Outbound isn't dead—but it's quietly breaking in very specific places. While most teams obsess over activity volume and surface-level metrics, the real performance gaps hide in plain sight, masked by busy dashboards that tell you nothing about where momentum actually drops.
In a tactical session that cuts through the noise, Matt Volm moderated a conversation with Mark Bedard (CEO & Co-Founder at Upcell) and Matt O'Connell (Head of Global Sales Development at Upwind Security) to reveal the systematic approach RevOps teams need to diagnose outbound like an engine—not a black box.
Most organizations point to pipeline problems and simply conclude the sales team isn't prospecting enough. But as Mark Bedard explains, there's a massive amount of work that happens before opportunities ever hit your CRM. The 5 C's framework provides a systematic way to identify exactly where that work breaks down:
"There's very little focus on pre-opportunity metrics. It's very easy to just imagine that all of a sudden there's an opportunity and boom, it's in CRM. That's really not what happens at all." - Mark Bedard
You should also check out the blog post 12 B2B Prospecting Techniques That Drive Results in 2026.
The first breakdown point happens at sourcing. While many teams track how many contacts reps add daily, they miss the critical patterns that determine success. Matt O'Connell emphasizes that for Upwind Security, the target is 20-30 contacts per day — but the number varies based on your ICP and total addressable market.
The real insight? Zero sourcing days kill momentum faster than low activity. As covered in our recent blog post on fixing tech bloat, consistency in operations beats sporadic high performance every time.
"Much better to have consistency day in and day out. It's much easier to manage from your perspective, but it's also much less taxing on the rep if they miss that day." - Mark Bedard
Beyond volume, teams must measure sourcing depth. Are reps multi-threading within accounts or just grabbing the first five people they find? O'Connell shared a cautionary tale: "Had an example at a previous company where a rep sourced 70 contacts from the same account, which creates problems for a lot of reasons. You end up getting blacklisted if you spend too much time at the same account."
This connects directly to the account-based marketing strategies RevOps teams need to operationalize for sustainable growth.
Even when reps source the right contacts, getting them into workable systems isn't guaranteed. This operational check reveals critical gaps most teams never measure.
"If 10% of the records that the team is actually exporting are not making it into CRM, that means they're only ever at best going to operate at 90% efficiency." - Mark Bedard
Common blockers include:
As we've discussed in our analysis of revenue stack AI readiness, these integration failures compound when you layer AI tools on top of broken foundational processes.
For more on this topic, also check out The Complete Guide to GTM Stack Optimization for B2B Growth Teams.
Here's where most teams make a critical error: filtering data before prospecting. If your team consistently shows 90%+ email and phone fill rates, that's actually a red flag.
"What that tells me is your sales organization is filtering right off the bat. He's now just sliced his TAM in half. He's eliminating 50% of the good fit contacts that he should be exporting into CRM." - Mark Bedard
The solution? Let ops teams handle multi-provider enrichment in CRM rather than having reps filter at the source. This approach, similar to the systematic thinking we advocate for AI-ready revenue systems, ensures you're not artificially limiting your addressable market.
For more on this topic, check out The AI-Ready Data Mesh: Why RevOps Needs Multi-Vendor Enrichment.
Most successful teams use 2-4 data providers, with different approaches:
As discussed in our podcast episode on MongoDB's AI implementation, the key is operational simplicity for reps while maintaining backend flexibility for ops teams.
When teams complain about "bad data," they're usually conflating two distinct problems:
Correctness issues: Wrong phone numbers or email addresses that bounce or go to the wrong person. Solution: Find a data provider with higher accuracy.
Freshness issues: Outdated information where contacts have changed jobs or roles. Solution: Implement just-in-time data refresh at the point of engagement.
"A CRM is old and dusty. I've never had a person come up to me and say my CRM is squeaky clean. That record needs to be up to date when the sales team's calling it." - Mark Bedard
This insight aligns with our approach to aligning revenue teams using KPI metrics—focus on the metrics that matter at the moment of truth.
Poll data from the session revealed that 91% of RevOps professionals struggle with freshness over correctness. This makes sense given that about 30% of records in static databases are out of date at any given time, as people change jobs, get promoted, or shift responsibilities.
Only after fixing all upstream metrics can you fairly evaluate individual rep performance.
"Very important to get those blocking and tackling metrics down so we're all playing on an equal playing field. Then you can start to think about the soft skills and measuring reps against one another." - Mark Bedard
This systematic approach prevents the common mistake of blaming conversion problems on rep performance when the real issues lie in data quality, workflow efficiency, or territory assignment — topics we explore in depth in our RevOpsAF podcast series.
"It's why it's really important to look under the hood to see where they're spending their time, not just the raw activity numbers, but who are they actually reaching out to?" - Matt O'Connell
The 5 C's framework provides that systematic lens RevOps teams need to diagnose outbound performance like an engine rather than guessing at solutions. Because when outbound breaks, it rarely fails all at once—it quietly breaks in very specific places that only the right metrics can reveal.
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