Why Outbound Still Matters and How to Do It Better

Hi, guys, how you doing?

Welcome back to the podcast.

So it's a another week and we're going to talk about outbound sales strategy today because it's something that's a thing that's really close to my heart.

It's, as I said, I'm just finishing off a two week trip down to Rafi with my team here and one of the things I hear a lot about is about how do I do outbound, how do I go about winning new business?

So I want to share some thoughts today about how you can do that.

And I'm going to start by saying this.

People ask me, ask me the question a lot.

People say, oh, is it outbound dead?

Is it still the right thing to do?

You know what, what's the best way to approach this?

And many people actually think, oh, I don't know if I should do this or I don't know if I want to do this.

So the first thing I'm going to tell you is this.

You have a target to hit.

If you are not hitting your targets right now and leads are not coming to you, you need to go to them.

There's a saying I use with everyone I work with, which is if your ship is not coming in, you have to swim out to it.

And otherwise either that or you accept that you're not going to hit targets.

And the consequences of that are lots of things.

Sometimes if you're in a sales role, it can mean losing your job.

If you're in a business, it can mean not hitting targets and worst case, not bringing money in.

That can stop you from doing what you want to do and to live in the life that you want to live.

And so I, I think it's a real shame that more people don't think about this.

I speak to solar business owners and people that sort of want leads magically to appear on the tree and they don't.

And the reality is, if you don't know where to focus and where to generate business, then you never will generate business.

And you're relying on hope and expectation.

And hope's not a strategy I advocate.

So look, if you're thinking of starting an outbound strategy, what are the things you should do?

And here's the sort of steps I would take.

And there's sort of six steps that I think you should focus on.

And I do a course on this, a sales plan course.

You want to reach out.

How do we have a chat about what that looks like?

But the first thing I always encourage people to do when you're starting with a, a strategy here is to start with some, not just about volume.

I hear a lot of people go, I'm going to pick up the phone.

In fact, I had a client recently who, whose team would go, oh, I'm going to pick up the phone.

And it's like, okay, so who are you going to talk and why are they going to care about listening to you?

And we had a conversation for a while and basically the sales team were doing this activity and it was basically a waste of time for, for want of a better phrase, they were wasting their time because they were doing things that weren't, that were just basically what I call boxing in the dark.

They didn't have a clue what they were doing, where they were doing and how they were doing it.

So I always say to people, start with some clarity on who you are reaching out to, on why they should care before you even engage in any way, shape or form.

So who are these people and should they care about you and your outreach and outreach which is focused on you selling and pushing your services and saying, hey, we're, we're here.

Do you want to buy our stuff?

I think in some cases it can work if you're very much a transactional business, but if you're in a relationship sale or the sales cycle is longer, then it's a much harder thing to do.

So I encourage you to start firstly by, you get a bit of paper and just working out who, who you're reaching out to.

And, and the second point which leads on to that is to have what we call an ICP or an ideal customer profile.

So I'd like you to define who your ideal customer is.

What are their, what's their journey, what's their, their pain points.

I was doing some mentoring with a company at the moment with them, some of their, some of their team that are up and coming and with each one of them, I've talked them about, you know, in a competitive market you've got to be able to really understand your audience.

It was once told me to, told to me, get a PhD in your customers problems.

And so really thinking about the audience and what their journey is and what's triggering them is, is a massive, massively important thing to do when your target, when you're spraying and praying, your target and your outbound activity generally is more chance of failing than not.

I've got a guide that I've created on success rates for salespeople and if you look at the numbers, they're quite scary in terms of the average conversion from outrage activity to new business.

So it's something like in the region of 3% of total conversations you have will turn into customers.

And that's with a really quite targeted and focused approach because it is difficult to turn cold business, cold knees into, into.

Into one business.

But if you're just generalizing and just trying to go after everyone, then it's even harder.

So spend a little bit of time to write down, you know, the pain points.

I always say, pos follow pain.

So what are the pain points of your audience?

What are the challenges?

What are the things that are causing them to be concerned or to want to invest money or.

Or what impact is it having on their business?

What, what challenges do does the pain create?

And create a Persona.

And if you don't know what a Persona is or don't want, reach out to me, contact me at James White Sales.

Put a comment in this in the podcast outline or reach out to me and drop me a message in my team and we will send you an ideal customer profile document that when you complete it takes a bit of time, really gets you to understand your audience and who they are.

So I'm going to encourage you to really just think about the pain points and the challenges or the desires of your audience, not just what you think is what you offer.

And as I said to someone I worked with yesterday as well, be really honest with yourself.

There's a great book by Marcus Sheridan called they ask, you answer.

And what he does is that he.

He basically talks around how you need to really think about what's going on in the mind of your bar.

I always talk about sales and what we do is prospecting about, you know, put yourself in the, in, in the shoes of your buyer.

What are the thoughts going through their head around your service or the service from anyone else in your marketplace?

What are the things that are going through their mind?

And if you can't work those elements out or don't know those, then speak to some of your customers, maybe who are existing customers.

Ask them what are the biggest challenges they're facing.

What are the, you know, the things that are on their mind?

What are the things that keep them up awake at night?

You know, it's an old, you know, great way to look at what are the bleeding neck problems?

If your neck's bleeding, you got to fix that quickly.

If you don't fix it, you're dead.

So what are the bleeding neck problems for your audience?

And when you start to understand that and know that and don't Think like a buyer.

Then things become easier and people say, oh, it's hard.

I don't know my buyer, I don't know market.

You've got tools out there.

There are no AI tools that can help you understand the challenges.

If you go to, you know, chat CPT or anything like that and ask, you know, I sell to, you know, HR directors of X, Y of IT companies, put in there what the challenges are.

Do a Google search.

There are information and lots of details out there about the challenges of your audience.

And the more you understand that, the more you create a Persona, the more you can then try and craft a message that is going to turn that outbound approach into something more concrete.

So sorry to interrupt the podcast, but if you've got a sales issue at the moment that's really hacking you off, challenge me, I'll help you solve it.

Reach out to me.

Drop an email at hello Amesworth Business and I will help you solve your sales challenge.

There's not one I don't think I can't handle.

There's no sales issue that I can't resolve.

I've seen them all over my career.

I want to help you solve yours.

So reach out to me.

Let's make sure we handle your sales challenges and fix them so you can get back to smiling again.

Now back to the podcast.

So that's point number two in total.

Point number three is this.

I think too many people lead with a pitch and the problem is when you lead with a pitch rather than value, you are increasing the chance of your audience basically saying turn away and ignoring you.

And that's because no one actually buys your product or service because they want to buy your product or service.

They're buying it because it does something for them.

It gives them something, it gives them an outcome.

It gives them something that they can use.

And so when you, when you lead with a pitch, it's easy to turn off and say, I'm not interested in that because they just want to serve themselves.

Now in some cases it can work with a small, small proportion of, of people.

It can work.

And in some cases you can find that it will, will you.

You can be a bit more direct, some people, but invariably if you're trying to out do outreach activity now and you're going in with a high, I'd like to sell you our stuff.

This is what we do.

We are this company.

We are great.

We are.

Do we, we are this, we are that.

We.

Most people I think are going to ignore you.

Whereas if you go in with A what I call a value based approach where you're trying to help not sell and create some, open some doors with some education, then I think your chance of success do go up.

Not always straight away, but in time, but it goes up.

So an example of that might be when I go and talk to my audience, one of the things that I will do is I will talk to my audience and say to them and share some ideas on how their sales team are maybe not performing at the level they want them to or maybe, maybe I'll share about how their sales team don't have control of their numbers and therefore can I share some ideas on how they can increase their conversion rate at different stages.

All that does is it makes my prospects go, okay, this is quite useful, it's quite helpful and enables me to open the door.

So lead with a value.

You know, I have this, you know, say the saying, you know, show sales value before sales vanity.

So before you start saying how great you are and telling the world how you know, amazing you you are and what you can do for them, give them some value and insights.

And one of the things you need to do is accept that you might need to do that without getting anything in return.

And that's why outbound is tough and takes work and time because you have to sometimes knock on the door before you get a result.

I had, you know, and the way to see this a little bit is like, you know, sport.

You know, I interviewed a couple of cricketers that I sponsored a while back and Jamie and Craig Overton and they were telling me, you know, they, they expect to bowl 45 balls without getting a wicket.

They accept and understand that they're not going to get a wicket straight away at every ball, but they've got to do the work to get that and they trust the process.

So I'm going to say to you, you've got to trust the process.

By offering value and sharing things that helpful and then doing the other things that we're going to talk about in a moment, you're going to be able to increase your chance of getting some, some outreach.

But again like I say to you, response rates from even, just response rates even convert if the overall conversion rate is 2 to 3%.

Response rates can be 5 to 10%, maybe 15% in some case if you're doing it really well.

So understand that for every 100 people you speak to, 80 odd are going to leave you alone and not touch it, engage with you.

But if you can engage with 20 that are, then you're in a good position.

That's point number three.

Point number four is this.

I think that the, the way outbound prospecting is done now has to be done on a way which I will call personalization.

What do I mean by personalization?

So if you can personalize your or to your audience and talk about some stuff that's really unique to them, such as comment on a post or a real something that's changed in their role or, or a shift in their marketplace or something that's, that you've seen that's happened to them, then I think you're going to see a far greater increase of people wanting to at least engage or have a conversation, especially if you know that you've been able to help people in that industry in that space before.

Because if you can.

And again, one of the great ways to do this is to look at your existing customers and see who you work and be successful with and then engage with, you know, the similar types of people.

And what it does is when you're able to then, you know, talk about.

Actually, I understand the challenges you face, but congratulations on what you recently did there.

I saw that and thought it was great.

What you do is you, you bring people, you make people think that you're not just seeing them as another notch on the bed post, but you're actually keen to engage with them and support them and help them.

So try and personalize.

And, you know, a great way to also do that is a thing that I use is some printed cards.

I have some printed cards I will send to people just to be able to open up a conversation or say congratulations or say well done.

And little gestures like that can make a big difference.

And that leads me on to my point around, my next point around, you know, how to, how to, to engage in this is, is don't just focus on one channel.

I have people sometimes say to me, I've emailed people.

I'm like, okay, email's great.

But email people get hundreds of emails per day.

Your email is probably just gone to the bottom of the pile.

If you think that's the only route to success with them, you've got to, you've got to change things around.

So, you know, I think there are three or four different methods you can use.

You can use the phone.

Again, a lot of people don't know how to do that.

I'm maybe gonna do it.

I've done some podcasts on calling.

That's one thing.

You can use email as part of a mix.

You can use a social Media Strategy, whether it LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever, you can use video prospecting.

So video prospecting.

So using a tool like Loom or Vidyard enables you to do a video to help someone.

You can also do direct mail, which is, which is a good way, maybe even voice notes, which other people are starting to use.

So what you've got to try and do is to get into what I would, a cadence rhythm.

So work out your sales cycle and then be in a position where you can start to communicate with that person.

Let's say your sales cycle takes three months for you normally to find it to work with a customer.

Then start to engage every two weeks or every 10 days with that person with a personalized approach on issues that, you know, they face across multiple channels.

And suddenly they're going to see your name appearing in multiple areas and go, who is this person?

It's going to make them more likely to want to open up a conversation.

Now it can make them go, thanks very much, I'm not interested.

Go away.

And that's fine.

It happens.

But if you mix your channels up and become prevalent in lots of places, then it makes a difference.

And you need to make sure that your messages in those environments are also quite short and sharp and punchy.

I'm not going to go through everything today in the podcast around how to.

To do outbound activity.

Totally.

But so many people get it wrong by focusing, like I say, on what they do, rather than being able to share something that's of value.

A lot of people will ask for time, I think at first, you know, I get loads of people LinkedIn that message me and say, can I have some time?

I'm like, I don't even know you.

You're not in engagement.

I don't even know what you can offer me.

And yet you want me to give up my most precious asset.

No, I'm not going to do that.

So sharing guide, sharing resources, sharing cheat sheets, checklists, 1 pages.

Really great way of being able to build that value.

And if you do that across multiple channels, it can, can help.

Yeah.

So the next point is, is about consistency and discipline to do things on a regular basis.

And one of the biggest things that people get wrong with outbound is that they dip in and out of it.

And it doesn't work that way.

Outbound, I always say to people, generating new business is like going to the gym.

If you go to the gym and start doing it, but then stop and don't go for three months, you get unfit again and outbound is the same.

You've got to build what I would call regular daily disciplines for you to outbound to engage your people.

And if you outbound and engage your people in the right way on a consistent basis, day in, day out, even put, spend an hour a day on doing it the best top 1%.

I did a podcast a couple of weeks ago on the top 1% of sellers.

The top 1% of sellers will always prospect on a regular basis, daily basis because they know that they've always got to just keep the funnel fat at the top and keep adding new people in.

And when you actually do add new people in and have conversations, you become less desperate for the ones that are lower down your funnel to close because you just know that, okay, well, I've got other opportunities there.

I'm not stuck with one option.

And that will make a huge difference when it comes to the way which you approach things and the way we should do things with, with other people.

So really try and just have the daily discipline and consistency to engage.

I, I always say to people, my record is 19 times when I engage with a lady in my previous business, I engage with a time and time again sharing value, sharing insights.

And on the 19th time she came back and said, thanks very much for this, it's helpful.

Now is the time.

And it took around eight months, I think, to do it, but it was worth it in the end.

And, and then the final part of this, you know, how to approach outbound is to test and, and measure and to, to refine things, to send stuff out and to see how you get on.

You know, you can't improve what you measure.

And if you stand some communications out and those don't work, fine, try a different version.

Try and see which, which methods work best for you.

Try and see which methods maybe work best for your audience.

You've got to be able to engage with people rather than just being able to, and then measure what's working rather than just hope that one message or one email will work.

You know, when we create, you know, my team creates sales blueprints for people, we will always say, look, there's going to be a bit of work to do over a period of time.

We're not going to get this always right.

So you've just got to test and tweak things, except that things are going to take a little bit of time.

But accept that if you do that, then over a period of time you're going to get some results.

And like, as I say, this approach works.

It's Worked for people I engage with.

We generate leads and opportunities from having conversations, especially when you talk at the problems of the audience.

But you always have to remember, as I always say, this is going to take some time, it's going to take some work and it's going to take some effort.

So please don't think this is a simple click your fingers and you're going to be there.

So that's how I approach an outbound strategy.

By the way, if you think I'm wrong, I think I'm mad, think this isn't the right way to do it, then let me know.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

If you think there's a different route, if you think it's the route just to, to phone up 500 people a day and see how you get on, let me know.

I think there's better ways of doing it.

But hey, share your thoughts and let me know what you think.

But, yeah, if you want to achieve success over time and get results, you've got to understand that it's going to take work, it's going to take effort, and you're going to need to commit to doing it.

And if you don't, then don't be surprised when the results don't happen.

And if you're not sure how to do it or you're thinking, oh, I'm not sure where I'm going with this, then ask for help.

Ask for help with someone like me or someone else.

Just ask some help.

There are courses, there are materials, the guides available to help you do this more effectively.

In fact, I've actually got a prospecting guide which we'll put a link to so you can get access to this as well.

But you have to do it.

If you're not going to do it, don't be surprised if the results don't happen the way you want them to.

So I hope that's helped you give some outline on an outbound strategy to approach.

Yeah, try it.

Try and see what happens.

Let me know what you're doing.

And again, one of the things to think about, and I'm maybe going to cover this off in a proper, in a podcast itself, is people are afraid of the rejection or people saying stuff to them or whatever.

Just remember, you know, the end of the day, people aren't being personal to you.

They just, at that period of time, it's not right for them.

So just be brave, take some action, get on the front foot and do some things and see, you see what happens from there.

And he was born with a condition called sacral, I think it's called, which basically meant his legs and his spine didn't work.

And when he was three years old, his legs were amputated to the knees and yeah, he had to move around using his hands in his wheelchair.

And he was, he was bullied at his school, but he went on to basically become a.

An inspirational story.

And his challenge in his story is about overcoming adversity.

And this is a guy, you know, Spencer, who's had some of the worst times really that you can imagine.

You know, being double amputee is horrendous.

But he decided not to let his disability bother him and affect him and he's got on with his life and built an inspirational story.

So there you go.

Spencer west is today's inspirational story for the podcast.

I always think, as I always say to you, if you go through a tough time and you're thinking that life's bit crap, then remember you could be like someone like Spencer who overcame losing his legs to, to, to progress and to, to develop.

So, yeah, maybe use that as a story for you.

But that's it for this week.

As ever, thank you so much for listening.

If you enjoyed it, please let me know.

We're growing the podcast, you know, more and more and more people are downloading it.

Never before, which is fantastic news and I'm really keen to bring you more guests and people to help you achieve what you want to.

So, yeah, just thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and sharing the podcast with other people.

Let's get more people getting the sales success they want and if we can do that, we're all going to be in a good place and I'm certainly going to feel better.

That's why I do what I do this for.

So that's it for me.

Thank you so much.

Take care, guys.

Have a really week and see you soon.

Bye.

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