Shift Your Focus

What’s up, it’s Zayd.

I’ve been pretty vocal about what I think is wrong with the state of outbound - and where I think it’s headed.

It’s obvious that it’s shifting.

But it isn’t always clear what that means in practice. What should you - as an SDR/AE/etc - be focused on right now?

In today’s newsletter, I’m breaking down some of the shifts I’m seeing from the old to new outbound playbook and how that should shift your focus /priorities right now.

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Zayd’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

• Mr Beast’s LEAKED docs on gaining traction & scaling (link)

• Startup sales journey (do NOT skip steps) (link)

• Top 30 marketing tools for early stage founders (link)

• 10 best SaaS growth charts (link)

• 6 habits that lead to PMF with founder-led sales (link)

• Position your product to be irresistible (link)

Stop Focusing on the Wrong Things

You’re wasting your own time if you’re focused on improving skills and tactics used in the old outbound playbook. It’s outdated. What once worked simply doesn’t anymore.

Trying to figure out how to:

• make more calls

• send more emails

• research faster

is going to keep you running in circles with lackluster performance.

The new outbound playbook isn’t predicated on making more calls, sending more emails, or learning how to skim posts and 10ks and websites faster.

If you want to succeed in the new outbound playbook, you need to shift your focus.

Top of Funnel

The old outbound playbook used filter-based lists. Get a ton of contacts, then filter by things like where they’re from, their role, etc.

The new outbound playbook uses website visitor data. It makes way more sense. Someone visiting your website is likely already doing research to solve a problem - and they happened upon your site as a potential solution.

Pre-Qualification vs. Post-Qualification

In the old outbound playbook, you’d message 10k prospects and qualify the problem intensity based on their response.

In the new outbound playbook, you scan through 10k website visitors and pre-qualify their problem intensity prior to sending a message. For example - are they viewing my competitor on G2? Yes? Let’s reach out.

Prospect Research

The old outbound playbook required digging through blogs, posts, websites, and podcasts for bits of info you can use to personalize the outreach.

In the new outbound playbook, you’re wasting your time if you're focused on this. Run automated research workflows in the background. Let it handle scraping job postings, social media posts, 10ks, etc. so you can focus on the human parts of sales.

Outreach

In the old outbound playbook, you could get away with blasting 10k prospects with the same template.

Between email send caps and prospects getting a stronger radar for detecting BS messaging - you can’t do this anymore.

The new outbound playbook requires hyper-personalized outreach to a smaller batch of people. Maybe 100 - but you know they’re all ideal fits.

Focus on sending each of them custom messaging based on your tone and what you know about the ICP.

Incentivized Metrics

Sending 500 emails a day used to be a sign of a good SDR. Output, output, output.

That means pretty much nothing now.

Convert 10% of leads to meetings and then we’ll be impressed.

Stop focusing on sending more emails and focus on getting more people on meetings. More emails ≠ more meetings. Personalized outreach, to the right prospect, at the right time = more meetings. Focus on getting better at that.

How I Can Help

Let me book sales calls for you while you’re raking leaves. Seriously.

I built Valley to be your automated SDR and empower AEs. Get started today and watch your calendar fill up with qualified leads.