5 Ways to Accelerate Your Inbound Lead Pipeline

Is your sales organization truly optimized to transform inbound leads into customers through inbound sales? If you sell products or services over the phone, chances are that you have a marketing team working in overdrive to generate a steady stream of inbound leads. Marketers spend long hours investing in ads and creating content that inspires qualified leads to pick up their phones and call. But the fact remains that most companies have yet to optimize inbound sales. And this is a big problem, because recent data from BIA/Kelsey reveals that more businesses view inbound phone calls as a top quality lead source than any other channel.

It’s not too late to optimize your inbound sales processes. Here are 5 things that many of our customers are already doing to ramp up inbound lead-to-close rates.

Separate Your Inbound and Outbound Sales Reps

One of the top mistakes a company can make is to say “sales is sales.”  But being successful at inbound and outbound sales require completely different tactics and approaches.

Expecting an inbound rep to also be great at outbound sales would be like expecting a musician to be proficient at a completely different instrument and saying, “it’s all music.” But specializing helps your team see much faster results. Think about it. If a musician spent half of her time working on playing the piano, and the other half of her time playing drums, it would take her twice as long to master each respective instrument. However, if she focused all her efforts on mastering the piano, she would see results a lot quicker.

By specializing, sales reps can see results a heck of a lot quicker. And in today’s fast-paced business environment, ramping up a sales team quickly can spell the difference between bankroll and bankrupt.

Separate Your Team Into Product Specialists

Several of our customers are seeing success by specializing beyond sales roles and are specializing by product or vertical. Say your company sells SaaS hosting packages. Imagine if every time a caller dials your business looking for a cloud app hosting package, that caller was instantly connected with a rep who only sells cloud app hosting packages. They would be far more familiar with the specific pain points, competitors and objections that go with selling app hosting packages than a general rep who sells all manners of hosting packages.

We designed Revenue.io to be able to specifically route inbound calls to specific closers or inbound sales queues based on the specific ad or URL they saw before calling. For example, if a prospect clicked on a Google ad for “App Hosting Packages” they could be given a phone number that automatically routes them to an app hosting specialist.

Use Sales Scripts

Sales scripts are almost ubiquitous in the telemarketing agency. As a result, many more skilled reps handling inbound calls have an aversion to using sales scripts. “Using a script kills the natural flow of a conversation,” you may have heard reps say. But skilled inside sales reps don’t have to stick to scripts verbatim. Simply having access to important talking points, objection-busters and current promotions can help reps perform at peak levels. After all, even top NFL teams still use a playbook.

Give Marketers Real-Time Feedback

Revenue.io’s call rating tool enables reps to give marketers real-time feedback into lead quality from specific marketing campaigns.

Even the most skilled inbound sales reps will have a hard time converting unqualified leads into opportunities. Creating predictable revenue streams demands that inbound leads are at least somewhat qualified. Inbound reps need a system to alert marketing, in real time, to the percentage of qualified leads that are coming in. There are several ways to do this. Of course reps can log data manually in custom CRM fields. But your reps can take far more calls if they have a way to quickly alert marketing to the quality of leads being generated by campaigns. To that end, Revenue.io’s call rating tool is helping our marketing customers optimize campaigns to drive more qualified traffic to inbound sales reps.

Record Calls

Sure, inside sales managers can learn a lot from dashboards. They can predict which reps are on pace to meet goals or which times of day have the highest volume of inbound calls. But in order to optimize ROI, managers need to constantly be searching tactics that are both successful and repeatable.

Listening to call recordings can be one the best ways to hear—straight from the front lines—what’s working and what isn’t. Is a particular rep creating more pipeline than her coworkers? If so, listen to that rep’s sales pitch to see if her success can be replicated. Sure, maybe she’s a natural. But perhaps she’s thought of a new way to pitch your company’s offerings that really resonates with customers. Without listening to a recording, you’d know that she was a great rep but you might never know why! That’s why we were sure to provide our customers with the ability to automatically record calls and log them in Salesforce.

Want to learn more inbound sales strategies? Download our free eBook Accelerating Pipeline with a Dedicated Lead Response Team!