Outbound is copycatting marketing

My wife’s grandfather was an excellent sales rep in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Always president’s club. Sold lots of these:

All he would do was focus on making people laugh.

“People are much more likely to buy from you if they enjoy the conversation.”

Fast forward to the AI Era of Sales

If you’re a revenue leader today, you’re surrounded by signals-based outbound, inbound-led outbound, gray-area legalities of scraping data and reverse IP lookups on individuals (not OK in California) for “person-level intent”.

The LinkedIn feed is awash with finding the “ready-to-buy 5% of your market” and perfecting the message to them.

But all of this, marketers have been doing for decades.

Remember Cambridge Analytica?

Before B2B revenue teams decided to get creepy, marketers were getting creepy about consumers, at insane scale. The adtech industry is still there, collecting massive amounts of data. Back when I was working with Disney, HBO and Verizon Wireless, they would hire armies of people to tag video content to determine correlations between audiences watching the content and the elements within the content.

Today, adtech companies are estimated to have collected trillions of gigabytes of data on consumer behavior globally, monitoring 25 billion devices. By the time an American child turns 13, they have collected 72 million data points about them… on average. Back in 2010, they had an entire landscape of adtech companies.

Marketers have been perfecting the art of “customer stalking” long before B2B outbound got the idea to do it.

Now, B2B outbound has borrowed marketing’s obsession with “figuring things out about your buyer without talking to them.”

Has the signals craze paid off?

I remember when I first encountered ABM programs a decade ago, and the sales and marketing leaders of a company told me they would “wait to send the email and phone sequence until marketing had run ads for a couple weeks.”

Foolishness.

1. You have no guarantee your ad audience will effectively cover everyone in the sequence with impressions.
2. You have no guarantee your impressions will be persuasive enough to “raise awareness” in your target accounts.
3. You’re not an IBM dealing with massive audiences. You’re a B2B startup. Reality check.

The same thinking is prevalent now, but with a different shape:

“Let’s gather all the possible signals before we go to talk to these people.”

Foolishness.

Just. Call. Them.

If you called them, you could learn things like:

• Who really owns the tooling budget
• What competitor they’re using, and when the renewal date is
• The name of the new SDR leader that’s not public yet
• Whether they’re internally aware of your solution already.
• Hiring and layoffs in your target org.

We estimate this conversation costs about $20-30 fully burdened (time, tools, data).

Go ask your marketing lead: would they spend that much to have a first party data feed per account that was more accurate than anything the internet could provide?

They would.

They do, but on less effective data sources.

They spend it on third party topical intent from around the internet. They spend it on seeing who’s on the website even though they haven’t opted in. They spend it on ad impressions, 99% of which don’t bring any results, and those that do only occasionally lead to a conversation that can match the intel above.

Partly, I’m jaded. I tried to use AI to qualify accounts for TitanX. Went real deep - job descriptions, growth and hiring signals, confirming the website has a B2B CTA - and still almost half of teams we called into didn’t cold call. Even when their JDs said they hired cold callers, they’re not picking up the phone. (Cultural problem for a separate newsletter).

Ultimately, we get better intel when we talk to the team.

So we’re switching to a phone-first approach to signals: collecting intel by talking to humans.

After all, we already know who picks up.

It works wildly well - Joey lays out the detailed strategy here:

And who knows, maybe we’ll discover that the impression we make on the phone is worth the effort?

People buy from people.

Thanks for reading,

Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)

P.S. Where do you fall on the simplify-versus-tinker thing? Hit reply, I read every response.