Jim Wilson on this episode
Jim Wilson, partner at Costanoa Ventures focused on go-to-market strategy, joins Eddie Reynolds to discuss how B2B SaaS companies should blend inbound and outbound motions for maximum pipeline velocity and deal closures. With deep experience investing in and advising early-stage companies through Series B, Jim brings a pragmatic lens to a debate often clouded by marketing automation hype and vendor incentives.
The core thesis is this: inbound and outbound are not mutually exclusive; they are two sides of the same coin, and effective go-to-market strategy requires salespeople to own prospecting and integrate both signals into a unified account-based approach. Rather than segregating teams into "inbound SDRs" and "outbound BDRs," high-performing companies build pod models where both inbound and outbound activities feed a single account list, scored and prioritized by sales leaders. The conversation dismantles the myth that account executives should live entirely off inbound leads—great salespeople prospect, and marketing should support that with tools, templates, and strategic content, not replace it.
Jim emphasizes the difference between treating inbound as "leads" versus "signals," warns against over-relying on lead scoring systems that marketing owns and controls, and stresses that salespeople must reclaim the art of selling from the machinery of automation. He highlights practical tactics: referral asks made easy by providing warm intro targets, leveraging LinkedIn for research and warm connections, pipeline generation days blocked on the calendar, and pod models that keep teams accountable to account outcomes rather than activity metrics. The episode explores how outbound prospecting can validate inbound messaging, how early-stage companies should experiment but then interpret results before scaling, and why the highest-performing reps combine methodical research, targeted messaging, multiple contact motions, and human touch to break into and move accounts.
Throughout, the conversation advocates for integration over segmentation—one team, one toolset, one account list, multiple channels and signals working in concert to engage prospects across the buying journey.
What we cover in this episode
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1:22
ABM is outbound with rigor Outbound motion has evolved into account-based marketing by prioritizing quality targeting over quantity dials, requiring upfront diligence to optimize expensive sales resources.
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3:49
Early-stage experimentation framework Early-stage companies should experiment broadly with go-to-market motions, then rigorously interpret results and double down on signals that work before scaling.
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6:23
Content and pattern recognition Inbound strategy combines insightful point-of-view content with systematic pattern analysis across leads to identify repeatable buyer behaviors and preferences.
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9:01
Reframe leads as signals Marketing should stop reporting MQLs; instead, treat form fills and engagement events as lower-confidence signals that require automation or additional validation before human prospecting.
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14:37
Salespeople own prospecting Great salespeople prospect independently, learn buyer personas, and inform marketing; relying solely on inbound undermines the core sales skill of hunting and building pipeline.
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20:19
Pipeline generation days Sales leaders must block dedicated time for outbound prospecting, treat it as a program with target lists and friendly competition, and monitor progress not just activity.
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27:24
Integrated account scoring Combine multiple buying signals (content engagement, company growth, buying committee activity) into single account scores; let reps decide when to engage based on context.
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35:01
LinkedIn research and warm intros Use LinkedIn to research targets, find mutual connections, and ask customers for warm introductions to specific named accounts, not generic referral requests.
The lines worth sharing
ABM is about prioritizing quality over quantity. A target list is 10 to 15 to 20 companies, not hundreds.
Jim Wilson · 1:47
The biggest mistake I see is companies jump from experiment to scale without the interpretation part in the middle.
Jim Wilson · 5:22
A good salesperson can hunt on their own and doesn't need to live off inbound leads. That's the whole profession.
Jim Wilson · 14:52
Prospecting is a skill, and it's not a skill that most people look forward to doing. You have to schedule time and block it out.
Jim Wilson · 20:47
Common questions from this episode
What is the difference between outbound and ABM?
Traditional outbound is sales-driven calling and emailing. ABM (account-based marketing) adds upfront research and diligence so salespeople target high-potential accounts and buyer personas with precision. The key is prioritizing quality over quantity, focusing on 10-20 named accounts rather than spray-and-pray dialing.
How should early-stage companies approach inbound and outbound experimentation?
Experiment broadly with both motions using a loose ICP, then rigorously interpret the results. Look for patterns in what works and what doesn't. The biggest mistake is skipping interpretation and jumping straight to scaling. Double down on winning signals and abandon tactics that fail.
What is an MQL, and why is it problematic?
MQLs (marketing qualified leads) are often loosely defined—anyone who fills a form or hits an arbitrary score. This creates conflicts when marketing controls both the definition and the metric. Instead, treat form fills as lower-confidence signals and use automation to collect additional engagement signals before routing to sales.
How do you combine inbound and outbound into one motion?
Build integrated teams (pod models pairing reps and BDRs), integrated tooling (one account list scored by multiple signals), and integrated strategies (sales leaders prioritize accounts using both inbound engagement and outbound campaign performance). Let sales decide what to pursue based on context, not silos.
Why should salespeople prospect instead of relying on inbound leads?
Prospecting is a core sales skill. Great reps learn buyer personas, craft relevant messaging, and build their own pipeline. Relying solely on inbound undermines this capability. Sales leaders should hire for prospecting ability and block time for pipeline generation as a core activity.
What is the best way to ask customers for referrals?
Don't ask for generic referrals. Instead, come with a pre-researched list of 4-5 target companies and ask if they know anyone there. Make the ask easy by doing the work upfront. People respond better when you show effort and give them something specific to react to.
SEO meta description
Jim Wilson of Costanoa Ventures on blending inbound and outbound strategy: prioritize quality accounts, integrate teams, and let salespeople own prospecting and messaging for maximum pipeline.
Target keywords
Jim Wilson Costanoa Ventures
inbound outbound strategy
account-based marketing ABM
B2B SaaS go-to-market
pipeline generation sales prospecting
lead scoring MQL qualified leads
sales automation outreach
pod model sales team structure
LinkedIn prospecting warm intros
revenue operations RevOps
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Read the full transcript · 53 KB · Jim Wilson
SPEAKER_00Welcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome to another episode of RevOps Corner. Today, we're going to talk about blending inbound and outbound with my special guest, Jim Wilson, partner at Costa Noa Ventures. Jim, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me, Eddie. Topic I'm passionate about. I'm excited to dive into this. And today, we're going to talk about blending inbound and outbound, how we define inbound, how we define outbound and ABM, how to select which motion should be primary, how to blend them together to build the most pipeline and close the most deals. So, Jim, I'd love to get into this, and I'll start by asking this. You've said in the past that outbound is often referred to as ABM. Could you unpack that for me and help me understand what you mean by that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. So, first off, as you know, Eddie, salespeople like to label things, and the more the labels
JIM WILSONare an acronym, the better. It's easier for them to remember it. Everything from medic to SEO, they love that.
JIM WILSONBut in general, what I try to do when I wrote this article is try to describe what's actually happening in an outbound motion.
JIM WILSONAnd a traditional outbound motion, if you go back to classic B2B enterprise sales, as you are salespeople, and the salespeople are calling out or emailing out, communicating out. But it really has kind of evolved, I think, to be ABM, being account-based marketing, because
JIM WILSONyou're trying to do a lot more diligence work up front so that salespeople, which, you know, and when you look at your routes to market, they're probably the most expensive asset you have in your go-to-market tool of things you're doing, that they are optimized to be working and going after the best potential prospects that you have. So that's why I really think about it around outbound marketing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNow, is there a case where you think that outbound is not ABM or it's not done properly? I'll give you an example.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWhen we look at lower ticket items, you'll oftentimes see organizations that will say, my ICP is any company with, you know, 20 to 100 employees in any industry. They give their salespeople a list and they start dialing for dollars, making 100, 200 calls
EDDIE REYNOLDSa day. I've yet to see an example where that's the most efficient path to go to market.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut would you agree that that's not necessarily ABM?
JIM WILSONI agree. In fact, I think that one of inherently ABM is about prioritizing quality over quantity. I think that's the whole point of it is that you're trying to do more research and more
JIM WILSONdiligence work up front so that, to use your example, a target list is 10 to 15 to 20 companies, not hundreds. I think that, again, that's something that the really well-performing companies do well. But they really focus on quality targeting versus kind of the spray and pray approach where you're just trying to call anybody.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNow, in your work with B2B SaaS companies, have you seen a case where companies are doing
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhat I've described, where they are just calling anyone and everyone and making as many dials as possible? Maybe a low ticket item that they're selling and that works effectively and that's a motion
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat you would recommend they keep doing? Or would you always recommend that they have a more focused strategy with a set of named accounts or another way to prioritize a limited number of accounts they want to go after?
SPEAKER_16Well, it's a good question, Eddie. And I should qualify that I, at Kosnow Ventures, we invest in early stage companies.
JIM WILSONAnd so I spend most of my time with the 85 plus companies that are, you know, seed to series A to series B companies. So with those companies, oftentimes the biggest advice I give them is to experiment with your go-to markets. And by experimentation, I talk about inbound experimentation and outbound experimentation.
JIM WILSONAs it relates to outbound and your question, I do think that while you don't want to prioritize quantity over quality, I do think in the early stages, it's good to experiment. So I think that the early stage companies are, I'll just say a little bit looser with their ideal customer profile and their buyer persona because they are trying to experiment and they have a little bit more range in which they can go after. I think in general, companies want to experiment first, then interpret the results. The big mistake I often see with companies is they don't spend enough time looking at their experiments and then figuring out what's actually working and what's not working and what insights they can get from companies. And then they start to scale. They kind of jump from experiment to scale without that interpretation part in the middle. So I do think that early stage companies can go broader and call a little bit more. And I think that that is successful mostly when they take the time to interpret those results and double down on the stuff that's working and quit doing the stuff that isn't working.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I've definitely seen that in my own business. I started this company eight years ago and we've worked across a number of different industries and we actually started by serving B2B SaaS companies.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut then inevitably, as early stage companies do, we took money from anybody that was willing to work with us. And we found ourselves stretched thin in different areas until we finally came back and said, let's look at the customers that we're working best with, where we add the most value, where we want to double down and invest all of our time, energy and resources.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd that brought us back to B2B SaaS. And that's not to say that we refuse to work with anybody in any other industry. But I can completely identify with what you're saying. And especially in the early days, you're looking for both money to keep the lights on and also signals for what's working and what's not, who you might want to work with, who's best to work with, who's going to get the most value out of your offering. And so I can completely identify with that. With that said, I don't think most companies do experimentation well. And I'm curious, when you're talking with an early stage company with limited resources, do you recommend any specific approach or framework for how to run an experiment, how to define whether or not they have taken the right steps to validate whether or not that experiment worked or didn't work? Do you have any advice there on how to approach it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yes, I do. So in terms of frameworks, look, the first thing I try to tell them is don't think of this inbound and outbound as an either or.
JIM WILSONThink of it as an end. Companies should be trying to do both. In the area of inbound, I think the number one thing that HubSpot popularized and is really very true for most companies is this idea of inbound marketing and creating content. And the key here is to really create insightful content, content that has a strong point of view. We like to give the advice. My partner, Martina Lachinko, likes to talk about having a strong point of view around any content you create because you want the buyers to be interested in it enough to engage with you on the sales cycle. So that's partly a key thing on the inbound side. I think the other part of inbound is literally just taking all of the leads you're getting from inbound and starting to qualify them, not so much qualifying them for callbacks, but qualifying them for characteristics and looking for patterns. Just like people don't do enough experimentation, people don't look at patterns enough. And I think that the patterns are there.
JIM WILSONNow, you have to get the volume, right? So you have to get the volume needed in inbound to be able to see those patterns. But I think those two things, content creation, getting your volume, and then looking for patterns are the key things that I advise on inbound.
JIM WILSONOn outbound, it's kind of the opposite, right? You want to qualify before you engage, and you want to create a really good list of companies and buyer personas.
JIM WILSONAnd the biggest bit of advice I give to people here is around buyer personas. So we have a lot of companies in our portfolio that sell technical products, infrastructure products, security products. I think it's a common misnomer that you try to target the executive, the CIO, the CISO, the chief data officer. Those, in many cases, are the worst people to try to gain entry or access into a company because they're the busiest. And frankly, they're not always in the weeds, if you will, with the latest technology.
JIM WILSONFlip side is you don't want to go too low and target individual users because individual users are usually wrapped up in their day-to-day business. So the general advice I try to give people is think of the ideal entry buyer persona as a manager, manager who is close enough to the problem, who he understands and appreciates it,
JIM WILSONbut is high enough up in the organization that he cares about making an improvement.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat makes a lot of sense. So when we think about trying to blend inbound and outbound, my basic question is, how do you do that? And I'll preface this with some thoughts here. I personally struggle with the concept of inbound and the concept of an MQL for a number of reasons. When we think about an MQL in many organizations, they have a very loose definition. It can be, I've seen organizations where an MQL is anyone that's ever filled out a form or it's, they've hit a certain score and it's an arbitrary score. And this is where I agree with you. I think that lead scoring, for example, requires a lot of experimentation. It requires iteration over a sustained period of time to arrive at a place where you know that you have a certain score that reflects an MQL that is worth having the sales team call. But oftentimes that doesn't happen. We've got issues with marketing being held accountable for MQL numbers, which then if they're also controlling the definition of MQL, creates sort of a vicious loop where we're calling something qualified that really isn't. There's so many problems with that. And for me, if somebody goes to the website and downloads a white paper, that may or may not be an indication that they are worth calling, that they are any better than a prospect we could download from Zoom Info. And where I get really challenged with the definition of inbound is, I look at this in my own business and I say, if you go to our website and you fill out a form and you expressly request a call with us, then that to me is inbound. Everything else, and even that, I would have to filter that through, are you in our ICP and our buyer persona? Anything beyond that for me is just a signal. Now, it may be a strong signal. It may indicate that you are the first person we should call. But I struggle to call that a lead, quote unquote. So with all of that preface, I would ask you, how do you define inbound and how do you define inbound qualified leads or marketing qualified leads?
SPEAKER_02Look, I completely agree with you and say that sales isn't the only organization that sometimes makes the mistake of focusing on quantity over quality.
JIM WILSONMarketing does the same thing. I mean, literally, how many organizations have you worked with where the first thing the marketing organization will talk about is, oh, MQLs. And it's usually followed by how many MQLs, not insights from the MQLs. And like you said, signals. I almost think the industry would be better if they did call them signals versus leads because it's just that. It's a signal. It's one of many data points. I think the thing that companies need to do, though, is a couple things.
JIM WILSONFirst, you know, there's a lot of tools out there right now. We invested in one of them, Demandbase, that helps you with this. And they do lead scoring and they do things to target.
JIM WILSONBut in the early stage companies, and frankly, I think even later stage, I think a common mistake is people make the lead score too high initially. And it's coupled with what you're talking about, which is if you make the lead score a little bit higher, open the aperture up a little bit, but treat it less like a lead and more like a signal.
JIM WILSONThen you're able to engage the customer, not with a human, not with someone doing an outbound call, but maybe with some type of automation that can give you a second and a third signal. So to use your example, someone that downloads a white paper, great, that's a signal. So an ideal kind of activity to follow up might be one or two automated emails that encourage them to look at a video recording of a demo or to schedule a call with a rep. Those are further signals that get you farther down almost the marketing or lead funnel more than anything else.
JIM WILSONAnd I think the key there is automation so that not all of these leads or you call them MQLs are traded equal. And the salespeople are calling on the ones where the signal is much stronger and you're automating the rest where you can collect two or three more signals to see how real it is and how qualified it is.
JIM WILSONAnd then finally, look, I think that sales and marketing just needs to accept the fact that there's going to be a little bit of slack in here, right? There's going to, not every single lead is going to convert or not every single inbound is going to convert. And to me, the thing that the really great organizations do is the sales leader and the marketer get together and start to figure that out.
JIM WILSONAnd the stuff that's low signal, they build in automation that doesn't take any human time to qualify more, to make it more qualified.
SPEAKER_30And then they figure out the signals that are strong buying signals or strong signals of engagement.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think another reason I struggle with the concept or the terminology of inbound is that if we take a lead and we call it an inbound lead, but then the next action is that our team has to make a series of outbound calls or cold calls or warm calls, whatever you want to call it, in order to convert that lead into an actual meeting and opportunity. And if those calls result in a very low conversion rate, then to me, I struggle to call it inbound, but it doesn't really matter what we call it. What matters is what we do with it. And so I love the idea of looking at it as a signal and then comparing that signal to other signals to say, at the end of the day, if we are going to pick up the phone or email or LinkedIn DMs or whatever, and reach out to people to try to set meetings, who are the best people that we should call? Or even better, who are the best accounts that we should call? One challenge I have with lead scoring is, who would you rather call?
EDDIE REYNOLDSThis one lead with a high score or this account with five different people with a high score?
SPEAKER_02Well, listen, I mean, I grew up in a series of companies that frankly favored outbound over inbound, right?
