How To Build A B2B Outbound System In 2024

Taylor Wells (00:01.456)
Hey everyone, thanks for listening to the GTM News Show. I got Scott here today, hey Scott. Doing well, doing well, thanks for jumping on. So Scott came across him on LinkedIn like I do a lot of my guests. He's posting some great content around outbound systems, emailing, calling, all that fun stuff. So I'd love to jump right in, and before I hit record, you mentioned we should definitely talk about.

Scott Martinis (00:05.974)
Hey, how's it going?

Taylor Wells (00:27.764)
what folks are not a good fit for when it comes to outbound strategies. So let's start there, Scott. Love to hear your thoughts.

Scott Martinis (00:34.026)
Yeah, so I think the root problem here is a lot of startups and early stage companies, if you've been selling off referrals, if you've been selling off inbounds or PLG, you really have only captured a solution or a market. And I think this is actually the problem in general with intent data is like if you think about how intent data is categorized.

It's kind of terrible actually because it's like, oh, you're interested in this category, right? It's kind of trying to take inbound marketing and put it on the outbound. The problem with that is if you, you're going to do...

Typically outbound messages, at least from an email perspective that are solution focused, you get like a 0.1% conversion rate from email to interest. Really low. And so you have to do stupidly high volume. You're essentially shotgunning the market trying to find people with buying intent.

This is compounded because a lot of times those companies, they talk all about their product. And what you need to talk about instead, if you want to hit a larger market, is you need to talk about pain and you need to talk about problems. If you can talk about those two things, and typically for me, the easiest barometer of whether someone's a good fit to do outbound is, do they have like an actual sales process with like a defined discovery process? And do they have case studies? If you don't have those two things, you're gonna really struggle with outbound

Customers are going to look you up and they're like, what does this person do? How they help someone like me? They're sunk. Then when they actually get on a call with you, you're going to slide into solution pitching and then it just doesn't work. So I think those to me are like, hey, you need these two ingredients and you can do this as a solo founding team. Don't get me wrong. It's just a lot of small teams have not put those foundations in place.

Taylor Wells (02:25.112)
Super interesting, Scott. Thanks for sharing. That's, yeah, I like that idea. Solution aware. And I'd love to hear more about, so it sounds like from an outbound perspective, if they have case studies, if they have a sales process, obviously they have a proven track record and then a way to convert those low intent leads is essential. I'd love to hear more about that solution aware. So,

Taylor Wells (02:52.68)
Can you explain more about that concept? Because actually I haven't heard about that concept before.

Scott Martinis (02:56.024)

You know, it's just stages of the marketing funnel, right? Pain aware, oh, my back hurts. Problem aware, it's like, oh, I have a herniated disc. Solution aware, I'm considering steroids, injections, or this kind of surgery, like where, or I'm looking at chiropractors. Solution is I have decided what to do with my problem. And the problem is by the time someone's solution aware, you've actually caught them late in the buying process. Trigger event selling is amazing on this front. And this is actually why referrals work well,

building your own, if you build a network of strategic partners, you're building like an intelligence network where people funnel people right as they start going into a buying process into you. And so that's where referrals actually come from in a sense, based on trigger event selling research. I think that where people, another way of thinking about it, this is demand creation versus capture, right?

If anything that's solution aware, we are this category that is demand capture messaging.

Demand generation, I guess another way to say it is, if you don't have demand generation messaging on your website and your outbound content isn't demand generative, like it talks to pain points or problems people have, you're gonna fail. Because someone already has to believe you, someone like you is the solution to their problem, versus, hey, did you know that if you have this problem, it can happen because of this, and you can do this about it.

Taylor Wells (04:34.16)
Love it, that's super cool. Yeah, it reminds me of, I think it was Forrester came out with a study that only 5% of your target market is in market at any given time, I think 3 to 5%. The rest of it is not looking for a solution, so maybe that kinda ties into like they're not, there's no demand that you can capture because they don't even know they have a problem or they're not aware of a problem or it's not acute enough of a problem, all those different types of things. So if I'm hearing you correctly, go in with.

More of a demand generation, educating the market on a problem that they may not know they have. You'll get a much higher percentage than that, that 0.1% of just trying to basically capture all the demand that's already in market. That people already know they have a problem, they're already looking for a problem. And even to your point, they're probably too late to get to that point because they probably already asked for a referral or they already looked on Google or they already got to somebody else. Super interesting. I'd love to hear more about...

Scott Martinis (05:34.494)
I was just saying, I had a funny conversation. I was asking Justin and Michael, like, Hey, what do you think about buying cycles and intent? And Justin was like, I create buying cycles. Right. And I think the heart of good sales trainers is they dig the, especially guys like Justin and top of funnels, they dig and they're like, Hey, other people like you have solved this problem. Other people like you have addressed this. That's you're actually creating demand because you're giving insight.

in your top of the funnel.

Taylor Wells (06:03.952)
I love that. That's so cool, he creates buying cycles. That's an awesome, awesome marketing and slogan. That's super cool. Cool, awesome. So we kind of built a foundation as folks that are not a good fit. Like if they don't have case studies, they don't have a sales process, maybe they're going in with a solution aware mindset of like, hey, how do I just get those three to 5% of your market versus going in with educating.

What else, what other things do you see that are like best fit for folks that are looking to do outbound? Yeah, what are some great, great clients that you've had, that you've had great success with? What type of clients were they? What kind of mindset? What kind of systems, processes, etc.?

Scott Martinis (06:49.078)
Honestly, part of the reason we're going through the pivot is I am not happy with the revenue creation we've had with a lot of clients. I had a client I had a few years back had this very strange and interesting offer, which was like, Hey, I will ghost write a book for you. And, and then once we ghost write a book, I will make it a number one bestseller on Amazon and you'll be able to leverage that to get clients to do that. And, and the way it worked is you didn't have to do any writing. You literally just like.

interviews and then a writer wrote the book based on the call transcript. So it's content repurposing, people know about that these days, but that worked very well. We generated quite a bit of sales, but that's also a unique offer. I think one of the reasons I'm pivoting my business model is a lot of the clients we've had

have been pretty early stage and don't always have a sales leadership background. So like we would do call audits and I was like...

no, I don't know about this. We have one client where even though I'm not personally happy with the email results, they've got pipeline committed a month or two in. And really what that came from is the sales leader was just so on point, jumped on the leads, thoughtful responses, good discovery, very clear next steps. They did a very good job at that. And they also had a clear idea of their ICP.

That works, then it works really well if you can do that. We're also pivoting with that client to do a lot more AI in creative stuff in our outbound just because they're in an e-comm niche. So it's that market's just super saturated. The, hey, can you have 15 minutes? That's not a good offer. That doesn't add value in that market. And those people don't wanna buy that way anyway.

Taylor Wells (08:39.256)
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, it sounds like a good offer something unique versus, you know, you know going in with your products differentiated offer That you stand out versus a typical You know, can I have 15 minutes or typical 30 minutes, etc? Tell me more about your pivot. What what's what are you seeing? Yeah, what what's caused the pivot and what do you what are you moving to?

Scott Martinis (09:02.023)

I started thinking about this at the beginning of the year. A lot of it came just from a lot of conversations with Adim Mandarovic. And if you don't know, Adim has gone into a ton of different businesses with this methodology he calls closed circuit selling. And the idea is basically like, what if I could distill everything that is compelling about a prospect buying into like a very short, concise piece of content. And then look at my best billing clients.

find the common characteristics, find the segment of people like them that are actually in a buying cycle right now, and meet them with that content with permission-based messaging. So in Adim's case, he took financial services product in like the New Zealand area. It was like a 12 figure, or not 12 figure deals, 7 figure deals, 12 month sales cycles, and he was so dialed on his messaging and his targeting, he would get 7 figure deals.

to call closes because he'd find the people exactly in buying cycle and just say hey look that can I send you this research on XYZ and then we'll see if it makes sense to continue the conversation. He told me the first time he was doing that someone actually called him back midway through the buying process and was like hey can we go to contract on this. So that's kind of a very extreme example of getting all this stuff right.

also was doing some of the stuff phone ready leads and task mentions are doing on phone validation. He was doing that like years back where he would call initially with a survey and then call back with an actual offer. So that, so that's kind of where it started is I was talking to Aidan, talking to Justin thinking, um, a lot, like what, what's the future of B2B look like, like what, what playbook is going to work with the buying process moving online. Um,

Taylor Wells (10:46.364)
Hmm, interesting.

Scott Martinis (11:02.27)
And then that kind of, I guess I'm calling it like outbound demand generation, which is like the problem with normal dimension is a lot of times it's focused either on just capturing the lead or if it's more of the refined labs approach, it's like, Hey, we're going to educate the market, but there's not really an understanding of like, who's your ICP. So for me, I'm going to look, I'm at my approach to me. Okay. Let's find the criteria, the 10 data points that your best billing customers, your favorite customers have in common. Let's get those people. That may only be a thousand.

500 companies. But let's get those people and then what outbound demand generation is going to be about is bottom, bottom funnel up, right? A lot of, I hear ABM marketers talking about, hey, let's, I'm going to work on new top of funnel content. I think that's the wrong place to start. I think, hey, let's start with the bottom of funnel content. Let's figure out why our prospects are buying.

First, let's revamp the proposals and the sales process and sales collateral, reengage all of our dead leads, see if we can get some closed one. Then let's make sales calls useful again. Let's find some good reason like an audit or something educational or uncovering a problem or a roadmap, something that is like, hey, I actually wanna talk about this. And coincidentally, those pain points that you discover during that call, tee up a proposal, tee up a next step.

create value at sales call and then top of funnel, we do things like events, LinkedIn content, white papers. That's kind of the pivot that we're going through. And start from the bottom, give people a reason to take sales calls and then solve the markets problems at scale. And really all we're doing is we're mapping out the steps that our best customers are taking to win. And we're just putting that into content, breaking that up into little pieces, distributing that, all with the goal of,

Scott Martinis (12:57.208)
in front of my market that's buying and put potentially some of the people in the buying cycle, but really the best fit customers, regardless of buying cycle first, and then create like an outbound content funnel that gets them closer and closer to buying experience. So it's a little less reliant on the salesperson educating and having business acumen, like you still want that, right? But you doing more of that, you're moving that content focused buying journey.

Scott Martinis (13:27.011)
to social media, to LinkedIn. So it happens before they even talk to reps, but in a targeted way.

Taylor Wells (13:33.544)
Very cool. So if I'm hearing correctly, you kind of start with research, like what, you know, bottom of the funnel, what activities, what content, what messaging worked, and even further down, like the customers, like what success worked, case studies, etc. Take all that data, take all that messaging, and then funnel that into first kind of an outbound content approach, which is really interesting. I'd love for you maybe dig a little bit deeper in that. I think most folks are listening, understand taking that content and running ads.

Scott Martinis (13:46.731)
Yes, absolutely.

Taylor Wells (14:02.972)
or creating organic content or doing thought leadership, et cetera. But maybe if you could talk a little bit more about how you distribute that through an outbound approach.

Scott Martinis (14:12.718)
Sure, sure. So first of all, before we do anything outbound, and I think that the usual problem with outbound agencies is like, it's gonna take 90 days before you start seeing revenue.

That's not a good client experience. So what I want to do is like, Hey, first let's get, because like, if you're a new sales rep, what's the first thing you're going to do, you're going to call all the clothes lost, right? That's the fastest way for you to hit your number. Well, like, well, I'm an, I'm an agency. Like I'm not going to be an outbound agency anymore. I'm just going to be, I'm going to create revenue. Let's start with your clothes lost since if I was a rep, that would be the first thing I do. So we start with bottom of the funnel. How can we convert the people that were almost there, but not quite? So we start with that. Then, then change the sales and discovery process. So it's more value.

Now, the outbound content side, it would look like one of two things. It's like, hey, Taylor, saw you just hired a new CMO. Given the raise, I'm guessing you're trying to do a lot more brand building and lead gen to fuel future sales expansion, right? We've helped brands like X, Y, and Z do this. Would love to talk through a few of the latest marketing plays that's making them successful. That's an example of a value

added sales call that you would target to someone with buying intent or triggers. So that's an example of value added. That's an example of kind of, you're still asking for a call, but you're creating value. You're crafting the sales experience to serve the buyer and educate the buyer and create value to their situation. So that's one example. The other example would be like, hey, Taylor.

Since you're in this LinkedIn group, I'm guessing you're interested in DemandGen, we're hosting a webinar on how you can, or we're hosting a live workshop on how you can, so how you can apply DemandGen in a more targeted approach without needing ad spend, right? That's, and then it's like, it's this, do you want an invite? Or here's the LinkedIn event.

Scott Martinis (16:18.286)
Or even like I tried this campaign actually is, hey, I just posted a guide on it. Can you take a look and give me your feedback on it? Ideally, we're not there yet. Ideally, you pair custom AI prompts with the value prop.

Right. I think my new bar, we're not, we're definitely not there yet. I'm hoping to get there by the end of the year is like every message should have some form of custom prompt that ties the prospects experience to your value prop. Um, to create some customization. I think that's, that's where it goes. So that's, those are two examples. Um, and I hope you can see like. In prospecting the buying cycle value added sales call, otherwise general problem solving content. Anyone who is in a buying cycle and there aren't triggers or who's about to be in a buying cycle.

They're going to want to attend that event and then you're going to capture them.

Taylor Wells (17:12.184)
Love it super cool Scott. Yeah, I This is actually similar to something I did years ago And continue to do for my clients and work on which is kind of like an inbound outbound approach Or you're taking a typical like inbound content like an event right or some sort of Case study or white paper or whatever something valuable content that they would enjoy consuming and you're going in an outbound channel Which is like I still never see this it's crazy. I don't every day I get

Scott Martinis (17:18.112)
interesting.

Taylor Wells (17:40.956)
dozens and dozens of typical like, hey, you know, we'll spoke a meeting, I never get invited to a webinar, I never get invited to some sort of content. And so I think you're definitely onto something and I was super successful with this kind of concept, even just inviting people to a webinar, cold email, invite them to a webinar, obviously personalize it, and it sounds like you're trying to get to some AI personalization at the beginning to kind of tie in the content.

Taylor Wells (18:08.376)
Which is super cool and make it personalized and whatnot Love that we could probably talk for an hour about that because I think that concept in general like how do you it's just different Right is this you're coming at it. Everyone else is tip, you know doing the typical It's meat you're coming out from a very selfless standpoint of just trying to give them content so it sounds like there's two approaches obviously if they're in a buying cycle or if it's a closed lost or There's some sort of intent you go out at more with You know the case study example

Taylor Wells (18:37.96)
And in book a meeting if not general awareness you go at it with inviting them to content educating them and whatnot Super cool. I'd love to hear more about we have a couple more minutes left here just about kind of some tactical Setups as far as so outbound in general is so saturated, right? Whether it's cold calling or email or whatnot or social selling. I love to hear let's talk about email for example or maybe just in general, what are your kind of pillars of

Taylor Wells (19:05.348)
What are some things that you have to get right to even get in somebody's inbox? Right. Let alone have the message resonate, which is kind of what we talked about at the beginning, how do you actually get in front of people? What are some tools, data, um, best practices? Loaded question. So.

Scott Martinis (19:10.487)
Right.

Scott Martinis (19:22.134)
Oh, that's like, it's weird to talk about this because I feel like it's kind of been solved. It's like, so these are basically the options. On email, you need email warming, you need subdomains or secondary domains. And

you need those need to be correctly set up. And then you need a tool that supports volume email or inbox rotation. So the stack, the options right now, basically that are I think really good are instantly smart lead and Apollo just added up to 15 inboxes per seat. Those are the options on that front on the, and then, you know,

Options there are basically buy inboxes with CloudFlare or GoDaddy and then buy G Suite or Office 365. Make sure to set up, you know, all of those tools have instructions on how to set them up correctly. And then the other option which we're looking at is Warme.io. Steve Schmidt told me about that. Send grid and then like subdomain, something like that. I think that's another decent option. That could be a lot simpler. We're going to experiment with that. So that's kind of the inbox stack. Nothing too crazy there.

just set up the tools correctly. The harder part with email actually is you need a really clean lead list. So you need to do some form of lookaliking. If you just, anytime you pull an industry based list, 30 to 50% inaccurate and you need to have some good automated persona matching. Yeah. So I think to me, that's almost the harder part is like, yeah, you know, inbox rotation, all that stuff, like that playbook is pretty well established. Spintax or AI personalization,

Scott Martinis (21:06.736)
you really the last thing I'd say is just like get a really clean lead list if you're gonna do phone my shortlist get good phone data

Best in the class seems to be right-bound right now. Lucia, Apollo, Zoom Info's coverage isn't that great, but Lucia and Apollo seem pretty good. Seamless is cost-effective. And then from there, you either go phone-ready leads for the low volume. You can go task minions or cloud lead to phone validate. Or if you wanna go volume side, sales-finished notes or like that's the stack. Like that's what you do. And there's a few options we're exploring on LinkedIn Automation.

Those are kind of the volume options. And then if you want to go low volume, I would phone validate and use Lavender with a really good lead list and some buying intent. So, yeah.

Taylor Wells (22:02.108)
Very cool. Well, you could probably do a two hour master class on just all that technology and what the why's behind it and everything like that. And I've learned a lot from you and I've looked into almost all those things and I can attest that you need all of those things. And I'm curious, Apollo's data, do you validate their data at all or are they good to go in general?

Scott Martinis (22:17.166)
Fortunately, yeah.

So you have to use verified Apollo leads, but if you do verified, you don't, it's like, it used to be a lot worse. Um, they made some changes and now it's like, if you have verified Apollo data, you're basically done. Like we don't, we don't do anything else. Like we just, we pull the lead list from Apollo. We, we, you have to check the box. That's like only verified leads and then you're done. And then my go-to there from there would be like scrubby, and then do some other waterfall enrichment, but like Apollo.

Taylor Wells (22:48.349)
Very cool.

Scott Martinis (22:55.056)
Verified and done is good enough 90% of the time.

Taylor Wells (22:58.972)
Very cool, interesting. And so yeah, I've been following Apollo for a while. I'm a customer of theirs and really appreciate everything they're doing. Have you used their sequencers at all? Cause I know like syntax, can you even do syntax in Apollo?

Scott Martinis (23:09.974)
Yeah, we, funny, you can't, you, okay. I just met with the product manager and I was like, hey, this is how you should build. I met with the product, they have a really incredible PM in charge of sales engagement, Matt Lincoln. I'm really optimistic. They've got, I don't know.

They have good things coming on the dialing front. And I think I can say that I talked with them about how I would implement Spintax. It's gonna be significantly better. Their Spintax is gonna be significantly better to an easier to use than other tools on the market. So I'm very excited about that. Or you don't really need Spintax if you have AI personalization, just FYI on that.

Taylor Wells (23:50.024)
That's exciting.

Taylor Wells (23:55.068)
Totally. Yeah, how do you integrate the AI personalization with Apollo? I know we're getting to the weeds here.

Scott Martinis (23:59.246)
So we don't do a ton of that. The current plan is gonna be just CSV imports from Play or Magic Reach would probably be one of the two go-tos. Eventually we might use Cargo and a direct API integration. I'm trying to get them to loosen up the API limits, but Apollo's got a pretty limited API out of the box, unfortunately. They just have a lot of rate limits. That makes it more painful.

So hopefully they change that.

Taylor Wells (24:30.344)
Got it, got it. Cool, super helpful. Yeah, I know we got into the weeds, that's cool. Yeah, really valuable information. I think in general, the biggest takeaways are obviously determine if you're a right fit to do outbound. I really love that content. How do you coin that again? Content-led outbound or what was the term you used there? Outbounded demand generation, right, very cool. And whether you're educating folks.

Scott Martinis (24:48.967)
I'm calling it outbound demand generation. Outbound demand generation. That's what I'm labeling that, yeah.

Taylor Wells (24:59.216)
We have a minute or two left. Can you just give me kind of a rundown of intent data? What's your thoughts on intent data? How valuable is it? And then triggers if those things kind of coincide

Scott Martinis (25:07.478)
So I have not personally used it a lot. So I am like, from what I have heard, from the people I've talked to, they're seeing like double digit lifts in close cycle close rate.

Scott Martinis (25:26.114)
from a structural perspective, from what I've talked to you with Kyle Williams at Brifstack, you like double. So the way it's like, okay, intent data, 10 to 40% lift. Could be really good in enterprise. But if you pick the right structural fit, you too, X the close rate. That's what, at least what Kyle Williams said. So for me, I'd rather pick the right structural, just do a really tight lookalike first, and then sure you can layer on buying triggers on top of that. But the buying triggers that are active, you're maybe,

heard. Max at Trigify did a really interesting test on that. He saw like a 10-15% lift. So it's noticeable, it's better. I don't think it's as important as building a good look like in my opinion.

Taylor Wells (26:11.696)
Got it. And it'll look like is just finding the right list, making sure you're targeting the right ICP to base on your current customer success.

Scott Martinis (26:19.798)
what are your A tier best billing customers happiest what customers have? Because usually you will find trends. For instance, a lot of SMBs, I've seen this in a couple of different companies, your A tier customers, they'll always have, they typically will have a certain number of people in key departments. So for instance, one company we worked with, the A tier lookalike was, they're using Shopify, they're using CloudFlare CDN, they've got at least 10 meta ads in the meta library, meta ad pixel, they're using Klaviyo,

They've got at least one marketer, at least one person in the ops department.

I think that was it. Oh, and they have 90K plus site visits a month. Another guy, site visits didn't matter, but they had to have one marketer, one salesperson. So that's kind of like department head counts and key titles. Like for me, if someone doesn't have an account executive, they're a lot worse of a fit. So for me, those are like, those are some, no one was really talking about that as a fit thing. Presence of job titles, department head counts, tech, get what do your AT or customers have in common? And you can look at that on sales down really easily.

but the data isn't quite as good as sales down. That's what I would look at. And if you can stack those things together, what typically happens is if you don't have those roles, it's a lot harder for people to use your tools effectively, right?

I got to go in a minute, but that's to me. No one seems to be talking about, I should maybe do some more content on this, but that's what I would look at. Like department head count, what titles do they have? What tech do they have? Keywords and industries, just go a little deeper and you'll be surprised. It's been my experience.

Taylor Wells (28:02.14)
Super cool, Scott. Thanks so much for sharing. Thanks for coming on the show. Super helpful. How can folks follow you online?

Scott Martinis (28:07.955)
Just go to my LinkedIn, Scott Martinez. I'm pretty sure I'm like the only Scott Martinez in the world, so should be easy.

Taylor Wells (28:14.288)
Some good marketing there for you. Super cool, Scott. Thanks again for coming on. Really valuable information. Thanks everyone for listening, and we'll see you next week.