Inbound sales: What, how and why?
What is inbound sales?
Inbound sales can be part of a comprehensive sales and marketing strategy that also includes inbound marketing and active work with customer journeys—one of the most effective strategies for driving growth in traffic, leads, and customers.
In inbound sales, the focus is on incoming leads. These are individuals who voluntarily identify themselves, for example, by filling out a form to receive a free e-book that helps them solve a problem or challenge. The ideal scenario, of course, is when this lead converts into a customer.
An inbound salesperson only reaches out to qualified, warm leads and takes on an advisory role from the very beginning, helping the buyer address their challenges and achieve their goals. Businesses using the inbound methodology achieve a high level of alignment between their marketing and sales departments because both work toward the same objectives.
Inbound sales is one of the fastest-growing sales strategies for B2B businesses.
Why Inbound Sales Is So Relevant Today
Sales Is Undergoing Radical Change Right Now
Customer behavior has significantly transformed in recent years. Today’s buyers are more informed than ever, with access to unlimited information 24/7. They conduct 360-degree research through search engines, social media, videos, user reviews, and by exploring potential suppliers' websites. Buyers trust themselves the most and prefer as much objective information as possible before reaching out to a supplier.
As a result, we see that 70-90% of the buying process is already completed by the time a potential customer contacts a salesperson. The power that salespeople once held, due to their control over product information, has now shifted to the buyer.
More and more people in your target audience are individuals who have never known a world without the internet and computers. According to Think with Google, half of all B2B buyers in 2012 were millennials, meaning they were born after 1980. Today, many of these individuals have moved into leadership roles and are key decision-makers.
These buyers actively use the internet to research products and services. They dislike being sold to, often block online ads, and rarely answer unknown calls. For them, traditional outbound sales tactics are intrusive, and they prefer to consult Google instead.
Inbound sales is designed for today’s buyer behavior—shifting from interrupting to helping. For a buyer with a recognized need, you’ll be perceived as helpful if you provide content that assists them in solving their problems and challenges.
Jonathan Lister, VP of Sales Solutions at LinkedIn, summarizes this approach with the following quote:
"As marketers, we should be changing the mantra from 'always be closing' to 'always be helping.'"
Who is Inbound Sales Suitable For?
Inbound sales is an optimal sales strategy for businesses that have their own salespeople and where the customers' purchasing process is information-based – which applies to most businesses selling to the business market (B2B). Inbound sales is therefore not a strategy for businesses in the FMCG segment or for pure e-commerce companies, where sales occur online.
What Results Can You Expect with Inbound Sales?
A comprehensive strategy that integrates the sales and marketing functions according to the inbound method can provide the following benefits:
- Shorter sales cycles
- More sales agreements
- More sales opportunities
- More referred customers
- Increased revenue per new customer
- Consistent access to qualified leads
Better collaboration between the sales and marketing departments
What does a transition to inbound sales require?
A transition to inbound sales requires changes in how the business organizes its sales and marketing efforts and which KPIs are reported. For many, it will require investing in a business system with the necessary functionality.
To succeed with inbound sales, it is essential that the sales and marketing departments work closely together with clear responsibility distribution. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) must be created to define what the two departments commit to delivering to each other.
The marketing department's responsibility is to generate and process leads until they are ready to be contacted by sales. Their delivery to sales is sales-qualified leads (SQLs) – prospects who are both interested in you and interesting for you. Sales commits to contacting these within a given timeframe.
How to Get Started with Inbound Sales in Your Company?
Define Your Personas
Before you can sell anything at all, you need to define who your customers actually are. This is absolutely necessary for a successful inbound sales strategy. To do this, you create what is called a persona.
A persona is the personification of your ideal customer. By creating fictional descriptions of the decision-makers you want to reach, it becomes much easier to understand the potential customers' needs, challenges, and goals – and thus easier to tailor communication and the sales process to their context.
If you want to learn more about how to create a persona, you can read more here.
Define the Buyer’s Journey
The buying journey begins when a potential customer experiences symptoms of a problem or an opportunity. This is the awareness phase. It is followed by the evaluation phase. Here, the individual gains an overview of the different approaches to how the opportunity or problem can be solved. Once the method or approach is chosen, the individual moves into the decision phase. Here, they are left with a list of 2-3 possible suppliers.
Traditional sellers focus on their own needs rather than the buyer's. This provides little value to the customer. If you cannot offer anything of value beyond the information the buyer can find on their own, you have no reason to make contact.
You must use the purchasing process as a tool to understand the buyer's journey. A buyer recognizes that they have a challenge or a need, they evaluate the options to solve these, and finally decide which solution to choose. To better understand the purchasing process for your customers, you can consider the following issues.
Awareness Stage:
The buyer becomes aware that she has an opportunity or a problem. What words does she use to describe this? How does she acquire information to understand this better? What are the consequences for her if she does not act? What are the most common misunderstandings related to the problem or opportunity? How does she determine whether the problem or opportunity should be prioritized?
Consideration Stage:
What solutions or methods is she exploring? How does she acquire information about them? How does she perceive the advantages and disadvantages of each solution or method? How does she choose which solution or method is right for her?
Decision Stage:
What criteria underlie her decision? What does she like about your company compared to the alternatives? What concerns might she have with your solutions? Who else is involved in the purchasing decision? What perspectives do the different decision-makers have? Do they expect to try the product or service before buying? Do they need to make any preparations after purchase?
Ask yourself these questions. This will give you a solid foundation for implementing inbound sales in your organization.
Establish a sales process that supports the buying journey
Once you understand your customers' buying process, you need to establish a sales process that supports them through the three stages of the buying journey. Such a process will help ensure that both the seller and the buyer feel they are on the same level throughout the entire buying and selling process, rather than being at odds with each other.
Similar to the marketing efforts in inbound marketing, inbound sales also have a methodical approach to the sales process, as the model above shows.
Identify
Identifying potential customers in your target audience is the first step in an inbound sales method. Before you get that far, you must define which buyers you can help and who are the right customers for you. Both traditional sellers and inbound sellers have been good at this. However, how they go about identifying potential customers is very different:
Traditional Sales
A seller operating with traditional sales strategies will be completely unaware of which buyers are active in their purchasing journey. The seller looks for buyers they believe could be suitable customers and contacts them via phone or email.
Inbound Sales
If you are an inbound seller, you prioritize digitally active buyers and focus on those who are in the evaluation phase of their buying journey. These are potential customers who have recently visited your website, filled out one of your forms, or opened an email from you.
Connect
After you have identified the potential customers, you must reach out to them. As mentioned earlier, there is a massive gap between how traditional sellers try to connect with potential customers and how today's buyers want to be sold to. This is because they approach it completely wrong.
Traditional Sales
In this phase, traditional sellers search for potential buyers who might be interested in or have a need for their services or products. These are contacted via phone or email, without any prior relationship. If they finally make contact, they must assess the buyer's needs and interest.
Inbound salg:
Explore
In this phase, you explore the unique challenges and objectives of the potential customers you have sales-qualified. If you, as a seller, find that your solutions are a good match with the buyer's context, the potential customer becomes an "opportunity." Similar to the previous phases, traditional sales strategies also proceed inefficiently here.
Tradisjonelt salg:
Inbound Sales
If you are an inbound seller, you are supportive and look for a solution to the buyer's problems. You must focus on the challenges and provide specific solution proposals.
Advise
Inbound sales is about basing the entire sales strategy on the buyer's needs, rather than the seller's. The entire sales process is tailored to the buyer's context. This is particularly evident in the final phase of the inbound sales method. Just take a look at how traditional sales differ from inbound sales at this stage.
Acquire a CRM System
If you want to build trust with customers by offering them relevant content based on their interests and needs, you need a system that can handle large amounts of data in real-time. Therefore, you should consider acquiring a CRM system, which is a customer relationship management system. It is essential for increased sales and productivity and will provide you with the following benefits:
The ability to lay a foundation for better collaboration between marketing and sales.
Better decision-making basis and opportunities to lead both the sales and marketing departments.
Improved opportunities for handling leads and better customer service.
Opportunities for automation, and consequently more efficient marketing and sales staff.
PS: Markedspartner uses HubSpot as a platform for sales, marketing, and customer service. HubSpot has a CRM at its core, which is actually free for everyone. Read more here.