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1. Identify the ideal customer profile (ICP).

Businesses cannot begin an effective outbound sales motion without knowing their ideal prospects. 

The optimal scenario is to have clearly established product/market fit with an existing, successful product. Sales leaders should analyze patterns within their most successful and satisfied customers. Look at factors such as company size, industry, geographic location, and annual revenue.

2. Develop a prospect list.

After identifying the ICP, sales teams will then use the ideal customer profile to create a list of prospects to reach out to.

On larger sales teams with specialized roles, dedicated prospectors – called sales development representatives (SDRs) – can be responsible for building prospecting lists. SDRs focus on researching and identifying potential prospects, qualifying them based on the company's ICP, and creating targeted lists for the sales reps to work with.

On smaller sales teams, individual sales reps are typically responsible for creating their own prospecting lists. This approach requires each rep to have a solid understanding of the company's ICP and buyer personas. Sales reps can use tools like social media, attend industry events, or simply dig through online databases to create their own lists. 

In some cases, companies or sales managers will acquire prospecting lists for their teams to target, either by purchasing lists from third-party vendors or using in-house resources to generate the lists.

3. Reach out and begin pitching

With targeting set, sales reps can begin reaching out to prospects to create relationships or simply deliver their pitch up front. 

The sales manager’s job here is to help identify winning patterns to use as a template for all sales reps.

For example, if reps using LinkedIn Sales Navigator were consistently adding qualified leads into the pipeline at a higher rate than reps cold calling, it would make sense to make LinkedIn Sales Navigator the standard outreach method for at least 80% of the team. 

In addition, it’s important to develop a standard pitch script for all reps to work from, even if they aren’t required to adhere rigidly to the script. 

It’s important to try multiple approaches in the beginning, but the goal is always to find a winning formula and turn it into a standardized approach that can be used to train new reps as the team grows.

4. Qualify new leads based on the ICP.

Once sales reps get an initial response from a prospect, they need to assess the level of interest and readiness to buy from each prospect.

Given outbound’s low conversion rate and the volume of conversations sales reps must go through in order to close each customer, it’s important that reps spend as much time as possible on leads that have a genuine potential to close.

At the same time, there can be a lot of subjectivity built-in to this process, and not every sales rep will be great at navigating that subjectivity, so providing some objective ranges is nearly always the right choice.

The goal is to have clear qualifying metrics that minimize time waste while still allowing for some flexibility.

5. Nurture qualified leads into opportunities.

Once leads are qualified, the heavy lifting begins for the sales representatives. 

Nurturing leads typically involves building relationships, understanding the prospect's needs, and positioning the solution as the best fit to address their challenges.

The amount of time invested in the nurturing phase will vary from company to company, solution to solution, and ICP to ICP. It’s important that sales reps don’t rush the process, but it’s also important that they don’t overshoot the sale.

6. Close opportunities and create new customers.

The ultimate goal of any outbound sales motion is… closing sales.

Sales reps should attempt to close as soon as it’s possible, and this timeline should look fairly consistent across customers and reps. It’s good to provide the team with some flexibility, but it’s also important to push outliers toward the averages, provided they aren’t simply overperforming relative to the team.

Closing should be the simplest part of the process, and it’s the team manager’s job to make sure reps aren’t letting great fish off the hook.

The goal is to have clear qualifying metrics that minimize time waste while still allowing for some flexibility.

7. Follow-up with new customers during onboarding.

When a new customer is closed, they are beginning the most important phase of their relationship with the company.

Many companies make the mistake of having the responsible sales rep drop out at this point. The customer is handed over to an onboarding team or customer success team without any further communication from the rep who closed the sale, which is a huge mistake.

The rep responsible for closing the sales should always stay engaged with the customer through onboarding, past any critical retention milestones identified by the company, and ideally, for the duration of the customer’s life cycle.

The simplest way to accomplish this without taking up the rep’s time is to have automated check-ups sent from the rep’s email to new customers at regular intervals. Reps can field any customer responses personally and provide personalized encouragement around the benefits or challenges that led to the customer closing in the first place.