Your Response Rates Are a Warning Sign, Not a Quota Problem

Back in the mid-2010s, I was one of those sales reps with a pretty bullish mentality towards outbound email outreach. Unfortunately, the tables turned, and my response rates to cold email outreach plummeted 90%. Over the last decade, the same amount of outreach has begun producing just a tenth of the results; not only for me, but for sales reps everywhere. 

The problem wasn’t email. The problem was how we, as outbound sales reps, responded to the decrease in positive outcomes. As a collective, the sellers changed buyer behavior and now, we’re seeing this pattern repeat itself. This time, it’s happening on the phones, and if sales leaders don’t learn from what happened to email, reps will inevitably burn through another channel.

The lesson for sales leaders

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, sales across industries began to encounter new obstacles. Email providers like Microsoft and Google became stricter about bulk sending and began blocking and blacklisting domains that engaged in it. As a result, the sales leaders I worked with and I saw email outreach response rates drop from 2 to 3% to 0.2 to 0.3% — a substantial decline, to say the least. 

By 2024, the channel had become untenable for cold outbound. With the dwindling number of responses, the common fix was to send more emails to bridge the gap. However, trying to fix the problem with more of the same activity that caused it was like pouring gas on a fire. 

For sales leaders, it’s important to recognize that when results drop, volume isn’t the solution just because it feels like the safe answer. Many of us turned to a volume push because it is measurable and easy to hand out. Unfortunately, it is rarely the right solution. Volume is the easiest lever to pull, but it treats the symptom and ignores the cause.

History repeats itself

Today, sales teams are turning back to the phones for cold outreach. As someone who works with hundreds of sales leaders and their teams, I’ve noticed a concerning trend developing. Most of these teams — if not all — are bringing the outdated volume playbook with them. 

What is likely not realized is that, in the same way email providers intervened, phone carriers are intervening as well. In the last few years, carriers have started cracking down on mass-dialing activity and, to stop it, have implemented ‘spam likely’ caller ID labels.

More dials lead to more spam flags, which lead to fewer answers, which lead to more dials. In other words, if volume centricity persists, the phone channel will soon be as untenable as email. Once a number is flagged, even the prospects who would have welcomed the conversation no longer pick up.

What I tell CROs now

If there’s only one thing you take away from this article, let it be this: when a drop in results happens across your sales team, rather than assuming it’s a quota problem, treat it as a warning signal. 

Chief Revenue Officers, Chief Sales Officers and Heads of Sales are up against board mandates that demand they do more with fewer resources. My advice, which I’ve seen deliver time and time again, is to measure outcomes per activity, not total activity. Precision beats volume every time. A rep who books three meetings from 40 calls is building something sustainable. A rep who books the same three meetings from 400 dials is burning through goodwill, phone numbers and their own morale.

To that point, it’s also crucial to fix the inputs before attempting to scale them. Contact data is wrong 15 to 25 percent of the time, so without addressing those inaccuracies, deploying that data to dial at volume multiplies waste. Every call to a wrong number is a wasted dial and one more signal that can get your numbers flagged. Cleaning your lists, verifying direct dials and prioritizing the right accounts will do more for your pipeline than another 100 dials a day.

It’s the responsibility of sales leaders and reps alike to protect the channels we depend on. Think of it like foraging. An experienced forager takes only what they need and leaves the roots in the ground, so the plant keeps producing season after season. Pull up the whole plant to fill your basket faster, and you’ve just had your last harvest from that spot. Blasting a channel with volume is the sales equivalent of pulling up the roots. 

The channel isn’t the problem

Although my mentality towards cold email outreach has evolved since the mid-2010s, what I’ve come to learn is that I wasn’t wrong about email — I was wrong about scale. 

At the end of the day, every channel has a reputation, and burning it hurts everyone who uses it, including you. Before it’s too late for the phone channel, let us all keep in mind that the channel isn’t the problem; the appetite for volume is.

If we, as a collective, can resist the instinct to lean on quantity, we’ll not only get more quality outcomes, but we’ll also be leaving the roots intact and harvesting from our channels for a lifetime.

Back in the mid-2010s, I was one of those sales reps with a pretty bullish mentality towards outbound email outreach. Unfortunately, the tables turned, and my response rates to cold email outreach plummeted 90%. Over the last decade, the same amount of outreach has begun producing just a tenth of the results; not only for me, but for sales reps everywhere. 

The problem wasn’t email. The problem was how we, as outbound sales reps, responded to the decrease in positive outcomes. As a collective, the sellers changed buyer behavior and now, we’re seeing this pattern repeat itself. This time, it’s happening on the phones, and if sales leaders don’t learn from what happened to email, reps will inevitably burn through another channel.

The lesson for sales leaders

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, sales across industries began to encounter new obstacles. Email providers like Microsoft and Google became stricter about bulk sending and began blocking and blacklisting domains that engaged in it. As a result, the sales leaders I worked with and I saw email outreach response rates drop from 2 to 3% to 0.2 to 0.3% — a substantial decline, to say the least.