Inbound Selling

How to Change the Way You Sell to Match How People Buy

Brian Signorelli

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119473275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Change the way you think about sales to sell more, and sell better.

Over the past decade, Inbound Marketing has changed the way companies earn buyers' trust and build their brands – through meaningful, helpful content. But with that change comes unprecedented access to information in a few quick keystrokes. Enter the age of the empowered buyer, one who no longer has to rely on a sales rep to research their challenges or learn more about how a company's offering might fit their needs. Now, with more than 60% of purchasing decisions made in the absence of a sales rep, the role of the rep itself has been called into question.

With no end in sight to this trend, sales professionals and the managers who lead them must transform both the way they think about selling and how they go about executing their sales playbook. Expert author and HubSpot Sales Director, Brian Signorelli has viewed the sales paradigm shift from the inside—his unique insights perfectly describe the steps sales professionals must take to meet the needs of the empowered customer. In this book, readers will learn:

• How inbound sales grew out of inbound marketing concepts and practices
• A step-by-step approach for sales professionals to become inbound sellers
• What it really means to be a frontline sales manager who leads a team of inbound sellers
• The role executive leadership plays in affecting an inbound sales transformation

For front-line seller, sales manager, executives, and other sales professionals, Inbound Selling is the complete resource to help your business thrive in the age of the empowered buyer.

Part 1
The “Why?” Behind Inbound Sales

Chapter 1
I Was Never Supposed to Be in Sales

There is simply not enough written on the topic of sales from the front-line reps' or front-line sales managers' perspective—the ones bringing billions in revenue into millions of businesses, day in and day out. They are the ones that truly understand the nature of today's buying and selling environment, and it's my opinion that theirs are the voices that matter most. And that their voices should be heard. My goal here is to give them that voice.

Of course, there are volumes upon volumes of literature written about sales management, sales leadership, sales tactics, and more. Yet, these front-line stories are being told too infrequently, mostly because the ones who write anything about sales haven't sold anything in the past decade. Beyond the obvious, that's a problem because by the time those individuals—the academic, retired professional, consultant, or sales executive—writes his or her book, the landscape has inevitably changed. They also won't tell you the truth about what really happens on the front lines of sales because they do not know anymore.

Beyond that, I'm writing my story because the world of sales has changed! Drastically! The same way that the marketing world has experienced dramatic change over the past decade, so, too, has the sales world. Many times, for example, we hear from marketers that over 60% of a buying decision is complete before a prospect ever connects with a sales rep,¹ though I'm not quite convinced that sales reps and sales professionals fully understand the magnitude and impact of that reality. They almost seem to be in denial of the fact that buyers are—unequivocally—in complete control.

Before a buyer ever speaks to a sales rep today, they have already done an immense amount of research in private or, at the very least, in the absence of a sales rep. They know your business. They know your competitors. They likely know your products' or services' strengths and weaknesses, as seen through the eyes of your customers. They may even know you. How?

The modern buyer uses a myriad of tools at their disposal, such as Google and third-party customer review sites, like G2Crowd and TrustRadius. They have already figured out where your product stands relative to those of other leaders, and they already have a sense of who your executive leadership team is. If they want to learn about anyone at your company, all they need to do is search LinkedIn.

What led to the rise of the empowered buyer? Here is an extremely abbreviated history: Internet magnates like Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Biz Stone, Reid Hoffman, and countless others transformed the way in which we all access and synthesize information—through search and connectivity. With this newfound access to seemingly perfect, limitless, and integrated information, came a shift in how we all make buying decisions. Simultaneously, technologies also arose that enable anyone to completely block out unwanted messaging. Technologies like TiVo allow us to skip right over commercials; satellite radio empowers us to eliminate ads altogether; caller ID gives us the choice of accepting or rejecting anyone's call; and services like the National Do Not Call Registry—to an extent—put the power back in the consumers' hands, preemptively blocking telemarketers from breaking up family dinner, for example. Translation: Yesterday (pre-Google), most everyone had to rely on mediums like TV, magazines, tradeshows, newspapers, the Yellow Pages, or even cold calls from sales reps to get answers to the questions they were asking. All the control was in the hands of corporations, and their sales teams. Today, not only does the Internet allow modern buyers and consumers to take back that control, empowering them to find information they need on their own terms, it turns out that people enjoy this self-led experience far better than being interrupted. So, the power has shifted away from corporations and traditional media platforms, and back into the modern buyer's hands.

While the challenges that came with this democratized access to information are well known in the global marketing community, they seem, in a way, to have been lost on their sales counterparts. Where does all this change in the way that people find, or block, information leave the modern sales rep? In a phrase: Gone are the days where buyers rely on sales reps for information. Therefore, as sales professionals, we need to change the way we sell to better match the way that the world now consumes information and makes its buying decisions. We must do this without having nearly the amount of control or, in fact, any control that reps of yesterday may have enjoyed. We must evolve and find new, relevant ways to connect with, and engage, buyers. Simply creating a target account list and cold-calling straight through it, repetitively, is dead.

Here are some facts that help shed light on how challenging today's selling environment is for sellers:

• 
  Over 60% of the sales decision-making process is done before the sale is made (CEB Research).²
• 
  By 2020, it is expected that as much as 80% of a buying decision will be done without a sales rep (Forrester).³
• 
  Once a rep gets to the sales conversation, more than 50% of the decision-making process is driven not by what they sell, but how they sell (Challenger Sale).⁴
• 
  Over 90% of CEOs said they never respond to cold emails or calls. For the ones that do, only 2% of all outreach turns into a meeting scheduled (Forbes).⁵

One of my hopes in writing this story is to do nothing more than share what I've learned, felt, and experienced with anyone who should feel so inclined to keep reading. At no point in this story will I claim to be a de facto expert. I've simply learned an immense amount through experience and expect to only learn volumes upon volumes more as I continue my career in sales. But I think it's critical to share what I've learned so far, document it, and make the front-line sales rep's and manager's perspective widely available.

I started my career as a research analyst a decade ago (about 2007), jumped into the startup world for a few years after that, and then decided to take the plunge into the sales world. No experience, no training, no prior coaching or knowledge. All I had was my mixed bag of experiences across five years and a determination to give sales a shot for at least one year.

So, my desires above all else in sharing this story are to:

1. Inspire sales reps and sales leaders to rapidly adapt to the new sales world reality, so that they may thrive.
2. Encourage reps yet to be born, considering a career switch into sales, considering a switch out of sales, or somewhere along their sales journey to keep going and take only the bits and pieces of this story that work for them.
3. Create the possibility to improve the all-too-tenuous relationships that exist between buyers and sellers today.

To understand where we're going together, I'd like to take you with me to the beginning of my own story. It isn't necessarily interesting, and it probably isn't unique. But it's my story, and I think it's worth sharing with you, if for no other reason than context for how I arrived at where I am today.

When I came to HubSpot in 2012, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had no sales experience, no training, and I had never been fully involved in a sales “process,” I had never really asked anyone for money, at least not in the sales sense. What I did have, however, was a desire to make money, or at least that's how I perceived my sense of motivation in life back then (I would later come to find this was only partially true, and mostly derived from the fact that I'd been living paycheck to paycheck for the prior five years). I'm not sure where that desire came from, but it has been present my entire life. Rest assured, however, that this fascination is not what you think. I never did, nor do I now, value money for the sake of money. It's the freedom that it represents, and the work almost always required to get it, that motivates me the most.

A brief timeline of events that led up to my adventure in sales at HubSpot: By the time I graduated from college...