Modern Sales and Marketing Techniques for Filling Your Sales Funnel

Get a quick overview of how to combine digital marketing content with modern sales and marketing technology to pique prospects' interest, generate sales leads, and keep the sales funnel flowing.

Modern sales and marketing technology, like HubSpot, is changing the sales game. Now, salespeople can find out who's coming to the website, what pages they're looking at, who’s engaging with their emails or social media activity, and more. Information and technology have completely changed the process of buying and selling.

Here are 12 modern techniques you can start doing now to get the best results and most value from your sales and marketing investment.

1. Give Prospects What They Want
2. Pique Interest With Digital Content
3. Find Warm Prospects With Technology
4. Create a Digital Content Library
5. Use Content for Direct Sales
6. Use Content for Marketing
7. Create Lead Generation Pages
8. Collect Prospect Intelligence
9. Track Website, Sales and Marketing Email Activity
10. Track Social Followers
11. Use Lead Scoring to Prioritize Prospects
12. View Prospect Profile Before a Sales Call

1. Give Prospects What They Want

Today’s prospects are looking for:

• Company websites that are easy to read and navigate
• High-value online content that is relevant to their issues
• Savvy business solutions vs. selfish sales pitches
• Insights about how to improve their business outcomes

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2. Pique Interest With Digital Content

Prospects are searching online. Good, highly relevant content draws prospects to your website vs. your competitors. The right messaging entices them further and further into the sales funnel.

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3. Find Warm Prospects With Technology

Modern technology helps companies capture contact information and learn more about the prospects visiting the website. It helps salespeople talk to the right prospects at the right time with the right message.

Use content combined with technology to:

• Get found by your target prospects as they gather information online
• Pique interest in your company before they ever talk to a salesperson
• Have on-target sales conversations
• Increase sales process efficiency

4. Create a Digital Content Library

What content, you ask? Develop a variety of blog articles, educational content offers, videos, case studies, and more that address the objections, questions, and concerns prospects have as they move through the buyer journey.

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5. Use Content for Direct Sales

Include content in direct sales emails to answer questions, objections, or concerns throughout the sales process.

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6. Use Content for Marketing

Promote content through social media, email marketing and co-marketing to drive prospects to the website - all the normal marketing activities!

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7. Create Lead Generation Pages

Collect contact information in exchange for good content.

Here's an example outline of how to create landing pages and digital marketing campaigns that drive conversion (including budget projections).

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8. Collect Prospect Intelligence

Data about how your prospects are engaging in the sales process is critical for framing the most appropriate sales conversations throughout the buying process. Some of the data points that are very useful include:

• Time Last Seen: The last time the contact was on the website
• Last Email Marketing Click Date: The last time the contact clicked on a marketing email
• Recent Conversion Date: The last time the contact filled out a form.

From there, you can slice and dice to determine what pages they visited, how many pages they visited, what form they filled out, and much more. Remember, though: prospect intelligence is only collected if the user allows us to track their cookie. If someone declines the cookie, there is no prospect intelligence. If you want to learn more about how the cookie process works in relation to sales prospecting data, check out the article, How to Use Your Website to Identify Warm Prospects.

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9. Track Website, Sales and Marketing Email Activity

Find out when your prospects open your emails and if they’re clicking on what you send.

Sales Emails: Turn on tracking to get notified when your prospects open your email, and you can also see what they clicked on!

Marketing Emails: After a send, review the results to see who clicked. It's also a good idea to see who bounced and unsubscribed so you can follow up if it was one of your hot prospects or customers.

Track Website Activity

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10. Track Social Followers

Monitor your social media accounts to see who’s following you and interacting with your posts. It could be a potential customer!

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11. Use Lead Scoring to Prioritize Prospects

Ensure that the most qualified prospects are clearly identified and pushed to the top of the sellers priority list.

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12. View Prospect Profile Before a Sales Call

Before you contact a prospect, see how they’ve engaged with your company so far.

Getting prospect's attention from outbound outreach is increasingly difficult, so it's more important than ever to enable your company to get found online line, and that users have a good and easy digital experience once they get there.

And if you want to know who is "walking" into your digital "store," you need modern sales and marketing technology to allow you to notice them and work your sales magic. (We use HubSpot! It's got everything sellers and marketers need in one platform.)