Hope Is Not An Inbound Strategy
You don't have a prospecting problem. You have an inbound problem.
Most salespeople have one of three relationships with inbound.
The first is hope.
They've heard it works, they believe it might work for them someday, and they're waiting for the day it does. No real plan. Just a vague optimism that if they keep showing up, something will happen. Optimism without the right architecture will lull you into a false sense of security.
The second is effort without architecture.
They're posting. A lot, in a lot of places, on a lot of topics. They're getting some likes, building a following, and occasionally getting a comment that feels encouraging.
The problem is that the followers aren’t the right kind. They’re not potential customers. Often, they’re other sales reps who like the way they said something. Leads aren't coming, the pipeline isn't flowing, and they can't quite figure out why, because they feel like they're doing everything right.
I lived in that second category for longer than I'd like to admit. I created a lot of content, putting it out there, and waiting for it to convert. What I didn't have was a clear picture of exactly who I was talking to, what problem I was naming for them, what I wanted them to do next, or how I'd know if any of it was working. The systems weren't connected. The strategy wasn't coherent. The effort was real but the architecture wasn't there.
I can talk for days about the mistakes I’ve made, but that’s another fireside chat for another time.
The third relationship might be the most dangerous: plausible deniability. Tell me if you’ve ever heard a rep complain that "marketing isn't getting me any leads." I saw a movie about that once…
It’s usually said with enough frustration to sound legitimate, but what it usually means is that nobody has invested seriously in making inbound work, and now the absence of results is being used as evidence that it doesn't.
That's not a marketing problem. That's an accountability problem dressed up as a strategy conversation.
What Good Actually Looks Like
Inbound works when a very specific person encounters your content at the moment they're feeling a very specific problem, recognizes that you understand their world, and takes a step toward you.
That requires four things to be true simultaneously.
You have to know exactly who you're talking to. Not "VPs of Sales at mid-market companies," but the specific version of that person who wakes up first thing in the morning thinking about how too much of their revenue depends on too few people, and they can't figure out how to change that. The more specifically you can name their problem in their language, the more magnetic your content becomes.
You have to be consistent with your message, not just your volume. Posting every day about different topics for different audiences isn't an inbound strategy; it's noise. The people you want to reach need to encounter the same point of view, the same language, the same perspective, often enough that they start to associate it with you specifically.
You have to know what you want them to do next. Every piece of content should have a desired next step, even if it's just "think about this differently." The ones designed to convert need a clear, frictionless path: a resource worth downloading, an assessment worth taking, a question worth answering.
You have to be able to measure it. Followers and impressions don’t mean much, and they quickly become distractions. You need to think about resources downloaded, assessments taken, conversations started, and calls booked. If you can't connect your content to a downstream outcome, you can't improve it.
Why It's This Far Down the List
Inbound is fifth out of six channels, not because it's less valuable, but because it's the slowest to build and the easiest to do wrong. It’s also usually someone else’s responsibility if you’re a field sales rep. It’s worthwhile to create your own engine, and I like the idea of being proactive about it, but it’s just so easy to do an incomplete job of it while the “data” makes it look like you’re crushing it.
The flywheel takes time. Consistency takes discipline. The coordination required among what you're saying, who you're saying it to, and what you want them to do next is harder than it looks from the outside.
But when it works… When the right person finds you at the right moment because you've been showing up consistently with something worth saying, it's the closest thing to momentum this business has to offer.
That's worth building. Just go in with your eyes open about what it actually takes.
This is part of a series on opportunity creation. Next up… outbound prospecting.
