5 no-nonsense recommendations for your sales and marketing

A New Year brings with it new resolve and if you want to move beyond the business equivalent of promising to do more exercise and drink less, and really want to kick your sales and marketing into gear for 2017, here are 5 no-nonsense recommendations for areas you should focus on.

1. Deploy lead scoring
   The single most valuable tool for identifying warm and hot prospects is lead scoring. Lead scores accrue through engagement with your emails and your website and can be tracked through affordable marketing automation software that is easily tailored to your business's requirements. While it can take a few months for lead scores to accrue and patterns to emerge, they will completely change your perspective on marketing and sales when they do.
2. Employ resources to make the first direct contact with warm leads
   In B2B, it is rare for prospects to buy 'off the bat'. They need a nudge to let you explain in more detail how your product or service could make a difference to them. Making sure you have resources in your structure with the skills and responsibility to make direct contact with your warm leads will mean that you have a regular flow of new business opportunities in your pipeline. If you don't have the requisite resources in-house, outsource them. This is telemarketing 2.0.
3. Develop a content plan as a driving force for lead generation
   Marketers have been talking about content for several years now, and with good reason. Content is what you use to get people to read your emails, bring traffic to your website and show engagement via downloads. The process isn't complicated, nor as resource intensive as it can first appear, but it does need a rolling plan of activity that mixes evergreen, time bound, unique and curated content that answers the questions your target audience will have.
4. Make sure your website is geared to lead generation and online sales
   This means clear navigation, lots of downloads, effective use of landing pages and a proper understanding, based on analytics, of where to place your calls to action. If your website is attracting traffic, but not generating leads, it is not geared to lead generation. Change it or rebuild it.
5. Increase your demand for good measurement and analytics
   There is no longer any reason to say that marketing is not measurable. A demand generation programme is infinitely measurable through the right combination of lead and lag performance indicators. Use Google Analytics, lead scoring, social media analytics and email results in combination with sales to create a performance dashboard that gives you a clear picture of trends and ROI.

Here to help

Please talk to us if you want any help with putting these elements in place. We can provide consultancy and advice to support your own implementation or handle the implementation and ongoing management of programmes on your behalf on an outsourced basis.

Whichever approach you choose, we hope this help you have a successful and prosperous New Year.