social selling trainingWhether you sell financial services online or run a small business, outbound sales is an indispensable element to achieve success in a highly competitive market. Basically, it’s the process of reaching out to potential customers using various mediums. In other words, a salesperson will try different sales channels to create a list of potential customers and communicate with them through social media, emails, or cold calling.
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For this reason, you need to build the best outbound sales team for your business. But it’s never enough without the right tools. So, if you want to make your outbound sales marketing efforts work, make sure to invest in the following tools:
#1 Phone System
If your sales team relies on phone calls to connect with your potential customers, you need a modern phone system for your sales team. It allows you to set up a full-fledged contact center that can:
- Manage your voicemails
- Give you a supervisor control to monitor every conversation
- Integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) software
- Auto-route your calls so your sales team can quickly attend inbound calls
Using phone systems from Drop Cowboy Ringless Voicemail and Text and others have many benefits, and one of these is that the accessibility is high. It means you’ll have more control over the conversations as you can monitor all of them. However, since some modern phone systems rely on the internet, there can be latency problems like delay or lag in voice response.
#2 Sales Engagement Platform
To reach out to your target customers at scale, you should have multiple touch-points, typically ranging from 8 to 12 follow-ups, to get a response from them. Doing this manually by keeping track of bounces and replies is very difficult and often impossible. To experience ease and convenience, make sure to choose the best sales engagement platform for your outbound sales team.
According to Power-Dialer, a good sales engagement platform automates the whole process of keeping up with your leads and helps you set up an intelligent follow-up sequence. Also, it helps you set up a standardized sales process for your business. For outbound sales teams that contact more than 30 people daily, a sales engagement platform is imperative and not just an option.
#3 CRM Software
The other outbound sales tool you should have for your outbound activities is CRM software. With this, you can centralize your calls, emails, sales dashboards, and social tools. It means your CRM for business becomes a unified solution for your marketing and sales teams.
CRM software for tech startups can also help you streamline the entire process. This tool tracks all the activities, from identifying prospects to closing the deals. So, your sales team will get a clearer picture of working by logging in to the software rather than switching between various tools.
Your marketing team and sales team can also use unified CRM tools that provide visibility into customers and leads that engage with your marketing campaigns. As a result, it’ll be much easier for your sales team to generate quality leads and identify opportunities effectively. With such benefits of CRM, it becomes crucial for businesses using outbound sales marketing to stay relevant in the market.
#4 Screen Recording Tools
Another outbound sales tool you need for your business is a screen recording tool. It’s an excellent tool to help your sales team create videos quickly and easily. It allows users to record the screen and make videos simultaneously. It means your sales team can record their screen to provide a quick demo of how your products work, speak along with the recording, and capture their face with a webcam in one go.
Your sales team can personalize cold emails better with such videos. It can be an excellent way to stay ahead of your competitors since most consumers are used to receiving traditional cold emails. As they can see your sales team member in a screen recording video, it can help build trust and encourage them to initiate conversations with your team.
#5 Meetings Scheduling Tools
A sales meeting forms a crucial part of any sales company’s routine. Unfortunately, scheduling meetings often involve a lot of back and forth.
This is why you need to invest in a good meeting scheduling tool. It allows you to integrate with your calendar to check your availability and show it to your invitees in their time zone. All in all, this kind of outbound sales tool eliminates the hassles involved in connecting with others, so you’ll have a more streamlined workflow and be able to accomplish more.
#6 Email Automation Software
The usual way of sending cold emails to a list of potential customers often involves writing email content and copy-pasting the content each time you send an email to your customers. This process can be less productive, time-consuming, and prone to errors. Fortunately, you can use various email automation tools to experience ease when sending cold emails.
As its name implies, an email automation tool automates sending emails to your customers based on the rules you set. For example, suppose you want to send introductory emails to potential customers who have interacted not more than once. In that case, it’s never impossible to set it as a rule in your chosen email automation software.
It’ll automatically identify the customers and send the email instantly. Therefore, you don’t need to sort your list manually or worry about copy-pasting your email content every time.
There are many benefits of using email automation software as one of your outbound sales tools. Aside from the time your team can save, your team will be able to do more tasks, enabling them to level up their productivity.
#7 Sales Prospecting Tools
In terms of outbound sales, it often starts with list-building and can be labor-intensive when done manually. Luckily, you can use sales prospecting tools to help your sales team automate the process of collecting contact information of prospects and filtering them. With the right sales prospecting tool for your business, you can easily simplify the process of list building.
