Inbound2Grow

This is it, the last episode of Inbound2Grow. It’s been a great year, and we want to thank everyone who has listened to, reviewed, read, or otherwise enjoyed the show. Inbound2Grow allowed us to explore the concepts we laid out in Inbound Organization, but we feel like we’ve covered the bases and it’s time for something new which brings us to the Industrial Executive.

The Industrial Executive podcast will pick up where we left off ...

Every company, regardless of what they sell, is impacted by technology. From the technology you use internally to track sales to the chatbot your clients use to talk to you, technology has the potential to create a superior, remarkable, and memorable customer experience.

[1:29] Question: What do Inbound and Technology Have to do with One Another?

Every piece of technology you us...

Very few companies think about how their accounting, finance, or legal departments impact their customer's success. But if you’ve ever had a bad experience wading through a 20-page legal document or spent hours on hold trying to correct a bill, you know that those interactions impact how you feel about a company as a customer. A bad enough experience with a back office department can make a customer walk away, but conversely, a gre...

Ecosystems are easy to overlook. Most often the business of running a business, building and maintaining a thriving company culture, and building an inbound organization take center stage. But whether you know it or not, you’re already in an ecosystem. All of the people and companies you work with, everyone your business touches, form your ecosystem. The greatest choice you have is whether you nurture and actively build that ecosys...

If you’ve ever connected with someone on LinkedIn or got a new follower on Twitter and then immediately got a direct message asking you to check out their product/service, set up a call, or any other pitch you’ve experienced a sales fail.

[0:35] Todd’s Rant

Too often modern salespeople utilize outdated tactics that fall flat in the age of inbound. Time wasting cold calls, unsolicited emails, and cold outreach of all kinds ...

This week we sit down with our friend Jill Konrath to talk about the biggest issue facing sales and marketing people today.

Everyone Jill talks to is overwhelmed. Everyone is too busy and feels like they aren’t getting enough done. And in today's business world everyone is also expected to always be on, responding to emails, actively engaging in social media, and generally being instantly available.

The result of all of this overwh...

Inbound customer service is more than reactive platitudes. Customer service used to be customers calling in and spending hours on the phone waiting to tell every person they talked to the same information in the hopes that someone could fix the problem. Customers still have problems, of course, but inbound customer service and success means that the customer service people you talk to know who you are, your history with the company...

In the old days, we create qualified leads by offering up lots of content. Our prospects found our content, filled out a form, downloaded the content, and then we reached out to them. This strategy still works, but over the last few years, we realized that what people like more than free content is free stuff. And it turns out that giving away software, a product, or service is an even more effective way to qualify leads and move p...

Everyone says they are customer-centric, but, like most things, being customer-centric is more difficult than just saying it. Further, what passed for customer-centric five years ago doesn’t cut it today. Today’s modern buyers expect more from the companies they work with and buy from. For a company to be truly customer-centric, they need to be solving for the customer across all levels of their organization. In other words, to be ...

Back in the day, in the 90’s, selling used to be boots on the ground, go out, and educate clients and prospects face to face. You would take them lunch or snacks and hope they wanted to sit down with you. Marketing wasn’t involved with demand generation or awareness; their role was more about supporting sales people. And there were lots of sales people, typically men, and very few marketing people, typically women, because salespeo...

For all of the companies out there dedicated to being inbound organizations and helping their customers succeed, there are ten more who aren’t. It is not uncommon for inbound to enter an organization through the marketing or sales department first. This means that often the first hurdle to becoming an inbound organization is getting leadership buy-in.

At the beginning of every organization's journey to becoming an inbound organization, there are inevitable potholes in the road. The good news is that these potholes are completely normal and can be overcome. Potholes to becoming an inbound organization can look like strategy mistakes, content pitfalls, sales stumbles, or mission blunders. Whatever potholes your organization finds in its road, the most important thing to remember i...

An inbound content strategy is so much more than just churning out feature or product-based copy and sticking it on your website. An inbound content strategy understands and accommodates your personas and every stage of the buyer journey. Great content speaks directly to your prospects, answering their questions and helping them make decisions.

This episode of Inbound2Grow was recorded last week at INBOUND 2018! Recorded live in-front of INBOUND 2018 attendees, we interviewed two leaders of the inbound revolution, Eric Keiles and Jill Konrath!

Inspired by Mark Schaefer’s assertion that inbound costs increase over time, in this episode we unpack that idea and discuss the need for adaptation and adoption of inbound as a mindset rather than a methodology.

A large part of being inbound is creating and maintaining engagement with your prospects and customers. From first contact with a prospect all the way through the buyer journey, engagement is how you stay connected to your prospects and deliver the information and, most importantly, the help they need to reach their goals. To effectively engage with prospects and customers every step of their buyer journey, across all levels of you...

Personas are one of the fundamentals of inbound, shaping not only your marketing and sales efforts but all levels of your company. So, what is a persona? Personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on actual data and some speculation about things like demographics, behavior patterns, and goals. Personas represent a person, not a company or market!

Strategies are high-level plans for achieving specific objectives. Strategies guide your efforts, and inbound strategies are no different from any other strategy in this regard. Where an inbound strategy differs from other strategies is that inbound strategies are more than just a guide, they are a mindset and an attitude, and they touch every level of an organization.

Everyone thinks they have great customer service, but can you prove it? A ten-minute-long customer survey might suggest that the survey takers are satisfied, but who is most likely to actually give you ten minutes of their time to fill out a survey? If you’re only talking to and hearing from good fit customers, then your results are going to be skewed. And unreliable results mean you don’t have accurate, measurable, actionable data...