How to get Inbound Buy-in from Your Sales Team

Our lifeblood here at Viral Element revolves around unifying marketing and sales. Although traditionally these have been separate departments, it’s time to realign your thinking and combine their efforts. By gaining inbound buy-in from your sales team, you can bolster business results in unprecedented ways. Here’s how to do so..

Imagine being sold on the idea of an elephant and getting a giraffe instead… how would that make you feel as a customer? Probably a mixture of confusion and a loud “that’s not what I bought” (what are you doing buying elephants, anyway?).

It’s our job as marketers to imbue sales teams with the right tools such as sales content libraries to help people know what they’re getting when they sign the dotted line. To get “inbound” buy-in from your sales team, you need to ask yourself some key questions. So get your confetti cannons ready! In the words of Lana Del Rey, we’re off to the races!

What to Ask for Buy-in

Sales has to muddle through tons of leads and nurture and qualify the ones they think are primed enough to be approached. There are a plethora of moving parts, so if the process isn’t refined, it can be difficult to ascertain what’s working and where there’s a spoke in the cog.

It’s the job of everyone to help facilitate this process, because more business means more opportunities.

Here are some valuable questions to ask regarding the sales team:

• What are the most frequent pain points sales are wasting their time with? Can these pain points be addressed with blogs, slide decks, or a previous video you’ve done?

• What takes up most of the sales department’s time? Try working with them to set up automated workflows that can educate leads and work to qualify them before sales has to spend their time with them on the phone, or in-person.

• Does your sales team struggle with managing their pipeline, or organizing their lead management? Consider setting up HubSpot’s CRM and/or using Sidekick. Want to learn more about this? Check out HubSpot’s blog on the benefits of using a CRM.

• Does your sales team waste time working “unqualified” leads? Help develop a strategy that does a better job of determining sales-qualified leads, or “SQLs.”

• Does your sales team follow a specific process? Develop a process that can be utilized across your sales team. This can be updated and refined over time as sales are made, and the funnel can be examined for kinks and obstructions.
• Is your sales team unaware of the content that marketing teams are producing? Every morning, have both teams join forces for a quick, stand-up meeting. This way, everyone is in the loop and sales understands the content that’s being produced to bring in new leads. You can read more about these quick, daily meetings here.

Inbound marketing is not a one person show; it requires an entire team to garner the most success. It involves the cooperation of both your sales and marketing teams; this concept has recently become so popular that it’s been coined “smarketing.”

Next Steps

By asking these questions, you will be setting your sales team up for success and it will help you find where the shortcomings are, and also how to accommodate said shortcomings with valuable material for leads. That way, no one will ever leave a sale expecting one thing and receiving another–everyone will be on the same page, and speaking the same language.

So don’t avoid talking to your sales team, because they are an invaluable asset to starting the inbound process with a client.

 

Source: Bluleadz