What is inbound-led outbound?

If I was a betting man, I would say that no one uttered the words “inbound-led outbound” or “warm inbound” prior to 2024.

And now, we have hour-long roundtables with multiple panelists dissecting the concept.

It’s one of those things that people come up with to better position their product in the market. “Outbound is dead!”, they’ll say, wanting to trigger the fear-of-missing-out. “What you need is inbound-led outbound.”

So it is a gimmick? I wouldn’t go that far. It is clever positioning, to be sure, but the concept is not without its merit.

For the longest time, at most companies, inbound and outbound demand generation were neatly separated between marketing and sales—both meeting only at handoffs.

Inbound is all about positioning yourself as a magnet for potential buyers by creating engaging content, SEO, SEM, social media, earned media, webinars, etc. What you want is a lead in exchange for all that value.

Outbound is all about the push. There’s a list of companies that the seller (assigned or in territory) engages in cold outreach using multiple channels, until they get a yes or no. That’s reductive—sellers can be far more intelligent on the details, but let’s say it’s that.

In terms of timeline, outbound preceded inbound. Inbound was hailed as the remedy for all the frustration and hostility that buyers had developed towards pushy sales practices.

Inbound worked great for the companies that did it right for a long time. For example, Hubspot’s valuation is built upon the impressive inbound engine they built as an early adopter of the method.

But inbound has a lot of chinks in its armour, some that developed over time and others that merely became apparent with its passing.

To name a few:

• Inbound is an infinite game of building and waiting. You can get a pretty good idea of who you’re going after but rarely drill-down to the company or individual.

• The onus is on the buyer to signal their intent by sharing their email, phone, function, company, or other data. Before that event, inbound is completely dark.

• Even post event, inbound may fail to capitalize on the opportunity. The lead may go into an endless nurture sequence, or at handoff—rejected by sales. There are many traps, delays and bad timing is one.

This is the backstory that creates the perfect landing strip for inbound-led outbound. It’s fairly simple—you pinpoint the strengths of both methodologies and marry them.

Here are some ways in which that might play out in terms of a workflow or process:

• Someone visits your website, their identity is revealed by a person-level ID tech, and then an email (or InMail) shoots from the seller that owns that account: “Hey John! Saw you were on our site...”

• Cross-reference companies visiting your site against 3P intent signals on those researching your category. The shortlist from that overlap get invited by the assigned sellers to a hyper-personalized webinar tailored for that cohort.

• An old inbound lead visited your pricing or demo page but then bounced without taking any action. This event triggers a call from the seller. “Hey John, remember you downloaded our 2024 report? Well, my team told me that you were looking at our pricing and I thought I’d check in…”

There are a fair bit of permutations and combinations that you can patch together to come up with these plays.

Executed thoughtfully and with attention to detail, inbound-led outbound can be a great way for marketing to have a more immediate and tangible impact on sales efficiency.

It is also an excellent example of technology enabling business because some of the intent data, person-level ID tech, and automation systems required to makes these plays work simply did not exist when outbound and inbound first became mainstream.