Apr 29, 2024
What is Allbound?
Learn the definition of allbound and the reason so many marketing and sales leaders are shifting to it away from traditional siloed inbound and outbound GTM tactics.
The Waning Epoch of Inbound vs. Outbound
Inbound vs. Outbound.
Marketing vs. Sales.
Pull vs. Push.
Demand Gen vs. Lead Gen.
Why make noise about this dichotomy?
Outbound is broken and inbound is… broken.
Paid media budgets are not what they were 5 years ago. Not even close. And it takes “1,000-1,400 touches per opp” sourced for cold outbound.
Broken.
How’d we get here?
A Brief Analysis of Sales and Marketing Misalignment
Within any given B2B company, there often seems to be a great divide between two ways of thinking:
On one side, “attract” potential customers with “awareness” campaigns and “organic” “content.” (Marketing)
On the other side, “prospecting” takes “leads” and “sequences” them for “outreach” with “personalized” “messaging” - ideally with “triggers” or “signals” prompting the effort. (Sales)
For as long as B2B customer acquisition efforts have been around, these two have sat far apart, in different departments. At best, sales and marketing share lists of companies to target. At worst, and far too often, they compete for credit in a single CRM property: the “Lead Source” field.
This is the problem of Inbound vs. Outbound: it prioritizes credit, attribution, and budget decisions over Go-To-Market success.
It’s time to retire the old dichotomy.
If we think about it, there really isn’t that big of a difference between sales teams prospecting, and marketers running campaigns.
The channels vary, the typical metrics vary, and the skills needed to execute them vary (only somewhat). But they’re mostly the same: a message, through a channel, to an audience. Usually at scale, ideally with triggers and signals that make sense of why you’d send such a thing to such an audience.
But because these sets of activities occur within two different teams, there is a big problem with how these strategies get measured, defended, and optimized.
Walk with me for a second…
Forecasts and reports that break down leads and opportunities and revenue into inbound vs. outbound miss two very important realities:
Everything is multi-touch now. And just because you can’t attribute it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
“All roads lead to the website.” (I first heard this from Retention.com COO Santosh Sharan) So “Inbound” - anything coming through the website - becomes code for either “we don’t know where it came from” or “marketing was the first touch.”
Why Inbound vs. Outbound in the first place?
Why do we group revenue into such distinct buckets as “in” vs. “out”?
The most common defense of the Inbound vs. Outbound model is something like “we need to know whether to invest more in sales or marketing.”
That’s sort of true but not entirely. Really, you need to know whether to invest more in “SDRs”/“BDRs” (whose prospecting is very similar to marketing) or whether to invest more in marketing-originated activities.
This struggle between sales and marketing for the Lead Source field, the struggle between Inbound vs. Outbound pipeline creation, it suffocates Go-To-Market organizations.
It seems we are confused about how to set up this GTM organization, the part of the business dedicated to creating revenue.
Prospecting and Marketing… Same?
After all, what is the difference, really, between syndicated content for lead generation, and outsourced SDR shops who book meetings for you? Maybe one or two conversion steps, but still it’s the exact same type of funnel and set of activities.
Or what is the difference between advertising for lead gen and cold calling for meetings? Again, just a couple steps in the conversion funnel but basically the same set of activities: a message tailored to an audience to scale pipeline creation.
For those who feel this is an oversimplification… where did all the paid media budgets of 2022 disappear to? Sales prospecting.
Now, maybe you don’t have SDRs. Maybe your account executives do the prospecting. That just means you have expert deal closers who are 50% marketers by trade - trying to scale prospecting to build a pipeline that keeps them sustained.
Is there really a better way to set up GTM?
Yes, there are several. But we won’t dive into all of them here.
One quick fix to this weird disjointedness between sales and marketing, is to move sales/business development (prospecting) under the marketing umbrella. This works well because then, when you measure marketing on pipeline creation, you can deprioritize channel attribution because they will own prospecting and marketing acquisition channels.
But even if you don’t reorganize your prospecting team, you can still find tactical alignment for sales and marketing.
Here’s one way of thinking about the solution:
Make attribution harder, but revenue easier.
The problem with dichotomizing revenue with the “inbound vs. outbound” perspective is that the best GTM playbooks are ruining its utility.
Sure, it’s been helpful for financial planning to have a “marketing-sourced revenue” or at least “marketing-sourced pipeline” view of the business.
But we all knew that couldn’t last, because in good GTM organizations:
Marketing hands leads to sales, smoothly and with context.
Marketing doesn’t stop working those leads once they’re in with sales - they retarget with nurture campaigns any active leads and open opportunities.
Marketing is nurturing upsell and cross-sell opportunities all across the journey.
SDR teams are working across top-funnel and mid-funnel accounts to multi-thread and nurture, and discover more context for pain/problem and use case.
Marketing and SDR are together influencing the same accounts. Whose to say who wins? Does it matter? (You say yes, so you can fire some SDRs or some marketers; I say - only do that if you’re not hitting targets, otherwise, keep them both).
Marketing is sharing website intent (first party intent) with the sales team so improve existing prospecting nurtures and create fresh ones.
For the organizations already operating this way, the next concept here is nothing novel.
For all the rest:
Enter Allbound: where Inbound and Outbound converge.
Allbound is more than “allbound sales” or “allbound marketing.”
This is important because quite a few mentions of allbound strategies have come up recently in the context of only a single channel like the phone.
How can the phone be an allbound strategy? It can’t, unless it’s part of an integrated stack that includes first party intent to detect companies that have been cold called, or push visitors into “warm” calling sequences.
What is Allbound?
An allbound strategy is a Go-To-Market methodology for using both inbound and outbound tactics glued together by first party intent from the website.
The website becomes the bridge between sales and marketing channels.
Right now your website is a vacuum. Why not turn it into the source of your best signals, and connect it with outbound sales efforts?
All of a sudden, you’re running a variety of powerful tactics that truly create and capture demand. And not in an ethereal way like demand gen folks talk about doing with LinkedIn posts. But in a way that lets you record companies and contacts who have visited your site, whether or not they’re in your database, and engage them on and off the site.
Allbound is simply a way to take that website intent signal, alert your sales reps, and offer them and your marketers multiple ways to engage.
Chat on the website.
Email and LinkedIn sequences after they leave the site.
“Warm” calling after they leave the site.
Push them back to the website to loop through the engagement channels again.
There are 3 reasons allbound is vital:
First Party Intent is the Best Intent
3rd Party Intent is questionable and little proven. Just because a company has some employees who are browsing articles perhaps related to topics perhaps related to buying intent does not mean they care at all about your product.
2nd Party Intent is legitimate and valuable. The data from review platforms can be excellent to understand competitive purchases and reach out to companies who are evaluating competitors.
But still, nothing beats those companies who have checked out your pricing page, solutions pages, across multiple IP addresses (visitors), over the course of days or weeks.
Each intent type is better in combination, but since you’re budget constrained anyway, might as well buy the best: first party intent.
Buyer Behavior is Multi Touch
We touched on this earlier (pun intended), but it’s important: there are very few linear paths to purchase these days. By merging outbound and inbound tactics into a unified approach, you can establish high familiarity and stickiness and other wonderfully vague marketing objectives with your potential buyers.
Consistency across channels will win where scattershot strategies have not.
No Website is an Island
So stop using it like one.
A website is not a place where people go to fill out forms.
It is a research point. Sales and marketing can together push visitors to the site to encourage research and evaluation, and capture them there and after they spend time on the site. In this way, sales and marketing make the website the core of their strategy, rather than a weird vestigial organ from the early 2000s era of GTM.
Allbound Strategy in Action: Real-World Playbooks
There are nine playbooks that make up a great allbound strategy. Only nine. Not every company needs to do all nine. But if you find yourself doing only one, or even none, of these, it’s time to experiment.
These allbound playbooks work best in concert.
Each playbook either contributes to pipeline creation or pipeline acceleration, or in the case of PLG: trial/freemium monetization and upsell (AKA "make more money from your self-service users").
They also have great names.
Inbound Only Playbooks:
The Bread-and-Butter: Chat with ICP Visitors
Goal: Pipeline Creation.
The most common use case for ServiceBell.
Detect quality visitors on your website by filtering to high value pages, repeat visitors, long durations, excluding careers, or using first party intent integrations to find ideal customer profile (ICP) accounts.
Then alert reps for proactive chat opportunities, and provide custom journeys to engage visitors while reps are away or busy.
Proactive chat outreach is surprisingly effective: to the right quality visitors, we typically see 15% or greater response rates.
The Deal Dance: Chat with Open Opportunity Visitors
Goal: Pipeline Acceleration.
Detect open opportunity accounts by integrating your CRM (HubSpot or Salesforce) with ServiceBell.
Once they’re on the site, or in deal docs (e.g. Dock.us, Qwilr, Proposify) then send an alert to the owning rep so they can engage with them directly while they’re evaluating the deal. You can also set up custom journeys to offer the right representative’s schedule to their opportunities.
Often this is a great opportunity to have additional conversations with known contacts, or to connect with someone new at an account. Multi-threading like this will increase your chances of winning a deal.
The PLG Plug: Chat with Trial and Freemium Users
Goal: Trial/Freemium Monetization & Upsell.
Set ServiceBell up in your trial or freemium product, then filter for users who have high potential to convert or buy into a higher tier. This could be because they have company attributes (size, location, etc.) that make them a good fit, or because they have spent a good deal of time in the right places of the app.
Then alert the sales or CS team responsible for converting these users, or engage these them with custom chat journeys.
The Campaign Trail: Chat with Ad Campaign Visitors
Goal: Pipeline Creation.
Take your high-value paid media campaigns - whether paid search (SEM) or paid social or otherwise - and use ServiceBell to detect when visitors from those campaigns land on the site.
You can do this with UTM_term for paid search traffic coming from keywords that you know convert well. This way, your reps can engage with known context (“It seems like you’re looking for [keyword or topic] solutions - is that right?”)
You can also do this by UTM_term for paid social audiences where you have your ICP clearly defined or segmented, as described in this post here.
And of course, you can adjust your custom journeys, alerts and segments to fit with UTM_campaign and UTM_content values, so that the automated messages and suggested sales rep messaging match what the visitor had already seen off-site.
Proactive chat, journey messages, and pre-recorded videos per campaign/term/content work very well in these settings.
This approach allows you to improve the ROI of your paid investments since you’re only increasing conversion rates on top of what you’re already getting.
Inbound-to-Outbound Playbooks:
The Loop-de-Loop: Follow up with Website Visitors on Email and LinkedIn
Goal: Pipeline Creation.
Use ServiceBell to cold call the ideal contacts at companies who have visited your website. Filter site traffic into the ideal customer profile visitors (company size, location, etc.) and meaningful intent signals (time on site, pages visited, multiple visitors).
Then push the companies to your sales engagement (sequencing) platforms, enrich the companies to find contacts and get their email addresses, then add to an email or LinkedIn sequence there.
Alternative you can run enrichment on ICP titles in ServiceBell and push those contacts with their emails directly to your sales engagement platform.
Because ServiceBell can track UTMs, and integrate with most major sales engagement platforms like Outreach, Apollo or Salesloft, you can catch these contacts and engage with proactive chat when they return to the website.
The Demand-to-Dial: Follow up with Website Visitors via the Phone
Goal: Pipeline Creation.
Use ServiceBell to cold call the ideal contacts at companies who have visited your website. Filter site traffic into the ideal customer profile visitors (company size, location, etc.) and meaningful intent signals (time on site, pages visited, multiple visitors).
Then push the companies to your own CRM, enrich the companies to find contacts and get their phone numbers, then add to a dial list in ServiceBell’s dialer.
Alternatively you can run enrichment on ICP titles in ServiceBell and push directly to ServiceBell’s dialer.
The Boomerang: Follow up with Website Visitors via Ad Retargeting
Goal: Pipeline Creation.
Use ServiceBell to deliver ads to companies who have visited your website. Filter site traffic into the ideal customer profile visitors (company size, location, etc.) and meaningful intent signals (time on site, pages visited, multiple visitors), then deliver these audiences to LinkedIn Ads, or use Bullseye.so or Metadata.io to send these audiences to Meta (Facebook and Instagram ads) and Google (Adwords and YouTube).
Because you can also filter using UTMs, you can serve waterfalls of retargeting ads. This approach is considered best practice by great ad agencies like Impactable and Directive.
Note: as much as we’d all like retargeting using contact-level detection, it is unlikely you have audiences large enough to then have match rates high enough on social channels to run contact-level retargeting. If you do, then absolutely go for it.
Outbound-to-Inbound Playbooks:
The Clickthrough Catch: Engage Clickthrough Traffic from Email and LinkedIn Sequences
Goal: Pipeline Creation.
As you run email and LinkedIn sales outreach efforts, some of these contacts will visit your website.
If you’ve included links in your sequences, you can use either UTM codes on the URLs or ServiceBell’s integration with major sales engagement platforms to detect people when they arrive on the site from one of these campaigns. This can alert the reps who are the owners of the contacts or companies within your connected CRM.
This also works effectively for sending people to ServiceBell’s scheduler and connect with them live as they’re about to book a meeting.
You can also use a List or Campaign field in your CRM which is then mapped to ServiceBell to identify companies that visit your site without clicking a link in your campaigns, so that you can alert reps based on demand driven by sales campaigns.
The Checkup: Engage Follow up Visitors from Cold Calling Campaigns
Goal: Pipeline Creation.
As you run cold calling campaigns, whether for voicemail drops or conversations, some of these contacts will visit your website.
When they do, ServiceBell can detect the majority of them and alert you or your team. If you’re the owner in CRM and your CRM is integrated with ServiceBell, you can get notified as the owner. You can also keep a field updated in your CRM to track which call sequences they’re part of, and use this to add context to the alert that tells you they were part of a recent cold call campaign.
And to ensure you’ve got coverage even when you’re not around, build custom journeys tailored to your major call campaigns.
