Council Post: Top Five Outbound Sales Strategies To Grow Your Business

By Alfredo Atanacio, Founder of UassistME.CO. Alfredo was recognized as an Inc. 30 Under 30 in 2012 and is an AGLN Fellow.

Today, the importance of a good marketing strategy is undeniable if you want to grow your business. However, figuring out which one works best can be quite challenging. Based on our experience providing assistance to small and medium businesses in the United States with their marketing efforts, we believe that a mix between inbound and outbound marketing strategies is the right way to grow successfully. 

Here are some of the outbound sales strategies that have had a positive impact on the growth of our company and that of our clients.

Creating a Customer Persona

Before developing any marketing strategy, inbound or outbound, we suggest creating an ideal customer persona. A customer persona allows you to understand your existing customers and prospects better. This helps you curate your content, services, product development and messaging to meet your target audiences’ specific demands, behaviors and issues.

Here are a few tips to consider when creating a customer persona for your business:

• Browse through your customer database and discover trends related to your leads and customers’ behavior towards your content.

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• Utilize form fields that collect the essential customer persona information.

• Know your team’s feedback and experience on the leads and customers they are mostly interacting with and ask them to make generalizations.

• Interview your existing and prospective customers to uncover what they like most about your brand, services or products. 

Lead Generation

Lead generation is by far one of the most effective ways to succeed in outbound sales marketing. For small businesses and startups who are in dire need of adding qualified leads to their sales pipeline, some of the best lead generation tools we’ve used include ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, among other platforms. Having your ideal customer in mind will help leverage these tools to look for qualified prospects that could be a great match for your product or service. Another way of generating leads is through referral programs. A referral program is one of the top foolproof techniques to generate leads. These programs encourage people to promote your brand as they will receive a perk for every converted lead.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing involves the use of social media platforms to promote your brand’s product or service. It gives business owners and marketers a way to communicate and engage with customers and reach new audiences that can potentially become paying customers. Using social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter is a great way to establish business relationships and promote your service by providing content of value and proof of work to potential customers.

Paid ads on LinkedIn are also a great way to generate business-to-business (B2B) leads. Once you’ve figured out your target audience, you can set an InMail campaign to land on the inbox of hundreds of potential customers that might be looking for what you have to offer.

Cold Email Marketing

When doing cold email marketing, you should create great quality and attention-grabbing emails. In order to entice people into opening your email and have them visit your company’s website, you must create a high-quality email with an attention-grabbing headline.

Once the emails are sent, follow up with prospective customers and track their open rates. In case people have opened your email and visited your website but did not pursue the purchase, promote your brand to them again through retargeting ads.

However, take note not to push your potential customers away. Avoid bombarding your target customers’ inboxes with cold emails, or you might find your way in their spam or blocked email addresses. We recommend keeping track of metrics such as open rate, click rate and unsubscribers to measure the quality of your content and adjust and improve if necessary.

Participating in Online Communities

This strategy definitely does not receive enough recognition in the digital marketing world. However, participating in online communities actually delivers a number of advantages to businesses.

First, it encourages brands to create better services or products. Online communities such as forums, internet communities and Facebook groups can be great networks for you to get an overview of your product or service and to evaluate how your customers are going about your brand. As a result, you get to improve your offerings and your brand as a whole.

Second, you can create partnerships and take advantage of networking opportunities with fellow business owners in your industry to grow and strengthen your brand. You can also promote your product or service by providing content of value to the community and reaching out to members that may be looking for your service.

Final Thoughts

Now that you know some of the most effective outbound sales strategies, you can incorporate them into your inbound marketing strategy and grow your company in a more efficient and timely manner.