Sorry to crash the AI Sales Outbound Automation Party, but:
Where is this going to end?
Sending automated, highly personalized outbound sales emails and even videos. What a hype in the VC/Startup world this year. What a sales dream.
A dream – or a nightmare? Where is this going to end?
I'm already flooded by pseudo-personalized automated mass emails slipping through the Gmail Spam filter. I'm not even opening any, anymore.
In the old (not so old) world, my primary filter for how seriously I took cold outreach was assessing the effort someone put into it.
A highly personalized email meant: A lot of effort the other side spent to craft it (vs. mass emailings).
Getting a personalized video? Wow – it feels disrespectful not to answer!
But now and soon – I can't use this filter anymore. No idea if a human crafted that message or not.
I'm not going to click on that link to see a personalized Generative AI Sales Video that thousands of others got, too.
For 1-2 years, leveraging the novelty effect, ok. But how about the future? How about "in 2-3 years"? Do you believe that a potential buyer or a talent you want to recruit will pay you more attention and click on that link to an automated, AI-generated video?
Especially given that with all these new technologies, literally everyone will be able to do it – the one-person coach, the restaurant, the enterprise.
Imagine how many more of these messages we all will get – diminishing every single message's potential attention in an inbox.
There is another drama: Those who will actually put in the human efforts to address someone in a "truly" and "genuinely" personalized way will be perceived as automated.
Same for outbound calls, by the way.
Thus, the market will shift:
Formerly: Those automating outbound on scale must leave the impression that the sender crafted the messages individually.
The Future: Humans investing the efforts to write individual messages or shoot videos need to prove that these were not machine-generated.
REPLY 1:
Don't think end game is important as technology evolves and there is no "endgame" as such.
Here's how we use AI in our outbound campaigns and it's super efficient..
step 1: for a prospect, we use perplexity api to generate all the relevant insights based on the product pitch we are selling + pain points etc.
step 2: based on the output from step 1 and the product we are pitching + the profile of the user (where we extract information from linkedin and recent posts etc) we generate a personalized email
step 3a: the email goes to a drip campaign which is a mixture of email + phone calls.
step 3b: phone call prompt is generated the same way as email and there is a highly personalized pitch to the customer. the pick up rate varies from market to market.
In the drip campaign, the follow up messages contain value added information on the business, personalized for the user's profile.
we generate insights from email open, email clicked and feed that back to the ai to generate follow up personalized emails.
All of this works completely automated, with a bit of oversight and we essentially just focus on how to make it even more efficient. There is more to the above, but I skip - not everything should be shared :)
REPLY 2:
Sounds like you need an AI to sift through your emails and filter out those BS AI sales pitches, İskender 😅
In a world where “higher, faster, cheaper” is the focus and manual tasks can be automated, why wouldn’t someone take advantage of it? While they might lose you as a potential customer, many others will likely convert.
I do appreciate the human touch and the romantic notion of sales reps crafting their own outreach, but automation can make sense for this specific task.
Looking further ahead, even if you become the best at sales automation, once a deal is closed, it’s still all about human connection, relationship-building, and achieving the customer’s goals. Without that, you risk building an unsustainable foundation with low customer lifetime value (CLV) and would need to be profitable at the very first touchpoint.
Reply 3:
I think this goes back to brand building (personal or company). Regardless whether a pitch is AI or not, if you recognize the (personal) brand behind it, you probably take a look at it - I'd assume.
And well, having spiky points of view and writing original stuff yourself will continue to be a differentiator. AI is good at many things, but not at having contrarian/spiky opinions.
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