Posted by LinkedSelling in B2B Lead Generation & Sales Development
How to Create an Aggressive Growth Schedule Using A Multi-Channel Outbound Approach
“Yeah, things had really started to flatten out the last few years.
But now we have an aggressive growth schedule.
A big part of that is driving more leads.”
That’s something a client recently mentioned to us.
Every company can relate; they all need to achieve predictable growth. It allows for you to better compensate your team, keep A-players on longer, expand your vision, and even on a personal level to create something more meaningful.
At LinkedSelling, we have people who send their kids to college off of the work that we do. We have people who support their growing families. This is important work that we do on many levels.
Maybe 2020 was a major hit and negatively impacted your growth, or maybe you just want to knock it out of the park this year, no matter how things have turned out in the past.
This client was absolutely on point - driving more leads is a major factor.
There’s no question, in a rapidly changing environment, business leaders are tasked with achieving maximum value for their organizations, including implementing growth strategies that help improve profitability and long-term value both for business stakeholders, employees, and their clients and communities.
Driving leads are a major factor because sales are the fuel for company wide growth. It not only drives increases in revenue, but when sales forecasts are met, companies can predict revenue growth, plan for future expenditures, and implement increasingly aggressive growth strategies.
For leaders charged with marketing and sales specifically, they are expected to grow the pipeline and keep the sales coming in. Sales teams need to meet -and exceed - those goals if they want to grow.
In this post you’ll learn how some of the top businesses are facing growth challenges head on with a multi-channel outbound approach to lead generation and sales development to support predictable and even aggressive company growth.
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How Your Sales and Marketing Processes Affect Business Growth
All businesses need revenue to grow. That can come from venture capital, loans, or revenue. Which is exactly why it makes sense to invest serious attention, time and resources on maintaining your pipeline and ensuring you have an endless supply of sales qualified prospects - and thus opportunities to close new business.
There are, of course, other factors to consider and prepare for. Potential growth opportunities includes:
- Exploring new markets, whether that be new geographies, new verticals, new marketing channels, new customer segments, or even new product categories.
- Identifying opportunities for potential acquisitions and partnerships
- Digital transformation strategies whether that means diversifying your marketing, adopting new technologies, or optimizing existing online presence and marketing channels
- Either revamping or incorporating the systems that will support aggressive growth
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At the end of the day, growth requires bold action, especially in today’s changing (and challenging) world. You may need to reinvent your systems and processes in order to drive that business growth - and your sales pipeline.
Obviously, the more opportunities you have, the more you can close, and the more you can predict future sales and plan for expected growth.
That’s exactly what MarketSmiths did. Using LinkedSelling’s proprietary outbound sales development strategy, they were able to drastically increase the number of quality leads - and more importantly, more of the RIGHT kinds of leads that booked appointments on their sales calendar. In fact, over the course of a few months, this approach booked them over 70 qualified appointments with “wish list prospects”.
The secret sauce was in prospecting a very targeted audience and then implementing strategic multi-channel messaging campaigns on LinkedIn and via email that nurture these highly targeted prospects to book a phone call, creating the opportunity for the team at MarketSmiths to close new clients.
Support Predictable Growth & Scale With An Integrated Multi-Channel Outbound Approach
Every client we work with has different needs, which makes it impossible to suggest a generic strategy that will work for all businesses with aggressive growth goals.
That being said, we do however, recommend an integrated multi-channel outbound approach to lead generation. This is exactly how we help our clients get sales appointments with hard-to-reach, high-value prospects.
Before we get into the details of how we integrate multiple marketing and sales development channels into a cohesive, scalable system, let’s the address the reasons we’ve structured our lead generation approach this way:
1. an integrated multi-channel outbound approach offers more control over lead quality and volume
It isn't enough to "get more leads." If you want to advance your sales conversations and streamline the sales process, you must find the right type of prospects. We’re talking sales qualified prospects. It doesn't matter how many leads you get if they are not qualified.
Speaking of how many leads you’ll get, with the outbound approaches that we’ll cover below, you’ll have much more control over the lead volume of your pipeline with a multi-channel strategy. As you grow, you want to be able to control this aspect so that your team can manage the lead flow properly, ensuring that leads aren’t falling through the cracks. For example, with referrals only, you have no control.
2. it allows you to take back wasted time and resources.
We hear all the time from businesses we speak to that they need to be careful with their lead generation and marketing budget. They’ve been burned before, and they need results.
They’re sales teams are either wasting time with haphazard prospecting or they’re too busy with admin tasks that they’re not as focused on closing as they could be.
By working with someone like us, or by implementing a similar approach on your own, the approach we utilize fills your best sales people’s calendars, you’ll save money and get better results.
Rather than allowing your best closers to waste time doing what they’re not good at… poking around on LinkedIn, sending emails (which often don’t actually get sent), and picking up the phone to call new prospects (which your best sales reps probably avoid like the plague), you can create or outsource a system that will turn all that around.
3. this approach makes your pipeline more predictable.
You’re taking a more proactive approach to your lead generation, rather than being reactive to - and relying on - incoming referrals and reputation. By knowing exactly where your next quality opportunities will come from you’ll be able to better forecast sales and unlock real growth by allowing your team to do what they do best.
4. it provides a structure that will build more profitable business relationships for your company.
The foundation to any sale is the trust your prospects have in your reps and your business. Not only that, our multichannel outbound campaigns position our clients as leaders in their space, further supporting and building the trust their audiences have in their expertise and ability to deliver. We approach outbound marketing campaigns and the database of leads we build for you as assets to be nurtured the right way for both short-term gains and long-term wins.
5. this will make your influence more widespread.
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If you want to level the playing field with your competitors and arm your team with the ammo they need to close more deals, your brand (and your employees) need to be viewed as authorities in your field. We take a unique approach to develop strong relationships with your audience through a multi-channel outbound approach, including social media, email and phone all while positioning your team as the go-to choice in your vertical.
>>> Accurate forecasting is easier said than done if you don’t have the right systems in place. Continue reading to learn how to create a better approach to sales forecasting & revenue predictability <<<
Why Using Multiple Channels to Create Momentum and Predictability
You know that you shouldn’t “put all your eggs in one basket”, especially because as so many businesses have learned with the Google and Facebook changes over the years, if you’re over reliant on one channel, any single change can affect your entire business.
With a multi-channel outbound approach, you diversify your lead generation to maximize ROI. It’s the same with your retirement account. You are invested in a mutual fund that diversifies your portfolio, so that when one channel suffers from market trends, another outperforms and it balances itself out. The key though is being able to predict the volume, regardless of what happens in each channel.
For years, businesses relied solely on reputation and referrals. However, as mentioned above, these are things that you cannot control. The need for a predictable outbound lead generation strategy is necessary for continued aggressive growth precisely because it’s proactive and puts more control in your hands. A reactive approach is simply not scalable.
Listen Technologies, a client of ours, learned this firsthand. We started working together to fill their pipeline, they were primarily reacting to interested prospects who came to them.
Adam Collings, the Director of Marketing, said they wanted to change that,
“We knew that in order for us to continue to grow as a company, we needed to get our solutions in front of people who have the problem but may not be aware that there's a solution.”
They wanted to really understand “what it looked like to socially sell our product” - and do so at scale. We managed multi-channel LinkedIn messaging and email campaigns to send targeted LinkedIn messages and emails to their prospects leading them to book appointments.
The result?
A full pipeline of quality prospects and a completely transformed view of lead generation - at scale.
This illustrates exactly why you need a system that you CAN control.
Something where you’re the one pushing the “on” button and where your company is the one targeting specific prospects and initiating the outreach. With a multi-channel outbound approach, your company is completely in control of how many leads you get, the quality, and the amount of conversations you’re having, and opportunities you’re creating so that you can increase your sales.
That alone is reason enough to consider using multi-channel campaigns but it’s not just related to the fear of change. The real driver of including as many channels as possible in your outreach to prospects is based on the habits of those who succeed.
For example, if you study some of the most successful sales teams today, you’ll find that over 80% use at least three marketing channels and create at least 15 touch points per prospect.
Why are so many of these teams taking a multi-channel approach?
Because they’ve learned that showing up in your prospects’ preferred channel is how you break through the noise.
Understanding the channels you incorporate into your marketing mix and how they work together to create a sum that is greater than its parts and allows you to engage with your prospects via the channel they prefer, at the time they prefer, and with the right messaging.
And that’s our goal:
To help our clients develop predictable and scalable systems to support growth by connecting with their prospects at the right time with the right message and in the right place.
>>> To learn more about the channels we use and why, click here to read, “Why Multi-Channel Marketing Is A Must For Modern Business Development Teams” <<<
There is a caveat here: predictability is a very tough thing to get to. It doesn’t happen overnight and you can’t achieve it by starting a outbound multi-channel campaign and two weeks later, you’re reaping the fruits of it and you know where you’ll be the rest of the year. It doesn’t work like that.
However, the good news is that what you’re looking for is a mathematical formula. Assuming that you have the right message for the right market, and the right playbook to reach them, here is your formula:
If you reach out to X amount of prospects, you’ll get X amount of appts.
X amount of those appointments will show up to the appointment.
X amount of people will close.
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What Does An Integrated MultiChannel Outbound Approach Actually Look Like?
As an outbound outsourced lead generation and sales development agency our job is to put you in front of the hard-to-reach, high-value prospects. Our tactics include our revolutionary and proprietary:
- Multi-touch LinkedIn messaging outreach strategies,
- Targeted email outreach,
- Social media ads management,
- And Sales Development Rep (SDR) dialing services
>>> Not familiar with SDR dialing services? See how incorporating SDR’s increased our speed to lead AND our appointment numbers by 33%! <<<
This is what we mean by an “Integrated Multichannel Outbound Approach”; we connect with targeted prospects and using some combination of the channels above, execute proven systems to attract these prospects, connect and build real business relationships with them, start conversations, qualify them, and get them on your sales team’s calendar.
Here’s one last example of how a multi-channel outbound approach could look for you…
Over 200 Leads and 50 Qualified Appointments in 7 Months
>>> Channels Used: LinkedIn Messaging, Social Media Ads, Follow-Up Emails, and SDR dialing
When Standing Partnership came to us, they were looking for a new way to generate high-quality leads and appointments.
After analyzing their sales process and their target market, we implemented a multi-channel approach with two main funnels with the ultimate goal of getting more appointments on their calendar and more leads on their list. The first funnel was an outbound messaging campaign via LinkedIn, which involves identifying and connecting with the client's target prospects and then sending them a series of messages designed to lead to a consultation call. The prospects we targeted included C-Suite executives from mid to large-sized B2B companies.
We also designed ads offering a free copy of their e-book. Here is an example:
These ads ran on LinkedIn, giving prospects interested in the e-book an opportunity to opt-in using a form. From there, they were sent to a page where they were urged to book a consultation call to learn more about what Standing Partnership has to offer.
The leads that came from either funnel were also followed up with via personal calls from our Sales Development Reps (our SDR team) on behalf of Standing Partnership, further qualifying them and encouraging them to schedule a consultation call.
Your Turn: How Would A Multi-Channel Approach Support A Growth Trajectory For Your Company?
There is sufficient evidence to say that utilizing a multi-channel outbound lead generation strategy will create and support an aggressive growth schedule:
- It gives you more control over growth
- It’s scalable and repeatable
- It’s diversified and protects you from depending too much on one channel
- It contributes to the trust and authority your business has in the market
- It helps you connect with your targeted audience when they want to connect - and how.
If you’d like to learn more about incorporating this kind of strategy into your marketing mix and lead generation strategy,
(...Including how we use LinkedIn, Email, Phone and paid advertising in an integrated, multichannel approach to attract and build trust with the right kinds of prospects in THEIR preferred channel…)
Then definitely check out our Outbound Sales Development Blueprint Demo:
You’ll learn:
- The modern system for building trust and landing sales appointments consistently with your top prospects creates consistent, high dollar sales opportunities.
- The single most important factor for standing out above your competition and filling your pipeline with potential clients year-round without ever having to leave the office.
- The exact outbound strategy we implement for our top clients to book their sales team’s solid, that has led to hundreds of 6 & 7 figure deals.
- How to properly structure your multi-channel approach to engage your prospects in their preferred medium without blowing your budget on expensive technology or spending hours every week sifting through complicated reports.