Getting quality inbound leads isn’t really a challenge anymore, is it? Even though it’s time-consuming, if you create brand awareness, improve your SEO, build a robust content strategy, and market your product well, you’ll be able to start generating inbound leads for your company in no time at all. Yes, this is an extensive and complex process with a vision set for the future, but it works.
However, what do you do when the pipe is depleting, when your inbound lead strategy isn’t quite in place yet, or you want to rapidly ramp up sales volume in a short amount of time? Outbound lead generation will always come to your rescue.
Outbound lead generation gives you more control over the quality and quantity of leads that come in, however painstakingly manual the process is. And to do this right, you need to adapt to how the game has changed in today’s world. This post will tell you everything you need to know about outbound lead generation, and how you can establish a strong lead-gen process for your company.
What Is Outbound Lead Generation?
Outbound lead generation is the process of approaching prospects through a variety of sources to deliver a sales pitch and convince the party to buy. Often termed as a “traditional” sales channel, below are some examples of how these leads can be generated:
- Cold Calling
- Cold Email Outreach
- Cold LinkedIn Prospecting
- Door-To-Door sales
- Events and Trade Fairs
- Print Ads
- TV commercials
- Outdoor and banner advertising
- Press releases
The channels may vary for different companies, but the essence remains the same; you have to put yourself out there for the leads to flow in. Unlike inbound sales, leads don’t just fall on your lap. You have to go out and look for them.
Benefits of Outbound Lead Generation
Putting yourself out there can be difficult—finding people to connect with, convincing them to agree to talk with you, and doing your due diligence before you have a conversation with them; all of these can be extremely exhausting. This is the exact reason why once you opt to go for outbound lead generation, you need to invest in essential tools that will power up your team.
Faster Pipeline Building
If your company doesn’t already have one, look at building a sales development team. This team does outbound prospecting and allows us to add leads to the pipeline at a much faster pace than alternative methods such as inbound marketing or partnerships. You are connecting with prospects in real-time and are able to address their concerns and convince them at a much quicker rate than other channels.
Attracting New Business
Outbound lead generation helps you efficiently explore new markets, experiment with new messaging techniques, and gather a huge deal of data about talking points, value propositions, and buyer personas.
Creating a Killer Outbound Lead Generation Process
Determining your Ideal Customer Profile
So much of the content reps create- like emails, sales pitch decks, etc for outreach is vague and broad, which comes off as rehearsed. Take your time and create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for your products. You can have more than one, depending upon the kind of audience you cater to. This defines exactly whom you are trying to target, and shortens the outreach process. Also, helps improve your pitch and deal conversion rates. Once your sales reps know what kind of personality they should be targeting via email and LinkedIn, the process will become much more focused.
Paying Attention To Your Lead Lists
Companies often tend to not pay attention to their lead lists to save time and money and instead focus on connecting with people who respond.
The data you are using to create your lists should be checked thoroughly before you even get to put it in a sequence. Take time—whether you are crafting a new list from scratch or buying lead lists. Sometimes, even the smallest mistakes like getting the name of the person wrong could sabotage your chances of closing the deal.
You can also use a platform like Slintel to generate leads that match your ICPs. Slintel offers 250+ million leads from 16 million companies with 20+ filters like industry, company size, decision-making power, software or tech stack being used, the desire to buy or the buying intent score, revenue, funding, and the likes.
Alternatively, you can also download Slintel’s Chrome Extension to generate leads from websites and LinkedIn profiles. SDRs at Guesty doubled their Opportunity-to-Deal conversion rate using Slintel’s Chrome Extension. Click here to know more.
Crafting Emails With Valuable Content
You have your clean and shiny list, now what? It’s time to start crafting! Your prospects should feel like the message is for them. Concentrate on finding prospects that fit your buyer personas, and taking it forward from there by gathering more information. Provide them links to valuable resources that can explain your product/service. Knowing clearly what you do will help your prospects determine whether they want to move forward with you or not. Check out these 5 email templates for some inspo.
Having More Than One Way Of Taking It Forward
A lot of prospects would not want to connect with you in the first instance, without clearly knowing what you do. They might not want to get on a call with you right away, or they might not have a requirement for your product. Give them time, and enough resources that you might think would be valuable to them. Go through their social profiles, and see what. Sharing resources like whitepapers, product pages, blog posts, ebooks, and other content will keep them engaged for a longer time, and help build trust.
Making Use Of Your Social Channels
Sometimes, highly effective emails can do the whole job- you get a positive response, and you start building your relationship from there. However, this happens a lot less in today’s world, and you are better off connecting with them on your social channels, along with calls and emails that you are sending. This will ensure multiple touch points and ends up building engagement and trust with the prospect. Also, you have put in a lot of hard work in finding these prospects and understanding them. Don’t let this go to waste. Have them added and engaged with the content you share on your personal channels as well?
Worth The Effort?
All companies use some form of outbound lead generation in their sales process, but the trick is to make the content from inbound sales work for your outbound sales too. Outbound prospecting, outreach, and sales can be time-consuming and exhaustive as it requires a lot of attention to detail and constant human intervention. The good part is that it has the ability to increase your qualified leads by multi fold and that too in a short amount of time. That seems worth the effort put it, does it not?
