Targeted Outreach As A Surprising Growth Strategy

The old methods just weren’t cutting it anymore. As a company that helps their clients drive growth, Standing Partnership knows a thing or two about client acquisition and retention, along with the struggles that companies face when it comes to growing their business. 

However, when it came to marketing their own company online and generating new clients, their previous methods of gaining new clients through referrals, content marketing, and social media ads just weren’t producing the results they were looking for.

What’s the missing piece? 

In their case, it was the targeted outreach and strategic messaging. 

They have the experience and the know-how, we just helped them dial it in a little and scale it. After analyzing their sales process and their target market, we implemented a multi-channel approach with two main funnels, both with the ultimate goal of getting more qualified appointments on their calendar and more leads on their list. 

What’s most interesting here is that we used a multi-channel approach, including a channel that many B2B businesses don’t really consider a viable way to scale: targeted, one on one outreach. 

It’s a targeted outbound approach where you build relationships directly with people who fit your prospect profile. These can be cold leads that we send one-on-one messages or email to, or who we call on the phone.

Our methods warm them up and have proven to increase appointment numbers. In fact, using this in conjunction with a strategic ad campaign, we delivered over 200 quality leads for Standing Partnership to follow up with and 50 quality sales appointments. If you’d like to read more about their experience, read the full case study here.

In this blog post, we’re going to focus on the targeted outreach side of this campaign and others to show you that it can be a viable and important part of your growth strategy. 

Many businesses see this as time intensive and ask questions like…

Can this work for my business?
Do people really respond to messages from companies on LinkedIn?
Or email even?
Can you build relationships with people who don’t know anything about you via email or LinkedIn messaging, or even phone calling?

We answer with an emphatic YES, but only IF you have all the pieces aligned, if you support it within a multi-channel strategy, and if you follow an approach that’s designed more for building relationships than for selling.

Why Outreach is Important for Growth

First, let’s dive into a little more detail about why targeted outreach contributes to your growth strategy. 

In our experience, you can’t wait for prospects to come to you ready to buy. We’ve worked with hundreds of businesses and have executed lead generation and sales development campaigns for companies with different goals in all kinds of industries. All of them can benefit from a proper targeted outreach strategy. 

The thing is, just following up on inbound leads and tiring out your current customers and clients for repeat orders isn’t a growth strategy. 

You need new business consistently. Ads can help. Content marketing can help.

But their effectiveness is exponentially increased when you combine it within a multi-channel approach and create an outreach strategy that involves identifying and connecting with targeted prospects and then sending them a series of strategic messages, emails and or phone calls designed to lead to a quality sales appointment.

Note that this does take time, especially if the leads start out cold. But when you systematize the process, it’s doable for any company.

Let’s talk about how to get started with targeted outreach…

Do You Have the Right Network?

A successful outreach strategy starts with the right list or pool of prospects. Naturally, you need to know where and how to build that network. 

Because if you’re reaching out to the wrong prospects, you simply will not see results. In fact, even if you’re reaching out to the RIGHT prospects but you have the wrong message, you won’t see results either. Plain and simple. 

So, like always, you MUST start by ensuring you have a list of prospects, or a network of people who fit your ideal client profile! This means you build prospect profiles where you understand the basic demographics, but also how they think, what drives them, and what pain points they have. 

Then, you get to work building a list. To learn more about how to create a targeted database, click here.

Email Is Not Dead

Many people say that “email is dead.” They also say that for cold calling, or whatever other tactic isn’t working for them at the time. 

To show you exactly how alive email is, especially when used as part of a multi-channel outreach campaign, one client we worked with was able to book 144 appointments in 9 months using strategic messaging via email, along with other outreach channels.

Initially, they had tried SEO, they tried AdWords, they even took a swing at outbound marketing. Like many businesses, what they weren’t getting was traction...

“We have had some success with this but it is taking a LOT of hours to uncover the right lead - like finding a needle in a haystack. We've also found that we're not keeping leads warm - some prospects we spoke to 6 months ago weren't ready for a meeting but were interested - so we said we'd call them back. When we finally got through to them they'd purchased with someone else.”

They needed a system to not only target and identify the right kinds of prospects, but that would also enable those touchpoints, follow-up emails and phone calls without taking away from other parts of the business.

To learn more about how outreach played a huge role in developing a consistent pipeline of quality leads, click here to read the full case study.

Why did this approach work? 

Even though many companies think that outreach and outbound lead generation takes too much time, they were able to revamp their outreach in a strategic and effective way because:

• They had a targeted network
• And they built a system using messaging and email outreach

If it sounds so simple, why don’t more people do it? 

Well, a lot of people try. We’ve found that consistency often fails because there is no system to support it continually, or a system that incorporates multiple different channels that build on each other. Typically we see companies that start over from scratch every month, when with a system, you build momentum over time.

Targeted One-On-One Messaging

One-on-one messaging?

Many people with aggressive growth strategies would not include this at scale because they don’t expect it to bring in the kinds of results they want to see. While it does take more time, especially because a lot of the prospects you’d be reaching out to are cold, it is unwise to ignore one-on-one messaging. 

That’s especially true when using a platform like LinkedIn where you have an audience primed to look for vendors, expecting material to help them forward their business, and where you have a high number of active decision makers.

To give you an example of one business business messaging  worked amazingly well for, consider Itegria’s experience. As an IT solutions provider, they needed a systematic and consistent way to get new quality appointments on the calendar month after month. 

Using our proprietary multi-touch messaging campaigns on LinkedIn, and then more recently, with the added addition of an SDR (sales development rep) telephone component, we’ve been able to target and connect Itegria with the right kind of prospects, getting quality prospects to book appointments. Here’s an overview of the system we implemented on their behalf:

After 5 months, we’ve booked 25 sales appointments for Itegria. And it continues to gain momentum. In six weeks from the time of this writing, we anticipate that Itegria will be around 36-48. To get more details on how we implemented a targeted outreach strategy and how it affected Itegria’s growth, read the full case study here.

Now, you might be asking, wait a minute… ONLY 25 appointments so far? 

While 25 appointments may not sound like a lot, when compared to inconsistent referrals, forcing a company to depend on the lifetime value of each client that Itegria can close from those 25 leads, the ROI for partnering with LinkedSelling in this capacity has proven positive.

What Does “Targeted Outreach” Actually Look Like?

Targeted outreach sounds like one of those business terms people like to throw around, so let’s move it from the abstract to the concrete. What does targeted outreach actually look like?

We’ve compiled five of our best proven messaging campaigns to show you how you can use messaging to keep your pipeline flowing and contribute to company growth. 

We’ve done a write of these messaging campaigns, complete with both real examples and templates you can adapt, along with the WHY behind the strategy so you know why it works and how you can make it work for your team as well. 

Click here to see the exact types of messaging campaigns we execute for our clients.

In Conclusion

When businesses think of growth strategies, they often think of digging into profits and losses, reworking the organizational structure, reviewing their supply chain, and finding where they can allocate resources for best results. One surprising tactic that’s often overlooked as a growth strategy is targeted outreach. 

When incorporated within a multi-channel approach including one-on-one messaging, email, and even phone calling, an outreach strategy like this is an effective lead generation tool that keeps the pipeline full and your sales team closing!

If you’d like to see an example of how we use one-on-one messaging within a multi-channel strategy, including some real life examples and templates you can adapt, click here to download a pdf of our top messaging campaigns.