The Magic of Inbound Sales: A Deep Dive

The first time I heard the term “Inbound Sales,” it felt counter-intuitive. What is the point of selling to a prospective client who is already trying your product? Why sell once you are already inside?

As an outsider to this sales methodology, I spent some time researching the topic. In this article, let us explore what Inbound Sales is, its need, and what it takes to land an Inbound Sales role.

Inbound Sales is not about selling the product. Often, the client is aware of your product and is hence already inside your funnel. Most of them would have already explored a trial version of the product as well.

The first step in Inbound Sales is lead qualification- understanding whether the customer’s business context is right for the product.

The second step is to be an advocate or a consultant for the customer by empowering them with all the facts, addressing their concerns, and guiding them towards arriving at a buying decision.

Some clients who truly understand the product might realize it is premature to buy the product because their business context is not ready. An ISR who helps a client understand this gains trust and increases his chances of closing the sale in the future. This part of the job is called ‘cultivating future clients from failed prospects’

Inbound Sales versus Traditional Sales

Unlike traditional sales, a decision of the prospect to not purchase is also a win. If an ISR signs up clients using the usual pushy sales tactics without trying to understand the product fit to their business context, two major problems are usually encountered.

1. The client soon realizes that they are stuck with an unwanted product and is eventually left dissatisfied. This impacts not only client retention but also brand perception.
2. Valuable bandwidth not just of the ISM but other critical teams like solutions, customer support, etc are misspent on an unprofitable client once the deal is closed.

To summarize — Inbound Sales is a win-win-win role that evangelizes a relevant product offering to an ailing client who finds value in the solution and is rewarded in the process. Inbound Sales Managers thrive upon this synergy. Personally, as someone with a consultative services sales background, this synergy resonated very well with me.

Which organizations find the most success with inbound sales?

Inbound sales roles have a high success rate in companies whose growth is led by the product, not by sales leaders. A typical Product Led Growth (PLG) company is obsessed with the problem statement that their product is positioned to solve. They spend a lot of time not only evaluating the prevalence of the problem statement but also identifying the right customer who stands to derive the most value from the solution.

1. Large deals vs large volume of deals — Such companies often let go of potentially lucrative revenue streams like large enterprise clients in their initial stages while focusing on small and medium clients. This is a great trade-off, as having large enterprise clients with a lion’s share of revenue means aligning the product roadmap to satisfy a small segment. The diversity of small clients helps them improve their product by opening up a wide breadth of use-cases.
2. Client profitability vs Deal closure — For a PLG company, a client who derives little or no value from their product is unprofitable because they will eventually leave. The unprofitability stems not only from the duration of product usage but also from customer satisfaction. Most PLG companies generate a significant portion of their leads through referrals, recommendations, and client testimonials.

Inbound sales aligns very well with PLG companies because the focus is setting the clients up for success with the product rather than just deal closure.

How to zero in on an inbound sales job?

Find an organization that is trying to solve a problem you understand. This idea was highly impactful in my own journey. In my previous job, my client was struggling to manage a massive data pipeline landscape with hundreds of source systems and thousands of ETL jobs. I worked with him to build a solution and hired fifteen data engineers to execute it. Then I came across HEVO’s Automated Data Pipeline. The product eliminates the need for a massive engineering team whose bandwidth could be used for core business activities and automates the setting up of pipelines, which can go operational in a few minutes.

As an inbound sales representative, you are talking about one product in depth with a wide variety of clients. Your understanding of the product, the problem it is trying to solve has a direct correlation with your ability to enable your client for success.

For a fresher or someone early in their career, it’s difficult to understand the problem being solved by a product just based on personal experience like I did. My suggestion, in this case, would be to extensively go through the product website, check the competitors, and go through client testimonials as a first step. Then, reach out to an expert in the same field to understand how prevalent this problem is and the value a potential client gains out of this product.

Gauge whether it is truly an ‘Inbound Sales’ job. More often than not many job postings use the term for a traditional sales job. Do the following checks:

1. Do you have to bring in your own leads? An ISR is assigned leads that are already generated.
2. Is it a customer-facing role? If the role is limited to building solutions internally or driving demos only, it is a pre-sales role packaged as an Inbound Sales role.

How is a candidate evaluated for an inbound sales role?

Inbound sales primarily involves a consultative approach to arrive at a buying decision along with the lead. So a typical candidate is evaluated around:

Business Acumen — How well do you understand the business context that triggers a buying decision for any product? This is typically evaluated through a Case Study round:

1. Go To Market Case
2. Product Value proposition
3. Pricing a product
4. Arriving at a buyer persona

Curiosity & Empathy — Understanding the business context involves diving deep with the client to gather requirements. This requires genuine curiosity to know more about the problem and empathy for the client. This is passively evaluated across your interactions with the company.

1. How curious are you about the product, company, and culture?
2. Do you ask questions to clarify or do you just make assumptions?

Articulation — I placed this obvious criterion for a sales job last because the job provides ample opportunity to perfect one’s articulation. Most Inbound Sales interviews have a ‘Mock Product Pitch’ round where you are evaluated on-

1. Discovery — Gathering requirements of the client
2. Product Understanding
3. Handling objections — how you navigate various objections from the client
4. Maintaining composure, articulating clearly and other softer elements

Do you like the idea of working as an inbound sales manager? Do you relate to the above-listed qualities? We are always on the lookout to hire A+ talent to our Inbound Sales team. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn to evaluate a career at Hevo Data.