Who Needs to Be an Inbound Organization?

• Are you a senior executive thinking about growing your business and achieving competitive advantage?
• Are you an entrepreneur, business owner, or startup looking to scale?
• Are you a manager or team leader looking for a new approach that will position your organization to succeed?
• Are you a marketing, sales, or service manager looking for the best way to empower your team?
• Are you a CMO, CRO, or SVP in a large organization and wonder why your sales and marketing efforts seem to generate fewer and fewer net new sales with the same or even increased spending?
• Do you find it hard to create product or service differentiation in the age of abundant buyer options?
• Are you experiencing increased competition and decreased customer loyalty?
• Are you a young professional trying to decide what kind of company you want to work with to start and grow your career?

If you said yes to any of these questions, the ideas of Inbound Organization are for you.

This book is for the millions of companies around the world that may be struggling with building engagement with their customers, prospects, and a wide audience and are wondering why it gets harder and harder each year to grow revenue and build enduring customer relationships.

It is for the leaders of companies that struggle to build competitive advantage and have tried various marketing and sales tactics to no avail.

It is for:

1. Connie, the CEO and owner of a regulatory consulting firm, who needs to figure out how to get their compliance consultants more engaged with existing clients and prospects.
2. Wayne, the owner of a small capital equipment manufacturing company, who wants to drive new leads in new markets, is spending money with a marketing agency focusing on Google Adwords but is not getting any leads, and is trying to attract skilled workers in a tight labor market.
3. Kari, the owner of restaurants, manufacturing, and distribution companies, who needs to drive a consistent flow of leads to his distribution and manufacturing businesses, find enough opportunities to grow in a shrinking market sector, and align his team to changing market demands. He also needs to figure out how to get diners into his restaurants.
4. Paul, who runs marketing for a large manufacturing company that has a dominant market share in one product line but is struggling to grow other product lines, and who is fighting with his IT and sales departments, which are blocking his path to more online marketing investments.
5. Katie, who graduated from a local community college, is launching her first software company startup offering a recruiting app for seasonal workers, and needs to reach her target audience and generate her first hundred customers in the next 18 months.
6. And Larry, who wonders why he can't get prospects on the phone, why his cold calls and visits are only successful a small percentage of the time, and who needs to build a revenue-generation model for a future when he will not be a part of the business.

What This Book Is and Is Not

This book is about the principles, ideas, and tactics we see people successfully adopt that transform organizations into strong, enduring customer-centric businesses that are adept at building relationships that create competitive advantage. An inbound-focused business creates an amazing culture that treats employees and customers like human beings.

This book reveals the beliefs, principles, and strategies of these successful inbound organizations so that you can transform your organization into one too.

The book is intended to help leaders apply inbound practices across an organization and instill a new, holistic way of thinking about the entire business. This book is not just about marketing or sales, but how all departments fit together to deliver what buyers want today while creating a culture that fosters sustained success.

This book provides insights into building an organization that creates relationships with buyers, employees, partners—with anyone in your business's ecosystem—to establish a competitive advantage and increase brand recognition, conversion rates, and market share—whatever your industry.

To do inbound, you must be inbound.

This isn't a book about how to market and sell your product or service but rather it's about building an organization that has the people, culture, and strategies in place to succeed in the age of buyer control. An organization that wakes up every day focusing on making sure all of the people it touches are successful.

In other words, to be inbound.

Why We Wrote This Book

We have been involved in the inbound world for nearly a decade, and it has been fascinating to see the impact of inbound thinking on businesses worldwide. Starting with marketing and then moving to sales, the powerful concepts surrounding the inbound movement have morphed into a revolution of business transformation that has had a demonstrable impact on hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of people.

We are in the middle of a dramatic shift of the fundamental aspects of how companies create cultures, how businesses scale, how buyers purchase, and how businesses engage in meaningful conversations and lasting relationships with their customers. The next decade will only accelerate these changes. Companies who align their vision, philosophy, processes, systems, and tools with the way buyers think, learn, discover, and purchase will have a huge advantage.

Rather than only update a business plan, organizations must adjust their total mindset and establish a strategic foundation to succeed.

This book shows leaders how to build their company's future around inbound principles and create the new organizational foundations necessary to deal with the ongoing changes in buyer behavior.

This book will illustrate why and how the inbound customer experience conversation must take place in the boardrooms of companies, must be on the desks of founders, entrepreneurs, business leaders, consultants, advisors, and in the mind of anyone who is responsible for leading a team, a small business, or an enterprise into the future.

The fundamental premise behind being an inbound organization is simple: everyone in the organization must consider how their role specifically influences the customer journey to enhance the customer experience—hence the need for organizational leadership to focus on becoming an inbound organization.

The way most businesses are structured today is not conducive to building complete and extraordinary employee, partner, and customer relationships.

This book will address the gap in understanding and give business owners a road map to building an inbound organization.

We want to help you.

We want to teach you how to build an inbound organization.

We want to show leaders how to start the process.

We want to explain what an inbound company culture is and how to build it.

We want to show you how to create an inbound organization that can be a competitive advantage in the age of buyer control.