Outbound Sales involve a process of selling a product to a targeted audience where customer engagement is initiated from the seller’s end. Outbound marketing includes more traditional forms of marketing tools such as TV commercials, radio advertisements, print advertisements such as newspaper ads, magazine ads, flyers, brochures, catalogs, etc. 

Salespeople directly initiate contact with prospective buyers with the intent of making a sale using outbound sales techniques like cold calling, cold emailing, social selling, door-to-door visits, trade shows, and industry events, etc.

There are two basic steps to be considered in Outbound sales:

1. Finding potential customers 

2. Reaching / Communicating with them.

Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash

Finding Potential Customers

First, we need to understand who our prospects are and find more of them. 

The key to success in outbound sales is identifying your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

This is basically understanding which niche are you in a position to nail at this stage of your product and focusing on that segment.

It is finding that small pond which you can completely dominate and become a big fish.

Linkedin can be used in order to find the right prospects but as its search engine is comparatively weaker, one can set up a Google Custom Search Engine which makes it a lot easier if the right keywords are chosen. 

It has the following benefits:

Deep Keyword Search: You can find a potential customer linked to the right keyword that indicates the potential need for your product.

Advanced Prospecting: You can find high potential customers by using advanced search tools such as specifying the number of recommendations, how recently they have joined, number of posts, public email address, etc.

These days there are many tools that can help sales representatives to identify their target audience such as sales prospecting tools, B2B Lead Generation software, CRM customer relationship management tools, scheduling tools, etc.

OUTREACH ( Communicating with Potential Customers  ) 

Now here you need to decide how to contact your prospects, which can be via :

a. Cold Calling / Telesales:

As the name suggests, you directly call potential customers and tell them about your product.

According to the experts, cold calling is still very much alive. The strategies have just changed because today’s buyers need to be attracted to a product with solid reasoning. Business buyers have a low level of patience for cold calls and one needs to identify their needs more precisely.

Pros: Easier to convey ideas through its interactive nature.

Cons: Requires time and manpower.

b. Email Marketing

This is an effective tool to promote your product as most people these days often read their emails once or twice a day. 

pros: You can quickly contact a lot of people and filter out people quickly.

cons: Less personal, so you need to be clear about the content.

c. Social Media: 

Social media offers us an opportunity to get to know our prospects before even reaching out to them. LinkedIn, for example, can show you what a prospect is interested in, the organizations and individuals he or she follows, and much more.

This information can lead to a more tailored outreach.

The idea is to share data and information using social media like Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, Twitter, etc

Pros: You can showcase your quality through posts and have a constant channel to nurture prospects by sharing information.

Pons: Less direct and your prospects may not visit your content.

Conclusion:

Overall, outbound sales is a very effective method to reach mass audiences once advanced marketing tools and techniques are employed in order to promote a product.