In this conversation, Antoine Marsden, the owner and founder of Outbound Works, discusses the challenges and strategies for successful outbound sales. He highlights the increasing noise in the marketplace and the need for personalized and relevant outreach to capture prospects' attention.

Antoine also emphasizes the complexity of buyer organizations and the importance of multi-threading and building relationships with multiple stakeholders. He shares his approach of using data to optimize outbound motions and leverage technology to increase efficiency. Antoine concludes by providing his elevator pitch and contact information.

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Takeaways

Personalized and relevant outreach is crucial to capture prospects' attention in a noisy marketplace.Buyer organizations have become more complex, requiring multi-threading and relationship-building with multiple stakeholders.Data plays a key role in optimizing outbound motions and reaching prospects through their preferred channels.Leveraging technology, such as parallel dialers and data aggregation platforms, can increase efficiency and effectiveness in outbound sales.

How Outbound Worx are Using Data Aggregation Transcript

Hans (01:39.816)

Hey everyone and welcome again to Deep Peek, the man podcast, a show where we talk with business and revenue leaders who are in the trenches, as they say, when it comes to generating demand and generating leads. So today I'm joined by Antoine. Antoine, thanks for joining us. Would you please go ahead and tell the people, the listeners, the viewers, depending on where they are, who you are, what it is you do?

Antoine (01:55.458)

Thanks for having me.

Antoine (02:04.382)

Yeah, so my name is Antoine Marsden.

I am first and foremost a son, brother, and father of two. I live with my partner in Windsor in the UK, just a stone's throw from the King's Castle. And professionally, I'm the owner and founder of the anti-legion agency Outbound Works. We create outbound sales motions for customers that have trouble either building consistent and predictable outbound engines or finding it difficult to generate conversations with their ideal customer persona at scale.

Hans (02:38.876)

Okay, I appreciate that. And then, so we come from a sort of similar background and I've spoken, I like to frequently talk with people who are more or less in the same industry that you are. And I know that you see it all, right? Like you talk with a lot of different business or revenue leaders, a lot of different industries, a lot of different sales motions, a lot of different ways of generating leads and a lot of different personas that you all have to prospect into.

So, you know, from all the people who come on this show, you'll probably be one of them who has the best idea of what is going on in what I call the macro. So what's happening, generally speaking, in sales land and sales, the sales environment. So what are some things that you're seeing? What are some changes that you've been seeing that, you know, that everything's moving towards? What is your general idea of what's happening?

Antoine (03:33.634)

So I think there's a couple of things happening all at the same time that are creating a bit of a pressure bubble on outbound development.

Hans (03:40.469)

Mm-hmm.

Antoine (03:43.85)

you know, firstly, I think that the proliferation or the intensity of the noise, uh, in the marketplace is, is kind of deafening, right? You've got so many different channels, uh, you've got an over-reliance on, um, a number of those channels, IE email, for example, um, where everybody's fighting for the same piece of inbox and that is driving, uh, more and more customers or prospects should I say to be kind of switched off.

right? They've got very, very short attention spans. They're not reading these full emails. A lot of emails are very generic, not relevant, not personalized, automated, pray and spray.

Hans (04:28.139)

the predictable revenue playbook.

Antoine (04:30.49)

Exactly. And it just drives a lot of people crazy. And that means that they're sending more and more of those emails to spam. You know, the message that people are trying to convey isn't being seen or being read. And therefore that's then having an impact on the number of genuine conversations that they can get into with those prospects. So I think that there's a lot of this in the marketplace. Obviously, there's some measures now being brought into place to try and reduce those effects, but

anytime soon because it's an easy way of getting in front of as many people as possible without having to do the harder stuff, which is obviously trying to get into conversations with those people.

Hans (05:13.884)

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Antoine (05:15.902)

I think another aspect that feeds into that is the complexity of buyer organizations now. So many, many years ago, you used to have a smaller number of stakeholders and decision makers that would come together to buy a solution or a service.

Depending on whether you're a small, medium, enterprise, mid-market or enterprise, now you're seeing that those numbers have increased a lot. And you're seeing that buyers are more fearful of making the wrong decision because of not only the impact they would have to the company, but the impact of their credibility within the company.

Hans (05:54.924)

Sure.

Antoine (05:55.966)

So there's more people now being involved. That's now dragging out sales cycles longer and longer and longer. And it means that there are many, many more touch points that need to be executed in order to just get people at the table and get a deal over the line. So that's another thing that I think is adding a lot more kind of legwork. And a lot more kind of, you know.

Hans (06:07.409)

Mm-hmm.

Hans (06:12.812)

Sure, exactly.

Hans (06:18.04)

Sure. And then when you're saying more touch points, are you saying whereas multi-thread, maybe you could get away with multi-threading, I don't know, a few years ago, now you absolutely have like everyone has to do it and it's become a must or, and I mean, that naturally brings with it more touch points as well, or what, like when you're saying more touch points, what are some things that you're doing, for example, to actually achieve that?

Antoine (06:41.974)

Well, my agency is very focused on the data piece. So we're very much focused on okay.

Everybody has access to these channels. We can, we could buy an SEP platform and we could pump out sequence after sequence after sequence, right? But is that really what's driving the conversational kind of, you know, number? It's not. All that's driving is just more spam. So

Hans (07:03.669)

Mm-hmm.

Hans (07:08.83)

Mm-hmm.

Antoine (07:15.326)

On the data side, we look at something called channel optimization, which is how does each prospect on this list prefer to be contacted? What's the level of activity that they have on their social feed, for example? Is it more likely that they are going to respond by email over a cold call?

We then like to wait and kind of tier those prospects so that we aggregate those channels the most effective way so that we then see a higher level of responses from our outbound campaigns. I think that there's a lot of people that will believe that one data partner will give them everything that they need, but actually you need to be utilizing multiple business to business databases in order to firstly understand

Hans (07:51.626)

Okay.

Hans (07:59.968)

Mm-hmm.

Hans (08:07.817)

First, the understanding of the place is correct. And you'll be able to reach that place.

Antoine (08:08.444)

if the data is correct to be able to enrich that data in the right way, validate and verify emails, you know, that kind of stuff. And then from there, fine tune that information so that your outbound system can act in the most effective way in reaching these prospects in the channels of their preference.

Hans (08:26.469)

That's pretty interesting because like most, well, most sales organizations are already or should be at least tiering their prospects or at least their accounts, right? Where, okay, these are tier one accounts. We will manually prospect those, maybe tier three, four, get into these predictable revenue automated campaigns. That's what you already saw for a while, but then actually rank contacts. I know actually I had someone on yesterday, Kyle, and I know they're doing it.

That's that's There in a slightly different way to you all I'll share a recording with you but there was a sort of doing it between the actually see and And try to predict Which channel they prefer that is really unique and that's not something that I think I've heard before And it's interesting and then you already mentioned. Okay social activities So if they're really active on LinkedIn, you could you could then say okay, they

potentially prefer to be contacted there, right? Or am I thinking about that wrong?

Antoine (09:26.762)

No, I know you're thinking about it the right way. You know, I can give you an example of myself and you'll be able to relay this to yourself and so would anybody who's watching and listening to this. But if you email me, you're unlikely to get a response, right?

But if you cold call me, it's very likely I'm gonna pick up the phone. So for me personally, I prefer to get a cold call because I wanna get a feel for the person who's calling me. I wanna understand whether or not the offer is relevant. I am interested in new technologies and that kind of stuff because obviously I'm a business owner. I'm looking at things that can potentially, right? But there's too much noise in my inbox. So I don't bother with reading half the stuff that comes through.

Hans (10:02.252)

Exactly, always looking for an edge, right?

Antoine (10:12.026)

Um, and, uh, I'm, I'm busy on social. Um, but in terms of managing my inbox on social, again, that's, that's quite an investment of time for me. So if you want to give me a call, that's going to break through the noise. Somebody like yourself might be, you're more open to being contacted on social because you spend more time there. You're comfortable being contacted there. And if there's a number that calls you that you don't know, you're not going to pick it up, right? So it, I think that this type of information is very useful because

Hans (10:31.306)

Mm-hmm.

Antoine (10:41.68)

you can create an outbound motion that is not only efficient but effective because the effectiveness of that motion is what will then determine your success in being able to convert from not just the conversations that you have through to the meetings that are held but then through to what happens on the next stage and then through to close one or close two.

Hans (10:50.954)

Mm-hmm.

Hans (11:01.52)

Exactly, exactly. It's how you start, how you set the tone, how you... That's the right way to affective, to effectively shorten that sales cycle. If you reach out to the right person the right way, ideally at the right time, then you've already, you know, passed so many hurdles that you're just making things easier for yourself. So I really like that. That's a very interesting strategy and my next question was going to be, you know, about any specific tactics or strategies that you see are working.

Antoine (11:14.221)

Yes.

Hans (11:31.58)

Is there anything else in terms of maybe specific tactics, strategies that, you know, so this I would, this is more of a, let's say a broad strategy. Can we start with this with the right data? Then you have that data. What are some other things that you see are working in terms of getting the attention of people? Because like you said, people are being bombarded left, right and center. How are you managing to capture their attention?

Antoine (11:56.894)

I think you can split out campaigns and outbound motions. So if you have a large TAM and you have high relevance, then you can use some of the platforms that we use, for example, a Connect and Sell, which is a parallel dialer, which will call four or five, six numbers at the same time, and then it will...

based on who picks up first, that call will then be put through to the actual caller, right? And the reason why that works so well is that a lot of challenges that people have with outbound is actually getting their sellers to pick up the phone in the first place. And not just pick up the phone and make the dial, but stay consistent within a specific amount of time that they're calling so that they can have as many conversations as possible.

Antoine (12:49.552)

delay or potential for delay because after every conversation you have, it's then straight onto the next call, right? Or you're straight into another conversation. So if you're having conversations every three minutes or every four minutes.

Hans (12:59.2)

exactly.

Hans (13:03.4)

Yeah, you should keep that flow going and you can say, okay, you know what, I'm gonna schedule a calling block an hour, two hours, and I'm gonna have some really good conversations. And you can really sort of hype yourself up for these two hours because you know, okay, they're gonna be, let's say, action packed hours where you're gonna be talking to a lot of people. Then after that, maybe you do your follow ups, your CRM work, et cetera. It makes things a lot easier. Okay.

Antoine (13:24.922)

Exactly.

Hans (13:25.78)

Then yeah, my next question was gonna be, what technology do you feel that you're leveraging that gives you an edge, but you've already answered that for me. So you're way ahead of me.

Antoine (13:34.042)

Yeah. So, so yeah, that's definitely a technology that I stand by, um, actually being a, you know, I'm not, I don't just have a service that develops or helps companies to develop conversations. I'm at scale. I do this myself every day. Right. So my calling blocks, I run calling blocks for customers at worst. I'm having five to six conversations every hour with somebody within a target audience or target market.

Hans (13:39.84)

Mm-hmm.

Antoine (14:02.466)

where you can, and that's within one hour a day. So you're running two to three hours for a customer, the level of conversations that you can actually reach. And then my other kind of must haves in terms of technology, leveraging of B2B data platforms, so, so important, don't use one, you definitely need at minimum five within our organization, we're at between the 12 to 15 mark.

Hans (14:05.013)

Yeah, exactly.

Hans (14:23.081)

Right.

Hans (14:27.568)

Okay, just to increase coverage and to double check, right, whether the information that you have is actually correct or...

Antoine (14:34.303)

Yeah.

Correct. Because one data platform will give you amazing kind of data in Europe, not so great in America. It will give you more numbers or less, you know, kind of switchboard numbers or kind of direct tiles. It won't give you the right kind of email addresses. Another one will. There's lots of nuances within all of these different platforms. Best to aggregate all of them so that you've got the right data for your campaign, because your list is your strategy.

Hans (14:41.665)

Mm-hmm.

Hans (14:53.801)

Mm-hmm.

exactly.

Hans (15:02.484)

Mm-hmm.

Antoine (15:06.166)

more efficient as you're going through your outbound kind of motion.

Hans (15:10.64)

Exactly. All right. There's one tool actually, I spoke with the founder. What was it like a couple months ago? It's called Waterfall. Are you familiar with them? Waterfall.to I think. They're a data aggregation platform. So they help you. They have access to all these databases and you give them one data point and they then aggregate that from all those databases. It might be interesting for either you to check out or anyone who is...

Antoine (15:19.133)

waterfall.

Hans (15:36.188)

listening, watching. Whenever you set data aggregation, they get into my first thing. And I think he might be located in the UK as well, but I could have that wrong. And then as we're signing off here, so it was very interesting then if anyone says, you know what, this sounds interesting, but 100% sure this is from me. What is your elevator pits? What do you do? Who do you do it for? And how do people get in touch with you?

Antoine (15:40.542)

No, that's really cool. Sounds cool.

Antoine (15:45.809)

Okay.

Hans (16:05.256)

Well, you already answered that one. I think you prefer a cold call, right?

Antoine (16:10.739)

Yeah, but you can reach me on LinkedIn. But the way that I typically talk about what I do is, I'm sure that you know of, or anybody watching this will know, you know, a lot of founders and sales organizations that struggle with getting their sellers to have enough conversations with cold prospects, minimize the time that they spend on finding numbers, correct emails, and having the best fit list, and also not being data and process driven with their outbound strategy.

So I help them solve it without having to invest and buy new tech, hire lots of people, or having to slow down pipeline development so that they can actually get clarity on their outbound messaging and gain proprietary market data for their products and their service.

Hans (16:41.536)

Mm-hmm.

Hans (16:57.184)

Okay, sounds great. And then I'm sure you can reach Antoine on LinkedIn. And if you can find his phone number, then everyone can give you a call. And to continue the conversation, I appreciate that. Everyone else who tuned in, who watched, who listened, I appreciate it as well. Hopefully I'll see or hear from you again soon. We'll be releasing more videos, more podcasts really soon. And looking forward to seeing you again there. Have a good one.