What outbound actually costs, and how to tell if it will work for you

The honest answer to whether outbound will pay back is that we are not sure.

Outbound works for ten to fifteen percent of companies within the first three months, if they are lucky. For sixty to seventy percent it takes anywhere from three months to the more likely twelve. And for twenty to thirty percent of companies, it might never work at all.

That last number is the one people want removed from the page. It stays, because there is a structured way to increase the probability that outbound works for you, or to reach a definitive answer that it is not your channel. Both of those are useful outcomes. Only one of them is usually planned for.

First, the horizon

Take a nine to twelve month view. Have the bandwidth, the budget and the headspace allocated for that horizon before you start.

If you cannot do that, the honest suggestion is not to get into outbound at all. This is not a hedge. A programme that stops after four months has not run a short experiment, it has run no experiment, and the money is gone either way.

Then targeting, before anything else

Think very deeply about targeting before you think about anything else. If you get the right company at the right time, that is fifty percent of your outbound battle solved. You are already winning.

It is the most important lever you can pull, and the other two are not close.

The second lever is the offer

Messaging matters, and the key to getting messaging right is the offer. An offer is something of value you give a prospect to start building a relationship.

A good one has three properties. It gives them value without needing them to invest significant time, effort or money. It gives them value without needing them to become a customer. And it demonstrates your authority in the problem you solve, so that even if nobody takes you up on it, the mere fact that you have such an offer in place builds your credibility.

Getting the offer right is critical to cracking outbound. It is also the part most companies skip, because it is the part that looks like giving something away.

The third lever is channel, and there are not many

Email, widely used. LinkedIn connections and DMs. WhatsApp sometimes. Cold calls. Most outbound plans include email, LinkedIn and calls in some combination.

On calls specifically, there is a threshold worth knowing before you budget for them. If you are selling a product or service under ten thousand dollars in annual contract value, cold calls are not a viable channel for you, and getting to ROI will be extremely challenging. You need to get very good at the automated channels that scale without humans.

The further north of ten thousand you go, the more relevant calling becomes. The same is true if you sit in a commoditised industry, and if you are a nice-to-have rather than a must-have solution.

Think in pods, not in budgets

The question is not what outbound costs. It is: what is the smallest pod of people, process and technology you need in order to prove that outbound works at all?

Only once that one pod is delivering consistent, ROI-positive results do you scale, and you scale by adding pods rather than by enlarging the first one.

The numbers to build your own estimate with

These are benchmarks we work to. They are close enough to plan against.

• Engaging one individual over email: about five cents per person per month, at the very highest.
• LinkedIn connections and DMs: about twenty cents per person per month, if you are fully automating it.
• Mobile numbers: roughly thirty cents per number. Each individual needs an average of seven calls to actually get on a line.
• A sales rep: about two thousand dollars a month in India, closer to five thousand in the US. Add twenty percent on top for enablement.
• Data and tooling: two to five hundred dollars a month, depending on whether you need mobile numbers.

Do not underestimate enablement

Most outbound fails not from a lack of ability but from a lack of enablement. And enablement is not only the right tooling and the right training. Most importantly it is consistent headspace.

Outbound is a living organism. It is a plant. If you stop feeding it for a couple of weeks it is going to die, and you will have to build that pipeline again from scratch.

Concretely, that means somebody senior. It could be the founder, the head of sales, the head of marketing or revenue. Somebody with experience and fine-tuned judgement, thinking about outbound for at least an hour every single day, without fail.

And each sales rep needs about three hours every week spent on improving their cold calls.

If you do not have that hour a day from someone senior, the rest of the arithmetic does not matter. That is the input most likely to be missing and least likely to be budgeted.

One floor before you model anything

You cannot run experiments on a subset of fewer than two thousand leads. For us that is the absolute minimum, so that you can run on a thousand people each, every forty-five days.

It is fine if it is the same thousand people. You run different offers on them every forty-five to sixty days and see what gives you results. But you need at least two thousand.

On the higher side, ten thousand. Beyond that you need certain extra capabilities to keep noise levels low, so that the experiments still yield readable results.

The fifteen minutes

With those numbers, work out how many companies and how many individuals you are targeting, what your offer will cost you to deliver, and which channels you are activating. Cold calls will likely be your largest line.

Plot the expected monthly budget, multiply by twelve, and you have your number.

If that number is one you are not willing to commit to for a year, that is genuinely worth knowing now rather than in month seven. It frees you to put the same money into performance ads, organic search, partnerships or events instead, which for a lot of companies is the right answer.

And if you do commit

Get the targeting right. Think deeply about the messaging and the offer. Make sure your distribution infrastructure is stable, which does not mean great, it means stable enough that it stops being a variable.

Then run extremely controlled experiments, where only one variable out of targeting, messaging or channel changes while everything else is held constant. Relentless A/B testing to find that one elusive combination that gives you a predictable number of meetings each month.

Do that and you give yourself the best chance of cracking outbound, or of knowing that you gave it your best shot and it is not for you.

Side Kick runs outbound as controlled experiments. One variable, two groups, one deciding metric named before anything goes out. If you want a second pair of eyes on the numbers above before you commit a year to them, that conversation is free.