As a sales performance company, we help turn leads into customers and generate new revenue. CRM, sales, and sales enablement are vital to our clients' success, and today, we are bringing you a recap of the most popular posts we've published in 2018 on these topics.

We pride ourselves in providing our clients and visitors top-notch, quality content through our blog to teach them and guide them to success. We've searched for the most popular blogs of 2018, and we've curated these lists that will publish each day this week to bring you some of the most educational and informative content from the year. Check out these top blogs on CRM, sales, and sales enablement from 2018.

In 2015 (yes, three years ago!), I wrote a blog post titled, “3 Things Every Media Company Needs to Do in 2015,” and it was pretty popular. I consider myself uniquely qualified to write about this topic because I spent the first half of my career selling advertising at a media company and the second half (so far) consulting media companies on their B2B marketing, lead generation, and sales enablement needs.  

“Sales enablement” is a term that seems to get thrown around quite a lot. I’ve found, however, that many sales and marketing professionals really don’t understand what “sales enablement” is or why it’s important. My definition is pretty simple. Sales enablement is any tool or process that supports the sales function—helping salespeople guide their prospects through their buying journey—from exploration to evaluation to final decision making and close.  

At LeadG2 and our parent company, The Center for Sales Strategy, we use the HubSpot CRM to manage our sales pipeline and activity. We also provide full customization, set-up, and training on the HubSpot CRM for our clients. Coming from a media sales background myself, I’ve seen my fair share of CRMs being rolled out, and ultimately never effectively used internally. This is why I love working with media companies today and helping them simplify the process of choosing, setting up, and using a CRM with the HubSpot CRM. 

While no CRM (or really any software tool) is perfect—we personally think the HubSpot CRM is at the top of the list and provides unique benefits that other CRMs can’t deliver on. This is why I’ve developed a list of what I believe to be the top eight reasons media companies will love (and do love!) the HubSpot CRM.

In 2006, HubSpot launched software designed to help organizations execute their inbound marketing strategies. Fast-forward to 2017 and you’ll find over 30,000 companies in over 90 countries relying on HubSpot’s Growth Stack software to help them build their sales pipelines and accelerate their revenue growth. However, there are many marketing and sales leaders that still don’t know what HubSpot is and how it can benefit their business.   

HubSpot’s Growth Stack includes CRM and sales enablement tools, but the foundation of the Growth Stack is HubSpot Marketing. HubSpot Marketing allows organizations to bring all the tools they use to support their marketing under one umbrella that shares the same data. It includes everything a marketer needs to increase website traffic, convert website visitors into leads, and “close the loop” to deliver a measurable ROI. Below is a summary of HubSpot Marketing’s functionality. 

It seems as though the world of selling gets more complex and challenging every year.  Consequently, salespeople are always looking for an edge — a tool, a process, or a technology that helps them become more efficient and more productive. I found such an edge when I deployed HubSpot’s Sales Pro Tool. It’s a sales enablement tool that’s part of HubSpot’s Growth Stack. I use it all day every day.  Here are five ways it has made me a better sales person.      

Email is one of the most important pieces of technology that we use today. While we might even rely too much on email, it’s a necessary part of the sales process. However, if you really think about it, the way we use email hasn’t changed all that much over the years. Sure, we now have email in our pockets (via our phones) but the actual tools we use are pretty much the same.

Or so you may think…

This is where some of the leading sales enablement companies (like HubSpot Sales) come into play. They are helping make salespeople smarter, faster, and able to improve one-to-one email communication in some big ways. Let’s take a quick look at some of the tools your salespeople shouldn’t be doing business without. 

In the work we do with media companies, staffing firms, and other professional service businesses, two topics consistently appearing on our clients’ radar screens are how to accelerate prospects’ movement through their sales pipeline and how to close more sales, faster.

There are basically two areas we focus on as causes for a slow sales process.

First, we look for key infrastructure that may be missing or misused or underused. This can range from lack of sales training programs to missing technology like a CRM or marketing automation platform.

Second, we look at micro-level factors focused mainly on how the firm engages with prospects on a one-to-one or customized level. We know to a high degree of certainty that if a firm is using a one-size-fits-all approach to closing a sale, then a more customizable approach may be just the ticket for reaching sales goals quicker.

In this post, I’ve summarized what's holding you back from making your sales process faster.

Each year at budget time, most B2B companies face a similar challenge. How do we increase our revenue from the prior year? For many, the simple answer is hiring more salespeople. After all, if our average salesperson makes $100,000 and they are selling $1,000,000 worth of business, you can easily increase your sales by hiring 2 or 3 more salespeople. The bottom line expense would be $200-$300k for salaries, but the increase in sales would be $1,800,000-$1,900,000. Of course, you also need to factor in your management span and the possibility of needing additional sales managers to account for the increased size of your sales team. Also factor in sales training and other overhead that a growing sales team needs to be effective.

On paper, increasing the size of your sales team each year is a great strategy for increasing sales on an annual basis. However, at some point, it gets very expensive to carry the overhead and expense of a well-paid sales team, and at some point there will be diminishing returns as most markets are only so big.  

As a group, salespeople typically aren’t shy about providing feedback and sharing their opinions. Oftentimes, you don’t even have to ask them. They’ll volunteer their unsolicited points of view about what works and what doesn’t work with your organization’s sales and marketing strategy. Sometimes, the best first step to take toward improving sales performance is to stop and listen to what your sales team has to say.

I spend a lot of time listening to salespeople. Below is a synopsis of the most common complaints I hear.