How to Build Inbound and Outbound Sales Teams in 2025
Find out how to build your inbound and outbound teams in 2025
Building a sales team in 2025 isn’t just about hiring reps and hoping for the best. Buyers are savvier, competition is fiercer, and guesswork won’t cut it.
Here’s a closer look at how to build the best inbound and outbound sales teams so you can hit your 2025 sales goals.
Inbound sales vs outbound sales
Inbound and outbound sales are two sides of the same coin, and both contribute to business growth.
Inbound sales focus on attracting leads who are already looking for solutions and pulling them in through helpful content, SEO, and email nurturing campaigns. The main goal is to guide potential customers down the sales funnel by building trust and offering value.
For example, a company might host webinars that address common pain points, positioning itself as an industry expert and naturally attracting leads.
Outbound sales, on the other hand, take a more proactive approach. Outbound teams reach out directly through tactics like cold emails, cold calls, LinkedIn messages, and targeted prospecting. They aim to spark interest and create opportunities by introducing products or services to people who may not even know they need them.
Both approaches require different strategies and tools, but when combined, they create a balanced sales engine that captures active buyers and untapped opportunities.
However, this only works if inbound and outbound teams have the right skills for their tasks and know how to apply them.
Inbound and outbound sales team skills
Before we dive into the different skills required for each strategy, all sales representatives need these skills and qualities:
- Experience – Seasoned reps bring insights and confidence and can train less experienced team members through examples or specific tips.
- Ability to learn and handle criticism – Team members can absorb feedback, learn quickly, and adapt to new strategies.
- Goal-oriented mindset – Salespeople who know how to set and achieve goals can balance short-term wins with building long-term relationships. This keeps pipelines healthy as they progress through sales cycles (which last 70-162 days).
- Tech savviness – No sales specialist or company can compete in the market without effectively using CRM and sales tools.
- Adaptability – The ability to change on the go helps teams handle shifting priorities and unexpected challenges without losing momentum.
- Clear communication – Excellent writing and speaking skills ensure that ideas, pitches, and follow-ups resonate with prospects at every stage of the customer journey.
That said, inbound and outbound specialists need different hard skills and expertise to reach their goals.
Skill sets for inbound and outbound
Knowing which skills your inbound and outbound teams need will help you hire the right talent and get them up to speed.
Here are some of the path-specific skills for each strategy.
| Inbound sales skills | Outbound sales skills |
| Content creation and SEO knowledge | Prospecting and lead generation |
| Data analysis and performance tracking | Cold calling and emailing techniques |
| Relationship-building and nurturing | Social selling and LinkedIn outreach |
Success metrics for inbound and outbound
Tracking the right metrics for inbound and outbound sales helps you understand what’s working and where to improve. While some metrics might overlap for both engagement paths, there are many that are strategy-specific.
Here are some inbound sales metrics you should monitor, as well as how to calculate.
| Inbound sales metrics | How to calculate |
| Website traffic (total visits to the website) | Sessions/Unique visitors |
| Lead conversion rate | (Number of leads / Total visitors) x 100% |
| Customer acquisition cost (CAC) | Total marketing costs / Number of new customers |
| Email open and click rates | (Emails opened / Emails sent) x 100% and (Clicks / Opens) x 100% |
| Customer lifetime value (CLV) | Average purchase value x Purchase frequency x Customer lifespan |
Here are some outbound sales metrics you’ll want to calculate and keep an eye on.
| Outbound sales metrics | How to calculate |
| Response rate | (Responses / Total outreach) x 100% |
| Meeting booking rate | (Meetings booked / Total outreach) x 100% |
| Sales cycle length | Average time from first contact to closed deal |
| Win rate | (Deals won / Total deals) x 100% |
| Pipeline value | A sum of all potential deals in the sales pipeline |
Outbound sales teams roles
Outbound sales teams are typically divided into business development representatives (BDRs) and outbound sales representatives (OSRs). Both play crucial roles in outbound, but they have a slightly different focus and set of responsibilities.
Business development representatives
BDRs are typically responsible for generating and qualifying leads. They focus on the early stages of the sales cycle by identifying potential customers and reaching out to spark interest.
This includes prospecting new leads via various channels and qualifying them based on specific criteria.
It’s also possible that they may work with inbound leads forwarded from marketing, but in most cases, BDRs focus on cold outreach.
Outbound sales representatives
OSRs are specifically focused on outbound sales, reaching out to people who have yet to show any interest in a product or service.
They engage in cold calls, cold emails, and social media outreach, and they try to quickly determine if leads are worth pursuing.
Accordingly, OSRs work almost exclusively on new markets or untapped sectors.
Inbound sales teams roles
Inbound sales teams are comprised mostly of sales development representatives (SDRs), augmented by marketing specialists. They play important roles in inbound, but they have significantly different responsibilities.
Sales development representatives
SDRs are focused on qualifying and nurturing inbound leads. This involves taking marketing-qualified leads and turning them into sales-qualified leads who are ready for a demo or deeper sales conversation.
Some of their core tasks include:
- Responding to inbound queries
- Lead qualification
- Follow-ups
- Scheduling meetings
SDRs might also experiment with re-engagement campaigns or other tactics for keeping leads in the pipeline.
Marketing specialists
Although marketing specialists aren’t fully part of inbound sales, they do play a critical role by creating demand and revamping copy on request. This involves working with SDRs to create content, outreach campaigns, and SEO strategies for attracting leads.
Overlapping roles in inbound and outbound
There are a few roles that you’ll find in both inbound and outbound strategies.
Account executives
Account executives (AEs) are bottom-of-the-funnel specialists who handle closing deals passed from SDRs, BDRs, and OSRs. Their success depends on negotiation skills, adaptability, and relationship management to seal the deal.
Customer success managers
Customer success managers (CSMs) are after-sales specialists who focus on onboarding and retaining clients. They need strong communication and problem-solving skills and adaptability to build lasting customer relationships.
How to define sales strategies to help with building sales teams
Defining clear sales strategies is key to building a focused sales team. The right balance of inbound and outbound methods will allow you to align your team’s efforts with your goals.
Inbound sales strategy
Successful inbound strategies need to provide helpful and relevant content to attract potential leads.
Here’s what you need to do to define your inbound strategy:
Identify your buyers
Understanding who you’re selling to is the foundation of quality personalization. In fact, 96% of marketers say personalization increases the likelihood of repeat purchases while 94% state personalization increases sales.
You’ll want to start by researching your ideal customer’s demographics, pain points, and buying behaviors to create detailed buyer personas. This will help you create targeted marketing materials that can guide prospects to a purchase decision.
Map the buyer’s journey
You should map each buyer’s journey stage to see if some processes or practices can be improved or optimized. This will also show you if the content for each stage is tailored to your leads’ needs.
For example, blog posts work best for the awareness stage, case studies for consideration, and demos for decision-making.
Create value-driven content
Content is king in inbound sales—it drives people’s attention and convinces them to stick around and check out your solution. For one thing, 73% of B2B webinar attendees turn into qualified leads.
But before generating tons of content, think about the types and topics your audience prefers. For instance, if you sell video messaging software for email marketing, an ebook or presentation with proven ideas for video messaging should interest your target audience.
Optimize for discoverability
Even the best content is useless if no one can find it. So follow SEO best practices to rank higher in search results. Here are the basics:
- Optimize meta titles, descriptions, and headings with keywords
- Promote your content through social media, paid ads, and partnerships
- Use tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to track rankings, analyze keywords, and prioritize content that attracts the most traffic
Nurture leads
Lead nurturing keeps your brand top-of-mind while gradually building trust with prospects.
Tools like HubSpot or AiSDR can help automate and personalize email campaigns. This allows your team to focus on more complex tasks while ensuring no potential deal is overlooked.
Outbound sales strategy
To be successful, outbound strategies need to help you proactively find and connect with potential customers.
Here are some of the things you’ll need to do to define your outbound strategy.
Pinpoint your target audience
Just like inbound sales, outbound sales thrive on precision targeting. That’s why you must define your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) based on industry, job roles, and challenges. Knowing the exact match, you can feed your criteria to tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator or AiSDR to source leads in seconds and build lead lists.
Craft compelling cold messages
Highlight how your solution addresses the prospect’s pain points and improves workflows to spark interest in them. One hack is to use AI email writers to research and draft emails. That way, you’ll get a personalization level with low effort. You can also use them to A/B test email frameworks and spintaxed copy to see what works best.
Reach out over multiple channels
Maximize impact by engaging prospects through emails, LinkedIn messages, phone calls, and even text messages. This might help increase a customer’s lifetime value, as omnichannel shoppers tend to make 1.7x more purchases than those using a single channel.
But don’t send the same outreach or follow-ups through all the channels at once—that will just annoy your leads. Research, test, and analyze their preferred channels, timing, and messages to find the best way.
Personalize content for companies and pain points
Сustomize outreach to reflect each prospect’s industry, role, and challenges to show that you care and your solution can help with their issues. With this approach, you can win them over even if they’ve just heard about you for the first time. For example, include insights about their company’s growth or recent funding rounds to show you’ve done your homework.
Align inbound and outbound strategies
Your inbound and outbound strategies should complement each other for maximum impact. Use insights from inbound marketing, such as website visits and content downloads, to inform outbound outreach. For instance, an outbound team can prioritize using whitepapers with the most downloads for cold outreach.
These strategies and tactics may sound pretty basic. Still, when you go through the whole list and define the details, you’ll see what needs to be done for your inbound and outbound sales teams: roles, tools, and other resources.
How to scale your sales team
Scaling your sales team isn’t just about adding more people. It’s also about building the right structure to support growth.
With the right mix of talent, processes, and tools, you can expand while keeping costs under control.
Balance in-house specialists with outsourced talent
Combining in-house specialists with outsourcing allows for flexibility and cost management, as well as keeping your core team small enough to make it feel cozy and efficient. This way, in-house teams offer deep product knowledge and the ability to adjust to changes, while outsourced specialists can quickly scale efforts.
The cost advantage is one of the biggest. In the U.S., the average salary for an in-house BDR is approximately $66,000-$107,00 per year. In contrast, some SDR agencies offer pre-vetted sales specialist services for ~$1,000 per month, depending on the sales volume.
Create a sales playbook
A comprehensive sales playbook standardizes best practices and gives your employees solutions for common sales issues. It serves as a reference for email templates, call scripts, objection handling, and closing techniques.
For example, you can add a repository of successful email templates and call scripts tailored to different buyer personas to the playbook. This way, you can ensure that new hires know how to act according to the company’s policies and practices without overloading more experienced colleagues with questions.
Automate time-consuming tasks
Automation allows your sales teams to focus on high-value activities like building relationships and closing deals. Plus, automation tools are accessible to everyone today, as you can find many free or low-cost options on the market.
By delegating high-volume tasks like data entry, follow-ups, and scheduling, your team can save hours every week. As a result, you get fewer errors and more time spent on selling.
Leverage AI sales reps
When simple automation is no longer enough and you don’t have the budget or desire to hire more sales reps, AI SDRs and AI BDRs are a viable choice.
AI-powered tools can run outreach and shoulder the workload of many sales tasks, from lead generation and qualification to writing cold emails and nurturing leads.
For instance, AiSDR finds leads that match your ideal customer profile in a database of over 700 million contacts, qualifies them, and researches their social media and other data to define pain points. Using this data, it then generates highly targeted, hyperpersonalized emails.
When working with inbound leads, AiSDR recognizes a lead’s intent signals, researches them, and contacts prospects at the right time with the right message (or recommends human SDRs to do it).
AI SDRs and AI BDRs like AiSDR provide many benefits for efficient scaling:
- Cost-effectiveness – With AI tools, you don’t need additional hires; you can automate tasks and lower overhead costs.
- Faster response times – AI operates 24/7, providing immediate responses to prospects even when your sales teams aren’t around.
- Expanded reach – AI can manage a higher volume of leads, especially for tasks that don’t require human touch (lead generation, qualification, etc.).
- Replicability – With AI, you can easily test different sales tactics and strategies and scale the effective ones across different campaigns.
- Efficiency boost – AI minimizes human errors and optimizes workflows, allowing your team to concentrate on strategic initiatives and relationship-building.
Best tools for inbound and outbound sales
Your sales tools can and will make or break your inbound and outbound strategies. Here are some of the top tools you can use for your sales.
AiSDR
AiSDR is capable of powering both your inbound and outbound sales outreach, and takes special steps to avoid burning through your leads. AiSDR can:
- Converse with your inbound and outbound leads naturally, work with objections, send follow-ups, and answer questions
- Write highly personalized emails with generated videos and even memes
- Warm up your inbox and set up the email infrastructure
- Track website visits and send targeted outreach to visitors
- Build campaigns for different intent levels
Pricing: From $750/month
HubSpot
HubSpot is a popular CRM that streamlines sales processes by providing sales agents with information about leads and customers and automating many mundane tasks. Some of the most useful features include:
- Pipeline management tools for clear visibility into deals
- Reporting dashboards to measure performance
- AI assistant Breeze Copilot (Beta) to get personalized insights and recommendations, generate content, and automate routine tasks
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $15/month/seat
Calendly
Calendly simplifies booking meetings by eliminating back-and-forth emails. It’s ideal for setting up calls with prospects and clients by:
- Allowing prospects to book meetings based on availability
- Sending automated reminders to reduce no-shows
- Integrating with Zoom, Google Suit, Microsoft Suit, HubSpot, Zapier, payment services, and other tools for seamless scheduling and meeting
- Supporting team scheduling for round-robin or group meetings
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $10/month
TitanX (formerly Phone Ready Leads)
TitanX helps optimize cold-calling campaigns by improving connection rates and reducing time wasted on bad numbers. For this purpose, it offers:
- Verified phone numbers selected with a predictive algorithm to connect you with high-quality prospects
- Preferred communication channels of decision-makers
- Contact enrichment
- API integrations with your existing tech stack
Pricing: Custom pricing based on features and scale
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is a data-driven platform for B2B sales teams that helps them find and reach out to ideal prospects. Its useful features include:
- Verified contact and company data for a targeted outreach
- Intent data, website visitor tracking, and buying signals
- Lead enrichment
- Conversation analysis and predictive modeling
Pricing: Custom pricing based on team size and features
RB2B
RB2B helps sales teams identify anonymous website visitors so you can turn passive traffic into inbound leads. Your team can use such features as:
- Real-time data on anonymous website visitors
- Real-time alerts when prospects visit key pages
- Lead scoring to prioritize high-interest visitors
- Integration with LinkedIn, Slack, HubSpot, and various marketing and sales tools
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $129/month
Common mistakes to avoid when building sales teams
Building a strong sales team is more than just hiring great talent. It requires careful planning, the right tools, and a strategy that avoids common pitfalls.
Here are 3 of the most common mistakes you might make (or you’ll hopefully avoid) when building sales teams.
Too much focus on one strategy over the other
Relying solely on inbound or outbound strategies can lead to missed opportunities. While inbound might bring warm leads, outbound is critical for reaching untouched markets. Balance both approaches to build a robust pipeline.
Not investing in the right tools
Choosing tools without understanding your team’s workflow can backfire. For example, investing in AI SDRs designed for outbound sales won’t deliver results if you also need tools for inbound lead nurturing.
The best-case scenario is that you’ll waste time looking for and setting up a new tool. The worst case—your team will still do most of the job manually. So, evaluate tools carefully before committing.
Poor communication between teams
Misalignment between inbound and outbound teams can result in duplicate efforts or lost leads. Your outbound and inbound sales reps should not be opposites but part of the bigger, united sales team. Set regular meetings and shared KPIs to keep everyone on the same page and working toward unified goals.
