160: Mac Reddin: How to leverage dinosaurs to get warm intros and drive better pipeline
What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Mac Reddin, Founder and CEO of Commsor.
Summary: Mac treks through the Jurassic wilderness of modern sales, where outbound campaigns cannibalize themselves while AI-powered sequences are degrading response quality by the day. Real marketing power flows through human networks, forward-thinking companies are transforming their SDR teams into relationship architects who measure success through network depth and authentic engagement. Be the team that does better. Your competitive edge lives in human connections that no algorithm can replicate, requiring a complete rethinking of how we incentivize and measure revenue team success.
About Mac
- Mac is a career-long entrepreneur, his first business was a gaming network built on top of Minecraft which peaked at 150k users per day
- He went on to create various bootstrapped businesses over the course of 5 years
- He created a substack newsletter for the community space which eventually evolved into an actual community of over 10k people
- One day he took part in a no-code hackathon and the idea of Commsor was born, initially a community reporting and metrics platform
- Today Commsor is a 40-person company focused on curated introductions and building the go-to-network movement
The Origin of the Dinosaur Brand Came From a Typo
A misspelled tweet transformed Commsor's brand identity forever. Someone wrote "Commsaur" instead of "Commsor" on Twitter, sparking an organic evolution that proves how authentic brand moments outperform manufactured marketing strategies.
The story unfolds with raw honesty from Mac: "It became an inside joke, then our internal branding, and eventually our entire visual identity." No marketing committees. No focus groups. No desperate attempts to retrofit meaning into the accident. The team simply recognized the genuine enthusiasm building around their accidental dinosaur mascot and rolled with it.
Consider these organic moments that cemented the dinosaur's place in Commsor's DNA:
* A casual Slack screenshot sparked employee excitement
* Internal conversations naturally incorporated dinosaur references
* Team members added dinosaur emojis to their social profiles
* Customers started associating the brand with its prehistoric mascot
The business impact materialized in unexpected ways. One prospect lost Commsor's name but remembered the dinosaur. They scoured LinkedIn for employees with dinosaur emojis in their profiles, found the company again, and booked a demo. This kind of brand recall demonstrates how authentic visual elements create deeper connections than carefully crafted corporate identities.
Mac's experience teaches a powerful lesson about modern branding: manufactured meaning falls flat. When the team needed a new logo, they faced zero resistance to the dinosaur concept because it already represented their culture. You can't engineer this kind of organic brand evolution in a marketing workshop or through trend analysis.
Key takeaway: Authentic brand moments emerge from genuine team interactions and customer connections. A typo-inspired dinosaur logo drives more business value than countless hours of strategic brand planning because it represents something real: a company culture that embraces creativity, humor, and happy accidents.
Why Your Mass Outbound Strategy Cannibalizes Itself
Mass outbound marketing operates like a ravenous snake devouring its own tail. Every blast campaign you send erodes response rates across the entire ecosystem, forcing you to send even more emails to hit your targets. Mac draws on the ancient Ouroboros symbol to illustrate this self-destructive pattern playing out in marketing departments worldwide.
You feel the tension daily: outbound outreach serves essential business functions. Your team needs to:
* Connect with potential podcast guests
* Build strategic partnerships
* Source vendor relationships
* Develop sales opportunities
* Nurture industry relationships
Yet the industrialization of this process through purchased contact lists and templated messages has created a toxic environment. Response rates plummet while marketing teams double down on volume, hoping quantity will save them. The math gets uglier each quarter: 10,000 emails become 20,000, then 50,000, as engagement metrics spiral downward. Your carefully crafted messages drown in an ocean of automated noise.
Mac points to the last two years as a breaking point. Marketing teams hurtle toward catastrophe like Thelma and Louise, eyes locked on the dashboard metrics instead of the cliff ahead. The cognitive dissonance feels suffocating - everyone privately acknowledges the broken system while publicly defending increasingly desperate tactics. AI tools threaten to accelerate this race to the bottom by making it even easier to flood inboxes with personalized-but-soulless outreach.
Your outbound strategy needs a reset focused on human connection. Replace mass automation with careful curation. Send fewer messages with deeper personalization. Study your target accounts' actual needs before reaching out. The marketers who thrive will build systems around quality interactions, not maximum velocity. This shift feels counterintuitive when every internal metric pushes for more volume, but the alternative leads off a cliff.
Key takeaway: Break the cycle of mass outbound marketing by prioritizing quality over quantity. Build genuine connections through carefully researched, personalized outreach that demonstrates real value to your recipients. The future belongs to marketers who choose meaningful engagement over maximum velocity.
The Brutal Math Behind Why Your Sales Outreach Dies Unread
B2B buyers now receive 500% more cold outreach than three years ago. The math becomes brutal: every sales message you craft competes with hundreds of others in an attention economy that's hitting its breaking point. Your thoughtfully personalized email drowns in the same inbox flood as automated spam blasts and LinkedIn form messages.
Think of outbound sales channels like a public park destroyed by overuse. Each individual visitor might leave only a small trace, but multiply that impact by thousands. That's what's happening to email, phone, and social outreach. Even when you craft the perfect message, your prospects have already built defensive walls:
* Automated email filters that quarantine anything resembling sales language
* Phone settings that send unknown numbers straight to voicemail
* Browser extensions that block LinkedIn connection requests
* Calendar apps that require "approved sender" status
A recent conversation with a frustrated sales leader crystallized this reality. He argued that CEOs who ignore cold outreach risk missing game-changing opportunities. But flip that logic: as a CEO of a small company, Mac sees hundreds of pitches monthly. Each one demands attention, evaluation, and response time. For leaders at larger organizations, that number multiplies exponentially. The brutal reality is that most prospects physically lack the hours needed to evaluate your message, no matter how brilliant.
The psychology of modern buyers reflects this overwhelm. When you receive 50+ sales messages daily, pattern recognition kicks in. Your brain builds shortcuts, filing anything that looks like outbound into the "deal with later" folder (which really means never). Sales teams chase prospects through an ever-shrinking window of attention, while buyers fortify their defenses against the growing assault on their time.
Key takeaway: The outbound sales crisis stems from pure mathematics: too many messages chase too...
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