Revenue is the lifeline of any business and to generate revenue, you need sales, i.e., paying clients. As you know, there are several ways to find leads and eventually convert them to paying clients. There’s outbound, inbound, product led, founder led, partnerships and other approaches.
For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus solely on outbound sales. It’s the quickest approach you can put into practice compared to the others, and a fantastic way to iron out your offering and product-market fit. Oh, also, it’s really for tiny tiny start-ups, like one founder with a right hand jack-of-all-trades type set up.
What is Outbound Sales?
Outbound sales is the process where a seller, usually a sales development representative (SDR), proactively reaches out to potential buyers, often through cold calls or emails. The sales representative is the one initiating the outreach.
What are the different channels you can use?
In most organizations, you’ll see sales reps using a combination of E-mail, Cold calling and LinkedIn in a multi-step sequence. Nowadays, you’d be hard pressed to find a successful outreach campaign that doesn’t include LinkedIn. Now of course the fun in sales is how creative you can be, so anything from sending cards or thoughtful letters to event meetups often work well too.
How do you get Lead lists?
In the age of SaaS tools and AI, there are a plethora of options you can use to generate lead lists. Some of the popular ones are:
- Apollo – cheap, accessible, good integrations and also has in-built sequences
- Zoominfo – very expensive but claim to have more accurate date – highly US focused
- Lusha – cheap, accessible, lovely extension and integrations
- Cognism – great for phone numbers, especially in EMEA
These are just tools where you go in with your set criteria, update filters, and generate a list of contacts. Most contacts come with e-mail IDs, phone numbers (mostly HQ and not personal phone numbers) and LinkedIn profile URLs.
The real question though is, what are you actually looking for? It’s easy to filter for things like company headcount, HQ location etc, but how do you know what to filter for? When building a list of leads to reach out to, how do you even know which contacts should be in that list?
The new era of lead enrichment
The aforementioned tools are fantastic for generating lists and especially tools like Apollo and Lusha are brilliant value for money. However, if you’re serious about doing the most effective outreach at scale, you can’t skip leveraging AI driven tools like Clay or Kuration AI. There’s a bit of a learning curve but these tools help you Find, Enrich, Transform and Export (FETE) leads from one place, at scale. Highly recommend spending some time on the free Clay University videos.
Well, the process is pretty simple. You do your research, and based on your product or service, ability to service clients and positioning, you define your ICP and your personas.
What is an ICP?
An Ideal Client Profile or ICP, is the written definition of the most perfect and valuable client for your company. According to Gartner, it defines the firmographic, environmental and behavioral attributes of accounts that are expected to become a company’s most valuable customers.
Why defining your ICP is critical
The reason these accounts would be your most valuable customers is because they would be able to derive the most value from your solution. It blows my mind how often companies just start spamming the entire world without first even figuring out who would actually benefit from their solution.
Somehow many founders are of the notion that just throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks is the key to success. But if you’re trying to sell relocation services to a Kebab shop with 2 outlets, your chances are slim. If you’re selling to everyone, you’re selling to no one.
Founders often say “but you never know.. What’s the harm in trying?”. Well, the harm is if you aren’t hyper targeting, you can’t possibly personalize your messages meaningfully, which will lead to a massive drop in conversion rates. What that means is, prospects who might have been interested with a relevant outreach will now also be turned off. So the opportunity cost is huge. Hard to measure, but not something you want to miss out on, especially in the early stages.
Also, defining your ICP, and the relevant personas within your ICP is the only way to create relevant messaging and get feedback. Unless you do this, you wouldn’t be able to have conversations with prospects that actually care. A lot of untargeted outreach might still lead to calls and busy work, but that would make it a lot harder to figure out how to adapt your offering, what pain points to solve and how to create a wide moat around your business.
How do you actually convert those leads?
So say you’ve defined your ICP and your buyer personas within your ICP, so you have some direction. You have a solid hypothesis on what kinds of companies you want to reach out to and exactly who you want to speak to within those companies.
For example, if you’re selling Payrolling software for SMBs, you probably want to focus on Head of HR, HR Manager or Payroll personas in companies with < 200 employees. Now that you have the list and contact details, you can start reaching out. But how? There are multiple ways, the most common being:
Quality outreach, yourself
You write the e-mail messages, you connect and cautiously build relationships on LinkedIn, you pick up the phone. If you’re a small company on a tight budget, I’d recommend starting with this approach to first get some traction and understanding first-hand what’s resonating with the market.
You can use any number of sequencing tools right from Instantly to Lemlist, to SalesLoft, to Apollo, to Outreach, to HubSpot and a million others. It really doesn’t matter.
What does matter is choosing a tool that’s right for you. My personal favorite has to be Lemlist, for a few reasons: ease-of-use, multi-channel outreach options (LinkedIn, Aircall integrations), hyper-personalization capabilities.
Important: Pay attention to your e-mail deliverability, DMARC and DKIM and SPF configurations. After all that hard work, the last thing you want is your e-mails not landing in the target inbox. More about the technical side of things, in a simple Cloudfare article here.
Use Agencies
I can’t believe I’m even recommending this, but using outreach agencies is definitely a viable option nowadays. Agencies come in various shapes and sizes, with different claims to fame. Some will just help you with generating enriched leads, some will book meetings for you, and some will even do the discovery calls and only hand over sales qualified leads. In my experience, most agencies make lofty promises and mostly under-deliver, so be very cautiously optimistic.
Now I would only recommend doing this once you have a solid foundation. I.e., know exactly what your ICP is, who the personas are, what messaging is working. If not, the agencies will just help you spam the world but your ROI likely won’t meet expectations.
How to Make Outreach even more effective
You can do a lot to make your outreach more effective, but probably the best summation of what works is reaching the right person at the right company, at the right time. Person, Place and Time.
There are as always many tools that help you understand buying intent signals, tools like 6Sense or N.Rich that help with Account Based Marketing (ABM), so you know who’s actively looking for a solution like yours. Beyond that, being creative is the most cost effective way to improve your conversion rates.
For example, if you’re selling talent relocation services, you could focus on companies that actually mention relocation in their job descriptions, offer it as a perk or have dedicated relocation pages on their websites.
The golden principle: Give, give, give, then ask
Ultimately, you want to make money. Customers give you their hard earned money for creating value and helping them. Ergo, the absolute best way to make your outbound sales motions more effective is delivering value upfront. Show your prospects what you can do before they even ask to gain their trust and confidence.
For example, if you’re selling software that tracks website user behavior to improve Conversion Rates, share 2 to 3 points of improvement that you’ve already identified with your tool.
Sure, this takes longer and is a ton more effort. But like everything, you get what you pay for and. In this case, when you target right, and create solid value upfront, you pay with your time but the dividends are well worth it. Targeted e-books, infographics, (personalized) videos, and the like are all good options to show your worth upfront too.
Wrapping up
In summary, outbound sales can be an invaluable strategy for early-stage startups to quickly gain traction, refine their product-market fit, and engage potential clients. By clearly defining an ideal client profile (ICP) and personalizing outreach to target specific personas within that ICP, startups can avoid wasted efforts and achieve meaningful connections. This solid foundation will go a long way in helping you leverage the power of RevOps as your company scales.
While tools and agencies can help streamline lead generation and enrichment, the key to effective outreach lies in delivering value upfront, demonstrating your solution’s relevance, and engaging clients thoughtfully. Quality, not quantity, ultimately drives higher conversion rates and sustainable growth.
