Outbound sales has been a staple of B2B sales strategies for decades. With the rise of inbound and digital marketing, outbound has grown less popular. However, outbound sales still provides numerous advantages, especially for growing businesses that are ready to accelerate their revenue growth.
The Definition of Outbound Sales
Outbound sales entail proactively seeking out and getting the ideal buyer closer to you. Unlike inbound sales, which target prospects after they’ve interacted with you through one or more channels, it needs you to reach out to those who haven’t already engaged with you.
Usually, companies utilize cold calling software to:
- Find hottest leads with the help of automated lead routing
- Call them using an automated dialing system
- Automate appointment setting
But, in order to do so on a long-term basis, market segmentation and personalized messaging are required.
Starting with segmentation, you need to find your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs), then reach out to them with targeted messaging while developing a scalable and repeatable process. This is the key to outbound sales growth. In this article, we’ll show you how to do it, step by step.
Use Market Segmentation to Identify Your Most Appealing Markets
The technique of dividing a market into distinct client groups is known as market segmentation. Increased conversions, improved financials, and faster product iterations will result from doing this correctly and early on.
Market segmentation is a straightforward notion, but it necessitates perseverance and iteration. Begin by segmenting a large target market into discrete subgroups of individuals or enterprises with similar requirements and interests. After that, start devising and implementing tactics to reach out to them.
Market segmentation can be divided into three categories:
- Segmentation based on attributes
- Segmentation based on needs
- Segmentation based on the value
The most valuable and practical strategy is value-based segmentation, which allows businesses to focus on attracting the most profitable prospects. It also puts you in the best position to create successful strategies for each area.
Create a Clear, Value-Based Hypothesis to Guide the Segmentation Process
Hypotheses should be simple, logical, and testable, and should be based on customer attributes or criteria that allow your organization to clearly divide current consumers into value-based divisions.
Large online e-commerce platforms, for example, employ your technology because it helps them prevent fraud. Smaller e-commerce and SaaS enterprises, on the other hand, may use your promotional tools to boost traffic to their websites. Once you’ve developed a theory, you must test it against the evidence.
Gather Customer Information and Data
Your current customer base can offer valuable insights, but you first need to create a list of all customer accounts. The list should be comprehensive and contain all clients and it should be built from a billing or customer relationship management (CRM) database.
Furthermore, accounts that are outliers, too new, too old, or too little (in terms of revenue or organization size) should be excluded from your research because they could skew your results. The ultimate purpose is to figure out what basic criteria will be used to construct barriers between client groups.
Perform Data Analysis and Categorize Clients into ICPs
Now, you must perform an analysis based on your criteria. For example, if the primary criterion is revenue, you can use means, medians, and modes to group customers into high- and low-revenue segments. Alternatively, if your criteria is organization size, the mean or a median number of employees in each segment could be calculated.
Once you’ve determined which criteria will be used to identify your ICPs, you’ll have a large enough sample size to start segmenting.
Assess Each Segment’s Attractiveness
To determine the attractiveness of each micro-segment, a formula or set of weighted criteria must be devised. Consider the following:
- The current size of the segment, in terms of economic value
- Future growth or expansion potential of the segment
- How easy it is to reach out to the segment
- How much time does it take to close a deal
A formula like this generates an objective metric that may be used to compare and prioritize micro-segments across time.
In most cases, the ultimate selection of micro-segments is self-evident. However, as markets and rivals evolve, it’s critical to keep refining existing segments and creating new ones to guarantee your organization is concentrating on the most lucrative sectors.
Look for Leads in Each Micro-Segment
It’s time to start building a list of leads once you’ve discovered the most appealing market segments. The objective is to find a few, targeted leads in each segment. Begin by determining who the decision-makers are in each segment. Next, look for customers whose organizations are the right size and in the correct industry.
The final step is to locate potential customers that have the revenue, authority, and decision power to purchase your product.
It’s challenging to produce high-quality leads that turn into paying customers. The most important factor is quality. You’ll end up spinning your wheels again and over if you merely increase the volume without qualifying the leads.
Conclusion
Outbound sales is all about reaching out to the right prospects, at the right time, and in the right context. Market segmentation is essential for outbound sales because it allows you to reduce your market. By doing this, you’re able to develop unique strategies for each micro-segment.
Once you’ve got the right ICPs, it’s time to create a solid outbound sales process– a process that can be used to identify the most qualified leads, contact each, and move them through the sales funnel seamlessly.
short url:
