Chart of the day: Closing more deals remain the top priority for sales teams worldwide, whilst getting a response from prospects remains a challenge - part 3 of 10.
Last week, my chart showed the priorities and challenges of a marketing team. This week we will delve deeper into the sales team within businesses to uncover their priorities and challenges.
What are your company's top sales priorities for the next year?
For the majority of sales professionals, closing more deals remains a top priority (71%). However, improving the sales funnel is in second place (44%) and social selling and other sales strategies are third (29%).
Investing in sales technology (16%) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) (14%) are the lowest scoring priorities.
What is the most difficult to do in sales compared to 2 to 3 years ago?
Even though…
Chart of the Day: Digital Marketing statistics - Converting leads to customers remains a top marketing priority over the next 12 months - part 1 of 10
It is important to know how sales and marketing are evolving, and how/ when this will affect your business. There are various marketing and sales priorities to think about when outlining your business strategy and initial planning but it is also important to know its challenges and how to face these.
Marketers are making the leap into visual content creation while salespeople are slowly shifting from the hard-seller stereotype to a more trusted advisor.
- Brian Halligan CEO HubSpot
In this chart series, I will breakdown the HubSpot 'State of Inbound 2017' report for all your sales and marketing needs - taking you through section by section and breaking down its results.
The 10 areas that will be covered are:
Top business priorities
Inbound marketing priorities and challenges
Sales priorities and challenges
…
A review of different frameworks covering the customer journey, brand and content
Today, consumers do not search, engage and consume information within individual channels while making purchase decisions. Their journeys are fluid and choices are influenced by multiple channels, devices and screens, and a vast array of content, both online and offline. Therefore the challenge for businesses today is to understand how their customers behave and to establish a multichannel marketing strategy to effectively communicate with prospects in the right channel, at the right time. The frameworks and digital marketing models I review in this post can help build communications around the consumer rather than a product.
With the advent of the internet and the ongoing evolution of the media landscape, businesses are having to continuously play catch-up whilst the gap between consumer behaviour and business-readiness has never been greater:
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How to review your digital brand differentiation using 3 complementary frameworks
Differentiation should be considered a key element to your brand strategy and help to provide an opportunity and vision to define a niche within your market sector, helping to gain the attention of your existing customers and extend your proposition to encourage new markets and audiences.
Framework Models of Brand Differentiation
After completing an organisational digital strategy health check, you will have a wider picture of the landscape your organisation is positioned, its strengths and weaknesses, the competitor landscape and the potential opportunity to create a model of differentiation from the competition in order to meet your organisations objectives.
To help understand whether a model of differentiation could exist, it is important to evaluate the quantitative and qualitative research completed. There are 3 models you could consider to apply to your organisation when considering a Brand differentiation strategy:
Three frameworks/models for brand differentiation
Framework 1:…
There’s no better way to start 2017 than to take stock of emerging trends in today’s continually evolving marketplace and put some best practices in place for the year ahead.
As we pause to look back on what has changed, we should take note of the improvements that are needed in order to stay on top of any new advancements. A lot has changed in the past 12 months. New marketing tools have been created and existing services improved that will continue to shape the way that we conduct marketing research. Forward thinking marketers are placing more emphasis on survey-based software in order to discover exactly what their customers want.
As political change influences the way we work and developments are made with marketing tools, it is important that we stay informed about any relevant changes.
It’s an exciting time for digital marketers with numerous online tools to help you deliver more effective…
Digital marketing models to provide useful frameworks for digital audits, planning and strategy
If you are a marketing manager needing to create a digital marketing plan or conduct an audit or review online communications, models provide a helpful flow as to what to include and to ensure nothing is missed.
Previously, in 2013, we created a free guide to support students using models in their assignments or when creating plans - Essential Marketing Models. Based on feedback from studying professionals and their lecturers, we thought it would be useful to have a specific guide to Digital Marketing Models.
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Smart Insights Free Members can also download an editable digital marketing plan template featuring our popular RACE Growth System, a simple structure to…
How data, technology and changing consumer expectations are shaping the marketing mix
The advancement of so many transformative new technologies over the last five to ten years is shaking up the modern marketing world. From the emergence of wearable technology, to chatbots and mobile payment apps, disruption is taking place nearly everywhere we look.
All of these technologies have the potential to give marketers new opportunities to meet and surpass consumer expectations. However, this is only possible if marketers can keep their skill-sets up to date and look at ways to integrate new ways of working into existing processes, for example through an effective digital transformation agenda.
The technological advancement we’re seeing is not linear. Instead, it is occurring rapidly in the form of major leaps, with consumers and pioneering tech companies leading the change:
Many businesses are struggling to keep up and it’s…
Chart of the Day: we question whether flash sales and daily deal marketing services are still giving customers what they want?
Daily deal sites have taken a few blows over the years, Groupon cut staff and fired it's CEO, Living Social was eventually bought by Wowcher which was sold by the Daily Mail. Amazon have also closed their daily deals service. But one great insight into daily deal sites is search history, which has slowly declined for 5 years.
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The UK is one of the most prominent countries searching for daily deals, Australia, Ireland, Canada and the US also have a pretty strong taste for daily deals too.
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Google Trends also reveal that one of the most searched for keyphrase was www.ebay.co.uk daily deals.
Searches for daily deals might be declining, and…
The 11 step launch marketing plan
The success of a startup will often depend on its approach to marketing. Unfortunately the vast majority of startup founders have little to no experience or marketing or managing a marketing budget. How do you deal with this dangerous contradiction? Well it's in the planning! Make sure that you’ve got your marketing strategy in line by applying this product launch framework.
There are a million articles out there on brand development, launch marketing, PR, viral videos and more. Reading them all would be a start – or you can check our tried and tested approach below!
The framework described below is typically rolled out step by step over 18 months. We hope it helps.
'In this world of intangibles and endless competition branding is everything.'
Phase 1 - Strategic Positioning, Brand and Web Presence
1. Strategic positioning (ad Early Adopter target market definition)
The first step in a successful brand/product…
Planning and optimising across the whole customer journey is the most effective way to win and retain customers.
Anyone who's worked for an Ecommerce business, or indeed just about any kind of business, will know that customer retention and re-activation is the key to driving consistent growth in profit.
Attracting entirely new customers at the top of the funnel can often become the focus of Ecommerce campaigns because you naturally want to get more and more people into that funnel to convert and thus make you money. But if you have not invested sufficiently in creating an engaging customer lifecycle which converts and re-engages your customers to tempt repeat purchases then attracting new customers will not be the most effective tactic. You should be focusing on improving the customer lifecycle itself.
I'm going to show you why with a nifty little tool I like to call maths.
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