Looking at the figure of 200 CONTACTS CREATED in the our dashboard above, these contact were created by a join effort between the sales and marketing teams. 

Key, however, is that not all of these contacts are ready to be sold to now.

So, the question is: How do you fill your sales pipeline by grabbing the attention of your target audience that is ready to buy now?

This is done with a combination of Inbound and Outbound strategies.

What is an Inbound Sales Strategy?

Broadly the domain of the marketing team, with inbound, prospects will discover your company through your marketing efforts and reach out to you or show signs of interest organically.

Examples of organic inbound traffic channels could be social media, content, or paid ads leading to a landing page. On that landing page, the prospect needs to leave their email address behind in exchange for a valuable piece of content that is designed to solve their core pain points.

We use landing pages like the one below to generate lists of prospects. The prospects give us their contact details in exchange for a download. In this case they receive an infographic on Marketing Automation.

Before the lead is passed onto sales the marketing team will decide if the lead should be passed on to sales (Sales Qualified Lead), or whether marketing should continue to carry on nurturing the lead (Marketing Qualified Lead).

What is an Outbound Sales Strategy?

The domain of the sales team, outbound lead generation is when a salesperson contacts a lead through cold outreach tactics.

The sales team might to this by reaching out to a contact list, sending warm emails, phoning leads, or gathering leads at industry conferences.

Once interest has been generated through these methods, sales conversations begin, and the leads are fed more educational content and then moved into the sales funnel.

Leads that are not ready to close now, are handed over to the marketing team to nurture into a sales-ready state that we call a Sales Qualified Lead.

When the lead becomes sales-ready and indicates they are ready to buy, by coming back to the website or downloading a new guide, the marketing department alerts the sales team and hands the lead back over to be closed by sales.

Sales enablement

To add to the sales teams outbound efforts, it is important for the marketing team to share the eBook and value-adding assets with sales. By using these assets the sales team can engage with their prospects by sharing valuable content.

With this content salespeople can avoid that all to common call…

‘Hey Bob, just checking in to see if you are ready to move ahead with your purchase.’

Answer: ‘Thanks for calling again… But I’m not ready. Call me next year.’

Follow up with a useful share of content.

‘Hey Bob, our product team just released this really great comparison of CRM software. I think this might help you with your decision process.’

Answer: ‘Thanks! That’s super useful. I’ll let you know what I we decide next week.

Sharing valuable content positions your salespeople as experts and advisors. This is the type of company any buyer would prefer to do business with.