Outbound Will Never Be The Same

Andrew Chen, The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs: https://andrewchen.com/the-law-of-shitty-clickthroughs/
Jen Allen Knuth, Google is taking nunchucks away from the kids: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/demandjen1_if-you-gave-your-10-year-old-kid-nunchucks-activity-713057...
Alex Vacca, The end for Outreach and Salesloft?: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alex-vacca_the-end-for-outreach-and-salesloft-outreach-activity-71302...


What if everything you knew about outbound marketing was about to change? Join us as we embark on a comprehensive discussion, probing the imminent transformation in the outbound marketing landscape. With tightening restrictions on emails by giants like Google and Yahoo, we shed light on the subsequent downfall of sales automation tools. As leaders navigating the realm of B2B software and services, we arm you with insights and predictions essential for embracing the future of outbound marketing.

Think outbound sales is a breeze? Think again. It's time to unravel the challenges one step at a time and discuss conventional outreach tactics from emails to calls. But as we unmask these strategies, we also underline the importance of credibility and relationship-building, which often get lost in the rush for short-term gains. We examine the diminishing returns of relying solely on outbound tactics and warn against the temptation of over-dependence on automation tools. It's all about finding that perfect balance - complementing outbound strategies with a genuine intent to build relationships. 

Lastly, we journey through the crucial mindset shift needed in sales - moving from a focus on sales numbers to providing value. We delve into our experiences with CEO and CFO client relationships, where proactive and helpful outreach made all the difference. Remember, automation and AI are here to assist us, not replace the human touch in sales. Tune in as we underline the importance of delivering value to customers and prepare yourself for a radical shift in outbound marketing. 

Transcript

Gary Schwake: 0:05

Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B Software and Services companies, especially those with less than 50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support. Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now. You can even kick it off if you look.

Tiana Quiroga: 0:45

It's like nobody's really listening, but I should All right here we are here, we are.

Gary Schwake: 0:49

Just get us kicked off Tiana. Nobody's listening. Thank you.

Andy Monahan: 0:52

That's the name of the podcast. Nobody's listening anyway.

Tiana Quiroga: 0:59

I'm kidding. Maybe I'll add this to a blooper. It's right, his name is fine.

Andy Monahan: 1:04

in a movie called Major League there's a guy announcing the baseball game on the radio and he's watching the game and everything he goes. The post game show is brought to you by Christ. I can't find it. The hell with it. His friend goes. You can't say that, you can't say that on there. He goes. I don't know what he's listening, anyway he's like by that time too, he's very hey hey, Eddie slipped in his movie reference Brighten early.

Gary Schwake: 1:30

I love it.

Tiana Quiroga: 1:31

Yeah, this is the perfect way to start it, okay, okay. So, hello, welcome to this edition of the GTM Pro podcast. This is Tiana speaking, and I'm here with our hosts, andy and Gary, and today we're going to be talking about outbound will never be the same. So Gary came up with the topic and we just I just wanted to ask you what do you think of it? Why do you feel like album will never be the same? Where did you come up with the concept and where did have you seen anything around out there that's actually making you think this way, or what is it about it? Tell us.

Gary Schwake: 2:15

Yeah, I mean we've been feeling it for a while, but there's been a flurry of activity on LinkedIn here recently that really jumped out, one of which was it was, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago, maybe Alex Vaca and some posted this out, so I'll give a shout out to Alex. But he said is this the end for outreach and sales loft? And the idea was that Google and Yahoo, specifically, are really starting to throttle down the or perhaps put tighter parameters around the kinds of email messages that can be sent, recognizing that not to call out specifically outreach and sales loft, but sales automation tools were effectively getting around spam laws by using Google and Yahoo and Outlook and others to be sending these emails. And that and there's been related posts about the interestingly enough, the very success of these tools actually created their demise, and we call it. Actually Andrew Chen, who's now a partner, andreessen Horowitz, long time ago this is probably 10 years ago came up with a law that is called the law of I'll call, I'll say crappy, click throughs.

Gary Schwake: 3:42

He uses a different term for crap. That is something we see all the time, which is marketers, when we find something that works, really anybody in revenue, when we find something that works, will use it to the point that we destroy it because the recipient, the receiver, pop up ads. You know, those social media, whatever works at the time, will just absolutely destroy it. And that happened in droves and was probably accelerated by what happened during COVID, when a lot of these organizations that were using events to try to connect with people suddenly didn't have events to fall back on, and so everybody fired up their own version of an SDR. Combined with the time that we started to layer in automation and we made it really easy to just throw out a pile of crap out into the world.

Tiana Quiroga: 4:32

Do you think that happens because it's just the like over exposition that we get to these things every day that's making us people, as listeners or as receivers, tired of getting all these ads and these pop-ups like, do you think it's just the how much they push it into us and how much they put it out in our faces without being asked for it that gets us tired of it? Or what do you think?

Gary Schwake: 4:57

Yeah, I mean, it really is. Yeah, it's the foundation of the, that law, which is just that, that kind of like we used to call it banner blindness or pop-up blindness or whatever. When you see a banner ad on a on a webpage, you just literally don't even see it because you stop paying attention. Well, when you start getting generic, the same email message from 15 different companies in your inbox, you learn how to identify them very quickly, without any automation, and just ignore them. And so and so, to overcome that, as they, as as these messages and these calls and the various ways to outreach became less and less effective, we made up for it with more of it. We did more volume, which only accelerated the demise.

Andy Monahan: 5:49

So and then we got fancy about it, where we really started to use some automation and other tools like burn domains. So we, we, you know we'd use a different email account altogether to do this with, and you know it would be sort of like our own website, but it would have a little different suffix on the end and that would be our email address that we'd send all these things out with. And those are I think those also are at risk of getting popped by the email platforms as well. Pretty soon that's going to start closing down, just like the conversation with, you know, outreach and sales often so on.

Gary Schwake: 6:30

And even if it doesn't, people aren't reading these messages, right, they're not. They're not helpful. I love the way that and this. This is also consistent with the law. Jen Allen, new and forgive me, jen, if I mispronounced your last name, knuth so she's demand, jen, and she's an evangelist with lavender, which is also a AI sales automation company. But she said, if you gave your 10 year old kid nun chucks and they chased their little brother around the house with them relentlessly, you'd take the nun chucks away. That's pretty much what Google and Yahoo just did to sales and marketing. Right, you give, you give the kids a bunch of nun chucks and they go off crazy and they're starting to hurt people and, you know, do silly things, and so they're realizing.

Andy Monahan: 7:19

That's a great analogy, just in that they're, they're going to hurt themselves, right. So we also talk about, well, we have seen this right. So, also to baseline this, we're not this is not conjecture we are literally living this with clients where, you know, this has been a thing that they've done, this high volume outbound game and, to Gary's point, it's it's worked to some extent. But even doing some recent iterations of this and I mean there's one case, no names named here, but several thousand emails being sent, several thousand email addresses with multiple iterations of you know a cadence, right, and I think there was like one reply that was like even semi-warm, and you know. So we're just seeing this and and and the.

Andy Monahan: 8:10

You know the the notion of leads. Leads are, well, it's free, right, it's like it's really inexpensive, it's not free. So these leads, these leads are people you know you possibly want to have a relationship, you want them to be your customer for some reason, right, you've targeted them, they're, they're, they're, maybe even they're cultivated in some ways. So you start spanning them. That is an opportunity cost. They're going to start tuning you out. To Gary's point on the love blank click-throughs, they're going to start tuning you out and then to rebuild a relationship with them where you actually do start sharing things that are useful to them, because that's that's the goal in all this is be very precise. We'll get to this. You want to be very precise and you want to have something useful for them to consume. The antithesis of that is just go hard, outbound, cta oriented. You know the old here's my calendar link. You know you want to demo Like that's, that's burning that list and that is an opportunity cost. That's, that's a good relationship. You're possibly burning a bridge.

Tiana Quiroga: 9:24

Yeah, it's not only not free, it's. It's something that is costing your client. Every time they because, every time then they, they relate you to this idea of spamming messages that they get from you, so they don't really want to know more about you. It's something that you do generate this rejection idea in their minds, and whenever they they, you position yourself of some as someone that's constantly just trying to get something from them, when you're not necessarily telling them specifically. What can you offer them is just putting yourself in a position where you can actually tell them what you're good for.

Tiana Quiroga: 9:56

And so what do you think we can actually do about this, because that's something I really like that you I don't remember which are you said the other day but that everybody just killed outbound and that's why the tactics don't work work anymore. It's because people literally killed it by over using it and over exposing people to it. So so that means automations are probably just too much for people right now, and since they get it every day and it's overwhelming for people to receive it, how do you still, how can you be able, as a company, to Message yourself without these type of automations, without getting positioned like this in the customer's mind Like how can you change that and what would you really do about it?

Gary Schwake: 10:42

So the starting point Before we go there, because I do want to back up, actually, because, andy, something you said sparked a thought and then Getting to that, more than the mechanics of the specifics around it, which is the, the fact that we think that's sending emails is free Well, why did? Why did we get there in the first place? And if you, you know, take a step back and think about all the converging events that happened over the course of the last several years To bring us to this point. I think one of them is a couple of things one, the, the proliferation of software companies as a whole, the number of competitors in any specific niche, and, segment after segment, we've we have hyper segmented, down to the point where, from the buyer's perspective, it is really hard To understand what's going on. Like, who is what, what options do I really have? And it's arduous.

Gary Schwake: 11:46

And Then you combine that with the diminishing economic returns, ie the expense of how well paid ads have actually performed. Right, the platforms are economic animals. They are going to extract up until the, the equilibrium point, the, the inflection point, every dollar of economics out of it, and they'll keep doing. That's what happened. And so we we have a lot of noise, lot of competitors and we just want to get in front of our customers and shake them into like, hey, pay attention to me, pay attention to me. And so we turn to email and we send it by the time, and and calls and every other way we did that and to any, to your point it's. The opportunity cost there to me is is almost greater than the hard dollar cost associated with bad paid ads, because you're literally Training your future prospect or future customer to ignore you no, it's credibility, and and that doesn't show up in the P&L though.

Andy Monahan: 12:54

Right so like there's a there's like this lag out in the you know out in the world, where people it's starting to catch up In essence, where it's like, oh my, like what these people are paying attention. We have nowhere else to turn. That's a low-cost distribution avenue to get our, to get our you know our requests for demo out into the world. And and then suddenly you're left with like we have no credibility with, with prospects we actually care about, because we we actually have targeted these lists but now they're just not listening to us at all. We can't get them up, we can't get them home.

Andy Monahan: 13:26

The other side of.

Gary Schwake: 13:27

It's interesting is the, in a way, the false positive of it quote working like booking meetings, the predictability of it. I make X number of calls, I get a wide number of meetings. Those meetings turn into opportunities. Those opportunities turn into and some of them are really good. You're point about it working, but in a big way to me it's it's false positive because it we've established now that it's not repeatable and it prevented us from building the muscle of doing the harder, more permanent things associated with creating a relationship with the buyer universe. And this is all this you hear about content and dark social and you know so on and so forth. It seemed predictable for a while that and that was another.

Andy Monahan: 14:12

You know, just nail in the coffin where it's like okay and and you know you do it for a while and it's working and diminishes just like any like a direct reaction, diminishes just like any like a direct response channel.

Andy Monahan: 14:23

You know something, I know a bit about direct mail it's going to decrease every time and I think that's kind of what's happened. And to your point about you're gonna, you're gonna do it till it's like on the margin, you know zero NPV and and with something that appears free, that means zero, like it's literally not working anymore. And here's the here's the real issue with opportunity cost is it's on credibility. So everything we're saying about you know now they just ignore you, they they associate you with spam, right, and it's really hard to build that back, just like, you know, any relationship, it's really hard to get trust back. So if you, you know, if you start there, great and we'll get into like well, how do you, how do you generate credibility? But if you, if you start at a point where you're in a credibility deficit, it's, you know, it's just that much harder to dig out of that.

Gary Schwake: 15:20

Yep, yeah. And then to counter that, and you see this all the time, it's, I mean maybe not surprisingly, especially from hardened enterprise sales leaders who have relied on some form of outbound their entire career. They're not wrong, right, but the big difference is the From an enterprise perspective, speaking as a former enterprise salesperson myself, the kind of outbound that you would do was Relationship oriented, because I only have so many clients that that I know who the buyers are, the companies. In many cases I know who the people are, and now it just becomes a function of establishing a relationship so that I can earn the right to have a conversation with them, so I can be invited into the dialogue. And that kind of outbound is it's very much about bringing and adding value. Right, it is having insights and providing so much value that the recipient actually appreciates the outreach, because you're bringing something to them that makes them have a broader perspective, have more knowledge, whatever the case may be. And so If we take that mindset and bring it down to where most people play, or most organizations play, which is non-enterprise everything from you know smaller deals to all it Seven to ten to fifty, even a hundred thousand dollars there's more volume there, there's more outreach and and that has become a very transactional play. And now we're really, as we think about how you do this, tiana, to your question is we need to think more like Building a relationship.

Gary Schwake: 17:06

Now you asked about tools and automation and things like that. Here's one of my concerns, because we're gonna see this A person who will remain nameless A lot of respect for this individual. They are a senior executive at Another sales automation company that talks about the need for this, but we do a little bit of interview from a CEO. Then we pop that into chat GPT and ask for three top takeaways. Then we tell chat to be T to write a 100 word email with value prop relative to passing the interview, and we edit that to get it back down and then we send that out to tailored prospects every week, right? So so is there that tool? Absolutely? Can it help you? Certainly, but it just gets to again back to the point of. That probably works and will work for some period of time, but at some point it won't because we will succumb to the law. It'll get so easy for people to do this that the recipient will be able to see it coming and tune it out, and so it's like empathetic for these tactics, but we just have to be not saying that that's not something we shouldn't pursue because it will work for some period of time but, just like you said, andy, we will see diminishing returns on that. And so if you're betting the farm your revenue engine on that tactic, first of all it's potentially less scalable, but it really becomes a function of we as I guess.

Gary Schwake: 19:00

To your point, tiana, about how we think about this, is that what we see when we work, especially with lower middle market companies, is that there's so much focus on more, more, more, instead of how do we? We already have some degree of flow? How do we make sure that our system is humming on all cylinders and nothing's falling out once it comes into that system? And then how do we repeat that for durability? And the bias is always towards, well, if I just get more of it, then I'm better off. But yes, there is. We need to continue to expand our footprint, we need more people to know about us, but it's a series of things that compound over time. There's no one tactic that is the silver bullet.

Andy Monahan: 19:54

It's also where it's tempting and I don't want to go off topic, but it's also tempting to experiment outside your ideal customer profile arena. Right, Because you, well, I've exhausted this base, like you know. I've exhausted these leads and so I need to find more, and so you're starting to think about well, maybe I can go up market and that brings in totally different topic that we'll talk about another time. But, like a whole other world of now, you're talking about a completely different market, a completely different business model, a completely different set of competitors, alternatives and so on, and it's just then. It's a real mess because you're not even serving that market very well with what you do. So what's the answer? You need to get better at speaking to those you serve best.

Tiana Quiroga: 20:51

Yeah, and in a way, that's how you would really approach it, in order for people not to associate you with spam, like just get better at actually communicating what you're saying and what would be good for them, instead of what you actually want to sell.

Andy Monahan: 21:06

You know them, you want to prove you know them well, especially in the context of, obviously, what you do as a company and so on. Like, you get them and they you know. That's where the credibility starts. That is a good point.

Tiana Quiroga: 21:19

To Gary's point also, this year's like falls. If you generate like, if you only focus on growing and growing on, as Gary said, more and more and more, and then you generate like in order to do so, then you force your teams into creating all of these false positives, which were this year's goal, but they're going to be next year's starting point. How do how does that even become sustainable? At a point is just all going to crumble up down because the foundations are not strong enough to sustain everything that's going to happen afterwards.

Gary Schwake: 21:55

Yeah, that's a great point, that's a good, also a good pivot for, you know, as we think about 2024 planning, as we sit here in December of 23. And, andy, you bring up a good point which is another, another version of more volume is different segments, different client types. What have you right? Same same idea as looking through the mechanics, and one of the surprising things is that, in as we have worked with a number of clients as they prepare their plans for review by the private equity board, is that there is still in these plans today Some number of well, we're going to do outbound and we're going to do this time we're going to do it differently and the the so to your point about the rickety nature of someone's plan is something that hasn't worked before. But we're going to do it differently and expect it to turn out differently. I would be a little concerned.

Andy Monahan: 23:01

Somebody once said, said something about that definition of insanity, or doing.

Gary Schwake: 23:07

doing doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Yeah, so so that that, I think, is the P again Important here. This is not saying that don't do outbound. That is not the point, and we'll get to ways that we've actually already started to incorporate some of that here. But as we think about 2024 planning, the the knee jerk reaction is that we need to get in front of our customers. We know who they are. We have this particular target segment in in any way. We've seen this about expanding out of it. Almost never have we ever seen a company that has exhausted its sellable, addressable market. No, never, right, there's a fraction of what's available to them.

Andy Monahan: 24:01

The grass just typically looks greener again because things get harder. Yeah, always going to.

Tiana Quiroga: 24:08

Did you think they just don't know where to find? Like, do you think they just don't know where to find? Why do they believe that they've exhausted their market?

Gary Schwake: 24:18

I think, like Annie says, it just gets harder and, frankly, there's more and more competition you start to bump into. New competitors are always coming in offering something similar at a lower price, so you start to get nibble that from the bottom. You have some success. So companies that work with larger companies excuse me, companies that have been in the space longer you know the legacy competitors are now starting to explore you as an option and you start to realize your product gaps or what have you, so you start to bump up against that. So it feels like that you are running out of room in your swim lane. The reality is that, as every day that goes by, you need to be more and more clear about whom you serve and why you serve them, and constantly be looking for ways to make that happen. To message that Now it doesn't mean that there absolutely is a place where you need to move into a different segment or begin to push up market to be able to capture some of those things or lower your price or completely different strategy.

Gary Schwake: 25:37

Yeah, you know more of a but, but you can't do those things in isolation. It's all part of a system, right? And so the? As we get back to the topic of the 2024 plan with outbound, it is to your point you said it well which is this year's goal? If it's, if it's, if you achieved it on the basis of a tactic that it has diminishing returns, you aren't going to make up for it next year in volume, right? So it's the whole just became the chasm that you need to fill became even bigger.

Tiana Quiroga: 26:17

Yeah, so how do you insert like OK, so let's, let's put myself in a position of like well, we should think of all the departments, like available and doing the outbound. How do you think of, how should you act from it from a marketing point of view and how should you act from a sales point of view? And if I, if you were the CEO, what different in order to not follow the same strategy? That is being going out about lately.

Gary Schwake: 26:50

Well, I think. So let's talk about what. What we said, that outbound is still a thing, but what? What do we think it looks like? I mean, what are we? What are we working on there? And, andy, you've you've been spending some time on this, so absolutely what have you?

