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Would like to double or triple your sales closure ratesLeads who have been nurtured using Inbound Marketing typically close at far higher rates than any other type of lead.  That's why we offer Inbound Sales Consulting Services.

Our Inbound Sales Framework

  • We teach you the Inbound Sales Methodology
  • We first help you attract the right leads to your business 
  • Then we get them to call you
  • You then help them solve their problem
  • Your sales team now generates more sales
  • You experience a higher average order value
  • You achieve 'trusted advisor' status because you delivered value.
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Many Sales Managers, Business Owners, Entrepreneurs and Sales People Need Help Transforming Their Sales Process.  As Inbound Sales Consultants, Our Inbound Sales Consulting Service Includes:

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Inbound Sales - What Is It Sales Enablement Inbound Sales Teams Sales Funnel vs Flywheel Sales Prospecting Sales Goals Sales "Force Multiplier" Hubspot CRM Social Selling Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) Inbound Sales Agency

What are Inbound Sales?

Inbound is all about providing a helpful, human, and holistic experience to anyone who interacts with your company in any way.

As a salesperson, you have more skin in this game than anyone else at your company. But you have a problem, sales is one of the if not the least respected professions in North America

 

Trusted Professions North America

 

Why doesn’t anybody trust salespeople?

 

Most salespeople haven’t adapted to the modern era.

Imagine what it was like to buy a product before the internet existed.

Back then, buyers really needed salespeople in order to make a decision.

 

Key Questions in the Buyer’s Mind

 

  • What’s included in your offering?
  • What does it cost?
  • How does it compare to competitors?
  • Who else is using your offering — and do they like it?

 

The internet changed the buyer–seller relationship. Now, the information buyers use to make a purchase decision is just a click away.

 

Have You Adapted?

 

Inbound Sales vs Outbound Sales

  • Your buyer is using the internet to research your company.
  • Are you using the internet to research your prospects?
  • Your buyer is using social media to research your product.
  • Are you using social media to answer their questions?

 

Who Is In Charge Of The Sales Conversation

 

  • Your buyer is accustomed to being in charge of the sales conversation.
  • Are you ready to act as a guide and help them achieve their goals?

 

Sales Transformed

 

  • Inbound sales transforms sales to match the way people buy.
  • Inbound sales teams base their entire sales strategy on the buyer rather than the seller.

 

The first step in transforming to an inbound sales model is to understand the way your customers buy your product or service.

 

The New Buyer's Journey

 

The active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase.

An outdated sales process has three parts:

  1. Prospect
  2. Demo
  3. Close

 

What Today’s Buyers Want

Buyers don’t want to be prospected, demo’d, or closed in your sales process.

They want to be educated, supported, and guided through their buying process.

 

Defining the Buyer’s Journey

 

 

Inbound Sales Stages

 

 

Awareness Stage

 

The thing the buyer is Becoming Aware of in this stage is their Problem, not your solution.

In the awareness stage, you need to know:

  • How do your buyers describe their goals or challenges?
  • How do your buyers educate themselves on these goals or challenges?
  • What are the consequences of inaction by the buyer?
  • Are there common misconceptions buyers have about addressing the goal or challenge?
  • How do buyers decide whether the goal or challenge should be prioritized?

 

Consideration Stage

 

In the consideration stage, you need to know:

  • What categories of solutions do buyers investigate?
  • How do buyers educate themselves on the various categories?
  • How do buyers perceive the pros and cons of each category?
  • How do buyers decide which category is right for them?

A key component of an inbound sales strategy is connecting with the buyers before they enter the decision stage.

 

Decision Stage

 

In the decision stage, you need to know:

  • What criteria do buyers use to evaluate the available offerings?
  • What do buyers like about your offering compared to alternatives?
  • What common concerns do buyers have with your offering?
  • Who needs to be involved in the decision? How does each person’s perspective on the decision differ?
  • Do buyers want to try your offering before they purchase it?
  • Outside of purchasing, do buyers need to make additional preparations, such as implementation plans or training strategies?

The world has changed, and far too many salespeople are living in the past.

What Is The Difference Between an Outbound Sales Process And An Inbound Sales 
Strategy?

Before we get into the nitty gritty details of defining a Inbound Sales Strategy, it's a good idea to know the difference between an Outbound Sales Strategy vs an Inbound Sales Strategy.

When it comes to sales strategies, there are two main approaches: outbound and inbound. Outbound sales focuses on reaching out to potential customers, often through cold calling or email campaigns, and trying to convince them to buy your product or service. In contrast, inbound sales is all about providing a helpful and personalized experience to anyone who interacts with your company, whether through your website, social media, or other channels. By focusing on the needs and goals of your buyers, you can guide them through their decision-making process and build long-term relationships. Adopting an inbound sales strategy requires a shift in mindset and tactics, but it can lead to more satisfied customers and higher conversion rates.

Adopting An Inbound Sales Strategy

Now let's discuss the best practices of inbound selling for the individual salesperson.

  • First, improve the experience you provide to your buyers.
  • Prerequisite: you need an inbound sales strategy.

An inbound sales strategy can be applied to every salesperson at every company.

4 Phase Inbound Sales Strategy

  1. The identify phase 
    Inbound Sales Process
  2. The connect phase
  3. The explore phase
  4. The advise phase

 

Identify Phase

  • The identify phase is the first part of your inbound sales strategy.
  • Gather as much information as you can about each individual prospect so you can better understand their situation.
  • Focus on providing an experience of helping your prospect make progress in a journey they’ve already begun.
  • The hallmark of an inbound sales strategy is finding ways to attract people to you.
  • Not only do these activities help you identify active buyers, they’ll also position you as a thought leader.

 

Passive Buyer

People who aren’t yet looking to buy but might be in the future.

 

Buyer Experience

The experience you want to provide is that feeling of giving a name to a problem you didn’t know you had.

 

Connect Phase

  • The connect phase is the second part of your inbound sales strategy.
  • Many salespeople jump straight into trying to demo their product, even if the buyer doesn’t fully understand the problem they’re trying to solve.
  • Offer content or consultations to help the buyer diagnose their situation.
  • Then you’ll be there to guide them through the rest of the buyer’s journey.
  • Show a genuine interest in helping your prospect accomplish their goals and overcome their challenges.

 

Explore Phase

The explore phase is the third part of your inbound sales strategy.

Here you’re the expert.

You can assess whether you can help the buyer more efficiently and thoroughly than they can help themselves.

 

Advise Phase

The advise phase is the final part of your inbound sales strategy.

In this final phase, you prepare and present tailored presentations customized to your client's needs.

Examples of Tailored Presentations

  • A PowerPoint deck emphasizing only the value propositions aligned with the buyer’s needs, using the buyer’s terminology.
  • A product demonstration illustrating only the features important to the buyer, in order of importance to the buyer.
  • An ROI analysis customized to the buyer’s metrics and business.
  • A proposal or contract that spells out a client’s goals, agreed upon scope of work, and metrics that indicate success

 

Remember!

 

  • Your buyers don’t need you to provide them with general information at this point.
  • Your buyers are drowning in a flood of information overload.
  • Focus on helping them connect your company’s broad positioning to their specific challenges.
Read More About  Implementing Inbound Sales

Sales Enablement

What is Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is the processes, content, and technology that empower sales teams to sell more efficiently at a higher velocity. To implement a sales enablement strategy at your company, your marketing and sales organizations are going to have to work closely together.

70% of a buyer’s research is done before they talk to sales.

Source: Aligned to Achieve

59% of buyers prefer not to talk to sales at all.

Source: Aligned to Achieve

<8% of sales enablement functions live inside of marketing departments.

Source: CSO insights sales enablement optimization study, 2016

Developing A Sales Enablement Strategy

 

Key Elements of a Sales Enablement Strategy:

Aligning Goals

Marketing and sales have to be aligned around a single revenue goal.

Content Strategy

Your sales team is already producing content –they just don’t call it that.

Identify Your Target Buyer

Increase the time reps spend speaking with more qualified buyers.

Reduce the time reps spend speaking with less qualified buyers.

What is Sales Enablement About

Sales enablement is about bringing marketing and sales together to keep up with today’s empowered buyer.

Align Your Teams Around a Unified Revenue Goal

It is absolutely critical  to have a vision and setting goals that will get you to your goal.

What is a Goal

A goal is a metric outcome you can check off a list.

What is a Vision

A vision is a state of affairs you want to bring into being.

“In every successful transformation effort that I have seen, the guiding coalition develops a picture of the future that is relatively easy to communicate.”

John Kotter

SOURCE: “LEADING CHANGE: WHY TRANSFORMATION EFFORTS FAIL”

You have to have goals and a vision.

Your vision is what’s going to motivate your teams.

Your goals are how you’ll make sure you’re on a path that has the potential to fulfill your vision.

CREATING A REVENUE GOAL

  • Come up with a vision that marketing and sales will be equally excited about
  • Calculate how much that vision would cost to achieve

Start by developing a vision both marketing and sales can buy into.

COST OF THE VISION ----> GOALS FOR THE TEAM

Ask yourself how achievable those goals are.

Sales enablement will empower your sales team to accomplish things that would otherwise be impossible.

“If you can’t communicate the vision to someone in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signifies both understanding and interest, you are not yet done with this phase of the transformation process.”

John Kotter

Source: “leading change: why transformation efforts fail”

Developing a Lead Qualification Framework

Lead qualification is very important

Both the marketing and sales teams need to have a shared understanding of what a qualified lead is.

The main thing a marketing team should be concerned about is generating leads their sales team can close into customers.

Identifying fit and sales readiness

Lead Qualification Questions

  • What makes someone a good fit for your offering?
  • Which actions demonstrate that someone is sales-ready?

What makes someone a good fit for your offering?

They Fit Your Ideal Customer Profile

Your Ideal Customer Profile is a checklist of the most basic attributes someone needs to have in order to be successful as your customer. To define a qualified lead, you have to understand what makes someone a good fit for your offering. Creating an ideal customer profile is an excellent way to do this.

An ideal customer profile is a checklist of the most basic attributes someone needs to have to be successful as your customer. The best way to create your ideal customer profile is to get representatives from both marketing and sales together to discuss what attributes your best customers have in common. If you’re in a B2B organization, your ideal customer profile will be at the company level. If you’re in a B2C organization, it will be based on a particular market segment. Regardless of what space you’re in, here are some questions that should help jump-start the conversation between marketing and sales:

  1. Are there economic factors that make a customer ideal or not ideal?
  2. B2B: Number of employees, revenue, customers, etc.
  3. B2C: Income, education, household size, phase of life, etc.
  4. Are there market segments that are ideal or not ideal?
  5. B2B: Industry, vertical, etc.
  6. B2C: Occupation, interest, lifestyle, etc.
  7. Are there geographic locations that are ideal or not ideal?
  8. Are there legal standards that are required to purchase your product or services?
  9. Are there any other attributes that make a buyer ideal or not ideal?

Turn the above into a checklist and use Hubspot’s marketing automation forms to collect this information as prospects progress through the system.

Sample Ideal Customer Profile B2C

·      Wants to live in Miami

·      Has an annual income of at least $90,000

·      Has a credit score of at least 700

·      Can pass a background check

SAP BW Consulting, Inc. Ideal Buyer Profile B2B

·      SAP Partner

·      At least 20 FTE’s

·      At least 1 dedicated marketer

·      Has Own Add-On SAP Solution

·      Willing to Invest at Least 20% of Annual Revenue in Marketing

Good Fit vs Poor Fit Leads

It’s best to keep this part of lead qualification binary.

They either area good fit and you can help them, or they are not and you cannot help them. Disqualify them and move on.

Which actions demonstrate someone is sales-ready?

Put some serious thought into what makes a lead “sales ready.”

Your marketing and sales teams need to come together and identify the actions that are most meaningful.

Mastering Lead Qualification

Defining a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

Leads that are both a good fit for your offering and ready to have a sales conversation.

Lead Qualification Matrix

HAND RAISERS

Someone who explicitly asks to talk to sales.

THE MORE LEADS YOU HAVE, THE HIGHER YOUR LEAD QUALIFICATION STANDARDS CAN BE.

Warning

MANY SALES TEAMS ARE OVERLY AGGRESSIVE WHEN REACHING OUT TO EARLY-STAGE LEADS.

 

Lead Qualfication Matrix

 

Lead Qualification Questions

  • What makes someone a good fit for your offering?
  • Which actions demonstrate that someone is sales-ready?

Hold Your Teams Accountable With a Service-Level Agreement

Why is an SLA important?

69% of high-performing companies rank communicating business goals company-wide as the most important and effective way to build a high-performing team.

7% of employees know what they need to do to contribute to company-wide goals

SOURCE: WORKBOARD

Service-Level Agreement (SLA)

An agreement between a service provider and its customer that guarantees a certain output.

Without an SLA, marketing and sales might be chasing differing and even conflicting goals.

CREATING AN SLA FOR YOUR TEAMS

To create an SLA, you need:

  • The average conversion rate from lead-to-opportunity
  • The average conversion rate from opportunity-to-closed sale
  • The average value of a sale

Poor Example SLA

“Every month, marketing will deliver 1,000 qualified leads to sales, and sales will contact each of those leads within 5 minutes of receiving it.”

Excellent Revenue Focused Example SLA

“Every month, marketing will deliver $100,000 in lead value to sales, and sales will contact every marketing qualified lead within 24 hours of receiving it.”

Optimizing Your SLA

Implementing an SLA is a recipe for growth.

As marketing gets better at delivering the right number of leads, they’ll need to also get better at delivering those leads at a sensible cadence.

For sales, the SLA requires contacting leads within a certain amount of time.

How quickly should sales contact leads?

As quickly as possible, ideally within 5 minutes of them becoming a qualified lead.

What happens if your sales team can’t get a hold of someone?

Even having a very basic SLA will set you apart from the competition.

Start with an SLA that requires marketing to deliver a certain number of leads each month and requires sales to contact those leads within a specific timeframe. 

Beyond The SLA

Four Concerns About SLAs

  • What if the SLA requires more leads than marketing can deliver?
  • What if marketing is delivering more leads than sales can handle?
  • What if sales rejects marketing’s leads?
  • What if marketing’s leads aren’t any good?

See how much time your marketing team is spending on the different assets they’re creating and how many leads those assets are actually generating.

GOOD CONTENT ->GOOD LEADS

BAD CONTENT ->BAD LEADS

Using Buyer Personas in Sales Enablement

Buyer Persona Definition

A semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on data.

Ideal Customer Profile

Broadly describes your target market

How to Define Your Buyer Profile

Start by creating your ideal customer profile, and then define your personas based on the sorts of people included in that profile.

Interview Actual Buyers

Ask them all the same questions.

You might even consider scripting the questions so you make sure you ask them the same way to each person.

Persona Interview Question Topics

  • Goals
  • Challenges
  • Watering holes
  • Shopping preferences

Using Jobs to Be Done in Sales Enablement

JOBS THEORY

A way of digging into why people buy products.

Rethinking Your Competition

If you have a deep understanding of the job people hire your product to do, it will completely transform the competitive landscape.

“Just as the milkshake wins the game of commuting hands down against bananas and bagels, V8 wins hands down against peeling carrots, boiling spinach, and flossing celery strings out of your teeth. [...]

“Competing against apple juice is tough. Competing against celery is like going downhill on ball bearings.”

Clay Christensen

SOURCE: COMPETING AGAINST LUCK

Focus on the people who need your help instead of fighting over prospects who just aren’t that into you!

How to Partner

Partner with other solutions to provide more comprehensive coverage.

Partner with other solutions to provide more comprehensive coverage for that job.

How To Uncover Your Customers’ Jobs

Work backwards from the time the person bought your product.

Ask them…

  • Why did they buy it?
  • How long did they think about it before they made the decision?
  • What was it that made them finally go through with the sale?
  • Had they thought about buying before and not done it?
  • Were they making do with something else (or nothing at all)?
  • When did they realize they didn’t have to make do anymore?

Why are people going through this story? What job are they trying to get done?

What does a job look like?

A  Framework

As a ____(who)__________,

When I am __(Situation)__,

I want to__(motivation)___,

So that I can __(outcome)_.

Job Dimensions

  • Functional requirements: What’s the minimum functionality required to get the job done?
  • Financial requirement: What are the monetary guardrails I need to stay in to make this financially feasible?
  • Personal identity: How does this product or service act as a symbol to represent what I believe about the world?
  • Social appearance: How will others view me while I use this product or service?

Once you get an intimate understanding of the job people are hiring your product to do, you’ll be able to search for other people who have that Job to be done.

Understanding the job at that level can completely transform every aspect of your business.

Creating a Hero Statement

The importance of hero statements

Hero Statement = Ideal Customer Profile ≠ Buyer Persona

Imagine Business Development is a hero to $10-to $50-million companies that want to double the size of their business in the next three to five years.

You can use your ideal customer profile for the first version of your hero statement.

Knowing who you’re a hero to can transform your entire company.

Pick One Persona

Pick One Job

Own It

Look for relationships between your personas and the jobs you help them get done.

You can’t be everything to everybody.

Being a Hero to Your Customers

  • Define your persona.
  • Figure out their job to be done.
  • Put it all together into a hero statement.
  • Focus your entire organization on being that hero.

The Power of Content in Sales Enablement

Sales Enablement Content Definition

The processes, content, and technology that empower sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity.

MANY MARKETING TEAMS AREN’T PRODUCING ANY SALES-RELATED CONTENT.

If your marketing team hasn’t been focusing on driving people toward Purchasing your product, it’s time for them to Rethink their priorities!

Using Pre-Sales Content To Enable Sales

Two Ways Content Helps Sales

  • Attracting people to your company
  • Helping them through the sales process

For a lot of companies, the content they publish doesn’t actually Drive results. 

The more education you can provide your prospects before they meet with sales, the more qualified they’ll be when they get there.

Using Content During The Sales Process

Your sales team needs easy access to excellent content that’s relevant while they’re meeting with their leads.

Even if your sales content is easily accessible, your sales teams won’t use it if it isn’t part of their process.

Start by working on changing your company’s sales process so that content fits into it.

Create content that will enable your sales team to add value throughout the sales process.

Align Your Business Around Content Creation

The importance of company-wide collaboration

Why Marketing and Sales Should Collaborate on Content?

  • Marketing has a better skillset for creating content, but sales has access to more timely information.
  • If your marketing collateral doesn’t align with your sales collateral, you’re going to have problems.

Designating a content manager

Get sales involved in content creation

Make content creation a company-wide initiative

Getting Started With Video Content

 

Get Started With Video

 

Your sales process should be infused with relevant content from beginning to end, including multiple types of video.

Making Content a Company-Wide Initiative

  • Choose a content manager
  • Get the rest of the company involved
  • Experiment with video
  • Making Content a Company-Wide Initiative
  • Get sales involved

Continuing Enablement After the Sale

The importance of customer enablement

Help customers fire their old solutions

If you truly understand the job someone has hired your product to do,

You should be able to produce content that helps them get it done.

You need to be creating content that will help people use your product most effectively.

Encouraging people to buy from you again

Help your customers do the job they hired your product to do, and also encourage them to buy from you again.

Your customers should feel like you’re invested in their success.

Three Ways to Enable Customers

  • Provide help for people to fire their old solution.
  • Encourage people to buy from you again.
  • Focus on the job they hired your product to do.

Evaluating Sales Enablement Technology

The importance of technology in a sales enablement strategy

“When sales and marketing are in alignment, when your data is in alignment, there is a single source of truth on which both teams can agree. Using data as the common language fosters collaboration and improves communication.”

Aligned to Achieve

Three Reasons You Need Technology

  • To measure the results of your efforts
  • To provide visibility
  • To automate parts of the lead management process

“A simple example of a process gone wrong is a lead that converts on a mid-funnel offer but also triggers a defined ‘sales-ready’ behavior the same day, like filling out a Contact Us form.

John McTigue

“Marketing automatically sends out a thank you and adds the lead to a new lead nurturing campaign that sends them more marketing emails over the next few weeks.

John McTigue

SOURCE: https://www.kunocreative.com/blog/bid/85692/Sales-and-Marketing-Alignment-Goals-Motives-and-Tactics

“Meanwhile, the sales team receives the SQL notice and immediately calls the lead and starts the sales process.

John McTigue

 

“If Larry Lead is receiving both marketing and sales messages, and they aren't in sync, the risk of losing that lead skyrockets.”

John McTigue

CHOOSING THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY

 

Martech Landscape

 

How to Choose the Right MarTech Stack

  • Start with the core and then move to the edges.
  • Connect the core and edges as seamlessly as possible.

“What frequently happens in B2B companies is that marketing relies on marketing automation as their single source of truth and sales does the same with CRM. Sometimes the data doesn't agree and that causes problems.”

Aligned to Achieve

Inbound Sales Teams

Define Your Sales Process

The basis of building all Inbound Sales Teams is building a well documented Inbound Sales Process.   

Jobs To Be Done 

Jobs to be Done or JtbD is a handy concept when it comes to defining your sales process.  It helps you uncover the motivations of your customers.  Knowing this allows you to target other customers with the same problems.  Part of of Inbound Sales Consulting process is to do a deep dive into your customer's needs.   We combine this with the development of different 'Buyer Personas' involved in making purchase decisions, which is the norm in most complex sales.

Job Dimensions

During the research phase, we'll find out the following of the JtbD of your customer:

Functional Dimensions: What’s the minimum functionality required to get the job done?

Financial requirement: What are the monetary guardrails I need to stay in to make this financially feasible?

Personal identity: How does this product or service act as a symbol to represent what I believe about the world?

Mapping Your Sales Process

Once your customer's JtbD has been fully explored and documented, we'll proceed to work with you to document your Sales Process.

Your customer goes through three stages during their buyer's journey, collectively called:

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Decision

The buyer's journey, however, rarely proceeds in straight line.  For complex products and services, you will have multiple buyer personas who each have different informational needs in order for them to make it through the buyer's journey.

Sales Stages

After you've defined your buyer's journey, the next step is define the different stages of your sales process.  These Sales Stages will be configured in your Hubspot CRM system, and each stage should have the following characteristics:

  • Required
  • Factual
  • Inspectable
  • Buyer-Centric

You should have no more nor any fewer sales stages than required.  Simpler is better, and far more likely to be maintained by your Sales Team.

Sales Playbooks

For your sales process, we'll develop Sales Playbooks that provide the right information for the right stage of your sales funnel.   Your Sales Representatives can use them to support them with their interactions with your customers throughout the sales process.  They are meant to be continuously updated as you learn more about how well your sales process is functioning.

Sales Team Recruiting

In order to help you develop a high performance sales team, you will need a recruitment process that works.  Our recommendation is to develop a set of Interview Questions unique to each role, and to ask those exact same questions of every candidate that fills the same role.

Ideal Sales Candidate Profile

At the top of the list of ideal sales candidates is coachability of the candidate.  What does this term mean when it comes to Inbound Sales?  It means someone who can execute your sales process.  

This is why it is so important to have a defined Sales Process.  

Elements of a Sales Hiring Process

  • A well-defined, customer-centric sales process
  • A deep understanding of your target personas
  • A salesperson profile based on your process and personas

New Sales Hire On-Boarding Process

  • Define your sales process.
  • Develop a playbook to help your reps execute the process.
  • Break the playbook into chunks that get delivered over time.

Include the internal processes a new employee needs to understand in order to thrive at your company.

 

 

 

Sales Funnel vs Flywheel

Flywheel Sales - A Virtuous Circle

For years, the Funnel has served as the default metaphor for how your marketing and sales process works.  But the reality was never so straight forward.  Customer's could and did enter your marketing funnel at various points, and sales and service could and does influence how those leads get turned into happy customers.

 

 

Screen Shot 2021-01-19 at 12.51.28 PM

 

The Flywheel Represents How Your Business Actually Works

The flywheel represents, at the top level, time you, the business owner, have spent working on the business.  It also graphically represents how a customer experiences the business processes you have designed and how your customer actually experiences them.

Happy Customers Drive More Customer Acquisitions

What the flywheel represents that a sales funnel cannot is that a satisfied customer will tell others about their experience.  An unsatisfied customer will also tell others about their experience.  That's why it is so important to work at delivering customer 'delight', both before, during and after the sale.   You want referrals, of course, and happy customers make referrals, both the ones you know about and the ones you do not.

Happy Customers Provide Energy To Your Business Flywheel

Probably the most important aspect of the flywheel metaphor is that your customers actually provide energy to your system.  They are much more important to your business success than just the transaction.  They can:

  • Drive New Customers To You From Giving Positive Referrals
  • They will buy more from you
  • They will increase their average order value over time, if you take care of them.

With fully integrated Sales, Marketing and Service systems like Hubspot, you can not only set up these processes, you can measure them, at every stage of the journey.   

There's a lot more to know about the Flywheel.

 

 

 

Sales Prospecting

Hubspot Makes Prospecting Easy

That said, you still have to do the hard work of following up.  One of the ways it makes prospecting easy is by showing when someone has visited from a particular company, even when that person has not yet identified themselves to you via completing a form.

Use Chatbots To Allow Prospects To Qualify Themselves

You can dramatically improve your prospects experience with you by providing a chatbot, which is a free tool provided by Hubspot, even the free version.  It is much more than a simple chat tool - it can be designed to allow customers to tell you who they are, what they want, and as well, if they qualify to buy from you.   They are also a great ecommerce channel, and in fact, the Facebook Messenger Chat is one of the most used customer service channels.  It also happens to be possible to integrate Facebook Messenger with the Hubspot Chatbot tool to drastically simplify managing this channel.

Increase The Time You Spend Selling

On average, salespeople only spend about 36% of their time selling.

Source: InsideSales.com

That's right, most sales people spend almost 40% of their time NOT SELLING.  By using Hubspot efficiently, your sales team can dramatically increase the amount of time they spend actually selling.  Some of the tools provided by Hubspot that help to increase Sales Efficiency include:

  • Email Open Notifications - So you know when a prospect opened one of your emails and you can follow-up.
  • Task Lists Creation - Both automatic via workflows and manually.
  • Sales Email templates - save time by reusing email templates that work, yet send emails that are highly personalized with contextually relevant information.
  • Sales Document Repository.  Store and make available to the sales person the documents they need when they need them, so they aren't recreating them on their own.
  • Online Meetings Tool - Eliminate looking for an open meeting slot.  Include your meeting link everywhere and let your calendar fill up.
  • Zoom Integration - One of many ways you can provide your prospects an easy to use online meeting place.
  • Sequences - Workflows for salespeople.  Set up and send a series of personalized emails, reminders to link up on LinkedIn and create tasks. 
  • Recommendations - The system will use machine learning to recommend things such as when to send an email or actual phrases to include in what you're saying.

Sales Prospect Profile

One of the critical task every business must tackle is identifying the ideal Sales Prospect Profile.  Once you build a picture of who your ideal prospect is, you can use a system like Hubspot to enrich contact data to help you quickly focus on the right person.

There's much more to learn about prospecting using Hubspot and more generally, how to use the web for prospecting.

 

 

Read More About Creating a  Sales Prospect Profile

Sales Goals

Why Set Sales Goals?

“Great dreams aren't just visions, they're visions coupled to strategies for making them real.” - - Astro Teller

“We use the word ‘moonshots’ to remind us to keep our visions big — to keep dreaming. And we use the word ‘factory’ to remind ourselves that we want to have concrete visions — concrete plans to make them real.”

- Astro Teller

Goals can help you establish a consistent standard for high performance and productivity.

How To Set A Goal That Aligns With Your Company's Purpose

 

Use Objective and Key Results (OKR)

 

A goal setting system that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization.

OBJECTIVES

Statements that define the qualitative outcome of your goal.  Think of objectives as the intent behind your goal.  They define where you want to go.

“By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and ideally aspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine again fuzzy thinking —and fuzzy execution.”

-John Doerr

KEY RESULTS (KRs)

How you benchmark and monitor how you get to the objective.

“Effective KRs are specific and time bound, aggressive, yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable.”

- John Doerr

Key results are numeric.

Objective: Improve customer satisfaction

KR 1: Increase customer retention from 70% to 80% by 2021

KR 2: Achieve a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 15 from our company customers by Q4

Key results can be graded by setting:

  • Numeric key results
  • Binary key results

There's a lot more to learn about establishing Goals and Objectives.  

Read More About  Setting Sales Goals

Sales "Force Multiplier"

How To Leverage Hubspot To Multiply Your Sales Force

Have a Defined Sales Process

Just as a high performance team has a coach and playbooks, your sales team needs to have a highly defined and refined, yet flexible sales process.

