Friday, August 26, 2011

Business Benefits of Outbound Prospecting

Outbound qualification offers significant value to your marketing efforts by enabling your people to 
  1. Communicate directly with users and buyers
  2. Significantly grow your sales pipeline.
Create more sales and opportunities. The most direct result from outbound qualification is the greater number of qualified prospects you’ll give your salespeople, which will ultimately result in more sales. In most instances, these sales opportunities would not be created through other marketing channels.

Lower the marketing cost for customer acquisition. For many companies, the marketing cost of a closed sale is higher than the cost of a closed sale through an outbound prospecting program. If this is the case for your company, then you will lower the marketing cost of acquisition as you expand your outbound qualification efforts.

Reduce the sales cycle time and increase conversion rates for your entire business — not just the business created by your outbound program. When the results from outbound qualification are closely tracked and turned into insights, and you use those insights to generate and implement ideas for improvement, you can substantially increase your business overall. Using the insights you gain will enable you to improve in a number of areas.

For Example:
  • Find better and more specific target customer segments and roles where your product is most appealing. Constantly adjusting the target lists based on results will help you increase your conversions and refine your other marketing channel results as well.
  • Improve your competitive-advantage messaging and content. Direct conversations with cold prospects will dramatically improve your ability to figure out what messages and content resonate with them and what kind of information will turn them into warm prospects. You can use that information to improve your messaging and content throughout all other marketing channels as well.
  • Identify the most frequent buyer objections and figure out ways to overcome them; you can then incorporate those replies into your messaging and content to prevent or mitigate similar objections in the future. Outbound prospecting gives you the best opportunity to identify the reasons why your target prospects may not want to buy a product like yours, or your product in particular. This gives you the opportunity to craft your messages and content in a way that addresses the objections across all of your marketing channels