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Why outbound sales just got interesting again · Data Beats Opinion

• 0:00
  Speaker A: AI might be steadily eroding the returns from paid ads and content marketing, but it's supercharging what's possible from Outbound. In this episode of DataBeats Opinion, we dive into how AI, programmatic, outbound and precision targeting are revolutionizing cold outreach. All right, welcome to another episode of Data Beats Opinion. I am your host Keith Perhack from Segmetrics. And today, super excited, we have Harris Kenney from Outbound Sync. Thank you so much for joining us.
• 0:32
  Speaker B: Thanks for having me, man.
• 0:33
  Speaker A: Yeah, I'm excited. So this actually came about because we are both tinyseed companies, and even within Tiny Seed, we are two companies that are very focused on kind of a similar market, which is that marketing, sales slash, how can we get people to become customers on the Internet kind of thing. We'd love to hear a little bit about what outbound Sync is and then get into maybe how you started it.
• 0:59
  Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. And then even within that, integration tools within that space. So we're sort of like very much cousins.
• 1:07
  Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:08
  Speaker B: In the Tiny Seed family, for sure, man. Yeah. So great to be on the show and just a fan in general of Segmetrics. I remember before we even applied, I'd always, like, admired what you were building here. And I saw in my head, like, okay, these are the kind of companies that Rob and Tracy and ANR are investing in. So super fun. Thanks for the opportunity to chat. And, yeah, I mean, on my side, where we got started was I was running an agency, an outbound agency, for about three and a half years, and the tools didn't talk to each other. You know, we were sending cold email, and we were a HubSpot partner as well at the time. And the tool we were using, Smart Lead, Smart Lead Data, did not integrate with HubSpot at all. And we had customers who were asking that for that. And so we started there just getting Smart leads data into HubSpot, and we have just basically built on that in the last two years. So then we added Salesforce, and then we added a few more email sequencers.
• 2:02
  Speaker A: Did you continue on with the agency after that, or how have you kind of done the agency with the software or shut down the agency or what was kind of your strategy there?
• 2:11
  Speaker B: Yeah, great question. So, well, you kind of got to go back a little bit, but I started working for myself in 2019, before my wife and I started having kids and growing a family. I just wanted to have the flexibility. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do, but I Had had, you know, about a decade of experience doing sales and marketing growth stuff and I thought I would be able to piece something together. So I was doing a fractional sales for a little while and it was tough. Well, about like eight months after I started the business, there was that whole like global pandemic situation. Yeah. Which wasn't the best timing. And I think like as navigating, I was able to get through that somehow on my own and realized like, oh, you know, it's really obvious, but if I'm not working, if I get sick or something, money stops. And so I felt very unsure. And even within that, because I was a one person consultant, like I didn't get any help from anybody. There was literally no program at any level of government and not even my own bank was like getting back to me about like options. And I remember just being like, wow, this is, I'm really on my own here.
• 3:22
  Speaker A: It's something I don't think a lot of people realize. They see the single founder out there and they're like, oh, it's the dream life. And it's like there are a lot of things, society is not really built for that. Right. Like getting a loan. And that's why things like, I don't remember the name of the bank, but there was a, the, the Silicon Valley Bank. I don't remember. Maybe it's just Silicon Valley bank. But one of the reasons it was so popular among founders was because it understood SaaS and it understood this idea of O, I don't have assets because we're a software company. I don't have revenue, I have mrr. Right. And the value of that over a standard. Yeah.
• 4:01
  Speaker B: A lot of caught up. Yeah. And they wouldn't. And I think they didn't require as much like personal commitment to underwrite like the companies. And they also had this like ability to like, if you raised venture capital, they would like manage that, those funds for you. Yeah, definitely. I think it's like a segment of. And at this time I was just running a consultancy. So there was no money, nobody's money. And there was even a person I knew who was like a VP of business banking who I had known from years earlier who was at the credit union I was at. And I remember messaging him on LinkedIn and being like, hey man, credit union who? They're not an SBA preferred lender. So I have access to nothing at the moment. Do you have any idea? Anyway, the whole thing was just really. Actually it was pretty intense. So I like left that period one of the thoughts as we were going through, that was, okay, I gotta, like, how else can I make money? How else can I build a business to support my life of wanting to be a good dad and a good husband? And found Rob's podcast stars for the rest of us. And so when I was listening to that podcast and I ended up having a few different SaaS ideas, ended up turning my sort of consultancy into more of an agency. And then from the agency, the goal I eventually was to have a SaaS. I had five different ideas. The fourth one of five was up on Sync, which was the best that took off the most. And so I tested it slowly. I bundled it with services, then I sold it on its own as, like, an okay SaaS. But revenue grew. I joined Tiny Seed, and then when I joined Tiny Seed, I committed to shutting down the agency completely. And it was just the summer of 2024 where I was doing both. And that was 0 out of 10. Do not recommend. It was excruciatingly hard as a solo founder of two really different businesses. So on the other side of that now, agency's done all in on the SaaS.
• 5:56
  Speaker A: And yeah, it's interesting because that's essentially the story that we had as well. And we shut down the agency fully, I think, a year after Tiny Seed. So we had, like, some straggling clients that we continued to work with after Tiny Seed. But it was exactly. You say it's impossible to grow that SaaS while you're focusing on an agency and making that trade for time to money versus time to no money.
• 6:22
  Speaker B: Right.
• 6:22
  Speaker A: Because an agency is. You are getting paid for how much you work. Right. It's dollar in, dollar. It's time out, dollar in. Right. And a SaaS is the opposite, where you are spending a lot of time upfront for no return with the hope that that then builds on itself and stacking bricks to get your return on the end. But it's a hard decision to make when you're running that agent. It's like, oh, I can work for two days and bill that out at billable hours, or I can work for two days and get zero. Yeah, right.
• 6:55
  Speaker B: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
• 6:58
  Speaker A: Yeah. You can actually see in our MRR chart exactly where we stopped, where we let clients go and started focusing on psychometrics. Every time we do that, revenue went up. Our MRR went up.
• 7:08
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 7:09
  Speaker A: So.
• 7:09
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, for sure.
• 7:10
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 7:11
  Speaker B: And then, you know, and then combine that we had, you know, growing the family, We've got two kids now, and we went through some really tough Medical, family, medical situation during that time. So, I mean, the last. It's been a long couple of years here, so, I mean, knock on wood. I mean, things could always get worse, I guess. But I do feel comfortable about the position that we're in today. I feel like we've got, got a great team, it's an interesting space, we're growing. So I'm hopeful, I'm cautiously optimistic. But, you know, and that's something I
• 7:43
  Speaker A: want to dive into because sales has changed a lot in the last, I will even say like four months. Yeah, like it is. I am inundated with sales outreach where as before, like, occasionally I get a call, I'd maybe have one or two emails a day. And it is constant now. Yeah, and I'd love to hear what it. How do you see the industry changing right now? Like.
• 8:09
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, for sure it is interesting. I mean, it's a real cat and mouse game across these different channels and kind of where, I mean, we can talk about individual channels and how people are optimizing, we can talk about how AI is being used across these channels and we could talk about kind of like where I'm seeing people win right now. I mean, there's so many different things, like topics within this that we could talk about. I mean, I think that in general, the velocity is crazy fast right now. Things are changing really, really, really fast. You know, we were talking about, let's
• 8:43
  Speaker A: start at the macro level. Like what's the, what's the. I mean, I think everyone knows that it's AI that's changing this, but what's the overarching change that you're seeing? And then let's dive into some of the specific channels that. And talk about how they're changing and some channels going down the toilet and some becoming better. Right?
• 9:01
  Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I think that overall what I, what I would describe as happening is the transition to programmatic outbound is that if you look, no matter what channel you're looking at, whether it's email, phone, LinkedIn, I mean, even DMs on a platform like X or direct mail. I mean, literally anything with the exception of, to an extent, even WhatsApp, I mean, SMS I think, is the one that's kind of less affected by this because there's such clear rules from the FCC and there's such a clear penalty that most people just, they're just not messing with it. But outside of that, everything is going programmatic, which means like the ability to crank volume in a lot of different ways. I mean, and in different ways. But to me that's what's happening is that what was a one to one activity is now becoming a one to many activity across every channel. And that's putting pressure on tons of different systems in tons of different places. And at bounceync, we are part of that. I mean we are part of that evolution that's happening for better or for worse. That as people are exploring these new tools, especially point solutions to get, you know, alpha or to get return on these different point solutions, they're like venturing further off the path into more of these niche tools to accomplish niche tasks. We help bring that data back into the CRM. And that's kind of our job to be done is when you pursue these new tools, you know, you don't want to silo that data out in another place. And so it's sort of the informal part of the neighborhood. Whereas I think psychmetrics is covering a lot more of the, like, more formal, established kind of tools of the ones that we tend to work with are. They're more on the edge, I guess.
• 11:00
  Speaker A: So when you talk about the niche tactics, what does that mean? Like what are some. Can you give me some examples?
