How to Go from Outbound to 95% Inbound Marketing

Many B2B companies waste much time, budget, and resources on outbound marketing initiatives that generate poor or inconsistent results. While the reasons may vary, much of it can be attributed to a lack of understanding of how the company’s ideal customers conduct research, evaluate, and make purchasing decisions. So what can B2B marketers do to shift their approach to drive higher-quality leads and achieve sustainable growth?

That’s why we’re talking to Ronan McDonnell (Managing Director, CMO Mojo), who shares proven strategies around how to go from outbound to a 95% inbound marketing approach. During our conversation, Ronan explained how B2B companies can best leverage inbound strategies for reducing headcount in sales, improve the quality of leads, and attract potential investors. He also shared some common pitfalls that B2B marketers should avoid, and provided some practical tips on targeted market research, developing a scalable inbound strategy, and to how effectively coordinate with sales teams for better impact. Ronan also stressed the need for social proof, competitive analysis, and continuous improvement across marketing channels.

https://youtu.be/LNzyjUJGDlc

Topics discussed in episode:

[3:13] Why B2B companies are transitioning from outbound to inbound marketing

[5:02] The importance of making the outbound-to-inbound switch

[9:59] Key challenges and pitfalls to avoid

Not focusing on niche targeting
Ignoring digital PR
Lack of healthy backlinks and original content

[13:40] Strategic steps B2B marketers should take when switching from outbound to inbound

[28:26] How to handle pushback and manage pressure to deliver immediate results

[31:09] Actionable tips for B2B marketers:

Recognize that buyers are self-educators
Collect and showcase customer reviews/testimonials
Identify competitor spaces and be present in those spaces
Open, improve, and test out marketing channels
Develop clear marketing roadmaps
Champion the internal communications
Fail quickly and measure your success

Companies and links mentioned:

Transcript

Christian Klepp 00:00

Many B2B companies spend far too much time, budget and resources on outbound initiatives that yield little or mediocre results. The reasons for these outcomes vary, but much of it can be attributed to a lack of understanding of how the company’s ideal customers make decisions and buy.What if I told you that there is a way for you to go from fully outbound to 95% inbound. How would that change the trajectory of your business? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Ronan McDonnell, who will be answering this question. He’s the founder of CMO Mojo, who helps B2B companies think smarter about how they implement their marketing initiatives, tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. All right, I’m gonna say Mr. Ronan McDonnell, welcome to the show, sir.

Ronan McDonnell 00:55

Hey. How are you? Thanks for having me. Good to see you.

Christian Klepp 00:58

Pleasure to have you on the show, Ronan, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation, and I’m not going to give too much away at this point in time, but you know, when we got on the pre interview call, you dropped this topic and suggested that we talk about it in this interview. And I thought, Hmm, that’s a pretty bold claim, but you know, let’s, let’s give it a shot. So let’s, uh, let’s not keep the audience in suspense too long here, but I’m gonna just dive right into it, if you don’t mind.

Ronan McDonnell 01:28

Sure, absolutely.

Christian Klepp 01:29

Fantastic. Okay, so, Ronan, you’re on a mission to help B2B companies to develop transformational marketing strategies that will help them scale and grow their business. But for this conversation, we’re going to focus on the topic, which I said is slightly controversial, but here we go, and it is how to go from fully outbound to 95% inbound, in B2B. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. So the first one is, provide us with examples that help substantiate this bold claim. And the second part of the question is, why do you think it’s important for B2B companies to make this strategic switch?

Ronan McDonnell 02:11

Yeah, I suppose it does come across like a bit of a bold claim, really, doesn’t it? But to be honest with you, it’s kind of what I’ve come across most in my marketing career to date, in most places I’ve ended up working, you know, it’s always been kind of outbound sales led, which makes sense, you know, somebody starts a business and they’re, you know, it’s founder led sales, and then it’s outbound selling and things like that. But ultimately, there comes a point where, you know, the company wants to get some inbound leads as well, and not to rely specifically on just outbound. So, yeah, it’s kind of what I’ve just become accustomed to. I suppose, to answer your question, to substantiate the claim, you know, I worked in a B2B SaaS (Software as a Service) company, not most recently, but just before that, and the entire company, you know, a seven figure ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) company was built 95% outbound cold calling, you know. And that’s a grind, not even using ABM (Account-Based Marketing) or tactics or anything like that. So, you know, there was some referral clients from a good network that the leadership team had, of course.

Ronan McDonnell 03:13

But you know how first thing to say really is, kudos to a company to actually be able to do that, but we they wanted to start a marketing function, and they saw the value in actually getting inbound leads. And, you know, every sales person’s dream is really not to be doing cold calling, at least have something to reference on, on warmer exchanges, or have a steady stream of leads coming into them, you know, so they can come into work on a Monday morning and they don’t have to worry about, oh, I just have to hope this guy is within ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) before I call him. There’s lots that marketing have done before they’re ever on the phone. So within 12 months, we were able to flip that around. There’s, I think there was five or six sales people, and that was BD (Business Development) or SDR (Sales Development Representative) , cold calling lead generation people in the company. So we were able to switch that around from 90, 95% of leads coming from outbound sales, and flip it completely the other way, where only about 5% were coming from outbound sales, the inbound leads were taking over the sales people. Sales people’s time enough. Yeah. So it was great that way. We were able to reduce headcount in the sales team at that level, but we were able to promote some of the people to account executive roles, to work deeper on into sales or deeper down the sales funnel, which was really positive. And then we reserved about, I say, two maximum in the lead generation space. So yeah, it was, it was really positive. And yeah, it took about 12 months to do, which was good. But I think, you know, most companies can achieve it. Whether it takes a little bit longer or not. It’s really, it’s really good for the future of the company, outside the first 12 months anyway, you know. So sales is a numbers game, optimized by performance and talent and great and skill and training, all of that kind of thing. But really, if you can optimize, optimize those people that are on the phone with. Your Sales Team speaking to them, you can, you can get a lot more done.

Ronan McDonnell 05:02

So yeah, to answer your second part of your question, why do I think it’s important for B2B companies to make that switch from outbound to inbound? You know, I have a few points on it, but it comes down to a few key things, obviously, head count, the cost of that in sales teams, particularly, along with turnover in sales teams. You know, relying on people to hit the ground running every Monday morning to make call after call, especially when they’re cold, is really tough to do. I personally think, because I worked in sales for a long time, that there is a shelf life on that people don’t tend to stay lead gen forever. I think there’s a limit to the amount of sales calls you can make in your life if you’re not either going into an account exec role or deeper into the sales funnel. So having a predictable inbound engine in place really kind of makes sense there. You know, sales people need to have a pipeline of warm leads and warm engagements. Even you know, just anything warm to reference on a call and to give a purpose for a conversation to take place. It just tends to convert better, of course, as well.

Ronan McDonnell 06:05

You know, another big point, really. It might not be important for everyone, but certainly for someone listening it is, funding and scaling. So if you’re looking to scale your company or take on funding, or go through funding round, Series A, Series B, etc, there does need to be evidence of demand and a pipeline there, and evidence that you’re able to fill that pipeline without relying on, you know, cold calling and just sales on its own. It should be a combination of sales and marketing. So in my experience, investors always like to see, or in some cases, they need to see, you know, not just the funnel, but the world above the funnel. You know, your new leads, your warmer leads, the caliber of those companies who might be attending your webinars or downloading your reports and guides or signaling in some way that they view you as an authority in the space they need to see that world before, just, just, just before the funnel actually kicks in, you know? So, yeah, I would never say abandon outbound. That skill needs to be alive and well in your organization, especially if you have it to begin with. You paid for it day one, and you probably paid well for it. So you don’t want it to die away. But yeah, you do. You need a stream of leads flowing into the company.

Ronan McDonnell 07:15

You know, another case for it would be for to learn whether you know it’s a PLG (Product-Led Growth) approach that you need to take with a particular type of customer, a product led growth approach, for anyone who’s not familiar with PLG, you know, or if it’s kind of a larger enterprise sale. So yeah, it reduces the stakes a little bit for your sales team, and they can relax a little bit and experiment with things a little bit if they know that there’s more leads coming in behind the one that was just generated. So, yeah, all in all, it kind of tends to, it tends to help the company in multiple different ways, really. So there’s, there’s lots more reasons, I’m sure, why you would want to go inbound entirely. But even myself as a business owner now, having leads come to me is, you know, it’s just so nice compared to having to go out and guess that business, you know.

Christian Klepp 08:01

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, like yourself, I started out in sales as well, and I was on two sides of the spectrum. So I was in one function with outbound, and then the other one was more inbound. Of course, the inbound situation was more, well, it’s always a more like, like, a happier problem, I’m gonna say, look, or a good problem to have, because you’re getting all these inquiries and orders, whereas the outbound one is, like, basically pounding the pavement and and just making all these cold calls. And I don’t know about you, but I did everything I could to avoid cold calling.

Ronan McDonnell 08:40

I did. I would sit silently in order to avoid it. Sometimes it just, yeah, you need something to reference on the phone. Maybe it’s a conversion or a download, or a colleague of theirs spoke to you before, or something. You know, you just want warm engagements. You know nobody likes to, similar to door to door sales or people knocking on your door, fundraising or something, you know, a few years ago that was so so so normal. And I think people regard their homes now as more sanctuary type things. So it’s wild to people now that that would happen. And I think it’s very similar in this world. It’s for some people to receive a cold sales call is wild for them, and they’re taken aback at the concept. So at least having them make the first move by downloading or engaging or something, attending a webinar, or whatever it is, or show some sort of intent, at least there’s something to reference on the phone call, and it’s less awkward for the salesperson, and the salesperson isn’t on the back foot trying to prove that there’s a real purpose for the phone call. So yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Christian Klepp 09:41

Absolutely, absolutely. I’m gonna move us on to the next question, which is about key pitfalls. So again, on this topic of switching, or making that shift from outbound to inbound, what are some of these key pitfalls that you think B2B marketers need to avoid, and what should they be doing instead?

Ronan McDonnell 09:59

Yeah, so I’m. There’s a number of pitfalls, really. I think a lot of marketers kind of only covered the basics. We’re all trying to get across every channel, and we can rush that sometimes. So, you know, sometimes you might, you know, a key pitfall I do see, and it sounds kind of silly now to say it, but very broad. For example, Ads-campaigns to very broad pages, or home pages. Sure you can go to your head of marketing, or you can go to your CEO and say, oh, yeah, ads are running. Ads are running. No problem. But I myself, if I’m searching something, and I click on an ad for that particular thing, and it takes me to a homepage I’m out of there, you know. So, you know, you need to narrow these things a little bit. So I’d avoid that pitfall of going very, very broad. You need to get super, super, super, super, super niche with this type of stuff so.

Ronan McDonnell 10:43

Yeah, I think rushing is a big pitfall. To do things like that. It’s going to cause you pain. You need to get it right. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well. I think, you know, a big Pitfall, and I’ve been, you know, guilty of it myself, is just running towards technical SEO. I’ve done it. It does need to be done, so don’t abandon it. But the pitfall here is, it stopping once your titles are lovely, your internal linking is beautiful, your alt text is so descriptive, it’s amazing, but there’s more to it. You can’t stop there. Everyone is doing that now, so it’s what happens beyond that. Is the cream that gets the opportunity to rise to the top. If you ignore technical SEO on the flip side, you’ll be really, really penalized for that, and there’ll be problems, but you definitely need to do it. But don’t stop there. I think a lot of marketers just tend to clean the website. If the website’s clean, then we’re going to get leads. But that’s, that’s, I don’t think that’s necessarily true, to be honest, especially in the age of AI as well.

Ronan McDonnell 11:39

So yeah, I would say those two and definitely, definitely ignoring digital PR (Public Relations). Digital PR, I think, was up to now, not a top priority for businesses, let alone marketing teams. But in the age of AI, it has moved from, you know, number four or five on the priority list straight up to number one, if not a close second, you know, especially in the age of AI. So it’s the biggest needle mover nowadays is to have your digital PR in a really healthy place. You do want healthy backlinks from high, high performing websites. You do want to be creating original content and getting it out there, and have journalists and other brands pick it up for you. And you know, it might not help you for technical SEO and things like that, but for AI or grabbing the AI overview on Google Search backlinks and all that, the pitfall there is treating PR as a nice to have, rather than Now, in today’s day and age, it’s an absolute need to have, you know.

Christian Klepp 12:36

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I love it. I love it. I loved, also what you said about SEO, because it’s that whole bit about, okay, let’s just focus on the technical aspect of it. But hey, let’s just, let’s just ignore the fact that the content is not that great.

Ronan McDonnell 12:54

Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you have a five page website, I bet you it’s pretty clean, you know. But that’s not necessarily mean that it’s good at all. So yeah, definitely getting past the technical side of SEO, and that’s sometimes the most fun thing to do for myself. Personally, I love that, but you have to realize now that things have changed, and we all have to kind of accept it. So yeah.

Christian Klepp 13:15

Absolutely, absolutely talk to us about the importance of the following and how marketing can play a strategic role in each one. Again, we’re zooming in on the topic of switching from outbound to inbound. So there’s three aspects over this, all right, so targeted market research on developing the right inbound strategy and coordinating the inbound approach with the sales team, because let’s not forget about those guys.

