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?

At Vainu, we believe there’s a right way of doing sales. One that uses data in every step of the sales process to be truly relevant for prospects, to listen, and to provide value. However, are we practicing what we preach?

People are crazy and times are strange, things have changed, says an old Bob Dylan song. But even in the midst of crisis, in these singular, turbulent times, sales activity doesn't stop. Here, at Vainu, we've asked our salespeople to share their best piece of advice to keep on selling and succeed in remote sales.

The modern Formula 1 car is an elegant piece of engineering: A complex machine capable of racing at over 200 MPH at ease. But the car is also an intelligent and connected data system.

Multiple sensors across the car and driver are constantly monitoring and transmitting information, measuring lap times, tire and brake temperatures, airflow, and engine performance. Back in the days, the success or failure in a race was solely down to the split- second decisions the driver made on the track. Today, data dictates how F1 cars are built and driven.

Similarly to racing, data analysis has permeated sales as well. In this article, we’re going through the steps you need to take to build a trusted data foundation that powers your CRM and enables you to make data-driven decisions in every customer interaction.

You’ve worked hard to craft a beautiful website, you’ve created thoughtful content pieces for your target audience to interact with, and you finally start seeing a steady stream of inbound leads coming in.