Tring tring!
Most sales professionals shudder at the thought of achieving their outbound sales goal. But, outbound sales is the cog that runs a business organization.
Achieving an outbound sales conversion is no less than an achievement to celebrate. This means that your entire sales cycle has come to fruition and that your marketing initiatives are on point.
Having to call a large number of outbound leads can leave you pulling your hairs at the end of the day. Tracking the count of outbound sales you made with the best outbound call tracking software could help generate sales reports faster and be in line with your sales targets.
Let's dial the first outbound number and hope for an outbound sale.
What is outbound sales?
Outbound sales refers to the process of a sales representative initiating contact with a lead from their end. In the case of outbound sales, the seller begins the customer engagement process instead of the buyer. Outbound sales are more time-consuming and hard to crack than inbound sales since a sales rep has to evoke the interest of the sales lead.
The key feature of outbound sales is that you are contacting your leads through prospecting as opposed to them reaching out to you (which is inbound sales). This proactive approach allows for highly targeted outreach, allowing you to only contact the people who fit your ideal customer profile. And since you’re initiating the conversation using specific methods, you can measure whether or not they were successful with predetermined sales metrics.
If you need to close more deals, you reach out to more prospects. Outbound sales place the ball in your court.
Most businesses will rely on outbound sales but also account for the inbound sales where conversations are initiated by leads, as opposed to their own reps. To see the most success and fuel your pipeline full of healthy leads, you should definitely use both inbound and outbound sales strategies for your sales teams.
Inbound vs. outbound leads
There is a huge difference between a lead that tries to contact you and a shortlisted lead that a sales rep reaches out to. Both have very distinct sales intent, and the intent in the latter one is not entirely absent as more businesses would apprehend it to be.
| Inbound lead | Outbound lead |
| They are classified as "warm" or "hot" | These leads are generally "cold" |
| They give a call on the company's toll-free number or internal call telephony. | Sales rep reach out to these leads by themselves by accessing their contact details via CRM software account. |
| Their phone numbers are registered in the call telephony database. | They may or may not have correct contact information in the CRM database. |
| The chances of achieving a sales deal are high. | The chances of achieving a sales deal are low. |
| They can reach out multiple times based on their high interest. | They can choose to ignore sales rep calls and never call again. |
| They don't have a lot of sales objections for the reps. | They have more sales objections and can call multiple times to clarify that. |
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Inbound vs. outbound sales
Businesses score lesser inbound sales than outbound sales, which can be a contradictory statement here. But even though a lead calls on an inbound, the actual lead count is less.
Inbound sales occur when a buyer contacts your call center software and initiates interest from his end in buying your product. In these cases, the sales cycles are much shorter as the lead could have strong levels of buying intent which could trigger them to make a purchase right away or keep in constant touch with the organization. By default, inbound sales leads can be classified as "warm leads" or "hot leads" and do not require a lot of conversion push.
Outbound sales occur when a sales rep initiates a sales call with an outbound lead. Outbound leads can be a mixture of leads attributed from multiple sources within the customer relationship management (CRM) software. They can be traced back to lead sources like organic, referrals, social media, website leads, chat leads, and so on. The lead intent ranges from "cold" to "warm" and is seldom "hot". These leads are assigned to sales representatives and take a lot of time to convert since the business approached them first.
The good news is that you don’t have to choose just one. Both inbound and outbound sales can add value to your pipeline.
Outbound sales strategy
While the idea of outbound sales is to reach out to leads and convert them into customers, you don’t want to go about it by dialing at random. Without an outbound sales strategy, you likely won’t see the success you’ve been anticipating for this method.
While outbound sales strategies will vary from business to business, there are four stages that every effective approach goes through.
1. Identify your target market
Before you even think about selling using outbound methods, you need to first determine who you are going to be selling to. This group of likely buyers is referred to as your target market, ideal customer persona, or buyer persona.
Identifying your target market doesn’t mean you won’t sell to anyone who doesn’t fit within it. Rather, it simply allows you to focus your time, energy, and resources on a specific group of people who are more likely to buy. For example, if you were selling snow blowers, you probably wouldn’t air a commercial in Florida since they rarely experience measurable snowfall. However, if a Floridian asked you to sell them a snow blower, you wouldn’t hesitate to do so.
Here’s how you can go about identifying your target market:
- Look at your current customer base: Analyze the types of customers that currently buy your solution and pick out qualities that make them a good fit for your business.
- Evaluate your solution: Come up with a list of features that your solution offers and use your business savvy to ideate who could potentially benefit from them.
- Be specific about qualifications: Make a clear and specific list of qualifications that someone needs to hit to be considered an ideal customer. Pay attention to things like industry, role, and company size.
- Evaluate: After coming up with methods for identifying your target market, make sure that your list gives you a substantial amount of leads to work with. If not, do some reevaluating.
From those data points, create an image of who your ideal customer persona is. Recognize that it might be necessary for your business to come up with more than one target market, and that is perfectly alright. Smaller and more specific target markets allow for more focused and effective marketing and selling to that particular group.
2. Generate leads
The next part of your outbound sales strategy will be to generate leads based on the target market you’ve identified. While you’ll generate a large number of leads, not every single one will convert into a customer. That expectation is unrealistic. The purpose of generating a lot of leads is to account for the lack of conversions you’ll experience, as some will ultimately fall out of the pipeline due to disinterest or poor qualifications.
Lead generation is all about increasing awareness of your brand, picking people’s curiosity, and getting them to take a specific action so you can officially consider them an interested lead.
Here are some strategies for doing that:
- Gate your content: Within your content marketing, pick out some valuable assets like templates, reports, or other downloadable content.
- Host an event: Put on an event that will provide value to your target marketing and get attendees’ contact information as they register.
- Offer a coupon or discount: Get the attention of people already interested in your business by offering money off your solution with a coupon or discount code. All they have to do to get it is give you their information.
- Provide a free trial: Anyone that signs up for a free trial is interested in what you’re offering, and using it will only make them more likely to convert.
The key factor of all of those strategies above is that they all attract people who are interested enough in your business to hand over their contact information. Whether it be a piece of content, insight from an event, or money off your solution, they will bring in the right crowd.
With all of the tactics listed above, the one thing you must remember to do is only allow access to those items if the lead gives you their contact information. This way, you can grow a list and start doing some outreach.
3. Conducting outreach and qualifying leads
With your list of people to contact in hand, it’s time to start your sales cadence by conducting outreach and qualifying leads. Now, it’s important to remember not to get ahead of yourself as you enter this stage of outbound sales. Notice that this step does not say to sell anything to anyone. Before you can start that, you first need to qualify your leads.
Qualifying leads is all about determining which people on your list are most likely to buy your solution and offer the most long term value to your business. This way, you strategize even further and prioritize the most promising leads. Most sales reps will undergo lead qualification by using the BANT method, which stands for budget, authority, need, and timeliness.
As you conduct your outreach, you must determine the following criteria for each lead:
- Does this person have the budget to buy my solution?
- Does this person have the authority to make buying decisions, or am I speaking with a gatekeeper?
- Does this person have a need for my solution?
- Will this person be able to make a timely purchase?
With those answers in mind, you can place leads in a few different buckets based on their likelihood to make a purchase and then prioritize your time, energy, and resources accordingly. If you conclude that some leads aren’t worth pursuing, remove them from your list. If they are showing promise, move them down the funnel.
Your lead qualification process will include research, but you’ll also need to conduct outreach. This initial contact will also act as the start of your relationship with the lead. After you’ve come up with a prioritized list, start your outbound sales process and follow it all the way through with each lead.
Remember, the purpose of this stage is to qualify leads and make sure they would make promising prospects, opportunities, and loyal customers.
4. Sell, sell, sell
At this point, you’ve thrown out all of the dead leads that likely won’t go anywhere and divided your sales qualified leads (prospects) into different groups based on their priority. Now, you can focus on selling. Finally!
