What's up, it's Zayd.
For most of the last decade, if you were selling outbound software, you sold it to the VP of Sales. That was the obvious buyer. They owned the SDRs, they owned the number, they owned the budget.
I don’t think that’s the case anymore. The teams getting the most out of modern outbound are increasingly marketing-led, and the person running the tool is sitting on the demand-gen side. That massively changes who you should be talking to, selling to, and targeting.
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The Motion That Performs
There are a few key “tells” to look for when it comes to finding the teams that are best suited for this kind of tooling.
They run a marketing-heavy motion
They want to generate meetings directly rather than just generating leads for someone else to chase
Their problem is that booking meetings at scale has always required SDRs, and a marketing-led team usually does not have a stack of SDRs sitting underneath it the way a sales-led team does
The solution is to give that team a way to produce SDR output without hiring an SDR org and the gap closes. One person on the demand generation side runs the tool as one of their initiatives, and the output looks as if the company suddenly stood up a meeting-booking team overnight. They skip the MQL stage entirely and deliver SQLs straight to sales. The meetings that come out of it end up being their cheapest pipeline across every channel they run, and ultimately, that’s what matters most to a buyer.
💡LinkedIn Hack of the Week:
Someone following your company page but not connecting with you personally is researching your company. Warm prospect.
Why Marketing Is The Easiest Buyer
TLDR: Seats and scrutiny.
Fewer seats. A demand gen team running outbound needs three or four seats, not a license for an entire sales floor. Smaller commitment = faster yes.
Lighter procurement. A smaller purchase that sits inside a marketing budget faces less of the security-and-compliance gauntlet that a full sales rollout triggers.
Sharper motivation. Marketing is tired of being measured on MQLs that sales then ignores. The chance to deliver actual qualified meetings, the thing sales actually wants, is a strong pull.
On the sales side, everything is just a little more complicated. You’re buying outbound software for a bigger team, through a heavier procurement process, against a backdrop where reps are already expense-carding three other tools their leadership has not approved. It’s all slower and noisier and more hoops to jump through.
🎁 Gift from Zayd:
The B2B Growth and Sales Creator Handbook
What This Means For How You Sell
Moral of the story, we all need to stop assuming the VP of Sales is your only door. Some of your best-fit accounts have a demand gen lead who is one good tool away from running an outbound motion that looks like it has an FDR team behind it.
And if you are the operator reading this, the lesson points the other way. If you sit in marketing and you are still handing leads across a wall and hoping, you may be one initiative away from owning the meeting itself.
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