AI Will Make Cold Outreach More Valuable, Not Less
The counterintuitive case for investing in outreach automation
Some say cold outreach is a dying channel — the degree of bots and spam will render the whole channel useless.
I believe the opposite is true, that AI will actually usher in a golden age for cold outreach. Because unlike content marketing and other channels, AI solves the problem it creates.
The problem with cold outreach
Getting cold outreach sucks, for reasons that are pretty straightforward:
Most messages are entirely irrelevant.
The ones that are potentially relevant are mostly from low quality providers.
There may be diamonds in the rough, but it takes too much work to vet them.
And yes, automation is going to make all of those things a lot worse in the short term. But relative to other channels, it also more clearly provides the solution.
Most companies die unnecessary deaths
Cold outreach is all about relevancy. If you can find the right message for the person at the right time, you don’t even need mutual connections or a recognizable brand — they will respond because it feels like you are reading their mind.
The need for relevancy creates the cold outreach problem. Especially without the tools to fine tune the process, the simplest solution is just to send a ton of messages. Hey {name} I think {your company} might like my product?
But that doesn’t mean outreach is tapped as a channel. Most startups will die before ever finding or contacting their ideal customer. And on the flip side, too many companies die unnecessary deaths before finding the right solution to their problems. Which is why AI is much more likely to scale it 1000X than drive it to 0.
The world of 1000 assistants
One way I like to imagine the future is to picture a world in which everyone has 1000 assistants. What would you have all of those assistants do every day?
It’s a useful frame because you would quickly run out of automating the things you are already doing, which are the jobs most people think of when they imagine AI agents. Maybe you take the first 100 assistants to book your travel and record your meetings and do the busywork in your job. What about the other 900?
The answer is fairly obvious — you would have those 900 assistants talk to the assistants of other people. Once you start thinking like that, you can actually imagine needing a million or a billion assistants, which is the right way to think of the potential scale of AI.
Now imagine each company has one assistant assigned to outreach each high potential customer. And that potential customer has one assistant assigned to triage each outreach message. That’s how you get the golden age of outreach.
The outreach renaissance
Interestingly, I find it harder to make the same rosy argument for other major channels like content marketing or advertising.
For one thing it’s just not clear why you would ever need those channels in a world where cold outreach is scaled one million times. Why would I create generic content when I could enter into a detailed conversation with each potential customer?
A more nuanced take is that outreach, content marketing, and advertising will all converge. Content marketing will be totally individualized and you’ll pay for outreach in the channels where customers live, just like we pay for advertising today.
But that final form feels much closer to outreach than any of the other channels today, and will emerge gradually via iterations. So if you want to bet on that future, the place to invest today is in sophisticated prospecting and outreach automation.
Go forth and outreach
I’ve heard peers argue that the flood of AI tools that have launched to do prospecting and outreach automation are basically performing market arbitrage — scooping up the value in outreach while they drive it out of existence.
There may be a weird transition period where the conversion rates go down, but cold transactions are simply too valuable to the economy for there to ever be a true cliff. New tools will crop up to solve the problems that others create. And in the end, we’ll all get our 1000 assistants.
We’ve been investing in outreach ourselves and building custom agents to do prospecting in biotech for customers, and my strong feeling is that we are much more likely to enter a golden age than an outreach winter — something I can’t say for content marketing.
P.S. if you’re curious about our stack, I’ve tested dozens of AI outreach tools in our research and strung together a few to make our own process work for biotech. Right now we’re using a combination of Clay, Apollo, Attio, and La Growth Machine — if you want to know how it works just reach out and I’m happy to share.