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Traditional CRM vs. New CRM: Which Is Right for Your Business?

The landscape of customer relationship management (CRM) has seen massive shifts over the years, progressing from traditional CRM systems to the emergence of new, more flexible CRM technologies. Traditional CRM is typically an on-premise system primarily focused on customer data management and tracking sales activities, whereas new CRM leverages cloud technology to provide extended functionality, greater accessibility, and more user-friendly interfaces.

Key Takeaways

Here are the key differences between traditional CRM and new CRM:

  1. System infrastructure and accessibility
  2. User interface and usability
  3. Functionality and features
  4. Integration capabilities
  5. Cost implications and return on investment

Table of Contents

  • What Is Traditional CRM?
  • What Is New CRM?
  • Traditional CRM vs. New CRM: Key Similarities
  • Traditional CRM vs. New CRM: Key Differences
  • Traditional CRM vs. New CRM: Which Is Best?

What Is Traditional CRM?

Traditional CRM, short for Customer Relationship Management, is a system that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. Its goal is to improve customer service relationships, retain customers, and drive sales growth. These systems are typically installed on company servers (on-premise) and are managed by IT staff.

How Does Traditional CRM Work?

Traditional CRM works by collecting customer data from various communication channels, including a company’s website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials, and more. The CRM software then analyzes this data about a customer’s history with a company and improves business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and driving sales growth.

Benefits of Traditional CRM

The benefits of traditional CRM are manifold. It provides an organized system for storing and retrieving customer data, allows for tracking of sales activities, and gives detailed insights into customer behavior, enabling businesses to formulate effective marketing strategies. The on-premise nature of traditional CRM also gives businesses full control over their data, which can be critical for organizations with stringent data security requirements.

What Is New CRM?

New CRMs, often referred to as modern or cloud-based CRM, is the latest evolution in the field of customer relationship management. These systems, like their traditional counterparts, aim to streamline customer interactions and data management. However, they do so with a host of additional features, greater flexibility, enhanced user experience, and cloud-based accessibility.

How Does New CRM Work?

New CRMs operate on a cloud-based model, allowing for real-time access to customer data from any location and any device with internet connectivity. This type of CRM system integrates with various digital platforms, including social media and other third-party applications, and provides an expanded set of tools such as artificial intelligence capabilities, marketing automation, and more.

Benefits of New CRM

New CRMs offers a number of benefits over traditional systems. They provide improved accessibility, allowing employees to access customer data anytime, anywhere. These systems are usually more user-friendly, with intuitive interfaces that reduce the learning curve for staff. Furthermore, new CRM systems are built to integrate seamlessly with other digital platforms, broadening the scope of data collection and customer engagement.

Traditional CRM vs. New CRM: Key Similarities

Here are the key similarities between traditional CRM and new CRM:

  1. Both aim to improve customer relationship management
  2. Both provide tools for data collection and analysis
  3. Both can automate certain repetitive tasks
  4. Both provide features for sales forecasting and tracking
  5. Both aim to increase customer retention and drive sales growth

Traditional CRM vs. New CRM: Key Differences

Feature Traditional (On‑Premise) Modern (Cloud‑Based / New CRM)
Infrastructure Local servers, internal IT Cloud servers, vendor‑managed
Access On‑site or via VPN Anywhere, any device
Setup & Maintenance Weeks/months, internal IT required Days/weeks, vendor handles updates and uptime
Upfront Cost High ($25K–$50K+ for mid‑sized teams) Low (subscription, ~$25–$150/user/month)
Security & Compliance Full internal control Vendor‑managed with enterprise‑grade standards
User Interface Complex and dated Intuitive and user‑friendly
Functionality Basic CRM features AI, automation, analytics, social integration
Integration Flexibility Limited, custom development needed API‑driven, prebuilt integrations

Here are the key differences between traditional CRM and new CRMs:

  1. System Infrastructure and Accessibility: Traditional CRM systems are typically on-premise, meaning they are installed and run on servers within the organization. In contrast, new CRM systems are typically cloud-based, allowing access from anywhere and at any time.
  2. User Interface and Usability: Traditional CRM systems often have complex user interfaces that can be difficult for some users to navigate. New CRM systems prioritize user experience, featuring intuitive designs that facilitate ease of use.
  3. Functionality and Features: While traditional CRM systems focus primarily on customer data management and tracking sales activities, new CRM systems offer a broader range of capabilities. These might include artificial intelligence tools, social media integration, and advanced analytical tools.
  4. Integration Capabilities: Traditional CRM systems often have limited integration capabilities with other digital platforms. In contrast, new CRM systems are designed for greater compatibility with various digital platforms, including social media and other third-party applications.
  5. Cost Implications and Return on Investment: Traditional CRM systems often involve significant upfront investment for software purchase and installation and ongoing costs for system maintenance and upgrades. New CRM systems, usually subscription-based, can provide a higher return on investment due to lower upfront costs, scalability, and continuous updates and improvements from the provider.

Traditional CRM vs. New CRM: What’s Changed in 2025?

The choice between traditional CRM and new CRM largely depends on a company’s unique needs and circumstances. Factors to consider include budget, implementation timeline, specific feature requirements, IT resources, and data security needs.

System Infrastructure & Accessibility
Traditional CRM systems remain on‑premise, installed and maintained internally. In contrast, modern CRMs today are overwhelmingly cloud‑based, with around 80% of CRM deployments using cloud platforms and 63% of businesses preferring cloud solutions. Cloud CRMs offer instant remote access, real‑time collaboration, and automatic updates—letting companies deploy in days rather than weeks.

User Interface & Usability
Older CRMs often suffer from clunky interfaces and steep learning curves. Newer platforms now emphasize streamlined, intuitive UX that minimizes onboarding friction and boosts adoption rates.

Functionality & Features
Where traditional CRMs were limited to basic customer and sales tracking, new CRMs now integrate features like AI‑powered forecasting, social media lead capture, automation workflows, advanced analytics, and built‑in communication tools. Teamgate, for example, supports in‑app dialing, LinkedIn integration, and lead scoring for highly proactive sales teams.

Integration Capabilities
Legacy CRMs often have limited compatibility. In contrast, modern CRMs boast API‑first architectures with native integrations through platforms like Zapier, supporting unified workflows across email, marketing, support, and finance tools.

Cost & ROI
Traditional CRMs often incur high upfront costs—sometimes $25,000–$50,000 for a mid‑sized deployment—plus ongoing maintenance and IT support. Cloud CRMs use subscription pricing (typically $25–$150/user/month), with lower upfront investment and built‑in updates, yielding faster ROI for many businesses.

Security & Control
On‑premise CRMs afford total internal control—appealing to industries with strict data governance needs. Cloud CRMs, while vendor‑managed, comply with top security standards, offer automatic backups, role‑based access, and continuous compliance updates. Most organizations now find cloud options meet or exceed required security standardsTeamgate+15

Teamgate CRM: Start Your Journey Today

Teamgate CRM offers the best of both worlds, providing the reliable data management features of traditional CRM along with the innovative, user-friendly, and flexible features of new CRM systems. With our platform, you can streamline your customer relationship management processes and drive growth in your business.

Whether you’re a fan of the control and stability offered by traditional CRM or the flexibility and cutting-edge features of new CRM, Teamgate CRM has a solution tailored to your needs. Ready to experience the future of customer relationship management? Request a demo or start your 14-day free trial today!

Related: All-in-One CRM v.s. Dedicated CRMs 

Want your business to grow like a bushfire but don’t want to spend money? Your wish has been granted early this year.

Here is a massive list of 400 free online tools and resources to help you become more productive, propel your design, social media and content marketing efforts to new heights and automate time-consuming tasks, so that you can direct all your attention and energy to more fruitful projects.

AI Tools for Business

What kind of article would we be writing about helpful tools in 2025 if it didn’t include AI? While this section spans all categories that we dive further into below, it is the only list fully focused on AI tools geared to drive your business to greater heights.

ChatGPT: The Classic. Helps with writing, brainstorming ideas, drafting emails, and answering questions. Best for general use.

Google Gemini: Like ChatGPT in terms of capability, but works inside Google Docs, Sheets, and Gmail to summarize, edit, and organize information.

