Cold Sales Outreach Emails Inefficacy - a sign of upcoming disruption?

Everyone does it, everyone hates it, large companies are built on it (Outreach, Apollo) and it underlines the foundation of CRM systems (like Salesforce and HubSpot).

What prompted me to opine here was an accidental feature we developed at Jelled.AI that sorts communications that you don’t need to pay attention to out. Looking at the results of it - it got me thinking. I will explain.

But first - there is no surprise the efficacy of cold outreach emails has been declining (despite all the hacks - that largely do not work) and probably reached the point (with the introduction of AI tools into sales workflows) where the cost to send them is near zero, but the efficacy is an asymptote of zero. In fact I would argue there’s a high probability of a net negative return as receiving cold emails could drain whatever good will the customer could have had before opening them.

My personal routine handling inbound sales outreach was as follows:

1. I never respond to cold sales outreach, except if it’s from founders

2. I will mark repeated sales outreach email as spam (although that doesn’t seem to help due to various email distribution tricks people are using) and will block the sender.

Nonetheless - that’s still annoying.

So - with the new feature, Jelled.ai automatically detects inbound sales emails (so far with 100% accuracy) and sorts them out into a separate folder (the AI engine itself keeps the content if you ever need to do a research on it in the future). As a result - my inbox is super clean and I no longer get annoyed by the all the inbound.

However - this brings up several interesting observations. While using LLMs to generate emails is practically free (comparing to other methods involving humans) - getting rid of these emails is also free. Therefor the usefulness of the cold outbound channel is NIL and the only people making money here are from OpenAI.

The voice channel was already useless (I never ever pick up the phone in the first place if you are not in my address book). Text will largely meet similar fate (including mentions).

So, if cold outbound is of no value - that means that the value of SDRs is just an expense (the introduction research can be done by AI agents, while the introductions will still need to be done through the influencer network).

What does this do? Does It invert the SaaS sales model as it empowers the buyer to run a competitive bidding process through AI - which is already aware of company plans, budgets, timelines, etc.?

This, being on top of other AI advances, brings into question the need for CRM systems—which really have nothing to do with customer relationship management but are designed to manage the salesforce. Humans are forgetful, unorganized, need complex compensation plans, and are generally flawed. AI-first designed systems will obviously not have any of those problems. Additionally, as we have fewer humans, we will need fewer seats—there goes your pricing model as well.

Are we going to see an upheaval in the world of Salesforce? Does it apply to other professionals (in marketing for example)?

Something possibly to keep an eye on in the near future.

Thoughts welcome!