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Marketing technology is supposed to help us build relationships at scale.

But somewhere along the way, many marketers and sales teams started confusing automation with relationship building.

Nowhere is that more obvious than LinkedIn.

Every day, professionals are inundated with:

The result?

Trust is declining, response rates are falling, and buyers are becoming increasingly skeptical.

This week we take a closer look at why LinkedIn outreach is getting worse and what professionals can do about it.

Over the past six years I've run LinkedIn outreach campaigns than I can accurately count: different sequences, different targeting approaches, different message formats, different follow-up cadences. I've had campaigns that generated real relationships and real revenue. I've had others that burned through lists and produced nothing but silence. I've rebuilt strategies from scratch after watching metrics fall apart. I've tested variables that seemed significant and turned out not to matter, and ignored ones that turned out to matter enormously.

This article isn't for people who think automation is cheating. It's for the ones who use it seriously and want to use it better.

A few months ago I ran a different kind of test.

Instead of sending outreach, I decided to receive it.

I started accepting nearly every connection request that came in — salespeople, founders, consultants, agency owners, recruiters, marketers. No filtering. My only objective was to observe what happened next, at scale, without any of the assumptions I'd built up from being on the sending side for so long.

What I saw wasn't shocking. But seeing it from the other side, in volume, was clarifying in a way that years of running campaigns hadn't been.

Three problems kept surfacing. And if you're being honest, you've probably built campaigns guilty of all three.

The pitch before the relationship.

Connection accepted. Message fired — sometimes within seconds.

"Thanks for connecting! We help companies like yours..."

I've triggered this sequence myself. I know the logic: you've done the work to earn the connection, the tool is ready, why wait? Get the message out while attention is high.

Here's what the data eventually taught me, after enough iterations: the immediate pitch almost never works, and it makes every subsequent touchpoint harder. The sequences that generated real conversations — the ones I'd actually call successful — were built around establishing relevance first. Giving the other person a reason to be interested before asking them for anything.

When I'm on the receiving end of a fast pitch now, I don't just ignore it. I mentally write off the sender. That's the cost that doesn't show up in your sequence metrics.

Targeting built for volume, not relevance.

A meaningful percentage of the outreach I received during this experiment was aimed at the wrong person.

People assumed I owned an agency. Others thought I'd founded a technology company. Several pitched services with no connection to anything on my profile. Some reached out about roles, apparently under the impression I was hiring.

I've pulled broad lists before — job title, industry, keyword, load and send. The volume math seems to work until you start thinking about what's happening on the other end of every misdirected message. It's not neutral. It's actively negative. Credibility lost with that person, permanently, in the first ten seconds.

The fix isn't complicated. It's just slower. Tighter lists. More time per contact before contact is made. The campaigns I've run with tighter targeting have outperformed high-volume ones consistently enough that I stopped arguing with myself about it.

Messages written for everyone, which means no one.

Long. Company-first. Structured like a capabilities deck.

Paragraphs about the organization. Client names as social proof. A friendly-sounding CTA that's clearly templated. Then a follow-up at day three, day seven, day fourteen — running on schedule regardless of whether the first message got any response at all.

I've written these. The ones that worked shared a common characteristic: they were built around something specific to the recipient. An observation that showed I'd paid attention. A question that couldn't have been sent to five thousand other people unchanged.

Short messages forced that discipline on me more than anything else. When you only have a few sentences, you can't hide behind company overviews and client logos. You have to actually have something to say to this particular person. That constraint, it turns out, is a feature.

What this is really about.

The tools aren't the problem. We both know that.

What I observed in this experiment — and what I've seen consistently across six years of running these campaigns — is that the practitioners who get the best results aren't the ones with the most sophisticated sequences. They're the ones who've internalized that automation is a way to do human things at scale, not a replacement for doing the human things.

Volume is a resource. Intention is the strategy.

LinkedIn still works. It works remarkably well for the people using it with enough discipline to treat it like a network rather than a list. The platform hasn't changed. The fundamentals of how trust gets built haven't changed.

Most of what's gotten worse is self-inflicted — by people who learned just enough about these tools to use them at scale, but not enough to use them well.

You already know which side of that line you want to be on.

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A monthly speed networking session designed to help marketers, agencies, vendors, and technology professionals connect 1:1, exchange ideas, and build relationships across the marketing technology industry.

Registration is handled directly through the Martech Bonanza Slack community and all sessions are facilitated by the Martech Bonanza team.

If your job involves prospecting, outbound sales, account-based marketing, or business development, you've likely encountered Apollo and ZoomInfo.

Both platforms help sales and marketing teams identify prospects, build lists, enrich data, and drive outreach efforts.

But they approach the market from very different angles.

Apollo built its reputation around affordability, accessibility, and integrated outreach tools.

ZoomInfo became the enterprise standard for data quality, intent signals, and large-scale prospecting operations.

The easiest way to think about it:

Apollo helps teams find prospects and immediately begin outreach.

ZoomInfo focuses on delivering deep company intelligence and buyer insights.

Apollo has become extremely popular among startups, agencies, consultants, and smaller sales teams because it combines multiple functions into a single platform.

Apollo excels at:

Many users can replace several tools with a single Apollo subscription.

For organizations building outbound programs on a budget, Apollo is often difficult to beat.

ZoomInfo remains one of the strongest platforms for enterprise prospecting and account intelligence.

It excels at:

Larger organizations often rely on ZoomInfo because accuracy and scale matter more than price.

When targeting enterprise accounts, having deeper intelligence can create a meaningful advantage.

The real story isn't Apollo versus ZoomInfo.

It's the continued rise of data-driven prospecting.

Sales and marketing teams have more data available than ever before.

The challenge is no longer finding prospects.

The challenge is finding relevance.

That's especially true on LinkedIn, where buyers are increasingly overwhelmed by poorly targeted outreach.

The best prospecting platform in the world can't fix a bad message.

Apollo wins on affordability, ease of use, and built-in outreach.

ZoomInfo wins on data depth, intelligence, and enterprise capabilities.

The bigger lesson?

Better data helps.

But relationships still close deals.

Bonanza Take: The future of outreach isn't more automation. It's smarter targeting and more authentic conversations.

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