Is outbound 3x harder now?
Is outbound 3x harder now?
Or are we just worse at cold calling?
👋 Hey, Toni from Growblocks here! Welcome to another Revenue Letter! Every week, I share cases, personal stories and frameworks for GTM leaders and RevOps.
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What works really great on Linkedin these days: “Outbound as dead”
And I wanted to take a minute and remind everyone that Outbound very, very much works.
And just because some folks on Linkedin are successful in getting engagement with this topic, it doesn’t mean they are actually right about it.
So, where is this noise even coming from? Well…
There is some trouble for outbound:
Sales are a whole lot harder in 2024. Winrates are down 18%, Sales cycles are up 16% and deal values are down 21%.
It used to take 200-400 touches per opp generated by cold outbound. Now that number sits at 1000-1400.
Predicting your pipeline has gotten a lot harder. 57% of companies missed their pipeline targets last year.
TLDR: Outbound now requires more work for the same results.
But it still works for those that are doing it right.
Not a single player north of 40 million in ARR achieved that level without over 50% of pipeline coming from outbound.
So if you want to keep growing, you’re not even going to think about dropping the motion.
But with that said, what’s actually going on with outbound?
Why are we struggling?
One way to think about what is happening is using the Fogg Behavior Model.
Simply put, it’s a way to explain human behavior.
In order to change a behavior (get more people to react to our outbound) we need to work on a combination of motivation, ability and triggers.
Motivation are the drivers that motivate a prospect to take action (react to our outreach).
Ability are the drivers that helps a prospect to take action easily. Try and remove as much friction from the process as possible.
And triggers are a cue that initiates the behavior - our outbound call/email/ping.
To keep it simple, let’s say you want to sell more ice cream.
When the weather gets warmer, our customers want to buy more (motivation).
Or we lower the price, making it easier for them to buy (ability).
When it comes to outbound software sales, we’re seeing the opposite happen.
Layoffs are ongoing and Finance is cutting tool budgets (motivation).
With less VC money going around, software prices feel more expensive (ability).
The problem?
Since all of these factors interact, you will see massive (3x) drop-offs in success rate, even with small changes.
What should you do about it?
And this is where the neat model breaks.
You could now simply say, you know what? We will simply wait.
Wait until VC money flows easily again and folks are happy to buy.
But 1) this might not happen at all and 2) this might be too late for most of us.
So what can you do?
As a seller, you need to realize that the prospect’s ability and motivation to buy are out of your control. You can’t get them more funding. You can’t stop those layoffs.
What is in your control is the trigger.
And there is one suuuper simple problem with the triggers you send today.
They don't work. Those emails aren’t getting opened, and even if they do, no one takes action.
The triggers don’t actually land.
That is the problem.
You need to go back to the fundamentals to fix your outbound.
Whom do you target
What do you want to say
How are you going to say it
Getting better here would have worked 5 years ago too, but it simply wasn’t necessary. The math worked.
Now that the math doesn’t work anymore, those 3 things are the things you need to change and improve to make the math work again.
An example of what doesn't work anymore:
Anyone above 250 employees
[First Name], I also went to [University], you should buy my product.
Cold Email & Calls
If the above is your playbook today, you won’t be successful.
Focus on the quality & approach of the trigger for the audience.
If you nail this, you will get reply rates up, you will get back to 10-12 meetings, and you will get the math to work again.
Are you mainly relying on sales forecasts to predict revenue? They’re great… but they’re only going to show you open NewBiz opportunities this quarter. What about the rest of your bowtie?
Growblocks lets you predict performance based on revenue drivers such as leads, hires, and planned initiatives - using our GTM data model, so you can predict where you’ll end, no matter the timeframe.
On The Podcast This Week
Mikkel and I share the 4 biggest outbound mistakes we’ve seen
- joins us to talk about how RevOps is broken and how to fix it
