Right now, you might be asking yourself, "how can inbound marketing help us achieve our growth objectives? Will b2b sales leads that we generate from inbound marketing result in actual revenue?
Truthfully, the only way to know is to actually see what inbound leads look like to begin with. So, I'm pulling back the curtain, and giving you a first-hand look of what an inbound lead looks like and how you can leverage them to increase sales.
Watch the video above and then keep reading to see why it works and how you can implement something similar.
Most b2b lead generation companies and agencies only care about one thing, because you only hired them to do one thing... which is to generate leads, of course.
But high-quality b2b sales outcomes don't just happen because there are more leads. They happen because those leads are met with strategic treatment. When they're generated by inbound marketing, they're treated with inbound sales techniques and tracked through inbound technologies like Hubspot. When they're generated in other ways they're treated accordingly.
Successful b2b sales reps are sheparded and coached when changes (even good ones) occur and aren't left to their own devices to find new business.
So, if VALUE is important when making inbound marketing investments, you must acknowledge the differences in how those leads are going to behave.
Here are a few critical differences that prove to be game changers one way or the other... either good or bad depending on how you treat your inbound marketing investments.
With inbound leads and properly installed and maintained customized business intelligence solutions in place you get to see every step your prospects make on your website and tracked content (like emails, social media, etc). Everybody's journey is different because each person has a mind of their own. And, with inbound, you're creating limitless ways of discovering your value proposition.
The same pitch won't work on everybody, and by equipping your salespeople with actual data behind the leads, they're not making any assumptions about what their prospects are interested in seeing.
It's one thing to know your company exists. It's another thing entirely to know you exist AND ask for your help. That's the thing about inbound leads - they're requesting your knowledge, because either they are directly asking for your time, or they're downloading or gaining access to something that requires them to give you their contact information in exchange.
Going back to the first point, knowing what they're doing and seeing them engaging with content that requires them to have some skin in the game will give your sales teams more fuel for those calls.
There is nothing quite as valuable as having permission to market and sell to somebody. When they give you their contact information, they're putting their trust into your hands, but ultimately, they're giving you a chance to help them solve their problems.
Now, it's important that you don't abuse the trust being instilled in you when that exchange occurs. For this reason, the nurturing process is crafted and refined to pull people from the early stages of their buyer's journey to making a decision.
When we initially launch an inbound campaign, we're looking to find answers to a lot of unknowns, because we are typically the first inbound marketers in the picture, and/or there is typically very little hard data for us to go off of. So, we create a lot of A/B tests, until we hone in on the details that we know lead to favorable outcomes.
Sales and marketing leaders share the same goals of being able to create repeatable, scalable processes with measurable outcomes. By having total visibility of their activities, we get to see where certain ideas fail and where others succeed. This allows us to scale and cross-pollinate between sales and marketing.
Explore our Sales Enablement Services to see how we can help you take your inbound b2b sales leads to the finish line: