In your mind, you know the feeling when you and a prospect are on the same page and your solution is the obvious choice. You’ve helped the buyer improve their life. Conversely, you know the feeling when the buyer turns adversarial. When everything you say is disputed. Inbound Sales creates aligned sales and eliminates time wasted with bad leads.
Its unfortunate that the practice of sales has an over-bearing, pushy and selfish reputation that it does. Unfortunately, many sales people and their organizations perpetuate this stereotype with sales techniques which don’t include the buyer’s needs. In a consumer sales environment, the best example of buyers voicing their displeasure about the sales environment is Amazon. In a Business-to-business context, my best example of this is a phrase that became a joke within one of my previous companies; “I don’t know what I sold them and they don’t know what they bought, but we’re doing business together.” That is not how I sell. The worst part about selling the ‘easy’ way is that no value has been established, meaning the product or service is commoditized. When cost is challenged at the contract stage, there is little option available except to lower your price. If this sounds familiar, keep reading because there is a better way.
The Inbound Sales Methodology is based on understanding the Buyer’s Journey [Want to increase sales? Understand your Buyer’s Journey]. As the Buyer’s Journey identifies and dissects the three stages of buying: Buyer’s Awareness, Buyer’s Consideration, Buyer’s Decision; the Inbound Sales Methodology supports this Buyer’s Journey with its own stages: Identify, Connect, Explore and Advise.
With the support of an institutional sales process, a sales person practicing the Inbound Sales Methodology will find ways for buyers already in the purchase process, Active Buyers, to identify themselves during the Identify Stage. Common practices include new digital techniques such as using social media and building a unified website for lead generation as well as old fashioned relationship and list management. The key here is to identify prospects who are active. Identifying potential buyers who are not yet ready to buy is the job of the marketing and advertising department, not the sales staff. In this way, all leads are warm, sales people are not wasting their time and marketing has new measurable responsibilities.
The connect phase of the Inbound Sales Methodology begins with the understanding that a prospect has been pre-qualified. Pre-qualified by their own self-selection. The legacy sales method would have the sales people spent their time qualifying a buyer by asking questions such as “how much is your budget,” at a time when these are the last questions a buyer wants to be asked. Instead, the connect phase of the Inbound Sales Methodology is about understanding the buyer’s motives, challenges and goals. Asking relevant questions and listening is how people connect.
If you are a good sales person, nothing I’ve said is new or different from what you do today. What is new are the automated tools which you can use to save time and better prioritize your efforts. In a successful digital environment, the self-selection of active buyers and discovery of these buyer’s challenges and goals are often automated.
These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads. And to you they're gold, and you don't get them.
Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They're for closers.- Glengarry Glen Ross
Inbound sales people transition to exploratory mode when a buyer expresses interest. Like a friend, the salesperson will explore if they can be of help. Always gathering context for a personalize presentation designed to help the prospect conclude that the seller is the best solution.
Finally, the Advise phase is dominated by personalizing your business offering to the buyers wants and priorities. Your value is translated and the buyer, being an active buyer, is ready to purchase. For many companies, the Explore and Advise phases can also be supported with online sales automation. Not expensive ‘I need to get an IT involved’ kinds of automation but with simple changes to the online environment. My favorite example is when a restaurant hides their phone number and address on the “contact us” page. A quick change is to put the phone number and address on every page and make them active for mobile users. This kind of little change is often a catalyst for increasing sales.
Want to increase sales? The Inbound Sales Methodology helps automate the sales process and prioritize active buyers.
Written by Scott Madlener
Chicago - New York - Zurich