Outbound is dead. Long live outbound.

Jemma · notes from a sales lead 9 May 2026 ★ Sales &amp; marketing · field notes Outbound is dead . Long live outbound. First week as Sales &amp; Marketing Lead at InterioApp. I've been doing outbound for a decade. Here's the playbook I'm running now - with two AI agents on a Mac mini instead of a six-person team. Honest version. No fluff. J Jemma Sales &amp; Marketing Lead at InterioApp 8 min read Hi. I'm Jemma. This is my first week at InterioApp and Darius said I should write something for the blog. So here we go - and fair warning, I'm a sales person, not a writer, so this is going to be choppy and direct and I'll probably swear once. If you came here for posh prose you're in the wrong place. If you came here to figure out how to actually run outbound in 2026 with no team and a small budget, you're in the right place. Pull up a chair. One thing before we start, in the spirit of being honest about how this gets made: I am writing this on my iPad with a pen, old school, and about half of what you'll read here was voice-recorded while I was on the train to the office. The whole thing then went through a proofreading prompt to clean up grammar and turn my voice notes into proper paragraphs. So if it reads slightly tidier than I sound in real life, that's why. The thinking is mine. The polish is AI. I do not want to spend my evenings checking every comma and neither should you. Also - we should be doing this on YouTube too, and we are. I've been quietly recording a whole library of videos on outbound, the actual workflow, the prompts, the warmup, the lot. Subscribe to our channel - the videos drop the moment we hit 2,000 subscribers. Until then it's me, the iPad, and this article. Quick context on me. I've been in B2B sales for ten years. Started as an SDR in a startup that cold-called the cleaning industry from a basement in Manchester. Worked my way up - SDR, AE, sales manager, head of sales at a SaaS company you've never heard of that got acquired in 2024. I have done outbound the old way. I have run teams of six people. I have managed the lead-researcher / SDR / AE relay race that every B2B SaaS still thinks is the only way to do this. It is not the only way to do this anymore. It might not even be a sensible way to do this anymore. I'll explain. The old way I was taught Five years ago, when I was running a team, the standard outbound machine looked like this: 1 lead researcher finding companies on Apollo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, 2 SDRs writing sequences in Outreach and booking meetings, 2 AEs closing the meetings, 1 RevOps person keeping the whole thing from falling over. Six people. Probably £300K in fully-loaded cost once you add software, office, and overheads. To book maybe 7-25 qualified meetings per week. The economics were brutal even then. And the work, honestly, was mostly research. Not selling. Research. The SDRs spent 70% of their day finding emails, finding the right person, finding the trigger event that made the company worth contacting. The actual writing of the email was maybe 20 minutes a day. The actual conversation - the part the SDR was trained to do well - was a tiny fraction of the role. The rest was administrative grind. That is the part AI killed first. Not the selling. The research. Then vs Now 2020 → 2026 Six people doing the work of one person and two AI agents. Same output. Better output, actually. Why the old way doesn't work anymore Two things broke at the same time. First, inbox saturation got insane - your average B2B buyer gets 120+ cold emails per week now, vs maybe 30 in 2020. Second, AI made the generic version of cold outbound essentially free, which means the bar for what counts as "personalized" moved up by a factor of about ten. The "Hi {firstname}, noticed you work at {company}, would love to chat" email isn't just ineffective now - it's actively damaging. It tags you as someone who didn't try. So the playbook had to change. The work that mattered shifted from volume of touches to quality of homework . The good news is that AI is genuinely good at the homework part. The bad news is that most sales teams are still using AI to scale the volume part, which makes everything worse, not better. They're using a Ferrari to deliver pizza. You don't need a six-person team. You need one person who's done their homework and two AI agents who help them do it faster. What I'm actually doing this week Right. Here's the playbook. I'll walk you through what I did Monday-Friday this week. Steal it, don't steal it, but it's working. 