Can Inbound Generate Enough Leads?

It's a new year, and hopefully, it will be a better one, with business picking up for firms that saw setbacks in 2020. 

As we all work on setting our sales goals for the year, we need to evaluate what strategies are most likely to generate the leads we'll need. Unfortunately, for a lot of small and medium businesses like ERP resellers, inbound along is not going to do the trick. 

Inbound Might Not Meet 2021 Sales Goals

A key reason is that it takes a LOT of inbound traffic to generate enough qualified leads. Check out the image at the top of this article.  If you assume typical B2B lead conversion rates for ERP software, it could take as many as 100,000 inbound inquiries to generate 12 deals a year. 

Now it's true that some firms are doing exceptionally well with inbound. If they have a focused target market and have been consistently investing in content and inbound strategies for years, they may be generating substantial pipeline from their marketing content. The strategy worked for me for many years. 

But those firms typically have a dedicated marketing team, are consistently publishing really high quality content, and are focused on a very specific target audience or need. They're building a solid email list of subscribers who WANT to hear from them, and they're able to convert enough of those subscribers into leads to meet at least part of their quota.

Large software publishers are also often pretty successful with inbound. They have strong marketing teams, large marketing budgets, and they're making a substantial and consistent investment in marketing.

No Magic Wand For Inbound Marketing

But if you have not been consistently investing in your content strategy, there is no magic wand to suddenly make inbound start performing. It takes steady, substantial investment of time and money to make it work. You can't turn it on today and start generating qualified leads next week.

So while you absolutely MUST invest in content and inbound marketing, most firms need to find additional ways to generate sufficient pipeline to meet your sales goals.

LinkedIn Prospecting Can Help

LinkedIn provides a great way for your sales team to find and convert qualified prospects.

Want to learn how to do this? Check out my free webinar where I teach what I did to book 125 sales calls in 6 months using only LinkedIn and Google.

BTW, I strongly recommend against outsourcing your LinkedIn outreach. I've tried it with a few different providers. The results were not great. You'll get far better results if you learn the strategy and do the outreach yourself. The webinar link below will show you how to do it.

About the Author: Candyce Edelen is founder of PropelGrowth, where she teaches B2B entrepreneurs and sales professionals to build authentic, human-to-human relationships on LinkedIn. Her strategies have helped clients shift from spammy automation to genuine outreach, resulting in higher-quality leads and increased sales. Candyce is passionate about helping professionals build trust and create a reliable, predictable sales pipeline. She's also a firm believer that you can't automate a relationship.