The problem with prospecting is that we judge people

I sent an email campaign this week and something just happened that shattered my view of prospecting.

One reply said: "I gotta tell you this is great. One of the best outbound sales prospecting emails I've seen."

Another person eviscerated me. Went out of their way to do it. Messaged other people about it. Decided who I was and why I'd sent it without asking me a single question.

And here's the thing. My genuine reaction to negative feedback, always, is: brilliant, tell me why. Tell me what missed so I can fix it. I mean that. I'll happily take a kicking if it comes with a lesson.

I didn't get a lesson. I got a verdict.

I'll write the whole story up properly next week. But it forced a realisation I can't sit on until then.

Everyone says the problem with prospecting is AI. Or the tooling. Or that best practice changes every five minutes and nobody can keep up.

It's none of that.

The problem with prospecting is that we judge people. We read four lines, write someone's entire story for them, and then act on it like it's fact.

Which is ironically the most human error there is. The thing everyone's terrified AI will strip out of this job is the exact thing doing the damage.

So here's a quick test before you bite back at anyone. Does every email you send convert at 100%? Contact to lead, lead to pipeline, pipeline to won? No. Mine don't either. Nobody's does, right? Nobody has cracked prospecting. Nobody has cracked sales. The best people I know are the ones still learning.

And that's exactly why the biting costs so much. When you tear someone down instead of telling them what was off, you take away their ability to learn. They don't come back curious. They come back defensive, or they don't come back at all.

And most of the people getting judged aren't spammers gaming the system. They're confused. Because AI now writes confident, polished, genuinely dreadful emails all day long, and if you don't yet know what good looks like, you read one back and think it's brilliant. These people aren't cynical. They're proud of it. They need a human to tell them, not a pile-on.

If a mate sent you that email, you'd tell them why it didn't land. Do that for a stranger. It takes two minutes. Or opt out and move on.

Basically: don't be a dick.

Everyone's worried AI is making this work less human.

Be human then. Ask before you decide.