I wrote about outbound in the past years already a few times.
Today, what I see around tells me we need an update.
We are probably living one of the best and worst moments for people who make a living by reaching out.
But, let’s go in order.
The most significant shift is evident.
AI. Clay. n8n. And all their friends.
Despite what many say, they all sit in the same bucket.
Personalisation at scale.
And no, they do not really personalise.
They scrape a signal, sometimes relevant. Often not.
They drop it into a sequence and that same sequence hits 10,000 people.
That's it.
On the other side, LinkedIn usage keeps rising.
As an ex-LinkedIn seller who sold Sales Navigator for four years and trained thousands of salespeople on “social selling”, I can say this clearly.
What I see today has little to do with what we taught.
Random connection requests, no context, accepted. Immediate pitch.
If email at scale is bad, this is worse.
I did it once.
Got called out by the prospect.
Deserved it. 😅
Outbound today is a challenge between relevancy and scale.
If your SOM (serviceable obtainable market) is big enough, a dual approach can work.
On one side:
On the other:
On top of that, you equip your sales team properly.
Sales Navigator.
The golden rule of social selling still works.
It just requires effort. Which means:
One to one and relevant.
Do this consistently for a month, and 20% of colds to interest is realistic conversion.
Now let’s talk about “we need to scale”.
Scaling usually looks like this:
The question we should ask before setting this up is:
Selling a 1 or 2K ACV product to restaurants, lawyers, or accountants?
Testing scale might make sense.
Selling a 25K finance platform to CFOs in large companies?
You already know the answer. (see above)
Outbound is tough.
Budgets exist - we are not in a budget contraction, the opposite, companies are looking to innovate, to digitalise.
But inboxes are flooded.
A wave of GTM engineers appeared overnight. Most have little sales background. Reinvented...
All sending mass campaigns.
They justify 0.5% conversion rates.
Two years ago, we had 3%. Four years ago, 5% was common.
Cold calling remains the only at-scale outreach that still works.
3 to 5% cold to interested.
Sometimes, 10% dial the first contact.
30 to 50 dials per day.
Simple scripts, time blocked, cold calling sessions with your team.
Effective.
I am scared.
More people enter sales without scars, without expertise or relevant background.
The algorythm is pushing them, so we are surrounded.
They share numbers without foundations.
And LinkedIn becomes harder (and cringer) to read every day.
But I am also excited.
AI, automation, and enrichment are powerful.
In the hands of teams that care about relevancy.
If you build on relevance first, you can finally do more with less.
And outbound - hopefully - becomes human again but with more power in our hands and less time spent.
Thanks for reading this far. See you all next week.
