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Last week I sent a cold email campaign. Two replies came back about the same email, and they could not have been further apart.

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

Another person went for me. Properly went for me. Not a "no thanks", not an unsubscribe. They went out of their way. Messaged other people about it. Decided who I was, what I'd done and why I'd done it, and reached every one of those conclusions without asking me a single question. No reason given. Just the verdict.

Same email. Same week. Same words on the screen.

And I want to be honest about my reaction, because it wasn't hurt feelings. It was frustration. Somebody had a strong, specific, negative reaction to something I made, and I never found out what caused it. I'd have paid for that information. Genuinely, name a price. Because my reaction to criticism, always, is: brilliant, tell me why. Tell me which line did it so I can fix it. That's the entire mechanism by which anyone gets better at anything. There isn't another one.

Instead I got judged by a stranger on a few lines of text.

And look, I'm not playing the victim here. I'm not pretending I've cracked it either. I've sent bad emails. Emails I'd cringe at now. I haven't cracked prospecting, and I've never met anyone who has. The best people I know are the ones still learning, right?

But sitting with it this weekend forced a realisation.

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 a few lines from a stranger, write their entire story for them, and then act on the story like it's fact. Lazy. Automated. Spammer. Didn't even look at my profile. All of it built from a handful of words and no evidence.

Which is the most human error there is. And that's the bit that gets me. Everyone is terrified AI is stripping the humanity out of this job, and the thing actually doing the damage is the most human failure we have. We didn't need the machines for this one. We brought it ourselves.

So next time something lands in your inbox and annoys you, notice how fast the story arrives. You might be right about the sender. You're often not. And if you can be bothered, two minutes and a reason is worth more to the person on the other end than anything else you could send back. If you can't, opt out and move on.

Just don't send a verdict. Nobody has ever learned a single thing from a verdict.