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.

So, it’s the end of the year and you are trying to get a handle on the overall value, monetary worth, of your overhead door company.  The struggle lies in the fact that you have huge swings in revenue because your door installs come at random times throughout the year.  It makes it incredibly hard for you to predict the amount of money that you will bring in year over year. So, how do you convert your business into one that has a steadier and even larger stream of revenue?

Step One: Lower Your Expectations… obviously, I’m joking. But seriously, you have been doing this for how many years now?  I’m sure it seems like a really daunting task to have to pass on all of that knowledge and experience to your sales team.  But, the fact is, without setting your sales team up for success and without adequate sales training your team will flounder, you will experience a ton of churn on your sales team, and your overhead door company will fail to grow.

They need nice, new phones, right?  Oh, and fancy, wireless headsets – looking like Britney Spears ready to cold call some fools.  Bring in the stack of overhead door marketing brochures that we just got back from the printer and make sure they all have plenty of those.  Our radio ads are kicking butt and our mailers are hitting almost every household in the zip codes around my business. So, honestly the phones should just be ringing, right?

I’m not telling you something you don’t already know here, but the overhead door industry is unique. You are working with so many different types of customers—homeowners, small business owners, big business owners and even mid-level executives who handle buying and repair decisions. Because you work with such a varied client base, attracting prospects may seem to be a complicated matter.

Marketing brochures: general, colorful, printed pages containing basic information about your business, products, and services, usually including a phone number or website address, but overall not targeted, not measurable, and by most accounts, not that useful for gaining customers. If this is how you can describe most of your marketing materials - including your website, email blasts, social media, advertisements, and downloadable content - stop what you’re producing. Marketing should be building sales enablement tools, not brochures.

Happy Star Wars Day, everyone! Yep, it's a real thing, and yep, we're celebrating here at Jül. Not only did we host a themed webinar today on the force of inbound smarketing, I'm also bringing you the best of the best advice from Star Wars - in GIF format. Normally, people think that marketing for B2B companies has to be kind of boring, straight-laced, and rigid. Not so, fans! In fact, that was our first episode today - Episode IV: Know Your Target. Here's a recap of the important smarketing lessons we touched on today. 

Search engine optimization. Content creation. Social advertising. Viral video production. Banner ads. In the world of digital marketing, there are agencies that focus on each of these individual tactics. Then, there are agencies that focus on strategizing the combinations of these tactics that work best for you. Which do you need? And how do you know?

As more organizations eye a strategic switch from traditional outbound marketing (print ads, cold calls, TV, and billboards) to consultative inbound marketing, it’s grown essential to drive greater alignment between sales and marketing. No longer is it possible for sales and marketing to exist as separate silos with a contentious relationship – the advent of smarketing means these functions are two sides of the same coin.

Inbound Smarketing is a Competitive Advantage

Making the change from sales to consulting in a smarketing (sales + marketing, explained more here) way is a strategic initiative. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Why Good Strategies Fail: Lessons for the C-Suite, “88% of respondents say that executing strategic initiatives successfully will be ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ for their organizations’ competitiveness over the next three years” (p. 5).