How to Optimise your Outbound GTM Strategy

It’s common for companies to get stuck on their own tunnel vision, stopping them from understanding the complex go-to-market landscape and finding solutions to improve their underperforming outbound activities. This article aims to provide a different perspective and share tools, insights, and stories to help you optimise your outbound GTM strategy . 

Value Proposition & Product Market Fit

Having a clear and consistent definition of your value proposition and product market fit can be a challenge, and moreover, can lead to confusion among employees, clients, and prospects. To overcome this, it’s crucial to establish a shared understanding and common language through ongoing research and communication.

In the beginning, your growth is most likely driven by organic reach, including networks, friends, former colleagues, etc. Serving a wide range of clients, some will be successful and others not. By analysing different indicators, you should quickly be able to gain insight from these partnerships and define your ideal customer profile (ICP). Look at the majority of a company, the maturity of the target persona, company size, industry, language barriers, growth figures, proposition, target audience, experience… This is key information to identify what kind of companies you’ll most likely be successful with.

PERSONA CARD

In the process of building a common understanding between a company’s team, clients, and prospects, mapping out the value proposition for a given persona is crucial. 

What should appear in you persona card:

  • Specific criteria: Size, location, growth of the companies? Seniority of my interlocutor?
  • Pain points: what’s a challenge they are facing and not solving?
  • Pain relievers: what solution can I offer them?
  • Differentiators: what can i offer them that they won’t find anywhere else? 
  • Possible objections: what criteria will they be looking for and am I covering them?
  • Approach angles: what’s the best way to approach my ICP in order to maximize my success?

 

USE THE RIGHT TOOLING

To build a comprehensive lead list and reach the appropriate audience for your campaign, a proper tech stack can be necessary. The need for various tools can change as the company grows and evolves. Initially, a company does not need the most advanced tooling, as the tools themselves will not guarantee success in an outbound campaign. However, they can help make the process more efficient.

What’s the Saleslift Studio go to Tech Stack?

  • Identifying prospects: Sales Navigator, Built With, Dun & Bradstreet, Crunchbase
  • Extract Contact  Information: Lead Studio (an in-house product), LeadQ, Hunter, Google
  • Engagement Management: Salesloft, Lem List, Outreach
  • Personalization: Videyard, Openai, Loom
  • Quality testing: GlockApps, Mail Tester
  • CRM: Sign Request, PipeDrive, SalesForce, HubSpot

Content and marketing

COMMUNICATION IS KEY

Effective communication is a key factor in successful business development. However, it’s not uncommon for companies to have separate marketing and sales departments that operate in silos, potentially missing out on valuable insights and collaboration opportunities.

To overcome this, a company can implement integrated communication strategies that bring marketing and sales together. By using marketing content in sales outreach and gathering direct feedback from prospects, the company can gain valuable insights into the product-market fit and make informed adjustments to its marketing strategies. This feedback loop helps to ensure that the marketing efforts are resonating with the target audience and drives business growth. Effective communication and collaboration between departments is crucial for a company to stay ahead and make informed decisions for business development.

FOCUS ON LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS

Long-lasting relationships are the most valuable assets in any business, and working on a strategy to reach this goal makes the difference. Building sustainable relationships relies on two principles:

  • Make the reach outs multi-channel
  • Make the reach outs multi-touch

At the core of this strategy is the idea of adding value in every contact moment, with a focus on nine or more touch points on different scenes, this can be email, linkedin, phone calls, in-person meetings etc. This approach makes the difference with others who may be more focused on short-term results and short-term strategies. Being relevant in all your communication with your prospects will guarantee strong and long-term relationships, which will impact your long-term strategy and success.

MESSAGING & CONTENT

Starting from scratch with a modern sales machine can be a challenging task. However, having a clear understanding of what works and what doesn’t can be beneficial in the long run. That is why building an overview of the reach outs with their performances can be a real game changer. While experimenting with reach outs for a specific persona, you’ll come to learn some insights that will be forever useful for your company. A/B testing, length of the message, tone of voice, days of the week… Keeping track of these understandings will help you find the best way to approach your prospects and later on, for another campaign on a similar persona, to come back to the results and already find answers.

Example: At Saleslift Studio we have extensive experience in developing messaging for various clients across different industries and geographies. A recent insight we gained in reaching out to c-suite level executives is the importance of establishing yourself as a peer rather than positioning yourself lower. Networking with executives requires an unique approach, but by keeping your messages brief and focused, you can demonstrate your competence and assert yourself as someone worth connecting with.

THE PREDICTABLE PROSPECTING MATRIX

To supplement our research and better curate our approach, we have developed a tool in-house called the “Predictable Prospecting Matrix”. This matrix can help you understand where your sales potential lies based on your brand awareness and the complexity of our proposition. For example, companies with high brand awareness and a simple proposition would fall into the top right corner of the matrix, whereas companies with lower brand awareness and a more complex proposition, like Saleslift Studio, would start in the bottom left corner. 

The challenge for companies like us is to network effectively and educate people, establish credibility, and ultimately sell. 

By staying relevant and delivering value
through effective segmentation, you
can build credibility and avoid losing it.

If you want to learn more about the Predictable Prospecting Matrix, you can find a dedicated article following this link.

Quality check

In addition to analyzing your insights and utilizing our in-house tools, it’s important to conduct a qualitative review as part of the process. This step is crucial as it allows you to understand how your existing customers and new prospects are framing their problems and solutions. By listening to their language and understanding their needs, you are better equipped to communicate and resonate with them. By conducting qualitative interviews and looking at your data, you’ll be able to develop various messaging strategies to test and determine your success rate. 

It’s important to remember that at the end of the day, your personal brand is on the line every time you send an email or communicate with someone. Before hitting the send button, ask yourself if you’re proud of what you’re sending and if it builds or loses credibility.

EXECUTION AND OPTIMIZATION

An essential aspect of effective email communication is keeping track of key performance indicators (KPIs).
These KPIs include:

  • The number of people who receive the email: delivery rate
  • The number of people who open the email: open rate
  • The number of people who book a meeting after receiving the email: conversion rate

Using tools like SalesLoft, you can keep an eye on who is opening your email regularly and adjust your approach accordingly. Testing multiple approaches at the same time and monitoring the KPIs can provide valuable insights into what resonates with your target audience. By sending your email to 30-40 people, you can quickly gain an understanding of which marketing materials and value propositions are having success and which are not. A success rate of one out of 20 opens or 5% is considered above industry average and can be used as a benchmark for making key amendments to your content writing and marketing approach.

The next step is for you to optimize your strategy, A/B test your approaches and review your results to continually adapt and improve your reach outs. Additionally, it’s important to be able to repeat successful strategies and share the learnings with the entire team so everyone knows what works and where success comes from.

Conclusion

If you’re a company looking to scale your sales quickly, but lack the in-house resources or expertise to do so, we can help. Our team will work with you to define your messaging and target audience, and help you reach them at scale. By continuously gathering feedback, we’ll optimize your outreach efforts to reach the most relevant prospects with the most effective sales language. The result? More meetings booked with the right people and faster, more predictable deal closures and long-lasting success. Contact us!

 

If you want to watch the webinar on How to Optimise your Outbound GTM Strategy in 2023, click here.