Starting with your most promising prospects, schedule meetings, calls, or video conferences to have a discussion about what you can do for their business. Then, prepare for those meetings.
The most important asset in your sales toolbox is going to be your value demonstration. Ask yourself why your customers should buy from you and convert it into a presentation. Pick out all of the most important features of your solution and really sell it. Explain it to its entirety and add personalized details that that specific prospect would want to hear. Make sure that each sales rep on your team can deliver a version of your value demonstration at any time. You never know when you might need to use it.
It’s important to note that your value proposition will likely change over time and you might have a different one for each solution your business offers. As your industry, company, customer base, and offerings change, the manner in which you present it must adapt to reflect those changes.
After your value proposition, your prospects might come back at you with some questions, comments, or concerns. Part of any sales reps training will be to handle these objections. The moral of the story is to always come back to the value while also presenting the risk of not using your solution. Show the prospect what they might be missing out on, or a pain point they might keep experiencing if they don’t decide to buy.
Outbound sales techniques
As you move through your outbound sales cadence, you’ll want to use a mix of three outreach techniques: cold calling, cold emailing, and social media messages. Make sure to use all three of these methods until you get a response from a prospect and determine which channel they prefer. Then you can move forward accordingly.
Cold calling
Cold calling is one of the pillars that make up the structure that is outbound sales. It refers to the initial sales call that a sales rep will make to a prospect without having any other type of contact beforehand.
Reps are typically trained to handle a few varieties of conversation they might experience as they cold call prospects. Make sure to train every cold caller on things like what to say if the prospect doesn’t seem interested, or if they are receptive to the information. You’ll also want to train them on how to leave a solid sales voicemail. When prospects answer the call, the rep needs to follow the flow of the two-way conversation. However, if they need to leave a message after the beep, it’s all on them to make it worth listening and responding to.
Cold emailing
The cold email strategy also holds up the foundations of outbound sales, as it is a quick and easy method to contact a large number of prospects at once. Certain email software tools allow a mass amount of messages to be sent at once. While this offers convenience and frees up time for reps, don’t let it stand in the way of sending a personalized email that will actually make the prospect want to respond.
Social media messages
Don’t forget to take advantage of the digital age. Make sure that social media messages and interactions are also a part of your outbound sales techniques. Gauge how active your prospect is on their social channels, and tap them on the shoulder a couple of times.
The cool thing about using social media for outbound sales is it doesn’t have to be as direct. As long as you are reaching your audience, that’s a win. For example, one touchpoint might be a direct message, another might be liking their photo on Instagram or replying to one of their tweets.
Outbound sales tools
The combination of those techniques mentioned above might sound a bit daunting, but there are plenty of tools you can use to simplify it. Equipping your sales team with everything they need to go about your outbound sales strategy is necessary for them to maximize productivity and effectiveness. After all, they are your revenue generators, so here are some software tools that’ll make their lives a heck of a lot easier.
CRM software
Above everything else, you must provide your sales reps with a customer relationship management (CRM) system. The purpose of using a CRM is to help businesses track and manage all of the data they have on all of their customers, which includes interactions born from outbound sales methods. CRMs hold all customer contact information, show their current position in your sales pipeline, and create reports based on your progress toward goals.
Auto dialers
To make cold calling more of a breeze, reps can benefit from using an auto dialer. This software will automatically dial a prospect’s phone number, eliminating the tedious task of doing it manually. While this may seem like a minuscule problem in a cold caller’s day, anything that frees up more time for a rep to focus on the customer and content of the message is a step in the right direction.
Email marketing software
In a similar sense, email marketing software can automate the process of sending cold emails to your prospects. While adding a personal touch to each email, including the prospect’s name (obviously) and a connection that is reason enough to reach out, there are a few other elements of cold emails that are going to be the same for each send. Email marketing software can also segment your lists based on their engagement levels with your messages.
Business intelligence software
Every effort made toward your outbound sales strategy can be properly evaluated with business intelligence software, which is a tool that provides visibility into all of your company’s data. As you implement all of your outbound sales methods, measuring success will require evaluating data and drawing conclusions about what’s working and what needs to be changed. With that insight, sales reps can make more informed decisions as to how to move forward when selling.
Outbound sales tips
At this point, you’ve got your outbound sales strategy, techniques, and tools at the ready. You’re almost there. To ensure your outbound sales efforts are providing your desired results, make sure to keep the following tips in mind as well.
Educate your team
Selling can take a lot of different routes. Due to the variety of questions, concerns, and objections that could be encountered, your reps need to be educated to a point where they can handle anything that is a prospect might throw at them. Your entire team needs to have all of your value proposition points ready to go at all times. They should also be able to sell anyone on the fact that your business is different and more valuable than your competitors.
Focus on being helpful
This tip is more of a general sales strategy, but it’s relevant nonetheless. As your sales reps implement and use your outbound sales strategy, make sure their priority lies in listening intently and helping the customer. Prospects aren’t oblivious to the world of sales – they know you have a quota to meet. So if they catch on to you being too pushy or sneaky, they won’t feel very comfortable or valued as a customer.
Put the customer first and make sure to keep their best interest in mind. If that ends up meaning that they don’t buy your solution, then so be it. It’s better to have a reputation for being helpful than selfishly hungry to make a sale.
Automate where you can
With the outbound sales tools listed above, make sure you are automating wherever it makes sense. Don’t sacrifice the effectiveness of a personalized email or phone call, but when it comes to things like entering information, analyzing data, and creating reports – rely on automation. This will free up time for your reps to focus on the actual customer, rather than their data.
Use multiple channels
Your outbound sales cadence should include a variety of channels. Until you figure out which method of communication your prospect prefers, approach them from all angles using a mix of different outreach techniques. Once you determine the channel on which they are most present, record that preference in your CRM.
Ask for referrals
If you’ve given your customers the positive experience they deserve and you end up closing the deal, remember to ask for a referral to generate new outbound sales opportunities. Word-of-mouth marketing to get new leads is incredibly valuable, as the customer who made a purchase will likely speak highly about the experience they had with your brand.
Best outbound call tracking software in 2024
The outbound call tracking software can allow users to call directly from the erp software that they are using, record lead activity and the conversation recordings. This type of data is very useful if you are aspiring to increase the rate of your outbound sales as it provides a contextual history to refer to before initiating your next call.
* Below are the top five leading outbound call tracking software solutions from G2’s Spring 2024 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
1. HubSpot Sales Hub
HubSpot Sales Hub has been a leading CRM provider that allows businesses to track, nurture and reconnect with outbound leads to shorten sales cycles. With advanced analytics powered dashboards, you get richer data, call histories and lead profile information that can convert cold leads into warm and help achieve sales goals.
What users like best:
"I love that all of the information I need for a customer is easy to find; regardless of who spoke to the client and or when, notes, call, emails, its is all there. Integrating all forms of sales into an easy to identify, implemented methods used with your sale leave for no room for error. Its is all logged and easy to pick up and continue the sale with the hisory logged. Customer service is so much easier and clearly logged with the options to track. I use it everyday all day!"
– HubSpot Sales Hub Review, Martha B.
What users dislike:
"The pricing of HubSpot Sales Hub may be prohibitive for small businesses with limited budgets, especially if they do not require all the features included in the platform."
– HubSpot Sales Hub Review, Mohsin K.
2. Salesloft
Salesloft is an intelligent revenue intelligence platform that stores actionable lead data for sales reps in real-time to touch base with high conversion potential leads. It is an easy to use platform that eliminates silos between your sales and marketing teams and generates quick and efficient reports.
What users like best:
“As a legacy customer of Outreach, the move to Salesloft was one of the best things we could have done for the business. The platform gives us more power than ever to create a memorable customer experience, from the initial touchpoint, all the way through to customer satisfaction, retention and growth. What makes Salesloft really special is the team. Everyone at the company is obsessed with their customers. We're constantly learning from them through their daily/weekly webinars, and the customer success team keeps us informed of any important changes and inovations when it comes to using the platform.”
