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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.
Jade Campbell (00:00):
I like winning and I like seeing progress and change. I think one thing I've realized working at Envoy is that this is the perfect size company for me because I have the ability to manage and work with the team. I have the ability to make change that actually is impactful and I can see that. And I have visibility to leadership, which I love. Envoy's leadership, it's been really great.
Todd Busler (00:22):
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. Hey, everyone. Pump to have Jade Campbell join the show today. If you're a sales leader or manager struggling with getting your reps to do the right behaviors, this episode is for you. She spent the last five years at Envoy building out the SDR team, SDR to AE function now runs all mid-market sales. She's worked under a handful of great CROs. She's seen Inbound outbound motion. She went through a COVID up and down. But what I take away from this conversation is she knows how to motivate teams.
(01:20):
She knows how to drive the right behavior. She talks a lot about how that got instilled in her, where did she learn those habits and what you should do if you're in a similar position trying to get your reps to do the right behaviors consistently enjoy. Jade, welcome. Excited to have you. I want to hop right into it. I think maybe I'll just start with, give the people a quick intro, who you are, what you've been doing at Envoy. I think a lot of people in the SaaS world know Envoy, but maybe some don't. So let's just start with a quick intro and then we'll hop into it.
Jade Campbell (01:49):
Okay. So I'm Jade Campbell. I've been with Envoy for almost six years, so January, 2020 is when I started right before the COVID Madness took over and I've really been on two different main teams since I've been at Envoy. So first three and a half years I was on the BDR side inbound outbound and then ran the whole program. And then for the last two and a half years I've been managing the SMB segment. So when I took over the team, we were like six people, seven people, and now we're up to 14 reps and we're going to continue to grow that next year. For those who don't know what Envoy is, we started off as a visitor management platform. So if anyone's ever gone to an onsite and had to sign in at the front desk, that's typically powered by Envoy. Maybe had a nice little selfie as part of that experience. But we've really grown and I think honestly COVID forced us to grow as a company. We extended into other areas of the workplace, so we now have an entire workplace platform where you can do desk booking, room booking, get a ton of analytics around how your space is being utilized. We launched emergency notifications recently, so pretty much if it has to do with how people work in your office or how visitors experience your workplace, we help with that.
Todd Busler (02:56):
Love it. One thing that stands out about your background is this product marketing kind of positioning type of background and then a move into BDR leadership and then now pure sales leadership. How did your prior roles prepare you for building out the S-D-R-B-D-R organization?
Jade Campbell (03:13):
Yeah, so I think this is buried in my LinkedIn. So my first six years professionally was at a company called Meltwater, and I have to give a lot of credit to my sales discipline to my experience at Meltwater, and I'm sure we'll talk about that later. But I was there for almost six years as well, and I had almost a different role every single year. And my last role was managing the sales enablement program. We had one person per geo, so I had been working in the Sydney, Australia office. I ended up doing a lot of product enablement and training for that company and helping with connecting sales feedback to the product team. And then my job after I left and before I came to Envoy was product marketing. And that's really where I switched back into BDR because I just think the team needed a lot of help on the sales side.
(03:56):
But to answer your question, I think when I first started I worked really closely with marketing, so I was running the inbound BDR team when I first started Envoy, honestly, I had never seen a company get as much inbound as Envoy did coming from Mel Water where I was lucky to get one inbound lead every three months and it was usually like spam to be honest with you. I came here and my team was booking per person 45 plus meetings a month, which is insane. So working in lockstep with marketing and tightening all the screws to make sure nothing was getting missed is kind of what helped me. And I think just honestly, I think my past experiences helped with the operational piece of everything. How does this change impact this team or if we decide to do this, what are all the different loose ends that need to get tied together in order to effectively launch whatever initiative or campaign we're doing? Having exposure to different teams helps me think through that before the change happens and then hopefully, and not always, but hopefully the change goes better.
Todd Busler (04:54):
Yeah, I think the marketing background, you get certain operational rigor and just thinking about more the entire customer journey ends up being great for people moving into sales development and sales leadership and undervalued in a lot of situations. Nice. Being at a company with that much inbound, I think a lot of people in SaaS today are not experiencing that.
Jade Campbell (05:15):
Sure.
Todd Busler (05:16):
When you got there and there was a lot of inbound coming in, eventually you went and said, Hey, we got to turn on this outbound motion. Walk us through that process. What was your learnings? What was that journey like?
Jade Campbell (05:27):
Yeah, so we actually had an outbound team when I started. So I started on the inbound team and I will say as much as I loved that period of time for Envoy, I think we were in that stage of company where we were getting inbound, and eventually that reaches a certain point where in order to really grow and scale the business, you have to get the outbound motions to supplement that. And I think we've gone through several forcing functions of that. We've been able to ride some of the changes that happen in the workplace from COVID at periodic times, but I think the two years have been a lot more normalized and have required us to lean more heavily into the outbound program, not just for BDRs, but also for AEs. So when I first started, admittedly the outbound team, there weren't a lot of guardrails or processes.
(06:11):
There was a lot of blast emailing. We had this weird ROE where if an outbound BDR had touched an account within 60 days, I think even if they came inbound, doesn't matter how many accounts that BDR had been reaching out to, it would count for the outbound team. So I actually had a baby in 2020, my first child, and when I came back, I started peeling back the layers of that and I was like, Hey, this doesn't seem right. I really want marketing to get credit for what they deserve credit for because more marketing budget means more sales opportunities on the sales side. I don't think all salespeople realize that, but I firmly believe that. So I think that's where I started poking holes in that and trying to understand what are the actual outbound motions. And fortunately it paid off. We actually moved the BDR team on the outand side to hybrid for a short period of time because we were just so inundated with interest in the market in 2021. And then that kind of set the stage for resetting some of the expectations on how that team operates going into 2022. Yeah. Sorry, I'm getting my ears a little mixed up.
Todd Busler (07:11):
What was your experience with the hybrid model? Are you a fan of that?
Jade Campbell (07:14):
Oh, this was like a controversial move, I think, and every CRO has a different opinion about this, and I can see both sides. So for us, so we launched a product called Desks, which was basically desk booking, and this was right at the height of all these companies being like, we're going to come back to office, but now we've outgrown our workspace. We need to make sure we have a space for everyone. So we had so much inbound that we couldn't support it with the amount of inbound BDRs that we had. So I do think that the shift helped us. It was some of the craziest and best times that Envoy were the six months after we made that change. I personally believe that BDRs need to have wins sometimes, so it was also just a great way for them to have really fruitful conversations and then hopefully take what they learned and adapt that to other similarly profiled companies.
(08:03):
But then we ended up getting another C who came in and wanted the two channels more separated, which was fine. I think we had been doing that for about a year at that point. And then there's always a lot of change management that goes into that. But yeah, I think it depends on the company. I think it depends on the team size. It depends on what the core priorities are, if it's pipeline at all costs, I think sometimes that can be a good move for you, but if you're really trying to make sure both parts of the org or pipeline funnel are operating the right way, sometimes merging them, people look for the easiest way out typically. So if you get an inbound lead, that's where they're going to go chase
Todd Busler (08:39):
A hundred percent. So you mentioned the early days of the kind of outbound muscle, say a lot of blast emailing, kind of loose rules of engagement or maybe not the clearest rules of engagement. What would you say from a systems process standpoint, you started to mature? How did you approach that? What came first? What were some of the learnings? How did you deal with, Hey, you only can make so many changes at a time? How did you approach it?
Jade Campbell (09:07):
Yeah, yeah, the changes at a time thing. I'm someone who can handle a lot of change. I moved a lot as a kid and I have to remind myself that not everyone is built that way. And I have learned that over the years that I've been managing. So where did we start? On the operational side, I think I typically try to anchor on low hanging fruit first. What is the easiest thing we can do that can have the highest impact? So we didn't even have any operations around how to go after closed lost opportunities. And when I mentioned the inbound and how much inbound we were getting, we had a ton of closed lost data in our database. So operationalizing that, making sure that the team had the right sequences, that those accounts were getting redistributed to new people who were coming onto the team and that we actually were going after those in a more strategic way.
(09:50):
I think that was a really low hanging fruit easy win for us. And then because Envoy has so many products and we can sell it to so many different buyer personas, I think a lot of times other people at the company might be like, we just need to land these big, big accounts. And I'm like, I understand that, but we're also working with people who are just starting their sales career and it's not so straightforward to them. So I think operationalizing and being super specific about what product are we pitching, what buyer are we pitching it to, and then teaching them how to prospect and to cold call into that with that specific pitch is really important. Otherwise there's a million things they can do and they're like, where do I start? What's most effective? How do I learn all of this?
