An outbound sales strategy can be extremely effective for driving deals — but it’s not for the faint of heart.
Outbound sales take guts. It requires resilience and perseverance; an innate drive to continuously improve one's skills and processes; a willingness to embrace innovations in technology; and, of course, an unwavering passion for the product, the client, and the art of selling.
In this article, you will learn the basics of an outbound sales strategy, including its advantages for B2B businesses and how it compares to an inbound strategy. Then we’ll dive into common challenges associated with outbound sales and how to overcome them. Finally, you will find a list of 11 proven tactics to improve your B2B outbound sales strategy.
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What is Outbound Sales?
Outbound sales, also known as “prospecting,” is a strategy where sales representatives proactively reach out to potential customers through cold-calling, cold email outreach, and other direct methods. Outbound sales strategies focus on targeting ideal prospects, qualifying and nurturing leads, and converting leads to customers.
How Do Outbound and Inbound Sales Differ?
While outbound strategies are focused on hunting down new leads, inbound methods aim to attract leads who are actively seeking out a solution. Effective inbound tactics for attracting leads include content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media marketing.
Here are some key differences between outbound and inbound sales:
Outbound Sales | Inbound Sales |
Sales reps send cold outreach to prospects | Sales reps and/or marketers leverage content to attract warm leads |
Fast-paced, high-volume approach to generate leads quickly | Long-term, consultative approach to stay top-of-mind until prospects are ready to reach out |
Requires more time and resources | More cost-effective in the long-term |
Skills required: Persistence, ability to handle rejection, confidence, strong communication and negotiation skills | Skills required: Empathy, ability to create engaging content, strong communication and relationship-building skills |
For a well-rounded approach to sales, most B2B companies use a combination of outbound and inbound strategies to keep the pipeline full.
5 Advantages of an Effective Outbound Sales Strategy
Let’s dive into five key advantages of having a solid outbound sales strategy.
High-Value Lead Generation
Outbound sales enable you to focus exclusively on consumers who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). When you use a prospecting tool like Nimbler to filter by industry, company, location, budget, and seniority, you can build targeted lists of prospects that are highly likely to convert.
Faster Sales Cycles
When you need immediate results, outbound is the way to go. Fast-paced, high-volume tactics like cold-calling and cold-emailing can help you generate leads, drive conversions, and close deals in a short period of time.
Scalability
Once you have outbound systems in place, it’s easy to scale your efforts. By investing in the right sales automation tools, you can automate high-volume prospecting, list-building, outreach, and pipeline management.
Higher Revenue
By targeting high-value prospects, reaching decision-makers directly, delivering persistent follow-up, and expediting the sales cycle, an outbound sales approach contributes to increased revenue for your business.
Valuable Insights
Through direct interactions with prospects and leads, sales reps can uncover valuable insights about consumers’ challenges, desired solutions, and objections to your product. Your business can use this feedback to optimize everything from sales messaging to product offerings.
Common Outbound Sales Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Here are some of the top challenges B2B businesses face regarding outbound sales, as well as strategies to overcome them.
Challenge 1: Low Response Rates
Outbound sales strategies typically yield lower response rates than inbound strategies. That’s because, with outbound methods, you are reaching out to people who might not be actively looking for your solution. However, there are ways to optimize your outbound tactics for higher response rates:
Personalization: Use first names in subject lines and greetings, directly address the prospect’s specific business needs, mention previous purchases, and use the same language as your prospects.
Targeting: Fine-tune your contact lists to ensure only the most promising prospects are included.
Timing: Generally, send cold emails between 9-11 a.m. or 1-4 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Use A/B testing to determine the best times for your specific market.
Creativity: Use your in-depth knowledge of your target audience to craft compelling subject lines and messages that will grab their attention and entice them to click.
Multiple Channels: Reach out to prospects through multiple channels (cold-calling, email, texting, direct mail, social media, trade shows) to improve your chances of getting through to someone.
Challenge 2: Complying with Outreach Regulations
There are regulations in place to protect consumers from unwanted emails and phone calls, privacy breaches, and misleading information. It is crucial to adhere to the guidelines of the CAN-SPAM Act and Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) to avoid legal repercussions.
Here are a few important guidelines to follow:
Clearly state your name, company name, and contact information in your cold email outreach or at the beginning of a phone call.
Use a subject line that accurately represents the contents of your message.
Always include an option to unsubscribe, and honor unsubscribe requests promptly.
Only make calls between 8 a.m. - 9 p.m.
Do not call numbers listed on the National Do Not Call Registry.
Challenge 3: Persistent Follow-Ups
Maintaining a consistent follow-up schedule is crucial for effective outbound sales. However, persistent follow-ups can be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and difficult to manage — especially when dealing with hundreds of prospects at a time.
Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) tools can do a lot of the manual follow-up work for you. With the right tools, you can create autonomous, trigger-based outbound campaigns that always reach the right prospects at the right times. Furthermore, AI can analyze campaign metrics and response sentiment to make adjustments to improve campaign performance.
Challenge 4: Reaching Key Decision Makers
B2B salespeople typically have to go through gatekeepers before they can reach company decision-makers. That’s why B2B sales cycles are usually longer than B2C transactions.
To reach key decision-makers right away, you need high-quality B2B data. Invest in a reputable data provider that enables you to filter prospects by seniority and job title (in addition to many other attributes). Build a prospecting list of company leaders — people who are most likely to have purchasing power. This should help you skip a few gatekeeping steps.
Challenge 5: Maintaining Motivation with Rejection
The average conversion rate in outbound sales ranges from 2-5%, which means you can expect about 95% of your sales attempts to be met with rejection.
