Mapping out your newest outbound sales plan?
You could just copy-paste your previous one…it worked o-kay…
But if last quarter's sales plan was so-so, chances are it's only going to get worse.
You need a new outbound sales strategy.
Well, lucky you, because we just happened to write an awesome blog on the best outbound sales trends of 2022, the top software to get the job done, and great examples of how to train outbound sales reps to reach their full potential.
Which blog? You landed on it.
Scroll on.
Outbound sales is a method where your team actively pursues sales opportunities through pushing their message or pitching prospects. It can involve cold emailing, social selling, digital marketing, and more.
Anytime you're contacting leads and customers instead of waiting for them to come to you, it's outbound sales.
What is outbound sales compared to inbound sales? Let's go over the main differences in this table.
|
Point |
Outbound sales |
Inbound sales |
|
Strategy |
You find customers |
Customers find you |
|
Content |
Promotional, emphasis on advertising |
Educational, emphasis on SEO |
|
Securing customers |
Sales pitching |
Lead nurturing |
|
First contact initiated by |
Sales rep |
Customer |
The main thing to remember is the prefix “out” – as in “reaching out”. Inbound means customers come “in”. Easy, right?
Here are some outbound sales examples:
An outbound sales process is all company to customer. You don't wait for them to come to you.
Examples of typical inbound sales processes include social media presence, PR, content marketing, and SEO.
Check out our blog for more in-depth info on inbound vs. outbound sales.
Okay, now we've got the niceties and obligations out of the way – let's get to the good stuff. We know you're here to boost your outbound sales skills with the latest tips and tricks.
Without further ado, let's dive into the 7 top outbound sales strategies.
Have you heard about demand generation as a part of an outbound sales process?
Believe us, there's nothing wrong with lead generation. In fact, we wrote a blog post on lead generation software!
But demand generation is turning some heads.
This post on LinkedIn by Chris Walker, CEO at Refine Labs, has some great positive points about incorporating demand generation into your strategy. It's nearly a combination of inbound and outbound sales.
Demand generation is generally a long-term project to educate a wider audience on your company to create interest and spread recognition. Then when you step in with your normal outbound sales techniques, they're even more effective.
No wonder over 70% of managers consider building an audience more important than converting sales.
A few key benefits of demand generation:
Content marketing, a key part of demand generation, creates 3x as many leads as standard outbound marketing. And it costs 62% less.
Social selling is the practice of using social platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to connect with prospects, develop connections, and engage with potential leads.
Liking, commenting, and sharing posts all count as social selling and accomplish the same thing: boost your company's reputation and credibility by taking an interest in your potential customers.
It's the modern way to build business relationships and form solid connections. It's a more friendly and less intrusive form of outbound sales.
Here are a few great stats on social selling:
Psst – it's also one of the best ways to research your prospects. And researching your prospects is a must. Knowing your prospects' likes, dislikes, and pain points (maybe even hobbies!) helps sales go more smoothly.
Hosting a webinar or a podcast is an excellent way to generate interest and leads. They're both a way to leverage your industry know-how to draw new eyes your company's way.
Plan for your webinar or podcast to address your target audience's needs, interests, and pain points. Make it valuable to your prospects.
Translation? This isn't a commercial or 30-minute product pitch. People won't watch that.
If you make an engaging, interesting webinar, it could end up being your biggest game-changer. 66% of businesses say their sales teams prioritize leads coming from webinars and 79% of them confirm a direct influence of webinars on pipeline and revenue.
Additionally, 78% say they help lower the cost per lead.
If this is your first time delving into podcasts and webinars, consider guest-starring on someone else's to save time, money, and effort. Then, you're also diving into an established audience and getting a great recommendation from the host.
Imagine you had data around the food you and your family actually ate and could grocery shop accordingly:
95% of carrots were eaten. 20% of spinach was eaten. Next grocery shopping plan: buy more carrots. Spend less on spinach.
No, we aren't rambling. We just wonder why more outbound sales teams don't utilize CRM data to build a successful outreach plan. It ensures solid, repeatable success and also decreases ramp-up time for new salespeople.
Your CRM can help you build a data-driven outreach plan by:
82% of companies agree that retention is cheaper than acquisition. Plus, increasing retention by just 5% can boost profits from 25% to 95%.
A data-driven outreach plan will be easy to create using a CRM that allows you to track phone calls.
No, not like the six million dollar man. Build the perfect customer profile.
We've all monitored demographics but have you used “firmographics”? They're a set of characteristics to segment organizations by certain criteria.
Criteria like:
Not everyone has to fit your certain customer profile, but you will discover which prospects you should spend the most time and effort on. You'll also find out which leads are less likely to close (so you can waste less time on them).
Make this profile as detailed as possible using data from your CRM (this heavily ties into the last point of leveraging CRM data!). Base it on actual customers that use your product or service.
How do your customers use your product? How did they come to find out about it? What did the purchase process look like for them in particular?
The answers to all these questions will help you shape your perfect customer.
Ever heard of a unique selling proposition (USP)? The short answer is that a USP is the special little thing that makes your company or service stand out in the crowd.
The long answer is in Ringy's blog post on unique selling propositions. ;)
One of the most famous USPs was coined by M&Ms in 1941. Many other chocolate brands of the time were simply little pieces of uncoated chocolate, so M&Ms made the distinction that their candy “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand,” due to their colorful candy coating.
Having a clearly defined USP simplifies and streamlines your outbound sales process immensely. It was much easier for M&M's sales reps to pitch their product with such a clarified difference.
How much easier? Well, after pitching that their chocolate wouldn't melt in tropical climates, the U.S. Army bought exclusive rights to the candy for the duration of WWII.
If that doesn't inspire you to go work on your USP (or at least go eat some chocolate), we don't know what will.
Do us a quick favor and think about the last cold emails your team sent out. How about the last cold call you shadowed?
Did the rep talk about what your product does…or what the product can do for the prospect?
It's the difference between advertising a feature and advertising the value that the features bring. And showcasing value will show a prospect how the product will benefit them upfront.
Here's a table of examples of value vs. features.
|
Feature |
Value |
|
Task automation |
Saves your reps time doing the little things so they can focus on what's really important |
|
Mobile device enabled |
Monitor data and drip campaigns anywhere you go |
|
VoIP phone |
Easily scale your business' phone system with no extra wires, cables, or PBX box |
Do you see how attractive it is when you display value over features? It communicates benefits your prospect will receive in plain English, right upfront. No fancy words or guessing how that feature solves your problem and pain points.
A typical outbound sales process is identifying leads, prospecting, outreach and qualifying, making a sales call, and closing the deal.
It hasn't changed much over the years, although it's somewhat easier and more streamlined, thanks to sales reps having task automation at their fingertips now.
Of course, your outbound sales process may differ slightly depending on your company's personal pipeline (duh) – but this will be a very general example from prospecting to closing.
This is tied into the point we made about “building the perfect customer”. Before you even start looking for customers, you have to know who is a good fit for your product or service.
Ask yourself a few questions:
Questions (and their answers) can be even more complex, and the more specific you get with identifying your audience the easier prospecting will be for your sales reps.
Now we're actually searching for those ideal customers we just identified. This is all about finding leads and filling up your pipeline with candidates.
A lot of salespeople do this manually – digging through websites, browsing LinkedIn, and attending events, conferences, and seminars to get contact information and names.
It's really no wonder that 40% of sales reps claim this is the hardest part of outbound sales. Lucky that we wrote an entire blog post on how to generate leads.
Now it's time to take all those leads we gathered and reach out. (Outreach? Get it?)
Cold email, cold calling, and social selling – we're basically touching base, saying hello, and introducing those potential clients to our service.
This is also when you qualify the lead on if it's hot (likely to close), warm (interested), or cold (not likely to buy).
The first real conversation most reps get to have with a potential customer. It could be a product demo, or it could be just to talk.
Whatever it is, it's definitely a big deal as it's what all salespeople are hoping to score after emailing lead after lead.
Hearing “Sure, let's hop on a call” is a big win.
If all goes right, your salespeople have just converted a lead into a customer and closed the deal. Contracts are signed and champagne is served – it's the outcome everyone was looking for.
This is where the outbound sales process ends – and then you cycle back around and start prospecting again.
*sigh*
Nothing lasts forever.
Now, we aren't going to leave you twisting in the wind – the future is here, and with it we have a myriad of tools to make outbound sales easier.
There are some amazing low cost CRM programs out there.
Outbound sales and Ringy? They go together like ham and cheese.
Ringy includes a wide array of outbound sales features to streamline your processes. But we've clearly laid out the value those features bring.
|
Feature |
Value |
|
Email templates |
Streamlines your prospecting |
|
Email and text drip campaigns |
Easily boost demand and lead generation |
|
VoIP softphone |
Facilitate cold calls with click-to-call and local I.D. |
|
Task automation |
Take away tedious little to-dos so your reps can focus on pitching |
Plus, it includes detailed contact organization, data and analytics, contact and calendar integration, progressive dialers, and more.
All for $109 / month (pricing accurate as of November 2023).
Not too shabby.
Yes, yes…you could nearly say we wrote the book when it comes to searching for a Hubspot alternative. But it's still a great product!
Easily create templates, add accounts and contacts with a click, manage and share documents with prospects – it's a solid sales tool.
Hubspot features a pretty straightforward drag-and-drop interface to interact with your customized pipeline, so it's user-friendly with a pretty nice learning curve.
There's no harm in trying it out, as It starts with a free package (accurate as of 04/2022).
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an outbound sales tool that's primarily focused on social selling. It helps you identify the right prospects, build valuable relationships, and stay informed on your industry.
It's fantastic for gathering leads both from custom recommendations and its advanced search, and contacting them is easy with its messaging feature (30 messages per month included).
It also integrates with Salesforce, one of the most popular CRMs on the market.
Its base plan is $79.00 / user / month with its next tier at $125 / user / month (pricing accurate as of 04/2022).
Close boasts smooth workflow, automatic email tracking, no manual data entry, and an intuitive pipeline. But we suppose that it had better be intuitive – it was made by salespeople for salespeople.
It has solid lead management where you can get an overview of:
Its most popular plan is $99 / user/month (pricing accurate as of 04/2022).
Copper is a great option for Google Workspace fans since it features direct integration with all Google programs and allows you to log in using your Google account.
This can simplify things immensely if your team is used to using Gmail, Sheets, Docs…it eliminates a large piece of the learning curve.
Copper is simple, but that doesn't mean it's lacking. It still includes all the CRM standards: solid workflow, automation, analytics, and data.
It's priced at $69 / user/month (pricing accurate as of 04/2022).
So now you have some great strategy ideas and you're browsing through sales tools and CRM software – but it will all be in vain if your team isn't sporting amazing outbound sales skills.
Surprisingly, 27% of businesses don't offer any type of sales onboarding.
Let's not be part of that 27%, okay?
Especially when it can be so simple to provide sales training. Take a look at some proven methods.
|
Training method |
Examples |
|
Documents and handbooks |
|
|
Sales managers as coaches |
|
|
Seminars and events |
|
|
Instructor-led training (ILT) |
|
|
Sales training program |
|
Training your salespeople in essential outbound sales skills won't just help them build confidence and do their job more efficiently – 76% of organizations with a solid sales enablement program see an increase in overall sales between 6% to 20%.
Wow.
Software company Clari is a revenue operations platform with a focus on efficiency, predictability, and growth. They give revenue teams insights into their business to increase forecast accuracy, find sales opportunities, and streamline efficiency.
But how could Clari help other revenue teams when they themselves were struggling with sales? They were having trouble with targeting the wrong accounts and chasing leads that didn't fit their profile (among other things). As a result, they had frustrated sales reps that couldn't focus.
Clari utilized LinkedIn Sales to update their firmographic data and revitalize their customer profile. Using metrics like company size and headquarter location, they were able to redefine their ideal territory.
So sales reps could move forward with confidence with data-driven prospecting and clarified territory plans. The revenue operations team had this to say:
“It's been a game changer and enabler for Sales to hit the ground running.”
You can see how valuable a detailed customer profile is.
FormPiper's outbound sales team used to consist of two AEs (account executives), although they had plans to scale and build up a new team of SDRs (sales development reps).
But they didn't know where to start.
Partnering with a coaching service, FormPiper got valuable management advice on how to build sales development functions. They also met weekly for coaching sessions, strategy development, and management updates.
Co-founder Brad Parker hired three SDRs to his new team and worked one-on-one with them, reviewing their progress and building their outbound sales skills to quickly and smoothly ramp them up. He also created an SDR playbook and built a system for sales call roleplaying.
This sales training paid off in full when FormPiper went from 30 demos/month to 48 demos/month. And their newest SDR was fully ramped in under a month.
We bet you're already scrolling back up to our section on “outbound sales training”, huh?
Inbound sales are when your customers contact you about making a deal or purchase. Some typical methods of inbound sales would be social media presence and good SEO.
So what are outbound sales? When you reach out to your customers about making a deal or purchase. Common methods would be cold calling and cold emailing.
It's all in the name. Customers come in, then it's inbound. If you're reaching out, it's outbound.
An outbound sales rep's job is securing deals and building relationships by reaching out to current and potential customers through calls, messages, and in-person interactions.
Their primary role is customer contact and interaction, though depending on the company, they may have additional duties like managing schedules, updating customer profiles and databases, and more.
A synonym of outbound sales. Outbound marketing entails that you and your team reach out and make first contact with clients. Inbound marketing means you wait for them to come to you.
Pour yourself another cup of coffee and crack those knuckles – time to map out your next outbound sales plan. You definitely have enough new strategies now.
Get your sales reps social selling and guest starring on podcasts this quarter. Nail down your unique selling proposition so they can tell your prospects all about it. And don't forget that they should be practicing touting value and benefits over plain ol' features.
Remember to pick up a good outbound sales tool, too. Request a demo with Ringy, and our friendly team will definitely have a few great recommendations (heads up – they might sound a lot like our recs).