Todd Busler (10:32):
I want to dig into this a bit. I think it's one thing that's really interesting. Most sales leaders I talk to right now are like, Hey, the product development cycles are moving really quickly, both internally and the competitive landscape, like the rate of changes just undoubtedly significantly faster now. And I think on what you mentioned like facilities, workplace building operations, a desk product that's pretty complex early on. So how do you approach enabling the reps on that? Did you split things out by product line? Did it take a ton of education like, Hey, this persona cares about this thing, how did you do it?
Jade Campbell (11:06):
Yeah, so we started off with persona outreach and that took a lot of bandwidth to make sure that we had the right messages and the right content from marketing. And I will say our marketing programs have evolved. So now I would say one step beyond that where it's a specific persona, but a more targeted and tailored message that we're going after in a more isolated ICP. Because the reality with Envoy is if you have an office, you can use Envoy. And I think that is really exciting and also really overwhelming for someone who doesn't know where to start. And going back to Meltwater, for those who don't know Meltwater, Meltwater is a PR and media monitoring software. I'm sure they, that's what it was when I started over 10 years ago. I'm sure they say they're a little something different now, but we had several products and as a new person at company, it was my job to learn one product and to really understand the persona for that product and just sell that product.
(11:59):
And then once I had done six months of decent sales of that product, then I was able to start learning about our social media product. So it was a slightly different buyer, and I tried to apply that approach even in my team today with SMB because we also have to generate our own pipeline. We don't have BDRs aside from the inbound team that are generating pipeline for us. So you started with personas. I think if you can work with a marketing team to really get crystal clear on what your ICP is or maybe where you're winning as a business and then create a marketing campaign where there's webinars, there's content on the website, there's eBooks, there's blogs, you can get really tailored on which accounts the team should be going after. The messaging goes in line with that. It's much easier to enable someone on that specific pitch of who to go after and what to say than to be more broad about like, oh, you could go after this buyer persona, but you could try to pitch them every product and then they get overwhelmed. They don't know what to pitch. I think we've elaborated on that approach and every time we have a new product or we have a very specific campaign that we're running, we try to be extra targeted in who we're sending that message to and what the message is. Essentially
Todd Busler (13:06):
What you just described, it's not easy, especially at a high growth company with a lot of people moving around and you kind of blending, is this product marketing, is it demand gen? Is it enablement? The sales leader doing a lot of the enablement, what do you think are some of the parts you really nailed in that, what I would call multi-product enablement, multi-product kind of prospecting? What parts do you think you really nailed or that are good learnings to share with audience in areas that took you longer to figure out?
Jade Campbell (13:34):
I think messaging is always something you're never going to know the answer to in my personal opinion. I don't know if that's true everywhere, but I think you can have 8 million conversations about how to increase the open rate on a sequence. My philosophy is maybe more old school, but I'm like, give them the tools and if you hire strong salespeople, they're going to figure it out. So I would say the things I personally am really great at and I think help the business is the operational piece. So getting a dashboard and getting all the reports that the team needs in order to work off of and make sure that I'm holding them accountable to how many people do they have in sequence each week, how many calls are they making? We can talk more about some of the things I do because it's probably different from other sales leaders, but I think my philosophy, you've got, they have to be on the phone. We can sit here and talk about messaging the entire day, but if we didn't go talk to anyone on the phone, it doesn't matter. We didn't learn anything.
Todd Busler (14:27):
Why do you feel that way? I agree with you. Why do you feel that way?
Jade Campbell (14:30):
Okay, I'll go back to Meltwater. So just like Meltwater was, I was a fresh college grad. I didn't know what I was getting into. I remember I got my job offer and my dad was upset that it was a sales role, but I think his stigma of sales was, oh, it's entirely commission based, and he wasn't very familiar with tech sales. So I ended up starting this job and I grinded. I was like, if I was not in my seat at 9:00 AM making calls, I was in trouble. And our hours were nine to six in office five days a week. Lunch was from 12 to one only. So if you had calls over that block, you were expected to eat your lunch real fast and then get back out on the floor. And I was a BDR and an ae, and I had a monthly quota.
(15:11):
Weirdly, we didn't have territories, so that was an interesting bucket where we could end up working really large accounts really early on, but it ingrained this sales philosophy and I've had to learn how to make it more digestible for other companies or for this next generation of sellers. I think that they might push back a little more than we did when we first started in sales. I think I had that work ethic before I did two majors. I always took extra classes. I was the captain of a bunch of things, but at the same time, I just think that I agree. If you're not talking to people, you're not learning anything. So that's something, I mean, I think if you ask anyone on my team, they'd be like, oh, Jade, that has really high expectations, and she's always thinking we can do more. And some days they probably like it and some days they're like, oh, I wish she would stop caring about this so much, but I give 120% to everything all the time.
Todd Busler (16:04):
You brought it up around the operational piece and accountability, and I want to spend a lot of time there. I've been lucky enough to get to know you a little bit as a customer and see the type of ship you run. I really respect how you go about it, and I think it's undervalued, right? People can talk about strategy and messaging and what you do, but it's like, look, that accountability and just creating the right sales culture matters a ton, maybe more than all of the other stuff. But one thing you said, I want to dig into a little bit around, I know the Meltwater sales culture. I have some people that have worked there. It is intense and I think great training ground to be able to lead you to what you're doing and the success you're having. How do you think about that with the next generation of selling? It's a little bit different in terms of how you manage those people, what their expectations are, how you communicate with them, what learnings do you have there?
Jade Campbell (16:52):
Yeah, I don't have a perfect solution. I'm not going to sit here and say I hire perfect people. I will say I think the hiring profile, and again, this is something that happened over 10 years ago that Meltwater had a great hiring profile. We didn't hire people with experience. We hired people who were fresh out of college, but had that grit and that ability to just, I don't want to say bullshit because that's not the wrong word, but talk through, get information and then have a strong output that was good enough to get you to the next step. I mean, we had a group interview, this is how crazy Meltwater was. We had a group interview as our interview process, and then everyone who made it from the group interviewed it. We had to do mock cold calls. And again, we've never done sales. We're fresh.
(17:32):
I think I might've still been in school when I interviewed at Meltwater. When I think about the next generation, I think part of it's like getting the hiring profile and it's a little trickier because outbound teams are a lot more prominent now. So there's a lot of people, especially from the AE side that typically I'm looking for people who've had sales when I'm hiring for my team. But the best feeder talent program for Envoy has been BDR. If we can hire someone in as a strong inbound or outbound BDR, nine times out of 10, they're going to be super successful when they become AEs at Envoy. So I think hiring is one part, and then I think the rest is this generation of sellers needs to have a lot of trust. You need to have a really trusting relationship with them for them to do what you want them to do.
(18:13):
So I think that comes in different layers. I think it's fighting their battles. Sometimes I would say I'm a manager who fights battles for my team when I think they're worth fighting or I think they deserve to be changed, I'll go above and beyond to try to find ways to help. It's end of quarter, I'm doing sales math for each person on my team every single day to see which deals can we try to give maybe a greater discount to you to bring in sooner in the quarter, or if we can get these two deals in, it means you hit this milestone. Whatever the metric is. I think that's one thing. And then I think when I turn on the, this is what I need from you guys, I think that's more palatable because of all these other things that I'm doing in the background to help the team. Sorry, that was a long-winded answer.
Todd Busler (18:53):
Not long-winded at all. And it's really interesting because I've probably done like 25 of these podcasts and most people have similar-ish profiles. Some were senior, some were junior, but similar-ish profiles. And one of the most common and distinct trends is just that best leaders get in the boat, right? You're there with two weeks left in the quarter trying to figure this out for them. And then what that means is when you're starting the next quarter and you're like, all right, it's time. This is what we have to do. People listen and they follow you. And I think there's been some innate leadership qualities that you probably don't even realize you're doing that is interesting from my perspective. I see it across all of these conversations. Jade, I want to dig into the accountability piece. You mentioned that a lot of this came from likely your early experience of like, Hey, this is what it was, and you were doing it. You were seeing what great looks like and you saw people getting promoted. So I'd imagine some of the leadership style comes from how your leaders led teams. You were on some from osmosis, but how else have you developed that leadership, the leadership skills and your leadership style?
Jade Campbell (19:57):
I think a lot of it's from experience. It's not here's how to do it sometimes, sometimes how not to do it and then do the opposite of that. I have definitely had some really great leaders that I've worked for or with over the years. I've also had some leaders where I'm like, what is happening? Why are we doing this? I feel like we're not on the same page. I don't feel like you're listening to me. So it's a bit of both. I would say. I also, anytime there's leadership training, I'm the person who's going to volunteer and try to join that. How do I learn the individual strengths of each person on my team and how they like to be managed or work with and adapt that to how I work with my team? The Gallup StrengthsFinder training I think was probably the biggest eyeopening piece of training for me. It helped me understand myself and also helped me understand people who are wildly different in terms of their priorities or what they anchor towards. So I'm actually trying to see if we could do that at Envoy right now. I think we've done it once a couple years ago, but maybe this is bad to say. I don't listen to a ton of podcasts or books. I feel like I'm more of a learn by doing type person.
