Adam Robinson on this episode
Adam Robinson, founder and CEO of RB2B and Retention.com, brings deep SaaS experience from scaling bootstrapped companies to multi-million dollar ARR while navigating the collapse of traditional outbound sales. His expertise spans email marketing, website visitor identification, and demand creation through thought leadership.
Traditional cold outbound is broken, and high-touch LinkedIn-led prospecting is the answer. Response rates on spray-and-pray email campaigns have cratered from 8-10% five years ago to 1% or lower today, thanks to automation saturation, spam filters, and market fatigue. The solution is not to abandon outbound entirely, but to flip the funnel: create demand through personal thought leadership on LinkedIn, generate intent signals when prospects visit your website, and then reach out to warm prospects with context and credibility already built.
The reframe here is viewing LinkedIn activity as prospecting, not just marketing. By consistently posting on pain points your audience experiences, building genuine connections, and engaging authentically with your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), founders and sales leaders can identify warm prospects at scale. Tools like RB2B then identify those anonymous website visitors and surface them via Slack, allowing sales to reach out within 24 hours when intent is highest. This combines the efficiency of outbound with the trust-building power of inbound.
The episode covers practical implementation: how many LinkedIn posts to write, how to segment your network for algorithm advantage, the timing and cadence of outreach sequences, when to personalize vs. prioritize relevance, and how to train your team to execute warm outreach that feels human, not automated. Eddie and Adam also discuss demand creation vs. demand capture, the evolution from HubSpot-style form fill nurture to intent-driven outreach, and why this motion now rivals high-touch enterprise sales in conversion rates.
What we cover in this episode
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5:52
The Collapse of Outbound Response Rates Response rates on cold email have dropped from 8-10% to 1% or lower due to automation saturation, spam filters, and market fatigue over the past five years.
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12:39
Leveraging LinkedIn for Thought Leadership Consistent, authentic LinkedIn posting builds trust and audience with your ICP, making warm outreach exponentially more effective than cold lists.
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22:42
Demand Creation vs. Demand Capture Modern sales should focus on creating intent through thought leadership and content rather than capturing existing demand via forms and email lists.
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26:12
Warm Outreach Campaign Strategies Identify anonymous website visitors, connect on LinkedIn, and sequence email and messaging within 24 hours to strike while intent is highest.
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27:13
Personalization vs. Relevance Relevance matters more than personalization in email outreach. Message must speak to prospect's actual industry and problem, not generic surface-level research.
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32:02
Content as Discovery and Sales Tool Marketing content can double as a scoping and discovery tool in sales calls, helping prospects understand their own needs and your solution fit.
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37:54
Optimizing LinkedIn Connections and Reach Maintain high ICP concentration in your network by removing non-targets. Accept only ICP inbound connections to improve content algorithm reach within your ideal audience.
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43:47
Balancing Automation and Personalization Use your EA to execute warm outreach that feels human, not automated. Follow tight playbooks and decision trees, but avoid blast messaging and spammy tactics.
The lines worth sharing
If you start doing more and you continue doing more, eventually it will become your whole job because it will do far more for you than anything else you could possibly do.
Adam Robinson · 14:34
This is LinkedIn thing is a way to automate incredibly high touch sales. It's building a very deep connection with someone by business terms.
Adam Robinson · 12:39
Very few people are having effective, highly personalized campaigns because it still needs to get through and the person still needs to like see the subject line and click through.
Adam Robinson · 5:52
I don't care as much about personalization as I do about relevance. The email I get nine times out of 10, is just not relevant to my industry, let alone my company.
Eddie Reynolds · 27:13
Common questions from this episode
Why have cold outbound response rates dropped so dramatically?
Spray-and-pray automation has saturated email and LinkedIn, spam filters are tightening, and prospects are fatigued. Response rates fell from 8-10% five years ago to 1% today. Even highly personalized campaigns struggle to land in inboxes or get clicked.
What is inbound-led outbound and how does it work?
Build thought leadership on LinkedIn to create demand and trust. When prospects visit your site, identify them with tools like RB2B. Reach out within 24 hours with warm context already established. Response rates are exponentially higher because intent and credibility are pre-built.
Should I personalize or prioritize relevance in outbound emails?
Prioritize relevance over personalization. Generic personalization (company name, title) is easy to spot and doesn't work. Emails must speak to the prospect's actual industry problem and situation, or they get deleted regardless of how personalized the opener feels.
How much time should I spend on LinkedIn content creation?
For founders and CEOs, 80% of prospecting time should go to content, engagement, and building your library of greatest hits. You can repurpose themes and pain points across 50+ variations. Consistency beats perfection; post frequently and refine based on what resonates.
How do I avoid looking like a spammer when reaching out on LinkedIn?
Feel human, not automated. Use your EA to follow tight playbooks and decision trees, not blast tools. Open with a hook tied to their engagement or website visit. Wait for conversation history before asking for a meeting. If you have message history and they see your content, book rate is absurdly high.
Should I accept all LinkedIn connection requests or curate my network?
Curate ruthlessly. Accept only ICP requests; deny or disconnect from non-targets. High ICP concentration in your network improves content algorithm reach within your ideal audience. Avoid hitting the 30,000 connection cap by pruning low-value connections.
SEO meta description
Adam Robinson on inbound-led outbound: how to fix abysmal response rates by leveraging LinkedIn thought leadership, anonymous visitor identification, and warm sequencing.
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Adam Robinson
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Retention.com
cold outbound
LinkedIn prospecting
inbound-led outbound
response rates
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thought leadership
website visitor identification
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Read the full transcript · 53 KB · Adam Robinson
SPEAKER_00Welcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome to another episode of RevOps Corner. Today I have my very special guest, Adam Robinson, the founder and CEO of RB2B and Retention.com, two separate companies, which we're going to get into in a moment, to talk about the abysmal prospect response rates that we're seeing today and what to do about it. Adam, thanks so much for joining me today.
ADAM ROBINSONEddie, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo let's start this off by going over your background. If you could share in like two minutes or so, just a little bit about what you've done in
EDDIE REYNOLDSyour career and what both of your companies do.
ADAM ROBINSONSure. So my first 10 years of my career, I worked for an investment bank called Lehman Brothers, which is now defunct. And if you're an old dog like me, you know, it was responsible for the financial crisis. What I did there was I traded credit default swaps. If you're an old dog like me, you know, that was actually responsible for the financial crisis. The day that I showed up in Manhattan in 2003, two guys were in my apartment making a homepage on Dreamweaver for a website. It was baby blue and said the words Vimeo. And I watched them build that company. And it seemed like the coolest thing in the world. And I aspire to be an internet entrepreneur like them. So after the financial crisis, I took the plunge. It is very hard to become an internet entrepreneur if you have zero relevant experience. I don't know if anybody else has tried that before, but it's a very long and winding road. Somehow I ended up in the email space. My first company was called Robley Email Marketing. It was a newsletter app for very small business. The competition was MailChimp, which is like one of the best SaaS success stories that's ever existed. Revolutionary go-to-market motion with freemium. They were impossible to compete with basically. So in trying to solve other problems in the email space that MailChimp was not solving, that led me to a company that I still own, but do not run anymore called retention.com, which does basically like anonymous website visitor resolution, and it resolves it down to a deliverable email address. So you can do it in the U.S. It's this great use case for e-commerce. That company sells only to e-commerce stores. It's 22 million air, our bootstrap started four years ago. And then the new company is called RB2B, person level website visitor identity. Also same backbone technology, but instead of taking it to a deliverable email address, we take it down to a LinkedIn URL and a business email, and we push it to Slack. And I'm emulating MailChimp's go-to-market motion. It is a freemium PLG, low price. Any mid-market B2B is paying like between $300 and $1,000 a month monthly, massive value. It's a killer signal. And it's U.S. only because it's not GDP. It doesn't play well with GDPR because Europe doesn't like stuff like this.
ADAM ROBINSONSo yeah, that's the story. I think it was under two minutes actually.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou know, it's funny, like I think I took a similar but opposite journey. So I tried to start my first dot-com when I was 14, 15, something like that. Tried to learn how to program.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI had a website, products. Nobody ever went to the website because you actually have to like drive people to your website. Like not something I understood at that point in time. And went to school, majored in entrepreneurship and somehow got in love with finance. I spent a couple of years in commercial banking because I just wanted to figure out like what I wanted to start, what kind of company I thought I'd work with small businesses.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then I like somehow got this notion that I should go into investment banking and then Bear Stearns went under. And so I thought, you know what I'll do? I want to get emerging markets experience. I'll go to India where I can, you know, speak English and I can work in investment banking and I'll get really far away from New York and maybe avoid the crisis. And the first day of my job as an investment banker, and I'm going to use air quotes for that, was the day that Lehman went down.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWow. That's incredible.
ADAM ROBINSONHow long did you do it for?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo let's see here. So I was in India for a year. I think the job only lasted about six months because it just got to the point that like we're just doing nothing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAbsolutely nothing. I mean, it was locked down during that time, especially in EM.
ADAM ROBINSONIt was like, you know, it all just, yeah.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, what was really funny about that experience in case any of our listeners find this interesting is it became Casablanca.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo I had all these friends that were working at, you know, Goldman and everywhere else, and they're all getting laid off. And they're getting these severance packages where they're saying, hey, we've paid for your apartment for the next six months.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou're getting this big cash payout. And now you're in India where aside from housing, everything is dirt cheap. Do you want to stay here in your free apartment or do you want to go back to the UK, Australia, US and go try to figure it out in March of 2009? So all my friends were like, no, we'll just stay here and we'll just drink every day.
SPEAKER_17And it literally became Casablanca.
SPEAKER_13Yeah. I went through a period like that. It's really fun.
ADAM ROBINSONIt's the opposite for me right now. But those periods are, I think, I think when you go through a period like that, it's really hard to appreciate how wonderful it is. But you just kind of need to, like whenever you're given time off, you just have to take it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI don't know. I was both manically depressed at that point in time with my inability to progress in my career. And at the same time, it was one of the best years of my life. So it was just like a very bipolar experience.
ADAM ROBINSONYeah, I can totally relate to that. But like, yeah, I guess my reflection is it's impossible to, but like try to enjoy it as you're going through it as much as possible.
SPEAKER_23Yeah.
ADAM ROBINSONYou know, because you're going to miss it when it's gone in a lot of ways. But then in other ways, it's great when you're on the other side.
SPEAKER_14Well, anyway, fast forward 15 or so years and we're here and we're here to talk about selling software, specifically about these response rates.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd so let's talk about this. I mean, I think we're talking about outbound here. We'll see how this conversation evolves.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut let's start with the problem. Why are response rates so abysmal? And if you have any data on this, how bad are they?
ADAM ROBINSONSo like, you know, I'm kind of an early stage startup guy, right? Like my biggest company is 22 million ARR or whatever.
ADAM ROBINSONSo I haven't gotten to the, you know, 100 million revenue level where like you're doing a bunch of brand marketing and stuff. How do you grow in an early stage startup? I think five years ago, if you asked 10 successful early stage founders, 10 of them would have said, cold email, Aaron Ross predictable revenue style. Cadences, you know, did I get the right person? Can you intro me to like so-and-so, right? That really worked in the middle to the end of the last decade. I think it has slowly become less effective as more people have adopted that playbook to get off the ground. And by the way, companies who are well on their way do the same thing. I think they have a little bit better brand recognition. So like maybe it works a little bit better at the time. Recently with automation tools, AI, everything else, there's so much going and every single SaaS company doing this regardless of their size. So much is going out on these channels and it's not just email, LinkedIn, you know, cold calling, you know, it's kind of the same thing that on the other side of it, spam filters are ratcheting down and they're not letting as much in. I think two, three years ago, you could have said incredible personalization is the sort of kryptonite of the spray and pray strategy and it still works. I think very few people are having effective, highly personalized campaigns because, you know, it still needs to get through and the person still needs to like see the subject line and click through, which is kind of a big problem now. So if we're defining outbound as that, as like this super efficient, low cost way to do sales, which existed as a possibility for a while, and many tech companies scaled that up, I think that's completely broken. Now, I think you can still in the real world, have an account list, get people to show up to a Lakers game, you know, build rapport with them and get them on a demo. So that kind of type of sales definitely works, but this highly efficient, highly effective outbound strategy, you know, I talked to sales leaders who are incredibly data driven in the middle in 2015, you could expect a five part sequence to have like a 10, eight, six, four, two response rate to those emails. And now it's like four, three, two, one zero, not even that I'm hearing the response rates are like, you know, 1% or something on cold email, just very low on these, on these channels that you think of when you think of outbound that like, you know, zoom info, Apollo outreach, IO, you know, sales off, they made popular this motion. So, yeah, the question is, if that's not available to an early stage SaaS company, how do you distribute software, you know? You're going to tell me outbound is dead, right? Well, can, can, can, can an early stage software company really afford to do a sophisticated, like in retention.com, our entire sales motion is, you know, kind of like influencer affiliate drive them to an event and then get them on a demo and like do an annual deal. Right. Like that's a sophisticated motion that took years to develop. And I'm just not sure that's an option for a lot of early stage companies. Right. Like, so what do you do? I mean, that's, that's, that's what we're talking about now. What do you do?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. Well, it's interesting because like, as we both alluded to, we both spent some time in finance and even when I was in finance, I was selling like every job I had.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo coming into SaaS, like I, my first SaaS job was in 2009 after I got back from India, first AE in a startup. I didn't know what I was doing. My CEO didn't know what he was doing. We were just trying to figure it out. I was doing outbound all day, just pure cold outbound, building my own sequences in Salesforce before they had tools like sales loft and outreach and trying to do that. I went back into finance for a little bit and then I joined Salesforce thereafter. And it's been an interesting comparison because when I worked in finance, my last job raising capital for private equity funds, we're closing like 25, $50 million deals. And as like basically bankers, we're only getting like one or 2% of that. So it's not as big as it sounds, but it's still really meaningful, really meaningful transaction.
EDDIE REYNOLDSRight. And so their mentality was always, it's got to be high touch. It's got to be personal. You got to take these people out and like golf with them. You got to take them to lunch. Like they would never dream of putting somebody in like an automated sequence and outreach. And then I get into SAS and I start seeing these motions that you're talking about. And for me, it was difficult. Like I just couldn't wrap my head around it, even working at Salesforce. And we didn't have tools like outreach and sales loft, even when I was an AE at Salesforce. So I just kind of defaulted to personalizing everything and it wasn't as scalable, but it worked. And then when I left Salesforce, that's when this stuff really took off. And I started to see like mid 2010s, like where every company had these SDR BDR teams and they're doing this. And I saw this like automation scale. And then I'm looking at this, like, does this really work? And it seemed like it did work for a while and now it doesn't. And now it's like, we're full circle back to this idea, not only of doing this sort of like personalized outbound. And you and I are going to get into some really interesting stuff on like how to use LinkedIn to do this and maybe other things. There's that piece of it. And the other piece that I find really crazy is that like I worked with bankers that were making millions of dollars a year and they still weren't afraid to pick up the phone and cold call. And now it feels like people in SaaS have become a condition that like if you are over the age of 25, like you're too senior to like prospect. And that is just like an insane concept to me.
ADAM ROBINSONLook, I don't prospect in a conventional sense, but 80% of my work week is prospecting.
ADAM ROBINSONI consider this prospecting, you know. So in that regard, I totally agree. It's like, and I have our whole team posting on LinkedIn, right? Like everybody's got to be in, everybody's got to be in sales. Everybody's going to be marketing. Everybody's got to be in product. Regardless of what your role is, we need help and feedback in those three areas from everyone if you're going to participate in this company, right? So I totally agree with you. And I love what you said about high touch. And I think this LinkedIn thing is a way to automate incredibly high touch sales. Because what is high touch in the end of the day? It's like, it's you building a very deep connection with someone by business terms, right? Like for the trust to be there to do a massive transaction with them instead of them going and doing it with someone else, right? Like, and yeah, like this, this social media vehicle, which we're here to talk about, it does that for you without you having to pick up the phone. You know, like I hadn't called anybody and I got, you know, I can walk into an event of demand gen marketers and people walk up to me and they won't even say their names because they feel like they were watching a video of mine the day before. And they just heard me, you know, lamenting about like getting kicked in the nuts with this today.
SPEAKER_19And I just don't know how to solve this problem and like blah, blah, blah, you know? Yep.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI see that too. I don't think my reach is quite as big as yours, but I've been working pretty hard on it for a few years now. And I've seen the exact same thing about 50% of our business is coming inbound right now, which wasn't the case even 12 months ago. And the other 50% is largely coming through partners, which is kind of where I focus. And 50% of those partners are coming inbound where I'm having like PE and VC firms reaching out to us saying, I want to talk to you about how you might be able to help our portfolio companies, which is amazing. So it's like 75% of our business is basically some form of inbound. And then the other 25% is oftentimes me doing what you're about to get into, like engaging people on LinkedIn. And then I'm like, Hey, Bob, like you see me come out on your post like a hundred times.
EDDIE REYNOLDSLike, Hey, I have a question for you. Can we chat? And all of a sudden it's really easy to get a meeting.
SPEAKER_13Yeah. I mean, in that is amazing. Like, I just think that that is so unbelievable that like, and how much time do you spend of your total work week creating content?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo we talked about this offline of maybe making this podcast, like a free consulting session for me, because I think it'll be valuable for the audience.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt should be fun to get into. So it's just like, how do we actually solve this problem? I spend the bulk of my Mondays focused on content. And I've, I've hired some people over the last 12 to 24 months. So we have our SVP of RevOps. She writes most of our newsletters in theory, I'm supposed to write some of them, but just struggling to get there. We have a marketing manager that actually does like all like the copywriting and like proofing and actually posting it on our website, editing this podcast, editing videos.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut I'm spending the bulk of Monday, reviewing all the content she produces, picking the clips, reviewing the newsletter, making sure it aligns with my beliefs. And then writing out like seven thoughtful LinkedIn posts.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThen Tuesday through Friday, I'm juggling sales activities and managing the company.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I don't yet have any salespeople. We're hiring somebody right now as we speak. But at this moment, with the exception of like some of my SVPs of RevOps that do the delivery and the consulting, I'm managing the pipeline myself. So that takes up a good chunk of my time. I engage on LinkedIn every day. And then I rarely have time to go in and actually do any level of outreach. I've got this list of like 30 engaged accounts that like send us leads and I try to work those. And then when I'm done with all of that, I maybe have like a few hours a week to do any level of prospecting. And so it's, it's a heavy lift.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's a very heavy lift, but I would say probably 25% of my time is devoted to content.
ADAM ROBINSONSo I'm just like totally flip-flopped. My Monday goes to internal meetings. It's awful. It's like 14 in a row from eight until 530. Absolutely terrible. One-on-ones and executive meeting. And like I'm running RB2B is whatever. It is just, I call it hell day. And then the whole rest of the week, 80% of that is guests, lots of podcasts, our content, you know, writing LinkedIn posts, doing, you know, talking head video for, to go with the LinkedIn posts. Yeah. Content creation is, is, is 80, but yeah. So I'm just, I'm just, somebody told me this a year and a half ago, by the way, when I had no game whatsoever. So, so I had, if you were to summarize my journey on LinkedIn in one sentence or two sentences, it's like started in October of 2022. Didn't know what I was doing for 12 months. Know exactly what I'm doing ever since then. Right. So during that period of not knowing what I was doing, I was trying to figure out whether I should like pick up the volume or not. Cause I was maybe not posting as frequently or like wasn't doing it. And I talked to this guy who manages the organic program for one of the big real estate influencers on the YouTube world. He's like, okay, if you're asking me whether you should crank it up or not, I'm only going to say one thing. He's like, if you start doing more and you continue doing more, eventually it will become your whole job because it will do far more for you than anything else you could possibly do.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's so interesting you say that because that thought has occurred to me a lot and it's like, I'll give you another corollary to this and we got to bring this back to outbound.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut I had a friend of mine reach out. He's trying to go through this journey. He's posting on LinkedIn. He sees I'm having a lot of success. He's like, what do I do here? He's getting one, like two likes. It's awful. Then this was really frustrating. He says something to me about like, oh, I'm thinking about this post about how I sold my company for $40 million. And it's all because I bought Salesforce. I rewrite the post for him literally over text message. I'm like, write it this way. He copies and pastes it on LinkedIn. I engage it. I have a decent audience of people that care about Salesforce, especially having worked there. All of a sudden he gets 500,000 views on this one post is four times bigger than any post I've ever written for myself. I'm just like, what the absolute. So after having this success, like I start coaching him like a little bit, I'm like, hey, you should do this.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou should do that. You really need to think about your funnel, what this looks like. And then he just goes off the deep end and now he's spending four or five, six hours a day on LinkedIn. And I think he surpassed me. He's got half my audience that he's built in like six months versus me in three years.
SPEAKER_22And now I'm almost ready to go back to him and go, hey, Darren, like teach me now.
EDDIE REYNOLDSLike now that it's your turn, like help me understand what I'm doing wrong. And it's been amazing to see his journey where he's like, I'm just going to pour every ounce of energy I have into this. And I just see him just consistently crushing it post after post every day. He's figured it out.
ADAM ROBINSONYou can figure it out. That is for sure. If you're willing to, so like we're both entrepreneurs, it is not easy to start a business. It is not easy to create a good product. It is not easy to create a good service. It is every bit as difficult to find the alignment between, it's basically finding your voice or content market fit. Or another way to think about it is there needs to be a match between the clarity, consistency, and constancy of the character you're trying to create and an audience that actually wants that character. Right? It's easy to sit there and say, here are my content pillars. This is who I want to be. What's difficult is creating, aligning, creating those pillars that people actually want to consume at the same time.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, it's also just difficult to write good content. Like I, people will ask me for advice, like, how do you do this? How have you had, like, how have you grown your LinkedIn? And I'm like, you just, like, just bash your head against the wall repeatedly every day for like three years. Like, there's not science to it. It's like, you have things that hit and things that don't hit, but it's largely correlated with the level of energy you put into it. At least in my experience.
ADAM ROBINSONYeah. I want to respond to that with one idea that I think is helpful for people to, to hold on to. My buddy, Andy Muborn, who's been in the game longer than me. He's a sales influencer. He's got like a couple hundred thousand followers. He's like, you post on LinkedIn to add to your library of greatest hits. Your library of greatest hits is how you grow your audience. Right. Cause you're kind of like your library of greatest hits. You can repurpose those. Like, you know, this predictable revenue post that I sent you, right? Like I have, I have written that, you know, 50 different ways over the past nine months. Like Chris Walker, I love studying him because this guy has been talking about the same shit for five years. He's a friend of mine, but he's, he's a master of the game. Right. And when it comes to LinkedIn, you can say what you want about what he says. Right. But he's incredibly good at saying the same thing over and over again from a different angle in a way that almost seems novel until you sit back and think about it. And it's like, oh, he's talking about this like multi-touch attribution thing that I've read him from him 500 other times. But it works every time, you know, I'm also a big fan.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I, I, I think a lot about how he approaches things and, you know, he'll just talk about, I think he's kind of off this now, but he talked about how the MQL is dead a thousand times. And then he talked about like this, um, self-reported attribution, like putting a field on a website. And this is amazing to me that like, you're talking about the concept of putting a single field on the website that asks, how'd you hear about us? And most people would say that one time they'd get two likes and that'd be it. And instead, Chris is like, how can I find a thousand different ways to scream from the rooftops? Why this is like the end all be all of all marketing when it's not, we all know that. And it's like, yeah, I mean, it works. But anyway, let's, let's take this back to outbound. All right. So we're trying to solve for response rates and let's get like in the weeds here.
EDDIE REYNOLDSLet's try to solve my problem. Cause selfishly, I want to solve my problem and hopefully it's good for our audience. What you are basically saying, let me try to see if I can summarize this for like a juicy clip. Response rates on outbound are abysmal. And so what you are recommending is that BDR sales reps, founder CEOs start sharing thought leadership on platforms like LinkedIn. And then using that as a form of outbound to book more meetings, more pipeline, more deals.
ADAM ROBINSONMore or less. So what I am suggesting is that, you know, the CEO is easiest for me to talk about. It's, it's, it's kind of like the model I'm suggesting is that, and this is another Chris Walker idea. There's demand creation activities and there's demand capture activities. I do think that there was demand creation that was happening when this outbound motion was successful in this sloppy way that we were talking about, which never should have been successful in the first place. Now, I think people in that type of role are really only capturing demand that was created in other ways like we're doing right now. Right. So really it's like through thought leadership and guest slots and like whatever else you want to do. It is actually originating demand that then creates a signal like there's this beautiful visit my website signal under your name or it's maybe for you, it's book a demo. I don't know what it is, but like for me, it's visit my website. I am creating an intent signal, massive amounts of one daily from posting on LinkedIn. People come back to my site. I then can identify them with this new technology I have. And then I can have a sales force that's, you know, 2% of the size of what was required to create this amount of awareness and signal back to my site before go after only those people. And, you know, that is the way to do sales these days. And the added benefit is if it's through this thought leadership, who are you going to pick up an email from somebody, you know, and trust, right? So like you can build a machine where it's actually Adam reaching out to these people who hit your website and they're infinitely more likely to pick up and then reply to that email than if it's some rando that works for me, right?
ADAM ROBINSONSo that's what I was just about to ask is like, how is this different from like the HubSpot model?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe were all taught like 10, 15 years ago, you know, you do SEO, you get them to the blog, you get their email address, and then you have an SDR just like hammer the hell out of them for the next two months. How's this different? What you're saying is that you're going to use your own personal name that they have like built a relationship with your content to get that meeting, to get that response.
SPEAKER_48So I think there's two big differences with SEO. It's not even really true demand creation because search is kind of a demand capture vehicle.
ADAM ROBINSONSo I just think that the megaphone of this with the way social media works now is so much greater. And you kind of have more sort of control over it in this weird way. You can decide what you're writing about and go after audiences very specifically. So like that's number one. It's like there's better demand creation coming directly from the person that is actually the most desirable to have the relationship with the company, like the guy in charge. And then unlike before where you had to actually capture a form fill, which is like a one to 2% event, you know, this new tech lets you get 20, 30% of people who hit your site and then go after them. So those are two pretty major differences. It's not just a form fill.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo what you're saying is, is like you do all this and somebody goes to your website and you're figuring out who they are, what their LinkedIn handle is, what their email address is. And you're surfacing that to the team via Slack. Yep. There you go. And then what exactly do they do with that information?
ADAM ROBINSONThey just start out, you know, like I think it depends on whatever channels are working for you.
ADAM ROBINSONI would just do something very similar and start kind of like a warm outreach campaign that doesn't specifically say that they were on the site. And I think you would find that the response rates are exponentially higher than taking a list out of Apollo and doing the old blast way. But yeah, I mean, what we have observed is that a successful reply, oftentimes people kind of don't even realize that they visited the website. If you hit them, you know, within 24 hours and they're like, wow, I was thinking about, I was thinking about this, like, this is like very serendipitous. So that's kind of, you know, what I would do. Right. So for my companies, it's like mainly email and LinkedIn, connect with them on LinkedIn quickly, you know, shoot them an email with the sort of problem statement, like based on what pages they were looking at or something. Maybe hit them with LinkedIn message the next day, you know, an email the day after that or something. So effectively putting them into like a, some kind of a sequence cadence type thing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSRight. Yep. Got it. And if you want to get really, if you want to get really dangerous and you look at the pages they were looking at and, you know, sort of prioritize people are looking at pricing pages or whatever else.
ADAM ROBINSONYou know. How personalized are you getting when you do this? What's strange is for RB2B in particular, it's a PLG, like low friction, low touch, like low price deal. And like really the people who this product is best for are people whose website is trying to get you on the phone with them because you have like a high ACV and like whatever. So, you know, we are not doing things with the level of sophistication that I would do if we were like selling something for a hundred K it's kind of, you know, I'm running it through a clay table and doing this automation stuff. You know, it's, it's just, I view for our model, it's almost like just a repeat, it's a retargeting thing. Almost. It's like an impression in their inbox and I hope to bring them back to the site again, but it's like, not as crazy personalized as I would be if there was like real money on the table with every one of these leads. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_07And I should clarify like a month.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And I should clarify, like, I don't even care as much about personalization as I do about relevance. Yeah. Cause it's like, I have to imagine the emails I get are similar to the emails everyone else gets. And nine times out of 10, I'm just like, this isn't even relevant to the industry I work in, let alone my company or my situation. Right. I got an email yesterday and it's like, Hey, have you heard about the MasterCard lawsuit? And I'm like, I don't process credit cards. This is not relevant to me.
EDDIE REYNOLDSRight. You know, and we do charge a hundred thousand dollars. Like, I don't know anybody that puts that on a credit card. So nice research. Good job there. Are you guys trying to do things to make sure that the folks that you're messaging fit that description, that they are using their website to try to get somebody on a call?
ADAM ROBINSONSo we're a freemium PLG model. And one of the reasons that I wanted to go to market that way is because there's a few reasons why this becomes an, I won't pay for this.
ADAM ROBINSONOne is my traffic is too low. Right. And then even if your traffic is low, there are some people that would pay for it. And some people that would not. And the dollar value is very confusing to try to figure that out. So the idea was just like, make it free for like the bottom 80% of traffic. Even if we're getting absolutely run over by like some high ACV, low traffic websites, and then, you know, charge for the top 15, 20%, whatever. So how that ends up shaking out is that we have a 15% zero touch conversion rate from people who have a book, a demo button in a 3% zero touch conversion rate from people who do not. So without targeting or humans, it's kind of like when people try the full featured version for 30 days, they don't end up seeing a ton of value if their website's not trying to do that. And they do if it is. So they end up paying us if they have it and they end up not if they don't. Does that make sense? It's kind of just happening because of that dynamic, you know, but if we were doing sales led motion outbound, whatever, like, yeah, like all, all of the things. All of my targeting resources would go to those people. That is for sure.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd that's selfishly what I want to solve for. So like, how do I, what do I do with this? Right. So I've got all these posts that are going out on LinkedIn. We're really like laser tight on our ICP or in our case, our IPP, our ideal partner profile, the buyer personas, you know, we like actively send LinkedIn connection requests to the types of people we want to see our content. Meaning my assistant does that for me.
SPEAKER_22You know, if you got a connection request from me, I'm sorry. It wasn't me that sent it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou know, so we've got all that going on. And then I'm looking at it saying we are selling a hundred thousand dollar solution or we could partner with somebody that could send us a million dollars worth of business.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo I'm all about personalization, but how could I, how could I improve this, this outreach?
EDDIE REYNOLDSHow could I use a tool like yours? Yeah. How could I use other tools? How would you improve this process?
ADAM ROBINSONAre you, are you, are you driving people? What's, do you have a visit my website link under your, under your name? Oh yeah.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And specifically like I post twice a week trying to push people to our newsletter and where we've had a lot of successes.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI post on Friday, Hey, this is what we're sharing in the newsletter tomorrow. And we'll get a lot of people to sign up for the newsletter. Cause you, you have to wait 24 hours unless you want it in your inbox. And then on Sundays I post, Hey, we published this newsletter, go check it out. So that drives a lot of the traffic to our website. And then I'll just kind of say offhand, it's really funny. We have a proposal for a significant engagement later today. And when we were doing the discovery call, I literally pulled up our newsletter in front of the guy and used it and just said, how much of this stuff do you need?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I'm getting off track here, but it is just fascinating to me being a founder selling and marketing to see the overlap where we're using our marketing content, not even as a sales tool, but as like a scoping and discovery tool. Because there's so much overlap with our marketing content and the problems we're trying to solve for obvious reasons. Right. And it's just really interesting to see when you're driving people to the website and you're doing these discovery calls and there's a sort of like virtuous cycle here where your content is so on point that you can literally use it as a scoping tool.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's a beautiful situation to be in.
ADAM ROBINSONI mean, you know, people, I would think like if, if I heard that early in my journey, it would create envy.
ADAM ROBINSONI would be like, how do I get there? And sometimes the answer's not obvious, right? Like kind of this place that I found myself in before it really clicked was I was trying to create content on LinkedIn for e-commerce store owners. And I was not one and I did not have one, you know? So it was just a different, and like, so I was like, what do I do? Well, we're all entrepreneurs. I'm going to just like work in public and talk about my, my broad business problems, like hiring, firing, maybe making a good product, like whatever. Everybody, you know, every e-commerce guy wants a SaaS. So like, I'll talk about that some, and it was fine. It did a lot, but like, it's not nearly as potent as when it's like, I'm a SaaS revenue leader. You know, I tried to scale up a BDR org in 2023. It looked great for three months. And then obviously it wasn't working. My VP sales quit and we, you know, whatever. So like that just like pierces the heart of people who went through a similarly agonizing experience in 2023 who were in SaaS. So anyway, that's, that's fantastic that you have. Yeah, I'll just say, right.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt took a long time to get there. And I think it comes from a place of going, I'm sitting on the phone with a prospect. I'm talking to them about their problems. They're saying, how do I do this? How do I do this? How do I solve this problem? And I'm like, we should write marketing content on that. And so like to make it really tangible, a lot of what we talk to people about, which is why I'm doing this podcast with you today is how do we operationalize our outbound program?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo for example, like I'm not the messaging guy. It's not what we do. I have no fucking clue what you should put in your email to try to get a meeting other than just my 20 plus years of sales experience. It's not our area of expertise, but I'm constantly thinking every day, like, how do you build a better outbound operation and an inbound operation? That's why I'm doing this podcast with you. I'm trying to learn. And so then when I take that and I think like, how do we codify this and turn this into marketing content? And then I go and I present that in a sales call and I get feedback and then it makes me go, how do I make the marketing content even better? And it just keeps going in this like virtuous circle of like better content, better sales calls, better content, better sales calls.
ADAM ROBINSONTotally. Chris Walker describes what he does on LinkedIn as I take people down a pain funnel. I think if you can really get good at, and again, I think now, like what I said before, it's like now I'm so good at talking about the pain because it's my own. But he's not talking about his own pain. He's talking about the pain of the 50 million ARR SaaS where he analyzed the $5 million ad spend and like, you know, 98% of it is literally like 18 times whatever inefficient or something like that.
ADAM ROBINSONRight.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWhich is really well done considering that he was like a junior marketing manager selling like med tech devices before this. Right. So he's had to like figure all this out from zero. And I think he's done it in a way that resonates with people that do this every day.
SPEAKER_25Totally. And I think just his loop was his agency in what they were doing for people was providing that pain.
