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Think your "Hey {FName}" and "I see you went to {University}" messages are winning you deals? Think again.
In this episode, Toni and Raul dismantle the myths of modern personalization and reveal why most attempts fall flat. They explore the three critical layers of real personalization, why AI can't (yet) replicate human relevance, and how spending 10 minutes on a genuinely tailored message beats sending 100 automated ones.
If you're sick of crickets after your outreach campaigns and want to know what still works when everyone else is letting robots do the talking, this one's for you.
Creators and Guests
What is Revenue Brothers?
What happens when a VC and a CEO come together?
– They nerd out about all things revenue. And they don’t always agree.
Raul Porojan of Project A Ventures and Toni Hohlbein of Growblocks are the Super Revenue Brothers. In every episode they dissect and debate current issues in B2B SaaS, and offer solutions on how to solve them
No matter if you’re an early-stage startup or a scaling unicorn – you’ll always learn something new.
RevBros - The Reason Your Personalization Sucks
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IntroductionIntroduction and Workshop Recap
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[00:00:00]
Raul: That's always a good test kind of like, would you respond to this email last week I did a workshop on like mailingand the strategy behind that in general they were trying to convince me of things that I didn't think were very good.
I was like, okay Be honest to yourself. Would you respond to this mail? And he was like, no, I probably wouldn't if you wouldn't respond to this, because it's obviously an AI, because it's obviously just copy paste.
Why are you sending these?
Toni: So if I'm, sounding a little bit more relaxed today, this might be because I'm sitting on a couch today and chilling a And I'm, I'm quite literally leaning back today. So if anyone on the pod is wondering why Toni isn't so intense anymore. maybe that's the reason, but we wanted to kind of, try the setup and we'll only have Raul being intense here today.
but what do we want to talk about intensely in this session Raul?
Personalization in AI
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Raul: So there is this topic that's actually been intensely talked about recently, and I think in the [00:01:00] age of AI that is dawning upon us with all its benefits and cons, there is The idea that AI is going to help you finally nail personalization. And, I'm not sure that that's going to be the case and it's definitely not the case right now, but I think it's a good moment to think about and talk about what is personalization actually and how to go about it and how I could help us achieve that.
Toni: Yeah. So kick us off a little bit. When someone says personalization, AI and sales, maybe, everyone thinks about the AI SDR, right? is that the direction you're thinking or kind of give us a frame, for our listeners to understand what we want to talk about and then let's dig into that.
Raul: so specifically, I think what we should start is personalization in outreach or in, whatever communication anyways, you can even personalize on an inbound request, that's not even the worst idea typically, but let's assume for the sake that we're talking personalization in mail, linkedin and calls and
typically, there's a lot [00:02:00] of mistakes people do with personalization in general. They kind of have an idea that it's like a good thing to do, but then they don't really know, because it seems like this is a kind of no nonsense topic, where, yeah, yeah, just personalize, and then you're supposed to know what to do.
and because of that reason, the Barrier for what personalization is kind of like satisfying to a lot of people when they do outreach, or when they use an AI is way too low, and they don't really achieve the results that they're trying to achieve, which is another way of saying people are kind of personalizing and thinking that they did the right thing, then not getting the numbers or hitting the quotas that they hope they would and the improvements and then saying, Oh, personalization is bullshit or we'll just let the AI do it.
This is where it's really important to understand. there's a lot of things that I cannot do right now, and I certainly have not seen any kind of level of personalization that I would help you with. And there's a lot of companies that claim that they have an AI that personalizes.
They have an agent that does these and these things, and it's gonna be great for you. And [00:03:00] because you know you should personalize, you go out and buy these tools. I think that's the wrong way to go about it. I think what's really helpful is understanding what personalization really is. And then making a good judgment on whether that AI should be helping you or not.
Toni: then enlighten me. what does personalization actually mean? Because when I think about it. the personalization that happened five years or 10 years ago was like Toni in the subject line, then the next step was, Oh, I also went to the same university or, Hey, we're in the same group on LinkedIn or kind of, that was personalization back then.
And now it feels a little bit more, basically kind of takes more sources like, Oh, you recently fundraised, this is now personalization, right. Is that the right way to think about personalization or what is it that you maybe see differently?
