Outbound Sales – Actively target your potential clients

What is outbound sales?

Outbound sales is a method of selling where companies use data to target potential clients by calling or emailing them with a sales pitch. This approach utilises the tools that inbound can not deliver. This is namely personalisation and continual follow-up touch points with prospects. Outbound is an old practice that outlived its usefulness many years ago as alternative methods were improved on. The practice has started to see a revival though and now it is more relevant than ever before. With less people spending their time on social media, there’s an ever increasing emphasis placed on the importance of old fashioned sales practices – outbound sales being one notable example.

How to conduct outbound sales?

1. Create a outbound sales plan

Firstly, it is important to create a plan of attack and build a solid workflow. Across your sales team, you need to split up who and when to call. There are different platforms to reach prospects and at each step. The tasks must be assigned to each sales rep. Hence, read more about creating a sales plan through Hubspot here.

2. Set specific target criteria

Secondly, to have a highly targeted business, you need a clear goal to grow your business. You will typically need to create specific audience personas with which you can target your sales towards. Social media is a great way of improving the scalability of your business, but it is for those businesses that are local or community focussed and have selling as their main objective.

3. Use ABM

Thirdly, ABM can be a great way to target specific decision makers within a company or industry, and it is also easier to achieve some form of personalisation with your marketing messages. Projects are going to specific individuals so it makes sense for you to tailor your message.

4. Leverage social media

Fourthly, social media has created a world wide network of people with similar interests, and it has become its own way of connecting with customers. As such, sharing your content on social media is a great way to improve your search engine rankings and drive traffic back to your website. However, Linkedin is a great place share generic content like the press releases. Social media like Facebook and Twitter must be used in a more personalised way. By keeping an eye on comments, questions & suggestions made by your reader base, you can easily contact those who have questions or concerns by sending them direct messages or commenting on their individual public posts.

What next?

Finally, It is important to start looking for prospects, which you can do using platforms like Triggr. It can help you find look a like businesses to your current clients.