In this session, Mark Roberge, SVP of Sales and Services at HubSpot is speaking about the nature of inbound leads from company websites. Many sales people will say that these leads are not qualified, but inbound sales and working leads from your website is different than traditional sales. Here's what Mark has to say:

  • Outbound sales (the traditional way) says that a company has to identify a prospect as a good fit, then identify if the prospect has a pain the company can solve.
  • Inbound sales turns that framework on its head. The prospect self-identifies that they have a pain point to solve, then they find your company and your company determines if they are a good fit.
  • You should use lead intelligence to control the marketing to sales hand off.
  • Most companies think of lead score as a threshold, and once a threshold is met, they reach out. Lead scoring should help prioritize sales calls, not qualify or disqualify them.
  • Spend time and research your prospect that has become a lead from your website. Look them up on LinkedIn. What is their tenure at the company? What is their background? Who is their boss? Are they in your network? Use marketing analytics to know how to approach them. What web pages have they looked at? You can make assumptions about what they are interested in.
  • If you are going to invest time in a prospect, you have to know how they are interacting on your website, and what they are saying on social media.
  • When you call, contextualize the sales call. Verify that you know about the information that they downloaded from your website in the conversation.

Connecting with website leads

  • Typically, these will not be the CEO. You have to frame your discussion around influencers and build trust. Be consultative. Ask for the influencer to engage with the decision maker. Give them some tips and information about your product or service that they can use.
  • You have to transform the way your prospects perceive your sales people. Rather than "always be closing," they need to "always be helping."
  • Can your sales team become thought leaders by starting a blog or helping to write a guide for your website? Sales people can work with the marketing team by calling and communicating the idea for the blog post and marketing can write and post it.
  • Inbound sales should feel like a doctor/patient relationship rather than a sales/prospect relationship.