This is the TitanX newsletter, where GTM is built on conversations, targeting, and, of course, Phone Intent™ - Read more.

Over 50% of the Internet is AI generated. 71% of social media images are now AI generated. Whether or not that’s true, we’re all more skeptical of whether something is real.

This newsletter could be AI-generated. It’s not, though.

But you feel that right? Just by mentioning the possibility that soulless set of chips digesting a graph of vectorized text snippets wrote this, I planted a seed of doubt. And now you’re looking for patterns, not reading.

Not listening.

We are living in the empire of the inauthentic.

Over every piece of content - and soon, not just text, but every voice and every video - looms a dark shadow of doubt. Which, you should agree, is something you do not want your prospects to feel about you.

So how do you combat that? How can you get off the treadmill of constantly trying to find new pattern interrupts, find new channels that work?

And maybe just as importantly, why should you?

Let’s get into it.

First, a few updates/reminders:

AI is an accelerator of what’s already been happening, basically forever: channel decay.

A new tactic or channel gets hot, it gets adopted, it gets abused, it stops working, everybody complains about it without doing anything about it (unless you’re smart), and then eventually everybody either:

1) Gets used to the channel sucking and accepts it as a new (bad) baseline

and/or

2) Finds a new channel that works (for a while)

In the case of AI, the equal and opposite reaction is essentially disgust and demands for less of it.

Most of that’s for artists and authors right now. Hollywood. But if it’s not already a thing, I’d expect that B2B brands will soon start “certifying” products, email communications, marketing content as “human” - B2B always trends a bit behind B2C.

That is the natural reaction to AI-Slop’s decaying effect on pretty much every channel.

But really, AI slop is just a false flag.

Your real problem is you’re channel/tactic bandwagoning because you can’t commit to building defensible growth with authenticity baked in.

Cause: focus on the wrong metrics. Activity measurement leads to… more activity.

And because a free market (and your growth systems) love efficiency, actions flow towards the lowest friction. If something can be automated, it will be. By both you and your competitors.

So when you choose a new volume playbook/tactic/channel you’re getting into a race to the bottom when it comes to channel effectiveness. You started a countdown to when the channel decays. It might be two months or two years, but it will stop working and then you’ll have to re-build your GTM playbook. Again.

What do you do instead? What do you measure? How do you get off the treadmill of Sisyphean nightmares that is outbound channel decay?

Return to first principles, and use the things that are hardest to automate and difficult to scale. Difficult, at least, for your competitors.

Some call this “friction maxxing” - but where effective it’s the fastest track to any real moat that might remain in your GTM.  

Conversations will never not be the atomic unit of GTM in B2B. Sure, PLG is a thing. Sometimes people buy software without talking to a rep. But even then, the decision to purchase depends on conversations within that organization… stretching the metaphor here. And most of our beloved PLG SaaS still end up with a sales led motion to close bigger deals with target accounts… ChatGPT and Claude both have them, not to mention the old guard of Canva, Apollo, HubSpot, etc.

The phone will also continue to be somewhat less automatable than other channels. The day of reckoning is coming, though, when phone call connect-ability will be as difficult a problem as email deliverability.

Carriers are working hard to make it next to impossible to use automated tactics to call their customers.

Without even getting into behavioral preferences (some of us may crave real conversation with a human to verify we’re not being duped), there are regulatory reasons the phone is AI-proof: TCPA requires prior express consent to place robocalls/AI calls to recipients.

Fortunately for you wonderful software/services sales people, you don’t need to look far to survive in the AI era. It’s not like you need to become a GTM Engineer or return to door-to-door…

You just need to pick up the phone.

Thanks for reading.

Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)

P.S. If you read this for, you probably care about your connect rate. We triple it, or pay you $10,000. Reply for more info.