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The coordination between marketing and sales has never been more important, and is particularly critical at the bottom of the sales funnel when both teams are hard at work to convert prospects into solid customers.   While you’ve been busy collecting email addresses and devising compelling content that demonstrates your thought leadership and printing solutions, your sales team has been eager to know who your next hottest prospects are so they can act to seal the deal. You can identify these folks via a three-step process: determining who is a “marketing qualified lead” (MQL), those who are “sales accepted leads” (SQL), and finally those prospects who are ID’d as “sales qualified leads” (SQL). Let’s examine all three, what defines them, and what you goals and actions are at each stage.   First, you probably have already identified “just plain” leads. Perhaps they’ve shown some interest in you, via website visits or downloaded content. Your job in parsing through this complexity can be …

The worst question you can ask someone close to you is, “What  do you want for your birthday?” This also applies to choosing a Christmas gift. Why is it a bad question? Because if they are someone truly close to you, shouldn’t you know already? Shouldn’t you have thought about this well in advance? It’s not like the date is a mystery. Shouldn’t you be paying attention to their interests enough to have a good guess as to what would be a thoughtful gift? And what about your clients? Consider your top 10 customers. What do you know about them? What do you know about their future? Could inkjet printing be a part of it? A big part of your vulnerability in each account comes down to being a good match for them in 2021. Sure, you can wait for the phone to ring, take the customer request, and hope you are the only one receiving a call like this. Or, you could do some thinking and some research to learn enough about their company and their industry and their opportunities to offer up some …

We are coming up on a magical time of year. The weather is turning colder, the holidays are approaching and, it’s beginning to look a lot like… Marketing! Admit it, you thrive in a chaotic environment and flounder during the quiet times. Think about the days just before Thanksgiving, right around Christmas and just before New Year’s. The ability to connect with customers is downright lousy. Their attention (and yours, probably) is turned in a different direction. This is the perfect opportunity for you to create some marketing content to assist in your inkjet print sales. Part of what makes digital and inkjet printing different comes down to storytelling. You need to create success stories in video and printed form to help customers and prospects understand the benefits of this technology. Let’s skip to the end of the chapter… When your phone rings and someone says, “I saw that video you posted on LinkedIn about the company that got double digit response rates because of personalized …

Search engine optimization (SEO from now on) is usually thought of as attracting eyeballs to your website at the top of the sales funnel, where prospects are just searching for information. But SEO can offer powerful returns at the bottom of the sales funnel, and help convert prospects into new business. As you probably know, SEO is a technical process that aims to make your website receptive to web traffic. At its most basic, you’ll want to add keywords and phrases to your site and its content that you think your prospects are searching for, so you’ll show up high in their search results. Sure you’d love to attract lots of visitors to your site, but it won’t mean much if a good number of them don’t become customers at some point. Let’s examine a few best practices to move this process along. Long-tail keywords. SEO entails more than adding solitary “head” keywords or short phrases to your searchable content. You also want to craft longer phrases and even sentences that anticipate …

Most of us work well in a chaotic environment. We thrive off of the uncertainty and excitement of jumping from one task to another. Let it rain! Let it rain! Let it rain! So long as things are fast-paced, we are in gear and able to keep up. But… When things start to slow down and we have done a poor job of preparing for those quiet days, this same group of people who thrive in chaos, flounder in the calm. Unable to get excited about doing anything, we do nothing. Coming up are a unique few days on the calendar. Typically, Thanksgiving week is one of preparing for travel and Black Friday shopping. This year, to the surprise of no one, will be different. You are likely not traveling. As such, let’s talk about what you can do during that week that will help you “sharpen the saw,” as Stephen Covey would say. How about inkjet? If on the list of reasons why you were not selling more inkjet, or any at all— is that you don’t understand it, the crash course is a great use of your time. Make an …