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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
The founder and CEO of Bombay Shaving Company Shantanu Deshpande took to LinkedIn and shared a picture from the topper’s newspaper advertisement.
In the caption, he wrote
“It was shocking to see the amount of hate targeted at a teenage girl who had topped an exam because of her facial hair. Our simple message to this amazing young woman with such a bright future. Love to see my team ooze class. No opportunistic sales, QR codes, nothing. Just a heartfelt message to a fellow Bae.”
The caption further reads,
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“Dear Prachi, they’re trolling your hair today, they’ll applaud your AIR tomorrow.”
It was the advertisement’s closing statement that fueled controversy and drew backlash from the public.
It stated,
“We hope you never get bullied into using our razor.”
Netizens’ Reactions
The post went viral within hours of its posting. Many netizens called it “disgusting” and “absurd.”
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One user wrote,
“This is a collective failure of your team. Hope they read each and every comment and reflect. Did no one in the team notice this problem? How disconnected are they from reality? This will leave a deeper scar on the girl than anything else, and I will always remember your brand for being an opportunist.”
While another commented, “Insensitive.”
“This is terrible, a huge mistake you made. This is bullying this woman on another, bigger level,”
wrote another.
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“Classless and in poor taste… You don’t deserve more attention than this,”
one commented.
What the CEO Has to Say?
Shantanu Deshpande described his caption as a small token of support for Prachi, and thus defended the ad.
His efforts to clear the air were in vain, as many netizens still found the company’s response via the ad lacking sensitivity.
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Bombay Shaving Company’s intention was to extend support for the topper. However, it ultimately led to more criticism and enhanced controversy.
Recently, the class 10th and 12th results were published by the Uttar Pradesh Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad. Prachi Nigam scored 591/600 marks and topped Class 10. She revealed that her aim is to crack the IIT-JEE and become an engineer.
Gerber and Perrigo Face New Lawsuit Over ‘Store-Brand’ Infant Formula Pricing; All Pending Toxic Baby Food Cases Consolidated into New Class Action MDL
Infant formula makers Gerber and Perrigo have been hit with a class-action lawsuit, which accuses the companies of artificially creating a shortage and jacking up prices for “store-brand” formula sold at Walmart, Walgreens, and other retailers.
The lawsuit was filed on Monday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. It accuses Perrigo of violating antitrust laws by collaborating with Gerber to prevent competitors from entering the market for store-brand formula.
Perrigo, one of the nation’s largest suppliers of store-brand formula, sells its products under retail labels at prices lower than similar branded products. However, the lawsuit alleges that Gerber, by granting Perrigo the first right of refusal to Gerber’s excess formula supply, which could have been sold to other competitors, is engaging in practices that stifle competition.
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The lawsuit claims that through this arrangement, Gerber agreed to keep its excess formula out of the store-brand market, thereby gaining a share of Perrigo’s profits. The lawsuit was filed by four residents of California, Illinois, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, who will represent millions of customers who have purchased store-brand baby formula. The lawsuit does not name formula retailers as defendants. It asks the court to intervene and end the anticompetitive deals between Perrigo and Gerber and seeks more than $5 million in monetary damages.
This lawsuit is similar to another case filed in Brooklyn federal court by a potential store-brand competitor, P&L Development. Gerber and Perrigo requested the dismissal of that case, which was denied by the judge in February. The companies involved in the lawsuit claimed they compete fairly with other infant formula manufacturers, including those of store-brand formulas. The lawsuit also cited the squeezing out of P&L Development from the store-brand market, which has led to higher prices.
Gerber is also facing numerous lawsuits accusing its brands of baby food of containing dangerously high levels of toxic heavy metals, such as lead, arsenic, and mercury. These heavy metals are extremely toxic, even for adults, and can have catastrophic consequences on developing children, leading to health complications and neurological damage. Conditions such as ADHD and autism may be linked to consuming these toxic baby foods.
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On April 11, 2024, all the lawsuits pertaining to toxic baby foods, which had been filed at different times in various courts, were consolidated into a new class action MDL in the Northern District of California and assigned to Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley. Besides Gerber, other baby food manufacturers like Beech-Nut and Campbell Soup Co. have also been named as defendants.
The legal wrangling between the crypto sector and the SEC, or the Securities and Exchange Commission, is getting uglier, with ConsenSys, a major protagonist of the Ethereum Blockchain, filing a lawsuit against the regulatory body in a Texas federal court. This legal action seeks an intervention to ward off a looming SEC lawsuit against the company regarding features of its popular MetaMask wallet. The lawsuit also seeks the court’s help in deciding once and for all the vexed question of whether Ethereum’s digital token, Ether, is not a security. The legal uncertainty hangs heavily on the crypto sector and puts a question mark on its very existence.
In an exhaustive 34-page legal filing, ConsenSys states that the SEC’s endeavor to exert control over Ethereum is both illegal and a threat to blockchain technology.
The complaint states,
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“The SEC’s unlawful seizure of authority over ETH would spell disaster for the Ethereum network, and for ConsenSys. Every holder of ETH, including ConsenSys, would fear violating the securities laws if he or she were to transfer ETH on the network. This would bring the use of the Ethereum blockchain in the United States to a halt, crippling one of the internet’s greatest innovations.”
The lawsuit also alleges that SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has embarked on an aggressive enforcement policy directed at the big players in the crypto sector like Coinbase and Uniswap. The lawsuit particularly points out a campaign that involved a deluge of subpoenas asking firms and developers for documents related to their dealings with the nonprofit Ethereum Foundation, which supports the blockchain’s development.
The crypto sector is up in arms against Gensler’s tactics and has contended that the SEC has never provided clear rules meant for the distinct features of blockchain technology. However, Gensler negates this argument, saying that the existing securities laws are clear and sufficient, and that the crypto industry refuses to comply with them.
Gensler’s actions are full of contradictions since, in the past, the SEC had maintained that blockchain’s tokens, like Bitcoin, are not securities and hence beyond its purview. A senior official in 2018 had stated that Ethereum has reached a state where it is adequately decentralized, and further, the agency also gave the green signal for the launch of Ethereum futures trading—an implicit acknowledgement that Ether is a commodity. However, at present, Gensler is using a recent feature of Ethereum, known as staking, as grounds for the recent legal campaign.
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The lawsuit was filed after the SEC issued a Wells Notice, which is akin to a formal letter warning that the agency intends to sue a firm and could lead to a settlement later. The SEC charged ConsenSys that MetaMask was operating as an unlicensed broker-dealer. MetaMask offered users a means to stake Ethereum on their behalf. Staking was a feature introduced in September 2022 on the Blockchain as a replacement for the energy-intensive mining process. The process involves a system of validators who pledge collateral to become trusted validators.
The SEC objects to the process of staking, which has changed Ethereum from a commodity into a security. ConsenSys founder Joe Lubin has called this account of the SEC “preposterous”.
Lubin said,
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“The act of staking is really just posting a security bond so you can get paid to contribute labor and resources to help operate the Ethereum protocol. Now they’re trying to turn that into some sort of investment contract.”
Lubin also stated that the SEC’s actions will lead to a halt in the growth of the crypto sector and blockchain technology as a whole. Lubin feels that the SEC seeks to block pending applications by companies to launch spot ETFs for Ethereum, following the huge popularity of Bitcoin ETFs. The SEC is in fact trying to regulate a technology on its merits and it will only stifle innovation.
