(Hubspot)---Cultivating Happy Customers

Seven Customer Delight Guidelines

There are seven guidelines that you want to follow to delight customers after closing with them. Customer delight is a competitive advantage for you; so therefore, the more trust you build with people, the more promoters you will create. Building trust with people is the core to customer delight because it will create lasting relationships with people. Here are the Seven Customer Delight Guidelines:

1. Delight employees- If you delight your employees, they will delight your customers. Happy employees will = happy customers.
2. Educate employees- Make sure to educate your employees and develop team principles that they follow. Having a unified message will help to make sure that solving for the customer is key.
3. Empower employees- Make sure that all the employees are empowered to make important decisions.
4. Listen- Make sure to listen. Collecting data about the inbound experience is going to help improve, innovate, and better educate your employees.
5. Ask Questions- Ask questions to learn more about your customers and any problems or concerns they are having.
6. Help & Educate- Its both a pre-sale and post-sale activity to be the best educator. 
7. Follow up- Always follow up with customers to make sure they are satisfied. If you can follow up properly, customers will want to come back.

(Hubspot)---How to Transform the Way You Sell

Transform the way you target accounts

When you target accounts, you want to make sure that you are targeting the right people. Buyer personas should be the main concern of your focus. Once you can number down those group of people, then only the people who are experiencing the pain you solve should enter the top of the funnel. Be careful with those group of people you select.

Transform the way you prospect accounts

When prospecting your accounts, make sure that you research your lead thoroughly. Get as much information as you can about their company and the industry they are in. Check social media to see if they have accounts that you can follow and get news from. Get lead intelligence and determine the goal of your call before picking up the phone. Your conversation with the lead can go a long way to closing.

Transform the way you connect with accounts

When connecting with accounts, you want to build rapport. You want build a strong connection with the account so that they are comfortable with you. Make sure that you know your audience as well because this not only helps you connect with them, but you know more information about them as well. Be helpful and speak the prospect's language because the more you connect with the prospect, the more likely they are to connect with you.

Transform the way your prospects perceive you as a salesperson

You want your prospects to see you as a sales educator. You also want to be seen as a trusted advisor for your prospect. Also make sure that your sales organization is more human so that the prospects are more open to connect with them.

(Hubspot)---Smarketing

Five Steps to Integrate Smarketing into your Organization

Before I give you the five steps to integrate Smarketing into your organization, you may want to know what it is right? Smarketing is the process of integrating the sales and marketing processes of a business. The sales and marketing relationship is often a negative one, so Smarketing should help to make these processes easier. Now that you have a little information on what Smarketing is, I'm going to give you the these five steps to integrate it into your organization:

1. Speak the same language
• Make sure to create a metrics-based goal for marketing which can be tied to sale's goals
• Define the hand-off process between marketing and sales which will make the process smoother
• Define your buyer personas to both groups in order to make sure they target the same people
2. Set up closed-loop reporting
• Make sure that you can identify the signs that you don't have closed-loop reporting
• Identify the benefits of closed-loop reporting for marketing and sales to both groups
• Example reports based on closed-loop data
3. Implement a service level agreement
• Definition of an SLA: agreement between sales and marketing
4. Maintain open communication
• Types of meetings and topics for each 
• Types of emails and content for each
• How to maintain open communication outside meetings and emails
5. Rely on data
• Dashboards are effective because they provide frequent, public, and transparent communication around progress towards goals
• Examples sales and marketing dashboards and reports
• The role of data in issue resolution and problem solving

(Hubspot)---Content that Converts

Creating Content that Converts

When creating content for your website or blog, you want to make sure that the content is compelling enough to grab the viewers attention. Content quality is the most important factor to increasing conversion rates. Therefore, you need to make sure that your content is interesting enough to help convert visitors into leads. Once you visitors become leads then they are one step closer to becoming customers which is the end goal of your inbound strategy.
   
The Buyer's Journey is an important measure to consider when developing your content. If you go through the various stages of the consumer's buying process, then it will be much easier to target the wants and needs of the consumer. Awareness stage content helps educate on nature of problem in general. Consideration stage content helps educate on specifics of problem. Decision stage content helps educate on solution strategies. Use analysis to determine which stage of the Buyer’s Journey needs refinement.

(Hubspot)---Amplifying Your Content With Social Media

Why Social Media is Crucial to your Inbound Strategy

Social media has become one of the most important ways to attract consumers to a business. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are being used by thousands of internet users every day. As a matter of fact, Internet users spend 4X more time on Facebook than Google. Consumers are checking their social media accounts for the latest news, trends, and events which makes advertising a business on social media more prevalent. There are millions of people using social media, so what does that mean? There's a lot of traffic! Below is a list of different social media outlets for marketers to target.

   

   
You can use social media to go through any of the steps in the inbound methodology: attract, convert, close, or delight. You can use social to attract visitors to your site. A study showed that 74 % of marketers saw an increase in traffic after spending just 6 hours per week on social media. Once you attract these visitors, use social media to convert them into leads. Social media is effective for customer acquisition, so use it to engage not just leads, but customers too. Social media can also be used to delight, which is staying connected with customers and keeping them happy. The inbound methodology is very important to remember when making your inbound strategy.

     Social can be used to help you business foster connections with prospects. Once you establish these connections, it allows you to gain information about consumers to keep them happy. Not only will you know about the customers, but they will get to know about you and your company as well. This will make it easier to show your personality with socially shared content. Don't be afraid to show what makes your company special. Enjoy this process and be you!

(Hubspot)---Fundamentals of Creating a Blog

Blogging Best practices for Remarkable content 

The most important thing you need to know about having remarkable content on your blog is that....if you build it, people will come! There are many rewards that come with having remarkable content such as social shares and inbound links. Inbound links are incoming links to a website or webpage. They essentially votes.

Some of the best practices for remarkable content rely on 5 easy steps to remember: 

1. Keep your buyer personas in mind- Make sure that you know your audience so that your content is on target with the wants and needs of your ideal buyer,
2. Address one topic per blog post- Overwhelming the viewer with too much information could cause them to not want to keep reading. If you find yourself writing about something other than what you began with, then its time to create another post.
3. Blog consistently and frequently- When beginning a blog, it is important to publish as often as you want to help you get found online. 82% of marketers who blog daily report positive ROI for overall inbound efforts. Consistent blogging has proven to be effective for marketers everyday.
4. Don't forget about formatting and great imagery- Make a blog post as long as it needs to be to make sure that you get your message across. Also, use bolded text to highlight some of the key takeaways that you want you viewers to have. Include subheads, numbers, and bulleted lists. This makes you content easier to follow so that the reader will easily process the information. Make sure to use high-quality images as well. Nothing is worse than having bad images that the viewer either can't see or doesn't want to see. Formatting and great imagery are a key part of having remarkable content.
5. Don't miss out on lead conversation opportunities-  Remember that your blog has huge lead generation potential, so don't miss out on it. Maybe think about adding a call-to-action (CTA) to your blog and some of the blog post. Having a relevant CTA can prove to be the difference between the viewer staying or leaving your blog.

Inbound marketing success

Inbound marketing success

Last week, we learned about fundamentals of inbound success. There were two types of marketing on the web. There was traditional marketing and inbound marketing.

Traditional marketing included cold calling, cold emails, interuptive ads, and is considered marketing centric. This type of marketing is considered invasive and deters the consumers interest from the content. Its considered the old way to market a company and does not engage with the consumer.

Inbound marketing equals content + context. It includes SEO, blogging, attraction, and is considered consumer centric. This type of marketing engages with the consumer and offers their input. It makes the consumer want to read the content and attracts them to the content as well.

There are four steps to the inbound methodology: attract, convert, close, and delight. Inbound marketing is supposed to attract strangers and turn them into frequent visitors. It then converts these visitors into possible leads. These leads then turn into customers which is apart of the closing process. Once the customers are delighted, they then turn into promoters for your company and help to get your business out by WOM. These steps are illustrated in the chart below.




Some of inbound's best practices are broken down into four fundamental steps. The first step is to use the buyer personas. Here you identify who we're targeting. Learn there trends and learn about the buyers so that you can target their and interest and fit their needs. The marketer must identify with the buyer so that they are considered during the buyer's journey. There are three steps in a buyers journey: awareness , consideration, and the decision. These steps are explained below.



The next steps is to identify trends that are in the market. Identify any trends that buyers are having so that you know how to tailor your business to thrive in this market. The third step is to create persona profile stories so that you can identify consumers and gain their interest and target the three steps of the buyers journey. The last step is to leverage your content. This is to make sure your content will attract the consumer and target their interest.