11 Keys to Successful Inbound Sales

In today's market, the power has shifted from sellers to buyers. Buying and selling powers are shifted from sellers to the buyer. Inbound sales are the basis for any successful sales strategy as the buying & sales process are transformed. Today the entire sales process depends on the inbound leads or targeted outreach. 

Inbound sales apply to all types of businesses, from the largest corporations with complex sale processes and smaller businesses. Today buyers have more power than ever before to make purchases.  Best sales strategies need to be adapted accordingly to push a quick sale on an uninterested customer. This article will learn deeper into the techniques and strategies to succeed in inbound sales. 

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What Are Inbound Sales?

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Inbound sales is a personalized modern sales method focusing on your prospect's pain points. Inbound sales begin with qualifying the leads through inbound marketing strategy utilizing social media, blogging, video marketing, emails, and much more. Once attracted to your potential buyers, the next step is the inbound sales reps will connect with the prospect to understand and learn about their problems and challenges. 

Inbound sales prioritize individual buyers' interests, goals, challenges, and needs. In the inbound sales, the inbound sales agent will work to meet the potential buyers' needs, guide them, and push them towards the decision-making process in the sales cycle. With the inbound selling strategy, your business can close the sales as soon as possible. 

Analyzing the modern buyer behavior of the lead will help your marketing and inbound sales team to perform and effective sales. Inbound sales methodology helps you to understand your customer's buyer journey by analyzing their activity during the awareness stage. It is the most simplest and easiest way to craft a customized approach to sales outreach.

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Inbound vs. Outbound Sales What's The Difference?

Outbound sales techniques are the traditional method of sales that involves trade shows, cold callings, cold emailing, purchased contact lists, and more. In this outreach, the sales team will reach many people who may or may not be interested in your product or service offerings. 

In contrast, inbound sales methodology attracts interested potential prospects, qualifies them, and ensures they are ideal for the product or service offerings. Inbound marketing or inbound methodology is a scalable sales strategy that focuses on attracting interested prospects to your business and building lasting relationships with customers. 

Sales Experts can use outbound techniques for engaging potential buyers who may not yet have shown interest in products or services offered by your company while also increasing awareness of its brand among those affinity groups where it operates successfully.

Inbound marketing is the most effective approach of attracting customers, with incomparable value. Inbound reaches out and engages interested consumers with creative marketing materials that are beneficial for both parties, involving businesses trying to make money off their products or services while providing quality service at no cost. 

Outbound approaches often use the sales funnels, which waste time if potential clients aren't interested in what you offer. Inbound marketing, the sales expert can use social media to connect with potential customers. According to HubSpot, a study says that 76% of the buyers are ready to have a sales conversation with the sellers on social media platforms. LinkedIn is the most effective channel for successful inbound sales among all the social media platforms. The stat shows that nearly 62% of B2B customers respond to salespeople on LinkedIn.

Why Do You Need to Employ Inbound Sales Tactics?

Research shows that half of the sales are closed through the sales professional with follow-ups. So it is more important for a business to have a cold email sequence and the best introduction follow-up email for your sales campaigns. The statistics show that up to half the people will buy from someone who followed up first, and if your business isn't trying to capture their interest early in the inbound sales journey. If your business missed capturing potential prospects early on the buyer journey, there would be more chances of missing thousands of potential leads. 

There are some key stages when it comes to the customer decision-making process. 

The first stage is when they're just researching products and services. This involves exploring options on your website or reading reviews before ultimately making a buying decision.

Your business needs to hook at this point to get people's interest and move the prospects to the next step. In this step, your sales team needs to establish a connection with the prospect and help your potential modern buyer answer any questions related to your product or service offerings.

And the final step is the business need to establish the need to build trust. Take time and build trust in your brand with the potential customers and educate them. Position your business as a trusted source in the decision-making process. 

It is hard to let go of the sale. But through inbound sales strategies make the sales process work. To make sales successful, you need to put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. 

Solution-Oriented Approaches for Inbound Sales 

The inbound sales strategy is all about putting the customer first and foremost. Prioritizing the customer's needs is more important than focusing on the business essentials for inbound sales success. This means the company needs to be helpful without obligation or expectation of return service so that your business can build relationships that will last a long time both now and in the future.

In inbound sales, the aim is to be "Alway helping" instead of "Always be closing". As you build a relationship with your prospects, keep the conversation problem-oriented and help them identify their issue. Once this has been done, it will be easier for both parties to discuss the potential target's pain points. Craft solution-oriented content through your product/services to resolve the problem or challenges of the potential buyers. 

We know that some leads are more interested in one offer over another. We need to ensure that you focus on helping with this specific potential client by first understanding their needs before moving into ant sales action. Your sales and marketing team needs to speak with the inbound leads first to understand their top priority needs and then, based on the potential leads responses, begin your conversation that benefits the current needs.  

Four Stages In the Inbound Sales Process

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Inbound sales are the most effective way to engage with customers and find out if they are a potential fit for your product. In other words, inbound focuses on customer needs while adapting based upon how interested prospects show themselves on their buyer's journey and the sales process as a trusted advisor throughout the sales process. The inbound sales include 4 stages as follows.

Finding the Potential Customers: 

You can make a huge difference in your business by engaging with potential customers instead of strangers. Concentrating on the warm lead will lead to better conversion. You might have their contact details through a contact form and permission to send informational email outreaches, including guides, content downloads, webinars or live chat, and more. Inbound leads are the prospects who drive from the social media post, blogs to your website. Here are the email marketing Hacks for successful inbound sales.

Connect with Prospective leads: 

At this stage, your business needs to be aware of the potential buyer's needs and ensure whether you can help them out or not on their pain points. In this stage, your potential clients are now considering your solutions as part. Help them achieve what they want by advising and improving the situation at hand through your offerings. This stage aims to make the prospects consider your business solution as their goal. 

Explore Deeper: 

At this stage of the sales process, you start talking with your potential clients to determine if they're a good fit for products or services. In other words, At this point, you need to figure out if your products are a good fit for prospect needs and identify your sales opportunity.

Recommend a solution:

The inbound sales methodology is a great way to generate leads because it can be very cost-effective. You don't have to spend the time and money necessary for more advertising. Your business will be targeting and engaging with people who are interested already.  However, this approach does take some initial effort by creating content or building up good quality leads or valuable leads might feel like hard work at first. However, once these tasks become completed, you will successfully utilize the inbound strategy.

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11 Inbound Sales Techniques For Successful Sales 

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1. Do Your Deeper Research

One of the best ways to make your conversation successful. It would be best to prepare for a conversation with your prospect by looking into their past. Who are they? What's so special about them that made them come to your website or through reach out in general, and what convinced this lead and find how your product/service are different from other competitor's offerings. 

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Your sales team can connect with the prospects over a call (inbound sales call) with the prepared question and qualify the leads by reaching the lead. You can prepare engaging content by discovering the prospect's most recent conversion on your website or social media platforms and coming up with great content that interests them and solves the pain points. 

Using Smartwriter, your business can create a personalized sales pitch through Personalised Cold Email Outreach and Personalised LinkedIn Outreach. 

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2. Leverage Your Social Media Platforms 

Nearly 70% of the B2B decision-makers utilize social platforms to make their purchasing decisions. Linkedin is the most utilized platform when it comes to B2B sales. This platform helps the business find new prospects and enables them to learn more about their prospects. 

LinkedIn is an amazing tool for narrowing down your prospects and finding out more information about them. With the key facts you already know, it becomes easier to tailor a conversation to take up as much of their time or attention as necessary.

The social media networks help the sales experts know about the potential customers about their current job, decision-making authority, previous works, achievements, and more. Details of the prospects help the salesperson begin a casual conversation with the person while speaking. It gives you an information advantage for an initial sales conversation.

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3. Build Rapport 

The best way to start a sales conversation is by building rapport with your prospect. You can do this through social media or even just small talk, as it's always worth trying out the "conversation starter" question. We already discussed that social media like Linkedin are a great place to gain some insights on your prospect's background, which will help start a conversation. 

Starting your conversation with something like: "I saw that blog post you shared on LinkedIn the other day about "Topic". It gets them to speak openly, which is important for making any relationship work.  Avoid the sales pitch during the initial conversation. The goal of connecting with the potential customer is to build a good relationship and create trust in the brand. 

When you have established trust with your prospect, remember never to lose it. At each stage of the sales cycle, keep asking questions and providing guidance so that both parties benefit on board before moving towards a deal closure, leading to long-term success & relation with the potential buyers. 

4. Real-Time Sales Triggers

Inbound marketers have a big advantage in sales because they can see how prospects interact with their content. The sales triggers such as form fill out, downloading ebooks, engaging on social media are powerful indications of sales readiness, and they will engage in your business sales conversation. In-depth knowledge of the leads will drive you through an effective prospective campaign. 

Sales reps don't need to wait too long before following up after the sales trigger. Ensure that your sales team has access to important prospect activities in real-time. This way, when you're trying to sell a product or service, and the customer is open-minded about possibilities, this will likely lead them on a path forward the sales closer on the sales cycle.

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5. Carefully Target Your Inbound Leads Using Personalized Contents 

To create content and to message for your initial pitch with the prospects, it’s more important to know your potential customers. Go beyond the demographic data and dig into psychographics (what problems they're facing) as well as their biggest challenge or concern. 

Understand the customer behavior on your website and create a customer outreach. For example, abandoned cart emails, sending special offers, offering the product or service they look for,  sharing newsletters on specific topics, etc.  The key to success in inbound marketing is understanding your customers. That's why we recommend talking directly with any potential clients or consumers who might be contacting you through live chat on websites like Facebook Messenger (or whatever platform they use). Connecting with the people who are interested or active buyers in your business offering will value both sides.

6. Enable Social selling

Invest time on the social media platforms to build your brand and identify additional leads through relevant content publishing, responding to the conversation. Start responding to other people's posts on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter and sharing their own interesting stories about products.

A business needs to invest their time on social media to gain new leads, begin publishing engaging content, respond to relevant conversations on the related communities, and share other high-quality information that would grab and interest targeted buyers. This will help you improve your brand awareness and enable you to find more potential leads. 

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7. Describe Your Buyer Personas 

When creating an accurate buyer persona for your product or service, think about the types of customers who would benefit from it. The buyer's persona indicates what kind of client and who will benefit most from your product or service offerings. The buyer's personal information includes the prospect's company size, job role, challenges, goals, preferred social media networks, level of decision-making or buying power, etc. 

The inbound methodology is a sales and marketing strategy that aligns your team with achieving the scalability necessary for success. This can be done through personas, targeting them effectively with outreach efforts, and engaging those potential customers or clients with guidance from your business.

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8. Segment Your Email Campaigns

Segmenting your sales outreach campaigns will enable the agile sales professional to create highly personalized emails. The Mailchimp study found that the segmenting campaigns are a nearly 14.31% higher open rate when compared with the non-segmenting campaigns. Take time and do research and segment your targeted prospect list. Taking the time to research which lists need what information might seem like a tedious task, but it's worth doing. 

By researching and segmenting your list, you can create emails highly targeted to specific needs. Your business can boost the open rates by sending out segmented messages. Implementing the segmenting campaigns will result in higher ROI. 

9. Always Do Follow Up

Building a relationship with your prospects is the only way to ensure they use and recommend your business. The first step involves building trust, identifying their goals, developing rapport by learning what makes them challenging. Make sure that any offers or recommendations align perfectly to help their current situation. 

If you want to get a response from your prospect, don't just send them random emails. Send targeted ones that are relevant and exciting to your targeted customer. You can do this by following up after those initial contact attempts with the customer or sending personalized messages on their behalf at special times like holidays and more. 

