The Inbound Epidemic

Hey friends,

I posted something this week and received way more replies than I had expected.

I worked with more than 100 startups in Italy, and in <5% of those cases they had inbound leads.

The ones that did usually had a founder who had a background in growth or performance marketing. (lucky them!)

The remaining 95% relied entirely on outbound.

That wasn’t true for everybody.

Below are the actual comments that people made.

• A founder working with small budgets cannot simply decide to have inbound.
• You can achieve 5M just from outbound efforts.
• People nowadays are overwhelmed by the amount of content available, and as a result, personalised outbound is more effective than inbound marketing ever was.

I completely agree with most of them.

Still, I would like to offer my viewpoint.

I am not against outbound. I use it. I tell every founder I work with to start there.

In the zero-to-one phase, outbound is the quickest method of finding out whether anyone wants the product you’re developing.

You contact people directly and receive quick answers.

No inbound funnel offers that kind of speed at the beginning.

What I continually observe after having worked with hundreds of startups is this: the fastest-growing companies, the ones who raise more and close more, all have inbound leads.

Maybe not from day 0, but from day 1.

Yet creating an inbound strategy isn’t on the agenda of most founders.

I understand why outbound comes first, though: you send a message today. You get a call booked today.

But you can also have it the other way around: you spend 6 months pushing through outbound, spending endless hours, and you get nothing.

You feel you didn’t spend the money, but you spent 6 months and all those hours - what’s the price of that?

I’m not a marketing person. I’m in sales.

I won’t pretend to know every inbound channel.

But I sit with founders every week, and here’s what I actually see working, even at a small scale.

• The founder sharing the true story on LinkedIn, not through the company page but as an individual describing what is actually going on within the business.
• Set a small budget for Google Ads at the beginning in order to obtain some traffic while the organic side is still weak.
• Content in the form of a blog post, a newsletter or YouTube.

When you begin to build pull from the start, even in a small way, then two years down the line you are going to be in a much better position.

This has an effect on the way your sales team operates and makes it easier for your reps to achieve their goals.

Start creating the kind of thing that attracts people whilst you are still carrying out the part that pushes people towards you.

It’s the founders who manage to do both from the start that I see as the ones who end up winning.

Thanks for reading this far; see you all next week!