7 Proven Outbound sales strategies that'll get you promoted
As per the research says that 55% outbound sales and 27% for inbound sales. Outbound sales remain more critical to many business successes, especially when it comes to the enterprise market segment. If you are not implementing outbound sales means your business is missing huge opportunities.
A good outbound sales strategy for your business can achieve better growth. Outbound sales are one kind of sales, and it has a unique strategy to sell your product or services that involves finding, sales pitch, and closing the deal with the new buyers. Start here if you’re new to outbound sales. This article helps you to understand exactly what outbound sales are and their strategies! Let’s start with the fundamentals.
What are Outbound Sales?
In outbound sales, the sales reps proactively seek out the right customer and move them closer to the sales. In other words, the sales expert has to reach out to potential customers who have not engaged or connected to your business before. Unlike inbound sales, your targeted customer (inbound lead) already engages with your brand through multiple channels such as email subscribers, blog readers, social media channel followers, etc. Many works involve outbound sales, such as lead prospecting, qualifying the leads, and creating an email or cold calling list to reach potential prospects through cold emails and cold calls with personalized messages.
The key successes of the outbound process depend on identifying ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and reaching them out using hyper-personalized messages. The sales reps reach out to the prospects and begin their sales pitch. The best classic outbound sales strategy example is cold calling. However, modern sales teams also utilize cold email to potential clients as another opinion of the outbound sales method. Inbound sales strategy, the lead comes to you through successful content marketing whereas, in contrast, the sales expert contacts leads and initiates the sales funnel on outbound.
Difference Between Inbound Vs. Outbound Sales
The key difference between outbound and inbound sales relies on the person who initiates the sale in the inbound sales process. The potential prospects initiate the sales while the sales reps first connect to the potential customer in the outbound sales. The salesperson or business will come to the potential clients in outbound sales and the prospect coming to the business on the inbound sales.
Your targeted prospects will search your business through a search engine, via social media posts, land on the website to read your blog post, attend the webinar or seminars, or schedule a demo with your business/request for consultation call on the inbound sales.
The prospect initiates the connection with your business inbound by submitting forms on the website. Then, your sales reps will connect to the potential customer through call or email. Outbound sales refer to a selling dynamic. Outbound sales methods include cold calls, cold emails, and following up. On the other hand, inbound sales involve advanced digital technology such as SEO (search engine optimization), online Ads, content marketing, white papers, reports, influence marketing, blog articles, and social media activity.
Finally, on the inbound sales, the potential customers are defined as “warm leads,” while buyers on the outbound sales are described as “cold leads.”
So what are these 7 strategies?
Outbound sales is a great way of finding the right customer to improve your business and overall revenue. Your business can find your exact type of prospects in outbound sales instead of waiting for your buyer to discover your brand and engage with your brand through content or connection for a consultation/demo. Many B2B businesses have already implemented both inbound and outbound sales. The outbound sales tactics can increase revenue in the long run. Here are the seven outbound sales techniques your business needs to get you started.
1. Establish A Specific Targeting Criteria
Before beginning your sales prospecting, find what your ideal customer will look like. In other words, the first part of outbound sales is defining your buyer persona. Your business needs to define what your buyer persona is. It does not mean that all the prospect's profiles will fit your product or services.
Before starting your outbound sales outreaches, your business needs to identify the targeted customer who likes to buy the product so that your business can avoid wasting time on the less profitable customer profile.
Create a detailed potential prospect profile for your business, and base customer profile your sales team can find the actual customer and advocates of your product or services.
2. Develop A Outreach Plans
Your business created an outreach plan for our potential customers that will result in effective outcomes. When you’re thinking about cold-calling, email campaigns, or voicemails, take the time to plan out your outbound sales technique. Every business owner is concerned about growing their business and increasing revenues.
Make sure everyone on your sales/ marketing team knows what they should cover in an initial sales conversation. Outline the sales workflow for your sales team from initial contact to closure. Drafting the script for the cold calling will lead the potential customer in the right direction in the outbound sales process that helps you close sales more promptly. Make sure your cold call scripts and email contents address your targeted customers' needs and include the pain points and how your business product or services will be a better solution.
Like cold email outreaches and cold calling, many businesses rely on various tools to promote their business to their target market. One such outbound strategy is content marketing. It involves creating and distributing valuable content online in the form of social media posts, blogs, videos, and more. The primary goal of content marketing is to attract prospects and convert them into profitable customers.
3. Work On Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) is another business marketing strategy that focuses on the set of targeted accounts. Account-based marketing involves a personalized outbound sales campaign. It is the holistic approach that is beyond lead generation.
This strategy allows you to market with your current customer, and it promotes both upselling and cross-selling to get the most value from the large accounts. Account-based marketing (ABM) is the most popular approach among B2B sales.
Instead of focusing on the generic approach, the personalized marketing approach with hyper-personalized messages to the targeted customer will attract, engage and lead to a better conversion rate.
The ABM approaches encourage both the sales and marketing team to identify the targeted lead and customize email campaigns. It also has shorter sales cycles as its account-based marketing, and your business can reach the decision-maker. The majority of the B2B sale involves multiple stakeholders. Nurturing simultaneously with the targeted prospects will downsize your sales cycle.
Nearly 85% of marketers say that account-based marketing (ABM) offers a higher return on their investment (ROI) when compared to other marketing strategies.
4. Gathering Targeted Prospects Data (Identifying, prospecting, qualifying leads)
Today generating leads manually is complex. Using the sales automation tools, your outbound sales rep can find the ideal customer without spending much time on prospecting leads. Software like Clearout, Hunter, Smartwriter, Prospect.io, Autoklose, and more helps the business find any decision maker’s email address and information accurately. You can collect dozens of leads and verify the prospect information before performing the outbound sales campaign, and the AI sales email tool helps the outbound sales teams build sales pipelines faster and reduce hard bounces.
After finding and verifying the prospect's contact information, the third step is qualifying leads through outreach. In this process, your sales reps will start connecting with the leads through cold email or cold call and qualify the leads with a set of questions and identify the high-quality lead.
The outbound sales team segments the email lists with cold prospects (unlikely to buy) and warm leads (people who are interested and ready to buy your product/service). Segmenting and creating a qualified email list will take less time to close sales, particularly if your business has a good nurture process.
Identifying leads is the more crucial part of outbound outreach. Using AI technology to identify leads lets your business figure out who is a good fit prospect.
5. Implement Personalised on Cold Email Campaigns
Using personalization in your cold email campaigns will improve your email open and response rate. Advanced personalization for your cold emailing will create attention to your process and help your brand stand out from the crowd.
Personalizing your email subject line, email intro, and an email message will attract your email and hook them immediately. The ultimate goal of personalized messages is to grab prospects. The statistic says that cold email sent to the key decision-makers gets a 45% open rate if the email content is relevant and personalized.
Cold emailing is one of the best outbound lead generation strategies that every business needs to consider. Outbound sales cold outreach huge ROI. The McKinsey research found that cold emailing is 40x more effective for acquiring new buyers than social media like Facebook and Twitter.
Many business owners and marketers believe that email marketing is the most powerful tool. Email marketing is also more popular among consumers. Yes, email marketing with personalized touch works. Nealy 64% of small firms practice email marketing to reach their potential customers. As per HubSpot’s marketing report says that 78% of marketers have seen an increase in their email engagement because of personalization.
Email personalization offer various benefits as follows
- It will improve your cold email marketing open and click-through rates.
- Reduces your unsubscribe rates
- Able to gain more customer satisfaction
- Allows re-engaging with the existing customer.
Email personalization is simple and easy to implement in your marketing strategy. Smartwriter cold email ai generator helps you to tailor email personalized cold email outreach for massive data. The AI engine allows you to generate b2b personalization that helps to develop 1-on-1 relationships with your prospective buyers with zero effort. Start your free trial and begin to send thousands of hyper-personalized emails per hour.
6. B2B Cold Calling Technique
Cold calling is an extremely effective b2b outbound sales strategy to promote your business when it is done correctly. The HubSpot analysis identified that 69% of customers are happy with receiving calls from the sellers.
This proves that the cold callings are not dead, and cold callings are valuable to your sales efforts. Cold calling and emailing are the best
way to connect with the key with a decision-maker directly. Assume that you are reaching the right person with the cold call script to increase outbound sales success.
Focus on highly qualified leads is a great way to build initial rapport and enable b2b companies to quickly learn about their pain points or areas that your business can help them.
Cold calling strategies for more successful cold calling
- Determine the goal of cold calling. Cold calling is not making sales. The goal is to connect with the decision-maker and build a personal connection with the target customer. It is all about getting the sales opportunity.
- Perform research on your markets and the potential prospects before initiating the cold calling. Businesses need to find the right audience to make your cold calling. Connecting with the right people determines your cold calling success.
- Be persistent; nearly 80% of the outbound sales rep succeeds on their 5th calling, but many salespeople give up on the 2nd call. So to improve the sales conversion rate, a business requires a minimum of 5 follow-up sales calls, and email sequence is more important to make sales closer.
- Find your business's ideal time for cold calling to reach the decision-maker directly. The best cold time is not too early in the morning or late in the afternoon. Among business days, Thursday and Wednesday are perfect days to make B2B cold calling.
- Improve your chances of positive connection by leveraging connecting the targeted buyers on the social media platform. Vorsight statistics say that more than 70% of people will speak with them on cold sales calls if they are on the common LinkedIn group.
A connection on social media is a real advantage for outbound sales. You'll have a greater probability of being noticed by someone you want to communicate with if they have been following you. The LinkedIn platform will increase your outreach potential. The network is important because it will make you more approachable to people in the same industry.
7. Network with LinkedIn Automation
Start social selling enables your business to establish a rapport with your existing and new connections. Social selling is a more effective way of marketing if you invest 1$ and it delivers you $5 of ROI. Social selling provides a higher return on investment.
Make use of platforms like LinkedIn to kickstart relationships with the potential target. Among B2B decision-makers, Linkedin is the most popular platform where they spend much time on it compared with other social media platforms like Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.
59% of B2B marketers state that they generate leads using LinkedIn. Social media are an excellent place for networking with potential buyers as long as businesses use them correctly.
There is a wide range of LinkedIn automation tools where businesses can send LinkedIn connection requests automatically, share introductory messages, and follow up with prospects. LinkedIn will build rapport with potential prospects, send out cold emails, and the call will be more likely to engage and respond. They will start showing interest in your business solution.
You can try a simple and highly converting LinkedIn prospecting message using AI. Utilize the social media platforms to perform research on decision-makers and their companies so that you can create advanced personalized email and cold calling scripts. Your business can use a tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to identify your ideal prospects more quickly.
LinkedIn is a great social media for outbound sales where your business can build relationships with your potential leads. The best strategy for outbound sales is to focus on building relationships with your prospects. It's impossible to get a sale out of every connection you build, but if your business can genuinely try to meet their needs, it would be better to get a sales opportunity.
Final Thoughts
Take advantage of outbound sales marketing to boost your revenue. Lead generation plays a crucial role in outbound sales using the right lead generation software to capture and create an ideal customer profile list. To increase revenue, we offer seven outbound sales strategies to help close those crucial deals. Your sales experts can build outbound sales opportunities by building relationships with the targeted customer from the above outbound sales tactic. The primary goal of outbound sales is to drive meaningful interactions with potential prospects. Smartwriter AI is the holistic set of tools for sales professionals to develop their relationships with prospects. Your business can implement a mix of outbound and inbound marketing stages to achieve maximum sales conversion.