Berman calls the cold email funeral posts engagement farming
Alex Berman argues the market punished spray-and-pray, not the motion, and that the AI SDR replacement story stops at the enterprise door.
Alex Berman posted a rebuttal to the "cold email is dead" genre, saying it is the post that gets 400 likes on LinkedIn every Tuesday and has been dead every Tuesday since 2019. His position is that the market punished spray-and-pray rather than the motion itself, and that the operators who adapted are eating the ones who did not.
He lists three things he says the doom crowd keeps missing. First, adaptation has a shape, and it is fewer sends, tighter lists, sharper offers and research on the account. Second, buyers still open messages that speak to a problem they have this quarter, and what they ignore is the 1am "quick question" from a bot with no offer. Berman frames that sharper filter as help rather than harm, on the argument that it clears room for operators who write well.
The enterprise argument
The third point is the one most likely to matter to anyone selling upmarket. Berman argues the "AI SDR replaces outbound" story dies at the enterprise door, because security teams block unknown senders, procurement wants a human name on the other side, and compliance flags anything that reads like a generated blast. His read is that time spent by SMB posters declaring outbound over is time the enterprise lane stays open.
He closes by naming who he thinks is writing the eulogies and why.
Read it as a position, not a result
Two caveats worth holding. Berman is arguing a position and does not attach numbers to it. There is no send volume, no reply rate, no time window, so nothing here is evidence in the way a posted campaign is evidence. He says his pipeline is still the cheapest way he has to put an offer in front of a buyer with budget, which is a claim about his own economics with no figure behind it beyond the tool cost.
The second caveat is that the same post carries a vendor plug. Berman says he runs his lists through ScraperCity at a flat $149 a month for unlimited pulls from a database of more than 90M B2B contacts. That does not make the argument wrong, but the argument and the ad share a post, and a reader should price that in.
For people sending, the useful part is not the verdict on whether cold email is alive. It is the specific failure mode Berman is pointing at. If the thing getting filtered is generic copy with no offer, then the fix is list quality and offer clarity, not another declaration that the channel is over.
I think they are farming engagement more than booking meetings.
The market punished spray-and-pray. The core motion is fine.