Outbound mistake: Underestimating the power of brand recognition

Outbound mistake: Underestimating the power of brand recognition

👇

Most sales teams focus way too much time of their outbound efforts on the coldest leads.

- The org builds a huge list of named accounts

- Named accounts are assigned to territories

- Reps choose the coolest sounding logos showing intent

- Then SDRs/AEs start dialing and sending out emails

Sound familiar?

This strategy won't work in 2024.

⛔️ Cold call pick-up rates are hovering around ~5%

⛔️ Cold email reply rates are around ~1%.

Sure, your top reps will do better. But your entire org. will not.

Your reps simply won't have enough at-bats for a generic strategy like this to work.

And you can't build an org-wide strategy around what your best reps can do.

💡 Solution: "The list is the strategy"

The answer to 2-5x the outbound results is choosing the targets more carefully.

The time to value is way faster than upskilling everyone, which will take months.

Help reps spend a disproportionate amount of time on targets familiar with your brand

✅ Step 1: Set up proper tracking

My friend Kyle Vamvouris is bull-ish on using proper dispositions & statuses for contacts. Then train reps on how to use these properly.

- Open (all leads that haven't been touched)

- Working (leads we're actively prospecting to)

- Prospect (responses, but no meeting booked)

- Booked

- Bad data

- Disqualified

This help reps quickly identify prospects in the "Prospect" and "Working" buckets—prospects with brand awareness who are most likely to engage.

✅ Step 2: Engage previously contacted prospects

Any sales org with a few years of data will have hundreds of prospects in this bucket. Create campaigns and workflows with your ops team to engage:

- Closed/lost deals

- Previous customers at new companies

- Prospects who no showed meetings

- Stalled deals with no next steps

- Prospects who responded to cold emails, but didn't book time

- Prospects who answered cold calls, but didn't book time

- Prospects downloading marketing content etc.

The list goes on. Make it easy for reps to see prospects within named accounts reps have previously engaged with.

Ops should spoon-feed reps with reports to execute on this.

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Most reps are spending way too much time on completely cold leads.

And not spending a disproportionate amount of time where there's brand recognition.

Agree or disagree?