Andy Monahan: 27:03

found. Well, the backdrop for me and you know I say this occasionally right which is we gotta think about everything working backwards, from a customer's moment of value, working with you and your product, that's. That's actually the, the, the place you're selling, you're not selling, you're not selling a, a demo, you're selling them getting to a moment of value further down the line. That's a bit of a mind, a mindset shift for some folks, especially in sales, not to pick on them but like I'm trying to. You know, I'm trying to get deals right and I'm trying to throw them over the fence to my customer's support and and they'll figure it out right. That's when we're talking about a system we've gotta get. We've gotta get away from that a little bit and really be thinking about the moment of value and not only bringing it up into sales but bringing it up into marketing, bringing it up into our content and our collateral we're sharing again to gain credibility. But on, we talk about, talk about different types of marketing. We talk about problem marketing and product marketing, in the intersection of those being very important. Problem marketing is I am describing a situation in the world that my ICP really cares about and and and I'm explaining how they can solve some of these problems that they have out in the world, right. So that's that's kind of problem, marketing. And when we, when we do outbound, we need to be thinking about those things. We need to be thinking about how we're, how we're helping our constituency, and really key things that go with that are targeting.

Andy Monahan: 28:50

I know them. I know them not, not just like here's like personalization with an outbound email where I insert their name in there in their company's name. That's not knowing them. Knowing them is I've done a bit of homework. I know how long you've been in your role. I know what you do, I know what your company does. I know I know what, who your customers are. I know what you care about, maybe even a bit based on the posts you like on LinkedIn, the posts you post on LinkedIn, things you share, things you talk about, like I know you right, that's number one.

Andy Monahan: 29:27

Number two, that goes all along with just really good, let's say, firm of graphic targeting is what's going on with you. There's a couple parts of that. One is what are the signals that that are out in the world, that that suggests something's changing with your company, something's changing with a dynamic in your industry or so on. And then there's actually buying intent signals, which are I am, you know, we. There's tools out there that do some of these things right. Or you're coming to me, you're visiting many pages on my website and I can see that again, different ways of doing that, but I can see that there's like there's intent there and when you triangulate those things, you can outreach to someone very thoughtfully and it takes work.

Andy Monahan: 30:20

That's the other piece of all this is it's not automate. Not, you can automate to a certain point, but at some point you have to. You have to take over and do the hard work and care about this constituent and when you do that well, it will resonate. That is where credibility comes in. That is where they're going to say you know what they do, know me, they care about this problem I have, they've researched. Clearly, you don't have to be perfect, like you don't have to. You know you don't have to go crazy, but you have to, you know care, and you can't do that at incredible scale. That's got. That, by definition, has to come down to a certain, you know smaller amount. I say you got to, you know slow down, to go faster.

Gary Schwake: 31:04

Yeah, and so that you a couple things that resonate there, andy. One is obviously buyer led growth. It is reverse engineering. Stop thinking about the tactic and start thinking about where is your buyer in their process. Have empathy with the problem hence the problem marketer and determine how can I help them prove value, to make it tangible.

Gary Schwake: 31:33

You know, as you're describing that, I'm thinking back to my days when I had CEO and CFO clients and I had, you know, less than a hundred fifty, maybe seventy five, because it was really big dollar stuff and the the way that we would work together as a team and you covered a particular industry. So a research report would come out or news or a conversation that you may have had, and you would immediately think, because you knew the customer so well, or the prospect well, what was on their mind and what they were thinking about. You would proactively outreach and say, hey, I know you're struggling with this thing and here's something that came across my desk, here's how our team is thinking about it, here's the implications for your business and thought you would find this of interest. No, ask, no, book a meeting, no, just I want to be helpful to you. And if we think about now, how do we replicate that same kind of thinking and and value add when somebody has many more than fifty to seventy five customers? And I think that's where some of the tools can come in. But the minute we flip from I heard a podcast this morning from github that developed co-pilot eight, that AI tool for developers said notice, it's not pilot, it's not doing it for you, it's an assistant, it's a research tool, it's it's a helpful assistant to you.

