Bad outreach is everywhere. And the frustrating thing? Most people sending it don't know it's bad.

The competition for new business has never been more fierce, yet the way many sales teams approach outreach hasn't kept up. Inboxes are fuller. Buyers are more selective. And the idea of simply increasing output and chasing harder is actively damaging relationships before they've even started.

At ALF, we spend a lot of time thinking about what good outreach looks like. Here's what we see going wrong, and what the data (and experience) says about how to fix it.

 

The Volume Trap

The most common mistake in outreach is the belief that volume is a strategy.

It isn't.

Becky Hipkiss, BD100 Rising Star 2025 and Head of New Business at We Are Futures, recently joined us on our podcast OnBDwithALF, and she made the point clearly:

If the same message could be sent to ten different brands without changing a word, it's going to feel like spam. Full stop.

Quality outreach involves considered research into your prospects, focusing on genuine relationship-building. Generic messaging often falls flat, and salespeople will get burnt out trying to hit high outreach targets that end up yielding low conversion rates.

The salespeople winning new business right now are the ones treating outreach as a long game, not a numbers game.

 

The AI Problem (And It's Getting Worse)

Let's address the elephant in the room.

AI-generated outreach has flooded inboxes and buyers have noticed. More and more people will now automatically delete any emails that look AI-generated, indicating a lack of trust and relevance. The irony is that the tools built to help teams scale their outreach are now the fastest way to get ignored.

The problem isn't AI itself; it's AI used without reasoning. Brackets still sitting in the message body. Wrong names. Generic openers that could have been written for anyone. These aren't just embarrassing; they’re destroying brand credibility.

AI generated outreach has raised the bar so that now, genuinely personalised, human communication stands out more than it ever has. That's an opportunity if you're willing to put the work in!

 

Talking About Yourself Is a Strategy - Just Not a Good One

Another common mistake is making it about you. When it comes to quality outreach, you should always be thinking about adding value.

Leading the messaging with credentials, awards and case studies is not going to get the best results. The message should be framed around what the prospect actually needs and not about you.

Buyers will actively avoid suppliers that send irrelevant outreach. If you’re not doing enough to add value, you could be creating a long-term trust problem with your prospects. That trust deficit is real, and leading with your credentials does nothing to close it.

What does? Understanding their world better than they expect you to. Referencing a challenge their sector is actually facing right now. Connecting what you do to what's keeping them up at night, not the fact you won an award last year.

This requires research. High-performing BD teams invest their time into research, and it's the reason those teams consistently cut through where others don't. Quality outreach over volume, every time.

Becky at We Are Futures had a rule for quality outreach:

Before anything goes out, ask yourself one question. What are you bringing to the table for them? If the answer is anything other than a direct response to a real challenge they're facing, start again.

 

Email Is Not Dead. Email-Only Is.

73% of B2B buyers report email as their preferred outreach channel. So no, email is not going anywhere, but treating email as the entire strategy is a mistake that's costing teams meaningful pipeline.

The typical cold email response rate is only about 1 - 5%, and roughly 19 out of 20 cold emails get ignored entirely. Even within a strong email strategy, the numbers are humbling. Only one-third of email marketers use personalisation, despite it offering an estimated revenue increase of 10 - 15%.

The smarter approach is a multi-channel strategy. Email does the foundation work, LinkedIn creates ambient visibility, events build real trust, and warm introductions do the heavy lifting when the opportunity is there.

Research by SoPro found campaigns integrating multiple channels generate leads at a 31% lower cost than single-channel outreach. But this only happens when those channels are used with purpose. Sending the same generic message across email, LinkedIn, and a follow-up call doesn't make your outreach multi-channel. It just makes it annoying on three platforms instead of one.

The key is coherence. Your outreach should feel like one story told across multiple channels, not the same message copy-pasted into different inboxes.

 

"Not Right Now" Is Not a No

Becky Hipkiss said that 95% of buyers aren’t actually in a position to buy right now. So it’s clear that quality outreach is more about relationship-building and learning to play the long game.

According to Gartner, B2B purchase decisions now involve 6 - 10 stakeholders and takes 22% longer than five years ago. In the media and advertising industry, where budget cycles, CMO churn, and procurement processes all add friction, the gap between first contact and a brief can easily stretch to a year or more. That's not a failure of outreach. It's the nature of the market.

Part of the fix is being more selective about who you pursue. But the other part is building a keep-in-touch discipline that sustains relationships through the long gaps between active conversations. Consistency is key!

That means showing up with something genuinely useful: a piece of research, a relevant campaign observation, a prompt when something changes in their world, rather than a check-in email that's more about your needs and wants than the client.

 

Timing Is Everything (And Most People Ignore It)

We’re not talking about the time of day or day of week, though those matter too, but we’re more focused on the moments in a prospect's professional life when they're most open to new conversations.

New appointments are one of the most powerful triggers available. When someone takes on a new role, they're actively reassessing suppliers, strategies, and partners. A timely, relevant message to someone new in a role will almost always land better than the same message sent six months into their position.

The same logic applies to funding rounds, new product launches, sector-specific news, and regulatory changes that affect a prospect's business. Outreach centred around a moment in their world, rather than a moment in your pipeline, feels completely different on the receiving end.

Shoot your shot. But make sure the timing gives it a real chance of landing.

Pipeline Health Beats Database Size. Always.

 

Finally, the metric problem.

A lot of BD teams are measuring the wrong things. Volume of emails sent. Open rates. LinkedIn connections. Database size. These numbers feel productive. They're often not.

More meetings are being had that lead nowhere. More pitches are being entered that don't convert. The industry is working harder for the same or worse results.

The shift worth making is from measuring activity to measuring quality of engagement. How many prospects have had a real conversation about their actual challenges? How many have engaged with your content more than once? How quickly are you moving from first conversation to something that resembles a brief?

A smaller, more engaged pipeline will almost always outperform a larger, colder one. And the outreach that builds it, specific, timely, human, and genuinely useful, is exactly the kind that's getting harder to do at scale and more valuable because of it.

Do the research. Make it about them. Show up consistently. And give it time.

 

Enjoyed this piece? Listen to OnBDwithALF - ALF's podcast where we talk to the people shaping new business in media and advertising. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

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At ALF Insight, we help sales teams gather the information they need to understand their prospects’ and their challenges, and most importantly, how to add value and elevate your outreach strategy.

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