How to future proof your outbound strategy with micro campaigns

We sat down with Brendan Short - founder of the Signal to have a conversation about the future of experimentation in outbound, the role of AI in Sales, and how to think about GTM engineers - a hot new title that has yet to prove itself. 

Is outbound dead? Not in our opinion

Contrary to the sentiment all across linkedin, we believe that outbound is not dead. What is happening is a shift in the landscape, and a shift in how and what jobs actually need to be done are changing. But it’s important to understand why things are shifting:

First, the old playbook isn’t working

What do we mean by “the old playbook”?  Here’s the play:

1. Buying a bunch of contacts from a B2B database
2. Loading up contacts into a sequencer with a generic sequence
3. Sending them out at scale 

It doesn’t work like it did 5 or even 3 years ago.  

“The problem is it still works a little bit, which is the most dangerous place to be. There’s a new way of doing things that’s starting to emerge, which is interesting and exciting. The question is how to we build this new playbook where we can do 10x less volume ” 

Second, Companies are trying to be more efficient

The days of growth at all costs are over and companies are trying to move towards profitability, or at least efficient growth. Rather than scale with headcount - teams are looking to scale with technology and automation.

Four years ago, if you needed 24 more meetings a month, you hired 3 more SDRs. That is just not the case today. 

Third, the magic of LLMs and AI

These tools fundamentally allow you to scale micro campaigns (or a type of automated play) that weren’t possible. You’re able to train agents at a scale that is just a magical (or scientific) unlock.

What are micro-campaigns, a new playbook for outbound?

A micro-campaign is a very small, highly targeted list of contacts who get a very specific and timely messages (between 50-250 people). To get this targeted you need data points that don’t exist in a traditional b2b database.

To build your micro-campaign you should think about three things:

1. What are relevant titles? 
2. What are rich data points you can layer on top? 
3. What offer that makes message timely/relevant?

Here’s an example for a recruiting service:

1. Target persona(s): Find a list of VPs of Sales
2. Rich data points: Narrow the list to people who have posted a new role in the past two weeks
3. Relevance Message: Deliver a message that shares relevant candidates from your candidate pool 

What makes this so powerful is it’s exceptionally relevant and it delivers value to the prospect immediately. If that message were to send 30 days or two months later - it becomes completely irrelevant to the VP of Sales, who is left thinking “I wish I got this note 30 days ago”. 

The goal is to reach these people first, before they make a different decision or a competitor reaches them first. 

⚠️ The difference between personalization and a microcampaign ⚠️

A microcampaign is not AI researching a profile to automate some personalized message. It is a hyper-. All people in the micro campaign might get the exact same emails . The personalization comes from selecting the right profiles using rich data points - not in customizing each message.

Who builds micro-campaigns and what is a GTM engineer?

The GTM engineer profile is shaping up to be someone who is running these microcampaigns at scale. However, finding a person who is both technical enough to orchestrate, creative enough to come up new data points, and has enough sales savvy and business acumen to make sure messaging is relevant is almost impossible.

“This person sounds like a unicorn. There's only a couple hundred of these people in the world today, and the tooling for these people is nascent at best. It’s very hacky, and frankly AI on it’s own does not have the creativity needed.” according to Brendan. 

So how can you make a bet to experiment with micro-campaigns?

Assemble a tiger-team:

1. A very thoughtful SDR 
2. A strong ops person or engineer who is interested in go-to-market, prompt and systems engineering
3. (optional) A marketer to help create custom offers/assets 

How should Sales leaders think about measuring success of this approach?

The best approach to micro campaigns is approaching your bets like a VC.

First spread your bets.

Then, double down on the winners.

If you launch 20 campaigns, 18 will likely fail, 1 might break even, and 1 might work really really well.

The goal is to rapidly uncover and scale what works really really well.  And to continually test so that when your winning campaigns start to flag, you can move on to the next tactic.

At Champify we’re finding that successful campaigns that built publicly available data like fundraising are working for a shorter amount of time before becoming a flop. A few years ago something like a fundraising campaign worked well, then a website visit worked for a while, but the more the technology evolves and the more other companies can adopt the same signals and plays, the less effective they become. (Similar to how sending a lot of emails worked for outbound, and then everyone could send a lot of emails and now….) 

What are the biggest mistakes people make?

The biggest mistake you can make is not having an owner with a clear goal. Some companies are experimenting with an ops team testing, but they have so many other key responsibilities it can be easily pushed to the side. 

Brendan’s recommendation is to have a person/tea who is goaled on:

1. Number of experiments ran
2. Pipeline target (or meetings set) similar to an SDR

"The biggest mistake is not having set goals around how many experiments are you running and getting caught up in this “we're trying to get this one out the door”.  You are tasked with creating a portfolio of bets . You need to be just shipping these things consistently."

What types of micro campaigns does Champify power? 

1. Re-engage closed lost contacts when a new exec joins
2. Get intel from below the line product users as they join target accounts 
3. Send thoughtful gifts to Closed Won Contacts who’ve changed jobs
4. Multi-thread to former customers when they join open opps

We think these are so powerful because they are:

 1. Always relevant 

2. Based on data only you have

Any one can send a messaging saying “you have a new CRO” - only your company can say “Following up on the conversation we were having with Mike and Jill last november. Does your new CRO shift your priorities so that it makes sense to pick up this conversation again” 

And we have a lot more thoughts on what’s next. Talk to us if you’d like to learn more!