Business Growth Blog

I spend hours every week reading blogs (literally). It’s how I get my information. I can instantly spot a good company blog vs. a bad company blog.

Here are 10 tell-tale signs you’re wasting valuable time and money on your blogging efforts.

I found this infographic on the HubSpot Blog that breaks down a bad prospecting email. It really caught my attention because I have recently seen an email that looks just like this one. I think the author, Leslie Ye is right on with this analysis. Writing good prospecting emails is hard work, and this is a great example of how NOT to do it.

A website home page has a lot of work to do. It has to be both smart and good-looking. It has to have a cool vibe about it that speaks to your company’s personality. It has to have interesting offers, different ways to reach you, and lists of things for visitors to do – all without being cluttered, messy, or overstuffed. Forget it, right?

Don’t worry, it’s not as impossible as it sounds. If you take it one step at a time and break it down into what’s important, constructing a website home page can be a manageable project with long-term rewards.

If I had a dollar for every time this happened to me, I’d be rich.

Ring ring!

Me: “Hello? This is Krista.”

Solicitor: Long pause from automated dialer... “Hello. May I please speak with Krista Moon?”

Me: Sigh...Didn’t I just say my name was Krista? “This is.”

Solicitor: “Hello, Ms. Moon. How are you today?”

SERIOUSLY?!

Blogging and email marketing are increasingly becoming standard practices for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Creating content and sending messages is very easy now-a-days, which puts us in the midst of a never-ending data explosion.

Videos, articles, chats, streams, texts, emails, pictures…With so much content available, people have to pick and choose very carefully what they want to give time to. Only content that is relevant to the issues, thoughts, or concerns a reader has will get noticed, and only content that adds value in some way will get their time.

(Note from Krista: Yes, those are my dogs and they are giving me their full attention. And no, I wasn't showing them a presentation, but you get the idea. 🙂 I couldn't resist using this pic on this post! Now on to Julie's article… )

While there is a wealth of information on how to put together a good PowerPoint deck for your sales presentation — right down to the number of words and size of font on each slide, little attention is given on how a presenter can interact with those PPT slides in order to ensure his or her message resonates with the audience.

Sometimes I come across articles I want to read, but it physically hurts my eyes to look at them. I get so much information thrust in front of me every day that I'm forced to pick and choose very carefully which articles I dedicate my time to. (I wish I could read all day, but work must get done!)

When I find an article I want to spend time on, my curiosity has been piqued and I look forward to getting the information. If I find it difficult to read (visually or textually), I end up feeling let down. And then I furrow my brows, click my tongue, and quickly leave the website.

What's the best way to stay relevant in this ultra-fast changing world of sales? In this article, I'm going to share with you a little bit about my journey developing my inbound sales and marketing craft and the absolute best sales resource ever...

As soon as I finished my teaching certificate I got my first...sales job. (Classroom teaching wasn't for me.) I didn't really know anything about sales except that I liked educating people about how to solve their problems (the teacher in me I guess) and as with most salespeople, I liked "being on the road" and "making what I'm worth".

Take advantage of a great networking and relationship management tool, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a very powerful tool when used correctly. But just “being” on LinkedIn is not enough. Having a profile on LinkedIn will get you about the same thing as going to a party and standing in the corner. Someone might come up to you, but you can’t expect any results. If you want to get results you have to learn to utilize the tool to interact and commit to doing it.

I recently received an email campaign Marketo put together to target HubSpot users such as myself. My agency is a HubSpot Gold partner and we’ve been using their technology to manage our marketing efforts for many years now. Marketo is one of HubSpot’s biggest competitors.

The purpose of the email was to let me know that Marketo is better than HubSpot (from their perspective anyway) and ask me to schedule a meeting for further discussion.

When I dissect the exchange between me and the Marketo rep and the emotions it invoked from my perspective as the prospect, it reinforced many of the things I’ve been writing about regarding buyer personas, sales messaging, and differentiating from the competition.

Read more to get a real life example of the prospecting process and see firsthand what sales strategies can engage - or disengage - a potential customer.