Why you need outbound ops in your life

An excellent product does not guarantee excellent sales, just as an outstanding outbound sales team does not guarantee outstanding revenue efficiency. 

Outbound SDRs rely heavily on personalization to connect with prospects, but to manually personalize messages for each unique person takes significant time, effort, research and fine-tuning. To sell at scale, outbound sellers need a pit crew to keep the revenue engine going and accelerate sales.

That’s where outbound ops comes in.   

What is outbound operations?

Outbound operations (outbound ops) uses technology to process oceans of relevant data so that SDRs can achieve their performance targets without needing to manually personalize messages for each prospect.

Outbound ops is a relatively new field pioneered by the co-founders of Dogpatch Advisors, Kyle Williams and Ben Salzman. The two former Googlers tested their outbound sales strategy for some of the search giant’s products as well as those of other companies before perfecting and formalizing their outbound sales techniques into a new sales function: the outbound sales ops practitioner. Such a professional — either a tech-savvy seller or an analyst who understands buyer behavior — possesses the technical skills needed to source, clean, analyze, and deploy relevant prospect data to vastly improve the results of an outbound sales campaign.

You’ll be delighted at how vast some of those improvements can be:

• Depending on the market, a capable outbound ops team can help infuse the pipeline with $40-50 million worth of sales qualified leads (SQLs) annually.
• Outbound ops can deliver as much as 8X improvement (from 3% to 25%) in first meeting rates.

How to make outbound ops work for your sales team

In two episodes of The Sales Engagement Podcast, Kyle and Ben share many of their experiences developing outbound ops as a new sales function, as well as building the business case around its consistently remarkable results.                       

1. In Three Ways to Start Visual Prospecting To Improve Response Rates, Kyle and Ben describe outbound ops as a “clearinghouse and centralized function for sourcing, managing, and normalizing large volumes of data.” They also share some outbound sales tips on how to use visual messaging to drive higher relevance and value for prospects.
2. In Outbound Ops Part 2: Relevance at Scale, Kyle and Ben give a walkthrough of the data universe that outbound ops manages on a daily basis.

A few outbound sales tips from the pioneers of outbound ops

Here are some practical ways you can reinforce your outbound sales campaigns:

• Source data the right way, depending on the situation. You acquire data by a) collecting what’s already there in your process and organization; b) purchasing from vendors; and c) outsourcing.
• Use intent data to determine the degree of personalization you need to engage a specific prospect.
• Prioritize relevance. Determine which data resonates most with each persona and use the data points to personalize messages.
• Adopt visual prospecting. Personalized images (i.e. videos and gifs) can make an SDR’s job a lot easier. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just familiar, simple, and spot-on.

Listen to the podcast episodes Part 1 and Part 2 for more information on sourcing data, intent data, prioritization, and visual prospecting. Outbound ops is changing the structure of sales orgs at many B2B companies across the board, including Outreach.

If you want to scale up your sales, you need outbound ops in your life!