As a new B2B company just starting out, you might be putting a lot of focus on getting leads and landing sales appointments. It’s understandable. Without leads and sales, your business won’t survive. 

But there are far more benefits to outbound outreach than just landing a sales appointment. While landing sales appointments will lead to giving your business the money it needs, focusing solely on increasing sales numbers won’t help you refine your business strategies and grow and evolve. 

There are a range of other benefits you can get with outbound prospecting beyond sales appointment conversions. 

Prospecting can give you a lot of information on how to improve your sales processes, and where to take your marketing efforts next. In extreme cases, outbound outreach can give you much-needed information that will lead to a complete pivot or overhaul of your business plans. 

Below, we’ll discuss four benefits that we have identified after working with hundreds of small, mid-size, and startup B2B clients on their outbound program.

‍By paying attention to your prospecting conversations beyond trying to land an appointment or deal, you can see if there are any holes or gaps in your marketing plans or the way you communicate your offerings to your clients. You can also see what you’re doing right, and multiply your efforts for greater sales and conversions.
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‍1. Pivot your product based on prospect feedback

The responses you get through your initial email outreach can help you improve your service messaging and value proposition. Depending on what you want to know and what your prospects share, you may even get feedback on how you can improve your current line of products or services. 

For example, some of our SaaS clients have realized through our outbound program that many of the features and benefits that they are offering through their software are simply not needed or desired in the industry that they are targeting. However, through prospect conversations, they may find that many of their prospects all ask if the software does one particular task that they believe would be a “gamechanger” for their job. 

With this intel in hand, they go back to the drawing board on their product and quickly shift their development plans to solve for a feature that accomplishes that one task, and in turn, have a much better product that fits their market and solves a real problem for their ideal customer base.

Through prospecting you can also get information on what types of products or services you can offer next. Through this strategy, you can gain insight into the gaps in your market that your business can exploit in the future. This technique also ties in with point number three below.

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 2. Rethink Your Customer Profile

New businesses often think they have their customer profile down-pat, but that’s not always the case. And unfortunately, you don’t know what you don’t know. 

If your messaging and branding is talking to the wrong person, you’ll have a difficult time growing your business. The companies that seem like they hit rapid growth have usually nailed down their customer profile, which allows them to grow so fast.

When your offerings are built specifically for your ideal customer, your marketing efforts will be far more focused, your sales more effective, and profits greater. When your messaging consistently resonates with your ideal customers, sales are easier to close because you’re talking to decision makers that can actually have a personal connection to your offer.

If you’ve been in business for a few years, prospecting can also help you hit refresh. Change is inevitable, and it’s not surprising if your customer profile may have changed since you first started.