Outbound prospecting
Definition
Outbound prospecting is reaching out to potential customers who haven't contacted you, by email, phone, LinkedIn, or paid social, to start a sales conversation.
Outbound prospecting is reaching out to potential customers who haven't contacted you, by email, phone, LinkedIn, or paid social, to start a sales conversation.
Inbound waits for the buyer to search, read, or fill out a form. Outbound goes to the buyer. The argument about which is better usually misses the point, which is that they reach different people. Inbound reaches the buyers who are already looking. In a market with a few thousand real prospects, that's a small slice at any given moment. Outbound reaches the rest, if it has a reason to.
The reason is what separates outbound that works from outbound that doesn't. Prospecting a list of job titles produces the emails and calls everyone deletes. Prospecting a list of companies where something just changed produces conversations, because the message is about the change.
An example
A cloud consultancy wants mid-market companies moving to Azure. Inbound catches the ones searching "Azure migration partner," which is a few a month and mostly other consultancies. Outbound emails the 30 companies in its target size that posted a cloud architect role or have a colo lease ending in the next year. Those 30 weren't searching yet. That's why nobody else has emailed them.
The channels
Email carries the reason. Phone and LinkedIn follow up on it. The order matters: a call that opens with "I sent a note Tuesday about the Ashburn lease" is a different call from one that opens with "do you have a few minutes to talk about cloud."
Related terms
Outbound vs inbound · Multi channel outbound · Cold email · Buying signal
If you want this run for you, see our outbound agency, or outbound for MSPs.
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