Inbound marketing funnels are aimed at driving potential leads and customers to your business through content. This content attracts them, nurtures them through various processes, and eventually converts them into paying customers.

In recent times, these funnels are a more dominant strategy for businesses mainly as a lead generation tactic and to increase conversions.

However, inbound marketing funnels can also give a major boost to your sales processes. 

The sales process refers to several stages that your business prospects go through as they purchase your products and services. It varies among different customers and businesses.

The Sales Process

A defined sales process like these helps you know which stage your prospects are at so that you can strategize accordingly and win that sale.

How Do Inbound Marketing Funnels Fit Into Your Overall Sales Process?

All inbound funnels are meant to drive more leads who need answers or solutions to their problems. They go through a nurturing process that further educates them and provides information about their needs.

This information and interactions become highly relevant to your sales team. They can use them during conversion stages at the bottom of the funnel.

More funnels increase the number and variety of customers you attract, nurture, and convert, making the sales process work even better and faster.

Why Inbound Marketing Funnels Can Boost Your Sales Processes

Prospective buyers no longer want to be sold to, especially right after their first contact with a company. Such outbound salesy approaches push them away.

Rather, they want content that speaks to their pains and can provide them with solutions. This makes inbound funnels increasingly effective in improving results from your sales processes.

How To Use Inbound To Improve Sales Processes

1. Create purchase inducing content

To speed up the sales process for certain products, you must create more enticing content for your inbound funnels. Content like case studies, demos, can help your business convert leads faster. They convince prospective customers that buying from you is a great decision.

Such content must then be supplemented with appropriate calls to action, especially in cases where you cannot provide all the information to your prospects.

For example, when dealing with customized offerings. Let the potential buyers know where and how they can get the information they need.

2. Pay attention to your messaging tactics

Inbound marketing is a major communication tool between you and your potential customers. So, you can improve your sales by structuring your messaging to provide solutions and reflect the actions you need them to take. 

As you direct customers to your pages, they need to find strategically persuasive language to push them to make the desired steps and buy. However, this language must focus more on the value they get from the sale or exchange and less on a sales pitch.

For example, if your inbound funnel is a white paper or an eBook. Your messaging should show them what the resources are about, a sneak peek into it (e.g., images) instead of staying ambiguous or simply hard selling.

Furthermore, ensure that the message is as clear as day and instantly understandable when they land on the page. It can be tempting to get fancy with wording. But this can rather confuse your audience and thus produce the opposite result. 

3. Simplify the purchase process

Making every stage of your inbound marketing funnel as sales friendly as possible can boost your sales processes. Ensure that prospects in your funnel have all the information they need to make an informed purchase decision.

Furthermore, as they progress down the funnel, they should find it easy to pay without much trouble. Otherwise, some buyers may simply abandon the purchase when the process becomes too complex. 

Since your inbound funnels revolve around content, also include information to simplify the sales processes for buyers.

So, your marketing and sales teams must work together to identify and provide answers or address concerns that buyers often have about purchasing. Then they can make sure the answers are readily available and accessible when needed.

4. Create Attractive Conversion Stage Offers

Towards the bottom of the funnel, leads are sales-qualified and closer to purchase. Those sales motivated emails must therefore provide offers your buyers cannot refuse. 

Bottom of the funnel offers may come in various ways, like discounts, free upgrades, among others. The most effective offers at this point must represent something more valuable for them than content.

5. Improve collaboration between marketing and sales teams

The transition between your marketing departments is critical to your sales process. Traditionally, the marketing department nurtures promising leads through inbound funnels and then hands them off to sales when they became sales qualified.

However, without management platforms like CRMs, it can get difficult to do this seamlessly. So, businesses must embrace automation tools so that lead information is readily available for all parties. 

That way, the marketing to sales transition becomes easier. Your teams can identify which prospects are ready for the sales pitch through lead scores.

The salespeople also have access to details of the entire customer journey. They thus have adequate information to derive effective conversion strategies.

6. Contact qualified leads

With the information and pathways that inbound marketing funnels provide, your sales team can contact potential customers and achieve better results.

Traditional outbound sales processes involved cold calling leads for the famous "sales pitch." These rarely work anymore.

However, well-built inbound marketing funnels help to capture valuable leads data about their preferences and pain points. Also, during the nurturing process, your teams can learn more about the customers and their companies.

You can then use this data to reach out to sales-qualified leads through calls or emails. Instead of giving generic sales pitches, you'll be able to focus on the value they need and how they can get it from you.

Furthermore, since funnel automations track behavior too, your teams can make contact at the right time. Statistics indicate that the best time to contact leads is at least 5 minutes of them engaging with your content.

Final Thoughts

Inbound funnels are not just excellent means of generating leads and conversions. They can also greatly boost your sales processes when appropriately used, like in the different ways above.

However, to fully maximize Inbound marketing funnels in your sales process, you must integrate your marketing and sales teams' activities through companywide marketing automation tools and CRMs.

SharpSpring offers such comprehensive marketing automation and CRM software that will boost your teams’ collaboration and thus help you get the best of your sales processes.

Reach out for a free demo or consultation and find out how we can help you build effective inbound marketing funnels.

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