Reviving Outbound B2B Sales: Mastering Traditional Strategies in the Digital Age

11:35

I want to tell you an old story that you need to know. For 14 years I've been writing a blog post every day, minus 13 days when I was in the Himalayas and I went to Mount Everest. When I started, I thought there was no possible way I would be able to write and post every day, but it turns out I have done both of those things.

Back in 2010 or so, I predicted that we would lose an entire decade of B2B sales because there were a number of charlatans in the industry that got enough attention. They promised to revolutionize sales using social media. Maybe you remember some of these people or maybe you’ve forgotten their names, but they've all now largely disappeared. There are no longer many social selling people now that the charlatans have been weeded out. This isn’t to say anything negative about social selling. In fact, I have some good friends that are really good at it and offer great advice, like Brynne Tillman, Daniel Disney, or Carson Heady.

A Decade of Social Selling

At the time, people were saying that social selling meant the end of cold calling. Now that we have social media we can go on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and nobody's going to have to pick up the phone anymore. A few of us, including Jeb Blount, Mike Weinberg, Mark Hunter, Chris Beall, and others, believed that B2B would still need inbound and outbound sales.

One day, I noticed that there was a lot of advertising for Inbound, which is a conference run by HubSpot. They are one of my favorite companies, and I actually use their products. After hearing about their Inbound conference, I thought that there should also be its opposite, an Outbound conference. I called Jeb Blount and I said, “I got a really good idea. We're going to start a conference called Outbound.” He said, That's the best thing you've ever said. “It's the best idea you've ever had,” and we decided to do it.

We had about six weeks to put the first Outbound together, and 400 people showed up in Atlanta. All of them were there because they knew that we were telling the truth: You're still going to need cold outreach in sales.

It’s not going to be easy in the future. You're going to need inbound, referrals, and every other option you can find to start a conversation with somebody who may need your help.

The social selling charlatans disappeared pretty quickly because it became clear that social selling alone isn’t enough to give you the pipeline that you need. Even so, I recommend you use everything at your disposal. Use the phone, email, social, referrals, networking events, and whatever you have to do to fill your pipeline.

Since then, the evolution of technology has overrun everything salespeople do. Technology is central to how people run their businesses, and that’s not always a good thing. For example, if you buy something from a technology company, they may claim it will make you more efficient, but the goal of selling is being effective. When you are effective, you automatically become more efficient because your efforts pay off more quickly.

If you said, “Hey, Anthony, I'm going to be super inefficient but I'm going to have an 82 percent win rate,” my reply would be, “Great! Don't be efficient! If you have an 82 percent win rate, then you can be as inefficient as you want to be.” Now, imagine you look at this the other way, and you’re super efficient with your time but your win rate is only 20 percent. Well, then you're going to have a really tough time getting a commission, and you're going to have a really tough time keeping your job, and you're going to have a really tough time paying your bills because a 20 percent win rate won't help you, no matter how efficient you are with your time.

You Don’t Need to Sell Like a SaaS Company

We continue to look at technology as some sort of a vanguard, like they know more than we do about selling, which is not true. What they've decided to do is to be as cheap as possible, build some SaaS product, and split the sale between SDRs and BDRs. SDRs are taught to cold call and to qualify only, and then they flip the sale to somebody else, a BDR who closes. It's kind of like you make a date with someone who’s interested in you. Then, you sit down and say, “I'm really happy to be here with you, but I'm busy right now so I'm going to have my brother come in and he's going to have dinner with you instead.” Your date would be like, “WHAT!? I thought I was having dinner with you!” You say, “I know you'll love my brother. He's really good and he'll take good care of you.”

This is not how sales should work. If you are an SDR or BDR, look at the following link, which shows you how to get a full-cycle sales job. That’s what you should do.

You should want to be a full-cycle salesperson and take responsibility from cold call through close. Then, you can show up a year later to offer your client something new so you can cross-sell and upsell. This is what you really want to do.

SDRs and BDRs might work in technology companies that are selling SaaS, but companies in other industries shouldn’t be building their sales teams like tech companies. We should be helping people learn how to sell the full cycle.

Your Technology Stack for B2B Sales

When I started selling I had a stack of index cards, a Sharpie, a phone, and a phone book—and that's all the technology that I needed. The first time I went back into my family's business, after I had two brain surgeries, we were doing $3 million as a company. At the end of that year ,we were at $7.8 million. I did $4.8 million by myself, thanks to the ability to talk to people and have a conversation about change. So that's really all you need.

