Most business leaders don't love working for their own businesses.
You might be paying yourself less than you're worth, sinking cash into operating expenses or working capital instead of investing in growth or paying yourself a higher salary. You can't hire that key person to take tedious work off your plate. You can't test that new marketing channel. You can't develop that product idea. You're stuck while competitors who figured out predictable revenue generation pull ahead.
Money doesn't bring happiness, but it does bring options. Most business leaders want options to improve their businesses, so they seek to create more options by generating more revenue.
But most businesses struggle to control their revenue. You can't control when new customers close or how much new revenue comes in each month. You're stuck on the hamster wheel with bad clients and not enough help.
Outbound sales offers a solution. When done right, outbound gives you control over your pipeline and your revenue trajectory. Instead of waiting for random inbounds or trying to make your daily posts go viral, outbound lets you proactively reach the exact people you want to work with, on your timeline.
The desire for control is why frustrated business leaders turn to outbound.
You already know that smart leaders use lean startup methodologies to iterate toward a profitable business model: launch something quickly, measure results, and iterate quickly. Lean startup is how you focus on the 20% of activities that generate 80% of your profit.
The same principle applies to sales. Smart leaders should use the lean outbound process to iterate toward a profitable sales pipeline. Lean outbound is the 20% of outbound activities that generate 80% of your sales pipeline. This guide shows you that 20%.
The outbound space is littered with shiny objects. There's always a new AI sales tool and a new sales influencer to follow. But more is not better. The real challenge is separating the signal from the noise, by identifying what actually books sales meetings at a cost-effective clip and cutting everything else.
This approach is for cash-constrained businesses with aggressive growth targets. Lean outbound is most effective especially if you've tried outbound before but got burned. Businesses that find outbound success are either a) lucky, because they stumble upon outbound success quickly, or b) disciplined, because they forged their own outbound success through a data-driven iterative approach to building their outbound motion. If you're the latter, you've basically discovered the lean outbound process by yourself.
Think of your lean outbound motion as a math function or coding function, which you can visualize in a couple ways:
Your input is your investment: time (sales leader hours or team hours), money (salaries, agencies, tools, infrastructure, databases), and attention (focus on outbound versus other channels).
Your function is your outbound motion, which consists of 3 core components: message, market & infrastructure. More on this in the next section.
Your outputs come in 3 different modes: sales meetings, outbound motion feedback, and strategy feedback. More on this in the section after next.
Message and market are straightforward. Think of your message as your product and how you frame it to your market. Think of your market as your TAM, and how you access your TAM.
The degree of fit that your message has with your market is the primary indicator to your outbound success. At the end of the day, no amount of outbound expertise or resources can force a market to accept a message that doesn't resonate.
Infrastructure is the least straightforward component. Your infra is just the execution quality of your outbound. Think of your infra as the catch-all bucket for everything which delivers your message to your market.
Most people in outbound tend to think of infrastructure as just your email infra, but you can include your entire tech stack and team into it. In addition to domains, inboxes, and sending capability, it includes tech tools and human execution ability, all packaged together to send your message to your market at scale and at a regular cadence.
Although outbound feedback and strategy feedback are types of possible outputs, aren't sales meetings the only output you should care about?
Yes, sales meetings are the most desirable output. Unlike "feedback," sales meetings convert to revenue and provide direct ROI measurement.
However, if sales meetings were easy to get, then every business would be crushing it with outbound. Every business that's good at outbound today was bad at outbound at some point.
How did they go from bad to good at outbound? How did they go from generating zero meetings to generating a repeatable pipeline?
It comes down to how quickly you can iterate on the other types of output from your outbound motion, i.e. feedback for your outbound motion and feedback for your strategy. If you've already nailed your strategy and you iterate quickly on your outbound motion, then you can build your repeatable pipeline.
Your outbound motion feedback can be feedback on any of your 3 outbound motion components: message, market & infra.
Messaging feedback reveals whether you're getting any positive replies at all, what objections keep coming up (wrong timing, wrong person, unclear value, competitors preferred), whether people are confused about what you do or who you help, and whether prospects understand your offering well enough to have an opinion.
Market feedback shows whether certain segments are responding better than others, whether you're reaching the right seniority level or getting "not my department" replies, whether company sizes (SMB versus Enterprise) are showing different engagement patterns, and whether you have enough quality contacts left to test or have burned through your TAM.
Infrastructure feedback tells you whether your campaigns are delivering your message to your market, whether you're scaling up the execution of your campaigns, whether your tech stack is working as expected, and whether you need to invest in more tech or process or outbound personnel.
Strategy feedback reveals whether you're solving an urgent problem in the correct way. It shows if you understand your ICP's buying motion properly, indicates if your timing is right (market readiness), can inform product pivots before you waste months building, and can even tell you whether your business is worth more of your own time or if you should pivot or shut down.
Each iteration (or each "turn") of your outbound motion is one loop of 1) inputting your investment, 2) letting your outbound motion transform your input into outputs, and 3) iterating based on the outputs. Your lean outbound process is just repeating this learning loop.
More specifically, each turn involves transforming your investment into a batch of campaigns, which your outbound motion executes over 2+ weeks to develop your campaigns and wait for results to come in, and the results are either sales meetings, outbound motion feedback, or strategy feedback.
Each campaign is a permutation of a specific segment of your TAM plus a specific message plus infrastructure setup. Each campaign yields some degree of all three output types, which informs how you iterate on your lean outbound process.
More campaigns per turn means more learning per turn. More turns over time means faster adaptation to market feedback. But you can't brute force success with lean outbound; quality and quantity both matter. You need at least 1,000 leads for each campaign to be statistically meaningful, and you need to be thoughtful about how you interpret feedback to iterate on your outbound motion.
You can visualize your lean outbound process like this:
Each turn ends with you or your sales leader having to decide how you want the next turn to go. Do you adjust your infrastructure? Rewrite your copywriting? Target different segments? Increase or decrease investment?
What does your data tell you about how you can succeed with outbound?
Eventually, after logging enough turns, gathering enough data, and iterating enough on your outbound motion, you should have conviction on which of the below four outcomes your lean outbound process has led you to.
You've reached this outcome after multiple turns of lean outbound if:
Apathy is the most cutting feedback that the outbound market can give you. A market is apathetic to a product when the product doesn't solve an urgent pain. You should probably pivot your product. Or at least pivot your understanding of the buyer journey. Apathy from the market means you misunderstand the market's demand for your product, and you'll likely keep losing money with outbound unless you make a deeper strategic change.
You've reached this outcome after multiple turns of lean outbound if:
This is happening because your CAC exceeds your LTV. You're spending more money to acquire each customer than they contribute as margin. You're basically losing money on each customer, and your customers aren't willing to pay you enough to sustain your outbound motion.
To get out of this predicament, consider one of:
You've reached this outcome after multiple turns of lean outbound if:
Sometimes your profit and your cashflow go in separate directions, even though your revenue is growing. This is happening because your payment terms are poor, and your business is sinking cash into working capital in order to add more customers. This is common for industries where customers expect to pay you on aggressive payment terms in their own favor, while you finance their purchases in the form of accounts receivable. Some industries where this outcome is more likely include wholesale & distribution, construction & engineering, government & public sector contracting, staffing, healthcare, and professional services.
Getting out of this predicament is difficult because it requires some pivot to your business model and your strategy. Usually this involves some form of factoring, invoice financing, or accounts receivable securitization. If you can increase the perceived value of your product, then you could negotiate better payment terms for yourself, such as earlier payments, larger deposits, and tighter credit controls. You could push your vendors to extend your accounts payable, which alleviates the pressure for you to collect on accounts receivable. Some business models might be able to reduce working capital by reducing inventory and moving to a just-in-time model.
You've reached this outcome after multiple turns of lean outbound if:
Congratulations. You've reached your ideal outcome!
When you find success with outbound, your next goal is to optimize your outbound motion. In this case, you should still keep running lean outbound, but now you have a couple new goals:
If you find success with outbound, your next efforts are probably best spent first on maxing out your TAM and monitoring changes to your market over time.
Lean outbound is hard because you have to make new bets with incomplete information. But if outbound were easy, everyone would be doing it and succeeding with it. The competitive advantage goes to those who can move and adapt quickly.
You're not building a perfect outbound machine. You're doing lean outbound: the 20% of activities that generate the easiest 80% of sales meetings.
Negative results are not great, but you can treat them as data to inform your next iterations of your outbound motion, not failure. The only real failure in outbound is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.
.png){kind=small}