As an inbound marketer, I download pretty much every piece of premium content I find. (Premium content? That’s the material for which you need to fill out a form or you can’t download it, a form asking for your name, email, phone number, perhaps job title, and the like.) For me, it’s purely research on marketing trends, learning how to do inbound marketing better, and of course, checking out the competition.
I find it very interesting that even though I sometimes use my gmail account (not my work email) that I constantly get calls from companies where I downloaded some premium content, and they’re trying to sell me marketing automation services. It's not hard to do a search on LinkedIn to find the few Hasenbauers that are out there. It's not like my job title and my company are hard to find. Most anyone can see that I work for a company that does marketing automation and inbound marketing.
So why do these companies bother calling and following up on leads that have no chance of converting? Great question.
Three Questions to Ask Before Making the Call
Before any inbound marketer picks up the phone and calls a lead, there are three questions they should ask themselves:
- What is the history of this lead with my company?


I woke up this morning, dreading the 525,600 Cyber Monday emails I would have to sift through to get down to real business today. It was worse than just Cyber Monday email—since I was out of town for Thanksgiving, I hadn't touched a computer since Wednesday afternoon... which meant I also had all the pre-Thanksgiving, early bird and Black Friday notices filling up my inbox.
Things have fundamentally changed in the media industry, and I’m excited to have the privilege on November 8th to discuss why
So you drank the inbound marketing Kool Aid and it’s the sweetest you’ve ever tasted. Your team is churning out
