How to make your first outbound call — A step by Step Guide
82% of buyers accept meetings with sellers who cold call. (RAIN Group)
57% of C-Level buyers prefer to be contacted by phone. (Crunchbase)
As an organization, start exploring the potential of Outbound channels to generate leads and expand their client base. Understanding that Outbound calling is not the reverse of Inbound calling is imperative.
This blog covers some recommendations on handling your prospects via Outbound calls. Whether you are a team leader, an SDR, or a founder looking to make their first outbound call, this blog covers everything essential to make it successful.
We’ll delve into establishing trust, crafting an impeccable elevator pitch, and ensuring your prospects eagerly anticipate your next call.
Outbound vs. Inbound — Quick Summary
Inbound calls are customer-initiated, responding to inquiries or issues. They’re timely, reflecting existing relationships.
Outbound calls, initiated by businesses, seek to generate leads or sales. They aren’t time-sensitive and often involve contacting prospects without prior connections.
Success hinges on creating interest and building initial trust.
How are Outbound calls different from Inbound Calls?
Some critical differences between inbound calls
Prospects may have yet to do significant research into solutions, so they may not understand deeply what they want.
It’s only sometimes necessary that a prospect is looking to solve an immediate problem in their business. Hence, it’s essential to dig deeper by establishing a clear link to a business problem(s) that’s important to them and how your product/service can help them.
Establishing trust with the prospect. It is crucial to successfully advance the deal through each phase by ensuring confidence in the seller, product, and company.
Given the prospect’s limited familiarity with the product and company, we will likely encounter more objections on outbound generated first calls. Handling objections effectively is crucial.
Ona positive note, if a prospect has agreed to the meeting, it means that the value proposition, messaging, and the company resonated with them, so something relevant needs to be figured out.
The objective of an Outbound Call
TL;DR — Find a hook that makes them want to take the next call, establish credibility, and find a pathway to the next call
Key objectives we should aim to accomplish on the first outbound call are -
Find problem statements/business priorities/hooks that are important to the prospect that we would likely be able to address via location tech. Listen without interruption.
High-level examples / high-level details of relevant solutions that you provide as a product/solution for such problems
Establish credibility (e.g., customer names, investors, the background of team/founders, etc.)
Aim to get a clear pathway to the next call.
Ask — Did we address your questions? Who else can benefit from this? Are you ready to move forward with a (Demo Prep, Demo, etc.)
That’s it!
The prospect may not be a decision-maker or up the ladder on a buying journey. Hence, while keeping the conversation limited, understanding the opportunity is essential.
Avoid long, one-sided monologues about your company. Listen to understand, not to pitch.
Go into the technical details of our of your product. Demos are also likely optional (but maybe good to keep handy)
Discuss what a pilot or trial could look like
Deep technical/operational details of the problem they’re facing
Elevator pitch
Unlike an inbound call, we will almost certainly need to give an elevator pitch to your prospect. Remember to practice this in case you dont remember it.
But outlining some key elements from my experience of what we’ve found helpful for such a pitch.
Importantly, this elevator pitch shouldn’t last more than 3–4 mins.
Description of what your organization does -
Remember that the goal is to find hooks / or keywords that the prospect will immediately connect with and wish to learn more about.
So use simple to-understand phrases of what your organization does that a prospect can associate with.
Avoid using complex terms that someone may not be accustomed to or connect to a problem that your product may be able to solve.
Add some use case/industry solution-specific keywords.
Provide keywords that are relevant to the industry you target. This allows us to see if they connect with one or more keywords.
Learn frequently used industry jargon that would resonate with your prospect.
Add clear differentiators
Add clear differentiators that make you stand out from your competitor without explicitly mentioning the competitor.
Add clear business problem statements.
“People often want to reduce their bills or improve operational efficiency through better planning.” add clear problem statements or connect with your product marketing team to describe unique problem statements.
Throw in some credibility pointers.
E.g., “Top investors fund us “work with all kinds of small and large customers, including companies like “Name few companies,” “Have great G2 Reviews,”
Prep suggestions for the outbound call
For outbound calls, it’s essential to do some prep work before the call to understand what could be attractive to the prospect. Some suggested ideas for crucial prep work.
Industry of the prospect and the use cases that typically occur.
Prospect’s LinkedIn profile to learn about their role and likely seniority
Examples of onboarded customers in similar industry
Be sure to have an agenda set before the call. Feel free to share it in the meeting invite. Confirm the schedule with the prospect at the beginning of the call.
The BDRs should share the messaging that resulted in them securing the meeting. This will assist the Account Executive in preparing for the next call.
If the prospect is critical or a senior decision maker from a large enterprise account -
Look up recent articles/blog posts/YouTube videos by that person and/or company to see what they’ve been talking about recently.
Read the company’s publicly available reviews and see what problems you can solve for them using your product.
Keep some demos and demo videos handy if we need to showcase something.
Consider adding one of the top-management employees from your organization.
Ways to get prospects to talk
Some ideas on getting the prospects to talk
Confirm the agenda and ask, “What else would you like to get out of this call?” or “What is most important to you?”
Throw keywords around use cases and business problems that might be relevant to that industry.
Ask about the prospect’s role and what fundamental business problems they are working on. And then dive deeper into one or more issues with a location component.
A simple reminder is to ask permission to ask questions if the prospect is not engaging. This can take the edge off of the conversation.
Things to avoid on your first outbound call
The key goal is to have the prospect connect with one or more hooks (or keywords/phrases), so they want to come back to the next call, maybe together with other team members.
A vital part of that is to keep the conversation interactive to the extent possible.
So, a few key things to avoid
Avoid long, one-sided presentations. As a thumb rule, other than the elevator pitch, which could be 3–5 minutes, everything else should be less than 2 minutes, and then ideally, allow the prospects to speak.
Avoid super long decks, 3–4 slide decks to add structure to the call without making it long-winded, where we risk losing the prospect’s attention.
Spending too much time on a direction/use case/value prop that the prospect needs to resonate with.
What are the next steps?
The following steps could take a few different forms. Some suggestions on how to handle this
Ideally, fix a meeting for a specific date on the call itself.
An alternative is to suggest a “placeholder” a few weeks out — e.g., 2 weeks, and say, “Let’s keep it, and we can move it closer to the date if needed”’. Or, say, “I’ll check in with you closer to the date.
If there is no interest in a meeting, maybe ask, “Can I follow up with you in 3 weeks to see if it makes sense to connect in the short term?”
And then send an email after the call with resources like a demo video and/or case study.
Always check, “Who else in the organization can benefit from this?”
If the prospect looks to end a call with, “Let me connect you with someone else internally who would be more relevant,” — definitely ask for a specific name so we can reach out directly. Ideally, we should rely on something other than this person to make an intro.
Outbound calling is Hard. But, few things can make it easy. One process, the second is grit!
So…
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