30 of 100 points
ACV and TAM math
Whether the numbers work. Contract value has to cover the cost of outbound, and the market has to be big enough to feed it for more than a quarter.
3 questionsCan rule outbound out
In 3 minutes, you'll find out
12 questions, no email required
ICP clarity
Press 1 to 4 to answer
Most teams start outbound before they can support it. If your contract value is under €10K, fewer than three hundred companies could realistically buy from you, or nobody has the time to take calls, you should not be running it yet.
The weightings are not equal, because the failure modes are not equal. Contract value and market size can rule outbound out on the numbers alone. A messy CRM cannot. It just makes the first quarter more expensive than it needed to be.
30 of 100 points
Whether the numbers work. Contract value has to cover the cost of outbound, and the market has to be big enough to feed it for more than a quarter.
25 of 100 points
Whether you know who to aim at. Outbound multiplies your targeting, in whichever direction it is pointed.
20 of 100 points
Whether anyone is there to catch what outbound produces. Meetings booked into a calendar nobody has time for are a cost, not pipeline.
15 of 100 points
Whether the system has somewhere reliable to write. Outbound generates records constantly, and it inherits whatever mess it writes into.
10 of 100 points
How much of your pipeline runs through you. Heavy founder dependency is the problem an outbound system exists to remove, so it raises readiness rather than lowering it.
Each answer is worth zero to three points. A dimension's share of its maximum is multiplied by its weight, and the five weighted results add to a score out of one hundred. Below 50 the verdict is not yet. Between 50 and 70 the basics hold and the gaps are worth closing before you spend rather than during it. At 70 and above, what is left is tuning.
A weighted total on its own would let a company with a €4,000 contract value pass by scoring well everywhere else, which is exactly the wrong answer: a tidy CRM does not make up for numbers that do not work. So four conditions set a hard blocker and fix the result at not yet regardless of the total. They are no product-market fit, contract value under €10K, fewer than three hundred addressable companies, and nobody with capacity to work replies.
The thresholds were set against the full distribution rather than by feel. Scoring every one of the 14,745,600 possible answer combinations shows that among respondents who clear all four hard blockers, about 18 percent still land in not yet, 70 percent in ready with fixes, and 12 percent in ready now.
Half the questions put their best answer last. That is deliberate, and it is why the scorecard cannot be gamed by clicking straight down the page: answering the same column twelve times returns not yet on four of the five columns and ready with fixes on the fifth. Answering second-best on every question also returns ready with fixes, which is the right verdict for a company that is competent everywhere and excellent nowhere.
One dimension scores in the direction people find surprising. Heavy founder dependency counts upward, not downward. A founder closing most of the deals is the problem an outbound system exists to remove, so it raises readiness rather than lowering it. Pipeline that already arrives without you is a good problem, and it usually means converting existing demand beats making more.
Harochi builds, runs, and hands over outbound systems for B2B SaaS companies at Series A and Series B, past €2M ARR with contract values of €10K and up. The blockers in this scorecard are not a lead-scoring model dressed up as advice. They are the published fit criteria we apply to inbound enquiries, which is why a negative result here sends you to reading rather than to a calendar.
Outbound works when four things are true at once: your contract value covers the cost, your addressable market is big enough to feed it for more than a couple of quarters, your targeting is specific enough to point a system at, and somebody can work the replies it generates. Miss any one and outbound does not underperform. It fails in a way that gets blamed on the channel. The scorecard on this page tests all four, plus CRM hygiene and founder dependency.
Roughly €10K in annual contract value is the floor where the numbers start to work. A working outbound engine costs real money in data, sending infrastructure, and someone who can run it. Below that figure you need so many deals to cover the fixed cost that the channel loses money before it starts. That is not permanent: raising price or moving upmarket changes the answer, and plenty of companies should do one of those before they touch outbound.
Under a few hundred companies that could buy, outbound is the wrong tool. You burn through the list within a quarter and the second pass lands on people who already ignored you. At that size, work fewer accounts by hand over months. That is a different job from what an automated system does well, and it is usually better kept in-house.
An SDR without a system spends their first quarter building one badly, because list building, sequencing, and deliverability are engineering problems rather than selling problems. A system without anyone to work replies produces meetings nobody takes. Build the system first, then hire against it. The second hire is far cheaper once the first has something to plug into.
Expect the first qualified meetings somewhere in weeks four to six, and a channel you can forecast from at around the three-month mark. Anyone promising pipeline inside thirty days is either counting meetings that will not close or sending at a volume that costs you the domain. Harochi treats a thirty-day expectation as a reason to walk away, not a target.
Yes, and it does for a meaningful share of the people who run it. Four conditions set a hard blocker that fixes the result at "not yet" no matter how well everything else scores: no product-market fit, contract value under €10K, fewer than three hundred addressable companies, and nobody available to work replies. In that case the page does not ask you to book a call, because there is nothing we could sell you that would help.
The three-year cost of each path, including ramp time and the loaded cost of a hire.
What the monthly fee covers, what it does not, and why the tooling is billed separately.
The failure patterns we get called in to fix, and the rule that prevents most of them.