Definition
Prospect Experience (PX) is the sum of how a potential customer perceives your company before they decide to engage, respond, or buy.
It includes the first message they see, the subject line they ignore, the tone of your follow-up, and the level of effort your outreach appears to contain.
Long before a prospect replies or buys, they are already deciding whether your company feels generic, thoughtful, forgettable, or worth engaging with.
Sales Outreach Post 2024
For the last couple of years, you may have noticed that booking new business meetings has become harder.
A big reason is that Google and Microsoft now set the rules for most professional inboxes. Through Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, they shape what gets delivered cleanly, what gets filtered, and what starts to damage your reputation. Even a complaint rate around one in a hundred emails can be enough to hurt sender reputation and reduce the odds of future messages reaching the inbox.
To compensate, many teams have increased output. More contacts. More sequences. More touches. On paper, that sounds rational. In practice, it has usually created more sameness.
And even when your domain has survived the battering and the email does get delivered, there is another question: is it actually read? Prospects have now lived through years of sales automation. They can smell a templated message a mile off.
The challenge now is not just getting into the inbox. It is sending something a prospect actually wants to read.
Why Are Companies Getting It Wrong
Many sales teams and sales managers have been trained to believe that more is better.
Leaving a prospect untouched feels like leaving money on the table, so the instinct is to contact everybody rather than choose carefully.
Scale has become a signal they feel they need to show. More output looks like more ambition, more control, more certainty. The arrival of AI has intensified that tendency because it promises even more activity while stripping away much of the thought and effort that used to sit inside good outreach.
There is also a deeper belief that technology must always be the answer. If the current tools are not working, the instinct is often to add another platform, another automation, or another layer of software. As Rory Sutherland has argued, a lot of technology adoption is ideological as much as empirical. In sales, that mindset has made thinking feel optional when it is actually the missing ingredient.
The 4 Constituents of the Prospect Experience
The model is simple on purpose. It gives you a clear way to inspect outreach before you send it.
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01
Outreach that gets noticed
Before anything else, it has to catch attention. It needs to look and feel different enough from the surrounding noise that a prospect pauses rather than deleting on autopilot.
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02
Outreach that shows effort
It should feel considered. Not mass-produced. Not churned out. A prospect should be able to sense that someone thought about them before pressing send.
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03
Outreach that shows creativity
It should contain an idea, angle, or execution the prospect was not expecting. Creativity is often what turns an interruption into something intriguing enough to explore.
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04
Outreach that shows personality
It should sound human. Tone, judgement, warmth, wit, and point of view all matter, because people respond differently when they feel a real person is on the other side.
The idea is to send something that is opened, read and remembered.
Bad Vs Good Prospect Experiences
Let's see how many of the bad examples you recognise.
Bad Prospect Experience
- Generic cold emails
- "Just following up"
- Fake personalisation
- Long explanations no one asked for
- AI-written outreach
- Messages that ask for time without earning attention
It's not offensive. It's just forgettable.
Good Prospect Experience
- Something that makes the prospect pause
- Something that makes the prospect feel considered
- Something that doesn't look like everything else
- Something that piques the prospect's curiosity
- Something that feels like it was meant for you
Not louder. Different.
Advice To Sales Teams
Principles
- 01 Slow down before you scale
- 02 Make fewer, more considered touches
- 03 Think about how it feels to receive your outreach
- 04 Focus on moments, not sequences
- 05 Optimise for memory, not volume
Because that's what prospects actually respond to.
Closing Thoughts
If you're being ignored, it's not a 'we're not doing enough' problem. It's a Prospect Experience problem.
If you want to rethink how your outbound feels to the people receiving it, we should talk.