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Despite the hard work that B2B salespeople put into building trust, over 79% of leads never convert! Even the best-performing sales companies only close a fraction of their sales-qualified leads (SQLs). Lead nurturing is the main challenge behind the low conversion rate.
With a well-thought-out sales outreach strategy and tools, the sales department can minimise the chances that their target audience will overlook their efforts. But before we get down to the tools, let us explore a sound sales outreach strategy.
What is Sales Outreach?
Sales outreach involves engaging with potential customers through email, text messaging, LinkedIn messaging, and other social channels to convert them into customers. These potential customers should meet your ideal customer profile (ICP) to be more efficiently converted into paying customers.
However, sales outreach continues beyond attracting new customers. Sales outreach enables the sales and marketing department to respond to B2B churn rates that average 28%, depending on the industry. By improving customer service and raising the value of your products, your sales team will be more equipped to combat customer churn for the long haul.
2024 Sales Outreach Statistics
- Over 50% of your prospects need to fit your business better.
- 42.5% of sales reps take 10 months to contribute to the company’s goals, ultimately losing 15% of potential customers.
- 79% of salespeople use social selling to meet their quotas.
- 80.3% of B2B buyers come from LinkedIn, higher than Twitter’s 12.7% and Facebook’s 6.7%.
8 Effective Sales Outreach Tips
A well-defined outreach strategy incorporates a two-pronged approach featuring input from an organisation’s sales and marketing departments. Key objectives of the collaboration include the following:
- Attracting new sales opportunities.
- Initiating contact with decision-makers.
- Identifying their unique challenges and needs.
- Fostering trust in the relationship.
We’ve compiled our top 8 sales outreach strategies, which are guaranteed to expand your reach and build meaningful interactions with B2B audiences in your industry.
1. Identify Your Ideal Customers
The widespread thought that more customers mean higher sales is often farfetched to some extent. With B2B outreach, target audiences demand more personal relationships based on trust and a genuine understanding of their unique challenges, to provide long-term solutions.
The ideal customer can be identified through a wealth of data, ranging from:
- Industry
- Demographics
- Location
- Income
- Interests
- Purchase intentions
As such, your inbound marketing efforts should be channelled toward building content that addresses the ideal customer’s unique challenges.
2. Use Buyer Personas to Develop Sales Outreach Messaging
Fictional characters in a marketing strategy are called buyer personas. They’re accurate and detailed representations of your desired target customer. A buyer persona is a profile of your most suitable customers based on deep research. The details included in the persona’s profile include:
- Behavioural traits
- Age and gender
- Location
- Interests, hobbies, and goals
- Biggest challenges
With buyer personas representing an accurate portrait of your ideal customer, you want to create email templates, LinkedIn outreach messages, and content as tailored to them as possible.
3. Prioritise Your Decision-Makers
While small companies are run by individuals and a few employees, large and medium-sized organisations have hundreds – and sometimes thousands – of employees working at various levels. In a B2B environment, your outreach efforts should be aimed at the decision-makers.
Buying decisions in a B2B setting are made by a select few C-suite managers, who have the final say on the company’s spending. Unfortunately, getting in touch with key decision-makers can be difficult, but on the bright side, most have a strong presence on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a professional platform boasting over 65 million decision-makers. What’s more, 4 out of 5 LinkedIn users influence business decisions. LinkedIn allows its members to search for key decision-makers via:
- Job titles
- LinkedIn groups
- Influencers
- Mutual connections
Once you identify the right decision-makers, the next step would be to select a means to reach out to them through their favourite channels.
4. Pick Your Sales Outreach Channel
Now that you have a clearer picture of your ideal customers, it’s time to figure out how to initiate contact with them. One popular outreach channel in the past was cold calling. However, today, email and social media channels take the top spot.
With over 1 billion members, LinkedIn is the right place to reach out to B2B leads. Currently, 59% of marketers generate leads from LinkedIn instead of 26% for other social media channels combined. Moreover, 78% of marketers rate LinkedIn as the most effective social channel for their goals.
We recommend a mix and match of several – if not all – channels to drive better results. A multi-channel approach ensures broader coverage and that your sales team’s success is not limited by the channel they use.