Three top outreach software tools and how to use them

What is outreach sales?

Outreach sales refers to the strategies and tactics used to contact new prospects, leads and existing customers.

With the right target audience, it can add new leads to your sales funnel and introduce potential customers to your products or services.

Common outreach sales activities include making cold calls, sending cold emails and sending social media messages.

By nature, outreach messages are unprompted by the prospect: You’re reaching out to them with a solution you believe will interest them.

Other times, you’ll use outreach campaigns to reengage a warm lead, start a conversation with someone who has asked for information about your products or services or bring back a former customer.

As a rule of thumb, if you initiate the conversation with a lead, you are using outbound sales techniques. The alternative is inbound sales, where the lead comes to you.

5 outreach sales techniques to drive leads into your pipeline

1. Qualify your leads

Lead qualification helps you understand whether or not your prospect has the power to buy or is a good fit for your product or service.

Keep your team focused on the leads who fit your ideal buyer persona and are likely to need your product. These segments are more motivated to buy, accelerating the buying cycle as a result.

There are two steps to determine who your ideal prospects are:

• Building an ideal customer profile (ICP)

• Comparing prospective leads to this ICP

Build an ICP

Evaluate your sales data to find commonalities across your won deals. Focus on:

• Which segments have the best conversion rate and highest deal value

• The buying behavior of your customers (including how fast they made a purchase)

• The common pain points your product solves

• Common customer attributes (such as company size, location, industry, etc.)

• Which customer segments have the highest LTV (lifetime value)

Now focus your attention to those prospects.

With a well-defined ICP, your reps can focus their time on nurturing high-value prospects rather than chasing unqualified leads.

Compare prospective leads with your ideal profile

There are several ways to qualify inbound sales leads against your ideal profile.

You can use web forms to generate a pipeline of inbound leads. This saves your reps time and enables you to get valuable information from a lead, including an indication of their level of interest and the problems you can help them solve.

Once you have their details, you can compare them to your ideal profile and assess whether they make a good fit, or if they’re not in the position to be a customer.

For example, asset reliability experts Reliability Maintenance Solutions (RMS) uses Pipedrive’s Web Forms across their product pages to identify what visitors want and fast-track them through the sign-up process.

Use chatbots, such as Pipedrive’s LeadBooster t, to qualify leads while they browse your website. Chatbots can guide visitors through any questions they have and help them find a product or solution they’re looking for. Reps can then get involved when they need to start a sales conversation

This inbound lead qualification method has the prospect reaching out to you and indicates they need what you offer.

Generating inbound leads can take time. To speed up the process, consider investing in outbound sales activities.

Use Prospector to identify best-fit contacts based on your ICP’s shared attributes.e This will provide you with verified contact data and allow you to reach high-value leads.

For a more manual approach take to social media. Use LinkedIn to search for contacts based on job title, location and industry.Identify communities where your ICP is active. Use their profile to learn more about their position and company and determine if they fit your ICP.

Lead generation is a two-way street. Qualify leads before reaching out to them to ensure you’re not wasting their time or yours.

Not sure if a lead fits your ICP? Use a lead qualification process during the discovery call.

2. Cold emailing

The best way to get prospects interested in your service is by demonstrating what you can do for them.

Personalized emails help you build a connection with your recipient, which is key to generating a response. Do this by demonstrating an understanding of their problem and how you can solve it.

Basic information like name and company will help you personalize your emails and catch their attention. However, you can also check their social media profiles or company pages for relevant information.

For example, compliment them on an award they’ve posted about or start a conversation about an article they shared on LinkedIn.

The purpose of your cold email campaigns is to demonstrate:

• That you’re well informed about your lead, their company and their problem points

• That you can offer a solution that will help them with their challenges

Remember, the most important part of your cold email is personalization. This gives you a much higher chance of having your email opened and read.

Other keys to success include keeping your email concise, well-informed and well mannered.

To judge if you’ve been successful with this, it’s crucial to monitor engagement metrics for your cold email campaigns. As such, email tracking is a key feature integration for any outreach software.

3. Cold calling

Like cold email outreach, cold calling also benefits from a personalized approach.

Before you go into the call, be aware of your prospect’s name, position and company name, and know the challenges they’re likely to be facing and how your product can solve them.

Unlike emails, you’re communicating with your prospects in real time.. This means your lead has more chances to say “no” and end the conversation before you’ve made your pitch.

To engage your prospect, begin the call by stating their name. This demonstrates you’re looking to speak to them, rather than “the person in charge of IT procurement”, for example.

Once you’ve introduced yourself, state the reason you’re calling. It’s important not to waste your lead’s time. Make your pitch succinct and to the point.

Listen to their concerns and be polite. Even if they’re not ready to make a purchase now, they may in the future, so don’t burn your bridges. Instead, leave them thinking that your business is a contender when the time comes to solve their problem.

4. Social media outreach

When using social media as part of your sales outreach, it’s key to choose the right platform.

If your products are photogenic, Instagram could be for you. B2B or SaaS companies may have more success on LinkedIn.

Get your reps to join groups or communities and contribute to discussions that are relevant to your industry. Be consistent and you’ll generate awareness and qualified leads over time. Use these communities to start the conversation before moving it over to a consultation over the phone or Zoom.

3 outreach sales tools to help automate the process

Automating repetitive tasks with outreach tools is one of the fastest ways to increase lead volume and deal velocity as part of your outreach campaigns.

Here are a host of helpful outreach sales tools and sales engagement platforms to automate the repetitive tasks and keep your team focused on selling.

1. CRM software

If you’re not already using CRM software, now’s the time.

A CRM can help with automation and streamlines sales development activities to ensure that you’re maximizing your sales pipeline.

Here’s how a CRM can help with outreach sales automation.

Outreach templates and scripts

Writing individual emails is a time-consuming task.

With a CRM and outreach software, you can create email templates with customizable fields to personalize with ease. This reduces time spent drafting outreach sales emails without compromising on conversion rates.

Even the subject line of a cold email campaign can be enough to dissuade a prospect from opening it, but a good CRM will offer A/B testing to help create the best subject lines and ensure you maintain healthy open rates.

When your team cold calls a prospect, measure their success and provide pointed feedback and training with call-tracking software. This enables you to log dialer calls and record them, so you can review conversations and look for areas of improvement.

Set follow-up reminders

Knowing when to follow-up with prospects is key to progressing deals through your pipeline.. The more leads you have, the harder it gets to track each one.

A good CRM will help you schedule emails when the timing is right. Set automated reminders with customized workflows to ensure you deliver consistent outreach to each of your leads and never miss a follow-up opportunity again.

This is particularly important for email campaigns, where well-timed, personalized emails and follow-up emails achieve higher reply rates than emails sent at irregular intervals.

Measure your results

CRMs allow you to track your most important sales metrics, giving you a grasp on where your sales outreach strategy is working and where it needs refining.

With customizable dashboards to review the numbers, you’ll know where to make changes to improve results and what your most effective outreach strategies are. Knowing where you’re getting the most success will ensure that you’re spending your time reaching your ICP.

2. Email automation tools

Email automation can help you send value-driven messaging and sales enablement content to specific lead segments.Beyond templates for your marketing campaigns, email automation features, like mail merge, offer impressive personalization and automation.

For example, email marketing Chrome extensions, such as Email Finder, help you grow your email list during the SDR research process.

You can create automated campaigns that respond to your lead’s behavior, such as the emails they open, the messages they engage with and the purchases they make. You can also create automated workflows to send messages when certain triggers occur, keeping your lead engaged whatever stage they’re in.

Depending on their purchasing history and website behavior, email automation tools can send targeted messages to your leads with offers and deals customized to their interests.

Good email outreach tools will show you the effectiveness of your campaigns so you can determine what your leads are responding to best. You’ll see email response rates, bounce rates and other deliverability metrics which you can use to improve your email outreach campaign effectiveness.

3. Universal automation tools

Automation tools like Zapier allow you to connect several apps together and automate parts of your workflow that would usually require a manual touch.

By setting the conditions you want to trigger, you can create automated processes that help you act on time-sensitive tasks without the need for manual intervention.

Get email notifications about lead activity or automate follow-up emails when they sign up for a consultation, webinar or other lead magnet.

When an outreach sales campaign gets a response from a lead, you can set up a trigger to move them to the next stage in your pipeline.

If there’s a part of your workflow where a condition met in one app triggers a response in another, you can automate it. There’s a vast amount of time to be saved, and automation reduces human error when it comes to repetitive tasks.

Automation allows your reps to spend less time on admin and more on fostering relationships with your leads and accounts.