Sometimes, it’s not about how many leads you generate; it’s about what you do with those leads once they’re in your database. Generating leads is a wasted effort if you let leads go untouched in your CRM.  Providing adequate outreach through a series of touchpoints not only helps you stay on top of recently generated and high-priority leads but it enables you to build trust with them and lay the foundation for a strong relationship. It’s moves like these that are crucial when it comes time for your leads to make a buying decision.  This is where sequences come in. Sequences are a fea ..read more

A day in the life of a marketer is akin to a juggling act. You have to plan out the day, check emails and respond to anything relevant, conduct a morning huddle with the team, monitor campaign performance, schedule social media posts, and more. While these tasks are critical, they can also be overwhelming and consume a huge share of your time. Fortunately, marketing automation helps you eliminate repetitive tasks and focus more of your time on high-value items on your to-do list and big-picture marketing plan.  In this article, we’ll dissect how marketing automation helps reduce the amoun ..read more

​​When you think of “marketing automation,” does it immediately send you into doomsday mode where robots entirely take over all jobs usually done by humans, or are you normal?  What it really means is that you won’t have to do banal operational tasks like scheduling and publishing posts and emails. An autobot could do it while your team is free to do what you really hired them for.  Let’s discuss more about the ways you can leverage marketing automation to boost team productivity, increase sales efficiency, and accomplish goals faster.  8 Ways Marketing Automation will Boost You ..read more

Like so many areas of business, in recent years, the field of marketing has evolved to make use of the major advances in technologies of automation, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more. Together, these technologies are increasingly being applied to the burgeoning discipline of sales and marketing automation. If you’re a marketer, you’ll probably be aware that there are a number of powerful tools and platforms offering marketing automation solutions. These promise to boost the productivity of your marketing efforts, saving you time and money by automating routine process ..read more

The average customer journey these days involves a lot of self-service: we do our own research, read reviews of products and try to decipher which ones are real vs. paid or bot-generated, and then make the decision alone.  It’s a big shift from the days of hand-selling in department stores, where a human would not only greet you but also educate you on your options and help you decide which one best fits your needs and budget. This isn’t a call to return to the past, though. Rather, it’s a suggestion of how marketers can infuse the presale steps of the sales funnel with that same human to ..read more

We’ve all been there: you notice that typo after the email to your boss has sent; you’re halfway through your data report when you realize there’s a question you wish you’d asked in the survey; you can’t figure out how to change the filter in your Zoom settings to make you not a cat when you’re in front of the panel. Well, luckily, most of us haven’t been that last guy. Still, human errors happen, and they happen more often when we’re overloaded with busy work. This is exactly why automation is a hugely important part of our daily lives – sales and marketing work is no exception.  Wh ..read more

For small and lean businesses, marketing automation is a game-changer. Companies use it to automate repetitive tasks, create and schedule lead nurture campaigns, and facilitate sales follow-up, so nothing slips through the cracks.  However, each marketing automation tool is not created equally. The more reliable and efficient your automation tool is, the more redundancies it eliminates, creating a well-oiled process that generates leads and converts them to customers.  Let’s talk about some of the features to look for in a marketing automation tool, as well as some of the ways market ..read more

Have you ever wondered how some brands manage to accomplish so much when it comes to their sales and marketing strategies? Well, let you in on a secret: they have some help. Sales and marketing automation tools are like having a personal assistant handle the tasks related to growing and sustaining your business. And with 75 percent of marketers using at least one type of automation tool, it’s a safe bet that companies killing it with their marketing and sales performance owe a big thank you to automation (rather than luck or endless budgets). The beauty of marketing automation comes from both ..read more

When it comes to iconic couplings, we’ve got Beyonce and Jay-Z, peanut butter and chocolate, and… marketing automation and CRM.  Yes, just like the perfect matches that have come before them, sparks fly when marketing automation software meets CRM. How do we know? Because this collaboration is the edge that gives our platform the ability to bring small businesses more and better marketing capabilities — and we’ve seen firsthand what a difference that can make. Having CRM software integrated into your marketing automation platform is a best of both worlds scenario. Once you use it, you won ..read more

Selecting the right marketing automation software shouldn’t be like trying to solve a confusing and complex math equation. You also shouldn’t have to spend an arm and a leg to get the right tools to grow your small business.  Marketing platforms come in many different shapes and sizes. When you find one that’s straightforward, it’s like finding gold. It’s even better if that platform is 100 percent free.  But, there are a lot of options out there. It can be easy to head straight for the one that is well-known or widely used. While HubSpot is a marketing automation industry leader, th ..read more