5 Tips to Revamp Your Outbound Sales and Get up to 10% Close Rate

Struggling to close outbound leads in SaaS? You’re not alone. Sales teams across the industry face challenges like hitting quotas, managing dry pipelines, and — let's be honest — simply getting that final “yes” from prospects.

Here at Belkins, we hosted the insightful event “Seal the Deal: Closing Outbound Leads in SaaS,” where industry experts shared their battle-tested strategies for outbound success.

The conversation was packed with valuable insights, and we’re excited to share some highlights with you:

• Unobvious hacks that helped Belkins achieve a 10% closing rate boost by Rosie Partmann, Head of Sales at Belkins
• SMB deal-closing secrets — what works (and what absolutely doesn’t) according to Alex Dzhurasenko, Head of Sales at Reply.io
• Closing tactics and best practices for mid-market and enterprise deals, courtesy of Tom Rowe, SVP of Sales at Chili Piper

By the end of this post, you’ll be equipped with actionable tips to improve your outbound lead closing rates, regardless of your target market size.

Unobvious things that helped Belkins achieve a 10% close rate

The sales climate is different and things are progressing a bit differently in 2024 than they have previously. Before we dive in, check the stats picturing the current industry landscape:

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Note: Though Salesforce reported that their sales cycle is 100 days or three months on average, you should mind that its lengths heavily rely on multiple factors and can vary under different conditions. For example:

• Chili Piper has a short sales cycle, around 35 days for mid-market and enterprise opportunities. Over the past two years, their sales cycle expanded by nearly 20%. One of the reasons is that right now people put a lot more rigor within their evaluations.‍
• Reply.io also had a sales cycle of around 30 days in 2023. They haven’t seen much of an increase, but that’s because they changed their audience and went down the market a bit.‍
• Belkins had a roughly 45-day average sales cycle in 2023. Now it’s between 54 and 60 days and going up.

The longer sales cycles mean salespeople should double efforts with nurturing, follow-ups, etc. This creates additional pressure on the sales teams. That’s why it’s important to optimize your funnel and automate whatever processes you can to unload from your team and boost their performance.

Let’s see what you can do to achieve that.
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Why lead qualification and process automation matter

Two important thoughts here:

• Qualifying leads upfront is crucial to identify prospects with a genuine interest and budget to solve their problem using your solution.
• Automating lead assignment and qualification frees up sales reps’ time for higher-value activities.

As for the first point, here’s a playbook we use at Belkins to identify whether the prospect is the right fit:

When automating lead routing and qualification, you can use external tools like Chili Piper. This helps both to optimize your sales team efforts and streamline booking appointments for prospects. Such solutions empower your prospects to schedule meetings directly with the available rep, reducing friction.

Pro tip: Consistent communication and feedback between sales and marketing teams are essential. Hold regular discussions to assess lead quality and quantity and make adjustments as needed. This feedback loop ensures marketing efforts target the right audience and generate qualified leads for the sales team.

How to build a supportive sales environment

In addition to tools and tactics, the unobvious thing #2 is about people. High team morale is critical for sales success.

Here are a few ideas on how to support your sales team:

• Provide them with qualified leads so that they see you value their time.
• Celebrate wins (meetings booked, deals closed) publicly to boost morale and team spirit. You can do it in Slack, for example. Or any human resource management system (HRMS) you use.
• Help SDRs see the impact of their work by highlighting the revenue generated from their qualified leads.

We believe that by implementing at least some of these strategies, SaaS companies can improve their outbound lead closing rates.

Best practices and pitfalls of selling to SMBs

In the second session, we discussed strategies for landing more outbound software deals, especially in the SMB space. Three takeaways come here:

Introduce self-serve

One key takeaway was the importance of offering a self-service option alongside your sales process when targeting SMBs. As Alex put it:

“If we really want to win in the SMB space and be the number one solution, we need to create an environment where users can easily get familiar with the platform through a self-service option.”

This self-service entry point, combined with transparent pricing that’s readily available, empowers SMB buyers and makes them feel in control of their purchasing decisions. Having live chat support to answer questions is also critical for this model.

Offer transparent pricing 

Both Alex and Tom Rowe emphasized how critical price transparency is for winning over SMB buyers. As Tom explained: 

“If you're selling to an SMB and you have your pricing behind a lock and key, you’re leaving tremendous amounts of money on the table.”

Take an example from the CRM world: HubSpot makes its pricing public, which simplifies decision-making and speeds up purchases. On the contrary, enterprise players like Salesforce gate pricing information. 

It’s not bad to hide pricing, especially when you have a lot of tailored offerings. But being upfront about costs from the start builds trust with SMB prospects.

Adjust your discovery and demo process 

When demoing for SMB audiences, you often have a limited window of 15–30 minutes. This means adjusting your typical discovery and demo approach:

• Do pre-call research on the prospect’s LinkedIn, website, and industry to make initial pain point assumptions.
• Validate those assumptions during the call through casual discovery questions.
• Move relatively quickly into the demo portion to meet SMB expectations.
• Continue sprinkling in discovery questions throughout the demo.

Following a consistent process for discoveries and demos is important. At the same time, you need to stay agile and allow for that flexible conversational flow.

Handle pricing objections 

When prospects cite pricing as an objection, Tom recommends:

1. Setting an upfront agenda that includes pricing. This helps to avoid that becoming an early disruptor.
2. Avoiding negotiations and discounts if you have transparent pricing (which you should for SMBs).

Rosie, another panelist, agreed — her approach is to lean into the value justification:

“There’s a reason behind the price point… you’re charging what you need to be charging in order to make sure that client is serviced properly.”

Seize the power of the “land and expand” model

For SMBs, Alex advocated for a “land and expand” strategy versus requiring full commitment upfront.

“What we've seen with our audience is a readiness to run a validation of the tool, which expands during the first several months.”

Offering free trials or proof of concept periods allows SMBs to experience the product before fully buying in. The sales team can then nurture them with ongoing success support to expand the account over time.

These tailored strategies for SMB outbound sales empower SaaS companies to seal the deal on smaller business revenue streams more effectively.

Note: Every audience segment requires adapting your sales playbook.

To sum it up, here’s a list of “do’s” and “don’ts” from Alex’s experience:

Now, let’s proceed to a larger scale in SaaS sales — selling to enterprise companies.

3 critical mistakes to avoid when selling to mid-market and enterprise

To run more efficient sales cycles and close more deals in SaaS, Tom recommends staying away from these three things:

Mistake #1: Not setting an agenda upfront

Setting a clear agenda at the start of any sales call is absolutely critical, yet it’s often overlooked. Tom advocates opening with something like:

“We have 45 minutes today. Here’s the game plan: I’ll ask some quick discovery questions first to understand your needs. Then we’ll dive into a 15-minute product demo tailored for you. We’ll reserve the last 15 minutes for pricing discussion and next steps.”

This addresses the three core fears prospects have on sales calls:

• The rep will waste their time.
• They’ll be pressured into wasting money.
• They’ll struggle to end the call politely.

An upfront agenda quells these fears and lowers defensive barriers. It also ensures a smooth call flow where you control when to handle things like pricing conversations. Here’s a structure you can follow to set the agenda:

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For sales managers, enforcing agendas standardizes processes across your team. This makes onboarding and coaching easier. Reps stay on track, have clear “permission gates” for each call stage, and require less mental energy.

Mistake #2: Talking features before outcomes

Tom observes tenured reps often make the mistake of jumping straight into an excessive feature demo, believing prospects want a comprehensive walkthrough. Wrong approach!

Prospects primarily want to know what your product will accomplish for them — the “why” behind those features. As the famous quote goes, “People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.”

Implementing new software is a major undertaking. You must first overly convey the high-level outcomes and problems solved. Only once that endpoint vision is clear should you delve into showcasing specific product capabilities.

Example for a scheduling tool: “What we accomplish is ensuring 100% of your qualified form leads get booked through instant calendaring, eliminating drop-off. How we do that is through features like [concierge routing, automated reminders, etc.].”

Mistake #3: Failing to “conduct” the deal

The final pitfall is allowing deals to get bogged down in messy email threads once you have an initial “yes.” Rather than thrash around chasing eight different stakeholders, you need to take charge as the conductor.

Create a shared action plan that divides deliverables, deadlines, and ownership across the buying committee. Then systematically work those items by isolating individual owners, not engaging the full group.

For complex tasks like security reviews, arrange 1–on–1 meetings with just the CTO. Update the overall group selectively when you complete major milestones. This approach maintains momentum by creating accountability loops among the buyer team, not just between you and them.

Tom also stresses monitoring your open opportunity age to identify lengthening cycles. When that stretches beyond norms, win rates suffer — so staying on top of step-by-step execution is critical.

Overall, structured agendas, outcome-focused demos, and skillfully quarterbacked deal logistics enable sales teams to run tighter enterprise processes and avoid costly missteps.

4 extra tips to smooth the SMB sales process

Finally, four tactical tips to streamline your sales processes and accelerate your sales cycles:

1. Bring your product upfront. For SMB buyers, Tom recommends making product demos and educational content freely available before the sales process even begins. Allow prospects to self-educate so your sales team engages with already knowledgeable leads.
2. Be transparent on pricing. Transparent, visible pricing is critical for the SMB market. For companies selling across SMB, mid-market, and enterprise, a blended approach makes sense. Post pricing packages for the SMB and mid-market tiers, but allow enterprises to request custom quotes.
3. Align sales and marketing through win rates. To keep sales and marketing teams aligned, make win rates a focal metric that both teams discuss regularly. Declining win rates can signal issues with lead quality, market positioning, or sales execution — making this a powerful intersection point.
4. Segment your availability strategically. Ensure at least 4 hours of availability per geography you need to cover for outbound account executives working with leads from SDRs. For example, reps based in EST should have 4 hours open for European prospects and vice versa. This prevents major time zone conflicts and allows you to be fully available during reasonable business hours in each region.

By embracing these strategies, SMB sales teams can create frictionless and enjoyable buyer experiences. Not to mention that they speed up the journey from lead to customer.

For even more tips, watch the recording of the event.