In the highly competitive B2B sales environment, there are two major strategies you can employ to generate and convert prospects: inbound and outbound. With the rise of digital communication channels and evolving B2B buyer behavior, many sales teams are gradually shifting focus from outbound to inbound sales. But the truth is, with the right strategy in mind and tools at hand, outbound sales can still be incredibly effective, especially when approaching potential customers in early stages of their buying journey.
In fact, according to statistics published by RAIN Group, 82% of buyers are willing to accept meetings with sellers who reach out to them, while 71% actually want to hear from sellers at the earliest part of their buying process.
By proactively reaching out to your prospects, you can expand your market reach, generate more leads, establish and build relationships with potential customers, fuel your pipeline, and drive customer acquisition. That is why outbound sales remains an essential strategy to the success of many B2B organizations. Let’s look at some of the best strategies to implement to improve your outbound sales process.
What is Outbound Sales?
Before getting straight to the strategies, tips, and best practices on how to improve outbound sales, let’s review the fundamentals. Outbound sales is all about making the first move and reaching out to your prospects proactively instead of waiting for them to find you and initiate contact with you. The aim is to connect with leads through outbound call center software, get them interested in your product or service, and eventually move them towards the final purchase decision through the process of follow-ups.
Cold calling is a classic example of outbound sales. Today, however, with digital channels on the rise, outbound sales teams are actively using email outreach, outbound SMS, and other communication channels.
Strategies and Best Practices on How to Improve Outbound Sales
Below, we’ve outlined some of the most effective strategies and approaches you can leverage in your outbound sales process to streamline your outbound sales efforts.
1. Use an omnichannel approach to amplify your outreach
It’s no secret that today’s business communication has become omnichannel. By using multiple communication channels to connect with your potential customers, you can increase touchpoints and engagement and convert prospects more effectively. The key is to ensure that all the channels are integrated, with customer data automatically synced between the platforms you are using. Here’s a quick overview of the channels that work great for B2B outbound sales:
✓ Cold calling
Despite being often viewed as outdated, cold calling is still one of the most effective outbound sales strategies for B2B businesses. According to research from Crunchbase, organizations that don’t cold call experienced 42% less growth than those who used the tactic.
Unlike reaching out to prospects through digital channels, cold calling presents an excellent opportunity to engage with your target audience in meaningful one-on-one conversations and create personal connections, which is a solid foundation for building long-term relationships with potential customers. Cold calling also enables you to move prospects through your sales funnel faster. During a phone call, you can easily uncover the specific needs and pain points of your prospects, immediately address their concerns and doubts, and build trust and credibility in a more efficient way than through digital channels.
✓ Cold emailing
Statistically, the average open rate for cold emails is an impressive 24%. Moreover, cold emails generate a return on investment of up to 4400% higher than any other channel, making cold emailing the most efficient channel for outbound sales. The goal is to start a conversation, initiate a new business relationship, and educate your potential customers about your product or service.
Through a series of follow-up emails, you can move your prospects through your sales funnel at a comfortable pace, giving them all the necessary information they need to make an informed decision whenever they are ready. And because cold emails are less intrusive than cold calls, 80% of buyers prefer to be contacted via email.
✓ SMS text messaging
In addition to cold calling and emailing, you can also use SMS to enhance your outreach and increase engagement. While SMS is more commonly used in B2C, there are ways you can use it for B2B sales in combination with other channels. With an open rate of around 98% and 60% of people reading a text within 1-5 minutes of receiving it, SMS text messaging is the fastest and one of the most efficient ways to reach out to your prospects directly on their phone and cut through the noise of email inboxes.
One of the ways your outbound sales team can use SMS is to send brief reminders to prospects about the upcoming demo calls or meetings, helping you reduce no-shows. Another way is to send a follow-up text after having a demo call, thanking the prospect for their time and encouraging them to take the next steps. Similarly, your reps can send personalized SMS messages to re-engage prospects who have gone cold.
✓ Proactive live chat
Though live chat has been traditionally more associated with inbound customer support, it can also be effectively used as an outbound sales channel. According to Zoho’s research, 85% of companies in the B2B sector and 74% in the B2C sector use live chat for sales.
For one thing, with proactive chat triggers, you can initiate conversations with prospects who are visiting your website. Chat triggers can be set to initiate chats based on specific behaviors, such as when prospects visit specific pages, spend some time on your website, or perform a certain action like downloading your e-book. That can help you engage potential leads at the early stages of their journey. Secondly, you can use pre-chat forms or chatbots for lead pre-qualification, collect more information about your prospects, and then route qualified leads to live sales reps.
2. Boost your cold calling efforts with auto dialing software
If outbound calling is your primary outbound sales strategy, using auto dialing software like VoiceSpin can help you increase the efficiency of your outbound calling efforts. There are many solutions out there offering different types of auto dialers sales teams can benefit from. First and foremost, with auto dialing software, your sales reps don’t have to dial numbers manually – the system can automatically dial through your lead list, saving your reps time and effort.
Moreover, auto dialers can skip disconnected numbers, answering machines, and busy signals, connecting agents only to calls answered by prospects. Below are some other helpful features and capabilities of auto dialing solutions that can help your outbound sales team run efficient cold calling campaigns:
- Predictive dialing: When operating in the predictive dialing mode, auto dialers can dial multiple calls per agent and use AI and ML algorithms to determine when an agent becomes ready to handle the next call. Predictive dialers help increase talk times, reduce idle times, and ensure sales reps handle more outbound calls in less time.
- Intelligent lead scoring and distribution: Many advanced AI-based dialing solutions can automatically score leads, prioritize them, and connect them to the best-suited agents based on the probability of closing a deal successfully, helping businesses maximize their conversions.
- Local caller ID: With local caller ID, the dialer system dynamically displays numbers with local area codes on your prospects’ caller ID. Considering that people are four times more likely to answer unknown calls from local numbers, local caller ID can help you significantly improve your call answer rates and the efficiency of your calling campaigns.
- Automated voicemail drop: With voicemail drop, the dialer will automatically leave a pre-recorded voicemail message whenever the system reaches voicemail. Since a typical sales rep leaves around 70 voicemails per day on average, automated voicemail drop can save your outbound sales team a bunch of time and effort.
- CRM integration: When the dialer software is integrated with your CRM system, your sales reps get instant access to all the available customer data and history of previous interactions right as they are making calls, helping them deliver more contextual, personalized experiences when interacting with prospects.
3. Craft compelling cold calling scripts
Though cold calling is one of the most effective ways to connect with prospects in B2B, the success of your cold calling efforts largely depends on how professional your sales reps are in handling voice communications. And this is where call scripts can be extremely helpful.
Scripts help ensure your agents know exactly what to say and how to respond to prospects in every possible scenario. That, in turn, means reduced anxiety and stress (especially for newly hired reps), improved confidence, and better handling of objections. And when your agents sound more confident, they can build trust and rapport with prospects easier and quicker, improving the efficiency of your cold calling campaigns. In addition to that, ready-made scripts help ensure consistency in your messaging.
Encourage your sales reps to use scripts as a roadmap while allowing room for personalization and improvisation whenever the conversation takes unexpected turns.
4. Help your team overcome objections like a pro
One of the most challenging parts of the outbound sales process is handling objections – especially in cold calls when you need to respond immediately. However, knowing how to overcome most common objections effectively can often make or break the deal. That’s why being able to anticipate and skillfully handle sales objections is a critical skill for any outbound B2B sales representative. When facing objections, it’s also important to actively listen, avoid interruptions, show empathy, and acknowledge the prospect’s concerns.
Here are some of the most common types of sales objections your sales reps need to be prepared to handle with professionalism and confidence:
- Price: We don’t have the budget for it.
- Wrong timing: We’re focusing on other priorities right now.
- Lack of trust: I’m not sure your solution will work for us.
- Lack of authority: I’ve never heard of your company.
- Lack of need: We don’t see a need for your product.
- Working with a competitor: We’re already using a similar solution.
- Lack of decision-making power: I don’t have the final say on this.
5. Build an effective follow-up strategy
According to stats published by Yesware, only 2% of sales happen after the first point of contact, while 80% of sales deals require five or more follow-ups to close. And even though 60% of customers reject offers four times before making the purchase decision, 44% of sales representatives give up after the first unsuccessful follow-up attempt, and only 8% of salespeople follow up five times.
These stats prove the importance of having a consistent follow-up strategy, regardless of the channel you use to connect with your prospect. They also suggest that failing to follow up with prospects after the initial unsuccessful attempt or after hearing a NO is a surefire way to lose potential sales.
- Ask for referrals after closing a sale
Last but not least, you can also leverage your existing customers to expand your outreach by simply asking for referrals. Referrals are a powerful way to generate new business because they come with built-in credibility and often lead to higher conversion rates. Based on the stats from SPOTIO, 91% of customers say they’d give referrals, yet only 11% of salespeople ask for referrals. And what’s more, 73% of executives prefer to work with sales professionals referred by someone they know.
To get the most out of referrals, develop a referral system that outlines when to ask for referrals (e.g., after the customer has left a positive review of your product or service), who you will ask for referrals (e.g., specific account types), and what incentives you are going to offer in exchange for a referral.
Take Your Outbound Sales to the Next Level
While many factors can contribute to the overall success of your outbound sales efforts, it’s mostly the combination of the right tools and strategies your team employs that makes your outbound sales process a lot more efficient. Use the best practices and tips provided above to refine your strategy and take your outbound sales to the next level.
