Inbound, outbound and now inbound-led outbound?
Go-to-market leaders are trying to crack the code for pipeline development in a world where buyers are becoming ever more immune to the high volume of generic messaging they receive.
LinkedIn posts proclaim “outbound is dead” and “welcome to the era of inbound-led outbound!”
This screams of taking an inside out view of what we hope to achieve with our pipeline generation activities.
Vendor centric prospecting
Too often we fall into the trap of looking at the world through our own lens instead of our customer’s.
This is what we see when we talk about inbound versus outbound and each of our potential pipeline channels:
We put ourselves in the centre, and we spin up teams to drive each of these channels.
(I’m not getting into the specific activities here, so marketing events could be its own channel, or part of your inbound or outbound channels.)
This leads to siloed thinking and claims over attribution “yes the customer called in, but because they had responded to my outbound email”, “yes but that was because the partner asked them to after they attended our event…”
Customer-centric prospecting
Things look very different when you put the customer at the centre of this diagram.
Now we wrap the prospect (or existing customer we are looking to expand) in the range of channels we have available to us.
Firstly our product - helping our users to receive the value they expect from our product and encourage wider use cases with the same users or encouraging propagation to new users. This can also include our customer success and technical support team’s interactions with our customers.
Customer referrals - who do we already work with that knows this prospect? Who do they trust. Customer referrals close faster, buy more and churn less, and yet very few companies have a strategic customer referral program.
Partners - who does our prospect already buy from and trust? Business advisors, system integrators, tech resellers? Instead of trying to bash the front door, why don’t we see who can let us in the back door?
Sales teams - inbound or outbound? Who picked up the phone first doesn’t matter to the customer, they want inspiring, educating, insight sharing sellers with business acumen that can add real value to our buyers in every interaction.
Marketing - beyond our sellers our marketers raise awareness of the problem we solve, and help buyers understand the possible solutions and how we could be. possible option. I like the idea of rebranding the Chief Marketing Officer to the Chief Familiarity Officer - helping our customers understand where we fit in their world and warming them up for any of the previous channels.
Break down your silos
In the first diagram you have silos - each channel is primarily owned by one team across marketing, sales or customer success.
Each team fights for their own attribution to justify their cost.
In the second diagram we all have the same goal - to deliver the best experience to the buyer and to surround them with the best options and capabilities we can offer.
Who picked up the phone first doesn’t matter.
In an ideal world our customer interacts with every channel - sees some brand marketing, receives a timely “how-to guide” from a seller, attends an event with a consulting partner they already work with, gets a recommendation at a peer networking dinner, signs up for a freemium trial and quickly finds themselves adding in more users…..
How do you look at your prospecting channels?
How do you think they’ll evolve as the volume of generic messaging increases?
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