nobody wants to hear this

Despite a lot of denial and keyboard thumping on LinkedIn and Twitter*, outbound sales is not dead.

How do I know this? Two quick stories from tech leaders.

Matt Plank, the Chief Revenue Officer of Rippling (a company with $2B in funding) shared that 50% of his company’s revenue comes from outbound sales. He expects that number to hit 60% in the next year. That includes using the phone. In a room full of people at the Saastr tech conference last week, the audience reacted like like nobody wanted to hear this. My good friend - let’s call him J - leads sales for the Asia-Pacific region. He’s at a fast-growing business automation company. His big goal for this calendar year is to 3X his company’s revenue in the region. How? Good ol’ fashioned phone calls. Again, nobody wants to hear this. I mean, really, I don’t want to hear this. Automated outreach is easy. Especially with new AI tools popping up every day. Automated outreach also means nobody tells me “no” to my face.