This can be a major obstacle, as delivering products and services to the right audience to generate the best returns heavily depends on your sales approach. Which begs the question: should you focus more on an inbound or outbound sales plan?

Both offer different solutions geared to addressing certain challenges and fluctuations across your target audiences, so understanding your customers’ needs and adapting on-the-fly is most important. And that’s where having an experienced partner to help you plan and execute strategies comes into play.

As a leading provider of data-driven sales services, eClerx Customer Operations offers a suite of support solutions that can help guide your sales strategies and provide insights on how to improve continually.

Before you begin to put a sales strategy into shape, you need to understand exactly how inbound and outbound sales function and the impacts they deliver.

Simply put, the primary difference between the two comes down to who contacts who first. This may seem small, but each one brings a very different type of customer to a business. Inbound sales revolve around the customer contacting the business first and outbound sales involve the business directly reaching out to the customer.

Let’s break each one down.

Because inbound customers take the initiative in the relationship, they are often more informed about the business and what they are looking for.

Since these potential leads are already interested, the primary goal of inbound sales is to make business offerings seem as enticing as possible with personalized content tied to prospects’ current needs across the customer journey. You might see one major challenge that can arise from this: volume can be difficult to manage in tandem with your business’ own outreach.

That’s where eClerx’s Sales Services team’s exhaustive experience supporting inbound strategies comes in. Here’s an example: in the Telecommunications industry, one client had thousands of potential customers contacting their agents by phone, email, or directly through the company’s website each day. Utilizing state-of-the-art solutions and our own trained agent workforce, we routed calls to our personal delivery center, where our agents handled customer conversations to inform on and upsell solutions.

By doing so, we helped maximize the ROI per call and provided the information necessary to ensure that customers leave with a good experience.

On the flip side to inbound sales, outbound strategies require businesses to take the initiative and often demand intensive research by the sales team. Outbound sales are very useful for businesses that have either a crystal-clear audience they want to target or a specific solution to offer that customers might not find through a Google search.

Even in the digital age, outbound sales solutions result in 82% of buyers accepting further discussions with sellers that proactively reach out to them.

However, it is difficult to achieve these high marks without trained and charismatic agents to help drive the conversation. That’s why eClerx’s sales team makes it a priority to provide our clients with a team of seasoned outbound sales staff to handle these calls during peak hours. We also train lower-performing agents with the strategies needed to provide the best customer service possible, resulting in one of our clients having 92% of their customers rate their interaction as “excellent.”

In truth, for most businesses, it’s best to utilize the strengths of both inbound and outbound services, according to Mark Hardenbergh, eClerx’s Vice President of Strategic Business Development.

Blending each sales strategy into a “perfect union,” Mark and the eClerx Sales Services team take advantage of the unique attributes of inbound and outbound sales to deliver adaptable offerings and focus on high-value opportunities such as the prioritization of prime time windows for outbound sales.

“The last calls of the day in the evening are almost always the worst calls,” Mark said. “The agents want to go home, which can lead to lower effort and more mistakes, wasting prime time call hours when customers are less busy. Those are the opportunities our team heavily invests in to ensure optimal conversations are taking place at just the right time.”

– Mark Hardenbergh, VP Strategic Business Development

Mark and his team leverage 100% of these evening windows, putting more team leads on the floor during the very end of these shifts to provide greater support to the entire call center, resulting in a 250x growth in business for one of our telecommunications clients since our relationship with them began in 2010.

With the prime hours covered, the Sales Services team then plans out an inbound strategy to find the right scale and mix of agents to greet each potential customer when they reach out.

“To make this happen, you have to know your inbound call patterns cold and scheduling accordingly,” says Mark, “as well as understanding what agent profile has the strongest sales results and hiring to that profile.”

– Mark Hardenbergh, VP Strategic Business Development

Once the best times and agents are discovered, our team routes calls to these top agents, ensuring the maximum ROI is received on each call. Additionally, Mark makes sure to set up additional training for the rest of the agents, as well as prioritize hiring agents with similar skills to the strongest members, guaranteeing your inbound sales team is set up for success.

Looking ahead, Mark and the eClerx Sales Services team look to continue building strong relationships with partners and build new ones, helping our clients leverage the best inbound and outbound strategies in 2023, as well as introducing some of our Analytics and Automation services into the mix.

Finding a trusted partner that understands the intricacies of inbound and outbound sales, the opportunities they offer your customer base, and how they can help achieve your business goals is the most important step when starting to plan your sales strategy. Our team of longtime industry experts has helped many large organizations with their sales approaches, and we’re ready to introduce these best strategies to your business.

Click below to get in touch with us and learn more about how our Sales Services can help you reach the right customers.