Outbound Sales: Why and How?
Early-stage business growth usually relies on founders leveraging personal networks, then asking clients for introductions, then they begin to see results from marketing and sales outreach. Mindracer works with CEOs that need to hire in the time and experience to grow, to help them improve their sales and marketing results so that they can learn what works in their business, and scale.
Outbound sales is often part of the discussion when CEOs bring us in to support their team, as they have low inbound lead flow and need to start delivering results. Where appropriate, outbound can be very effective, and can also be very expensive if it is deployed wrongly. Mindracer helps our clients assess if the strategy is good for their target market and product, and if so, supports their team in adopting this powerful strategy.
What is outbound sales?
An outbound sales team is made up of individuals dedicated to prospect outreach - which means messaging as appropriate to start a conversation. An outbound sales team can be directed to focus on sectors where you’ve already won customers: specifically companies and people at those companies that fit your ideal customer profile, or to help test out a hypothesis that your product or service would be valuable to a new target audience.
Outbound sales is all about outreach. You are proactively contacting prospects and making an offer to attract them into your sales process; unlike inbound, where they are coming to you. Outbound teams use a multi-channel approach for this outreach. Everything from cold calls to email and sending messages on social networks such as LinkedIn should be considered as part of an outbound strategy. Messaging is vital, as the nature of outbound is to interrupt someone and create a good enough reason for them to start considering a purchase.
If this initial barrier is overcome, prospects enter the top of the sales funnel and the sales team needs to nurture them along the journey to convert leads into customers.
Why do you need an outbound sales function?
The benefit of adding a dedicated outbound sales function is that the team is then less reliant on the founder(s) leveraging networks, personal connections and having the time within the context of dozens of other jobs. It is also true that, if given the choice, most sales reps would rather work inbound leads than prospect for new outbound opportunities, and for this reason it is often advantageous to have a specific target for outbound created deals.
The best mantra we have heard, and like to use is: “With inbound leads, you get what you get. With outbound, you get to prospect for what you want”
If you know that you have a product that delivers a lot of value to your customer, a typical contract value is high enough to cover the cost of a dedicated outbound strategy, and there is not an easier “lever” to pull to drive sales, adding outbound can be an excellent solution.
Most of the time, we help businesses to leverage their existing client list to create a lookalike profile go and get more, similar clients. The name recognition of their existing clients helps to win new business is one of the most effective ways to drive forward growth.
With an outbound sales function, founders can expect sales to become more consistent. When this is done the right way, outbound sales should be a powerful, scalable and reliable new revenue source to factor into growth projections, making it easier to scale other areas of the business in-line with new clients coming on-board.
How to set up an outbound sales function:
Companies can build this function one of two ways: either internally, or on-boarding an outsourced resource, such as a company that provides outbound as a service. Typically, the easiest way to start is by outsourcing the prospecting and booking of introductory meetings.
Often great advantages are achieved by outsourcing the outreach phase of the sales process to a company that specializes in doing this for many other companies, so that you benefit from their experience and market awareness to refine your outbound strategy to the point where it makes financial sense to build an outbound team with a manager to oversee their output. When this function is built internally, we advise to take it very seriously. it can take at least 3 to 6 months to get a new team up-to-speed and performing effectively, and is often a very difficult and time consuming task.
It naturally takes longer when the target market involves selling into Enterprise customers because of the increased complexity of finding and talking to the correct people. The outreach process has many component parts from research and scripting, to email content creation, coaching and developing the repeatable system for generating meetings.
Mindracer Consulting, with our decades of experience have many partners that provide this service and would be happy to make introductions or collaborate with your existing partners to enhance strategy, fine-tune this team's efforts, generate more interest from prospects and move new outbound leads through the sales pipeline.
Want to know what we can do? Here are a few testimonials from happy clients.
In our clients words:
“Our sales are exploding” SaaS CFO.
“Brought rigor to what was a haphazard sales process” SaaS CEO
“Transformative and palpable increase in velocity and process” SaaS CEO
What results can you expect working with Mindracer?
Increased revenue and profitability;
Designing and refining a sales process for outbound sales;
Your outbound team taking a proactive approach when nurturing prospects;
A clear sales strategy, aligned with growth objectives;
Identify opportunities and marginal improvements;
Reduced sales team and account turnover;
More qualified and viable prospects in the pipeline.
Do you have a sales challenge that needs a high-impact solution?
Get in touch, for a no obligation chat. Book a video consultation today.