Inbound Marketing Expands Into Inbound Sales To Help Clients Close Leads
Going into 2016 inbound marketing agency owners are going to get more and more requests from clients to help close leads. It makes sense when you consider it—most people think about marketing as leads generated. They don’t often think about the challenges associated closing those leads.
Now that inbound agencies have taken the lead generation puzzle and solved it to the point where leads are coming in on a regular basis, the sales team is now the next area to be put under the microscope. Based on our experience, once you prove you can generate leads you’re going to get pulled into the sales conversation.
Here’s how to prepare your agency to handle the inbound sales requests in 2016.
Understand The Issue With Sales Today
Buyer behavior has changed so dramatically that if your client is still selling the way they sold in 2005 they are likely going to be disappointed with the results. Today people don’t want to be pressured into anything. We want to be educated, nurtured and advised all through the sales process. As soon as you start pushing prospects, they disengage.
You have to be ready to tell this story to prospects and clients who have sales related challenges. You have to be able to show clients that the experience you're creating in the marketing process must be continued into the sales process.
If you want to connect with today’s buyers you need to educate, counsel, advise and coach them all the way through the sales process. Marrying inbound marketing with inbound sales means proactively working to create an inbound experience which increases average revenue per new client, shortens the sales cycle, improves the close rate.
Understand The Impact From Adding Inbound Sales
Adding inbound sales services to your inbound agency should allow you to increase your average monthly reoccurring revenue from ongoing retainers. It should also allow you to add extra service offerings to current clients who identify closing their leads as an issue. Finally, it should give you another option for resigning clients for a year two engagement with your firm.
But these only impact your agency. Adding inbound sales to your service portfolio should have a major impact on your clients' businesses too. In fact, this impact is even more important because you’re actually helping your clients realize the revenue necessary to justify their overall investment in your firm giving you better referrals, better references, and happier clients.
Create Your Inbound Sales Product Catalog
In the same way you’ve worked to create a product catalog for the inbound marketing services, you also need to create a product catalog for inbound sales services too. These catalogs allow you to define the services, the deliverables and then set the pricing associated with delivering these services in the specific way you describe them in the catalog.
Standardizing all your products/services across your entire agency also sets the groundwork for building playbooks and processes for each of these services. Further controlling the costs associated with delivery and providing consistent definitions of deliverables for all clients.
Test It With Your Agency First
One of the best ways to get good at inbound sales is the same way you got good at inbound marketing—do it for your own agency first. Create an inbound sales process for the agency and follow it religiously. Utilize content in your own sales process. Create some qualification criteria that helps flog unqualified prospects and move them out of your process early.
Use the new inbound sales process to create your sales funnel metrics. You know from your inbound work how many visitors you need each month and how many leads your conversion rate generates each month. Create the same metrics for your sales process. How many sales qualified leads do you need to generate the right amount of sales opportunities and then how many of those opportunities do you typically turn into new clients.
Benchmark your agency and then work to improve those metrics month over month. This exercise helps you improve your ability to deliver inbound sales services because almost every sales team works the same exact way.
Trial It With One Client
Then take that learning and apply it to a single client. You might want to offer the services for free because you are learning and trialing it. Better yet, maybe a discounted engagement would make more sense to your bottom line. But be transparent with your clients. Let them know this is something new and something you’re trying out.
Picking the right client to test new offerings like this is important. Make sure they’re ready to going down this path with you. Make sure your communication is open and honest. Most importantly make sure you have a strong business relationship and a solid personal relationship might help too. Solid relationships ensure that if you need to talk to them honestly about the progress—they’re going to be receptive to those conversations.
Once you get a few of these new inbound sales engagements under your belt you’ll be a lot more comfortable selling inbound sales and adding inbound sales to your standard engagements. The process of working on these tactics with your agency and with one or two selected clients provides you a valuable test environment to learn, make adjustments and create new service offerings in the future.
Start Today Tip – I know adding sales consulting services might not be what you envisioned when you started your firm. Perhaps this area feels uncomfortable. You’re at a crossroads. You’re either going to be an inbound marketing agency or you’re going to be an inbound agency. Today you need to make that decision and then start planning accordingly. Your clients don’t care what you call yourself, they just want results. Leads or revenue, either way you have to decide how you want to help. Perhaps you need to add a sales consultant to your team in 2016 and let them focus on delivering inbound sales services. Perhaps you’re comfortable delivering sales services on your own. Regardless, make the decision and execute accordingly.
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