Marketing
Not the same old routine. Using inbound marketing sales to rejuvenate your sales staff.
By Ryan Parlee
It’s the weekly Monday sales meeting – the same old routine. You’ve discussed the team’s goals. You’ve talked about your wins and losses. You’ve brainstormed on local clients to cold call. Heck, you’re ready to pick up the phone and start dialing BUT your Sales Manager wants to talk about something new – a different approach to generating leads. She’s EVEN invited the marketing team in here so this is clearly not going to apply to you. After all, it’s called inbound marketing not sales, right?!?
This is actually a common misconception about inbound but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Inbound marketing not only reaps huge rewards for your marketing department, it can mean big wins for your sales squad, too – which means big wins for the entire organization.
Simply put, inbound marketing sales aims to efficiently attract a new audience to your product/service, convert them into leads and then turn those leads into loyal customers by closing and delighting them with remarkable content. For this blog’s purpose, though, we’ll concentrate on the aspects of inbound marketing that the sales force want to hear about.
Lead and follow
Who wants to make a cold call when you can be delivered a warm lead? (This screams for a pizza analogy but it’ll make me hungry, so let’s move on.) Cold calling, though not dead as some proclaim, is still around. If you’re a politician, a scammer or just a plain old phone spammer, stick with it. If not, ditch the cold calls. Their success rates are not high. Recently, cold call to appointment rates have been measured as low as less than 1%. We all know that’s just a waste of your time. Inbound marketing instead serves a warm lead to the sales-staff. With inbound, most customers end up landing on your URL all by themselves. They’ve already done their research and are interested in what you’re selling because the marketing team has come up with remarkable content and optimized searching, tailored to the person you’re targeting!
Inbound also makes it easy to turn that initial buy into a customer, forever loyal to your brand. Hubspot states that successful “inbound companies continue to engage with, delight, and (hopefully) upsell their current customer base into happy promoters of the organizations and products they love.”
Save yourself some time
The traditional sales cycle can be a long and frustrating one – often taking weeks, if not months for bigger purchases. What salesperson wouldn’t want to shorten it? Since inbound revolves around creating remarkable content that is relevant to your customer, you can count on the time between first contact to final purchase being drastically shortened. Inbound marketing gives your customer the information they need so they are empowered, knowledgeable and confident. They won’t spend as much time researching and contemplating – they’ve already done it! Now, you can close that deal faster.
Additionally, with inbound, your salesforce can target the right person at the time that is right for them. Your AE’s will know exactly where your lead is in the buyer’s journey and won’t have to waste time talking with unqualified leads.
Repurposing with purpose
The remarkable content that your marketing team has created is designed to keep users coming back for more, eventually turning them into promoters. Think about it, though. All of this content can also be uber useful to your salespeople, too! All of the blogs and the videos, all of the e-books and infographics and all of the white papers and product comparisons are now at their fingertips – which means they are at your traditional marketing customer’s fingertips, too. Have your sales team repurpose that content so your customers can keep up with you and your organization. It’s an awesome way to position your company as a thought leader while keeping your clients connected to your brand and product, too.
Creating remarkable content and generating qualified leads is only a small part of the inbound marketing puzzle. So, if the marketing team shows up at your next weekly sales meeting and the boss wants to talk about inbound, realize that it does apply to you, too. Not only can it save you time and patience while providing you with content for clients it can provide you with stellar leads to increase your bottomline.
Want to learn more about inbound marketing sales? Download our Intro to Inbound Marketing guide here:
