Marketing has a huge role (and impact) in an effective outbound sales and prospecting strategy.
The rise in account-based marketing (ABM), which I consider a sales-integrated strategy, is proof of this. ABM came about because the world now realizes that outbound has to be more than just a sequence of cold calls and outbound emails that hopes one of your 1/1,000 touch points happens to hit someone with intent and time to speak through a sales pitch. Unfortunately, this spray-and-pray method doesn’t often amount to much.
Marketing can be involved in outbound prospecting in simple ways and extremely deep and targeted formats.
Why should marketing be involved?
Modern tools and strategies give us the ability to gain touch points, brand awareness, and low-friction prospect education of outbound prospects in highly effective ways. These actions will DRASTICALLY improve your outbound success. I repeat, DRASTICALLY.
Marketing also provides the opportunity to create and build the intent needed for your outbound to be effective. That is marketing’s role in a sales-led organization.
3 effective tactics marketing can implement today to support outbound sales
- List/account-targeted advertising: Before outreach, your digital team can load and target your prospects directly through paid channels like Linkedin, Youtube, Google Ads, Mailers, Programmatic, and more.
Pro-tip: The goal here should be brand awareness and education. - Content collaboration and soft-selling: An incredible enterprise strategy is to create a content collaboration or interview strategy that invites your prospects to speak and build value-based relationships with your organization. Podcasts, webinars, social media segments, and case studies are good starting points.
Pro-tip: This is an excellent way to understand a prospect’s needs and craft a solution before you ever “begin selling.” - Implement intent data: Platforms like Apollo.io and Bombora are valuable in helping prioritize your efforts around intent signals. This has two major benefits: 1. Outbound prioritization of your giant target lists. 2. Exponential increase in the intent of your prospects from the get-go.
By encouraging marketing and sales to collaborate on outbound prospecting, you can utilize proven marketing strategies to find the right prospects at the right time and target them with the right messaging to build brand awareness, solution education, and intent. The overall result will be drastically different with your outbound.
