Are You Outbounding Your Inbound Marketing?

By Peter Gracey, Co-Founder, President and COO, AG Salesworks

Outbounding (verb). to communicate personally and proactively with a sales prospect via email or phone with the goal of determining their level of interest in your product or service.

This is a great term to describe a formal telequalification process. We don’t call it cold calling because everyone we call has already received some sort of communication prior to us actually embarking on our call plan. By the nature of having a strategy to create “inbound” leads we eliminate the need for true “cold calling” on behalf of our clients. That’s why we use the term “outbounding.” There has to be something to call what you do to prospects after they’ve received your “inbound” communications.

The difference between a services firm that identifies fully qualified opportunities for its clients and many companies selling B2B technologies is that the services firm offers a full cycle strategy for dealing with inbound opportunities. Many of the organizations that we work with have beautifully designed inbound strategies that are kicking off some real gold. Unfortunately, for some reason, very few of them have any process in place for what happens after the lead comes in. In most cases it’s being popped over to sales reps who make the customary 2 dials into them, and then complain to the VP of Sales that everything marketing is sending them sucks. C’mon admit it....that’s what is happening at your company isn’t it?  

Good news, here are the three things you need to do to make sure that you have an outbounding strategy that not only works, but makes you sleep better at night.

1. Build or outsource an outbounding team. Build it or lease it, I don’t care just get a team in place to follow up on your inbound marketing campaigns. These aren’t quota carrying sales people, but rather telequalification reps that specialize in separating the wheat from the chaff within your inbound leads. They qualify and pass the sales-ready opportunities and nurture the rest.

2. Have a regimented call plan. Having a regimented call plan has a statistically proven impact on the effectiveness of a telequalification rep. Don’t ignore this fact when building or leasing your team. Work with your sales counterparts to develop an acceptable follow up plan that all of your inbound leads must be brought through. Don’t develop it on your own and force it on sales. Get their feedback and input to develop a truly bipartisan call plan.

3. Let sales own telequalification. OK, so you did all the heavy lifting and drove the process of building or outsourcing your outbounding, now hand it over to sales for management. If you are a marketing executive, why on earth would you have a bunch of salespeople reporting into your organization? The best telequalification reps are future salespeople. For that reason they should be managed by current sales management.  

You’ve collaborated and agreed upon the call plan so you know that your inbound campaigns are going to get the air cover they need to become closed business. It is for this reason that you can pass the team over to sales and let them run the day to day training and monitoring needed. Since you are brilliant, you’ve also customized your CRM to track whether or not the call plan is being adhered to. Since you practiced good forethought and have that report, your job is simply to monitor it and make your opinions are heard when your inbound gold is being treated as anything less.

Blowing off inbound is a crime. Make sure you are outbounding it.

Peter Gracey is the President, COO and Co-Founder of AG Salesworks, a provider of high quality and fully qualified sales leads to technology companies. Pete oversees client engagement, personnel management, business strategy, across-the-board data analysis and long-term strategic planning. He is also a prolific blogger who posts frequently to the AG web site and contributes online video presentations. Gracey is an Adjunct Professor of Sales and Marketing for the University of Massachusetts Amherst.