No one can imagine their world without the internet. Our whole life is dependent upon it, not only do we pay our bills or buy some new products, everything in this world revolves around it.

But this was not exactly the scenario few years back. Just imagine for one second that how it would be possible to buy products without the internet as people used to do in the past. Buyers always need salespeople for making a firm decision. Sales People till now have been the force that can influence decisions.

Why are these salespeople the real players? Because these are the only people who can answer the important questions of buyers. Like what are the offerings of the product? How it can solve our problem? Or how they can compare it with their competitors?

But, there is a new sales method which is emerging and is changing the way buyer-seller relationship used to be. Today, all the information is only one click away from the buyer. The power to buy and sell has been completed diverted from the seller to buyer and this is how the process of buying has changed completely.

So, the new process involves keeping up with the empowered buyers and convert visitor into lead and then converting them into customers. Whether your sales process is relying on targeted outreach or relying on inbound leads, inbound sales is highly relevant in your business. This is completely natural as inbound sales has completely transformed the process of selling and the sales representatives sell in the way in which people buy.

You will come across many people who will talk about sales transformation but, there are only few who teach you. Therefore, we have come up with the article to make you understand about the ways in which the prospects buy. If you want further information, you can visit our inbound marketing course.

We will discuss about difference between inbound sales and traditional sales

6 Ways to Start with Inbound Sales:

  1. Define Your Buyer Journey:

The sales team builds sales process based on their needs and not around their buyers need. Such legacy salespeople concentrate their power over boxes checking that this sales manager took out for them rather than listening to buyer and supporting them with purchase process. So, in this process the buyer and sellers get misaligned. Moreover, such process of self serving offers minimum value towards buyer. However, when a business uses inbound marketing strategy, these buyers don’t need to be closed, demoed and prospected. The basic process of adding the zero value towards buyer because every information they are getting within the meetings is found easily without help of the sales representatives.

Sales people are not able to add value beyond information found by buyers on their own, the buyer doesn’t need to get himself engaged with the salespeople. This is why businesses found the need of inbound sales. In this, businesses first try to understand buyer’s journey. This is like what we have been discussing for inbound marketing. Inbound sales is a subset of inbound marketing.

The three most important frameworks for buyer’s journey includes:

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Decision

In awareness stage, buyers tend to find out the problems they are most likely to experience in achieving their goal. They finally decide that whether they should go for it or not. In the consideration stage, buyers define their goals and challenges clearly along with the commitment to address them. They analyze the methods available to achieve the goals. In the decision stage, buyers focus on the solution. They look for special offerings and decide the best product or service that can suit their needs. You can have more look on buyer’s journey in one of our previous posts.

  1. Develop Sales Process to Support Buyer’s Journey

Once you have completely defined your buyer’s journey, the next stage is to create sales process. We are talking about inbound sales here, in which customer would be coming to us and we won’t be reaching them cold calling. This process is going to support buyers with help of analyzing the buying journey and thus, salespeople and buyer will be completely aligned with this selling and buying process.

To develop the inbound sales process, define the roles of salespeople at the awareness, decision and consideration stage for supporting the buyer. Here are the four basic frameworks for the process of sales or to grow sales using inbound sales methodology:

  • Identify
  • Connect
  • Explore
  • Advice
We will discuss about various stages of inbound sales process and how it can help in generating maximum results

Stages of Inbound Sales Process

The first part is to identify the users that might be interested. You have to bring them inbound. and convert these customers into leads. You can use various mediums like social media, press releases, blogs to bring them inbound and get their details using various methods. You can have a look at how to convert visitors into leads which is one of our previous posts. Then the next step is to connect with such leads, look at what they are seeking and by generating their interest in product or service, convert them into qualified lead.

The next stage is where you explore the qualified leads by interacting, doing research, seeking information from them and providing information about your product, how it is different, how will it solve a problem and convert them into opportunity. Last stage is to close, this opportunity. By now, the customer is really interested into your product or service and you need to offer him the best product or service available and convert this opportunity.

Though, I personally don’t believe in the complete theory as there are flaws. There are times, when buying is an impulse behavior or an influential decision which might have been created by perception around you etc. But, it is considered a basic and can help you know how things should flow in the organization.

  1. Define your identification process:

After, the brief let’s look at how identification stage is. Identification process helps convert visitors into leads. We know that people handling inbound sales need to bring them in and convert them into leads. With the help of data, you can identify the type of persona and can check its suitability. We will now discuss how can we identify them.

  • Inbound Leads:

If the visitor on your website leaves his contact information along with other details then look for it, if it is matching your ideal buyer requirements.

  • Inbound Companies:

It includes the unknown visitors to the website which match your ideal buyer profile. In such case, you have no personal contact information for the buyer but all you have is the company name. Inbound Sales team can then visit company website, to identify if it would be a fit.

  • Trigger Events:

Look for trigger events to find out that whether the buyer is active or not. It can be something like social media mentioning about your company or your competitor by the buyers. Make sure that you follow hashtag or keywords and have good presence on social media. Also, try to keep track of every feedback given by customers. There are various sites like Trust Pilot, Glassdoor etc. where reviews can be posted keep a track of them as well.

  • Social Selling:

Social selling has emerged as new sales method and therefore, it is wise to invest few hours in a week on social media to publish content and respond to conversation.

  1. Connect Stage

In connect stage, sales team tries to approach the lead through emails and maybe calling them as well to discuss the proposition. Though I don’t think calling can generate a great ROI for many of the low margin businesses, but great emails and messages can generate a good traction. Reason is customer can respond on his own convenience and they are able to take a better decision as they can analyze it.

Convey a clear message and information to the lead. Try to generate his interest, know more about his expectations, problem he is facing and tell him about your offerings, how he will be benefited out of it, comparison with competitors etc. Getting him aligned with your buyers persona will label him as a qualified lead.

  1. Explore Stage

In explore stage of inbound sales, the salesperson’s transforms into presentation mode after finding out buyer’s interest. But, the outbound salespeople usually don’t understand their customers and fail to provide effective and value-added presentation.

However, inbound salespeople transform themselves into exploratory mode when the buyer shows interest. They easily recognize that they have no trust level or understanding with buyer for the delivery of personalized presentation.

Rather, inbound salesperson’s influence the initial interest of the buyer in order to develop further trust with help of explore conversation. These sales people use their credibility to go deep into the conversation to find out buyer’s challenges and goals. With help of strategic questioning and value positioning in exploratory stage, these people guide the buyers to draw conclusion about the product as whether it is meeting their need or not.

  1. Advice Stage

In this stage, the legacy salespeople try to deliver a similar presentation and some similar case studies to every buyer. They may also do research about needs of the buyer in context of their own interest. After that, they deliver a pitch or provide information that would match the requirements of opportunity created.

There is a difference in the way how inbound sales and outbound sales person would act in such a situation. Inbound sales people would have lots of data, information about customer his needs, prior data explaining what other people of same persona do etc. But, outbound sales people react on their instinct, have no way of telling whether user would be interested or not, are they targeting the right audience or not etc.

Within today’s tough selling environment, it is necessary for the salespeople to realize that they have a completely different function as compared to their predecessors. If you want further information, you can visit our inbound marketing course.  We use similar tactics to help our clients and provide them with digital marketing service in India.