Selling is Helping, and Other New Truths in Marketing + Sales

At BizzyWeb, we believe in a simple adage: The more you help people, the more successful you’ll become. We’ve geared our blog and email newsletter to helping as many people as possible, and we’ve published more than 300 free BizzyWebinars to help our clients and friends learn how to improve their marketing using digital tools.

Helping feels easy when it comes to marketing, but what about that final, most important link for business-to-business (B2B) companies: Sales? It turns out, the same rules apply, and Sales has evolved from boiler-room tactics to consultative conversations.

As a HubSpot partner, I’m lucky to have access to some of the best content and training available for both marketing and sales. I just completed a Pipeline Generation Boot Camp with HubSpot’s first sales person, Dan Tyre. Dan is a powerhouse sales guy, with enough energy to light a small city. Dan hosts this special, invitation-only, 8-week session just a few times per year. Here’s what I learned from Dan:

Always Be Helping. Most sales professionals try too hard, too fast to “Sell” their prospects, and fail as a result. Just like Spam is the cancer of marketing, cold calls are the source of annoyance and frustration in the B2B world. Dan taught us that having a genuine interest in our prospects (and looking for easy ways to help and/or offer advice) takes the pressure off both sides of the conversation: Sales pros can ask simple questions to find a prospect’s true needs, and prospects can brainstorm over a 5-minute conversation to see what they might be able to improve.

Have a Process, and Do the Work. HubSpot coined the term “Inbound marketing” – a relationship building process that adds value to everyone you talk to, visits your site, or connects with you via marketing. Your marketing fills the sales funnel by providing helpful (and visitor-focused) content. Each helpful blog post, whitepaper, event or video you produce is designed to a simple Call to Action (CTA), at which point you can deepen the relationship by offering custom content tailored to each visitor’s actions. Content is customizable by logging data into a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, and sales/marketing automation software delivers useful content, and triggers a sales conversation when it’s clear a prospect is interested in more information.

Sales + Marketing Have Merged. Close integration between teams means “SMarketing” is the new way to approach growth in any organization. The new B2B sales process often looks like this:

• Marketing Outreach (Helpful/Engaging content)
• CRM is populated by visitors in trade for useful assets / tools
• Sales automation sends prospects additional information based on their behavior (email opens, site visits, response to ads)
• Connect calls identify prospect needs, offer value at each interaction (quick wins), and qualify good-fit leads
• Discovery calls dig deeper and identify actual needs, and get prospect buy-in for a proposal
• Solution presentations offer a systematic plan to achieve the lead’s stated goals
• Automation tracks every interaction between the lead and the SMarketing team. Every email opened, every visit to the website, every call made or received is tracked, and automated sequences keep “warming up” leads and prospects with additional value.

If you’d like to chat about what I learned from Dan (the LION) Tyre, let’s talk! Or, if you’d like to hear more about how Inbound marketing can help Grow your organization, just click the button below. We’d love to help you Generate Buzz (and Growth) Without Getting Stung!

Transform Your Sales With CRM Today!