Somewhere out there, the right type of customer for your brand is hitting the tipping point and experiencing enough pain to drive them to a purchasing decision.
There are also thousands of companies that will never be the right fit for your solution.
The challenge with outbound sales is being able to distinguish the good from the bad so that your cold emails can start conversations with the best potential customers for you.
To make the most out of outbound emails, you need to make sure that you’re targeting buyers that are worthwhile to sell and support.
Wasting Time on Unqualified Accounts
There are more wrong answers than right ones when targeting for outbound sales.
Reaching out to leads that aren’t a good fit for your solution will waste everyone’s time and decrease the overall performance of your cold email prospecting.
The right sales leads should ideally have specific characteristics, use cases, and problems that make them a great potential customer for you (now or in the future).
If you invest resources in targeting accounts that are a bad fit or unqualified for your solution, you risk wasting time that could be spent on more ideal buyers.
Mindfulness about why you target accounts will help you identify bad fits so can you maximize the value of your outbound sales prospecting efforts.
Lost Focus & Profitability
With the right outbound sales process, you can filter out most of the bad deals generated from poor targeting during deal research or qualification.
However, not all of these deals will disappear. Your team will have plenty of chances to close bad customers and the repercussions can diminish your profitability.
It usually takes resources from marketing, sales, and customer success to close and retain customers.
Each minute spent on the wrong sales deal takes time away from the qualified leads you want and decreases the number of successful outcomes you create with outbound.
The Cost of Supporting Bad Customers
Making deals profitable is only half the battle when selling to bad fit customers. The next challenge comes with actually delivering what you sold them.
Any customer can reach out to support, ask for your team’s time, or leave reviews about your company for future buyers.
When a customer’s expectations don’t align with the outcomes you produce, it creates dissatisfaction and takes more energy from your team to make it work.
Instead of wasting time making the best out of unsuccessful customers, you should focus on targeting ideal target buyers that can generate value with less hassle.
Conclusion
Outbound prospecting gives you the freedom to choose your next potential customer.
Without a clear understanding of the best verticals and personas to target, it becomes difficult to find great customers and generate consistent results with outbound sales.
To make the most of your outbound prospecting efforts, you should define the characteristics of your ideal customer and target the best possible buyers for your solution.
[Generating outbound leads? Check out our new free video series the Cold Email Playbook to get insights and content from 7 cold email experts]