Outbound Sales: A Complete Guide for SDRs [+tools & tips for 2024]
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 2024
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 contacting potential customers, usually by phone or email, 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 its 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.
OR
- 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 understand 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 prioritizes individual buyers’ needs, difficulties, goals, and interests. 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 points and other issues. |
| Benefits | Enable you to reach target customers directly and connect with highly qualified leads. | Builds trust and credibility between you and your target audience, and allows you 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 better than the other. The right mix of both these will give a competitive advantage.
Tools you need for outbound sales
You don’t need a gazillion tools for your outbound sales. It suffices to have a well-planned sales strategy and a minimal number of necessary equipment.
Let’s examine every tool that has to be in your stack.
- CRM software
- Sales Prospecting tools
- Sales Engagement platforms
- Email Automation tools
- Sales Acceleration software
- Analytics and Reporting tools
- Sales Forecasting tools
- Appointment Scheduling tools
To know more details about the tools, check out the Top 8 Outbound Sales Tools You Need [With the 3 Best Techniques].
Outbound Sales Best Practices
Without much ado, let’s get started. 🚀
- Segment your market
- Focus on qualified lead generation
- Make everything about the prospect
- Embrace multi-channel engagement
- Follow the 3×3 Rule for email
- Make an effective autopilot template
- Have a solid outreach strategy
- Focus heavily on automation
- Be prepared to handle objections
- Maintain a metrics dashboard
Click to understand in detail – 10 Outbound Sales Best Practices to Boost Your ROI
Mastering Outbound Sales KPIs
Handling outbound sales can be very demanding. If they are not properly measured, they could wind up depleting your resources.
To prevent these kinds of problems, it is essential to measure outbound sales KPIs. In other words, you need reliable information to back up your choices.
Lead Generation KPIs
- Lead volume
- Lead conversion rate
- Lead response time
- Lead Quality Score
Sales Productivity KPIs
- Activities
- Opportunities created
- Proposals sent
- Deals closed
Sales Performance KPIs
- Sales Conversion Rate
- Average Deal Size
- Win-Loss Ratio
- Sales Cycle Length
Customer Satisfaction KPIs
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer Acquisition KPIs
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Customer retention rate
- Customer churn rate
Mastering Outbound Sales KPIs: Your Key to Success [3 free templates inside]. This is an exhaustive guide to understanding the KPIs in detail.
Outbound Sales Process
Here’s your material to go through the sales process much deeper- Outbound Sales Process: A Beginner’s Guide
How to Use AI in 2024 [outbound sales]
Why AI?
Because, without AI, you’d be left behind in the world of outbound sales.
- Provides you with more insightful information by analyzing rival moves, market trends, and consumer behavior.
- Generates workflows that are automated.
- Uses outreach and hyper-personalization to target ICP
- Predicts which leads are most likely to convert, saving you time and energy by allowing you to concentrate on the leads that will pay you.
- Makes a schedule for your meetings so that your mind is free to think more strategically.
- Makes routine chores more effective.
Prompts to level up the game
To create buyer persona
> Prompt 1
Can you help me with ideal customer profiles for a Sales Engagement Platform? Help me with the type of industry, company size, region, and roles to go after.
Prompt to decide on outreach channels
> Prompt 1
Starting a cold reach-out campaign soon, what are the channels to reach out for a Sales Engagement Platform Company?
You can check out more prompts like these here – How to Use AI for Outbound Sales in 2024.
Suggested Resource: 16 ChatGPT prompts to write cold emails
Are there any limitations to Outbound sales?
Well, there are always two sides to the same coin, which is no different for outbound sales.
Breaking through the noise is hard. The following facts make it harder.
- 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.
Other outbound Sales resources you’d want to know
- 7 Best Sales Prospecting Techniques for SDRs
- 13 Top Sales Resources from 2023
- Sales 101: The Ultimate Outbound Sales Guide that a Founder needs
- The Sales Challenge Survival Guide for SDRs
FAQs
What is Outbound Sales?
In simple words, it is the process of reaching out to people. People who can be your potential clients. To reach out to them, you’ll use emails, calls, Linkedin messages, etc.
Inbound Sales vs Outbound Sales: Better option?
What are the different steps in the outbound sales process?
How many outbound calls or emails should you make/send per day?
Final thoughts
Sales is a complex process that requires a lot of moving parts. To be successful, you need to have a deep understanding of your product, your market, and your customers. You also need to communicate your value proposition and close deals effectively.
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 every touchpoint in one place.