Outbound Sales: Everything You Need to Know

What is outbound sales?

Outbound sales is a revenue channel in which a company solicits new business from cold prospect lists. The focus of outbound sales is on identifying prospect pains, and presenting their product or service as the obvious solution. Outbound sales is important because it gives companies a different approach to generate new business. Essentially, it can help diversify sales channels in case one fails.

What are the types of outbound sales?

The types of outbound sales are door to door, events, cold calling, cold email, direct mail, and social media outreach.

Here’s a short description of each type of outbound sales:

Door to door is when a sales teams physically visits prospects to make a more personal contact.
Event selling is where a sales team represents their company to a concentrated group of qualified prospects.
Cold calling is when a sales rep calls a phone number from a list of prospective customers.
Cold email is reaching out to new email address from a prospect list.
Direct mail is sending sales letters directly to the physical address of a prospect.
Social media outreach is using popular or rising social channels to get in contact with prospects.

The type of outbound sales your team will use depends on the information you have for prospects. To increase contact rates, using more than one channel can increase your visibility.

What is the benefit of outbound sales?

The benefit of outbound sales is that it doesn’t rely on marketing to generate leads. This is important because there are two risks; access and financial. Access risk comes into play when a platform restricts access due to rule violation. For example, Facebook uses AI to help restrict ad accounts to help manage millions of accounts. However, it can make mistakes, and unfairly cut off businesses from new revenue. Financial risk is when the advertising doesn’t work, and the cost to acquire new customers is greater than the money made back.

What are examples of outbound sales?

Examples of outbound sales are the following:

Door to door sales teams selling products or services.
Cold emailing relevant businesses.
Cold calling a list of prospects to generate new appointments.
Using social media, like LinkedIn, to connect with prospects.
A combination of any or all of the above.

What is outbound sales strategy?

Outbound sales strategy is the broad plan for accomplishing a company’s sales-let revenue goals. It is tailored to address the needs of the customer, analyzing the market that the company is in, and creating differentiation within the marketplace. Outbound sales strategy can be divided into three segments: lead generation, sales, and customer success. Outbound sales strategy is executed by teams to find new opportunities.

What is outbound sales process?

Outbound sales process is the steps that sales teams follow to sell their product or service to as many target customers as possible. There are several important steps that team should follow.

The common steps of outbound sales process are:

Prospecting
Qualifying
Discovering
Proposing
Closing

Each step is important, as they increase the likelihood of making a sale.

What is outbound sales prospecting?

Outbound sales prospecting is the process of reaching out to prospective customers to sell them a product and service. The goal is to fill up a salesperson’s pipeline to close more sales.

What is outbound sales playbook?

Outbound sales playbook is a document that contains all sales-relevant information for the sales team. For example, it could contain processes, scripts, principles, methods, and training material. It’s an important document to have because it helps with training new sales reps, and making sure the team is consistent.

What are the outbound sales methods?

The methods for outbound sales don’t vary much from standard sales methodologies. They include selling methods like SPIN, SNAP, NEAT, MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, Solution, Consultative, Challenger, Value, Conceptual, Relationship selling, and Agile sales. Each method is best used in different scenarios. For example, if the “time to sale” is short, more general methods are useful. If the sale takes longer, a more specific methodology can be advantageous.

What are the principles of outbound sales?

Outbound sales principles serve as guidelines to help the team make good decisions.

The following are examples of outbound sales principles:

Focus on the prospect.
Help guide people to the best solutions.
Master your schedule.
Log important data in your CRM.
Always aim to be better than you were yesterday.
Not everyone is going to be happy you called; don’t take it personally.
Slow it down.
Listen.

What is outbound sales rep?

Outbound sales rep is a person who conducts outbound sales activity. These are individuals who are tasked with developing, maintaining, executing, and managing the outbound sales of a business.

What do outbound sales reps do?

Outbound sales reps are responsible for generating leads using outbound sales methods, and helping close new business.

Their responsibilities are some or all of the following:

Calling and emailing prospects.
Reaching out with social media.
Qualifying prospects.
Discovering their needs and pains.
Setting an appointment to close them.
Log their activities in their CRM, and report useful information.

What are the outbound sales skills?

Outbound sales skills are soft or hard skills that help a person sell. Improving sales skills will help them close more deals.

Here is a list of outbound sales skills:

Time management
Sending strong emails
Content creation
Writing a good message that will pique the curiosity of potential buyers
Listening actively
Effective empathy
Story telling
Handling and overcoming objections
Knowing how to ask potential customers for the sale
Researching prospects and markets

What are the outbound sales KPIs?

Outbound sales Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics that determine how well sales teams are doing. They’re important because they, if set up properly, provide a clear picture of how a sales team is doing. The benefit is that they can help a team change their strategy or fix part of the sales process that isn’t working.

Here’s a list of outbound sales KPIs for individual sales reps:

Number of people reached out to.
Number of people responded.
Number of people qualified.
Number of appointments scheduled.
Number of appointments attended.
Number of deals closed
Average value of deals.

Here’s a list of outbound sales KPIs for sales teams:

Monthly average sales growth.
Monthly outreach attempts.
Average response rate.
Average deal value.
Sales cycle timeline.

There are other minor KPIs, but the aforementioned list are the most important to convert prospects into new deals.

What are outbound sales channels?

Outbound sales channels are the ways in which a salesperson can reach prospective buyers.

Here’s a list of outbound sales channels:

Email prospecting
Cold calling
SMS prospecting
Social media outreach
Sending direct mail
Attending trade shows and events

What is outbound sales calls?

Outbound sales calls, or cold calling, is an outbound sales channel that salespeople use to prospect. It’s important since it directly connects salespeople with possible buyers, and conveys more meaning than text.

What is the process for outbound calls from customers?

If you’ve made an outbound call, and receive no answer, sometimes prospects will call back. If this happens, you can follow your standard calling script and process. For example, you can start by introducing yourself and telling them, in brief, what you or your company does. Ideally, you’ll mention a problem they are likely dealing with, which would make them more interested in anything else you have to say. Then, try to qualify if they are a good fit for your offer, and set an appointment.

Here are the steps listed out:

Introduce yourself
Mention common problems that you help solve
Qualify them as a good fit for your offer
Set an appointment with them in the near future.

How do you start an outbound sales call?

You start an outbound sales call with a pleasant introduction. It’s important to identify who you are and why you’re reaching out.

Here’s the core parts of a good script:

Who you are
Why you’re calling
A reason that they should keep listening

What is outbound sales email?

Outbound sales email is any email sent to prospects with the purpose of engaging and selling to them. Despite the rise of other communication, email is still very prevalent and valuable for companies. The cost to send emails is very inexpensive, so the primary cost is time.

How to do outbound sales

The exact way to do outbound sales depends on your product, service, and market. In general, the core of doing sales is the same. The only difference is where the first contact with customers comes from.

Here’s a list of steps you can follow to do outbound sales:

Create lists of prospective buyers.
Create scripts and message templates.
Start reaching out.
Record the results of each attempt and successful call.
Qualify the prospect.
Set an appointment with them.
Propose your solution.
Close the deal (won or lost).

How to improve outbound sales

Outbound sales can be challenging, so it’s important to improve the process over time. For example, you can increase your contact rate by improving your message. The benefit is that you’ll talk to more people, and close more deals.

The most crucial part to improving is measuring your impact. Collecting data is always your first step. Every time you or your team makes a call, mark it down. Every time someone picks up, record it somewhere. Track your results for each step in your process to identify where you can improve.

Here are some ways to improve your outbound sales:

Write a better sales script
Listen to prospects more
Improve your copywriting
Increase your rate of reaching out
Follow-up with prospects

How to build outbound sales team?

Building an outbound sales team helps scale customer acquisition without relying on paid channels.

Here are the steps for building an outbound sales team:

Create your sales process and training material.
Advertise the position and list the benefits of joining your team.
Identify the highest potential candidates.
Interview them with strategic questions.
Remove poor-fit candidates and hire the remaining candidate(s).
Train them and evaluate their performance over the next 3 months.

It’s important to have a good team culture, competitive pay structure, and good learning opportunities for your recruits. If you lack good reasons for them to stay in your team, you’ll end up having a high employee turnover.

What are the outbound sales tools?

Outbound sales tools are anything that helps a team reach out, track, and close deals.

Here are a list of common outbound sales tools:

Phones or phoning software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools
The classic pen and paper
Digital or physical scripts
Objection queue cards

What is outbound sales software?

Outbound sales software is a range of tools that help sales prospectors. The most common outbound sales software is CRM software. It helps teams visualize and manage their sales pipeline. For example, the team can track new leads from stage to stage in their sales cycle, noting and tracking important information.

Here’s a list of common outbound sales software:

Voice over IP (VoIP) software
Emailing software
Prospect list databases
Prospect list data scrapers

What is outbound sales automation?

Outbound sales automation is software that saves teams time by eliminating repetitive tasks. For example, if you have a 3-email sequence, you can save time by automating the second and third email. The second and third emails act as follow-ups to help get a prospect’s attention. The benefit is that sales teams don’t have to spend the time to send additional emails, so they can focus on more important tasks.

What is the relationship between inbound and outbound sales?

Inbound sales is any selling activity that start from marketing campaigns. This differs from outbound sales because it doesn’t rely on salespeople’s effort to generate interest in a product or service.