Why Outbound?
As a marketer, reading anything about Outbound is likely to make you roll your eyes. You’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s basically a euphemism for spam, dialling for dollars, and door to door sales.
“Outbound..”, as one marketing site put it “is based on interruption. Inbound is based on permission”. The general theme in marketing and sales is that an inbound lead is preferable. On the surface, this seems obvious. Surely someone who is coming to your business and registering their interest is likely to be more likely to buy from you versus someone who you approached?
Not necessarily.
It’s difficult to find objective resources about this online, as the world of inbound is actually quite political. It turns out that there’s a lot of money to be made in SEO, SEM, Online Ads, Content Marketing, and the like. Companies like Google and Microsoft have also set up mailboxes to divert emails into “promotions” and “spam” folders, in order to protect individuals from Philippines Photo Editor unsolicited content and also make it extremely difficult to get through to a prospect.
In an extreme example, for any company running high volume inbound campaigns, you may be familiar as well with the tremendous cost of sifting through the leads in order to find qualified candidates. This is something that isn’t typically discussed, but in working with high volume inbound companies (10,000 leads per month and above), we’ve seen that what they term to be a good conversion rate sits at approximately 4-5% and in many cases, Inbound leads are converting at 1-2%.
If this is you, note that this means that 95-99% of inbound leads are not, in fact, leads.
The standard closing rate for a standard B2B lead is from 15-27%.
The B2B outbound closing rate sits at 22%.
So why does Outbound get such a bad rap?
The cynic will point to the fact that there isn’t a lot of money to be made by platforms for outbound by the companies that own our attention, but the reality is that outbound has been abused for so long that it is very difficult to separate it from SPAM.
Outbound has been dumb for a while:
Cold blasting a wide list of email addresses
Cold calling a list of phone numbers
Knocking on doors
All of the above harasses and annoys the majority in order to win over a minority.
There is a better way.
It’s something that I have been pioneering with my Sales Development agency Whistle, and if done right, is more effective, more affordable, and gets faster results than traditional inbound tactics.