Why should you speed up your sales learning curve if you’re doing outbound?
Because if you don’t quickly figure out what you’re doing wrong, you’re going to lose out on sales.
So you need to know what’s working asap because once you know what works, you can scale on that.
This article is for founders or sales professionals who would like to boost sales starting as soon as this week. (Whether it’s Linkedin outreach or cold email to get more qualified leads every day.)
(But if you would like to skip the learning curve, hop on a free 15-minute strategy session with the founder of Salesbread.)
Tip 1: Interview your current BUYING customers
If you know why customers are buying your product or service, it will help you figure out exactly who your ideal target audience is.
You might have an idea of who that might be, but it’s important to dig deeper.
Ask your current paying customers these 6 questions:
1. What problem did you have?
Your client should paint a picture of what kept them up at night.
2. What was your company doing when you started looking for a solution?
This helps us figure out how to build a look-alike list of prospects to go after.
They might say something like “Oh we just hired our first sales rep.”
Or
“Oh, we just reached our first 20 000 monthly visit milestone..”
Whatever.
We are just trying to figure out why they called us.
3. What options did you consider?
This question helps us handle objections.
4. Where did you go to get help?
Did they reach out to other agencies, or go to Google? Social media platforms? Etc
5. Why did you buy from us?
This is not just a benefit, but also “why did our specific service match your company?”
By asking this question it also gives us insight into building the right list of prospects to reach out to.
6. What do you think of these outreach messages?
Have the company judge your Linkedin messages or cold emails.
Why?
Because this allows you to see whether your clients (or potential customers) would reply to your messages or not. This allows you to improve.
Tip 2: Hire the right employee OR work with a good agency
If you make a bad hire it can cost you time and money. You could try out a few salespeople (Maybe 2 or 3) Give them each a trial run, and see who performs the best.
Make sure that the employee knows your KPIs and that they have experience with lead generation.
For example, if your goal is to close 2 deals a week, (and previous employees have been able to do this) make sure that they know the drill.
By putting the right sales team in place productivity will scale.
We have a few articles on how to hire the right person for the job.
Another option is to work with a good Linkedin lead generation agency that has already helped a company like yours get new prospects.
Or (more importantly) work with an agency that has already cracked the audience that you are going after.
Whether it’s CMOS, CHROs at corporate or solo founders, work with an agency that has already gotten sales leads from these professionals.
By doing this you will shortcut the learning curve and scale quickly on your prospecting efforts.
SIDE NOTE:
Be wary of an agency that wants to lock you into a fixed-term contract.
Rather work with an agency that can teach you how to do outreach, and once you have enough leads and have learned how to do lead gen, you can bring the entire sales process in-house.
Salesbread doesn’t lock clients into contracts (our results get our clients to stay with us), and we even teach founders and sales teams how to do lead gen so that once you are finished working with us, you can build your own in-house sales team.
Tip 3: See what your competitors are doing
And no, we aren’t talking about corporate espionage…
But…
One of the best places to go when you are trying to upscale your sales is to see what your competitors are doing.
For example:
- Are they running Linkedin ads?
- Do they have an email list that their prospects can sign up to?
- Do they have an inbound marketing strategy?
- What’s their home page like on their website?
How are your competitors promoting their services?
Go through their marketing material. If they are paying a lot for ads, prioritize that for your company.
You’re looking for how they tell their story, what comes first, what’s excluded – Go there.
Tip 4: Chat with your existing Linkedin network
If you use Linkedin the right way, and you have built a profitable network of connections, you can reach out to these
Linkedin users to gain more leads. Specifically your 1st and 2nd degree network.
By doing this, it’s forcing you to do outreach for your company.
You could even ask professionals in your network how they do their outbound.
You could say that you’re new to the business, and do they have any advice? This also helps you to build relationships with people in a similar niche as you, or with prospects that you would eventually like to sell to.
Just start conversations with the right people.
Tip 5: Seek out qualitative feedback not closes
This means that instead of sending messages that are asking for a sale, like: “Should we talk about getting you set up with X solution?”, you should back way up in the sales conversation.
Instead, say:
“Hey, I want to find out where your company is at when it comes to Xyz?”
Or
“Jack, I’d love to learn how your {company name} is addressing this {pain point?}”
Just start conversations.
Don’t try to sell your product or service from the get-go.
You can mention what your company does for context so that the prospect knows where the conversation might be heading but never pitch a sale in your messages.
Tip 6: Seek rejection – You learn faster by getting rejected
When a prospect rejects your cold email, your Linkedin connection request, or even an inMail, view it as a good thing.
Why?
Because you learn faster by getting rejected, than by stone-cold silence. When you know what not to do, you figure out very quickly to stay away from that particular strategy.
Rejection gives you a chance to change your outreach message, or reevaluate your prospect list.
This could also potentially lead to an opportunity to engage with a prospect and ask why they rejected you. They might give you feedback and say your message was awful or that they only deal with XYZ, so your product isn’t a good fit for them.
Tip 7: Launch 2 micro-campaigns
Once you have followed the tips we have just shared and you are closer to launching your outreach campaign, you are going to launch 2 micro-campaigns to 2 different segments.
A micro campaign has just 1 follow-up, so there are just 2 touches.
For example, your connection request message and a follow-up message.
So you are going to write 4 different messages and send these messages to your 2 segments (in other words, your 2 different lists.)
See below:
There you have it…
If you want to speed up sales, follow the above tips or get on a free 15-minute strategy call with Salesbread, and let’s help you land 1 qualified lead a day.
