How to Craft A Sales Outreach Strategy That Wins Clients Faster

These are very exciting times for business owners — no matter the size and kind of your business, you have so many different tactics at your disposal to grow.

That also means that competition can be overwhelming, especially if you have an online brand. To reach and win clients faster than your competitors, you need to be at the right places, at the right time.

And that’s exactly what this article is about!

I’ll walk you through a step-by-step guide on crafting a robust sales outreach strategy for lead generation, packed with actionable advice and real-world examples.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or refining your approach, you’ll find valuable insights to help you connect effectively with potential clients.

Let’s dive in.

1. Set Clear Goals and KPIs: CRM Integration

Define Your Sales Goals

To evaluate how effective your sales outreach strategy really is, you need two things: clear sales goals, and a clear set of benchmarks, something to compare your performance to.

For example, you might set a short-term goal of “acquiring ten new clients each month”, tracked and managed through your CRM.

You can track your retention rate, turnover, return customers, and more, to see which metric you need to improve to reach a more long-term goal, such as “growing my revenue by 25%”.

This process ensures that your daily activities are structured to directly contribute to your broader, strategic objectives.

Pro tip: I love finding ways to simplify this process and to use automation whenever I can. If you’ve ever used a CRM tool like HubSpot, which I love, you can use their templates for goals!

goal template example

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Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Now that I have a clear goal, like landing 10 new customers per month, and I know I can use automation for some of the processes, I should also focus on specific metrics to track.

Defining your KPIs lets you adjust your daily efforts on the go. That means that if you notice that you’ve landed only 2 new clients by the end of week 2, you can take a close look at your KPIs to see where you have room for improvement.

This is where it pays to get more granular:

Let’s say you’re using LinkedIn as one of your outreach channels. You should keep an eye on metrics like your response rates, or the number of responses per 100 messages sent, and the percentage of those responses that convert into meetings.

Your sales teams and marketing teams can work together to see how you can optimize the overall engagement on your LinkedIn pages. That can mean adapting your content output, figuring out new pain points, and redefining your buyer personas.

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Analyzing the performance of your outreach efforts like social media, phone calls, and email campaigns, can help you course-correct in time to reach your short and long-term goals.

2. Understand Your Target Audience: Create your ​​Ideal Client Profile

Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Drumming up new business heavily depends on defining your ideal customer profile.

A few key data points to rely on for crafting your ICP:

  • Demographics: The statistical characteristics of a population such as age, gender, income, education, and occupation, which help identify and categorize groups within a market.
  • Psychographics: The psychological attributes of people, including attitudes, interests, values, lifestyles, and personality traits, used to understand motivations and preferences.
  • Behavior: The actions and decision-making processes of individuals or groups, such as purchasing habits, brand loyalty, product usage, and feedback, which provide insights into consumer patterns.

Let’s apply this for someone selling a SaaS product: you might want to consider factors such as company size, industry, decision-maker roles, and their technology adoption tendencies.

Instead of casting a wide net and hoping for the best, your sales strategy should aim for a smaller sample of people who are most likely to become your customers, based on your ICP. Knowing their pain points, you’ll be able to tell them how your SaaS tool fixes them, in measurable terms.

Keep in mind that people like numbers they can relate to. That means boiling it down to, for example, a sum of money your tool has helped a client save or make in a month of using your product.

Accurately defining your ICP ensures you’ll target the right market, with the right numbers, which is essential for achieving predictable and scalable revenue growth. You can use your ICP to create dedicated, audience-specific campaigns to reach the right prospects and not waste your time (and budget) on poor-fit market segments.

Research and Gather Insights

Getting to know your potential clients shouldn’t be a guessing game.

You might start out with one ICP, but you should keep an open mind and learn on the go. Every outreach channel and inbound strategy you use is an invaluable source of data about your prospects. This data can help you refine your ICP as well as your outreach tactics to fit your audience better.

For example, using LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to dive deep into the professional backgrounds and current roles of your prospects. This level of detail can reveal not just who your prospects are, but also what challenges they face and what solutions they might be receptive to.

I’ve found that integrating insights from LinkedIn can transform a standard sales outreach strategy into a highly personalized conversation starter. I believe that this isn’t just about landing sales — it’s about building relationships, as well as your own reputation.

To me, that is immeasurably more valuable than just landing another deal.

3. Gather and Use Data

Importance of Data in Outbound Sales Outreach

Ask your sales teams, and they’ll tell you: it would be downright impossible for them to close a single deal without data.

It’s crucial for building trust, nurturing leads, filling up your sales funnel with viable prospects, and boosting those conversion rates.

