A Better Approach to Outbound

There’s a question raging on LinkedIn right now - is outbound dead?

The consensus is that ‘bad’ outbound is dead…but what does that mean exactly? And how do you do good outbound?

Let’s first look at bad outbound.

Bad outbound is where the focus is almost entirely on volume to capture the tiny, tiny fraction of folks who might be willing or able to take time out of their day to learn about your solution.

It’s like trying to capture lightning in a bottle.

In poor outbound, this is touted as success…

That’s 250k people bothered - to make $28k in sales! 🤯

The fundamental problem everyone faces is that maybe 1-5% of the market you want to reach, are actually looking for a solution at any given time (known as being ‘in market’).

(See the 95-5 rule, based on research, for more on this).

So far, I’ve seen three approaches to trying to tackle this issue:

Option 1: Crack a nut with a sledgehammer (the volume approach)

Option 2: Only prospect those in-market (signal/intent approach)

Option 3: Abandon ship and stop outbound (focus on inbound)

Let’s run through why each of these is problematic, and then consider a 4th option.

Option 1: Scorched Earth

As shared above, this is a pretty crazy way to try and build pipeline, with conversion rates going down & down, meaning volume has to go up in a linear way, which results in:

• Burning through your Total Addressable Market (TAM) in an unsustainable way
• Having to spin up and maintain dozens or hundreds of different ‘burner’ email domains and inboxes
• Setting fire to your brand reputation with the hundreds of thousands of people you’re spamming

Option 2: Signal based prospecting

This is actually a very sound way to do prospecting - in theory.

Wait until your potential customers show some evidence they’re interested in a solution or there’s an event that might trigger their need for it, and then approach them at the appropriate time.

The reality is more challenging, because:

• Everyone has access to the same commoditised signals (job move, fundraising, hiring etc.) which means you’re just part of the noise
• Many signals are not really robust (someone from a company of 10,000 employees visited your website…so now trying to find the needle in the haystack)
• If they really are in the market and you’re not already on their radar, you’re behind the curve and playing catch-up

It ends up like kids football, with everyone just chasing the ball.

There are lot of vendors in this space, touting it as the ‘new way’ but the reality is that good outbound teams have been doing it for at least 10 years (the first SDR team I stood up 7+ years ago used it to great effect).

But with the ease of accessing this data, it has become saturated really fast.

Option 3: Inbound-only

With declining effectiveness and horrible unit economics, many companies are clearing the decks of outbound teams, repurposing the teams to inbound or other roles (or making layoffs).

And instead they’re hoping they can create a replicable inbound demand generation motion.

The idea of building an inbound engine is not a bad one (in fact I’d absolutely endorse it), but if its wholesale replacing your outbound efforts you’ll face difficulties:

• It takes time to yield results, which can create a short-term pipeline shock to the system
• You become reliant on inbound, which depending on how you build it can be expensive and/or sporadic with delivering results (the roller coaster!)
• To an extent you’re self-selecting often to those who are moving to the ‘in market’ stage and therefore not touching the majority of folks not actively researching solutions

This is why inbound only motions, particularly those that are heavily performance marketing based, often end up getting expensive really quick as you quickly pick the low hanging fruit, and then don’t have enough new demand created to keep up with your growth numbers.

Option 4: Educational Outbound (Insight-Led Sales)

Instead of abandoning outbound, why not adjust it to the reality that >95% of folks you reach out to simply aren’t ready to buy yet?

Is that really crazy?!

Rather than trying to relentlessly force direct conversions and replies from <70 word emails sent hundreds of thousands of times, offer prospects some value instead.

Focus on educating your potential customers!

As the Challenger sales showed us, one of the first things we must do with prospects is to ‘teach’ them something uniquely interesting in order to win their trust.

This means having a Point of View and taking a well educated guess on their core business challenges, ideally offering them additional insights or summarising helpful research that will resonate with their current context.

Will they respond immediately with a ‘buy it now’ type of urgency?

Maybe not.

It depends where they are on their own buyer awareness and readiness journey.

Remember every buyer has to run through different stages, which are:

(No) Awareness of the problem (60-90%)

(No) Awareness of the implication (5-30%)

(No) Awareness of the solution (1-5%)

By taking this more educational approach, you can reach buyers more easily where they are in their journey.

In many respects, this is the nature of Demand Creation v Demand Capture…consistently informing your whole market about problems they may not be aware of.

It expands the size of the pie, versus reducing it by burning through your TAM like a Tasmanian devil.

Why don’t we do this more often?

Impatience is the obvious answer.

We all need results yesterday. So we take a seller-centric approach to everything we do.

What will get us to our number, who cares how many people need to spam to get there?!

But another reason is that in the past, taking this approach has been complex and difficult.

It involved SDRs or AEs doing a ton of personal research on every prospect, then trying to figure out what insights or materials might be most relevant to them; and then crafting that into a well written and relevant message.

That could easily be 15-30 minutes per prospect…hardly conducive to efficiency or the types of numbers needed to yield rocket-ship growth.

And to date, most AI vendors have actually focussed less on quality content, more on massive automation with thin layers of personalization, allowing for the mass spamming to grow exponentially.

A better way

That was until RevvedUp, where we believe in a buyer-centric approach to go-to-market, which means our platform is geared towards providing a more insight-led and value-add prospecting experience.

We still save reps many hours a week on manual research and copywriting - but we ensure every email is fully tailored to the needs and interests of the prospecting, by employing our AI-generated ‘personalisation strategy’.

Combined with thought leadership resources produced by your business or pulled from other authoritative sources, you can offer a highly relevant and insightful outreach to every prospect that supports their needs and offers an educational approach to earning their trust.

Ultimately it boils down to: give them something worth paying attention to.

Next steps

We think every company should make more Deposits than Withdrawals if they want to maintain long-term growth and success in a market.

One of the best ways to do this is to improve the quality and relevance of their outbound prospecting.

Instead of tens of thousands of spammy emails that act as a withdrawal, now you can offer some value to every prospect instead, making a deposit for the future.

Whilst 97% aren’t ready to buy yet, they’ll file it away for later…and you’ll be front-of-mind when they are ready to take the next steps.

If you'd like help in staying Consistently Relevant across every prospect, we'd love to chat.