You start browsing for a product on one device and end up buying it on a different one, or you start online and complete the sale in the store. Sound familiar? You are not alone.

A study conducted by Google found that 98% of Americans switch between devices every day, manoeuvring from mobile devices to desktop to tablets.

Grasshopping is the essence of a shopper’s journey these days.

This zigzagging across multiple channels doesn’t just happen in retail but is also very much relevant for B2B buyers. It is clear prospects today are present on every device, every platform, and every channel; and the salesperson must meet them where they are.

The golden ticket to strong prospect engagement is a strategy that connects multiple channels and drives consistent outreach — enter omnichannel outreach.

At its core, omnichannel outreach is the art of interconnecting channels such as social media, email and phone to actively engage your prospects and generate leads.

In other words, omnichannel outreach is a necessary evolution of outbound sales. The key attribute of omnichannel outreach is the complete integration between channels and tools allowing for a holistic experience for the prospect across your touchpoints. It is a prospect-focused strategy to link the individual outreach channels together on a single, intuitive platform in an attempt to foster a strong relationship with the prospect.

Let us now look at what differentiates omnichannel outreach from the more widely used strategies.

When people were working at the office, it was easier to get hold of a prospect since they were located at their desk, which meant single-channel prospecting still worked for some – although not the most effective. But, since the pandemic and the normalisation of remote working, salespeople must now reach out to their prospects through multiple communication channels. Thus, giving rise to a need for multichannel and omnichannel outreach. 

On the face of it, both multichannel and omnichannel outreach may seem quite alike but there are sizable differences between them. Let us analyse these differences in detail.

Multichannel outreach is the process of using different channels to reach, connect and engage prospects. The different channels exist independently of each other and the lack of integration between each channel can often make it difficult for salespeople to track progress on each channel.

Omnichannel outreach focuses on delivering a consistent and often personalised experience across all communication channels used. The guiding principle of omnichannel outreach is the integration between channels on one dashboard, making it possible to drive the conversation forward based on the prospect’s behaviour. Such behaviours to see a prospect’s preferred channel include multiple emails opens, the number of times a link was clicked, or an accepted connection request.

Let us hone in on two key aspects to better explain the differences between multichannel and omnichannel marketing strategies.

1. Channel-focused vs. prospect-focused

The multichannel approach targets prospects via as many channels as possible. This means casting the widest net to get the most engagements on various channels such as social media and email.

Conversely, the omnichannel approach connects those channels in one place to ensure a more meaningful engagement is made with prospects at every touchpoint. It may be possible that your prospect is more active on a particular channel or prefers one platform over another. With omnichannel, you can make outreach a unified and intuitive process to engage with prospects on whichever channel they are present on.

2. Inconsistent outreach vs. consistent engagement

As multichannel operates each channel separately, the lack of integration between each touchpoint can result in an impersonal experience for the prospect. Multichannel can also often amount to style inconsistencies across the different channels used.

Omnichannel is focused on ensuring the same experience and continuous messaging exists across every channel. Omnichannel outreach aims to provide a streamlined and consistent experience to prospects as the salesperson reaches out to them via different channels. A consistent brand image and message ensure a heightened sense of familiarity and relationship with the brand.

In short, multichannel outreach doesn’t cut it anymore

Multichannel outreach uses a variety of communication options that are not synchronised or connected, which can be burdensome for the salesperson to keep track of and ensure timely follow-ups. However, omnichannel outreach allows salespeople to move between the channels seamlessly as they are inter-linked. This is one of the main reasons why omnichannel outreach trumps multichannel outreach.

An omnichannel outreach strategy can convey the right messages to the right prospects in the right place at the right time to help nurture prospects more effectively.

An effective outreach strategy is one that gets your prospects’ attention on the channel they are most active on or where they are most comfortable engaging with salespeople. Since we do not know which channel that is, the omnichannel outreach approach helps to discover this.

Below are some other key benefits of using omnichannel outreach:

• Integrates outreach mediums to connect with prospects on their preferred channel
• Makes mapping prospect journeys easy as it’s on a single dashboard
• Integrates social media into your sales and marketing strategy
• Facilitates exceptional and rich prospect knowledge through CRM integration
• Scheduled follow-ups can be easily executed from a single dashboard
• Makes lead scoring easier as they can be segregated into  ‘hot’, ‘warm’ or ‘cold’ etc based on intent data gathered throughout the campaign
• Can be used to automate repetitive top of the funnel tasks allowing salespeople to focus their attention on final lead conversion

Acquire quality B2B Contacts 

When it comes to B2B lead generation, it’s important to work with accurate, fresh and targeted data. Lacking quality in the data can have disastrous effects on the foundation of your sales and marketing revenue in the long run.

Consider changing your data provider if the data you get has limited variables and/or is resulting in your deliverability rate being less than 95%. To give a reference point, hubsell provides on-demand processed contacts to ensure data freshness and human-validated contacts with up to 25 variables ranging from the simple label data (e.g. name and title) to more meaningful categorical data (e.g. seniority and department), allowing for high levels of personalisation and analysis with at least 95% deliverability rate.

Implement dynamic campaigns 

Personalisation is the cornerstone of all marketing activities and it goes above and beyond the scope of just customising the message content. Personalisation needs to be incorporated through the entire structure of the campaign to create a sequential, parallel and conditional outreach strategy across channels. That is what it means to implement a dynamic omnichannel campaign.

Best done through outreach automation software, a dynamic campaign is not a static set of predetermined touchpoints but dynamic in the way that each touchpoint can change depending on the behaviour of the prospect from the previous touchpoint. Such changes can be a change of channel or message to deliver the most relevant prospecting experience.

Integrate your channels & tools

Last but not least, an effective omnichannel outreach strategy should have seamless integration between channels and tools. This includes CRM integrations as well as integration of channels like email and social media accounts. 

A sales automation tool like hubsell provides you with the possibility to sync your mailbox and social media accounts to its platform and do outreach across channels. The outreach process closely resembles hand-typed messages manually sent from personal accounts.

Next steps

Now you have a personalised pitch in hand and also know that to get your prospect’s attention you have to adopt an omnichannel outreach strategy. So you go on and contact them on all the different channels, one by one, and do regular follow-ups in the hopes of closing the sale. Smooth sailing right?

Sadly, this is easier said than done. Businesses are now more complex than ever and stakeholders typically involved in enterprise deals have climbed to an average of 6.8 today. Even if you integrate your channels and reach out to them through a single portal, it still means you have around 7 people to contact and follow up with. And that is just for one B2B purchase.

We know that omnichannel outreach is the way to go for outbound sales but how do we make the outreach process simpler? Short answer: automation.

At the most basic level, automation is made up of two main elements: a trigger and an action.

The trigger is the primary condition that, if completed, will set the automated action in motion. The action is the consequence of that trigger being set off. It’s also possible for a trigger to set off several actions in single automation. An application for this would be monitoring a contact’s behaviour across their buyer journey, and setting off automated but human-like responses on time that ensure personalised and consistent outreach.

Thanks to automation, you can take manual tasks away from marketing and sales teams, making them quicker and more reliable. You get to manage the working time of your salesforce more effectively; allowing them to concentrate on functions that they do best – building relationships with prospects and closing deals.

As we discussed, omnichannel outreach can make outbound sales very easy. Let’s now see it in action.

Suppose you have the right contacts at your disposal. You initiate an omnichannel outreach process by first sending a LinkedIn connection request with a message.

Scenario 1: They do not accept your connection request.

Scenario 2: They accept your connection request but do not reply to your follow up message(s).

Scenario 3: They accept the request and reply.

In each of these scenarios, you can personalise your next outreach message by using ‘if-this-then-that’ technology that makes it look unique and genuine to the contact resulting in higher open, reply and engagement rates.

For instance, if they do not respond on LinkedIn, you can switch channels to email and set up an automated follow-up to say: “Hello {firstName}, I gleaned from your LinkedIn profile that you are interested in marketing and sales tools that simplify outbound sales. You may not have seen my connection request so thought I’d reach out by email to see if there’s a mutual fit”.

This is only the first step, with the right omnichannel outreach software, you can use intent data based on every interaction in the campaign and generate appropriate responses. You can also track metrics such as open rate, time taken to respond and the number of times a link was clicked from a single dashboard. All of this can help you customise a dynamic omnichannel outreach campaign that is based around conditionally executed follow-ups, personalised message content and humanlike reverts at every step.

Outbound sales is a staple of every growth-minded sales and marketer’s toolkit. To distinguish yourself from the noise and meet your prospects where they are, omnichannel outreach is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity. An effective omnichannel outreach strategy combines quality B2B prospecting and sales automation to reach targeted contacts with the right message, at the right time, and through the right channel.

Opportunity generation solutions like hubsell can help you launch an effective omnichannel strategy so your salesforce can focus solely on the revenue generating parts of sales.

For those that are unfamiliar with hubsell, we provide an end-to-end B2B prospecting solution with on-demand generated B2B data and multi-channel personalised outreach automation software to generate sales qualified leads.