About this episode
Eddie Reynolds and Rachael Bueckert, hosts of GTM Science, unpack the LinkedIn meme about Gigi from GG's Pizza and use it as a lens to reveal exactly what most B2B outbound teams are doing wrong. Eddie has spent over 25 years in sales and revenue operations, and Rachael leads go-to-market strategy for Union Square Consulting, where they work with revenue leaders to diagnose and fix broken go-to-market motions.
The core insight: a pizza delivery call demonstrates better outbound execution than most enterprise SaaS companies. Gigi knows who bought before, what they ordered, when they're likely hungry, and can deliver in ten minutes. Most B2B teams can't articulate any of that about their own prospects. This episode breaks down the six problems systematically killing outbound right now, from definitional confusion all the way through to broken economics and messy systems. The framing is intentionally first-principles: instead of debating whether outbound is dead, Eddie and Rachael ask what actually works, what actually converts to revenue, and what the payback math has to look like to justify the effort.
The conversation covers the difference between intent and relevance (and why most teams confuse personalization with actual relevance), why segmentation matters more than most companies realize, why targeting people with zero buying intent is a fool's errand, and what the CAC payback threshold really is for outbound to make sense. They walk through the pizza example thread by thread—showing exactly what Gigi gets right about segmentation, messaging, timing, targeting, and follow-up—and show how to apply that rigor to your own outbound motion.
What we cover in this episode
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1:00
The pizza meme explained Why Gigi's pizza outbound is actually better than most B2B teams despite seeming absurd.
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3:20
Problem 1: No shared definition Nobody agrees on what outbound means, making it impossible to compare what actually works.
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9:21
Problem 2: Targeting with zero intent Most teams chase prospects with no buying signal instead of finding people that have problems to solve.
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11:16
The biggest fallacy in sales Trying to change hearts and minds instead of finding people who already want what you sell.
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27:31
Problem 3: Relevance vs. personalization Most teams confuse mail merge personalization with actual relevance; true relevance comes through segmentation.
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33:46
Problem 4: Lack of segmentation Forcing reps to context-switch across industries and buyer personas destroys effectiveness.
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49:18
Problem 5 and 6: Systems and payback Messy systems hide what works; CAC payback economics determine if outbound is even viable.
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42:37
What dialed-in outbound looks like When segmentation, messaging, intent, and follow-up are all working together, outbound works.
The lines worth sharing
If people want a fork, sell them a fork. Why don't we just go find people that need forks?
Eddie Reynolds · 13:22
Relevance to me is ultimately coming down to segmentation. It's not mail merge and AI.
Eddie Reynolds · 28:01
This is the biggest fallacy in sales: trying to change hearts and minds. It's a fool's errand.
Eddie Reynolds · 14:42
Why would I invest two hours of my time if you don't even think it's worth five minutes to do the homework?
Eddie Reynolds · 34:37
Common questions from this episode
Why is outbound for pizza actually better than most B2B outbound?
Gigi segments to past customers, knows their buying history, understands when they're likely hungry, delivers in ten minutes, and uses relevant messaging. Most B2B teams skip all of that and spray-and-pray to cold lists with no signal.
What's the difference between relevance and personalization in outbound?
Personalization is mail merge and AI pulling your content online. Relevance is segmentation: targeting one specific buyer persona with one specific problem, in one industry or company type, so messaging actually resonates.
Should sales try to create demand or just capture it?
Sales should capture demand from people with a burning need to solve a problem. Creating demand is marketing's job. Trying to convince someone with no problem to buy is a fool's errand and wastes time better spent on warm prospects.
At what deal size does outbound stop making financial sense?
The rule of thumb is 40 to 50 thousand dollars. Below that, CAC payback becomes unprofitable for most teams. But this depends on your margins, churn, and how efficient your process is.
What are the six biggest problems killing outbound right now?
No shared definition of outbound; targeting people with zero buying intent; confusing personalization with relevance; lack of segmentation forcing context-switching; ignoring CAC payback economics; and messy systems that hide what actually works.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds and Rachael Bueckert explain why a pizza delivery call is better outbound than most B2B teams, breaking down six problems killing outbound effectiveness.
Target keywords
outbound sales strategy
B2B outbound problems
sales segmentation
CAC payback
buying intent signals
relevance vs personalization
GTM Science podcast
Union Square Consulting
cold outbound effectiveness
sales messaging relevance
outbound efficiency
go-to-market operations
Read the complete conversation
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Read the full transcript · 75 KB
EDDIE0:00and I think this is the biggest fallacy in sales, full stop period.
EDDIE0:03I thought it was my job to like change
EDDIE0:04hearts and minds.
EDDIE0:05thought I was supposed to go in and like, convince people to think differently
EDDIE0:08about the way they do things. And that's just like a fool's errand.
EDDIE0:12If people want a fork, sell them a fork.
EDDIE0:13Why don't we just go find people that need forks? You know who needs forks? People have food sitting in front of them and they don't have a fork.
EDDIE0:19How do we find those people?
EDDIE0:20Not the person that just finished lunch. And they're like, what do I need a fork for? I'm not hungry. I think you should need more.
EDDIE0:26Like it's
EDDIE0:27a fool's errand,
EDDIE0:28because there are so many people out there that have so many problems that you can solve for. If you just put your energies into finding the people that have the problems you solve.
EDDIE0:44actionable playbooks from the trenches working as go to market strategy and rev ops consultants for our clients here at Union Square. Consulting and candid conversations with revenue leaders in the market that have been there. Now let's get into it.
RACHAEL1:00Today's topic is based on a LinkedIn post that you, Eddie, shared that really took off and had a picture of. I guess we could call it a meme, but it was a post from somebody named Pier Richardson and I hope I'm doing that name justice. And it says, why is no one doing outbound for pizza? And then in quotations, hey, this is a gig from GG's Pizza Calling he ordered last week.
RACHAEL1:20We have a pepperoni pizza ready and can deliver in ten minutes. Are you hungry? And it's really funny because it's absurd to think about. But Eddie, you said Gigi's actually running better outbound in this meme than most BB teams. And then you went on to list the six really big problems with outbound. So just listing them off for now.
RACHAEL1:42What are those six core problems you're seeing in outbound right now?
EDDIE1:46All right. So the six problems that I lined in this post were the number one that there's no shared definition of what outbound means. Number two, that there's oftentimes a lack of buyer intent in our outbound. And we're going to obviously dive into this on this podcast. Number three is a lack of relevance. Number four is a lack of segmentation.
EDDIE2:04Number five is of course the economics here specifically CCaC payback. And last and not least, our messy systems that inhibit our ability to actually execute outbound efficiently. So we're going to dive into this. You're going to ask me a bunch of questions about it. And for those listening we hope this is really valuable. I'm curious if we can transfer a meme on LinkedIn into a podcast that resonates with people.
EDDIE2:27It's just a funny way to catch grab attention to something that is like a very common problem. But we're going to dive into these six particular problems and use the pizza example to articulate those problems and how why people and answer the question, why doesn't anybody do outbound for pizza? And what can you learn about it as a software or a tech company trying to do outbound in your own business.
RACHAEL2:49With pizza?
EDDIE2:50With pizza.
RACHAEL2:51All right.
EDDIE2:52Are we going to title this outbound for pizza, by the way, is that going to be the episode.
RACHAEL2:55Title of maybe?
EDDIE2:56I think we should I think we should title it. Why doesn't anybody outbound for pizza? I think that'd be good.
RACHAEL3:01Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I think so. Cool. All right. So number one problem. No shared definition. When people say outbound what are the different things they're actually lumping together. And why does that conflation lead to bad decisions. And why does that mean that we would or wouldn't consider the pizza analogy outbound.
