Cold email is tanking. LinkedIn is next.
Outbound agencies are pivoting, cold email numbers are ugly, and LinkedIn DMs are heading the same way. Here's what I'm seeing, and where I think it goes.
Cold email is tanking. I'm not saying that for effect. I'm saying it because of what I've watched happen over the last six months.
A lot of outbound agencies, big and small, have either shut down or quietly started adding new services. Personal branding. AEO. Content writing. Basically anything to do with creating content.
No hate to personal branding. It's really important. But when an agency that was never built for personal branding suddenly adds it to its services, that usually tells you one thing: the original offer isn't working out that well anymore.
Then this week I was scrolling Reddit, and three threads lined up almost perfectly with what I've been seeing.
The numbers on cold outreach are ugly
The first one was a Reddit thread in r/agency where an ex-Googler shared real numbers for every channel they tried to win new clients.
- 116 cold emails with perfect inbox placement. Zero real replies.
- 92 Sales Navigator InMails. One reply.
- 896 LinkedIn connection invites through automation. About a 9% accept rate, and zero deals.
- Roughly $720 spent boosting posts. About 9,000 impressions.
- Google Ads was the only cold channel that actually paid off.
- Referrals signed the day after the proposal.
Read that again. Perfect deliverability, and still nothing.
Email as a channel worked wonderfully in the 2000s and the early 2010s. Based on my conversations with people who ran outbound back then, it was really good. Then it slowly started tanking. Today it takes a lot more volume to get similar results, to the point where the ROI justification just isn't there for a lot of brands.
So for most people doing outbound through cold email, it's a hit-or-miss game. And in recent months the misses far outnumber the hits.
Agents buying from agents is real, but not the way the hype says
The second thread was a Reddit thread in r/marketing arguing the marketing department is about to disappear because agents will soon buy from other agents. Hundreds of people pushed back.
I think the core idea is true. That's literally one of the reasons we built the GTM Daily MCP server. It lets people discover GTM tools and find GTM roles right inside ChatGPT or Claude. You can even publish a post on GTM Daily through it.
I'm also moving GTM Daily in a direction where it's more of a publicly accessible infrastructure, rather than only expecting people to come and visit the website. Don't get me wrong, I'd definitely like people to visit the site and consume things the traditional way. But I don't think that's the only way people will find things anymore.
So yes, agentic and AI-native will become a big thing. But the pace and the actual shape it takes will be different from what the hype says. It's not going to replace everything 100%.
Here's what I think actually happens:
- The quality bar for marketing goes up substantially. Mediocre stuff gets filtered out faster.
- At the same time, the baseline becomes accessible to a lot more people. The bare minimum that used to need a team now needs a prompt.
Both of those are true at once, and that's what makes it interesting.
LinkedIn is heading where cold email went
The third one was a Reddit thread in r/linkedin asking whether LinkedIn shadowbans are real. One marketer said their posts went from 3,000 to 8,000 impressions down to 50 to 300 after the March update.
A lot of people are seeing this. And it connects to something bigger.
As cold email stops working, people are shifting to LinkedIn DMs. There's now an entire business of renting LinkedIn profiles to send outreach at scale. If LinkedIn doesn't crack down on this, the brand of LinkedIn gets diluted, and the channel stops generating results in the longer term.
Here's a personal one. I'm not a lot of people's ICP. Still, I get outbound on LinkedIn from time to time. If I get ten messages, six or seven are usually not relevant to me at all.
That's the early sign. My prediction: LinkedIn as an outbound channel might see some growth for the next six months or so. Then it saturates, and the decline begins. Rented profiles and spray-and-pray outreach will piss people off, the same way it did with email.
Reach speed is not sales speed
This is the part I think most people miss.
A lot of the current approach is about speed: sell to your entire TAM as fast as possible.
Earlier, your capacity to reach your TAM was limited. To reach everyone you'd need maybe twenty people and twelve months. Now it takes two or three people and a month or two.
But founders now expect sales to happen at that pace too. As if you can sell to your whole TAM in two months because you can reach them in two months.
That's not how it works. The rate at which you can reach people is not the rate at which you can sell to them. Buyers still have budgets, timing, priorities and trust to build.
And that gap is putting a lot of pressure on outbound agencies. Clients expect results at the speed of the tooling, and the market simply doesn't move that fast. That's a big part of why so many agencies are pivoting.
So what do you do?
Stop treating volume as the strategy. Cold email didn't die because people stopped reading email. It died because everyone sent too much of it to people it wasn't relevant to. LinkedIn is on the same path.
What still works is what the ex-Googler's numbers show: be where buyers are already looking, earn referrals, and be genuinely relevant when you do reach out. And increasingly, be findable where people actually ask questions now, which is inside ChatGPT and Claude.
That's the bet we're making with GTM Daily. If you want to try it, connect the GTM Daily MCP and find GTM tools and roles right inside ChatGPT or Claude.