5 Secret Weapons for Outbound Sales Outbound sales teams initiate contact with customers and increase the chances of successfully closing the deal.
By Peter Daisyme Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
If your business relies on outbound sales to generate new customers and keep cash flow going, you likely already know the challenges your teams face. Inbound sales teams merely react to those who contact them, providing information and answering questions. Those customers have enough of an interest to have reached out, increasing the chances that the call will lead to a conversion.
Outbound sales teams initiate contact with customers who may or may not be interested. Today, in some cases, these are cold calls, with the customer never having shown any interest whatsoever in a product. In other cases the leads are vetted, often through a research process that makes it more likely they'll say yes.
With my last company I had to learn the hard way the difference between inbound and outbound sales are very different. I hired a team of outbound sales reps while all I needed was an outbound sales force to sell my product. I learned the right and wrong ways to sell our product to the masses.
Related: 3 Tips for Converting Sales Online
With the right tools in place, teams can arm themselves to increase those chances even further, equipping each professional with the secret weapons they need to succeed. Here are a few of the tools that I personally used to leverage our outbound sales success.
InsideSales PowerDialer.
If your team needs to call numerous people at once, the InsideSales PowerDialer can help. InsideSales' tool takes predictive dialing to the next level, using analytics to determine the best time of day to contact each person on a call list. Instead of merely dumping a call on a sales representative without warning, the PowerDialer also lets those employees press "dial" when ready, which gives them time to review the record before the call, rather than rushing to read it after the call has already connected. The process of logging each call and leaving a voicemail is automated, so your representatives will spend their time moving onto the next person on the list rather than logging call notes into a database.
LeadGenius
When your teams are calling on customers, they can gain an advantage by having an updated list in front of them. If you aren't constantly updating your databases, chances are a large number of your contact names are outdated. LeadGenius not only provides an up-to-date list of high-quality leads, but those leads can also be built with just about any custom data point you want. This tool uses a combination of data analytics and human researchers to research each lead using a combination of private and public information. When you get a list of leads from LeadGenius, your sales team can immediately start contacting prospects at scale instead of wasting valuable time researching each name before making contact.
Related: 8 Steps to a Successful Sales Call
Toofr.
Your outbound sales team can waste hours each week searching for email addresses before making contact. Toofr specializes in connecting professionals with the information they need, with a built-in database of email patterns and positively-guessed email addresses for millions of domains across the globe. Your team can simply enter a first and last name and a company name or website and Toofr delivers an address in response. You can also collect a list of names and companies or websites and upload it as a CSV file and Toofr will return a list of email addresses to match.
Outro.
This software allows you to automate referrals and get the best intros to potential clients. With an introduction through a trusted individual you're 3x more likely to make the sale. Outro makes it incredibly easy for the people who know, trust, and love your business to make high-quality referrals. With this software you can leverage others connections on Linkedin for outbound sales success.
PersistIQ.
Even with a list of fully-vetted leads and email addresses, the process of contacting those leads and following up later can be laborious. PersistIQ helps by helping teams create smart email campaigns that automatically deploy based on predetermined actions. You can send an introductory email, then follow up with a second email based on the action each recipient took on the first piece of communication. With automatic emails in place, your team will also avoid missing the opportunity to follow up, increasing the number of deals you close each month. You can also use the tool to conduct A/B testing and refine your marketing efforts in response to things that work and things that don't quite bring the results you intended.
Related: The Rise of Inbound Marketing and the Death of the Cold Call
If your business relies on outbound sales to bring in new customers, the right tools can make all the difference. When you support your team with great technology, you free them up to spend more time speaking to prospects and less time doing administrative work and research. Shop for the right set of tools that support your own unique environment.
