Building an Outbound Engine for SaaS firms

Yash Shah (00:00.662)

Okay, let's hope that we are live. We'll wait for a couple of people to join in. It already says that we are live but...

Let's still wait for a second or two. OK, OK. We have first few viewers. So we are live. Awesome. Hello and welcome to Momentum Office Hours. My name is Yash, and I'm joined by my co-founders Shane, Jay, and Koushik to discuss topic of the week, UX for, sorry, topic of the week, is setting up an outward engine for SaaS companies. This is, the way, this is how you know that this is a licensed. Things like these.

I already tell you that this is a live session. Our goal is to provide you with actionable insights and practical strategies that you can apply to your own products. Throughout the session, we encourage you to engage with us by asking questions and sharing your thoughts. This is a fantastic opportunity to learn from each other and gain new insights that can help drive your SaaS initiatives forward. So let's get started. Jai, Shane, Koushik, how are you doing today? Doing fantastic. Great. What's been happening? Yep.

Good to have all of us. That's always good, right? So can't complain. it was your birthday yesterday. How did it go? It was a lovely, lovely time. Got a chance to spend a relaxing day. I got to sleep in, which is a thing that you value a lot as you approach older ages. Time just to last but to go to the gym, be healthy, be grateful that I can go to the gym and still be active and then...

just a nice dinner at a Caribbean restaurant in the evening with the wife and kid and wrapped it up with just, you know what, an early night. I never thought a birthday would end at 11 PM. But now it does. That is something that I value the most, like a quiet dinner and an early night. Absolutely. That's the key. for sure. And so today we're going to talk about Outbound for

Yash Shah (02:08.503)

for SaaS firms. And so let me start it off. Let's try and get some understanding as to what are some of the channels broad outside of Outbound. What are some of the channels through which a SaaS company can acquire customers? And then let's dive deeper into building blocks of Outbound. you can of lay out a groundwork in terms of how the GTM for a SaaS firm sort of looks like in terms of what are the things that are at play.

And then maybe let's dive a little deeper into the building like first principles or frameworks for creating an outbound engine. So I think I'll start with the first key to success in outbound that I've learned when I started when I built my business. was the list is the strategy.

And that term came from a company that we were using a very, very reputable company in the outbound space called connect and sell. So the ability to really compress time and have 15 to 20 conversations in an hour, you're going through hundreds and hundreds of contacts in a day per rep. And when that's happening and you are acquiring data or using data to connect with and have those conversations.

The only thing that matters at that point is if you're having conversations at speed, at scale, the list has to be the strategy. So the list has to be the right type of company, the right type of job title, and more importantly, the right type of problem that you're trying to address for that individual. And then when you're going at speed and those conversations are actually happening every three to five minutes, you have to be able to have the same conversation over and over so that

additive motion builds, and then your reps can build dialogue. They can build kind of a pattern of information throughout the day that compounds over the weeks and then over the months. And then when you review that data, you're able to see the ICP in this market is telling us this and only until you have key insights. Let's, let's just use the example. You're starting it from complete stretch. have no insights, no data running right now. So you have to build those insights and it always starts from

Yash Shah (04:27.447)

Who is the person I'm trying to help? What is the problem I'm trying to solve? And knowing that key component allows everything else outbound, inbound, social, any type of written content, right? Your whatever on public media, whatever the case may be, everything resonates obviously from having that key component, which is an accurate representation of who your idle customer profile is.

It's so important that you say that because more often than not, like when I started our own outbound journey and I failed multiple times at it. But when we started our own outbound journey, our strategy was like we spent an inordinate amount of time choosing the right tools and platforms because we thought that having the right tool to send out an email or a message or to make a call or whatever the case may be, that is the right strategy. But I agree with you wholeheartedly.

We hear that having the right list, the people who have the intent, the people who have that pin point and the pitch sort of meets with the pin point and figures out a way to solve that. think that is a good strategy to go after. That's interesting. It's 100%. And look, you know what's quite funny? When I started my agency back in 2020, I started in like the peak of the pandemic. April, they said, go home.

The next month I started to just look at a few Udemy videos, took a 12 week course. And after 12 weeks, I thought I'm ready. Let's, let me start business. And the one thing I found very quickly that gave me like convincing mindset that it was possible was I found I wasn't aware of databases, like mass large databases when I was working in a company, because you're either just provided leads or you just have to source your own leads. Right. And that's where my

outbound kind of skill set was developed because when I started in the companies that I did build my skill sets in and my career in, it was always from complete scratch. Honestly, two invoice, like an actual, the full sales process. A complete life cycle was, it was that independent. And then when I started to clash a little bit with my manager, it became, I think I could do this better. And then I found a very,

Yash Shah (06:51.209)

probably a lot of people on here that actually pay attention to Outbound, they'll know a guy called Daniel Disney, one of a very, very influential figure on LinkedIn. And he shared all the links on Cognizm, Connect and Sell. And those were the tools that I went and sourced. And the money that I had in commissions and my business partner who had money there, we took that money and invested in tools. And then those tools were what we thought would be the answer.

to what is the company job title and region, which was the only things that we ever had to pay attention to and quickly found out this is not the answer. So what we had to do is we had to kind of catch up like an employee mindset of working on one by one lead genera, like one by one contacting leads to tens of thousands of leads, calling tens of thousands lead, emailing tens and thousands of leads and how to build those systems so they work, but then how to organize data so that

a big system like this could accompany the level of data that we want. then where those problems started to rise, Connect themselves with the company that said, look, the reason you're having this much of a problem is you need to start with the ICP. And again, every outbound campaign after that became wildly successful from our first three to then we had groups of 10 over the course of the years.

But that's why we became wildly successful because we spent a good amount of time on that two, three, four week ICP preparation, which some do it well, some do it half-assed, but the ones that do it really well and spend time with it, everything originates from that fully developed ICP. Got it. Interesting. So as you mentioned, the first step would always be about finding out ICP and building lists according to that. Could you brief us a little with respect to what would be the further stages of

setting up an outbound engine once the list building will be the next step? Yeah, so list building is number one in terms of who you're going to contact in what sequence across which campaigns. Then the copy. Copy is obviously massively important because a lot of people think you just send a bunch of things, send a bunch of messages and hopefully whether you want to be short and simple in your message or have long nuanced messages.

Yash Shah (09:14.381)

or clay personalized messages, or you want to spend hours and hours of research on the top 10 messages. Like the copy really does matter. And again, the copy comes from the ICP and that's from what we found. You can either guess what your future prospect problems are, or hopefully you have customers or examples where you can identify those through those conversations. And then that becomes that message that you load up into each and every one of your campaigns. But then yes,

to your point, how do you action the lists, right? What is the best form of action in that list? So depending on like your budget threshold, the honest answer is that's what it comes down to. So I found that the easiest, quickest wins is obviously cold calling. But you have a great cold caller and then we could dissect this because we'll go through.

cold calling, can go through LinkedIn, we can go through email, social channels and all the other components, but we'll break down cold calling after you hear what I have to say about this. When you have somebody who's great at cold calling, i.e. myself, I can get onto a list of hundreds of people and every other conversation that I have, I can engage in a chat at a high level with a CEO and convert a conversation in some level of interest, which is what you're trying to achieve, some level of it, not the meeting.

some level of interest and then to engage in a next step that allows that meeting to be closer to what you want, right? Which is you having a chance to introduce yourself to them. Now on that, what do you guys think in terms of like, again, just for the quick win piece on cold calling, what have you guys found? So I think like on the cold calling side of things, it is something that delivers the highest amount of ROI for sure, if it is done well. Yeah.

And the ability, so it's extremely predictable. So, so it doesn't matter what your conversion rates are, but it is extremely predictable. You know what you will do this week, this month, this quarter, this year. If that is like through that channel. One of the challenges that we've seen, however, is identifying and retaining a great cold caller, like training them, them, training them and retaining them. That's extremely, extremely difficult because while

Yash Shah (11:36.29)

the relationship that a SaaS company will have with a cold caller is that of an employer and an employee. The cold caller still needs to have a business mindset, right? Because he's the person talking to you. He needs to understand your pain point and he needs to give you a business solution, not the product that they are setting you up to purchase, but they have to have that nuanced conversation, which is, think, the most difficult piece to...

to sort of nail down. think that's, but if you're able to get that done, you have the scripts and if you have all of those things in place, then I think that's a great channel to start as well. It's a very strong channel. It's a very, very strong channel. But again, like you said, to your point, most companies want a quick fix and they think, yes, cold calling because the notion, the stereotype of it is, yes, you can get these quick fixes. As long as you make those 100 calls, you should get three answers or conversations.

and one should end up in a meeting, let's say every day or every other day. But the problem is this, you have people like me who think they're great at cold calling. I am quite good. Again, not to just humble brag, but when I went and built my agency and I tried to hire people to do my job, and then again, not really, these were the early stages of business, but then like taking client revenue and saying, will call, cause I believe I can cold call, but then I'm hiring people to do it.

That's what happens across the entire industry. So then companies go into a relationship with these agencies and these outbound agencies that want success and quick wins, but they don't realize they speak to a great CEO who was probably a great cold caller. And then they hire somebody from a third world country, any, that doesn't mean anything bad, but nine times out of 10 hiring that talent is like great talent is retained by somebody else already. They're not just openly available on the market.

So then what happens, you usually have bad experiences and you might get some because they have to assign a big team. And those packages, our packages for sales qualified leads, they were called sales accepted opportunities. They had to have a tactical need, a strategic need. Again, this is client expectations from a fully developed inbound situation, construction companies, sorry, SaaS automation, no code, create paperless processes for SaaS at enterprise.

Yash Shah (13:57.995)

and they wanted to do it for construction companies. So to eliminate those massive Carilion, Balfour, Betty, huge construction projects, that's what they wanted to do. 35,000 annual ACV, right? That's not an easy sell. So they had to sell that into these, and they needed a tactical need and a strategic need on the first call. And that was hard. So you had to have two calls or three calls from outside before we could pass over like a lead sheet. So good lead sheets become a part of

the album process, the conversation, the book meeting, a lead sheet, and then it's passed over to the person. Now, again, does that call call or take on the meeting himself or does he pass it on to the next person? And is there a transition where this person doesn't really care so much about how the call callers conversation was? Yeah. Right. And then that becomes it becomes a nightmare. So that's why then calling if it's done right for a quick fix and a strong ROI with the right person or right company.

then yes, it's great. But then what do you do if that isn't the option and you don't have 8,000 bucks a month to spend on one cold caller that does include all your lists and stuff because that's what UK and US pricing is 8,000 bucks, one cold caller list building, everything is included. Right. So then you have email and social and for your guys, what do you guys think you've seen in terms of email and social and its success on outbound at the first stages?

So yeah, you run the campaigns. Yeah. Yeah. So when it comes to email, my personal thought process is, I mean, it worked well if, as you mentioned earlier that, know, pain points if they are addressed well enough and the copy is, you know, short enough for, you know, person to directly read the whole copy, address the challenges, they see that, hey, this is my challenge already mentioned. And so it tempts them to book a call or, you know, get a resource that can help.

take one step closer to the meeting. So email for sure. When it comes to LinkedIn outreach, guess these days it needs a lot of amount of personalization because everyone is just shooting random email, random LinkedIn messages. So even if I check my DM right now, will be lots of messages just getting about these and that sort of services just to become a vendor partner or looking for a job or something of that sort. So I would say when

Yash Shah (16:21.921)

When it comes to LinkedIn, it has to be more polished and there are more steps involved rather than just sending a message. There needs to be some good amount of impression to be set up. So you might want to follow the person today, send a connection request later or just, you know, let's say follow request today, next day or gap of two days, want to interact with their recent post and then send a connection request, build your own presence. And along with that,

talk something about their something that they posted or they have done in the last just in one line and then talk about that you know value part that we do in emails. That's where the actual conversation starts. So it is little slower. It takes some steps. But I have done that. If done well, that also gives great results. So email is first and second will be LinkedIn. That's what I would say. The thing that I'm seeing that LinkedIn and email is like business owners like us.

we know what's coming. Right? You know what's coming. You know what's coming just by looking at your pending invitation. So in the morning, I can, I know just from looking. this again, so if you're doing outbound, your headline is really important. The way your name is, the way your picture is, it's very important. So if you have somebody who has a picture that's like black and white, it looks like it's from 1989. And it says,

CEO and co-founder of data production warehouse. Like I know he's going to sell me data. I know if they're like someone trying to be really creative at their UIUS studios, they have some creative ways of saying it. then you push accept and it's just like, I sometimes I look at my watch and I say, how long is it going to be until I get this message? And you put Russian Roulette on. How many times have you done that?

I've been on both sides. I've given that as well. So when someone sends out a request, I reply to them. At the time of accepting the request, I reply to them that, please don't sell me. If you're not selling, then I will accept your request. So I've been on that side as well. And then I've been on the other side, which actually pushed me to change my LinkedIn bio. So my LinkedIn bio used to be helping SaaS firms build better products faster. As soon as someone read it,

Yash Shah (18:43.777)

helping SaaS firms build better product trust. They figured out that we are, what we are, who we are, what we're trying to do. And so I received similar messages from people who I genuinely wanted to connect as well. So I just like, because my job is to stay in touch with SaaS founders, see what they are going through, look at the LinkedIn person, genuinely learn. And that's why I would send out some LinkedIn requests. And hey, this is a guy I want to follow. This is a SaaS company that's growing really quickly.

And I genuinely want to follow what he's doing on GTM side, on product side, on engineering side, on design side and so on and so forth. And then I received those responses as well. Accepting your request as long as you don't sell. Which is fair. But I think on LinkedIn, very few... mean, it's extremely difficult to get through, for sure. It takes significantly longer.

as well. And I think it's a good test of how good you are as a salesperson to be able to have the prospect, know that you are going to sell something and still get a call booked with them. And so it takes some amount of ingenuity in terms of the messages that you write and the engagements that you do on LinkedIn. I would argue that it's a full-time activity if you choose LinkedIn as a channel.

I think you're spot on and what people are failing to realize is there is a piece where now because there is so much information, which again links right to outbound on your ICP and being able to have the right people, there's so much information in terms of like, for me, you could really find out a lot about who I am and how to sell to me based on my presence on LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Facebook.

every Twitter, everything. And some of them have different messages, right? So when you're coming to somebody on LinkedIn, and you are speaking to a CEO, most people want to go to the CEO, most people are using some automation software that their company is for. And they say, just enter this ICP, the job title and person and type of company, and then they'll just start blasting them with messages. And then they wonder why nothing happens versus the ones who actually think and it's not to say you go in and

Yash Shah (21:05.517)

have to spend hours and hours of thinking, right? But do it right. Like look at the person and the type of profile you want to look at and help. Yes, look at the other criteria. But then there's another key element that we found. And it was with a company who was building AI tools back in 2021. We actually partnered with them and they were based a psychographic AI tool. And the psychographic AI tool was based on the truth of the matter was it was based on an if then, if this then that.

mechanism, right? And, they were positioning it as AI. And the whole point was what kind of other triggers and factors do you pay attention to when you're, when you're engaging with one of these profiles, right? And like in the message, a lot of CEOs before that I was trying to engage with, it was about a podcast. Hey, do you want to be on a podcast? And I quickly saw like only these types of industries want to engage. All of these don't.

So then you've got to learn and refine that, right? And then the next tier, how you want to engage. And I think it's what you're providing them with. So everybody wants to connect. And if you know, it's a sales development representative, connecting with a CEO from a company that sells data packages again, or insights dashboards, they're like, know they're going to sell to me. Right. But if somebody says, Hey, I can help you be more competitive in your industry, or I can help you gain market share over these top 10.

agencies in your country? Do you want to know how to do it? I think these are the differences in like, again, so your ICP, your lists, which includes your data, the messaging that you're going to go after, after the messaging, right? What kind of mechanisms are you going to use in terms of the channel? So phone email, like one to one email at this stage is it takes 400 emails to get one positive reply apparently today. That's like the latest HubSpot insights.

then LinkedIn, like again, that's a little bit more personable. And then what like technology you're bolting on to amplify cold calling and amplify your email and amplify your LinkedIn. And then what kind of data you're getting back and the insights and through all that, there are tons of learnings in each stage. And it's your prerogative to extract the key insights at the most impactful places so that when this

Yash Shah (23:27.373)

flow of information is getting through to the persona, to the end user of who you want to help, the information flows freely so that it can be understood and simplified, right? And then you're able to categorize that list of people that are like, are ready to buy, which is red right at the top of your 3%, which is barely anybody. You're not going to find that very quickly, but then it's all the rest of it where people miss is they have all this, this market that they can educate.

Yeah. And that's why it's worth the value. Absolutely. that was something that I was going to get to as well as what we've seen in terms of building, like the absolute start of building a relationship has to be where you reach out and you offer the value first. So if you're targeting finance heads of SaaS companies, as an example, you want to give them financial projection template.

If you're reaching out to CEOs of automotive companies, you want to invite them for a podcast. If you're reaching out to someone else, you want to invite them for an interview on your blog or something like that. So do not invite them to a webinar that someone else is doing. They don't have time to attend webinars. That's for sure. Don't do free webinar tickets. Don't ask for... genuinely, that's really not something that works.

It just makes me feel like, I mean, when I, if I receive, you know, a free webinar invite or something like that, it's like, you know, my time's not that, I mean, my time's more valuable. Unless it's like from, from Y Combinator or something like that, which is something everyone would sort of respect. figure out what is genuinely of value. What are the things that ultimately when you're reaching out to a person, you're still reaching out to an individual.

What are the things that they crave? What are their pains, their fears, their gains and their emotions and like, what can you do to help them and then slowly and gradually build a relationship over a period of time. And it is absolutely for sure that the outcome of your first message is still the same. So if I send out my first message and say that, know, we are as an example, like we used to run client judge. So if I would send out the first message and say,

Yash Shah (25:50.539)

Hey, you we used to run client joy, sorry, we are running client joy, client is a CRM, would you like to check out our product? So that's, that's one example of a very poor message. The outcome of that might be that they check out the website and then they decide whether this is good or bad or not required for them. The second message is, Hey, I'm running client joy. We have a podcast for agency owners and you as an agency owner, I would love to have you on as a guest. Right. Would you be open to doing?

The outcome of that message is still they will check out client-drive website and they will still figure out whether this is good, bad or not required for them. But the first message, the relationship is built on a positive. So there are these small little ways of getting better. But Koushik's been quiet for a while. For a second I thought that was because. Listening to everyone.

Give it a design spin, right? So ask a question on Outbound. So what are your questions? We have a couple of questions in chat after this, so we'll take those up as well. Sure, sure. So by trying to understand, so one thing that I was keen on discussing more is about the ICP part. how do you go about, how should one go about building and refining their ICP for these outbound campings?

So I mean, is the process or how do you plan for it? That's one. It's a lengthy process. Yeah. That's one. And one more thing is I was trying to cover the starting and ending part. So one is with respect to the ICP. And second thing is after all these, and if let's say you get negative responses, how do you recommend someone to iterate upon their approach after the negative responses?

all the work that has been done for the Outdoor Cafe. So we'll answer the first one first. So the second one is negative. The first one is like, what is it like? So Jai, for example, what's your opinion on the length of time our ICP process has taken? Three weeks. It could be three weeks, but three weeks for sure, if you do it right. And that's with AI, right? And that's we did it with AI too, with some AI.

Yash Shah (28:18.201)

yes. So imagine you imagine you don't have AI. Yeah. Right. So if people don't know what they're doing again, is there's when you are in a publishing house, the publishing house, when you're going to sell to marketing directors to sell them ad space, lead generation mechanisms through webinars, white papers, whatever the case may be, you're going to them. And the only thing they tell you is three components.

the job title, is a marketing director type of industry, which in my case was oil and gas and what countries I want to focus on, which in my case was UK, some of Europe where they could spend money, Jack region really. And then the USA, those are the only three components that I was able to get. Right. And understand. And even through all my sales processes for three, four, five years, it was just that. Until again, I started my agency and I took on clients and I thought those three components were enough until

the negative response were coming back. And when those negative responses came back and I didn't have an answer, that pushed me into a corner where I was tested. And my testing at that point was how do I find better information? How do I educate myself to a better level so I can understand how this damn thing works? And what I found was a very reputable, so some of the clients I served were very big, large corporations, Baker Hughes, Hencore, these companies service.

multi-billion dollar EPCs, multi-billion dollar end users. So when they go at scale, one of the keywords that I found was ABM, account-based marketing. But to what extent is ABM? Because ABM is a topic that's thrown around. And then there's these niche players that really dive deep into ABM. And one of the marketing directors showed me the exact playbook, the 50 page playbook that was able to generate them a 1200 % ROI on one of their campaigns where

An event just so happened to be one of the platforms that they used where they met an end user. They were actually selling like semiconductor components to semiconductor companies at that point. And they closed an $835,000 deal. But it was because they were in the right room, right at the right time where the emergence of adhesives and solubles around creating semiconductor wafers, that was real, right?

Yash Shah (30:44.653)

And as I took that information, thought, number one, the selling point of appointment setting is very low in the industry. It's about two to $300 a meeting and it's very cheap if you're trying to run an operation. So how was I able to 20X, 30X that? And to take it to an 8,000, 9,000, $10,000 package, you needed to know great insights. And that's what AVM is usually about. How deep are your insights about your ICP, about your ideal customer account, about your ideal company account?

And then you were able to go into so much detail through LinkedIn, through other psychographics, where do they spend their time? Their social channels. And I found out that there was more to an ICP than just your job title, the type of industry and the country. And then the last, the like the final icing on the cake was a guy called Andrzej Zinkovic. A lot of people know him in the industry. He runs a company called Full Funnel IO and he introduced a concept to me three years ago that he's now charging for today.

And I developed that over serving multiple clients, but that gave us the framework which made sense, which was you take your clients and you interview your clients. That's the best message you can get. And you ask them the right questions that can transfer into a message. And then you take the markets that you want to serve and you identify through certain criteria, what is most important about your market that gives you enough data to say, this makes sense to go into.

And then you want to categorize if it's one market, great. That's the that's where you want to be. But if you've got multiple markets, then it's about categorizing them and ranking them. And then the last piece about now you've got your you've got 10 customers, let's just say you've got four different markets that are ranked in order of one, two and three and four. And now you've got the size of the company that you want to work with. Right. And those are based on billion dollar companies, multimillion dollar companies, two hundred thousand dollar companies.

and splitting those because you're billionaire, you're billion dollar companies, the CEO of that company, you're not speaking to, if you're speaking to them at the tier three, it's a very different ball game. The CEO of that company is dealing with multiple senior managers, mid-level managers, then their managers, then the employees. So his problems are very different from his problems. And then you work through those tiers, right? And then you find out who's involved in that process. Is it one person here? Is it four people here? Is it 20 people here?

Yash Shah (33:11.809)

Who do you not want to speak to? then once all that information is like together, then you've got a map and you could go map out your account and then you build a list that is based on that criteria. And if you do that right, if you are going into the market with customers you've served and the voice of that customer in a message that say, Hey, I spoke to my customer last week. The reason they told me they work with us is because this, this, and this, they saw that they needed this. They were struggling with this and we were the perfect solution at that time.

That message will resonate. you don't, I've not had a situation where the message isn't resonating unless the product is quite bad. So to answer the question, the first thing is how does the process work? Format that allows you to do it. It's very personable. is very tedious. AI allows us to do it a little bit faster because you can extract data very quick. You could get through the process a lot faster and then the building the list. And then again, though, if you're not getting the right message, then you've got to switch. So it's all about the

that you're just switching the messaging, tweaking it, I train tweaking, I to A, B, A, B testing it. And that's the thing with our band why it's so expensive and why people are afraid of it because three to six months in, you might not have your response, you might have not not have the success as you expected. Six months in, you might not have the success as you expected. But where we where I jumped out of my hat and out of my shoes was when my client the biggest pain in the butt. She told me Shane.

just want to send you the good news because 100,000 euros in business from three contracts. You're the most painful vendor, but you're most profitable vendor we've ever used. So thank you. that's the real truth. But it's because we did things right, slow, but we learned. And now we can do the process in three. Yeah, no, absolutely. so just a small sort of a side note.

that has worked well for us on top of what Shane mentioned is the fact that like a lot of people who might be watching this are, know, SaaS companies who are just getting out and they will not have a lot of customers at this point of time. And so if you don't have enough customers that you could speak to or if you're running a company that as on date runs on inbound and so you don't have lot of opportunity to speak to your customers as well. One of the other smaller sort of an alternative and this is a workaround, this is not replaced.

Yash Shah (35:36.909)

This is a workaround until you are in the ideal position. What Shane mentioned is an ideal practice that you should do until you're in a position to get there. A workaround that has worked well for us is to go to G2 pages of competitors, look at the reviews and look at like a sample size of you know, 10, 15, 5 star reviews, 20, 30, 3 star reviews or smaller and then see what are the customers of your competitor.

saying, right? What are their languages? What do they think about the product? How did they come across the product and so on and so forth. There's no beating the insight that you will be able to get once you speak to the customer. But in absence of that, you being able to do that, this is a smaller workaround that you might want to try. We'll quickly take up a question that we have from the audience. Can you?

Shane, can you tell us a couple of tools that you recommend for setting up an outbound engine for email and LinkedIn? For email and LinkedIn, those are like the foundational elements. So Vibeav from Smart Lead, he has built something incredible where the community that he's built around his email product is really cool. The support is actually really cool. The features that he has in the product are really cool.

companies like instantly you have Lemlist, you have a load of companies that are quite good. But Smart Lead for the past four years happened to be my go-to on LinkedIn. Heyreach is a really, really big name right now and they are like taking the market by storm. They were good, but we ran into a small issue with like the transferring of list and then we moved to Expandee.

and Stefan Smulders, the CEO of that company, he's put together an incredible company and a lot of like, you don't have to purchase Sales Navigator, for example, with him, it's built into his tool. So like a feature like that changes the game massively. But so an email on LinkedIn, those are two of my kind of go-to tools, depending on budget, like if you are starting out, Apollo is great, like your email kind of the ability to find emails.

Yash Shah (37:55.765)

and the level, the volume of emails you can find is really cool. It's only a hundred bucks a month. If you want to be a big, big, big fish and you want to go play hard, go get Cognizm. It'll cost you about 30, 40,000 bucks. But that was where we were able to supercharge the operation. If you want to be really, really smart, you don't buy any of them. You go to a reputable vendor that has all seven of them and can prove he has all seven, Seamless, Apollo.

Cognizm, ZoomInfo, Lucia, SalesIQ, Slintel, and he has all of them. And then that part, you tell them the list requirement, you tell them to go get everything and do all the hard work, validate the list and give you back only what's real. And if you're like, if you've got a bit of money and you want to do it that way, then that's like the ideal way for data. But data sources, the other ones I just mentioned, and then plugging that into email and LinkedIn. And then if you've got even more money to spend.

then there are some call calling agencies that you might want to tap up, but be very careful who you tap up. That sort of answers our last question of the day as well. But I still ask that what do you recommend for a company to do? So let's take an example of a, and this is something that I'm building up. The question is this one line which I'll ask. But let's say if there's SaaS company doing let's say 25, $30,000 in monthly rent rate, should they go ahead and build

an outbound team in house, recruit people for themselves, or should they go ahead with a vendor or an agency? What would you recommend? So to be honest, depending on, again, if you're doing 30,000 a month and let's say, if you could do five, if you could spend 5,000 bucks a month on outbound, the best organization will start small.

and they will say, here's how you should do it. And they'll help you prep the landscape for how to successfully deliver outbound. And they'll prep you in terms of what data you need, what systems you need. And if you're really good, you should be able to deliver your outbound system with just those digital channels and a few social channels, right? And then, yes, in terms of building an in-house, like hiring an agency or building in-house,

Yash Shah (40:18.815)

I would say when you do get to the point of wanting to bring in callers that can action lists that have had some engagement because to assign a caller to go call, call, call leads. That's a, that's a hard, expensive job. That's going on brute force. You build it first. You do the map, you get some groundwork, get some awareness and familiarity, and then you stack a call caller on. And he like, again, that call caller.

he can switch at the drop of a dime because it's a very low paying job. It's a very hard job. But if that person has what he needs and you make his environment cool, then yes, then bring that individual in-house, make them happy, give them everything that they need so their job becomes easy. And then this little bit of work that you've done here where you plan and then you've got this email infrastructure bill and this strong LinkedIn mechanism that's established, then you just allow that cold caller to

build a framework, start executing, have some wins and successes. And then when you build the rest of your team in-house, they have somebody they can replicate the successes from. And then that's how I believe it can scale. So again, I think it's the right way. It's not the rush, hey, let me just pay a company eight grand just because I've got to a meeting quota. And if it works, it works great. No, but it has to be done properly. This is not just a quick fix. That's my opinion.

I think this has been a brilliant conversation and this is extremely valuable and meaningful. Hope you guys thought the same as well. thank you Shane for joining in and thank you Jay and Koushik as well. So for all the people who found some value, do consider subscribing, commenting, liking, wherever you are. This is on LinkedIn as well as...

as well as YouTube. As I shared with you last time, I've already spoken to both Google and LinkedIn and your subscription to this channel is for free. that's already sort of in place. the advantage of subscribing to the channel today is that you will not have to subscribe to us again in the future. So just do it. It's always helpful and meaningful to do something today that you can do in the future.

Yash Shah (42:39.935)

All the tools and technologies that Shane mentioned, we'll be linking that in the comment wherever you are watching this right after the stream. And I think one of the other pieces that Shane also mentioned earlier was around IFTTT. And so we've done a separate session on that with Harsh. And we'll link that as well if you're interested in learning what is if this, then that, and how you can build APIs and

IFTTT and Zapier and all of those integrations into your product and platform. What are the steps to do that? We'll be linking that session, that live stream in the comments as well. Thank you for joining in and we'll see you again next time. Bye bye. wow, there's some firecrackers for Shreet. How did that? Yeah, that's it. I think I've got some setting on my thing, but some reactions and...

hearts come out of my hands and fireworks come out. I don't know. It might just be the iPhone. Awesome. That's great. I'll try with an iPhone next time. Next time, yeah. Bye-bye. Bye.

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