I had a great conversation with a prospect recently on the role that inbound marketing and outbound sales play together. Their B2B solution is the best fit for large enterprise customers. These customers typically have complex sales cycles that often involve multiple decision makers. This means that outbound sales is the most impactful tactic to close business for this customer. Inbound marketing will help to generate inbound leads, but it is a bigger help to support the sales team and to help nurture leads. There are many tactics used as part of inbound marketing that are equally as powerful when applied to an outbound sales effort.
Content Marketing
From an inbound effort content marketing, with a big focus on blogging, is a great way to have new prospects discover your company, product, or service. Great content is also an excellent tool to help support outbound efforts. A well-crafted blog can be shared as a follow-up from a meeting or with a prospect.
Social Media
Sharing updates regularly through Twitter and Linkedin keeps sales people and their solutions top of mind with both customers and prospects. One of the best types social messages to share are blog posts and white papers. This gets contacts back to your website and reinforces your subject matter expertise.
Email Marketing
One of the best examples of email marketing to support enterprise sales is an email newsletter. The email newsletter has lots of great sales information for the sales team. Most email solution will track opens, clicks, and bounces. The knowledge that can be gained can range from seeing what a contact is clicking on and therefore interested in to bounces that signify a contact may have moved on from an organization.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is an excellent tool for the modern sale person. Leads are nurtured by providing applicable content. The interactions by the contact with the email, content, and website are all recorded. This can help with lead scoring and focus the outbound efforts on the contacts that could be the most receptive to conversations about your B2B solution.
If you are interested to better understand inbound marketing and how it can help your sales and marketing efforts download our white paper.
