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Guide: What Is Outbound B2B Lead Generation?
Guide: What Is Outbound B2B Lead Generation?
Last updated:
October 21, 2021
Christian Bonnier
Christian Bonnier
Christian is creative director at ListKit and co-founder at KnowledgeX.

Lead generation is the lifeblood of any B2B business.

If a business has a healthy pipeline of leads, they’ll never need to worry about where their next client is coming from.

With new leads constantly flowing into the pipeline, this allows a business to scale predictably and sustainably without needing to divert a ton of attention or resources to things like paid ads or promotion.

This bears the question, how are successful businesses able to keep their pipelines packed with leads in today’s ever changing digital landscape?

Enter: Omnichannel B2B lead generation.

If this sounds like a bunch of agency jargon to you, don’t worry!

Let’s dive into what exactly outbound lead generation is and how you can start leveraging it to generate qualified leads for your business.

Using Multiple Outreach Platforms

Lead generation, in its most basic form, is generating leads for your business by sending cold messages to your ideal prospects.

Multi channel outbound B2B lead generation is simply using more than one outreach platform to generate these leads.

By utilizing more than one platform, you’ll mathematically have a higher probability of getting responses from prospects, and thus a greater chance of getting on the phone with them and signing them on as clients.

Here are a few of the most common, and most effective, cold outreach platforms to combine together with your omnichannel outreach strategy.

Cold Email

We call cold email the ole’ reliable.

Cold email has been an effective form of cold outreach for years, and there’s no signs of this trend changing in the near future.

Cold email is just what it sounds like – sending emails to cold prospects in the hopes of getting an interested response from them.

Regardless of the omnichannel strategy you decide to set up, we strongly recommend cold email as the foundation of it.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn outreach is probably the most common form of outreach that’s used in tandem with cold email.

Similar to cold email, LinkedIn outreach consists of sending cold outreach messages to your ideal prospects on LinkedIn.

A key distinction between LinkedIn and email is that LinkedIn is a social media platform, and your messaging should be more laid back and conversational than cold email because of this.

Treat LinkedIn as though you’re talking to a friend rather than your boss.

We recommend GrowthBoost for cold email and LinkedIn omnichannel outreach.

And of course, every ListKit comes with LinkedIn URLs for each prospect.

Cold Call

The dreaded cold call!

Cold calling gets a bad wrap in the business world, with the notion that every call you make will just end up with a disgruntled prospect cussing you out and hanging up.

Of course, this will sadly happen from time to time…

But cold calling is a great way to supplement your omnichannel outreach efforts.

Since you’re already reaching out to the prospect on other platforms before you give their phone a ring, you can mention these other messages as an opener once they pick up on the other line.

The huge benefit of omnichannel outreach is catching prospects where they’re most likely to answer, and a cold call might be your best bet with some of them.

Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and dial, or search up a reliable cold calling agency that can handle the legwork for you.

SMS/VM Drops

Similar to cold calling, SMS messages and voicemail drops will be a great supplement to your outreach efforts.

Using a tool like GoHighLevel, sending automated voicemails and SMS messages is an effective last ditch effort to get a reply from prospects.

It’s best to keep these messages short, because after all you are contacting prospects on their phone rather than a work email or LinkedIn account.

If the message is concise and provokes interest from the prospect, you’ll have success.

The Benefit of Omnichannel B2B Lead Generation

All of these different platforms for cold outreach are great and all… but why should you care about omnichannel outreach?

Well, because omnichannel outreach gives you the best chance at running a successful campaign that generates interested leads and calls booked on your calendar.

Think about it like this…

If you get 3 chances at making a basket, are you more likely to make it than if you only had 1 chance?

I’d say so!

The same is true for reaching out to your ideal prospects.

Hitting Them Where They’re Most Active

Most people check their email on a regular basis, which is great news for cold email!

But the key word in that sentence is most.

There will always be some prospects that don’t see your email, maybe because their inbox is flooded, or they don’t use the email you reached out to them on as their primary email.

This is why an omnichannel strategy is crucial.

If you’re only running cold email and your email slips through the cracks of a prospect’s inbox, your outreach will fall flat.

But if you follow up on that email with a LinkedIn request, an InMail message, and then a cold call or voicemail drop, you instantly just gave yourself more at-bats with this prospect.

A non-reply doesn’t always mean a prospect isn’t interested, it could very well mean that you’re not hitting them where they’re most likely to reply.

Most Touch Points

Along the lines of hitting them where they’re most active, hitting prospects with multiple touch points will very much play to your advantage.

Maybe they viewed your email, were intrigued, then had to hop in a meeting…

Or their wife called…

Or they had to go take their kids to soccer practice.

There are a million reasons why your message could fall flat, which is why the more touch points you have in an outreach campaign, the better.

2-3 emails with a LinkedIn connection request followed by 4 LinkedIn messages wrapped up with a voicemail drop will do a lot more to ensure you get a reply from a prospect, whether positive or negative.

If they see your name pop up in their inbox again after they meant to reply initially, they’ll now gladly take the time to reply back to you.

Most Efficient Use of Leads

There are only so many leads out there that fit the description of an ideal client.

Even though that number could be 456,282 and you will have years of runway with your outreach, it’s still important to be efficient with your use of leads.

Say you reach out to 1,000 contacts with email, and only get a reply from 75 of them…

That leaves 925 prospects that are wasted and tossed to the side as you prepare a new list of contacts to reach out to.

As you can imagine, this is a very inefficient way to conduct cold outreach and won’t be sustainable forever.

Omnichannel outreach combats this.

If there are 925 contacts remaining after you run through your email sequence, these contacts are now sent to a LinkedIn connection acceptance step, or an InMail step.

Say 20% of these contacts either reply to your InMail or accept your connection request, you now have another 185 opportunities that otherwise would’ve been dead leads.

After LinkedIn, the 740 remaining contacts can now be cold called or sent to a voicemail drop step, and the process of maximizing opportunities continues.

As you can see, utilizing an omnichannel strategy is very sustainable and efficient!

How to Set Up Omnichannel Cold Outreach

Now that you understand how effective omnichannel outreach is, it’s time to set up your very own omnichannel sequence!

The first step is of course to get a list of contacts from a service like ListKit.

While you wait for your ListKit to be delivered, set up an omnichannel sequence.

Once you plug your ListKit into your outreach platform of choice, sit back and wait for replies to start rolling in.

Conclusion

Cold outreach is the best and most cost effective way to generate a healthy pipeline of leads for a B2B business.

Outreach methods like cold email and LinkedIn are effective on their own, but they’re even more effective when combined into one fluid, multiple channel outreach strategy.

By leveraging this type of B2B cold outreach, you’ll be able to hit prospects on more than one platform, give yourself a much better chance at getting a reply from them, and book calls with qualified prospects on an efficient, consistent basis.

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