Like natural resources, outbound sales prospecting with a channel like cold email is dictated by the number and type of qualified buyers available to you.
In less than 400 years, the American Buffalo population drastically dropped from 30M+ to hundreds because of how industry players approached the Buffalo hunting market.
Without an understanding of how to approach your market and prioritize leads, you risk creating an unsustainable outbound sales program.
Before you start cold email outreach, you should understand your buyers and build your outbound sales strategy in conjunction with research on your target markets.
Define Your Total Addressable Market
Your total addressable market (TAM) is the total qualified accounts and contactable leads available to you.
Some companies have thousands of buyers, while others only have hundreds.
Market size has a huge impact on your outbound sales strategy, so you need to make sure the time spent on prospecting and outreach volume makes sense for your markets.
Smaller Market Sizes
Sellers with limited markets have to spend more time and energy on fewer buyers.
For example, a company with 100 total buyers would have no problem finding the time to reach them all. However, how they spend their time on that outreach is the challenge.
With less buyers available, companies have to be more methodical, multi-threaded, and relevant with their outreach in order to successfully convert outbound sales.
To compete in scarcity, companies targeting smaller markets need personalization, account-based programs, and constant visibility into the lives of their buyers.
Larger Market Sizes
If you’re targeting a market with thousands or tens of thousands of buyers, then time is your enemy: each second spent on one lead takes time away from another lead.
For example, a company with 10,000 buyers could potentially reach out to all of them within a year. However, how much time they spend on each buyer is the challenge.
With more buyers available, companies have to be more efficient and scale their outbound outreach in order to reach new qualified buyers before their competitors.
To maximize reach over larger markets, companies need automation, great segmentation, and a prioritization strategy to keep you focused on the best buyers.
Competitive Markets
Market competition is a separate factor from market size.
Regardless of the number of buyers available, your success with outbound sales is impacted by your direct competitors, indirect competitors, and alternative solutions.
When buyers have more options to solve a problem, it’s much harder to stick out from the crowd and convince them that your solution is the best option.
However, it’s more than just the number of competitors and alternative solutions.
Equally important is how your solution compares to the other options on the market.
If your brand is unproven or your solution is undifferentiated, then you have to spend more time and energy on your outreach to get noticed by buyers.
To stay competitive, you should constantly be aware of how competitors or alternative solutions position themselves, sell to potential buyers, and compare to your brand.
Conclusion
The more research you can put into each lead, the better your cold emails will perform.
However, your outbound sales strategy is limited by the scale you can achieve.
Effective outbound prospecting is about productively using your time to generate sustainable pipeline growth for the specific markets you’re targeting.
With clarity on your market size and shape, you’ll have a clearer understanding of how to approach outbound sales prospecting to make it successful for your situation.
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