Outbound Tips to Hit Your Sales Prospecting Goals

When was the last time you adjusted your outbound strategy? Was it two months ago? Six months ago? February of last year? Chances are that your messaging, strategy, and structure for sales prospecting have gone stale since the last time you gave them some TLC.

The problem is that 82% of teams aren’t hitting their outbound targets and 65% say it’s because of generic messaging or old outbound strategies.

Are you working within those boundaries? Have responses to your emails slowly diminished as your sequences continue to send the same messages day after day?

You’re not alone (obviously) and fortunately, there’s a surefire way to break the monotony of cringe-worthy sales sequences.

In total, there are six tips your SDRs, AEs, and sales managers can use to maximize the potential of your outbound strategy, regardless of the sales engagement platform you employ. 

1. Plan sequences for short, medium, and long-term deals
2. Infuse Every Sequence with Versatility 
3. The 80/20 Personalization Rule
4. Don’t Slack on the Integrations
5. Automate Your Sequences to Give Real Value
6. Use Sentiments to Hit the Right Note with Prospects

As an Outreach partner with thousands of implementations and optimizations under our belt, we’ll be using their platform as the central figure, but again, these apply to any platform. The point is to stand out at every touchpoint and to bring value and excitement to the outbound process so that your pipeline is overflowing every quarter.

Six Tips to Optimize Your Outbound for the Future of Sales Prospecting

#1) SDRs: Plan sequences for the short, medium, and long-term deals

There’s something like 126 business emails landing in the average decision maker’s inbox every day. A majority of those are cold pitches in the first stage of an unfortunately unenthusiastic sequence. That’s called food for the archive.

The secret to grabbing a decision maker’s attention is being the most interesting thing in their inbox. Not just their email, but on LinkedIn, their phone, and with the inclusion of video, you’ll be hitting a high note with every account. 

For every sequence, whether you’re targeting those warm leads or you’re going after closed-lost accounts, run a sequence that includes multiple touchpoints with varying forms of communication. 

If you’re going after warm leads, your sequence should have, at the very least, four different touchpoints with the client over two weeks. If you’re going after closed-lost accounts — whether they went cold or the timing was wrong — you can have medium to long sequences that nurture those relationships over a 12 to 24 months period. Every time you check-in, offer them some value and ensure those relationships don’t go stale.

Once you have the sequencing schedule, it’s time to refresh how you reach out while sales prospecting.

Related Content: The Top Five Modern Outbound Plays for Next-Level Sales

#2) Infuse every sequence with versatility (hint: Use Video!)

Any frontline salesperson, SDR or AE, needs to stand out from the crowded streams of other sellers. And today, standing out is easier than you think; it just takes versatility and consistency.

Video will be your best friend in creating engaging outbound sequences. Whether you’re going after warm leads or closed-lost, think about giving your future self a leg up by creating sequences that not only nurture current leads but develop older ones as well.

Start your sequence with an email that quickly outlines how you can help them. If they’re a closed-lost report from the past year, introduce video to it. Vidyard seamlessly integrates with Outreach so you can send a video without leaving the platform. Send them something like, “Hey Jon, I know it’s been a long time and I wanted to let you know we’ve been working on our {{specific solution}} that correlates directly to {{what the prospect does}}.”

If it’s a warm lead, it’s important to set high-value tones right off the bat. If they’re closed-lost, ignite the conversation again with messaging that resonates with them immediately. You can run a report and re-engage the top 20-30% of closed-lost from the past year.

After that first step, hop on LinkedIn and either send them a video with Vidyard or you can record a video on your phone and attach it to the DM. (If you’re not connected with them, send them a connection request. You can use InMail if you’d like to, but we advise you to steer clear if you can. The more you use InMail, the less effective it becomes.)

Next, get on the phone and give them a call – if they don’t answer, leave them a voicemail saying, “Hey Jon, I’m following up on Monday’s email and forgot to mention that…” Seasoned sellers don’t repeat the same jargon from their emails, they make sure they’re providing layers of value with each touchpoint.

(P.S. – If you’re an AE opting for the direct send move, make sure it adds value/worth their time. Virtual coffee is nice, but VPs and CEOs don’t have time for that.)

#3) The 80/20 Personalization Rule

What’s the best way to stay out of your prospect’s archive? Personalization.

When it comes to personalizing any touchpoint, our recommendation is 80/20. Whether you’re sending an email or a LinkedIn video online, keep 80% of the content to the message you have and then boost it with 20% personalization. The quota-crushing mindset buyers have come to admire is when sellers are thinking, “How can I add value or stand out in every touchpoint?”

