Inbound leads versus outbound deals. Easy choice if you ask most sales professionals. Many will say they prefer incoming leads, such as demo requests and so-called “hot-leads”, over spending time manually prospecting and connecting with potential customers. But the truth is, outbound deals can be equally as good—sometimes even better—than inbounds. It all comes down to timing.

Ask a librarian how they classify books and you better have some free time. Grab a coffee, sit down, the reply will be long. Library classification is a precise, systematic method for coding and organizing library materials so people can find its books quickly and easily.

Successful business-to-business sales and marketing activities also require a methodical classification of accounts and the decision-makers within those accounts. When you group companies according to specific attributes, you can uncover unique ways to identify the particular needs of each group. You’ll serve each group of companies better.

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.

There’s little to no rest in sales. Every week, month or quarter the countdown starts over, and you (or your team) are racing to hit quota against that clock. Time is a commodity in sales. (Like you didn’t know that already.)

There are numerous ways in which you can streamline your sales. One useful way to save time and increase sales is to make sure you’re concentrating on best available leads, and not wasting time on dead-end ones.

But HOW? How can I improve my lead scoring and make sure I prioritize my valuable time on the leads most likely to close now?

Relax, modern technology can do the ground work for you. In this blog post we'll tell you how.

Love them or hate them, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms have matured into incredibly complex systems. Countless features and options help companies and salespeople track and optimize their entire sales process, making CRM systems today the backbone of any sales organization.

However, while CRM software is powerful on its own, integrating your CRM with other tools across your sales stack will unlock its full potential. Only when you connect to other tools, you’ll achieve a seamless workflow without having to go back and forth between multiple systems.

In this article, we’ll explain why you expand your system’s functionality with CRM integrations. As an example, we’ll go through the three steps you need to take to integrate your CRM platform with a sales intelligence tool.

Good marketing requires a solid relationship between you and your prospects. Good sales, too. Hardly breaking news, I know. But with B2B sales moving into digital commerce, scaling interactions with your customers and prospects can sometimes prove challenging.

Enter marketing automation.

Behind every successful motion picture, there’s an entire team of people, responsible for different tasks, working towards the joint goal of co-creating the next blockbuster movie. The director is the creative genius with the vision, who works closely with the actors to coach and guide them in that direction. On her side, there's the producer. A film producer is running more operational tasks such as the hiring of crew and cast, scheduling, and sourcing of material.

Why are we talking about movies, you might ask? Well, because in high-growth sales organizations it’s not uncommon that the VP Sales becomes a sales liability. Sales coaching, forecasting, evaluating sales tools... are just a few of the things we usually see sales leadership spend their time on. With too many things on their plate, a VP Sales will either be letting important processes and decisions slip through the cracks, or spend way too much time looking at the numbers while not spending enough time on their people.

Having a sales operations role is a smart solution for a growing sales organizations, similar to the what a movie director seeks in their producer. By leaving more responsibility on the sales operations manager (producer), the VP Sales (director) can spend more time on leading the team towards success.

For a few years, account-based marketing (ABM) has been the hottest topic in the B2B world. Companies are concentrating on acquiring specific high-value customers with highly targeted, personalized campaigns, basing the targeting and marketing message on particular attributes of an account.

In sales, being lucky is in your hands. Your expertise, your networks, and your contacts will boost your luck-o-meter, but when the stars are not aligned—and usually they aren't, tapping into modern technologies and data will undoubtedly increase your chances of closing a deal.

A study by CSO Insights shows that almost half of salespeople feel they don't have enough information before reaching out to a prospect. Acknowledging this, it comes as no surprise, that according to Forrester, only 22% of salespeople are very effective at personalizing content for every buyer interaction. What makes this equation even more problematic is that modern buyers expect an even more relevant, personalized approach than they did a few years ago. Buyers are more knowledgeable when they have their first interaction with you, and they expect you to meet them where they are in the buying journey.

To learn how not to fall into these statistics, continue reading further about the what, why and how of tracking and acting upon trigger events.

Lengthy lead capture forms are as off-putting as bad breath and pit stains on a first date. Good marketing requires a solid relationship between you and your prospects, so you want to make the “getting to know each other” process easier and more fun.

In the last several years, marketing automation has helped digital marketers manage and nurture these relationships at scale, but at the expense of extremely terrible first few dates. More often than not, the relationship fizzles out quickly. The question is, how do you get past the first dates phase and get to know your prospects. Does your marketing automation platform have enough data points to deliver the campaigns necessary to nurture those relationships?