Why Email Doesn’t Work Anymore and How You Can Support Your BDMs

Let’s start by correcting our own headline. Email still works. People obviously still use it, BDMs still book meetings through it and we are not suggesting your sales team should collectively store selling by email tomorrow morning.

The issue is if your team is relying on cold email – they are going to struggle.

The B2B buyer has changed considerably. Buyers have access to more information, more vendors and increasingly sophisticated AI tools that can research those vendors for them. At the same time, sales automation and generative AI have made it incredibly easy for businesses to produce and send more outbound communication.

Those two developments have collided in the buyer’s inbox.

A BDM can now create personalized-looking emails at a scale that would have required an entire sales development team a few years ago. Unfortunately, so can everyone else. The recipient opens an inbox filled with messages claiming someone “noticed” something about their company, offering fifteen minutes to discuss a revolutionary solution and following up several times to make sure the first automated email reached the top of the pile.

The problem is not that email suddenly stopped functioning. The problem is that sending another email is no longer enough to create credibility, interest or intent where none existed before.

If you want BDMs to perform in the next generation of B2B selling, marketing needs to do considerably more work around them.

The buyer is doing more without your salesperson

This is probably the biggest change B2B organizations need to understand.

Gartner reported in March 2026 that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience. Its survey of 646 B2B buyers also found that 45% had used AI during a recent purchase, demonstrating how quickly AI-assisted research has entered the buying process.

That does not mean buyers never want salespeople. Gartner’s May 2026 research adds important context: 69% of B2B buyers said they prefer to validate AI-generated insights with sales representatives, and buyers reported using an average of seven information sources during a recent purchase.

Put those findings together and the opportunity becomes much clearer.

The BDM is still important, but the buyer may not want the BDM involved at the beginning of every research process. Buyers are increasingly comfortable investigating the market themselves, learning about potential suppliers, comparing options and forming an opinion before they decide a conversation is worth having.

Marketing therefore has a bigger responsibility than simply generating names for sales to contact.

Your job is to make sure the organization is present and credible while that independent research is happening.

Your BDM is being researched too

Imagine your BDM sends an email to a decision-maker who has never heard of your company.

The recipient is mildly interested but not interested enough to reply immediately. Instead, they search the company name. They visit the website, look at LinkedIn, perhaps search the salesperson’s name and increasingly may ask an AI platform what it knows about the organization.

What happens next depends on what they find.

If the website looks dated, the company has very little search presence, there are few credible third-party references and the salesperson’s LinkedIn profile appears abandoned, that original email now has to overcome all of those signals.

A stronger digital presence changes the context. The prospect encounters useful content, sees credible company information, finds active leadership, discovers reviews or industry references and can clearly understand what the organization does. The email did not suddenly become better, but the environment surrounding it did.

This is why B2B sales and digital authority can no longer be treated as unrelated functions.

Marketing is creating the evidence that makes the salesperson more believable.

Irrelevant outreach can actually hurt you

More outbound activity does not automatically create more opportunity.

Gartner’s 2025 research found that 73% of B2B buyers actively avoid suppliers that send irrelevant outreach. The same research found that 61% of B2B buyers preferred an overall rep-free buying experience at the time of the study.

That should make B2B organizations think carefully about the instructions they give business development teams.

If success is measured primarily by the number of emails sent, calls completed or contacts added to a sequence, the organization can accidentally encourage behaviour buyers actively dislike. A BDM with a target of sending hundreds of emails has an incentive to increase volume, while the buyer wants relevance.

AI can make that tension worse because it allows teams to produce superficially personalized outreach at enormous scale.

The solution is not to stop prospecting. It is to become more selective about who deserves outreach and make sure there is something valuable surrounding the conversation when it happens.

Your BDM should not be trying to introduce your entire company from scratch in an email. Marketing should already be helping with that job.

Email should be one touchpoint, not the strategy

HubSpot’s 2025 cold calling research provides an interesting look at how sales teams are already behaving. Among sales professionals who cold call as a major part of their daily activities, 73% combine email with cold calling, 44% use social media outreach and 54% use SMS or text messaging.

The significance is not that every B2B organization should immediately start texting prospects. The appropriate channels depend heavily on market, geography and customer expectations.

What matters is the multichannel behaviour.

Experienced sales teams are not necessarily betting the entire prospecting strategy on one email sequence. They are using combinations of communication methods because people behave differently and buying journeys do not happen inside a single channel.

Marketing needs to apply the same logic.

A prospect may encounter your organization through Google, see a LinkedIn post from an executive, receive an email from a BDM, visit the website, read an article and return two weeks later after asking an AI assistant to compare several providers.

Which touchpoint generated the opportunity?

Potentially all of them.

Search should be supporting your BDM

One of the strongest things marketing can do for business development is make sure prospects can find the organization when they begin researching.

This includes traditional SEO, but the opportunity is larger than ranking for a handful of keywords.

If your BDM is targeting decision-makers in a particular industry, your website should contain enough information to demonstrate that your company understands that industry. If the salesperson is introducing a specific service, there should be substantive content explaining what the service does, who it is for and how it solves relevant problems.

The website should answer questions before the prospect has to ask the salesperson.

This becomes even more important because buyers increasingly prefer self-directed research. Gartner found in 2025 that buyers favour online self-service when searching for general information and learning new things, while seller involvement becomes more valuable for tasks requiring contextual judgment about whether a solution fits the organization.

That suggests a much more productive division of labour.

