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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):
We started at Champify with a really simple thesis; Cold prospecting is going to continue to get harder and harder and less effective every day that passes. There's too many competitors in each category running a very similar playbook. Email hasn't been effective for the last 18 months or so, and as I said, what I think is happening or what has happened with email is going to happen with cold calls, and I expect that similar precipitous drop coming very soon. Everyone wants to build stronger pipeline, but only a few know how to make it happen. If you're listening to this show, 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've built it. Let's get into it.
Todd Busler (00:59):
Hey everyone. Welcome back to Cracking Outbound. I'm your host, Todd Bustler, CEO of Champify . Today, I want to talk to you about something we're all feeling in sales right now, that creeping sense that outbound just isn't working like it used to. And the thing is, you're not crazy if you feel that way. We're all pretty aware that it has changed. The playbook that has gotten us from 2012 to early 2024 is fundamentally broken. That ship has sailed for most of us. Today's episode is not a product pitch. It's really a breakdown of why outbound has evolved, what I'm seeing top teams do on a daily basis to approach outbound differently in 2025, and how you can adapt starting this week. Let's dive in. For years, outbound followed a really distinct formula, a lot of it driven by early Jason Lemkin, Aaron Ross, early Salesforce, kind of predictable revenue playbook, buy a list, find a funding event spot, a job title and a job post fire off a bunch of cold emails at a sequencer like Outreach, SalesLoft, et cetera, and hope something sticks.
Todd Busler (02:06):
And honestly, it worked, especially when you were relatively early to a new market. At my previous role, leading sales at Heap from about zero to 40 million, we built $50 million plus in pipeline this way, and it was a major reason why we were able to exit for north of $500 million. But now everyone is playing the same game with the same tools, the same signals, the same AI flavor of the week, and the buyers are seeing through it. The noise has increased dramatically and the impact has gone down with every waiting day. I talk to SDR teams that are saying, Hey, my response rates are down, my open rates are down. I can't get people to answer a call to email. And the reason for this is buyers are fatigued. Reps are starting to burn out, and there's a lot of teams trying to optimize a broken system, adding more volume, layering AI to allow us to go wider, warming up different inboxes, leaning heavier on automation or volume.
Todd Busler (03:05):
But if you're honest with yourself, it's not working the way it used to and just do more is no longer cutting it. So let's talk about what is working in 2025. The best outbound teams, the ones still generating real consistent pipeline fit into one or two camps. There's the first camp, which I like to call centralized ai. First outbound. Think about this as a go-to market engineer or a growth marketer or a really op centric BDR leader that replaces the email portion that the SDR team was doing, right? So what this means is instead of having 10, 20, 30 SDRs hitting go on outreach and SalesLoft cadences, they're taking a single growth marketing person or go to market engineer and orchestrating the email portion at scale with one person owning this copy segmentation list, building targeting, using specific signals in mini micro campaigns. They can let the SDRs focus on higher touch work, which is usually social selling on LinkedIn, getting more involved in events and doubling down on cold calling.
Todd Busler (04:17):
Now, this is a lot of work. It requires managing and warming up multiple inboxes, having AI agents and being completely up to date on that, always on evergreen plays. This is working well for companies in more mature categories, usually with bigger markets and typically smaller a CV products. The problem is many of us don't fit into that camp at Champify. We sell deals from 25 to 150k plus we have a narrow target account list. That volume oriented play as much as I wish it did work just doesn't. So camp two is a group of people or a group of companies that sell a higher end product, usually with a smaller target market. The third party signals here and more automation don't work super well, right? We know those buyers are inundated and a slightly better personalization or dropping the college name that they went to or the bar that their hometown is in.
Todd Busler (05:13):
It really doesn't matter and that doesn't work anymore. So instead, the group of companies in camp two is mining first party signals data from inside their own company's virtual four walls. When I say that, what I'm talking about is CRM data call transcripts and recordings, calendar invites, past opportunity notes. Most teams are sitting on a gold mine of context. Former champions, power users buying committee members who never got touched, people mentioned in early cold calls or discovery calls, and they're not doing anything with this data. Here's some of the plays that these companies are doing right now that are working re-engaging closed loss stops based on why they were lost. Hey, there was a budget blocker. There was an entire team focused on a different initiative and null and willing to give this intention until a specific date following champions, former admin users, buyers, customer success contacts who just landed at a new prospect account, finding power users who've grown in, matured into decision-making roles at their new companies.
Todd Busler (06:17):
This a massive play for us personally. We have some of our best power users, our SDRs or frontline SDR leaders, they're taking director level jobs and they have a say for what tooling they want to bring in. And when we see that movement, we have specific plays for multiple people moving into a target account or a previous buyer and a swarm of users that are getting promoted moving into a target account. And this is performing at a much higher level than anything we can do at a cold outbound scale. Another example is threading into an exec that might've been mentioned on a discovery call but never got looped in or engaged. When you look through, and I know this because we're doing it for ourselves and for our customers, when you look through a lot of these call transcripts, people are giving you nuggets. When is going to be a better timing?
Todd Busler (07:03):
What needs to change personnel wise for us that have a proper crack at this account? The problem is people aren't tapping into it. The insights that I mentioned are warmer, right? The outreach is contextual and based on historical interaction with your individual company. This is not something anyone can scrape off the open web. This is not something that the new AI flavor of the weak tool is going to help with. Therefore, the conversation is higher. Just think about this like any supply and demand, if everyone can get access to the same information, it's going to get less powerful. In addition to this, in camp two, what we're seeing is people really leaning into cold calling. Let's be real here, cold calling sucks. There's a whole book on it called just that from my friends Nick and Armand. However it works, and we use it at Champify, right?
Todd Busler (07:52):
If you have great reps that are excited to pick up the phones, they know how to navigate a call and get introductions to the right people and they can nail a succinct value prop. That's a weapon. Folks like Kevin Dorsey at SMB focused company finally just said publicly that his SDRs are 100% focused on the phones and they outsource email to that centralized person or team, right? Phones and cold calls, they're having their moment. Companies like Nooks and Orum and Titan X and other technology focused to get more dials and connects is becoming increasingly popular. I personally believe this window's going to be short. I believe it's a window that's open, but it's going to start closing and closing fast. The reason why I say that is as people move away from email as a core strategy, more and more people will start making more and more calls.
Todd Busler (08:47):
Therefore, your buyers are not only getting inundated with email, they're going to start get inundated with calls. And I believe they're going to continue to answer the phones less and less. So the result will be connect rates going down and the motion or this window becoming saturated quickly. So if you're relying on cold calling plus generic signals, I believe your edge is fading. The more you layer in first party data, more context, smarter timing, the more of an opportunity and the more alpha that you'll have. I also want to address another point that I keep hearing. Whoever orchestrates AI and all of these different signals best will have a competitive advantage. I don't buy that. Here's what I think is going to happen. The orchestration layer will become trivial AI just from 12 months ago today. It's insane how you can scrape the open web, find a flurry of signals, stitching together the tools and prompts or playbooks is not going to be a long-term advantage and six to 12 months, anyone with a basic rev ops function will be able to spin up solid automated or heavily automated workflows to these same organizations.
Todd Busler (10:01):
So you're going to be up against Sirius competitors, and I don't believe that orchestration will be your edge. The edge will be however your data, the first party signals that you're feeding into the system that no one else has access to, that allows you to be highly differentiated and historical in your messaging. Historical meaning you can pull from things that your company has learned about a specific account maybe over the last couple years and start to make sense of that in creative ways. That orchestration is very interesting. So AI here where I think a lot of organizations have spent tens of thousands of dollars in hundreds, if not thousands of hours, are going after a strategy that based on supply and demand explained earlier, is just going to get less and less effective by the day. Lemme give you a quick story. One of our customers, an enterprise sales org, north of a hundred million in a RR, ran a reengagement play using nothing but their own closed opportunity data call recordings from those closed opportunities and CRM notes.
Todd Busler (11:10):
Now, an issue with CRM notes is people move around. AEs have short-term incentives, but being able to pull that information from wherever it may be, email activities, CRM notes, call transcripts, et cetera, makes this possible. They then filtered these ops for closed loss due to the loss code or loss reason, right? So timing a budget, which I don't really believe, but the real thing in budget was maybe a budget freeze or they're focused on another part of the business, or the entire ops team who needs to handle installation is heads down on another piece of tech for the next 10 months. Things like champion churn, all are things that could have changed. They fed the CRM notes, they fed the call transcripts, they fed the email for any ops that haven't been touched in the last six to 12 months into ai. And the result is they've sourced dozens of ops by using this first party data to be highly personalized.
Todd Busler (12:06):
And again, messaging that no one else can write. The kicker, the most exciting part here is reengage. Closed lost ops convert 20% higher than going after an account your first time around. We have many customers that have on average, between two and a half and four closed lost ops on any given account before they actually win that account. Lemme say that again. The chance of going after an account that you've never had an opportunity with versus one where you have closed law stops, you're going to win the second camp 20% higher. And what I believe and what one of our customers and SVP of sales at a public company said is Nurture is the new pipeline. Nurture is king, and I believe that. So that's what I mean when I'm saying hidden pipeline. So what are some things you can do right now? You don't need to buy new software now coming from someone selling software, you don't have to do that, right?
Todd Busler (13:01):
Not yet. Start with a first party signal audit. So pull all of your closed law stops, filter by time or stage, and ask yourself what needed to change in these accounts for them to be winnable? What needed to change in those accounts for those accounts to be winnable? Next, export all of your advocates. So who are the former buyers? People that have implemented your software, customer success contacts, highly engaged product users, where are they now? And what you're doing is you're looking for some overlap between champions or advocates and those closed loss opportunities. It's a great opportunity to reignite them. Step three, review the call transcripts. AI has made this very, very easy to say What other execs were mentioned on a call that never got looped in? What specific timing oriented or budget oriented blockers were mentioned that may be no longer exist today?
Todd Busler (14:03):
Lastly, check the meeting data, right? Unfortunately, the reality is most people don't do a good job of capturing meeting data aka who are your reps having meetings with? A lot of times those contacts aren't making it into your Salesforce or your HubSpot. And what you want to understand is who did your reps talk to at those accounts that didn't convert without an understanding of the full buying committee or the people that have been engaged. It's really hard to understand what your plan should be to reengage. So what I would suggest it's pick one play, run it manually. A few emails, focus on getting introductions from the humans that have had those meetings or have those relationships with the contacts that the company are trying to target. Have a designated way to manage these introductions. Make a few calls, track the response rate. You'll be shocked at how much of the first party signal is hiding in plain sight and will actually work at reigniting Pipeline.
Todd Busler (15:06):
And when you're ready to scale that, automate it, embed in Slack, retroactively, grab all the right contacts from your Google Calendar outlook, look through email. That's when Champify could help. But I would recommend you do this manually first. And by the way, if you're thinking, wow, this feels really hard, the reality is, you're right. The game has gotten 10 times harder than just four or five short years ago. Jason Lemkin kicked off Sasa this year with a very similar message. What you're feeling, you are not alone. And there's a lot of reasons for that. All of what I just described is the reason why we're launching a new addition to our product suite called Insider ai. We started at Champify with a really simple thesis. Cold prospecting is going to continue to get harder and harder and less effective every day that passes. There's too many competitors in each category running a very similar playbook.
Todd Busler (16:03):
Email hasn't been effective for the last 18 months or so. And as I said, what I think is happening or what has happened with email is going to happen with cold calls. And I expect that similar precipitous drop coming very soon. And I say that from a CEO of a company where we book about 75% of our outbound meetings on the phones, right? So that's why I'm sitting here making podcasts. That's why I'm sitting here putting out new content because I think it's a window that's going to close. So what's left to focus on, and in my opinion, what should be the primary focus of AI is on things that people cannot copy. Earned signups, value delivered via introductory calls, useful content produced over the years that people are engaging with and want to consume and want to give their email because it's so good.
Todd Busler (16:53):
It's almost worth paying for. And positive experiences deliver to your customers, prospects, former users of your products, et cetera. Insider AI makes sense of all of that. Email data, call transcripts, calendar data and more. And then layers AI on top of it to make sense of who should you be re-engaging, when should you be re-engaging them, and how all powered by ai, the world will move to much smaller SDR orgs. And I believe much smaller sales orgs overall, and the money is going to flow into content specialized events, building brand personalities and more. It's already happening. But what I'd encourage you to think about is stop chasing the AI flavor of the week and think about what are plays that we can run that no one else can copy, where you have an actual data advantage. And I think that's going to be the most powerful part of making outbound work in 2025. So to wrap, outbound isn't dead, but the way we've been doing it, yes, it's done. The winners in 2025 and onward will be the ones who operationalize their internal knowledge, not just spray more emails or chase the latest AI hack that everyone else can copy. If this episode hit home, send it to a friend or drop me a message on LinkedIn. And if you want these plays in your inbox, sign up for the Champify newsletter, links in the show notes. Thanks for listening to the Cracking outbound. See you next week. Don't miss it.
Todd Busler (18:31):
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.