sellingout

Director of Partnerships

Inbound demand gen?

A lot of the posts here seem to be about cold outreach (emailing/calling). Are y'all also doing anything to beef up inbound inquiries or is that the domain of marketing in your orgs?

Our inbound closes at pretty insane rates but we're relatively unknown in our space...i can send a bunch of cold email (i've never actually tried cold phone calls) but it'd be great to see more stuff coming in organically.

Would love to hear what other people at smaller orgs (20-30 FTEs/$5m annual revenue) are prioritizing here.

🔎 Prospecting

👑 Sales Strategy

📨 Marketing

23 comments

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SoccerandSales

Big Shot

Account Executive

Everyone WANTS more inbounds but fact is that cold calls will convert more than cold email, and if you aren’t calling you won’t be selling as much than if you were

sellingout

Valued Contributor

Director of Partnerships

KTBFFH! Is that a fact (conversion of calls > email)? Is that consistent across industries?

I have never converted when someone calls me for any reason ever but have definitely taken meetings based on cold email - small sample size but it's hard for me to imagine someone legit picking up their phone and being like 'yes, sell to me'....

SoccerandSales

Big Shot

Account Executive

I imagine there are industries out there where email is best, but also that is probably you projecting what you would want which typically will lead to Salespeople to choosing the easier paths (which is email)

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Love the hand-raising inbounds - but the rep owns the pipeline. Have to keep prospecting.

SaaSsy

Politicker

It's supposed to be the domain of marketing but I guess I'm just jaded because I've never received super solid inbound leads. If you're relatively unknown in the space, can you share some more details about what ya'll are doing to get good, qualified inbound (and how many per week, etc.)?

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

I'm in the same boat as you.

tightlines

Politicker

Account Executive

Yes, so jaded

sellingout

Valued Contributor

Director of Partnerships

We are not really doing anything repeatable. We've gotten inbound referral traffic, people who have heard us speak at a conference, people who see us as qualified vendors in their vendor management portal and then just reach out through our webiste....

We get 1-2/month but almost all of them have turned into some sort of business, and our avg deal size is 100-200k

NotCreativeEnough

Big Shot

Professional Day Ruiner

inbound stuff is great. But you have to be able to prospect and build up your own pipeline as well. You can't control your inbound. So if you rely only on that you'll see a lot more ups and downs. Consistent strategic outbound will help you keep a more consistent pipeline.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Yes, good point about control - control what you can, which in this case is outbound effort.

NotCreativeEnough

Big Shot

Professional Day Ruiner

exactly. I always treat inbound like "extra" and try to keep my pipeline full on my own. then whatever comes from inbound, which is out of my control, is just icing on the cake

LordOfWar

Tycoon

Blow it up

I hate the term cold outreach, to me it implies you've done no research on your prospect. I only call those who I know I can do business with (i.e. they have current projects in my scope). This warm outreach is how we get business. I don't think we've ever converted an inbound to a sale in my time here.

sellingout

Valued Contributor

Director of Partnerships

yeah i mean you're just redefining the term to fit your own process - of course I'm not emailing a stay at home mom asking her to drop 400k on an enterprise solution.... the people we reach out to are relevant, but they're relevant to dozens (hundreds?) of other vendors as well so i'm pretty sure their inboxes are hot commodities.

Also most companies have the giant EXTERNAL SENDER warning plastered onto emails coming from outside of their domain

LordOfWar

Tycoon

Blow it up

I get it, when I think of cold email I think of the guy who keeps emailing me to sell me aircraft parts when 2 seconds of research would tell you I don't make or sell aircraft.

A good salesperson will tailor their mailout, sadly most do not.

The external sender thing is common now, I think it is more for anti-phishing than anything.

Diablo

Politicker

Sr. AE

Transactional product will have a lot of inbound leads but it depends whether you are working in SMB, MM or Enterprise. Inbound can work well in the first 2 very well but if you are an Enterprise rep, you will get your ICP through O/B.

It’s always good to be not dependent only on inbound leads if you want a high ticket customer unless that what’s the org wants to do :)

tightlines

Politicker

Account Executive

Modern websites do help

sellingout

Valued Contributor

Director of Partnerships

if you build it != they will come....drop a bunch of time and money on a website with no plan for generating traffic those resources are wasted imo

finboi

Notorious Answer

Fi-nance

In your case you might have to “effectively” create your own inbound.

For example, if you have a video online or a webinar. Even a one pager. Blast it out to a large number with something along the lines of “we saw you are in X industry so might be interested in Y problem. We put together some great information here that out clients in X industry found valuable. Let me know if you want to chat more”

GreenSide

Politicker

Sales manager

You haven’t cold called?

Gasty

Notable Contributor

War Room Community Manager

@sellingout: Inbound inquiries is usually and fundamentally owned by Marketing I guess. You have a marketing / demand gen team in your company currently?

sellingout

Valued Contributor

Director of Partnerships

None at all. We have a BDA doing mostly outbound, myself and one other person who is like 70/30 sales/brand marketing

ThatNewAE

Big Shot

Account Executive - Mid enterprise

At one point the inbound channel will reach saturation. Starting outbound then will get a lot of resistance from yourself and the team.
It should be a good balance of both from the start.

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

That's marketing.

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sellingout

Inbound demand gen?

23 comments

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