Spray and Pray

What it actually means

Spray and pray is a numbers-first outbound approach. You write one message, load it into a sequence tool, and fire it at hundreds or thousands of contacts who share a loose criterion like job title or industry. The message doesn't reference anything specific about the recipient's company, role, or situation. It's built to scale, not to land.

On LinkedIn this shows up as identical connection requests and follow-up DMs sent to anyone who fits a Sales Navigator filter. In email it's the same subject line and body copy blasted to a purchased or scraped list.

Why it matters to anyone selling B2B

The appeal is obvious: it's cheap to produce and easy to measure in raw volume. One template, one send, thousands of touches. But the research on this is consistent about the outcome. Mixmax describes spray and pray as a technique that "often leads to low engagement and poor conversion rates because it lacks personalization and relevance." A piece on accountant outreach makes the same point about email: sending the same generic message to a large list "usually fails."

The failure mode isn't mysterious. Recipients can tell within a sentence whether a message was written for them or for a spreadsheet. Generic messages get ignored, reported as spam, or actively damage how a prospect perceives your brand before you ever get a real conversation.

The misconception

The belief that keeps this tactic alive is that more sends always beats better sends, that if personalization boosts reply rate by some percent but volume can be multiplied ten times over, volume wins on raw output. This ignores the compounding cost: burned domains, burned LinkedIn accounts, prospects who now associate your company name with a message they deleted without reading. Volume without relevance doesn't just underperform, it can close doors permanently with accounts you'll want to approach again later with a better pitch.

How it's actually measured

The honest way to evaluate spray and pray against a targeted alternative isn't messages sent, it's replies, meetings booked, and opt-outs per thousand sends. Teams that run both approaches side by side almost always find that a smaller, tailored list converts at a rate that makes the untargeted blast look like wasted spend, even after accounting for the extra time personalization takes.