How Inbound Marketing Creates a More Effective B2B Sales Team
What if we told you there was a way to get clients to call your B2B sales team, instead of the other way around? You’d be interested, right? Well there is a way to do this, and it’s called inbound marketing.
The principle is simple: produce content that attracts leads to you, rather than traditional methods of push marketing, in which you put yourself in front of the potential lead, whether they wanted you to or not. (Want a longer explanation? Check our complete guide to inbound marketing.)
How Inbound Marketing Can Support Your B2B Sales Team
More than ever, buyers are performing thorough online research before making purchases. This isn’t just the case in the consumer market; B2B clients are using online search to increase their efficiency when sourcing products and services for their businesses. What that means is that a digital presence, and an effective one, is crucial for any B2B manufacturer or service provider who wants to stay competitive. Using inbound marketing in that digital strategy can support your sales team in many ways.
Content Creation Pre-Qualifies Leads
Creating content that is useful to your potential buyers at every stage of the buyer’s journey is one of the ways that inbound optimizes your B2B sales team’s time. If your clients can get the information they need about the product or service you provide from your website, without ever having to call you, that means that
a) when they do call, they’re qualified leads and
b) your sales team is spending less time fielding calls about general awareness topics from unqualified parties who are not ready to make a purchase decision.
Awareness stage content will inform readers about the value of your product or service and allows them to self-qualify or disqualify, before ever making contact with sales.
Lead Nurturing Content Builds Trust
This content also helps you to build buyer trust. Buyers are more skeptical than ever of salespeople, who ultimately have an agenda—make a sale. When you create content on relevant topics that address the needs, concerns, and challenges that your potential customers face without an obvious sales pitch or pressure to make a purchase, these readers come to trust and appreciate your brand.
The formula is simple: produce quality content → attract leads → make sales. If your content is informative and compelling enough, it can practically make the sales for you. Investing time writing content saves you time—you invest the time writing once, but it’s read numerous times—and effort—non-leads will disqualify themselves, and buyers at the decision stage will contact you. When your B2B sales team isn’t busy fielding calls for awareness stage information, they can focus their energy on qualified leads who are ready to make purchases, and investing their time in these leads will increase sales and produce satisfied customers.
If you’re interested in what inbound marketing can do to support your B2B sales team, or how you can implement digital marketing strategies for your company, let’s talk. For more information on inbound marketing for B2B manufacturers, check out our comprehensive guide.
