The following is a guest post by Stephanie King.
What is the gold standard for B2B companies when referred to sales and marketing? – It is the combination of outside sales, inside sales and marketing.
For most of the B2B companies doing inbound marketing is more or less difficult. But then again for many, inside sales means cold calling. When we talk of cold calling we know, it is the complete antithesis about inbound marketing.
Therefore, what does a company should do? – Do not mix the inbound marketing with inside sales. Rather try to understand and generate sales from the inbound marketing techniques.
You bother about attracting people with great content and then you just follow them up, pestering them over the phone. With that thing said here, you need to make out a proper reason to keep the structure of your sales and marketing departments, the same before.
Here you will get to know the 4 ways to change the inside sales conversion to align with inbound marketing activities.
- Right Set of Conversion at Right Place
If you are calling a prospect for the first time, then meet her wherever she left off with your marketing content. You need to start from the scratch and interact in a manner like the one she has not done before. The risk of doing all the trust building is done alone by the content. Use the content as the starting place. You need to kick off the conversation with a thought provoking question. Like the last thing, probably your prospect might have given a read.
Start the conversation saying, “I am curiousâ€: Are you able to identify which other manufacturing owners talked about in that ‘X’ topic: are they for me?
- Try To Be An Educational Resource
Is your prospect still standing in the gathering phase? If you are going to call her make sure that you keep on adding value to their decision making process. Look for the content that is able to build the resource for your site, share those articles or blog on your website. You can offer the email option so that readers can solve their queries reading the interesting post.
- Push The Company To Become The Next Content Brand
Companies are their which pours significant energy in some of their articles. When they finally reach out to those new leads, via thrilling contents, those leads are often excited to hear from them. A good example to cite here is HubSpot, their VP of sales shares that when they contacted their readers over the phone, and yes, they were eager to receive it. The readers have followed the stuff for so long. It seemed that everyone wanted to talk to the HubSpot personnel.
- Behave Like A Consultant
If your product is able to solve the problem of the customers then you must obviously know two or more things about the problems. Use those things that you need to reach out the customers. Ask the current customers what their immediate needs are, and send your prospects a quick message sharing the recommendations. Your observations are the starting point of discussion. Look through your prospects Facebook page and look out if there is something that needs tweaking.
What Says The Conclusion?
In my opinion, B2B marketing is making changes towards the online arena, but that does not mean you will discontinue the inside sales efforts. Inside sales teams are the important extension of the B2B marketing teams. Mostly when you implement the advanced automation features, like closed loop marketing system.
Note: The old way of structure marketing and sales teams may not be continuing for a long time. There are organizations that have started bringing outside sales teams to turn inside sales into market teams. If you are a B2B marketer, make sure to connect with leads further down the funnel and it may be advantageous to transfer ownership of the sales teams from outside sales to marketing.
Stephanie King is the freelance writer and develops high-end web content for various internet-marketing agencies. She is also the private consultant to call centers in the US and helps them to distinguish between inbound marketing and inside sales to get higher conversion rates.