This is the third in a series of posts discussing the role of outbound lead generation in the marketing mix.
In my first post, I described five buyer types that are best reached through outbound sales and marketing.
Then I reviewed the benefits that accrue to marketing from outbound marketing: ROI, market insight and a robust database.
With marketing contributing at most 40% of sales’ leads, outbound lead generation is critical for most organizations.
It is rare to find a sales team that achieves its goals only based on inbound inquiries and referrals.
Despite the noise in the marketplace, most B2B marketers are looking to develop an optimal mix of outbound and inbound marketing, where each type of marketing works together to enhance results.
But let’s face it…outbound sales is a thorny activity saddled with negative connotations.
Inbound is simple in its elegance: build relevant content and they will come.
However, it’s not that straightforward.
The reality is that most inbound marketers conduct outbound marketing. Yes, even HubSpot has a large, outbound calling telesales team.
It’s important to differentiate between responders and inquiries. Responders have indicated interest in an offer while an inquiry is requesting a sales call. A responder is probably more interested in your offer than your solution.
Inbound marketing will engage many prospects but only a small fraction will ‘raise their hand’ to speak to the sales team.
Sales is then engaged to call responders to identify the buyers vs. the information gatherers amongst highly scored prospects.
This is outbound, unsolicited calling. The responders did not request a call nor did the responders expect to receive a call from your sales team.
Sales organizations are always cold calling. Sales people cold call every day. To expand business in an existing account, a sales person asks for a referral to another division. A sales person calls a new account that shares key pain points with a current customer.
Some would call these efforts ‘warm calling’. Not so. This is a vendor-centric view that recognizes that the sales person is ‘warmed-up’. From a prospect or customer-centric perspective, there is no direct relationship. Rather, the prospect recognizes that the sales person is an ‘informed stranger’ who is conducting a cold call.
Account-Based Marketing is rifle-shot outbound marketing. If your organization sells gear to telcos, the global target market is approximately 40 accounts. Account-based marketing or marketing to accounts as a single market favors precise sales and marketing outbound strategies.
Alignment to sales territories favors outbound marketing. Similar to account-based marketing, the definition of a finite list of named accounts will yield a market that can be communicated to with outbound, customized messaging to unique segments. For example, an organization could target five verticals with 1,000 accounts in each vertical with vertical-specific messaging. Email, direct mail and outbound calling are often successfully deployed here.
Outbound sales and marketing play a vital role in complementing inbound and filling gaps that inbound cannot address. With optimization of the mix between inbound and outbound, B2B organizations will enhance the alignment between sales and marketing and build better demand generation programs that meet buyer needs.
Photo Credit: Robert Lesser
4 Comments
Robert,
Good post, I agree on the importance of outbound activity to complement inbound interest.
Regarding "cold" vs. "warm" calling, my experience is that the reason for and structure of the call makes a huge difference in conversion rates. A call that has a well-researched reason behind it ("here's how I can help you") and a strong reference ("here's a person you know and trust who can vouch for the value of my offering") will have high conversion rates, even higher than many inbound sources.
Unfortunately, many outbound efforts are of the "spray and pray" variety, which I find inexcusable given the amount of business and social connection information available today.
Hi, Robert. You raise some great insights in this series.
I find myself disagreeing with one of your premises, though. You seem to position everything as either/or … i.e., 'a lead was generated either by sales or by marketing' or 'a lead came in either via inbound or outbound tactics.' I think that all of this misses the crucial insight that marketers need to be more successful — i.e., that buyers are at different stages, which has implications for different channels and different needs from sales vs. marketing. Every buyer goes through a process w/ different stages of idea formation and different information needs. If you were to map engagement w/ a buyer from earliest to latest stages, it would show a sequence that starts with inbound then goes to outbound and eventually hands off to sales.
The observation that more leads might have come in from one source or the other is in fact a false reality. It's that leads came in at different stages in their buying process, and as marketers we need to know this and have the right subsequent sequence in mind to move the buyer to eventually being sales ready.
The bigger point here is that all sales and marketing activities need to act in concert around the buyer and his/her process. And so any type of analysis that asks whether you should do one or the other w/o putting it into the context of where this stuff fits into the buying cycle has a lot of potential to get us off track.
Adam Needles
B2B Marketing Evangelist
Silverpop
Twitter: @abneedles
Blog: http://www.silverpop.com/blogs/demand-generation/
@Umberto – I agree that customer insight allows outbound sales to provide a relevant message….very similar to direct marketing, isn't it?
@Adam – this series of blog posts is intended to restore some balance between oubound and inbound marketing.
In doing so, I have sometimes simplified the identification of lead sources to emphasize a point.
I have also noted the importance of optimzing the marketing mix rather than looking for a silver bullet.
I agree with you that sales and marketing must look at demand generation from multiple perspectives for success: buying cycle, selling cycle and buyer personas.
All the same, some situations do favor use of outbound. For example, innovators and early adopters who have latent needs are not searching for a solution as their need is unrecognizd. Outbound marketing is a good fit here.
There are many B2B organizations with weak to non-existent marketing organizations to produce content and inbound marketing progams. Sales must outbound to produce their own pipelines.
I can also provide many examples where inbound marketing is more appropriate.
Great post.
With all the hype about how sales goals can be achieved with inbound techniques, your bubble bursting example of Hubspot's outbound efforts made me laugh out loud!