The Art of Outreach – Like a True Martial Artist

Bruce Lee said, “Be like water.”  The best outreach operations are like water – fluid, adaptive and precise.  Successful outreach isn’t about overpowering the system by brute force and high volume, but by understanding the system and the environment and flowing with it intelligently.

You don’t have to look far at outboundIQ to find a skilled martial artist.  From our Founder / CEO on down, we have many who not only embrace the martial arts, but use the concepts to help drive our customers’ successful outreach efforts.  As you continue to hone your outreach strategy, you can leverage the fundamental concepts of martial arts to guide your actions.  Here are some examples:

Discipline

· When faced with a challenge, a true outbound martial artist follows ethical best practices. In other words, we respect compliance standards as the rules of the arena.

Respect           

· An outbound campaign should respect the customer, and exclude anything that can be construed as abusive, intrusive, or misleading them.

Form

· Martial artists call this Kata.  For outbound, it means having processes that are compliant, streamlined, optimized to mitigate negative outcomes downstream (whether that takes the form of complaints, flagging, blocking, consumer mistrust, etc.).

Flow

· Like Jiu-Jitsu, your outreach should be able to adapt to changing rules, but also to carrier and customer behaviors. Trying to brute force your way to get to the customer will often result in poor outcomes.  Which leads to a key “flow” concept:

Using Minimal Force for Maximum Effect

·  We often hear people imply that blasting out as many calls as possible will get you the contacts.  “It’s a numbers game” they often say. Now, while it IS a numbers game, the best outbound operations know WHICH numbers we’re talking about, and that’s often centered around Contact Rates (%) and Total Success outcomes (count).  Why?  Because it’s the most basic indicator of campaign effectiveness and production. 

·  If you read many of our prior blog posts, you’ll see that an intelligent, targeted outreach effort often gets much better results (with fewer dials) than volume-based, indiscriminate dialing.

And last, but not least, Honor

·  Your brand (or your customer’s brand) is protected by doing things the right way.  Your reputation for ethical, high integrity and quality outreach is YOUR black belt.  It proves your discipline and mastery of outbound.  We embrace this to ensure that our client’s messages are delivered, not blocked.

At the outboundIQ dojo, we use these principles every day.  And like martial artists, we often embrace the Sensei role, by teaching how to engage customers skillfully, effectively and with high integrity – in other words, successfully.  Talk to any one of our ouboundIQ black belts, and you’ll understand how discipline and focus lead to mastery, and by adopting these principles, greater outcomes will emerge from your efforts.