Business Growth Blog

I regularly talk to companies that are considering starting an inbound sales and marketing program, but they lack the technological capacity required to do the work.

While there's a variety of sales and marketing technology available, the tool we've had the most success with is HubSpot. They put all the necessary functionality required into one system, which improves data sharing, communication between the teams, and work efficiency.

Technology and data are changing the sales game. Now you can easily find out which contacts in your database are engaged and what web pages they're reading. This information is a game-changer for helping salespeople frame sales conversations that get results. You can also get a list of prospective companies that are looking at your website.

Coming from an old-school sales background, having access to all of this information still boggles my mind. It's pretty cool! Read more to find out how to identify warm prospects buzzing around your website.

Many of my customers use WordPress when we first begin our engagement. I've tried and tried to do inbound marketing on WordPress, and it hasn't worked out for me yet. I spend more time dorking around with technology than actual marketing. On top of that, I don't get all of the functionality I need, and my efficiency and effectiveness decrease dramatically.

People think that WordPress is “free.” Yes, it is true that it doesn't have a subscription fee or anything like that. However, time is money. Would you rather spend money on implementing WordPress plug-ins and creating workarounds to make it sort of do what you want or on designing and implementing marketing campaigns that can actually drive business results?

If you want to do inbound marketing (meaning blogging, email marketing, social media, lead generation, and the like), we recommend our clients - large and small - migrate fully from WordPress to HubSpot. Here's why:

Technology. Love it or hate it, it’s part of our world now. The right sales and marketing technology will help you get discovered, build credibility and trust, attract followers, and increase qualified sales leads.

However, it requires a holistic approach. One component is worthless without the other. If you don’t have ALL of the following technological capabilities, you’ll likely end up sorely disappointed in your sales growth.

Many of the businesses I talk to want to improve results from their sales and marketing efforts but don’t have the technology or resources to pull it off. Choosing the right strategy and system can be a big challenge. There’s a lot at stake: not getting it right can limit your ability to effectively market and sell your products and services, negatively impacting your growth goals.

If modernizing your sales and marketing system is on your priority list, a system upgrade or hiring new resources is also likely in order. It can be hard to know who to trust or how to maximize chances of success. It’s increasingly complicated stuff.

Check out the following infographic. It outlines 4 crucial decisions to make before investing in your sales and marketing system.

As salespeople, we send out a lot of sales prospecting emails. We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find just the right words to encourage potential customers to engage with us. It's tough.

I continue to be amazed at the technology that allows us to dramatically increase our ability to engage with the right prospects at the right time in the right way.

Most salespeople know they need to use a CRM (a Customer Relationship Management system, or sales database), but they dread it. It can easily seem like a bunch of time consuming data entry – and if it’s not set up right, it is. HubSpot recently did a survey, and found that on average, reps spend 1 hour and 32 minutes per day doing data entry. Yuck!

On the flip side, reps do need some way to manage all of their prospects, leads, and opportunities. And sales managers need ways to efficiently track forecasting and sales. If you think CRM is a pain, try doing it without a CRM!

These 2 sales prospecting tools can be very powerful in helping you secure meetings and close deals. Personally, I think they’re game-changing.

When it comes to all the functionality you need for lead generation, I came up with about 16 must-have marketing technologies- and that's just for starters. Truth be told, there are many others I wanted to include, but the list was getting too long.

Regardless, it's a LOT of stuff. Every technology costs money and they take time to learn. Worst of all, dorking around with technology can be a real barrier to actually doing marketing and generating leads.

Creating a marketing system that has all the functionality you need can be a challenge. You have 3 options for efficiently pulling all of these marketing technologies together.

There's no way around it: marketing requires that you have certain technological capabilities. Here's a list of the functionality you need in order to generate leads online (it's long, but there's an important reason for each component):