For many, inbound marketing and inbound sales represent a paradigm shift from the usual way of doing business. But the two strategies work together to build something more than a series of lead conversions: they help you develop long-lasting relationships with your customers which serves you and them better.
Related Blog: Why Passing the Inbound Sales Certification is the Best Thing You Can Do in Less Than 4 Hours
Inbound marketing helps leads discover your business by positioning it where they go to find things out. It nurtures their engagement with your brand by supplying high-quality content and access to personal, human communication. But when it comes time to convert those leads into sales, it doesn't work to hand them over to a traditional sales process. Inbound sales needs to continue to work with the customer personally.
Modern consumers are savvy: they know when they're being prioritized as a sale first. Incidentally, any individual sale isn't where the value of your customers lies: with the social-media fueled economy of reputation modern businesses operate in, customers are often your best advocates. Inbound sales means taking a more active role in your customers' education and solution-finding activities. It means catering to their questions and pain points, working with them to discover what best benefits them, and bringing them to a stage where even if they don't complete the immediate sale, your business is positioned at the top of their list for future purchasing decisions.
With inbound marketing and inbound sales, the key is to never adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. Whether you're educating a lead in the initial awareness phase or helping them make their final purchasing decision, your teams have to work from grounding in the customer's needs – not the business's offerings. Sharing that philosophy between your marketing and sales teams can make the transition from lead to customer seamless, and keep customers coming back again and again.
Inbound Sales: The Buyer's Journey
The Internet has transformed the relationship between buyers and sellers. These days, buyers can access all the information needed to make purchase decisions and no longer need a salesperson to answer their questions. To meet the demands of today's empowered buyers, it will be necessary to update your sales process. The fact is that regardless of your company's size or the complexity of the sale, inbound sales is an important component of Inbound Marketing. Inbound sales allow your sales process to evolve to keep up with the modern buyer. Below are some inbound sales concepts that can help you to sell the way your prospects buy:
1. Understand the Buyer's Journey
This means that you should be listening to your buyer and supporting them throughout the purchase process. Your salespeople will have to provide them with information that goes beyond what they can find with their own research. You can view the buyer's journey as consisting of an initial step where they understand their challenge or objective. The next step is their commitment to addressing it and the last stage consists of seeking the best available solution.
2. Creating a Sales Process that Provides Support for the Buyer on Their Journey
Salespeople should start by identifying those who have challenges and objectives with which they can provide assistance. These are their leads and they should connect with them to help them decide whether they want to focus on the challenge or objective. If they do, they become qualified leads. Salespeople evaluate the challenge or objective of the qualified lead to see if what they are selling is the solution. If it is, they provide advice to the buyer about how their product or service is suited to them.
3. Understand the Processes for Identifying and Connecting with Leads
This should start with understanding which buyers your product or service can help. With inbound sales, you connect to the buyer with a message tailored to their challenge or objective.
4. Understand the Process for Evaluating the Buyer's Challenge and Advising Them
Your salespeople should start evaluating when the buyer shows interest. Over time, they can build trust and delve deeper into the buyer's needs. They can use the information gathered during this stage to tailor a presentation to them.
How to Choose Which Leads to Work on First
It is important to keep in mind that all leads are different. As we have discussed above, they are all at different stages of the buyer's journey and they all have unique, individual needs. Assessing these needs is an important part of prioritizing your leads and in turn, increasing productivity and sales. Evaluating your leads is necessary to maximize lead conversions. Here are some of the most important factors to check for prioritizing inbound sales leads.
1. Evaluating Leads
Many marketers prioritize leads based on the time they entered the system. But this random focus can slow down sales if you are spending too much time with cold leads. Usually the most important factor for identifying a hot lead is the interest level of the prospect. Devoting more attention to people who are ready to buy improves inbound sales, while keeping in mind that nurturing leads is crucial for future business.
2. Start with inbound marketing Leads
It's important to interact with leads that have found you through your site as soon as possible, since competitors are just clicks away. Visitors who have responded to a call to action should be treated as warm or hot leads since they have shown a level of interest that indicates they are thinking about your product as a solution.
When you follow-up within the first five minutes of receiving contact with a prospect, your chances of closing a sale increase exponentially. Other leads that should make your priority list include those from social media and referrals. Quick response is one of the key make or break factors when it comes to inbound sales.
3. Monitor Who Opens Your Emails
Your next batch of leads to focus on can be the ones that are currently reading an email from you. One of the best ways to track who is reading your emails is with the HubSpot Sales tool. This tool reveals how often prospects are opening emails and how much they are clicking on links. Responding as soon as possible will improve your sales conversions.
4. New Visitors
People who are new to your website should be in your third tier of prioritized leads. Visitors should be prioritized by the amount of time they spend on your site. Reaching out to loyal visitors to answer their questions is sometimes all it takes to initiate a sale. HubSpot's free CRM records page views from companies visiting your website, even before they become leads. Furthermore, it lets you target those companies by determining which events and actions they are taking, which allows you to very specifically filter those whom you can help by targeting their needs.
Given all of these crucial components of Inbound Marketing and Inbound Sales, these may be more involved than you originally thought! While it is true that there is a lot of strategy and planning, it is an undeniable system for success if it is right for your company and executed properly.
