The Ultimate Guide to Sales Outreach

Did you know that social selling is one of the biggest sales outreach tactics at present? 

In fact, social sellers have a 66% greater chance to reach their quota of prospects compared to traditional sellers. Moreover, 78% of salespeople who use social media channels sell more than their peers.

The way you go about your sales outreach can have quite an impact on your business.

Not having an effective outreach strategy can result in your cold sales outreach emails ending up as spam. It could also mean your calls getting rejected. These are not favourable scenarios when you are looking to improve sales.

In this article, we’ll examine the best sales outreach practices and their importance. Alongside this, we’ll also explore how to improve sales for your business with sales outreach tools and more.

What is Sales Outreach?

Sales outreach is one of the major aspects of running a company. In simple words, it’s defined as the process where your sales rep engages with a prospective customer. 

Your sales rep then convinces the customer to buy your company’s product or avail its services. This is known as an outbound sales strategy. It depends on factors like building a specific lead list and contacting them through various channels.

Meaningful input is a necessity when it comes to effective sales outreach. You can provide offers and campaigns that your audience wants or even give them personalised messages. This greatly reduces the chances of your customers overlooking your brand. 

Why is Sales Outreach Important?

Being in the sales team of any company is quite stressful. There’s a lot of persistence, hard work, and creativity that you will need for sales operations. Unless you have these qualities, it’s difficult to be a good sales representative.

Since there are so many processes involved in sales, it is easy to overlook what’s really important. In such scenarios, your company would bear the consequences of poor strategy and you’d lose customers. 

As such, it’s important that you put sales outreach at the top of your priorities. It is one of the fundamental responsibilities that your sales reps need to handle.

5 Reasons Why Sales Outreach Matters For Your Business

Now you must be wondering why sales outreach is so important. Primarily, it’s because it is crucial for your company to keep growing. 

Here are five reasons why sales outreach is so important for your business to thrive:

• Reaching new prospects

Arguably one of the best benefits of sales outreach is reaching new prospects. In fact, outbound sales outreach opens more doors and gives you more opportunities. 

• Seize sales opportunities faster

There are some sales strategies that could take weeks before you see any results. Sales outreach is not one of those time-consuming sales strategies. 

Sales outreach, mainly outbound sales strategy, enables you to target new leads in a very short time period. Moreover, it gives you more control on how you want to pace your sales cycle. 

• Going after big accounts

An outbound sales strategy is a great way to beat the competition and target bigger accounts in your market. Despite lacking authority around your business, you can still initiate conversations with major clients. 

The important thing is to have a solid sales strategy and target the right accounts. This will allow you to have conversations based on relevant solutions and offers.

• Promotion of products and services

Unsure of how to launch your newest product in the market in the most effective way? Your answer is targeted sales outreach. Easily talk about your products and services while building a lead’s trust. It’s the best way to increase brand awareness. 

You can also better understand your prospects and what challenges they are facing. Only then will you be able to offer solutions through your products and services.

• Builds stronger relationships

Your sales outreach should have a value-first approach. When you start personalizing your outreach messages you will be able to make your prospects feel valued. 

Using personalized messages to initiate the very first conversation can have a lasting impression on any potential customer. Instead of only focusing on early sales, try to build strong connections with your prospects to boost conversions.

B2B vs B2C Sales Outreach: What’s the Difference?

B2B and B2C have the same fundamental basis they start with a service or product and end with a sales conversion. 

But, both of these sales outreach processes have many distinct differences. B2B sales outreach processes are often very complex and can have anywhere from five to eight steps. 

However, B2C sales processes are often simpler and involve lesser steps. Now, let us look at some more differences between B2B and B2C sales outreach.

Also read, Difference between B2B and B2C Sales.

B2B Sales Outreach Processes

Here are the basic steps and characteristics involved in a B2B sales outreach process.

• B2B sales target organizations, entities, corporations and businesses.
• The sales process is long and complex.
• These sale processes involve several decision makers all in the same organization.
• The price points in B2B sales are quite high.
• Salespeople working in B2B sales require continuous, extensive mentorship and training.
• In B2B sales, deep relationships are built between your customers and sellers, based on trust.
• All contracts involved in these sales processes are carefully worded, edited and reviewed.

B2C Sales Outreach Processes 

The steps and characteristics involved in B2C sales outreach processes include:

• These sales processes are generally targeted towards individual customers.
•  It is based on and driven by market prices.
• B2C sales processes have short and simple sales cycles.
• These sales processes focus more on the quantity than the quality of your prospects.
• B2C sales processes generally don’t have any contracts. If any contracts are involved, they are simple.

Top 5 Sales Outreach Practices

Your business needs to reach out to new leads effectively and get them interested in your products or services. Sales outreach is just one part of this process. First, you need to ensure that you are working with a solid plan.

Here are the best sales outreach practices that can help you boost your sales through the roof:

• Understand your target customers

Unless you talk to the right customers, you will be unable to enhance your sales cycle or maximize your ROI. You could even create an ideal customer profile (ICP). Your ICP is a set of attributes that includes the different traits your potential customer will have.

• Use the right communication channels

You can get in touch with leads and converse with them through various channels. Most companies use sales outreach channels like email, cold-calling, SMS, LinkedIn and other social media platforms. 

However, some channels are more suitable for your company’s objectives and target lead preferences. As such, try out several channels and choose the one that works best for you.

• Personalize all outreach messages

One of the best ways to make a sales campaign successful is by personalizing your outreach message. This allows you to build trust with your leads and keep them interested in your company and its offers. 

It is important you give each lead a unique experience to make them feel like a valued customer.

• Use newer technology to your advantage

Sales outreach can sometimes be quite overwhelming to salespeople despite years of expertise. It’s important to support your sales team so that they can function efficiently. 

With new tech, a lot of manual workloads will be taken off the shoulders of your sales team. In this way, their productivity and quality of work will improve.

• Always follow up after initial contact

On average, it takes five phone calls to contact a prospect successfully. However, 44% of salespeople give up on leads after one attempt. 

For this reason, it’s crucial to follow up with clients after first contact. In your follow-up plan, ensure that you are giving leads enough time to respond.

How to Structure Your Sales Outreach Strategy?

Generally, the responsibility of building a sales outreach strategy lies with your salespeople and sales manager. 

The structure of sales outreach strategies will differ for each company based on their own requirements. However, there are some main factors to consider before you structure a sales outreach strategy, they are:

Research your target audience

As mentioned before, it is crucial that you understand the audience you are targeting. You must research their demographics and also understand the challenges they are facing. 

You must know what your audience needs. Without this, you’d be unable to put the right promotional efforts towards getting them to convert. Some research techniques include interviews, questionnaires, online surveys etc.

• Create buyer personas

After your research, you’ll have to create a fictional personality for your target buyer. This persona should include all the common characteristics that are relevant to your brand and what you’re offering. You should take into account the market, your company’s goals, and budget and do a SWOT analysis.

• Prioritize contact data

Here, you get the contact data of your leads and create a priority list. This list is based on the chances that they are likely to convert. Popular methods to get contact information include website contact forms, social media platforms, webinar forms, survey forms, etc.

• Choose the right outreach channel and perform multi-channel outreach

Depending on which outreach channel your leads are most active on; you must choose one. Based on your audience research, you can also implement a multi-channel outreach strategy. This will make your outreach more effective.

• Data integration in your CRM

Besides contacting leads, it’s also important to record the conversations that your sales reps have with customers. 

An easy way to store this data is by using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. A CRM makes sales processes much easier and faster.

Also read, What is outbound calling.

5 Popular Sales Outreach Tools You Should Know

With sales outreach tools, you can automate several aspects of your outreach strategies and sales cycle. 

Here are the 5 sales outreach tools you should know about:

• SalesBlink

This all-in-one full-stack sales outreach tool can automate several tasks and connect you to potential hot leads.

• Prospect.io

Specifically meant for outbound sales, this is a well-performing platform for automating your sales.

• SalesHandy

It is one of the best outreach tools for cold emailing. It includes features like merge mail, email templates, email personalization, automated follow-ups and more.

• Woodpecker

Another great tool to help you reach out to prospects with your cold email campaigns is Woodpecker.

• Wiza

This tool is specifically built for LinkedIn sales outreach. With it, you can build your email lists via linkedIn prospecting and also export the contacts to your CRM.

Conclusion

As you would have understood by now, reaching out to prospective clients is vital for any sales process. 

Sales outreach is basically a way to attract new leads to your company’s sales pipeline and convert them. It’s also a necessary practice for  promoting the newest offers from your company. Not only this, but also for prioritizing the most important prospects in your strategy.

There are many ways you can begin conversations with new leads and tell them about company offers. Among these, the most popular sales channels are cold calling, emails and LinkedIn. These channels are used by most companies all over the world.

With this article, you now have a better understanding about different sales outreach practices and their importance. When trying to structure your outreach strategy, explore all your options first. 

Remember to always make informed decisions and form a sales outreach strategy based on the results you get. You must also base your decisions on target prospects and how you can best personalize messages from your company.

Keeping all this in mind, you too will be able to boost sales for your business!