Flip your outbound workflow for booking meetings

Boost your pipeline numbers by flipping your outbound workflow. Learn how to use deep account research, prioritizing high-value leads, and hyper-personalizing outreach efforts.

Last week we had our yearly sales review meeting. When we were looking at our sales outbound experiments and numbers, we were surprised…

→ 4 major and 10 minor experiments in sales workflow

→ 1 major change and 6 minor changes together improved our pipeline numbers by 36% with just same resources

12 months ago, our sales team had a workflow that looked something like this:

1. Defined the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for targeting accounts.

2. Got the Account List from Apollo/ZoomInfo

3. Divided Accounts Across Sales Reps

4. Our SDRs to reach out using intent signals and account scoring,

5. They used to research for Ice Breakers and Personalization

   1. Job changes

   2. Announcements

   3. Media news

6. Cold Calling, Emailing, and LinkedIn Outreach

The challenge for us: 

More time spent on research meant better personalization but fewer outreach numbers…

less time on research meant hitting more accounts but with weaker personalization.

Why this workflow?

This was necessary to have best practices from Day 1. It was based on research with sales coaches and the challenges sales teams faced at that time:

• Mindless calling on generic scripts.

• Sending generic value proposition emails that lacked personalization and didn’t stand out.

• Targeting all ICP accounts as if they were equally important.

• Few teams could effectively apply multi-channel strategies back then, so even generic efforts used to get attention.

Initially, we optimized …

for striking a balance between quality and quantity in our outreach efforts. We followed what other sales leaders were guiding their sales reps…

• Spent just enough time on research to personalize without missing too many outreach opportunities.

• Prioritized high-intent signals to focus efforts on prospects most likely to convert.

But challenges were just starting to come out… 

We discussed it with sales teams. Over the last 12 months, we have interacted with more than 80 sales leaders and have identified challenges that they too have started experiencing.

Challenges with existing Outbound Workflow (by Sales Leaders)

Here’s what sales leaders shared with us in discussions:

• The current sales outbound workflow has become intense and tiring, not generating satisfactory results.

• SDRs need to reach out to all assigned accounts within a limited timeframe. They rely on intent signals for prioritization. It used to help earlier but this seldom helps now.

• We want to maximize our meetings and demos from all ICP accounts. This makes it tough to do extensive research and maintain personalization.

• Buyers are ignoring generic emails, messages, and calls. Our SDRs are continuously struggling to break through the noise.

• Intent signals do help in prioritizing accounts but are not useful for personalization or ice-breakers.

• Despite using power dialers, we aren’t able to get meetings as our sales reps end up  using generic scripts as they can’t keep research notes of all calling accounts handy.

• Our SDRs are stuck between transactional personalization (job changes, investment) vs deep strategic personalization (business goals, challenges). It’s a huge trade-off between research time and outreach volume.

• We are struggling to meet Sales Quotas QoQ. The main reason being 

  • We aren’t able to warm prospects if we don’t do deep research.

  • We aren’t able to reach all targeted accounts if we focus on deep research for each account.

• What About AI? We have been evaluating AI tools but not able to see how that helps with current workflow challenges.

  • It’s too complex to leverage DIY AI Tools i..e define the entire workflow for each account in AI along with all documents and references. It’s equivalent to manual efforts.

  • All the AI tools that we have checked improve workflows only marginally.

  • The account research (as promised by some) lacks context; reps end up discussing transactional items instead of strategic ones.

  • Accounts prioritized by intent signals are often already talking to multiple companies—what about those silently observing the market?

  • Email personalization tools can generate text with company context but lack specific insights, making emails still look generic.

These challenges made one thing clear for us: 

Our current workflow needs a serious revamp if we’re going to hit our sales quotas and truly engage buyers.

What’s working - Flipped Outbound Workflow

After a lot of experiments (4 major and 10 minor), we finally landed on a workflow that addresses all the challenges we faced. We implemented it using our own tool, “Evabot,” and even helped a couple of clients adopt it. 

The result? A 36% increase in our pipeline numbers.

Here’s how it works:

1. Always a first step… Start with detailing Ideal Customer Profile for outreach.

2. Get Accounts List from Apollo/ZoomInfo

3. Parse through the entire list for a deep account research using AI Tool.

4. Prioritize the accounts. We usually create batches i.e. Top 30%, First 20%, Second 20%, and Last 20% high-priority accounts.

5. Assign top 30% Leads to Sales Reps for outreach.   

6. Use AI-based account research to score and prioritize these assigned accounts.

7. Leverage account research to hyper-personalize email outreach and calls at scale.

What We've Done Here

Instead of dividing accounts from the entire ICP universe, we focused on just the top 30%. 

Here's how we equipped our SDRs:

Integrated account research directly into their call prep notes (which pop up when they dial through a power dialer).

Synced this information with their LinkedIn outreach and email workflows.

The Steps our SDRs followed

1. Pick a high-priority account from the top 30%.

2. Reach out with personalized calls, emails, and LinkedIn messages.

3. Engage prospects with pain based insights and book meetings.

This new workflow introduces hyper-personalization at scale, making each interaction more meaningful leading to outcomes i.e. further meetings.

How to implement “Flipped Outbound Workflow”

The entire workflow can be implemented using a primary AI tool i.e. Evabot which does account research at a core.

1. Use Evabot for Account Research:

   - Parse through your entire account list with Evabot to get pain-based account research and scoring for each account.

2. Prioritize Accounts:

   - Once the research is done, use SalesLoft or Outreach to sort the accounts in order of priority for outbound efforts.

3. Assign Leads to Sales Reps:

   - Assign the top 30% leads to sales reps based on your resources.

4. Detailed Account Research:

   - Each sales rep should use Evabot to look up detailed account research and top insights for their assigned accounts.

5. Integration with Tools:

   - Integrate Evabot with your Power Dialers, Outreach and CRM.

6. Call-Prep Notes:

   - Call prep notes will autofill with insights for an account as the call is picked up with/without using Power Dialers.

7. Personalize Communication:

   - Sales reps will receive top insights along with frameworks to hyper-personalize their email and LinkedIn communication.

Word of Caution:

Don’t get overwhelmed by the workflow change. Our team can guide you through step-by-step implementation.

---

If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed earlier:

1. AI based Account Scoring - Why, How and What?

2. Cold Calling 2.0: Setup 2x More Meetings

Subscribe to get access to our weekly posts on Prospecting, Automation, AI, Revenue Growth and Lead Generation.

---

Interested to see how to flip your outbound workflow to book more meetings? Book a meeting slot on the link below.