The new outbound playbook we used to book 500 meetings

Outbound is being declared dead every week. AI is ruining outbound. Every business struggle to get it to work. But, we managed to get it working (again).

In today's episode, we share the new playbook for outbound we used to book 500 meetings in just a few months, with 3 SDRs.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (03:38) - Where outbound started
• (06:18) - AI SDRs
• (09:29) - Text is dead
• (11:22) - A different outreach
• (15:06) - The one that worked
• (16:45) - This won't scale
• (20:00) - LinkedIn and Email Outreach
• (22:11) - AI Integration in Outreach
• (25:00) - Account Selection and Targeting
• (30:12) - True sales and marketing collaboration

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Creators & Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone. This is Toni Hohlbein. You are listening to the Revenue Formula with Mikkel and Toni.
[00:00:06] In today's episode, we share the outbound playbook we use to book 500 meetings with just three people on the team. Enjoy
[00:00:19] So, you know,, we're recording remotely and it's not COVID times. That's not why,
[00:00:25] uh, We decided,
[00:00:26] Toni: like each
[00:00:27] Mikkel: exactly. We decided, Why not try and not be in the same room and just see what actually happens. Is this better?
[00:00:35] Is it worse?
[00:00:35] Because You
[00:00:36] know
[00:00:36] Toni: You know what's, you know, what's really funny? It took you one and a half hours to set up and I got it done in about 10 minutes. Who would have thought? Who would have thought that I would be the fast one
[00:00:46] Mikkel: yeah. Yeah. I think we've been fairly challenged. Let's just
[00:00:50] say the
[00:00:50] Toni: You have been fairly challenged. Come on. I mean, technology is not your thing. It's not. It's fonts and colors and these kinds of things. Everything else is a little bit like too much for Mr. Mikkel.
[00:01:00] Mikkel: Yeah, but thank you so much for contributing to the show. You're welcome. By showing up.
[00:01:04] Toni: Hey, I'm doing, I'm doing everything that's required of me, okay? And I'm ticking all the boxes, all the boxes,
[00:01:13] Mikkel: So you had one job today, which was prepare an episode.
[00:01:18] Have you actually done your, have you done
[00:01:20] your
[00:01:20] Toni: it's even more than just showing up, it's even more than just
[00:01:23] Mikkel: I know. And have you done that homework
[00:01:25] though?
[00:01:26] Toni: Of course, yeah,
[00:01:27] Mikkel: gonna, what are we gonna talk about today?
[00:01:29] Toni: Mikkel, I mean, come on, did you, did you not read the, the, the show notes? This is, this is, Pretty disappointing. So actually funny story. I obviously have, you know, we're using LinkedIn a lot and we also use it for outreach for, um, for Growblocks.
[00:01:45] And there, was one outreach and never replied to it. It was actually really good. Lead, so really good person, you know, saying lead sounds so like impersonal, um, and he was like, hey, I know, let's, you know, I mean, you asked me for this chat, when, when do you want to have that chat? And I never replied, because maybe it was also at the end of Growblocks, and it's like, yeah, come on, screw that.
[00:02:07] And then he was like, Toni is like, is this a, you know, do we want to, and I never replied. And then finally I was like, Hey, I'm just now realizing maybe this was all automated. Um, and you just made it feel like it wasn't. If it's, if that's the thing. You guys should probably do an episode on this. And guess what?
[00:02:27] Mikkel: here we
[00:02:27] are,
[00:02:28] Toni: Now we're doing an episode
[00:02:29] Mikkel: but, and it's so funny, uh, so we're always going to talk a bit about outbound, specifically outreach. And one thing it reminded me of as I was reading through the episode, I remember, I want to say 10 years ago, I got an outbound
[00:02:43] message.
[00:02:44] Toni: When you were 35.
[00:02:46] Mikkel: I don't want to talk about that. Yeah, probably, no.
[00:02:49] I was, uh, working at Falcon, you know, and you were as well. I got a outreach from an SDR and it was a video and I felt like I've still remembered to this day, not what he said or anything. I remember it was from HubSpot, right? I was like, Oh, that's a pretty great outreach versus the, you know, people just spamming on email and stuff.
[00:03:08] So I was like, yeah, this is going to be a fun, a fun episode for sure. I think what you and I have seen is a lot of folks just. Still pooping all over outbound. We have as
[00:03:18] well, you know, uh, in a previous episode. And, uh, I think you, you wrote into kind of notice it's being declared every week. And I was like, more like every day. and I think it's, it obviously works for the, you know, outrageousness. It is, uh, the likes and engagement. but I think there's also some truth underneath, which is folks are kind of struggling with outbound.
[00:03:38] Toni: No, I mean, when you think about what's the history of outbound, and let's just say kind of more recent ones. So it really started with Aaron Ross's, predictable revenue, right? Kind of, he was back in the day writing, 50 emails a day. And then following up with a cold call, basically, and he booked, I don't know, you know, 10 percent meetings from those emails.
[00:03:59] So that was a completely different time. This doesn't work like this anymore. And the way I think people aren't thinking about it, is really, it's just a technological evolution, kind of every time something is being achieved that, um, where people go like, oh, wow, this, this clearly isn't automated, um, But it is automated.
[00:04:25] This is then when they're kind of the bar goes up one step, right? So for example, in the beginning, um, it was inserting your first name. Like that was, that was, oh, wow, they're using Toni. So therefore I'm pretty sure
[00:04:39] this is not automated. this is genuine. Someone is really reaching out right now. and then later on, it was maybe inserting the name in the subject line or, you know, and, and the, this keeps going on and on and on.
[00:04:51] I think the last thing that I could vividly remember was. People saying, Oh, you went to this and that school and you did this and that thing. trying to basically kind of, they were kind of scraping my LinkedIn profile and then using that to create an email input, right. Uh, trying to make me believe that this was a handcrafted email instead of, instead of something, automated, which it obviously was at that point, right.
[00:05:16] And I think if you're trying to win this technology battle, you, you really need to be at the forefront of that stuff. Right. And frankly, what we have seen so far, is that AISDRs are trying to be the ones that are winning this technology battle,
[00:05:33] but I think they're at least for now. At least for now, you know, who knows AI fantastic, blah, blah, blah.
[00:05:38] But for now, they're kind of not nailing it at all. I think it's, it's, it's really just a email cannon still, um, that burns through domains like crazy. You don't need to follow up with the SDR and check how many activities they locked in a day. Yeah. You don't need to do that anymore. but also despite all the, all the AI is going to tailor stuff, There ain't much tailoring happening as far as I can see.
[00:06:04] and it's kind of, you know, yes, different emails going out on maybe different channels, but it's still the same email cannon, right? So that stuff actually hasn't been moving technology forward that much. I think at least in, in terms of
[00:06:18] Mikkel: There's also two points where I'm like, is it really gonna be Is it really going to be better to have like an AI seller? The first one that made me think of is, there's this scene in the Simpsons where Homer, he gets like a Robodialer 2000 and it calls the entire city with a pre recorded thing, right? I can see this not working out great.
[00:06:39] You, you know, a company connecting that AI SDR and it just starts calling like
[00:06:45] crazy every single company and you forget a setting in there. And all of a sudden it calls the company, you know, 10 times per day. I saw someone who was like getting, you know, I think it was like tens of emails every single day from the same
[00:06:58] AISDR. Yeah. From the same AISDR. Right. So, and I mean, right now, to be fair, it's in its infancy. Of course, there's going to be those defects from birth. It's, it's just super normal, I think with
[00:07:08] technology like that. But I'm also just thinking about the other, um, technology we've had in customer service for ages. Where you just end up screaming agent, all writing, you know, agent. and, uh, I think we have some ways to go. So let's see. let's see if we as a humanity can actually nail that technology.
[00:07:28] You know, that's that's going to be the big
[00:07:29] question.
[00:07:30] Toni: I mean, and the next big, bigger thing is obviously going to be, um, Voice AI, like people calling you, doing cold calls and so forth. so, so all of this makes total sense, right? so when, when we were looking at our own go to market, and this is now a Growblocks story, um, when we were looking at our own go to market, And we were thinking, how, how can we cut through, right?
