Dear marketing manager and inbound enthusiast...

Another possible title: "Yes, inbound is important, but why not abandon outbound".

Dear Marketing Manager,

I appreciate the list of 412 prospects you sent us. I really do. As you know, none of them had a phone number, and 87 had a personal email address (gmail, hotmail, even AOL) and not a professional one. So I had to discard them because I have no way of knowing which company these people work for.

I cleaned up the data in BriteVerify and of the remaining 325, 48 were rejected, leaving us with 277 leads. We have an intern in the sales team who looked at every Linkedin profile and discovered that 32 of them were competitors and 69 were consultants. In short, unusable.

Of the remaining 176 leads, 94% are individual contributors or low-level managers. In other words, people who want to be educated. So we still have 11 prospects to contact who have some potential to buy our software. I enhanced the data with ZoomInfo and Kaspr to get the telephone numbers.

As you may know, the telephone drop-out rate is ~4%... so after 4 calls per lead, we've only spoken to 2 people. One doesn't remember attending the webinar or downloading any white papers and the other has no issues. In short, the €50,000 we spent to set this up hasn't resulted in any tangible conversations.

I'm not saying that's your fault, I'm just saying that maybe we should rethink this whole flow, and agree that my team should only get leads from qualified accounts.

How should we go about maximising revenue?

Yours sincerely, A worried sales manager.

I saw this post on Linkedin by Tito Bohrt, which made me laugh. Does this happen to you too? How do you value inbound vs. outbound?