What is outbound lead generation? An in-depth guide

Outbound marketing can be tricky. Answering cold sales calls is considered such an irritant that it’s become a comedy staple. If a sitcom writer wants to frustrate a character, they have them answer their phone to a salesperson. So, it’s unsurprising that outbound lead generation has a poor reputation—but is this deserved?

Well, if you’re still using outdated tech and techniques, then the answer is “maybe.” But, if you’re up to date with the latest communications technology and know how to pull in high-quality leads, it can actually be hugely beneficial both for businesses and their customers.

Let’s look at what outbound lead generation is, how it can benefit your company, and how to overcome its various challenges.

What is outbound lead generation?

Outbound lead generation involves contacting potential customers to make them aware of your product or service. Both sales and marketing teams can take part in these activities.

It’s called “lead generation” because the aim is to produce leads—to identify and reach out to people who may have an interest in your product or service. A good lead is someone likely to engage with your outbound callers, and that may ultimately convert. 

Outbound lead generation can be a crucial part of a business’s sales funnel. Through it, you can channel high-quality leads into the mouth of your funnel, and with the right follow-up tactics, many will travel all the way to conversion. This means boosted brand awareness, a bigger pool of customers, and a resultant improvement in your bottom line.

There are many ways to generate outbound leads, including outbound calls, emails, social media marketing, traditional media ads, and more. 

Who’s responsible for outbound lead generation?

The major work of outbound lead generation is usually done by outbound sales and marketing teams. Sometimes, they’ll work in conjunction—in fact, that’s the best-case scenario—but the role of each team is slightly different.

Outbound sales team

Outbound sales lead generation sees teams reach out to potential customers through tactics like cold calling and sending promotional emails. They also try to guide leads through the sales process using things like follow-up calls, sales demos, and so on.

Outbound marketing team

Outbound lead generation in marketing involves promoting a business through things like advertising campaigns and PR events. Unlike an inbound marketing team, which will try and draw customers to a business, an outbound team will push the brand out into the world in an effort to reach new leads.

Inbound vs outbound lead generation: Similarities and differences

There are several key differences between inbound and outbound lead generation. The biggest difference is that inbound marketing is designed to draw leads in, while outbound marketing focuses on reaching out to them.

It may help to think of it in terms of a brick-and-mortar shop. In this scenario, the inbound team would be inside the shop, answering customer queries, talking them through their purchasing decisions, and making interior displays look nice. Meanwhile, the outbound team would be on the streets, handing out pamphlets, offering free samples, etc.

Both teams ultimately want to bring in more customers and boost sales, but each operates differently. For best results, inbound and outbound teams will work in tandem to help customers through every stage of their journey.

In a non-brick-and-mortar context, inbound lead generation may involve things like:

• Raising the brand’s reputation through thought leadership

• Producing informative, entertaining, and helpful blogs and social media posts

• Boosting the brand’s SEO to make it more visible to inbound leads

• Nurturing existing leads through the sales funnel.

The whole idea is to help customers find your brand, engage them through attractive content and a quality brand reputation, and ease their way to conversion.

Outbound lead generation, on the other hand, involves things like:

• Contacting potential leads directly through phone calls and emails

• Producing targeted outreach campaigns designed to engage new audiences

• Raising brand awareness through generalised display campaigns, perhaps involving billboards, event sponsorship, etc.

The aim is to reach out to brand-new leads and usher them into the sales funnel. Rather than pulling them from within the wider sphere of your brand influence, outbound tactics go out into the world and give potential customers a gentle nudge in your direction.

The benefits of effective outbound lead generation

So, as you can see, there’s a lot to be said for outbound lead generation in sales and marketing. When done properly, it can bring numerous benefits to your business. Here are just a few of them.

It cuts your sales cycle

A huge amount of your sales cycle may be taken up by customers browsing your offerings and mulling over their decision. When done effectively, however, outbound lead generation can slash this time by reaching out to hyper-targeted leads and fast-tracking them through to purchasing.

The right tools can speed things up even further. For example, things like sales automation and real-time coaching for salespeople can help lessen the time to purchase.

It brings in new audiences

Outbound lead generation is a fantastic way to pull in new audiences. If you’ve done your research properly, it can help you forge fresh connections with leads that may never have reached you through inbound techniques. 

At the same time, outbound lead generation gives you a brilliant way to quickly test the waters of any new market and gain insight into which markets are worth focusing on for both inbound and outbound purposes.

It raises brand awareness

Things like display and mass-market email campaigns may be more generalised than many inbound techniques, but they’re great for building brand awareness. For purely getting your name out there and boosting brand recognition, outbound lead generation tactics are often effective.

