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Most sales managers we meet agree that the primary way to get new customers is and will continue to be to pick up that phone and make that cold call. But they are also frustrated that cold calling is time consuming and produces unpredictable results.
In this blog post, we will show you how you can structure your outbound sales process to make it produce sales in a more predictable way. Read more to learn how.
A structured outbound sales process you can apply
Have you come across the big debate in outbound sales management?
One side of the camp argues that the outbound sales process should be compartmentalized into different roles (this view is advocated by for example Aaron Ross’ book Predictable Revenue). The other camp argues that one salesperson should handle the whole process.
Regardless of which camp you belong to, you will probably agree that the outbound sales process consists of the following general steps:
- Prospecting (finding a relevant customer to call)
- Hunting (making the call to create an opportunity)
- Closing (turning the opportunity into a paying customer)
- Upselling (increase the revenue from the customer)
These steps can be performed by one person or by specialized roles. In either case, it is useful to be aware of which tasks are included in each step.
Step 1: Structured outbound prospecting
How much time do your salespeople actually spend in front of customers?
If your answer is “not enough time”, prospecting might be one explanation.
Without proper prospecting routines, you can spend hours figuring out which company and who within that company to call. When you make that call, the prospect might not even answer or might not be in the market.
We need a better and more efficient way to prospect.
Prospecting consists of sifting through data online, looking through websites to clean data, searching for people, and reading old notes in your CRM system to make sure the company is relevant and OK to call. In short, it is a data analysis job, not a sales job.
If you separate prospecting from selling, you can allow specialized data minded people to more efficiently find the right companies to call and the contacts within them. They can specialize in tools that help them do their jobs more efficiently. And they can provide your salespeople with pre-verified lists of contacts including a small summary. This way, your salespeople can spend their time doing what they should do: Calling and Selling.
Here are some of the tools that have helped our clients prospect more efficiently:
- Datanyze to extract people from LinkedIn
- Dolphin Data Platform to find companies in the right stage of the buying process
- Hubspot which has a vast number of companies and contacts that you can simply add to your call list (note that you must be using their CRM system to do this)
Step 2: Structured outbound hunting
Upon hearing the word cold calling, salespeople fall into one of two categories:
- They light up and get excited (rare)
- They shudder and shy away (common)
It takes a very special kind of personality to succeed at cold calling consistently.
This person is motivated by many small but quick wins rather than building long-lasting relationships.
By providing them with pre-verified lists so that they can focus on the calling, and setting up incentive programs for them that rewards several “wins” per day (for example by rewarding them per accepted meeting), you will create highly motivated cold callers that will gain real momentum, often making 50-100 calls and producing 2-4 meetings per day.
Step 3: Structured outbound closing
Your Closers will receive the meetings that your Hunters book. They will also receive inbound sales leads from your Inbound Marketing Process.
You have probably, like most sales managers, tried to convince your sales people of the importance of qualifying a lead before spending time on it. But few succeed. Why?
The reason is that when you have few leads coming in, you grasp every straw, no matter how distant the reward might seem.
But with new leads coming in left and right, day in and day out, the mindset will shift. Suddenly, your Closers will be forced to qualify, because they won't have time with leads that aren't serious.
Now, they will start begging you for ways to qualify leads more efficiently. The method we have found to produce the best results is to let your sales people score each lead on a scala from 1 to 5 based on the following:
- Whether the contact is a decision maker
- The severity of the company's pain
- How well your solution can solve this pain
If the total score is high, your sales people can spend an unproportionate amount of their time creating fantastic personalized presentations for these leads. The rest can be treated reactively or sent to the lead nurturing bucket.
Your Turn to Structure Your Outbound Sales
If you belong to the camp that believes that a salesperson is paid a lot so they should be able to do everything from prospecting to closing, ask yourself what you are paying these people for: Their ability to convince a customer to buy, or compare CRM records?
In any case, if you want to build an effective outbound organization you shouldn’t suddenly go and hire a bunch of new people. Instead, start by reassigning task. Rather than two people doing all three steps above, let one of them focus on prospecting for the other, so the other gets more time in front of clients.
By reassigning tasks like this in a step-by-step fashion, you will be able to see the benefits of building a structured outbound sales process without taking on the risk you would otherwise. But you will see the benefits immediately.
While we discussed your outbound sales process in this blog post, in the next one we will look at its companion: How you can structure your inbound sales process.
(This blog post is part 5 in a series of 10 blog posts. See all blog posts in the series here: A Complete Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment.)
