What is Inbound Sales?
Inbound sales is a personalized, helpful, modern sales methodology.
Inbound salespeople focus on their prospect’s pain points, act as a trusted consultant, and adapt their sales process to the buyer’s journey.
Today, with information just a click away, buyers are empowered to make a purchase decision. To keep up with the empowered buyer, the sales process need to transform too.
Exactly like inbound marketing, Inbound Sales seeks to educate and engage with prospective buyers and gain their trust – without scaring them with a hard sell or cold calling.
By acting as consultants willing to educate, salespeople will be able to engage with prospective buyers where they already are: seeking out information about their pain points.
Inbound Sales prioritizes the needs, pain points and goals of the buyer.
There are four actions that the Inbound sales team should implement:
Identify, Connect, Explore, and Advise.
While outbound salespeople might use a scattergun approach to interact with prospects, Inbound Sales identifies strangers who are already active in the buyer journey and may have goals or challenges they can solve.
In the connect stage, inbound salespeople engages the leads with valuable conversation to earn their attention and trust.
Inbound salespeople explore their qualified leads’ goals or challenges to assess whether their offering is a good fit for the qualified leads’ context. If it’s a good fit, these qualified leads become opportunities.
Leveraging on the information gathered from the Connect and Explore stage, inbound salespeople will offer advise and solutions that are uniquely positioned to help the buyer. If the buyer agrees to the salesperson’s offering, these opportunities become customers.
In short? Some of Inbound Sales outcomes are:
- Higher sales team efficiency, response and close rates
- Better prospecting, targeting and customer retention
- Clearer sales performance measurabilty and forecasting
- Increase in revenue growth rate
- Sales and Marketing teams work in alignment and accountability
- Sales people are positioned as value-adding advisors