AI-Generated Sales Outreach: At What Cost?

"Here's the best ever workflow to generate meetings!"

"It's easy," they say. "You book meetings while you sleep," they say.

 Here's how it works:

• Use a de-anonymization tool to get the email, phone number and social profile of your website visitors. (Questionable, to say the least. Looking forward to hearing more from Clark Barron on this topic soon!)

• Connect with these people on LinkedIn. (Great, more LI requests to filter though.)

• Import these poor souls into a tool that will send auto-generated emails to them, or god forbid, call them. (Are you kidding me?)

First thing to ask yourself: Is your communication adding value for the prospect? Is it useful and/or helpful?

When I visit your website and then get bombarded with outreach via the above workflow, what benefit is there to ME? There's virtually no value in the emails that are being sent to prospects, except to repeat the same messaging and CTA that didn’t work when they visited the website.

On top of that, every single email, slack, or text I get is another thing for ME to process and decide what to do with. So now I have a to-do item because I visited your website. Maybe your site isn't good enough, your value prop isn't clear enough, or your product just wasn't a fit. I'd start there before I'd risk emailing website visitors. Maybe YOU aren't sending tons of emails, but when seemingly every vendor is using the exact same tactic, it amounts to a LOT of emails for prospects.

But people are apparently booking meetings this way. I don't know what the conversion rates are, but this leads to…

Question two: Are there any negative, possibly unseen, side effects to this kind of outreach?

For every meeting you've booked using the above workflow, do you know how many prospects have you annoyed or turned off in the process?

Why would this be so annoying for a prospect, you ask? Aside from the onslaught of inbound messages that I already talked about, the underlying data that drive everything is just not that great, which makes the whole experience even worse.

Personal Examples:

1. Wrong email address. The de-anonymization tool I hear the most about is giving software vendors my PERSONAL email address, that I've never used for anything related to work. Not once. I do not want this email in your CRM, and I definitely do not want a prospecting email next to an email about my kids camp schedule or an email about my dad's recent doctor appointment. Hard pass.

2. Wrong person. That same platform mixes up my husband and I because we both work from home. Guarantee he wants these emails 100x less than I do. Especially the ones that start "Hi, Brian - saw you on our website." Hilariously, that one came directly from the de-anonymization vendor. When I asked him if he had ever been on the site he said, "I work in FinServ. I'd get fired for looking at software that does what you just described." He's gotten phone calls from vendors, too, asking for me. Would love a recording of how that went.

3. Wrong company info. And lastly, that same platform thinks I work at a job I haven't been at in over two years. That data gets passed to their customers which is then used in the outreach. So I'm being prospected as someone who works at a 3k person company in a highly regulated vertical, when I’m in fact a self-employed marketing consultant that works with startups and SMB.

It's not just me - for every client I've worked on with this stuff, it only takes a few minutes of sifting through the data until we get to the "Why is the BDRs mom on our prospecting list?" conversation. (100% true story.)

To cut to the chase: I believe that every single touchpoint is making an impression about your brand and it's either positive or negative. There's no neutral. So, do I have a better or worse impression of your brand when I get generic or inaccurate or AI-generated outreach? 

Maybe some meetings are being booked, but you are guaranteed to have annoyed someone (or their spouses, roommates or officemates!) along the way. I'm not alone in this - loved Kyle Lacy's recent post on this topic.

I make a mental note of companies that try to robo-prospect me and, in the words of Taylor Swift: I've got a list of names and theirs is in red, underlined.

I cannot believe this is ending with a Taylor Swift quote. Unbelievable. I don't even know who I am anymore. And I wish software vendors also didn't know who I was. LOOK WHAT THEY MADE ME DO.

P.S. I did opt out of RB2B's database - the link to do that is at the bottom of their homepage. Highly suggest doing so if you don't want emails after visiting websites!