What Is Outbound Lead Generation?
5 Strategies for SDRs
Learn how to generate more leads.
Lead generation is one of the most critical processes for your company to grow in your industry.
Whether it is done through inbound or outbound methods, understanding this process is crucial for salespeople, entrepreneurs, and more.
This article will show you various strategies for outbound lead generation and give you a good understanding of how they work.
Whether it is done through inbound or outbound methods, understanding this process is crucial for salespeople, entrepreneurs, and more.
This article will show you various strategies for outbound lead generation and give you a good understanding of how they work.
What is Outbound Lead Generation?
Interacting with potential consumers unfamiliar with your product by cold calling, cold emailing, or other means is known as outbound lead generation.
It works through sales or business development representatives (SDRs or BDRs): they are the ones interacting with potential outbound leads.
The goal is to generate interest in a product or service and develop an early sales pipeline that can be enriched.
The first interaction between a lead and an SDR is where inbound lead generation differs.
An inbound lead seeks out and initiates contact with a business, perhaps using a form on your website.
Inbound, the lead came in. Outbound, your team went to look for it.
It works through sales or business development representatives (SDRs or BDRs): they are the ones interacting with potential outbound leads.
The goal is to generate interest in a product or service and develop an early sales pipeline that can be enriched.
The first interaction between a lead and an SDR is where inbound lead generation differs.
An inbound lead seeks out and initiates contact with a business, perhaps using a form on your website.
Inbound, the lead came in. Outbound, your team went to look for it.
What Are Outbound Leads?
An SDR contacts a cold lead that matches your product or service's ideal customer profile (ICP) after having done the proper lead research.
They proactively offer information and assistance.
The goal is to pique interest and set up a meeting for a product demo rather than immediately offering their product or service.
Contacts who show interest in your offer after being contacted by an SDR for the first time are considered outbound leads.
They proactively offer information and assistance.
The goal is to pique interest and set up a meeting for a product demo rather than immediately offering their product or service.
Contacts who show interest in your offer after being contacted by an SDR for the first time are considered outbound leads.
What Is the Outbound Sales Process?
A sequence of actions known as the outbound sales process is intended to help salespeople convert prospects into clients. It is a flexible, repeated how-to guide for effective outbound sales prospecting.
- Everything starts with finding and identifying cold leads who have shown curiosity about your offer and who you should contact.
- After that, you must identify their pain points by researching on LinkedIn, for example.
- While doing lead research, you should find out if the prospect fills the criteria to be a future customer of your company. Think of regulations due to laws or agreements, and check their credibility and potential to stay relevant in their industry.
- The next step is to reach out to your prospect with a pitch designed to address the prospect's issues.
- Now you have to actively listen to what the prospect tells you. You may have to change your offer or follow up with more information.
- The last step is closing the deal and ensuring the customer is well-knowledgeable about your product.
Best Outbound Lead Generation Strategies for SDRs
Cold Email
As stated, cold emailing is an outbound lead generation strategy where an SDR emails a prospect with no knowledge of your business. These emails are intended to establish a relationship with the prospect who can be your future customer.
Cold emails help you reach your potential leads anywhere across the world. It is a continuous and friendly sales channel for turning cold leads into potential customers.
Most sales channels demand spending money on pricey tools, effort on training, and a strict ROI period. Anyone with an active email account and a value proposition that applies to the receiver can use cold emailing.
That does not imply that achieving success is easy. On the contrary, it takes time to master cold email, and it's challenging to stand out in the inbox.
The barrier to entry is, however, essentially nonexistent.
The cold email channel lets you directly dialogue with a founder, CEO, or other essential decision-makers.
Once you've perfected the technique of sending cold emails that receive responses, you'll be able to get in touch with people all over the world and have sincere, helpful conversations.
But remember that communicating your objective and performing effectively enough to stand out in your recipient's inbox requires knowledge.
Cold Calling
Cold calling is another outbound lead generation strategy used by SDRs to reach out to potential consumers who have never spoken to the salesperson before.
Although door-to-door interactions in person are also technically included, it typically refers to phone-based chats. Hence the term cold calling.
You still need to do lead research to create high-quality b2b data and real value. You're wasting your time and money if you don't know what to do or who to talk to.
