How to turn cold outbound into an always-on GTM conversation

Reply rates have been falling for years, and many teams have responded by using AI to send more, faster. Cold email gives you fewer early signals too, since a link or a tracking pixel makes a message more likely to land in spam.

In this episode of Revenue Architects, John Lloyd is joined by Keith Jensen, President at Cadre AI and a former CMO, on turning cold outbound into an always-on conversation with your total addressable market. His view is that email should be judged like any paid channel, on what it drives, since nobody expects everyone who sees a Meta or TikTok ad to reply. The asks get more creative too, like an invitation to contribute to a white paper or join a coffee at an event, and the signal often comes later, when someone from the TAM turns up on your website. For clients, Keith’s team builds a pre-CRM that holds the whole TAM. Website visitors are resolved against it and scored, and once they’re ready, AI pushes them into the CRM and on to the right seller.

Then the marketing side. The same TAM becomes an ad audience, matched to devices for connected TV and social, so a small segment sees a company that looks much bigger. Messaging comes from 55 playbooks, built after rolling 515 industries up into industry groups. And once leads come from signals, Keith argues an MQL has to be a score, measured against the conversion rates of form fills. John and Keith also get into who should own all of this when there’s no well-built RevOps team, and where AI slop comes from: people keeping the old five-minute review for work AI now does in zero minutes, when it needs 25 or 30.