So what exactly is the New Inbound?

Introduction

I want to talk about something I've been hammering on for at least three years now, and that still leaves a lot of people confused: the New Inbound.

Before I start, let me be clear that the point here isn't to kill the funnel, isn't to go after anyone still running inbound the old way, and isn't meant to be a history lesson…

But I do have to go back in time a bit to explain how inbound started and why it stopped working the way it used to.

What I'm really after is giving you the autonomy to make your marketing produce more today.

That's it. The goal is for you to finish this and understand what's blocking your pipeline. And, from there, to have a way to unblock it.

Because in B2B marketing, strategic autonomy only exists when you understand where all of this came from, what changed, and why.

Without that, you're at the mercy of the next trend, the next guru, or the next "new formula" that shows up in your LinkedIn feed.

So let's get into it.

Before we talk about inbound, about HubSpot, about any of it, it's worth going back to the question that holds everything up.

What is the role of marketing?

And here's something worth sitting with for a second: the word "marketing" comes from "market."

Which means marketing is, literally, the discipline of thinking about the market. Of understanding the target market, of acting on the target market.

So, translated into your day to day, marketing's job is to make your company (or your project) penetrate its target market.

In B2B, that happens through acquiring new accounts. And, eventually, through expanding inside those accounts to pull out as much revenue as possible.

That's it. That's what marketing is for.

And let's be honest, that's what everyone wants. So that's the frame for this whole conversation…

How does marketing get a company into a target market?

With that question in mind, now it makes sense to go back and understand where inbound came into this story.

The story of inbound is more interesting than people think, and it's worth telling properly.

Back in the early 2000s, there were two guys at MIT: one named Brian Halligan and another named Dharmesh Shah.^[1]

Brian came out of sales.

He was the pipeline, outreach and prospecting guy. He'd spent his whole career helping tech companies hit quota, and nobody understood the outbound game better than he did: cold calls, lists, dials, meetings booked.

But around that same time, he was noticing that cold prospecting was getting harder and harder to make work (seen this movie before?).

At the same time, at that same MIT, Dharmesh was running a startup blog called OnStartups.

And here's the thing: that blog had a huge audience, for free, without him chasing anyone.

People found him on their own, googling how to build a startup, and they'd read, comment and come back.

When Brian looked at that, he had the insight that became inbound.

Basically, he thought:

Here I am burning energy interrupting people who don't want to be interrupted, and Dharmesh has a huge audience showing up on its own because he publishes useful content.

People are teaching themselves about the very thing we're trying to sell.

Why not play that game instead of trying to interrupt?

And here's the part almost everyone forgets, and I need this one to stick.

The original premise of inbound was demand creation.

Let me take my time with this, because it matters.

What Brian and Dharmesh saw was that buyers were already educating themselves.

They were already going to Google to understand their problem. Demand was already being created in the market, through content.

Their insight wasn't "inventing" demand creation.

It was seeing that it was already happening and building an organized way to take part in it, using the digital tools that were showing up at the time (Google, blogs, forms, email, and so on).

So they looked at how people were educating themselves in 2006 and decided:

"Alright, let's optimize this."

That's how HubSpot was born. And inbound became, in practice, a method for industrializing market education.

So where does the lead come into this?

Pay attention here, because this is another piece the whole market twisted later on.

The form and the email weren't designed as a "machine for generating leads to hand off to sales as fast as possible"...

They were designed as a dedicated nurture channel that did two things at once.

• On the buyer's side, they got a direct line to the company to keep learning about their problem at their own pace, with relevant material landing in their inbox.
• On the marketer's side, they got measurement. You could see how many emails someone opened, which pages they visited, which links they clicked. That became lead scoring.

The lead was the means, not the end. The end was educating the buyer to the point where they were ready to talk to sales.

And it worked, didn't it?

That logic carried most of B2B marketing for the last 15 years, and HubSpot itself went from two guys at MIT to a publicly traded company.

But something happened along the way.

Over time, the market wore that logic down…

It kept putting more weight on the "generate the lead" half and less on the "educate the lead" half.

Targets got heavier on MQL volume, reports turned into MQL-only dashboards, sales started demanding "leads," and marketing answered by shipping filled-out forms as fast as it could.

Until we got to where we are today, where only the lead matters and nurture happens after the sales touch, as a generic automated flow that barely works.

What started as demand creation done well turned into a race for lead generation.

See the drift?

For a fairly simple reason.

Technology always moves forward, and people's behavior changes along with it.

Which means the way you do marketing and sales has to adapt to that new behavior too.

It's always worked that way.

In fact, that's exactly what Brian and Dharmesh did back then…

They looked at the state of technology at that moment and saw that it was opening up a new way to take part in the education the market was already doing on its own.

They didn't invent "educate to sell." They adapted "educate to sell" to the technology and the behavior of that moment.

Now pay attention, because this is where it all connects.

Right now we're living through another leap in technology and behavior.

A new moment, and this new moment is shaking the foundations all over again.

Let me explain...

The premise of inbound, as we just saw, is demand creation through education, right?

Buyers educate themselves, and the company takes part in that education by publishing useful content where they study, opening a channel to keep things going (email, in the original model) and tracking engagement to figure out when they're ready to buy.

And let's be clear: that premise still holds.

It always has, actually. Content marketing is far older than any of this — it goes back to the 19th century.

Education isn't going anywhere. Just the opposite: B2B buyers have to educate themselves more and more, because technology keeps advancing...

And with it, problems and their solutions evolve too, which makes the wrong decision more expensive, more complex and more crowded with people every year.

So, if you work in B2B marketing, your main objective is market penetration through education (demand creation).

What changes, and changes A LOT, is how that education happens.

And seen that way, the entire old inbound education logic from HubSpot (Google + blog + email + form + lead scoring) has lost its grip…

Not because the idea was wrong, but because the channels where buyers educate themselves today are different ones.

And that produced 3 truths you, as a marketer, can't ignore.

1. The first truth is that the journey isn't linear, especially in B2B.

Old inbound assumed a more or less predictable path…

Someone searches on Google, lands on your blog, educates themselves, fills out the form, enters the nurture flow, matures and talks to sales once the score hits the threshold.

A straight line, one person at a time.

Except B2B buying was never a straight line, and today even less so.

In B2B, especially in complex sales where you work at the account level, there can be 6 to 8 people involved in the process (Gartner's number), each entering the journey at a different time and through a different channel.^[2]

In practice, one person comes in through a LinkedIn post, another through a podcast, another because they heard your company's name in a WhatsApp group, and another because a peer they respect mentioned you.

So there's no longer ONE entry point to capture and nurture. There are several, all happening in parallel, at different moments in each committee member's journey.

And the linear mechanism simply can't represent that.

2. The second truth is that education has decentralized.

This one, the way I read it, is the most structural change of them all.

The B2B buyer no longer depends on Google. Like it or not, Google was where education lived in old inbound. It isn't anymore.

As I said above, today B2B buyers educate themselves on LinkedIn, in podcasts, in private communities, in WhatsApp groups, in LinkedIn newsletters (hi there), in conversations with peers, and so on.

What's more, the data says roughly two thirds of that education happens before they ever talk to a salesperson.^[4]

That's dark social in practice. Invisible, distributed and impossible to measure or capture in a form.

And here's a practical consequence a lot of people still haven't swallowed: your content increasingly needs to be ungated (open, no friction).

Exactly like this page you're reading, because the goal today is to be found, consumed and shared in those spaces.

3. The third truth is that content has become a commodity.

When old inbound started working, content was a differentiator.

Early on, few B2B companies had a blog, few invested in SEO and few had a dedicated team.

Then the model caught on and the market noticed. Every company started cranking out content on an assembly line.

Entire businesses were built to scale it.

Anyone remember Rock Content here in Brazil? A huge company whose core business was exactly that: delivering content volume to feed the inbound machine.

And Rock wasn't the exception. There were dozens of operations running on the same logic.

Little by little, that turned the game into a commodity…

Stop and think about how many generic, repetitive, opinion-free articles written purely to rank on Google you've read in the last 10 years. Probably hundreds.

And now, with generative AI, it's the final blow.

Anyone can crank out 50 articles a day, Google is drowning in soulless text, and the whole "Google search > click > website" logic is being cannibalized by answers that come straight out of an LLM chat.

So there it is. Put those 3 truths together and you land on the conclusion that inbound, as the idea of taking part in the buyer's education to create demand, still holds…

But the old inbound's MECHANISM for doing it does not!

So if you want to keep penetrating the market (which, remember, is the objective. Market penetration = selling more = new accounts = a bigger base = revenue), you need to understand that the way you run inbound has changed.

B2B Insiders has been hammering on this for about 2 or 3 years now.

If you've been following us, you know we were the first to talk about this in Brazil, even before the articles from abroad about the death of the MQL and so on.

We were also the first to talk about the "death of the funnel" and about the need for a new inbound.

Back then, to give you an idea, AI wasn't even a thing yet, but we could already see the old inbound starting to wear thin.

So much so that today it's the conversation in the feed of 8 out of 10 B2B marketing heads.

And over those years, we didn't just break the funnel. We also started building something that actually fits how people learn and buy today.

We call it the New Inbound, of course, and we're already running it and creating value for clients and students. Let me walk you through the logic of it below.

The logic of the New Inbound has 5 stages that run as a continuous cycle, not a linear funnel.

They are: Position, Ensure Impact, Detect Signals, Start Conversations, and Optimize.

I'll admit it: in the three years we've been hammering on the funnel and the dependence on MQLs, the question we hear most is about measurement.

And I get it, I really do. If there's one thing old inbound does well, it's handing you that (false) sense of control.

But the truth is that CTR, CPC, landing page conversion rate, leads and CPL don't cut it on their own anymore.

They were designed for a linear funnel world and for reading signal from a single channel. Here we're reading signals from all sorts of different places at the same time.

And here's a point I want to make VERY clear before I get into the practical part.

Your metrics are a consequence of the tactics you choose to run back in step 2 (Ensure Impact).

Every tactic comes with its own set of metrics you're able to read, and that's exactly why you can't look at "metrics" without looking at "tactics" alongside them.

A podcast has different metrics than a thought leader post on LinkedIn, which has different metrics than a lead magnet, which has different metrics than a booked demo.

What helps organize all of this is splitting metrics into three levels. And I make that split based on a simple question: what do I know about whoever generated this signal?

Let me walk you through each one.

Invisible metrics

Invisible metrics are the ones where you can measure the signal, but you don't know who the person is or what company they represent.

Examples: podcast plays, YouTube views, LinkedIn post impressions, paid media campaign impressions, and so on.

You know the thing happened, and you know how much of it happened. But you don't know a single name.

And here's a point a lot of people underestimate: most of the education a B2B buyer goes through happens precisely in tactics that only produce invisible metrics.

A podcast, a YouTube video, a post in the LinkedIn feed, someone reading a newsletter on LinkedIn (hi there, whoever you are on the other side). In practice, the invisible is where demand creation happens.

Visible metrics

Visible metrics are the ones where you know who the person or the company is, even though they never actively handed you the data.

Examples: a like on a LinkedIn post, a comment (on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on the blog), a share, company-level visitor tracking on your site, a reaction on a thought leader post from someone on your team, and so on.

In other words, the person didn't necessarily fill out a form, didn't give you an email, didn't raise their hand, but their behavior told you their name.

And pay close attention to this one: a visible metric on LinkedIn especially is an extremely strong signal...

Because it comes with context: identity, job title, company, industry. That's a whole different level of read compared to "a podcast play from someone I can't identify."

Intent metrics

Intent metrics are the ones where the person, on their own, handed you their contact info.

And inside this one, there are two sublayers.

Low intent: the person gave you their contact info in exchange for something, but not necessarily to talk to you.

They downloaded an exclusive resource, commented on a lead magnet to get a piece of content, registered for a webinar, subscribed to your newsletter.

It's intent, but the real willingness to buy is still low.

High intent: now the person actually wants to talk to you.

A demo request, a request to talk to sales, a sales inquiry form. This is the closest thing to an MQL, but with one important difference: here the person asked for it, marketing didn't "graduate" them with a score.

The classic mistake

And here's a classic mistake I want to spare you:

There's no such thing as "intent metrics are better than invisible metrics."

It isn't true. They measure different things, at different moments in the process, in different tactics.

A podcast tactic, for example, will produce almost 100% invisible metrics.

And that doesn't mean the tactic isn't working. It actually means it's doing its job (educating, creating demand in the invisible) and that the intent signal will show up LATER, in a different tactic (probably in the visible layer or in the contact form).

That's why the rule is: you have to look at the three layers of metrics side by side with the tactics you're running. Always.

And to make it even more concrete, look at this example in real time:

On the version of this newsletter I published on LinkedIn, I can measure a few invisible things:

• How many people it reached,
• How many views it got
• How many saves it got (something I watch pretty closely, by the way). I don't know who saved it, but I know it got saved.

Now, if you like or comment over there (go on, leave a comment), from that moment on the metric becomes visible, because now I know exactly who you are, what company you work at, what your job title is, and so on.

And if at some point after that you click one of the invitations at the end and sign up (yes, there are invitations at the end of this piece), then you've handed me an intent metric (low intent, in this particular case, because it's still education).

One single signal, three different layers, depending on the interaction you choose to have with me.

From there, the natural next step for anyone who wants to actually run this is to cross the three layers.

It's looking at invisible, visible and intent metrics together and starting to read market penetration as a system.

Because that's where you start building your leading indicators of market penetration.

But leading indicators versus lagging indicators, my friend, is a subject for another piece. Otherwise we'll never finish this one today.

Everything I've explained here (where inbound came from, the wrong turn the market took along the way, the three paradigm shifts, the 5 stages of the cycle and the logic of the three metric layers) is B2B Insiders' proprietary methodology.

It's what we call New Inbound B2B.

And it's what we've been applying with the clients running our Demand Generation operation.

And listen, if this piece left you with more questions than answers, that's a good thing.

It means you're starting to see the real size of the game.

But before you go off agreeing or disagreeing (and you're allowed to disagree, that's part of it), I want to invite you to two things.

The first is to get to know B2B Insiders, which is where we apply this method every day, with clients running a real Demand Generation operation.

The second is the B2B Demand Generation Program, which is where I teach New Inbound step by step. In there I show you not just the "what" but the "how"...

How to position, how to build presence without depending on Google, how to detect signals at scale, how to start conversations without sounding like cold outbound, and how to build the dashboard of invisible, visible and intent metrics that guides your team day to day.

If you want the autonomy to decide your next marketing move without being held hostage by the next trend, and if you want your marketing to start producing real results again, that's where I'd start.

Until next time,

David Costa Lima