Sales Reps Won’t Call Your Inbound Leads?

Sales reps love the sound of the phone ringing. Hope springs eternal: could that be the sound of a ready-to-buy customer on the other end?

Alternatively, when the voice on the other end is someone trying to sell you something, you’re thinking: lunch bag let down.

Sales reps often won't call because they don't want to reach an unresponsive audience. And they have another reason to drive this thinking home: we can do amazing things with digital marketing, why make calls to people who may not actually want your product?

Hubspot: The World’s Best Digital Marketing Software & The Pitfalls Of Using It

Consider this: Tangible Words and our clients use a best-in-market tool: Hubspot. Hubspot not only runs marketing campaigns for you, but offers better tracking and reporting than even Google Analytics. PLUS Hubspot also logs all user interactions with your website (where an email address was voluntarily given) in Hubspot’s built-in, free CRM.

We’re not the first to stop leaving money on the table and experience an 80% increase in revenue - I bet you’ll find a company exactly like you who has grown with Hubspot.

A few years ago, without Hubspot, a customer tracked that Tangible Words’ SEO copywriting increased their company’s online sales by 340%. In that same year, Tangible Words’ content partnership doubled that company’s revenue. We immediately set out on a path to find software that allowed us to prove sales ROI on every marketing task we do online for our clients - from website content services to social media marketing. You can’t arm your sales and marketing team with better technology and tools than Hubspot offers. Amongst all the other piecemeal softwares you could try to run at the same time - some even for free - Tangible Words paid to become a Certified Hubspot Agency because Hubspot is all in one.

Yet, despite the advances in amazing technology for monitoring who is on your website, this base human annoyance of being sold to and being interrupted still gives inbound and content marketing an unnecessarily bad rap and can make your sales team ineffective.

Because, here’s what’s happening. The marketing department says “Hey Sales! Person X downloaded our ebook - call them!”

And the sales rep thinks, “And I’ll say ... ‘Have you read that ebook yet?!’”

No one wants to be disruptive - let alone look like a dufus at the same time. So sales reps won't call. But they should.

So now I’ll explain how to fix both problems (call maker and call receiver) at the same time.

Not Seeing Results with Hubspot? Here’s What’s Wrong With Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Despite the fact that Hubspot has a solution to completely alleviate this problem, the way most companies are running inbound marketing still speaks to the painful 34% gap: the difference between how Sales sees a lead and how Marketing sees a lead.  That gap is a limit to your growth goals.

The irony is that inbound makes it easier to marry the efforts of Sales and Marketing and get “Smarketing.” But training to set that engine up is required. And while your Hubspot software licence is like buying a beautiful new car - you still need to buy fuel to run it. That’s where certified Hubspot Agency support comes in.  

A year ago I was that busy exec who was really good at straight-arming off other sales people (I still am, thank you very much) and yet I was selling all the time (definitely never picking up the phone and calling people who didn’t ask me to specifically call them).

Suddenly, after one of those calls I intended to straight arm, Tangible Words wound up spending $8000.00 USD on a product we never budgeted for. And before you go “#SUCKER” to me - let me tell you, there was never an ounce of buyer’s regret on that purchase. So how did that happen?

Beyond the work I was already doing with Hubspot Marketing software, I embarked on an additional study of the Hubspot Sales software. I took Hubspot’s Employee #6 Dan Tyre’s 8-Week Pipeline Generation Bootcamp (seriously, this guy is the ultimate Hubspot sensai and our team learned more from him than Daniel-san ever could).  

In this journey of deeper Inbound Marketing learning & Smarketing discovery, we now transfered that knowledge to everyone we work with. That’s why companies outsource, so you can get cross industry best practice. Because the brain needs to learn things over and over, I’m going to hammer out the three high level takeaways for you to use.

3 Reasons Why You Called Someone, It Didn’t ‘Work’ - And How To Fix It

1. Human to Human Connect Calls
   

   If someone called you and you shared a few laughs and the call was done in 10 minutes - you aren’t going to dislike that person and you won’t feel interrupted and annoyed. The few times this has happened to me, I have hung up the phone feeling so inspired, I actually made more time for them in my schedule. This is pipeline mastery in Dan Tyre’s eyes. Tyre’s Hubspot Agency class helped me develop a repeatable process so that now I know how to teach our Smarketing Hubspot clients. In the meantime, don’t be stiff! Be Chummy. Be a human, make a connection across the wires.
   

2. Stop Qualifying on the phone!
   

   Tyre needs you to understand the old way of ABC - Always Be Closing - is sooooo dead. To really bury that outdated adage, you need to realize when you get on the phone with someone you are not allowed to start qualifying them - that’s assumptive and interruptive. Only qualify them if they ask you to. Now this is hard for people like me who default to a transactional efficient style. When I can see the pain point, I want to move the conversation along to help them. This isn’t great when you’re on a Connect Call with someone you don’t know that well - you jump ahead at the first sign when you should look for more indicators of fit first, otherwise both the caller and the receiver lose time.  
   

3. WIIFM: Be Ready to Help Them
   

   As a professional salesperson you already know you need to prepare for your sales calls. But really understanding how to efficiently prepare for your calls is harder. Of course you want to offer something insightful and valuable - and be dynamic enough to add more value in the conversation as the opportunity arises.
   

If you’re receiving any kind of information from another company - it has to be presented in WIIFM style. Of course, I could totally understand that as a copywriter, but the problem was you could spend 40 minutes researching a company, putting information together, and then get a voicemail. A few days later, you’re too busy to follow up so you just lost all that time.

Tyre showed us by having a prepared list of help you can offer on the spot, you can actually research your lead in 3-7 minutes.

Consider making a tagged Content Index of pillar content, to help sales reps dynamically be a helpful person on the phone.  Make your list of “Go to Helps” and have those prepared for the call so you can listen and offer something of value and follow up on it. This also helps sales teams with their follow-up cadence (something most sales people get stuck on).

These are 3 massive skills we’ll be passing on to all our clients to really close the loop on how inbound marketing can help your sales team to become Smarketing.

Kick-start Your Campaign With a Free Checklist

This free checklist will get the process started. Work off of the framework provided to build the audience you need for economic growth.