Complimentary Inbound Sales Consultation

Why Inbound Sales?

Inbound Sales is the counterpart to Inbound Marketing. It's how you make sure that all those Inbound Leads that your marketing team is generating, get turned into paying customers.  It's the foundation to building a sales plan and hitting your revenue goals.

How is Inbound Sales Different than Traditional Sales?

It all depends on how you define 'traditional sales'.  But here is how I see the major difference - today's customer, especially in the B2B enterprise space, spends a lot more time educating themselves than they ever did in the past.  With the advent of AI, especially ChatGPT, customers can find multiple suppliers for every product and service, anywhere in the world.  But if your marketing and sales team have done their job, then they'll find you first.  And there is a definitely a first mover advantage in today's market.

Inbound Leads vs Traditional Sales

Traditional sales typically begins with interruption — cold calls, unsolicited emails, purchased lists, and outbound prospecting aimed at creating interest where none previously existed. Inbound leads, by contrast, originate from prospects who are already researching solutions, consuming educational content, and actively looking for guidance.

When comparing inbound leads vs traditional sales approaches, the difference is not just tactical — it’s strategic. Inbound sales aligns with how modern buyers actually make decisions. Today’s prospects often complete 60–80% of their research before ever speaking to a salesperson. They expect insight, relevance, and value — not pressure.

Instead of convincing someone they have a problem, inbound sales focuses on diagnosing, educating, and guiding buyers who already recognize their need. This results in higher trust, shorter sales cycles, improved close rates, and stronger long-term customer relationships.

During your complimentary strategy session, we assess how effectively your organization is capturing, qualifying, and converting inbound leads — and where traditional sales habits may still be limiting performance.

Where Do I Start with Hubspot Inbound Sales?

You need a financial plan, that stretches from top-line revenue goals all the way down to individual Account Executive revenue targets.  That's why I start every Inbound Sales implementation engagement with a thorough discussion focused on goals.  If you can't put a number down, it's unlikely you'll recognize when you've succeeded nor will you know when you need to make a course correction.  It's this revenue target setting process that helps answer the question "How much do you want to make".  It's also a key element in sales capacity planning, an often overlooked area that you must master to achieve your sales targets.

Who Needs to Lead the Inbound Sales Effort?

The owner of the company for smaller concerns.  For larger enterprises, the conversation involves the C-Suite.  For very large companies, especially publicly traded companies, the ability to set goals, and forecast your probability of hitting those goals, is something the analyst want to see.  For example, SAP, a publicly traded company, produces a finely tuned, actionable sales plan, that involves the entire organization.  From experience, I can tell you this process is both challenging, and extremely valuable.  

What is Inbound Sales?

It's a sales methodology based on Hubspot's experience and enabled by their CRM (Hubspot CRM)- but you can implement it with Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, or even Microsoft CRM systems.  It's about making sure your sales team members have both the knowledge they need about your product and the sales enablement resources required to help your customers understand what value your solution helps your customers achieve. 

While enterprise sales, especially enterprise software sales, still requires a lot of human interaction, aka, relationship management, it also requires a great deal of additional help from the extended sales team, such as Pre-Sales, Product Marketing training, Executive Management and often, partners.  This often means you have very different sales pipeline stages from your competitors.  You may also have completely separate sales pipelines and associated and optimized sales pipeline stages segmented along product lines, industry lines or geographic lines.  

Let's Break Down The Individual Steps

If you're familiar with the Inbound Marketing Methodology, you'll notice the phases of the Inbound Sales Methodology are very different.   That's because they actually interact with each other and support each other.  If you're a Hubspot user, then you're already light-years ahead of the crowd as both the marketing and sales system use the same underlying database and are fully integrated. 

Identify

In a fully Inbound Marketing powered lead generation environment, sales will already receive leads with a lot of information associated with the lead.  This typically includes all of their activity on your website, content downloads, calculators ran, and much more.  But your sales team will still want to do some further research on each lead, and in many cases, add additional information to the contact record.  This can be done manually or automatically.  This is called data enrichment, and helps to both quality the lead and provides context for the connect call.

Connect

If you're team already 'hot leads' from marketing, then by all means, they should be reaching out, ideally within 5 minutes or less.  However, some organizations are practicing a hybrid sales methodology, which includes cold emails,  cold calls, and social media outreach, such as on LinkedIn.  A good CRM system, such as Hubspot, facilitates all of this activity, and helps ensure you can track and improve your connect progress, all the time.

Explore

The Discovery Call is a key part of the complex sale.  For the complex sale, it usually consist of more than one call, and very complex needs assessment activities.  This is where those delicate qualifying questions get asked, such as available budget, implementation timeframes, and what problem(s) the prospect is trying to fix.  It's really where you and the client decide whether to move to the next step, also known as Qualifying In or Out.

Advise

This is where the rubber meets the road.  It's here where you and your team have to be able to make winning solution proposal presentations, handle objections and ultimately, drive toward the close.  These can be simple or the more likely scenario of a large complex deal, can be exceedingly complex and take both a lot of time and money, and expertise.  These types of deals are where 7 and 8 figure (and beyond) deals happen.  They require time, effort and money, and are highly competitive - always.  

What I'll Need to Know From You

During our first Inbound Consultation call, aside from getting to know each other, we'll be discussing your sales goals for the year, how you currently handle sales, what issues, if any, you're having with your current sales process, such as your sales conversion rates, and of course, your product or service.

Lead Generation Approach

Of course, to make sales, you need leads.  We'll discuss your current lead generation strategy, including both Inbound Lead Generation (if that is your approach), paid advertising, such as Google, and your Google Ad Spend Strategy.  We'll need to understand how many leads you're currently generating, across all channels (and if you can't tell that, we'll dive into your analytics challenges) and which leads from which channels are converting into sales at which rates.