Setting the Scene
Welcome to the Build an Outbound Sales Process course. Here, you will learn the basic principles that define an effective sales strategy and will come away with concrete examples to help you reach, engage, and convert the right prospects, at the right time.
The Apollo Story
Apollo started out in 2015 with a big vision and a lot to learn—outbound sales have since become instrumental to our revenue and business growth. In early 2016, we went from $20,000 in revenue to $300,000 in 4 months. By the end of 2016, we went from $300,000 in revenue to $1 million in 3 months. Just a few years down the road and Apollo is now a world leader in the data intelligence and sales engagement space. The Apollo platform helps over 10,000 paying customers and over half a million Apollo users to build and scale their outbound sales systems. These results were achieved almost exclusively thanks to the outbound sales process that we have followed. In this course, we will be dissecting the ingredients of our success so that you can take actionable steps to achieve similar results for your company.
Outbound Sales 101 Overview
What is an Outbound Sales Process and why do you need to develop one for your business? It all boils down to one simple concept:
To operate a business, you need revenue. To generate revenue, you need to secure meetings and convert those conversations into sales.
Not all companies use outbound sales tactics. Some depend primarily on inbound sales and referrals. Although these methodologies have their benefits, they can only take your business so far. Companies that create an effective outbound sales process are able to generate opportunities quickly and repeatedly at scale.
Outbound sales is a tried and tested tactic for companies in all stages of growth. You may choose to tap into outbound strategies before your product is even live or to generate your first 10 customers. On the other hand, you may use outbound to scale your business from 10 to 200 customers or from 200 to 10,000. The sales strategy you execute should depend on the specific stage in which your business is at. In this Build an Outbound Sales Process course, we will concentrate on the outbound tactics to follow if you want to take your business from 1 to 10 customers or from 10 to 200 customers.
Course Outline
We’ve broken this course into 6 bite-sized chunks:
Outbound Sales Metrics
Sales metrics help you to gauge the success of your sales efforts over time. You can use a number of data points to evaluate and compare your results against your business goals. This module will look at some sample sales metrics that you can use as a benchmark when first carrying out your outbound sales strategy. By the end of this course, you should be ready to adapt these metrics to your business goals and target market so that you can continue to scale your sales initiatives and in turn, dramatically boost revenue.
Create a Product Market Fit Canvas
A Product Market Fit Canvas is a holistic summary of the different facets of your product and value propositions matched against the main goals, challenges, and needs of your market. In this module, we’ll deep dive into the PMF fundamentals, look at examples, and equip you with the knowledge you need to create your own Product Market Fit Canvas for every outbound campaign that you run.
Target Real Buyers
Sales targeting is the process in which you identify, find, target, and engage with the right contacts, from the right companies, through the right channels, at the right time. In this module, you’ll learn more about why targeting is important, you’ll see examples of how to use Apollo to find your ideal customers, and you’ll put this knowledge into practice with a practical exercise.
Craft Killer Sales Email Messaging
Writing effective outbound sales messaging means learning how to speak the language of your potential customers and transmitting your message to the right people in a concise, engaging, and relatable way. There are many methods to crafting optimal sales messaging to engage and convert your ideal prospects. In this module, we will focus primarily on leveraging the Research, Reference, Reward, and Request approach, we will share some useful resources, provide examples of first touch and follow-up messages, and set you up for writing your own killer messaging within Apollo.
Outbound Sales Analytics
Sales analytics play a fundamental role in understanding and improving your outbound sales strategy. By analyzing the data from your campaigns, you can A/B test different tactics, evaluate what is and isn’t working, and make strategic improvements to increase your open, click, response, and win rates. In this module, you’ll learn about what to experiment with and why. You’ll also find out more about how to leverage the Apollo Analytics tool to gain valuable insights into the performance of your sales campaigns.
Additional Considerations
In sales, there is no single right answer for all prospects. The tactics that work on one of your buyer personas may not work on another. The channels, messaging, number of touches, and overall approach you take are likely to differ drastically depending on many factors such as industry, Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and product offerings. In this course, you will learn how to choose the type of approach that best fits your business. On top of that, we’ll look at how to keep your domain healthy and the best methods to avoid SPAM so you can ensure your emails arrive safe and sound in the right inboxes at the right time.
Practical Exercise
Without checking the information above, write down the 6 facets that make up an effective outbound sales process. Next to each one, write down your understanding of each and why you think they are important aspects of a successful sales strategy. Put your notes to one side and come back to them at the end of the course to compare and evaluate how much you’ve learned.
Next Steps
Ready to get started? Continue to the first topic in this course: Build an Outbound Sales Process: Metrics to learn about the data points that you can use as a benchmark to measure and evaluate your teams’ sales performance.