Should Your Company Do Outbound?

Maybe not.

I have a lot of people ask me about stuff like Clay , cold email infrastructure, and outbound in general, and honestly, a lot of times after talking to them for 5 minutes I can tell there's other steps they need to take before they start doing any serious outbound efforts.

For the record, I know outbound works, but it might not be worth it to everybody.

These days I ask a few qualifying questions before even getting into whether or not an AI assisted spam cannon and robodialer is going to be the right move for your business.

Think of this as sort of a checklist you can use before you decide to hire an SDR team and start having your reps blasting out cold calls.

As an aside, I think inbound leads somehow get a bad rap on LinkedIn because we have some kind of romanticized image of boiler room sales reps banging out cold calls and creating something from nothing. But at the end of the day if you're profitable and happy, you don't need to go outbound. In my opinion.

If you don't hit enough of these points to really think a true enterprise outbound motion is right for you, I have some alternatives at the end of this article.

First lets define outbound, at least in the context of this article:

• Having an SDR team making cold calls and cold emails
• Sales doing highly targeted email campaigns with custom messaging
• AE's that might make cold calls or do other forms of outreach
• Revops, marketing, or sales building lists, getting contact info and giving these leads to sales
• Referrals. I consider this outbound because a human has to ask for one.

What is NOT outbound? These are obviously viable channels I just want to be crystal clear about what I'm not talking about:

• Marketing sending out spam emails
• The CEO emailing their buddies is not outbound.
• Trade shows. I love trade shows but I wouldn't really consider this outbound
• Paid ads/SEO/content

Now that we've established that, here is my list of considerations to ask yourself before building an outbound motion. This is mostly relevant for ENT SaaS but could probably be true for other business models as well, not sure how well it translates to SMB. Let me know in the comments what you thought if you're not in ENT SaaS

How are you following up on inbound leads?

You would be surprised (or maybe not) on how many companies simply don't get back with inbound leads. There's no SLAs for a 2-hr response time at most companies. A leaky funnel is a big reason people start thinking about outbound as if it is going to be some magic fix for a shitty sales and revops process.

Are you trusting your network to give you feedback?

Avoid trusting your network for feedback at all costs. Don't trust feedback from people who you're friends with or who you gave your product away for free to. One of the best benefits of outbound is to get instant feedback from your market that is relatively unbiased. I see this with founders and early stage companies a lot who have simply not tested their offer with most of their TAM.

What kind of referral program incentives do you have?

If you are still working your way through your network you should have some kind of referral incentives. Not to say you can't do outbound before setting this up, but it's just such an easy channel to get right. You can fix this at any time, and I promise you asking a paying customer for a referral is much easier than selling people you've never talked to.

Do your reps ask for referrals at the time of signing?

Once again something people just don't do. It's just another lever to use to build pipe that most people aren't taking full advantage of. It needs to be codified as part of your sales process.

Do you have a warehouse of untouched MQLs?

No explanation needed here. But yes I've literally seen SFDC reports with like 1000 untouched inbound leads before. I can't make this stuff up. Before anybody makes a single fucking cold call you need to go take care of this. And you need to double check your automated qualification criteria to make sure that good leads aren't being auto dq'd. I've seen that happen before too.

Do you have a systematic way to follow up on C/L deals?

Automated reminders? Are you asking for feedback from your prospects on deals you lost? Or are you just closing the opp and never talking to them again. "What would it take for us to win your business in the future?" Simple question everyone should be asking. Call them back in 6-9 months to ask how the vendor they switched to is doing.

Do you actually know what your ICP is?

If you don't know what your ICP is, you're going to be spraying and praying. That's fine in the beginning as that's what we all do, but it's not sustainable. You and your reps will get burnt out. I've been there. I've been that burnt out rep that kept pivoting when leadership was trying to figure out our ICP. Part of outbound is validating hypothesis around this, so it's ok to not know, but you need to be honest with your team instead of acting like everything is ok.

Does your product cost enough to make outbound viable?

Very important. If it can be charged to the company credit card... Marketing is simply going to have to own creating SQLs. Humans are expensive, I'd say if TCV is under 10k just optimize paid ads/SEO/trade shows etc until you've hit the point of diminishing returns. At that point outbound isn't even necessarily the right move, could be building new products, reaching new markets etc.

Are you selling a commodity? Outbound is 10x harder for commodities

Not saying you can't do it but I've tried doing outbound for an SMB commoditized widget, it's just a losing game. And as a rep you're not building skills for your future. As a company it's easy to think you'll just hire some guy to bang out cold calls to rip and replace more expensive incumbents, but this isn't really a good business model unless you like burning money.

Do you have an understanding of your sales cycle and how it will differ when you do outbound?

You know you actually have to sell when you're doing outbound right? And you have to have a process. You can't just expect layups. You have to have a process, and ultimately be willing to accept the fact that in many ways, outbound is an experiment that may never yield results. That said, it may be the only growth lever that you think can help you hit your goals. I could write all day about the AE/SDR relationship, compensation for "booked meetings" etc

So what do you do if you don't check any of these boxes?

I'm so glad you asked!

First of all, congrats on being honest with yourself that hiring a bunch of SDRs is a bad idea. You're saving yourself like 7 figures and saving those SDRs from having to suffer through being your experimental rats.

If you want to build more pipeline but don't think a true outbound motion is right for you, you have a couple of options as I see it. This is kind of general advice but maybe it will give you a place to start

• AI personalized email campaigns with Clay/AI.

You might need to hire an agency for this if you don't know how to do this stuff, I don't have time to explain everything here but basically this would entail scraping highly pertinent data about your prospects and using that in email campaigns. This needs to be so good it looks like a human wrote every email. This is 100% possible with Clay and AI. You can go on to use this data to create other sorts of campaigns such as LinkedIn ad targeting or even direct mail.

• Double down on marketing channels

Not much to say here - you should know what marketing channels work or don't. I highly recommend youtube as a marketing channel. Vastly underused in B2B but it's working for me to generate leads.

• Build new products in your platform

Lots of times people think they need to hire SDRs when really they need to hire a product manager, a programmer, or something else. Maybe you are trying to move upmarket or break into a new geo. This might mean you need SOC2 compliance or HIPAA, not a bunch of sales reps.

"I checked enough of those boxes. What do I focus on first?"

Awesome. Well this is highly dependent on what stage you and your company is at.

If it's just you, your co-founder, and a VA, then congrats, you are now an SDR. You have a lot to learn but you can do it! Start busting out some cold calls. I wrote a few posts about this you can find here and here, which will hopefully give you some context on how to build a sales motion from scratch.

If you're a larger company, it's kind of hard to say.

Do you have a sales team? Do you have SDRs that are just handling inbound leads? If that's the case I'm sorry to inform you they are not cut out for the job. If you change someone's job description from inbound SDR to outbound SDR you're setting them up for failure unless you give them a huge raise. I've seen this firsthand on multiple occasions. It's just never ended well. You're probably going to have to do some hiring.

Do you have an AE team? Chances are one of them might actually be doing some of this already. Get a meeting with them and ask them what's working. Use the articles I wrote + this AE to build a framework for what outbound might look like at your company.

If none of them are doing outbound, and they do not have a calendar full of meetings, sorry to say but you suck at hiring. It's ok. Most people suck at hiring and most companies aren't incentivizing the right kinds of behaviors. Even if outbound wasn't in the AE JD, the best sales reps know you can increase ACV by going outbound. If they are experienced reps they may have a rolodex they have been pulling from. This isn't exactly cold outbound but still worth having a conversation with them about what's working and what's not.

Somewhat related but I don't necessarily buy the whole "your AE's need to be prospecting" narrative we've been hearing about recently. Listen, I think they should be, but I wouldn't say they need to be spending 2 hours a day cranking dials. That's just not an effective use of their time, unless, like I said, their calendars are not full of client facing meetings.

"Outbound is harder than ever, therefore we need to get AEs to prospect" Does that make any fucking sense to anyone? No. I would qualify this by saying there's a lot of variables and nuance that go into this, but if AE's are the only people in the company that know how to build pipeline, you guys have bigger problems that you need to deal with.

You now have the building blocks of pipeline

If you've read this entire article, plus the two I referenced, you have everything you need to start executing. Doing great outbound doesn't require a 10k per rep per month tech stack. All you need is the yellow pages, a barely functioning sharpie, a notebook and a desk phone. In fact I think most reps would be more productive that way instead of inundating them with all the distractions that the average rep has these days.

If this was helpful I hope you will like, leave a comment, and share it with someone who is struggling to build an outbound motion or thinking about building one.