inside sales Archives

11 Things You Must Know to Succeed With Inside Sales

August 19, 2015 By Heather 9 Comments

I take dozens of consultation calls for cold email critiques and inside sales consulting every week.

Although the challenges and needs of my prospective clients vary depending on the size of the organization and the stage their company is at, many of the questions I hear often repeat themselves.

I recently held a webinar about cold emails that had more than 325 questions during the Q&A session, many of which could not all be answered live. I picked 11 of the most relevant questions to respond to, based on how frequently they were asked, and how important they are to running successful outbound email campaigns.

Here are the 11 questions with my answers:

1) What’s a good cadence for sending cold emails?

I recommend sending 8 emails approximately 4 days apart, but anything between 3-7 days apart is okay. I usually avoid sending email campaigns on Mondays or any Fridays right before holiday weekends, but it depends on your audience (test everything and see what works for you!). If your inside sales team is also cold calling or sending messages with Linkedin InMail, Tweets, or other forms of communication, you might want to vary that a bit, but generally 4 days apart is an effective cadence.

2) Why should I send every prospect 8 emails and not just a few?

After sending millions of cold emails in the last decade, I can say with confidence (and data) that about 1/3 of your total responses will come from emails 5-8. So if you’re only sending 4 emails (or less) you’re losing out on at least 1/3 of your potential leads. Sending 8 emails allows you to be persistent while also testing a variety of value propositions mixed with different emotional appeals to see what resonates best with your prospects.

3) How can I send a prospect 8 emails without it sounding too spammy?

Every message you send should add unique value to your prospects. Messages start feeling obnoxious and spammy really fast when you start repeating the same redundant message over and over. Sending one email followed by 7 more emails that all say “Hey, I’m following up” isn’t doing you or your prospects any favors.

Each of the cold emails I write for myself and clients focuses on a unique idea or benefit. Before you start writing a single email, you should brainstorm and make a list of your product/services’ benefits, as well as your prospects’ priorities and pain points. This helps you plan your email campaign and avoid redundancy.

4) Why is it important to use an email tool when doing “cold emails” that utilizes mail merge instead of sending through something like Mailchimp, Marketo or Aweber?

Your cold email campaigns won’t be successful if they don’t look like they’re a one-on-one conversation. Mass emails immediately signal to your prospects that you didn’t take the time to send them a thoughtful message, which doesn’t incentivize them to make an effort to respond and schedule a call with you.

Tools like Mailchimp, Marketo, Aweber, and others are meant for used for sending mass marketing emails to people who already opted into your list, and therefore those individuals will be more familiar with you and interested in your business. If they sign up for your newsletter or webinar, they expect you will send them emails with valuable information, and so it doesn’t matter as much that these emails look mass.

The recipients of your cold email don’t know you and don’t care about your business, so they won’t take the time to respond to an email that looks like it was sent to 100,000 people. Sending mass emails with tools like Mailchimp make your email headers look mass (“sent from mailchimp.com”), whereas sending mass emails through a mail merge still resembles a personal email request. Mail merges will always inbox better (assuming you have your mail server configured correctly and that your domain hasn’t been blacklisted for spamming) and get more opens/responses than mass marketing emails.

5) What’s the best way to start a cold email?

You only have a few seconds to grab someone’s attention, so your first sentence needs to hook your prospects in immediately. The best cold emails usually start with compelling sentences that capture the prospect’s emotions, or intriguing questions that start thoughtful conversations.

EXAMPLE 1: “I have an idea that could potentially 3x {!Company}’s qualified leads that worked well for Box.”

EXAMPLE 2: “How are you generating qualified leads for {!Company}? Is your current response rate for cold email campaigns above or below 5%?”

6) Should I include URLs to click on in my cold email?

Be careful about including URLs in your cold emails, especially early on in the sequence. While links to great guidebooks and videos might help educate your prospects on your business, they often deter them from responding to your email because they feel like they already have everything they need from that collateral.

You also need to be careful about heavily relying on links to deliver the “meaty information” to your audience. Your prospects will never click your links if you don’t have persuasive calls to action to entice them to click on those links. If you leave all the meat of your pitch inside a piece of collateral, but neglect include something alluring in the email copy, that collateral will never be seen.

7) Should my cold emails have HTML or only be plain text?

Plain text! There should be absolutely no HTML or design in your cold emails. Cold emails are supposed to feel like individual one-on-one requests sent from a human, which means NO HTML/design! Just simple plain text like you would send to one of your friends or colleagues in a normal email.

Don’t do it!!!

8) How can I prevent or reduce the risk of being “blacklisted” as a spammer?

Make sure you are sending cold emails to a very targeted list of qualified potential buyers. You should only be reaching out to people that you genuinely think you can add value to. The “throwing spaghetti on the wall and hoping it sticks” approach of spamming 10,000+ unqualified leads is almost a sure way to get your domain blacklisted. Building a great list doesn’t happen magically. It takes time and money, but if you aren’t willing to do this you shouldn’t be sending cold emails. Also, make sure your cold emails actually add value to your prospects and aren’t just obnoxious/self-serving.

9) What’s the difference between B2B and B2C emails?

B2B emails usually go out to a much smaller and more targeted audience. With B2C emails, you generally don’t have much information about the individual, unless you have spent a lot of time and money on generating a list. With the exception of Nigerian scammers, B2C emails rarely look or feel like personal one-on-one requests.

While B2B emails are rarely thought of as fun or sexy, you need to remember that you’re still emailing living and breathing human beings, and so your copy should be enticing. When sending B2B emails, you have the advantage of being able to collect and leverage extensive data on your prospects (first name, company name, location, industry, etc) so make sure to leverage these fields in your cold emails. Generally the more you personalize your emails to feel like highly relevant one-on-one requests, the more responses you will get.

10) Why shouldn’t I open a cold email with “Dear Sir or Madam”?

Using excessively formal language like “Dear Sir” doesn’t sound natural or human. When you see that type of language you generally assume that you’ve just received an email from a mass marketer or someone who’s first language probably isn’t English.

Elementary school taught us that you start a letter with “Dear” and other formal rules, but this isn’t how people communicate in email in 2015. Unless you’re emailing the queen of England, keep your emails more informal and conversational. As a general rule, try to use first and second person (“you” and “I”) instead of third person (“they”). It sounds more natural and will warm up your prospects better.

11) How can I make my Calls to Action stronger and get more responses?

Your Calls to Action should always have an incentive for your prospects to respond. You need to entice them with value if you want to get a response. That benefit shouldn’t require buying your product either, but something they will immediately receive because they have a call with you. Your prospects’ time is valuable, so you need to convince them that you won’t waste it. (And asking your prospects for a “demo” is not exciting, unless you are selling the Oculus Rift!)

A great call to action could be: “When do you have 20 minutes so I can give you a few strategies for doubling your qualified leads?”

For more tips about inside sales best practices and creating laser-focused cold emails, check out the Salesfolk Cold Email Mastery Course. (The first lesson is free and has actionable advice as well as real examples to help you write better cold emails that people will actually respond to.)

3 Copywriting Mistakes That Make Your Cold Emails Look Stupid

June 30, 2015 By Heather 6 Comments

copywriting mistakes

Do your prospects take your cold emails seriously?

Are your emails creating excitement and a desire to do business with you, or are your prospects forwarding your messages to all their friends in the office so they can laugh when they reread your cheesy, desperate pitch?

Today’s cold email prospecting requires crafting highly personalized messages that offer your prospects actual value. The standard opening lines “can I speak to the right person?” and “who’s in charge of X department” no longer have the same results as they did a decade ago.

Too many salespeople substitute bullet points and flashy graphics for a quality message.

But your prospects aren’t dumb.

They can’t be swayed by salesy gimmicks and outdated tactics. Your prospects crave simple messages that speak directly to their needs and goals. So, if your cold emails are the butt of everyone’s jokes, you’re probably making at least one of these copywriting mistakes:

Cold Email Copywriting Mistake #1: Writing For (and about) Yourself Instead of Your Prospects

“I hope your week is going well. I recently returned from the Affiliate Summit conference in Las Vegas where I was a featured speaker. What a great show! My presentation went really well, was standing room only, and I got a lot of great feedback, so I can’t complain. I went ahead and recorded a video webinar to walk you through the presentation slides, notes, and examples from my presentation.”

The above cold email is too self-focused. It tells me nothing about the product or how it can help solve my problems. Rattling off a list of your achievements and successes doesn’t excite anyone but your mom (and maybe not even her). Cold emails should focus on your prospects, making them feel special and appreciated, not confused and irritated with you.

If your product and messaging are relevant and valuable to your prospects, they will sing your praises.

Cold Email Copywriting Pro Tip #1: Instead of bragging about yourself, craft messages that focus on specific benefits that will entice your prospects. You can transform each of your product’s features into benefits. (Remember, one benefit per cold email!)

Cold Email Copywriting Mistake #2: Being Vague and Impersonal

“I am taking a bit of a guess here, however based on your LinkedIn profile, you appear to be an appropriate person to connect with… or might at least point me in the right direction.”

This email gives no sense of who the sender is or what they’re after.

If you’re doing cold emailing correctly, it shouldn’t be a guessing game!

In 2015, you have all the tools you need online to do thorough research and know exactly who you’re reaching out to.

Highly impersonal emails like this one don’t engage your prospects in an authentic conversation. The lack of custom inserts and personalization makes this email feel extremely mass and spammy—the sender has taken no time or effort to add details that would indicate a thoughtful one-on-one request.

Cold Email Copywriting Pro Tip #2: Be thoughtful about your audience and take time to research at least 3 buyer personas before writing a single email. Look for keywords in LinkedIn profiles that indicate buyers’ priorities and what KPIs they care about. Check Twitter to see what kind of content they consume and share. Once you have these details, provide specific details that would only be relevant to that particular audience so they know you are thoughtful, considerate and intelligent.

Cold Email Copywriting Mistake #3: Overwhelming Your Prospects With Too Much Information

“I have been referred to write to you by a strategic customers/partners. I cover the Asia market basing out of Singapore. My strong business sales track records of over twenty eight years ensures that I can contribute very profitably to your business organisation. I am a trained engineer (Electrical) with an MBA (University of Strathclye) and a doctorate of philosophy (Ph.D. – University of South Australia) in market research degrees on the Infocom industry. I was working for infotech companies including Oracle, Intel and Honeywell, Texas Instruments before working as a freelance business consultant over the last several years.”

Don’t try to cram your entire resume (and perhaps an online dating profile?) into a single cold email! Your prospects don’t have time to skim through walls of text to find your pitch.

This example (only 1 of 4 paragraphs I received!) is so bloated and full of useless fluff that I can’t figure out what they’re selling or what the heck any of this has to do with me.

Rambling is the fastest way to confuse your prospects and lose their interest. Giving your prospects simple, concise messages that add value shows you take them and their business seriously.

Cold Email Copywriting Pro Tip #3: Cold emails are only meant to to be the first step in starting a conversation with your prospects–nothing more; keep them short and sweet. Your messages should be no longer than 2-5 sentences. Make sure to review your email one last time before you hit send, and cut out any words or sentences that don’t add value.

I hope that was helpful!

Would you like to know more about the copywriting secrets I use to regularly to write kickass cold emails that make prospects sit up and take notice?

Our newest cold email guide, “Copywriting Secrets for Crafting Seductive Cold Emails” comes out today, and is all about copywriting best practices that can help transform your cold emails from excrement to excellent?

Check it out for yourself!

Start seducing your prospects. Get the Guide Now.

4 Ways to Research Your Sales Prospects Like A Journalist

April 30, 2015 By Heather 2 Comments

How well do you really know your sales prospects?

Do you know that they eat a poppy seed bagel with strawberry cream cheese and cinnamon at that cafe on 2nd and Market, or do you barely even know their first names?

You can’t craft a good cold email if you aren’t thoughtful. The first step to creating a single cold email or building a full-blown campaign is to deeply understand your audience.

Who are you sending cold emails to?

Personal trainers are very different than CEOs, and both are an entirely different creature than a VP of Marketing or Engineering.

Before you start writing any cold emails, you need a crystal clear understanding of who you’re writing to. Without this you’re hopeless.

Step 1: Be Curious About Your Sales Prospects

The best salespeople I know are genuinely curious individuals who are fascinated by their prospects and want to get to know everything about them and their pain points.

Before you start researching your prospects, you should have a few questions in mind. These questions will guide your investigation to make it more effective.

Ask yourself these questions about your audience or “buyer persona” before you start writing an email:

What title/role am I contacting?
What size company do they work for?
What industry are they in? (Is there industry-specific jargon I should include?)
What are their priorities at this time?
What pain points do they have? What’s really keeping them up at night?
How can you solve these pain points?
What do they read? Who are experts they respect and follow? What do they talk about?

Step 2: Scour Your Sales Prospects’ Social Media

It’s great if you can actually talk to someone who fits the same buyer persona. This could be a friend, colleague, or one of your customers. However, if you don’t have access to these people and need to get started, a great approach is what I like to refer to as “e-stalking.”

Once you have decided what persona you’re reaching out to and what criteria define that persona, make a list of 5-10 people in each buyer persona that you want to contact.

Once you have a list of these people, research the heck out of them.

Go on Linkedin and learn everything you can about them.

For example, when I searched for Vice Presidents of Sales at Software companies with 200-2000 employees, I found some of these people:

Let’s take a look at Doug Landis’ profile. He’s the VP of Sales Productivity at Box.

When doing prospecting research, you want to pay careful attention to your prospects’ “about section” to see how they describe themselves. In Doug’s case, he had a description about Box that was probably written by marketing, so that didn’t tell us a lot. So instead we can look at how he describes his past and present roles:

It’s not a big surprise given Doug’s role as “VP of Sales Productivity,” but Doug’s descriptions and recommendations are very sales driven, and focused on “strategy,” efficiency/productivity, and how he manages various programs. This gives us some clues about his duties at Box, as well as what he cares about and values.

Now let’s look at some of Doug’s skills:

Like the rest of your prospects, Doug’s skills are rich with keywords that tells us about his priorities and what technologies he regularly utilizes in his job. For Doug and other VP Sales at software companies, you’ll notice “Salesforce.com,” “CRM,” “SaaS,” “sales management,” and “leadership” all tend to appear.

These may seem obvious, but it’s important to make careful notes of the keywords on each person’s profile so you can start to see which keywords are repeated across 5-10 profiles to spot trends.

Let’s take a closer look at the recommendations Doug has received:

These recommendations both help you discover more keywords, and also give you a sense of the tone that is used in his industry, department and what KPIs matter to his career. You begin to see how “productivity” and managing programs are a theme for Doug. It’s important that we compare these to the other profiles though to see if Doug is an outlier with a unique experience, or if he has characteristics that are similar across our entire buyer persona.

After you finish 5-10 names of similar profiles you can see if there are any overlapping keywords that you should weave into your email campaign.

Next, hit twitter and google. Parse through their twitter feed to see what kinds of things they share, and pay attention for content type and recurring keywords. See if you can find any blogs they’ve created on Google, and check out their Google+ if they’re active on there. If they’ve spoken at a conference or other things, you can look at that too. The more you know about them, the better off you are.

Let’s analyze a few Twitter profiles from other VPs of Sales. I’ll look at Bridget Gleason from Yesware.

Here’s what you’d find after searching just 5 minutes on Twitter:

Bridget recently attended the AA-ISP 15 conference
She seems to be focused on hiring, since she’s posted a number of articles about interview questions
Bridget highly values professional self-development based on the type of content she is consuming and sharing on Twitter
She is very data-driven: “Data almost always matches my intuition.” (April 21 tweet)

If you’re targeting a particular industry, research that industry a bit too. If you’re looking at salespeople, research things like “Top 10 sales influencers” or “Top 10 sales blogs.”

Forums are also a great place to look. Once you decide which forums to look at, you should search them internally for specifics. Quora, Reddit, and Linkedin Groups are great places to start looking.

Step 3: Take a Tour of Your Prospects’ Offices…Virtually

You need to understand your prospects’ environment if you’re going to grasp their mindset.

If I’m looking at software or technology companies, I typically start out by searching Crunchbase to see if they have any recent news or funding, but you also want to do a google search and visit their website. If their company has a blog, try to parse it for topics and tone, paying special attention to any blogs that are popular.

Learn to read like a writer. For every piece of content that’s being created and shared, you want to analyze the intention or goal behind it.

If someone posts an article called “5 Ways to Prospect Smarter,” their business is probably somehow related to sales or prospecting. After examining the company blog, product page, and price page (assuming they have them), try to determine what each company is trying to accomplish and who they’re selling to.

Then go a layer deeper and think about what their customers goals and pain points are, and how they’re trying to solve them with their product. This also helps you make sure this is indeed the correct audience/person for you to be reaching out to.

After you’ve gathered all this information and taken extensive notes, you’re ready to start thinking about how to create your cold emails. Skipping this step will make your cold email campaign a guaranteed flop.

Step 4: Make an Imaginary Friend & Write to 1 Person

This simple tip will make writing cold email campaigns so much easier.

Instead of trying to write an email that appeals to thousands, hundreds, or even just dozens of people, focus your message on a single person. Try to imagine everything you can about that person–from their morning routine to how they interact with their boss and their colleagues. The more you can imagine every detail of their life, the better the emails will be.

Do whatever you need to do in order to accomplish this—name them, print out a photo, draw a picture…whatever works for you.

Don’t worry about being too specific or narrow. The more you can feel you know this individual, the better your emails will be. It’s best not to think too much when you’re writing.

I always tell my friends and clients, “Write drunk, edit sober.”

Once you write the email, you can always go back and check your results against other names in your list to make sure what you wrote also works for them.

We have a great Buyer Persona Research Worksheet that you can use to build your own buyer personas based on the same internal methods our copywriters use when researching an email campaign. (All you have to do is create a free account on the SalesFolk Cold Email Crash Course, and you’ll be able to get that worksheet and preview other lessons in the course for free.)

I Smell Words: Copywriting and Synesthesia

February 28, 2015 By Heather 5 Comments

Think the colors of “The Dress” are interesting?

What if you could smell and taste emotions, temperatures and words?

What if every smell you inhaled instantly triggered a string of memories that were forever associated with that particular smell? (Not to mention every cross-linked emotion you associated with that smell.)

For me “mosquitos have always smelled like ice,” and laying by the warm fireplace tastes like bitter acid in my mouth.

I have synesthesia, and the rarest of kinds.

My sense of taste and smell are linked with many other senses including hot and cold, fear, anger, sadness, pain and so forth. I even have acute sensations associated with different words.

Every smell means something different to me, and emotions take on their own flavors, literally.

Synesthesia, Math & Copywriting

For as long as I can remember, writing and math have always been two of my most favorite things. But for me, they’re not exclusive.

The great copywriters like John Caples, Oglilvy, Sugarman, etc all emphasized the importance of viewing copywriting as much of a science as an art. However, I’ve always perceived copywriting and languages as some kind of mathematical equation.

I’m not sure if it’s the synesthesia or a coincidence that I connect copywriting with math, but I do know I naturally perceive the world as a series of patterns. Learning new languages like Japanese, Korean, Arabic or Cantonese was never an art or right brain activity for me, but instead something more robotic and mathematical like a computer.

I don’t know if this is good or bad, but it is what it is.

Whenever I’m writing copy–for a blog post or one of our clients’ cold email campaigns–there’s always a right and a wrong. Before I even start writing, I already know there’s an optimal configuration of words and sentences that I need to aim for. My only challenge is to make the paper match the equation I see in my mind, and so copywriting is really more like deciphering a code inside my mind than a freeform experience.

My mind knows there’s a correct order of words to convey the strongest emotions to create the most persuasive copy, and anything less is imperfect to me.

Sometimes this drives me crazy because I can’t quite get the paper to match the formula I see in my head, and so I obsess for days and hours until it’s perfect.

My Synesthesia & Math Driven Copywriting Formulas

It’s a little bit hard for me to deconstruct my own thought processes and reverse engineer my mind to understand my own copywriting equations, but I’m working on it.

Here are a few things my mind regularly focuses on when making decisions around my copywriting:

Positive or Negative? (What emotion do I want to elicit with my message? Do I want to propel people with fear or honeypot them with desire? Great email campaigns often alternate between positive and negative emotions.)
Minima, Maxima, or Average? (Once I’ve decided if I want to convey a positive or negative sentiment, I then decide how extreme or not I want to be. Do I want to have a powerful Call To Action that everyone will respond to, and risk getting unqualified leads or scaring off more timid people, or should I be more gentle and incept ideas into my readers’ minds?)
Direct or Indirect? (Should I be aggressive and direct, or should I be gentle and try to “honeypot” the reader? There’s a time and a place for both, but my email campaigns usually start more gently and become increasingly more direct over time.)

Once I’ve determined which effect I want to give my reader, my mind works backwards like “reverse induction” used in game theory.

I first choose the pattern/structure of the copy I want to create. I have many formulas I use for my email campaigns and copywriting. Before writing a cold email campaign I architect the general order of emotions I want to evoke. Once I’ve decided the emotion for each touch-point of my 8 emails, and then I start crafting them.

For every email I can choose from a number of patterns in sentence structure based on the effect I strive to create based on the 3 decisions above. After that all I have to do is find the right words to match those patterns. I’m fortunate that my mind naturally assigns numbers to every word on a positive/negative scale based on the intensity the emotions those words evoke.

Here’s an example of how my mind scores some words:

Idea: +3

Tip: +2

Advice: +2

Suggestion: +1

Comment: 0

Critique: -2

I score them this way based on how negative or positive I perceive the connotations of these words to be (in most scenarios–their connotations could change in some cases). Notice that I have scoring systems for nouns and not just adjectives.

Once I’ve weaved together my beautiful pattern of words to create the right emotions I’m attempting to elicit, I pause and review everything on a macro and micro level to make sure it’s correct, reviewing the formulas in my head.

I smell the joy of success and accomplishment every time I create a perfect pattern of copy.

So now you know the “big secret” behind my copywriting and cold email campaigns…. (Shhhhh, don’t tell anyone!)

PS: “The Dress” was orange and blue to me.

Don’t Wait for Inbound to Deliver Your Leads

June 26, 2014 By Heather Leave a Comment

I’ve seen too many new companies believing “Build it and they will come” over the last 6 years with the startup “Gold Rush,” but no matter how awesome their product is, companies begin to question and regret this philosophy after sales numbers continue to fall flat after 6 months of their product launch. While creating a product people actually want is important for finding product market fit, you won’t be selling much if no one knows your product even exists.

Why Inbound Marketing isn’t Enough

Sharing great content is a great way to strengthen and expand your audience, but what do you do if you don’t have an audience at all?

Some people may discover your awesome blog posts and videos on the internet organically if your content has good SEO, but in today’s ocean of content that’s getting harder and harder to even get noticed. Unfortunately it usually takes between 6 months and 2 years for most blogs to take off and give the company the ROI they’ve put into their blog. Whether your company hires writers or it’s just the opportunity cost of the founders’ time to write articles, creating content is never free. Today having a successful and widely read company blog often requires using advertising spend to promote content on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.

Like SaaStr‘s Jason Lemkin and Hubspot’s Mark Roberge I agree that every company should be creating useful and interesting content for their customers and prospects to consume (which is why I’m writing this blog post for you!), but that doesn’t mean you should put all your eggs in one basket. Even Hubspot, the creator of the inbound movement, uses outbound sales and marketing to help them get enough extra leads in their sales pipeline to meet their high-pressure growth targets.

Using inbound As Predictable Revenue‘s Aaron Ross says,

“Inbound & Outbound go best together, like peanut butter and chocolate.”

Outbound Email Still Reigns King

Few people see cold email as sexy, but even with the popularity and hype around social media, it’s still a powerful force to be reckoned with. Recent white papers and articles from Ken Krogue, Aaron Ross and MarketingProfs all conclude that in 2014 nothing besides expensive executive seminars can beat sending outbound emails.

Reasons Outbound Emails Beat Inbound & Cold Calling:

Email is incredibly scalable. Mail merge templates, custom inserts, and automation software make it easy for you to create mass cold emails that feel personal enough for them to seem like individual emails. Once you have great email templates with high response rates it’s easy to scale your sales pipeline by just adding more contacts to your list.
Better and more affordable data. We have so much information at our fingertips today and have great apps like Rapportive that make it too easy to research your prospects that you have no excuse not to. Likewise, scraping tools and outsourced prospecting research makes it affordable to get the contact information for the decision makers you need to reach, along with the everything you need to know about them and their company to get a conversation going.
Unlike inbound, you control the volume. Unlike blog posts, events and white papers, which leaves you waiting for responses from your prospects, you get to make the first move with email. Want more people in your pipeline? After you’ve figured out the right messaging for your cold emails, all you have to do is increase the size of your contact list.

The Winning Sales & Marketing Strategy: Inbound + Outbound

I would never tell you to quit doing inbound marketing.

You do need to be realistic about the results it will bring you and consider its costs though. Inbound marketing is a great strategy for building an online following and getting more customers in your pipeline, but it’s a longterm strategy that takes time. If you don’t have that time to keep spending on marketing without selling a lot (and who does?!), you should consider doing outbound emails while your inbound is still ramping up. Because once it does, you’ll have a killer sales and marketing strategy that you can continue to scale.