“Personalization” in outbound is overrated. Relevance is what actually works.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately after watching how firms approach outbound and marketing.

Everyone talks about personalization like it’s the magic trick.

You know the playbook:

• Mention their name three times
• Reference their company
• Comment on their LinkedIn post
• Mention a random podcast they were on

But honestly… most of that feels fake.

What actually gets responses is relevance, not personalization.

There’s a big difference.

Most personalization today is just surface-level tokens.
A name. A company. Maybe a detail scraped from LinkedIn.

Real personalization is context.

For example:

Instead of saying:

That’s personalization.

But it’s not very meaningful.

Compare that to:

Now the message is about a real situation.

That’s relevance.

It shows you understand the business problem, not just the person’s LinkedIn profile.

We’ve been experimenting with this idea in some prospecting playbooks and the response rates are dramatically different when the message is built around situational insight instead of just personalization tokens.

Curious what others are seeing.

Do you think personalization is overrated?
Or is it just being used incorrectly most of the time?