– Salesloft Review, Jonathan P.
What users dislike:
"It would be helpful to get open and click rate data when you send emails to several recipients through Outlook. There are also times when I cannot get the SL icon to show up in my Salesforce pages. Just yesterday I had to close all of my windows and re-sign into all of my accounts to get SL to integrate with Salesforce again."
– Salesloft Review, Lauren P.
3. OpenPhone
OpenPhone is a call delivery and lead management tool that offers collaborative features for your teams to centralize their lead operations and share sales resources through bulk messaging. It also allows you to manage customer calls and consumer relations with deep integrations and configurability.
What users like best:
"I cannot say enough about the PEOPLE at OpenPhone. Marissa Harbath is an absolute pleasure to work with. Even with the difference in our time zones - she responds immediately. If she doesnt have the answer, she connects me with the appropriate person. When I contact OpenPhone Support directly, they are quick to respond, efficient and knowledgeable. It was such a smooth transition. We are new to the platform, but its been a very positive experience thus far!"
- OpenPhone Review, Jeanine A.
What users dislike:
"I don't like not being able to set a default time zone for scheduling messages. It's a bit annoying to have to be selecting the time zone every time I go to schedule messages when I always use the same one. They should have the option to select a default time zone for scheduling and be able to change it if needed."
– OpenPhone Review, Nakira B.
4. Dialpad AI voice
Dialpad AI voice is an AI customer calling tool that allows your business to stay connected to their sales leads from anytime and anywhere. You can also initiate automatic call responses to interact with outbound leads, that adds to overall efficiency.
What users like best:
"It's great for a lot of different platforms. The transcription is great. Great Admin panel with a lot of controls and analytics. The account team is pretty flexible with license count. Can be adapted to a ton of different situations (user phones, main line, conference room calling, etc.) which make it a great solution to solve a lot of needs."
– Dialpad AI voice, Patrick M.
What users dislike:
"I'd like to see greater flexibility in terms of call handling & routing for departments. If the channels feature were to incorporate 3rd party integrations, it would be a viable contender to replace basic Slack functionality and allow us to consolidate our tech stack.
I'd also like to see the ability to notate, assign, or chat in department call logs and voicemail inboxes so it is clear if someone has addressed a missed call."
– Dialpad AI Voice Review, Brandon L.
5. Outreach
Outreach is a power tool for teams to connect with more leads. Imagine a platform that automates emails, tracks engagement, and helps manage all your outreach efforts. This translates to increased efficiency, allowing you to build relationships and close deals faster. It also sends automated emails to prospects in bulk to promote discounts and offers.
What users like best:
"Outreach is a great platform that integrates with many other useful tools for a sales organization. It allows for automatic email/call sequences to occur and it is very easy to use platform. I love the simplicity and navigation tools to set up sequences and call steps to properly contact customers and potential customers. I love the notifications as well. This allows me to see who has clicked, replied, and opened the emails to have "warmer" leads than initially expected too. Overall a great tool for a sales organization to have!"
– Outreach Review, Brian S.
What users dislike:
It does not sync perfectly with Salesforce. Some tasks repeat, or activities that are not in a campaign don't count towards it and mess up the sequence sometimes
– Outreach Review, Justin B.
Think outside the box
Outbound sales need more patience, determination, and motivation. Reaching out to these sales prospects with relevant information and allowing for breathers between follow-ups could be the best way to achieve more outbound sales and aid business growth.
Unsure of how to start a conversation with a sales prospect? Check out 12 types of sales scripts to increase confidence and close a deal.
This article was originally published in 2020. It has been updated with new information.
Mary Clare Novak
Mary Clare Novak is a former Content Marketing Specialist at G2 based in Burlington, Vermont, where she is explored topics related to sales and customer relationship management. In her free time, you can find her doing a crossword puzzle, listening to cover bands, or eating fish tacos. (she/her/hers)
