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- We Built a Brand on One Channel. Then It Stopped Working.
We Built a Brand on One Channel. Then It Stopped Working.
How abandoning our old playbook tripled our pipeline
Last November, our pipeline fell off a cliff. We went from 30 SQLs a month to 11.
So I burned our GTM motion to the ground. We brought back our old BDR Colton Mathews. He 3xed our pipeline in a quarter on LinkedIn. Here's how:
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Jason AI is a conversational AI tool focused on enhancing B2B sales processes. It acts as a personal assistant to sales teams by automating outreach sequences, handling responses from prospects, and booking meetings.
The team was great, but the market had shifted.
Deal sizes were shrinking, the opportunities landing in our DMs were primarily from smaller companies, and November was bone dry for net new pipeline.
We completely killed our philosophy on content-led outbound.
We built a brand on "content-led outbound is the only way to book pipeline."
And that meant we had overlooked other channels of acquisition entirely. I spoke with friends on LinkedIn crushing it on cold email and cold calling to target larger buyers. Pipeline doesn't care about the source. A meeting is a meeting.
Our DM game hadn't evolved in 12 months. Prospects were agreeing to meetings then ghosting.
The game had changed. Everyone's in the DMs now.
We progressed towards asking more casual probing questions. Like:
"I think I need to get better positioning?"
us: "what makes you feel like you need better positioning?"
Colton and I tested different openers and realised the following insights:
Nailing your first message is all about landing a response.
Using a closed-ended question to start convos gets more responses.
Most prospects will only respond after the 2nd-3rd touch.
Don't be scared of the length of the messages, the more it looks like you've -DM'd your thoughts on the go the higher the response rate.
Creating intrigue to get them to want to understand "how your system works" is the biggest needle mover.
I got incredibly strict on what is a qualified meeting.
Before, any booked meeting with ICP counted. That created pipeline problems.
Now Colton only gets paid if the call has 2-3 of: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline.
No more calendars full of useless meetings.
Turned our entire prospecting engine into signal-led.
Before we were just reactively contacting people from content and running some cold outbound. Now my BDR is using Clay + Apify to look for signals.
Have people raised recently? Are they looking for a GTM? We are focusing outbound on the section of the market who has the greatest need for our services.
We doubled down on human-led GTM.
Sure we could automate pretty much every part of this process but everyone is doing that. A great motion still needs a great operator in the loop. Colton and I work as a team. He writes scripts.
If I'm required to follow up with a lead I will record a voice note.
A mix of automation + real human touch has taken us to booking a meeting every single day from our team.
The result?
Higher quality pipeline with the right ICP.
We are back to former pipeline flow at 30 meetings last month.
And we are enjoying the process of slinging deals again.
Sometimes you've got to kill your darlings.
What worked to get you this far won't be what takes you to your next growth goal.