About this episode
Eddie Reynolds and Rachael Bueckert are go-to-market strategy consultants at Union Square Consulting with deep expertise in outbound efficiency. In this episode, they analyze over 100 million emails of data and trace industry claims back to their sources to cut through the hype around outbound tactics. The research reveals a surprising finding: much of the data vendors cite is unreliable, with folklore, vendor citation chains, and even fake addresses masquerading as credible sources.
The core finding is that basic, targeted outbound still beats AI-powered automation and intent data, and most outbound tactics work only if you nail your ICP and personalization first. Reynolds and Bueckert walk through six common outbound strategies: targeted, warm signals, trigger-based, third-party intent, autonomous AI SDRs, and spray-and-pray. They find that targeted outbound doubled reply rates, and that attempts to build fully autonomous AI SDRs have a 97% failure rate for revenue generation. Their research also challenges the narrative around expensive intent data tools, showing that vendors' own ROI claims often lack scientific rigor or control groups.
What makes this episode distinct is the reframing of the six tactics as really three motions (targeted, middle-ground, spray-and-pray) that can be combined with separate signal types (warm, intent, trigger). Reynolds shares the exact LinkedIn message template he used to source millions in business, and explains why he'd spend money on warm signal-based outbound before intent data. The episode also explores why reputation burn matters more than most founders think, and why spray-and-pray eventually fills your pipeline with the wrong customers.
What we cover in this episode
-
0:36
100M emails and unreliable data Why industry reports on outbound are often untrustworthy, featuring fake return addresses and vendor citation chains.
-
8:53
Targeted outbound doubles reply rates Tight ICP, real research, and personalization beat generic sending across all six tactics tested.
-
10:02
Three motions, not six tactics Reframing outbound as targeted, middle-ground, or spray-and-pray combined with separate signals like warm or intent.
-
15:56
Segmentation step everyone skips Building buyer segments with the same problems and solutions, not just targeting by title or industry, unlocks personalization at scale.
-
20:56
Intent vendors claim 20%, reality is 2-5% The gap between vendor ROI claims and actual website visitor identification rates shows how unreliable third-party intent data truly is.
-
31:37
LinkedIn message sourced millions in business A templated trigger-based message to new Salesforce sales reps drove hundreds of millions in revenue for Reynolds early in his career.
-
43:40
Only 3% of AI SDR teams saw revenue Fully autonomous AI outbound agents show overwhelming failure rates; the one success case required three hours daily of human oversight.
-
51:09
Spray and pray burns reputation long-term Blasting low-ICP accounts fills your pipeline with poor-fit customers who become detractors and harm brand perception in market.
The lines worth sharing
Think the problem with spray and pray is that you can make money doing this. If you send enough emails and spin up enough domains, somebody is going to reply.
Eddie Reynolds · 0:00
Everything that you can possibly find out there points to do anything else but spray and pray. You're scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Eddie Reynolds · 0:26
This is where I will say trust your own data more than any external data. And we have done this internally here over the last ten years.
Eddie Reynolds · 30:33
The overwhelming majority of companies trying autonomous AI saw no real revenue from it. Only 3% reported any type of revenue generated at all.
Eddie Reynolds · 43:40
Common questions from this episode
What outbound tactic has the best reply rates?
Targeted outbound with tight ICP, real research, and personalization doubles reply rates compared to generic sending. Multiple independent sources confirm this as the best-performing tactic across the six strategies analyzed.
Does autonomous AI SDR outbound actually work?
No. Only 3% of companies running fully autonomous AI SDRs saw any revenue. The one documented success case required three hours of daily human oversight, so it was not truly autonomous at all.
Is third-party intent data worth buying?
It depends on your specific business and product. Vendors' ROI claims are usually from studies they paid for and lack scientific control groups. Test it against your baseline targeted outbound using dollars-in, dollars-out metrics before committing budget.
What makes trigger-based outbound work better?
Trigger signals like new hires or funding only work if your product is genuinely relevant to the trigger and you personalize the outreach. Blasting a generic message to everyone who raised funding usually fails because it lacks personalization and relevance.
How much of B2B outbound data is unreliable?
Most vendor claims lack scientific rigor. The research found vendor citation chains, folklore with no traceable sources, and studies with fake return addresses. Always trace claims back to original sources and test your own data.
What's the most important first step in outbound?
Nail your ICP and build tight buyer segments with shared problems and solutions. Then personalize through real research. This foundation matters more than any tactic, tool, or signal you layer on top.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds and Rachael Bueckert analyze 100M emails to reveal what's actually working in B2B outbound: targeted outbound doubles reply rates, 97% of AI SDRs fail, and intent data ROI claims are unreliable.
Target keywords
what's working in outbound 2026
targeted outbound reply rates
autonomous AI SDR failure
third party intent data ROI
Eddie Reynolds outbound
Rachael Bueckert Union Square Consulting
B2B outbound tactics
warm signals outbound
trigger based outbound
spray and pray outbound
outbound efficiency pyramid
Read the complete conversation
Auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly cleaned. Expand to read or search inside.
Read the full transcript · 69 KB
EDDIE0:00think the problem with spray and pray is that you can make money doing this.
EDDIE0:05If you send enough emails and spin up enough domains, somebody is going to reply to those emails, and then you can book meetings
EDDIE0:12pipeline and close one revenue. The question is,
EDDIE0:15can you get as much out of that as you can by spending your time, money and resources on something else?
EDDIE0:19And I think everything that you can possibly find out there points to do anything else but this
EDDIE0:26you're doing is you're scraping the bottom of the barrel. So you go through your first 100 top accounts
EDDIE0:30you spray and pray them and nobody responds. You go to the next under the next, under the next hundred. By the time you finally get somebody that responds,
EDDIE0:37they're
EDDIE0:37account number 800.
EDDIE0:39before you know it, your pipeline and your existing customers are filled with people that are not in your ICP.
EDDIE0:45Your ICP tells you who is going to be the easiest to win. The people who are going to pay you on time. These people are going to sing your praises out in the market, and then people that are not in your ICP, by definition, are the opposite of that.
EDDIE0:56not to mention the burn domains and all the money spent on the tech and the data and all this other stuff.
EDDIE1:01then what do you have to show for it? You have a bunch of kind of shitty customers that don't like you very much, and tell everybody in the market that you're not that great,
EDDIE1:07wouldn't it be better as a company
EDDIE1:09to take a targeted approach and get really good customers that will tell everybody that you're the greatest thing since sliced
EDDIE1:21actionable playbooks from the trenches working as go to market strategy and rev ops consultants for our clients here at Union Square. Consulting and candid conversations with revenue leaders in the market that have been there. Now let's get into it.
RACHAEL1:36We get asked what's working in outbound right now? A lot, especially after we make updates to our outbound efficiency pyramid. People read it and they see how outbound should be properly executed, but they still want to know what specific outbound tactics are actually performing these days in the B2B tech industry. So we did some deep research across a huge amount of industry reports covering 100 plus million emails, 9.7 million plus B2B sales transactions, and over 300 companies.
