Interview with the vampire (I mean, 🦇salesperson🦇)

Season 7, Issue 8: Leaving the nest, going outbound with Travis Pearce!

Mar 13, 2024

Welcoming my old/current colleague Travis Pearce onto the stage to chat about building an outbound motion from scratch
A checklist of marketing assets to build for outbound
Some good links this week!

Wassup Mehketeers,

Always Be Closing (in on prospects who don’t know about you…yet.) That’s the sales mantra we’re going with today!

Outbound was the most requested topic in last week’s poll (it was in the issue about MQL’s with Axel Sukianto, in case you missed it) so I had to bring on Travis for this issue! Trav and I worked together at Perkbox way back in 2019-2020, and since then he’s gone on to work for Deel, and built HubSpot Australia’s outbound team, setting it all up and building it into a well oiled machine.

So you could say he’s been doing outbound SaaS sales for a pretty long time now.

Trav and I recently reconnected to work on building an outbound motion for a SaaS product together, so this is all pretty fresh in my mind, and of course in his mind all the time.

Here’s the interview, and then what we did to set up outbound, from scratch.

T-t-t-t-t-traaaaaavissssssss

As mentioned, Trav and I used to work together so there’s my disclaimer out of the way. Trav is now doing outbound on a freelance basis and you can take this as my official endorsement of him if you’re looking to test outbound and don’t want to hire a whole agency for it.

Travis's website

Kayla: The relationship between marketing and sales is a well known cliche. From the sales side, what do you want marketers to understand about your role and how they can help you?

Travis: From the sales perspective, it's important to realise that what first grabs a prospect's attention isn't always what seals the deal. In today's economy, it's critical to understand what the prospect experiences on a day-to-day basis. It means understanding how their business operates, what they do in their role, how they're personally measured, and really figuring out what your product or service needs to do to solve their problems. While marketing materials and form fills provide some information, BDRs and SDRs can help marketers delve deeper to equip Account Executives with the necessary details to close deals.

K: You've built outbound functions a few times now, what is the hardest part that people should put the most effort into up front?

T: It may not be the most difficult task, but understanding how to segment your market and identify your ideal customer is crucial. Putting effort into this upfront will pay off greatly. It's important to consider the specifics of customers who need your business rather than just focusing on the dream brand. Some questions to consider include: Are they multi-location businesses? Are they in a metro or rural location? Do they require a certain number of employees? Do they need a specific sized bill? What business function buys your product or service? These are just a few examples, but completing this task will ensure your business is significantly more effective when beginning outbound.

K: How do you know if a certain product or company is well suited to an outbound sales motion?

T: It is a good question. I am not convinced that you need a certain product to be suitable for an outbound sales motion. I have seen SMBs with small average sale prices to Enterprise publically listed companies effectively utilise the outbound sales motion. I think it comes down to the individual business and how the leadership wants to generate new opportunities.

K: What kind of tests can sales/marketing run together to get the most out of outbound?
T: I suggest testing lists in your CRM, such as those from events, past marketing campaigns, or Closed Lost opportunities. Most businesses should find some relatively cold leads that you can put outbound effort into sourcing fresh opportunities.

K: What is your biggest tip for getting started?

T: To add to the answer to question about which products are suited to outbound, my biggest tip is to create a sequence of activities that incorporate multiple communication channels. Incorporating calling, emailing, texting, LinkedIn messaging, voice messaging, and video communication will significantly increase conversion rates. There are many amazing technologies to support making these efforts efficient. Please don't just call a prospect once and hope they answer, more effort is needed! haha

Setting up outbound

Any good outbound program starts with knowing your targeting, so make sure you’ve got an ideal customer profile (ICP) to go after. You can try going after everyone, but you’ll waste a lot of time doing it.

Once you’ve got this, start tailoring your existing marketing material to be very specific to your ICP. Whether this is industry, job title, job to be done, or any other identifier, start thinking about how your content/assets need to change up when the context switches from “I requested this piece of information” to “this was forced in front of me.”

You’ve got a really short attention span to work with, so break longer assets into shorter pieces, like:

Diagrams that are optimised to be sent in an email (and not as an attachment)
Email nurture flows, keeping only the very best/snappiest hooks for your subject lines
Ice breakers to prompt intrigue on the phone
And, not shorter but have outbound specific landing pages

Phone v email?

Email’s not dead, I’ll stand by this until I am dead. Travis taught me recently about the clustering technique, he explains it in the interview below.

The reasoning behind it is you’ve hit them on every channel, so if they’re going to reply, they’ll do it on the channel they prefer or are most responsive to. Personally I haven’t been able to convince anyone to test out texting, so I can’t speak to it, but I do think it’s worth experimenting.

The other method is the traditional drip feed, which is slower and longer. At the end of the day, people will repsond if you catch them at the right time, so as long as you’re varying the days and times you’re reaching out, just keep trying until they give a firm no.

A clear path for follow up and pivoting

Once you’ve gotten someone saying “you know what, I am interested,” you’ve got to have that follow up process set out and agreed upon by the sales team, with any call outs to how this is different to an inbound lead being followed up.

The last tip from me is have a list of backup ideas to test out if your first attempt doesn’t work. Maybe it’s who you target or how you select them, maybe it’s changing messaging (run through the list of categories: pain points, value propositions, jobs to be done, features, ROI, etc), maybe it’s changing the channel you focus on.

Let everything run for a few weeks, evaluate, and make appropriate changes, until it feels like you’re getting consistency.

If all else fails, there’s this LinkedIn post about how a Spongebob gif got an outbound target to finally reply. Here’s a snippet of the post:

Rounding up links at the rodeo

Harry’s newsletter, AKA Marketing Examples, made a reappearance in my inbox, and included this gem of an SEM ad:

Google’s got some small algorithm updates this month, here’s a summary
The Celtic’s NBA team is blowing people away with their new video editor/social media manager posting absolute 🔥🔥🔥THIS is how you repurpose an archive of content
I was featured in Strivin’s Women in Leadership book for International Womens’ Day, all proceeds are being donated to charity
Verve Super’s blog on how to talk about the gender pay gap report that came out is a really amazing resource that everyone should read, even if you think you’re well educated on the topic!

I don’t usually offer this, but if you have any follow up questions for Trav, feel free to either reach out to him or let me know and I’ll follow up with him and add them in to the next Mehdeeka issue. It’s a big topic and honestly I don’t feel confident I’ve done it justice with my selection of interview questions or my ramble.