Outbound is dead? Not according to our sales figures.
Last week I talked to another founder who told me he was killing his whole outbound program. “Outbound is dead,” he told me. “Nobody responds anymore.”
I smiled. I’ve been hearing “outbound is dead” since I moved to the U.S. 10 years ago.
If that’s true, then why do my salespeople keep closing deals from cold emails?
The truth is that outbound isn’t dead. It’s just changed so much that most people no longer recognize it.
Here’s what’s actually happening in 2025:
→ AI “personalization at scale” remains BS. If an email looks like spam to you, guess what – it looks like spam to your prospects, too.
→ Multi-threading increases responses. Talk to as many different people as you can within an org. They’ll make the case internally.
→ Inbound multiplies outbound’s effectiveness. PPC, organic and social all serve as air cover that improves your name recognition when your SDRs reach out.
→ Personalization works if your SDRs actually do their due diligence. I’m not talking, “Oh, I see you went to Duke!” I’m talking, “Congrats on the promotion to Events Manager! Your old boss used Salesforce to manage your food truck vendors, but we outperform them on XYZ features. Can I show you a demo?”
We don’t win on outbound because we’ve got a bigger budget or a faster auto-dialer.
We win because we immerse every salesperson in our product.
They don’t get to sell until they convince ME they know Concord (and the SaaS contract management space in general).
And they don’t reach out to leads until they’ve spent hours on support calls with existing customers, so they know contract workflow pain points back-to-front.
Intentionality makes a difference. It really does.
What’s your take – is your outbound strategy evolving or dissolving?
Matt Lhoumeau is the CEO and co-founder of Concord, a leading provider of Agreement Intelligence solutions. Concord empowers growing businesses to make smarter operational decisions by unlocking actionable insights from contracts, and is trusted by over 1,500 companies worldwide.
