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tags: Week 1, H3, M2
---
# Inbound vs. outbound sales

Now that you're familiar with the sales funnel and process, you might be thinking...
::: info
🤔 Where do leads initially come from?
🤔 Who is responsible for generating them?
🤔 What responsibilities do marketing and sales have and how do they interact along the funnel?
:::

Great questions! There's no standard answer. It depends on each specific company, the type of product, buyer, and market...

There are, however, two main types of lead generation strategies companies follow: Inbound and Outbound.
 
## Inbound vs. Outbound
In essence,

- **Inbound** refers to activities that lead to attracting customers to inquire about your product without having to reach out to them directly. Often times this activity is tackled by the marketing team and involves creating and distributing relevant and valuable content that the customers want. Sales can also develop an inbound strategy by building a solid brand in social channels (most often on LinkedIn).
- **Outbound** includes any approach where the marketer or salesperson reaches out directly through the customer through direct mail, cold calling, or social selling.

Although this is not always the case, inbound strategies are more common and effective when selling B2C, whilst outbound strategies are more common and better suited to B2B.
 
## So who takes care of the leads at each stage?
As always, depends on each company 🙂

In some cases, Marketing will take care of generating as well as nurturing a lead through the initial stages of the buyer's journey and hand over the leads to sales once they're ready to buy. In some cases, the sales team will do outbound calls to cold prospects when they don't even know they have a problem.

For you, it is important to know how marketing and sales work together in your organization and what strategy they follow for lead generation.
 
 

Let's look at the main differences between an inbound and an outbound strategy and what that means for a sales team in the video below 👇

{%youtube AwaBQMHj864 %}

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