3. Running Multi-Channel Experiments for Early Outbound
- Abishek Murthy CGO at Locus, Ex-COS at Freshworks
Platforms like G2 are incentivised to sell the same leads to 20 other people, right? This means that the same lead is being touched by 20 different people, and that’s the first fundamental assumption we need to work with.
Let’s imagine this scenario as a leader, and I can tell you this: if I worked for, say, 10 hours, I spent about six hours on a Zoom call, about an hour on an email, or a few hours on the phone, etc. That’s how a leader’s time is spent between channels of communication.
First, see, are you only in that two-hour window of a leader? Or are you on all the eight-hour window of a leader? An eight-hour window on the leader means you’re on social, and you’re on email, your chat, you’re on 100 other things. So, first figure out if you are playing that two-hour window or in the eight-hour window.
Now, the next thing you must consider is that a leader probably gets about 300 – 400 odd emails daily, so what will make your email stand out?
The way I look at an email funnel is a classy subject line that makes somebody open the email, great content on an email, gets them to click through to a landing page. Whatever the CTA is, it has to engage them deeply.
The first thing to do is to think about solving the 8‑hour problem and then the two-hour problem. If you’re writing an email, you’re only solving a two-hour problem, think about solving an eight-hour problem.
If you’re a high ACV product, you can spend much more on conversions. So think about if you’re confident about the product and if you’ve hit PMF when you think about what you can do to engage deeply.
Think about ways to engage deeply, think about solving for the eight-hour window and be crafty. In the early stage, more often than not, the non-measurable ways to engage will kick off more than the measurable ones. If you’re a high ACV product, that means you can spend a lot more on your engagement.
I ran an event back in the day where we called the customer for a summit at FreshWorks when one of the plans was I wanted to send Starbucks coffee to everybody who was an attendee.
No company, including companies like the really large ones, has figured out two things — one, attribution. Attribution is a worldwide problem. The second is channel mix.
At an early stage, as long as you know you can keep your burn low from a Demand Gen perspective, you should try multiple things. If I were you, I would focus on everybody complaining about your competitors and go behind them.
Outbound is a very, very hard thing to solve because outbound is very intrusive. This means you need to be creative there. Some of the things that I would do if I were to send some merchandise to everybody I’m trying to reach would be to give a free XYZ to any CSM leader who gives a 30-minute slot.
One of the things that I’ve seen in the last two or three years is outbound has become a multi-touch attribution and not single-touch attribution, which means it’s not just about your SDR sending out 20 emails, but your prospect should have seen an ad, they should have engaged with the content, it’s becoming a lot more complex.
This also means that you can experiment a lot more. It is a journey of two years plus. You need to do that. Attribution will always be a problem. Don't wait to solve it and do multiple things.
For now, I would ask you to focus on just experimenting with demand gen. Imagine you have four people for demand or three people for demand. Come up with one non-measurable outcome and two measurable outcomes, and let your team try out ways to achieve them.
Some leads can come from responding to a core article; somebody else can bring leads directly into the funnel, and so on.