How to Succeed as an Outbound Sales Agent: 5 Steps & Skills for Success

Understanding what it takes to thrive in outbound sales can help you overcome challenges and give you a serious leg-up on the competition.

What is an Outbound Sales Agent?

Outbound sales agents or reps are responsible for reaching out to potential customers to sell their company’s products or services.

Typically, they do this by selling via outbound channels such as calls, texts, or email, as well as in-person or virtual sales appointments conducted with leads. Outbound sales agent roles are often found at businesses operating as either outsourced or in-house contact centers.

Many outbound sales agents work in the role of outbound lead generation as part of a wider operation—whether it’s a small team or a full-scale call center. Lead gen agents dial or otherwise contact lists of leads or make cold calls in order to qualify customers, gauge interest, and move leads closer to a final sale.

Because outbound sales agents can play a vital role in businesses in an array of industries, the specifics of any given role will vary. Nevertheless, the five outbound sales skills, tips, and techniques below are especially important to sales agent success.

5 Important Tips & Techniques to be Successful in Outbound Sales

1. Believe in Your Mission

When it comes to outbound sales, the people who are most successful are the ones who believe deeply in their mission. In other words, in sales, you need to be confident in your abilities and what you are selling.  Think of it this way: if you’re pitching a product to customers but you don’t personally understand why it’s valuable or needed, are they going to buy it? If you answered “no,” you’re right.

With this in mind, first, sell your product to yourself. Understand what makes it unique, how it helps people, and what sets it apart from the competition. Only then can you communicate these benefits to your customers.

Intel your competition. See what they do right and what you can do better. Read reviews & study up, because odds are your competition will be top of mind for your customers as well. Knowing their weaknesses only can heighten your strengths.

Step into the shoes of the customer in order to comprehend their processes, environment, buying habits, and challenges/pain points. To do this, start by surveying your current customer base to learn more about the ins and outs of their buying cycle. As well, pick their brain on what they like & dislike about your product and operation as a whole.  

2. Understand Your Value Proposition

To strive in outbound sales, you need to understand your company. What is the true intrinsic value that your company brings to the consumer? How is the consumer’s life better upon their purchase? Importantly, how is this added value brought by your company done in a unique way. The better you understand this, the easier it will be to communicate them to would-be leads and differentiate yourself from other brands.

To help define your value proposition look at these four steps:

1. Define the problem your company is solving.
2. Quantify the problem.
3. Ask if your solution is a breakthrough or compelling enough in the respective space.
4. Measure how easy your product is to adopt by new customers. (Is there a learning curve to your solution?)

3. Build Resilience

Life as an outbound sales agent can be a grind—there’s no escaping that. It’s a job that can involve a lot of time behind a computer or on a phone. And it’s certainly one that can deliver its fair share of rejection. Nevertheless, outbound sales—like sales more generally—can offer incredibly rewarding moments and outcomes.

To reach those moments, it’s important to be persistent and resilient. Beyond maintaining a positive attitude and learning to approach every call anew, outbound sales agents should develop means of coping with rejection. Managing your emotions is critical to the role outbound sales agent, and it’s a key step toward success.

4. Understand the Process

Outbound sales is a process. The more you understand this, the more effective you’ll be in the sales experience. To be as efficient as possible in this role, it’s essential to understand the journey buyers go through — from awareness to purchase — and how you can adjust your attempts to cater to each phase. Additionally, you can use the insights you gain from each call to adjust your call scripts. While every customer is different and not every moment of outbound sales is scripted, the right scripts, developed based on your cumulative sales experience, can offer a blueprint for success.

5. Know Your Customers’ Needs

The most essential factor in becoming a good outbound sales professional is to understand the needs of your customers. Across the telecommunications sphere, this is critical. Develop a process for understanding consumer needs, and then put a process in place for addressing them, be it adopting call center software or initiating surveys to understand how well you’re meeting your client’s requirements. 

One exercise that can help you generate a clear picture of your target customers’ needs is creating detailed buyer personas. By thinking holistically about how different types of customers learn about your products and approach the buying process, you can develop a process of selling to customers as complete people—not just names on a list.

Better Outbound Sales Start Here

While attempting to excel at outbound sales can feel intimidating, these five steps can help you master your position and ensure you’re as effective as you can be. At the end of the day, outbound sales is about anticipating and meeting the needs of your consumers.

The more efficiently you can address and fulfill these requirements, the happier your customer base will stay, and the more upwardly mobile your career will be.

As you seek to improve your outbound sales efforts, don’t forget to take advantage of technology, such as predictive dialing software for your call center, to enhance your efforts. Ideal for streamlining, measuring, and enhancing the outbound sales experience, they are powerful weapons for the modern outbound sales professional.