While your CRM provides powerful insights into lower-pipeline processes, your outbound activities may not be getting enough attention.
By Marc Gassó on May 21, 2019
The complexity of the sales process can make defining its phases and their purposes confusing.
Each step – target company research, prospecting ideal buyers, contacting, and closing a deal – needs its own set of tools. Attention to the specific needs of these separate phases creates a faster scale for any B2B SaaS.
However, a traditional CRM isn’t customized for the outbound sales phase of the sales cycle.
In the upper-funnel, Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) prospect leads via emails and calls to convert them into meetings. In the meeting, an Account Executive explains your product or service’s benefits and turns the lead into a business opportunity.
The outbound sales process is vital because it helps validate your go-to-market strategy. Your SDRs are your ears to the ground – and insights from your outbound sales team can help you make better growth decisions.
SaaS is a different playing field
Nowadays, in the hyper-competitive market space, companies aren’t afraid to invest in technology for their sales department. A sales tech stack must systemize, manage, and analyze the current funnel and make valuable forecasts. Typically, the majority of this investment goes into a CRM SaaS companies use, such as Salesforce or Pipedrive.
In a SaaS company, sales and marketing teams need more than just a traditional CRM to assist them.
Inbound marketers and customer success departments have their own specialized tools, so what about the outbound team? A CRM gives a generic overview of the outbound process. However, external tools and integrations are needed to perform basic actions – like activity tracking and KPI measurement.
Despite being a useful tool, a CRM doesn’t integrate your playbook and systemizes your processes. It isn’t complex enough to achieve a well-rounded outbound sales strategy.
However, it’s crucial to adapt outreach objectives with the appropriate channels, cadence, and pitch strategy to the characteristics of each market. And you’ll need a different platform for that.
Why can’t a traditional CRM manage the outbound sales process?
Account-based sales
This theory treats each company as one unit, with multiple ideal customer profiles within one account. In traditional CRM, one lead responds to one person. You’ve heard of account-based marketing, so why not apply the same strategy to sales?
Think globally and approach a potential client as a representation of an entire company. This strategy allows more profound insights into a company’s scenario and considers a multiple-decision maker situation.
The account-based focus is especially important when it comes to the cadence. A full overview of cadence by account allows an understanding of the level of company engagement visually in seconds and quickly reveals key moments.
Understand the level of account engagement visually in real-time and quickly reveal key moments with Bloobirds cadence.
An account-based platform supports a predictable revenue model and converts your playbook and processes into action.
Meanwhile, in a CRM, one lead corresponds to one person instead of the overall company. Sequence features don’ttypically offer a visual cadence overview.
Sales-oriented vs. task-oriented
Outbound sales requires that an SDR takes specific actions at particular points in the pipeline. Furthermore, these tasks should be automatically prioritized daily to set up the SDRs for efficient goal achievement.
CRMs can’t assist an SDR with task automation or organization. Therefore, a proper SDR tech stack must add a tool to generate appropriate tasks to optimize the sales process. This tool should help your sales reps know exactly what to do and when – leaving you to concentrate on the big picture stuff.
The easy option is to connect to your CRM a prospecting platform. An all-in-one platform built for SDRs can immediately help you define your playbook and start prospecting in an assisted and systematic way.
Workload management
The goal of a CRM is to help manage a database of leads, companies, and clients. However, with each SDR managing an average of 100 companies in their outbound pipeline, a CRM alone isn’t capable of executing the heavy lifting.
Systematic prioritization and company goals must direct order for each day’s tasks. This structure, allowed by an all-in-one outbound sales platform, allows your reps to focus on star accounts.
With each SDR managing an average of 100 companies in their outbound pipeline, a CRM alone isn’t capable of executing the heavy lifting.
Activity tracking and data collection
When prospecting potential customers, it’s vital to know how often to contact them to achieve favorable and engaging responses. To establish an effective strategy, you’ll need to collect data from your SDRs through the amount of contact attempts and responses from your target buyers. Unfortunately, recording this crucial piece of an outbound strategy is something that a CRM can’t do on its own.
Trying to get SDRs to fill in mandatory forms correctly can be futile, to say the least. When you collect data intuitively, you can turn it into insights for testing new markets, optimizing your messaging, and predicting revenue flow.
A prospecting platform makes sure that the right data is collected from your SDRs, at the opportune moment. Look for a platform that automatically turns that data into strategic dashboards.
The fix
In summary, having a strong outbound sales strategy is key to being able to scale your SaaS business.
The right tools are critical to skyrocketing growth. Bloobirds can help by assisting your process with an all-in-one prospecting platform customized for B2B SaaS companies. And when it comes to outbound sales, CRMs aren’t enough. Find out more.
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