Inbound-Led Outbound: Prioritizing Your Lead Gen Path

For over a decade, the inbound and outbound marketing duo have played a major role in the B2B lead generation process .?

Our upcoming LinkedIn webinar this Tuesday, Jan. 24 (10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. PT – check your local time), Treat Your Inbound Like Your Outbound , hosted by CIENCE and Salesloft , will take on a holistic look at how modern marketing teams can incorporate both methodologies to enhance their prospects' buying experience.

Eric Quanstrom, CMO of CIENCE, will cover what is often the #1 gap between marketing and sales—unconverted ICP-match leads to your website.?

Also included will be hot topics like the types of data that can be leveraged by marketing teams today: how to identify formerly anonymous website visitors and work inbound leads effectively—what we call inbound-led outbound.

This event is a great opportunity for B2B sales teams and marketers who aim to find new ways to engage their prospects. A recent Gartner research finds that only 5% of a buyer's time is spent interacting with a salesperson in sales cycles, meaning that vendors need to prioritize the prospects with better probabilities of closure.

The inbound-led outbound methodology is capable of doing just that: handpicking leads depending on clear intent data signals (first-party intent captured on your website). Visiting your website is a great hint that a visitor could be interested in your brand. Getting to those visitors before your competitors is the ultimate goal of the inbound-led outbound approach.

The Art of Prioritizing Leads

How different are inbound leads from outbound leads? Trish Bertuzzi, president and chief strategist for The Bridge Group , once mentioned that “With inbound, you get what you get. With outbound, you get what you want.” That was until the inbound-led outbound “X” factor came into play.

To treat inbound and outbound efforts like two sides of the same coin, B2B companies must learn how to focus on their ideal customer profiles (ICPs ), those defining details about companies that possess the right characteristics to become your clients.

By understanding what industry, revenue, number of employees, region, and other relevant criteria would make a specific business a perfect match for your product, it becomes easier to classify prospects according to the following lead buckets:

Inbound-led outbound?

These leads are already visiting your website, which means that they are slightly familiar with your brand and are curious about how you might solve their needs.

Intent-led outbound?

Second and third-party tools identify topics where potential customers are not aware of your company, but their web journey and content consumption indicate that they are looking for solutions similar to yours.

List-led outbound?

These contact records are collected by data providers and need to be reached through cold and multichannel interactions even when they are not actively looking for your product or service.?

Dissecting the data provided by the inbound-led outbound prospects allows B2B marketers to match their ICP criteria against their current visitors. This way, both inbound and outbound campaigns can be programmed to target the lowest-hanging fruit, which is only part of the CIENCE lead prioritization method.

Read More: Taking Pipeline Lead Prioritization to the Next Level

Inbound-Led Outbound Requirements

The notion that inbound leads are marketing-owned while outbound leads are sales-owned has echoed throughout the years. Nevertheless, smart companies are deciding to stop the rivalry and focus on combining forces to generate leads of the highest quality.

The following requirements must be met to access inbound-led outbound prospects:

1. Detection

Knowing who visits your website is key to determining if your inbound and outbound campaigns are hitting the right target. Website visitor trackers, like CIENCE GO Show , are able to identify even anonymous visitors.?

By deploying the right tools, B2B marketers can validate live visitors, create behavioral and demographic filters to segment leads, and score them automatically based on their web activity.

2. Matching the ICP

Once data from visitors is processed, B2B marketers should focus only on the leads that match their ICP criteria. CIENCE GO Data is a sales intelligence platform that offers over 300 million lead records from all industries to its users.

Through the usage of contact databases, it is possible to create a target account list made out of company-to-contact real names, phone numbers, and email addresses.?

3. Organized outreach

You already know someone in a specific company who is interested in your product; now it's time to find out who is the right decision-influencer, when is the perfect time to engage, what is the contact channel of preference, and what message would trigger productive sales conversations.

Sales engagement platforms like Salesloft are capable of loading contacts and reaching out to visitors quickly. Sales teams will be able to orchestrate every call, email, meeting, and interaction through one platform with all activities automatically synced to their CRM .

Aligning inbound and outbound marketing has never been easier. Want to know more about inbound-led outbound lead generation? Then don't forget to tune in to our webinar this upcoming Tuesday, Jan 24. Happy sales!

Before You Go

Check out our favorite content this week to get your sales and marketing juices flowing:?

Blog of the Week

Intent-Based Marketing Guide: What Is It and How Does It Work?

Intent-based marketing can be defined as a hyper-focused marketing approach that leverages customers' intent data signals to create customized experiences. The intent marketing approach relies on sales intelligence tools to identify and track the interests of potential customers. Keep reading to learn more about this subject.

Podcast of the Week

Enterprise Sales Development with Ingo Dhandayudham

In this episode of the Enterprise Sales Development podcast, we speak with Ingo Dhandayudham, senior director of Global SDRs at Talkwalker. Ingo shares his perspective on how to improve the sales development craft without compromising quality and many other inspiring techniques.

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