Building a customer service department when you are a small or scaling business might seem like a daunting challenge. It might even be tempting to say, "surely that's something that can wait until we are bigger, we want to focus on winning new logos."
Buying B2B solutions is a long hard slog. Gartner says the median B2B buying group consists of between 6 and 10 people. Each of these people need four to five pieces of information to help them. Usually, around 83% of the time they have gone and sourced this information themselves.
Then starts the painful process of achieving consensus and a concrete action plan.
Brent Adamson, a Gartner distinguished VP, puts it this way.
"The hardest part about B2B solutions isn't selling them but buying them. Today's buying journey has effectively reached a tipping point where it's become unnavigable without a significant amount of help"
The B2B sales person plays a significant role in providing that help. Here's how.
The 'phone is undoubtably a critical business tool; it isn't going anywhere. So it makes little sense to have your 'phone system sitting out on a limb and not integrated with your other business systems. The shift to the cloud provides small and medium businesses with an affordable, simple way to fully integrate their suite of customer facing applications.
There are a Tsunami of applications floating in the cloud available and waiting to be connected to your customer tech stack. (wait...can you have a Tsunami in a cloud? Perhaps it's a thunderstorm?)
However, we usually firmly advise our clients against creating a Frankenstein's monster of applications from many different firms, connected via less-than-perfect APIs or via expensive custom code. Many providers have acquired technology to build into their own product stack rather than build it from scratch, which is simply putting lipstick on the proverbial pig.
So we have seen the powerful benefits of one unified codebase across your customer stack It's clearly the preferred solution. It creates a great deal less friction in your business. You spend less time doing your work. You learn a single user interface. Less things go wrong or stop working. The connections between software providers don't fail. The end result is significantly better and faster ROI.
A site is no longer just an "online brochure", it’s a key asset in generating a consistent stream of leads for the sales team.
In this blog, you’ll learn the 7 key website elements for effective b2b lead generation. If your site is missing these capabilities you're missing out on revenue.
Let’s start with a definition: What exactly is a marketing plan? It’s the detailed sequence of tactics and activity that achieves your marketing strategy. It’s how you go from strategy to action. It’s what tells your team what to do and in what sequence, when they arrive at work each day. So it’s important!
And that's the problem this blog aims to overcome, armed with this free Funnel Velocity Calculator tool.
If you want to read about the background to funnel velocity, why it's important and how to use it in your business start reading from the top. If you want to use the calculator right now and just need some guidance on completing the sections, scroll through the blog to the relevant slide you need help with.
This post was originally published by The B2B Marketing Lab.
Previously, if you wanted to build your website using the HubSpot content management system (CMS), you had to purchase a HubSpot marketing licence (Basic, Professional or Enterprise) and install the CMS as an ‘add-on’. The CMS ‘add on’ would give you access to the website management platform, allowing you to build your website and put it live.
However, since HubSpot’s conception in 2006, there has been no way for businesses to have the HubSpot CMS as a standalone solution to host and manage their website.
So for many businesses looking to take advantage of HubSpot’s sophisticated CMS, they had no choice but to grit their teeth, purchase a Basic, Professional or Enterprise licence and get on with it. Whereas others simply used something else!
That is, until now!