EDDIE3:20Yeah. This is great. We got to tie this all back to pizza. Right? Okay. So Gigi here is calling a an existing customer a previous customer I don't know, I work in recurring revenue businesses. Right. Like I don't know if they do subscriptions for pizza, but this person has bought pizza before. And Gigi is not only calling somebody who is an existing or previous customer, depending on your definition, but she's also leveraging the information.
EDDIE3:44She's got product usage data at her fingertips. Is this I don't know, but I think that that's really the important point is what are we considering outbound. And so for me, in its purest definition and its worst definition in terms of like effectiveness, pure cold calling is like, here's a desk and a phone and that's it. And you get email too, because it's 2026 and we use email, but that's it.
EDDIE4:11That's pure cold, right? Well, I would posit the question like, why in the hell would anybody do that? I mean, if you've got like some super hot product and I don't know, you're trying to sell licenses to Claude or ChatGPT like that might work. But it also asks, like, why would you start there? Why wouldn't you do anything else first, starting with trying to sell to your existing customers.
EDDIE4:34And then when we go to new business, how about folks with some buying intent, whether we've got third party intent signals and we call that intent based outbound, or we've got first party intent signals like marketing engagement and we call those inbound leads. What is the difference between following up with an inbound lead where somebody downloaded a white paper, did not want to talk to sales, and we've called them a bunch of times.
EDDIE4:56And doing outbound where we downloaded somebody from zoom info and they didn't want to talk to sales, and we called them a bunch of times. To me, the only important distinction between those two things are what works and what doesn't. What if we take a thousand white paper downloads and we take 1000 leads from zoom info, and we call each of them ten times, so that's 10,000 calls.
EDDIE5:16Or when I say calls. I mean emails, whatever. Well, which generates more revenue or more importantly, which generates more gross margin or LTV? Why would I care about anything else? Like we're in business to make money, so which is going to generate more money and so we can slice and dice this in so many different flavors. We can go ABM, we can go plug, we can talk about existing customers.
EDDIE5:38We can do all the above. And maybe we'll get a chance to do that here on this podcast. But I could just think of a million different iterations and examples of this that would be better than just calling somebody out of the blue that has no signal whatsoever that they should want to buy from you.
RACHAEL5:54I can just imagine getting a text from some random restaurant number or something being like, hey, we have pizza, do you want one? Like, who are you?
EDDIE6:04Well, first of all, that would be illegal, right? Because you haven't opted in. Yeah. So I mean that's another issue, right? So like how does this apply to B2B. Right. Well how are we emailing folks. Are we going to send a massive marketing email to people that have not opted in? Well, I can't do that, especially in Europe.
EDDIE6:20I don't know, like are we doing that in the US? Is that a good idea? Do we need to spin up all these domains. Because they're going to mark that mark as a spam and burn through that. Like these are all questions that like, people have to answer. And a lot of people do. And there's a very sophisticated answer to this, where we spin up all these different domains and warm up the domain and all this other stuff, and it's just like at the end of the day, like, why don't you just target people that have a reasonable likelihood of having interest, so you don't have to do all of that?
EDDIE6:45Because I don't see companies doing this that are super profitable. And maybe that's because I don't work with companies that sell products for like 500 bucks or whatever it is they're selling products for. And that's not my space, and I don't know anything about it. But when we're selling enterprise level products, I don't mean enterprise sales. It could be SMB mid-market, but when we're selling products for a reasonable price point, why don't we put some effort into like showing people that we actually care about them and target the right people instead of just hurting through, like, massive amounts of data and capital to try to get like the 0.001% conversion that we're hoping is going
EDDIE7:21to pay off for us. It just doesn't
EDDIE7:23it doesn't seem productive to me, because then even if we win that game, then like, what do we have on the other end? We have a bunch of like really bad fit customers instead of just like finding the better fit customers and doing a better job of attracting a higher percentage of those that we target.
RACHAEL7:36So would anything change if the whole market defined outbound the same way tomorrow? Let's
EDDIE7:41You know, it's interesting. I saw that question in your prep doc, and I was like, how am I going to answer that? Well, I think that it doesn't really matter how we define outbound. I think what matters is whether or not it works or not. But it is challenging to try to have this ongoing conversation about whether or not Alban is dead when we have no shared definition of it.
EDDIE8:02When I see things online that say like, oh, well, intent based outbound is better than outbound, or inbound is better than outbound. Well, how do we objectively look at that? Like what data set are we using that shows that this is better or not better? I mean, when you look at what's actually working in go to market, you're relying on like the self-reported surveys of people that like, scanned a bunch of people on LinkedIn or some tech vendor that has some very limited set of data, not that it's limited in like its size, like they have like millions of records, but it's limited in its accuracy and depth.
EDDIE8:37And we're just kind of guessing at like what works or what doesn't work. And then at the end of the day, like, what really matters is what works for my business. And I think objectively, you can look at things and just say, well, if we target buyers that have a higher level of intent, whether that intent is determined by $0.06 or it's determined by our own marketing data, or it's determined by different signals out in the market, like they just hired somebody they had.
EDDIE9:00I mean, around of funding is like the most overused thing in the world, but still relevant. That's obviously going to be better than targeting a company that has none of those things. Right.
RACHAEL9:12And, and like that leads directly into the problem number two lack of intent. So why do you think that is the default then rather than the exception.
EDDIE9:21Just why is it the default to like target people with lack of intent.
RACHAEL9:26Yeah this is probably it.
EDDIE9:28I think that the answer is is that like first of all, I think when people think of intent based outbound, they think of like $0.06 in a bora. And, you know, the argument goes that what you're doing is you're trying to capture demand at this stage where people are already actively searching for a solution to their problem, and you're behind the eight ball, they're already talking to your competitors.
EDDIE9:49And now that signal spits out because they're googling or whatever. They're putting the signal out into the market that they're interested in buying this thing. And then you're behind the eight ball because you're like vendor number four to like, step in and throw your hat in the ring. Now, I don't have any proof points or data to validate or invalidate that, but it makes intuitive sense to me that, like, these tools have to get signals from somewhere.
EDDIE10:14And those signals are probably not going to come three months, six months before somebody is ready to buy such that you're able to like, get first mover advantage. We know in sales, the first mover advantage is really, really critical. And so this goes into like the difference between like creating demand and capturing demand. Now I don't think it's super effective for sales to create demand.
EDDIE10:37I think that like everything I've learned in sales over 25 years, tells me that if I call somebody and they don't have existing demand, the best thing you can possibly do is just move on, maybe see if you can get them to opt in to your marketing so that marketing can nurture them. But I do not think it's a productive use of sales people's time to try to, like, turn somebody that has no demand and to somebody that does have demand.
EDDIE10:58And specifically, what I mean by that when I talk about demand is do you have a problem that you want to solve for not to like get to like wax philosophical about sales, but like if you have a burning problem, like let's just use the most common example, that's so easy to understand. If you're like, I need to lose weight.
EDDIE11:16I have to lose weight so badly I have this like burning, need to lose weight. Okay, cool. Like here's any number of solutions to help you lose weight. Like we can do that. But if you're sitting around and you're thinking, I might want to lose some weight, but I don't know, I've got so many other things going on.
EDDIE11:30I've got work, I've got like family. This isn't really like my top priority right now to no amount of like diet, exercise, pills, whatever. And it's an easy button. And this is probably why I was just, like, selling like hotcakes. If there's any level of like, sacrifice, then people just aren't going to do it in their personal lives or in business.