RACHAEL2:06And we traced every step we could find back to its original source to ensure that what we were looking at was real data that we could trust. We looked into six common outbound tactics, so we covered targeted warm, signal based, trigger based, third party, intent based autonomous AI. Stress and sprain. Pray outbound. And one thing that stood out the most to me anyway, was how much of the data on these tactics is so unreliable.
RACHAEL2:35We found vendor to vendor citation chains, folklore with no traceable source, and one widely cited independent audit that listed its return address as 1000 Fiction Ave, San Francisco. So, you know, fiction ave really seriously and just kind of side eyeing lead pipe on that one. But we did find reliable data too. So today we're going to go tactic by tactic and dig into what we actually found, why it works or doesn't work and how to actually execute
RACHAEL3:01And thanks for being with this with me. Because I can only really go over like what I found in the reports and the overarching like. I won't go into the nitty gritty bits of the data, but you can find that in our written report, which we'll have the link to in the show notes. But, Eddie, you're here to actually explain what it all means and how we should execute these things properly.
EDDIE3:21Yeah. Well, and it's interesting because I haven't looked at your questions yet, so I'll be interested to see where this goes. But you're usually asking me questions and having me access a subject matter expert. But you're the one that did all this research. I would like to start, though, by just explaining to the audience why we did this.
EDDIE3:37Because it was my initiative to ask you to do this. And the reason for this is because
EDDIE3:45I was talking to a major, major VC. I don't want to name drop, but somebody everybody knows, somebody who has deep expertise in go to market. I mean, specifically, one of the folks that works in go to market helping their portfolio companies, an investor that is largely invested in B2B and B2C tech and AI, and somebody that personally has a lot of deep experience with outbound.
EDDIE4:08And he asked me like, what's working with outbound right now? I said, we sent him our outbound efficiency pyramid. And he asked me, like, what's working? Specifically asked like, what's working with companies that don't have like a great brand? Like, I don't care what's working for anthropic, what's working for everybody else. And it was a little bit dumbfounded.
EDDIE4:24I'm like, we're a boutique consulting firm. We work with a very small set of clients. It's not like we have 10,000 clients and I can do some, like massive study. And I can tell you like all this data points that are like based in, in real hard science. You're a massive private equity firm, and you guys do have lots of portfolio companies that you could look at.
EDDIE4:43Why are you asking me this? And yeah, he was just trying to understand, like, what do I know? Like what could he learn? Really smart guy. And I think the smartest people in the world are just open minded and want to learn from anyone and everyone they can. But it really took me back. And so my answer to him was, I mean, yeah, like when we look at our clients, it's the basic stuff that's working.
EDDIE5:02It's getting your ICP dialed in, its nailing down your process. It's making sure you're reaching out enough times across enough channels with the right messaging, etc. there's no silver bullets. There's no, you know, magic solution here. And his response to me, and this is all over email that we were communicating this is he's like, yeah, okay. No silver bullets.
EDDIE5:20Like I'm seeing the same thing. And it's just really interesting to have this conversation. And it inspired me to say like, well, hold on a second. Okay. Like, I can tell you what I've seen in my 20 plus year career in sales, I can tell you what's working and not working with our small set of clients, but let's go dig deep and let's go into these industry studies instead of doing a survey.
EDDIE5:40And all respect for the folks that put surveys out there. One of them inspired this as well. But like if I go and ask a bunch of people on LinkedIn, like, what are you guys doing with outbound? What's working? Not working? It's their definition of what's working, right. And that like our study also like succumbs to that issue as well.
EDDIE5:58But people might say it's working because they're booking a bunch of meetings that never turn into pipeline or close. One business. Like to me, that's not working. And what we see with our clients, especially those that come to us and people don't come to us because they have a perfect go to market, obviously, is that they're just all these basic things that are broken.
EDDIE6:15And I imagine, like, well, if these people answer to survey, what are we doing and what's working and what's not working, I would not value the responses to that tremendously. What I would value is somebody saying, we ran this experiment, we measured Kak, payback and LTV to catch dollars in, dollars out. And this is what worked best. And this is what didn't work best.
EDDIE6:37And here's like the measurable result. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of that data out there. So we got to do the best we can with what we've got. But I was really excited to see the results of this study that you did. And you put a ton of time into this. Rachel and I put some time into it as well.
EDDIE6:52When I make sure we weren't putting BS out in the world, it's like, sure, we could just ask claw to do this research, spin it up, and just spit out a report. But like, you put in some really serious work to make sure that this was legit. And I appreciate that. And it was exciting to see this. It was also validating to see that like, yep, we're back to get the basic things right, get the fundamental things right.
EDDIE7:11This is what matters most. And there's some other things that can help,
EDDIE7:14they're not the end all be all magic bullet. And yeah, let's get into it I'm excited to dive into this.
RACHAEL7:21Yeah. And you know, like I know that I have my limits and all the reports and stuff that I can read through and aggregate. So
RACHAEL7:28there might be something out there that I missed and I, I feel like I tried very, very hard not to like, miss anything big and obvious. But, you know, the biggest thing that we found out is that, like I said before, a lot of this data is not perfect.
RACHAEL7:44A lot of it is unreliable, but there are signals that we can take from it and use in our outbound motions that and potentially see better results than if we weren't using it at all.
EDDIE7:57100%. I mean, we have to work with the data that we've got, and this goes back into outbound as well, even like the data points that we're going to talk about in outbound itself. Are not perfect data, right? Even within each of these flavors of outbound that you mentioned, and I could also get into like how I think that after having done this study, I think we were maybe looking at this through the wrong lens.
EDDIE8:18I would reclassify these things, but I was really following what other people had put out in the world. So fine, like I wanted to validate for that. But when we dig into intent, warm, signal based, etc., like, what does that stuff mean? Each of those signals is dirty, unreliable data that varies from company to company. And that's part of the reason why it's really hard to to see like really reliable trend lines.
EDDIE8:43What might work for one company will not work for another. And at the end of this, to skip ahead,
EDDIE8:48ultimately the answer is we're going to tell people, measure your own data and figure out what works for you.
RACHAEL8:53All right. So let's get into it. So the first one we're talking about is targeted outbound. So this is a rep working a small list of 40 to 60 roughly named accounts with tight criteria and real research before the first touch. So it's not a mass blast to a bunch of untargeted camps. This was the best performing tactic in the entire report, as you can imagine.
RACHAEL9:12And another important thing to say is that all these tactics are not mutually exclusive. You can have multiple. You can do multiple of them at the same time. So you can have targeted third party intents, outbound motion running. So for targeted outbound multiple independent sources all agreed. You know, personalized, tightly targeted sending gets roughly double the reply rate of generic untargeted sending.
RACHAEL9:36And we were seeing that the best AI system teams. So the ones using AI to research and personalize rather than as an autonomous SDR, we're seeing up to three times the revenue per rep.
RACHAEL9:49So, Eddie, what needs to be in place data wise and process wise before we can operationalize targeted outbound like this.
EDDIE9:56So I want to answer your question, but I want to just kind of plant the seed for the audience for for something else here as well. Before I answer this,
EDDIE10:02when we did this and we published this and we put all this out in the world as soon as I looked at it afterwards, revisionist history here, what I realized is what we're really talking about is three ways to do outbound and three different sets of signals.
EDDIE10:15It's not six different flavors of outbound. What we have is are you going to do like a targeted approach or spray and pray all? Are you going to use an AC to like fit somewhere in the middle? Those are basically like your three options is go and research each and every account, tailor every single message, go hyper personal, put a lot of time in it.
EDDIE10:37And that's why it doesn't have to be 40 to 60 accounts. But that's the example used because you can't do that with very many accounts.
EDDIE10:44Spray and pray is let's put a template together and just blast it out to the world. And oftentimes, and I think we'll probably do a podcast with Jerry on our team because he lived and breathed this for ten years in his past company where they built a massive machine.
EDDIE10:55Doing this, you have to spin up new domains because people are reporting you to spam, so you burn through them. To build all this automation, you have to spend tons of money on data, and then you get very little to show for it. Right? And somehow people still think this works. And I'm excited for Jerry to come to the podcast and talk about how he did this for years and how it didn't work.
EDDIE11:17In his view. Yes, they booked revenue, but he didn't feel like it was worth it. And he's going to go into why. But yet we still see people doing this. And stars make it kind of easy to do this as well at scale. And so those are kind of your three options. Right. And then separately we have signals.
EDDIE11:30And so we didn't identify this but targeted as implying that you're just basically using good ICP and buyer persona signals firm graphic techno graphic signals. Right. That's it. Then we get into the ACR and that could use the same signals. Or we could go spray and pray and we could use the same signals, but just a much, much larger list.
EDDIE11:57And like lower requirements of what meets ICP, buyer personas, etc.. Right? Then we could layer into any of those, any of the other signals. We could do third party intent with any of those three motions. We could do warm signal based with any of those three motions. However, warm signal based has limits like there's only so many people that are going to visit your website or that you have past relationships with, so you're limited in that regard, probably limited with third party intent as well.
EDDIE12:25But you could apply any of these signals to any of these motions. Now let me get back to answering your question. Can you repeat that question just so that I can remember exactly what it was?
RACHAEL12:34Yeah. For sure. So what needs to be in place data wise and process wise before we can operationalize targeted outbound.
EDDIE12:41you know, there's a spectrum here right. Targeted outbound could be as simple as let's go into zoom info. Let's grab every company in the industry that we want to target. Let's sort by revenue. And let's grab the top 40 to 60 accounts, for example. It doesn't have to be this exact number based on revenue. And give that to rep number one and then the next to rep number two, etc..
EDDIE13:00Right. That would be a pretty like bare bones 101 version of this. And then you say, okay, go to the website, go to their LinkedIn profiles, research them, and then draft a personal email. I personally if I was doing this and when I say if I was doing this, this is basically what we do. It's a little it's a lot more sophisticated than that.
EDDIE13:19But essentially this is what we do. Like, I wouldn't even use tools like outreach for this. If you want to get hyper hyper personalized tools like outreach, sales loft, etc., they lock you into this rigid sequence. And so when you're staring at step number three and it says send an email, you have to send an email. Ultra personalized might be like, oh, you know what?
EDDIE13:38Like we have a mutual connection. I'll ask that mutual connection for an introduction. Oh, they posted on LinkedIn. Oh, they're going to this conference. I'm going to this conference next week to let me like, reach out via the slack channel that we're both in and ask them if they'd like to meet up at the conference. Right. Kind of going off like a down a tangent here.
EDDIE13:56But for me, like the penultimate hyper hyper personalized means that literally you just essentially have a desk and a phone or a desk and a phone and email and you write the email from scratch. And this is what I've done for most of my career. And even in 2026, this is what works best. We are still booking meetings, doing exactly this this week as we record this podcast and booking a lot more meetings than most teams are able to book per activity or per rep.
EDDIE14:23But if you want to take this to the next level, you can get increasingly sophisticated. So the first thing that you want to do is have the best possible targets. We've talked before about how most companies do not have their ICP dialed in. Your ICP is not your total addressable market. It's not 15 different industries from 1 million to 1 billion in revenue in North America and Europe.
EDDIE14:44That is your Tam or total addressable market. Your ideal customer profile is somewhere between your Sam and your some, which is essentially the best people that you can actually target and actually potentially obtain. So going back to the 40 to 60 number, let's say we have ten sales reps or 100 sales reps for easy math. What is 400 to 600 or 4000 to 6000 accounts that we actually want to target?
EDDIE15:11What criteria can we use to narrow that list down and say, okay, sure. Like more revenue is important, but are our best customers dictated by how much revenue? If so, great use that number. But maybe there is other criteria that is far more nuanced and difficult to to identify. And so however far you have to go with that, building that target list for me is the absolute best thing you can possibly do.
EDDIE15:36Like along with doing proper research and personalization to generate meetings, meetings via outbound. So that's it. Like dial your ICP in and then build out your sequence. So like we need to reach out to multiple people in each account multiple times through multiple channels with good messaging, and then sit down and like create really good messaging for that particular buyer.
EDDIE15:56The thing we miss is segmentation. So the best way to get like, the most relevant messaging for somebody is to say, let's build a segment that just has one type of buyer. Now that could be like a particular title in a particular industry. But what's most important is this buyer has the same set of problems and the same set of potential solutions as every other buyer in their segment.
EDDIE16:17So me as a small business owner, specifically professional services, I get all these emails that are like, hey, you're in Reb ops. I'm like, you're selling the accounting solution. Doesn't matter that I'm in rev up. So what matters is that I run a small business and I get these other emails that say, like, here's what we did for Pepsi.
EDDIE16:32I'm like, I don't care what you did for the CTO at Pepsi. This is in no way relevant to me. Like, in no way could anything that you do for the CTO of Pepsi be interesting to me as a small business owner of a professional services company. So if we can take and segment all of our our buyers into different segments where the messaging will resonate, or we can say, you might have this problem and here's how we help solve this problem for someone like you, or here's how we could solve this problem for you.
EDDIE17:02That's going to resonate the best. And it's also going to make it so much easier for human reps or even AI, to go and do the research, because you're able to provide clear instructions for. Here are the things to look for. Here are the problem statements, the solution statements, etc. that we want to share here, the case studies, etc. that are going to make that messaging really resonate with people on the other end.
EDDIE17:21So those are the core building blocks to doing really any outbound but especially targeted outbound, which is the key here that works best.
RACHAEL17:30Awesome. Okay. We're going to motor right on to the next flavor of outbound just to make sure we get it all done in time for the podcast.
RACHAEL17:38All right. Tactic two.
EDDIE17:40For the podcast. You can leave that in. It's it's all right but let's keep going. What's the what's the next piece? We don't have to be perfect, Rachel, as I almost get your name wrong.
RACHAEL17:50What were you going to say?
EDDIE17:53Oh my God, you know I miss you. I don't mix you up with Sarah.
RACHAEL17:55I was going to say.
EDDIE17:56Yeah, I don't know.
RACHAEL17:57Like, anyway.
EDDIE17:59All right, let's keep cranking.
RACHAEL18:00So tactics you warm signals. So warm signals there. There are two types of or warm signal base. We saw that there were two types. So there's the relationship based which means there's a past customer past champion who you had a relationship with before. And now they've changed jobs and they're in a different company. So you have kind of an in there.
RACHAEL18:20And then there's behavioral warm signals. So somebody who has visited your website and you can see that they know about you and that they are engaged with your content, but they've never reached out to you yet. So on the relationship signals side, the direction is clearly positive. You know, former champions lead to meaningfully better win rates. I think we could just assume that that would work better than if it was completely cold.
RACHAEL18:45But a lot of the data that we saw for this was specifically from vendors who are selling that type of data signal, and we had kind of conflicting results on how good the ROI was. So one vendor cited that they had ROI that was seven times higher than the other vendor. Just just saying that, like, this signal performs this much better than cold.
RACHAEL19:11So it's hard to see exactly what the multiplier is on how well it should work for you, but chances are it will work better than than not. On the behavioral signal side.
EDDIE19:23If I could interject, Rachel, I think what you're saying is, is like it's very obvious that selling to somebody that you have a relationship with is going to work better than all other things. Being equal, selling to somebody you don't have a relationship with. This is like sales 101, right? I want to hire a salesperson that has a big role, Dax, and has a bunch of contacts in the industry.
EDDIE19:39Right. Like we all know this. What you're also saying, though, is that the vendors that sell this type of these types of tools and data, like here are all the past champions in your deals that have now moved to different companies. For example, have these studies that it's hard to really trust the data. So we're kind of trying to balance with like, yes, it's kind of obvious that this is going to be valuable, but there's not this concrete bulletproof study that we could truly trust, but it's probably enough to go with it and say like, yeah, if it was my money, which is, by the way, this is something we do here at USC, I
EDDIE20:14would spend my money pursuing this. We absolutely call people that are now at different companies that worked with us in the past, obviously, and it works. Anything more on the on the relationship based?
RACHAEL20:30I don't think else on the relationship is just behavioral signals.
EDDIE20:33So I think what's so interesting is we didn't create these categories like we copy these categories from other people that have put stuff on this topic out in the out in the world. And it's so interesting to me that we're like blending Rolodex with identified website visitors. It just seems so arbitrary to me. Right. So this next category is people that just happen to go to the website, and the fraction of those people that we can identify that our inner ICP.
EDDIE20:55Your research showed what.
RACHAEL20:56the research didn't show a real ROI on how much better this converts. The numbers that we mostly found was how accurate can you actually like? How accurately can you actually identify who's on your site in the first place?
RACHAEL21:10the real bottleneck is yeah, trying to see like can you actually identify who's coming to your site?
RACHAEL21:16We had two different vendor studies saying that their tools can identify 15, 20% of website visitors at the person level. And then our B2B, which is a really popular one. It was cited at four different match rates depending on who is reporting it. So one said they identify 8% of people, one said 20%, another one was 30, another one was 40 to 45%.
RACHAEL21:38So a huge range depending on who's reporting like what these match rates are. So it's hard to say, like how accurate can we even get this? But the general consensus is
RACHAEL21:48it does perform better than cold. Like if you're reaching out to somebody who is already on their website, they already know a little bit about you. The logic would dictate you're probably better off getting your response out of them than completely cooled outbound.
EDDIE22:01And what have we seen in our own business? We've tried at least two tools right, to identify visitors to our website.
RACHAEL22:06don't think we've actually ran any outbound campaigns with our visitor data.
EDDIE22:12No, we haven't, but just in terms of like simply identifying those visitors, how accurate have you seen that to be?
RACHAEL22:19Oh, very, very low rates of who we could actually see like gosh, I'd say probably like 2 to 5%.
EDDIE22:28I think that that's why we haven't done this. That just coupled with like we have limited capacity and we have really, really tightly defined target prospects. But you know, the people that we want to talk to are in large established companies. Now, that doesn't mean that they're all working in an office. Far from it. But it's not like our target audience are a bunch of solo producers that should be impossible to track down.
EDDIE22:54Plenty of people that are visiting our website work in large companies, or at least midsize companies, many who have company laptops and all kinds of software that's tracking what they're doing. And you would think we would be able to identify more of these visitors. But what you're telling me, Rachel, is you've installed at least two tools on our website and have never come to me and said, hey, Eddie, I think I can identify a bunch of really, really strong prospects here and we should spin up a program to go out to them.
RACHAEL23:18Yeah.
EDDIE23:19That's a short answer.
EDDIE23:21So and it's interesting, I mean, part of that is like if we had a giant sales team, we probably like invest more heavily in that. But it's been a mixed mixed bag for us, and it would be really easy to just take this and move this into the MKL. Right? So we're talking about people that have come to the website that haven't even filled out a form, and we all know that people that do that and then fill out a form because they want to download some white paper or whatever, like lead magnet we've created become these scored M-class.
EDDIE23:49They then need to do multiple different actions in order to reach a score. Then we send it to the sales team, and the sales team says, I want to call these people. None of them respond. They don't have any buying intent. This is a worthless list, right? And this is not something that people just started talking about six months ago.
EDDIE24:04This has been a problem for like ten years. So I think that this is a signal that we could potentially use if filtered through the other signals. So if somebody is clearly in the ICP and buyer personas and an ICP super tight and they are in an account that's really, really valuable and they go to the website and we can identify them, then of course we should reach out to them.
EDDIE24:28But just like MKL, if we set the bar too low and we start flooding our sales team with anyone and everybody that's visiting our website, that hit the web page one time and is like on the edge of our ICP, this is most likely not going to pay off. Just like flooding sales reps with every single quote unquote MKL that fills out any form on our website hasn't worked for anyone either.
EDDIE24:51Over thousands of companies for multiple years. At least that's my $0.02 on my hypothesis. But what do I know? I think I didn't create the study.
RACHAEL24:59Yeah,
RACHAEL25:00Real quick, if you're listening to this and you're wanting another set of eyes on your outbound pipeline to see what is working, what's not, and what you could be doing better, we actually have a free offer for exactly this, called the Outbound Pipeline section. You can check that out. Union Square Consulting pipeline and the link will be in the show notes.
RACHAEL25:19I think a lot of for a lot of big buying committees or for, you know, that are looking for really large tools with high ISVs,
RACHAEL25:29or let's say it's the crow that needs to decide on something, it's usually not going to be them going to the website and actually looking at the pricing page and stuff. Right. It's usually they have an assistant or they have somebody else under them that they say, hey, go research, you know, these five different companies and let me know who you think I should get on a demo with.
RACHAEL25:47So the person that you're seeing looking at your pricing page, you know, that might not actually be a decision maker or you might disregard them because they're not, let's say, a crow, even though they might actually have a say in the decision, or at least to say.
EDDIE26:01Well, I.
RACHAEL26:01Think it's a demo.
EDDIE26:03I think that comes down to like really clearly mapping out your buyer personas and not just the decision makers, but who influences a buying decision, right? So like if a rev manager is going to the website for a company to sell some go to market tool, that's probably somebody that you want to engage with, even if the crow is your decision maker, if it's an intern at General Electric and subsidy that isn't part of your ICP in France and you sell to us, then maybe not.
EDDIE26:36I think that that's case dependent on the organization. Right. But this just kind of goes into like basic like inbound and outbound 101. I mean, we're going to get into the tent next. And as we go down the list, we're just starting to get weaker and weaker signals. But what I would say is this always comes down to execution.
EDDIE26:52If you really tighten in like what your ICP is and like if you implement an account scoring methodology and you score accounts in a way that only accounts or leads are going to reps that have a decent high, decently high conversion rate, certainly higher than doing targeted outbound, then you can have a program that works. And this for me is the bar, right?
EDDIE27:16If I can take a targeted list of 40 to 60 accounts that are dead center smack in the middle of our ICP, that don't know us from Adam, and give that to a rep, and the rep goes and makes 1000 calls and books X dollars of revenue. And then I give that same rep or team of reps a different list.
EDDIE27:34That's from whatever. And I'm like, hey, here's this hot leads list of identified website visitors or intent or inbound leads or what have you, and they make all those calls and generate less revenue than the bar is not high enough, right? We could just as easily say on inbound leads, like we will only send inbound leads to reps if it's a in a fortune 500 company that is filled out a form and requested a meeting, I mean, that would be stupid.
EDDIE28:01That's like a hand raiser if there ever was one, but we could set the bar there, right, and say those are the only leads that go to reps. And then we would have an extremely high conversion rate. Right. But the bar we get to adjust to decide, like where do we want to be. And oftentimes organizations lower the bar because there's one person that's tasked with generating these leads or prospects or data and sending it to the sales team.
EDDIE28:25And it's a separate group of people that is responsible for actually turning that into revenue. And they're fighting with each other because they can't align the way that bar is.
RACHAEL28:33So what do you think the final word is on warm signals. Any.
EDDIE28:38So again like let's just talk specifically about somebody that visited the website. I think if all the other things are dialed in there, like smack in the middle of the ICP, right? Buyer persona,
EDDIE28:49we've got a tight list and I've got two accounts of equal quality that I could call. Do I want to call somebody that visited the website?
EDDIE28:56Yes, absolutely. But, you know, if my ICP is companies with 20 million to 100 million in revenue and they're sitting at $2 million. No, I probably don't.
RACHAEL29:09All right, so the next tactic on our list is trigger based outbound. I know you mentioned in Ted before, but we're actually going to talk about trigger base first. So trigger based is when you're reaching out when something changes at the company. So this is like a funding round new hire announcement or a hiring surge cybersecurity attack. Let's say if you're like a cyber if you have a cybersecurity product, even though the prospect has zero prior connection to you and they've never reached out to you before.
RACHAEL29:37So the logic here is probably the most intuitive of everything we've looked at so far. You know, a company that just raised money, for example, has a budget and a mandate to spend it. Right? So we saw claims ranging from two x to four x higher conversion rates using the tactic we claims ranging from 3 to 5 x higher reply rates 30% shorter sales cycles.
RACHAEL30:01But again the data for this was some of the weakest that we found anywhere in the report. Pretty much like every single number traced back to either a vendors own claim. So a vendor that's selling this kind of data, or it was just a circular citation chain of vendors, citing other vendors, citing other vendors that just the source, the true source falls apart the deeper you look into it.
RACHAEL30:23It's like it just didn't really come from anywhere.
RACHAEL30:25So, Eddy, even with basically no reliable data behind it, does the logical loan make this something worth doing and investing in?
EDDIE30:33Well, this is where I will say trust your own data more than any external data. And we have done this internally here over the last ten years. I also did this at Salesforce, and I have seen it work again and again and again. But it depends so much on the signal, the product you're selling, the outreach, etc..
EDDIE30:52So again, coupling this with like personalized outreach versus spray and pray. Let's use funding as an example. Every single company that raises funding their executives get like a thousand emails a week later. Right? How easy is it for me to go and pull a report of every single company that got any level of funding and then just send out a template and it's like, hey, congrats on your funding.
EDDIE31:16Here's my product. Would you like to buy it? And people do that, and it doesn't work for us though. For example, I'll go back many years to when we were partnered with Salesforce. We're still technically a partner, but we don't really work with them anymore. And one of the signals that was incredibly valuable to me was a new sales rep, why?
EDDIE31:37I was a sales rep at Salesforce, and on the first day they were like, you need to go find your partners that you're going to work with, are going to help implement Salesforce and consult your customers on how to get value out of Salesforce. So on day one, like somebody reaches out to me and they're like, do you want to go to lunch?
EDDIE31:51And I'm like, yes, absolutely. Like they told me, I have to like, meet these people and build these relationships. Fast forward six months. I've met ten, 15, 20 of these people, 2 or 3 of them. I actually trust a few of them I don't like. A few of them have fallen out and I'm overwhelmed. I'm trying to hit quota and I'm like, I've got my guys like, I'm good.
EDDIE32:07I don't need anything more. So when I left Salesforce, I reached out to all the people that I knew and I was like, hey, this is what I'm doing now. I want to tell you about my company. And they just gave me the highs in there. Like, I'm good. I've got my partners. I like Eddie, nice guy. Congrats on your new venture.
EDDIE32:23But like, I'm not going to go mix things up. I've been working with this company for the last two years. I trust them, we've got a rhythm. We worked really well together. I'm not going to replace them with you. I'm good. I don't need another like consultant. So I reached out to all the newbies. Hey, congrats on your new role at Salesforce.
EDDIE32:40I worked there for a while. It was a wild ride. I was training going like this is literally like a templated message that I would send people on LinkedIn. And I sent like thousands of these messages, and I set up hundreds and hundreds of meetings, and we sourced literally millions of dollars of business from these exact people. So this was an incredibly valuable signal.
EDDIE32:57Today, we work more with private equity and venture capital firms, and specifically most of the time, not all the time, but like it's probably like 5050, but like a good 50% of the time people are reaching out to us. Crowe specifically, are reaching out to us when they're new in the role. So much so that we've created these offers like the first 90, like, here's how we can help tackle, help you tackle your first 90 days in the role as a crow.
EDDIE33:21We've seen this work when I was at Salesforce is the same thing. Like a new VP of sales comes in and they want to shake things up for their sales team. They absolutely want to like, get different reports and different metrics and implement different processes and Salesforce and that give me an opportunity to sell products. So yes, I have seen this work firsthand over the last 15 years pretty much continuously, but at the same time like to just go blast people because they've got funding and you're selling some like accounting solution.
EDDIE33:48I don't know, like what's the funding for? I mean, if they've raised their first round of funding and all of a sudden they need to hire like 20 new people and you have a solution to help them hire 20 people, then that might be really, really relevant. But I think that that signal is overused by a lot of folks that don't necessarily have something relevant to sell.
EDDIE34:07They basically spray and pray their messaging out and then it doesn't work. So of course it's not going to work. So I think it depends on the signal and how you use it.
RACHAEL34:14Yeah, I think a lot of people who want to do this kind of outbound, they look online like what's the best practice, what are the best signals to use. And then they just kind of take a list and go and do that. But like you said, not one playbook. Playbook is not going to work for every single company.
RACHAEL34:31Like you need to find out what your secret sauce is. You need to find out what your specials unique signal is that is going to surface the most probable ideal customers for you. And so, Eddie, how does a company figure out what their best signal would be to go after?
EDDIE34:49I mean, you just have to test and iterate like you just make me think of, like there are an infinite number of random examples of this. Like, I remember talking to somebody in real estate and they're like, yeah, we pay like people in India to go to these like government websites and scrape like, like city construction. I don't know anything about real estate, so forgive me.
EDDIE35:10But like, we, they scrape like, like building permits and then we reach out to them with this messaging and it like, works. And we just like, book clients, like customers hand over fist. There are an infinite number of examples of these triggers. Right. And so I think first and foremost, you just have to like get to know your customer.
EDDIE35:26Like, let's look at our customers and the ones that we want. When, how and why did we win them. Right. So like I didn't come up with this idea that we should start working with crows in their first day on the job. In fact, if you were to ask me, I would have thought that would be a bad idea.
EDDIE35:41But we just kept getting leads from crows that are like emailing us from their Gmail, and they're like, I start a new job on Monday, I need your help. And they're like, oh, I guess that makes sense. Like, I wouldn't have thought they would need our like one or help that early, but they like or stepping into a new role and like, what's the first thing that a crow needs to do in a new role?
EDDIE35:58For one, they need to get like all their, you know, systems and processes and metrics and reporting in order. And a lot of times they're walking into this dumpster fire and they're like, I haven't even started a job yet. And I already know that this is a problem. I can't, like spend my first three months like just dealing with this.
EDDIE36:14Like, I got to fix this ASAP. And that's unique to our business. I am sure there are other problems that crows specifically don't want to tackle until after like month three, months six, etc. and I think that's unique to every product and every business and every customer that you're selling to. So I would start by looking at like, what are your past wins?
EDDIE36:32What did that look like? Talk to your customers. Talk to your sales reps and formal hypothesis. Maybe if we find this signal it might work and then go test that hypothesis. Build a list, go reach out to do all the right things, do a targeted approach, and then measure whether or not that works or not.
RACHAEL36:49Awesome. So on to the next tactic. We're talking about third party intent data. So this is you're essentially buying a signal from a platform that says this account is out there researching your category. So they're looking for your competitors or you on G2, something like that. There's some real evidence out there that this correlates with better outcomes. But every headline ROI number that you'll see advertised is typically going to come from a study that the vendor themselves paid for about their own product.
RACHAEL37:18And these are those Forrester studies. So we saw data like 21.3% better close rates, 55% of companies reporting positive returns with intent data, a lot of case studies from companies like $0.06 claiming 300 to 5 500% ROI. But nobody, including the vendors, can actually tell you that it'll outperform the targeted outbound that you're already doing. So this is something that you need to try yourself and calculate for yourself.
RACHAEL37:50Like, is this working? Are we actually not just booking meetings, but are we getting ROI from this before? I'd suggest, you know, paying one of these vendors for that data.
EDDIE38:00Yeah. And for me, like if you think about the order of operations, let's start with like a hand razor MKL smack in the middle of your ICP and buyer is like your CXO of a company. You know that's exactly right for you. Goes to your website, pokes around, fills out a form and says, I would like to see a demo of your software.
EDDIE38:20Right? Okay. That's obviously really valuable. Next we have that person. They're not ready to do that. They download a white paper. So now they've gone to the website and they've like self-identified and we're going to reach out to them. And we already know that this can oftentimes have like very limited returns depending on where we set the bar okay.
EDDIE38:36Now we go like a step below that and we say okay, they haven't even filled out a foreign. They just went to our website and we use the tool to identify that website visitor. And now we're going to reach out. I'm like, okay, this is where I see increasingly diminishing returns. Now we go to an intent signal. It's like they didn't even go to our website.
EDDIE38:51Or if they did, we don't know it. They went to G2 or whatever, and they're searching around for things that are relevant for our product. They might have a problem. How valuable is that? Now again, I think like no one can say this unless they look at your actual data. And I think it will be very dependent upon what you're selling.
EDDIE39:11But it seems pretty downstream to me from a lot of other options. And the common criticism that I hear with intent is, hey, like you're basically trying to like capture demand. You're not creating it. You've got somebody that's already decided they want to buy something. They're not going to your website, they've never heard of you. They're going elsewhere to like search around.
EDDIE39:31And then they probably already have a vendor or two in mind that has already built some demand with them. They're on their website. They maybe fill out a form, they may be set out, set up a demo, there may be on call number 2 or 3, and now you see the signal and you reach out cold and you try to insert yourself into that deal.
EDDIE39:49Now you can go a couple of ways with this. You can do that targeted approach where you personalize the email and put your heart and soul into trying to get a meeting with them. Or you can just blast them with some template that's also going to like dictate how well this works for you. Right? But to me, this is the last signal that I would personally invest my money in.
EDDIE40:09But it depends on what I'm selling. I am sure there are companies out there where an intent signal is super valuable for them, but I don't personally know what that would be.
RACHAEL40:18As interesting to you because like you can see these case studies on $0.06. And I believe that those cases, those companies that run those case studies are telling the truth. I don't think they're lying about seeing that ROI, but those are just very specific cherry picked companies that this outbound tactic is going to work very well for them.
RACHAEL40:36So
RACHAEL40:37how would you suggest a company tries testing whether this is actually going to work for their specific business?
EDDIE40:44Well, so first, before I answer that, I would just say like maybe I'm interpreting your research the wrong way, but what I thought that I saw was that they're essentially not only cherry picking, like what, you know, companies are looking at, but probably cherry picking the data and correlating it. And there's a difference between correlation and causation. Right.
EDDIE41:01So just because these companies closed a bunch of deals and there were intense signals, there is not the same thing as saying, hey, this company ran an outbound program specifically with these intent signals and a separate outbound program without it, and the program with the intent signals produced a much higher ROI. Those are two very, very different ways to look at this.
RACHAEL41:20Yeah, and they pretty much never do like testing scientifically like that, where they have one control group and then their test group is pretty much always just like,
RACHAEL41:29a bunch. This, this company used our product and they saw
RACHAEL41:33600% higher ROI, but like higher than what is never really test against. It's like higher than what they were doing before.
RACHAEL41:41And you know and it's not just it's not very scientific.
EDDIE41:43Yeah. And also like what's 600% ROI? Are they just saying like they generated 600% of the revenue that they spent on the tool. Like I don't know where they got that number from. But it's interesting. So like to answer your question, here's how I would test it.
