Marketing and Sales Education Center

For new Hubspot users the Prospect Tracking Tool may not seem to have a lot of value as the tool only gets down to the Internet Service Provider level.  For example, when a prospect logs in at a location other than the office, it is probably going to log their visit as Verizon, Sympatico HSE or Starbucks.  You may not be sure what you can do with that information or even if it has any value at all.  It can be pretty vague.

Recently, Google completely transformed the world of SEO tactics. Many B2B marketers are still under the impression that if they optimize all of the pages on their website with as many keywords as possible, that will drive traffic to their website and improve their search engine ranking.  While this was true at one time, trying to get Google's attention at the expense of focusing on what your audience wants is no longer a viable internet marketing strategy.  Google has made it this way.  Today, successful marketers will need to create remarkable content targeted to their audience and their marketing personas. In fact, some are now starting to refer to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) with the new term CEO (Customer Experience Optimization).

Many business owners think there are a whole host of ways to increase business and fuel their growth. Some thnk that having a great product is the only thing you need. If you build a better moustrap they will come. That may work for Apple, but more often than not, that strategy fails.

The scientific community, it seems, is beginning to embrace social media as a way of improving dialogue and communication.  To the general public, the scientific community has seemed like an impenetrable fortress of scientific terminology, jargon and very complex concepts.  We wanted to understand the research more, but we were hopelessly lost when we tried to find out more about the great scientific breakthroughs we hear about. 

Sometimes, desperate times call for desperate measures.  That was the dilemma Zeller's, a Canadian discount retailer, found itself in last year.  Zeller's had just announced that it was going out of business and had sold many of its store leases to U.S. giant Target.  Zeller's found itself trying to sell much of its inventory with very little marketing budget.  Faced with a very restricted budget - $400,000 vs. the $20 million marketing budget of other big retailers - Zeller's could not do the traditional TV, radio and print advertising campaigns for its final pitch.  It still had to continue to sell product for months to come and do so profitably.

It seems some of our staff have become enamoured with haiku poems, to the point that almost everything they write (texts, emails, notes) is in the form of a haiku.  Since we are all about going with mother nature and that with this staff member in particular, resistance is futile, we will be assimilated, we have decided to start a new feature "From the Haiku Corner" to allow our staff to pursue this creative outlet.

Expiring patents for best-selling cardiovascular drugs, including Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi's anti-clotting drug Plavix and Pfizer's cholesterol-lowering treatment Lipitor, have left drug makers scrambling for next-generation replacements.  The patent losses could reduce sales of cardiovascular drugs to $60 billion by 2017 from $83 billion in 2011, according to analysts' forecasts.  In Reuter's article "Big bets aim to jolt heart drug sales back to life", it was reported that "big pharma" hopes a new generation of drugs can replace the cardiovascular drugs that are coming off patent.  Recent product launches have achieved less than expected results and new heart medicines still in clinical testing represent some of the biggest gambles ever made by these industry leading companies.

Mark Fidelman wrote an op/ed piece on Forbes.com titled Salesforce.com's New Social Strategy is Brilliant, Here's Why that I thought was very relevant to how sales professionals will develop new business leads and interact with their customers.  It is a given that social media has transformed how we interact with each other - not just communicate.  It is now about open and free flowing information exchange.  Those companies that do not adapt to open exchanges of information with their prospects and customers face being left behind by their competition.

Recently, I read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.  For those of you who have been living in a cave over the last 30 years, Steve Jobs is the visionary co-founder and eventual CEO of Apple.  He was also CEO of Pixar, a Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) production company. Both of these companies changed the way we viewed computers, technology and computer generated movies.  Both Apple and Pixar created a superior user experience and they weren't afraid to push the envelope on new technology; they developed products that consumers didn't even know they wanted or needed.

If you want to increase web traffic for your company's website, search engine optimization practices are still an integral tool to achieve this.  Although the latest Google algorithm changes suggest that you design your website for visitors and not for the sake of search engines, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is still important to pursue.  It is worthwhile to spend some time on optimizing your website in an effort to fine tune it to ensure you are promoting the content on your website so that it attracts the right kind of visitors.