If you want to bring in consistent revenue to your company, outbound sales is precisely what your business needs to scale its growth. By investing in outbound sales, you’ll be able to raise more awareness for your products and services.
Outbound can be the best way to connect with key decision-makers in companies that you know are a good fit for your solution. Since outbound sales is a more proactive, targeted strategy, you can focus on specific customers that will benefit the most from your products and services.
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What is outbound sales?
Outbound sales refers to the process of a seller initiating engagement with a prospective buyer through sales activities. The sales representatives of a company make outbound sales calls or utilize other sales channels in order to reach prospects and convert them into customers.
When engaging in outbound sales, companies push their message or pitch to their prospects, through cold calling, email campaigns, social selling, and other strategies. This means sales representatives target potential customers who have not yet expressed interest in a product or service offered by the company. As an outbound seller, you focus your sales efforts on activities that involve you approaching people that fit your ideal customer profile.
How to create a successful outbound sales strategy
The first step in building an efficient outbound sales system is developing an ideal customer profile (ICP). An outbound sales strategy can shorten the sales cycle by empowering sales representatives to research and identify a potential customer with purchasing power.
Know your ICP
What is an ideal customer profile (ICP)? The ideal customer profile (ICP) defines the type of company that would benefit the most from your products and services. In other words, it is the representation of your ideal buyer. Outbound sales is a powerful engine that can let your company grow exponentially especially when you target prospects who fit your ideal customer profile.
When defining your ICP, it would help to identify the business model of the companies where your customer personas work. Most companies follow one of two business models based on the type of customers they serve. B2B (Business to Business) refers to companies that sell their products and services mainly to other businesses while B2C (Business to Consumer) refers to a company that sells its products directly to individual consumers.
Create content that supports sales
Content marketing is a great way of engaging sales prospects and nurturing leads, eventually turning them into customers. By doing this, you can establish a strong online presence and create a brand identity that resonates with people.
Content marketing can be used to nurture relationships at every stage of the customer journey. Content worth creating are blog posts, how-to articles, ebooks, case studies, videos, webinars, whitepapers, and courses.
Done right, this strategy can shorten the sales cycle, and drive more people through your sales funnel. Online content creation is a powerful way of providing value for your audience, and doing this can help increase your leads, conversions, and ultimately, your profits.
Offer a strong value proposition
What makes your ideal customer want to buy from you? Your value proposition is the answer to that question, and it’s what’s going to bring you revenues.
The value proposition plays a central role in convincing leads that they need to avail of your product or service. It tells them why they should buy from you. The value proposition highlights how your product or service will be of more value to them compared to similar offerings from your rivals. It will be much easier to do outbound sales if you make your value offer compelling.
Five stages of outbound sales
The outbound sales process lays out the specific steps that agents need to do in order to turn a lead into a sale. The ultimate goal is to build a scalable sales process that will bring in repeat customers consistently for your company. By giving them a framework to follow, less experienced representatives can quickly adopt best practices and learn what to do at different sales stages.
1. Identify market segments
Market segmentation is a strategy wherein select groups of consumers are identified so that certain products or services can be presented to them in a way that matches their needs. When done right, market segmentation can lead to increased conversions and can help foster brand loyalty and customer engagement.
In order to do market segmentation, divide a broad target market into distinct subsets of individual consumers or businesses with common needs and interests. You can then begin designing and implementing tactics to target them.
Types of customer segmentation include: demographic segmentation, geographic segmentation, behavioral segmentation, psychographic segmentation, and customer journey segmentation.
2. Generate leads
Lead generation is the process of identifying potential customers for your products or services. You generate leads by coming up with a list of people you want to contact and finding their contact information. Some of the most popular lead generation strategies include using paid social ads, creating a newsletter, offering free trials, and offering gated content assets such as ebooks, white papers, reports, courses, and worksheets. Lead generation all comes down to filling your sales pipeline with leads or people who may fit your target market.
The process of increasing the interest of people in your products and services is called nurturing. Lead nurturing is designed to maintain or strengthen a relationship with prospects at every stage of the sales funnel.
Outbound sellers often have to search for their own leads. Through a combination of social media outreach, cold emailing, cold calling, and networking, outbound sales agents identify potential buyers and reach out to introduce their solution.
3. Conduct outreach and qualification
Representatives can now begin doing sales outreach and engaging leads via cold email, cold calls, or face-to-face meetings. Large-scale sales outreach campaigns can be repetitive and time-consuming, which is why automation software can be used to streamline the process.
Qualifying leads is all about determining which people on your list are most likely to buy your solution. During this stage, representatives will qualify leads into hot (ready to buy), warm (interested), and cold (disengaged) so they can schedule future follow-ups and modify approaches. This allows you to strategize and prioritize the most promising leads.
Lead qualification can be done by using the BANT method, which stands for budget, authority, need, and timeliness. The BANT method can be used to determine how qualified a prospect is so that sales representatives can focus on selling to prospects who are a good fit.
4. Hold sales calls and meetings
Now your team gets to do what they have been trained to do: sell. This could be going on a call to learn more about potential customers, discuss the features and benefits of your product, or show a presentation to executives.
At this stage, a sales representative can respond to concerns about the price, product, or timing of the purchase. The agent should help prospects see the value of getting your product or service instead of other solutions in the market. Before the sales call ends, the agent should define clear, actionable next steps that both parties should do in the future.
5. Close the deal
The final step, which is considered the most difficult stage of selling, is closing. However, if you followed the sales process correctly, your close should come easy. When you get this far, your prospects should be ready to purchase. If the prospect is still hesitant, it may be best to discuss their concerns again to address any objections.
The best thing that you can do for your outbound sales strategy is to focus on providing value and building relationships with prospects and leads. By having a data-driven approach, you can scale your outbound sales efforts in order to get the maximum ROI from it. For this reason, doing outbound sales is considered one of the most profitable ways of acquiring customers.
Outbound sales strategies for 2022
Doing sales in the 21st century is complicated. Sales professionals can do more when they are equipped with technology that will help them build relationships with their prospects. Modern selling can make use of sales technology that can improve engagement and increase efficiency.
Your company should be able to adapt to the ever-changing sales and marketing world. Just sticking to old-fashioned methods will hurt your business in the long run. This is why you need to update your outbound sales strategies to get ahead of your competitors.
Here are some outbound sales strategies worth investing in this 2022:
Strategy #1: Referral program
A referral program is one of the best ways to get new customers. These programs encourage people to promote your products and services since they will receive a perk for every converted lead. This makes word-of-mouth marketing as one of the most powerful channels for bringing new customers to your company.
Customers will only refer to your company if they have had an extremely positive experience with your product or services. It would be best to identify your best customers who actively use your product or service as they can best communicate its value to others. As soon as you close a deal, ask if there’s anyone in your customer’s network that might benefit from your product or service. The key is to simply ask existing clients for facilitated introductions.
Recommended sales technology: A B2B referral program such as Referralrock makes it easy for a company to streamline the sharing process, track all referrals, and automatically reward the business for sharing. This will transform your customers into your advocates and help you reach new audiences.
Strategy #2: Social selling
Social selling is the process of leveraging your social networks to find the right prospects, cultivate relationships, and eventually help you close deals. It involves fostering trusted relationships on social media platforms as part of the sales process.
Build an organic relationship with your prospects by sharing interesting content and interacting with them on posts they’ve already posted or shared publicly. After some time, you can then initiate a conversation with them which can eventually be transformed into a sales conversation. Though this process of interacting with prospects takes some time, the organic nature of your relationship can increase your chances of conversion.
Recommended sales technology: LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a B2B social selling platform that allows sales professionals to target the right people based on certain criteria. The Sales Navigator allows you to find, save and segment LinkedIn leads. It provides an advanced search option to find your ideal buyers, based on categories such as job title, company size and more.
Strategy #3: Outbound email
Cold emailing can be a cost-effective approach for those looking to jumpstart their growth. However, if done incorrectly it can be a huge waste of time. In order to avoid low response rates, conduct thorough research on each potential client before reaching out to them.
It would be best to segment your outbound email campaigns into smaller groups based on specific criteria. You can start by subdividing your list by job role and by industry. This allows you to craft email messages with a more relevant marketing message. For instance, you can send an email to managers about increasing efficiency while an email sent to Chief Financial Officers could tackle return on investment (ROI).
Recommended sales technology: A CRM can allow you to see if prospects are reading your emails, what videos they are watching, how they responded to forums, and other information that can help you customize your sales pitch.
Strategy #4: Cold calling
A cold call is a call made to prospects who have been shortlisted based on prior research. It would be best to use cold calling scripts to increase the chances of converting people who have not shown prior intent.
A calling script is a carefully crafted document that guides agents as they interact with leads. Equip your sales team with a script containing detailed information about the product as well as answers to common questions and objections.
Recommended sales technology: Contact center software allows companies to manage inbound and outbound customer communications across multiple channels. Some can also integrate with your CRM to help nurture leads systematically and speed up conversion through contact automation.
Aloware is a cloud-based contact center software that can supercharge your outbound campaigns with unlimited calling and texting. If your business deals with a lot of outbound campaigns, there are many ways Aloware can help your company.
Aloware’s power dialer can automatically dial phone numbers from a list, eliminating tedious tasks from compiling data to recording conversations. The power dialer can ring as many as 500 leads per day, helping salespeople crush their quotas. The built-in dashboard also allows supervisors to review pickup rates, call duration, and dispositions to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Adopt new sales technologies to stay ahead of the competition
Changes in technology and the business sector are moving fast. Your company should be able to adapt to these changes. Align your business’s outbound sales strategies with new sales technology. This will allow your company to stay ahead and outperform your competition in the long run.
In order to keep up with the times, you should update your sales strategies whenever possible. Aloware can help you with these technological changes in 2022. You can equip your sales team with features like unlimited calling and texting as well as sales automation.
Aloware is a powerful contact center software that is suitable for companies looking to implement these sales strategies in 2022. Aloware integrates seamlessly with popular CRMs such as HubSpot, Zoho and Guesty. Book a demo today and find out how Aloware can support your sales strategies.
