Despite the growth of inbound marketing strategies, outbound calling campaigns still remain a strong and widely used sales tactic across industries. As the stats suggest, inbound organizations are almost 4 times as likely to rate their marketing strategy effectively. With a marketing automation platform acting as an invisible helping hand, it is quite possible for a salesperson to become a fanatic. What happens when the inbound marketing leads by sales development respondents fall short of fulfilling the lead quotas?
To meet the delta arising due to the gap between what inbound sales produce for your pipeline and where your targets lie, it is in the organization’s best interest to invest in an outbound sales campaign backed by Sales CRM Software. An outbound sales campaign will help the company in:
- Gathering target audience insights
- Improving brand awareness and recalls
- Maintaining a current sales database
- To generate leads and eventually greater sales
Implementation of effective planning and usage of Sales CRM Software in the outbound sales campaigns can result in a 50-60% increase in the outbound calls. Mentioned below are the top ten checklists for your sales team to turn your outbound sales endeavors into a successful campaign.
Planning
Adopting customer relations management software can help your business grow by managing the sales process right from the lead scoring to enlarging and enhancing long-term customer relations. By providing an overview of your projected sales, Sales CRM Software helps you plan outbound marketing campaigns and prepare for dips or increases in sales volumes.
You need to make your goals SMART – Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timely. Once the goals meet the criteria, they can be evaluated on the three most crucial metrics for the outbound sales campaigns- open rates, response rates, and close rates. While the first two rates are on a decline, your efforts should be towards keeping them at least 50-60% and 12-15%, respectively. Close rates should be at around 1% while having fluctuations under scrutiny.
Also, Sales CRM Software allows your SDRs to view the schedules of the field agents along with the potential of various territories so that right team members are at the right place at the right time, thus optimizing your team’s performance and concentrate their efforts in advance to incorporate efficiency.
Target Segmentation
By segmenting the target markets based on the demographics of the consumers, their generation, or geological locations, the marketers determine the potential product features and how to reach out to those segments. Sales CRM Software goes much farther than initial segmentation and target marketing because of SDRs’ extensive information. Using the databases from sales pipeline management software, CRM marketers can create promotions designed to meet specific customer needs and wants.
This further categorization and segmentation helps businesses in retention of customers and generating loyalty towards the brand. A typical Sales CRM Software promotion includes customer loyalty programs, personalized action between the customer and the sales respondents, and an ability to promote customer satisfaction by offering them what they might require the most. Here’s why you must combine customer segmentation with Sales CRM Software for the benefit of your brand:
- Analyze Patterns and Trends
While being an essential resource to your business’s sales team, Sales CRM Software harvests customer data for the marketing staff. Consequently, it helps them analyze and track the trends and patterns for effective segmentation of consumer databases.
- Determine the Lifetime Value of the leads
Sales CRM Software will help create predictive models that determine the profitable customers based upon the lifetime value or CLV they possess. CLV indicates the net worth of a relationship with a certain customer. Segmenting allows targeting different strategies to the high CLV and low CLV groups.
- Increase Sales
Sales CRM Software can boost sales by about 30%. When combined with customer segmentation, the platforms open doors to even more avenues of attracting effective results. A staggering 82% of the buyers will pay more for a better customer experience. The 23% who are fully engaged represent the premiums in revenues, relationship growth, and profitability.
Valid Email List
To have an effective outbound sales campaign, it is imperative that your data in the Sales CRM Software database is clean, current and consistent. But it can be a difficult task internally to have accurate data of your target accounts and the individuals you build at those accounts.
In the US, about 83% of the organizations have ranked email as their primary communication channel. That is why ensuring that you are sending the data and collecting it from accurate email addresses plays a crucial role in your outbound campaign’s success.
With the integration of data validation and email verification tools seamlessly into the Sales CRM Software, it becomes possible for your business team to verify the syntax, mail server, domain, and email address in your database. And since 78% have witnessed improvement in their campaigns by improving data quality, it is imperative that occasional maintenance to the email database within the Sales CRM Software is a fruitful use of your efforts and budget. There are three things that keep your database clean and tidy:
- Management of unsubscribes
- Keeping track of soft and hard bounce backs
- Surveying and learning from the un-opens.
With tools like Agile’s email finder, it becomes a hassle-free task even if you start from scratch and need the email address of potential prospects. The process helps your sales team create and nurture leads instead of spending their hours gathering contact information.
Campaign Setup
With an extensive CRM tools list, Agile’s campaign management feature set allows your sales team to create campaigns for a variety of different purposes. Built upon a simple drag and drop interface, the Sales CRM Tool helps you create campaigns that can be as complex or simple as you want them to be. The campaign nodes include wait steps, email sends, queries, and lead scores, determining how one step continues to another.
While 65% of the marketers consider generating leads and nurturing them as a challenge, Customer relation management software can effortlessly create complex, multichannel campaigns. With a comprehensive list of nodes to choose from, one can generate campaigns that leverage landing pages, web forms, social media posts, SMS text messaging, and email sends.
An integrated visual designer lets your business harness the power of segmentation by creating automated Sales CRM Software workflows that include sales, web engagement, and marketing. Once the campaign goes live, Sales CRM Software showcases every element of the campaign and its contribution to your outbound sales campaign’s goals. Integration of Sales CRM Software can deliver an ROI of $8.71 for every dollar spent, a metric showing a rising trend over the past years. Thus, the sales CRM programs help improve the bottom line of your business and help in closing more deals with automated nurture campaigns and full-cycle analytics.
Email Content – Text, Images & Videos
CRM email marketing includes strategies to keep the business clients and customers engaged and prevent them from exercising the unsubscribe option. This is achieved by using a customized approach towards the email content creation for the target needs and nurturing the relationship with them. Companies can personalize each contact, get to know their shopping behavior, and anticipate their actions while drafting content for them.
Customers are more likely to respond to short and sweet emails and get it right to the point by bringing in a personal touch. Building upon it, the inclusion of images and videos to showcase the products and their importance for certain prospects goes a long way in converting them into leads. This makes sure that they reply and are keen to receive emails from your business in the future. Sales CRM Software helps the company in doing so in the following way:
- Prepackaged & Custom Templates
Sales CRM Software provides you with a vast list of prepackaged email marketing templates to offer your business the visually appealing and aesthetic look and feel it needs. It also supports creating custom templates through a process that can be pulled with zero experience in programming. The functionality helps add up content with a great degree of customization according to the audience your business deals with at any given moment.
- Personalization
With the help of its targeted messages capabilities, Sales CRM Software makes it easy for your sales development respondents to personalize the emails by merging contact attributes into your messages. With a vast CRM tools list, it becomes easy to pull each recipient’s respective name, location, industry, and more into your emails for a personal touch that better engages contacts and prospects alike.
Email Subject Headlines
About 47% of the email recipients decide whether or not to open an email based on the subject line of it alone. That is why it becomes so crucial for your outbound sales campaign’s success to craft headlines that are compelling enough to drive your prospects to click through. The subject analysis tools can help you understand which subject lines offer the most open rates and eventually find the email content that works the best for you by generating analysis on emails with the best CTRs and response rates.
Keeping in mind the following while drafting a subject line will help you in getting the reader to open the mail and take team time to make the desired action:
- Keep the title short, ideally under 50 characters. Research indicates that subject lines with 6 to 10 words have the highest open rates at 21%.
- Avoid caps and exclamation marks to avoid being filtered out as spams.
- Certain words will trigger anti-spam filters, but the recipient will most likely ignore them if they make it past these gatekeepers. Try not to sell with your headlines.
The psychology of exclusivity is a powerful thing. When people feel like they are inside, it gives them a sense of belonging that could build loyalty and compel them to convert better on your emails. The right phrasing can make your recipients feel special, and the effect can be magical.
Responsive Test
Today, web development is not about one-size-fits-all solutions. It is about taking advantage of the opportunities presented by new technologies and using them to create meaningful experiences for your clients.
Moving forward, your outbound sales campaign will need to stand up to the responsive testing to ensure that the Sales CRM Software your business uses is capable enough to assure reliability to the sales team and the users. Therefore, To ensure conversion of prospects into leads once the traffic is incoming, the maintenance of the customer relations management software’s overall performance should be the utmost responsibility of the development team.
The responsive testing of the Sales CRM helps your business in the following ways:
- Responsive testing enhances the search engines’ overall performance quality, driving more significant traffic towards the company.
- It makes your software relevant across devices and platforms.
- It reduces the risk of costly system/application failures
According to a study by Econsultancy, 62% of companies that designed their websites to be mobile-friendly increased sales. Therefore, with the help of Sales CRM Software, You can specifically modify elements for different displays (mobile, tablet, laptop, desktop) so that you rest easy knowing that your customers are getting the best possible experience.
Drip Campaign setup
Sales CRM Software helps your SDRs move leads through the pipeline faster and increases conversion rates with powerful drip campaigns. These campaigns enable you to stay in touch with groups of people based on events like when a user signs up for an account or how often they visit your site.
Building up a drip sales campaign is easy but perfecting the content and driving leads down the pipeline requires practice, patience, and optimization. About 74% of the marketers consider converting leads as the top challenge for their outbound sales campaigns. Using Sales CRM Software, Marketers can quickly build automated campaigns to include targeted messaging, and salespeople can nurture prospects who are not yet sales-ready. As the prospects begin to respond, a relevant stream of messages will be sent, and a variety of automated actions can be triggered based on the prospect’s unique actions.
This triggered automated action can be launched in many ways when someone interacts with an email, submits a web form, completes a survey, registers for or attends an event, submits subscription preferences, or is added to or removed from a list. Furthermore, by using decision nodes, your sales team can even send the participants down the different paths based on specific criteria. From the segments that form, participants will move on to the next series of events only if they meet the decision node’s conditions. Thus, Sales CRM Software can help your business put the leads on a fast track, and engaging with them more effectively will convert more of those interactions into meaningful revenue for your business.
Reports
Although reporting language and capabilities vary from product to product, almost every Sales CRM Software provides some out-of-the-box reporting tools that cover the basics:
- Sales reporting (revenue, pipelines, goals, etc.)
- Campaign reporting (email, landing pages, lead sources)
- Customer reporting (buying patterns, demographics, profitability)
Agile Sales CRM Software’s reporting capabilities go well beyond traditional CRM reporting, providing drill-down metrics with cohort analysis, conversion reports, advanced analytics, and more. Sales teams can create their own custom reports using the criteria they want to dice, slice, and view the data exactly the way they require.
Also, the ability to schedule any report to automatically run at a set time and have the results delivered to your email inbox can help your team keep track of their movements along the needle with visual reports that show how your lead pool and customer base are growing over time. These reports play a vital role in examining the effectiveness of your outbound sales campaign as they let you drill down to understand what drives qualification and conversion for a specific cohort of leads.
A/B Test – Repeat
Running an A/B Test is quite easy, but carrying forward, you need to understand that it is not a Swiss knife on its own. The purpose of these tests is to evaluate landing pages to enhance lead conversions. But it will not go about fixing the problems with the product pricing, marketing campaigns, business operations, and measurement framework, etc. Instead, these tests will help give a push to your conversion rates by offering statistics in the results for different aspects of your outbound sales campaign in the Sales CRM Software. A/B tests are performed in order to improve:
- email opens
- clicks
- conversions
The first step in setting up an effective A/B test is to decide what you will test. While you may want to test more than one thing, it is important only to test one thing at a time to get accurate results. Something you might consider testing include:
- Call to action
- Subject line
- Testimonials to include
- The layout of the message
- Personalization
- Body text
- Headline
- Closing text
- Images
Each of those things is likely to affect different parts of the conversion process. The larger your test sample, the more accurate your results will be.
Conclusion
Building upon the grounds that the single most crucial factor in accelerating the growth of any business is leads- an unrelenting and continuous stream of qualified leads, your management needs to work towards setting up a funnel that encompasses not only the potential of making most of its high performing support team but also helps it in satisfying the revenue targets.
Integration of Sales CRM Software into your business’s outbound sales campaign propels leads through the sales funnel much more quickly, assuming they are nearly ready to buy. Moreover, the leads may be accurately hyper-targeted through lead scoring. Based upon the interest shown in your business, outbound calling can directly aid in building the sales pipeline. To get the most out of leads you generate, filter them through the scoring process and prioritize them for immediate results.
