014. Driving Revenue Through Inbound or Outbound Channels

Welcome everyone. Bountiful Life is the best place where B2B professionals can learn more about demand generation and sales enablement in general. And today we are going to talk about how do you drive revenue through inbound or outbound techniques? A very interesting topic, something kind of like a conversation that I have very frequently with prospects trying to understand what do we mean by that and what are the differences. So really excited if you are watching or listening to this episode for the first time, remember to either follow us or subscribe so you can get more notifications of future events and let us dive in right away. So why this topic? Well, usually I have conversations with prospects where we discuss, you know, if our services make sense. We are demand generation agency. And in those conversations, obviously the, the part of the process that I follow is I try to understand if how they are sourcing revenue right now and try to differentiate the fact that we will help most of our clients with the inbound part of their demand generation process or revenue source. And that's when I have this look on. Well, what do you mean by inbound? And if you don't do, if you do inbound, what is that you don't, you don't do? So that, that's the, the reason of this conversation or this talk. And so let us dive into first the definitions. What do we mean when we say inbound inner techniques, strategies, lead sources or revenue source? Well, the biggest difference for me, and there are many ways that people define them, but the biggest difference for me is, is when the lead or the opportunity or the person that you are doing business with as a, you know, as a lead or prospect comes to you by adding any channel that you have available, forms, phone numbers, live chat or whatever, they come to you. That's an inbound process or lead or the result of an inbound strategy. And if you as a company, either sales or marketing or any other actor on the company or just the owner is reaching out to that person without, you know, being asked, that for me will be an outbound process. And that's the one I like the most, I think is very clear because order definitions focus on cost or the channel itself being used. And so it goes into these gray area in between and, and that exists. But I think if we focus on that aspect of who is reaching out is very clear the definition. So the first problem probably is that some people think that either marketing or sales do only one, but the reality is that not both areas can do both. Both areas can have inbound and outbound techniques apply other Companies, the only difference probably is going to be scale. But however, it's really common that most of the outbound efforts are being performed by sales and most of the inbound efforts or a larger percentage of inbound efforts are and in my opinion should be performed by marketing. So usually when I have this conversation with prospects, that's what I try to mean by we will help you with the inbound portion. Because most of the inbound efforts come from marketing and usually the client itself is either the owner or they have. Ideally, a sales team is doing the outbound or the outreach to prospects. However, again, there are situations where one department can do the other because, for example, a client or a prospect might reach out to a salesperson that they already know and that will be an email lead for the salesperson. And marketing can do outreach efforts that scale, like sending cold emails to a big list of people, that will be an outbound effort, even when it's triggered from marketing. When usually your outbound efforts are one on one on sales, that will be the difference between the two areas. Now, before diving into what do they have, what are the differences we need to dive into, what do they have in common? Because that's really important. Some people say, well, it's better to do one or the other. I don't agree with that because they share two key things. The most important one is that it doesn't matter if you are doing inbound or if you are doing outbound. You have the goal of creating demand and generating revenue for your company. So that's really what the main thing that they have in common. It doesn't matter if you are the one that is reaching out or if you are getting prospects or opportunities. If you are doing this correctly, you are influencing the revenue generation process of your company. And the other important thing is that it doesn't matter if you're doing inbound or outbound. You should have very defined and concrete segmentation of your market to have a clear say on which is your audience. Right? So this is another thing that they have in common and they should have in common. Because even if you're doing outreach, that doesn't justify that you are not, you know, targeted on who you reach out either on one on one efforts or at scale. And the same goes for inbound. Just because you are writing content, it doesn't mean that you are trying to reach to everybody that can read it or everybody that can watch it or listen to. You should try as much as possible to narrow down who should listen, who should watch that content. Or read it. So those things I think are the ones that they have in common. However, they do have clearer differences and we can talk about them as pros and cons. And there's a framework that I recently heard that I like it a lot. It's actually a podcast that I would recommend you guys for in this case. This podcast, sorry is for creative people, entrepreneurs. It's called two Bobs. And one of the hosts, Blair Eames, I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly, share a fantastic framework about how he called it, I think is the, the ladder of leads or lead generation. And while he called that and he uses another step between sales marketing, there's one called education. Look it up on, on iTunes is two bobs if you're interested. There's something that I'm going to extract from there that I really does resonate with what I believe are the pros and cons of, you know, inbound and outbound channels or techniques. The first one, the, the one that is really relevant is he called it the expertise validation. And it's really interesting because when you are doing outreach efforts or out down efforts, usually the expertise or the, the reputation is held by the person on the company that is reaching out like the salary saying well we are great or we are good at this or we have successfully solved this. And so when you're doing that happen effort, the only person that can back up, that is the person doing the reach out only you don't get an external validation. And that's something that happens with inbound. When you create content or when you interact with people in the industry, you show expertise as you are sharing your knowledge and that brings you validation, you know, from external validation. It's not about the, you know, we are good and we are the best and we take care of you is I know and you can showcase things that you have done and people will find them. And it's even better if you get that validation from someone else. Just like what I'm doing right now, right, Saying I think this podcast is great and people get into that content that's even better. That's the stage that he calls educational. So that will be one key difference. The other one, and for me is one that is really relevant especially to owners because we will have two camps. It is related to power, right? When the company is reaching out through outbound, the power on the buying decision is on the buyer, right? Because he is the one that is being asked. And so in outbound the seller is in a weaker position because he is asking for or if this is a marketing effort. But it was going to be the same. The level of trust and the level, you know, the reputation will be low because that person have never heard of the company probably or if have had he's been interrupted, he might not be ready to buy. And it's