Business Growth Blog

If upgrading your sales and marketing system is a top priority, consider these 4 foundational questions before you make the final call.

Technology and data have revolutionized the sales and marketing landscape, offering insights that were once unimaginable. With the right tools and strategies, you can now discover how prospects interact with your online presence, uncovering valuable data that transforms sales conversations into impactful engagements.

Coming from an old-school sales background, having access to all of this information still boggles my mind. It's pretty cool! Read more to find out how to identify warm prospects buzzing around your website.

What is Clearbit?

Clearbit, the first AI Native Data Provider, enriches CRM data and simplifies the process of identifying top target accounts, understanding who is ready to buy, and instantly finding their contact information. There is a robust integration with HubSpot to build B2B lists with company and contact data and automatically sync those into HubSpot.

I regularly talk to companies that are considering starting an inbound sales and marketing program, but they lack the technological capacity required to do the work.

While there's a variety of sales and marketing technology available, the tool we've had the most success with is HubSpot. They put all the necessary functionality required into one system, which improves data sharing, communication between the teams, and work efficiency.

Many of my customers use WordPress when we first begin our engagement. I've tried and tried to do inbound marketing on WordPress, and it hasn't worked out for me yet. I spend more time dorking around with technology than actual marketing. On top of that, I don't get all of the functionality I need, and my efficiency and effectiveness decrease dramatically.

People think that WordPress is “free.” Yes, it is true that it doesn't have a subscription fee or anything like that. However, time is money. Would you rather spend money on implementing WordPress plug-ins and creating workarounds to make it sort of do what you want or on designing and implementing marketing campaigns that can actually drive business results?

If you want to do inbound marketing (meaning blogging, email marketing, social media, lead generation, and the like), we recommend our clients - large and small - migrate fully from WordPress to HubSpot. Here's why:

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.

As salespeople, we send out a lot of sales prospecting emails. We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find just the right words to encourage potential customers to engage with us. It's tough.

I continue to be amazed at the technology that allows us to dramatically increase our ability to engage with the right prospects at the right time in the right way.

Most salespeople know they need to use a CRM (a Customer Relationship Management system, or sales database), but they dread it. It can easily seem like a bunch of time consuming data entry – and if it’s not set up right, it is. HubSpot recently did a survey, and found that on average, reps spend 1 hour and 32 minutes per day doing data entry. Yuck!

On the flip side, reps do need some way to manage all of their prospects, leads, and opportunities. And sales managers need ways to efficiently track forecasting and sales. If you think CRM is a pain, try doing it without a CRM!

These 2 sales prospecting tools can be very powerful in helping you secure meetings and close deals. Personally, I think they’re game-changing.

When it comes to all the functionality you need for lead generation, I came up with about 16 must-have marketing technologies- and that's just for starters. Truth be told, there are many others I wanted to include, but the list was getting too long.

Regardless, it's a LOT of stuff. Every technology costs money and they take time to learn. Worst of all, dorking around with technology can be a real barrier to actually doing marketing and generating leads.

Creating a marketing system that has all the functionality you need can be a challenge. You have 3 options for efficiently pulling all of these marketing technologies together.