4 Best Practices to Boost Your Sales Outreach Strategy Success

 

Effective sales outreach is an essential part of the sales process, and more than likely if you’re a Sales Professional, you’re involved in some sort of sales outreach. When people think of sales outreach, they often think of cold calling, but it’s become much more than just picking up a phone. The introduction of email really changed the “cold call”. 

The challenge is that people are smarter than they used to be; email response rates have rapidly decreased over the years as people no longer respond well to the cold, hard sell. However, other forms of outreach are on the rise, such as text messaging, digital advertising, social media, and more.

Sales outreach is the best way to maintain a steady flow of warm leads. And with the right outreach strategy, Sales Professionals can deliver quality leads and close more deals. Remember this though, great software programs exist for this very reason … And, the right Marketing Coach or Strategist might just have the ability to create a couple or a few years of outstanding posts, blogs, graphics, and even videos … VERY crucial!

 

Here are my top tips to help you boost your sales outreach to be more successful:

 

 

1) Identify the right target audience

First and foremost, make sure you are targeting the right people. It doesn’t matter how good your sales outreach is if you’re going after the wrong audience because no matter what, those leads will never warm up. And what Sales Professional wants to waste time and energy chasing prospects that will never buy?

Spend the time to identify your ideal target audience and build a list of people that meet the criteria you identify. Work with your Marketing team or Business Coach to create buyer personas (and also understand how to master this). By first creating an ideal or target customer profile, sales teams can figure out who the right people to target are. They can then use qualifying questions to zero in on these ideal prospects quickly. It’s important to prepare the right qualifying questions in advance to quickly figure out which prospects to pursue. Or, Market to their hot buttons and what it is that keeps them awake at night …

 

2) Commit to active, ongoing outreach

The thing about sales outreach is that it’s not a one-and-done deal. Active outreach means ongoing engagement with your target or ideal customers. Also, once you’ve done a round of outreach, make sure you are circling back and following-up. Sometimes you may need to follow-up several times before getting anywhere. This is one of the top tactics that MOST Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs get completely wrong. The average is 20-50 or more touches. But, with advanced Marketing or Advertising, those numbers can be at 5-12 touches … A HUGE difference when doing it right …

If a prospect asks you to follow-up on a specific date, add a reminder to do so. Getting back to someone at the right time proves that you’re listening to them and respect their time. AND, don’t forget about DRIP Campaigns. Ask me about them, if you don’t know what they are, and what they do and why. And if you happen to NOT be doing that, you are missing out on revenue and profit …

 

3) Use sales outreach, automation, Artificial Intelligence, or lead generation tools

The challenge with ongoing outreach is it takes up a lot of time. In order to be successful at it, you need to allocate a few hours a day at minimum just for outreach and follow-ups alone. The good news is, there are effective ways to automate this process effectively to save time without compromising personalization or quality of leads. You can automate quite a bit of it, but the “communicating with humans” part you shouldn’t.

The right sales outreach automation and engagement tools save you tons of time, enhances productivity, improves organization and alleviates the stress of having to stay on top of outreach and follow-up. And as always, the “right” Professional has these tools … And more importantly, knows what works and what doesn’t work in Marketing or Advertising …

 

4) Align marketing and sales outreach

It’s extremely important that Sales and Marketing align their outreach efforts in order to better support each other. Marketing is likely producing and sending content to leads to help qualify them before passing them along to sales (if done right that is). As a Salesperson, you can benefit from knowing what content is being published as it can help aid the Sales Process. There may be a relevant piece of content available that answers a specific question or use, and what you believe your prospects are asking you for … (Think “Hot Buttons”) … (Think “Pain Points”) …

The feedback loop between Sales and Marketing should remain open, so Marketing can not only help sales, but sales can also help Marketing improve their own outreach by knowing the kinds of questions that prospects/customers have been asking. Think about their fears, problems, uncertainties, frustrations, concerns, and issues. Then provide your solutions or answers often … And, if you invest in the “right” Strategist or Coach, there are sources out there that know these answers, if you don’t …

 

 

Sales outreach, though sometimes tedious, is a necessary part of getting prospects and converting them to customers. When done successfully, sales outreach is a powerful way to boost sales and company growth. If you want to learn how to improve your sales outreach, fill out the box below, and just ask … Why wait!