Inbound Leads?

Last week OpenView Partners hosted a forum on Content Marketing and coming from a sales background I have to admit it opened my eyes to a completely different perspective. Over the last year or so, I have been so focused on outbound demand generation initiatives that I lost sight of all the inbound demand that marketing has potential to generate.

One of the highlights of the forum that I particularly enjoyed was VP of Inbound Marketing Mike Volpe’s presentation on inbound marketing at HubSpot. Mike shared with us the incredible results he has seen through their content marketing efforts. When he said that he had a queue of inbound leads because the sales team didn’t have the capacity to handle all of them I thought that I had actually misheard him.

In my experience working with outbound demand generation teams, marketing’s job is to identify the right target segments and acquire the right lists from trade shows, purchased, directories, etc for the demand gen team to call on. Not very creative and not very exciting… Mike and his team on the other hand are successfully able to generate enough inbound leads to feed sales just by creating a lot of really cool, valuable, and interesting content, maximizing their web presence and optimizing themselves for organic search.

Hubspot’s case study shows that a marketing team good enough at generating qualified inbound leads, can actually serve as a substitute to a demand generation team that is responsible for creating qualified opportunities through an outbound initiative. This opens up an interesting debate with regards to resource allocation, especially within the expansion stage companies we work with where resources are limited. Companies deploying growth capital expect to results and return on every investment, and switching to an inbound model is often perceived as too risky.

Without doing too much research and going into too much depth, my humble opinion on this topic is that the “outbound” model the way I describe it above almost definitely yields results faster, and it is much easier to manage and track those results, than with and inbound “content marketing” model. However, the inbound model can be incredibly effective and fun when executed well.

There is a wealth of content on the internet comparing outbound and inbound marketing models; however I think that most of it was put there by inbound marketers, and is probably heavily biased. If you’d like to learn more on this topic here are some links to some interesting articles and virtual discussions on this topic:

http://blog.junta42.com/

http://www.junta42.com/content-marketing-playbook.aspx

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/2989/Inbound-Marketing-vs-Outbound-Marketing.aspx

http://ezinearticles.com/?Understanding-Outbound-Vs-Inbound-Marketing&id=1462289

http://www.slideshare.net/Seth_Stuck/seths-inbound-vs-outbound-marketing-1047275