What's up, it's Zayd

"Our outbound is off."

"Our LinkedIn numbers are down."

"Inbound's gotten weird."

"Ad performance is cratering."

"Even referrals feel slower."

I feel like everyone I talk to keeps saying the same thing and assumes like each one is a separate problem.

They’re not, so you don’t have to tackle each thing independently. Fixing the subject line, changing the targeting, hiring a new marketer, and rebuilding the sequences would be a waste of time because really, it's just one problem wearing five different costumes.

Every channel is getting worse at the same time, and it all because of…attention.

Or a lack thereof.

We are in an Attention Recession.

Forwarded this email? Get Enabled in your inbox each week.

My favorite finds of the week

Here's what's happening (without all of the jargon):

Every channel (email, LinkedIn, paid ads, SEO, webinars, events, even cold calls) relies on the same underlying currency.

Attention.

The supply of attention from a given buyer is roughly fixed. There are only so many hours a VP of Sales is going to spend looking at vendors in a given quarter.

The demand on that attention, however, is exploding. Thanks to AI, every outbound team can now send 10x the messages, generate 10x the content, and run 10x the ad variants they could two years ago…and every buyer is feeling it.

When demand for a fixed resource goes up, the price of that resource goes up. In attention terms, that means: it costs more touches, more money, more creativity, and more time to earn the same mindshare you used to earn casually.

That's a recession. Things still work. They just cost more and return less.

Reply rates have been compressing for a decade, but AI-generated outbound has dumped lighter fluid on the trend. When a CRO gets 120 "personalized" emails a day, all of which mention their recent LinkedIn post, the marginal cost of getting noticed gets astronomical. The median cold email campaign in 2026 returns less than the median campaign did in 2022, across every benchmark I've seen.

Same dynamic, different stage. LinkedIn used to be the cheat code. Acceptance rates were 40%+. Reply rates were 10%+. Now it's an arms race of AI-generated comments, AI-written messages, and AI-assisted content. LinkedIn responded by tightening detection and the API surface. Every play you run now gets more expensive.

CPMs on LinkedIn and Meta have been climbing year over year for most B2B categories. You're paying more to reach the same person, who is now seeing more ads from more competitors, and clicking on fewer of them. The net: CAC up, conversion down.

Trade shows cost what they always cost, but a buyer's willingness to take 30 one-on-ones at a conference has dropped. Everyone feels it. The floor at most industry events is quieter than it was in 2019.

Even the good stuff is getting worse. Form fills on product pages are down. Demo-show rates are down because buyers are doing more of the research silently, through AI, before ever identifying themselves. By the time they fill out a form, they're at the bottom of the funnel, but you only see them when they're already close to a decision, which means your "top of funnel" is invisible.

Every one of these is a real, measurable compression, and they're all happening at once.

The instinct, when a channel softens, is to push harder. More emails. More LinkedIn activity. More ad spend. More SDRs.

In an attention recession, this is exactly wrong. More volume from you raises the noise floor for everyone, including you. You're paying to saturate the channel that you need to cut through.

Here's what I'm seeing work with the best founders and sales leaders I talk to:

1. Channel concentration.

Instead of being medium-good on six channels, pick one and be the best in your space. One channel, one motion, executed with a level of quality that looks insane from the outside. Most of Valley's best customers are running one primary channel with one clear hypothesis, rather than five.

2. Relationship compounding.

Every touch with a prospect should accrue. With most outbound, each email is a new cold start. The teams that are winning are building systems where the second message knows what the first message was, the demo references the LinkedIn comment, the follow-up references the event. It's less about any single interaction and more about making the sum larger than the parts.

3. Asymmetric payoff bets.

Dinners. Intimate roundtables. Physical mail. Hand-written notes. Things that are expensive in time, cheap in money, and completely outside the AI-generated attention vortex. The ROI on a ten-person founder dinner right now is absurd, because nobody's computing it that way.

2026 Guide to LinkedIn Outreach with inmail changes and safety checklist

If you take one thing from this newsletter, make it this: do not benchmark yourself against the version of outbound that worked in 2023. The channel that returned 15% reply rates two years ago is not the same channel.

Your job, as a founder or sales leader in 2026, is to figure out what kind of attention your ICP actually has left, and how to earn it in a way your competitors are structurally unable to copy. That's almost always "do fewer things, but do them at a quality level nobody else can match."