How to Use Inbound Prospecting to Get More Sales

When it comes to sales and outsourcing, there's often a debate about outsourcing inbound prospecting and letting a professional partner do the job or working with an in-house sales team.

Inbound prospecting is a complex step in the sales funnel to generate more buyers.

It requires expertise and skilled SDRs to avoid losing leads to the competition.

This article will explain how inbound prospecting works and why it is better for you to partner with an external expert sales outsourcing company.

Inbound prospecting is a strategy used in sales and marketing to attract and engage potential customers who have already shown interest in a company's products or services.

Unlike traditional outbound prospecting, which involves reaching out to potential customers who may not have expressed interest, inbound prospecting focuses on creating content and experiences that draw potential customers in and encourage them to engage with the company.

Inbound prospecting typically involves creating high-quality content such as blog posts, social media posts, videos, and whitepapers that address the needs and interests of potential customers. By creating valuable content, companies can attract potential customers to their websites or social media profiles, where they can learn more about the company and its products or services.

Once a potential customer has shown interest by engaging with the company's content, the company can use strategies such as lead magnets, email marketing, and personalized outreach to nurture the relationship and move the customer toward a purchase decision.

Inbound prospecting aims to create a sustainable and scalable way to generate leads and build relationships with potential customers.

This happens when salespeople prioritize quantity above quality or lack criteria for qualifying new leads and prospects.

Salespeople are frequently left to their own devices when determining who is likely to convert and when and how to approach them, which isn't enough in today's market. Worse yet, promising opportunities may fall through the cracks if they don't know how to prioritize.

About 61% of marketers report generating high-quality leads as one of the most difficult aspects of running a business.

The challenge is recognizing whether a lead can be turned into a prospect. It is a waste of everyone's time when you focus on someone, and later, it turns out that the prospect is not a good fit.

SEO is essential to increase traffic to your website.

If your organization is not focusing on SEO to be highly ranked in the search results, prospects won't find you. After all, 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.

The consequences are fewer people coming to your website and fewer people becoming paying customers.

Your startup may offer the right solution to solve the problems of your ideal customer profile. Still, if your content can't create a high engagement rate, the likelihood that people will submit their email addresses is low.

Test your content with A/B testing to see how it performs.

It's practically impossible to conduct effective inbound prospecting without the right sales enablement tools.

You will lose time, money, and potential clients if you use the wrong software or try to keep up with all the essential work without specialized equipment. And if you have to be willing to spend on it too.

It shouldn't be about setting a meeting or product demo or making a sale right away. Form a relationship and remind them of their interest. At this stage, it is too early to ask for concrete actions to close a deal.

The lead still wants to find out whether your company offers them enough value to buy or not.

So how do you overcome these challenges?

Once you have optimized your SEO to show up high on search engine results and your social media strategy has drawn interest, you must hold on to that interest. Offer your visitors value and show them you provide a product or service that can help them. Provide useful information on your web page and implement a call-to-action (CTA) to get more information from your prospects.

A typical approach is to exchange information. People sign up for your newsletter for free information or tools, to download an eBook, or to request a demo after watching a webinar.

This information exchange can provide valuable information about your prospects if you ask for it in a form. You can gain information such as their name, email address, phone number, company, location, and title, among other things.

This makes the prospect a real lead.

Now that you have leads, you need to turn them into customers. But be careful.

Remember that selling or setting an appointment is not the right step at this stage. Your leads are not ready yet to make a decision. So nurture them.

All the information you get from your leads can be used to give them valuable resources to help them see how you can solve their pain points.

Your aim has to be to gain trust and start a conversation. Providing information with an email newsletter, warm calling, giving them offers, and researching them is essential not to lose their interest.

According to LinkedIn, 62% of B2B customers respond to salespeople who connect by sharing relevant content and insights with the buyer.

Having a specific strategy to turn your leads into buying customers is extremely important to get the most out of your inbound prospecting. Set specific goals.

For example, "I want x% leads to turn into buying customers in x weeks." Be realistic about your goals.

It also helps you see what's working and what's not working.

Keep a list of leads so you can keep them up to date on new products, services, deals, and company developments.

Keep track of each lead status so you can customize the content you provide them.

This makes the approach personalized, and leads will be able to tell.

Use the information they give you to learn more about their personality and pain points.

A quick check on Google and LinkedIn is a good start. Also, a CRM can deliver helpful information about the person and their company.

Offering your leads resources and solutions will bring them closer to seeing you as the answer to their problems.

For example, discount codes or free consultation meetings help win customers faster and sustainably.

Once a web visitor gives their information to your company, it's essential to have an ongoing conversation. With follow-up emails or warm calls, you can ask questions to get more information about them.

This helps you have conversations to move them to the next step in your sales funnel.

As we've seen, to overcome the challenges of inbound prospecting you need a dedicated team of professionals.

One way to make sure you have this is by outsourcing this part of your sales process to an SDR as a service company.

Full-time in-house teams that handle inbound prospecting and all the associated tasks are expensive to run. By outsourcing externally, you'll save on hiring and training costs.

Depending on your company's size and marketing growth objectives, a decent outsourced sales firm would be significantly less costly than an in-house team because you won't have to run with extra costs.

Extra costs for hiring internally don't only include the basics, such as a high salary and healthcare, but it also costs time.

After all, the SDR or BDR you're hiring internally will need time to be trained on how to do the job.

Whereas SDRs and BDRs at SalesPipe already know to start inbound prospecting immediately.

Outsourcing allows you time to focus on your strengths.

While the outsourced team handles the massive workload of putting your ideas into action, you can focus on product or service development.

Inbound prospecting takes a lot of time and effort. Researching and communicating with a long list of leads takes up to several hours. This saved time can be used to focus on other strategic decisions.

Hiring an external partner who handles your inbound prospecting will bring expertise to the game. Professional outsourced SDRs like our team here at SalesPipe are experts in doing research on their customers and communicating with them.

They identify their pain points and deliver helpful information and resources as part of their daily tasks.

Plus, they will have the support of their company, which specializes in lead generation.

Professionals may provide an independent view of your company and give new, innovative ideas and tactics to increase sales.

They will also receive the feedback of customers and keep track of it so that you can work on bettering your product or service.

Inbound prospecting is essential to convert leads into buying customers.

The process needs to be done by people who have the expertise to do proper research and have professional strategies and time they can dedicate to communicate with leads.

Because of the high requirements and the time-consuming aspect, it's worth considering working with an external partner. Losing valuable leads because the expertise is missing to turn them into buying customers is not what you want.

To learn more about how SalesPipe can help your inbound prospecting efforts, get in touch with us.