EDDIE11:52So unless I'm selling a pick, I want somebody that's like, I have to lose weight. This is my number one priority, or at least number two or number three priority. I'm willing to commit to this. I'm willing to go to the gym every single day. I'm going to change what I eat. I'm going to weigh my food. I'm willing to do whatever it takes.
EDDIE12:08How can you help me lose weight? And then I am now competing against other vendors, other solution providers in the space to convince that person that I am the best way to help them achieve the outcome, that they have already decided in their mind that they want to achieve. And I'm not trying to convince them that they should want that thing in the first place.
EDDIE12:29And I think that that's the job of marketing to go out there and say, here's all the reasons you might want to lose weight. You know, it's going to improve your health, like you're going to be around for your grandkids, yada, yada, yada. And then six months, a year or two years later when they're finally ready. Then sales can engage and have that conversation.
RACHAEL12:47And I think it's important to it's like it has to be more than just a problem that the company is facing, has to be a problem that is important to the specific person that you're trying to talk to as well. Because we've we've had this happen to us where the company does have an issue with their go to market operations, and they could really use our help.
RACHAEL13:04But that person that we're contacting and talking to, it's so low on their priority list. They have so much, so many other things going on that it just doesn't go anywhere after that.
EDDIE13:13That's the case with every solution ever being sold in B2B anywhere. When I worked at Salesforce, like we talked about level one, level two, level three pain, and I remember if this is a Sandler thing or it came from something else, don't really care. But level one is like the technical pain. Like the example is I want Salesforce to work because I need a dashboard, like okay, cool.
EDDIE13:32Like so you need something that has a dashboard. Cool. Level two is the business pain. Why do I need a dashboard? Why I need a dashboard so that we can hit our number. Level three is what's what's the personal pain. Oh I need a dashboard so I can hit my number so I can get my bonus. And I can get promoted and I can get this, that and the other happen.
EDDIE13:47And I have this beautiful thing on my resume. And like, my kids are proud of me. And those things. If you don't have like the level three pain, you've got nothing. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I have talked to somebody and you're like, this is so obviously a need for the business, and the person for any infinite number of reasons is like, I don't care.
EDDIE14:05I don't really care. Like, you know why I don't care? Because I just turned in my notice. I'm leaving the company. I'm out. I'm gone in a week. Why do I care if the company hits their number at the end of the year? I won't be here. And if you don't have that, you've got nothing. You've got absolutely nothing.
EDDIE14:22Right. And so I think that the problem with outbound is, is if we're targeting all of these people that don't have this, and then we are trying to tell salespeople, and I think this is the biggest fallacy in sales, full stop period. Like when I got into sales, like I thought it was my job to like change people like change heart and hearts and minds.
EDDIE14:42I thought I was supposed to go in and like, convince people to think differently about the way they do things. And that's just like a fool's errand. Like the analogy that I started using when I was at Salesforce is like, I don't want to change someone's religion because there were at that time a group of people that are like, what do I need Salesforce for?
EDDIE14:59I can just manage everything in Excel. Why do I need a dashboard? Why do I need to forecast accurately? Why do I need visibility? Know what my team is doing? Why do I need to see how many calls they've made, how many meetings they've set up, or et cetera, etc. and it's like I can scream until I'm blue in the face about like, why you as a muslim should find Jesus.
EDDIE15:17And I know that people do that, and I just cannot imagine a more difficult job. It's like fighting windmills. Why in the world if you are somebody that wants to make money, whether as a sales rep or as a revenue leader or a CEO of a company, why in the world would you want to fight windmills? If people want a fork, sell them a fork.
EDDIE15:37Why don't we just go find people that need forks? You know who needs forks? People have food sitting in front of them and they don't have a fork. How do we find those people? Not the person that just finished lunch. And they're like, what do I need a fork for? I'm not hungry. I think you should need more.
EDDIE15:52Like it's just a fool's errand, because there are so many people out there that have so many problems that you can solve for. If you just put your energies into finding the people that have the problems you solve.
RACHAEL16:04I like all the analogies. You're coming up with forks and windmills.
EDDIE16:08And forks and windmills and selling ice water to people in hell.
RACHAEL16:11Yeah. So is back taking it back to intent then. So we want to like that's the issue without band that people without finding people that have an actual intent in an actual signal that they are, you know, experiencing that huge problem that's going to make them want to buy it. So how do we separate, you know, actual buying intent from someone who's just doing passive research as a solution to this?
EDDIE16:33Well, I think it's so case dependent upon the product, the market, etc.. But like what this ultimately comes down to is reverse engineering the people that bought from you, what signals were they spitting off like? A common example is somebody hits the pricing page three times. Okay. Well let's look at that for our company. What percentage of people that hit the pricing page three times ended up buying from us?
EDDIE16:55If that percentage is high enough and it doesn't need to be 50%, it might be 1%, and 1% might be enough to justify saying, let's have our sales team call each of these people 10 or 15 times to try to get a meeting, to try to get them into pipeline, to try to win them as a customer. And if we do the math and we look at all of that stuff and we look at what's actually occurred in the past with those types of leads, and we look at this and we just say, and I'm going to kind of skip ahead here to payback.
EDDIE17:24Is this profitable or not. That's all we're looking for right. What are the signals that are going to like drive the people that have the most level of interest. And those signals can be wildly different for each company. I mean, there's common examples like hitting the pricing page, there's new hires and key roles, there's funding, but there's so many other signals that get spit off that could be relevant.
EDDIE17:50There's who they're hiring, what job postings have they just posted? There's like there's just any infinite number of examples. And we talked a bit about this in like our ICP definitions. And this ultimately comes into lead scoring as well. I mean, the thing we always tell people about lead scoring is you never know what's going to be right at first.
EDDIE18:10You need to test and iterate. So you start off and you say, okay, well, we're going to score these leads in this way and send the sales team. Let's see which of these convert. Now the key here is like a lot of companies are in a bad spot because they don't have the execution. So you send a lead over.
EDDIE18:26And I know we've kind of converged from outbound to inbound. But you send a lead over and you say, hey sales, we think this is a hot lead. And then they don't call them and then the lead doesn't convert. Was that because sales didn't follow up, or was that because the lead was garbage and sales and marketing just argue with each other?
EDDIE18:41Well, the way to answer this is you have to go execute first. You got to go call them ten times or whatever it is, call, email, LinkedIn, smoke signals, whatever your process is, you got to go do the thing and you have to do this at scale repeatedly. And then you say, okay, here's a batch of a thousand leads that we all called ten times each.
EDDIE18:58Maybe it's 100 leads. Whatever. I mean, statistical significance starts at like I think a number of around 30. Don't quote me on this. I'm not a not a scientist. But you've got, like, a batch that's good enough. And you say, like, we called every one of these people 10 or 15 times, like, how do these convert?
EDDIE19:16And now we can improve our lead scoring or improve our account scoring. If we're talking about outbound or ABM or what have you. And keep iterating.
RACHAEL19:24And I think this is a place where outbound and inbound do converge in the line, can blur a little bit. When we talk about having a lot of intent and having a lot of relevance in our outbound motion, and we've talked about this before and just labeling it all about where it's kind of all mixed together, and everybody works pretty much together.
EDDIE19:47Yeah, we have and there's a part of me that feels really strongly that, like, every company should just do some form of all bound ABM because at the end of the day, any like we're going to get to this, but we're talking about in order to justify outbound, you have to have a certain price tag. If you're selling a product for like $1,000 a year.
EDDIE20:06I have no idea how you do that. It's not something I have any experience at. It's not my space. Good luck. Probably shouldn't be listening to this podcast. If you're selling something for 50,000 or 100,000 or even $20,000, like there's a point, like you have a sales team, right? I'm talking about companies that have actual sales teams, and you're picking up the phone and you're prospecting.
EDDIE20:27You don't just have like a call center taking orders. Well, those people making those purchase decisions, even at 20 or 30 grand, there are multiple people in an organization that are influencing that decision. So whether we're talking about inbound leads or cold prospects, we are really not talking about an individual person. We are talking about a buying committee, even if that buying committee is like super small, we're talking like SMB 20 K price tag.
EDDIE20:54There's 2 or 3 people that influence the decision. Fine. But as we increase in price, like that number can grow to like five, ten, 15, 20 different people as we get into the enterprise. And it's hard for me to understand why we would ever want to even think about designing anything we do, whether it's the strategy, the process, the systems, the metrics around a person and not around an account.
EDDIE21:18So if we can agree on account based instead of contact or lead or prospect based, then that's one element. And then the question is like, should we have our salespeople calling people that we don't market to? I struggle with the answer to that. Why? Why in the world would we spend all this money to have salespeople calling folks and not market to them?
EDDIE21:42Is it because they haven't opted in and we can't email them without spamming the crap out of them? Okay, fine, I'll buy that argument. Is it because we don't by ads, we don't know how to target them with ads? Okay. I mean, I run a really small company and we're doing targeted ads right now. It doesn't have to cost a lot of money.
EDDIE21:58But why would you not try to nurture and warm up those leads while you're working? And why would you not try to grab that signal and and and work with that? So okay. Like, when do we do cold outbound? I guess the answer would be that we don't have enough marketing leads, even if we drop the bar so low that we say, like literally anybody on our website that's filled out, a form that's given us their information or leads, anybody that's going to our website and we've been able to use a tool like Ruby, for example.
EDDIE22:26What's the tool we're currently using?
RACHAEL22:27Rachel a vector.
EDDIE22:29Factor okay. The only thing about vector, but I trust that that's the best tool because you've picked it out. We use it to like vector, and we have identified somebody that's like, fine, okay. We have none of that. So we just have to go pure cold. Like we don't trust the data in sixth sense or we don't want to pay for it or whatever.
EDDIE22:47Fine. Now we're just going pure cold. If that works economically, then that's perfectly fine. But just first, principles like that's not going to work as well as anyone else. So I wouldn't start there. And oh, by the way, we just totally skipped over existing customers. I would really want to exhaust our upsell of existing customers before I start just, you know, grabbing a phone book and dialing for dollars.
EDDIE23:10But hey, if you can grab a phone book and dial for dollars and make it profitable, like, by all means, like do it.
RACHAEL23:15Well, yeah. Like it comes down to what is the highest chance. Like, which audience do you have the highest chance of actually selling the most to in the least amount of time to make the most like ROI on your sales time. Right? So it's been like proven, I guess, like there's been studies that have been done where we know that there's a significantly higher chance of expanding an existing customer than there is a landing, a totally new customer.
EDDIE23:41Yeah. And that's also just like, duh, right? But you only have so many existing customers, so you can't exhaust that. But I think, like, I would even argue like my order of priority would be first and foremost, let's expand our existing customers. Next. Let's go target the people that have a high level of intent through marketing. First of all, it'd be hand raisers.
EDDIE23:59Of course, then for people that are not raising their hands, it's who is engaged with our content the most. And how do we reverse engineer the folks that are warm enough that they can convert? And then, you know, the open question, like, does a tool like $0.06 or Bromborough provide data that is actually going to help you convert folks into customers at a profitable level?
EDDIE24:21And then of course, there's like all the other signals in the market, like who's hiring who, like who just stepped into a new role, who raised capital, like, what other signals are there out there? And you start to get into pure cold. But one could even argue that, you know, somebody like, for us, like a new CRO steps into a role.
EDDIE24:39There's intent there. Like, I don't know any CRO operating a company at a certain level that's not going to come in and say, like, I need to improve the go to market engine. The question is whether or not they want to hire us to do it, that that's the open question, but I don't think any CRO is ever walking in saying, nope, I want to come into the new role, and I just want to keep things exactly as they've been the whole time.
EDDIE24:59I know my predecessor got fired for not hitting his number, but like, I'm just going to keep chugging on, right? So that's a strong buying intent signal for us.
RACHAEL25:09I would I would argue that that's actually more relevance. I think intent is more like, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but more like the person themselves taking actions that show you that they're interested or might be in the place to buy. But relevance is like a timing thing, right? So like a new crow just joining the company, that would be like a relevant timing.
RACHAEL25:31So an offer like our first 90 days program would be like a relevant thing for somebody who just joined the company as Crow.
EDDIE25:40I think we could split hairs on all of these terms, and we could have a long debate on all of this stuff, because I think what you're saying is valid. But the point that I'm trying to make is if we use intent in its broadest sense, these are all intent signals. We've got, you know, intent signals from marketing, we've got intent signals from $0.06, we've got intense signals from triggers out or like just data out in the market, like new new hires, open positions, fundraising, things like that.
EDDIE26:08And it gets really murky, right? Because then, well, then what is pure cold outbound? This thing that I'm like pooling all over. Well, then I guess it would be the thing that lacks that. And I mean at is at its extreme. It's the spray and pray. It's. Rick is every company in these 14 industries with between 1 million and $1 billion in revenue.
EDDIE26:28And the buyer personas are these list of like 75 titles or whatever. And so we just downloaded this list and we're going to send, you know, 100,000 emails this month because we're going to burn through a bunch of domains that is pure cold outbound. And I have yet to meet anybody that has shown me that that's worked.
RACHAEL26:48Yeah, maybe back in the day, like when we didn't have the internet and all people had was just salespeople calling them randomly to discover new products or the newspaper, you know, it worked a lot better back then.
EDDIE27:00I guess, but even then, like, you still have signal data, like you can see, I mean, I've literally, like, knocked on doors trying to sell vacuum cleaners, but I can still, like, pick which house I knock on, and I can literally pull up databases to find out how much they spent on that house and what their most likely like household income is.
EDDIE27:15Right?
RACHAEL27:15That's true.
EDDIE27:16That's true. There's always.
RACHAEL27:17A Segway. Oh, I'm just segway into relevance. So the third problem is lack of relevance. We kind of touched on it a little bit and, you know, relevance and intent kind of kind of blurs together a bit.
RACHAEL27:31I think a big difference is relevance comes through a lot in your outbound messaging. So, you know, we see in emails all the time, people just having the mail merge, you know, hey, Jim.
RACHAEL27:45And like, oh, how did you know my name? Or hey, Jim, I hear you go to this university. I also go there. Do you want to buy my product? Like, that's I think I'm, I think I'm mixing my wires with personalization. I'm like, that's that's not actual personalization. No, but this is relevant.
EDDIE28:01This is fine, Rachel. And we don't have to edit this out because I think this is the exact problem people have with relevance and personalization. Everybody's so confused on it. And like I'll just say I completely disagree with everything you're saying. I don't think any of that is relevant. And that's totally fine, because I think a lot of people are thinking like along the lines of what you're thinking.
EDDIE28:20Relevance to me is ultimately coming down to segmentation. So I'm going to try to sell you something right now, Rachel, and I'll try two tactics. I send an email and I'm like, hey, Rachel, I know that you're into like weird gore movies because I like found that out online somehow. Now that's out there by that's true.
RACHAEL28:40It's true.
EDDIE28:41True though and and you know go Canadians and I really loved Cool runnings and just all this stuff. And at the end of the day how much are you going to care about this. That's like a temp number one. Here's a tip number two. Hey Rachel, I know that you are a marketing team of one. And you're you work for a small professional services company where your CEO creates a bunch of content and is the primary like face of the company.
EDDIE29:10As a result, I imagine that you're spread incredibly thin. I see you have podcasting. I see you have YouTube. I see you have a newsletter. How do you get everything done all day, every day? We've worked with a bunch of marketers like yourself that are trying to grow in their careers and get a million things done with limited time.
EDDIE29:31I would love to share with you how we helped Jane at this professional services company grow the marketing engine to generate $10 million in revenue.
RACHAEL29:41Would you take my money? Take my money now! What is that? Take our money.
EDDIE29:46Let me ask you this. How many people out in the world are there like you? How hard would it be for me to find a bunch of small professional services companies that have a single marketer? That's the like I didn't even I'm not even getting creative here. Literally. It's just job title, number of people in the role, industry, size of company.
EDDIE30:09That's it. And you know how many emails I get that are like that. Hey, Eddie, I know you're the founder CEO of a small professional services company. I imagine you're facing these challenges. No, I don't get these emails. I get these emails that are like, hey, Eddie, I know you're like, insert merge field of whatever. Like I have the most, like random title on LinkedIn because I think it's like CEO Shiro and go to market optimization.
EDDIE30:31I don't even remember what the hell it is, right? But whenever they do the mail merge, it just looks awful. And then they're like, I want to tell you what we did for Pepsi. And I'm like, Pepsi spends more on like eraser or pencil erasers than my entire company's revenue every year. And they're not even in my industry.
EDDIE30:49Like, why would I care? Maybe if you said Accenture, but even then, it's like Accenture spends more money cleaning their bathrooms than we have in revenue. I don't care what Accenture is doing.
RACHAEL31:00Yeah, I get a lot of emails being like,
RACHAEL31:02you know, we do this for software companies just like USC. And I'm like, we're not a software company. Immediately just delete the email. I don't even read it. I see that preview and I'm like, yeah, no.
EDDIE31:12This is not uncommon for people, right? So like, how can we create segments where now like let's fast forward this or not, fast forward this, but let's transition this to sales. Right? So I'm writing the email, I'm making the cold call. And instead of saying like, hey Rachel, you're not my sales rep, by the way, I need you to make whole calls today.
EDDIE31:31First person you need to call is a CFO and a tech company. The next person you need to call is a CMO. In a professional services company. The next person you have to call is a chief operating officer in a manufacturing company. Good luck with that. And by the way, this is like kind of sort of what I experienced when I worked.
EDDIE31:48Salesforce is as much as Salesforce is great. There's that element. It's impossible. It's absolutely impossible. I worked there for three years and my primary industries were tech, professional services, media and advertising and then just everything else under the sun. I didn't even get to media and advertising. I still to this day have no understanding how media and advertising works.
EDDIE32:09I know there's this thing about this insertion order and somebody pays money and it's like, drop 100 grand and then you have to like, serve the ads. And if you don't serve the ads for 100 grand, I still don't understand this because it is hard for human beings to, like, wrap their head around 18 different things. So now imagine Rachel, and I'm like, all you need to do all day long is call this one type of buyer one role in one type of company.
EDDIE32:32It doesn't necessarily have to be the same industry I've always sold to industries myself, but I can imagine there's lots of companies that like maybe if I'm selling like payroll software, it doesn't matter what industry I'm in, it matters how many employees I have or it matters like what we pay our employees or, I don't know, but one type of buyer, one individual that has the same problems that are going to resonate with them.
EDDIE32:58And then you can really go far with that. That's relevance to me. And relevance is possible at scale, personalization at scale, a bunch of merge fields and AI that like figure out, like like when I see people that regurgitate my content in an email, I'm just like, it's obviously AI, like, you haven't won me over. And by the way, the thing that you just did with the AI to like, pull all the crap I wrote about XYZ has nothing to do with the problem you're trying to solve.
EDDIE33:25So like, why do I care? Congrats that you like unleashed AI on me and had it read like a bunch of stuff I produced online. This does not endear me to you in any way whatsoever.
RACHAEL33:36Especially these days when people are like disliking AI more and more and also just with people who are following along with the problem numbers. We are on problem for lack of segmentation. Just wanted to call that out.
EDDIE33:46Well, let me just harp on this for just a minute. Like why this is so important? Because like at the end of the day, anytime a rep reaches out to me and they're always like the proverbial like, can we have time for a call? Which I have issue with that as well. You're asking me to give up like not just a half an hour of my time.
EDDIE34:01It's a half an hour of my time if the call goes poorly. So it's like you're basically saying, hey, what I'd like you to do is 1 or 2 things either completely waste a half an hour of your time, or I want you to invest at least two hours of your time exploring something that might work. Okay, cool.
EDDIE34:17Now, why would I do that? Now, if you have just blasted me with some template or even some AI, you are signaling to me that this is not worth your time. You haven't spent five minutes to go to my website, check out my LinkedIn profile, see what I actually do, what my actual role is, what my company actually does, what we actually look like.
EDDIE34:37And this isn't like just my ego. Maybe it's a little bit of my ego, but it's not just my ego. It's me asking like, why would I invest two hours of my time? Because that's what it's going to take. If we have a call that doesn't end in like, this was a waste of my time. No thank you.
EDDIE34:53Why would I invest two hours of my time? And you don't even think it's worth five minutes of your time to do the homework?
EDDIE35:00Like, what I'm looking for is you're the expert in your domain. You know who you help. You know, the people that, like, have the biggest problems that you can solve for you know how you solve those problems for them. You know what they need to do on their own. We go back to the weight loss analogy like, I can't lose weight for you.
EDDIE35:17You've got to like, eat the right foods and do the exercise. I can't do it for you. So like you as the vendor are the expert in how to achieve this outcome. And what you're telling me is, hey, like, I think the likelihood that like we can help you is so low that I'm not even going to spend five minutes looking through your website.
EDDIE35:37Yeah, that's a really bad signal in my opinion.
RACHAEL35:39Quick pause. Everything we talk about on this show. Diagnosing go to market ops. Prioritizing projects for revenue. Impact processes. Metrics. Insights. Building a predictable go to market engine. We've built frameworks for all of it. They're free and undated on our website. Union square consulting frameworks. The link will also be in the show notes, so make sure you check that out.
RACHAEL36:02All right. Back to the episode.
RACHAEL36:05it's funny to me when I get cold emails and it's somebody trying to sell us, like data enrichment or outbound help, like, like third party outbound teams and then the emails, like you're a busy software company, like.
EDDIE36:21Absolutely terrible.
RACHAEL36:22No.
EDDIE36:23I don't know. I, I try not to waste my time with them, but I'm just like, do you think I'm just so stupid that I can't figure out how to, like, do a merge field? Like, I don't need your help for this. If I wanted to just spam the shit out of people, I don't need your help.
RACHAEL36:34Yeah, exactly. Especially the way that they do it. That's all it would be. But I realized we haven't been connecting any of this back to outbound for pizza.
EDDIE36:42Oh, man.
RACHAEL36:43We're not giving the people what they want.
EDDIE36:45All right, well, let's go back to Gigi. Right. So Gigi has done all these things. So, like, what's the what's the relevance here? Right? Gigi's customer is potentially hungry, and she has the benefit of knowing that, especially at a certain time of day, most people are hungry. She is segmented down to like existing customers, people that like pizza.
EDDIE37:06She's not calling anybody that has a gluten allergy or is dairy free or any of these things because they bought pizza. Now, she could have found another way of finding out that they like pizza. But in this case, she found that, like, these are people that have a problem, they're hungry and they like the solution that she has, which is pizza.
EDDIE37:28The messaging is relevant. Like, hey, you bought a pizza before, would you like to buy it again? And it's not even creative. Like she can just like hammer that message to every single person has ever bought a pizza from them, she said. We can have it there for you in 30 minutes, right? And so there's some level of like location, proximity, right.
EDDIE37:45She's not calling people presumably, that are three hours away, which is also not that hard to do. Like we can figure that out with tech. So like Gigi's batting a thousand for me in this example because she like she's doing one of two things here. One is she has like gone through this like mess of the database and found this information and like thought through it really carefully.
EDDIE38:08And then she places this call, which would be massively unpopular or not unpopular, unprofitable for selling pizza. And she's got some like go to market ops guru in the background building out all these lists. And they're like, hey Gigi, here's a list of all the people that bought pizza from us in the last month that are within 30 minute delivery time window.
EDDIE38:33Here's her names and phone numbers, and she's ready to rock and roll.
RACHAEL38:38At 6:30 p.m. O.
EDDIE38:41You're thinking 630. I was thinking more like 10:30 a.m..
RACHAEL38:45What for? Pizza, Kenney?
EDDIE38:47Pizza for lunch?
RACHAEL38:49I mean, I guess so, but I don't know.
EDDIE38:53I don't know, I mean.
RACHAEL38:55I, I guess if, if they're in an office building and, you know, like where they work and be like, hey, you're thinking about what you're going to have for lunch.
EDDIE39:03Maybe you're right. I don't know. I just like a lot.
RACHAEL39:06If I've ever had pizza for lunch.
EDDIE39:09I had pizza for breakfast. Rachel, you need to, like, step it up.
RACHAEL39:12I've had pizza for breakfast. Cold pizza left over from the fridge, but I've never had it for lunch.
EDDIE39:22Oh. Come on. Like you have, like, the two pizza lunch at work. I mean, how long you been working remote now?
RACHAEL39:27Oh, God. Like at least ten years. Yeah.
EDDIE39:30All right. Well, there was there was a time. There was a time.
RACHAEL39:34When I.
EDDIE39:35I guess we would have the pizza lunch at work.
RACHAEL39:37No, you're right, because I did do like I did some stand in work on TV shows and stuff. So sometimes they gave pizza to the crew and it was like a huge deal.
EDDIE39:47You know, there's an idea for outbound for pizza is like where? Or all the companies that have conference rooms and the team meetings and things like that. There's another angle for relevance, right? You're not the person. You're not the person eating the pizza. The person that needs to provide the pizza.
RACHAEL40:03Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. That's. Yeah. There you go. I have anyone listening to a piece of company.
EDDIE40:09There's got to be somebody doing Outback for pizza catering that would actually be profitable, right? Like if you order no pizzas, like, if you call a film production and they order, how many pizzas did they order for a film production?
RACHAEL40:21Oh, God. I mean, it depends on the crew. Crew size.
EDDIE40:24Like 20 pizzas, probably.
RACHAEL40:26At least I'd say. Oh, yeah, it depends on the crew size, but it could be like 100.
EDDIE40:31feel like the audience is missing the thing that's most interesting about this story. What TV set were you on?
RACHAEL40:37It was The Last of Us the first season.
EDDIE40:40What the heck is
RACHAEL40:41Oh, you know the guy, Pedro Pascal. And they're zombies
RACHAEL40:44all that fun stuff.
EDDIE40:45Yeah. What was that like?
RACHAEL40:47It was actually amazing. It was probably one of my favorite experiences of my life. And it happened so randomly, too. That's like a whole story I could get into. But I don't want to sidetrack us too much. But no, it was really, really cool. Pretty much every scene where there was an adult woman, so not like Little Girl, I was like, there.
RACHAEL41:07And I did the whole scene and I had said the lines in the script with the stand in for Pedro, and I got to meet like the actual cast members and stuff. And yeah, so I watching the series back, it's weird because I have memories of actually being there in that place and doing those things.
EDDIE41:24That's so cool.
RACHAEL41:25Yeah.
EDDIE41:26All right, let's go back to Alabama for pizza.
RACHAEL41:29Problem number five is kak payback. And you mentioned it a little bit earlier. But let's get into it more now. Is there a deal size where outbound stops making financial sense.
EDDIE41:41So a lot of people will say at 40 or $50,000 you can't be profitable without pound. And for anybody listening that doesn't understand the assumptions here, first I'll say there's a lot of assumptions because we have to assume that we are paying our account executive a certain amount of money to close deals. Or more specifically, we pay our accounting a certain amount of money, period.
EDDIE42:04We have our overhead on top of what we pay them. And then of course, like they close a certain amount of revenue. So if you just do the division, you can figure out per dollar or per deal what it's going to cost you. And then if we have the stars doing outbound, we have to add that on top is marketing nurturing those those leads or getting in there and helping us open the door.
EDDIE42:25We got to add that in. Is there an essay involved in the deal? What about all the tech that we have, etc. etc. etc.? A good chunk of our sales and marketing budget goes into this. And then on the back end we have the customer that signs for $20,000. Gross margin let's say is 80%. So it's only $16,000 of gross margin.
EDDIE42:49Are they on monthly, quarterly, annual? How quickly do they churn? And I think we ultimately need to look at what is the payback and the LTV and is a sustainable. And companies are already struggling with this across the board, not just with outbound. And so the rule of thumb is 40 or $50,000. I was actually trying to use claw to like, beat this up and test a bunch of assumptions here.
EDDIE43:13And it arrived at like 20, $25,000. But this is all just based on how much people are producing. Like how many acres are you turning over? Like, okay, the one SDR you hired is super successful. But like we also have to account for the fact that we have to pay a bunch of other stars that are going to churn out of the business.
EDDIE43:30And overall, our entire program is this profitable or not. And so I don't have a definitive answer for you, but the rule of thumb is 40 or $50,000. I think if I was running a software company or a tech company, and I wanted to really know that, I would just look at my own numbers and I would drill down and I would do the math to figure out whether or not our outbound is profitable.
EDDIE43:52And then I would further segment it to see like, well, maybe an enterprise, it's profitable. Actually, that's probably a bad example because we're trying to talk about the minimum price point, but maybe there's a certain product or certain segment of customers or a certain industry. It's profitable and it's not with another. And I would want to identify what is profitable because it's not even about what's optimal.
EDDIE44:12Like maybe inbound does a better job, but like if I can make money doing outbound, I want to make money doing outbound. Like, let's keep doing that. That's fantastic. But the answer to your question, the rule of thumb is 40 or 50 grand.
RACHAEL44:23So does automating any part of the process change the payback math, or does it just move the problem around?
EDDIE44:29It could, but at the end of the day, you're going to spend a certain amount of money on sales and marketing. And if you automate, you are going to need to produce more revenue in order to improve that payback or that LTV to CCaC. So yeah, absolutely. I mean, you think about like what we can automate, we can automate the research, we can automate the initial draft of the email.
EDDIE44:53We can automate how we define our ICP on a regular basis by analyzing our data. We can, you know, semi-automated territory plans and target lists. We can more importantly get better target lists. There's so many things that we can do with outbound. None of them are easy. They all involve, you know, human loop. They all involve iteration. There's so many things that we can do, but that's not necessarily going to just like double our profitability, right?
EDDIE45:25So yeah, like it would be interesting to think about if we say, okay, well, we've done the math and we've figured out that we're able to maintain profitability at $50,000. What if we did all of these things? Could we improve the efficiencies enough to be able to sell 40,000 or 30,000? That would be an interesting thing to try to solve for.
