Get leads by reaching out 10 of 14 in this group
SOP 29
Set outreach volume
What this page is for. Use it to decide how many people you contact, how many times, by how many routes, and how much of that you are allowed to automate. It also carries the yield benchmarks, so you can tell whether a bad week is a bad process or an ordinary week.
SOP-29-Set-outreach-volume.md
1. The identity everything on this page moves
Number of people reached out to, multiplied by response rate, equals output.
You can move either term. Push volume up with automation and accept a smaller fraction of replies, because the n is large enough to carry it. Or push the response rate up with personalization and accept fewer sends. The instruction is to do both, and sections 2, 3 and 5 below are the three ways to do it: automate delivery, automate distribution, and follow up more times in more ways.
2. Automate the delivery — how the message gets made
There are two ways to make anything you send: live, or recorded.
| Live | Recorded |
|---|---|
| Saying a script to somebody on the phone | A pre-recorded voicemail dropped into a voicemail box |
| A personal voice memo to each lead | A templated email to an inbox |
| A handwritten card to every person on the list | A templated text to a phone |
| Pre-recorded videos |
Live gets the highest response rates. Recorded gets responses too — just not as good ones. The trade depends on how much money and how much time you have, and it is a real trade rather than a preference.
The extreme case, carried with its condition. An old maxim about sales letters, from an era before any of these platforms and repeated here because the principle survives the era: write as though you had one letter left to make all the money you would ever need. You would probably handwrite it. You would probably put the stamp on yourself. You would probably make the whole card handwritten. That is the extreme because that is the highest response rate — and it costs elbow grease, which is what you spend when you have more time than money. As the money arrives, you start trading the other way.
The middle case is worth knowing about. A live voice memo with the person's name spoken in it, sent as a direct message, gets a much higher response rate, because it took active time to make. That is personalization by a different route — scaling the unscalable.
A condition on this whole section. As machine-generated messages improve, there will be a continuing contest between senders and recipients over whether a given message is genuine. The instruction that survives it: automate as far as you can without sacrificing response rate, and keep watching, because the line moves.
3. Automate the distribution — how the message gets sent
Delivery is the making. Distribution is the sending, and the two automate separately. You can keep the making entirely manual and still automate the sending.
| Manual sending | Automated sending |
|---|---|
| You dial the number | A robot dials several numbers at once |
| You click send on each email | A blast of a thousand emails at once |
| You click send on each text | A thousand texts at once |
| You click send on each direct message | Not established on this page |
| Not established on this page | A thousand voicemails at once |
4. How much automation to use: size the universe first
Generally — not always, because of what machine assistance now does — you sacrifice personalization for scale, and personalized messages get a higher response rate. The rule that follows is the useful part, and it is given as an opinion: the fewer leads you have, the less automation you should use.
Two worked ends of the range:
| The universe | What that implies |
|---|---|
| Selling enterprise software or data to hedge fund managers — only a few thousand of them in the entire United States, at least in the US | A personalized handwritten letter, and probably a personal gift, because each account is probably worth a great deal and there are not many of them |
| Selling weight-loss products to women in the United States — 160 million women, and maybe a hundred million above a qualifying age | You have far more to shoot at, so you might use much more automation |
It depends on what you sell and who you sell it to.
The combination to aim at. Maximum personalization with maximum volume is the best position there is, and technology means you do not always have to trade one for the other. Personal data gets more accessible every day. If you can build the setup that delivers both, you have an unusually effective lead-generating machine.
5. Follow up more times, in more ways
Two separate levers, and both are volume.
More ways. The more routes you try, the more likely you are to reach somebody. People differ in ways you cannot predict from the outside: some ignore phone calls and answer direct messages, some are the reverse.
More times. Contacting somebody repeatedly, and quickly, communicates that you have something important to discuss. Curiosity rises, because they start to fear they are missing something.
The stated pattern. Contact somebody two or three times across email and text and phone, then three times again a few hours later, and three times again a few hours after that. You are far more likely to get a reply from that than from one call with no voicemail left — and one call with no voicemail is what most people actually do before concluding the channel does not work.
Why a non-reply tells you nothing. The person might have been between things. She might have had a whole day out with her family. She might not have needed your thing at that moment and might need it later. None of that is visible to you.
One figure here is unreadable and is not repaired. A number of attempts — nine — sits attached to a phrase about an average, inside a sentence that does not resolve into a claim, so what it is an average of cannot be recovered. The page does not guess at it. This page gives no figure for the average number of attempts required.
6. Work the list again from the top
Once the list is big enough you can keep harvesting it. When you finish contacting it, start again at the top.
The action step: after you have attempted to contact somebody multiple times in multiple ways, wait three to six months, then do it again.
Three reasons that works, and all three are reasons about them rather than about you:
- They might not have seen it.
- They might not have had time to respond.
- Their circumstances have changed.
The one exclusion. Somebody who has asked you not to contact them again is off the list. Not because a second approach could never work — it could — but because for the same effort you could reach somebody who is not already negatively disposed toward you. It is more efficient to turn neutral people into customers than to turn people who have already said no, and a bad reputation follows you around. Try hard, and be respectful.
7. The outreach brief and its volume benchmarks
| Question | The answer |
|---|---|
| Who does this | You — it is one of the things only one person can do |
| What you send | A hook, then a lead magnet or the core offer — a large, quick result |
| Where | Any private communication platform |
| To whom | The list you scraped, bought or assembled |
| When | Every day, seven days a week |
| Why | To get engaged leads, and to sell more |
| How | Live calls, voicemail drops, email blasts, text blasts, direct messages, text messages, video messages, voice messages, direct mail pieces, handwritten cards |
| How much | 100 a day, minimum |
| How many times | Two or three times a day, at least for the first few days; after that, seven days of one a day |
| How long | As long as it takes |
8. If you are new on a team, copy the best person and double the inputs
| Step | What you do |
|---|---|
| 1 | Find the person on the team with the best numbers |
| 2 | Copy exactly what they do — do not get clever |
| 3 | Double their inputs. If they make 200 calls, you make 400 |
| 4 | Change nothing until you beat their numbers |
| 5 | Once you have beaten them, start iterating |
Copy what works before you change it. You are going to be bad before you are good, and volume is how you buy your way through that: enough volume takes luck out of it, and doing twice as many gets you good in half the time.
9. How many leads one person should be given
Give every rep an explicit number of leads to work each week, and expect them to care for those leads like children. Give a rep too many and they will waste them — which is also the argument for getting your own leads at the start, since that is how you learn what one is worth.
| Rule | The number |
|---|---|
| If somebody can work 100 leads at full capacity | Give them 70-ish |
| What the shortfall buys | Time and energy to get everything out of the leads they do have |
| What equal allocation enables | Absolute quotas — 70 leads out, seven appointments back, no leads left behind |
10. The yields
A phone example, with an arithmetic problem in it.
| Stage | Figure |
|---|---|
| Cold calls a day | 100 |
| Pickups | 25 |
| Engaged leads | Four |
| Hours of calling that takes | May take four |
| Engaged leads per hour | One |
Read that table with the disagreement showing. The take-up of the lead magnet among people who picked up is given as a quarter, and a quarter of 25 pickups is roughly six, not four. The surrounding arithmetic — four hours of calling, one engaged lead per hour, four in total — is consistent only with four. The page carries four for that reason and flags the quarter as the figure that does not fit. A second reading puts pickups at 20 rather than 25, still with a quarter taking the lead magnet; a quarter of 20 is five, which does not give four either. This page does not settle which reading is right.
Cost per engaged lead: if you are making the calls, the cost of your time is whatever food it takes to keep you alive. If somebody else is, it is their hourly rate. Either way one engaged lead per hour is not a bad rate of exchange.
An email example, from a company running outbound email only.
| Stage | Figure |
|---|---|
| Open rate — the email equivalent of a pickup | 30 percent |
| Replies, as a share of opens | 10 percent |
| Opportunities | Not tracked in that system |
Multiplied through, 30 percent opening and 10 percent of those replying is about 3 percent of the list becoming engaged leads. The rates will vary; 3 percent is a target to aim for.
A direct-message example. Record a short personal video or voice note for each of 100 people, speaking their name and one line about them, then the usual message. An illustration puts replies at about 20 percent, which is 20 engaged leads. Qualify them for a call with the acknowledge, compliment and ask pattern on SOP 14.
Solve for headcount from the goal. Once you know roughly how many sends make one customer, work backward. Say emails turn into customers at one in 150, and the goal is 60 a month: that is 9,000 emails a month, or 300 a day across thirty days. If one person can send about 75 a day, you need four people sending. The figures in this example are invented.
Count the whole cost of a calling team. Nearly all of the cost of outreach is labor, so count all of it, and the software too. One rep on $18 an hour for a seven-hour day costs $126; a $45 fee for each show they book, at three shows a day, adds $135; and leads at 8 cents each, 300 of them, add $24. That is $285 for three shows, $95 a show. Close one show in four and a customer costs $380. Against $2,500 of profit on a sale, that is a return of about 6.6 to 1. The figures in this example are invented. The floor to hold that ratio against, at least three to one, is on SOP 55; more is better, and three to one is the minimum.
A scaled example, and the conditions it must be read with. One virtual assistant sends 2,000 emails a day using several pieces of software, which is 60,000 emails a month. That generates 40 engaged leads a day, of which about 10 percent are sold — four customers a day, which carried the business past 100 customers a month.
The arithmetic correction on that example. Two different counts appear for the same step: forty customers a day, and four customers a day. Ten percent of 40 engaged leads is four; the arithmetic exercise set immediately afterward is built on four customers a day; and four a day is what carries a business past 100 customers a month. The page carries four.
The conditions, which are not optional. The response rate on that system dropped, because personalization was stripped out to get the volume. The business was a portfolio company that started at $250,000 a month, which was the minimum size accepted at the time — bigger businesses are handled now, so the example is early rather than typical. And the lifetime value there was high enough per customer to make four customers a day worth building for. Do not carry the customer count without the lifetime value that pays for it.
11. What this page does not cover
Building the list is on SOP 27. Writing the message is on SOP 28, and the reading level to write it at is on SOP 31. The voicemail that borrows a third party's name is on SOP 30. The warm-outreach version of the daily rhythm is on SOP 18.
Hiring the people who make these calls, setting their pay, and the legal requirements in your region are not covered on this page.
Terms defined on this page
- Copy before you change
- Copy what already works before improving it: a new rep copies the best performer exactly, doubles their inputs and changes nothing until they beat those numbers; a new advertiser copies competitors until matching their performance, then gets clever.