5 Important Steps to Build an Effective Outbound Sales System

Outbound is a popular sales strategy where salespeople actively search for and reach out to potential customers to engage and move them toward a purchase decision. An outbound sales system is an essential means to gain outbound sales success. It’s also important to improve communication, track progress, and keep your team organized to have an efficient and effective outbound sales system. But there’s more to it.

Let’s look at how you can build a worthwhile outbound sales system.

1. Segment your target market and find valuable segments

Market segmentation is one of the first steps to building an outbound sales system that brings results. There are various ways to segment a market; however, the value-based approach is quite effective.

Value-based segmentation helps:

• Identify price-insensitive customers who show willingness to pay more for certain products and services that they believe are more valuable
• Discover key reasons for customers finding a particular product or service more appealing or beneficial to them
• Identify people or companies in your target audience who need more attention in terms of service and sales
• Find out which prospects are being poorly served by your competitors, so you could strategize for converting them into your own customers
• Increase sales ROI, create more responsive and agile sales strategies, and determine value criteria influencing customers’ buying habits

Once you’ve created discrete value-based, clearly identifiable customer groups, you can easily target the most profitable, high-value segments. This will help your outbound sales reps generate strong revenue by closing more deals and increasing your average deal size.

2. Determine how attractive each segment is and create buyer personas

The next step to creating an effective outbound sales system is to measure the attractiveness of the market segments you’ve created. This helps prioritize, compare, and refine segments so your outbound sales team could focus on the most valuable ones.

Here’s what you may need to consider to evaluate a segment’s attractiveness:

• Sales cycle length and ease of doing sales outreach
• Whether or not the segment calls for major changes within your business
• Whether or not the segment is a good fit for your existing business model
• Customer quality and segment size, especially in relation to value

Be sure to build buyer personas or ideal customer profiles for each segment, and group customers into them. It’s not enough to only create segments, you also need to be able to identify the most ideal customers within each of them. This works great if you’re a business that serves various industries, offers multiple types of products, and sells to different categories of companies and people. 93% of organizations that segmented their database by persona exceeded revenue and lead goals. Further, 82% of organizations improved their value proposition and 90% gained a clearer understanding of their buyers by using personas.

3. Hire, train, and motivate to build a strong outbound sales team

An outbound sales system is incomplete without a powerful team. It starts with hiring the right people for your outbound sales team. Set clear expectations, eligibility criteria (experience, educational qualifications, certifications, etc.), explain roles and responsibilities, and how your ideal candidate should be when hiring.

Invest in training your new outbound salespeople as well as your existing team members to enable them to exceed their goals and improve sales results. Sales training has an enormous ROI of 353%. Besides, equip your team with the right tools, materials, and other resources to make them efficient at outbound sales. Cultivate their sales talent and skills and make them familiar with your sales culture.Don’t forget to keep your outbound sales team motivated at all times. Run a lunch and learn program, healthy sales competitions, use digital sales leaderboards, or gamification to build your dream team. A 3PL services provider increased its bottom-line sales margin by 45% after implementing a sales gamification tool.

4. Use B2B data and insights to better target and convert prospects

Data is a crucial element that decides the success of an outbound sales system. Without it, you really can’t expect your outbound salespeople to perform better, whether it’s lead generation, nurturing, or conversion. Using accurate, relevant, updated, and clean B2B data is one of the best moves to make to create a foolproof, unfailing outbound sales system.

With intent data, your outbound salespeople will know exactly who is mostly likely to buy from you, interested in your brand, or ready to make a purchase. Intent data can help with 2-4X pipeline expansion. 99% of businesses have gained sales/ROI growth with intent data. Further, 99% of large organizations use intent data in some way or the other.

With other types of B2B data like firmographic, psychographic, technographic, and demographic, you can personalize and tailor your outbound sales campaigns for any target audience. B2B data and insights are a must if you’re to stay ahead of the competition and improve your outbound sales performance.

5. Create high-quality lead lists to start selling

High-quality lead generation is among the most challenging tasks in sales and critical to building an outbound sales system. Nevertheless, you can achieve improved results by implementing best practices. LinkedIn is a go-to lead generation or social selling tool for salespeople.

Here are key LinkedIn features and products to generate leads:

• InMail
• Advanced search and specific filters
• Sales Navigator
• Lead Gen Forms
• Sponsored Content
• Text ads
• Pulse
• Groups

You can also use conventional outbound lead generation strategies like outbound emailing, cold calling, direct mail, outdoor advertising, and print ads to build lead lists. Sales and marketing alignment is another proven strategy to improve and scale lead generation. It will allow your outbound sales team to work in lockstep with the marketing team. Most importantly, the marketing team will start generating exactly the kind of leads your outbound salespeople are looking for.

Modern sales organizations would also partner with a B2B sales intelligence provider to get access to a comprehensive, accurate, and human-verified database for lead list building. Furthermore, B2B data companies can help you clean and enrich your lead database to prevent bad data.

A Final Word

By following the informative guide provided above, you can take the difficulty out of building an outbound sales system that works. Remember to create an outreach plan because it’s a vital part of an outbound sales system. Your outreach plan can include the channels your salespeople are going to use, the type of messaging and email or call format to use, the follow-up method, timelines and cadences, etc.