Crickets (twice)

Hi folks —

A long-time friend of mine — super smart, runs a YC SaaS company, knows how to build and sell — recently spent serious $$$ to build the most impressive outbound system I’ve ever seen.

It was a total bust.

Thanks for reading,

Eric Boggs
CEO @ RevBoss

My aforementioned friend — who shall remain nameless of course — hired a guy that built a Ferarri GTM machine to juice his B2B SaaS offering, which has real product/market fit in a few verticals.

The core of the machine is an agent-powered data system that crawls public data, stores the relevant details, parses the things, qualifies the other things, interprets that other thing, etc.

This data system powers a qualification / personalization system that generates hyper-personalized messaging that references precise details about each company.

Not "I noticed you’re using HubSpot" stuff, but real details that would be relevant to the target buyer, all concocted through public data sourcing and honest-to-goodness brilliant data processing and personalization.

He ran it.

Crickets.

So they tried again. Different vertical with clear traction and P/M fit — same approach.

It was, and I'm not exaggerating, the most thoughtful and impressive outbound process I have ever seen in my life. And I have seen 1000s of these while running RevBoss.

Crickets.

Three years ago, a version of this outbound system that was 5x worse would have worked really, really well.

In fact, we would have fallen all over ourselves with amazement at what we were able to build and our clients would have lost their sh*t.

Buyers don’t care because they don’t buy this way anymore.

TL;DR: the outbound channel is cooked.

Even with all the non-stop Claude, crab, agent, AI chatter — and even with everyone nodding along to posts (like this one) about how all of the things don’t work any more — people are still remarkably anchored to the old ways and expectations.

And I get it. The old ways had a logic to them. You send enough emails, you get a lead. Didn’t always work the first time around, but you could usually find a way to make it work by tweaking the messaging or the prospecting. The effort always seemed to map to an outcome.

Nowadays I think we’re in a Post-Effort Reality™️.

There used to be a GTM world where hard work and iteration could close the gap between where you were and where you wanted to be. You just had to find the right message, the right list, the right sequence. Keep testing and grinding! You'll get there!

Pretty sure world is gone.

AI isn’t necessarily doing the work better than humans, but it has made it practically effortless to do the work and now everyone else is doing it.

The barrier to entry on "good outbound" dropped to zero, which means the barrier to getting someone's attention went to infinity.

The inbox is full of Ferrari-style email now.

Nobody's impressed by another Ferrari.

So what do you do? Honestly, I don't know if I have a clean answer. But I'll tell you what I believe.

When someone came to RevBoss and said "I get all of my leads through referrals and I need to branch out" my old instinct / business model was to say "great, let's build you an outbound engine."

Now I think the honest answer is the opposite:

You shouldn’t stop relying on referrals, you need to systematize the referral engine you've been running reactively your whole career.

And weirdly this reality has been staring me in the face for the past several years. Even in our best months in which we’d spend big $$$ on customer acquisition, 50%+ of our new revenue would come from…you guessed it…boring old referrals.

I just took the channel for granted and never really invested in scaling it.

Just like everyone else in a “we get leads through referrals and word of mouth” business, we just took them as they came and then went looking for cold leads to fill the gaps.

You can definitely build the perfect personalization machine.

But what if instead of building the perfect personalization machine, you built an audience of a couple thousand perfect-fit prospects who trust you?

What if you invested in those relationships programmatically — sure with lots of automation and AI on the backend — in a process based in genuine effort, content, and value?

And what if the "go-to-market motion" was just... being known and trusted by the right people?

That's the thread that we’ve been pulling at RevBoss the past ~18 months…and it’s working.

I'll be the first to admit that it's slower and harder and way less satisfying in the dopamine department than knowing the 100 emails you sent today will turn up a lead or two tomorrow.

And it’s tricky starting client relationships with “we’re not exactly sure how this is going to work, but it can work” — but that’s the requisite openness and curiosity.

The new way more like tending a garden — you have to plant some seeds in the right conditions, be patient and attentive, and wait to see what sprouts.

The new way is actually the old way…and I think the last marketing motion in which effort can map to an outcome.

Historically, my March emails have had a fairly pronounced Carolina basketball theme.

Not so much this year. 🙃

I got this autographed James Worthy #52 as a thank you for coaching my daughter’s middle school rec basketball team this past season. It’s a thoughtful gift in part because the parents that led the effort chose Worthy from the Carolina pantheon because they knew he’s from my hometown.

This was my 4th (or 5th?) season coaching these girls and it’s only gotten more fun each year…after I reset my expectations and let myself have fun.

Here is a short video from a year ago.

This isn’t a basketball team, this is a basketball social club.