Is outbound going to die?

I see a ton of sales/marketing products all powered by AI, making hyper personalised content to target potential users and customers. These tools now make sophisticated, high-volume paid marketing campaigns accessible to everyone, from large enterprises to individual consumers. With LLMs, the messages and content have gotten to a point where the accuracy and quality of the has improved tremendously at scale. Moreover, the scale of outbound sales has also increased rapidly. You are now able to pump out 1000s of SEO blog posts, generate reels/videos on the fly and even use AI agents to do email/phone outreach at a never before seen scale.

While I think these AI powered sales products are going to perform very well in the short run, this is also going to cause a certain about of fatigue for the users and customers. (there is a small window here where companies adopting these tools are going to crush it) Eventually, humans are going to get used to the constant spam and start mentally tuning out these hyper personalized initiatives. It will kill the trust, attention and the subsequent conversion rates of these products. The SEO posts won’t be read, emails and calls will go unanswered and people will start tuning out even the personalised videos.

On top of this, ALL the companies will have equal access to these tools to create content and campaigns. Imagine giving out every SaaS company in the world these tools and asking them to sell their products to the same 10000 enterprises which pretty much everybody is targeting. There is going to be so much personalised AI slop in the future.

So what will happen? How will sales evolve in the future? How will new companies build and acquire users?

Your existing distribution will start mattering more. Having private access to the buyers or people will be absolutely important. Making personal relationships to these decision makers and other key people in the network would become compulsory since they essentially become gatekeepers. If outbound doesn’t work and it’s all going to be inbound, referrals and personal relationships will basically be everything.

We will start seeing companies build all this bottoms up. They will try to create and engineer virality on Twitter(like the icons.com team) and spend a ton of money on branding (for the company and maybe the CEO). Having a good Twitter/social media presence will become a compulsory pre-condition. The company owned channels (like websites, email lists or apps) where you have direct access to customers will become key demand generation pipelines. These will generate organic growth as satisfied customers and partners naturally promote the business.

The community and network effects will become critical competitive advantages. Companies will invest heavily in building engaged and trusted user communities, starting platforms where users create value for each other, and developing network driven acquisition strategies. These interconnected relationships will generate demand, creating defensible moats against competitors relying solely on paid acquisition.

If you are working on alternative sales/GTM products working on the above problem, please reach out to me.