How inbound and outbound work together

Hey, welcome back to the podcast. We've got another one for you today. It's just me and Harrison this time. We're going to have some more guests on again soon. But today we wanted to talk about sales and marketing, inbound versus outbound, how you can build the momentum to actually get more leads in your funnel and how you can do this as a sales team or a marketing team and how that line's kind of starting to disappear. So I think an important place to start is like how things used to be seen was there's marketing that did the sort of like awareness and they did the coloring in as I used to call it just to annoy my marketing team. I know it's much more important than that, but they do that sort of like long process stuff. And the sales team did anything that was for immediate business to solve their quarter. Right. And that's how it used to be seen. Whereas I think now I just see them as marketing and sales are a set of skills that feed into something that builds more revenue. That's it. And anyone in the team can actually pick up one of those functions and run with it. For their purpose. And the new suite of Claude, GPT, and other tools that are out there, more specific tools as well, that allow an individual to start developing content, like, I don't know, you can start to launch a LinkedIn webinar quite easily yourself. You could start to run and build content or small little apps like we build to build, um, like lead magnets. All of this is possible now, and that is the inbound side of things. Outbound is that sort of outbound process that you hear us talking about of sending cold email and sending LinkedIn and then signals for warm email. These things together are your go-to-market engine. And I think that old-fashioned view of marketing does X and sales does Y is starting to die.

Yeah, the classic, like every company has ever faced this challenge is marketing generates leads, sales generates revenue. So marketing generates leads and sends them over to sales. And then sales is like, I don't like these leads. They're not any good. And so then they don't get followed up with. So marketing, sales isn't following up with our leads and sales are like, these leads are shit. And now you end up in this like battle because neither of them are aligned around the same incentive, which we've talked about on other podcast episodes, right? Is if your marketing team is incentivized to generate leads, they're going to generate leads that aren't sales ready. And so that's not, that's going to frustrate the sales team. And if the sales team is only buying on short-term revenue for the quarter, which is probably not going to be changing. They're not going to be thinking about long-term goals, long-term objectives as it comes to how they could build a new pipeline from all sorts of sources.

Yeah, and I think as salespeople, there's a couple of things that made Succession go quite heavy into doing the inbound and outbound for our clients, not just outbound. And one of the things I've worked over 100 companies and we saw the companies that were already doing the inbound approach themselves. So let's say that's posting employees and company account posting regularly. It's running things like LinkedIn ads or Google ads. It's probably being at trade shows comes under that account as well, under that as well. Building content that goes out of just of awareness or education, all of these pieces. Meant that actually when we go to run outbound campaigns, your audience has started to be warmed up already. So you convert a higher percentage of those touchpoints. It doesn't mean it suddenly makes it come out a magic bullet, but it means your conversion on that is higher. It also means doing outbound is going to increase the conversion of your inbound processes. So you're going to get more website visitors and people at your booth. And these two things are part of a cycle that drive each other and lead to better outcomes. And we saw that with the clients that were already doing it. So.

Yeah, outbound, the, yeah, let's also take a step back to talk about outbound, right? The historic view of outbound is I'm going to send a message to generate a meeting and your market is, I don't know, 95, 5%, right? So 5% of your market is potentially in buying mode for what it is that you sell. That probably changes a little bit depending on what it is that you sell, but whatever, let's just use those numbers because they've been different studies that have been done on this. So 5% of your market is in buying mode. That means that if you need to, and also of the 5%, only a subset of that is actually going to respond to anything that you send them. Right. So not only are they not in buying mode, they probably don't know who you are. So you're going to have to find a way to stand out with your messaging. And so if you use outbound as a purely a mechanism to drive like current meetings and meetings that are going to happen right now, you're missing out on literally the other 95% of the market, which is you— like, the interesting thing with outbound today is you can put a message in front of exactly who you want, right? For any sort of marketing channel, you can't really do that. Like, you don't have that level of precision to say, I want this exact human being to receive this exact message. Like you can do your best with targeting, like audience filtering on LinkedIn or specific keywords that people search for on Google, but you don't have like a mechanism to put like an exact message in front of another person. And so that's where outbound is super powerful. And so if you think about outbound as saying, I'm going to get the best possible message in front of the right people that I want as customers. Like it has a different mindset where it's not like I need to convert this person into a meeting. Like, that would be great if they happen to be at the right timing. You're not going to influence somebody's timing no matter how good you set up different signal campaigns that look for what you theoretically think are good timing. Um, it's still not going to be like a silver bullet to turning that, those insights, turning those people into active meetings. They have to be in some sort of buying process or be thinking about this or be thinking about the problem. And also, if your message is just a laundry list of stuff that you do, unless they're actively buying that thing, it's not going to work. And so you need to focus that messaging around like hopefully probing for active problems that people are facing or different challenges that they might be facing in the business, figuring out how you're going to personalize that message to them, not in a weird way. Like I see you walk your dog down at the park at 3 PM on Tuesdays,, but like stuff that's relevant to them and their company. Like a small, just a small example there, right, is I think Jess wrote a really beautiful article in our newsletter about funding. So just the most common, I would say, signal people want to look at is does this company have funding? Did they just raise funding? So you and everybody else is also reaching out about the same funding that they got because you all monitor the same tools, you're all monitoring the same signals, you're all monitoring the same press releases. You all have access to the same data, so there's nothing unique about it. So the only way that you could actually leverage that as a relevant signal is if you are taking the context and the content of why they are raising money, what is most important to them, translating that into then a relevant message for how it is that you can specifically help them reach those objectives. Like, that message is going to get lost in all of the noise with every other congrats on your funding. Email that gets sent. And so even when you're thinking about outbound, you have to be thinking at it at a much deeper level than I'm going to take this message and send it to this list and hope that it works, because then your results are just going to be sub-1% reply rates. Like, you're just not going to be able to get the results that you want, and you're not even going to be getting towards that 5% of people that are trying to, right? Because that same 5% is also probably being hit by all of the competitors in the space. And so you really have to do unique things in order to try and stand out from that perspective. And that's where the combination of these things works so well in parallel, right? You have outbound, putting the best possible message in front of the right people. You have the inbound side, looking at content, putting on webinars, putting out thought leadership type content. Not just, hey, come buy our, like, not just like product brochures, but actually like good, interesting content that your people and customers will actually care about, that they'll want to read. Right? There's a lot of people put out content, but they don't put out content that their customers actually want to read. Put out content your customers want to read, and then get it in front of them. And also, outbound is a great channel to do that. Right? If you want to be sharing content, you want to be sharing this information, share it through the same sort of outbound channels that you have where you can put that perfect piece of content in front of the right person.

Yeah. And then the flip side of that. So you've got your inbound content that you can now put into your outbound to help warm up that 95% audience. You've also got your lead list you've probably worked really hard on for your outbound, right? You've worked really hard to narrow it down so it's for a very specific audience, very targeted list. You can now use that in your inbound process when you're targeting people through ads. So you get the right ad in front of them. And you think, why do I want to get to them everywhere? So we talk about this a lot about how many touchpoints does it take from somebody who doesn't know you to start to engage? And the data is getting crazy, right? It's up to about could be up to 15 touchpoints, like before somebody will engage with you. A touchpoint is you met them at the booth. They saw your brand on LinkedIn. They got an email, they got a LinkedIn message. They downloaded a piece of content. They saw a callout you made. All of these are touchpoints. So if you're only taking control as a salesperson of that email, you are leaving a huge chunk of the control of your pipeline to other people and their capacity.

Right?

Whereas if you're in a small company and you can start taking ownership of this and start building stuff or have an agency do it, but you get it taken care of. So you are looking at what marketing can be done for the sales objectives rather than what marketing can be done for the marketing objectives.

Mm-hmm.

Because they, we all know in companies they're not always aligned. And I would say work to align them, but don't let that be your only approach. So now you've got, what do I want to do to generate more meetings on my calendar? Not only today, but next quarter. So it isn't much of an uphill struggle rather than an uphill huggle. So you go, then you get there, right? And you've started to build momentum and touchpoints and you have started people coming to you for meetings as well as you are reaching to them. And it's so easy to do and take control of now with Claude GPT, writing your own posts on LinkedIn. You may have all seen that we, uh, we recently launched a free lead capture app. You can put on your phone at any conference, you can do the lead capture, obtain the email addresses of these people and start your outreach. Right. I spoke to someone recently that, oh, I suppose you're giving this away and then you're going to start to charge for it. No, it's going to be free forever. And the reason it's free forever is actually that's one of our lead magnets. We want you to see that. We want you to get warm fuzzy feelings about Succession. And when you think of who you're going to work with, you come to us. So these things are easy to do now. And it's that kind of momentum that brings inbound traffic and supports the outbound motion.

Also, just for full transparency, that app took 45 minutes to make. I made it for your JPM, which probably took 20 minutes. And then after enough people are like, yeah, I want this thing. We were like, okay, fine. And then it took me another 25 minutes to actually make it usable for other people. The speed at which you can make these sort of lead magnets and mini apps is incredible. Like we've done ROI calculators for customers. We've given them widgets that they could put on their website. Like basically anything where you're just like, feel like you're bottlenecked because you don't have a human to do the work, like just go straight into a rep player, a Claude code, uh, OpenAI, uh, ChatGPT, go to your Copilot, whatever you've got. And like, just go build something, start tinkering with it, build something. And then if your company has got crazy compliance and won't let you actually do anything like that, then ask or share it internally so that the team can build the proper version or something., but there's so many creative ways. Everything is possible now. It's pretty wild, right? Everything's possible. So like you just have to be creative and use your creativity and then you just have to go and do it and you have to be a bit of a tinkerer nowadays.

Yeah. And I would say I have a point to make about the go share it internally in a second, but to say about go build it and people are like, oh yeah, but I don't know where to start. It doesn't matter. You don't need to know where to start. You need to know how to have the idea of the thing you want to do. That is it. So you go and do it.

And you don't even need to know how to write. Or speak, like you just need to load language. Like you just need to be able to describe the thing and then you just keep describing the thing and what you want. And then ultimately it's going to end up being what you want.

But even down to, I wanted to build an app and I was like, cool, I'm going to build this app. I'm going to go talk to Claude about it. And I started talking to Claude and I was like, and he's like, oh, so you do this and you do an API. And I'm like, huh, what? Where do I get one of those? Oh, so you've probably got this. Yeah, I've got that. So go into this section. Okay, cool. I'm in there. What do I do now? Cool. Here's the API key. Like I didn't know what I needed. I got told what I needed, how to find it, how to do it. And now the app works, right? So it's going to talk you through how to build it. You just need to have the idea. You need to have the idea of an input and an output and everything else can be taken care of. But that's, we're not going to go down a rabbit hole. This isn't Build AI stuff. Everything's Build AI stuff to us.

Sure.

No, cool. But what I would say is if you're in a small company, just start doing this. Come talk to us. We're happy to have a chat. If you're in a larger company. If you go to marketing today and go, I want a little app that does this, or I want a piece of content that does this, how long are you going to wait? Right?

However, you'll probably never get it.

Probably never get it because you're not priority. However, if you hand them a piece of content generated with the right branding guidelines, because you took your branding deck and gave it to Claude, you generated this piece of content that's specifically for you that you want to send out in an email. You send it across to marketing in an email, go, I built this because I need it. Can you just confirm I'm okay to use this? It's more likely you're going to get a yes, right? You'll probably get something, pick holes in it because they have to find something wrong with a Pantone or a hex code. But other than that, you will— this is my PTSD showing. Other than that, you'll probably get a yes and they may even use it and stick it on the website and then you're like recognized for doing it. So you just need to be doing both.

Yeah, exactly. Do stuff, create it, share it. The more stuff you put out in the world that's useful, Again, the key thing being useful, like the last thing we all need is more AI slop. So make it useful, make it interesting, make it interesting to your customers, not just to you and your internal team and your own way of thinking. It's going to drive more of that inbound, but also leverage those assets and those tools that you put together for outbound as well.

Yeah. So I think the thought process I often go through when I'm writing a campaign or building a piece of content is what's the outcome I want from this? Is the outcome I want from this? Is there someone to get a feeling about me? And in which case, you're probably targeting the 95%. That feeling could be, oh, this is a brand I trust. This is a brand that's very credible scientifically. This is a fun brand that's given me something for free, like a capture app or a roast my email, right? It doesn't matter. You're building a feeling about you with that thing, not a response necessarily. Then there's the alternative with I need to hit them with a pain I think they're feeling now. I need to hit them at a timing that's something that's critical. And I want them to respond now while they're feeling that thing instantly. There are different outcomes and you approach them slightly differently and you can approach them both with inbound and outbound. But I start from the point of what is my objective? And then I build an outbound or an inbound or a combined flow and ship it. And I think that's how we should think about things, whether you're a sales rep or a marketing person. Listening to this.

Yeah, the other piece too with this is like, even for marketing teams, if you're not leveraging LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn ads are probably the best channel where you can target the right types of people. But if you're like, ah man, I've had to create so many different ad variants or so much ad copy, whatever. One, get access to the LinkedIn API, give it to Claude. Claude can help manage all of that for you. Two, also, if you need to be creating more creative, you can create one asset. Or Leverage Cloud or Codex or whatever to create that asset and then have it make 15 variations of it. Test out different headers, test out different imagery, test out whatever you want, whatever the different variables are. Now all of a sudden you've got 15 that you can pick from. You don't have to use all 15, but maybe you use 7 of them and you're like, great, I just took one asset, turned it into 7, and I'm able to reuse these wherever I want. And those could be repurposed into LinkedIn posts, those could be repurposed into, to whatever you want from there. And the same thing goes for like repurposing content. If you've got a blog post that you wrote, that you created, or an app note, or maybe you recorded a video, like what we're doing here, is you could turn it into multiple pieces of content very easily. Just give Claude or whoever or whatever the correct, like, file and be like, I need to turn this into 10 different files, right? Whether that be LinkedIn posts, whether that be images, whether that be Cut up clips, videos, give it what it is that you want, and you're gonna get as an output all of that content based off the context of the thing that you've already spent a lot of time on so that you can have that asset be carried a lot further, right? So you wrote this app note, probably took weeks, months, whatever to get put together with all of the perfect data analyzed by all these different scientists. But then all you do is you put it on your website and hope people come and download it. Like, Maybe you do one LinkedIn post about it and like a link to it. And so LinkedIn doesn't share it very widely because the algorithm, because it has a link in it. So there's all these different ways that you can take your existing content as well and repurpose it. So it doesn't always just have to be brand new ideas and full creativity or creative mindset to generate new stuff.

Yeah, definitely. And as a ref as well, the simplest thing you can do is when you see a new piece of that content go on the website, build an outbound campaign around it. That's a very straightforward, simple thing. It's already there. Just build a campaign about, would you like to see this thing we've built? And make sure your list is specific enough that the person that gets it cares.

Yeah.

Really simple approach. Great. I think we've covered most of this. I'm gonna, here's my charity appeal before we finish. The KPI for how many discovery calls Succession gets sits with me. So this is my charity appeal. If you like what we're saying here and you want to hear a bit more about how we do, inbound, outbound, then book something with us, have a chat, no drama. This may be something you want now, you want in 6 months, 12 months' time. As you said, we're happy to talk to the 95% of people as well. So grab a chat with us and we'll tell you what we do already and you can implement it.

Love it. All right. Hopefully we'll talk to every single one of our listeners very soon.

Yeah. All 3 of you better book a call with me, including Jess, who's on our team. She's probably listening.

Love it. All right. Good episode. See you in the next one. Later.