This has happened a few times. I’ll post about running a nearbound sales process— tapping into those buyers trust for intel, intros, or influence—and someone will posit that I’m being too cute calling it ’nearbound’.
It’s what the best salespeople have always done. Does it really need a new name?
I think it does.
To paraphrase C.S. Lewis,
good
language must exist if for no other reason than that bad language does.
I don’t
mean four-letter words. Language goes bad when it stops producing the desired result.
Maybe the best practitioners of
outbound
are already layering in trusted voices who surround the buyer, but most aren’t. When you say ’outbound’, what comes to mind for most is what most salespeople do—mass quantities of cold, impersonal (or worse yet, badly "personalized") emails.
They treat it like a numbers game when, in reality, it’s a network game.
Whether we like it or not, the word ’outbound’ doesn’t
convey the need to surround the buyer, live in their market, and partner with those they trust.
That’s why nearbound resonates. It takes a little something from its predecessors
outbound
and inbound and brings a little something new. Nearness is a concept we understand. Combining that with "bound"
isn’t
just
a cutesie move. It opens up a new way of seeing and thinking.
Nearbound is, in many ways,
just
a way to give voice to what the very best revenue pros have already been doing. But that voice is desperately needed because the majority haven’t
figured it out.
If you’ve been running these plays already, you are ahead of the rest. Now you have a word to explain what you do and how you do it.
If you haven’t
been running these plays, there’s no better time to start. (And no better place to do it than at the
Nearbound Summit.)