• 11:06
  Speaker B: Yeah, so. Well, I mean like one interesting one, email gets talked about a lot. So we don't have to talk about like oh like deliverability is getting harder. I think like a lot of people know that phones are an interesting one to talk about because it's a little different. So there's multiple ways that people are doing dialing today. And so if you think about it as like an equation, like if you're doing X number of dials, you've got like your numerator denominator. One way that's been more like in vogue in the last few years has been parallel dialing. So a sales rep can be using a tool like Aurum or Nooks and they can be dialing multiple numbers at the same time. And so like if I want to get more connects, if I want to have more conversations, one way I can do it is by calling more people. And one way to call more people is to have like multiple phone numbers dialing simultaneously. And that when there's a connect on any one of those lines, it then passes the connection to a person to pick up the phone and like pick up the conversation. So that's like one thing that's happening on the dialing side, parallel dialers. But the other thing that's happening is power dialers aren't new. That's where you Have a dialer that works through a list of numbers sequentially like one after the other after the other after the other. And there's often like a human in the loop sitting there like waiting for a connect to happen and it auto dials for them. But the, what, the innovation that's happening there recently is the idea of scoring a phone numbers for the propensity to answer. And so the idea here is that like there's a percentage of the population that answers the phone. They for whatever reason prefer or have to get information that way because of their job or because of their whatever. And so there's these data providers that are scoring with a P score, propensity score like a P1 is likely to answer. And so if you're a phone person and these dialer, these data providers identify you as such, then I actually don't have to increase my number of dials like horizontally. I can, I can improve my connect rate by actually lowering my denominator, calling fewer people. But the people who I call have a higher quality, 25 to 40% chance of answering. And I've tested this myself and I've gotten literally 40% connect rates which is very high. Um, and, but in that case you use a different stack. You can even use a regular phone because you're just calling like 10 people one after the other manually. You don't, you don't even have to go all these things because you're pushing the, like, you're pushing the validation and stuff like that to, to, to another part of the stack where someone else is doing that for you. So anyway, but like this, like these are just two examples of how to call phone numbers. And like even within that you've got dialing mobile numbers. Even within that you've got data providers that are now really specializing by, by geography. So it's like oh well this provider is really good for Europe, this provider is good for Australia. You also have like verification of numbers where they just like check and make sure a line is still active. So like this is just phones but like this is happening everywhere basically at every point of the stack there are, there's this like unbundling and like
• 14:02
  Speaker A: it's, it's really fascinating because from the outside, because I'm not in sales, we've, we've done sales, we've worked with sales companies before to do all this kind stuff but we always see it as a numbers game that is now increasing because of AI and this parallelism. Right? So you can now where you could maybe do a thousand or five thousand people. Now you can do 100,000 or a million people just because it is so paralyzed with AI and being able to do that stuff. But what you're talking about is almost using that different type of technology, but that technology to go back to almost kind of like an 80s or 90s strategy of sales calls where you are more in depth on each person. Yeah, but you have a much better list, you have a much better quality lead for each call or for each outlook that you're outreach that you're doing.
• 14:59
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's definitely starting to happen. And I think like you're seeing much, much, much better segmentation now where people are using like web enabled AI agents to find not just like software companies, but software companies that have SOC2 and they're finding that by going to the site, going to the footer, finding the security page, then the web agent goes to the security page or they're looking for metadata of like an image that includes like SoC2 ping or whatever and making a determination on like. And so then now you know, if I'm a company that does like GDPR compliance, I say hey, notice you have SOC 2 and I know you're a software company. And so software companies, they all, they all sell globally, you know, have you thought about GDPR compliance or whatever? So yeah, I do think and the potential to do that kind of stuff at scale. So like I can feed a list of 50,000 domains to an agent and have that, have one at a time, a web enabled agent, check each website. And now I've got, I go from 50,000 down to like 10,000 or whatever. Um, and then within that I can do, I can do, I can do more, I can segment based on whatever, you know, headcount size and things like that. So yeah, I, I do think that, I do think that it's like there is like a potential for a return to like much better segmentation, much better list building. But I mean I will say like, honestly like sometimes it is a numbers game and it's just like, but, but then the question is like what's the offer? So it's like worse I'm seeing people, this is where I think Programmatic Outbound and like outbound as marketing. Like it's moving under the marketing umbrella where I'm seeing people use Programmatic Outbound to like get newsletter subscribers. Like B2B brands are like just, just like promoting podcast. Like they're not even trying to get a meeting, they're just like hey, we just interviewed someone.
• 16:46
  Speaker A: How does that how does. Okay, my mind's getting a little bit blown. How. How does that even work? I mean, I assume it's similar to ads, but is that.
• 16:54
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's like an ad now, essentially it's a private ad network.
• 16:59
  Speaker A: That's crazy.
• 17:00
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 17:01
  Speaker A: And I would assume not phone. I would assume that's mainly.
• 17:04
  Speaker B: That would be more email and LinkedIn.
• 17:05
  Speaker A: Yeah, DM stuff.
• 17:07
  Speaker B: Like that stuff. Yeah, I mean, I mean, depending what the thing is, right? Like, like, let's say like people are doing like dinners and stuff, right? Like, like calling a list and being like, hey, we're hosting a dinner. Let me know if you're interested. It's going to be, you know, at the same. What is the Shopify at Shop Talk or whatever Shopify is like event is. But hey, we're going to have a big like event at like a Brazilian steakhouse. Like let me know if you're, you know, just. So that's like a marketing thing. So some of these sales tools are being now deployed towards like marketing objectives. So everything is kind of getting shuffled up and some people are getting incredible results with that. Like, I know people run really successful plays. Excuse me, Getting guests on podcasts. Really successful. Using cold email to do that.
• 17:45
  Speaker A: Yeah, we get, we get a lot of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 17:50
  Speaker B: And so the idea would be like, oh, for this podcast, if you're like, oh, we want to a, we want to get guests. You're like, you know, if you want to record every day, you want to turn this into a daily, you could spin up a campaign and I guarantee you, you could fill a recording calendar with, with people who would be legit.
• 18:02
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 18:02
  Speaker B: Not saying you should or need to, but like that's the kind of stuff that people are using these tools to like do all sorts of different things. And then if you're like a big SaaS with a PLG motion, I mean, fixer AI, they've talked about this. I mean, they're sending, I think like literally over a million emails a month, but they have a huge PLG motion. And so people see the name, they end up on the website, they see it again, they end up signing up later. Like it's, it's ads. Like you. Exactly what you said. Like people are thinking of it as ads.
• 18:27
  Speaker A: And just to clarify, for people who might not PLG product led growth. Correct.
• 18:31
  Speaker B: Okay, yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry.
• 18:33
  Speaker A: Just as you were.
• 18:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah, so they're. Yeah, they're a PLG product LED growth company. Right. So like a very low cost product so historically the, the, the like heuristic was like oh, you have to have a high ACV to do outbound because you have to have a sales LED motion. And the point of outbound is to get a meeting. But like now people are spinning up like whole panels of email accounts so that the cost per account is like essentially free.
• 19:01
  Speaker A: That's crazy.
• 19:01
  Speaker B: Yeah, so it's weird. Oh man, it's weird out there.
• 19:04
  Speaker A: Yeah. So this kind of ties into something that we're seeing recently which is advertising has started to eat itself. AI has taken over search to a degree. Ads have started to go the AI route which means that your ad optimization is now at the behest of Facebook and Google. So there's not many levers you get to touch anymore. It's essentially pay money to Google and they get you people. That's the dynamic now. And so a lot of people are trying to find what is the next thing. How do we get ads in front of people? How do we get promotions in front of people that are not the standard ad networks? And it's interesting that it's co opting almost the outbound for a marketing or ad play.
• 19:58
  Speaker B: Yeah, definitely.
• 19:59
  Speaker A: That's fascinating to me.
• 20:00
  Speaker B: Well, I mean fixer, when they've talked about this, they've compared it, they've literally said we are going to compare cold email to meta ads and see which has a lower cac, lower cost of acquisition or for the cost to acquire the customer. So like they're literally comparing it head to head on, on a cost per customer basis.
• 20:19
  Speaker A: That's crazy. You said they're doing email or they're doing it just all in. Wow, that's crazy.
• 20:25
  Speaker B: Now they have a huge tam. If you have an inbox, if you, I mean frankly a lot of people have multiple email inboxes. So I mean their TAM isn't 7 billion, it's like, I mean like multiple tens of billions because most people have more than one email address. Most people have two at least if they have an email address they have a work and a personal right. So it, and that's who they're selling to. It's like this AI thing that manages your inbox and does a bunch of other things. So anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really interesting, really, really interesting time with that. And then out of home stuff is picking up and like this in person stuff and events and so it feels like everything's in the air right now from, from what I see on my side of things.
• 21:05
  Speaker A: So how would I think that there's Always a pull in in companies about, oh, should I do more marketing? Should I do more SEO? Should I do content? Should I do outbound? Normally the, the traditional wisdom is kind of like what you said. When you have a high cost product, that's when you start sales. But what it sounds like is that sales or outbound should start pretty much at the same time that you would do marketing. I guess in your mind, what would be the lever? When do you make that decision? It's like, okay, now I should probably start trying to do outbound even if it's not sales led Outbound.
• 21:46
  Speaker B: Yeah, totally. I mean it depends on what size of company and all these other caveats. But like in general, the number one failure mode I see is failure to launch. It's like they just, people say I should try that and they don't do it. And I mean, frankly, like this isn't a sales pitch for me for our product. People who use it, they tend to be more at scale. They tend to have teams and stuff. Right. So if you're like a smaller company, I am like not. I mean, if you want to use our product, heck yeah, great. But like in general, that's not our typical customer, you know, so this isn't even like I'm not trying. My goal is not to educate the market and to get more people going from zero to one on outbound. Like it's people who are doing outbound who want to like attribute it better. That that's kind of our customer. Right? It's kind of probably, it's like a lot more of like a segmetrics type, more sophisticated like rebots and marketing. Org. So like if you're not doing outbound right now, I have nothing to benefit from you sending 100 emails a week or whatever. Like I have nothing to sell you basically. But the number one failure mode I see in general is like not doing it or not doing it like enough where it even matters. And I think I found great for tight feedback loops. It forces you to ask hard questions about who are we selling to and what's an offer and if we can't come up with an offer, like we got a problem really, you know, and you can run like simple campaigns. And I think that, I think, I think a company should always have at least one outbound channel running in some way at some time. I'm heavily biased towards sales and marketing and growth. But I think like if you're not growing, you're dying. And I think like you have to constantly be investing in growth. I. I do. I do feel pretty strongly about that. And I think there's almost no amount of focus you can do. You can't focus too much on. On. On trying to invest in growth in the company in some way, because otherwise, I don't know. I mean, I'm not saying it to grow forever and be a trillion dollar company, but like, you, you know, you got to be going somewhere, right? I mean, what do you think? I mean, you've been in the game for a long time, a lot longer than me. What do you think?
• 23:41
  Speaker A: I agree. I agree. I think that you. I think the always growing is. I think there is a point at which you're like, yep, we're good. We're definitely not there yet. We're still, like, I still have aspirations of much more revenue that we're doing right now, but I 100% agree that it is the focus. And like you said, the launching of that, and not just the initial launch, but the continued improvements and working on a singular marketing strategy. And this is always one of the problems that we had back at the agency where we worked with so many different clients, we knew so many different things, and it's all very exciting. Webinars are fun. Like YouTube video content is fun. Like SEO is fun, like, quizzes are fun. Like all of this stuff. Podcasts are fun. Like, all this stuff is really fun to do. And it all works as long as you focus on something. And the problem that we always had was that we would jump between multiple things and we wouldn't put the effort into each of them because we were trying the next thing. But when we, the clients that we worked with who were really succeeding, they found one or maybe two things and they just went all in on it. One of our clients, he did a weekly webinar, and at the beginning, there was no one on it. It was like he was in a room talking to himself, and he would put it out on Facebook afterwards. And he did that week after week. He got better and better. And then there was one person and 10, and then soon there's like 300 people on these weekly webinars every week. Right. Like, it just. You got to put in the effort. There's no immediate thing that you're going to do and just succeed right off the bat, or if you do, you're very lucky. So it really is like you're saying you show up, you do the work for one thing. Continuously.
• 25:33
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, I think that. Yeah, I think people just don't try. Like, I don't know. Yeah, they think it's just going to happen or whatever. It's like you, you gotta, I mean the amount of effort it takes is extraordinary. And I see that with our agencies. And you ran the agency yourself. I mean that's one thing, you know, we talked about like some hot takes. One hot take that I've seen is like, I think people give agencies a bad rap. And like what I've seen is that our agencies work exceptionally hard and in. I'm not going to say it, I'm not going to percentage on this but in many instances I see the agency is working harder than the client to try to generate results for the client. And there's this like idea of like the principal agent problem and like in theory the principal, the person who's hiring the agent or agency should care more about the problem because it's their company, it's their whatever. But I have seen the inverse to be true. And I just think it takes an extraordinary, extraordinary amount of effort. Even when you hire someone to do it, I think sometimes they're working harder on it than you think. Now that's not always true obviously, but from what I've seen and working really close to these people, like they really, really care. You know, they are not being like, haha, I got a good retainer and now I'm going to go, you know, mess around and do nothing. Like you see the timestamps of Slack messages and emails and you just know that they are really trying to figure stuff out. And you know, I see them in WhatsApp groups talking to each other and sharing notes and trying to find ideas about like how to get an edge and how to get it to work better. And so that is something I think that like people that are in these growth roles, I think they like care in general. They care a lot and work a lot harder than people may realize from the outside. And when someone is having success, there's probably so much more that went into that than you know, when you're looking at it.
• 27:11
  Speaker A: This is not where I was planning on taking the conversation, but I. This is fast. I have many thoughts about this.
• 27:18
  Speaker B: Okay, go, go on.
• 27:19
  Speaker A: I love to dive into this again. I agree. I would not. I, I agree with you. I think that there are some agencies and some agencies that do that, that it is a numbers game. They don't care. You're just another number. They want to keep you happy. But there is not the sophistication or knowledge within the agency to be able to support you correctly. Those definitely Exist. But I agree that especially with smaller agencies, they really want you to succeed. And I would also agree that when the principal at the company is getting an agency, the agency does care more. And the reason is because if the principal cared more, then they would do it themselves or hire someone internally. Right? They would not. If it's a core piece of your business, you are not going to get an agency to do it. You're going to build an internal team to do it. If you're testing it out, if this is just another thing you're doing, if you don't know what you're doing with it, then you'll probably get an agency or something. But I agree that usually the client wants the result. They don't care about the day to day of what that actually is and they don't care about the process that the agency is going through to do it as long as they are delivering those results.
• 28:48
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And definitely the results matter more than anything else. Right. But it's just like, I don't know, I just, I feel like people are, are really trying and they're getting really creative and they're trying new things and I feel like there's not enough credit given for that. Cause I just see it, you know, and you see people like, ah, yeah, we had some churn on this one. You can tell they're like, kind of like, dang it, we, you know, we threw a lot at that. You know, I think for smaller agencies, I can't speak to like big advertising agencies that have hundreds or thousands of employees. I just don't have exposure to that part of the Martech ecosystem. And so I just, I just don't know what it's like to work for one of those big shops. But you know, agencies under 50 people is kind of where I have a lot of experience. And that's what I'm seeing.
• 29:30
  Speaker A: Yeah, I agree, I agree. Awesome. So I want to go into some other things that I have a whole list of things I want to talk about. So of course we're looking at outbound and then response rates and of course wanting to become a customer. But that's kind of the end piece of the whole thing. From that, hey, I'm doing outreach to, hey, you're a customer. What are some of the metrics, the things that you look at to say, hey, we're doing well here, you know, those, those kind of leading indicators instead of the lagging indicators of like becoming a customer?
• 30:06
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think like one of the first ones is how long does it take you to ship a campaign? So if it takes you a long time to ship a campaign, you have some internal organizational issue. Like it shouldn't take a month to ship an outbound campaign. And so like speed to shipping of campaign, it's like you're, you have some alignment issue, you've got some product market fit issue. Like there should be some level of understanding of who are we selling to, what do they care about, how should we segment the list? I'm not saying it's easy, but it shouldn't be that hard. So if it's taking a long time to ship campaigns, that's like your first sign of a problem. And then after that. So assuming you're shipping, then you kind of jump down to reply rates. So if the reply rate is really low, like under 1%, you may have an infrastructure issue, you may have a data problem, you may have like an inbox problem, or bad phone numbers or LinkedIn accounts are getting locked or whatever channel you're using. But like if it's below 1%, it's suspiciously low, especially with email because you should be getting out of office replies and stuff at a minimum. So then if you get that reply rate up a bit, okay, we can send something, it's arriving at some level of deliverability, we're getting some level of engagement with it, then that's where you start looking at, okay, what's the response rate within that? And this is where one of my opinions about the agencies come from is that what we find is that agencies are getting oftentimes 2 to 3x the pipeline influence that they're getting credit for. And the reason why we know that is because we're sending the data to HubSpot and Salesforce where there's better attribution reporting inside of the CRM just for outbound anyway. And so we can see, oh well, here's like 50 people who got emails, never responded, but actually did convert. They clicked on an ad, got it, or they signed up for the product or whatever. And so that's where my opinion is. Once you get the replies and you're kind of, you've got some level of engagement, that's when you have to kind of open the aperture a little bit and say, okay, there's multiple forms of a conversion. The gold standard is we get a reply, it's positive, it leads to a meeting, the meeting is positive, it leads to a deal, the deal closes.
• 32:07
  Speaker A: Great.
• 32:08
  Speaker B: Outbound crushed it. We made money out of thin air. But there are other outcomes short of that. Or that don't meet every single one of those checkboxes that are still positive, where it's like another person within the company signed up or that person signed up, but like a day later through another channel or whatever. And so that's kind of where we see where we're, we are trying to get people to focus a little bit when we look at getting the data into an environment with the rest of the data that they have.
• 32:35
  Speaker A: That's actually fascinating to me because we see the same thing with advertisements where a lot, you know, it's going back to billboards, which are not trackable at all, but they are things that influence people to purchase. And so you're saying you're showing the same thing with outreach where. And now that you're saying this, I have done this internally as well, where I get some sort of outreach. I forward it to someone on my team. It's like, hey, we should look into this. They're not responding, I'm not responding. But we're going to go to the website and look around, right?
• 33:06
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 33:07
  Speaker A: Yeah. Fascinating.
• 33:08
  Speaker B: And like anecdotally, like, I helped a tiny C company founder. Just like as a buddy, I built a list for him and he shipped a campaign and he was like, well, I'm not getting a lot of replies, but my website traffic is noticeably up. Like, he's like, I can see it. He's like, I've been looking at this chart for three years. He's like, I know what our, I know what our web traffic is. You know.
• 33:29
  Speaker A: Right.
• 33:29
  Speaker B: And, and, and I can see some of them are clicking the secondary domain. Try acme.com. they're going to that secondary domain and then it's redirecting. Some of them are clearly just typing in the name in Google or whatever and then landing through search. So it's like anecdotally, like we have those little, those little examples and then we have others that go further. So yeah, this is where I think like programmatic outbound, like outbound as marketing. Like, I don't know, I don't have like a single unifying term for all this. But like, I think the parallels are there. And that's what's funny about it is like all these lessons that like GTM engineering or scaled outbound community, like marketing figured this stuff out, like 15, 20, you know.
• 34:05
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 34:05
  Speaker B: In some cases 100 years ago, people are like going back to Ogilvy to be like, what if your subject line wasn't bad? You know? But it's like, how old are these Ogilvies you know, So I think there's a lot of catching up to do on the sales side with this stuff.
• 34:17
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think you just touched on something that drives me nuts the most about marketing as it becomes scalable like this. Right. It's all so bad. Right? It was bad before, but there was a floor because you had to spend a lot of time and money to get the ads. Yeah, there were bad TV commercials, but you're spending a million dollars, $100,000, whatever to get it and to like record the thing and to like edit and to get it on there. Like there's a modicum of effort going into it now that it's all AI generated. There's so much that's just like schlock going out there. We did an audit of some of our ads that were being auto generated because the way Google works with ads now is you list up a bunch of terms and then it picks them and puts them together in the best way. And one of the ads was Segmetrics. Segmetrics. Segmetrics segment. And that was the whole ad. That was one of the combinations that Google was like, this would be a great ad for your business.
• 35:23
  Speaker B: Well, that's like that old meme of like that show Pimp My Ride or it's like, yo, I heard you like Segmetrics. So I put psychometrics on your segment. Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, how many impressions does it take for someone to remember you? So if you just stuff them all into one ad, then you, you know,
• 35:42
  Speaker A: oh, that's the strategy.
• 35:45
  Speaker B: It's like you could take nine women and make a baby a month.
• 35:48
  Speaker A: Exactly. The nine touch points you need before you, before you relate to a brand, they're just getting it all out of.
• 35:53
  Speaker B: Exactly, exactly one ad. Nine mentions. Boom.
• 35:57
  Speaker A: But it really does show. Like I think there is a. We started doing this with ads and I started doing this a little bit with outreach. But you put quality in. Better subject lines, better relationships and not the AI schlock that everyone else is. And I say AI derisively, but like any non, any fake schlock really is just not going to convert because people can smell that a mile away.
• 36:26
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 36:27
  Speaker A: And it really is going back to old school marketing from even the 50s and 60s and 70s and stuff like that, where you were paying for that stamp, you were paying someone to put it in an envelope and send it out. You had to put care into it. Now in order to stand out, you have to put care into It. Because it is possible in a month to go through the entire population of the world and email every single one of them. Right.
• 36:57
  Speaker B: Spam your tam.
• 36:59
  Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
• 37:00
  Speaker B: Yeah. No, for sure. I do think so. I think you're seeing a lot more creativity as a result of that. And there's ways that people are using AI that are really, really cool. Segmentation, I think is really cool. Going through programmatically and splitting up and saying, okay, yes, it's a SaaS company, but is this the right kind of SaaS company? Like, to me, those ways of using AI are really powerful and can result in significantly better campaigns. But if it's like, feeding the whole thing and having it, you know, GPT. Right. Like a whole thing, it's like, I don't know about that.
