RB2B

Andy Mewborn just showed me how he’s generated 44 ops ($440,000 pipeline) in 30 days with FULLY-AUTOMATED 2-touch warm outreach. His 2nd email is SHOCKING [templates below]: BACKGROUND: Andy Mewborn is a master at the craft of selling. He was at Outreach for 8 years. Helping them go from 0 to $250M+ in ARR. He built Taplio and sold it to Guillaume at Lempire. Plus, he’s got 186,000 followers on Linkedin. Now, he’s building a product now will take down Highspot and Seismic. He revealed EVERYTHING during our last Inbound-Led Outbound LIVE. ______________ Here’s Andy’s 4-Step Framework to generate over $440k pipeline in under 30 days with ZERO effort: 1. Lead with credibility. - Andy talks about how he was early at Outreach - Everybody he’s selling to knows the brand - He drops that he has 4k happy users 2. Use as many numbers as possible. - People love numbers, full stop. Use them. - Look at my hooks, his hooks, Chris Walker’s hooks. 3. Craft the killer offer. - In Andy’s case, he’s using the “gift card” play, asking for feedback - I’m sure I’ll get some blowback for saying this is a KILLER offer - (Scoreboard, it’s working for him, he showed us on a webinar) - “Ask for money, get advice, ask for advice, get money.” 4. BONUS: Be a “Known Sender”. - What is the largest determinant of open rates? WHO SENT THE EMAIL. - This is another magical thing about building a large audience. - Many positive replies say, “I love your stuff on LinkedIn”. ______________ Now for Andy’s two-part sequence: 1. TRIGGER: Website visitor identified by RB2B. 2. ACTION: Two-Part Email sequence sent through Instantly Email #1: Subj: feedback Body: Hi {{firstName}}, I was early at Outreach.io. Now I’m building a HIGHSPOT/SEISMIC competitor (3x cheaper & 10x more user-friendly). We currently have ~4000 users that LOVE us. Would you be open to giving honest feedback on the product I’m building? Andy Mewborn Distribute.so, CEO PS…. I’ll compensate you with a $100 GIFT CARD for your time. Email #2: Subject: [n/a] Body: …if you aren’t interested feel free to tell me to go kick rocks  :-) ______________ TAKEAWAY: Everybody loves to talk about how outbound is dead. Meanwhile, Andy is using an intent signal to book demos while he sleeps. How is this possible? I believe it’s because he’s doing Inbound-Led Outbound. Interested in learning more about this type of warm outbound? I’m doing a live webinar with the Lempire team. It’s tomorrow (July 16) at 12pm EDT. Register here: https://lnkd.in/gdwH2bjS

In 2020, when I joined Apollo as the President & COO, they were stuck at single-digit ARR for over five years. Here’s the 6-step GTM playbook they used to get unstuck and become a billion dollar behemoth: BACKGROUND: Four years ago, the B2B data market was just as crowded as it is today. With companies like... ZoomInfo, D&B, Lusha, RocketReach, Cognism, LeadIQ, 6Sense, Seamless, Uplead, Lead411 and many more. ZoomInfo and D&B were clearly the market leaders and most other companies followed their product and GTM strategies as a recipe for success.  But not Apollo. They took a different path. Here’s the 6-step GTM playbook they used to differentiate themselves and become a Unicorn: 1. Do something different: - If you do not have a differentiated product then go for a differentiated GTM - Apollo doubled down on PLG as their primary GTM channel while other vendors focused on enterprise sales with PLG as their secondary channel 2. Follow trends, fulfill unmet demand: - Getting the timing right is important when pursuing a contrarian strategy - The timing for Apollo’s PLG approach was perfect because Covid created massive demand for SMB data tools 3. Brand Awareness: - Apollo’s Programmatic SEO was not helpful for enterprise sales but it helped accelerate SMB and individual sales - Perpetually free plans and low priced plans ensured word of mouth virality 4. Hiring the right team: - When doing PLG it is important to build a low cost sales structure with low monthly quotas where reps celebrate $5K/yr deals and not ignore single seat opps  - Bulk of the inbound sales team was hired out of LATAM with relatively high ROI    5. Understand SMB Churn: - SMBs are cost conscious and churn rapidly. If they get access to multiple tools for the same price, it can reduce churn. - SMBs only use 20% of the feature set of enterprises. Perfect use case to develop an entire GTM stack for the same price to increase stickiness 6. Turning power users/ agencies into brand advocates : - With individual solutions that are free, it is common to get millions of ‘indebted’ users. Most companies do not squeeze enough value of these free users.   - Leveraging these users on social media to generate UGC content can significantly increase brand recognition and amplify outreach Of course, there was much more to it.. That's why tomorrow (at 12pm PT), in a LIVE session with Adam Robinson, I'm breaking down in detail the GTM playbook Apollo used to go from single-digit ARR, to exponential revenue growth and landing a $100M investment from Sequoia. Register here: https://lnkd.in/gWzUUrzF

