The Strong Outbound, Crappy Follow Up. It’s now new, but it’s accelerating with AI.
It’s going to be a more and more common playbook in the Age of AI.
Take last week. I got an incredible well timed, well written email from an agency about helping on production side of our podcast. And we do need help. I told them to do a test project, and if it went well, we’d just use them.
Then the shoe dropped.
“How many podcasts do you do?” they asked.
I mean, take 5 seconds and look. Go to Spotify, Apple of YouTube. You will see the answer. Literally in seconds.
Deal lost.
AI is probably going to accelerate this trend of Strong Outbound, Terrible Follow Up.
Done right, AI will make our outbound better researched, more relevant, better targeted, higher value, and even more timely. Much of the AI generation outbound today is just more spam, with fewer typos. But some of it is already getting better. Especially when it’s a combo of human + AI, thoughtfully done. T That’s in fact why the outbound I was sent above was so strong.
But if over-reliance on AI leads to terrible follow-up, performance in the end might be worse.
We’ll see. In an age where so many of us are looking to do less ourselves, and automate more, the follow-up after the outbound may get even worse.
And if it gets worse … we may take it away from sales reps entirely. We’ll see.
A related post here:
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And we’ll talk about this and so much more at SaaStr AI Summit at 2025 SaaStr Annual, May 13-15 in SF Bay!!
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