Why You Need to Grow Your Outbound Sales Business

Outbound prospecting refers to a sales technique representatives use to hunt down prospects, rather than wait for prospects to come to them.

Most B2B sales organizations mandate that reps spend a percentage of their time prospecting because outbound can significantly increase your sales pipeline. However, most B2B sales organizations have not perfected the outbound business model. Building outbound business is crucial for sales organizations for a number of reasons:

Unequaled Precision Targeting
Huge technology advancements have allowed us to target our inbound marketing efforts pretty specifically, but nothing can yet equal the persistence and resilience of a sales representative reaching out directly to his or her prospect. Outbound prospecting is one of the quickest ways to determine in which market segment you find the most success. Refine marketing targets based on the results you get from your outbound strategy.

Objection Handling
Outbound prospecting is a great way to get feedback from prospects on your initial offering. When you reach out directly to a target that you think is a good fit, their rejection is much more likely to reveal a primary objection than it would if you had send them a generic marketing email from which they unsubscribed.

Also, because sales reps make the first effort to reach prospects, rather than prospects reaching out to sales reps, reps hear objections upfront, and can head objections off at the pass before prospects latch onto them for leverage.

Improving Message
In the same way that outbound prospecting gives you an inside edge on objections, outbound prospecting quickly uncovers areas for messaging improvement. Reps can tell which sales messages resonate and which ones fall flat.

Outbound prospecting can offer the best opportunity to identify reasons why prospects resist products or services. Being aware gives you time to craft specific messages that address objections.

Increasing Conversion Rates
Outbound prospecting asks reps to reach target decision makers. Marketing efforts may have propelled a deal to an unresponsive gatekeeper, and outbound prospecting may be the only way to move the deal forward.

Lowering Marketing Costs
Because they hold lead generation requirements as well as ambiguous brand awareness goals, marketing teams pay a lot of money for leads. Whether they plan events, pay for content, buy campaigns, or more, their cost per leads is usually in the thousands. An outbound sales lead is free, unless it involves a few hundred dollars to travel to a prospect or take a prospect out for a meal.

Outbound prospecting, because of its targeted nature, eliminates the need for lead nurturing. All marketing costs associated with lead nurturing typically disappear when sales sources and qualifies leads.

Generating More Sales
One of the most direct results outbound prospecting offers is a larger quantity of qualified leads. This inevitably results in more sales.

Using outbound prospecting as part of a coordinated effort in a multi-channel marketing strategy is an effective method for reaching the most covetable prospects. Stay tuned in to the InsideView blog for the rest of our series on outbound prospecting.