The second eBook of the Sales and Leads category. It is the map of where small business customers actually come from, how to choose two or three sources to focus on instead of dabbling in ten, and how to build a steady flow of enquiries you can predict from week to week.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 30 minute read
Chapter 3
Inbound and Outbound Leads
The difference between leads who come to you and leads you go to find, and the right balance for the kind of business you run.
Of the eight sources from chapter two, six are inbound - the customer finds you - and two are mostly outbound - you find the customer. Inbound is generally cheaper to run per enquiry, slower to scale and produces customers who are already half-sold by the time they arrive. Outbound is faster to switch on, more expensive per enquiry, more demanding of your time and produces customers who need more of the conversation skills from the previous eBook to convert.
Most small businesses should be heavily weighted to inbound, with outbound used sparingly in narrow situations where it genuinely fits. The reason is simple: inbound compounds, outbound does not. The hour you spend writing a useful blog post, sending a thank-you to a referrer or updating your Google Business Profile keeps producing enquiries for years. The hour you spend on cold outreach produces what it produces this week and then stops.
This chapter helps you think about the balance. By the end you will have a clear sense of how much of your lead generation time should be inbound versus outbound for your kind of business and your stage.
The full chapter explains the compounding difference, the narrow cases where outbound earns its place, the all-outbound trap and a worked weekly time budget for three different business types.
Why inbound compounds and outbound does not
Inbound assets stay on the internet. A search-ranking blog post, a Google Business Profile, a referrer who knows you well, a body of social posts, a partnership in place - each of these keeps producing enquiries long after the work is done. Outbound work expires the moment the message is sent. The cold email you wrote last Tuesday produced what it produced last week and is now gone. To keep outbound producing you have to keep working at the same rate forever.
This is why a small business that does six months of inbound work usually has more pipeline at the end than a small business that did six months of outbound work, even though the outbound business may have had more enquiries in any given week along the way. The compounding is invisible week to week and decisive year to year.
When outbound earns its place
Three situations make outbound worth doing for a small business. First, when you sell a high-value business-to-business service to a small, identifiable list of potential clients - a few hundred firms in your region, named decision-makers. Second, when you are launching something new and need to get in front of the first ten or twenty customers fast to learn from them. Third, when you have a partnership opportunity that requires you to introduce yourself to potential partners directly. Outside those three situations, outbound time is almost always better spent on inbound that compounds.
The all-outbound trap
Some small business owners feel productive when they are sending messages and unproductive when they are writing a blog post or updating a profile. They tilt their week heavily toward outbound, get a few enquiries, mistake that for proof that outbound is working and double down. Six months later the inbound assets have been neglected, the pipeline depends entirely on this week's messages and the owner is exhausted. The fix is to track time honestly and to protect a minimum number of hours per week for inbound work, even when outbound is producing.
Weekly time budget by business type
Local services - 80% inbound, 20% outbound (mostly partnership outreach).
Online sellers - 90% inbound, 10% outbound.
Business-to-business services with small target list - 60% inbound, 40% outbound.
Trades - 90% inbound, 10% outbound (partnership and review outreach).
What to do this week
Look at the last four weeks of your lead generation time and roughly split it into inbound and outbound. If the split is wildly different from the budget above for your business type, that is the first thing to fix. The companion eBook Outbound Sales on a Budget covers the narrow cases where outbound is worth doing in more detail, including how to build a small target list and how to write outreach that does not get ignored.
In the next chapter we go deep on the source most small businesses underuse - referrals and partnerships - and the small set of habits that turn it from accidental into systematic.
