When I think about outbound sales, I think about touchpoints. Emails, LinkedIn Connections/Messages, calls, and all of the ways that you’re trying to get in front of somebody to create awareness.
But I think that we’re putting way too much emphasis on whether one of those individual touchpoints books a meeting. I can say from experience, a lot of the time, that isn’t how it happens.
What outbound actually looks like
What really happens is this:
Someone gets an email from you and they don’t reply. A little bit later, you send them another email and marketing is also touching that same account. Then they go to your company’s website, where they start doing their own research, and a few days later, they fill out a demo request form.
To me, this is outbound working.
The outbound didn’t necessarily create the lead on its own, and neither did the marketing. What they did was work together. They told someone the same story in different ways enough times that eventually that person became curious enough to think, “this might actually help my business.”
AI changed the volume, not the job
Now, AI has made it possible for sales reps to create more touchpoints than ever. We can research faster. We can write and personalize emails at a scale that would have never been possible for one person to do manually. Today’s SDR can get in front of more people than they ever could before.
But so can everybody else.
So, I don’t think the answer is to use AI to create more touchpoints. I think the opportunity is to make the touchpoints we do create better.
Find the right company. Find the right person. Find an actual reason why that person might care right now. And then be persistent enough to actually get in front of them.
To get there takes judgment. And this is where I think the role of the SDR starts to get more interesting as AI does more of the work.
Find your key accounts
Right now, I don’t think any manager should be having their reps try to meaningfully work hundreds of accounts. If you’re responsible for touching hundreds of accounts, somebody is getting missed. I’m sorry, there just isn’t enough time to actually think about all of them.
So hear me when I say this: you need to find your key accounts.
If a rep has a smaller group of accounts to really focus on, they can actually spend time figuring out how to get into them.
They can research the company. They can find the right people instead of just going after the most obvious title. They can look through LinkedIn and see if they know somebody who knows somebody. They can figure out what’s happening at the company right now and whether there is actually a reason to reach out.
And most importantly they can start looking beyond the obvious ways of getting in front of someone. They can get creative.
That’s the piece I think gets missed when we talk about outbound.
Good outbound takes thinking.
Especially now, as we’re asking AI to do more and more of the execution while we give it the direction. We’re telling it what companies to look for, what matters, who a good prospect is, how we want to sound, and what kind of message we want to send.
So it actually matters whether the person directing the AI knows how to think through those things.
The basics don’t change
When we really think about it, the basics of outbound don’t really change.
You still need to find the right company. You still need to find the right person. You still need a reason to reach out. And you still need to figure out how to actually get in front of them.
What changes is how much of the work around outbound can now be done for us.
What I’m doing for the next 30 days
So what I want to do is this: I want to see what happens if I go the other way.
For the next 30 days, I’m going to work five key accounts at a time. Although I won’t be able to tell you what accounts I chose, I will be able to give you the logic behind my decisions.
These will be five accounts that I think are genuinely worth my time, and I’ll work them through the entire sequence. I’m going to spend more time figuring out who I should actually be talking to, why I should be talking to them now, whether I have a way into the account, and what else I can do besides just sending another email.
If someone gives me a no, I’ll move another account in and take note.
What I want to know is pretty simple: can I get more meaningful engagement by going much deeper on fewer accounts? Or are people just truly burnt out from all the outreach they get?
I’ll let you know what I find.