Remington BeggHopefully, you have been following my last few articles talking about inbound sales as the clear winner in strategies! If not, check out my last blog here.
I’m sure you are all loyal readers, now just trying to figure out how to get your sales team up to speed and started with inbound sales techniques. As the title of this feature would suggest, I’m about to drop some helpful knowledge in the form of the top 5 tactics to use to get your team started with a winning inbound sales strategy TODAY.
Website
You were probably thinking I was going to hit you with a sales and email script to follow, right? If only it were that easy! Inbound sales starts from the top. It’s a total mindset change from how you do business today and requires an overhaul of most your marketing efforts, especially your website.
First things first, YOU NEED A WEBSITE, YES YOU! But don’t sell anything on it. We don’t sell anything only except for ourselves. That’s validation, buddy, and it’s what your website is for. If I go looking for a company and they don’t have a website or Facebook page, I’m out! In this day in age, not having a site is worse than having a bad one!
Having a good website is even better, but the best is having one that works for you! When we begin working with clients who are looking to begin using an inbound method, we always start with the website.
Are you generating content that is useful to your buyer personas? Are you talking to them in an authentic voice? Do you have any gated material? Are there any CTA’s on your blog or homepage? Getting your website to work for you, and not against you, is step 1 in your path to inbound success!
Marketing Automation
Emails, templates and the buyer's journey– OH MY! Marketing automation software can truly change the way you communicate to your leads, prospects and customers while making life so much easier for your sales and marketing team. If you can’t afford to take the leap to pay for that just yet, create Google Docs with templates that can be used by your entire team.
Think of every form of communication your sales team sends:
- Prospecting Email series
- Follow up after a meeting series
- Did you read the proposal series
- Missed meeting series
You may not realize the amount of time each sales person is taking to create and send these emails. Over 20% of each day is spent doing “office” tasks and not actually talking to prospects. You can reduce this time for each sales rep with curating these emails, on brand and on voice so they all sound the same! Consistency with your brand is key, and an entirely different conversation. But read more about how brand is power here.
Set aside a few hours to really dig into your buyer’s journey. Who are these people you are trying to sell to? What are their titles? How do they find success? Taking a minute to step back and evaluate who the hell these people are is going to drive better conversations as you move them through your sales journey.
SMARKETING Alignment
Answer this question honestly: Have you ever sat down with your sales and marketing teams to talk about how they can work together to drive better leads and close more deals as a team? The answer for most is NO.
Instead, I’m always told, “stay in your sandbox, take the leads you are given and work them. If you don’t close them, well you messed that up, not me!”
Both lead quality and closed sales are the responsibility of both marketing and sales.
But how? This one could be a total mind-blower for some of you, but get the top players on both teams together to talk (not c-suite level leaders, the people in the trenches). ‘
Address the current situation:
- Are the leads good?
- Where are the leads coming from?
- Do they meet the buyer profile and personas?
Work together to create the profile and personas that make sense and from there put together an internal contract to work from. Use this meeting to begin to hold marketing accountable to a quality and quantity lead flow, while holding sales accountable to a follow-up process.
Mindset for Helping, Not Selling
This is where scripts or email templates can really come in handy! Find your organization’s voice, write it down, practice it together and fully lean into HELPING. Your business might not always be the best fit. It might not always be the most affordable. Your business might not have what they need, BUT you probably know someone who does.
If you are following the above steps, you are generating thought-provoking content and attracting leads to your website. You are using automation to nurture those leads until they’re ready to speak with sales. You are working with marketing identify and improve what is and isn’t working with content. Overall, you have made an organizational change to HELP. Doesn’t it feel good?
Video All Damn Day
Video is taking over the web! There are tons of creative ways to use video to highlight your organization. From a sales perspective, you can use cool tools like Soapbox by Wistia to include video in your emails.
Put them on your website, use them for your blog, highlight your team, Facebook, Instagram…there hundreds of ways to incorporate video into your sales and marketing strategy to reach more prospects and help close deals.
You don’t have to be an expert editor either! It’s not a major motion picture, it’s a 10 second clip. So get brave and say hello to video. It will dramatically change your open rates and really help with connecting to your prospects. (And it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.)
Wrapping It Up
So, the title might be a bit misleading, but inbound sales strategies actually begin with inbound marketing strategies! However, you can begin making the change TODAY in your organization and its culture by working on just one of the five tips above. It might take some time to see the inbound leads a coming, but when they start streaming in, your sales team and your CEO will thank you!
