To understand Inbound Sales, we need to start with buyers and how their behaviors have changed over the years.
Imagine what it was like to buy a product before the Internet existed. Back then, buyers really needed salespeople in order to make a decision. Salespeople held all the cards. They had answers to the key questions in the buyer’s mind. Questions like: What is included in your offering? What does it cost? How does it compare
to other competitors? Who else is using your offering? And do they like it? Were all common place questions buyers asked sales people.
The Internet changed everything, including the buyer/seller relationship, and it's time to catch up.
Now, the information buyers are looking for to make an informed purchase decision is just a click away. The power in the buying and selling process has shifted from the seller to the buyer, and the buying process was transformed.
But many companies never changed their selling process to match today’s empowered buyer. This is where the practice of Inbound Sales comes in.
What is Inbound Sales?
Inbound Sales transforms the sales process to match the way people buy.
Whether we are talking about an Inbound lead, or a targeted outreach campaign, big company or small, complex sale or simple - the same Inbound Sales principles apply.
As we see Inbound Sales change to match today’s empowered buyer, we begin to understand the two philosophies that drive Inbound selling.
1. Inbound Sales teams base their entire sales strategy on the buyer rather than the seller.
2. Inbound salespeople personalize the entire sales experience to the buyer’s context.
By incorporating these two philosophies into your company’s sales process, you’re well on your way toward transforming to an Inbound selling model. Inbound Sales can provide a competitive advantage for your company, and create a buying experience your buyers will love.
In short, Inbound Sales is all about offering your buyers the solutions they want. By utilizing valuable content, engaging with prospects, and crafting a personalised strategy, Inbound salespeople are able to offer prospective buyers exactly what they need, when they need it. Compare that to the old way of selling, and you’ve got something seriously exciting on your hands - It's transformational.
The Inbound Sales Process
You might have a current sales process in place that you’ve been using for years, and it might be the wrong sales process for the way your buyers want to work with your company.
In fact, a lot of businesses don’t even have a sales process at all, or worse, they have salespeople who all do something different - they do it their way.
Inbound Sales gives you the methodology to create a sales process and we highly recommend it.
This allows you set up series of Inbound Sales steps that walk your prospects through a series of educational informational opportunities, this also starts the process of you helping to get to know your prospects better and helping them get to know you, like you and trust you faster. The better you are at getting your prospects to know, like and trust you, the sooner they’ll feel comfortable picking your company, when it comes down to decision time.
Be The Safe Choice, And Understand Buyer Pain
One of the most important things to remember is that buyers need to feel safe. They have to know, like and trust you enough to feel like you’re the safe choice. Next, they have to have acute pain. So, if you are the safe choice but they don’t have acute pain, they’re not ready to move forward.
They might have acute pain but not be ready to pick you as the safe. This means you have more work to do on building buyer trust with more education, sales references, case studies, story telling, testimonials, and a relationship.
An important part of your process will be the need to design your Inbound process to uncover pain and evaluate how acute their pain is. Then, work your sales process to make your buyers feel safe, educating and guiding them until they’re ready to buy from you.
"The first improvement we typically see after implementing an Inbound Sales process is increased close rates. That makes sense, right? If your prospects feel safer during the process they should close and say yes at a much higher frequency."
The next improvement we see, is that your sales cycles get shorter. This might seem like a longer and more complex process, but it actually gets prospects to feel better about your business faster and in a more strategic way. Both of these improvements can make a significant impact on your top-line revenue.
THE BRIT AGENCY is a B2B Inbound Marketing Agency providing Inbound Marketing, Inbound Website Design and Inbound Sales services to companies around the world. We're focused on growing website traffic, qualified leads and sales, using the Inbound lead generation and marketing automation process.
THE BRIT AGENCY is a Certified Platinum Tier Hubspot Partner, a HubSpot CMS and GDD certified Inbound Website Design Agency, a Shopify eCommerce Partner, and a certified "Google Badged Agency Partner". We have offices in Toronto and Barrie, Canada ... and Salisbury, UK.
