17 Actionable Tactics for Inbound Sales [2022 Update]

Carefully target your inbound leads

Before you create any content or messaging for your inbound campaigns, it’s even more important to know who your ideal customer is. Having in-depth buyer personas documented is a good start. But try to go beyond the demographic data and dig into the psychographics. Find out what problems they’re facing. What’s their biggest challenge? Just as important, what isn’t a concern?

For example, if your ideal customer works in an enterprise-level business, they’re unlikely to be worried about making their first hire or a list of free tools. However, to a startup, that kind of content could be invaluable.

The best way to research this is to talk to your existing customers. Get them on a call and find out what’s on their mind. Ask them to share specific ways your product or service has helped them, and why they chose you over your competitors.

When you know exactly who you’re talking to, it becomes much easier to create content and use messaging that appeals to them – making your inbound marketing much more effective. 

Make the most of your data

A key principle, one behind many of these inbound sales tactics, is understanding that there’s more to inbound sales than leads magically coming in, all eager and ready to buy. Inbound sales aren’t magic; they take work, both to procure and to convert.

To start, when a lead comes in from a landing page, you are going to want all the relevant data on them you can get. However, long forms with lots of questions are likely to put off prospective customers. As a result, many people reluctantly settle for less information, making do with nothing more than a name and an email address.

At Reply, our first step to converting inbound leads into sales is to enrich the data. Anytime an inbound lead comes in, we want to see all the important details, which for us includes the size of the company and their location. Using tools like Clearbit, our business development team will look at the number of employees, the size of their sales team and their annual revenue, seeing how they match our ideal customer profile.

Additionally, we will look up their social media profiles for two reasons. First, this would allow us to use social touchpoints within our multichannel sequences. Secondly, their profiles can provide tons of additional personal information we can use to personalize our outreach and make it more relevant.

Segment and be relevant

Speaking of relevance, we use plenty of other criteria besides company size to segment our leads. The ones you’ll use depend on your company and the kind of product or service you offer.  

We’ve already mentioned researching the demographics and psychographics for your ideal customer in our first tactic, and these can also be used to separate your leads into different lists. For example, demographics could include location, budget, and the number of years they’ve been in business. When it comes to psychographics, you might find that your solution is ideal for several different use cases. 

You can also segment based on behavior and actions. For example, you might want to prioritize leads who’ve visited your site or opened your emails multiple times, send different messages depending on articles they’ve viewed or ebooks they’ve downloaded, or target them based on their interactions with your product (as in this sequence for trial sign-ups). 

Document your buyer journey

While you can’t ensure every inbound lead is a perfect match for your ICP, you can have a good idea of the journey they take. Despite what you might hope, it really does take a journey for someone to go from casual visitor to happy customer, one that takes time with multiple steps. Unless your product only costs a couple of dollars, you’re not going to see a lot of impulse buys. 

You should always remember that it’s the buyer’s motivations that drive their journey, not you. Maybe you want your inbound leads to head straight to the checkout, or you have a beautifully designed website and you want to show off every single page. 

Your leads will have other ideas. You can’t create their journey for them — the best you can do is learn their journey, then make the steps as smooth and easy for them as possible.

So, what does a typical buyer journey look like? 

First of all, before their journey can truly start, your prospects need some level of awareness. They need to know they have some kind of problem, an itch that needs to be scratched. So for our inbound leads, that might be something like: “I spend way too much time reaching out to prospects, which means I don’t have enough time to engage with them.”

They’ll then consider their different options. What’s the best way of dealing with their problem? How have other people dealt with similar issues? “I could delegate my outreach to someone else, or I could try sacrificing quality for quantity, or I could try automating personalized emails.” 

Finally, they’ll make a decision. Of all the options they’ve considered, which specific solution is the best? “What’s the best automated email solution? Which plan is the right one for me?”

Three simple steps, but making sure you’ve accounted for each of those steps and made them as frictionless as possible will help more of your inbound leads complete that journey. That means having the right content, in the right format, for the right stage (more on this later).

