Businesses in today’s times simply don’t have the time to be found by their potential customers. It’s up to the businesses to take the initiative and reach out to their leads. This is where outbound sales comes into the picture.
In this post, we’ll take a detailed look at how outbound sales can be scaled for business growth. But first, let’s talk about the differences between inbound and outbound sales.
How is outbound sales different from inbound sales?
The essential difference between inbound and outbound sales is quite simple – inbound sales processes are initiated by prospective customers, whereas outbound sales processes are initiated by a business’ sales representatives.
Here’s a brief overview of an outbound sales process:
- The sales representative(s) of a business gets in touch with a prospective customer and offers the prospect the product/service that the business specializes in.
- To reach out to prospects, sales representatives may use a variety of techniques such as cold texting, cold mailing, and/or cold calling.
- Outbound leads tend to be more difficult to persuade and convince as they lack awareness and engagement.
And here’s how an inbound sales process works:
- The prospect reaches out to the business and states the pain point/need/problem.
- For gathering more information, the prospect may schedule a free consultation, attend webinars, and/or read blogs.
- The prospect subscribes to a free eBook or newsletter by submitting an email ID.
- A sales representative gets in touch with the prospect.
- Typically, inbound leads are easier to persuade and convince as they are already interested in the product from the start.
So, now that we’ve answered the commonly asked question, ‘what is inbound and outbound sales?’, it’s time to get into the benefits of outbound sales and how you can scale them.
Outbound sales – the benefits and how to scale them
- Rapid lead generation: If an outbound sales process is implemented correctly and successfully, it won’t take much time to generate leads. Once the leads are generated, it’s up to the sales reps to work their magic and keep the leads engaged. Simply put, the greater the engagement, the higher the chances of closing more deals. On the other hand, inbound sales processes like content marketing and SEO may take a long time (a few months at least) to deliver results.
- Predictable revenue generation: Inbound sales processes may be easier to execute than outbound sales processes. However, revenue generation is often unpredictable in inbound sales. If you want control over how much revenue is being generated, outbound sales is the better choice, as a well-formulated outbound sales process doesn’t leave anything to chance. The only tricky bit is adding more prospects to outreach campaigns. However, once you add them, the number of qualified leads will be predictable.
- Opportunity to sell to enterprise customers: Outbound sales is ideal for businesses that are making all the moves to go up the ladders in their respective industries. When an outbound sales process is initiated, sales reps can go after enterprise customers and sell products/services to them, which typically generates far more revenue than selling to individuals.
- Create and dominate your niche: Outbound sales gives businesses complete control over who their customers are going to be. This allows businesses to build customer bases that are focused, which is a stark contrast to inbound sales, where there’s no consistency in the types of leads generated. So, when it comes to creating and dominating a niche, there’s nothing better than outbound sales.
- Can be automated: The majority of an outbound sales process can be automated. For instance, your business can choose from a wide variety of tools that can be used for each step of an outbound sales process. From sending cold emails to sourcing leads to following up with interested prospects – there’s practically no outbound sales task that can’t be automated.
Now that you know about all the benefits of outbound sales, it’s time to talk about what you can do to scale it. The first thing to do is to identify the important roles that will allow the outbound sales processes to be scaled. For starters, there should be sales managers and account managers in your core team. While sales managers will focus on business development and handling market research, account managers will handle pre-close and post-close leads.
Next, it’s all about segmenting the outbound sales processes. You can do this in a variety of ways. For instance, a business with a global presence can segment its outbound sales on a per-country basis. Many businesses also choose a per vertical approach. B2B scale-ups that aim to dominate a niche typically choose the per vertical approach. Properly segmenting outbound sales is critical to the success of your outbound sales effort, as it allows the most relevant areas to be focused on.
So, that’s it for this post. We hope it gave you more clarity regarding your inbound vs. outbound sales comparison and also taught you a thing or two about scaling your outbound sales efforts.
