Our Stories
Dan's Inbound Story
I am a business growth enthusiast. I love helping entrepreneurs grow their companies in a way that helps them accomplish their business goals. I advise, invest in, and strategize with owners of varying types and sizes of companies globally. I work with hundreds of companies to help them establish a good culture, define their go-to-market strategy, deliver a quality customer experience, and scale quickly.
My business career started 38 years ago when I was a teenager in the 1970s, selling books door to door (for the SouthWestern Company of Nashville, Tennessee) to work my way through college. The experience taught me the basics of what is now described as a traditional sales process.
The company assigned me a territory in Bellingham, Washington, the first year and Portland, Oregon, the second year. I was given no salary and one week of group sales training. I was dropped off with a few other sales recruits without a place to live, and, without knowing anyone in the territory, within three months I became a top producer for the company.
After I graduated college, I started my career with a regional company that sold personal computers in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1983 my boss quit and accepted a position at a start-up company with a more national scope. He asked me if I wanted to make the jump for a new opportunity, and I agreed to give it a try. This company, Businessland, scaled from $20-plus million and a few locations in 1981 to more than $1.3 billion in less than a decade.
For the first 25 years of my career, I focused on sales, sales management, executive sales management, and general leadership. Running companies during this time was more art than science, more “gut feel” than data; growth rates were lower, and change was much slower.
In those days, the sales process was very seller-centric. Because the salesperson was the central conduit for all information about the product or the service, they were taught to give just enough information as required to get someone to buy.
In 2007, when I first started at HubSpot, I worked in the sales department, selling the HubSpot platform by cold-calling prospects. I called everyone in my physical Rolodex as well as my friends and family. After a few months, new prospects began reaching out to us! So my job morphed into follow-up with inbound leads. This was a huge transition because we went from trying to reach everyone to focusing specifically on leads who expressed an interest in our software by entering their contact information on the HubSpot website. It was a huge improvement in connection efficiency, velocity of the sales process, and quality of life.
In 2007, when I was the original salesperson for HubSpot, people typically had two questions when I connected with them on the phone: (1) What is inbound marketing? and (2) Will it work? I always smiled and explained that the discipline was new, but that it seemed to make sense to me. Also, everyone at HubSpot was an MIT Sloan School graduate and super smart, and I thought it had good potential because I had personal experience (I was an early customer of HubSpot). Even though we only had a few data points, it looked like the new inbound sales process would have a profound impact on revenue generation and customer acquisition.
Inbound marketing effectively eliminated the most time-consuming, low-value activity in the sales process (prospecting) and replaced it with a self-selection process to connect with higher-value clients. This leads to better sales results. Because of the online nature of the transaction, it could be accomplished via the web and over the phone, which greatly reduces the cost of the sales process that traditionally took place in person. Because of the volume of transactions, smart managers could capture valuable data to determine the key points for the specific sales process. This leads to improved efficiency and velocity of the sales process, which leads to a better ROI and lower cost of sales. I started writing, blogging, and speaking about the impact of inbound sales and marketing to thousands of people per year. I quickly realized that the foundation of the process was a philosophy of acting with transparency, focusing on the customer, and providing value before you asked for remuneration. In fact, I authored a blog article titled “Always Be Closing Is Dead: How to Always Be Helping” in 2015 that was very successful in explaining the philosophy and impact.
This new philosophy of leveraging a data-driven engagement process of attracting total strangers and turning them into delighted customers resonated with many people in the audience. Todd was one of those people. After a presentation in California in 2016, he mentioned that he had been working with companies on some of the same types of issues for many years. So, in an effort to share our experiences and help more companies, we decided to commit our observations, thoughts, ideas, and opinions to this book.
Now, 11 years into the inbound revolution, it is easy to answer both questions that people asked me in 2007. Inbound does work, and we can prove it. We know that companies that practice inbound have a clear competitive advantage.
Over the next few years, every company will face a choice. Companies can continue to lean into the traditional way they market, sell, and support, or they can adopt a new philosophy to leverage that competitive advantage.
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Todd's Inbound Story
I founded Top Line Results, a consulting firm specializing in helping companies change and grow using inbound marketing and best practice growth strategies. Top Line Results has helped hundreds of clients grow their businesses over the past nine years. We still work with many of our first clients, so we understand how to deliver results over time and how adopting an inbound mindset across the entire organization is critical. We were an early partner of HubSpot, and we cut our inbound teeth with the people at HubSpot who later rose to senior management. We coach, mentor, assist, consult, and deliver marketing and sales results for our clients every day, and we use HubSpot to help them do it.
