JDR Group's 'Digital Prosperity' Blog

HubSpot is the marketing leading sales and marketing software platform for small businesses. While not the ideal fit in every single case, for the majority of business owners we work with it is the platform we'll recommend. 

Sales forecasting is one of the most essential processes in an SME because every element of the business is tied back to sales. If you think about it, sales forecasting has a direct impact on your company’s financial performance and financial planning.

You may be aware that HubSpot offers a tool called pipeline management? But what is it and how can it assist with your sales pipeline management?

Ask many agencies and you will come away with the impression that lead generation is the Holy Grail. Sales is almost a dirty word – something that will take care of itself when the leads come in. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Lead generation is essential, but only a tiny minority of these leads will convert to customers on their own.

The best investment decision you can make for your business in the last third of 2017 is to get yourself a decent Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). There are many high-quality commercial systems available, although purchasing a licence for a premium package can be expensive. Fortunately, some of the big names in CRM software offer free versions of their apps, including many of the tools featured in the full package.

Regardless of what industry you are in, a CRM system is exactly what your company needs.

What Is A CRM System?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management with the aim to help grow and organise anything from a local company with a few employees, to corporate international enterprises. CRM Systems can manage a large amount of data all on one platform, enabling businesses to reach their full potential. They provide an insight into sales activities and account history, with highly useful and recommended reporting and tracking functions.

A good CRM system is crucial for any small business that wants its digital marketing campaigns to succeed. With limited staff, limited time and limited resources, a CRM system is the best way a small business can optimise its workflow and pool together all its data in an easy to understand and utilise format. With everything in one place, it only takes a few people to run a great sales campaign.

In order to generate leads, it is important to understand what users want, care about, and do on a company's website. A way of gathering this information is through lead generation, an inbound marketing strategy designed to nurture the visitors and getting them on the path to eventually buying from the business.

Your Bounce Rate is a good indication of how successful or unsuccessful your webpages are at capturing a visitor’s interest. By analysing the bounce rate of different pages you can determine what approaches work and which do not, and how to improve your content to meet the requirements of your target market.

In this article we will address two things: what bounce rate is and what steps you can take to reduce it.

Most of you would have heard of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. If you are, or ever have been in the B2C industry I have no doubt that you will have witnessed first-hand the money that can be generated from these events. However, those of you who are in the B2B industry will have substantially less stories to tell regarding your company’s financial success during these events.

This is because most B2B businesses don’t see where or how they can profit from the Black Friday and Cyber Monday events and therefore tend to shy away from joining in. As far as most B2B companies are concerned these events are solely for B2C companies and are something they rarely bother to take a serious interest in as far as business is concerned.