Business Growth Blog

Every company has a sales and marketing plan, but more often than not there are gaps, missing pieces, and weak spots. Here are some articles and resources that can help you deepen your understanding of sales & marketing strategy development and determine if your current plan is working to its full potential to meet your business growth objectives.

Sales and marketing content is vital for communicating your value to potential customers. However, creating it can be arduous: and bad content is worse than no content, so it has to be good.

When I first started inbound marketing, I tried to create everything myself. I quickly realized that it was inefficient and expensive. That may sound counterintuitive: How can it be MORE expensive to do it yourself vs. hiring someone? That's easy—if I'm doing jobs that I'm really not skilled for, it takes me longer and doesn't turn out as well, so I don't get the best results over time.

One of the most popular things salespeople search for is information about how to write prospecting emails. And it’s no wonder: figuring out “what to say” to get a prospect interested enough in a conversation is HARD! There are a gazillion templates and ideas available out there to help kick-start your prospecting efforts. I decided to consolidate some of the best resources I’ve seen in one post.

One of the biggest problems businesses face is figuring out what to say to take a prospect from “Who the heck are you?” to “I want to do business with you!”

How do you get on your prospects’ radars and capture their interest? The first step is to clearly understand your buyer journey. The second step is to create and promote the type of information prospects need at each stage.

Typography is a core element of your brand. The right font attracts readers, helps define the visual representation of your company, and makes your content more interesting and readable. Deciding which font to use can be confusing because there are so many options to choose from! In this infographic, you’ll see typography examples from a variety of brands, along with recommendations for best use cases.

Getting sales meetings with new prospects is not easy. They have no idea who you are, are overwhelmed with work, can't imagine taking on another project, and are happy with the status quo. It takes tremendous effort to get prospects to understand the benefit of making a change and then get them to actually move forward with a new idea.

When I talk to business owners (and some marketers) about email marketing, the first thing they say is “I don’t want to send too much email to my list. I just want to do once a quarter, or once a month.” People are very protective of their inbox. They’re already overloaded with work and overwhelmed with the amount of information flowing their way.

There’s no denying it: every time you send an email newsletter to your list, the number of subscribers you have goes down. In the world of email marketing, we call it your email attrition. You can’t prevent email attrition; it’s going to happen no matter what you do. Typically, companies lose approximately 25% of their email list every year. On the surface, that sounds pretty bad! But it’s actually not.

You might think that understanding typography is only important for a graphic designer, but everyone uses fonts. In the business world, executives and sellers frequently have to put together presentations, proposals, business plans, and more - and they don’t always have the luxury of having a graphic designer at the ready to help them.

My friend Jill Konrath, sales strategist, speaker, and author of 3 bestselling sales books put a message on LinkedIn asking for people to submit sales limericks for a project she’s working on. It got my wheels turning, and I ended up coming up with something. Here it is!