Boring is best.
Why being boring is the secret to great lead generation
Let’s be honest - marketing has gotten ridiculous.
Everywhere you look, there’s someone shouting about “streamlining your growth” or “unlocking 10x efficiency with AI-powered workflows
It’s all noise. It’s meaningless. No one cares and no one is buying.
And thanks to social media, LinkedIn, and the avalanche of ads hitting us every day, all that hype has officially lost its meaning.
We’re officially in the era of the death of the buzzword.
It might sound cool in your head - but all it’s doing is confusing your buyers.
Especially younger buyers - they’ve got zero patience for corporate bullshit.
Which means 99% of all the cold outreach email content is frankly useless.
Authenticity is booming and has never been more valuable.
2 quick rules of thumb to audit your outreach pitch:
If you were to remove all adjectives - what would it still make sense?
Are you able to visualize or create an image of what you pitch?
If not, you still haven’t figured out your positioning/message and your cold outbound emails are likely failing at an alarming rate.
Take Slack for example:
❌ Buzzword Version: “Slack is an intuitive, collaborative, real-time messaging platform that empowers modern teams to communicate effectively and drive alignment.”
⚡ De-buzzworded version of this: “Slack is a messaging platform that lets teams communicate……..” 🤔
✅ Better version: “Slack is a workplace chat room where teams can message each other, share files, and organize conversations into channels - instead of getting lost in messy, disjointed email threads.”
This better version is clear, relevant and I can see exactly why and how I would use this.
Note: If your outreach emails sound like a startup pitch from 2016 - it’s time to update it.
No One Cares about “Game-Changing” Anymore
Think about how many cold emails or LinkedIn DMs you ignore daily.
I personally get anywhere between 3-10 every single day.
99% of them start with the same templated nonsense:
“Hey Alex! People like you are saving 100% of their time every week using our cutting-edge platform...”
Come on. No they aren’t.
And if they are - you should be able to tell me how very easily - ideally via a case study or short video. I shouldn’t have to book a 1 hour session to find out.
It’s all fluff. And anyone who’s ever taken a chance on those promises knows they’re inflated beyond reality - and a poorly masked pushy sales call .
The “evidence” is cherry-picked, the ROI is an edge case, and the message feels like it was written by ChatGPT-3 in 2020.
So what actually works?
Boring authenticity and relevant applications.
What “Boring Authenticity” Actually Means
It’s about sounding like a real person, reaching out to another real person. Not a marketing robot.
If you found a cool new piece of software - how would you tell your friend about it?
When I was helping a global sales team do outreach to event managers - the people who run big conferences - they tried everything.
Stuff like:
“Simplify your event.”
“Cut admin time in half.”
“Make your events effortless.”
Nothing worked.
But when we personalized our outreach using the name of their flagship event name (literally just putting “TechWorld 2025” in the subject line) we hit >80% open rates.
No gimmicks. No hype. Just authentic relevance.
Seeing the name of their own conference sparked curiosity - Overdue bill? New sponsor? A complaint?
Then we rewrote the first sentence to strip out the fake formality. None of that “Hi there, hope you’re well, noticed your profile...” garbage.
Instead, we went with:
“Saw you’re running TechWorld 25 in a couple of months. Not sure if you’ve heard of our product, but it’s typically used to support these types of conferences in these three ways...
Registrations that auto-personalize the registrant journey.
A native app that helps control conference notifications and traffic.
Connects into your CRM to automate post-event follow ups.
Boring. Simple. Real. Relevant.
And guess what?
We got 30% click-throughs and 25% reply rates - average a new qualified lead everyday.
Because people felt the message was legitimate and relevant to their needs. It wasn’t trying to impress, they didn’t have to read between the lines. It was easy to consume and offered to help in the ways they cared about.
Boring Forces You to Be Honest
Marketing has become a competition to sound exciting. But that’s the problem - when everyone’s shouting, nobody listens. If everything is amazing - then nothing is.
If you’ve ever seen shows like The Masked Singer, or So You Think You Can Dance - there is only so much exaggerated emotion the human brain can take.
Being boring forces you to show your actual value.
If you can’t hide behind words like “streamline,” “transform,” or “simplify,” you have to explain, clearly, what you actually do and why is it relevant to me?
It’s brilliant positioning.
Take DocuSign, for example. For a while, their tagline was “Close more deals faster.”
Which is nonsense.
DocuSign doesn’t close deals. It’s a digital signature tool. Saying it boosts sales is like saying shoelaces help you burn fat because you use them while running.
What they should’ve said was something like:
“Automate your entire document approval process.”
“Most companies send 15 emails to sign off a document - we do it in 1 click”
“Stop chasing signatures. Send once, track automatically.”
That’s specific, measurable, and instantly relatable.
That’s authenticity. That’s value.
Nobody Cares About Your AI
If you’re selling B2B software, your job isn’t to “transform” anything.
Your job is to make some internal process easier, faster, or less painful.
That’s it.
Nobody cares how “sexy” your product looks or whether it uses AI.
They care about how it helps them get through their day without another headache.
The buyers you’re emailing are tired.
They’re out of time, out of budget, and just want something that works properly and fast.
The Rule Is Simple: Be Boring
When you strip the marketing fluff away, what’s left?
The truth.
And that’s the only thing that cuts through anymore.
Think about any cold email/message you’ve actually replied to. I guarantee they were:
Authentic
relevant
And probably boring
No emojis. No buzzwords. No “skyrocket your results” crap.
Just something that made sense.
So next time you write a cold email, ad, or landing page — stop trying to impress people.
Sense check it with 2 quick rules of thumb:
If you were to remove all adjectives - what would it still make sense?
Are you able to visualize or create an image of what your pitch?
Remember - Be boring. Be relevant. Be helpful - and you’ll see the results.
Because boring is believable.
And believable is what converts.