Business Growth Blog

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!

Technology. Love it or hate it, it’s part of our world now. The right sales and marketing technology will help you get discovered, build credibility and trust, attract followers, and increase qualified sales leads.

However, it requires a holistic approach. One component is worthless without the other. If you don’t have ALL of the following technological capabilities, you’ll likely end up sorely disappointed in your sales growth.

Don't waste resources writing blog articles that don't help you get new business. The best results come from a holistic blog strategy.

The biggest problems I see sales teams face by not having a clearly defined niche market, or target prospect, is a lack of focus on who their supposed to call on and an inability to create strong sales messages that get meetings. And when you’re eager to work with any kind of company that walks through the door, it’s very easy to get monopolized by customers that take too much time for not enough money.

Here are 3 tips you can use to help you define your niche market.

Inbound marketing can get costly. So how can you afford it, especially if you’re a small business? Here are 2 ways to reduce your inbound marketing costs:

A landing page is a lead capture web page. It has a form that a website visitor has to fill out in order to get a special offer, like a coupon, discount, ebook, video, or some other type of valuable content.

The landing page conversion rate is the percentage of people that fill out the form.

Here's the most important part: Once a website visitor fills out the form, they get entered into your database and can be followed up on by a salesperson or furthered nurtured until they're ready for a sales call.

Landing pages are the lifeblood of online lead generation.

Here's an example of what a landing page looks like: