Building Sequences for Inbound Leads

Overview

If you have a marketing department, they are probably generating leads for inbound sales people. One of the most important questions a company can ask themselves about their inbound process is "How personalized do we want to get?" With an intelligent combination of triggers and sequences, you can create a fully-automated inbound process with room for heavy personalization.

Best Practices

Map Lead and/or Contact fields from Salesforce to the Prospect fields in Outreach

• It is extremely important that Outreach capture the same insights that marketing is able to when generating inbound leads. This is typically done by creating a field for each thing you care about on the Lead object in Salesforce, then mapping that to Outreach so we can mirror that data and use it to generate hyper-personalized content.
• If you don't use Salesforce, you can simulate this approach by exporting your inbound leads from your existing CRM and importing them in bulk into Outreach.

Build a trigger

• When leads are generated through marketing funnels and eventually land in your CRM, they often need to meet certain criteria to qualify as a marketing-generated lead. At this point, Outreach can take over with the use of the Trigger feature. If your CRM is Salesforce, the trigger can look at fields on the Lead's page layout then take action based on those field values (e.g. automatically add to "White Paper Download" sequence if Lead Score is "12" and Source is "white paper").
• If you don't use Salesforce, you can create the same automated process by first creating the trigger in Outreach, then exporting your inbound leads from your existing CRM and importing them in bulk into Outreach.
• Automatically sequence your inbound leads from Salesforce

Automated emails vs. heavily personalized touch-points

• Depending on the level of personalization you want, you may choose to build fully automated email sequences, task-based sequences or both. However you slice and dice your inbound leads, you can always address each customer segment with its own set of customized triggers and sequences. For inbound leads that are considered 'high value', we recommend building sequences into a cadence of manual tasks that gives the sales person the freedom to personalize each touch-point on their own.

Optional: Auto-convert inbound Leads to Contacts in Salesforce

• Some customers qualify a lead before it gets into the hands of the sellers. If that's the case, you may want to consider setting up a workflow rule in Salesforce that automatically matches inbound leads to existing Accounts by the lead's email domain, then automatically converting it to a Contact before distributing it to the sales team.