Raul: Yeah.
Levels of Personalization
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Raul: So I think there's kind of three levels of personalization layers that have emerged. and I don't think that there's anyone who's written this down or anything, but I've even talked to ventures who think about it this way.there is layer one, which is personalization on a company [00:04:00] level. There is layer two, which is personalization on a department or function level.
And then there is layer three, which is personalization on a personal per person level. And as an example of that, it could be the, I'm writing Toni on LinkedIn or an email. Hey Toni, I see you recently raised a Series A, and then yada, yada, yada, whatever I want to do. I'm not saying that's a great example by the way, but it's an example of company personalization.
Then number two would be on a department. I was like, Oh, hey, Toni, as someone who's ahead of engineering, you probably have this in this problem. You probably work with 10 people in your team and you don't know how to manage them remote or whatever problem I picked to talk about. And then number three on a personal level would be these examples that you just gave us.
Like, oh, by the way, Toni, we went to the same university. Now, I don't think any of those were good examples of personalization, but they are kind of in those layers. And you want to do is you want to choose the right layer for the right job at the right time. but most of [00:05:00] all, you kind of want to, that's kind of the whole point of like personalization.
Effective Personalization Techniques
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Raul: it's not even so much about the layer in itself. It's about the, so what that happens with that. The whole point of personalization. The biggest point of it, yes, you can be maybe a bit nicer and people will maybe find you a bit more attractive to talk to whatever, but most of all, it's about relevance and it's about showcasing some things.
for example, in the bad example of, Hey, Toni, as a head of engineering, you probably have these and these problems. So yes, I'm working a lot of being relevant to you within the first sentence and kind of like speaking about a problem that is near to you.
But then also I'm showcasing that I'm understanding this business. And, that is another thing I'm doing. It's kind of like a relevance, but also legitimacy to, to who I am and showcasing that I talked to a lot of head of engineers. That's the nice thing about personalization. What it can do is it can show people things.
And make them understand people things about you without you saying it. It's much more powerful that you, as a head of [00:06:00] engineering, from what I write, you understand that I'm someone who talks to a lot of head of engineerings. And you kind of take that as, oh yeah, Raul is quite legitimate to me. Rather than me telling you, hey Toni, I talk to a lot of head of engineers.
Toni: Yeah.
Raul: So inferring these things and kind of showcasing what you are to these people, is part of what makes personalization so powerful.
Toni: When you say that, that really means, You know, to a degree, you know, sometimes I would say like showing them that you have authority in the space or that you're worthwhile talking to almost. I kind of, that's, that's kind of step one, basically there, if, if I were to kind of capture it like this, did I, did I understand it correctly? Okay. And now that, that I know that, you know what are you talking about? Let's just say it like this.
Challenges and Solutions in Personalization
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Toni: I feel what sometimes happens is. And this kind of the bad example, and, maybe you tell me how to fix that and make it better. It's like, it's sometimes a little bit difficult to connect whatever general statement I used to make you feel like I know what I'm talking [00:07:00] about, connecting that to what I want to get out of this thing, which might be
only loosely connected, if anything, right. And something similar usually also happens with, almost demonstrating that you're not a robot, like really trying to find something on the LinkedIn profile or in your kind of research that, you know, it's so far out, like an AI wouldn't do this.
that it could be person could be on a post or something like this. And again, it connects zero to, what it actually is you want to talk about. Right. Kind of that bridge.I see that fail a lot. Do you think that's an issue? That's a problem that ruins the whole thing or is that just part of sometimes, you know, how this is being constructed?
Raul: Yeah, I think it comes from Oh, I'd write my whole spiel. It's, it probably even copy paste. And then P. S. we went to the same university. How did you like the football team? Whatever. Random stuff, And that to me is the lowest kind of rank of personalization that you can do because it is completely, it has some benefits, I guess it's better than nothing maybe, but it is completely taken out [00:08:00] of the blue and it has no correlation to anything I'm writing about.
And, who says that that's the only way to go about it? And it's not, thankfully. So personalization can be much more. But it's not for the lazy, right? Because what I'm going to say now is something where you actually have to become good at, but it can really pay off. personalization can also be tone.
