Page 129 - The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million - PDFDrive.com

3. A lead opened an email from my drip marketing campaign

4. A lead mentioned a key phrase relevant to my business on social media

5. A lead mentioned our company or our competition on social media

6. A lead followed our CEO on Twitter

7. A lead downloaded one of our ebooks

Salespeople need to know in real time when these engagements are occurring,
and should be organizing their prospecting activity accordingly. Forget
alphabetical order and deprioritize touch cadences.

Specialize Sales by Inbound versus Outbound

As we have discussed in this chapter, selling to an inbound lead requires a new
set of skills. For this reason, specializing the members of your sales team by the
types of leads they cover (inbound versus outbound) is a good idea. This
specialization is also important for another reason: if a salesperson receives 50
inbound leads per month and is asked to supplement his pipeline with cold
calling, that salesperson will not do the cold calls. Salespeople will always look
for the path of least resistance to hit their goal. If you do not give a salesperson
any inbound leads and tell them they need to hit quota through cold calling,
they'll find a way to make it happen.

This is the approach we used at HubSpot as we scaled to $100M in revenue. We
had one team that called the inbound leads exclusively. They got really good at
using specific tactics to engage with these inbound leads. We got really good at
sizing this team in order to optimize the lead flow per salesperson and the time
spent on each lead. We had another team that had to get to goal by cold calling.
These folks were given business development reps, or BDRs, who made the cold
calls and set appointments for the outbound closing specialists. This team could
take advantage of targeting perfect-fit companies but had the added task of
educating cold prospects and creating pain points.

This tactic of specializing by lead source works really well during the $0 to $100
million journey. I have seen it implemented at many start-ups, and it
immediately resolves issues of salespeople refusing to call inbound leads or
refusing to make cold calls. In most cases, companies are transitioning from a
small team that exclusively makes cold calls to a hybrid structure that
accommodates inbound volume. The best thing to do is take your top-performing
salespeople and rotate the inbound leads between them. That way, they can start