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If you think outbound is dead, you’re either lying or you’re bad at it.
Quotas keep rising, your people are grinding, and the pipeline isn’t growing. It’s an equation that drives you mad. While everyone wants more opportunities, only a few know how to build an outbound culture that delivers.
I’m Todd Busler, former VP of Sales, now co-founder of Champify, and I’ve spent my career sharpening how to build a company pipeline that’s self-sufficient.
On this show, I’m talking to sales leaders who have cracked the outbound code. They’ve built an outbound culture beyond their SDRs and scaled repeatable systems that drive real pipeline without relying on hacks.
We’ll break down the winning plays, processes, and frameworks behind growing that outbound muscle to help you get results faster.
No fluff. No hacks. Real strategies from real people who have done it so you can stop guessing and start opening.
Todd Busler [00:00:00]:
The reality is no one has the answer. Everyone is using the same things to try to fight and get the same results. The thing that's really hard to do is build a commitment to building the right team, the right culture, the right process, the right operating cadences, etc. Everyone wants to build stronger pipeline, but only a few know how to make it happen. If you're listening to this show, you know outbound is not dead. You just need a little help building a system that actually works well. You're in the right place. I'm Todd Busler and on this show we're breaking down the plays, processes and frameworks behind repeatable pipeline growth straight from the people who built it.
Todd Busler [00:00:40]:
Let's get into it. Something that's really been on my mind lately is the importance of building outbound oriented sales cultures. I get asked a lot around, what do you think of this new tool? Or how is your company using X product? And ultimately, at the end of the day, when you talk to the best organizations, you very rarely see them talk about the importance of one tool, one strategy, one campaign. What you realize is they've developed strong outbound cultures that set the right expectations. They're really good at performance management. They're talent magnets, right? And they're constantly focusing on skill development and testing to understand what works. So there is no silver bullet. There is no one magic tool.
Todd Busler [00:01:31]:
But what I'm going to talk to you today is about the importance of building an outbound sales culture that will lead you to be able to create this outbound sales machine that will accelerate your growth. The idea when you're trying to really build this machine is thinking about the most powerful outbound culture that'll allow you to constantly scale this and get results better and better month over month, week over week, quarter over quarter. Why do I think outbound culture is the most important rather than a sales tool, new strategy, et cetera is. The reality is AI is making it so much easier to get access to the same tooling. So, sure, there's dozens or hundreds of new vendors out there that are saying, hey, they have the answer. The reality is no one has the answer. Everyone is using the same things to try to fight and get the same results. The thing that's really hard to do is build a commitment to building the right team, the right culture, the right process, the right operating cadences, etc.
Todd Busler [00:02:26]:
So I'm going to take the next couple of minutes and break down six ingredients to building an outbound culture. The way I did this, by the way, this isn't me just spewing stuff from my head or from my own individual experience, which is small sample size. I went and interviewed some of the best VP of sales, CROs, enablement leaders at the biggest names in B2B tech and put together my learnings as an asset for everyone else to opt into and share the collective benefit from. So let's start with the six. First one, commitment. Second one, clear expectations. Third, an operating cadence and rigor around that operating cadence. Then comes operations support.
Todd Busler [00:03:04]:
So RevOps, support, sales ops, export enablement and skill development and then a focus on talent and team building. So let's get into each one of them. The first one is commitment. The reason why I say this is a lot of earlier stage companies think about outbound as a test and the reality is this isn't a test. You're either making the commitment at the founder, CEO, board level down or you're not, right? And if you think this is a test, there's a high chance it's going to fail. If you're approaching this as a commitment, you're going to find a way to make this work. I'll get into the details of exactly what I mean, but this needs to be looked at as we are doing this, not hey, we are going to test this for a quarter.
Todd Busler [00:03:44]:
The second part is clear expectations. So this starts with expectations to the board and the CEO around how long does outbound take to start seeing results? What are expectations in terms of what those results might look like and some of the early indicators of it. And then the clear expectations from CRO, VP of sales down, right? You are not going to be able to hit your number unless you source x percent of your own pipeline, right? That means you must generate n number of meetings a week or Y opportunities per month. That's what I mean by setting clear expectations when you're getting going. They might not be on the result side in terms of new meetings, new ops, new two way conversations. They might actually be on the output side, right? You have to work 50 accounts over the course of the month and this is what an account worked looks like, number of prospects, number of touches, etc.