Systematize Your Process

Once you have a fully documented Sales Process, you can then apply 'systems thinking' to every part of it.  What does that mean?  That high performance sales teams have and use tools and techniques to achieve their goals.

Get What Is Inbound Sales In A Unified Sales And Marketing System [Ebook]

Increase The Time Your Sales Force Spends Selling

If a sales person is spending 36% of their time 'not selling', then an obvious force multiplier tactic is to find ways to reduce this time, ideally, to zero.  

This means having marketing work closely with sales to prepare needed sales content, such as Case Studies, SOWs, and other documents that a sales team needs to support the sale.  For large enterprise sales, establishing 'bid centers' is a common tactic that has proven highly effective. 

What do they do?  

As many complex RFPs require input from experts from all over the company, and often, from outside the company, it makes sense for the response to these types of RFPs to be managed on behalf of the Sales Person.  

Develop Productized Services or a Menu of Services

Though very tough to do, especially when you offer highly complex products that  can be configured in a huge variety of ways, i.e., SAP, it is possible to develop a focused or productized service offering.  Others refer to it as a Menu of Services, but this is for simpler offerings.

Train and Coach Your Sales Force

Hiring the right people to start with, is a good start to building your Sales Team.  There's a lot you must get right to get the right people on the bus.  

But once they are on board, you need to provide the right amount of training, but not much, to get them 'onboarded' and selling.  This is where proper sales coaching comes into its own.  With a CRM system like Hubspot, where you can monitor and measure every aspect of the sales process, you can quickly spot performance issues and provide on-the-spot Sales Coaching. 

If you hired the right people, meaning they are coachable, you will quickly see results you can take to the bank.   

There's a lot more to learn when it comes to multiplying your Sales Force's productivity.

 

 

Read More About Using  Hubspot As A Sales Force Multiplier

Hubspot CRM - Customer Relationship Management

Why You Need A CRM?

Did you know that over half of all businesses are operating without a CRM?

 

75% of sales managers say that using a CRM helps to drive and increase sales.

 

When a company engages a customer using a CRM, that customer is likely to spend 20-40% more the next time they buy from that company.

SOURCE: CLOUDSWAVE

Why Do You Need a CRM?

Because it enables a company to provide faster, more personalized service to their customer.  This results in customers spending 20 to 40% more.

Only 57% Of Sales Reps Record Their Calls

Hubspot can automatically record a call, or just keep a record of the fact that a call was made and any notes you took during the call.  You can also create a task right from within the call log.

What Steps We Help You With Implementing Hubspot CRMS

  1. Help you create a CRM account
  2. Set up users and permissions
  3. Create custom properties
  4. Set up lead views
  5. Define your deal stages
  6. Import existing data into HubSpot
  7. Set your team  up with the email
  8. extension
  9. Help choose a marketing solution
  10. Teach you and your team to use reports in the CRM
  11. Train your team to use the CRM

There's much more to learn about the Hubspot CRM system

Read More About  Implementing Hubspot CRM

Social Selling

Align Your Company's Goals With The Right Channel

There are a variety of social media channels, the biggest of which include:

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Snapchat
  • LinkedIN

Align Your Buyer Persona With The Right Channel

Though each channel uses different 'actions' to denote things like engagement, at their core, all of them want you to spend time on their platform so they can you to advertise on them.

Hubspot, as a content market centric marketing and sales platform, helps you in a number of ways when it comes to getting positive results from the various social media channels:

  • Integration with the primary channels
  • An AI Driven Content Publish Calendar 
  • Measurement capabilities focused on what it takes to make a sale, versus vanity metrics.

Social Media as a Customer Service Platform

You can and should be listening for your customer's comments on social media.  By setting up #Hashtags and connecting, following and otherwise interacting with your clients, when done right, you can uncover valuable customer service interaction possibilities.

 

 

Read More About Social Selling

Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ)

Hubspot CRM Quote System

There are a variety of ways to speed up and streamline your quoting and Inbound Closing system using Hubspot and integrated tools, such as Pandadoc

Hubspot Price and Quote System

Hubspot itself allows you to create a catalog of services and associated prices, which you can you use to quickly prepare a quote for a client.  For example, when we quote on a Hubspot project, it is based on our own highly customized version of the proven hubspot consulting framework and we use the quote system to pull in our Hubspot consulting prices.   With its Stripe integration and other mechanisms, it allows you to 'close the deal' on services, thus turning the traditional manual process into an ecommerce system.

Pandadoc Enterprise CPQ System

When your quote or SOW requires more sophistication, then you can use the natively integrated Pandadoc CPQ system. With it, you can create complex templates, including embeddable videos, provide e-signature capability and simple payment mechanisms, such as Stripe Integration and more complex ACH payment capabilities.  There is also the possibility to embed tools within the system to provide even greater functionality.

 

There's a lot more to learn about CPQ systems

 

Get Started with Pandadoc

What Does an Inbound Sales Agency? Do

Inbound sales agencies specialize in helping companies attract, engage, and convert leads using inbound marketing strategies. These agencies offer a wide range of services to help businesses grow, including:

  • Content creation
  • Search engine optimization
  • Social media management
  • Email marketing
  • Lead nurturing
  • Sales enablement.

Inbound Sales And Marketing Agency

SAP BW Consulting, Inc. is a fully Certified Hubspot Marketing and Sales Agency that provides these services, delivering them using the Hubspot Inbound Sales Platform as their core enabling technology. Whether you need help with lead generation, customer acquisition, or customer retention, SAP BW Consulting can help you achieve your goals and grow your business with their expert inbound sales services.

Inbound Sales Services

When it comes to inbound sales, there are a variety of successful inbound sales strategies that businesses can implement to attract and convert leads. Some of these strategies include creating engaging content, optimizing for search engines, leveraging social media, nurturing leads, and enabling sales teams. At SAP BW Consulting, we understand that every organization is unique and requires a tailored Inbound Sales Approach to inbound sales. That's why we start every engagement with an Inbound Sales Assessment to identify where your business stands in terms of inbound sales. From there, we use our extensive enterprise sales background to develop a customized approach that aligns with your business objectives and drives growth. Our team is fully certified in the Hubspot Inbound Sales Platform, and we're committed to delivering expert inbound sales services that help you achieve your goals.

Inbound Consulting Services

As an Inbound Sales Company, meaning we drink our on Kool-Aid, we rely on Inbound Organic Leads that we generate from Inbound Marketing.  That means we know exactly what we sell, what the compelling vision is for our product, in the eyes of our customers, and that we have developed a huge variety of pieces of Inbound Content.  In short, we know how to generate Inbound Sales Leads.

Set Up Your Inbound Sales Funnel

At SAP BW Consulting, we believe that a successful inbound sales strategy starts with setting up an inbound sales funnel. This is no small task, as we want to make sure that all inbound sales leads are worked by the right inbound sales agent at the right time. That's why we start every engagement with an inbound sales assessment to identify where your business stands in terms of inbound sales. From there, we use our extensive enterprise sales background to develop a customized inbound sales approach that aligns with your business objectives and drives growth. Our team is fully certified in the Hubspot Inbound Sales Platform, and we're committed to delivering expert inbound sales services that help you achieve your goals. By setting up an inbound sales funnel, we can help you attract, engage, and convert leads using inbound marketing strategies, including content creation, search engine optimization, social media management, email marketing, lead nurturing, and sales enablement. Let us help you grow your business with our expert inbound sales services.

Inbound Sales Support

Once we've got your Inbound Sales Funnel defined and fully configured in the Hubspot Inbound Sales Software (CRM), we then start to train your Inbound Sales Team up on the appropriate Inbound Sales Techniques:

  • Creation of Inbound Sales Deals - Early on, there will be a temptation to delay the creation of Deals within the CRM system.  This is almost always a mistake.  We help you to both decide when is the most appropriate time to create a deal as well as to automate the deal creation process.
  • Inbound Sales Call Script(s) Creation - This is one of our favorite Inbound Sales Tactics.  While complex sales call scripts almost always get deviated from during real conversations, the simple act of creating them and rehearsing them is often enough to dramatically improve an individual Sales Rep performance.
  • Inbound Sales Email Templates - For many Inbound Sales Teams, there is little collaboration possible when it comes to creating sales email templates.  That's why we always strive to help your sales team create 'perfect' sales email templates and the sequences (a Hubspot tool) to drip-feed them out according to carefully choreographed plans.  That way, you can measure their effectiveness.
  • Inbound Sales Playbook - Inbound sales process steps need to be thought about in advance and gamed out.  Some call it engineering.  We call it developing your inbound sales playbook.  Inbound sales scripts are only a tiny fraction what needs to be developed to fully support your Inbound Sales Team.
  • Inbound Sales Training - We are firm believers in train the way you plan to win.  B2B Inbound Sales can be especially complex.  Your clients have very high expectations of your Account Executives.  A highly trained and highly experienced, Inbound Sales Representative, can be invaluable to a company.  That's why they have to be trained on your product, your unique value proposition as well as how to use the Hubspot CRM software effectively.

 

Inbound Sales Solution

As a Hubspot Certified Sales and Marketing Agency, we help both B2B and B2C companies implement advanced Inbound Sales Strategies using the Hubspot Growth Suite.  The platform, which provides marketing, sales, service, and revenue operations solutions, all off of one integrated platform, allows us to deliver an Inbound Sales Solution that is both customized to the needs of the individual customer as well being a cloud based SaaS solution which is constantly being updated.

Inbound Sales Conversions

One of the major advantages of the integrated nature of the Hubspot Sales Platform is that allows you track every lead from first contact all the way through to the final sale, eliminating any debate about who or what should get credit for the sale. As an Inbound Sales Consultant, Hubspot shines a light on every marketing and sales decision, and provides an objective measurement, measured in bottom-line dollars, of what works.