Outbounding

Win New Customers with Outbound Sales and End Your Dependence on Inbound Leads

William Miller

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781400219445
• eBook ISBN: 9781400219452
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Sometimes, sales organizations rely too heavily only on inbound lead generation. However, when the inbound leads dry up and marketing efforts stop yielding results, the need for outbound activity becomes more crucial than ever.

Many companies have let their sales people devolve into an order-taking, customer “farming” team where the focus is following up on inbound leads or just trying to upsell current customers. Conversely, this is the critical time in the life of a business when?organizations with a team trained to sell outbound successfully will rise above the rest.?? 

Outbound selling can be intimidating even to the most senior rep, yet that same intimidation around cold calling and outbound sales can be transformed into confident success with the right?tools at your disposal.

In Outbounding, sales expert William Miller provides sales teams with everything they need to: 

• Have the right tools to outbound and not to just harass
• Learn how to outbound to the C-Suite as well as the manager level
• See prospect meetings less as win-lose battles and more as opportunities to use problem-solving skills
• Utilize templates and ideas that really work and can be adapted to one’s own style

Outbounding equips sales people with the knowledge, training, and road-tested sales tactics to raise the success rate of their outbound sales, using proven strategies that deliver breakthrough results.

PART 1

The Starting Point

Emails that contain questions are 50 percent more likely to get replies than emails without any questions.

CHAPTER 1

The Story

JERRY AND JENNIFER are talking. They have been friends for a long time, really neighbors, and even though they both are busy and in sales, they usually have a coffee every few weeks just to stay in touch.

Jennifer got into sales after attending a neighborhood block party. Jerry and Jennifer got to talking, and Jerry convinced her that sales were in her cards. Jerry would act as a coach and mentor if she wanted to get into sales. She had just been laid off from her current job and had nothing to lose. Jennifer agreed, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Today, they are sort of talking and complaining. Jerry is a senior account executive (SAE) for the ABC company, a marketing automation software company, and Jennifer is a senior sales development rep (SDR) for the XYZ company, a shop-floor machine-tool vendor.

“No, you’re wrong. I’ve got it much tougher,” Jerry spoke out. He was pretty adamant. Seems like they were having a discussion on whose job was getting harder.

“I’m tracking to be about 85 percent of goal YTD,” he said. “With my current pipeline and with the lack of good leads the SDR team is sending over right now, I’ll have to do some outbounding myself, even though it’s not my job. Seems like I have to do everything myself.”

Jennifer was having none of it. “Well, Jerry, you are really wrong on this one. At least you have a territory and customers you can prospect into. We have been told we have to generate 20 percent more leads than we have been sending over, and the only way to reach those new goals is to outbound, which we have never been trained to do, and quite frankly, is not in my job description. I follow up on inbound leads, qualify for fit, and then flip them over to sales or out of the funnel. That’s my job. I don’t understand why I have to change what I do every day just because the company isn’t getting enough good inbound leads. They should make the AEs go find some leads. Isn’t that why they call them hunters?”

The last few months for both ABC and XYZ have been kind of rocky. It looks like they both will miss revenue forecasts for the quarter, and that hasn’t happened at either company for many years. Both companies are feeling the pressure and salespeople are getting a bit on edge.

In both companies, management has been sending a strong message—Let’s fill the funnel so we have prospects we can attempt to bring in by the end of the quarter, now, whatever it takes.

“Listen, Jen, I know it seems like an impossible task, but you just have to call lists and make dials. That’s what I did when I started out. In my current role, I have to generate interest, control the sales process, and then close deals to make money. Closing is hard work, so now I have to add prospecting to my list of to-do’s and, well, it just seems like I’m not getting any help.

“The number of leads I’m getting has dropped significantly, and now I’m getting terrible quality leads, I mean, Facebook leads for a B2B sale, really?” Jerry was frustrated, and it was coming out in his tone.

Jennifer was on a roll, though, and nothing was going to stop her.

“I’ve been at my company for almost two years now,” she said, “and I’ve never had to outbound. Following up on inbound traffic is what I was hired to do and I’m pretty good at it. Now, I’ve got to cold-call, cold-email, sequence my contacts, set cadences, and on and on. It’s just not attractive. I hate getting rejected. It’s why I took this job and turned down an AE job. Outbounding is just not what I do.”

SUMMARY

Conversations like this are happening more and more often. Inbound traffic for sales leads, given the advancement in marketing, has done a great job over the years. Website hits, blogs, conferences, referrals, and digital apps have made it simple to get leads . . . when a buyer initiates the interest.

Research has shown that a buyer who generates interest is already down a buy path and is therefore a more qualified lead than one where you have to generate a need.

Inbound, except for tire kickers who can be disqualified quickly, usually have an identified need and the deal has energy, since the prospect is open to change. That’s why they are dedicating some resource to explore the situation.

When outbounding, the prospect could be anywhere on the buyer’s journey. They:

1. May not know they need anything.
2. May not know they need to change.
3. May know they need something, or need to change, but it’s not a priority yet.
4. May know they need something and are just starting to investigate.
5. Are in full investigation mode, and they did not contact you (you’re not driving the sale, someone else is).
6. Are making a decision and need to validate a few other vendors, usually on price.
7. Made a decision and now there is no need.

There are more categories to be sure, but let’s compare.

Inbounding to get a lead is just like hopping on a bus that has already been identified, qualifying you are on the right bus, and then going through a buy/sales process, hopefully with you in control.

Outbounding, to get a lead, you may have to:

1. Find out if they are looking for a bus.
2. Figure out if there really is a need to change buses.
3. Help develop what the new bus needs to do.
4. Help the clients generate the energy for getting a new bus.
5. Help the clients work out whether they can afford a new bus.
6. Help the clients figure out what the new bus is going to do that the old bus didn’t.
7. Create a plan of how to implement the bus.

You get the point.

Or, you can outbound to see if a prospect has an ongoing process and you just have not been contacted yet, which usually means someone else is driving the bus and, well, that deal is going to come down to price, isn’t it? Are you feeling shopped yet?

Either way, outbounding requires skills people have not acquired and managers have not been made aware how to coach, measure, and reward for it.

Welcome. There is a better way.

CHAPTER 2

How Do Customers Buy?

I have no special talent.

I am only passionately curious. —Albert Einstein

WHY IS IT that most salespeople try to sell something, be it a solution, a process, a platform, a service, a product, or an intangible? Whatever it is, wouldn’t it be easier to get customers to buy rather than try to sell them something? If customers have already agreed to make a change in how they currently are doing things, getting them to buy something is usually a layup (basketball term, sorry).

When outbounding, the attitude you take every day to every call, email, and touch must be with the customer in mind, not what you want to do.

• • •

THE START

When you look at how someone buys something, look no further than emotional needs and wants. It can be argued that at the consumer level, fears, needs, love, safety, and the like most often drive consumer behavior. Years ago, an article in Inc. magazine said there are some basic emotional reasons people buy.

Greed. “If I make a decision now, I will be rewarded.”

Fear. “If I don’t make a decision now, I’m toast.”

Altruism. “If I make a decision now, I will help others.”

Envy. “If I don’t make a decision now, someone else will win.”

Pride. “If I make a decision now, I will look smart.”

Shame. “If I don’t make a decision now, I will look stupid.”

Not going to argue these, and in a Business to Consumer (B2C) world, that works out quite well. Now compare these typical reasons a company buys something.

• Revenue Increase—Revenue drives the company, and getting things out of the way to help achieve revenue is usually the top motivator.
• Cost Reduction—Getting rid of costs so the company can spend the money it has on more revenue-generating ideas; also called “improvements” or “efficiencies.”
• Market Share—Market share grabs are not for the weak, but you see time and time again where spending freely to capture market can pay out at the end.
• Risk Reduction—At the ATL (Above the Line) level, it is all about risk. Help a company to address risk issues, thus making them money or saving them some.
• Market Speed—Usually, the faster you can respond to market needs, the more money you can make.
• Quality Improvement—Technology, among other options, is a big sale here. Customer churn, repeat customers, and the ability to attract customers away from the competition are reasons usuall...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part 1: The Starting Point
• Part 2: Getting to Work
• Part 3: On Your Mark, Get Set . . .
• Part 4: Go
• Part 5: Sales Management
• Index
• About the Author