Deprogramming SDR Outreach from Blind Automation to Mindful Quality
Guest blogger: Walla Ng Ong - 4 min read - Jun 26, 2025
Six months into my SDR journey at my current employer, I’ve learnt that we are a well-oiled machine producing performing exactly the same as Fortune 500 SDR organizations. In other words, we are mediocre 🤷♀️. No job beats modern SDR for the most amount of “furious activity” for the least amount of results.
The Automate2Win-by-Volume Problem
Like most companies, we have what I call the “great sales execution platform, terrible content” syndrome. We were measuring everything, automating everything, and optimizing everything except the one thing that actually matters: the quality of what we’re saying to prospects. Our team is fantastic at executing processes, but the content powering all that execution is uninspiring, and frankly, forgettable.
I bet many of my fellow SDRs would agree: if it was us on the other side of the phone call hearing the pitch, we’d hang up too. We know this yet we keep dialing because, I guess we are somehow ok with automation being salesop’s problem and messaging being PMM’s problem. At the end of the day, we are the ones who miss quota, so why this pervasive attitude?
So anyway, my complaining won me a spot on a tiger team to address the outreach quality problem at my employer. Our first mission was to collect outreach examples from other companies (to my company) to understand what others might be doing right and wrong. Sadlly, what we discovered was most of it, from the best of the best companies to unknown startups, was mostly all wrong.
Even the Big Players Are Failing
One of our most surprising findings was how poorly some of the most well-known companies, organizations with seemingly unlimited resources and sophisticated sales teams, were performing at basic outreach. Here’s an example:
“Hey [First Name], hope you’re doing well. I noticed [Company Name] is growing fast and thought you might be interested in learning how we’ve helped similar companies like yours optimize their workflows. Do you have 15 minutes for a quick call?”
The personalization is surface-level at best, value proposition is completely generic, and there’s zero indication the sender knows anything about the recipient’s actual business or challenges. This came from a large cap that sells sales technology to other businesses.
These are established organizations that should be leading by example.
The AI Personalization Trap
We also collected examples from companies using AI-powered personalization tools, thinking we’d find the good stuff. Instead, we discovered something even more troubling: AI personalization that’s so shallow and poorly executed that it actually performs worse than non-personalized traditional outreach.
Here’s a typical example of what we found:
“Hi [First Name], I saw that your company recently launched [Product Name]. Congratulations on the expansion! Our platform has helped similar companies in the service sector increase their operational efficiency by 35%. Would love to discuss how we can help you achieve similar results.”
The sender clearly used AI to scrape recent company news and inject it into their message, but the connection between the “personalization” and their solution is completely arbitrary. The AI grabbed a random data point and forced it into a generic pitch.
Most sales execution platforms have jumped on the AI personalization bandwagon, but the reality is that this shallow personalization often does more harm than good.
A Glimmer of Hope
That said, we did find some standout examples that gave us hope. Tools like ZingReach are delivering on the promise of intelligent personalization. Instead of just inserting company names and random data points, ZingReach analyzes target companies and prospects to uncover genuine business insights that inform the sales approach. We were able to hack something together using Zapier too, but data quality and diversity of data sources was a big limiting factor.
For example, in one instance of our outreach to a Fortune 500 retail giant, it first figured out the top 3 problems stated by their CxOs for their upcoming quarters, found out the company’s own estimates of the USD costs of these problems, filtered down to the one (out of 3) problem our offer happens to solve, calculated the approximate effort (time) involved based on similar other customer cases from the past and the expected results thereof. Our outreach sounded like we worked there.
Testing the Difference
Curious about whether the quality difference actually mattered, I incorporated the pivot to quality over quantity into my own outreach process and tracked the results. I’ve documented them here.
The data was clear: when personalization is done right, it works. When it’s done poorly, it’s worse than no personalization at all.
The Surprising Reality About Innovation
Here’s what really struck me about our outreach research: I expected the bigger, more established organizations to be leading on outreach quality. Instead, they seem to be trapped by their own procedures. Their over-reliance on standardized processes and risk-averse cultures means they stick with “proven” approaches even when those approaches are clearly not working.
Smaller organizations like mine seem to show a willingness to try new approaches and adapt quickly. Most of them get duped into the AI-personalization gimmick though.
The Path Forward
For my fellow SDRs reading this: at the end of the day, it’s all about impacting revenue. You can have the most sophisticated automation in the world, but if your content isn’t compelling, you’re just sending bad messages faster.
Don’t get trapped in the procedural box. Yes, follow your company’s processes, but also think about the bigger picture. Every message you send either builds or destroys your company’s reputation with prospects. Every interaction either moves the needle on revenue or wastes everyone’s time.
The companies that will win in the next few years won’t be the ones with the most automation, they’ll be the ones that figure out how to combine smart processes with genuinely compelling content. Your prospects are drowning in generic outreach. Be the signal in the noise, not just another piece of automation. The revenue impact of getting this right is too significant to ignore, and the competitive advantage is too valuable to leave on the table.