I’ve gone to great lengths to scrub my personal phone number and details from business channels online.
Yet there are entire companies—looking at you, ZoomInfo and friends—whose whole business model is to scrape, expose, buy, and sell people’s private information for profit.
This isn’t “sales enablement.” It’s commodifying consent.
Cold outreach already feels inappropriate to me (and probably to a lot of neurodivergent folks). It’s an interruption at best and harassment at worst. But when it’s built on scraped private info people never offered you? That’s crossing a line.
I don’t understand why people defend it. Seriously. This isn't clever sales strategy—it's normalizing disrespect.
I’ve even had to add disclaimers to my LinkedIn and other social media bios telling people not to solicit me, as well as utilize services like DeleteMe. Because too many see having my data as permission to use it.
Maybe it’s time to rethink sales culture. Not every lead is a target. Not every person owes you their time. And having someone's contact info isn’t the same as having their consent.
If your sales strategy depends on violating boundaries, it's not worth defending.
Is there an ethical way to do cold outreach? Or is it just time we called it what it is?