Ronan McDonnell 13:41

Okay, perfect. So I would say for targeted market outreach. First of all, you know the importance of it is, especially going from outbound to inbound. It’s non-negotiable now, and this is really hard to do. I’m a person who gets in the weeds and likes to get deep into the work and do the work, but you gotta stop, take time, take some space, and understand what’s actually happening in your marketplace. You know, who are you competing with? How they’re competing with each other is really important, why the winners are winning and what tactics they’re deploying. Are they advertising on each other’s brand name searches, for example, things like that. Those tactics are very important to understand. Do they have very aggressive us versus them alternative pages? You know they’re important so well they’re important to have the aggressive nature of them is at your own discretion.

Ronan McDonnell 14:27

But you know another thing I would you know this is not to be controversial, but go on a buying journey with each of those competitors as far down the funnel as you can before you know you need to exit and feel that experience that you’re getting and feel where you would either engage in purchase or abandon the buying journey completely, and that will just, that’s just pushes a gap in your face. Now you know what the gap is. You can fill that gap so you can capitalize on those weaknesses. So there’s tons of market research you can do. You can get into your Tams, your toms, your so. On all of that, if you want to, but just sometimes placing yourself in the buyer journey is really, really important, and a lot of that will help you to transition from outbound to inbound in an organization, you know, so you’ll know where those gaps are.

Ronan McDonnell 15:11

As for developing the right inbound strategy. I think the researcher just kind of mentioned will help to understand, help you to understand the importance of developing the right strategy. It’s not just about getting people to knock on the door or visit the website. It’s creating a strategy far beyond that. It’s how you open that door and welcome them in, understand their situation and move things in the right direction. This, and I kind of mentioned this earlier as well, the sooner you can identify someone might be a PLG player, for example, or somebody might be an enterprise size client with multiple stakeholders and buyers. The sooner you can actually identify those things with the right strategy, the sooner you can push them down the correct funnel and stages and things like that.

Ronan McDonnell 15:55

And then, I suppose, finally, for coordinating the inbound approach with the sales team. You know, it’s good that you asked this piece last, because it is most important, really. You know, the other things, if you don’t do things will be tough. If you don’t do this with a sale, with it, with the sales team, and get really tight with them, you’re just going to lose you know, if you’re not starting with discovery calls internally with your sales team. I think you’re going to lose out a lot. They’re way closer to the customer than you are, and that goes for the customer success team as well. Okay, now, because you’re in marketing, you might be doing a lot of, you know, new business marketing, but don’t forget, there is customer marketing. You know, there’s adoption and there’s scaling accounts as well, but it can help to separate things down. I think when sales teams hear from the company internally that there’s, you know, hey, we want more inbound happening here, they can sometimes feel, well, this is an attack on my identity and what I do in an organization, so I’m going to resist, whereas it’s actually a huge positive, as it will relieve that outbound pressure, you know, it’ll create a flow of leads and allow the warmer conversations we had mentioned. So, yeah, it’s having that internal communication is super, super important as well. And, and, yeah, you know, it’ll help you, help them to stop cold calling people they think are in their ICP and actually call people warmly that they know they can sell to. So yeah, there’s, there’s a huge importance there of coordinating the inbound approach, you know, with the sales team in particular. So, yeah, it’s everything, really, to be honest with you, you really need to be fused. And I think only from working in sales myself for so long, you know, I’m in a great position to understand what a sales team needs from a marketing team.

Christian Klepp 17:37

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I was in a previous role where we had to work closely with a sales team. So I can attest to that, that that reality, that it would be in everybody’s interest to collaborate, and for the marketing people to treat the sales people, not necessarily as friends, but to find this common middle ground, right? And to get them to get them to understand that you know you’re here to like, help them hit their goals, right? Help them. Help them, like, carve out this path, right? I don’t want to use the word support, because that’s the old impression. That’s the old stereotype of, like, okay, marketing, a support sales. That’s not to say that we don’t do that absolutely, but we need to lead with strategy, because that’s where they’ll see the value, versus just like, Okay, well, marketing is going to help with sending me some leads, and they may or may not be qualified.

Ronan McDonnell 18:34

It also depends on the relationship you walk in on. You know, as a marketer, I’ve worked in a place, one place in particular, where, you know, the sales team would get one lead per quarter, and it would be, you know, a gmail or a spam or something there, just, it just wasn’t firing. So their opinion of marketing in general was, Oh, geez. Like, you know, what are these guys doing, talking to, asking us questions about, say, you know, our customers and stuff like that. But when you actually start to push a few deals through the pipeline and there. And you know what ended up happening is they’re like, Oh my God. Like, I got one lead this week, two leads next week, the next week, and keep on building. Then you’d be surprised. Like people open up and they realize that it’s not sales versus marketing, which it is in a lot of companies. I know someone listening to this has a sales versus marketing situation. It’s sales and marketing. So, yeah, like marketing, are there to service sales, not not serve sales, but you know, they have to work in conjunction. And I think what I just said sounds very one way traffic, but when you’re actually chasing up the sales team to find out how things went in order to inform your own marketing strategy, you close that loop, and the actual feedback goes full circle. So I think, you know, that’s a quick way to make it marketing and sales, as opposed to marketing versus sales.

Christian Klepp 19:50

That’s right. Okay, moving on to the next question. So um, based on your experience. How can a B2B marketer, or how can a B2B company make that strategic switch from fully outbound to inbound? So walk us through the steps. And you know from your experience, what are the key components that absolutely have to be in that process?

Ronan McDonnell 20:13

Perfect. Yeah, okay, well, I’m glad you said steps, because it is a series of steps. Don’t send an email internally to say, hey, sales, stop doing your outbound calls. We’ve got it from here. Don’t worry.

Christian Klepp 20:25

So here you go.

Ronan McDonnell 20:29

Exactly it’s, you know, so where are the leads guys? So, yeah, it’s definitely a series of steps. And, you know, sometimes they’re in order and sometimes they’re not. But really, what you’re trying to achieve there in terms of steps, is you’re creating a demand generation engine, right? So the good news is that you probably already have a lot of the groundwork done. If you’ve gotten a sales team up and running, okay? You have your market research to a certain point. Maybe it’s a little bit older, you know, it’s still useful. You can refresh it. You have your ICP, your ideal customer personas. You might already have those well known all right, a useful step is also to learn from sales what specific event is happening in their buyers, you know, professional life, when they manage to actually create a deal or close the sale. All of that information is really, really important. So as a marketer, you know, you should always be in, oh, this is a tough one to say, but insisting or supporting that the sales team are doing last deal diagnostic phone calls monthly or quarterly, and that you’re either in them or you’re getting a report from the manager afterwards, whatever is less abrasive at the time, and indeed, as well as lost deal diagnostic calls, calls on why they won. So why they won deals, those co those review calls, are just gold. If marketers can get the information back from the sales team why they’re winning and why they’re losing. Your marketing will become, you know, better, faster and cheaper. You know, you’ll just get there quicker and more efficiently. Basically, we need to know why we win or we or we lose deals basically.

Ronan McDonnell 21:56

Cool, other steps, I would say, include things you know, that we’ve already discussed, but you have to set about building more authority in the space. And this, you know, I’m trying to say AI less and less every day, but it really is happening at AI across the board. You’ve got to build that authority in the space, and you’ve got to be in more places. You know if you’re not on the review sites, let’s say, for example, you might be a software product. You’re not on G2, Capterra, you know, even forums like Quora and Reddit, even if it’s just for AI and LLMs (Large Language Models) to consider you in their surfaces by definition. If your competitors are somewhere competing and you’re not there, you’re not competing. So get wide as well as deep. Don’t go too deep on one thing. Go wide first, and then you can incrementally improve the depth of those channels.

Ronan McDonnell 22:47

You got to build out relevant content. Okay, so that’s a huge step. You’ve got to start doing your if you’re not already, your webinars, your round tables, you’ve got to actually be a human being on front of people these days as well. I think AI is doing so much, but ultimately, I think the tables are going to turn again, and it’s the human, the human touch, that’s going to close deals, you know, and open deals. So I think that will really move the needle on trust as well, testimonials, reviews. I know I sound like a very this is very basic marketing tactics, but it’s I want to reinvigorate people to go after this big time, because there’s a big reason now, especially with ChatGPT, Cloud, Perplexity, etc, testimonials, reviews, video testimonials. You know, there’s so many ways you can repurpose all of those. And as I said, it’s not breaking information, but it’s doubling down on everything that you need to to trigger more inbound leads, okay, in the company I mentioned earlier in the episode. You know, when we did that 12 month run and we changed the company to 90 , 95% inbound, 30% of closed business that year originated with a download. Now, it didn’t download the week before it didn’t download the month before, or four months. But somewhere along the line, we converted that person. We kept them warm with relevant content, invitations to webinars, things that we knew they would like, very specific based on what they downloaded as well, by the way. And once people, once you’re kind of top of mind, when the buyers needs arise, that’s when you actually capitalize marketing. Can’t force anyone to buy anything, but all we can do is be top of mind when that need comes up.

