Outbound Marketing

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Outbound Marketing is a technique for directly reaching out to prospects to generate interest in company products and services via email, phone, social media, web, and offline means.

Description

Outbound Marketing provides an individualized go-to-market approach to generating interest with prospective customers. Outbound is classified by a business initiating conversation, sending its message out to specific contacts at specific companies. Key principles of outbound marketing are to rigorously define target audiences, then pursue a multichannel approach towards engaging individually with prospects. Commonly used channels include email, phone, web, and social media platforms.

This multichannel approach is commonly referred to as a sales cadence, sequence, or wave. The term sales cadence was developed by SalesLoft as part of a 2014 product release. It is synonymous with the concept of reaching out to a given prospect multiple times across multiple channels in an orchestrated fashion.

Outbound Marketing is typically executed by Sales Development Representatives (SDR’s). SDR’s generally focus on opening conversations with key contacts at target accounts. It is common practice for SDR’s to complete a high volume of specific activities to prospects each day. The rise of the SDR role has coincided with the effectiveness of generating new business.

Compared with inbound marketing, outbound attempts to establish a direct relationship between company and customer.

Rise

With the rise of new technologies to organize specific sales activities, the spread of the internet, ubiquity of mobile phones, and introduction of the social graph to businesses, Outbound Marketing has become one of the most effective ways to land new customers.

Many credit the book Predictable Revenue, detailing the rise of Cold Calling 2.0 at Salesforce with the rise in popularity of Outbound Marketing. Since 2012 many companies now understand that to be successful, connecting with the right targets is the key to setting qualified appointments that lead to new business.

According to [1] Google Trends, the SDR role within sales departments didn’t even exist prior to 2011 in any meaningful way, but has now increased dramatically, showing hundreds of thousands of listing on popular job boards.

Cycle

Research

Rigorous sales research is the first step to start any Outbound cycle. This involves internally defining the personas who are a good fit for a company’s product or service. Following, external research to build an accurate lead list.

A company's targets must be well-chosen to have any direct message resonate. This is a very long process that suggests detailed planning, building lists of contacts and accounts.

Awareness

The second step involves raising awareness with contacts at target accounts. This process of generating demand involves a multichannel approach as most prospects are busy, distracted professionals who don’t necessarily prioritize outreach from businesses they don’t already know.

Engagement

The third step of the Outbound cycle is engagement. After creating customer awareness of the company and product/service, engaging the prospect with relevant messages leads to the beginning of a sales cycle, typically in the form of an appointment, meeting, demo, or similarly scheduled engagement.

Outbound method

To perform well, Outbound Marketing usually requires a number of tools that help an SDR perform the discrete actions that lead to awareness and engagement.

Combined with data analysis, auto dialers, research services and subscriptions, drip campaigns, email tracking, and Sales Engagement Platforms, this new approach is a mix of technology, process and people.

Templates

Most cadences rely on templates as the backbone of dialog between SDR and prospects. These are messages and scripts that can be further personalized to attract the interest of leads. Templates are based on popular behavioral psychology tendencies.

Templates form the backbone of drip sequences. They are geared towards recipients and are useful ways for businesses to create awareness and start conversations with new customers.

Multi-Channel

Given that prospects are able to be reached across multiple channels, most Outbound Marketing is designed to start conversations on any one of email, phone, web, or social channels. By running cadences across multiple channels, businesses boost the visibility of their offering by structuring messaging that most directly resonates with target prospects.

Email

Email is fundamental to Outbound Marketing. Most commonly, email approaches are one-to-one, a direct outreach from a prospector to a prospect. Email is an appropriate strategy to reach businesspeople given it’s ubiquity, reach, and access. It is important to know that volume of sends, SPAM compliance, and GDPR laws all affect email deliverability.

Phone

Sometimes referred to as “cold calling”, Outbound Marketing via phone calling is a prevalent method for connecting with prospects. Though viewed as potentially interruptive, direct phone calling is often the most effective method to reach decision-makers.

Web

The commonness of web pages and growing prevalence of chat as a method for establishing direct contact with prospects is a growing trend in Outbound Marketing. The immediacy of chat combined with the less personally invasive medium of the web may offer a better experience for dialogue to occur.

Social Media

Social media has spread the world over and is a huge opportunity for Outbound Marketing. With the ascendancy of the social graph on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, offer the ability for SDR’s pursuing Outbound Marketing strategies to initiate conversations on these sites. Referral networks are an important method for connection on social media sites.

Outbound Process

To work well, Outbound Marketing requires a process that, if respected, provides a large competitive advantage to other go-to-market strategies. The process is composed by four main steps Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. There is nothing random about use of these steps in specific sequence to obtain buy-in and permission from the process, ultimately leading toward the action of an appointment, meeting, or demo.

Awareness

An important differences between Inbound and Outbound Marketing is the fact that, “with Inbound you get what you get, while with outbound you get what you want.” This means that companies using Outbound Marketing know exactly the people they want to be talking with. They initiate the creation of buyer personas and target lead lists. These prospects reflect the concept of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

By focusing attention and efforts on the ICP, any awareness-generating activities are by definition a good use of business resources. Companies can get to know their ideal targets and which channels they have to use to reach them.

Interest

After raising awareness of target prospect, the next step in Outbound Marketing is to raise interest in having a conversation. As such, any messaging and value proposition must be relevant to the prospect to trigger a response.

Engagement rates are the most valuable metric for an SDR. They want to attract, rather than repel, or be ignored by prospects.

Desire

As such, Outbound Marketing tactics serve to create desire within the prospect. Tactics to achieve desire often take advantage of behavioral psychology, marketing content, promotional products, or something of value for the prospect so he/she will be glad to spend more time learning about the prospector and company. Desire is often translated as having an appealing Call-to-Action.

Action

The Call-to-Action is useful to spur the prospect to complete an action that advances the sale. Utilizing the direct activities that moved from awareness to interest to desire to culminate in the action of a meeting, appointment, or demo, Outbound Marketing creates a positive cycle that generates value both for both prospects and businesses.

The concept of distraction

Outbound Marketing takes into account a primary trend of the 21st Century: the rise of distraction. Traditional advertising is inescapable and relies on consumers taking actions to engage with businesses, leading to massive spending for attention, and overwhelming consumers. Many consumers have strategies to ignore, isolate, or tune-out advertisements, further distancing businesses from the traditional marketing goal of generating demand. Selective attention develops and is generally intensely self-centered. This leads to shorter attention spans, greater need for stimulus, direct interaction, and thus heavy competition for businesses. As such, increasingly the best way to reach distracted, self-interested prospects is through direct, Outbound Marketing means.

References

This article "Outbound Marketing" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Outbound Marketing. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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