Why Value Beats Volume in GTM with Matt at Prospeo (Prospeo.io)

Introduction and company overview

0:03Matt, welcome. How's it going? You well?

0:06Yeah, doing well, man. Thank you for having me.

0:08Awesome, man. You're welcome. Thanks for joining. This is the first one of the go to market game podcast. We're very excited to have you on. Let's dive straight into it. Matt, give us an idea of who are you, what do you do, what's going on, and what sort of company you work for right now. Yeah. So I'm head of sales at Prospeo and a founder of two sales training community sales upskills and founder le sales. So what's wonderful is I teach you know we've currently got about 7,000 users across both platforms and I I teach them all the dark arts of sales and then actually practice what I preach with what we're doing at Prospeo which is fantastic.

So, and for anyone who hasn't come across Prospeo, we're a B2B contact database, the best in the game. We triple verify everything. So, it means you have more phone calls where you're actually having a conversation with people and your emails will actually land, which is wonderful.

1:05Love it. Awesome. That's great. And and give us an idea of the the go to market motion over at Prospeo. You know, when you first came into that role, what did it look like and what have you sort of been working? What have you been developing in that time that you've been head of sales?

1:21Yeah, I mean, to be honest, the the Prospeo go to market strategy has been so weird and so wonderful and it's gone through a serious change this year. Previously, you know, and I I can give you some indication on who our ideal customer profile is, but we would usually sell our our data to outbound agencies. So, people are doing high volume emails and need to keep the bounce rate lower. And this I'm talking like not your normal B2B SAS, but I'm talking, you know, 500 to a million plus emails every single month. So, crazy numbers. And then we started to we were targeting also founders of startups and companies who had a more I suppose technically savvy revops function where they were you know using waterfall enrichment as part of their data but which is also still such a rare

2:14For sales functions.

2:15And then fast forward to now right so it's still the same target audience. So we're still going for founders, outbound agencies, but now because we're a database and not necessarily a step in waterfall and just for verifying emails, you know, we're way more suited to those sales functions now. So we'll be targeting like you know your heads of your VPs of sales, revenue, all those sort of roles. And so reason for explaining that is previously our go to market strategy was literally all word of mouth. So, if anyone knows outbound agencies, they all know each other. Every single one of them knows each other. It's one of the weirdest industries in the sense of all these competitors just in WhatsApp groups with everyone.

So, our go to market was purely word of mouth and that got us to a specific point and and now we're now we're really like changing the game. So, with with the new new platform, we're now doing outbound. We're now doing marketing. We're doubling down on and yeah, it's it's it's exciting. It's it's something that I've been very excited for and yeah, it's now it's it's working now, which is fantastic. So, yeah, a lot more to talk about on the outbound front since the start of this year.

3:30Love it. Awesome. So w with those two distinct ICPs, you've got the outbound agencies and then you've got sort of individual companies that you're selling to you know would you say that the foundation of Prospeo has been built on outbound agencies and now the natural sort of next step is to move into that you know going directly almost to the end user.

3:51Yeah 100%. So like I mean outbound agencies are fantastic right? I think like one thing that sales functions in general, I mean when you're in a sales function, you don't necessarily interact with outbound agencies because you you know a sales function is a com arguably a competitor to an outbound agency and vice versa, right? Naturally, it's very rare that you see these two mix unless you, you know, I'm seeing this more now where sales teams focus more on the cold calling and then they'll have an agency do the emailing outbound stuff and get get some nice little clay table set up and so on, but the outbound agency industry is limited.

I mean, there's there's a there are a lot of outbound agencies, but is limited. If you compare that to how many sales functions there are on the planet, there is one market that's I I reckon actually the outbound agency market wouldn't even make 1% of the sales function market. So, it makes natural sense that we need to start appealing more to that market. But at the same time, we want to make sure that we're still as appealing to outbound agencies as possible because honestly, they they do what's best practice when it comes to especially email. And also if you meet some outbound agencies that are specialists in cold calling, you know, the numbers that they do are insane.

So, you know, if we can still service that that industry to the level that we were doing before and be able to then offer that to sales functions, you know, it's just a win-win. And the reality is our competitors aren't at that level. Like you know, well, we all know the big players of contact databases, right? I don't know a single outbound agency that uses any of them. I I actually I don't maybe maybe some cold calling agencies would use maybe use Cognizant. I'm not sure but you know they're not you know they're not they're not delivering that level of service. So that's the thing now.

It's like we now need to educate people on like well you know if these guys and girls can send 2 million emails a month without any issues imagine what your sales function could do you know and that's now the that's the game we're playing.

The importance of data in sales and marketing

6:05So so it seems like you've the the foundation of Prospeo like we talked about was was built around you know targeting outbound agencies who are at that cutting edge of tech of infrastructure of systems of tactics whatever it may be. And then once that's proven, once that's leveraged, then moving that into the end user, like you said, a lot of these end user companies are using Zoom Info, they're using Apollo, they're using Cognism, like you said. But seeing that decline, sort of seeing the results decline year after year after year after year, and not really looking at data as as the sort of addressable as the addressable problem there.

So, I'm curious with this new go to market motion that you guys have in play, what is your what does it look like? I mean, how are you guys going after the end user? Give me a sort of an overview of what that's looking like.

6:56Yeah, I mean, it's it's a combination of two things. So, we have our outbound email campaigns that we're running and then it's a combination of that and then online content. So the posts that a lot of our partners are doing about us, the ones that we're doing about us, and all it is is around building the hype and and myself, I'm doing cold calls, which is great fun, you know, and you know, I I can share some of my little secrets on that, which have been surprisingly successful. But yeah, so you know, that's it. But the so far the main drivers are outbound email campaigns. I mean the nice thing is because we are a database

7:33We have all the contact data.

7:34Yeah. The data sorted

7:35So we have to use it. So we are we we're driving that really hard and also like we've got a lot of partners who love us to bits and you know the launch since the 12th of January. I think Prospeo's been mentioned something like 420 times

7:52In the in literally in the last two and a half three weeks which is

7:56Like crazy. And the nice thing about all of that and I've got two colleagues who obviously are helping us build all organic push with people that you know we don't know but they're like look how good this is and it's

8:14It's you know that's that it's the snowball effect of seeing all these other people talk about it. People are then testing it and then within two weeks are like oh yeah I'm going to post about this which I just like it blows my mind. It's like a viral. It's like a virality that's been that's being created there. And I think it's normally a great sign in a business if it can create virality, you know, before it really goes out to out to market or outbound if that makes sense. Like if you look at another company like Clay, you know, very similar tool which allows content creators to make really good content about it.

And now they're building that sort of enterprise sales motion where they're they're going, you know, further to those end users. And and to add to that, by the way, I mean, this Clay is a really good example of this, like if Clay was bad and still had partners who they paid, for example, it wouldn't have done what it did.

9:03Because people would start trying it, they go, "Oh, no. This is [ __ ] I don't, you know,

9:06Well, I've lost all credibility for that person, right?" And, you know, so it's a really good indicator for us because we've, you know, actually the feedback we've been getting, yeah, we've had some teething issues as we've changed our product naturally with everything. And we're on top of them and fixing them. But at the same time, despite that, people are like, "Holy [ __ ] this is unreal." And also for them to say that about a data provider, right? Like data isn't sexy. It's not a sexy thing,

9:35You know? It's it isn't, right? So it's

9:38You know, it's weird to even see people talk about it in this way,

9:41But again, like we say, you're you're an outbound agency. You know the importance of you know if an email is verified and you know it's not going to get flagged for spam and and so on that is way more valuable than 10 emails which have got question marks next to them like that can cause more damage than good and it's the same with mobile numbers like you there is no point dialing a mobile number that's not real you know that's just that's just a minute and a half wasted so for those sales teams that are doing their 100 calls a day you know there will be 60 of them that are pointless to even dial in the first place.

So get rid of them, replace those with 60 banner numbers and then suddenly like booking three meetings in a day is suddenly realistic. And you say that to someone now and they'll be like,

10:26Yeah. Three meetings in a week maybe. And that would be good. You put it, you know, it's it just shows how important that piece of the puzzle is.

10:33Yeah. It really is. I mean, the the the list and the data. I mean, somebody else said this, it's not me, but someone said this is the strategy. I think it was like one of the outbound operator guys. You know the list and the data is the strategy. You know you can build everything else. You can have the best reps in the world but if you give them terrible data, a bad list, they're not going to produce results. Whereas if you give like an ordinary or average rep a really good list, you know, they're going to they're going to outproduce that really good rep and then you can coach that average rep into becoming a really good rep as well.

You know, I think it's I think it's really interesting. And when you look at the marginal gains in a in a funnel as well, like if you you know, break down cold calling into connect rate, pitch rate, conversation rate, meeting, booked rate, you know, if you tweak your connect rate by 1% over the space of an entire year, like if you zoom that out to an entire year, the impact that that has on on your pipeline is enormous. Like it's, you know, depending on your average contract size, this could be it could be worth millions just by improving it by 1%. So, you know, like you said, really focusing on that data, focusing on the

11:39It it's so so important. And the conversations that I have with revenue leaders, you know, I I I often find that it's an area that is lacking and is like and not a lot of zooming in is done on that area. There's other areas that are maybe more sexy that get looked at, but the marginal they go to messaging, don't they? They're like, "Oh, messaging's

11:59We haven't picked the right ICP."

12:01And actually, just, you know, they're sending emails from their main domain. They've been doing it for the last 15

12:07And, you know, you look up the hell of that domain and it's awful. So, it's like, cool. You're already like shot yourself in the foot like before you've even started. And it's like, well, you know, you have to then do all the infrastructure stuff that you guys are amazing at. Then it's the then it's the data and then it's the messaging, right? You know, it's like if any I always refer to that as like the three pillars and it's like if any one of those pillars is incorrect, the whole thing

12:33And then the problem there is is like, well, cool. If you don't have the infrastructure or the data set up and you you have the great messaging,

12:40But because the other two are screwed, like then suddenly you're going to start self-doubting that messaging. And that could be the messaging. That's like that is the message to the right person with the right pain point. You need to keep doing that. People go, "Ah, it's doing [ __ ] Why?"

12:52Yeah. And and if your and if your connect rate is not good enough as well, you're having less conversations. So even if your messaging is good, when someone picks up the phone, you're so unpractice and you know, you go, "Oh my god, someone's just picked up the phone." You then, you know, trip yourself over going through the messaging, you don't get your tonality right, you don't get the you don't get the emphasis on the right things, right? You're not listening actively. Then you fumble that call and you're not going to book them in the first place. So, you know, having that data, having that list properly mapped out with great data, improving your pickup rate, having more conversations, you know, it's massive.

But you mentioned earlier around cold calling and what you've been doing in cold calling. So, I'd love to sort of like zoom in on what you're doing right now there and how that's been going.

Cold calling and activation conversations

13:36And I mean, we're keeping it super simple, which is wonderful. So, cuz I'm in this position actually, which is really fascinating, are my two co-founders, Hugo and John. Shout out to them, too. People in the industry all will know them from back in the day. But like I need to prove to them that a sales function even makes sense, which is a really fascinating place to be because we're we're we're historically productled growth. So, people can go to our website, they can sign up for a trial, they convert. And we're very good at product leg growth. You know, it's how we've got to today. There is like a a space for the bigger deals where where you could justify a person handling them.

And also we find at a certain size people want to speak to someone which I thought wouldn't happen actually. I thought we could just but we've had people go no I want to speak to someone. So okay cool let's test this out. And in part of that, you know, it's actually it's great to use the database to then it gives me way more conviction when I speak to someone, especially when I'm cold calling people and I'm cold emailing people and I'm seeing it work. So my flow is really really straightforward. I'm targeting purely decision makers at businesses that'll either be founders of companies with maybe like five to 20 people where founderled sales is still important and maybe they've got their first founding account exec or first founding SDR.

This is pre them hiring a sales leader. After that, once the company gets bigger, so we're sort of looking at maybe like maybe 50 to 200 people, sales leader function is in place, they've got a sales team, and then that's the other ICP. So, they're going to be the ones making the decision on what contact data they go for. And it's wonderful because I so I do a few different things. I'm either targeting people who I can see are using a technology like Zoom info Cognism because we can see. So, it's a case of my opening call and just to let you know, I always go down the route of permission based opener.

Like, I swear by that. I know some people kind of

15:41Yeah, me too. I love them. Yeah,

15:43It's easy, right? You just get to the no or the yes quicker and it's just and it's a it's a simple one, Tom, where I be like, I'm calling you out the blue. I get that. Do you have a few moments while I'm calling you specifically? And I'll explain. And then that is usually enough. Go on then. And I'll be like, look, I'm speaking to heads of sales like yourself all the time. In your case, I know that you currently got a contract of Zoom Info and I just want to let you know that there is a provider out there that's a ton better, but there's no point us having this chat until we can probably coincide this when your next renewal is.

So, when is that happening and I will set you up with a a trial and I guarantee you'll get better performance out of it. That is enough for them to normally tell me when their contracts up. So, what I'm doing at the moment is I'm just booking times in my calendar in 2 3 9 12 months for when I know their renewals are coming up. That's one way of doing it. The other way, which is one of my favorites, by the way, is you know, people are getting worried about the the screen the screening on on phones now.

16:42Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

16:43So, my best line on this for getting people to pick up is, "Hey, it's crazy boy Matt from Prospeo cold calling you right now. Wow. Wow. And I don't know what it is. And I don't know what it is about maybe the AI reading that out is just weird.

17:01But I think that weird pattern interrupt and I don't know why, but people are just picking up the phone and I've already told them I'm cold calling them in in that that

17:10It sounds crazy. And I tested this with a few friends to start and then I start testing this with people. I have no idea who they are. And I have not seen a difference in pickup rate with it, which

17:21Which I think is ridiculous. But also

17:24There's a lesson to be learned here in my opinion

17:27Is the outbound is like yes I've got my line manager who signs off on all the stuff we do

17:32But he's not being strict with me on having fun with any of this stuff

17:36And weirdly having fun with it is a lot better than not having fun with this.

17:40Oh 100%. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's already quite a stiff industry. Do you know what I mean? But one thing that you I pick up a lot and I I bet other people do as well is with your content on LinkedIn is you know you have quite a fun personality. Your content is fun seem obviously you take it seriously but you come across you know quite relaxed quite loose quite light and I think taking that energy into a sales motion is is so important. It's that's absolutely massive because people if you're stiff and someone's going to read your stiffness straight away they're going to be stiff.

Whereas if you can just lighten the load around it, realize it's not actually that serious. Nothing that we're doing is that massively serious. You know, I think it's a I think it's a big game changer.

18:22It's huge. And I think it's the I mean, I don't care if someone says no, right? I'm going to get I'm going to get thousands of people to say no to me.

18:29Like I I just know that's a fact. But I you know, I'm probably a bit more relaxed on what my target is and things like that because I have got this really good product behind me, which half the time it sells itself, which is great. So, you know, I can't take that for granted. Like, there are tons of sales people out there who are selling really tough products to sell. And they have to do way more of the heavy lifting and, you know, they have to increase probably they'll probably have to do more activity than I would do naturally, I

18:57But I also see what my total addressable market is. It's [ __ ] huge. So, you know, I I can have a bit of fun and relax into this. And and also we're such a small team. We can just try stuff so flexibly,

19:11Like getting a campaign signed off is and maybe I can touch on some of the email stuff that we're doing alongside this. And I mean, you did touch on the content and you know, I've grown my LinkedIn to I'd say a pretty healthy number. There are people that are like I aspire to be and they're on completely different levels to me.

19:28Yeah. But there are people in my network who I can easily now call and they're like, "Ah, you're the you're that weird dude on LinkedIn and doing all those weird videos and stuff like that." And or or you know, the other stuff. I I you know, I literally met someone the other day who downloaded one of my med pick resources.

19:45From like 2 years ago.

19:48And then we met each other.

19:50Easiest meeting I've ever booked in my

19:53Because he already had some form of like, "Ah, you're you're a nice guy. You help people. I'll give you the time a day." Yeah.

Value-first marketing and sales

19:59And so that's really fascinating.

20:02I think that's a really that's a that's a really interesting area and I think we can we can we can dive into that as well around personal branding and sales because like you said like you've just touched on there. I I think it is it is huge and I think a lot of sales people could could really focus on on building their their personal brand. But there was two things that you mentioned just before when we were talking about cold calling I thought was really interesting. I just want to dive into that before before we move on. One of them was around the qualification that you're doing straight away where you know you can say look I can see you're using Zoom info when does your contract end?

So you're going for that instant qualification to say yes they are using it and boom now we know when your contract ends instead of really forcing a meeting that doesn't need to be forced. You're kind of going for an activation which then spreads out your pipeline and sort of helps you map out what the market looks like right now when those contract renewals are coming through. I mean, I find that really interesting and I find a lot of companies that I speak to are just going for that meeting straight away and maybe burning their their TAM when it doesn't need to be burned.

21:08Well, I I don't know if it's necessarily if they do that, I don't necessarily think it's burning the TAM, but what you've got to understand is what four they and I see the number change all the time. It's like 3 and 5% of your market are in market right now. So your job is to find out who that person is. Who are that three and 5%. And as simple as that. So if someone's not in market right now, I'm not going to waste my time trying to sell to them.

21:32Literally no point. There are some scenarios where people double up something like our platform with someone else's platform.

21:38It gets complex with sales functions of that size, though. So there's no point. There's literally just no point.

21:43And I know people need data. They need it. Like if they've got a sales function, they need data. So that just becomes the game. It's like, well, if I get you at your buying window, my close rate skyrockets.

21:55If I include loads of people that aren't in the buying window right now, my my close rate plummets. So, it's one of these ones where and also I have this conversation with someone and I and you know this is this is the real magic and we can touch on some of this stuff as well because I think this is the most slept on thing in sales in general especially with sales and marketing teams. But I then call that person back in 3 months time and I'm like, "Hey Tom, you're probably not going to remember this, but we spoke 3 months ago. You told me your contract's coming up to renewal in 3 months time.

I've prepped a few things for you and look, I'm going to honor that trial that I told you about. I've got some credits for you to play around with.

22:35That person on the second call who's definitely forgotten I exist is like, okay, guard comes down. Yeah, I did. How does this person know? Yeah, I think I do remember. Okay, well, he's really enthused. Let's let's hear him out. And it's like bam, that second call is like the conversion rate of that is even higher than the first. Even higher and it's

23:00So it's a long game to play like that's that's a if you've got a target loom over your head and

23:06Yet you are in danger of performance plans then maybe this isn't the right approach to you.

23:12But you do that enough times over few months you you you know in 3 months time I'm going to be

23:18Insanely busy.

23:19Which I'm looking forward to. And I think that is maybe a point there around how sales orgs like build out what their quotas look like. You know, okay, you need to book this many meetings in a month, but not looking at what percentage of the market have they activated for future, you know, future pipeline. Obviously, if someone's not performing, if they're not doing anything, yeah, put them on a pip, get rid of them, whatever. But I think there is a lot to be said for orgs that skip over the activations, those conversations. You know, me and Louis call it conversation maxing. That's what we're trying to do when we're we're working with a company.

We want to get as many conversations happening with your market as possible because most people aren't, like you said, most people aren't in market. Maybe 3% are in a buying stage, maybe. It depends on the market. Okay. You know, you're doing a lot of calls. You're going to speak to a lot of people that aren't in market. You have to be activating them and nurturing them. And and I think what you you brought up there was, you know, having good backend. You know systems in place so that you you know your reminders are there you know when to call them up you've got that information ahead of them and then coming into that call with goodwill as well so like you know I'm going to honor that trial here's a bunch of free credit you know I can show you exactly how we're going to outbeat the whatever tool you're using right now I I think that that's huge and I think

24:40A lot of people zoom in on the short term like what are we doing right now instead of building out okay if we can have you know 10,000 convers conversations in a year. There's no way that we don't convert x percentage of that into you know enormous pipeline which then converts into enormous revenue you know six to nine to 10 months to 12 months in the future

25:02Like yeah and you think about the amount of data you just collect in those conversations in general right my my word but you know again people kind of look past that data and go ah I want I want the meeting books

25:13But I like looking at all the conversations I've had with all the information and again like you know now we've like I I've just purchased a tool to do cold calling through called

25:22I've never heard of them before and before I was always using sales loft outreach, you know, all that sort of stuff. But this is just a simple dial that I can I can make mobile numbers in every country. So I'm calling from a local mobile and afterwards I get the transcript, I get the summary, I get the pain points, all of this, I've got that information. So again, when I reach out to the next time, I've got my little summary of information and it's like that data is just incredibly valuable. So, and another thing we touched on really quickly is when you mentioned about like the trial and I've got strong strong beliefs in this.

I think there's two things that people really sleep on is one is the offer.

26:02Like offers are so incredibly powerful.

26:06And then the other one, I'm hoping one day this will stick. I mean, there's definitely a term for this already, but I'm trying to coin. Value first marketing and value first sales VFS or VMs and the idea is like what things are actually valuable to your ICP your ideal customer profile I'm talking to a head of sales what are the things they struggle with ramping reps training reps because they're too busy doing pipeline management or aren't very good at training nine times out of 10 that's the case and their team aren't quite hitting target and they can't do the training and therefore that's not helping them hit target and then they're kind of in this little stuck space.

So for me I'm thinking hm

26:48What stuff would they really value. So we've just come out with a the ultimate prospecting cold calling guide to help your team cold call and it's based off incredible amounts of data. I've spoken to four different sales leaders on this who have got really good sales sales function. So I've just like gathered all this information then we've turned it into a guide have it for free. Nice. I'm sending this to every single one of the sales leaders I've got in my network. I'm going to send this to every single sales leader I've got on got the email for and I'm going to ask for absolutely nothing in And I'm going to do that multiple times I will bet money on that helping me convert business.

27:32And also in it I've got like little bits about Prospeo and the importance of the data in the cult. I can I can link it and I think that's an important step where this value first resource I've

27:42It's not an advert for Prospeo. Prospeo's in it though,

27:47But you know it makes sense to how we've sort of embedded it in.

27:51But I'm going to go and help all these people. And I did this with my two communities. I've given away tons of stuff for free over the last two almost three years now. And it's like you build little bits of favor with people. They like you a little bit more. And also, by the way, like to add to this, and this is we're all intrinsically selfish. We always think about ourselves first. So, if you can put yourself in a position where you're going to either help someone with something or make them laugh or both, then they're going to be way more open to you in general.

28:22Yeah. And they just want to repay that favor as well at some point.

28:26Yeah. And it may not necessarily be like in my head, I need to I'm going to repay this guy's favor, so I'm going to book a meeting. But it's more next time I speak to them, they're going to be like, "Ah, I like this guy for some reason. I'll hear him out." And that's enough for me to be like, "Tell me about your contracts. Who's your data provider?"

28:42Ah, I've heard mixed things about them. What do you think about them? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Same. Same.

28:46If I could show you something that, you

28:50I'd bet money is good.

28:51Would you like to just try it out for free? And if you hate it, you hate it.

28:55Yeah. Go on then. Like, why not?

28:58So, yeah. Value first. Sales value first marketing Matthew Putnham quote 2025

29:04Love that make sure you get that copyright or not otherwise I'm going to steal it so

29:08I'm in the wrong I'm in the wrong year

29:112026 mate

29:12A year behind so awesome I mean yeah I I I completely agree so so moving on to the the the other aspect of of your outbound at the moment which is cold email I'd love to know a little bit more around you know what are your goals of cold email how are you building it out what is your infrastructure look like. I'm really interested because there is a lot of information out there around cold email. A lot of the information I've given out and a lot of other people as well. So I'm I'm really curious to see what you're doing.

29:40Yeah, I mean we've kept it relatively straightforward in the sense of so yeah, we're using email bison. We're obviously using Prospeo data.

29:51Here's here are some stats that most companies have one domain and an email for each person in their sales function. I think we have got a grand total I think of 162 domains and about 700 So what we're doing is we're testing messaging now and then the plan is to scale that once we know what's working. You know what we're doing is we're I mean we've got a ton of tests on it any one time. I

30:17Believe it's like 15 running right now.

30:20And we're just kind of turning off the ones that are like ah not hitting as hard as we thought. Shift and we're obsessing over just testing what what messaging works. And the fascinating thing is what we're doing is even if we don't like something, we're still testing it anyway. So I may challenge Hugo's idea and what would work and what I think is a problem for a sales leader or outbound agency and he's going to challenge me on the same instead of us just picking one, we go for both.

30:48At least that way the number will actually tell us

30:49Get them to fight.

30:51Yeah. And if if if someone's right, they're right. If someone's wrong, they're wrong. Doesn't really matter. We factually know now. So yeah, we we're sending our volume is is now starting to scale. I mean it was amazing our first campaign I think in the first what was it? I have the stats somewhere but yeah in the in our first ever campaign we ran 12 different things. Yeah

31:14And it was we didn't we don't track open rate but our

31:18Our response rate was 9.8% and our positive response rate on that was something like just shy of 70% of them.

31:25Which was like we've come out of the gates swinging. I was like

31:28This is not norally it doesn't normally go this way. And you know

31:34Yeah. Yeah. Right. And we've done some campaigns now that are like bringing the number down.

31:38And we targeted different ICPs which are you know actually our response rate from out agencies Yeah. Was ridiculously high. It's less for sales leaders.

31:48So it's kind of like that's starting to even out now. But we're still we're still hovering around sort of the the 5% response rate which is like

31:55It's very healthy for for cold email. Yeah. I mean if you're getting above 1% you know it's great. Yeah. So you can yeah like you said you can scale that. And with your TAM you've got you know you've got volume to scale into. So with those ones that you have you've tested so far and you've switched off. Was there any that you were like that you came in with an inherent bias towards to say okay I think this is going to work but that didn't work. And I'm I'm curious what why do you think those didn't work?

32:23Well, not necessarily inherent bias. It's more we've made assumptions on pain points for all the ICPs. So, we've got four pain points for every single one of them. Don't get me to quote them now cuz I'm not going to remember them off the top of my head.

32:35And so, it's been a relatively fair test between all of them.

32:40And it's just one's better than others. So for outbound agencies quality to cost ratio that's the really important thing because there are providers like us who are way cheaper claim to be verified but they don't verify in the same way we do. So it's like how do we balance that costing point for sales functions is a bit easier because you know one of the things we're we're testing now is like the admin side of things for their sales function reducing all of that because

33:14You know they have more calls and having to do less things to do with less building and all this sort of stuff versus the pain point of hitting targets and stuff like that because they're not having enough. So we'll test those two. I've got an assumption that the the revenue number will be the more important one, but you know what? Let's let's see. I I have no idea.

33:31And yeah, that's an interesting one because I'm not going into this at all thinking I know what's going to work and what's I've got some really good ideas on, you know, I know how to structure an email. Well,

33:44I know how to get someone to read an

33:46You one of my inherent skills is relevant clickbait in subject lines.

33:52Yeah. I don't know what it is, but I can see I can see a subject line and be like that that will be

33:56That's going to work. Yeah.

33:57Or that one will work, right? But you it's relevant clickbait. You know, you click into it and then the subject line makes sense for the content. So, it has to make sense otherwise it's just like that's when you annoy people. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. It it's very much like which I which I love this because it's like we are experimenting and again I don't have that pressure of trying to impress someone who's my boss for example

34:23And again I think that's because Hugo trusts me with this stuff anyway but you know I think one of the people really challenged with especially sales reps if they are writing their own emails which is something I don't always suggest unless they're super experienced but

34:36You're you've got this awkward scenario where you're you're trying to show the person you're emailing you know what you're talking about so it builds confident in yourself, you're also writing an email that in theory, if my boss sees it, are they going to bollock me about it or not? And just naturally by doing that, it probably makes your email [ __ ] versus like that opening line being just a little bit weird. Why is that there? You know, the classic one, I think one of my favorite emails I ever se was from Cognism and they they sent me an email saying not interested in the subject line.

I've never clicked an email so quickly in my life. Yeah, don't get me wrong, I was infuriated

35:16Well, that's the thing though when you opened it, was the was the sort of rage bait, the clickbait too much where you couldn't even enjoy, you couldn't even get value out of the contents of the

35:25No, I did think it was quite good. It was more like it was advertising something about how to avoid and it was the opening line was, "Yeah, that I was like, "Yeah, god damn it does hurt. It hurt me." so so yeah and I think that's the thing I think you kind of have to step out and go I don't know what's going to work so let's find out what's going to work I have some assumptions let's test the assumptions let's do all the basics right so length of email you know are we opening with something that shows this is for them is it a relevant problem is it a relevant does the solution make sense to it and the offer Really?

Cuz just to let everyone know who's listening, a meeting booked isn't an offer. I'd love to have a chat with you about this time. Of course you [ __ ] would.

36:16Of course you would. But it doesn't necessarily mean I want to have that chat as the as the as the potential buyer. So you know what is the offer

36:24I think having that call line at the end as your CTA does work, but you have to have nailed the observation and pain because if they have got that pain right now, they will take the meeting 100%. And then that comes back to our whole thing about the 3% in market right now. So if you nail that 3%.

36:42And then let's have a call about this. I can show you some cool stuff. They'll say yes. Or

36:46The stuff that's been working really well for us,

36:48How many credits would it take to test if this is better or not?

36:53People will come back saying a thousand. Is a thousand credits and test it.

36:57Let's have a call. Yeah, that's a that's a really cool that's a really cool line. Sort of like giving them it sort of it's like a soft question. It gives them the the it's on them to reply. It sort of gives them the power. That's what I'm trying to say. And then it helps to qualify their their need as well. Like you know what I mean? If they come back and say 20,000 credits, you know, okay, maybe these guys need some serious help here.

37:22So that's cool.

37:23Also like it's the confidence in that, right? Like I'm I'm putting up we're putting a lot on the line there. Like we're going like, "Yeah,

37:30Name it. What what what would it take?" Cuz I know it's going to work.

37:34I know either way. So just just tell me. Let's get let's get done with

37:38Yeah. Get that It's And it's good confidence up front as well. Do you know what I mean? It's it's com it's that conviction behind having a great product allows you to be a little bit cheeky up front. You know, you find it when people have terrible products. They start to get all stressed out and then they just all these guard rails come in and they think, "Oh my gosh, email doesn't work." And it's like, "No, it's just probably you're in the wrong in the wrong vehicle

38:01Yeah. They don't have product market fit or something like that.

38:03Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

38:04Yeah. And unfortunately sales reps they have no power of a product market

38:08No, they don't. They should probably they should probably ditch that as soon as they can and move on to someone else.

38:12You know, I I've suggested that more and again I you know I I train sales people. She's part of my living and it's like sometimes you'll see a product and you know I'll be just quietly being like like the you're doing the right things here. So what I would suggest at this point is job search. Just just have a look. Just have a look cuz I mean there is some scenarios I I've been in I've had a couple of jobs where we didn't have product market fit and I've never worked so hard in my life and I didn't necessarily get the reward for it.

38:48Yeah. But you know actually you I learned other skills around how to how to start testing like crazy, how to get things working and stuff like that. And yeah, sometimes that is the case. Sometimes that is the case.

39:00You build that resilience I guess from a company that doesn't know product market

39:05You get that you get those reps in

39:07It's tough. One of the things that you were talking about there that I thought was interesting was around, you know, around reps doing their own emails and and something that I've seen over the past sort of 18 months is is a consolidation of outbound email away from reps and more into a centralized into a centralized sort of channel for for for companies doing outbound email. So I mean do you agree with that? Do you think that that should be the case? And if that is the case, is it now more that it is a marketing function rather than a sales function with all of that testing?

Cuz all of this seems like marketing, copy testing, you know what I mean? These little tweaks that we're doing, it's almost like advertising.

39:48I I'll be honest, I I I've got some rather strong views on marketing and

39:53And also marketing is so many different things. Like a sales function, in my opinion, is a marketing function.

39:58Outbound is just marketing. It's just it's the company name popping up in different places and getting eyeballs, right? So, us cold calling, us emailing, same thing.

40:07Where I think the responsibility of this stuff sits is with whoever's most qualified to write this stuff

40:14From a sales perspective. Because most marketing people who don't have sales experience, you know, they will write a marketing email that'll be awful as an outbound email.

40:23Like facts. It just will be. You know, I'll make a I'll make a a huge generalization here, but like, you know, the use of like emojis and stuff like that, which, you know, have a have a place in a marketing email, do not have a place in an outbound email. Simple as. And, you know, it's a simple thing. I'm not saying all marketing just put emojis everywhere and sunshine and rainbows. That's not the case. But like that is the case. Where it does work though is like when marketing and sales are aligned on, hey, this is our most used free resource that helps our prospects be impressed by us.

Okay, that sales team should be sending that to everyone direct messaging people on LinkedIn, email, you know, so there's some crossovers. So for me, I think I don't really mind who owns the messaging as long as the person who's the best at writing it from an outbound perspective because an STR who's been in a job for a they they don't have enough skin in the game to know yet. Like they just don't unless they are an absolute wordsmith and psychologist who understands just how people think all of a sudden like they don't have they haven't experienced enough yeses and nos to know how to write it in the same way I think a marketing manager who's had no sales experience same thing

41:42Yeah it's it's all about the training as well like if you've not had the training you know how are you going to know what to write I mean you just and all of this data that and all of this information that surrounds cold email now that all of the the gurus will tell you on cold email is is built off the backs of, you know, probably hundreds of millions of cold emails that have been sent and dropped back on it.

42:05And that's what I was saying earlier about like, you know, I'm now starting to see some sales functions outsource that element of their game to outbound email agencies. And I think that's the right thing because it comes back to the same thing. I think they are better at it than probably who they have in place at the moment. A revops function who's really good at infrastructure and database and all that stuff will be most likely [ __ ] at writing emails. So should sit with them. Heads of sales a lot of the time

42:31Emailing back in the day this is what worked. Yeah.

42:34Doesn't work now. So not the best person for it. Enterprise SDR who's been hitting target for six years running probably the best person for it. Therefore they should own the writing of it or whoever is going to own it. But do you see it always comes for me that's where it comes back to so and and and also it comes back to like agreement in who the ICP is what their pain point is. This is always a really interesting experiment to do with any company

43:05Is individually go and speak to everyone and get them to fill in who the ICP is and what the problems are. 95% of the time everyone's got a different opinion.

43:1495% of the time. So you then bring them down to what is the ICP. So me and Hugo, funny enough, we've been talking about our ICP pre the launch where we do all our outbound. We've been literally talking about that for 10 months. Been having conversations for 10 months in preparation for this. So we've got so much data in the leadup to this where we're like, let's we know what we're testing. We we like with conviction, we know what we're testing. We'll see what works. And yeah, it's you know it's it's and I think that's how we've come out the gates swinging to be honest. But

43:47I think that's where the conversation maxing comes in. You know I mean like you said you've got all this information, all these transcripts, all these calls, all of this all this information and then you know the beautiful thing now is that we everyone's got access to LLMs. You can put all of that information in there and get really good summaries of, you know, you could have a thousand conversations, consolidate that into a really strong battle card of this is our ICP. These are the people who are saying they're most interested. You know, this is their key pain points. And it's really interesting because when you do that, and we do this all the time.

We take our calls, we put it in, we do our sales calls, our, you know, demo calls, our cold calls, all of it in and we we find things quite often that that we didn't expect to see, you know what I mean, in there that that come out as pain points and those assumptions that we came into it with into those campaigns with sometimes get proven wrong. But but that leads me to a sort of a follow-up question around AI which is like a huge buzz word these days. Everyone's talking about it. I mean where do you see it fitting in a sales organization and and how are you leveraging it at the moment?

44:56Yeah. I mean I think your example there is like a fantastic example to be honest with you. So like I I see it probably most used in two

45:05Yeah. And these two places are usually wrong. So, I think what was really important about the example there is you're using the LLM, but you're giving it all the context. We're giving everything to it. I've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of words of context on just who we've spoke to.

45:23About things. And it's that context that then is going to help the the GPT or the Claudes do what they need to do. I'm not going to the GPT or Claude and going, "Hey, I work at prosper.io. IO, who's my ICP, what's their pain points? Because what they all do is they've got access to all the bits of information. They're just taking they're just giving you the average answer back from it all.

45:49Nine times out of 10, the average answer is just average. So you will then pump that into something and it'll just give you average results and then you think

45:56It's [ __ ] Yeah.

46:07I hear the thing I want to hear and go, "Oh, yeah. Well, that's the thing. That's the thing." But suddenly the problem that they've actually mentioned that's really painful is something else, you know. So there's there's two places I see it being really successful. One is is ICP refinement. So again the exact example take all this information

46:26And just keep continually refining the ICP and then using that for messaging and variations of messaging. So you know and but again I would give it the source material. So these are some of the emails that are working really really well. How else could we do this? And then get it to like spin out versions for me with tests with different pain points and things like that. So I mean they're they're they're two of the things. And then you know sometimes for for content creation but again it's easy just to go and ask it to go and make you something. So like when I make a resource I mean luckily I've been making I've been making all this training for years upon years upon years and at the same time I'm continually talking to people who are better at it than I am and I've got all these words stored.

I've got all these words. So whenever I'm getting it to create content for me or things like that,

47:19You know, I'm providing it thousands and thousands of words as part of my prompt

47:23Like I want to create X Y and Zed using So it's always being provided incredible source material and then it does its thing really quickly which you know I wouldn't have been able to do in that same period of time. Yeah, it's the speed speed of that that data comprehension and amalgamation of all that data I think is is is huge.

47:46But I'm curious on your thoughts on because you see a lot of posts on LinkedIn and stuff and it's like fire your sales team, fire your marketing team, this one nadn or chatgpt script is going to change your life or whatever it may be.

48:01You know, where do you see in the next sort of 5 years or so? Do do you see that happening? Do you see the sales rep being dinosaured, being retired, or how do you see it progressing?

48:12I I think maybe people will be able to do more with less. I do see a world with that, but you adjust what people do. So there is a world where if you've you've got your product market fit, you've got your messaging and you've got your ICP and you want to scale to the moon. Well, you get to a position where your email campaigns are set up like we've got. So me, our sales function right now is two of us plus someone who's helping us with the emails, right? It's just three of us in theory, but we're booking in as many meetings as like a you know like a a team of just four people devoted to cold calling and stuff like that.

Like we are doing more with less, but it means when we scale that, we will do more with less. Again, we're going to scale in a different way. So, I'm starting to see that I think cold calling is going to work incredibly well for us. I now want to potentially get the best cold caller I can find that exists to do more of that stuff. And that that's what it comes down to. So like the admin side of things, all the things that are like just take loads and loads of time, that's what we're trying to find fixes for with AI. That's where we're like, okay, well this process, let's solve that with that.

But anything to do with human interaction and stuff like that with the follow-ups and stuff like that, it's all human because we understand better than I'm not going to get AI to respond to emails. Like I'm I'm not going to do

49:44I'm not going to get AI to cold call people. No,

49:46I'm never ever

49:48Ever going to do that because AI can't have a joke with someone and they're not going to go they're not going to leave a voicemail going,

49:54"Hey, is Matt cold calling you? Wow, wow, we are or whatever." They're not going to do that. So there's this lack of, you know, pattern interrupts and stuff, things like that. Look, I think people, they always run with this stuff people want more with less, naturally, of course, means better, it means better profit margins. It potentially means hitting target easier. So, it's always going to be a hook that gets people really, really

50:2498% of the time, you'll dive into these things and it'll be incredibly disappointing. Yeah, like it just will

50:31Like can you use this some of this stuff to enable a team better? Yes. Yes, you can do that. But it's about enabling the team better.

50:37Yeah. Building that like exoskeleton around them so they become super

50:42That's it. That's exactly it. And now before doing that, you need to find out if you've got product market fit and the right messaging, right? You shouldn't then be like, let's use AI to work this out because it's not going to work it out. It won't work it out.

50:53Facts. Bet money on that. I mean I again I have I've asked so many AIS SDR functions to provide me testimonials of happy customers who have lasted more than 6 months. I've not had a single company do.

51:06And the one company that was able to do that were able to do that because their AI SDR

51:12Is paired with a real SDR and a human person who's doing cold calling.

51:17It's funny. I could probably provide a hundred negative testimonials from sales calls that I do with organizations that have used an IISDR and and thought, my god, I've just spent 6 months doing this and we have got nothing off the back of it. Like I'm talking zero. Some of them are getting zero replies, even negative replies from the back of these, which is

51:36You'll find that most of the people that are in the position where they're firing their STR function or AU function because of, you know, they're the ones who actually should be fired.

51:43Yes. And that's going to be the clip we use at the start of the video

51:47Because it's true. They're not and it comes back to the things we've spoken about. They they don't know how to write an email in a compelling way. They don't know who the ICP is and therefore they're like, "Oh, sales functions not working. We should get rid of it."

51:59No, no, no, sir.

52:00You should get rid of yourself.

52:02You are the problem in this scenario, right? You are the problem. So, get fired. That's what I'm saying.

52:09Love it. Love it, man. So to wrap up, what do you think from a a go to market perspective, what do you think is overrated advice? What do you see that's pedled all the time that when you see it, you just grinds your gears and you think it's this is a load of [ __ ]

Pitfalls of overrated advice

52:25This is probably like a generic one, right? But I see it so much cuz it happens. So because it is generic, I suppose, but is as soon as you see the classic do this thing for this channel, all the other channels are are dead. And I see that so often and unfortunately people see it and they want to do it but you'll then see that the person is either pedalling a service that solves that thing right

52:49Or they're awful at the other two channels like LinkedIn or cold calling. So every time you see that just just ignore it cuz it it Yeah. And if you need to have conversations call

53:04Like do that instead and then from that work out your messaging with your emails and then once you got your messaging with your emails do a text version of it which you then use on LinkedIn to DM people with you know so you're not sending an email version of it. All channels work and they work the best when all combined, but kind of do it in that order. Like anyone who pushes otherwise, I they I I can literally tell you right now, they have not been in the game for however long and they don't know what they're they honestly they don't know what they're talking about.

53:34Simple as

It's like a signal that they

53:37It's like a it's a signal that they don't know what they're talking about. So, it's almost like a red flag in

53:42The lie alarm goes off, you know? It's like you are and and you're going to scam someone out of their money probably to some degree.

53:48Probably. Yeah. And then we're going to have to pick up the pieces later.

53:52But awesome, Matt. Well, look, I really appreciate your time. Thanks for jumping on. I think it's been a really insightful conversation. I don't know if there's anything that you want to plug at the end of this or or give a shout out to.

54:02Look, I think we've plugged it a ton in this, but hey, prosper.io, I am the head of sales, so message me directly so I can earn that sweet sweet commission. Okay. And prove out that sales function should exist here. Maybe I'll give you a deal or a really good trial. How many credits will it take?

54:21How many credits? I'll give them to you.

54:23So, DM Matt with how many credits it will take. I'm DMing him 1 million. So, we'll see what he got.

54:28Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I will be ignoring that.

54:31Awesome, Matt. Thank you very much.

54:33Brilliant. No problem, man.