Demographics
This component of the buyer persona is essential because it allows you to craft messaging based on a prospect’s age, gender, location, etc.
While you may be excited to jump into the thick of your outbound lead generation strategy, there’s a lot that needs to be set up before making cold calls or sending sales emails. If you want to have an appointment setting program that yields sustainable and predictable growth, it’s vital that you:
- Identify Your Target Audience
- Define the Buyer Personas of Your Target Market
- Select Your Preferred B2B Outbound Sales Strategy
- Craft Consistent Sales and Marketing Messaging
- Fill Your Sales Pipeline With Outbound Prospects
By the end of this blog, you’ll be able to understand how each of these steps can get your outbound lead generation program started on the right track.
Identify Your Target Audience
First things first—what kinds of businesses do you want to get more opportunities from? Identifying your target audience is vital for getting the leads you want and that are likely to close business with your company.
As you consider your target audience, it’s important to think about your sales and marketing qualifiers. Sales qualifiers are the objective criteria a prospective business must meet to sign on for your company’s product or service offerings. Many commercial businesses set minimum sales qualifiers that potential customers must meet ensure they meet their business with a positive ROI. For example, roofing and HVAC companies might have a minimum square footage requirement, while MSPs and tech companies often require a minimum employee headcount. Narrowing down sales qualifiers can help your sales operations analysts build prospecting lists that present your sales development representative (SDR) teams with high-quality prospects to chase.
Marketing qualifiers are also important to consider when identifying your target audience. This can help your SDRs determine how interested a prospect is in your company’s product or service. If they show little to no interest in changing their current solution, then they’re not a marketing qualified lead. However, if a prospect shows urgency and is ready to make a purchase at the drop of a hat, they would be considered a marketing qualified lead.
When identifying your target audience, you must build your ideal customer profile (ICP). Creating an ICP is vital to your outbound strategy because it helps your SDR teams know what opportunities to set up your account executives. The closer a lead meets your ideal customer profile, the more likely they will present your company with a substantial ROI.
Define the Buyer Personas of Your Target Market
While there may be one overarching target market for your business, there’s often more than one buyer persona. Defining the buyer personas of your target market is essential because it can help your SDR and marketing teams better segment prospects in the sales pipeline and effectively guide them to the end of the sales funnel.
As you consider the buyer personas of your target market, it’s crucial to think about their:
Select Your Preferred B2B Outbound Sales Lead Strategy
Once you’ve identified your target market and segmented their buyer personas, how do you plan on getting a hold of them? As you select your preferred B2B outbound sales lead strategy, it’s important to keep your audience and their personas in mind. Additionally, you must choose a method that aligns with your brand’s and short- and long-term business growth goals.
A few of the most common outbound sales lead strategies that SDR teams follow are:
Cold Calling
Cold calling may sound old school to many businesses, but it’s still an incredibly effective way to generate outbound leads. One of the biggest gripes companies have about cold calling is that it isn’t a reliable way to get new sales opportunities through the door. However, this is often because SDR and marketing teams don’t know how to do it to their advantage.
Cold calling is a sales craft that very few internal SDR teams know how to implement and sustain for long-term success. For a cold calling strategy to be effective, SDR teams must stay up to date on the latest best practices and obtain all the necessary sales tools and technologies to effectively keep up with leads in the sales pipeline.
Want an inside look into the latest cold calling best practices? Download our exclusive guide to gain insight into how our high-performing SDRs use cold calling to build and maintain relationships with qualified leads in the sales pipeline!
Cold Emailing
Email marketing is one of the most common outbound lead generation tactics that B2B marketing and sales teams use to engage qualified prospects consistently. Cold emailing is an effective outbound lead generation practice because it allows prospects to respond and engage on their own time. Additionally, sales emails encourage prospects to interact with your inbound marketing materials, such as your website, social media platforms, and marketing collateral assets. This allows them to learn more about your company, your products or services, and why they’d benefit from their everyday business operations.
While cold emailing may be an effective outbound marketing strategy, it shouldn’t be your only approach to building relationships with leads in the sales pipeline. As a best practice, our SDR and marketing teams integrate phone calls and sales emails into our client’s outbound lead generation campaigns. After the first initial point of contact with a verified decision-maker, our SDRs put them into a lead nurturing campaign. They’re routinely sent emails to keep our client’s company at the forefront of their minds. When the qualified prospect is closer to the end of their buying cycle, our SDRs make warm calls and aim to schedule a sales meeting with one of our client’s account executives.
Social Media Outreach
Social media is often identified as an inbound lead generation practice, but it can also be used to connect with potential buyers in your target market. While you may not want to reach out to them on their personal social media accounts, contacting them through their professional LinkedIn profiles is a great way to open the door for potential business networking.
LinkedIn is designed to connect like-minded professionals in their field of work, making it an incredibly effective B2B outbound sales strategy for growing businesses. With LinkedIn outreach efforts, your SDRs have the opportunity to send them relevant content marketing materials such as brochures, sell sheets, and case studies to help them learn more about your company and product or service offerings. Additionally, you can use LinkedIn outreach efforts to direct potential buyers to your website, giving them the chance to explore your digital marketing materials on their own time.
Direct Mail
For a more localized outbound lead generation strategy, many businesses choose the direct mail route for business growth. Direct mail lead generation is effective because it is:
- Highly targeted to potential buyers
- Customizable to each household
- In a tangible format for safekeeping
- Available in a range of formats
- Easily measurable
- Cost-effective for small businesses
Craft Consistent Sales and Marketing Messaging
When it comes to messaging, consistency is key. Sales and marketing messaging must align with one another to represent your brand voice well and establish your company as a trusted leader in the industry.
Inconsistent messaging is one of the biggest downfalls of a company’s lead generation efforts. Before starting your outbound lead generation efforts, your sales and marketing teams must collaborate to ensure each sales pitch and marketing asset used in your appointment setting program represent the same voice. Without consistent messaging, you risk turning away high-quality sales opportunities because they can get confused about what information you’re trying to portray. If your sales and marketing messaging is inconsistent with your brand, how could you expect potential customers to trust what your company has to offer?
Fill Your Sales Pipeline With Outbound Prospects
Last but not least, after you set up the framework for your outbound lead generation program, it’s time to fill your pipeline with prospects that meet your ideal customer criteria.
While there are many ways outbound SDR and marketing teams can get prospects for their sales pipelines, one of the most common ways they do this is by using trusted sales prospecting software, such as ZoomInfo and D&B Hoovers. These sales tools and technologies are essential for kickstarting your appointment setting efforts because they provide SDR teams with all the information they need to initially contact a prospective business. With a sales prospecting tech stack, your SDRs have access to the following lead qualifying information:
- Company name
- Company location
- Company industry served
- Annual revenue generated
- Number of full-time employees
- Decision-maker name
- Decision-maker job title
- Decision-maker email address
- Decision-maker direct line
- And more
This information is a good starting point for SDRs and their outbound lead generation efforts. However, they must verify all this information when they speak with the prospect to ensure they meet your company’s sales and marketing qualifiers.
Key Takeaways
An outbound lead generation program doesn’t start by immediately reaching out to anyone that could be interested in investing in your company’s product or service. There’s a lot that has to go into place if you want a business growth solution that yields long-term results.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, our SDR and marketing teams are specialized in crafting an outbound lead generation program for B2B clients that empower them to secure more sales appointments and generate more revenue. If you need help building an appointment setting program that’s sustainable for the long haul, contact the lead generation experts at Abstrakt!
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