Outreach With Outlook – How to Turn Your Prospects into Customers

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By definition, outreach is an active form of marketing whereby a business seeks to increase its exposure by using methods other than the mainstream ways like social media and search engines. Most businesses use email for their outreach activities, hence the growing popularity of the email outreach strategy.

Are you considering using outreach to increase the number of leads and grow your business profits? Outlook, one of Microsoft’s most popular emailing and contact management tools, is an excellent tool you can use especially if you either cannot afford a reliable CRM software or just want to simplify the whole process.

Here, we show you three simple ways to use Outlook to boost your outreach results. And as you’ll realize, most of Outlook’s hidden power can only be unlocked by integrating it with compatible extensions and add-ins.

Let’s get started!

Lead management

How you manage your leads and prospects often shows in the rate at which you convert them into buying customers. Manage them poorly and you’ll hardly close significant numbers to keep your business afloat. The reverse is also true.

A big part of managing leads is qualifying them to ensure you’re working with only those with the biggest potential to convert and buy from you. It makes little sense investing a lot of your energy on prospects you know very little about and only realize later on that you were wasting time and other resources on them. This is why lead scoring should play a central part of your outreach process to help you save on your efforts and time.

Outlook supports integrations with other useful tools that can help you research your target market – which is essentially the first step to learning who best suits your business and who doesn’t.

For example, the Clearbit for Outlook add-in is a great feature that will assist you gather crucial information on your prospective clients. This includes providing you with details like their industry, company size, full official names, their contact information, positions and titles at their workplace.

Using this information, you can gauge how well a lead is qualified or their level of interest in your products and services. To put this into perspective, if Clearbit shows you that a particular person you’re targeting is a CEO of a company with 10-15 staff, you might consider reaching out to them for a staff management software you’re developing. The same cannot be recommended if the tool returned information that the person in question serves as the accountant of that company.

Scheduling of meetings

One of the most effective ways to develop meaningful relationships, whether with your staff or clients, is through meetings. This is where big things and ideas are shared and discussed. For example, meetings with prospective clients offer you the opportunity to sell your products and services, present demos, and even close deals and sign contracts.

Unfortunately, planning and finding suitable times for meetings can be quite a tedious and time-consuming task especially if several parties are involved. The good news is that you can automate the process and significantly reduce cases of failed meetings and stresses that come with organizing them manually.

Using an Outlook add-in like FreeBusy or Boomerang, your leads can choose the different times in their calendars that they are available. Alternatively, you can send them all your availability and let them choose the date that works best for them. In the end, you can easily agree on a time that both or several of you find most suitable for a meeting.

Signing contracts

Let’s admit it, one of the reasons we all work so hard in business is to close more deals and increase our bank balances. And what a better feeling when you finally sign that contract and get paid to start working on your client project!

With the advancing technology and the fact that people are getting busier by the day, it pays to automate and make contract signing process more convenient for parties involved. You no longer have to meet physically to complete this process; at least not with Outlook extension tools like DocSend and Docusign now readily available.

In addition to going paperless and saving on both time and money, these automated contract signing tools help you store your documents safely in the cloud. This means you never again have to worry about your papers getting damaged or misplaced.

Do you have any experience using Outlook to manage your exchanges and how you deal with your prospective clients? We’d like to hear your feedback.