Tag: lead generation

What Is Social Selling? A B2B Guide for Sales Teams in 2026

Posted on by Moshe Pesach

Originally published December 2017. Updated September 2026.

Most sales teams already have LinkedIn open all day. They check who viewed their profile, accept a few connection requests and send the occasional message that starts with “Hope you’re well.” Then they go back to the call list.

That is not social selling. It is social presence, and it rarely moves a deal.

Social selling is something narrower and more useful. It is the discipline of using social networks, mostly LinkedIn in B2B, to find the right buyers, understand what they care about, and earn enough trust that a conversation feels welcome rather than intrusive. Done well, it shortens the distance between a cold name and a warm meeting.

This guide covers what social selling actually is, why it matters more now than when the term first appeared, and how sales and marketing can run it together without turning it into another box to tick.

What social selling means

Social selling is the practice of building relationships with potential buyers through social networks before, during and after a sale.

The definition sounds soft. In practice, however, it comes down to three concrete activities:

  • Finding the people who match your customer profile and noticing when their situation changes.
  • Understanding what they post, share and respond to, so your outreach speaks to their real problem.
  • Earning trust by being useful in public before you ask for anything in private.

What it is not: mass connection requests, automated messages with a first-name merge field, or a sales rep reposting the company’s product announcements. Those look like social selling on a dashboard. Buyers, however, recognize them instantly as selling.

Why social selling matters more now

B2B buyers do most of their research before they ever speak to a salesperson. They read, compare, ask peers and watch who shows up with something worth saying. By the time they fill in a form, the shortlist is often already written.

Meanwhile, buying decisions now involve several people. A single deal might need a finance lead, an operations head, a technical evaluator and an executive sponsor to agree. Each of them is researching separately, and most of them are on LinkedIn.

Buyers are on social networks. So the real question for a sales team is whether your people are visible and credible there at the moment a buyer starts looking.

There is also a simpler reason. Cold outreach is harder than it used to be. Inboxes are full of AI-written sequences that all sound the same. As a result, a message from someone the buyer already recognizes, because they have read her posts or seen her comment thoughtfully on a peer’s update, stands out in a way a cold email cannot.

Social selling vs. traditional prospecting

Traditional prospecting starts with a list and works outward. You find names, you reach out, and you hope the timing is right.

Social selling reverses the order. You start by paying attention. You watch for the signals that suggest someone might need you soon, and you build familiarity before you reach out. The contact still happens. It simply happens with context.

Traditional prospecting Social selling
Starting point A list of names Signals and shared context
First contact Cold Warm, or at least familiar
What the buyer sees first Your pitch Your thinking
Timing Your quarter Their situation
Measure of success Replies Conversations that turn into meetings

Neither replaces the other entirely. Most healthy sales teams need both. Nevertheless, teams that only prospect cold tend to work much harder for the same number of meetings.

The four parts of a social selling system

1. A profile that serves the buyer

A salesperson’s LinkedIn profile is usually the first thing a buyer checks after receiving a message. Most profiles are written like a résumé for the next employer. That is the wrong audience.

A buyer-facing profile says who the person helps, what problem they solve and what they know about the buyer’s world. The headline speaks to the customer, not to recruiters. Below it, the about section explains the problem in the buyer’s words. Meanwhile, the featured section holds something useful, like an article or a guide, rather than a product brochure.

2. The right network, not the biggest one

Connection count is a vanity number. What matters is whether the right people are in the network.

Start with your ideal customer profile. If you have not written one precisely, that is the first job, and our guide on how to create an ideal customer profile walks through it. Then map the roles inside your target accounts: the decision maker, the people who influence the decision and the people who will use what you sell. Connect deliberately, with a short note that explains why.

3. Signals worth acting on

Social networks surface changes that matter for sales. A new executive joins a target account. A company announces an expansion, a funding round or a new product line. Someone posts about a problem you solve.

These are signals, and they are the heart of social selling. A signal gives you a reason to reach out that is about the buyer, not about your quota. Therefore the discipline is to notice them consistently and act within days, not weeks.

4. Content that earns the conversation

This is where marketing earns its place. Salespeople should not have to write everything they share. Instead, marketing supplies the raw material: articles that answer real buyer questions, short insights from customer work, and a clear point of view about the market.

The salesperson adds the human layer. She shares the piece with a sentence about why it matters to this buyer, or she uses it as the reason for a message. That combination, company substance plus personal context, is what makes social selling credible.

How marketing and sales run it together

Social selling fails most often when it is left entirely to sales. Reps are measured on meetings and revenue, so posting and commenting quickly become the first thing dropped in a busy week.

It works when marketing and sales share the job.

Marketing owns the narrative, the content and the profile guidance. It makes sure every rep describes the company the same way, and it keeps a steady supply of material worth sharing. In addition, it can give each rep a short weekly brief: two posts to share, one idea to comment on, and the accounts showing signals this week.

Sales owns the relationships. Reps decide who to engage, how to open a conversation and when to move from public interaction to a direct message or a call.

Together, they agree on what counts as progress. That is where many teams go wrong, so it deserves its own section.

How to measure social selling

Likes and follower counts are easy to track and almost meaningless. The useful measures sit closer to revenue.

  • Conversations started with people who match the customer profile.
  • Meetings booked where the first touch came through social activity.
  • Accounts engaged, meaning target accounts where at least one relevant person has interacted with a rep or the company.
  • Time to first meeting for socially sourced contacts compared with cold ones.

