What’s Wrong with an Inbound Only Strategy

What is the size of your total addressable market? What percentage of that market is actively considering buying whatever it is that you sell? What percentage of those that are actively looking are considering buying from you?

Statistics on the percentage of prospects actively looking for what you sell are commonly cited as something close to 10 percent of the market. If you have a monopoly, then maybe inbound marketing efforts are enough to meet your growth targets. Why would you ignore 90 percent of the people and companies that would benefit from what you are selling? By not addressing the 90 percent of the market, you are leaving them to develop relationships with your competitors.

Let’s say you are brilliant at inbound marketing. Why still would you require your prospects to search and find you, rather than making it your responsibility to identify and pursue the very people and companies that your company was built to serve? Is the fear of interrupting someone so great that you can’t imagine doing so? Is the value you create so insignificant that you don’t believe it is worth your prospective client’s time? Is your belief so small that you don’t believe that you need to act with urgency to help your prospective clients produce the better results you produce?

While you are passively waiting for clients to beat a path to your door, your competitors are not. They’re willing to do what you are not. When they make more money and capture market share, they create a competitive advantage, one that isn’t going to be reclaimed by principles that suggest you can only help people who come to you for help, when they come to you for help, and one that requires that they bump into your content marketing.

All prospecting methods have value, but none are as effective as a well-balanced approach that includes different methods of prospecting, most of which are likely to be outbound. Competition is part of markets, and there is no reason to compete with one hand tied behind your back.