Automated outbound sales campaigns allow businesses to avoid traditional spray-and-pray tactics and generate up to four times more sales opportunities.
When CRMs were developed in the 1980s, the aim was to help sales reps optimize daily schedules, prioritize routine tasks, and ensure qualified prospects were contacted on time. Outreach.io—now nearly a decade old—elevates outbound campaigns further, enabling sales teams to use email, cold calling, and other outbound tactics to reach out to sales prospects and create automated sequences for effective lead generation. As an Outreach.io reseller, 3D2B helps clients streamline sales activities and spur better sales outcomes.
Outbound Outreach: Turning Organization into Action
Both inbound and outbound sales methods have one aim: to generate leads and drive sales. However, unlike inbound marketing, where the customer makes the first move, outbound marketing seeks out qualified prospects who are most likely to convert into long-term customers.
With outreach, sales teams use cold tactics like emails and cold calls to strategically move a prospect toward a purchase decision.
Outreach.io is a versatile and easy-to-use platform that employs email, social, voice, and text to reach prospects on their terms. The software extracts vital prospect and customer data and continually updates records with new information as it occurs. By taking the guesswork out of the sales process, it helps team members:
- Uncover key customer insights.
- Choose the next best actions.
- Test different messages and approaches.
- Optimize content to increase the odds of success.
From top-of-the-funnel leads to happy converts, Outreach helps sales teams close more deals, increase revenue, and meet or exceed their sales goals.
Building an Outbound Campaign With Outreach.io
What sets Outreach apart from other sales solutions is its focus on improving how sales agents sell. It goes far beyond organizing schedules and contacts, helping reps generate more and better leads, improve the customer lifecycle, and boost revenue.
Outreach uses a series of touchpoints called sequences to compel deeper prospect engagement. Here’s how to use the platform to build outbound campaigns that convert.
1. Craft the Right Message
Customized emails are a powerful way to connect with prospects. But truly effective ones require consistency and scalability.
Outreach gathers data from multiple locations and uses standardized guidelines to compose, edit, and review content. Reps save time and align messaging while still crafting creative messages that catch a prospect’s attention and encourage them to open emails or click on links. They can also create templates that align with multiple buyer personas and use data analysis to determine which prospects or existing accounts are ready to buy.
2. Utilizing the Right Channel
As customers have gotten more comfortable with digital sales approaches, they’ve developed distinct preferences for when, how, and where they want to receive content. With Outreach, prospects and customers can choose and change their preferred method or methods of communication, allowing your sales reps to work smarter. Whether sending emails, making phone calls, or texting, agents can craft messages more relevant to the recipient’s needs or pain points.
3. Get the Timing Right
Good sales reps know when to reach out and when to follow up. While it’s true that every passing day narrows the window of opportunity for sales success, agents walk a fine line between being persistent or pushy.
To make the process work, sales reps should prioritize the two weeks following initial contact, as Outreach research has found a direct link between responsiveness and the likelihood of an agent converting a prospect:
- After two days of buyer silence, conversion rates drop by a third.
- The longer buyers are silent, the less likely they’ll set up a meeting.
- By the end of week two, less than five percent of prospects schedule a meeting or demonstration.
In most cases where a prospect hasn’t responded within two weeks, it’s safe to assume they’ve moved on. And, unless there are extenuating reasons for not doing so, the sales rep should move on, too.
Get Started with Outreach.io Today
Periodic reviews of Outreach sequences ensure your sales process works optimally to convert prospects. As products, services, and sales strategies evolve, you should adjust sequences accordingly.
When performing sequence reviews, ask yourself:
- Have you accurately defined your targets?
- What is your desired outcome?
- What is A/B testing revealing about what works and what doesn’t?
Are sequence steps well-timed?
- Are there any bottlenecks; should you add additional steps?
- Are you crafting effective messages?
Sequence reviews take time, but the payoffs are worth it, helping you reap the maximum benefits from your carefully planned sales strategy.
AI-powered deal acceleration tools, buyer sentiment analysis capabilities, and helpful playbooks and messaging guides make Outreach one of the best sales tools for driving prospect engagement and conversation. Still have questions? Book a consultation with 3D2B to get the information you need before taking the leap.
