Inbound Sales Influence

Do you want to learn how to get qualified leads flowing into your business on a consistent basis? Wishing your sales team was setting new appointments on a regular basis? Do you want that sales team to have more productive time at appointments while feeling more relaxed & respected? Follow along we are giving you some no BS advice on how to become the authority in your niche.

If you want to know the secret of the lead generation process just think of the whole sales journey from a zoomed out perspective you can visualize the entire process from beginning to end. Inbound marketing focuses efforts on the beginning of the sales process. Inbound marketing is synonymous with inbound lead generation has a form of information marketing. At the beginning of the sales process your potential customers are trying to solve a problem and they don’t know what the right solution is – yet.

What is Inbound Marketing?

The top of the sales funnel is very broad as in the beginning before making any decision your buyers are finding information to make sure they make the right choice. When you put yourself in the minds of your buyers you can begin to develop a sense of what they are doing (or searching on Google) as it relates to deciding to buy your product or service.

Inbound marketing is being in front of people when they are researching to buy, or are ready to buy. It is also considered becoming the authority of a subject which builds trust with an audience or potential customer.

Why does inbound marketing matter?

If you don’t want a steady flow of new leads to your business without doing much of anything then keep wasting your money. Inbound sales are as good as gold so long as your sales team can close the deals. For large purchases some buyers may be holding off for whatever reason and are not ready to buy but need to look at the information. That’s what we call a warm lead, if you can catch them before they leave and re-market to them you will have a much better chance selling them soon.

• Makes closing new sales easy.
• Builds trust with buyers & audience.
• Sets you as the perceived authority.
• Allows you to build a list of warm leads for nurturing.

Inbound Strategy Concept

Once you place yourself into the persona of your customers it is easy to develop a list of actions and questions that you can develop helpful information content to cater to. Think about your last sales call, that lead had a lot of questions that they called you to answer…

• How are they going to find you?
• What problem are they trying to solve?
• What benefits do they receive?
• How are you different / easier / better?
• What are the frequent questions asked by them?
• What are common objections your sales people face?

Your buyers have questions, and you need to answer them, because it leads to new sales.

But hey, don’t just take our word for it, Here is what Victor Antonio has to say about inbound marketing (video)

 There are so many benefits to creating content related to the questions, concerns, and objections you face during the sales process. These days everyone will research something online before making a purchase, you know you do it. We look at everything from reviews, functions, features, comparisons, and more to justify our decision to make a purchase. We want what is best, and there’s nothing wrong with that!

The best place to put your content is at the top of your sales funnel

We need to dive deeper into why people buy to develop a secret marketing sauce. If you have been in business and have a respectable amount of sales under your belt, you know what these reasons are. If you have never thought of it this way just stop and think, why DO my customers buy  ___xyz? 

Reasons for creating content that is at the top (or broad) point of the sales funnel are numerous and provide the sales team with inherent benefits:

• Provides answers to commonly asked questions before the appointment.
• Answers to questions and helpful information positions your brand as an authority.
• Being helpful rather than pushing promotions can establish trust.
• Overall can help filter & qualify your leads, weeding out those less than serious.
• Puts you at the beginning of the discovery all the way to the conversion.

For example: Create a FAQs section on your company website that addresses many key points that are asked about doing business with you. If you have a pricing structure and don’t mind sharing your sales prices to the public, create pages on your website that speak to that, it could be a competitive advantage. Overall, make sure to look out for what the competition might be doing while trying to implement some of your own unique marketing ideas.

• Combine your warm leads list with your blog to create an email marketing campaign to keep those leads warm or convert them.

Approaching the sales process in this way allows you to “backward engineer” your buyer’s thought process. Think of the questions that arise that might cause them to search on Google for the answer. You can begin to imagine the different buyers persona that makes up your entire customer base. It means you can figure out exactly who you are selling to, who you are missing out on, and who to focus your marketing efforts on and in what way to do it.

