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Adopting a B2B strategy can seem daunting at times, where do you start and how do you prioritize whats important, is it lead generation, up-selling or maybe its brand awareness. Oh... whats a marketer to do?
Well the purpose of this blog is to help provide you with valuable tools that will enable you to align your sales and marketing to achieve all of the above. As when you begin to scratch through the surface you'll find a number of these objectives become intertwined with one another, and with an effective tech stack to manage this cohesion sure makes your life increasingly easier.
Before I begin, I know not all companies are not made equal, with this in mind please place a mental memory note from this point onward that the tech stack that I am suggesting below will excel in a small to medium business that specializes in B2B products or services.
Here are some of the items that I considered during the evaluation process.
Proven ability to effective manage company data
Cost effective -preferably free OR a month to month subscription fee
Integration, Integration, Integration! I said it three times because its JUST so important, must work across multiple systems
1. HubspotCRM
Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start. (yup you heard it here, lyrics from The Sound of Music). With so many data points to create a streamlined experience both internally and externally customer facing its pivotal for any business in the 21st century to have a robust CRM system.
Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or more bump in revenue in 6-9 months time. (Strategic IC, 2017) #HubspotCRM
I personally find the Hubspot CRM to be an excellent business tool.
First of all its free, so that's great!
#HubSpotCRM will enable you to easily manage deals in the sales cycle and store vital client information easily accessible to utilise for marketing campaigns at any given time.
Hubspot CRM also comes with some great extras like email open tracking which is hugely beneficial for anyone in sales, empowering you to know who is a potential hot prospect based on live activity ie they have opened and read your email correspondence.
HubspotCRm integrates into the Hubspot technology stack and with Zapier you can connect into just about any third party tool.
2. SEMrush
#SEMrush SEMrush is an excellent tool helping you define your keywords to boost your SEO. Simply type in the keywords associated to your business and SEMrush will provide you with the most relevant search terms. SEMrush performs comprehensive SEO audits to protect you from Google algorithms, and helps you create a much better link building strategy. #SEMrush What makes #SEMrush really stand out for me is the ability to see how you compare up against your competitors. How...By typing in your competitors domain you quickly pick up their keyword terms and their best performing paid for advertising campaigns alongside popular back links that are driving traffic to their website. A smart way to enable you to quickly compete using this insightful data. I am very impressed with heaps of data #SEMrush provides you with simply by typing in a domain name, this tool will help you navigate your SEO from the start enabling you to utilize cost effective keywords and phrases which you can wisely integrate into your content marketing strategy. #SEMrush offers a free version enabling you with 10 searches a day and additional monitoring features and site crawling data. 3. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
#LinkedInSalesNavigator LinkedIn Sales Navigator is your go to lead generation platform for any B2B company. The tool enables you to easily build up lead lists through your network expanding your search to 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections. This is Sales Navigators biggest advantage being the ability to expand your search further to 3rd degree connections 73% of sales people use technologies to close more deals #LinkedInSalesNavigator You can easily save prospects to a custom list enabling you to connect and message your leads directly. The team features are great as this enables you to share your saved leads list with anyone in your team, so you can tackle mass outreach and prospecting in a team environment in one central system inside #LinkedInSalesNavigator. LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides automated alerts which keeps you on top of any updates your leads have made or news mentions. Which makes for the perfect touch point or ice breaker for you to reach out to your leads and engage in conversation Integrates directly into Salesforce a bit trick if you not a Salesforce user, so you would need to work within the Sales navigator portal. 4. BUFFER #Buffer Buffer is an extremely simple yet powerful social media management tool. #Buffer provides you with a platform that will enable you to manage and schedule your social media posts and track their success with their built in analytics.
The end goal is action, not eyeballs #Buffer
#Buffer has a free version which can integrate into three of your social media platforms. What a huge relief that you can schedule all your posts in a morning for the next week and focus on the work load for the week ahead. 5. CANVA
#Canva I absolutely couldn't live without Canva. Its an excellent cloud based creative design tool that anyone can use. Packed full of features and stock images to help bring you rmasterpieces alive. #Canva is an essential tool to anyones tool box, not just marketors, need to spruce up a presentation - Canva, Need to tweak a image for your content - Canva Need to...yup you guessed it Canva. Best of all its free to start using, with a library of dimesnsions and templates for just about anything ie social meida posts, headers, presentations, logos and more you can quickly and easily get onto a project without having any graphic design knowledge. And if you need any helps there are stax of tutorials on Youtube that can help you with just about any project. Those are my top 5 tech tools for a B2B company to enable you to grow your business, please leave your comments below.