One thing that drives my wife crazy is that way I answer her questions about food. “Do you want chicken or steak?” My answer: “Yes!”
If there are two good choices, I want both! This is also true when it comes to developing net-new business. Having spent the first half of my career in sales and the second half in digital marketing, I believe that both play a critical role.
Are you happy with the amount of net-new business you’re getting? If you want it to grow, you need a strategy to attract and create new clients. After all, inbound marketing is great. But, here’s the challenge: for every buyer who is actively looking for what you sell, there may be 20 prospects who are not actively looking.
Your strategy should align marketing and sales to reach both groups: prospects who are actively looking and those who aren’t:
- Marketing’s primarily role is to attract and convert active lookers to sales leads.
- Sales’ primary role is to capture the attention of people who aren’t looking and convert them to opportunities.
Of course, your salespeople support marketing by taking qualified leads and bringing them through the sales process. Marketing supports sales by providing enabling tools to help them prospect more effectively. Properly aligned, these interdependent functions can drive higher levels of net-new revenue.
Inbound for Buyers Actively Looking
These buyers have a problem that needs to be solved. Like everyone these days, they go online to find answers to their questions.
To create inbound leads from buyers who are looking online, three things need to happen:
- You need to make sure that when they look for a solution, they find your company online.
- Once they find your company, you need to convert them to a sales opportunity.
- Finally (and most importantly), you need to quickly qualify them and hand off the opportunity.
In my experience, most dealers have made some kind of investment to get found in Google. However, just getting found is like having sales reps who doesn’t close—they may be well-dressed and look fantastic, but they won’t have a job for long. Similarly, if a website doesn’t close for the next step (in marketing, we call it “converting”), then you won’t get much in the way of leads from your website.
Finally, people filling out a form on your website is not enough. These leads need to be followed up on quickly—Harvard Business Review says that online leads should receive a response in less than 10 minutes. Sadly, many leads go stale when hours or days go by between the request and the follow up.
Leads can also come from more than just form completions. Instant chat, preferred by 54% of buyers, should be monitored during the business day so you can interact with website visitors. Social inboxes should be checked as well. Finally, looking through web visitor logs and triggering notifications based on lead scores can yield even more opportunities. Unfortunately, most dealers do not have anybody watching this.
Prospects Who Are Not Actively Looking: Outbound Prospecting
While your inbound marketing system is attracting the small segment of buyers who are actively looking, driving net-new business requires that you also do outbound prospecting.
In my experience, no inbound marketing system will drive enough opportunity to satisfy your appetite for revenue growth. Even with a steady stream of inbound leads, you should still do outbound prospecting because when you are the one creating the need, you have a great chance of closing the business.
Remember, there are two kinds of needs: felt needs and latent needs. Buyers with felt needs are doing research online. However, for every person with a felt need, there are many others with latent needs. They have the need, they just don’t realize it (or, the need is not causing enough pain that would motivate them to solve the problem and deliver the outcome). If you depend solely on inbound marketing, you’ll only touch the part of the market that’s actively looking. When you add outbound prospecting, you multiply your opportunity.
The job of salespeople is to bring latent needs to the surface to create felt needs. These become sales opportunities, and this is where I believe most sales reps have it backward. They spend most of their time looking for the hot opportunity with the buyer who is active in the buying cycle, rather than working to build relationships of trust during which they can turn latent needs into felt needs. If 1 in 100 prospects is currently “in the market” many sales reps will spend their days trying to find that one person, totally ignoring the 99 other businesses that probably have needs but don’t yet know it.
The good news is that much of the same content and many of the technologies you use to drive inbound leads can be used to make outbound prospecting more effective. Salesforce.com research tells us that it takes six to eight touches with a prospect to get an appointment. The old days of spray-and-pray, dialing for dollars prospecting doesn’t cut it.
Sales sequences allow reps to launch a series of emails, scripted call backs and social touches. With the push of a button, sequences can be set in motion, providing multiple touches over a period of time. Phone prospecting blocks, a staple of Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount, become hyper-effective as reps sit down to a pre-defined list of prospects to call.
What’s Your Strength?
In my experience, most companies tend to be good at either inbound marketing or outbound prospecting. Which one do you lean on most?
Allow me to challenge you—if you’re not good at inbound marketing or outbound prospecting, consider the benefits of developing a new stream of opportunities. For the area you’re good at, I challenge you to open your mind to the possibility that you could be doing this even better.
