Outbound lead generation is the process of finding potential prospects that may be interested, if unaware, of your product. It is a way to get your product and company name out there, providing you with visibility and potential clients and buyers.
Outbound lead generation is typically done by one of two teams,
marketing or sales. Marketing teams will focus on paid marketing such as Google Ads or campaigns run via email, print, or TV, to name a few. The idea of this approach is to generate interest in the product by sending the messaging outwards.
Sales teams will go through a similar initial process as marketing, and those leading the charge are
Sales Development Representatives, or SDRs. Understanding the product is step one. And not just understanding it, but being able to distill it in a quick, efficient way. As you can probably guess, sales and marketing often work in tandem on this one.
Following this, the correct audience to target,
an ideal customer profile, is built. Customer profiles can be as broad as simply tech companies in the US and as specific as law firms, only in New York City, with 100-200 employees, using G Suite products, generating specific revenue.
From here a sales team will set out to find prospects that match this profile and contact them in a variety of forms that typically include cold calls, emails, follow-ups, and demos, amongst others, to arrive at a sale. Prospects can be found on LinkedIn, conference or membership lists, or spaces dedicated to the particular product.
The idea of this type of approach in sales is to offer your prospect something to fix a problem that they currently have. It is incredibly important that the sales team properly understands the product, the customer profile, and the way it can make some aspects of life easier for the prospect. The information received by the prospect should be beneficial to them in some way. It should not be seen as unnecessary or noisy.
Sales teams have to be both creative and well-researched, the cream of the crop, to truly appeal to their prospect in a way that breaks from the rest of the pack.
While a sales team can call and email potential prospects for days on end, what they are truly after is the response of a lead that
turns them into a prospect. This happens when they see themselves and their problems addressed in the messaging they were sent, or, in the best of cases, they receive a solution to a problem they did not even realize existed.