How should an early stage B2B SaaS startup (<$1M ARR) balance inbound marketing with outbound sales?

As this is just 18 months old startup it will take sometime to gain a very good search engine presence. Mostly your overall strategy revolves around your competition. It is very useful to study the competitors strategies before any good strategy execution. You have to go to some extra notch than your competition in inbound marketing. Inbound will take some time to generate leads but it will essentially gives the result. The ratio of 2:6 is quite good. You can evaluate the same with your current inbound data and see where are the gaps to fill. Just fill those gaps you will be fine.

I used to think that inbound marketing takes long time to build up and that you can't / shouldn't expect immediate results. Turns out, I was wrong. Just like every other activity, if you do inbound the right way you should see immediate impact. Below is my 10-step tactic to quickly test if inbound can ever work for your company. I recommend you to write a test article - an article that is so good that if that doesn't generate some traction and leads, hardly something else will. Here's how to do it: Study your existing customers: what do they read, what are their interests, on which channels are they active etc. Find some other popular content in your niche (help yourself with buzzsumo or just simply google it - “inurl:blog <popular_term_in_your_niche>”. Find some places that can help you spread your content. Remember: content without distribution is pure waste. It can be various newsletters, reddit, hackernews like vertical sites, forums, linkedin groups. I like to pick a main distribution channel (the one where you'll focus the most attention to) and a few smaller, "satellite" channels. Find as many influencers as possible in your space that you can reference in your testing article. You can reference their previous articles, tools they are working on, quotes, videos, whatever. Now you should have a pretty good handle on what your potential customers like to read and share - pick a title that will definitely resonate with them and don't try to be too smart or original with this one (titles with big numbers that offer actionable, quickly obtainable advice work). Write an indisputably epic post: once you have all the data from previous posts this one comes down to execution. You must not half-ass it - post has to be long (at least 2000 words), full of actionable advice and enriched with rich media every few paragraphs (best to have an image for every 3-4 paragraphs to break the flow a bit). Ask for feedback on your draft: Send your first draft to as many friends as possible to review it: what they like, what they don't like, what is weird, etc. Don't worry about the time you spend on this: it might even be a few full days - your mission is to determine if inbound can ever work for your company - kinda important, right? Polish, polish, polish: Once you've gathered all the feedback it's time to polish the post. Go through it a couple of times, cut, edit, replace. It's important to use as simple language as possible. Better have 3 short sentences than 1 super long boring snake of a sentence. Take time to promote it: Ok, we are almost at the finish line. But don't be too impatient. Make a really long list of friends and colleagues you can ping to help you promote the content on the channels you picked in the 3rd step. Even ask other co-workers to do the same. Release the kraken. Publish your epic post and orchestrate the friend outreach from the previous step and ping influencers from the 4th step to help you promote it: if the post is really awesome you should quickly start to see some organic uplift as well. From here on it's easy: engage with people that comment on the post, thank for tweets, ask for feedback, etc. I'm pretty sure that if you did everything right, wrote the right content for the right audience and spread it through the right channels, you will see some traction. The end result - to do inbound or not: if you see great traction and feedback, you now have a recipe to follow-up on and create more of the same. If not, then you know that inbound might just be very hard in your space and it doesn't make sense to invest in it. Pour everything into what already works for you - outbound in your case. I wrote a longer article some time ago on this topic, some of the stuff is a bit outdated. But the research and distribution techniques are still super valid: https://medium.com/strategic-content-marketing/the-ultimate-guide-to-kickstart-your-content-marketing-machine-67929426a6ae

This is such a fast moving topic right now.  Nets and spears, Nets or Spears, Nets and/or Spears!  Bottom line is, if you should automate it, do it.  Inbound or outbound.  I can hear the cries now, but "should" is the operative word.  There are great sales enablement platforms exploding right now like outreach and salestalk that are freeing up sales people to sell vs market.  We dove deeper into the topic on a blog recently (below), but as a sales leader you need to ensure you have as much reaching out for your team as you can, ensure that you get your data without creating minutia for them, and you target the right audience.  Free people up to be creative for both inbound and outbound efforts and worry more about measuring the impact of scalable systems and less about the "inbound/outbound" debate. http://invisume.com/sales-experts/balancing-inbound-marketing-with-outbound-sales/

Great article Chad! I’m CEO of an early-stage B2B SaaS startup myself, and we place an emphasis on outbound. Our product is an outbound sales automation platform, so that’s not a big surprise. Our aim was to boost growth and create traction as soon as possible. That’s why we decided to focus on cold mailing. We started with two SDRs doing everything manually, and when we properly understood the process and knew all the pain points, we decided which parts could (and should!) be automated to boost conversion. After three months we scaled the number of demos from zero to 300, which sounds like hitting the jackpot when you rely only on inbound. The key to successful outbound is finding companies that actually NEED your product, even if they don’t yet know it.We follow three rules in our outbound strategy: research, personalization and persistence.Research. We constantly analyse our database and the needs of clients to find out which users get the most out of our tool and how we can help others grow. Thanks to that, we know which problems our tool solves and can address new verticals.Personalization. Each company needs a slightly different solution and responds to a different pitch, so it's good to vary the approach to each group. Cold mailing requires a lot of testing, but after a while you’ll know which strategy works best for certain targets.Persistence. Not everyone will be up for your offer, but if your research is relevant, undecided prospects will need what you're selling sooner rather than later. All you have to do is to be patient and not give up easily. That's why we send at least three follow-ups.Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that inbound is not important. It’s an essential part of a sales strategy, but it requires a lot of time and content to build a satisfying client base. You need to be smart about it – reach the right influencers, nourish your leads and truly engage with different communities instead of simply posting content. That’s why inbound should be connected to outbound. You need to know who your target is, and how you can help and approach them. We got that information simply by experimenting with different verticals, messages and strategies. After hundreds emails sent and scheduled calls, we outlined the perfect target and strategies to reach out to those people. For now, our inbound is mainly about building a community of passionate sales people, and getting to know their problems and resolving them.

It's tough to answer without seeing what your inbound effort looks like, and as other commentators have said, it takes time to build ROI from inbound. The great thing about inbound is that results snowball over time. A blog post you publish today that took 2 hours to write can still be found via a Google search in 3 years time. Conversely, the 2 hours you spend cold calling people today brings a limited, fixed return. If you're serious about developing an inbound marketing strategy that works, I highly recommend taking the http://www.buyerpersona.com/buyer-persona-masterclass-i offered by the Buyer Persona Institute (disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the Buyer Persona Institute, but we use their 5 Rings of Insight methodology when working with our own clients). Usually poor results from inbound marketing demonstrate that the company doing it doesn't really understand: a) the buyer's journey, and b) the content buyers want as they progress through it. Great inbound marketing campaigns are based on real insights into the buyer's journey gained from real customers. Average inbound marketing campaigns are based on assumptions about the buyer's journey made by people who talk to customers. Poor inbound marketing campaigns are the result of not understanding why companies should create content. These companies are just creating content for the sake of it, because they've heard that they're meant to.

Yes inbound marketing and sales should be balanced.The questions is how to balance them and no, number of people does not quantify balance.As it relates to inbound marketing though, the number of touches required and the length of time for those touches to manifest into qualified leads remain proportional to the sales cycle.Consider your competitor Marketo (who I believe is at a similar price point). Watch this demo below: (you can fast forward to 47 min.)As you can see multiple touches over an extended period of time across several people resulted in a 25k / year sale with a 12 month+ sales cycle.While people do outbound calls, inbound marketing can help bring people further along the buyer's journey before your guys need to interact with them.In order for your content to do what a sales person does naturally, your content design and http://christianoferraro.com/pages/content-marketing-strategy-the-definitive-guide must directly integrate with steps in the buyer's journey properly. Furthermore, the content consumption needs to be tied to the right KPIs with behavior properly interpreted to drive the appropriate assumptions on both content absorption and comprehension for the prospect. This is referred to as behavioral mapping an integral part of http://christianoferraro.com/blogs/beyond-industry/88451974-marketing-automation-strategy-the-definitive-guide.I would consider mapping what your outbound sales team does and translate those actions into appropriate content and behavioral map content engagement to identify qualified leads. If you are not sure to do that, send me a message and we can connect.From there, you scale where the balance lies in determining the marketing team to manage the process versus the sales bandwidth required to take qualified leads to close.Hope this helps :)

That's very interesting!We did a video interview with expert digital marketer, Sujan Patel about the same topic, and this what he had to say,"Inbound takes a long time for startups – 6 months is a long time for startups. So, outbound is a good way to get started and get some traction. Inbound in the long term is more sustainable, there’s more value and branding that comes along with Inbound."Sujan shared his insights on what marketing strategy works best for early stage startups – Inbound or Outbound. Check out the video here: http://arkenea.com/blog/sujan-patel-inbound-vs-outbound-marketing/  And for the names you have mentioned in the description, those people are also an inspiration fro us.We have done video interviews with them, to get answers for the most pressing questions entrepreneurs have about scaling their business.Here are a few links which might interest you:[VIDEO] Aaron Ross on http://arkenea.com/blog/aaron-ross-on-acquiring-more-customers/ [VIDEO] http://arkenea.com/blog/rand-fishkin-on-relevance-of-seo-to-a-startup-launching-a-product/ [VIDEO] http://arkenea.com/blog/guy-kawasaki-sales-tips/  [VIDEO] http://arkenea.com/blog/neil-patel-blogging-strategies-startups/  Hope it helps! :)

Good question! There's a great post (http://backlinko.com/content-strategy) that walks through the exact steps that Jimmy Daly from http://Vero.com took. It's proof that you can really bump up your search rankings and social authority with a single post. That said, there is just so much that goes into crafting and then promoting such a post. We're a B2B SaaS company with a fantastic research & content team. Here's our recent post that goes into great detail about how we set up our marketing stack: https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/saas-marketing-stack/ It's all about hearing those five magic words: "Can I get a demo?" Hope this helps!

I believe that outbound sales still remains the most effective way to reach new customers.Email marketing is great to start with your first “touch”, however you can’t build a real relationship via email.At Upcall, http://Upcall.com, we use our own platforms to leverage the power of 1000s on-demand U.S callers who we can train and they will call all our prospects.I would then create a sequence of email + calling in order to have the best effect, and track the results in a CRM.Good luck with your project!