“Sell them on why the problem is worth fixing first and then sell them your solution.” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 325
How do you sell differently when doing outbound and inbound?
Join the conversation below and check out Jason’s LinkedIn post!
Blissful Prospecting
Jason Bay on LinkedIn
Jason’s LinkedIn post
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listing to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jason Bay from Blissful Prospecting is back with another of his super insightful tips. Check it out:
Jason Bay: For as long as inbound has been around, especially with all the digital marketing and all this stuff that HubSpot is doing around creating inbound engines and helping people do that. There’s been a controversy over whether you should do inbound versus outbound. And I believe that you should do both. We happen to specialize in the outbound process, but I don’t think that should be the only part of your marketing mix, so to speak, and where you get leads and set your appointments from. Now if you’re an SDR, you might not really have a choice. I’m doing outbound, but there are also SDRs that do inbound, right? So what I want to talk about and where I see people having challenges is closing outbound versus closing inbound. There seem to be people, if you haven’t had a lot of experience with outbound seems to have some trouble closing at as high of a rate as you do with inbound. And someone put up a LinkedIn post and they said to the average close rate on outbound was like 10% or something like that, which I think is very, very low. So I want to talk about what those differences are.
So when you look at an inbound prospect that comes to you through your website, reaches out to you, whatever it might be, the biggest difference between that and outbound is that they’re typically further along in their buyer’s journey and closer to making a decision. So the buyer’s journey, that first stage is awareness. You know, I know that I have a problem and then I’m looking for a way to solve it. The interesting part of that, that’s the next stage in the buyer’s journey. And depending on the buyer’s journey you look at, there could be multiple stages in between, but interest typically is the next stage. And that’s like; Hey, I’m starting to look into options. I’ve identified what those are, and now I’m starting to explore a product or a solution or service to help me fix this problem that I am aware of. So the sale is focused more on why you’re the best to help them typically and less on why they should make a decision sooner rather than later. The second part with inbound that’s a little different is the internal narrative around their problem. And the best way to fix it has usually already been established, right? They already know that they have our problem, they’ve defined it already and they’ve already defined what they think is the best way to fix it. So with outbound, very different in these areas. So the first part that’s different is outbound prospects. When you reach out to them, unless you get lucky, which you will see, you know, 2 or 3% of the time is you’re typically catching people that are not very far along the buyer’s journey and they might not be in the buyer’s journey like at all.
So they’re probably not aware that they have a problem and they’re probably not looking for ways to fix it. So the sale typically is focused more on educating the prospect about a problem that they have or a way of fixing it that they may not be aware of. And the second part of this that’s different is the internal narrative around their problem in the best way to fix it has not been established because they’re usually not aware that they have a problem or they may not be aware of how to fix the problem that they have. So where do you want to focus your efforts little differently with an outbound sale is instead of asking all of these questions during the discovery process, you really need something valuable to share that’s going to open their eyes to a new possibility. So you need to have like the, Hey, here are two or three strategies we see companies like yours using to close this gap in whatever they’re doing.
So you need to educate the prospect on the opportunity that exists between where they are and where they could be. Usually, you need to come in with that information on a cold call or a cold email in order to get them to hop on a call. So you need to teach them something. The second part to that is again because the person and the company really haven’t gotten to the point to where they’re, you know, in that interesting stage and decision stage where they’re narrowing down solutions, you really need to sell them on the problem. So sell them on why the problem is worth fixing first and then sell them on your solution. Second, you really got to get their consensus on what the problem is and why it’s worth fixing because you caught them unexpectedly and they didn’t come to you with a problem.
So this is the two things that you need to do differently when you’re selling with outbound that you need to really, really focus on more than you might have to with inbound. So I put up a LinkedIn post about this, check it out in the show notes and I asked this question of how do you sell it differently for an outbound versus inbound lead and a lot of people comments, I recommend checking that out and I would love to hear from you, how do you sell differently when doing outbound versus inbound?
Scott Ingram: We’ve got a link to that LinkedIn post for you to check out at DailySales.Tips/325. Read the comments, add your own and be sure to connect with Jason.
Then make sure you’re subscribed to this podcast and come back tomorrow for another great sales tip.