I’ve been doing a deep dive into the integrated marketing management segment over the past few months. My goal has been to unravel the complex vendor landscape; to help marketers discern the capabilities of distinct vendor segments; and to help figure out what is a ‘best fit’ for their marketing organizations. (While we’re on this topic, as an update for those following this series, I DO plan to publish the final installment of my three-part series on the ‘Top 20′ platform vendors in this segment – i.e., the final ‘list’ – at some point over the next few weeks. So stay tuned.)
I have primarily focused on three ‘camps’ – demand generation, marketing automation/enterprise marketing management (EMM) and advanced customer relationship management (CRM) in my research and writing to date. My hypothesis with these camps has been that despite “… different roots, aims, legacies and constituencies, [they] are both converging on and vying for this core integration and management layer,” as I wrote in February.
Source: iStockphoto
Enter the fourth camp – the ‘inbound marketing’/marketing content management crowd – examples of which include new inbound marketing pure plays such as Hubspot, Magicomm, Vazt and Video Army, as well as content management stalwarts such as Crown Peak, which are evolving toward inbound marketing.
I’ll admit that when I first heard the phrase, inbound marketing, I said, ‘I don’t get it.’ In fact, I thought, ‘Wow, more confusing buzzwords.’ But I wanted to get to the bottom of this phenomenon, so I dug in, did some research, sat down a few weeks ago with Hubspot marketing VP Mike Volpe and more recently had a call with Vazt co-founder Seamus Walsh.
Now I think I get it, but I’m not sure that the phenomenon around this fourth camp is purely about inbound marketing. Dynamic and search-optimized marketing content management is a critical component and key value-add in a broader, integrated marketing context and for companies that deploy both inbound and outbound marketing. That’s why I describe this space as a dual helix of inbound marketing and marketing content management that is bound to eventually intertwine with the other camps. In fact, my conversations with Hubspot and Vazt made me think of the evolution of Marketbright, which started as a marketing content management system but has evolved into a demand generation system.
So what is inbound marketing, how is it tied to marketing content management and what does this all mean for marketers? Moreover, is this a real ecosystem of solutions, or is it merely a Hubspot phenomenon?
Before we go too far, it’s worth level-setting what I mean when I talk about this camp. The common thread you’ll see emerge: a dual set of capabilities of managing dynamic marketing content and of optimizing this content for search engines. Walsh at Vazt summed up this positioning: “We actually use content to drive business to [the] site.”
What is inbound marketing, and what are its plusses and minuses?
Inbound marketing seems to be everywhere. Now it even has its own event – the Inbound Marketing Summit – which attracted more than 300 marketers at the first one this past September, according to a press release. The Web site for this event frames up the challenges facing marketers today and how inbound marketing plays in:
The Internet has transformed the nature of shopping and the sales and marketing funnel. In order to remain competitive, your business needs to be found on the Web and leverage inbound marketing techniques to reach customers with targeted messages that customers seek out, not ignore.
What is interesting to note, though, is that inbound marketing as a concept is not new. Companies for years have strategized about how to better seize on opportunities when customers reach out to them. A quick search of the destinationCRM site, for example, found this reference to inbound marketing as a technique for turning customer inquiries into sales scenarios: “In an inbound marketing model every agent in the call center changes roles, from customer service representative to a salesperson,” noted a September 2004 article. But in this scenario we are talking about existing customers.
What is different about the new approach to inbound marketing is its focus on capturing new leads, which are ideally not existing customers, as well as on increasing the likelihood of those new leads finding your company. Moreover, the new inbound marketing crowd is focused on optimizing inbound leads via Web 2.0 mechanisms, versus via the simple one-on-one telephone conversation at a call center.
Let’s turn to the most vocal advocate of inbound marketing for a modern definition. Hubspot’s founder and CEO, Brian Halligan explains what he means by this term in a post on his company’s blog:
When I talk with most marketers today about how they generate leads and fill the top of their sales funnel, most say trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. I call these methods “outbound marketing” where a marketer pushes his message out far and wide hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack.
I think outbound marketing techniques are getting less and less effective over time …
Rather than do outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, I advocate doing “inbound marketing” where you help yourself “get found” by people already learning about and shopping in your industry.
Clay Schossow expands on this point of view in a post on his New Media Campaigns blog. He explains (almost as though outbound is somehow, suddenly a ‘thing of the past’) that outbound marketing “… was largely a numbers game – you knew you had to, on average, get in contact with a certain large number of people before one of them would be interested and make a purchase. This method was inefficient and expensive, causing marketers to waste time getting in contact with tons of people who may have had no interest in their offering.”
Sounds interesting, but we should provide some context around this ‘pro-inbound’ point of view:
- First, it’s important to clarify that ‘pure play’ inbound marketing is largely about ‘passive’ lead generation and not so much about lead nurturing or lead conversion – differentiating it from the demand generation and marketing automation camps and pointing to gaps in this mindset.
- Second, it’s important to point out that advocates of inbound marketing suddenly do not put much faith in the ‘active’ communication that salespeople and marketers engage in to connect with customers – i.e., the majority of the current practice of marketing today. In fact, it’s a bit of a marketing ‘counter culture.’ “We’re 100% organic,” ironically commented Vazt’s Walsh to me. But do customers always know what they want or how to find it? Can you be 100% organic in your marketing?
- Third, it’s also worth mentioning that marketplace interest in inbound marketing is largely being driven by the folks at Hubspot – a company that may have even invented the term (although I can’t verify this) and that are the lead sponsors of the Inbound Marketing Summit.
Not everyone buys the argument that outbound marketing is a thing of the past or that inbound is much more than a shiny new thing.
Christopher S. Penn takes on inbound marketing on his Awaken Your Superhero blog in a piece strongly-titled “Falsehood as Truth: The Lie of Inbound Marketing.” Penn comments:
There is more than just “make a cool video on YouTube” or “optimize your web site for Google” to marketing. Do these things matter? Absolutely. Search and content that rocks are vital components of any marketing program, and it’s just as insane to dismiss them as it is to dismiss outbound efforts like direct mail and cold calling.
The truth of the matter is that inbound and outbound marketing are both vitally important to your company, your products, your services, your ideas, and they complement each other. They are equally important, and they balance each other.
…
If someone tells you that any marketing methods, inbound, outbound, direct, fax, whatever, is the only thing you need, you know two things to be true – they are either lying or clueless, and they probably have something to sell you.
And that would be the ‘response’ to the counter-culture.
What type of marketing organization can benefit from inbound marketing?
I must say that I agree, in part, with Penn’s comments. There is no either/or, zero-sum choice ever to be made in marketing. Inbound marketing should be something every company deploys … as one part of a balanced marketing program. It’s not the whole game, and no company should rely 100% on an inbound marketing pure-play without other marketing systems or tools.
That said, there are clearly certain types of marketing situations where companies are better positioned to benefit from pure-play inbound marketing than others. This is something I’ve been thinking through following my recent conversation with Volpe.
There seem to be two marketing situations in which a company would want to really focus heavily on inbound marketing. These are:
- Relying on word-of-mouth or being sought out: companies that are typically based on personal networks and that provide consumer-focused professional services, such as accounting firms and law firms, or that people call only when their services are needed, such as a plumber
- Early stage and/or facing a massive lead deficit: companies that really don’t have processes sufficient for delivering leads, that don’t have complete insight into who they might want to target and/or that are focused on a niche area
Volpe explained to me that their target customer is a small business, often without a formal marketing organization. “We serve anywhere from 5 to 500 employees,” said Volpe. “A huge portion of our customers don’t have a full-time marketing person,” he explained later. “They’re not a classically-trained marketer.” He went on to explain that when his team does work with companies that actually do have internal marketing teams, they typically have 1-3 marketing people on staff, maximum, and have their hands full.
Looking at the two situations I’ve posed above, I get the first one. And I doubt that any amount of active outbound marketing will cause people to need plumbers when their pipes aren’t bursting. But I have a question about the second situation: Doesn’t this point to a company with a bigger marketing problem? Basic marketing 101 starts first with knowing your company, customer and competition and second with assessing segmentation, targeting and positioning. All of this should occur before you launch full-scale outreach – i.e., you need to know your audience before spending on lead generation and marketing communication. Is a lack of leads the result of inefficient outbound marketing or of a more-basic and fundamental business-positioning issue? Who is to blame? It’s worth asking the question.
Volpe differentiated his solution from the demand generation vendors by commenting that needing a demand generation platform “… almost assumes you have too many leads.” He went on to argue: “The truth of the matter, for [most] companies, is that’s not the problem.” But I go back to my question about whether that is more a comment on marketing tools or on businesses that have found resonance in the marketplace versus those that have not – whether they are large or small. Again, it’s worth asking the question.
What do inbound marketing vendors really do, and how is this linked to marketing content management?
I mentioned earlier that the common thread between vendors in this segment is ‘managing dynamic marketing content and optimizing this content for search engines.’ Here’s how this translates into what inbound marketing vendors really do:
> Managing dynamic marketing content to drive customer engagement: The core of the software services provided by companies in this segment are marketing content management systems. (Crown Peak may be the most advanced of this set.) That is why I have referred to this segment as the inbound marketing/marketing content management crowd, and it differentiates this segment from the firms that merely do search engine optimization. In fact, the marketing content management engines of vendors in this segment are robust and blur the lines between traditional Websites, social media and other communication channels. This is particularly critical as a way to drive greater customer engagement. Walsh at Vazt described it to me as “… aligning content with sales lifecycle.” Such an intelligent system also supports more-timely and resonant content – a step away from traditional marketing content that was focused strictly on features and functions and typically content that is more likely to hit home with a potential customer.
> Optimizing this content for search engines to connect interested customers with relevant brand-companies: Given that inbound marketing requires robust content – i.e., it is more thought leadership and customer dialogue than traditional static information on products and services – it must be constantly optimized for search-ability. This is where these vendors lend a hand – helping marketing organizations develop timely content in a way that makes it more likely to be found.
As I mentioned earlier, some prime examples of companies converging on this fourth camp include: Crown Peak, Hubspot, Magicomm, Vazt and Video Army (linked earlier).
What is the significance to marketers of the inbound marketing/marketing content management ecosystem, and how does it relate to the integrated marketing management space?
The value of the inbound marketing/marketing content management crowd extends beyond merely optimizing content to be reached via search engines. What this fourth camp brings to the table is complementary to the core capabilities of firms in the demand generation, marketing automation/EMM and advanced CRM camps, and it is strategic to the evolution of the integrated marketing management space. Moreover, as with the other camps, pure-plays in this segment are increasingly extending the capabilities so that they increasingly look like the other camps vying for the integrated marketing management prize.
Some additional thoughts on what this fourth camp brings to the table:
> Dialogue vs. drip: The world of automation and demand generation platforms are built on fostering interest in products and services, but this type of a ‘drip’ marketing and lead nurturing is not really true customer-brand dialogue … today. Systems from vendors in the inbound marketing/marketing content management camp are increasingly built around customer-interactive content, such as social media – enabling real dialogue around substantive issues. These capabilities are value-added to the other camps, especially in a B2B context. Following up my earlier note on Marketbright, sales VP Mike Pilcher recently explained to me why he believes it’s valuable for a demand generation vendor to be built on a robust content management system: “The transfer of information between supplier and buyer is at the core of business to business selling. What we also believe is that this information is not just white papers and brochures.”
> Authenticity: This type of dialogue also leads to increasing authenticity – especially as companies are forced to produce content that is less an encapsulation of features/functions and that is more about timely issues customers are grappling with. This is the same type of ‘small talk’ salespeople used to leverage in customer meetings but that is increasingly migrating to the Web. It also speaks to the topic of social CRM, which has been a key area of discussion over the last few months, most recently by CRM guru Paul Greenberg.
> Pervasive search optimization: Bringing the fourth camp together with other camps in the integrated marketing management segment has the potential to make search optimization a more-pervasive aspect of marketing systems. This is critical as the ball swings and marketers increasingly embrace neither inbound nor outbound exclusively, but rather embrace an integrated blend of the two.
We are starting to see firms in the inbound marketing/marketing content management space integrate with the other camps. For example, Hubspot syncs with Salesforce.com, enabling closed-loop analysis of program effectiveness.
There is much evolution that needs to occur among this fourth camp for it to offer more-sophisticated marketers the type of enterprise-grade capabilities they demand, but it is interesting to watch the progress and to recognize that this camp will certainly play a role in the long-term evolution of integrated marketing management platforms.
Adam, great post, thank you. To clarify our position, we set out to from the beginning using content and micro sites to attract clients at their time of need, when they turn to search to solve a business issue. When I say we are 100% organic, we are not proponents of PPC, banner ads, or mailing someone who did not opt-in to view our materials. We spent a considerable amount of time and effort developing content to get us to the top of organic search. In b2b, it is very unlikely we would ever suggest not using a sales or account management to get an understanding of the business issue a client is facing and to articulate how a company is uniquely positioned to solve that issue.
Excellent discussion!
I do think that there is a big change going on in marketing today, but I do not think that every company should be 100% inbound. However, if the average mix today is 10% inbound and 90% outbound, the optimal mix (based on ROI) should probably be the opposite, perhaps 80-90% inbound and 10-20% outbound. Marketing as a profession has a long way to go.
To try to add a few stats/observations to the trend:
– Cold call / telemarketing connect rates have been falling more and more as people switch to opt in communication and use caller ID to screen calls (outbound calling is gatteing harder)
– Email open rates and click through rates have been falling and falling as people use more spam filters (outbound email is getting harder)
– A survey of 150+ businesses indicates that companies that focus on inbound marketing have a 61% lower cost per lead than companies that primarily use outbound marketing (outbound is more expensive) [see linked URL on my name above]
– Social networks are growing at 500-1000%, Facebook has over 175 million members, etc. (inbound marketing, opt-in connunication is the future)
– Over 3,000 searches are conducted in Google, per SECOND (you can send lots of direct mail, or you can get found by the people already looking for you)
Marketing is changing. Yet, there are very few marketing software systems designed to help marketers adapt to these changes.
Lead nurturing and drip email companies provide a great service if you have a database of 25,000+ contacts. But as a marketer you also need to think about the other issue – how do you continue to add FRESH names to that database – at a low cost and with maximum ROI. The answer is either (a) you can spend lots of money on oubound markeitng tactics that are expensive and getting even more expensive, or (b) you can use inbound marketing to get found by the people looking for you and convert them using smart landing pages and have a 61% lower cost per lead.
I know what I have chosen to do. And 1,200 other HubSpot customers have chosen the same answer… inbound marketing.
Appreciate the dialogue, guys.
@ Seamus – I appreciate the nuanced point you are making. The issue of opt-in vs. beating a customer prospect over the head is huge. Conceptually, the inbound marketing theory makes a lot of sense in improving the quality of engagement. The issue in my mind is that you still need some additional tools to move things along.
@ Mike – Your comments and data really expand on this last point. There is no question that direct marketing and e-mail marketing has been showing diminishing return over time — meaning it’s critical for marketers to break out of the mold of grinding down customer prospects vs. engaging with them on their own terms.
That having been said, there still seems to be a natural lifecycle for tactics — i.e., your mix of inbound vs. outbound and your mix of sub-components will/should change over time.
That leads me to the question of how we can develop integrated systems that really cover both sides of the coin. As a marketer I don’t want to invest in one or the other, I want both … just in different proportions at different times.
I think almost any B2B company should use inbound marketing tactics, while marketing automation is most useful if you have lots of leads (I agree with Mike Volpe).
There are two segments that I know of where inbound marketing would not be an ideal fit:
– Very early-stage startups that have not picked a beachhead yet
– Companies that target very narrow segments of prospects that don’t reference each other
Very early-stage that usually don’t yet know what their sweet spot will be. There product might be used in multiple scenarios, and the only way to find out is try. Paid search or direct customer contact is typically the best way to discover your market, although online discussion can be useful too (around blog posts, LinkedIn discussions, etc.)
An example of the second group is high-end interactive agencies that target only Fortune-100 clients. These agencies have only a couple of hundred possible clients, and they are usually pretty high up in the hierarchy, so they won’t have a lot of time for research. Direct sales and traditional public relations are their proven methods.
Do you recognize these situations? Are there groups where inbound marketing may not work?
Adam, I agree, there is a natural progression in a sales cycle that require different tools along the way. Our first live microsite is called http://www.salesalignment.com, our philosophy is that it is imperative that sales process be aligned to the way people buy, be it one month, one quarter or one year. Inbound marketing is just one phase, it’s what we call convert at search.
The next phase of the life cycle is the development of a content strategy that addresses how to gather, evaluate and understand user wants and needs and how to transform that into industry and role based content that will be of value in addressing a client’s business issues. A content strategy is not something that is developed to sit on a shelf; there is a constant interaction between marketing, sales, creative and IT. It is important that the internal team has a through understanding of the prospects or client’s goals and that the client “needs” remain the central focus of the program. A content and contact life cycle strategy insures client buy, no matter where they enter in the buying life cycle.
Our next phase revolves around Account Based Marketing, with an emphasis on content – providing valuable information by addressing the individual prospect or customer’s business issues, before presenting products or solutions. The intent is to guide customers to your solution by educating and editorializing how you will solve a business issue and how your firm is uniquely positioned to do so.
I hope that helps in clarifying our position.
I’m pleased to see this healthy discussion occurring. I propose that we should avoid making blanket statements such as inbound marketing is for every business in every industry. I do believe a heavy bent toward inbound marketing makes sense for most B2B companies, assuming there is already a market for their product/service.
One of the ways I characterize inbound marketing is to call it content marketing and to say its primary purpose is relationship building. Don’t get me wrong, producing leads is very important I’m suggesting that marketers must start to build relationships with prospective buyers as early in their evaluation process as possible. Offering them content that can be found easily (ranging from white papers, newsletters, podcasts, videos, wikis, blogs, groups, fan pages, Twitter accounts, etc.) is a great way to build relationships and produce sales opportunities.
I think inbound marketing has different meanings to different people. In my opinion, it’s about content marketing and relationship building through online activities. Taking online connections offline into measurable results is the end game.
Mr. Borges makes a great point – content marketing much more accurately describes what much of ‘inbound marketing’ is; literally, it’s drawing attention, in relevant, impactful ways, to the content that businesses create to surround their product or service.
We believe that organically garnering interest in a business through the use of idea exchanges, user communities, SEO, and the litany of tools described by Mr. Needles above will far outshine (although not entirely replace) traditional outbound marketing efforts. For those interested, a colleague of mine wrote a blog that expands a bit more on this topic: http://www.ecrowds.com/get-found-inbound-marketing.
Apologies for the incorrect link in my previous comment (a period got thrown in there inadvertently); here’s the correct link: http://www.ecrowds.com/get-found-inbound-marketing
Adam,
Great post, thanks for quoting our blog in it. Our post may have seemed totally dismissive of outbound techniques, but we certainly still recognize their value and how they help companies gain new business. However, I really wanted to show a sharp contrast between the two strategies, so I took somewhat of a hard line against outbound.
Inbound marketing certainly isn’t something that was just “invented” in the past year, but it is becoming more of a mainstream idea. Our clients are grasping (and demanding) it more than ever, and we’ve seen real results on our own side.
Just from keeping our blog regularly updated and offering some free plugin downloads, we’ve seen our web traffic many times over. It’s also led to nice links and attention from people such as yourself.
Thanks again for the great writeup and look forward to following this discussion and your blog!
Clay
@ Jep – Good points. Particularly on the second point. I have a good friend who is in wealth management, and it’s a similar situation. They are very targeted in their marketing communication and client acquisition; thus, broad-based lead-gen is something they are careful to avoid.
@ Seamus – Good thoughts on placing solutions in the context of the marketing lifecycle. Different stages of building a brand and of developing customer relationships require different programs. Today, with the diffusion of solutions, this means leveraging different solutions at different points.
This is something Jep talked about in a recent post on his Lead Sloth blog (linked above), and I think he’s got some good thoughts on it in general (so you might want to sync up with him).
@ Bernie – Your comment, “… assuming there is already a market for their product/service,” is an interesting one. In fact, it raises a good point about the marketing lifecycle. We want to recognize that the lifecycle of solutions is not only a company thing but also a market thing. If there is no category, is anyone searching for your solution? A good question to think about. Thanks.
@ Sam – Thanks for sharing the link to the blog. Appreciate the engagement.
To your comments, I agree with you, in part. But I think it is important to differentiate between content that is explicitly about products and services, versus content that is about timely dialogue with customers. Good content marketing / inbound marketing requires timely content and dialogue, versus stale/static product briefs.
@ Clay – Thanks for following up on your earlier post with a comment here. Appreciate the engagement in the dialogue. I think it’s interesting that you note the importance of “… keeping [your] blog regularly updated … .” I think this goes to my earlier comment. Successful inbound marketing is about timely content and engaging dialogue … meaning you have to keep it fresh.
Thanks for the great comments, everyone. This has been a great dialogue!
Adam, we like how you are defining the integrated marketing management ecosystem, and certainly think this fourth camp is an integral piece. In our view, as marketers’ needs mature – with expanding product lines, broader geographies or changing demand – inbound communications become another important channel in the overall marketing mix.
As such, it’s critical for marketers to be able to analyze and monitor this type of dialogue in much the same way they do with outbound communications. Accurate, timely capture and integration of inbound communications creates another important dimension of marketers’ view of the customer. A sophisticated view that allows them to better segment, target and provide the most relevant information and offers to more quickly convert prospects to customers, or encourage repeat sales through cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
We look forward to helping customers continue to explore and benefit from the power of inbound marketing technologies. Thanks Adam for continuing to spur this important dialogue.
Adam, this is a great dialog! Forrester came out with a quote last week, up to 16% of SG&A expense is hidden costs associated with supporting sales.
Based upon this statistic, I think we would agree there is a tremendous amount if inefficiency and ineffectiveness in the sales, marketing and client engagement process. This is not a “sales issue” or a “marketing issue” quite often, a diffusion is caused by lack of process and internal communications. Technology is great, but even in a semi-complex b2b environment it is not the silver bullet. The human element and a defined process can provide an excellent stop-gap measure to start whittling away at the inefficiencies. We now have the Forrester number to benchmark and measure a potential ROI.
Adam
Any vendor that takes a position that it is 90% this or 10% that just doesn’t get it. Ask Mr B at Salesforce where the line is and he will say 90% sales people. Aren’t newspapers supposed to be dead? The radio? The movies, dead? Trains? Mainframe computers? Neidemyer? Dead? There is no one way to get information, travel or process data. The new thing is the new thing and it very seldom has such a seismic impact that we go from 90/10 to 10/90. Anyone out there still using Seibel? Yes, I think there is. This sort of thinking plus top down financial analysis (the market is X, our segment is Y, we can get W% and be a $10Bn company by Tuesday), are the two things in business that drive me to believe that certain people must need searchlights, centipede’s limbs and a Sherlock Holmes sized magnifying glass to find their butts.
Firstly there’s no one new thing about to transform marketing. Anymore than sales force automation systems automated sales people away or ERP systems removed accounting departments (but there were slides that said that is what would happen).
Despite what vendors will tell you, there is no silver bullet. Generating more leads is about using all of the tools available to you. Each channel will deliver differing results over time and you need to be constantly monitoring them for improvement, very seldom for obsolescence.
The part that is driving me to distraction is too often sales and marketing don’t talk to each other and don’t’ have an intrinsic respect for the other’s discipline. We end up with a perception of Blackberry using, sharp suited, silver-tongued, meat-eating, beer-drinking sales people and iPhone-using, casually dressed, fish “light on the oil”, chardonnay-drinking marketers. This lack of mutual respect means we as an industry are not fully leveraging the skills of the other disciplines.
The simplest example is to look to the VITO selling style of the 1990’s. We know it works, and it still works. Of course it doesn’t work when you get junior people in telesales to try it or worse yet, try to use email marketing and don’t personalize the email.
All this Marketing Automation and we still need to sell? How dull. Yes, it is all about revenue. Not about really cool messages, not about lead volume, not about even qualified leads, it is all about revenue. Any marketer that tries to claim success by ever mentioning the number of leads they have created without being able to track how much revenue they delivered just handed the power back to sales. If marketing can prove what they do actually delivers revenue then the power base shifts. People don’t want to talk about this so I see the political elephant in the room getting larger and leaving its unique smell and presents there for all to enjoy. There’s an elephant. Here it is.
Someone is going to own this new process and this combination of tools, inbound, outbound, scmoutbound. The person in an organization that knows how to draw trhe existing experience from sales and marketing, embed them in the tools available, and build a multi-dimensional, multi-channel lead generation and execution process will come out on top. It used to be sales because the revenue was easily seen to be associated with them. If marketing is to take control of the process, they must prove the work they are doing is directly responsible for the revenue. Sales becomes a closing machine for marketing, into a lead generation department for sales. This is the future of B2B sales if it is managed using both disciplines. Why is no-one telling you this? Well sales aren’t sharing as they don’t want to lose their power base. Marketing doesn’t have the data to prove this and so it just goes unsaid.
This is about building a wall where sales and marketing have to admit both have been generating inbound and outbound interest over time, work together to use the new tools available to create something new but re-using the techniques we know work.
Outstanding post Adam. Thank you.
The following quote “The Internet has transformed the nature of shopping and the sales and marketing funnel. In order to remain competitive, your business needs to be found on the Web and leverage inbound marketing techniques to reach customers with targeted messages that customers seek out, not ignore.”
Is one of the best summation of the new sales and marketing world we now live (or should it be the marketing and sales world?). Companies much like society in general are moving faster than ever. Inbound sales lead are critical to most companies success. Without Inbound marketing you are depending on your Outboard marketing to be in the right place at the right time. The scenerio is fairly simple. What do we do when we want to purchase a product or service which we are not familiar? Typically we go to people we trust and then we go to the internet. It is not likely the local watch repair shop is going find me when I need their services. Bottom line is in our hyper society the window is far to small to depend on Outbound Marketing.
Unfortunately, most companies still don’t get it, as several other mentioned. Every 50 something CMO needs to get some younger people in their organization and listen to their views to understand our brave new world.
Thank you for the balance in the article and everyones comments. I agree 100% with Mike. Sales is still critical to every organization (I had a VP of Marketing tell me the other day when they finish their software product it will sell itself, too bad they are not public so I could buy short), someone has to first keep the deals alive and avoid non-decisions and then close the deals. B to B sales will always be an art form and critical to almost every company.
I believe what we should be seeing is the line between sales and marketing becoming more blurred than ever before. Maybe we need a new term for the two group as a single group. Companies who are effectively marketing through the recession and have true synergy between marketing and sales will emerge the winners, now and especially when the economy turns around!
[…] 27, 2009 by Adam Needles My recent blog post on the inbound marketing / marketing content management crowd has gotten me thinking quite a bit about the holistic lifecycle of leads and of the role of […]
[…] changing. The strategy focuses more on initially responding to ‘pull’ and initial ‘inbound’ activity and on conforming to the buyer’s cycle than on driving interruptive […]
[…] I read. And read some more. A couple of articles that were most intriging were The Inbound Marketing / Marketing Content Management Crowd – A Fourth Camp? by Adam Needles and What Is Inbound Marketing? by Clay Schossow. But then I found another article […]
[…] social mediums for sharing links). (These are probably the themes you have heard around the new ‘inbound marketing’ concept that is being discussed more and more frequently in the marketplace.) The issue is […]
[…] recent blog post on the inbound marketing / marketing content management crowd has gotten me thinking quite a bit about the holistic lifecycle of leads and of the role of […]