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What do you need to make Inbound Sales work?

3 mins read

Inbound sales are the perfect type of sale because leads know what they want and they know how to get it because you’ve nurtured them into the right place at the right time. That being said, sometimes it can be difficult for marketing and sales to find true alignment during this process. Finding that alignment is key to producing the most efficiency within your sales process.

So how can marketing help increase the amount of qualified inbound sales?

How can your marketing team help inbound sales?

Marketing teams are in a unique and strategic position when it comes to helping their sales team. You don’t want these key players to be siloed - cut off in their respective offices, only sharing information when it involves the price of the macchiatos down the road. Both teams work efficiently when marketing and sales are integrated via the flow of information. 

It seems to be the case that marketing teams have a motto of ‘We’ll set ‘em up, you knock ‘em down’. This isn’t the case as marketing and sales should work in tandem to close those deals.

So what can marketing do to help sales?

Generate those leads!

Sales teams need to hit their goals and if your marketing efforts aren’t up to scratch, those numbers will suffer. It’s so obvious it doesn’t need stating, but I’ll say it anyway: the more good-fit leads you have, the higher the chance of making a sale. 

You can start by working back from your lead-to-customer rate. If you have a sales goal of 20% in your business, it means you have to increase your leads by 20%. You can do this by offering quality content. This could be blogs, premium content such as eBooks or video - anything that gets a prospect to give you their contact information. 

Help identify SQLs

It’s not just about the number of leads but the quality of them too.. You might supply 10,000 leads to your sales team but if only seven of them are going to make a purchase, what was a point in the effort?

Wasted time and wasted resources are the only things that come of that. 

Luckily, modern marketing platforms allow you to track your leads down the pipeline. Or funnel. Or slide. Whatever you want to call it - a CRM (such as HubSpot) helps you to develop criteria which categorise your leads. By assigning certain values to your criteria, you can score your leads which helps your sales team determine who’s most likely to buy and who’s best to target. 

These SQLs or sales qualified leads need to be identified and given to your sales team at the right time. 

Using a dedicated sales hub

Did you know 91% of companies over 10 employees use a CRM, yet 40% of sales reps still use spreadsheets or their inbox to store lead and customer data? This is a truly inefficient way to do business.

Here are some more killer stats:

  • 52% of marketers say they provide salespeople with their best quality leads while salespeople rank marketing-sourced leads last.
  • 66% of the time a salesperson spends doing other things other than talking to prospects.
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“From a management stance, a CRM provides full visibility of your sales pipeline. Everything can be tracked and monitored - all from a sales hub!”

By using a CRM with a dedicated sales hub, we can limit this compartmentalisation between marketing and sales. By tracking your pipeline in a CRM, you’re developing an intricate sales ecosystem you can manipulate and benefit from. 

Top tips from our sales expert

We’ve spoken to our inbound sales expert Caroline to provide you with the top actionable tips you can use to improve your inbound sales.

1. Work on your communication 

A CRM is great for providing visibility across your departments, but Caroline says communication between teams is also paramount when it comes to inbound sales.

"Marketing teams can provide feedback on who’s interacted with their content and sales teams can provide feedback on how successful that content has been. You need sync between the two, not a disconnection."

2. Use your pipeline to provide the right content at the right time

A lot of people don’t realise how useful the pipeline is for tracking leads. Use it effectively to determine where a lead is in their buyer’s journey and what type of content you should provide.

Caroline says this is where the sales team can recommend based on their feedback on what kind of content has been successful.

3. Search for similarities in the strategies

Marketing and sales may have different goals but according to Caroline, if those goals are broken down into their subsequent parts, you may find a lot of similarities. If the marketing and sales teams are made aware of these, collaboration across the two departments is positively affected.

They begin to work in tandem with each other in mind.

4. Segment your leads properly

Inbound leads are all different but over time, you’ll start to notice similarities. These could be in demographics, interests, the time it takes to make a purchase and so on. So, a tip that Caroline sticks to is if we have a lead, we need to determine what kind of lead they are and where they are in their buyer’s journey.

"By segmenting your leads, you can send them the right content at the right time. This is an example of using your pipeline effectively," she says.

These aren’t the only tips we’re offering. If you’re looking to enhance sales enablement within your marketing strategies, download our helpful guide.

Close more deals with our Sales Enablement eBook

Our guide will give you a thorough understanding of sales enablement, improve your knowledge on the best practices and even give you hints for finding the right sales enabler for your company.

We’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to use sales enablement properly. So if you want to identify SQLs and stay ahead of the competition, click the link below.