Sales teams are killing their outbound channels by answering falling response rates with ever more volume. The solution, however, is easier than the industry realizes.

Back in the mid-2010s, I was one of those sales reps with a pretty bullish mentality towards outbound email outreach. Unfortunately, the tables turned, and my response rates to cold email outreach plummeted 90%. Over the last decade, the same amount of outreach has begun producing just a tenth of the results; not only for me, but for sales reps everywhere.

The problem wasn’t email. The problem was how we, as outbound sales reps, responded to the decrease in positive outcomes. As a collective, the sellers changed buyer behavior and now, we’re seeing this pattern repeat itself. This time, it’s happening on the phones, and if sales leaders don’t learn from what happened to email, reps will inevitably burn through another channel.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, sales across industries began to encounter new obstacles. Email providers like Microsoft and Google became stricter about bulk sending and began blocking and blacklisting domains that engaged in it. As a result, the sales leaders I worked with and I saw email outreach response rates drop from 2 to 3% to 0.2 to 0.3% — a substantial decline, to say the least.

By 2024, the channel had become untenable for cold outbound . With the dwindling number of responses, the common fix was to send more emails to bridge the gap. However, trying to fix the problem with more of the same activity that caused it was like pouring gas on a fire.

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