Hello {{First name|Predictable Revenue community}},

I was talking to a client recently about their outbound numbers.

They had done the thing I usually ask people to do. Low volume, manual personalization, real work on each account. Their reply rate was minimal. So they also ran a batch of generic cold email, the kind you could send to anybody in the market, and that got them half a percent.

Two approaches. Neither one working.

There is an obvious third option sitting right there, and most people reach for it. Hand the writing to AI. Let it research the account, let it write the opener, let it decide what to say. Every tool that has launched in the last two years is built to make that easy.

I think it's a mistake, and I want to explain why, because my reasons are not the ones you'd expect.

Let me get the ideological part out of the way first, because it's the part I feel most strongly about and the part that matters least to your numbers.

I think AI-written cold email is a lie. You are pretending you wrote something you didn't write. That's it. I don’t like starting off a relationship by tricking someone. 

Now, the fair counterargument, and I've made it to myself more than once, is that we are already pretending. Nobody thinks I sat down and personally typed 200 emails on a Tuesday. The automation is already there. So what's one more layer?

Here's the difference. When I automate the sending, all I'm saving is my time and a few hundred clicks. The thinking already happened. I decided who to write to, what to say, and what to ask for. The machine is just moving my hands.

When I let AI write the message, I'm handing over the thinking. I'm letting it decide how I would approach a situation. And a cold email is not a small situation. It is very often the first impression a future customer will ever have of me and my company. That's the one I'd want to be mine.

The part that actually makes me laugh is the inconsistency.

We all know AI hallucinates. We all know you need serious guardrails before you can trust it with anything that matters. Nobody lets it touch billing. Nobody lets it send the contract. We put a human in front of every important output.

And then we look at the message that opens a relationship with a prospect and decide that one is unimportant enough to fully automate. We rank it below the tasks we double-check.

I don't think that's a considered decision. I think it's just what the tools make easy.

But set all of that aside, because I know some of you are reading this thinking that if it worked you'd do it anyway. Fair enough. I would probably think about it too.

It doesn't work. And if it does, a non-personalized version of the same email would probably produce at a similar level. 

I've spent a lot of time and a lot of money testing messaging, and I have not seen AI personalization add anything. What I've seen is the opposite. It gets in the way of a good message.

Think about what a well-written cold email actually is. A simple subject line. A clear premise. A body that gets to the point. An offer that is easy to say yes to. Every one of those pieces exists to carry one idea to one person.

Now take that exact same email and have AI bolt a personalized line onto the front of it. What you've added is a sentence about their recent funding round, or their podcast appearance, or a blog post somebody on their team wrote in 2023.

You haven't strengthened the idea. You've diluted it. The reader now has to walk past a line that has nothing to do with why you're writing before they get to the reason you're writing. And most of them can tell what that line is. They've seen a hundred of them this month.

The tight version beats the personalized version in my experience, consistently. Same message, less noise.

So I'm not anti-AI in prospecting. That would be a strange position for me to hold, because I use it constantly. I use it for every list I build and for almost every contact I source.

What I use it for is the layer underneath the message.

Finding the right accounts. Finding the right people at those accounts. Then sorting those people into the right campaigns so that I'm sending a very specific message to a very small group.

That's where the leverage is. If the group is small enough and similar enough, the message can be tight and clean and completely human, and it does not need any personalization bolted on, because the targeting is doing that job already.

AI is genuinely excellent at that work. It's research and sorting and pattern matching across thousands of records. It's the part I used to pay people to do badly.

It's just not the part most people are pointing it at.

Which brings me back to my client.

What I proposed to them was not a better message. It was a different purpose for the whole program.

Everybody right now is using AI to spend less time in the sales process. Fewer touches, less research, less thinking, more volume. That's the direction of the entire industry.

So do the opposite.

Use your cold email program to reach out to people you actually want to meet, and start a relationship instead of a pitch. That relationship can start as a podcast interview. It can start as a newsletter (👀). It can start as a blog post you want to quote them in. It can start as a customer development interview where you ask them about their world and don't sell them anything at all.

I've written about this before as relationship-first prospecting, and as prospecting for interviews. The mechanics change a little depending on which door you use, but the logic is the same every time. When everyone else is trying to compress the front of the funnel, the advantage goes to the person willing to spend real time there.

That's an unpopular thing to say in a market where every vendor is selling you speed. It's also the only thing I've seen work reliably in the last 12 months across a wide selection of clients. 

The tools will keep coming and going. There will be a new one next quarter that promises the same thing this one promised. The question underneath all of them stays the same.

If the first thing a prospect ever reads from you wasn't written by you, what exactly are you starting?

Collin

PS - If you’re looking at GTM/outbound tools and want something easier to use, hit reply.

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