Ronan McDonnell 24:29

So I’ve mentioned a lot of things there, that is a lot of upfront work, and I think marketing in general, there’s a lot of upfront work, and then the back end pays off in marketing, you know, but yeah, ultimately, I’d entire I’d sorry. I’d encourage brands to raise the entire ship, elevate all of the marketing channels, and open new ones. If they don’t have them, they might not all go to plan, and that’s fine, too, if some of them fail, fail fast is really, really important. And here’s a quote that’s, you know, I’ve had. Said to me a lot in the past, learning and coming up is, don’t let perfect get in the way of really, really, really good. Improve your channels incrementally as time goes by. Don’t open a new channel, like PPC (Pay-Per-Click), for example. Complete it as in, go deep for weeks and months and then move on to the next one. You’ve got to open things up and improve as you go and yeah, I think what you’ll see happen is that leads in marketing, inbound leads, will start to take a little foothold, and then they’ll grow. And they’ll grow if you’re learning as you go of course in closing the loop with the sales team learning why they’re closing, you know, sales will end up having warmer conversations with more and more people, and they’ll have more kind of feedback for you as well. And slowly but surely, the marketing leads will take a foothold, and your sales people should be and hopefully will be too busy with warmer leads to resort to a cold list. And that’s when the balance starts to actually tip, you know. So it’s definitely a series steps, rather than a very abrupt, you know, next Monday, we’re inbound only kind of thing.

Ronan McDonnell 26:07

But, yeah, there’s also plenty of components, as you asked, as well. But, you know, I’m not going to start naming tech stacks, really, but teamwork is huge on it. Clarity around the objectives, that’s number one. Make sure everyone knows what you’re trying to do. Very specifically, very, very specifically. And, yeah, just be user centric with it. With everything, make sure that you’re getting feedback from people who didn’t buy off you, or you lost deals from as well, you know. So there’s nothing. And the main thing is, really to get across to the team that there has to be a sense of fun in it, and the players in the game have to have a kind of sense of hustle about them as well. You know, it’s a fun job. I mean, if you go around the company and you shadow people, you know, if you’re a complete unknown or you’re just finishing school, and you go into like a any company, you go on all the different roles, a lot of the time, marketing will be named as, oh, that looks like one of the most fun roles to do in a company. And it is fun. So, there should be, there should be a lot of fun about it as well, you know. So that’s a major component in the process.

Christian Klepp 27:09

Absolutely, absolutely, I think you did a great job of laying that out so beautifully. And I feel obliged now to play a little bit of the devil’s advocate, if you let me. It’s think you’ve probably been in the game long enough that you’ve perhaps come across this one or two times in your career, the time factor, right? So earlier in the conversation, as you were walking us through the steps and breaking down all the components, you were saying things like little by little and slowly but surely. And in my experience, that’s the kind of language that senior management doesn’t particularly like to hear, right? Yeah, especially somebody in the financial finance department that’s watching what marketing is spending. So Okay, so here comes the question. I’m just trying to set this up a little bit. How do you deal with pushback from people in a non marketing function that look at you and say, Hey, listen, Ronan, this is all bright and beautiful, but we don’t have 12 months to deliver results here. We need to show something like in the next three to six months, in the next 90 days, right?

Ronan McDonnell 28:26

I suppose the way I try to deal with it is avoidance, but that’s impossible a lot of the time. And yeah, you’re right. Leadership teams don’t generally love that type of stuff, but I think you’ll find as well, it is the leadership teams that do take the risk and have the trust in you that actually end up winning out. And the ones that don’t do it, someone don’t do so well, I know, you know the old saying, you know, if someone says, oh, how much is it to do this particular thing? Well, what’s it going to cost you if you don’t, basically, but yeah, I do get asked that question by clients and a lot of the time, and you just can’t guarantee it, but you know there has to be a bit of trust in the fact that if you do all of the right things, the right things will will happen in return. Now, when I say we did it in 12 months, it didn’t happen at month 11. Every single month, you could see improvement. You just could there was organic was coming up, leads were coming in from PPC, and provided you’re hiring somebody, or whether you’re outsourcing it, or you have the right marketer in house, those things will happen because your competitors are making it happen for them. You know, you can do it. You just need to do it a little bit better. But, yeah, I mean, if the time frame is three months or six months, I mean, there’s no, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t have some sort of a sense of success happening, you know, but after that initial period, it’s a funny one, really, because usually you join a company six months probation for something that takes 12 months to achieve. So that’s a tough one. But you know, those who can see the kind of the movement under the sheets, really, I suppose, for lack of a better term, they can actually, you know, once leadership teams tend to see that change, then it’s just scaling from there. You know, if absolutely nothing is happening, then fair enough. You probably get your marching orders, and that’s absolutely fair. But in my experience over, you know, the last number of companies I’ve worked for over the last number of years, and the clients I have now is that if you don’t come in and make impact by doing the right thing, it’s extremely rare that you wouldn’t.

Christian Klepp 30:31

Well, that’s fair. That’s an absolutely fair point. Okay, my friend, we get to the point in the conversation, we’re talking about actionable tips and, goodness gracious me, you’ve given us plenty already. But let’s just, let’s assume there’s somebody out there who is in this particular situation, or is facing this predicament that we are talking about in this conversation today. And of all the things you’ve said,what are like? Maybe three to five things you would advise them to take action upon right now if they want to make that strategic shift from outbound to inbound.

Ronan McDonnell 31:09

Right now. Number one. Okay, number one is a realization, more so than you know an actionable tip. But I’ll get to the actionable tip you’ve got to realize first of all, is that, you know, buyers are self educators. Now, okay, they might not have been back in the day, but maybe they were, but a lot, a lot more now, so buyers are self educators. So you have to give them impartial information that informs a buying decision, and that’s all a sales team is trying to do in this day and age as well. All they’re trying to do is inform a buying decision. Now, if they carve it out correctly, the correct buying decision is you. But you know, if it’s not, you know you got to exit as well, but you got to realize that buyers are self educators. So the first actionable tip, based on that, get out to your customers now with your CS team, or get the approval from your CS team to go after them. Obviously, time it, time it well with what’s going on in that customer’s life cycle. Okay, you know, get out there, get those reviews, get those testimonials, get those videos. You can incentivize them. No problem whatsoever with that. Social proof is absolutely everything now and going into the future. People need while they’re self educating, they need evidence that you’ve done it. They need those case studies as well. Okay? They need to see those customer journeys, you know.

Ronan McDonnell 32:29

Another one then, is to learn what your learn where your competitors are and be there. We kind of spoke about that a little bit earlier as well. If you’re not there, you’re just not competing. By definition, it could be, as I said, Reddit is actually, you know, Reddit, Quora, platforms, marketplaces, yours might be trust pilot, for example, you know, be there and compete if there’s, you know, there’s value there in it.

Ronan McDonnell 32:51

The next actionable tip was this, number three, it’s a little bit kind of day one marketing, but make sure all of your marketing channels are open, you know, and open new ones if they’re not, you know, and improve the ones that you do have. So do this yourself. If you’re not fully comfortable and competent with it, get someone in just to have a quick chat with your marketing team, or outsource it if you don’t have one. But definitely you want to open them all, and some of them will close themselves based on performance. That’s fine, but you need to find out, because, you know, I’ve come across a lot of business owners who say, my friend’s a business owner, and they just put 50 euros a day on this one particular keyword. Sure we can do that. You know, that’s not like, you know, sometimes you might do it to humor the person, because there’s no way around it. But you realize very quickly that, you know, you have to find out what channel and and what tactics work for you. Otherwise, you know, you could click one button and your entire marketing function would just be working.

Ronan McDonnell 33:47

And another actionable tip as well is, and this is something I struggle with a lot. I don’t think I’m old, but when I was younger, is to plan. So if you’re a small team, plan like crazy, with timings, deliverables. And you know, some common sense. You know the old saying, fail to prepare. Prepare to fail, I guess so I personally work off marketing roadmaps. So you can build one on Google Sheets. If you don’t, don’t have any budget whatsoever, you could use Asana base camp Monday teamwork, whatever tool is doable. Map out your weeks, your months and your quarters, and team them based on industry needs and what’s happening in the industry at the time. When you have that, that sounds very cookie cutter to people, but here’s the thing, once you have those road maps all mapped out, and it’s really, really accurate, that gives you the flexibility to react to something brand new in the news. Okay, so you won’t get bogged down in trying to get the next thing out and get confused.

Ronan McDonnell 34:42

I would say another actionable tip. And this is all this takes a bit of leadership and a bit of guts is to own and champion the internal communication piece sales most likely won’t pick up the phone and say, Hey, I just closed the deal. And this is why you know you have to get that, because you need that as the marketer. So. You need to learn from other teams and teach other teams also take the best insights that others have internally and use them. They are usually closer to the customer than you, whether it’s your customer success team or your customer service team and your sales team as well, but you have to actually grab and own that process. We spoke about it earlier, the apprehension some sales team might have when you’re starting up this kind of process internally, get those people on calls, get familiar with them, trust will open up. You know, there’s nothing that beats authenticity. So they’ll know who you are and what you’re about, and it will work really well. Set up monthly calls and things like that.

Ronan McDonnell 35:35

Measurement is a big one as a marketing executive trying to avoid measuring everything, and then, as a marketing leader, trying to measure everything, but it is important to do so measure your successes, and as we said earlier, fail as fast as you can at everything that you’re going to fail at. So yeah, something’s going to fail. Just get there quickly and apply the learnings to everything else. Every company is different, you know. So what works for one company might not necessarily work for you? So yeah, there’s what’s that four or five or six pieces? I mean, there’s so much you could do, and we can get really, really, really specific on things, but ultimately, it’s just kind of, yeah, get into the hustle of it and do those quick things. You have so much in your business already that you can use, repurpose and create from it believable.

Christian Klepp 36:23

I love it. I love it. No, this is a great place to start. So yeah, you had six here that I took note off, so it’s pretty good. Okay, here comes the bonus question. So if the audience hasn’t guessed it already, you’re from Ireland, and if I read your LinkedIn profile correctly. You’re from a place called County Clare. So is there any thing like, perhaps a fun fact, if you will, about that region of Ireland where you’re from that not many people would know about?

Ronan McDonnell 36:55

Oh, my God, is there a fun fact about.

Christian Klepp 36:58

Like, one of these, like, did you know it’s like, on a cereal box or something.

Ronan McDonnell 37:02

I don’t know. Did you know The Cliffs of Moher are here? Everyone kind of knows the Cliffs of Moher when they come over. Okay, is there something interesting about County Clare? I bet you there is. But I’m just not here. Well, here’s one. So every county in Ireland has, like a kind of a nickname. I would say cork would be the rebel County. For example, County Clare is known as the banner County, and they were known, if I can get it right now, there is lads, lads, men from Clare during various battles with the English occupation. Over time, they ran in and stole the banners, the English banners, and they were from county Clare. So, yeah. So, yeah, that’s, that’s what I suppose I could come up with, with a few more, I’m sure, but my head is too deep in marketing right now.

Christian Klepp 37:49

I think that one will do. That’s a really good one. That’s a really good one, but no. Fantastic, fantastic. Ronan, this has been a great conversation, and I think you inadvertently gave us the title of this episode already. What was it that I wrote down the world above the funnel?

Ronan McDonnell 38:06

Okay, I like Harry Potter.

Christian Klepp 38:09

No, but, but no. Thanks for you know, coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. Please, quick introduce yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.

Ronan McDonnell 38:19

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. I keep my answers quite long winded, so I’ll try to get to the point on this. Ronan McDonnell is my name. I own and run CMO Mojo. So we’re a fractional marketing service. Basically, we’re an outsourced marketing team. There’s two reasons why you would why people hire us or we get hired. One is really for our consultancy or opinions and our guidance to business owners and people who have marketing teams already as well. And then the other reason is really to carry out the actual doing of the marketing function. So not just tell you what you need to do, but actually do it and report on how that’s going with you. So yeah, some clients are whatsapping me and WhatsApp on them all day long, and others just want to an email at the end of the week or a month. So we’re completely flexible and normal. I hope you’ve picked that up during the call and yeah, I just think as a business owner, it can be risky enough to hire a full time marketer right out of the gate when you don’t really know what channels are going to carry the business long term. So starting with an outsourced team is definitely the way to go. Yeah, that’s it.

Ronan McDonnell 39:19

My own route into marketing is not a one of academia. It’s very much on purpose. I started building my own niche websites back in the day and trying to make money off AdSense and stuff like that, and content creation. And, you know, I started to YouTube channels and got them both monetized and earning so all of the things it took for me to learn throughout that that journey has kind of really informed me, and I needed to break out of the insurance industry into the tech sector, and the common denominator there was sales. So I jumped across, and then from sales, I got my opportunity in marketing, then I did go to school and get the piece of paper in marketing to prove that everything I. Just learned. I actually do know and yeah, so I think that’s a huge advantage to CMO Mojo is that of a number of years of sales experiences as well. So if sales is my genesis, you know, it gives us an understanding of what a sales team needs from a marketing team. And you can email hello@cmomojo.io or cmomojo.io is the website domain. You can go there and click contact us, or, you know, pop my name into LinkedIn and you’ll see my cheesy grin looking at you. You can send me a demon DM and connect anytime.

Christian Klepp 40:33

Fantastic, fantastic. Ronan, once again, thanks for coming on the show. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon.

Ronan McDonnell 40:39

No worries. Christian, thanks have me, that was fun. Thank you.

Christian Klepp 40:39

All right. Bye for now.

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