Introduction - What Tools Can I Use To Manage My Sales Outreach?

A part of every brand's sales process is sales outreach. This refers to the process of reaching out to prospective customers in the hopes of turning them into paying customers - a crucial part of any business' strategy. This does not necessarily mean cold calling or going door to door as it might have meant 10 or so years ago, but refers to the collective process of reaching out to prospects via a number of different touchpoints, such as email, calling, and more.

In this series of posts, I will give you a refresher on what sales outreach is in more depth, and guide you through some of the most effective tools to help you more easily manage your outreach process.

Before I dive into using various sales outreach tools to aid in your success, and how they can benefit your business I want to remind you what sales outreach is.

Sales outreach is the art of reaching out to people to convert them into paying customers. This is not just cold emails, but also involves calls and social outreach. It often also incorporates finding the leads you would like to contact and nurturing them down the sales funnel, to eventually become clients.

As you can imagine, this is not the easiest process to manage, execute and optimize, but with the right tools you can manage the process as well as monitor your progress to increase your chances for success.

So, now that you have been reminded about what sales outreach is, I will go over the general outreach process that all businesses follow.

The Duties That You Will Need To Perform For A Great Outreach Process Are:

• Finding prospects
• Contacting prospects
• Monitoring of outbound process

"It's your job to help your sales reps understand their part in the company's success and to develop personalized success plans. Again, this may mean they have to change. " - Alice Heiman (Chief Networking Officer #S30c, #TEDxUNR organizer @coalitionsnow Advisor) @aliceheiman

Finding Prospects

When you are looking to sell a product you will have compiled traits that best fit the people and companies that would be interested in the product that you are aiming to sell. These traits are compiled into an Ideal Customer Profile or ICP. This is a vital step in your sales process, if you are targeting people who do not match this chances are you are going to struggle to sell your product or will sell to people who in the future will not gain the full benefit of your product.

Your ICP Should Include:

• Person Targeting (Head of Sales, Head of Marketing, CEO, COO, etc)
• Size of Company
• Industries
• Pain Point Targeting (Bad Website, Small Sales Teams, Ad Spendage)

Once you have determined this you will start your prospecting process. This will be where you will find the organisations you will be targeting, the names of the people you are targeting, the contact details of the people you are going to be reaching out to.

Contacting Prospects

In your sales process, you will determine how many times you would like to contact your prospect and how often. I would recommend that you should reach out to the prospect between 5–8 times. These contacts should be spread out every 2–4 days and should range from emails, calls and social outreach.

In our guide "Does Email Marketing Still Work - Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)", I went through different email outreach strategies that can be used to contact your prospect to gain optimal results This can be very beneficial in putting together your process for contacting your prospects. If you missed this article you can read it here.

In the article mentioned above we spoke around a 7 email touchpoint process. This process entails using 7 emails formatted to get the best response out of your clients. It would be advisable to adjust this to suit your companies personal needs and change out some of the emails for calls or social outreach to ensure you are reaching your prospect everywhere.

Monitoring Outreach

This entails having a way to monitor who you have reached out to and when you need to contact the prospect again. Part of this will be handled by a tool that you use to contact your prospect, as there are platforms designed to send drip mail campaigns.

Another good way to monitor your outreach process is using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. This is a system in which you can record when you have made contact with a prospect and when you need to next try to contact the prospect again.

These systems are handy in that they often allow you to sync your emails into the system to allow your emails to be stored in a central place.

In my next Post I will discuss with you why you should care about Outreach tools as well as give you an overview of the features your outreach tools should have.

You can read this post here. Beginner's Guide - What Tools Can I Use To Manage My Sales Outreach?