Todd Busler [00:04:34]:
The third one is operating cadence. The more rigor you have around this cadence, the better. You might have worked for a sales team that always is throwing last minute meetings saying hey, we're going to go do a deep dive into some conversion analysis or we're going to do a deep dive on some training and everything seems scattered and last minute. The best orgs that build powerful outbound machines and powerful outbound cultures have very rigorous operating cadences. So this means how do we run our pipe gen cadence? What I mean by that is let's say you implement something like PG Tuesday, which I'm a big fan of. And that comes from kind of the medpic playbook, the ptc, BMC datadog type of companies, right? PG Tuesday is sacred. That's when everyone in the sales organization is doing their calling, texting, email, LinkedIn, mining connections, actual activity. But the way their cadence works is Monday.
Todd Busler [00:05:29]:
They're doing planning. Their plan for Tuesday is due to their manager needs to have approval. Are we working the right accounts? Have we looked at closed Ross reasons? Do we have a strategy on what we're going to do in a given week? Tuesday is respected and sacred. Meaning you're not supposed to have any internal meetings. You only should have deals that are, you know, very late in the funnel that you're trying to advance. Otherwise, your expectations that you're spending 100% of the time prospecting. The reason for this is if you do this well, it means you're at least spending at a minimum 20% of everyone's time prospecting, showing that it's important. Getting back to the commitment and the clear expectations after Tuesday is over.
Todd Busler [00:06:04]:
Friday is to celebrate the results and do some form of enablement for the next week, right? So that's what a dedicated operating cadence looks like. And that level of commitment and the thinking around how meetings are happening, how training's happening, dedicated respect to the calendar, how that's happening, and that's what's required to make this work at scale. The fourth one is op support, right? So how do you measure what's working? Do you have clear definitions? Are reps adhering to processes? If you have different ways to define a new meeting or different ways to define what an opportunity is, it's impossible to measure and get better over time. Now you can get very deep in this in terms of tech enablement and limiting the number of clicks or maximizing the number of dials. But at the end of the day, you need clear definitions and adherence to process, tech playbooks, et cetera, to understand what's working, to be able to measure it.
Todd Busler [00:06:52]:
Last one's enablement, really skill development. Enablement. So are you just constantly approaching skill development? Are you doing role plays? Are you doing certifications? Are you sharing knowledge, right? The best organizations look at the profession of sales. Is exactly that, a profession much like an athlete, where they're trying to get 1, 2, 3% better every single day and then the last one's just on immense focus on talent and team building. So do you know what the negotiables and non negotiables are in your hiring process? Do you understand the rep Personas that you're hiring for? Do you understand what are the traits of reps that are working well today and how you can get your team on the recruiting and talent side to be able to go and replicate that in the form of new talent? I want to take a minute and dive into a couple questions I've gotten really on the details of each components or the six ingredients in building a strong outbound culture. The first one is how do you get your team fully committed? This is something I hear where you have a heavy inbound motion, you need to make the transition or you're turning on outbound for the first time. I think there's two core takeaways.
Todd Busler [00:07:54]:
The first is lead from the front or get in the boat with them. I have a mentor named Brian heinig. He's the CRO of a company called 2X Marketing. He was at Thoughtspot and Appdynamics and have learned from some of the best in the whole industry. He always talks about if you're the leader and you're requiring your team to do enablement, you should be the first one that submits it, right? So if you're asking everyone to do a video or certification, if you're a leader, do it first. The best leaders do this because they're getting in the boat with their team. This is the same thing for the CRO at harness. This is a $200 million ARR company.
Todd Busler [00:08:26]:
Every PG Tuesday, he's the first person picking up the phones on Tuesday. This a guy worth tens of millions of dollars that doesn't need to work, let alone make cold calls ever again in his life. But it sets the tone and shows that you can leave from the front. The second thing is recognizing, celebrating and rewarding the right behaviors. Justin Geller from Gong, who was the first bps sales there, he's been there for six years on a journey past 300 million in ARR, talks about that you have to build the importance of Pipegen into the entire ethos of your sales organization. And what he means by that is when you're celebrating on Friday or at the end of the month, not is it only who people have closed deals but who is leading the leaderboard on self-sourced pipeline, who broke into an account that you've been trying to break into for years and then he goes a Step further to say they build all of the promotion paths built on people doing the right PG behaviors, right? So that's how you talk about leading from the front.
Todd Busler [00:09:23]:
Recognize, celebrating and reward. And the last thing I'd say on recognizing, celebrating and rewarding is the more this comes top down, the better. So if the CEO is getting there, showing, hey, I'm prospecting with the team, hey, we're calling this out on an all hands meeting. It's showing what great looks like and what the organization values when it comes to expectations. I think there's a lot that can go in here as well. It really depends where in the journey you are, right? So if you're early in the journey, it might be as simple as you must prospect into 30 contacts at five accounts a week.
Todd Busler [00:09:55]:
Right. With a goal of getting one to two meetings. That's a great starting point. Everyone has the right expectations and now you can start, measure against that CI, you increase it five, find out what's working, coach and enable on the things that are working, dissuade people from wasting time on things that aren't working, et cetera. Once you get to a more mature level, you want to have something simple and measurable that you can have as weekly goals, right? So your goal is to source two new business meetings per week. It's non negotiable. They're going to have a leaderboard, we're going to measure against it every single week.
Todd Busler [00:10:26]:
And what the best leaders do is they're extremely consistent about repeating this goal, showing how people are doing against it and having uncomfortable conversations when people aren't hitting that. I want to tell another story about one of these six ingredients, which is the importance of enablement. As many people that are listening might know, I was the first sales rep at Heap. I was there from about 0 to north of 40 million in ARR and we got to around 20, 25 million in ARR. We hired a COO that came from Medallia, which was a very heavy outbound driven sales culture in his first few weeks. He looked at me and said, Todd, you're going to be every Friday for running sales enablement. You must come up with a training that you think is the most relevant and figure out how to uplevel the team every single week. First thing, I looked at him and said, every single week.
Todd Busler [00:11:15]:
We're doing this once every two months or so now. How are we going to do this every week? It sounded like overkill. I didn't think it was the right thing to do, but I obviously listened and I'll tell you what, it was one of the best things we've done as a company. The reason for that is B2B companies are moving really quickly. I actually think the rate of change from a product standpoint, competitive landscape, technical breakthroughs is faster than ever. So there's always something to train on. Hey, there's new product enablement. We're going to be using a new pitch.
Todd Busler [00:11:45]:
There's a new customer story I want everyone to learn. There's a new cold call opener that a new employee is using that's working way better. There's a new way, someone's talking about pricing. I'm talking about a bunch of different things with regards to enablement across the whole kind of sales process. But there is a ton of enablement just to do for top of Funnel. And if you're forced to do this weekly, your team is going to level up consistently. The tricks here are planning well in advance. I would recommend creating a sales enablement calendar, or maybe this is just a pipeline specific calendar where you assign owners, you get the best reps and managers leading sessions.
Todd Busler [00:12:23]:
Ultimately, you need to have one quarterback to make sure that this is happening. Plenty of leeway and it's just going to build the culture that hey, we are professionals, we're getting better at our craft and you're going to see numbers start to improve over time. In terms of talent, I think there's a lot of things that I've talked about so far that are more tactics or tricks to build this into the DNA of your organization. But talent is arguably the most important thing you can do here. Now, there's some people that believe you can't really be taught to outbound. You either want to do that or not. I disagree. I've seen people that have been in very heavy inbound motions figure it out.
Todd Busler [00:13:02]:
However, the biggest thing you can do is focus on getting people into your organization that have done this well and then make them the examples, right? These are usually people that want to control their own destiny. They're usually low ego, they usually have an ownership mentality. And then what you'll start to find is that you can attract a talent because a talent wants to work with other a talent. So find individuals within your organization that are doing well, find a way to boost them up and then bring in some people outside of the organization that have seen what success looks like. There's thousands of companies that have built great outbound sales cultures, right? And they'll bring the nuggets and learnings and morph it to Your organization. Another big theme I saw in interviewing these great VP of Sales CROs, et cetera, is that they're extremely thoughtful and consistent when it comes to performance management. So what this means is that they train their managers to have hard conversations with reps. They train managers to hold people accountable, they practice those conversations.
Todd Busler [00:14:08]:
They have a clear structure for performance management. What happens if people aren't hitting the requirements? That and expectations that you agreed to as an organization, how long of a leash do you give when someone didn't book meetings multiple weeks in a row? When we agreed that was the expectations, right? So these individuals, these top 1% leaders, are very good at moving people that are not bought in, that are not playing by, you know, following the playbook that you're building to create this outbound DNA. And they move them out of the organization and they slowly bring in people that want to follow this. They know that this playbook has success and they're ruthless when it comes to performance management, obviously in a friendly way, in a humane way. But you have to bring in the top talent and then over time you have to make sure that the average is kind of creeping up to what's possible with the best talent. In terms of three things, I see mistakes being made here.
Todd Busler [00:15:02]:
I think it's really important as leaders to think about anti patterns and things to avoid. The biggest one is just looking at this as a test or hey, we're going to half ass this. You're either doing it or not and you will figure out a way to make it work if you're committed. The second part, which goes to what I just said is around the talent. I think people can be taught this and there's a lot of people, especially earlier in their career that don't yet have all the certain habits they can be taught. But bringing in people that know what great looks like to even set the bar of what's possible. And you'll see this and when it happens, it's magic. I saw this at Heap, I saw this at Champlify.
Todd Busler [00:15:36]:
You bring in people that said, oh, that's what the quota was for the SDR and show someone that can double it. It shows the rest of the team what's possible. Or you go source the biggest deal in company history, outbound. Yeah, that's going to get people motivated. And the best thing you can do is bring in the right type of talent. And then the last thing is this a top down initiative. So I'll go back to my experience at Heap, the COO who became the CEO in order to show how important this was, he came to individual sales team calls to look at the dashboard who was booking meetings consistently and A he was doing that for accountability but B he was actively trying to learn where people were struggling so he could make sure we were working on the right solutions to fix this. He went so far as having the whole exec team once every other week spend two hours on their own PG because he realized their networks were so powerful and we weren't tapping into it.
Todd Busler [00:16:29]:
The whole idea is that was behavior that he was demonstrating. It wasn't just cheap talk, right? That was showing this was a top down initiative. So to recap, there is no silver bullet, there is no magic tool. And I say that as a founder of a sales tech company. Sure there's products like Champify and many others that can help move the needle, but the biggest thing you can do is create the outbound culture built on those six ingredients. Everyone has access to the same tooling. Most of the somewhat forward looking companies have similar ops talent, right? So it really what separates these organizations aside from product fit and pricing and market timing, the controllables that a sales leader has is the outbound culture. They can create the performance management rigor that they bring to an organization, the constant up leveling skill development and bringing and attracting top talent.
Todd Busler [00:17:21]:
What I wanted to end on today was what has my attention. I think there's two things right now I'm thinking a lot about. The first thing is I just reread the 30 minutes to present Club guys shout out to Arman and Nick on cold calling sucks. And the reason for that I think there's a lot of alpha in the phones as I'm doing this Q1 end of Q2 2025 email as a channel is getting harder and harder and we're personally and through our customers seeing that there's a lot of alpha on the phones and getting really good on the phones meaning data providers and objections and scripts and nurture plays. There's a lot of juice there and it's something that we're pushing to get better and better at every day. So it has my attention. And the last thing is rather than using AI to grab a new signal and send an email at the right time or automate a LinkedIn message, I think there's a lot of alpha and how do you use AI to guide the preparation process. So there's a reason top reps make a lot of money.
Todd Busler [00:18:23]:
There's a reason people that can prospect are always making a lot of money. The reason for that is getting into deals is getting harder and harder and I think there's a really strong use case for AI to basically empower the best people to do more and try to remove as much of the 1015 an hour account research work as possible to maximize their most valuable time, which is time on the phones, times in front of prospects, et cetera. So hopefully this was helpful. I'll put in the notes below a guide we have on this with some interviews with some templates with a bunch of other things that'll be helpful and then as always, hit me up on LinkedIn Todd Busler if you have any questions, I'd love to get some feedback. Thanks.
Todd Busler [00:19:07]:
Thanks for listening to Cracking Outbound. If this was helpful, let us know by messaging me. Todd Busler on LinkedIn. If there's anything you want to know about me being a founder or outbound strategies in general, hit me up. Every month I do a live AMA on LinkedIn and no topic is off limits. Looking forward to seeing you. Catch you later.