Smart Marketing Blog

Engage More, Stand Out with Sales Videos

Video is an interesting, memorable and inexpensive way for salespeople to personalize and humanize their messages, particularly for companies conducting some or all of their sales processes by phone or online. It can also have a profound effect on your connect success rate. One study I ran across found a 5X increase in email open rate and 8X increase in click-through rate for companies that incorporated videos into their sales processes.

What is a Lead Conversion Funnel?

  To understand what a lead conversion funnel is, you should know what a regular ol’ funnel is. According to “The Google”… So for our purposes, a Lead Conversion Funnel at the most basic level is a visualization of how prospects or leads interact with your company from an unknown website visitor to a new, first-time customer. The only difference with a Lead Conversion Funnel and your run of the mill kitchen funnel is that 100% of the contents poured in do not come out as customers.  This is where the conversion portion comes into play. There are imaginary holes in your funnel where leads leak out for various reasons, including disqualification, lack of interest, unsubscribes etc. In order to predict this loss with a reasonable amount of certainty, you use conversion rates to calculate the various lead stages. Each company’s conversion rates will vary but typically are fairly consistent from industry to industry.

What Keeps the VP of Sales and Marketing Up at Night?

Prospecting is one of the most difficult parts of the sales process. Why? The act of prospecting is typically interruptive, performed at the salesperson's convenience rather than the prospects, and too often it occurs too early in the buyers journey. All of this leads to frustration and inefficiency for the salesperson, and a turn-off for the potential buyer.

Think Beyond the Funnel & Leverage the Flywheel

For years, sales and marketing teams have focused their time and efforts around a funnel that focuses on attracting prospects at the top and converting them through various phases until they become an output at the bottom.   

Stop Interrupting and Selling, Start Educating and Supporting

Marketing and selling in the B2B engineering and technical space used to require exhibiting at trade shows and placing print ads in trade journals or technical publications. But engineers and technical buyers now prefer to start their product or service evaluation online instead of at events as they did in the past. More and more, these buyers want to be educated vs. sold to in the traditional sense. 

Video: Basics of Lead Scoring

As your inbound marketing efforts gain traction and you start to capture a steady stream of leads, you will likely encounter new issues. The surplus leads may bottleneck in the marketing > sales lead handoff, aging while waiting for review and follow up, or a drop in sales productivity as your high-value resources spend too much time evaluating leads instead of working qualified prospects. At the same time, you have a significant opportunity to monitor signs that a potential qualified buyer is ready to engage with sales.

Improve Your Sales Pipeline: 7 Steps to Email Nurturing

You’ve crafted buyer personas, developed content topic clusters and created optimized content for your target audience. You’re ranking well in search and generating more visits and leads than ever, but you’re not seeing an increase in business. What do you do next?

TREW Doubles Client Lead Growth with Inbound Marketing

HubSpot recently named our firm a HubSpot Platinum Agency Partner for its success with inbound marketing. Our focus is marketing to engineers and helping tech clients with branding, website design, content marketing, and pipeline management using the HubSpot platform and inbound marketing to grow leads.

What's Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is a strategy across process, resources and technology that improves the productivity and performance of sales’ ability to advance leads through the sales pipeline. 75% of survey respondents reported that sales enablement made a moderate or significant contribution to their sales forces

10 Questions When Creating a B2B Sales Enablement Strategy

Talented salespeople are highly valuable resources for your company, and you want to ensure that every hour they spend is applied in the most impactful way possible. A strong sales enablement strategy sets your sales people up to consistently sell more effectively. Companies that use sales enablement best practices are 50 percent more likely to achieve or exceed sales quota*.