Outbound vs inbound

Inbound lead generation brings buyers to you through search, content, and ads they encounter while looking. Outbound goes to buyers who aren't looking yet, through email, phone, LinkedIn, and targeted paid social.

The argument about which is better usually ignores the size of the market, and the size of the market is what decides it.

Inbound works when a lot of people are searching for what you sell. If there are two million potential buyers, enough of them are looking at any given moment to keep a pipeline full. Outbound works when the number of buyers is small and most of them aren't looking. If there are 4,000 potential buyers and 200 will buy this quarter, inbound catches the twenty who happened to search, and outbound reaches the other 180, provided it knows who they are.

Most B2B companies with $10,000-plus deals are in the second situation, and most of them have been told to do inbound anyway, because that's what the content agencies sell.

An example

A commercial roofer publishes articles about commercial roofing and ranks for a few terms. Three property managers a month find it. The same roofer emails the owners of the eleven buildings in the county that changed hands last month with roofs from the 1990s. Five write back. The first channel reaches people who were searching. The second reaches people who weren't, but had a reason.

What to do with both

Keep the inbound that works, because it's cheap once it's built. Add outbound for the buyers inbound can't reach, and build it on signals so the outreach has a reason. The two don't compete. They reach different people.

Related terms

Outbound prospecting · Lead generation · B2B lead generation · Buying signal

If you want this run for you, see our lead generation agency, or lead generation for commercial contractors.