January 30, 2019

Getting quality leads and clients for any business is a process in itself. E-learning business can also create a quality and consistent lead generation channel for getting quality clients for their business.

We are going to focus on outbound sales for this post and how outbound sales can improve lead generation for your e-learning business.

When you are in E-learning business you may want to reach out to following personas:

• Corporates for placement opportunities or staffing opportunities.
• Schools or Universities.
• Academy or professional training organisations.

I will explain how you can reach out to all three personas and create a consistent quality lead generation channel.

Persona One: Corporates

While reaching out to corporates define your Ideal Customer Profile as in what kind of corporates will be more likely to work with you or buy your product or services.

Example : If you are into student placements and these students are specially trained in digital marketing courses then you need to optimise your outbound sales and targeting to companies who are more likely to hire for digital marketing roles.

Targeting segment A : Recently funded companies

Recently funded companies will be in active hiring mode as they have to expand their business and grow fast with the money they have received in funding.

Thus, any company that is into staffing or student placements should reach out to recently funded startups.

EasyLeadz sales intelligence platform can automatically track recently funded startups and find out the right decision maker in these companies and reach out to them.

While reaching out to these companies you will have to optimise your content including a good email subject line and keep your content short.

People generally don’t like lengthy emails as no one has time to read. If you write a short email that addresses their problems and how your can solve their problem they may be interested to talk to you further.

Writing a good B2B cold email and have a sales follow up strategy will improve your response rates.

Targeting segment B : Actively hiring companies

Companies that are actively hiring are anyways on hiring spree. It means you must track and reach out to them as the timing is perfect for them to understand more about your staffing services.

If you want to reach out to actively hiring companies then you can either use Google job search or track job portals or use an automated sales automation tool like EasyLeadz.

Targeting segment C : Market wide targeting by company attributes

The other targeting method is based on industry and market.

You can target companies by their industry and other attributes like if they an Ecommerce company, SAAS company or if they are a BPO or call centre.

Depending upon the courses your E-learning business provides you can always optimise your targeting by specific industry.

If you provide BPO related courses then reaching out to all BPO’s with a certain size of the company is an ideal option.

You can read a case study on how Upgrad is generating quality leads using outbound sales.

Persona Two: Schools or Universities

The other outreach is when you want to tie up with Schools or Universities for your online certifications.

This could be a bulk deal as these schools may divert students to your portal in bulk. One deal with a school can cover up your 80% of the revenues if you are focussing on individual students for now.

The decision makers in schools are generally the owners and not professors or teachers.

Principals may be the influencers but the decision is mostly taken up by the owner of the school.

Using EasyLeadz you can create a targeting criterion of reaching out to all schools or universities in a specific area and EasyLeadz can automatically start finding and reaching out to the Directors of these schools or universities.

Persona Three: Academy or professional training organisations

The last targeting option is to tie up with other Academy or professional training organisations for cross sales opportunities.

Finding and reaching out to these companies is a big task in itself. You can google search these companies and can find 100+ companies but you will have to spend man power in order to create a good quality prospect list.

The other option is to use the advanced machine learning based company research tool which can instantly find academy or coaching institutes as per your targeting criterion.

The academy targeting can also work as a bulk cross promotional deal for your E-learning business.

At the end its all about optimising your targeting and qualifying companies the right way. Spend less time on manual prospecting and scale your sales prospecting with the right tools.

You can also invest this saved time on more important tasks like customers calls.

The key to good outbound sales is understand when your buyer has a need and who has a need and when you can reach out to them.