#8 Sales Intelligence Tool
Once you’re done generating leads, you have to gather information to determine which of them is worth your time and effort. You’ll need to use a sales intelligence tool to get all that information in this process.
If you think it’s useless to invest in a sales intelligence tool when you have other outbound sales tools, you’d better think twice. The reason behind it is that this tool can arm your sales team with all the information they need, allowing them to effectively prepare pitches, qualify and generate leads, and sell. So, if you want to improve your outbound sales marketing efforts, never hesitate to get a sales intelligence tool for your business.
#9 Social Tools
At present, everyone is on social media, which has become a hot market for all sales teams looking for prospects and aiming to build relationships with them. This led to social selling, which has become an essential part of outbound sales marketing.
As a matter of fact, social selling training is more effective for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-community (B2C) companies than traditional selling. It also becomes more effective once you know which social media site your target market is using.
Although being present everywhere is a good idea, it might not always provide the best results because your efforts will be split between various platforms. With the use of social tools for your outbound sales, your sales team will be able to manage and track their social media outreach activities. A social tool also allows your sales team to schedule posts and watch how your potential customers are engaging with your content.
There are several reasons why social tools are a worthy investment for your outbound sales team. These tools don’t only help your team centralize social selling activities, but they also allow your business to save time from juggling between various platforms.
Tips For Effective Outbound Sales Strategies
Now that you know the list of outbound sales tools you need for your business, it’s time to discover how you can take advantage of them. Below are some of the tips for effective outbound sales strategies:
- Understand Your Target Audience
Not all buyers are the same. How buyers will behave the first time they interact with your business may depend on various factors such as their problems, objectives, and demographics. To handle a diverse group of potential customers, creating buyer personas is wise.
Basically, buyer personas are a group of potential customers that show similar behavior patterns and characteristics. Your sales team can use buyer personas to run different location-specific outbound sales activities.
However, it’s never enough if you only have your ideal personas in mind. To get results with your outbound sales marketing efforts, you have to understand your prospects’ behaviors to connect the dots.
Using the best CRM that tracks and collects interactions with potential customers and analyzes their behaviors in your products and website will help you be more contextual. CRMs can also help rank leads based on their probability to engage with your business, which can help sharpen your outbound sales strategies.
- Focus On Personalization
Every business is trying to win the attention of many customers. If you want to set yourself apart from your competitors, you need to focus on personalization. Keep in mind that personalized messages scream for attention, and most customers tend to engage with personalized messages only.
With that in mind, your team should spend more time understanding your target customers to customize your email content and improve your chance of getting a response. In this case, the use of screen recording tools to create videos for your email content may come in handy. It’s because some customers prefer watching videos instead of reading a block of texts.
- Develop A Strong Selling Proposition
One of the factors that’ll help your customers differentiate your business from your competitors is a selling proposition. Many customers have become specific when it comes to needs. They know that they always have a final say about which products and services they want. Plus, with the massive amount of information online, customers typically spend time researching before deciding.
It’s good for customers, but for a business in a highly competitive environment, it calls for the need for a clear selling proposition. Even if there’s no formula to create an effective sales proposition, the golden rule is to keep it concise and tell the customers exactly how your offerings will benefit them.
- Never Lose Time Drafting Quotes
When your potential customers start getting interested in your products, your next step is to share documents. It may sound easy to deal with document requests. But once you consider the fact that multiple customers may ask for various documents, things can become complicated. To avoid this, make sure to implement the concept of CPQ, which stands for configure, price, and quote.
CPQ lets you maintain an inventory of the common documents requested such as onboarding documents, price quotes, product catalogs, and invoices. With your CRM software, CPQ works even better. You only need to make a database of documents in your CRM tool. Then, have a setting so that the pricing will get auto-updated and quotes will be automatically generated. This way, your sales team won’t lose time approving customer quotes and get everything done quickly within the CRM.
- Pay Importance To Tracking Performance Metrics
Running email campaigns, having a cold calling strategy, and undertaking social media outreach are great. However, if you lack a strategy and neglect the importance of tracking performance metrics, all your activities will become a fool’s errand. To get effective results in outbound sales, you should have high reporting standards to monitor if things are going as planned.
Although it can be overwhelming to analyze performance metrics, it’s crucial to make well-informed decisions. With analytics, you can effortlessly make data-driven decisions, enabling you to boost your sales team’s success rate.
Bottom Line
The best tools and strategies can add spark to your outbound sales marketing efforts. But before you invest in new tools, make sure to know your budget and needs first. This way, you’ll know which outbound sales tools can best suit your business. If you’re confused with the different outbound sales tools available in the market, weigh their pros and cons and always prioritize quality over price.
