How to get leadership on board with inbound

Getting everyone on board with inbound is one of the biggest challenges with our clients. Once they get it (understand the impact of inbound), then it moves ahead pretty fast.

Outbound tactics - cold calls, cold emails, banner ads, print ads - still work in some cases, but in our experience, they are all improved by adopting inbound marketing principles. In many ways, marketing now is inbound marketing.

Who does not think websites are essential today?

The key to being inbound is to create an attractive force that draws prospects, partners, and employees to your business. It is not telling everyone how great you are but people seeing it and wanting to be a part of it. Attract vs. interrupt is still the critical inbound idea.

See this page to understand how inbound impacts every aspect of the organization.

Some ideas to convince your leadership to adopt inbound:

1. Use examples - Ask leaders how they find new products, do they search online, read articles, etc. Guaranteed they use the Internet too, the obvious connection is that the prospects for your company do too.

2. Analyze competitors online and show them that your competitors and complementary companies are creating content and trying to establish thought leadership.

3. Educate about inbound - There are many stats on inbound and its effectiveness.

HubSpot’s 2022 marketing stats

This one will get leadership’s attention - inbound leads are at least 67% less expensive to generate than outbound leads.

And for good measure - companies implementing inbound generate up to 126% more leads than ones that don’t.

Inbound is easily the lowest cost of lead and, ultimately, customer acquisition.

4. Do they respond to outbound marketing? Ask the leadership if they take cold outreach emails and calls from people selling to them. If they say they do, then ask what makes them listen?

5. Look for connections to existing customers.?

Ask your customers how they research and find answers to questions and possible solutions to challenging problems. Asking this question is often an eye-opener.

All of your current customers use your website and consume your content or wish you were talking to them. Everyone looks at your website even if they meet you at a trade show, are referred by someone else, or drive past your building. Online content is your brand and front door; what do people see when they find it?

6. Run tests - with a small investment, you can test content to see if it makes an impact - maybe use more content during the sales process and monitor engagement. Or create a great guide to whatever you do and see how many people click on it on your site or open it in an email.

7. Hire a guide to develop a plan to adopt inbound. OK, that was a plug to hire us! Seriously, an outside perspective often brings more credibility to leaders in making a change.

Here is a podcast we did on this topic.

Thanks to Industrial Executive reader Lasse Pederson of Seritronic for asking me this question!

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