Most sales teams are obsessed with better pitches.
Welcome back to AI GTM WTF.
Most sales teams think the bottleneck is messaging.
Or AI personalization.
Or response rates.
In this episode with Matt from Prospeo, we looked at something simpler:
Why most teams are trying to sell before they’ve earned the right to.
And why the highest-leverage pipeline sometimes comes from giving something away.
The problem
Most outbound looks like this:
Identify ICP
Pull list
Write clever email
Ask for meeting
Even with AI layered on top, it’s the same motion.
Faster personalization.
Better formatting.
Still cold.
The issue isn’t the email.
It’s that the prospect has no reason to care yet.
The 78-page example
Matt shared something interesting.
Instead of running another outbound campaign, they created a 78-page cold calling guide built on data from 3 million calls.
Not a fluffy PDF.
Actual patterns.
Actual breakdowns.
Actual things sales teams could use immediately.
It wasn’t “thought leadership.”
It was operational.
That guide generated more real conversations than polished outbound sequences.
Why?
Because it made them useful before they asked for anything.
What makes value-first work
There are three things most teams get wrong when they try this.
1. They create fluff
A “guide” that says nothing new.
If it could be written in 30 minutes with ChatGPT, it won’t move anything.
2. They gate everything
The moment you hard-gate something, you’re signaling:
“We want your email more than we want to help.”
3. They don’t tie it to real pain
The best lead magnets aren’t broad.
They’re painfully specific.
If you sell to SDR leaders, don’t create a “Sales Trends Report.”
Create:
“The 12 objections killing cold call connect rates in Q1.”
Now that’s useful.
The live exercise
In the episode, we ran through examples for:
Rippling
Instead of asking, “How do we book more demos?” we asked:
“What would make a buyer bookmark something from us?”
That changes the thinking.
You stop optimizing for clicks.
You start optimizing for usefulness.
Where AI actually fits
AI helps with:
Analyzing call transcripts
Extracting patterns
Structuring insights
Turning raw operator thinking into clean output
AI does not help with:
Understanding your buyer
Faking authority
Creating insight you don’t actually have
If the insight is shallow, AI just scales shallow.
The long game
Value-first is slower at the start.
It doesn’t spike response rates overnight.
But it compounds.
When buyers already see you as useful, the “sales” conversation becomes smaller.
Less convincing.
More alignment.
In a world where everyone can generate emails in seconds, usefulness becomes rare.
That’s the edge.
If you’re building GTM right now, ask yourself:
What have you created that your buyer would actually forward internally?
If the answer is nothing, start there.
👉 The full episode is live on AI GTM WTF.
If this helped, subscribe — more conversations like this are coming.
-Rahul
AI GTM WTF isn’t here to celebrate the hype cycle. We’re here to arm you with what actually moves revenue.
If this hit, forward it to one operator who’s drowning in “AI strategy” decks and needs the signal, not the noise.
No AI SDR fairytales. Just the future of GTM.