How to implement inbound sales in B2B

When you’re starting to build your inbound sales strategy, there are a few key insights you should know about. We’re going to talk about the implementation itself, sales actions, lead generation, and how to align your marketing strategy with inbound sales in this chapter.

Why you should use inbound sales tactics

The crucial part with inbound sales is to capture your prospects’ interest at the early stage of their buying journey. If you don’t do this, you could be missing out on many opportunities and leads. Yes, it takes more time to use inbound sales tactics than outbound strategies, but in the end it’s about how you can help the buyer in the best way possible. Take the time to build trust, educate your prospects and position yourself as a trusted resource early on in the decision-making process. This way, you can ensure that you’re the first person prospects reach out to when they’re ready to purchase. 

Adopting an inbound approach instead of relying on outbound techniques helps SDR’s position themselves in a completely different way. This opens the door to building relationships, and more importantly, creating lifetime customers for your business.

Implement inbound sales in B2B

According to Hubspot, it’s highly recommended to 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. Understand the buyer’s timeline and adjust your sales process to match theirs. The buyers go through 3 different stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. You should strive to deliver the right educational content to your prospect at the right place and time.

These are the 4 inbound sales actions you should take:

1. Identify: This is the most important step because you need the right business opportunities from the start. If you know exactly what to look for, it makes it so much easier to actually target the right audience.
2. Connect: You need to 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, the leads become qualified leads.
3. Explore: Try to explore the qualified leads’ goals or challenges to assess whether their offering is a good fit. Then, connect specific goals with those challenges.
4. Advise: Make sure to advise your prospects on why your offering is uniquely positioned to address their context. Don’t stick to a generic script. Prospects want to know how features are specifically tailored for them, and how it will help them and their situation.

Inbound lead generation

Let’s talk about how to generate actual leads from the inbound sales method. The process of this technique is about attracting prospects and capturing their contact information through inbound methods. This strategy attracts prospects through the creation of helpful content. It makes your brand more visible online in search results and social media platforms. By using valuable content to engage visitors in information exchange (which means they will give you their contact information in return for your knowledge), ongoing communication can be achieved. 

What’s the best way to reach your prospects? With inbound lead generation campaigns, the focus is on helping the customer rather than selling your product or service immediately. Reach your buyers effectively early in the decision-making process, build trust and create a positive experience to influence their purchase. Think about inbound sales as laying out a trail of useful information that consumers can follow towards your brand – all the way to the end of the sales funnel. You can lay out this route by setting up the following: 

• Search Engine Optimization with link building
• Pay per click campaigns with Google ads
• Content creation to attract organic traffic for blog and resources pages
• Social media campaigns on Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter
• Real-time tools on website to interact with prospects: Live chat, chatbot and phone option

Marketing to leads in your sales funnel

Marketing and sales go hand in hand, that’s a fact. But with inbound sales, the marketing team is responsible for generating inbound sales. They should work on providing timely information and visibility in target markets. The amount of energy and time you spend on your marketing strategy will determine the success of your business. Let’s take a look at the sales funnel. We break down the customer journey through these steps:

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Evaluation
4. Commitment
5. Sale

The first thing to do is to educate your prospects at the top of the funnel. This is the discovery process, they’re learning what’s out there and which options are available. Make sure your content is accessible anywhere your audience might go as part of their research and discovery track. This information should be about helping them solve whatever issue or question they have. The main question is: how do you tie this education and guidance to your brand without pushing the customer away?

At this point we integrate a marketing strategy, but be conscious: if there’s too much pressure – too soon, the prospect will walk away. They’re considering your offer among many other competitors, so you need to differentiate yourself. How? By smart marketing strategies that are meaningful to the consumer. The qualities of an effective marketing and sales funnel are for example attention-grabbing content, the audience needs to easily access landing pages and pricing through the provided content, it solves a very specific need, it’s personalized to the target audience, and information about your product or service can be found quickly. Always be looking for ways where you can create the kind of experience that the customer just can’t help but talk about.