入站销售：如何出售潜在客户购买方式

Today, the power in the buying and selling process has shifted from the seller to the buyer. The buying process is transformed.

Which is why inbound sales is a critical foundation of any successful sales team strategy — because as the buying process changes, the sales process needs to transform, too.

Whether your sales process relies on inbound leads or targeted outreach, whether you’re a big company or small, and whether your sale is complex or simple — inbound sales is relevant. That’s because入站销售transforms selling to match today’s empowered buyer — so sales reps can sell the way people buy.

What is inbound sales?

Inbound sales is a personalized, helpful, modern sales methodology. Inbound salespeople focus on their prospect's pain points, act as a trusted consultant, and adapt their sales process to the buyer journey.

Inbound sales starts with attracting qualified leads through inbound marketing — this includes using video marketing, social media, and blogging to attract interested audiences.

Next, as an inbound salesperson, you'd want to connect with the lead to learn more about their problems and challenges. This can help you determine whether your product or service is a good fit fortheirneeds.

Once you've determined it's a good fit, you'd work with the lead to explore areas of opportunity and explain how your solution can help them reach their goals.

As you deepen the relationship with the prospect, actively listen to their concerns, and express genuine interest in helping them solve their problems, you'll be able to turn qualified prospects into customers and brand advocates.

And that's allwithoutwasting your time sales pitching to people who don't have an interest or need in your product or service.

Next, here's how to understand the difference between inbound and outbound sales.

Essentially, with inbound you are attracting interested customers by providing incomparable value through inbound marketing materials.

With an outbound approach, you're using asales funnelto get in front of as many people as possible, potentially wasting your efforts by engaging with consumers who are uninterested in what you're selling.

理解power of inbound sales, let's take a look at a few quick stats:

• 76％的买家准备在社交媒体上进行销售对话。（（Source)
• According to LinkedIn, 62% of B2B customers respond to salespeople who connect by sharing content and insights that are relevant to the buyer. (Source)
• When asked about quality content, 65% of B2B buyers said informational, easy to consume content is an important factor in their buying decisions. (Source)
• 41% of B2B buyers view 3-5 pieces of content online before interacting with a salesperson. (Source)
• 74% of business buyers conduct over half of their research before making a final purchasing decision. (Source)
• Personalization can help breed inside sales success. When both the message and subject line are personalized, emails have an average open rate of 5.9%and a click rate of .2%. (Source)
• 在新客户获取中，电子邮件比Facebook或Twitter高40倍。（（Source)
• Sales reps that focus on the value they can deliver to a customer during calls are 96% more successful. (Source)

By comparison, outbound sales can be more difficult to implement, particularly since it requires salespeople to conduct cold outreach to people who may or may not be interested in your product or service.

但是，在某些情况下，出站销售非常有效。

For instance, let's say you sell education software specifically for schools. In this case, you might call the superintendent of a school district and explain how your solution has already helped other schools in the surrounding region.

Even if the superintendent hasn't expressed interest by reading your blog posts or engaging with your social media pages, it doesn't mean she isn't interested – rather, it could mean she doesn't have existing knowledge of the types of solutions you and your competitors' offer.

此外，外站销售可能是您组织进入新市场的好机会。如果有合格的潜在客户尚未听说您的公司，那么您不想忽略它们，希望他们最终通过入站营销吸引它们。bob全站app这是入站和出站销售都可以帮助您的销售组织达到目标的地方。

What is easier, inbound or outbound sales?

出站销售是一个更加困难的过程，在外包销售方面取得成功可能更具挑战性。凭借出站销售，销售人员需要自行进行研究，识别痛苦点并以一个挑战的决策者来概述他们的解决方案如何满足公司的需求 - 而没有该买家表现出对与一份交谈的兴趣bob全站app销售员。

Outbound selling is also incredibly time-consuming. Consider, for instance, how it takes an average of有18个与买家真正联系的电话. And when you做finally reach the buyer, you need to convince them that your product or service is a good fit for them even if they've never heard of your business before. Basically, you're starting from scratch.

