Look, cold call pick-up rates and landing in spam are NOT the reasons why outbound isn't working for you in 2025

Look, cold call pick-up rates and landing in spam are NOT the reasons why outbound isn't working for you in 2025.

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How do I know?

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We've worked with thousands of reps in the last few years:

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- I see all the sh*tty emails

- Hardly any reps leave voicemails

- People are afraid to call cell phones

- Leaders are afraid to set call activity targets

- Product pitching like crazy

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So why isn't outbound working for you?

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Messaging.

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I know. Messaging isn't a sexy topic. But poor messaging is likely why outbound doesn't work for you.

Common messaging mistakes:

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⛔️ Creating outbound messaging in a silo

Mistake: A lone BDR leader, sales exec, or marketing exec creates all the cold call talk tracks and email sequences by themselves.

Impact: Messaging sounds generic and has too much personal bias.

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⛔️ Marketing or product creating outbound messaging

Mistake: A PMM or marketing leader writes all the outbound messaging

Impact: Since they've had little (or zero) conversations with real customers, the messaging is super generic

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⛔️ Product voice: feature heavy messaging

Mistake: Messaging focuses on how the solution works, specific features, etc.

Impact: This might work on a webpage, but not in a cold email. Messaging feels super salesy and isn't appealing to execs.

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⛔️ Not "chunking up" to business outcomes

Mistake: Messaging addresses all of the pains of the user, not the decision-makers

Impact: Reps get delegated down to product users and struggle to start sales conversations at the exec level

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⛔️ Not leveraging customer conversations

Mistake: Not using recorded customer conversations to inform messaging

Impact: Messaging doesn't use the customer's language and feels generic.

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What to do instead:

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✅ Build a messaging team

Get no more than 10 of the best people together to build common messaging. This should include a few of the best AEs, marketing, customer success, sales leaders, product specialists, etc. And make sure to assign a single person to own messaging.

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✅ Live workshop messaging by persona/vertical

Run live workshops to work out messaging together. At a minimum, messaging should be created for each specific persona. For enterprise, messaging should be created by persona AND industry.

A healthcare security leader speaks a different language than a SaaS security leader.

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✅ Build a messaging matrix

This is what the end product should look like:

Personas → Priorities → Current Solutions → Problems/Impact → Desired Outcomes

Now you have something that can easily be repurposed into talk tracks and emails.

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~~~

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If 2025 H1 pipeline looks thin—and outbound isn't producing results—get back to the basics and start with great messaging.

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Marketing should NOT own sales messaging. Sales needs to own sales messaging. And everyone needs to collaborate together for great messaging.

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Agree or disagree?

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