The Best Guide to Improve Your Outbound Lead Generation!

What is outbound lead generation?

By definition, outbound lead generation is the process of identifying and outreach to marketing leads proactively, rather than waiting for them to come to you – which would be inbound lead generation.

The goal is to reach out to as many leads as possible to generate more and more leads for your business. It’s a numbers game: the more people you’ll outreach to, the more marketing leads you’ll get.

It’s important to make the difference between outbound sales and outbound lead generation:

Outbound sales consist in selling something to leads who have already been identified, while outbound lead generation is the process of identifying these leads.

Outbound lead generation is run by marketing people and corresponds to the first step of the funnel. Outbound sales are run by salespeople and correspond to the last step of the funnel.

What are the main outbound channels?

Whether you’re talking about outbound sales or outbound lead generation, you are going to generate your outbound leads through different channels. Some of these channels will be exclusively used for sales or marketing purposes, or both.

Sales outbound channels

As a B2B salesperson, your goal is to close more deals from leads that have already been identified with marketing.

To do so, you can use the following sales channels:

• Sales email;
• Twitter;
• Cold calling;
• LinkedIn Prospecting;
• etc…

You’ll need to pick one of these channels and outreach to your B2B lead through it. It is a bit time-consuming but you’ll probably get some results with this method.

Also, there’s another – much more efficient – way to do it. Instead of doing it manually through only one different channel each time, you can use LaGrowthMachine to improve your sales process.

This way, you’ll be able to automatically outreach to thousands of your B2B leads through all of these channels at the same time!

Outbound Lead Generation channels

As a marketing person, your goal is to identify more leads that salespeople will outreach to.

To do so, you can use the following outbound marketing channels:

• Google Ads;
• Facebook Ads;
• LinkedIn Ads;
• Newsletters & other email marketing campaigns;
• Display Ads;
• Affiliate program;
• etc…

Once again, you can pick one of these but we strongly recommend you combine many marketing channels to test them all and see where your best results belong.

Why is outbound lead generation important for your business?

While inbound marketing is a way to pull leads to you, outbound marketing aims to go out and push your message to as many people as possible.

The goal of outbound lead generation is to reach a large audience and cast a larger net to attract more leads. By being proactive and reaching out to new marketing leads, you are increasing the volume of potential business in your sales pipeline.

Therefore, there are many advantages to building up an outbound strategy:

• Increased brand awareness: outbound lead generation allows you to reach a very large audience, which will eventually increase brand awareness.
• Get results faster: by being proactive and reaching out to new marketing leads, you’re increasing the volume of potential business in your sales pipeline faster than if you were waiting for them to come – the inbound way.
• A larger volume of leads: as we said before, the goal is to cast a larger net and generate more B2B leads. By doing so, you are increasing the chances that some of these leads will turn into customers.
• Better qualified leads: by doing proper outbound lead generation, you are also increasing the chances of reaching people who are really interested in what you’re selling.
• Improved sales pipeline: as a result of the previous point, you are also improving your sales pipeline by adding more qualified leads to it.
• Increased ROI: because you are targeting a larger audience and generating more leads, you are also increasing your ROI.

As you can see, outbound lead generation is a very effective way to get more B2B leads. But you should definitely develop your inbound lead generation efforts aside from this.

Why is that?

Well, because in the long run, inbound lead generation will be more sustainable and it will generate leads that cost less to convert.

In the next part of this post, we’ll learn how to build great outbound lead generation campaigns.

How to build a great outbound process?

Different methodologies exist to build outbound campaigns.

At LaGrowthMachine, we’re observing many clients building up their sales outbound strategies. From this knowledge, we’ve built our very own method, and that’s what we want to talk to you about right now.

To us, it goes from these 4 main steps:

1) Prospecting for the right leads;

2) Choosing your channels;

3) Creating personalized messages;

4) Following up with your leads.

Let’s take a more detailed look at each one of these steps.

Step 1: Prospecting for the right leads

This is probably the most important step in your outbound process. Why? Because if you don’t target the right leads, all of your efforts, time, and money you invested will be in vain.

To find the right potential leads, you need to ask yourself about your main targets.

Who are you trying to reach? What are their main characteristics? What are their needs and pain points?

You need to be as specific as possible when answering these questions. The more precise you are, the easier it will be for you to find them.

For example, if you’re trying to sell new CRM software to small businesses, your ideal target would be the decision-makers of these businesses.

These could be the CEOs, the COOs, the sales directors, etc… Next, you should pick the right channel to push your outbound marketing message.

That’s what we’re going to see now.

Step 2: Choose the right channels

As we saw earlier, they’re several existing channels for effective outbound lead generation processes. As an outbound marketing team, you’ll need to focus on the ones that best match your target audience.

For example, as we said, if you’re targeting decision-makers of small businesses, the best channels for your outbound message will be LinkedIn and Emails.

These are two very effective channels to reach your B2B target audience, as it is probably very active on it.

Once you’ve picked one channel or more, you shall find the best approach to generate leads through them.

For LinkedIn outbound tactics, for example, you can generate outbound leads by:

• creating LinkedIn Ads;
• send LinkedIn prospecting messages;
• Inmails;
• LinkedIn Groups;
• etc…

Step 3: Creating personalized messages

In B2B, customer relationship is much finer and more elaborate than it is in B2C.

This means that you need to invest a lot of time in creating the right message including great copywriting, a well-built message structure, and personalization.

To ensure you’re doing it the right way, the best way to do it is manually.

If we take our previous example, you’ll need to:

• Find the right contact information for your leads (full name, job title, company, etc.);
• Make research about them;
• Write a great copy that speaks to them directly;
• Do this for each one of your leads.

But if you’re doing it using LaGrowthMachine, you’ll save much more time while keeping the copywriting, structure, and personalization at their best, adding the multichannel experience. All of this automatically!

Our client manages to increase their outbound lead generation efforts by 3.5X with our tool!

Step 4: Follow Up with your Leads

Whether you’re doing ads or you choose to outreach to people by message, the first approach isn’t the only difficulty in this process.

If you want to qualify your leads, you’ll need to take care of following them up.

When talking about the outbound sales process, this would mean follow-up by emails, phone calls, LinkedIn messages, etc…

When talking about outbound lead generation in the marketing purpose of identifying your leads, this means ensuring that as soon as a lead has been detected, it can be integrated into the sales pipeline so your sales team can outreach to them!

If you’re using LaGrowthMachine, no worries: we’re keeping live data at each step of the sales process so you can follow up with your leads directly in our tool. You can even plug our outbound lead generation tools into your favorite CRM for better vision, lead management, and nurturing!