We recently published the first part in this series about specialized construction marketing planning. It starts with a strategic marketing plan built for specialized construction with clear goals and measurable, results-oriented tactics can help you build up a lead-generating machine for your business. 

The second step is to create and distribute content that's relevant to your target audience. Relevant content will attract this audience to your website when they're searching for solutions, and will establish trust with them when they read what you've published. 

You’ve identified a quality lead, connected with them and built trust through educational, customer-centric content, and explored solutions along with them. As your buyer goes through their buyer’s journey and you've followed the steps in the Empowered Sales Methodology, the next step is clear: advise them and close the sale. But how?

There is plenty of advice out there on how to close a sale. But negotiating is the step that comes first. As a salesperson, using any of these phrases while negotiating with a quality, qualified potential customer is a great way to make them look elsewhere for a solution.

Imagine this scenario: a hiring manager calls you up to let you know that an employee has given their two-week notice. ‘Fill out this new employee acquisition form,’ you tell the manager. And then you hear nothing for two weeks while the hiring manager scrambles to get all the necessary approvals and signatures for the replacement. Once everything is signed, you start recruiting for the open position - in IT.

When I get started on a strategy for a client at Trending Up, the most important question I ask is "what are your goals?". Obviously, the biggest goal for a home builder (or any industry business, for that matter) is to increase profits. It's my job to put together an executable marketing strategy that will get them there. However, part of our sales process here at Trending Up is to help the client identify exact pain points they're experiencing - so by the time they sign with us and we have our first strategy meeting, they answer my question much differently. 

Whether you’re ready or not, manufacturer marketing has already been disrupted. Peoples' behaviors have changed, and they’re tuning out traditional marketing tactics.

Marketing in 2017 is inbound-centric.

In fact, inbound is the preferred marketing method for all companies that spend under $5 million annually on marketing. If your organization spends less than $100,000 on marketing annually, you’re four times more likely to practice inbound than outbound. In the words of Guy Kawasaki, "If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing.”

As the driver of association membership, you’re well aware that retaining current members is preferable to recruiting new members plus regaining ones you’ve lost during the past membership drive timeframe. It’s very related to how businesses think about retaining current clients: according to Gartner, it costs 5x as much to acquire a new customer as it takes to keep an existing one satisfied.

You may have heard the term inbound recruiting in HR circles in the past few years. But do you have a good understanding of what it is, why it’s trending, and how it could change the way you do your job as a recruiter? Today, I’ll dive in and give some grounding to this new term and how inbound marketing for recruiters changes the way you recruit for hard-to-fill, high-volume open positions.

Identify, connect, explore, advise. We use a variation on Hubspot’s inbound sales method, but the main points are the same: by educational and consultative in your sales process. The idea (and, in practice, the reality) is that prospects have already done a majority of their research about you and your products before they are ready to talk to a salesperson. As a result, salespeople must adapt to today's buyers. 

I hope you all had a fabulous Thanksgiving! From us here at Trending Up, we’d just like to take a moment to share what makes us most thankful this year, from friends, to family, to our clients! Here are some from some of our team: