Guest Article

Best Outbound Sales Lead Generation Strategies to Grow Your Pipeline

21 October 2020

Guest Author

Your sales pipeline is likely to stay healthy as long as it’s consistently fed with qualified leads. However, generating qualified leads isn’t easy.

It requires careful planning and execution. If you’re entirely dependent on inbound sales lead generation, you need to rethink how you generate leads for your B2B company. What if there are not enough inbound leads to work? How can you be absolutely sure your inbound strategy will generate leads every single time?

Adding an effective outbound sales strategy can significantly boost your lead generation. With outbound sales, you increase your chances of quickly generating leads by proactively reaching out to your prospects through channels that they frequently use or are most effective.

It’s common to see companies hiring outbound sales specialists and backing their outbound strategy with accurate and reliable B2B data simply because these strategies have yielded results. Yet, there are more strategies you need to explore to generate leads reliably at scale.

5 Outbound Sales Lead Generation Tips to Scale Your Pipeline

Let’s dive into these proven strategies to create a robust sales pipeline through outbound sales lead generation.

Don’t ignore inside sales

Inside salespeople are used by almost 37% of high-growth companies. Moreover, an inside sales call costs $50, whereas an outside sales call costs $308. Regularly involving high-touch transactions over emails and calls, an inside sales model could be extremely effective in generating more leads, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, as outside sales calls have become much more difficult.

An inside sales model allows for better sales collaboration and increased dials and lead conversations. Furthermore, it helps you with improved connection rates with decision-makers as they prefer to engage remotely or virtually more than spending time on in-person meetings.

Personalization—Do it right!

Personalization can make or break your lead gen strategy. Too much or too little of it can derail your outbound campaigns. That’s why having access to accurate and updated B2B data, especially intent or behavioral signals, is essential if you are to personalize your outbound messages effectively.

The key to personalization is to figure out how to do it efficiently at scale. To efficiently personalize your content and even automate the process, it’s essential to have reliable data to segment based on industry, company size, geographic location, persona, tech stack, intent signals, etc.

Being able to segment based on these criteria significantly speeds your personalization, allowing you to personalize at scale. However, these efforts are only as good as your data, as incorrect signals will lead to misaligned personalization, which not only kills your chances of setting a meeting but reflects poorly on your entire organization.

With highly relevant data about your prospects’ industry, company, personal or professional profile, online behavior, and buyer intent, you can create perfectly balanced personalization to drive conversations. In fact, intent data in particular can deliver up to 4X pipeline expansion with 300% marketing ROI.

Cold call your intended audience

Meetings with salespeople were accepted by about 82% of buyers after a series of contacts starting with sales cold calls. In 2019, at least one or more cold calls were accepted by 69% of buyers. Keeping these statistics in view, cold calling is certainly not dead.

Along with a powerful cold call script, it’s essential to have the right contact numbers to connect with the right people to generate leads. When you can rely on the signals you have in your data, it is easy to quickly prepare for your call while minimizing your time doing due diligence. When you’re having to make calls at volume less time, researching means more dials and more meetings set.

Equally important is having the right phone numbers. Direct-dial numbers that allow you to skip gatekeepers significantly increase your connection rates and meetings sets. But direct dial numbers are not created equal. A recent case study demonstrated that using work mobile numbers increases your odds of reaching prospects by 7X, especially when most companies are working from home.

Enhance B2B digital presence

“Social sellers” are about 51% more likely to reach their sales quotas. However, increasing your digital presence to generate B2B leads is not about publishing two or three random social media posts or treating DMs like a second inbox. Your social media content should be relevant and add value to your buyers. Nearly 92% of B2B buyers show a willingness to engage with sales professionals who demonstrate industry knowledge and thought leadership.

Leverage the power of LinkedIn in your outbound sales lead generation efforts by tapping into this platform’s 675 million monthly users. Salespeople can use LinkedIn touchpoints to build more personalized outbound strategies and improve their sales performance.

However, no matter how effective social selling is, don’t neglect your multichannel outreach. Adding two additional channels to your outbound efforts will net you a 400% increase in engagement. So no matter what your most effective channel is, remember they all contribute to your overall success.

Don’t shy away from using additional, expert resources

A modern B2B sales model includes the right mix of sales intelligence tools and strategies. However, achieving that right combination may not be a single person’s task and may require outside expertise. Your full-time VP of Sales or sales ops team may need an additional mind with a strong sales background and proficiency to make sense of your outbound lead generation strategy.

You need to look into several aspects of outbound lead generation: sales process optimization, buyer journey mapping, outbound planning and analysis, organizational alignment, sales content optimization, tech stack design and implementation, etc.

Hiring a part-time sales consultant can take the load off of your outbound sales team and fill in the gaps in your sales process and execution. However, on-demand sales experts are quickly gaining traction, and hiring them is expected to become tomorrow’s standard in the sales world—even in the post-pandemic future.

On-demand leadership can quickly embed themselves in your organization, produce a faster ROI, cost less, and modernize sales processes and technologies. Finding expert on-demand leaders is easy. You simply need to partner with top B2B sales consultancy providers like Skaled.

Conclusion

Each outbound sales lead generation strategy has its pros and cons. You may need to perform trial and error before charting out a foolproof plan. Knowing what works for you and what does not and modifying your approach is vital to gaining success in your outbound sales lead generation campaign.

Author: Jason Hubbard, VP of Partnerships and Alliances, SalesIntel

About SalesIntel:

SalesIntel is the top provider of accurate and affordable sales and marketing contact data with the highest number of direct dials and human-verified contacts in the industry. The combination of automation and researchers allows SalesIntel to reach 95% data accuracy for all published contact data while continuing to scale up our number of contacts.