Inbound Sales: What is it and how do I do it?

What Is Inbound Sales?

Inbound Sales: Definition

In today's context where information is widely accessible, Inbound Sales positions itself as an adapted response to buyers' new expectations. This sales method goes beyond simply selling products or services. It aims to create relationships with prospects before even proposing an offer.

Inbound Sales is therefore centered on deep understanding of prospects' needs and challenges. The objective is to offer a personalized buying experience and a relevant solution to their problems. The Inbound Sales process generally unfolds in four stages:

• Identify potential prospects

• Connect with them to establish a relationship

• Explore their needs and challenges

• Advise the best solution to their problems

This sales method relies heavily on using digital channels such as content, SEO, and social media to attract and engage prospects. In essence, Inbound Sales is a strategy that puts the buyer at the heart of the sales process, prioritizing a consultative and tailored approach.

What's the Difference Between Inbound and Outbound Sales?

Inbound Sales and Outbound Sales are two distinct sales approaches.

Inbound Sales is a customer-centered approach where salespeople seek to understand prospect needs and propose adapted solutions. It's a "pull" strategy, where customers are attracted to the company through quality content and personalized interactions.

Outbound Sales is more of a "push" approach, where salespeople initiate contact with prospects, often through more traditional prospecting techniques like cold calls or purchasing contact lists.

In summary:

• Inbound Sales: Prospects come to the company themselves to solve their problems by calling on your services or products

• Outbound Sales: The company proactively goes to prospects and "pushes" its product or service

Difference Between Inbound Sales and Inbound Marketing?

Inbound sales and inbound marketing are two complementary facets of the same customer-oriented strategy, but they have distinct objectives and methodologies.

Inbound marketing emphasizes creating relevant, quality content to attract and engage prospects. It's about supporting and "educating" them about their challenges, aiming to generate need and move them forward in the conversion funnel.

Inbound sales focuses on direct interaction with these qualified leads to convert them into customers. Salespeople use information collected by marketing to understand prospects' specific needs and propose personalized solutions. It's therefore the logical follow-up to inbound marketing.

In summary:

• Inbound Marketing: Attract and educate prospects

• Inbound Sales: Convert leads into customers through personalized approach

These two methods work together to ensure a smooth, coherent customer experience throughout the buying journey.

Implementing an Inbound Sales Strategy

Understanding the Inbound Sales Process

Inbound Sales is built around a four-stage sales process:

1. Identify: This first phase involves attracting visitors to your website through quality content and identifying potential prospects among them

2. Explore: Once prospects are identified, it's about understanding their needs and pain points to propose the most suitable solution

3. Advise: In this stage, the salesperson becomes an advisor to the prospect. They propose a tailored solution based on their needs and context

4. Close: The final stage involves transforming the prospect into a customer by closing the sale

With Inbound Sales, the sales process is intimately linked to the buyer's journey. Each stage corresponds to a phase of the buying journey: awareness, consideration, and decision.

Marketing's Role in Inbound Sales

In an Inbound Sales strategy, marketing plays a central role. Indeed, it's marketing that initiates prospect attraction to the company by producing quality content that's relevant and adapted to potential customers' needs. This is a pull approach where customers naturally come to the company.

• Marketing creates and distributes attractive content: blog articles, white papers, case studies that attract prospects' attention and generate interest in the company. Content must be high-value and centered on prospects' challenges

• It uses SEO techniques and social media to maximize content visibility and reach a wider audience

• It uses techniques like "buyer personas" or "jobs-to-be-done" to better understand potential buyers and their challenges. This information is then used by sales teams to personalize their approach during first contact with prospects

In essence, marketing acts upstream by attracting prospects and collecting valuable information that enables sales teams to achieve more effective and personalized sales.

Key Inbound Sales Techniques

Key Inbound Sales techniques revolve around two universes.

The first universe consists of marketing techniques that favor lead generation in the inbound sales spirit with four main dimensions:

• Content: Inbound Sales relies on distributing quality content that's relevant and adapted to prospects' needs. This can take the form of blogs, white papers, webinars, or case studies

• SEO: Search engine optimization is essential for attracting visitors to your website. This involves meticulous keyword research and site optimization for these keywords

• Social Media: These platforms are excellent ways to distribute content, interact directly with prospects, and build relationships

• Marketing Automation: This technology automates certain repetitive marketing tasks, like sending emails, freeing up time for salespeople to focus on selling

The second universe focuses on sales techniques aligned with inbound sales. Here are two that stand out:

• Q2C Selling: A very comprehensive sales technique that provides a framework for building a sales process centered on your customer while perfectly using marketing tools to close better

• GAP Selling: Simpler, with a philosophy that works in 3 stages: understand the current situation, understand the desired situation, and "close the gap" between the two through your offer

Inbound Sales uses a range of digital techniques and tools to attract, engage, and convert prospects. The choice of techniques depends largely on your target audience, objectives, and resources.

The Salesperson's Role in Inbound Sales

How to Train in Inbound Sales?

To train in Inbound Sales, several options are available. Online training, like those offered by HubSpot Academy, constitute an excellent starting point. They cover the methodology's fundamental principles and teach you how to implement it.

Certifications are available, once again from HubSpot Academy. These certifications are an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise and showcase your skills to current and future employers.

The Business Developer's Role in Inbound Sales

As mentioned previously, business developers are responsible for transforming potential buyers into customers. In the Inbound Sales context, this role takes on a particular advisory dimension. Business developers become true consultants—their role is helping buyers understand their challenges, the levers to solve them, and convince them that your company is the best for this.

Their main missions consist of:

• Identifying and qualifying prospects via Inbound Marketing techniques (SEO, content, social media, automation)

• Establishing a trust relationship with prospects, positioning themselves as advisors rather than sellers

• Proposing solutions adapted to prospects' needs and context, based on information collected during the identification stage

• Closing sales by transforming prospects into customers

Business developers in Inbound Sales are therefore key players in the inbound sales strategy—without them, it simply doesn't exist.

The Business Development Representative's Role in Inbound Sales

In an Inbound Sales strategy, the Business Development Representative (BDR) handles lead qualification. They intervene at the cycle's beginning, during the prospecting phase. Their objective is converting prospects generated by marketing teams into qualified sales opportunities, ready to be exploited by Account Managers or business developers. Among their daily tasks:

• Identifying target accounts

• Generating new leads

• Qualifying incoming leads

• Organizing meetings or demonstrations with qualified leads

BDRs work in close collaboration with sales and marketing teams.

The Sales Manager's Role in Inbound Sales

The sales manager in Inbound Sales orchestrates the sales strategy. Their mission is ensuring the link between management and sales teams. Their role mainly revolves around three axes:

• They guarantee revenue and sales margin. They establish sales objectives and implement performance indicators to track and optimize results

• They lead and train their sales team. They ensure each team member has necessary skills to succeed, particularly good product and market knowledge. Without this, the advisory dimension is impossible to implement

• They manage sales activities. They analyze and interpret results, implement corrective actions, and control sales process application

Sales managers must also have excellent knowledge of different components and concepts around Inbound Sales to apply them effectively and transmit them to their team.