#28: Why sales-owned organizations are transforming into marketing-led ones

Why your outbound strategy needs to evolve, and how sales-owned orgs are turning into marketing-led machines to cut CAC, build trust, and actually convert.

What if I told you that your outbound will never be like before, and you need to change now?

Would you actually listen to me and change something?

According to Forrester, 66% of buyers consider the content they are served as “useless.”

(But since you know me by now, let’s pretend that everyone reading this falls into the lucky 34% of engaged ones.)

Why do I care?

Before I dive deeper, let me establish my authority on this topic first:

I’ve built my entire business around outbound. And unlike others who simply built businesses to make money and scale what already existed → we R&D-ed the whole thing from scratch.

We were obsessed with creating the outbound bible. Here’s what that obsession looks like today:

• We’ve always sourced our own leads. Even now, we have around 60 people focused solely on lead research.

• We spend almost two-tenths of our entire revenue just to ensure our clients get the best leads.

• Even with AI getting better every day, we still maintain a 10-person copywriting team dedicated to crafting creative outbound strategies.

• We’ve spent millions of dollars building Folderly, our flagship email deliverability product, while still keeping a full deliverability team designing smart warm-up strategies for every client.

• And of course, our SDRs...
  With a gigantic library of playbooks, canned responses, psychological frameworks, meeting booking techniques, and quality assurance systems.

This obsession with delivering meetings paid off:

↳ When some companies delivered 10 meetings, we delivered 20.

↳ When some agencies retained clients for 3 months, we retained them for 6, 9, even 12 months.

And that's why I have strong opinions about what’s happening now, and why outbound needs to evolve.

The moment we failed

Having said that, we became too relaxed in our understanding of the game.

We felt that our playbook was the best.

That there was no way it could be done better.

That we had done everything humanly possible to maximize the results of outbound.

Our belief was simple:

If you maximize each part of the process, you can trick the game.

But reality eventually caught up with us:

The entry point for outbound has become the easiest in history.

You can now pay $50 for an Apollo subscription or $200 to set up a few tools like Instantly, Clay, and others, and you instantly have:

• Unlimited access to lead lists

• Outreach tools

• Automation systems that let anyone run outbound at a decent level

Information today is everywhere.

Modern outbound playbooks are incredibly rich, from basic approaches to sophisticated Clay workflows, and they are available for free.

It doesn’t matter if you are junior or senior, technical or non-technical, marketing or sales, everyone now has the ability to run outbound at scale like never before.

Then came AI.

Suddenly, international companies became more confident with their messaging. Wherever you are based, American-native-like copywriting became a default setting.

Think about it:

In 2018, a business executive would receive around 200 cold pitches per month.

By 2022, that number grew to 400.

And it has continued growing at 20% year after year since then.

If anyone can do it at a low cost, using similar playbooks, tools, and resources, then how could anyone expect to win?

Old playbook

Now, thinking about clients. Even back in 2018, some smart ass like me could write a simple conversational email:

"Hi, if I could generate leads for you at 1/4 of your in-house cost, would you be interested in chatting?"

and get attention.

But in 2025?

We’ve seen it all.

We’ve tried it all.

Direct, personalization, video, memes, HTML, links, every trick in the book.

Why the hell should I care now?

Well... you don’t.

Even if you use a smart ass approach and somehow grab attention, the buying intent of such prospects is so low they won’t translate into real deals, resulting in poor ROI.

Leads without intent.

Clients without deals.

That's not how you build a business, right?

We were too relaxed.

Thinking it doesn’t matter.

Thinking these huge shifts wouldn’t affect us.

Thinking we could still deliver results by leaning on our years-tested playbook.

That worked...

Until 2022.

During executive meetings that year, we started noticing something alarming:
Cost per appointment for our clients was growing 10% to 20% year over year. And not in a good way.

The bell rang louder in 2023.

It had officially become too expensive for small businesses to get even 5 meetings for a $5k monthly spend, still trying to rely on the old outbound playbook.

↳ It became too expensive for our clients.

↳ It became too expensive for us.

And the conversation was never the same again. The playbook didn’t work anymore.

My journey

I took it as my personal responsibility to figure out the solution.

I had been heading our marketing team for some time now, and we had spent around $2 million a year on our own marketing, including a full team of internal BDRs pushing hard on outbound.

And guess what?

Our own appointments cost a fraction of what our clients had been paying.

So my job became crystal clear:

Figure out what Belkins does differently and apply it to help our clients reduce their cost of acquisition.

We started with research. We needed to understand how B2B buyer behavior had changed.

Here’s what we found:

↳ It now takes over 70 touchpoints across at least 6 channels to generate leads with real intent.

↳ 75% of buyers do their own research before ever engaging with sales.

↳ Brand reputation is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s now a core trust factor for buyers deciding who actually delivers value.

Marketing BDRs

Then, we turned to our BDR team.

At that time, they had been part of our marketing function for about a year, not sales.

(That shift alone was a game-changer.)

They were the first ones to leverage multiple marketing initiatives alongside outbound:

• Industry reports

• Tailored landing pages

• Video marketing

• Webinars

• Podcasts

• Gated content

• Comprehensive articles

All aimed at engaging and nurturing prospects' intent.

As a result, we were able to reduce our own acquisition costs dramatically, both by tuning and optimizing our messaging over time, and by deeply integrating marketing nurturing into every piece of our lead generation engine.

We looked at attribution as a new source of deals.

But honestly?

We realized it wasn’t just about attribution, it was about nurturing the new audience properly, which contributed even more than we initially thought.

Lastly, we analyzed the conversions across different audience segments:

↳ When we worked with industries we had exposure to like technology →
our conversion rates were strong.

↳ When we ventured into less familiar industries like manufacturing or construction → our conversations dropped by half.

Yeah.
Half.

The Future of Outbound

As a result of all this work, I was able to determine a few critical truths:

1. You cannot expect high conversions when entering less established industries.

When you move into an industry you haven't yet built brand trust in, you cannot expect the same results you’ve seen elsewhere at least not within the first 12 months.

You need to be ready to spend at least 50% more to break through the noise, then optimize over time.

2. Marketing plays a bigger role in outbound success than ever before.

Without marketing support, you are simply running outbound into a void.

Outbound alone can no longer build enough trust at scale. You need a marketing injection to move prospects forward, or else, you will plateau at the same weak results over and over.

3. All strategies must be revenue-driven, not function-driven.

There’s no such thing as "sales targets" and "marketing targets" anymore.

There’s only pipeline targets. Revenue targets.

Both sales and marketing must live and breathe the same goals: creating new clients, generating new revenue.

Brand awareness is not the goal.

It’s the byproduct of successful sales-driven strategies.

4. Your company has more marketing channels than you think.

It’s not just your company LinkedIn page.

It’s not just your newsletter subscriber list.

It’s not just your PR efforts.

Every outbound touchpoint counts:

• Emails

• Phone calls

• LinkedIn messages

• Personal posts

• Even casual outreach from anyone on your team

All of it is your marketing.

Your SDRs and BDRs should be actively promoting your marketing assets: articles, case studies, gated content, webinars because outbound should fuel marketing, not operate in a silo.

5. Everyone is now part of the brand communication team.

It’s not just "marketing's job" anymore. It’s everyone's job, including your Heads, your Executives, your C-level team.

Everyone needs to contribute to opening up new industries and conversations:

• Sending invites

• Launching surveys

• Sharing personal posts

• Talking about their experiences with your company

Personal branding isn’t optional anymore. It’s a core part of healthy, modern marketing.

6. A clean lead list is your secret weapon.

You cannot run personalized, targeted campaigns without an updated, accurate database.

Whether it’s a partner like Belkins, your in-house RevOps, or a CRM manager, someone must own the responsibility for maintaining data quality.

SDRs are no longer just booking meetings.

They are data collectors, enriching your CRM with every touchpoint.

Outbound is now a data enrichment engine, not just a meeting engine.

7. Your CRM must pull data from every touchpoint, or you’ll lose.

In 2025, it’s non-negotiable.

At Belkins, we use HubSpot, which pulls everything:

• Ad interactions

• Social engagements

• Email opens

• LinkedIn messages

• Phone calls

• Website visits

Every touchpoint. Every signal. All neatly tracked on contact, company, and deal level.

If your sales and marketing teams are split across Salesforce, HubSpot, and 4 other platforms?

You’ve already lost the game.

One CRM. One environment. One truth.

8. Your messaging must be updated and aligned across every channel.

Your buyers don’t care if marketing thinks they're X and sales thinks they’re Y.
They just see confusion.

You need one unified story across:

• Webpage copy

• LinkedIn posts

• Paid ads

• SDR messaging

• Content pieces

Alignment should be an ongoing, dedicated initiative owned by someone responsible for keeping the story consistent across all touchpoints.

And remember:

You can’t send SDRs into new industries without marketing backing them up with landing pages, case studies, ads, webinars, social proof → the full arsenal.

9. You must be willing to take a little risk to succeed in marketing today.

Here’s the hard truth:

If you’re scared to step on toes, you’re not going to win.

Running marketing in 2025 means:

• LinkedIn might block your page for automation.

• Microsoft might restrict your mailbox access.

• Privacy laws might complicate your outreach.

There’s always risk.

But if you check 9 out of 10 compliance boxes and leave one grey area unchecked to move forward, you’re still doing better than sitting still and getting crushed by red tape.

I’ve seen too many good campaigns die before they ever saw the light of day because internal compliance or IT blocked them out of fear.

Courage beats perfection.

10. Strategy is still your bedrock of success.

Ah yes, the "scary" strategy word.

For years, marketers turned "strategy" into a monster. A huge, inflated, month-long exercise just to feel more important.

Not anymore.

Thanks to AI, you can now build a real strategy without wasting months.

Here’s the simple, effective 2-stage strategy you should use:

Stage 1: Explore Broadly.

• Pick 3-5 major industries.

• Map all potential buyer personas.

• Run multiple A/B test cadences around different:

  • Approaches

  • Pain points

  • Hooks

  • Offers

You should run this for 3-4 months minimum. The more tests you run, the better, but make sure you allow enough time for real data.

A good baseline:

• 500 prospects per testing group

• 1-2 months of testing cadence

• 15 touchpoints (5 emails, 5 LinkedIn touches, 5 calls)

You’ll likely book appointments along the way. Not all will convert into pipeline, but that’s not the goal yet.

Your goal in Stage 1 is finding your sweet spot.

Stage 2: Focus Deeply.

• Now that you know the best industry and buyer group, go deeper.

• Focus on 3-5 sub-industries within your top-performing vertical.

• Build out the full buying committee (4-5 roles involved in decision-making).

• Research:

  • Unique challenges

  • Pain points

  • Objectives

  • How your product/service helps each role

Then map out every single channel you have:

• Cold email

• LinkedIn

• Cold calling

• Paid ads

• Webinars

• Case studies

• Gated content

• Industry events

Logically rank your channels:

• Top of funnel (awareness) → blog articles, industry reports

• Middle of funnel (authority) → case studies, solution content

• Bottom of funnel (conversion) → cold calls, event invites

If you want to dive deeper into this journey mapping,
this article will help → Omnichannel Customer Journey

Deploy your staged acquisition plan, cycle through your entire list,
collect high-intent leads, then move to personalized 1-1 outreach.

And don’t stop.

Keep optimizing your messaging for at least 12 months.

Then add 1-2 more industries every year.

In 5 years, you’ll have fully personalized journeys for 4-5 industries,
each with multiple unique buying committees mapped out.

That’s how you build an unstoppable marketing machine.

Within this strategy, your SDRs are no longer just appointment setters.

They are the bridge between sales and marketing.

Owning the entire pipeline from the initial connection with a brand-new audience to nurturing buying intent all the way toward the decision point.

Your organization transforms into a marketing beast.

Closing message

Over time, you become really good at this.

• Your case studies are sharper.

• Your ads are more compelling.

• Your webinar library expands with true value.

• Your website content hits closer to the real challenges your buyers face.

• Your conversions go up.

All your data gets logged.

It’s cleaned, maintained, and repurposed to fuel even more precise marketing nurturing.

You get a real-time, constantly improving view of your ideal customers.

Across every stage.

Across every channel.

↳ You speak your industry’s language.
↳ You address real challenges.
↳ You offer real solutions.
↳ You show up with insights no one else can copy.

And guess what?

✅ AI LLMs will love this.
✅ Google rankings will reward this.
✅ Your customers will love it too.

Because you are not playing a volume game anymore, you are playing a value game.

This is the transformation.

From a sales-owned organization into a marketing-led, sales-driven machine that doesn’t just survive the next wave of competition

It dominates.