Having problems getting sales and marketing to work together? After yesterday’s post, Missing the Boat by Not Connecting Sales to Marketing, Ben Slayter asked for some help with methods to integrate marketing and sales. What will work for your organization depends on a lot of issues, including personnel, politics, organizational structure, and executive management, just to name a few. Marketing and sales functions, while similar, still require quite different skills and knowledge (and talent), so the idea is to get marketing and sales to work together, not necessarily be the same people. Here are three general methods for connecting marketing and sales that may work for your organization: [Read more…] about 3 Methods for Connecting Marketing & Sales
Marketing
Use Alexa & Compete with Caution for B2B and Niche Sites
When you’re trying to get a handle on how well your site is doing, it can be helpful to compare it to other sites on the Internet. Both Alexa and Compete offer up a ranking of your site compared to all the other sites they know about. However, both Alexa and Compete come up with their rankings by extending the data they do have to make a hypothesis about how your site is actually doing (similar to how Nielson does tv ratings by getting reviews by a very small percentage of US households). For B2B and Niche sites, the information may be problematic if the audience polled by Alexa and Compete does not accurately reflect the niche or industry in question. [Read more…] about Use Alexa & Compete with Caution for B2B and Niche Sites
Social Commerce – What is it, Who’s Doing it, How can You?
Another one of the buzzwords that gets thrown around quite a bit is “social commerce.” Like most of these buzzwords, the practice itself isn’t necessarily new. People have been using socializing to sell things since they first started trading. But new tools have allowed companies to extend socializing to bring much more value to their customers (and their bottom line). Let’s take a look at what social commerce means with today’s tools and marketplace.
[Read more…] about Social Commerce – What is it, Who’s Doing it, How can You?