6 Outbound Sales Strategies Fueled by Data

You’ll come across many people who claim that outbound sales is dead and that inbound is the way to go. The truth is, by avoiding outbound sales strategies, you’re missing out on a huge market of potential buyers. You just have to know how to approach it.

When done correctly and driven by data, outbound sales strategies can be a winning tactic for any team. Here, we review outbound sales best practices and walk through five strategies to take your outbound sales tactics to the next level.

#1 Build your ideal customer profile (ICP)

Before you begin hitting the pavement, it’s critical to build your ICP to know who you are targeting. An ICP is essentially a picture of the type of company and customer who is most likely to buy your products and services and should include fully fleshed-out details like company size, business industry, job function, and more.
An ICP allows you to better identify the strength of any given lead. If a new lead checks off all the boxes of your ICP, you know you need to prioritize them and invest a lot of energy in building that relationship. And if a lead doesn’t fit your ICP at all? You can confidently set that lead aside and focus your efforts on those who are likely to be a better match.

When your team has clearly defined ICPs, then you can also make better use of the technologies that support sales. For example, you can fine-tune the lead scoring mechanism on your team’s CRM to better reflect the work you’ve put into your ICPs. And with the help of a third-party data platform, you can receive a targeted list of decision-makers to focus your outbound sales strategies on. With a B2B Contact Discovery tool, you can feed a platform the details of your ICP and receive fresh, accurate, and verified data to build a pipeline faster and see greater success in your outbound sales methods.

#2 Engage your leads on social media

LinkedIn is a great platform for outbound sales and B2B lead generation. You can tap into this social network to prospect for new leads. When you discover leads that closely align with your ICP, a quick look at their profile can be a wealth of information. You can view their recent posts and LinkedIn activity to get a sense of their interests, workplace opinions, and personality. You can check if you have any mutual connections or shared experiences to establish a connection. And you can interact with their content to build a relationship and capture attention.

All of this activity and research is valuable, so it’s critical to store those insights where they are easily accessible—ideally, your CRM. With Capture for Sales, a Google Chrome extension, you can capture critical lead data you find on social media (and all over the web) with a single click and save it to your CRM. Once you capture lead data with this tool, you can also receive verified data on-demand that may not be publicly available on your lead’s LinkedIn profile, such as work emails or phone numbers.

#3 Diversify and personalize your sales cadences

Create a sales cadence that is repeatable and flexible—and be sure to include multiple communication channels. When you’re pursuing leads, you should be reaching out through multiple modes of communication, like phone, email, social media and SMS if possible.

Diversifying your outreach with a multi-channel sales cadence is huge, simply for the fact that everyone has different preferences and you won’t know what their preferred communication style is unless you try them all. Why lose a potential customer just because you’re only calling and they only reply to emails? Or because they lose track of emails in their inbox but quickly respond to LinkedIn push notifications on their phone?

As you build out a diversified sales cadence, you’ll probably develop scripts and templates, which should be flexible to account for personalization. People want to feel heard and seen, and personalizing your outreach is key to accomplishing that. The problem is, you might not have all the information you’d like to effectively personalize outreach. This is where tools like Inbound Lead Enrichment can help fill the gaps. If all you have is a name and email, Inbound Lead Enrichment does the research for you and can provide fresh, accurate, and verified data across 100+ contact attributes.

#4 Maintain high-quality data with a clean CRM

You know that sales strategies driven by data are smarter and more effective, but here’s something that even the most talented professionals forget: it all backfires if the data you’re using is inaccurate.

Unfortunately, as diligent as you try to be, it’s nearly impossible to keep up with changes in customer and prospect data. So much can happen in the span of months, weeks, or even days. It could be a change in email address or phone number, or company changes like promotions, layoffs, mergers, and more. And not only is it impossible to try to manually keep up with it all—it’s a big waste of your time that could be spent strategically selling.

So as important as data hygiene is, it’s also labor-intensive and a task that falls to the wayside, often getting tossed back and forth between sales, marketing, and operations teams. This is where working with a data platform provider can substantially step up your CRM data health game—without wasting valuable hours or creating friction across departments. DealSignal’s CRM Data Health tool can automatically refresh your data, verifying data that needs updating and enriching contacts or accounts with incomplete data.

#5 Invest in a smart, integrated technology stack

As highlighted in our top tips, technology plays an integral role in effective, data-driven outbound sales strategies. When the tools and platforms you use don’t connect with one another, you lose track of valuable information. Take tip number two, for example. LinkedIn is a great platform for B2B sales, but when you don’t have a tool that connects important findings from LinkedIn to your CRM, you risk losing track of valuable information.
Take the time to evaluate your current technology stack and analyze what’s working for you and what isn’t. Do your tools do what you hoped or are they falling short? And do your technologies (or at least the critical ones) have the ability to speak to one another?

DealSignal’s B2B data platform integrates with a variety of tools, like HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce, and more, to make the most of your data and power up your outbound sales strategies.

#6 Analyze profitability

Analyzing profitability involves a strategic approach that includes market segmentation to identify and understand your most common consumers. By dividing these customers into distinct groups based on their characteristics, you gain valuable insights into their preferences, behaviors, and needs.

To determine profitability, you need to evaluate the estimated revenue and costs associated with serving each customer segment. This analysis enables you to identify the groups that generate the highest levels of profitability for your business. By assessing factors such as

• purchasing frequency
• average order value
• customer lifetime value and
• cost of acquisition

you can determine which segment is most likely to result in successful sales attempts and contribute significantly to your bottom line.

Once you have identified the most profitable customer segment, you can align your outbound sales strategies to specifically target prospects within this group. By tailoring your messaging, value proposition, and sales approach to the unique characteristics and preferences of these prospects, you increase the likelihood of maximizing sales and profitability. This focused effort allows you to allocate your resources and sales efforts where they are most likely to yield the greatest return on investment.

Moreover, analyzing profitability through market segmentation also enables you to identify opportunities for further growth and expansion. By understanding the characteristics of your most profitable customers, you can identify potential new markets or untapped segments with similar attributes to target with your outbound sales strategies.

Win More Deals With Fresh, Accurate, and Verified Data for Successful Outbound Sales Strategies

When you’re dealing with data, you can make better-informed decisions—the only question you should have now is whether or not you’re dealing with the right data. To see how fresh, accurate, and verified data can support your outbound sales strategies and win more deals, contact us for a personalized demo.

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Learn more about Sales Strategies

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• Sales and Marketing Alignment: Best Practices to Drive Revenue
• B2B Data: Using Quality Data for Better Sales & Marketing Performance
• Intent Data: How to Generate Quality Sales and Marketing Leads