Do your sales prospects know more about your company than you do about theirs?

Does your CRM tell your sales people, who has been to your website, and what pages they've looked at?

Does your CRM tell your sales people who's opened their emails and when?

Buyers have an advantage.

First, buyers have good information about your company when they make contact. Your sales reps, by contrast, don’t have a similar level of insight into their prospects.

Bridging this information gap, of course speeds the process and closes more leads. Shouldn’t that be the top priority for Sales and Marketing alike?

That’s largely the goal of Inbound marketing and marketing automation.  


Despite this lack of information about prospects, and the popularity of the term “social selling”…

Only 7% of reps and executives are prioritizing “social selling.”  

Think about it, with website visit data available, and social media data available, and CRM available, shouldn’t sales people have all that data at their fingertips for every customer call? It’s doable.

Data integrity and availability has become one of the biggest challenges facing sales today.

Because…

CRM utility and utilization is low. 

Companies struggle with the fact that their CRM is not seamlessly integrated with the website, with email, and with social tools.

So sales reps cannot get valuable information OUT OF THEIR CRM.

Instead, reps spend too much time, and struggle with putting data INTO THEIR CRM. That's time spent NOT SELLING.

That's the sales problem, that smart inbound marketing solves.

Inbound Marketing generates leads, identifies them at the top of your sales funnel, tracks them through the funnel, and automatically into your CRM, before they become customers. It puts that information at the fingertips of sales. And sales people WANT to use the software.

If you are responsible for sales, these are good reasons to invest in inbound marketing.

You can download the State of Inbound 2017 Sales Edition below.

If this interested you, you may also want to read:

• 2017 State of Marketing and Sales
• What can Facebook advertising do for your business?
• Do you have a concise measurable business strategy for your AdWords campaigns?