In today's connected world the information that buyers need to make a purchase decision is just a click away. The power in the buying and selling process has shifted from the seller to the buyer. The buying process is transformed. Due to this proliferation, the modern buyer is no longer dependent on salespeople for necessary purchasing decision information.
Inbound Sales realizes this need with today’s empowered buyer, they understand that sales process and sales experience needs to transform into the buyer’s context.
Whether your sales process relies on inbound leads or targeted outreach, whether you’re a big company or small, whether your sale is complex or simple; inbound sales are relevant. That’s because inbound sales transform selling to match today’s empowered buyer -- so sales reps can sell the way people buy. Inbound sales teams recognize they must transform their entire sales strategy so they're serving the buyer.
Inbound sales is a personalized, helpful, modern sales methodology. Inbound salespeople focus on their prospect's pain points, act as a trusted consultant, and adapt their sales process to the buyer journey.
Inbound sales organizations develop a sales process that supports the prospect through their buyer's journey. The stages that buyers move through are - Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. The four actions (Identify, Connect, Explore, and Advise) inbound sales teams must implement to support qualified leads into becoming opportunities and eventually customers.
Legacy sales teams build their sales process around their own needs, not their buyers’. Legacy salespeople focus their energy on “checking the boxes” their sales manager laid out for them instead of listening to the buyer and supporting them through the purchasing process. As a result, the seller and buyer feel misaligned. Furthermore, this self-serving process delivers minimal value to the buyer. Buyers don’t want to be prospected, demoed, or closed. These steps add zero value to the buyer because all the information they get in these meetings can be found without a sales rep’s help.
If salespeople cannot add value beyond the information buyers can find on their own, the buyer has no reason to engage with salespeople at all.
Inbound sales teams avoid this issue by starting with the Buyer’s Journey. Before they ever pick up a phone or send an email, they make it a priority to understand their buyer’s world.
They follow three-part framework for the Buyer’s Journey:
During the Awareness stage, buyers identify a challenge they are experiencing or a goal they want to pursue, then decide whether or not it should be a priority. In order to fully understand your buyer’s awareness stage, ask yourself:
During the Consideration stage, buyers have clearly defined their challenge or goal and have committed to addressing it. They evaluate different approaches or methods available to solve their challenge or pursue their goal. In order to fully understand your buyer’s consideration stage, ask yourself:
In the Decision stage, buyers have decided on a solution category. They create a list of specific offerings and vendors in their selected category and decide on the one that best meets their needs. In order to fully understand your buyer’s decision stage, ask yourself:
Once the buying journey is defined, the next step is to build your sales process. Unlike legacy sales teams that design their sales process first, inbound sales teams build a sales process after the buying journey has been defined. This inbound sales process supports the buyer through their purchasing journey. As a result, salespeople and buyers feel aligned through the buying and selling process, not at odds with one another.
In order to develop an inbound sales process, ask yourself what your salespeople can be doing at the awareness, consideration, and decision stages to support buyers. The following four-part framework for your sales process or the Inbound Sales Methodology:
Inbound salespeople Identify strangers who may have goals or challenges they can help with. These strangers become leads.
Inbound salespeople Connect with these leads to help them decide whether they should prioritize the goal or challenge. If the buyer decides to do so, these leads become qualified leads.
Inbound salespeople Explore their qualified leads’ goals or challenges to assess whether their offering is a good fit for the qualified leads’ context. If it turns out it’s a good fit, these qualified leads become opportunities.
Inbound salespeople Advise these opportunities on how their offering is uniquely positioned to address the buyer’s context. If the buyer agrees the salesperson’s offering is best for their context, these opportunities become customers.
Identifying the right business opportunities from the start can be the difference between a thriving business and a failing one. Knowing what to look for also helps salespeople create a predictable, scalable sales funnel.
Inbound salespeople connect with leads to help them decide whether they should prioritize the goal or challenge they're facing. If the buyer decides to do so, these leads become qualified leads.
Inbound salespeople explore their qualified leads' goals or challenges to assess whether their offering is a good fit.
Inbound salespeople advise prospects on why their solution is uniquely positioned to address the buyer's needs.
During the Identify stage, legacy salespeople are unaware of which buyers are active in a buying journey. Instead, legacy reps identify buyers they believe are a good fit and start calling those buyers randomly.
Here’s the problem: Many buyers have already entered the Awareness stage of the buying journey before they engage with salespeople. These active buyers should be targeted first, but legacy salespeople fail to differentiate active buyers from passive buyers.
Legacy Sales
Inbound salespeople are able to separate active from passive buyers, so they focus their time on buyers who are already in the awareness stage of the buying journey. These buyers may have recently visited the company website, filled out a form, opened one of the salesperson’s emails, or left a clue of their need in some other way.
Begin by prioritizing prospects who have already begun their buyer's journey. Build trust by participating in their online conversations on blogs and social media. Kickstart the sales conversation with personalized messaging that addresses the buyer's industry, role, and communication preferences.
Begin your outreach with advice or a surprising insight. When your prospect expresses interest, transition into exploration mode.
Understand the buyer's timeline and adjust your sales process to match. You should strive to deliver the right educational content to your prospect at the right place and time.
Legacy salespeople use cold emails and voicemails with the same generic elevator pitch and entice the buyer with a discount. Inbound salespeople lead with a message personalized to the buyer’s context. This context could be the buyer’s industry, role, interests, common connections, and so on.
Define personas. Understand the unique perspectives of the individuals you’re attempting to reach. First, segment your market by the types of companies you target. Then, define the personas of the different types of people you target.
Define the sequences for each persona. Determine which mediums you’ll use to reach out to each persona. Does your persona prefer being contacted via phone or email? How many times will you reach out before you give up?
Define the content for each sequence. Most of these buyers are in the “awareness” stage of their buying journey. Therefore, your goal is not to sell them on your product or even give them a demo. Instead, your goal is to educate them on the problem or opportunity they are exploring.
During the Connect stage, legacy salespeople focus their prospecting efforts on cold emails and cold voicemails. These cold outreaches highlight the same generic elevator pitch and attempt to entice buyers with offers to see a presentation about the salesperson’s product. When legacy salespeople actually get buyers on the phone, most of the effort is spent qualifying them on the size of their budget and their authority to spend it.
However, modern buyers do not rely on messages from salespeople to learn about products and services. This information is readily available online whenever buyers are interested. And modern buyers are not ready for a presentation at this stage of their journey. They want to have a two-way conversation with an expert who can help them frame their goal or challenge.
When inbound salespeople reach out to buyers, they lead with a message personalized to the buyer’s context. This context could be the buyer’s industry, role, interests, or common connections. In their opening outreach, inbound salespeople make an offer aligned with the Awareness stage of the buying journey. For example, inbound salespeople may offer a free consultation or ebook about the area the buyer is researching.
Inbound salespeople prepare themselves for the Connect process by defining their personas. When defining personas, segment your target market by company type. Then, pinpoint the different types of people you target within those companies. For example, you can segment the companies you target by industry, size, or geographic location. You can segment the people you target by role, title, function, or common behaviors.
In example below, the firm has six personas:
Once personas are designed, inbound salespeople outline their outreach strategy, or sequences, for each. The persona sequence defines how you will reach out to the buyer (phone, email, social, etc.), when you will reach out, and how often you will reach out.
Finally, inbound salespeople develop the outreach content for each attempt in the sequence. It is critical to personalize the outreach to the buyer’s context uncovered during the Identify stage.
Guide an exploratory conversation so that you’re in control, but your prospect feels like they’re being empowered to make the right decisions. Unlike traditional qualification frameworks like BANT, this new exploratory framework is something you’ll openly share with your prospects.
Focus on the prospect’s challenges first. People generally don’t make changes unless they have a challenge that impedes their progress. Use the small yet powerful wording adjustment of “challenges” instead of saying “problems.”
Connect goals with those challenges. Talk about the prospect’s goals. Listen for an acknowledgment that they don’t have a good solution and are afraid they won’t achieve their goals.
Share plans that fit the prospect’s timeline. Introduce how your product can help with the buyer’s goals and challenges. Ideally, your strategy is uniquely positioned to help in a way the competition cannot.
Discuss budget. The final thing to understand is how the prospect will fund any investment they must make to implement their new plan. Consider all costs involved including financial, time, and human resource investments.
During the Explore stage, legacy salespeople transition into presentation mode the moment a buyer expresses interest. But legacy salespeople do not understand the buyer’s context well enough yet to deliver a value-adding presentation. Because the buyer context is underdeveloped, legacy salespeople revert to generic presentations, outlining information buyers already have access to.
Inbound salespeople transition into an exploratory mode when a buyer expresses interest. Inbound salespeople recognize they do not have the level of trust and understanding with the buyer to deliver a personalized presentation. In fact, inbound salespeople are not even sure whether they can help the buyer at this stage.
Instead, inbound salespeople leverage initial buyer interest to develop additional trust and uncover buyer goals through an exploratory conversation. They use their own credibility to probe deeper into the buyer’s specific goals and challenges. As experts, they can assess whether they can help the buyer efficiently and more thoroughly than prospects can on their own. Through proper value positioning and a strategic questioning process during the Explore stage, inbound salespeople guide prospects to draw their own conclusions about whether a product is right for their needs.
Inbound salespeople build an exploratory guide to ensure the discussion is effective for the buyer.
Here’s a sample exploratory guide conversations with buyers, along with what these steps sound like in a real sales conversation:
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SAMPLE QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS |
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Build Rapport |
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Recap Prior Conversation |
As we discussed on our initial call, you aren’t happy with your current website. You and your partners feel that it does not accurately reflect the scope, quality, and impact that your work has. It’s also just not attracting top-notch new hires. You’re losing candidates because smaller, nimbler, and more web-savvy firms are being found online instead of you. Their marketing is working. But yours is not. You are interviewing firms like ours to figure out how you can fix these problems and turn your website and blog into recruiting magnets. Does that recap sound right? Would you like to add anything? |
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Set Agenda |
Typically, I’d like to make the goal of this call to figure out how I can best help you. I’ve worked with hundreds of mid-sized professional services firms like yours who were losing to more digitally-savvy firms. I can certainly share some advice based on my previous work with them. But I find that everyone is a bit different, so it usually makes sense for me to get more context around your goals, other challenges you’ve faced or anticipate facing, any relevant plans you have in place, as well as timelines and other constraints you might have. Are you comfortable having that conversation today? |
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Challenges |
Oftentimes, when I’m speaking with partners at health care firms such as yourself, they have one or more of a handful of challenges. Most have dabbled with internet marketing over the years, but have never really found success. They’re tired of spending money on the next shiny object and redoing their website every two years without any kind of measurable ROI. Most of the time they’re blogging, but not really getting much benefit from it. And sometimes, they have a web company that’s doing some social media, SEO and pay-per-click advertising for them, but they feel like it’s a wasted expenditure, as nothing really ever seems to improve. Have you ever faced any of these issues? |
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Goals |
Let’s step back a bit. Now that we’ve discussed the challenges of marketing the business to job applicants, does it make sense to talk about your recruiting goals? Often, we can work backward from your goals to figure out the right plan.
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Plans |
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Timeline |
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Negative Consequences |
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Positive Implications |
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Authority |
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Budget |
It sounds like if you do not increase the pace of sales hiring, you run the risk of shrinking your firm. With 25 employees on the payroll, this will be fairly devastating to the family culture you’ve built over the decades. You also run some personal risk of not being able to retire because your younger associates may jump ship to join growing firms where they stand a better chance of building a career.
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Inbound salespeople advise prospects on why their offering is uniquely positioned to address the buyer’s context. By sticking to a generic script, legacy salespeople fail to represent their strategy as a solution to their prospect’s specific needs. Prospects want to know how features are specifically going to help them and their situation.
As an inbound salesperson, you serve as a translator between the generic messaging found on your company’s website and the unique needs of your buyer.
During the Advise stage, legacy salespeople deliver the same presentation and same case studies to all buyers. Legacy salespeople might do some light discovery around buyer needs -- just enough to know there might be interest. Then, they revert to autopilot and deliver their generic presentation.
However, modern buyers have already seen the content of this generic presentation online. They struggle to connect the company’s generic value proposition with their specific challenges, and legacy salespeople fail to help the buyer make these connections.
On the other hand, inbound salespeople tailor the presentation to the buyer’s context, leveraging the information gathered during the Connect stage. During the exploratory conversation, inbound salespeople discover whether the buyer can be helped, wants their help, needs their help, or is prioritizing goals the salesperson is uniquely positioned to help with.
By uncovering the buyer’s context and tailoring the presentation accordingly, inbound salespeople add tremendous value to the buyer’s journey beyond the information available online. Inbound salespeople serve as translators between the generic messaging found on the company’s website and the unique situation of the buyer.
Provide a recap of what you’ve learned. The beginning of the presentation is all about restating where the prospect is now and the insights you’ve gleaned from your earlier conversations, such as a challenge your prospect has or a goal they want to achieve. Impress upon your buyer that you are uniquely suited to help them.
Suggest ways to achieve their goals. Craft a customized presentation that connects their goals and challenges to your offering, and shows exactly how they’ll benefit from your service.
Confirm the budget, authority, and timeline. Based on what it takes to set up their account and implement your solution, work backward to determine when they need to sign your contract. Outline a timeline that meets the buyer’s deadline.
In today’s selling environment, salespeople have to realize that they serve a completely different function than their predecessors. Legacy salespeople who only serve as sources of information will find themselves unable to compete with inbound salespeople who serve as translators between the generic information available online and the unique needs of the buyer.
The Inbound Sales Methodology covers every step of the buyer’s journey traveled on the road from stranger to customer, and each corresponding salesperson action. The new methodology acknowledges that Inbound Sales doesn’t just happen -- you do it. And, you do it using tools that help you personalize the sales process to appeal to precisely the right leads, in the right places, at just the right time in their buying journey.
Enter the modern world of sales and get started with inbound sales today
Start solving for the customer today.
For many growing businesses, success means lowering the cost to acquire a new customer. Luckily, inbound marketing gave us a playbook for that. But to remain profitable and competitive, businesses also need to focus on another key metric: LTV -- or lifetime value.
This Customer Experience Template Bundle includes:
