How often do you stare at your screen, searching for the perfect words to grab your customers’ attention—only to feel like a small voice in a sea of vendors battling for air time? The standard sales playbook isn’t cutting it anymore, and you know it.
A well-crafted sales outreach strategy can break through the chaos, amplifying your message and connecting with the right people when they need it most.
Explore this guide to learn how to build a successful outreach strategy and leverage tools to maximize your chances of a successful deal.
Elements of a successful sales outreach strategy
A successful sales outreach strategy has many moving parts, but all of them work toward the same goal: to find the right people and convert them to your product. Regardless of which channels you use or what type of people you’re looking for, all good sales outreach strategies share some common elements.
Curated leads
Many people say prospecting is the first step of the sales process, but Salesforce argues it should be customer research. If you take a scattershot approach to outbound sales, you’ll waste time and resources fighting for clients who aren’t even the right fit for your product.
An effective sales outreach strategy is targeted. You know the type of person you want to contact, their pain points, and their unique needs, allowing you to personalize your outreach efforts.
To find the right leads and build a sales pipeline, start with insights on successful past customers pulled from your CRM. You can also compare prospects to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). According to Sales Insights Lab, at least 50% of prospects aren’t a good fit for your product, so a buyer persona or ICP is a valuable tool for separating the wheat from the chaff and finding your target audience.
Meaningful personalization
Personalization is essential for a good sales outreach strategy. The prospects you contact aren’t interested in you yet. You must find a way to catch their eye through the sea of ads and messages demanding daily attention. Personalization is the best way to engage prospective customers and show them why your product is worth their time.
But even though personalization is important, it can’t be sloppy or overdone. Details like the prospect’s name are great, but be careful about adding too much random information, such as titles, company names, and locations. These details change frequently, and one inaccurate piece of information can cost you considerable credibility.
AI-powered tools like Loom make personalization easier and more natural. Loom’s Variables feature lets you add specific personalized elements to prerecorded videos so you can connect with prospects without overdoing it.
Non-salesy language
Some sales reps think product details are the key to successful sales outreach. If you can list all the features that make your product great, prospects will surely jump on board, right?
Wrong. Listing too many product features early in the conversation can make you seem spammy. In fact, top-performing sales reps list fewer product features than lower-performing ones.
Avoid promotional language or an aggressive call to action early in the conversation with prospective customers. You should lead with short, snappy messages that spark their interest and make them want to keep talking to you. The product spec sheets will come later.
Effective lead magnets
For cold outreach—such as emails, social media messages, or videos—you need to offer compelling lead magnets.
Lead magnets are a resource or incentive that offers value to customers without requiring them to do much to get it. Lead magnets include a few obvious options:
Templates
ebooks
White papers
To get more creative with lead magnets, you can offer assets like free courses, usable data, or free software trials. The most important point is that it gives something valuable to the customer in exchange for them continuing to interact with you.
Buyers like to do their own research. In fact, for inbound sales, 96% of prospects have done their own research before speaking with a sales rep. So, providing prospects with a resource they can use to investigate your product before they’re pressured to buy it can be valuable.
Keep in mind that lead magnets should be as friction-free as possible. Don’t require customers to complete a 12-step form and give you their credit card information. Asking for a simple email reply or just a few pieces of information should suffice, and you can still use those details to start retargeting and nurturing those leads.
Strategic follow-up
It takes about eight touchpoints within a sales cadence for a prospect to agree to a meeting, so efforts like drip campaigns and follow-up emails are essential to a successful sales outreach strategy.
Once you have established an ongoing conversation with a prospect, you can progress to multimedia follow-up messages. Use sales video software like Loom to create custom videos for product demos, presentations, and FAQs.
Loom lets you record both your screen and your webcam so prospects can see that you’re a real person. You can also use Loom to automatically remove silences in videos or filler words like “umm,” so every message is polished and professional.
5 steps to building a sales outreach strategy
Every sales outreach strategy will look a bit different, but regardless of your product or your customers, there are five basic steps you’ll want to follow as you get started.
1. Gather leads and clean up data
Before deciding which leads to target, you have to generate a list of leads to start with.
There are many ways you can go about collecting leads, including:
Lead generation software
Referrals from existing customers
Contact details data scraping tools
Events
Sales professionals tend to undervalue customer referrals as a lead-generation tactic or simply fear rejection. Even though more than 90% of customers are willing to give a referral, only 11% of salespeople request them.
Beyond referrals, high-quality leads frequently come from lead-generation software and business intelligence platforms. However, these solutions can be costly, especially for new businesses.
For a cheaper option, you can use data scraping tools like Octoparse or FindThatLead to gather prospects’ information from sites like LinkedIn.
No matter where your lead lists come from, you’ll want to clean the data before you start outreach efforts. For example, email verification tools can help you eliminate broken email addresses. AI tools like ChatGPT can also help analyze your final lists.
2. Select which channels to use
Your sales outreach strategy will differ depending on which channels you want to include. Here are a few of the most common options:
Email
Social media
Live chat
Phone calls
Events
Live chat and phone calls work better for inbound sales than outbound ones. Customers are very familiar with cold calling and tend to reject it out of hand.
Cold email outreach and social media are better options for outbound sales.
After establishing initial contact, you’ll also want to expand your reach into other channels. For example, you might first reach out to a customer through email but then include LinkedIn outreach in your retargeting efforts.
3. Create personalized communications
Be very intentional with your customer communication designs, including personalization elements. Sales outreach messaging should avoid overly promotional or “salesy” language until you’ve established a rapport with the prospective customer.
For your first couple of messages, you should have three main goals:
Don’t annoy the prospect or give them a reason to mark you as spam
Give the prospect something intriguing that will spark their interest
Overcome sales objections
Especially for cold email outreach, you’ll want to start with text-only messages to increase successful delivery rates. However, once a customer responds or interacts, you can progress to more engaging images and videos made with tools like Loom.
You can embed Loom videos directly into emails and social media messaging so customers can view them without leaving the channel.
Generative AI tools can also help you create outreach messaging, but use them carefully. Messaging should still sound human, and customers shouldn’t be able to tell you’re using AI, or they might doubt your credibility.
4. Launch campaigns and monitor metrics
When you’ve finished designing your customer communications, it’s time to launch your campaigns officially.
For social media and email campaigns, set up A/B testing to gather more information on the most effective messages. Since initial communications must be as short as possible while still attracting the customer’s attention, A/B testing can help you determine precisely which words or methods get results.
Aside from test results, you should monitor general performance metrics. For email, that includes:
Open rate
Response rate
Opportunity rate
Open rates below 40% are worrisome. You might need to check your email infrastructure and delivery rates to ensure your emails aren’t being sent to spam. You should also examine your subject lines since they play a big role in whether or not someone opens an email.
Even with a high open rate, response rates will be much lower—between 2% and 5%. Anything lower than that is a sign that you should revisit your messaging.
In addition to these email-specific metrics, you’ll want to monitor other typical sales cycle metrics, such as conversion rate, sales cycle length, and win rate.
5. Re-engage prospects
Sales outreach doesn’t end after the first message. Your sales prospecting strategy should include a series of messages or calls and multichannel retargeting to reach the same prospects across multiple platforms.
Tools to implement a sales outreach strategy
More sales outreach and automation tools are available than ever before, but you’ll need to be selective about which ones you use. A report from Productiv found that 40% of SaaS licenses are going unused.
Prioritize multipurpose SaaS platforms that add value to more than one area of your business, including sales outreach.
B2B database platforms
When you’re in the lead generation stage, sales intelligence and B2B sales database tools can make your life considerably easier. These platforms give you access to a vast supply of enriched data with a long list of filters you can use to find the right customers.
Tools like Apollo, ZoomInfo, and UpLead can be pricey. But if you want premium leads, the premium price tag might be worth it.
Sales engagement platforms
Your sales team can use sales engagement platforms to send multichannel communications, decide which messaging to use in which contexts, and share insights with various stakeholders.
Tools like Salesloft, Clari, and Outreach can help you build sales outreach campaigns across email, social media, live chat, and phone.
These days, sales engagement platforms often include generative AI outreach tools to help you create and optimize email messaging, analyze data, and more.
Video messaging tools
Videos are a highly engaging way to connect with sales prospects and build trust and customer relationships. Custom video tools with built-in AI features, like Loom, let you record, edit, and share sales prospecting videos across multiple outreach channels.
Personalize your sales outreach with Loom
Loom videos offer an easy way to create personalized sales outreach content without a ton of work from your sales team. You can record videos once and share them multiple times while still adding personalized elements for each customer, such as names and titles, with Loom Variables.
Add personalized video messaging to your sales outreach strategy with Loom. Start today.