[00:07:51] So I myself have built like two or three SDR teams, large scale in organizations, like up to, I don't know, a hundred SDRs or something like this. And it worked out beautifully at the perfect CAC Payback. Um, you know, it was 12, was predictable. You could just hire more and it would give you the same results.
[00:08:07] Um, but what we have found is that that kind of changed a little bit. Um, the specific company that I'm, That I'm also referring to, for example, kind of, this is what we learned back then, went from a 12 CAC Payback to like a 26, 27 CAC Payback on that channel.
[00:08:24] Mikkel: So that's not an improvement. Yeah.
[00:08:31] Toni: and we've kind of, we're realizing more and more that. You know, outbound isn't dead. Like I think, I think people need to differentiate between outreach and outbound. I kind of, there's, there's a, there's an outbound motion. That's the SDR sits down, writes an email, picks up the phone. I think some of that isn't dead.
[00:08:49] It's just stale. I think those conversion rates are just going to go down. but reaching out. Like the act of not waiting for someone to come inbound, but instead taking the initiative, going outside your door and kind of knocking on other people's doors. That still works. And by the way, it has to work because, you know, not everyone has the luxury of just getting tons of organic inbounds or having an SEO machine or whatever.
[00:09:12] It's kind of already there. They just don't have the luxury. So they have to go outbound. They have to talk to people and kind of try and kind of get them to, you know, talk to them and buy their services eventually. Right. So we were pretty convinced that. Outreach by itself isn't dead. Some of the tactics are dead.
[00:09:28] Right.
[00:09:29] And then we were basically kind of discussing, well, how could we, how would, could we push the envelope here? Right. And back then, and this is crazily enough, not even a year ago. Wow. It's not a year ago. we were basically declaring that, text is dead.
[00:09:46] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:09:47] Toni: Text has been taken over. you know, those, those emails are super easy to write with AI.
[00:09:52] Mikkel: it's, but you know what? It's also just like, if you want to cut through with text, the bar is just so much higher. Like, incredibly high, especially if we're talking emails, there's like two steps. There's first the subject line and the pre header, where it's like, do I even want to open this email? And then once you decide to open it, it's like, do I want to keep reading this email? Do you know what I mean? It's such an uphill battle already there, so.
[00:10:25] Toni: we, we, we basically kind of thought the same thing. And then we were saying, okay, you know what, this text thing, I think it's dead. It's not, it's not going to work out. and for our specific persona revenue operations, we also failed to find lots of, uh, lots of phone numbers to, you know, connect to them.
[00:10:43] And we also felt like maybe for those, it's also not. You know, lots of Gen X and Gen Z folks in there. Um, and they just don't like answering the phone. I don't
[00:10:55] Mikkel: like
[00:10:55] what I call you. You can even see it's me and it's like beep. No
[00:10:59] Toni: Yeah. So basically my phone is, is, is set up in a way it doesn't even ring anymore. The, the only notification I get is a text message afterwards that, you know, someone called me.
[00:11:11] But, but I never see the actual phone call happening, right? and we then kind of decided, okay, you know, not text, it's not gonna be phone. Let's do, let's do something else.
[00:11:22] And we actually decided to do a video, right? And back then video, you know, you had Synthesia around doing some of those avatars, but they're super clunky.
[00:11:30] you didn't have Sona or, I don't know, this other open AI thing yet. and we were kind of feeling like, Hey, we maybe have a year, maybe a year where we can own this video thing and still make it, you know, seem authentic. And what we basically started with was, Super low tech in the beginning. you know, my LinkedIn game was good.
[00:11:51] People knew me. I was connected to a bunch of people already. We, I basically sat down and recorded, I think, uh, 30 or 40. Videos, like straight up videos. I would kind of pull up the LinkedIn page of someone. This would be also what I'm sharing, kind of the LinkedIn page of that person. I would say, Hey Mikkel, we, you know, you know, hi, hi from Growblocks.
