The following is a guest post by Teicko Huber, the founder of Focus To Grow, a SMarketing consulting and services company that specializes in inbound marketing and salesforce development for companies that sell business to business.
Inbound marketing can have some clear benefits for sales teams to help them improve the volume and quality of sales. Here are 10 ways to use inbound marketing methods to support your sales team.
1. Build a Landing Page for Each Sales Person and Let Them Make it Their Own - Building a landing page for each sales person allows them to build a page that is authentic and allows them to feel like they are a part of the marketing process. When they send out emails they can have a URL or bit.ly that points right to their own landing page. This will encourage sales people to help engage the sales team. If you really want to have fun, use visiblegains.com and create video apps and put a name with a face as part of the prospecting process, sales process or follow up process.
2. Eyes and Ears for Sales - Participating in social media monitoring will allow the marketing department to pass on leads to salespeople earlier in the sales process, empowering them to shape the sales process and have access to an earlier opportunity alert tool.
3. Decrease Salesforce Costs - If you believe in Jim Collins’ “Hedge Hog Principle,” sales people have a highest and best use. A sales person's highest and best use is not prospecting, which is a very expensive way of moving a prospective buyer from awareness to a point of decision. A sales person’s highest and best use is moving a qualified lead from a point decision to a point of action, as rapidly as possible. In turn, it is exponentially less expensive to leverage inbound marketing to pull a prospect into the sales funnel rather than use a sales person to manage the process.
4. Interface to Collaborate with Marketing - Traditional forms of marketing don’t provide many opportunities for the sales team to engage in the development and execution of lead generating marketing ideas. However, the inbound marketing method and technology allow them to directly participate and build a stronger individual brand. Blogging, responding to questions posted in social media, tracking leads in a lead tracker.
5. Assets to Support Direct Selling - All of the assets blog posts, white papers, presentations, prezi.com, etc. developed to support online lead conversion can also be used to help sales people add value and convert leads during the direct sales process. Furthermore, assets developed to be effective in converting leads from a website are typically more effective than traditional marketing brochures, because they are designed to be remarkable and add value (pull people in); These assets drive action vs. shouting at people about how great a company’s products or services are.
6. Enables a Cultural Shift From Push vs. Pull Selling - Most organizations that rely on direct selling have failed to realize buyers’ behaviors have fundamentally shifted. This cultural shift requires companies to think about how to add value and empower prospective customers to choose them. Additionally, inbound marketing puts a customer at the heart of all decision-making and positions a company to better retain their existing customers.
7. Fills the Lead Generation Gap for Outside Sales People - Most sales people and owners that sell, struggle to reach their sales goals because they are unable to convert enough prospects to leads and leads to customers. Inbound marketing can help sales people reach goals by allowing them to spend more time with qualified leads.
8. Closed Loop Customer Acquisition from Click to Close Drives Out Sales Overhead - Historically, sales and marketing operated in two distinct silos, making it difficult to optimize a customer acquisition strategy. Inbound marketing software like Hubspot allows a sales organization to streamline the costs of customer acquisition, because sales and marketing are able to work collaboratively to an end that is mutually beneficial.
9. KPIs Resonate with the Sales Team and They Engage - When it comes to measuring success, traditional outbound marketing methods typically measure what a marketing department does (i.e. build brand awareness), not the results they’re out to get. Inbound marketing methods are measured on visitors to leads and leads to customers, which are terms that resonate with the sales team.
10. Creates a Culture Centered On the Success of the Customer - The entire organization from top to bottom operates under the same banner of adding value to the customer relationship and a shared commitment to the customer.
NOTE: It is fine to have internal KPIs and sales goals, but the success of the customer needs to be the foundation of an effective sales and marketing business model.
What other suggestions do you have?
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