One of your primary responsibilities as a sales manager, in addition to setting goals for your team, is to mentor and coach them to success.
One of the most important things you can do as a mentor and coach is to provide your team with every tool available and to advise them on all available strategies for generating demand, leads, and sales. This entails maximizing the effectiveness of every strategy, such as inbound marketing and inbound sales.
“Coaches have to watch for what they don’t want to see and listen to what they don’t want to hear,” John Madden once said. In other words, when it comes to adopting frameworks that are new to your organization, you must sometimes abandon preconceived notions and biases.
It also sometimes entails embracing efforts to align marketing and sales strategies. The inbound methodology is a framework that can be used by both marketing and sales teams.
Let’s take a look at how inbound marketing can help sales management.
What Is a Sales Manager’s Role?
Within an organization, the sales manager has several roles that necessitate:
- Sales knowledge and experience in general
- An understanding of the organization’s sales process
- Understanding of current and ideal customers, as well as buyer personas and buyer journeys
- Sales management and sales team supervision
- Sales goals and performance are monitored, tracked, and reported on.
As previously stated, providing the right sales tools to help your team succeed should include all of the tools available to all of your teams, including marketing. You must have good knowledge management in place so that all team members can find the information and customer data they require to optimize each touchpoint with leads.
Marketing, for example, spends a significant amount of time analyzing buyer personas and journey maps in order to better understand ideal customers and how a specific organization’s sales funnel works to move those individuals along in the process.
Sales managers who use inbound marketing tactics and collaborate with their marketing team can effectively use their knowledge to improve the sales process and build team success.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
When we define lead qualifications, such as marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs), we do so with the idea that knowing where a prospect is can help us decide how much time to devote to nurturing that relationship.
However, in the case of outbound sales, this entails a significant amount of time spent researching, prospecting, calling, and scheduling. Furthermore, outbound sales tactics engage people who may or may not be interested in buying from you.
Inbound marketing, on the other hand, brings prospects to you and is focused on attracting people who are actually interested in purchasing your products or services.
The inbound methodology has many moving parts in marketing and sales. Inbound marketing provides valuable information to your ideal customers through a process of creating buyer personas followed by needs identification, allowing the start of a trusted relationship.
Assume you’ve identified your ideal customer and have been able to identify unique challenges faced by his industry, his organization, or his specific role in each. Your marketing team will then create valuable content for your website that addresses that specific challenge and customer. In a nutshell, you deliver the right information to the right person at the right time.
Inbound marketing then allows you to begin a relationship with this person by sharing valuable resources and information at each stage of their journey. Using inbound sales techniques, you gradually move them toward your product or service as the solution.
Because you have spent time and effort cultivating a relationship based on trust and providing value (via your marketing and sales team), the ideal customer responds by choosing your product or service.
Your customers come to you rather than you casting a wide net and cold calling. While outbound tactics are important for lead generation, inbound is more cost effective and has the potential to shorten the entire sales cycle.
The process of identifying MQLs and SQLs is managed by your site content and, hopefully, a CRM that facilitates the entire process.
