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Outbound plays that actually work in 2024

Just sending cold emails with increasingly aggressive CTAs into the void isn’t going to work.

Posted by Sahil Mansuri

In a survey of 100,000 sales professionals on Bravado:

87% — of companies report that they did not have enough pipeline to hit their Q4 goals.
84% — of companies report that their SDR teams are underperforming.
77% — of SDRs missed quota in November.


From 2014 — 2022

Sales was caught in the frenzy of the Mass Blast Era. Enabled by the powerful spam cannons of SalesLoft and Outreach, companies suddenly could have their cake and eat it too!

  • $250K = 20 emails / day
    Why pay a $250K Senior AE to sit there handwriting 20 emails per day using industry expertise, reaching out to their carefully cultivated network, and fly to conferences??

  • $325K = 5000 emails / week
    When you can just hire 5 $65K SDRs fresh out of school and have them fire 1000 emails / week?!!?

Three things that stopped the music

  1. Economic downturn
    The economy crashed, stopping the flood of free VC dollars into tech companies, which shrank software budgets.

  2. Rise in spam
    Email / Cold Call reply rates have precipitously declined, hastened by Google announcing they will ban any domain that has even a marginally high Spam Rate.

  3. Era of AI
    Tools like ChatGPT have made all email communication generically good, which has reduced the impact of writing personalized custom emails.

After talking to over 100,000 CROs + SDR Leaders in the Bravado Network

Here's what the best are doing for outbound:

Only 13% of sales teams are above their outbound quota. Outbound has failed the remaining 87% of sales teams.

Three Outbound Plays that work today

  1. Regional dinners
  2. Customer-Led microevents
  3. Short-form, viral data

Regional dinners

This is absolutely the best converting strategy across B2B sales right now. They can be done in a scrappy, fast manner and generate millions in pipeline in just a few hours.

How to throw your own dinner:

1. Сhoose a place.
Book a 10-20 person private room at one of the 5 nicest restaurants in a major metro where you have a density of prospects.

2. Send emails.
Send cold emails to senior-level decision makers at the companies in that area.

3. Build relationships.
Gather them together for a 3 hour meal where you get to build real relationships and connections.

4. Convert to revenue.
Book a 10-20 person private room at one of the 5 nicest restaurants in a major metro where you have a density of prospects.

How to maximize ROI

1. Don’t cheap out on the restaurant.
You want to pick a restaurant that many many people would be like “holy shit, I want to go eat there!” This is the allure that will get you senior execs to actually show up.

2. Invitation from the CEO.
Have the invite email come from your CEO.

3. Keep the tone casual.
This isn’t a prospecting email where you are delivering value. This is you inviting a bunch of people to dinner.

4. Have a really great hook for the topic.
You want to pick something that is controversial, buzzy, relatable etc. As an example, we at Bravado might use the following as a topic for a regional dinner of CROs: VCs are putting immense pressure in this market on CROs and VPs of Sales to deliver unrealistic targets. How do we band together and push back on what is actually possible in 2024?

5. Сreate the right atmosphere.
Always make the dinner “Off the record” and ask attendees to transparently share their challenges in a room of trusted peers. This creates the right vibe during the dinner.

6. Always do this on a Monday or Wednesday.
They tend to be the best days for people to show up.

7. Do NOT make the dinner free.
Have each attendee pay a nominal amount ($100?) to hold their spot, refundable if they actually show up. Call this your insurance policy against no-shows. This will DRAMATICALLY increase your attendance rate.


Customer-Led microevent

Nobody wants to hear how a vendor does something. Everyone wants to hear how the most iconic, successful companies do things. Use this psychological trick to get prospects to tune in to hear secrets on how one of your clients is winning in this market. 

Can't do an in-person dinner?

1. Find your best speaker.
Send your best logo customer a really nice bottle of wine / whiskey with a handwritten note asking for a huge favor: would be they be willing to do a 45 minute webinar on (insert topic that is relevant to your industry).

As an example: Bravado might have the CRO of Salesforce share insights on how they think about setting quotas across their SMB, MM, and Ent teams in 2024. This would guarantee that leaders of all sizes would come, and hearing the CRO of Salesforce is something many sales leaders would want.

2. Create marketing materials.
Once they agree, create marketing materials around the event and queue up sequences to invite your target prospects.

3. Create value.
Stress that this is meant to be a small group, conversational format with live Q&A and discussion. It’s a capped, small event reserved for only 25 leaders.

4. Prepare your questions in advance.
Send questions in advance to the customer, ask them to send bullets back on anything they want to discuss. Be smart in which questions you ask, that might lead to opportunities for them to say “We use (YourNameHere) in order to power (KeyValueProp) during the webinar.

5. Record it.
Record it and then clip out the best 5-10 quotes / moments into short-form video content.

6. Post it.
Post that content online as free learnings / insights.

7. Turn those 5-10 quotes into the top 5 takeaways.
Turn those 5-10 quotes into the top 5 takeaways, and distribute that to your entire prospect list who didn’t attend. This is a much better cold email than “Do you want to meet to chat about my product?”

8. Say thank you!
Send your customer another really nice bottle of wine / whiskey as a thank you… and then rinse repeat with more customers each quarter.


Short, viral data

The final play that is working best is the data giveaway. This is the classic “deposits before withdrawals” move where you establish yourself as a trusted source prior to asking for anything (like a meeting) in return.

We ourselves at Bravado have found tremendous success here with something called Revenue Recap. It’s a free guide we giveaway that details stats like: what % of sales reps are hitting quota each quarter, how sales compensation has changed by metro or position, and, etc. We also produce a number of short-form guides… like this one that you’re reading right now.

Best practices

1. Positioning yourself as a knowledge center.
Becoming the trusted source in your industry is critical to winning customers.

2. You don't need to write a long whitepaper.
You don’t need to write a long whitepaper (no one is going to read it) or spend tens of thousands to get value. I wrote this guide in 5 hours on a Google Doc one Saturday afternoon.

3. Add an infographic.
Adding charts and other visuals is a great way to increase shareability. Social ftw.

4. Find a buzzy stats.
Find a couple of controversial or buzzy stats to add in. Things that people are gonna send to their peers with a “whoa did you see this??”

5. Add your own unique insight / voice your opinion.
If you don’t have any 1st party data to get unique insights, find stats scattered across the internet and assemble them onto a single place. Now add your unique commentary or POV and you’ve got something to claim as your own.

6. Add exclusive insights.
Insights gleaned from customers conversations are doubly awesome: not only do you get to learn from your clients, but then share those learnings as proprietary insights.

7. Don't forget to double-dip.
Repurposing in-person or online content by breaking it down to chunks is a great way to double-dip.


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