Not long after we launched our company, we realized there was a need in our target marketplace. Many organizations were experiencing flat or shrinking revenue tied to inefficient demand generation and lead creation. No surprise there: it was 2009, and we were in the middle of the great recession in the United States.
What was surprising were the consistent similarities of all of the companies we were talking to. They all cited the same set of circumstances:
- Our salespeople do well when they get in front of qualified prospects; they just need more opportunities.
- Our salespeople are not able to get anyone on the phone or to let them in the door “like they used to.”
- Our lead generation tactics are not working “like they used to.”
- Our website does not generate much for us, and we are not sure our customers are even using the Internet to look for our products or services.
- Our budgets are tight, but we're happy to invest in marketing that works. However, we don't know what to spend money on that will give us a reasonable short- and long-term return.
- Our lead- and revenue-generation system is all over the map, wildly inconsistent, and built and driven by individuals rather than process. How can we create one that is repeatable and reliable?
There was an obvious disconnect between how these companies marketed and sold and how their prospects bought.
At the time, we were only delivering consulting services focused on sales force improvements, but then one of our clients asked us to help them with their website. It seems they were getting annoyed when I kept recommending changes to the site. Their webmaster (now there is an obsolete title if there ever was one) would charge $500 to make the most minor of updates. So, they asked me to help them find a better way and build a new website.
The better way we found was the inbound marketing methodology developed by HubSpot.
Before we started Top Line Results, I was part of a turnaround team working at a small manufacturing company in Western Pennsylvania. That company was over 100 years old and was in the third generation of family ownership when they ran out of money and went up for sale. I was hired to lead the marketing and sales efforts and was faced with a very small budget, tough competition, a young and inexperienced sales team, and some lofty revenue generation goals from the investors.
We did not have a budget to spend on driving attention or leads, so we had to find low-cost ways of reaching our target audience. We built a site that started to generate leads, and, more importantly, we used Constant Contact to send marketing emails to our contact list.
The phone started to ring. Very few in our industrial space were creating online content beyond a catalog website, and none that I knew of were using email marketing to attract leads. The emails would come from my account and were signed by me. Our database was not familiar with email marketing campaigns, so I would regularly receive responses thanking me for the helpful information in my emails or asking to discuss a project. They thought I had only sent the email to them!
By the early 2000s I realized targeted content creation, an optimized website, and emails delivered to contacts with an interest in our topics were successful in opening doors and driving leads and sales at a very low cost of customer acquisition.
I was experiencing the power of inbound marketing before I even knew what it was called. Buyer behavior was changing, and this experience was my first inkling that the world of selling I grew up in was no longer the same.
I first learned about HubSpot while looking for solutions to market Top Line Results, when I came across HubSpot's blog posts and the free information they shared about inbound marketing. I set up a free trial and immediately realized the power of being able to quickly and easily update a website, optimize content without having to be a web developer, and having simple and powerful tools to manage all of the online experience.
That first client that asked us to help them build a new website watched the HubSpot demo and immediately saw the benefits (mostly in not having to call the webmaster, wait two weeks for simple changes, and then pay a $500 bill)—and they signed up. The next question they asked was “We don't have anyone in-house to manage this for us, will you do it?” We were now in the marketing services business.
We were barely two steps ahead of the client in terms of using the tools, but Leanne—my amazing wife, best friend, and business partner—quickly took control of the marketing tools and made them sing. Within 90 days the number of website visits had doubled, and leads had gone from zero to 30 by the third month of the project.
For less than the cost of one ad placement, or a fraction of the cost of a trade show, the client was generating more leads than both combined would have generated. They were good leads too, ones that turned into customers. And what was even better was the fact that this engine was now running 24/7/365, generating leads from all over the world, and was connecting them to customers in ways they could not connect using traditional marketing tactics. To this day that company is still a client of ours, and the inbound marketing machine we created is still growing every year and becoming ever more efficient and effective at generating leads.
In 2010 we had six other clients and, being a helpful salesperson, I took this story to all of them. Within 60 days, five of those clients signed up for HubSpot and hired us to manage their inbound marketing. Our transition from a sales consulting company to a revenue growth and inbound marketing consulting and delivery company had begun.
Fast forward eight years. After much success delivering inbound marketing results for our clients and consulting with hundreds of others on how to do inbound marketing and sales, we see the need for the next stage in the process for these companies.
Please go to InboundOrganization.com for free bonus content.
https://www.top-line-results.com/