completely different if you come inbound because in that case, usually the lead is coming from a position of I know that your company has experience or is capable of and I want to know if you guys can work with us. So the relationship on power changes inbound. Usually the seller has a stronger position than in the other case. But the reason outbound is really, really important is because it has something that is very hard to replicate on inbound, which is immediacy. If you need business now, and that's the reason most of those outbound efforts happen on sales, then you need to do ABAP because you can influence revenue faster or in a shorter term than with inbound. With inbound, especially depending on the kind of inbound effort that you do. For example, I'm going to go to an extreme here, but if you, if you want to write a book and that will show your leadership and your knowledge and expertise, that's great. Probably is the great inbound source of future revenue. But it will take a long time to recoup the investment and it cannot happen from today to tomorrow. However, if you have a list of potential buyers that are in their demographics, even if you don't know them and you start dialing in even when you will have a very low percentage of success because most of them will not be ready to purchase right now, most of them have never heard of your company before. Nonetheless, you might have an opportunity and you might get some business right away. So that's probably the biggest difference or the biggest reason. Some companies or most companies do outbound and it's mostly the recent sales is in charge of that because of that immediacy to bring new revenue to the business, right? And different kinds of organizations will have different mix of that. For example, companies that have a strong brand where a lot of effort has been done on the reputation and expertise and a lot of customers have succeeded with the company. They have such a presence that even sales get most of their leads from inbound efforts, right? The customers or the clients, potential clients are just lining up to be taken care of. That will be ideal, right? Like an Apple kind of example where the product is so well known that you just take the orders and in those cases even sales itself behave more Like a marketing process because it's taking care of the clients and all that, but it's not aggressively following for leads and it can be obviously the other way around. Now being more specific also on the assets are produced by those efforts. There's also a difference usually on inbound because it takes a long time to produce them and they are most, most of the time kind of like what they call evergreen. Those assets have a long live shelf life. They, they will block content, podcast videos will stay for a long time and usually outbound efforts will be short lived. If you go to a threshold, that will be the end of it. If you do a, you know, calling outreach event or something like that or campaign, probably you will have that event in particular and then you exhaust the list and that's the end of it. Right. So that will be another different. Now after, you know, I have this kind of like conversation with prospects. I usually get the question of well which one should I do first? Or should I do just only one right Is them. Should I just do inbound? And my answer is it's not black and white. This is really, really important. It's not that one is better than the other is just that it depends on the business and your needs. For example, talking about that immediacy, if you are, I'm going to put a very quick example. If you're just starting your business or if you are entering into a new market or industry where you don't have any reputation and you still have to build authority on the field, then probably starting with outbound will be the, you know, the one that will bring some results right away. And some people think that that outbound means, you know, completely spamming people. That will not be the case. It's just reaching out. You might do this through, you know, warm leads for very small businesses that might be just family and friends and knocking doors and trying to understand who might a good potential candidate and just asking questions. For larger businesses might be just reaching out to current clients or past opportunities or creating partnerships where you go together to market. But you, you will probably are going to be very proactive on that sense while you start building your inbound efforts. If in some cases you can wait, then yeah, definitely you can start with inbound first and just wait for the results. Usually on the long run, inbound has a higher return on investment. Obviously your potential leads will have a better experience. So you will not affect or damage the brand by reaching out for, for all the people that you know might be annoyed because you are reaching out right now, but again, most of the times when you have nothing, there's some level of outbound efforts that have to be done. Now, a better way to frame it or analogy that I like a lot is to compare it to someone that for some reason needs a constant supply of apples. I would use that example of apples. I like it. So imagine that let us transform revenue into apples. And you need apples. So if you need them now and you don't have any trees, probably you will, you will go to the supermarket or the grocery market, grocery store, and you will either buy directly those apples or you pay someone to bring them that knows how to pick the ones that you want. And for me, that's kind of like the analogy for the owner trying to sell directly or maybe commission someone. So in that scenario you feel that those add on efforts behave more like a cost of sales. Right. Which is actually what you know, when you are dealing with sales, sometimes commission will represent. Right. Is the cost of bringing the sale. And it has that immediacy. But. And it can scale quite, quite nice, right? If it makes sense, you can, you can keep it that way for a very long time. There are a lot of companies that start with a strong sales team and just do that for a very long time. But eventually, if, if you really want to be known on the market, you want to source those apples from, you know, yourself instead of reaching out or sourcing that effort, kind of like that. And so that's where your inbound process starts. And it behaves like that. It's like planting a tree. You will need to plant a tree. And for a very long time the only thing they will have will be the sprout. There's no apples there. But finally you get your own apples and you can stop relying on purchasing them from the grocery store. And you can definitely do both. But in general, my recommendation would be if you are a business owner or if you are a person in marketing, where getting to a company for the first time and there's no formal sales process, solve that first. Because that outbound process has to be happening at the beginning through sales. Marketing can do some outbound efforts too, on warmer leads and definitely start building your inbound machine over time so you can rely less and less on just outbound prospects, which I don't think ever is something that any company should ever stop. I don't believe that a company should rely 100% on inbound leads even when they can, even when they do. Some companies do for sure, but I think it's always healthy to have a mix on those just because. Just like it's usually healthy to have both the marketing and sales team, right? Not just one of them. So that will be all for today. If you have any questions posted here or you can just reach out by email or put them on the chat. I've been a pleasure being with all of you today and and remember, if you want to listen to future episodes, just subscribe or follow us. If you like what you heard today, give us a review or like or share with someone that you feel another B2B marketing professional that might be interest. That will be extremely helpful and thank you. Have a great day. Bye bye.