Outbound marketing the inbound way: How to fuel your sales engine

FOUR YEARS AGO, I was sitting at my desk in the Vendasta marketing department—which, back then, consisted of myself, my CMO, and an overworked-yet-surprisingly-mellow designer—when our CEO whirled into the room and declared, “Marketing’s main focus needs to be about leads. That’s all you guys should worry about. Leads, leads, leads.”

 

 

He was right, of course. We were spending too much time on posters and swag and weird cartoons about disturbing spokescharacters without thinking hard enough about our demand generation strategy. We had no defined marketing programs, no lead forecasts, and no idea what newfangled initialisms like MQL, SQL, or SLA stood for. Heck, we didn’t even know the difference between initialisms and acronyms—boy, have we come a long way.

It’s a common story.

One day, marketing wakes up from the dream otherwise known as start-up bliss, where it’s all conference booth pop-ups and business card templates, and realizes that revenue is just as much their responsibility as it is sale’s.

But here’s the thing: marketers HATE sales.

That’s why we went into marketing. We would rather spend our time in email templates and PowerPoint decks than pick up a phone—or, God forbid, a Polycom—and pitch something to a real human being. Even listening to sales calls makes us break into hives.

Here’s something else, though: I think most salespeople dislike sales, too. Maybe they enjoy the environment or the outcome or have a higher tolerance for BS, but those things are tangential. When it comes to selling, there’s always a risk of rejection, and rejection stings. That’s the way we’re wired.

As I see it, most salespeople don’t want to be salespeople. They want to be order-takers.

Here’s the difference:

Doesn’t order-taking sound great compared to the alternative?

That’s why HubSpot is so successful. “Stop cold calling,” they say. “Embrace inbound marketing. Be helpful to your customers. Inform them and provide them with great, valuable content so you’ll never have to waste time on crappy cold calls again.”

Except here’s the rub (there’s always a rub, right?).

Inbound is rarely—if ever—enough to hit aggressive sales targets.

Even HubSpot has an outbound sales department, despite the inbound-based gospel they preach 24/7. To me, it’s always been hypocritical. I’ve attended a few of their Inbound conferences, and not once has Brian or Dharmesh gotten on stage and said you have to have a blended approach. To them, the gargantuan Inbound sign behind them says it all.

 

 

But let’s peel back the curtain for a minute. Standing In the wings of this poorly drawn stick-figure scenario is Mark Roberge, HubSpot’s chief revenue officer. In his book, “The Sales Acceleration Formula”, Mark writes:

“[Here] is the approach we used at HubSpot as we scaled to $100M in revenue. We had one team that called the inbound leads exclusively…We had another team that had to get to goal by cold calling. This team could take advantage of targeting perfect-fit companies but had the added task of educating cold prospects and creating pain points. This tactic of specializing by lead source works really well during the $0 to $100 million journey.”

That’s interesting, coming straight from an original HubSpotter, isn’t it? Inbound isn’t enough. Not even for the biggest inbound gorilla in the room.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not discrediting the idea of content marketing. The concept of inbound is amazing, and the cult—err, movement—they’ve created around it is insane. But what it’s not is fast. And companies want big, ambitious results faster and faster and faster.

I’m not sure how long it would’ve taken HubSpot to go from $0 to $100M by relying on inbound alone, but I’m certain it would’ve been a lot longer.

So let’s take a closer look at what you should do when inbound isn’t enough for your big, bold ambitions.

What to do when inbound isn’t enough

When I picture sales, I picture the upper-class quarters of the Titanic, where men in tuxes are sipping brandy and making deals over fat cigars.

Sales:

When I picture lead generation, I picture the boiler room five decks below, where a line-up of sweating joes are shovelling coal into furnaces as fast as they can.

Demand Generation:

I’m not criticizing sales. I’m only illustrating that demand gen is a constant slog to fuel the company’s sales and marketing engine. Without it, your turbines would grind to a halt and no one would be going anywhere.

So how do you feed those furnaces and keep the ship moving?

Let’s look at the difference between inbound and outbound leads for a second.

When you think about inbound, you’re probably picturing well-qualified leads that came to your site, downloaded a piece of content, visited a bunch of your pages, and/or requested a demo. If they didn’t request a demo, all they need is a little nurturing.

When you think about outbound marketing, you’re picturing cold calls, email blasts, voicemails, gatekeepers, etc.  

Here’s what’s wrong with those images. Inbound leads aren’t always sunshine and rainbows, and outbound leads aren’t always darkness and swamp scum.

In my experience, there’s no difference—or a very negligible difference—between a top-of-funnel inbound lead and a cold outbound lead when they both match your buyer personas. There’s also no difference in the LTV of customers I’ve acquired through outbound vs. inbound (the thing to watch carefully is cost of acquisition—more on that in a minute).

Take your classic content download. Someone at your organization has put in a ton of time on white papers and webinars and case studies, and the downloads are trickling in.

But there’s a problem: when a salesperson calls these leads, a lot of them don’t remember who you are, or they haven’t read the paper yet, or they’r