Google Killed Outbound Automation

In September 2021 I launched The Modern Outbound System™ in effort to prepare salespeople for getting ahead of the chaos. Needless to say the sales world has changed aggressively over the past few years.

Teams shifted to remote selling, companies became more lean, and B2B buyers cutback their spending while sales has become increasingly more difficult.

To top it off, Google finally pulled the plug on outbound and things are changing fast.

If you joined my course you've been well prepared. If not, don't worry it's not too late.

But first, what are we talking about?

On October 3, 2023 Google announced that "Starting in 2024, we’ll require bulk senders to authenticate their emails, allow for easy unsubscription and stay under a reported spam threshold."

What does this mean?

Well, it depends at how you look at it.

From a consumer standpoint this means less spam and fewer sales pitches hitting your inbox.

From a salesperson's standpoint this means relying less on email automation, sending fewer emails, and playing more of a quality game than a quantity game.

However, there's also another side to this story which is why this is happening and why now?

A shift away from abusing email has been a longstanding trend, but usually nothing changes in this world unless there's a financial incentive, and that leads us to the cause and effect of this change.

If B2B sales organizations are forced to send fewer emails, this means fewer salespeople, which means fewer outbound leads, which means it's time to start spending more money generating inbound leads.

Are you starting to connect the dots?

Well, let me put it to you this way. Gmail is a free service but Google Ads is a paid service.

See where we're headed with this?

Yep, you got it.

This is what we call a "win-win" for Google because they get to deliver an upgrade to their free email service by further limiting and restricting spam and sales pitches in user's inboxes, while simultaneously increasing the demand for their paid ad services which will be used to generate more inbound leads in lieu of the outbound leads B2B companies have traditionally generated by automating thousands of emails per day using tools like SalesLoft, Outreach, and Apollo.

Yes, they anticipate companies will reduce the size of their sales teams which creates budget that can shift toward the inbound advertising model (they're clever like that).

To prepare for this change SalesLoft acquired Drift, which was a brilliant strategic move on their part as it allows them to expand their product suite beyond outbound sales and into the inbound sales realm.

These changes have been long in the making and the shift away from outbound selling will be a continuous movement for many reasons, but largely because people simply don't like being approached by salespeople and this creates opportunity to increase the demand for advertising services.

For this reason, we should expect further red tape and regulation to continue hindering our ability to generate outbound leads.

Additionally, as people continue to live more of their lives in the digital world it becomes natural that advertising gradually becomes easier than selling and the line between sales and marketing continues to blur to the point of being indistinguishable.

If you haven't already, join The Modern Outbound System™ online training course to learn what you can do to best position yourself as a salesperson in this new selling environment.

Happy Selling,