The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Sometimes we’ll get an influx of emails from different inbound marketing clients all at the same time questioning why their website or blog traffic is down (this happens internally for us too!). Recently this happened all at once, and ended up being a mix of #1 and #2 below, but it had our clients wondering what they could or should be doing differently.

After wrapping up four days in Boston at the INBOUND conference, our team left filled with tips and tricks, insights and inspiration – all aimed to make us better inbound marketers and even better teachers of the strategies that so many companies are utilizing to connect online with their customers, best prospects, and biggest fans. Plus, you can check out a great recap on all the keynotes here! 

Yesterday was the first day of HubSpot’s INBOUND conference, a gathering for some of the top inbound marketers, writers, speakers, and thought leaders in the industry – and it became evident very quickly to our team in attendance that there was an underlying theme to this year’s event.  

Congratulations! After all of your creative efforts to stand out, establish credibility, and demonstrate expertise, your prospect has finally agreed to meet with you. Considering how many other salespeople likely call on them in your market, this is a huge win! However, what you do next could make it all worthwhile… or simply a waste of time.

Those of us that work in or around the media industry know that radio, TV, and newspaper are far from becoming dead advertising vehicles. Instead, the best and most innovative media companies have learned that it’s about evolving and finding new ways to not only get the attention of readers, viewers, and listeners but to uncover new methods of attracting and retaining advertisers as well. 

The search for qualified, sales-ready leads is a challenge to almost all sales organizations and as technology continues to advance and all of our lives (and our prospects lives) become busier, the need to uncover and nurture qualified leads becomes increasingly more important.

You’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?  

My competitive nature to be the best, along with a perfectionist, Type A personality that many marketers and sellers have – oftentimes lead me down the path of over-thinking and over-working every little detail. This meant every email had to be crafted flawlessly, and presentations would sometimes come home with me to be worked on and perfected for the following day’s meeting. I sometimes obsessed over the right words to use with a client and avoided mistakes like the plague.

The primary focus of your inbound marketing strategy should be to get your business found by new visitors, and then convert them into qualified sales-ready leads. One of the primary places to do this is on a company blog. There are many other additional benefits such as developing thought leadership and providing value to current clients, but at the end of the day it’s lead generation that makes inbound marketing such an irresistible and powerful tool.