It’s not just in what you send them, it’s in what you know about them. Four any given outbound sequence, here are the three things you need to know:

• 1) How the company makes money
• 2) What the individual’s department does
• 3) What’s most important to the individual

It’s not all about how much impact you can have on the company as a whole, it’s about how you change the buyer’s life. How is your product going to help their day-to-day? If your messaging revolves around them and their role, then you’ll have a better chance at booking a meeting.

Quick Tip: One of the best features of LinkedIn is the ability to add video messages in the mobile app. Not only does it create a more personal tone, but it also provides a quick medium to reiterate or add on to any earlier messages. Send a text-only message first, then a quick minute-long video to seal the deal.

#4) Integrate and Do More, Faster

Integrating tools like Vidyard, Sendoso, and Koncert brings seamless variety to how you engage with prospects. While your email sequence is running, these integrations will offer a unique experience to your prospects.

Looking at past Outreach implementations and integrations, these are the top four integrations we recommend for building valuable sales sequences.

• Vidyard: Are you getting the picture yet? Video is becoming the most important tool in a seller’s kit, and by having a resource directly tied to your Outreach environment, you can send pristine videos to all of your prospects.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Prospecting has never known a more time-efficient and direct path to a seller’s ICP. Used in tandem with a data enrichment tool like Lusha, LeadIQ, SalesIntel, or Seamless.ai and your lead list will grow exponentially.
• Sendoso: Some B2B sellers have lost faith in the efficacy of direct mail/sending, but many companies consistently see an ROI (29%) that rivals social media. The key is to avoid generic gifts like Starbucks gift cards and instead opt for something that provides real value to your buyer. 
• Koncert: One of the more tedious aspects of cold calling is the lead-up to getting in contact with a prospect. Koncert allows sales reps to avoid those initial gates — dialing, phone systems, receptionists, and other gatekeepers — by having trained, human agents do the dialing for you. Reps can tee up their other activities and then focus on the conversation.

Related Content: A Conversation on Sales Engagement [Happy Hour + Recap]

#5) Automate Your Sequences to Give Real Value

Part of landing new accounts is hitting those people with the right message at the right time. When you apply that mentality to your sequences, you’re more likely to land a meeting with your potential prospects.

We’re not talking about “send all” automation, but about the automation that shows prospects that you understand where they’re at in the buyer’s journey, where their interests lie, and how you can continue to provide value for them.

For example, instead of bucketing people into a single sequence, talk with administrators about building sequences with content consumption and company interaction as the centerpiece. While size, industry, and other demographics help define some of the messaging, most of it will revolve around activities that marketing tracks. 

If they’ve interacted with a LinkedIn ad or a Google ad, downloaded your most recent whitepaper, registered for a webinar, came to your booth at an event. Whatever the activity is, you can add value to your sales prospecting by incorporating those details. 

Our advice is to assign each activity a score, and once a prospect or warm leads hits a certain level, they’re automatically added to a specialized sequence catered to their interests around your company, product, or service.

The idea is to move away from sequences that end with a reply, and base sequence inclusion on actions that signal some type of intent or interest. It’s more powerful and will undoubtedly have a deeper impact on how you communicate in your outbound.

#6) Leverage Outreach’s Sentiment to Level-up

While previous tips have been a catch-all for any sales engagement platform, this one is Outreach-specific. 

Within Outreach, sales reps and managers can pull buyer sentiment from sequences, and drill through the nuances of vanity metrics like meetings booked, clicks, and opens. Instead, your team gains access to a rich array of data that shows whether responses were positive, contained objections (and what they were), referrals, or unsubscribes. 

For example, if a sales rep looks into their intent report and sees that 47% of responses contained similar objections, then it’s obvious that they have some faulty messaging in their sequence. That rep can begin to rework how they approach their sales prospecting; instead of doing the guesswork on why they’re only getting so many clicks, they can unearth the actual problem. You can pull all sorts of sentiment-focused reports. Positive reply, but never booked, positive reply, but closed lost, and negative replies are just a few.

Sentiments are a game-changer. Not just for the seller, but management as well. They can help coach their sales team on the best messaging, the most positive sentiments, and optimize the outbound process for the entire sales org. It’s all about looking at the positive engagement, trimming the fat, and modeling all of your sequences off that.

Use These Six Tips and Get in the Driver Seat Early

Soon, all of this will be the bar. However, right now, no one is doing these things. Most sales teams are relying on the email sequences that filled their pipeline for the past few years. Thankfully, that time is coming to an end. The obsession with quantity over quality in sales prospecting is quickly coming to a close. 

The sellers on the horizon of innovation are going above and beyond to get that next meeting. They’re diversifying their sequence segmentation, leveraging versatile platforms to engage buyers, and creating a culture value in every interaction. 

To hear how you can start tactically introducing these tips and strengthen your sales engagement strategy, check out our webinar on the “Six Ways to Use Outreach to Close the Gap.”