Closing Outbound

Closing outbound deals is a totally different skillset to closing referrals and inbound leads.

When companies switch from a predominantly inbound motion to a strategic outbound strategy, they often think - I just need to hire SDRs or get my sales team to generate more of their own meetings, and that’s that.

But the problem is not just generating the meetings, it’s also the way you run those deals once you’re in front of the right people.

Here are 2 questions that are great for inbound meetings which won’t work in outbound generated deals:

❌ Why were you interested in talking to us today?

• They’ll be thinking “you contacted me so show me why I haven’t wasted my time”

❌ What are you looking to achieve with us?

• An inbound lead comes to your website with a scope of work ready, whereas an outbound lead is yet to define it

So what’s the alternative approach?

You need to do more education about potential problems they’re facing and then ask how they’re addressing them for outbound deals.

Inbound deals will already understand they have these problems, whereas outbound leads are often unaware of the size of their problems.

So if I was speaking to a revenue leader at a real estate company, I may say:

“We interviewed 100 regional leaders at real estate companies and 85% of them said a major challenge was having their team generate more of their own leads in the current economy VS investing more in marketing.

How are you getting your brokers to do that today?”

Whereas for an inbound lead, I could get away with just asking the question without the context and insights before.

The template is:

“Insert data about problem. Ask how question about problem.”