What Tools Can I Use To Manage My Sales Outreach? — Part 3

Published in

Inside Revenue

10 min readAug 8, 2018

The Advanced Guide

In the Intermediate guide, I took you through some of the tools that drive sales outreach success, focusing on the actual outreach tools as well as Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM’s). If you need a refresher on the topics discussed in this article, click here to read “What Tools Can I Use To Manage My Sales Outreach? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”.

In this article, I will be taking you through some of the best practices that sales teams follow to ensure they are set up for success, as well as a few for the tricks and tips we recommend you can use to improve your efforts.

“Top salespeople are insatiable when it come to learning. Commit time every week for knowledge and skill development.” — Lee Salz ( Sales Management Expert, bestselling author “Hire Right, Higher Profits”) @SalesArchitects

What Should I Watch Out For When Using Sales Outreach Tools?

In this article I will cover:

#1 Sales Outreach Prospecting Tips

#2 Best Practices For Doing Sales Outreach Via LinkedIn

So let’s move along…

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#1 Sales Outreach Prospecting Tips

Lead generation efforts and getting enough high quality leads to fill your sales pipeline has, and always will be, an ongoing challenge. And although the marketing department is tasked with generating leads for sales teams to contact, it doesn’t mean that sales should stop doing their own sales prospecting efforts and simply wait for the leads to come pouring in.

Although inbound marketing and marketing automation goes a long way in helping generate good leads for businesses, sales still has to embrace the traditional way of prospecting and self-generate leads at the same time — this not only aids them in going after the leads they feel are the most important to their efforts, but helps them in gaining a deeper understanding of their prospects to maximize their chances for success.

Below Are 7 Sales Prospecting Tips

1. Book Time In Your Calendar To Prospect Every Day
Just as you would book a consistent time in your calendar for your workouts every day, it’s just as important to book a consistent time in your calendar to prospect every day. Since prospecting isn’t always the most fun of activities, booking this time with yourself will go a long way in ensuring that this activity happens on a regular basis.

2. Find And Focus On Your Target Market
There are different types of people, industries and company sizes.Take some time to find out what your ideal customer profile looks like and do some research in your own database to help you identify the type of prospects you should be targeting.

Who are your top five customers?
Who are your worst five customers?
Who are your most profitable customers?
Which ones are the least?

Create profiles for each of these groups. Don’t assume that just because a company is in your database that they fit your ideal customer profile.

Once you have done this homework, you can use both the profile and your existing company list to find other businesses which match these criteria — making your prospecting process a much easier one.

3. Actively Work Your Call Lists
You’ve got the warm call list and the warm lead list, and even a lost lead list. Prioritize each list and then take some time each day to call the people on your list. See where they are in their decision process.

Whether you call to touch base again in 6 weeks or 6 months — it’s all about keeping in touch with your prospects and ensure that your brand stays top of mind. By working the list consistently, you’ll be able to turn warm leads to warmer leads and then hot leads.

4. Ask For Referrals
Nothing is better than a happy customer, because happy customers spread the happy word.

In a 2003 Harvard Business review article, “The One Number You Need to Grow”, it was quoted that “the value of any one customer does not reside only in what that person buys. In these interconnected days, how your customers feel about you and what they are prepared to tell others about you can influence your revenues and profits just as much.”

The best time to ask for a referral is immediately after the sale is made because this is when the experience of the sale is still fresh in the customer’s mind. His enthusiasm, excitement and good will (if the experience was good) will show through.

It’s also important to keep in touch with your existing customers to ensure that they are still happy with your product/service, and with your company. Remember to send them a birthday greeting and follow their achievements to be able to refer back to relevant events in their lives to create new talking points that drive responses. Set up a sales meeting to just to say hello and see how things are going. You can also send them invitations to events, share white papers, and other content that you think would be valuable to them.

5. Build Your Social Media Presence
If you haven’t figured it out, social media is here and it’s growing like hotcakes. Let me share some social selling statistics with you:

There are more than 2.27 billion people online (doubled since 2007)
91% of online adults use social media regularly
80% of active internet users visit social networks and blogs (Source: AllTwitter)
57% of marketers acquired customers via blogging
Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors
44% acquired customers via Twitter
61% of global internet users research products online

If you’re in doubt of where to start, start easy and take baby steps. Create a profile on the social media sites which are important in your work. If you’re B2B, make sure you’re on LinkedIn. If you’re B2C, make sure your business is on Facebook. Don’t waste time being where your potential customers are not.

6. Send Great Content To Prospects
According to a survey by Corporate Visions, 80% of the sales and marketing professionals surveyed said that their demand generation efforts were ineffective. Only 20% said that their efforts were effective. When they were asked why their efforts were less than stellar, 37% answered that their content isn’t engaging or provocative while only 9% said that they didn’t have enough content.

60% of B2B marketing and sales professionals say their organization’s demand generation campaigns focus solely on their own company’s products, features, and services — rather than focusing on their customers’ pain points.

In short, this means quit sending out content that talks about how great you are and how great your company is. Give your prospect’s and customers value through your communication. Show that you understand where they are in the buying process, what their challenges are and provide knowledge, ideas and inspiration which moves them further in the buying process.

7. Follow Up, Follow Up, Follow Up
The fruits of your labor generally do not show up on the first contact. Moving a lead from lukewarm to hot requires hunkering down and doing some work. This means multiple phone calls, emails and other follow up activities to set up meetings, etc. It can be a challenge to manage all these activities and using the capabilities inside your CRM system will help to keep you on track.

5 Tips To Get The Most From Email Hunter

1. Find The Email Pattern Without Having To Guess It
Even if you don’t find your target’s email address directly with the domain search, a good way to proceed is to guess the email pattern (for example {first}.{last}@company.com). Good news: Email Hunter can find it for you.

If there are enough email addresses using the same pattern on a domain name, we automatically deduce and show it.

2. Get Email Addresses From A List Of Websites
Did you know you could make Email Hunter’s searches in bulk? Just click on “Bulk” in your dashboard and choose Bulk searches.

You can paste a list of domain names or upload a CSV file. Options let you limit the number of results per domain and filter by type (generic or personal email addresses). Then your list appears in your download page. When it’s complete, hit the download button to get the list of email addresses corresponding to your list of websites!

3. Dramatically Reduce Bounce Rates For A List Of Email Addresses

You will have far better results if you carefully qualifies your list of email addresses. Once you have carefully selected your list of companies, you can improve deliverability by filtering Email Hunter’s results.

The quick way is to filter the best email addresses in your export, for example only email addresses with at least 5 sources. The number of sources is a good indicator of the reliability of an email address.

But the ultimate way to guarantee deliverability, is to verify the email addresses. You can do it on Email Hunter using our Email Verification service. Just go to the bulk verification, upload you list, wait a few minutes and you’re done!

4. Get Email Addresses From A List Of First Names, Last Names And Companies
Uploading a file with names and companies to get personal email addresses isn’t available on Email Hunter yet. But this is already possible using the API.

Don’t worry, you don’t actually have to be a developer. You just need to know how to use Google Sheets. Hunter has created an official Add-on for Google Sheets.

After entering your secret API key, the Add-on let you enrich your data with email addresses.

5. Use Email Hunter From Anywhere
Email Hunter for Chrome will definitely save you even more time. Instead of filling the domain name to search email addresses, just press Email Hunter’s button in Chrome to get email addresses corresponding to the website you’re visiting.

#2 Best Practices For Doing Sales Outreach via LinkedIn

InMail, available through premium subscription, is LinkedIn’s internal messaging system. The power of InMail is that you can message any of LinkedIn’s 300+ million members without having a phone number, email address or mailing address and they don’t even have to be your connections.

Even with access to millions of people, it’s important to be strategic with your outreach in order to get the best ROI for your efforts. Many sales teams are using LinkedIn for prospecting and seeing a huge increase in opportunities

Below are five best practices to keep in mind when prospecting via LinkedIn.

1. Keep It Brief

Best-selling author and top sales strategist Jill Konrath uses the power of 3×3; no more than three paragraphs and no more than three sentences per paragraph. It’s very difficult to hold anyone’s attention much longer than that. Therefore, make your message clear and concise, conveying what you want to say in as few words as possible.

2. Make A Connection

Before reaching out to a prospect, read their LinkedIn profile to gain insights into who they are on a personal and professional level. Find out their interests and priorities and use them to craft a thoughtful, personalized message.

Maybe you’re both members of a sports group or they went to college in your hometown. Mention that personal connection as a way to build rapport. Prospects are significantly more likely to respond to your message when you reference a common connection.

Also, if possible, leverage your network to get an introduction, creating a warm lead from a cold one.

3. Make An Offer

Make it about them, not your product or service. To build relationships with prospects on LinkedIn start by offering them something of value. Share an article of interest to their industry or offer to introduce them to a contact that may help to further their business.

4. Provide A Call To Action

What do you want them to do after they read your message? Perhaps you’d like them to reply to request additional information, schedule a call, set up a demo or visit your website. Whatever it is, offer a clear call to action so that everyone is aware of the next step necessary to move the relationship forward.

5. Be Persistent

LinkedIn claims to have a high InMail response rate. In fact, they’re so confident that they back it up with a response guarantee — if you don’t get a response in seven days, they’ll credit your InMail back to you. Companies like InsideSales.com also back them up by reporting a 300% increase in response rates when they use InMail, over sending the exact same message via email.

However, if for some reason the lead doesn’t respond to your InMail message the first time, be sure to send a follow-up message or two over the next several weeks. You can set up contact reminders either through your CRM or by using the LinkedIn Contacts feature directly on the site.

According to a LinkedIn case study, National Bank of Canada achieved 400% ROI with LinkedIn Sales Solutions, while PayPal reportedly achieved 3000% ROI with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

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In this article set I have gone over multiple sales outreach tools that can help you with everything from finding your prospects to contacting them, and even how to monitor your sales outreach.

We are working to bring you more guides on tools used in sales and marketing, so come back and visit our publication, Inside Revenue, for the release of these articles and more.