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The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

If You Forget About Lead Gen, You Can Forget About Growth

lead generation for sales growth

This article was originally published on Entrepreneur.com.

What’s the worst thing that can happen if you buy weak leads from a questionable source? New York City real estate broker Nathan Horne almost found out.

Like the thousands of professionals in his industry who collectively spent $10.5 billion on advertising in 2017, his employer, The Corcoran Group, focused on branding instead of strategic lead generation. So, when Horne called someone he thought was a hot lead, he got the surprise of his life. Instead of a potential buyer, the police detective who answered the phone made a veiled threat about having a gun and being willing to use it.

Topics: content strategy thought leadership Lead Generation sales and marketing alignment

Are You a Thought Leader? 6 Ways to Tell

Are You a Thought Leader? In every industry, there are people or businesses we think of as being thought leaders. These people and organizations are the ones that you check on regularly with regard to innovation, market challenges, and new initiatives.

Being considered a thought leader in your industry is certainly an advantageous position to have, as it helps with lead generation, sales, recruitment and retention, new business opportunities, and more.

Topics: content strategy thought leadership sales strategy Inbound Marketing

How Inbound Marketing Can Create Raving Fans for Your Business

How Inbound Marketing Can Create Raving Fans for Your Business

Every business wants raving fans; consumers that are so overwhelmed with great customer service that they can't stop talking about your brand. This is particularly important if your business has a relatively long sales cycle. If prospects take their time to research different offerings, building brand awareness and trust is big.

And, businesses are catching on. Those using effective inbound marketing initiatives are producing sales leads and, at the same time, establishing expertise and thought leadership in their specific industry. Those experiencing this success will tell you that it's contagious, but requires the constant sharing of quality content, which attracts interested prospects to their companies.  

So how do you get consumers to not only know about your brand, but like your products and services enough to engage with your company frequently, and rave to others about you?

Topics: content marketing content strategy Digital Inbound Marketing

4 Tactics to Make Sure Your B2B Content is Converting and Generating Leads

b2b content convertingCreating compelling B2B content is only half the battle when it comes to a solid lead generation strategy for your sales plan and your business. While your content must be grammatically correct, educational, formatted properly, and a good representation of your brand, it must also be strategically created following proven best practices that most inbound marketers and sales teams follow. These tactics are what help ensure your content isn’t just interesting or nice to read, but ultimately driving prospects closer to doing business with you and taking some kind of action or next step.

Topics: content strategy thought leadership Lead Generation

Has Your Sales Content Library Come Out of the Closet?

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What does your sales content library look like? Back in the old days of selling (the 1990’s), the sales library was a janitor closet with a few shelves to store corporate brochures, product sheets, and other printed sales material. Prior to going into the field for their appointments, the sales team would stock up on materials to hand out to prospects. Back then it was a long and cumbersome process to produce new material. It was also expensive to print, so refreshing and replenishing supplies was rare. Consequently, the content was written and produced in a way to be applicable to a large diverse audience and last a long time. Or in other words, the content was relevant to few, meaningless to many, and rarely had any impact on actually advancing the sale.

Topics: content strategy CRM sales enablement

Get Serious about Lead Generation

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If you're blogging to generate leads, developing an effective lead generation strategy is something not to be taken lightly. If you are expecting your business blog to generate leads, rank higher on Google and increase traffic to your website, you probably want to spend as much time focusing on why you are blogging as you spend on what you are blogging about.

Topics: content marketing content strategy thought leadership Inbound Marketing

Improve Your Investment in Content Marketing with Content Strategy

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Content marketing is already strategic when it's “relevant and consistent" and designed to "attract and retain a clearly-defined audience.” Content marketing has the goal of building relationships and impacting the decisions people make about you.

Content marketing is focused on your target persona. Content strategy looks more at managing the lifecycle of the actual content. Strategy helps you increase your impact and reduce your workload.

Topics: content strategy Inbound Marketing Sales

Digital Marketing: Social Media Can't Do These for Your Business

Top 3 Things Social Media Can't Do For A Business Or Brand"Things were so much simpler before Apple," says my 11 year old daughter after a recent panic attack over the thought of losing her Instagram followers and pictures. Her iPod Touch was a lemon and luckily under warranty, but the time between her device crashing and her logging back into her Instagram app was pure torture… for both of us!

Topics: Social Media content marketing content strategy digital marketing setting expectations Digital

Improve Your Inbound Marketing with Three Lead Generation Tips

Inbound MarketingYou’ve been working hard at your inbound marketing program… consistently writing interesting and informative blog posts, optimizing with keywords, promoting through your social media pages, and driving new traffic to your website. But the leads aren’t rolling in like you hoped they would and you just can’t figure out why. What could be the problem?  

Topics: content strategy Lead Generation CTA Inbound Marketing

Digital Marketing: Five Top YouTube Video Ads You May Have Missed

Five Top YouTube Video Ads You May Have MissedOnline video shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon, in fact YouTube gets more than one billion unique visitors each month who watch over four billion hours of video each month.   With those kinds of numbers,

Topics: content marketing content strategy digital marketing Digital