The end of spray and pray

By Anna Fontanes | March 2026 | 9 min read

Cold outreach response rates have fallen off a cliff. Twenty years ago, a 5% response rate to cold email was standard. Today, 1% is considered decent. Some benchmarks put average cold email reply rates below 2%.

LinkedIn InMails - which were supposed to be higher-touch than email - are hitting all-time lows.

This isn't because email is broken. It's because when something is free and easy, everyone does it.

When supply is unlimited, attention becomes worthless

Cold outreach works on one basic principle: the recipient hasn't heard from you, so a message from you carries novelty and attention. That's only true when cold outreach is scarce.

The moment you could send 1,000 cold emails in an afternoon without breaking a sweat - and the moment everyone figured out how to do it - the equation changed. Now the recipient's inbox is full of cold messages. The novelty is gone.

You're not competing with other salespeople for the recipient's attention. You're competing with thousands of other salespeople, plus their actual work email, plus their calendar updates, plus their Slack notifications.

This is straightforward supply and demand. When cold outreach was expensive and difficult, only serious salespeople did it. When it became free and trivial, everyone did it. Response rates collapsed because recipients built immunity.

The commoditisation of spray and pray

There's an entire category of tools now built to make cold outreach easier. Find contacts, write emails, send them, track opens, follow up automatically. All of it fully automated.

This is undeniably efficient. You can reach a lot of people very quickly. It's also become the baseline. If your selling motion is "find a list and send automated emails," you're doing the same thing as a thousand other companies.

Sellers often respond to this by sending more emails. But eventually, recipients don't just ignore your email - they unsubscribe, they mark you as spam. Your domain reputation suffers.

The cost of spray and pray has gone up. It's just invisible.

Why precision is the only remaining advantage

When the cost of reaching people dropped to near-zero, the economics of outreach inverted.

First, recipients are drowning. Many corporate email systems now have machine learning filters that identify cold outreach and quarantine it.

Second, there's reputation cost. If you're blasting 10,000 people and 50 of them report you as spam, your email domain gets dinged.

Third, and most importantly: precision is now the only signal that you've done your homework. When everyone is sending personalised-looking templates, a message that shows you've actually understood that person's role, their company's situation, and why you're reaching out specifically to them stands out.

It stands out because it's rare.

What precision at scale actually looks like

The only way to maintain precision at scale is to have a system that does the research for you. Automation that doesn't automate the outreach (the easy part), but automates the research (the hard part).

That looks like: define your ideal customer once. The system continuously finds accounts matching that profile. For each account, the system does the research - reads the website, scans the Companies House filing, checks job postings, identifies the buying signal - and presents you with a ready-to-use angle.

You still write the email. But you're not writing it blind. You're writing it based on concrete context.

FAQ

Are you saying cold email doesn't work anymore?

No. Cold email works fine if you're precise and you're reaching out based on real signals. What doesn't work anymore is spray and pray - volume-based outreach with minimal research.

Won't precision just mean fewer conversations, which means less pipeline?

Short term, yes. You'll send fewer emails. But they'll convert at higher rates. Over time, precision usually results in more qualified pipeline, not less.

What if my ICP is really broad? Can I still be precise?

Precision gets harder the broader your ICP. But even a broad ICP can be made more specific by using signals. Instead of "all SaaS companies," it's "SaaS companies that have hired a VP of Sales in the last six months."

Author Bio

Anna Fontanes is a revenue operations consultant who has built account scoring and ICP frameworks for UK B2B sales teams across SaaS and professional services.