Your prospects don't care which channel you pick
See the one thing they reward instead.
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A few weeks ago, I saw this post on LinkedIn from Kade (SDR at Common Room):
In the 164 comments, I’ve spotted two patterns:
Pattern 1: Every prospect has a different channel preference.
Pattern 2: What to do before you prospect them.
So let’s unpack them.
Pattern 1: Every prospect has a different channel preference
Some said call me. Some said short email. Some said video on LinkedIn. Some sales leaders said cold calls only. Sort the replies any way you want and no channel wins.
A few weeks ago I saw the same question in a Slack community:
What’s the best outbound channel in 2026?
That’s the wrong question.
Because “Best channel” assumes one universal answer.
There isn’t one.
Once you know what works for your market, the job is to optimize each channel in your context.
The better question:
What channel mix makes sense for your market, your segment, your account, and this person?
Channel preference works in layers.
Layer 1 - Market and segment set the default
Selling to restaurants (SMB), 1 contact per account → phone. Most owners are on the floor and may not have a LinkedIn profile. And with 1 contact per account, no way to multi-thread.
Selling to Fortune 500 (Strategic / Enterprise) → dinners, trade shows, gifts, sponsor intros, cold calling, email, LinkedIn, top-down approach, bottom-up approach.
Selling in European markets where cold calling laws are strict → email and LinkedIn lead.
Your channels adapt to your market, segment (SMB, Mid-Market, Entreprise, Strategic) and Cost of Acquisition.
Layer 2 - The individual sets the preference inside the segment.
Until you talk to a specific prospect, you don’t know their preference. Two CROs in the same industry will answer differently. One picks up unknown numbers. The other only engages with what their team forwards them.
The market narrows the channel mix. The individual picks the lane.
It’s also not an either/or question. It should be a mix, if your Cost of Acquisition allows it and your market allows it. Each channel has a ceiling. You can’t get 100% positive reply via email or LinkedIn. Same for calls. Same for the number of emails or phone numbers you can actually find in your market. You can’t get contact info for every prospect.
And channel sits downstream of relevance.
Even if you knew every prospect’s preferred channel, it wouldn’t save you. The leaders in the comments didn’t say “I prefer email and I take any meeting that arrives by email.” They said the opposite. Channel works when relevance is there. Without relevance, no channel works.
So “what’s the best channel” assumes a single answer that doesn’t exist at either layer. The market narrows it. The individual decides it.
If your team is debating email vs. LinkedIn vs. phone before they’ve fixed who they’re going after and what they’re going to say, they’re optimizing the wrong stage of the system.
The channel is the way the work is done. The part that decides whether the delivery lands happens upstream.
Which raises the real question the best comments were actually answering: how do you get relevant? Pattern 2 answers it.
Pattern 2: What to do before you prospect them
Here are the 3 strongest comments. That’s where the interesting insights were.
Two more quotes from posts I captured a few months ago that line up with the same pattern:
The pattern across all 5:
Show me you understand my world before you ask for my time.
That’s the work upstream of the channel.
Move 1: Get inside through the team
Before you contact the decision maker, talk to their team. The individual contributors. The front line managers. Ask them:
What’s the current process?
What tools do they use?
What are the current challenges?
What have you done to fix that?
Get into the account through the team. Multi-thread so the exec hears about you before you ever contact them. Better: get someone they trust to hand you over. That’s what most of these leaders described in their own words: get introduced, multi-thread, get handed over by someone they trust.
That’s why an account-based approach makes outbound work.
Move 2: Make your POV the reason they vouch
You don’t earn the intro by asking for it. You earn it with a point of view sharp enough that someone inside will repeat it for you.
Show up with a hypothesis tied to a top-3 priority. A reframe. An insight from the front lines. Something that proves you understand their world before you ask for their time. That’s the email Orlob described, the one that makes him lean back in his chair. Your champion repeats it up the chain.
Outbound teams in 2026 have no excuse to show up without a hypothesis and research. AI is the best tool to do this at scale: using public, online information (strategic initiatives, the facts they share online) to build a real point of view about how your solution might help their business.
In 2026, outbound teams have no excuse to send generic outreach.
This is how outbound creates demand
Most outbound teams capture demand. That’s the main reason people say outbound is dead, that you can’t generate revenue with outbound, that outbound only works because of timing.
When your outbound team gets inside through the team, shows evidence you did the work, and educates the buyer, outbound creates demand at scale.
You don’t intercept that demand. You create it.
That's it for today.
Hope it was useful!
Elric
P.S. Also
Building that system is what I’m doing with clients right now. If you want one for your team, reach out, happy to talk it through.
And I’m building something new: a membership to upgrade the paid newsletter: a way to build these systems without me in the room. The frameworks I unpack in breakdowns like this one, plus the workflows to run them inside your own company. So if you're interested to join the beta let me know.
We’re back with 2 live sessions:
This Thursday I’m going live with Will Rohleder, SDR Director at TeachTown, whose 14-person SDR team wins 42% of the deals they source, against 34% without them → Save your seat
The week after, Florin Tatulea joins me live (Author of Prospecting from the Trenches & GTM Engineer in Residence at ZoomInfo). We’re going to unpack How to Scale an Outbound Team in 2026 → Save your seat
Other resources that might be helpful on the same topic:
