Outbound sales
Contents
Woah woah woah, we're doing outbound?
Yes! But do not be afraid:
- We are not doing this to 'go enterprise' - for now we're trying to reach more of our ICP.
- Our investors did not ask us to do this - we came up with it ourselves.
So why are we doing it now? I thought our inbound pipeline was good?
Outbound sales is a thing we will need to get really good at as we continue to scale PostHog, as 100% inbound eventually dries up. We are not going to be the first company in history to build a huge Saas business with zero outbound, and most companies like us start thinking about outbound around our ARR. Even the largest, most beloved devtool products of all time do this - they just do it in a smart way.
We want to start doing outbound now because, if we wait til inbound slows down, we’ll panic and make bad decisions, trash the brand, and copy and paste what other boring companies have done in a short-sighted way that doesn't work for our audience.
Outbound is helpful because it is a good way to generate more leads in a semi-predictable way - and there are lots of cool ways to do it in 2025 using GTM engineering, agents etc. We should view outbound as a type of hyper-focused marketing that generates sales opportunities.
Let's get on the same page - what is outbound?
‘Outbound’ means a few different things. This is how we think about it in relation to customers:
- Using PostHog and spending a lot of money
- Using PostHog and spending a little money
- Using PostHog with good engagement/high ICP, but not spending any money
- Person signed up at some point, but not really using, usually just kicking the tires
- Not signed up, but has heard of PostHog
- Not signed up, never heard of PostHog
None of these people are currently talking to us - that's why they are under the umbrella of 'outbound'.
We’ll call 1-3 ‘warm’ outbound and 4-6 ‘cold’ outbound. Technical Account Managers are responsible for managing leads from warm outbound, in addition to their book of business. Technical Account Executives are responsible for managing leads from cold outbound, in addition to inbound leads (which comprise 90% of leads today).
We are building a BDR function that will generate leads, mainly focused on cold outbound to start.
What we're doing today
Our focus today is on three categories: inbound leads, getting much better at warm outbound (we have a huge number of leads that we could be converting better), and experimenting with colder outbound. Ben Bradley is leading our experiments today with the
To see which leads go where, check out the leads page.
We are also starting to experiment with cold outbound, specifically:
- People who have moved to a new job and are familiar with PostHog
- People who work at a growing (adding employees) software or technology company that, as best we can tell, are not currently using PostHog
If you're reading this after getting outbounded by PostHog, blink twice you can opt out here
We've linked to this section because you've been included in our first few experiments. We want to work together, but not at the expense of you hating us.
So, if you'd rather we didn't reach out, you can opt out with this button: Opt out of outbound
No forms, no 'are you sure?', no hurt feelings. You can always change your mind later by reaching out to us directly. We would note that you're on our list because we think you're a good fit for PostHog, but that's for you to judge.
Most SaaS companies would likely just blast you with emails, calls and DMs without your consent. If you can’t already tell, PostHog does things differently.
What we're doing next
We are hiring a founding BDR and are going to run a bunch of experiments in Q1. By the end of Q1, we want to have a v1 outbound playbook, filled with repeatable things that we know work, and working closely with the