• 37:31
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's. I have seen it be the best for analyzing and summarizing, much less creating. My favorite one that I got recently was like, hey, I just went because we're in Portland, Oregon and said, hey, I just went to the food carts downtown on Washington last week. They were great. Those closed down four years ago. It was like, no, you didn't. It was a very sore point when those were shut down. So, yeah, it's just stuff like that. Like, yeah, yeah, I could rant about that forever.
• 38:10
  Speaker B: Well, yeah, I think that you have outdated data or you have, like, tactics that someone came up with a while ago, and then they get old and you got to come up with a new one. So it's like the idea of, like, ps, I heard this restaurant is good. Like, you know, have you ever been there or whatever?
• 38:23
  Speaker A: Those things do work 15 years ago.
• 38:25
  Speaker B: Yeah, I know. But here's the thing. You know, there's that quote, like, the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. So I think, like, to take a step back from the space that you and I live in, which is, like, deeply saturated, very online, little cynical, probably not to put words in your mouth, but my assumption, the whole economy is not like that, actually. And some of these tactics that you'd see someone on LinkedIn, like, you know, cutting about, are crushing in different verticals that are like, less online and. Or in different geographies where there's less. Less saturation. So, like, I know people that are running campaigns like it's five years ago with local. With language localization and just absolutely printing money in different countries where, you know, these. So I think, like, it depends on where you're sitting in some cases, and it's not the same everywhere. And you know that. But I'm just saying for the sake of saying, like, there are some exceptional results that we're seeing. Some people are getting because they're finding again that Alpha. Clay. Clay has been talking about GTM Alpha, but they're finding where there's something that like someone doesn't know, that they don't know that about the restaurant thing and they don't know that about whatever tactic. And so they're like, oh, okay, hey, like I've had people send emails in other languages, like, you know, in Dutch and get replies back of like, oh, like, thanks so much for the note, you know, and stuff like that. Whereas, you know, not everyone's going to be maybe that, you know, not it's going to be like that. So it depends. It depends on where you're sitting at, what industry you're in and what country you're in and what language it's in. And some of these things that we're. We. That we know are not like everyone doesn't know kind of thing.
• 40:07
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that's honestly a huge takeaway, which is that. And I have to keep reminding myself of this a lot, which is that I am not necessarily my average customer because I think about this stuff every day of every minute of every week of every year. Like, I'm constantly thinking about analytics and metrics and what is the best way to. And 90% of people just are not thinking like that and taking that to outbound. I remember when, you know, your emails always say, hey, Bob, right? If your name's Bob. Right. And I remember first time I saw this about 15 years ago, I was blown away. And then in the body of the copy, they would also use the mail merge. So it's like. And I'm just saying this is my friend Bob. And it just. The first time I ever saw that, I was like, it's so obvious. But man, it just connects. Right? And now that's old hat. I see that. I'm like, oh, he just mail merged it. But you're exactly right. So many people don't even realize that you can schedule emails ahead of time. Right. And load them into a sequence that. Yeah, it's. I still remember Patrick McKenzie. You know Patrick McKenzie, I believe.
• 41:20
  Speaker B: I mean, I know him personally. I don't know him personally, but of course I'm familiar with his work.
• 41:24
  Speaker A: Yeah. Patio 11. Back when he was doing the bingo cards, he had an automated script that sent. I think it was weekly or monthly, I can't remember, but essentially it sent the weekly bingo cards. It was Handcrafted bingo cards sent to all the users every week or whatever. And it was just a randomized script that grabbed one of the bingo card sets that he had made and sent it out to everyone. And one time the script failed and was not able to send and he got a bunch of emails from people being like, we always love your newsletter. We're so sad that you didn't send it out today.
• 41:59
  Speaker B: Oh, my gosh.
• 42:00
  Speaker A: And it's, it's just, you're not. Even if, like us, the business came out of our needs and we would be customers of this product if we had not built it, we're still not our customers.
• 42:17
  Speaker B: Right.
• 42:17
  Speaker A: Because we are in this every single day in a level that 99% of our customers are not.
• 42:24
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And I think, like, you know, one thing that's been so interesting to me is like, you know, you talk about the mail merge idea and stuff. I mean, one area where people are getting really interesting results right now is there's like whole swaths of the economy where they're just like, not on LinkedIn, like at all. The company isn't on LinkedIn. The people aren't on LinkedIn. They're just like, out working like a normal person has worked for the last however many, you know, however, however you think we've been here, I mean, millions of years, just getting up out of bed, walking out of their house and going and doing something for somebody out in the real world. And so there's like parts of the economy that literally aren't online. I mean, now they may use internally, they may use QuickBooks or something like that. Sure. I'm not saying the business is like analog, but they're all. Org chart is not on there, all their, you know, air and AP clerks aren't on there and stuff like that, you know, so, you know, whereas like, in our space, it's like the companies that we tend to work with, all of them on, all of them are on LinkedIn or 99% of them are. And not only that, all of them have posted probably within the last three months, which is like such, such an exceptionally small part, small rare thing of the economy, you know, whereas in our space, like, you could totally run a play. If I'm running outbound for segmetrics, I could totally reasonably run a play where I go and I scrape the list of all these contacts and then I go scrape their LinkedIn and then I go scrape their last 10 posts and for, for whatever chunk of the list I can get a post for. I reference that, their most recent post. Whereas for like a whole bunch of companies, like, none of those things are true. They're not posting, they don't have an account, their company doesn't have an account. You know what I mean? So it's like.
