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.
But it also means that many of us have inboxes full of AI-written drivel that doesn't work.
That's another thing that came up at Saastr. Keep in mind, this is a conference attended by a lot of tech founders and growth people who work in AI:
AI isn't working.
No matter how many emails one person can "write" and "send" with AI, it's missing an important ingredient. A person.
That's why companies like Rippling are leaning in on human-to-human connections. That's why J is so good at what he does. Selling is about relationships. And when a relationship starts through some faceless AI, well, it ain't much of a relationship is it? And it turns out, it's not much of a sale either.
We're building our target account list now at Accoil. And as much as I don't want to hear it, the quiet voice in my head tells me that personal messages and picking up the phone is going to work.
If you and me, we want to stand out, it's time to pick up the phone and call the person who should buy your stuff.
Happy selling,
Peter
(382/500)
PS: On spotify today... The Midnight
*My fingers automatically type Twitter when I think "X" :shrug: