What is your tried and true method of assessing an organization’s goals to determine the customized proportion of inbound to outbound leads needed for success?

Every organization is different, and I always start with looking at both historical data and benchmarks. Generally, the lower the average deal size, the higher the percentage of inbound leads should be. For example, if your ADS is low (let's say $5000 or under), it's not very efficient to have both SDRs and AEs spending time researching contacts and cold prospecting, especially since cold prospecting converts at low rates. In terms of time spent to get a deal, a large % of the deal size will be taken up by paying salaries. Similarly, it doesn't make financial sense to run 1:1 or 1:few ABM campaigns on these deal sizes because of the effort involved.

As deal sizes get larger, the percentage of outbound should increase. Once you get into the millions per deal, it makes a lot more sense to spend dedicated sales effort to research and prospect into accounts. At this point, it also makes financial sense to dedicate marketing resources to build custom campaigns and messaging for a 1:1 ABM approach.

Start with the business targets to understand what the goals of the business are. Slice those business targets by available segments such as: region, country, solution, etc. Then look at the historical conversion rates within each segment to understand what's worked in the past. Build your model off the historical data to find out where you should be investing. Now, put together a recommendation that invests in the highest performing channels in the regions with the best win rates.

This is another one where the answer shifts dramatically based on the company, the team, the market their in, etc.

Maturity of the org. If an org is young and in those early growth stages with limited brand recognition, I might recommend some default rule of thumb like an 80/20 outbound-to-inbound split at first. Then gradually shifting toward 50/50 as inbound marketing gets better, channels mature, etc. A more mature company with established inbound demand might only need 30% outbound to supplement inbound leads. Though lots of very mature orgs are still at around 50/50.

What kind of data you have. If you know enough about the companies ARR goals vs historical conversion rates and can reliably (very important word) reverse engineer the funnel then you can back into the right balance. If inbound lead velocity is strong but can’t scale fast enough, I’ll recommend a heavier outbound mix. If inbound is highly efficient but underutilized, we optimize that first before leaning into outbound as a volume play.

What your target audience actually prefers, what behaviors. For a dev centric SaaS company, I’d lean on an inbound-heavy strategy since the audience prefers self-research and trials. In contrast, for a high-ACV enterprise SaaS offering, outbound will need to do more heavy lifting early in the funnel, supported by ABX-style inbound plays.

Internal makeup of your company. If the company has a lean marketing team but a strong sales team, then start by maxing out what you can get from them and goal marketing on making up the delta, shifting more toward inbound over time, with the goal of surpassing outbound eventually. If the company is investing heavily in brand and content, a more even mix can drive efficiency over time.