CEO @ Retention.com & RB2B | Person-Level Website Visitor Identity | Push LinkedIn Profiles to Slack in Real-Time, 100% Free!
Sales KILLED sales. Don't take my word for it. That's what Kevin "KD" Dorsey told me. The way we do outbound makes it 10x harder on all of us to do outbound. Here are real #'s KD saw on the frontlines: Connect Rates: 2020: 12-17% Today: 3-4% Open Rates: 2020: 50-60% Today: 25-30% Response Rates to a sequence (emails 1-4): 2020: 10% -> 8% -> 6% -> 4% Today: 5% -> 4% -> 3% -> 1% I'm sure you're thinking: "Adam, of course outbound is harder now. There is SO MUCH more of it." True, but... The more we do the worse we also seem to get at it! That's not how it should work. Personalized emails objectively perform better. Yet 93% of emails sent today are automated. Why? Because companies are addicted to speed and scale. They've forgotten what “good” looks like. Here's how we fight back: We have to create messaging that is so good that it survives in a low engagement environment. What does that mean? We need to start building our outbound machines based on inbound signals. Here's a few suggestions from KD: 1. Huddle with marketing. - What are our highest performing headlines? >> make subject lines of emails - What are our best performing content pieces? >> lead with value - What are our best short/long tail keywords? >> speak to problems 2. Start with email - Start with your highest ACV/lowest churn/stickiest buyer persona - Create persona and industry-specific messaging - Make the messaging problem-based - Drive inbound w/ outbound activity 3. Stack calls on top of email engagement. - Every vertical has a different pickup rate w/ calls. - Use what you learned in email to formulate the call scripts. - If your email inboxed, the iPhone MIGHT add your name to callerID (big win) 4. Iterate - Forever - Never stop - Keep testing TAKEAWAY: If you’re selling on the frontlines (or running a team of sellers), you know outbound is harder than it used to be. That doesn’t mean it’s not the SINGLE BEST WAY to scale your startup. But the engagement rates from 2015-2021 aren't coming back. We must fight back against endless sequences and mindless automation. We have to create better, personalized messaging. We have build a better, more efficient, signal-based machine. It’s time to sell better.
It's wild and again only going to continue to get harder. For every agency cranking out 100k emails a month, and every AI automated touche point, and all that, it will continue to get more and more challenging. Once we find something that 'works' in sales, then it becomes about 'scale' which then very quickly makes that thing even harder to continue to do. It's getting wild out here Adam Robinson
Agree with some points but want to add more... First, its not just that there are more emails, spam filters have become better (such as filtering out emails with links). If you're an account sending lots of automatic emails, many won't even go in the inbox. Second, everyone is saying we need hyper-personalization. That takes a lot of time and you will be sending less emails overall. So while you may increase the chance of getting your email read, the chance of emailing a customer who is in the market for a solution that you are providing decreases. That does not seem like the right solution either. Third, I have heard dozens of competing strategies. Everyone is trying something different. Messaging people who are a little warm with extremely clear language about what problem you solve (and the proof) makes sense to me ... and doing it in a way that keeps your brand top of mind for when they are in the market to buy.
The low barrier to entry in outbound sales has caused the average quality of cold emails and cold outreach in general to plummet. This means the average response rate is much lower, but that's not because cold outreach doesn't work anymore, but because the average person doing it sucks.
Kenny Madden
1w
Jason Saltzman of Live Data Technologies did some amazing analysis for me Adam Robinson Kevin "KD" Dorsey A couple of things: The original SDR type position was nothing like the role it is today Oh my the SDR role was not invented in 2011 :) Look at 2010/2011/2012. This is when the salesforce assembly line "predictable revenue" book was released and through no fault of the authors. The book got completely miss-understood/misused. Essentially a philosophy of 1000 e mails/calls/dials =1 sale, therefore 2000 emails/dials = 2 sales. Startups, VC backed, Private Equity playbooks " Copied" it and said to all their portfolio companies do this. Of course the Executives think all these VC's walk on water so they just did what they said. circa 2011 - 2015 slowly starts to break down. These same folks and companies get confused and the answer is do more.( brute force) 2015 -2023 Make it up in volume and proliferation of easy button send 1000 "personalized at spam" e mails finally starts to have an adverse effect. 2024 - looks like MORE + MORE + loads of artificial automation 😂🤔🥺🥺🥺
Companies burn their tam so fast now. I think few understand how much damage a bad interaction does to their brand
Sales strategy should be decided based on the behaviour of the person who is your decision maker from a particular region, check what communication medium they use most and craft msging accordingly. Outbound is tricky and one opinion cannot conclude its fate. It's not best practices but best sales leaders which is a missing link. They are not adaptable and committed and mostly the internal environment is the reason. When there is commitment, you will get what works best for you against all odds and advices sometime.
Here is where most people are wrong. You talk about building machines. Sales is people business. AI and automation is not people. Sell better means serve better. Your scaled personalization is BS. You never scale human curiosity and you never scale human complexity. Get back to be human, and outbound is easier than ever.
Mac Reddin 🦕
1w
5. Try something new instead of always trying to eek an extra % out of the ways you’ve done things for ten years.
Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Studeo
1wActually - arguably it was the fed that killed sales. An artificially low interest rate environment for many years created a massive glut of cheap $$ which ended up in the hands of investors (VCs, etc) and which led to more and more speculation and over-investment in companies the market could not possibly bear. That $$ was then simply used to achieve GTM equalization in the marketplace among the vast ocean of competitors - which of course creates a massive influx of noise in every channel (cold outreach in particular). The human brain gets desensitized to all this cheap GTM $$ over time and then your yield curve starts dropping - fast. The solution: eliminate Keynesian manipulation of the money supply.