MBA1036 Strategies for Getting Started with Outbound Sales

Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Whether you're burning the midnight oil or waking up early to get on your commute, we got you covered with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100 MBA net and in today's episode, you will learn how to get started with outbound sales. Many of us, when we start our business, we start with inbound sales. So we attract people with great content or we advertise on Facebook and people come into our business, opt in, try our products out and buy. But as you grow your business, you may want to start doing some outbound sales, especially if you're in the B2B world. Business to business. How do you get started? How do you approach these clients directly and get them to switch to your business, to your service, to your product? In today's episode, I'm going to give you some strategies to get started. Many of us, we get very intimidated by outbound sales because it requires some direct sales skills. Never fear, we got you covered. We're going to show you how to get started and put your best foot forward. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 MBA show is brought to you by Long Tail Pro, a step by step system to help you quickly discover thousands of profitable, easy to rank keywords for almost any niche. Visit longtailpro.commba and use coupon code MBA for a free trial and 30% off your subscription forever. Again, that's longtailpro.commba, and use code MBA. Many businesses and companies are starting to do more and more outbound sales. This actually was the bread and butter of all business sales back in the day. But because of the nature of permission marketing and the Internet, inbound sales became all the rage of the last few years. And if you're like a lot of people that start online businesses, you don't want to be a pushy salesperson. So you tend to tend to lean towards inbound sales. But if your business, whether it's a product or service, is serving other businesses, you're going to want to take a look at doing some outbound sales to grow your business. If you're not a consumer product, then outbound sales is going to be a strategy you're going to have to implement at some point if you're going to scale. This is especially important if you're in the service industry, but it's just as important if you're providing any kind of software product subscription to other businesses. Let me give you a quick example. I might be using a certain email marketing service and a new email marketing product or business might approach me to switch to their service. Let's say the service is called Easy Email. And Easy email approaches me, whether it's via an email or a phone call. Their whole mission in this call or email is to start the conversation about potentially switching to their service. As you can see, it's an outbound call. They're going out and trying to get me as a client, rather hoping that I stumble on their website or click on one of their ads and become an inbound client. So in today's episode, I'm gonna give you five strategies on getting started with outbound sales. Number one, you wanna have a system in place to make it easy for them to switch to your product or service before you make that outbound call or email. Why? Because they are most likely using something already. If not, it's still going to require work for them to get started with your product or service. So you want to have a system in place and you want to communicate this system when you speak to them, whether it's on email or on the phone. So they understand this is not going to take a lot of time and effort on their side of things. There's nothing worse than getting an email or phone call with a service that says, hey, you can switch over to us. All you got to do are these 10 steps. It's like so much work to do to switch over. Nobody wants extra work. Even if you have a better deal and you're more affordable, many people will say, you know what? I'm good with what I have. It took me a while to even get set up. No thanks. If they're not using a competitive service or product already and you wanted to get them started with your product, they might not understand the value of why your product is important. And the idea of getting started with something new may seem like a lot of work. So you need to have a system in place to take care of all the headaches. Say, for example, we go back to that easy email marketing business we talked about. They're approaching me to switch over to their service. If they told me, hey, we have a whole system to do the migration for you. So we're going to migrate all your email lists, all your automations, all the emails and campaigns you would normally do into our service, and you don't have to lift a finger. This is included with our service if you switch over. So right off the bat I'm like, okay, they have a system in place. It's going to be pain free for me. What else? This is going to open up the conversation because that's still not enough. I still don't know why I should switch. Are they better? How? In what ways? But by having that system in place, it allows you to start the conversation. So make sure you have a system to get them onboarded or switched over to your product or service. Number two, outbound sales are a lot easier when it's through an intro or a referral. If I think about the businesses that have approached me via outbound sales that I actually signed up with, most of them come from a referral, meaning somebody I know introduced me to them and said, hey, this is company so and so this is what they do. I think they can really help you in your business. It's a good fit. Number one, you're coming from a trusted source. So this company is being referred by somebody I trust. So I'm going to give you the time of day purely out of the relationship I have with that person. So that means you want to get referrals as much as possible when you're doing outbound sales. So if you have some clients out there that you've worked with, you have customers that have used your product, there's nothing wrong with asking them, hey, do you know anybody else that would benefit from what you're benefiting from with my product or service, and you can be very specific. You say, can you refer me to three people? You know, three is a very specific number and it's not that many. Three emails are very easy to send, or three messages are easy and quick and painless to send. So getting a referral and letting the outbound process begin from there is going to increase the likelihood of you actually making that outbound sale. So that's strategy number two. Number three, do not ignore the obvious. This is a sales call. There's nothing worse than somebody trying to hide behind the phone call and say, oh, let's just get to know each other. I want to network when really the agenda is I want to have you switch over to my service. So it's best just to be transparent at the start. If you get that referral, if somebody introduces you to somebody and says, hey, I want you to introduce you to Michelle, Michelle, listen, I think Omar's product is great for you. You're going to benefit from them. You're going to benefit from the product. I do. I'll let you guys take it from here. At this point, just be direct and honest and just say, hey, Michelle, it's good to meet you. I'd love to schedule a time to show you how Webinar Ninja can help you and your business. I can break down exactly what we offer, how much it costs, and what your return on investment will be. When people get emails like this, it's just so refreshing because they know what they're getting into. They know that, hey, that sounds great. I want to know all that information. That's what is in the back of everybody's mind. Is there a return on investment? How much is this going to cost me? How is this going to help me? And just being direct, hey, this is a sales call. Let me sell you on what I have to offer you. Let me show you if we're a good fit or not. So don't avoid the obvious. Be transparent. Go for it. Strategy number four when you're doing outbound sales, often you're not going to get a immediate response. If you're applying or sending emails to somebody who has referred you to somebody, or even if you're just cold calling or emailing them, it's going to take several attempts sometimes to get a response. I get emails all the time. People trying to sell me their products or services or try to make some sort of connection or partnership. Now, some of them are just completely not a good fit. But those that are a good fit, sometimes I just get busy. I am very busy sometimes and I get caught up and things get buried and I can't reply to email that quickly. So those who are persistent, I often reply to them first because it's like, man, this person has emailed me a few times. Let me get back to them and I'll get back to them either way if we're interested or not. But the point here is that don't give up. Keep trying to reach out, whether it's via email or via phone. Depending on how you do your outbound sales, you may not get an immediate response. Sometimes it takes a few times for them to recognize your messages and get back to you guys. I got more on today's topic, but before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. One of the first things you got to do when you start a business is acquire a business address. You need it to register your business. You need it to open up a business bank account. You even need it to register for email marketing. Yes, you need an Address on the bottom of your email marketing newsletters. But if you work from home like a lot of us do, you don't want to put your home address and have your customers show up to your door. And you don't want to spend the extra money every single month on having a business office. This is where Earth ClassMail comes in. They hook you up with a swanky business address and all the mail that gets sent there gets scanned and uploaded to your account in the cloud. That means you never have to check physical mail ever again. You could see it anywhere, anytime, from your phone or your laptop. Pretty cool. So cool. We signed up. We absolutely love it. And we've been using Earth ClassMail for over a year now. And Earth ClassMail wants to hook you up with a free month so you can get started with your business address. Just go to earthclassmail.com mbamonth and use coupon code MBAMONTH. Again, that's earthclassmail.com MBAMONTH Coupon code MBAMONTH all right, let's review the first four outbound sales strategies. Number one, have a system to make it easy for them to migrate, to switch over to you or, or get started with your product or service. Number two, outbound sales is a whole lot easier when it's through a referral or an introduction. Number three, don't skirt around the issue. Don't ignore the obvious. This is a sales call. Give them what they want to hear. And number four, follow up several times. It may take a few times before you get a response. Be persistent. And number five is along those lines. And that strategy is sales is a numbers game. You're going to have to knock on a lot of doors. Figuratively, you're going to have to reach out and try to sell to people outbound sales several, several times before you make a sale. In most cases, you're going to get more no's than yeses. But the more times you're at bat, the more times you try to make that sale and reach out to companies and reach out to potential customers, you increase the likelihood of making more sales. So understand that it's a numbers game. The more you do it, the better your results. So it's best for you to set yourself up with a schedule of calls or emails that you need to do. Whether it's every Monday, I'm going to spend two hours and send 20 emails. And that way by the end of the month, I reach out to 80 to 100 people. You're going to close some of those sales. But if you try to do this like one or two emails a month, a couple emails here and there, you're going to have a weak response. You're going to lower the chance of you actually making sales. And my last piece of advice is that if this is something that is very, very hard for you to do to go out and make sales, then you really need to consider hiring somebody for this position. There are people that love this type of stuff, so give it to them. It may be the best investment you make in your business because one, you're not doing things that you don't like to do. And number two, any investment in sales is great because revenue is what keeps the business going. Just make sure it's cost effective and you're getting an roi. So you can pass on these strategies to the person that's going to take on this position. All right, that wraps up today's lesson. Don't forget tomorrow's free ride. Friday. Every Friday we give away a free ride to one of our programs. This month we're giving away Easy course, a 30 day course on how to build an online course in 30 days. It's a $500 course over at EasyCourse co. We are giving it away for free. All you got to do is leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. You can win. Just leave us a review and you enter the draw for every week. Just listen on Fridays to see if you won and if you didn't, no worries. You get a chance to win next week. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. Outbound sales is a part of every business. Whenever you meet somebody at a conference, whenever you're presenting on stage, whenever you're even just talking to somebody at a party, you're presenting yourself and talking about your business in some way, that is a sales exercise. People are getting sold on your story, on your business, on your product, on your offering or they're not. So keep this in mind. Even when you are meeting with people, when you're at conferences, when you're at meetups, the way you approach and talk about your business is a form of sales. Alright, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.