With thousands of reviews and unbiased opinion posts just a few clicks away, buyers are more empowered than ever. In fact, 60% of buyers want to connect with sales during the consideration stage, after they’ve researched the options and come up with their shortlist.

Has your sales outreach strategy evolved to keep up?

In today’s market, the best sales outreach strategies strike the perfect balance between volume and precise targeting. At least 50% of your prospects are not a good fit for what you sell, so it’s important to identify the bad fits as early as possible. You don’t want to waste your time and your prospects’ time if they’re never going to fully benefit from your product or service.

With these sales outreach best practices, you can effectively prioritize your funnel, win the attention and trust of your perfect leads, and bring in the highest ROI. But first things first, let’s go over some of the basics…

What is sales outreach?

A sales outreach strategy is the set of tactics you use to attract new business, including prospecting emails, campaigns and offers. For some companies, this is likely to include account-based selling techniques.

Sales outreach is connected to sales prospecting, or the process of bringing in new business by searching for buyers for your products or services. Sales outreach can either be inbound or outbound.

Inbound vs. outbound sales outreach

In outbound sales outreach, you make the first move by seeking out and selling to your buyers. This used to rely a lot on cold calling (unsolicited calls to sell a product or service), but now it includes cold email outreach and social media outreach.

On the other hand, inbound sales outreach consists of a warmer sales approach and your buyers come to you. Your leads are people who have already made the first move and have an idea of what your product or service offers.

As you’re not starting from scratch, inbound outreach is generally more effective and easier than outbound prospecting. However, many companies incorporate outbound sales outreach as well to reach a wider audience and get a higher volume of leads in their funnel.

Best practices for sales outreach

1. Build an inbound sales machine first

If you solely rely on outbound sales outreach, your sales machine will grind to an abrupt halt when you stop putting the hours and money in. This isn’t a sustainable strategy!

Instead, build a foundation of inbound sales outreach that can be supplemented by cold outreach strategies.

This can mean creating buzz on social media, using SEO and keyword research to drive qualified leads to your website organically, and attracting leads with lead magnets before guiding them down the funnel.

2. Create a diverse sales outreach strategy

There’s a wide range of tactics that you can include in your sales outreach strategy, so it’s worth handpicking those that best suit your business model and what you’re selling.

Examples of inbound sales tactics:

• SEO for high-value keywords, focused around relevant topic clusters for your business
• Nurturing emails for leads (e.g. blog subscribers) that move contacts down the funnel and towards sales-ready actions, like requesting a demo
• Lead magnets on your website, such as banner offers, CTA buttons, discount codes and optimized pop-ups offering value-adds
• Social media and email campaigns for people who already know your brand

Examples of outbound sales tactics:

• Cold emailing to a carefully collected list and with personalization tokens
• Cold calling
• Social outreach, such as LinkedIn Message Ads

3. Incorporate account-based selling

Account-based selling takes a quality-over-quantity approach to sales, and there’s much that you can take from it to add to your sales outreach strategy. This works especially well for B2B businesses that want to attract higher-value clients.

Rather than trying to bring in the most leads, account-based sales focuses on bringing in the right leads. Many of the key principles of account-based selling are sales best practice, including:

• Personalizing your messaging to every prospect, so they feel like an individual rather than an email on a mailing list
• Knowing your key sales personas: the target audiences that are a perfect fit for your product or service
• Integrating sales, marketing and support for a holistic customer-centric approach

Our mission is to make multi-channeled, content-led campaigns that people actually want to watch and read about. While we’re a creative agency that specialises in purpose-led digital content, we also produce offline advertising campaigns that disrupt convention and command attention. We place shareability at the core of every decision and understand the power of PR-ability and earned media, leaving paid to fan the flames not light the fire. We don’t just get you talking to your consumers – we get consumers talking about you.

We know how important it is to genuinely intrigue and engage people, because that’s what turns eyeballs into action. So we transform owned channels into entertainment platforms by operating on the forefront of culture, producing meaningful creative content that gets results and adds much needed resilience to your brand.

We even approach traditional media from an engagement perspective, ensuring it travels as far as possible, living on beyond its media spend. We’re no typical creative agency, as we retain a sense of ownership throughout the entire process, from ad strategy to creative to distribution and everything in between, taking responsibility for results and not being reliant on spend.

We’ve applied this approach to viral marketing, guerrilla advertising, and full service integrated campaigns for charities and brands with positive stories to tell. And these projects continue to capture even the coldest of hearts – there’s a reason we have a BAFTA sitting on our awards shelf.

So, whether you’re looking to grow your brand awareness, smash your commercial targets, or you’re simply on the prowl for an ad campaign that defies all expectations, get in touch here. You can follow these links to view our work or find out about all our latest news and events.