Beyond Marketing and Sales: The Complete INBOUND 2019 Experience

Written by: April Grudier

Whether you’re in marketing or sales or operations, or simply invested in learning about best practices of modern business, it’s time to get excited. The event of the year is right around the corner: INBOUND 2019 is almost here.

HubSpot’s annual conference takes attendees on a three-day whirlwind tour of everything inbound, with cutting-edge tactics and high-profile speakers. It’s a carnival of networking, spotlight speakers, happy hours, interactive sessions and insightful events aimed at boosting your business’s inbound acumen. Our team will be there, and we can’t wait.

By now, we’re old pros at INBOUND. For the last few years, BlueSnap has sent a team to the conference, both to learn from and to educate our peers across different industries. This year, we’ll be the only payments provider in attendance. We’ll be bringing our unique expertise to augment the impressive array of inbound topics (and chowing down on some delicious seafood — it is Boston, after all!).

Why we INBOUND: The importance of payments

Marketing, sales and payments should go hand in hand. Many inbounders focus on marketing and sales, the complete buyer’s journey, personas and so on — but they often forget the crucial stage of actually paying for the product or service. The complete inbound experience for your leads touches every stage of the journey, up through conversion to customer. It’s just as important to optimize payments for the inbound methodology as it is to update your content marketing tactics.

Know your audience

How people buy is changing rapidly. As your buyers evolve, you need to evolve with them. Nail down those buyer personas with key details like what payment methods they use, whether they prefer mobile and what website designs they’ll find most appealing. Chances are, your personas have pain points around payments as well. Simple issues like your checkout page can hurt your chances of conversion, despite the best content nurture strategy.

You can personalize the experience for your buyers on the payments side as well as the marketing side. If your business has global customers, localization will help you appeal to them with conversions in their local currency and preferred payment platforms (for instance, buyers in Germany primarily use PayPal, so that plugin is essential). Similarly, if your personas are typically on the go, optimize your payments for mobile with mobile wallets.

B2B companies also need to take personalization into consideration. How your customers want to pay — be it bank transfers, international wires or even phone payments — will vary wildly depending on the type and location of the company. Make sure that your business audience has a tailored experience designed to make the payments process as easy as possible for them.

Deepen your data strategy

Payments data can also help deepen your understanding of how your personas truly shop, bringing insights that can refine your entire inbound strategy. After all, data is essential to inbound. It guides marketing and sales tactics, and it should guide payment integrations too.

Fully compliant payment data and practices will both increase customer trust and improve your data strategy to help you truly understand your customers. Check out this talk at INBOUND 2019 on data privacy best practices to learn more about the importance of data.

Streamline the buyer’s journey

Payments providers consider every stage of the buyer’s journey in excruciating detail. After all, the payment stage is the moment of truth that makes or breaks a conversion. It’s the ultimate step in the buyer’s journey, so payments should be seamlessly integrated — frictionless.

Speakers at INBOUND 2019 will focus heavily on friction in the buyer’s journey. Poorly-planned or unaccounted for friction is the enemy of inbound practices, and experts will discuss everything from increasing buyer trust during sales to eliminating friction for customers.

Reducing friction is the key to a successful payments process. Payment should be integrated into the design of the product or service, not divorced from it. (Uber is an overused but relevant example.) Your customer should focus on how you can help them achieve their goal or solve their problem and ultimately forget about payment entirely.

That’s especially true for SaaS. Most companies operate on a subscription service now. Payments should make that easier, with features like auto-updates of card information when a customer loses or updates their credit card. Payment providers like BlueSnap also offer payment retries, so that customers don’t need to get involved over a simple payment failure caused by network issues.

It’s all about ensuring your customer has the best experience possible and is delighted with your offering, from marketing to sales and straight through to payment. Payments help you map out your entire lead to revenue plan and track the ROI of every marketing initiative with full insight into the payment process. With the right provider, you can optimize every part of your process for inbound and ensure the best journey for your buyers.

INBOUND 2019: What to look forward to

We’ve already highlighted a few sessions you should check out, but there are so many more learning opportunities at this year’s conference. You can go in expecting to focus on marketing and come out with a million new ideas on how to increase sales along the way.

Make sure to check out the social events as well as the speakers, which include big names like: