Digital Marketing Blog

I was never one for ball sports, for a variety of reasons. But, there are times when participation in team games would line up very well with Inbound Marketing and Inbound Selling. You’d have one teammate capture and guide the ball all the way up to the other end of the field, and then pass it to someone else so they could score the goal.

And then the teammate receiving the ball drops it, because they weren’t prepared for their job.

A dropped ball is one kind of frustration, but a dropped buyer is another deal all together. Your marketing and sales teams will need to be on the same page, if you want your inbound marketing strategy to truly succeed - here’s why:

How efficient is your engine?
You may not be an auto-enthusiast, but it’s an established fact that an inefficient engine runs poorly and at great cost.

Now, take the concept of an efficiently-run engine, and place it into the marketing sphere. How efficient is your marketing engine? Are there places where effort is wasted, or where things could be streamlined better?

Closed-loop marketing is for a marketing section what a tune-up is for your vehicle of choice. It connects your sales and marketing teams, identifies the leaks in your marketing strategies, and helps you see what brought your leads to you in the first place. It’s a huge assist to the Inbound Marketing methodology, and it’s backed up with hard data, so it’s irrefutably helpful to incorporate into your strategies.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of all the spam leads which come from my website. We’ve cleaned all that up now using software to filter leads and work them until they’re sales ready, then we get notified about them.

Once you do the work to attract today’s buyer, you know the ones who start researching a new purchase online, you’ll see a huge increase in leads from your website and you need to have a way to efficiently deal with these leads.

OK, so despite the title of this post, you have to work out what makes a great lead for your business because your business has it’s own unique definition of what makes a great inbound B2B lead.

Defining what makes a great lead is one thing, separating the diamonds from the glass can be a real challenge.

Here are a few things you can do which will allow you to easily separate your great leads from the ones which either aren’t ready yet or just aren’t right for you.

And when you get tired of doing this manually you can use software to do most of it for you.

You no longer have control over the buying process. Most people know they can find out a great deal about their problems and how to solve them by doing research on the Internet. That’s why more than 80% of people now start their buying process by doing some research online.

Because they do this research, 60% of their buying decision is made before they even speak to a salesperson.

If you’re relying on cold calling or not including the information people need to make a buying decision on your website, your sales performance will be declining.

Here are 5 steps you can take to get the attention of these buyers and improve your sales performance.

All sales people love cold calling and calling that lead who may have gone cold. Just kidding, I think most sales people hate this part of their jobs it’s frustrating and unproductive.

Inbound marketing works to reduce or eliminate these tasks from your sales process. Won’t your sales team love that?

So how does inbound marketing help your sales team? Here’s how:

Does your sales team spend too much time chasing cold leads or cold calling? Would they be better utilised working warm leads and closing deals?

Wouldn’t it be great to have your highly paid sales teams working on the productive end of sales rather than the costly and unproductive end? Well you can if you use your online marketing both to produce warm leads for your sales team and for your sales team to direct cold leads to.

Most people now search online when they start a buying process and this applies to both B2C and B2B purchases. Make sure they can find you and use your website to move them from visitors to leads to sales qualified leads.