Thank you to everyone who contributed! I said I'd report back after asking this across several founder and GTM Slack communities. The biggest takeaway was that there really wasn't a magic outbound playbook anymore. Almost everyone agreed that generic, high-volume cold outreach is getting harder. The themes that came up over and over: • Lower volume, much higher personalization. The best outreach referenced something specific happening in the prospect's business today, not just their job title. • LinkedIn is increasingly part of the sales sequence, not a separate channel. Many founders email first, connect on LinkedIn, engage with content, then continue the conversation there. • Trust is the biggest challenge. Buyers assume most outreach is automated, so demonstrating genuine understanding of their business matters more than ever. • Founder-led channels consistently outperformed traditional outbound. Referrals, conferences, partnerships, thought leadership, and communities were mentioned far more often than cold email as top sources of pipeline. • Many suggested reducing the first ask. Rather than leading with "book a demo," start a conversation with an observation, question, or insight. Overall, the consensus wasn't that outbound is dead. It's that the winning teams are replacing scale with relevance and building trust before asking for a meeting. Really appreciate everyone who contributed. This definitely gave me a few ideas to rethink our own approach.
What's actually working for you right now to get cold leads to book demos? Context: we paused our automated email sequences a while back because response rates were so low. Most of our demos/customers lately have come from conferences and reseller/agency channels. Now we're reevaluating direct cold outbound and I'd love to know what's finding real traction right now. We convert well once someone books, so the challenge is getting more qualified prospects onto the calendar. Are you seeing traction from cold email, LinkedIn, paid ads, founder-led outreach, or something else? Happy to share back what I'm hearing from a few other communities where I'm asking the same thing.
Does anyone here offer any of the following services:
Content and newsletter writing services for brands and/or founders for marketing and sales emails?
Creating AI-generated newsletters for brands?
I'd love to understand industry rates, not looking to hire this service. Thanks!
