Is your sales team equipped for success? Tradition says yes, today's consumer patterns say your team is falling behind. Despite skill, persuasion and connection, your built-in sales process needs a boost, maybe even a hard turn towards the methodology of the digital sell.
How does your team get there? You start by understanding the recent shifts in buyer patterns and then you adopt a variety of digital tools, we’ll talk about those more below.
Today people research, test and compare in order to make an informed buying decision. Consumers want to learn about a product or service before they buy. They search the internet, they read reviews, they become informed. Your business can help to facilitate your sales by providing consumers with the information that they need to make that informed decision to buy. You do that through a strategically populated website.
The goal in building a digital sales funnel is to align your marketing and your sales, we do that using inbound methodology. Inbound sees the establishment of processes that work to attract new prospects, convert those prospects into leads, turn those leads into customers and then maintains those customers. It is a many pronged strategy that includes tools like calls to action, buyer personas, blogging, premium content offers, landing pages, social media, email marketing, forms and workflows. Once these tools are developed and in place they work together to make a strong sales driven website and digital strategy that produces leads for your sales team to close.
Let’s take on calls to action (CTAs) as an example; they are arguably one of the most important aspects of a digital sales funnel. CTAs are buttons that direct users navigation around a website. Take a look at Hughes & Co.’s homepage and the CTAs that we utilize. You’ll see that they direct prospects to “Learn More” about the projects that we work on. We believe the best way to sell our services is to show potential leads the results that we deliver for our clients, if they dig what we can do, then they are directed to book a “Free Consult” via CTA. Through this direction, we are able to drive customers to the aspects of our website that contain the valuable information that they need to make a buying decision.
A digital sales funnel starts with strategic marketing and is closed out by a well equipped sales team. Your sales team probably has a CRM, but are they using that CRM effectively? If they are not using a CRM a free one that we recommend (and use) is the HubSpot CRM. You should be using your CRM to track contacts, send sales emails, track companies deals and update sales tasks. It should be a platform where your success and movement is clearly indicated. Other sales enablement tools that your team will not only benefit from but, love are SideKick and LeadIn. These tools help for smarter communication and deliver unmatched lead intelligence. We dive more deeply into how exactly to use these tools in this blog.
Once your online presence is focused on the sell, you will have equipped your sales team for success.