Why is Outbound Sales going to be an important strategy in 2023

Sales is hard. Software sales is even harder. Persistence is the key to success when it comes to outbound sales. Let’s understand outbound sales a little deeper.

What is Outbound Sales and why is it important in 2023

When a seller starts a conversation and reaches out to a potential customer, it is outbound sales. The seller could be an SDR (sales development representative), a company, a freelancer, etc. who wants the target customer to know about his/her product or service.

It is the process of proactively reaching out to potential customers, usually by phone or email, in order to generate new leads. It’s a great way to reach new customers and grow the business.

In 2023, it’s going to be tough to be on the outbound sales team. Many sales leaders and experts opine that in the coming year firms could struggle to stay afloat. This means less money is available to spend on tech. Hence, your outbound efforts may take a hit.

However, this should not scare you, but rather make you more focused on the job at hand. Despite the market conditions, a great product and targeted sales efforts will bear fruit.

To understand it’s importance, let’s what the benefits of outbound sales are.

Benefits of Outbound sales

Highly targeted prospecting efforts

Firms that have an outbound sales strategy have an edge when it comes to targeting the right prospects. Why? The reason is simple.

SDRs conduct in-depth research before reaching out to the prospects. They identify the right customers that fit the ICP (Ideal customer profile). They prepare a list with all the relevant details like the challenges the customer is currently facing, the tools they use, the revenue they generate, and so on.

Hence, this helps your SDRs in identifying the relevant prospects and launching targeted campaigns.

Proactive approach

Sales reps contact prospects rather than waiting for them to contact them. Unlike inbound sales, leads do not discover you, rather you go out and find them.

This happens when the reps deeply understand the dynamics of a prospect’s business. The in-depth research conducted by the SDRs opens up new business opportunities proactively. They know whom to target, and how to handle different objections, and with time it becomes easy for them to grab the prospect’s attention.

This helps in reaching out to a larger audience and also more targeted prospects which translates into higher ROI.

Higher ROI

The maths is easy here. You don’t have to wait for several weeks and months for your inbound strategies to kick in and get quality leads. With outbound sales, you can directly connect with qualified leads.

How? You have got a list of target personas. Within that list, you might have customers belonging to different revenue buckets. If you target the ones with higher ARR/MRR, your deal size will be larger.

For example- Imagine you want to generate $10,000,000 in revenue. You can do that either by

Generating $1000 from 10,000 customers.

Generating $10,000 from 1000 customers.

With time your SDRs get the know-how on handling larger accounts and you can target high-value clients in your list. Thus generating higher revenue.

Suggested Read: Check out 5 ways to generate high-quality outbound leads to understanding how you can get quality leads faster.

Instant feedback

In continuation to the above point, with outbound sales, you’ll receive immediate feedback from the prospects. Since you’re connecting with them directly, figuring out what they think about your product is relatively easy and fast.

Tailored customer touchpoints

Even though the outbound strategy entails “cold” calls and emails, it’s the best strategy to opt for if you’re looking to make bigger deals faster. That’s because you know whom you’re reaching out to and are aware of their specific pain points.

Understand their presence on different platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, FB, etc. This makes your reach-out message more relevant to them and therefore more effective. Knowing this, building a predictable model helps in targeting similar accounts and scaling up the business.

As you saw, these are the benefits of outbound sales. There are challenges (which we’ll talk about later). However, if you can overcome them, there’s nothing better than outbound sales.

In case you’re wondering, then there’s another lead generation activity known as “Inbound sales“.

Let’s understand what it is and the differences between the two so that it becomes easier to know which one you should prefer for your business and why.

What is Inbound Sales?

Unlike outbound sales, in inbound strategy, leads come to you through various channels. It gives individual buyers’ needs, difficulties, goals, and interests a top priority. The inbound sales strategy is to meet customers where they are and help them throughout their journey.

This strategy focuses on nurturing the leads and providing them with valuable content rather than pushing them to close the deal. Typically, the inbound lead conversion is higher.

This is challenging because-

The deal size is usually smaller.
Time to Value (TTV) is longer. This means that customers might see value only after a considerable amount of time. The longer the TTV, the higher the chances of churn.

Inbound Sales vs Outbound sales

Now let’s understand inbound sales and the major points of difference between the two. This will help in understanding the previous context better.

Difference	Outbound Sales	Inbound sales
Purpose	To sell a product	To grab attention and educate target customers about the product
Approach	A Salesperson reaches out to prospects and pitches the product to resolve their issues.	Customers come looking to resolve his/her pain point and other issues.
Benefits	Enable you to outreach target customers directly and connect with highly qualified leads.	Builds trust and credibility between you and your target audience, and gives you the opportunity to connect and nurture the leads.
Cost/lead	Expensive	Less expensive
Deal size	Larger	Smaller
Part of	Sales team	Marketing team
Conversion likelihood	Less likely	More likely
Sales cycle	Longer	Shorter
Time to Value	Shorter	Longer
Example	Cold calling, emailing, Social selling, Paid media, etc.	Content marketing, SEO, Videos, webinars, podcasts, etc.

Inbound sales is going to take time. So, be prepared to put in considerable effort without expecting a return for at least 6-8 months.

Your choice of sales strategy depends on various variables, like

Average Deal-size
Nature of your business, and product
The stage at which your company operates
Your buyer’s journey, etc.

You see, neither strategy is inherently good than the other. The right mix of both these will give a competitive advantage.

Are there any limitations to Outbound sales?

Well, there are always two sides to the same coin and that is no different for outbound sales.

Breaking through the noise is really hard. The following facts make it really hard.

The number of cold emails sent each day
The outbound conversion % is usually low
The number of cold calls done each day
The number of cold emails a fortune 500 executive receives each day
The number of cold calls connects is less than 1%
The number of touches to get to a meeting is north of 14 touches post covid.
Navigating through multiple gatekeepers.
Too many rejections

However, It’s all worth the effort as the deal size is always huge. So, if you can overcome these challenges, you’re setting yourself up for success.

Final thoughts

Sales is a complex process that requires a lot of moving parts. In order to be successful, you need to have a deep understanding of your product, your market, and your customer. You also need to be able to effectively communicate your value proposition and close deals.

Most importantly, for outbound sales, have a sales tech stack ready. Technological advancements have made the sales process not so boring anymore. Sales engagement platforms, like Salesgear, help SDRs immensely in keeping information about each and every touchpoint in one place.