Gary Schwake: 33:10

I think, if we think of all of these automation and AI tools as that, but at the core we still need to deliver value that the recipient believes is custom developed for them and and helpful, that in a lot of ways it moves from being a sales channel to a marketing channel. You know, because the minute I ask to book a meeting, I am not helping you, I'm helping me. I don't want to book a meeting. If I want to book a meeting, I will let you know. I I got your email, I will reply. Like I know where to find you. You don't have to ask me to book a meeting, but if you can, there is very real value in helping me up through the clutter of the web to put into my inbox something that will help me as I think about my, my job or my role. It's really understanding your customers.

Andy Monahan: 34:05

So again you've you reverse engineer moment of value from someone in a specific situation in a specific industry and so on, and you've seen that more than once in your customer base. You could reverse engineer that and say you know what this person looks like so and so in my customer base, and I'm going to explain this situation. You're kind of selling there, but it's very contextual, it's very specific and you're putting a stake in the ground. That's the other thing too. This is uncomfortably specific. We like to say that too. Right, you are putting a stake in the ground and say you know what, I might be wrong here, because I'm being pretty damn specific, but if I, if I do it right and that is their problem it's going to really click yeah, yeah.

Gary Schwake: 34:53

So let's land this plane here a little bit. So if we're now thinking we're sitting in this chair, we're at a you know company with less than $50 million in revenue, so we don't have an SDR team of 50 people. How should we be planning and thinking about building outbound as part of this motion? Like, what are the? What are the key pieces that we need to think about? Where does it live in the organization? How should we be doing that?

Andy Monahan: 35:23

It's a good one. I mean, listen where it lives in the organization is very contextual, right. Like we talk about. Is that marketing or sales as a starting point?

Gary Schwake: 35:35

Yeah.

Andy Monahan: 35:36

Call it the SDR function, but I think it starts with how big your customers are, how many prospects you should have, and so on. So there's kind of a starting point for the basis of this for what a scale look like. Right, Because if you start with a pilot, which is somebody doing this all manually, who does that right? Is it an SDR, Is it an AHE, With a list of like these are my top- With a co-pilot.

Gary Schwake: 36:11

These are my top-covered accounts.

Andy Monahan: 36:13

Right, I know who I need to go after. To your point about working and banking, you know who you need to talk to. Or is it a thousand? Is it a couple thousand? And that will dictate the process, the tools that can facilitate that, which is like you want to take something that's very organic, very one-to-one, and try to scale aspects of that to make it more efficient.

Gary Schwake: 36:40

So you, that's a good I mean fantastic point, right, if you're not already doing this today and some folks are indeed still have we've seen a lot of the SDR teams shrink in size significantly because of the lack of productivity, but they're still out there. And the other thing, we see this conflated with quote-unquote ABM, which is a topic for another day.

Gary Schwake: 37:09

I think that word yeah, but is there is no need to go out and buy a bunch of technology to go do this right? I think one of the things that we are actively working on right now is are there signals that you have available to you today Close lost deals, demos that never happened. You know people that have been a power consumers of content but have never engaged, have joined, whatever. Whatever those signals are where you could now design, if you were the buyer, what information, what topics relative to your product are chewing you up right now, thinking about 2024, and you're actively thinking about how to solve for it where you can proactively put in front of them things that are helpful. And so that's why I say I think the design of the experience absolutely involves marketing, but at the same time, it has the customization of a one-to-one kind of thought process that sales would have.

Gary Schwake: 38:23

And start there to your point. It doesn't have to scale Can you get that to move the needle? And it doesn't have to be a tonnage game For a lot of companies. If you think about another five, 10 opportunities created a month from this pool, that's significant. That moves the needle, will you?

Andy Monahan: 38:44

bring up a great point in very current real-life situation with a particular client which is working from the middle out, and in this case it is exactly that looking at closed, lost deals, looking at former customers, looking at demos that never ended up consummating a meeting, and going back to those lists and just reaching out to them in a new way, in a very thoughtful, personal way, like hey, and in this case, having something new to convey a bigger view of the world as it pertains to this particular product in a particular use case, having something a little bit different to say, is a great place to start, like that's not reinventing the wheel at all.

