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!

@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.

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/

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.