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:
The majority of respondent prioritized converting leads to customers (70%) and attracting visitors to their site (55%) whilst considerably less (29%) said sales enablement was a top priority.
It is critical to have a structured sales process in order to convert leads into customers. First, think about the process and methodology; find customers, convert and then analyze. In order to achieve this ask questions like:
Surprisingly, not that many respondents said that sales enablement was a high priority within the next 12 months. This is placed at a much lower priority even though it is an important part of any business. Without training, coaching, organization, and equipment it can be challenging for your sales team to convert those leads into customers which are what you ultimately want.
The low percentage of this result could be because companies believe their sales team are already trained to a high standard and have the equipment and knowledge they need to push for a higher conversion of customers and the capability to increase revenue from pre-existing customers.
Increasing revenue from existing customers is most important in Latin America (49%), yet least important in North America and Austrailia/ New Zealand (43%).
As you can see there are slight differences in priorities across different continents. Whilst the highest priority is always converting leads into customers, there are minor differences in other priorities. Austrailia/ New Zealand, Europe/ Middle East/ Africa and North America place importance on growing traffic to their site (58%-65%) whilst Latin America place this just as important as increasing existing customer revenue.
Whilst most continent priorities offer large percentage differences in some areas from others, Asia's seem to be the most evenly split between the 6 priorities with only a 32% range compared to NAM's range of 50% difference.
We would love to know how you prioritize your marketing goals, and whether these stay true to HubSpot's research. Comment below or tweet us to let us know your thoughts.
If you can't wait until my next Chart of the Day, you can view the full report online
By Carolanne Mangles
Carolanne Mangles Dig DipM is the Digital Marketing Executive for Click Travel, an award-winning corporate travel booking platform. She is a specialist in B2B SaaS and enjoys planning and optimizing the full customer journey across all digital channels to create brand awareness, great user experience and copy that really sells the benefits of the product. She was previously Digital Marketing Executive for Smart Insights where she was involved with multiple digital channels to manage fully integrated membership campaigns to boost new customer acquisition and current membership retention. She has spoken and given masterclasses at B2B Expo on Search and Content Marketing, holds an IDM award in GDPR and loves a glass of red wine. Connect with her on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter.
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