[00:12:14] I saw you did X, Y, and Z. It sounds so good. Super impressive. I just checked out your company. Then I would go to the next tab of the company. It's like, Hey, you guys had 250 people, so and so many go to market. Must be pretty difficult to keep track of everything. Right. Uh, let me show you what we built in order to do that.
[00:12:30] Um, and then I actually jumped over. And, uh, did the next tab and showed, um, showed the platform, showed, showed Growblocks, basically kind of give a, give a mini demo. then I said, Hey, if this is interesting, uh, just ping me, uh, boop. Bye. And sent this thing out. We, we played around with, you know, versions that were three minutes long.
[00:12:49] That was not good. Uh, a minute was difficult to get. Enough personalization and authenticity into it to then earn the right to show the platform and stuff. but it worked out like that worked out. And, and, and I think in the beginning it's also a bit unfair because people knew me already and some of them either were creeped out and it, that's always the case with, with outreach, right?
[00:13:13] People are kind of, you know, especially when they personalize people, some, some fraction of the folks will be creeped out. It's like, wow, Toni. Did you really just sit down and record like a video for me?
[00:13:24] And, um, fair, fair enough, which I, by the way, totally did. So this was all manual labor, nothing AI, anything. This was just me sitting down doing this stuff. but Uh, got a lot of replies. Like it started a lot of conversations and, and it didn't start a conversation in the sense of like, Oh, do you want to like have half an hour call?
[00:13:43] You and I, we just talk about revenue operations and how the space is going. No, no, this was a clear CTA. Hey, do you want to talk about, you know, the product? Not necessarily buying the product, but do you want to talk about the product? And it was pretty clear to people that this was a sales conversation that's happening, not just a chatty moment or something
[00:14:02] Mikkel: I was also just going to say, like, when you think about most selling, so right now, uh, we're reselling some of the old equipment on what's the equivalent of Craigslist in Denmark, right?
[00:14:12] And could you just imagine trying to sell something there where you're number one, not showing it. You're not putting the price up.
[00:14:18] And I think that's the majority, by the way, of outbound. I think that's why, at least, video is such a beautiful format. Because you can show things you just can't. If you put a screenshot into an email with text, forget it. Like, it's gonna hit a spam filter. People aren't gonna see it. It's gonna be, you know, huge email all of a sudden versus video.
[00:14:37] It's, it's so different, right? And you can I think you can also connect on a very different level all of a sudden with the person on the other side. Uh, which, which I think to be honest, I think going forward with all the technology we have, that's going to matter even more, right?
[00:14:53] Because now you can scale, you can hire these AI agents to just do outbound for you.
[00:14:59] And then if someone decides to actually Google that person, you just find like, does not exist.
[00:15:04] Great. So,
[00:15:06] Toni: I think, I think one of the, one of the moments where we're like, Hey, this might be working out was actually, we sent and we used, I'm not sure if it was Loom or Vidyard or some, some, some video platform like this. And it basically tracks how many times it's being opened and viewed, right? I mean, basic shit.
[00:15:26] and we had one video sent to a fairly large organization. I think it was 500 people or something like this. and that video got viewed 50
[00:15:35] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:15:36] Toni: And,
[00:15:37] Mikkel: Got shared with the sales team.
[00:15:38] Hey guys, look at this. You should do it. You
[00:15:41] should do the same.
[00:15:42] Toni: And basically the RevOps guy was writing back. This is how Outbound should work. And then he shared it with his whole sales org. They didn't buy or anything like this, which is like, that's the tactic.
[00:15:53] That's how it should be done. Um, and that's when we're like, okay, you know what? Probably this thing is working out. and then what we basically did afterwards is trying to find more and more ways to, to automate the whole thing. Um, and, uh, this is then where, um, you know, we, Uh, hired some folks, like we had two, three SDRs, uh, one I would say is like an outbound engineer, kind of David Kuebler, look him up, he's a fantastic guy, um, basically kind of trying to figure out what are the different pieces of the puzzle that we need to stitch together for, because, you know, recording 30 or 40 of those videos.
[00:16:30] That's, it's like a, you know, it's a penalty, you know, you need to sit down for three or four hours and do this, and then you're not happy with the take, you redo it and so forth. Um, so we basically kind of try to find ways, how can we automate more and more and more and more of this stuff
[00:16:45] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:16:45] I think one important thing to note here is it started out as something that is highly unscalable when you think
[00:16:53] about it. Right. But, but, but you also have to realize that then you can start solving that problem, which is a way better problem to have then, Oh, we don't have a motion. That's.
[00:17:01] So I think it's better to say, well, this is working, but if we scale it, like it's done now, it's going to be highly inefficient.
[00:17:07] So how do we improve that? Right? I think that's especially what you want revenue operations or, uh, those types of folks actually work on figuring out. I think the other, uh, factor that's really interesting to just note here is I think for a lot of outbound previously, it's been about the. Quantity of outreach
[00:17:26] Toni: Yeah.
[00:17:27] Mikkel: right?
[00:17:27] So when we talked just in marketing circles, when we talked about creating content, it's like, well, you could do more volume, but you can also do rich content, like add a deck or a PDF or a video or some proprietary research. And I think that's where it can get tilted into now. So, uh, you know, we've used a rich format, but also kind of set up a way. To create appeal with this LinkedIn in the background.
[00:17:51] Um, so, so it's not just like, Hey, we do video and then boom works like that's, you do need to put thought into it. Right.
[00:17:58] Toni: know what we, and, and, you know, I know some of the people listening, they received something like this from me, so they, they know exactly what I'm talking about. Um, but, but really what you need to imagine is I am as Toni, talking to you. I have your LinkedIn profile open in the background, which you can see.
[00:18:17] Uh, you can see your own LinkedIn profile. I'm scrolling up and down your LinkedIn profile and saying stuff. Um, and then I'm jumping to your company's profile and, and I'm saying stuff there. Right. Um, basically what's happening then the first 30 seconds is. Oh shit. This is like, this is really for
[00:18:37] me. Like this is, first of all, I can see my own picture here.
[00:18:40] Scary. What's Toni going to say about my picture? Do it look good? Do it, do it, you know, do it, does it, does he approve? Like, you know, what, what is going to happen here? Kind of, there's an immediate like, oh, wow. Let me kind of, Let me at least listen to this thing, right? and then you basically buy the right, um, for them to continue listening after you maybe said something smart or something funny or something authentic, um, something that is incredibly difficult to completely AI away, like the whole thing, right?
[00:19:12] and then, then you earned the right to jump into the pitch. And the pitch is really just to show and tell, right? And what we then did as the next step is As a step one, we had then SDRs, two or three. that basically did the same thing, basically did the same thing. They had, you know, the LinkedIn profile of someone in the background, they were commenting on things, they were talking about some insight that they might be seeing.
[00:19:38] Um, and then they were sending this out in a LinkedIn message, right? That, that was kind of step one. Obviously, their conversion rates went down, they were not recognizable, they didn't, you know, it wasn't me basically there, but they had tons more time to create those videos, right? And once we hit that stage, we're thinking, okay, number one, how can we get Toni back in the game?
[00:19:59] Because he has nicer conversion rates.
[00:20:00] but then also number two, okay, yes, we're LinkedIn and that's our channel, but there's also email, you know, let's not forget email. The, the, the problem with LinkedIn is that You have basically limitation of, um, how many people you can connect with to send them, uh, a, a message for free, right?
[00:20:21] That's, that's the main, that becomes the main bottleneck when you really think about how can we scale this thing. And then the, the bottleneck before that is basically how many connection requests can you send per week, right? Um, and, um, that becomes like a bottleneck. You, you wanna manage. And if you don't.
[00:20:39] If you can't manage that well enough, you will need to rely on some emails, uh, as, as a second channel or as a third channel there as well. Right. But what we did there then is to basically also embed the video. Like we were basically kind of leading with the video. Sure, there's a subject title and so forth, but I think it was a one liner and then, then video and kind of a snippet.
