Do you have trouble generating high-quality leads despite robust and widespread outreach efforts?
In the face of growing competition, B2B businesses are constantly vying for innovative campaigns that appeal to the prospects’ pain points. However, the quest for acquiring more leads can be counterproductive, especially if the users possess a low intent to purchase your products or services.
Securing high-quality leads should be the end goal for your business. For one, qualified and interested leads result in faster conversions and save the hassle of spending time and resources on low-intent prospects. The primary prerequisite for gaining quality leads is creating a comprehensive sales outreach strategy.
Read on as we explore the meaning of a sales outreach strategy and discuss 14 tips sure to boost your outreach campaigns!
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How Important Are Sales Outreach Strategies?
The process of reaching out to new prospects in an attempt to make a sale can be complex. For starters, it is the responsibility of the salespersons to be aware of the users’ pain points while pitching the products or services of their brand. Provided how sales outreach focuses on cultivating long-term relationships with new prospects to increase conversions, it is vital to devise a pre-meditated strategy that enables smooth communication with the user.
Establishing a sales outreach strategy is a reliable way to reach new prospects through diverse channels. The benefits of an outreach strategy can be summarized as follows:
- Provides you with complete control over your sales cycle
- Makes it easier to curate targeted lists to detect the ideal client profiles
- Helps prioritize bigger accounts for maximum profitability
- Assists in communicating deals and new offers to potential clients
While sales outreach is an impactful method to boost your sales efforts, it requires extensive planning and involves several variables.
14 Ways to Develop a Booming Sales Outreach Strategy
Did you know that 82% of B2B buyers are keen to interact with salespersons if they reach out to them? This willingness is especially prevalent during the early buying stages, where the prospective client has a lot of questions and requires clarity from the vendor’s sales teams.
However, it is challenging to reach out to these buyers and capitalize on their curiosity without a well-defined sales outreach strategy. Hence, we have compiled a list of 14 tips to boost brand awareness and reach the right audience at the ideal time.
1. Know your Target Audience
Outreach strategies are ineffective without the relevant data to back them up. It is crucial to understand your target market and recognize the group of industries that will benefit from your products or services. Some of the details pertaining to your targeted companies can be categorized into the following groups:
- Industry size
- Location of the company
- Revenue of the company
- Specialization
Once you obtain this data, you can assess your audience’s pain points and explicitly cater your offerings to solve their problems.
2. Take the Assistance of Real-Time B2B Intelligence
After defining your ideal client profile, you might be confused about the best place to start. Given that your audience will consist of several prospects worldwide, it can be challenging to initiate outreach strategies without direction.
In such instances, buying signals provide significant help. Salespersons can determine prospects with strong buying intents through their online activities. For instance, if a decision-maker is browsing through online infographics, searching through relevant web publications or visiting similar websites, it is safe to say that they possess a solid buying intent.
3. Focus on Solving Problems
Your outreach strategies must account for the buyer’s position in their company and some of their existing problems. For example, if you are targeting a decision-maker from the marketing department of the organization, 4here are some relevant factors to consider:
- The day-to-day responsibilities of the marketing head
- The problems in their existing work structure
- How incorporating your product or service can ease their hassles
- How collaborating with your company can help them achieve their long-term goals
When you divert from the core features of your offerings and focus on the benefits for the user, you showcase your value and increase the likelihood of making a sale.
4. Determine the Best Communication Channel
Some B2B decision-makers prefer professional channels like LinkedIn, while others are open to being contacted via Instagram. Every buyer has a preferred communication channel where they are more active and respond to messages faster.
To determine the best communication channel, you can try a multi-channel approach with your outreach campaigns. This approach provides crucial information about their active channel and helps you direct all sales efforts on that medium.
5. Emphasize on Personalization
A whopping 65% of B2B businesses are now inclining towards leveraging intent-centric data. The most common complaint revolves around the fact that B2B-catering companies are not taking sufficient time to understand the buyer’s needs, leading to a drop in the quality of services.
In the face of this displeasure, personalizing your sales efforts becomes extremely important. When your offerings are according to the users, then you can assure their needs and wants are taken into consideration. Creating buyer personas and tailoring your offerings to specific B2B buyers will increase ROI and result in a smoother experience for the prospects.
6. Use a CRM to Track Outreach Efforts
Customer relationship management software has risen as consolidated platforms that make it easy to track and manage existing outreach campaigns. You can store your interactions in this software and avail of the following benefits:
- Automated segmentation of prospects
- Organized contact data for better accessibility
- Seamless creation of sales reports for a given time period
- Ability to set reminders to follow up with leads
7. Don’t Forget to Follow Up!
Following up is an important element for all sales communications. After having a productive session with the user, it is vital for sales teams to immediately reach out through the preferred communication channel and direct the prospect to the next course of action.
The biggest benefit of following up is that it helps you stay relevant in the audience’s mind and leads to quicker sales cycles.
8. Adopt a TOFU Strategy
The Top of the Funnel, or TOFU strategy, is a method that focuses on educating the buyer throughout their journey of making a purchase. It starts from the awareness stage when the salesperson reaches the buyer and ends at the purchase stage when the buyer has completed the payment.
The TOFU strategy is a joint effort between the marketing and sales teams of an organization. It aims to capture the users’ attention and retain their interest in the brands’ offerings by establishing several touchpoints throughout the buying process.
9. Bank on Automation
Browsing through prospect information and categorizing them into groups is daunting and time-consuming legwork that eats into the productivity of sales teams.
When you substitute these efforts with automated tools that set up meeting reminders, plan follow-up calls and enable easy segmentation with similar categories, your sales team has more opportunities to focus on reaching prospects and increasing conversions.
10. Experiment with Social Selling
Social selling involves using social media networks like Instagram or Facebook to reach out to potential clients and advertize your products or services. This concept focuses on connecting with new leads and showcasing brand value through targeted and personalized messages.
While social selling may not always produce desirable results, it is a low-cost effort that provides a respectable ROI. Moreover, social selling has reportedly caused significant revenue growth in about 61% of the companies that adopted this practice. Not to mention, it prevents the hassle of succumbing to data privacy laws since the information about the users is publicly available on their social media handles.
11. Rely on Pre-Designed Databases
Lead generation is a taxing process for any organization, especially due to the lack of a validated and authentic contact database of their target audience. Thankfully, the rise of several data vendors has made it possible to acquire extensive contact lists pertaining to different industries and professions.
These databases are compiled with strict compliance with data privacy laws and other legal obligations. Incorporating them into your marketing efforts will enhance the quality of your leads and give you access to qualified prospects looking to engage with sales teams.
12. Develop a Complementary Relationship Between Marketing and Sales
Sales outreach efforts cannot be successful if they operate independently from marketing. The aim of both these departments is to entice prospects and convince them to make a purchase.
Hence, the shared insights can form the basis for a robust sales outreach campaign that understands the prospects and provides a smoother experience throughout their sales cycle.
13. Accumulate Data of Critical Decision-Makers
A well-curated lead generation database can be the difference you need to execute impactful campaigns. It is vital to supplement your contact list with updated information about the C-level executives of different organizations responsible for the decisions of their respective departments. Generating a direct connection with them will save time and lead to faster sales cycles.
14. Avoid Scripted Pitches
When you create a sales outreach strategy, remember that decision-makers are flooded with thousands of promotional and marketing calls daily. What can you do to stand out among this sea of B2B marketers?
The answer is customization. Engage in a personal conversation with the buyer to enable an organic relationship and gradually draw their attention to your offerings. Take it up a notch and make the conversation about them to maintain their interest and discuss your products or services.
Summing Up
An effective sales outreach strategy has a two-pronged effect. It helps your sales teams connect with more prospects while trying to revive old connections and increasing the chances of making a sale. However, it is essential to develop a carefully laid out strategy that accounts for variables like lead generation and personalized pitches to improve conversion rates.
Reach out to B2B buyers using a mixture of automation tools at your disposal and ease the process of tracking and managing sales. Focus on quality over quantity to decrease the cost per client acquisition and divert your resources to more crucial aspects of sales.