Cold calling is a fantastic technique to establish a rapport with prospects and discover their problems or potential areas of assistance. Your sales pipeline will fill itself if you execute a sound strategy and concentrate on calling highly qualified leads you've verified for relevance.
You establish a human connection with the prospect during the conversation by getting to know their personality, sense of humor, and other traits. Cold calls result in a deeper connection because you get an immediate reaction, unlike cold emails.
Cold calling is an excellent outbound channel for a new sales rep to generate b2b leads since it forces you to practice your sales pitch until it is shiny.
It also helps by giving you in-the-moment feedback, enabling you to modify your pitch as necessary.
Social Selling
Social selling, one of the best lead generation techniques in B2B, helps sales development representatives interact with and nurture leads by enhancing their personal brands and brand recognition.
LinkedIn is the best B2B social selling platform since it focuses more on business than Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. In addition, LinkedIn is the finest for outreach, even though you can utilize these other channels to develop your brand and make niche advertisements.
SDRs engage with and nurture hot leads to do this by developing their personal brands. This includes providing valuable content to prospective customers. They can also employ outreach tools to send InMail messages to the appropriate prospects.
Make sure your communications are as tailored as possible when using LinkedIn outreach as an outbound lead creation channel.
Users of LinkedIn are more likely to "get" LinkedIn and be receptive to messages from strangers. Since Facebook is the top social media site for business-to-business networking, using it appropriately makes sense.
It's also important to remember that most people spend their time on social media platforms rather than in their email inboxes. Thus, using LinkedIn increases your visibility.
One great tool that LinkedIn provides is called LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
It is a must-have tool for every sales professional to have LinkedIn Sales Navigator as part of your toolbox to get high-quality B2B data.
This LinkedIn product is further evidence of the site's focus on B2B networking and sales. Advanced lead and company search, alerts on your sales leads and accounts, and the opportunity to make your lists are just a few of its features.
Video Messaging
The importance of videos is rising across the board in today's digital world. As a result, each network, including TikTok, Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram, has a specific video-based segment that keeps expanding yearly.
Even for outbound prospecting, videos are a great channel to engage with cold leads.
Video prospecting is a great way to generate cold leads because it is less intrusive than phone calls and more interactive than emails. Not to add, by showing them real product demonstrations and yourself, you may build trust with them.
Sales professionals can record and deliver a brief, customized video to a prospect using video prospecting with Loom, for example.
Prospecting videos can also be sent as text messages or private messages on LinkedIn or other social media sites. In addition, email is often how prospecting videos are sent.
This way makes it possible for the prospect to see the person talking. Demonstrating that the salesperson is a real person, humanizing both the individual and the entire process.
Watching a video saves time and needs less work from the prospect to connect with your solution than sending them a long and complicated white paper to read.
If you fast and simply explain what you offer via video, customers are more likely to remember it when they encounter their pain spot.
Multi-channel Outreach
An outbound campaign to generate B2B leads can be carried out online, on social media, by email, or in print. It broadens the audience for your business by generating leads through outbound marketing.
The multi-channel outbound approach, as the name implies, is cold outreach through different channels.
Blogs, social media posts, advertisements, video material, and SEO are all great examples that can be used to combine several channels with each other.
The objective is to target more prospects through various channels which may have yet to hear of your business.
As stated, cold emailing is an outbound lead generation strategy where an SDR emails a prospect with no knowledge of your business. These emails are intended to establish a relationship with the prospect who can be your future customer.
Cold emails help you reach your potential leads anywhere across the world. It is a continuous and friendly sales channel for turning cold leads into potential customers.
Most sales channels demand spending money on pricey tools, effort on training, and a strict ROI period. Anyone with an active email account and a value proposition that applies to the receiver can use cold emailing.
That does not imply that achieving success is easy. On the contrary, it takes time to master cold email, and it's challenging to stand out in the inbox.
The barrier to entry is, however, essentially nonexistent.
The cold email channel lets you directly dialogue with a founder, CEO, or other essential decision-makers.
Once you've perfected the technique of sending cold emails that receive responses, you'll be able to get in touch with people all over the world and have sincere, helpful conversations.
But remember that communicating your objective and performing effectively enough to stand out in your recipient's inbox requires knowledge.
