Inbound sales and marketing operation is quite different from your outbound operation. I’ll first concentrate on giving you the big picture of how the system works, but will show you how to mix inbound and outbound successfully later on this post.

The inbound operation is a funnel, so familiar with your sales funnel, but it’s actually quite much wider and longer than your usual one. Before a customer became a lead, you might have nurtured her months.

Inbound is not just different on the customer acquisition side. If you acquire customer via inbound channels, the relationship is likely to progress differently. If you are using outbound tactics your sales costs are likely to be high. Thus you have to aim for large initial purchase to cover customer acquisition costs, at least to some extend. But it does not stop on customer acquisition. To maximize the value of the relationship, your key account manager is calling customer on preset interval trying to call often enough not to miss...

Sometimes you need to sell. Sometimes the product sells itself. But always, the customer buys. Does she need persuasion or just a bit of help, or can she make the journey on her own, it depends.

Some products and services can be sold to some customers over the telephone or in an online meeting, some require face-to-face meetings, and real enterprise sales are on their own level requiring not just a salesperson, but a whole sales team and a project lasting many months or years. Thus there are so many different leads and situations.

A sales lead is the Identification data of a person or entity that has the interest, authority and budget (i.e. money) to purchase a product or service. (Wikipedia)

In an outbound strategy you define your customer typically in such a way that you can easily buy media or contact information to reach them. You are reaching for CMOs in companies with turnover over 5 million perhaps. Thus when such a person is interested, you already know she is likely to...