Your outbound sales funnel helps you take control of the sales process. Learn how it can help with everything from lead generation to shortening your cycle.
A funnel is a visual model of a buyer's journey from lead to customer. While there are numerous versions of it, it typically starts with an awareness stage and ends with action or the buyer becoming a customer and receiving their product or service. In the case of the outbound funnel, however, that starting point — awareness — begins with your sales team proactively reaching out to leads to induce awareness via channels like email, calls, and social media. In contrast, an inbound funnel attracts customers to a business through awareness activities like content marketing and advertising.
When you have a strong sales funnel, you gain a better understanding of your target audience and your customers. It leads to higher conversion rates, more direct targeting, improved customer experience, and more efficient allocation of resources. It also drives revenues, improves customer loyalty, and provides you with a competitive advantage.
Sales funnels can be broken up into multiple stages, usually between four and six. But no matter how you divide them up, they still focus on the same aspects of the buyer journey and your sales process.
Awareness. This is when customers become aware of your brand or products. In outbound sales, that's usually through cold outreach.
Interest: It's not enough for a prospect to be aware of your brand or product; they must also be interested in learning more about it. You can generate interest through compelling yet valuable content.
Desire: At this point, the prospect realizes they have a want, need, or pain point that requires a resolution, but they haven't yet determined that your specific product is the one they want. Outbound sales reps can use various nurturing techniques and incentives to help persuade them.
Action: This is when your customer is ready to make a purchase. Your goal is to make it as easy and as positive an experience for them as possible.
Loyalty: Loyalty isn't always a part of the sales funnel, and may not even be relevant to your industry, but you can include it if you like. This is the post-purchase attempt to retain a customer and encourage them to make repeat purchases.
Every sales team's path towards building an outbound funnel will probably look a little different based on factors like industry, market trends, and your target audience. However there are some steps that are fairly universal. Take a look at six of the most important ones.
When you want to raise awareness and generate interest in your products with the hope of eventually selling them, you have to find the right people to sell them to. That all starts with your target audience. You're not gonna convert people who aren't the right fit for your brand. Understanding your target audience can also help you craft more effective messaging.
Some best practices for defining your target audience include:
The messaging you send to your prospects and customers will largely depend on where they are in your sales funnel. For example, at the awareness or interest stages, you might record a demo of someone using your product and share it with your leads and prospects. By the time they reach the action stage, they've already determined that they need the product, so a demo might not do much to persuade them. At that point, you're focusing more on closing the deal. Rather than sending a demo, you might offer a discount code or some sort of package deal.
When you create an outbound sales campaign, you can reach your target audience through multiple channels. Email, cold calls, and social media are the most common. In order to choose the right one for your business, you must look at:
In many cases, you'll find that a multi-channel approach is best. It helps you reach a wider audience, improves the customer experience, and helps your business build trust and credibility. All of this can lead to higher conversion rates.
Personalizing your outbound outreach can be time-consuming, but it's usually worth it in the end. Personalized messaging is compelling, it improves metrics like open and click-through rates, and it enhances the customer experience. While you might not have time to sit and write a personal email to every single lead on your list, you can rely on segmenting to break your list of leads down into smaller groups and tailor your messaging to them.
You can segment them by various demographics like location, profession, industry, income level, or marital status. You can also use psychographics, like values, interests, and pain points. Some sales teams even segment leads by behaviors. For example, did they open your emails? Sign up for your email newsletter? Click on a link to a blog post that you sent them?
When you've completed all the previous steps, you can then begin your cold outreach campaigns through the various channels.
For email outreach, make sure you have compelling subject lines, a concise body, a clear CTA, and a value proposition. Avoid sounding too salesy. Focus on being authentic and offering solutions to leads' problems.
Cold calling can be difficult for many reps, but preparation is key. Make sure you have a script you can follow, but keep it flexible. You want to sound conversational, not robotic. It's also important to prepare yourself to handle any objections. When you notice the same objections over and over again, jot down some helpful responses you can use. Whatever happens, remain positive and show gratitude to the lead for their time.
Social media is the newer kid on the block when it comes to cold outreach, but it's proven to be an incredibly effective tool. LinkedIn is especially important for sales, particularly B2B. But no matter what platform you use, remember to optimize your own profile first to build credibility. Grow a following through organic activities, like sharing interesting and valuable content and engaging naturally with connections and followers.
Once you begin contacting leads through the various channels and putting your messaging out into the world, you'll want to track your performance continuously to see how it's working. Are prospects moving through your funnel towards the action stage or are they stalling at one of the previous stages?
You can do this by monitoring key metrics. Which metrics you use will depend on your campaigns. For example, if you're focused on email outreach, you'll want to stay on top of open rates to determine if leads are even entering the sales funnel at all or are they sending your emails to spam? If so, you'll need to try to determine why and make strategic adjustments. Perhaps your subject lines aren't strong enough or maybe you didn't define your target audience correctly.
But tracking your metrics isn't just a strategy for identifying challenges. It can also help you identify your strengths. When you see something that's working well for your team, you'll want to replicate it. It could be that one of your reps has high response rates when others don't. You'll want to find out what they're doing differently and figure out how the rest of your team can do it too.
If you follow those aforementioned steps, you're well on your way to building a strong outbound funnel. But there are a couple of additional things you can do to optimize it.
A/B testing is simply creating two versions of the same thing and implementing them simultaneously to see which one performs better. For example, you can send the same email to two groups of people, but Group A has a different subject line from Group B. You can take a look at your metrics — in this case, your open rates — to see which group was more likely to open the email based on the subject line. You can use this type of testing with everything from the type of CTA you use to the timing of your outreach efforts.
Another way to optimize your outbound funnel is to incorporate technology that automates some of the workflow for you. For example, a sales engagement platform might perform repetitive tasks like sending follow-up emails so that your sales reps don't have to remember to do so and they have more free time to focus on their strategies. You might use them to set up sequences or cadences, or you can set up triggers. For example, if a prospect clicks on a link in your email but doesn't engage any further, it might trigger the platform to send a follow-up email within 48 hours.
The outbound sales funnel represents the stages of your customers' buyer journey from the time they become aware of your brand or product until the time they hopefully make a purchase and beyond. Building a strong sales funnel can help speed up your sales cycle, increase conversion rates, and help you close more deals. To do this, you'll need to define your lead audience, craft compelling messaging, segment your leads, choose the right channels, execute outreach, and track and monitor campaign performance.
