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The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Brian Hasenbauer

Brian Hasenbauer

Author, Speaker and expert on all things digital including: social media, inbound marketing, online video trends, etc.

Recent Posts by Brian Hasenbauer:

10 Habits of Success to Adopt into Your Daily Routine

Screen_Shot_2015-06-18_at_4.11.35_PMThere's so much content published every week that a person can never read it all themselves. That's why we're here, bringing you the weekly wrap up.  

Topics: Wrap-up

Lead Intelligence or Lead Stupidity? Which Category Does Your Company Fall Into?

24418861_sAs an inbound marketer, I download pretty much every piece of premium content I find. (Premium content? That’s the material for which you need to fill out a form or you can’t download it, a form asking for your name, email, phone number, perhaps job title, and the like.) For me, it’s purely research on marketing trends, learning how to do inbound marketing better, and of course, checking out the competition.

I find it very interesting that even though I sometimes use my gmail account (not my work email) that I constantly get calls from companies where I downloaded some premium content, and they’re trying to sell me marketing automation services. It's not hard to do a search on LinkedIn to find the few Hasenbauers that are out there. It's not like my job title and my company are hard to find. Most anyone can see that I work for a company that does marketing automation and inbound marketing.

So why do these companies bother calling and following up on leads that have no chance of converting? Great question.

Three Questions to Ask Before Making the Call

Before any inbound marketer picks up the phone and calls a lead, there are three questions they should ask themselves:

  1. What is the history of this lead with my company?
Topics: Lead Nurturing Inbound Marketing

How to Sell Inbound Marketing to Your Boss: The Complete Guide

You’ve been reading our blog for a while, and you’re convinced that your company should start an inbound marketing program. But there’s one problem: You can’t get your boss to sign off on starting an inbound marketing program.

Maybe it’s because your boss is unfamiliar with the terminology, or worried about the amount of work it’ll add to your already-full plate. Maybe she needs more information about what, exactly, she’s approving before making a final decision. Maybe she just doesn't know how inbound marketing works.

This post is for you, to show your boss. It’ll walk through the foundations of inbound marketing, and show the benefits. It’ll detail the level of work involved, and offer tips on how to streamline the process.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is the process of drawing the attention of prospects to your expertise, thought leadership, helpfulness, and reliability, before they are ready to buy. The best and most cost-effective way to convert strangers into customers and promoters of your business.

inbound-3
How Inbound Marketing Works

The benefits of inbound marketing are often misunderstood, leaving management to scratch their heads. The common perception of inbound marketing is that it’s all about writing blogs and lead generation. As you will see, inbound marketing is much more than that. It offers numerous benefits beyond lead generation.

Topics: Inbound Marketing

Best Practices when Networking on LinkedIn

Five_Big_Things_Happening_in_Social_Media_Right_NowThe recent lighting up of the Twitterverse following the rather intemperate remarks of a Cleveland job-bank executive gave many of us one of those cringing laughs. Or was it a laughing cringe? We cringed at how mean she was to a young job seeker, but we laughed at many of the comments made as the event proved again that bad news travels faster than good, that ugly behavior often makes for more interesting copy than does good behavior.

But let’s take this opportunity to look at what that woman was trying to accomplish—to respond appropriately to a LinkedIn connection request. She failed miserably, but you can succeed if you follow these best practices.

3 things to remember when you're networking on LinkedIn:

1. You don’t have to accept every LinkedIn request that you receive.

Topics: Digital

Never Send an Email When You’re Angry: Otherwise, This Might Happen to You

join_us_LinkedIN

If you have been on LinkedIn recently, you might have seen this response to a LinkedIn connection request circulating. It’s an email exchange where a young 25-year old asks to connect with a senior level executive in charge of a local job board on LinkedIn. The request was denied with a tirade about how the young woman behaved badly. Perhaps the younger woman was in the wrong, but the response the executive gave was exceptionally mean-spirited.

After seeing how this one executive responded to a LinkedIn connection request, I thought this might be a good time to remind everyone about LinkedIn etiquette.

But before we get into that, let’s talk about email. Email is, among other things, a revolutionary way to keep in touch with people you rarely see. You can convey a lot of information, share ideas, keep people on task, send cat pictures, and more. But there’s one thing you absolutely, positively, 100% need to remember: 

Email is forever.

Topics: Digital

Don't Treat Your Inbound Marketing Prospects Like Bill Murray in the Movie Groundhog Day

Dont_Treat_Your_Prospects_Like_Bill_Murray_in_the_Movie_Groundhog_DayRecently I was having a discussion with my colleagues about how Dynamic Website Personalization (DWP) is changing inbound marketing and how it's going to change the way that websites are designed and leads are captured and nurtured.   This conversation was prompted by a great article from the folks at Entrepreneur.com
about how websites are being designed with the user experience taken into consideration to create a more personalized experience based upon customer life cycle, industry or other criteria that is deemed important. 

Topics: websites Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing as Easy as 1, 2, 3

Inbound_Marketing_as_Easy_as_1_2_3Recently after writing a blog post about how inbound marketing isn't rocket science, a few clients asked me to boil down inbound marketing to its most simplistic nature.

So here it is… inbound marketing as easy as 1, 2, 3.

1. Create Content

The most common form of content creation that we are used to with B2B is blogging. So, the first step is to create a blog and start blogging. Yes, you need a plan and yes, you need to create content that's relevant to your persona... but don't hesitate to get started writing blog posts and doing it consistently 2 to 3 times per week, EVERY week! 

Topics: Inbound Marketing

It’s Not Rocket Science, It’s Inbound Marketing

Its_Not_Rocket_ScienceRecently while attending a meeting with a prospect and explaining the 7-Step Lead Generation process to them, and how they start to generate leads with inbound marketing, they made the comment that “inbound marketing is like understanding rocket science.” This comment stuck with me and made it more evident than ever that to some, inbound marketing is not as easy to grasp as some experts make it appear.

Why is Inbound Marketing Difficult to Some?
If you understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media, email marketing, and website design and have a great team of writers on staff, and have someone that can dedicate 10 hours a week or more to publishing blog posts and creating landing pages for your premium content, it’s not really that challenging.  

What? You don’t have those skill sets within your company or the resources to dedicate to inbound marketing?  It’s okay… for those companies that don’t have this expertise but are still interested in generating leads through inbound marketing there are plenty of ways to make the process easier and doable even for the smallest of companies.

How to Make Inbound Marketing Effortless
Well, you can’t really make it effortless but you can do a few things to help supplement the resources you have available. Here are 3 steps to make inbound marketing easier: 

Topics: Inbound Marketing

Five Characteristics of an Inbound Marketing Culture

Building_an_Inbound_Marketing_Culture_at_Your_CompanyThe best inbound marketing programs and the ones that create the most leads are not necessarily the ones that develop the most content or have the prettiest infographics.  The most successful inbound marketing programs are the ones that embrace inbound marketing throughout the organization, and understand that in order to succeed it will take more than just the efforts of one person.  An inbound culture differs from an outbound culture in that the expectation within an inbound culture is that the company’s website and blog will be sought out and found by our prospects, because of the great content that’s created rather than having to utilize outbound methods to attract prospects to their website.  

In a very basic sense, an inbound culture understands that the very core of their existence is based upon trying to solve their prospect’s needs and explaining to them in a non-sales oriented way how they can do that for them.  

There are several characteristics that successful inbound marketing organizations share and we have listed our top 5 below.

Topics: Inbound Marketing

Five Tips For Using Your LinkedIn Account to Build Your Personal Brand

5 Tips For Using Your LinkedIn Account to Build Your Personal BrandWith social media becoming an increasingly important part of the business landscape it’s now more important than ever that salespeople have a good presence on social media. While there are a number of social media platforms to choose from including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn to name a few of the most popular ones, networking on LinkedIn should be a primary goal.   
LinkedIn, which has over 225 million users, is where most people go to research other companies and to make purchase decisions about products and services for their companies. If you are a salesperson and setting appointments is a primary part of your job, you can be assured that you are getting checked out online and on LinkedIn before a prospect says “yes” to your asking for an appointment.

Getting Started on LinkedIn

How do you get started using LinkedIn? It all starts with having a thorough profile.
There are some LinkedIn users that won’t accept networking requests from LinkedIn member that don’t have a profile picture.

When you get started using LinkedIn it’s very important that you make sure you have a complete profile including adding your past positions, recommendations and a good headshot or profile image. Without having a solid profile established, especially a profile image, whatever you do on LinkedIn won’t be as effective. So establishing a solid profile is important before you start to engage your network.

After you build your profile you are not finished. That’s just the start of what you need to be doing on LinkedIn. With what seems like more salespeople competing for the same accounts it’s important to not just have an account on LinkedIn but to actually USE your account on LinkedIn.
Topics: Digital