Master Inbound Marketing

Have you ever felt uncomfortable getting on the phone and talking with someone? How about setting the tone as the first point of contact for the sales process, and running connect calls with potential leads? When first joining the IMPACT Sales team, the connect call was always a huge hurdle I felt I would never be able to get over. I was comfortable speaking with people in person, but it did not resonate over the telephone. I stumbled through conversations, had noisy backgrounds, started calls completely unprepared and, needless to say, the calls were ineffective and  my confidence level just kept plummeting. I needed to find a repeatable call structure that I could use to truly qualify prospects and set our team up for good conversations.  

Chris Faraone, founder of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, was not happy with Medium last week, after they rolled out yet another change to how the publishing platform functions and enables their publishing partners. Those organizations who had their own independent subscription paywalls on a Medium publication they had created -- like BINJ -- were notified on Friday, April 27, they would be canceled on May 7. After that date, readers with subscriptions to those publications would lose them as they came up for renewal.  (Of note, affected publishers were welcome to ask for an extension, if they needed more time to handle the news that they were going to be losing a revenue stream.) As Faraone was quick to point out, this wasn't a small change, like the sunsetting of a particular feature. Instead, Medium was gutting a critical source of funding. 

Samantha Stone If you write it, will they come? In this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Marketing Advisory Network Founder Samantha Stone talks about why she wrote her book Unleash Possible, and how publishing a book has impacted her career as a marketing strategy consultant and professional speaker. From how long it really takes to write a book to whether to self-publish and how to get listed on Amazon.com, Samantha has candid advice about every aspect of publishing your first book along with insights on how to use it to market your business.

It’s a fact: digital skills are essential to succeeding in today's competitive business landscape --but keeping up with the changes is becoming more and more difficult. A recent CapGemini/LinkedIn survey revealed that while more than half of organizations surveyed acknowledge a widening digital skills gap, and while even more agree that this shortage is hampering digital transformation efforts, many still have no formal plan in place to improve. How can this be?

Everyone has a daily routine and it’s never the same for any two people. You might wake up at 4 AM and head right to the gym, or start your day by watching the morning news. The possibilities are endless. You might even be a late riser or someone who’s neither a morning person or a night owl. Either way, how you start and end your work day can have a big impact on your overall productivity and performance at the office.

We’ve talked a lot about account-based marketing (ABM) on recently and the general consensus around here is that it’s good for you, your brand, and your bottom line. There are a lot of tactics to juggle, inbound and outbound when building an ABM strategy, so here is a super condensed version of its key principles to help you make sense of it.

I love that feeling when Friday rolls around and the weekend is in sight.

Earlier this month, a group of corgis in outfits fit for a queen strutted down a mini red carpet in New York’s Herald Square. I don’t tell you this because it’s an adorable visual (which it absolutely is), but because it’s just one of many royal wedding-themed campaigns making headlines since news of the impending nuptials of Prince Harry and American actress, Meghan Markle, broke. If I learned anything on my brief trip to London, a few weeks after the wedding of Prince William and Kate in 2011, it’s that nothing is off-limits when it comes to royal wedding memorabilia, merchandise, or marketing. (I came home with a handbell with their faces on it, if that tells you anything.)