Almost everyone has experienced it: the relentless stream of LinkedIn connection requests, the “just following up” emails, the messages that start with “Hey Vassilis!” as if you’re old friends. Some are merely persistent. Others cross into territory that feels manipulative, even offensive.
For years, I sat on the receiving end of these approaches, treating them as little more than background noise. My strategy was simple: ignore and move on. I viewed these messages as a byproduct of having an online presence; annoying, but harmless. However, lately, the tactics have shifted. I began seeing patterns that moved beyond mere persistence and into calculated manipulation. The uncomfortable truth? They work. And they work often enough to justify their continued use.
This crossing of the threshold (from annoying, to deceptive) is what finally prompted me to speak up. It is one thing to be sold to; it is another to be engineered. Let’s dissect the mechanics of these modern B2B playbooks, why they persist despite the friction they cause, and what this evolution reveals about the current and future state of sales.
The Standard Playbooks
The Multi-Touch Sequence
This is sales 101: contact a prospect across multiple channels over 2-3 weeks. The pattern is based on the widely-cited statistic that it takes 7-8 “touches” to get a response from a cold prospect. The persistence isn’t personal, it’s systematic.
The Value-First Approach
Rather than leading with a pitch, they offer something first: a relevant article, an invitation to a webinar, a whitepaper, or benchmark report. By “providing value” upfront, they create a subtle obligation and establish themselves as a helpful resource rather than just another vendor. The ask comes later, after you’ve presumably been warmed up by their generosity.
The Problem-Aware Template
These messages reference specific pain points supposedly common to software engineering departments at companies like yours:
I noticed companies like [company name] often struggle with scaling engineering teams / managing technical debt / attracting senior talent…
Here’s the thing: they’re using industry generalizations rather than researching your actual situation.
The Social Proof Play
We work with [competitor or similar product], and they’ve seen a 40% improvement in deployment velocity.
This simultaneously creates legitimacy (if our competitors use them, maybe we should) and Fear Of Missing Out - FOMO (are we falling behind?). Sometimes the social proof is genuine. But most of the time they’re cherry-picked, exaggerated, or strategically vague.
The Trigger Event Approach
These reps are monitoring your company for signals: funding announcements, job postings for senior engineers, product launches, conference appearances. They time their outreach for moments when you might actually need their solution. You may think this is actually one of the more legitimate approaches (at least they’re doing their homework!), but it still means your company’s activities and your own personal activities are being fed into sales automation systems across dozens of vendors.
Other Common Approaches
Beyond these core playbooks, you’ll encounter several other variations:
- The “Breakup” Email: After no response, they send a final message - “I’ll assume this isn’t a priority and remove you from my list” - designed to trigger guilt.
- The “Quick Question” Hook: Messages with sentences suggesting a brief ask when it’s actually a full sales pitch waiting on the other side.
- The Survey/Research Request: “We’re conducting research on engineering leadership”, but the research mysteriously reveals you need their offering.
- The Comparison/Audit Offer: “Free assessment” of your current infrastructure, that’s really just sales qualification disguised as service.
- The Latest Hype Integration Play: “Your customers are demanding AI features”, the latest hype cycle where every vendor suddenly has an AI solution that will help you add intelligence to your product.
And of course countless other baiting techniques are waiting for you out there.
When Playbooks Turn Manipulative
The tactics above are standard, perhaps even acceptable. But there’s a darker set of approaches that cross ethical lines.
The Escalation Ladder: From Polite to Aggressive
Watch as the tone shifts across this sequence:
- Touches 1-2: Friendly, helpful tone. “I’d love to show you how we’re helping companies like yours…”
- Touches 3-4: Mild pressure. “Just circling back on my previous message…”
- Touches 5-6: Guilt or challenge. “I haven’t heard back - is this not a priority for you right now?”
- Touches 7+: Aggressive ultimatum. “Should I assume you’re not the right person?” or “Can I close your file?”
The psychology is deliberate: create urgency or trigger a response through discomfort. Some Sales Development Reps (SDRs) are explicitly taught that a “no” is better than silence, because it’s a response they can log and report to their manager.
The Gatekeeper Bypass
You respond to a cold outreach stating that you are not the right person, or perhaps you choose not to respond at all. Instead of accepting this boundary, they counter: “I understand - who should I speak with instead?” or “Would you mind introducing me to the person who handles this?”
Think about the audacity here. You have clearly indicated a lack of interest or relevance, yet their response is to dismiss your boundary and deputize you into their sales force. By asking for a direct introduction or a colleague’s contact details, they are asking you to compromise your internal network for their commercial gain.
In any other context, providing internal contact paths to an unverified external actor would be flagged as a security risk. In sales, it’s framed as “helpfulness.” You should not, under any circumstances, provide the details of your colleagues to a cold caller. If you genuinely believe an offering has merit, you may choose to discuss this internally with your company and then decide how to proceed.
Manufactured Intimacy
Messages that open with “Hey [First Name]!” and casual language as if you’re already acquainted. Or worse: “We’re delighted to have met you at [conference name]!” when you’ve never communicated at all.
They’re trained to write as if they’re continuing an existing relationship rather than initiating a cold contact. It’s deliberately deceptive, designed to bypass your mental filters for unsolicited sales approaches.
Identity-Based Manipulation: Where It Gets Personal
This is where sales tactics cross from annoying into genuinely offensive territory.
You receive a message that opens with:
- “As a fellow Greek…” (or even worse, written in Greek)
- “I noticed we’re both from [your hometown]…”
- “My family is also from [your region of origin]…”
- Comments about your name’s etymology or ancestral background
This isn’t accidental. This is weaponizing your identity and heritage as a sales tool.
Why is this particularly egregious: It exploits cultural norms around helping “one of your own.” It creates artificial obligation based on shared background. It takes something deeply personal (your heritage, your roots, your identity) and commodifies it for commercial gain.
Some sales trainers actually teach this as “finding common ground” or “building rapport.” But there’s nothing genuine about it. It’s manufacturing false kinship for the explicit purpose of making a sale.
For those of us from smaller ethnic communities or regions, this manipulation is especially invasive. The bonds within these communities are real and meaningful. Using them as a sales tactic is a calculated exploitation of something that is morally wrong.
The Uncomfortable Economics
Here’s the part that’s hard to accept: these tactics work.
Not on you, perhaps. You may be immune or have developed pattern recognition to understand and avoid these approaches. But they work often enough across the broader target audience to justify their continued use.
Those few opportunities can generate enough potential revenue to make the entire campaign “successful.” The remaining 99+% who were spammed or offended simply don’t matter in this calculation, because as it turns out the ends justify the means. Let that sink in for a bit.
Who Responds to These Tactics?
They’re effective with:
- Less experienced engineers who haven’t yet developed pattern recognition for sales approaches
- People-pleasers who feel guilty not responding or uncomfortable refusing to help
- Those from cultures with strong in-group obligations (the ethnicity/ancestry play specifically targets this)
- Those who think that responding will just make it stop (personally, if I have not subscribed to a newsletter, I will not even hit unsubscribe as this is a signal for them that someone is listening)
- People who haven’t learned to set firm boundaries with cold outreach
The Race to the Bottom
The companies that use manipulative tactics have optimized for conversion rate, not reputation. They’ve calculated that:
- Burning bridges with 99% of prospects is acceptable collateral damage
- Offending people doesn’t hurt them (those people weren’t going to buy anyway, goes the logic)
- The people who respond don’t seem to care about the tactics used
It’s the same economic model as spam email or robocalls. A tiny success rate justifies a massive negative impression on everyone else.
And here’s the meta problem: this creates a race to the bottom. Companies see competitors using aggressive tactics and getting results, so they adopt them too. Sales leaders promote SDRs who hit quota using these methods, reinforcing them as “best practices.” The system perpetuates itself.
The Opportunity Cost: What You’re Not Getting
Here’s something that makes these tactics even more frustrating: in theory, sales conversations could be valuable learning opportunities. A good salesperson understands their market deeply. They talk to dozens of engineers every week. They see patterns across companies, industries, and use cases. They could offer genuine insights about what your peers are struggling with, what solutions are actually working, and what emerging challenges you should be thinking about.
But that’s not what happens with these playbook-driven approaches. The conversation is extractive, not collaborative. They’re mining you for information (budget size, decision timeline, pain points they can exploit) while offering nothing substantive in return. The entire interaction is optimized for moving you through their sales funnel, not for mutual value exchange. Also be vigilant with what information you are allowed to share about your company.
This is the real tragedy of modern sales playbooks: they’ve eliminated the possibility of unexpected learning. You might engage with a cold outreach hoping to discover something new about your market, a technology, or an approach you hadn’t considered. Almost universally, you come away with nothing but time wasted.
Now imagine an interaction where someone reaches out with genuine domain expertise and offers real insights before asking for anything. Not vague numbers, but the actual facts of what the value proposition is. Would you remember them years later?
What This Means for You
First, recognize that you’re the target of an industrial process. Sales development is now heavily automated, data-driven, and optimized. The personalization you see is often manufactured at scale. The commonalities they mention are frequently mined from your LinkedIn profile by automation tools.
Second, understand that your response (or lack thereof) is a data point in their system. They’re iterating on what works. Every A/B test, every message variation, every new manipulation tactic exists because somewhere, at some point, it outperformed the alternative.
Third, accept that the vast majority of these interactions will offer you nothing of value. You’re not missing out by ignoring them. The chance that you’ll learn something genuinely useful is vanishingly small; not because the products are necessarily bad, but because the sales process is designed for extraction, not education.
Fourth, and most importantly: you owe these cold outreach attempts nothing. No response, no explanation, no referral to a colleague. The manufactured intimacy is not real. The shared heritage angle is exploitation, not community. The aggressive follow-ups after you’ve said no are not deserving of guilt.
Your attention and your network are valuable. Protect them accordingly and follow up only if you are genuinely interested in their offering.
A Better Way Forward?
For sales professionals reading this: I understand you have quotas. I understand the pressure you’re under. But consider what you’re optimizing for. Your help is needed to fix this broken system.
The manipulative tactics I’ve described may generate short-term results, but they’re burning long-term trust not just to your company but for all B2B outreach. They’re training an entire generation of software engineers to automatically dismiss and block sales outreach. They’re making it harder for every company out there to get through the noise.
There is a better approach: do real research, reach out with genuine specificity, respect boundaries when set, and build actual relationships rather than manufactured ones. It’s slower. It doesn’t scale as well. But it works with the prospects who matter most, the true potential buyers with real budgets and real problems.
For engineering fellows: share your experiences. When a vendor uses manipulative tactics, tell your network. When someone reaches out with genuine value and respect for your time, remember them and speak about their company. We can collectively shape what “best practices” look like by rewarding the behavior we want to see. And remember, those tactics are mostly executed by companies with products and services that do not speak for themselves.
The current system works because we allow it to. We can choose differently.