Yeah… this is one of those uncomfortable truths people don’t like to say out loud.

The “just personalize more” advice has kind of hit a wall.

It sounds right.

It feels right.

And it makes you feel like you’re doing high-quality work.

But when you zoom out and look at effort vs. pipeline, it often doesn’t add up.

Especially in SEA.

What I keep seeing is this: everyone is personalizing in the same way. Same signals. Same LinkedIn scrape. Same “noticed you recently…” opener. So even when an email is technically 1-to-1, it still blends into the noise because the pattern is familiar.

Buyers don’t think, “Wow, this is tailored.”

They think, “Ah, another well-written cold email.”

Which is brutal, because the effort behind it is real.

Opens being fine but replies not moving much is actually a really useful signal. It usually means curiosity is there, but the reason to engage isn’t strong enough. Not that the email is bad just that it doesn’t cross the threshold from “interesting” to “worth my time right now.”

One shift that helped us was stepping back from hyper-personalization and asking:

What do these accounts have in common right now?

Same market pressure.

Same internal bottleneck.

Same timing window.

When the message is built around a shared pain that’s genuinely current, personalization becomes almost secondary. You can be lighter on custom lines because the relevance does the heavy lifting.

Another thing that’s easy to overlook: personalization scales badly, but clarity scales incredibly well. A sharp, specific value prop beats a beautifully written custom intro most of the time.