Your outreach strategies, both direct and indirect, are how you form connections with your customers.
This is HUGE, because customer interactions are the way you generate satisfaction with your brand – your product – and get those sales numbers you need.
A happy lead is more likely to become a satisfied buyer.
Naturally, outreach strategies have changed over the years.
There are the old-fashioned door-to-door sales (think Avon) – which still kind of exist in the form of Tupperware parties and Norwex parties, etc.
There are also new-fashioned approaches like the use of social media, digital marketing, artificial intelligence on websites, and email engagement.
By the end of this article, you’ll know:
- The difference between inbound, outbound, multi-channel and omnichannel strategies,
- The benefits of each of these in building customer relationships,
- How omnichannel engagement and sales engagement will skyrocket your sales success.
“Many marketing professionals interchangeably use terms like multichannel and omnichannel when referring to the strategies and tactics they deploy, but there are incredibly important differences that need to be recognized. It’s worth understanding the difference between outreach strategies and, most importantly, recognizing the synergies that can be achieved if you adopt a truly omnichannel approach to outreach,” says, Delma Lara, Director of Marketing, Hyperio.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound strategies are marketing-driven, designed to bring customers to your business through creative content that is engaging and/or informative. This will help you to be visible before a larger audience of potential prospects, which is critical for your sales success if you want to generate more qualified leads.
Your focus with inbound is to develop a stellar brand name for yourself and build a clear and attractive purpose that your customers will want to engage with. In doing so, they bring themselves into the sales process.
Inbound efforts might include great visual content (info videos, etc), catchy blogs loaded with information relevant to your prospects, a mailing list with the inside scoop on your products and deals, or more tangible objects like newsletters, webinars, or following your company’s social media to stay connected.
In order for inbound strategies to be successful, you need to really appeal to customers in a way that draws them to you. Start by learning what your customers’ interests are, and then set up your content to fit those interests in a way that feels natural to the prospects.
Follow Hubspot’s methodology of: Attract, Engage and Delight in order to get your best results from this channel.
What is Outbound Marketing?
If INBOUND is the process of drawing your prospects to you, OUTBOUND is the natural opposite in which you actively pursue your prospects.
The outbound approach means that you’re reaching out to your prospects through obvious efforts to engage them. For example, direct messages via email, phone calls, or traditional advertising such as print media.
The important thing to remember is that sales and marketing should not be one or the other – you should do both.
When your leads bring themselves to your doorstep, you don’t just smile and nod and let them hover nearby without acknowledging them – you invite them in. Your leads have done some of your work for you. Once they’re on your site, engaging with your brand, researching your product to see if they qualify as a buyer of your product, you need to engage with them.
Your inbound efforts attracted interested parties to your site, and outbound engagement will allow you to reach out directly to those people with a message tailored to them.
This is where the multi-channel outreach strategy is going to come in handy for you.
What are Multi-Channel Outreach strategies?
Multi-channel outreach is the method of using – you guessed it – multiple channels to engage with customers.
This means you’re emailing them and popping up on their social media, you’ve got an in-person or online store they can visit that’s easy to navigate, and a responsive customer service line they can access by phone whenever they need you.
Multi-channel outreach is a great way to get your inbound and outbound audiences to mix and become one pool of easy-to-access prospects that your sales reps can work with.
The multi-channel approach is the warm and friendly version of sales engagement that has eradicated the “cold” method of outreach (cold calls and cold emails – basically the act of reaching out to prospects without knowing anything about them in advance – and inevitably hitting a sales dead-end).
In a world that has shifted to an almost entirely digital sales process, multi-channel is one of your best options for success because it involves: knowing what your leads need, knowing where to find them, and engaging with them on all of the platforms that they find the most comfortable.
You’ve probably heard the term multi-channel, and you might think it’s the same as omnichannel, they are actually two different terms to describe slightly different strategies.
Although both multi- and omni-channel outreach both use various channels to engage customers, there’s one major difference between the two:
Multi-channel gives your company a presence on every channel that customers can engage with.
Omnichannel is an integrated sales strategy that unifies customer interactions on every channel.
The Omnichannel approach to sales success
In a nutshell, the omnichannel sales strategy is the King of Covering All your Bases – seamlessly.
Not only are you engaging with your customers on multiple channels, but you’re doing so through one unified engagement platform. This means that when your customers bounce between channels (which happens several dozen times a day) their data doesn’t get lost between channels, or even between devices (cell phones, home laptop, work computer, etc).
Your business is the hub of all customer interaction, so that no matter where they are, your business platform recognizes them and there’s never an interruption of service – which is a big frustration trigger for customers who respond very well to ease and convenience.
Multi-channel strategies alone can build your presence, make you recognizable to customers – but the omnichannel approach is the holistic, easy experience that customer’s need to build both awareness and trust of a company’s brand. Not only do they know who you are, but they can reach you any time, anywhere.
Sales engagement tools to help you focus on your omnichannel outcomes
If you’re using an omnichannel approach to building customer relationships, then you’re on the right track! What more do you need? The tools to help your sales reps manage the most important part of the process – qualifying leads and closing sales.
Omnichannel is the pathway to get you the most qualified leads and generate sales, and your reps are your last step in the process – so give them the tools that they need to thrive.
A sales engagement platform is software that can bridge the gaps between marketing, sales, customer experience, and internal data tracking – and it can help your sales reps close more deals.
What’s not to love?
Quantity vs. Quality – You Can Have It All!
If you use a hyper-intelligent sales engagement platform, you can have both quantity and quality when it comes to prospecting and sales outreach. Meet your customers where they are – online – and have the right technology with intelligent insights to accelerate the performance of your entire sales operation.
With Hyperio you can go from warm to sold in lightning fast speed. We don’t want you to take our word for it, though. Schedule a personalized demo with us and we’ll unlock your free 30-day risk-free trial! Just book an appointment right in our calendar!
