Business Growth Blog

When you're in sales and marketing, or any other business role, you're probably looking at contacts on LinkedIn. If you're using HubSpot CRM, you may want to get those contacts into the database so that you can identify good fit leads and track your sales activity. In this video, I'll show you a quick and straightforward way to sync LinkedIn contacts to HubSpot.

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!

You may be wondering what managing passwords has to do with sales and marketing. Well, it has to do with improving operational efficiency, which is one of the things I try and help my clients do.

I was talking with a customer last week, and he was going back and forth between a Word document that housed his passwords and the applications he was trying to log into. We didn’t have time to get into it, but I wanted to show him how to use a password management program to make the whole process 10x easier.

I figured if he wasn’t using a password system, then there are probably other people out there that aren’t either, so why not share the info with everyone?

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