In this blog, we will discuss:
- What Is Outbound Sales?
- Outbound Sales vs Inbound Sales
- Step-by-Step Outbound Sales Strategy
- How Outbound Sales Leads to Closing Deals
- FAQs about Outbound Sales
What Is Outbound Sales?
Outbound sales is essentially when a seller initiates a conversation with a potential customer. That seller could be a company, the founder of the company, or a freelancer, or it could even be a sales or business development person working at a company, and they’re trying to reach out to another person to see if they’re interested in purchasing their products and services.
The reason for why outbound sales is so important is because you might have an amazing product and service that might change the world. But if nobody knows who you are, why they should buy, or actually even taking a step back, if they don’t even know that you exist, how can they actually buy from you? That’s why a sales and business development person has to actually reach out to another person and say, “Hey, are you interested in buying our products and services?”
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Outbound Sales vs Inbound Sales
Outbound sales is very different from inbound sales, Inbound is when you generate content or something like that and people come to you. For example, a company created a YouTube video or a blog and someone reads it and they say, “Oh, that’s pretty interesting. Let me talk to your sales team to see if I wanna buy.”
Outbound is when people don’t even know who you are and maybe you don’t even have a brand yet and you’re reaching out to another person cold. They don’t know who you are. It’s not a warm introduction. And you’re basically just saying like, “Hey look, I think I can help you solve these kinds of problems. Do you wanna have a meeting?” And then if they agree to that meeting, then you can actually start selling.
Step-by-Step Outbound Sales Process
The main goal of outbound sales is to initiate a conversation with a potential buyer. Outbound sales can take many different forms because there are many different channels for reaching out to somebody. The big three ways that many people are using to generate outbound leads are cold emailing, adding them on LinkedIn and sending them a message, or it could even be cold calling.
Of course, you’re doing this cold, meaning they don’t know who you are. They don’t expect your call. They don’t expect your message. But even if it’s cold, if you write the right message or you make the cold call in the proper way, people are willing to have a conversation if you can solve their problem.
The whole process include the following milestones:
- Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- Understand Customer Pain Points Before Outreach
- Build Your Target List and Find Decision-Makers
- Define Your Sales Process and Outreach Channels for Targeting
- Create a Structured Outreach Workflow
- Follow Up Prospects time to time and Re-Engage Leads
- Choose Between: High-Velocity vs Account-Based Strategy
- Run a Discovery Call and Identify Customer Pain
Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Segment Your ICP by Use Cases and Industries
To do outbound sales, the next step is to figure out your ideal customer profile, meaning who is your ideal customer that should actually purchase your product and service. Where most people get it wrong is they don’t have an idea of who they’re selling to. They try to sell to everybody. And in the end, they don’t sell to anybody because they’re not being specific enough. When it comes to your ideal customer profile, sometimes you may have many different profiles in many different industries, depending on how mature the company you’re working at is.
An example is Notion. Notion is a note-taking tool that is used personally almost every single day when writing YouTube videos, getting some ideas, and writing down scripts. But there are many different use cases to Notion. If you go on their website, they have people that are already customers, like Wall Street Journal, Pixar, IBM, Verizon, Nike, McDonald’s. The use cases of Notion are very broad. It can kind of be for everybody.
If working at Notion, the thinking would be, what are the different industries or different departments that use our product? Then create an ideal customer profile for each and every one. Some people use Notion to do roadmaps of creating a new product. Some people do it to organize their engineering code. Some people use it for recruiting HR. Some people use it as a sales CRM, design, and marketing. So many different types of use cases.
A case study example is Blinkist, an app where they summarize books for you. Instead of reading the whole book, you can just read a summary of it, and you basically pay a subscription for that. For this company, Blinkist, they’re using Notion for their hiring process. As they go and recruit people and they do referrals and things like that, they’re using Notion to organize everything.
Notion itself can be very broad. It can be for everybody doing many different things. But what they’ve done is created different ideal customer profiles for different types of people, so that they can go after these different segments.
If Blinkist is an app, a modern type of company, a well-funded startup, and they’re using Notion for recruiting, then the next step would be to think: these modern startups that are well-funded, they’re choosing to use Notion for recruiting tools versus any other software that exists.
So how about we make a list of all the other modern apps in the app store that are also well-funded like Blinkist and send them a cold email to see, “Hey, we’re working with Blinkist to help them with the recruiting using Notion. Just curious to know how you’re doing in your recruiting and to see if you’re interested in learning how you might be able to streamline some of your HR processes with Notion.”
That’s how you define an ideal customer profile and niche down a little bit more and go after a specific industry with a specific use case.
Understand Customer Pain Points Before Outreach
When you’re crafting your ideal customer profile, it’s really important to understand one thing, and that is you gotta understand what pain your ideal customer is probably experiencing. You don’t know for sure, but you can take an educated guess based on your research online. What pain do they probably have? And how do you solve that pain?
Whether you’re doing a cold email, a cold call, whatever it is, you have to basically address those pains. Do they actually have that problem? And can you actually solve it and communicate that you can do all these things? Once you’re able to do that, then people start taking meetings with you. If there’s no pain, there’s no reason for why someone would want to take a meeting, no matter how many emails you send.
Define Your Sales Process and Outreach Channels for Targeting
The next step of outbound sales is how do you actually do outbound sales. What is the process? Essentially, you wanna make a list of the people you wanna reach out to. Then you wanna make a deeper list of all the decision-makers that you personally want to reach out to. Then you find an outreach method that works in your industry.
For some people, it may be cold calling, and that might work really well. Other people, it might be cold emails. Other people, it might be LinkedIn. You gotta understand in your industry, what are people already doing? And that’s the one that you should probably start with because it does kind of work. You wanna basically just mimic other people’s success and not have to reinvent the wheel.
Create a Structured Outreach Workflow
Once you find a channel that does work, you can actually sprinkle in different touch points to increase those touch points and increase the odds somebody will actually communicate with you and start that conversation.
A campaign might look like this. Day number one, you might add them on LinkedIn. Day number two, you might send them a LinkedIn message to learn to see what their challenges are. If they don’t respond, maybe day number five, send them a cold email. If no response, day number eight, give them a cold call. Don’t respond? Day number 12, send them a LinkedIn message. And then day number 17, send them a cold email.
There’s different ways to do it, depending on what you’re doing and how far you wanna spread out each touch point, by how many days. Usually the recommendation is a minimum three to four days at every touch point. You don’t wanna be calling someone every day cause that’s quite annoying.
Follow Up Consistently and Re-Engage Leads
From there, you just keep doing it until they actually respond. There’s going to be a point where you might feel like, “Okay, I reached out to this person so many times, they’re not responding.” You just gotta let them go. Or you can put them in your CRM and say, “Okay, they’re not responding now, let’s go ahead and reach out to them three months from now, or six months from now and then we try the process again.”
Choose Between High-Velocity or Account-Based Strategy
Depending on your strategy, if you are going high velocity, you would just go fast and try to get as many meetings as you can to see if your product or service has product market fit, see if people are buying and you wanna move fast. But if you’re working at a large company like Oracle or Salesforce or Microsoft, and you’re doing enterprise, they might give you a list of 50, 100 companies, or maybe 500 companies, and they say, “Okay, you can only sell it to these companies. So basically just keep pounding the phones, keep sending them emails until they book a meeting with you.”
In those instances, you have a lot of touch points because you’re trying to break into specific key accounts that you wanna work on. But if you’re selling something that you can sell to hundreds of thousands of people, then the recommendation is velocity. If you’re going for these specific accounts, the recommendation is a combination of all these methods spread out over a longer time, so you don’t act annoying, because you don’t wanna burn any bridges.
Run a Discovery Call and Identify Customer Pain of Prospects
Once you actually get that meeting, you’re gonna talk to hopefully a director or above level over the phone, and you’re trying to just understand what their problems are and then you’re eventually trying to sell them.
For outbound sales, something very important that you have to understand is that they don’t really know who you are, what you do. So on the first phone call, you’re kind of educating them a little bit about what you do and what value you bring, what problems you solve, and why you’re different from your competitors. Then from there, you’re going to ask them a lot of questions to see if they actually have any real pain that you can solve. Because if there’s no pain, there’s not gonna be any sale.
How Outbound Sales Leads to Closing Deals
For the Notion example, if they’re reaching out to someone and they’re trying to sell into their HR department, they have to understand, is their HR department experiencing any pain? Do they have any problem with their previous software? Are they doing it manually and everything’s not centralized? What is the pain someone has and how do you solve it? Only then will people actually buy your product and service.
They will buy if you can find the pain, identify it, show them that they have it and make it hurt. And then remedy that pain, solve it with your solution. And then that’s how you close the deal.
FAQs about Outbound Sales
1. What is outbound sales?
In outbound sales, sellers initiate conversation with potential customers who have no idea about the seller’s products or services. The agents form an ideal customer profile and reach out to their potential customers to educate them about their business by targeting their pain points.
2. What are the main steps in an outbound sales process?
The main steps of outbound sales process include:
- Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- Understand Customer Pain Points Before Outreach
- Build Your Target List and Find Decision-Makers
- Define Your Sales Process and Outreach Channels for Targeting
- Create a Structured Outreach Workflow
- Follow Up Prospects time to time and Re-Engage Leads
- Choose Between: High-Velocity vs Account-Based Strategy
- Run a Discovery Call and Identify Customer Pain
3. Why do outbound sales campaigns fail?
Outbound sales campaigns usually fail when you fail to comply with outbound sales process and do poor targeting, define vague ideal customer profiles, weak messaging, lack of personalization, or not addressing real customer pain points.