If you told me you had a budget to buy a sales stack, and asked what you should buy, I’d suggest a really good CRM and a data source. Those two things and a phone are all you need to be successful. If you've got the chops, a modern sales approach, an executive briefing, and know how to create value, you're in pretty good shape. If you're missing those things, you could be in trouble.

Pipeline Isn’t Everything

For the past few years, folks have been saying that having a pipeline is more important than winning. This doesn't make any sense, and I’ll explain why.

Say you go out and you get people to say yes to a meeting. You eventually sit down with them, you have that one meeting, you go immediately back to your office, and you type that new opportunity into your CRM. Now your sales manager is like, “Jimmy got an opportunity! This is great, we got another opportunity in this pipeline!”

They love it and then they decide you should have 4x your quota in the pipeline. Why? That means that they expect you to win 1 out of 4 deals, a win rate of 25 percent. That is not how you become a professional salesperson, it's not how you're going to make money, and it’s not going to give you what you need to win deals. But the way sales leaders look at win rates is a lot like the lottery. Every opportunity is a lottery ticket, and the more you have, the more you increase your chances of winning, but that's not how sales work. The way that sales works is that the winner is the person who has the best conversation with the client. This is the person who best helps them understand their problems, how to address them, and how to help them make the changes that they need to succeed in the future. That is what you're really supposed to be doing.

If you’re a sales manager or sales leader, the only way to reach your goals is by winning a lot of opportunities with increased effectiveness! Instead, many managers require 4x or even 8x their quota. An 8x quota means they're expecting a 12.5 percent win rate. That is how you starve to death, or find a new job as a customer service person, or perhaps a barista. If you can't do better than a 12.5% win rate, you should look for another profession. Focusing on the pipeline instead of effectiveness is misguided sales advice.

Too Much Automation Ruins Deals

I recently saw one person on LinkedIn who said they have figured out how to scrape their targets’ LinkedIn profiles, find something personal about that person, and then hand it off to ChatGPT to personalize a message. I argue that if a person isn’t preparing the message, it’s not personalization. That’s just using tech to avoid doing the work of a salesperson and having to talk to a person.

This is going to be a bigger problem as more people start running similar scripts. And it's going to look bad for everybody because prospects are going to realize that the messages are just AI-generated spam. Two weeks ago, a young person told me he programmed ChatGPT to make 30,000 cold calls and sign people up for meetings. He asked me if I was interested in learning this technique and I told him no. I am on the other side of this. I think that you should call because you're a human, and that makes a difference to the people who pick up.

Google and Yahoo have recently said if you send more than 5,000 emails from your domain name to personal email addresses, you’re a spammer and your domain will get the death penalty. This is trouble because we can’t email, and now people are working from home, so they're not answering their business phones, which means we have to get to their mobile phones.

All of this is because a bunch of barbarians on LinkedIn decided that they're going to automate all of prospecting and cold outreach. It's a very bad idea. If you see salespeople doing this, you should give them a little bit of feedback. Explain that none of us are going to be able to talk to any of our clients in the future because they'll never know if it's just ChatGPT or an actual person trying to reach them.

If I were your sales manager, I would say:

You're going to do this by hand.
You're going to pick up the phone.
You're going to call people.
You're going to sit down across from them.
You're going to develop relationships.
You're going to understand their business.
You're going to help them figure out how to help their business.

That is how you're going to succeed in the future. Take away all of the technology, and the hype, so you can spend your time and energy on being a human.

While everybody's using AI technology, they're also saying you need to be more empathetic. So you're conflicted if you believe that you should automate everything and then tell people to be more empathetic and human. I don't know how to put those two things together.

If I'm too cheap to give you a real salesperson and instead use ChatGPT, but then I'm going to tell my salespeople to be more human and have more compassion for people facing problems, it’s a mess!

We are almost halfway through another decade when salespeople are not being trained and don't understand why they have to put all these opportunities in the pipeline except to make their sales manager happy. Over reliance on tech is a bad idea if you want to win deals and grow your business. If you want to be successful in the future, just be a human, have empathy, sit down with people, and develop relationships—and you'll do great!