Your sales team responsible for outbound?
Wonder if it should sit within your marketing team’s remit?
Well we think they’re part of the same growth engine and should definitely sit together! Even if the division of labour isn’t as clean.
This week we have a helpful expert on outbound join us to discuss exactly what effective outbound looks like and how marketing and sales can and should work together to get it right.
At the end of the day, it forms an important part of the overall growth strategy of any business, particularly B2B ones!
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Transcript
Ricky Pearl [00:00:00] I could pick up the phone right now and be talking to a potential customer within 15 minutes. I could do that right now. There’s very little you could do by way of broad marketing strategies that could achieve that search engine optimization or whatever it might be. Takes time.
Welcome to the B2B Playbook. We built this channel for small B2B marketing teams who wanna drive more revenue for their business. Every week, we’re showing you how to create more demand for your brand, step by step using our five feeds framework. So if you are time poor resource strapped, but you still wanna make a big impact on your business, make sure you hit that like and subscribe button down belows to you.
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George: Welcome back to the B2B Playbook listeners. This week’s interview is with Ricky Pearl. He’s a B2B sales specialist and the c e O of Pointer now pointer. They deliver sales to service, meaning that you can outsource your sales to them. Ricky shared with us a lot of great points from why outbound is part of marketing, not [00:01:00] sales, to why it’s a very fast and important part of any B2B business’s growth engine
Kev: we also discussed specifics like what the process of setting up and running outbound marketing looks like, the best channels to do it on, and also how to scale it effect.
George: Yeah, that was so practical. uh, the conversation listeners, it even touches on how to measure results and when you’re likely to see those results. So it’s another fantastic episode. my, if I do say so myself, Kevin, where we dive Into what customer-centric B2B sales can look like with a truly helpful expert.
We hope you enjoy this conversation with Ricky Pearl.
George Coudounaris: welcome back to the b v Playbook listeners, as you know, we rarely have guests on our show. Instead, we select a few true experts who align with our view that B2B marketing is more about people, not platforms.
Today, our special guest is Ricky Pearl. Ricky is a B2B sales specialist and the CEO of Pointer. [00:02:00] Pointer delivers sales as a service, meaning you can outsource your sales to Ricky and his team. I connected with Ricky last year and it became very clear to me that his approach to sales is very customer-centric.
Ricky, thanks so much for coming on the show!
Ricky Pearl Excuse man. That’s like the nicest intro I’ve ever gotten. Thanks for having me here.
Why Talk About Sales Here, And Relationship to Marketing
George Coudounaris: I’m glad. I’m glad. Now, Ricky, our marketers who listen to the podcast, they might be thinking, you know, why on earth do we have a salesperson on at the B2B playbook?
Well, look, I know that many of our listeners, they work in small, in-house teams. We’re really, especially early on the lines between sales and marketing. They’re a little more blurred.
So listeners, whether you need to help your organization with some cold outbound, or you just wanna understand what your sales team does, so you can better work together, this episode’s gonna be jam-packed, full of helpful, actionable strategy. No pressure Ricky.
Ricky Pearl Listen, I’m the [00:03:00] first to say I believe. Sales is a subset of marketing. It’s all about taking your product to market and where marketing ends and selling begins is a very blurred line.
George Coudounaris: And I think that’s why you’re such a great fit for today, Ricky and I haven’t heard a lot of salespeople say it. But I’ve become quite familiar with at least some of your methodology and some of your thoughts and I’m so keen to get them out for our listeners.
Defining Outbound Marketing
George Coudounaris: So the place I want to kick off, I think is first to really just get to grips with that term outbound, because that term outbound can really make so many of our listeners, so many of our marketers just shutter.
Ricky, what is outbound marketing and why do you think so many marketers at early stage companies are a bit afraid of it?
Ricky Pearl outbound is the antithesis of inbound. Just in, in its vernacular, like in the language. But broadly, when you create a product that’s designed to solve a solution, you’ve got two options. Either you can wait for someone who’s identified that they have that problem to start [00:04:00] exploring the market for solutions, and they’ll do that by looking on Google, you know, asking around. And you can capture that intent through search engine optimization, through search engine marketing, through paper click, or whatever other way that you’re gonna do to capture their ac their intent of trying to find a solution. So that’s, you know, with a whole host of other categories, a whole lot of ways to get inbound marketing.
Outbound is when you say, well, I don’t know who has the problem right now, but we’ve created a solution that was designed for people who look this way, feel that way, think this way, or whatever it is. This is the kind of people we designed the solution for. Why don’t I try, initiate a conversation with them. And ask them if they have or are aware of a current problem and if they would like to explore a solution. So outbound is just us initiating the conversation as opposed to them initiating a conversation.
That’s the difference,
George Coudounaris: Which can be so hard to do. Everyone’s a little bit afraid of [00:05:00] taking that first step. I mean, that’s why. Ricky, I was never good at approaching girls in a bath. That’s a really hard thing to do, and I think it’s actually a reason that so many marketers I think are attracted to inbound because you feel like you can do so much of it from behind your computer screening.
You don’t have to interact with people as much. Of course, on the B2B playbook, we highly recommend that people are talking to customers and potential customers all the time doing customer interviews, that kind of thing. So we definitely encourage people to get out there and go and speak to people.
Benefits Of Outbound Marketing
Ricky Pearl I mean, that’s where it’s so critical early on, right to begin with your product team, if you’re the marketer, your product team’s very similar. They just wanna sit behind a computer and code. So if they are constantly building a solution, but you’re not getting enough feedback and insights from the markets, you’ll build yourself out of a product market fit.
So marketers get, having conversations with potential customers is critical for business success, especially early on.
George Coudounaris: Okay, so getting that feedback from the market is clearly a huge benefit, and getting [00:06:00] on the front foot, not having to wait for it to come to you is a huge benefit. What are the other benefits, Ricky, of doing outbound activity?
Ricky Pearl I think timing is a big one. I could pick up the phone right now and be talking to a potential customer within 15 minutes. I could do that right now. There’s very little you could do by way of broad marketing strategies that could achieve that search engine optimization or whatever it might be. Takes time.
They’re fantastic and don’t get me wrong, they’re a better long-term strategy, but you don’t easily get short-term wins. You can get much quicker short-term wins in outbound. So it’s a great way to grease the tracks. It’s a great way to work out messaging, right? I can test a message right now based on an assumption, based on an audience.
I could say, Hey, I think this is what will resonate with them. I could be sending out an outbound campaign by this afternoon. I could get insights to if that worked. If it didn’t work. I can phone prospects and hear their terminology, hear their language here, they just, how they talk about [00:07:00] it. And all of this could feed the terms that I’m using for paper, click the terms that I’m using for other forms of marketing.
You rarely can pick up that voice of the customer so much quicker. So rarely it’s like best actually when it’s not a standalone sales activity, but part of a broader marketing , plan.
George Coudounaris: I love how you’ve grounded that and again, as it being part of a broader marketing plan, it sounds like it’s just a fantastic place to really start your marketing, cuz as you said, you can go out there, you can get on the front foot.
And something else you said, which really resonated with me was you’re actually picking up like the voice of the customer when getting that feedback.
So many marketers would approach outbound, I think with paid activity, with PPC activity, with running ads because they’re like, well, this is a way of us pushing our direct response message in front of our potential customers. But the data that you’re getting from that is nowhere near as good as if you are actually on the phone to that person getting their feedback, hearing their voice, getting their thoughts and [00:08:00] feelings on your value Pro.
