How to Improve Your Sales Process & Generate More Qualified Leads

Chances are, if there's a shortage of Advil around the office, you can probably trace it back to the sales team. After all, there's nothing more frustrating and mind numbing than making sales calls with prospects who either aren't ready yet, or don't intend on buying from you regardless.

It seems very few phone calls result in a prospect who is actually sales-ready, and even fewer that result in a sale.

It can all seem like a severe waste of time. And it happens all too often.

It's the result of a sales team operating without the necessary structure or metrics in place that are trademark characteristics of an inbound marketing campaign.

So if you're looking to save your sales team from hitting the bottle (of Advil, that is), keep reading and learn how the structure of an inbound marketing campaign is better suited for a more productive and effective sales process.

Interested in learning more about if inbound marketing is right for your company? Contact IMPACT and learn how we can help!

A More Effective Sales Process with Inbound Marketing

As marketers, all of our goals are pretty much the same. To generate more leads from our business or website.

However, the way this is executed differs drastically depending on the structure of your marketing campaign. Traditional methods, like outbound marketing, focus more on print ads, direct mail, cold calls, and trade shows to generate leads and perform sales calls. As you can imagine, solicited marketing just doesn't yield the type of qualified, sales ready lead that can make your sales team's job easier.

Inbound marketing, however, does. This is because before your sales team even gets on the phone with a prospect, they have already been nurtured down the sales funnel to not only qualify your company, but to also qualify the lead for you. This way, no ones time gets wasted.

Creating Offers Creates a More Effective Sales Process

Inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content in order to attract more traffic to your website. The idea is, once this traffic is there, they'll convert to leads from one of your many lead generation opportunities (free offers, demos, etc.)

Once they've submitted their contact information to access one of your offers, they've now become a lead, and the process of nurturing them further down the sales funnel has begun. Using HubSpot's workflows tool in their new software, you can set up automated email responser, so that once a lead is acquired, they'll receive automated emails (you choose how often) pushing new offers or blog posts in an effort to get them re-engaging with your brand.

In order for a lead to become sales-ready, they'll first have to meet a set of guidelines that you've set forth, and thanks to the HubSpot software, it's extremely easy to track this.

The most beautiful part? Once your sales team is involved, the "waste of time" prospects have already been filtered out, leaving only a pool of qualified, sales-ready prospects for your sales team to work their magic with.

More than Just Leads

As you can see, inbound marketing is about so much more than simply generating leads. It's about qualified leads. It's about providing your sales team with only the most sales-ready leads possible, as to not scare away any "green" prospects, and also avoid wasting their time.

So toss the Advil back in the drawer and forward this email over to your sales team. They'll thank you.

Interested in learning more about improving your sales process through inbound marketing? Contact IMPACT and learn how we can help!