Stop Optimizing for Sends. Start Optimizing for Relevance.

There's a stat from Salesforce's State of Sales report that's been sitting with us: 73% of B2B buyers actively avoid sellers who send irrelevant outreach. And the word that stands out there isn't "ignore" — it's "actively avoid." Because those are two completely different things.

Ignoring something is passive. You scroll past it, delete it, move on. Actively avoiding something means you've made a decision. You've formed an opinion about that person, that company, that brand — and you've decided you don't want anything to do with them. That's a relationship destroyed before it ever started. And it didn't happen because the product was bad. It happened because the outreach was lazy.

We say this as people who run outbound campaigns for a living, so we're not here to tell you cold outreach doesn't work. It absolutely does. But the version of it that works looks nothing like the version most companies are running.

The gap between sending and reaching

Most outbound programs are optimized for sends. How many emails went out. How many contacts are in the sequence. How many touches happened this week. Those things are easy to measure so they become the thing people manage to — and in doing so, they lose track of the actual goal, which is starting a conversation with someone who has a real reason to be interested in what you do.

When you optimize for sends, you end up with a list of 2,000 people who vaguely fit a job title, getting an email that could've been written for anyone. The email might be technically decent. The subject line might even be clever. But the person reading it can tell, in about three seconds, that it wasn't written for them. And that's the moment they move from the "ignore" bucket to the "actively avoid" bucket.

Here's what makes this particularly costly: B2B buying cycles are long. The person who dismisses your outreach today might be the right buyer in eight months when their contract comes up, or when their team doubles, or when their current solution starts failing them. If your name is already associated with irrelevant noise, you've closed that door without ever knowing it was open.

What relevance actually requires

Relevance isn't a writing problem. You can't solve it by making your emails sound more conversational, or by adding a line about something the company announced last quarter. Those things help at the margins, but they're not the thing.

Relevance starts with the list. It starts with being genuinely selective about who you're reaching out to, and having a clear, honest answer to the question: why this person, why now? Not a template answer. Not "they fit our ICP." A real answer that you could say out loud to that person and not feel embarrassed about.

For some companies that means going narrower on industry. For others it means timing outreach to specific trigger events — a funding round, a leadership change, a product launch — things that create actual context for a conversation. For others it means accepting that the list is going to be smaller than they'd like, and that a smaller, better-targeted list will outperform a large generic one almost every time.

The 73% figure is actually an optimistic framing if you think about it. It means 27% of buyers are still open to outreach from people they've never heard of, as long as it feels like it was meant for them. That's a real opportunity. It's just one that requires doing the work before you hit send, not after.

The version that doesn't create avoidance

We've run enough campaigns to know what separates the ones that generate pipeline from the ones that generate unsubscribes. It's not the offer. It's not even the timing, though that matters. It's whether the person on the other end feels like you know something about their world — not their name and company name, but their actual situation.

That might be a specific challenge that's common in their role at their stage of growth. It might be something happening in their market that creates a real opening for what you do. It might be as simple as referencing a conversation that's already happening in their industry, rather than leading with what you sell.

The emails that don't create avoidance are the ones that feel like they came from someone paying attention. Not a tool. Not a sequence. Someone who looked at this person's situation and thought: we can actually help here. That's what cuts through. And it's replicable at scale when the process is built around it from the start.

If you want to build something that actually reaches the right people, we'd like to hear about what you're working on.