What is Channel Validated Outbound?

It’s an alternative to the pervasive multi-channel approach that most companies run.

Multi-channel outbound relies on reps executing lots of activities across email, phone and LinkedIn in the hopes of starting a conversation with a prospect.

But outbound sales is becoming more difficult - connect rates are declining across all channels (fewer people pick up the phone, email deliverability is declining dramatically and LinkedIn spam bots crowd the platform).

In recent years most organizations responded to this by throwing more headcount at the problem. The logic is, more reps executing more activities should help us reach our revenue goals. On the surface this is sound. Afterall, the equation for outbound is a simple one:

Activities X Connect Rate X Conversion Rate = Meetings Booked

Problem is, this is expensive. The all in cost for a rep is somewhere around $100K per year. Which is fine when companies can raise at 50-100X ARR, not so much in the new reality.

So what’s the solution today? Channel Validation.

Channel validation as I mentioned earlier, is an alternative to multi-channel outbound.

Channel validated outbound allows reps to start conversations with prospects with far fewer activities. The reason is, they’re reaching out to people through a channel that they know the prospect is active in.

A rep executing channel validated outbound:

• Cold calls prospects that they know pick up the phone.
• Runs sophisticated social selling sequences on prospects active on LinkedIn
• And uses email to reach everyone else (because why call people that don’t pick up).

Channel Validated outbound begins with a channel validation process. Basically just answering two questions for each person the rep wants to have a conversation with:

1. Does this person take cold calls?
2. Are they active on LinkedIn (not do they have a profile, but are they active on the platform)

The answer to these two questions helps to group prospects into one of four buckets:

1. Phone and LinkedIn Validated
2. Phone Validated
3. LinkedIn Validated
4. Failed Validation

(if you want access to the sequence structure for each validation status click here)

Why do it?

Channel Validation allows reps to execute time intensive activities like cold calling and LinkedIn Social Selling on prospects that are actually going to engage with them in those channels.

To give you tangible examples - a Series B SaaS company selling to VPs of Sales, used to get 6% connect rates on cold calls prior to implementing channel validation. They now get 27% connect rates.

So now when a rep makes 60 dials in a day they have 16 conversations instead of 3.

Reason enough for you?

Want to test it out?

If you want to run a Channel Validated Prospecting pilot ($500) schedule a call in here and we’ll help you get it set-up.

Want the sequence templates - get those here

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