I’ve mentioned Dave Breshears in this newsletter a few times, most recently with a (complimentary) comparison to everyone’s favorite cantankerous broadcast TV diagnostician, Dr. House.
Dave’s had an unorthodox sales career. He started out as an academic, studying and teaching communication at UT Austin. He didn’t get his first sales role until he was 40. He’s currently running the show at Silicon Hills Revenue Lab where he helps clients (many of them big name SaaS companies you know and love) get their outbound efforts back on track.
One thing I love about Dave is that his social science background means he brings academic rigor to sales processes without ever losing focus on the humans involved—both buyers and sellers.
Dave and I geeked out on a topic near and dear to both our hearts when it comes to sales: capacity. We talked about what capacity really means in a pipeline generation context; how human sellers are simultaneously your biggest bottleneck and the only reason outbound sales works at all; as well as how to find and fix capacity problems.
I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and I think you will too. Watch the video for the full story. Or if you’re an Xennial like me and you still prefer to read words, I’ve pulled out some of the key takeaways below.
1. Capacity ≠ headcount
I think of capacity as the total amount of revenue generating activities that a revenue organization can do in a given period of time. (2:49)
Per Dave, there are two types of revenue-generating work your team can be doing: generating pipeline or closing pipeline. Obviously, teams have to do both. The issue is that capacity is a zero sum game. For every unit of time your team spends on closing pipeline, they can’t spend that time on generating pipeline.
This leads to Dave’s hottest take: if your team relies on outbound to hit your number, full-cycle reps don’t work. You need separate pools of capacity for generating pipeline (i.e. SDRs) and closing pipeline (i.e. AEs).
2. The phone remains undefeated
For every meeting that you were booking with an email, you were booking three of those meetings with a phone call. (20:41)
Dave spent the past couple of years partnered with OneView. They studied outbound channel efficacy across 65 brand-name SaaS companies and they found that the phone was about 3x more effective than email.
It’s no surprise email sucks. Anyone with an inbox can tell you that channel is completely saturated. But it’s not just about the phone being good by comparison with email. Dave argues that the human-to-human, synchronous nature of the phone creates a much better environment for actually setting a meeting since it triggers some human empathy and offers an opportunity to handle objections.
That is, of course, if you can get someone on the phone.
3. Effort is evidence
We earn attention over time through the efforts that give evidence to the prospect that we’re invested in them, that we aren’t just hitting everybody in the universe and moving on. (34:51)
This was probably my favorite part of the conversation. Assuming you’ve got your persona and ICP reasonably dialed in, prospects aren’t really responding to your particular channel or message. They’re responding to the evidence that you’re really trying to reach them and you’re willing to invest the time to do so.
This is why, by the way, multi-touch still matters even though the phone is more effective. Each human touchpoint helps accumulate evidence that you’re investing in the prospect.
This is where automation gets people in trouble. I’ve written about spending human tokens before. The thing that gets a prospect’s attention is signaling that you’re willing to expend costly human effort to reach them which runs in opposition to automation tactics like parallel dialers. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t automate—you should!—but it’s way too easy to do it in a way that removes the evidence of effort that makes outbound more effective.
4. Humans are the bottleneck
A seller can reasonably engage about 80 accounts a month… That suddenly becomes an incredibly restricted set of targets. (52:00)
I’ve written about this many, many, many times. Dave does the same math.
Take a real sequence like 17 touches over 22 days—7 of them calls—and multiply that over 3-5 contacts per account. Once you consider what a rep can actually do, you’ll quickly find that your outbound capacity is far more limited than you realize. Even if your reps are doing 80 dials a day, you’ll probably only fully engage 80-100 accounts a month. It should come as no surprise they’re not covering that 3,000-account territory you gave them.
This is also where a lot of AI-driven scaling starts to break down. AI systems can operate at a speed and scale that humans can’t. The problem is, AI generally can’t set the meeting, and instead funnels a now “warm” prospect to a rep to call. That sounds great in theory but the reality in most orgs means using a lot of human time to call relatively low quality prospects.
Dave’s point is that any AI system that overwhelms the human bottleneck ultimately doesn’t improve outcomes.
5. Get started by looking at task completion
Those aren’t sequences. Those are random acts of prospecting. They don’t earn attention. They don’t demonstrate persistence. (57:00)
Big systemic problems like capacity can seem overwhelming, so I asked Dave to wrap the conversation up with a concrete piece of advice for sales leaders.
His suggestion was to look at these two things:
How many touches per prospect are reps actually completing in their sequences?
How many of those are completed on time?
He’s seen these be predictive of problems in world-class sales development orgs. When OneView pulled sequence data during their engagements, they usually saw sequences built around 12-to-15 touches. The messaging was fine but the problem was in the execution.
On average, reps actually completed about 3 touches and ran them more than a week late. Sometimes this was an effort problem, but most often it was reps getting overwhelmed with all the activities they were being asked to do. That usually meant skipping the highest cost activities (phone) in favor of more automation. Shockingly, conversion rates go down in this case.
So, if those two numbers are off, you should go figure out what’s preventing your reps from getting their touches done on time. You’ll often find they’re over capacity.
And that’s a wrap! Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
