Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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 [00:00:03]:
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. Let's get into it.
Happy to have Alex Olley as our guest today. He's the Co-Founder and CRO of Reachdesk. They've had an amazing run over the last six, seven years in the gifting space and what you're going to hear today are a couple common themes around an ownership mentality and an eat what you kill mentality from day one from go-to-market, his constant focus on experimentation and a breakthrough always being around the corner and then another theme of just constantly learning. All of us in go-to-market, the game is changing very quickly and those who can learn the fastest will win. And he's a great example of that. Hope you enjoy the episode.
I'm excited to chat with you. I think, hey, you've been really helpful to me in my founder journey and I think most people in our world know who you are. But I wanted to start with, you know, you've had a really impressive almost seven year run now at Reachdesk and really successful career even before that. I think a quick intro on yourself and just kind of who you are, what Reachdesk is for the people that don't know and then we'll hop into it.
Alex Olley [00:01:31]:
Yeah, so I'm in one of these weird positions where I'm one of the founders, but I'm also the CRO and I say technically at the beginning I was the CEO, but I remember saying to the other founders that I want to be the CRO. I love sales. I've been in sales. I've run marketing teams too. I want to combine the two. That's my role. Okay, I want to be the CRO. I don't want to be the CEO.
Alex Olley [00:01:52]:
So I'm the CRO. I reached Escapin. I think I'm in my 25th quarter in a row. I don't. But I am a professional CRO. I don't get to keep that seat just because I'm a founder. But I love go-to-market and I say that intentionally, by the way. I don't just love sales or marketing or customer success or account management.
Alex Olley [00:02:08]:
I just love all of it. And Reachdesk, you know, we help companies create and accelerate pipeline using gifting and swag, ultimately. And we do that through our sending platform. Yeah. And we're based all around the world. We've got people in Portugal. We've got most of our people in the US and the rest of us are in London.
Todd Busler [00:02:25]:
You know, your background, Alex, is super interesting, right? You've been a sales guy. You started the company. You know, I think the way you talk about being a CRO at heart is actually really similar to how I think about even a lawyer for a minute there. What part of sales kind of came naturally? What led you to take a step away from tech and then hop back?
Alex Olley [00:02:44]:
I kind of feel bad saying this now because I wish I'd known at the time. This was 10 years ago, actually. So I'd been in sales for a number of years. I started managing a team, and I'd also already been at law school. So I'd basically had an offer from my dream law firm. And I was listening to a lot of my friends, my peers, my family, who were just like, sales is a bit dirty. Why are you in sales? Like, you've been offered this job. It was actually an entertainment law firm. So the job was to represent people like the Rolling Stones and Daft Punk and some of the coolest artists in the world, right? So you like quite a cool lawyer job. Um, and I think I listened to the sales is beneath you chatter too much. That made me think, I need to get out of this and go and do a proper job. And I went into law and I was like, I really don't like this. This isn't for me. Like, it's cool.
Alex Olley [00:03:33]:
Yeah, it's great, like, meeting all these celebrities and representing them in different. In different facets. But I had this really strong calling for the years I was there to be like, I think you're built for building companies, for selling stuff that. That felt more natural to me. And you asked me about, like, what came naturally versus what didn't. I think the things that I'm good at is the thing that drives me in. Go to market, particularly in sales, is genuine, like, curiosity, right?
Alex Olley [00:03:58]:
To solve problems. I thought I was getting into law to, like, I'm gonna go solve people's problems. And actually, I realized it was very different. I'm there to kind of build them. Just put it. Put it bluntly. But, like, that genuine curiosity to solve problems and that desire to learn to, like, keep getting better and better. I also believe in hard work, right?
Alex Olley [00:04:14]:
I don't think I was naturally Good. As an AE myself, I think I had to put in way more hours. But I, I realized that if you, if you can get smarter and smarter over time and if you've got great mentors and people teaching you that curiosity, that problem solving, solving desire and that hard work combined with how do I get better with my numbers, how do I get better with my process and the different playbooks. When you combine all those together, you can create a really good mix of competencies to make you successful. So I think that that's what, what helped me naturally, I think the thing I had to unlearn perhaps a little bit more. I talk about unlearning a lot was rules are not there to be broken, right? If you want to be the top 1%, there are certain things you just got to abide by and respect. And I think I'd just been winging it and shooting from the hip a bit too much for too long and I had to get rid of that.
Todd Busler [00:05:06]:
Right, before we hit record. Alex, you mentioned an analogy of how you thought about sales in the early days of Reachdesk. What exactly was that? How did you guys approach it as you were just getting going?
Alex Olley [00:05:15]:
It's funny, I, I stole this from someone who we were talking about like this go-getter mentality, particularly how we approach things at the beginning of Reachdesk, but just how I think a lot of companies should approach things, which is, I have to credit a guy called Adam. We came up with this concept of like the caveman strategy, which is like Neanderthal era. You had to go and get your food, club it over the head, bring it back to the cave. Like that was the kind of our process. Like we need to go and get our revenue. We cannot wait for it to come towards us. And that's what we've been doing since day one. And that's still, that's really still our approach today.
Alex Olley [00:05:49]:
And we don't have this really sophisticated like 80% of our pipeline is from inbound or anything. We still are very outbound heavy and it still stays true today.
Todd Busler [00:05:59]:
We're very similar, I think, just philosophically and like company, pipeline, mix, et cetera. And we always say, like, this isn't just going to happen, like you are going to create it. Whether it's finding your food analogy or getting your next meeting, like you have to go and do the things. Another thing you said, Alex, I think similarly is I don't think I was ever the best AE. I think I was a decent AE and some things I did well. But more of the revenue kind of architect. What was one of the biggest challenges for you or the biggest differences in going from that AE seller to the revenue orchestrator? Right. What were the biggest things you had to learn there or even unlearn in using your vernacular to kind of get the motion going?
Alex Olley [00:06:41]:
Yeah, if you're talking about one day you're an individual contributor. I mean I was managing people, I think you were before this as well. But all of a sudden you are. Let's go back to the beginning of Reachdesk, right? You have nothing. You literally have nothing. Like day one, you have a website, you don't have a brand, no one knows who you are.
Alex Olley [00:07:01]:
A lot of the time you're kind of in like that sort of stealth mode. There's no process, you don't have messaging, you've got kind of got nothing, absolutely nothing. And I actually remember leaving my old job and sort of turning up and be like, right, okay, we need to start building a sales motion. And she'd be like, what kind of, where do you start? Because you can start anywhere but there's, there's absolutely nothing. And that was a bit of a. I remember feeling a bit ill. I was like, oh my God, what have I, what have I done here? And then you get like. I remember holding that thought for about five seconds, be like, you just need to get on with it, right? You've committed to this. That just sort of mental challenge was, was the hard part. But obviously the difference is you. It's actually a wonderful thing. It's this kind of amazing opportunity is the way I sort of framed it to myself was like all the things I wanted to do that actually frustrated me in previous roles where decisions were getting blocked or so much legacy process. And this is just the way things have been done.
Alex Olley [00:07:57]:
I could go, I can actually build my dream motion, what I think looks good and start from scratch. And so we just started building and I think we, from day one we actually built something quite quickly, quite good. I'd been geeking out on a lot of this stuff for many, many years and there were just so many things that we just like, okay, well let's start here. And I remember saying to the other founders, like, we get this amazing opportunity of being born account based and that is an amazing thing. And I remember whiteboarding this whole thing of like, these are all the things that we can do which we don't need to worry about because when we're not, you know, we're not a 15 year old business, it's got this legacy stuff. We can start there. And I think that foundational mindset is what drove our outbound approach, our very refined icp, our targeted messaging, understanding personas, their pain points, all those things. We built it quite quickly.
Alex Olley [00:08:43]:
It was a challenge because obviously you've only got yourself to do it, but at the same time it was like this amazing experience.
Todd Busler [00:08:50]:
Yeah, it's nice when you don't have to pull yourself out of the legacy. Hey, we've only thought in MQLs or Hey, we have this reporting we need to stick to. It's like, no, I'm going to start from scratch. Getting a bit more tactical. What were some of those big early breakthroughs? Obviously you talked about the mentality and hey, we have this kind of hunter mentality. We figured out who our accounts are going to be. You get the persona based messaging. What were some of the early breakthroughs that allowed you to say, oh, wow, we're really onto something.
Todd Busler [00:09:15]:
We're starting to build the early signs of a machine here.
Alex Olley [00:09:18]:
Yeah, that's a very good question. What were some of the early breakthroughs? At the very beginning, you make some decisions and you think you, you kind of hope they're going to work, right? It's really for those that haven't been in that situation, it's quite terrifying because you're thinking, I have this plan to hire these people. I've already hired people, actually, I've kind of got these people on board and I'm not sure this is going to work. I'd say the early breakthroughs were kind of cheating in some ways because we use our own product to sell now. At the very beginning, we would come up with these crazy direct mail campaigns, right? And some of them just would not work. Some people still refer back to them, but we would just try all these different ways. And remember, this is pre-COVID. Okay? So these were the days where we could come up with something really creative and we would land it on someone's desk and then we'd follow up off the back of that.
Alex Olley [00:10:07]:
But some of them went horribly wrong. I'll give you an example of one. We sent out these, like, these packages with like these brick mugs. So it was like a coffee mug in the shape of a brick. And. And I think the message was something like, do you sometimes feel like you're banging your head against the wall not being able to figure out how to generate more pipeline or something like that. It just landed really badly. And people are like, why have you sent me a brick mug? So we'd follow up, hey, you get the mug and hoping they'd be really excited by it.
Alex Olley [00:10:32]:
And they were like, I don't get it. And some people, actually, there's a guy called Chris who's now a customer of ours. He's like, yeah, I still don't get why you sent me that mug. Why did you send us a brick mug? Again, it's like it just didn't land. But, but then some of them would work so well. And it was when we realized that one to one personalization was really working, not just for us, but with something we had to put into our product. Those were the big breakthroughs. So let's get back to Chris actually.
Alex Olley [00:10:56]:
Perfect example, we found out that he was a big Portsmouth football fan, right? So we sent, and we knew he posted something on LinkedIn about his son going back to school to go and get like some certain items. I think he was asking for recommendation for like backpacks or something. And we sent him this Portsmouth backpack for his kid and some like, swag for him with a note saying, like, hope back to school goes well, here's something on us. And he replied immediately saying, I get this now. This is brilliant. This is absolutely amazing. I'm going to take a meeting. And so everything we did at the beginning was just like purely one to one, personalized, using gifting, like really tailored messaging.
Alex Olley [00:11:31]:
Everything was well thought through and researched. And we didn't do the volume play. We just went, these are the guys we want to go after. These are our dream customers. Let's go all in on making this the best possible experience for them. And that worked so well for us. I think that's what accelerated us.
Todd Busler [00:11:47]:
Two things, like subtly I'm hearing, which are awesome, is you're right in the beginning. You don't know, right? You have to have the confidence because you bring on some of these reps. It's like, okay, I'm committing we're going to have some type of success. But it really is a bunch of experiments in the beginning trying to find something that's going to work. Okay, let's go try to repeat that. And then it also seems like in today's, you know, fast forward into where, you know, if you were starting today, it's kind of like, what do we automate? How do we do everything at scale? And you guys really took the opposite approach. And as you and I know, it gets easier and easier, right? You get a handful of Chris's, then you have more social proof, and then you learn from what worked, right? And it kind of builds on itself. Now, you know, fast forward five, six, seven years.
Todd Busler [00:12:26]:
You've been through tons of iterations and evolutions of your pricing and your hiring profile and figuring out the nuance of your market. What were some of the things you wish you knew earlier or some of the things that maybe you spun your wheels on that didn't end up panning out?
Alex Olley [00:12:43]:
One of the things I wish we'd done sooner to kind of perhaps answer it slightly differently is I wish I'd invested more in like the operational side of things sooner. So like, I'm not a RevOps guy. I don't think anyone in the business at the time was thinking about data and like doing deep analysis and really having a forward looking approach to things. We would debate like, does this make sense? Does this mean this? Like we didn't really know kind of what was going on. And I think I left it too late to bring in Jeff, who I would always be like, I think I've spoken about this publicly before. He was one of those key hires when I suddenly was like, oh my word, RevOps is like a game changer. But we were spinning our wheels on the data, the analysis, the actual way to operationalize things so it can 2x someone. I don't believe in like 10xing someone but like actually saving them time, putting them in a system where they can rinse and repeat.
Alex Olley [00:13:34]:
And I think we were too scrappy for too long, which slowed us down. And I think we should have brought Jeff in when we were at one million in revenue. I probably bought him in when we were like 10. And I was thinking if I'd had that sort of operational mindset from someone sooner that can get into the systems and stitch it all together and then think about it from both the buyer's standpoint but also the seller's standpoint and create that sort of repeatable data driven architecture. My word, I think we could have got where we are way quicker.
Todd Busler [00:14:05]:
I had the same experience, Alex, when I was at Heap. I think people criminally under invest on both the rev op side and getting to a lot of those answers faster. And then I think the next flavor of that is on the enablement side where you're like, oh, I just get smart reps. They can listen to gong calls and figure out what happens. It's like actually when you see someone really good at enablement, could be the sales leader to start or full time enablement person, you just start to see like, oh wow, there's tons of room for productivity gains. My experience has been the same One thing that I think is really interesting about your business, Alex, is, you know you mentioned kind of being account based from day one. You brought up things like understanding different personas and the messaging. You kind of sell to sales and the marketing and I'm sure like sometimes the user is different from the buyer.
Todd Busler [00:14:49]:
How long did it take to figure some of that out in terms of who do we need to get on the hook? Who actually needs to pay for this thing? How do I educate our sales and marketing team to be able to operate that motion where there's multiple stakeholders?
Alex Olley [00:15:02]:
I can still remember the conversation, right? So at the beginning of a business I remember sitting down with the other, with JMLS and Alex, the other three founders, sitting down this hotel bar in London, Victoria, and we're like, so we're going to sell to like we are big built for BDRs and AEs ultimately like one to one gifting to help them like break through to prospects, accelerate deals and they can do it all in like their systems and everything. So we're like, we're going to do all these campaigns, we're going to get loads of excitement within the SDR team. So we're going to send them like all these gifts and stuff and then they're going to take it to the economic buyer and they're going to be like, we need this thing and we've been testing it for free and we spent six months doing that like getting so much hype because we thought that's what our teams would have wanted and we just kept getting so much pushback going. Yeah. That we love it but marketing doesn't want to buy it or like we don't have a budget for this and we're like, okay, what are we going to do? And I remember sitting down with like a couple of companies that were like testing Reachdesk within the SDR team at the beginning. Every time they're like, oh, we kind of, yeah, we can't get through to marketing. And I was like, okay, well we just need to start writing more content for marketing. We need to make them the hero, make them feel good.
Alex Olley [00:16:06]:
What we realized was that the indicator to our success is a lot. Still to this day people say we need to do account based marketing and they think we need to do gifting, right? So the two are still a little bit confused because some of them were buying. All of the ones that were buying were saying we're doing account based marketing. We've invested in 6sense and Demandbase and these account based tools and they had A really robust outbound strategy and we were complementing that. So we, we noticed that all the guys that were buying from us at the beginning had just hired account based marketing managers or had brought on these types of technologies and the penny dropped and we're like, hang on a second. It's not just about selling to marketing, it's about selling to what I call front foot marketers who are, have some kind of demand generation, account based approach to their, to their method.
Alex Olley [00:16:51]:
And we fitted really neatly because they're like, oh yeah, we can see how it works. We're going to pop it straight in. And so we were like, okay, we've just refined our ICP. Maybe we've cut it down by like 75%. Those guys were all buying and so we just sold to them. And what I did, I'd say for the first probably three years of Reachdesk, I was just the guy that wrote playbooks. I would write, I remember writing sales, what we call the sales development playbook, the STR playbook. And it was actually just like workflows of how gifting can be put into your outbound sequences and how you follow up off the back of it and the signals you should use to be able to leverage it properly.
Alex Olley [00:17:27]:
And I think for a long time we realized we were just like, let's just sell that, let's sell these workflows and these ideas and how to, how to embed it. Because I realized no one actually knew how to do gifting as part of like a, an outbound account based methodology. And so coming back to your question, it was really like took us ages to figure it out. We were wrong. Not only we were wrong about, it wasn't just about selling to sales, but there was a specific type of company and marketer that was really ripe for us. And when we nailed that down, things just like took off.
Todd Busler [00:17:56]:
I think this is a thing a lot of people struggle with. You know, you said even cutting down your ICP quite dramatically. We've had the same experience here. You think you have a good understanding of, then you find one lever, one complimentary tech or one thing that the business is doing that's showing like, okay, here's the real icp. Sure it might be more narrow than we thought, but there's plenty there. How did you learn some of that from the outside, right? Like, how did you know someone was committed to an account based approach or aligned philosophically to the types of customers that, you know, typically bought into what you were doing? Was there any obvious signals from the Outside that, you were like, okay, if they're doing X, we know we need to focus on them. And how did you arrive there?
Alex Olley [00:18:36]:
Yeah, we actually did it. Honestly, it was just using simple technographic data. We looked at all the guys who were. Who we were winning. You start with the hypothesis they're using HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce Outreach, Salesloft, 6sense, Demandbase. We looked at all of them, and then we just saw the trends. We're like, oh, everyone is using these, these guys, and we saw this sort of overlap, and it was by. We kind of got there. You have to get there the hard way sometimes because you have to try things, assume that you will have a certain degree of success. And I've always said there's a, my, my mindset towards things, particularly early stages, there's always a breakthrough around the corner. That is the thing. That one kept me going.
Alex Olley [00:19:16]:
But also, you got to try different things sometimes. Sometimes you layer data on top of one another until you spot it. And sometimes it's actually just staring you in the face and you get that quicker. Or it's anecdotal. People go, I think it's this. And you go, oh, yeah, you're right. But this one was one for a while. Took us six to nine months.
Alex Olley [00:19:32]:
And then once we had, like, those first 15, 20 customers, we're like, they all have these same things. And it's about how you prepare the data.
Todd Busler [00:19:40]:
Yeah, I love that and agree. The breakthrough right around the corner. Because, you know, this job, a lot of times it's banging your head against the wall thinking, like, I've exhausted all the options and there's one easy fix, hopefully. Sometimes right in front of your face, sometimes it takes a little longer to get there.
Alex Olley [00:19:55]:
That's what, like, kept me going. I was like, oh, this is so hard. But there's always a breakthrough around the corner. It's kind of like it kept me going, keeps others going. But I ask the same question all the time, like, particularly when we're stuck, what else? That is a question that gets so underutilized when we're stuck. Okay, we think it's this. What else? I haven't thought about what else. Well, let's talk about what else.
Alex Olley [00:20:18]:
What else could it be? What else are the options that we could explore? What else have you thought about? The what else? Question is how I've unlocked the breakthroughs in the past. And it's the thing where people just go, all right, well, at least we tried. And then they give up, right? Think about that. There's always a breakthrough around the corner. Ask what else can we think about? What are the options? Like what else is the thing that's helped me unlock those things and others to make sure that we're exploring all options tactically.
Todd Busler [00:20:43]:
How do you pull that out of people? Right. Because I think like some of the best leaders, whether this overall kind of executives or CROs is they're really good at soliciting ideas from the rest of the org because some of the best ideas come from everywhere. How do you actually go and do that? Is that in every one on one people are sick of you saying what else have we, what else have we not considered? What have we thought about? Do you do like kind of dedicated brainstorming time? Like how do you actually go and get that? Especially as the organization has grown.
Alex Olley [00:21:11]:
I think there are three things to this. One, all the guys that hopefully they'll be listening at some point. But they call me the therapist. They are. We're in therapy mode now because I really dig and dig and dig and keep getting to the root. I'm just like that. I just want to get to the root cause of things. There's a really good book I think it's called, it's called The Coaching Habit and it's about like you may have read it, but it's about asking those questions to uncover the truth. But like practically two things. One, every Monday we meet as a go to market team. Okay. That is BDR leadership. That is a leadership, CS marketing everyone, right? And we talk about the problems that we're running into. So we always start with pipeline pacing by source. How are we doing against our pipeline goals, right? Average deal size, win rate, sales cycle length, forecast, retention.
Alex Olley [00:21:59]:
All the kind of standard stuff you'd expect to see. So we get all the numbers out in front of everyone and we. So customer success can help us, we can help them, blah blah, blah. We can just talk about the numbers. But we dedicate most of the session to what I call the issues. The issues are these are the really big horrible things that are just like getting in our way right now that whether or not this impacts you, we need to figure this stuff out together. And often you get different suggestions. Some we've had some of the best suggestions from like our customer success leadership has helped sales because I'm a firm believer in diversity of thinking and the problem most teams have.
Alex Olley [00:22:33]:
And so that comes back to hiring is my point, I suppose. But the problem I think most teams have is they sit in a room with other sales leaders and They've all had a playbook that they've pulled out the bag before. And the problem with sales leaders is usually like, who shouts the loudest? And they're quite egotistical quite a lot of the time. And so you have to bring in other minds, right, to kind of challenge that, but also come at it from a different angle. That's one thing I found has worked really well. So when you're tackling issues, don't just tackle it in isolation with, I'm going to get loads of BDRs and BDR leaders to tackle a BDR problem. Maybe bring in marketing sales as well, ideally customer success, and then ask people to speak up. And you have to sometimes give them a voice.
Alex Olley [00:23:13]:
I haven't heard from you. What do you think? When I've asked that question in the past, they go, why do you think this? I'm like, oh, my God, I'm glad I asked that question, because we wouldn't have made that breakthrough. So that's. One point is you create a forum for people to be able to solve problems together. And the other part is we bring these problems to the front line as well. So I had breakout sessions with BDRs and AEs in this case. So we were trying to. The problem was that our win rate dropped ever so slightly.
Alex Olley [00:23:36]:
So I said, look, guys, we need to come up with three ways that you think are going to work for. How can we improve our outbound win rate without suffering on volume? I know you tell me the things that you think we should be doing and leadership is not allowed to speak. We just listen. And so BDR's going, well, I think if we did this and we did that, then that. And maybe if we tweaked that, then that's probably going to help our win rate. And actually you wouldn't destroy our activity. So that's probably going to work. I'm like, oh, my word, why didn't we think of that? And so you have to.
Alex Olley [00:24:03]:
I call it walking the floor. You got to walk the floor and you've got to give again. I talk about giving people a voice a lot. You have to give them a voice. And I think that's so underestimated. It's really hard when you're a really big company. But I think every company should be doing it where you have to go to the front line and say, here's the problem. What do you think too? And some of the best ideas can come from there as well.
Todd Busler [00:24:23]:
Love that. I'm not surprised by the success you have. I think some of the things you're describing, like in theory, sound really simple, are hard to do consistently and hard to keep giving people that voice. And especially as you get bigger, it just, you know, multiplies in complexity. Alex, one thing you've wrote a lot about that I always read and I share with my team is kind of the concept of inbound and outbound being one team. I think you're very early on that from like what I gather, what led you to that line of thinking and then how has that changed? Maybe the way you guys go to market versus other companies. And again, you have you this, this unique lens because you see the intricacies of a lot of your customers go to market. So what, what led you there?
Alex Olley [00:25:04]:
Look, mate, this started from just a massive frustration of mine for so many years. I'm sure people listening to this will be like, I'm still in this. It stems from the problem of attribution. Now attribution, I believe, was invented to give people credit. It wasn't built to help people really analyze what's working versus what's not working. That's the problem. I think we, I used to spend too much time, we'd close a deal and marketing would be like, yeah, well that was like a marketing deal. And then there would literally be like shouting matches over this stuff.
Alex Olley [00:25:36]:
And I was like, why do we care always like, you know, I've seen finance professionals, CEOs set these just terrible goals for marketers which allow them to gamify the system, which do not set sales up for success. And so I was just like, I just don't want to live in this world anymore. I don't want to live in this world where we're just fighting against each other all the time. I don't want to live in this world that's about credit. And I don't want to live in this world where I think people can just hit their number and feel really good about it, which doesn't translate to revenue because at the end of the day, the best go to market professionals are the ones that care about revenue. And that is it. And so I basically made this decision, comes back to like day one at reached us. I said, in this business we are not going to talk about attribution from a standpoint of credit.
Alex Olley [00:26:21]:
We're going to talk about revenue and we're going to try and optimize and optimize the way we get to our revenue number by having diverse sources of pipeline but actually getting them to work together. I call it all Bound, I think some people call it different, different things. But I haven't seen a single argument in this business that actually that was a marketing lead, thank you very much. Or yes, marketing's hit 150% of our number, but sales have hit 50%. So we feel good and we don't care about how you feel. It doesn't exist. And what we've engineered is a world where I actually, my marketing team, some like demand gen digital head of marketing, all these guys, they have a comp plan which is tied to revenue. I think marketers, most marketers underpaid for what they do, particularly the revenue marketers.
Alex Olley [00:27:06]:
And I kind of wanted to bring that. I can't get to quite parity. It's really hard. I want to narrow the gap there. But I also, I want them to be thinking about how do we win the best fit customers for us. So I was like, look, we need a certain amount of pipeline. We need to think about how we diversify our pipeline. But ultimately we need to figure out how we make it all work together so that we hit our revenue goal.
Alex Olley [00:27:27]:
That is the challenge, and we've been working on that for seven years.
Todd Busler [00:27:30]:
Very, very much aligned. If you're a VP of sales, new CRO, banging your head against the wall and saying, wow, we're spending way too much time thinking about who should get credit for this. You mentioned the comp, right? Which I think is a massive lever here. Is there anything else or any advice you'd have on, hey, here are the things you can pull, or here's the argument you should be making why this is the right way to approach this, or here's how we go about making this change.
Alex Olley [00:27:54]:
I think the starting point, if I were, if I was new CRO or VP of sales, I'd be looking at pipeline pacing versus actual revenue one first, if those two are actually kind of imbalanced, you don't really have a problem. The problem might be around who's arguing with who. And do we have this like a culture problem as such. But you don't have a revenue problem if marketing's hitting 100% of their number and sales are hitting 100%. You don't put me to change too much. To be honest with you. I wouldn't really rock the boat. But this is the thing I speak to most CEOs, CROs and CMOs about, right? And because I speak about this a lot, I get a lot of messages about this.
Alex Olley [00:28:27]:
And I was actually, I was speaking to a CEO this morning and he said, the same problem. He's like, marketing keeps celebrating and it's kind of awful to watch because they're always at like 120 their number, but we're not hitting our sales number. And so they literally hate each other and it's just not working. I don't know what to do. And I was like, well, what would it take for you to put the marketing number actually the same as sales. And then everyone works together to figure out how we hit the pipeline we need that's going to close so we can hit our revenue number. He's like, well, I might need to let go of my head of marketing. I was like, well, it sounds like you might have the wrong person. Sometimes, you have to have the right people as well who are willing to embrace that. If you're going to shift that culture and that mindset, you've also got to have the right people who are on board with it. And some people just aren't on board with that journey and therefore it's the wrong journey for them.
Todd Busler [00:29:11]:
I think. Alex, much like my journey at Champify, we're in a unique spot where we get to see a lot of organizations many times multiple steps or years ahead of us and what they're doing in their go to market motion, right? You're having conversations multiple times a day or, you know, dozens of times a week and seeing what others are doing. Where do you get inspiration on kind of what's working well on the outbound side, where should we be testing things? Where, where could we be pushing the boundaries? Some of the things we're doing, where do you go to learn? Where are some of the thing people that you follow that are challenging your thinking in all the right ways.
Alex Olley [00:29:45]:
Yeah, two places, LinkedIn and like smaller events. LinkedIn. I do follow a lot of people. It's kind of hard to figure out what's genuine versus like what, what's not. But yeah, I, I, I'd say I've got like five to 10 people that I can reach out to. I, I trust to be, to have my finger on the pulse. I mean, I, I give a massive shout out to Kevin Dorsey. I was, I was with him last week actually in, in Arizona.
Alex Olley [00:30:09]:
And he's just one of those people that just like anything he says, I'll pretty much go, yeah, I'm pretty much going to try. Copy that. Because, because he's always innovating the right way. But I find that I've been very fortunate to be part of this sort of B2B go to market community. You know you're in the same community as us, we're building tools for go to market teams and you do naturally get exposed to people who have their finger on the pulse and that's really fortunate. It's quite rare actually. But I do tend to like go to a certain select few events where I'm very honest to say, look, this actually I'll be very transparent with you. A year ago our outbound channel was starting to underperform a lot.
Alex Olley [00:30:46]:
And it was communities like Pavilion, but also like we've got SDRs of London for example, those kind of communities where I can sit down and go, how are you guys navigating this right now? And I'll try and get it sort of straight from the horse's mouth, directly from the source. And usually I walk away with one or two things. I go, okay, maybe we do need to upgrade a little bit. So it typically is communities that I've spent my time building and I trusted partners who I think have always got their finger on the pulse.
Todd Busler [00:31:13]:
Digging into that example, I think what's really interesting in the world we're in and what's hard for CROs VP of sales today is like things are constantly changing, right?
Todd Busler [00:31:22]:
So like what I've heard from this conversation is yeah, we, you guys were pretty early on the all bound model. Really early on, hey, we're going account based from day one, right? Building all the right outbound culture kind of caveman style in the beginning. And then something changed, right? Whether that's like macro, the market is changing or hey, certain channels are getting less effective. In that example you mentioned, what did you find? Like what was it about the outbound that was starting to say, okay, this isn't working as well and what changes did you make?
Alex Olley [00:31:52]:
Yeah. So look, transparently I think we hadn't really nailed the latest version of our ideal customer profile. 2023 happened, right? And if you're in, you're selling to sales and marketing and you're a tech vendor, the tech industry kind of started to struggle. Budgets obviously were being cut. So we're like, okay, our total addressable market is now a lot smaller compared to where it was before. And I had to really start inspecting things like which segments in terms of like enterprise, mid market, commercial, the geos, the industry verticals.
Alex Olley [00:32:26]:
You've got a lot of different routes you can go, but you can't go after all of them. Unfortunately. I think one of the things that we did, which I'm really glad we did, and I remember Jeff, I mentioned him earlier, our Revox guy. I remember when we launched this, he was like, I'm really glad we're doing this. And what we did is we essentially built this squad, actually. I remember sitting down with our. One of our sales managers. I said, I need I basically two of your best people.
Alex Olley [00:32:49]:
And I said the same with our sdle. I need a couple of your best people. I've put product marketing. I put Jeff rev ops, and that was me. And we basically built this squad. And we were like. Rather than like, say to everyone, you're going to go after all these different segments and kind of spread it around and spread the risk. We built this squad, and their job was basically to like, tackle new industry verticals, new segments, and, you know, we started selling to customers that we just never sold to before.
Alex Olley [00:33:15]:
Oh, okay. Actually, this is working. So let's put more of our effort towards that. And we just unlocked things bit by bit. It did take time, but I think it was about, you know, in those situations, you've got to. You've got to navigate things, and the worst thing to do is to kind of bet the house on things and, like, distract the entire team. I think the best thing to do is take a smaller hit squad and just go and find those pockets of gold. And that.
Alex Olley [00:33:38]:
That unlocked a lot for us. It helped really put a mirror up to who our ideal customer profile really was at the time. It did help us unlock certain industries that we just weren't able to do before because I think we did go too widespread. But ultimately, it was about. It was an ICP move more than anything. And I think we've got that pretty nicely drilled down again.
Todd Busler [00:33:58]:
And there's so much you're saying, Alex, that I think we could spend hours on. A couple of things I'm taking away is just like you said, caveman. I think what goes into that, though, is just like an ownership mindset that you have in go to market from day one. It's like, look, this is what it is. We're going to control our destiny. Like, yes, it's going to be hard. We're going to find our way there. Also, this constant theme of experimentation, right, where you don't know the next breakthrough might be around the corner, but you have to get enough shots on goal to find that thing.
Todd Busler [00:34:25]:
And I think very similarly, same thing with that Monday meeting you mentioned, right. I hear Kyle Lacy, who's a marketer I really look up to, calls the pipeline council. He's like, look, good ideas come from everywhere.
Todd Busler [00:34:37]:
Sure, you're looking at the numbers and what's pacing, but you're really trying to find breakthroughs and that's the, the mechanism to do it. And then the other thing that I think is really refreshing, as I hear you talk, is ICP is a moving target, right? And you think you know it and it actually way more narrow than you may think. Or something changes in the market that unlocks something a little bit different and just realizing like you've never nailed that thing, right? It's an ever moving target. And the better you can get in terms of narrowly focusing on groups of companies, the better success you'll have. And the last one, which is just constant learning, right, from people in your networks and your communities because you surround yourself with five, six, eight other people that think similarly. You're expanding the number of tests and experiments that are happening, right? So you get to see what you can start to copy, which I think is awesome learnings for people. The last question I have for you, Alex, is if you were going about it today, right? So you guys launched like, you know, called six, seven years ago. You've grown really impressively, navigate a lot of hard times based on ages, who you're selling to and the category you're selling to, COVID, etc.
Todd Busler [00:35:42]:
How would you go about it differently now? Like I always think about, you know, if I started a company, my next one, I don't think I'd be two times better. I think I'd be 10 times better. How would you go about it now if you were starting Reachdesk, you know, 2025, what would be the biggest, biggest differences?
Alex Olley [00:35:57]:
Well, I mean, I think I've sort of listed some of them. But if we were like day one, I'm quite happy to say this in the sense that I would still do some things. I would do the same. Would be relentless, focus on like that outbound, allbound, ICP, understand personas, just the fundamentals. I wouldn't change any of that, honestly. It's just put that foundational place in that just actually doesn't change at all. I think I would probably be thinking about it back in 2019 when we started it. Well, we started in 2018.
Alex Olley [00:36:28]:
We really launched 2019. I would be thinking about it now from a much more operational standpoint. It's like, how do I. How do I 2 to 3x the productivity of the people. I've got my team and actually keep the team a lot leaner. I remember I started Reach, I was like at one point I had a. I think I had a team of 120 and I was, like, really proud of that. It's so cool I got all these people now.
Alex Olley [00:36:48]:
Now I look back at them like that. It's a dumb. When I think about it, I think I would just be really maniacal about that productivity aspect of getting the right signals into their hands, helping them understand what those signals mean so that they can have really productive conversations. I would probably do less in terms of, like, email and LinkedIn outreach. And I would be optimizing for them to be on the phone more and think about ways I can use those channels that are more written communication to still be very personalized. We still personalize a lot, but to try and make them into more of, let's say, BDRs, into more of what I call a call center. But I would be thinking about it from that landscape because I think there's so many ways you can enrich data and do research and use AI to optimize things. And you've got parallel dialers.
Alex Olley [00:37:31]:
I think you can get a lot more out of reps. And back then I was just like, let's just hire more bodies. And whether that was a mistake or not, I don't know. But that's how I would think about things differently.
Todd Busler [00:37:42]:
Yeah, there's so much not only just on the AI front, but also on the offshore talent front and new tooling that you can use that we think very similarly now. It's just like, how effective can we get our best rep before we're thinking about adding anyone else? Like, where is that upper limit on someone? And then, okay, let's go try to replicate that before we're just doing the spreadsheet math of, you know, eight people here. Go higher. So, Alex, this was awesome. I think there's so many nuggets of learnings for people. I'm confident that you'll accelerate some people's learnings or give things that are super actionable. Appreciate you sharing your learnings. Where can people find you? How do they get in touch if they have questions?
Alex Olley [00:38:18]:
Yeah, if you've got questions, just hit me up on LinkedIn. I've started posting a lot more now. Again, I sort of had a bit of a break for six months or so gathering my thoughts, but. But I post a lot more on there, so follow me on there if you want. But if you do have questions, just like connect with me and just DM me on LinkedIn, I suppose.
Todd Busler [00:38:35]:
Love it. Alex, I really appreciate your time. Wishing you guys big 2025. And I personally appreciate the help that you've given to me and some of the learnings you've shared with me. So big thanks.
Alex Olley [00:38:45]:
My pleasure, Todd. Thanks for having me, man.
Todd Busler [00:38:46]:
All right, take care, Alex. See you, buddy.
Alex Olley [00:38:48]:
Bye.
Todd Busler [00:38:52]:
Thanks for listening to Cracking Outbound. If this was helpful, let us know by messaging me Todd Busler on LinkedIn and share this episode with a friend that you think will be interested. If you want more resources about building and scaling all things Outbound, you can sign up for our newsletter at champify.io/blog.