A few thoughts about Outbound Sales in 2023

Very happy to share our second article after we published the first one almost 2 years ago. First, we wanted to say a big thanks to all the people who interacted with the first article (10k+ views and 350+ signups on Substack). To be honest, we have been very surprised about the engagement, all the feedback we got, and the people we met thanks to this piece of content 🙏🏼

Since then, we had the chance to join new adventures, Maki People for Louis (HR tech, 20 employees, post-seed) and Pigment for Edouard (Fintech, 270 employees, post-Series C), and continue learning about Growth, Outbound, and Sales in B2B SaaS companies.

With the current economic situation, new technologies, the highly competitive environment… the Outbound game obviously evolved since 2021 and to drive results and be successful, you need more than ever to combine several ingredients:

• the right technical and operational setup: sourcing & enrichment tools, deliverability, tracking, GDPR, team alignment, AI…
• understand your prospects and the buying journey: the different channels, develop strong business acumen, customer intelligence, market trends…
• take into account prospect’s and stakeholder psychological bias: FOMO, peer recognition, Sales Rep's “fear”/”rejection”, etc.

We’ll share below a few thoughts and learnings from our current experiences and what we’ve seen by talking with peers:

1. A more and more complex buying journey that requires more relevant & consistent messaging across channels
2. The importance of being proactive and creative in a tough and competitive market

1. A more and more complex buying journey that requires more relevant & consistent messaging across channels and teams

The power of multi-channel

We all know that the buying journey is complicated. It can start with a cold email, then the prospect can visit your website, go to G2 check your customer reviews and competitors’ ones, attend a webinar, etc.

All external insights, marketing engagements, and Sales activities are displayed on the account timeline in Salesforce #Allbound

We often see a lack of alignment, communication, and even some competition between channels (i.e. Outbound vs Inbound) and teams (Growth, Business Development vs Marketing). Whereas it’s so important to take into account all those components and get a consistent message through all the different channels your prospects can be in front of.

To answer this challenge, all the “Top-of-Funnel” teams need to sit down together, align on goals, segments they want to address, and build the right Ops processes.

At Pigment, we want to make sure that all the data and events (1st and 3rd party) captured by the Growth and Marketing teams are visible and actionable in the tools used by the Sales team. This is why we automatically push everything into Salesforce in two custom objects:

• Insights = external signals showing that a company is more likely to buy (for the best ones) or simply a way to improve outreach personalization by finding custom hooks/personalized icebreakers. It includes job postings, G2 and Website visits, Followers of our LinkedIn company page, previous Pigment users…
• Engagements = events/signals related to Marketing activities. It includes Demo Request Submission, Webinar Registration, Gated Content Download…

We also push all these events in the dedicated Slack channel we create for each opportunity we have with a prospect company. The goal is to align internal stakeholders in one place and make the information visible to the people who don’t have access or don’t go in Salesforce on a daily basis :

Industry-Based-Targeting

Industry-based targeting will help focus your growth strategy in which Growth, Marketing, and Sales collaborate closely to create personalized buying experiences targeting the same set of accounts.

At Maki People, we put in place an industry-based strategy to target top Enterprise accounts. Below, is an example of assets created to target Consulting firms. The idea is to align cold outreach and the content we created to educate our prospects.

The channels used:

• Cold outreach (email + LinkedIn)
• Product screenshots focusing on the use case
• Webinar
• PR
• Exclusive lunch with C-level

screenshots of content sent by Maki People to target Consulting firms

PS: we often saw BDRs don’t use the content created by the Marketing - it’s too bad! And at the opposite, Marketing teams don’t leverage enough Outbound to distribute the content to the right prospects.

The beauty of Outbound, as we like to say, is to have full control of who you target and to be proactive.

P.S. You can also have a look at the following article written by Maxence (Co-founder @ Cargo) about ABX.

Outbound takes time (even with the help of Intent data 😅), be patient and focus

There is more and more content about Intent data (i.e. triggers) and we talked about it in our previous article. Whereas it’s easier to use Intents with all the new tools on the market (Lonescale, Datachimp…) - we see many companies struggling to really show the impact and enable the Sales team to use it in a good way.

We see 3 main challenges (i) how you educate your Sales team on the importance of signals, (ii) how the data is pushed to the Sales team so they can easily use it, and (iii) how you leverage the data in your messaging/copywriting.

To answer those challenges, here are some examples of actions we put in place:

1. enablement: ownership of the Sales managers to allocate the accounts with Intents to their team
2. visibility: slack channels + custom object in Salesforce (cf screenshot in the section above) and Sales engagement tool (Salesloft, Outreach…)
3. engage: copywriting workshop, properties in your Sales engagement tool, and ready-to-use email templates/sequences

Something we both didn’t do enough in the past is to experiment more on the outreach part (copywriting, sequence steps, etc).

At Maki People, we don’t have for the moment the chance to have BDRs but that’s an opportunity to go further in the funnel and experiment a lot on the messaging part.

At Pigment, we recently decided that the BDR team will focus on the upper segments of our market (companies with > 1000 FTEs) and that the Growth team will now own the segment 500-1000 FTEs by implementing a fully automated outreach engine (by the way, Pigment’s Growth Team is hiring to work on this ambitious project).

An automated outreach engine (requiring data collection/transformation/ segmentation), combined with high creativity and copywriting skills, will allow you to strengthen and multiply your distribution efforts. This is beneficial for both sales prospecting and marketing initiatives like pre-event acquisition and content distribution, all while reducing Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC).

And when we talk about Intents, timing is of course key. That's why we've introduced a new CRM status at Maki People called 'Interested' at the contact level. This helps us better track positive engagements that could lead to meetings. Below is a concrete example:

1. A decision maker from a target account said that they’re hiring someone to manage what we offer
2. Two months after we identified this person thanks to the “New Hire” Intent
3. Meeting booked ✌🏻

2. The importance of being proactive and creative in a tough and competitive market

Outbound is even more complicated for two main reasons:

• the current economic environment and some companies freezing budgets
• the competition increases as it becomes easier to outreach people with the new great tools available on the market, AI and more companies double down on the Outbound motion as they have to adopt a more proactive and “aggressive” approach in this new environment

As a result, buyers are more than ever solicited. So, to drive results, you need to stand out even more than before!

Step back and proactivity

I think the first step is to realize these changes and understand what evolved for your prospects. Ask yourself these basic questions: are they still growing? do they still have the budget for your type of solution? what are their new priorities? For instance, if you sell a marketing software to manage ad spending, you should check on the platforms if they’re still investing in paid ads or if you sell an HRIS tool, it might not be the right timing if your prospect just announced a laid-off or hiring freeze. These changes are not an end in themselves and the idea is not to feel demotivated, but rather to adapt, talk with your team, and be able to try new things, change your ICP, your approach/message, and being even more creative.

Our advice when you work on a new strategy is to do things that don’t scale - start small, iterate, and be agile! Talking about agility, if you don’t have the internal resources (people, skills, or tooling) to launch or double down your Outbound engine, consider asking for external help could also be a good option (👋🏻 you can have a look at the agency Scalability or Growth freelancers - don’t hesitate to ping us if you want introductions).

Show, Don't Tell: Adopt a PLG "Attitude" in Your Outbound Motion

You have probably heard about the term PLG (Product Lead Growth) which has been very trendy in recent years and that we often contrast it with Outbound and Sales Lead motion.

In a classic (and old school 🤔) Sales motion, it’s only after a few meetings that the prospect has a chance to get an overview (or even just an idea!) of the product they are evaluating. If PLG has been a proven acquisition channel for many successful SaaS companies such as Figma, Slack, and Calendly, it’s because buying habits have changed and more and more users want to try before buying.

At Maki People and Pigment, we see great success by adding product screenshots in cold emails. If you’re creating a new category or replacing a legacy tool, it’s a great way to show how you differentiate and to make it easier to understand your value proposition for your prospects. And since both of our companies operate in competitive markets - the design and UX of the product are key differentiators in our cases, our main competitors are legacy players. As a bonus, if you’re able to personalize your visual assets based on use cases or prospect information like the logo, company name… you will stand out and show the extra mile!

Here is an example of a follow-up email that includes a personalized mockup that we could send to a prospect:

example of GIF we use at Maki People when targeting Luxury brands

And an example of a real answer from a prospect after he received the mockup:

example of GIF we use at Maki People when targeting Luxury brands

At Maki People - when looking at our best sequences and the content that drives more positive replies and meetings, we found that the following type of GIF that we used in a “bump email“ was a key asset (we personalized it based on the industry or a use case to be relevant):

example of GIF we use at Maki People when targeting Luxury brands

Adopt a warrior mindset: focus on activities and launch new campaigns every week!

Sales is a numbers game. If you also have the chance to have a huge market to address - you shouldn’t be shy and have no excuses to send a high volume of emails (in a smart way of course). As Louis told one day to one of his interns (👋🏻 Marc Desazars) - we should not leave the office without reaching the email limit of all of the email addresses we use for automated outreach (you got the idea - it’s a mindset to have). Imagine your main competitor sends 500 emails/week and you 1000 emails/week - the difference at the end of the year in terms of results can be huge!

Recycling and combining your audiences could also be very powerful for reaching your objectives. That’s why it’s important to think long-term and create the right properties when importing data into your CRM or prospecting database. The more data you have, the easier it will be to create narrow audiences, resulting in more relevant messaging.

Example of an email (with the variables) from a campaign that combines two audiences previously launched:

Examples of data points from Maki People that ease building audiences directly from their CRM (Hubspot):

Be creative and always think about new ideas. Look at all new meetings booked, opportunities, customers, growth content shared on LinkedIn, news from your industry, past sequences analytics, etc…

Creativity and your capacity to try new things are a big competitive advantage!

PS: Pigment is hiring in Growth, Sales, and Marketing in EMEA and North America - you can check out the open positions here!

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