Sales Driven Marketing Hub

Sales depends on Marketing to create content that will help generate leads and create follow-up opportunities with prospects.

Ever wonder how writers consistently come up with great ideas for compelling content? Do they ever get writer’s block? Of course they do, but knowing you’re not alone doesn’t make things better.

You’ve got to come up with something. Even when other projects get in the way, and you’ve fallen behind on your editorial calendar, driving new opportunties for Sales remains top priority. Here’s a list of 22 things you can do to get out of a jam...

Sharing the right content, with the right audience, at the right time will make or break a campaign. New ideas and sophisticated strategies are adding complexity, and not all marketers are created equal. The game has evolved and now requires six talents to succeed in modern day marketing.

Campaign Manager - The campaign manager plans and executes messaging based on buyer behavior and customer readiness. They develop a marketing automation strategy that follows pre-determined lead scoring guidelines and list segmentation rules. It’s about managing the funnel to distinguish between marketing ready leads and sales ready leads.

Small business owners and consultants can now use Google Helpouts to generate leads and share their expertise.

You can search for experts on the topic you need and get help right away. You have the option to join immediately via live session or schedule a future date.

Helpouts incorporates Google Hangouts, Google Voice Chat, Google Wallet and other Google tools, and allows the option to deliver a service for free or for a fee. All of the features found in Hangouts are also available in Helpouts, including remote desktop, Google drive, YouTube videos and other tools to help you share your expertise. Check it out...

Some managers take a, "Don’t do anything without my approval," approach.

It doesn’t take long before team members stop contributing new ideas.

Could this be happening at your company?

It's easy to spot. When you observe your team, how do they behave and interact? Are decisions being made based on guiding principles or is everyone asking for permission?

Figuring out how to build social influence can be overwhelming and frustrating. The game has changed multiple times over the last five years. There are more players and more rules. There are groups within networks which leads to rules within the rules, creating more challenges and limitations than ever before. What's worse, the social networks are ever changing, doing "what's in the best interest of their users," of course... and it just makes everything harder.

There's a difference in the way champions view and manage their emotions.

Some people have the idea that positive emotion puts them into positive motion.

Champions think the exact opposite. They believe that positive motion leads to positve emotion. They don’t worry about whether or not they “feel like it.”

Winners know it has to be done… and so you find a way… and YOU make great things happen.

This quick story represents a perfect parallel. If the bear and the wolf can hunt together, so must Marketing and Sales...

Photographer Lassi Rautiainen captured the profound partnership between a she-wolf and a brown bear in the wilds of northern Finland. For days, he witnessed the strange pair meet every evening to share food after a hard day of hunting. No one knows when or how this relationship was formed, “but it is certain that by now each of them needs the other.”

What can leadership do when the team is suffering from "Shiny Objects Syndrome"? It isn't that the last 10 ideas weren't any good, it's more about lack of planning, strategy, and execution. Taking time to think through your plan sets the stage for success, builds credibility, and creates buy-in with your team.

Here's a list of seven questions that will help you activate alignment between marketing, sales, and sales operations... 

Companies that set out to change the game, do 10 things better than everyone else…

1. They build a marketing and lead generation strategy that changes conversations from, “I’ve never heard of you,” to “I’m a part of your online community. I see you guys everywhere on social, and I was doing a search for companies who can help us with A, B, and C… and I found you on the front page of Google.”

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves. -Steve Jobs

Always give people more than what they expect to get. -Nelson Boswell

Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends. -Walt Disney