The cost of customer service is often overlooked. After all, it's not as visible as marketing or sales. But poor customer service can be extremely costly for businesses in multiple ways, from lost sales to damaged company reputation.

Research is important in preparation for anything you do if you want to be successful.  It’s also the most important and first key layer in sales.  Before you do anything whether that is call, email, or breathe, you should always make sure you know whom you are calling or emailing. 

Sales are not by accident.

A successful sales team does not happen by accident. Instead, success comes from a constant evaluation of what is working or not working, documented in a sales playbook for the entire organization to benefit from, and weekly training is the foundation for sales success.  

In the past, when newspaper ads, mailers, magazine ads, massive billboards, and other traditional marketing mediums were the only channels to advertise. Measuring the marketing return on investment (ROI) was difficult and typically created tensions between the sales and marketing departments because each believed they should receive recognition for the increase in revenue.

Most business owners, sales managers, and sales professionals strongly believe they have a firm grasp on their ideal buyer. In most cases, they are correct. But, this knowledge was obtained over years, if not decades of experience working in the industry, market, selling to prospects, managing customer accounts, and held in their brain. Now, we both know that everyone in your company does not have all this information at their disposal. This is why developing a buyer persona is extremely important to the overall success of your sales and marketing.

A digital marketing campaign is an online marketing effort put forward by a company to drive engagement, conversions, traffic, or revenue. [Study.com, Danielle Reed] A variety of marketing channels can be used simultaneously to reach the goals of an organization. Each channel also has different assets that should be associated with the campaign. For our purposes we will only focus on four types of campaigns which our company develops to increase engagement, results in more conversions, website traffic, and revenue.

Over the past few weeks, I have thought deeply about the direction of our company as the managing partner and, more specifically, my role as our only sales professional. Over the last seven years, it’s been a lot of fun, a grind, frustrating, and rewarding. But, I believe we are headed into uncharted waters over the next 12 – 18 months due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One sales tactic that is often overlooked by sales professionals is creating a personal meeting link in their email signature. This particular feature is extremely useful due to the flexibility, integration capabilities, automation, and allowing the prospect to choose when it's a good time to meet. Let's get started with creating your first personal meeting link in HubSpot and you can read a more detailed blog on HubSpot's Knowledge Base. 

Most small to medium sized companies often overlook the email signatures used by their employees. We are often told that they never thought about it and they never knew it could be used as another tool for sales - more on this later. But, before we get started, you may want to familiarize yourself with the email service provider your company utilizes (G Suite or Outlook) and how to edit the signature (instructions for G Suite or Outlook). Now, let's get started.