Inbound Sales

Inbound sales is a personalized sales methodology that focuses on the needs, challenges, goals and interests of individual buyers. Instead of focusing on closing the sale as soon as possible, inbound salespeople work to understand the prospect’s pain points, act as a trusted consultant, and adapt their sales process to the buyer journey.

Inbound sales methodology is the act of “pulling” interested prospects to you and then qualifying them based on their fit. Basically, you are attracting interested inbound leads by providing incomparable value.

Inbound Sales vs Outbound Sales:

In the outbound sales, you need to reach out to the leads educating them about your product and kind of “pushing” them to buy it who may or may not be interested in your product. As an example, sales reps often use cold calling when trying to reach potential clients. They usually have limited information about leads. Thus they try to promote the solution without a clear understanding if they really need it.

In the inbound sales, on the contrary, potential buyers find your service from a publication, a social media channel, etc. They come to your well-structured website with the purpose of learning how they can benefit from a service your company provides. Inbound sales seek to educate prospective buyers and gain their trust - without scaring them away with a hard sell. By acting as consultants willing to educate, your salespeople will be able to meet prospective buyers where they already are: seeking out information about their pain points.

Develop your Inbound Sales methodology:

• Understand the buyer’s journey: If salespeople cannot add value beyond the information buyers can find on their own, the buyer has no reason to engage with salespeople at all. Inbound sales teams avoid this issue by starting with the Buyer’s Journey. Before they ever pick up a phone or send an email, they make it a priority to understand their buyer’s world.
• Define your Buyer’s Persona: Your buyer personas are fictionalized representations of the types of customers who would benefit the most from your product or service. A buyer persona description should include information like job role, company size, challenges, goals, preferred social channels, level of buying power and more. In order for the inbound methodology to work, both your sales and your marketing teams need to be aligned on personas you’re targeting and the process for targeting them. This alignment ensures the scalability of your team and the success of your outreach efforts.
• Align inbound sales and marketing teams: This is because your inbound sales process will be tightly connected to an inbound marketing process. In fact, its methodology was initially borrowed from the inbound marketing one. Inbound marketing focuses on the individual buyer more rather than a wider group of people. It helps inbound sales greatly with lead generation strategies. In turn, marketing doesn’t generate revenue but sales do.