The real cost of outbound lead gen today

There is much hype today about AI being a potential outbound lead generation killer. Revenue growth rates are down to 16% (from 36% in 2021), and the cost to acquire one dollar of growth is approaching two dollars. So yes, things aren’t looking too rosy when it comes to lead generation. But perhaps AI isn’t the culprit, and instead the savior?

An overlooked opportunity: growth loops

In the short history of AI to date, there is already an abundance of lead throughput improvement tools powered by AI, and that’s good. But there is also a potentially overlooked opportunity here, whereby AI can actually help with lead input as well. Enter stage right (Bowtie right) the concept of growth loops.

What if your users became your best sellers?

What if we could leverage not just our customers, but our end users to be advocates of our service? Through targeted incentive, end users are arguably the best voice to pitch the value of our products and often carry more credibility than even the best sellers in our organization. Incentives can take many forms, such as:

Where AI steps in: matching users with the right opportunities

Traditionally, customer value has been measured using customer lifetime value. But perhaps we should also be measuring their value in terms of advocacy impact ($).

This is where AI comes into play. Agentic AI (AI capable of making autonomous decisions to achieve goals) can objectively measure the rational and emotional engagement of an end user, and from this, align them with potential new opportunities—in effect automatically matching users to the perfect advocacy opportunity.

The compounding effect of growth loops

The real magic here is the mathematics of compounding. Growth loop activity stems from the highly concentrated right-hand side of the customer journey (retention and expansion), then loops back into new-customer acquisition. For every existing customer, we may have 10 or more users. That multiplier alone has a huge impact on the number of opportunities fed back into the lead generation machine.

In fact, for an $80M ARR SaaS company with an ASP (Average Selling Price) of $50K, converting just 1 in 50 users to an advocate results in a 10% revenue growth impact in year one. Add to that the compounding effect of time, and by year five you could see growth acceleration of over 50%. Yes, 50%.

A dual-engine model for scalable lead generation

The net of this is a dual-piston lead generation machine, lessening the risk and burden on marketing, while driving measurable uplift in sales and revenue. The advocacy from our end-users is 100% human-led, but knowing who will be the most effective and how to incentivize them is all down to AI.

The marriage of Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence may just mean that in this new world of “more efficient growth,” there is still untapped potential to drive more input as well as better throughput.