"Go Outbound... Pipeline Cures all" Andreessen Horowitz... but Rightbound / Allbound is better

Pipeline is business lifeline in today's market. I've even heard it said that opening is the new closing.

The need for outbound sales and marketing was the major theme of last week's EMEA B2B Sales Leadership Roundtable, where 200+ sales leaders gathered, to share what is working best today that I broadcast live from the Sales Innovation Expo.

Here is the full recording for those that are interested or here's the

In a downturn, sales teams accustomed to hitting quotas from inbound marketing, PLG, and partner lead activity are finding significant gaps in coverage...

Imperative that companies become obsessed at knowing, identifying, and targeting their ICP ... this means outbound - Pavilion State of Sales Development Survey Nov 2022

In recession budgets tighten, and FOMU causes projects to be cut or postponed / sales cycles lengthening as is clear from looking at?recent earnings calls and surveying & speaking to 6k B2B Sales leaders over the last 2 months.

Hubspot reports that?74 percent of companies?primarily use inbound over outbound in 2019... and this needs to be adjusted for the new reality we find ourselves in.

This is not an Inbound vs. Outbound

NOR Marketing vs. Sales

NOR Passive vs. Active debate...

But effectiveness matters in today's do more with less budget, headcount and runway world,

Profitability: optimising revenue, margins and cashflow... is back in fashion

I believe in Rightbound and Allbound.

Outbound and Inbound aligned and co-ordinated to drive mutually agreed outcomes...

A hybrid approach and truly aligned sales and marketing - the illusive holy grail throughout my career...

STOP PRESS: We operationalised it (to learn how jump to the end)

BUT I am certain that Inbound is currently being over-leveraged in the go-to-market mix and this misallocation of resource is sabotaging many of my peers

Over reliance on inbounds was blamed by > 90% of 6k+ EMEA B2B sales leaders polled in October/November for them missing their target!

I highly recommend you read Andreessen Horowitz 's article Pipeline Cures All but in summary:

It’s not just in a downturn that companies find their inbound engine is no longer enough to drive business. Whether you’re operating in a down market or your inbound motion has just reached its saturation point... there’s only one cure for elongated sales cycles and pipeline deficits... Go outbound - Andreessen Horowitz (known as "a16z")

Pre-covid, the fish may have been jumping in your boat. In 2023 you will have to go fishing if you want to eat.

47.1% of Sales Leaders report that Outbound Sales Is More effective than 1 year ago - Pavilion State of Sales Development Survey Nov 2022

Each of my sales reps routinely book > 0.7 meetings with only named CXOs at their dream ICP accounts on their target list for every hour of outbound calling alone, not even counting email and linkedin touches.

Your team can achieve this as well. Happy to discuss how

Why Outbound sales is so important today

According to Hubspot in 2022, the inbound champions afterall:

• 63% of prospects have very little to no awareness about a company before they are first contacted by a sales rep. So every day your sales reps work without outbound prospecting, they may as well be working for your competitor, as they are gifting share of voice in market and hearing the voice of the customer away.
• Only 22% of marketing leaders report 'increasing revenue and sales' as their top priority for 2023 - WTF! Misalignment was gone mad

Out of all your leads, 79% will never convert into sales - Marketing Sherpa

According to Korn Ferry in 2022 during Covid:

• Sales teams generated 58% of new leads, which is up from before covid
• BUT marketing went from providing 22% of a company’s leads down to 17%
• AND OF THESE 90% of MQLs have never converted into SQLs because they were classified as an MQL much too early in the buyer’s journey

Only 5% of salespeople believe that they gained quality leads from marketing - Iron Paper

‘Direct interaction with the provider’, meaning an interaction with a Sales Representative, is the most important factor of making a purchase decision for a business buyer... slightly more important than ‘References’!

Benefits of outbound sales vs inbound

Precision - Highly targeted

The mighty spear of outbound sales development is built upon relevance.

Relevance is how your product or service can help your prospect, who well have you targeted your audience and do you speak to their pains / priorities.

Your sales team identify specific leads and nurture the most promising. If inbound sales involves casting a wide net and waiting, outbound sales is identifying the juiciest fish and going after it specifically.

You get what you get from Inbound, while you get what you want from Outbound

Personalise

You can personalise contact with individual prospects, and build a relationship with them.

You’re not relying on general brand awareness; you’re talking directly to them.

Conversations matter more than ever today with FOMU and buyer indecision demanding a trusted adviser recommendation to cut through all the content marketing info overload inducing analysis paralysis.

Outbound calling trumps email here, and inbound channels are not even in the race.

Speed - Faster Time to Value

You don’t need to wait for prospects to find out about you, browse your content for a while and then contact you. You can reach your market quickly and convert sales in less time.

?? Shorter sales cycles / time to value vs inbound only

?? Lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) vs inbound only

?? Higher LTV and lower cost of servicing clients due to ideal customer fit

Instant Feedback

Reps can receive immediate feedback on their sales targeting, messaging from the buyers they’re chatting with and make adjustments, get referrals...

You constantly learn, re-learn, and unlearn things.

It creates a knowledge loop that helps you:

1/ Having different days every day

2/ Progressively master the field you're in

3/ Improving the quality of your work

4/ Connecting the dots

5/ Sharpen your thoughts and way of speaking

Compounded, those 5 points can bring you very far.

Markets are changing, tenure is down, so your PMF (product-market-fit) and champions are changing... outbound is the only way to re-calibrate fast.

If your prices are off, the product or service you’re offering is lacking features or your prospects prefer other brands, they’ll let your sales team know soon enough.

You’ll then me able to iterate and adapt accordingly.

It could take ages and extensive customer research to get that level of insight with a purely inbound sales strategy.

Your market has / is changing... you need to tap into the Voice Of the Customer directly to adjust Product-Market-Fit

Influence Buyer Journey early enough to Shape It in your Favour

Over 75% of B2B buyer process is now complete before a person at buying company ever speaks to a sales rep, and only around 5% of a buyer's journey is spent with any single shortlisted vendor - Gartner

But with outbound you can change this.

You can speak to buyer before they have set their buying criteria, and influence their strategy and planning before it is basically set in stone and educate them about the merits of your unique approach before someone else indoctrinates them, either a direct competitor or a completely different category of activity that steals their attention.

This is especially vital if you are a startup / scale-up without significant brand awareness or if you are selling anything even vaguely new that might be considered a "nice to have" and not a "must have" today.

Remember mature inbound engines at market leading brands that have already spent vast sums of money for years and iterated and refined... still fail to build mental availability

63% of prospects have very little to no awareness about a company before they are first contacted by a sales rep - Hubspot

So if you have anything actually worth saying, let alone anything different, yomusta proactively reach out to educate your market and help them become aware of your better way

We tried it but Outbound doesn't work for us

I hear this a lot.

Let me be clear it is not outbound that is failing here, but you.

Invariably their targeting is poor, they really don't know who their personas and ICP are, now I appreciate that the market has changed and so product -market-fir has changed, but this is still poor.

As targeting is off, inevitably messaging will be off as well.

Typically they are not multi-threading all stakeholders in the DMU with persona-relevant content that is aligned to each individual's communication preferences.

Typically they do not lead with well-researched actionable value and insights, they just go straight to an ask from cold.

Relevance resonates, too many get distracted with pointless personalization BS

All too often outbound means they have email sequences to deploy... that's the extent of it... reps are pretending to themselves they are actually selling when they are really just hiding behind email hoping for an order to come in like a marketer.

I am all for sales and marketing alignment but there is a distinct difference.

Some companies get all caught up in triggers and nascient intent data, and personalisation, and timing... when really they should just pick up the phone and get it fro the horse's mouth unfiltered with assumptions.

My Tip... be phone-first. Each of my team book a meeting with CXO every 75 minutes on average from outbound calling alone, and this approach activate the otherwise dead email channel.

Cold email is dead, but I do get an 85% open and 90% reply rate to emails I send on a talk-to-send strategy... as in I talk to someone on the phone and say look out for my email that they ask / agree to receive...

But I am phone-first and Linkedin heavy ironically, and I think this is the only reason I can do well on email today.

The phone activates / makes viable again the email channel, so it is no longer cold email.

44% of sales professionals who sell remotely say phone calls are the most effective channel for remote selling… over double email or video - HubSpot 2022

76% of B2B new buyers appreciate speaking to someone on the phone and even 15% of repeat buyers - McKinsey

87% of respondents said talking to a person on the phone to answer questions made them feel more confident in making high-consideration purchases - Invoca Research

Want to operationalise a top performing outbound and integrated inbound/outbound strategy in days...

After almost 20 years seeking the holy grail of allbound, truly aligned inbound and outbound sales and marketing, I've discovered the secret, the connective tissue that pulls it all together.

A world where

• Outbound sales development, empowered by a solid conversation-first approach, leads to a 164% increase in influence on your pipeline where the cold conversation didn't have an immediate outcome to a meeting...

• Talk-to-send increases email open rates by 4-5 times and replies by 80-150 times...

• That great whitepaper you created actually gets seen by the people that matter, and you actually close the loop and get the feedback from the horse's mouth from the named decision maker at your dream target account, and arrange to meet up at a forthcoming event.
• Sales reps actually follow-up in a timely manner on every marketing lead generated, and every lead generated is truly a good fit.
• You routinely generate fresh referrals from 70% of your clients and 5% of the people that you speak to in your TAM that do not buy anything from you

This is not some pipedream... this is what we are doing, and you can too.

• Move from impossible to predictable
• Don't play fair and do what everyone else is doing
• The step-change for your go-to-market is here. And available
• Rig the game for competitive advantage & dominate your market

Book in a time to speak about how each member of my sales team books 0.7 meetings per hour from outbound activity ONLY every day and typically generates >2k in additional pipeline for marketing to nurture and activate.

• True allbound revenue insurance and time to value optimisation.

Sidenote: Why Inside Sales Model is so Important Today

Implicit in the Andreessen Horowitz's article is that you should be switching to a predominantly inside SDR-driven, as opposed to field-based, outbound sales model.

Sales Effectiveness

• 75% of buyers prefer not to meet sales agents face-to-face - SalesLoft
• Remote workers are 13% more productive than their office-based counterparts and have more selling time - Stanford University

Seller Cost Reduction / Higher Margins

• Average outside sales call will cost €308. Vs Average inside sales call costs €50 - Pointclear
• On average, sales leaders save €10,000 per remote team member per year compared to hosting them in an office - Velocity Global
• Most decision makers are still avoiding do live events and taking unnecessary F2F meetings... so since there is a strong correlation with accessing the executive buying committee and sales cycle efficiency and close effectiveness, it makes sense to choose channels that allow you the decision maker access you need to succeed today as cost effectively as possible.

Happier Sales Teams / Less Employee Turnover

• 70% of sales professionals in UK said that moving to forever-remote work is a good thing - Net Imperative

Side Note on PLG

Many PLG companies see outbound sales as "old school"

and buy into the fallacy that "marketing will generate inbound demand"

Why spend money acquiring customers when your product is so good that it sells itself?

This pervasive attitude is massively limiting many companies actual growth.

And it is a wasted opportunity for PLG companies as they have the tools and insights to do outbound better than many traditional outbound sales-led companies.

Accelerate Adoption

A person using your freemium model?is not always the budget holder and will be more likely to convert if you multi-thread with critical stakeholders from the company the user belongs to.

Tailor Outbound Value Proposition

One way to tailor your outbound approach is to?look at the product-usage data of one or multiple users?from the same company and look on linkedIn for the stakeholder who’s most likely to kickstart the buying process decision.

Then, you can message these stakeholders with a very tailored approach, sharing how their team members use the tool and why they should start paying for it or expanding their usage.

By sharing stats on product usage and focusing on ROI, your message will more likely resonate with the budget holder or generate a referral.