Chapter 3
The Building Blocks of an Inbound Organization
An inbound organization creates competitive advantage in the age of buyer control by building relationships with employees, prospects, buyers, and partners and intentionally designs a personalized experience to help them reach their goals.
An inbound organization is guided by a philosophy, a set of core beliefs, and best practices that impact every person in every department to provide value and build trust with customers, partners, and anyone they touch.
An inbound organization leverages a centralized view of the customer to provide a personalized, proactive, and persona-based interaction that enhances the buyer's journey to create an extraordinary experience over the life of the relationship.
The concept of inbound was originally defined in 2007 in relation to the narrow discipline of marketing, recently expanding into sales and service.
Inbound is defined within specific disciplines:
Inbound marketing—attracting customers through creating and sharing content that is relevant and helpful, and not interrupting to build trust.- Inbound sales—a modern, buyer-centric form of sales where the seller prioritizes the buyer's needs ahead of their own. Inbound salespeople focus on the buyer's pain and context above all else, customizing their sales process and solution, should one exist.
- Inbound service—delivering an exceptional customer experience after the point of sale by helping buyers see success in solving their problems.
Inbound impacts everyone in a company including finance, accounting, legal, engineering, human resources, and production.
Everyone.
There are also core beliefs that define an inbound organization. These beliefs are:
- Helping others is the right thing to do regardless of your economic self-interest.
- Focus beats bandwidth.
- Treat people like human beings.
- Solve for the customer.
- The full customer experience is your best sustainable competitive advantage.
- Collection and evaluation of data yields the best decisions.
Being an inbound organization means focusing on the goals and aspirations of employees and customers and creating a company, a culture, a product, a service, and an ecosystem that is attractive to those who share your beliefs and are aligned with your purpose and vision of success. These beliefs dictate your culture and guide your team and individual's behavior.
The Disruptive Impact of Inbound
HubSpot cofounder and CEO Brian Halligan is credited with creating inbound marketing as a term of art. His ideas, in conjunction with marketing theories defined by his partner, Dharmesh Shah, and by HubSpot special advisor David Meerman Scott, guided the formation of HubSpot over twelve years ago. A HubSpot marketing director at the time sent David Meerman Scott an email saying, “We just started a company based on your ideas about changing buyer behavior,” and the revolution had a name.
When HubSpot marketing software debuted in 2007 lots of people thought it was just a piece of software. It soon became apparent that it was much more than a marketing tool. HubSpot and the inbound marketing methodology became a welcome resource for organizations impacted by the sea change in buying behavior. Inbound represented a new way of thinking about how to start conversations, build relationships, and organize business activities. Over time inbound became a philosophy and set of best practices that offered practitioners something of immense value: a competitive advantage. For the first time in our lifetime, inbound marketing gave small- to medium-sized businesses the ability to compete and win against much bigger companies with much larger advertising and marketing budgets. Inbound marketing leveled the buyer attention playing field, because “inbound is about the size of your brain, not the width of your wallet.”1
Inbound marketing helped early adopters build tremendous value for their buyers and consequently for themselves by gaining first mover advantage. These inbound marketing pioneers built content and dominated SEO for their target niches and generated the lion's share of attention leading to long-term relationships with buyers. Relationships were based on helping, educating, and advising as opposed to interrupting, annoying, and closing.
Since its inception, inbound has disrupted virtually every vertical and horizontal market for hundreds of thousands of companies in more than 130 countries. This disruption is not just driven by technology but by the companies that use technology to create a superior, remarkable, and memorable customer experience. Inbound has a dramatic impact on every industry associated with outbound or interruptive marketing including advertising, publishing, media, PR, trade associations, and marketing agencies.
Inbound has revolutionized how companies go to market, communicate with prospects, and sell. But it goes beyond just having prospects find you online. Inbound reflects the idea that the customer experience is the key to differentiation in the marketplace. Inbound is about being helpful first and taking the long-term view of the customer relationship.
In this age of buyer control, disruption is not just driven by technology but by the companies that use technology to create a superior, remarkable, and memorable customer experience.
Many startup companies intuitively understand these concepts and build inbound organizations from day one. Look at the major stock indexes and the fastest growing companies in the headlines today. How many of these companies vaulted to success by rethinking the customer experience? Many of the names of hypergrowth companies from the past 20 years did just that: Amazon, Google, Uber, Zappos, Netflix, Spotify, HubSpot.
The average lifespan of companies listed in the S&P 500 index of US companies has decreased from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today.2
Why? You know why, because you use these companies for one specific reason: they offer a superior customer experience.
Organizations with years of experience with a product-based strategy, layers of bureaucracy, and outdated policies may find it hard to become inbound, but it can and does happen. We will see examples later in this book of companies new and old, one over 100 years old, moving toward becoming an inbound organization.
“Customer experience is the new marketing.”3 And as a result, organizations must build systems and processes that reflect this new reality.
The problem is that 91% of unhappy customers won't complain—they simply leave,4 so customer experience is more important than ever before.
We believe that this is the best time to be a business owner, an entrepreneur, a marketer, a salesperson, or a service person—you have the tools to deliver great customer experiences that result in lasting customer relationships.
It has never been easier to start a business. But it has never been harder to scale a business. The winners will be those that are the most helpful to buyers and create great customer experiences.
“We take most of the money that we could have spent on paid advertising and instead put it back into the customer experience. Then we let the customers be our marketing.”5 Customer experience is no accident. It must be designed, engineered, executed, and measured against industry best practices and constantly improved.
The buyer, as well as employees and partners, are now in control in ways that previous generations couldn't even imagine. This is the new business battleground. How to react is the decision that all business owners, directors, senior managers, and advisors must make. Evolving into an inbound organization is one way to solve this problem.
All businesses must make a choice. Follow the same outdated business models of the twentieth century or embrace the way customers buy today.
The place to start is to define your mission.