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- 141: 14 Things That Kill Outbound Results
141: 14 Things That Kill Outbound Results
Jed Mahrle
February 22, 2026
Welcome back to the Practical Prospecting newsletter!
Today, I’m sharing 14 things that kill your cold email results.
Agenda
Messaging Killers
CTA & Offer Killers
Targeting Killers
Process & Execution Killers
ZoomInfo finally released GTM Studio.
I heard about this months ago, and I’ve been HYPED for it.
GTM Studio connects dozens of data sources into one platform and uses AI to help you build highly targeted lists without needing technical skills.
Check out this video I posted about how I’m using it to do AI research and waterfall enrichments at scale.
Messaging Killers
#1 - Social Proof
Name-dropping customers the prospect does not recognize, or using vague proof like “teams like yours,” or “Other marketing leaders,” instantly screams marketing email.
Social proof only works when it is credible to them.
#2 - AI Snippets
Most of the emails we send have at least one personalized AI snippet. These are usually short custom fields such as: [City], [Tech Stack], [Time in Role], etc.
When you’re doing custom fields like this across a large list, it’s almost inevitable that AI will make mistakes, and you might end up with very “AI-looking” snippets.
If you don’t have a quality control process for checking this and cleaning them up before they go out, it could be quietly killing your conversion rates.
#3 - Generic Hooks
Rule of thumb: Make your opening hook feel as 1 to 1 as possible. If it could apply to 100 other people, it’s probably not that good.
It serves the most important goal: Earn enough trust with the reader to get them to read the rest of your email.
The rest of your email could be spot on. But if you get the hook wrong, it won’t matter.
#4 - A Problem That’s Not Specific or Relevant
This is one of the biggest problems I see with cold email. The problem statements feel SO generic…
“Are you struggling to book more meetings?”
“Are your margins low?”
“Are you trying to reduce spend?”
Don’t name an obvious problem everyone has. Get specific.
I approach this with a two-step process:
Write down all the problems your product/service solves
For each problem, write down 3 different ways you could position that problem
No have 9-15+ problem statements. Test all of them in batches of 500-1k email sends until you find the one that resonates best.
#5 - A Value Prop That Restates the Problem
A lot of cold emails say the problem twice and call it a value prop. A real value prop explains how the problem gets solved in a believable way.
Emphasis on “a believable way”. You have to address what they’re probably already doing, and explain how your solution is the better choice.
“Save time,” “increase efficiency,” and “reduce costs” without explaining the mechanism sound like vague marketing promises.
#6 - Claims Any Competitor Could Make
If the value prop sounds like it could be copy-pasted onto a competitor’s website, it is not differentiated enough for outbound.
For example, there are a million lead generation agencies like mine. But the three core members of our team (myself included) helped build PandaDoc’s outbound engine from scratch on its path to becoming a unicorn. Anyone can send cold emails. We know what it actually takes to build outbound into a sustainable, profitable growth channel from day one.
You have to find that unique angle for your solution. And just like in my example, it may not be a feature.
CTA & Offer Killers
#7 - CTAs That are Too “Cute” (for lack of better words)
EVERY SINGLE email I get now ends with:
“Open to a chat?”
“Worth a quick convo?”
For a while, it worked. But now, it screams AI. In general, overly short and choppy “copywriter style” cold emails dramatically underperform vs. emails that try to sound like a real human wrote it.
#8 - An Offer That is Actually Self-Serving
If the offer primarily benefits you (demo, intro call, walkthrough), prospects feel it immediately. Good offers give value before asking for time.
On the flip side, generic PDFs, vague audits, or “free assessments” with no defined outcome are worse. If your CTA is a “free give”, make sure people actually want it.
I talked about this in a recent newsletter; you can check it out here. I shared 8 CTAs and offer ideas you can use.
Targeting Killers
#9 - Using Signals Everyone Else Has Access To
If the signal came from a standard data provider filter, it is unlikely to differentiate your outreach.
Examples include:
Recent funding
New hires
Job postings
Company growth
The only way these work is if you personalize the email way beyond that signal.
For example, recent funding can actually work as a signal IF you have customers who share the same investor as the company that just received funding.
You can mention: “A few other [PE Firm] backed teams are using our solution for X, figured you would find it interesting as well…”
Do that instead of “Congrats on the funding!”
#10 - Good Signals Paired With Generic Messaging
Even unique and “custom” signals (which I talked about last week), fail when the problem and value prop do not logically follow from them.
Rule of thumb: if the signal does not strongly imply a problem you solve, don’t use it in your messaging. Otherwise, it’ll feel out of place or like a bait and switch.
Again, I shared good examples of this in last week’s newsletter.
Process & Execution Killers
#11 - Counting Replies Instead of Quality
Open rates no longer matter. Reply rates arguably don’t matter either anymore.
The metrics you should be tracking the closest in cold email are:
Positive Reply Rate
Positive Reply to Meeting Rate
Leads Per Positive Reply
#12 - Not Strategically Tagging & Re-Engaging Leads
If you do cold email long enough, eventually you’ll get to a point where half your pipeline comes from following up with people who said “Not now” 6 to 12 months ago.
In Smartlead, we strategically tag each lead. For example:
Interested - Not Now
Using a [Competitor]
Not Interested (With Context)
Then we re-engage those leads each month or quarter, with custom messaging based on their tag.
#13 - Poor Reply Handling
Poor Positive Reply to Meeting Booked conversion rate comes from a few things:
Slow speed to lead. Your goal should be to reply in under 10-minutes. Otherwise, momentum can die.
Not going multi-channel. When you get a reply, call them and reach out on LinkedIn too.
No follow-up. After a positive reply, follow up at LEAST 3-5 times until they convert.
We’re actually testing Underfive.ai (not sponsored) for this right now. It’s a bot that will reply to all of your cold emails and LinkedIn DM replies in under five minutes.
So far it’s working really well.
#14 - Slow Iteration Speed
We believe every company has a winning cold email campaign. It’s just a matter of testing and iterating until you find it.
That’s why speed of iteration is so important.
I just built an automated workflow to help us solve this (check out the video here).
Every day, n8n pulls in all of our active campaigns from Smartlead.
From there, it flags anything below our benchmarks:
Under 2% reply rate
Under 20% positive reply rate
Those campaigns get sent to Claude.
Claude analyzes them against our Testing & Iteration SOP, identifies the likely issues, writes new email variants to test, and automatically pushes everything into Asana as a task for the team.
All members of my community will get access to these types of workflows and more.
Thanks for reading!
Jed