S7E5 - B2B SaaS Sales Growth: Outbound Strategies to Scale Revenue with Joey Gilkey

Outbound is building trust from a further back starting line. Inbound, I'm building trust from someone who's done a little bit of research, maybe converted through an ad or through content or SEO or wherever you. So your starting line for that deal is much further along. A CRO at a 500 sales rep company is not going to be my first line of defense when it comes to selling, but a CRO at a 8 person company is. The messaging that I'm going to communicate to a CRO and 8 person company is quite different than a CRO of a 500 person company if and when I ever get in front of them if I need to get in front of them. If I have a lot of not-meas and referrals, I know my title and targeting is wrong. If I have a lot of not-interested, it's probably a messaging issue or a targeting issue. If I have very high meeting and very high activation and low not-interested and not-meas and referrals, then I'm onto something. I can scale that. But it's all data. It points to what's working and what's not. Scaling review in BDB SaaS requires more than just a great product. Without a consistent flow of high quality prospects, growth will stall. In this episode, we're going to break down proven Alban strategies to help BDB SaaS companies generate more qualified opportunities and close deal father. You will learn how to structure an Albao Playbook, personalize Algrita scale and choose the right channels to consistently connect with your ideal buyers. I guess today is Joey Gilkey. Joey is the CEO of TitanX, where he helps companies to increase their connect rate. They even have a claim everywhere I found him that they will increase your connect rate with 300% or they will actually give you money back as well. Welcome to the show, Joey. Well done man. Thanks for having me. Yeah, the claim is a bit of a shell shock for some people, but I'm like 230, I know, I haven't had to pay it yet. It's irresistible off the right. We're going to have a cover more in today's episode as well. We're going to talk about BDB SaaS specifically outbound. I like to start off this season with a story. Would you have an Albao story to tell our listeners to start off with? Sure. Honestly, I can tell mine, which is really cool. So I find enough TitanX is only about 14 months old, 15 months old. We've grown extremely fast in those in our first year and beyond that. But the funny story behind it is I took a services company and turned it into a SaaS. I was running a big services company and I was using another vendor called at the time Fund Ready Leads, which was a tech-enabled service company. I'm by guy named Ryan Reissert. And I was a customer of them. They were small. It was a little slow. It was a very expensive tech-enabled service. But there was something powerful about it. For me, it was, I need to get my hands on this before anyone else does. I acquired the company in August of 23, thinking I was super intelligent. I'm going to buy this tech-enabled service. It's going to be the moat around my fairly large service company at the time. And what I found out about six months in was people didn't care about what we did. They cared about the technology behind what we did or the tech-enabled service. But it still was a service. Do I want to shut down millions of dollars in my existing service business for a company that's doing virtually nothing? The answer became yes. So shut down my company, Apex Revenue, we're growing fast. But the moat became more valuable than the castle the moat was protecting. And so in late May of 24, we launched TitanX with $0.00 in revenue. Because in the time after I acquired it, I shut down the entire company, took all the revenue off the balance sheet. In just use it to support the company, we have been outbound driven and inbound linked in organic. We went from zero to five million in 12 months off those two channels alone. Outbound has been my bread and butter for my whole career. Enterprise, mid-market outbound specifically. And we took a company that was not a SaaS. It was a service. We invested heavily all of our profit from the service company that we had before Apex. I pumped into R&D and market research and launched what was then Fomarty leads as TitanX for the first time was $0.00 in revenue. June 1st of 24. And between June 1st of 24 to June 1st of 25, we went from zero to five million with a brand new SaaS. That's quick. Yeah, it's been fun. And you mentioned purely outbound but also inbound linked in. Was that driven by outbound? That's interesting. Now it's essentially a compounding effect because our LinkedIn has taken off so much that our outbound has gotten substantially easier. More people show up to calls now having known or heard of us, me, our leadership team, our company. I would say 70% of the time they've shown up heard of us. Whereas when they first started they had no idea who we were. But now outbound. We don't do outbound on LinkedIn. Like we don't do DMs and that kind of stuff but we do organic content talking about outbound. And maybe throwing a shade on some competition like Nux and Orm. It's been wild. What's funny is you can you can do outbound. This is where attribution gets broken right? Because you can do outbound that can hear your name, look you up on LinkedIn. And then watch your content. They come inbound through LinkedIn. But outbound was truly the attribution for that deal. LinkedIn was just more down funnel. Attribution from a conversion perspective. We're tripling down on on both outbound and LinkedIn. Our page strategy started to produce substantially at this point as well. And it's been keeping reinvesting back in growth. Start with their basics. How would you define outbound in the modern BDB size guilt context? Outbound is about identifying the accounts that I want to break into knowing that I target accounts but I sell to people. It's identifying those people with those accounts who are all strangers. Finding a way to get your message in front of their pain. Whatever that channel might be, ours is obviously preferably the phone. Through there it's convincing a complete stranger that you understand their problem and that you have a potential cell for that problem that leads them to a place where they're willing to evaluate whether or not your claims are true that you can solve that problem. That's all I've done is outbound is building trust from a further back starting line. Inbound I'm building trust from someone who's done a little bit