What Is Inbound Sales?

Inbound sales is a sales methodology where teams focus on engaging and converting prospects who actively show interest in your product or service. Unlike outbound sales which rely on cold outreach to potential customers, inbound sales respond to buyer-initiated interactions.

With the traditional outbound-based sales playbook becoming less efficient by the day as a result of being over-saturated, inbound sales have to carry more and more weight in terms of sourcing leads.

But getting inbound sales right is a difficult task, especially if you’re just building out the function. Companies typically turn to inbound sales when they feel ready to scale their sales game, yet there are many pitfalls and ways to getting to wrong. This article will walk you through the why and the how of building an inbound sales team that can help drive revenue - from day one.

Let’s dive in.

Why Use Inbound Sales? 

First thing first, you have to understand that inbound sales are fundamentally different from outbound because compared to cold outreach, you’re talking with people who are already interested in your product. And while it’s tempting to automate part of the process with AI and chatbots, the real prize is in taking that opportunity to build trust between the prospect and your company.

With that in mind, you should know that today's B2B buyers complete 90% of their journey before talking to sales. Inbound sales align with this behavior through:

• Meeting prospects at their moment of interest: Buyers researching solutions are at their peak engagement. Inbound sales lets you capture and act on this interest immediately rather than hoping to catch them at the right time with outbound.
• Providing value before asking for commitment: Through content, resources, and immediate assistance, inbound builds trust before asking for anything in return. This creates credibility and positions you as a trusted advisor.
• Letting buyers control their journey: Modern buyers want to research and evaluate on their terms. Inbound sales respect this by providing multiple engagement options rather than forcing a single path.
• Reducing friction in the sales process: By removing barriers like forms and qualification calls, inbound sales make it easier for ready-to-buy prospects to engage meaningfully with sales.

In other words, the job of inbound sales is to roll out the red carpet to the buyer who raises their hand and offer them expert assistance both via conversations and on-hand materials to answer any questions they have to help move that deal forward.

Benefits of the Inbound Sales Approach

With outbound channels getting saturated with AI personalized messages, automated calls, and a whole host of other behaviors, buyers are increasingly ignoring cold outreach. Yet they still have problems that they need to solve and are proactively seeking out solutions. Inbound steps in to help with that, and the benefits are tangible:

1. Cost Efficiency

• Lower customer acquisition costs: According to Hubspot, inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound leads because you're engaging already-interested prospects rather than trying to create interest from scratch.
• Better qualified prospects: Inbound leads self-qualify through their behavior and content consumption, reducing time spent on unqualified opportunities.
• Higher conversion rates: Inbound leads convert 54% better compared to outbound sourced because they're actively seeking solutions rather than being interrupted.
• More efficient resource allocation: Sales teams focus efforts on prospects showing active interest rather than spreading resources across cold outreach.

2. Better Buyer Experience

• No cold outreach Buyers aren't interrupted with unwanted pitches, improving their perception of your brand and increasing the likelihood of engagement.
• Self-directed discovery Prospects can research and evaluate at their own pace, building confidence in their decisions through autonomous learning.
• Immediate value delivery Through content, tools, and instant engagement options, buyers get value from the first interaction rather than waiting through a qualification process.
• Multiple engagement options Buyers choose how they want to connect - whether through immediate video calls, chat, or scheduled demos - matching their preferences.

3. Improved Sales Performance

• Shorter sales cycles By engaging prospects at their peak interest moment, deals move faster as buyers are already educated and motivated.
• Higher close rates Inbound leads close at 14.6% versus 1.7% for outbound according to Spotdev, because they're better informed and have higher purchase intent.
• Better quality conversations Sales discussions start from a place of mutual understanding since prospects are already familiar with your solution.
• More predictable pipeline Inbound creates steady lead flow based on market demand rather than outbound activity levels.

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While that may sound promising, the inbound sales playbook itself has changed a lot in the past decade or so. In its original iteration, it was little more than a team tasked with responding to customer inquiries through forms. Later on, it was augmented with live chat and now AI-based solutions. As we enter the world of real-time sales, it’s evolving yet again, and the way you build your inbound sales department should embrace that.

Building Modern Inbound Sales Teams: What Most Companies Get Wrong

When you scale your sales team, you find yourself fighting multiple fires on different fronts, which would be considered growing pains for a scaling company. The typical challenges one has to tackle involve questions such as:

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• Response time chaos: Decent inbound flow paired with a drowning sales team. Symptoms include varied lead response times, and the problem can’t be easily solved by throwing 10 additional SDRs at it.
• Channel mix questions: Your efforts are paying off, but each lead acquisition channel comes with different CAC and conversion rates. Where to invest to maximize your returns?
• Process scaling concerns: What worked with your first AEs is not working with multiplied headcount. Some deals fly straight to closing, while others are lost in the scheduling jungle. Will tightening the bolt on your processes help or are you just adding unnecessary pain and friction?
• PLG vs. sales-led tensions: Especially common in software sales with wildly different buyer personas. Some need more hand-holding than others, so how do you balance between gating and opening up?
• Tech stack headaches: My CRM is a mess, SDRs use different tools than AEs, and marketing is doing its own thing. How do I build a tech stack that scales without becoming a Frankenstein of tools?

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When thinking about your inbound sales function, it’s important to understand the mix of how your Account Executives source their leads. Traditionally, it would look something like this:

• Marketing brings 40% of the leads with paid advertising & content,
• Inbound activities like chats, contact requests, inbound follow ups and SDR activities make up for another 40%,
• And 20% is self-sourced by the AE themselves.

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Fortunately, as pressing as these problems might be, experiences across fast-growing companies in the last few years have taught us how to tackle them with confidence. 

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Choosing Your Sales Motion

How you structure your sales motion will largely determine the shape your inbound team will take, and we can broadly speak about three big categories: sales-led, sales-assisted, or product-led (PLG) motions. Each has different strengths and weaknesses, or to put it another way, they’re different tools for climbing different hills - or markets.

Traditional Sales-Led

The world of enterprise sales with fancy meals, and big accounts getting worked on by a team of people. Traditional sales-led motions fare heavily on the qualification and friction side of things, as you concentrate your efforts on fewer key accounts while filtering out the rest. Inbound sales play a supporting role here, split between qualifying prospects and helping AEs work on bigger targets.

Sales-Assisted

Mid-market and above, best fit for high-ticket sales or complex products that require some hand-holding. Your inbound sales teams act as a layer of trustworthy experts who understand the customer's problems and study their industries swooping in to help just in the nick of time to move those deals forward.

Product-Led (PLG)

The lightest touch out of the three, PLG in theory allows customers to onboard themselves, aided by nothing else than the clever design of your product. In practice, we know that this isn’t quite the case, and PLG companies like Asana, ClickUp, or Notion have their own inbound sales teams to work on accounts. Inbound sales at PLG companies start to blur with the role of the customer success team, working with product analytic signals to find good accounts to work with - or to save those who are at risk of churn.

Building a Modern Inbound Engine

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Naturally, the performance of your inbound team will be tied closely to your marketing efforts, and to that end, the teams and their goals should be aligned. This means not just agreeing on KPIs, but to have back and forth communication on what’s working and what isn’t, using a collaborative approach to understand your target customers campaign after campaign.

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But for inbound sales to shine, you need to be on the top of your game in one crucial aspect: nailing your lead response times.

What Most Companies Get Wrong: The Five-Minute Window in Inbound Sales

Study after study has shown that buyers will go with the seller who responds to them first in an overwhelming majority of deals. A slow lead response time can kill your business, and you should strive to have your sales team respond within 5 minutes of an inquiry.

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One way to do that is with SLAs: force the team to be prompt with their responses, using Slack or other collaborative tools to see, in real-time, if leads are getting the care they need.

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Another popular option is using website chat software, allowing prospects to talk with your team directly. In recent years, chatbot-based solutions like Drift have prolificated, but we find that the more AI customers have to interact with, the more they value a real human connection - especially in areas where building trust is crucial.

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That’s why at Captiwate, we chose the approach of having real-time conversations by turning our website into a video call platform. Visitors can reach out to us any time through our widget, but we can also proactively monitor their behavior to see if they’re browsing a page indicating high engagement, like our pricing, alerting us to proactively reach out.

If you want to try it out yourself, you can do so for free today.

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The Future of Inbound Sales

The most successful inbound teams are moving away from the traditional "capture and follow up" model toward real-time engagement. This means:

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• Immediate human connection: Instead of making prospects go through forms and scheduling, allow them to talk to a sales rep when they raise their hand,
• Multiple engagement options: Chat, calls, instant videos chats, and live demos are offered in addition to just “booking a demo”, leading to:
• Buyer-controlled journeys: The prospect chooses when and how the deal moves forward, giving them confidence and building trust.
• Reduced friction points: Everything else in our digital lives is as smooth as the click of a button. We can make the B2B buying experience similar if we invest in the technology.

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In a world where every sales channel gets saturated with AI and automated messages, the companies who want to win will have to stand out. When it comes to building an inbound sales team, that means allowing for human-to-human connections to happen at the highest peak of buyer engagement.

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