Advice is everywhere in outbound sales.
Gurus, thought leaders, and reps regularly broadcast approaches, trends, or tactics as the next best magic bullet to generate outbound leads and close deals.
Cold calling? Just grab a phone list, use the latest script or approach, and call away.
Cold emailing? Just get an email list, use the latest template or approach, and email blast.
Easy, right?
While some sellers might find success with certain approaches, many replicate and fail to generate the same outcomes because they have different solutions, sales models, and markets.
B2B companies often rely too heavily on external advice. Instead, they should be spending the time needed to test their outreach and optimize for their specific selling situation.
To crack the puzzle to your particular market with outbound sales, it takes diligent research and continuous testing on what resonates with your target buyers.
1) Markets Constantly Change
There is no one answer on how to approach outbound prospecting, because buyer expectations, competitors, and market situations regularly change.
Modern buyers are digitally connected, fast-learning, and empowered throughout the buying process with instant access to community feedback, online reviews, and vendor landscapes.
This constant change means the performance of your cold emailing will degrade if you don’t stay up-to-date on how your market environment is transforming.
Regular market research and testing gives you visibility into what’s working, what’s overused by competitors, and how your buyers are evolving.
2) Outbound Sales Don’t Happen Overnight
Sellers often adopt advice or templates because they have unrealistic expectations for outbound sales. Many companies perceive outbound as a quick, magic bullet for closing customers.
This mindset prioritizes short-term tactics and approaches rather than a well-structured, long-term strategy for consistent outbound sales growth.
When the advice or templates don’t work or generate the performance they want, sellers with a short-term vision often abandon outbound sales altogether as ineffective.
Rather than kicking off an outbound lead generation campaign and giving it 30 days to pass or fail, you should regularly observe performance and iterate so you can improve sales outcomes.
Once you identify the right messaging, targeting, and follow-up game through your tests, you’ll start to gain traction and generate more consistency with outbound sales prospecting.
With a mindset devoted to long-term outbound success, you’ll have a better understanding of how your sales prospecting approaches fit into the overall outbound sales system.
3) Testing Makes Outbound Sales Measurable
A major challenge with outbound sales is the ability to compare the performance between different buyer personas, industries, channels, and messaging.
Without a clear understanding of your situation before you start, you’ll struggle to effectively measure performance and consistently identify improvements for your outbound sales program.
The solution is to seek clarity through a testing system.
In order to effectively test cold emails or cold calls, you need a well-structured process that can be trained, measured, and repeated.
By separating the performance data between one target market or approach and another, you’re able to analyze, hypothesize, and find what works for your company.
Conclusion
The difference between industry leaders and everyone else is in how effectively they can influence buyers and stay relevant.
Even the best outbound sales approach will become obsolete over time as new strategies, competitors, and buying behaviors emerge.
With an effective testing system for your outbound sales program, you’ll have more visibility over your performance and more control over the outcomes you produce.
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