Welcome back everybody to our latest episode of stacking growth. I'm super excited to have not only Carl here with us I'm always excited to hang out with Carl, but our special guests Jessica Watts co-founder much City Jessica. How you doing? I'm good.
It's Friday. It is Friday. This is when Carl and I usually jam and it's usually just he and I talking and it's nice to have Exactly it's nice to have a guest somebody who definitely knows more than Carl and I talked to us So we're excited about this. I know everything sails outbound sails wherever this conversation goes.
I'm looking forward to it Why don't we jump in by just I'd love to hear kind of more about why you introduce yourself to the audience? And then I know the fact the story about love you to share kind of just the founder story of mud city and how you How you came about starting next with your with your co-founder Jeremy? Yeah, so by way of introduction My name is Jessica Hay co-founder of mud city I founded mud city with my co-founder Jeremy Von Holly He sits on sort of the revenue operations side of the business I sit on the sales strategy side of the business. I'm recovering VP of sales Had a sin as a VP of sales prior to founding mud city at an organization that was funnily enough Heavily outbound driven so I think like 80 plus outbound driven so not a surprise that that's sort of the cornerstone of mud city At our ethos mud city helps emerging technology companies specifically be to be stand up their outbound motion usually from scratch So we're usually working with organizations who have no infrastructure yet.
Maybe they have a CRM Maybe they don't maybe they have a sales engagement platform. Maybe they don't maybe they tried something Maybe they haven't and we sort of come in and we help build the ecosystem that allows outbound thrive Sometimes inclusive of even hiring the talent training the talent ramping the talents with the overarching intent to hand off a fully formed In-function ecosystem back to the client for them to maintain in perpetuity long after mud city is gone So think of us as kind of an outbound accelerator and outbound incubator for companies to get them through Really that first 12 to 18 months. We're outbound is just a real slog And is it's riskiest from a cack perspective and success perspective and then once we sort of proven the channel we hand it back So why um, thanks for the explanation. I didn't realize your prior company was an 80% outbound.
That's incredible. Um, Maybe more Man Why did you start a company like what how did you and Jeremy come to this decision? I'm just curious because obviously you're a very successful VPS sales Jeremy is probably if not the best one of the best revenue operations leaders I've ever met Yeah, so yeah two world-class people here and you decide to go off and do your own thing. What was that conversation like?
I think I think for us The like the foundation of our entire relationship started when I was the director of business development Um, I I was you know, one of the top performing reps at jelly vision was a pretty far previous company And I just noticed a very compounding pipeline problem And we were hiring more and more aes as so many companies do because aes equaled scale, um, which is we can get into that in another Second, but I was kind of staring into a pipeline that I knew wouldn't support the headcount that we were bringing on nor would it support the numbers that we had So I actually went and pitched myself to go take over a kind of fledgling vdr team at the time There's about like three or four of them no structure like no, not a lot not a lot of repeatability or scalability and what they were doing and Um, Jeremy joined soon after and so a lot of what we were doing was figuring out how to build a people pipeline So it's kind of the cornerstone of everything that we've ever done that work then built a sales ecosystem that became jelly vision and then obviously I promoted to VP of sales and I Oversized everything that was you know all segments of our aes all of our channel strategy as well as top of funnel And all of that kind of morphed but I think the hypothesis was like what happens if we can pick this up and put it down for other emerging technology companies and Put companies in the driver's seat of their own growth to teach them how to fish like what happens when that when that can be done successfully I think the first question was can it like can we pick this up and put it down anywhere? I think we've largely proved that we can um with some exceptions and Then how does that change the dynamic and when you can really predict pipeline and build sustainable revenue plans? Um, what happens and that's kind of the cornerstone This is fascinating. Can I ask a question here Cassidy?
I'd like to 10 questions Okay, ask 10 or you ask one I don't know. Maybe I ask one compound question and it hello at the live inside of it Um, I'll tell you why I'm fascinated dusca Because one you decided to enter what I think is a very crowded space Like there's a low barrier to entry to go and just like going on linkedin and saying I was an sdr I could help people stand up outbound, right? So it's just like a crowded space with like no real filtration as to like who gets into that and it's a lot of junk out there, right? The second thing is that's fascinating I'm obsessed with this idea of a professional services firm like yours or like ours That the end goal is to hand you something that's proven and you become less dependent on us, which is the complete opposite actually But most yeah, it's that it's almost crazy, but it's also like You're competing against probably other like outbound agencies or like these like outbound like sdr like uber sdr services that Don't want to hand anything off.
They they want to actually like take more and so Why choose like that crowded space you obviously have so much experience like not just building an app on tv You were vp like vp sales you could have done anything But you showed an appbound agency and then how did you decide that you wanted it to be like this project base accelerator where you're experimenting Proved handed it off as opposed to just man potentially managing just being the outsourced team long-term So that's such a good question and I love I love that you pointed out that what we do is a little bit counterintuitive and that we ultimately Do you want to hand off like a fully built program the first question that I get from everyone is well What about you know, pretty predictable revenue for yourself and I think that we're just confident enough that enough companies have this problem and that there's A journey behind beyond just implementing the one-doubt program but actually optimizing it thereafter. Um, but I I think for us The space is super crowded and noisy to your points and I think that's because top of funnel specifically outbound is not viewed as a strategic function And it's big beef that I had even stepping into the director of business development role initially It's that that role is not viewed as a strategic function within organizations despite it being the tip of the spear much like marketing a lot of In a lot of ways the tip of the spear and messaging the tip of the spear and segmentation the tip of the spear and Really defining the contact life cycle over time how it gets handed off how it gets treated yet It's not viewed as a strategic function. And so this idea that you can just outsource the activities themselves Is not the point what about the cohesive strategy that your organization needs the insights that you're going to get from this channel That if you outsource it you never collect learn from socialize internally like we're talking about a channel that is historically under valued so much so that people run around screaming cold calling is dead. It's not it's still the highest performing channel for every single one of our clients.
It's just horrifically Commodity, right? It's horrifically implemented and in it's exposed. No one's exposing 100% of the time curse this cursing above board Nursing is encouraged. Yeah, 100% of the shitty emails they get from like marketing or sales You see some of that they are exposing the shitty cold calls they get because they're you feel them the cringe is so much more real that they get exposed the question is not is cold calling is like a good channel it Is it being strategically deployed?
It's the question we should be asking about 100% of channels 100% of the time for whatever reason Outbound is the only one that's like it just doesn't work. Just cut it. It's outdated. It's just just cut it It doesn't work like it's just kind of bizarre to me The way that it's perceived and it's it's so noisy that I think it was a big passion of mine to take that head on because I built an entire revenue organization On on the back of it incredibly successful outcome program.
I know what it can do And I think part of it was us wanting to check wanting to challenge that directly You've seen it Jessica. Like one of the things that's special about you. This is again so fascinating and I like I'm sold Like I would like a contract sent to me afterwards like a photo cast like you just told me on all of that It's amazing your passion. I can feel it But you actually have seen it.
This is I think something that overlaps to with refined labs in our marketers Not many marketers know what good looks like right and that's something we're trying to solve for it That's like you all the same thing. It's like people stream cold calling is that and etc. It's so difficult to It's so rare to see it done well to see like the magic of it Even when you see glimpses like maybe on LinkedIn of like, you know Like a Kyle Coleman or somebody like posting like a really good cold email that got a response or something You should don't see it like impacting like funnel level data. Like you just not exposed to that So I think that's that's a piece of it that it sounds like you debunked where it's like let me show you what good looks like And by the way, it might not be the right fit for you either I'd love to talk a little bit about that if we're ready to like pivot What happens when you like have been instances where it's like or what what?
Context what needs to be true in your experience Where it's you know what cold calling or maybe outbound in this specific way high volume cold calling or cold email like isn't a good fit Like other certain industries that you find that it's less effective or certain stages of a company where it's less effective or more effective Talk to me a little bit about kind of your, you know, maybe just anecdotally what you see across the board I think we've actually not found that it's more or less effective in certain industries because like what you have to remember And I think this is often Misunderstood outbound although it's refer outbound has referred to as the channel Outbound is comprised of many channels and each of those channels have their own baselines So this is what I think is crazy Going back to how a director of business development or a head of business development that would run an outbound program is not perceived as strategic They themselves are running many channels of which cold calling is simply one You have SMS for some personas, you know, that works nicely You have LinkedIn, you have alternate social channels the best outbound channels are omni channels So much like marketing we're running multiple channels in our campaigns But only cold calling gets discussed which for like that's just crazy to me. Um, and so I think like going back to the original question It's Actually, I don't even remember what the original question is now The other question is like other scenarios where you find that Not really like because again, you can just change the channel complexion for the vertical So like a great example is um, you know, we still see Verticals like healthcare pick up the phone at just a wildly high percentage Meanwhile, if I were to go call Particularly into technology companies, let's say like a HR persona or marketing persona I'm not gonna see that but they become much more regional reachable via SMS much more reachable via LinkedIn So like that's where we might say let's start to pull the trigger on things like gifting Let's start to pull the trigger on things like LinkedIn videos and alternate things in our content And those things tend to work, but it's relatively industry agnostic The biggest thing is CAC. Do you have the deal size to support it? Because if you don't you don't and you're never gonna make back Your investment on the channel because it is and this is true.
This is a true criticism criticism about bound It's expensive because you're asking humans to deploy your strategy versus just deploying it digitally Like you can with a lot of marketing channels, right? And so you have to have a real true understanding of Your cap repayment, which then is another question do companies even understand Healthy cap for themselves to begin with this is kind of the initial conversation We have with a lot of companies we're trying to figure that out and then do they understand where they should be pointing out versus where they should be Pointing their digital channels because they both shouldn't be covering the same spread Right? Like you want to be very intentional about where you deploy a high-cack channel And I think that's something that's also typically misunderstood No, don't send outbound at your lowest at your lowest ACV Like you're not gonna get the CAC story that you want to see that's not where it's best deployed Send it to your hardest to penetrate most valuable Customer base or prospect base that requires that many omni-channel touches to warm and do it in partnership with the contents that your marketing team is already producing Like pull those components together and I think that that is not how a lot of companies deploy outbound Which you know is always if you're not doing that. Yeah, you're looking at it in a really expensive channel.
You can never cover the cost on Yeah, that's fascinating. I was actually telling Cassidy yesterday because I got a lot of outbound to me and I remember Cassidy yesterday I was like talking about this sales rep that's been pursuing me for like nine months now who I've had a conversation with I've said no, I've seen like an abbreviated demo and they still continue to pursue me and I was telling Cassidy yesterday like It's such a waste of their time and from a CAC perspective catastrophic because even if he closed me Whereas small sales team like this is not going to be a big deal for this guy You know like the juice is not worth this I am worth from a deal perspective Like two emails and then you should move on like any more than that you are upside down from a cost perspective in this In this whatever it is that you want to call it is right this pursuits and so it's a fascinating point you bring up and like I Feel that as well. I also feel like this made his wild Look car. I'm gonna jump in for a second.
You know why he's pursuing you because the word is out there You're easy. Yeah, you're an easy target man. You pick up the phone. You respond to your emails Oh man.
I like to hear their pitches. You know are you crazy? He's connecting exactly I'm good for vanity metrics, man. I really am like I'm great for a dashboard, you know You know as a if you're selling technology and carls not bought into your solution You know you're in trouble because that guy pitches me every other week on something now I was like a decision maker and budget holder here instead of just the champion for all technology out there We would have the biggest most epic tech stack that would create no revenue for us likely, but it would be really cool So I don't know if that can I think there's value to that though because it has to be going back to your original question Like why did you mean I get so good at this?
