8 Ways To Improve Your Outbound Sales

Christina Gilbert (0:09)

If you're just starting outbound and your reply rates are low, maybe even close to zero, this video is for you. As the founder of my company, OneSchema, I personally generated and closed millions of dollars in revenue through founder-led sales. As a visiting partner at YC, I've helped hundreds of YC companies improve their outbound. So in this video, we're going to cover eight things you can do to improve your sales outreach. Tip number one, you want to start manual before you automate. The biggest mistake I often see founders make, they'll come to me during office hours and they'll show me their email pipeline, and it will all be automated. They've loaded up a tool, they blasted out a thousand emails, and they ended up getting zero replies. The biggest issue with this is if you get zero replies from a campaign that you didn't give any thought to in the first place, then at the end, when you have zero replies, you've learned nothing. The problem could be your messaging, or your company targeting, your prospect selection, your deliverability, or your subject line. So my recommendation is to do at least 100 outreaches by hand, for you automate anything. It's honestly probably going to end up being more. When I say by hand, I mean genuinely by hand. Spend time thinking about one individual person. What is her problem specifically? What would actually capture her attention? Visit her LinkedIn page and read about her company.

Doing this homework personally is how you'll come up with your highest converting outbound ideas. Tip number two, targeting beats perfect messaging. I often see founders spending hours tweaking their email copy, but they barely even think about who they're emailing. Outbound prospecting is kind of like looking for a needle in a haystack. You need a person that has the exact pain point that you solve or a perfectly crafted message won't even land. So here's an example. I worked with a company in the winter batch who was selling an infrastructure product that should have been sold to senior engineering leaders. But when I opened up his LinkedIn and looked at the prospects he was selling to, a lot of them were DevRel managers, GTM managers, there was even a customer success manager. He was sending hundreds of these messages and was wondering why he wasn't getting any replies. So if you spend a little bit more time thinking about whether or not the person you're sending the email to actually has the pain point, you'll often end up seeing a huge increase in your reply rates. Those wrong job titles were never going to buy, no matter how good your email was. So how do you find the right job titles?

The first thing that I typically like to do is look at the customers that you already have. Then look at the sales process. Who is the person who is pushing the last deal to close? Who actually signed the contract? Who is the person who paid? Look at all of their job titles and then reach out to people who have similar profiles. You should also look at who has already replied to your outbound. So if you're at the very earliest stages of your journey, and you don't have any customers or any replies yet, ask yourself who in the organization has the most to gain from buying your software. Here's an example. Imagine you're selling software that monitors employee devices for security purposes.

A chief security officer might get fired if there's a data breach, so they would really be interested in something like this.

But an engineering manager would probably rather not be monitored at all, so they're not a great person to target. It's also really important to make sure that you're reaching out to the right companies. One mistake I'll often see companies make is they'll do a search in a tool like Sales Navigator, and it will return a bunch of profiles that maybe sort of match what they were looking for, but were actually the wrong type of company. For example, if you search for tech companies in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you're often going to get a bunch of IT implementation consultancies, so you want to be really thoughtful about how you're using list building tools. Verify individually that each company is a good fit for your customer or your message is going to fall on deaf ears. As you do more outbound, you'll start to discover clues about a company that indicate that they need your product. These are called intent signals. A great place to look is often at job postings, as they'll tell you a lot about a company's priorities. Company growth is another very common intent signal. Imagine you're building compensation planning software.