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If you’ve hung around me for longer than five minutes, you’ve heard me say that sales is about talking with people. The fact is, the more people you talk with, the more you’ll sell.
The good news is that there are lots of people to talk with to make a sale. The problem is, far too many salespeople have quit talking with people.
Email Prospecting Has Suddenly Stop Working
Instead they keep prospects and customers at arms length through asynchronous communication channels like email - especially when prospecting.
They lean on email because it’s easier to hide behind a keyboard than pick up the phone and face rejection. But here’s the cold, hard truth: Email as a prospecting channel has suddenly stopped working.
Recent data indicate that salespeople today are sending three to eight times more emails than they were just a couple of years ago … yet they’re getting only a tenth of the response.
Let that sink in for a moment. Three times more email and a tenth of the response. These days you can send your prospecting emails dressed up in a pink bunny suit, riding a unicorn, tossing hundred dollar bills in the air and prospects are still going to ignore you.
Essentially salespeople and their AI minions are banging out more and more email to make up for the lower response rates leading to a vicious cycle of diminishing returns. At this point, for all intents and purposes, email prospecting is dead.
The Decline of Email Prospecting
What happened?
In the past, crafting cold email involved strategic thought and personalized messages unique to each prospect. It was a slow process which meant salespeople sent fewer but more effective prospecting emails that were at least tolerable for prospects.
If your email didn’t connect, your prospect would just delete it and, sometimes, at least respond that they were not interested.
Ten years ago, the slow decline of email as a prospecting channel began with the advent of sales engagement platforms like OutReach and SalesLoft. These platforms opened the door to reps to send streams of automated emails in multi-step cadences at the push of a button.
Then two years ago, AI burst onto the scene and suddenly everything changed. A legion of enterprising tech entrepreneurs promised magical prospecting engines that would “replace” salespeople altogether. Just push a button and AI does the hard work to fill the pipeline.
All Prospecting Email is Suspicious
These AI apps churn out prospecting emails using “hyper-personalization,” scraping tokens off your LinkedIn profile, grabbing a crumb of information from your Facebook feed, and slapping that into an email to make it look human.
But here’s the problem: buyers aren’t stupid. The second they sniff out that a robot is behind the curtain, it completely turns them off. People don’t like to be manipulated — especially by AI. Once they realize they’ve been duped by AI, they trust nothing else in their inbox.
And because AI can send emails 24/7 — relentlessly — without taking a coffee break or a vacation, inboxes have been flooded with this shallow AI-generated drivel.
The reality is that these platforms are basically spam machines that turned the slow decline of email prospecting into a fast moving avalanche of pain. These AI powered sales automation tools have scaled email volume to an extraordinary and unsustainable level.
The deluge of AI generated email led to a phenomenon called the Great Ignore in which all prospecting messages — good or bad, human or AI generated — are cast into the same bucket and ignored by the prospects.
Sales Prospecting Cynicism
Buyers are drained, exasperated, and exhausted with this crap. I talk to decision-makers every day who say, “I don’t open any email from someone I don’t already know anymore. I just delete it. I don’t have time for that.”
And if they do open your email and see it’s obviously AI text, rather than just deleting your email, they’ll block you permanently.
Think about it. How often have you looked at your own inbox and found an email with an awkwardly “hyper-personalized” opener that references your dog’s name, a local restaurant, or a sports team. The minute you realize it’s not truly personal, that it's a a cheap AI gimmick, you feel manipulated. You become cynical. You trust nothing.
So you delete or block the sender.
Multiply that by thousands or millions of prospects doing the same thing, and you see why email as a prospecting channel has just quit working.
The Root Cause: Why Email Prospecting Quit Working
The root cause of this problem is that the vast majority of sales professionals rely on email as their sole prospecting channel — primarily because they fear synchronous channels like the phone and face-to-face prospecting.
So they double down and send even more emails. As they scramble to get noticed, the consequence is paradoxical: the more they try to connect with email, the more they resort to cheesy tricks and manipulation, the more prospects shut down and ignore them.
With thousands of sales organizations and millions of salespeople using this same approach, it’s just not sustainable. And this is exactly how we’ve ended up with three times the email volume and one-tenth the response rate.
Pick Up the Damn Phone
For the modern salesperson, this presents a profound challenge — how to capture attention in a world that is learning to ignore you. The answer is: Pick Up the Damn Phone!
The phone is your single greatest secret weapon for breaking through the noise and getting the attention of spammed-out prospects.
The truth is nothing will ever beat a real-time, interactive, synchronous prospecting conversation. You can hear their tone of voice, address objections instantly, and actually have a conversation.
Hardly anyone calls anymore, because they’re scared of rejection or they assume that no-one answers the phone. But guess what? Prospects do answer the phone and they will talk with you.
And even if they don’t, you can leave a sincere, voicemail message in your own voice, that puts you miles ahead of the AI-generated garbage in their inbox.
Prospecting In-Person
If you’re an outside sales rep, get out in the field and swing some doors. I’ve spent a lot of time out in the field lately, going door-to-door with sales teams. Time after time, we walk in, ask to speak with a decision-maker, and we get immediate face-to-face conversations. No hostility; no one kicking us out.
Prospects are starved for genuine human interaction. They are tired of video calls and chatbots. They’ll talk with you if you show up.
Your Action Plan for the Week
This week, I want you to put email prospecting on pause. Instead, focus on the phone and in-person prospecting. Block an hour each morning, first thing, for telephone prospecting. Make at least 25 dials each day.
Then, while you are out in the field, set a daily goal of five door knocks or drop-ins. Ten is better if you can pull it off.
After each appointment, look to your left, look to your right, and look behind you — then walk in those doors. You’ll be shocked at how receptive people are when you’re standing right in front of them.
Lean Into Being Human
In a world where robots are faking sincerity and spamming the universe, your best asset is your genuine, authentic, flawed-but-real human self. That’s what resonates. That’s what triggers trust.
You have a personal brand, a vibe and style that AI can’t replicate. So show it off.
Pick up the phone, knock a door, get out there and talk with people. Because in this age of spam and robotic nonsense, human contact is the key to building a winning pipeline.
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