10 Tips For Early Impact As A New Growth Outbound Manager
A few ideas when joining a new gig as a Growth Outbound Manager and some content resources to level up your growth and outbound skills and mindset.
Deep dive into your CRM data - customers, open opportunities, closed-won, and lost reasons to identify patterns (i.e. industry, growth rate, tech stack…) and understand your persona (job title, seniority, background…). It's the foundation for implementing the right strategies and crafting spot-on campaigns.
Listen to sales calls to understand the customer journey, prospect’s pain points, decision-making process, persona verbatim, and tone of voice - it will help craft relevant and impactful copywriting. Interview Sales reps to learn about how they prospect, their (own) definition of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), their day-to-day challenges, what works and what doesn’t for them, and ask how you could help them to be successful.
Build a weekly or monthly reporting process where you share your learnings, results, main challenges, and next projects - don’t try to hide your challenges. Having significant results will likely take time to show your impact. This is why communication is key to sharing your progress and all the work behind generating results aka pipeline and revenue.
Identify opportunities for immediate impact with proven strategies and projects - don’t reinvent the wheel. Examples: help Sales Reps better source contacts using Surfe, set up your first sales triggers/intents using Datachimp or Lonescale, implement a visual prospecting strategy using Bannerbear…
Put yourself in the shoes of a BDR by doing their job for a few weeks. Goals: understand the whole prospecting process, be familiar with prospect objections, and book your first meetings on your own to build internal credibility - something key as your role will imply enabling and advising people.
Quickly identify operational challenges and work on processes that will need to be prioritized to deploy your first projects. Examples: CRM hygiene, Total Addressable Market (TAM) identification and mapping, set up of a unique key to properly sync data across your different tools and allow (clean) automation, etc.
Get an overview of the funnel metrics and understand how you can collaborate with marketing and synchronize the outbound & inbound motions (#AllBound) to drive demand and pipeline generation. One initiative can be to help with pre and post-event outbound to supercharge marketing events with highly qualified leads (the strength of Outbound is the proactive mindset and the ability to control the audience).
Don't spend too much time evaluating tools - leverage your peers who are in a similar industry/stage to make faster decisions and avoid errors people already made. Tools and data are commodities (i.e. LinkedIn scrapper, email enrichment…). In the same idea, don’t spend time building products that already exist → the value is in the outcome and it’s how you’ll use them that will make the difference!
Focus on operation, adoption, and making data and processes actionable for GTM teams (i.e. CRM data flows, Slack alerts..). A classic trap of Growth people is to “play” too much with data (i.e. spending too much time “scraping” data, trying to find “hacks”, or building fancy and complex automation) - get the shit done, make things operational for the teams, and focus on impact.
Adopt a creative mindset and high-velocity routine. Everyone does Outbound, it’s your capacity to find new ideas and iterate fast that will make the difference compared to the competition. Focus on what you control, input (audiences, experiment you launch), and hard work - there is no shortcut or secret!
📚 Some resources we recommend to level up your growth outbound skills and mindset:
Practical Prospecting newsletter from Jed Mahrle - ex-Global Manager of Outbound Sales Development at PandaDoc
Guillaume Cabane’s SaaStr talk about low budgets and lean Ops, and his video about “The Past, Present & Future of Growth”
A new way to ABM from Hillary Carpio - Head of ABM at Snowflake
Outbound Sales Fundamentals article from Clearbit
How To Find Your Next Big Marketing Idea from Elena Verna - Interim, Head of Growth at Dropbox
Unleashing Sales Potential: The Synergy of Sales Ops & Enablement by Maxence de Villepion - Co-Founder at Cargo
Building a Sales Engine from Seth DeHart - Partner at Point Nine
Outbound 101 For Marketing & Sales from Rachael Tiow - ex-Director ABM and Lifecycle Marketing at Auth0
Brian Chesky (CEO of Airbnb) new playbook #Mindset&Velocity
👋🏻 Maki People & Pigment are hiring in Growth, Marketing, Ops, and Sales - don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions!