Inbound Sales: Understanding the Inbound Sales Methodology and strategy
Recently and for the future assumptions, Inbound Sales aligned with Inbound Marketing Methodologies are considerably the smartest approach toward strategically and long-term customer and brand relationships.
According to business experts, developing an accumulative, compatible inbound sales strategy to the buyer’s journey requires adapting strategically controlled steps in every stage in the process since the awareness, consideration up till taking the decision.
The main concern along the inbound sales process is to attract the required customer with the set criteria and persona, using personally tailored and relevant high-quality content, following the coming approach:
1. Identify:
As an initial step in the buying process, the awareness stage of the buyer journey, when brands are focusing on identifying their customer in the way to transform the visitors into leads.
Taking the Inbound Sales path, at the beginning before start producing messages and content, studying your customers is vital to attract the target segment tailored precisely to certain persona, solving their problems and feed their specific pain points.
Outbound Sales techniques may be the best approach when you are going forward to direct pain and clear customer demands. This comes after pointing the major problems and their effect on your target, here comes your role as the Solution.
Aligning inbound Marketing and sales efforts based on the same access data leads to an unstoppable tool for reaching the right people, nurturing and building the right-meaningful relationships.
2. Connect
Identifying the new leads and setting the required persona that would benefit from your product and service, building the base to reach the next level of connecting and communicating through the consideration stage. In this phase, Inbound Marketing and Inbound Sales goes in parallel to produce the valuable content that attracts the right customer for long-term relationships.
Content Marketing would be the super-factor of this phase. Since we are avoiding the outbound techniques such as cold-calls, the new technique of warm-calls comes insight with personally tailored messages using the right content in the perfect context to start conversions all along the modern media and social networks, answering the question of why this specific segment of people should get your product/service among other competitors.
Product and brand promises you would offer based on the clear objectives makes your customer feel more secured and assured and raises your chances of converting the lead even more.
3. Explore
Passing through the identification process, then connecting to the customers for a long-term relationship between them and the brand. Exploring the engaged leads to your content during the consideration stage is a must. Segmenting and classifying the acquired would be the deeper process of analyzing their needs, demands and sales opportunities.
proceeding the journey of the lead from just a normal visitor to a prospect who is seeking to understand more about your business, reaching you in a certain context in their search to find the best solution for their problem.
Studying your customers, building personas is away, profiling their identity and online behavior from the content they interested in and that they are engaging with, forms they submitted and more, all work for your future deeper level of connection revealing their problems, demands, aspirations, and solutions.
Structuring this data makes your business move straight-forward to your target audience for closed sales with future benefits and advocacy.
Pro Tip:
Getting closer to your prospects makes Sales opportunities more optimistic through claiming your products and service as the solution during the Decision-making phase in the buyer journey, turning them from being leads to be real customers and advocates afterward.
The salesperson role now came to the most critical phase. Acquiring the leads, nurturing them, followed by advising them while making their decision to get the solution for their demands and pain. Qualifying the lead to get empowered in their decisions to trust your business by following your promising solution.
Why adopt an Inbound Sales Strategy?
Now you got a closer shot and vision toward implementing inbound sales techniques, yet the worthy question is does it make sense? Does spending this effort is that mush rewarding from a business perspective. Let’s find the answer to why you should develop and structure your own Inbound Sales Strategy for your business?
1. By the side of raising your customer acquisition rate, but also expanding your brand presence vertically. Inbound sales open your gates for opportunities, prospects and qualified leads with deep and long-lasting relationships.
2. Cost reduction would be the golden bowl every business seeks. Inbound sales offer you a lower cost in operations with short-cuts between marketing and sales approaches.
3. Inbound Sales motivate you to accept and get more flexible when adapting changes and new trends that will definitely affect your Buyer persona identity, pain, demands, and journey.
Inbound Sales Strategies Your Team Needs to Adopt
Considering the different objectives and approaches of every sales team on a certain business, want to adapt the strategies and methodologies to fit your own company, there are five strategies would bear a high level of potentiality for your business:
- Buyer Persona, Profile, Segment and Differentiate Buyers than Ideal Buyers.
The initial step toward the Inbound Sales Technique is to identify your leads and prospects. This might be one of the most critical steps to figure out Who would be your Ideal Buyer, consumer, customer and who would be the advocate. Maintaining a deep understanding of the Ideal Buyer Profile, aligned to the business offers allows you to spot opportunities then narrow your focus to the individuals personally.
2. Develop the buyer journey that fits your inbound sales process.
Building a completely buyer-focused journey is a top priority from Inbound sales prospective. By putting the product and service inside the right context of the target customer. Understanding the journey of your customer since their discovery phase reaching the decision phase, defining each and every step challenge and experience.
- Content is the King yet context is the Head!
Opportunities and prospects from sales perspective are connected to generate the fast win, yet from Inbound one, it’s the gate toward an opened endless dialogue that generates more and more data assisted the coming acquisition process for more qualifies leads based on the context your content was offered thoroughly during the journey.\
- Ditch the Pitch
The play here is about using the right time to achieve your goal from the opportunity. Before considering the offering pitch and presentation, the process will take much time to get developed within certain progression through an inbound approach toward offering the right solution for certain segments of people and well-recognized buyer persona.