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If you work in B2B sales or manage a team in it, a portion of your work goes into contacting prospects both old and new in outreach efforts. Whether you’re keeping the ties with an old prospect alive or reaching out to new ones, you have an arsenal of channels for your task from phone calls to messaging, emails, social media or personalized embedded videos to create an engagement that ends in a sale.
With the proper outreach strategy in place, you can deliver quality leads and improve sales performance.
Try out these time-tested best practices for outreach to boost your inbound and outbound sales:
It’s easy to cast too wide a net when going for as many sales prospects as possible and end up wasting time, money and energy. Some leads don’t work because the approach strategy was wrong, and some don’t pan out because they are unwilling.
To avoid wasted efforts, it’s important to create the ideal customer persona such that the sales team assesses the most promising leads. You can then zero in on the ideal prospects through qualifying questions.
Active outreach, in simple terms, is to keep the outreach process ongoing, with the sales representatives allocating large chunks of their day on the phone or emails for the task.
They need to specifically focus on prospects who have been called the least to ensure they never go cold. It’s important to follow up at the right time to show them that you are paying attention.
Phone etiquettes are a precious skill set salespeople need to possess. Regardless of how long the workday has been or how stressful the month has been, good salespeople do not sound impatient or gruff, especially when the prospects repeatedly turn down the calls or reschedule them.
By staying organized, showing respect, consistently maintaining a friendly tone and returning messages promptly, it is possible to keep a foot in the door.
Sales automation tools are effective techniques that can significantly save time and increase productivity. The tools can analyze and narrow down the most promising prospects at the right time and enforce optimum sales schedules and good habits that streamline the process and remove a lot of confusion.
An important feature of automation tools is their email and call sequencing aspect that you can customize based on personas, industries, product offerings and verticals.
When Sales and Marketing work with a symbiotic relationship rather than being adversarial or in their own bubble, they can support each other’s efforts by sharing customer outreach data. With the mutual exchange, the salespeople can get an insight into the type of emails their prospects are most likely to open. The marketing people can benefit from learning the questions being asked by the prospects. The information exchange can also help both the departments decide the quality of the leads and reduce redundant work.
This one might seem obvious but is often poorly executed by the salespeople. The time and trends change, and so do the way to attract someone’s attention with it. Brainstorm to figure out what would grab a prospects’ interest- it could be a statistic, a personalized message or some days an emoji can do the trick!
People love messages that carry a personal touch or speak to them instantly. For example, instead of using a “Hi There”, they could be greeted by their name. Automation tools can help consolidate data for email personalization. Therefore that is a technology that you must leverage to save time and customize emails.
When resonating with a prospect, there’s nothing like extending empathy to their specific pain points. Once the stage of the customer's buying journey is established, you can use a personalized approach to highlight pain points and how your product or service can address them to alleviate their difficulty.
Prospects are swayed more by stories and real-life case studies to build trust in your organization. There is no need for them to trust a salesperson trying to pitch something they may not need. So you need proof to validate the offering, and the benefits you claim will come with it.
Whether it is an email or a phone call, the communication should be concise and to the point without feeling that they are wasting time. Emails should take no longer than a minute to read, while phone calls that have to be timed at the right time of the day and week need to be filled with more relevant questions and less fluff.
Sales Outreach is a necessary tool. When used properly, it can significantly improve productivity, sales figures and customer relations. Even if most of these strategies work out, there is always room to iron out the wrinkles and convert more leads into customers.
