Outbound Prospecting – Best Practices
Outbound prospecting is a marketing channel, where you identify targeted prospective customers and reaching out to them delivering sales pitches. Cold calling is one of the examples of outbound prospecting, but modern sales reps use cold emails and other communication methods.
#1 Outbound Prospecting Tool to Build a Strong Sales Pipeline
Inbound vs Outbound Prospecting
Having potential customers coming to you through successful content marketing is known as inbound prospecting. It is a long-term solution that will revolve around a lot of important elements, which are then transformed into a useful content offering solution.
Inbound efforts are great, but when starting a business, there will be less time to solely rely on inbound to land new customers.
Whereas, reaching out directly and introducing prospects to your company and its products/services is known as outbound prospecting. The outbound prospecting strategy brings in new customers quickly and efficiently.
In a traditional outbound prospecting strategy,
You will have to build a list of potential prospects, both individuals and companies that will benefit from your products/services. Reach out to them through cold email outreach and cold calls.
A growing business can pick a quick and essential approach like outbound prospecting to establish the first point of contact and forward those qualifying leads to the sales reps who can close deals.
Benefits of Outbound Prospecting:
Outbound Prospecting always delivers certain elements that inbound cannot such as
- A high-quality leads funnel
- Highly targeted lead lists (companies, titles, and contact information)
- Better sales pitch
- Personally Connect with prospects
- Tick off all qualification criteria
- Passing better leads to the sales team
Outbound Prospecting System – An Overview
The process might differ according to each business, but the basic steps of an outbound process will look like the below:
1. Define Ideal buyer Personas
In order to do accurate targeting and to increase the potential client ratio, you must define your ideal customer profile and buyer persona carefully. In my case, my target audience is top-level CXO’s, VP Sales & Marketing in tech companies who can be easily found on LinkedIn and other B2B networks.
2. Lead Generation
Find B2B prospects that match your ideal customer profile from Online Directories, Professional & Social networking sites such as LinkedIn are rich sources. Append missing business email addresses and phone of your ideal B2B prospects,
Automate the process whole process of building a B2B prospect list from the internet using eGrabber’s flagship outbound prospecting tool, LeadGrabber Pro
With LeadGrabber Pro the whole process of building B2B leads is made much easier, as it covers the first step of Finding your ideal B2B prospects, Appending business email & phone, till exporting the list to CRM/ATS.
3. Cold Outreach
An effective outreach strategy can help your business with promising leads filling your sales pipeline.
The cold email marketing program is one of the effective ways that enable you to generate new leads for your business, complete more sales, and takes you a step closer to your goals.
Here are 4 important cold email strategies that will double your response rates:
- Start with stronger personalization
- Attach a social proof
- Explain the value proposition
- Add a clear call to action (Read more..)
Cold calling – to deeply understand the potential customer. To avoid being seen as scammers, legitimate businesses, cold call to business phone numbers of prospects and introduce rather than concentrating to close the sale.
4. Selling
You can build your selling strategy based on your past experience in selling. If you haven’t, start with what you think will interest your audience, and then build from there.
As you learn, you will know what works and what doesn’t. Once you have a plan in place, you’re ready to start selling! Put your plan and learning into action and then get them on the phones!
5. Closing Deals
If the sales calls and meetings are successful, you will close the deal and your sales team has made a sale. The process of selling is done once you close a deal, but stay in contact with your customer and build a lasting relationship for future business.
Effective Tips Carry out Outbound Sales Prospecting Process Efficiently
- Focus on helping your prospects. Know your customer’s needs and recommend other appropriate software that is a better fit in their process.
- Building a lasting relationship with the customer can yield your referral sales and renewal.
- Follow-up on other prospects that did not convert through multiple platforms to increase the chance of making a connection.
- Automate your outbound prospecting process as much as possible, for instance, set up an automated email sequence. Concentrate on new prospects yet trying to convert the existing prospect base.
What are you waiting for? Start your outbound prospecting today. Happy Prospecting!