David Brian Howard

  By David Howard Director-Level Sales Executive | Startup Growth Strategist | Founder, Cadre Crew The days of spray-and-pray outbound are over—and honestly, they’ve been dead for a while. If you're still pulling 10,000-lead lists from Apollo and blasting generic emails with “Quick question…” subject lines, you're not just behind. You're invisible. I’ve spent over a decade in the trenches—building sales teams from scratch, designing outbound funnels for SaaS startups, and coaching founders through their first million in ARR. And if there's one hard lesson every scaling company needs to learn in 2025, it’s this: Volume doesn’t beat relevance. Relevance at scale wins. The Problem: Outbound Got Lazy Around 2018, outbound exploded. Sequencing tools like Outreach, Lemlist, and HubSpot made it frictionless to send thousands of messages a week. Suddenly, every founder with a ZoomInfo subscription became a “closer.” David Howard The result? Buyers tuned out. CTOs, CMOs, and H...