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TLDR; + ICYMI + some other acronym:

You hire reps to hit numbers. 

You build systems you believe will help them accomplish this.

And yet…

There is a huge gap between the math in your model and the work your reps are doing every day.

In other words: you hired that extra SDR because you needed a lift in performance on pipe gen goals to get to your revenue target.

But then they get in, sit down to work, and everyone simply prays that that extra SDR will get enough meetings that hold, qualify, and convert.

No one does the math of how the day-to-day activity of your outbound reps should convert into opportunities.

(Don’t worry, if you run full cycle sales, this is still for you: you may be doing only 1 hour a day of outbound instead of 8, but that just puts more pressure on the math).

This odd reality is the result of a decade of two things:

Sales tech that is more wishful thinking than anything else. For a while we drank the koolaid on topical intent (reach out to this company if someone who works once googled something related to what we sell); now it’s signals (some of which work, some don’t, but notice how vague everyone is about which ones are best and why). 

This has led to sales leaders who have a “preferred” tech stack (sequencer, data enrichment, dialer) not backed up by any real verifiable data. I once worked with a sales leader who preferred a tool because it had nice dashboards. 

Parallel dialing absolutely sits in this category.

Spotify while you wait to talk to a human, burning numbers and spamming the market but normalizing it, and ultimately most SDRs still struggle to hit quota. They had their run.

Sales thought leadership that is entirely skills-focused, or strategy-focused, but never math-focused. There are a handful of folks out there who zero in on the math. Funny enough, when I ran the deep research on who does lean into this, I ended up with a list of people we already work with, including Ryan Reisert and Outbound Operators of course. I first learned Math of Sales from him, and have been haunted by it (in a good way) ever since. I am not alone.

And while plenty of sales gurus speak on discipline, few tie it to the microeconomics of the daily outbound grind. Or if they do, it’s with antiquated methodologies of multichannel sequences (based on zero real data) or poor benchmarks.

Take for example this sequence setup which went viral a while ago but has zero basis in data. 

There is more to unpack about bad sequence methodology than one would expect, as we try to figure out where outbound thought leadership went wrong. 

Here’s why:

It is a self-evident truth that any new SDR leader has a biased opinion based on magical thinking about the best way to set up a multichannel outbound sequence. (If you say “not me!” that puts you in the 1%).

What wisdom is that sequence based on?

Because it isn’t science.

As a thought experiment, picture how many variables would be required to test the optimal 10-day (not even 14-day) multichannel sequence, I asked Claude Opus 4.7 to help. It did a decent job defining the array of possible “combinatorics” (new word for me) required for testing.

So that’s a very ugly truth: you would need at least 10’s of thousands of sequence formats to find the best approach to a “generalized optimal multichannel sequence” (something that could be cut-and-paste between organizations).

Not to mention you’d need a sufficient sample size to send them to, segmented perfectly, and then measure meaningful responses.

Not to mention most organizations don’t set up their email or phone channels to not get sent to spam or marked as spam.

If this is the current best practice of our day and age, we have a problem. Fortunately, it is becoming less acceptable as a gold standard. But its current replacement - “signals” in the vaguest of senses - is still not math-able.

How many signals will happen in a given month? How do we staff against signal count, response, response rate, and opp creation?

No one knows.

What this means is that - while sales guru-ship worked hard to become metric-oriented (props to the Bowtie from Winning By Design, obviously, and Kellen Casebeer’s Message Market Fit framework, which works for testing) - thought leaders really struggled to marry their wisdom with on-the-ground mechanics of optimizing an outbound team. 

It’s one thing to pull levers on win rates, velocity, and deal size; it’s another entirely to optimize conversations and meetings set.

We have seen this in real-time at SDR conferences, of which there are now quite a few, where most of the currency is in familiarity, brand, cool factor, rather than the real discipline of outbound. And what expertise exists sits safely in the “skill-building” zone, because SDR leaders can control that. And there’s value there, of course, like in Jason Bay’s many excellent videos and courses.

But sales SDR leaders cannot control responsiveness from the market.

This isn’t a pointless inquiry. After all, the entire premise of Predictable Revenue was predicated on a waterfall of math.

My theory is that we gave up.

We gave up because the math was too hard to do.

We gave up because the best practices and “blessed purchases” (an email-centric sequencer with no regard for deliverability and only manual LinkedIn and call steps, a data vendor with an extreme focus on data coverage with no regard for data quality, or now a parallel dialer which causes more problems than it solves) did not help us hit our numbers.

We gave up because it is, in fact, hard to build great lists.

Outbound, which as a discipline did not exist separately from full cycle sales until a little over a decade ago, became too hard to predict.

And if you cannot predict how many meetings or conversations your reps will have, how can you defend them against layoffs? Or argue for resources to grow?

How many conversations will that Extra SDR You Hired To Hit Your Goals have today?

Three?

…One?

………….Zero?

Let’s be honest: we would fire an SDR who never talks to anyone. 

As Kevin Dorsey puts it: “it doesn’t make sense to pay people not to talk to people anymore.”

And if that is the case, that none of us who have led SDR teams (yes I have actually led 4 different teams, no they didn’t hate reporting to marketing), would ever dare to fund a conversation-less rep, then we should be doing our damnedest to make the math make sense.

This, more than anything, is why Joey’s ideas are resonating. Math-oriented sales leaders are starved for ideas they can sink their teeth into, fed up with the malnourishment of volume-based outbound, hungry for a way to win that makes sense of the daily grind.

Think Netflix for outbound sales and the ultimate living guide to building phone-led GTM. We'll add 3+ new videos every month, including extreme transparency into our data & processes.

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Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)

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