Business Strategy: What is Inbound?

Hi there, I'm Lindsay with HubSpot Academy. Let me introduce you to the world of inbound and provide you with a big picture view of everything your business needs for a successful inbound strategy. First, what is inbound? Inbound is a fundamental shift in the way you do business and is a philosophy based on helping people. The inbound approach to doing business is more human and customer centered. In today's world, buyers have all the power. There's been a massive shift in the relationship between businesses and buyers. Now a buyer has more information about your product, industry and competition. Inbound is a better way to market, a better way to sell and a better way to help your customers. If your customers are able to grow, then your business will too. Growth is the result of a well executed inbound strategy. So instead of interruption based messaging where businesses had all the control, inbound is about empowering your buyers. You need to align with the way buyers think, research and purchase. It's about being helpful and being a business that's helpful during each experience they have with you and your business. Rise to the challenge to meet consumers where they are. Here's Brian Halligan, CEO and co founder of HubSpot on what inbound means to him.

Inbound means to me. It's kind of a state of mind. You know, the old way you went to market was outbound. It was very interruption oriented. It sort of extracted value out of your prospect and it wasn't fun. It wasn't fun for the prospect and it wasn't fun for the person who is going to market with the message. And inbound's a new way to go to market. It's a new way to go to market. That is a much more lovable way to go to market for the marketer and the marketee. And inbound really strives to help people go to market in a way that matches the way humans want to be sold and marketed to. So inbound, it's almost like a state of mind to me.

To practice inbound, you need to be inbound. Being an inbound business means you're building relationships and having conversations with, not at, your audiences by giving them value. Being a part of that conversation means sharing helpful, relevant content. And at the right time, it's about drawing people in. That's why it's called inbound. After all, if you want to get value out of your prospects and customers, you need to give them an experience that they will value. This includes a good marketing, sales and customer experience. Here's Brian Halligan again, the other big.

Change that's going on is I felt like, at least when I was growing up in my career, the best product always won. And what you sold was really important. I think more and more it's about how you sell it and when they say how you sell it, it's about creating just that end to end delightful experience and business model that really matches the human behavior. And you don't have to look far for that type of thing. Look at the music industry. It's been totally turned upside down by Spotify. Spotify. It's a better model of buying it and it learns from you and it changes over time. The service is better. Amazon, they've disrupted virtually everything. It's just a better way of buying. Yes, it's cheaper, but it's more convenient. The service is better, it's fantastic. Everything. Look at Uber. Uber, it's a car that drives you around. Taxis do the same thing. It's a better business model, a better go to market, a better service model. And so I think the companies that really do well today are the ones that leverage data to create a gorgeous end to end experience for that customer. From marketing when they find you, through to sales when they become a customer, through to service and then back to marketing consumers.

Buying behaviors are going to continue to change and evolve. Your inbound tactics and tools will also change and evolve, but the inbound philosophy will still remain true. It's a philosophy about pulling people in by being helpful, by actually caring about what the problems are of your potential buyers and how you can help solve them. That's why inbound should extend to every aspect of your business. Here's Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot's CTO and co founder on this fundamental shift.

So inbound is really about a more empathetic, human friendly approach to business, whether it's marketing or sales or customer service. So the idea is to put yourself in the customer's shoes and say, how would I want to be marketed to? How would I want to be sold to? How would I want to get service from a company? So marketing, sales and service have all been changing and are continuing to change. And they're all changing in similar ways, but at different rates. So marketing has changed earlier and faster than we saw over the last 10 years. So what changed in marketing essentially was as people, we got tools that allowed us to block out marketing messages, to block out outbound. And so as a result of those tools, we didn't have to get inundated with marketing messages anym for sales, we got access to information. So no longer do we have to rely on a sales rep to tell us things about pricing or customer reviews. We could just find that information on the Internet. So that's the fundamental kind of shift that started to happen in the world of customer service. What's changed is now we have choices. So back 10, 20 years ago, you could only choose between three particular providers, and so you had to deal with whatever service they gave you. And now customers have a choice. So that's kind of radically changing how we approach customer service.

You've probably come across some of your favorite brands actively practicing inbound. It's that problem solving blog post that shows on your Facebook feed. It's the product review that you found after doing a quick search in Google. The sales representative that you worked with that helped you solve your problem at the appropriate time, or that question you had about your subscription that got easily answered by a customer service representative on the company's website. These are experiences that felt personalized, experiences that felt relevant, experiences that felt helpful. Inbound is a philosophy that if you truly and fully embrace it, it will transform your business. If you haven't already caught on, there are some common themes when it comes to inbound. The core tenets of inbound are about being more human, helpful, and holistic in how you market, how you sell to people, and how you help your customers be more successful. It's about being as helpful as you can be as you're trying to take a prospect and turn them into a customer, and how you're trying to help your customers see more value from your product or service. You want to treat people that are having any type of experience they're having with your business as a human, not just a number. Every individual is unique and they want to be treated that way. And having all of your vectors aligned around an inbound approach provides a holistic experience for anyone that interacts with your business, no matter where they are in their buying journey. It's time for you to support your prospect's buying process. It's time for you to join in and empower buyers and customers to make the right decisions for themselves.