Earlier this week, Punxsutawney Phil disappointed us yet again. According to this year’s shadow, we are in for six more weeks of Winter. For those of us in snow-prone locations, this leaves us with three viable options:
Image: ABC South Florida
I’m reading Amy Poehler’s book right now.
I belong to a book club in Pittsburgh. When I’m in town, I try to attend. At first, I had ambitious goals of reading each month’s selection whether I could attend or not. However, as life and business have become increasingly busier, I’ve developed a very bad habit of only reading the books that interest me. When this month’s selection was announced, I thought to myself “Yes, Please.”
“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” The question, asked repeatedly by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg during her 2013 book tour promoting Lean In, makes the assumption that fear is present from the start. And, if you are doing a startup, fear is likely a familiar emotion.
One of the most common questions when I'm selling inbound marketing services to startups is this:
"How will you write about X when are are not an expert in X like we are?"
Good question. After all, I do spend a lot of time selling into companies that serve a niche market (often offering a breakthrough product or service which only exists thanks to said founders). I do encounter this question quite often.
It’s almost the end of January, so if you set a New Year’s resolution there is a high probability that you’ve already broken it - or that you are about to. Despite the fact that 2015 started off with packed gyms, high hopes and social media news feeds filled with fail-proof formulas for success, most resolutions fail.
Are you ready for 2015? If you are a sales or marketing professional, it’s time to buckle your seatbelts. The moment that we’ve been waiting for in our industry for many years is about the happen: Smarketing is going mainstream.
For any company (especially startups!) thinking about how to grow revenues in 2015, sales and marketing are undoubtedly two of the top concerns. How will we generate leads? How will we sell to those leads in order to reach our growth goals? But most importantly, how will leads generated by marketing lead to sales-ready interactions for that the sales team can leverage?
Once star-crossed lovers, sales and marketing had a tumultuous relationship in the past. But, those days are over, baby! Inbound marketing has changed the relationship between sales and marketing forever. What was once tense and competitive is now full of deep love and respect (..right?). Thanks to inbound marketing, marketers are able to provide sales with more and better leads and help shorten the sales cycles. Both functions work together to create a personal and meaningful relationship with customers and prospects. The blend is real, as marketers are now spending their time selling and sales is spending its time marketing.
Blogging is so important - it can account for 55% more website visitors than if you weren't blogging. In terms of results, there is a big difference between the businesses that blog and those that don’t. Despite this, it is easy to find reasons to push blogging aside:
“Dealing with customers’ needs are more important.”
While companies often under-prioritize their blogging efforts, they shouldn’t. In fact, companies should be highly motivated to blog, given the benefits experienced by companies that blog regularly. Blogging is associated with higher numbers of traffic, leads and sales, which is the whole point of inbound marketing.
When you take a look at the numbers, blogging, it turns out, is downright irresistible. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at blogging statistics and why your company blog is the ticket to getting your prospects’ attention.
In the era of “let’s do everything online,” there aren’t many nice things being said about trade shows:
“They’re expensive.”
“They make my feet hurt.”
These are all true.
Despite this, companies keep doing trade shows. Why, you ask? Well, usually for the wrong reasons, like this one:
“OMG. How will it look if we don’t participate this year?!”
That’s not a good reason to invest in a tradeshow. But, there are some great reasons:
