#30: PART 2 - Modern Marketing Playbook for Non-Marketers. Everything Easy You Need to Know About Complicated "Omni"
Part 2 of the non-marketer's guide to building an omnichannel strategy that actually works without the BS, complexity, or need for a marketing degree.
Are we rolling? 🎬 PART 1 if you missed it.
Think about your marketing as a mechanism for building touchpoints with prospects.
The equation is simple: More touchpoints → Stronger brand recognition → Higher engagement rate → Increased likelihood of them talking to you first
You can build touchpoints via any channel at your disposal.
The Current (Broken) Approach
Most outbound teams cycle through leads once every 3 to 6 months with a cadence of 3-5 steps.
That's not enough.
Cadences of more than 5-10 steps become annoying for people, because most follow-ups after 3 always go like this:
"Did you see my email?"
"Putting this on top of your inbox"
"ANSWER ME"
The result: With this approach and no other marketing channels except direct outreach being implemented, you literally just touch the surface and move on to another batch, not being able to establish brand presence.
The Touchpoint Multiplication Strategy
What I propose instead is to think about how you can build as many touchpoints with a selected group of ideal prospects.
LinkedIn connections:
Not just from your AEs' pages
Add founder-led sales → Amazing!
Throw your delivery team into the mix
Your AMs too → Yes!
Let's connect all of us
Content strategy: Writing blog articles? What do you write about?
If you connect your content (make sure it's authentic and expert-led) to the main pain points and solutions of your personas, send them in your:
Emails
LinkedIn messages
Posts
Direct mail (😊)
For them to read it.
Organize webinars, events, or maybe run ads, build surveys, whatever you do, focus on building meaningful touchpoints with value for people.
The golden rule:
Relevancy is better than personalization.
If you are relevant, authentic, and have things to say, you will be heard.
SDR as Part of Marketing Growth Function. The Model That's Breaking
The well-established view in the last decade is that SDRs/BDRs should be part of the sales function, focusing on generating new business via direct outreach, while marketing's job is to build inbound funnels to contribute X opportunities to what BDRs are generating.
Think of this as 2+2 = 4.
Both typically work apart:
SDRs get feedback directly from AEs about how meetings go and who to attack next
Marketing focuses on highly qualified deals and closed clients to build back the targeting
This formula worked well during 2010, maybe up to 2020, during the days of rising Gong, Salesforce, and other outbound-led sales motions.
However, looking at this in 2025, we all can agree on the following:
Problem #1: The SDR Identity Crisis
SDRs cannot book meetings directly with decision makers leveraging their personal profiles. No one wants to get on a call with an SDR.
We trick people, saying that SDRs are GTMs, Managers, Consultants, or other titles. But not an SDR. Why is that?
We don't want to be sold to or handed off.
John Barrows (I just quote him too many times these days, although we've only spoken three times) said to me that the problem of top- and bottom-of-the-funnel split for SDRs and AEs is that it's not built around what clients want, but around how to scale a sales machine.
Which is exactly what Salesforce was doing.
What about clients?
Now, buyers are in charge. They don't want SDRs. They want to be in control of their buyer journey and have a feeling that they engage only when they want.
Problem #2: The Farmer AE Evolution
AEs/SEs, by being fed meetings for the last 10 to 15 years, forgot how to build their own book of business.
They:
Don't build their personal brands anymore
Don't strive to become SMEs
Handle 50 booked meetings each month
Use solution-selling playbooks similar to customer success
In other words, they became farmers, not hunter-gatherers.
Watch the BlackBerry movie on Netflix. There's a character, Jim Balsillie, typical sales of 1996. Direct, arrogant, go-getter, result-oriented, success-hungry, blah blah blah. In modern corporate realities—toxic. While at the same time, he's great at making deals, marketing product, creating slogans and content, picking up the phone, flying to meetings, basically, he handles the process end-to-end: "Give me a product and I'll sell it."Does it resemble modern AEs? Unfortunately, not really.
AEs now want everything to be handed to them on a silver plate: leads, tools, scripts, playbooks, guidelines, collaterals.
Their scope is narrowed down to what 20 years before would be only 1/3 of the spectrum that AEs needed to develop.
We are to blame, we are who leveraged the Salesforce top-and-bottom model.
Problem #3: The 60+ Touchpoint Reality
Clients need more than a pitch deck or a demo call. We need more than 60+ touchpoints across multiple communication channels to convert buyers.
This means that marketing attribution in its general meaning ("what channel drives more conversions, I'll put more money there") has become less effective.
Direct outreach either doesn't work in its original sense to drive opportunities and has transformed into:
Building connections
Intelligence gathering
Communications
Content distribution
Nurturing
With opportunities being a successful byproduct of this motion. With automation or without it. With AI or without it.
The Great Migration: SDRs → Marketing
Marketing has become the most important function in business. Since marketing is more active than ever and needs to move faster, it requires additional capabilities.
SDRs will move from sales to marketing.
They know what marketing has been missing 3 new channels: social prospecting, cold email, calling. Marketing will deploy them to do the following:
Gather data
Build and verify lists
Get intent
Test messaging
Tailor buyer journeys
Distribute relevant content
Assist in building playbooks
Sales will eventually move to full-cycle sales with AEs owning the entire relationship end-to-end.
This is also what Salesloft and Marc Niemec, their CRO, believe and that's where their company is positioned, as discussed in one of my recent episodes of the Belkins podcast → stay tuned, it’s coming!
The transformation: SDRs will transform into growth/revenue functions with automated or semi-AI-automated agentic processes.
What Does This All Have in Common with Omni?
All of this combines together:
Deep understanding and relevance of your messaging for buyers
Very robust data hygiene and list-building policies
Building touchpoints around buying committees
Leveraging SDRs as a growth marketing function
These are all omnichannel characteristics.
Omnichannel will be the future of all effective playbooks. It actually already is, but we'll see more companies trying to implement it.
It's more effective and easier to run than ABM.
Definitely costs less.
The Bottom Line
We started with "I should just write a book" because omni seemed too complicated.
But here's what it really is:
Omni = Treating your buyers like humans who exist across multiple channels, not targets in a single channel. It's not about being everywhere at once. It's about being in the right place at the right time with the right message, consistently.
The companies still doing multichannel spray-and-pray will keep feeling like that annoying rep who calls 5 times a day.
The ones who get omni? They'll be the Aaron Brownings who stay top of mind without being top of inbox.
1:1 Business Consulting
I've been invited to join Intro.co to be able to provide 1:1 consulting and coaching for folks who are building agencies or want to leverage my sales and marketing experience.
Feel free to book me at the following link → intro.co/michaelmaximoff
Thank you for reading part 2 of my marketing-related collection!
Good read