Have you perfected your inbound B2B sales strategy? If not, you may be perfectly fine.
Over the past decade, inbound advocates have trumpeted the superiority of inbound sales and marketing. They call it more organic, less intrusive, and more cost effective. The only problem is this is usually not the case.
Putting all your eggs in the inbound basket can be a big mistake. Outbound is still as relevant as ever, when done right. In the last year, new technologies have elevated outbound B2B sales from the designation of “boiler room tactic” to a critical piece in most companies’ growth strategies. Here are a few things you should know about outbound for your own sales teams:
Misconceptions
As businesses have struggled to keep up with the ever-changing marketing landscape, they’re always being sold on the latest strategy to win customers. The result is a type of peer pressure that drives companies to stay ahead of the competition. This can easily make previous efforts seem outdated, especially as time passes and multiple new “flavors of the week” are introduced.
In addition to feeling they’re outdated, sales teams sometimes also mistakenly assume outbound efforts are more expensive than inbound. Since experts have touted the benefits of inbound sales for so long (most notably, companies with inbound services to offer), marketing and sales teams sometimes perceive inbound as the better value.
For example, experts label outbound efforts as interruption based, reminding marketers that the average person is now inundated with thousands of expensive marketing interruptions every day. However, this is not necessarily the case when the messages are targeted and the method of communication is inexpensive.
The truth is outbound ROI far outshines inbound when it's highly-targeted and limited to channels that scale with small marginal cost such as email. Tools such as Yesware, Outreach.io, and Quickmail make it easy for sales teams to email personalized messages to large swaths of their target audience in a cost and time effective way.
Tools such as LeadGenius offer fully managed outbound services including custom lead generation and targeted email outreach for the same monthly cost as an inbound marketing automation system such as HubSpot, Pardot, or Marketo.
The Downside of Inbound
Inbound marketing will always have a place in a business’s lead-gathering efforts, especially now that businesses have so many ways of grabbing the attention of interested customers. With inbound marketing, a business targets those who have shown interest in its products or services, whether through its website, an in-person event, or some other outlet.
Unfortunately, this limits the number of people a sales team can target. An inbound pipeline is limited to the percentage of the marketplace that is aware of your product. In contrast, an outbound pipeline can be targeted at the most profitable segments of your market, regardless of whether they’ve heard of you.
While the perception may be that inbound sales efforts are less expensive than outbound, it can actually be the opposite. To be heard over all of the other companies striving for customer attention, businesses must ensure their websites and social media posts stand out, which means investing serious time and expense into strategizing those efforts. As responses slowly trickle in, a business can lose customers to competitors.
The Upside of Outbound
Inbound proponents neglect to tell their audience how outbound sales has evolved in recent years. Virtual outbound marketing helps sales teams gather data on potential leads, leading to more informed outbound sales efforts.
This puts the cost of outbound marketing on par with the cost of inbound marketing, since both efforts can utilize the same tools. Outbound can even be more effective than inbound, since sales teams will be reaching out to a large number of highly-targeted leads.
The predictability of outbound marketing appeals to sales teams that like to have more control over their efforts. Instead of waiting for customers to find them, these teams can identify targeted prospects and reach out to each person on that list. For that reason, some of the best sales teams in business today (both large and small) rely heavily on outbound for growth.
However, the most successful teams combine outbound and inbound sales efforts, just as championship football teams balance passes and runs. When a business can seamlessly combine both strategies, the result is that every sales effort is geared toward someone who is likely to convert, which avoids wasted effort and boosts results.
Technology has dramatically evolved the way sales teams locate and connect with leads. With the right solution in place, a business directly contacts only those customers that are likely to convert. When sales teams rethink the way they think of outbound marketing, they can create a sales strategy that will put them ahead of the competition.
