By: Holly Berrigan
Image Source: ThinkStock
When discussing sales initiatives, you typically hear about two distinct efforts: inbound sales and outbound sales.
Inbound is what every business wants to have: ample leads coming to them and fluidly converting into customers with a little hand-holding.
Outbound is the more difficult one to master, as farming and nurturing leads is time consuming and generally much less cost-effective than inbound.
When the inbound leads dry up, however, outbound becomes a necessity. So how do you make outbound sales a fruitful and fun endeavour? By focusing on targeted sales outreach.
Targeted Sales Outreach (TSO):
Targeted Sales Outreach, or TSO, is a term we've coined to represent the combination of inbound personification and outbound sales to scale and accelerate lead and revenue generation. TSO allows sales teams to achieve higher conversion rates than traditional outbound prospecting by combining an uber-targeted approach to prospect who will actually find value from your product or service. An example of a TSO process is as follows:
(Image by FullFunnel.co)
There are multiple moving parts in TSO that make it more effective than outbound:
- Identify (down to what coffee they like) who your targeted persona is
- Mine contacts that fit this persona
- Develop strategic content which hits on the pain points of this persona
- Distribute this content and targeted message (email, social, warm calls)
- Automate the nurturing of these leads
While this may read like common sense, most people simply come up with a list of companies that might be interesting and start emailing and dialing with the simple goal of trying to talk to someone there. However, without the persona based contact search and content, your outreach will likely fall on deaf ears and be considered spam.
The goal of this effort isn't to close over an email, but rather take what may appear to start out as outbound leads and guide them into the inbound journey.
The key takeaway here is to really think through who you want to talk to and why they would find value in talking to you before interacting. This approach, while taking more time and thought, leads to higher conversion rates overall.
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Holly Berrigan is Director of Accounts for FullFunnel and helps businesses gain traction. With a background in business development and international media, Holly enjoys creating and optimizing sales and marketing strategies. Fluent in Spanish, French, and Italian, Holly most enjoys training her golden retriever, Normando, in Spanish.