A challenging and often frustrating aspect of B2B sales, prospecting demands a level of attention that can consume busy sales leaders and teams trying to close more deals.
But if you’re looking to meet (and sizably exceed) your sales goals this year, you most likely need to spend more time reaching out to potential clients.
Outsourcing Your B2B Prospecting
It’s hard to believe that prospecting, once ran from a little black book of numbers, has evolved into needing expensive CRMs, a variety of sales enablement tools, and extensive amounts of time to reach contacts.
Add on the proclaimed “Great Resignation” and you can bet contacts and prospects stored in your databases are becoming increasingly outdated, unorganized, and even harder to manage.
Stressed about leads?
You are not alone. More than 40% of salespeople reported that prospecting is the most challenging part of the sales process. That’s why so many sales leaders are choosing to outsource their prospecting and outbound marketing efforts to increase revenue.
Studies show organizations “who partner with other companies in the global business landscape” score higher in overall health and show higher profits than their counterparts. And according to a recent study by Accenture, companies with effective partner lead generation and coaching are 63% more likely to meet or exceed their set revenue goals.
For many B2B companies, this means outsourcing the entire process of prospecting, including, list building, data cleansing, cold calling, and appointment setting.
Picture This: You wake up with a calendar full of appointments with potential buyers who are excited about your solution.
You have all of the call notes, recordings, and real-time reports that prepare you with any necessary information to help close the deal.
You aren’t worried about no-shows – your appointments are all confirmed and rescheduled if needed. With no anxiety from the previous cold interaction, you are cool, calm, and relaxed on your sales call. You make a lifelong customer.
These are feelings our clients experience every day waking up with more qualified sales appointments on their calendars from outsourced prospecting. If you are looking to scale, break into a new market, or increase sales opportunities, outsourcing part or all of your sales processes can help you meet your goals.
An Extension of Your Internal Sales Team
If you are looking to outsource your B2B prospecting, it is important to find a partner who acts as an extension of your internal team and performs according to the standards, values, and goals of your company.
Communication is essential for proper alignment. Your partner should be walking you through their onboarding procedure, detailing all of the technical details, strategic elements, your offering, and script for your campaigns.
A standard onboarding process usually contains:
Once your campaign is up and running, your assigned Account Manager will act as the bridge between your internal sales team and your client SDRs that will be calling on your prospecting campaigns.
It is their responsibility to consistently refine your prospecting strategy, track performance, provide sales development advisory, and give the ultimate level of customer service.During this process, you might face some challenges associated with high expectations or low results.
You must be patient and trust in their expertise. This is a major reason why finding the right outsourced sales development partner that aligns with your company’s needs is critical for prospecting success.
Leveraging Their Expert Prospecting Tools
If you lead a B2B company, you know one of the hardest challenges is managing a sales pipeline full of quality contacts and prospects that are always changing.
Your internal sales team needs accurate contact information, targeting, and messaging to successfully identify prospects and nurture them down the funnel. And since 40%-70% of leads aren’t ready to purchase right away, you need to have a plan for keeping them engaged.
That means looking into expensive CRMs, sales enablement databases, prospect research tools, list-building resources, and reporting tools that can quickly diminish profits. Additionally, these tools normally require experience, knowledge, and talent across multiple disciplines to create an effective sales process and keep it running smoothly.
This can be an extremely time-consuming process for those handling these tasks in-house. Especially when there is so much information involved.
One study found that 9 in 10 companies use 2+ lead enrichment tools to learn more about prospects.
So, unfortunately, technology is an expensive (but necessary) investment for running a successful outbound prospecting campaign.
Your outsourcing partner already has an expensive sales tech stack that they can leverage in each stage of your sales process to further your prospecting efforts and keep your internal team aligned.
You can leverage their prospecting and sales development tech stack to:
- To Consistently Improve Your Results: With a constant pulse on the market, lead generation experts are always working to refine and improve results from client campaigns.
Real-time tracking, reporting, and campaign communications are an important part of aligning with your outsourced sales partner. After all, prospects aren’t giving up their information or sharing their problems, just because you asked them to. You need to be providing real value and an incentive to move forward. Experts are able to accomplish this best.
To consistently refine & improve messaging, your Account Manager should be working with you directly, being open and honest about campaign results.
- To Make Better Business Decisions: Businesses need to become hyper-focused on innovation, the quality of their product, and the satisfaction of their customers. This involves consistent and genuine conversations with consumers about their experiences and encouraging them to provide testimonials and leave reviews.
Your prospecting team knows that every market interaction is feedback and is able to continuously use this feedback loop of information to improve their strategy and help you make improved business strategies. Marketing departments love working with outsourced agencies that allow them to test messaging and find what resonates best with their target audiences.
Not taking advantage of this interaction means losing an opportunity to connect and build on what you’ve done right and improve on what we could do better.
- To Get Better Feedback: Cold calling, for example, is great for evaluating product-market fit because it gives you direct insight into the mind of your potential customers. Getting feedback can be tough, but working with an outsourced partner can make it easier.
Your outsourcing partner can spend more time focusing on discovery and learning more about how they use your product or service. They can also help you calculate your total addressable market, a metric that can provide critical insight into the growth and revenue potential of your new market.
- To Have Accurate, Clean & Compliant Data: It can be difficult to keep up with the latest rules in prospecting and outbound compliance. With an outsourced sales team, your risk is automatically reduced, knowing contacts are properly sourced and contacted with clean and compliant data.
Your outsourcing partner can run data scrubs that substantially reduce phone numbers that are either fake numbers (litigator numbers) or Do Not Call numbers that are fundamentally are not quality leads.
By eliminating these factors, the quality of targeted contact lists increases, enabling client SDRs to have more conversations, and in turn, can produce more appointments or next steps.
- To Properly Nurture & Follow Up: One major benefit of working with an outsourcing partner is that you never lose sight of an opportunity because prospects are followed until they become qualified leads, or they are determined not to be valuable.
For companies dealing with more complex purchasing decisions, outsourcing their nuturing and follow-up conversations helps keep sales cycles shorter and flowing more evenly.
- To Gain More Qualified Leads: You know what you do better than anyone. Lead generation experts also know their field better than anyone. They have a constant pulse on the market and constantly work to refine and improve capabilities and results from client campaigns.
Studies from a 2021 Sales Insights Lab report that 66.7% of sales reps only reached out to 250 people or less in a year. That’s certainly not going to fill your sales pipeline or give you more opportunities to position your brand in the marketplace.
When you outsource your prospecting and lead generation needs, you get more sales appointments with qualified prospects who understand what you are selling and how you can help them solve their problem.
You are able to get right to the decision-maker on your sales appointment, cutting time, resources, and costs. This allows your internal sales team to focus on building better relationships, closing more deals, and which activities bring in more revenue.
Successful sales leaders know the right outsourcing partner will complement their brand, cut expensive tech costs, support internal sales functions, and drive higher revenue.
