Good day PROs!

Mark Kosoglow spent a decade at Outreach building the Outbound motion. His latest thinking his him rebuilding the function from the ground up.

Maybe We Swung Too Far?

"Outbound" has been around a LONG time as a key pillar of sales.

In the 2010 - 2015 period, the Outbound motion started to change considerably, as technology provided a more robust set of tools built specifically for the purpose.

My own experience started in 2011/2012. We were a small software company reaching out to organizers of events (classic Founder-Led Sales) and were getting crushed by random tasks and follow ups in Salesforce.

"There has to be a better way."

Enter Salesloft. We became an early customer of one of the first Sales Automation platforms. The tool made the entire process So. Much. Easier.

We were able to ramp up activity and therefore got better results. And so did everyone else. So much so, we all created a brand new role (and function) called the Sales Development Rep.

This went on for a decade.

Then in 2022, "investors changed their minds" (from Mark). No longer was growth the ONLY consideration, but we now also had to consider the capital it took to fuel that growth.

Sales Development teams everywhere were drastically reduced. In the Lower Middle Market, it was more common to see teams eliminated entirely.

We definitely got more efficient, but in a world of abundant supply (i.e. competitors) and infinite noise, growth has been a GRIND (at best).

Refactoring the Function

Mark is a self-described operational thinker, so he is constantly assessing the right structures and systems for Go-to-Market. In his decade at Outreach (the Sales Automation platform), he led a team that started at $1mm revenue and grew to $250mm.

Needless to say, that kind of growth requires constant assessment and retooling of the engine.

So when he says he thinks the Sales Development function needs to be "refactored," we listen.

Uniting Around Channels

Just like a football team has a Head Coach and specialized coordinators (offense, defense, special teams); Mark is advocating for a similar approach to Sales Development around channels (email, phone, social).

The bar for "good" in each of these channels has gotten so high that expecting a small team of early-career professionals to master all of them, as well as our product and market, is not realistic.

But imagine the power of an Outbound team that has an expert in each of email (and data), phone and social.

One caveat is that Mark's past and current experience is with "hyper scale" organizations, where teams go from 50 people to 500 in a few short years.

In the Lower Middle Market, this specialization in the past has been challenging. But now with AI-assisted tools, this is now becoming possible.

It just requires a very different set of skills, organizational and incentive structures.

Basic Contact Data is "Salt"

Basic company and contact data is a commodity. Everyone has it and the quality of it is deteriorating.

The difference is enrichment. But not from the usual data providers. This enrichment is AI-informed and pulling from multiple, sometimes obscure, data sources, the goal of which is to provide relevant insights around which you can build a more personalized outreach approach.

And this is personalized that is WAY beyond "hello <first name> at <company name>."

The World Turned Upside Down

Go-to-Market is undergoing the most severe amount of change that I've seen in my 25+ years of experience.

The fact that we now call it "Go-to-Market" instead of "Sales & Marketing" is an indication of that.

In 2006 Amazon launched S3, a major catalyst for the growth of the software industry.

In 2011, Mark Andreesen famously said, "Software is eating the world."

The 2010s were a perfect storm of digital transformation. We invented, modified, adapted and expanded ways to market and sell our products.

By the end of the decade we had what we all thought was the universal playbook for growth.

Then suddenly, it all stopped working, at least as predictably and efficiently as we expected.

The core concepts are valid, but we need to rethink how we execute.

Experience in the trenches and conversations with experts like Mark are starting to reveal a pattern of core capabilities required to reach prospective customers.

• Deep, "Always On" customer insights, synthesized and democratized across the organization

• With these insights, content that considers the entire "job-to-be-done" for our customers

• Multi-channel orchestration of distribution of this content

• Prospect data in smaller batches, but with more timely and custom enrichment

• Visibility on the customer's experience across our revenue engine

Does your company structure unlock and expand these capabilities? Reply and let us know!

Gary & Andy