Outbound: Start with the data
Kyle Norton is CRO at Owner.com, where he's taken the go-to-market team from 2.5 million to nearly 100 million in ARR in under four years. Before that, he built Point of Sale go-to-market at Shopify. He hosts The Revenue Leadership Podcast, is a longtime LP at GTM Fund and Stage Two Capital, and founding member and Co-Chapter Head of the Toronto chapter of Pavilion.
In this entry, Kyle argues that outbound has one point of failure — the data. Give reps better data, automate prep, centralize the system-building, and outbound efficiency improves dramatically.
Everything starts with data quality
Whenever I talk about outbound, I come back to one thing: start with the data.
Outbound will ebb and flow. We've gone through periods where outbound carried the day, and others where we were 90% inbound-driven. Right now we're swinging the pendulum back to diversify channel mix and target a certain type of customer.
Our ACV is only $8 to $10k, so how do you make cold outbound work in that world? By obsessing over the quality of the data, and stripping every wasted motion out of your rep's day. Outbound won't work if your BDRs are spending 70% of their day researching leads and calling contacts who aren't the real decision makers. You can maybe book a meeting every two days. You press reps so hard on a dial number of a few hundred a day that they can't find enough high-quality leads to hit it. If you tiered those leads, 25% might be A, 50% B, 25% C. Tier C is who you will never close. The dial number gets hit, but you've wasted your time.
Our ACV is only $8 to $10k, so how do you make cold outbound work in that world? By obsessing over the quality of the data, and stripping every wasted motion out of your rep's day. Outbound won't work if your BDRs are spending 70% of their day researching leads and calling contacts who aren't the real decision makers. You can maybe book a meeting every two days. You press reps so hard on a dial number of a few hundred a day that they can't find enough high-quality leads to hit it. If you tiered those leads, 25% might be A, 50% B, 25% C. Tier C is who you will never close. The dial number gets hit, but you've wasted your time.
No training, hiring profile, call volume or slick techniques can overcome giving your team bad data.
No training, hiring profile, call volume or slick techniques can overcome giving your team bad data.
AI's job is to remove wasted motion
With AI, it's absolutely possible to give your reps only the Glengarry leads — the perfect ones. My top outbound BDR last month generated $174,000 in closed won ARR. Cold. That's one BDR producing two million in ARR in a single year. The historical average was $72k per rep per month closed-won. We're now closer to $120k per BDR. Some of that came from better training or new scripts but a lot of it came from giving them only the leads worth calling.
To make our outbound work, we strip every wasted motion out of the rep's day. We collapsed everything we could into one box we call AI PCR — pre-call research. Our applied AI lead watched our outbound BDRs work and set it up to capture everything between calls. Now, our outbound BDRs make 150 to 250 calls in a day and are still hyper-prepared. That's the kind of thing that becomes possible once the data is right.
Centralize or lose the advantage
Build it in-house like us, use Clay, hire a GTM engineer, or pay a consultant. Once you have the good data, start enriching your ICP. Build a score, deterministic or ML-based, that tells you which leads are worth calling. The point is to keep filling in the map of your target market — who they are, what they use, who you can win against.
Build it in-house like us, use Clay, hire a GTM engineer, or pay a consultant. Once you have the good data, start enriching your ICP. Build a score, deterministic or ML-based, that tells you which leads are worth calling. The point is to keep filling in the map of your target market — who they are, what they use, who you can win against.
But this only works if one person owns it. A lot of teams think the answer is giving every rep a Claude skill and letting them generate their own lead lists. It's not. Maybe if you're really small you have to start there. But somebody has to own the centralization: take in all the good ideas, build them to higher production quality, and deploy one version at scale to every single rep. And it has to be a specialist. Someone trained in AI doesn't just get output that's 50%, or even 100% better. It's 20x better. Expert versus non-expert is so divergent in this category that you need to go get expertise.
But this only works if one person owns it. A lot of teams think the answer is giving every rep a Claude skill and letting them generate their own lead lists. It's not. Maybe if you're really small you have to start there. But somebody has to own the centralization: take in all the good ideas, build them to higher production quality, and deploy one version at scale to every single rep. And it has to be a specialist. Someone trained in AI doesn't just get output that's 50%, or even 100% better. It's 20x better. Expert versus non-expert is so divergent in this category that you need to go get expertise.
Hire applied AI before more reps
The response I always get: “Who's going to do this? We don't have the money.” That's the wrong math. The money you would have spent on half of your BDRs, spend that on a GTM engineer. A GTME is twice the cost of a BDR. Take two of those BDR headcount and put it into one GTME, or pay a consultant. Fix the data first, and everything else gets better.
What's probably more controversial: I don't think your AEs need to be super AI-savvy. Great if they are, and I want to encourage people. But it doesn't move the needle the way people think it does. If I were starting over, I'd hire applied AI early — alongside RevOps, sometimes ahead of it. And if you're hiring a RevOps leader at an early-stage company, they need to be applied AI capable. Hire that person, build the system, and you can build a scorching outbound motion.
Kyle Norton
CRO at Owner
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