2025 is the year to stop giving outbound so much lip service

2025 is the year to stop giving outbound so much lip service.

"We need to create a culture change this year"
"Pipeline generation is our #1 focus"

You can't have a culture of hunters without:

- Enabling the skills required to make outbound work
- Participating in those enablement sessions
- Making sure their front-line leaders are bought in

Giving it lip service ain’t gonna cut it.

It’s time to be about it instead of talking so much about it.

If you’re serious about making a culture shift and turning reps into hunters, here’s what our best clients do:

✅ 1) Create the narrative

A strong “why” and purpose to why outbound is so important for the future of the company’s growth. Bring reps into the vision of where the company is heading in the next 3-5 years and how their individual outbound efforts help with that.

✅ 2) Make it real for every rep

Help every rep dial in their sales math—the exact number of outbound activities it takes to hit their earnings target.

✅ 3) Get buy-in from front-line leaders

Front-line leaders should be participating in some of the outbound with reps. Run power hours, make calls, send emails. Do the thing with your reps, group workout style. This builds tremendous buy-in.

✅ 4) Focus on behavior change, not just activity

Use conversational intelligence to measure if reps use the new cold-calling approaches. Behavior drives quality activity, which drives outcomes. Measure behavior change.

✅ 5) Align incentives

There are many ways to do this. Some orgs pay a higher commission on new business. They give more inbound leads to reps who source outbound deals.

✅ 6) Public accountability

Create a public leaderboard where you most # of outbound sourced deals, $ outbound sourced pipeline, $ closed/won from outbound, largest outbound deal, etc.

Then talk about it in every weekly team meeting and all-hands call. Celebrate it in Slack.

✅ 7) Provide world-class enablement

Up-skill your reps. They need world-class strategies and tactics to make this work. And it has to work quick. Don't expect results if all you're doing is providing a talk track and telling them to get after it.

✅ 8) Refine & adapt

Last but not least—assess how the program is going and make changes as needed. Analyze what the best reps are doing. Share those best practices. Document them. Scale it across the rest of the org.

~~~

What would you add to the list?