The Inbound Prospecting Guide: How to Work High and Low-Intent Leads Without Wasting Them

Inbound vs. Outbound: Clearing Up the Confusion

Outbound is fairly straightforward. You go out, start conversations with strangers, and create a pipeline of potential deals. Cold calls, cold emails, social DMs, all seller-initiated.

Inbound is different. Inbound means that in some way they are coming to you. They aren’t strangers.

Inbound lives on a spectrum. On one end, you have people reaching out directly for a demo. On the other end, you have people engaging with content, attending events, downloading research, or interacting with social posts. Companies label all of this as inbound, even though the level of buying intent varies dramatically.

That’s where most confusion starts.

Inbound as a spectrum

If you think of inbound as a spectrum, you’ll see on one end you have signals that tell you someone has a “high level of intent” to buy something. On the other end, you’d see signals that someone has a “lower level of intent” to buy something.

At the high end of the spectrum are signals like:

• Requesting a demo
• Visiting the pricing page
• Researching competitor reviews

These indicate a higher likelihood that someone is in the market for your services / solution.

At the lower end of the spectrum are signals like:

• Downloading content
• Attending a webinar
• Engaging with social posts
• Researching a topic online

These people are engaging with marketing, but they are not necessarily ready to buy.

Inbound historically outperforms cold outbound, and that shouldn’t be surprising. These people are familiar with you. But familiarity shouldn’t be treated as permission to lazily pitch.

Context Is the Real Signal

Inbound signals are really not much different than outbound signals when doing outreach. They (inbound signals… or any other “signal”) are context for why you’re reaching out.

Attending an event is context. Downloading a report is context. Requesting a demo is context. What matters is how you use that context to shape the message.

You can personalize with additional context by layering in additional 3rd party signals, things like past experience, tools they use, company changes, or market dynamics. But even without that, inbound context alone is often enough to start a conversation.

The mistake teams make is treating inbound as a shortcut to meetings instead of looking at the context as an opportunity to get curious and start a conversation.

The Inbound Spectrum in Practice

High intent and low intent inbound share the same foundation:

• Context matters
• Tone matters
• Curiosity matters

What changes is the intention behind the message based on the context. Are you incorrectly putting pressure on a prospect to get them to a meeting when they should be engaged for a conversation? Or are you correctly getting them to the next step? Are you automating the right steps? Did you approach them too aggressively?

These are all questions that can be answered by looking at the context and the intention.

Segmentation Creates Priority

Whether it’s a high intent or a low intent inbound lead, you’ll still want to further enrich the inbound signal to gain more context. 

Tools like ZoomInfo, Apollo and Clay provide great data studios for this routing and can create predictable splits in your lead list. You can pair this with our agent, Ora, which does a broader enrichment and reasoning to further speed up seller’s research, and writing processes.

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Creating this segmentation on common traits (size, industry, title, etc) and more unique traits (size of sales org, selling to enterprise vs. SMB, hiring for AEs, a self serve model present, etc) creates opportunities to better prioritization.

If you work at Lavender, you’d hopefully treat a VP of Sales differently than a SDR attending a webinar. But, that prioritization would change if that team was hiring in sales. The focus of the message might also change is they sell SMB vs. Enterprise.

Higher priority accounts would see:
- More touch points across more channels
- Less automation

But, they would still see a message that matched the context of the inbound signal.

Marketing & Sales Alignment Pro-Tip: At Lavender, we’ve historically used a “hand raiser” marker on marketing collateral and events. So if you signed up for an event, you’d be asked if you’re interested in taking a look at Lavender. This can be a killer 1st party datapoint. If folks are showing other 3rd party datapoints, it’s still fair game to reach out. But, it makes prioritizing who gets outreach easier.

Subject Lines

The subject line on an email to an inbound lead should still follow the rules of internal camouflage - with one exception.

You have familiarity - use it!

If your subject line was going to be “demo request”, or “State of Email Report”, add your company name as the first word in the subject line. You might see a longer subject line, but this taps into a simple truth:

Your reader is skimming for names they recognize and threads they expect before giving attention to the sea of “everything else” in their inbox. This subject line trick allows you to break away from everything else because that familiarity is there.

Low-Intent Inbound: How to Execute

What Counts as Low-Intent Inbound

Low-intent inbound signals include:

• Social engagement
• Webinar attendance
• Content downloads
• Research activity

These are signals, but on their own they are not signals that it’s a good time to sell something. In conjunction with other traits and signals, it can start to paint a picture that it’s a good time to talk to them about your product or service. But, this changes the context.

Interest in a topic doesn’t equal interest in buying a software or service. This is why these types of signals are “low intent”.

The Seller’s Role in Low-Intent Inbound

Your role is to act as a guide.

Inbound was originally coined by HubSpot around the idea that content can be used to pull prospects into your orbit sooner and more efficiently than if you were to only try to reach out cold. This creates a pool of people who are on a journey learning about problems they have, that you can solve - ideal for sales.

The sellers job is to work in alignment with the guiding principles of inbound. That means to support their exploratory journey, instead of hijacking it by applying outbound tactics to an inbound lead pool. 

You’re trying to help them understand the topic, and their challenges, more deeply so that you can both understand the gaps they’re facing. It’s not about kick starting a sales cycle with every webinar.

Here’s how this comes to life:

Example: Content Download Follow-Up

Hey Julia, saw you downloaded our State of Email report. What’d you think?

If there’s something you’re trying to dig deeper into, I’m happy to send over more specific research.

This is wholly focused on starting a conversation and being helpful.

Example: Social Engagement Follow-Up

Hey Julia, how good was Jen’s post on multi-threading? Is your team trying to do some of that today?

This is conversation-first. No pitch. No pressure.

Example: Webinar Follow-Up Using Customer Stories

Thanks for stopping into the webinar, Joe. Will touched on some data around cadences.

We just finished advising our customer, AcmeBot, on their cadences. Results are up 60 percent from the original 2x lift we saw. Know they sell to a similar persona? Happy to share any learnings.

The product stays secondary. The value comes first.

Remember low-intent inbound is about guiding

Buyers are burnt out from everything turning into a pitch. Sellers who win use inbound signals to create value-add moments.

This is also how low-intent inbound turns into advocacy. These people can become internal coaches and champions as you work deeper into the account.

How to Follow Up

While a cold call, a LinkedIn connection, and a DM are appropriate, given the lack of “buying” signal the urgency should match the cadence structure.

3 emails over 2 weeks, a call with a voicemail, and a LinkedIn connection are probably on point for someone who has the right “title”. If they’re at the right account, but don’t have the perfect title it could also be effective to get the conversation started.

But, lets say they’re a lower priority contact. They’re not the right title and it’s not a great fit account - then you’d want to tone down the touch points.

For lower priority inbound leads, you can also utilize more automation than if they’re higher priority.

Higher priority leads should be treated as higher priority. So, if a higher priority lead comes inbound they should be see fewer automated touch points.

While it seems counter intuitive for “inbound”, when you have someone within your org’s orbit engaging with content and in a mindset to learn from you - taking an extra 3 minutes to ensure you have full context can be the difference between a “wow” experience and a typical sales encounter.

This is true for high or low intent inbound.

High-Intent Inbound: How to Execute

What Counts as High-Intent Inbound

High-intent inbound includes:

• Demo requests
• Pricing page visits
• Competitor research

These signals indicate someone is likely in the market to buy something.

Speed to Lead & Tone

High intent leads tend to be a higher priority- which deserves less automation. But, sometimes the signal deserves faster action. Automation helps. 

The problem is tone. Inbound works best when you frame yourself as a helpful resource, not a sales rep rushing to close.

If they’re already interested in making a purchase, you break patterns, come across as helpful, and create some early reciprocity in your emailing. You can supplement this by leaning into channels like the phone quickly to get in front of them as well.

Example: Demo Request, Done Wrong vs. Right

Will, really appreciate you reaching out to learn more about our email coaching platform.

At Lavender, we’ve built the leading email intelligence layer. Most know us through our extension, but we’re helping teams understand why email works.

I’ve included my calendar link here, but let me know if the following times work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

This might convert, but it also looks automated and spammy.

Now, here's what a "conversation-first" email looks like:

Natalie, saw you reached out to learn more. What caught your eye?

Happy to help. Included my calendar link in the signature if finding time is easier.

The scheduling link still exists below the signature. The difference is tone. This email opens a conversation instead of forcing one.

Why High Intent Still Requires Thought

You might be tempted to think messaging doesn’t matter here. They’re ready to buy, right?

These are the most important leads you’ll ever get. You don’t throw messaging at them. You get curious.

Only a small percentage of your market is actively shopping, every high-intent lead matters.

Research Before You Reach Out

High-intent signals are clues, not reasons.

Someone on your pricing page might be:

• Hiring
• Evaluating tools
• Under pressure to scale
• Responding to internal initiatives

Your job is to understand why.

Example: Demo Request Follow Up

Hey Chad, saw your request to learn more. What got you excited to dive in?

I noticed you’ve been making hires recently in sales, guessing that plays a role.

Just helped a team in your space in a similar position. Focus was on getting their new rep’s pipeline faster. Started to get quality opportunities in place in half the time. 

I included my calendar link here, but let me know if you’d prefer I use your scheduling link.

You acknowledge the context, add insight, and keep things flexible.

Example: On Pricing Page

Hey Chad, with your recent hiring, have you looked into any AI solutions to support those new sellers?

We recently saw strong pipeline results with AcmeBot.

Here, pricing page visits or competitor research signal a broader initiative. You play a little dumb and open the conversation.

Following Up on High-Intent Inbound

High-intent leads that don’t respond still deserve follow-up. These leads should see more calling (with voicemails pointing them to your other outreach)... these leads could even be worth using a LinkedIn Inmail credit on if you’re not getting through via other channels.

If you’re looking at ways to follow up over email, I’d check out our frameworks. Here’s a simple structure that could create 4 follow ups for a cold email and cover you for 4 weeks:

1. Clarification email
   
   
2. Thoughtful bump
   
   
3. Request for referral
   
   
4. By-for-now breakup
   
   

This gives clarity, nudges action, and leverages human psychology to get the response.

Don’t Squander Inbound

Inbound is not permission to pitch. It's the context for starting a conversation.

When message matches intent, and intent matches tone, marketing and sales can find work in tandem to create more high quality opportunities. Marketing got them to the table, it's on sales to read the room and approach them in a way that’s situationally appropriate.