另一方面，在某些方面，入站销售要容易得多。而initialinbound marketing foundationcan be hard to build — i.e. creating a website with a strong SEO ranking, writing high-converting blog posts, and expanding your social media presence to reach new audiences — once the foundation is established, it's much easier for your sales team to pitch to leads who've already expressed interest in your brand.

此外，很难制定强大的入站销售策略，因为它要求您的销售领导者创建与买方旅程保持一致的策略。所有这些都需要时间，精力和奉献精神。

Simply put, inbound sales might take more work upfront, but it's ultimately the easier approach once you've created a strong inbound selling strategy. Outbound selling is more time-consuming and challenging because you're selling to people who haven't expressed interest in your brand.

Let's review some tactical steps to get you started with inbound selling, next.

入站销售Techniques

1. 定义买家的旅程。
2. Develop a sales process that supports the buyer's journey.
3. 确定您理想的买家角色。
4. Lead with a helpful, customized prospecting message.
5. Craft customized questions to uncover the prospect's pain.
6. Give a tailored presentation.

1.定义买家的旅程。

Legacy sales teams build their sales process around their own needs, not their buyers’. Legacy salespeople focus their energy on “checking the boxes” their sales manager laid out for them instead of listening to the buyer and supporting them through the purchasing process. As a result, the seller and buyer feel misaligned. Furthermore, this self-serving process delivers minimal value to the buyer. Buyers don’t want to be prospected, demoed, or closed. These steps add zero value to the buyer because all the information they get in these meetings can be found without a sales rep’s help.

If salespeople cannot add value beyond the information buyers can find on their own, the buyer has no reason to engage with salespeople at all.

Inbound sales teams avoid this issue by starting with the Buyer’s Journey. Before they ever pick up a phone or send an email, they make it a priority to understand their buyer’s world.

We recommend the following three-part framework for the Buyer’s Journey:

Awareness

During the awareness stage, buyers identify a challenge they are experiencing or a goal they want to pursue, then decide whether or not it should be a priority. In order to fully understand your buyer’s awareness stage, ask yourself:

• How do buyers describe the challenges or goals your offering addresses?
• How do buyers learn more about these challenges or goals?
• How do buyers decide whether the challenge or goal should be prioritized?

Consideration

在考虑阶段,买家clearly defined their challenge or goal and have committed to addressing it. They evaluate different approaches or methods available to solve their challenge or pursue their goal. In order to fully understand your buyer’s consideration stage, ask yourself:

• 买家调查哪些类别的解决方案？
• How do buyers perceive the pros and cons of each category?
• What differentiates your category in the buyer’s eyes?

Decision

In the decision stage, buyers have decided on a solution category. They create a list of specific offerings and vendors in their selected category and decide on the one that best meets their needs. In order to fully understand your buyer’s decision stage, ask yourself:

• What offerings do the buyers typically evaluate?
• 买家使用哪些标准评估可用产品？
• What differentiates your offering in the buyer’s eyes?
• Who needs to be involved in the decision? How does each stakeholder’s perspective on the decision differ?

To put this all in context, here is an example of a buying journey for a fictitious recruiting company called Tyre Recruiting.

Let’s say Tyre Recruiting has 10 employees, all of whom are on-staff recruiters except for their CEO. Tyre Recruiting helps companies find salespeople to hire. The firm targets U.S.-based companies in the technology and health care sectors with less than $100M in revenue.

招聘人员在招聘寻找轮胎公司that fit their target profile and convince the company to hire the recruiter to source sales candidates. The CEO of Tyre Recruiting decides to use the inbound sales methodology to drive their customer acquisition process.

Here’s the journey Tyre Recruiting’s clients go through when selecting a recruiting firm:

2. Develop a sales process thatsupportsyour buyer through the journey.

Once the buying journey is defined, the next step is to build your sales process. Unlike legacy sales teams that design their sales process first, inbound sales teams build a sales processafterthe buying journey has been defined. This inbound sales processsupportsthe buyer through their purchasing journey. As a result, salespeople and buyers feel aligned through the buying and selling process, not at odds with one another.

In order to develop an inbound sales process, ask yourself what your salespeople can be doing at the awareness, consideration, and decision stages to support buyers. We recommend the following four-part framework for your sales process, or the入站销售Methodology:

1. 确认
2. Connect
3. Explore
4. Advise

Inbound salespeople确认strangers who may have goals or challenges they can help with. These strangers become铅。

Inbound salespeopleConnect这些导致帮助他们决定是否他们should prioritize the goal or challenge. If the buyer decides to do so, these leads becomequalified leads.

Inbound salespeopleExploretheir qualified leads’ goals or challenges to assess whether their offering is a good fit for the qualified leads’ context. If it turns out it’s a good fit, these qualified leads becomeopportunities.

Inbound salespeopleAdvisethese opportunities on how their offering is uniquely positioned to address the buyer’s context. If the buyer agrees the salesperson’s offering is best for their context, these opportunities becomecustomers.

Here’s Tyre Recruiting’s hypothetical sales process, mapped to the buying journey, for Tyre Recruiting.

3. Define your "Identify" process.

During the Identify stage, legacy salespeople are unaware of which buyers are active in a buying journey. Instead, legacy reps identify buyers they believe are a good fit and start calling those buyers randomly.

Here’s the problem: Many buyers have already entered the Awareness stage of the buying journey before they engage with salespeople. These active buyers should be targeted first, but legacy salespeople fail to differentiate active buyers from passive buyers.

Inbound salespeople are able to separate active from passive buyers, so they focus their time on buyers who are already in the awareness stage of the buying journey. These buyers may have recently visited the company website, filled out a form, opened one of the salesperson’s emails, or left a clue of their need in some other way.

Before you can identify potential buyers, you need to define which buyers you can help and which buyers you can’t. This is called the ideal buyer profile, and defines which buyers are a good fit for your offering and which ones are not.

Once the ideal buyer profile is defined, use the following hierarchy of lead sources to prioritize leads.

1. Inbound leads:Visitors to your website who provide their contact information via a conversion form and are from a company that matches your ideal buyer profile. Do not worry if the contact is not your buyer. Focus on their company.
2. Inbound companies:Anonymous visitors to your website from companies that match your ideal buyer profile. In this case, you have the company name but no contact information on the buyer. You can use the Prospects tool in HubSpot CRM to identify these companies
3. Trigger events:Watch out for trigger events that suggest a buyer is active in a buying journey. Hypothetical trigger events include social media mentions of your company or a competitor by potential buyers, social media mentions a keyword or hashtag aligned with your value proposition, a social media post or blog post by a potential buyer, or a new role or new executive hired by the company.
4. Social selling:Invest at least a few hours each week publishing content, responding to relevant conversations, and sharing other content that would be interesting to your buyer. Doing so not only develops your personal brand with your buyers, it also helps you identify additional leads to pursue.
5. Common connections:Passive buyers who fit your ideal buyer profile who you are connected to via professional acquaintances, personal friends, or maybe even family.
6. Passive buyers:As a last resort, identify passive buyers who highly match your ideal buyer profile.

In all cases, enrich your identified leads with information about the buyer’s interests and demographics.

4. Define your "Connect" process.

在连接阶段，传统销售人员将他们的勘探工作集中在冷电子邮件和冷语音邮件上。这些冷水展览突出了相同的通用电梯音高，并试图吸引买家，以查看有关销售人员产品的演讲。当传统销售人员实际上接到电话中时，大部分努力都花在预算的规模和花费的权力上。

然而,现代的买家并不依赖于消息摇来摇去m salespeople to learn about products and services. This information is readily available online whenever buyers are interested. And modern buyers are not ready for a presentation at this stage of their journey. They want to have a two-way conversation with an expert who can help them frame their goal or challenge.

当入站销售人员接触买家,他们lead with a message personalized to the buyer’s context. This context could be the buyer’s industry, role, interests, or common connections. In their opening outreach, inbound salespeople make an offer aligned with the Awareness stage of the buying journey. For example, inbound salespeople may offer a free consultation or ebook about the area the buyer is researching.

Inbound salespeople prepare themselves for the Connect process by defining their personas. When defining personas, segment your target market by company type. Then, pinpoint the different types of people you target within those companies. For example, you can segment the companies you target by industry, size, or geographic location. You can segment the people you target by role, title, function, or common behaviors.

在我们的轮胎招聘示例中，该公司有六个角色：

• Persona A: VP of Sales at a technology company
• Persona B: Director of Recruiting at a technology company
• Persona C: CEO at a technology company
• Persona D: VP of Sales at a healthcare company
• Persona E: Director of Recruiting at a healthcare company
• 角色F：医疗保健公司首席执行官bob全站app

Once personas are designed, inbound salespeople outline their outreach strategy, or sequences, for each. The persona sequence defines how you will reach out to the buyer (phone, email, social, etc.), when you will reach out, and how often you will reach out.

最后，入站销售人员为序列中的每次尝试开发了外展内容。在识别阶段中发现的对买方环境的宣传非常重要。

An example sequence for Persona A for Tyre Recruiting is show below.

5.定义您的“探索”过程。

在探索阶段，买家表示兴趣时，传统销售人员过渡到演示模式。但是，旧版销售人员对买方的背景尚未足够理解，尚未提供增值介绍。由于买方的环境不发达，旧版销售人员还恢复为通用演示文稿，概述了信息购买者已经可以访问的信息。

Inbound salespeople transition into exploratory mode when a buyer expresses interest. Inbound salespeople recognize they do not have the level of trust and understanding with the buyer to deliver a personalized presentation. In fact, inbound salespeople are not even sure whether they can help the buyer at this stage.

Instead, inbound salespeople leverage initial buyer interest to develop additional trust and uncover buyer goals through an exploratory conversation. They use their own credibility to probe deeper into the buyer’s specific goals and challenges. As experts, they can assess whether they can help the buyer efficiently and more thoroughly than prospects can on their own. Through proper value positioning and a strategic questioning process during the Explore stage, inbound salespeople guide prospects to draw their own conclusions about whether a product is right for their needs.

Inbound salespeople build an exploratory guide to ensure the discussion is effective for the buyer.

这是轮胎招聘用来指导与买家对话的示例探索性标题，以及这些步骤在真实的销售对话中听起来像什么：

6. Define your "Advise" process.

During the Advise stage, legacy salespeople deliver the same presentation and same case studies to all buyers. Legacy salespeople might do some light discovery around buyer needs -- just enough to know there might be interest. Then, they revert to autopilot and deliver their generic presentation.

However, modern buyers have already seen the content of this generic presentation online. They struggle to connect the company’s generic value proposition with their specific challenges, and legacy salespeople fail to help the buyer make these connections.

On the other hand, inbound salespeople tailor the presentation to the buyer’s context, leveraging the information gathered during the Connect stage. During the exploratory conversation, inbound salespeople discover whether the buyer can be helped, wants their help, needs their help, or is prioritizing goals the salesperson is uniquely positioned to help with.

发现买方context and tailoring the presentation accordingly, inbound salespeople add tremendous value to the buyer’s journey beyond the information available online. Inbound salespeople serve as translators between the generic messaging found on the company’s website and the unique situation of the buyer.

In today’s selling environment, salespeople have to realize that they serve a completely different function than their predecessors. Legacy salespeople who only serve as sources of information will find themselves unable to compete with inbound salespeople who serve as translators between the generic information available online and the unique needs of the buyer. Enter the modern world of sales and get started with inbound sales today by taking HubSpot Academy’s入站销售class.