Expanding your B2B business to a new country can be daunting. Obviously, you need a solid market entry strategy, but also you need to develop a deep understanding of how B2B sales are done in market you're eyeing.
Vainu expanded to new markets a few years ago, so we thought we'd like to share our story and how we did by answering these ten common questions about expanding a B2B business to the Nordics. We'll take our expansion to Sweden as an example.
The terms prospect, lead and buying signal are all well-known to B2B sales professionals, but their differences can be unclear. In part, the reason is that different CRM and marketing automation providers are using the terms in different ways. That's why we feel a clarification between prospect, lead and buying signal, and their roles in sales process, seems appropriate.
Our definition is very close to the framework used by HubSpot among others, and helps unify the conversation within a sales team, and further enhance sales and marketing alignment, or smarketing. Be sure to clarify sales terminology in your sales playbook!
HubSpot published its State of Inbound 2017 business report last week. The report gives comprehensive insights to plan your future marketing and sales strategies as the data is collected from over 6,000 respondents! In this blog post, I'll go through the findings relevant to sales prospecting, lead generation and B2B sales in general. For those interested in marketing, I recommend downloading the report as well. But let's dig in!
For years, companies have been using historical market information to obtain a detailed view of potential sales prospects. However, these insights can get skewed by one's own biased viewpoint or include rather general qualifications such as revenue size, number of employees or location, which don't actually tell whether or not an organization needs your service now.