• 44:02
  Speaker A: So, yeah, this is one of the things. So this would be an interesting thing to, to dive into for a minute, which is that, you know, they always say, go where your customers are. Right. If your customers on Facebook, you advertise on Facebook, you do outreach on Facebook. If they're on LinkedIn, what do you do when your company list is not necessarily that connected online in the way that we are?
• 44:26
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 44:26
  Speaker A: Is it trade shows? Is it like, what, what is it?
• 44:30
  Speaker B: Yeah, so, I mean, so we have obviously exposure to people that are doing scaled digital outreach still. And so what we see is it's two things. First, you've got to find the people. So they're scraping from unconventional data sources. So they're not going to be in zoom info. But if I'm a roofing contractor, I might be on Angie's List. So it's like scraping Angie's List or Houzz or, you know, if I'm thinking about like Resident Home Services or whatever, or it's just like scraping Google Maps. So, like, that's like one thing. It's like you gotta, you gotta find, you just gotta find the company at all, like, where it is and what do they do? And like, some of them don't have websites, but they're doing like $10 million a year in revenue doing roofs, you know, and, and it's like, if we have a shared customer, if the roofer has a shared customer with us somehow, if we don't do our job or the roofer doesn't do their job, like, which one do you think they're going to notice first? Probably the roofer. So they're doing really important work. So you got to start finding the people somehow. And that's where, like, tools like apify and Phantom Buster are starting to kind of crack open. These, these different types of data sources, which are really interesting. And then, and then it's relying on generic info at email addresses or calling in, and that's where people are kind of, that we would have visibility into those kinds of channels. But if you had fields, field service rep, field sales reps, you could knock on doors or whatever. But I think the first problem is just finding the companies. And then depending on what you do, then the question is, like, what channel am I going to use to get in front of them trade shows you mentioned before. Actually I'm a pretty big believer in trade shows. I think they're pretty powerful channel and I think you can do a lot of outbound around trade shows that can get some pretty good results. But yeah, I do kind of like the old school stuff. I do think it's, it's. It's nice to meet people and see people and do do interesting things and they, they remember that it's hard to fake it. Especially if you have a good team.
• 46:25
  Speaker A: They stand out a lot more I think.
• 46:26
  Speaker B: Yeah, if you have a good team and you can put your team in front of people, they remember that, you know, like oh yeah, that person was awesome. Like I love talking to them, you know, people. I think, I think that stuff matters. So yeah.
• 46:38
  Speaker A: Awesome. Well Harris, thank you so much.
• 46:40
  Speaker B: I want to.
• 46:41
  Speaker A: I always close this out with a couple of lightning questions. We have gone a little bit long but so we'll do a couple. But I do want to ask like are there any unusual metrics that you look at in your business, in your personal workflows or anything like that that you're always looking at, that you're tracking that you're saying like this is something that I always try to keep in mind in life, in business and whatever.
• 47:06
  Speaker B: Well, this is a lightning question. We can do.
• 47:10
  Speaker A: We can do. It can be slow. Lightning.
• 47:11
  Speaker B: Okay. Slow lighting. So I mean for the business it's MRR right now every day I'm checking it constantly in chartmogul. On the support side, this is a little unusual, but some SaaS people are really surprised but we actually do almost all of our support through Slack customers. Yeah, I vastly prefer it. So keeping an eye on my Slack notifications because that's like our support cue. Like are we getting back to people? I know I don't know how well it scales or whatever, but it means a lot to our customers and I think it's part of why we're growing as quickly as we are because I think people want to be there and they want feedback there and they so on. So that's one that's like a little unusual. Everyone talks about their revenue but I think that one's a little unusual for most companies are not doing as much support in Slack as we are. So yeah, those are kind of two work answers. Yeah. Awesome.
• 48:01
  Speaker A: Yeah, we do. We have not gone slack for everyone yet, but we do have slack VIPs because there are customers that need more support. But man to do all support in slack.
• 48:11
  Speaker B: That's what I found, is that they don't actually abuse it.
• 48:14
  Speaker A: They don't. We had the exact same worry, which was that, oh, people are just going. We're just going to be inundated constantly. And it's not that bad.
• 48:24
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's actually. It ends up being a little hurtful. You're like, oh, I thought you wanted to talk to me more. I thought the reason we didn't talk
• 48:30
  Speaker A: so much, access to me, and you're just, like, just sitting there. Yeah.
• 48:34
  Speaker B: You can message me anytime. What's with the crickets? I'm right here. Don't you want to bother me?
• 48:40
  Speaker A: Well, Harris, thank you so much for joining me. Where can people find you?
• 48:44
  Speaker B: I'm super active on LinkedIn, so just my. My name Harris Kenny, which I'm sure you can see in the show description or whatever. That's. That's the main place. Or our website, outbound sync.com.
• 48:55
  Speaker A: sounds good, Harris, thank you so much for joining us.