Reveal: What Is Inbound Sales and Marketing?

Inbound Sales focuses on aligning the steps in the sales and marketing cycles with those in the buying cycle. This is accomplished by leveraging technology, process improvement, and knowledge to effectively and efficiently collaborate with the most appropriate individuals both internally and externally.

In traditional sales and marketing (i.e outbound) systems, companies focus on finding customers. They use techniques that are poorly targeted and that interrupt people; these include cold-calling, print advertising, T.V. advertising, junk mail, spam and trade shows.

Inbound Sales involves marketing focused on becoming found by desired customers. By leveraging the web 2.0 and sales 2.0 tools, Inbound Sales leads to/results in increased communication and collaboration between sellers and buyers, and within selling teams. 

The new Inbound Sales environment is heavily dependent upon technology (including Web 2.0 offerings) to do everything from routine contact and account management to increasingly sophisticated opportunity management and prospect collaboration. Inbound Sales has changed the way sales people sell and consumers/buyers buy through the proactive and visible integration of both the knowledge and the measurement of the buying cycle into the sales cycle - all done via technology-enabled communication and collaboration (between the two cycles). 

With proactive and visible integration of the buying cycle into the sales cycle ,these two dimensions of technology-enabled collaboration and buyer behavior integration change the way salespeople sell and consumers buy.

Source: http://goo.gl/eN0qmX