Broadly speaking and because most people want information quickly, I’ve summarised the 4 different phases within the progression of outreach.

1. The one-to-one Era: Personalised but not scalable.
2. The mass mail merge mayhem: Scalable but impersonal.
3. The ABM revolution: Targeted and strategic.
4. The AI-powered wave: Combining personalisation and scale.

One-to-One Era: BDR’s and SDR’s would go hyper-personal and spend hours researching personas and companies to find a “hook” to personalise and stand out from the sea of cold emails.

Mass Mail Merge Mayhem: Then someone had a "brilliant" idea: "What if we could send the same email to everyone at once?" Enter the era of mail merge and mass spam. Suddenly, inboxes were flooded with "Dear {First_Name}" emails. This was the "spray and pray" era.

ABM Revolution: As inboxes got more crowded, smart marketers realised: quality trumps quantity. Enter Account-Based Marketing (ABM). ABM was a bit like the One to one era, but with a strategic twist. It wasn't just about personalisation, but about targeting the right accounts with the right message.

The AI-Powered Renaissance: Welcome to the present (and future). AI isn't just a buzzword—it's revolutionising how we approach outbound email. Personalised first lines to 1000’s instead of 100’s of emails, enrichments based on events, research at scale.