Outbound Sales - What is the Definition?

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As you could guess, outbound sales are sales, performed using cold calling or cold emails sent by the agent. People still argue about cold outreach - is it still actual and does it work or is it just a waste of time? Honestly, there are enough people who support both thoughts. But our purpose is to find the truth and understand if outbound sales are an effective solution to improve sales rate or if it is even not worth starting an outbound sales campaign? 

Both inbound and outbound sales are equally important for businesses to make deals, but there are many differences between the implementation of each technique. In this article we will talk mostly about outbound sales, their tactics, strategies, and methods. We will try to answer all the questions about outbound sales so you will have enough information to make a decision - are outbound sales suitable for your company or not. Firstly, let’s start with the differences in outbound sales tactics for B2B and B2C. 

Outbound Sales for B2B Companies

The sales cycle in the outbound sales process for B2B closes much longer than it is for B2C. B2B outbound sales strategy must include the direct rules of using CRM systems because there can be many outbound sales calls to one lead, and exactly they can be serviced by different agents. Outbound sales tactics for B2B should focus on the top of the funnel, where most of the interactions take place and a bigger part of communication takes place in this part of the funnel. As a result, B2B outbound sales calls are less emotional and more tactic.

Outbound Sales for B2C Companies

On the other hand, the B2C outbound sales process is often even more difficult than it is for B2B. Your sales agents must perform more cold calls to find more potential buyers. B2C is more about cheaper goods and services, so the goal of the outbound sales strategy is to find as many leads as possible. To tackle this challenge a professional sales team and massive cold calls are needed. Nonetheless, making a deal by using cold calls is a bit easier for B2C firms than it is for B2B. 

Why do outbound sales have many opponents?

An awful reputation for outbound sales is unfair, but there were enough things that have led to this situation. Aggressive outbound sales techniques, irrelevant offers, low-qualified agents who tried to sell something without any politeness, bad time-choosing strategies, and other disgusting outbound sales tactics are the reasons why many people are against cold calls and other outbound sales tactics. On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with outbound sales if they are performed in the right way, using the tight client`s portrait and wise outbound strategy concerning the customer's time and needs. Outbound telemarketing is a great way to boost our sales rates and find customers who already have a need but still haven’t found your business. Outbound sales calls can be comfortable and useful both for the company and the client if all is done in the right way. How to avoid all issues connected with cold calling reputation and convince customers to choose your service via outbound sales strategy? Find the answers below.

Benefits of outbound sales that you can’t get in any other way

Outbound selling isn’t the most appreciated type of sales, and we have told you why. Anyway, it offers such advantages which can be achieved by other selling methods. The question is not to use or not to use an outbound sales strategy, but how to use it wisely and effectively to perform both customer satisfaction and sales growth. 

Make deals faster than ever

Inbound sales are a long and hard process. Inbound leads are way more expensive to get than outbound. Permanent investments in search optimization, digital and content marketing, website development, and target advertising are too long and expensive if you want to start selling tomorrow. Outbound sales techniques are much easier, so you don’t need to sit and wait when the customers will find you, entrust you and decide to choose the service. You can start cold calls directly after purchasing outbound sales tools, such as an outbound dialer. What is even sweeter - outbound telemarketing allows changing outbound sales strategy exactly when it is in process. 

If you are ready to try the all-in-one auto dialer designed by VoIPTime, then here’s a link for a demo!

 

Scale-up into new markets

Outbound sales tools open new horizons to scale up. Have you ever dreamed about expanding your business to new markets? Have you thought about your products - maybe they are actually for customers from other markets, but they can’t find your service? Outbound sales strategy is the way out. Targeted cold calls can easily meet customers in new territories who need your solution. Such an outbound sales campaign will bring you dozens of new clients because they will be easy to convince. The main challenge is to find markets, which are the most suitable for the offer and start outbound telemarketing!

Convince clients who doubt

While those who have already made a decision will come on their own, some customers could have seen your website, blog, or social media, but they are still doubting. They can look for the service for months, and do other customer interactions but the conversion will not be finished. This situation is not very good, because they are the people who are almost ready to bring you money, but they need an impulse. Outbound telemarketing is a hitch to help them make a decision.

Contact decision-makers

Outbound sales campaigns can be easily optimized to target stakeholders and decision-makers while ignoring random leads who are likely to have weak buying power. One conversation with an influencer can bring you much more impact than untargeted calling. 

How do organize the outbound sales process in the right way?

Outbound telemarketing should be organized in compliance with all requirements because one mistake in the stage of preparing can cost you the whole campaign and dozens of lost leads. Even though every business has its specialties, here are regular rules of how to perform outbound sales calls in the right way to achieve the expected goal.

Identify the market, your clients, and their problems

Before starting any lead generation campaign or, what is even more responsibly, sales campaign, you have to understand the market, the portrait of the ideal customer, his problems, and the ways your product is solving them. Check for competitors, their price lists, and differences between the services which are provided by the competitors and your company. Make your outbound sales team know all about the market where you are going to start. Find a suitable outbound sales program to be sure that your outbound sales will go in the right direction without any issues. You need a qualitative auto dialer because without it you will finish calling your lead bases at least in the next century. Create an outreach plan to determine where are you going to find leads. 

Find the leads

Now it is time to decide where are you going to find your future clients. Unfortunately, there are not too many forms of gathering leads - there are three of the most popular ways. You can do it manually by surfing LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media - and this is suitable only for B2B. The next way is to purchase lead generation software and extract emails and phone numbers to get more or less targeted leads (you can target them mostly by region or keywords, or extract data from individual websites). This approach also includes target advertising on Google and social media, but it is more about inbound marketing. The last method is to buy a database or pay a lead generation company to make them take responsibility for the appointment setting. Your goal is to gather enough contacts in the list, so the outbound sales team can start outbound selling.

Start outbound selling and segment the leads

This stage is the one that is the most awaited - now the communication starts. While agents are passing through the contact list to perform sales, the leads must be divided into groups. We can bet you know what we are talking about - hot, warm and cold leads. During this process, you can control how agents perform and what is going on well, and what should be fixed. At this stage outbound dialer is needed - without it, the team will process calls with a speed of a snail. There are many telemarketing software platforms, so there are enough offers to decide, but we will discuss this issue a bit later. 

A call to make a deal

After segmenting the leads, sales reps are ready to make a second call to the clients who have already decided to covenant with you. This can be a video demonstration, a live meeting in an office, or a long phone call to discuss all pros and cons of an offer and finally convince the customer to make a deal. For B2B this stage isn’t as easy as for B2C - it can contain many calls and meetings until the contract will be signed.

Final step

If the agent performed well and the customer has been persuaded, it is a moment of success - the deal is done and the new customer has bought the product or service. Now starts the process of customer support during his experience of the product, but this is a topic for another article.

Related: Startling Call Center Tips At Zero Cost

What can boost the outbound sales rates?

Now you know how should the outbound sales process look like. Another question is how to achieve the highest results, what tools to choose and what methods will lead to success. We will say a little spoiler - the right dialing software and features it should contain are the keys to triumph. 

Proper tools - high rates

Outbound sales are impossible without the right tools. The nature of cold calling is that it needs to perform hundreds of calls per day, so it is too difficult to do it manually. Special dialing software not only saves time, but also gathers data, provides dashboards, helps to control agent performance, avoids invalid contacts or robots, and can be integrated with other tools to create a complicated system that is easy to use and includes all necessary functions. An all-in-one dialer is the best solution to cover all needs, such as inbound calls, statistics, call recording options, and, exactly, outbound calls. Also, it can be integrated with CRM and call scripts, and that is essential in cold calling because agents need all information about customer interactions and preferences. 

Auto Dialer 

The goal of cold calling is to process as many leads as possible. It can’t be done without a special instrument, which is called an auto dialer. This tool automatically calls all contacts in the list and transfers successful calls (which have been taken by a lead) to the agents, and has features to redial busy signals, answering machines, invalid phone numbers, and other situations when a lead is impossible to be processed. An intelligent dialer can provide all data about the customer during the call to help agents convince a client. Advanced dialer algorithms are preferable for cold calling because they are developed for outbound campaigns and their key goal is to perform as many calls as possible.

