What outbound tactics have you tried to increase your outbound sales? If you’re still relying on outbound cold calling to generate new business, it’s time to rethink your outbound strategy. A lot of outbound sales strategies are out there, but only a few will work for your business. While outbound sales can be a powerful tool for generating new leads and closing deals, which will allow your company to focus on other areas of growth, you need to determine which ones are suitable for your branding.
Many businesses choose to outsource outbound marketing tasks to make it even easier. However, it’s not enough to outsource your sales anymore if the outsourcing company is not equipped with an experienced sales team, robust tools and technologies, and industry expertise.
If you outsource outbound sales functions or if outbound sales are a big part of your business model, it’s important that outbound marketing and sales teams work closely together. This blog post will give an overview of some proven outbound techniques to get more leads and increase revenue.
How to build an outbound sales strategy?
Nowadays, businesses choose to outsource outbound marketing tasks to make things easier. Building an effective outbound sales strategy requires industry expertise and market knowledge. However, there are other key elements that you need to get right in order to build an outbound sales strategy. The most prominent ones include:
- Focus on the right customers to go after
- Establish a relationship using a personalized approach
- Incentivize your sales and customer representatives to do the right things that you want them to do
- Encourage and support your sales team with marketing efforts and collateral to educate your future leads and customers
- Create a sales pipeline and map out your outbound strategy to help you stay focused on the right activities
- It’s important that outbound marketing is continuously aligned with inbound lead generation to avoid wasting time chasing the wrong prospects, which may happen if there isn’t enough coordination across all parts of the business
Outbound sales strategy to accelerate business revenue
The following are some of the tried and tested outbound sales strategies that businesses have been using to accelerate their business revenue and profit margins:
1. Identify your target market
The first outbound sales strategy you need to master is identifying the right customers. It’s important that your outbound team knows exactly who they’re going after, what their pain points are, and how much profit margins they expect from each deal. You can start by creating a list of potential buyers in different industries and narrow down this list to only the most promising ones. Your outbound sales team should be able to qualify and assess each prospect’s potential based on their expertise in the industry, market knowledge, product features/benefits, and your company’s capabilities. This is usually done by asking specific questions about what they are looking for in a solution or service provider. The information you collect will give you a better idea of the outbound sales strategy that would work best for your business.
2. Identify perfect customer profile & key decision-makers
It’s crucial to identify the right people who are actually making a decision for outbound sales. You must get familiar with your potential customers’ company culture, organizational structures, and key individuals involved in the buying process. This includes their pain points, goals, problems you can solve for them as well as budget constraints and other limitations that may affect purchasing decisions. You can use outbound strategies such as cold calling or emailing to reach out and get in touch with your potential customers’ key decision-makers, who may not be part of the usual buying process but are still essential influencers for sales prospects. While it’s important that you focus on a small group of high-priority contacts, ensure that your outbound representatives are in close communication with your in-house marketing team, as they would also need to work closely together to identify the right outbound sales strategy.
3. Establish a clear, value-based hypothesis that will guide the segmentation
Once you’ve identified your target customers, outbound sales teams can use this information to establish a clear hypothesis that will help them segment their prospects and figure out the right outbound strategy for each customer. This means breaking down potential targets into different groups based on certain criteria such as:
- industries they’re in (more than one may apply)
- size of their company
- annual revenue and number of employees they have
- key challenges you can help them solve for their business or customers, etc.
Once your outbound sales team has a clear hypothesis about the right people to go after, it will be easier for outbound representatives to create personalized outreach plans based on outbound strategies that would work best for each customer.
By segmenting your prospects and prioritizing them according to their potential value to the company, you can make sure sales representatives are focused only on people who have the budget and authority to buy.
4. Generate customer data and insights
Generating data about outbound sales prospects is essential to make outbound campaigns more effective. Once your outbound team has identified their target customers and segmented the list based on specific criteria, you can start generating data that’ll help you find the right outbound strategies for each prospect. This includes information such as:
- Demographics
- job title
- company size and the industry sector they’re in, etc.
While generating data about outbound prospects is crucial, it’s important to filter out any irrelevant or outdated details as well. You must have access to relevant customer data that tells you where your potential customers are in the buying process, what their pain points and goals are, etc. It is important that you determine what kind of information you should rely on when generating outbound prospect data.
5. Analyze data and group customers into “Target Ideal Profiles”
Once outbound teams are privy to the right information about your prospects, they can use outbound strategies that will help them get in touch with customers who have a greater potential of becoming high-value leads and closing deals for your business. By gathering enough customer insight, outbound representatives can also figure out what their next outbound steps should be.
6. Find leads in each micro-segment
Your outbound sales team can find leads in each outbound segment using strategies like cold calling and emailing. It is important to closely monitor your outbound strategy’s success rate so you can identify which outbound steps are working best for your prospects and what improvements need to be made if necessary. For example, it would be better for outbound representatives to focus on creating personalized outbound campaigns instead of using one-size-fits-all outbound strategies if they see that certain prospects are not responding well or closing deals. This is because sending a targeted message would give them higher chances of getting in touch with people who have the budget and authority to buy your products.
7. Use Omni Channel attribution
One of the most important aspects of outbound sales is properly attributing leads and revenue to specific outbound campaigns. This means using an omnichannel attribution that can help you identify which outbound strategies are actually working best for your business, whether it’s email, phone, social media, or a combination of all. Omnichannel attribution helps outbound teams identify what outbound sales campaign brought in leads, which ones closed deals, and how exactly each outbound step contributed to the overall revenue of your business.
8. Automate outbound sales as much as possible
Finally, you can automate outbound prospecting emails and voice messages through email marketing tools such as MailChimp and Marketo, so they’re delivered to the right people at the right time according to their behavior.
Conclusion
By using outbound sales strategies to their full potential, businesses can close more deals and increase revenue. It is about finding the right tactics that work for your business and improving them using additional resources.
