Outbound Sales vs. Inbound Sales – Who doesn’t love a warm sales lead?
A prospect contacting your business and looking for your product or service is one of the most rewarding things to experience. It means that efforts you have made with marketing and inbound is starting to work.
The hard truth about Inbound and content marketing is that it can take between 6-9 months to see positive movement. It’s a marathon, not a sprint with it comes to inbound. According to the software company, MOZ, it takes an average of seven visits to their website before a visitor signs up for a free trial. It takes work, it takes time and it takes commitment.
While you are hard at work on your inbound efforts, don’t neglect your outbound sales efforts. From startups to large national companies, outbound sales efforts are vital to continuous growth and revenue.
Startups might neglect outbound sales efforts as they aren’t sure where to begin, or don’t have experience cold calling to sending cold emails. Large businesses may be busy dealing with inbound leads, and forget the importance of outbound sales efforts for pipeline building in the future.
If you are just starting out with sales for a new product or you are beginning outbound sales efforts for an established business, here are three suggestions to keep you motivated and selling.
1. Start with the data
Data is a wonderful friend for those starting or renewing their outbound sales efforts. You can use your data to help you predict, execute, optimize and continue to grow. If you know that you are looking to close 10 new deals a month then work the numbers backwards. Determine the ratio of closed deals compared to the number of opportunities at various stages of the sales funnel. You can base this on past information your company has, or standard sales close ratios.
The conversion rate for your business or product will help you understand the quality of your qualification and sales processes. This helps your better define your outbound sales efforts. You might see ratios such as 20 leads to generate one sale, 10 prospects per sale, or five qualified prospects per sale. This data helps you understand how many people you need to be contacting to result in a closed sale.
2. Research your targets
These are countess tools to help with list building and finding contact information like paid subscriptions from Data.com. These tools can be effective but do have a cost associated with them.
Using Linkedin as a search tool is also an effective way to do research and find your targets in business contexts. Almost everyone who is anyone has a profile.
Contacts in the education system are simple to find, as every district as a website listening their staff.
Smaller Businesses are often listed on Manta and often times the names listed are the owners.
The internet is a goldmine of information if you take the time to research well and find the resources that work for the prospects that you are targeting.
3. Do it afraid
All sales people have that great story of a big deal they’ve won. Their stories are full of how they worked hard, continued with persistence and persuasion and got the deal in the door. The thing that is less talked about is the countless rejections, close calls, bad timing and flat out failures that sales people experience all the time. Don’t be afraid of rejection, it will happen.
But what will also happen, is success, at some point. If you continue to push and work hard, you will have a conversations with a prospect, a hot lead or someone who is ready to buy right away. Doing nothing and not creating outbound sales efforts too costly, so even if you are fearful, give it all you’ve got and do it afraid.
At SalesEvolve, our commitment is to always provide a professional sales outsourcing team to hit targets, grow revenue, build pipeline and win deals. We have worked with clients to launch new products and positioned startups for growth. We can scale beyond appointment setting or opportunity generation and we can drive deals through the pipeline.
