Mistakes To Avoid When Building Your Outbound Programs

There are a lot of mistakes that companies make when they build outbound functions. Here are three for me that I’ve made and I’m particularly sensitive to. They might not be the three most common, but they’re the three that kind of stand out to me.

The first mistake is that companies have just a blind belief or expectation that it’s gonna work. They’ve read about it online, their bud might be the CEO of a company that runs a business or they might know a woman that’s a VP of marketing that’s had a lot of success. It doesn’t mean it’s gonna work for you and it doesn’t mean that whatever you put in your spreadsheet is actually gonna be reality when the rubber meets the road.

The other big mistake that I see organizations make is they massively overcomplicate the process – it doesn’t have to be hard, it doesn’t have to be rocket science. You just have to have a good offer, a tidy process, and a good person that’s running it, both at the management level and at the rep level, the SDR or BDR that’s actually cranking out the email or making the call.

The last mistake that I see companies make is massively underestimating the people aspect of it all. SDR teams require a ton of management. It is a huge recruiting challenge. The really really good reps don’t stick around for a long time. They want more red meat, they wanna get promoted, they want a bigger paycheck and the reps that are struggling often need a lot of help. So it isn’t just a matter of “we’re gonna go hire three kids straight out of college and a couple of them, you know, were varsity athletes, and they’ll just make some cold calls and magic will happen.

There’s a huge people investment in running a productive SDR team. The companies that I’ve seen run a really powerful SDR program deeply understand their market and their buyer, they run a simple, clean process, and they support their team with management, training and tools, and all the things they need to be successful.