Cold outbound is dead. But outbound itself? That's your marketing team's most valuable safety net.

A VP of Sales at a Series B SaaS company told me last month that his team was burning through 200 cold calls daily and generating exactly 3 meetings per week. When I asked what happened to the other 997 calls, he shrugged. "That's just how outbound works."

That's the problem. Sales teams treat outbound like a numbers game—make enough calls, send enough emails, and eventually something sticks. Meanwhile, marketing teams are sitting on behavioral data, engagement signals, and intent indicators that could transform those same outbound efforts from spray-and-pray into surgical strikes.

The question isn't whether sales should do outbound. It's whether they should be doing it blind.

The Cold Outbound Delusion

Most B2B companies operate under a dangerous assumption: that sales-owned cold outbound is a necessary evil for growth. They're wrong on both counts—it's neither necessary nor particularly effective anymore.

Here's what cold outbound actually costs:

A study by TOPO found that it takes 18 calls on average to connect with a buyer. Of those connections, roughly 2-3% result in meetings. Of those meetings, maybe 10% close. So if we follow the logic: you need around 3,000 cold calls to generate 5 closed deals.

But the real cost isn't in the dials. It's in the opportunity cost.

While your sales team is grinding through cold lists, they're not working high-intent leads. They're not nurturing relationships with warm prospects. They're not closing deals that marketing already warmed up. They're burning time and goodwill on prospects who have never heard of your company and have no reason to care.

The worse news? It's getting harder.

Email deliverability has dropped 25% in the last two years as spam filters get smarter. Cold call answer rates have fallen from 9% in 2020 to less than 5% in 2025. LinkedIn connection acceptance rates have dropped below 30% for most industries.

Cold outbound isn't just inefficient. It's dying.

The Real Role of Outbound in 2025

Here's the contrarian take that most marketing teams miss: outbound isn't dead. Cold outbound is dead.

The difference? Cold outbound targets people who have never interacted with your brand. Smart outbound targets people who have already shown interest but haven't converted through your inbound channels.

Think about your funnel. Marketing generates awareness through content, social, SEO, and paid channels. Some prospects convert immediately—they fill out forms, book demos, request pricing. These are your inbound leads, and sales should absolutely own them.

But what about the other 95% of people who engage with your content, visit your pricing page, download your resources, or attend your webinars but never fill out a demo request form?

That's where marketing-owned outbound becomes your safety net.

These prospects aren't cold. They're warm but hesitant. They're interested but not ready. They're evaluating but haven't decided. And they represent the highest-ROI opportunity in your entire go-to-market strategy.

Why Marketing Should Own This

Sales teams are optimised for closing, not for orchestrating multi-touch nurture campaigns that respect buyer intent signals. Marketing teams are built for exactly that.

Marketing has the data:

• Who visited your pricing page three times this week

• Which prospects attended your webinar but didn't book a call

• Who downloaded your case study, read your comparison guide, and checked your G2 reviews

• Which accounts are showing buying committee-level engagement across multiple stakeholders

Sales doesn't have this visibility. Even with a CRM, they're looking at discrete actions, not behavioral patterns. Even with sales intelligence tools, they're seeing demographics, not intent.

The data challenge: Your CRM and marketing automation platform already capture this behavioral intelligence. The problem is turning it into actionable outbound segments. Export your high-engagement, zero-conversion data monthly (accounts with 3+ page visits or content downloads but no form fills). This becomes your warm outbound target list—the prospects sales should be calling, not random cold lists.

Marketing has the channels:

The most effective outbound in 2025 isn't a cold call or a generic email. It's a coordinated sequence across email, LinkedIn, retargeting ads, and direct mail that creates multiple touchpoints without feeling aggressive.

Sales reps can't orchestrate this. They're managing 50-100 active opportunities and don't have time to build custom multi-channel campaigns for warm-but-not-hot prospects. Marketing teams can automate these sequences while maintaining personalisation that actually resonates.

How DOJO helps: Once you've identified your warm prospect segments, use DOJO AI to build campaign messaging that maintains your brand voice while adapting to each segment. Ask: "Create a 5-touch email sequence for prospects who attended our webinar on lithium supply chain forecasting but didn't book a demo. Focus on addressing common objections about data accuracy and implementation complexity."

DOJO analyzes your brand's existing content and voice (from your website and published materials) to generate messaging that sounds like your team wrote it, not a generic AI tool. This solves the biggest bottleneck in warm outbound: creating segment-specific messaging at scale without losing authenticity.

Marketing has the messaging:

When a prospect visits your pricing page but doesn't convert, the right response isn't a sales call asking, "Are you ready to buy?" It's a marketing touch that addresses the specific hesitation: "Here's how [similar company] implemented our solution in 30 days" or "Common questions we hear about pricing" or "How we compare to [competitor they just researched]."

This requires understanding where prospects are in their journey and what information they need next. Sales teams optimise for closing today. Marketing teams optimise for moving prospects forward through the funnel.

How DOJO helps: Use competitive intelligence to craft positioning-aware outbound messaging. Ask: "Analyze [competitor website] and identify their main positioning claims. How does our value proposition differ, and what objections might prospects have when comparing us?"

DOJO can analyze competitor websites, marketing materials, and positioning to help you understand what prospects are seeing when they evaluate alternatives. This intelligence informs messaging that addresses specific competitive concerns rather than generic value props. For example, if a prospect downloaded your competitive comparison guide, your outbound message should reference the specific differentiators that matter most in that comparison.

The Framework: Outbound as a Safety Net

The most successful B2B companies structure outbound as the final layer of a comprehensive targeting strategy, not as the first line of attack.

Layer 1: Inbound Conversion

Marketing generates awareness and drives qualified traffic to conversion points. Sales works these inbound leads immediately (yes, within 15 minutes) because they've raised their hand and expressed explicit interest.

Conversion rate reality: Even well-optimised inbound funnels convert only 2-5% of qualified visitors. That means 95-98% of interested prospects don't convert through traditional inbound channels.

Layer 2: Marketing-Owned Nurture

Prospects who engage but don't convert enter marketing-owned nurture tracks based on their behavior signals. This isn't generic drip campaigns—it's intelligent sequencing based on engagement patterns, content consumption, and firmographic fit.

How DOJO helps: Build behavior-based nurture content by asking DOJO to create variations for different journey stages. "Create three versions of our core value proposition: one for prospects in early research phase, one for active evaluation, and one for final decision stage. Maintain our brand voice but adjust the evidence and specificity for each stage."

This ensures your nurture sequences speak to where prospects actually are rather than forcing everyone through the same generic content journey.

Layer 3: Warm Outbound (Marketing-Owned)

When prospects reach specific thresholds of engagement without converting—multiple page visits, content downloads, repeated website visits, buying committee engagement—they trigger marketing-owned outbound sequences.

This isn't cold calling. It's strategic outreach to warm prospects using behavioral data to personalise messaging and timing. Marketing owns these campaigns because they require multi-channel orchestration and sophisticated segmentation that sales teams aren't equipped to manage.

How DOJO helps: For each segment you've identified from your CRM/analytics exports, use DOJO's AI agents to create campaign messaging frameworks:

"Create outbound email messaging for prospects who: 1) attended our webinar on battery supply chain forecasting, 2) visited our price assessment methodology page, 3) but haven't requested a demo within 14 days. Address the common hesitation that price data requires too much internal process change to implement."

For multi-channel consistency, ask DOJO to adapt core messages across channels: "Take this email message and create variations optimized for: 1) LinkedIn InMail (more conversational, reference mutual connections if possible), 2) a retargeting ad headline and description (focus on social proof), 3) a brief voicemail script (conversational, low-pressure)."

This ensures your warm outbound feels coordinated rather than randomly hitting prospects across disconnected channels.

Layer 4: Sales-Owned Follow-Up

When warm outbound campaigns generate responses or meetings, sales takes over for direct engagement and deal progression. This is where sales excels—having conversations with prospects who are already familiar with your brand and have demonstrated genuine interest.

The key difference: Sales gets warm handoffs from prospects who have already engaged with your brand multiple times across multiple channels. These conversations start with context and momentum, not cold pitches and skepticism.

How DOJO helps: Create reusable sales enablement content that gives reps context for warm conversations. Ask DOJO: "Create a one-page sales brief template for warm leads from our 'pricing page visitor' segment. Include: typical engagement patterns we see, common questions they're researching, likely competitors they're evaluating, recommended opening questions, and key differentiators to emphasize."

Build these templates for each warm outbound segment. When marketing hands a lead to sales, include the appropriate brief so reps understand the prospect's journey before the first call. This transforms handoffs from "here's a name and phone number" to "here's a warm prospect who's been researching X, comparing us to Y, and probably has concerns about Z."

Why Sales Teams Resist This

Let's address the elephant in the room: most sales leaders will hate this idea.

They'll argue that sales owns all revenue-generating activities. They'll worry about losing control over pipeline. They'll insist that their reps need to "control their own destiny" through outbound prospecting.

These objections miss the point.

Marketing-owned outbound doesn't eliminate sales prospecting. It makes sales prospecting exponentially more effective by ensuring reps are only calling warm prospects with demonstrated interest and known behavioral patterns.

Sales resistance to this model typically comes from three places:

1. Fear of losing pipeline control: Sales teams are measured on pipeline generation and worry that relying on marketing-owned outbound makes them dependent on another team's performance.

The reality? Sales teams are already dependent on marketing for awareness, demand generation, and brand building. Marketing-owned warm outbound is just making that dependency more strategic and measurable.

2. Belief that more activity equals more results: Sales culture often celebrates activity metrics—calls made, emails sent, touches completed. Marketing-owned outbound eliminates low-value activity and focuses on high-probability opportunities.

The question isn't how many touches you complete. It's how many qualified conversations you generate.

3. Lack of trust in marketing's ability to execute: In many organisations, marketing is seen as responsible for "top of funnel" while sales handles everything revenue-related. This outdated model creates artificial boundaries that hurt both teams.

The solution? Make marketing directly accountable for warm outbound performance metrics: response rates, meeting generation, and pipeline contribution from targeted campaigns.

Implementation: How to Make This Transition

Shifting outbound ownership from sales to marketing doesn't happen overnight. The most successful transitions follow a structured approach that proves value before forcing change.

Month 1: Pilot Program

Identify one high-priority segment—maybe accounts that visited your pricing page multiple times or companies that attended your webinars but didn't book demos. Have marketing build and execute a custom outbound campaign for just this segment.

Measure everything: response rates, meeting generation, sales cycle length, close rates. Compare these metrics against traditional cold outbound performance.

How DOJO helps: Start by building your pilot campaign messaging. Export your target segment from your CRM (e.g., "50 accounts that visited pricing 3+ times in last 60 days, no demo request"). Then ask DOJO:

"Create a 4-email outbound sequence for mining companies and battery manufacturers that visited our lithium price assessment pages multiple times but never requested access. Each email should address a different concern: (1) data methodology and accuracy, (2) implementation and team adoption, (3) contract flexibility and pricing, (4) comparison to alternatives they might be considering like [competitors]. Include subject lines and maintain our authoritative, data-driven voice."

Review and refine the output based on your team's knowledge of these specific objections. DOJO provides the framework and maintains voice consistency; your team adds the specific industry insights that make messaging resonate.

Month 2-3: Expand and Optimise

If the pilot shows promising results (and it will), expand to additional segments. Build playbooks for different engagement patterns: high website engagement, content consumption without conversion, buying committee-level activity, competitor comparison research.

Establish clear handoff protocols between marketing-owned outbound campaigns and sales follow-up. Create dashboards that show sales leaders exactly what engagement history each prospect has before they take the first call.

How DOJO helps: Analyze what worked in your pilot to inform expansion. Upload your pilot results (response rates by email, meetings generated, feedback from sales) and ask:

"Based on these pilot results, which messages generated the strongest response? What patterns do you see in the language, positioning, or structure that I should replicate for other segments?"

Then build playbooks for new segments: "Create an outbound campaign framework for prospects who downloaded 2+ case studies about gigafactory supply chain planning but never requested a consultation. Structure: 3 emails over 14 days, each building on themes from the case studies they read."

For each new segment, have DOJO create the messaging framework, then customize based on your team's specific knowledge of that audience's concerns and motivations.

Month 4-6: Scale and Systematise

By this point, you should have clear data showing that marketing-owned warm outbound outperforms sales-owned cold outbound on every metric that matters: response rates, meeting conversion, deal velocity, close rates, and cost per acquisition.

Use this data to make the case for formal ownership changes. Marketing owns outbound campaigns for all prospects with engagement history. Sales owns cold outreach only for strategic target accounts that require white-glove, personalised approaches that can't be automated.

The goal isn't to eliminate sales prospecting. It's to make sales prospecting 10x more effective by ensuring every outbound touch is informed by behavioral intelligence and coordinated across multiple channels.

How DOJO helps: Document your warm outbound process for scalability. Ask DOJO:

"Create a standard operating procedure document for marketing-owned warm outbound including: how to identify and export target segments from our CRM, campaign messaging frameworks by segment type, channel sequencing best practices, sales handoff protocol, and key performance metrics to track. Format as a practical playbook that a new marketing team member could follow."

This transforms your pilot learnings into a systematic process that scales beyond the original team members who built it.

The Metrics That Matter

Traditional sales-owned outbound gets measured by activity: calls made, emails sent, connections requested. These metrics encourage volume over quality and reward busywork over results.

Marketing-owned outbound should be measured by outcomes:

Response Rate: What percentage of targeted prospects respond to your campaigns? Marketing-owned warm outbound typically sees 8-15% response rates compared to 1-3% for cold outbound.

Meeting Conversion: What percentage of responses turn into qualified meetings? Warm outbound converts at 60-80% because prospects are already familiar with your brand and have demonstrated interest.

Pipeline Contribution: How much qualified pipeline does warm outbound generate monthly? Track this separately from inbound to demonstrate incremental value.

Deal Velocity: How quickly do warm outbound leads move through your sales cycle compared to cold outbound? Warm leads typically close 30-50% faster because they enter the conversation already educated about your solution.

Close Rate: What percentage of warm outbound opportunities close compared to cold outbound? This is where warm outbound really shines—close rates are typically 3-5x higher because you're reaching prospects who have already shown interest.

Cost Per Acquisition: What's the total cost to acquire a customer through warm outbound campaigns? Factor in marketing time, tools, and sales effort required to close deals.

A mid-market SaaS company tracked these metrics for 12 months after shifting to marketing-owned warm outbound:

• Response rates increased from 2.1% (cold) to 11.3% (warm)

• Meeting conversion jumped from 35% to 72%

• Pipeline contribution from outbound doubled despite 40% reduction in total outreach volume

• Deal velocity improved by 38%

• Close rates increased from 6% (cold) to 22% (warm)

• Cost per acquisition dropped 68%

The results speak louder than any argument about ownership.

Tracking with DOJO: If you're running paid campaigns as part of your warm outbound (retargeting ads, LinkedIn sponsored content), DOJO's Performance Marketing features can analyze cross-channel performance: "Compare our LinkedIn retargeting campaign performance (targeting website visitors who didn't convert) against our standard prospecting campaigns. Show: cost per click, click-to-conversion rate, and cost per meeting booked."

For campaign performance analysis, upload your outbound campaign results (as CSV exports from your CRM/marketing automation) and ask DOJO's Data Analyst to visualize trends: "Create charts showing: warm outbound response rates by segment over the last 6 months, meeting conversion trends, and pipeline contribution compared to cold outbound over the same period."

The Strategic Advantage Nobody Talks About

Here's what most companies miss about marketing-owned outbound: it creates a sustainable competitive advantage that's difficult to replicate.

Your competitors are still running sales-owned cold outbound programs. They're grinding through cold lists, burning through sales rep time, and generating mediocre results that barely justify the investment.

Meanwhile, you're running sophisticated, data-driven campaigns that target prospects at exactly the right moment with exactly the right message across exactly the right channels. You're not hoping to catch someone at the right time—you're using behavioral signals to know when the time is right.

This isn't just more efficient. It's strategically superior.

Cold outbound is a commodity that any company can execute. Sophisticated warm outbound requires marketing intelligence, technical capabilities, and process maturity that most companies don't have. Building these capabilities creates defensible advantages that compound over time.

