From being quarantined in our homes to keeping six feet apart and avoiding handshakes, the way we interact with other humans has drastically changed. In the business environment, the normal behaviors and tactics that salespeople have relied on to drive their success are no longer available. We can no longer drop by to see a client, meet a prospect for lunch, or fly to another city for a face-to-face meeting. More and more selling is now being conducted over the phone and via email.

And this isn’t a short-term trend. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that “a new normal has developed for businesses of all sizes across nearly all industries, with changes likely to endure even after COVID-19 is a thing of the past.” We may have lost a few tools from our sales toolbox, but we’re going to replace them with new ones that we can use to build relationships and advance the sale.

Marketing automation has quickly risen in importance for businesses across all sectors. Surveys indicate that nearly half of all companies have adopted the technology, and that number runs even higher for B2B businesses. 91% of marketers also agree that marketing automation is “very important” for their success across different marketing channels.

Recently, I shared a post explaining how to send videos via email. Due to spam, security, and email hosting features, many email clients do not allow video embeds directly into emails, so with a few easy steps, marketers and salespeople can send video via email, just not with an actual embed. If you are a Hubspot Sales user at the Professional or Enterprise level, I have good news! Not long ago, Hubspot announced a feature that enables salespeople (or any Hubspot user communicating with a contact through the CRM) to embed videos directly into their 1:1 emails! 

Alright, it's time. Video is important to marketing and sales. I know, I know... but have I done much with it? Not until this year. After attending INBOUND 2018, Hubspot's annual conference, I decided that it's time. Time to jump feet first into the world of video to enhance our company's marketing and sales efforts and achieve bigger and better results. 

Video is often cited as a tool that helps drive marketing and sales performance, and the numbers shared in a Hubspot blog back up those claims:

• 97% of marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service.
• 76% say it helped them increase sales.
• 47% say it helped them reduce support queries.
• 76% say it helped them increase traffic.
• 80% of marketers say video has increased dwell time on their website.
• 95% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.
• 81% of people have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand's video.

We often wear a lot of hats, juggle a lot of duties, and report to a lot of people. It can be challenging to gracefully and successfully achieve everything you want to (and need to) while also adopting a new marketing or sales tactic. I network with a lot of marketing, sales, and public relations professionals, and these are the most popular reasons people share that they avoid getting started with video, and ways to overcome these excuses to achieve results with video in marketing and sales strategies.

As we've shared in previous posts, our team recently attended Hubspot's annual conference in Boston, INBOUND. Each year, INBOUND marks a monumental time for Hubspot's product updates and announcements, and this year didn't disappoint. This year's over-arching theme at the conference was, 'Grow Better,' and these product updates will assist Hubspot users with just that: growing better and growing bigger. 

The most common mistake marketers make when designing and executing an inbound marketing strategy is attempting to do it all by themselves. Doing anything solo usually adds additional risk. Team efforts almost always prevail over one-man shows – just ask Lebron. Batman had Robin. Ben had Jerry. Lewis had Clark. And Lennon had McCartney. Heck, even when I was 12 years old, I was told to never go swimming in the lake without a “buddy.” So marketing needs to team up with sales to mitigate risk and increase the likelihood of success.

Is a blog a marketing tool or a sales tactic? The answer is yes. A blog that’s a forum for educational content that resonates with your target personas is both. Blogging has long been identified as a productive marketing tool. Blogging supports marketing’s objectives when its' content attracts new visitors to your website and helps convert those visitors to leads. However, if that’s the only function of your blog, then you’re missing out.      

Most small growing businesses know they need to continue to make strategic investments to sustain their growth. The challenge is knowing where to invest. If the obstacles to growth that you’ve identified are branding and visibility, hiring additional recruiters will not solve these problems.

When it comes to developing a strategic marketing plan or sales process, one of the first things we recommend any company to do is to get a clear and accurate understanding of their customers and prospects. What’s key here is that this profile (commonly called a Target or Buyer Persona) is based on research, not assumptions. Which means you’ll need to conduct some actual research (or hire a company like LeadG2 to do it for you). The most effective way of doing this is with a mix of online surveys and live interviews. The surveys allow for a large sampling size, while the interviews allow for a deeper dive and further understanding. You can dive a little deeper into what that target persona survey process might look like here, but for the sake of this article we’ll be focusing on what it is exactly that your Target Persona should tell you about your B2B prospects so that you can have better and smarter marketing, content, and sales conversations.