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What is Outbound Sales?

Outbound sales refers to sales teams who call leads generated by web forms, email subscriptions, or some other lead source. This can take the form of cold calls, where the lead hasn’t explicitly expressed their need for the service or product, or it can be following up with a customer who engaged with email advertisements sent out last week. The point of outbound sales is to be proactive, and use the information that leads generate in order to understand them better and make sure their needs are met. This article briefly introduces the types of outbound sales reps found in companies today, and the tools they use to optimize their productivity.

Types of Outbound Sales Reps

There are two important types of outbound salesmen/saleswomen. The first is Sales Development Reps, and they’re the ones primarily responsible for prospecting leads and creating promising opportunities for Account Executives. Sales Development Reps often use cold calls to engage their customers, but more modern approaches include social media and email engagement prior to calling.

The second type of outbound salesperson is a Lead Response Rep. These salespeople are responsible for engaging customers who have filled out a web form, asked for a quote, or otherwise expressed desire for the product or service your organization offers. Although they are responding to inbound sales engagement, it’s important that these salespeople are using outbound sales methodologies to keep the lead active. When dealing with B2B (business to business) prospects, following up is crucial. B2B sales pipelines are usually filled with more steps than ones dealing with regular customers, and involve more finessed engagement with one or more decision-makers.

Tools for Outbound Sales Reps

Auto Dialers

An Auto Dialer is a piece of software that manages long call lists, dialing out to several numbers at the same time to maximize the productivity of an outbound salesperson. These dialers often either play a prerecorded message (Auto Dialer) or connect the callee to an agent (Predictive Dialer), depending on the nature of the call. By providing agents with this software, sales teams can cover more leads within a given workday, and spend more time following up with qualified leads than prospecting them. Voicent’s dialer products go one step further to provide customer data, giving the call context to assist the agent in the call, or giving the prerecorded message a person touch by dynamically inserting CRM records into the message.

Click To Dial CRMs

Another way to engage your leads is to manually choose records to call using a CRM (Customer Relations Management software). This software gives the user the ability to see engagement history, products/services they’re interested in, and other insightful information that can help close the deal. By using a CRM, your sales teams can focus on the leads that have prerecorded data, while ignoring (or putting off) leads where data is limited or nonexistent.

Automated Workflow

An important facet of lead management is knowing how to get the most of customer/lead interactions with software and websites. By tracking the interactions customers have with your website, you can glean valuable information like what products or services they need, how big their organization or team is, and even how much they’re willing to spend. By using an automated workflow system that allows you to automatically log this information, Lead Response Reps can have a plethora of information to guide their interactions with the customer so that their offers are well-targeted and satisfy the customer’s needs.

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