Increasing sales during their early days is an important goal for a startup business. As such, they put a lot of emphasis on increasing outbound sales. But it can be a challenging effort, as not every sales pitch is going to grab a customer. So, here are some useful strategies that can help you boost your outbound sales.
The Challenges To A Startup Business’ Outbound Sales
Various challenges can affect your sales department’s effectiveness in drawing potential customers. By understanding what these are and how they exactly affect your outbound effort, you can plan the strategies better.
Finding The Right Leads
Finding leads is itself relatively easy, what with all the channels you have. But finding the right leads is where it gets harder. Her, you will need to go through a bit of trial and error to narrow down the prospects that fit your ideal customer profile. What makes this harder is that not everyone provides enough information to determine whether they are a match.
And assuming that you do get initial good prospects, the next challenge is finding more of them. This compounds the initial challenge, as you might need to expand your search. That will require you to expend more resources.
Getting A Response From Leads
Once you have your leads, you need to get a response from them. Here, your challenge is getting the right message across to them. After all, many people are adverse to sales representatives that offer them anything. As such, you need a good strategy that will convince them of your value proposition.
Additionally, just a single message won’t do. Some prospects require several interactions before they come on board. This can end up slowing your startup business’s sales growth. Your sales team might also end up being too occupied with these customers to capture other targets.
Keeping Your Sales Team Motivated
Surprisingly, your startup business’s potential for sales growth can also hinge on your sales representatives’ motivation. After all, the actual task of convincing leads to becoming customers will fall into their hands. As such, you would want to keep them motivated to pursue those leads until they close the deal.
The challenge lies in the fact that every agent requires different motivations. We’re not talking about money here. Rather, they have different ways of coping with the task of convincing people. You need to take these different motivations into account when building a training program to them boost their performance.
Improving Your Startup Business’ Outbound Sales
One thing that you need to remember early is that no one strategy will boost your outbound sales significantly. Instead, you will have to utilize different strategies at the same time. Your goal here is to resolve all of the above challenges to turn prospects into actual customers.
Build Your Outreach Plan
An important part of your overall outbound sales strategy is your outreach plan. It details the workflow that your agents will use in engaging each lead. Some of the essential components that the plan should have are:
- Ideal customer personas: Note that, depending on how your segment your customers, you might need to have several profiles for each group.
- Persona map: if you are doing B2B, you would also want to list the specific people within your prospect companies to sell to.
- Outreach channels: Determine the best channels for reaching out to specific customer segments and indicate them on your plan.
- Script: Creating scripts will help your sales agents more effectively steer their interaction with customers towards their desired direction.
- Agenda: Determine what you would want to talk about with the customer. This also helps you better work with the customer in resolving their needs.
- Follow-up strategy: Detail when your agents should follow up their initial interaction with a prospect and how that follow-up should be conducted.
Once you have your outreach plan, it would help to discuss it with your sales reps. They can help you iron out the details and make adjustments. But keep in mind that, while the plan will serve as your guide, you would still want to have some degree of flexibility in your outreach efforts.
Explore Accounts-Based Marketing
Traditional lead generation strategies are great for gathering a large volume of leads. However, you still end up selecting only a small number of those to convert. With account-based marketing, you determine from the onset the exact companies that you would want to capture. You then focus on reaching out and closing the deal.
The main draw of this strategy is that you get to align your sales and marketing strategies early. This creates a more solid approach, as you get them working together to capture prospects. You also shorten the sales cycles since you nurture all prospects at the same time.
To start with account-based marketing, use your customer profile to quickly identify the target companies you want to capture. Look into who the key decision-makers are in these companies. Using that information, you can then tailor your tactics to the specific needs of these decision-makers. Once they know your product, they are more likely to bring it up to higher-ups and increase your chance of a deal.
Outsource Your Startup Business\’ Outbound Sales
As noted above, limited resources can affect the reach of your outbound marketing efforts. A great way to extend that reach without having to expend more resources is by outsourcing this part of your sales. With that, you not only get to gather more leads, you also have a better chance of turning more of these leads into converts.
But outsourcing isn’t just a force multiplier for your sales team. You also get more experienced sales reps. These specialists will work closely with you to better identify the right targets from all those leads. They can also provide you with strategies that you might not be aware of and better tools for engaging and capturing leads.
Boost Your Startup Business’s Outbound Sales With Us
Building your startup business’s outbound sales success is an ongoing effort. Expect that you will be refining these strategies as you discover new prospects. To have better chances of capturing these prospects, you should have the right team by your side. Sign up with us and we will lend a hand in growing your sales.