Beyond the Inbox Noise: What Outreach Strategies Look Like in Modern B2B Sales

Leo Goldfarb, Partner at Albato Embedded, examines the ideal email outreach strategies for modern B2B sales environments. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

In today’s market, it takes more creativity, more channels, and smarter technology to break through into the mainstream. While email remains the foundation of outbound campaigns, it now needs to be augmented with new tools and approaches—from AI-generated, personalized videos to automated workflows—to engage prospects effectively. These are some key trends companies should keep in mind as they work to level up their sales outreach strategy.

Cold Outreach Is Not Dead, But It’s Harder

Despite rumors on LinkedIn that “cold email is dead,” outreach remains a powerful growth engine, but it is getting more challenging.  The buyers have become harder to engage, so outreach must evolve. Generic emails just won’t cut it.

Multi-channel outreach remains relevant. Email alone is rarely enough. Based on industry data, multi-channel outreach drives a 77 percent to 91 percent increase in response rates. Additionally, using LinkedIn as an outbound channel converts prospects into 5 or fewer touchpoints. As a result, combining email with LinkedIn messages, voice notes, cold calls, and other touchpoints is now essential.

According to the observations of our colleagues from Sendspark, the reply rate, which might have been 1 percent a year or two ago, is now close to zero due to saturated channels. However, emerging tools (often powered by AI) can still yield results from cold outreach; you just have to work smarter and embrace new strategies.

Multi-Channel Sequences and More Touchpoints

The most effective outbound campaigns now run longer sequences across multiple channels. Today, it takes around 20–25 touches on average to book a meeting, whereas a few years ago we might have booked one with fewer than 10 touches. Since buyers are inundated with outreach, persistence across channels is key.

Diversifying channels is equally important and ensures you “show up” where the prospect is paying attention. For example, if emails alone don’t get a response, a gentle LinkedIn message might. In fact, one of the highest-performing Albato tactics on LinkedIn was surprisingly simple: sending a short “bump” message that referenced previous emails. This low-pressure nudge often prompts the prospect to reply (many genuinely missed the emails in their crowded inbox). When they respond with “I don’t recall seeing your email,” it opens the door for the rep to follow up immediately with the promised information—in this case, a video summarizing the pitch.

The takeaway for sales teams is to design outbound sequences that mix multiple channels and don’t shy away from 10, 15, or even 20 touches. As long as each touch adds value (or at least serves as a polite reminder), the data shows that multi-channel persistence pays off in securing replies.

AI-Personalized Videos

“Seeing is better than telling,”–video has become a powerful tool in outbound communication. With AI-generated personalized video tools, you can send thousands of prospects what looks and feels like a one-on-one video message, without recording a thousand times.

Tools like Sendspark let you record a base video (for example, a salesperson introducing themselves or giving a short demo) and then personalize it at scale by merging in variables like the prospect’s name, company, or other details. For instance, the preview image might show your sales manager holding a whiteboard with the prospect’s name, or even the prospect’s company homepage in the background of the video.

For greater efficiency, your teams can combine a custom intro with reusable content. The first 15-20 seconds of the video are a personalized intro,  and the rest might be a pre-recorded product demo or case study. For example, Albato prepared video versions for different customer segments (verticals), highlighting use cases of its integration platform across various industries. This approach means the team can reuse a library of core video segments while still making each prospect feel the video was made just for them.

In essence, AI videos enable you to bring a human touch to cold outreach without requiring human effort for each prospect. This means you can craft outreach that feels one-on-one – increasing trust and engagement–even when it’s largely automated behind the scenes.

Automation: Integrating Tools and Triggering Actions

Another smart approach to outbound strategy is automation and integration—using software to connect all the moving parts of an outbound funnel so nothing falls through the cracks. Albato, as an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), practices what it preaches by automating many of its own sales processes. For example, when someone watches a video, it doesn’t just register as an isolated event—it triggers a series of actions via Albato’s automation, such as notifying the manager that the customer has watched 80 percent of the video. Or, enriching the lead automatically with ChatGPT.

The automation can dramatically amplify the outbound efforts. It ensures fast follow-up (imagine responding to a video view or website visit within minutes with relevant content) and removes grunt work (like lead scoring and data entry). It also helps maintain consistency―every lead gets the right touches based on their behavior, without relying on sales reps to remember every step. Implementing this level of automation gives a great edge.

Spintax and Deliverability: Adapting to Reach the Inbox

Even the best outbound campaign falls flat if your emails never reach the inbox. Therefore, another clear trend is to improve email deliverability strategies and maximize the chances your message gets seen.

We use Spintax to randomize emails and adjust how we send emails to avoid spam filters. The reasoning is simple: mass emails usually get flagged when hundreds of copies of the same text go out, but if every email is unique, it’s much harder for spam algorithms to catch a pattern.

Another deliverability tip is to go easy on tracking pixels and HTML. We deliberately disabled open-rate tracking images in their emails after noticing that Gmail would show recipients an ugly “warning banner” about a hidden image/tracker in the message. Those banners scream “marketing email” and hurt trust. So we sacrificed the ability to see opens to appear more plain-text and human—a trade-off that paid off in deliverability. Similarly, we avoid heavy HTML or design in cold emails; a simple, personal-looking email tends to deliver best.

In short, diversify your sending infrastructure and keep a close eye on it. Simplify the design of your emails, make them more human and straightforward.

Your Focus in 2026 B2B Outreach

The SaaS outbound sales playbook is being rewritten with AI, automation, and personalization at its core. The success in cold outreach now comes from orchestrating many elements: multi-channel sequences, personalized video content, automated workflows, deliverability hacks, and innovative use of data/AI to prioritize leads.

For Sales pros, the encouraging news is that these tools make it possible to do more with less manual effort—reach more prospects in more engaging ways, and let technology handle the heavy lifting of scaling and follow-up. However, the human element is still crucial. The most promising results come when you use automation and creativity in tandem. Focus on quality outreach amplified by smart tech.