The spirit of inbound marketing is all about adding value, but the sales process, on the other hand, is usually thought of as the time to extract it. You’ve given your audience content and solutions, and now it’s time for them to pay you for a solution, right?
Wrong.
Actually, the sales process is the PERFECT time for you to be adding value and continuing to build trust with your prospects, especially for B2B businesses. The last thing you want is to build up all this brand equity just for someone to end up feeling like a transaction.
Instead, if you approach the sales process in a collaborative and value-driven way, you’ll end up with more customers, and ones who are happier to be working with you.
Here are 4 practical ways you can add value during the sales process:
You work so hard to create great content for your marketing channels, but a lot of that content would actually be better suited further down the buyer journey. By creating sales content suited to the Decision stage and empowering sales teams to share that content when it makes sense, you can keep that dialogue going and provide actionable insights throughout the sales process.
The sales process should be a conversation, not a transaction. Make sure you ask open-ended questions during the sales process, and then use the answers to create a better solution. Too many sales people will ask questions and then ignore the answers whilst going straight into a sales pitch, but these answers are a great opportunity to gain insight into what your prospects are thinking and how you can help them.
Trust me when I say this: prospects can tell when you’ve prepared for a meeting. When you have, you start from even ground and can have more productive conversations. You can come to the table with answers, not just questions. But when you go in blind, you spend half your time establishing the playing field before you can really dig in. Guess which call prospects come away from with more trust for your company?
Before every meeting, do your homework. Try to understand as best you can what the company does, who they serve, what their challenges are, and the background of the person you’ll be speaking to.
Then, every time you meet, spend some time getting to know their activity history in your CRM, inferring from the content they’ve consumed what pain points they may have. If questions were asked during your last meeting, make sure you come equipped with answers.
Lastly, don’t overlook your prospect’s needs for the sake of keeping your product library simple. We’re all for productising your services and automating as much as possible, but at the end of the day it’s more important for your clients to see you as collaborators and partners, and that relationship starts with the solution you build together.
No matter what the steps in your sales process look like, there are undoubtedly ways you could be better adding value to your prospects. To learn how you can use this strategy to build trust and close more deals, click here to speak to a member of our team.