Consider two companies with similar offers running the exact same outbound campaign:

• Company A has a website with tons of social proof, they have a decent number of reviews on G2, and the founder is easily found on LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Company B has just a placeholder website, zero social proof, and the founder doesn’t even list the company on his LinkedIn profile.

Which company do you think will have a higher reply rate?

Which company do you think will close more deals?

The answer is obvious.

But it’s nevertheless the most overlooked aspect of cold outbound.

Nowadays buyers are extremely sophisticated and everyone is bombarded with cold emails.

So even if they get a message that spells out precisely a problem they’re struggling with and offers a no-brainer solution, people don’t hit that reply button right away.

They do their research first.

They check the website, type in the company name and person that sent the email on Google.

If they don’t find much, they’ll ignore the email.

So one of the biggest levers you can pull to improve your outbound results is to work on what shows up when people search for your company and your name.

Doing that kind of shadow work will do more for your outbound results than any fancy copywriting, personalization, or automation.

It’s really the biggest difference between a cold email that gets ignored and one that gets a reply.

So if you’re not getting the results you want from your outbound, start by doing some shadow work.

“When we launched, we did a lot of brand campaigns. PR, billboards all over SF, events, podcasts and more. We focused our outbound efforts on companies who had likely heard of us through one of these channels. Only after Brex became a household name in our target market (tech startups) did we allow SDR’s and AE’s to reach out to anyone they wanted.” - Sam Blond