Inbound - The Blog: The Secrets Behind Click To Close

How To Drive Massive Increases In Sales Opportunities For Your Sales Team

Marketing is going through a massive transformation. Marketing teams and digital marketing agencies are all being asked to deliver much more than fancy creative. Today, they’re being asked to deliver leads, and not just any leads. They must deliver high-quality, sales-qualified leads that quickly move to sales opportunities and potentially new customers.

If this is the new normal, then business leaders, CEOs and even VPs of marketing at companies going through this change in expectations need to adjust their strategy to make sure they produce compelling creative and the sales opportunities expected.

This shift requires an adjustment in thinking and an adjustment in the selection of tactics. It requires a more holistic understanding of the buyer journey and how both marketing and sales delivery impacts the overall business results we’re all looking for under this new set of expectations.

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Why Rethinking Your Revenue Generation Strategy Might Be Your Best Option

I know, it sounds dramatic. When we wrote the book “Fire Your Sales Team Today” we were hoping the title would grab everyone’s attention. Who hasn’t considered firing poor-performing salespeople? But that was not our intent. Our intent was to have you fire your sales team and then rehire them immediately under a different mandate: Guide instead of sell!

We wrote that book several years ago, and today it’s probably more relevant than ever before. Your buyers are behaving in dramatically different ways, yet most companies are still running sales and marketing playbooks from the 1990s. It’s time to toss those playbooks in the trash and start again with a “click-to-close” system that attracts prospects to you, converts them from visitor into lead, actively nurtures them from lead to sales opportunity and then efficiently helps them understand why your company is the only one they need to select.

This revenue generation machine is scalable, predictable, repeatable and efficient at producing a regular flow of leads, sales opportunities and new customers.

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How To Cut Through All Of The Confusion And Produce Results With A Blend Of Inbound Marketing And Demand Generation Tactics

Just to illustrate how confusing the world of digital marketing is right now, on my way home last week, I heard an ad on the radio for an internet marketing agency that was going to help companies get leads by using new internet marketing tactics to drive business results. Funny how they promote their ability to use the internet to drive leads for you, but they need the radio to drive leads for themselves.

In a similar story, the picture here is of a newspaper ad from another digital marketing firm identifying how confused everyone is and how they’re also here to help, but they need old-school print-based newspaper ads to get their own story out. It’s not surprising CEOs are confused when you see conflicting messages like this on a daily basis.

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The Secret Lies Buried In Your Own Expectations And Budget

We get asked this question often: “Do I need demand generation, inbound marketing or both?” It’s a great question for CEOs and VPs of marketing to be asking, but the answer almost always lies in the follow-up question we have to ask: “Well, that depends; what are your revenue goals for the company and what expectations do you have for this marketing over time?” In short, how quickly do you need leads?

If you’re thinking you need leads quickly and you have the budget to support it, you should consider a blended, double-stacked demand generation and inbound marketing program. The demand generation tactics will produce leads early in the process and the investment in inbound will sustain those leads, even allowing us to dial down the demand gen tactics over time.

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Here’s What To Look For And How To Screen Agencies At INBOUND 2017

Good news! Your CEO just gave you approval to hire your first digital marketing agency. You’re excited because you signed up to attend INBOUND 2017 and you’re pretty sure you want an inbound marketing agency. More good news: A lot of agencies are on display at the INBOUND 2017 conference. This sounds like the best place to start your search.

You wouldn’t be wrong. A lot of agencies are going to be exhibiting at HubSpot’s annual conference from September 25-28 in Boston, and a lot of agency owners are going to be speaking (and even more are attending). But how are you going to compare, share your goals and evaluate their ability to help you?

The short answer is you might not be able to do all of that in just a few days. But if you come to the event with a plan, you might be able to narrow the list down, and you might be able to come up with a selection process that ensures you get the right shop to help your company with its unique set of marketing and sales challenges.

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Driving Leads, Sales Opportunities And Revenue Is An Outcome You Should Expect

You’re getting nice increases in visitors to your website, but your website is only producing a steady 1% site-wide conversion rate. That’s not horrible, but it’s definitely on the low side of average. Average site-wide conversion rates run between 1% and 3%, with top-performing sites doing upward of 8% to 9% across all pages.

If leads, sales opportunities and revenue are goals of your program (and they should be), ratcheting up your website conversion rate with a conversion rate optimization (CRO) project should be at the top of your to-do list. In essence, you’re taking a company asset (your website) and the visitors coming to your website, and you’re optimizing the performance to produce more revenue.

However, CRO projects are tricky, and if you go into one without experience, a plan and a solid strategy, you could find yourself spinning your wheels and wasting both time and money.

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5 Must-Have Elements To Ensure You Exceed Your Revenue Generation Targets

Setting, hitting and then exceeding your revenue goals is more complicated than ever before. The key complicating factor is one you have little control over: your prospects. They’re not sitting in their offices waiting for you to call them anymore. They’re out and about, they’re on their smartphones, they’re actively running their own purchase cycle without you and they’re only bringing you in at the end of that journey.

This makes getting their attention, telling your story and actively engaging in their buyer journey with them a major challenge. This revenue generation strategy challenge requires new thinking, new processes, new tools and new expectations around the behavior of your marketing and sales team. But it’s not all bad news; there’s just as much good news.

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The Ability To Predict Leads And Match Program Tactics To Lead Generation Is Key

Marketing today requires a highly complex set of tactics that need to be tightly orchestrated, and that’s just to get leads. If you want those leads to be high quality, turn into sales opportunities and then convert into new customers, now you’re talking about sales process upgrades, and the complexity just keeps getting trickier.

The questions that CEOs ask me all of the time are “am I getting enough leads?” and “are we getting the right amount of leads for the investment we’re making in marketing?” Those questions are hard to answer, but any digital agency worth its salt should be able to show CEOs exactly what they’re getting from their efforts and exactly how many leads, sales opportunities and customers are coming through the pipeline.

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Go With A Plan, Stick With Your Plan And Adjust On The Fly

INBOUND 2017 is going to be an overwhelming experience for most attendees, especially if this is your first time at the conference. With around 20,000 attendees, hundreds of sessions and more than 500,000 square feet of continuous exhibition space, you’re mistaken if you think you can just show up. The key is having a plan and working that plan.

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Yesterday It Was All Inbound Marketing, Today It’s The Right Blend Of Demand Gen And Inbound Tactics

Inbound marketing sure has changed since it splashed on the scene in 2009. Now almost nine years later, what had been a pure attract approach is now part attract and part strategically interrupt. I’m not burying criticism here. I agree with a looser definition of inbound, and even as an agency, we’re all-in on configuring a marketing program based on the client’s needs, goals, objectives and existing resources.

In case you can’t tell, we feel strongly that demand generation is an important part of doing what inbound was originally designed to do — get leads, turn leads into sales opportunities and then convert those opportunities into new revenue. If marketing (any kind of marketing) can’t generate revenue, it’s wasted money and wasted effort.

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