We just started outbound at Breakout and we are at 40% open rate and 2% meeting booked rate from our very first sequence (this is when we have limited brand recognition and our online presence is in it's infancy).
At my previous startup HackerEarth, we regularly source $100k-200k deals from cold outbound 🤯 (even in this climate when there is so much outbound noise).
So why have the AI SDR platforms failed so spectacularly. The reason is because they, and 90% of us focus on the least important aspect of outbound - copy.
We spend countless hours 🕰️ obsessing over the subject line, the message, the personalization when that matters very less. People skim through your email in less than 15 seconds. As long as you are not shitty emails, that 20% improvement in your copy basically goes unnoticed.
The two most important thing for outbound to work are the following
Who are you sending it to?
Are they in-market?
Doesn't matter how many people you send your email to. If the list is not relevant, you are not going to get a response.
More importantly if your buyer is not in-market, nothing really matters. 🤷
So instead of obsessing over the copy, you should be obsessing over your list and figuring out who in your ICP is likely to be in-market.
In my previous company, we would have touched more than 100k prospects (even more) through outbound. I would be fooling you if I said we cracked how to figure out if they are in-market.
You can get some signals here and there but they are not reliable.
But the best way to hedge against that was to be persistent. When people think outbound they think 3 or 5 email sequence.
Instead think multiple touches over 6-9 months. You wouldn't know when your buyer is in-market so you need to give your self a large enough surface area and you need to combine that with a multi-pronged touch - email, social, SEO etc.
Outbound will never die, it needs patience and the focus on the right thing - list and timing.
Thanks to Milind for helping me crystallize this thought.
This post was originally shared by on Linkedin.