Sales Outreach: Your Guide to Maximizing Success

Prospecting is a crucial phase in your sales strategy.

However…

Your company can only create more sales opportunities through outreach. An effective sales outreach campaign is the key to making your business stand out through all the noise.

So to help you get there:

We created this article to teach you how to structure your sales outreach campaigns for better results.

You’ll learn the nuts and bolts of how to best contact your leads after prospecting. And we’ll also share with you the biggest mistakes you must avoid to close more deals quickly.

Let’s get started.

How to Structure a Sales Outreach Campaign: Tips To Get You Started

Sales outreach is the process of contacting qualified prospects in order to convert them into customers. It refers to the steps your sales team must follow to nurture new leads and convince them to make a purchase.

Structuring your sales outreach campaign is fundamental if you want to enhance your sales performance.

Here’s where to get started:

1. Identify Your Target Market

The first step to developing an efficient sales outreach strategy is identifying your target clients. This is often referred to as creating an ideal client profile (ICP) to concentrate on in your outreach.

What makes a target client?

A target prospect is any individual or company that matches what your ideal customers look like.

If it’s a person, you could focus on their job title, industry, location, decision-making power, etc. For companies, you must take into consideration their budget, size, industry, buying process, objectives, and more.

Understanding your customers is also a key step in creating an ICP that improves your sales results. Research your potential buyers and their pain points so you can create more relevant offers.

Now:

Identifying your ICP from the get-go helps you stay focused in your outreach attempts and only target prospects with a high chance of converting. That’s an excellent way to increase your campaign results and speed up the sales cycle significantly.

2. Select the Right Channels

How will you contact target prospects?

Using the wrong outreach channel is a guaranteed way to waste your sales team’s time and sabotage the whole process. You’ll struggle to get good results with any campaign because you’re not meeting your target clients where they are.

The most popular outreach channels for sales are email, phone, voicemail, and social media sites (especially LinkedIn).

Depending on the buyer persona you built earlier, you’ll prioritize different channels to ensure that your message will be heard. Be sure to also take timing into consideration when choosing a medium as that’s going to affect your performance results.

Want to know a little secret for enhancing your outreach results?

You can reach out to the same lead via multiple channels simultaneously or depending on where they are in the funnel. An omnichannel approach enables you to remain consistent in your messaging and solidify your main brand message.

3. Plan Your Outreach

Some of the questions you must answer when planning your outreach are:

When should you reach out to your prospects?
Which leads should you contact first?
What tools will you need to execute your campaign?

You should also prepare the content you’ll use to educate your prospects throughout the sales journey. The more content pieces you have, the wider your options for customizing and targeting prospects specifically.

That’s where alignment between your sales and marketing teams becomes a necessity.

Now, here’s the truth:

As much as you’d like to prepare for a sales campaign, you’ll never reach your desired results without trying. You have to discover your leads through constant interactions and analysis to be able to make informed decisions in your strategy.

And that brings us to the next important step…

4. Test, Measure, and Adjust With Each Campaign

Testing and optimization are fundamental parts of any outreach strategy.

New sales trends are coming into the scene every day. And outreach strategies work differently based on your ideal customers, their challenges, and their preferences.

Therefore:

The success of any outreach campaign you launch is dependent on testing and tracking. It’s crucial to experiment with various ICPs, outreach techniques, channels, and tools while you monitor your progress to see what’s working best for your sales team.

Also:

That explains the necessity of always starting with setting clear objectives for every campaign. As you store more data, you’ll have all the knowledge you need to make better-informed decisions.

Common Mistakes Made When Structuring a Sales Outreach Campaign

You can’t build a perfect outreach strategy from your first attempt. Before you can master anything in sales, you have to make a lot of mistakes and miss many sales opportunities due to inexperience.

But:

You can save yourself months-long of work if you anticipate mistakes before they happen and prepare for them. So in this part, we’ll share with you the biggest mistakes to watch out for in your sales outreach strategy.

Let’s get to it:

1. Not Knowing Your Target Audience

This is the biggest mistake your company can make when doing sales.

Many companies still launch outreach campaigns while their target buyers are vaguely identified. They spend big bucks and countless hours chasing unfit leads that would never convert.

Figuring out your ICP from the start will enhance your sales cycle. More importantly, it guides you through every step of the process, from the quality of the leads you should generate to the type of content you create.