The way you write things. So if I know that you went to the same university and you lived in the same city, probably I might just throw in a term or a word from that university while talking about something else. And it might even be a little bit subtle where you just realize after looking at it for a second time, it's like, Oh, this is kind of familiar.
Oh yeah, this guy went to the same university, which is much more powerful. That you think about that as a, as a prospect, then that I tell you, Oh, we went to the same university, just using kind of a word that they used in that city for my university that I went to, there is so many things I know that I could put in there that would be much more subtle than, Oh yeah, we went to the same university, but still showcase that we did that.
And that creates a much more genuine [00:09:00] connection that maybe actually someone would give a shit about. The fact that I say we went to the same university doesn't really mean anything, because there's 10, 000 people at my university. But if you come up with that fact yourself, by my tone and by a couple words that I put in there, from Mannheim, which is Monnheim in German, more like that, and if I put a couple terms in from there, it might even be endearing to you, it might do something with you, and it's definitely different.
which is another point of that. Right? So tone is one, but then another one would be topic. So what am I talking about? Now, if I look at your profile and I see that you're very interested in some very specific, problem in engineering, or maybe I see you're very, you were a speaker at some event, or you have your own podcast.
Now that could be a great topic to talk about. I don't have to necessarily. Call out the fact that I am talking about it. I don't have to say, Hey Toni, I see you did a podcast about A, B, C. We also really care about A, B, C, but I might rather just pick that topic and talk about it. And that is also personalization, right?
Toni: I think for me, there's always like two questions around this. Number [00:10:00] one, like, I'm not sure I'm good at that because I try kind of, and then I sit there and do some research and try and figure something out. and if I spend enough time, then sure. But if I want to, even scale this up a little bit, if I want to get, you know, 30 or 40 of those messages out a day.
It's like, that is already difficult. And I can sometimes even feel my own brain slowing down at the third or fourth or fifth kind of example. And maybe it's just the muscle that's missing, but that is just one problem. The other problem is like, how do you teach this to those 22 year olds or the AI or whatever, whatever it's, you want to use it on to scale this thing up.
how do you do that? Right. Because I think. You know, finding the odd chance that, Oh, they're from the same university. And, I can build a connection through that versus, Hey, I'm talking to so many different people and I need to find a unique connection to all of them.
Like it's, it's difficult, right? I mean, isn't that the biggest issue here?
Raul: So yes to some I I say yes or no. So [00:11:00] yes, it is a muscle and you have to flex it and you have to kind of have to build that muscle and then use it. But, the payout can be huge, especially nowadays. And I'm a firm believer.
The Future of Personalization and AI
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Raul: This is one of my main hypotheses and how sales is gonna evolve is that this is one of the very last things that sales can still do much better than any AI.
And even within the next couple of years, it will probably still be that. although who knows, but let's see about that. But as of this moment, I think personalization is even more. Of an, of a distinction maker than it was a year ago and even five years ago and therefore it's probably worth it to, to build that muscle.
So that's number one, but number two, I also think that there's ways you can make it more distributed and you can make it more, viable as a kind of like team thing rather than just use it for your own outreach. And, so. Let's just take the example that I gave before where I said, I'm reaching out to Toni and Toni and me went to the same university.
So I assume he lived in the same city as me, [00:12:00] which is why I'm going to use some terms from that city. And that's going to make the mail more endearing, which increases the odds that he was going to be open to talking to
Toni: Yeah.
Raul: It doesn't have to be that. It could also be something else. So again, let's not be lazy.
Let's not just call out the fact that Toni's a head of engineering. What I could do is I could be someone, or I could even have my whole department be very up to date on like. in group thinking of head of engineering, meaning I could use a word that it's in a meme that head of engineering's use on Reddit, for example.
and that is like a very in groupie thing and I could do so. In a very non cringe way. I could do so in a very organic way. just by making whatever joke is there, is there right now, which means that I showed to you, I'm not just a random sales dude. I'm not just a random founder. I'm kind of one of you, right?
I thought, I think about the same things. I laugh about the same things.
