Okay, I know – funeral plans have not been announced yet, and yes, this is an Inbound Marketing and decidedly Demand Generation Systems oriented blog. Mea culpa! But bear with me for a moment…
Let’s do a quick informal survey:
1) How many phone calls to people you have not been introduced to, did you make in the past month?
2) How many emails to people you have not met, did you send in the past month?
3) How many ads in traditional media (print, radio, TV) did you place?
4) How many people responded?
Hello? Is anyone still listening?
Of course, your answers depend on a great many factors, but it’s a safe bet to assume that if you did any of these things, you did less of them than you used to say a year ago, and that you will do even less in the future than you did now.
I suspect even the most stuck-in-the-old-mindset executives would reluctantly agree with this assessment, but what I find fascinating, is that a bunch of people would have answered the questions with some significant numbers. Except for number (4). That one probably merited an embarrassed shrug.
Three things have led to the Death of Outbound Marketing:
1) The fall from grace of being polite – used to be it was considered rude not to reply to a phone call, even when you knew the stranger was trying to sell you something. Ditto for emails. And this failure of manners is a direct response to the deluge of interruptions and the avalanche of noise from all the outbound marketing efforts. The noise causes instant Tune-Out by the intended audience. Now that I think of it, Angus, our Chief Executive Dog, simply goes to sleep when he’s faced with too many signals to interpret.
2) And this lack of interest by the target audience is hurtling traditional media outlets off the nearest cliffs like a landslide: CanWest gone! Murdoch to follow soon because he’s trying to charge for his online content in an effort to remain profitable. People are canceling their ads because they’ve learned that shouting louder and longer doesn’t achieve any effect other than to empty your wallet.
3) The rise of Inbound Marketing and Sales and Marketing Automation. As our slogan says: More Leads, of higher quality, at lower cost. Tough to resist, not so?
I’ve sold everything from encyclopedias door-to-door, to complex software systems, and most of that was done using Outbound Techniques. But these days, the process just doesn’t work. What’s the point in buying an expensive list of names with all their contact details (some of which are actually valid), when the contact won’t respond to your outbound message? Let’s face it, the only way past the spam- and junk-mail filters, and that very handy delete key, is with an introduction. It’s not surprising, then, that LinkedIn is so popular. Well here’s another prediction: It won’t be long before people on LinkedIn realise that 500 tenuous and uncertain connections to more or less unknown people does not a real connection make. Sure some of them work, but who among us is really going to pay attention to someone who knows someone who may, or may-not actually know someone else, who we barely know ourselves? The more tenuous the connection, the less you trust it, and the less you trust it, the less inclined you are to respond.
So I ask you, what’s a poor Outbound Marketer to do?
Well that’s easy: Call an Inbound Marketing company and start selling again!
Bit-by-Bit #6 from Eric.
Axel 
Christine Koenig 
Eric Goldman 
