Jan 11, 20239:55 AM - edited Jan 11, 20239:57 AM
Participant | Partner
Inbound sales vs. outbound sales...
We debate this a lot internally within our company with respect to the Inbound Methodology and having an active & engaged sales team.
Oversimplifying a bit - one end of the spectrum has sales teams just sitting and waiting for leads to come their way from an Inbound Marketing activities.
On the other - Hubspot still talks a lot about ABM and prospecting and making contact -- which in my mind is doublespeak. Saying you are doing sales propsecting in an 'inbound way.' It's still interruption marketing. It's still initiating a conversation that was not requested.
Aren't we still expecting Sales Teams to generate their own leads in addition to the inbound strategies being employed in conjunction with the Marketing Team? We still expect sales teams to pick up the phone and introduce themselves to someone 'cold' right?
We just make sure we've done our search and aren't picking up a phone book and smiling and dialing all day. Which in the end is just traditional sales prospecting anyway right?
I'm speaking in extremes - but in the end is there a nuance I'm missing? Is there a soft touch prospecting / outreach campaign that is more inline with the Inbound Methodology? Can someone provide an example or the daily routine of an sales person in an Inbound company?
In a perfect world, leads would be generated entirely from inbound efforts and would simply raise their hand (fill out a form, book a meeting) when they're ready to chat. At that point, the sales rep would take over and work to help/educate them, hopefully ending in a sale if it's the right fit. Sales reps wouldn't need to send the "You don't know me, but..." emails or deploy any other cold prospecting tactics.
However, I don't know if there are any companies that are truly able to be that hands-off! Many don't have reliable inbound marketing strategies in place, and it typically takes years for organic content to start consistently producing quality inbound leads. Many companies also have some form of paid advertising (paid search, paid social), which could be considered more interruptive in nature as well.
In order to keep the lights on, sales reps need to leverage some of those more traditional, yet interruptive, outreach tactics. I think that the secret sauce that HubSpot is promoting is all in the approach though.
Traditional cold calling and prospecting is way more about quantity than quality. If you know that you need to call 10 people to get 1 response, you're ready to spend the day making 100 calls to get 10 responses. Your pitch is probably the same, and it's probably way more "You need thing. We do thing. Give money now." The general vibe is that the rep doesn't want to be cold calling and is just going through the motions. I'm generalizing a ton here, but I don't think that the traditional volume-focused approach is the best or preferred approach these days.
What seems to work better (and what HubSpot advocates) is making the most of a cold outreach attempt. Yeah, it's lame that you need to reach out to someone who has never heard from you before, but what can you do to actually turn it into a valuable experience for the prospect? Instead of making those 100 calls to get 10 responses, you're trying to make 10 really good calls to prospects that you've already internally researched and vetted as much as you can. The approach here is providing upfront, personalized value that outweighs the weird feeling of a rando contacting you. It's way more focused on helping (shoutout to Dan Tyre) than selling. The prospect shouldn't feel like you're just smiling and dialing your way through a ZoomInfo list, they should feel like they were hand-selected because you feel that you have an opportunity to help them and their business — if they're interested of course.
Traditional cold prospecting would have you relentlessly calling the same person or everyone else in the company until you get a response or a restraining order, but I think that this newer approach to cold prospecting tells you to back off if you don't get a response. Whatever you were offering clearly wasn't valuable enough, so you should reconsider your approach and make sure you're standing out from the other 10 unsolicted pitch emails your prospect is receiving every day.
Ultimately, it should come down to your prospective customer — what matters to them? How do they want to be communicated with? How can you actually help them? I think if you're catering to the prospect, you can consider any sales tactic to be inbound.
Hopefully this is helpful! Totally open to any other thoughts, and interested to hear what the rest of the Community has to say!
Jan 17, 20238:41 AM - edited Jan 17, 20238:42 AM
Participant | Partner
Inbound sales vs. outbound sales...
Jacob,
Thank you! Great response and it reinforces the approach we and others have been using. Having done sales for 25+ years - my take is that the approach you describe is inline with the approaches of Carnegie & Sandler and similar methods that breakdown the sales routine into a reliable process. All that's to say is there's 'nothing new under the sun' here.
Research is key and having a good reason to call -- other than 'buy now' -- is what's needed to START the conversation. The challenge is getting past the whitenoise of robocalls, cold emails, and competing interruptions which make the first 20 seconds of a call (or VM) the hardest part of the day.