Your Sales Team Has Better Things to Do Than Write Cold Emails

The in-house marketing team typically defaults to whatever data vendor the company already has a contract with—ZoomInfo, Apollo, Cognism. They download a list based on job titles and company size, maybe industry. But they don't know which titles actually have buying authority in your specific market, which company sizes are the sweet spot, or which industries are adjacent opportunities you're missing. They build a list that looks right on paper but performs poorly in practice.

‍The sales team doing it themselves builds lists opportunistically. One rep finds a prospect on LinkedIn, another pulls contacts from a trade show badge scan, someone else adds companies they drove past that "looked like they might need our product." There's no systematic approach, no consistency, and no scale.

‍The local marketing agency uses the same data sources as everyone else and applies generic B2B targeting. They don't understand that in your industry, "Director of Operations" at a 200-person manufacturer is the decision maker, but at a 200-person distributor it's the "VP of Purchasing." They build lists based on what works for their other clients—law firms, accounting practices, local service businesses—not for specialized B2B sales.

The in-house marketing team assumes the data vendor already validated the emails. They didn't—or they validated them 6 months ago when the list was created. People change jobs every 2.9 years on average; in sales and marketing roles it's closer to 2 years. A list that was 95% valid when purchased is 85% valid six months later and 70% valid after a year.

‍The sales team doing it themselves doesn't validate at all. They find an email, they send to it. When it bounces, they move on. They don't realize that every bounce chips away at their domain's reputation.

‍The local marketing agency might run the list through a basic validation tool, but they don't deduplicate against your CRM. Your best customer gets a cold email. Your hottest prospect—the one your sales rep has been nurturing for three months—gets a generic blast.

The in-house marketing team segments by obvious demographics: industry, company size, maybe job title. But they don't segment by pain point or use case because they don't have deep enough customer knowledge to identify those patterns.  

‍The sales team doing it themselves doesn't segment at all. They have one email template that they send to everyone, swapping in the first name and company. Reply rates are terrible and they conclude "cold email doesn't work for our industry."

‍The local marketing agency segments based on their playbook from other clients. They'll create "small business" and "enterprise" segments. But these generic frameworks miss the nuances of your market. The agency doesn't know this because they've never sold in your space.

The in-house marketing team sends cold emails from the same domain and infrastructure they use for newsletters and customer communications. When cold email deliverability issues arise, it affects everything—including transactional emails like order confirmations.

‍The sales team doing it themselves uses their personal work email. They don't understand SPF, DKIM, or DMARC—they just know their emails aren't getting responses. When the IT team finally investigates, they discover the sales rep's sending patterns have damaged the entire company's domain reputation.

‍The local marketing agency sets up a new domain and configures the basics, but they cut corners. They skip DMARC or set it to monitoring-only mode. They use shared IP addresses that are already tainted by other clients' bad practices.

The in-house marketing team doesn't know warming is necessary. They set up the new sending domain, write the campaigns, and launch—sending 500 emails on day one from an account that has never sent an email before. Within 48 hours, they're blacklisted. After burning through three domains, they conclude that cold email is "too risky."

‍The sales team doing it themselves uses their established work email, which doesn't need warming—but also doesn't need to be used for cold outreach. They mix cold emails with regular business communication, so when deliverability issues arise, they can't isolate the cause.

‍The local marketing agency knows about warming in theory but doesn't do it properly. They might send 10 emails the first day and 20 the second day. But they're not generating real engagement signals (replies, forwards, moved-from-spam). The account looks warmed but isn't actually trusted.

The in-house marketing team writes cold emails like they write everything else—feature-focused, brand-voice-compliant, thoroughly reviewed by legal. The emails are 400 words long, include three links, mention the company name seven times, and sound like they were written by a committee. Every spam filter in existence flags them.

‍The sales team doing it themselves writes emails that are either too casual ("Hey! Quick question...") or too formal ("I hope this email finds you well. I am reaching out to introduce..."). They don't test subject lines, they don't vary their copy, and they use the same template until someone tells them to stop.  

‍The local marketing agency writes cold emails like direct mail—long-form copy, value propositions, calls to action, P.S. lines. They don't test against spam filters because they don't have access to enterprise-grade testing tools.

The in-house marketing team uses mail merge to swap in first name and company name. That's it. The body of every email is identical. Email servers see 1,000 messages with the same content and immediately flag the pattern.

‍The sales team doing it themselves might manually vary their emails—but they can't do it at scale. They write a few versions and rotate through them, but they're still sending recognizable patterns.

‍The local marketing agency doesn't understand that personalization tokens aren't enough. They proudly report "100% personalized emails" because every message includes {{first_name}} and {{company}}. When you point out that the actual email body is identical across 5,000 sends, they don't understand why that's a problem.

The in-house marketing team schedules campaigns to send at "optimal times" based on studies they read about email open rates. Tuesday at 10am. So they blast their entire list Tuesday at 10am. Email servers see a spike from an account that normally sends 20 emails a day, and they respond accordingly.

‍The sales team doing it themselves sends when they have time. They might power through 50 emails on Monday morning, then not send again until Thursday. And they don't coordinate with each other, so three reps might all hit the same target company on the same day.

‍The local marketing agency uses their email tool's default sending speed, designed for opt-in marketing emails, not cold outreach. They don't throttle by company. They don't have systems to prevent the same company from getting hit multiple times.

The in-house marketing team sends test emails to themselves and their colleagues—who are all on the same domain, with the same email infrastructure, and have all already exchanged emails with the sending account. Of course it lands in inbox.

‍The sales team doing it themselves doesn't test at all. They write an email, they send it. If it doesn't get responses, they assume the prospect isn't interested. It never occurs to them that the prospect might not have seen the email at all.

‍The local marketing agency tests, but only against Gmail because that's what they use personally. They don't test against Outlook, which is dominant in enterprise environments. They don't test against corporate email gateways like Mimecast or Proofpoint.

The in-house marketing team forwards all replies to sales, unfiltered. The sales team gets 100 emails, 80 of which are out-of-office messages, unsubscribe requests, and "wrong person" responses. They spend an hour sorting through noise to find the 10 replies that matter.

‍The sales team doing it themselves handles replies when they can—which is whenever they're not in meetings, on calls, or doing the other parts of their job. A hot reply comes in at 2pm, they see it at 6pm, they respond at 9am the next day. The prospect has moved on.

‍The local marketing agency doesn't handle replies at all—that's "sales' job." They send the campaigns, report the metrics, and hand off anything that comes back. You're paying them for sending, not for the work that actually converts replies into meetings.

The in-house marketing team hands off "ready to talk" replies to sales and considers their job done. Sales gets an email that says "a prospect wants to talk" with no context about who they are, what they're interested in, or what's already been discussed.

‍The sales team doing it themselves sends their Calendly link—which feels impersonal after a carefully crafted cold email exchange. Or they manually propose times, wait for responses, propose different times, and lose the prospect somewhere in the three-day scheduling loop.

‍The local marketing agency doesn't do scheduling. That's "sales operations" and outside their scope. They measure success by reply rate, not by meetings booked, which means their incentives aren't aligned with your actual goal.

The in-house marketing team logs campaign sends but not individual prospect activity. You can see that "Q4 Outreach Campaign" went to 5,000 people, but you can't see which specific emails John Smith at Acme Corp received.

‍The sales team doing it themselves is supposed to log activity manually. They don't. Or they log some of it, inconsistently. Six months later, a different rep reaches out to the same prospect with the same pitch, because there's no record of the previous conversation.

‍The local marketing agency provides reports in spreadsheets or their own dashboard. You have to manually reconcile their data with your CRM, which nobody does consistently. Campaign results live in one system, sales pipeline lives in another.

The in-house marketing team reports on email metrics: sends, opens, clicks, replies. They can tell you the campaign had a 45% open rate and a 3% reply rate. They cannot tell you whether any of those replies turned into revenue.

‍The sales team doing it themselves doesn't track cold email performance at all. They know they sent some emails, got some replies, had some meetings. But they can't tell you which campaigns work, which segments convert, or what their cost per meeting actually is.

‍The local marketing agency reports on their deliverables: "We sent 10,000 emails, generated 300 replies, achieved 23% open rate." But they don't track what happens after the reply. Their metrics make them look good regardless of your actual results.