In this episode of the Selling in Asia podcast, Founder Tom Abbott sits down with Collin Stewart from the Predictable Revenue Podcast to discuss how to build an outbound sales team. As the Co-CEO of Predictable Revenue, Collin and his company specialize in setting up outbound sales teams for businesses. He’s a champion for ‘Salespeople shouldn’t prospect’. Instead, closers should close. Account managers should manage accounts. And prospectors should prospect.
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Outbound sales Vs. Inbound sales
First of all, let’s answer the question: what are outbound sales teams? Commonly referred to as inside sales teams, prospectors and even cold callers, they’re actually sales representatives – also often known as sales development reps (SDRs) or business development reps (BDRs), who reach out to cold or lukewarm contact and reaching out to establish a connection. On the other hand, inbound sales teams receive warm leads from various channels, particularly your content strategy and then pass these deals onto account executives.
So which approach is better to adopt and is more effective for business? The short answer is that they’re both necessary and complementary to each other. However, their differences lay in the simple fact that inbound sales are a long term process involving creating consistent content, allowing you to build a flow of leads. The only real downside is that you can’t pre-qualify your leads, making the process a little hit and miss.
On the flip side, outbound sales allow you to get results quickly. All you have to do is either call or email your pre-qualified prospect. However, it requires consistent effort to gain leads; otherwise, you will have absolutely none. For this reason, you need to combine the two sales approaches.
How to build an outbound sales team
You’re looking to level up your business with a dedicated outbound sales team, but how exactly do you build an outbound sales team? To help you get started, below are some considerations you need to make before hiring, training and implementing your outbound sales strategies.
Seperate your inbound and outbound sales teams
Inbound sales reps primarily fill the gap between the sales and marketing team. On the other hand, outbound sales reps are actively hunting and capturing leads. Therefore, it makes sense to keep the two entities separate, mainly because they both have different processes. If forced to work in tandem – you’re essentially just giving your sales reps too much to do, and they will often fail to juggle this workload, meaning that your outbound sales team is not high-functioning and as effective for revenue.
Organise your outbound sales team structure
Now that you understand that inbound and outbound sales teams need to be kept separate, you can begin to hire the necessary specialised roles and structure your team.
Sales Development Rep (SDR)
Sales Development Representatives are responsible for qualifying all leads at the initial stages of the sales funnel and are therefore required to research potential clients, connect with and educate prospects, and qualify leads before handing them off to the sales team’s closers. You’ll usually find Sales Development Reps helping to scale up start-ups looking to grow quickly or even when inbound leads aren’t enough to fill the pipeline.
Business Development Rep (BDR)
Business Development Representatives are laser-focused on the organization’s customer base and excel in producing Prospecting Strategies. The Business Development Rep’s goal is to identify prospects, initiate the first outreach with potential customers, book meetings, and fill the sales team’s pipelines.
Develop your outbound sales process
When establishing an outbound sales team, the first thing you should do is to build an outbound sales pipeline, particularly an outbound sales process that can be tweaked, tested, optimised, and scaled upwards in the future. These internal guidelines help to align your outbound sales team, keeping them on the same page when it comes to lead generation.
Market, Messaging, Channels & Tactics
Collin advises that building a successful outbound sales team is more than just finding great prospectors, sales development reps and closers. In fact, each factor in the outbound sales process is a multiplier (messaging, marketing, tactics and channels), and some can multiply to zero if you don’t do it right. Therefore, it’s not enough to just have a large market – you need a verifiable and documented way to put people who are most likely to convert into customers.
Upskill your most valuable resource
Employee training and development is proven to increase an employee’s job satisfaction and morale. Nothing is more demotivating than not having the skills to excel in one’s role. By providing corporate training for your personnel, you can develop their weaknesses into strengths. Ultimately, allowing for increased productivity, motivation and adoption of new technologies while reducing employee turnover.
Invest in your most valuable resource, your sales team – get them the training they deserve to excel with SOCO/.
Equip leaders to implement the SOCO/ Selling Methodology
Train your team in SOCO’s cutting-edge sales methodology, while saving time and maximising effectiveness through our SOCO Selling Train-The-Trainer program.
SOCO’s proprietary methodology is gleaned from decades of developing and delivering training for world-class companies across industries, around the globe.
Our Train-The-Trainer program includes everything your trainers and leaders need to easily implement an effective ‘digital first’ sales training system including an e-learning portal, workbooks, videos, and complete ‘Training Leader’ manuals.