The next step of outbound sales – how are they done? What is the process? Do you want to make a list of the people you want to contact? Make a deeper list of all the decision-makers you want to reach out to? Find a method of outreach that works in your industry, right?
- For some people, it might be cold calls, and that might work very well.
- For others, it might be cold emails.
- For others, it might be LinkedIn.
So you have to figure out in your industry, what are people already doing?
And that’s where you should probably start because it works, right?
You want to just emulate the success of other people and not reinvent the wheel.
And now in addition to that, once you find a channel that works, you can keep trying to make contacts through other channels of communication to increase the number of touchpoints and the likelihood that someone will start communicating with you, right?
And start that conversation.
For example, a marketing campaign might look like this.
Day 1, you add them to LinkedIn.
On day 2, you might send them a message on LinkedIn to see what their issues are.
Day 5, If they don’t respond, send them a cold email.
Day 8 If there is no response, give them a cold call.
No response?
Day 12, send them a message on LinkedIn.
On day 17, send them a cold email, again.
So there are different ways to do this, depending on what you’re doing and how far you want to spread each point of contact over how many days.
I usually recommend a minimum of 3-4 days for each point of contact.
You don’t want to call someone every day because it’s very annoying.
And then basically, you just keep doing it until they respond and there comes a point where you feel like,
“Okay, I’ve reached out to this person so many times and they don’t respond.”
And you just have to let them go or put them in the CRM with a note,
“They’re not responding now, we’ll contact them in three to six months and repeat the process.”
Now, depending on your strategy – let’s say you, go with high velocity, you’re just going to act fast and try to have as many meetings as possible to see if your product or service is a good fit or if your product or service fits the market.
See if people are buying, and you want to move fast, right?
If you work for a big company- Oracle, Salesforce your customer list is limited, say 50 to 500 companies you will be told,
“You can only sell to these companies. So basically, just keep making phone calls, keep sending them emails until they give you an appointment.”
In these cases, you have to have a lot of points of contact because you’re trying to get into key employees that you want to work with.
But if you’re selling something you can sell to hundreds of thousands of people, then I recommend speed.
For outbound sales, it’s important to understand customers don’t know who you are and what you do.
So during the first phone call, you educate them a little bit about what you do and what benefits you provide, what problems you solve, and why you’re different from your competitors.
And then, based on that, you’ll ask them a lot of “Customer development” questions to see if they have any real pain that you can solve.
Because if there are no “pains,” there won’t be any sales.
Like in the example with Notion-a note-taking app, if they’re reaching out to someone and trying to sell to HR, they need to figure out, who is HR in pain?
Do they have any problems with the previous software?
Are they doing it manually and everything is not centralized, right? What is the pain that someone is experiencing and how do you solve it?
Only then will people buy your product and service. If you can find the pain, identify it, show them that they have it, and turn it into pain. And then eliminate that pain with your solution.
Then you will close the deal.
That is outbound sales.
