Business

5 Tips for Running Successful B2B Cold Outreach

With a paltry 3 percent of people deeming salespeople trustworthy, selling continues to be tough today as it was two decades ago.

Not only are B2B products/services expensive, but the sales cycle is also complex and time-consuming as well. And let’s not forget the General Data Protection Regulation policies that restrict how you can reach target audiences.

So, how do you craft cold outreach campaigns that address consumer pain points and encourage engagement? Here are five tips worth considering:

  1. Define Your Target Audience

B2B Cold Outreach

With millions of B2Bs on the market today, you have an illimitable pool of potential customers worth talking to. But simply pulling out a list of numbers to cold-call doesn’t guarantee success.

If your strategy involves finding out during that first call if your offerings suit your target, you’re simply wasting resources.

And there’s the prospect to think about—if you manage to hook them only to realize deeper in that your offer doesn’t match them, the higher your loss will be. They won’t just be frustrated, but you’ll also lose their trust and they might not want to deal with you going forward.

Properly defining your ideal customers allows you to select those you want to approach with precision. And zero in on the truly promising leads. You’re better off targeting and nurturing five highly qualified leads rather than 15 or 20 companies that have no use for your products/services.

When defining your target audience consider the following:

  • Determine who needs your solutions and why. Jot down the paramount features your products/services contain and their benefits. Then think about the companies these benefits may help. Go into their psychographics to understand their values, drivers, purchase behavior, and which features and benefits hold the most appeal.
  • Analyze your existing customers. If you already have some customers, look for similarities in interests, characteristics, and business models. It will help you identify the most profitable customers and target prospects similar to them.
  • Research the competition. Pick three to five major competitors and look at whom they are targeting. The key is not to go after the same prospects but to see who they are overlooking. It will be easier to find success there.
  1. Determine the Right Decision Maker

B2B Cold Outreach

Nothing is more frustrating than getting on the call with the wrong first contact. 

The person may seem receptive and have you go into details leading you to believe your efforts are successful. Only for you to realize that they aren’t the right decision-maker and you’ll need to find the right one and repeat your pitch.

So, start by knowing your target industry and creating hyper-targeted contact lists. Similarities may be plenty, but it’s the subtle differences you’ll want to dig out to help you identify their decision-makers with greater precision.

Gather information about your target companies including their operations, internal structures, likely gatekeepers, and decision-makers.

Invest in technology as well. Tools such as ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and Salesforce may help accelerate your prospecting process by identifying decision-makers within your target industries. 

Don’t assume that a “C” in a title automatically means the person is your target decision-maker. 

In today’s business, C-level executives rarely make all the decisions by themselves. Many organizations form decision-making units that comprise a broad set of personalities.

You’ll need to tailor messages that showcase relevance, rationale, ROI and build relationships with these stakeholders.

  1. Pay Attention to Your Conversation Starters

 

Did you know that up to 45 percent of B2B buyers look forward to hearing new ideas at the beginning of a sales call? Buyers crave personalization and unique approaches to their problems. 

You probably won’t strike a deal if your pitch sounds unfriendly and detached from their reality.

Your conversation starters need to demonstrate an understanding of your target company’s needs. Based on your discussion, you can point to the unique benefits that suit their needs—benefits whose usefulness the listener can discern quickly.

Trigger events are great conversation starters. Through marketing intelligence or social media announcements, you can learn about upcoming events like expansions, mergers, etc, that open opportunities for partnership. You can use this info to initiate conversations.

  1. Document Your Process

B2B Cold Outreach

Committing your processes to memory or using an excel spreadsheet is no good for long-term success. You’ll need a well-maintained CRM system for that. 

When your sales process is fragmented and spread across different databases, it makes it tough for new sales teams to understand your system of operations. 

Similarly, your team’s productivity may come to a halt when a member leaves, since no one “understands” how the person did things.

With a CRM system, you have a properly-documented and repeatable sales process that follows a consistent method to nurture and transform leads into sales. All documents are stored centrally and can be accessed by the sales team for clarity, continuity, and unity.

While a cold outreach may not succeed right away, it doesn’t mean the lead was an unsuitable customer. It may be that the timing was wrong or the specific need didn’t exist at the time but is foreseeable.

Documenting your processes grants you the history of potential customers with notes and observations from previous interactions. Your team can refer to these interactions to refine their messages when reaching out to them again.

In addition, proper documentation ensures your team doesn’t contact different people within the same organization simultaneously. It also minimizes trivial but unpleasant mistakes, like asking for the same info repeatedly or approaching a lead too soon following rejection. 

  1. Use Intelligent Technology

B2B Cold Outreach

It’s not a matter of investing in a bunch of random platforms and hoping they work. Rather, it’s about ensuring each tool meets your needs and integrates with existing tech to improve overall performance.

We recommend starting with a CRM system and then adding other tools as needed. The CRM system helps streamline workflows and increases conversions.

Interfacing the CRM with sales intelligence allows it to compare present data against updated online sources to identify and correct errors and improve lead qualification. It also improves strategic contacting by automatically researching online information for sales triggers.

Data scraping tools share valuable demographical information, like names and titles, email addresses, and employee size in target companies for campaign optimization. 

You can then use your email automation tool to reach out to these leads and wow them with your unique selling points.

There are a couple of main reasons here: the thousand times cheaper price tags which they come for. And the second most important is about how hard it is to distinguish it from the genuine.Nowadays working on your look replica rolex is very important considering the fact that it constitutes the image you present to people around you. Sporting your time piece expresses a certain level of imagination and good taste. Taking that point into consideration, nothing can stand against it so that’s why people figured out a way to compensate the need at lower prices.
dekhnews