How to Build a World Class Outbound Team with Aaron Ross

Bonjour. I'm happy to be here in Paris. It's been 7 or 8 years since I was here last with our little family trip. Interestingly enough, my wife was supposed to come here last night with me, but we have a baby who's sick at home. So she got— luckily she got a later flight, so she's coming in tonight. But it'll be the first time in 7 years or so, maybe since our honeymoon, that we've been away for 2 nights together. And you'll probably see why in a second. Let's see if this works. It does. It's like magic. Now, as Vasyl mentioned, there's a couple books— I've actually done 4 books, but the 2— the one book people first heard about was Predictable Revenue. And that, if you haven't read it, went into how I, Salesforce.com, created an outbound sales and prospecting process and team that helped them create $100 billion in a few years. A lot more since then. And then a couple years ago, Jason and I wrote this book, From Impossible to Inevitable. Predictable Revenue was the sales bible of Silicon Valley. From Impossible, we want to make the growth bible. We're actually going to update that. That's the latest book. And just fun fact, if anyone is going to China next month, it should be out in China next month. It's gonna be called From 1 to N. But I like the COVID Now, a fun fact that you may not know is I have a big family. So we have 9 kids, and I only got married 7 years ago. So went from 0 to 9 kids, and it actually took us like 6 years. So I think Hyperscaling a Family is going to be a future book. You know, I don't— has anyone else here have more than 3 or 4 kids? I don't see any hands. Okay, there's a few brave souls, a couple. Yeah, it's fun and a lot, but it's worth it. So let me start today. Now everyone's here at SaaStr because there's no better place to learn about how to grow a company. And I want to start by going over what is the main problem with growth today that I see. Well, there's always more than one, there's never one thing, but if anyone tells you there's only one thing They're lying. But here's, here's only one of many problems, but the main one that I see, this trend which is getting in the way of sales, marketing, and growth, which is this information overload, choice overload. So there's more apps, there's more channels, there's more messages, there's more email, more social, more stuff to do, and people are just overwhelmed. Your customers are overwhelmed. Your salespeople are overwhelmed. All right. Is there anyone here who feels like I'm just not busy enough? Oops, I'm going the wrong direction. Here we go. So at home, that what these are, what customers and salespeople generally look like. Some confusion, some frustration. Now, they don't put this face on the outside. This is what they look like on the inside at work. 'Cause we're all at work like, I got this, I got this, and inside we're like, I don't got this. Traveling, it's just, so this is where a lot of people are just overloaded. And you'll see things like GDPR, which is one consequence of this, how to try to reduce the overload. It's not gonna work, it will in some ways, but the overload is gonna continue and continue to grow forever, basically. This is an unstoppable trend. So how do you combat this? And by the way, what does this look like? What's the big deal? So what this causes, it's all the same thing around— you're missing your goals, you're wasting money, you're wasting time, and really it's wasted opportunity. So let me ask you, if— think about this— last year, if you had gotten everything right in sales and marketing, how much more would your revenue be this year? That's a better way to think about it. So here's some more like tactical day-to-day issues that you will see. Now these could be caused by many reasons, but again, this overload, this overwhelm, this confusion causes things like, you know, high sales turnover, right? Not enough leads or pipeline, or you're getting appointments and not closing. It could be, you know, your teams are arguing because you're just confused, or customer churn. So here are 3 problems that the confusion translates into in your day-to-day business and what we're doing wrong, or what I see a lot of companies are doing. So the first is we're doing this superficial, superficial sales specialization. Now, how many people here have read Predictable Revenue or From Impossible? Oh wow, okay. Great. So you'll— it's a familiar idea. We'll get into this, but we'll all— I'll get into what people aren't doing the right way. It's okay, you can raise your hand, sir. That's alright. No, no, no. So also, companies haven't nailed a niche yet. And the third thing is outbound is misunderstood. So we'll go through what this means because if you really bold— oh, look at that font. So predictable, predictable revenue in one word plus one letter. It's Foku. Oh no, I'm sorry, that's focus. Because this is how you counteract the overwhelm and the overload. Again, there was, you know, 5— let's say 3 years ago there might have been 500 sales apps or 500 marketing apps. Today there's 5,000, and in 5 years there'll be 50,000. Foku. It sounds like we're in China, back in China. So how do you do this again? You focus to cut through that overwhelm and complexity. And now remember, this is for your customers as well as for your salespeople or marketing people or people people, because everyone is overwhelmed and confused. That's just the state of people's minds these days. Okay, so now the 3 steps to making more moan are— moan, that doesn't— okay, why? Money. Okay, money. How to make more money. I told you I wanted the custom font. So how to— 3 steps to making more money. Because I think of Lego blocks. How do you make this repeatable? How do you make it predictable? Because whatever you solve today, because the world's changing, whatever your tactic is today, it's not going to work next year. So how do you keep evolving this? So here's the 3 solutions to the 3 problems. We're going to go through sales specialization and some tips on how to get it right. How to nail a niche and how to add outbound to inbound, I would say, the right way. Now sales specialization was in both books. If you haven't read them, the idea is if you have salespeople that are doing too much, if they're prospecting and they're closing and they're managing customers and they might be getting inbound leads, they just, they get overwhelmed. That was the conventional model of sales. They did everything. The new model, which is what works and what you have to do— the way you do it might be different based on your business. So I call these the 4 core roles, right? So the top left is inbound lead qualification, which your, your marketing leads go to, junior reps. Bottom, outbound prospectors, closers, who's basically selling new customers, and roles after the customer signs, which could be customer success, it could be account management. The idea is you're creating more roles so your people can do fewer things better. Because when they're doing too many jobs, they just get overwhelmed and they do a bunch of things either poorly or okay. This way they can do one thing really, really well. So prospectors prospect, closers close. Now, and this is how all the fastest-growing companies do it now. Here's where people get it wrong. So I just want to— if you, if you're like, I know that, that's what we do, okay, just to make sure you're doing this the right way. Here's 3 areas again I don't see people going far enough with this idea. The first is a lot of companies split list building from the prospecting. You might have prospectors and they should be doing some of their list building or cleaning, but they probably shouldn't be doing all of it. Sometimes that looks like marketing building lists for them. Sometimes you have junior researchers. That depends on your market. That's one area that I think companies should invest more in, more, get more specialization. The second one is that if you have more than one sales development rep, more than one junior salesperson or SDR, BDR, whatever you call them, you've got to split inbound from outbound. So the junior reps that are responding to inbound marketing leads That job is different than the prospector's. If you only have one person, they do have to juggle. But a common mistake is you might have 2 or 3 or 4 SDRs, and if you're lucky enough to have inbound leads, but then they have the same SDRs doing both, doesn't work. Split them. And the last is making sure you're splitting the people who are assigning new customers from the people who are managing current customers, whether you call it customer success, account management, doesn't matter, right? Those are different jobs. Here's just a couple common ratios. If you have, for every 400 inbound leads that have to be touched or reviewed by a human, you probably need 1 full-time inbound lead qualifier. And 1 outbound prospector should not support more than 4 salespeople. People. Again, then they get too scattered, and that relationship between a prospector and salesperson is really, really important. It's vital towards making outbound successful in your company. So there's a couple quick questions. Well, what if we're too small? If you're only one person, or you have one person on the team selling, you apply the principle of focus by specializing their time on your calendar. You block out hours of prospecting time or whatever you need to do. That's how you use this idea. And if you're worried that passing customers from one person to the next is going to be a problem for relationships, just consider if you do it the right way, your customers will get much better service because every step along the way they have someone who's an expert at that area who's dedicated to getting back to them right away. Because when salespeople do everything, They give great service to some customers and really bad service to others. So number 2, nail a niche. This actually— so I'm gonna start off with— this is the biggest lesson I've learned since Predictable Revenue came out. So let me start my own personal story. You know, speaking, I didn't always speak in front of crowds. And funny enough, when I was in investment banking, the main feedback or critique was that I wasn't very good at verbal communication. So that was a long time ago. When I left Salesforce, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I started off by developing this thing called Unique Genius, like helping— I wanted to help people find more passion in their lives, so how to make money through enjoyment. And I also did this thing called CEO Flow, turn your employees into mini CEOs, right, to help create more freedom and enjoyment in companies. But when I got married in 2011 and I had kids, I became an insta-father because my wife had 2 kids already. You know, it was this moment of like, oh shit, I need— or merde— I need to make more money because I can't— I'm not a single person. And so there was this moment where I had to make more money more predictably, and These were, were interesting, and you know, if I had more time they could do something, but they were not going to support the family. So I nailed my niche with outbound prospecting. That's where people needed me the most. They didn't really— most people, I found most people didn't feel like they really needed fulfillment, or they really— our CEOs really needed freedom, right? They really needed to make money. And what I've learned is that when you're working with people who know you, a lot of companies, you start out with your relationships, as you should, right? There's this high trust, and then you grow, but you plateau. And to break that plateau of organic growth, you have to start marketing yourself to people who don't know you yet, whether that's through online marketing or outbound prospecting. This is why through doing outbound prospecting for years, I've seen this principle. So when you start to try to grow and you're struggling, the most common reason is you haven't nailed a niche. What that means really is you've learned which kind of customers need you the most and what they care about, how to intrigue people who don't know you personally, right? Because when they know you personally or your company brand, you have a bit of a crutch. You get you started, but at some point it blocks your future growth. And when you're starting out with your company, you can get away with confusing messaging, right? Because you're relying on your relationships or your investors' relationships. But as you start to grow towards people who don't know you, you can't get away with that. And you end up— if you use that early messaging, you end up confusing your customers or confusing your salespeople with terms like We're the leading network scalable social architecture. We do AI list building, or we do AI insert whatever the AI thing is. I don't know how many people here are doing AI, but probably everybody at this point. It doesn't mean anything to people. I see some smiles. Yes, AI. So again, what we want to do here is nail a niche, which doesn't mean we're thinking small. It means we're being focused, right? This idea of focus. 'Cause when we're trying to be everything to all our customers, it just confuses them. 'Cause again, you're not competing against your competitors, you're competing against all the other things that are on the mind of your prospect. How many people here have customers who will say, "Ugh, I just didn't get to that. I just didn't look at their proposal yet. I just didn't get to that thing yet. I've been so busy." That's that overload. So to win and to be able to enable yourself to grow faster, You want to be a big fish in a small pond. And it's easier to make the pond smaller than the fish bigger. It's easier to tighten your targeting and to make your messaging more specific to your customers than it is to change your product or your company. So here's an example, right? Amazon started with books. They had big visions of online commerce. Zappos for shoes. Salesforce— Mark Benioff always wanted to create a big company. But Salesforce automation was their strength. And Predictable Revenue, we're starting in outbound. Like, what's your beachhead market where people need you? Because this is probably, this idea of need versus nice is probably the simplest way to start to figure this out. You are not a nice-to-have and you are not a need-to-have. But to which customers are you a nice-to-have and to which ones are you a need-to-have? To my unique genius customers, I was a nice-to-have. Or to the market, but I'm a need-to-have with sales. So this is really where companies spend too much time chasing customers that don't really need them. Salespeople, if people aren't buying— okay, here's the best example of when you're a nice-to-have. You do a demo and they're like, "Wow, that's so cool," and you never hear from them again. You're nice to have in that situation. So how is that different? Now Acquia was the fastest-growing company in North America a couple years ago. So they serve Drupal customers, websites that use Drupal, and in their mind they're like, well, we can target companies that already use Drupal, or we can target companies that are evaluating whether they should use Drupal or not and try to get in early. But the bottom line is the companies that needed them were the ones that already used Drupal and they needed help with it. They were a nice-to-have to companies that didn't use Drupal yet, but were just evaluating Drupal versus their other options. And they went from $0 to $15 million per quarter with outbound within like 3 years because they nailed that niche. So what do customers want, right? They don't care what you do. They don't care about AI. Or whatever the current buzzword is. They care about what's the result you create for them. What do you do for them? So this is my daughter Aurora, and she'd say, "Hey dad, I love donuts. Hey, can you take me to donuts?" I'd say, "No." And at some point, learning from me, as good smart kids do, she started to do this, "Hey dad, when we would go for donuts, those are some of the happiest memories of my life." Speak to your customer. I'll keep telling that story forever. So here's 3 ways to improve your messaging today. Today, when someone asks you, "What do you do?" Pretend they ask you instead, "How do you help customers?" Because it automatically reframes in your mind more of an answer based on results. And the so what, or what's so great about that, two versions of the same thing, which is you say, all right, we do AI-based list building. And I apologize to anyone here who does that because there's probably a few of you, but hopefully this helps. We do AI-based list building. Okay, what's so great about that? Because no one cares about AI-based list building. What's so great about that? Oh well, you can get better contacts for less money. With lower bounce rates. Okay, now I'm listening. So here's another example of a company in the States that sells to hospitals. So they started out with this email campaign asking, hey, who's in charge of receivables? And you know, there can actually be multiple kinds of receivable— receivables at a company. And when they switched to 'Who's in charge of patient cash collections?' Their response rates, the positive ones doubled or tripled, right? Because it spoke to the customer. How do you get into the mind of your customer? Now Jason is the one who actually started this and I latched on to his idea here, which is the 20 interview rule or basically just doing interviews and making it an incredibly important part of your process. Because people don't do enough interviews. You're too busy trying to buy AI-based apps and not talking to your customers. So you don't need to do 20. That's really if you're starting a company, but maybe even 2, 3, 1 to help speak to the customer and learn how they think. That will be your best investment of— it's kind of a— it is kind of a pain in the butt to get interviews scheduled, but invaluable towards improving your messaging and marketing or in outbound prospecting. And one last example here on nailing a niche. 'Cause it can be a struggle to go through this. It's not you do it in one day. This can take weeks or months to sort of nail a niche. There's a company called Whiteboard Geeks that we helped with, and after 3 months they were sort of struggling. We were only getting 4 appointments for them a month, and then we went through another sort of nail a niche exercise, and by switching to a more focused type of company, biotech and medical device companies, different messaging, they're able to triple their appointment rate and actually start to close some revenue much more quickly. So this can work. So this last bit is more tactical on the outbound side. And if you haven't, you know, this— I would say the state of the art of outbound is a bit going back to basics because people get distracted by all the fancy technology when in reality what's missing is, do you know your customer? Because most people don't. Are you— have your team set up the right way? Now when I say adding outbound to inbound, there's a lot of companies that you have inbound leads, but you can actually be too successful at inbound. So for us, you know, we had some kids. There's 2 kids came from my first wife's first marriage. We've had 3 bio kids together, and then we also— a part of this, we did outbound to get more kids through adoption. Does that work? This is Rosie. I just love that picture because she looks like a— the hair like a troll. And then this is Maverick. It's a fake Halloween— it's fake blood. That wasn't real. So we get outbound and inbound go really well together. Now my wife will say, you just thought that's a cute picture to put up there. I'm like, yeah, okay. Now you think about some of the fastest-growing companies in the world that you assume are inbound-driven. Like Google or SurveyMonkey, Box, Slack. They actually, they do outbound. You guys know this? All these companies do outbound, even at Slack. Now, what I hear is the executives don't know this, but there's people, people call us at Slack and like, we want to build an outbound team. Our executives don't, so I don't know if like the executives know, but people are building outbound teams at all these companies. Marketo and HubSpot had huge outbound teams. So if you have this fantasy that, oh, just do inbound and we're going to— that doesn't— that's not reality. At some point inbound plateaus and you need outbound, but they go great together. And if you're too successful inbound, you become too dependent on it. Then it can be a hard change, right, because it's a cultural change with different processes and roles. Here's one example, because you don't want to wait until your leads plateau before you add outbound. But one of the examples I'll say is when you're— if you have salespeople and they're just used to getting leads and showing up and doing demos and closing, it's a switch to do outbound because they're gonna get appointments and they show up and the customer is not ready to buy right there. And like, oh, I have to sell? What, they— that lead, that was a bad lead because they didn't want to buy. No, that's called outbound, where you have to work for it. You might actually have to sell. Okay, that's— but that's one cultural change that you see. I see all the time. So when you add an outbound team, here are just some basic goals that you would like to see. If you have your own team of prospectors, which for most of you is the right long-term, long-term solution, you'd like them, each prospector, to do 5 to 15 qualified opportunities per prospector per month. The range is based on your market, your product, how niche is it. It could even be less than 5 if you're in a very picky super niche. It's just a range. If you see people getting more than 15 qualified opportunities, I've never seen that in reality. It usually means they're getting more than 15 appointments or demos, but the quality is not there. If you're using outsourcing, you might want something at least like 10 accepted opportunities a month. But either way, your goal is generally to get of these opportunities a quality rate that you get to close 20% of them, or at least of the dollar value. And sorry, you know, it's 4 to 12 months. It takes 4 to 12 months to get a team or program up and running and successful. Okay, it can't— it depends on niche. You get the right people. In fact, I go through here some of those variables and how long it takes and the upside. It depends on your executive commitment, how crowded the space is, your product, your deal size. You're start— I mean, there's all these factors. So again, but if it takes longer than a year, something is wrong, but it can take up to a year. But here's one of the best ways to think about how you start if you don't have one yet. Actually, how many people here do not have much of an outbound program but want to start one? Okay, how many people here already have outbound prospectors? Bunch. And how many people here use some kind of outsourcing service? Not as many. Okay, so think about it this way. Are you a growth company, or do you want to be— you want to be a growth company or a simple company? Everybody here with investors is a growth company. Just that means is growth is the most important thing. You're gonna do whatever it takes to grow. But by simple company, I mean you want to keep it simple. You probably don't want to hire and manage salespeople. It's worth it. You're like, I'm not gonna— I'm okay not growing as fast. I just don't want to hire more people. I just want a small team. Because there's these 4 starting models for outbound. If you want to grow, to build a team or to grow it, the first one is an internal team. You hire your own people, right? Most of you, this is the right long-term solution. Whether you start with outsourcing or whether you start by hiring, at some point you need your own internal team. By the way, almost every company, every growth company in here someday will have an outbound team, whether it's this year or in 5 years. It's when, not if. External team means you use outsourcing as a way to get started if you're not ready to hire someone. If you are a growth company, it might be a way to get started simply. If you're a small company, sometimes you start with that, maybe you keep it. C is parallel. If you're really trying to move quickly, sometimes people do both. They do some outsourcing while they're building their team. And the last one, scrappy, means you really don't have much time or budget, so you got to do it part-time here and there on the cheap until you get something going. So really, there's not a best model. This is what model is the right one for you. There's pros and cons to each, but here's 3 tips. Avoid remote hires if you can. It's just, it just makes it so much harder unless you already have a proven process and system and you have defined it and it's working, and then you can look at remote hires, but not the beginning. Another one is when you start something new, start with 2. If you can hire 2 people, and this is true for any sales role, because not only can they have that buddy system to support each other, but if something goes wrong with one of them, you're not left high and dry. The last one, number 3, is make more phone calls. People not using the phone enough. There's a lot of tapping. It's very quiet in sales rooms. What we see, now I'm guilty, in Predictable Revenue I wrote cold calling's dead. Okay, it was a little bit dramatic, I admit it. Cold calling's not dead, but there's many ways you can use the phone. You can make cold calls, you can do research calls, mapping calls, follow-up calls. There's ways to use it, and we've seen as customers, our clients that use the phone get better results than those who don't, whether it's to get appointments or whether they're— it's for like research-based purposes. So here, the last bit really want to go over why outbound— outbound is not all about AI. Now I'm sorry, I'm just picking on AI because that's the the word of the year. So it's not about AI, email templates, account-based anything, apps, or lists. That's not what outbound is about ultimately. Okay, so now if you have a program, if you already have a team, this is where you especially wanna listen. Okay, it is about the dashboard. Now, I have a family car. And if I don't know, if I don't have a speedometer or it's wrong, how am I gonna be driving that car? By the way, this is the car. Why is that so funny? Yeah, it's a Sprinter. So if your dashboards are wrong, I don't know if I've ever met a company that had accurate outbound dashboards. Ever. So by the way, if you're small, you may not need a dashboard. If you're a startup and you don't have much of a team yet, you don't need a fancy dashboard, but you do need something, at least something to start. So here's where people go wrong on dashboards. When you have your outbound funnel and you're looking at your activity metrics, your call and your email and your social, and you're looking at your results metrics, how many quality conversations are we getting, how many meetings or demos are we getting, Okay, so number 3 is the important one to start. So we need to know how many qualified leads, or whatever you call it, leads or opportunity, qualified opportunities have the salespeople accepted into their pipeline this month. Also by per prospector, and every single one of those needs to be audited. If you have an outbound team, Alright, so how many people have outbound teams? Great. Leave your hand— hold on, leave your hand up now. If you have someone on the team checking every single opportunity for quality, leave your hand up. Okay, there's a few. Good, excellent. Because there's too much subjectivity and you will— you have to check every single one. Now pipeline creation rate is just the dollar value of pipeline created per month. So if you measure that, that's your best indicator of future revenue. So here's some of these mistakes: using leads instead of accounts, tying compensation to the number of meetings, right, not accepted opportunities, combining inbound and outbound into one dashboard, and not auditing every opportunity. I'll leave this up for a second. And by the way, I know they're recording this and they have the slides, so I'm sure you guys can get this in some other way. You don't have to write everything down. These are really common. And I would say, going back to the auditing of your opportunity, you cannot trust your outbound dashboard. It will not be accurate unless you're auditing every single opportunity, because whether you have new hires or people are like fudging the numbers or salespeople are trying to do a favor for their SDR, it will be wrong. And if it is wrong, the executives will not be able to trust it. And if they cannot trust your results, at some point it will fail. Now Marc Benioff, the number one thing, he didn't believe in outbound because at Oracle he saw everyone fudging it. So for 2 years we had, I audited everything until finally he's like, okay, I believe it's working. Now we're going to expand it. And when you get it all right, you can do what Acquia did, which was, you know, we had 3 prospectors with them for 6 months. They got some data like, okay, if we're gonna see $720,000 in revenue per year from each prospector, let's hire 40 of them. And they added an extra $30 million per year over in a couple years to help them break $100 million in revenue. So to wrap up here, going back to those 3 things, Sales specialization, generally you want to add more roles is how you take the next step. I rarely have seen companies that have too many roles. This is all about adding more focus to your team and company. How do you cut through the overwhelm? With nail and niche, do one interview. How about one? You don't even need to do three. You don't need 20 unless you have a new company. Start with one. And with outbound, if you don't have one, If you don't, you need like one person to own it. If you're creating a program, you need one person. If you already have a program, start by fixing the dashboards because I guarantee you they're wrong. Now with that, actually, I'd like to just for Mina here just to introduce the last slide. She's our VP of marketing and growth and here are my partner. She'll be here. If you have more questions, she'll be the one to find. Well, I'm out.

Exactly. I'm playing myself and Aaron for the day. So thank you for being here. And in terms of connecting with Predictable Revenue, we'd love to meet as many of you as possible. So if you can't find Aaron, come and find me. And if you go on to Aaron's Twitter, which is your first slide, so it's just Moto CEO. The pinned tweet has my Twitter handle on there. And you can ping me if you want to connect with us, if you want to partner on anything. And anyone who's a subscriber is going to be receiving our slides as well. And another thing that's coming out soon is, you know, we're talking about outbound, and internally we work a lot on outbound marketing as well as outbound sales. So we'll be releasing a new blog post talking about how outbound marketing can support your sales team as well. So great being here. If you have any questions at all, you can, uh, go onto our website. We have a dedicated page for SaaStr Europa attendees, and you can get a free consultation if you're interested in getting started with us. Thank you. Thanks, Eric.

Great. Thank you, everybody, and thank you, SaaStr team.