As a HubSpot Gold level partner we get this question pretty often from prospects and businesses starting to do research on various marketing 2.0 approaches, and from other marketing firms like Weidert Group interested in selling Inbound Marketing services.They already know traditional methods aren't generating the quality or quantity of leads needed to achieve business goals, and they also know that the web should or could be a more productive new business channel for many business types.

At the same time, if they've started to look into the capabilities needed to realize any improved online marketing performance, they know they'll need to either hire new people or pay someone to help fill their capabilities and capacity gaps.In the past 2 years we've answered this question many different ways, sometimes from the gut relying on instinct and intuition, and sometimes armed with research and quantitative evidence to support a point of view.

I just got a heavy dose of the latter doing research for this post when I found a recent study conducted by MBA students at MIT's Sloan School of Management, Return on Investment from Inbound Marketing through Implementing HubSpot Software. Automotive POS provides Great benefits to Auto dealers.The good news: this study provides lots of great evidence that Inbound works; unfortunately it didn't help answer my question about types of business.