Leslie Venetz: Why Your B2B Outbound is Killing Your Brand

And somehow, I don't know how, we're gonna talk about that, we went from that type of human selling into a totally robotic, just send as many emails and make as many calls to the various people and it will work out state.

Yesterday, one of our Gen Z sellers in the kitchen was looking into our CEO, who used to be a seller as well, and was like, "So Nick, how did people used to sell before Zoom?" Was like, "How did people really actually connect? Did you guys, like, most of the times travel?" It's like, huh, yeah, okay.

So let's do the ABC [laughs] of sales.

'Cause a lot of people are just jumping in to that type of a sea of just legacy outbound, that everything is just very, very orchestrated to be s- the same.

So you say that most of B2B outbound today is legacy and high volume, low value, and so on.

So what...

How is it really affecting brands right now?

Yeah.

Being into that stage where it's like how do we actually sell nowadays if it's not that volume?

Mm-hmm.

Um, so something really interesting came up when I was doing research for my book around trust, because I, I wanted to figure out what the real impacts were of, like, reputational harm of, of breaking that trust that we have with our prospective customers and our customers, and the data was, was shocking.

Um, I should have, I should have had it at the top of my mind for this conversation, but it was something like, um, Aon ranked reputational harm to the brand as, like, the number seven overall risk to B2B, of all types of B2B companies globally.

There was a McKinsey report that showed something like, you know, US businesses lost 4.8 billion in revenue because of reputational risk issues.

And so when we connect that back to sales and marketing, to the revenue function, the folks that are most often the front line of the business, right? Like, when, when folks think of most B2B brands, they're thinking of the people that they're interacting with, the people they see posting on LinkedIn, the people cold calling them, the people sending them emails.

So it, it is the function of the sales and marketing departments to uphold the reputation of the organization, of, of being somebody that, you know, a B2B buyer would want to even engage in a sales conversation with.

And what's happening instead is that we have always had this weird dichotomy between taking a quantity or a quality approach.

Like, I've spent so much time reading about it and researching it-

Mm

... and I still don't quite understand why we have this very black and white, like, you either do quality and you spend an hour researching before you pick up the phone once, or you send out 5,000 emails a day, when you and I know that the magic actually happens in, in finding a balance between those.

Mm.

But we have so many folks that have been doing that quantity outreach for so long, and they claim it works because they send out 30,000 emails and they get three opportunities from it, and they don't talk about the 3,000 people that unsubscribed or blocked them, or the people on Reddit writing, like, nasty posts about how they're being harassed by XYZ company in their email, right? They don't talk about all of that reputational harm, because what they're actually doing is spamming.

Like, that, that isn't sales.

Sending out 30,000 generic emails, that is not sales.

And with the advent of AI, those outdated, historic quantity spam practices now are being done at a scale that is disgusting.

It's kind of unfathomable.