While cold calling might not be dead, it’s fair to say inbound marketing (brand-related content that helps reel in “warm” prospects for hungry salespeople) has transformed sales for organizations the world over, and become an integral part of the go-to-market process.

For a GTM org, both outbound and inbound strategies have their benefits. Outbound sales (usually through cold calls, emails, and other forms of deliberate customer targeting) has long been seen as the path to securing certain lucrative high-value clients; inbound motions, on the other hand, can build authority in the market place over a longer period of time and can offer up low-hanging fruit for sales teams. So, is there a happy middle ground emerging between the two for your GTM team?

Meeting the customer

Inbound leads are typically buyers coming to the vendor themselves, whether that’s through submitting an inquiry form, signing up for an event, or downloading materials from the vendor’s website. That contact could be in response to a blog posting, a social media campaign, or an SEO strategy that has driven a client to your door. However they arrive, sales teams need to be ready to close the deal fast.

“Inbound is really great because it’s oftentimes the warmest leads you’re going to get,” said Angela Garinger Bennett, vice president of AI GTM transformation at Outreach. “People are actually saying, ‘I’m in the market. I’ve been evaluating this particular type of purchase,’ so being able to get to the discovery phase, the demo phase, getting to close won revenue happens much more quickly because they’re in the market to buy.”

Read about the importance of precise outbound.—LI

If Dell doesn’t immediately come to mind when thinking of major AI players, nobody would blame you. The company has moved like the g in lasagna away from laptops and other consumer goods and into AI infrastructure.

A core component of this push is Dell’s enterprise-focused Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) which has used a familiar Dell playbook to grab pole position in the AI race. It is creating a comprehensive AI needs ecosystem for customers who want end-to-end solutions (think servers, storage, and networking solutions).

Revenue Brew spoke to Dell’s Arthur Lewis, president of the ISG unit, about the pivot, and what comes next.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When the pivot towards AI started, what was the original strategy? How did it evolve over time?

We understood there was going to be a lot of training infrastructure that needed to get built around these foundational models, and the way in which we typically go to market, the way that we typically approach engineering and product roadmaps, was really not going to carry the day.

We have uptimes of over 99% and when you get into this complicated infrastructure, that really says a lot. Our ability to design, our ability to deploy and integrate our quality, our service and support, you couple with that our financing capabilities that we have for some of these very large orders. You start to stitch together a really nice story for customers, and that’s part of the reason and why we stay very advanced.

Keep reading here for Dell’s partnership approach.—BS

A long-winded email isn’t just a cure for insomnia...it’s becoming a cybersecurity threat, with attackers using excessive dummy text to lull AI defenses to sleep.

The tactic—spotted recently by email security company Sublime Security—is less an example of flashy, model-breaking commands like “ignore all previous instructions” and instead more like, “nothing to see here, drowsy LLM.”

“They’re sort of poking the bear a little bit, and seeing what they can get away with,” Luke Wescott, Sublime’s threat detection engineer, told IT Brew.

Hidden message. In a May 5 post, Wescott and Machine Learning Researcher Anna Bertiger broke down how the tactic works.

Within the phishing email’s HTML, threat actors hide a heap of harmless looking text: an Adidas newsletter, in one example, a whole romance novel in another. The phishers bury the text using a font too tiny for humans to see—but AI tools can.

What do sportswear and a love story have in common? Threat actors hope the “hidden” text is innocuous enough to fool an AI-based system into incorrectly considering the malicious email a harmless one, and let it through the spam filter.

Read about why “jailbreaking” matters.—BH

Primark’s biggest US bet yet: a Manhattan flagship built on ultra-low prices (Retail Brew)

At the brand’s recent flagship opening in New York’s Hudson Yards, Primark US President Kevin Tulip told Retail Brew about its evolving role in the US.

What CFOs and CEOs are saying about gas prices (CFO Brew)

Move over, watercooler talk. There’s a new hotspot in town: The gas pump.

As the war in Iran sends gas prices into the stratosphere—the average price nationally is now over $4.50 per gallon—CFOs from a wide range of industries are addressing the elephant at the gas pump head-on.

Developers fear performance evaluations based on AI data: survey (IT Brew)

Want to scare a software developer? Skip the ghost stories and go straight to judging them on how they leverage AI at their jobs.

Forget sifting through endless listings. Revenue Brew and CollabWORK highlight only a handful of roles each week, chosen for your interests and industry. Click here to view the full job board.

• Associate Director, Value Transformation Office at The Clorox Company
• Vice President, Global Astronaut Sales at Virgin Galactic
• Business Intelligence Analyst at Dickinson Financial Corporation
• Account Executive at United Site Services
• Director, Pro Sales Operations at Home Depot