In part one of our two-part piece on scaling your outbound sales process, we covered all the basics: The two essential prerequisites that must be in place before you get started and a detailed look at the five steps you need to take to get your program off the ground. In this part, you’ll learn what metrics you can use to determine success, an ideal (and affordable) tech stack to launch with, and some critical things to look out for.
Outbound sales metrics
So you’ve got a dedicated employee reaching out to prospects daily, some robust ICPs and a stellar email outreach campaign on autopilot. Now how do you know your outbound sales process is actually working?
It’s all about the metrics.
While every company will have different specifics based on size, industry, target buyers and other factors, here’s an idea of how you can develop your own metrics to measure your success.
In this scenario, let’s say you’re reaching out to 50 people per day, or 250 people per week. Of those 250, you should aim for at least 10 meetings or demoes booked per week. That works out to 4% meetings booked.
Of course, weekly measurements (and daily) will fluctuate, so expecting 40 meetings booked per month is reasonable. Whether those are spread out evenly through the days or weeks doesn’t matter as much as the numbers you’re seeing each month.
Assuming you’re reaching out to customers that are a good fit for your product, you can expect to create 20 opportunities from those 40 meetings. If your average contract value is $10,000 per year, that’s $200,000 opportunities generated in the pipeline every single month. And assuming you close about 25% of these opportunities (so 5 closes per month), you’ll see $50,000 in annual recurring revenue per month generated from your outbound sales efforts, or $600,000 for the year.
Your numbers might all be different (and they probably will be!), but this should give you a good idea of how beneficial having a dedicated outbound salesperson can be in terms of contributing to your bottom-line revenue.
Tech stack
There are a number of tools that you’ll need to incorporate into your outbound sales process to get it off the ground. Here’s a roundup of some of our favorites that you can grab for relatively cheap – altogether, these tools shouldn’t cost more than $250 or $300 per month.
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A contact details tool
If you’re using LinkedIn to find prospects (and you should be – it’s the largest, free database of professionals out there), you’ll notice that there is no native option to get their contact details. You’ll need to use a tool to get that info, which you can then plug into your email outreach tool.
Our top picks for contact details tools:
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An email nurture tool
There are many great tools out there to help you create email nurture campaigns. These are essential for outbound sales, because buyers typically require multiple touchpoints before they make a decision. By adding them to a nurture sequence, you’re more likely to be top-of-mind when they’re ready to make a purchase.
Our top picks for email nurture tools:
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A tool for additional criteria
The more information you have about any given prospect, the more likely you are to end up closing the sale. That’s why we recommend using a tool to get additional details about the prospects and companies you’re targeting, such as whether they are sending Facebook ads, or using a tool that your software is complimentary to.
Our top pick for additional criteria tool:
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A CRM
A customer relationship management tool is essential for inbound, but it also helps with outbound. Both sales teams should be talking to one another, and using a CRM can help avoid duplication of efforts or (embarrassingly) sending a cold email to a prospect that is already in an inbound nurture sequence.
Our top picks for CRMs:
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Bonus: LeadSift
Of course, we use our own tool for prospecting, too. In fact, we don’t need to spend hours each day scouring LinkedIn for leads: we use LeadSift to do the job for us, which enables our outbound salespeople to focus more on email nurturing and developing a more refined strategy.
Things to look out for
To wrap up our guide to scaling your outbound sales process, here are a few things you want to watch out for:
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Don’t resend emails to the same contact
Internal communication between salespeople, and between your sales and marketing departments, is essential for a well-oiled outbound program. Without it, you might find yourself sending multiple emails to the same contact. This happens when your salespeople don’t have visibility into each other’s pipelines.
Likewise, if your inbound and outbound teams don’t communicate, contacts who have filled out a form on your website might also be added to an outbound sales nurturing sequence – a big no-no, and a red flag to prospects.
We suggest synching up once a week with your inbound team and CRM to see if any contacts match those you’re prospecting to, and stop prospecting immediately.
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Normalize company names
Uncovering prospects through LinkedIn is great, but it does come with a caveat: often, your leads will come in with “odd” company, or even personal, names. They might work at IBM, for example, but their contact information will say “International Business Machines.”
This is one of the reasons why we suggest reaching out to 50 – and not 500! – prospects per day. It gives you the opportunity to normalize names and personalize emails.
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Don’t send emails at inappropriate times
Lastly, be sure to pay attention to the timing of your emails. You want to know the holidays in the timezones of each of your prospects, for instance, so that you don’t send an email while they are away. Similarly, sending emails at 3a.m. in your prospect’s timezone, which may be noon for you, is likely to backfire. You’re trying to send emails when they will be seen, read and responded to, so stick to appropriate hours. This is were an email scheduling tool comes in. Write emails now, schedule to be sent later for perfect timing
And that’s it! If you combine these tips with the steps outlined in part one of our outbound sales guide, you’ll have a fully functioning outbound sales process in no time. Good luck!