Let digital marketing handle the information people can research themselves, then allow your BDM to provide context, judgment and human interaction when those things actually add value.

AI visibility is becoming part of sales enablement

The arrival of generative AI adds another layer because prospects can now research your organization without necessarily using Google in the traditional way.

Gartner’s 2026 research found that 45% of surveyed B2B buyers used generative AI during a recent purchase, primarily to gather information about vendors and products.

That should immediately connect AI optimization with sales enablement.

If a prospect asks an AI system about your company, what information is available? Does the system understand what you do? Are credible third-party sources reinforcing your expertise? Does your website contain enough useful information for AI search experiences to retrieve?

This is why digital authority has become such an important focus for us at Pulsion.

Your sales team cannot control what a prospect finds when researching independently. Marketing can influence the quality and quantity of information available.

Building authority through useful content, backlinks, citations, reviews, professional profiles and credible third-party references helps create a stronger information environment around the organization. The immediate objective is not simply getting an AI platform to mention the company. It is making the business easier to understand and validate wherever research occurs.

LinkedIn should make the BDM look like a person worth talking to

LinkedIn is particularly important in B2B because prospects can move very easily from a company to the people representing it.

This creates an opportunity that many organizations waste.

A BDM’s LinkedIn profile should not look like an online résumé that was last updated when they accepted the job. It should help establish credibility around the markets and problems that person discusses with prospects.

That does not mean forcing every salesperson to become an influencer.

Useful LinkedIn activity can be much simpler. Salespeople can share company expertise, comment intelligently on industry developments, participate in relevant discussions and maintain professional profiles that clearly explain their role.

Marketing can support this by creating content salespeople actually want to share rather than sending everyone the same corporate post with instructions to “please amplify.”

The goal is familiarity and credibility. When a prospect receives an email and subsequently visits the BDM’s LinkedIn profile, the two experiences should reinforce one another.

Your content should answer the questions sales keeps hearing

Sales teams are one of the best sources of content ideas in an organization.

They know what prospects ask repeatedly. They hear objections, understand where deals become stuck and know which comparisons come up during conversations.

Marketing should be mining that information.

If BDMs repeatedly have to explain the same issue, there is probably an opportunity to create useful content around it. If prospects consistently misunderstand a service, the website needs improvement. If competitors come up repeatedly, comparison-oriented content may help buyers understand the differences before sales becomes involved.

This is what buyer enablement should look like in practice.

Gartner has specifically recommended that sales enablement leaders work with marketing to guide buyers using digital content and AI-powered tools as buying journeys become increasingly self-directed.

The website should therefore become part of the sales team rather than a digital brochure marketing maintains independently.

Good content can work before the BDM reaches out, support the conversation after contact and continue helping the buyer while the internal decision process unfolds.

Marketing needs to create air cover

This is the concept at the heart of what we call Pulsion 2030.

Business development should not feel like sending individual salespeople into a market and asking them to create demand entirely through personal outreach. Marketing should be creating air cover around those people.

That means prospects encounter the organization in search. They see useful content. They recognize executives and subject-matter experts on LinkedIn. They find credible third-party references. They see the brand appearing around the problems the company solves and can validate the organization independently when a BDM eventually reaches out.

This does not replace the salesperson. It makes the salesperson’s job easier.

The BDM no longer has to establish the entire credibility of the company inside a six-sentence email. The email can start a conversation because the digital ecosystem provides the evidence behind it.

For B2B organizations selling complex or higher-value solutions, we think this relationship between sales and marketing will become increasingly important.

Human salespeople may actually become more valuable

There is an interesting tension developing in B2B buying. Buyers want more self-service and increasingly use AI for research, but that does not mean they want humans removed from important decisions.

Gartner predicts that by 2030, 75% of B2B buyers will prefer sales experiences that prioritize human interaction over AI, particularly as transactions become more complex or consequential.

That is not contradictory to the current preference for rep-free research.

It suggests that the role of the salesperson is changing.

A buyer does not need a BDM to read the website to them. AI can summarize basic product information instantly. What buyers still value is context, judgment, reassurance and the ability to discuss how a solution applies to their particular organization.

The future BDM therefore needs to become more valuable, not more automated.

Marketing should remove the burden of delivering information buyers can easily obtain themselves and create the credibility that gets the salesperson into the conversation. The BDM can then focus on the human part of selling that technology cannot replicate as easily.

Stop asking email to do everything

Email is not dead, and we are not recommending that B2B organizations abandon it.

We are recommending that they stop expecting it to carry an entire business development strategy.

The modern buyer may research your company through Google, AI, LinkedIn, industry publications, reviews and your website before responding to the first message. Marketing needs to be present throughout that process and create enough credibility that when a salesperson finally enters the conversation, they are not starting from zero.

That requires closer alignment between digital marketing and business development. Search strategy should reflect the markets sales is targeting, content should address the questions prospects ask, LinkedIn should support the people representing the organization and AI optimization should make the company easier to discover and understand as buyers adopt new research behaviours.

At Pulsion, this is the thinking behind Pulsion 2030. We believe the next generation of B2B growth will combine strong human business development with a digital ecosystem that creates visibility, authority and familiarity around the sales team.

Visit gopulsion.io to learn more about our B2B marketing, AI optimization and digital authority programs, or reach out to the Pulsion team to discuss your project. If your BDMs are working hard but struggling to get attention through email alone, we can help build the digital air cover that gives those conversations a much stronger place to start.