The fact of the matter is that customers start their buyer’s journey online seeking one thing – information. If the information you have accessible is relevant and of interest, they are much more likely to engage a sales rep at your company.
Therefore, converting inbound leads starts first and foremost with a solid inbound marketing strategy. The questions customers are seeking answers to change with every website visit. Strategy should be designed around what questions leads are asking each time they visit (first, second, third visit, etc.), creating paths within your website and social platforms that draw leads back to you.
It’s proven that effective inbound strategies will generate more lead flow than any amount of outbound marketing. Customers want a company they can trust and believe in. Once you have customers engaging with you online and moving down the sales funnel, next is closing the deal.
How can your sales team engage with today’s buyer?
5 Tips to Converting Inbound Leads to Sales
1. Align your inbound sales and marketing strategies
Successful revenue generation begins with a successful sales and marketing strategy. Align sales and marketing so goals are easy to measure, objectives are clear and collaboration is not only encouraged, but also expected.
Have you considered creating service level agreements that outline shared objectives and goals?
This can set the tone for the expectation of collaboration. Companies with aligned sales and marketing departments see five times the results of those whose marketing and sales departments work in silos (whether intentionally or unintentionally).
The sales funnel should include marketing; it should not be a separate thought process. Marketing qualified (MQL) and sales qualified leads (SQL) should be defined in your service level agreement. At what point do you consider a lead ready to engage with a sales rep? Lead qualification in itself can create a multi-dimensional conversation.
Lead qualification is based on two core pieces of information: 1) Are they a good match for you? 2) How interested are they?
Sales should also spend some time with marketing to understand what information is gated and ungated on your website. If information is gated (meaning customers give you information like a phone number or email in exchange for your online content), sales can reference this in a conversation with a customer. If information is ungated, sales needs to know the customer didn’t “formally” give his or her information and it may feel a bit creepy if you tell them you know where they have been on your website.
2. Let the buyer’s journey customize your sales process
Let’s take a look at how an inbound lead affects various stages of the sales process from the customer’s point of view:
- Discovery: Keep in mind that if I have already been on your website, I already know some things about you and you do not need to repeat that info to me.
- Follow Up: Quick and efficient follow-up will give you a higher likelihood of 1) Reaching me before I am overwhelmed with phone calls 2) Having a lasting first impression before I am overwhelmed with information from competitors 3) Feeling overall disinterested simply because I am overwhelmed with information and calls.
- Presentation: Anticipating what I may need from you is a great way to build rapport with me. Don’t regurgitate what I already know.
- Closing: I expect you to be the expert. Once you have established rapport and trust with me, advise me with logical potential next steps in the decision-making process and explain the why.
Include standard operating procedures for sales reps that receive inbound sales leads in your service level agreements. What time frame are you expecting a sale qualified marketing generated lead to be followed up with? How many attempts and within what time frame are follow-up calls expected? All of these items are things that need to be mutually agreed upon between your sales and marketing departments.
Goals for both the sales and marketing departments should include milestones that allow you to measure progress quarterly and annually.
3. Assess your current sales talent and structure
Assessing sales talent is a touchy subject. However, what many organizations find is that the skills of a successful traditional salesperson can vary significantly from that of an inbound sales professional.
Skills inbound sales professionals possess include being tech-savvy, data-driven, and highly personable. They have exceptional listening skills and can connect with prospects in a meaningful way — a way that anticipates needs, asks the right questions, and has the right kind of resourceful information at their fingertips. They act quickly, and through effective use of technology, can manage higher lead volume than a traditional sales rep is used to.
Also keep this in mind: time is of the essence. It is statistically proven that you have a higher likelihood of converting an inquiry to a sale if he or she is addressed in less than five minutes. This may mean re-distributing the division of labor within the sales office or even committing one sales rep just to inbound sales, depending on your volume of qualified traffic.
4. Create a technology roadmap for inbound sales
A technology roadmap includes how to create a closed-loop sales and marketing technology system (where your CRM and Marketing Automation Platform are able to communicate with each other). Your roadmap should also include the strategy that will be used to build and manage your pipeline.
Identify which system will drive sales vs. marketing workflow. Both your CRM and MAP typically have email functionality of some sort, but when and how you use it becomes key to avoiding frustration from unrealistic expectations.
Identify other systems that can be integrated. For example, can you integrate your CRM with your billing system? Can you integrate your online directories or referral programs to eliminate duplicative data entry?
Your technology roadmap should include benefits, limitations, and goals related to the software your organization uses for sales and marketing.
5. Create content collaboration and outline sales use
Although marketing has typically been responsible for creating content, your sales team oftentimes holds the key to understanding what customers really want to know.
When it comes to knowledge of pain points, differentiating factors and the kinds of questions prospects are asking at various stages of the sales process, collaboration between sales and marketing is critical in order to identify content needs, and shifts in marketing strategy to drive lead volume.
Once content has been created, how is the new content communicated with sales? Can they repurpose it depending on the buyer’s journey? How can it be used in the sales process?
A process for communicating new content availability should be defined.
Without this critical component, you are likely to accumulate a mass of content that is being leveraged online and not utilized well by your sales department. Remember, the key to converting inbound leads to sales is a consultative sales process. If sales reps aren’t equipped to provide useful, relevant, and helpful information, you are likely to be out-sold.
Need help converting your inbound leads into sales? Contact the experts at Marketing Essentials today!
