Berman says the compliment opener now hurts replies
The opener that used to win is now the one prospects delete on sight, according to Berman, though he attaches no test size.
Alex Berman says he tested compliments against no compliments in cold email, that compliments won for years, and that the result then reversed.
In his post, Berman describes the compliment opener producing higher reply rates and more meetings for a long stretch. Then, in his words, one day the data flipped and compliments started hurting response rates. His explanation is saturation. Every cold email started with "I loved your LinkedIn post", and prospects trained themselves to delete on sight.
Prospects trained themselves to delete it on sight.
What he says replaces it is the problem-led first line. Berman describes the best-performing emails as leading with a specific, accurate description of something that is costing the prospect money, and says that is what gets replied to in 2026.
What the claim does and does not carry
No send volume, no reply rate, no date range, no industry. This is one operator's read on his own testing, not a dataset you can check. Treat it as a direction of travel from someone who sends, not as a measured result. The mechanism he names, a pattern that works until enough people copy it and recipients learn the shape, is the same thing that has killed every other opener that got popular, and it is the part of the claim that is easiest to believe without the numbers.
The swap is also not like for like on effort. A compliment line can be generated from a LinkedIn post at list scale with no real research. A specific, accurate description of a problem costing a particular company money cannot, at least not reliably. If the first line is wrong, it is worse than generic, because now you have told the prospect you do not understand their business. Anyone moving from compliments to problem lines across thousands of sends is taking on a research burden, or an enrichment pipeline, that the compliment never required.
Jeremy C. Jones replied to Berman making the same point from the recipient side, arguing that the opener has to earn the next line rather than flatter its way there.
Berman replied "Yep".
For people sending, the testable version of this is narrow. Run your current compliment opener against a problem-led opener on the same list and the same offer, at a size big enough to mean something, and look at replies rather than opens. Berman's claim is that the market caught on to the compliment. Your list may have caught on earlier, or not yet.
Specificity does the work a compliment used to pretend to do.