#4 Tech Sales Circa 2005
In 2005:
LinkedIn had 1 million people
Email was primarily used for internal communication
People picked up all of their phone calls
2023 - LinkedIn has a billion users, the average person gets 100 emails a day (none of which are internal), and no one picks up the phone from an unrecognized number.
Generating pipeline would’ve been so easy 18 years ago…
In the early aughts, tech company’s employed full-cycle field reps who relied on rolodexes to drum up pipeline and close deals.
There were also a 100x fewer technology companies and CIO’s were responsible for all tech decisions/budget. So as long as you had a rolodex of great CIOs, this process worked well.
But Salesforce and EMC changed the game.
Yes, their technology was innovative and set the stage for digital transformation across the enterprise - stretching technology decisions beyond the CIO seat.
The real gamechanger, however, was standardizing the SDR function as the primary growth engine for tech companies.
Up until that point, “boiler room” cold callers only existed in the financial industry. Since entry-level brokers didn’t have their Series 7, they passed leads to a certified broker who could close the deal.
With the phone/email channels largely clear for their outreach, much of SFDC and EMC’s explosive growth can be credited to this innovation. Especially Salesforce.
Over the next several years, a number of macro shifts led this practice to explode in popularity.
In 2008 interest rates went to zero which led to increased VC activity and significant cost reductions to build technology.
With more money flooding into the system and more technology being built on top of each other, the B2B tech sector exploded between 2005 and 2023.
It also resulted in an explosion of SDR teams. When the name of the game is grow, grow, grow to gain market share and beat the competition, investing large sums of capital into professional cold-callers is a non-issue.
Over time this fertile landscape became a polluted landfill. In 2023 we are lucky to get a reply from a highly personalized email, and nobody picks up the phone. Execs bucket everything to spam and are conditioned to ignore unknown numbers.
What will happen?
We’ve already seen layoffs which will continue in the short-term. But this also means a significant reduction in the saturation of phone/email/Linkedin outreach. Anyone able to ride out this period and make it to the other side will see a rebound in conversion rates from those channels.
Creative/personalized outreach will rule the day. With all the noise and inevitably some bad product experiences over the past decade, buyers will require more trust and relationship-building during their decision-making process. Showing you know their business, their KPIs and them personally, will be critical to getting in the door and ultimately winning the business.
The solution here is to hire a lean team of strategic sales development reps who spend their days on highly creative outreach. You will invest a lot to ensure they stay with the organization for many, many years as they are the company’s future sales leaders.
To take advantage of the opening up of cold channels, invest in an outsourcing partner dedicated to high-volume outreach that will accelerate pipeline generation at a fraction of the cost.