Inbound is the Demand Compass motion that attracts accounts and pulls them in through content and a real point of view; it builds the brand awareness axis, runs underneath every quadrant rather than owning one, fills the Market Map with accounts you can then read, and does not convert on its own.
Inbound is the motion that attracts accounts and pulls them in. It is one of the three motions that develop the awareness axis, with Outbound and Nurture, and none of the three converts: they fill the Market Map. Inbound differs from the other motions in one way. The quadrant sets the motion for Outbound, Nurture and Activation, but Inbound does not own a quadrant. It runs underneath all four, filling the Map with accounts that now know you and can be read on both axes.
Inbound runs on content and a real point of view, usually carried by the founders. This category education earns first familiarity and makes the next outbound touch land as relevance instead of noise. An account that read your argument about their problem, even once, answers a signal-informed email very differently than one meeting you cold. More content means more reach, and more accounts wandering into the dark channel where the Signal Radar can finally see them.
We built our own business this way. When we started, no one was searching for us, so we published a point of view consistently, ran workshops where we taught the method instead of pitching it, and built a newsletter that is now thousands of revenue leaders deep, most of whom found us before they had any reason to buy. None of it produced a meeting the week we did it. What it produced was an audience that knew us, so when one account got a new VP or a board mandate, ours was the name already in their head. The mistake is to measure this motion by the meetings it books this week. It is awareness you are building, and awareness is measured on its own axis.
From The Demand Compass, by David Moreira and Marcos Stubrin. All terms · The book