Click-to-Dail tool in CRMs

The useful option allows an agent to call a lead directly from the CRM interface. It is a great feature because it saves the agent`s time and lets him not lose a lead that, based on data in CRM system, should be called immediately. Agents often spend much time scrolling through CRM, so this tool will help them to perform important calls at the moment they will realize such a need. 

Local Caller ID

Leads are more likely to answer calls with the same as their location than to answer unidentified or far away located calls. The outbound dialer can offer such an option to decrease the rate of unsuccessful calls - no answer, busy signals, or out of the zone. This tool is extremely important, because it let agents connect with a customer and start a conversation, and without it, there is a high probability to lose a potential customer before the communication would even start. 

Automate voicemail

Leaving messages on voicemail manually will consume a great deal of time. It is an unacceptable loss of effort and resources, so automation is a good way out. Such a tool as an all-in-one dialer can propose the solution, and the agents will save time to perform more calls instead of losing time talking to a voicemail.

Make sure the team understands the outreach plan

The plan for gaining leads must be brief, understandable, and clear for every team member - no matter is it the operator or manager. Employees have to understand what they do, why they do this, and what are the goals and objectives. KPIs should also be clearly described. 

Put in the plan such things as what the first touch is more preferable - cold emails or calls, waiting time before marking lead as unresponsive, key mentions during the conversations with clients, tips to work with voicemail (if you still didn’t automate it), how to segment leads, which call scripts to use, etc.  

A clear understanding of the outreach plan will help workers do their tasks faster and with higher engagement, while you will not worry about the process. But still, monitor all activities to make sure that all is going in the right direction. 

Your value proposition has to hook clients from the first attempt

In cold calling, the failure exists in two forms - the hanged-up call and put you on a spam list. There is no way to avoid these two disgusting situations except the qualitative value proposition - it must make a customer interested before he decides to hang up the call. There are many tips to improve your offering, but the main options are interesting, brief and clear presentation in pair with a sales pitch which is essential fo your customer. So if people prefer not to talk with agents, there are two variants: either the lead hasn’t fit your ideal customer profile or the presentation was not as good as it could. The responsibility to provide offers that will catch customers is on agents, but also on you because you are a leader who creates and forms the offer. 

Research every leads closely

Most B2B decision-makers say that agents who are contacting them aren’t ready for the conversation, even if they have spent time preparing. This tendency explains why many deals are broken in the middle of the way. Every deal is extremely important for any business because it leads not only to earnings, but, especially in B2C, to achieving a possible brand ambassador or, at least, a permanent customer. Is it that difficult to spend a few hours researching your lead? In B2B such resources as LinkedIn or Facebook can provide tons of useful information which can help to close the deal. And yes, your customer will be pleased if the agent will show his knowledge about his business. And it’s a fact that such clients are more likely to continue communicating with the company. 

Call scripts are the best friend of outbound marketing

The client loses interest in the first 20-30 seconds of a call. This is the opportunity window for an agent to hook him up with an offer or keep his interest for further communication. To improve agents` performance, call scripts are a must-have feature. All-in-one dialer solutions can offer an interface to construct  call scripts directly in a program. Call scripts are even more needed while using advanced dialer algorithms because agents are spending 80% of their time talking to leads - and most of the leads are cold. 

To try all the solutions proposed by telemarketing software, determine your needs and choose an offer that suits the most and contains as many features as possible. We can offer you such a solution - use this link and look for complex and ideally optimized software for the outbound contact center. 

Interested in ultimate solution for outbound sales & telemarketing?

Contact us to discuss your needs and see Voiptime Contact Center in action!

Eugene Siuch

Content Manager and Copywriter

Focused on customer service measurement and improvement, SaaS marketing and industry insights, and researching different methods of staff motivation and performance management in the field of customer service providing.

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