We kind of had park lunch at jelly vision like we were early adopters have gone We were early adopters of outreach like early early like the CEOs were still selling us early And we had time we had time to play where I think a lot of companies got a blader So I there's validity to just getting the tools and seeing what they can do in testing and trying What's interesting is we we see a lot of companies we obviously start a lot of these relationships analyzing data and then over time We look at how mixed changes and where success happens in these accounts I actually did a session on this a few weeks ago We went through we analyze pipeline sources across existing accounts And there's only two places at a macro level where you get you know positive return on investment and positive tech Where pipeline and close rates are what you expect and it's on high intent inbound and outbound and that's it Lee Jen events all the other bullshit Time and time again doesn't work And how you have a strong outbound and you have a strong high intent inbound and even like you said with large accounts You mirror these things together and everything else is just noise But yet companies we find companies time and again just spending a ton of time on everything but these two things It's crazy too because I almost guarantee without having seen that analysis that you'll find inbound and outbound supporting one another So like everyone wants to say and it's so funny to me how like outbound and marketing and up arguing or bickering It's like we're in the same customer journey all like we're supporting the same buyer perception Like we're we're educating and guiding the same contact and it's the best day of my week When we will source a deal and you'll see or source an opportunity and you'll see that crossover where BDR outreach drove the contact of the website Where they then took action right or vice versa, right where it's somebody was on the website. We caught them It's that's the dream, but then instead we have we we've created this noise where now we have people fighting over attribution It's like you you did think you did it like your channels worked, you know what I mean? I think that's driven from leaders, you know because I want like this channel level team level attribution I don't know if anyone's really cracked the code on you know And maybe because that's important to have visibility into the effectiveness on a channel by channel basis But how do you prioritize pipeline overall above? It's that's admittedly difficult I think to do You know to your point to whenever you talk about like the companies that do it really well You can look at like all the category leaders right in any category It's like they have really great marketing engines and their sales teams like you go to revview or something like that And guess what you see you see really high attainment, right?
It's like both of these organizations are working very well. Oh surprise surprise they're a category leader And I think that's because you know you see like it's not just omni-channel outbound It's like this even more meta omni-channel like go-to-market outbound whatever because it's marketing That's also g-marketing is marketing outbound. I mean honestly running ads in a LinkedIn feed is kind of outbound It's like nobody asked for that so you can actually 100% and this is what's so crazy to me It's like outbound is so insulting everyone's so insulted by it But you're literally getting advertised you while you're writing your scathing post by a marketing team that didn't ask for your consent to be there Yeah, you think of like the ads and stuff like it's all actually outbound. Oh my god.
I just opened the can't work Oh, you're gonna get fired dude I was like really all marketing besides maybe email marketing because you often do it But like anything that's not like opt-in to it's really an outbound channel ads Podcasts I mean those things are put out first directionally and then consumed not unlike a cold call or a cold email Which is put out first and then consumed I don't know what I just did but I feel like it just changed I don't know if you go to market, but I'm very I'm very young You had this amazing you had this amazing thought you can just like pack yourself on the back and take the rest of the Off but even that framing might look to I'm gonna do that actually Now that you said I got approval everyone from my boss and take the rest of my Friday off Um, but it's almost like that reframing is maybe something that's necessary So like let's de-stigmatize outbound because marketing is doing it too And by the way we see it done at a horrific level the people that come inbound to us and stuff I mean it's bad like some of the lead gen that we see is way more wasteful than a BDR making some calls Anyway more expensive you said that outbound's expensive, but really like we see some pretty expensive lead gen programs that produce zero dollars in Pigeons, so they're both expensive, but um maybe that reframing might help to like align teams Jessica How do you what kind of narrative you tell do you work with marketing leaders like together with sales? Or you typically only talk to me about like how you foster alignment between you know these two organizations? Yeah, so it's really interesting for us because again going back to the point that we work predominantly with emerging technology companies It's rare that will work with like probably the same kind of marketing team you all see Um, so a lot of times we're pre scoring we're pre uh, you know high intent low intent Um, and so it's it's a lot of education Honestly, like we're having like the contact versus leads fight like every single day Um to to just like paint a clear picture Of the contact lifecycle like really emphasizing the contact, um But we also do work with a couple companies who do have great marketing leaders and I think It's always to me our job is to reframe outbound as a channel for them because once they see it working The way that we can get it to work. They're like Absolutely You're driving our performance up like we're getting more demo requests like we're we're talking to more people We're getting more insights.
You're telling us the content to build we're getting Connect recordings that are telling us which direction we want to push our content like there It's really just showing them because I don't think to your point A lot of companies have seen outbound work the way that we deploy it And I understand why you would be skeptical if you had it I would understand why you would be skeptical of the channel if you had only seen a sort of spray and pray working off of a Lead list that has no sort of like Thermographic or technographic theme or any sort of like messaging base or foundation to create personalization upon It has no means to sort of like nurture or contact beyond first connect like anything that's not that is not in my mind outbound It's spam and there needs to be two different words for that Like there has there has to be a delineation between like outbound well done and sort of everything else You would be shocked. I think of the number of BDRs who aren't working territory days still still It's it's wild to me. Um without that territory days We haven't made a decision for the BDRs. I'm who they should be talking to we haven't helped them focus their messaging We haven't helped them focus their efforts.
We haven't pointed them in a direction We as a leadership team haven't even made a decision on where the channel should be and I think It's like both BDR the absence of great BDR execution that gives you know outbound a bad name It's also the indecision of leadership to place it appropriately that gives Outbound a bad name and I think it's just kind of showing that it can be different It seems like I mean for me the list building is so like it's so commoditized and people are again Just go get zoom info just export from whatever from rocket reach or whatever your tool is and it seems like that's actually the most critical Peace and the part that is the hardest because it creates like you have to build consensus around who our targets are and you have to have a message crafted Would you agree Jessica that? One that is the most important part about bound is the list it really is the strategy and then two like BDRs Like that falls on their shoulders most of the time these entry-level sellers that are like I have to come up with a point of view for this company to share it with strangers live on a call You know, it's like that's not their job what we talked to me about how you think about this So I actually disagree with you that the list is the most important because And I think this has to be challenged everyone thinks the list is the most important The list is only as important as the message that it serves And it's like no one else here's anything like if you hear one thing and you shut this off The list is only as important as the message that it serves So what we do when we implement we always start with value proposition construction We kind of have created a type of value proposition. We call it a Y-by That is kind of built for BDR to deploy So like it's rid of all the noise that maybe like alternate like marketing would want to take that to the 10th degree It wouldn't be enough for marketing, right? But like what does a BDR need to deploy so we start with our Y-byes and this is like the art Who are we talking to?
Why and what is the I cut my teeth in like the school of Challenger I'm an old CEB or like where they literally wrote the book so Like what is the pseudo controversial opinion that we're taking to this persona so that they'll hear us And I think this is the hardest part for us because Especially early stage founders want to say everything that the product can do and we have to be the ones that say nobody cares Nobody cares at all All we need to do is come up with two really really powerful value propositions and then go build the list Because the list isn't just the contact data the list is okay cool What is what is the actual like insights that we need to know about the company? So give you a good example We work with the company in the insurance space they sell to heads of underwriting right and underwriting is sort of guided by two terminal metrics expense ratio And there's another one that I'm going to forget right now But it's publicly available data So once we basically said we're constructing a value proposition around Organizations that have a less than stellar expense ratio we could go get that data pull it in then go build a list Now we're literally leading with hey, I noticed that your your last publicly published expense ratio was x What's going on like this has got to be this is not a priority for you all like how do you consider? How much more personalized is that then Great, I know who's steve is and I put him in a sequence that has nothing to do with his business It doesn't teach him anything that doesn't tell him that we can you know like List design is messaging and I think that would be a new concept We see this issue it was so well said Jessica and we see the same issue on the marketing side It's always about the audience and the messaging or the positioning of the value proposition secondary and then you see shitty ads out there I mean nothing to anybody and people wonder why it doesn't work It's because they spend all the time obsessing over an audience in no time figuring out exactly what you just walked through And I also love the language you got this too, but the Wi-Fi yeah, so I was gonna dig into this I love the language and Wi-Fi like what Yeah, you mentioned it's different than maybe what the marketer would do Could you not to get away your secret sauce? But like what how do you do that?
What is it? Yeah, so it starts with probably You know, what is your current state? What is the problem of the current state? What is the future state and what is the outcome of the future state?
It's simple. It's always so simple It's a grid It's a quadrants of just realistically thinking through the totality of the problem but getting really specific And we we try to create two of those that are super compelling at the top of our engagements And it's a messaging workshop that we do with our customers, but a bdr actually can't do anything with that That's not an executable messaging format So then what we do is we actually take that and we turn it into a question Um, that'd be york and now so hey, I'm giving you a call because I was wondering insert Wi-Fi question And then we construct all of our sequences on Wi-Bis So we have cold sequence y by one cold sequence y by two and then we have cold Or y by one warm nurture y by one cold nurture And like it's just you can build these entire sort of automations and outreach that sort of support this Wi-Fi framework And that's how we track messaging efficacy and we start to see why by one is outperforming Wi-Fi too What about Wi-Fi one is doing better? Okay, cool. We're gonna start to workshop Wi-Fi two to make it better It's not strong enough and then we can kind of go through these iterations And we even go so far as to say like for every opportunity scheduled what Wi-Fi scheduled it Right and you can start to see sort of how the messages move through your funnel and start to figure out what you need to go do more of Imagine a partnership with marketing where you're like, why by one is killing it go make two e-books on this topic Like that's collaboration That's I think the power of outbound is that you can get quick reactivity To is this message compelling how are these conversations going?
And it's really well structured so that a junior seller can execute it Because that's like the that's the catch here is we are trying to deploy this message through more junior sales people So it it just has to be really tight in terms of how you execute that The market research piece there is like more valuable than I don't want to say it's more valuable than the pipeline You can't monetize the value of the market research that you're doing but like man, you're validating Wi-Fi's right you're validating like a messaging you're You're we were talking about this yesterday Cassidy where it's like you're validating that there's a demand for a problem And that is so difficult to do and the most valuable thing that a business can assess company can can discover is like There's demand to solve these problems Languageed in this way then the product follows right and it's like it's it's fascinating that this is so similar to marketing I don't know if Cassidy, I'm sure you agree But like the same stuff that marketing is doing for a slightly different output at the end, right? It's it's an ad creative versus a sequence theme or whatever it is a y-by statement or a question But imagine these two teams getting together and supporting each other in crafting this how much better the questions might actually be when Marketing is collaborating and how much better the advertising might be when sales is supporting self. I don't know I don't have a question. You're just blowing my mind right now So keep going well, I was gonna say earlier Cassidy.
It's not that different than as a marketer creating a campaign, right? We're saying and this is this is also another part everyone wants outbound to go after the total addressable market No, like yes, no And so when you start to think of just going after the pockets of the sales addressable markets that are the most relevant You are creating a campaign you are acting with a marketer, right? And I think people don't think about it that way either But it's the same behavior, right? We're saying what is what is sort of the micro audience that we're trying to talk to?
What is the micro message that we're taking to them so that hyper personalize and then let's Look at it and let's assess it and analyze it in a million different directions until we kind of know what we can get from it And I think it's like a campaign Yeah, I would agree and with that though I'm about to dig in a little bit deeper. So I get the y-by I get the setup It's um super jazz as a kind of process person here yet How do you what do you do next and I'm just fascinated by this because I've had so it's like bad marketing It's like bad marketing. I've had tons of bad outbound to me. So when I hear how is it supposed to work I'm just fascinated by it.
So like you've done the strategy the y-by the messaging What do you do next when you're in this engagement? You're getting the setup Then we have to teach it to people so if the company has rep seated they go through our bootcamp We have a three-week bootcamp that exists solely to teach our y-bys and to ramp reps on it Because if they can't deploy the y-bys across every channel then it doesn't matter that we created it And that was the big disconnect for me is I didn't see agency sort of moving from strategy to execution To actually field compliance because any of those things miss on outbound in particular you fail You just fail and so that's why we actually like we have managers who pick up after academy managers listen to every single connect and scorecard compliance And it is like high touches hell It's high touches hell, but it has to be for a period of time Until which point you can sort of step back and say is this working and you can be like, okay We have roughly the right two messages they can scale and then also we haven't even talked about like we we set up just a crazy Crazy dashboarding suite behind the scenes so that we understand Will we call our baselines? So what is the baseline from dial? Depuga what is the baseline from connect to convert?
What is the baseline from conversion to hold and then we start to establish baseline forecasts that basically say okay You have a channel that can produce X amount of meetings in month that you can predictably forecast so long as your baselines hold and you can get to and once you have those You can sort of hand it off because we created all the all the content we created the framework for messaging We've created a literally a BDR boot camp in academy We've created a management playbook created your dashboarding suite Now you can sort of take that back and then people tend to reach back out to us when they're either trying to shift their message Right or be they've made some material change in their products So they need new enter a new vertical and kind of do this all over again And those are the points where we kind of come back help them establish that and then and then they kind of continue from there Let me ask a question on that. So This is fascinating in this ordering So you come up with the Y-Bies you have the boot camp where you're training the BDRs before they even go deploy this Is there a period in between where you're testing messaging first to kind of figure out And this could just be like a SWAT team of like what is gonna work or not or do you do that after you've done the boot camp and you've gotten the BDR trained up So we initially started and we didn't do that And so people would sort of enter kind of this full-fledged engagement because we'll work with companies too from anywhere from I think much like you guys We work with companies the upwards of 18 plus months and then kind of passing um, and so We weren't testing prior to that and we sort of stepped back and said why? Like theoretically before they go hire the headcount do all these things right Shouldn't we have some idea that we're directionally close? And so we just started to offer what we're calling vertical validations Which is a three month boot camp with one of our senior BDRs because all of our senior BDRs are very good at establishing playbooks from scratch It's a very different skill than taking a playbook and becoming successful within it Um, and so we have a senior BDR Basically run one Y-by for three months to get it to 150 meaningful connects And then we analyze it and we say are we close?
Do we even achieve a connector that we could scale against did we Get materially good insights to refine our Y-by and make it better Um, and we're people to schedule a couple meetings like was there enough interest and again The goal is not meaning the goal is the insights and the proving that there are the channels to build on top of this But then after three months our clients would then say okay, let's enter the full engagement We have enough data. Um, so we sort of created this pre-engagement that I think gives us a lot of that testing So that we have a couple iterations under our belt before we go Like full bore, um and start like placing head count on top of it and all of those things I love that. It's fascinating. Um So let's say you know what the message is and you tested it.
It's working What like what do you do to deploy that? Meaning maybe now we're getting into like how do I identify who I'm gonna put in front of? How do I might we talk in like I'm just curious we talk about thousands or tens of thousands of companies We're talking to the slot, you know, like hundreds of a thousand like how do we how do you do that? HPDR works.
Yeah, HPDR works between 275 to 350 accounts. That's To us a great territory. Um, and then we each each company like we build a pro-flight you play books Um, and so it's like these are the exact personas. We should always be working, you know, basically like Uh, a VP a director and then someone lower each of those has sort of like if it's the lower level their content It's kind of developed as like a referral up sequence.
Um, like each of that messaging is like slightly different Um, and so we ask them to keep 175 well researched and we have like an entire framework that constitutes whether or not a contact is well researched Um, 175 active and well researched contacts in cold sequence at a time if they can do that they can ramp and within usually slightly under under two months Um, and beyond that then we say cool. We got it to this point now. How do we optimize the channel by adding in potentially other channels doing doing more touch points across different channels Introducing things like video introducing, you know, alternate alternate mechanisms to potentially try to optimize Um, the channel performance, but first we just try to get to establishing the baselines once you establish your baselines You can basically create a project plan for your worst performing baseline You can start to like rearrange things and change things and then you have a channel that's fully unique to the company And the way that the persona engages with them in your optimizing over time Man, that's fascinating. I love this stuff.
How often do you feel like these y-bys get stale? Like what's like the what do you feel like of the message? What do you what do you feel like is like the shelf life of a y-by? To be 100 honest with you, we don't quite know yet.
Um, I think we're still trying to figure that out because Obviously once the contact goes through like the entire y-by the nurture Um, like we have engagement thresholds and automation set up and outreach that would basically kick them to the appropriate nurture and Things of that nature. Obviously they can't go through that y-by again So at the point where you sort of have your first crop that's gone through that y-by anybody who didn't convert You know, you sort of have to start to create your next message or we kind of put them through the second one and test if that is a better hypothesis for that contact Um, but we're really trying to figure that out right now because For some clients we have them scheduling on their initial y-by still it and they perform incredibly well and for others That fall off is a little bit steeper and I think that's because the art of the message is still an art like not 100 Of our y-by's hit like I don't want people to walk away and be like if I establish this framework is going to work every single time We still have y-by's that flop and we have to go back to the take drawing table And say let's try this again Um and do something different but at least you have a framework for testing that's repeatable and that you can keep running until you hit the ones that That win and I think for a lot of programs. That's the hardest part is like how should we be shipping these? In a complete package that our reps can actually deploy successfully that then we can actually measure the advocacy up And I think that we have kind of down pat Love it talking about efficacy.
I'm gonna I'm gonna rattle the cage here. Um, open up a can of worms What video okay, I'm just gonna ask like I have beef with video prospecting You got beef. Oh my god. We got the same Valuable enough to me or to give me personally so it's very anecdote But at hubspot my vid your account was like a graveyard of like unwatched videos and I was like it's the juice isn't worth The squeeze but I don't have as much data as you have you find that video gives your teams enough uplifted justify the significant additional labor that goes into producing video So it's interesting because like The red herring of video is shit content in shit content out right so it's like for us It's like if you can put great content in sure like it's great content I think that video performs differently across different channels.
I've yet to see considerable increase in email With video. I haven't seen it like at me. Vid yard like let's run a campaign like let's like live prove me wrong where I do see it lift Meaningfully is linked in and I think that where you have prospects who show A willingness to engage respond have conversations if you want linked in it's a really digestible way to make that channel effective um That's my bet with a video at the moment. I'm sure there's people who disagree with me or want to push that further, but I just Have seen so much terrible video and it's it's almost cringier than a bad phone call to me because I have like I have to see it with my eyes You know Multiple of your senses, you know, it's not just like what you hear you also see something Uh cringy.
Yeah, again, I I don't have the science behind it But for me, I'm just like if you hit me with a compelling enough why by Whether it's written or it's video in theory shouldn't like should it matter because the message is so relevant, right? I say this capacity I'm like if I'm in if you could send me the crappiest email ever, right? There's one sentence that just and that has a why by that's really painful to me And you just nail that hypothesis like and then and then your second sentence is do you want to buy this from a sales person? I would respond with that right because the why by was so relevant so I just don't see like video making something You know, I agree with you.
I think it's the wrong question It's like I think the question should always be like was your content was your original hypothesis the correct one anyways, right? Because anyway, you deliver a shitty hypothesis. It's still shitty And I think that like the power of a well constructed why by is harley may reach out to you with a great why by and it could be wrong Yeah, but what you'll get is a really strong hypothesis and what we see is prospects willing to correct you And so where that gets really powerful is not only are we sort of leading with the hypothesis We're getting really good data back and we're getting it back immediately And like I think that's the core question that all of us need to be asking is how do we get the most valuable data back from these channels so that we get smarter? And I think we'll sort of moment going back to the top of this far where you're like, I don't know because the meeting is pipeline It's like it should be insights insights insights is the value because insights power innovation the power better messages They power better personalization, but nobody values the insights in fact Is there a single company even like saying how many insights would be captured from the field this week?
Where's the metric for this? It's amazing. What's crazy? How about one more thing just to go back to the very very beginning when I was like outsourced sdr versus accelerate, right?
So like I see this like kind of ad for mud city for whatever So maybe like give me some royalties You know that we have we have some marketing work to do so by all means like we're not about the back hit me with hitting with the Or to see this ad or like this website headline or this t-shirt that says like don't outsource accelerate like this idea of playing on like Accelerating versus outsourcing but the whole point is do you you lose all those insights if you just outsource because that just gets sucked into like some sdr Agencies black hole CRM and that feedback maybe never gets to the customer because they don't care about it They just like it's either a meeting or a pipeline or we don't want it There's like this treasure test of insight that just like sinks to the bottom of the CRM ocean never to be recovered and You're saying It's like that's the big difference with us here. We work 100% natively in our customer systems So every dial that we are mixed you like every disposition logged like all of it is yours And so whether we make sense of it or you make sense of it later It's yours and I I would like there to be a movement where like early stage founders like sit in a room with people who are like operators Who just scream at them to build their proprietary? Dataset sooner build your data set sooner like right now like get pull the trigger on sales force like do whatever it takes like Build your data set because it will build your future messaging it will tell you where not to go It will tell you where you've been and I just don't think That is top of mind when it's really like your most valuable thing that you have as a company is all of the history of every conversation You've ever had of every persona that you tried to target all of it. It's gold Yeah, we talked a lot about this and we've actually put out some kind of positioning around the fact that When you think about a revenue organization like most companies do not treat it like the rest of the company like you think about building a product There's a whole process insights are core experimentation is necessary There's a process that goes through in order to scale now and to be successful It's the same thing that you're talking through on an outbound model.
It's the same thing we talked to on the marketing side It's like put time and time again. This is not how companies think when it comes to you know a revenue engine But yet they'll think like this all day long like comes and building the product. It's just nuts It's a crazy act you like we talked about this a lot at let's say you but I'm like I don't know what's wrong with enablement Like no one can define it or tell me like exactly what it does like every like I don't know what that is and I think RevOps like it's like that entire whatever that is today that like really poorly formed blob of like revenue support functions There just needs to be like a chief insight officer who sits on top of it and is just like aggregating Making sense of all of the field activities in a way that can be digested by the heads of each function and made Strategy and you see people see companies do this religiously but be become something with it So it's just like I think there's a whole there's a whole maturation of here of like what what does being a support function mean like What is actually useful to the front line? What is actually useful to senior leadership in its insights always And I haven't met a CMO or a CRO who has time to go do that right?
So who does and I don't know I think it's an interesting question Yeah, I think time and again We put people in the roles of sales opposite rev opposite are equipped to do that level of leadership and management I mean we're usually putting somebody in that role who's built infrastructure Yeah, and now we want him to be strategic and insightful and like being able to just a different skill set It's like that all of it. It's like how do we make that entire ether like really work? Because I think product marketing like can sometimes exist to tell the narratives that the companies want to tell instead of actually Taking their cues from the customers. So it's like how do we do that?
I think a little bit differently and the fact that this conversation can start with outbound means it's a channel that you can not write Off stop writing it off and it just starts there I think Period I love the purity of like being able to understand what works What doesn't when it comes to messaging and positioning because what marketers will struggle with is It's they either don't think about it or they can't experiment and test for it And what's the what's beautiful about like outbound is like you're gonna know like it's either gonna work Or it's not gonna work because you're gonna see that in the insights in the day to come back at you Yeah, if it's crickets, then you know, it's not working or the other audience but chances are it's a messaging But even crickets is valuable But I also do you like the same challenges from our stakeholders or companies to where it's like where's the meetings and I don't think anything is really gonna Change until that changes and I would be shocked if we collectively are not experiencing that same reality with with leadership Where it's you know, it's still revenue over everything and like don't get me wrong That's the truth but like revenue is the ultimate lagging indicator So what are we doing to get creative about like the leading indicators that get us there and starting to give them value? Just I don't know. It's tricky and at the balance and it's hard and it'll probably never resolved but we can talk about it It's funny you mentioned the outbound validation. I never really talked about this my last company We did this we hired a firm to help us use outbound to validate messaging and to your point We completely shit the bed.
We did not find one message that worked out of all the tests Which told us we're in the wrong spot like it was just like all the things that we hypothesized and tested failed Yeah, so we knew we just like our thinking was way off and so we then we found the messaging over time like through marketing channels But like if we didn't cross off this whole body of theory and hypotheses We would have still been testing and been way away from like what actually mattered to the market and yeah super powerful like it was a painful to see how bad we did but Very insightful because we realized we're just completely wrong I think too. It's like great. So you didn't go spend how much money on it like in a lot of a lot of companies when they come out of the gate on Outbound they come out of the gate so hard, you know, let's go hire our first seven reps It's like hire one. Yeah And don't hire another until you until you've proven that one can do the job like it's it's it's crazy What we'll do to just solve a pipeline problem Only to not solve the pipeline problem I agree.
All right. I got a couple more questions. I'm gonna be respectful time I have one back the video and that is it's part of the reason video doesn't work for Carl is because of the beard like Would you recommend he shave that up if he's gonna walk and talk or I can do it I can figure maybe that's how I do here for a week no beard for a week and we see If anything the beard should be like a real strong personalization lover that should make video work even more like Yeah, that's true Which is a good thing that she would give me a list of only male bearded That I had some kind of like relevance to them I could leave with a you know a beard oil type of hook and then move into my why by that's what I'm here Yeah Well, she also said probably the thing you appreciate most on this call she said she thinks video is effective on LinkedIn And you got your whole walk and talk back your sales guy walk and talk so like this is This is Very well for you. Yeah, it's a combination for me.
I agree. I don't want to beat the beat the dead horse on the video thing But there's just something about video in email. It's just like not it's it's it's it's it's it's uncontectual I am not in my email because I'm enjoying myself and wanting to watch videos like I hate my email inbox It usually when I'm in my inbox, I want to clean it up hit to do's and get the hell out, right? So that's why I'm gonna be adverse to a video.
I'm not there just hanging out You know what I'm saying? But on LinkedIn my frame of mind is different and my hypothesis is that why you're hitting someone with a video in a channel That is video appropriate where they're assuming videos. That's a part of the experience of LinkedIn And that it so it makes logical sense but people still do it and I think it really just comes from video vendors But that's a story for another time. There's like other things to do that I think work really well in email It's like more a lot of companies don't have like just simple giffes of their product that that tell the whole story in three seconds You know like those things you pop them in an email while up like you pair that with the Y-Vci You get to see the thing that does it even if it's even if it's like off-handed and you didn't even really mean to do it You consumed it like those things are super powerful.
So it's like It all first is what are you even trying to fix if you're trying to fix email performance with video That's probably not the best go fix email performance by actually getting some really incredible content And if you were trying to fix LinkedIn, yeah, maybe invest in video And almost overcomplicates the channel of email because okay, it's not working for us Let's fix it with video and now we have to like enable people on how to do video the right way And that's even more personal and more challenging as another layer of complexity that probably gets a lot of companies Further from a positive outcome and then they go to they jump to the conclusion of email cold email doesn't work or cold email is dead I'm a big proponent of voicemail like all my VBRs you voicemail everyone says that voicemail is dead It's like not supposed to be a converting channel the airwaves are open No one's doing it. It can be used so thoughtfully as as a moment to warm and to create familiarity and to tee up future outreach So i'm a big proponent on using all of that. Yeah, i'm a big voicemail person too I don't know why people don't leave it. I can not leaving a voicemail to like like a doorbell Dainish whatever they call it say you didn't go ring somebody's doorbell and then run that it's a wasted interaction It's a wasted phone call because they you left no message no no impression at all It's a completely wasted dial now.
It's like you're already here. Just leave a 10 second message Speaking of voicemail. I wonder the kind of evolved to How do we see the future? Let me give you a few things that have going on in my head one is like i'm a guy who I don't read my emails from people.
I don't know. I don't give I don't pick up the phone from people. I don't know Um, how do you reach and I feel like that's the trend like there's gonna be a trend where like email bot email Like the inbox is just junk the voice mail the phones we're tired of getting bombarded What is like on one hand the future there and then to the other thing that we see on the marketing side is this You know, we're called this notion of dark social where people are learning and educating in communities. So Does it matter who reaches out do we see in the future?
Um, maybe instead of a bdr reaching out it's coming from a subject matter expert in the company or somebody who's like linked and famous like coral Um going outbound. I mean does like what are some of the things that you may see that on the horizon that kind of changes the um strategy about them that makes me sense. Yeah, no, it totally does and I think I think all of that is possible You know, we even have situations in which our vdrs are sort of like Working with the ceos linkedin um thoughtfully and like doing targeting that way where we have ceos or leaders in the company who have like particularly strong um social presences that you know carry a lot of cloud Um, and I think that's also, you know a conversation to have I think those starts sorts of deviations start to get relatively industry specific We don't see that happening in sort of um, I'll call it like more late adopting industries where we do see that happening in tech Right. Um, and so I think though probably always be a traditional and sort of an innovative playbook that you need to know when you pull which Um for which audience that's more persona based Um more vertical based that's where the playbooks deviate.
It's not so much like outbound doesn't work here. It's just that it maybe looks a little different That actually makes complete sense of me. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Um anything else you see on the horizon like uh like just in like your Crystal ball in terms of just maybe just revenue strategies in general let alone outbound just you're you're kind of in these emerging tech companies where you're Kind of cutting the edge.
Uh on what companies need to be successful. That's a good question I think the one thing I'm really pushing for and it's kind of a boring topic, but I'll continue to push for it is I really want to see us As revenue leaders redefine what it means to build an annual revenue plan Um, I it's such an ill-defined art Slash science that every company does it differently. I think it's sort of It's sort of the flaw of a lot of organizations in terms of like the way the targets are set Um, and I think coming out of the pandemic and then into a recession I think a lot of people are questioning the way revenue plans get written and they should and I think that you can't actually talk about revenue Plan design without talking about addressable market analysis and how you as a company connect those dots Um because the reality is you can have the best mouth strap in the game right? You're the best marketing team You can have the best sales team in the game, but if you're writing plans on completely unrealistic Tams, unrealistic account universes, um, unrealistic numbers top down you won't have success.
Um, and so I think it's For me like that is that is the next frontier of making revenue a more sustainable function for the humans within it And making growth slightly less traumatizing if possible Yeah, I like that I would add to that Both on like the top down flaws, which I think we've probably all made And it's gonna get worse and then the other one I've thought about a lot is why revenue plans because you're already planning This quarter next quarter following quarter so like why is it just not rolling? It feels like we have a trajectory and we kind of know it needs to be done and then we take a step back and we build a Magical Yearly plan that we're not on the course to hit or come close to hitting but yet we stop everything We're doing to kind of think irrationally versus this quarter i'm trying to get to here and next quarter I'm trying to get to there and if I have more money I can accelerate that and these are the Channels and programs I put in place that I wouldn't experiment with and so forth and so on but the annual planning process kind of just It's devoid of that reality. Yeah, it's like or for the next funding round is devoid of that reality It's like we have more money now. We're gonna justify more money We have to build these crazy top-down plans that are unrealistic to do that You spend a lot of time and like the way that we build our app on models is like inherently bottom up um and so I think I think people are surprised when it's you know based on what you told us like this is the actual Stalable account universe that you have this is how many headcount could ever sit in this and carry Carry a territory that could sustain the targets that you want out of them It's always much smaller than they think and I think if you start to create teams that way You end up in a world where you're actually incentivized to develop people And I think right now it's it's really really tricky Where you're in where incentivizing companies to build teams really really quickly that they can't support that they'll ultimately lay off over a period of time When they don't put up the results that they inevitably have to hit and then they'll do it again And instead of sort of questioning why we plan this way we sort of say we'll do it better next time And I would like to see it stop saying we'll do it better next time I would like to see a systemically crack open annual planning and think about it differently Because I think then we can start to seek more creativity in the functions themselves Like that is when we actually have space to design and innovate and maybe actually mine insights and get smarter at functions because we'll have The time and space to do so and I'm probably talking about something that's impossible in sort of a vc back you know board directed Ether but man, that's still for me the future like that is the future that is where I would like to see us go I would like to see us Learn from the school of hard knocks that has been the last two years and do something different I here here.
I would agree with that Well said I have one last question and car may have some questions and that is and I almost like canceled this podcast How did you end up at Iowa State? You seem like a Amazingly intelligent person you have a great career like you started a company all these insights, but you went to Iowa State How that happened? Um coming out hard for the cyclones. I see you all right?
No love for size But I'm from Iowa. So I'm a Chicago trans plant I was born in Fortage, Iowa I found that no one is heard of and I actually went to school on a vocal performance scholarship because I was going to be an Opera center so they gave me a scholarship to sing there and I was a vocal performance major for like two and a half years before I was like Do I ever want to have money ever? And I changed my finger Are you gonna give us a taste of uh you still have some opera in you? You're gonna get a good one on the it is shocking how fast you lose your chops It is shocking and I once after a couple cocktails did try and it's not there anymore Cassidy.
It's gone Next time we'll get some cocktails I the reason I bring this up is I know where Fortage is I grew up in Iowa in southeast Iowa Yes, yes, yeah, I knew this yeah, I grew up a hot guy fan You have to throw shade so I grew up actually a hot guy fan but then when I when I joined Iowa State's music department, I was like excited to have an allegiance here and no one in Chicago is a cyclone fan everyone is a hot guy here Um, so it's we're rare breed Well, it's there's a good reason there's no Iowa State fans who cyclone fans and Chicago There's no psychophans in Iowa All right, this this uh piecast is over Well done. Well done. I'm glad we didn't do this before I would have lost some money Um Carl anything you want to ask after that? No, I think we need to do part two for sure.
Um, I'd love to get into outbound create demand for capture demand Um, but yeah, no nothing for me Awesome Jessica what Carl was saying so I don't think you can hear him As I would love to do part two and get into create demand and capture demand using outbound channels Well, you can't hear Carl, but will you tell him that I also want to do a part three and we can have a battle royale on his stance on, uh, commissioning I even know she had beef with that so yeah, we can do part three Awesome, let's do that. Well, just got um let everybody know where to um where they can find you. Um, Well, yeah, where can everybody find you? Uh, mudcity.io is our website You can also just look me up on linkedin um and even if you're not ready or unsure about bound as a good channel for you When you just want to start that conversation, it's a conversation I'm willing to have uh, so it's on the horizon Or you talked about it and you're unsure how your company wants to proceed like let's just talk it out I love your content on linkedin so I think that's where people should find you like likewise Um refine labs is the goat at content you guys are truly the best in the game.
So genuinely an honor to be here Thanks for having me It was very kind. Yeah, it was wonderful having you with where to do it again And uh, thanks for spending your Friday afternoon with us Jessica anytime. Thanks guys. Have a good weekend