Sales outreach

In B2B sales, you are always engaged in some sort of outreach as you are trying to contact the prospect and build meaningful relations with them. But the term doesn’t boil down to just making connections. So what does outreach in sales mean?

Sales outreach is the process of reaching out to potential and former customers via phone calls, emails, messaging, and social media to engage them in cooperation and persuade them to make a purchase. 

The main challenge of a B2B sales outreach is contacting the right business, the right people, at the right time, and with the right offering. 

Sales outreach has close tights with sales prospecting methodologies, which represent two sales approaches: inbound and outbound.

Balance between inbound and outbound sales 

The key rule to a successful sales outreach lies within a unique strategy to balance between inbound and outbound sales methods. The primary difference between them is the origin of your leads. 

• Inbound sales presuppose that leads get interested in your company themselves. They reach you to inquire more about your product or service, hence, the prefix IN in the term.
• In outbound sales, you reach potential customers who have not expressed interest in your business yet. The prefix OUT means that you figuratively go out to prospect for leads. The typical outbound sales techniques include cold calling, cold emails, and automated emails. 

Sales outreach strategy tactics

As mentioned, balancing between inbound and outbound sales opportunities is a key point of a sales outreach strategy, i.e., a set of tactics your company should use to attract new businesses to your product or service. 

Here are six sales outreach strategy tactics to help you improve your conversions and boost sales:

Identify your best customers

Probably around half of the prospects are not always a good fit for what you are selling. So the first thing to do for your effective sales outreach is to understand your ideal customer profile. In other words, you should have a hypothetical image of a company that would be the best candidate for purchasing your product or service. 

To define the ideal customer profile, you should use firmographics, including the company’s:

• size
• average revenue
• industry
• location

Choose what buyer personas to contact

As soon as you’ve identified who your ideal customer is, you need to understand the roles your buyer personas have in their company to come out with a corresponding messaging strategy. After that, you’ll be able to prioritize them. 

For example, you may first choose to speak to a purchasing specialist, i.e., an employee responsible for communications with potential vendors, or be lucky to reach a decision-maker. No matter whom you are going to contact, your communication should be adapted to the prospect’s position.

Outline your communication

You can’t start reaching your potential clients if you are not prepared for the conversation. As such, you should identify:

• your prospect’s primary projects and responsibilities
• several ways on how your company may ease their daily work
• their main goals and pain points
• your business’s solutions to help them reach their goals 

This way, you’ll sketch your forthcoming communication and ensure it’ll be relevant to your prospect.

Determine the outreach channel

Now that you know the specifics of your buyer persona and have mapped their needs and your ways to fulfill them, you have the last thing to think about — how you’ll reach your prospect. 

Keep in mind that the choice of the communication channel must solely depend on their activity, not your common way of contacting your customers. So, don’t start sending a sales outreach email or giving your first call if, for instance, you’ve noticed that your prospect is an active LinkedIn user. In this case, you should make the first interaction on this platform. 

On the other hand, if you see that your potential customer has already joined your email list and is highly engaged with your content, there’s nothing better than getting to them right through their Inbox.

Start with a personalized message

Remember that the best way to start cooperating with your prospective customer is to build trust with them. That’s where personalization is a must. It makes your prospect feel you’ve done your homework and know what they need. There’s no surprise that personalized email campaigns get an 18.8% open rate. 

When conducting outreach, ensure you’ve customized your message with the prospect’s data, and that the problem you are about to highlight in your message is relevant and burning. 

Record outreach in your CRM

Make sure all your interactions are documented in your CRM. If you haven’t started using a CRM, it’s high time to think about it. It will enable you to keep all outreach information in one place, share it with your team, and access the data whenever you need it. 

Tips on how to outreach effectively

Now that you know how to build your sales outreach strategy, here are several tips on how to implement it in the best way.

Use a sales outreach automation tool

To enhance your sales outreach, you’ll most likely need good automation software among sales outreach tools. It will save your time, increase productivity, and work as a one-for-all platform to record your sales results. 

Snov.io is a perfect solution for your sales outreach ambitions. It contains sales prospecting, email messaging, and campaign analytics tools gathered within one platform, which, by the way, you may try for free. 

Target the right leads

93% of B2B buying processes start with an online search. Although the web seems to be a vast space for getting prospects, finding those who will convert is rather challenging. 

The biggest mistake you may make is trying to chase as many potential clients as you can. Going after any lead will cost you tons of wasted time. As an outcome, the percentage of deals that will never close will grow, causing the loss of productivity and overall frustration.

Not to face this unpleasant moment, you should always have a clear vision of your perfect lead and target only those prospects who fit your ideal customer profile.

Always stay engaged

Sales outreach requires lots of energy and daily hours of active work. That’s a never-ending process. You should get in touch with new prospects, send follow-ups to those who stay cold, and be quick to respond to any prospect’s requests that arise. 

Keep in mind that about 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. So, the golden rule for your successful sales outreach is:

‘Not any touchpoint with the potential customer should be missed.’ 

Value your time

Just like with sales prospecting, not all leads whom you’ve already tried to contact and followed up will decide to consider your offer. Much fewer will decide to purchase it. 

You can’t continue following up forever. At a certain point, it will become too pushy and just useless. As some sales gurus claim, you need at least five follow-ups on average for 80% of successful sales cases. So, if you did all you could, stop and switch to other prospects. 

Implement a ‘Smarketing’ outreach approach

Sales and marketing teams should never operate separately. Ensuring that both share the information about your customer outreach, you’ll be able to achieve 38% higher win rates. That’s why successful companies already use the term ‘Smarketing’ to explain the necessity of aligning their sales and marketing efforts. 

To make your sales and marketing outreach go hand in hand, you should have a single customer journey and customer persona in mind. You should also match messaging throughout the whole campaign, work together to analyze the client feedback, and continue cooperating at a post-sale and retention stages. 

Wrapping up

Sales outreach is a crucial part of your sales routine. If done correctly, it’ll bring you desired conversions, closed deals, and customer loyalty. That’s why you should plan ahead and come up with effective outreach strategies that will help you achieve your sales goals. 

Stay proactive, build your ideal customer profile, and Snov.io will do the rest — our platform will automate your sales outreach efforts and keep your data safe in one place.