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Is it possible to up the success rate of your sales team? This post has some tips on how to close a sale, using integrity and authenticity.

Converting leads into sure-fire sales: it’s the ultimate end goal of all your marketing efforts. So how can you make sure that all your hard work creating buyer personas, streamlining your marketing strategy and handpicking your perfectly-crafted content will be converted into sales when all is said and done?

Sales and marketing absolutely need to be aligned; here’s how best to integrate the two in the digital space.

The title of this post is a bit misleading because this really isn’t a topic for debate. Sales should absolutely be involved in digital marketing, unless you want your brand to get left in the dust. By now, savvy marketers have realised that the silos and the silent rivalry separating sales and marketing teams are bad for business.The smart question is: how can you get your sales team inspired to get stuck in when it comes to digital marketing?

Use the 80/20 rule to win your customer’s trust and loyalty by adding value through useful and engaging content, instead of just punting products.

Let’s face it, there’s nothing endearing about 100% hard-sell advertising. The era of stereotypical “used car salesmen” and push marketing tactics is stepping aside to make way for inbound marketing and sales. Customers are gravitating toward businesses who add value by being helpful, authentic and building lasting, mutually beneficial relationships.

The challenge of aligning sales and marketing is tenfold when your marketing services are outsourced – even if the outsourced team is packed full of insight and expertise, their ability to integrate with your salesforce is a vital piece of the puzzle.

There is no doubt that an event planner’s job is probably one of the most exciting and the most stressful of all the vocations out there.  No two events are the same, no two budgets are the same and no two unpredictable circumstances are ever the same, either.

So, how does an event planner manage to stay so cool, calm and collected? And why do they keep bringing on the same stress to themselves day-in-and-day-out? The answer is simple, the best event planners, plan.

There are a few secrets to organising a kick ass event and we’re going to spill the beans on them right now.

Move over Millennials, Generation Z is set to take over.

The generation buzzword for the longest time has been the all-too familiar Millennial - you know the ones who are brash, narcissistic and entitled? Or so the cliché goes. But we cannot forget the new spending force, Generation Z, that’s about to take the world by storm. According to a very interesting article posted by The New York Times, Generation Z is set to be the “next retail disrupter”. What does this mean for marketers though?

In 2015, the holiday season saw US consumers alone spending $56.42bn on e-commerce sites. Cyber Monday (the Monday following Black Friday) that year saw $2,671m being spent online in one day. The ease of online shopping makes our present lists far easier to purchase, and it’s evident in how consumer behaviour changes over the holiday season.

The number one thing we hear from clients nowadays is they’re having difficulty understanding what their customers need and want, and knowing this will help you align your sales and marketing efforts much better. While you are not your customer and will never be, it does help to put yourself in their shoes and anticipate what their needs and wants are.

Marketing your brand is about more than putting a price to your product; it’s about connecting with your audience and selling them on what your brand can tell them about the world around them. Telling a story is by far one of keys to a great marketing campaign.

Since the turn of the century, South Africa’s internet penetration has exploded from less than 10% of the population having access to the internet, to 55% in 2015. For brands in South Africa, this presents a fantastic opportunity to attract and engage with their customers online.  

Google’s Consumer Barometer is constantly updating to show us the behaviours online that can help us to adapt our strategies to local consumers, and using this data in conjunction with internet penetration statistics can guide our marketing activities for better online customer experience.

You can’t ignore the Internet, and believe us, neither will your customers. From research to actually purchasing a product in the ‘offline’ world, the web is taking up a huge portion of your customer’s time and gives them an immediate first impression of your brand.

So why do people talk about customer experience and user experience as if they were different things?

These days, it’s foolish to think that customers will watch a TV ad and immediately trot to the store, bank card in hand. The buyer's journey is a lot more complicated than that, and on average 81% of customers do some online research before spending a cent.