Ricky Pearl Yeah. You know, it’s, it’s the same as getting value from your insurance policy. You get value, like theoretically when nothing happens, nobody wants a health incident that they have to claim. But when you’re selling something where the outcome is a non-event, it’s much harder in marketing. When you are not capturing the intent, when you don’t know what’s happening, it’s very hard to fill that void.
You can see what they did click on. You can see where they did bounce off your website, but what you can’t see is everything that’s not happening, it’s that void and you can fill that void. So when I send an email in, that email is ignored. Or I come up in the search engine and it’s ignored. I dunno why it was ignored.
If I phone someone, I’d say, Hey, I’d like to talk to you about. and they say, I’m not interested. You say, look, if you don’t mind me asking, I would’ve assumed this, you know, is quite important to you at the moment or to people like you, and I’m not trying to sell you anything here. I’d really just love to understand why isn’t this on your agenda?[00:09:00]
And they might say, Hey mate, listen. Like it’s, yeah it’s nice, but it’s just not a big problem that we wanna solve. Like a scratch on my glasses. Yeah, you can point to the problem, but unless it’s in the middle of my eye, I’m probably not gonna buy a new pair. So like you get to understand this so quickly when you’re having genuine conversations with other people and there is no other way to get that level of insight that quickly.
George Coudounaris: Well, Ricky and marketers, it should be pretty clear why a guys should stick around for the rest of this episode because that can save you so much pain, so much time and so many dollars if you get this right early on.
Ricky, before we go into outbound more in your process, I’ve had a trawl through your LinkedIn. I haven’t heard it from you directly, but I’ve looked a little bit through your story. I’ve seen you’ve been quite entrepreneurial yourself. You’ve set up businesses. I think I saw you set up one for your sister. Was there a moment that you truly, where you truly realized the power of outbound marketing and was there a moment that you just fell in love with it and you were like, God, [00:10:00] this is so, I.
Ricky Pearl Yeah. I’m, I’m very um, impatient. I’m very like aggressive in how I want to get something done, you know, if I want to, I wait to kick something off, so when I launch something, I need active tasks as opposed to passive tasks, and that makes me feel, more validated in what I’m. So when I started these businesses, I wanted to do something, , and I needed to do something then and there.
And that’s where I really found outbound satisfied, an itch for me that I could get it set up, I could get it going whilst everything else that was passive was building in the background.
But the one win that I had that I think rarely cemented it for me, I put together this email campaign at a job that I had.
It was a four email sequence, and the third email was, I don’t know, something like, you know, hey, if you’re not gonna get, you know, replied to me at least, you know, push me off to someone who’s willing to help. I don’t know what the email was, but something like that. This is going years [00:11:00] back. Messaging’s changed a lot since then. And I’ve gotta reply back to that saying, I’m so sorry, mate. I’ve been super busy. How are you? Next week, Tuesday, and this landed up a year later being like an eight figure deal for the company that I worked for.
George Coudounaris: Wow.
Ricky Pearl And I got the reply when I woke up in the morning. This was during Covid, and I turn on my laptop and I see this response.
Back then, like this was all fully automated. I didn’t even know the person that I was sending the email to, and here’s a a 10 plus million dollar deal from a cold email that I sent to someone I’d never spoken to. It’s you know, if that’s the potential, I can’t not do it.
George Coudounaris: Yeah. The upside there is huge. And I encourage our listeners to just empathize a bit and think to yourself like, I, I dunno, Ricky, I get so many emails in my inbox. Some of them are definitely cold outbound ones in my inbox and some of them are really relevant and I’m just too busy at this point in time to look at them.
But after that second, [00:12:00] third interaction, it’s definitely happened where I’ve gone and replied and I’ve gone, thank you for keeping this top of mind. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to deal with it then, but I am ready to deal with it now. So it that’s so powerful. It’s so powerful.
Ricky Pearl And I think that’s, you know, like people also need to get out a lot of these connotations that they have with outbound. There’s nothing wrong with approaching someone at a bar, at a club, at a pub anywhere and starting a conversation with them. If you are respectful, if you’re being genuine and if it’s an interaction that they’re happy to pursue, if they’re not happy to pursue, they’ll tell you to bug her off very quickly.
But there’s nothing wrong with that. The upside of being brave enough to do that might be you meeting a life partner, or the upside of someone else doing that to you. Maybe that you met a life partner, right? Like it, there’s so much upside to doing it. But we are not at all talking about sleazy trick tactics. Anything of the sort, we talking about genuinely trying to start mature conversations with people that you actually believe that you [00:13:00] can help.
What Bad Outbound Activity Looks Like
George Coudounaris: Okay. Well then I want to go into Ricky, cuz you touched on it there, the sleazy tactics. What does bad outbound activity look like? Before we define what a good process looks like, what does the bad look like?
Ricky Pearl the bad is just pure spam, the bad is firstly lack of relevancy. If you not sending a very relevant message to a person, you spamming them. how to find what’s relevant is challenging because everyone often thinks that what they have is hyper relevant. Everybody wants this, everybody needs this.
No. You gotta find true relevancy. If you sending something that’s true, relevant, and you’re not tricking people. So not using purposefully tricky language like Hey George, we would like to discuss a partnership with you. You like, interesting. What does the partnership look like? Well, the partnership looks like you buying my product. You
George Coudounaris: Oh my God. The number of those I get, and I’m sure everyone gets, they are horrible. That feeling of being tricked
How To Make Your Outbound Hyper Relevant
Ricky Pearl I’d like [00:14:00] to discuss this opportunity with you, what you know, say like all of that. Really real ly spammy, good outbound is hyper relevant. And when possible, and we can discuss the details of this there’s something called persona-based campaigns and trigger-based campaigns. And you can relate this to a lot of your other marketing activities where a persona based is just an audience.
Does this person meet my audience? Are they an HR manager at an enterprise with more than 5,000 employees? Yes. Alright. That’s the kind of person we made the solution for. They are part of my audience. But the trigger would be what made it hyper-relevant? And that’s often, there’s a whole lot of different triggers you can have.
But let’s just say your solution was about saving money for these HR managers or reducing their need for headcounts or increasing retention. If you saw that they recently had a mass layoff, That makes your solution more relevant to them. So then you’ve got a trigger based campaign and you can [00:15:00] start a genuine conversation.
Hey John, I saw that you recently had to lay off 10% of your workforce. That’s got a really bloody sting. We’ve got a solution that kind of helps you do X, Y, Z, which could, have helped you or can help you in this particular way. Is that something that would be interesting to you or not?
George Coudounaris: I’m already seeing Ricky, that overlap between marketing and sales here, right? Because that’s exactly the same thing. We need to look at. We’ve gotta look at who it is that we’re serving. It’s gotta be relevant. And that trigger can be like hard to define. But I think you, you provided the really good example there of looking at real data points that show you that hey, something very real has happened in that person’s life or business, and they are now more likely in market for a solution.
Ricky Pearl Now, let me just I wanna make something perfectly clear, at least from my perspective. Outbound emails is outbound marketing. It is a marketing function. It is commonly performed by salespeople these days [00:16:00] for various reasons. But if, even if a salesperson does it, that job to be done is a marketing activity, not a sales activity.
There’s obviously blurred lines, what sales, what’s marketing, but this is outbound marketing. And I think that when you frame it that way, marketers sit there going, okay, this is meant to be in my bag. This is meant to be in my toolkit. how can I use that? So it really should be very similar to marketing.
George Coudounaris: Yeah. Yeah, that, that makes total sense. So you think this is actually an activity that should be done by marketers and then at some point it’s handed off to sales when they, I suppose, reach a certain engagement threshold.
