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The metric: Deals Sourced via Outbound

Learn how Dee Acosta sourced 50% of all his deals via outbound at Metadata.

How They Moved The Needle

1. He always sets a personal quota.

This serves 2 important functions:

• 1) It keeps him sane if the given quota is unrealistic
• 2) It challenges him to exceed the given quota if it’s too low

His experience is that sales quotas are often set top-down, not bottom-up. Leadership sets a revenue target, and reverse engineers the sales quota. In some territories, the goals may be completely unrealistic. In others, they may not be high enough. So his personal goal serves as a sort of “sanity metric”. It helps him keep from despairing when he’s under quota and the goal is unrealistic, but also drives him to exceed it when he knows he can.

2. He only outbounds to people he feels the product will actually help, taking into account their stage and current challenges.

Bad outbound pitches everybody that broadly fits the ideal customer profile (ICP) (if there’s one at all). Dee takes a more nuanced approach. He’ll use traditional sales tools to identify companies or people that are quantitative or firmographic fits, but he’ll also use LinkedIn’s activity feature, to dig deeper. He learns how active prospects are, what they’re posting about, where they’ve worked in the past, etc. In short, he’ll only send outbound messages if he truly feels Metadata can help the prospect, and their company, at the stage they’re at.

3. He skips personalization unless it’s authentic.

Most of what people think is personalization isn’t. If a prospect lives in Philly, and you mention the Eagles, that’s not personalization. It’s impersonal, generic info anyone can find and use. But, if you and the prospect both went to Temple, you can lead with more authentic, personal, shared experiences. Dee feels that lots of people spend hours trying to personalize, and end up forcing it.

The result: they waste hours trying to personalize or grab attention, and it doesn’t yield much fruit. So for each outreach, he spends a few minutes to see if there’s anything that’s truly personal. If not, he doesn’t bother with it and opts for a short, sweet, relevant “canned” pitch.

4. Canned messages can still be relevant, and helpful.

If he can’t authentically personalize a pitch, he reverts to a canned message. But that doesn’t mean it’s spammy, or thoughtless. Quite the opposite. A lot of work goes into crafting these templates. His recipe for relevant canned email contains:

• The problem the prospect is facing. Everybody loves to hear how hard their job is.
• How you solve the problem. Too many emails tease the result, without explaining how.
• Customers they’d be aware of, who use you too.

He also crafts 1 email for every pain the product addresses, rather than trying to be everything to everyone. For example, if he’s pitching Rev Ops or CFOs, he might focus on how the product can drive profit. But if the prospect is in a “boots on the ground” role where their manually running campaigns, he’ll lead with how the product can save time and automate mundane processes.

5. Sales needs to know the company’s differentiators and lean into them.

Sales needs to be able to articulate how your product is foundationally different than your competitors. Who are you for? What makes you different? When should people consider you, and when are they a better fit for a different solution?

Dee feels that ideally, differentiation should be crafted by the CMO or product marketing, and passed to the rest of the team. But if it doesn’t exist, it’s still on sales to have something they can articulate. If nobody is owning differentiation at your company, Dee recommends starting by reading case studies and G2 reviews to learn what past successful customers found they liked best about you (compared to other products or services).

6. Number of touchpoints matters, but they aren’t always necessary.

Dee has had many instances where prospects have booked a demo after 1 or 2 cold messages. He feels it’s more about your targeting and messaging (see above) than the number of touches.

7. Quality is crucial, but it’s still a volume game.

Most of Dee’s success with outbound can be chalked up to thoughtful, clear, concise outreach. But he made sure to point out that at the end of the day, you still have to send a lot of messages to get success at scale.

8. Build your personal brand by posting publicly, to build a stronger foundation of trust.

Dee is genuinely kind, and thoughtful, & posts regularly on LinkedIn. So when he sends messages, many people have likely seen his content or at least recognize his avatar. Companies invest in building trust and awareness for their brand, so prospective customers know them, trust them, and like them before they hit the website.

Dee feels that salespeople should do the same, so their outbound is more recognized and better received.