If you’re in SaaS you may not recognize this guy, but every serious entrepreneur needs to study him. Why? Because he bootstrapped his SaaS startup to $100M ARR in just 36 months. Here are 8 lessons I’ve learned from Russell Brunson and Clickfunnels that you should implement in everything you do, starting today: 1. Start posting content every day Russell started a daily podcast in his car on the way to work where he published experiments he was doing, what was working, and what wasn’t. He stuck with it for years and woke up to thousands of fans saying they binged every episode. Slowly becoming an “expert” over time created the possibility of $100m ARR. 2. Deeply understand the psychology of your prospects If you understand the deepest fears and biggest dreams of your prospects, you can create messaging that pierces the hearts of your target audience. 3. Make sure your offer ISN’T incremental People are not looking for a better version of what’s not working for them. You need to offer a new vehicle. 4. Master one-to-many selling This was the true unlock, and something no one else has done. Russell was spending $3K driving traffic to a weekly webinar that made on average $50k in yearly subscriptions. Not kidding. The secret: he bundled/value stacked info products WITH his SaaS (and positioned the subscription to the SaaS as “free”). 5. Create a category Russell created a website builder when there were 100s of them, but positioned it as a “sales funnel builder” and had zero competition (for a bit) in that new category. 6. Have ugly branding The first time I saw the Clickfunnels website, I couldn't believe it. It looked like a kindergartener made it. Like everybody else in SaaS, I blew them off, only to find that it was the fastest growing bootstrapped SaaS ever. 7. Start a movement Russell studied the biggest movements in history - good and bad - and dialed them down to 3 key components: A charismatic leader, a new opportunity and a future-based cause. Russell created a tribe called Funnel Hackers and his 2 Comma Club to celebrate the most successful members. He’s a religious-level figure to many. 8. Stay bootstrapped! Infusionsoft tried to acquire Clickfunnels for $35m early on and VCs were beating the door down. Russell wanted to stay bootstrapped. TAKEAWAY: Russell Brunson would crush anything he set out to do. Even so, it’s SHOCKING he could bootstrap $100m ARR selling a $97/mo product to vSMB. What’s even more insane is that it’s been almost 5 years and no one has tried to replicate his playbook in SaaS. I believe that Russell’s go-to-market strategy: 1. Driving people to a live event 2. Using an influencer to do one-to-many selling 3. Value-stacking tech with info, tools and templates …is the future of GTM. I’m sure the sellers of $1M unbudgeted tech will push back and say “no way”. And maybe for complex and expensive enterprise tech, that’s true. But for everybody else, I have just one question... Why not?

I'm getting a ton of pissed off SaaS GTM leaders in my LinkedIn comments saying, “Isn’t Inbound-Led Outbound JUST marketing?” Here's my response to haters (like Mark Kosoglow) and a breakdown of Inbound-Led Outbound 101: BACKGROUND: - I’ve been calling the GTM motion I’m building at RB2B “Inbound-Led Outbound” - It revolves around Influencer-led content activity that drives website visits - Those site visits trigger messaging from the influencer that create business outcomes Part One: The Influencer-Led Model 1. TikTok’s interest-based algorithm and LinkedIn’s thought leadership ad ushered in an era of high-quality organic content being exponentially more valuable than paid ads. 2. Think about how much more focus you’re giving this post than a carousel of similar businesses using ZoomInfo or an obvious case study interview. 3. The best organic content creators build more trust than any other marketing mechanisms. They are building human-to-human connection at scale. 4. The kicker is we immediately know when they have created something great, and can inexpensively promote it to target prospects with ads. I believe Executive-level influencer marketing is the most capital efficient way to generate awareness that has ever existed. We haven’t fully accepted this yet in B2B. The output of Part One for me at RB2B is: - LinkedIn posts every other day - Guest spots many podcasts/webinars in B2B as possible - Try to give keynotes whenever people will have me Part Two: Capture the Site Visit at the Person-Level We believe that a site visit is the best intent signal available, by far. Before RB2B, company-level website visitor identity was ubiquitous. But there is the obvious limitation of needing to know who the actual person is. With RB2B, we can now capture contact information at the person-level and trigger sales workflows. Part Three: Warm Outreach From the Influencer An underlying assumption of the Inbound-Led Outbound thesis is that response rates are steadily trending towards zero. Who will prospects respond to when there is so much inbox noise? 1. Someone they know and trust 2. If it’s the perfect message at the perfect time Said differently, if I were to send an email or LinkedIn message to a regular engager in my audience, they will probably respond. If someone on my team were to email that person, the response rate would be much lower. Here’s the magic of the influencer’s profile doing the outreach: The influencer can book the meeting, but they don't have to take the call. These profiles are more than just marketing machines. They are scalable sales machines. Outreach for us means: - Pushing our site visitors to a Clay table - Filtering for ICP - Sending an AI email through Smartlead Which converts at 11%. Outreach for you might mean: - Filter to ICP - Connect on LI - Add to email flow - Make a warm call However you book outbound demos, just do the same thing. *Post continued in comments 👇

Customer Acquisition Costs are about to explode. Here's why the next great $1B Unicorn Startups will compete and differentiate on CAC not Product (and the 2 GTM strategies that will generate billions in revenue): BACKGROUND As the pace of AI-based product development picks up, the price of building apps decreases, and the number of market substitutes will increase, driving CAC to unthinkable levels. The fastest growing SaaS companies will use Partnerships and LinkedIn Influencer Marketing to lower CAC and cut through the noise. Here's a breakdown: 1. Partnerships As new business dries up and all business shifts to competitive displacements - lead sharing and account intel sharing will become rampant. Partnership is the most exciting and underlooked jobs of the future It's one of the last non-linear growth opportunities still left unharvested That's why companies that get partnership right will grow faster. We will see companies decide who in their user stack to automatically share their leads with that are not directly competitive to each other through a platform like Crossbeam We will see the rise of automated systems where you select a few vendors from a tech stack and a demo video with pricing and packaging can be generated in real time along with a provisioned license of an instance with just those 4 tools integrated with automated APIs  We will see AI systems where you punch in a prospect and the system will spit out the different ways to approach the prospect via joint solutions with 5 different vendors. Along with best message to pitch and the least friction point for the prospect to enable them to displace other vendors.  2. Linkedin Influencer Marketing Attracting audience to listen to your pitch will become a much larger business than it is now. In B2C, influencers are not only creating demand but also fulfilling demand in the same session while providing entertainment. B2B will follow suit.  We will see Influencers combining entertainment and education in the same session all designed to drive demand and instant signups. Top 1% of the sales reps, Marketers, Recruiters, Vendors, Engineers will all be influencers Right now influencers get measured on content engagement. As it becomes easier to measure actual units of demand created (not likes or comments) the way these Influencers are measured and incentivized will also undergo a change making their approach more strategic. Today's successful B2B influencers are sharing tactical best practices on Linkedin to get traction. Popular Linkedin Influencers of the future will do a lot more research on content and audience in collaboration with Product marketing folks. They will craft a strategic narrative to connect with the audience to build intense demand for the solutions they are promoting. That's how I see it anyway. What do you think?

Over the past 10 years, I’ve bootstrapped startups $0-$1M three times. Each time was TWICE as fast with HALF the resources. Here’s the breakdown of what I did, how long it took, and how many FTEs we had: 1. Robly Email Marketing January 2014 - May 2015 - Took 17 Months, staff of 25 when we hit it - Entirely sales-led - We had a call center to book a $35/mo subscription and did a 1-to-1 manual onboarding (it was a really, really good list) - Stalled out at $3m ARR, sold to PE in 2020 for $10m 2. GetEmails (now Retention.com) November 2019 - April 2020 - Took 27 weeks, staff of 6 when we hit it - Did Facebook ads, drove a 15min demo - Diana Ross did a thousands of them - Currently $21.7m ARR, 27% total margin 4.5 years later 3. RB2B March 2022 - June 2022 - Took 16 weeks, staff of 5 when we hit it - Founder-brand driven Inbound-led Outbound (mostly Linkedin) - Check out our dashboard (in comments 👇) for up-to-the-minute metrics TAKEAWAY: Startups are HARD. The longer you do this, the more skilled you become at the craft. We’re all looking to capture lightning in a bottle. Each swing you take, you’re closer to it. Keep building.

I’ve now worked with 100+ founders, marketers, and salespeople setting up RB2B workflows. Here are 8 surprising use cases that companies are using to turn signals into revenue (besides booking demos): 1. Which pages drive ICP traffic - We wildly underestimated value proposition here - We need to make our own dashboards and offer a small upsell 2. Cross-selling existing customers from product pages - Morgan at Chili Piper gets credit for this one 3. Multithreading across customers - Sendoso use case #1 - Buying groups are the MOST valuable use of the intent signal - We’re building buying group functionality 4. Finding lookalike site visitors of successful customers - Sendoso use case #2 - I personally love it - although it’s fairly similar to an ICP visitor 5. Looking at competitors on your site - Who doesn’t want to know who’s snooping around? - You can see which pages they are paying the most attention to 6. Looking at investors on your site - Even if you’re not raising in 2024, still need to know who is thirsty 7. Discovering new ICPs on your site - Akooda use case #1 - 13% of their organic traffic is HEALTHCARE, reading about problems they solve 8. Current customers clicking on support pages - This one saved us with our biggest customer at Retention.com - They were looking at deliverability issue page, we saved the day, and customer TAKEAWAY: The power of Person-Level Website Visitor Identity goes far beyond booking demos. Our creative customers are figuring out new use cases every day. It’s helping us help our existing customers get more value out of the tool. It’s also helping us build out our product roadmap. Most importantly - it’s helping churn!!! Thank you RB2B community for being so badass and figuring all this stuff out. P.S. Tomorrow at 1pm EDT I'm doing a LIVE event with Clay and Sendspark to teach you how to convert "signals" into revenue. We'll show you exactly how to capture website visitors, enhance that with Clay, and then automate personalized videos for each person. Register here: https://lu.ma/55ob97py

In the next 18 months, Enterprises' increasing investments in AI will come at the expense of existing technology spend, causing a decrease in SaaS revenues. If you're a SaaS founder, here's how you survive: BACKGROUND Enterprises worldwide have spent $154B on AI solutions in the first half of 2024 According to a recent IDC forecast, GenAI spending will continue to enjoy over +70% CAGR between 2024-2027 But with high interest rates, we are seeing slower than usual revenue growth for the buyers. AI is expensive and a typical AI budget includes costs for infrastructure, hardware, hosting, data acquisition, R&D and salaries. So where is all this money for AI coming from? I see two areas that may contribute towards an increase in AI budget in the absence of high growth in revenues. 1. Decrease in overall spending on SaaS and non AI purchases  2. Decrease in overall hiring with increased employee productivity So what do you if you are a SaaS founder? Remember... As the market shrinks, it also provides non-linear opportunities to some. Here are a 6 things SaaS founders can do to complete against shifting budgets: 1. Realize that most growth in future will come from competitive displacements and not net new growth 2. Integrate AI capabilities in your own SaaS as buyers start to reward SaaS tools with AI capabilities 3. Identify and dominate a Niche or Vertical markets 4. Develop partnerships, ecosystems and community 5. Build marketing and thought leadership for your community 6. Review pricing to stay competitive for your niche In the short run (next 18 months), there will be some pain for SaaS companies that fail to react effectively to these evolving times. Some will even go out of business. But, In the long run (2026+) SaaS companies will thrive with increased operational efficiencies and enhanced user experience with the use of AI. We will eventually enter a decade of digital transformation opportunities where buyers switch to an AI first paradigm causing one of the biggest bull runs the tech world has ever seen. Just make sure your SaaS business survives to witness it. 

Sales KILLED sales. Don't take my word for it. That's what Kevin "KD" Dorsey told me. The way we do outbound makes it 10x harder on all of us to do outbound. Here are real #'s KD saw on the frontlines: Connect Rates: 2020: 12-17% Today: 3-4% Open Rates: 2020: 50-60% Today: 25-30% Response Rates to a sequence (emails 1-4): 2020: 10% -> 8% -> 6% -> 4% Today: 5% -> 4% -> 3% -> 1% I'm sure you're thinking: "Adam, of course outbound is harder now. There is SO MUCH more of it." True, but... The more we do the worse we also seem to get at it! That's not how it should work. Personalized emails objectively perform better. Yet 93% of emails sent today are automated. Why? Because companies are addicted to speed and scale. They've forgotten what “good” looks like. Here's how we fight back: We have to create messaging that is so good that it survives in a low engagement environment. What does that mean? We need to start building our outbound machines based on inbound signals. Here's a few suggestions from KD: 1. Huddle with marketing. - What are our highest performing headlines? >> make subject lines of emails - What are our best performing content pieces? >> lead with value - What are our best short/long tail keywords? >> speak to problems 2. Start with email - Start with your highest ACV/lowest churn/stickiest buyer persona - Create persona and industry-specific messaging - Make the messaging problem-based - Drive inbound w/ outbound activity 3. Stack calls on top of email engagement. - Every vertical has a different pickup rate w/ calls. - Use what you learned in email to formulate the call scripts. - If your email inboxed, the iPhone MIGHT add your name to callerID (big win) 4. Iterate - Forever - Never stop - Keep testing TAKEAWAY: If you’re selling on the frontlines (or running a team of sellers), you know outbound is harder than it used to be. That doesn’t mean it’s not the SINGLE BEST WAY to scale your startup. But the engagement rates from 2015-2021 aren't coming back. We must fight back against endless sequences and mindless automation. We have to create better, personalized messaging. We have build a better, more efficient, signal-based machine. It’s time to sell better.

If I was a first-time startup founder, I would not aim to build a $1B unicorn. VCs will hate this, but here's why you should think SMALLER and try to create a $3m-5m ARR profitable SaaS instead: 1. It’s relatively easy to get a small, profitable SaaS working. One extreme of entrepreneurship is the solo consultant, the other is sending people to Mars. SaaS is somewhere in the middle. Smaller goals mean smaller teams and less complicated products, probably no management layers, no big expensive tech, no SOC2, etc. 2. It’s much easier to bootstrap a small, profitable SaaS.  If all you’re trying to do is get to sub-$5m ARR, you can very likely build a solution that exploits a small hole in a very large market, and do it quite profitably. You won’t need VCs to sign off on your idea, which means far more ideas are available to you. 3. Your odds of success are much higher if you are aiming lower. According to Notion Capital, 3% of startups make it to $100m ARR, whereas 60% stall out between $3m-$10m ARR. You are 20x more likely to be successful if your endgame is single-digit ARR.  This might be a hard pill to swallow, but as a first-time founder you are probably not skilled enough at execution to pull off a unicorn. I never have, and I’m 12 years in. 4. You will learn VERY VALUABLE lessons as you fight to $3-$5m ARR. Just because you aren’t shooting for the moon doesn’t mean you won’t learn many of the exact same lessons you’d learn if you were playing much bigger. I learned SOOO many things about teams, product, sales, and marketing being stuck for 4 years at $3m ARR.  5. You will be able to start a bigger, better startup with the free cash.  GetEmails (now Retention.com) was the result of 3 years of experiments inside of Robly and currently has 7x the revenue and 4x the free cash. RB2B is being funded by Retention’s free cash, and looks like it could be much larger.  6. You will eventually enter the Bootstrapper’s “Promised Land”. While you and your co-founders may not be excited about $4m ARR with $1.5m of free cash, if your second startup is 3x bigger and your next is 3x bigger than that, you will be in a position where you are being paid the equivalent of a small exit EVERY YEAR with resources to do whatever you want.  TAKEAWAY  Starting a SaaS startup is hard.  Especially as a first-time founder.  Lowering your ambition will increase your chances of your success. And smaller successes in the short-term can compound into much larger successes down the road. VCs will try to interfere with this restrained ambition. They want you to aim higher, grow faster, build more complicated products, and hire more people. All while incinerating capital as quickly as you are willing to tolerate.  That won’t maximize your probability-weighted average of long-term success. The most important rule of the game is simple: Stay alive so that you can keep playing.