Judging good sales leads is essential to business success. A steady supply of leads is invaluable, but they must also be likely to convert to sales. The best, or most qualified leads are those tending toward significant purchases, at a good price and with ongoing repeat sales opportunities. But how do you identify them? Start by asking the following questions:

For many business owners, their LinkedIn profile is not seen as a primary marketing platform for the business itself. LinkedIn is seen as useful for personal and business connections, sourcing project opportunities and promoting the individual image. As such, your LinkedIn profile, which may have developed organically over many years, may appear more like a rambling CV or project resume than a honed business development tool. However, we also need to consider that the personal brand of the company CEO/MD can be very beneficial for generating leads and sales for the business.

It is crucial to respond to your customers and where their needs are at this point in time. This might sound too obvious to repeat, but, still, many business owners compare their companies against what their competitors are attempting to offer, rather than aligning with their customers' goals. Customer metrics can all too easily become an abstract calculation, but without a deeper understanding of what drives their behaviour, it is difficult to know how best to serve them personally.

It is hard to overestimate the value of word-of-mouth recommendations for businesses. People trust recommendations by their friends and associates much more than they do the claims of marketers. Testimonials, the recorded experience of real customers, step beyond informal referrals to give what marketing experts call the 'social proof' of a business's offering. Unsurprisingly, a glance at the websites for any number of industry sectors indicates the value placed on testimonials.

While things aren't back to normal for the UK's businesses yet, many companies are ramping up their operations again – and the good news is that the economic hit hasn’t (so far) been as bad as many people had feared. Therefore, if you want to strengthen your hold in the marketplace, you need to show people that you're ready to do business today. Whether you've continued, reined in, or even halted your marketing activities during the Covid-19 lockdown, you should increase your efforts now. Read on to find out why.

Whether you're just beginning to get your business operations back on track or you're still being affected by lockdown measures, you may have lost ground in recent months. However, that doesn't mean that you can't recover well.

SMEs face many challenges but one of the biggest is sales lead generation. Search online and you'll find a host of companies claiming to be able to help you identify potential clients. However, is outsourcing this aspect of your operations a sensible solution, especially if your operating surplus is limited? How can you ensure that you're not wasting your hard-earned cash?

If you own a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME), you may still be handling sales yourself, particularly if you haven't been in business long. That means you'll almost certainly have run into ‘gatekeepers’. These are the people who protect key decision makers by deflecting your sales calls or emails, often front of house, reception, or customer service staff. So, how can you get past them so that you can seal the deal? Here are five tactics you can use.

To boost your profits and cultivate new opportunities as we move out of lockdown, you'll need to make sure that new customers keep coming through your door. Therefore, it's crucial that prospective clients in the local area can find your business with ease. One of the simplest (and cheapest) ways to ensure that people in your area can find your company is to use Google My Business. What exactly is this service and how can you use it to grab a larger slice of your local market?

While the modern business world has dealt with downturns before, the current situation is unlike any that we've previously experienced. This doesn’t mean the worst predictions are necessarily accurate – they rarely are – but it's hard to predict what's going to happen. However, by taking steps to maximise the return that you're getting from your investment in sales and marketing now, you'll be better placed to grow your business whatever the future brings.