Sales Directors - How Many Miles Have You or Your Team Driven in 2014 to See Cold Prospects?

It’s the middle of winter, it’s Tuesday morning at 6:30am you have eaten your complementary sausage and eggs and you are just about to leave your low budget hotel for a client meeting first thing. But It’s not just the wind and rain that’s cold this morning, the lead you are about to see is cold and you just have the basic information and you’re expected to make this sale.

Is this a story you are all too familiar with?

What if I told you that this form of sales can be a thing of the past!

There is a solution to this old and tired way of sales and it’s called inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing helps to qualify leads before you even meet them. Rather than speaking to anyone and everyone about your service, your content is created for your target market and the forms on your website ask prospects intelligent questions as they engage with your business. Notifications are then sent to the sales team if the lead meets specific criteria and requires a face to face meeting. This means that less time is spent travelling and staying in hotels to meet un-qualified leads.

Instant and Rich Lead Intelligence

With inbound marketing you can quickly break down your contact database. Inbound marketing allows you to get an instant idea of where in the buying process your leads are. This enables your sales team to then customise and change the sales process to make sure that they meet the client’s needs. Inbound marketing allows you, in real time, to understand which content the best leads tend to engage with and use all of this intelligence to better optimise your sales processes.

It Opens the Door

Inbound marketing allows you and your sales team to know what specific pieces of your content a prospect has read.  The prospect has then opened the door. The sales team now has something to talk about which the prospect specifically has an interest in.

The best sales people understand that building relationships is critical, and by seeing which content a prospect has consumed, you can get a better understanding about what problems they may be having, and take the conversation in a path that helps the prospect. Now you are travelling to meet prospects with a conversation in mind and you already know the prospects pain points.

Content Makes an Excellent Sales Tool

All of the content produced by your inbound marketing strategy makes for a brilliant sales tool. When questions come up during the sales process, you can point leads to specific pieces of content which will help answer their problems.

Content such as:

• Blogs
• E-Books
• Videos
• Webinars
• Infographics

Whether it's referencing a couple of blog posts in an email, or recommending that a prospect reads an E-book, it helps to nurture leads and take them through to a sale. This proves to potential prospects that you are the market leader in your business and the prospect knows that you are the solution to their pain points.

Improved Alignment with Marketing

Inbound marketing enables alignment between sales and marketing teams. Marketing teams can see exactly where leads came from, and how they have engaged with the company and its website before speaking to sales. Likewise, marketing can see which of their leads go on to become sales, and how much each lead they send goes on to be worth. This helps marketing to refine their lead generation strategy, and give sales more qualified leads to go speak to face to face.

Fast Improvements Made Possible

Inbound marketing allows you to analyse what content is being read and downloaded by prospects. Inbound marketing allows you to quickly test different landing pages, messaging and content pieces to discover what your prospects respond to, and what they don't. This allows the sales and marketing teams to quickly test new ideas to ensure that the prospect discovers you as the solution to their pain points and is ready to get in contact.

To find out even more about inbound marketing and how it can increase leads, enquires and sales. Please read this article for more information - Get More Leads, Enquiries & Sales: 5 Core Principles Of Inbound Marketing

CONCLUSION

Inbound marketing is a solution that can increase your leads, enquires and conversions to make you and your sales teams convert more leads into customers. Inbound marketing generates website visits and page views that bring your sales team warm leads which have already been qualified, and in most cases are ready to buy.

Inbound Marketing allows you to have a full picture on the prospect before you even schedule a meeting with them. No more struggling to find out information on a prospect before a meeting. Inbound marketing informs you what content the prospect reads on your website, what landing pages they have visited and what content they have downloaded. Plus the prospect has filled out intelligent forms to acquire this content giving you their contact details.

I’m sure if you and your sales team have all of this information before the client meeting, you would be pretty confident about closing the sale.

Article by Dale Bonser