Make it easy for the prospect

Speaking of the buyer journey, the whole process from start to finish should be as intuitive and simple as possible for your prospect. That means no friction preventing your prospect from getting all the information they need to make a decision. Then, once they have that information, the actual sale should be just as simple. 

Documenting your buyer’s journey is a great way to understand what content you might need. Work out all the potential questions your prospect might ask at each stage, then make sure the answer is easily available. 

Of course, the best way to make sure you’re answering the right questions is to see how your prospect interacts with your website. Solutions like Hotjar and Lucky Orange allow you to do that, providing the heatmaps that identify where they drop off. Once you have this, you can apply mechanisms, such as deep linking, to direct customers to the right pages and tools, and help them move along the journey.

Tracking search terms, both the ones that bring visitors to your site and the ones people use while on your site, let you know what information people are looking for. Using live chat or triggered surveys, you can talk directly with your prospects and listen to their questions.

In rare situations, you might decide not to tell them everything. 

For example, at Reply, companies interested in an enterprise-level package have to contact us for pricing. The reason is simply that all enterprise packages are unique and tailored to the customer. However, even where you don’t have all your information publicly available, it’s essential prospects easily see how they can get that information. In our case, that means a button on our enterprise pricing page that opens up a chat with our sales team. 

It’s not just information that should be readily available though. The process itself should be easy to follow with as few hoops to jump through as possible. 

A great example is Amazon’s one-click checkout. Rather than having to fill out your details every time you place an order, everything can be done with a single click. While that may not be plausible for your business, it’s wise to regularly examine your process, test your site, and see where you can make things easier for your prospect.

Revisit your messaging and tactics

A big part of successful inbound sales is message matching. If a lead has followed a link to your site and ended up on a landing page, you need to reassure them that they’re in the right place and that you’re going to fulfill your promise. 

For example, let’s imagine your inbound strategy includes promoting a free ebook. When an inbound lead clicks through to learn more, show them the ebook title straight away. Show them an image of the ebook. Explain what they’ll learn to further pique their interest. Don’t confuse them by showing them different offers or, even worse, leading with a sales pitch. 

Here’s an example of one of our ebook landing pages. The ebook itself is front and center here, no fluff or product pitching to distract them.

The most important thing is ensuring that, at every stage, your message is clear. It can be tempting to try and get clever with your messaging, but clarity will always be more effective than any snazzy wordplay. While your inbound messaging should be designed to grab attention, it should never confuse your leads. If someone lands on your website, they should be able to tell within seconds who you are, what you do, and why that matters. 

Match your message with your actions

Drift carried out a study of companies’ response times. Of the 433 companies they reached out to, only 7% responded within 5 minutes. The vast majority took over 5 days to respond if they even responded at all.

The study found that even a 10-minute response delay decreases the chances of qualifying a lead by 400% (compared to a 5-minute response).

This highlights one of the biggest mistakes I see companies making with their inbound leads. They may be getting thousands of leads but they lack a process to manage those leads. For them, their inbound sales funnel is just one big leaking bucket.

To get those leads to sales, you should be able to process and engage them, e.g., send your first email, within minutes. But it’s not just about sending automated emails. Anyone can do that. To stand out you have to get creative. At Reply, that first email is personalized and sent from a named salesperson, along with their personal, direct number.

We also have a dedicated IVR number: +1 855 747 99 53. Go ahead and give it a call, it’s toll-free.

A real person will pick it up. If we don’t answer it’s because we’re all on the phone, but, when someone leaves a message, that doesn’t get put off and forgotten. We have sales and support teams that follow up on any calls as soon as humanly possible.

Sure, you can automate a lot of the process, and I encourage you to do so. The best option for your sales and support team automation would be employing a call center phone solution that offers a call collaboration dashboard and call widget embed possibility, call forwarding and keeping records of every single (even missed) call.

Our whole business is focused on helping people automate the sales process. But automation is only good if you can back up what you’re saying with attention and action.

Get proactive and engage

One of the biggest mistakes people make with outbound sales is keeping it all one-way, blasting out messages to prospects without listening to what they have to say. 

However, you can easily make a similar mistake with your inbound strategies. Even though the idea is to attract prospects to you, that doesn’t mean you should be completely passive in the process. With inbound, your prospect has reached out to you because they like what they see and they want to learn more. Ignoring them isn’t going to help anyone. 

However you get your prospects, two-way communication is a huge advantage. 

Fortunately, current technology means communicating with prospects is easier than ever. For example, solutions like Drift allow you to chat with site visitors in real-time. 

When a prospect hands over their email in exchange for a lead magnet, you can have an auto-responder set up to start a conversation as well as automatically adding them to a nurturing sequence in Reply (we will share a few proven sequences to copy or use as an inspiration, so keep reading).

On the other hand, you don’t want to ambush them with a hard sell or bombard them with marketing. Instead, show genuine interest in them and find ways to add value, rather than working out how much you can sell them. 

One powerful technique is to use Socratic questioning. Originally used by Socrates to teach his pupils, the method uses disciplined questioning as a way to learn more. Rather than lecturing students, Socrates would ask them questions that allowed them to find the answers themselves.

This approach can also be used when you engage with your prospects to learn more about them and their pain points. Asking about the prospect, their situation, their problems, and how they’re currently dealing with them allows you to provide the best solutions. 

Of course, once you’ve asked a question, it’s important to actively listen to what they have to say. Ask clarifying questions where necessary, and never be afraid to go off the script if that’s where the prospect’s answers lead.

Build the A-Team for inbound

If you’re building your inbound team from scratch, there are several specific roles you’ll need to fill: 

• a writer to create compelling content that will draw leads in, 
• a designer who can take that content and make it visually appealing,
• sales reps who can nurture and convert those inbound leads. 

In addition to that, you might want someone to manage your inbound campaigns, someone who can take the lead, set goals, and come up with a winning strategy, as well as reviewing the data from earlier campaigns to optimize future efforts. As you expand your efforts and move into different channels, you’ll have to grow your team to include more specialists who can focus on getting the most from each step. 

For smaller companies or those just starting out, you’ll likely have people take on multiple roles. In that case, you should ensure that everyone understands their responsibilities and can meet them. 

You might also decide to outsource certain tasks, which can be a huge help when you lack the workforce or an expert on staff. That is a very common tactic for outbound sales when you have a trusted lead gen agency doing the heavy-lifting for you. However, by keeping ownership of the overall direction of your inbound marketing, you can ensure your messaging and content are consistent across the company. 

When hiring new members of your inbound team or outsourcing certain roles, it would be great to find someone with decades of experience and a proven track record. Yet, I’ve found that it’s far more important to bring on people with the right qualities. Many skills can be taught, but if someone isn’t willing (or humble enough) to learn, if they don’t share your company’s values and goals, then they could end up holding your team back. 

Once you’ve found the right people to join your team, get them off to the best start with a comprehensive onboarding program. When Kyle Racki, co-founder and CEO of Proposify, described their hiring process for inbound sales reps, he explained how they were able to get two new hires (Amy and Ryan) up to speed: 

Save money with the right software

To carry out a comprehensive inbound campaign, presuming you’ve got a smart team in place, they’re going to need the right tools.

You can’t just expect your team to be responding to all their leads and nurturing them with a standard Gmail account. The good news is, even if you’re short on cash, you can get started without investing in a lot of software.

For example, Reply is an easy and affordable way to do the job. If your outbound team is already using it for cold outreach, you can also create a few inbound campaigns to send marketing content to your leads. 

Alternatively, you could use dedicated tools like Active Campaign or MailChimp.

When it comes to PPC and Facebook ads, you don’t need any fancy software or agencies. At Reply, we take care of all this in-house. We’ve taught ourselves how to write high-performing ads, and there’s no reason you can’t do the same.

By choosing your toolset wisely, if you’re willing to educate yourself to carry out the process all in-house, you can save money and still see massive results.

Become a thought leader

We’ve talked about giving your inbound leads the information they want. But there are plenty of other sites out there offering that same information. To stand out from your competition, you need more. 

You need to give your leads something unique. 

The first step is to produce content that’s truly valuable to your prospects. For example, a step-by-step video tutorial on how to set up your e-commerce site is much more useful than a blog post showing off your holiday snaps.   

However, value is also tied to how unique an item is. That means if your valuable content is just recycled from the top ten results on Google, it won’t be as valuable as you might think. That doesn’t mean you can’t take inspiration from other pieces of content. You just need to make sure you add significant value to what’s already out there.

One way to produce unique content is to put your spin on it. We’re all unique individuals, with different backgrounds and experiences, all of which give us a unique viewpoint. By leaning into what makes you unique, you can create unique content. 

Of course, all the unique content in the world won’t do you any good if it’s just a thinly veiled sales attempt. People expect you to promote your product, just as we expect adverts at the start of the YouTube video. However, if your content is nothing more than a sales pitch, people won’t stick around. 

When we produce content at Reply, obviously we’d love it if people who found it useful went on to sign up for a free trial. However, our goal is for our readers to always get value from our content, to learn something helpful, whether they sign up for Reply or not. 

By serving your inbound leads, by focusing on their needs and pain points, you’ll be a trusted resource, a teacher, a mentor that your prospects turn to when they need help.

Harness the power of social media

While you should definitely work on driving targeted traffic to your blog and growing your email list, an even better channel to share your expertise and connect with your audience is social media.

Using LinkedIn, Twitter, or any other suitable platform, you can tap into the existing audiences — relevant groups and communities — to deliver your insights directly to your prospective customers. With a great deal of consistent effort (and a bit of luck), you can also build your own following.

For example, our sales team has been posting on LinkedIn for almost a year (semi-regularly). Along with sharing valuable insights, we are running sales engagement sequences with social touchpoints in the background. And though we often lack consistency in these efforts, our reach has been steadily growing month by month.

Outside of the conventional social media platforms, there are also many communities you can tap into. This can be Quora, Reddit, Product Hunt, or Sales Hacker — it all depends on where your leads may reside. Once you spot the right platform, start establishing your personal brand and thought leadership there.

Just keep in mind one thing: No one likes blunt pitching and undisclosed promotions. People don’t come to Reddit or Twitter to make a purchase. They come for information, value, or entertainment. So make sure to give them that.

Implement account-based marketing

We’ve talked about account-based prospecting tactics before. All in all, this approach implies the use of highly targeted campaigns, where each account, i.e., a larger organization, is considered a single prospect. So, rather than targeting as many accounts as possible, you focus on the right ones and target them with unique, relevant, and timely messages.

Account-based marketing campaigns are usually carried out across multiple channels, including email, social media, ads, website, etc. These are dynamic and usually automated campaigns that tailor the messaging and touchpoints based on the lead activity or intent signals data.

Think of an ad that haunts you whenever you go after visiting a certain website, a landing page or popup that mentions your company name, a personalized email or LinkedIn message referring to your recent activity with their content.

There’s much room for creativity here. The key to running a successful AMB campaign is data. The more information you can get, the better you will be able to tailor your touchpoints.

Luckily, there are many tools that cannot just help you identify website visitors or track their activity, but also listen to specific signals all over the web, and discover hidden patterns in their behavior indicating their interest.

Expand co-marketing partnerships

When starting out, you might not have a large audience or influence to get your message through. But many other companies serving similar markets do. So why not team up to expand your reach, amplify your voices, and deliver twice the value to your audience?

Co-marketing is a joint marketing effort of two or more businesses operating in related markets or targeting similar audiences. This includes a wide range of cross-promotional activities, e.g., social media shout-outs, guest posts, co-organized events, promo campaigns, etc.

For example, we at Reply have co-organized 10+ webinars with our partners over the past year alone. Thanks to our joint efforts promoting the events, each one of them attracted on average 400-500 registrants. This equals 400-500 warm inbound leads to fill your pipeline.

This experience organizing niche events (and connections we’ve made along the way) helped us organize Sales Development Excellence, the 5-hour online conference for SDR leaders.  With more than 2,000 registrants and 4,000 total views within the first few months, this was another big win for our inbound marketing efforts.

What’s more, we’re regularly contributing guest posts to other high-authority blogs, including ClickUp, Process Street, Dialpad, LeadIQ, etc. This allows us to establish thought leadership in the niche, build valuable links, and put our content in front of the new audience.

Personalize every touchpoint

One of the notable sales trends from 2021, personalization at scale is widely used in cold outreach. Inbound marketing campaigns are no different. After all, every person wants to feel valued and unique.

According to Epsilon research, 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that offers personalized experiences. So, even if you’re sending an automated email to every prospect signing up for a trial or downloading your ebook, try to make it look as if it was intended for them personally.

The exact approach you choose might vary from default email variables to dynamic landing pages or even personalized videos. The good news is that most of those tactics can be implemented at scale with minimum effort, using dedicated personalization tools. 

For example, Vidyard will help you create 100% personal videos in seconds while Hyperise is a great option to customize your images or landing pages.

Read on to find some of our proven inbound sequence templates, featuring examples of how we use personalized images and video.

Re-nurture with a clear funnel

When inbound leads come in, regardless of their source, not all of them are going to convert. In fact, for most companies, 90%-95% of inbound leads won’t convert. And you should be prepared to take those users who haven’t converted and re-nurture. You can’t just send one email and, if they don’t get back, assume that’s the end of the conversation.

I talk to a lot of companies and ask them about their process and what they’re doing for their inbound prospects, how they’re nurturing them. And for most of them, that’s where they stop. They send those 2-3 emails and if they don’t get a response, that’s it. No re-nurturing, just game over.

We typically send 4-5 emails, but we’ll also try to reach out in other ways. Our marketing team will get involved. They take a look at this lead and ask why they aren’t interested in buying. They send them relevant content to nurture them. This could be in the form of infographics, links to something interesting, or even compressed PDFs of white papers and resources. They surround them in social channels. They place ads.

More importantly, we circle back to the sales team at Reply. They start looking at those not converting, looking internally into those companies, and targeting other people in those same companies. If one person has expressed interest, then there’s a good chance others will too.

If you visited us, we want to nurture you in more than just one way. One drip creates a lot of ripples within the company.

Bonus: Reply’s inbound sequences to copy

To help you see these tactics in action, let’s go deeper and take a look at two typical inbound sales funnels at Reply.

The first type of inbound lead we usually get is a demo request. The request comes in and the lead goes into our campaign email sequence, made up of 5 steps.

Day 1: Automated email + task (prospect research)

Day 2: Call (or voice mail)

Day 4: LinkedIn (connection request) + follow-up email

Day 6: Follow-up email

Day 9: LinkedIn (InMail/message) + call

The first email might look like this:

Use your inbound leads to feed your outbound teams

Through the inbound process, you have the opportunity to learn a lot about your leads and customers. Your marketing team should be looking at what type of inbound users you’re attracting and using that to decide what kind of content you should be creating and marketing to those types of users. While that information can then be used to improve your inbound process, it would be a mistake to leave it there.

This is valuable information.

Besides inbound sales, we also use what we learn to improve our general marketing and social presence.

For example, you might see a significant proportion of your inbound leads coming from unexpected markets.

Maybe your accounting software for SMBs is attracting interest from freelancers or enterprise-level companies? Maybe your CRM SaaS for marketers is a big hit with recruitment agencies? By passing that information onto your marketing teams, you can improve your targeting and possibly tap into new, unexpected markets.

Share what you’ve discovered with your outbound sales teams and use it to optimize your outbound marketing messages.