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Here’s our truth.

Line drawing of Nick and Matt sitting cross-legged on the floor. Nick — in a cap and glasses — asks ‘Hey Matt, what’s our ICP?’ Matt, with a laptop on his lap, replies ‘A business that needs us’.

We’re Matt and Nick. We built Cull to sort this out…

1

The Inbox

We opened our junk mail one month. More than half the cold emails that hit us were from lead-gen agencies, pitching lead-gen services. To our lead-gen business. Every one AI-generated, strategically empty, outcome-free. Spray and pray in the worst possible way. Your inbox is probably the same. We start here because it’s the shape of the whole problem.

2

Sales 1-0-1

  1. Find the businesses that need you.
  2. Find the buyers inside them.
  3. Have the right conversations.
  4. At the right time.

Get step 1 wrong and you’re in Wasteland.

You have your ICP, of course…

3

ICP

Everyone’s starting point. But the ICP feels moribund to us. Useful for narrowing the world, sure. But they’re a description of an ideal shape — what a business looks like. With no proof of need. When people ask us “What’s your ICP?” our response is “A business that needs us”. We’re not trying to be clever. It’s unarguable. It clears the starting point and begs the question that really matters. How do you find them?

4

Lookalikes

The logic of lookalikes feels sound. You know who’s already bought, so find more of those businesses. But lookalikes don’t prove need. They amplify the shape, not the pain. Lookalikes feel productive — volume in the funnel, team working away. Often wrong, quietly, at scale, and blind to timing…

5

Wasteland Part 1: In-market timing

Only about 5% of B2B buyers are in market at any given time. Intent signals firing. But they won’t have you on a shortlist unless you’ve already been talking to them. If you haven’t, you’re too late. (See no. 14)

Another 10% of B2B buyers are likely coming to market in the next 4-9 months. Intent signals unlikely to be firing. This slice of your list is the most valuable. It’s where you focus effort to start a conversation. Assuming you can define the 10%.

The remaining 85% won’t be on a shortlist for a long time, if ever. They are pretty much pure waste right now.

6

Wasteland Part 2: Bad data. Bad qualification.

Tools get a lot of trust. Too much. We’ve done what most teams don’t.

In a popular list tool, we manually checked a thousand accounts across a few typical ICPs — three weeks of numbing work. More than half didn’t fit the ICPs. Across multiple criteria. And looking at the tool’s fit scores was embarrassing.

We no longer trust the list tools. But they’re all you have, right?

7

GTM Tools with bolted on AI

The most widely used GTM tools were created before AI went mainstream. They’ve moved fast to plug it in for obvious reasons — it’s table stakes. What we see is bolt-on versions of basic models (because token burn is real) — ‘answers in seconds’ is proof — creating outputs based on zero context, surface thin, generic.

We don’t trust the tools that aren’t AI first.

8

Stack fatigue

More tools are not the answer to “everything’s broken”. They are the source of half of it. Every CRO we speak to says the same thing now: ‘we don’t want more tools’. They’ve got too many. The integrations are brittle, half the seats are unused and three tools do roughly the same thing. The stack has become a burden, not a foundation. Are your GTM Engineers focused on workarounds for a broken stack? Or accelerating your path to value?

9

The single source of truth

Where is it in your business? Where do you keep the product marketing plan, the ICPs, the segment research, the sales briefings, the Battle Cards, and everything else? And what about AI research by the team? Where do their outputs go (assuming they’re valuable in the first place)? We’ll ask the question a different way. What’s your SDR ramp time?

10

Freestyle AI

Did we just mention the value of AI outputs? Yes — those individuals running unstructured AI sessions for their own research, qualification, copywriting, decision-making, whatever. No guardrails, no project instructions, crappy prompts, no context windows held across sessions. Every session starts from zero, the previous one’s lessons gone. We call it ‘Freestyle AI’. Because it is.

And yet decisions are made on these outputs. Account research becomes a paragraph from a chat window. Qualification becomes whatever GPT said. Outreach copy becomes whatever the SDR pasted in and ran. HITL? Nah. How much of your pipeline is run ‘freestyle’?

11

SDR waste

The SDR’s week is mostly waste for two reasons. First: So much of the list they’re working is wrong. Every hour spent downstream multiplies the wrongness, compounds the original error. And the waste.

Second: By every honest count we’ve seen, half an SDR’s time goes to non-selling activity: manual lead research, data cleaning, and CRM management. On all those wrong accounts too. Go figure.

12

SDR pain

The SDR role can be brutal. Unrelenting pressure to hit targets, but where the majority of targets in a lead list are plain wrong. They’re either guided on what list to build or are given lists to research and work. A failure to book meetings is almost always on them, even if they’re good. They disengage, miserably. They’re shown the door or move on. You know this. The replacement comes in, the ramp time kills, the cycle repeats. What’s at fault here? Not who. What? One of our goals with Cull was ‘to help make SDRs happy’ because the SDRs we talk to tell us the same story, time and again.

13

Back to your inbox. Time to talk Cold Outreach

Automation created an outreach tsunami — spray-and-pray at super scale and warp speed. AI created messaging patterns and sequences that everyone started using — spotted a mile off. To make things feel more human, deliberate mistakes were introduced to messages. Geez. Spam filters, of course, are having a field day. No wonder cold outreach response rates are in the garbage. Its day is not quite done, provided we nail the proposition, the timing and the humanity. But you must start thinking about it like this…

14

Forward to your future. It’s ABM-lite.*

By the time you fire off a single-threaded cold email to an in-market account, its buying group has already met without you. They’ve talked to each other for months, asked ChatGPT, checked with their network, read the reviews. A shortlist has formed. You’re on it or you’re not. This changes the move.

The typical outreach doesn’t get you on the shortlist any more. Presence does — across the whole buying group, across channels, across months. Sustained, multi-threaded, with brand, marketing and sales working off the same page. Starting 4-9 months out when they’re realising their need, not blasted on a single cadence. That’s ABM-lite.

Now it’s the only motion that shapes the ranking. If you can identify which accounts are actually suffering a problem you solve — before they begin their research — you’re in their pre-journey.

* Account-Based Marketing (1:Few) and also known as ‘cluster marketing’. Scaled for smaller teams. It targets a defined set of accounts within a segment, engages the full buying group across multiple channels over months — multi-threaded by design. Brings sales and marketing onto the same page. Used to be enterprise-only but ABM-lite has surged among smaller B2Bs as automation and AI drive down ABM costs and implementation time.
15

Quick question ;-)

Look at the accounts your team is working this week. If you knew they actually needed your product, how would that change your truth?

Your honest answer is the teardown.

— Matt & Nick. Cull.