Inbound vs. Outbound Sales

Once you specialize your Sales Team into lead developers and closers, you can take a step further by separating the Lead Development team into inbound and outbound teams for more efficiency.

What comes in through your market efforts, ideally, should be the same clients that your outbound team searches for, but having a dedicated person focus on qualifying inbound prospects makes scaling your business faster and easier. By essentially letting the Outbound Lead Development Team focus only on bringing in the business they can build a profitable pipeline directly to your salespeople. As a bonus, it’s easier to track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts through the inbound team.

The key to the effectiveness of this split is multi-tasking destroys any momentum the Lead Generation Team has built up during the day. It takes time and energy to switch gears between tasks. If your company has a large volume of inbound prospects from your marketing efforts, it will increase the efficiency of everyone involved to separate your Lead Development Team into the two sub-groups.

The inbound people should be well versed in your website content, webinars, podcasts, videos and other marketing efforts to answer any questions an incoming prospect has. Have you ever been to a store and asked an employee about an ad only to be met with cluelessness? It’s not confidence inspiring. The Inbound Lead Development Team’s job is to know about what brought the prospect in, how it relates, and determine from there if the prospect is a good fit for your product or service.

Your Outbound Lead Development Team, of course, should know what is going on in your marketing channels, but it is not strictly necessary. All they need is the profile or profiles of your ideal customer and they are set to run at full steam. They need to focus on sending mass emails, responding, determine fit, and making introductions to your sales team. Your Outbound Lead Development Team should be some of the most narrowly focused people in the company.

Separating the teams into inbound and outbound smooths the entire qualification process. Your teams and their managers can more acutely focus on what is working and refine what can work better within their specialties. If you allow your teams to keep the flow and momentum they have built up over the day, you will be rewarded with higher productivity, leading to more qualified leads, in turn leading to more sales.

Originally published at blog.leadware.io.