I have traditionally been a believer that any form of marketing other than what is classified as, “Inbound” is typically a waste of money and time. As I think about it however, I actually think that this idea of, “Inbound marketing” is actually a bit ridiculous. HubSpot defines inbound marketing this way: “Since 2006, inbound marketing has been the most effective marketing method for doing business online. A little further down the page they ask, “What is inbound?” MORE

With lots of inbound leads, you’ll need to prioritize which ones need a response first, and it’s not always as easy as you might expect to make this judgment call. When a visitor or lead gets in touch on your website, it’s important to get as much context as you can around the live chat conversation you have with them. Your aim should be to understand what they want, how you can help them and to judge how fast they need a solution. MORE

The interesting thing is that the way we get our clients right now is strictly around content marketing, inbound and SEO. Adam: All your clients today are inbound. But it ended up working out, because we built our own inbound machine just in the nick of time. Eric Siu has helped some of the biggest brands in tech accomplish one all-important task: grow their revenue. Eric is the CEO of digital marketing agency Single Grain. MORE

The visibility and urgency of tactical requests from engineering, marketing communications and sales—plus a lack of priority and support from senior management for inbound research and strategic thinking—can place severe constraints on the product manager’s ability to act as CEO. When someone calls the product manager CEO of the product, what does that mean? And is it a helpful analogy? The product manager as CEO of the product sounds powerful and strategic. MORE

From outbound to inbound. Most people view live chat as a tool for responding to inbound leads, but one of the most under-utilized benefits we’ve seen on the Intercom sales team is to warm up the cold outreach experience. This new approach to live chat as a part of cold outreach has turned outbound emails into inbound conversations. Even better, these inbound conversations quickly become an opportunity to build a relationship with a future customer. MORE

What’s more, if you disable inbound conversations on the Messenger, and the user has no previous ones, the conversations app won’t appear at all. Yesterday marked one of our biggest releases yet – our all new messenger. MORE

Andrew: Brian Balfour was previously the VP of growth at HubSpot, which invented inbound marketing and a bunch of other important concepts. [Hi readers: I wanted to share a podcast interview I did with Adam Risman of Intercom, who interviewed me on a wide array of topics including Dropbox’s viral growth methods, my time at Uber, and future growth strategies. This was originally published on Intercom’s blog here. Hope you enjoy! -A]. Listen to the podcast here ». MORE

Top KPIs in organizations might include sales revenue, customer value, conversion rates, inbound marketing ROI, and site traffic to name a few. ON-DEMAND WEBINAR. Make UX A Part of the KPI Conversation With Universal Measures. MORE

On January 13, 2018, more than one million residents of the state of Hawaii received an emergency alert on their smart phones, warning them of an inbound ballistic missile. By Abdul Rastagar. The warning instructed people to “seek shelter immediately” and finished with the ominous sentence, “This is not a drill.” ” The message, however, had been sent inadvertently by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency during routine testing. MORE

productboard , the all-in-one product management solution, launched today on Product Hunt the Portal , an all-new interface that bridges the divide between the product teams and marketplace. productboard Portal enables product managers to get the pulse of their customers. MORE

Finally, for businesses that really want to dial up their self-service support, our new Messenger allows you to turn off inbound conversations for the very first time. Turning off conversations will reduce the flow of inbound messages that your team receives, lightening the load on your support team, while still providing customers with ample opportunity to help themselves using the Article Search and Content Showcase apps. MORE

When 80 percent of Internet users own smartphones, it is no surprise that mobile marketing has quickly become one of the leading sources for generating inbound leads. This tactic is fast and effective at delivering solid inbound leads to new businesses. By Sophorn Chhay. MORE

Top KPIs in organizations might include sales revenue, customer value, conversion rates, inbound marketing ROI, and site traffic to name a few. Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are basic measures that are often front in center in most board rooms. MORE

Think about it as either inbound or outbound comms. A lot of our time as PMs is spent communicating with other people in our organization. MORE

The primary value chain online activities are as follows: Inbound Logistics: Data feeds (RSS, XML, CSV…), ad slots, business pain, keyword research, availability of community tools (e.g. MORE

A frontline rep for inbound leads would spend most of their time triaging a ton of messages received through various channels. Until relatively recently, salespeople were not too enthusiastic about the idea of using live chat for sales. We saw it as taking away our power to prioritize our time for leads and instead gave that power to whoever happens to be online at that moment. But by using live chat to capture and convert leads, that attitude has begun to change rapidly. MORE

A few members of our Marketing team recently attended HubSpot’s Inbound 2017 conference in Boston, one of the year’s largest events for marketing professionals. On the final day of the event, they had the opportunity to hear Ed Catmull, co-founder and president of Pixar, who discussed his leadership strategies and how they contribute to building a healthy culture within an organization. Catmull writes in his best-selling book, Creativity, Inc.: MORE

Purpose Example Branding, growth hack, inbound marketing, account base marketing, mass marketing, B2B marketing, product marketing, and etc. What is marketing? Some people may say advertisement, SEO or SNS. Others may say lead-generation or branding. Those are correct. But it’s not enough. MORE

Andrew: Brian Balfour was previously the VP of growth at HubSpot, which invented inbound marketing and a bunch of other important concepts. What do Dropbox, Uber, AngelList, Front, Gusto and Boba Guys have in common? All have benefited from the sage advice of growth expert and Andreessen Horowitz general partner Andrew Chen. Andrew’s been an angel investor and advisor for a slew of name-brand startups; however, he’s most widely known for his invaluable essays on growth. MORE

Many of the companies we work with are looking to analyze inbound traffic among their various channels. Businesses are constantly in search of useful tactics that improve their brand’s performance and bottom line. MORE

Similarly, we talked about how Netflix did a fantastic job of putting together an astonishing culture deck that certainly caused a boost to inbound recruiting with the company. Last night I had the pleasure of attending the latest Startup2Startup on engineering management with Yishan Wong , an early director of engineering at Facebook. MORE

Product owners can close the gap between a product manager’s inbound role (that is, understanding the needs of the marketplace) and the development team’s need for product direction (that is, understanding the detail of personas and their problems). MORE

I was being interviewed for a Product Managers position by a Chief Operating Officer (COO) who used to do the job that I was interviewing for. The company has adopted and really embraced scrum so naturally expects the Product Manager to take on many of the Product Owners responsibilities. MORE

As you can see in the picture, these categories are inbound and outbound Product Management. This division between inbound and outbound PM duties is much more pronounced at larger companies. If you are an inbound PM, you might want to take steps to get into an outbound PM role. MORE