Sales and Marketing

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 flipside, 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 ...

Sales teams today are more responders than the intruders of the past. The limitless supply of Internet information makes it easy for buyers to progress themselves down the sales funnel. By the time they make contact with sales, many have virtually made up their mind to buy. It's not always easy going, sometimes the sales team is confronted with well-informed prospects who have ...

Think, for a second, about what you do before you purchase a product or service! The path a buyer takes is called the customer journey and usually looks like this: Need awareness Research Compare Resolve concerns Purchase Repurchase Often steps are added or changed but however it looks, successful sales relate to: The number of people with a need The conversion r ...

Sitecore is a leading web content management system for marketers but, if we take a holistic view, we could also argue that Sitecore, with a CRM, can substantially help the sales team as well. Sales, if you don't know, has moved on from the days of: Grab x number of phone numbers Spend a week calling them Repeat Today's sales teams have more demanding prospects who: ...

Sitecore and a few other enterprise web content management systems do a great job of personalizing web content in real time. As visitors navigate the website, Sitecore busily scores the navigational behavior, matches preset profiles, and renders targeted content that aligns with the visitor's interest. Yes, it's amazing. Sitecore collects a raft of valuable data about each vis ...