of research, maybe converted through an ad or through content or SEO or wherever you. Outbound is the same exact process except for the starting lines further back. I'm starting with zero trust. That's it. Literally it. It's the same thing. Just a longer. I think there's one of the common challenges right? Where the SaaS company start doing outbound or inbound and they don't have the trust. Got any other common challenges? SaaS company's a face when trying to scale. You need more than just product market fit but you need product market fit. A lot of companies try to scale dysfunction. They're injecting technology and AI into their outbound go-to-market motion. Unfortunately all those things do is they just scale the dysfunction that currently exists. I'm a huge enemy of scale if you aren't doing the fundamentals correct. The fundamentals there's only four for outbound specifically. What do I say to those specific personas? Rep is who's delivering that message to that specific list. Follow up is once I had that conversation or I had those interactions. What do I do based on that Intel I've gained from them? And so if you can't nail those fundamentals there's no reason to scale. The biggest issue I see with scaling is they try to scale it when they don't have those four pillars in place. Yeah it all makes sense right? If you're not targeting the right companies with the message and what did you say regarding rep? The rep is the qualitative and quantitative aspect of delivering that message to that right person or persons at the right accounts. And so you can have great targeting and a great message but if you have a bad rep you're never going to get as far as if you have a rep who knows how to deliver that message. Who would deliver that message to? Can contextualize it to whomever you're talking to? And it's at the right accounts that you actually want to work with. I see far too often now like data providers, Zoom info, seamless Apollo, even six cents, demand base, all these tools that have data provision, right? They're a data provider. They have made acquiring data commodity. The challenge with that is people are going into these tools and they're far too trusting that the criteria and the parameters they put into the demographic, psychographic, firmographic, etc. To find accounts and find people that they're trusting that the system is queried correctly that it's going to surface the right people based on that criteria. And it is never the case. They're always going to give you titles that are irrelevant. They're always going to give you companies that are not a good fit. And yet we're too trusting and so we just take that list and we throw it into our go to market process. And when we do that we wonder why. Email our ploy rates are down, connect rates are down, LinkedIn, DMs are down. If that's the case, the few at bats you do get if half of them are irrelevant to you, they can't buy from you, they're not an account you want to work with, they're not the right contact. You've substantially limited your go to market approach. That's what the list is the strategy at the end of the day. You don't have the list right and everything behind it does not matter. Yeah, it's interesting because we're doing somewhat outbound. We're running paid ads ourselves for example right now and we're really focusing on migrating clients over from competitors to us. We ran our own list as well. I'm mandy went over them to figure out are they actually a good fit or not. Yeah. And I think I did maybe even 60% which was in the list because I went over it manually. Not really able to skill that much, but it does prove what you're saying. Like you can just run all these lists but they might not be the best quality you're looking for. That's right. I think it's a shame there's different variations of every title. And so unfortunately zoom info and otherwise are not good enough to normalize titles and realize that this title is the same as this title or this title is not the same as this title but they sound very similar. You find this interesting point where you have a commodity like data and it's very readily accessible. It will just cost you a couple of credits to pull them off of the platform and you're just too trusting in the process. And when you throw it in there, no wonder it's not working. And most companies do not have Apple on the works period. Yes and we covered it for the mental's right list message wrap follow up. We drill down on all components and outbound strategy should have to make it successful. As you mentioned like most of them don't work. What should an outbound strategy have? Yeah. It will be built around those four pillars. So if you think about the first pillar, it's accounts first then people. I'm going to have amazing titles if I sell to VPs of sales. Well the VP of sales at a company with three reps is very different than a company with 3000 reps. And so those titles probably don't handle the same things. and those accounts are not the same fit for us. You get started to the accounts, you have to get very, very dialed in on your ICP. And so that means not just who can we sell to, but how do we sell to each account we can sell to? We have different bands of customers, right? Customers that have three to 10 reps, we have customers that have 10 to 50 reps, we have customers that have 50 to 500 reps. Those are different bands that require different decisions. It also requires different decision making, right? Because a CRO at a 500 sales rep company is not going to be my first line of defense when it comes to selling, but a CRO at a eight person company is. The messaging that I'm going to communicate to a CRO and eight person company is quite different than a CRO of a 500 person company, if and when I ever get in front of them, if I need to get in front of them. And so it starts the accounts, then it goes to the people. Because once I understand the accounts and the bands of which these accounts live, different ICPs for us, then I can start looking at the bands of people. If you have a large enough annual contract value or lifetime value of a customer, then you're probably taking more of a name to count approach, right? You have larger companies, bigger deals. And so that means that you can have what we call above the line and below the line approach. There's contacts above the line, right? It's my director's VPC suite. I've got below the line, managers, individual contributors, revops, et cetera. And so we have to understand that every single one of those people have a different pain point and a different goal than the other person in the account. And so what I see often times is people will pull down a list for an account, let's just say, Dell is the account that I want to break into. And I pulled on 50 different titles. I might have 20 different variations of scripts that I need to have to break into that account. Because revops cares about what? Efficiency, they don't care about the head count, they care about the integrations, efficiency, rep productivity. CROs care a lot about mitigating head count risk. They're managing a P&L, they're looking at LTV to CAC ratio, they're looking at profitability, looking at rep capacity. VPs of sales have a much different mandate. Start with the accounts, then move to the personas who are all the personas in the account that can either be a conversion point for me, can be an influence point for me, or can be an intel point for me. They can just give me information that I can feed to the top. And so that pillar list, start the accounts, move to people, understand that all people are different, which leads to the next pillar, which is messaging. What is that messaging that is going to resonate with those people and those accounts, depending on who they are, what jobs and functions that they own? Far too often we have a very blanket default script that we use for an entire account. But again, revops is different than chief revenue officers, different than VPs of sales and so on. And so you have to have different messaging that resonates with them. The third is the rep, what are the inputs and the qualitative aspects that inputs are? What's our rep capacity based on a funnel math? How many dials do they need to make to get X amount of connects, which yields X amount of meetings, which yields the X amount of opportunities and close one deals? And I need to look at each one of those as a lever that I can pull. Okay, well our connect rate slow, we should invest in Titan X. Our meeting rate is low, we should either invest in better lists, meaning if we target better people, have better conversions or messaging, right? Or it's simply tonation and things that you have to train the rep on. How do they speak? What's their business acumen? Do they understand the pain points of the business at a core level? Now as you move from that, it's follow up. There's a specific system we follow. Buckets framework is based on how that interaction or conversation went. You bucket them into specific buckets. No specific buckets have very specific next action follow up, right? We can go layers deeper than what those buckets are. That's the core of outbound. So the right people say the right thing, deliver it correctly, can follow up. This podcast episode is brought to you by SAST over. My personal favorite SAST event and community. The Europe event is taking place on the 14th and 15th of October in Dublin. And it's going to be two full days of investor-match making, talk from other founders and meetings, which will be a huge focus this year as they're planning to have over 15,000 pre-scheduled meetings before the event. As a listener, you're getting an exclusive 30% discount through the link in the show notes. If your company is already doing above 1 million AR, you might even qualify for a completely free ticket, while they last plus up to 400 euros reimbursement towards your travel expenses. Discounted and free tickets are limited. So if you're free to pause now, hit the link by your ticket or get your free ticket. And then I will see you in Dublin. As I already said, we'll have a boot there as well. So make sure you get your ticket and then come back to this episode. As I've been through the buckets, people say, no budget, not the right timing, all the tournament things. Are those buckets or do you treat them completely different? Yeah, there's six buckets. Main six are meeting scheduled, right? Very simple. I talked to John Smith. John Smith, here's the pitch. I saw the problem. He's well-integging meeting. That's what everyone's aiming for. Outbound's broken as they only focus on that bucket. Bucket 2 is activation, an activated lead. Means I didn't get John Smith in the counter, but we had a meaningful conversation that you'll did one of the three eyes as I call it, right? Tent, I'm with this incumbent solution. We're not happy. We're gonna be looking in Q4. That is an active problem. We are gonna solve that in Q4. Treg, which is, huh, I hadn't thought about that before. That's interesting. Tell me more or interest. Like, yeah, it sounds interesting. Can you send me something? Can you follow me next week and call me again? Right, if they had those three eyes, they're an activated. They're not in the calendar, but they're activated. The next is not now, which is timing. You could argue timing is the fifth pillar of the four because you can't control it. Timing is relevant, just not now. It's not something that's a priority right this second. The next two are very similar with one key nuance, which is not me and referral. So not me is, I call John Smith and John Smith is, yeah, I don't own that function. That's not something that's a priority for me. It's not my department, so on. But I don't know who it is. Furl is the same definition, except for they tell me, yeah, that's not my function, but that's Sally over in Rebops. Okay, great. So I got a referral out of that. And the last one is not interested. Not interested could be for a number of reasons. One is they will never buy. They third of your market will never buy no matter what happens. It might be not interested because your messaging sucked. Your sales rep delivered it poorly, or it's timing, we just didn't know it was timing. This is a lot of factors that lead to not interested. And when you put them in those buckets, there's a specific follow up. I put them in a meeting bucket. It's passed to the account executive. The account executive needs to follow up, do a meeting prep, needs to make sure they're gonna show up to the meeting, meeting confirmation, et cetera. If they're activated, that goes to the account executive. It's part of the strategy. Most people will leave someone that would be considered activated with the SDR. But that point, there's enough intel that if I feed that to the AE and they follow up, they're more likely to get a conversion and turn that into a meeting. When, not me, referred new person. Not interested, why? Messaging, rep, listen to the call, analyze, and so on. If you do those buckets, you will get clear on what's wrong in your funnel. I have very high meeting and very high activation and low not-interested, not-meas and referrals, then I'm onto something. I can scale that. It's all data. And would you then, because you mentioned when you could come to the AE or would you tag them in this DRM system that you could also run targeted ads on not-now bucket, for example? Yeah, that's right. So, I mean, that's kind of like level three of this whole thing, but it's once you get them, if you have your go-to-market motion dialed in, you know it's good targeting. You're getting good meeting activation, not now rates. Then absolutely, the moment they hit, you know, a pipeline or a certain lifecycle stage in the CRM, they should absolutely go to target ads, right? We use LinkedIn as our retargeting. And so, we target the entire cowl swarm the account. And so, if I, if I, using Dell again, if I get Dell converted, I'm gonna go after all of these titles, specifically in LinkedIn, I'll do a profile match. And I'm gonna go after only Dell, for that particular campaign. Yeah, you mentioned that you're not doing outbound on LinkedIn. You only do outbound Vifone, if I understood correctly. How did you decide or identify that phone is the most promising outbound channel for you? And why for the question? Great question. What did you do anything on LinkedIn? And we are doing some LinkedIn, but there's no system behind it. It's more case by case. We believe the phone is the most impactful tip of the sphere channel for outbound, specifically, is because we believe that the phone is just an advertising channel. It's all it is. It's conversational advertising. The only advertising channel where I can pick the account I wanna break into, pick the person I wanna talk to. And if I can get them, I can deliver a one-to-one ad directly to them with my voice and get bidirectional feedback from them on how that ad hit them. We believe the phone is most impactful because not only do you get great conversions, but will you also get valuable insights into your marketing content, your SEO strategy ads, even cold email if you roll out cold email. You start gaining a lot of hot points or triggers that you start to hear. All right, so something that we're doing is, every time we have a cold call, it's recorded, we use GONG as our recording, we use front spin as our dialer. Every time that a call goes through, it goes into clay. And then clay does this thing to extract the transcript of that call and starts to pull out different things that are being set. Then it categorizes that and then it starts to help us develop different copy, different messaging, different content, different ad ideas. The biggest reason I hired my head of marketing is not because it's a great marketer, but it's because he believes the phone is the tip of the sphere for the best marketing. - Interesting, just because like you, as you mentioned, you can talk exactly who you wanna talk to and then you can get the insights that you're looking for, but you wanna use it differently, right? How do you see phone outbound being scalable enough? - The benefit of our technology is you get 25% connected. I talk to a prospect every four dials, I pick up the phone. Most people are talking to someone every 25 dials, they pick up the phone. And so for us, we have an advantage or anyone who uses TitanX because I get to have conversations at scale. I mean, it's not uncommon that a rep can have 15 conversations or connects within an hour. And so that's 15 new data points that we get to use. Some of those will be conversions, some of those will be activations, some of those will be not now, some of those will be not interested and so on. But it's incredibly scalable 'cause I'm getting every hour, dripped in brand new data that feeds the machine. And depending on how they buck it in those six buckets we mentioned, they're gonna get different types of ad sets, right? If it's a not now, then we start nurturing them with different types of content that if someone is not interested. If we get them into the funnel, into the pie, I hit a meeting schedule show up they're qualified moving to active qualification and they move into stakeholder alignment stays They move into commit stage. They're gonna start getting more like testimonial bottom of funnel type of stuff Hey, you're not alone considering this video testimonial video testimonial etc It's gonna start swarming the account so that it bolsters their decision and gives them confidence that this decision They're not alone in this and that when people have taken that plunge to make this decision the video testimonial supports the impact that can have Right, and so everything else can go more into a nurtured where it's like hey, there's content they can download stuff There's webinars or things of that nature. They can just keep educating themselves to the point where okay Not now is now and not interested is I might be interested right once they get there We just start working them down that ad funnel working more towards middle and bottom of funnel advertising that supports You know, I just we just closed or we're about to close a big deal where we started without bound They're about to IPO I believe and I started out bound didn't convert but got engaged with the account and then Based on attribution they've clicked on 11 paid ads in the last 30 days and converted today They converted to a meeting a couple weeks ago and now they're down funnel about to convert and so we can kind of see This inner weaving of outbound and inbound and paid all working together. Yeah, they were with the identify you as a solution With the outbound code and educated themselves and then from there you kind of nurture them all the way down and it's right You don't really call it out anymore. Would you still call in between follow up with them on the phone? Yeah, all the intentions happening on the site and with the ad. That's right. Yeah And so there's enough Notifications of intent going on if they are starting to pop on some of our paid stuff that gets fed to the AEs To follow up on and then we're also watching we're not just running ads for when they're pre-meeting right we're gonna keep running ads through the process and so we use Tracking on our deal rooms and our deal rooms are syncing seeking up with gong and sales force and so all this is all this data Is talking and it's showing okay. They're they're clicking on ads. They're accessing the deal room All this stuff is happening and building a case around why this is a hot deal for us It takes a while to get there, but once you get there, it's obvious what's working and what's not yeah We treat this almost as a best practice my next question is well like what are the common pitfalls companies fall into when they want to have something like this or Outbound working for them. It's putting too much value on meetings like I'm not gonna sell a deal if I don't have a meeting So I'm not saying meetings aren't important. They're absolutely important. They're crucial and they're a precursor to getting a deal done But the problem is when you know a lot of people have based their entire model off of the sales development playbook or predictable revenue Which is written 15 years ago where they fractionalized the SDR and the AE they used to be just outside sales and inside sales And we move to this SDR BDR and AE pod structure It's become so inefficient because of a lot of the headwinds the market that it's one SDR handles one AE And so the problem with that and I've seen it even worse where it's like one AE has two or three SDRs because it's not inefficient We're inverted right one SDR per four AEs because it's not efficient and profitable and so The what I see people doing too wrong is they think that meetings are the North Star metric for sales development They're not we need them but how we get to them is different if you go to the chat homes buyer pyramid chat homes is The genius RIP 3% of your markets actively buying 7% is open to it 30% is not thinking about it 30% does not think they need it right now 30% will never buy if that's true and we're focused on meetings Which slices are likely to take a meeting right this second the people who are actively buying or maybe the people who are open to it But you've got the 90% of the market Not in that stage of buying and so You have those not thinking about it. How do I get to think about it? It's not a priority. How to make it a priority? So those people will turn into meetings the more that they figure out that this should be a priority For the not nows it's a win and so I need to stay on top of them and have the correct follow-up approach to them I can turn that portion of the market into thinking about it more actively thinking about it for now or in the near term And then the other 30% is the never gonna buy you need to be able to figure out who those people are and why they'll never buy Those people usually get de-cute out pretty quick Yeah, so if we don't focus on the number of meetings scheduled then we focus more on the buckets Focus on the buckets focus on completed meaningful conversations Because what I want to do is I want to survey the market and figure out where they at in these five buckets Are they in the six buckets but in the five categories that chat home breaks now? Are they in the buying window open to it? I'm not thinking about it If I can survey the market I can get a good idea of where every account is at any point And then take my next step follow up based on where they're at for always going for the meeting You might hit somebody who's not thinking about it try to get the meeting You don't get it give up or you try and back next week And they're still not thinking about it and they're still not gonna take a meeting You've done nothing to move the needle on them starting to think about it and so The focus should be that you should treat this like advertising some of its brand awareness some of us to educate some To convert and we have to start looking at it like ad channels As opposed to turning sales development into a conversion only channel and we talk about phone albums It's often affected by seasonality right now We're in summer people are taking off at least in Europe People tend to take off three or four weeks off Like how do you maintain the momentum or do you go with the fact that it's gonna be slower and not think of things later? So there's there's two parts to it right there's deliverability and there's receptivity Deliverability is can I deliver a call and have a conversation That is not seasonal I can have a conversation at any point for the most part Receptivity is how receptive is the prospect to that call Now some people are just never gonna be receptive no matter if they're on holiday or not Some people are not receptive because they're on vacation Some are receptive because they're on vacation It's pants can I deliver a conversation and are they receptive if not that's fine be unmemorable that call John Smith Hey, I'm on vacation cool. Call you back hang up. I'm not trying to get much out of them So I'm gonna call him back in a week or two whenever he's back from vacation and I can say hey John This is Joey. We spoke last week sounds like it was the worst possible time to call you around vacation with your family Hope that was amazing. Here's what I was calling then he can go into oh, we did talk I don't remember him, but we must have talked because he mentioned my vacation The objective is I think we're too pushy. We're quoted driven oftentimes most companies are and quotas are based off of meetings Reps push meetings over and over because it's what they get comped on if you push meetings on people who are not receptive It's not gonna end well whereas I could have gotten ideal two weeks later Had I just played my cards better and so I think that's where from a seasonality perspective it doesn't matter You have to be very cognizant of their receptivity to that call yeah Yeah, and I think this is a tactic SOS founders can use right not to focus on the actual meeting but have meaning of conversations One of the questions I want to ask like what is an unexpected yet high impact outbound tactic It's almost this right having the minimum conversations and just record everything from there put them into buckets In advertising, we're not trying to go bottom of funnel conversion every ad I would hope not at least right some of it's for awareness some for consideration some for decision And so we've got top of funnel middle of funnel and bottom of funnel for a reason But we try to go straight to the bottom of funnel as fast as possible and unfortunately buyers are resistant to that And so I think that we have to start thinking that way we have to start seeing it as advertising a stat that most people know is If I mentioned the buckets there's meetings activated not now, etc If you follow up with activated The right way if an account executive what I'd call professional seller follows up with activated You're going to turn 30 to 50% of those into meetings your str was gonna instead was gonna try to get them into meeting They wouldn't but instead if you treat it like the way I'm talking about treating it You'll be able to identify those people as activated leads when AE follows up You'll get 30 to 30% to 50% of them into a meeting And relatively short order and so I think that you're actually by focusing on meetings You will get less meetings than if you don't focus on meetings and focus on the right strategy Yeah, in the end you're gonna push for something people don't want they've It happens naturally it's like dating it's like if I'm forcing marriage down everyone's throat I'm not gonna have as much luck as if I force conversations to happen and see what I get from those conversations And then I follow up on the best conversations and then guess what now I'm married because I found the right person You know you find love when you're not looking exactly Exactly If listeners should only remember one thing from this episode What should be when it comes to albums getting? How much she can give you two because they can't be separated One is the list of strategy. It's a very manual process It should not be automated AI should not do it You need to have a manual process to make sure it's the correct list You put garbage in you're gonna get garbage out If I go to trashy bars to find a wife I'm probably gonna find trashy candidates to get married to I want to make sure that's a very practical list building approach Is one go account by account make sure it's a good fit Once you have built a list you can build a list at scale But don't send it into your go-to-market motion just yet A very easy hack is bring that list into a spreadsheet Google sheets are excel go to the job title column that is job title Sort it a to z it's going to batch your titles in alphabetical order for one But it's gonna batch all the very similar titles together CEO CEO or CMO CMO and so on Then you scan that and make sure like oh do I want to talk to the assistant to the CEO? No, but they got pulled in because that's what zoom info and these other tools do They're trying their best, but it's not successful So you remove it from the list garbage out that's number one number two is you know We've been talking about start treating the phone like an advertising channel that the sole purpose of is not to simply just convert meetings If you do those two things you're gonna be the head above everyone else in Album People just don't do that too lazy one question bit off topic you probably noticed the Apple update with dial Is it gonna hurt do you think it's gonna hurt outbound phone call? I think it's gonna fundamentally change things I think it's gonna hurt certain platforms So if you are currently parallel dialing on nooks or orm it's going to wreck parallel dialing entirely thank goodness But it's going to A lot of reasons behind that it's very technical and nerdy. I won't get into it unless you really want me to So that's one, but I would say the second is I think it can actually help the right people And so the fundamental belief that tie next has is that there is a reachable market and there's an unreachable market. We define those as the people who have human behavior to pick up a cold call versus the people who do not have that human behavior. It's like, Jordan, if I asked you, do you pick up cold calls? What's your answer? I have to say yes because I often get calls from people I don't know. So I have to pick them up, but I'm not really never got. So you have the human behavior to potentially or even likely pick up the phone. But I guarantee like my wife, right? She's a good example. Never. There could be an emergency and the police department could be calling her number. She doesn't recognize she will never answer that phone and she won't check her voice, Mel either, but that's her. And so that's her human behavior. I'm not going to change that because I call her five times over two weeks. It's not just who she is. So because we believe that we believe there's people who are high intent for the phone. They have a high intent to answer or at least a moderate intent. And there's a low intent, which is I'm not likely to or I will never pick up a cold call no matter what changes. And so if that is true, right? Then I want to ensure that I am calling those who are high intent. Now the reason I bring that up is because with iOS, it's creating a new channel for us to potentially get a hold of people. If I called my wife and she has iOS turned on, right? Where it does screen it. We have a new channel, which is now going to be a push notification on the phone where I can deliver a message to them of some sort. Are they still unlikely? Yes, but I might turn people who would not have answered a cold, called cold into somebody who will actually answer if it is relevant or if it's well crafted. So there's going to be a new strategy for how you actually deliver and talk to AI screening to get that push notification as optimized as possible to encourage people to actually pass through and say yes, I'll talk to that person. People who are high intent will stay high intent, people with low intent will stay low intent. However, we now have a greater shot of actually getting them than we did before. Because now we are delivering a written message, which is their preference, then picking up a cold call and figuring out this relevant. Yeah. Yeah. And it all comes back to what you said before, starts with the right accounts, the right people, the right message, so then you can actually deliver them something even though they don't pick up the phone. Yes. And parallel dialing is not going to be able to functionally work with iOS. Because I think the adoption rate is going to be very high. Notes put on articles saying the adoption rates can be really low. That's completely fraudulent. It's not true. They're looking at Google and say, Google's had iOS screening and we found through 5 million data points that only 4% have it turned on. There's only 5% of the entire market that has Google. So that means 80% adoption. What's going to get adopted? And you don't realize that. But the challenge is you call four or five people at a time and one or two of them have iOS screening. Are you going to hang up on everybody else to talk to AI? If yes, you might have missed an app that was someone who didn't have it turned on. You could talk to them. What are you going to do? And maybe they do AI and AI talks to AI? Well, that's illegal. At least in the US, TCP AI guidelines, there's operation roundup just came out this week. Seven telecom companies are given warning letters of the TCP AI and fraction of the FCC put out. There's a very expensive mistake for people to make. I think that positions people who are willing to go slow and more strategic are very well. I think that's going to destroy the volume spray and spray model, which I'm excited about. Same for me. It saves me a lot of phone calls. I'm going to turn on for sure. I already downloaded the beta 30 downloads. Let's look in the future a bit more. What should founders prepare for the next two to three years? I genuinely think this is what I'm hearing a lot from like large PE groups in the tech space, large VCs who have a portfolio of companies that they're helping steer, guide, advise or force, right? They're portfolio companies to do. And I'm seeing a lot of mistrust in the sales development, business development, arm, DRs and BDRs. And so I think in the next two to three years, we're going to see a massive shift towards account executives having to self source more on their own pipeline. So account executives right now have historically based off the predictable revenue sales development playbook model. They have gotten to the place where they just sit on their ass and they wait for SDRs to book meetings. Those days are gone. They will be gone. And so I think if you really want to stay on top of things is how do I make sales development efficient and effective as possible? And how do I get my account executive sellers doing sales development again as opposed to waiting for SDRs to do the sales development for them? So if you're starting to prepare, it's start preparing with as you start hiring account executives, start hiring with the trait, this account executive will self source, not just sell, but open up opportunities as well. So that's where I see it going. I do not see that most companies can pull off an SDR motion unless you take my advice and not to like self promote, but use something like a tight next that enables you to get into far more conversations than you are today because connector telling can continue to drop. And so I think that if it continues to drop and you have to pay for SDR salary and account executive salary and this SDR keeps producing less and less, the profitability on that pod structure working is not going to be in existence. It would be my assumption. Let's dive into the final two questions which are more revenue related. If you would be able to give advice to a founder who's just starting out like there maybe a zero dollars MR a bit further, but they're on the way to 10K MR. What kind of advice would you give a SaaS founder here? Product market fit all day every day. Don't focus on anything except for the customer and what you sell to them. The practice that I have run in multiple companies now that has always worked out well for me is figure out who you want to sell to first before you build too much. Obviously you have some MVP type of product to sell, but maybe not. And so my belief is I want to identify the people I want to sell to, I want to identify the pain that they have and then I want to go talk to them with zero strings attached outside of will they be helpful to me. So I've done this on three companies. Every company had great product market fit after this. I try to find about 20 people in the market. I'm willing to pay for their time. I'd be like, Hey, John, I'll pay you whatever you're hourly rate for just 10 minutes of your time. I'll give you an hour for 10 minutes. And all I'm asking for you, John, is I have nothing to sell you. Not today. I hope I do in the future. It's why I want to talk. I think I know your market very well. I think I have a solution to this specific problem. All I want to do is get 10 minutes where I can tell you exactly what I think I'm going to bring to the market. I'm going to give you a permission to shoot it. Right. You get a license to shoot. I mean, shoot as many holes in that as possible to make me better, including what I'm going to charge the solution, how I'm going to deliver it. Have three or four of those conversations recreate the offer or product. Go to the next three or four. Do it again. It or eight. By the time you do about three rounds of that, you have a really solid product that people want to buy. And ironically, the people you ask for help and said, I have nothing to sell will inevitably tell you half of them. Hey, when you actually launch this, it'll be back up. And there's your first seven eight customers. Yeah, because in the end, you're fixing their pain. You kind of already have identified their pain, but they're going to shoot you a product. Then they tell what's wrong with it because they have different pains from there. You're building it what they want. Yep. And you're going to tell my hey, in a month when I refine this, can I do a last pass with you? Yeah, of course. Another conversation. Any final holes they want to shoot they can or you say, great, I'm close to launching this. I really appreciate that. Okay, when you launch, you may shout, yeah, there's your customers. Let's assume we pass 10K MR and making you step. I know we're going to grow towards 10 million AR. You can chop it up. You can do however you want, but what kind of advice would you give SaaS founders who are on that from 100K ARR to a million? It's all about scaling up selling, but it's founder led. So I think founder led content, I think founder led selling, right? Assuming you can. Ideally, you can. If not, you should probably find a co-founder of the can. I do not think that you're ready for salespeople yet, unless you have a background in sales like I did. I mean, I had salespeople day one, even with zero dollars in revenue, but it's because I knew what I could get out of them. And so start investing in that because I'm a big believer and do document delegate, right? Three D's. Do it well until I can document it while that I can then delegate it to someone. And so focus on that. And I would also say, get yourself out as much administrative work as possible as soon as possible. So the moment that you start taking home a paycheck, go ahead and write off half of it and get an executive assistant. Take it off your plate. Stay really close to your customers. Start getting feedback from the product. What was, you know, help them help build your roadmap and incentivize them to give you K studies, video testimonials. When you're first starting, you lack proof. And so start getting people to start talking about your product, etc, etc. And incentivize them, pay them, discount them, whatever it takes to get those because those are worth way more than whatever you comp them on. Once you get to a million, what's about scaling up the leadership team? And so it's starting to get systems and processes in place and people to run those system processes. So now we start looking at, okay, who is the talent that I can bring in? And here's one thing, I, I used to skimp on talent, be very cheap with talent. I've been an entrepreneur for eight years. I've sold two companies. I used to skimp on talent and it hurt me. If you buy cheap, you buy twice, right? And if you were a product, like a really cheap product and like it broke in a month, you had to go buy the nicer one. It's like, I should just buy this in the first place. It was more expensive. And so what I have learned is just go find the best possible talent that you can possibly afford. And if you can't fully afford it, find a way. You have equity, give mother benefits, even if you have the right system in place, take out some debt, good debt. I don't think that you need venture capital to build a company these days. I think venture capital is bad for most companies. To start building those people, once you get to about five million, it's about scale. And back to the talent thing, like pay people what they're worth. I'm a huge believer at the end of the day that you should not hire people based on their potential ever. You should hire people based on where they're at today proven. I'm not trying to buy. I'm not going to pay for your future potential. I'm paying for what you can do for me day one when you walk in here. And so I'm a big fan. I mean, I have, I don't have a single employee on my payroll that makes less than a hundred thousand US dollars because I believe in paying for talent, right? I'd rather pay an extra 30, 40, hundred thousand dollars and get what that should get for that money than pay someone 40, 50, 60, thousand dollars less and either replace them or be disappointed in their performance. It's about pouring gas on what's working. Get a little bit more relentless about cutting expenses and bloat because you want to have enough money and cash to start shoveling into what's working. I think you get to about five million, you get bloated with your tech stack, you're paying for a lot of stuff, you're trialing and stuff like that. Start getting aggressive with cutting expenses, start looking at what's not working and start cutting it and take all the that savings and dump it into what is and just triple down on it and you will get the 10. I mean we went 0 to 5 and 12 months. I think we'll probably finish this year which is about 20 months of company age around 10 to 12 million. That's quick. I've done this a few times very poorly I might add. Learned mostly from mistakes but yeah man I think you do a lot of those things that should be on the right track. Nice nice nice. Let me three as see if I can summarize so if we take it all the way to the beginning outbound is basically targeting people within accounts. It's all about trust so you're going to combine outbound within bound and you need to start building trust. In the end it's about convincing people you understand their problem. The fundamentals of outbound lists message, rep and follow-up. If we're going to talk about lists it's account first people. Make it a manual process. If you're going to put garbage in garbage it's going to come out and talk about message. How do you sell to different personas? They have different pain points. When we look at the rep what are the conversion rates per stage and how are they performing. With the follow-up put follow-ups into different buckets. You talk about a meeting scheduled activation meaning for conversations then not now the timing one, then not me and then the referral. Get them to give the right name and then the not interested bucket. When we talk about phone outbound it really allows you to advertise to what's a person gives you value inside record calls, read insights and categorize them, support the inbound nurture machine as you mentioned and connect data sources, call recording, CRM, data providers etc. Meetings are important but focus on actually having meaningful conversations and get insight from the phone calls rather than just focus on the meeting. Treat it as advertising as you mentioned. The iOS update it will allow you to actually give a crafted message so it's not going to kill how bound from calling. When we talk about growing from 0 to 10kmr focus on product market fit who do you want to sell to identify the pay people for their time to get people to shoot your product and put holes in it so you can improve your product. One to ten million when we first talk about 100k to one million, found it that sales do it, document it and dedicate it, have people or have clients build your roadmap, build proof and then one million plus it's all about systems and processes, pay people what their word and then five to ten put gas on what is working. Amazing recap. No AI is being used here. If people want to get in kind of really joy, how can they do so? What is the best way? Check me out on LinkedIn LinkedIn.com/i and/showagulky. Very active on there. You can also check out tightnext.io if the product sounds interesting for you to go to market. It's perfect. We're going to link to our tightnext.io, we're going to link to your LinkedIn profile. We're also going to add a link towards the chat home permit you mentioned so we're going to add it into the recording as well. I think it's a good one for people to get to know. Anything else before we drop off? No, I love it. This is a great episode. Take out band very seriously. It can be your most powerful channel if you handle it appropriately. That's the right closing. For people listening on Spotify or any other channel, leave us a review. We want to boost the algorithms of course. On Spotify we will add a poll always happy to learn what you thought of this episode. Thanks again for coming on Joey. Appreciate it man. Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your BDB SaaS Podcast. You made it till the end so I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor this show. If you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about greatest, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your BDB SaaS.