At LeadG2 and The Center for Sales Strategy, our tech stack not only serves to support our sales and marketing efforts, but it also enables our consultants and content teams to super-serve our clients and provide top-notch service and deliver quality results and help them achieve success. Are you utilizing tech to support your marketing, sales, or service efforts at your company? 

We asked our team what marketing and sales technology they use most frequently, and here's the top 10 tools from what was submitted. Yes, there's actually more!

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?

One of the biggest resources that marketing teams have is access to their sales team. That's right! The sales team is a key resource for successful marketing campaigns. 

So, how is the sales team a resources for marketing? Here's how marketing and sales teams should collaborate throughout the marketing campaign process to drive better sales results.

Most managers and sellers have experienced this:

• A seller is moving a new business prospect through the sales process.
• All signs are positive.
• The prospect goes silent, and will not respond to email, phone calls, letters, or stop-ins.
• The seller goes to his/her manager and asks for advice.
• The manager spends time listening to the seller, conducting diagnostic work, and providing advice to the seller (what to do to restart the stalled sale).

On the surface, this sounds like a good system, but in reality, it is not. Here’s why:

• Managers work with multiple sellers—doing this for many sellers takes up a great deal of time and is often redundant (same problem… same solution).
• Sellers might not have easy or timely access to their managers—this delays the sales process and allows the sale to get further off track.

There are no shortcuts in life. You may have heard this phrase before, but it absolutely rings true when it comes to generating leads through inbound marketing. We often hear marketers ask if there are ways they can supplement the marketing leads they capture on their website to boost results with email marketing.

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.

Many people out there think they are blogging. Are they just blogging to blog? Or are they strategically blogging to get results and drive the efforts closer to success?

We believe that every great inbound marketing or sales enablement plan includes a well thought out content strategy, which is why this is one of the first, and most critical, steps we take with a new client. It’s so we can ensure we aren’t creating content just for the sake of creating content, but that we have the end sales results in mind. Below is a sneak peek into the steps that our consulting team and content strategist take when developing a robust content strategy.

When it comes to blogging, you may be wondering, "What makes the perfect blog post?" In my opinion, this is both an art and a science. It needs to be visually appealing with text breaks, a good amount of white space, and visual elements. But it also needs to be written in a way that provides value, engages the readers, and encourages them to take a specific action.

In other words, writing a good blog post is no easy feat. Understanding the basic building blocks of the perfect blog post is a great start.

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.