We all know that the B2B customer journey is a complex and lengthy process. Most of the time, you will be engaging with a group of people going through a nonlinear journey over an extended period of time.
Taking that into account, you won’t have a distinctive inbound or outbound customer journey. You will have multiple touches with different people in the company. Some touch points will be inbound, and others will be outbound.
Here is an example of a customer journey:
Oct 23 – Lead 1 – Interaction through sales
Dec 23 – Lead 1 – Visit through Google Ads
Dec 23 – Lead 2 – Visit through Google ads – Brand campaign + Organic search
Dec 23 – Lead 2 – Became an MQL
Jan 24 – Lead 1 – Engaged on G2 Crowd
Mar 24 – Lead 3 – Engaged at an event
Apr 24 – Lead 3 – Sales email
Apr 24 – Account closed won – New Deal – Yay!
This is a simplified version of the journey – the actual journey had many more touch points.
Both marketing and sales contributed to this deal. Trying to force a clear source type to each lead or deal will lead to running a flawed GTM play.
Forcing all deals into ‘inbound sourced’ or ‘outbound sourced’ buckets is just not reflecting the reality of B2B buyer journey: literally every closed-won deal has touchpoints with both.
Why Do Most Companies Approach Inbound and Outbound the Wrong Way?
Let’s start with the basic fact that the B2B customer journey is a complex and lengthy process. Most of the time, you will be engaging with a group of people going through a nonlinear journey over an extended period. Taking that into account, you won’t have a distinctive inbound or outbound customer journey.
You will have multiple touches with different people in the company. Some touch points will be inbound, and others will be outbound.
Here Are Three Questions You Should Ask Yourself:
1. Do you have a simplistic first touch/last touch view of your funnel, ignoring everything in between?
2. Do you have a clear structural distinction between inbound and outbound—such as inbound = marketing and outbound = sales or sales development? This structural distinction can also be seen by using separate tools for each play.
3. Do you have separate budgets, reporting, or analytics for inbound and outbound?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, your GTM motions are not as effective as they can be.
So, How Do You Approach Inbound and Outbound Correctly?
Start by shifting your mindset to understand that inbound and outbound should not be a lead source or a deal source type—they should be an attribute of a single touchpoint, whether it is the first one, last one, or any touchpoint in between.
Have a single owner for your whole GTM funnel, not necessarily inbound or outbound. Don’t divide it between marketing and sales. They should work in unison. Sales and marketing should work together to create a synergistic impact and focus your resources on higher impact. One entity should have the view of the whole funnel from the strategic level up to the tactical one.
Adopt an account-based view—in B2B, you are selling to a company rather than a single person. You have a group of people who should go through your customer journey, which should be tailored specifically to each persona type.
Steer away from simplistic single-touch analytics. They drive you to the wrong conclusions because you are missing all the touchpoints in between the first and last touches.
Unify budgets and resources—instead of forcing a budget separation, focus on which touchpoints provide more value to each persona at each funnel stage.
Get a complete journey analytics solution (revenue marketing or attribution platform) that gives you a view of the whole customer journey. CRMs are great—we use them every day, but they aren’t built for analyzing B2B customer journeys. Trying to build your own using a BI platform will require many resources, and will take a long time to set up.
Conclusion
I am aware that making this shift is challenging—you have to convince and collaborate with your sales, marketing, and leadership teams to make it work. There might be egos in play here as well. Even if your GTM strategy is working well, adopting a synergistic view of your funnel will make it work even better.
Separating inbound & outbound to different silos is a symptom of a larger problem – a broken GTM motion. This oversimplification is a sign of weak data operations. Let’s stop shooting in the dark and let’s clean up this data mess.
