It’s no wonder to have a hassle while picking the best sales strategy for promoting your products in the market. There might be various suggestions and insights you might have heard about the two heavyweight competitors: the Outbound Sales having an established similarity with the 20th century’s president campaigns vs the rookie of digital world, the Inbound Sales, which has proven it’s immaculate efficiency. This post is a walk-through over them, to help you provide an insight for clear understanding and selecting the suitable option for your product.
Table of Contents
- Outbound Sales
- Nature of Outbound Sales
- Achilles heel?
- Inbound Sales
- Yin and Yang
Outbound Sales
Still remember the times of Clint Eastwood and his western classics ? The giant bell that summons the people of the town for the gatherings? This is where the concept of Outbound Sales traces its origin from.
When you are making people reach out to you for the product, then it is Outbound Sales. This includes the traditional marketing campaigns like television advertisements, posters, demo shows etc. which we have all experiencing in our day-to-day lives.
In digital world, Outbound Sales broadly refers to cold calling. Cold calling refers to the process of making telephonic calls, emails etc. to the identified potential customers regarding our product.
Nature of Outbound Sales
Outbound Sales are generally of huge size involving a high budget as it’s principal is to brand the product as the legible solution to the problem it is developed to solve.
Let’s have it with a general example. The reach of a Cola in the hands of Pacino would be way more effective than Morgan Freeman’s. Indeed both having the immense popularity, but the view of public towards Al as an icon would be selling point of the product.
Achilles heel?
Outbound sales are greatly bound to budget constraints. For being a startup in Cola manufacturing, you can never dream of neither hiring Al as your ambassador nor buying the advertisement time in Big Bowl.
So, the major weakness is that reduction of budget is directly proportional to the reach of your product. The reason for demanding this huge budget is the hit and miss ratio. Both hiring a local model for our ad in CNN and telecasting Al‘s ad in local TV is inefficient. Since, the basic ideology of Outbound Sales is to “reach to the masses in a massive way”, many startups can’t come up with enough manpower to cold call basically everyone on the phone directory.
In cases of cold calling, there are many a disadvantages. Most people will get annoyed on getting calls when they are in the middle of their work. I believe even people in Sales are not an exception. Emails are made even easier. SPAM!
Inbound Sales
The whole concept of Inbound Sales is to analyze the potential customers those who are in need of our solution, guide them by providing a walk-through over their problem and explain them how our product will be the perfect solution they are seeking.
The approach entirely contrasts the Outbound Sales practices. While Outbound Sales are generic Inbound Sales practices tend to be more concerned with the certain identified individual and their problem. In Inbound Sales, there would be a more casual two way conversation between the sales person and the customer. The sales person would listen to the needs and goals of the individual and his challenges. Then he would be providing the course of the solution and along with that a proposal to buy his product.
In this way, the customer would be more satisfactory with the product. On the other hand, the hit ratio dramatically increases and the company’s cost is reduced dramatically. Making a two way communication also helps the customers and sales people to utilize their time efficient. They can schedule their meetings on common terms and can avoid any sour experiences.
Yin and Yang
It can be said that the adoption of any of the above methods would be entirely depended on the type of business you own, the target customers and the budget constraints.
If you are developing an entirely new product that is only applicable for the elites? Are your target customers individuals who would hate cold calls? Is your budget not allowing for a mass sales recruitment? In these cases, you can use Inbound Sales which will entirely fit into these conditions.
But using Inbound Sales has its fair share of problems too. It’s time consuming and replaceable. The implementation of Inbound Sales starts from contents and in their promotion to viewers. We can safely say that a viewer can view multiple contents and the judgement is left to their own.
Conclusion
The experts in sales had always been constant in one thing. Adapting. These methods are not any kind of formulations to be followed. They are proven establishments that we can get inspired from and the decision of which to follow when is entirely dependent on your own.