Cold Outreach Isn't Dead. Your Playbook Might Be.

Full transcript

Neil Anderson 00:09
Let's kick this off. My name is Neil Anderson. I'm the co-author of Outcome Marketing and co-founder of the company Outcome Marketing, and welcome to Outcome Marketing Live on LinkedIn. I'm joined by Michael Maximoff, co-founder of Belkins. Belkins has run outbound for a thousand-plus B2B companies since 2017, across more than 50 industries. So when the market says something isn't working, Michael is the guy with the data to tell us whether it's the channel that broke or the playbook that broke. Michael, take a minute and give us your intro, and then we can jump into the discussion.

Michael Maximoff 00:54
Neil, thanks for having me. I always enjoy talking to you. When we hang out we come up with really cool ideas and exchange news and trends, so I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. I know we don't have much time, but I hope it's productive for us and for the folks listening. I started Belkins about ten years ago. Historically we did a lot of cold email lead generation. Over the years our playbook transformed, and now we do omnichannel, full-funnel acquisition end to end. We call ourselves a pipeline generation partner, a funnel builder, because at the end of the day we're all about outcomes, and I think that's what resonates between what you do and what we do.

Michael Maximoff 01:58
Very often people go on LinkedIn and read about something that worked for someone, and they don't think about outcomes. But I've been about outcomes since day one, because we started guaranteeing outcomes in the contract. That was our differentiation early on, when we were the underdog with no budget and no name. There was a big company called Science back then, and I remember analyzing how we could compete with them. I knew I needed to change my value proposition to a model where I could guarantee results. So we were the first to say we'll book you 10 or 20 meetings in the first three months, put it in the contract, and if not, we work for free. That was my pitch coming up.

Neil Anderson 03:17
We're going to spend time on outcomes today, but I want to start with what I'll call the noise problem. You've been in the business a long time, so have I. I have hundreds of unread emails in my inbox. My LinkedIn direct messages are becoming a graveyard. I never pick up the phone when the caller ID shows a name or a number I don't know. With all this noise coming at people, what does your playbook say you should do to break through and even get engagement, a conversation, a phone call, an email answered? What's your secret sauce?

Michael Maximoff 04:25
Noise is a big problem, and now with AI it's bigger. We've done a study since 2022. On average, a decision maker got around 100 to 150 cold emails per month in 2022. In 2023 it was 200. In 2024, 250. In 2026 it can be 600 or 700. It's doubled, and we know why. Access to data is cheap. Anyone can get Apollo for 20 bucks and pull leads, and now there's AI automation on top of it.

Michael Maximoff 05:20
The way I look at it, and the way I want my customers to look at it, is that dealing with the noise takes patience. Impatience in marketing is a sin right now. I get it. I'm a CEO, I have a marketing budget, I want to put it to work and get results in the first month or two. But that doesn't work. If you do that, you generate a lot of noise, a lot of emails and messages, because you haven't built any relationship with the person you're talking to. You just start selling to them.

Michael Maximoff 05:54
So my best playbook, and what I offer clients, is this. Say we build a list of 1,000 people we want to do business with. Let's not sell to them right off the bat. Let's not pitch our services. Let's start by building a relationship. Connect with people, like their posts, start a conversation through a few comments, share something if you have something going on. But don't expect a conversion right away. Those people have never heard of you. You don't know whether they have a problem. So why would they listen to you and then let you sell to them? It takes more time to develop and nurture those relationships, but if you think of it as a long-term thing, six months or twelve months instead of two, and you know you'll eventually do business with people on that list, then the script looks very different.

Michael Maximoff 07:04
When I asked myself that question, and I knew I wasn't in a hurry, my job became: how many people do I talk to in a day or a month? How many do I connect with? How many learn about my business? How many resonate with what I think, and how many can I discuss things with? If that's the goal rather than how many meetings I book, you can be successful. Now people will ask how you build pipeline if you're only doing this nurturing kind of marketing, and that's fair. The point is that marketing is a broad spectrum. You have multiple campaigns, strategies and playbooks going on, and you can't only apply one. If you do this on LinkedIn and nothing else, no content, no newsletter, no meeting people, no conferences, no direct outreach to people you know, no reaching out to existing clients, you won't be a very successful marketer. If you do all of those things while being patient and smart about the noise, eventually you'll be very happy. Does that ring a bell?

Neil Anderson 08:43
It makes total sense, and it leads to an adjacent question. You run a business with a lot of employees who do this work, so you have to have a playbook. On one end of the spectrum is the playbook, and on the other end is expertise. A smart operator could wing it and do good work. But if you're running a company with dozens of people doing this, you need some sense of a playbook. Where do you find the balance between the expertise of a smart operator and a playbook, which could be rigid and structured: step one, step two, step three, this month, next month?

Michael Maximoff 09:46
It's an interesting question. Since we're on LinkedIn Live, go and check out any CEO, any smart operator of a software business that's coming up. They're all doing marketing. They're all posting, trying to understand how to build the brand of their business. In 2026 it's not an option to be an operator and not be good at marketing. Everyone needs to be, even employees and contributors. That's why I built an internal tool to help my team post more. We have an internal currency people can exchange for company merch and perks by posting on LinkedIn. I'm not even asking them to post about Belkins. Just post about your job, what you're passionate about, try creating content, try building an audience. Over time, the more people in the organization with strong brands, the better the organization does, because when a client or a candidate looks at who works there, they see a lot of great people and think that company might be doing something special.

Michael Maximoff 11:31
I moved away from the question a little, but what I'm saying is that before, it was a balance-seeking situation: I don't need to do that, I can hire smart people to do it for me. Now that's not an option. You need to be good at marketing and good at sales, because if you're not, you're missing out. I can't just be an operator and a robot at this point. Robots can't succeed. It makes you think about how you develop taste, because what we're all building is brands. Brand is important because you want people to feel something when they deal with you and your organization. You can't build that without actual people, founders, owners, operators, managers, going out there. Businesses aren't only about the transaction any more. Think about how many CRMs there are, how many ERPs. Why deal with Salesforce or not? Why deal with one agency and not another, when there are so many appointment-setting companies in my space? Maybe people know Belkins more than others, with our weird name. We wanted to create a brand people resonate with, and to do that, we operators had to learn. I don't have a marketing background. I was taught marketing over the years, and I had to write.

Neil Anderson 13:35
You've done very well, Michael. No podcast would be complete without a discussion of AI, but I don't want to talk about AI itself. I want to talk about one or two of the big changes it's made to marketing. I have an expression I use: AI is the great leveler. It's helped everyone be good at research, at strategy, at content and copy, at making beautiful artifacts. Now even crappy marketers are up where excellent marketers used to be. One thing that leveling effect has done is get people looking at outcomes. It's no longer activity. It's no longer a beautiful slide deck, because we can produce a beautiful slide deck in hours, a strategy in days or weeks, a plan in days or weeks that used to take months. So how do you stand out?

Neil Anderson 15:12
I remember pre-pandemic when someone emailed me with personalization, something about what I was doing with one of my clients, referring to messaging on our website, and I thought, this is really smart. Now that's table stakes. Everyone does it, and it almost makes me want to gag, especially when they get it a little wrong. They take something from your website and twist it, and you know you're being played. So how do you get to people without them feeling played? What's differentiating any more?

Michael Maximoff 16:05
Great question, and I have a lot of thoughts. I saw an interesting image lately. Before AI, we had a few ideas, most of them were implemented, and more people used them. Now you have many more ideas, fewer people implementing them, and even fewer using them. Which brings me to the point about AI slop. On paper it's not slop. If you build a marketing strategy with AI, put in your value proposition and your ICP, go to Claude and do extensive research, the strategy on paper looks cool. It tells you the right things in the right order. You can't argue with it. It's tailored to you, it packages you in a way that makes sense. That's what AI does right now: it makes sense. It's logical, nice looking, compact. And that's what a lot of people are doing. They get this amazing brochure of a strategy, and then: fine, what do I do with it? How do I implement it? That's where the problem is, because AI can't implement it for you.

Michael Maximoff 17:56
When you and I work on something complex, we go back and forth. When you work on the book, or your podcast, or a newsletter. I've done 50 editions of my newsletter, and I spend hours on edits. At the end it looks nice, but I've done 10 or 20 edits, because I knew the first version was average. If I thought my first version was great, I'd never do an edit. That's what AI does. It presents your first version as a great, complex, nice-looking strategy, and you never ask whether it could be better, because it looks smart.

Michael Maximoff 19:03
So how do you differentiate? At the end of the day, when an expert works on a strategy, that's what leads to outcomes. When I take ownership of something and say I'm going to do this, it means I'll drive the idea to implementation and to actual life, and I'll deliver the outcomes. Then the client doesn't care whether I used AI or not. They got the outcome, the ten meetings, the client. But to get that client I probably changed the AI strategy 20 or 50 times. I spent nights on it, because whatever it gave me initially would never work. It's the same with product. I'm building AI products now, and when I build one I think it's amazing. I send it to the people who'll use it and they say it's a bad product, this isn't how we work. I'm building a tool for my content team right now to automate some of their work, and they keep giving me that feedback, and I keep changing it, and then I realize they're right. Then my partner shows me his amazing product and the first thing I say is, you'll probably change it a hundred times.

Michael Maximoff 20:35
Which brings me back to the noise. If we take whatever AI gives us for granted and post it, or run the strategy it gave us, we probably won't get the outcomes we're looking for. That's why we see headlines about Meta focusing on AI, firing staff, then having more AI problems, more slop, more code and less work getting done, and wanting people back. You need someone who takes that information, works with it for a hundred hours, gets something decent out of it, and provides the outcome. If my AI fails at something I can't fire my AI. But people have the instinct: I need to get this done, I need to be creative and hard working, I need to provide those outcomes, because if I don't I'll get fired and I need to pay my rent. That's a philosophical point, and I see you smiling, but I think it's natural, and all of us are doing it with AI. We're just not talking about it.

Michael Maximoff 21:55
If a client comes to us and we ask for the ICP, and they send an ICP they built with AI, our first reaction is that we can use it as the foundation, but over the next two months we'll change and adjust it, because if we only rely on that ideal client profile we'll probably fail the campaign. That's why, with the AI SDR companies right now, you go to San Francisco and see the banners: AI 2.0, virtual employee, we'll do your pipeline while you sleep, we'll build the strategy, you just pay us two thousand or five thousand dollars and the rest is solved. We'll do the messaging, we'll sell to your clients, we'll do everything. And we all know what happens at the end. So don't do that.

Neil Anderson 23:02
We have time for one more topic, an evolution of the same one. We've talked tactics, noise and playbooks. I want to talk about selling outcomes. The whole go-to-market model is changing. When I was with Chief Outsiders we talked about big-M marketing, or holistic marketing, or strategic marketing, omnichannel marketing. There's a lot to it. But now, with AI taking so much of the grunt work and the day-to-day, the go-to-market model is no longer just about creating a plan with an events piece, an advertising piece, an SEO and AEO piece. You need the plan, but you need expertise, and you need someone, like you've been describing for the last five minutes, who's going to grind it out, implement it, evolve it and get the outcomes. If you can't produce those outcomes and provide proof to prospects that you can, who cares whether it's AI or Joe Schmo? To me the model is now about three things: the expertise, the customer's challenges and the customer's input on the problems they're suffering with, and the AI tools that help you dig into the parts of the problem.

Michael Maximoff 25:32
You're absolutely right. One of the big changes is that before, we could talk about a channel or a playbook: I'll do your content, I'll run your ads, I'll do your email. The reason we changed to omnichannel, and the reason you talk about outcomes, is that I can't just run an email playbook or a paid ads playbook and generate outcomes. It's impossible, because it isn't part of a bigger strategy. When we talk about strategy, what comes to mind is an expert, someone with developed taste, who can tell you this isn't good, this is great, this might work, I'll take a risk on it. I've lately been sitting in board meetings on behalf of my clients, and when a CEO who used to be a CFO talks, they think about budget and ROI. This channel doesn't produce good results, let's cut it and put the money into that channel. Someone with 20 years of marketing sits there and says, no, if you do that the entire tree falls. So you need that expertise, someone with the hunch that says we can go in that direction. Then that person needs to know how to implement, and that's where the modern tools come in, because you can't take two months any more. I need the strategy in 48 hours, not a month. You need to move faster.

Michael Maximoff 27:41
Then the third thing you mentioned, the customer's challenges and pain. Don't start me on customer participation. I think that's the biggest thing people don't talk about. I did a podcast with my managing director, Alice, who's been with me for ten years, and one of the key things we talked about was the difference between a successful client and an unsuccessful one. Participation is so important. If you participate, work together and provide, that's what you get in return. If you just delegate, you're the expert, do your job while I do my things, it never happens. Great marketing and a great playbook start by building the foundation, and the foundation is in the business. How does my data look? Who's cleaning it? I can't build good marketing or good AI training on bad data. Who owns that? How do we create a unique value proposition, what do my case studies look like, how do I collect testimonials, how is all of that structured? Then AI can learn from it.

Michael Maximoff 28:59
Last example, I promise. A lot of people say they want their AI agent to write authentically, the way the company does. So what are you going to send it to train on? Case studies? And the case studies are very bad, very generic, because nobody put time into them. They were brochures: we did this for this client with these challenges, that's it. If those are your case studies, that's the authentic content you can expect from AI. But if for the last four years you put your sweat into case studies that are five to seven pages long, with interviews, the challenges, what you did that was unique, and you send twenty of those, each ten pages long and detailed, then AI has a lot to learn from. To do that you had to change your mindset and build the foundation first. That's where participation and collaboration start, and it's very underrated. To be honest, I'd put expertise and participation on a higher tier than AI and automation. With automation you can do pretty much anything with ChatGPT in collaboration with the client, rather than a fancy $10,000 AI tool built only for marketing with personalized intent and whatever else, that you won't use in the end because you're not participating. Sorry for swearing on your show.

Neil Anderson 30:42
That's okay, we like it, it's authentic. It's a bit like building a software product without talking to customers about what they want in it. This is a three-legged stool, I think. You're in a service business, I'm in a service business. Having expertise, having the customer be part of the process, and then the AI tools that help you accelerate and improve the quality of the work. The go-to-market model is changing, not only for people like you and me in services but for software too. Even HubSpot is starting to talk about charging based on results rather than seats. We're seeing a transformation, and I think it could be really interesting and positive.

Neil Anderson 31:44
We're running out of time, so I want to wrap up. Thank you to the audience for listening today. Everybody's busy, whether you're listening live or to the recording, and I hope it was useful. Michael, thank you so much. Number one for your energy. You bring so much energy that every time I finish a conversation with you I have to walk around and burn some of it off. Thank you for participating with me today, and thank you for being an Outcome Marketing practitioner who's part of the marketplace. We're trying to establish a marketplace rich with people who are focused on outcomes. Thank you, and I hope we can do this again soon.

Michael Maximoff 32:34
Of course. Thank you so much, Neil. It's been a great pleasure, and we discussed lots of great things. Thanks again, and bye everybody.