What Growing Companies Know About Sales (And Stagnant Ones Refuse To Do)

Outbound Sales Strategies Set Growing Businesses Apart

In my time working with clients and prospective clients, there’s consistently one thing that sets the growing businesses apart.

They sell.

More specifically, they have outbound sales processes in place.  They realize that to grow, rarely can you rely solely on inbound leads.  They realize that you have to be willing to work the numbers, to proactively reach out to prospects both warm and cold, and to sell.

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Why You Shouldn’t Focus Only on Inbound Sales Leads

On the other hand, some prospects I talk to say things like “I’m only interested in speaking with people who are interested in my services.”

This is actually a bit of a false statement, because it presumes that anyone who is interested knows about you, and will seek you out. Everyone else must NOT interested. Which is not necessarily true.

The thing is, if you take this mentality, you’re missing out on all the other prospects that fit your profile and just don’t know about you or are still considering their options. Maybe they just need a little more prodding to push ’em over the line.

If you focus on #inbound #leads only, you'll miss out on prospects who haven't found you yet! Click To Tweet

Can you grow without doing what I’m recommending? Sure, but it’s rare.  (The exception are solo business owners and freelancers. You can make a nice income on nothing but referrals if you do great work, but if you want to grow past $200k a year you better start selling.)

Are you in? Ok, now what?

Example of a Sales Funnel

Here’s one funnel that works for us.  I’d say right now this amounts to about 29% of our new client acquisition.

1. Lead with useful content to get opt-ins. (Think white papers, free reports, webinars, ebooks, video series, etc.)

2. Utilize social media to drive traffic to the content landing pages.

3. Nurture prospects for some amount of time via email marketing.  Give ’em some time to get to know you.

4. Give ’em a call to see how they’re enjoying your stuff, and to offer them an additional service/product.  (you or your sales team)

This process is exponentially more effective than simply cold calling off a list. Make no mistake, it still takes a commitment to outbound selling.

As they say, “Anything in life worth having is worth working for.”

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