Outbound prospecting is one of the best ways to identify and reach out to potential customers. It helps the marketing team to come up with a list of prospects whom it then contacts and introduces to the company and the products or services it is offering.
The popular methods used to contact prospects are cold calling and cold emailing. The two make it easy to reach out to potential customers without incurring significant costs. However, despite its potential, not many businesses manage to increase sales using outbound prospecting.
The failure is attributed to the fact that marketing teams fail to make use of the free resources available at their disposal, which can make outbound prospecting more effective. This makes it difficult to appeal to potential customers, which consequently translate to little or no sales.
How can you make Outbound prospecting more effective for your business? By incorporating free sales tools which are among the free resources available to the marketing department.
Examples of these tools and how they can benefit your business
If you want to succeed with outbound prospecting, you need software that can help you manage data of all your prospects. A free version of Customer relationship management (CRM) software can be beneficial. It can enable the marketing team to keep a database containing all the required information about the prospects. It can also be designed to group potential customers according to the likelihood of purchase, among others.
Your prospects might not necessarily come from the same geographical location as you. This means that they might be from a different time zone. Knowing your prospect’s time of day allows the marketing team to avoid making contacting at odd hours. That is why you need tools such as Timee and MyTimeZone to assist you with identifying the time difference, and so scheduling calls and emails accordingly.
One of the reasons why prospects ignore cold emails is because most of them are generic messages, which they do not find appealing. They, therefore, see no reason to read the whole message, and in most cases, mark them as spam. You can avoid such issues by personalizing the message you send using tools such as Gorgias templates and templates for Gmail. The tools allow you to address the potential customers by name, thereby creating a good first impression. This helps to keep them interested in the content.
You also need tools such as Grammarly which checks for spelling errors among other writing mistakes present in a message. This is important in outbound prospecting as it ensures that your emails are always professional.
There are many other tools that you can use to make outbound prospecting the right marketing practice for your company. You only need to identify those that will work for the business.
The takeaway
Free sales tool can turn outbound prospecting into a fruitful marketing channel for your business. The tools enable the marketing team to manage data, contact prospects at the right time, personalize messages, and avoid grammar mistakes, among others. All these make it easy to turn prospects into customers.