EDDIE41:57I would take like the outbound program that we've been doing and hopefully we've already been doing this.
EDDIE42:01And we look at payback and if we can LTE to catch ideally. And if we can't do that then we look at other signals like how many activities does it take for us to generate a meeting pipeline revenue. But activities are only so valuable because it depends on what you spend on those activities. Right. But how many activities does it take us to generate a dollar of revenue?
EDDIE42:24And then if we take that and then go and test some intent signals, is that better or worse? And then we have to pay for those intent signals. So we have to include that cost as well. That's why I'm a really big proponent of using dollars and dollars out, because at the end of the day, if I can spend $1 on marketing and generate $2 of revenue, assuming I have decent margins, that's something most companies will do, want to do, and should do all day long.
EDDIE42:47But if we're not looking at that data and we're just looking at like, well, we spent this money on this intent tool and we booked this many meetings, it's like, who cares?
RACHAEL42:55All right, so on to tactic number five autonomous AI stars. And we talked about this a little bit earlier on.
RACHAEL43:02what we're talking about here in the data that we saw for this is for fully autonomous AI. So the agent is running outbound end to end with no human involved at all. It's a very very hyped tactic.
RACHAEL43:13But the data points are leading to very high failure rate. So one large scale survey found that the overwhelming majority of companies trying to do this tactic saw no real revenue from it. We did find one company that documented some real success running it for months, but the catch was is that it took about three hours a day of hands on human oversight.
RACHAEL43:34So it wasn't really autonomous in practice at all.
EDDIE43:37You're talking about Sastre, right?
RACHAEL43:38I think that was Sastre. Yeah.
EDDIE43:40Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're talking about Jason Lemkin, who's been extremely public and sharing this. And what I remember reading was, is that one source we had was Sastre talking about their own experience with an SD, and two them running a survey and talking about the experience that other companies had had. And only 3% of those companies had reported any type of revenue generated at all.
EDDIE44:01It's not even ROI. It's just did we generate any revenue? Yeah, and it's not hard to see why. Because an AI, SDR for me, like can span the spectrum from spray and prey to targeted. So for example, we got a trial of artisan and I log into it and there is absolutely nothing to prevent you from going and building the most tailored, perfect prospect list that you've ever built in your whole life and uploading it into artisan.
EDDIE44:28They also have their own tool that you can identify accounts and contacts with. I haven't vetted whether or not that's better than zoom info or some other tool, and I probably never will because it's dependent on your company and your product. And so that's for you to determine. But you could upload that list and then you could literally go into artisan and you could just handwrite every email, just like it's like Gmail, like you don't have to use any AI whatsoever in their tool right now.
EDDIE44:52On the flip side, you can also just load up some crap list of 10,000 contacts and spin up a bunch of IP addresses and just start spraying and praying. And at the end of the day, like, cool, AI can go and do some research and tailor it. But I get these emails and it's like, hey, Eddie, it's really interesting that you went fishing last summer.
EDDIE45:12I never post about I don't fish and I wouldn't post about it if I did, but this is just like a it's usually something else. I mean, it's like completely unrelated to what they sell. And so like, would you like to buy an accounting solution? Like what? Congrats to your AI. Went to like my content on LinkedIn and found out that I was fishing last summer.
EDDIE45:31Okay, first of all, it's clear that this is AI. Secondly, I don't know what that has to do with accounting software, so no, no thank you. Yeah, but does that mean that, like, it's impossible for an AI tool to go and do research and like really fit in. So like we for example, we spend a lot of time working with operating partners, a private equity ministry, capital firms, specifically people in gun market.
EDDIE45:59That is a really, really narrow segment. There's only so much we can say to those people right now, if one of them goes on LinkedIn and starts posting about phishing.
EDDIE46:10I don't know that I would ever leverage that, especially if I didn't know that person.
EDDIE46:14What I would want to do is I would want to go and find out what they're saying online about go to market.
EDDIE46:18And I would want to relay that to like what we're saying and what we believe. And at the end of the day, like there's a handful of problems that we would try to solve for them.
EDDIE46:26And that's kind of boilerplate. It's like, hey,
EDDIE46:29I imagine that a lot of the companies that you work with have a problem with their outbound engine. We have built this framework and all these things to help. Would you like to hear more about that? And then just at the top insert, here's the research I did. I read your article on what you think is working and not working in help and or why.
EDDIE46:48You know, stars are here to stay in age of AI. And I agree with you and I imagine that you face this problem like this is not rocket science. Like good sales emails need to be relatively short and they need to identify who you are, what the problem you solve is, how you solve it, and then tie in some personalization all at the same time.
EDDIE47:08You don't have a lot of real estate for that, so there is no reason that if you don't like, if you get really, really tight in your segment, there's no reason that you couldn't have AI do a lot to help you with that.
RACHAEL47:20I was talking recorded a podcast for recently with the crew of Dunham, and it won't be out by the time this one is published, but they essentially sell like AI employees. So they're agents, but they're like a quote unquote person with like a personality. So anyways, you train them to do a specific job. And I was asking him like, do you see ever see a future or is it possible right now at all to have like a fully autonomous AI, SDR employee for B2B tech, where the is, you know, is not like small business, you know, five digits, six, sometimes six digit subs.
RACHAEL47:57And he used straight up just like know
RACHAEL47:59as a person who sells that specific type thing
RACHAEL48:02you don't want an AI agent running such high stakes outbound and high stakes deals. You want a human being talking to these people because no one wants to buy a tool or a service that costs $10,000 a month or more from a computer, from from a robot.
RACHAEL48:21Like, no one wants to do that. It's most useful when you have high volume inbound leads coming in, and you just don't have the amount of humans to respond to all of them. And they say that's where, like an AI ser, an AI agent is the most useful, like lower contract value, high, high volume leads coming in inbound.
EDDIE48:39It's interesting. I don't know that I believe that. I think that it's largely true. And we can just debate like where the line is. Right. If you're selling something for like $10 million, like even if you could use an AI, SDR, if you have a like point 1% better chance by handwriting the email, then you should probably handwrite the email.
EDDIE48:57And I say this as somebody that has sales reps that I tell handwrite over email. That being said, there are also a lot of people that we just don't reach out to at all because we can only handwrite so many emails. And I really wonder if you do everything else right. Unfortunately, we do sell something for six figures, so we're not messing around here either.
EDDIE49:16To the Tis point, maybe it's five figures. I don't know where the line is, but it's hard for me to believe that it is impossible
EDDIE49:24to send out these emails. And Jason Lemkin says this. He says like, hey, we replaced our sales team. We're sending out these emails.
EDDIE49:32They're not the best sales emails you've ever seen, but they're better than most of the sales emails that we have seen from reps that we've hired.
EDDIE49:38they're machines that never quit, never, like get have a sick day. And they just keep going. And so I think there's a time and a place for it. But Jason Lemkin has explained in fine detail the exhausting amount of work that they have put in to make this work. They didn't just, like, dump a list, spin it up and hit go.
EDDIE49:58They did all the things that we're talking about here. You can literally like take our, you know, about efficiency pyramid and compare it to what Jason said he did and they matched like basically one for one. He talks about getting your ICP dialed in, getting your data dialed in, like mapping out your process like this can be done.
EDDIE50:18Sastre is doing it. Some people criticize them and they're like, well, you're selling like conference sponsorships. It's not the most complicated thing in the world. Okay, there's a lot of things that are not the most complicated thing in the world. Even though I would argue what we do is not the most complicated thing in the world. But I haven't personally tested this yet.
EDDIE50:36I probably will soon. Because I do think that when I look at our own go to market, there's just a lot of people that we will not have time to reach out to, and there are a lot of people with the exact same like problems. And I don't see why we couldn't leverage AI to, like, get in front of some of those people.
RACHAEL50:54It's tough though, like, I feel like when you have a much smaller Tam
RACHAEL50:58and there's a bigger risk of, you know, repelling or pushing away those people or creating a bad reputation for yourself if they like, really don't like getting AI messages, I don't know.
EDDIE51:09I don't believe that. And I'll tell you why. Because we hired an outsourced SDR agency like many years ago. I was like strongly against it. I heard all these people like, oh, how did this outsource SDR agency? And like, I always hear people that are so excited on day one and day five, they're never excited on day 45 or day 90.
EDDIE51:28Yeah. But I was like, you know what? Like I have been talking smack about these people for years. Why don't I try it out? And this, this, this company came recommended to me by two other companies. So I like hired them and they inevitably just sprayed and prayed like these, like really crappy messages. They were mostly LinkedIn DM's and it was awful and it was embarrassing.
EDDIE51:49And then like two years later, I'm looking at this and it's like not an email that just disappears. It's a LinkedIn DM that just sits there forever. And I was literally messaging people and I'm like, I'm sorry about this messaging. It was a failed attempt at outbound outsourcing. Says, yeah. And people just were like, no worries, whatever. Yeah, I'd be happy to meet like didn't care.
EDDIE52:10And so like, I don't think I was talking to Jerry about this the other day. I don't think that like people are sitting around like with your email on the fucking wall, like, oh my God. Eddie emailed me this crappy spraying praying email six years ago. Yeah, I think the real damage is when you do this at scale, you burn your domain and people mark you as spam and then you can't get your email into their inbox.
EDDIE52:31I think that that's the damage. I don't think anybody's thinking about you. I can't tell you how many times I get an email from somebody like, did you see my last five emails? I'm like, no, I didn't, because first of all, I don't look at these emails. And secondly, like Sarah, like screens, all of them for me.
EDDIE52:43So like, no, I didn't see I literally didn't see your email. I think though that like for us, it's not that you have to choose between the two. We are going to do highly personalized outbound to the very select group of people that we want to like, meet with the most. But there's another tranche of people that we would also like to meet with that we just simply do not have the time to reach out to.
EDDIE53:05And I don't see why we couldn't use some level of like, tools to do that by being really thoughtful about it. But what do I know? I haven't tested this yet. I'll report back when I do.
RACHAEL53:16And I really hope that people who do end up trying it out, you know, publish their findings online somewhere. There's there was so little data for this. It was very, very hard to, like, come to,
RACHAEL53:27a conclusion where I felt like, oh, yeah, for sure this works, or for sure this doesn't work because it's so new.
RACHAEL53:33Just people aren't reporting. There are there are two that they're seeing. So yeah, keep talking talking about it. If you're experimenting about it, talk about it.
EDDIE53:41Cool. And there are people out there I'm going to plug Jason Lemkin. But he put a lot of this stuff out there and it's out there and it's just one company and they're different from every other company, but it's out there something. But anyway, we have people trailing off at the end of the podcast.
RACHAEL53:55Yeah.
EDDIE53:56And I got babies that are about to wake up and start screaming, let's wrap.
RACHAEL54:00We only have one tactic left in that spraying prey. And I feel like we've already talked about that. There isn't any groundbreaking data on this. You know, we know it gets about like half the reply rate of targeted outbound or some usually significantly less. And this is just sending generically at volume. So any any points on.
EDDIE54:17This there's
EDDIE54:18There's just one thing that I would say I think the problem with spray and pray is that you can make money doing this. If you send enough emails and spin up enough domains, somebody is going to reply to those emails, and then you can book meetings and pipeline and close one revenue. The question is, can you get as much out of that as you can by spending your time, money and resources on something else?
EDDIE54:41And I think everything that you can possibly find out there points to do anything else but this Jerry on our team who did this in his company at like not as like sales person like as like Rev ops. They did this for years and they did book revenue, but like at what cost? So I think that that's one problem.
EDDIE55:03I think another problem that people overlook is what you're doing is you're scraping the bottom of the barrel. So you go through your first 100 top accounts and you spray and pray them and nobody responds. You go to the next under the next, under the next hundred. By the time you finally get somebody that responds, they're like account number 800.
EDDIE55:22And then the next one is account number 8000. And before you know it, your pipeline and your existing customers are filled with people that are not in your ICP. So you have lower close rates, lower dollar size deals. People are negotiating for, like worse terms. People are paying you later and I'm not making this up. This is the definition of ICP, right?
EDDIE55:42Your ICP tells you who is going to be the easiest to win. The people who are going to pay you on time. These people are going to sing your praises out in the market, and then people that are not in your ICP, by definition, are the opposite of that. And when you spray and pray, that's what you're going to get your pipeline and your customers are going to be full of that, and you're going to have low close rates and slip deals and high churn, not to mention the burn domains and all the money spent on the tech and the data and all this other stuff.
EDDIE56:09And then what do you have to show for it? You have a bunch of kind of shitty customers that don't like you very much, and tell everybody in the market that you're not that great, and wouldn't it be better as a company to take a targeted approach and get really good customers that will tell everybody that you're the greatest thing since sliced bread?
EDDIE56:23That's my that's my $0.02.
RACHAEL56:25Absolutely. All right. So before we wrap this up, if if anyone here is listening to this and they are or you're wondering if you could get like a second eyes on your own outbound pipeline and trying to figure out like what tactic is actually going to work for your business, we build something for exactly this. It's a free offer.
RACHAEL56:42It's called the pipeline inspection. You can check it out. You can get consulting com slash pipeline inspection and the link will be in the show notes as well.
RACHAEL56:51that's all we have for this topic. Thank you so much,
EDDIE56:53Thank you for putting this together. This was fun as always.
EDDIE56:56Thanks for listening to the episode. If this resonated. Please give us a five star rating and a follow. It helps us reach more people, and you get our latest and greatest content without having to search for it. And if you're looking for hands on help and go to market strategy and or rev ops, please reach out to us.
EDDIE57:11We help our clients with everything from annual planning to improving processes and go to market, implementing systems to support those processes and go to market AI. We're always happy to offer a free consultation to help you identify the best opportunities to improve your go to market engine, with or without our help. You can find us at Union Square consulting.com and the info will be in our show notes.
