Outbound sales tools you can't ignore

Having a full complement of tools in your sales department means making sure that you understand the importance of outbound sales tools. This is a critical necessity when you find yourself responsible for important enterprise accounts. Each and every day your team should be targeting and delineating new accounts to add to your stable.

Here are a few best practices that will improve your numbers.

• A good CRM. There's no way around having this part of your toolbox in good order. This should be your one stop database where everything comes together and you can see the data you need to make decisions about which prospects to target.
• A sales intelligence tool is another element for a good outbound sales tools package. If you can find one that can supply information and even analytics on business leaders and the decision-makers for any given organization, all the better. This is an excellent tool for understanding how well current projects are shaping up.
• The sales communications platform is a big part of what we supply here at Outreach. By focusing on all the statistics and data around any email campaigns and bringing it all together in one easy to see location, you've got a better chance of closing the deal with any particular client and seeing trends as they develop.
• Using social media to get the information you need on a prospect is invaluable. Online outbound sales tools like LinkedIn can give you a direct interaction to what a prospect does and an insight into their process. These are also excellent platforms to look for any recent news about a prospect that you can use to your advantage.

Prospecting is one of the cornerstones of any successful sales campaign. Researching out any company before an initial contact is made easier when they have a website. It's a good idea to take a good look at their pages to find out what it is they do and how you can solve any problems they might be having with their process.

Be sure that any prospecting you do has an immediate set of results for any prospects that you are contacting. Make sure to shy away from talking about your own product too much. Connecting the dots between the personal and social level is the kind of one two punch that will make all the other outbound sales tools that you are using connect.