Building a repeatable sales process for your business, and applying it to all aspects of your sales team – from reps all the way down to your customers — adds consistency, efficiency and greater revenue to your organization.
In this four-part blog series, we’ll discuss each step of the inbound sales methodology and how to build an effective sales process that can be used company-wide.
Stage 1: Identify
Prior to forging a new relationship with a particular prospect, it’s important to first identify whether you are able to help this prospect. As common sense as this may sound to some, it’s still very common for businesses to receive calls from salespeople who are offering products or services that do not benefit their business.
When building a sales pipeline, “Identify” is the first stage in the Inbound Sales Methodology. This stage is the foundation for the entire process. The HubSpot Pipeline Bootcamp, instructed by @dantyre, teaches that in order to effectively go through the entire sales process, it’s critical to get this first stage right. If you can identify that you can get a prospect to go from where they are to where they want to be with the product or service that you’re offering, then this person can be considered a lead or a target account.
Once you know that you can help a particular business, you can get in touch with these leads, then follow the last three steps of the inbound sales methodology — CONNECT, EXPLORE, ADVISE — with the goal of establishing trust and then helping a business achieve its goals over a long period of time.
How to Find Leads
Leads can be found in a number of ways. Oftentimes, if a company is just putting a more defined process together, these leads can be found in their CRM. Other times, its through inbound leads, or those that come to your website and download an e-book, whitepaper or read a blog post. And lastly, leads can be found by monitoring conversations on social channels to look for buying signals or other trigger events that indicate that a company may be in need of your product.
How to Create an Ideal Prospect Profile
The identification of a lead should be preceded by a process that details what your company is looking for. Whether or not a prospect is considered “ideal” should be based on multiple parameters. For example, although there’s nothing wrong with saying “we help tech companies”, the fact is that the tech industry is varied and multi-faceted. This makes “we help tech companies” an overgeneralized statement and one that puts your company into a category with greater competition. When it comes to truly helping companies, the real movement happens when you delve deeper into the type of business that you’re reaching out to. Creating a very specific buyer profile opens your company up to a unique segment within a particular industry that may currently be underserved and not as sought out as a more generalized group.
An example of a specific “buyer profile” is the following:
- Tech companies that specialize in cybersecurity
- Must show various signs of desire to grow via online efforts
- $10M+ in annual revenue
- Sales cycle >60 days
- 50 employees or less
- Has a marketing department
In addition to this, a sales process should take a prospect matrix into consideration. Both the prospect fit matrix and the buyer profile should be posted for your entire organization to see so that lead generation is transparent.
If a prospect fits all, or most, of these criteria, as well as the criteria, they’ve passed the identification stage.
Getting in Touch
You can help the leads that you’ve identified in the prospect fix matrix in a major way; having this valuable information arms you with all that you need to have a meaningful and impactful conversation.
This is not a suggestion to SPAM these companies, but to approach them on an individual basis with information that’s helpful and speaks intellgently to their current pain points and challenges by doing one or more of the following:
- Send a helpful piece of content
- Do research and come up with tips that are helpful
- Invite them to a webinar that will help them solve some of the issues they’re experiencing
Notice a theme here? All of this communication should come out of a knowledge of the ability to help. You know that you have a product or service that’s of incredible value to a select segment of companies. The longer that these companies stay in the dark, the longer it’ll take for them to achieve their goals.
Next Step: Connect
Now that you’ve identified an ideal list of leads — get out there and HELP! Help, I say! Now is the time. These businesses need what you have to offer, they can afford what you have to offer and they want what you have to offer (they just don’t know that it exists yet!).
You can get in touch with the list that you created in a number of ways, including by phone, e-mail and on social channels.
In the next post, we’ll discuss what the “connect” stage of the inbound sales methodology is all about and how to effectively connect with prospects.
Thank you for reading our post! If you’re interested in learning more about inbound, or how you can effectively execute inbound sales or inbound marketing, get in touch with us. We offer a free consultation that packs in a whopping amount of value in 30 minutes. We’d love to hear from you.
