The Premature Death of Outbound Marketing
The SBA estimates that 600,000 new employer businesses are incorporated every year. Not many of them benefit from a brand name like IBM or Coca Cola. In order to survive they have to hunt for new business.
Even major corporations like EMC, Cisco and Hewlett Packard have huge teams dedicated to prospecting for new business in both their installed base as well as new potential customers. Without a process for prospecting and the associated measurement criteria, it’s every rep for themselves, which is never as efficient as a process that utilizes the knowledge of the team to make the entire prospecting effort better with every selling activity.
The inbound marketing industry does itself a great disservice when they position themselves as an inexpensive alternative to outbound marketing. Our experience with clients has shown over and over that the combination of the two strengthens each.
- Having an effective inbound marketing strategy can provide improved branding and build the trust, visibility and authority of a company. It can gather prospective leads throughout search and social mediums, collect behavioral data on them, and hand your outbound team a lead that they better understand at a time where the prospect is looking to make a purchase.
- Having an effective outbound marketing strategy accelerates your inbound strategy by providing a personal touch to the inbound lead. The outbound sales representative can build a relationship with the prospect, educate them, and respond effectively to any objections the prospect may have.
Outbound marketing has many advantages… it can be reproduced easily, turned on and off, or increased and decreased to regulate the demand. While it may require a higher investment, the results should be predictable, quick and positive.
Add a marketing automation platform like our sponsors Right On Interactive, a proposal management solution like TinderBox (also our sponsors), and you can increase the efficiency of your outbound efforts significantly… reducing the time your outbound team has to spend on administrative tasks. Sales enablement closes an efficiency gap where inbound and outbound meet.
Outbound marketing was how I built my business in the first place, and I have helped lots of financial professionals build their businesses too. Not just calling, but sending custom promo packages. It works and it works well for me and thousands of others. True enough, there is a lot of work involved, but the combination of outbound done with class and professional inbound works excellently for many businesses.
Agreed @stephenwanderson:disqus!
Funny though, how this strategy gets a lot of bad PR, when it can be very effective.
Really great point Doug! Inbound works when you get in front of people who know they have a problem. But most people don’t know they have a problem until they see an alternative to a current state. That’s what outbound does for you. In our business, Facebook is an amazing way to do outbound marketing. With FB we can easily target people who are either friends of our existing customers or folks who share the characteristics of our existing customers.
Great post and insight.