Best Outbound Lead Generation to Elevate Sales

Generating leads can make or break a B2B brand. Businesses in this space tend to compete with each other based on the number of leads they can generate to enhance their sales process. In the past, there were not many strategies for generating leads besides approaching potential leads in person.

However, much has changed now. Today, there are different categories of lead generation namely – outbound and inbound, which help facilitate different leads by organizing them categorically. Outbound lead generation is one such strategy that can help in acquiring potential leads to boost a business. However, what strategies must one apply for effective outbound lead generation? We will find out in the article below.

Let us first understand the general overview of outbound lead generation and what kind of leads it can generate.

What is Outbound Lead Generation?

Outbound lead generation is a method of reaching potential leads and customers who are unaware of your product/service. It incorporates outbound calling or other outbound lead generation tactics to connect with consumers who are oblivious about your product. Once generated, these leads are contacted to determine whether they are potential customers and can be onboarded in the sales funnel.

Multiple lead generation tools, communication methods, and strategies can be utilized for outbound lead generation. These strategies and tools include phone calls, social selling, email marketing, TV, direct mail, social media, and radio ads.

Your outbound lead generation strategies must answer the following questions about your product:

Once you answer these questions, you can then move forward with effective outbound strategies for your product.

Before we get to the strategies, let us look at the different steps that are required to decide on your go-to outbound lead generation process. 

Steps to Understand the Outbound Lead Generation Process

The outbound lead generation process is thorough and meticulous and requires careful filtering and sorting of different leads and options available to the sales and marketing teams. This process begins with identifying the target audience and ends with them being onboarded in the sales funnel. This is how outbound leads are acquired. 

Let us take a look at the different steps of this process, one by one:

1. Identify the Target Audience

The first step is to identify the target audience to begin outbound marketing. To do this, follow the pointers discussed below:

• Your sales team must prioritize spending time on the right leads and eliminate the wrong ones.
• Make sure that the team does not target the right audience with the wrong service/product.
• Determine that your sales team is on the right track and isn’t wasting any valuable time to generate potential leads.
• Categorize your target audience into smaller groups so that the sales team can be more strategic and pitch the best suitable products.

2. Identifying the Mediums to Reach Out

Now that you’ve gathered a list of potential leads, the next step is to set up communication mediums for reaching out to them. This is where sales cadence comes into the picture. Effective cadence enables you to engage with leads over time via mediums like calls, emails, social media, seminars, and much more. This results in a timely and regular way to lead nurturing.

Clodura.Ai can further help you take this up a notch by allowing you to set up customized and automated sequences across various platforms. This tool can also help you track factors like open/click rate, reply rate, bounce rate, etc. By tailoring your communication to the preferred channels of your prospects, you increase the chances of engagement and conversion.

3. Collecting Data through Leads

Once a list of potential leads is decided, the next step is to create a list of people genuinely interested in your product/service. These people will reveal data that sales reps can leverage to convert them into clients. Here are some notable pointers:

• These leads must fit your ICP (Identity Customer Profile).
• Your sales team can prospect these leads through outbound lead generation tools like Clodura.AI or Apollo.io, or even your businesses can outsource such activities to lead generation companies.

The data collected from these lead lists can then be improved with data enrichment. Clodura.AI provides CSV enrichment with 40+ data attributes that help enrich the existing lead lists and enhance them with extra data points making them more actionable.

Buying lead lists is another option. However, it is not generally recommended. Once you finish these outbound tactics, the sales teams have different lead lists they can contact to convert. 

4. Qualify Leads by Performing Outreach Strategies

After the lists are made, it is time for your outbound marketing team to start engaging with these leads. Simply follow the bullets below:

• Sales reps and sales development representatives connect through cold emails, calls, and other tactics to qualify them as potential customers.
• The sales professionals must be able to distinguish the sales-qualified leads from the ones that aren’t. 
• Acquire enough information from these leads by asking them qualified questions and matching their details to the set criteria in the sales teams’ Service-level Agreement (SLA). 

These suggestions will help you streamline your sales funnel and identify the leads that meet the criteria or fit the bill, termed Sales-qualified Leads (SQL). These SQLs are then onboarded to the sales pipeline. 

Clodura.AI provides a sales cadence that helps in performing automated outreach with AI that eliminates hours of manual effort to deliver the best results through refined email campaigns.

5. Identify the Channels of Outreach

Picking the best channels for effective outreach is crucial in outbound lead generation. The common channels in B2B include LinkedIn, emails, and even cold calls that can reel in high-quality prospects. 

The road to success is to target the channels where your audience is the most active. Different decision-makers prefer different modes of communication which is why companies utilize a multi-channle approach. 

6. Follow-Up and Nurture

Many leads won’t respond on the first visit. This is why regular follow-ups are necessary for these leads. Engage them with valuable content. 

Cold leads can be nurtured by sending them case studies, blogs and articles, and industry trends. The aim is to keep your product on top of their minds so it is the first thing they think of before making a decision.  

7. Track and Analyze

Tracking and monitoring your lead generation strategies and their impact can be vital for the marketing funnel. Track metrics like conversion rates, open rates, and response rates to see the strategies that work the best. 

CRM software can help in tracking leads via funnel during which analytics tools can offer insights into the efficiency of the strategy. Clodura.AI has 8+ CRM integrations along with sales analytics that helps in accomplishing both these things at the same time. 

Top 10 Effective Outbound Lead Generation Strategies 

Devising the right lead generation campaigns is something that all businesses try their best to get right. Since there is no one way of generating leads, it depends on the business and its target audience to determine which one suits them best. We will take a look at the top 10 best outbound methods to understand the different approaches businesses can take to meet their campaign goals:

1. Cold Calling

The most infamous tactic in outbound lead generation is cold calling, which has been around forever. It might not be the most scalable outreach, but it has several benefits, especially when coupled with decent sales intelligence software.

Since cold calling is quite personal, SDRs can learn a lot through a single call. However, cold calling is not as easy as one thinks. SDRs need to figure out the best times to call and understand effectively how to pitch the company’s product to a potential lead. This is where SDRs can target prospects from their lists and cold-call contacts to set up a meeting with them. 

The outbound sales team generally uses Sales Navigator to research their ideal customers for cold outreach. And to cater to this requirement effectively, Clodura.AI is one of the best sales intelligence platforms that can be utilized as a sales intelligence software. It consists of 600M+ contacts and 120M+ direct dials with an accuracy rate of 95% to help users choose from a large pool of contacts.

2. Cold Emailing

Similar to cold calls except the medium for approaching is email instead of phone. Cold emailing is more cost-effective and efficient than the former, as in terms of scalability, it is better. 

Moreover, it’s equally important to utilize cold emailing at customizable intervals with dynamic templates to keep your outreach campaign engaging. Clodura.AI handles cadence effortlessly. The systematic approach of this tool keeps your leads engaged throughout the sales process, and helps build a stronger pipeline. 

Make sure to engage with your prospects by interacting with them rather than simply selling your product/service in emails. While selling, focus on the respective benefits more than its features that can help that particular audience solve problems. 

Due to the convenience of sending emails through email marketing software, they can also be deleted and ignored easily. Make sure not to craft the email as ‘too intrusive’ as such emails can end up in the prospect’s spam folders due to their negative impression.

3. Social Selling

A B2B business can use social media channels to generate leads through engagement. Social media platforms can help acquire prospects, build relationships, and interact with potential leads. Social media marketing can also help achieve sales targets easily. 

When a business uses social media, it targets a larger pool of buyers. This is one of the best marketing strategies as it is highly scalable and budget-friendly. 

For B2B businesses, LinkedIn is the best social media platform for social selling within the industry. While other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok can be used to build brand value and awareness, LinkedIn can be used to develop targeted outreach strategies. 

4. Multi-Channel Outreach

Outbound lead generation involves multi-channel outreach, which implies that it can be done through multiple channels at once. Previously, sales reps found website CTAs with high conversion rates unreliable. They also found spending time on a prospect’s social media time-consuming. However, these are quite effective today, as outbound lead generation lies in between them. 

Besides the generic cold calling, sales reps can engage with social media connections, relevant content marketing resources, pre-targeted ads, email campaigns, and more. However, marketing teams need to be quick, as social media channels can change instantly. 

Some of the channels that prospects can be contacted on include:

• WhatsApp
• SlackConnect
• Videos

5. PPC Campaign

Paid advertising campaigns are one of the best ways to get your brand’s name in front of the targeted leads. This comes under the outbound strategy, as the user is not looking for your product or service. These campaigns target people who might not be aware of your brand. 

Pay-per-click advertising gives returns every time a user clicks on your online adverts. It can be a costly way of marketing for small businesses as it asks you to pay a certain sum of money to a host website. This is a famous way for B2B brands to market their products on social media.

PPC campaign marketers find it difficult to plan a campaign effectively. Researching and filtering out the proper PPC keywords, and organizing and grouping these keywords into the right campaign ad groups is no walk in the park. 

For the campaign to be successful, it needs to develop landing pages optimized to provide a seamless user experience to visitors and conduct a meticulous PPC audit. 

6. Content Syndication

Content syndication implies repurposing your own content on different websites. Syndicating your content means expanding it to a newer audience, which results in high-traffic conversion. It amplifies your reach and boosts traffic to your website. 

Businesses syndicate valuable content in different forms, like articles, blog posts, infographics, and videos. These forms provide valuable content to its readers for free through third-party websites. Online communities, such as Facebook and LinkedIn groups, subreddits, and forums, act as mediums for seamless distribution. 

7. LinkedIn Cold Outreach

As mentioned above, LinkedIn is one of the biggest platforms for B2B brands to market themselves. Cold LinkedIn outreach allows businesses to connect with potential prospects who match their target audience and send messages to address their issues. 

Personalized communication through the platform helps build relationships with potential leads and prospects. LinkedIn also provides analytics to track the progress of your campaigns, helping in lead generation.

Clodura.AI provides a free Chrome Extension that helps acquire emails directly through LinkedIn without having to copy the email address or manually search the lead’s profile. Hence, this increases the chances of lead prospecting and engagement directly through email communication. 

8. Multi-threading Stakeholders

Before, SDRs used to close a deal by sending cold emails to a single contact and closing on their buy-in as the main decision-maker. However, the rules have changed today. Deals are closed by involving multiple stakeholders in the bargain across several departments with different perspectives, needs, and concerns throughout the buying process.

Sales reps need to understand the key decision-makers in the purchase and try to convert them. These decision-makers will let you know the following things:

• The solution is in the works right now.
• How efficiently does it work?
• How can the solution be better?

Reps must also teach themselves how to talk to these stakeholders on their level. Their needs and motivations might completely differ from person to person.

9. Personal Branding

Personal branding is a relatively new strategy in the B2B industry. A personal brand, in this case, implies how sales reps market themselves and share certain skills, personalities, and experiences with the world. A good sales rep will positively influence public perception and enhance his/her visibility. 

A solid and reputable profile of a sales rep speaks volumes to the customer about his/her credibility and reliance within the industry. For reps, this can create a robust image of themselves in the market building a better network and gaining more buyers.

SDRs ensure that every section of their profile is complete and that their skills and credibility are visible to their audience. This is when they start publishing content and showing the world who they are, everything the company has to offer, and how can they make the buying process easier. 

10. Referral Marketing

This strategy is important for outbound lead generation. It is done through word-of-mouth suggestions from satisfied clients, partners, and other industry connections. Referral marketing also enhances brand awareness by reaching out to unexplored audiences. It finds individuals by filtering out the ones that do not match your ICP and keeping the ones that match your target audience. 

Furthermore, referred customers have a higher retention rate and are more loyal clients than non-referred ones. Hence, this kind of marketing can conveniently generate a sales-qualified lead and a marketing-qualified lead. 

This is how referral marketing helps in outbound lead generation by boosting brand awareness, fostering customer loyalty, and increasing one’s network of audience. 

Inbound vs Outbound Lead Generation

Outbound lead generation is something that helps in enhancing the sales funnel, however, how different can it be from inbound lead generation? 

Let us take a look at the table given below to understand the difference between inbound and outbound lead generation:

Both inbound and outbound lead generation are poles apart when it comes to the different approaches to generating leads. However, both methods provide effective lead generation that helps boost a company’s sales. Now that we understand the differences between these two, let’s look at the benefits of outbound lead generation.

Benefits of Outbound Lead Generation

The right strategies utilized by B2B or B2C tools outbound lead generation as impactful as inbound. There are quite a few benefits associated with outbound lead generation. Let us take a look at a few of them below:

• Builds Awareness Quickly – Paid advertising is one of the ways that helps in outbound lead generation. As opposed to social media, content marketing, and search engine optimization for inbound, paid advertising does more marketing than all of the three combined. Hence, it is one of the quickest forms of lead generation. 
• Tests and Reaches New Markets – Outbound lead generation allows you to display your product in front of markets that are oblivious to your existence. Every day your sales team can make hundreds of cold calls while your analytics team can track in real-time which strategies work and which ones don’t.
• Shortens Your Sales Cycle – Outbound lead generation is a great way to focus on leads who are ready to decide if they want to purchase your product or not. 

Find the Right Outbound Lead Generation Strategy for Your Business

Every business has its own which not only makes it unique among a sea of brands but also a worthy contender for competing for the top spot. This is why all the strategies can work for a few brands and some for others. 

It is up to the business owners to determine which ones are suitable for their business, as the more popular choice might not be fit for a niche B2B company. Hence, A/B testing different strategies over and over to gain a general overview of the ones that work exponentially better than the others helps a lot in finding the right outbound lead generation strategy for your business. 

Increase your Sales Funnel through Outbound Lead Generation

Increasing a company’s sales funnel through organic marketing can be frustrating and difficult to do. This is why people resort to outbound lead generation, which encourages push marketing on a large scale. Regardless of the results, it is not easy for companies to master the world of outbound lead generation.

Clodura.AI is an AI-driven sales prospecting tool that helps generate leads and plan outbound strategies. It has a database of more than 600M contacts and over 120M direct dials to reach them. It also has a free email address verification tool and efficient sales engagement software. This tool can eliminate your lead generation problems and boost a company’s sales funnel manyfold. 

Frequently Asked Questions on Outbound Lead Generation Strategies

1. How does data impact outbound lead generation? 

Outbound lead generation tools like Clodura.AI help organizations access all the data they require about a client. This improves their outbound strategies and opens up bigger opportunities. Data helps identify new areas for expanding your business, establish your total addressable market, and leverage buyer intent. 

2. How are inbound and outbound lead generation similar? 

Both of the above-mentioned types of lead generation are similar, as their goal is to generate and nurture leads and add them to increase the company’s sales funnel. They also focus on enhancing brand awareness and generating more website visitors to grow a business. Clodura.AI provides users with advanced sales engagement capabilities that will help them generate both these leads effortlessly.

3. What outbound lead generation strategies are good for small and large businesses? 

One of the best things about outbound lead generation is that businesses do not need to have a large budget to spend on outbound calls, sales prospecting, or marketing campaigns. Tools like Clodura.AI make it easier for all brands to apply all these things through a single platform as it provides not only these but also sales engagement and intelligence features.

4. How to automate outbound lead generation? 

Below are a few steps to automate outbound lead generation:

• Email automation
• CRM integration
• Personalization and customization
• Data collection and segmentation
• Workflow automation
• Analytics and optimization 

Clodura.AI is an AI-driven B2B lead generation platform that helps automate your outbound lead generation strategies. Its sales engagement tools and an extensive contact database library help in not only identifying the right leads but also segmenting them in an organized manner to facilitate lead generation.