The master plan for successful outbound lead generation

Outbound lead generation is an efficient and quick process of pushing messages out at a target audience, regardless of whether they have asked for it or expressed an interest in the content. If you wish to reach out to prospective customers rapidly, you need an outbound lead generation team. Their job is to go out to your target market and connect with prospective customers using various methods like emailing, cold calling, and prospecting on social media. Once a prospect’s interest is signified, the lead generation team then hands over the potential leads to the marketing team.

The need for outbound lead generation

It’s 2020, outbound channels continue to remain as strong and essential as ever. In fact, Email consistently beats other lead generation channels in terms of use and effectiveness. Not only this, but outbound marketing complements inbound marketing as well. Inbound works well for creating awareness, whereas outbound is perfect for activities that need accurate touches. With a solid and rational outbound follow-up plan, you’ll be ready and be able to immediately engage every prospect that comes your way. Wondering if outbound lead generation for you? You definitely need outbound lead generation in case:

1. You aim to grow your sales but your pipeline lacks opportunities.
2. You have a complicated, time-consuming sales process and you deal with detailed businesses that require various decision-makers.
3. You want to explore new markets and need the latest information to support expansion.
4. You think your sales process will gain an advantage from interaction and feedback from a wider variety of potential clients.

The benefits of the outbound prospecting team

With an efficient outbound lead prospecting team, you will encounter the following benefits:

1. The rapid growth of pipeline, compared to inbound marketing or partnerships.
2. Gather more market intelligence, that will allow you to create dynamic prospect profiles. This is because outbound teams can verify potential information earlier in the funnel, making lead conversion easier.
3. You can look into more markets with higher effectiveness, and productivity allowing broad testing of the miscellany messaging techniques. Hitting into new markets will also open your doorways to more data sets that will help you create buyer personas and offer more relevant value proposals.
4. Increase the creativity of your sales team.
5. Impact your sales results. 
6. Outbound lead prospecting will help you to cut through the value experienced in online channels to deliver your messages in front of the right audience since more accurate information leads to better segmentation.
7. It will improve targeting and shorten the sales cycles due to one on one interaction with the first contact.

Factors needed to set effective outbound campaigns

1.  Accurate Buyer’s Persona
   To deliver the right results for your outbound lead generation campaign you need to be clear and specific enough on who you’re trying to target. That’s the reason a well-defined buyer’s persona is an essential aspect of effective lead generation. The buyer’s persona should be recorded and assist you to provide particular answers to questions like :
   

    

   • What do your most successful customers have in common? (i.e., industry, company size, technology, etc.)
   • Why do your best customers do business with us?
   • What do your top customers gain from buying our offer?
   • Which decision-makers do you usually talk to and win over in your top accounts?
   • What pain points and triggers do these decision-makers respond to

Top outbound ways to generate leads

1. Email Marketing
   • Email continues to be the most preferred and most efficient outbound lead generation channel. Email’s accuracy, versatility, and wider reach make it the perfect tactic for outbound activities like:
     1. Initiating contact with cold prospects
     2. Nurturing leads from other channels
     3. Following up with the client
     4. Distributing content
     5. Rapid response to prospect queries and requests
     6. Corresponding with prospects regarding sales appointments
   • Though Email Marketing generates high ROI but only if you follow it in the right way. To follow the right approach, try using the following tips:
     1. Maintain a consistent email scheduling and sending frequency.
     2. Execute your email marketing campaign using reliable automated marketing platforms.
     3. Make sure emails stand out with an irresistible subject line. Your subject line should create inquisitiveness.
     4. The content should interest your target group.
     5. You should use a design that balances visual graphics and personal touch.
     6. Exit with a closing line that is a strong call-to-action.
2. Cold-Calling
   • Telemarketing, the live phone calls remain an integral basis in the lead generation process. Recent research shows that B2B decision-makers still prefer to hear from over the phone: 57% of C-level executives and nearly 50% of directors/managers respond to sales calls.
   • But, in today’s time, the role of phone calls in lead generation has changed. Phone calls are now most effective in outbound activities such as:
     1. Continuing and fortifying contacts made on other channels.
     2. Responding punctually to prospects.
     3. Collecting and verifying information in real-time.
     4. Examining prospects’ interests.
     5. Understanding the prospect’s pain points and expectations.
     6. Promoting content to a targeted audience.
   • To take full advantage of outbound telemarketing’s try using these smart calling strategies:
     1. Make calls a consistent part of a lead nurture path by keeping messaging constant.
     2. Set the stage for follow-ups.
     3. Control data on past prospect’s activity to schedule outbound calls
     4. Consider each call as a chance to provide value
     5. Track performance with a full set of KPIs and metrics
3. LinkedIn
   • Social media’s reach and impact make it a pivotal addition to a modern outbound strategy. In B2B lead generation, LinkedIn should be your platform of choice. LinkedIn is the ideal social network for doing outbound activities like:
     1. Searching and engaging new contacts through LinkedIn connections.
     2. Plotting out target accounts and prospects using LinkedIn profiles and activity.
     3. Expanding the width of relevant prospects by joining and participating in LinkedIn Groups.
     4. Spot specific market segments with LinkedIn’s search function.
     5. Reaching out directly to prospects.
   • However, all these activities require you to magnify your LinkedIn presence and improve your future for participation and conversions on the platform. Here are a few tips to keep in mind magnify your presence:
     1. Begin with optimizing your LinkedIn profile.
     2. Work to constantly grow your network by LinkedIn connections and profile views.
     3. Stay active in suitable industry groups and make sure to contribute to the community.
     4. Make the most of LinkedIn mutual connections and common interests when exploring potential prospects
   • Email, cold-calling, and LinkedIn touches are the three main channels that make up an efficient outbound lead generation workflow. They’re simple to set up yet very successful, and it’s also simple to build other outbound strategies on top of these channels.

Best tips for productive outbound lead generations

Outbound lead generation is a highly efficient channel when employed as part of a solid marketing strategy. Here are five tips to achieve better outbound lead generation outcomes.

1. Target Audience
   Targeting is one of the most crucial advantages of outbound lead generation. If you aren’t completely availing the targeting options of your outbound lead seller, you’re wasting your money.
2. Time
   Time is a major challenge in outbound lead generation because a company’s response time highly depends on its lead provider. Some providers are quick enough to deliver leads as they come in, while others deliver leads in a single array at the end of the campaign. A lead that’s a few days old holds a higher value than a lead that is a few weeks old. As time goes on, your point of empathy fades – information changes, leads move further in the buying process, leads forget they completed the form, and so on. Logically, outbound lead generation should be sourced to a company that is capable of delivering in a timely manner. For instance, FunnL, which has a track record of delivering in a timely manner.
3. Preparation
   If you can’t handle the leads in an effective manner, you shouldn’t be running the campaign. In order to persuade the best results from outbound leads, companies need to be prepared with planning and content in place before you run the campaign. On the planning side, representatives need to understand exact needs and attitudes at every stage of your sales process, allowing you to quickly identify and efficiently serve clients at those stages.
4. Customized process
   In the majority of cases, you’ll be generating more targeted leads through outbound lead generation, you will be able to dedicate more time and attention to every lead. Use this time to customize the process for these leads. Leads can tell when you’re working from a script. Just a small piece of company-specific information will make you stand out from the crowd. Don’t stop personalizing your messages. Timing is another factor that can be customized to fit individual leads.
5. Measuring everything
   Companies should be paying attention to a variety of metrics when it comes to lead generation. You should observe conversion metrics. It’s also more important for you to collect metrics then comparing and developing personas and campaign messaging. This information can then be used to optimize your campaign planning and targeting.

Outbound lead generation workflow

Here’s an outbound lead generation workflow that makes use of emails, phone calls, and LinkedIn in a combined way.

1. Intro Email or InMail: Relay intent to explore ways for exceeding sales KPIs/productivity objectives.
2. Follow-up InMail: Refresh them about Intro InMail.
3. Email: Send an infographic about the causes of sales performance.
4. Follow-up Email: Send a whitepaper about the right CRM setup.
5. Phone: Discovery call.
6. Social Media: Share an article and tag the prospective client.
7. Video Email: Benefits of cloud-based CRM.
8. Social Media: Engage with prospects on LinkedIn by tagging them in a post, or, responding to their comment in a group, and so on.
9. Voice Mail: Check-in if a prospect has queries about resources sent.
10. Email: Have your director send an email, this will help to improve response rates.
11. Phone or Email: Plan a face-to-face meeting.

This workflow can be customized to suit your needs. The key idea is to combine these three channels to provide a multi-channel experience for your target clients.

Outbound lead generation is a crucial aspect of lead generation. First, contact and then send an introduction email or use LinkedIn In the mail. You should clear your intention to offer services that will help potential clients to improve productivity and meet their sales goals. If the prospect doesn’t respond within a time frame you consider rational, find other ways to get yourself noticed. For instance, look for LinkedIn connections you have in common and ask for an introduction. It also helps to sometimes ask a colleague at the executive level to initiate a meeting. Senior-level management responds better to peers.
Notice that this process is not a straight line. Things will not always work out as you expect, so you have to be creative and transform your strategy accordingly. The key with outbound lead generation is to never give up and to keep working at it until you get a good number of qualified leads.
That is why you need results-driving experienced companies like FunnL, whom you can trust and be confident that they are worth it. FunnL has been successfully generating sales qualified meetings with the help of their right approach as a part of its framework. FunnL today is the fastest growing platform to generate successful sales qualified meetings and has generated more than 10,000 leads for about 100 companies. Keeping the sales team on point with measures like result-driven outbound lead generation strategies, the prospective leads, and making sure the engagement level is high is surely one of the main reasons for FunnL’s success.