Tag: sales - Page 2

Like every other business owner, a month ago I stopped in my tracks. I looked around, read everything I could and basically tried to fill my head with as much knowledge as possible. I know that I don't know what I'm doing and right now more so than ever. I had so many questions: What is happening to the world and how is it going to effect my business? How do I navigate through this period of uncertainty and change, without falling apart? How are my staff going to take this? What's important? What isn't?

There’s a point in the sales funnel where the prospect is handed off to the next team member. Specifically, this is the point of the funnel where the marketing hands off prospects to sales and sales pass prospects to an account executive. The middle of the funnel is like a valve. At this point, you can expand lead quality definitions to pass a higher volume of leads to your sales team, or even tighten the definitions to give them a more specific segment of qualified leads. In the middle of the funnel, marketing facilitates the hand-off to sales. For this hand-off, content is created to engage and educate leads to identify who is interested in making a purchase. This part of the funnel has the biggest potential for marketing and sales to not completely align, so it requires the most attention. Below, we have some tips for how to prevent leads from going cold in the middle of the funnel.

 

Staying relevant in your industry is harder than ever. Every industry is overly saturated with companies fighting for the attention of their audience. Each company has its own way to provide value, and it can be really difficult to convince your customers that you provide a more valuable product than your competition. For this reason, you need to be able to set yourself apart from the rest of the pack to survive. Search engine optimisation is a great strategy to not only maximise the visits to your website, but it can also keep your efforts relevant and competitive in a saturated market. Below, we have some of the ways that search engine optimization can benefit the marketing performance of your business.  

The role of marketing is to provide the platform for sales to occur. That means generating leads, warming them up and then passing them on to our sales counterparts. When sales teams are cold calling and chasing leads, and you have a fully functional marketing department, there is something going wrong.

Few things can make a business more powerful than an aligned marketing and sales team. When both departments can rally around the same story, it leads to greater benefits for each department and the company as a whole. But how exactly does this happen? After all, marketing and sales have individual sets of metrics and goals: marketing is measured on generating demand and sales is focused on converting leads. If marketing and sales are going to work together, they need to be able to collaborate on their projects. Alignment is all about collaboration, and if each team is working towards the same goal it will make this process much more successful.

If you don’t fully understand the difference between marketing and advertising, you are not alone! Marketing and advertising are certainly related and intertwined, but there is a distinguishable difference between the two platforms. Each platform has different processes and approaches to promote products and services, but they work towards the same goal. Knowing how they differentiate will put your business on the path to success.

Chatbots are here to usher in a new era of customer service! Are you ready? Customer service agents will always be needed for the human element of customer conversations, but a chatbot can greatly assist your customer service team. Customer service agents love automated services like this because it frees them up to focus on the bigger pieces of their work. It creates a win-win situation where the chances that a customer will have to call in for support are diminished while being more productive with the time of the customer service agents. Below, we have some ways that a chat could change the way your customer service operates.

Building a marketing budget is a crucial step in establishing your marketing needs. A budget may sound like a kind of “leash” at first, but really, it’s a way to plan and strategise financially. A comprehensive, solid marketing budget will be able to equip your team to establish and accomplish the goals you set. Below, we have some things to consider while you are building your next marketing budget.

You are either at the half way mark or you have just closed off a financial year - either way, there are some things every entrepreneur should have done in July that really is a game-changer for the rest of the calendar year.

With the end of another quarter imminent, our business is re-thinking the way in which we do business. There are operational changes, a new management team and a number of strategic overhauls that will help our business navigate a new era.