The Lost Art of Outbound Sales
There has been a long-raging battle in Marketing and Sales departments on whether to invest more in inbound or outbound acquisition.
Should we hire an SEO consultant or invest in a lead database? Should we invest in our blog or improve our outreach program? etc…
Inbound lead-generation has been winning this battle for the past ten years.
It is perceived as a less intrusive, time-consuming and painful. Whereas outbound has been perceived as an outdated and hard-to-maintain lead-generation process.
The most common lead-generation split of companies that reach out to us is: 70% inbound vs 30% outbound.
The most common reasons for this split are : “outbound is too much work”, “outbound is not scalable”, “data research and outreach take too much time”…
The truth is that companies tend to focus on inbound just because… it’s trendy.
Everybody wants to do inbound
The truth is that inbound vs. outbound sales is a false debate. They are both as demanding and both as efficient/cost-effective when well mastered.
Even though outbound sales have been used forever, literally, before the internet even existed; it seems that some companies are clinging to the believe that inbound strategy is the way to go.
The inbound trendiness comes mostly from a powerful propaganda led by CRM and Marketing Automation actors. They have been preaching that with inbound, lead-generation can be totally automated.
“With a good enough website and traffic you would not need to prospect customers. They would just come to you.”
However…No such thing exists.
Any company, big or small still needs to prospect for clients. Inbound by itself is never enough. Sometimes nothing beats the good old ways of picking up the phone and sell your product.
The funny thing is that even the most advanced companies today such as Google or Microsoft use outbound sales.
Why? Because if well-managed outbound can:
- be more targeted than inbound (if your ideal customer is the CTO of HSBC, good luck getting his attention with inbound),
- be more engaging than inbound (this is one-to-one communication),
- deliver immediate results,
- generate exceptional sales increases,
- deliver unique insights,
- and perfectly complement inbound lead-generation.
Outbound is getting sexy again because some people (like us :)), have realized that companies lack a dedicated platform/help to manage and scale their outbound process.
We are witnessing a rebirth of outbound sales thanks to the latest digital technologies and artificial intelligence.
And we are glad to be part of it
