u/oogaboogapeanutmonke

Been an inbound seller at a major B2B research/advisory firm for the past 2 years.

While it was great for the first year, our company has been steadily tanking (our stock is down over 50% this year, which may narrow it down..). With this, marketing has clearly faced major pressure to get our inbound team more leads.

Over the past 6 months, our marketing partners have at least tripled the amount of paid/email campaigns they’re running, and a lot of them are straight up false advertising. What used to say “fill out your info to speak with a sales rep” will now say “fill out your info for access to insights” or “fill out your info to experience the future of executive support”.

The forms we rely on don’t even mention sales anymore. They are pure bait and switches. The prospects get no free resources, and are oftentimes (understandably) pissed that we then reach out with calls and emails, telling them that they need to spend 5-figures to get access to the report they thought they’d get sent to their inbox.

My team is sharing these concerns with management, but they are drowning in kool-aid and just yap about getting better at objection handling. I genuinely like facing objections because it gets me closer to a deal, but “I am not interested and you guys told me I’d get something for free” is proving to be a pretty difficult objection to overcome.

Thoughts here? Anyone experience anything similar? I like sales, but pestering people who I feel the company has misled just makes me feel shitty about what I’m doing everyday.