AI – A Great Tool for Cold Outreach

If your sales depend on cold outreach, you know emails have become less and less reliable for connecting with prospects.

Companies already face an uphill battle attracting great sales talent when the job is 70% admin and 30% actual selling. Add declining email effectiveness to the mix and the problem intensifies. If you’re pulling leads from LinkedIn or Apollo, you’re getting the same intel as everyone else at the same time – no competitive advantage, just more noise in an already crowded inbox. In fact, if you’re selling into traditional industries like logistics, manufacturing, or healthcare, many of the best prospects aren’t even on LinkedIn.

The Real Battle: Infrastructure Over Inspiration

Clever copy or a polished sequence in your CRM is no longer enough. The war for deliverability is being fought on three fronts: infrastructure, data, and reputation. A beautifully written sales email sent from an unverified domain will go straight into the void. Email filters measure sender reputation not just through technical compliance, but by tracking recipient behavior. Do people open your messages, reply, or forward them? Or do they delete and mark them as spam?

Just a handful of complaints can drag an entire domain down. While it’s tempting to obsess over copywriting tricks, the logistical underpinnings can matter even more: Are you sending the right email to the right person at the right time? If a recipient values your emails, it’s far more likely that your emails will continue to make it to their destinations.

AI: From Problem to Solution (There Is Hope!)

Most prospecting today is built around public signals: the news and events everyone can see at the same time (funding rounds, new hires, tech changes, job postings). Many sales teams are monitoring these, likely including your sales rep along with a dozen competitors.

Cold emails won’t accomplish much in isolation. In a world where filters limit volume, companies that are now pairing email with LinkedIn, re-targeting ads, or even traditional phone calls are seeing more success.

This is where agentic AI can make a difference. Modern AI tools can analyze spam scores before a message goes out, automate warm-up schedules, and adjust sending volume based on deliverability signals.

By automating the administrative grind and surfacing smarter data, AI frees sales reps to do what they do best: be more strategic and creative.

What should sales leaders do?

1. Audit the basics: Broken email security processes can sink an entire program.
2. Demand higher standards: Purchased lists and mass blasts decrease your brand value or, worse, permanently affect your domain and all correspondence attached to it (including emails to existing customers). Build campaign lists specifically for your ideal customers.
3. Invest in AI tools: That provide genuine competitive intelligence, not just recycled data.
4. Remember that filters learn: Every complaint trains them to treat you with suspicion. Discipline, patience, and smarter targeting aren’t optional – they’re your new competitive advantage.

Get a handle on deliverability with the right infrastructure and intelligence, and good old-fashioned email becomes your window to the companies that need you most.

Pablo Jiménez de Parga Ramos is a co-founder of Throxy, the outbound growth partner for companies selling into traditional industries like manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare.