Run outreach as an assembly process

1. First, be sure leads are the limit

The premise: this work is for someone who has, hopefully, already found that leads costing too much is what holds the business back. Be clear on that first. If it is not the limit, do the other work instead.

Finding the one limit is SOP 184, and the leads branch of the money question is SOP 196 — Answer the money question, starting with acquisition cost, section 2.

2. Three uses for outreach

Outreach, in general, has three common uses.

1. Customers, directly. The most common practice.
2. Affiliates. The view here is that this use is badly underrated and underused. One example: to win wealthy individuals as clients, it would, in this view, make much more sense to send cold outreach to accounting firms that serve many such people, and strike deals with the firms. Take a lower-leverage route to a person with higher leverage, rather than a low-leverage route to one sale at a time. The view here is that nothing is wrong with selling one to one; it is simply harder.
3. Talent. This one is not nearly discussed enough. Every business is short of demand for something, either for customers or for talent. So outbound can go after high-value targets, employees in particular, the most valuable targets you will get. Rarely, in the view here, will a customer make you more money than an employee will.

Put together: you can point these tools at customers, at affiliates who already have customers, and at employees.

What an affiliate earns is set on SOP 47 — Price affiliate commission off acquisition cost; SOP 48 to SOP 51 take up the terms, a launch into a partner's audience, the lasting arrangement and a lead magnet carried under a partner's name. The talent side, seen as a constraint, is SOP 200 — Treat a supply constraint as demand for talent.

3. The assembly process

Think of outreach as an assembly process. The stages, in order:

Stage	Where on this page
Getting the leads	Section 4
Personalization	Section 5
Qualifying the leads	Sections 6 and 7
Contacting the leads	Section 8
Preparing the sales reps for the leads	Section 9

Beside the stages sit the tools that help with every one of them.

4. Getting the leads

Find where they gather. Work out where your customers spend their time. For selling to other businesses it oftentimes can be LinkedIn; for a local business it might be something like Google Maps.

Choose a lead source. Buy leads, scrape data, or hunt for them by hand. All three work. Buying and scraping can scale further, but if money is tight, hunting by hand works fine too. One manual method, called great here: join the communities where these people are, and learn what they care about and where they spend time. Talk to whoever runs each group and see if you can work on something together. Do not be scammy or strange about it; there are ways to make it good for everyone involved.

Match the platform to the business. Selling software points to LinkedIn's Navigator tool; local services point to Google Maps and Yelp.

Start narrow. Ideally, get good at one way of getting leads before you expand to others.

Scraping, buying from a broker and building a list by hand, with how to test a sample and why you give a group more than you take from it, are on SOP 27 — Build a cold list, section 3.

5. Personalizing at scale

Once the list is in hand, the goal is outreach that does not read as automated, although in fact it is. The simple way to get there: find something about each person that you can mention.

Channel	Something to mention
Email	A LinkedIn post they made recently, or the sports team they like best
Door to door	One example praises a red door and a nice lawn
Cold calling	It might be a detail taken from their website or social media

AI can now automate most of this. You pull recent activity, changes at the company and social posts, and from those, personalized opening lines are generated at scale.

The researched snippet, and why it earns a reading, is SOP 28 — Write a cold message, section 2. The trade between personal touches and volume is weighed on SOP 29 — Set outreach volume, section 4.

6. Qualifying: budget, authority, need and timing

The aim is to collect four things from every lead: budget, authority, need and timing. As questions: can they afford it, with money to spend; can they make the decision; is there a real need; and is now a good time?

The four as application questions, and the case for friction, are on SOP 208 — Set prerequisites, raise lead quality and add friction, sections 7 and 8. SOP 98 carries a different four-letter test for use on a call.

Fold the questions together. You can typically bundle them. If you already know a company's revenue, for example, you do not necessarily need a separate budget question. You can still ask one if you would rather be more direct.

Put the price and the hardest objection on the application. In one company's own sales of a paid event (the example is for that event alone), there is a minimum revenue requirement to attend. On top of that, the application states the ticket price and asks whether it is acceptable. A tip: tell people the price, and have them accept the biggest objection as part of applying. For that event the biggest objection is not wanting to travel, so the application asks whether the person is willing to travel within a set window of time. The result: fewer applications, but more sales overall, and a dramatic gain in efficiency per rep, so each rep closes more. This is the kind of friction meant by raising a funnel's throughput, and such moves are typically counterintuitive.

Let one answer screen. One owner ran a very large business that received a great many applications. They found they could tie 95 percent of their sales to the answer to one question: if they were picked, or if the fit was right, would they be willing to begin as soon as possible, tomorrow, or the following week? The applicants who chose as soon as possible or tomorrow were that 95 percent; the following week produced about zero sales. So they began disqualifying anyone who picked the following week, at once and whatever else they had answered, because those people never bought.

The value of collecting data of this kind is SOP 219 — Find the right customers, screen for them and capture data.

7. Qualify before you reach out

Run the budget, authority, need and timing test before the outreach itself. It could go into your outbound reps' (SDRs') scripts or into an application flow; which one depends on the way you sell. Either way, make sure it is there. It will add friction, and you will earn more, and the trade is worth making.

Signals to check before anyone is contacted, as examples:

• the company's size and revenue;
• whether you are reaching the decision makers, with their assistants as a route to authority;
• pain points peculiar to them, visible in what they post, probably the hardest signal to find;
• for software, recent funding or job postings. People typically do not hire while they are shrinking, so a company that is hiring will at least usually be medium or growing.

8. Contacting the leads

Plenty of tools can multiply your volume. The kinds:

Power dialers. A power dialer calls several numbers at once and connects the rep to the first person who picks up. One team uses one (the example is for that team alone). The recommendation is a dialer of no more than two or three lines; that team probably runs only two. The limit is not about cost: with good pickup rates, which that team has, extra lines waste leads. Two lines with its reps works very well for that team.

No vendor names. No particular vendor is recommended here. Naming one sounds like an endorsement, which it is not; do your own research. These are themes that can work; what works best for your business is yours to find out.

Email automation. Tools already exist that can send personalized emails in bulk, at scale. Cold email is still not dead: as long as people spend a particular kind of attention somewhere, there is a way to advertise there, and what you need is the skill to do it.

Social automation. Direct-message sequences across platforms, with tools such as ManyChat, which is not the only one. It is probably fairly closely tied to Instagram and Meta, so it will be fairly vanilla. That suits one practice: in its view, you never want to put your profile at risk by doing anything sketchy, so it tends to use only very vanilla providers.

Pick the channel by the audience. Ask where they spend their time and which channel they really answer on. Sometimes those two differ; sometimes they are the same.

SOP 29, section 3, separates making a message from sending it and lists automated dialing among the ways to send. For a lead who has opted in, SOP 91 — Run the first-contact channel stack and the double dial starts on every channel and stays on whichever one gets an answer.

9. Prepare the rep before the call

This is strongly recommended as high leverage; preparing for sales calls is badly undervalued. Take about two minutes to learn a fact about a prospect's business and they will think you are very smart and very hardworking.

Give reps something useful before each call:

• recent news or changes at the company;
• pain points the prospect has named;
• any posts, interactions or earlier touches.

These can be summarized, and AI can do all of it now. Ideally, the rep should sound as though they did their homework, with openers in this pattern: I noticed you have just added a second location; I saw that a particular problem is on your plate; I saw a hiring post for a particular role. It shows you are not one more cold caller. Even those first lines can make a huge difference, because nobody wants to be rude to a person who knows a little about them. Once you shift from a stranger to someone they might know, their tone turns polite.

Brief the rep on the four letters too, budget, authority, need and timing, so the call is not spent on pointless qualifying questions.

10. The offer matters most here

A better offer and lead magnet matter enormously. Ranking it at all is uncomfortable, since the offer counts for a great deal in all three methods, but for outreach one would say it probably counts most: a really strong offer, one that stuns people within 60 seconds, is extremely valuable. SOP 28, section 3, asks for the same thing inside a shorter time. Improving the offer and lead magnet, the bucket that bears on ads, organic content and outreach alike, is set out on SOP 209 — Pick a lead bucket, starting with the offer and lead magnet, sections 3 and 4.

11. What this page does not decide for you

• How to find a prospect's own pain points. It is called the hardest signal to find, and no method is given. Not established on this page.
• Whether the route to authority is a prospect's assistants. The phrase is "assistance for authority"; this page reads it as assistants. Not established on this page.
• How far applications fell, or sales rose, once the price and the objection went on the application. This page gives no figure for either change.
• Where the rest of the owner's sales came from. The first two answers account for 95 percent, and the third for about zero. Not established on this page.

12. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Confirm that costly leads are the limit; if not, work elsewhere
2	Decide what the outreach is for: customers, affiliates who have customers, or employees
3	Find where your customers spend time, and match the platform to the business
4	Buy, scrape or hand-hunt a list; ideally get good at one way first, then expand
5	Find one thing to mention for each lead; AI can draft opening lines at scale
6	Qualify on budget, authority, need and timing, typically folding the questions together
7	Put the price and the biggest objection on the application
8	Check signals before contact: size, revenue, decision makers, pain points, funding, hiring
9	Contact through tools; a dialer of two or three lines at most, as recommended here
10	Keep automation vanilla, as one practice tends to, and use the channel the audience answers on
11	Brief each rep: company news, pain points, earlier touches, and the four letters
12	Make the offer strong enough to stun people within 60 seconds

13. Where this sits

• Conferences as a source of leads: SOP 218 — Work conferences with the speaking fee, survey close and booth.
• Enriching your lists and screening for the customers you want: SOP 219, named in section 6.
• A routine for testing what you run: SOP 220 — Run two-round concept testing and promote to control.
• Scoring inbound leads and taking poor fits off the calendar: SOP 84 — Score and route inbound leads, section 1.

14. What this page does not cover

Outreach for talent, set beside outreach for customers, is SOP 200 — Treat a supply constraint as demand for talent, section 10; outreach for salespeople is SOP 252 — Market for salespeople the way you market for prospects, section 6. Choosing a vendor for dialers or automation tools is not covered on this page.