Sales Driven Marketing Hub

How do you become an influential thought leader?

See them in action, and it seems like every move they make gets shared thousands of times across social networks.

Where is the best place to meet influencers? ...and how do you approach them to help you promote your brand?

Seth Price from Placester shares his list of 22 influencer marketing ideas from influential marketers...

The gurus will tell you email is by far the preferred method of communication for most of your prospects. Want to know the best time to send an email, and increase your chances of having it read?

GetResponse analyzed 21 million messages sent from US accounts and found that 23.63% of all email opens occur within the first hour after delivery. By the second hour, the results drop by half.

Check out this infographic to get the details.

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.

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.

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

Both internal and external forces are driving the need for marketing to work more closely with sales. Here’s list of five ways great marketing teams align to increase sales...

Efficiency Leads to Agility – Brand building and lead generation reduces prospecting time, shortens the sales cycle, and allows your team to quickly adjust when market changes require you to be nimble.

Buyer Personas and Buyer Behavior - Companies that target content to specific to the buyer can produce highly predictable results that ultimately lead to increased closing rates.