Is doubling down on outbound the right move?
May 15, 2025
I was chatting with a sales ops leader that wanted to automate his inbound pipeline.
Meaning - have an AI automatically qualify, research and respond to each lead, only booking meetings with those that are qualified.
His reason?
- Inbound was a small chunk of the pipeline
- Often they weren’t great quality leads
- And it was distracting his team from outbound, which they historically booked the most meetings from
As we got talking, we realized that wasn’t the most valuable use case for AI.
His team focused so hard on outbound because historically the conversion rate has been super low.
So low that they focused on breaking into an extremely limited number of accounts. And when they had that focus, they were able to book meetings with high quality leads.
So instead of automating inbound, we focused on using AI to automate account research, message generation, follow ups and scheduling. All the steps needed to break into an enterprise account.
My lesson?
When we use AI to amplify non-winning processes, the value we get is in time saved.
But when we use AI to amplify winning processes, the value we get should directly impact revenue.