[00:20:59] So you can see it that there, you know, some, some email experts will tell me like, Oh, you know, probably the image didn't load for like 80 percent of the people because of whatever reason, but it worked right. People were watching this video. and if someone was watching the video, we would then get a ping to then do, you know, even more reach out basically, right, kind of, if we got to a point where someone watched.
[00:21:20] I think 70 percent or something like this of the video, they would then receive a cold call from us. So they, they would, we would kind of go a bit stronger there because there was already some recognition then at that point, right? They've seen our SDRs faces and voices and so forth. And we basically kind of then could add some additional channels on top of the initial touchpoint.
[00:21:40] Mikkel: I think another, so besides the, how do we reach out? There was also another thing kind of happening, which was the, let's say almost the account selection piece. Right.
[00:21:52] Toni: But before we go into that, I just want to finish the, the story here. Um, one, you know, there's, because there's, I think there's one important leg missing. Which I almost forgot, which was the, how do we get Toni back in the game? And like, Hey, busy CEO, blah, blah, blah, doing all of these things. Can't do four hours a day of video recording.
[00:22:11] and then what we did was basically we looked at the video we produced and we saw there were repetitive tasks. and then there were things that are slightly different. And actually what we then ended up doing is the, Oh, let me show you the platform. That was canned, like completely like this was,
[00:22:31] I did five to 10 takes and then we selected the best one.
[00:22:34] And that's then the one we took. this was one
[00:22:36] Mikkel: And then it changed between you having a red sweatshirt and then a
[00:22:39] what? No,
[00:22:40] Toni: Yeah. And, and then the other cut was, where I'm still on the LinkedIn profile. Um, which is then like, Oh, geez, this is me. and I'm still saying someone's name. Yeah. Um, but then the, the name was actually AI generated. The, the, the name was AI generated.
[00:23:01] You know, I'm saying then Mikkel. and it was kind of funny because. Things like Mikkel kind of got wrong, but things like super complicated Chinese names that I could never, never pronounce correctly, I suddenly felt like I was speaking Mandarin fluently, right? Um, so it was like, hi, you know, whatever. Um, And then I went into a little bit of, you know, personalization that was also canned.
[00:23:25] that was always the same. and that then really created the, the, the, the first name or bringing up the name at some point in the conversation. And then as the background picture, the LinkedIn profile, um, that then created that. Um, that familiarity that, Oh, this is unique. This is about me. Let me listen to that.
[00:23:48] Um, that then helped them to transition to actually watching the actual pitch. Right. And with that stuff, uh, I could send out 40, 50 emails like, or engagements like this per day without doing anything. A single amount of work, like nothing. I had to do nothing in order to get
[00:24:05] Mikkel: So what was it you had to record? Because you didn't. You didn't have to record the demo of the platform. What, what did you have to record in order to send out actually?
[00:24:12] Yeah.
[00:24:16] Toni: it was all, you know, basically it was like two chapters. One was the, the demo recording. Um, and that stayed the same across several different variants of the pitch. And then, uh, I only had to record the first part, um, once the AI did the, changed the name around, um, and the AI changed the, um, uh, the LinkedIn profile and the background around.
[00:24:38] So basically kind of the two things, audio and video changing, which is pretty, it was pretty, pretty neat to actually, it was pretty
[00:24:44] Mikkel: Yeah. And I think, so I think it's also just like, when you look at the production, we had, two phone booths, we had, uh, professional mics. We had a couple of things to really enable that this, the quality. Of this
[00:24:56] thing was top notch. So I think it was, um, it was really well executed.
[00:25:00] And, I think the other piece that really mattered a great deal is that also we knew exactly who we were going after.
[00:25:05] We had a shared, uh, account list between sales and marketing, but yeah, I say it like it's two massive departments. We were sitting in the same room, but
[00:25:13] you
[00:25:14] know,
[00:25:15] Toni: about that actually a little bit more, right? Because I don't, I don't have a great story to tell about the account selection itself. Um, and maybe you have more to share there, but I think one realization in this super early beginning, we were, had like, we had SDRs, uh, at some point already, um, didn't work out.
[00:25:34] Need to kind of change that. Um, and I was like, Hey, no. Mikkel and I were going after the LinkedIn audience. We're going after, you know, the newsletter folks. Don't touch those. Build your own list, um, similar accounts, but your own engagement thing over there and do that. And that was fucking stupid.
[00:25:53] Mikkel: That was really
[00:25:55] stupid.
[00:25:56] Toni: And, but it, you know, back in the day, it would make perfect sense. Like, how can we do attribution? Oh yeah, that's right. We should just have different channels then we can attribute perfectly. But we have a basic kind of. changing business outcomes, you know, degrading business outcomes in order to have better attribution, which is completely silly, but also we're not the only ones doing that.
[00:26:19] That's like a, across the board, a bunch of people that were doing this exact same thing.
[00:26:22] Mikkel: So a couple of things here, we had Harrison Rose on talking about the Paddle story.
[00:26:27] He mentioned how when they build up the marketing team, they basically said the ICP, it's this list of companies. That's like, that's, those are the ones we want you to bring in period. Right? So they worked off of the same list and I was like, huh, that actually makes sense.
[00:26:43] And then to your point, yes, I think a lot of marketing teams, they will be very protective of their brand audience. If you went to. Well, very well established company now and said, Hey, we're going to go after every single LinkedIn follow up of the company page and the CEO, they're gonna be like, not sure I like that. Um, but if those are the customers you want, what's the big deal?
[00:27:05] Honestly, and you have to realize, and I think that was our realization is, you have an email list, how long does it take for someone to finally crack and go, you know what? Yes. You've added in the demo request thousands of times. Now is the day I'm going to do it.
[00:27:21] Let's celebrate.
[00:27:22] I'm going to click that button. I think you and I had a couple of conversations on that was like, yeah, they're not just going to miraculously do it all the time themselves.
[00:27:30] Toni: So the, the thing is, right. So number one, all of your demand gen guns should be trained at the same
[00:27:39] target. Like that, you know, it's, when you say it out loud, it sounds so obvious. But that's, that's what it should be. Right. And then the realization also in that, you know, whatever the real number is, but for someone to take action or be aware of your brand or something like that, they need to be exposed to it several times.
[00:27:56] Some people say seven times.
[00:27:59] Um, and this is like a B2C thing, like, oh, you need to see a TV ad and maybe then you have an out of home banner, or you see something on the internet, but seven times you need to be touched by that brand for you to like, ah, okay, now I know what a Mars bar is. and we were basically saying like, Hey, wait a minute.
[00:28:15] That's probably not that super much different from, from B2B also. Right. So this is realization number one. And then. However, we can, try and get to those folks. It's the same folks, but however we can do that, we should totally do that. And, or maybe they're sitting in a community, maybe they're sitting somewhere else, maybe you should kind of get there, go there as well.
[00:28:33] And then the other realization was, and that's the same with, you know, subscribing, everyone who's not subscribed, you know, you should subscribe. It's free. It's great for us. but it's also going to be great for you if you do it. the, the other realization was you need to ask for it, which I just did, right?
[00:28:49] You have to ask for someone to take action. Very rarely. Is someone just going to be like, you know what, actually, you know, now something in my life changed. I really want to go and do this one thing. Rarely that just happens by itself. You need to go and tap someone on the shoulder and do that. And what we realized with the outreach, we had a fairly large, pool.
[00:29:10] Of folks that are lukewarm and interested, but not really ready to take action. Maybe they're busy, maybe they have other problems. And what we then basically wanted to do is we wanted to create an army of people that tap, tap those folks on the shoulder. It's like, Hey, you're ready now? I mean, I still remember there was so many opportunities booked.
[00:29:29] where one of the SDRs reached out once or twice, booked the opportunity and high fives all around and boom, you know, rockstar, you fucking nailed it. And then Mikkel and I looked at the engagements like, Oh no, this person has five stars on our sub stack. Um, and we know that person has been listening to our podcast
[00:29:46] for like, you
[00:29:46] Mikkel: they wrote us on LinkedIn or like,
[00:29:48] Toni: All right. So there, there, there was so many other connections there. And, um, and when you're sitting there, it's like, Oh damn, is it, I think, I think this is really a marketing opportunity, but you know what, who gives a, who gives
[00:30:00] a shit, honestly,
[00:30:01] Mikkel: I think, that was also the conversation we had at one point when, Oh, should we do the rules of engagement on attribution? I was like, yeah, let me go sharpen my knives now. I think let's park that conversation for a second though.
[00:30:12] I think what's also beautiful about this approach of having SDRs reach out to the marketing audience is. Marketing team, you can actually do less selling when you think about it. You don't have to put a demo request in every single email when you have something new or you really want to sell, then that's what you do. So you send out an email. That's actually a sales email, not just something where you. You know, put a CTA that's completely separate in the bottom or something.
[00:30:36] So I kind of changed that, I think, approach a little bit as well.
[00:30:40] But I think going after the same list, extremely helpful. And I mean, we then took it to the point where we created the audience on LinkedIn, ran thought leader ads with Toni.
[00:30:51] Next on the list was all the SDRs, by the way, to kind of help them get a bit more surface with the audience we were reaching out to. And then the beautiful thing is, um, Some of these contacts were in our CRM. So we could basically flag when they were visiting the website to our team. Right. And it's like, okay, I sent them this outbound message yesterday and now they're on the website. Let's see, maybe I should do something now in a followup or whatever.
[00:31:19] Right. And I think that's, I think that level of collaboration, uh, also worked out really, really well.
[00:31:26] Toni: Yeah, and I think, you know, ultimately, yes, you need to kind of try and focus on the same target. The other thing really is in this extremely busy market is sure you can create a cool product and so forth, but You also in your, in your outbound, in your outreach, in your, in your marketing and the way you present yourself, you, you have to be unique to some degree.
[00:31:47] You have to stand out in some way. Um, and I think we achieved this actually pretty well. Uh, we, we booked more demos than we actually needed. Uh, we just didn't convert
[00:31:56] Mikkel: We didn't close them.
[00:31:57] Damn it.
[00:31:59] Toni: So, I mean, you know, it's, you know, you can always blame me, the sales guy, uh, Mikkel, uh, but ultimately, I think this was, this worked actually extremely well.
[00:32:08] Right. We had a really nice content engine running. We built a lot of organic reach. and I think people should copy that totally. Right. Kind of this whole founder led thing doesn't necessarily need to be that, but you know, create a content engine. And then find other ways to try and tap into the same audience and don't do that with, you know, sending an email.
[00:32:29] Try and do that with something that has a, has a much larger chance of actually being viewed and consumed. Because, if, if, if that doesn't happen, the outreach as a whole, basically, practically didn't happen.
[00:32:42] Mikkel: much. And I mean, if you don't want to build it yourself, you can probably write a message to Toni or me on LinkedIn and see if we would be willing to come on as advisors or
[00:32:53] do some contract work.
[00:32:54] So, uh, so
[00:32:55] do that. But I think, by the way, in any case, what we will do, and I'm not going to promise it's going to be there as the episode live, but we should definitely do a Bye bye. Substack newsletter on how we actually did this, maybe with just the structure laid out for folks to see, and some of the solutions, examples of the different, outreaches we had. Uh, so if you're not subscribed, check out revenueformula. substack. com. Uh, we'll definitely have something on this in the future.
[00:33:22] Toni: That's
[00:33:22] Mikkel: I think we're at the end here of the episode.
[00:33:25] Toni: Mikkel, I'm not sure if I liked it more or less. I think I, I
[00:33:28] Mikkel: well, what I like now is
[00:33:29] Toni: liked it more because, because I can just hang up and do my own thing here
[00:33:32] Mikkel: that's exactly what I was gonna say. It's like, we don't have that awkwardness of being in the room and who's gonna clean up and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just like, bye! Anyway,
[00:33:43] Toni: it, that's great. and maybe tell some other folks about it. And otherwise, thank you so much for listening and maybe watching and have a great day.
[00:33:51] Mikkel: bye.