Rippling's CRO explains how Programmatic Outbound, a marketing-led approach that avoids hiring SDRs, worked for early growth but hit a wall. After two years, their database ran out of accounts to target, forcing a strategic shift as the company scaled.
In the early days, what we referred to as Outbound was really Programmatic Outbound. That was led by marketing, which was me in the early days in the basement, until we then hired our cmo, Matt Epstein, at the time. And I think Programmatic Outbound, I think makes a lot of sense when you're a small company, mostly because it's essentially free. You gotta build your database, buy the right tools, but you don't have to staff an entire SDR team to go after the accounts. And so Programmatic output makes a lot of sense. You have virtually an unlimited tam. You can. There's hundreds of thousands of accounts that you could go after. And then eventually for us, we did really Programmatic Outbound up until about two years ago. And two years ago, we were looking at our next year's growth plan and we were looking at the revenue that we wanted to get to, and we ran into this constraint of we literally don't have enough accounts in our database to continue to get the yield that we get on our programmatic outreach.