• Attract
  • Show up organically for a given search result
  • Pay for display ads to show up
  • Paid ads on social media + organic reach
• Engage
  • Solve the problem, speak to them, provide value & information
  • Low risk offer and other lead captures
  • Answer common questions & concerns
  • Graphical content campaigns, showing the lifestyle
  • Direct marketing like email campaigns
• Satisfy
  • Show your social proof, reviews & ratings
  • Provide referrals

You need to show up on the very first search a buyer would make. Which means you need to make original content related to the questions your buyers are asking. You need to find their pain points and create content that addresses their concerns. You also need to make content that shows your products or services in action or when completed. You ALSO need to tell a compelling business story that conveys your differences & advantages.

Think about it as being the educator to your target audience.

So, how are YOU going to do all of these things?? Create a strategy by gathering the information. As mentioned above, just think of your last sales meeting from the point of pre-qualifying to the delivery of your proposal.

• How did the lead find you? (Capitalize on that, it’s working)
• Was the lead qualified to schedule the sales meeting? (Collect pre qualifying questions)
• What questions were asked during the sales call? (Write them all down)
• What concerns and objections mentioned during the meeting / call? (Write them all down)
• How long did it take to deliver the quote / product or service? (Collect information about your fulfillment process)

The items above are the foundation to creating a successful inbound marketing strategy. Now you need to understand how this basic information can be turned into inbound sales techniques. Understand this concept: combining feedback from customers AND sales teams to transform into detailed informative pieces of content that can be marketed across all of the platforms & channels that your buyers spend their time produces game changing results.

Develop an Inbound Strategy

 

There are essential online tools that you must know how to use in combination with your gathered information. There are 2 realms of marketing space online & offline. Since 92% of research is done online you need to be digital. However, combining both offline & online marketing strategies can be a 10x factor for most businesses. You can start with either but generally speaking the best ROI is online marketing, especially organic search rankings.

Your website must be the source of content & conversions

Use your blog! Not only can static service, products and other pages rank but blog posts will also rank in search results. This article is not about website page optimization but with a well designed site you have a great start. You need to use the power of your website blog for many reasons! Using the information that you gathered consider some of the following action items to develop a strategy:

1. Take care of home-base first, your website design.
   Design needs to be clean and easy to navigate with clear calls to action in smart places. Your website must load fast and get to the point. Get your blog ready, or if you have one get it organized & optimized. Interlink pages within your site to be more helpful.
2. Create new blog & portfolio posts
   Digital assets are blog posts using the questions that were gathered create a detailed blog post of at least 600 words and include images to answer the question in as much detail as possible without trying to pitch the sale until the end. Make sure to link to relevant pages within your site if naturally mentioned in the content of the post. Keep this up as new questions arise to stay relevant. Be sure to share these posts on all of your social channels.
3. Create Low Risk Offers & Downloads
   These are like PDFs and online brochures, special access videos and things like that you may be able to create and upload to your website to offer as a download in exchange for an email and zip code. This must be something that you can give away at an extremely low cost and use as marketing tool at the same time.
   1. Pricing Downloads
   2. Exclusive Offers
   3. Sales Coupons
   4. Special Access Items
4. Create a lead follow-up system
   By using the low risk offers in the right way you will get email submissions that you can plug into an email marketing campaign to keep them warm until they are ready to buy. One way to accomplish this is to use the posts you have made (or should be making) on your blog. Remember to be the educator, and not to pressure or push for sales.

So what are you waiting for? Get to work or contact us NOW!

WE WILL HELP YOU IMPLEMENT THESE CUSTOM STRATEGIES

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This should be enough to get you going, and we may update this post into the future. This is by no means the absolute comprehensive guide to inbound lead generation but we hope it has helped to shed some light on how you can get started with inbound sales influencing. We are Nexxus Designs, a digital media & marketing company for the professional business owner.