What’s your close rate on a cold call?
I’m willing to bet it’s in the very low range.
That’s because buyer behaviour has changed. The power has shifted in their favour as information is readily available and no longer ‘owned’ by the sales representatives as in days gone by. In fact, with access to this information, buyers today typically make 60% of their purchase decision before they even speak to a sales consultant.
Attempting to connect with them before they are ready and without the insight or context needed to advance the transaction is going to plummet your hit rate and leave potential buyer’s feeling harassed. It’s time to put a stop to blanket cold sales calls once and for all and make sales connections more meaningful and prosperous.
Here’s how!
How to Transform Your Sales to the 'Inbound' Way
Target Accounts More Effectively
Ultimately this aspect of transforming your sales process to a more inbound-driven approach primarily rests with your marketing team. It comes down to producing the right type of content for the right type of people, i.e. your buyer personas. The objective is to fill the top of the funnel with leads that are experiencing challenges that you are able to solve, not ones that are unlikely to make use of your solution or service.
Furthermore, marketing needs to be able to quickly identify at what stage of the buyer journey a lead is at in order to assign them to the corresponding marketing funnel phase. For example, leads in the awareness or consideration stage should stay with marketing for further nurturing where leads displaying decision-making signals should be handed over to sales for immediate follow up.
Profile Your Prospects Properly
Profiling prospects means having an understanding of the lead before picking up the phone. It is the process of researching your leads to gather sufficient insight and context about them in order to tailor your initial sales contact. So channel your inner Sherlock Holmes and get down to a little detective work. Before you make contact you want to have background information about:
1. The Company
Look at things like:
- The company size in terms of employees and revenue
- What they sell and to whom
- Your lead’s role within the business
- Whether there will be any other stakeholders involved in the decision process, e.g. a line manager or department executive
- Any pertinent company news, whether they are hiring (if those positions are relevant to your solution), new funding or executive changes
2. The Industry
Read up on their industry focusing on:
- Advances or developments in the industry that pose opportunities or threats to the business
- Their positioning within their industry
- Any upcoming events you can talk about
- Whether you have any shared contacts, groups or communities
3. Social Media
Some may consider this on the border of ‘stalking’ but listening in on prospect and lead social conversations is worth the effort. Studies show that 73% of salespeople using social media as a sales tool outperform their colleagues who did not.
By monitoring social media you will be able to establish whether your lead is engaging with any other vendors, has other needs looking to be fulfilled and the type of questions he or she is posting as well as the responses or feedback being received.
A huge amount of insight can be gleaned from social media profiles so don’t miss out on the opportunity to use this free and reliable resource.
4. Marketing Lead Intelligence
Your marketing software collects valuable information about your lead’s interaction with your site and marketing campaigns that you can tap into. Review the contact record to see:
- What marketing resources they have downloaded
- Which pages on your site they have viewed
- What emails they have received and read
With this information at hand you can identify where they are the buyer journey, uncover the topics or needs that are most pertinent to them and the content that is resonating with them. This helps you to tailor your sales call to be contextually relevant to your lead based on their known pain points and individual engagement history with your business.
Connect With Your Prospects
We’ve done a substantial amount of research so now it’s time to pick up the phone and use the data to make a meaningful connection with our prospect. In order to get the most out of the call you need to:
- Build rapport using common areas of interest
- Speak in your persona’s language, using familiar terms
- Be helpful!
Change The Perception of Sales Representatives
Sales people aren’t typically welcomed with open arms. People are wary of them, putting their guard up for fear of being pushed into a sale that they don’t necessarily want or need. It is up to you to change this perception of sales by … well … not being that type of sales person.
Inbound Sales people are inherently helpful, putting their own agenda’s aside in favour of genuinely assisting prospects, gently guiding them to a decision with education not persuasion.
Throw out the scripted sales pitch and drop the ‘always-be-closing’ approach. Use your listening skills to truly understand what pain your prospect is looking to solve and then provide the necessary information and enlightening material to help them do so. Aim for a more human, one-on-one interaction that offers an enjoyable experience for your prospect.
For those that are accustomed to sales the ‘old-school’ way, this can be a difficult transformation but one that is absolutely necessary to address the evolving buyer behaviour. Without this shift to a more buyer-centric sales process, closing rates will decline along with revenue. This doesn’t mean that quotas go out the window. The inbound approach fosters trust. Trust in your sales people and trust in your business. And at the end of the day, trust is what translates into relationships that deliver results, for both parties.
Feature image is altered. Photo credit: nate steiner via photopin cc
