4 min read

Sometimes just a little is enough

By Sigurd Gran on 23.jan.2020 18:38:50

Topics: inbound

 

Most B2B companies rely heavily on their sales team to maintain and growtheir business. This isn’t because they’re not up-to-speed with the latest digital tools and trends. It is simply because it is manageable, familiar and because it works!

But, how can you start using the internet to scale the initiatives you already have in place?

HubSpot coined the term “Inbound Marketing” which describes the process of generating awareness of a problem in the market, so that providers can sell a solution to that problem to buyers who are tactically led through a purchasing process.This helps them solve subsequent issues along the way.

The main framework of this strategy is called the Inbound Model, which has later evolved into the Flywheel.

inbound model & flywheel 

 

 

 

Same s**t, different wrapping

A lot can be (and has been) said to advocate this approach to modern B2B marketing and sales, however, it is a rather generic approach (at this level) and it is hard to find many arguments against it. Since it is a very generic model it is also quite difficult to derive exactly how to utilize it for an individual company, and often one ends up hiring a person or a team to try and create the entire inbound marketing universe.

Truth be told, you can end up wasting a lot of money on stuff that doesn’t really create value.

What I find very useful is to look at the inbound methodology from a slightly different perspective. Instead of thinking about how to “attract”, “convert” and “close” I think about “relevance” and “timing”. How can you make what’s important to you important (enough) to others? How can you obtain a position as a relevant helper with important issues? How can you make sure your timing is aligned with that of your potential customers?

 

Relevance

How relevant your product or service is perceived is usually tightly connected to who has a budget for something, because, let’s face it, we’re not really selling to “personas” we are helping people with their “jobs to be done”.

If you want to reach the top of someone’s to-do-list you need to be aligned with the priorities their boss has set for them and that is usually not “find a new software we can use”. It’s usually more like “we need to hire more great people” or “we need to improve our customer support” or “we need to figure out a cheaper way to ship our product”.

When you figure out what’s your potential buyer’s “job to be done” you can start creating some accurate value propositions and explaining them on your website.

Obviously, you need some eyeballs on your website for this to make any sense. You need to drive relevant traffic to your content and, depending on the nature of your game, you can either tap into existing traffic through SEM and SEO or you have to “create some new” traffic hammering out content, do live events and some good old advertising. Those who find your (new?) value propositions relevant will visit your site and probably think your important stuff is important as well.

All of this is quite obvious and will hopefully generate some leads, however, you will be missing out on all the opportunities where the timing isn’t right. One way of solving this issue is to always have a large presence “top-of-funnel”, but there is a much better and more efficient way.

 

Timing

Let’s imagine a beautiful world, where all your potential clients let you know about your relevance to solving their problems some time in the future, and then later check in to let you know they are ready to start the purchasing process. At some level you can call this rational behaviour, however, we humans aren’t rational.

We have a very short attention span and we definitely have short memory. We tend to solve problems “on the fly” and we most definitely want to find all the information ourselves without talking to eager sales people.

This is where modern internet technology can help us most. With a quite simple setup, using either HubSpots suite of (free in many cases) tools or a different, custom stack, you can use your content and marketing efforts to get relevant visitors to your site. With your newly acquired knowledge about their priorities you can offer them valuable information, confirming your relevance to them, by having them leave their credentials for you to store in a CRM system in exchange for it. Then you can systematically monitor their progress through the customer journey,at their own speed, and finally, with a rather high accuracy, ascertain when their timing is right. 

 

You will be able to see when your leads are re-visiting your website, what pages they are browsing, what content they are downloading and what emails they open and which links they are clicking. In other words; all the information you need, to know when to pick up your telephone, is at your fingertips.

Most sales organisations would only need this simple setup to obtain a much higher hit rate when booking sales meetings or following up on leads and reaching their growth goals.

 

To sum it up

Getting more business from the internet can be a daunting task, especially when faced with all the varying strategies and concepts of digital marketing.

The inbound marketing philosophy can really help guide us towards a more customer friendly and (in most cases) more efficient way of working, however, going all in at once can often result in losing focus.

Start by defining how you need to communicate to become relevant to your buyers and  identify when their timing is right. Then create your digital customer journey backwards, one step at the time, starting at the point where your sales people should take over.

  • Align your value proposition with your potential clients’ “jobs to be done”
  • Drive relevant traffic to your site with SEO, SEM or advertising
  • Offer some valuable content for visitors to download in exchange for their contact details
  • Store their information in a CRM system and continue to add more data as they interact with you or your website over time
  • Have a routine for determining who is ready and when for a sales call and act instantly
  • Let your sales people do what they do best; close the deal

KEEP ME INFORMED 

Sigurd Gran

Written by Sigurd Gran