Ricky Pearl Absolutely. We’re not gonna go into the absolute minutia of it, but in general, your marketing team would be , responsible for bringing in marketing qualified leads or people that were previously unaware, making them aware, finding when they have interest, and then passing them over to the sales team when they’re ready to engage. There’s no difference [00:17:00] here. I’m trying to find people that are either unaware or might potentially be interested and we are just doing that through outbound as opposed to inbound. I think the reason it’s landed with sales typically is cuz of the skillset required for the phone components of it, or because it’s often done as a one to one, as opposed to one, to many approach.
But it is very much within the bounds of marketing so much so. that very often the BDR or SDR function in large organizations also handles inbound leads. So you’ve brought an inbound lead, you don’t know if they qualified or not. You need to call them and have a conversation or have further email communications to determine if they are qualified to go within your sales process.
And that function is often performed by someone who falls under marketing. But very often, and at least 50% of our clients, the BDR falls under the cmo.
George Coudounaris: There you go. Yeah. Yeah.
Ricky Pearl very much a marketing function.
How To Prepare For Outbound Marketing
George Coudounaris: There go listeners, very much a marketing [00:18:00] function, so even more reason to pay attention to this episode. If outbound marketing isn’t something that is on your radar and isn’t within your remit either.
So Ricky, you’ve touched a little bit on your process, and because I think you’ve said that so much of this stems from marketing. It’s probably gonna sound a little bit familiar to our listeners, but what do you need to do before you start your outbound marketing outreach? What work do you need to do at your end?
Ricky Pearl All right. So I’ll start off with the technical, because that’s the only place there isn’t direct crossover. Although for decades now, marketers, we’re actually the only ones with the technical skills to set up email campaigns. You’re configuring Marketo or your marketing operations programs.
So you have to configure your emails for delivery slightly different to your typical broad campaign or your your newsletter style marketings, because these aren’t opt-in. So there is some technical needs, and we can go into the [00:19:00] details of those if you want, but you technically need to configure your setup to be able to deliver cold email.
If you’re doing cold calling, then again, you need some technology there. You don’t want someone sitting there, you know, doing a minute worth of dialing off their mobile phone. You need to create some efficiencies. Boats make it more pleasant for the operator, but also to be able to increase the volume.
So technical setup. From there, everything would sound extremely familiar to marketing operation. It’s who do we want to talk to? What do we want to say to them? What channels do we want to say it on? What would we like the call to action to be? And if they’ve performed that call to action, how does that fall into an operational flow?
What’s next within that funnel? Like, I, I’d struggle to find where it’s any difference to I don’t know what you’re normally doing within a marketing operation.
George Coudounaris: It all sounds very familiar, , that’s for sure. And that tools component is really important and it does sound like it’s something that should definitely be within. [00:20:00] The market is remit, so I really appreciate you coming on here and making that very clear.
Ricky Pearl And let me give you an example. If you are doing a search engine or paper click kind of a campaign and you need to do an audience build, you’ll have various tools, whether it’s, I don’t know, through Google or through Meta or through some other third party where you can build an audience. I want to people that look like this.
Similarly, if you want to do cold email or a different form of outbound, you have to say, well, who do we want to talk to? We need to build a list. Slightly different providers. There’s a whole lot of different data providers, but rarely exactly the same where you’re saying, I need to build a list of the kind of people that I’d want to talk to outbound.
The tweak is that it’s not necessarily just a lookalike audience, it’s an exact audience. It’s, I want to talk to these 1000. you enrich their phone number or enrich their email address. There’s a whole process to do that. Or different tools that help you do that, and that’s your audience. So who you talk to, step number one, now, you’ve gotta work out [00:21:00] your messaging framework again.
How would that be different to a pay per click advert? You know, what are we gonna talk to them about? What’s the subject line, what’s the body, what’s the contents, what’s the call to action like? It is so similar to your other marketing campaigns that other than a few technical differences, it’s very hard to differentiate,
George Coudounaris: So it just comes back down to really deeply understanding exactly who that customer is, segmenting the market, finding something that’s very important to them, figuring out what their pain points are, talking to it, and putting it all together in a way that actually gets their attention.
Ricky Pearl 100, 100% when we work with our clients, and we are putting together a ideal client profile brief, and we’re going through the persona. And if I just stick with that hr example that I gave earlier, we’ll say, all right, well, if we’re talking to like an HR manager or an HR coordinator or an HR lead, they may be more interested in talent acquisition recruiting.
And , that kind of language, they’re quite operational. If we’re talking to a chief people officer [00:22:00] or a head of people and culture, they’re more interested in the strategy. So they want to talk about how to attract better talent as a preferred employee, or strategies to retain talent longer, like the same topic, but from a very different language, different point of view.
And you would normally be building that out within your personas so that you can deeply understand. , the people, your audience and the people you’re talking to and the language you need to use to attract them. Are they metric based? Are they based like motivated by any emotive benefits or a business outcome?
These all things you rarely have to determine to market your product. What’s the headline on your landing page? Or are you talking about a feature or you’re talking about an outcome, or you’re talking about a benefit? You’ve gotta make those same determinations for your email in your outbound.
So very much all ties together and you can actually use that outbound message to work out what’s actually resonating better to determine what one line should go on your landing page.
George Coudounaris: [00:23:00] super great feedback loop to build in and you can get it so quickly. And something you mentioned there, Ricky was in your HR example um, how you have to make that message relevant to depending on who it is that you’re speaking to , within the organization. So something that we always try and tell our marketers, something that SALs are incredibly aware of is that there’s often not just one person you’re dealing with within an organization, but there’s a whole buying committee.
And how much of them you need to engage typically depends on how big your offer is and the size of the organization that it is that you’re dealing with. I suspect that the answer here,
Who should be first point of contact with outbound?
George Coudounaris: Ricky, might be that it depends, but my question is, when you go to do your outreach, who should that first point of contact try and be?
Are you going after the champion? Who is it that you’re targeting?
Ricky Pearl So it’s an interesting one and it very much depends if you’re doing account-based marketing or not. If we’re talking account-based, which is a lot of what Pointer does. We are usually going off to all of them. So that, you’re right, there is a buying committee, but there’s actually more than a buying [00:24:00] committee, cuz often the end user isn’t even on the buying committee.
We might be buying a piece of software that all the employees need to land up using for their clock-in nine clock out. For example, you’re selling a rostering software, but it’s the HR manager, general manager, operations manager that are your buying committee. The CEO for example, on something that big may be an influencer within that buying committee.
But the, not even necessarily any of the end users, the staff that would clock in or clock out are involved. So you can talk in outbounds, all of them. So we’ll often outbounds to the end user. Just for insights, Hey, we wanted to approach a company about clock in, clock out. I’d love to just get some feedback on if this is a current pain point for you.
So we are outbound for that feedback within the buying committee. People have different interests that they keen on, right? So if we are talking. Um, Hr, again, just to use that example, the HR manager might be interested in recruitments. The chief people officer might be interested in the cultural [00:25:00] impact that the solution could have.
The CFO f might be interested in reducing churn and cutting down on recruitment fees by 25% all within one solution. Everyone has their interest within in it, and you gotta pro take that message to that individual.
George Coudounaris: when it comes to actually taking that message to that individual. I mean, there’s a number of different ways we can try and reach each of those members of the buying committee. If you know, you could use LinkedIn outreach, you can use email, you can pick up the phone and call them. What is the best way to reach these people?
Best channels for Outbound Marketing?
George Coudounaris: What’s the best channel? Ricky?
Ricky Pearl Yeah. So the best way no different to the rest of your marketing campaigns is test, measure and iterate. So you do have your various channels. You’ve got email, you’ve got phone calls, you’ve got LinkedIn some solutions. You’ve even got Facebook, Instagram, direct mail. There’s a whole lot of different channels.
We usually start with an omnichannel approach, so we’ll try emailing people, calling people using LinkedIn as well [00:26:00] and we’ll start working out what channel seems to be best. So for example, if some people aren’t active on LinkedIn, so then it’s useless. If they we do a lot in construction and email is nowhere near as effective as the phone when even text SMS messaging very effective there.
So you do want to do a bit of channel validation, but usually omnichannel is best because whether a person is on LinkedIn or not is probably less about their industry as a whole and more about that individual. So one CFO might be on and the next CFO F not. So we would typically try send them an email.
and send them a message on LinkedIn, not an email. Those are currently pretty useless, but, you know, LinkedIn strategies, a whole nother conversation, but we’d usually try omnichannel in general and scale it back. Then once we work out which channels are most effective. Sometimes cost is the prohibitor.
You don’t have someone to cold call, in which case it’s email and LinkedIn are two more economical channels, so that [00:27:00] determines it. But broadly, I would say that the channel matters a lot less than the message. Your marketing message is still by far more important than the channel that message is deliver.
George Coudounaris: Well, that should again sound very familiar to our listeners. I hope if they’ve been listening to the bitterly playbook, that’s a message that they’ve taken away from it.
Perhaps our conception of. Outbound was a little bit off, but we often really thought of it as either it’s done in a way that is really at scale, but not personalized at all.
Versus I think your approach, which is it’s a lot more relevant, it’s a lot more personalized. But then how do you scale that? Like how do you actually scale these interactions that you.
Ricky Pearl So there’s three, a few different levels, sorry, of personalization at scale, so one is through, you know, you can have a blend of personalized and automated. So very often and very common within outbound [00:28:00] campaigns. The first email is person. So maybe there’ll be a five email sequence. You know, email two is just a reply to the thread of email.
Number one, email three might be trying a new value proposition or coming at it from a different angle. Email four might be playing on a different emotion and email five, whatever. So email one, let’s just say might be personalized. So we’ll do something called five by five where you spend five minutes researching a prospect and gather three to five personalized elements that you add into your template.
So that first line is personalized. Hey, George, love the B2B playbook. Would actually love to get some of your feedback on this new marketing platform that we have, which helps marketers do X, Y, Z. Would you have some time for a chat that’s personalized? Just because I said B2B playbook, right? What’s the level of personalization?
Call it like a three out of 10. If you can tie that personalization into the hook, into the message, into the reasons very useful. So you [00:29:00] get different degrees of personalization and they can be scaled with five minutes per person. And when you’re talking B2B and you’ve got a deal size of couple of thousand dollars of that average customer value, the five minutes is really worthwhile. So absolutely can do it that way. Another way is call which we call personalization at scale through hyper relevance. And bear with me, I’m gonna give you an example that I have, which is uh, pointer. We do sales management as a service as well as outsourced sales. So people often come to us, they wanna hire someone to do cold calling and market.
So for example but they don’t want to coach someone on cold calling. It’s all well and good that I’m telling you, BDR should fall under marketing. But then it’s another thing to say, well, Like, how do I coach this person on called calling? This isn’t effective. So we come in and manage them. So level one is find companies that hire SDRs or BDRs and I could approach them saying, Hey, would you like help with marketing with management of [00:30:00] your bdr? So that’s still relevance but’s. Let’s give that a one outta 10 in relevance. Next, I could find companies who hire BDRs but don’t have a dedicated BDR manager. Now I know my proposition is slightly more relevant for them. So there’s level two. Now I could find companies that hire BDRs, don’t have a dedicated BDR manager, and have recently had churn within the organization.
So now I know that this management is actually impacting them and they’re feeling some pain. Then I could find companies with hire BDRs. Donor BDRs managers recently had churn and the BDR department reports to marketing and not sales. Now again, I know that my ethos and culturally I’m a much better fit.
Then I could find people who hire B donor BDR managers recently had churn their reports to marketing and they just had a new CMO start within the last six months. Then I could go through all of that again and find that new marketing [00:31:00] CMO who didn’t manage a BDR at their previous organization. Now I have a bloody tight fit in terms of who I’m targeting and when I send them a message, it doesn’t even have to be personalized.
I can say, Hey, George, I’m pretty sure that running a BDR team is a pretty painful new experience. We specifically set up to help CMOs run their BDR departments without it dragging them, you know, into the weeds of the operations. We’d love to have a chat to you about that. I, and I could say that to every single CMO who fits that brief.
Because I’ve gotten that relevancy in the way I’ve targeted my audience. So there are a few different ways that you can scale outbound either with five minutes of research per person or with a deep understanding of your audience and research.
George Coudounaris: Well, I love that. It becomes personalized just by virtue of it being extremely relevant. I think that is absolute gold there, and that really comes down to that list that you start [00:32:00] off from with, from the beginning and making sure that you definitely have that value proposition that’s extremely attractive to them.
And based on that trigger, as you referenced Earl earlier, like you are highly relevant and so that you don’t have to, put in that huge amount of effort trying to tailor your specific email to, their personal life or other information that you’ve picked up from trolling around the web because it’s just become so important to something that they’re dealing with.
Right.
Ricky Pearl Yeah. And I think that’s part of it. We’re all in business to solve problems and we all have problems that need to be solved. I go to sleep at night and I lose sleep based on the problems that I have. If somebody send me a message the next morning saying, Hey Ricky, we helped solve this exact problem.
And that’s the problem that I lost sleepover last night. Oh, you think I’m going to ignore it? Just sorry. That’s exactly what I need, but because you sent it to me as a cold email, I refuse on principle to engage and I’m gonna lose sleep tonight [00:33:00] again because of it. No one’s gonna do that.
So if you can find relevancy, you are always going to win. Finding relevancy is tough. And a lot of your listeners will have another challenge on top of that, which is they are trailblazing, they’re creating a new category. This CMO that I just gave an example of, May never have heard of BDR Management as a service.
And so they are not Googling, how do I find BDR management as a service? Best BDR management as a service company. It’s not a category that exists. So I’m already going to struggle with inbound. And the listeners that have that struggle with you even more so will find that outbound is a fantastic way for them to create awareness within people who might not be aware.
George Coudounaris: that’s helpful. A alone is even just showing that person that, Hey, I like, I know you have this problem. You haven’t had the means or the time to articulate what it [00:34:00] is, but I’ve actually articulated it for you. I’ve got the solution, and these are the huge benefits that can come if you just go ahead and fix it right now.
I think that’s a huge benefit in and of in of itself.
Ricky Pearl Absolutely. There’s so much of that. And there’s other ways that you can integrate this within your broader marketing strategy. So we have tools on our website that will de-anonymize web traffic. So if a com, if someone visits my website from a particular company, I’ll get a notification saying someone from the B2B Playbook podcast.
And I could literally share my screen and show you where it shows that, cuz you visited my website visited your web. Won’t say George, we’ll just say someone from this company visited the websites. If that company fits my deal, client profile, they just anonymously visited my website, but now I know they may be in the market for a solution.
I can outbound them again, the likelihood of being relevant is higher because they’ve shown some form of intent. there’s lots of different ways to incorporate this outbound. At various degrees, and I think a marketer would be crazy to not at least [00:35:00] pick up some of those easy ones, even if they’re not building a full blown outbound campaign.
