Time To Rethink Sales

In today's interconnected world, buyers have easy access to the information they need to make purchasing decisions. This has shifted the power from the seller to the buyer, transforming the buying process. As a result, the modern buyer no longer relies on salespeople for decision-making information.

Recognizing the needs of the empowered buyer, inbound sales understands that the sales process and experience must be tailored to the buyer's context. Whether your sales process relies on inbound leads or targeted outreach, whether you're a big company or small, inbound sales is relevant. It aligns selling with the way people buy, allowing sales reps to effectively serve the buyer.

So, what exactly is inbound sales? It is a personalized, helpful, and modern sales methodology. Inbound salespeople focus on understanding their prospect's pain points, acting as trusted consultants, and adapting their sales process to match the buyer's journey.

To implement inbound sales successfully, it is crucial to understand the buyer's persona and their journey. This involves tailoring the sales process around the stages of the buyer's journey - Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Inbound sales teams must follow a four-step framework - Identify, Connect, Explore, and Advise - to support qualified leads in becoming opportunities and eventually customers.

Legacy sales teams often build their sales process around their own needs rather than the buyer's. This can result in misalignment between the seller and buyer, with minimal value delivered to the buyer. Inbound sales teams avoid this issue by starting with the Buyer's Journey and prioritizing understanding the buyer's world.

The Buyer's Journey consists of three stages - Awareness, Consideration, and Decision - where buyers identify challenges or goals, evaluate solutions, and make a final decision. Once the buying journey is defined, the sales process can be built to support the buyer through their purchasing journey, ensuring alignment between salespeople and buyers.

Inbound salespeople follow a four-part framework - Identify, Connect, Explore, and Advise - to guide their interactions with leads and prospects. They identify strangers who may have goals or challenges, connect with them to help prioritize their needs, explore their goals or challenges to assess fit, and advise them on how their offering uniquely addresses their context.

By focusing on the buyer's journey and implementing the inbound sales methodology, sales teams can effectively serve the needs of today's empowered buyers, providing value and ultimately driving successful sales.

During the Connect stage, legacy salespeople primarily rely on cold emails and voicemails, using the same generic elevator pitch and offering discounts to entice buyers. However, inbound salespeople take a different approach by personalizing their message to the buyer's specific context. This could include their industry, role, interests, or common connections. Inbound salespeople understand that modern buyers are not interested in a presentation at this stage of their journey. Instead, they want to engage in a two-way conversation with an expert who can help them understand and address their goals and challenges. In their initial outreach, inbound salespeople offer something aligned with the buyer's current stage in the buying journey, such as a free consultation or ebook related to their area of interest. To effectively execute this Connect process, inbound salespeople define their personas, segmenting their target market by company type and pinpointing the different types of people they are targeting within those companies. This allows them to tailor their outreach strategy and content to each persona, ensuring a more personalized and effective approach.In example below, the firm has six personas:

Persona A: VP of Sales at a technology company Persona B: Director of Recruiting at a technology company Persona C: CEO of a technology company Persona D: VP of Sales at a healthcare company Persona E: Director of Recruiting at a healthcare company Persona F: CEO at a healthcare company Once personas are designed, inbound salespeople outline their outreach strategy, or sequences, for each. The persona sequence defines how you will reach out to the buyer (phone, email, social, etc.), when you will reach out, and how often you will reach out.

Finally, inbound salespeople develop the outreach content for each attempt in the sequence. It is critical to personalize the outreach to the buyer’s context uncovered during the Identify stage.

Explore Possibilities Explore Guide an exploratory conversation so that you’re in control, but your prospect feels like they’re being empowered to make the right decisions. Unlike traditional qualification frameworks like BANT, this new exploratory framework is something you’ll openly share with your prospects.

Focus on the prospect’s challenges first. People generally don’t make changes unless they have a challenge that impedes their progress. Use the small yet powerful wording adjustment of “challenges” instead of saying “problems.”

Connect goals with those challenges. Talk about the prospect’s goals. Listen for an acknowledgment that they don’t have a good solution and are afraid they won’t achieve their goals.

Share plans that fit the prospect’s timeline. Introduce how your product can help with the buyer’s goals and challenges. Ideally, your strategy is uniquely positioned to help in a way the competition cannot.

Discuss budget. The final thing to understand is how the prospect will fund any investment they must make to implement their new plan. Consider all costs involved including financial, time, and human resource investments.

During the Explore stage, legacy salespeople transition into presentation mode the moment a buyer expresses interest. But legacy salespeople do not understand the buyer’s context well enough yet to deliver a value-adding presentation. Because the buyer context is underdeveloped, legacy salespeople revert to generic presentations, outlining information buyers already have access to.

Inbound salespeople transition into an exploratory mode when a buyer expresses interest. Inbound salespeople recognize they do not have the level of trust and understanding with the buyer to deliver a personalized presentation. In fact, inbound salespeople are not even sure whether they can help the buyer at this stage.

Instead, inbound salespeople leverage initial buyer interest to develop additional trust and uncover buyer goals through an exploratory conversation. They use their own credibility to probe deeper into the buyer’s specific goals and challenges. As experts, they can assess whether they can help the buyer efficiently and more thoroughly than prospects can on their own. Through proper value positioning and a strategic questioning process during the Explore stage, inbound salespeople guide prospects to draw their own conclusions about whether a product is right for their needs.

Inbound salespeople build an exploratory guide to ensure the discussion is effective for the buyer.

Here’s a sample exploratory guide conversations with buyers, along with what these steps sound like in a real sales conversation:

STEP

SAMPLE QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS

Build Rapport

So, how well do you know [Common Connection]? That article you wrote the other day was great. How did it perform? Did you go to the local chamber event the other night? Recap Prior Conversation

As we discussed on our initial call, you aren’t happy with your current website. You and your partners feel that it does not accurately reflect the scope, quality, and impact that your work has. It’s also just not attracting top-notch new hires. You’re losing candidates because smaller, nimbler, and more web-savvy firms are being found online instead of you. Their marketing is working. But yours is not. You are interviewing firms like ours to figure out how you can fix these problems and turn your website and blog into recruiting magnets. Does that recap sound right? Would you like to add anything?

Set Agenda

Typically, I’d like to make the goal of this call to figure out how I can best help you. I’ve worked with hundreds of mid-sized professional services firms like yours who were losing to more digitally-savvy firms. I can certainly share some advice based on my previous work with them. But I find that everyone is a bit different, so it usually makes sense for me to get more context around your goals, other challenges you’ve faced or anticipate facing, any relevant plans you have in place, as well as timelines and other constraints you might have. Are you comfortable having that conversation today?

Challenges

Oftentimes, when I’m speaking with partners at health care firms such as yourself, they have one or more of a handful of challenges. Most have dabbled with internet marketing over the years, but have never really found success. They’re tired of spending money on the next shiny object and redoing their website every two years without any kind of measurable ROI. Most of the time they’re blogging, but not really getting much benefit from it. And sometimes, they have a web company that’s doing some social media, SEO and pay-per-click advertising for them, but they feel like it’s a wasted expenditure, as nothing really ever seems to improve. Have you ever faced any of these issues?

Goals

Let’s step back a bit. Now that we’ve discussed the challenges of marketing the business to job applicants, does it make sense to talk about your recruiting goals? Often, we can work backward from your goals to figure out the right plan.

As a partner in the firm, do you have specific hiring goals you are responsible for achieving? Have you calculated exactly how many candidates you need to interview in order to make one good hire? Have you calculated the number of applicants you need to generate in a year to reach those goals? Are there other goals you’re hoping to accomplish with your hiring efforts? Plans

What are you doing now regularly that helps you hire new salespeople? What’s working well? What have you tried in the past that hasn’t worked? What are you thinking of doing next? What are you doing to get more traffic to your careers page? Can more people in your firm contribute to the blog? Can you do it more frequently? Are there subject matter experts who could contribute if someone interviewed them and then wrote posts for them? Have you considered outsourcing some of the writing to external SMEs? Do you create content that is optimized to rank in search engines? How do you monitor and improve rankings? How does your firm manage social media? Have you thought about doing online advertising with Google or LinkedIn? What are you doing to convert more of your traffic to leads? You had to complete a form to download an ebook of ours. Have you considered creating an ebook and using it to capture leads on your site? Could you do a webinar or a seminar? Offer a free consultation? What are you doing to convert leads into applicants? Are you doing an email newsletter now? Do you nurture leads at all based on the content they’re reading on your site? Do you have a recruiter dedicated to calling leads? Do you have multiple approaches to connecting with them? Does every partner and associate schedule time, then make calls on a regular basis? What does your hiring process look like? How do you track your current applicant funnel? Do you have weekly meetings to review pipeline and brainstorm how you can move deals forward? Sounds like you are not doing much of this regularly. Is it because you don’t know that these are best practices or because you don’t think it’s all necessary? Have you thought about using an agency like ours to help you build a solid hiring plan? How about an agency that can help you execute this or even execute much of it for you? Would it help if I showed you how other firms have used us to meet or exceed hiring goals? Timeline

What happens if you don’t start hiring more salespeople by the end of the year? Do you have a date when you need to hit X number of salespeople on staff? Negative Consequences

If you don’t achieve this goal, what happens to the company? What happens to you? What happens to others (your boss, coworkers, etc)? How important is overcoming these challenges to your company? Positive Implications

When you start hitting your sales hiring goals again, what will you do next? When you no longer have to worry about losing sales hires to other local firms, how will you feel? Authority

How have decisions been made like this in the past? Who needs to be involved in this decision? Usually, when my clients are making this decision, the following people need to be involved: Multiple partners, the associates who will drive the ongoing work with our firm and the partner who manages the budget for outsourced services. Oftentimes, there’s a vote. How do you do it? Who covers those responsibilities for your firm? Budget

It sounds like if you do not increase the pace of sales hiring, you run the risk of shrinking your firm. With 25 employees on the payroll, this will be fairly devastating to the family culture you’ve built over the decades. You also run some personal risk of not being able to retire because your younger associates may jump ship to join growing firms where they stand a better chance of building a career.

Do you have a budget set aside to avoid these issues? What do you plan to invest going forward so that you’re 100% confident that you’ll hit your goals? If I were to come back with a plan that projects we can get you to five new hires per quarter, what would you be willing to invest now? Advise Advise Inbound salespeople advise prospects on why their offering is uniquely positioned to address the buyer’s context. By sticking to a generic script, legacy salespeople fail to represent their strategy as a solution to their prospect’s specific needs. Prospects want to know how features are specifically going to help them and their situation.

As an inbound salesperson, you serve as a translator between the generic messaging found on your company’s website and the unique needs of your buyer.

During the Advise stage, legacy salespeople deliver the same presentation and same case studies to all buyers. Legacy salespeople might do some light discovery around buyer needs -- just enough to know there might be interest. Then, they revert to autopilot and deliver their generic presentation.

However, modern buyers have already seen the content of this generic presentation online. They struggle to connect the company’s generic value proposition with their specific challenges, and legacy salespeople fail to help the buyer make these connections.

On the other hand, inbound salespeople tailor the presentation to the buyer’s context, leveraging the information gathered during the Connect stage. During the exploratory conversation, inbound salespeople discover whether the buyer can be helped, wants their help, needs their help, or is prioritizing goals the salesperson is uniquely positioned to help with.

By uncovering the buyer’s context and tailoring the presentation accordingly, inbound salespeople add tremendous value to the buyer’s journey beyond the information available online. Inbound salespeople serve as translators between the generic messaging found on the company’s website and the unique situation of the buyer.

Provide a recap of what you’ve learned. The beginning of the presentation is all about restating where the prospect is now and the insights you’ve gleaned from your earlier conversations, such as a challenge your prospect has or a goal they want to achieve. Impress upon your buyer that you are uniquely suited to help them.

Suggest ways to achieve their goals. Craft a customized presentation that connects their goals and challenges to your offering, and shows exactly how they’ll benefit from your service.

Confirm the budget, authority, and timeline. Based on what it takes to set up their account and implement your solution, work backward to determine when they need to sign your contract. Outline a timeline that meets the buyer’s deadline.

A Better Approach To Sales A Better Approach To Sales In today’s selling environment, salespeople have to realize that they serve a completely different function than their predecessors. Legacy salespeople who only serve as sources of information will find themselves unable to compete with inbound salespeople who serve as translators between the generic information available online and the unique needs of the buyer.

The Inbound Sales Methodology covers every step of the buyer’s journey traveled on the road from stranger to customer, and each corresponding salesperson action. The new methodology acknowledges that Inbound Sales doesn’t just happen -- you do it. And, you do it using tools that help you personalize the sales process to appeal to precisely the right leads, in the right places, at just the right time in their buying journey.

Enter the modern world of sales and get started with inbound sales today