Outbound Sales Strategies for B2B Businesses
Before the Internet Boom, Outbound Sales was a relevant way of selling your products and services. Telephonic “cold” calls, home to home distributed pamphlets, and sales executives personally going out and meeting business clients and making a sales pitch were common sights.
Technology and the relative ease associated with Inbound marketing have affected Outbound in general as businesses have started to prioritize less intrusive strategies. While this is the case for B2C, B2B businesses still highly benefit from Outbound as they make the experience better for prospects as they bring real value to the table.
Outbound is still here, relevant, and effective. The best part is that you have more control over it in comparison to Inbound and your fate isn’t in the hands of search engines or social media platforms and other third parties.
Source: snov.io
What are Outbound Sales?
Outbound Sales is an approach in which the business, through its sales executives proactively reaches out to potential clients and makes a sales pitch, presents value propositions, and uses various other tactics to convert leads into customers.
Cold Calling is the first thing that comes to a marketer’s mind when Outbound sales are mentioned but that’s no longer the case. We have email marketing, trade shows, industry conferences, business events, social media, and direct messaging on various social media platforms that act as various channels of Outbound sales.
Technology has changed a lot of fundamental things about Outbound Sales, you’re no longer firing in the dark hoping to score a sale. The guesswork and intuition-based decision-making have been replaced by reliable data and data analytics.
Automation and AI have further smoothened the framework and workflows pertaining to Outbound Sales. Generating an Ideal Customer Profile based on existing customer data helps you reach the right prospects who may benefit from your services. Account-based selling is another approach that can make your Outbound Sales function productive and efficient. Personalization made possible by the data of a client made public by them in the online space adds furthermore to the effectiveness of it.
Like every business function, your strategy is what decides how well it will perform and it’s the same with Outbound Sales. So here are some effective Outbound Sales strategies you can implement.
Outbound Sale Strategies for B2B
Refine Targeting Criteria
Social Media Platforms and the Internet, in general, provide us access to almost everyone online. For Outbound Sales, you need to find out who among those in the online space might have a requirement for the product and service you’re selling.
This can be achieved by developing an audience that matches your existing customers or prospects who are likely to buy from you. For example, if you are a SaaS web application company, you can find out which businesses are trying out the products of your competitors. This enables you to identify, track and target individuals and businesses that would benefit the most from the solutions you provide.
Value-oriented Sales Pitching
Your potential clients may already be aware of the type of services or products you’re providing and chances are they’ve already been approached by your competition (or have used them). So, making a sales pitch that highlights your products or services will prove ineffective.
Businesses of all kinds and sizes are dealing with some or the other type of problems and they desire solutions to these. As a business utilizing Outbound Sales, your pitch can directly target their pain points.
Highlighting the value that your product or service may add to a client’s business may enable them to grow faster and more reliably than they already are is a good way of making sure the potential client actually converts.
Building an Outreach Plan
This is essential as it will provide a structure to how the Outbound Sales function operates. An outreach plan will act as a guideline for sales executives when they engage with potential clients.
Having an Outreach plan also provides sales executives with an idea about how much time and resources can be dedicated to pursuing a single lead. This ensures resources are not wasted and only the clients who show interest are further pursued.
Image Courtesy – Technology Advice
While it is necessary to have an outreach plan, it must be flexible enough to better meet the client’s engagement expectations. You can incorporate email-messaging-call sequencing into your outreach plan to make it even better.
Personalized Approach
The world is full of companies who’re bad at Outbound and your potential clients are tired of dealing with them. So, If you approach a client with a generic sales pitch, be it via call, email, or messages, chances are you will be greeted with a gatekeeper, a cold response, or no response at all.
This can be avoided by making use of personalization. A lot of data is available online about your prospects. Since you are B2B, you can simply check what your prospects and their businesses are up to on LinkedIn. This data can be utilized to make your sales pitch personalized to work as ice breakers.
