Chapter 28
The Inbound Organization in 10 Years
Is inbound really a revolution? It was started by a small group of passionate people that had a nearly impossible goal—to change the way small and midmarket companies marketed and sold and to help them grow. It introduced a very specific methodology that defined an innovative way to create a competitive advantage. It was supported by thousands of smaller businesses who were willing to take a risk by embracing unconventional thinking. It grew from a few early adopters to hundreds of practitioners, then thousands, and now millions.
There were numerous offshoots, iterations, updates, stops, and starts along the way. Lots of companies entered the ecosystem to connect, compete, and iterate. Inbound is now taught in hundreds of universities worldwide, with tens of thousands of certified professionals and thousands of certified partners. More and more companies are leveraging inbound for their culture, systems, and new business development process.
A dominant theme emerged in the first decade of inbound growth: regardless of your position, whether you decided to practice inbound or not, everyone was impacted in some way. Companies that embraced inbound, the philosophy and culture, inbound sales, and inbound marketing claimed a huge competitive advantage as the evolution of the modern buyer became mainstream. This advantage takes the form of visibility via website traffic and social media, lead generation capabilities, customers' engagement, and potentially high-value employees. Companies that decide to continue with traditional methods are also being impacted. As it becomes harder to generate new customers and more difficult to reach prospects, they watch as their customers get to choose from more options. Buyers are also affected as they realize how to leverage the code and content funnels to their advantage.
The future belongs to organizations that embrace inbound because buyers are not going back to a world where interruptive marketing rules the day.
There were two consistent responses from the experts we asked about the future of inbound.
One, tools and technology will continue to improve, allowing buyers more ease of use in research and organizations to understand buyers in more detail. Technology tools will help companies be more specific in understanding who prospects are, what prospects want, and where they are in the buyer journey. It will be even easier for inbound organizations to have more specific context, insight, and actionable information about buyers in a segment of one.
Two, both buyers and employees will continue to crave more human, helpful, and relevant experiences with the companies they choose. The core beliefs of inbound will become the minimum requirements in the future.
During the next phase of inbound, buyers will customize their interactions with sellers, rather than the other way around. Buyers will be able to create a buyer profile with personal and company information, preferences, habits, history, and goals. It might not even feel like a buyer/seller relationship. The “seller” will be available when the buyer is ready, with clear, helpful, useful information, and product and service combinations that will match their needs exactly. The buyer won't even have to look for it. The goal of one-to-one marketing will be much closer to reality.
“The future will be more individualized with highly customized relationships,” is the way HubSpot's Andrew Quinn describes it.
Suneera Madhani of Fattmerchant describes her view of the future: “Buyers will expect things to be created with them in mind, more narrowly designed for them, more personal, and for sure delivered the right way, at the right time.”1
Bob Ruffolo, owner of IMPACT, a company with a mission to help other businesses improve with inbound, puts it this way: “Technology is going to continue to improve the ability of companies to connect to more people who want a more personal level of service. If you have a product based or an internally based mindset, the distance between what you're doing and what people expect will dramatically increase.”2
If businesses don't start adopting inbound principles and the buyer-centric mindset now, the technology gap will make those companies more and more irrelevant.
Technology Will Drive Marketing and Sales Personalization
Artificial intelligence (AI) will interact with marketers to plan, create, build, promote, and execute marketing campaigns.
Salesforce has acquired AI tools and integrated them into their CRM products. Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, says, “Put bluntly, if Einstein can find the best leads and set up an email prompt, what's to stop it from one day closing the deal itself?”3
Seventh Sense co-founder and CTO Erik LaBianca talks about AI and sales activities:
As things stand, salespeople and marketers routinely lose deals and customers by not following their process or not fully understanding their customer. AI is well-suited to tackle both of these problems, by tracking the buyer's journey and providing sales and marketing support, and by applying behavior data to segmentation and targeting instead of back-of-the-envelope guesses.
For instance, instead of relying on a checklist that probably doesn't exist or is ignored, AI could populate a profile for each incoming lead and select an appropriate call or email script to ensure that an inbound sales representative is able to articulate value in a way the customer can appreciate.
Or, instead of guessing how well a given piece of content will resonate with a target segment, AI can provide real-time feedback to the writer, suggesting possible changes to target a given interest segment, or providing a view of who is most likely to appreciate the piece.4
Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of PR 20/20 and creator of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute, adds: “If you make a list of all the things that inbound marketers do every day—from setting up automation rules to writing emails, to doing A/B testing, picking editorial calendar topics, scheduling social shares and keep going down the list—there isn't a single obstacle to intelligently automating any one of those tasks that enough money and time wouldn't get through.”5
Dharmesh Shah on the future of bots:
One of the big reasons behind the consumer shift to messaging applications and live chat is the buyer preference for getting more immediate, real-time communication, completely on your own terms. Bots are really handy. They do a lot of routine tasks, they deliver accurate and effective information, and they can delight customers with a quick response. Which plays right into buyers' new expectation of response times and helps optimize which leads go where.
In addition, most people want a business to be available 24/7. This can seem daunting, particularly for smaller businesses and startups who may not have the resources to deploy an army of live representatives to look after a new channel where immediacy is key.
Bots give us the unique opportunity to seamlessly automate the conversations that users have with businesses in a highly personal and convenient way. With bots, people can chat with businesses immediately, regardless of where they are, what time zone they're in, or what their needs are. Bots do not get tired or overwhelmed; they do not grow impatient. Put simply: in this new, conversation-centric landscape, bots will give our customers an unfair advantage.6
AI and bots are two of the many technological changes we expect in the next decade. Technologies like virtual reality and blockchain will make further inroads into marketing.
Governments will almost certainly regulate large social media and Internet companies. Data privacy will continue to be a concern and a source of ongoing regulation. Regulation, however, will not stop the pace of new technology impacting the process of buying and selling.
The Inbound Organization in 10 Years
People will continue to seek out more human, helpful, and relevant experiences and continue to want to work for companies that align with their social goals. Adopting the core beliefs of inbound will become a natural part of any new business and will increasingly become the norm for all companies.
Here are some thoughts on the inbound organization in the next decade:
Marketing moves to SMarketing with the elimination of the decades-old, archaic delineation between the two departments.- Companies will post more content on central repository websites than on their own.
- Spending will continue to move away from interruption marketing to inbound initiatives.
- Customer-focused teams will collect better data and develop insights in a more natural way.
- Influencers and crowdsourcing of content will continue to grow including reviews, rankings, and comments from real buyers.
- More personal direct messaging with buyers.
- More intuitive search and social media tools will appear to help buyers understand how to start, evaluate, and decide all purchases.
- Customized options and concierge service will become more popular.
- Service interactions will become more immediate and seamless and built into the product or service.
- Organizations will create deeper and wider ecosystems to leverage the power of a network, collaborating to solve problems and add value for buyers.
- Organizations will monitor and adjust based on real-time feedback from equipment, service sites, websites, mobile phones, and any other customer connection point.
As buyer control continues to expand, marketing leaders will continue to exert more influence in organizations. Marketers will gain more clout within inbound organizations, all the way up to board of director positions. Executives with inbound marketing experience will rise to the top positions as more companies discover that customer-centricity must be reflected in all aspects of the management structure.
Customer-centric skills and expertise will be the key organizational characteristics. World-class companies will actively recruit employees with inbound skills.
Inbound organizations will continue to turn to distributed workforces to find talent and recruit more remote employees. One of the most common complaints of business leaders is the lack of talent available to fill digital marketing spots. To address this, companies will build networks of gig workers, part-time employees, and contract workers from wherever they can find them. New skills sharing platforms will arrive, allowing people to apply their skills to problems and for customers across a wider variety of industries and types of expertise. Physical location will continue to be less important than finding the person with the right skills.
Millennials will be moving into senior leadership positions within the next 10 years and will expect their businesses to be inbound with a corresponding culture. They will expect their companies to be transparent, socially conscious, diverse, sharing, and a fulfilling place to work. We expect the trend toward company culture as a competitive advantage to accelerate.
Adopt Inbound
The organizations that adopt inbound, gather the best buyer behavior data, understand how to derive insights from that data, and have a vision to leverage emerging technologies will be the winners in buyers' minds.
The companies that recognize and adopt inbound will be able to deliver amazing customer experiences. These companies will create differentiation, in some cases an insurmountable advantage, and establish first mover advantage in many, if not all, industries and market segments.
The organizations that understand these ideas now have the best chance to be the winners in the future.
Inbound values won't change in the future, but strategies, tactics, and processes will evolve. The following are some likely attributes of organizations in another decade:
- Organizations will be mission focused with a strong sense of social responsibility.
- Trust will be the currency of relationships.
- Business will be more human (even when you are working with bots).
- Radical transparency will be expected of everyone and in every relationship.
- Buyers will expect more personalization.
- Sellers will match engagement to the buyer's journey.
- Decisions will be made close to the customer by cross-functional teams.
- Employees will continue to expect to work with a purpose and a plan for advancement.
- Communication will be open and available when customers, partners, and employees want it.
Katie Burke describes her view of HubSpot and inbound in the future this way:
What inbound stands for will stay the same (relevance, humanity, and growth), but how it takes shape in terms of technology and products will change dramatically. My hope is that our philosophy stays the same but our product and platform evolve to meet the changing needs of our prospects and customers.7
Dharmesh Shah summarizes the future of inbound:
Inbound principles will remain the same, but we will have evolved our practices. The idea of solving for the customer will be second-nature for many organizations. They will channel more and more of their marketing and sales investments to the things that drive the best ROI, namely, delighted customers that provide referrals. The technology will have evolved to allow companies to provide smooth, fluid ways for customers to engage. Everything will work from one shared understanding of the customer. This shared understanding will be used to personalize the experience, and the underlying data can power machine learning algorithms to go even further and make recommendations and predictions.8
Inbound has already become more than just a marketing strategy. The original strategy reflected the changes in buying behavior, but inbound today has come to represent a way of thinking, a mindset, and a philosophy for growing your business in the 21st century.
The world will become more inbound because people will become more inbound.
Buyers will crave ever more human treatment from companies; they will seek only helpful companies, not self-serving ones.
Human, helpful, relevant.
Inbound embodies these ideas. The future belongs to the inbound organization.