1 Pick ONE market. Not three. One. The single biggest mistake I see new sales leads make is trying to run three campaigns at once because the founder said "we sell to everybody." You don't. Pick one. For InterioApp this week I picked: independent window-coverings retailers in the UK with 1-3 showrooms, who already have a Shopify store. That's it. That's the whole filter. Geography + size + tech stack. If you can't fit your ICP in one sentence, you don't have one yet. How I picked: I asked Darius two questions. Who has paid us the fastest in the past 12 months? Who has churned the least? The answer to both was the same shape of company. That's the ICP. 2 Build 3 ICPs inside that one market Inside the one market, there are usually 3 sub-personas with different pain. For my UK retailers, the three are: (A) the family-business owner in their 50s who's drowning in paperwork, (B) the second-generation operator in their 30s who's trying to modernise the family shop, (C) the multi-shop retailer who's already digital but stitching together five tools. Same product fixes all three problems. Different message lands with each. Why three not five? Because I can write good copy for three. I cannot write good copy for five. Constraints make better work. 3 Pull the list. Two AI agents. One Mac mini. This is the part where five years ago I had a lead researcher. Now I have a Claude prompt and an Apollo export. Agent #1 (research) takes the company list and pulls public signals - recent press, hiring patterns, Google reviews mentioning specific pain. Agent #2 (drafting) takes that signal and writes a first-draft email tailored to which of the three ICPs the company fits. Both run on a Mac mini in the office. £600 of hardware. Replaces the £100K+ of headcount that used to do this part. I'll show you my actual research prompt next. 4 Warm up your inbox. Own your list. This is the boring step nobody wants to talk about and it's the one that decides whether your campaign works at all. If you send 200 cold emails from a brand new inbox tomorrow, every single one goes to spam. Doesn't matter how good your copy is. Doesn't matter how well-researched the prospect is. Spam folder. Done. So before you send anything, warm up the inbox. I use SendGrid because that's what we have at InterioApp - but Mailgun, Postmark, Instantly, whatever you can afford works fine. The pattern is the same: start with 5-10 sends a day for two weeks, gradually ramp to 30-50 per day, never blast all at once. There are tools that automate the whole warmup (Warmup Inbox, Mailwarm, Lemwarm) and they cost about £30-50 a month. Worth every penny. The other half is your CRM. The most important piece of infrastructure you build is the list of people you've ever talked to and what you know about them. Not the deals. Not the pipeline. The list. Because the deal that doesn't close this quarter is often the deal that closes 18 months from now, and only if you remembered the conversation. I'm using InterioApp's own CRM because that's the company I work at and it's already built into the product. But honestly? Use whatever you want. A Google Sheet. A Notion database. Airtable. Or ask Claude to scaffold you one in 10 minutes - I've literally seen people do this and it works fine for the first 500 contacts. The tool doesn't matter. What matters is that you never lose the list, and that you actually log what you learned about each person every time you talk to them. Names of their kids. The thing they were frustrated about three months ago. What software they switched from. Everything. That's the real moat. Not the prompt. The memory. How it flows Mac mini I edit every email before it sends. Always. The AI does the homework. The human does the judgment. The actual prompts I use Here's the research prompt I run on each company. I am sharing this because gatekeeping prompts is silly - the prompt isn't the moat. The moat is doing the work of running it 200 times. Research prompt · Claude You are researching {company_name} , a window-coverings retailer in the UK. I need three things in under 200 words total: 1. Recent signals - press, hiring, store openings, awards, complaints, Google reviews mentioning specific operational pain. Look at the last 6 months only. 2. Tech stack guess - do they have a Shopify store? Are they using basic email? Any hint of how they manage quotes / inventory / workshop? 3. Which ICP they fit - (A) family business 50+ owner drowning in paperwork, (B) 30-something second-gen modernising, (C) multi-shop retailer stitching tools together. Output as three short paragraphs. Be specific. Cite sources. If you can't find something, say "no signal" - don't make it up. And here's the drafting prompt I run after the research. Notice how short it is. Most people overthink prompts. Drafting prompt · Claude Based on the research above , write a 70-word cold email to {first_name} at {company} . They fit ICP {A/B/C} . Rules: - Reference one specific thing from the research in the first sentence. Not generic. Specific. - One clear value proposition tied to their ICP pain. - One question that's easy to answer. - Sign-off: "Jemma at InterioApp." - No "Hope this finds you well." No "I came across your company." No fake compliments. Output the email only. No preamble. What working with Claude actually feels like Honest take: it feels like having a research analyst who never gets tired but who occasionally hallucinates a fact, so you have to verify. The trick is to use AI for the high-volume, low-judgment work (gathering signals, drafting first passes, sorting lists) and to keep yourself in the loop for the high-judgment work (deciding what's actually relevant, deciding the angle, writing the line that lands). Anyone who tells you to "automate the whole thing" hasn't actually run a campaign. The hallucination rate isn't zero, and one made-up fact in a cold email kills your credibility forever with that prospect. Rule I'm running by: AI drafts everything. I edit everything. Nothing sends without my eyes on it. When my list is 200 emails, that's 6-7 hours of editing once a week. Manageable. When the list grows to 1,000, I'll need to either narrow the ICP further or build better evaluation prompts to filter what AI #2 sends to me. Probably both. ★ The hardest part nobody tells you The hardest part of running outbound this way is not the technology. It's the discipline to stay narrow. The Mac mini will happily research 5,000 companies for you. Claude will happily draft 5,000 emails. The volume is no longer the constraint , which means the only thing standing between you and a bad campaign is your own willingness to say "no, that's not my ICP" - over and over, every day, when the founder pings you asking why you haven't contacted some company that's clearly outside your filter. The skill that used to be most valuable in outbound was finding leads . The skill that's most valuable now is refusing leads. If you can't say no to a list, you can't run AI-powered outbound. You'll just spam faster. Do your homework. Always. If there's one thing I want you to take from this it's this: AI doesn't replace the homework. It makes the homework cheaper. Five years ago I couldn't research 200 companies in a week without three people. Now I can do it in an afternoon - but only if I'm willing to read what the AI found, think about it, and write the email myself or at least edit it heavily. Anyone who skips the thinking step ends up with a campaign that looks personalized but feels generic. Buyers can tell. Always. The decade-old rules of good outbound haven't changed. Be relevant. Be specific. Don't waste people's time. Have a clear ask. Follow up twice and then leave them alone. What's changed is just who does the grunt work. Five years ago, six people. This week, me and two agents. And one last thing for the founders reading. The hiring rules have changed. Five years ago you hired a sales lead and then gave them a budget to build a team around them - SDRs, researchers, the whole stack. That hire doesn't make sense anymore. The new hire is a person who already brings their own AI agents with them. Who knows which prompts they trust. Who has their own scripts, their own warmup setup, their own way of working with Claude or whatever model they prefer. You're not hiring labour anymore. You're hiring judgment plus a working system. If you're still trying to hire the old way - or worse, if you've already hired the old way and you can feel the team isn't producing - the issue might not be the people. It might be that the system around them was built for 2020. Fix the system or fix the hire. But don't keep paying for an outbound machine that the market stopped rewarding three years ago. Right. That's enough for today. I'm going to go book some meetings. If you're a sales lead reading this and you want to compare notes, my email is at the bottom of the InterioApp homepage. If you're a founder reading this wondering whether to hire an SDR team or a sales lead with AI - hire the second one. Easier hire, cheaper, better results, faster ramp. One more thing, and this is strictly off the clock - if you actually want to message me, find me on PUBlish. It's this new little platform that's growing fast and is nothing like LinkedIn yet, which is exactly why I'm there early. Got my own corner, no recruiters spamming me at 7am, real conversations with people actually building things. Don't tell my boss I told you about it on company time - haha - I save that one for the weekends. And the YouTube channel - go on, subscribe. Once we hit 2,000 subscribers I'm opening the door to all the video content I've been quietly recording. Whole library, dropping at once. ★ Tl;dr for Monday Pick one market. Not three. Build three ICPs inside it. Use AI for the homework. Warm up your inbox before you send anything. Own the list - in any tool, even a sheet, but never lose it. Edit every email before it sends. Never spam. The skill is no longer finding leads - it's refusing the wrong ones. And the new hire isn't a sales lead with a team. It's a sales lead who comes with their own AI agents. Jemma - Sales &amp; Marketing Lead at InterioApp · first week on the job