I talk to a lot of small- to medium-sized professional services firms who are growing. Their revenue is going up in the right direction; they have a lot of activity and are busy. But when they take a step back to dive into their revenue numbers, there's one thing that is very scary.

Outbound prospecting for new business has always been a bit of a numbers game. Years ago, when I first started as a Sales Development Rep, the formula was simple. If you made 100 phone calls, you could expect 10 appointments, and at least 1 of those prospects would turn into a client. The numbers would vary from industry to industry and market to market, but that was the standard everyone was shooting for.

Outbound prospecting is still a numbers game today. Unfortunately, the numbers are just a lot bigger. It requires more phone calls and more emails than ever before to get fewer responses, fewer appointments, and fewer clients. Why is it so hard? What’s changed?

Have you ever tried to fill a leaky bucket? A bucket with holes in it? It can be a very frustrating experience. A lot of times, marketers have this same experience when they are trying to keep their sales pipeline filled with new leads. There's a lot of pressure on marketers to generate new leads and to keep new leads in the top of the funnel to generate more sales activity.

Sometimes when you generate leads via inbound marketing, you can get a lot of information about your prospects and leads when they fill out a lead capture form. It really depends, though, on what you're willing to ask.

You can ask things like name, phone number, email, company name, industry, revenue, and more. There's a lot of different variables you can ask for.

The tricky part is, when you ask for too much information, you might limit the number of people that are willing to provide all of that to you. Consequently, this might limit the number of leads you could generate.

A few times a year, we have a company-wide step challenge to see who can get the most steps in to foster some friendly competition and some good health. In fact, I just got back from a quick walk on my lunch break to see if I could squeeze in a few steps for today.

Before I left, I had a call with a prospect who was expressing some frustration they're having in trying to get their sales team to contribute to their blog. They know their sales team has some great ideas and great thought leadership and subject matter expertise, but they just can't get them to share.

Over the last several years, many organizations have purchased marketing automation software technology, hoping this would be the answer to a lot of their marketing problems. They knew they needed to do something different to build a more sustainable sales pipeline and help qualify more sales leads. And they knew that technology could potentially be the answer. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations woke up six months later and were really frustrated.

Salespeople can be great sources of blog content. They engage with prospects and the market everyday. They're hearing questions and overcoming objections, and their responses to these questions and objections are great content for blog articles because this is what your prospects want to know, read, and learn.

THE CHALLENGE: How do you get your salespeople to get the info out of their heads and into the blog? How do you get your salespeople sit down and write?

Every day, I talk to business leaders who share some common sales challenges. Whether it's a business owner, VP of Sales, or a VP of marketing, the struggles are often the same. I often get asked these questions:

• How can we generate more qualified leads for our sales team?
• How can we get our sales team in front of more opportunities?

Yet, when I go to their websites, what I often find, is websites that are old, boring, static, and basically online brochures. This might be great for communicating your brand message, but its one-way communication. That could have worked back in 2008 or 2009, but it's 2019, and your prospects (and your market) expect so much more!

Think about all the time your sales team isn’t at work, but you wished they were. 

When they’re on vacation.
When they’re at lunch.
When they’re commuting.
When they’re on a flight.
When they’re with their family on the weekend.

Now think about the time your sales team is at work, but they’re not involved in sales-related activity.

When they’re in a staff meeting.
When they’re filling out an expense report.
When they’re flying to a conference.
When they’re working on a proposal.
When they’re responding to an associate’s email.

The list seems never-ending. The truth is, salespeople aren’t always very productive. In fact, according to HubSpot Research, salespeople spend just one-third of their day in sales-related activities.

Now, imagine if you had a sales resource that never went on vacation, or took a break, or got sidetracked by unproductive activity. Inbound marketing is that resource.

Today’s economic indicators seem to be positive. Unemployment rates are down. GDP numbers are up. And it seems that more and more companies are meeting, and even exceeding, their revenue growth objectives. Favorable economic conditions are always welcome, but we all know that success just doesn’t happen. It takes hard work and preparation from a lot of people to grow a business.

Preparation can take a lot of different forms – hiring, training, building out processes, and leveraging new technology. Proper preparation also requires that we re-evaluate our infrastructure. Do we have the essential elements in place in which to build upon? Our houses have infrastructure – foundation, plumbing, electrical, heating, and air conditioning, etc. Our marketing has required infrastructure as well. Below is a list of the basic marketing infrastructure elements critical to growing a company.