I've been in B2B sales and marketing for a while. Here's what I've watched happen in real time.
Cold email got commoditized first. Salesloft and Outreach took what used to be a manual, thoughtful process and turned it into a spray-and-pray machine. Everyone bought in. Reply rates crashed and spam filters got smart. Now your carefully crafted sequence lands in a promotions folder nobody checks.
So everyone pivoted to cold calling. "Email is dead, dial more." And it worked. For a while.
Then the same thing happened. Power dialers came first. Then parallel dialers. Suddenly a rep could blast through 200 dials before lunch. Great, until every other team did the same thing. Now iOS screens your calls before they even ring. Carriers flag numbers after 20 dials. Your brand new number has a spam score before you've even used it.
The pattern is always the same. Someone finds an edge. A vendor turns it into a product. Everyone buys the product. The edge disappears.
The real problem is that outreach is now nearly free to run at scale. Low cost plus low friction means everyone is doing it. Your prospects are getting hit from every angle, all day, every day. They've built walls.
So what actually works now?
Ads. But not the way most teams run them.
Broad targeting on LinkedIn is expensive and wastes most of your budget on people who will never buy. The teams winning right now are running ads against specific contacts. Think: your CRM list, event attendees, your competitor's customers. People you already know are in-market.
Ads are expensive and that's why this will be a "pay to play" approach for your chance to win.
If you can now nurture your contacts via Ads instead of spam, you're sure to generate leads against your competitors who are just doing the same BS.
Cold outreach interrupts strangers. Contact-based ads stay in front of people who already have some context on you. That's a completely different dynamic.
The cost of ads is high enough that not every team will do this well. That's actually why this barrier is the moat.
Anyone else feel like the outbound playbook has completely broken down in the last 12 months? What are you doing instead?