LinkedIn also offers its own Social Selling Index, a score that reflects profile strength, network quality, engagement and relationship building. It can be a useful coaching tool for reps. Still, treat it as a habit tracker, not a business result. A high score with no meetings is still no meetings.

For the handoff from marketing interest to sales conversation, our guide on converting MQLs to SQLs covers how to agree on what a qualified contact actually is.

Common social selling mistakes

Pitching in the first message. A connection request followed immediately by a product pitch is the fastest way to be ignored. Lead with relevance, not with the offer.

Automating the human part. Tools can find signals and organize accounts. However, messages that are obviously automated undo the trust social selling is meant to build.

Posting for peers, not buyers. Many reps post content that impresses other salespeople. Buyers, meanwhile, want insight into their own problems.

Treating it as a campaign. Social selling compounds over months. A two-week push followed by silence gives buyers no reason to remember you.

No shared message. When every rep describes the company differently, buyers notice. The fix is a clear narrative that marketing owns and sales uses.

Where to start this quarter

  1. Agree on your customer profile and the three or four roles you want to reach inside each target account.
  2. Rewrite each rep’s LinkedIn headline and about section for the buyer.
  3. Give each rep a list of 20 target accounts and a simple way to watch them for signals.
  4. Have marketing publish one useful piece a week and send reps a short sharing brief.
  5. Set a weekly rhythm: a few thoughtful comments, one share with context, and outreach only where there is a real reason.
  6. Review after 90 days using conversations and meetings, not likes.

Frequently asked questions

What is social selling in simple terms?

Social selling is using social networks, mostly LinkedIn in B2B, to find the right buyers, understand what they care about and build trust before asking for a meeting. It replaces cold, context-free outreach with conversations that start from something relevant to the buyer.

Is social selling just posting on LinkedIn?

No. Posting is one part of it. Social selling also includes building the right network, watching for signals like job changes or company news, engaging with buyers’ content, and reaching out when there is a genuine reason to talk.

Does social selling work for B2B?

Yes, and B2B is where it fits best. B2B purchases involve several decision makers who research independently, often on LinkedIn. Being visible and credible to each of them shortens the path to a first conversation.

What is the difference between social selling and social media marketing?

Social media marketing is mostly one to many: a company publishes content to an audience. Social selling is one to one: an individual salesperson builds relationships with specific buyers. The two work best together, with marketing supplying the content and sales supplying the relationships.

How long does social selling take to work?

Expect early conversations within the first month if the targeting is right, and a meaningful effect on meetings after about three months of steady activity. Like most relationship work, it compounds, so consistency matters more than intensity.

Who should own social selling, sales or marketing?

Both. Marketing should own the narrative, the content and the profile guidance. Sales should own the relationships and the conversations. When either side carries it alone, it tends to fade.

Tomorrow the LinkedIn tab will still be open all day.

The test is whether the next message your team sends from it could start with anything other than “Hope you’re well.”

5 Creative Presentation Ideas from Top Sales Leaders

Posted on by Moshe Pesach

While sales isn’t the only profession that has to deliver impactful presentations frequently, it’s certainly something sales professionals do regularly. So how can you go about keeping your prospect’s attention and covering all the information you need? Try these five creative presentation ideas I learned from Julie Hansen of Performance Sales and Training to improve your presentation style and gain new and effective presentation skills.

#1 Break Your Talk Down Into Chunks

People are constantly being bombarded with new and exciting information and the average attention span has gone down to five minutes. This means long, linear presentations are no longer the most effective way to present your material. Instead, you should break your talk into three to five minute chunks and focus each chunk on a certain part of the message. Changing chunks is as simple as changing topics or shifting to a new point.

#2 Focus on What’s Most Important

Your prospect has already read your website and reviewed enough information to determine whether you’re likely to be able to help them, so skip the parts of the presentation where you introduce your company. Just like movies and novels start with the most compelling part of the action, your presentation should start by answering the main questions that they’re likely to have. Focus on what’s going to be most important to them.

#3 Customize For Your Audience

Different buyers of the same product will be interested in different features or aspects. Take the time to think about what might be driving their purchasing decisions and customize your presentation to talk to the specific prospect. This is more than putting their logos on your standard slide deck. This is doing your research and getting into their heads to be able to answer those most important questions first. Ask yourself how your features will impact them. When you understand your customers, you can help connect the dots between the problem they have and the solution you’re offering.

#4 Know Your Key Point

What is the one thing you want your audience to walk away from your presentation remembering? For a sales professional, it’s probably that you can help them solve a certain problem. If you know the key point you want them to take home, you can then build the rest of your presentation about that topic and present it in a number of different fashions to improve its stickiness.

#5 Keep Your Audience Engaged

When your audience is actively engaged with your presentation, they are much more likely to remember the details of the material you’re presenting. There are many different ways to engage your audience, asking questions is only one. Simple engagement such as slides, videos, and stories is the first step. Active engagement such as questions and contests are even better. You can add these engaging sections in between the different chunks of your talk to help break it up and keep your audience attentive.

With these five tips, you’ll be sure to keep your audience engaged and spark an ongoing conversation about how you can help your prospect. While we can’t replace the charisma and art of the sales professional in the field, Team StepUp can support your company with great branding, insightful content, and lead generation. We can also help with automation – get a taste of how automation can improve efficiency with our free guide to email follow-up. These and other automation tools free your sales team to do what they do best – take the story of your company and share it with your best prospects, personally.

