Somewhere around year three of doing this, a rep on the team pulled me aside after a call and said: “They knew exactly what I was doing before I finished the second sentence.”  

That landed. We’d been running the same script for months, congratulating ourselves on the volume, and completely ignoring the fact that buyers had already learned to tune it out. 

If you’re putting out genuine effort and still getting silence back, it’s worth asking whether the problem is the work or the approach. In my experience, it’s almost always the approach. And I say that as someone who had to learn it the hard way. 

Here are five things I stopped doing, why I stopped, and what I do instead. No frameworks, no buzzwords. Just what’s actually true 

Opening with A Fun Fact About Them 

There was a phase where personalisation became the answer to everything. The thinking was: if you reference something specific about the person, they’ll feel seen and be more likely to engage. So reps started digging through LinkedIn profiles for anything they could use. 

University. Hobbies. Recent job change. Football team. 

The problem is that buyers figured this out fast, and they find it uncomfortable rather than warm. Analysis of 16.5 million cold emails found that genuine personalisation, linking outreach to a specific business context, drives reply rates significantly higher than surface-level personal detail. The buyers who responded weren’t responding to flattery. They were responding to relevance. 

Getting called out on it directly, as happened to me once, is clarifying. The prospect replied: “I’m not sure what my football team has to do with anything. What is it you actually want?” They were right. Performing warmth as a tactic is worse than being straightforwardly transactional, because people can feel the difference. 

“Performing warmth as a tactic is worse than being straightforwardly transactional. People can feel the difference.” 

What actually works is leading with something that shows you understand their world. If they’ve been hiring heavily, or their sector is dealing with a specific headache right now, that’s your opener. Not because it’s clever, but because it’s relevant. 

Stop this 

“Saw you’re a big Arsenal fan! Tough few weeks, eh? Anyway, I wanted to reach out about…” 

Try this 

“You’ve hired 12 engineers in the last 90 days. In my experience, that’s exactly when onboarding starts to quietly fall apart. Is that something you’re feeling yet?” 

Turning the First Call into an Interrogation 

The BANT framework, Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline, was designed to help reps qualify efficiently. In practice, it often means showing up to a call having done minimal research and asking the prospect to explain their entire business situation to you before you’ve given them a single useful thing in return. 

What it feels like from the other side is an interview where they’re doing all the work. And with decision-making units now averaging over four stakeholders per deal, buyers arrive at conversations already having done extensive independent research. They don’t need to be walked through their own situation by someone who hasn’t done their homework. 

Flipping the dynamic is simple, but it takes discipline. Open with an observation about something you’ve genuinely noticed in their industry, in their competitive landscape, or in conversations you’ve had that week. Give something useful before you ask for anything. Once you start doing that consistently, the quality of information you get back changes completely. 

Instead of “What keeps you up at night?” try 

“I’ve been talking to a few heads of ops in your sector this week and the same thing keeps coming up around [specific issue]. Is that landing on your desk too, or have you approached it differently?” 

You still get the information you need. You just earn it rather than demand it. 

 The “Just Bumping This” Email 

The bump email is the sales equivalent of knocking on someone’s door twice and then standing there saying, “just checking, you heard me knock.” Nobody reads it and thinks it’s helpful. They feel mildly annoyed, delete it, and move on. 

Only around 5% of cold emails get any reply at all in 2025, and a bump that adds nothing new to the conversation is guaranteed to be in the 95%. The only follow‑up worth sending brings something genuinely new, like a relevant piece of research, a short case study, or an observation about what’s changed in their world since you last spoke. 

If you don’t have anything new to say, wait until you do. Silence is better than noise, and a message that has nothing to offer actively damages your credibility rather than just failing to help it. 

Stop this 

“Hi, just bumping this to the top of your inbox. Would love to find time to connect!” 

Try this instead 

“I came across this case study this morning, a company in your space cut onboarding time by 40%. Given what you mentioned last time, I thought it might be worth five minutes of your time.” 

Posting Content That Sounds Like It Was Written by a Committee 

At some point, LinkedIn became a place where people performed thought leadership rather than actually shared it. Polished posts. Careful, inoffensive language. “5 habits of successful salespeople.” Safe enough that nobody could argue with it. Forgettable enough that nobody did. 

The posts that got people reaching out were the ones where something honest was said. Admitting a discovery call had gone badly and explaining what had been done wrong. Disagreeing publicly with a piece of advice that gets shared constantly.  

Writing about a deal that was lost, why it was lost, and what changed as a result. Subject lines that sound like genuine questions consistently outperform marketing language, and the same principle applies to content: authenticity opens doors that polish keeps shut. 

“The posts that got people reaching out were the ones where something honest was said. Authenticity opens doors that polish keeps shut.” 

You don’t need to be controversial for the sake of it. You just need to have an actual opinion, based on actual experience, and be willing to put it out there without hedging it to death. That’s rarer than it sounds, and people notice. 

Creating Fake Urgency to Push a Close 

“If you can sign by Friday, I can hold this price.” 

Those words have been said. The price wasn’t going anywhere. There was no real deadline. It was just a deal that needed to move, and that felt like the fastest way to move it. 

The problem goes beyond the fact that it’s transparent, though it is. Forrester’s research across 18,000 global B2B buyers found that price sensitivity and trust are the two factors most likely to derail a deal at the final stage. Manufactured urgency triggers exactly the wrong response: it signals that your timeline matters more than their decision-making process, which makes them trust you less at the precise moment you need them to trust you most. 

Real urgency comes from their situation. If you’ve done the work to understand what a problem is actually costing them in time, money, and missed opportunity, the deadline is already there. You’re just helping them see it clearly. 

Instead of a fake deadline, make the cost of waiting concrete 

“You mentioned this is eating up about eight hours of the team’s week. That’s a full working day, every week. Over the next quarter, you’re looking at losing around 100 hours to something we could have fixed by the end of this month. Does it make sense to get that time back sooner rather than later?” 

That’s not a pressure. That’s just arithmetic. And it lands completely differently. 

The Thing Nobody Tells You 

When you stop doing all of this, there’s a strange adjustment period. You feel less salesy, and that can feel uncomfortable if being salesy is all you’ve ever known. Your activity looks different. Your emails are shorter. Your calls are more conversational. You share more and ask for less. 

And then, gradually, something shifts. People start replying. Not to be polite, but because you’ve said something worth replying to. Calls stop feeling like battles. Deals move because people want them to move, not because you’ve engineered them into a corner. 

It sounds simple. It isn’t always easy. But it’s the only approach that holds up over time. 

The POINT Company provides outsourced SDR teams for B2B businesses that want pipeline built the right way, by people who sell like human beings and understand what it takes to get through in 2026. Here’s how we work.