You would be really silly to not message someone who’s visited your website and spent five minutes there clicking her out.
George Coudounaris: Yeah, that, that’s a complete no-brainer. And, you know, traffic de anonymizing software, so many of the marketers that I speak to don’t have it installed. And I just tell them, go to Clearbits weekly free trial. It’s incredible. It costs you nothing. And I use it for our business. Every week I get a whole list of people who visit the B2B playbook, who visit the B2B incubator.
And for me then, that’s a list of people that I can reach out to. And if it’s the playbook I look to collaborate. If it’s the incubator, they could be interested in joining our program. And it’s, I don’t, just personally Ricky I’m a little bit afraid, you know, listen, I was before a little afraid of just picking up the phone and cold calling anyone worried that they’ve never heard who the hell I am.
But just cuz they’ve been on my website, I’m thinking like, you know what? Like they’re [00:36:00] interested. They at least know who I am. My face is all over it.
Ricky Pearl so how’s this? Even if you, even if that was too much for you, if somebody visits your websites, you go find who the relevant buyer the right persona at that company is. Just connect with them on LinkedIn. Don’t even send a message. Just Blind Connects. At least now, if you’re doing content creation on LinkedIn, they’re going to see it.
Or you could try connect with them with the message. Hey, saw someone from your company poking around on our website. Amazing how far technology has come. If anyone wanted to ask any questions, I’m available here to chat or just give me a buzz. Yeah, could send that as a message. It’s very soft. You could do that and that is not a front.
Even with someone with call reluctance or a bit nervous for doing outbound, if you wanna upgrade from Clearbit, which is, I don’t know, like $30,000 for the paid version, the free one, highly recommended. There’s no one who’s listening to this who should not at least have the free version on their websites.
There’s tools like Lead Magic, which we use for example, which [00:37:00] is just a couple of hundred dollars a month. And I get notifications in my Slack and I set the criteria, so I’ll only get the criteria if they meet my icp, they’re from Australia and they’ve been to my website more than twice and spent more than five minutes on my website.
I’ll get a notification in my Slack, so I’ve set a higher bar for when I’ll actually pick up the phone and phone them. But yeah, there’s so many of these good tools and it’s not outbound or inbound. It is sophisticated allbound marketing campaigns.
George Coudounaris: and marketers, that’s probably a good indication as to how, if you’re working on demand generation, how that overlaps into account-based marketing and the role that sales plays in that. And marketing plays there. There’s very clear tools there , that allow you to see the effects of your marketing, to make sure that you’re targeting your icp, that what you’re doing is resonating with them, and you can start to identify who those engaged accounts are.
And then it becomes, that orchestrated approach between marketing and sales to actually do that [00:38:00] outreach and start to engage these potential buyers.
Ricky Pearl for account based marketing having that, that outbound element is incredibly important. One, you can contact end users get research. You use that collected research as part of your marketing message. Further on, saying, we’ve spoken to your team and we understand that this is a. We would like to discuss how we can solve that problem.
Your sales team is approaching key personas. You’ve maybe set up a landing page, or you are even just monitoring the traffic on your website to see if it’s working. We sent an outbound email to a massive brand for one of our clients, massive, one of the, the biggest retail brands in the country. You know what they did? They ignored our email. Promise you how rude that was. They ignored our email, but 30 minutes later, after clicking send, there was a visit on the website and they registered for a demo, right? [00:39:00] And that’s what happened. This, it happened a month ago. They saw the email, it was semi intriguing.
They didn’t care to engage, but they went and explored on the website, saw a very legit business, legit website, good social proof, like the messaging on the website sold them, not the messaging on the email. The email just got them intrigued. They booked a demo, you know, like it is. You’ll often see an increase in web traffic on the back of email campaigns.
It’s, in fact, I’d argue that just email campaigns without the rest of the marketing is also quite useless. In fact, more so than the rest, right? So that whether it’s account based, there’s slightly different tactics and strategies, whether you have a budget for calling slightly different tactics and strategies, whether you can only do email or only do LinkedIn.
There’s different tactics and strategies, but you initiating conversations broadly is a superpower. You being able to do that, imagine you were able [00:40:00] to do that and willing to do that, and your competitor wasn’t. Who do you think is going to win? Who was the person who met more people at the club? The one who was willing to start conversations or ones who waited for someone to come talk to? I’m not like, I hate those analogies, but it’s just something that like, I guess a lot of people have had some personal experience with. If we are there to win, we want to be able to start conversations, not by spamming. It can be as strategic as you want. You could make three cold calls a day. You could send 10 cold emails a day. But if they are done well, it will pay dividend.
George Coudounaris: And as you said if it doesn’t work and doesn’t turn into a client like you at least get so much amazing feedback to realize, is your positioning slightly off? Is this not as big a need for that segment that you were going after to begin
Ricky Pearl Right. We, We’ve got a client now who was set. They’re like, this is, I, yeah, I’ve built this product. It can do a whole lot for a whole lot of different industries, [00:41:00] but I rarely think that this particular industry is going to love it. They’re gonna love it. And so we set up a campaign to do. And we’ve gotten a lot of responses.
I think we’ve got about a 15% response to our cold email campaign. That’s a significantly high response rate. Overwhelmingly negative, but not like negative. Hey, F off. I mean, obviously you get some of those, but very few. The vast majority was, I don’t actually need this. I don’t need this right now.
This isn’t something that we think we need. This isn’t a problem for us. Our assumption was wrong. It was just wrong. We learned within two weeks that our assumption of which audience and which like segments and RCP and persona, what, and it was a clever guess, was the founder and myself. We thought this would be a winner and we were wrong.
But you know what? We figured it out in two weeks. I didn’t build a four month plan to attract this audience via search engine optimization and pay, you know, like in all the rest two weeks is what it [00:42:00] took for us to realize we need to pivot. And that’s the difference between success or failure for a lot of businesses. As a marketer, you could go build a whole campaign around this audience for three months. By the end of it, there’s no revenue and your job’s on the line. The company’s unhappy, nobody’s won. If we could have just figured that out in two weeks it would’ve made a big difference.
George Coudounaris: I think you’ve made that so clear what the upside is. , it’s very clear to me, Ricky. As you said, finding out in two weeks versus four months, like trying to get your inbound engine to work and then still there’s just zero guarantee that person even wants your services or really truly needs that.
It’s a very, very clear case for doing outbound.
Ricky Pearl Yeah. On your I have all the respect for marketers cuz the one thing you have to do so well, which I struggle with as a seller, is you have to keep a course. You’ve got this like a big cruise liner trying to turn around. If you want to turn around, you’ve got a plotter course. You’ve gotta check everything else in the water.
You then turn the steering wheel and it takes you a couple of kilometers, [00:43:00] worth of time to turn a full circle where it’s I’m here in a speed boats, which sometimes means maybe I don’t keep a, a true course and I maybe lack that long-term strategy. But it’s a real benefits to have both.
George Coudounaris: I suppose one of the fears that sub marketers have around outbound is they feel like if they reach out to someone who they think is their dream customer and they don’t get a good response, and they have, a sequence of three or four follow ups and just nothing comes of it. They might feel that Ricky we’re burning bridges.
We’re burning bridges. That scale with people who become, could become our dream customers. What do you say to those marketers who feel that way?
Ricky Pearl I’d say there’s probably two parts to it. Three. The first is whether they ignored you or if they even just replied saying, stop. You know, this is unsolicited stop. Whatever. Rude message one. It’s not a reflection of you as an individual. Firstly, they don’t know you. This is just a brand. It’s just a person.
