B2B Outreach and Lead Generation in 2029

Here's what I think B2B outreach and lead generation will look like in 2029.

1. There's a big trend towards increasing output. Sales acceleration tools like outreach.io allow companies to make WAY more calls, emails, and social touches... and a few tools like growlabs, allows even more significant increases in outreach volume.

I've talked with a VC firm that deploys a system that enables 50k+ emails a month, all feeding back to one SDR.

Small companies, I think, are learning more about the volume game. I don't know if large companies will every fully adopt it... It's very hard to scale vs. just hiring an SDR.

I think the most effective tactics will be to

A. Send 10x more outreach than anyone else

B. Be 10x more personalized

However, there's another problem... and that's data

2. Here's the biggest issue overall with outbound... and that's data.

The big problem with a 10x volume increase is that no current databases effectively categorize their leads.

Most companies I think can be categorized in the following ways

A. What products or services they sell

B. What industries they sell too

C. Their USP

I feel VERY few companies do this. They classify by tradition industry classification codes, which works 50-80% of the time, but they're usually are 2-7 subsegments within a market that change this.

The actual contact for outreach is relatively simple... ZoomInfo has crowdsourced it, a bunch of companies are guessing it, and others like leadiq have really clever scraping tools.

I think, over time, prices will drop for raw data simply through the number of providers.

The winners in the data market will be people who can deliver a clear ideal customer profile... not just industry/position/etc.

This is the real constraint in some ways of volume outreach... it's not easy to come up with a list that matches an ideal customer profile.

3. Useful AI will be deployed. Right now, according to their claims, conversica can convert 40% of white paper leads into sales qualified leads. They have competitors doing similar things in email, and some companies doing similar things in live chat (AI and outsourced).

If that's true, within 10 years, someone will most likely be able to create a rudimentary AI outreach tool. I don't think AI will totally dominate B2B outreach, probably more machine learning... but someone will probably create an algorithm that scrapes a website, compares it to an ICP, and personalizes cold emails based on the data.

It's going to likely start as a "services company."

4. Linkedin and other social networks.

Linkedin has two competing priorities: maintain user engagement to sell job services, and sell sales navigator licenses. The incentive on sales navigator right now is NOT to personalize; it's to do mass outreach. It's simply easier, and a lot less emotionally risky.

Personalized outreach is just not effective enough... in my experience, creating rapport is not that effective compared to bulk outreach. Why craft the perfect message when you can reach 10 more people in the same time?

They MAY be able to incentivize extremely personal social selling over time, but I doubt that will really go anywhere, to be honest.

They also have 2 other external problems: it's practically possible to stop Linkedin automation because any virtual machine can easily replicate human-like behavior, and 10% or more of CEOs will want to delegate interactions on their Linkedin profile.

CEOs just won't use Linkedin at some level if they can't delegate it.

It's a bit challenging too on LinkedIn because if you legitimately prospected for 8 hrs a day on the platform, you could send out TONS of connection requests... and LinkedIn would want to incentivize that behavior.

LinkedIn might allow users to more heavily punish spam connection requests... or limit the total number of connections, but their official policy is not trending towards that.

I think, in a perfect world, they would want to incentivize heavily personalized outreach.

But I don't think great personalized outreach will actually beat avatar-based outreach that's scaled and researched well. Not in terms of raw output that is.

5. A quick note on advertising. A study I saw showed that web adoption is not likely to continue at massive rates in terms of net new users. I'd agree with this: VERY few people aren't on most social platforms, especially in business.

The trend is likely going to be towards "pay for play" content. We see this already with Facebook, where you don't REALLY have reach without paying for it.

However, advertisers currently do NOT have a great way to build precise audiences. Interest targeting is a joke compared to sales navigator targeting, especially for B2B.

Advertising does have a non-trivial advantage in lead generation because it delivers self-reported data and some level of initial rapport.

We will probably see some commoditized services and software to produce white papers and drive leads to them for a variety of industries.

However, since the supply of users isn't increasing, but their demand for them isn't increasing, costs will go up.

The big opportunity I see here other than streamlined lead ads is hyper-precise custom audiences.

If you could develop a system running targeted LinkedIn or Facebook custom audiences to EXACTLY the right customer profile, you would keep ad costs really low while generating significant engagement.

You'd need new content fairly often to prevent ad fatigue, but the opportunity is still there.

6. It's worth briefly mentioning UpWork, FreeeUp and other freelancing services. That does make sourcing data really easy, and doing basic cold calling and outreach simple

TO RECAP

1. Data is getting really cheap... especially emails, but also phone numbers

2. The cost per activity is dropping a LOT. There are hard effective limits to this at some level because of spam controls. Phone, email, and social platforms will be incentivized to put spam requests in place here.

3. Advertising costs are going up overall

4. Some AI and machine learning opportunities will exist, but it's a non-trivial problem

Overall, the big opportunities are:

1. Lists that precisely match an ideal customer profile. In other words, precise CLASSIFICATION. This is hard, and not necessarily something VAs or software can do... at least now.

2. Precise custom audiences for advertising. In other words, DISTRIBUTION of data through multiple platforms

3. Personalized content will matter to some extent. Correctly classifying a business is, in my opinion, more important... this allows personalization at scale essentially. But, if you have a correctly classified list, PERSONALIZATION matters quite a bit. It may be enough to offset issues with classification. Really this actually just means RELEVANT information.

4. VOLUME of outreach. This is, in my opinion, the last area that needs focus... if you don't have correctly classified leads, with some level of relevance, then they won't convert. Also, volume leads to a certain level of waste past a certain level. That being said... if you can stay ahead of Google and Microsoft and keep delivering emails at scale... and LinkedIn and phone of course, that will be a huge advantage. But I think classification matters more. (edited)

FINAL SUMMARY

The final summary of what outreach will likely look like in 2029:

The people who win will have extremely well-classified leads. They will know almost every business in the market which fits their ideal customer profile. They will segment those leads by what stage of the customer journey they are in, and they will maintain high advertising ROI using laser targeted custom audiences.

Some people will use AI or outsourcing to simplify outreach and appointment booking... but they will only be marginally more effective, I THINK, without well-classified leads.

Volume and personalization will be normal at a basic level. Neither one will get too out of control, though, because having a VA read something from a Linkedin profile or website will get old after a while to read in your inbox, and communication channels will be incentivized to protect their users from spam.

Companies that are 10x higher volume or 10x higher personalized will win at the edges... but they will have to work pretty hard to stay ahead of communication channels. Otherwise, they'll hit spam limits.

The winners in classification, however, will be able to win in both volume and personalization. The fact that they have homogenous lead lists means their outreach will slip through spam filters across multiple channels. That will make it easy to scale both in terms of volume and personalization.

The overall impact? I think this will lead to greater and greater specialization in businesses... both in software and services. There are just too many network effects available for specialists, especially focused ones. Many, MANY business functions will be served through outsourcing companies or software.