Struggling with outbound? Here’s a checklist to solve the real problems

Outbound Troubleshooting 101

Dec 01, 2024

Read time: 2 min

👋 Hey, Elric here! Welcome to this week’s free edition of Outbound Kitchen. Every week, I dig into real questions on scaling outbound to make it your #1 growth engine.

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A VP of sales hit me up saying:

“Our Outbound BDR team isn’t performing. Help!”

Whether you’re a GTM leader or a rep struggling, here’s the truth: Firing isn’t the fix.

I made a checklist to find the real bottleneck in your process or team.

Use it to solve the problem:

Checklist: Outbound Troubleshooting 101

1. Work backward from problem identification

First, identify what needs fixing. What’s the plan to improve it? And how will you know when it’s working?

2. Metrics to track

These are the metrics you should focus on to uncover the problem:

Show rate:

How soon are they booking meetings? (Ideally within 3 days)
Are calendar invites accepted during the call?
Are they selling the value of the demo?
Are they raising a problem worth addressing in the meeting?
Who are they booking with?

Deal size

End user team size targeted
Are they targeting the right tier (Tier 1, 2, or 3)?

Meetings set

Are they hitting the required number of activities?
How much time is wasted on non-pipeline-generating activities like calling bad numbers, targeting the wrong accounts, or researching?
Pre-research: Are they building lists with talk tracks?

Daily activity goals

How many conversations per day?
Minimum 50 calls for BDRs.
Are emails relevant? Are frameworks up to date?
What’s the timing on their activities?
What industries and titles are they targeting?

Conversation Quality - cold calls

Review the latest call scores.
Call Dispositions: where do most calls end? Are they hanging up too early?
What's their tone?
Are they asking the right questions to uncover prospect problems?
And most importantly, are they asking for the meeting? If not, why?

Then you can go deeper into each channel metric:

Cold calling
Cold emailing
Social selling channels: LinkedIn
Etc

But most of the time the problems will be:

3. Common outbound problems

All spam, no quality. Or all quality, no volume.
BDRs stuck on tasks that don’t drive pipeline, and revenue.
No motivation, no tools, no support.
Weak onboarding, zero enablement, no training or coaching.
No structure for 1:1s
No operational discipline.

4. Potential Solutions

Enablement: Build stronger business acumen and problem acumen.
Create a solid outbound data infrastructure.
Offer clear expectations, career paths and individual coaching.

Firing isn’t the fix.

Broken processes are the real problem (95% of the time).

What’s your go-to checklist when outbound isn’t hitting?

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