The Internet has fundamentally changed how buyers engage with businesses. Today, buyers are overly confident in what they know and aren’t interested in catering to a sales representative’s qualifying script during phone calls.
The prolific access to online educational content places the buyer in control of the sales process. Salespeople today seem to occupy an unenviable role as a gatekeeper between the product and consumer and traditional outbound sales methods have become much less efficient.
As a result of this painful reality, the Inbound Sales approach emerged to address this reality that recommends adopting the following tenets for sales teams as they adapt to the "Age of the Buyer."
Transform your sales approach with Inbound Sales so you can exceed your sales goals, address your sales productivity issues and overcome the challenges created by universal access to information that enables the modern buyer to control the sales process.
Inbound sales is about building trust with your buyer. Salespeople should help people make buying decisions, more than just making a sale. To combat prevailing buyer prejudices and to add knowledge and value to the conversation, sales representatives need to transform themselves into advisory, service-oriented consultants.
Sales now need to ask themselves:
Tailor your sales content to the wants and needs of your buyer. As you learn more about your leads over time, you can better personalize your messages to their specific needs. Sales representatives today can (and should) leverage a whole host of technologies to understand what buyers are saying online and which buyers are visiting your website, opening your emails, and even viewing your pricing page. Over time, organized sales teams will be identifying the behaviors of best fit customers, leading to better qualified leads.
Base the entire sales process on the buyer, not the seller. When interacting with buyers, sales representatives need to actively inquire about and listen to the buyer’s challenges and goals for the purchase. As a consultative advisor and product expert, the sales representative can then share recommendations with the buyer to help them accomplish their goals or address their challenges. This may include the buyer using their solution, if it’s a good fit. Sometimes, it’s in the sales representative’s best interest to point buyers to a different product or service.
Salespeople can beat low buyer expectations by adopting an inbound sales strategy and perhaps even delight the buyer in the process.
The method to improve sales productivity in this digital world is to implement the Inbound Sales Methodology. To apply this new methodology efficiently requires the right content and tools that streamline the sales process for each buyer persona your business targets.
Hubspot offers free Inbound Sales training to help organizations learn the methodology. The Hubspot sales tools enable the methodology to scale. Inbound Sales solves problems for the customer, and that means changing your outreach approach. Inbound Sales blends nicely with the Inbound Marketing process because many of the elements required to prepare for customer engagement originate from buyer persona research.
Inbound Sales has three stages as sales teams Identify qualified prospects, Connect with those prospects and Advise the prospects about how to address their problem or implement a solution.
Services at the Identify Stage of the Inbound Sales Process:
Services at the Connect Stage of the Inbound Sales Process:
Services at the Advise Stage of the Inbound Sales Process:
The inbound sales methodology is a complete change in thinking for most sales teams, requiring a lot of work for each prospect. However, the payoff is significant because the time you invest helps identify and develop highly-qualified prospects and the approach you take as an inbound sales representative provides a substantial advantage over the typical, traditional outbound sales rep.
As a certified Hubspot agency, we have gained both expertise and experience with these inbound sales techniques, and they have helped our business excel. They can help yours succeed, too.
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