JIM WILSONAnd I am very much a student of the game in terms of sales. And so I believe very strongly that a good salesperson can prospect outbound and does not need to live off of inbound leads or signals. A good salesperson should be able to figure out a target company and a target entry point and then have a nice honed message to get that person interested.
JIM WILSONSo I think a big problem, frankly, in the industry right now is an over-reliance on the concept that you generate all inbound leads and that salespeople's main job is to qualify those inbound leads.
JIM WILSONI just don't buy that. I think that a good salesperson prospects on his own, knows how to learn about the market, learn about the buyer persona that people are selling to, learn about the product, and figure out an outbound strategy. And frankly, it works in reverse, too.
JIM WILSONStrategies of what's working can absolutely inform inbound motions.
SPEAKER_02But that was, frankly, one of the catalysts of why I wrote this article, because I saw too much where early-stage companies were saying, well, we're just going to work on inbounds.
JIM WILSONAnd once we've got enough knowledge from inbound, we'll look at maybe layering in a salesperson. I just don't think that's a winning strategy. I just wanted to add one more thing, Eddie, which is, look, any salesperson that's worth his salt wants to prospect, right?
JIM WILSONSo I tell sales managers all the time, like, the first question you should be asking a salesperson that you're hiring is, how do they prospect? What works? What do they like to do? Because I just, I don't, that's the whole profession.
JIM WILSONThe whole profession is about learning how to generate excitement with people that don't know about your company or your product and running a sales process.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, absolutely. I think that I'm with you. I think salespeople should prospect.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think salespeople should run sales cycles. I even think salespeople oftentimes should be working with existing customers.
EDDIE REYNOLDSMaybe that's just because that's where I've spent most of my career and almost every sales job I've had for the last 20 plus years, including this one where I'm the CEO of the company, but I still sell every day. I've had to do full cycle sales and I understand why the model has been built the way it's been built.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt worked for a little while, but I think I struggle to appreciate this scenario that people paint. When we talk about building an inbound only engine, what I see most often is, is you have these account executives that don't have the ability to prospect.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThen they get these inbound quote unquote leads that they still have to prospect into. So now they're calling into these contacts and accounts without any real control to say, I think that this is the best place for me to invest my energies or not. Or they get fed these leads via SDRs and they're in meeting after meeting and now they've given up power to push back and walk away from deals. Because if you're working a deal and you need to close this deal in order to hit quota and you're not doing any outbound and this deal is falling apart, you don't have access to the right people, they're not clear on what their needs are, everything you try seems to fail. Do you keep chasing that deal or do you close it out? How do you close out a deal that's going to cause you to miss quota if you have no capability to pick up the phone and build some other pipeline to replace it?
JIM WILSONAbsolutely. Well, look, good salespeople can hunt on their own and really great salespeople will inform the marketing department as much as anything else of things they've learned. And the great salespeople I know are not reliant on inbound signals. They see that as one of many options they have to help inform them on a territory.
JIM WILSONBy the way, I saw an article you wrote and you talked about how if you were to give career advice to salespeople, what's the difference between an early stage and a late stage? And for people that want a career in sales, be aware that if you want to go into an early stage company, you have to be really comfortable with experimentation.
JIM WILSONIf you go to a later stage company like a sales force, they've usually got it all figured out. And it really is kind of paint by numbers and you go through steps one through ten.
JIM WILSONBut for people that I work with oftentimes in early stage companies, the best ones are very good at experimentation on outbound and very comfortable with running rapid experiments and kind of taking that information and forming an opinion on what's a repeatable sales process that works.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, as I mentioned in that article, I've done both and I really enjoyed working at Salesforce and being not only taught the playbook, but having it really ingrained into me as muscle memory. And when I left Salesforce and started my own company, I found that that playbook worked really well. Of course, I had to adapt it to a new selling motion. I had to experiment a lot. And I did that as the first AE in startups before joining Salesforce. But having that playbook was really powerful for me. At the same time, though, having the ability or the need to experiment, to try new things, to get your hands dirty, to go and build the things that you need to build in a startup is really fun and enriching for me. And so I enjoyed it. But I think one of the things I was trying to lay out in that article is people and hiring managers should be really careful what they're signing up for when they think about either taking that next job or hiring that next rep, because it's a very different environment going from a small company to a big one.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd so that's what inspired me to want to share that. So I'm glad you enjoyed it as well. It was good advice. Thank you. So taking this back to inbound and outbound, there's one exception I potentially see here, and I'm curious about your perspective. Let's say that we've got this inbound engine, maybe coupled with some SDRs making a bunch of calls.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd now we have our account executives with their entire day just filled with meetings and demos. And they're just running these demos, running these meetings. Maybe this is a low-dollar item, $10,000 ARR, something like that. And they're just cranking through these calls all day, every day, hitting quota. They have no time whatsoever to prospect. Now, we could just hire some more reps, and now each of them has 20% more time in their day to prospect. Or we could continue to build on our model where our AEs are purely inbound. What do you think about that model, and how would you recommend approaching it?
JIM WILSONI think that it's a trap. Assuming it's actually working.
EDDIE REYNOLDSCorrect, right.
JIM WILSONLook, I think that even when it's working, I think that sales leaders can fall into this trap that it's just an inbound motion and can confuse activity with progress with their salespeople. You know, one thing I've seen in all my years is that salespeople have no problem filling up their day. They can be very active, and they can have a lot of high activity.
JIM WILSONI think a good sales leader's job is to make sure that there's actually progress related to that. It's not just activity that's filling up the day without results. So, one thing that I've seen a lot of sales leaders in our portfolio do is schedule PG days, pipeline generation days. And the idea is that you have scheduled time that you are not following up on leads or information that came inbound.
JIM WILSONYou're not following up on pipeline activity or anything else other than just purely outbound prospecting.
JIM WILSONAnd the great sales leaders run it like a program. Paul, the CRO at BugCrowd, runs a program where he does pipeline generation, and people have dedicated time in which they outbound prospect. And they have target lists that they work on, and he makes it fun and challenging for everybody. So, I think that even in a scenario where it's running well, I think that you still have to schedule time to outbound prospecting. The last thing I'll say on this topic is it's really hard to do that, right?
JIM WILSONLike, prospecting is a skill, and it's not a skill that most people look forward to doing.
JIM WILSONYou have to do it all the time. And so, to do that, you have to schedule time and block time out to do it. Because otherwise, your day will get filled up with activity versus progress.
SPEAKER_22I've personally seen this for the last 20-plus years trying to do this, including this week, where I have a certain amount of time I want to spend prospecting, and it's really hard to get to.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's so easy to prioritize something else. And this scenario that I paint where an AE is just on the phone and demo after demo, call after call, is really a mostly fictitious scenario.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBecause you still have to follow up on your pipeline. And now you're faced with, do I follow up with this deal that's probably worth debting out? Or do I put extra energy into making this presentation a little bit better? There is never an end where you're going to say, I can't put more time into this. And so, you're right. It is so incredibly easy to just eat into the time that you could otherwise spend prospecting. And the one scenario where I saw this was when I was at Salesforce and we acquired Pardot, right? I mean, you can imagine that a company like HubSpot that is just screaming at the top of their lungs that everything is inbound would have developed this type of motion. And so, I was there at Salesforce when we acquired Pardot. And I saw the account executives at Pardot in this exact situation where they were just flooded with demo after demo after demo after demo. And I remember sitting around talking to my team. I was a core AE at Salesforce. And just kind of like looking at each other thinking, what is going on over here? There were some people that we worked with at Pardot that were really, really good salespeople. And they made it through the transition. But there were other folks that I feel like my team, we felt that they just didn't know how to sell. Because they were so used to just, they would do eight demos a day. And if they closed one of them, they're hitting quota. And inevitably, the organization did exactly what you're recommending. They hired more reps. They started telling people they needed to start doing outbound. They needed to close more deals, et cetera, et cetera. And we saw a lot of people sort of get flushed out of the organization because they didn't actually have the core sales skills. They would show up and do a demo and ask, would you like to buy this or not? They didn't have the muscle to go and do the other things that are necessary to maximize their close rate, to close the biggest deals, and to go develop their own pipeline. And so I think that that was really detrimental for them as individuals, as well as for the organization, once it matured into a place where they couldn't rely solely on inbound.
SPEAKER_08Correct.
SPEAKER_27I think that's so true. And listen, the other thing that I'll say that we haven't talked about yet, but if you think about the art of prospecting, I think that, and if you flip it around, because I get prospected to a lot in my role right now.
JIM WILSONAnd I can tell the person that's trying to automate the prospecting, I can see the automated emails, I can tell the person that's kind of doing it as a side hustle, you know, not their day job. And then I can see the people that are methodical and they've clearly done some research on me. They've done some research on our firm. They have a strong message and a reason why they're contacting us. Those are the calls I'll take. So that's the other reason why you do want to have dedicated time to this is because prospecting effectively, it needs to be a first-class citizen and the people you are prospecting to need to feel that they're a first-class citizen.
JIM WILSONThey're not just one of a list of a hundred names you have and you're just spewing out automated emails and just swapping and cutting and pasting names and companies. They've got to know that you took the time to research them, to look at their company, to map yourself as to why you're reaching out to them, why you think that your solution would be a good fit. And that's how I, and people don't talk about it, but that's the art of prospecting that works.
JIM WILSONThe people that have high conversion rates are the ones that do dedicate time and put in the effort to make people feel special that they're getting prospected too.
SPEAKER_22Couldn't agree more. So let's talk about how to do this. Let's talk about how to combine inbound and outbound in an earlier stage company, or it could be a later stage company that's just earlier stage in this regard.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe've got our inbound motion. So let's say that we have a clear definition of our ICP and our buyer personas, and both marketing and sales are aligned on that. Marketing is now generating content to address the specific pain points and challenges that people in our ICP and buyer personas are facing. And that content is good, and they're getting it out to the market, whether that's through SEO, whether that's through ads, whether that's through organic social like we do. And people are seeing that content. They're going to the website, and they're downloading white papers and filling out forms and sharing their information. Separately, because we do have this clear ICP and buyer persona, we can go to Zoom info and download a list of folks to call. And so, so far, I've only given one signal. The only signal that I've given you is that people are downloading white papers. So now let's say that we have a second signal. Let's say, for example, that company growth rate is a strong indicator of opportunity in the account. So now we have these two signals. One signal is something that we could download from Zoom info or other tools. Another is something we're getting out of HubSpot. We could have our inbound team, just inbound SDRs calling down on all these white paper downloads, and we could have our quote-unquote outbound team calling down on all these folks from Zoom info that have a high growth rate in their company.
EDDIE REYNOLDSHow would you tackle that? How would you combine those two motions into a single motion?
JIM WILSONYeah, well, so first, one thing that you didn't mention that I would do right away, and this is the job of the salesperson, is every salesperson in the company, and if you don't have that many salespeople, you still have a list, but you have a list of target accounts and target entry titles.
JIM WILSONAnd if, to your point, in an inbound motion, if that company or that title come through, that immediately gets bumped up, right? And again, oftentimes, a really good outbound prospecting motion, it will be that they came from an outbound person reaching out to someone and then saying, hey, by the way, here's a great white paper on our website. So it's not always the case that inbound comes before outbound. Sometimes good outbound will come and drive inbound. So that's one way in which you- Great point. Second thing I would say is, again, I think that the marketing and sales teams need to make sure that they don't over-rotate on activity, and instead they pull up once a week, maybe once every two weeks, and just take a look broadly at the list and patterns they're seeing and things that they can make adjustments to.
JIM WILSONAnd then the final thing is, and then the final thing is that I do think that it's to that automation part, but it doesn't need to be that every human, whether it's an SDR, BDR, and inside rep, that they take every inbound signal and do a phone call.
JIM WILSONI think that they can kind of get routed back to a second activity. The second activity could be video. I think that a lot of really great companies use video and video explainer tools as a way to kind of advance a sale. One last thing, too, I'll mention, Eddie, again, because I'm looking at the potholes and the things that people don't think about.
JIM WILSONPeople really need to look at their buying motion. So I'll contrast it with a really simplistic product, which is simple in the sense that it's easy to evaluate, easy to buy, maybe a single person can make a decision, the price point is low, and a complex product. So oftentimes a complex product, and I'm generally referring to the infrastructure of security, it is very difficult to try to do that without someone, usually an SE paired with an account rep, to help them along the way. So I think that people need to be really smart about that. If you have a complex product, you need to figure out a way to get a human in the loop sooner rather than later, and you need to make it compelling enough for the prospect that they want to get a little bit more information by scheduling a demo
JIM WILSONor by scheduling time with the rep to understand a little bit more about the product and the company.
EDDIE REYNOLDSLove that. So let me share my thoughts and see if I'm aligned with you here on how to combine inbound and outbound. So what I'm thinking is, in an ideal world, I would not want to have a separate inbound team, separate outbound team, inbound SDRs, outbound SDRs. Let's say we have account executives, maybe we have SDRs. They're both just an all-bound motion. I would want to take my account list, and I would simply want to decide, who do we want to call? For marketing, I think you're absolutely right. They downloaded a white paper. That may not be a signal that we want to call them. That may be a signal that we want to put them into another type of marketing campaign and try to nurture that account more, and ideally get them to the website so that they're clicking on the book a demo or book a call button, which to me is your golden MQL, and what marketing should be judged on in addition to actual qualified pipeline and closed one revenue from marketing. So we've got marketing really focused on how do we drive people to want to talk to sales, to get into qualified pipeline, and to actually buy from us. Then you have the sales team that is looking at your account list, and let's say you have these named accounts. You have 20 named accounts, 200, 2,000, depending on the size of your sales team. And then within that named account list, you're looking for signals. I've given two signals. One signal is they're downloading white papers, and the second signal is that they have a high growth rate of their company. So now we look at those two signals and we assign some type of an account score. This could be very simple, right? And we might have to experiment to see how this works. And maybe they've downloaded 100 white papers, and every CXO in the organization has done that, and so that's going to float their account score sky high, assuming that they're in our ICP and our buyer personas. Or it may mean that they're growing at 100% year over year, and that's going to float their score sky high. Somehow these accounts surface, and we now have a list of accounts stack ranked by score, and our reps can at least look at them, maybe not call them, but at least look at them and decide, do I want to call this company? Now, having done this myself, there are times where the automation and the scoring is not going to be perfect, and you're going to look at that for half a second or five minutes, and you're going to decide, I'm not calling those folks.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThere is another company that's better to call right now. But conceptually, what do you think about that approach?
SPEAKER_02I think we're completely aligned, and I would simplify it down to three things.
JIM WILSONIntegrated teams, integrated tooling and processing, and integrated strategies. And let me give you an example of the first one. I'm 100% with you. I'm not a big fan of segmentation between inbound and outbound. I personally like pod models. I like the idea if you're going to have a BDR organization to pair a BDR with an outside rep or an enterprise rep and make them function as a team. And the BDR doesn't get stuck with just qualifying inbound stuff.
JIM WILSONThe BDR might do some work on the outbound list building and the outbound strategy and helps along the way. And the same thing goes for the more senior person in the pod. He may be reviewing the list of inbound stuff with the BDR and prioritizing what they call. That, to me, is integrated team. Integrated tooling and processing is just what you talked about, is it starts with the list.
JIM WILSONIt starts with an informed list of the companies that we have a strong opinion of that we want to talk to. And I think that solely relies on the salespeople. A good salesperson should know, hey, this is the type of company we want to talk to. This is the type of person we want to talk to. And then the last part is your integrated strategies. Look, I think that the great sales teams have integrated strategies where they do this, that. Because they just take a review and say, okay, look, start of the week on Monday. Here's 50 companies with various scores, but I have a hunch.
JIM WILSONAnd by the way, one of the reasons they might want to talk to a company down in the middle is because they've got an outbound campaign going well. What better way to go after an account than having both an inbound and an outbound strategy, right?
JIM WILSONYou've got the rep calling on the right buyer persona. You might have other people in the company that are looking at content on the web. That, to me, is an integrated approach and integrated strategy. And I'm biased, but I do think salespeople and the sales leader needs to drive that. They need to be the people that say, look, let's just take a step back and look at all these different signals and figure out what we're going to go after.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I love that. And we talked offline before we started recording about how inbound can inform outbound and vice versa.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSpecifically, and I've experienced this personally since I generate so much content with my own hands or my own voice. You put out a piece of content to the world that is, in theory, supposed to be designed to address problems that the buyer personas in your ICP are facing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd sometimes that hits and sometimes it doesn't. You have the same thing when you do outbound. Whether you're writing the email from scratch or you're leveraging some template that was given to you by marketing or sales, you're doing the same thing, right? Oftentimes you're leveraging that marketing asset and you're getting immediate feedback from the market as to whether or not this resonates or doesn't resonate. I'll give you an example. We launched office hours with our SVPs of RevOps strategy and RevOps systems. And it was just kind of this one-off of like, well, why don't we just carve out an hour on their calendar and see if anybody cares? And then I sent that to a few of the VC and private equity partners that we work with thinking, you know, these are mostly go-to-market advisors. They're not going to find this valuable. It's not like we know anything they don't. And one of them responds with, this is so awesome. I'm going to share this with my whole portfolio. And I thought, wow, I wasn't expecting that type of response. But that's the exact feedback loop that we were talking about offline, right? And so then I think this then leads us into sales, going to marketing. Like we talk a lot about the concept of having a pipeline council where you have sales, marketing, CS, product, et cetera, all sitting together in a single meeting talking about the pipeline and how to grow it. And now you've got the opportunity for sales to give feedback to marketing to say, this is the content that is resonating most. And sales may be the first individuals to actually distribute that content to a target account by way of outbound.
SPEAKER_02That's absolutely right. Like I think that this fallacy that inbound comes for the chicken and the egg thing, right?
JIM WILSONLike inbound doesn't necessarily need to come before outbound. I think that good outbound can inform inbound as much as anything else and can validate it. I will say that the one difference is that outbound is generally inefficient, right? A really good salesperson can only do so much at scale, whereas inbound, you really can do stuff at scale. So think of it along the experimentation along the lines of efficiency, right? Here's a good example. Good discovery questions. There are some things that are just not going to be efficient and can only happen in a good conversation qualification discovery question that happens between a rep and a prospect. So don't try to put things like what is your value proposition, what is some of your infrastructure in an inbound motion because it's just not going to work. There's stuff that is inefficient but is very effective for an outbound salesperson to do. Think of the things that you can use to gather signals efficiently and put those into the inbound strategy. I mean, I do think that the two just have to be tightly coupled and work together.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou raise a really good point. Like over the last 5, 10 years since sales loft, outreach, et cetera, have exploded, we have now given the ability to salespeople to be efficient, contradicting what you just said.
EDDIE REYNOLDSHowever, I do agree with you because if you are going to log into outreacher sales loft and press send all on an email to 1,000 people, then I want to ask this question. Why isn't marketing doing that? If you are now taking it upon yourself to write the world's best email that's going to be distributed to 1,000 people, isn't that what we hired marketing to do?
JIM WILSONAbsolutely. And look, I should qualify. When I think of efficiency, I think of it relative to marketing, right? So you're right. We can, a salesperson can now send out 1,000 emails.
JIM WILSONAnd at the same time, a website can reach 10,000 customers, right, through SEO. So it's all relative to the two.
JIM WILSONBut yes, look, marketing should be in a place where they're taking all their knowledge from inbound, but also their knowledge on product. Like a really strong product marketing person is probably a key hire for most companies and is giving the salespeople templates and different tools that they can use to experiment. They need to be short. They need to be concise. They need to be punchy. They need to have metrics associated with them. And I do think that that's something that salespeople should expect from marketing. Now, I'll again caveat that, Eddie, that the best salespeople I know, yes, they want to get it for marketing. And yes, they want marketing to do some of that work, but they also craft some of that themselves based on their own opinions and their own information that they get from talking to people.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I completely agree. And now that I'm in a position as a CEO where I'm doing my own prospecting, I'm also managing now a multi-person marketing team and influencing and sometimes writing that marketing copy myself.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's really interesting to swivel my chair around where I might work with my marketing team and we generate this wonderful piece of content.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then the next thing I'm going and trying to send that to somebody and I'm filtering this through this lens of what does this person want to hear from me? What's most important to them? How do I present this to them? And so I love the idea of having these email templates that give you a place to start. But again, if we are just going to press the send button without any types of customization, then I would just ask, why don't we just have marketing do that?
JIM WILSONWell, look, I think that the key thing here is the goal. What's the goal of some of the outbound? And this is, again, a common pothole. The goal is not to make a sale. The goal is to get engagement. Right. So oftentimes I think a problem occurs in the content is the content is trying too hard to make a sale when it's really the opposite. The goal of content and the goal of top of funnel prospecting is to get a customer engaged.
JIM WILSONSo you want to keep it simple. You frankly want to leave a little bit of mystery and intrigue so that people want to engage you. You don't want to supply so much information that people feel like, oh, you know what? From this article and from this one page technical data sheet on the company, I can make my own decision.
JIM WILSONThis isn't for me. You want to leave just enough so that they will engage you in a way and preferably engage you with a human for the right set of reasons.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI love that you use the word engagement instead of meeting, because I think this is another trap that we fall into both in sales and marketing that oftentimes we're just going after booking that meeting. And LinkedIn is now such a powerful channel for Outbound.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I see people will go into LinkedIn and treat it like email and send this long message asking for a 30-minute meeting. LinkedIn can be so much more powerful, especially not just LinkedIn, but especially LinkedIn can be so much more powerful to just simply get engagement. Ask a simple question and see if you can just get someone to respond. And now you're actually having a meeting. You're having a real-time chat with somebody that will naturally lend itself to a meeting if there's anything there. And look, people, I think, don't understand the value of LinkedIn for prospecting.
JIM WILSONTo me, the value of LinkedIn to prospecting is if you have a target entry persona, the first thing you should be doing is research on them, right? The second thing you should be doing is see who you're connecting to and where are their mutual connections. Maybe this person worked at a company that is using your product today. Man, if that was the case, that would be the first thing I would lead with with an email. By the way, did you know that the company that you left or that you were at five years ago is using our product? And, of course, the golden ticket is that there's a mutual connection and you can work on a warm intro.