EDDIE45:45I definitely think it's there. But I think one of the challenges is, is like companies have so many things broken and outbound that unless you can tell me, hey, we have our ICP dialed in, we've got a detailed process. We're super, super careful about who goes on to this target list. We have highly relevant messaging. We've broken everything down into segment, so we're just going after one buyer at a time.
EDDIE46:09We've perfected the messaging. We've perfected the follow up process where multithreading the account. We are going through multiple different channels in order to get to each of these individual contacts within this buying committee, etc., etc., etc.. We're marketing to these folks and we have all this data, we're analyzing it. We have a Go to Market Council where we review this once a month.
EDDIE46:30We have dedicated time with rev ops or go to market ops or marketing or sales or all of the above to analyze our data and see what's working and what's not working. And less you're doing all of that then? No, I don't think that you're just going to like magically spin up AI and it's going to double your efficiency.
EDDIE46:44And now all of a sudden you're profitable selling a $25,000 product. When yesterday you weren't profitable selling something 50 grand outbound. No, but and we've had people on our podcast that have literally shared stories like this. If you do have those things dialed in, it's very possible.
EDDIE47:01We had Ryan Milligan from Coda Pass on sharing similar stories. We had you interviewed Kyle Norton about this. Like these stories are there, but these people have, like, their stuff dialed in.
RACHAEL47:13Absolutely. And if they didn't already, the whole story of the podcast is how they dialed it in in order for it to work. Yeah. And I think that's just like a it's just become, you know, a first principles rule of AI in any company. Like you need to have these processes and these foundations dialed in before you can expect to see any significant or impactful change with AI or ROI from AI.
EDDIE47:40And you know, what's funny is, like, I could even I could even make the counterargument to that, Rachel. I could say, no, you don't, because you actually don't. You can go and you can go and spin up AI with none of the stuff in place. It's just not going to work until you get it in place. So whatever you want to start with, it's like saying like, well, you're not going to lose weight just by going to the gym if you eat like terrible food, okay.
EDDIE48:03But you can still go to the gym. And then slowly over time, like stop eating terrible food and then you'll lose weight like it's it's not complicated, but I think it's a little bit of correlation and causation. It's unlikely that a company that has been running go to market with all of these things broken is just going to slap AI on top, and then they're going to wake up one day and go, oh, you know what's funny?
EDDIE48:24We never analyze our go to market data because we're so busy, like just doing stuff. But we did finally take a look at it and this isn't really working. And so we're going to go back and fix our ICP. We're going to go back and fix the process. We're going to keep iterating on this. We're going to like pull rev ops off of like the flood of, you know, ad hoc requests and being reactive.
EDDIE48:45And we're going to tell them to sit down for three hours every week and analyze our data and come up with thoughtful ways to improve, go to market. It's unlikely that a company is going to make a pivot like that, but if they did, they would make the AI work.
RACHAEL48:59But it's hard. Are you used myself? Oh, sorry.
EDDIE49:01I was just going to say. But it's hard for me to envision that because as much as like we at USC neglect our own go to market because we have like the cobbler shoes thing, we still have like, all our data, like kind of dialed in because it's just so easy to do it if you just have some level of intentionality.
EDDIE49:18And so when we try to spin up AI, it's like we've got all this rich data and it's not perfect, but like, it's just so hard for you to imagine when you're coming from a situation where things are just like an absolute dumpster fire, like there's just so much to clean up before any of this is going to work.
RACHAEL49:31I was just going to say I'd argue against myself as well
RACHAEL49:34because I was just thinking about this. You can you can use AI to help you get those foundations in place, like using AI to analyze all your gong calls and all your Salesforce data or whatever to, like, help you find your true ICP or something like that.
RACHAEL49:49Or dump a bunch of data from your books to see like, okay, which who are best customers? Who expanded the most, who turned the most or the least? So like there is a place for AI before you have the foundations in place. But I think but.
EDDIE50:04You're just talking about using AI to build the foundation, and.
RACHAEL50:07That's what I mean. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. So before I was like, oh, if you don't have the foundations, you can't use AI and have any impact. But I'm saying now like, oh no, you can use AI to help build the foundations. And that itself will be an impact.
EDDIE50:20In theory. But here's the challenge. It's like you can only use AI to rebuild the foundations, to the extent that you can use AI to rebuild a foundation. So like let's talk about ICP at the very base of the foundation. If you have a bunch of junk data in there and you feed it into the AI, the AI is like, well, either I don't have the data that I need to identify which customers are in ICP versus not, or that data is inaccurate.
EDDIE50:44So it's going to mislead me. So then you say, okay, well, why don't we use AI and non AI tools to enrich the data. Let's go use zoom info and Clay to go in and look at all of our past customers, all of our past opportunities, leads, prospects, etc. and figure out like what the common threads were. Okay, well, that works to the extent that you can use those tools, but and we just did this exercise ourselves, and as much as we try to gather the right data, there was still data missing when we did this exercise a couple of weeks ago.
EDDIE51:14And you can't go back and get that data. There are definitely data points where it's like, you can't get that now, and that is going to impact your ability to define your ICP. And so it's really hard to do this stuff when you have no foundation.
RACHAEL51:29I feel like we are getting a little bit on to a different topic that we do like talking about a lot foundations for AI. So let's bring it back to the last problem in our problem list for outbound messy systems.
EDDIE51:42I thought that was what we were just talking about. So I don't think we're off topic.
RACHAEL51:46I guess. So I didn't read the last problem before I said that and reading it like, oh, wait a second. Yeah, perfect segue actually. Just record scratch.
EDDIE51:55Record scratch.
EDDIE51:57This is this is.
EDDIE51:58Exactly the point that I'm trying to make is like, okay, so we want to do outbound. First and foremost, we need to target the people most likely to buy.
EDDIE52:04How do we do that? We do that by reverse engineering, by looking at the people that have already bought from us. And it's hard to do that with messy systems because we go back and we say, okay, we call this person on October 12th of last year, and they turned into a customer on February 5th.
EDDIE52:23Well, first of all, do we I'm making the assumption that we have a record that we called them. If our systems are messy enough, we don't have that record. Maybe the first thing that we see is that we created an opportunity with them. Okay, well then that means that I can't see all the people that we called that we didn't meet with, that we met with, that didn't turn into pipeline or even people that like were pipeline, but we never bothered to enter it into the CRM.
EDDIE52:49And so now I'm working with a much lower set of data, which makes it much more difficult for me to figure out which types of prospects are most likely to convert. It's the same thing with the process. Like, well, here's a simple question how many times should you contact somebody before you give up? And then we could just use a rule of thumb and say 15.
EDDIE53:09But, you know, it would be so much more interesting to me would be to say, well, show me all the people we reached out to 16 times. Did any of them by after the 16th attempt? What about the people? 15, 14, 13? At what point in time do we hit a cliff where it's like, okay, sure, sure. We have one customer that we call 13 times before they responded, but only one and and and all the other people here is 999 people we reached out to 13 times.
EDDIE53:38They just completely ignored us. Well, the logical conclusion would be to say, let's stop calling people 13 times doesn't seem to be very productive, and we can't do that if we have messy systems. And the beauty is it's not hard to fix the systems. Like, what do we need? Like we need to integrate our email. We need to find a way to log goals.
EDDIE53:59We want to integrate call transcripts or even with all the AI these days, like we don't even necessarily need to integrate as long as we can just access that data. We've done this ourselves. We feed into our call recording tool, in the email, into Salesforce, into HubSpot. I forget what other tools, and it's like, we have all this stuff at our fingertips.
