How to Build an Outbound Sales Strategy for B2B
Outbound sales have fallen out of favor in recent years with the emergence of inbound as the strategy of choice. Inbound tactics like SEO and content marketing are touted for their ability to create strong brand awareness and generate passive leads. At the same time, outbound is often referred to as an outdated method, irrelevant now that technology tools exist to pull customers to you.
Here’s the thing: inbound strategies are effective. Companies need to be using them to stay competitive and relevant.
But outbound sales? They’re not dead. In fact, they provide a critical means for pursuing the leads you want, not just the ones that happen to make their way to you. Outbound sales make your sales teams more proactive, empower you to go after high-profile and high-potential customers, and yield faster results.
In short: your company still needs an outbound sales strategy. In this article, we’ll cover how to build one.
Quick Takeaways
- Training your sales team with insights from experienced Account Executives enriches their skills and aligns them with your sales strategy.
- Understanding your ideal customer profile is crucial for targeting prospects and maximizing outbound sales efforts.
- Integrating inbound content strategies with outbound tactics helps engage new prospects and set up effective follow-ups.
- Lengthening your cold email sequences can notably improve your reply rates and enhance visibility.
- Regularly evaluating your performance using KPIs like lead conversion rates and email open rates is essential for refining your strategy and maintaining high performance.
- Staying updated with market trends and adapting your approach ensures your outbound efforts remain effective and relevant.
Why Outbound Sales Excel in B2B Marketing
B2B is where outbound marketing truly gains an advantage. Businesses like to be sold to, making prospects less hostile than in any B2C scenario. Companies always strive to remain competitive, constantly looking for solutions that reduce costs, increase efficiency, and boost sales.
If you approach businesses with offerings that help them run smoothly and earn more profits, there’s a good chance you’ll capture their attention.
Not only that, but…
- B2B companies are more open to discussions that promise operational improvements and higher profitability.
- It enables your sales team to reach out to key stakeholders and decision-makers directly.
- You can shorten the time needed to close deals by engaging with prospects who are actively seeking solutions.
Outbound sales not only keep your pipeline filled with qualified leads but also ensure that you’re engaging with businesses primed for your solutions.
How to Build Your B2B Outbound Sales Strategy
Prepare Your Sales Teams for Outbound Sales
Training your sales team is crucial. They should be knowledgeable about the product and skilled in communication and negotiation. Training them on how to use CRM systems, sales analytics, and automation tools effectively can keep them sharp, motivated, and productive.
Ideally, your training should come from the best, your experienced Account Executives (AEs). AEs bring real-world experience to the table, sharing insights from their own sales journeys. They can offer practical advice, reveal successful strategies that have worked in the field, and highlight common pitfalls to avoid.
This rich, experiential learning helps your team understand the nuances of sales that aren’t always apparent from standard training materials.
When your team is trained by those who live and breathe your sales strategies, it ensures everyone is on the same page and ready to present a unified front to prospects.
In short: AEs set a high standard for your sales reps to follow.
Don’t forget to keep the training program dynamic and ongoing.
Regular updates to training materials and sessions help keep your team in the loop with the latest product changes, market conditions, and sales tactics. Interactive methods, like role-playing and simulations, make the training process engaging and practical.
Identify Your ICP
Who is your ideal customer? It’s one of the first questions you should ask when you begin building your outbound sales strategy. Quantity does play a role in outbound sales — generally, the more leads you pursue, the more you’ll convert — but only if you’re intentional about it. Building your ideal customer profile (ICP) ensures you don’t waste critical time going after leads that will never convert.
You can build your ICP by asking yourself questions like:
- What problems do we solve and who needs them?
- What size organizations are we able to serve?
- What budget does the company need to afford our solution?
- What kind of company culture fits with our products and services?
- Which industries are our solutions relevant for?
Find Customers Who Fit the Profile
Once you deliver a clear picture of your ICP, it’s time to build your list of potential customers who fit that mold. You can start by using social media tools to find companies that fall under your target profile. LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Facebook ads are two great options for finding leads in an ongoing, automated way. Manual searches are effective, too, and allow you to drill down using filters and targeted search terms.
Other ways to find new customers: crawling search engines, attending conferences and trade shows, hiring a third-party lead generation service, or purchasing a leads database.
Grow Your Online Presence
This is one place where your inbound and outbound sales strategies connect. Once you start outbound sales outreach, your potential customers will look online to learn more about you. Growing your online presence with content is a way to build community with these prospects and expose them to your content over time.
Maintaining a great blog, sharing your content on social media, and implementing SEO tactics to rank high on search engine results pages are all ways you can support the claims you make in your outbound outreach efforts and increase trust in your brand.
You can also use online activity to continue building a bigger prospect list. While content itself may be considered an inbound strategy, you can turn it into an outbound effort by following up with engaged commenters, going through follower lists to find new lead opportunities, and using social media as an additional touchpoint with current prospects.
Perfect Your Cold Email Outreach Message
Cold email outreach is a critical component of any good outbound sales strategy. It allows you to communicate directly with prospects, share your value proposition, and provide a strong call to action that encourages prospects to take the next step. In a recent survey by Chief Marketer, B2B professionals rated email as the outreach strategy with the highest ROI.
All that said, getting noticed via email is no small task. Professionals today — especially B2B decision makers — are inundated with emails. To stand out, your message needs to be attention grabbing, personalized, and authentic.
And believe it or not, cold email outreach is a long game. It typically takes several messages before you’ll get a response — in fact, sending a 4-7 email sequence vs. 1-3 can triple your response rate. This means you don’t have to fit every message into your first email. Consider how you can build momentum with intentional, thought-out messaging across several emails.
By testing different versions of your outbound emails, you can determine which configuration yields the highest response rates. This process involves experimenting with elements like subject lines, email content, and call-to-action buttons. Once you identify the most successful format, you can standardize it to elevate your campaign’s overall performance.
Evaluate Your Performance with KPIs
Once you’ve implemented your outbound sales strategy and started generating sales, you might be tempted to settle in and rest on your laurels. But this approach will quickly set you back if you don’t know your outbound efforts are working.
You’ll only know if you keep track of your efforts. This starts with setting goals that can be measured. We recommend using the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goal framework to set detailed and easily measurable goals with predefined KPIs. These KPIs, whether lead conversion rates, email open rates, or customer acquisition costs, should align with your specific goals and provide actionable insights into how well your strategy is performing.
Should B2B Companies Focus Less on Inbound?
It’s a burning question for many businesses, and no single answer fits all scenarios. Outbound can be more beneficial if your product benefits from a sales-centric approach. It allows you to identify and reach out to specific leads directly, giving you control over your sales pipeline.
Conversely, if you aim to build a significant digital footprint and establish a long-term presence in the market, inbound strategies are your go-to. By creating valuable content and optimizing your online presence, you attract leads organically, which can lead to sustained growth over time.
In many cases, a combination of both strategies yields the best results. The two often complement each other.
For instance, small or medium-sized businesses with limited budgets can leverage outbound strategies to reach leads they might otherwise miss while simultaneously using inbound methods to build brand authority and draw in a steady stream of interested prospects.
Practical Tips for Combining Both Strategies
- Use outbound tactics to quickly fill your sales funnel with qualified leads, especially when launching new products or entering new markets.
- Invest in content marketing, SEO, and social media to cultivate a lasting digital presence that continuously draws in potential customers. After all, inbound is highly effective when your goal is to establish a strong market presence and build a significant digital footprint.
- Implement both strategies in tandem. While outbound efforts can provide the immediate boost you need, inbound strategy will ensure your pipeline remains full over the long haul.
Over to You
The world — and just about every business landscape — is evolving more quickly than ever. Preferred communication tactics, the right message, market trends, customer pain points, and a number of other factors all change over time. Evaluating your performance against these external factors and refining your strategies to stay relevant and resonate with potential customers is also essential.
Our outbound email software and lead generation services are custom-built for startups, consultancies, marketing agencies, and other B2B organizations.
Schedule a quick call with us to learn how we can help you win more clients.