It can be tough to keep hearing “no” or getting zero response. To maintain motivation, arm your ego with data. Look up the average conversion rates for your industry so you’ll know how many rejections to expect compared to sales.
If you don’t already have a data-driven process in place, establish one and follow it consistently. Sticking to a proven system and knowing what to expect in the long run will dull the sting of rejections.
Challenge 6: Being Ready to Handle Objections
Savvy buyers will always have objections — they’ll say they can’t justify the cost, they don’t currently need your solution, they already have a provider they trust, and so on.
To handle these objections with finesse, you must be prepared. Learn the most common objections to your product or service, and develop a set of standard responses that have proven to be effective.
When objections arise during a sales call, you’ll have these responses in your back pocket — just be sure you are listening to the prospect’s concerns so you can tailor your response accordingly.
11 Outbound Sales Strategies and Tips to Drive Better Results
Now that you understand what you’re up against, let’s take a look at some proven techniques for crushing your outbound sales goals.
Fine-Tune Your Targeting
Optimize your sales outreach — and avoid wasting time and money — by focusing only on highly likely-to-convert prospects. Develop your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and identify prospects who meet the criteria. Build segmented contact lists and launch tailored outreach that speaks directly to your niche audience’s needs.
Verify Your Data
Accurate data is crucial. After all, nothing says, “Don’t open that email,” like a wrong or misspelled name. Instead, partner with a reputable data provider like Nimbler to get accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date contact information.
Personalize Emails and Messages
To use personalization effectively, go deeper than just using a person’s first name in the email subject line.
Take the time to research the prospect. Did they recently start a new job or publish an intriguing article? What is the most significant pain point for someone in their role? What is the latest industry news that might be impacting them?
Use gathered insight to craft a sales message that is so relevant that they can’t help but pay attention.
Offer Value
Don’t just pitch your product. Offer value through a case study, a free audit, a 15-minute strategy session, or educational materials.
Providing value during the sales process will differentiate you from competitors and show that you care about and understand your potential client. This can be an effective strategy for closing the deal and maintaining long-term client satisfaction.
Use Multiple Channels
Even though email is considered the most effective B2B outbound sales channel, a multi-channel approach can help you get a prospect’s attention. You can reach out to prospects through a combination of emails, phone calls, text messages, and social media direct messages. Plus, social selling is gaining a lot of traction in recent years as an effective sales strategy. Use your personal LinkedIn profile to share helpful news or best practices to establish trust with your potential buyers.
Send a Video
A whopping 87% of marketers say incorporating video has increased sales, according to Wyzowl. Whether you’re sending a video message via Loom or creating a custom product demonstration, leveraging video is a smart strategy for getting a prospect’s attention.
Create Trigger-Based Outreach
Timing is crucial in B2B sales. To ensure you reach prospects at optimal times, use a sales intelligence tool to build trigger-based outreach.
A sales trigger is any type of event that indicates a good time to pitch to a prospective client. Common sales triggers include new hires, product launches, funding rounds, relevant legislative changes, and competitor announcements.
Always Follow Up
Research shows that 80% of sales require an average of five follow-up calls after the introductory call. To be effective, your follow-up strategy must be consistent, timely, and engaging — and a little creativity never hurts!
Try these follow-up techniques:
Begin the call with a thoughtful question: Use your notes from previous interactions to ask a relevant question about their business, and frame it as curiosity (“I’ve been wondering, how did the new product launch go?”)
Share new information: Instead of saying, “I’m following up on our call last week…,” let the prospect know you have something new and valuable to share. It could be an upcoming seasonal promotion, a new product feature, or a recently published case study that is more relevant to them.
Schedule your next call: Before you hang up, ask the prospect if they would be available on a specific date for another call (“Would you be available next Tuesday at 11 a.m. so I can show you a product demo?).
Ask for feedback
The best B2B salespeople are reverent, not patronizing. To show your prospect that you consider them an industry expert, ask them for feedback on your solution. This is a great way to encourage prospects to sign up for a free trial or beta test. Plus, you’ll receive valuable feedback on your product or service.
Use Automation Effectively
Automation enables you to optimize, economize, and scale your outbound sales efforts so you can boost revenue growth. But to use automation effectively, you must know how to balance it with the human touch.
Certain tedious tasks can be easily automated — things like lead scoring, meeting scheduling, and CRM updates. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), you can also automate personalized email campaigns.
Then there are some tasks that still require a real human: initial phone calls, objection handling, negotiating, and creating tailored proposals.
Sales teams that use automation effectively will free up more time and resources to focus on the human-centric tasks that can put your company ahead of the competition.
Track and Optimize Outreach
Tracking your outreach efforts is crucial for understanding sales performance and making data-informed improvements.
Here are some key metrics to track:
Leads generated
Velocity (the speed at which leads move through the sales pipeline)
Response rates
Conversion rates
Cost per lead
Compare these metrics across your different outreach channels (cold calling, cold email, LinkedIn, etc.) to determine which channels drive the best results for each stage of the sales process. By analyzing this data regularly, you can continuously refine and optimize your outreach strategy.
Meet Nimbler, Your All-In-One Outbound Sales Tool
Ready to build a more powerful and streamlined outbound sales strategy? We invite you to explore Nimbler, the ultimate sales automation platform for B2B businesses.
Powered by AI, Nimbler lets you automate every step of the outbound sales process: list-building, lead qualification and scoring, cold email outreach, responses and objection-handling, appointment-setting, and more!
Discover how Nimbler can help you optimize your outbound sales strategy for increased revenue. Try Nimbler for free!
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