Todd Busler (20:59):
It's working whenever it's working. You mentioned seeing some of those leaders, some of which you learned a ton from, and they were able to improve things in a lot of ways and other leaders that maybe didn't have the outcomes that they had hoped for. Where do you think are the anti-patterns there? At some point, I'd imagine you're going to go and take over a different sales organization and there's a lot of learnings of seeing CROs that you've seen come in. Where do you think they make mistakes? Where do you think are the common lifts?
Jade Campbell (21:29):
Yeah, I think it's not getting hands dirty enough to understand the problem, and sometimes it's just lack of time. But I would argue I have two kids, five and under, thankfully. I have a very loving and supportive husband who's also a great parent and we can tag team, but I go to a bunch of events. I was at an event this week and last week I join at least one to two customer calls every day. I have one-on-ones with 14 direct reports right now. You can find a way to do it, I promise you. I promise you, you can find a way to do it. So not getting your hands dirty is a huge problem because then you're making decisions with partial data. And sometimes I think those decisions are to prove a point and say, you hired me for a reason. This is why we're doing this.
(22:10):
And that doesn't always work out that way. And then I think the other part that I've seen is not getting your management team to feel like you're fighting the battles for them. I think sometimes when leadership changes, some great leaders come in and it's like, we're going to do this together. What are the biggest problems? I'm going to help you unblock them. And others will be like, everything you're doing is totally wrong. I'm going to change all these things. And in my time at Envoy, usually that second approach doesn't work and there's a long game. You have to be patient and kind of see what happens. But eventually that's what happens. And I think people want to work for people who care about them and want to win. And I try really hard to remember that every day. I want my team to know I care about them and I want to make sure they know I'm doing this because I want them to win. I also want to win.
Todd Busler (23:00):
Hey listeners, interrupting the podcast for a quick 20 seconds for a Champ five plug. If you've been getting value from our content via webinars podcast stuff I write on LinkedIn, I hope you understand that we think about and take pipeline generation very seriously. If you're listening to this podcast, the needs you care about, figuring out outbound, figuring out how to be more creative to prospect into your top accounts and win more revenue. At Champ five, what we do is turn your entire company's existing relationships into new revenue. Champ Five's AI finds your highest converting revenue opportunities from former customers at new companies to previously lost deals ready for a re-engagement and turns them into repeatable pipeline engine at scale, all within your existing workflows and low learning curve, which means high adoption. We're generating 20% of pipeline for companies like s and p Global and working with some of the largest, fastest growing B2B orgs in the world. If you're interested in what we do, we have a compelling offer for people that are listening to this podcast. We'll go through a data test, we'll go through a closed lost audit, and we'll show you the potential pipeline opportunities you have within your existing systems, email sales@champify.io and mention this podcast and we'll present you with a compelling offer. Enjoy the rest of the show.
(24:16):
Yeah, it's interesting the way you're describing what you do with your team in terms of blocking, getting things off their plate, fixing the fighting the battles. It's like, okay, you want the same thing from your leadership. And to be able to do that, they have to have their hands dirty enough to understand which are worth fighting, right? The best CRO I've ever worked for, I was a VP of sales, he came in above me. I was really happy because I feel like I was hitting my end of, alright, I'm not really sure what to do next. And he sat down and he said, okay, what's working? What's not? What are these things on the not working? Do I need to go fix first? And just trusted that. And I was like, okay, this guy's on my team, believe me. Go help me with these things because I haven't been able to fix them.
(25:00):
I'm really happy you're here to fight some of those battles. I can keep the lights on here. And it became this like, alright, we're on the same side of the table. I've worked for others where I'm like, you didn't even listen or talk to any customers and you're trying to change things. This is not going to go well. Right? So I've had a lot of the same experiences. Talk to me about a big part of the accountability is performance management. I get the sense with you, Jade, you're not one to shy away from tough conversations, but talk to me about how you think about and approach performance management and how you approach those tough conversations that I don't know about for you, but I still feel like now after doing this for 12, 15 years, there's still uncomfortable conversation. They get a little easier but not much. Right. How do you approach it? What have you learned there?
Jade Campbell (25:48):
Yeah, I try to be proactive and do whatever I possibly can to prevent those conversations from having to happen. But the reality is no matter how great of a recruiter you think you are or hiring managers, that just happens. And honestly, sometimes people just have weird life situations that happen that impact their performance at work. And you have to be okay with that on the performance side. So I try to have very clear cut standards on my team of what are the expectations and some of that falls on things that they have to take accountability for and present to each other on a weekly basis. And then there are other things that I will set, and I think this has evolved over the last two years to your point of too much change at once. I've had evolutions of to where we are today that I think each step has helped me get to where I am today.
(26:35):
But I've also acknowledged as much as I want to think everyone on my team is going to do the job perfectly, most of them have never sold before. And even if you have a more mature team, sometimes they haven't sold in the same motion that you've sold or I think there's a lot of sellers out there who've only sold at companies that really relied on inbound and an inbound sale is totally different than an outbound sale. And that's kind of the evolution of Envoy. The first three years was very inbound heavy and then something changed in the market. And as much as we still get inbound, we have to learn how to sell people and how to get them off competitors or convince them to spend money on something like Envoy. And part of that is we have to tell people what to do in order to get there.
(27:12):
So on my team, every Monday we have a weekly standup where we actually go over everything we did last week. Each person gets five minutes, which is not a lot of time, but I basically have them say, what are they on for the quarter? What are they forecasting? We've gotten granular enough where now they say, these are the amount of opportunities I created last week. Here's what I qualified, here's what I closed, lost, here's what I'm booking this week, here's what I'm booking next week. And I think that just having them having a forcing function of checking Salesforce to make sure that those things are in line has helped a lot of them understand, oh, I can feel okay about this quarter or Oh crap, I thought I had more pipeline than I actually did. So that's one piece on Wednesdays we do big deal review.
(27:52):
We just start in the order of the largest deals. And I actually don't still probably talk more than I should in those calls. I can't help myself sometimes, but I always try to start off by asking the team like, okay, what questions do we have for this person? Let's poke holes in this deal and learn from each other and let some of the more tenured members of the team share why they would do something or not do something. So those are the weekly meetings that we have where everyone has to show their stuff in front of each other and talk about it. I don't know if other companies do this, but I have matured to this. A year and a half ago we had a new CRO and he was very much like, we don't have enough pipeline. And he was right. We didn't, and no one was talking about it and we were like, why are we not hitting our numbers?
(28:31):
And the reality is we just didn't have enough pipeline and there were expectations for AEs, but no one was hitting them. So that was a wake up call for me. I was like, he's totally right and I don't even know what my pipeline coverage ratio should be. So we got that number and I just leaned into that. So I started off by telling my team, the SMBA team, you got to make X number of calls every week in order to get into the inbound lead rotations. Basically if you miss that number that week, you don't get inbound leads. The next week we saw an improvement, but the reality was some people were making so many calls and booking no meetings and I was like, okay, well this is not helpful. So then I changed it maybe six months ago to you have to generate at least $10,000 minimum in new pipeline every week, which sounds like a low number, but over the course of the quarter and how our channels work, that is fine for es.
(29:14):
And then same thing, I would have some people pipe one deal that's three times that amount and then that deal will go close loss. And there was just no added benefit. So now maybe three months ago we switched to, you got to generate three new opportunities every week. And I will say most of the team hits it every week and then the weeks where they don't, the people who did hit it just have an awesome week of inbound meetings that they get on their calendar. And I'm the only team that does this at Envoy and I'm very transparent about it with the team. But I mean I get caught, people work until 8:00 PM on Friday sometimes, which is what I used to do in sales trying to get into the router because they want those meetings the following week. And I think if I had just done that right away, I would've had a lot of upset in my team. But I think the people who are consistently hitting their number, it's not an issue. And even if they miss one week, they're fine. They have enough pipeline, it's more for the people who need to catch up and kind of see, okay, I need to put in a little bit more work or I need to be more strategic about the people I'm reaching out to.
Todd Busler (30:12):
Huge fan of that. I always like to study. There's a big public software company that's famous for inbound leads got routed based on close rate and it's like, okay, that's great, but if it's more pipeline, and that's probably built for a more inbound rich environment. But the same idea which is like, hey, if you're doing the right behaviors and it's working, this isn't about pure equality here. I want everyone to have the opportunity, but your job is to maximize the pie. Right? So I love that. One thing you mentioned that is a common thing in a bunch of organizations I speak with and I've lived through it as well, is you mentioned that the first three years of your journey was pretty inbound heavy, right? I think you guys caught some awesome tailwinds with where you were positioned with COVID, right? And then it had to go more outbound heavy. What was it like trying to switch more of the inbound wiring for reps to this, Hey, we're not that anymore. This is an outbound culture. You just gave a great concrete example of you don't get on the router unless you generate X amount of pipeline. Did you find that those reps with the inbound experience could make the switch over to hey, this is the new envoy, or did you have to bring in a lot of fresh new talent that had different backgrounds?
