Is Outbound Dying?

I’m breaking into a nervous sweat just writing the title to this post. As a person who thinks prospecting is so vital, and properly done, so powerful, I am in a quandary writing this post.

How do we incite customers to change when they don’t recognize they may need to change?

How do we drive sufficient levels of demand to achieve our goals?

How do we standout when customers are overwhelmed with information–particularly as we look at tools like ChatGPT enabling us to create reams of both good content and crap.

Is more content even the answer or does it aggravate the problem?

I know thousands of sales people will be forwarding this article to their managers, saying, “This guy says outbound is dying, I don’t need to do more prospecting!” But we have to generate new demand, new opportunity. We have to capture attention.

What’s going on?

Sadly, I think we are poisoning the well of outbound. We live in a world of increasing volume and velocity–across every channel. The volume has become overwhelming and our instincts for dealing with it is to shut it off. Our inboxes are filled, our voicemails are filled, our social channels are filled.

Some examples:

1. I’m having trouble with the spa at my house. I call the repair guy, getting this response, “I am no longer answering phone calls from unknown numbers because of the volume of spam. If you are a customer, please text or email me….” And his voicemail wouldn’t accept any voicemails. (He did respond to my text, so in the next day or so I can relax in the spa.)
2. A CRO client and I were talking about the problem with prospecting. He was complaining about poor open and response rates on their outbound programs–regardless of the channel. I asked, “Do you open anything coming into your email or other channels?” He thought, looked at his trash folder (forget spam), and there were over 150 prospecting emails from that day in his trash. He said, “There’s so much there, and most of it is crap, I just never open a thing.”
3. I was speaking to one of the best CMOs I’ve met. He and his team had just done a very focused, highly targeted outbound email series. I looked at his targeting–he was aiming for the bulls-eye of his ICP. Each of the emails his team were developing were written individually to key persona’s in the ICP. They were about specific issues they knew that company and that individual were having. They were well constructed issues based, provocative emails. In short, everything was “right” about the emails. There was virtually nothing that an “expert” would have recommended changed. Yet opens were less than 1% and responses significantly less. As his team researched the problem, they discovered, that all their outreaches were drowned out in the sheer volume of what their target recipients were receiving. While many said, “I wish I had seen that,” they hadn’t because of the volume inflicted on them.

I could go on, but think of your own responses to these outreaches. We see ever increasing volumes across too many channels, we just ignore them. So even the high quality outreaches are ignored.

And the answers the “gurus” provide is “Just do more?” I’ve written about the advice they are giving, “Write 1000 emails in 15 minutes with ChatGPT….” I have an “expert in outbound marketing,” feeling it has been necessary to “touch me” 105 times in the past 32 days. I have another marketer that has gone through his sequences (he apparently has a sequence of 6), 20 times in the past 90 days.

Outbound is dying because it is drowning in the volume of messages, mostly bad, but some good, that we are inflicting on everyone through every channel. However, good the quality of the message, it no longer matters because it is lost in the volume of garbage that fills our inboxes.

So what’s the solution?

I’m breaking into a cold sweat when I say, “Maybe we have to try something different, maybe outbound is no longer the answer!”

Most readers are probably leaping to the answer, “It must be inbound!” (Again, I know sellers will be going to their managers saying, this isn’t my problem anymore, marketing just has to create more inbound!”

But I don’t think inbound is the answer–at least in it’s current form.

Our focus on inbound is leads, more importantly, qualifying the leads….”Are you interested in our solution, are you the decisionmaker, do you have budget, can we schedule a demo?”

Our current focus on inbound is lead conversion. But perhaps it needs to be different. Perhaps it needs to help the caller better understand their own business, the issues they are facing, whether they should change, the questions they should be asking, the things they should learn.

Rather than inbound’s focus on qualifying, perhaps inbound should be focused on helping the customer understand and make sense of what they face?

But this new form of inbound requires different talent than we traditionally use in inbound. It requires people who understand business, business problems, challenges. It requires people who can ask different questions, get customers to think differently. It requires great skills in curiosity, collaborative conversations, critical thinking.

But then, how do we generate inbound? How do we incite the prospects to search? How do we incite customers to think differently?

I suspect it’s something around thought leadership. But again, thought leadership profoundly different than current thought leadership.

So much of what passes for thought leadership is formatted as, “You have these issues, we have the solutions…..” We have to think of thought leadership from the customer point of view. What are issues they face? What are the challenges disruptions impacting them and their markets? How are people responding to those challenges? What should they be thinking about?

But then there is the issue of, “where do we show up to provide that thought leadership?” Clearly, it’s where the customers are hanging out, but where is that? So many are getting disenchanted with social channels like LinkedIn and Twitter–primarily because of the volume of outbound “shouting” in these channels–finding something meaningful and important is virtually impossible (I get scroll fatigued in LinkedIn just trying to find interesting and new ideas…..”

Maybe the answer is more F2F–conferences, tradeshows, events. Maybe it’s in the movements around communities and cohorts–though these often seem to be megaphones for more outbound. Maybe it’s in smaller groups of thoughtful people, perhaps some of our customers that invite us to participate with their peers.

I don’t pretend to know the answers, but what’s currently working isn’t working. And everyone is aggressively taking action to make them not work.

We have to change. We have to rethink what we do. We have to find a way to standout, to engage customers in new and different ways. Right now, I’m putting my money on a new form of thought leadership combined with a reinvented form of inbound.

What do you think? Is outbound dying? What will/should arise from it’s ashes?

 

Afterword:  I tried to think of a way to illustrate the problem our customers experience with the outbound efforts of sellers.  Using the picture below:  Is the customer going to take the time to find that 1 carat diamond in the pile of garbage.  Customer inboxes are this mountain.  Outstanding outbound is that diamond.  The problem is, how does the customer find it, or do they even take the time.