SETUP INBOUND SALES CONNECT STRATEGY FOR BUYER PERSONAS

To setup, an inbound sales Connect Stage strategy you need to reach out to buyers via email and voicemail first. Share content about the three common challenges their buyers have at the Awareness Stage. Then offer buyers free consultations to discuss these challenges further and engage with the buyers through social media. Social selling allows you to develop your own personal brand with your buyers, but you will also identify additional leads to pursue.

Use Buyer personas-customer data, demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. Create personas with doing research, identify trends, and create persona profile stories. Ask role, company, goals, challenges, watering holes, personal background, and shopping preferences. Interview customers, former customers, prospects, etc. Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups. The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.). “exclusionary” — persona is a representation of who you don’t want as a customer. If you take the time to create negative personas, you’ll have the added advantage of being able to segment out the “bad apples” from the rest of your contacts, which can help you achieve a lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer (and see higher sales productivity). Interview customers either in person or over the phone to discover what they like about your product or service. Creating buyer personas is crucial.

Why does Inbound matter? Traditional marketing has always been cold calling, cold emails (SPAM), interruptive Ads, and marketer-centric. Inbound marketing is about SEO, blogging, attraction, and customer-centric. Inbound is about being apart of the conversation. This means sharing helpful, relevant content with the world. Check out these inbound marketing terms to get you started.

Inbound Methodology (DIAGRAM)

Attract Strangers and Visitors->Convert to Leads->Close to customers->Delight to become promoters

Inbound Best Practices

USE A BUYER PERSONA TEMPLATE

What’s a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. Buyer personas help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and they make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups. The strongest buyer personas are based on market research (feel free to use our Market Research Kit, which includes five research and planning templates) as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.). Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20. We suggest starting with one to three since you’ll be creating separate pieces of content 6 for each persona. You can always develop more personas later if needed, but it will be most efficient to focus your efforts initially on the top one to three personas that comprise most of your customer base.

Persona 1 (Example)

Persona Name: Insurance Ian

Background & Demographics: What is your persona’s typical gender? Age? Where do they live? What’s their income level? Which job titles do they commonly hold?

• Owner of an insurance agency
• Married with a family
• Graduated From Business School
• Late 30s – 60s
• Income $70k

Identifiers: What are your persona’s preferred forms of communication — social media, email, blogs, apps? 

• Achiever
• Talkative

Spends Online Time On: Where are they spending their time?

• Facebook
• LinkedIn

Goals: What’s your persona’s primary goal related to the industry you’re in?

• Lead generation through social media
• Increased social media traffic
• Introduce YouTube to his social plan

Content to leverage: Leverage Your Content: Website pages, business blog, social media, landing pages, calls-to-action, marketing e-mails

Linkedin Groups:

• Insurance Professionals
• Global Insurance Professionals
• Global Insurance Network

Facebook Groups:

• Insurance Agents Network USA
• Marketing for Insurance Agents – MFIA
• Insurance Soup

Challenges: What are the major roadblocks getting in the way of your persona reaching their goals?

• Social media exposure
• Navigating client relationships & communications
• Professional development
• Buys leads lists from Sales Genie

Common Objections

[Why would someone choose NOT to buy your product/service?]

When developing buyer personas, here are some questions to consider:

• What is their demographic information?

• How do they get leads?

• What is their job and level of seniority?

• What Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups are they members of?

• What organizations or associations are they apart of?

• What youtube channels do they watch?

• What does a day in their life look like?

• What are their pain points? What do you help them solve?

• What do they value most? What are their goals?

• Where do they go for information?

• What are their most common objections to your product/service? You can also use HubSpot’s free Make My Persona toanized, sleek PDF for you. A Buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.

Define personas

1. Types of companies – geography, size, and subcategory industry
2. Types of persons – role, title, function, common behavior
   • Persona a: Partner at professional services firm
   • Persona b: Marketing manager/associate at ps firm

Once the persona structure is in place, add details about each persona. Focus on the perspectives of each persona at the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. Awareness stage person questions:

1. How do personas describe goals or challenges align with your company’s offering?
2. How do personas educate themselves on their goal or challenge? Industry peers, other senior leaders in the organization, online forums like Linkedin and Quora, Google, industry publications, tradeshows
3. What are the implications of inaction by each persona?
4. Common misconceptions personas have about addressing their goal or challenge?

Define sequences for each persona. Decide on mediums to reach out to each persona by phone, social media, email, and in person. Sound human and helpful by personalizing email subject line to personas perspective. Avoid mail merge, auto-dialers, and use the content you layout as guidelines. When will you reach out? If you don’t connect on the first outreach, when will you try again?  How many times will you reach out before you give up?

Define the outreach content for each sequence

In order to do an outreach content for each sequence, you will need to take an inventory of your existing content and check sent emails. Keep outreaches short with 15 seconds voicemails and emails less than 200 words. Reference the buyer at least 2x as much as you mention yourself.  End all emails with a question identifying a goal or a challenge.

EXAMPLE: VP of Sales Communications 5 times over 2 weeks

Outreach content for inbound leads include emails, website visits, and social media. Increase the quality of the product, increase the pace of sourcing, decrease cost per unit, reallocate time spent on sourcing to higher-value activities. Use interest-specific content in your outreach sequences. Use an email template tool and CRM to develop personal messages salespeople can automate some of the sequence execution.

1. Call, Follow-up with an email, Follow Twitter Handle and retweet a post
2. If no reply in 7 days – call, email, subscribe to blog and comment on a blog
3. No reply – call, email, LinkedIn request
4. Call, email
5. Call, email, LinkedIn message

Social Selling

You can spend 5 hours per week social selling – the monitor LinkedIn group, follow thought leaders in space and retweet content, 1 guest post to the company blog. Read a few blogs and comment on them. Find the people on Twitter that your prospects follow and share their content with your followers. Send DM. Find the LinkedIn groups in which your prospects are active and engage with these groups. Consider creating a group. Find the blogs that your prospects read. Share these posts on Twitter, Linkedin, and other sites where your prospects are. Comment on the blog with your company link. Invite to participate in market research. Publish to your company’s blog. You could send common connections on Linkedin a private message if they connect with you. You need to get social selling now!

SETUP INBOUND SALES CONNECT STRATEGY:

4. Use the buyer’s journey-Awareness stage (problem), consideration stage, and decision stage. The Marketing Funnel has evolved.
5. Create Remarkable Content-Inbound Marketing=Content + Context. Check out the Hubspot Content Mapping Template out!