Cold Calling
Cold calling is another outbound lead generation strategy used by SDRs to reach out to potential consumers who have never spoken to the salesperson before.
Although door-to-door interactions in person are also technically included, it typically refers to phone-based chats. Hence the term cold calling.
You still need to do lead research to create high-quality b2b data and real value. You're wasting your time and money if you don't know what to do or who to talk to.
Cold calling is a fantastic technique to establish a rapport with prospects and discover their problems or potential areas of assistance. Your sales pipeline will fill itself if you execute a sound strategy and concentrate on calling highly qualified leads you've verified for relevance.
You establish a human connection with the prospect during the conversation by getting to know their personality, sense of humor, and other traits. Cold calls result in a deeper connection because you get an immediate reaction, unlike cold emails.
Cold calling is an excellent outbound channel for a new sales rep to generate b2b leads since it forces you to practice your sales pitch until it is shiny.
It also helps by giving you in-the-moment feedback, enabling you to modify your pitch as necessary.
Social Selling
Social selling, one of the best lead generation techniques in B2B, helps sales development representatives interact with and nurture leads by enhancing their personal brands and brand recognition.
LinkedIn is the best B2B social selling platform since it focuses more on business than Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. In addition, LinkedIn is the finest for outreach, even though you can utilize these other channels to develop your brand and make niche advertisements.
SDRs engage with and nurture hot leads to do this by developing their personal brands. This includes providing valuable content to prospective customers. They can also employ outreach tools to send InMail messages to the appropriate prospects.
Make sure your communications are as tailored as possible when using LinkedIn outreach as an outbound lead creation channel.
Users of LinkedIn are more likely to "get" LinkedIn and be receptive to messages from strangers. Since Facebook is the top social media site for business-to-business networking, using it appropriately makes sense.
It's also important to remember that most people spend their time on social media platforms rather than in their email inboxes. Thus, using LinkedIn increases your visibility.
One great tool that LinkedIn provides is called LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
It is a must-have tool for every sales professional to have LinkedIn Sales Navigator as part of your toolbox to get high-quality B2B data.
This LinkedIn product is further evidence of the site's focus on B2B networking and sales. Advanced lead and company search, alerts on your sales leads and accounts, and the opportunity to make your lists are just a few of its features.
Video Messaging
The importance of videos is rising across the board in today's digital world. As a result, each network, including TikTok, Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram, has a specific video-based segment that keeps expanding yearly.
Even for outbound prospecting, videos are a great channel to engage with cold leads.
Video prospecting is a great way to generate cold leads because it is less intrusive than phone calls and more interactive than emails. Not to add, by showing them real product demonstrations and yourself, you may build trust with them.
Sales professionals can record and deliver a brief, customized video to a prospect using video prospecting with Loom, for example.
Prospecting videos can also be sent as text messages or private messages on LinkedIn or other social media sites. In addition, email is often how prospecting videos are sent.
This way makes it possible for the prospect to see the person talking. Demonstrating that the salesperson is a real person, humanizing both the individual and the entire process.
Watching a video saves time and needs less work from the prospect to connect with your solution than sending them a long and complicated white paper to read.
If you fast and simply explain what you offer via video, customers are more likely to remember it when they encounter their pain spot.
Multi-channel Outreach
An outbound campaign to generate B2B leads can be carried out online, on social media, by email, or in print. It broadens the audience for your business by generating leads through outbound marketing.
The multi-channel outbound approach, as the name implies, is cold outreach through different channels.
Blogs, social media posts, advertisements, video material, and SEO are all great examples that can be used to combine several channels with each other.
The objective is to target more prospects through various channels which may have yet to hear of your business.
Conclusion
Outbound lead generation for B2B Software-as-a-Service will remain essential for many businesses to grow.
Every SDR worth their salt should be aware of the best strategies for generating B2B leads.
What all strategies have in common is personalization. The better your offer is tailored to your prospects, the better your chances of a positive response.
If you want to know more about cold outreach strategies, join the SalesPipe Community.
Every SDR worth their salt should be aware of the best strategies for generating B2B leads.
What all strategies have in common is personalization. The better your offer is tailored to your prospects, the better your chances of a positive response.
If you want to know more about cold outreach strategies, join the SalesPipe Community.
Post by Mattes Wöstemeier.
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