How to build a cohesive sales outreach strategy?

Hear me out. 

Salespeople spend only one-third of their day actually talking to prospects. 

I mean, as a sales professional, you should be spending at least half of your day talking about sales. 

So, what exactly eats up sales reps’ time? 

The statistics say… 

• Emailing (21%) 
• Data entry (17%) 
• Prospecting & researching leads (17%) 
• Internal meetings (12%) 
• Scheduling calls (12%) 

I can see three tasks you can completely automate, sparing you 50% more time every day! Now, think for your entire sales team!

What you need is a well-thought sales outreach strategy (and the power of automation). 

That’s the topic of our discussion today.  

What is a sales outreach strategy? Why should you care about it? and why you NEED to automate as much as you can. 

What is a sales outreach strategy? 

Sales outreach strategy is the planning of how your sales team will communicate with prospects throughout the customer journey. 

Basically, every communication from prospecting to sales closing will fall under this outreach plan.  

75% of B2B brands witness a whopping 4 months to acquire a new customer. A relatively older statistic, but the average sales cycle has increased by 24% from 2012 to 2014.  

Don’t you think, as we progress, our sales cycle should get shortened? 

Well, market dynamics are definitely not in our control, but how you outreach and pivot is definitely in your control. 

Our aim for this article is to minimize our cycle and automate different parts of sales outreach. 

Types of sales outreach 

As we all know, salespeople communicate with two mindsets: 

Inbound sales outreach: The prospects come to you and show interest using various digital mediums. 

Outbound sales outreach: You reach out to prospects with a calculated guess that they might be interested in your product/services. 

The main difference between inbound and outbound sales is that, in inbound sales, most sales efforts start at a later stage of the journey, while outbound sales start at an early stage.  

5 Steps to create a cohesive sales outreach strategy

Our goal is to create a strategy that you can use for inbound and outbound both.

You know there are some common parts in inbound and outbound. We want to identify exactly those parts, and automate them!

These are the steps where you can create a successful sales outreach strategy and execute it well, whether it’s for inbound or outbound:

1. Define where you need automation and where you need manual communication 
2. Create reusable templates 
3. Set up automation for repetitive outreach 
4. Experiment with various templates 
5. What else can be automated in inbound and outbound outreach? 

Step 1: Automation or manual communication? 

The first step to an effective sales outreach strategy is to know where exactly you want to leverage automation and where you want to use personalized communication. 

If you manage to find these items, you can create a solid plan for yourself, no matter inbound or outbound.  

The next question should be – Is there any common communication occurring in inbound and outbound both? 

You should automate them. 

These are some of the most common communications occurring in both cases:  

• Product/service education communication 
• Nurturing emails to push prospects down the funnel 
• Follow-ups to book a meeting 
• Welcome or onboarding emails once prospects signup for a free trial 
• Confirmation emails for a product demo  
• Pricing related communication 
• Contract overview communication 
• Account sales communication to provide better services 

All these tasks can be automated if you have a streamlined business process.  

There are some communications where automation is not possible. For example, discovery calls in outbound or negotiation phone calls.  

But you can still leverage automation, partially.  

Step 2: Create re-usable templates 

Once you figure out the parts you need to automate, create email templates for them. 

Invest heavy time in these templates. They are your assets.  

These assets are going to save you a lot of time for you, so test them before putting them in the process. 

Step 3: Set up automation for repetitive outreach efforts

The next stage is to set up automation for all the repetitive communications. 

You need to be very careful with the triggers, conditions, and actions. 

These are some of the examples of sales automation you can use here. 

Trigger	Condition	Action
If new deal is created	If deal is moved to “Interested” stage	Send a product education email with resources
If deal is moved to “Book a meeting” stage	If Tag is equal to “Demo”	Send an email with calendar link to book a meeting    Send a text message with calendar link
Activity of “Demo” is marked completed	If Tag is equal to “Demo Done”	Send a thank you email and a text
If deal is moved to “Closing” stage of the pipeline	If Tag is equal to “Plan 1” or “Plan 2”	Send pricing information email

There are tons of sales outreach tools in the market. But I’d suggest you pick a platform very carefully.

You simply can not spend enormous amounts of dollars on sales outreach tools. So pick one that offers much more than outreach.

Salesmate is absolutely that kind. It’s a CRM. It’s an automation platform with sales and marketing journey creation capabilities.

Step 4: A/B test with various templates 

Once you set up the automation, now your job is to further improve your own process.  

Experimenting with various email and text templates can be life-changing for you. Even experimenting with subject lines can help you improve the process.  

According to statistics, subject lines with numbers in them got an open rate of 20%, while emails without numbers got only 12%. 

In Salesmate, you can simply add a small A/B Split Action Button to your journey and start experimenting.  

Step 5: What else can be automated inbound and outbound? 

Till this point, we only talked about communication that was common in both practices. But individually, there are certain items that you can automate.  

Let’s find out. 

Inbound Sales Outreach Automation	Outbound Sales Outreach Automation
Self-learning product material	Cold email outreach campaign
On-Demand Product Demos	Sending sales collateral in consideration stage
Communication for downloading lead magnets

6 Sales outreach tactics to enhance your overall strategy 

1. Have a highly-targeted buyer personas

It is proven that having buyer personas help you perform better in your sales outreach. And so, you may already have a buyer persona in your sales outreach guide. 

What I want you to understand is – just having a buyer persona won’t be as effective as having a highly targeted buyer persona. 

Have a checklist of your ideal customer profile. Be specific with this profile. Do not have generic or trivial pointers. Instead, have precise and meaningful concerns about your buyer persona. 

Consider their responsibilities, type of work, daily activities, goals, and so on. These pointers will help you know your target audience in a better way. 

2. Optimize your outreach channel 

The practice of selecting the correct outreach channel is very known and helpful.  

While selecting the right channel, you may consider answering questions like: 

1. Which channel is actively used by the target audience? 
2. Which channel is best for my outreach for various stages of the sales pipeline? For example, calling is amazing when you’re dealing with cold leads. But for a warm lead, email would also work. 
3. Which channel can help you deliver information in the best way? 
4. Can you combine multiple channels for better results? For example, you can send an email along with a text message for conformational communication. 

These questions can surely help you discover your finest outreach channel mix. What enhances it – is using automation to improve your sales outreach. 

Whether you choose calling, text messaging, emailing, or any other mode of communication, you can always enhance it by shifting it to auto-pilot. 

With the help of a Sales Automation Platform, you can not only save your time but also level up your sales outreach game. 

3. Have a highly personalized outreach 

You don’t sell the product or service; rather, you make the customer believe you’re here for them with the required solution.

To win this trust, you need to make your target audience feel heard and understood. 

You must focus on delivering tailored and thoughtful content. To do so, you should start adding the required personal touch to your communication mode. 

Whether you’re sending a message or an email, ensure you personalize the same using efficient software. There are various tools that allow you to personalize your outreach.

However, I would suggest a tool that offers multiple personalization features along with automating your outreach. 

If you’re wondering which software can help you experience this benefit, then here’s your solution – Salesmate CRM.

With over 140+ personalization options within Salesmate, create more personalized messages, texts, and emails that clearly highlight the key message you want your customer to focus on. And we understand that doing this, again and again, must be tiring.

So with Salesmate, you easily automate your entire outreach process and close deals faster. 

So, this is one of the very efficient ways to enhance your outreach plan. 

4. Leverage sales cadences 

Here’s another unique way to improve your sales outreach.

You are well aware that follow-up is an inevitable part of every sales process. You have to connect multiple times with your prospects to turn them into paying customers. 

However, it is essential to understand the slight difference between following up and annoying your prospect. 

You need to ensure that you effectively plan your follow-ups. You should know the best time and day to talk to your prospects. 

For instance: 

1. You should follow up with your prospects during the daytime. 
2. Send most of the emails at the start or during the mid-week and not on weekends. 
3. Send the sale, offer or event invite 2-3 days before the event and not on the same day or too early. 
4. Choose the right channel while following up with a prospect. 

And so on. Along with scheduling the follow-ups, you should even draft the content accordingly. For instance, you should plan the quality of the content. This includes strategizing the subject line, the CTA option, the opt-in/out option, and so on.  

All these qualities help you improve the efficiency of your sales cadence. Moreover, one of the best ways to optimize your sales cadence is to automate your tasks.  

Since follow-up is a recurring activity, you should focus on scheduling and personalizing your activities.  

You can easily optimize your sales cadence with the implementation of Sales Sequences. So, go ahead and try it yourself. 

5. Align marketing and sales teams  

This is a very smart way of improving the sales outreach process.  

Sales outreach activities are very similar to those of marketing tasks. After all, sales outreach is similar to advertising your business to your prospects. 

And so, involving the marketing team would be a wise decision. Marketers can help you enhance your outreach content. They can do so by assisting or creating your email and social media content. At the same time, it helps you build a sales pitch that yields excellent results.  

Moreover, you could even ask them to help you with relevant analytics that can be used during the course of selling. This helps you to choose the best channel. 

For e.g. if your marketing team has good experience with campaigns, it means your target audience like email communication, and you can adopt the same in your sales outreach strategy. 

Further, to have a seamless alignment between both teams, you should adopt Shared Team Inbox. It serves as a common platform where all the team members can come together and work on common goals. 

This is how the alignment of the marketing and sales teams can improve your sales outreach strategy.

6. Centralize data  

Data is a crucial part of every sales process. This data includes vital details like prospects’ credentials, personal and professional information, and various other sales-related data. 

You must preserve the data in a centralized place. You should store the data in a place where it is easily accessible and confidential at the same time. In such a scenario, an ideal cloud platform like Salesmate is all you need. 

Salesmate is a unified customer-centric platform that helps you to engage, nurture, and sell customers. It offers automation of tedious tasks, exceptional customization, and personalization features.  

It lets you stay connected with your prospect 24/7 while you’re away from your desk through its Mobile CRM. Overall, it is great software that enhances your sales outreach plan and the entire sales process. 

Sign up for a 15-days free trial and experience the results yourself. 

Conclusion 

Having an effective sales outreach plan is something that can help you achieve results. The ways mentioned above are simply an excellent addition that you can make to your plan.  

So, go ahead and make the necessary addition to experience better results.