Toni: So sometimes when I think about personalization, and I haven't thought as structured as you have thought about this, so kind of, you know, apologies there, but the. I sometimes think about personalization also in a way [00:13:00] it's like, I need to prove to you that I'm not a robot because I think as soon as someone is realizing, oh, wait a minute, I don't think a person wrote this.
I think all of the personalization wonder kind of, falls away. I feel like that, right. once you want to see, oh, I think this was actually not a person. it can be personalized as much as possible. For some reason, I suddenly kind of, my likelihood of responding positively drops a little bit.
Right. do you agree with that? Actually that it's, that it's like, once the BS detector or the robot detector goes up, it's like, ah, okay, fuck this.
Raul: I love that you said that because I know I'm not the only one and I always think I'm not the only one and you're not the only one I think we're probably actually in the majority. So, as much as all these AIs. Are doing wonderful things, but they're also telling us that nobody and they're implying nobody cares about the fact that a robot wrote this or like an agent, whatever you want to call it, I think people care and they will care, and they probably [00:14:00] will care more in the future as AI becomes more distributed, meaning that a genuine outreach will become kind of less of a percentage than it was even right now, which makes it more valuable and rarer and the fact alone that you're showcasing that this was a human being is is.
Something that makes it much more genuine, obviously makes it much more likely. Someone will respond to you because they want to interact with a human over an AI. And it's kind of like we're collectively acting as if that's not the case, but it is.
Yes. They're trying to use AI and think about how to do that to make life easier for them, but they also would probably not respond to an AI. and that's always a good test kind of like, would you. Respond to this email I've had this with two companies. I work with right now and last week I did a workshop on mailing and the strategy behind that in general at halftime during the workshop I looked at them because they were trying to convince me of Things that I didn't think were very good.
I was like, okay really think about this seriously Be honest to yourself. Would you respond to this [00:15:00] mail? And he was like, no, I probably wouldn't Right. So if you wouldn't respond to this, if you wouldn't reach a response to this LinkedIn outreach because it's obviously an AI, because it's obviously just copy paste.
Why are you sending these? I think that's another good way to think about that.
Toni: I think how I started to look at this whole thing was actually, I think it's an arms race. you know, 10 years ago, I could prove to you that I was crafting this message only for you by using your first name, I could prove that back then, right? Because the only alternative was, I don't know, like a mail blast out and They couldn't change the subject line, you know, per person, for example.
obviously someone fixed that, now you can change that in the subject line. later on it became something else and, now it's something else. And I feel like it's always when the AI starts taking over some turf. or the technology takes over some turf, then you as a human to prove that you're still a human sending this, you always need to kind of go to the next thing and go to the next [00:16:00] thing and go to the next thing.
And I also think that there's some kind of a weird relationship between, you know, the work that you put in that you then want to automate that then once you automate it makes. The work that he put in less likely to succeed, you know, it's like, it's kind of this vicious cycle kind of that goes, that's what I'm saying.
it's an arms race. That's kind of how I'm actually thinking about this. last time I basically kind of took part in the arms race, a good friend of the two of us, David, we were basically kind of saying like, okay, text is gone.
Like, forget about text, text is over now. and the only thing we have left is video. and, you know, to a degree, even there, we were starting to see the signs on the wall that probably that's not gonna hold, but by doing a video, we were able to prove to people that, hey, this is, this is us, this is true, this is who we are, like, we spent some time here to kind of do this for you, And we did this and it worked out and then guess what?
We started to AI automate this thing. And then it, you know, it stopped working. it's this arms race where I'm just not [00:17:00] sure where this is eventually going to lead, to be honest. I think all of the AI SDRs out there right now, they're almost building the wrong thing.
They're building a new Makato email gun, that also sends LinkedIn messages, and I think because of the existence of these things, the strategy will cease to work. I also don't think it's the right thing to give up and not do anything.
You know, we don't have that option. but I currently, to be really honest with you, like if someone were to ask me like, Hey, how should we do this? I don't think I would have a convincing answer, to be honest. I don't think I've been like Hey, you know, this is, this is how you should do the personalization.
it's very likely to succeed. So that's why I was like, also very interesting jumping to this, into the session. what does Raul see here where this thing is going? And that's basically my question to you now, right? Kind of looking at this, not from a level of how do you personalize, but what can't be done by AI yet?
And how can you prove that you're not AI? how, how, how is that going to end? How is that going to progress? How are people going to keep [00:18:00] using this medium and, and obviously personalization is part of it, but what, what is it the future that you are seeing?
Raul: the way, do you know, do you like Batman?
Toni: don't know. I, I, I'm indifferent.
Raul: there's this quote in Batman. I hope I'm not butchering it is like you either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain. Right. And that's what you were kind of describing right now, which is, you either die trying to automate or you live long enough so that automation doesn't work for you anymore.
and that's kind of the case that we're saying. And if I were to predict where things are going to go, I think this is very typical. and I'm starting to see this as I work with companies that they kind of see a little bit of success. and they kind of have this also, they always immediately jump to conclusions.
It's like, Oh, great. We have found this video doing thing. before I did videos myself, now I can feed videos in there. And now I can have AI automate that for me. Awesome. We can all of a sudden send. 100, 000 of these every single week. And now I can build a 50 people sales team where typically I just have two, three right now, and we're just getting by.
[00:19:00] I think that the jumping to conclusions is one of the things where people just shoot themselves in the foot and just the expectation of what AI can do for you, I think should be dramatically lowered. not especially necessarily from a quality standpoint, because it's going to go up, but like the effect that that's going to have as everyone is going to do that.
So that's number one, but number two is where do I think the differentiator will be? And also is right now. And that to me is the last bastion of actual personalization and a great use case for a video, by the way. Is actually sitting down, taking time and thinking about this person should be hearing right now, which is really difficult to do.
And you're probably not going to do a hundred of these a day, but like, if I were to actually sit down and think about how Toni might benefit from what I'm doing and the problems that he might have, and then I would, were I were to record a video, or a message or write a, write a, whatever I can write one.
I can do an audio message and say, Hey, Toni. I've been thinking [00:20:00] about your case. I know you recently raised a lot of money and, I also saw that you were at this event, I saw that talk, what did you think about? how to do a series B right now, whatever the next round. I know that, you're probably thinking about how to keep that money together right now.
And, within the next 18 months, you're trying to raise a series B as well. And keep going from there, right? So that was just a random example. I pulled out my ass, but actually try to be as close to relevant as possible to that person as you would if you were to meet Toni at an event or in real life or at the found right of a round table dinner in Berlin or Copenhagen or London or whatever, right?
That kind of discussion. Is what you could actually put as in an outreach problem is that takes 10 15 minutes to do because you really need to think or Maybe even longer and you can't do that many of them in a day But the payout might be very big. if you think about it, let's say you spend 4 hours a day, reaching out to people.
If you reach out to 10 people in this manner, over like 50 in another manner, but [00:21:00] the output is the same, namely 5 people answer back, which is very realistic, by the way. So this kind of reach out can get you 50 percent answer rate and booking rate for demos, whereas a automated reach out can get you only 10%.
That is very, very likely numbers in my experience. who says that that's the worst approach and it might even be better from the standpoint of what those demos mean later on, because the quality of the reach out was much better. It means that the relationship might be much better later on as well. So that's just my spiel.
I think the actual differentiation will be in really being one to one and personalizing the actual message. The things we were talking about in the beginning, they're just superficial stuff. We went to the same university, whatever, a year ahead of engineering, using a meme. That's nice and it helps, but like actually sitting down as a consultant, as an expert and telling you something that you might want to hear right now, that is really powerful.
Toni: and I really think you can have someone sit down for 10, 15 minutes and still come up with crap. So it's really, I think the outcome needs to be. [00:22:00] Prove to me, you spend time on me. Like it's almost that. Right. and there's so many different ways to signal this.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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Toni: So I think this could be a conversation that keeps on going we could go and philosophize also about this,especially kind of in the current age of AI and a new wave of personalization that people are faced with, not only on the sending the email side, but also on the receiving the email side, there's stuff that's evolving here.
And I hope we, gave you a little bit of a better understanding and framework to try and figure out how we can use this for your advantage, or maybe kind of understand why some of the stuff that you're currently doing. isn't really working in your favor, right? So Raul, Thanks so much for enlightening us here.
and thanks everyone else for listening and, have a great day. Bye guys.
Raul: Thanks everyone.