Why has sales automation not worked for your brand when everyone on YouTube has a video telling you how their new agency is “killing it” after a few short months and they are barely able to handle all of the leads that are coming in using these simple AI tools that are popping up everywhere?

Well, let's break down this myth and get to the heart of the problem. Sales outreach has been a cornerstone of sales efforts forever. At some point our version of sales outreach was standing in the town square yelling about your products or services like a beer vendor at a medieval sporting event. If you yelled louder than the next person you had a competitive advantage and potentially gained the business until the next person came into the square and started yelling about their products. Fast forward to 2025 and the same problem exists. You have services that you assume people want but you can’t yell loud enough on FB/Meta/Linkedin/Google/Etc. to stand out without breaking the bank on customer acquisition costs.  The problem isn’t your ability to yell, it's who you are yelling at. Let me explain: You run sales for a marketing agency whose services are valuable to companies looking to grow their clients. You have tried using email to connect with these potential clients but you are lacking one key element when you reach out:

Intent

You have no idea if the person on the other end of your email has any interest in your services.

There’s plenty of reasons for them to not be interested:

• Timing

• Budget

• Product problems

• Distribution issues

• Never heard of your company

• Working with another provider

Determining intent can come in a number of forms:

• Filling out a lead form on your site

• Downloading a white paper

• Clicking on an ad

• Watching a video

Typically you’ve had to get them exposed to your brand for them to show these signals of intent and that costed you money and potentially didn’t produce results that you were comfortable with from an ROI perspective.

So the question becomes can you create intent?

If they can’t be a client there’s nothing you can do on cold outreach to manufacture “intent” but there are tricks that good sales reps use to shift their intent to focus on your products or services.

Great sales reps spend time analyzing their wins, replicating successful strategies to produce more wins and the snowball effect means they seem to constantly be closing business. There’s always one rep outpacing everyone else on the team that seems to magically get all of the good deals.

Well it's not magic, it's correlation!  (yes, statistics)

Great sales reps do one thing well, they take their existing wins, do an analysis on what made those wins successful, and they use those wins to leverage the next win. That process keeps being repeated and creates a cycle where it seems like that rep just keeps getting “lucky” when in fact it's statistical analysis that is driving the next win. The early success of a stand out client is leveraged in the next outreach to the future client to build trust, showing results from the early client and actually increasing INTENT for the next customer. This process gets repeated with two successful wins and the next outreach is even more powerful and the snowball continues to build momentum.

Eventually that rep is getting incoming requests because they have worked with so many stand out clients that they become the "go to" rep in the industry that handles that category.

This process typically happens in a tight knit community of buyers and the rep becomes the expert in that space.

Your cold outreach and sales prospecting problem

The problem with your cold outreach strategy and why it hasn’t been working even when you’ve used “tools” to help get in front of decision makers, is because you aren’t finding tight correlations between your previous successes and the next potential client.

If you stand in the town square long enough yelling about selling apples you may find someone that’s interested, the timing is right and the price fits their budget. When you do finally make a sale and you find out that the buyer bought your apples to make the king’s birthday apple pie then you should start yelling that you have apples from Job’s Apple Farm that are fit for a king!

Take the trigger from the 1st sale and leverage it for the next one. Your sale to the king's baker can be your trigger to differentiate you from the other vendors for the next sale. You 'create' the intent to purchase from you vs the competition from social proof of the previous sale.

Great sales reps repeat this process over and over again finding a connection between the prospective new customer and positive sales in the past. They do it at scale because they become experts in the category and spend time researching the niche until they are the "go to" authority on the space which allows them to tell prospects about the previous wins they’ve had with similar customers that are highly correlated.

Your tools aren't sharp

The problem with your tools and your cold outreach in general is they aren’t looking at your sale to the king’s baker and properly using it to justify making the next sale to the next customer.

The other issue is it's hard to:

• Manually research the wins of every rep within the organization in the CRM or other platforms

• Do the researching on the highly correlated companies to the previous wins

• Find the decision makers at the highly correlated company that can approve a purchase decision for your product or service

• Do the tailored outbound outreach in a systematic way that’s authentic and customized to that particular prospect

Comparing apples and apples

The correlation has to be accurate for the comparison to fit. Just listing companies you work with is just as bad as generic emails to “Dear {{First_Name}}” you have to make a connection to the previous win in an authentic way.

This correlation could be broken down to include the same:

• industry

• company size

• company growth stage

• funding level

• geographic region/territory

• pain point

• technology challenge/limitations/stack

The closer the correlation the easier it is for the new prospective client to envision they can see the same kind of ROI as the previous success. It's time to stop yelling in the town square with a generic message and start having strategic conversations leveraging your wins to be a building block for your next sale.Why has sales automation not worked for your brand when everyone on YouTube has a video telling you how their new agency is “killing it” after a few short months and they are barely able to handle all of the leads that are coming in using these simple AI tools that are popping up everywhere?

Well, let's break down this myth and get to the heart of the problem. Sales outreach has been a cornerstone of sales efforts forever. At some point our version of sales outreach was standing in the town square yelling about your products or services like a beer vendor at a medieval sporting event. If you yelled louder than the next person you had a competitive advantage and potentially gained the business until the next person came into the square and started yelling about their products. Fast forward to 2025 and the same problem exists. You have services that you assume people want but you can’t yell loud enough on FB/Meta/Linkedin/Google/Etc. to stand out without breaking the bank on customer acquisition costs.  The problem isn’t your ability to yell, it's who you are yelling at. Let me explain: You run sales for a marketing agency whose services are valuable to companies looking to grow their clients. You have tried using email to connect with these potential clients but you are lacking one key element when you reach out:

Intent

You have no idea if the person on the other end of your email has any interest in your services.

There’s plenty of reasons for them to not be interested:

• Timing

• Budget

• Product problems

• Distribution issues

• Never heard of your company

• Working with another provider

Determining intent can come in a number of forms:

• Filling out a lead form on your site

• Downloading a white paper

• Clicking on an ad

• Watching a video

Typically you’ve had to get them exposed to your brand for them to show these signals of intent and that costed you money and potentially didn’t produce results that you were comfortable with from an ROI perspective.

So the question becomes can you create intent?

If they can’t be a client there’s nothing you can do on cold outreach to manufacture “intent” but there are tricks that good sales reps use to shift their intent to focus on your products or services.

Great sales reps spend time analyzing their wins, replicating successful strategies to produce more wins and the snowball effect means they seem to constantly be closing business. There’s always one rep outpacing everyone else on the team that seems to magically get all of the good deals.

Well it's not magic, it's correlation!  (yes, statistics)

Great sales reps do one thing well, they take their existing wins, do an analysis on what made those wins successful, and they use those wins to leverage the next win. That process keeps being repeated and creates a cycle where it seems like that rep just keeps getting “lucky” when in fact it's statistical analysis that is driving the next win. The early success of a stand out client is leveraged in the next outreach to the future client to build trust, showing results from the early client and actually increasing INTENT for the next customer. This process gets repeated with two successful wins and the next outreach is even more powerful and the snowball continues to build momentum.

Eventually that rep is getting incoming requests because they have worked with so many stand out clients that they become the "go to" rep in the industry that handles that category.

This process typically happens in a tight knit community of buyers and the rep becomes the expert in that space.

Your cold outreach and sales prospecting problem

The problem with your cold outreach strategy and why it hasn’t been working even when you’ve used “tools” to help get in front of decision makers, is because you aren’t finding tight correlations between your previous successes and the next potential client.

If you stand in the town square long enough yelling about selling apples you may find someone that’s interested, the timing is right and the price fits their budget. When you do finally make a sale and you find out that the buyer bought your apples to make the king’s birthday apple pie then you should start yelling that you have apples from Job’s Apple Farm that are fit for a king!

Take the trigger from the 1st sale and leverage it for the next one. Your sale to the king's baker can be your trigger to differentiate you from the other vendors for the next sale. You 'create' the intent to purchase from you vs the competition from social proof of the previous sale.

Great sales reps repeat this process over and over again finding a connection between the prospective new customer and positive sales in the past. They do it at scale because they become experts in the category and spend time researching the niche until they are the "go to" authority on the space which allows them to tell prospects about the previous wins they’ve had with similar customers that are highly correlated.

Your tools aren't sharp

The problem with your tools and your cold outreach in general is they aren’t looking at your sale to the king’s baker and properly using it to justify making the next sale to the next customer.

The other issue is it's hard to:

• Manually research the wins of every rep within the organization in the CRM or other platforms

• Do the researching on the highly correlated companies to the previous wins

• Find the decision makers at the highly correlated company that can approve a purchase decision for your product or service

• Do the tailored outbound outreach in a systematic way that’s authentic and customized to that particular prospect

Comparing apples and apples

The correlation has to be accurate for the comparison to fit. Just listing companies you work with is just as bad as generic emails to “Dear {{First_Name}}” you have to make a connection to the previous win in an authentic way.

This correlation could be broken down to include the same:

• industry

• company size

• company growth stage

• funding level

• geographic region/territory

• pain point

• technology challenge/limitations/stack

The closer the correlation the easier it is for the new prospective client to envision they can see the same kind of ROI as the previous success. It's time to stop yelling in the town square with a generic message and start having strategic conversations leveraging your wins to be a building block for your next sale.