How Outbound Sales Powers Startup Growth
If you’re like most startup founders, you’ve got your mind on a singular goal: achieving growth. Scaling and growing a new business is no easy feat, and it’s one that founders usually put on their own shoulders, often with limited resources to support the effort.
What they (and you) need is a smart, targeted, cost-effective way to scale that yields real results in the forms of sales, revenue, and an established market position.
Enter: outbound sales for startups.
Outbound sales is the most direct and effective way to connect with prospects who are best-fit for what you have to offer. It leverages data-driven approaches and smart engagement strategies to convert those prospects into your pipeline and nurture them until they convert to paying customers.
Today, outbound is also largely automated, meaning that you as a founder can implement it, even if you don’t yet have full-scale marketing and sales teams in place.
In this guide, we’ll tell you exactly how to do it.
Quick Takeaways:
- Outbound sales is the fastest and most direct way to reach your ideal customers.
- Laying the foundation for successful outbound sales with a defined ICP, clear goals, and the right tools and technologies is essential.
- Outsourcing allows founders to focus on mission-critical activities without sacrificing the scale or quality of their outbound sales strategy.
Why Outbound Should Be in Every Founder’s Arsenal
Whether you’re bootstrapping a new business or working to scale up quickly, it can be tempting to cast the widest net possible and assume that you’ll catch a decent percentage of the audience you reach. The more people you reach, the more leads you’ll convert into your sales pipeline. Right?
Not necessarily.
Today, inbound strategies like SEO and content marketing are helping brands establish brand awareness and connect with audiences on a larger scale than ever before. But they’re still not the most effective way to scale a startup business.
There are a few reasons why. First, inbound is slow to take effect. Companies create and publish content for weeks or even months before they start to earn real traction via Google rankings. Second, by nature, inbound marketing waits for customers to come to you.
And finally, while inbound efforts can be targeted to specific audiences, they don’t involve the same level of precise and often one-on-one targeting that happens in effective outbound sales prospecting.
As a result, companies are reaching a lot of people using inbound methods, but they’re converting new leads less efficiently and leaving too much of the early-stage sales process to chance. And while inbound may be all the rage right now, a mere 12% of marketers say that they’re satisfied with their current lead conversion rates.
Founders and startups don’t have time to wait for long-game inbound strategies to pay off, or to figure out how to boost low conversion rates over time. They need a way to get right to their highest-potential customers to establish a solid brand reputation and bring in real revenue.
In other words: When you’re looking to scale your new business—and especially when you need to do it quickly and/or with limited resources—you need to prioritize outbound sales first.
Outbound Sales for Founders: Strategy Essentials
To be most effective and drive the most reliable growth, your outbound sales strategy should operate like a well-oiled machine. That requires laying a foundation with the following key steps:
Step 1: Lay the Foundation
Create A Clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Before you start any outbound prospecting, it’s crucial to know exactly who your ideal customers are. For B2B founders and startups, this means describing organizations.
Spend time developing an ideal customer profile (ICP) that describes the attributes of organizations you want to sell to, including industry, company size, budget, location, maturity, and more.
Once you’ve created your ICP(s), you can also develop buyer personas to describe the people within those organizations who are responsible for making purchase decisions. Then, you’ll know how to target the right companies and effectively engage important individual contacts.
Segment Your Audiences
Not all prospects are created equal. It’s important to segment your audience based on the criteria you used to create your ICPs (i.e. industry, company size, budget, etc.). You can then do two essential things necessary for smart outbound sales:
- Prioritize your highest-potential audiences
- Tailor your sales messaging to each segment
The former allows you to focus your resources first on prospects most likely to convert and translate to revenue for your company. The latter allows you to personalize your outreach for stronger engagement, something the majority of B2B prospects expect at every stage of the sales process.
Develop A Compelling Value Proposition
The success of outbound sales hinges on your ability to communicate a compelling value proposition. Key word: value.
Just because you’re reaching out directly to prospects doesn’t mean you need to get right to the hard sell. In fact, doing so can end a prospect conversation before it really starts. First, you must demonstrate how you can deliver value to potential customers by tapping into their pain points, needs, and goals for the future.
As a founder, you’ve likely gone through the value proposition development process as you launched your new business. Now, it’s time to formalize it in your outbound sales strategy.
Develop a strong value proposition statement for each unique customer segment, then use them as the foundation for creating your outbound sales messages.
Step 2: Scale Your Efforts
Plan for Multichannel Outreach
B2B customers use 10+ channels to interact with vendors throughout their purchase journeys. To execute an outbound sales strategy that wins, it must be multichannel, incorporating all communication methods that your customers use and prefer.
As you can see in the graphic above, traditional channels like email, telephone, and in-person are still effective for engaging B2B customers. But as time goes on, new channels like video conferencing, mobile apps, web chat, and buyer portals are also becoming more popular.
It’s important also to stay on the pulse of new trends in buyer communication so you can always have a brand presence where your prospects look for solutions.
Adopt Automation Tools
Automation is the key to scaling your outbound sales strategy. Using tools that are specifically designed to support outbound sales, you can prospect and sell on a larger scale without sacrificing the quality or level of personalization in your sales interactions.
These tools can include your CRM, sales prospecting system, video prospecting platform, appointment setting software, and more.
Step 3: Refine and Improve
Implement Data-Driven Reporting
Data is the lifeblood of outbound sales for startups. Without the same margin for error that very large or long-established companies have, founders must rely on smart data insights to reach the right customers and continually improve their approaches.
The automation tools mentioned above can help systematize your data-driven reporting processes so that they’re baked into the way you operate on a daily basis.
Continually Test and Optimize
Outbound sales is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s essential to test different strategies, messaging, and channels to learn what works best for your business and capitalize on opportunities. Don’t let your outbound sales strategy become static or stale because you assume what you’re doing now is best, or that it will always work.
Outsourcing Powers Outbound Sales for Startups
You might be thinking: This all sounds great—but where will I get the time? The truth for most founders is that they simply don’t have the extra hours in their day to execute the type of outbound sales strategy they know will actually yield results.
As they juggle responsibilities around investor engagement, product development, fundraising, and team management, founders find it challenging to dedicate the type of time and resources they want to sales.
The smartest solution is to outsource your outbound sales strategy. Outsourcing does require the type of up-front financial commitment that founders naturally try to avoid. But the benefits of having a full-scale outbound strategy in place far outweigh the initial costs.
But in many cases, it’s exactly what they need to do. Outsourcing allows you to implement the type of outbound sales strategy you need while you can stay focused on mission-critical activities that demand a founder’s attention.
Plus, a trusted outbound sales service provider has the expertise, tools, resources, and proven processes you need to accelerate your time-to-revenue with outbound sales and earn faster, higher ROI.
Success quickly follows. At RevBoss, we’ve seen it firsthand over and over again.
The combination of our cutting-edge outbound prospecting platform and personalized, expert service provided by our customer success team helps startups get their outbound sales engine up and running in just 2-3 weeks.
Plus, our technology integrates with 750+ applications, so it can blend seamlessly with your existing CRM and sales processes.
The results have been undeniable for our startup clients. After partnering with RevBoss:
- Data services startup Glynt increased their pipeline by 10X
- Altruist Partners quadrupled their web traffic and got so many qualified leads they had to pause service to handle all their inquiries
- SaaS company Boardable grew by 300% after implementing the RevBoss platform
If you’re ready for similar results, contact our team to get started.