Tactical Thursday: Comparing the Inbound and Outbound Sales Funnels

Video Transcription

Tiffany Sauder: So one of the problems that we make for ourselves when companies decide to adopt inbound marketing as their primary strategy is this: “My sales team is frustrated with all the leads.” The thing we never thought we’d hear from our sales team as marketers. Suddenly they’re saying, “Holy cow, I don’t have time to follow up with these. They’re not all good.” It kind of starts feeling like we’re crying wolf, like call this one and we feel like they’re not very good. So here’s an interesting paradigm to think about: the problem that we’re creating for ourselves and then how we might fix that.

So in the outbound sales world we create lists of people that we know are pretty good prospects. We have targeted counts for ourselves and so we’re pretty sure from our perspective that they’re a good fit. And then through the sales process of either reaching out via cold call or getting the newsletter we’re trying to figure out if that company that I believe has fit for the work that I do, do they have pain and do we think there might be an opportunity to work together?

Well, that gets flipped in the inbound world because what we know because they’ve downloaded a whitepaper, saw a video, attended a conference, came to a webinar – we know that prospect has pain. But what we now are deciding is figuring out does that prospect fit what we do? Are they big enough? From a geography perspective, are they close enough? Do we have a competitor in that space? So we are going to be throwing out a lot of people who have pain but aren’t a good fit for what it is that we specifically do. And I’ve found that when we can articulate this to the sales team at the beginning as we’re beginning an inbound marketing strategy with a client that they start to understand why that frustration is.

Because over here I have my quality and quantity teeter-totter. Over here is quality is very high and the problem we’re trying to solve is quantity. And over here in the inbound funnel the quantity generally is very high and what we’re trying to manage is the quality side of that teeter-totter.

So we’ve got different problems in these two funnels. I personally would rather have a quality problem than a quantity one. And so you’ve got to get really smart with lead nurturing, getting really deep into your database and understanding how prospects are engaging so that we’re smart about when we let sales know when there’s someone who has pain and we believe might have fit. Setting that expectation early with the sales team that they’re gonna be getting more quantity and then it’s their job to help us figure out with kind of a back and forth discussion what does fit look like and how do we get smarter so that we’re not wearing out our sales team but we’re setting their expectations and giving them leads that will convert. So, see if this works for you.