When it comes to making an investment, most people like to take their own sweet time deciding whether to gamble with chance or not. Most often, what we invest are valuable assets. For most businesses it’s money, but then you also have to take into account the time and effort that you spend in pursuit of an endeavor for those are investments, too.
Naturally, we like to make sure that our investment will flourish so we can earn back the time, money, effort, and other valuable resources that we have put in.
In Inbound Sales, we also make investments. We invest in training our sales people, we invest in the technological tools we use to get leads into our sales process, we invest in the time that we spend in implementing an Inbound sales strategy and we are ever hopeful that all these investments will grow. In addition, we capitalize on time as well, and we all know that time is a precious commodity.
So in an Inbound sales process, there are Inbound sales strategies in place that fortify your chances of landing more sales that will then translate into return of investment, which is the goal of every enterprise in the first place.
In this article, we will define what an active buyer is and distinguish it from a passive buyer. We will explain one simple thing that any business owner or marketing officer must grasp perfectly in order for them to know which sort of prospects are worthy of being recipients of all their valuable investments. In this article, we dare elaborate why active buyers must be prioritized over passive buyers.
What are you waiting for? Scroll on!
The First Phase of the Inbound Sales Strategy: IDENTIFY
If you have been studying the concepts within the Inbound Methodology, you might have noticed that an Inbound Sales strategy has phases. And the first of these phases is to identify potential buyers. Put simply, the first phase of an Inbound Sales strategy is like a weeding process.
Here, you employ tactics that will enable you to identify what your prospects’ main challenges are and what their goals are. It will let you see if their priorities at the moment will actually lead them into an actual purchase anytime soon.
In this initial phase, you get to classify your prospects: you have your active buyers, and then you have your passive buyers.
What are Active Buyers?
So what are active buyers? Active Buyers are those prospects who have already begun their buyer’s journey, they have identified their pain-points in their everyday lives and are intent on finding a solution for it. Other resources would also define active buyers as customers who may have made a purchase from a certain company, opted to subscribe to their newsletter and are most likely to make another purchase again soon as a continuing customer.
What are Passive Buyers?
Meanwhile, passive buyers are referred to as those set of prospects who may or may not make a purchase anytime soon and may need a tad bit more encouragement before making the decision to buy. These could be prospects who discovered your blogs, kept on visiting it but have not exhibited other more promising signs of an eventual purchase like talking to a sales representative or committing to a timeline for a purchase despite expressing an interest in your product.
Higher Chance of Making a Purchase
From the description of both active and passive buyers, it is clear that active buyers exhibit more signs of making a purchase, and as a business owner or as someone working in sales, active buyers are the ones you must endeavor to nurture and guide. They should be your target.
When you gamble, and dare invest your time and energy, you want your efforts to bear fruit. You aspire to generate revenue and have a return of your investment. Picking the prospects who you know can help you attain all that is crucial.
Final Take: Why Prioritize Active Buyers
By now you have a clearer idea on why active buyers must be prioritized over passive buyers.
When you make an investment, you nurture the hope that you will be able to generate a return of investment. That is key to growing and expanding one’s business.
A prospect going through an Inbound Sales process might take a day, a few hours, months, or sometimes a couple of years before making a purchase that will then help you earn your revenue. While you must nurture all prospects and extend to all of them the required patience, while you stick all throughout the phases offering constant help, you have to think about the goals you have set for your organization/company.
Passive buyers will require so much more of your time, effort, and money. Meanwhile, active buyers are most likely ready to make a purchase. Identifying active buyers and choosing to spend more effort in nurturing them because their chances of turning into a sale is higher compared to passive buyers should be part of your overall strategy.
That’s why active buyers must be prioritized over passive buyers, because doing so is essentially just good business.