Sales and Marketing

Almost every website includes a telephone number. It adds credibility and affirms that real people exist in the business. But what happens if someone actually rings the number!  An operator may be asked questions like: Can you tell me the price of your widget? How does your widget work? Do you ship to my town? What are your payment terms?  Phone calls usually require ...

It's time to panic! An extensive report in 2018 showed 55% of surveyed companies took 5 days or more to respond to lead inquiries. This does not bode well after reading another survey that shows the odds of contacting a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drops 100 times. The odds after 5 days must be horrendous! It's not just statistics - it also makes sense. The sales team ne ...

Personalized websites compel visitors to stay longer and show more interest in your products and services. The act of personalization is also beneficial as it forces companies to look deeply into the types of customers they attract and how to best respond to them. What does website personalization do? It simply changes what each visitor sees by showing more relevant images, te ...

It's embarrassing. We've been using web forms to push Sitecore analytics to Salesforce leads with S4S since 2013 but not for a second thought about not using web forms. Then along came a customer who said, "We need to see web analytics in Salesforce but we don't use Sitecore forms!". What! Who does that?  The use case was a sales rep needing to view, in Salesforce, the website ...

Business is about creating solutions and selling them. Marketing is finding buyers that need the solutions and sales is selling the solutions to them. That's it in a nutshell! This primer article is about the software that smart companies are using to make this work! The prospect to customer journey can be summarized as attract, amaze, convert, and retain: Attract: Systems ...

A visitor on your website is mesmerized by your web content and excitedly completes a lead form or phones your sales team. Filled with anticipation, they have the "I want it now" mindset which, from a sales perspective, is about as hot as it gets! So what tools and processes exist to take advantage of this key moment in the sales cycle? As it turns out, very few! The ultimate ...

The value of an integrated system is often far greater than the value of the individual components. Software integrations expose the features and data in one system to another and vice versa which can add significant value.   Why Integrate? Some common reasons to integrate are: Prevent the need to enter and edit the same data in multiple systems e.g. sharing CRM campaign m ...

You can't have it all! Or can you? GDPR has made us more aware of how personal data is captured and ring-fenced but on the flip side, this data is needed to personalize web experiences. Peter Schwartz, the renowned futurist, talks about this in a recent Salesforce blog and summed it up in one sentence, "On one hand, consumers want greater personalization and on the other, priva ...

Healthcare payers, providers, and vendors are facing more competition as consumers are increasingly making their choices online. Coupled with this, consumers are demanding more and more from their online experiences.  Fortunately, there are engagement techniques already proven successful with other industries that can be applied to the healthcare industry to ensure consumers a ...

Attracting students by inbound marketing is an important tool for colleges and universities. Leads are typically generated from an advertisement on a third party website, or directly from the provider's website. This article looks at increasing student numbers by integrating two best-of-breed systems to provide superior web content and efficiently process leads.  Higher educat ...