What Is Inbound Sales

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 Methodology

Understand Buyers Persona & Buyer's Journey
Tailor a sales process around the buyer's journey.
Identify your ideal buyer persona.
Lead with a helpful, customized prospecting message.
Craft customized questions to uncover the prospect's pain.
Give a tailored presentation.

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.

Identify Process.

During the Identify stage, legacy salespeople are unaware of which buyers are active in a buying journey.

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:

How do buyers describe the challenges or goals your offering addresses?
How do buyers learn more about these challenges or goals?
How do buyers decide whether the challenge or goal should be prioritized?

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 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.

Prioritize buyers that are active in a buying journey
Build trust by participating in the buyer's online conversations and lead with personalized messaging and advice
Transition into exploration mode when a buyer expresses interest
Personalize the presentation to each buyer and adjust the sales process to the buyer's timeline

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.

For example, the firm 'X' has six personas:

Persona A: VP of Sales at a technology company
Persona B: Director of Recruiting at a technology company
Persona C: CEO of a technology company
Persona D: VP of Sales at a healthcare company
Persona E: Director of Recruiting at a healthcare company
Persona F: CEO at a healthcare company

During the Connect stage, buyers have clearly defined their challenge or goal and have committed to addressing it.

They are evaluating 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:

What categories of solutions do buyers investigate?
How do buyers perceive the pros and cons of each category?
What differentiates your category in the buyer’s eyes?

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.

Reach out to buyers, with a personalized context message. This context could be the buyer’s industry, role, interests, or common connections. In their opening outreach, make an offer aligned with the buying journey.

For example, you may offer a free consultation or ebook about the area the buyer is researching.

Explore

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.

Build an exploratory guide to ensure the discussion is effective for the buyer. Leverage initial buyer interest to develop additional trust and uncover buyer goals through an exploratory conversation. Use their own credibility to probe deeper into the buyer’s specific goals and challenges. Assess whether you 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

Build Rapport
Recap Prior Conversation
Set An Agenda
Understand Challenges
Define Smart Goals
Understand TimeLine
Explain Negative and Positive Aspects

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.

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 sales people 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.

A Better Approach To Sales

In today’s selling environment, salespeople have to realize that they serve a completely different function than their predecessors.

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 don’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.

A successful inbound strategy requires seamless handoff and alignment between marketing and sales.

When you help clients align their sales and marketing teams, you’re able to prove ROI for the services you offer, help clients grow their revenue faster, and enable future investment in marketing programs.

Inbound is a better way to market, a better way to sell, and a better way to serve your customers. Because when good-for-the-customer means good-for-the-business, your company can grow better over the long term.

Enter the modern world of sales, marketing and delighted customers get started with inbound sales today.

It's TIME TO RETHINK SALES

Inbound Sales Methodology

THE KPIS OF INBOUND SALES

CRM Implementation

Sales & Marketing Alignment

Sales Enablement

Sales Coaching

Identify Process.

SEO

Social Media

Business Blogging

Lead Capture

Work Flows

Lead Nurturing

Explore

Leads Management

Cross Selling

Lead Scoring

A Better Approach To Sales

CRM Implementation

Sales & Marketing Alignment

Sales Enablement

Sales Coaching

Other Helpful Resources:

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