EDDIE54:19It doesn't even necessarily have to be integrated, but we have clean data.
EDDIE54:23if you don't have that, it's really hard to figure out what is actually working in your business.
RACHAEL54:29And also the workflows to like having the right guardrails and entry and exit criteria and, you know, form fields in your CRM to be able to.
RACHAEL54:38Push reps to collect the right amount of data and have it all in one place and push them to follow the process properly that you've laid out.
EDDIE54:45Yeah. And that's a no look at balance. Right. Because like everybody right now is talking about how do we save reps time. And so it's like okay first of all how do we collect data from the call transcripts, the emails, etc. to fill that data in the CRM so we can have better visibility. Ultimately, though, we need to be really careful with what we ask reps to do, and there's a lot of insights that we can get just by looking at like the overall conversion rates.
EDDIE55:04But like as an example, if we don't even know what industry the companies are in, we don't even see them in the pipeline because reps never even added them to pipeline in the first place. The meetings aren't there because we don't have our calendars integrated. Okay, like a lot of this data can be automated. I spend very little time like putting data into Salesforce.
EDDIE55:24We have all this stuff automated, but if you don't do either of those things, then how do you identify what's working specifically with outbound? What we want to know is who do we call? And of those people who turned into customers, and how do we double down on more people like them?
RACHAEL55:41All right, Eddie, how do we tie the last two backs? Pizza for opened outbound for pizza.
EDDIE55:46The last two. What were the last two again?
RACHAEL55:48Kat Kak, payback and Messy systems.
EDDIE55:51Okay, so I'll take the messy systems first. So Gigi does not have messy systems
EDDIE55:55for the purposes of this call. When Gigi calls and says, hey, you bought a pizza before, maybe you're hungry. Do you want when we can have it in 30 minutes? Her systems are dialed in. She knows who the customer is, their contact information, where they live, if they're in that 30 minute radius, and the messaging is relevant because she has whether she did this manually or somebody did this automagically for her, she's narrowed in on an audience that fits all that criteria, and she's able to just dial for dollars with highly relevant messaging.
EDDIE56:26That's what we want to do in go to market. How could I create a list of solo marketers in small professional services companies like you, Rachel, and get the message out that seem to resonate so much with you, which I just literally pulled out of my hat. And what if I just called like a thousand people just like you?
EDDIE56:47I guarantee there are a thousand people just like you out there. I guarantee there are 1000 people that are solo marketers in a small professional services company. I'd bet all the money in the world.
RACHAEL56:57Absolutely. So more probably.
EDDIE56:59Why don't we just find those people and then, like, put highly relevant messaging in front of them? Kak payback, though, is the critical piece here. I'm skeptical that Gigi can do all this stuff and sell enough pizzas in an hour to get a reasonable payback. If we just think about the margin on pizza, how many pizzas people order, etc., etc., that could be pretty tough.
EDDIE57:24Now, if we pivot over to catering and she's selling 20 pizzas at a time to film sets, then we might have that healthy payback. And I think companies are not looking at this enough on a channel by channel basis, because if they did, they'd see more opportunities to double down instead of thinking about like, well, how many calls do we have to make?
EDDIE57:42And what's the conversion to accounts and what's our close rate? And it's like all that stuff is great. Like, let's try to optimize for that. But the end of the day, what does it matter? The motion is either profitable or it's not profitable. And if it's not profitable, you can improve it to be profitable or you can't. And you should pull the plug.
EDDIE58:00And it's that simple. And we could dial this down to each channel. We could dial this down to a segment. Maybe it's profitable with film sets and it's not profitable with individuals. Maybe it's profitable with film sets and office admins, but it's not profitable with individuals. And we can keep going with this. Maybe it's really profitable in this zip code because people in this zip code, I don't know, like like to order pizza a lot.
EDDIE58:26And in this code, not there's so many ways we could slice and dice this. And if we're looking at this on a cash payback or LTV perspective, we have a much more objective view than just looking at pure conversion rates, because at the end of the day, I don't care what the lead conversion rate to close rate, the activity to meeting ratio.
EDDIE58:47I don't care about any of this stuff. I do not care if an STR has to make 10,000 phone calls to get one sale, so long as it's profitable.
RACHAEL58:55I love how easily you're able to actually
RACHAEL58:58like relate everything back to that one example. I did not read even remotely that deeply into that like paragraph that was shared on LinkedIn, but it was that all just improvised, or did you like, think that through beforehand?
EDDIE59:12I've been in sales for a long time. I never sold pizzas when I sold vacuum cleaners door to door. I've sold cell phones, I sold cars, I've sold banking, I sold investment banking. I sold private equity investment funds, I've sold software, I've sold professional services. I'm trying to think about what I'm missing. I used to sell things door to door when I was like five years old.
EDDIE59:35I was like, make little vases and like, put like, little like, I don't mind. My nanny showed me how to do this. I take like little pieces of masking tape and like, cover the bottle with it and then cover it in shoe polish. I don't know why that was appealing, but everybody in my neighborhood bought one. And then I went back and tried to try to upsell them to like an expansion deal and sell them number two, base number three.
EDDIE59:54And I remember this like lady yelling at me like I bought like four vases from you. I don't need any more vases.
RACHAEL60:00That's so funny. Oh my God.
EDDIE60:03So I'm just trying to visit Gigi slinging these pizzas.
RACHAEL60:06Yeah, she's killing it. All right, well, that is all the questions that I had. And we are pretty much at time anyways. So awesome. That was great.
EDDIE60:16Cool. Let's plug our outbound efficiency pyramid. Or is that already going to come in.
RACHAEL60:21We're going to have that in the show notes. But yeah if you want to learn more about how we suggest operationalizing your outbound, we have the outbound efficiency pyramid. You can find that on our website at Union Square Consulting.
RACHAEL60:37Outbound efficiency framework with dashes in between each word.
EDDIE60:41And if you're a.
RACHAEL60:42Member, all that good luck.
EDDIE60:43And if you're a pizza place, you have a special offer for you. Go to Google and type in outbound for pizza and call someone else because you're not in our ICP and we will not help
RACHAEL60:51Exactly. And then you've just learned our lesson that we were teaching you.
EDDIE60:55There you go. But if you're a tech company and you want to help with this or even a professional services company, you've done a little bit of that. But mostly tech companies, we can probably help you improve your outbound.
RACHAEL61:05Especially if you are new to your role or new to the company. We have a program that we kind of recently launched called the first 90, and that is helping you out in the first 90 days while helping you out in 90 days, setting up your go to market ops and optimizing your go to market operations after you've inherited messy systems into a new role.
RACHAEL61:25But you don't have to be super new to your role. You can be, you know, a year into your role. You can be five years into your role. We just find it's most helpful for people who are somewhat new and so getting everything set
EDDIE61:36Cool. Well, thanks for bringing us together, Rachel, and to our audience. Thank you for listening. I hope the pizza analogy was fun, and also that we left enough value here that it was worth listening to.
RACHAEL61:46Yeah.
EDDIE61:47Thanks for listening to the episode. If this resonated. Please give us a five star rating and a follow. It helps us reach more people, and you get our latest and greatest content without having to search for it. And if you're looking for hands on help and go to market strategy and or rev ops, please reach out to us.
EDDIE62:01We help our clients with everything from annual planning to improving processes and go to market, implementing systems to support those processes and go to market AI. We're always happy to offer a free consultation to help you identify the best opportunities to improve your go to market engine, with or without our help. You can find us at Union Square consulting.com and the info will be in our show notes.
