Outbound sales is a thing we will need to get really good at as we scale PostHog, as 100% inbound eventually dries up. Most companies like us start thinking about outbound around our ARR. We should start doing stuff now, as if we wait til inbound slows down, we’ll panic and make bad decisions, trash the brand, copy and paste what other boring companies have done in a short-sighted way etc.
What is outbound?
‘Outbound’ means a few different things. So we’re all on the same page, here are the six circles of hell outbound a customer may find themselves in:
- Using PostHog and spending a lot of money
- Using PostHog and spending a little money
- Using PostHog with good engagement/high ICP, but not spending any money
- Person signed up, but not really using, usually just kicking the tires
- Not signed up, but has heard of PostHog
- Not signed up, never heard of PostHog
We’ll call 1-3 ‘warm’ outbound and 4-6 ‘cold’ outbound. Technical Account Managers are responsible for managing leads from warm outbound, in addition to their book of business. Technical Account Executives are responsible for managing leads from cold outbound, in addition to inbound leads (which comprise 90% of leads today).
What we're doing today
Our focus today is entirely on inbound leads and getting much better at warm outbound - we have a huge number of leads that we could be converting better. In addition, we generate leads under category 4, ie. folks who have signed up and:
- Are from a company with 1000+ employees, before they add a card
- Have seen growth in engineer headcount in the last 90/180 days
- Recent fundraising announcement
- Have seen growth in web/social traffic
- Other intent signals for accounts below the TAM line, e.g. pricing page visits
(Right now we only trigger alerts for the first, but want to add more.)
What we're doing next
We're going to try some cold outbound experiments probably in Q4, and it will probably look more like a marketing exercise than a sales one. Most cold outbound is extremely bad, and our ICP is not interested in some AI BDR offering a discovery call. Most companies are bad at cold outbound and as a result spend way too much money on building sales teams that they churn through, and trashing their brand and profitability.
We will want to target companies with the highest spend potential under the vibe-based matrix, not just every giant enterprise under the sun. We are well-positioned to do this now that our brand is extremely well-known - it is much easier to get engagement when the people you are contacting have at least heard of your brand before. We are also building a lot more enterprise-grade features like RBAC etc. that will position us really well to serve these much larger customers, and we've already proven we can handle massive scale.