When was the last time you as a Co-Founder, Sales, Marketing, or Revenue Leader actually took the time to review your outbound sales process?
Have you just set it to “forgot about it” and whenever a top of funnel lead reaches out, you exclaim, “we’re all good!”?
Perhaps that strategy you implemented is generating conversations that are leading to booked Qualified Sales Meetings (QSM). However, is there room for improvement?
What are the signs that point to a review of your current outbound sales process? Here are some things to consider:
– Not booking enough QSMs
– Generating conversations that don’t convert to QSMs
– Receiving resistance with your messaging or an influx of objections from prospects
– SDRs who are reluctant to call prospects (call reluctance)
– An undefined Total Addressable Market (TAM) and Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs)
What actions should you take to refine and optimize your outbound sales process so you can increase revenue and attain your growth goals?
Refining your process can be time consuming. If you’re preparing for a round of funding and investment, you don’t have time to prioritize and focus on the necessary actions to either rebuild your process from the ground up or improve specific functions.
Sourcing Data
The foundation of any successful outbound sales process/program begins with data. When we engage a new prospect and client, we start with understanding “who is it they want to target” or “who they are trying to help solve a problem for.”
Next, we need to identify who the target is. There are a plethora of factors to consider, such as:
1) You should start with taking a deep dive into your CRM and understand based on current clients who you are being most successful in securing new business with and why. Once you have identified what your TAM is, then you can start to perform some searches to understand how big the TAM will be.
2) Review and assess who the key decision makers for your current clients are. Are you speaking to one type of buyer or multiple groups of buyers? Once you have determined who the decision makers are, you now have your ICP nailed down.
3) Once you have identified who your TAM is and who your ICPs are, then you can start performing granular searches on LinkedIn, Facebook, & Google if you do not have the ability or access to such databases.
4) Perform a search in your CRM of all poor records for the last 6 months. In 2019, the average turnover rate in the United States was 44.3%*. With so much turnover, that could negatively affect the lifespan of your data.
When searching for new data, some of the criteria you will want to use are:
-Company size
-Revenue
-Location/locations
-Financials
-Tech stack
-Contact first name
-Contact last name
-Job title
-Direct number
-Mobile number
-Email address
-Social profiles (depending on which social platform you will be using)
Reviewing Messaging
One of the issues that arises when kicking off a new campaign is when new clients have uninteresting and lengthy product/feature-driven messages.
Your messaging is not one-size-fits-all. For example, if you are speaking to a CEO, the conversation with them will be much different than if you are speaking with a VP of Technology.
One common issue that people come across is that their messages are complicated and filled with jargon. Your messaging not only needs to be conversational, but it also should address the why you, why now, and what problem you are trying to solve. You will require messaging for phone, voicemails, emails, social, video messaging for one-to-one video messages, and SMS messaging.
If you have multiple products/services to offer, create messaging for each specific product/service to build out a library. This will enable you to make minor adjustments based on the feedback you receive from conversations with your prospects.
Contacting Prospects
When contacting prospects, you’ll want to consider the following in order to determine your plan and strategy:
-What is your process for engaging your prospects?
-How many cadences do you have in place for contacting your prospects?
-Are you relying on one channel or are you using a multi-channel approach (email, phone, social, & video)?
-How many attempts does it take to get in front of your prospect?
-Are you targeting SMB small medium business, Fortune 500, or Fortune 1000?
-Are you creating triggers to prioritize prospects to follow-up?
-Do you have a clearly defined process for qualifying prospects?
-Are you running an inbound channel as well?
-How are these leads being qualified and how long does it take you to respond?
Tech Stack
To invest in all of the tech that will help with automating sequences, you’ll need a CRM for capturing leads, call recording software and power dialers, video platforms, and data sources. This can easily run over $50K/year.
It is safe to say most of us don’t have the time nor inclination to spend on demos of each platform and trial each one in order to decide which to purchase. It can be difficult enough to find time to create your playbooks, which will require even more bandwidth.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably thinking “How on earth do I find the time to perform all of these activities?” or “Why don’t we just stick with what is working now because we’re booking meetings?” However, are those meetings going to help you generate the revenue that is required for you to attain your growth goals and secure your next round of funding?
We have generated over $8.65M in net new pipeline for SaaS and service-based companies by building a predictable, repeatable, and scalable outbound sales process. If you would like to learn more on how we have achieved this and how you can easily implement the process yourself (without additional tech, marketing, or hiring efforts), then book a time with me here. I guarantee it’s something you can implement too in order to guarantee 15-30 meetings per month for your team. I’d love to chat about how you can achieve the same for your business.
*Average turnover rates in the US.
Martin MacArthur is Head of Growth at Sales Science
