In order to find new leads, marketing strategy is constantly reinventing itself. Among the latest trends, you must have heard about Inbound Marketing, or passive prospecting via content production, and Growth Hacking, optimization pushed to the extreme of its sales and acquisition process. However, we think Outbound Sales can really be a profitable acquisition channel you should not put aside.
What is active prospecting?
Unlike Inbound sales, in which the quality of incoming leads cannot be controlled, Outbound sales allow you to choose them relative to your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). Indeed, there are several possible techniques for creating your prospect file. You could buy it or rent it. But we would not really advise either. With a tool like Datananas, you will be able create your own lists of prospects by targeting your leads through professional social networks.
Do you have to contact these leads directly?
Now that you know where to find your leads, the second issue is contacting them in a clever way, avoiding cold-calls at all costs which are of interest neither to your leads nor your sales representatives. The whole outbound sales strategy is based on automated and personalized emails. In a perfect world, the Marketing team should be able to target semgents of prospects, write outbound email scenarios and send them through Sales Development Representatives’ mailboxes.
An ebook on outbound email copywritting will be available soon here. :)
Is the ROI of this marketing strategy interesting?
The way we see it, it’s the most profitable and accessible channel when it comes to calculating investment returns. All you have to do is compare the number of new clients coming from active marketing strategy with the amount invested. The latter often comes down to a tool for creating your prospect file, an email-sending tool, and time spent by the sales team. You also have to anticipate time spent by the marketing team for writing and improving templates and analyzing email statistics.
Do you have to keep up Inbound sales?
Of course you do, Inbound and Outbound are two very complementary marketing strategies:
Inbound Marketing allows you to build your brand image by establishing yourself as an expert in your industry.
It is also a very efficient acquisition channel even if the objective is measured on a longer term basis.
While Outbound sales campaigns allows you to take control of market research and the volume of leads reached in real time, all the content you created in your Inbound marketing is an asset you can build on top of.
For example, you can nurture the most unresponsive prospects in you Outbound campaigns with qualitative content. Including some content in your follow-up emails is a very good way to educate your prospects, providing them value… and also taking this into account for you Lead Scoring.