Andy Monahan: 39:34

That's somebody who's shown interest in you and, better yet, if they are coming back and in this case we can see they're coming back to the website, they're coming back. Looking at multiple pages, looking at a blog post, looking at a newsletter, we can see all that. That's signal. Why wouldn't we start there and get real personal, do our homework, do our research, know who they are, have a point of view on their use case, as this all pertains to a problem not asking for a demo right Some of them already have done that and being thoughtful about it, that's really, at the end of the day, being thoughtful and then worrying about scale after that's kind of the whole startup game right.

Andy Monahan: 40:20

Do things that don't scale and then worry about scaling them later right.

Tiana Quiroga: 40:24

Yeah, so it's a lot about what you say and not how many times you say it. More sort of thing like what's the messaging behind everything? What are you really trying to say, what are you really trying to express to your customer? And that's how they associate you with something that will eventually help them and not necessarily just basically, well, not stalk them.

Gary Schwake: 40:49

But yeah, it is kind of playing the long game.

Gary Schwake: 40:52

I mean, I'm empathetic that this all sounds great in theory, but I still have a revenue goal to hit right.

Gary Schwake: 40:57

But I think that it's so easy to pre-disqualify something because you immediately see that it's not efficient, so we don't even try it. And I guess what we're saying is, as you think about your revenue plan back to Andy's point of thinking from the middle out look at the places where the buyer is getting stuck and unstick those places and you may not need any new volume at all and it can be little. Leaning into those points of leverage and making some fairly modest changes that can have some pretty big impacts. And, as it relates to outbound, this can be one of those where, yes, it may look inefficient to start, but can we learn something very quickly within a quarter that we find ways to expand once we've validated that it works. But don't waste that time buying new tools, bringing new stuff in. Try to use what you have and think about it more holistically from the enabling the buyer to buy versus I need 50 meetings to come down to one opportunity, to come down to 25% win rate.

Andy Monahan: 42:21

Well, I think that that equation is even out the window, right Like. I think the issue is being forced there. So why not? I mean basically it's. Should I even do outbound at this point? For a lot of people, for a lot of companies, that's what they're grappling with Is this even worth doing at all? And then you juxtapose that against, quite frankly, the unprint you're planning right now and you have a bunch of things to your point, gary, about, like I just did the math and I need my conversion rate at this point in this funnel to double, to make my numbers next year. It's not going to happen. But even with things like pay or SEO or sales having a really good month and pulling a rabbit out of the hat, none of that's predictable as it stands anyway. So all we're saying here is without bound. Why not do some of this foundational work to see if you can make it more predictable and more sustainable? I think is another way to think about it.

Gary Schwake: 43:24

Yep, all right. Well, we have probably belabored this point that we go on for days on this, but we'll find some of that. I know we're going to go through and link some of the references to articles and laws and things like that for your reading pleasure, so you can jump in deeper if you want. Another thing to consider, too, is in I don't know 10 days or so, we are going to be doing a deep dive. Next week, actually, we'll be sending out a deep dive and then the following week we'll actually be going to more detail on that and some of these topics will be discussed there as well. So I encourage you to go to GTMPROCO to check it out and appreciate your sharing your day with us.

Tiana Quiroga: 44:11

Yeah Well, just for context, deep dives are for. Well, it's the first episode. So whoever here for the first time, just our monthly newsletter where we go deeper, and all of the subject that we will be talking around the month, and also that will come out on December 7, and then we will have a GTM workshop that will go even deeper on that, which you can join live if you want. So we'll leave the link to it somewhere around here and, yeah well, thank you for joining us. Thank you, gary and Andy, for being here, for explaining everything so clearly. I feel a little smarter, honestly, so vision accomplished.

Gary Schwake: 44:59

All right, thanks everybody. Thank you Bye. Thank you for tuning in to GTMPRO, where you become the pro. We're here to foster your growth as revenue leader, offering insights you need to thrive. For further guidance, visit GTMPROCO and continue your path to becoming board ready with us. Share this journey, subscribe, engage and elevate your go to market skills. Until next time, go be a pro.