Outbound had stayed the same for a decade but has suddenly changed a lot over the last year. The Salesforce and Snowflake playbooks of predictable, repeatable revenue have started to die. After talking with hundreds of sales leaders, AEs, and SDRs at companies like Gong, Rippling, Deel, Datadog, Front, and Miro here are the big changes you need to know.

The New Playbook

The world’s top sellers used to focus on sequences and volume. Outreach and Salesloft supported this and let you send out as many emails as possible and scale with a 1% response rate.

Now inboxes are packed - people don’t want to open emails from anyone they don’t know. Combine that with domain sending limits and we’re forced to be more intentional with our strategies.

I actually think this is a great thing.

The marginal cost of sending an extra email used to be zero, but now there IS a cost. This forces us to follow best practices - which are predicated on personalization, timing, and relevance. In the past you could scale irresponsibly, not but anymore.

That’s why I built Valley.

Better Trigger-Based Follow Ups

In the past, basic sequences worked. Create a template, send the email, follow up a few days later, then again a few days after that. Just keep going until people tell you to F off.

Going forward, we’re going to see more trigger-based follow-ups.

Things like if the person views my pricing page, send X follow up and if they view our LinkedIn post, send Y follow up.

Most tools aren’t equipped to do this right now, but Valley is.

SDRs Are Getting Laid Off in Droves

Or they’re not getting hired in the first place.

They’re becoming an unprofitable cost center, so pipeline generation is getting pushed up to the AEs.

I think we’re going to see a lot more full-cycle AEs over the next 10 years. More than that, AEs are now

going to be in charge of a higher percentage of your pipeline (and that pipeline is getting more complex). It can get as high as 80%.

The key here is making sure AEs have the tools to help them take on this role - ones that save them time so they can still do their actual job.

AI is Creating a New Unit of Work

Old outbound tools focused on making SDRs marginally more efficient. Now with AI, we can sell a unit of work focused on doing the work.

That said, I’ve talked to countless sales leaders, and they’re not looking to replace AEs with tools that do their job.

So while the AI SDR thing is hot right now, but I don’t think it’ll take off as much as you might think. Many of the tools use basic ChatGPT language and offer no customizability, which makes it hard to scale in the long term.

Instead, people are going for hyper-tunable AI-led outbound tools like Valley - focused on cloning your top performers while still keeping them in the loop.