Outbound Sales That Actually Work (for Creative Service Providers)
If you market your business on Instagram, you’ve probably experienced this flow:
Step 1: Get a new follower
Step 2: Almost immediately, get a generic reply on one of your Instagram stories along the lines of “this is so cute”, or “you’re so right!”
Step 3: As soon as you accept the message request and like their message or reply with a simple thanks, you’ll get a second cookie-cutter response like “I love your [content, stories, graphics]! How long have you been a [coach, photographer, designer, etc]?”
I hate to say it, but we get this exact flow often enough that we’ve literally just stopped replying when we get variations of that question. Because there’s no nice way to stop people in their tracks and say “no thanks, we’re not looking for a [SMM, coach, course on…]” without seeming rude, and we don’t want somewhere between 3 days and 4 weeks of follow ups on something we obviously don’t want.
And don’t get me started on email cold pitches… 3 days after we launched The Breakroom we got an email in our inbox from someone requesting to work for The Breakroom. I mean, I respect the hustle, but it wasn’t personalized to us or The Breakroom at all; his copy was terrible, and he wanted to write copy for us. And after we didn’t reply, he sent 2 “witty” one-liner follow-up emails within a week.
All that to say - cold pitches are a great way to piss people off when done wrong. BUT when done right, they actually work well.
Why does outbound sales even matter?
Quick definition: Inbound sales are when someone reaches out to you to buy something from you. Outbound sales are when you reach out to someone to invite them to purchase something.
One of the first questions we ask coaching clients when we’re talking about their marketing strategy is - where do your ideal clients spend their time online?
If I go back in time, shortly after I (Lyndon) left corporate and joined Jo full-time in a predominantly branding photography business, Jo got coffee with one of our favorite branding clients who was at the time doing mid-6 figures as a coach and course creator, running a thriving business where most of her clients were coming from Instagram. She transparently shared that most days she opened Instagram, posted, replied to comments, sent DMs, and then closed the app. She intentionally didn’t scroll or consume anything.
TL;DR - Our ideal client’s favorite platform was Instagram, and she intentionally refused to look at what anyone else was posting.
This is honestly something we hear a lot. By the time a lot of business owners get to a certain point, they intentionally cut back on how much they consume. Making them basically impossible to get your marketing in front of, no matter how amazing it is.
This is where outbound marketing shines, when positioned authentically and focused on relationship building first, this clientele cares about intentional connection and being responsive to their community. If you can land the right message in their inbox, with a small enough ask (at first), you’ll get an answer, peak interest, and start to nurture trust.
Here’s the exact process we used to launch our membership including some of the scripts we used.
Introducing our hybrid process for outbound sales:
One of my favorite big picture frameworks for sales is The Buyer’s Journey, which breaks the process into 3 phases.
Awareness: This is when people first learn who you are or what your offer is. We personally still trust organic social marketing to do most of this. But we’re also doing a lot of work to show up in front of other similar audiences by collaborating on posts or stories that get reshared (more on this later), and we know people who’ve seen great results with paid ads at this phase as well (I’d recommend proving messaging & creative works organically before going paid, tho).
If you’re doing outbound sales at the awareness phase, this is true cold pitching, which is both of the examples in the intro that have the highest chance to annoy people. We choose not to do this type of outbound sales.
Consideration: This phase is all about nurturing the relationship and building trust with potential customers. Common things in this space are educational content on socials, emails, podcasts, and even lead magnets. The goal here is to stay front of mind and either A) be their first choice when they’re ready to purchase your type of offer, or B) develop & define the need for them so they come around to needing your offer transformation.
For businesses that have relied heavily on social media to nurture their potential customers (us included) over the last few years, as social media has become more “noisy” and entertainment-focused, we’ve been finding it harder to actually build trust on social media. This is why we started doing the first step of our 2-step outbound sales process. I call this phase “Trust Generation”; you’re not selling yet, but you’re speed running the trust-building process.
Decision: This phase is all about closing the sale. Providing the right information. Having your messaging bang-on for your intended ICA’s felt pain points. And making them feel seen in a way that shows them you’re the right person to help them. This is what people commonly think of as “sales” – there are usually sales calls, DMs, or emails involved in this step to help people get across the finish line and commit to working with you.
Step 2 of our two-step process is “The (Personal) Invitation”; we’ve found that if you reach out to the right people, you can start the conversational sales process much earlier by inviting people in, rather than waiting for them to take the leap themselves.
A few concepts first:
Before we get into Trust Generation and The (Personal) Invite, let’s cover a few things.
Who does this process work for? As you’ll see in a second, this only makes sense if you’re at a mid/high price point (or have good Customer Lifetime Value), and/or if you’re a 1:1 DFY/DWY service provider that’s high touch.
Escalation of commitment: This is more of a snowball process rather than all at once. The goal is to get people to commit to slightly more each time. For example, the first message is simply asking if they’re interested in something/hearing more with a simple yes or no answer. The next message is about having them schedule or attend something that’s still free, but they’re committing their time. After that, you may move on to an invitation to a low-dollar offer, to give you a testimonial, or even where they have to actually take an action (eg: challenges). Each time you’re building the trust level and how much they’re willing to say yes to.
“It’s a numbers game” is one of the most cliché sayings in sales because, to some extent, it is true. For example, if your context is based on people who inquire with you, you’re starting with a baseline for that group of people who are all interested and ready to purchase (at some level). If you’re reaching out to people, that baseline doesn’t exist; many or most won’t be in a place to make a purchase today. But you can build your network, put them on a lead list to follow up with in the future, or even get a collab post in front of their audience, bringing more people into the Awareness part of your Buyer’s Journey Funnel, and eventually convert them into a paying customer.
Be a decent human being: I feel like this should go without saying, but it’s very easy to fully shift your mindset to thinking of it as “a numbers game”, so that every person you reach out to becomes a number. Remember that they’re people, and treat them how you’d want to be treated.
Step 1: Trust Generation
In the golden age of social media, you could trust what you saw on social media to be true. Sadly, that’s just not true. Anyone can masquerade as an expert, an AI model can pump out “best practices”, Canva’s AI will design complete carousels, and you can even generate videos with lipsynced audio that feel like real people.
We created this step of our outbound sales process specifically to build community & trust with people. We identified that people we had worked with in the past knew the value we provided and had no questions about the transformations delivered by our offers or the price points. But people who we’d never talked to face-to-face really struggled. Hiring a coach, like many creative services, is a high-trust purchase.
Our problem to solve was how we could strengthen the loose relationships with people who have been in our greater circles (already aware of us), and build trust quickly.
The answer for us was free weekly group coffee chats with 3-5 business owners. It only takes us an hour per week, and it has multiple benefits in addition to building community..
- We’re socially listening to our ICAs on a weekly basis - since we started doing these calls 4 months ago, we’ve launched 2 new offers specifically for our ICA that have already done mid-4-figures, that weren’t on our radar at all before we started coffee chats.
- We’ve created ambassadors - the week we launched the first round of our Pivoting in Public group program, we had 10+ affiliates sign on to promote it, and we had organic social shares about a program we were launching for the first time, simply because we had taken the time to build trust with them.
- The first 2 people to sign up for our membership, The Breakroom, were people who hadn’t followed us for more than 6 months, but they trusted us based on building trust quickly after being invited to a coffee chat.
Depending on your business, it doesn’t have to be coffee chats; it could be webinars or co-working calls. There are 3 criteria I’d filter through when deciding what you want to be your trust builder:
- Are you providing value? As a service provider and/or expert, to build trust people want proof that you actually know what you’re talking about. Providing value or solving a problem they have is one of the easiest ways to do this.
- Can AI create the thing? If yes, it’s a bad fit because if you’re selling a 1:1 service/expertise, you want to build trust that you’re a human and you personally know what you’re talking about. Sadly, this means that things like a free PDF are out.
- Is it something you can tag them on stories, and they’ll reshare? Don’t hate the player, hate the game - if you want more people to be aware of you, you want your “free thing” to also be working for you, and tagging people to get reshares in front of their audience (about how good of a time they had) is important (bonus tip: the story you tag people in needs to have a CTA in it, because their audience will only see that one slide, not your follow-up slide with a CTA)
So how does it work?
First, build a list of people:
- On a daily basis, I look at who’s watching our stories on IG & weekly who’s liked/commented on our posts from the past week
- Anyone that I don’t recognize, I’ll go to their profile and make a quick decision if they match our ICA (generally just people that follow us, unless they’re a great fit)
- Put them into a note on my phone with their name & link to the IG (eg: Jo & Lyndon https://www.instagram.com/joandlyndon/)
- Then, once a week, I 1) do a second pass through the list with Jo and confirm they’re a good fit, 2) send them a personal invites via DMs to our group coffee chats
Send the low ask first message - this is the exact script that we’re using right now to invite people to coffee chats (we iterate it every couple of weeks based on feedback and response rates):
Hey ___! We’d love to invite you to one of our group coffee chats, because we think you’re cool and we’d like to get to know you more!
A few months ago, we started doing (free) group coffee chats with 3-5 business owners each week because we realized that even tho we interact with people online every day, we’d never actually had a “real” conversation with many of them. Basically, social media wasn’t really social anymore.
We set these calls up with a super simple agenda: 1) introductions, 2) something you’ve learned recently, & 3) a question you think would be helpful to ask fellow business owners. No sales, no upsells, no commitments, just meeting cool people & growing the community.
And we think you’re cool people.
Would you be interested in coming to a group coffee chat?
*If you're a creative service provider and thought, “I want in on a group coffee chat,” after reading that, send us a DM on IG we’re probably still doing them… or something else even better.
Most people who respond are really positive that they 1) love the idea because it’s original, and 2) it’s really easy to just say yes to this message. The follow-up is immediately getting them scheduled:
Yay!! We do them on Fridays at 10 am est. Does tomorrow ___ work for you? If not, what about the ___ or ___?
And what’s a good email to send the invite to?
With a simple 2-message escalation of commitment, we now have a call on their calendar, that’s super low-risk commitment for them while still solving one of their pain points (entrepreneurship is lonely).
Step 2: The (Personal) Invitation
Now that you’ve built trust either through Trust Generation or previous interactions with them, you can move on to The (Personal) Invitation.
If you think about the simple carrot vs stick framework for trying to get kids (and adults) to do things - the carrot is the idea of “pulling” the person towards something that they want, and a stick is the idea of punishing or “pushing” someone to get the desired result. I’ve seen some convincing arguments that stick (“your business will fail”, “your lead flow will dry up”, “they won’t know how to purchase from you”, etc) convert more quickly… the first time. In our own personal experience, carrots make for clients who enjoy working with us, and many times upsell into a bigger offer.
For this reason, we usually frame the message in this step as an invitation. We’ll still use messaging that we’ve tailored to be specific to their needs and acute pain points they’re feeling, but we like to think of it as “offering healing” (transformations) rather than “twisting the knife” (fear based) when it comes to their pain.
When we launched The Breakroom, this is the script we used to personally invite people we’d already built trust with to purchase.
Hey ___!
[personal connection point]
Yesterday we publicly launched The Breakroom, a membership for creative service providers that’s equal parts education & peer community. This year, we’ve noticed 2 big trends: 1) what’s “working” for business owners is changing faster than ever, and 2) it’s hard to find trusted peers/community to learn from. That’s why we built The Breakroom, an application-based place to have accountability, ask questions, and get personalized education that applies to you without needing to do mental gymnastics to use it in your business model.
We think you’d be a great fit, and we wanted to personally invite you to join. Would you like me to send over more information?
You’ll notice the “[personal connection point]” as the intro to the message. These people have placed their trust in you and shared semi-personal details about themselves & businesses with you. They, in turn, now expect you to use that information when you message them.
This is also a very “simple” ask as a first message. It’s short with enough information to hook them in enough that they’ll ask for more information. In our experience, having the link and any details in the second message once they’ve micro committed makes them much more likely to actually even open a link to your fancy sales page. People are rather busy (read lazy) when it comes to linking out of apps. If you have a commitment from them before you send something that they will look at it, they’ll feel a little obligated to at least look at it.
We only ended up sending this message to a handful of people when we launched (we’d already done pre-launch private invites to a different list, and market research upsells from people we talked to in our building & validation phase, both other forms of personal invitations) and within about 10 days we converted a few of the people that we sent this message to.
Is outbound sales worth it?
To us, yes. I can see many business models where this does make sense, but also many where it just doesn’t. Which really just comes back to your price points, offer types, and how many clients you’re already getting from inbound.
What I will say is this more hands-on relationship-building process is how we’ve gotten some of our most valuable clients. That’s why it’s a hybrid - certain offers sell exclusively through inbound, based on the marketing we’re doing, some sell exclusively through a high-touch sales process, and then the majority falls somewhere in the middle. It’ll just be the ratios of the three that are different for each business, and you have to experiment a bit to figure it out for yourself.
Will we be sticking with this exact process & scripts for long? I can confidently say no - because we’re forever refining and learning, but this is one we’ve stuck with for longer than many of the others we’ve experimented with so far.
If you’re a creative service provider struggling with this right now, I’d recommend you check out The Breakroom, because we talk about stuff like this almost every week on our peer mastermind calls. Or if you want higher touch personal support, you can see our 1:1 coaching offers here. And if you just want to connect, shoot us a DM on IG and say hi, we love meeting new people!