Salespeople are the source for key insights into what the customers need and want at different stages of their buying journey. While in inbound, the sales people along with marketing, can come up with powerful content to be put in front of their customers, displaying the ability to help leads instead of selling to them.
In outbound, which is also sometimes referred to as an interruptive approach, the sales team can grab the attention of the buyer by trying to get the company’s message out to as many prospects as possible and placing it right in front of them.
With so much going about in each technique, startups and even recently established SME’s have to know exactly what they are getting into and decide which one will benefit them more keeping their product and business model in mind. In order to help startups solve such problems, Lucep has been organizing sales events in various cities – “Sales for Startups” with the intention of seeking out sales experts and ask them for tips, solutions and best practices for common challenges and sales processes.
In one such recent sales expert event, we had Sarah Hales as one of the panelists who after years of private practice as a commercial lawyer and managing a team of lawyers at NAB, joined Dragon Law as the Sales Manager for the Singapore team. Dragon law is an online legal services business. They are a B2B company that allow startups, SMEs and large enterprise as well to create documents using their own cloud technology in the most cost effective and efficient way.
Sarah hailing from various fields, over the years, had the chance to meet many clients along her career path that used either Inbound or Outbound techniques and were great at it. Dragon Law themselves had been using effective outbound techniques that Sarah describes about in the video and interview transcript below.
Zal Dastur, Lucep: So Sarah, because we were talking out there earlier, right, what we talked about…how startups need to sell to B2B and the fact that there is a big difference now, particularly with…between Inbound and outbound and which one do you pick and how do you go forward with that?
Sarah Hales, Dragon Law: So we’ve seen the importance of outbound hugely for us, mainly targeted outbound as well so fixing that profile as well. But being flexible and leading that profile change as you know more and more about your product. We have a matrix for our outbound lead gen guy and as more and more clients sign up the data from this CRM will change the matrix he works from to begin with the profiles of the companies we put in there. So we are constantly learning from customers who buy us via their profiles better as well and that’s a key point to the outbound part .
And I think working in sales, here in particular it’s really good to speak with your peers and other companies as well and get ideas from them on the outbound and inbound. One of the companies we partner with quite closely 26th, blogging companies done really well in New Zealand, Australia, US, recently England and Asia, have always relied on inbound because they’ve had a great breadth.
But in Asia, and we’re finding it as well, that you can’t do just the outbound as companies and especially we are looking at the start ups but also to get more SMEs on board now. The traditional SMEs here are not necessarily online and necessarily picking up your inbound processes and so the outbound may appeal in time. We literally have a team who sits there profiling the specific person within the company who is going to email.
So if it’s been one week where he’s been focusing on CFOs and COOs and he’ll do very targeted outbound outreach by highlighting their pain point and how dragon law can help them. Another week he might be focusing on CEOs of companies and he’ll use a different approach in a different outbound reach because they (CEOs) will worry about different things. CFOs COOs it’s about streamlining processes. CEOs, especially some of them if they we are targeting boutique companies one week, it’s about updating, keeping in line with developing technology and why would you use stale industry systems with legal when you’re up to date in most current things. So it’s really targeted reach for the outbound. We’re seeing the response rate and closing rate from the outbound as the highest from all of our lead gens at the moment.
So Sarah had valuable insights that were handed down to us in the interview. These have been listed down below
1. Know which one works best for you and in that be flexible and change as and when you know more about your product.
2. Know which one works best for you and in that be flexible and change as and when you know more about your product.
3. Addressing the pain points of your customers can be a successful tip that can be achieved by using either of these techniques.
4. Your product/services needs to be updated and streamlined with the developing technology in order to reach out to your targeted customers.
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