Jade Campbell (31:26):
Honestly, it was mixed. We had some, and I'm speaking more broadly on the AE side, but even as a BDR leader at the time, I feel like a lot of the A are like, oh, the stuff that BDRs are booking is crap. Their sales cycle is six months. I want it when you do outbound, it is longer. That is just how it works. And
Todd Busler (31:42):
Bigger but longer.
Jade Campbell (31:44):
Yeah, bigger but longer. And I don't think everyone understood that. So I mean we lost some people over the years because they just couldn't get the motion. And actually the guy who brought me to Envoy, he and I would talk about this a lot. There are some AEs that every two years they leave a company and they go to a new company and it's because it is inbound and it's an easy sale. It's like warn people who already know your company and they're interested and they're in an evaluation process and that's just not the case. So it's tricky. And I think that this is what I take on as my mission as the leader of SMB is my job is to make sure that my team can close inbound leads great. But also when times are tough, they actually know and have the skills to go find the outbound and close their own business.
(32:25):
And we've actually seen a massive lift in the last, honestly the last two quarters compared to the four before that of how much of our pipeline that is closing is actually sourced by us. A lot of our largest deals are now sourced by us because we've gotten smarter both on the expansion side and on the account profile of who we should be going after. But it's not easy and I think until a sees that it clicks. But if I was a direct seller right now, I'd much rather be busy and having lots of conversations regardless of how warm they are than just hoping that I get another inbound lead that wants to buy for the exact amount I need to hit my quota. So it's hard. I think it's hard, but I think this is why I'm so tough on my team. I want them to be adaptable in future environments because who knows what's going to happen. COVID showed that to all
Todd Busler (33:13):
Of us. Yes, yes. You mentioned, you talked about how you used some of the cadences in the early days. You walked through without explicitly stating some of your operating cadence. Hey, here's what we do on Mondays. Here's the big deal review on Wednesday. Here's how we change routing based on previous week's results. What else do you think are some critical parts in that operating cadence or overall playbook that is a part of your play that maybe some people don't spend enough time on?
Jade Campbell (33:41):
So I have a dashboard of all the different places where I think people can find opportunities. So it includes marketing campaigns, it includes event outreach for events that were upcoming. It includes like, Hey, these customer accounts you have not talked to in the last 90 days, both unmanaged and managed by CS has things like Shopify on it. It has intent data from G two and and I manage that list. So I think you asked me once, why is your team adopting Shopify more than others? Because every couple of days, and I operate off of to-do list, my husband actually put me onto this checklist platform. I used to make 8,000 checklists. The nice thing is you can set up recurring reminders. So every four days, every four work days, I have an alert that's like review all the champ five, and if anyone has more than five, I'm pinging them and I'm like, Hey, can you please work these IES today?
(34:34):
And they have all the resourcing, they have the sequences because we use outreach, they have the sequences to go put those in and then I expect them to call. But I am the manager that's asking, Hey, why have we not followed up on this? Or can we follow up on this? I do that with deals too. I'm pretty cut for especially now it's end of quarter. If we don't have next steps set with a deal, it's out of this quarter's pipeline until you get a next step and then I'll pull it back into this quarter. And that's important. I pull pipeline coverage ratios every Friday and anyone who's below the threshold, they get call blocks on their calendar from me, which is also something I've gone back and forth doing. But last QBR, you could see the week I added the call blocks and the output went like this. So I mean it's un uncomfy, but it works. So that's why we do it.
Todd Busler (35:18):
100%. 100%. Yeah. All this stuff you're saying, if you're listening to this, people are like, this doesn't sound like rocket science. It's like it's not, but it's hard. And you do it every week and you do it every four days and you have that conversation and you're fine saying, Hey, you're out of inbound router. And those behaviors compounded over a long period of time is what allows your work to do this and people get promoted. So I really, really respect how you approach it, and I'm not surprised that you have a ton of reps that really maybe in the beginning are like, holy shit, this is intense. But I'd imagine towards the end they're like, I like this. I'm learning. You're someone that has my back trying to help me be successful. So I really respect
Jade Campbell (35:59):
It's winning. I want them to win. It is not fun being in sales if you're not winning, that's not fun. It comes from a place of support and love and passion. I would say. I'm passionate about pretty much everything I do in life and sometimes they hate me. Sometimes they're like, this really sucks my
Todd Busler (36:17):
Magic. Hopefully it's so me a little hate or short, it's
Jade Campbell (36:19):
Temporary. And then the next day, I'll join a call and help them close the deal and then it's fine. But I think that's why it's so important to be in the weeds. If you want to make change, your team has to trust you.
Todd Busler (36:29):
What else have you done to keep the culture fun? I think this is even more important with the younger generation of sellers. I agree with you. I think people are like, well, here's a clear promotion path. Yes, you need that. Or here you take off a Friday when everyone hits their numbers. Sure. I think at the end of the day it's just winning. But what else have you done to keep the culture fun, growth oriented, inclusive, anything else you do?
Jade Campbell (36:52):
Well, we're in the office four days a week. Obviously, I have reps in Denver, and SF, and London, so I try to travel to the other offices, but I'm in the office every day with the people in the Denver team, not today. Fridays are day from home. So that's one thing I just think helps with culture because you get to know each other and you get to have lunch together and you can go out for drinks whenever you want after work. Believe it or not, we didn't have a bell. I always thought every sales company had a bell. We didn't have a bell until six months ago. And it has totally changed the vibe of getting a deal in. So I think that's been really helpful, big or small. We always are trying to celebrate those wins in all of our offices. And then we do team events.
(37:28):
So in July, I took my team to this place in Denver called Beat the Bomb, where we had four challenge rooms. We were collecting time and then we had to play this video game where everyone had one function of a controller and then you get sprayed with paint at the end. So we did that. So we try to do fun, fun things. It's funny, I feel like this generation that was very social. I'll try to have everyone over. I've had my team over to my house twice and it takes four months of planning because everyone
Todd Busler (37:54):
Has very social or very antisocial. They're social calendars,
Jade Campbell (37:58):
They have a lot of plans, and then they also have a lot of, I do gym at four o'clock, not four, that's part of the workday six o'clock on Monday, so every Monday is out. That is never anything that's ever been part. I'll change those types of things, but coordinating those things has been tricky. And then I think Envoy does a lot of great stuff. We have bonuses, so we have pineapples we can give to everyone every single month, which I think just helps with the team culture as well. I feel very fortunate for working with my team.
Todd Busler (38:27):
Yeah, I mean I'm really happy we did this just because we dove into the topics. I wanted to really around accountability. You had awesome details and anecdotes about how you approach that, and I think there's a lot for people to learn from this because before we hit recording, I'm like, everyone's like, oh, there's some magical tool or some new ai. It's like the reality is the big gains is in all the stuff you're talking about, and I'd firmly believe that, and I'm happy we had the chance to do this episode. My last question for you, Jade, is you've been doing this a while now. Some of my peers that are in similar situations are like, man, another quarter I'm doing this again. It was good in the beginning. I can make some pretty quick money if you're in tech sales and figuring it out. What keeps you humming? What keeps you motivated?
Jade Campbell (39:13):
Oh gosh. A lot of things. Like I said before, I don't do anything unless I care a lot about it. And I think part of that's just how I want people to perceive me. But I also just think that has been my innate DNA, I think, since I was a kid. And I'll give my parents some credit, but I'm very different from my siblings. So I don't think that's the only factor. I like winning and I like seeing progress and change. I think one thing I've realized working at Envoy is that this is the perfect-sized company for me because I have the ability to manage and work with the team. I have the ability to make change that actually is impactful, and I can see that. And I have visibility to leadership, which I love Envoy's leadership. It's been really great. Our CEO and our CFO have been here since before I started, so it's just been really great to watch us grow as a company. But I don't know. I like working. I love working both kids. I was like, I'm ready to go back to work. So
Todd Busler (40:09):
Jade, this is awesome. I really appreciate you taking some time out of your busy metric-filled days to do this. Where can people find you if they have questions or want to dig a bit deeper about what you talked about?
Jade Campbell (40:22):
Yeah, on my LinkedIn I think is probably best.
Todd Busler (40:24):
Cool. Everyone, Jade Campbell at Envoy. I really appreciate it, Jade. Have a great weekend and thanks so much for the time.
Jade Campbell (40:30):
Thanks Todd.
Todd Busler (40:34):
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@champify.io/blog.