However, instead of raking up tons of data without a clear goal, here’s a breakdown I like to use for my salespeople and myself when defining my own sales outreach strategy:

Types of Data to Collect

  • Customer interaction data (emails, calls, meetings) — Think of this as your customer relationship “cheat sheet”. Data on previous emails, the ones that got ignored, and the ones that got interested replies, successful demos, missed meetings, it all helps you understand what works.
  • Behavioral data (website visits, content downloads) — This is your window into your customers’ actions, so you can finetune your content output, sponsored campaigns, and elevate sales engagement.  
  • Demographic and firmographic data — One without the other doesn’t really work. Combine the demographic data on your prospect with their info about the company they work for. That can help you tailor your outreach messages to fit their personal and professional ecosystem.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Be Sherlock Holmes! Data can serve as your clues from past and ongoing interactions to guide you to your ideal sales outreach strategy.

Of course you’ll use a call to action (CTA) that brings you the most interested replies in your outreach campaigns. The same goes for refining the sales pitches your sales professionals use — of course they should rely on the pitch that gets them the most booked calls and demos.

Collect and analyze all the data you can, to make better decisions in terms of where to invest your time and effort.

Data will show you behavior trends, it will reveal unwelcome outreach strategies, and point you towards the most successful sales outreach plan for each market segment.

Pro Tip: Applying data-driven decision making to your sales outreach strategy is an integral part of optimizing your sales funnel. By analyzing data from each stage of the funnel, you can identify where prospects drop off and which touchpoints are most effective at advancing leads. This approach not only enhances your understanding of the funnel dynamics but also helps in optimizing your strategies for better engagement and conversion rates.

4. Leverage Multiple Channels

Cold Email Outreach

In my experience, different outreach channels work best for different businesses. It’s often a mix of various options, and it’s up to you to discover the blend that will work for your company and your sales reps.

However, cold email outreach stands as one of the most useful options. It can not only help you develop qualified leads for your sales funnel, but also collect data for your marketing teams and your product team.

I’ve used cold emails as a source of exceptionally useful information for my marketers and developers to tweak their own processes.

If we go back to our imaginary SaaS product, the team developing said tool can benefit from information you’ve gathered through cold outreach.

They’ll learn what sort of pain points people want solved with this tool, and they’ll help your salespeople communicate that solution more effectively. In many ways, data collected through cold email can fuel your product management efforts, supporting your team’s testing and refining protocols over time.

Plus, your product managers know what your ideal customers expect from your tool. That knowledge can, in turn, fuel your cold email campaigns.

But let’s dive into the more practical side of sales emails.

  • Personalization — I’m all for sales automation, but cold emails need a personal touch if you want to improve your chances of getting a response. People can recognize worn-out email templates, and they often don’t bother responding.
  • Creating a compelling subject line — Test different options, but try short and simple options that are relevant to the email content, and longer options that are more descriptive. Find out which works better for you! Then, refine and repurpose, and you’ll get better open rates.
  • Structuring the email content — There are no hard and fast rules, but keep in mind that when you’re emailing someone who doesn’t know you, you don’t have much time to grab their attention. Be honest, direct, and test which part of your value proposition will get the most engagement. Pro tip: smaller, readable paragraphs tend to work better, usually because many people read their emails on mobile phones.
  • Using lead magnets — Freebies are always a great way to generate interest and engagement, and to build a bridge for a longer conversation. Offer case studies, free webinars, how-to guides, e-books. Here’s another chance to streamline with automation, specifically by setting up an automated webinar as your go-to lead magnet to feed into your cold campaigns. It can be a pre-recorded product demo, a case study breakdown, or a Q&A with your CEO. As long as your webinar is value-packed, your sales prospects will appreciate it.
  • Cold email for lead nurturing — Your sequences should have a follow-up message or two (sometimes even more), to keep your brand top of mind, and to provide extra bits of information they might find useful. There’s no need to abandon your cold sequence after one or two emails. Build strings of emails, but make sure people have a simple way to opt out.

LinkedIn Outreach

Why not use LinkedIn for what it is — a professional network meant to help people connect with other professionals who might bring them value.

I’ve used LinkedIn’s InMail for b2b sales instead of using email only. InMail lets you personalize your message even further, and tie into your email marketing campaigns and sales.

Another way you can amplify your LinkedIn reach is to embed your feed on your website to showcase your latest posts, using LinkedIn’s API. Alternatively, you can add screenshots with your articles for a less dynamic experience.

That way, people who visit your site might be more inclined to drop by your LN page and follow you there, too. If and when possible, you can add a link to your LinkedIn profile in your cold email outreach, and share your email address when you connect with people via InMail.

In any case, these two tactics should feed into each other for better, faster results.

Cold Calling and Voicemails

Thanks to a slew of data scraping tools and business contact databases, you can easily find phone numbers of various decision makers.

