How to Track Outreach Efforts
Outreach efforts form a large part of a sales professional's strategy.
Well-thought-out outreach campaigns - when the seller actively seeks a potential buyer and initiates contact with prospects - remain crucial for business success.
However, many sales teams still find that their outreach strategy lacks clarity. This problem is compounded as they don't utilize the technology available to measure the success of their outreach efforts effectively.
Let's run through some outbound sales tips on ensuring an effective game plan for your sales team while also looking at best practices for outreach tracking.
After all, truly comprehending your data will help analyze your sales performance across different metrics, allowing you to refocus and optimize your outreach for the best results.
But first, a more comprehensive look at outreach.
What Are Outreach Campaigns/Strategies?
Your outreach campaign is the overarching term for all your strategies to attract new customers.
Your outreach plan may include one activity or a combination of several approaches, depending on the complexity of your organization.
As a general rule, we used to think of sales outreach as the traveling salesman or call center rep - knocking on doors or cold-calling clients in the hope of making a sale.
Nowadays, salespeople and marketers have a whole arsenal of tools and channels to utilize: email, social media, phone calls, widespread marketing campaigns, and more.
We also tend to speak of outreach concerning B2B sales, where businesses sell to other business clients as opposed to individual customers.
A well-crafted outreach strategy aims to move leads and prospects toward a purchasing decision via a series of touchpoints, emails, and follow-ups. It might look something like this:
This series is a rudimentary framework of the steps of a basic outreach strategy. However, if you want your outreach to be effective, these need fleshing out with multiple facets to get each step right.
Outreach Strategy Best Practices
Follow these outreach strategy best practices to give you the best chance of success:
1. Target the Right Leads
Go after the right prospects to avoid the time-consuming pursuit of incompatible leads.
The wrong prospects won't respond with a positive reply to your message, and there are no other actions you can take to convert them if they are the wrong type of client. These are challenges you simply can't overcome.
Reps want to interact with potential clients but don't want to spend time and effort tracking down non-buying prospects. To swiftly determine which opportunities to pursue, developing the appropriate qualifying questions in advance is crucial.
This is called creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) - a guide to making a list of 'must-haves' to help narrow your list of leads to organizations with the best chance of converting.
An ICP might consist of revenue size, type of product sold, employee count, mutual goals, and other factors.
2. Create a Persona Map
Once you've got a list of qualified leads, you need to find the right person or people to contact for the specific client.
Create a persona map for the client and think about the roles at the company you want to target.
This activity allows you to focus your targeted message by tailoring your outreach to their pain points - how will your product or service provide a solution to their problems.
This process will help you define and prioritize which personas to pursue.
3. Contact Through an Appropriate Channel
Once you've identified who you will contact within an organization, it's time to initiate.
You need to meet clients wherever they spend the most time.
For example, if they seem to be active on LinkedIn or Twitter, you could reach out there.
On the other hand, if the company is already on your email list and has a decent open rate and reply rate, then email outreach could be your best option.
At this point, tracking your data points comes in handy, but more of that later!
4. Personalize messaging
Personalization is critical for successful outreach in the modern environment.
You must take the extra time to adopt a customer-centric approach that shows you value partnerships on a personal level to increase the effectiveness of your outreach.
This approach goes beyond putting their name at the top of email templates or adding a personal subject line. These basic steps to personalize emails still risk sounding overly generic and bland.
People are increasingly astute at spotting these and seeing them for what they are - half-hearted attempts to connect clogging up their inbox.
Show you value the relationship with helpful advice, promote content that directly addresses their context, and show you are aware of their concerns and friction points.
5. Stay Active and Follow-up
Don't let up and let warm leads go cold. If weeks go by without contact, you risk the conversation drifting and losing momentum.
If you've successfully contacted a potential customer and received a positive reply, follow up with a clear path for the next steps to ensure a productive conversation.
6. Record all Your Documentation
Documenting your outreach efforts is vital.
Most teams use a Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) to keep track of all essential documents.
This system keeps all gathered information on various accounts readily available in one place, meaning anybody can jump in and get an overview of how things are going.
However, this is merely a foundation of your tracking efforts.
领英推荐
To make the most of all the data available, you need to utilize a sales engagement tool - this is where all sorts of automation can come in to help with your outreach strategy.
7. Automation
Automation is having a revolutionary impact on outreach efforts.
Advanced outreach tools can automate many aspects of your outbound efforts to save time and increase productivity.
Sales outreach tools like Buzz can help with email outreach and LinkedIn outreach by taking administrative tasks away from team members to let them use their time more wisely.
They'll also organize multiple channels and integrate other technology into one easy-to-use interface.
These tools use machine learning principles and artificial intelligence to leverage previous customer data to create personalized messages customized to your brand voice.
They'll even use data to advise on the right time to send messages so you can contact clients with hitherto unprecedented confidence that you're meeting the right person at the right time, with the right tone in the right space.
As if this wasn't enough help for your outreach, these automation tools will also transform how you track your outreach success.
Let's explore outreach tracking in more depth.
Outreach Tracking
Generally speaking, you can improve your outreach performance in three ways:
An outreach tracking tool plays a significant part in all three potential improvement methods for business growth.
Before looking at the specific benefits of tools like Buzz , you'll need to have a firm grasp of your key performance indicators (KPIs) for your outreach.
Performance KPIs
Each organization will track different KPIs depending on its industry. However, as a general rule, here are four KPIs that every company should be monitoring:
●?????Buyer cycle time: The time it takes on average from initial outreach to a buyer making a purchasing decision
●?????Cost per opportunity: This metric assesses how much it costs to generate a single lead.
●?????Click-through rates: This metric assesses the efficacy of all the steps of your engagement - what is the click rate or open rate on your emails? The reply rate? How many people are picking up the phone? Is one link getting more traction than another across social media etc.? These rates give you a great idea of what works and what doesn't.
●?????Calls-to-close ratio: The calls-to-close ratio looks at how many clients progress through the customer journey and result in a sale, expressed as a ratio of the number of calls made to successful conversions.
If you track these metrics over time, you'll build an insightful overview of your efforts as a team, allowing you to adjust and make changes accordingly if you are underperforming.
So, How Can Technology Help With This Tracking?
Outbound automation software can help track your activity, delivering data-enriched lead generation, multi-channel outreach, and powerful workflow automation.
The software will automatically track those KPIs mentioned above for you, creating detailed data-led reporting and analysis for you to act upon.
This kind of outreach software makes it easier to gain a holistic view of your outbound efforts - identifying strengths and weaknesses and helping you correct those weak links.
Let's dive a little deeper into the capability of these tracking tools:
Powerful automation
Using follow-up automation and intelligent email sequencing, you can streamline outbound operations to reach a prospect at the ideal time through the best marketing channel and never miss a chance to engage. Create clever routines that free your team members to concentrate on the highest-value clients.
This automation does not replace the human element - you are merely using the data-led suggestions to improve the efficacy of your workflow.
Enhance your pipeline
Once again, it's all about the data! These tools leverage a database of thousands of users for effortless lead generation based on data-enriched profiles. Utilize this vast source of information to create predictable frameworks to follow, leaving less to chance for your team members.
Comprehensive outreach
Keeping track of all your engagement is made easy with outreach across multiple channels presented in one easy-to-navigate interface.
This empowers your team to quickly get a picture of all engagement with a client, regardless of which channel, with recommendations for the next steps in the customer journey.
Personalization
Leverage all that data for unforeseen levels of personalization. You can rely on comprehensive knowledge compiled from several different data sources to create targeted messaging that shows a well-informed understanding of a customer's pain points.
What's more, you can get help from the software with automated messaging to get you going and save time.
Key Takeaways
●?????Effective outreach strategies lead potential customers to a purchasing decision in the most efficient way possible.
●?????There are several best practices to follow to give you the best chance of achieving optimum efficiency: creating ICPs, targeting specific people, using the proper channels, personalizing messages, staying in contact, and automating where possible.
●?????Once you do this, you need to be aware of specific KPIs and track these metrics to understand performance.
●?????You then need to act on this information by adjusting for what works and what doesn't.
●?????An outreach automation tool can help with all of the above for your organization, keeping track of all aspects of engagement and offering valuable insights for your team.
To find out more about the possibilities of automation tools that can help with all aspects of engagement and outreach, head over to Buzz, where there are several pricing options depending on your business's needs.