Let’s face it. None of us likes to deal with outbound channels. After years of training on the most sophisticated tools, it is hard to believe that sending emails and LinkedIn messages would work better than a “proper” inbound campaign. In addition, most CMOs I am familiar with enjoy too much managing the inbound campaigns, or working on brand awareness initiatives such as writing posts for social media or taking care of the SEO. As someone who grew up in the inbound world, I can understand the convenience of hiding behind your computer desk and waiting for prospects to come to you. Yet, for startups that like to grow fast, relying only on inbound campaigns is not an option.
Unfortunately, too many marketers still think of Outbound and cold tactics as spam or as a nagging telemarketing from the 70ts. Yet, in reality, Outbound for tech companies looks completely different and is usually the fastest, cheapest, and most efficient way for companies to obtain leads. This is mainly true for companies in their initial stages.
Outbound Marketing for Startup Companies
Let’s start at the beginning: the purpose of outbound is not to nag people. The role of the outbound campaign manager is to find the reason to contact the prospects in a way that will look the most relevant it can be. One of my LinkedIn connections wrote a funny post about it and compared the experience of receiving an unrelated cold message in your inbox to sitting in a restaurant while the waiter is offering you to adopt a cat. You might be a cat person and might be interested in adopting a cat, yet this topic should be discussed in the right time and space. Going back to marketing – make sure to approach a person only with a relevant message and try to explain the reason for approaching out of the blue.
My first suggestion would be to create short lists of people that you want to contact. The old school technique was based on the “spray and pray” technique which means contacting as many people as possible and hoping that something will catch. Yet, in our new era when data has become cheap, all the platforms obligate their users from spamming people. This is true for email marketing and for LinkedIn. When it comes to LinkedIn, the platform limits you to 20-30 messages a day.
In the bottom line, this is extremely difficult to create an effective outbound campaign targeting thousands of contacts at the same time as it can take months (!) to contact the entire list even if you have more than one user. Another issue is the relevancy. Senior people today receive around five-ten cold messages a day. In some cases, the number is even higher. A few years ago people would have gotten mad at companies that called them or sent them too many messages. Nowadays people just become apathetic to the fact that companies call them or send them emails without asking for it so they just ignore it. In my opinion, this is way worse than getting mad.
My recommendation is recommend creating a contact list of only the most relevant prospects. Whether it’s 20 or 50 or 500. If you find yourself with a target list of 3000 contacts, something went wrong.
One needs to be an artist in order to master the SDR work. It can take years to learn how to approach people in a way that will create the initial interest. Sometimes outbound been made by sending a message, sometimes via a call to the office, and sometimes via networking. Good SDR and outbound marketers know how to navigate through the different options and choose the right method to contact each persona. It’s a role that requires tons of creativity. Someone I know organized a weekend for senior people with the excuse of self-improvement just so he would be able to pitch one of the guests. He spent almost eight months preparing for this initiative. To determine the retreat’s topic, he had to learn what the prospect likes. In addition, he hired a company that was the face of the event and promoted it like it was their event. That enables him to come to the event as a “guest”. Lastly, he had to ensure that the person would come so that his efforts wouldn’t be in vain. When my friend learned that the person hadn’t signed up for the event, he asked the “organizers” to send him an email telling him that he won the lottery and had won several free tickets and the best hotel room. It was impossible to refuse that offer. During the weekend, my friend spent a lot of time with his prospect and became his friend. By the time they finished the retreat, he had a signed deal with him. As I said, outbound is an art.
How to recruit a good Outbound Marketer
One of the first things I do, when I start working with marketing teams, is explain to them that outbound is part of their work. God knows why, but for some reason, the standard in the market is that outbound is actually a part of Sales. Well, I think it’s a wrong practice. True, many sales managers also target their own prospects, foster relations and create a pipeline. Yet, in my opinion, it works the best when they do it on a small scale, super targeted, and on a strategic level. In other words – it is part of their network. Outbound marketing on the other hand is been done on a much larger scale. As I tell my clients – the goal is to bring meetings in any way possible and outbound is another method we should use.
So how to recruit a good outbound marketer? I always prefer working with individuals from second or third-tier countries. One of the most important things is to find someone in the timezone of your target audience. As an example, when it comes to North America I would always prefer to work with SDRs from Argentina or Colombia. For Europe, on the other hand, I’ll go with SDRs from Indonesia or the Philippines.
Another option is to work with an agency. Yet, one of the things you should take into consideration is that in the end, you are working with the SDR and not with the owner of the agency. That means that you need to double-check the quality of the SDRs and make sure that they are good. You should insist on interviewing the SDRs by yourself. Another thing you should consider while working with an agency is that the shelf life of an SDR is very short. Many times the SDR will quit and then the agency will provide you with a new person who will have to learn everything from scratch. That’s the reason why I like to recruit the SDRs by myself rather than working with agencies.
That’s it for now. Feel free to contact me for any questions you may have regarding outbound or marketing in general.
Elad.