The Importance of Sales Plays in Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Sales Plays are specific actions that a sales team takes in order to move a potential customer through the sales funnel. These actions include sending personalized emails, making phone calls, or scheduling demo presentations.

In an inbound marketing strategy, Sales Plays are an important part in the process of turning leads into customers. Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on attracting potential customers through content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and other tactics.

To be effective, an inbound marketing strategy must include a clear plan for how to move leads through the sales funnel. This is where Sales Plays come in. By using targeted sales plays, sales teams can effectively nurture leads and guide them toward a purchase.

Actions of Sales Plays When Into an Inbound Marketing Strategy

1. Personalized emails: Sending personalized emails to leads can help build a relationship and demonstrate the value of your product or service.

2. Demo presentations: Scheduling demo presentations can give leads a hands-on look at your product or service, helping them to understand its features and benefits better.

3. Phone calls: Making phone calls to leads can be a more personal way to connect and can help to build trust and establish a relationship.

4. Follow-up emails: Sending follow-up emails to leads can help to keep them engaged and can provide an opportunity to address any questions or concerns they may have.

Using Sales Plays in an Inbound Marketing Strategy 

We asked our team of experts to elaborate on the importance of using Sales Plays in your inbound marketing strategy. Here is what they had to say.

Sales Plays keep marketing and sales aligned to streamline the nurturing of qualified leads. Because inbound marketing is a strategy that attracts prospects by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them, when they want it, and where they are in their research and buyer’s journey, Sales Plays should be tailored with valuable content to enhance and further that strategy in the same way.

A good inbound marketing strategy will attract qualified prospects to your organization, and when they convert, the Sales Plays guide the sales team to nurture them in the process to becoming a client. Consistency in Sales Plays with the inbound marketing strategy creates a seamless experience for the prospect by providing related content, messaging, and thought leadership to the hands of the sales team to easily, and quickly, deliver to the prospect (who already has your organization or service top of mind).

This consistency helps to further educate the qualified lead, build trust with your organization, and keep you top of mind in their buying process. Sales Plays then enhance the success rate of your inbound marketing efforts because they help the sales team sell smarter and faster – while being in line with your marketing strategy.

— Shaye Smith, Director of Marketing

Sales Plays add further dimension to your inbound marketing efforts, not only in terms of getting your content in front of your target prospects, but also by demonstrating that your sales reps are subject matter experts.

They also allow your sales team to create a more genuine experience for their prospects by showing that they’re earnest in wanting to help their leads find the best solution for the problem that brought them to your website, rather than just trying to pad out their numbers for the month.

In short, Sales Plays compliment your inbound marketing strategy by making it more rounded and human in its approach.

— Sandra Sepaniak, Inbound Marketing and Sales Consultant

Sales Plays are a foundational tool that benefits sales teams of all sizes. Whether you have 1 or 100 salespeople, having a strategic and detailed step-by-step play of what you expect them to do in any given sales scenario helps eliminate guesswork and ensures sales reps are following best practices as well as saving them time and increasing their efficiency.

This ultimately impacts your inbound marketing strategy because you are able to incorporate key marketing content into Sales Plays that will enhance sales outreach by being more educational and helpful.

Your marketing content shouldn’t live in a marketing silo – it should be utilized regularly throughout the sales process and Sales Plays is a great way to do that!

— Dani Buckley, VP/General Manager

Sales Plays allow sales to sell smarter and faster by providing them with a repeatable sales process to follow. When your Inbound Marketing strategy includes sales plays, your team can spend less time planning their touchpoints and more time selling! It is a win, win!

— Emily Hartzell, Senior Inbound Marketing and Sales Consultant

Your Sales Playbook success is only as good as the captain and crew on the ship. I’ve seen many cases where the sales team puts in the hard work to build a solid playbook only for it to collect dust on digital shelves.

To truly launch a successful playbook, there has to be shared accountability for it’s success – and that starts at the top. In addition to the build out of the playbook, sales leaders need to put a success plan in place for usage. How will you hold sales reps accountable? How will you hold yourself, as sales leadership, accountable? Does that mean weekly check-in’s with the team to see how the plays have been executed? Does that mean tying a usage incentive in with it? Is there a plan in place for keeping it updated?

I recommend creating a cadence for analysis and accountability reviews to keep pace with desired sales outcomes.

— Isha Bell, Inbound Marketing and Sales Consultant

By incorporating these and other Sales Plays into your inbound marketing strategy, you can effectively move leads through the sales funnel and increase the chances of turning them into customers.