Inbound didn't die. What died was its mechanism.

The role of marketing is to make the company penetrate its target market. In B2B, that happens through the acquisition of new accounts and then through expansion inside those accounts, to pull the maximum revenue out of each one.

It's worth looking at where the word comes from, because the origin already explains the function. "Marketing" comes from market. Which means marketing is literally the discipline of thinking about the market, understanding the target market and acting on it.

Put in day to day terms, everything marketing does has to end in a single question: is this getting the company into the market it chose? If the answer doesn't hold up, the tactic may produce a good looking number in the report, but it isn't doing the job.

And it's with that question in mind that going back in time makes sense, because inbound was born precisely as an answer to it.

Inbound was born in 2006, at MIT, when Brian Halligan, who came out of the cold prospecting world, looked at Dharmesh Shah's startup blog and saw that people were arriving on their own, for free, educating themselves on the very subject he needed them to understand in order to sell. The original premise was not to generate leads, it was to take part in a demand creation that was already happening.

Brian came from sales. He spent his whole career helping technology companies hit quota, and nobody knew the mechanics of outbound better than he did: list, dialing, cold call, meeting booked. But around that same time, he was already noticing that making cold prospecting work was getting harder and harder.

At that same MIT, Dharmesh kept a blog about startups called OnStartups. And that blog had an absurd audience without him having to chase anyone. People arrived on their own, searching Google for how to build a startup, and they stayed to read, to comment and to come back.

While I burn energy interrupting people who don't want to be interrupted, Dharmesh has a giant audience showing up on its own because he publishes something useful.

A paraphrase of the reasoning that gave rise to inbound, not a literal quote.

Here comes the point almost everyone forgets, and it changes how you read everything that follows. Their insight was not inventing demand creation. It was noticing that demand creation was already happening, with buyers educating themselves, and building an organized way to take part in that education using the digital tools that were emerging at that moment: Google, the blog, the form and email.

And where did the lead fit into all this?

The form and the email were not conceived as a machine for generating leads to push to sales as fast as possible. They were conceived as an exclusive nurturing channel, which solved two things at the same time.

On the buyer's side, they got a direct line to the company to keep working through their own problem at their own pace, receiving relevant material by email instead of having to hunt everything down on Google all over again. On the marketing side, you could watch how many emails a person opened, which pages they visited and which links they clicked. That's where lead scoring came from, and it existed to tell you when someone was mature enough to talk to sales.

In other words, the lead was the means, not the end. The end was educating the buyer to the point of maturity where a sales conversation made sense. And it worked extremely well: this logic carried much of B2B marketing for almost 20 years, and HubSpot itself went from two guys on a campus to a publicly traded company.

But somewhere along the way, the market traded one thing for the other.

The market kept prioritizing the "generate the lead" part more and more, and the "educate the lead" part less and less. Targets got heavier on MQL volume, reports turned into MQL dashboards, sales started demanding leads, and marketing answered by delivering completed forms at whatever pace it could manage.

The detour explains how we got here. What's left is understanding why the old path stopped working, and that comes down to three very specific things.

Technology moves forward, people's behavior moves with it, and the way marketing and sales get done has to adapt to that new behavior. The premise of educating in order to create demand still holds. What changed, and changed a lot, is where and how that education happens.

That is exactly what Brian and Dharmesh did back then. They looked at the state of technology at that moment and understood that it opened up a new way to take part in the education the market was already doing on its own. They did not invent educating in order to sell, they adapted educating in order to sell to the technology and the behavior of that moment.

And we are living through a new leap in technology and behavior right now, one that shakes the foundations again. Education is not going to die, quite the opposite: the B2B buyer needs more education than ever, because as technology advances, problems and solutions get more complex, and the wrong decision gets more expensive and pulls in more people.

Seen that way, the logic of old inbound, which was Google, blog, form, email and lead scoring, lost its grip. Not because the idea was wrong, but because the channels where the buyer learns today are different ones. That produced three truths that nobody working in B2B marketing can ignore anymore.

The funnel did not break because it was wrong. It broke because buyers stopped walking in line.

Put the three together and there is only one conclusion. Inbound, as the idea of taking part in the buyer's education in order to create demand, still holds. The old inbound mechanism for doing it does not. And anyone who wants to keep driving market penetration, which means selling more, landing new accounts, expanding the base and generating revenue, has to change the way they operate along with it.

Sources: Gartner, on the size of the buying committee in enterprise processes. B2B buying journey studies from Forrester/SiriusDecisions and Gartner, on the share of the process that happens before contact with sales.

If the old mechanism no longer works, the question left is what takes its place.

New Inbound B2B is a method that organizes market penetration into a continuous cycle of five stages: Position, Ensure Impact, Detect Signals, Start Conversations and Optimize. It keeps the premise of the original inbound, which is creating demand by educating the buyer, and swaps the linear mechanism for one that respects how the B2B buyer learns today.

The most important difference from the funnel is that here there is no beginning and no end. Each turn feeds the next one with what was learned in the one before.

Reading metrics organizes itself around a simple question: what do I know about whoever generated this signal? There are invisible metrics, when you measure without knowing who it is; visible, when you identify the person or the company even though they never handed over the data; and intent, when they handed over their contact information on their own.

Before getting into each layer, one point has to be clear. Metrics are a consequence of the tactics you choose to run. Each tactic lets you read a set of its own, which is why you cannot look at a metric without looking at the tactic alongside it. A podcast has different metrics from a thought leader post, which has different metrics from a lead magnet, which has different metrics from a scheduled demo.

The classic mistake worth avoiding

There is no such thing as an intent metric being better than an invisible metric. They measure different things, at different moments, in different tactics. A podcast tactic will generate around 90% invisible metrics, and that does not mean it is not working. It means it is doing its job, which is to educate and create demand in the invisible, and that the intent signal will show up later, in another tactic.

The rule, then, is to read each layer in light of the tactic that generated that number. Always.

That closes the argument. What comes now are the questions that come up most when it is time to apply it.