With more than 100,000 concurrent customers and a host of accolades to their name, Salesforce is a giant within the CRM software industry. Offering a full range of cloud-based features and functionalities, Salesforce has for more than a decade been helping its customers streamline their communicative efforts with prospects, helping them close more (and bigger) deals and grow their bottom line. 

That already sounds like a pretty sweet deal. However, Salesforce is only as valuable as the data it stores. Clean and tidy data will make your processes fly, but working with unreliable and corrupt information is a miserable experience.

Obviously, knowing what something is is important. However, the practical value often comes from knowing how to do that something, not simply knowing what that something is. On the back of this very smooth introduction, we’ll be starting our discussion of the lead generation strategies that you should incorporate into your inbound marketing practices to ensure a steady flow of new leads.

Prospecting is seldom the favorite part of the sales process. It’s often considered hard and time consuming. In fact, prospecting it’s often identified as the hardest part of the sales process. Don’t fret! Thanks to technology, it shouldn't be too difficult to find good prospect and actionable leads.

Nine out of ten marketers diss gated content. And yet, nine out of ten marketers use gated content as a way of bringing in leads.

While reportedly first being coined in 2006 by HubSpot, you can find examples of inbound marketing through history, even before the emergence of the internet. The common thread that linked all of these different marketing initiatives was that they worked to pull customers to the organization, not push the organization’s offering upon the customer. With the immense popularity of the inbound methodology today, the results should really speak for themselves with regards to the efficacy of an inbound approach. But, how do you implement the inbound methodology with regards to lead generation? In today’s digital world, how do you as a B2B company attract customers to your organization?

These are a few of the questions that this article will be tackling. It will be going through four essential steps that you need to follow to build an inbound lead generation engine that constantly feeds top-quality leads to your sales team. These four steps will ensure that you’re attracting relevant visitors and converting them into productive leads. But, first, let’s cover the basics.

The most successful sales organizations are the ones working systematically. To do that you have to have clearly defined goals, sales KPIs (key performance indicators, that is), and relentlessly measure and monitor how your sales and marketing efforts contribute to help you reach them.

This is why performance sales development teams have well thought out sales KPIs that are being tracked daily, weekly and monthly.

With modern technology, the question is not what you can measure, but what you benefit from measuring. Following the right metrics will help you as a B2B sales executive evaluate the performance of your team and steer them in the right future direction. Measuring the wrong or additional metrics will simply take precious time away from the things that matter.

It’s B2B sales 101. Using standard industry classifications for market segmentation is commonplace. Need to sell to the finance industry? Use SIC code 6199, and you'll quickly find a list of companies in that industry.  

If you sell to particular verticals, it's easy to see why Industry classifications are essential for proper B2B segmentation. They can assist in identifying the particular organizations that benefit from your product or service and then selling to them. However, traditional industry codes, like NAICS and SIC, have two major weaknesses:

Salespeople often obsess over growing a big, beautiful sales pipeline. “Fill pipeline with hot leads” or “fill pipeline with best-fit prospects” are recurrent tasks at the top of the to-do list. While well intentioned, that often means salespeople will dedicate too much time to sales prospecting instead of thinking about how to get prospects to flow through the pipeline.

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” That's one of the most important quotes in business. At least if you want to be data-driven—and who doesn't, right? 

Do you want to stay on top of your sales activity and grow a healthy pipeline? Stay tuned! We’ve designed a sales activity tracking spreadsheet for salespeople to keep track of their daily activities of prospecting, calling, and meeting customers.