Business Insights

Marketing and sales alignment is all about creating a seamless customer journey that guides prospects through each stage of the marketing and sales funnel. It may sound simple enough, but this can be deceptively hard to pull off.  Getting it right requires a carefully planned approach for the top, middle and bottom of your funnel. As well as knowing how you’re going to move prospects from one stage to the next. Perhaps most challenging of all, it requires sales and marketing to work closely together and be completely aligned.

There is no one size fits all when it comes to cost-effective lead generation strategies. The methods you choose to adopt will depend on a number of factors, including your overall marketing strategy, resources, business objectives, and the type of industry you operate within.  However, if you think about inbound lead generation as a way to bring people into your sales funnel, as well as engaging and building trust with prospective customers, there are five cost-effective strategies which could fit the bill.

This article is the first in a series of four that will look at CRMs in depth, considering what a CRM is; what a CRM can add to your business; how you can choose the best CRM for your business - and how to get the most from it.  In the simplest of terms, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a software tool that allows businesses to track their interactions with customers and prospects in a flexible and scalable way. It pools a myriad of customer data in one place, allowing a business to record and, in some cases, automate its interactions with customers and prospects.

Marketers often focus their efforts on new business, but sometimes, the fastest and most cost-effective way to grow your business is to look at your existing customers. In fact, the success rate of upselling or cross-selling to an existing customer is around 50% higher than selling to a new one for the first time.

People are any business’ greatest asset and the right talent will help fast-growing businesses thrive now and into the future.  But acquiring that talent is easier said than done and entrepreneurial CEOs are all too aware of the challenges around recruitment and how to retain employees. In its 2018 report,  the Scaleup Institute found that access to talent is the major pain point for scaleup CEOs, especially as four in ten expect to grow employee numbers  by 20 per cent each year.