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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.
Rob Anderson (00:00):
So I have this model in BD that I talk about a lot with diagnosis and coaching, but it also applies to the leverage we can pull as leaders. It's the three E model. So you have effort, efficiency, and effectiveness. Effort, can I help them do more in the same period of time? Efficiency, can I help them get into more conversations, replies and interactions? Three, can I have higher quality or higher conversion on those interactions? So I tried to align the tools that I was rolling out into those three different buckets.
Todd Bustler (00:28):
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 Bustler 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. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm excited to introduce Rob Anderson today. He built the first SDR program at Docebo, which is now $1 billion market cap public company. He spent some time at Gong helping lead and build their enterprise BDR function, and then he boomeranged back to Docebo where he scaled the team to over 75 people. He's very forward looking when it comes to tech signals and getting the most from teams without growing headcount. He's made a lot of bold moves that were very controversial at the time and now are looking extremely popular in present day. He's also currently the CRO at TitanX where he talks to leading pipe gen organizations, sales teams, SDRs, ops every single day. He has strong opinions, but he's been very deep in the trenches and earned those opinions and he's not afraid to speak his mind. Enjoy the conversation. Rob, I'm pumped to be talking with you. How you doing?
Rob Anderson (01:52):
I'm good. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Todd Bustler (01:55):
Yeah, I think your story is really fascinating. We were just talking about kind of prerecord a lot of your run and learnings and a lot of hard earned lessons I'd imagine over the last decade that I'm excited to dive into. I want to start with you were at Docebo pre-IPO. Tell us about your experience there and outbound probably looked a little bit different at that time, so I'd love to learn about your experience and then I think for the audience how you eventually led your way back there and then we'll dive into all the details.
Rob Anderson (02:26):
Absolutely. We'll hop into time machine. So I joined Docebo back in 2017, so that was my second job in SaaS. I had started out in a smaller company called Achieve It back in the day when I just got my teeth cut there and they had let me know that they were looking for someone to build out their outbound channel from scratch after a couple failed attempts I would say. So the company was right around seven to $8 million in revenue at the time and had a lot of foothold with inbound growth and trajectory. So early product market fit scaled via inbound all the way up to seven to 8 million, which honestly primes you for outbound at that point. A lot of people try to start outbound well before they have something going. So that was definitely a strong signal for me to think that there is something here, but there's a couple failed attempts with one trying to take a enterprise shirae who had never done before and try to do it as a side project.
Rob Anderson (03:17):
We know how that goes, so they're really ready to invest in building this the right way. Then enter me, I was I think 24 at the time after my first nine months doing SaaS. I was super experienced and ready to take it on, but the company was being built out of Athens, Georgia in North America, which was kind of an interesting note as well for me where the University of Georgia is, but there's no other SaaS tech companies there. So I go up there for my interview and it's actually a funny story that same week my landlord had defaulted on my rent and I thought the world was crumbling around me. The other company had a reorg that was happening, but it actually allowed me to be able to move on a whim if I needed to. I took the job, I got it and I signed and I moved up there within a week and here we are.
Rob Anderson (03:56):
I have one rep and just myself. So I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I didn't know what an LMS was at the time, but I just knew that I had the outbound skill sets and I was hungry as hell and ready to make an impact. That whole first year was just about trying to document the playbook and see what works and back in 2017, a lot more channels were firing for us. Back then phone was still the thing that I was number one about since the beginning. Phone first was really dominating for us, but back then outreach sequences by persona, by industry we're still working really well. So we scaled up that team in the first year to about eight to nine people and threw up about a million dollars in revenue on the board for the first year. It took about six to nine months to actually get repeatable though. So that was year one my time there. I scaled from team lead to manager to director of outbound overtook inbound outbound and built the client growth channel and then finally was overseeing a global team across all different countries. So as you can imagine versus being an IC on a team lead versus near the end when I was doing, I think I've had about 70 to 80 plus people globally just a totally different job. So I'm happy to dive in different areas, but what would be most interesting for the audience you think?
Todd Bustler (05:05):
Yeah, there's a lot there. The first thing I want to double click into is I was going to say why didn't it go well with some other leaders, but you kind of answered it. It's a common trap I see too, which is, hey, yes, you might not have the right person, but I think that the thing you said around, Hey, this is treated as a side project. I think a lot of companies get to five a lot earlier now even trying to get outbound going, and if it's like this is an experiment, it's going to be treated as a failed experiment, or it's like, no, I'm hiring someone. We're making the investments, we're going to make this thing work. And I always caution people away from this side project approach to it. Being pretty phone first at that time is awesome to hear. What led you to think that way while like you said the persona, industry oriented sequences did work typically well, that was pretty, I would say, different than a lot of companies at that time.
Rob Anderson (05:56):
I think the fundamental of outbound is just to start a conversation and if you just look at the math and the metrics, it should point you towards the phone nine times out of 10 depending on your a CV and such, but I'm hoping it's over 50k if you're doing outbound in the first place. But the idea is starting a conversation. So let's take the best email reply rate campaign you have, Todd, for you, what is your best email reply rate right now on any of your campaigns you're running?
Todd Bustler (06:19):
I mean we're super call heavy too, but.
Rob Anderson (06:22):
Okay, so somewhere in the single digits probably though, right?
Todd Bustler (06:24):
Definitely.
Rob Anderson (06:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, in the low single digits probably. So back then, good emails were probably performing four to 7%. What is your connect rate typically is going to be right around the same approach right there. So both of those channels are going to start them at the exact same rate. However, are you going to bet that your best rep in an active channel is going to outperform a passive channel like email nine times out of 10? I would say yes. So I was just bought in that if we had more conversations with our market consistently, that would compound over time, especially in a saturated market industry like LMS, it's outbound. You can target the right fit, the right person, you can have problem statements, but you can't do anything about timing. So we just had to canvas the market and just understand renewal dates and incumbent renewal dates and incumbent and canvas that information over time and that would help us. So that was the foundation. It was just conversations can power everything and that kind of leads to where I'm at later is now unlocking that power, which we can talk about later. But yeah, I was all about the phone. It's just an active channel by far.
Todd Bustler (07:25):
Wow, there's a ton I want to dive into in the chabo experience. Before I get there, I know you also spent some time at Gong, really sales organization. What were your biggest learnings there? And I'm sure we'll get into how you used maybe some of those learnings when you went back, but what were some of your biggest learnings there?
Rob Anderson (07:43):
Yeah, Gong was an amazing experience for me for an educational perspective, and that was a reason that I was looking to broaden my horizon. If you think about it, the first company I was at was less than 2 million. Then the next one, the next four and a half years was all self-taught or learned in different capacities. So for the first six, seven years of my career, it was all self-taught or self-learn. I wanted to be around other people that had been there, done that, and what better place than the talent saturation of a company like Gong. I guess there's a theme in my career being lucky with the right type of leaders to work with, but I landed upmarket leading the enterprise and strategic inside sales motion alongside JJ Jensen, who was a great mentor for me. He was one of the first ams that built out Tableau, so he got to see a lot over his career and I learned a lot more about enterprise and strategic selling around the importance of Multithreading around the importance of having a POV around how sales development can go much further to the middle of the funnel versus just lobbying meetings over a grenade.
Rob Anderson (08:41):
So I think we probably had the hardest SQO criteria I've ever experienced at Kong up there, but that made us really good at what we did and now of course all the reps there are like presidents, clubs, AEs, I have no surprise. So that whole thing in essence was just enterprise strategic sales. It's not just a mid-market deal with a bigger deal tag on it. It requires a totally different approach.
Todd Bustler (09:01):
That's awesome. I like that. Throwing the grenade over and I think there's always this balance and every market and every size is different, but that's awesome skillset to learn, especially from people that have done it. Alright, I want to dive back into the first run at Doce bo. When you said we had $78 million of happy customers, a RR, I'm sure there was some natural expansion happening. Where'd you start? And specifically how do you turn those, what customers are doing today, why they bought maybe all from inbound into early success or early signs of repeatability on the outbound front? Where do you even start?
Rob Anderson (09:36):
Yeah, that's great because just who comes to you doesn't make that your best ICP, right? It's this self-fulfilling prophecy. If you analyze the inbound deals and you look at that, it would've told me, go dominate SMB, right? So it's like where do you want to be play? So we had to take the factors of different cohorted models such as close one, close loss, churn, customers disqualified opportunities, and you're looking for things like ACVs velocity, win rates, et cetera, trying to find your sweet spots. But the whole thing started out on it's an account-based model and we don't want SDRs picking our future customers, so we need to have a strong named account model. And it's interesting, my organization led segmentation almost two years before the AEs followed suit in that because I had to have account books to work off of, I had to go work off of that approach.
Rob Anderson (10:24):
So that was my first method. There was what was our best target accounts we could go after, but we needed to go source and not just the biggest of the biggest. We had to find this sweet spot and where we landed was this mid-market to upper end of mid-market pockets of IT software and IT services and custom software software companies and basically created a three-tiered model. But the challenge with my team as well was in the LMS, you're servicing a horizontal space, you can do something for everyone, which is a curse in outbound as well. So we really had to get good about where we targeted. So we had the tiered model out and next we started looking at creating client stories. That was probably the biggest unlock for me and just our phone presence and our emails was the idea of a before and after client story that we would index across the board.
Rob Anderson (11:14):
And luckily for us, we had invested early in Gong back in 2017, so we were able to get transcripts to help us out with that approach as well. But we had basically stories mapped for every industry and every persona that we wanted to go after in a sheet that we had to have the reps learn. They were basically note cards that they could pull out at any given second, and that was our approach for a long time was targeting verticals and personas and talking to people just like them and the before and after story of how we helped someone just like them and that was our offer was the social proof and that led for a long time, I would say, and it worked pretty well.
Todd Bustler (11:45):
First off, I love this. I do the same thing. I think a lot of people make mistake with early hires, especially SDRs or even AEs, spend so much time on the product and the clicks and the competitive positioning. It's like, look, if you can nail some of these relevant client stories, that's going to be your best friend and you can know one 10th of what you may think you need to know. How do you actually go get, if you're a new SDR leader, how do you actually make that productive? How do you enable the team to be able to do it?
Rob Anderson (12:13):
Yeah, that's a good question. They probably didn't love me about it. I literally left our onboarding halfway through and just stopped doing it back at dead. I thought it was just not relevant. We're going deep in the product. I sometimes say the more the worse you get, some people will take it that the wrong way, but yeah, I don't think you need to know a ton about too much about the product. It's all about onboarding should be what the product customer cares about, the problems that they want to solve and a story you can tell and those are the fundamentals and then you can build upon that because onboarding doesn't have to be just two weeks and it's over. It can be building on month two, three, et cetera, but how do we help them go get that information quickly? We built a majority of that ourselves.
Rob Anderson (12:47):
At the beginning we didn't have these dedicated product marketing functions that were helping us or they were swimming in requests from other people. So we went and found our CSMs or account managers. We gave 'em a framework of exactly what our stories needed to look like and we went to them. We actually started interviewing them just like we're doing right now, and we record those interviews and we would take the soundbites and put it into a repository. It depends on how much you want it, but every bit of the tools and resources are at your disposal in your organization as you speak. And if you have a CI tool at all, they're just sitting there waiting for you to mine that information. You could go do it yourself as an SDR right now by far. So go get it.
Todd Bustler (13:25):
I love that. Yeah. There's so much knowledge that people are like, yeah, it's in there. We'll deal with it later. And you can go do that. You don't need to wait a hundred percent and you don't need a new resource, like a product marketer is going to do the same thing you're going to do. There's no magic to understand the before and after story.
Rob Anderson (13:40):
No, you don't and have to wait for a case study. Those things take forever. You have to go get legal approvals, but you have everything you need sitting in there right now, quotes, proof points, and if you can't drop their name, you can just say A leading company in X, Y, Z said this, so don't wait for approvals. Go get it done.
Todd Bustler (13:56):
You said two things I want to dive into that I think are very interesting. So why'd you say, Hey, big tam, we could sell to anyone. This is horizontal, which makes it more challenging. Why do you say that?
Rob Anderson (14:08):
Because outbound, the only challenge you have is around prioritization, focus time. Time is your leverage that you have. So while you could go after 20 different industries, we also have multiple use cases and multiple personas within there. You could go get meeting with any of them. We serve 'em all. But what about the funnel metrics after the first conversation? What about who converts at a higher rate to stage two? What about those that don't stop and die at stage three? And what about after close one who expands the most? There's this whole approach where if you lower your CAC because you approached the right deals at the beginning, everything expands throughout the end. I wasn't thinking that strategically when I was 24, I'm sure, but what I was thinking of is you have reps who mean to learn client stories, problems that they solve, et cetera. If you reduce the variables, you start to get really good at the foundation, almost your 80 20 rule. Focus on those things get really good and expand versus doing onboarding where I had reps that wanted to learn everything about every part of the product, every vertical, everything, and you just dilute yourself. So I think it's all around just effectiveness and time to competency and then build upon that versus trying to do it all at once.
Todd Bustler (15:19):
Love it. I think it's a trap too. People are always like, look how big this TAM is. You can sell to everyone. It's like, cool, show me your top 300 accounts.
Rob Anderson (15:25):
I did this whole exercise and we do have customers and everything, but then you find this density of majority of them in two areas and then you get to sub industries and then you start really seeing some interesting things. So yeah, you can do it, but where are you going to win and win often?
Todd Bustler (15:39):
Was there anything outside of standard account level information that's typically been easy to get employee size industry headcount of the l and d department? Was there anything else you found over your journey that was like, oh, this is an interesting input that actually has a big impact? I'll give you an example. When I was at heap, we sold to product teams and what we found is the number of people in the product organization relevant to the overall headcount that was positively correlated with someone who's going to buy us. Any examples there you had?
Rob Anderson (16:10):
Yeah, I'm seeing this emergence a lot more recently with tools like relevance or things where you can scrape websites where you find information that's not locked in like a ZoomInfo, but you can tag and cluster information together. So I'd say over time before we got the cool powers of ai, nothing mind blowing, but our biggest challenge with docebo was technographic information. Someone didn't list information on their website if they're using a certain LMS, like you would just Shopify for example. You had to go out and actually earn that information. But it was the number one thing we needed was mapping an account out based on what system they're using for internal versus what system they're using for external versus their renewal dates. If you stack that up at scale, that is the holy grail for us in a displacement type organization. So collecting that information, but right at the end, I did find something like IT challenged, my thought was, wait, customer portals and partner portals are listed on their actual website. So then I went to built with and it was all sitting there for me the whole time. So I don't know what I was thinking there. So yeah, we unlocked that there I'd say. But yeah, I'm seeing a lot cooler stuff lately right now with direct pulls from LinkedIn, headcount growth by individual business line or headcount growth in certain areas, all pulled there. Pretty powerful.
Todd Bustler (17:22):
A hundred percent. Yeah. We use a product called Key Play. There's some really interesting ways that you can just go way deeper. Exactly, exactly. Or that you've thought of and you're like, shit, this is going to be impossible to get. It's not worth the hiring of.
Rob Anderson (17:34):
Yeah, we started looking some stuff for TitanX with sales led growth versus product led growth. We start looking at how many personas they sell to because if they sell to multiple personas and they're sales led, then you can start thinking of almost a credit consumption factor of more lists, bigger lists potential. So started thinking about things like that too.
Todd Bustler (17:54):
Yeah, it makes complete sense. There's one last thing and then we're going to get into where I think you've been super forward thinking on the role and function of an SDR BDR department. But you mentioned canvassing information and you're saying, Hey, in a renewal, typically mature category is very driven by the incumbent, very driven by a renewal. Did you do anything interesting there to incentivize, Hey, just figure out what's happening in this account from a comp perspective? I'm curious how you approached it.
Rob Anderson (18:24):
Yeah, I thought a lot about that. We standardized scripts to make sure that we were always asking two things. No matter what, you disconnected it from an outcome, but a positive outcome could be I just identified the current LMS and which one they're using it for in renewal. So it was consistent script and training and understanding the importance of why first and foremost. Secondly, we did spiffs around it as well, so you get a point for everything you collected over time. Where I was near the end was this was so valuable, I wish I would've incentivized it even further. The biggest thing to me was reps are still not good about normalizing putting something back in the system. We had system of record, you could capture it, but imagine the volume of BDR doing that every day. So that's where my whole focus became how do you take that information, normalize it and map it back to a record? And that was right before I was moving on and we were looking at AI agent type tools for that that were definitely going to make it work.
Todd Bustler (19:15):
That makes sense. During your second go at Docebo, I understand you were able to grow outbound productivity with a much smaller team that now is becoming very popular and maybe wasn't when you first started it. Can you share some either of the stats there or more importantly, how did you go about that? What led you to even want to do that? And then before we hit record, you're like, look, I think almost every organization can do this. I'm eager to get your take.
Rob Anderson (19:41):
Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. The second go round to Chabo was a fun one. It was one of the more impactful, I think runs I've had. And the whole idea was around becoming a hyper efficient organization and challenging the way that we've typically grown. And it's funny, if I look back though, I had this coin that I was like, I'm building an empire, and that was my whole thing when I was younger. I thought that was cool, but now all I see with headcount growth and bigger teams is complexity. All I see is more data needed, more territories needed, more things that could possibly go wrong. I'm not saying I want to remove teams altogether, I'll make that super clear, but I want everyone to be hyper effective and the mass capacity of what they can do before we try to think about pulling headcount as a lever.
Rob Anderson (20:22):
So that's where I was at the team I think was right around like 50 employees when I joined across everything from SMB to public sector to AMEA and apac, where before I think the team was closer to 70 or 80 back in the day. So yeah, it was definitely smaller. When I set out in January of 2024, I set out with a goal basically to, I want to start conversations at scale. I want to figure out everywhere I can remove the constraints to BDR capacity and start to eliminate where they spend time there and put time pack in their day. I did about a hundred plus demos I think over different technology, and this was after I already got the foundation of talent a set. I want to be clear, you don't look for a crutch until you have the talent in place. And I landed on four categories basically.
Rob Anderson (21:05):
One was AI research and AI emailing. Second was signal type tech. Third would be dialer technology, and fourth was phone intent with type X. All had different levels of things and things they helped me pull. So I have this model in BD that I talk about a lot with diagnosis and coaching, but it also applies to the leverage we can pull as leaders. It's the three E model. So you have effort, efficiency and effectiveness effort. Can I help them do more in the same period of time efficiency, can I help them get into more conversations, replies, interactions, three, can I have higher quality or higher conversion on those interactions? So I tried to align the tools that I was rolling out into those three different buckets. AI research and email was big on saving time. My CIO told me AI is supposed to be measured and time saved, so how much time is spent writing emails or researching accounts every day. It was pretty substantial. So we started to try to centralize the email function to a certain degree, which I think is where everything is probably going to go by the way.
Todd Bustler (22:03):
What do you mean by that?
Rob Anderson (22:04):
Centralizing? It is we have so much first party and third party data right now, and AI will do that and collect those signals and information way better than you ever could imagine and way faster. An email template is just a recipe on how to use those information. So AI frameworks are just dynamic templates leveraging information at scale. So if we have the ingredients of first party, third party data that we're connecting to and we have the frameworks in place we want to run, we can use automation to push all that together. So I'm imagining a world where that's all happening in the backend potentially by a campaign manager and the reps are finishing the last polishing of that. They get a certain amount of emails sent to them per day and you are finishing and putting some different finishing touches on that. And I think that's where a lot of it will go, which is going to point back towards why you don't need as much headcount as well is because you're not going to be owning the email function as much.
Rob Anderson (22:56):
So that's what I mean by centralization of the email function. So you take that research email writing, you put hours back in the day, next you get into signal tech, which is really that effectiveness layer, right? Is can I start with higher chances to convert? So we saw with past champions and past users, we saw a win rate that was around 33% outbound versus our baseline. It was almost two and a half times more effective. So my goal is if I could get people into more of those types of interactions, incredible, that's going to have a higher win rate and output. So we found some ways to do that. We saw if you use, there's some calendar technology and things where you could map back every person who's ever actually attended one of your demos where AEs didn't attach them the opportunity, associate them back and then see where they went now.
Rob Anderson (23:45):
We just added 50,000 people we were tracking just like that. So that was huge for us. Dialer, just do more in the same amount of time, pretty simple. And then TitanX was, if you just knew who picked up the phone, you could start there. So all these things work together. If you have a signal and you have the right person pick up the phone, boom, high effectiveness and high efficiency right there. So those were the four things I deployed last year to help me remove constraints to capacity. And they all had different time to value for sure. And iterations, AI email took some effort for sure, and some just plug and play. You didn't have to change much. So those were the things that I deployed last year and I'm sure we can unpack those a little further.
Todd Bustler (24:24):
Yeah, the one I want to unpack that's super interesting to me is I really agree with everything you're saying. I think in general there's so many people out there trying to optimize email and it's like, look, even with all these signals you can get with the AI like, the channel overall.
Rob Anderson (24:43):
Are we all playing the same game basically?
Todd Bustler (24:45):
Yeah, exactly.
Rob Anderson (24:46):
Yeah, exactly.
Todd Bustler (24:46):
And it's like a race, right? A hundred percent, right?
Rob Anderson (24:49):
Yep.
Todd Bustler (24:49):
So I think that campaign manager idea, more centralized focus.
Rob Anderson (24:54):
Yeah. One of my guys, I respect Scott at the point now, he just says, look, email's brand awareness honestly at this
Todd Bustler (25:02):
Point. So that's what I was ultimately getting at with you. You've seen this response rate or even open rates continue to go down. Does it get to a point where it's just like an ad? It's like, all right, hopefully they're opening it a little bit so when I call they heard of us.
Rob Anderson (25:14):
Everyone's just going to tell you that channel that they want to respond to over time. And that's actually what the whole TitanX premise is, right? Is the fact that some people respond over their phones, some people are going to respond over other channels, but if you just knew you could have a higher chance to respond. So that's why I just think teams aren't going to be as big because email is going to be brand awareness and centralized to a degree, and they can do that at a high volume. Next is dialers. Dialers can get you into a certain amount of calls a day, but there is limitations with spam filters. Once you start throbbing that up to a certain degree, the diminishing returns hit really fast. So then you start saying, what's the number of conversations a rep could actually get into each day at a capacity rate?
Rob Anderson (25:52):
And we run some math on that, and I think the number was right around 40 conversations a day is what A BDR could do at full capacity. Now. That's why the whole thing flips on its head. Anyone listening to this, your reps were having that many conversations in probably three weeks, so that's why you had to hire so many people. But what if you could get into weeks of conversations and days? That was the premise that I was introduced to right around August with TitanX was just give us your list. We'll filter based on who actually picks up the phone at a high propensity and you can just start out from the beginning and call those people. And that's where when I deployed that specifically on my enterprise team who had a 2% connect rate, got people making $150, have three conversations a day, we deployed that and instantly within the first three months we saw a five to eight x right around six to seven increase in productivity per headcount with just that alone, with just changing one thing.
Rob Anderson (26:48):
It's just who they called. So that was probably the biggest lever I pulled in regards to headcount, organic reduction is what I would say. So we reallocated almost a million dollars in run rate to other functions or other AI initiatives with that approach. And we're seeing it could cascade across almost every business unit is load up your best reps with as many conversations they can have per day, centralize the email function for them to finish, and then use LinkedIn as a humanistic approach for the long game of deposits. And that's the winning formula in my opinion right now.
Todd Bustler (27:22):
What do you have to say to some of these large organizations like a snowflake maybe that comes to mind that's still hiring a lot of SDR, still has really big team. Why do you think that is?
Rob Anderson (27:31):
I thought about it too. I was literally there at the chamber and I could have said we could reduce the team probably in half, but there's a lot of risk in political capital involved with that. What if I was wrong? What happens to a public company if you make a bet on that and you're wrong? I don't think I was, but a lot of other people were so risk averse that I would just intimidate them and challenge the model because the spreadsheet mass stopped mapping. So for a snowflake and them, I mean obviously they've been wildly successful and deploying something like this at scale challenge that model pretty heavily, especially when you start talking about the list building function. So that's where the list building function needs to be somewhat centralized as well. And that's where a lot of companies are stopping. They nail their named account model.
Rob Anderson (28:14):
They really focus, like we talked about at the beginning, all these attributes, but then they pass it off to the bds and then their list building approach is every BD across all 400 is different. Many people, they prospect what level they prospect, why they prospect them, and that's where your whole A BM strategy goes to die. So it's typically threatening those bigger organizations where you have to centralize that list building approach a little bit for them to make this model work. And that's been some of the feedback I've heard so far is that this is working good enough for now and good enough is good with us.
Todd Bustler (28:44):
I think the second part is also like how do you weight the talent kind of bench that you're building? And if you are seeing a lot of them get promoted to AEs, like sure, maybe it can be a little less efficient, but then you're going to pay for it on a ramp time people coming from the outside.
Rob Anderson (28:57):
Yeah, no doubt. I mean at Docebo, I think we promoted 65 people to all different various positions and a lot of those became the president's club people. So there is absolutely a talent bench and that whole model that works really well, but it just depends on how many AEs does a company like that actually need versus not. I'm sure there's various degrees of how much people are over indexed on hiring, but for those that don't have a ton of AE positions or growth in mind and you're hiring a ton of people just because that's what the spreadsheet says, I would challenge you that there's a better way to go about doing this model, and it starts really with your list building approach and who you are prioritizing and spending your time with.
Todd Bustler (29:35):
Before we move to TitanX, give you opportunity to explain, you kind of got there already, but I would imagine when you started to get the outbound function going at Docebo, you start to see AEs go, wow, this outbound thing is possible, right? Maybe we've tried it a little bit, it didn't work. How did that influence AE productivity? Did they start to do their own pipe gen? Did you have an approach where you're like, no, SDRs are going to do all of this. I'm curious what you did and then B, what you think is right.
Rob Anderson (30:02):
That could be a whole podcast episode in itself. Very passionate about this one topic. So you can imagine what happened maybe at the beginning is they're excited that we were getting opportunities and meetings generated for the first time. However, the AEs at that time were also over capacity and they were getting so many inbound leads that this was just one of many out there and they started to quickly be like, these leads suck because what? They were the right person, the right account, but they weren't telling you that they were ready to be bow tied and ready to be closed. So I actually see that you can put all your effort in the world into fixing the outbound model at the lead gen perspective at the top of funnel, but if you have not thought about how you are going to apply your learnings to the AE side, it is just going to become a cost center that's going to piss you off because that first meeting is not a discovery call at all.
Rob Anderson (30:54):
It's an intro meeting and it's a POV on why I think I even could help you not going in there and asking about their budget. This shit gets me really fired up. You get BDRs who spend five months trying to get to the right person, calling below the line, et cetera. They finally get there and then an AE comes, didn't prepare and just runs through the same checklist. That's a problem. And I ran into that a good bit, but it's not docebo agnostic. I see that at every company I've ever worked for. I'm sure you've seen a little bit of it too, Todd.
Todd Bustler (31:20):
Definitely.
Rob Anderson (31:21):
Yeah, it's frustrating.
Todd Bustler (31:22):
Yeah, people take inbound and outbound first meetings the same and this is very, very different, right? Your goal in that first outbound meeting is show you have that POV, you've done your homework and just see if there's a potential opportunity to explore something while lighting them up with excitement, right? It's very different. How did you work with your AE counterparts, CROs, et cetera, to eventually get to, Hey, we need to fix this or we need to address this.
Rob Anderson (31:45):
A lot of effort and it just kept evolving over time. We started segmenting our leads into three buckets and then have playbooks associated with each one of them. So there was inbound, there was outbound without a project and there was inbound outbound with a project. So the idea was that you could take someone without a project and over time work them to having a project while the renewal date came closer. So we had to start thinking about where people were in their buyer's journey and we had to start thinking about the offer that we would have and how we would run that first call. Some of it's could be some level of a audit approach or a benchmarking or sharing some type of metrics in the industry. It was definitely approach where I got way more involved at the beginning at Docebo where I was almost like an outbound sales manager in a way.
Rob Anderson (32:27):
I was making sure everything went through close, I was getting involved in all the deals. So that gave me an early insight into how things were actually progressing, but it was just a constant iteration, and I wish I could tell you that one little trick, but the biggest things were to nail were buy-in from the AEs, understanding that these are important and valuable. This is how you get to President's Club and crush your quota, not how you get there because the deal size are three X is big, the win rates are not as high, but you need way less of these deals and these are the logos that you want to talk to at the level you want to talk to. So getting buy-in, evangelizing wins how the SDR and the AE worked together throughout the funnel to get that to close. It wasn't as simple as a linear journey of discovery through close.
Rob Anderson (33:07):
Sometimes they would stall. Sometimes you'd have to go find more buyers and multithread and find new entry points. Sometimes you had to grow the deal organically and use that groundswell approach. But we were doing that through the funnel and became more of a tandem approach. That's where alignment actually starts to pay off. And then you had to start documenting these things like what was working wasn't working, and you finally had to look at the metrics that were success criteria. Where we started to land on and what we wanted to move the most was stage progression from stage two to stage three. We saw a huge falloff in stage two. So how do we create interventions and enablement to cross the chasm of stage two to stage three, which was basically when you start to get to a real proposal, and that's where the SDR function can go right now. If you're thinking, how do I defense my approach is move down funnel more, provide more value in multi funnel or mid funnel.
Todd Bustler (33:55):
Made me think very similarly probably because we struggled through a lot of the same mistakes to learn this stuff.
Rob Anderson (34:00):
Yeah.
Rob Anderson (34:00):
We all do.
Todd Bustler (34:01):
Yeah, a hundred percent. Rob, you mentioned getting exposed to TitanXI think not even a year ago or last summer. What led you to join? What are you most excited about?
Rob Anderson (34:11):
Yeah, I'm excited. So yeah, I joined TitanXA couple of weeks ago as CRO. I told Joey, I mean the quote was real. I said, this is the only solution I bet my career on to increase pipeline in 2025. I said that to him back in November after my first two months where we just throttled performance like crazy. It was so simple. The idea was provocative to me. I was like, it can't be that simple, right? If you just know who to call and they pick up and you just get into more conversations, sounds incredible. How could it go wrong? It all started right after last year's evaluations, right? The signals, the ai, the dialers. I had done those three things and those three things, they all paid off in different ways, but they all didn't close the gap on where I needed to go because my CEO gave me the mandate goals are going up 20 to 30%.
Rob Anderson (34:55):
You're not getting more headcount dollars. How are you going to close it? Luckily I'd been following Joey online seeing these outrageous claims about TitanX and phone ready leads. So I figured let's start a pilot. So I went a little rogue. I put the pilot on my credit card, didn't tell anyone about it. I just said, if I bring them killer results, they're just going to thank me for it. We went about our same process, didn't change anything, not new dialer, no new messaging, no new offers, no new scripts, same reps. In that same day we called a hundred people and we talked to 50 of them in two hours. The leverage that you can pull in that two hours, it was nuts. So we generated 3 million in pipeline that day, had about eight meetings, probably 20 plus follow-ups, and I was hooked. I was like, all right, how do I get this to the rest of my team?
Rob Anderson (35:39):
And that's when I rolled it out and it went pretty bonkers, I would say across the board. So since I put such a conviction in that program, I just kept talking to Joey and I just aligned with a lot of their values where they think the market is going. And if you just zoom out for a second, I've been in this position for outbound for 10 years. I saw the macro shift hitting hard. You can play this tape forward, right? Email no matter what you do. If you all play that game, it's going to go down. LinkedIn is amazing, but why would we automate the only thing that makes this human? It's just ridiculous to me. And then lastly is phone. It was affected yet inefficient. They fixed that. They wanted to scale this thing. I had been lucky enough to just have such a wide variety of programs I've been involved with over time.
Rob Anderson (36:22):
I just actually commented on Florence's post yesterday, but I do think high level sales development leaders get exposed to so many various functions and programs that it makes them very good candidates for the future CRO role. So from net new across every segment and every international market I was in to expansion, cross-sell and upsell programs to events, to marketing and demand gen, to implementing tech like Chili Piper and dialers and ai, we are in it. And that's why I'm just saying if you get involved in the mid funnel, really the only thing you're missing there is negotiation and closing and you hire a big team of people to help out cover any gaps. So all those things together, this has been the role that I've been gunning for and it's just the perfect time in the market with the perfect company that align to everything I believe in with real results. So why would I not jump at that?
Todd Bustler (37:13):
Yeah, I mean, nine out of 10 companies I talk to are struggling on the pipeline side and therefore it's in my opinion, 10 times easier to get someone either manager, VP of the enterprise sales segment, or even a good rep that is great at negotiating and then get the leader who's trying to fix the top of funnel problem. So I think you're right, and I think we're going to see a lot of that. Last question I have for you Rob, is how are you going about building the revenue function there? Are you going to have a big BDR or are you going to go about it full cycle? What are you going to do differently? You guys clearly aren't afraid to think differently.
Rob Anderson (37:49):
Yeah, it's a fun question because I have now been given the blank slate of I remove the red tape, I remove all the reasons why I couldn't do stuff before and now I got to put, it's all on me to figure it out. So a lot of people ask me, what are your challenges or what do you think the most challenging aspect of being a first time CRO will be at our stage? So we've grown from about zero to 4 million in 10 months without running a single ad, and we're trying to track down very, very high at the end of the year, I'd say for this. So what's my challenge? It's prioritization. It's where I spend my time. Everything I choose to do or not do today, a month from now, it all has an opportunity cost and we're looking for leverage. What's the highest leverage play that I can do today that's going to get us to where we want to go 12 months from now?
Rob Anderson (38:35):
And so I'm looking at different things like customer success functions. If we don't have a churn problem, do you focus there at all or not? Like expansion? There's so many potential opportunities and levers to pull there, but if net new is just ripping right now, what do you do? So that's where I'm really focused right now is like what are my levers to pull and where I'm thinking about my team? We're not looking to grow a huge team here. We're looking to have a small elite mighty team. We're looking for where we can deploy AI and leverage at any given point. So to get here, my CEO has been mainly doing the selling plus the two s and B AEs. So a couple of key hires we're looking to make. One would be a mid-market ae. We're doing named account model for the first time here in the mid-market space, massive potential. And then we're looking at potentially some things like a marketing lead or growth hacking individual maybe ahead of success and expansion. But beyond that, I want to give my AE calendars so loaded that they're begging me to hire someone else before I do.
Todd Bustler (39:33):
I love that spreadsheet math, hire all the reps instead. Actually just look at your rep's calendars. Are they flooded to where the point conversion's going down?
Rob Anderson (39:41):
My founder is adamantly against VC money and I'm all about that because I saw it with a public company. It's the same thing, but different is every quarter is the biggest quarter of your life, which then at the beginning of the next quarter, you're just chasing your tail again. It's very hard to zoom out and fix anything structural when you have that pressure on you. Same with a vc. How often are you pushed to go multi-product to increase your NDR and the valuation where that's going to spread your engineers and dilute their effort across your core function too quickly? I see it all the time. So we just don't want to make any stupid mistakes. We want to control what we know best. We want to control our own destiny and keep a lot of the equity on our side of the table as well.
Todd Bustler (40:24):
Love it. Rob, this was awesome. Amazing. For anyone in sales development right now, first time sales leadership, first time CRR rules. I'm excited to follow you guys around. We're happy customers at TitanX, and I really like the way you guys are approaching and have a lot of respect and wishing you a ton of luck. Appreciate you for sitting down with me.
Rob Anderson (40:43):
Yeah, appreciate that. And for everyone listening to in Signal Tech, ies, the Real Deal, a similar category, I saw almost $200 to one for every dollar I spent in Pipeline on the same type of approach, tracking champions, past users, et cetera. So I'd go give 'em a look. They're the real deal. Thanks for having me,
Todd Bustler (41:00):
Rob. Appreciate it, man.
Rob Anderson (41:02):
Alright, cheers.
Todd Bustler (41:04):
Thanks for listening to Cracking Outbound. If this was helpful, let us know by messaging me Todd Bustler 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.