Sales makes the world go round. You could be selling yourself at an interview, selling your product over the phone or field salespeople could be meeting clients on the road. Sales is a never ending cycle that goes on and on. The way we sell changes over the years, months and even weeks. Below I have laid out some inbound marketing tips to help transform your sales team.

Let’s start with some interesting facts that highlight the importance of inbound marketing:

• The Content Marketing Institute reports that 8 out of 10 people identify themselves as blog readers, and 23% of all time spent online is spent on social media sites.
• HubSpot’s research shows that 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search result.
• According to Search Engine Journal, inbound leads cost 60% less than outbound leads.
• Jeff Bullas writes that articles with images get 94% more views over those without an image.

As technology advances, so do the possibilities for both the seller and the buyer. Its vital that your field sales teams have the best possible information at their fingertips so they can target customers with the right content, at the right time. 

Inbound Marketing Tip #1: Attracting visitors to your website

The first of our inbound marketing tips is how to attract visitors to your website. The key here is to provide your potential customers with something of use to them. Keep your business top of mind. The best example of this is HubSpot. They practically invented inbound marketing and have become masters in providing useful information to business people worldwide. One of the main ways they do this is blogging.

Blogging

Starting a blog is the single best way to get found organically by your potential customers. It provides your target market with information they want to read and positions you as a source. The more you do this, the more you’re seen as an expert in your chosen area.

For example, an event management company may start a blog titled, ‘The 10 best apps for field salespeople’. This title is not directly related to the event they will be hosting, but they know that their target audiences are field sales people. Therefore, this blog will be of interest to them.

Keywords

Keywords are a vital area to keep your website high up in the search rankings. Using the previous example of ‘ ‘The 10 best apps for field salespeople’, the keywords here would be ‘’best apps for field salespeople'. It’s important to analytically research the keywords your potential customers would most likely search for.

Inbound Marketing Tip #2: Converting visitors into leads

Now, you have visitors on your website. How do you make them buy? I have devised some inbound marketing tips below. Contact details are a must. You can’t convert your visitors unless you have a way to contact them. The way you do this is through big juicy calls to action, killer landing pages, and customer forms offering value.

Landing pages

This is any page on your website. As with your CTA, people’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, so make sure you keep it short and not too clustered. Nothing is more unattractive than landing on a text heavy page. There are two main types of landing pages:

• Click through landing pages:

This is where the CTA button is most important. The sole purpose for this landing page is for the visitor to click through to the next page – Usually a registration or shopping cart page.

• Lead generation landing pages:

These pages are designed to capture the vital customer information needed to continue the process. By clicking through here the customer will receive something in return, below are some inbound marketing tips and examples:

1. Ebook/Whitepaper
2. Webinar registration
3. Free trial
4. Competition entry
5. Discount coupon/voucher

CTA

This is your instruction to the audience on how to take immediate action and benefit from your product. It’s a vital part of your content to master. When designing your Call to action button, below are a few best practices you can follow:

Keep it short and sweet – Potential customers don’t want a long-winded phrase squeezed into a box. The rule of thumb is to keep it below five words, two being ideal.

Give it some punch! – Action verbs create a sense of urgency for the customer and make it more likely for them to act (e.g ‘Get started’ or ‘learn more’)

Keep it simple - No need for any fancy lingo here, let the potential customer know exactly what to expect when they click on the button.

Be unique – Help the button stand out, but make sure to keep it in the colour scheme of the overall web page.

For more tips on nailing down a killer CTA and in turn increasing your sales, visit our friends at Wordstream.

Form

As you may have guessed, asking the right questions are key. You must get the balance right. If you’re too pushy with your questions, this may turn the potential customer off your product. If you’re questions aren’t detailed enough, you may not get sufficient information needed to follow up with your lead. Contact forms are filled out because they offer something (a demo, a free trial, a sample etc). Getting this stage right is key, because once you get the customer details, you can follow up with them and start the process of increasing your sales. HubSpot offer some top notch form builder software which can be foundhere.

Inbound Marketing Tip #3:Closing the leads

This is the moment your visitor who has come through the sales funnel and popped out the other end a customer. This is the result of hard work from both the sales and marketing teams. It’s the ‘sign on the dotted line’ moment that we are all familiar seeing on on the big screen. As a wise man once said:

"Always be closing… that doesn’t mean you’re always closing the deal, but it does mean that you need to be always closing on the next step in the process." – Shane Gibson

This is neither the start nor the end of the process, but it is a vital cog in the inbound machine. Please find below some inbound marketing tips on CRM systems and emails to help our leads cross that magic purchase line.

CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help you easily keep track of all leads and customers as well as helping you get in touch with the right prospects at the right time. This is a great way to increase sales and move on to the next step. Find out more at on the Salesforce website, one of the most successful CRM systems on the planet. Alternatively, learnHow to choose the perfect sales force automation system.

Emails

Sometimes that extra bit of a push is needed. A customer may digest your content, complete your form, click on your CTA, and still not purchase.

It’s important not to forget about these people and leave them out in the dark. You already have information on exactly what they have viewed and where their interests lie. From here, a series of well constructed, customer focused emails with information that you know interests them could be the deal breaker you need. Emails are sometimes forgotten about through technological advances but their importance has not waned. According to Salesforce's 2016 State of Marketing Report, “80 percent of marketers agree that email is core to their business.”

Inbound Marketing Tip #4: Delighting these customers so much they become promoters

In days gone by once you sell your product/service that’s it – boom – you’re done! You shake hands with the new customer and never hear from them again until there is a problem. It’s not that simple anymore. Customers are no longer happy with being satisfied, they want to beDELIGHTED! This is one of my personal favorite inbound marketing tips. According to statistics conducted by client heartbeat,

"The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%. The probability of selling to a new customer is 5-20%."

Social Media Monitoring

The power of social media is huge. More and more people, including your Uncle, Mom, and even your Grandmother are now on Facebook. This is a great way for a business to delight their customers by keeping an eye on feedback that they may post (be it good or bad) and answering any questions they may have. This can also be monitored through comments left on blogs, videos, and message boards/forums. Further and deeper monitoring can be conducted with social media analytics tools and software. For more information on social media best practices, check out Brandwatch.

Surveys

Listening is a key part to any business’ success. Whether it’s your employees or customers, you need to understand how they feel about your business. As with online forms, asking the right questions can make or break both current and future deals. Below are some best practices involved with survey questions:

• Give the prospect a good reason to get involved – Life is short, and people don’t want to waste their precious time on boring or tedious tasks. As is the case in blog posts, give the potential customer an incentive to get involved, something in return. The most popular way to do this is enter them in a competition for some prizes such as gift cards, tablets etc depending on the budget you have available.
• No tricks – If the survey will take 10 minutes, don’t say it will take 5. This will do nothing to improve your relationship with your customer and will affect the trust factor between both parties.
• Target market - Before writing out a survey, be sure to target the correct market. Ideally, buyer personas should be outlined so you know exactly who the survey is for and your speaking their language. We don’t want questions to be oversimplified or over complicated as this may cause annoyance.
• Always say ‘thanks’ – End the survey on a high note and be sure to give the customer an option to have their own input. And, of course, say ‘thank you’. As a wise man said –

"Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot." – Clarence Thomas

Customer Service Calls

People buy from people. Keeping in contact with customers as they use your product sounds obvious, but not every company does it - just the successful ones!

It’s much easier to keep your current customers, than acquire new ones. A five minute customer service call every couple of weeks can be the difference between a customer continuing their $10,000 dollar a month subscription or cancelling their account. The small details do matter. Remembering to acknowledge things such as a customer’s upcoming birthday, the birth of a child or even a simple Christmas card could work wonders for keeping the cash flowing in.  

So, there you have it. That’s the age old question, ‘how to increase your sales’ answered through some top class inbound marketing tips. The world is changing every day, but for now at least, inbound marketing looks like it’s here to stay. Just to recap:

• Attract visitors through world class content

• Convert these visitors to leads by gathering their contact details

• Close the deal and convert to customers

• Delight these customers to the extent that they tell ALL their friends

By following the above inbound marketing tips you can transform your sales team and increase the number of meetings as well as conversions. Here at Badger we love your feedback, do these inbound marketing tips work for your business? Could they increase the power of your field sales team? Thanks for reading and feel free to subscribe for trial!