Your sales team needs to partner with your marketing department to discuss who your potential buyers are and identify their needs. The more detailed you are in your ideal client descriptions, the better you can qualify prospects and segment them in more advanced stages.

2. Failing To Personalize Your Content

Content personalization makes all the difference when it comes to sales outreach.

Any potential lead you reach out to with untargeted content will ignore your messages. Even worse, if none of your outreach attempts are personalized specifically to serve your ideal clients, your salespeople will struggle to get any positive responses.

This is another huge mistake that’s partly caused by not identifying an ICP.

3. Not Following Up

Not getting any responses is often a harsh outcome, especially for your SDRs who spend most of their time planning and executing sales campaigns.

The truth is:

You should never take that personally because your potential clients probably get dozens of similar messages every day. Therefore, they’ve developed a natural talent for ignoring salespeople when they don’t see the value right away.

Besides:

It takes up to five follow-up attempts on average to finally get a response on sales messages. So any lead that you don’t follow up on is an abandoned prospect that you could’ve easily converted with some persistence.

4. Poor Cold Sales Strategies

It takes long years of experience for a sales team to get hold of the latest cold selling tricks and techniques. So on one end, it’s understandable if your SDRs aren’t delivering the best possible results they could.

But:

Despite cold emailing and cold calling being old sales techniques, they still work perfectly for experienced salespeople. In fact, top organizations around the world rely on these two strategies to land huge deals and increase profits.

So…

You should always strive to train your sales team to master cold calling and cold emailing. Work actively on improving your cold outreach using scripts. And teach your salespeople to handle objections with a positive attitude to turn any “no” into a “yes”.

Best Practices for Building Effective Sales Outreach Campaigns

To attain the objectives you set for your sales outreach campaign earlier, you need to equip your sales and marketing teams with the best strategies out there.

Here are 9 tips to skyrocket your sales outreach success:

1. Keep Your Content Short And On-Point

The first thing to keep in mind with email outreach is this:

Your target prospects are always busy with work. Moreover, they have dozens of emails in their inbox from strangers trying to sell them products and services.

So:

They will treat you like everyone else — unless you differentiate yourself from the crowd.

To stand out from the rest, you must keep your emails short and straight to the point — especially in your first outreach. Even if you have a lot of things to say, you should break down your message into multiple emails to keep prospects interested.

For example:

In the first email, you need to introduce yourself in a relevant manner to grab attention. Explain to each lead why you’re reaching out and how such an encounter could lead to amazing business opportunities for the two parties.

From there, you’ll keep following up with relevant details and content to nurture your leads and encourage them to take action.

2. Personalize Your Messaging

Personalization makes you look genuinely interested in helping your target leads. It also is a fundamental way to improve your sales outreach performance and encourage more leads to respond.

There are a variety of ways you can personalize your outreach and edge out your competitors. And it all depends on your knowledge of your target customers and the outreach channel you’re using.

Here are some of the best tips for personalizing emails, phone calls, and even LinkedIn messages:

Use the company name as well as the recipient’s name to refer to them in greetings and body text
Include personalized lines such as compliments or questions to engage your leads
Promote relevant content and solutions based on the prospect’s needs
Create structured templates and outreach sequences to save time and connect with more prospects
Automate your outreach efforts to improve efficiency
Use an industry-related language and vocabulary

3. Optimize Your Email Subject Lines

“Write better subject lines” is rarely good advice when we’re talking about email outreach. Because you already know your subject lines aren’t that good — but you’re not getting any practical tips on how to improve them.

First things first:

You need to understand why everyone is talking about subject lines whenever cold emailing is mentioned…

The subject line is the first thing your prospects will see when they get your email. So it’s the most important element of the whole email campaign. After all, if your emails aren’t getting opened, none of the awesome content you have inside will matter.

In short:

A captivating subject line can send your email open rates through the roof and get more people to respond to you.

To improve your sales email subject lines, you must establish a sense of scarcity and urgency. Simply because the question inside your target prospect’s mind always is: “why should I open this email?”

Your subject lines need to be unique and original. If you use a generic sentence from Google, there’s a high chance that others in your industry are doing the same. That’s the worst first impression you can leave on a prospective client.

Most importantly:

It’s impossible to tell which subject lines will work best on the majority of your prospects. Therefore, testing different versions and monitoring your open rates is crucial for choosing subject lines that work best for your company.

4. Help Them Take The Next Small Action

Here’s something that might shock you:

Most of the time, your target leads don’t even know that they’re interested. But even when they do, they may not always know what the next step should be.

Other times, they see something in your product or service and would love to learn more about it. Yet, they don’t want to show strong interest so they can avoid being forced into making a decision.

The solution?

Tell them exactly what to do…

Use calls-to-action (CTAs) repeatedly in your outreach to enhance decision-making and speed up the sales process. You’ll inspire your prospective clients to take little steps that get them closer to the final deal.

You’ll be surprised by how much you can improve your sales performance if you just ask.

Now:

While this is an outstanding solution for a lot of salespeople, you should only encourage your target leads to take small actions. That’s especially true when if your leads haven’t been well nurtured throughout the funnel.

For instance, you shouldn’t ask a lead in the awareness stage to make a purchase while they don’t understand what you’re offering. That will make you look desperate and can quickly push many quality prospects away.

6. Utilize Multiple Channels

There are a lot of mediums to use that can help you boost your sales outreach results. The most popular channels today are email, phone, direct mail, and LinkedIn.

The thing is:

While using a single medium might be easier, an omnichannel approach can maximize your outreach campaign results overnight. It’s the best way to maintain a seamless experience for each lead no matter where they are in the customer journey.

Now, let’s be honest…

There is no general rule as to which medium will work best for your organization. As long as you’re maintaining a consistent message with your targeted clients, your business will always win.

You should analyze your competition to see what your target audience uses the most. Be sure to also try out different approaches and automate the process to increase your chances of getting a response.

7. Improve Content Quality

Although content quality might seem trivial, it’s one of the most common reasons for outreach campaigns to fail.

Here’s why:

Content is created to help you nurture new leads effectively and capture attention. In fact, high-quality content is the best way to generate interest in your offers and market your company as a trustworthy business.

But what do people mean by content quality?

High-quality content is:

Engaging and easy to read
Highly valuable to the prospect
Relevant and industry-specific

The only way for your content to be effective is if it’s easy to consume and understand. Writing content in a complex language is unnecessary because the only thing your leads care about is solutions.

Also:

A content piece has to be rich with new information in order for it to leave an impression on potential clients. For example, an article that educates your leads on a specific solution will promote you as an authority in the industry.

Above all…

The emails, articles, infographics, case studies, white papers, or videos you share with prospects must always be relevant. You get very limited time with each interaction. So be sure to use that opportunity to deliver the right content to the right people.

8. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

The first thing your prospects see after receiving your message on LinkedIn is your profile. They want to know a few things about the person they’re interacting with behind the screen.

Therefore…

The best way to improve your sales outreach results on LinkedIn is by optimizing your profile.

Here are a few tips to help you do that:

Take a professional profile picture
Add a catchy, relevant headline
Write an optimized summary of your work history and mission
Update your work experience
Add company information
Grow your network organically
Share informational articles and unique posts

9. Revisit Your Campaign Objectives

Look…

Sometimes, the reason things don’t work isn’t because of your sales team’s inexperience or that you’re using the wrong techniques. It could simply be a result of setting irrelevant objectives or measuring the wrong KPIs from the start.

So ask yourself:

Am I focusing on the right goals? And do the KPIs I’m measuring reflect my success for those objectives?

It’s crucial to discuss the necessary steps your sales and marketing teams must take to accomplish your goals. You must also prioritize the metrics you’ll rely on to track your sales outreach progress based on importance.

This will help you keep your sales and marketing teams in perfect alignment throughout the sales cycle.

What is the best sales cadence?

“A 21-day sales cadence with 15 – 20 touchpoints is ideal for B2B outreach. To increase response rates and conversions, distribute those touchpoints through at least three sales channels, such as email, LinkedIn, and phone calls.“

Edd Young, Vice President of Operations

Customers Also Ask

What is a sales outreach campaign?
A sales outreach campaign converts prospects into paying customers by attracting, qualifying, and nurturing leads throughout the buyer’s journey.
Why is sales outreach important?
Without sales outreach, you will have to rely on referrals and inbound leads, which limits your ability to grow. A well-developed sales outreach strategy gives you more control over your revenue stream and the types of customers you convert.
How do you write a good outreach message?
Outreach messages should be pain-centric, addressing the root problem your ideal clients are facing and offering a solution. Dig deep, past the surface pain points, and drill down into the injustice of the circumstances. Paint a word picture for prospects detailing what life would be like on the other side of the purchasing decision. However, keep your messages short and sweet — between 125 and 200 words should do it.