Outbound Lead Generation: Strategies, Tools, and Tactics

If you want to acquire new customers and grow your business quickly, outbound marketing and lead generation tactics can be one of the best weapons in your arsenal. They can be highly scalable, don’t wait for customers to passively find you, and enable you to reach out to potential leads that align with your ideal customer profile (ICP) proactively.

In this post, we discuss effective outbound lead generation tactics and platforms you can use to increase your potential for success.

What Is Outbound Lead Generation?

Outbound lead generation is the practice of initiating contact with potential customers who haven’t yet interacted with your business. It includes tactics like cold calling, cold emailing, social selling, pay-per-click (PPC), and direct mail.

The goal of outbound lead generation is to identify prospects, spark interest, qualify leads, and move them into (and through) the sales pipeline.

Sales development representatives, business development managers, or performance marketers typically execute these strategies. As a result, both marketing teams and sales teams contribute to outbound lead generation.

How outbound lead generation differs from inbound lead generation

Inbound lead generation typically relies heavily on passive inbound marketing methods, like content marketing or chatbots, to capture lead data once users are already on the site. These methods typically generate marketing-qualified leads.

These strategies rely on helping potential customers find your brand. This is why inbound call centers prioritize incoming phone calls, while outbound call centers also initiate calls to clients.

Outbound lead generation efforts are more proactive; there’s no waiting for customers to come to you. They’re also more likely to generate sales-qualified leads (SQLs) from the start.

Outbound Still Works (Especially in B2B)

Some organizations are skeptical about outbound marketing, and we understand. We’ve all rushed to end an unexpected sales call or felt annoyed by aggressive selling techniques.

However, it’s clear that outbound marketing still works. RAIN Group’s report found that 82% of buyers are open to meetings when salespeople reach out if the message is relevant, and 71% of buyers who accept meetings want to hear from sellers in the initial stages of their buying journey.

Because outbound methods are so proactive, they can result in:

• Shorter sales cycles, as you can move users through the funnel quickly
• Greater control over pipeline volume, since you aren’t waiting on leads to come to you
• Easier entry into new markets where you may not have much brand awareness
• Scalability potential through automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to deliver personalized messaging

This is particularly true when you’re leveraging outbound campaigns that blend targeting, personalization, and automation.

Key Outbound Lead Generation Strategies

There are multiple outbound calling tactics to consider. Most businesses benefit from a combination of tactics.

Cold calling (Yes — it still works!)

Cold calling gets a bad rap, but it can be highly effective and scalable. It’s direct, cost-effective, and personable when B2B sales reps take the time to research prospects and personalize their pitches before making calls.

Power dialers can reduce rep idle time, speeding up the actual calling process and allowing agents to contact more prospects more quickly.

Features like voicemail drop, live coaching, and real-time call transcription reduce manual work for your team and can improve conversion rates. Sales reps may use voicemail drops as part of their outbound calling strategy to quickly follow up with prospects.

Cold emailing

Email marketing is a high ROI channel when you’re sending personalized, relevant content that’s effectively sequenced. A study by Campaign Monitor found that email campaigns can generate an ROI of $44 for every $1 spent.

Tools like Outreach and HubSpot can create well-timed and even intricate email sequences, which can be powerful when integrated with call center campaigns using Nextiva’s calling platform.

For best results, you should:

• Optimize subject lines to appeal to specific ICPs and potentially individual prospects
• Keep messages brief and to the point, leading with value that appeals to customers’ pain points
• Always include a call-to-action that encourages prospects to take the next step to move through the funnel

Social selling

Selling on social media platforms can be highly effective. LinkedIn is particularly powerful for B2B sales.

Individual sales reps and thought leaders can build a personal brand, engage with content, and send direct messages to prospects with relevant and personalized pitches. This is a great way to nurture relationships over time, which can be crucial for building trust.

Ensure that you’re aligning your messaging with the pain points of your ICP when you’re posting publicly. This can help you create relevant content that stands out and starts conversations.

PPC

Platforms like Google Ads, Meta Ads, and LinkedIn Ads can be used to run PPC campaigns.

Each platform has different pros and cons. While Google Search Ads requires people to search for the correct keywords, it can help you reach high-intent, in-market audiences. Meanwhile, platforms like LinkedIn allow you to appear in users’ feeds to create interest and demand.

These platforms can help you capture the attention of key decision-makers, especially since the targeting is nearly laser-focused. It’s also a strong option for retargeting campaigns, testing new offers, or expanding into new markets.

Keep in mind that while PPC campaigns can help B2B marketing teams reach their target audiences, they don’t replace more personalized cold outreach — they simply complement it.

Direct mail and cold gifts

While most brands focus exclusively on voice and digital outreach in their outbound marketing efforts, don’t overlook physical options.

Direct mail and cold gift sending — also known as physical outreach — can stand out more than ever in digital-saturated markets.

You can use clever, quirky, or high-value gifts to earn attention. This is a lead generation effort that can be effective in enterprise sales, especially for potentially high-value contracts.

Referrals (the overlooked outbound)

It’s easy to forget that referrals aren’t just a passive acquisition channel you wait to develop; they can be an exceptionally valuable and high-converting outbound tactic.

Start by asking current customers or existing prospects for introductions to people in their network. If a relationship and value are established, there’s a good chance they will.

Remember that outbound marketing and sales don’t have to mean reaching out to strangers; sometimes your best lead is just one introduction away. Since word-of-mouth marketing is an easy way to build trust and generate conversions, it is worth asking customers for referrals.

The Outbound Lead Generation Process

Outbound lead generation is relatively straightforward and focuses on understanding who your audience is and how to reach them effectively.

Let’s go through the process step-by-step.

1. Build your ICP and personas

Before you reach out to prospects, you need to know who you want to connect with.

Clearly define your ICP and establish buyer personas. These should include information like company size, industry, geography, pain points, the decision-maker’s job title, and tech stack.

LinkedIn’s demographic and firmographic filters can help you find prospects quickly, especially if you’re using a platform like LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator.

2. Source target accounts

Lead generation tools like ZoomInfo, Apollo, or Cognism can help you create targeted lists of users who match your ICP. These tools can offer firmographic, demographic, and intent data to help you identify relevant prospects who may be in the market.

Integrate this data into your CRM and outreach platforms. Ideally, use a native integration to ensure seamless and automatic data transfer and enrichment.

3. Create messaging and sequences

Multichannel campaigns can be highly effective, allowing you to stay in touch with prospects on the channels they’re most likely to engage with.

Write multiple touchpoints across email, phone, LinkedIn, and SMS. Always remember to reference the customer’s pain points, stress value propositions, and highlight social proof when it’s valuable.

This may include:

• Initially connecting with a LinkedIn message and noting a shared connection
• Following up with a brief cold call to discuss more
• Nurturing the lead with email campaigns that share use cases and case studies that are relevant to their pain points
• Sending SMS reminders before a demo
• Following up through email after the demo

4. Execute the outreach

Once you’ve created your messaging and set up your sequences, it’s time to execute the lead generation campaign and begin making calls and sending emails.

There are plenty of tools that can help you do this:

• Power dialers and voicemail drops can help you increase call volumes
• Automated email sequences can leverage time-based or trigger-based autoresponders
• Real-time analytics can help your team pivot quickly if a current strategy isn’t working

5. Qualify and convert

Once you’ve connected with prospects, it’s essential to qualify them to determine whether they’re a good fit for your product.

Sales teams can ask well-timed questions during an initial call to assess buying intent, budget, pain points, and the necessary use cases. You can also use lead scoring frameworks to determine which ones should be passed to the account executive (AE) team members.

If customers happen to land on your site, you can also leverage chatbots for lead generation. These can capture important qualifying information, which can be passed to sales reps and AEs.

SQLs should be moved into discovery calls and demo bookings immediately to build momentum quickly.

6. Track and optimize

Track key performance indicators, like open, call connection, and booking rates, as well as conversions. These metrics can help you determine the effectiveness of your outreach strategies.

Monitor these metrics individually and holistically. If your number of open rates increases but your booking rates either remain stable or decrease, it may mean that your messaging is less relevant and effective. If some reps opted for more generic messaging in favor of increased volume, you may want to help your team revise this strategy.

Nextiva’s live dashboards can help. You can view critical performance metrics in real time to determine what’s working so you can adjust as needed.

Tools That Supercharge Outbound Lead Generation

Multiple types of tools can help you scale up your outbound lead generation efforts without sacrificing personalization and relevance. Plenty of these tools can help improve personalization efforts.

Let’s look at the most important types of tools and some examples of each.

CRM

CRM systems serve as the central hub for all your outbound lead generation activities, storing prospect data, tracking interactions, and managing your sales pipeline to ensure no leads fall through the cracks:

• Salesforce: Industry-leading CRM solution that offers advanced customization, automation, and analytics to manage complex sales processes
• Keap: Small business-focused CRM that combines contact management with marketing automation and e-commerce capabilities
• HubSpot: All-in-one CRM platform that combines contact management, email marketing, and sales pipeline tracking to streamline your outbound campaigns

Dialer software

Power dialers and calling platforms dramatically increase your team’s productivity by automating the dialing process, reducing idle time between calls, and providing features like voicemail drop and call recording to maximize connection rates:

• Nextiva Business Voice: A cloud-based phone system with advanced calling features designed for professional outbound sales teams
• Nextiva Contact Center: A comprehensive contact center solution featuring power dialer, AI dialer, click-to-call, and voicemail drop capabilities for high-volume outreach
• NextivaONE: An entry-level unified communications platform that combines voice, video, and messaging for growing businesses

Email automation

Email automation platforms enable you to create sophisticated, multi-touch sequences that deliver personalized messages at scale, ensuring consistent follow-up without manual effort from your sales team:

• Outreach: A sales engagement platform that creates sophisticated email sequences and tracks prospect interactions across multiple touchpoints
• Apollo: An all-in-one sales intelligence platform that combines prospecting, email automation, and CRM functionality
• Lemlist: A personalized email outreach tool that helps create engaging campaigns with custom images, videos, and dynamic content

Lead intelligence

Lead intelligence tools provide the high-quality prospect data and insights you need to identify your ideal customers, find accurate contact information, and understand buyer intent signals before reaching out:

• ZoomInfo: A comprehensive B2B database that provides detailed company and contact information, as well as intent data to identify in-market prospects
• Lusha: A contact enrichment tool that finds accurate email addresses and phone numbers for prospects across LinkedIn and other platforms
• Cognism: A global lead intelligence platform that delivers verified contact data and compliance-ready prospecting tools for international markets

Sales engagement

Sales engagement platforms help your team create more meaningful connections with prospects through personalized content, social selling capabilities, and multi-channel outreach coordination:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: A premium LinkedIn tool that offers advanced search filters, lead recommendations, and messaging capabilities for social selling
• Vidyard: A video messaging platform that helps sales reps create personalized video content to stand out in crowded inboxes
• Regie: A powerful agentic AI sales engagement platform that generates personalized outreach content and automates follow-up sequences

Power Your Outbound Lead Gen With Nextiva

Are you ready to scale up your outbound sales and marketing strategies to connect with high-quality leads that will convert into sales?

Nextiva can help.

Our contact center software has advanced features designed to help your team increase output while creating personalized, relevant customer experiences with features like the following:

• Cold calling dialer: Help reps reach more numbers with less effort using Nextiva’s power dialer.
• Coach in real-time: Keep reps on script with AI-powered live coaching cards that are based on keywords.
• Analyze and optimize: Get call metrics, transcription insights, and campaign reporting all in one place.
• Seamless CRM integration: Reduce toggling and automate data entry with Salesforce or HubSpot integrations.
• Omnichannel outreach: View SMS, voice, and email in one place — perfect for follow-up sequences.

Regardless of the channels you choose to use for connecting with prospects, we can help. Learn more about Nextiva’s contact center solutions today. 👇