From “Founding Sales: Sales for founders (and others) in first-time sales roles” by Pete Kazanjy founder of Atrium Sales Analytics. Follow Pete on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Consider checking out How to Use This Book and Who This Book Is For sections to start.
Introduction
I don’t want to get too deep into inbound marketing, because when you’re very early in your go-to-market, it’s usually pretty unlikely that people will know who you are, what you do, or that they need you. This is the challenge with selling innovative solutions early on: if no one knows they have the problem you solve, or that there is a solution like yours that can solve that problem, they’re not going to be Googling for you, or stumbling across your site.
Creating content, like blog posts, tweets, infographics, and such, and making sure that they are well SEO’d to engender inbound leads at scale, is what is known as “inbound marketing.” This is a more advanced form of lead generation that we’ll get into in a later chapter, as it’s typically not appropriate for a very early-stage go-to-market. (You’d be producing a bunch of content for people who aren’t looking for it…). There can be exceptions where you’re attacking an existing market for cheaper—kind of like Hubspot took the power of marketing automation like Marketo and Eloqua, and brought it to the SMB and mid-market. But I find that these are often the exception, especially when we’re talking about acquiring your first 100 customers.
When you do get more advanced, there are lots of resources to assist with this, not least Mark Roberge’s book The Sales Acceleration Formula, chronicling analytics-driven sales powered by a robust inbound marketing machine. It’s no surprise that this come from the former Chief Revenue Officer at Hubspot, the company that has done some of the most impressive work at popularizing inbound marketing as a practice.
However, at this early stage, even though you won’t be focused on manufacturing content for inbound marketing at scale, you will still need a minimum viable inbound lead capture process to capitalize on your outbound appointment-setting activity. Why? Well, if your content and messaging are well executed, your outreach will actually end up driving people back to your website, where, if they are convinced by the messaging there, they could easily request a demo. I like to call this “outbound inbound,” and leads generated that way are some of the best inbound leads you can get—you know that you are only targeting qualified accounts, so inbound leads originating from your prospecting lists are bound to be strong.
Standard inbound leads, on the other hand, are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, they’re fantastic because they have a lot of “intent.” That is, prospects are requesting a demo because they’re convinced that they are interested by what you are doing, and are actively asking you to sell to them. What could be better than that? Well, the downside of inbound leads is that it’s the requester who is making this assessment, and he might not be super informed as to what makes someone qualified for your solution. So while he’s excited to talk to you, you might not be excited to talk to him.
Inbound Lead Qualification
As we discussed when we covered qualification in the Prospecting chapter, you want to be focused on potential customers that have all the characteristics required to have success with your solution—namely the business pain points that you solve and the staff who would use your solution. If they don’t meet those criteria, you don’t really want to spend your time talking to them. Even if they end up buying, they’re not going to have success and they’re not going to be happy. Not with your solution, and not with you for selling it to them when you should have known better. Much better for you to instead funnel them away—giving them a good experience even when you’re saying, “We don’t make sense for you”—then spend your time giving relevant inbound leads a fantastic experience. Qualification is something you’ll want to keep in mind at every step, from how you set up your lead capture forms to the questions you ask once you get those leads on the phone.
Inbound Lead Capture Forms
First, you need a means by which to capture these inbound leads in a structured format. In the previous chapter, we talked about setting up a <sales@yourcompanyname.com> inbox as an early solution. And that can work to start—it’s definitely much better than nothing. But it also makes for a really difficult time of capturing the relevant demand signifiers in a helpful way. So as soon as you’re able, swap that email link out for a big fat “Request Demo” call to action on your home page (ideally following the user down the page), and then point that button at some sort of form that lets you capture structured data. Don’t make it subtle. If someone shows up on your home page and is eager to talk to you, make it damn easy.
Check out some examples of how to do this.
It’s pretty clear what you need to do if you want a demo of HIRABL:
Textio uses a “free trial” concept that acts as the primary call to action (but which routes through a lead data capture form):
Your form tool, to start, could be something simple built with Google Forms, Wufoo, Typeform, or what have you. They’re all pretty much the same, and all you want to do is allow the prospect to express interest in a structured way. Make sure the form works on mobile, as that’s where a lot of your email outreach will be read. Often CRMs’ lead capture forms (like Salesforce’s Web-to-Lead) will include a feature that routes those leads directly into lead objects in the CRM, and can even provide a prospect-facing response email and a notification email to alert you to a new inbound lead.
What information do you want to capture? Resist the temptation to go crazy here. The biggest thing you’re trying to capture is qualification information and a means by which to get in touch with the person. Honestly, the minimum minimum could be a work email address and phone number, if you believe that you can garner all of the relevant qualification data from a company website or LinkedIn with just the name of the company (from the email domain, duh).
That said, that level of minimalism might be a little weird given that most prospects are used to providing name and company, so I typically recommend first name, last name, company name, title (this quartet helps you understand who you’re talking to); email address and phone number (this provides you the means by which to get into contact—and remember, these leads are asking you to get in touch, so you should definitely ask them for their phone numbers); and then the minimum viable demand signifiers that you can’t get on your own.
For instance, at TalentBin, we didn’t ask how many recruiters our inbound requesters had at their organizations, because that was trivial to find on LinkedIn—and every incremental field is a chance for leads to abandon the form. But we did ask how many software engineering roles they were looking to fill in the next six months, since we couldn’t find that on our own and that hiring demand was required for an account to get value out of TalentBin. Think about what the minimum qualification signifiers are for your solution, and which ones aren’t observable in the world and thus need to be asked.
Check out some examples of demo request forms.
HIRABL asks for the type of ATS/CRM that a recruiting agency uses:
Textio can get all the demand signifiers they need from looking at company career pages (though they really should ask for phone number):
Immediately probably could find out how many salespeople a given account has worldwide on their own using LinkedIn, so they don’t really need to ask that. But knowing the email system and CRM system the lead runs is important for their qualification process, so it’s good they ask for it:
Once you have a form set up, in addition to adding those “Request Demo” calls to action on your home page (and other relevant pages on your website), you should make sure it’s merchandised in your outreach emails, as well. That is, in most of those emails, you likely have a direct call to action like “just go ahead and respond to get something scheduled,” but putting a link to your demo request form in your footer is a good addition.
Lastly, there are folks who like to get in touch the old fashioned way, and for them that means a phone number. You might think that putting a phone number (even if it’s just for your cell phone) might lead to unwanted things like vendors calling you, or unqualified leads calling you and wasting your time. I assure you, your bigger problem is people not caring about you, rather than there being too much inbound. Instead, consider the decision-maker who is interested in getting a response really quickly, and used to doing business on the phone (do you sell to sales people? To recruiters? They’re frequently verbal people, not text people.) staring at your demo request form, dozens of which they’ve filled out so many times before with nary a response. Plus, typing is hard. And so she closes the tab instead of requesting that demo, because you didn’t populate a number. Populating a phone number somewhere on that demo request form gets you that demo. And make sure that phone number has a voicemail box that is checked for when it isn’t monitored is a good thing to have. If you do get to a point where there’s too much irrelevant inbound, and it’s legitimately a waste of your time (I’d be shocked), you can always take it down later.
Inbound Lead Response
Once you have an inbound lead data capture form in place, the next question is: what do you do with these leads as they come in?
First, the most important thing is to respond to inbound leads as quickly as possible. This is something that organizations screw up constantly, thinking that because someone is asking to talk, they’re happy to do it now, later, tomorrow, next week. This is completely false. Instead, what you have is a prospect who passed the threshold of sufficient interest in your solution and has made herself available right now. The key thing to understand is the “right now” component—as in, this can change because other priorities pop up, she finds another solution to her problem (how do you think she found you? She’s actively trying to solve this problem), or a myriad of other reasons.
The pace at which this interest falls off is incredibly rapid. As surfaced in research done by MIT Sloan and InsideSales.com, there is a 100x drop-off in contact rates between leads that are contacted within five minutes of submitting a lead form and thirty minutes. And it’s a 10x drop-off just between five minutes and ten minutes. As you can tell, responding to a qualified lead quickly is pretty darn important.
Of course, the challenge here, if it’s just you, is that you’re probably doing other things that keep you from checking your email every five minutes! And even if you’re not, checking your email every five minutes sounds like a great way to get nothing else done (though later, you’ll have a Market Development Rep who focuses just on this). That said, you should certainly make sure that your lead generation form provider can at a minimum send a new-lead notification to an email address of your choosing, including the information that was provided by the prospect. Especially phone number, so you can call her right away from wherever you are!
But the reality is that you may not always be able to instantly respond to those inbound leads. One way to help with this is an auto-response email coupled with a form completion “thank you” that includes that phone number we referred to above, directing leads who’d like to talk to someone quickly to call (a Google Voice number is great for this, as it can be redirected to any number). With this approach, you can increase your chance of an inbound call which, even if you’re not able to answer, shows more commitment on the part of the prospect, while letting prospects know you will be in touch.
A more recent approach to inbound capture and response is the rise of chat interfaces. Companies like Drift and Intercom have offerings that allow you to have a pop up on your homepage or product page, which can then amount to a “form fill”, but via a chat interface. The problem with this historically is that you need a human to staff this chat interface, and if you’re at the point where you don’t have enough inbound volume to merit that, you can mis-set expectation with the prospect when the chat window says “Hey, how can I help?” the prospect answers, and then there’s no response. More modern versions of this, again, like Drift, can follow somewhat of a “mad libs” approach and ask the prospect questions, and then catalog the answers—kind of like a demo request form, one question at a time.
Lightweight Discovery
Ideally, because you called the inbound lead back so quickly (right?), you can get him on the phone. But although I know you’re excited about getting him on the calendar for a demo as quickly as possible, first you need to make sure he’s qualified. If you go back to your ideal customer profile, you’ll recall the demand signifiers that indicate a prospect has the pain points your solution solves. Now is the time to ensure that this inbound lead definitely has those characteristics. Of course, because you set up your inbound lead capture form in a way that captures these signifiers, this is more about verifying the information, and potentially digging in a bit more. Moreover, you should be figuring out what other folks should be on a call. This is where “size of prize” comes into play—if the organization has many other potential users of your product, maybe you could get them all on a demo together? Or while you have this champion-to-be on the phone, figure out who would be involved in a purchasing decision—is he the person who would pull that trigger, or should you think about involving the boss in this case? These are all valid things to consider, which we’ll talk about more when we cover “discovery” in the Pitching chapter.
If, for whatever reason, it turns out that the individual and his organization aren’t qualified, it’s completely fine to let them know that this isn’t relevant to them. Of course, be sure to differentiate between a truly unqualified account and a qualified account for which this is simply an unqualified contact. Qualify the account, not the lead. By no means should you think that because someone came inbound you are obligated to do a demo for him. Rather, you are being respectful of his time, and preventing him from having broken expectations at a later juncture when it finally surfaces that your solution isn’t a fit. Worst, of course, would be if he ended up buying your product under a mistaken understanding of what it does and proceeded to feel cheated, all while soaking up your support resources and complaining to his colleagues about it. Let’s avoid all that drama right now, okay? If you’re respectful and candid about not wasting prospects’ time, while making it clear who your solution would be relevant to, you have the chance to convert helpful brand ambassadors who will tell their colleagues about you.
This happened frequently at TalentBin, where our technical recruiting customers were so stoked on the product (and our delightfully designed swag!) that they often bragged to nontechnical recruiting colleagues about the solution—which is great. This is what you want. But those unqualified folks would then end up coming inbound as leads. As such it was very important that our inbound market development staff could qualify them. Rather than just putting a meeting on the calendar, they would pivot around the individual to figure out if she might simply be an unqualified contact at a qualified organization—and in that case, work with this contact to loop in more qualified contacts from that same organization. Or, alternatively, if the entire organization was unqualified. (For TalentBin, that means a company with no technical, healthcare, or finance hiring. For HIRABL, that’s a staffing agency that doesn’t do contingency recruiting. What’s your version?)
Follow-up on Inbound Leads
If, unfortunately, you weren’t able to connect the first time you called that inbound lead back, all is not lost. Just as with your pure outbound efforts, even inbound appointment setting takes persistence. In fact, the second thing that people screw up about inbound leads is giving up on them too soon. Again, our friends at InsideSales.com and MIT Sloan figured out that each incremental attempt you make to reach out to an inbound lead adds another 15% chance of contacting them, falling off substantially after the sixth attempt. But after six attempts, you should have had roughly an aggregate 90% chance of making contact. So don’t give up! Remember, they asked for it, so you have nothing to fear.
While you’re trying to make contact, definitely make sure to leave voice mails and use your inbound lead response email template to let the prospect know that you’re doing your best to reach him. But while persistence is good, you do need to move on after a half-dozen attempts or so. There are plenty of fish in the sea, and we need you spending your time fishing. Along the way, just make sure to log your activity in your CRM (or, if you’re still in that Google Sheet, the new row you created for this inbound lead) to keep track of who’s in process, and how many times you’ve attempted to contact them.
Lastly, not every inbound lead needs a call. If an inbound lead comes in, and the information that is provided makes it pretty darn clear it’s unlikely to be qualified, a better approach can be to send what’s known as a “hard qualifier” email. This would include who the product is intended for, and why you think it might not be relevant for that lead, plus an ask to clarify if your thinking is wrong.
For instance, something like:
Hi there!
Thanks for your interest in HIRABL! I had an opportunity to check <COMPANY NAME> out, and it looks like your recruiting team primarily does temp staffing, as opposed to contingency permanent placement. Is that right?
The reason I ask is because HIRABL is used by staffing agencies to monitor candidate submissions to avoid what are known as “backdoor hires”—when a client hires one of your submittals but doesn’t let you know, so you potentially miss out on a fee. We find that 1 in 300 permanent placement submits ends up being a backdoor hire. So it’s potentially tens of thousands of dollars in missed fees. Yikes! More here in this little video: https://youtu.be/QihH8WuJj0c.
If I’m mistaken and this sounds like it would be relevant to <COMPANY NAME>, then by all means let’s get a demo scheduled for you.
Please let me know what you think!
Best,
Pete
This way, if you have a hunch that an account might not be qualified, you can send information over to help them disqualify themselves (while providing some nice marketing messaging in case they want to share it with their buddy who is qualified), saving you both time. Or, if your hunch was wrong, they’ll reply letting you know as much, and you can get on your way to scheduling the meeting.
While scaled inbound marketing should likely not be a focus for you this early in your go-to-market, there are some basics that will help make sure you are capitalizing on the inbound interest generated by your outbound activity. Moreover, as you start getting early word of mouth from prospects you’ve demo’d, you’ll already have a handy system for turning that inbound interest into appointments on the calendar, waiting to be pitched. Which we’re going to talk about next!
Further Reading:
More on inbound marketing as relates to revenue acceleration in The Sales Acceleration Formula.