The half of outbound nobody teaches
A few months ago, a prospect told me they’d run LinkedIn outreach for a year and got nothing out of it.
I asked to see it.
The list was a Sales Navigator export. Job title, company size, location and a few thousand people.
The message was four paragraphs long and explained everything the business did.
And there was no second message, one connection request, one pitch, then silence.
He’d concluded LinkedIn doesn’t work.
What actually happened is that he never ran an outbound campaign.
He sent a few thousand letters to strangers he’d never checked were the right strangers.
THE PART EVERYONE SKIPS
Most outbound advice is about timing. Watch for signals, reach people when something has just changed in their business.
That advice is good, I use it every day.
It’s also the second question.
The first one is: are these the right people at all?
If your list is everyone in your category, better timing just means being rejected faster, by more people, more efficiently.
WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE
An insurance broker came to me last year. Professional indemnity, same market as every other broker in the country. Four quotes on every deal, cheapest one wins.
We spent the first week not writing a single email.
Instead we asked a different question. Who needs this cover, carries real professional risk, and has almost nobody selling to them properly?
We found a professional group with about 400 members nationally.
85 of them sat inside one association. No specialist was working them.
21 qualified opportunities in 30 days.
The outreach wasn’t clever. The market was right.
That’s not a smaller market. It’s a market where you’re the only one in the room.
THREE QUESTIONS WORTH SITTING WITH
1. Who do you sell to, in one sentence?
2. How many of those exist in Australia?
3. Who else is selling to them?
Most people answer the first instantly and go quiet on the second.
If you can’t put a number on your market, you can’t tell whether you’re in a price war or standing somewhere nobody else has looked.
And if the answer to the third is “everyone”, that’s the work.
THIS THURSDAY
I’m running a free masterclass on both halves. How to find a market worth calling, and how to know when they’re ready.
Bring your business, and I’ll do a targeting teardown live on the call. Three questions, about four minutes, and we work out where your actual market is.
Thursday 13 August, 3pm AEST, 60 minutes, free, live on Zoom.
https://events.humanitix.com/get-10-qualified-opportunities-per-month-with-signal-based-prospecting