Outbound sales: your route to predictable growth

Anyone can start a business.

In the UK alone, 660,000 new businesses are registered every year. But of those 660,000 companies, 60% of them will fail within three years. 20% of them will collapse in their first 12 months of trading. That leaves only 20% who will really go the distance.

So yes, anyone can start a business - but the real trick is growing it and making it successful.

Why do so many new businesses go under? It can be for any number of reasons, but for a lot of them, it may have been that they didn’t develop an effective outbound sales system. Outbound sales is the surest route for building predictable growth, particularly in the B2B sector, where competition is fierce and startup growth targets are aggressive.

What is B2B outbound?

B2B outbound is the process of engaging with buyers and decision-makers inside a company to generate interest in a product or service and, hopefully, make a sale. The telephone is the main driver of B2B outbound, through an activity known as “cold calling”.

Other techniques can be used as well, including email and social media platforms such as LinkedIn; the combination of all these methods at once is known as a “cadence”.

B2B outbound is a proactive approach which requires identifying the key contacts in your target companies, going out into the market and selling to them.

The difference between B2B and B2C outbound

B2B outbound is not like selling to ordinary consumers. When you sell to consumers, you usually only have to convince one person on the merits of your product. When you sell to businesses, you often need to win over a group of people, sometimes entire departments. That’s why B2B outbound often takes a long time and comes with a multitude of challenges that need to be addressed.

Who conducts B2B outbound?

B2B outbound is conducted by salespeople. Depending on the size of the company, they can be working alone or more usually in teams.

What skills does B2B outbound require?

Generally, B2B outbound demands sales people who possess motivation, persistence and resilience. This is due to the length of the B2B outbound sales cycle and the number of stakeholders who are involved in any one deal.

Why is B2B outbound important?

Beyond the baseline objective of growing your customer base and revenue, B2B outbound delivers two important benefits to a business:

• It builds trust around your product or service - remember that people buy from people. B2B outbound is a process designed for human interaction - salespeople contacting and engaging with prospects.
• It provides a predictable growth model - with B2B outbound, you can create a sales framework that is scalable and repeatable, empowering you to grow your business quickly and efficiently.

Read more about how to build a B2B outbound sales team, geared for high-performance.

‍