Nearbound, or how to become the obvious choice

About 3 years ago I was sat outside a bar in Amsterdam with Ollie from Brightpearl - we started talking about the nuances of Nearbound and the effect it has on marketing in the ecommerce space.

I had just started Waye at the time and Nearbound was something that we were building in by accident into our processes, but when we started to actually build it into our processes in more meaningful way, the results exploded. And I have been obsessed with Nearbound ever since.

Not the theory of it, plenty of people can talk about the theory. I have been obsessed with actually doing it. With taking inbound, outbound and nearbound and getting all three pulling in the same direction, rather than treating them as three separate jobs owned by three separate people.

Everything below is a play we run for the agencies and tech companies we work with. The win is theirs, not ours.

Here is how I think about all three.

Outbound

Outbound rarely works in ecommerce. Not for the big stuff. If you are selling six figure projects, a cold email landing in someone's inbox on a Tuesday is not going to win the deal. Nobody wakes up, reads a stranger's pitch, and signs off half a year of budget by lunchtime. That is not how buying works, and it is definitely not how it works at that price.

So we mostly leave cold outbound where it belongs.

But outbound is not useless. It is just pointed at the wrong thing most of the time. It is very good for smaller asks. Inviting the right people to a survey. Getting a piece of research in front of someone it will actually help. Sending round something we have made because we think it lands for them specifically, not because we are working through a list.

And this is the bit that has changed. You can now use AI to build real personalisation and proper triggers into it. So outbound stops being spray and pray and starts being a well timed tap on the shoulder. The message is relevant because it is genuinely relevant, not because you dropped a first name into a template.

We ran exactly this play for Polaris Growth. Klaviyo put up the market development funds, and we turned that budget into a CRM benchmark survey in Polaris's name. The outbound was not a pitch. It was an invitation to take part in some research, sent to the right brands and written for each one rather than blasted at all of them. Nobody felt sold to, because nobody was being sold anything. They were being asked for a view they already held. That is outbound doing the job it is actually good at, a small relevant ask, with the platform footing the bill and Polaris keeping the authority and the leads.

Get that right and outbound earns its place. Get it wrong and you are just noise.

Inbound

Inbound is everything we build.

Most of a brand's future buyers are not ready to buy right now. Hardly anyone is, at any given moment. People are busy, mid contract, happy enough, or simply not thinking about switching this week. Chase only the tiny group who are ready today and you spend your whole life fighting over the same small table.

So we build for the rest. We make things for the people who will not need our client for six months, or a year, or longer. The articles, the research, the events, all of it exists to nurture. To be useful long before there is any deal on the table.

You can see the whole idea in our twelve-thousand case study. That is the Commerce Thinking newsletter, and twelve thousand is the number of views it pulls every month. The engine behind it is almost boring in how simple it is. Every couple of weeks we sit down with someone from Commerce Thinking's senior team for twenty minutes, talk about whatever is live in ecommerce, and turn that one conversation into two articles a week. Every Tuesday and Thursday, for over a year, without missing a beat. Almost nobody reading it is ready to buy anything the day it lands. That was never the point. The point is for Commerce Thinking to be so useful to the tech, finance and brand leaders who read it that it becomes the name they already trust. The replies, the traffic and the leads follow from that, not the other way round.

The trick is patience. You are not trying to close the ninety odd percent who are not buying. You are making sure that by the time they are, the client is the name they already trust.

Nearbound

Which brings me to the part I actually get out of bed for.

Nearbound is the recognition that your client is never the only voice in a buyer's ear. When a brand is choosing a new agency, or a new platform, it does not start from a blank page. It asks around. It leans on the platforms it already uses, the agencies it already works with, the other brands it respects. Trust travels through those relationships long before anyone gets a chance to pitch.

Think about how you pick a restaurant in a city you do not know. You do not read every menu in town. You do not respond to the flyer shoved through the door. You ask the one person whose taste you trust, and you go where they send you. That is nearbound. Someone the buyer already believes puts the client's name in their hands.

So we build that environment on purpose, on the client's behalf. Not by chasing referrals, but by wiring the client into the network their buyers already trust. The platforms, the other agencies, the brands with a good name. Turn up, be useful, do good work in the open, and over time the client becomes one of the names that gets mentioned when the question comes up.

Take The Forgotten Customer Experience, a report we built with Reveni. We did not write it in a vacuum. Every section had a partner brought in to contribute, someone with a real view on that part of the customer journey, so the thing carried more than one voice and more than one set of data. Then, once it was live, other partners helped carry it. A slot in a newsletter here, a post there, a shared link with their own tracking on it.

That is the rule for almost everything we make. At least one partner in the room while we build it. At least two more helping push it out once it is done. It works because it is genuinely relevant to them. The report says something they have a stake in, so they are glad to comment on it, add to it, and put it in front of their own audience. Their trust rubs off on the client, and the client's on them. That is how you build the environment for someone, one piece of content at a time.

The goal is simple to say and hard to earn. When a brand decides it needs a new agency, we want the client we are working for to be the obvious choice. Not one of five names on a shortlist. The one everyone around that brand already pointed to before the shortlist even existed.

Inbound builds the trust. Outbound puts the right thing in the right hand at the right moment. Nearbound makes sure the people around the buyer are already on the client's side.

Three years in, I am still obsessed. I think that is the correct response.