How B2B Sellers Can Close Inbound Leads More Effectively

6 min readOct 31, 2022

B2B SaaS companies are all about rapid growth, rising lead generation, and achieving efficiency. If you are good at B2B business online marketing, you’ll gain plenty of inbound leads. Obviously, they are the easiest leads to close, but many B2B salespeople don’t know how to seize the opportunity and make the most of these leads. Today, we are going to share some tips on how to close inbound leads more effectively.

Understand the Customer

Inbound leads seem easier to close, as they have already reached out to you on their own accord, but you still need to handle them with care and full attention. Contacting an inbound lead without searching for any information about them can ruin your first impression at best. At worst, it can make you lose a potential customer. Knowing important facts like what the company does, what are their values, and how they became a lead before reaching out will make a big difference at the early stage of communication.

When a lead contacts your sales team and shows interest in buying your product or service, they may be at any of the six stages of the buying process. It is important that the salespeople understand at which stage the lead is, whether they have a list of exact needs, or they’re simply searching to learn more about solutions that are on the market right now. All the scenarios should be approached in different ways, and a lack of comprehension of that fact will distance your potential customers fast.

Making sure your offers are matching the lead’s needs is crucial for closing inbound leads effectively, and it’s not just a marketing team’s responsibility. Although marketing is in charge of framing offers properly, it’s up to sales to ensure that deals are fine-tuned to guarantee maximum conversion rates.

Prioritize Leads

Once you have gotten potential leads, you have to determine which ones are worth pursuing and when. Rather than chase every potential lead that comes your way, develop an inbound lead qualification method that works for your company.

There are two traditional lead qualification methods that help you figure out the best leads for your marketing team: BANT (budget, authority, need, and timing) and CHAMP (challenges, authority, money, and prioritization) frameworks. In addition, marketing technologies have advanced and today we can use modern digital systems to qualify inbound leads. At the present time, you can apply detailed information from your customer relationship management (CRM) system to create a lead scoring system for your prospects.

To qualify and prioritize your leads, you need a good customer profile, therefore pay attention to data collection and analysis. Your sales team should have the right questions in the lead forms, which will help indicate the quality of the lead. Apart from customer profile questions such as job position and company size, you can also have questions about the urgency of the solution needed and what is their budget. Getting the right profile data allows lead scoring to show the best profiles and priority leads to follow-up. This will ensure you’re persuading the right leads, which has a positive effect on your deal-closing rate.

Decrease Response Time

Response time is a critical factor when it comes to closing leads, making sales, and increasing your revenue. Inbound leads reach out to your company as one of possible solution providers to their problem, but they are actively searching and surely they are looking at your competitors, too. If you are the first to respond, there is a high possibility of your company being chosen as a vendor and being the one closing the lead.

Statistics show the average response time for a lead is almost 47 hours, and that is obviously too long. The same report states replying to a lead in the first five minutes is 100 times more effective than calling 30 minutes later, so it’s best if your salespeople can find ways to respond to inbound leads in less than five minutes. Inbound calls from potential customers should never go to voicemail or wait on hold for a long period. You don’t want to lose a prospect and all the revenue they can bring just because you have waited too long to respond.

Due to the number of vendors on the market, the ability to contact an online lead decreases quickly. The buyer finds their seller and is not interested in talking to other sellers anymore. That’s why most advocate measuring follow-up times in minutes, rather than hours. But we recommend planning the speed of your response in seconds, rather than minutes. By developing an instant response arrangement or using software to prompt follow-up, sales teams are more likely to close the lead and avoid losing revenue due to ineffective sales work and prolonged response time. Thus, pay close attention to your salespeople’s lead response time and try to drive it down by all means.

Implement CRM System

Speed is vital when it comes to lead response, but in order to organize the chaos and enable efficient follow-up, it’s best to have a properly functioning CRM system with regard to data integrity and the importance of keeping all records up to date.

Have a good CRM that keeps track of the right lead actions so salespeople can read buying behavior. Look at information such as which content the lead has viewed, what emails they have opened and clicked through, and whether the lead has interacted with your company on social media channels.

One more important thing for closing more of your leads into customers is to make sure that you have your CRM system integrated with your marketing software to get Closed Loop Reporting (CLR). Closed Loop Reporting is a system in which data and information collected by marketing and sales professionals are made available to both teams. The integration is needed so your company doesn’t miss prospects by having data in two, three, or four different databases, and avoids sending people contextually illogical and untimely messages.

With implementing integration between sales and marketing, you’re able to see precisely what the marketing activities were in the beginning, middle, and the end of the buying journey that brought you closed leads. By analyzing the results, you can improve your strategy and close inbound leads more effectively than ever.

Offer Unique Features

With the number of competitors on the market, many B2B vendors struggle to close even inbound leads. To set your company apart from competitors, your marketing and sales teams can offer prospects a unique feature and reinforce the buyer’s decision to buy from you versus from your competitor. Having a unique sales feature as a part of your closing leads strategy, you distinct yourself from other B2B sellers, and thus, close more deals.

An excellent sales leverage is payment benefits. Offer your customers to buy through Comfi and split the sum with flexible payment plans. They can divide payments into 12 interest-free tranches over 12 months, and purchase annual plans while paying monthly. Comfi pays you the whole sum upfront within 7 days.

Buyers will choose annual subscriptions more willingly due to annual plans’ discounted rates, and will be your company’s customers for years, because you offer them a convenient way to buy your solution. Therefore, your churn rate will reduce, your buyers will become ARR, and you will grow your customer LTV by 15–30% and double your annual plan sales.

Comfi integrates effortlessly into your sales process, providing you with a marketing toolkit to set up the banners, email marketing and newsletters, and push notifications to let you communicate with your customers via your app. Be ahead of your competitors and close inbound leads effectively with Comfi.

To Sum Up

B2B sales is a main part of any B2B business and closing inbound leads is one of the best ways to boost sales. But if you don’t know how to deal with inbound B2B leads, you’re going to bypass a lot of opportunities.

Qualifying and prioritizing your inbound leads correctly will have a positive impact on your deal-closing rates and revenue growth. The faster you deal with good leads, the more successful your business is. At Comfi, we know that inbound leads are extremely Important and should be handled with care. So we are ready to provide you with a tool you can offer to your buyers to raise the deal-closing rate.

Are you ready to turn your inbound leads into buyers today?

Email us at: hi@comfi.app

Visit our website: https://comfi.app

Read our articles at https://medium.com/@amal_abdullaev/list/comfi-5194a678f62c