ADAM ROBINSONRight. Like, why are you working with Chris Walker's agency? It's because something is massively painful inside of this whole demand gen thing you're trying to run. And like your metrics don't make sense. You don't know how to measure it. Like whatever else. So he just had these atrocities that happen to have high revenue and high budgets show up at his doorstep and he made content about it. Right. So like whatever the equivalent is for your business of that, if you can get that flywheel going, which you described a version of it. Right. Like that's amazing. Now my flywheel is just, I'm reporting on my own business and it's like very similar to the struggles that other early stage and sort of early scaling stage SAS founders are dealing with. Right. Like on one side, it's just, how do I get this product off the ground when outbound doesn't work and like pipeline or whatever. On the other side, it's like, man, I got like 55 people working for us and we can't get anything done.
ADAM ROBINSONRight. Like we don't have processes. Like, how do you coordinate like all of these people?
ADAM ROBINSONRight. Like it's just a different set of issues. Both are equally painful for people at those, at those stages. So it's like, yeah, either it's coming from you or it's coming from the people that you're helping. Right. Like, so how does it relate? Yeah. How does it relate to outbound? I mean. And let me just recap the question here.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo you've got somebody that's engaging on LinkedIn. They're either posting and, or they're commenting on other people's posts. They're investing time on LinkedIn, trying to build up an audience, building up connections. And this is driving people to the website. It's driving people's interest.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNow what, what do we do with this?
ADAM ROBINSONYeah. So there's, and I'm going to speak from like, let's say I'm you, right? Like if I'm you, I'm doing two things. I am doing something along the lines of what you described.
ADAM ROBINSONCause like your content, I imagine is good enough to where you do get. So it's like, if I were just starting out, I would be doing 10 a day, 20 max outbound connection requests to people in your ICP. Right. If people accept that connection request and your content is good, they will see your content. So in the beginning, outbound connection requests, get better at content over time. You will be able to reach out to those people on LinkedIn messenger and have a higher rate of a book demo than had you not done that. Right. So that's play one. Then you get to where you are. And I would imagine you're getting quite a bit of inbound connection requests. I mean, I know I get a ton of them. I would accept only the ICP inbound connection requests, deny all the rest of them because that actually matters. Like the concentration of ICP of your total audience will determine the reach of your posts within that ICP.
EDDIE REYNOLDSOh, interesting. I just accept everybody as they spam me that I block them. Yeah, you, it may actually help you to have either you or your assistant or your EA unconnect with people who are just blatantly not in your ICP, blatantly not in your, your geographic.
ADAM ROBINSONIf there's 0% shot that these people would ever buy from you, it is a sort of not data driven, but deeply held belief by some LinkedIn people that you should unconnect.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWait, but now you got me interested, right? Because I get a lot of folks from India for a couple of reasons that are pretty obvious. One, there's a ton of people in India on LinkedIn. Number two, there's a ton of people in India on LinkedIn that are interested in technology, SaaS, go to market, et cetera. But I don't think that companies in India are a good ICP fit for us for a number of reasons, not least of which is the cost of labor in India. But these folks comment on my posts and like, it feels like that helps like generate more reach. Sometimes I got people like asking me for career advice and I'm like, I'll even take the time to try to answer those questions.
EDDIE REYNOLDSEven though I'm like, man, you literally could not be physically further away from our ICP than, than being in India. But, you know, it's a huge audience.
ADAM ROBINSONYep. I would say, so here's probably how I would think about it.
ADAM ROBINSONI think there's like a 30,000 total connection cap. I believe that's correct. Yeah. If I were getting anywhere near that, or I could model out that I was going to get anywhere near that in the foreseeable future, I would start to drop them. If you're not even close, if you're like 3000 connections, who cares?
SPEAKER_30I know I'm at like 25,000 now.
ADAM ROBINSONYeah, yeah. So like, honestly, man, like I would start maybe thinking about seeing if you could segment out who you just perceived as the absolute least valuable and unconnecting from some of them so that you don't hit that 30,000 and you're like. And you also think the algorithm will show content to more people by culling it down to people that are more in the target audience.
ADAM ROBINSONSo, Alec, my guy, believes that it will spread in your ICP better if you have a higher concentration of ICP of the total connection base.
ADAM ROBINSONIt's interesting. Okay, cool. I want to be sensitive to time, though, and move on to like, okay, we've got this.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNow, how do we like get in front of people? How do we convert these to meetings? Okay.
ADAM ROBINSONOkay. So anyway, so the last thing I said was you're posting on LinkedIn. You're getting inbound connection requests. You accept ICP visitors. The first thing you say to them in a DM is what caught your attention to have a conversation history in that DM. Wait 60 days, have somebody go back and ask that person for a meeting in the best way that you can. If your content is good, you will be a celebrity in their eyes and you will get an absurdly high booked demo rate. That is the sales motion that Alec, my consultant, does with 10 other B2B SaaS CEOs. He doesn't do with us because a lot of reasons. We're PLG, right? So that is one thing I would have going on for sure.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo just sending a message to the folks in the ICP and the point of that is maybe they respond, maybe they don't, but they see more of your content because you're messaging them. And then go back 60 days later and ask them for a call.
ADAM ROBINSONIf they accepted your connection request and you're putting out good content over the next couple months, you will become a celebrity in their eyes to some level because they'll see a lot of your stuff.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI've also noticed that you, you see a lot more content from folks that you've actually exchanged messages, exchanged messages with. I saw the other day, somebody I hadn't talked to in a long time. We went back and forth like four or five, six messages. And then all of a sudden, like his content is the first thing in my feed, which isn't normally the case.
ADAM ROBINSONYep. So there's that, there's that going on there. If you exchange a little message with them, they're going to see a lot of your content. If they see a lot of your content, you will become a celebrity in their eyes to some, to some extent. So the other thing that I would do, not to sort of talk my own book here is I would have an identity tool like ours on my website. When someone hit that site, I would have it filtered down to IDEO customer profile. And I would start some, I would connect with them on LinkedIn. I would outbound email them. I would try to get a conversation opened based upon that, that interest signal. If you want to get really sort of the next level below that would be engagers with your post. Try to get a message started with them, right? There's just a bunch of different, you could even create a LinkedIn live event that has a very district, descriptive pain statement related to what you do. You could, you're allowed to send out a thousand invitations a day. You could send out a lot of invitations to your ICP. The acceptors of that are without, whether they show up to the event or not, they care about that topic, right? Because why else did they, did they accept that event? So the one concern and question I have around this is right before this call, as I was prepping, I got this automated message from this guy and I won't throw him under the bus by naming him, but he's an influencer on LinkedIn.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI followed his content. I've had conversations with him, but just like nine out of 10 times, I get this message from him and it's like, check out this new newsletter, check out this new book I'm launching. And I just messaged him back today and I'm like, dude, take me off your automated list, please. If you want to have a meaningful relationship, I'm down, but I'm tired of just getting spammed. It sounds like you don't disagree with that. To me, it seems like we need a balance here. It can't just be like, I'm just going to write a newsletter and just send it to every single person I'm connected to.
ADAM ROBINSONCan't do that. I think the magic of LinkedIn DMs is somewhere in the middle of, it can be someone that is not you, but it needs to feel like that it is you and it has not been blasted.
SPEAKER_25You know, so like your EA, right? Like it takes a lot of thought, but like there can be a few different things that you can try to open up conversations with and sort of very simple plays based on what they say that someone else can run for you.
ADAM ROBINSONThat is not in any way identifiable as something automated.
SPEAKER_85Yep. Like I agree with you.
ADAM ROBINSONIt's like some guy like sent me this event and I'm just like, why would you think that I would go to this? Honestly, right?
SPEAKER_17Like, then where's the line for you? How are you determining who you do send that event invite to?
ADAM ROBINSONI know this guy, I know this guy, Nathan Latka. He does it. He runs at, so like what he does is he creates a LinkedIn live event. He runs ad spend to it with a very tight audience. And he then takes those, those engagers to like do more retargeting too. That's emotion. That's a play for him. A play that I have as an example is when people are onboarding our B2B, when they connect the Slack integration as an instruction of how to use the product. I'm like, Hey, the first thing you're going to want to do with these prospects is connect with them on LinkedIn. I'm going to drop my profile in and have you connect to it and say RB2B in the message. So I know. So I have people, you know, 20 times a day sending me a message that says RB2B. And then I write back, I'm like, yo, what's up? And like, that is now a person that I have a message history with that will then get, you know, fed my content. That if I want to go invite 500 people a day to like an event, then like whatever I could. So that, but, but that's just an example of a, you know, of sort of an opener related to our PLG motion. Like for instance, if they were high value and they fell off, they like did the 30 day and they didn't go by. I can then ping 20 of them a day who did that. And it's not a problem. If they're not connected to me, it becomes a problem. I can't reach out to them about the product. Right. So like, this is a play that I'm using. That's, that's ingrained in my product motion that involves this LinkedIn DM that does not come across as automated in any way. Right. Yeah. It makes sense.
SPEAKER_14And I mean, what I've been doing is doing all this stuff manually and I've, I've like tallied it up and I've got like almost like a 20% conversion rate from like hold message to meeting.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNow, granted that is within a very, it's, it's amazing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's within a small set of people that I'm already engaged with on LinkedIn.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI'm not doing this at scale because I don't have a lot of time to prospect, but it is a highly effective strategy.
SPEAKER_25So it's just like, how could you use maybe one other body to, to just start widening the aperture of, of that.
ADAM ROBINSONRight. You know, can you up the, you know, first of all, how big is the TAM? Is there, are there, you know, thousands of people, like, are you connected to all of them already? Like, I mean, we're working with like VC and PE backed B2B SaaS companies, more so in like the 50 to a hundred million dollar range.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's not a huge TAM.
SPEAKER_90And so that's where, like, I keep going back to just like highly personalized, but where I think we're leading to is getting, and we're like physically building this out right now.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's more of like an ABM-like motion where we say, here are the VCPE partners we should be working with. Here are the B2B SaaS companies, specifically those in their portfolio that we could be working with. Here are the CEOs, CROs, CFOs, et cetera. Now, like, that gets into like a plus 1,000 list of people. And then the question is, who's engaging with our content on our website, in HubSpot, on LinkedIn, et cetera. Who's come to events if we bring back, we used to do RevOps Live. I'm a Chris Walker fan too. So I just, you know, stole the naming convention. And we had a lot of success with that. And how do we cross-pollinate all these things?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then as a small company, how do we cross-pollinate all these things with limited resources and limited budget for technology? That's always a challenge, right? And that's, I think, where we're going with this is to just like narrow in and say, look, like a customer could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to us. So who are the accounts we want to get in front of?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd which of them are engaging with us in different platforms that we should prioritize? I mean, I just think it's, so like of that entire TAM, I think you should be connected.
ADAM ROBINSONIt should be a goal to be connected to every single one of them. Yep. If you did 10 a day, 1,000 people takes 20 weeks to connect to, right? So like you could be connected to everybody you want to be connected to in a year, even if it's a couple thousand. And then your content's dialed. I think you just keep putting it out. And then the last part of it is just designing with some assistance, some EA, like a somewhere in between automated and personal, like it's not using one of the tools, right? It's a human, but they're following a very tight playbook, you know, of sort of like connection, wait for them to see the content, wait to see if they engage. It's just like a big decision tree that this person plays out for you.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI'm a hundred percent following you, but we're at time. You probably got another podcast after this. So thank you for joining me. And before we run out of time, how can people find you, Adam?
ADAM ROBINSONSo LinkedIn, search Adam Robinson, search RB, go to rb2b.com. Check it out. That's the way. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. Hey, thanks for having me, Eddie.
ADAM ROBINSONThis is a great chat.
SPEAKER_17It's fun. Transcription by CastingWords
