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"But I already use AI for my outreach. Why do I need you?"

LP By the LeadPocket team·5 min read

It's the question we get most often now. AI can write a cold email in three seconds, and there are tons of apps out there that promise to write your entire cadence after reading your (also AI-generated) website copy. 


So why pay an agency full of humans to do it? Fair question. So instead of answering it ourselves, we'll let the AI answer it for us.

Last week two cold emails landed in our agency inbox. Two different senders with different products with emails written (almost certainly) by AI. Just check out the last line of each one of them:

Email one ended with: "If I helped you add LinkedIn as a service to your clients - would you test it?"

Email two ended with: "Would a one-page outline be useful for a fit check?"

When was the last time you said something like this out loud? Sales has to feel natural and human. These call to actions (arguably the most important part of a cold email) feel the total opposite of that. 


But it gets worse.

Exhibit A: the one that tried to teach us cold email

This came from someone selling LinkedIn outreach software (to us, a cold email agency). Gotta love it. Here's the whole email word for word (we've only changed the name and company for obvious reasons):

What gives it away

  • The fake research. "With domains like getleadpocket.co pointing to leadpocket.com" is scraped data dressed up as insight. It's like emailing someone pointing out "i see you're an email user". It tells us nothing we don't know and gives us no reason to care.
  • The weird compliment. "You eat what you sell" is a robot trying to come up with an alternative for "eat your own dog food." Think about it though. "You eat what you sell"? What's that even supposed to mean. The problem is not that AI wrote it, it's that they clearly didn't even care about proofreading it. Or worse, they thought it' was smart.
  • The unverifiable number. "800+ agencies" is there to sound big. But what's that even supposed to mean and why should I care? Who are these agencies? It's supposed to sound like social proof but it's a filler.

Exhibit B: the one that read our website back to us

Oh this one is special. Watch the first sentence closely, then compare it to our homepage. Again, verbatim, only the name and company changed:

What gives it away

  • It quoted us to us. "You don't just send cold email, you research, run outreach under the client's brand, manage follow-ups and objections, and only hand over interested replies." Thanks, I hadn't read my own website copy. Thank god you did it for me. It's honestly crazy that any experienced salesperson would think that scraping, rewording and sending our own website copy back to us is considered "personalization".
  • The em-dash. "cold email—you research." AI reaches for the em-dash constantly. Again, if you were to manually write your email from scratch, would you write that? No further questions your honor.
  • The wall of nouns. "sender-health dispatch gates, duplicate and suppression controls, safe retry rules, exact sent-vs-delivered evidence, bounce/reply reconciliation." What is that even supposed to mean? Seriously did anyone proofread this?
  • The shell-company address. A Wyoming registered-agent suite that thousands of paper companies share, under a name with "AI" literally in it.

Exhibit C: the one you get ten times a day

Now I bet you have fifty emails like the one below in your spam folder right now:

What gives it away

  • The broken merge tag. "Hi {{first_name}}." It's crazy that this still happens. 
  • "I hope this email finds you well." The most-sent sentence in outbound history. What if I didn't find me well? 
  • The invented compliment. "Truly impressed by the incredible work you're doing." I mean, thank you but where have you learned about my truly impressive and incredible work that I'm doing (which I am) if I'm not posting about it anywhere?
  • The buzzword salad. "Unlock explosive growth by leveraging cutting-edge, AI-powered strategies." Seriously what in the h*ll does this even mean.

Why every AI cold email sounds the same

It's actually very simple and it's because AI writes your emails from public information: blog posts, LinkedIn posts, template libraries, "10 cold email templates that convert" listicles. 

But pause for a second and think about what that means. The moment a template is good enough to end up in a blog post, it has already been sent a million times and the blog post author is not even using it anymore. Why would a salesperson spend weeks testing out different unique templates, tracking performance and choosing a winner only to... write a blog post so anyone can copy them? It makes no sense. 


But if you're not an experienced salesperson, you'll never even think about that. By the time the AI learns this copy, it has been exhausted for months. Your "fresh, personalized" AI email is the same email landing in every other inbox that morning, closer and all.

Everyone is drinking from the same fountain, so everyone tastes the same. And here's the thing: Sameness is death in cold email. The whole job is to not sound like the forty other people who emailed that person this week. That's why a lot of our replies start with "I don't usually reply to cold emails, but..."

What we actually do differently

LeadPocket has been writing cold emails since 2017. That's almost a decade of doing exactly this. Work doing by humans, for humans, long before everyone started AI slopping their way through sales.

That head start matters because we didn't learn any of this from blog posts or public sources. We learn it from thousands of sends a month, right now, and we decide on a new angle before it ever reaches a template library. And we never, ever, copy something that's public. By the time AI is confidently suggesting something, we have already retired it. We stay in front of the trend instead of a year behind it, which is the only place a cold email has ever gotten a reply.

AI is a fine assistant and you should use it. We use it everyday and we love it. But what most salespeople don't realize is that it's a terrible writer and strategist. The positive reply comes from the part it can't do: knowing what everyone else is about to say, and saying something else.

Gotten an email like these lately?

Now you know exactly why you need us. We research, write, send and qualify under your brand, and hand you leads that actually reply. You go sell.

Work with us