Improving your outbound sales process

There’s no doubt that pursuing outbound leads is resource-heavy work. But it’s worth the investment, as it allows sales to proceed faster with greater attention to detail and control

Speed

Outreach through cold calls, emails, or social media yields quick results from a wide audience. Reps can also receive immediate feedback on their sales process from the buyers they’re chatting with and make adjustments.

Precision and Personalisation

The outbound sales process is highly targeted, so your leads are likely going to be interested in learning more about your product or service. Plus, it allows reps to connect personally with consumers, build relationships, and tweak their strategy when necessary.

Control

With the outbound sales funnel, you’re in control of everything from the pace of marketing and selling, to call volume, to call recipients. With the right tools, like dialers or email automations, it’s easy to scale outbound operations

5 steps to the outbound sales process

Market segment identification

The first step of the process is to identify your potential customers. Ask yourself:

Who will you be selling to?
What’s your target audience/what types of businesses are you targeting?
Who are the decision-makers?
Do you have a buyer persona?

Without answers to these questions, your sales team won’t have enough information to contact the right people.

It’s worth segmenting your market into smaller groups as well. This can help reps tailor their sales approach, especially if your customers are in different verticals or your company sells a variety of products or services

Lead generation

You know who you want to reach. Now you need their contact information so you can start to fill your pipeline. This can come from an in-house lead generation team or a purchased database; it can even be outsourced to a third-party company.

Sales reps can also handle lead generation on their own by using resources like:

LinkedIn
Web directories
Social media platforms, like Facebook or Twitter

Outreach and qualification

Once you compile the contact information for your leads, it’s time to start reaching out to see who’s a likely customer for your business. When a lead is qualified, they move on to the next phase; if not, they’re removed from the list. How to know? Reps use cold outreach methods like email or phone calls.

Email, in particular, is a popular method for initial contact. It’s important to keep these early messages short, personalised, active, and relevant to your leads’ pain points. Reps usually need to follow up multiple times when cold emailing. Luckily, most sales engagement platforms can successfully automate this process without sacrificing the human touch.

Sales call and demo's

It’s the moment your sales team has been waiting for. It’s their time to shine doing what they do best: sell.

A sales presentation is an opportunity for reps to show how a product or service works and the ways it resolves specific pain points. It might involve an in-person meeting with executives, a demo of the software, or a sales call. If this call is the first live communication with your lead, be sure you come armed with relevant, personalised information so you can pitch effectively.

Keep in mind, too, that B2B and enterprise sales cycles are often on the longer side because there are more decision-makers involved. It’s important to be patient while staying in contact; closing a B2B deal typically takes more touches.

Closing the deal

When sales pitches and demos are successful, the customer signs a contract and your reps can celebrate a conversion. The signature isn’t the end of the road, though—your sales team should continue to nurture the customer and ensure they have a smooth onboarding experience.

Summary

Dynamics Telephony integration to Dynamics 365 includes a CRM embedded progressive dialer with call outcomes that can trigger workflows to send emails after the call. Automating the sales process will save time, money, give more management control and result in happier staff.