10. Educate Your Potential Prospects or Buyers

The business will have customers with different personas with various needs. In today's sales methodology, there are no approaches that fit all. To be successful in the modern sales environment, businesses and marketers must focus on providing content tailored specifically to each prospect's needs. 

Thesales team needs to focus on educating customers with the content to be successful. Modern sales require strategizing about helping your potential targets and finding solutions. This will allow the client to feel like their needs matter.

11. Open A Two-Way Communication To Understand the Potential Buyer.

People who have better trust and are comfortable with your brands will move towards sales or buying decisions. To make your prospects more comfortable in the same way, you need to take a genuine interest in them, and they'll be more likely to buy from your company.

If you need to build rapport, start by asking simple questions. You can ask them how they reached this point, what they've tried so far, and what they need right now. To foster a deep connection, ask open-ended questions that help the prospects to open up  & enable them to connect personally. 

Common Mistakes Inbound Sales Reps Make On Inbound Sales

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Concentrating on the Poorly Qualified Prospect

If the inbound sales are made correctly, your sales pipeline will be filled with qualified leads or ideal buyer profiles who are of real interest and need over your product or services. 

The sales process will be a complete time and waste of effort. If the sales reps line up, the prospects on the sales funnel without ensuring their interest and challenges, So qualifying and the product fit will help the business fill your sales pipeline with quality leads who are more likely to be converted as customers. 

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Focusing on the Customers Who Don’t Have Decision Making or Purchasing Power

Figuring out your prospect’s decision-making ability is a critical part of the inbound sales process. If you have a chance to spend a few minutes with them, you can find a few things that can give away whether or not they have purchasing authority. 

Don't make the same mistake as other salespeople. Take care to identify your key decision maker early on in the sale. Ensure the affordability of the business while focusing on prospects. Before building rapport, ensure who the key decision-maker is then If you find this early on, the negotiating process will be smoother. 

Don't waste your time and energy on the non-qualified leads. So it is more essential to spend time nurturing a prospect, and educating them on your product will help you convert them. 

A sales manager is nurturing and negotiating with a prospect, and when discussing price, they agree to offer a discount if they sign up. So focusing on the prospects with qualified leads with decision-making capability is more essential. 

Utilize The Outbound Sales in An Inbound 

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The business has the right mix of both inbound and outbound sales processes that grows your business.  It would be best to utilize both inbound and outbound strategies that often show the entire prospecting and following up process with prospects.

Inbound marketing is about attracting people to your content, whereas outbound marketing is about selling to people once they're already interested in your brand. Both forms of marketing should be used together to create an effective strategy for growing your business.

Once you identify the right buyers for your business, it's time to build relationships with them. The best way to do this is to create a nurturing plan. It is a great way to develop long-term relationships with your ideal customers.

To nurture these relationships, you need to value your potential targets. You can do this by providing education, offering personalized recommendations, and helping to solve prospects’ problems. You can also leverage the data you collected earlier to target your efforts at specific segments of your audience. 

The core of inbound sales is about understanding the difference between explicit fit and implicit interest. To do this, you should carry out research, which helps you contextualize your message to fit inbound.  To approach leads with inbound techniques, context is key. Even if you're following up on cold emails with the leads, you can still do some research to identify what they want and contextualize your message to fit the inbound sales framework.

Conclusion 

Today's buying process is transformed, and the inbound sale is the foundation for successful sales. If a business relies on outbound sales techniques, then the marketing and sales team will be working on the people who haven't shown interest in your company. It's a time-consuming and difficult sales model. Inbound sales have become a popular method for generating leads and closing deals with prospects. The inbound approach is all about being proactive, solution-oriented, and making the customer feel empowered by their ability to make decisions themselves. 

Inbound sales are where people come to your website to hunt for a product or service. Inbound sales have become dominant in today's world. If you want to increase your sales, it may be time for inbound marketing tactics. This strategy focuses on attracting customers rather than chasing them down with outbound methods like cold calling or spam email blasts. To do this successfully, you need an understanding of the different stages in the process and why they matter. The 11 techniques we’ve included here will help get you started employing these ideas in your business model.