Inbound marketing is an approach to digital marketing that focuses on attracting potential customers to your company website rather than paying for ads that appear outside of it. In other words, inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content (such as blog posts, videos, and guides) that helps users find you and leads them to take action (such as signing up for your email list or purchasing your products). Inbound selling is a subset of inbound marketing. It’s a strategic approach to sales that focuses on attracting potential customers and moving them through the buyer’s journey with the intention of making the final sale. In other words, it’s about creating content (usually in blog post format) that attracts potential customers and moves them through the buying process with the end result being a completed sale. There are many roles involved in making inbound selling a success. Successful implementation requires sales representatives who understand their role within the framework, support from marketers who create great content, and insight from data scientists who know how to measure its effectiveness.
The Difference Between Inbound Marketing and Inbound Selling
Before we get into the specifics of inbound selling, let’s look at the difference between inbound marketing and inbound selling. Inbound marketing is the broader approach that encompasses the elements that make up inbound selling.
At its core, inbound marketing is an effort to attract potential customers to your product or service through content. It’s essentially an alternative to outbound marketing—the traditional approach of advertising your product through billboards, TV commercials, radio spots, etc. A good way to think about it is this: Inbound marketing is a sales funnel. Inbound selling is one of the stages of that funnel.
Why Use Inbound Selling?
Marketers can’t control which ads prospective customers see, where those ads appear, or when those ads are published. But you can control the type of content you put online and where it’s published. Inbound marketing is a strategy for attracting customers to your business, product, or service by creating engaging, helpful, and/or interesting content. On the surface, it sounds like a no-brainer: get people to your website by creating good content and they’ll buy your stuff. But it’s a lot more involved than that. What to create? Where to publish it? What’s the best format? How often to publish it? These are just a few of the questions you’ll need to answer if you want to succeed with inbound marketing.
Goals of Inbound Selling
Although the core goals of inbound marketing and inbound selling are the same, the secondary goals differ.
An important goal for inbound marketing is to earn the attention of search engines and rank high for relevant keywords. Inbound selling, on the other hand, is focused on attracting a specific type of customer and moving them through the buying journey and toward conversion. This targeting allows you to understand your customers better and sell to them more effectively. It also helps you maintain a laser focus on your core audience while preventing you from wasting time and resources on leads who aren’t a good fit.
The Process of Inbound Selling
Like inbound marketing, the process of inbound selling isn’t a single action or event. Rather, it’s a collection of strategies and tactics that work together to attract and convert prospective customers. The following five steps outline what successful inbound selling looks like:
Attract – You want to attract the right kind of customer by creating content that addresses their problems and solves their problems.
Educate – Next, you want to educate your prospects so they have a clear understanding of the problem(s) your product or service solves.
Convert – Finally, you want to convert those prospects into customers by bringing them through the buying journey and doing everything possible to get them to take action.
Why Is Inbound Selling Important?
When you understand the value inbound selling can bring to your organization, you’ll see why it’s so important. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of inbound selling:
Stronger leads – Inbound selling offers a clear pathway to sales that allows you to identify the most promising leads and invest your time and energy in them.
Better customer acquisition – By bringing potential customers to your website and focusing on converting them rather than on outbound selling, you’ll see a marked improvement in customer acquisition.
Stronger brand – Inbound selling helps strengthen your brand by putting your best foot forward, which in turn helps you attract more customers.
How to Use Inbound Selling for B2B Sales?
A successful inbound selling campaign is both broad and focused. It’s broad in the sense that it covers a wide range of topics and is designed to appeal to a broad audience. It’s focused in the sense that it’s narrowly tailored to the needs of your target customer. Inbound selling works best when it’s focused on a single problem and providing a single solution to that problem. For example, if you work in B2B sales and your company sells HR software, you could create content focused on helping small businesses hire the right employees for their business.
How to Measure the Success of Inbound Selling?
Success can be measured in different ways depending on who you ask. A marketer might tell you that inbound selling is successful if it generates leads, whereas a salesperson might say it’s successful if it generates conversions. These are both valid measures of success because they show the inbound selling campaign’s value from two different angles.
Marketers – Marketers can measure success by tracking the number of visitors to a blog post, the number of leads generated by that blog post, and the rate at which those visitors subscribe to an email list.
Salespeople – Salespeople can measure success by tracking the number of visitors who move from the blog post to the sales page, the number of sales generated by those visitors, and the rate at which they close the deal.
Key Takeaways
Inbound selling is an effective marketing strategy that brings potential customers to your website and moves them through the buying journey by educating them about their problem and solving it with your product or service.
Inbound marketing and inbound selling are two different things. Inbound marketing is the broader approach that encompasses the elements that make up inbound selling.
Inbound selling is a strategic approach to sales that focuses on attracting prospective customers and moving them through the buying process with the intention of making the final sale. Inbound selling works best when it’s focused on a single problem and providing a single solution to that problem.
By investing in inbound selling, you can strengthen your brand, improve your customer acquisition rates, and make more sales by bringing more prospective customers to your website and converting them.
What Inbound Marketing is and How It Can Help Your Business
