Stop bribing. Start qualifying

What’s happening in SaaS right now is revealing—and not in a good way. The inbox arms race has reached a strange, almost comical point: companies are literally paying people to sit through their demos. Not paying for software, not paying for services—paying for your attention.

We’re not talking about a modest Starbucks card as a thank-you. We’re talking bribes that feel more like sweepstakes prizes. $50 Amazon gift cards. $100 DoorDash credits. And in my case, $250 in Nike gift cards from 6sense.

Here’s the kicker: I never had any interest in buying or implementing 6sense. None. I wasn’t evaluating solutions in that category. I wasn’t in-market. I wasn’t even curious about their platform beyond idle professional awareness. But when they dangled sneakers in front of me, I did what anyone would do—I took the call, collected the cards, and walked away with two brand-new pairs of shoes.

That’s not a story about me. It’s a story about the system. It’s about where SaaS outbound and demand generation have drifted—away from relevance, away from qualification, and into a bizarre marketplace where pipeline is manufactured with perks instead of built with purpose. It tells us something uncomfortable about the state of go-to-market strategy right now: if you can’t win attention with value, you buy it.

And that’s the problem.

Why Companies Are Paying for Your Time

On the surface, this looks like clever marketing. Incentives break through crowded inboxes, guarantee attendance, and keep reps busy. It’s cheaper than renting a conference booth or running another LinkedIn ad campaign.

But scratch the surface and you see something else: an industry that has lost confidence in its own value proposition. If your product can’t command interest on its own, you bribe interest. If your targeting can’t identify real buyers, you spray perks at anyone who’ll pick up the phone. This is the logical endpoint of outbound strategies that conflate activity with effectiveness. The math inside the demand gen dashboard looks better—more meetings booked, more pipeline created—but it’s a house built on sand. Because what you’re actually cultivating isn’t intent. It’s opportunism. People like me: curious enough to click, happy to take the perk, utterly uninterested in buying.

And maybe this isn’t just about marketing strategy—it’s about culture. For years, SaaS has celebrated a growth-at-all-costs mentality where every interaction is reduced to a transaction. Pipeline is the only currency that matters, and leaders hammer reps on activity metrics so relentlessly that value creation gets pushed aside. We’ve trained a generation of sellers to think less about building trust, insight, or long-term relationships and more about hitting the next meeting quota. In that environment, bribery doesn’t feel like a failure—it feels like efficiency. But it’s not. It’s a sign that we’ve forgotten the hard, messy, human work of creating value.

The Qualification Crisis

This is what’s most broken here: qualification is an afterthought.

Real qualification starts with questions that matter:

• Which accounts are in a real buying cycle?
• Which roles hold actual budget authority?
• What signals tell us that now is the moment for outreach?
• Does this person even have the authority or interest to act?

Instead, many SaaS orgs are casting a net so wide they’re paying strangers to take calls. That’s not MEDDPICC. That’s not Challenger. That’s not even basic rigor.

It’s laziness disguised as innovation.

The Cost of Lazy Outbound

There’s a hidden cost to this approach.

• You waste money. That $250 in Nike cards I pocketed was pure marketing spend thrown in the trash. Scale that across thousands of demos and you’re talking millions in misallocated capital.
• You corrode trust. Prospects learn to treat outreach like spam with a bribe attached. The demo becomes less about discovery, more about extraction.
• You train your reps badly. Reps learn that any warm body in a demo is a win. They chase activity instead of outcomes. They confuse pipeline with progress.
• You teach leadership the wrong lesson. That more meetings equal more momentum. That volume is victory, when in fact it’s vanity.

The short-term dopamine of “meetings booked” hides the long-term rot of wasted effort.

What Real Outbound Looks Like

Outbound isn’t dead. It’s just been stripped of discipline.

Real outbound is scalpel, not blunt instrument. It starts with account-level and person-level thoughtfulness:

• Account signals that suggest readiness: funding rounds, hiring surges, new product launches, supply chain shifts.
• Contact insights that prove relevance: role changes, tech stack use, digital footprints.
• Context that connects product value to business pressure.

When you do this well, you don’t need to pay people to show up. They show up because the conversation matters.

The Symptom and the Disease

The gift card demo is just the symptom. The disease is deeper: an industry that has prioritized activity over accuracy, calendars over conversions, noise over nuance.

Unless it corrects course, SaaS won’t just waste money—it will breed a generation of sellers who believe laziness is a strategy. Who think pipeline can be bribed into existence. Who forget that the goal of marketing isn’t to buy attention, but to earn it.

And here’s the irony: the companies that stop playing this game, that invest in real qualification, in bespoke data, in authentic relevance—they’re the ones who’ll win. Not because they paid people to take a meeting, but because they made the meeting worth taking.

Derek Rahn is the VP of Demand Generation at LeadGenius and an old cranky millennial