For this edition we’re looking into our crystal ball.

Are the strategies working well now going to destroy themselves?

What does that even mean??

Keep reading to hear what people think is up ahead for us.

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A “future of sales” take was shared last week by an OG seller (began in 2004), and it wasn’t ripped to shreds by dead-end sales reps for once. 124 upvotes, 83 comments, north of 50 sellers weighing in. The thesis was simple. Outreach is now a low-volume skill game, and the same AI everyone's bragging about on the front end is the same one killing the same front end efforts.

The pattern the thread kept circling: Every channel followed the same arc. Cold calling was gold until we stopped answering unknown numbers. Now phones screen with AI. Email was gold until we triaged by subject line. Now Gmail and Outlook run agents that archive your outreach before it's seen. LinkedIn was gold until everyone got pitched daily. Now it throttles accounts with low reply rates.

The tools lowered the barrier to entry, people rushed in, and the medium got degraded. The same “meta” that made a difference before is what now gets you flagged and lowers performance.

AI writes from patterns in large data blocks, and that same pattern is exactly what another AI is trained to detect. A game of cat and mouse so to speak. Sending more faster is not the edge it once was.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s still some hope.

Many of the sellers agreed that the tools never made bad reps good, they just gave them more shots, and now those shots are getting blocked at the source. Which means a lot of people are about to find out whether they can sell or whether they were just spraying-and-praying their way to quota.

The reps holding up the best have always been low-volume, high-relevance. Tight list. A first line that proves you actually looked at the person/their business. A legit reason to reach out now. As one put it: AI's fine for the research, it just can't replace giving a damn about who you're emailing.

In-person came up more than anything else. As you might expect. The most-upvoted reply was just "in person events will be the only way forward," and someone underneath said 95% of their deals come from them.

Trust still gets built by people. Some teams that went on layoff frenzies when they thought AI would buy back their margin are now hiring older reps back specifically to put a human voice back into the process.