intent-based outbound

and why it's difficult

We’re all getting more sales emails than ever and this is not going to stop any time soon. The recent acquisition of Clearbit by Hubspot is going to make outbound easier for everyone. What this means for who is sending those emails (hello!) is increased competition and likely a dip in conversion rates.

The solution is to differentiate your emails, as you would do with a product in a crowded market. Less spray and pray campaigns. More intent-based campaigns, targeting leads who showed some buyer intent and reaching out to them with a message that is relevant, personalized, and therefore likely to resonate (thank you generative AI).

The challenge is selling this approach internally to leadership if you work in a company or externally to customers if you run an agency. As you narrow down your audience based on intent (or signals or triggers or however you want to call them), the volume of people you reach out to goes down. And, you have to prove that the increase in conversion from cold email to meeting makes up for that loss in TOFU and eventually drives more meetings. Proving that takes months due to the length of sales cycles. And, it makes it a challenging situation to handle with internal stakeholders and customers.