Best Follow-up Email Templates After a Trade Show

Team Motivation: How to Get it, and How to Grow it

Posted on by Moshe Pesach

Where does team motivation come from? In our blog post last week we talked about training for sales teams, which when done right can definitely contribute to motivation. Some motivational speakers might argue that a great video or talk can give your sales team the motivation they need to grow.  Warren Greshes, of Speaking of Success, would disagree. Greshes argues that it is next to impossible to externally motivate someone and the only effective way to motivate anyone was to figure out their personal motivating factors.

Rather than trying to motivate someone externally through inspiring them or pushing them, it’s better to help them become intrinsically motivated. As a sales leader, your job is to give your team the tools and techniques they need to be successful. First, you have to start by finding out everything about each person on your team, from their personal goals to their wants and needs, just like you would if you were trying to sell to a client. Once you have that information, you have the key to motivating them by showing them how working for you moves them closer to their personal goals.

Go Through a Goal-Setting Process

It can take some time to go through a goal-setting process, but help them draw up a one to five year plan with specific steps attached. You may have to connect the dots and help them see that the lifestyle or personal goals they have are obtainable and exactly how much selling they’ll have to do to achieve those goals. Everyone is motivated by something different, so you’ll need to sit down with each person and discover what motivates them and what their goals are.

In some situations, you may need to help them draw the lines between how they envision their future and how their career success will get them there. If they know what kind of lifestyle they want in five years, then you can turn that into specific numbers of sales calls or meetings they need to make each quarter to make it happen. In other words, you translate their efforts into the money necessary to create the lifestyle they want. Money by itself doesn’t motivate, it’s the lifestyle money enables. It’s important to understand that business and personal goals work together to create motivation.

Tie Long Term Goals to Short Term Action

Once you know the goals, you can reverse engineer and write down milestones you want to meet every month to build up towards your final goal. Then write your goals down, set the metrics you want to meet, and track everything. Tracking allows you to manage someone by showing them what else they need to do to meet their goals and keeps you from having to micromanage your sales team.

Sustaining motivation over time is done by showing people how their actions are moving them forward. A five year plan is great, but you should break that into smaller milestones so that you can measure your progress and celebrate your results more frequently. Once you help your sales team members make a plan, you’ll want to revisit it every quarter to make sure they can see how they’re moving forward and make changes as life changes.

Your sales team is your client, so in addition to helping motivate them to work, you also want to provide them the training, tools, and support they need to reach their goals. You can start by sending them the link to our guide on email follow-up, which sets out key tips and tools for customising and automating email follow-up and making efficient use of the leads your sales team gets.  You’ll have to motivate your sales team, but we can make sure they’re getting the content, leads, and digital support they need to turn those goals into reality.

Best Follow-up Email Templates After a Trade Show

Building a Team with Sales Skills You (and They!) Really Want

Posted on by Moshe Pesach

Part of managing a sales team, especially at a growing or large company, is facilitating development of sales skills among team members. Katie Early and Kieran O’Flynn, Hubspot sales managers, recently shared a video within the Hubspot community in which they discussed their role in building a team with sales skills that translated to success.

Being a sales manager means you’re motivated to move the needle at your company in a big way, but you’re also focused on supporting the team members who work with you to make that possible. This means when it comes to training, you should pay attention to both what will improve the team as a whole and what will help your sales staff continue their professional growth. A good sales manager pays attention to each of these concerns and implements skills training options that address each one.

Internal or External Training?

Training can be accomplished both internally by a company trainer, sales manager, or other sales leader and externally by bringing in experts in the field or sending members of the team out into the community to get training. Sales leaders should have the ability and flexibility to mix the types and formats of the training their team receives to keep people engaged and reach those with different learning styles.

For example, sometimes having team members sit in a round table and discuss how they handled a particular aspect of the sales process is valuable because everyone gets an opportunity to share and learn from the others. In other cases, it helps to do simulated sales calls or one-on-one reviews to work with a specific team member on the skills they need to master. For the specific needs of certain team members, being able to send them to a training conference or executive classes at a community college can be helpful.

Training for Top Performers

It is important for sales managers to really get to know the individuals on their teams so that they can not only pinpoint what skills will help the most people, but how everyone likes to learn. Further, you should keep conversations open with your highest performing sales members to find out what kind of specialized training they need or would like to receive. Everyone wants to keep learning and growing, so you shouldn’t ignore the top performers just because they’re doing so well already. Sales teams often have high turnover after 2-3 years. A good sales manager is paying attention to everyone on their team, even the senior members, to make sure they feel like their careers are still moving in the right direction and that the company is invested in their success.

The other consideration for sales managers is how to make this training repeatable. After all, the odds are that if one salesperson needs this training, so will another. Can you replicate the curriculum you prepared by saving slides, taking a recording, or teaching others on the sales team to deliver the training?

If you’re wondering how your sales team can leverage digital data and inbound marketing information, download our guide on automating email followup. It’s packed with more tips for sales teams on customizing and automating lead followup to increase productivity and save time.  

Best Follow-up Email Templates After a Trade Show

The B2B Lead Funnel: How Inbound and Outbound Work Together

Posted on by Moshe Pesach

Originally published November 2017. Updated September 2026.

Most B2B companies have two funnels and do not know it.

Marketing runs one. It attracts visitors, collects form fills and scores contacts. Sales runs the other. It works a list, makes calls and books meetings. Each team reports its own numbers. As a result, each is convinced the other one is the problem.

A lead funnel only works when those two become one. This guide explains what a B2B lead funnel actually is, where inbound and outbound each belong, and how to connect them so interest turns into conversations instead of stalling somewhere in the handoff.

What is a lead funnel?

A lead funnel is the path a potential buyer takes from first becoming aware of you to becoming a sales conversation. It is called a funnel because many people enter at the top and fewer move through each stage.

In B2B, the funnel has a few features that consumer funnels do not:

  • Several people buy together. A single decision can involve a finance lead, an operations head and a technical evaluator, each moving at their own pace.
  • The cycle is long. Months, sometimes more than a year.
  • Most of the research happens without you. Buyers read, compare and ask peers long before they speak to a salesperson.

So a B2B lead funnel is less a straight line and more a set of stages that different people move through at different times. Still, the stages are useful, because they tell you what each person needs next.

The stages of a B2B lead funnel

Stage What the buyer is doing What they need from you
Awareness Noticing a problem, or noticing you A clear point of view on the problem
Interest Reading, comparing, asking around Useful content that helps them think
Consideration Building a shortlist Proof: examples, clear offers, answers to hard questions
Conversation Talking to vendors A salesperson who already understands their situation
Decision Getting internal agreement Material that helps them make the case to others

Different teams name these stages differently. The names matter less than agreeing on them, and on what moves someone from one stage to the next.

Inbound and outbound: two ways into the funnel

Inbound

Inbound brings buyers to you. They find an article through search, see a post on LinkedIn, hear a colleague mention you, or download a guide. They arrive with a need already forming.

Inbound is strong at the top and middle of the funnel, because it builds familiarity and trust over time, and it tends to attract people who are already looking. Its weakness, however, is timing. It works on the buyer’s schedule, not yours, and it can take months to build.

For the difference between content marketing and inbound as disciplines, see our comparison of content marketing vs. inbound marketing.

Outbound

Outbound goes to buyers. Your team identifies the right companies and people, then reaches out directly: email, phone, LinkedIn, events.

Outbound is strong when you know exactly who you want to reach and cannot wait for them to find you. In addition, it gives you control over timing and focus. However, cold outreach without context is getting harder. Buyers are flooded with generic sequences, and most of them get ignored.

Why you need both

Inbound without outbound tends to attract some people who are not a fit and miss some who are. Outbound without inbound tends to reach the right people with no reason for them to listen.

Together, they cover each other’s gaps. Inbound creates familiarity, so outbound lands warmer. Outbound focuses attention on the accounts that matter most, so inbound content gets read by the right people.

How to connect inbound and outbound in one funnel

The idea is simple. The execution is where most teams struggle, so here is how to make it concrete.

1. Agree on who the funnel is for

First, both teams need the same customer profile, in writing. Which companies, which roles and what problem. If marketing is attracting one kind of buyer and sales is calling another, no process will fix the gap. Our guide on how to create an ideal customer profile walks through building one.

2. Use inbound signals to guide outbound

When someone from a target account reads three articles about a specific problem, that is a signal. Rather than waiting for a form fill, sales can reach out with context: “A few people on your team have been reading about this. Is it something you are working on?”

This is where inbound and outbound genuinely meet. Marketing surfaces interest. Sales responds to it quickly and personally.

3. Make outbound point to inbound

Similarly, outbound messages should rarely end with “book a demo.” A better first touch offers something useful: an article that answers a question the buyer probably has, or a short guide. That gives the buyer a low-pressure way to engage and brings them into the part of the funnel marketing nurtures.

4. Define the handoff

Decide exactly when a contact moves from marketing’s care to sales. What behavior or information qualifies them? How fast must sales follow up? What happens if sales decides the contact is not ready? Our guide on converting MQLs to SQLs covers this handoff in detail.

5. Close the loop

Finally, sales should tell marketing what happened to every contact it received. Which ones became conversations, which went quiet and why. Without that feedback, marketing keeps optimizing for volume instead of quality.

Where the phone still fits

Speed matters more than most teams admit. When a qualified buyer shows interest, a prompt, personal response, often a phone call or a short personal message, turns interest into a conversation far more reliably than an automated email sequence.

The call is not a pitch. Instead, it is a question: what prompted your interest, and what are you trying to solve? Listening well on that first call does more to move the funnel than any clever sequence.

How to measure a lead funnel

Resist measuring each team on its own numbers alone. Marketing reporting form fills and sales reporting meetings creates two funnels again.

Instead, track a small set of shared measures:

  • Conversion between stages, so you can see where people stall.
  • Time between stages, especially from first interest to first conversation.
  • Source of conversations, including self-reported sources like “a colleague recommended you.”
  • Quality feedback from sales, meaning how many handed-over contacts were genuinely a fit.

Together, these show where the funnel leaks. In most B2B companies, the biggest leak is in the handoff, where interested buyers wait too long or get a generic response.

Common lead funnel mistakes

Treating the funnel as marketing’s job. The funnel belongs to both teams. When sales treats it as marketing’s problem, the handoff breaks.

Chasing volume at the top. More contacts are not better if they do not match the customer profile. They just create work.

Slow follow-up. Interest fades quickly. A day’s delay costs more conversations than most teams realize.

Automating the first real conversation. Automation is useful for organizing and nurturing. However, the moment a buyer is ready to talk, a person should respond.

No agreed definitions. If the teams disagree on what a qualified contact is, every meeting about the funnel becomes an argument about numbers.

Frequently asked questions

What is a lead funnel?

A lead funnel is the path a potential buyer takes from first becoming aware of your company to becoming a sales conversation. It is usually divided into stages, such as awareness, interest, consideration and conversation, with fewer people moving through each stage.

What is a B2B lead funnel?

A B2B lead funnel is a lead funnel designed for business buying, where several people are involved in each decision, the cycle is long and most research happens before a buyer speaks to sales. It needs to serve multiple people at different stages at the same time.

What is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?

Inbound attracts buyers to you through content, search, social media and referrals. Outbound reaches out to buyers directly through email, phone, LinkedIn or events. Inbound works on the buyer’s timing. Outbound gives you control over who you reach and when.

Can inbound and outbound marketing work together?

Yes, and they work best together. Inbound creates familiarity, so outbound outreach lands warmer. Outbound focuses attention on the right accounts, so inbound content reaches the people who matter. The connection point is a shared customer profile and a clear handoff.

What are the stages of a lead funnel?

Common stages are awareness, interest, consideration, conversation and decision. The exact names vary by company. What matters is that marketing and sales agree on them and on what moves a buyer from one stage to the next.

How do you improve a B2B lead funnel?

Start with a shared customer profile, agree on the handoff between marketing and sales, respond quickly and personally when a qualified buyer shows interest, and track conversion and time between stages. In most companies, the handoff is where the biggest gains are.

So next quarter, give both teams one report with one set of numbers.

Then see how long it takes someone to ask where the webinar leads went.

5 Secrets of the Best Sales Emails

Posted on by Moshe Pesach

Why should you spend time planning and writing a sales email? Because when done right, it absolutely works to drive traffic to your business. A recent talk by Heather Morgan from SalesFolk highlighted ways to create the best sales emails for your business.

Download our guide to email follow up after a trade show.

There are many reasons to consider reaching out to prospects via email. First, marketing has changed significantly in the last decade. There is more competition in all industries and it is no longer enough just to shout “I am here!” and wait for the work to appear. Telemarketing and cold calls are hard and not as effective. You need to adapt your approach to continue to gain new customers and projects.

Inbound marketing is the new way to attract and educate qualified leads, but building quality content takes time. You also have to spread this content over multiple channels such as email marketing, Facebook, and LinkedIn to attract leads to your website.

If done right, sales emails can be very an effective way to attract, educate, and retain clients. Here are five principles to follow to create an effective sales email:

Know Your Audience

Are you writing to the CEO? Then your email should address concerns most CEOs have such as cutting costs and boosting sales. Writing to the engineers? Then talk about tolerance, maintenance costs, or customization options. Spend some time looking at the web profiles of the company and individuals you’re targeting. You’ll be able to learn what they’re reading about and where their interests are. You can also see what thought leaders and industry influencers they follow. From this information, you can understand what their concerns are and how they’re making decisions. All this information can help you draft a better sales email.

Get a Reaction

People react to an email for three reasons:

  • Curiosity: Humans are, by nature, curious about things they aren’t familiar with. Use curiosity to get people to open your emails by employing leading questions as your subject line.
  • Desire: When you can paint a compelling picture of how you’re going to solve a problem and improve their situation, clients are quickly motivated to take action.
  • Fear: This is when you talk about situations people want to avoid. You can target their problems and pain points. Just be careful that your email is designed to motivate quick action and not make them give up.

Download our guide to email follow up after a trade show.

Create a Feeling of Trust

Call on existing customers to brag about your company. When it’s someone else exclaiming your virtues, prospects are more likely to take note. Ask your current clients to share a story about how you’ve helped them succeed. Get them to describe what it’s like working with you. Share a picture of your client or their name so that they are relatable.

Have a Clear Goal for Your Email

It is important to be specific about the goal of your email. Do you want the prospect to call you? Fill out a form? If you know what your goal is, you can craft your entire email towards the one simple action you want the prospect to take.

Collect Data

Be a data fanatic. Set goals for your sales campaigns and measure your results. Modern email marketing tools come equipped with email testing capabilities, advanced reporting, and lots of specific insight into what’s happening with each email.

Many people are afraid of cold emailing, but success really depends on your state of mind. If you have a great product or service that can truly help the people you’re contacting, then it is your obligation to sell it.

Now you know you need to send sales emails – but what to write? Check out our free guide of proven follow up sales email templates for ideas of emails to use throughout the sales process, and for every kind of lead. Templates can help you semi-automate your follow up process, save time, and reach more of the leads you want. When you use the right tools, the right leads will come your way.

 

Best Follow-up Email Templates After a Trade Show

Three Key Tips for Converting the Right Leads

Posted on by Moshe Pesach

Every business has a specific customer they’re looking for – preferably one who can afford their services and is ready to make a purchasing decision. For B2C companies, this customer might be clear to everyone. But for B2B companies and in particular industrial companies, often only the owner of the business inherently understands the profile of their ideal customer. Communicating this to sales and marketing teams, and making sure that you are converting the right leads, is a challenge.  

Inbound marketing is a marketing methodology that addresses this issue. In contrast to traditional marketing or even digital marketing, inbound marketing involves creating a system that starts with understanding the ideal customer. This understanding then guides an entire process of communication. Here are three key steps you can follow to start building an inbound system:

1. Create a Clear Buyer Persona

Take the time to sit down and draft a persona for your ideal customer. What role do they hold within their organization? How educated are they about your industry? What specific needs do they have that your company can fill? Is there a certain size or type of order they might need?

For businesses marketing to other businesses, this means that your buyer is generally someone in management or procurement at another business. They’re generally well educated and have done at least some basic research about your industry. Define exactly who this person is so that sales and marketing are reaching people who can make decisions, have projects your business can complete, and are focusing on converting the right leads.

2. Ensure Marketing and Sales Alignment

Particularly when businesses focus heavily on a professional sales team, marketing may get less focus. However, marketing still plays an important role in making sure the message is consistent and that potential leads are aware of the brand. Regular communication between marketing and sales personnel will ensure that marketing isn’t over-promising the company’s capabilities and the sales team is presenting a consistent, professional image.

3. Create a Clear Sales Funnel

In a manufacturing company, there is a clear process required for each task within the manufacturing process. In the same way, creating a sales funnel where a prospect goes from a stranger to a customer makes sure you’re capturing the information you need to make informed marketing decisions. It also ensures you can properly analyze every lead that comes your way, focusing on converting the right leads that will become customers.

Start with a clear process to document and track leads and move them from someone who is just learning about your business into a prospective customer. Your sales team should also have a clear process to follow for approving and sending out request for quotes and handling changes requested by customers. Even a simple process can be useful to make sure you don’t miss any details and, if set up correctly, can scale as your company grows.

Handling the marketing aspects of a growing business may seem like you have to learn a completely new, and highly technical, subject. That’s why collaborating with an outside marketing firm that specializes in B2B sales such as StepUp Marketing is helpful. While you’ll still have to articulate clearly who your buyer is, they have the technical expertise to set up the marketing processes that feed directly into your sales funnel.

 

get a free marketing assessment

Blogging For Business – 5 Reasons To Apply It To Your Business ASAP

Posted on by Moshe Pesach

In the past, blogs were considered a rarity within the business world – very niche specific, without much value. Now, this is no longer true – blogging for business has evolved to be the main staple in most business marketing strategies and more specifically, within any inbound marketing strategy.

While blogging can take some time and may even seem slightly daunting, the advantages of having a blog for your business are numerous and hard to ignore.

Blogging for business

Business Blogging Defined

First, it’s important to note that business blogging looks different than other forms of blogging. Perhaps you choose to blog in your free time, or maybe you’re a frequent reader of travel blogs, that’s all great. But with business blogs, you must keep in mind that its main purpose is to be part of a strategic marketing plan.

The length of posts can range drastically, yet what’s important is that you treat the blog as a part of your company’s website, and keep the subject of posts relevant to what you are selling or providing.

The goal of the blog should be to increase online visibility, whether that is through SEO or social media. Use your company’s expertise to share insights of real value with potential customers. Ensure that posts are speaking to your client’s challenges, holding their interest and proving to them that you are established within your specific industry. Showing them the value that your company has to offer simultaneously promotes your service or product, prompting traffic to be converted into leads.

 

Why Blog?

In 2017, a blog for your business has more to offer than ever before. The overhead is low, and the benefits are high. Consider this:

  • Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links
  • 82% of consumers enjoy reading relevant content from brands
  • Websites with a blog have 434% more indexed pages
  • 77% of internet users admit to using blogs

 

Here are five best reasons why we believe blogging for your business is a must:

 

#1. Business Blogging Drives Traffic

This was briefly mentioned above but is important enough to really dig into. Specifically, with Inbound Marketing, driving traffic (instead of being annoying/distracting) truly is key.

Make sure to view your blog as an extension of your website. Hopefully, your website has been kept simple and doesn’t have a lot of pages, yet most likely isn’t updated as frequently as a blog would be updated. Which is perfectly fine, because blog posts are basically just indexed pages on your website.

A statistic from Hubspot notes that 78% of internet users are turning to the internet to do their product research. With frequent blog posts addressing the concerns of your potential consumers, the odds of them stumbling upon those indexed pages are high.

With every blog that you write and post, you are increasing your chances of:

  1. Showing up in search engines (driving traffic)
  2. Increasing your social media presence with your current audience/followers
  3. Expanding the potential of being discovered via social media by new potential leads

Think of it this way – with each blog post you are publishing, you are increasing the odds that your audience will be sharing and re-sharing this post to others. It’s a simple way to build on free marketing, while also building credibility.

All the above examples are working towards your end goal of driving more traffic, resulting in more potential leads. Which brings us to our second reason.

 

#2. Blogging & Building Leads

In short, having a blog for your business is going to generate more leads, it’s as simple as that. The traffic that we mentioned above, some of it is looking specifically for your product or service, and therefore are well-positioned to be converted into leads once discovering your blog. When it comes to converting those leads, the use of ‘call to action’ opportunities within the blog are crucial.

Blogs are a GREAT opportunity to utilize CTA’s. Some simple CTA’s to consider adding to blog posts can range from free fact sheets, webinars, training, even an e-book; any simple value-add that encourages a visitor to exchange their contact information. Without a CTA, it may be little more challenging to ensure that you’re turning blog traffic into leads.

Part of turning your traffic into leads is also developing that relationship. The language or tone that your blog uses may help to connect more with your audience than your actual website does. When writing posts, consider asking questions towards the end to promote comments from your readers; which also will give you a view into the kind of traffic you are seeing come through your blog, and what kind of solutions they may be seeking out.

Along with building relationships with your traffic and/or potential leads comes the perk of also building trust. Or in other words, credibility.

 

#3. Creating Credibility

Stemming directly from the concept of building relationships through your blog now comes the concept of establishing yourself as a credible source of information to your audience; one of authority. The more that you are able to interact with your prospects and answer their questions, the more quickly you can build up that authority.

Perhaps there is confusion around a certain issue, or a visitor is unsure of how to solve a particular problem. If an existing blog post of yours is able to answer a question or solve that problem, you’re able to quickly (and easily) build up that credibility with a visitor, simultaneously increasing the chances of turning them into a lead.

It makes sense; if you’re able to organically utilize a blog to answer questions, the chances of your audience then trusting you and being willing to enter the sales process will be much higher than without. Not to mention the fact that your leads are coming to you more educated because of that blog, which may enable them to actually move through the sales process more quickly than those being established from ground zero.

At the end of the day, you should be striving to create a blog that establishes yourself as the “go-to” resource when it comes to your industry. Provide educational, easy-to-digest knowledge for your blog traffic, and you will build leads that trust you – leading to higher customer conversion rates. It’s as simple as that.

 

#4. Connecting With Clients

A business blog is also a great tool to genuinely connect with your customers, and communicate with one another. Focus on posting content that addresses issues or pain points that they have (and that you can solve), or use posts to further explore areas that may also be of interest to your audience.

It can be a great resource to test new ideas and thoughts on different solutions or products, by posting and then seeing how your audience directly responds. Using the “comment” feature at the bottom of a blog post is a must; end posts by encouraging your readers to respond to it with their thoughts or questions, and then use that direct feedback as some navigation as your business continues to move forward.

Perhaps your readers are choosing to reach out and comment on challenges that you had never even considered before. Just like the use of social media, blogs can be a great opportunity to then use that information that is freely given to you, and explore ideas within your own business, so that you can possibly offer solutions around those pain points being voiced while growing your business over time.

 

#5. In it for the Long-Haul

The last thing to consider when it comes to blogging for your business is that blog posts can help grow your business, forever. If you are writing relevant content for your readers to absorb and utilize, your blog posts will continue to bring traffic to your website for years to come.

Think about it. Once you share a new blog post, the hope is that it gets shared, reshared, read through emails being sent out, social media, and so on. This helps your blog to get ranked in search engines and then sets you up to be found in the future – for the weeks and months to come.

So essentially we are suggesting that a blog is not only a short-term but a long-term investment. As long as posts contain a value, they will continue to offer value as long as they continue to exist out there on the world wide web. Be patient, don’t always expect immediate results, and trust that traffic (and leads) will continue to flow in from your blog, over time.

Hubspot – our marketing platform – actually reported that 70% of their blog traffic per month actually comes from posts that weren’t even published during that month. The traffic came from old posts. Old posts, with great value.

 

It’s Time to Blog for Your Business

When it comes to building your business, blogging can be an extremely relevant, helpful tool, without having to put excessive amounts of time and effort into it. And the best part is, if you don’t know where to start, there are plenty of resources out there to help you launch your business blog and get it underway.

Questions? Comments? Want some help with starting a blog – or your entire marketing campaign? Get in touch with us today!

The Best B2B Lead Generation Strategy To Use In 2017

Posted on by Moshe Pesach

Business owners have become an attractive target audience in the advertising world. Many startup companies create new tools and products for businesses and we are seeing an increase in marketing campaigns.
If you ever tried a B2B lead generation campaign, you probably already know that it can be very expensive to generate traffic and leads to that market, and in most cases the campaign results are non-effective and non-profitable.

There are three main reasons for this:

    1. Highly Competitive Market
      Google Adwords platform is one of the best sources in analyzing the competitiveness of the market. In the B2B market, big brands can spend a lot of money and choose to bid very high on the most targeted keywords. As a result, it will be very expensive to advertise and compete against those brands.Because the B2B market has proven to be so profitable, it is also crowded.Many companies are competing in it and therefore paying dearly to be seen first in Google Ads or on other ad platforms. It then ends up being a very expensive market that only companies with big advertising budgets can contend in.
    2. A Specific and Narrow Audience
      The B2B audience is more complex to target. Not only because it’s only for business owners, but in most cases you want to target businesses in a specific niche. On top of that, you might also want to zone in on a specific size or type of business, or even a specific person within the business. This makes targeting challenging.
    3. More Difficult to Convert and Close
      As described previously, the B2B market is a very competitive, offering high-ticket products and services, therefore also making it more challenging to convert to sales.
      Bridging the gap from generating the lead (the first step in the sales funnel) to then closing the sale can become even more difficult when the the product is expensive, and the consumer has several (sometimes less expensive) options to choose from.

 

Targeting Tactics For B2B Campaigns:

1) Direct Offer Targeting
(A direct campaign for b2b service or product through all ads platforms.)

You can create a very direct campaign in Google Adwords using “Buying Keywords” – the exact keywords people use to search your products and services. In other platforms such as Facebook Ads you can target your audience by demographics, characteristics and even usability such as “page admins” by incorporating direct offer ads added right on their timelines.

Google Adwords Direct Targeting:

When To Use Direct Offer Targeting?
Google Adwords often sees great results, as the person who is searching the product or service has a better chance of being interested in the direct offer and converting into a lead. It can be tested immediately and shows results in no time. In Facebook ads, it might be more difficult as people are utilizing the site for more social reasons,  and not necessarily searching for solutions as they scroll through their newsfeed.

When Not To Use Direct Offer Targeting?
Within the many niches of Google Adwords, you’ll find out the competition to be fierce and expensive, not always giving a positive ROI for the campaign. It can sometimes cost much to drive traffic to the offer that a large budget is needed to win the game.

Facebook Ads Direct B2B Targeting:

2) Wide and Indirect Targeting

When attempting to target the  B2B audience indirectly, it may mean reaching them when they are not even fully sure what exact solution they are seeking. For example: If I’m selling a Task Manager Tool, the business owner might be searching in Google for “business growth strategies” or “business growth plan” (see pic.) Therefore my product may be very relevant for him.
With Facebook Ads you can reach people that have an interest in “similar products”, or have already bought tools to help business productivity.

Google Indirect Keywords:

Why Use Indirect Targeting?

This method of targeting can drive cheaper traffic with much less competition. Furthermore, it reaches a very a large audience and provides many ideas for SEO and organic traffic.

Facebook Ads Indirect Targeting Options:

When Not to Use Indirect Targeting?

When you need fast conversions and have no patience or time, this method won’t work for you. You probably won’t see high conversion rate from that traffic at the very beginning, and may even attract some non-relevant traffic as well.

What Is The Best Tactic?

The idea is to combine both tactics and use the advantages of each tactic.
As we described in the beginning, it is expensive to generate leads and sales in the B2B market, therefore it is extremely important to create a great sales funnel that will have a higher probability of closing the deal at the end of the day.

In order to do that, you should know a fundamental concept of the Inbound Marketing Methodology – The Buyer’s Journey! The Buyer’s Journey is the process each person goes through from the moment there is an interest in finding a solution to the problem, up to the moment they decide to buy.





"> Download our free guide for more tips on lead generation for your company.”/>




The Three Stages of the Buyer’s Journey:

  • Awareness: The moment the person realizes the problem exists,  and is strategizing around what to do.
  • Consideration: This stage prompts the evaluation of different solutions for the problem. The buyer is trying to understand what is the best fix from all the options there are in the market.
  • Decision: This is when the buyer wants to decide which brand will deliver the best results for him. There is now consideration between several companies that offer the same solution.

With the buyer’s journey, we understand that we can now prepare our sales funnel and create the best campaign for the B2B audience.

The sales funnel also divides into three parts:

TOFU – Top Of The Funnel:
At the top of the funnel we normally try to give our audience great content that will help them find different solutions for their problem, and show them that they have a fix for their situation.

Blogging, social media, articles, videos or any other content are used to raise their awareness about the solutions.

MOFU – Middle Of The Funnel:
In the middle of the funnel, we first want to convert cold traffic into a MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). This is done by downloading a simple guide, reading a blog post or commenting on a relevant Facebook post. During this stage, content focus more on benefits of our product or service, and how it can help them in the future. Also at this stage the user is more qualified to consider using our solution, so direct offers may be in play as well.

BOFU – Bottom Of The Funnel:
The last stage is the closing deal. Here you should handle any objections the user may have before buying. The most effective content include successful case studies, testimonials, guarantees or smart pricing.

Most marketers and advertisers tend to compete for the attention of the B2B audience when they are at the second stage of the funnel, which is mostly expensive and highly competitive. There is no need to give up on it completely, but it is very important to give more attention to TOFU, where we can get much cheaper traffic and a bigger audience with less competition. After capturing their attention, we can then follow them up to the other stages of the funnel.

Here’s a simple explanation on how to do it:

  • Long tail Keyword Research: You should look for long tail keywords that have high search volume and little competition. From here, think about content with real value that you can create with those keywords in mind.
  • Cheap Traffic Sources: First, optimize your content for Google search results. If you find powerful keywords, this can equate to great traffic opportunities. It is also very easy to drive traffic for solid content from all social media networks. Whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or others, people love great content and most likely will engage if it’s truly connecting with them.
  • Pixel Them: When visitors visit your content you can “paint” them with special pixels, and then follow them with different medias. With tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Ads, you can create different pixel lists and segment them by interactions and demographics
  • Direct Offers Campaigns: after they have expressed some interest in your message, you can then place your offers in front of your captivated audience on almost any media you want: Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc..

With this strategy we achieve:

  • Cheap Traffic
  • Bigger Exposure
  • Better Leads
  • Higher Conversions and More Sales

Here’s a quick example on how this method can be implemented into your business:

Let’s say you have a product for small businesses. You can see there are several hundreds of searches per month for terms like: “blogging for business” or “blog for business”.

You can create an interesting article about “7 advantages blogging for business has over other marketing methods”.

This article (with some SEO effort) can get to the first page in Google and drive consistent traffic to your website. You can also use social media and advertising platforms to promote this content and drive cheap traffic to your website.

Inside your article you can leave CTA’s (calls to actions) to your offer or to “Lead Magnets” where the visitors can leave their email to receive further great content. All the while, the visitors are pixelized to your remarketing lists and are now ready to see your offers.

Your remarketing lists can be also segmented by visitor behavior and interaction with your content. You should test several combinations until you find your winning and most converting funnel.

As you can see, the old method of direct offer targeting, especially for B2B audience, is getting more competitive and expensive. People are smarter than before and have less patience for annoying ads for things they have never expressed interest in. Nevertheless, the opportunity with B2B lead generation tactics is bigger than ever, as not many companies have adopted the Inbound Marketing Methodology yet.

If you want to win the game in 2017, you should join the movement and implement the tactics that are proven to work.

 





get a free marketing assessment




AI-marketing for global B2B companies. We install the system. You own it.

hello@stepup.email
linkedin.com/company/stepup

© 2026 StepUp. All rights reserved.Privacy PolicyTerms of Use