A sales outreach strategy is a combination of different working tactics to gain new customers and bring back the old ones. It refers to the researched and planned approach to attract prospective customers and encourage current customers to become loyal customers.

Research by Backlinko found that 8.5% out of 12 million outreach emails got a response from the prospects - (Backlinko, 2022).

With the understanding of the importance of effective sales outreach strategies to your sales activities, we have compiled a list of proven strategies that can help you generate better results with your sales outreach efforts.

An ideal customer profile, otherwise known as the Ideal buyer profile is a well-researched definition of the perfect customers for your products or services.

The sales community recommends including five (5) key bullet points in your ideal customer profile to give you a clear understanding of who they are and how you can reach them.

An ICP should contain:

1. Their expected revenue
2. Expected employees size
3. The organization’s structure
4. Their product or service
5. A mutual goal

Once you have completed this list, use the information to guide your lead generation and qualification process.

A persona map is an abstract profile of your principal customer - the main department in your target company or the key employee. It gives you a deeper insight into your customer base and understands how best you can connect with them.

To support your sales outreach practices, consider creating another five (5) bullet-point lists of your principal customers. The persona map should include:

1. The roles or job titles of your key decision-makers.
2. Their two to three primary daily responsibilities - are the projects or activities they perform at work every day.
3. Two to three ways your products or services can help them manage their daily tasks.
4. Two to three of their long-term goals.
5. Two to three ways your company can help them achieve their long-term goals.

By filling out these points, you will gain a better understanding of your key customers and develop the right campaigns to reach out, engage and build relationships with them.

The next step is to create a visual representation of the personas to rank them and prioritize your sales campaigns in order of their rank and the significance of their goals.

To achieve this, rank and prioritize your personas on a scale of one to five based on the following metrics:

1. How well do their goals align with your business solutions?
2. The size of their budget
3. Their authority within the organization

Once you have completed this, the next step is to calculate their score and focus on the ones with the highest score first. This process is called Account-based selling - a sales approach that focuses on selling to the right customers rather than more customers.

Identify the best channels that you can use to reach out to your customers and engage them for your sales purposes.

A good way to do this is to check out some of the platforms that your customers are using the most (most active on) and connect with them on the platform.

For example, if you notice that your customer is very active on LinkedIn or is a very active subscriber on your mailing list (typically opens 8 in 10 emails), then you should reach out and engage them on those platforms to increase your sales outreach practice.

Contrary to popular belief that personalization involves adding your recipient's names to your email or message, it goes way beyond this.

A good form of personalization is addressing your prospect's pain points or interests and telling them how you can be of help. Consider congratulating them on a recent achievement or identifying a gap in their project to entice them to read on.

Follow-up is crucial to the success of your sales outreach. You have to develop a timeline for your communication and interaction with your customers. It is not advisable to leave your customers for too long before sending them timely reminders on your products.

As much as you don’t want to stalk or irritate them with your excess messages or emails, you also don't want to leave them hanging for too long.

The next step is to compile and document all the information that you have gathered so far and your plans in a customer relationship management system (CRM).

A customer relationship management system (CRM) gathers, links, and analyzes all the recorded customer information - their contact information, communication with a company’s reps, and activities to help you better understand the information and how you can make use of them for your business.

(Image: Sloovi Outreach)

Our CRM tool,  Sloovi Outreach, is an all-in-one CRM platform that will help you improve your productivity and sales by tracking your daily sales workflow, prioritizing tasks, etc.

For the success of your sales outreach, you have to ensure that you agree with your marketing department to develop content and strategy to gain new customers and drive sales

Specifically, your marketing team's activities must be in tandem with your sales goals to help connect and build relationships with your prospects.

Use sales automation software to automate some of your sales tasks and help set up follow-up reminders. There are various tasks to automate. To improve your productivity, consider the sales automation tools with the best features and functionality for your sales automation. A sales automation tool like Sloovi Outreach accelerates your daily sales workflow.

An omnichannel approach is the use of various channels to reach out to your prospects or customers., you should also reach out to them from other platforms to improve your communication and relationship with them.

For example, If they are active readers of your emails, you could interact with them on LinkedIn by commenting on their posts or liking their posts (do this sparingly, so it doesn't appear creepy). You don’t necessarily have to message them on all platforms, just let them feel your presence here and there without stalking or creeping them out.

Over the past few years, email marketing has been rated by sales professionals and marketers as a powerful marketing tool as revealed below:

73% of marketers rated their email ROI as “Excellent,” followed by SEO (72%) and paid channels.

81% of survey respondents stated email marketing promoted customer acquisition and 80% that it enhanced customer retention.

With an impressive return on investment of $42 for each $1 spent according to the DMA Marketer Email Tracker, email marketing is one of your best options to boost your sales outreach practices.

In this lesson, we will be providing you with eight (8) effective strategies to use to build your email lists.

Invest in a robust email marketing platform to help you save time when building your email list and support your sales outreach messages.

Look out for email marketing platforms with advanced features like landing page builder, marketing automation, and importantly, A/B testing capabilities to support your email outreach.

The next step is to create lead magnets to entice your prospects to sign up for your mailing list by giving them something in return for their emails

Since people won’t just give you their email addresses without a reason, you must offer them incentives that they can’t refuse. Consider some of the most effective ones like:

(Image: WordStream)

• A free ebook or guide.
• A webinar registration
• A free course
• Emails newsletters
• A PDF version of a blog post
• A coupon
• A template or cheat sheet, etc.

Pop-ups are generally known to be annoying and disruptive, but if designed carefully, they have the potential to increase your email signups.

(Image: Hootsuite)

Consider the following important tips when designing your website pop-ups:

• Ensure pop-ups appear after your website visitors have spent some time on your website to make it less intrusive and annoying.
• Make sure your pop-up design is simple and contains attractive elements
• It must contain compelling captions that can engage your website/landing page visitors.

Call to action (CTAs) are an effective way to get your customers to perform your desired tasks. They are proven marketing terms that you can use to prompt an immediate response or in this case, subscribe to your mailing list.

Consider CTAs like

Dear Zee! Get access to these 5 proven marketing automation tools and improve your marketing results today.

Become a Pro at what you love, Zee

Promising them something valuable with your CTA is key to getting them to willingly give you their email addresses.

A landing page otherwise known as a lead capture page is a single webpage created specifically for a particular marketing or advertising campaign.

(Image: Simply Business)

A highly converting landing page is a proven way to gain your prospect's attention and get them to do your desired task. Your landing page must contain the following three key elements:

• A strong and compelling headline highlighting the benefits that your user gets from the page.
• A compelling copy to capture their attention.
• A powerful and relevant image.

Also, make sure you use a functional landing page builder to create your converting landing page.

Social media is a powerful tool to help you build your email lists. Add sign-up forms on your social media ads to get your prospects to provide you with their email addresses when they click on the ad.

(Image: Hootsuite)

If you are also going to offer contests and giveaways to your followers, social media can be an extremely useful platform to promote your content.

A viral contest or campaign is one that you can use to encourage your followers to share links to their colleagues and connections to subscribe to your email list.

(Image: Rafflepress)

You should also consider creating a referral program in addition to these viral campaigns to encourage and grow your customer base.

Another effective means of building your email list is by reaching out to all your contacts personally and explaining to them that you are creating your email list and would appreciate it if they signed up for it.

You should also encourage them to share this with their friends and network to help you build your email list much faster.

Sales outreach tools are engagement and interaction tools that you can use to engage your leads and move them through the sales cycle to improve your productivity and sales outreach performance.

You should look out for the following five (5) powerful features in a sales outreach tool before picking any:

1. Email Personalization: This helps to curate some email templates and personalization abilities to send personalized emails to your prospects and customers.
2. Email Scheduling: This helps you schedule and send your emails based on a set timeline.
3. Automated Follow-ups: This helps you automate your follow-ups with your clients.
4. A/B Testing: This helps you test out different email variations to determine which works best for you.
5. Email Tracking: This helps you track your outreach email analytics to understand which campaigns work best and you should focus more on.

Sloovi’s Outreach is an all-in-one platform that enables your sales and marketing teams to accelerate, manage and enhance campaigns by managing leads, automating sales outreach, developing customized reports, and managing the sales pipeline.

Sloovi Outreach will enable your sales teams to smash your sales target, reduce cost, and improve sales productivity by tracking your daily sales workflow, creating customized and intuitive reports, scheduling more meetings, and prioritizing leads with dynamic Smart Views.

Outreach offers four services;

1. Lead generation: this feature allows you to add thousands of sales leads and prioritize and track every integration with a sales lead.
2. Cold Outreach automation: this feature will enable you to send personalized, scalable, and automated sales outreach via emails, global calls, and SMS.
3. Report Creation: this feature provides sales leaders with all the insights about the activities of their sales reps.
4. Manage Pipelines: this feature tracks all the deals you are about to crack as they travel through each sales stage.