What is an outbound activity?

There’s kind of a misconception of what these actually are.

So what is an outbound activity? Outbound activity is anything for your business that you are actually actively reaching out to somebody. This could be done a couple of different ways, this can be done through social media, phone calls, emails, text messages. There's a lot of different software out there now that you can utilize that keeps you kind of up-to-date with keeping in touch with people. The most important thing though, is what are you doing to actually reach out to people? How does it look? Where does it go? Where do you spend your time? How do you make sure you're getting it done? Honestly, look at who's actually doing it now.

When I started in this industry about 20 years ago, we didn't really have all those things that are basically at your fingertips. Social media wasn't a big thing for us, so really we relied a lot on phone calls, emails, and just community outreach. Being out in the community, meeting people, shaking hands, getting to know who people were and this was the best way that we could really generate our business. We didn't have a lot to actually deal with the Internet. We could direct everybody to our website or we stayed in touch with them personally.

Nowadays, it's a lot easier. We have a lot of different ways to get in touch with people. We can scroll through social media, we have their phone number, we can do automatic text messages, but the biggest thing is really just being active. You have to be on there. You have to be active. You have to be reaching out constantly. This isn't just going for the people that you want to sign up or the people that you want as clients. This goes right for your current membership, the current clients you work with. Everybody that's active in your system needs to be reached out to. This was a big mistake for me at the beginning of my career. I really took for granted reaching out and doing those outbound activities to the people that were active in our program.

We would have somebody sign up, we only did group packages at a time so it would be a seasonal package, so we'd reach out a lot, we would get them signed up, they would be in our program for 3 to 4 months and then we wouldn't reach out again until it was the end. When it was time to renew or sign up again, I really lost a lot of people. There was no constant communication. Really we just kind of took your money, thank you so much, let's train, and train, and train, oh, by the way, you have to pay money again. I think that's the missing link with everything now and that's something that came to me over the years. I wasn't really showing people the love that they needed while they were there. At the end of the day, we're still just in a relationship-building atmosphere. People want to spend money with people that care about them. So staying in touch with them and making them part of your outbound activity process is huge. It’s something just as simple as just reaching out, congratulating them on their journey, not just when you see them but taking that extra step. Send a handwritten note, make a phone call beyond the actual just simple text message. It is a much bigger deal for the client.

Why are these things so important? Why should we be reaching out? Let's think about prospects so to speak. There's a lot of noise out there in social media and the Internet and everything that everybody is offering the newest tool, the best new training program, the fastest weight loss pill, that's going to get their results the fastest. But again it's just noise. So how does the noise work? Noise works in the sales processes that people need to consistently hear from you. Now when I say consistent it doesn't mean call somebody every day until they sign up. That's a good way to push people off, but you do need to show up.

They say it takes about 7 touches for somebody to actually take action for something. Taking action doesn't mean buying something, it could be they're going to go on your website and check it out or they give you a callback, maybe come in and check things out. You have to show up 7 touches for them to take action. Think about it, how are you spending those seven touches? What are you doing with that? Is it phone calls, emails, text messages, social media? Whatever it is, it's got to be there. It's got to be consistent and it's got to be telling the same message to this person.

The next thing I want to go into is, who are you contacting? We kind of break things down into three different categories. You have your cold leads. Cold leads are people that don't really know who you are. You have your warm leads. Maybe they bought from you before or they're really interested in getting going. Then you have your current clients. The people that are actively spending money with you and time with you. They should be broken down that way, cold, warm, and current. Now we have to take a look at where your business is. Do you have a lot of current clients that are really great at renewing? If your retention rates are great, we want to spend a good amount of time staying in those outbound activities. We want to make sure your current clients are happy, make sure they're renewing, make sure they're going if do it.

To reload that pipeline we're going to be active in that warm and cold lead section. We want to try and fill our pipeline for our sales. We want to make sure there's a constant growth of people that we can talk to that may be interested in our service. In any instance, you want to stay active with them, making sure you're getting a minimum of seven touches. It's not always a hard sale process. Again being a relationship business, it's just about connecting, making sure that they know that you care about them. That you care about their goals, you care about their wants, you care about their needs, and you care enough that you want to take this journey with them. You want to make sure that they're comfortable knowing that you're not just somebody that's there trying to take their money and run. You want to walk them through their process and make sure they're achieving their goals and guiding them through it all.

Since we're doing all these outbound activities it’s time to get the entire staff doing them. Now, a lot of people shy away from this as well because let's face it, it's hard to teach somebody how to be on the phone. Some people just really push themselves away from it. Either they're scared to do it, they have low self-esteem, they don't know what to say, how to say it when to say it or worst case scenario they just don't want to do it. So let's set a meeting with the staff. Let's figure out what's going on. Let's talk about everything, let's talk about what the big picture is and how all these things relate to business. It's going to relate to growing their business, it's going to really grow in your business and it grows everything on the bigger scale. But again a lot of times when people push away wanting to do outbound activities, it's mostly because they don't understand it and they're not comfortable with it. People tend to stay away from things that they're not comfortable in doing, so as an owner or as a director, as a head coach it's your job to really make them feel comfortable. It's going through call scripts, it's going through role-plays, it's going through the process of how they can do it until they become really comfortable in doing it. So with that, everything needs to be tracked.

We want to keep track of outbound activities. We want to set goals. You never want to go into a day; I have talked about this numerous times, you never want to go into the day guessing what you need to do, what has to be done, and to what extent. If you're doing outbound activities set a goal, see how much time you have that you can spend actually doing it. If you have a couple of hours set a goal for 50 to 100 outbound activities. That's not saying you're going to talk to 100 people, I mean that would be a perfect world, but that would take you forever. Let's face it you can do 100 DM's, you can do 100 text messages, you can do 100 phone calls in a few hours. You're not going to know that you can do 120 outbound activities unless you set the goal and go do it.

Finally, you want to go into what you actually did. You set your goal, you did them, what did you actually get done? Once you have those two numbers you can analyze your day. You find out how much was successful. Did I set a goal for 100 and I only got 10? What happened? Where do I spend my time? What went wrong? Maybe I had 10, but they were great phone call conversations. I got 10 people coming in next week to either do a trial, do a session, do a free class. Whatever it is, I think I'll take 10 hot leads just like that, but again it still comes down to numbers. It's considered a shotgun approach. I want to try and touch base with as many people as I humanly can, but at the end of the day, I'm going to have my actual number. I'm going to find out what happened and I'm going to make that set plan for the next day. You're going to repeat that every single day because if you're not tracking, you're just guessing. The worst thing that could happen is going into a sales funnel and you lose track of your numbers. You don’t want to miss opportunities and be behind the 8 ball playing catch up. So let's Institute this into our daily activities making sure that you're doing outbound outreach all the time.

Somebody who has done this for a long time, say 10-15 years know who they want to reach out to. It's always good to make a plan, but you know where you need to be. For new coaches, you have to give them a list of people to contact. You're going to generate a list, I want you to go through these, then you can also do this. For example, I need you to go through this list, then check in with me, let's go over it, let's see what happened, and go on from there. Stay actively engaged with your staff members, have them know that you're in this to help them. Again, relationship building, it's not just for your customers. Having somebody that knows that you care about them and their success within your business will have them want to stay with you and the business longer.

I just want to kind of recap so let's go over it. We have to do outbound activities, people need to hear us or we have to at least touch people a minimum of seven times. They have to see our material, they have to interact with what we have before they even do something to take the next step. Email blasts, phone calls, text messages, social media, all the above; we need to get these things firing on all cylinders so people understand that we're here for them. Contact people, cold list, warm list, and current clients. You want to make sure you're constantly filling up your sales funnel and making sure clients that you have to know that you care about them. Finally, tracking. Make sure you set your goals daily. Don't send a monthly schedule, don't set a monthly goal where you have this astronomical number. Little bite-size chunks, 120 a day if you have a couple of hours. Make sure your new coaches are set up for success. Have a list that they can go through, set their goals, get your actual numbers, and then analyze what happened, go over the daily recap. Make sure that you're succeeding in the places you need to succeed at.

I want to thank everybody for checking in. You can find me on Facebook and LinkedIn at Jason Bloom. Instagram is usually where I'm the most active it's Jasonbloom31 all or iron house solutions. Check me out over there, take a look at some of the content. I would love your feedback.