In this article, we take a closer look at the latest trends in outbound sales automation and how you can use them to 10x your pipeline. Advances in data democratization, web scraping, low-code development, and generative AI are ushering in a new era in the world of sales. Leading companies are already generating more pipeline than large, traditional SDR teams with just one skilled outbound sales automation expert.
table of contents
Problems with Traditional SDR Workflow
Common Outbound Campaign Challenges
The Problem with Sales Tech Stacks
How Outbound Sales Automation Works
Cost-effective way to expand outbound
A modern outbound sales automation stack
Innovative Outbound Strategies in Action
1. Problems with Traditional SDR Workflow
Inefficiency due to too much manual work
Many SDRs spend the majority of their day doing research and data entry. Here are some time-wasting tasks that make up a typical SDR's day:
Log in to LinkedIn
Scroll through your news feed and leave a comment
Perform a search in Sales Navigator
Adjust the filters multiple times to narrow down your search results
Manually verify accounts and open each company's website
Add companies to a Google spreadsheet if their website and LinkedIn profile match
Dig deep into company LinkedIn pages to identify decision makers
Add decision maker information to a Google spreadsheet
Upload the CSV to the enrichment tool to get email addresses and phone numbers
Spend 10 minutes creating one email (or adding it to a generic sequence)
These tasks are a huge drain on highly skilled SDRs' time, as they essentially act as highly paid virtual assistants, spending 80% of their day doing web research and data entry.
Difficulty in scaling
Expanding your SDR team doesn't necessarily south korea b2b leads produce linear incremental results. Effective scaling is difficult through simple headcount additions for the following reasons:
Difficulty in recruiting and developing great SDRs: Finding quality SDRs is difficult and often takes multiple rounds of recruiting before you find the right fit. Statistics show that roughly two-thirds of new SDRs fail within the first three months.
Pareto Principle impact: Typically, 80% of the pipeline is generated by 20% of the SDRs. The remaining 80% of SDRs may not contribute much to the company's revenue.
Training and management costs and time: It can take months for a new SDR to become productive. An SDR manager must be hired, incurring additional labor costs.
High cost
Running an SDR team comes with significant costs. Below are some common examples, but they can vary significantly across industries and companies:
Average annual salary for an SDR: Approximately $60,000
SDR monthly quota: 19 meetings scheduled
Actual achievement rate: Approximately 80% (15 meetings scheduled per month)
Meetings held: 12 (80% attendance)
Effective meetings: 8-10
Monthly cost: Approximately 500,000 yen (1/12 of annual salary)
Cost per opportunity: Approximately $625 ($500,000/8 opportunities)
Customer acquisition cost: Approximately $3,000 (assuming a 20% close rate)
These costs can eat into profits, especially for smaller deals: for a product with an annual contract value (ACV) of $10,000, the cost of SDRs alone represents 31.25% of the cost of sale, and once you factor in AE salaries, commissions, and other expenses, your profit margins drop significantly.
2. Common Outbound Campaign Challenges
Poor Listing Creation
Many companies create lists in the following ways, but each has its own problems:
Filtering by general industry or company size:
- May be less accurate and include many unqualified leads.
- May miss companies that truly match your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Buying lists from data providers: Lists purchased from providers like Musubu are often highly inaccurate. Without additional manual research, you're likely wasting time on low-quality leads.
Manual research by SDRs: Very time-consuming and expensive. The quality of the list can vary depending on the capabilities of the SDR.
Use a VA agency: They tend to be lower quality, slower, and more expensive than SDRs, and often lack deep industry and product understanding.
Generic and irrelevant messages
When sending large amounts of email, many businesses face the following problems:
Lack of personalization: The messages are obviously auto-generated and leave a bad impression on the recipient. It’s obvious they pulled a huge list from Musubu and blasted it to thousands of people without any data cleansing.
Risk of being perceived as spam: Generic messages are more likely to be dropped straight into recipients' inboxes, negatively impacting your domain reputation and potentially causing legitimate business emails to end up in the spam folder.
Low open and response rates: Unless recipients perceive your message as a personalized one, it's difficult to get a response. If you don't take the time to do the proper research and write a genuine letter, they're not going to take the time to respond.
Damage to your brand image: Low-quality bulk emails can damage your company's brand reputation, which can lead to lost business opportunities.
3. Sales Tech Stack Issues
Expensive data provider contracts
Many companies sign annual contracts with multiple data providers, but these have several problems:
High contract fees: It is not uncommon for annual fees to run from 50 million to 100 million yen. If you sign contracts with multiple providers, the costs will increase even more.
Long-term contract lock-in: Providers often require a minimum one-year contract, and in some cases, multi-year contracts.
Limited data coverage: It is difficult for a single provider to provide complete coverage of the data you need, which results in the need to contract with multiple providers, increasing costs.
4. How Outbound Sales Automation Works
Clever Lead Generation
Using automation tools, you can achieve advanced lead generation by:
Needs analysis by scraping job information: Automatically collect job information from companies that match the ICP. Analyze the job content with AI to identify the challenges companies are facing. This enables an accurate approach by linking the identified challenges with your company's solutions.
Timely approach with review site monitoring: Regularly scrape review sites like G2. Identify poor reviews about issues related to your solution. Automatically initiate outreach as soon as a review is posted.
Identifying ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) by analyzing website content: Automatically analyze the company's website content. Use AI such as ChatGPT to infer the characteristics of the company and the challenges it faces. This allows for more precise ICP matching and more accurate targeting.