This will ensure you aren’t black-listed, blocked or your emails don’t end up being flagged as spam. A personalized approach to sales will get you noticed and earn the attention of your prospects.
This strategy needs to be implemented carefully and passively. There are plenty of social platforms created for business networking that grant you access to a lot of top-level decision-makers from across industries.
You can use this to your advantage and try to build an organic relationship with your prospects using interaction on posts they’ve already posted or shared publicly. You can then use this to initiate a conversation with them which can eventually be transformed into a sales conversation.
Though this process is slow, the organic nature of the relationship you have with your prospects heightens your chances of conversion and brings in more value than if it were a cold call.
5 Tools to Assist You with Outbound Sales
Fun fact, Salespanel works with all of these tools to help you track outbound sales leads and convert them into customers. Learn More
#1 Hubspot
They’re one of the big names when it comes to Online Marketing and has a plethora of services and products that aid businesses in Digital Marketing. Their CRM software is one of the best in the industry which integrates well with other online marketing services making it possible for you to run your sales function properly and effortlessly. Their sales engagement feature allows you to connect and engage with your leads using various means to warm them up for you to make an approach.
Image Courtesy – Hubspot
Hubspot’s software solutions are user-friendly and easy to learn. You can drag and drop deals and leads together, monitor deal progress in real-time, prioritize and fast-track high-value deals, etc.
Hubspot lets you manage and monitor everything from one place:
- Email Marketing
- Sales Calls
- Website
- Social Media
Sales Navigator is a prospecting and social selling tool provided by LinkedIn that enables you to find the right prospects by utilizing account-based marketing. You can use their filters to find the right prospects and build a relationship with them before you go for the pitch.
You can network, socialize, and engage with people who’re concerned decision-makers for the businesses that fit your ideal customer profile. This will enable you to transform what could’ve been a cold call into a warm conversation.
Image Courtesy – Sales Navigator
Besides this, Sales Navigator has advanced features that enable you to find the right prospects quickly and it integrates well with the majority of the online marketing solutions providers.
#3 Cadence + Automation by Salesloft
Salesloft provides prospecting automation software solutions and is well known for the value they provide through their products. Cadence + Automation is a product they provide that combines prospecting and sales management into one software solution.
Image Courtesy – Salesloft
It enables you to find the right people and source their basic information and contacts and add those to your mailing or calling list as programmed.
This tool provides advanced scheduling for emails, calls, and messages and tracks every interaction, meaning that once a prospect has responded to your approach they’re shifted from your follow-up list to lead pool and forwarded for qualification.
#4 Close.io
Close.io was designed by experienced salespeople for catering the requirements of operating an effective outbound sales function. All the features you may require are included and as a virtue of being designed by salespeople, the workflows are easy to set up, scale, modify, and quick to function. This means you can engage outbound leads faster and scale the function effortlessly when required.
Image Courtesy – Close.io
Automated data entry and database updating, email and interaction tracking, one-click calling and pitch assessment, etc. are some valuable features that they provide.
They have a dashboard feature that allows you to monitor your entire sales pipeline from one place with the ability to monitor the statuses of every single deal. Leads can be segmented as per custom parameters which makes managing them seamlessly.
#5 Outreach
Outreach uses AI to power Outbound sales functions. AI provides you with in-depth insights about behavioral analysis of leads which can be used to prepare a more personalized sales pitch, significantly raising your chances of conversion.
Image Courtesy – Outreach
They provide the standard feature set required to successfully run an Outbound Sales function but on top of that, they even provide A/B testing, custom reporting, advanced analytics, workflow automation, real-time data synchronization, etc.
Final Thoughts
There is a lot of untapped potential in Outbound Sales and data-driven strategies need to be implemented to get the maximum ROI from it. Its best virtue is perhaps the level of control it offers to you in terms of scaling potential and handling or driving growth.
Outbound is completely in your control and can be scaled provided you are not landing in spam or getting ghosted. It is definitely one of the most profitable ways to acquire customers and something you should constantly work on.
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