Outbound sales remain a crucial strategy to the success and growth of many organizations, more so for enterprise companies. Outbound sales will always play an important role for sales teams, because it allows businesses to go after the type of customer they want or type of customers they know they can earn revenue from. Most successful businesses employ a mix of Inbound and Outbound sales process and strategies to drive business ROI.
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Getting the Basics Right
Outbound sales includes a process where sales teams take the first step and initiate conversations with prospects to drive engagement. In a typical outbound sales process, a seller identifies a potential buyer then reaches out using a mix of cold calls, prospecting emails, even social media messaging to move the prospects across the stages of the buying journey. This typical sales cycle involves a fair share of cold calls, follow ups, product demos and pricing negotiations before there’s a win.
A well balanced outbound sales strategy will consist of establishing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for your various products and services, building out the right sales playbook, developing the right sales content and identifying the relevant channels to use to pursue your list of potential buyers.
For an outbound sales strategy to be more successful in a digital-first environment where prospects are already inundated with marketing and sales messaging of all kinds, all the time, it is more than necessary for sales leaders to follow a deeper data-driven strategy and deploy a relevant sales tech stack to optimize their outbound sales process.
The Key to Scaling your Outbound Sales
- Reach out to customers that fit your ICPs, with tailored messaging
- Segment your audience with data-backed methods, to identify the most attractive markets
- Group customers and prospects into different ICPs, to build personalized messaging
- Drive sales outreach, with deeper customer insights and buying signals
Establishing a basic outbound sales methodology that is constantly measured, evaluated and enhanced in real-time to meet challenges or drive results helps create a more scalable outbound model.
But this is just a part of the whole process. Aligning teams with the right data and sales technologies, scaling actual day to day operations by hiring new SDRs or training/upskilling existing teams and exploring new territories and markets are also an important part of this.
What Makes for a Good Set of Outbound Sales Tools and Sales Technologies?
Sales is evolving and has to be backed by science and logic in today’s business environment. Prospects want relevance and sales teams have the means to easily identify potential markets and who would be the best accounts and contacts to reach out to and why, from those markets.
But to adopt a science and data backed outbound sales process that is aligned to core business goals and other team initiatives (like marketing campaigns) it is crucial to unify not just your data but also your sales and marketing systems.
CRMs and CDPs are often considered baseline tools for sales and marketing teams to align data, share updates on account traction within a unified dashboard and to measure overall progress.
Sales and marketing leaders use sophisticated behavioral insights and intent data to drive differentiation and get a competitive advantage in the market.
For a company that leans on outbound sales methodologies, a mix of email automation tools, call recorders, conferencing tools, product demo software, contract management systems can help create a more seamless experience not just for the prospects but for the sales people themselves.
When identifying sales technologies to boost an outbound sales process sales leaders need to look for features that can optimize their plans and processes and improve their win rates.
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Some of the most common sales technologies that help drive outbound sales
Phone automation software
Expecting your SDRs to make manual phone calls to thousands of leads each day is akin to asking them to waste their time and lower their productivity. Phone automation software that can auto-dial numbers, organize leads in a systematic manner and integrate with your CRM can help drive better team alignment and productivity.
Tools like Tenfold can track and log your customer interactions into a CRM like Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce and help create a compelling customer experience.
Then there are platforms like Ringio that can help sales people dial out of their CRMs using click-to-call features.
Video Prospecting Software
Using video in your sales prospecting can help you stand out while ensuring your get the right message across to your prospect. Moreover, video allows sales people to get more creative and interactive with their presentation.
Tools like Vidyard can help craft a personalized video selling experience, platforms like Covideo also help record, send and track personalised video emails to boost response rates. Platforms like Bonjoro can integrate with your existing CRM and you can build it into your sales workflows so your videos are sent at the right time in your sales cadence.
Sales Engagement Software
Tools like Outreach.io help you personalize and prioritize sales activities and orchestrate your email, voice or even social media campaigns. The insights can be used to fine tune sales processes and to identify which sales campaign or cadence works better than the other.
Sophisticated platforms like Salesloft, HubSpot help you manage different stages of the sales conversation and automatically tracks sales activities and engagement data in a unified dashboard.
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Outbound sales is here to stay!
Studies have proven that outbound sales drives a larger chunk of most business’s lead generation processes. In a marketplace that is constantly innovating and offering the same sets of customers and prospects a choice of products and services, no sales team can rely on just one sales strategy or sales tactic to drive business revenue.
