The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

I can remember it so well—sitting in the grass with a bunch of other sweaty 5^th and 6^th graders, out of breath from running laps and drills. We were the St. Joseph’s soccer team, and we were great at running around and yelling and kicking the ball in the general direction of the other team’s goal. We were pretty good at joking around and drinking the Gatorade, too.

But this practice was a little different. Today, Coach Freer had a big pad of paper and a sharpie. She proceeded to tell us this fabulous story involving fullbacks, and halfbacks, and forwards, and strikers. And those white lines on the grass? She told us what they meant, too. 

“Whoa!” I said to myself. “There’s a strategy here, and a structure!”

This memory came back so clear to me this week, as I finished building our latest online course, the Lead Gen What & Why: Inbound. In presenting the top 20 terms related to inbound marketing and lead generation, a real structure, based on strategy, started to come into focus.

In just a couple of weeks, the LeadG2 team will be heading to Boston for INBOUND 2016—the yearly marketing conference hosted by HubSpot. As a Platinum Partner of Hubspot, we appreciate how HubSpot continues to lead the industry in research studies, thought leadership, and educating marketers. We learn so much each year at the conference.

Over four days, five keynotes, and hundreds of workshop sessions, we’ll be increasing our knowledge so we can better help our clients, and we’re looking forward to that! 

It seems like a lifetime ago, but I was once the Associate Publisher at Competitor Texas magazine, a 80,000 circulation endurance sports magazine. Most of my clients were either running, cycling, or triathlon events or retailers and had a website but hadn’t started to build up a sizeable presence on social media. Most hadn’t even considered using digital ads to get visitors from related fitness websites to their own site.

It was a great time to be in the media industry, and we were just beginning to see the potential of integrating digital, social, email, event marketing, grassroots campaigns and print all together into one campaign. But we had one BIG challenge: how to effectively explain this new way of thinking to potential advertisers when many of these race directors still had event registrants filling out paper registration forms and mailing them in. They were certainly not embracing new technology or uses of media very quickly and were quite resistant to any change. So how to get through to them and show them how integrated solutions work? That’s where inbound marketing came in.

From the moment I started working with the team at Zimmer Radio & Marketing Group, I had a feeling they were going to do a stellar job with inbound marketing. Then, once I met with them at their office in Columbia, Missouri for our Inbound Marketing & Sales Strategy Workshop, which kicked off our partnership, I was convinced.

Collectively, they “got it” and understood that because the advertising buyer’s experience has changed, the role of the media salesperson had to change too. As a LeadG2 and The Center for Sales Strategy Consultant, it’s always exciting to work with a company who not only wants the results but is also willing to invest their time and money to get the job done. And in this case, not only because they want to grow new revenue, but also because they care about their advertisers and the people they work with. They believe in educating them and being a true partner to small and large businesses alike. They understood that inbound marketing is more than a campaign here and there or a great keyword strategy. It’s about creating a conversation with potential and current customers. It’s about being a thought leader, making an impact in their industry, and reaching buyers appropriately in the sales process.

I’m not writing this article to simply brag about my awesome client (though they are pretty awesome). I’m writing this to let other media companies know they can improve the way they communicate with prospects, and they can get real, tangible results by implementing the right strategy and the right tools.

Today's superstar salespeople aren't doing things the way they were fifteen years ago—they've aligned their sales process with the way that people buy today. Today’s superstar salespeople are also taking advantage of today's technology, which allows them to have a significant advantage over their sales counterparts who are still practicing the 20th century sales methods. These modern day sales warriors are using what we call lead intelligence to maximize their selling effort. This advantage is making an amazing difference in sales performance and it’s worth taking note.

While many of the sales fundamentals of the 20th century still apply, the fact is that with the advancement of technology, the use of email, social media, and the mobile phone, there have been some significant changes that have allowed salespeople to improve and deliver better performance. 

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.