Two, they’ll forget about it by that [00:44:00] afternoon. They all genuinely forget about it by that afternoon. Do any of you hold deep? Whatever your feelings are about Google as an example, you love that. Them as a company, hate them as a company, whatever. Do any of you hold deep presentment for the amounts of bloody join YouTube premium adverts that pop up whilst you are watching it? We all hate that, whether, if you’re not, we all hate it. It is beyond obtrusive. It is beyond frustrating. But if they stopped doing it next week, you wouldn’t even think about it anymore. You wouldn’t even remember how annoying it used to be, like by the next engagement. It’s irrelevant. What they did or didn’t do very often.
In fact, you’ll find, they’ll be like, yeah, I actually remember seeing an email from you guys about six months ago. It wasn’t interesting at the time, but I’m pretty keen to talk about it now. So you don’t actually know. Finally, I’d say winning in business is I actually, hold on. I’ve gotta think deeply if I should even say this.
Ah, fuck it. I’ll do it using, do Donald Trump’s pre no politics here, right? But if anything about us, politics [00:45:00] taught us something. It’s not about everyone loving you. It’s about a certain amount of people loving you more than everyone else, right? So winning in business isn’t about placating everyone.
It’s about finding advocates, finding customers, finding people who wanna work with you and wanna work with your business. You don’t need the whole markets to wanna work with you. In fact, most people listening to this, if you gained 1% of your markets, you’d probably retire early. Like you don’t need them all, but don’t not find that 1% because you worried about what the 99% will say. Go find your 1% and your 1% are the ones who will respond. Once you have that 1%, you have money in the bank. You can afford to pay for consulting marketers, for consulting outbound agencies, or you can get the world’s your oyster. You can grab number 2%, number three, number five, you can completely rebrand, reposition, but don’t lose because you’re [00:46:00] scared about the 80% who won’t buy anyway.
George Coudounaris: Very, Very powerful. And I think that’s something that’s gonna deeply resonate with a lot of our listeners, Ricky. I mean, at the end of the day, they’re stakeholders, like they’re boss. If you’re in a small team, they don’t really care like how you’re bringing in new customers, right? They don’t care about oh, is this inbound or was it outbound?
Your boss just cares. Do we have enough money to grow at the rate that you know, we want to next month? Have we brought in enough revenue? Are we meeting our goals? Are we hitting our KPIs? That’s what they really care about. They don’t give a shit about how it actually came in, so you’ve just gotta
Ricky Pearl the end of the day, it’s revenue.
George Coudounaris: Exactly. You gotta go and do what you gotta.
Ricky Pearl And I think that, yeah, outbound’s one of the great ways you can go out and do it. Lots of businesses were built on it. A lot of businesses are finding now, even if they started with product lead growth, firstly there’s a cold start to product lead growth. You need to get some initial users to start creating a flywheel effect.
So outbound was [00:47:00] part of their short term strategy or now on the back end, they’ve done product-led growth and they’re now looking at how do they grow into, say, the enterprise space or mid-market space. They’re looking for a higher average customer values and they’re starting to bring on outbound for a new market segment.
So specifically where the average customer value is higher by starting to bring on outbound teams of SDRs or BDRs. So there’s still always a place for it at the beginning, at the end. But as George as you said, we care about revenue, we care about outcomes, and the people who don’t use you aren’t thinking about you.
The people who told you unsubscribe or ignored, you have forgotten about you. Yeah. We take it personally. I don’t care.
George Coudounaris: I think that if there’s something I’ve learned, Ricky from putting us, putting myself out there, I suppose as a business owner and a content creator, it’s that it really suffered from the spotlight effect, right? Where we all think that everyone’s looking at us all the time and judging us and listening to us.
The reality is, as you [00:48:00] said, like that person doesn’t remember you 12 hours later, let alone 24 hours later. So whether what you did was good, bad or otherwise, like people just don’t really remember. What they care about is themselves. So you’ve gotta be able to do something that helps them. That’s all that really matters.
Ricky Pearl And this is why I think one of the reasons why outbound has landed with sales teams, I think at a deep psychological level in on general. In general, salespeople are more used to handling rejection as part of their job. And they were willing to take this. They’re willing to take the, they’re like, Hey, I’ll send the email.
I don’t care if they tell me to bugger off. I’m used to it. So so some of the skillsets that were needed for outbound, or even if it’s not skillsets, but attributes lended itself towards salespeople. But the marketers who have that mentality I think are pretty dangerous.
You know, the marketers who think like sellers and sellers who think like market.[00:49:00]
That is what is that’s the future. Those are the future leaders.
George Coudounaris: yeah. They’re a seriously deadly combination. I couldn’t agree more. Ricky I’ve seen you talk about I guess on LinkedIn you’ve spoken about when it comes to outreach, you should try and zig when others zag. What does that mean and is there a good example you can give us?
What, what does zing when others zag mean?
Ricky Pearl sure. If you go to your spam folder right now and look at every email, they’re all gonna look the same, right? It used to look like you know, Hey, I hope you well or hope you do well over the pandemic, or whatever it was. It is trends, right? One of the famous outbound called email artists will post something on LinkedIn and within three to six months, everyone’s using that style of message. What you need to do as a pattern interrupt within, within sales or within marketing, is you need to stand out. There’s a sea of information out there. Your ads have to stand out. Your message has to stand out. Everything has to stand out. And no difference to how you’re competing for attention in the inbox. [00:50:00] You have to have a pattern interrupt and stand out. If you look like everyone else, if you are using terminology, phraseology, writing styles, that looks like a marketing email, people will see it as marketing. For example so many marketing subject lines would be, I don’t know what the benefit is, or something catchy or something cool.
Maybe even have an emoji in the subject line. Go look at your internal emails between you and your partner, you and your boss, you and your colleagues. I can promise you there’s no fucking emojis in the subject line, right? I can, I promise you. There’s no Hey, George, what do you think of this? Nobody uses a first name in a subject line.
Unless it’s marketing, but in marketing, because they have these use of these merge fields, if I see my first name in a subject line, I’m not even reading that email. It is marketing,
George Coudounaris: Yep.
Ricky Pearl That’s what I mean. Sub a name in a subject line, that’s what all the marketers are doing. So I need to avoid that.
I need a zag. I can’t use that style. So I would just make the subject line [00:51:00] like what the internal e email is between, you know, you and your boss, you know, George slash Ricky, you know, one-on-one, like one like little, something like that, you know, podcast, I don’t know what, whatever you would use.
So that’s how you need to stand out. But now when everyone starts using that, well, then you’re gonna have to think about what’s next. There’s just so many examples to the point, there was a big trend this year of nobody’s using any fluff. So don’t say, I hope you hope this email finds you well. Hope you had a good weekend.
Any of that. It was just George, tell me how are you getting to a b, abc? How you’re achieving this outcome or straight, punchy, to the point did very well, but now we are all used to that. For example, do you would’ve seen a lot of the thoughts bump the thoughts in an email? What do you think in an email? As a bum, everyone sees that.
As soon as you see that, now you know you’re part of a sequence. What was it originally? Originally it was a way to psychologically trick you into [00:52:00] making you feel like you were rude for ignoring a person. You don’t want to be rude cuz you see yourself as a kind nice person and so you would respond currently because now you compensating as well for being rude.
You don’t see that anymore. Now when you see that thoughts bump, you think I’m being sequenced this asshole. I don’t want this. So you have to change that pattern. And so it’s breaking molds being one step ahead of the curve, seeing what everyone says is working, understanding that, internalizing it, and then being a bit different,
George Coudounaris: That’s a great example. And I think things that are really relatable. Other examples that I heard of when it came to outreach was, I don’t know, people say make it more personalized by videoing yourself and delivering that as a message. I personally find that really strange whenever I get that in my inbox, I just think
Ricky Pearl Who’s,
George Coudounaris: doing?
I don’t
Ricky Pearl who sends a cold video that’s like an unsolicited dick pic, right? Peop don’t do it, right? Yeah, there, there’s times if you’ve built up a relationship, if I’m you and your colleague, [00:53:00] if you dropping them a quick loom because you’ve got a complicated message to communicate.
Absolutely. Video is an incredible means of communication asynchronous communication in particular. But doing that cold when you haven’t earned a right. I find it to be quite weird. There was a trend in a period where it was different and it worked. Now, I don’t know, maybe in LinkedIn is also a little bit difference, but on email it is underperforming written emails on average by and large.
George Coudounaris: There you go. There you go. Listeners you know, zeig, another zag, but don’t be a weirdo. Just use your human intuition as to whether you would find it strange or not, and whether it’s something you would like to receive.
Ricky Pearl And so at the moment, you know, there were things like using spelling mistakes, all these little tricks and tactics that people were using to make it seem human. Whereas the right answer is actually just make it seem human. You know, you want it to be personal. Well also make it personal. Let your personality shine through. And that can work. And that will [00:54:00] probably work. And at least it’ll feel authentic to you. The only risk of putting yourself in an email is it does make the rejection feel personal. So you still, but yeah Zeig and others are zagging or zag and others, or zigging. Stand out from the crowd. Do things a little bit different.
Be a little bit exciting. Don’t be boring. Who wants boring? I hate boring people. We all hate boring. And it’ll, it’ll serve you well, that being said, there are still some rules that are not to be overwritten and don’t zag on those rules.
George Coudounaris: Okay.
Ricky Pearl one’s gonna read a wall
George Coudounaris: I’m gonna, I’m gonna have to ask, I have to ask what these rules are, Ricky, I mean, you just gave such a ominous warning. I need to know what are these rules
Ricky Pearl Oh, like fine. You don’t have to go into all of them, but like some of them that would seem obvious, right? Don’t send an email, that’s a bloody essay. No one is reading a 1000 word email. Keep it short, sharp and succinct,[00:55:00] that’s a rule that shouldn’t be avoided. What you say is different, right?
Get creative. No problem. Getting your e email delivered. I spoke much earlier about the technical side. The technical side still has a lot of rules. Sending pictures, lots of links using spam words. A whole other things will land you in the promotions folder or the spam folder. So don’t break a rule that’s gonna land you in the spam folder The best message in the spam fault is still useless. So there are still some rules to follow, but this is just more as a concept. As a marketer, your creativity is still an asset when it comes to cold outbound.
George Coudounaris: And I love that there’s actually more of a rhetoric of creativity coming back into marketing and sales in B2B for so long, B2B was just so boring. Everyone was just doing the same old corporate boring thing. And I think there’s a real resurgence in creativity and I think because AI makes busy work so much easier [00:56:00] to do, like creativity is gonna be what helps you stand a apart, I think, and working your personality.
Ricky Pearl Yeah. And I’ve seen some incredibly fun, I would still call it outbound campaigns because direct gifting, as an example, as a category is still a part of outbound. If you are sending someone an unsolicited physical mail or gift card that’s still a form of outbound Who’s initiating the conversation? right? And that I’ve seen like the most creative campaigns that just wow me. Someone from there’s a group called the Sales Rebellion. Sent, bought some like fake wallets. Not fake wallets, just like cheap wallets from Amazon or eBay, and then filled them with a whole lot of interesting cards.
So one was like a coffee card for their local coffee shop. One was like a fake driver’s license for the sales rebellion. One was like an appointment reminder like you’d get from the dentist with the dates and a time for when this person was planning to phone them, like this whole awesome campaign.
And they FedExed it over saying, Hey, I found, [00:57:00] hey, you know, hey George, found your wallets. Wink, right? And you’d get this wallets and it’s like what a creative, cool way to start a conversation. You’re gonna take that call and you’re gonna say, mate, that was great. What did you want to talk
George Coudounaris: Yeah.
Ricky Pearl You know, and this costume for $15, which if you’re talking about total cost of customer acquisition, if you’ve got a $30,000 product is for nothing.
George Coudounaris: It’s phenomenal. That’s phenomenal. Yeah. Creativity is so incredibly important to set yourself apart and get that relationship off to a great start. Ricky, when it comes to actually measuring the outcomes of this outbound activity what should we be looking for?
Ricky Pearl I’m gonna get a little bit insulting Yeah. To marketers. This is the seller in me coming
George Coudounaris: Come on,
Ricky Pearl Don’t look for, look for vanity, don’t look for vanity metrics. Email open rates. Who cares? It’s response rates that matters. You know, you wanna go even deeper. You can say positive response rates, although negative response rates is still an important consideration.
So [00:58:00] the further down you and closer you can take that metric to revenue, the better. This is a big shift that we need within marketing is getting, you know, measuring MQs and website visits isn’t useful, right? How did that enter the sales funnel? How did that impact pipeline and how did that pipeline impact revenue?
That’s what we care about. So the metrics for outbound is no different, right? How many meetings are we getting out of it? Yeah. How much pipeline re is it creating and how much revenue is it creating? Now, sometimes it’s hard to measure revenue because we are six months away from revenue, nine months away from revenue, whatever your sales cycle is.
So work that back to what the right metric is that you can measure. So for example, for outbound, we would typically track a attended meetings with the sales rep or booked demos with the right ideal client profile. That’s a great metric. If you can go one step further, one back, you might say, well, [00:59:00] how many calls are connecting? How many people are saying they’re not interested? How many people are responding to the message? How many people are clicking from the message through to the websites? There’s lots of things that you can measure and you just wanna improve them and improve them cuz you need to work out. Is your message off?
Yeah. You can’t wait for six months. Ah, well we didn’t generate any revenue from that. Let’s go change that first email in the sequence. You need to be able to measure that much quicker. So yeah, like response rates to an email is important. All the rest isn’t as important to phone calls. It’s positive conversations. Both of those should lead to meetings, sat demos, or discovery calls, and those should lead to pipeline generation or opportunities opened
George Coudounaris: So just like marketing then, I mean, it’s just leading and lagging indicators. We’ve gotta look, we’ve gotta look for both. We’ve gotta do our best to tie it to revenue, but at the end of the day, we’ve gotta make sure that we’re winning business. From those uh, customers, those ideal customers that [01:00:00] we set out with our list to begin with, right?
We’ve gotta make sure that they’re the ones that we’ve actually been going after engaging and closing.
Ricky Pearl Yeah. And love that it’s um, an outbound, when you talk about your list, you can physically track it all the way through almost to an individual. In outbound we’re saying, Hey, we want to talk to George. What would you say to George? Okay, let’s say that to George. Then let’s see if George booked a meeting and George converted to a demo.
And that demo led to an opportunity, and that opportunity led to revenue. And it’d be like, Ooh, that was interesting. We were right with George. What was unique about George that we could replicate on the next person we talked to? Like it’s so easy to find those insights to increase your velocity and increase your win rights.
When you track all those metrics, right back to an in.
George Coudounaris: And then marketers, like those are the insights that you guys can then scale. That’s what paid media is for, is to gather those insights and then [01:01:00] use that budget to scale it to those people who fit. Those descriptions like there’s just such a great, I hate that word I’m filthy of myself and I’m about to say it, but synergy between sales and marketing.
There go, give me a
Ricky Pearl I’ll give
George Coudounaris: than synergy, please.
Ricky Pearl fun. Let me g let me give you like a, another really simple example of where there’s synergy. Often organizations are outbounding a list of people. They’ve got a list of a thousand people that they’re outbounding. What we would do with all of our clients is we would also enrich their personal email addresses. We would take those thousand people, enrich their personal email addresses, add them to a custom audience and retarget them. So now we are outbounding the thousand people and specifically retargeting them. Through an ad campaign. You know, like that’s
synergy. That is gen that is actual synergy. And another way where it makes it quite obvious, oh, this really is a marketing tie-in, this is a marketing operation.
If I’m doing retargeting ads to these individuals [01:02:00] and sending these same individuals emails, I’ve actually just added another channel to my broad surface of attack for this audience.
George Coudounaris: Absolutely love it. That is fantastic.
How long does it take for outbound to start working?
George Coudounaris: Ricky, my final question is, and again I suspect I’m gonna get it depends, but how long does it take for outbound to start working for any of our marketers listening, if say, if they want to get started with without bound with your agency, how long is it gonna take for them to start to see some.
Ricky Pearl Um, So I’ll start off by saying as a founder or as a marketer, if you’re willing to pick up the phone, you could have results this afternoon. But let’s now talk like broadly as a strategy, as a department, as an operation. Usually it will take about a month to set up an email campaign. You need to warm up your inboxes.
One little trick for everyone here, do not use your primary email domain to send cold emails. Separate it out from your normal domain. Get a lookalike domain, like a.com or a.co instead of your.com au [01:03:00] and use that for your email. But it takes a month to warm up an inbox. If you try and move too quickly, you’ll just land up in spam within that month.
You do your list, building your audience, building your writing of your messaging, et cetera. And so a month after starting, you can be outbounding with emails if you knew what you were doing. Calling can scale a bit quicker, cuz rarely all you need is the list in the message. And the biggest delay, there’s usually getting someone competent at delivering the message.
But if you already have that in your organization, again, you could be outbounding comfortably at an operational level within a week.
George Coudounaris: Wow. Okay. That’s a lot faster than we are used to. Seeing some feedback and results Ricky. I gotta say thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead. Before we wrap
Ricky Pearl I I, before I make that sounds super quick. I’ll just add that even if you started that email campaign within a month, you may not get it right first time. So often month two is tweaking and iterating, and usually month three is where you start [01:04:00] seeing greats returns coming. But I’ll also add that the biggest benefit that anyone I’ve ever known gets from outbound is actually the mid to long term.
It’s people who received your email, who ignored it, who weren’t necessarily interested, but six months later actually came across a problem that they wanted a solution for the inbox to find your. or you know, had some brand recognition. So when you came up on Google, they were like, oh yeah, I think I know that company.
They have no idea where they know you from, but they saw it. Talking to people, I say, no, not interested right now. And you’re following them up in a year saying, what about now? And they’re like, actually better time now. Mid to long term is still where all the winds are, so don’t just be looking at outbound as a short term. Sorry, I know I went on a massive tangent there.
George Coudounaris: no, that’s perfect like that. That’s really sage advice and I guess that’s why it is part of a strategy, right? The longer you do this, the more benefits you’re gonna see come back from it. To all listeners out there, if outbound isn’t something that you haven’t considered before, [01:05:00] please reach out to Ricky.
Ricky, where’s the best place for people to connect with you?
Ricky Pearl Yeah ricky pointer strategy.com au or on LinkedIn, I’ll always accept a connection request cuz I don’t wanna make anyone else feel rejected. No I’m always available on LinkedIn or on the email.
George Coudounaris: Awesome. You’ve been so generous with your time. Thanks so much for demystifying outbound for us and showing us how we can do it in a much more human yet scalable way. I think it just, it really aligns with our approach to B2B marketing with the B2B playbook, and I’m just so glad we could get you one.
Ricky,
Ricky Pearl Thanks for having me
George Coudounaris: Thank you so much for your
Ricky Pearl Thanks for having me
George Coudounaris: Cheers.
Ricky Pearl Tap.
Kev: Oh, George, another interview. Another very helpful expert in the field. It’s so heartening to see so many like-minded people out there doing what they do to help each other out
and to help everyone else.
George: Yeah, look, Ricky is definitely a great example of that and he shows us a much more human, yet, still very scalable way, Kev, to do outbound.
Kev: [01:06:00] That he does, that he does, and we loved a few key quotes from Ricky. . So the first one is sales is a subset of marketing. That one should come as no surprise, but, it is in, this day and age where sales is often a separate team, but it is a very important point. Sales is a subset of marketing, which means a lot of the activities that they do is influence and really crosses over with what
we’re doing here.
George: One other point that I love that Ricky made, Kev, was that you can get immediate feedback on messaging and what’s working or not when it comes to outbound and the level of insight and context that you get is really. Unparalleled, like inbound just takes so much longer. But outbound, it’s such a great fit for companies when they start because you get that immediate feedback.
Kev: That’s an example of a, another quote that he said , the upsides of outbound marketing are huge, and that’s very true. As that point proves, you get that immediate feedback, but there’s tons of other upsides. With outbound, you can get really big leads, [01:07:00] with very little lift, and plenty of other upsides besides that
we’re also talking about how outbound marketing is really about genuinely trying to start mature conversations with people that you actually believe you can help. It’s pretty different to what we often, associate. With outbound marketing when we hear it, where it seems like a lot of sleazy tactics to get people to click through and to buy something and to have a conversation.
But let’s refocus outbound marketing to what it should be. Genuinely trying to start mature conversations with people you
can actually help.
George: And that’s why Kev, I love when Ricky said, look, it’s not outbound or inbound. It’s sophisticated allbound marketing. That’s what we need to think of it as.
Kev: And it’s great because it takes the pressure off, making that decision of whether this is outbound inbound, where this, there’s a sales or marketing. You should really be focused on how can the team as a whole go after the one. [01:08:00] The 1% who will definitely want to work with you, who will become your dream customers, , and , don’t lose out because you are really scared of what the 80% who won’t buy from you anyways is saying.
Just focus on the 1%
that really wanna work with you.
George: And Kev, I think it’s pretty clear that Ricky thinks, and I think you and I agree, that the gap between marketers and salespeople is closing. , he said the future leaders are marketers who think like sellers, and sellers who think like marketers. I thought that was a terrific point.
Kev: Yeah, definitely. And on top of that, a few other key takeaways is Zeke, where other people zag. , so I think that one is pretty commonplace., but a great point again, just to keep in mind that you really need to, , break that attention cycle. Do something different to get that attention from your dream.
Customers from the audience that you’re trying to reach, and at the mid to long term is where you really start seeing the results for outbound. So don’t dismiss [01:09:00] things very quickly in the short term. , even though you’re getting really quick feedback and things like that, really big results come
in the mid to long term.
George: All right, listeners, go and connect with Ricky Pearl on email or LinkedIn and through his business pointer if you’re looking for something like that. As always, we’re absolutely stoked that more and more of you are joining us each Monday by listening to the B2B playbook. And if we’re gonna ask just one thing, it would be to please pass the show into someone who might enjoy it and get value from it.
Or leave us a short review on whatever platform it is you listen on. It’s a huge help to us, our future listeners and viewers, cause we’re on YouTube now and we really, really appreciate it. Take care. Thanks Kev, and see you next week.
Kev: Thanks, George. Thanks to listeners. See you next week