Cold calling can be a very successful outreach strategy, especially when you have a well-established reputation, and you are certain your offer is a strong fit for your prospect.

With that in mind, you might not always be able to reach people, and instead, you get voicemail.

Here’s a quick and easy template I’ve used a few times ahead of specific events to try and gauge the prospect’s interest:

“Hi [Name], this is [My Name] from [My Company]. I’m reaching out because I’m heading out to [Event] next month, and if you’re attending, I’d love the chance to meet up for a cup of coffee, learn more about your plans for the upcoming period and see if there’s any room for collaboration between our two companies. Please give me a call back when you can, I look forward to the chat.”

Social Media Direct Messaging

Outside of LinkedIn, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are wonderful places for businesses to connect with potential customers directly.

This goes both for b2b and b2c, although it might be more common for b2c brands to leverage these, while LinkedIn is better-suited for b2b.

This is where your customer data collecting efforts will shine! Based on past engagement, your ad click-through rates, comment history and more, you can pick which prospect to message and when.

You can use direct messages to offer: personalized messages, promotions, discounts, unique offers, limited-time offers, support, up-sells and cross-sells, and much more.

Here’s an example:

image showing instagram direct

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5. Utilize Automation Tools

Email Automation Software

To grow faster and more effectively, you definitely need to leverage automation, and emails are an excellent sales segment you can automate.

Tools like Apollo.io serve not just as your email database, but also as a great tool to automate email campaigns.

I like to have pre-written follow-up emails for a wide array of target groups, based specifically on their pain points and needs. Automating follow-ups is a simple way to reclaim a good chunk of your time and focus on prospects that have responded.

However, even if you automate follow-up email steps, make your message valuable to them, even if it’s just a short nudge to remind them of your previous email.

For example, the PS is a great place to add another call to action, such as:

“PS: Can I send you our latest product catalog?”

Or:

“PS: If you’re busy to set up a time to chat, would you like me to send over a one-pager with our services so you can review it internally?”

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Scraper

Quickly compiling customer data — like job title, industry, company size, contact information, and location — allows you to tailor your outreach efforts more precisely. As a result, you can engage with the right prospects without the manual effort of sifting through their profiles.

Evaboot, for example, lets you scrape LinkedIn Sales Navigator into searchable CSV files you can then use with your email outreach tools, and speed up the entire process even more.

Make sure that you only send emails and messages to verified contacts, as you want to keep your reputation safe for the long haul.

Automating Social Media

As you can imagine, a SaaS provider that specializes in social media automation excels at social media automation. Go figure! Of course, I’m talking about Hootsuite. If you check out their Instagram account, you’ll notice that they:

  • Regularly post top-notch content aligned with the rest of their content strategy
  • Make it easy for followers to find useful resources
  • Keep things organized
image showing hootsuite instagram account

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This level of consistent and strategic communication helps keep the brand at the forefront of customers’ minds and can lead to increased conversions and customer retention. The best part: you can automate most of it to speed things up.

6. Follow-Up Strategies

Timing and Frequency of Follow-Ups

In sales and marketing alike, timing makes all the difference. Make sure you’re keeping your brand front and center when you kick off any conversation, no matter the channel.

Send a thank-you note within a couple of days of your initial chat to keep things fresh, especially if you had a face-to-face meeting, online or in person. Then, if you haven’t heard back in a few more days, ping them again with a little something extra to rekindle their interest.

Spacing out these interactions properly should help you not overwhelm your prospects, but also give them additional reasons to engage.

Creating Value in Follow-Ups

Injecting value in your follow-ups makes your communication more than just a regular check-in.

A few valuable additions I like to use in my follow-ups:

  • Case studies
  • Whitepapers
  • Latest articles
  • Product updates
  • Personalized offers
  • Personalized discounts

7. Analyze and Refine Your Strategy

Tracking and Analyzing Results

Google Analytics and your preferred CRM tool will be your allies here. Keep track of any insights into how each of your campaigns are performing — email open rates, bounce/spam flags, subscribers, and of course, any meetings booked and deals closed.

Take it a step further and look for best-performing aspects of your outreach, so you can make changes where necessary.

Continuous Improvement

There are so many aspects of your sales process you can adjust, and that will help you improve your results and reach those goals we’ve mentioned at the start of this article.

One crucial way all brands use to improve performance is simple, measurable A/B testing. Clear winners, for example, better subject lines, higher interest generated from specific emails, and more responses to a specific LinkedIn message — they all help you advance.

Conclusion

Although everyone’s sales outreach strategy will bi unique, these are some of the most pivotal tactics you can use for reaching more people faster and closing deals.

Do you have any favorites that have never failed you so far? Share them in the comments, and of course, we’re always open for questions!

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