As your marketing team gets better at identifying warm signals, segmenting audiences, crafting targeted messages, and orchestrating multi-channel sequences, your warm outbound performance improves continuously. Your close rates increase, your sales cycles shorten, and your cost per acquisition drops.

Your competitors running traditional cold outbound programs don't get these same compounding benefits. They're stuck in a linear model where more activity generates proportionally more results—except the results keep getting worse as cold outbound efficacy continues declining across all channels.

How DOJO helps: Use competitive intelligence to understand your positioning advantage. Ask: "Analyze [competitor website] and identify their main customer segments and value propositions. Based on our positioning at Benchmark Minerals, where do we have the strongest differentiation that should inform our warm outbound messaging?"

DOJO can research competitors' public positioning, then help you articulate clear differentiation in your outbound campaigns. This ensures your warm outbound doesn't just reach prospects at the right time—it reaches them with messaging that highlights exactly why they should choose you over alternatives they're evaluating.

The Future of Outbound

The companies that figure this out early will capture disproportionate market share as cold outbound becomes increasingly ineffective and marketing-owned warm outbound becomes standard practice.

We're already seeing early indicators:

• Forward-thinking B2B companies are reorganising their teams around this model

• Marketing automation platforms are building sophisticated outbound campaign features

• Sales enablement tools are adding behavioral intelligence layers

• Attribution models are evolving to properly credit warm outbound campaign contribution

The shift from sales-owned cold outbound to marketing-owned warm outbound is inevitable. The only question is whether your company makes this transition proactively or reactively.

Here's what happens if you wait:

Your competitors implement marketing-owned warm outbound and start capturing prospects at the exact moment they're ready to buy. Your cold outbound response rates continue declining as buyers become increasingly unreceptive to unsolicited outreach. Your sales team spends more time generating fewer, lower-quality opportunities. Your cost per acquisition increases while your close rates decrease.

Here's what happens if you act now:

You build sophisticated targeting capabilities that transform warm prospects into qualified pipeline. Your sales team focuses on closing instead of prospecting. Your conversion metrics improve across every stage of the funnel. Your cost per acquisition drops while revenue per rep increases.

The choice is obvious. The hard part is execution.

The Bottom Line

Cold outbound is dead because buyers have too many defenses against unsolicited outreach and too many better options for researching solutions. Sales-owned outbound fails because sales teams lack the data, channels, and time to execute sophisticated multi-touch campaigns.

Marketing-owned warm outbound works because it reaches prospects who have already shown interest, uses behavioral intelligence to personalise messaging and timing, and coordinates multiple touchpoints across multiple channels in ways that feel helpful rather than pushy.

The companies that restructure outbound ownership around this reality will generate more pipeline, close more deals, and acquire customers more efficiently than competitors still grinding through cold lists.

This isn't about eliminating sales prospecting. It's about making sales prospecting actually work by ensuring every outbound touch is strategic, informed, and coordinated.

Outbound should be your safety net for warm prospects who fell through the cracks of traditional inbound conversion. It should never be your primary strategy for reaching cold prospects who've never heard of your company.

The question isn't whether to make this shift. It's whether you make it now or watch your competitors capture the advantage while your sales team burns time on cold calls that don't work anymore.

Ready to transform your outbound from sales busywork into marketing's highest-ROI channel? Start by exporting your warmest unconverted prospects from your CRM: accounts with 3+ meaningful engagements in the last 60 days who never converted. Build your first campaign this week, using DOJO AI to craft segment-specific messaging that maintains your brand voice while addressing the specific hesitations preventing conversion.

The prospects are already there. The data is already there. The only thing missing is the willingness to challenge the outdated assumption that sales owns all outbound activity.

Marketing should own outbound campaign creation. Not because it's trendy, but because it's the only approach that still works.

Ready to implement marketing-owned warm outbound at your company? DOJO AI helps you build campaign messaging that maintains authentic brand voice at scale, analyze competitor positioning to inform your outbound strategy, and create sales enablement frameworks that give reps context before every warm conversation. Start your free trial, prove the results, and transform your go-to-market motion from spray-and-pray to surgical precision.