It gives valuable audience insights

Let’s say your outbound sales team is making hundreds of calls every day. With a tool like Dialpad Ai Sales, data from these calls can be swiftly analysed to gain a better understanding of what your potential leads respond to, what they don’t, which tactics work, and which leave the customer cold.

You can quickly feed these insights back to your sales team, simultaneously learning valuable information about your customers (which benefits your entire business) and refining your outbound techniques to get the results you need.

Top outbound lead generation strategies and tactics

So, how can you get these great outbound lead generation benefits without falling into the kind of outdated behaviours that can make outbound activities unpopular?

Well, the right outbound lead generation strategy and tactics can help enormously. Here are some of them.

Use the right software

Cold calling and emailing are among the most common forms of outbound lead generation. One of the best ways to make sure your outbound efforts in these areas are profitable is to use the right B2B lead generation tools and software.

Ideally, you want a holistic communication platform that integrates your outbound call centre software with your call centre CRM and marketing tools. A solution like Dialpad, for example, gives you outbound calling functionality that puts a wide range of vital tools at the caller’s fingertips.

For instance, integration with popular CRMs like Salesforce allows the caller to pull up customer data and insights, helping them understand where the customer will find the most value from their offering and how to engage them on a relevant level.

Similarly, Dialpad offers real-time help to agents, from prompts and analytics to the ability for supervisors to listen in, “whisper” advice, or even take over the call if need be.

Dialpad can be used on any device via our app, which also gives callers a lot of flexibility. They don’t need to manually dial numbers—our AI power dialer can do this for them.

Over time, our system can even gather call data that businesses can analyse and learn from, enabling them to hone their cold calling technique until it’s perfect.

PPC (pay-per-click)

PPC advertising campaigns are a quick and easy way to get your brand in front of fresh eyes. If you aim to build awareness and name recognition, PPC is a great tactic.

The concept behind it is pretty simple: you create an ad, launch it on a platform, and pay that platform every time someone clicks on it. It’s especially popular on bigger search engines like Google, where you’re more or less guaranteed to reach a large audience (but smaller brands should bear in mind that the cost of PPC can quickly rack up).

A good PPC campaign will address relevant audiences using precise keywords and SEO. For example, an outbound marketer for a piece of payroll software might bid for keywords like “Best payroll tools,” “Good payroll software,” “Best payroll solution in [location],” and so on.

Once your outbound team has identified and chosen its preferred keywords and phrases, they’ll group them into ad groups and campaigns. Each ad must be linked to a landing page, so a big part of any PPC campaign is ensuring these are well-optimised (this is one area where inbound and outbound teams can combine their skills).

Overall, PPC ads are a good way to reach a large audience and can be very effective at getting new leads onto your landing pages. But it’s usually worth budgeting more than you think you’ll need for a PPC campaign—if it goes well, the cost of all those clicks can quickly add up.

Social selling

Social selling takes place over social media and involves engaging with leads via these platforms to bring them closer to your brand.

Social selling has four major pillars:

1. Brand presence: Social selling teams will work hard to create a compelling, engaging, recognisable, and professional brand profile on social platforms. Ideally, this should position your business as a reliable and effective industry leader that can be trusted with a lead’s custom.

2. Targeting: Social media platforms give unparalleled targeting options, too. It’s easy to segment social media audiences to pinpoint the perfect prospects. This allows your outbound selling team to reach high-quality leads likely to convert.

3. Engagement: Social selling is about engaging with your audience and the wider industry. For example, you might proactively engage with relevant news stories by posting about them and then further engage with prospective leads by asking what your audience thinks.

4. Relationship building: Social selling offers great opportunities to build communities around your brand and, through these, relationships with your prospects. People are much more likely to buy from brands they connect to. Social selling lets you build these connections through your online community.

Content syndication

Content syndication involves spreading your content around so it reaches a wider audience. 

For example, you might publish a blog post on your own blog and on a third-party website. This introduces your blog post to new audiences and can help drive more people to your site.

What’s in it for the third-party website, though? Well, if you already have a partnership with, say, another brand or industry professional, sharing content can help showcase both your brands and cement your partnership further. Otherwise, third-party websites benefit from getting free content that helps them continue providing value for their audiences.

Ideally, you should syndicate your content across various relevant websites and channels. Seek websites and platforms with an audience who’ll find your content relevant and interesting.

Referrals

Referral marketing is where you encourage your customers to recommend your brand to their friends, family, and other connections. Often, this is done by giving loyal customers a referral link and promising them a reward (such as cashback or a discount) for everyone who signs up through it.

As with inbound and outbound sales, inbound and outbound referrals operate differently:

• Inbound referrals are people who are referred to your business from an outside source. For example, they may have read a great review of your product and come to investigate. These referrals are usually highly qualified and likely to convert.

• Outbound referrals more often take some effort on the part of the brand to bring them in. For example, you may be given the phone number or email address of a potential customer, and it’s then up to the brand to reach out.

Outbound referrals are often less qualified than inbound ones, but if the referrer knows the referee well enough, there’s usually a good reason they’ve passed on your details. Outbound referrals can thus be nudged into conversion with a strong outbound sales strategy.

Generating leads through referrals takes advantage of one of the most powerful and successful marketing strategies: Word of mouth. 

Both inbound and outbound referral leads are more qualified than most because they’ve been directed to your company by someone they know and trust. This inspires trust in you and your product from the get-go.

Common outbound lead generation challenges and how to overcome them

Outbound lead generation has huge potential when it’s done properly—but it’s also possible to get it very wrong. And when outbound lead generation goes south, you risk alienating customers and damaging your brand reputation.

So, let’s take a look at some common challenges and mistakes that businesses make with outbound lead generation and how you can overcome them.

An ineffective strategy

Running an outbound lead generation campaign without a proper strategic foundation is a bad idea. To make your campaign as successful as possible, you need to produce a proper outbound lead generation strategy.

When building your blueprint, think about the following:

• What do you hope to achieve with this campaign, and how will you measure your success?

• Who will be responsible for which aspects of your campaign?

• Who are your ideal customers, and how can you target them effectively?

• What’s the timeframe for your campaign?

In conjunction with this, you should ideally also have an inbound demand generation strategy. This should focus on building awareness of your brand/product, educating potential customers on how it can meet their needs, and generally nurturing your potential audience. 

When you pair an outbound lead generation and inbound demand generation strategy, you smooth the way for your outbound teams to get the results you need. 

If it's doing its job properly, your demand generation strategy should already have built up brand recognition and an understanding of your product, so your sales teams aren’t really going in “cold”—only tepid.

Poor customer profiling

Understanding your customers and potential customers is crucial for effective outbound lead generation. Creating accurate profiles can be a massive help here. 

Your personas will enable you to understand your target audience in a relatable, human way rather than as an abstract set of data points.

If you don’t create good customer profiles, you may struggle to build relationships and rapport with your leads. Rather than targeting highly qualified leads based on strong insights, you’ll miss the mark and find yourself calling up less qualified leads who may have little interest in your product.

So, take your customer profiling seriously. Build up buyer personas and profiles based on audience insights, and use these to target the right people in the right way.

Using the wrong tools

The right outbound lead generation tools and software can revolutionise your efforts, but the wrong tools will make the whole process much harder.

Ideally, outbound lead generation tools should make your processes smoother, more efficient, and more effective. Look for ones that are easy to use, integrate well with your existing tech stack, and have the kinds of features your operation will benefit from. 

For example, Dialpad can make your outbound teams’ job easier through many helpful automations and handy tools, such as voicemail drop and AI-generated insights.

Dialpad also integrates seamlessly with CRMs like Salesforce and brings its range of useful features within those platforms. For instance, Real-Time Assist (RTA) cards for coaching purposes can appear within Salesforce, as shown above. All of this gives your teams the best possible support when reaching out to leads.

Lack of alignment between marketing and sales teams

It’s also surprisingly common for sales and marketing teams to fall victim to silos, with little to no communication between them. This is unfortunate, as when they work together, they can achieve much more than alone.

For example, a marketing team working with a sales team can benefit from customer insights gleaned by sales and learn more about the best kinds of leads to focus on. They can feed this information into their campaigns to produce better-targeted ads that hone in on the features customers want from your products.

Similarly, when sales understands what marketing is doing, they know what to expect from customer communications. For example, if marketing has produced a campaign focusing on the cost-efficiency of a product, sales can also concentrate on this aspect in their outbound activities, knowing the customer will have been primed for this by marketing.

Again, the right tools and technology are a huge help here. For example, Dialpad integrates seamlessly with CRMs like Hubspot and Salesforce. This means that both sales and marketing teams can share insights via your CRM without ever having to click between platforms. 

What’s more, Dialpad also integrates with Outreach, a popular sales execution platform. So, if your teams use Outreach for, say, their email campaigns, you can get all the benefits of Dialpad, too, in the same place. 

This integrated, centralised communications capability is great for aligning teams and their campaigns.

Grow your business with effective outbound lead generation

Outbound lead generation has a huge amount of potential for businesses, but you must get it right if you want to reap the rewards.

With Dialpad, your outbound lead generation teams have every tool they need at their fingertips. From sophisticated analytics to helpful automation and AI in sales processes, Dialpad can help your sales teams reach and convert more leads.

Interested in finding out more? Then, take a product tour of Dialpad’s AI Sales Centre today!