JIM WILSONI don't see enough. These are kind of in the land of hacks, Eddie. But I don't see enough salespeople that leverage the ability to get warm intros to people as a way to get into accounts. But that's just some of the ways in which we can use social media and other tools to do things other than just kind of the blasting straight through the door with an email or a call approach.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I will admit that that's something that I struggle with myself and I just did it recently. I was emailing a CRO in one of the organizations that came to us via inbound and I got an introduction to him through a mutual contact.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd it's not something I do enough. And it was as simple as asking for this introduction and now I've elevated my sales cycle from someone else in the organization to the ultimate decision maker through that method. And I understand why people don't do it as much. It's another motion that you have to get yourself comfortable with. Kind of taking this off track for a moment. Something else that we've struggled with as an organization is asking for referrals from customers. And it's really amazing. It's the simplest and easiest thing in the world to do. But until we got comfortable with just going and doing it and thinking about how do we ask for this and what do we do, none of it is rocket science.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut for a long time, for far too long, we were just uncomfortable with that motion.
JIM WILSONLook, I think, Eddie, you're bringing up some of the things that I'm super passionate about. So here's my hack on referrals, right?
JIM WILSONThe common mistake a salesperson makes is calling up this champion in the best account and saying, hey, I really appreciate referrals. Would you refer me? I think that's the wrong approach, right? You're putting all the work on your champion. Instead, go to your champion and say, you know what? I've got five target companies that I'm trying to get into that are in your state, in Georgia, right? They are boom, boom, boom, boom. List them off. And say, I'm generally trying to reach these people because they're very similar to you. And, of course, don't list competitors. Don't do kind of the dumb mistakes like that. But I think that your chances of getting a referral go up tremendously if you show, hey, I've done all this work. Here's my target list. Do you happen to know anybody at these five companies? And then you'll see that people respond to that and say, yeah, as a matter of fact, I do know this person there. And take whatever they give you and run with it. But, yeah, referrals, I think it's the general question of like, hey, can you refer me is really difficult.
JIM WILSONI think instead if you make it easy where you've done the work and instead ask them to react to something, here's four companies I'm trying to reach. Do you know anybody there? Do you have any advice for me? I think that your chances of success are better with that.
SPEAKER_22I love that. It was a very long time ago. Somebody told me most people will help you if you make the ask easy for them.
JIM WILSONYeah, exactly. Exactly right. Like people want you to do all the work and you should. You're the salesperson. That's your job to do that work.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYep. Well, before we wrap, is there anything that you would add to how to combine your inbound and outbound motions for sort of the most effective new customer acquisition strategy?
JIM WILSONYeah, here's what we haven't talked about, which is salespeople kind of taking back, I think, the go-to-market strategy. I do agree with you, Eddie, that over the last five to 10 years, the concept of tooling and automation and turning this into a science has kind of drowned out the fact that sales is still an art, right? And so I would really encourage salespeople and salespeople that care and are passionate about what they do to take that back and to leverage their superpower and develop their superpower, figuring out messaging, figuring out strategies, and then figuring out productivity tooling to make it work.
SPEAKER_16Salespeople don't need to sit and, like you said, to just wait for their list of 10 demos to do every day.
JIM WILSONI don't know about you, Eddie, but man, that's not a job I would want to do. Wake up every morning and here's 10 companies and here's the people and they've all downloaded white papers and go call them and go give them a demo.
JIM WILSONThat's not very fun. It's not very creative. So I would just challenge sales leaders to take back the art of selling and have some pride in what they do. They are the folks that are supposed to be figuring this out. They are supposed to be figuring out and forming an inbound strategy and taking signals from that and learning from it and really take pride in the fact that that's what makes salespeople great is the ability to think along these ways and to think about prospecting and to have command of the message and command of the sale and have that presence within your company, whether it's a later stage company or early stage company. And make your voice heard.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI love that.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd it's something I really struggle with some of the tools that have become popular over the last few years. You know, we jump, I don't want to knock any one vendor in particular, but we jump into sort of our automated outreach campaign sequence, whatever we want to call it. And we're looking at this prospect and we're supposed to send them an email.
EDDIE REYNOLDSOkay, well, what if that prospect is heavy on LinkedIn and you're connected? What if you have a mutual connection to that prospect? What if they're speaking at a conference or going to next week? What if you could like mail them something creative? Like there's so many ways to get into an account. And I love what you said. I think great salespeople find those creative ways to try new things and see how they can break in. And if you take that away from them by trying to create the entire thing as an assembly line, I think you really do a disservice, especially when you think about it from the perspective of how do we break into this individual account? That's a big thing that I would even add to what you said. I feel like I have almost a 100% hit rate of breaking into specific accounts that I have just been dying to break into. Because if you go to enough different people with enough different tactics, somebody will finally open the door for you. And I think that that is lacking in some of the over-automation that we have popularized over the last few years.
JIM WILSONAbsolutely. I 100% agree. And that's why I think our joint message back is to salespeople is like, take back the art of selling. Because that to me is the art of selling.
JIM WILSONAnd make sure that you understand that automation is meant to support the art of selling, not overtake it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSLove it. Well, Jim, before we wrap, well, actually, let me just say thank you for joining us. And how can people find you?
JIM WILSONWell, thank you for having me. They can find me at CoSnow Ventures. I'm an operating partner there focused on go-to-market. I will say that a lot of our companies, I get involved in a lot of their sales and I love to talk to really excellent salespeople and sales leaders.
JIM WILSONSo go look at our portfolio page where they list some of them. And then I'm on LinkedIn. You can reach me on LinkedIn. I'm also on email and I'll always take calls or inbounds from great salespeople. I'm at Jim at CoSnow.bc. And again, Eddie, thank you for doing this podcast. Thank you for bringing up this topic. It's something I'm passionate about. Clearly, you are as well. I'm glad to see we're aligned on most of this. And hopefully people get a lot of value out of listening to this podcast.
SPEAKER_64Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me.
