I think I'm still an advocate of inbound marketing, but feel like I've also been learning a bit over the last 10 years. One thing I've learned is that the lead

I think I'm still an advocate of inbound marketing, but feel like I've also been learning a bit over the last 10 years. One thing I've learned is that the lead time on it, particularly if you're starting from the position of no platform and (potentially) no experience producing public artifacts, is quite long. The lead time on writing emails is pretty short; you can execute on it today, have a call lined up for Thursday, and get agreement in principle by Friday (depending on the complexity of the sale, but assume something which could be adopted in a low-touch fashion). Having a customer on Friday is a lot more effective in terms of learning what still sucks about your product than getting your first customer in February 2018. Your mileage may vary; there are lots of ways to play mix-and-match among approaches here. (I'd note that most of my previous success with high-value deals was indeed mix-and-match; something inbound like "Hey I liked this blog post" from a software company occasioned "Really glad to hear that. I have some thoughts about how it is relevant to your situation, too: $THOUGHT, THOUGHT, THOUGHT. Would you like to discuss in more depth?" occasioned Actual Sales Work (TM) quite a bit of the time.)