The Prospecting Armageddon

At SaaS and other b2b tech companies, hiring BDRs to send more and more emails seems to be all the rage, and now there are tools that let those BDRs send thousands of “personalized” emails automatically each day.

With the rise of all the automated cold email prospecting tools, there will be more and more cold emails sent. This will further reduce email response and engagement rates because inboxes are even more clogged. And then the software robots will send even more emails because companies need more leads, taking us further down the cold email death spiral. Eventually email response rates will be as horribly low as banner ad click through rates.

There is another path. LinkedIn used network effects. Dropbox created a viral freemium product. HubSpot ran the table with content. Slack leveraged PR and buzz.

You don’t copy everyone else’s product. If you want to be special, don’t copy their sales and marketing model either. (Click to tweet this — you can edit first)