Whitesonic/Jasper: A huge help to teams who don’t have copywriting capabilities. Creates blog posts, ads, and other marketing content quickly.

ElevenLabs: Turns text into realistic voiceovers for videos, podcasts, or product demos.

Otter.ai: Records meetings and automatically creates transcripts and summaries.

Github Copilot: Suggests code and helps developers write software faster. A big part of the reason you’re starting to hear the term “Vibe Coding”.

UXPin: Build or edit components of your design, prototype or website with a prompt or sketch.

OnlyMonster.ai: CRM and automation tool for agencies managing multiple creator accounts. It centralizes chats, analytics, and performance tracking to help teams automate workflows and scale efficiently.

Lindy.ai: AI and Automation go hand-in-hand. Create agents that handle tasks on your behalf.

Website Building Tools

resources

Image Source: Layers

Gone are the days when building a beautiful website could cost you an arm and a leg. Use these free website building tools to get your business online at no cost except your time.

Bootstrap Zero: Download hundreds of open-source and responsive templates and themes for bootstrap

Bootswatch: Another free resource for bootstrap theme although limited than Bootstrap Zero

HTML5 UP: Your source for free and responsive HTML5 themes, which are all fully customizable.

Landing Harbor: provides a free landing page for your mobile app – a great site to promote your business

Layers: WordPress theme that’s free forever. There is also a Pro version if you want to upgrade

Strikingly: Free responsive and mobile-optimized websites for the Strikingly domain

Templated: Free 800+ fully responsive CSS and HTML5 website templates

WordPress.org/Wordpress. Com: Free website builder and hundreds of free WP themes

Logo Generator

Image Source: ZenBusiness

Want to add a little oomph to your brand? Here are 5 free logo generators that you can use to create a slick and modern logo in just a few minutes.

Hipster Logo Generator: want a fresh and hip logo for your business – the name says it all

ZenBusiness: create a more professional looking logo in just a few minutes

Signature Maker: create your digital signature for free. It’s based on HTML5 so it works on most modern browsers

Squarespace Free Logo: free two-step logo generator from Squarespace with downloadable low and high resolution versions

Withoomph: free logo generator which shows you different versions of the logo

Business Name Generator

Image Source: Hipster Business Name

If you want your business idea to catch on and grow like a weed, do put a little effort into picking out a memorable business name. Sometimes the best ideas hide in plain sight, so give your imagination a tickle with these name generator tools.    

Domain: quick and free domain generator

Hipster Business Name: cousin of the Hipster Logo Generator – both of them are hip and very millennial

Impossibility: it calls itself as the “best domain name generator ever.” Try it to find out

Do you have a CRM that keeps you organised?

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Painless setup, no credit card required

Lean Domain Search: domain name generator with some advice how to get the ideal domain name for you

Naminum: just type a keyword where your want to base your company name and it will give you numerous domain name suggestions

Short Domain Search: search for short domain names in seconds. The site has added new tools for more refined searches.

The Name App: helps you find a name for any ideas you have

Wordoid: let’s you create new and catchy words for your business or for your next product. Available in English, French, Spanish, and Italian

Invoice/Legal Docs

Image Source: Wave

Fancy cutting costs without losing performance? Then charge and don’t be charged with these free invoicing and legal docs resources for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Docracy: open collection of legal contracts and documents

Termly: Legally backed policy generators and consent management tools for websites, apps, and businesses of all sizes. 

Free Invoice Generator: the name says it all

Invoice to me: create a more itemized or detailed invoice using this invoice generator for free

Invoice.to: clean and easy to use; however, it’s still experimental according to its creator

Kiss: legal documents for startup investors and owners all for free

Shake: create a legal agreement and sign it in a matter of minutes for free. It’s optimized for mobile so it’s easy to use.

Wave: ideal for small business owners who are looking for fast and easy accounting and invoicing, and it’s for free.

Idea Management

Image Source: Germ.io

Don’t let your ideas go to waste. Snap them up at their infancy, test, experiment and watch them blossom into something beautiful using these free idea management tools.

Germ.io: turns your ideas into reality by tracking them and allowing you to collaborate with your team until you successfully execute them

Experiment Board: allows you to test your startup idea for free in the community even before you publicly launch it

Skitch: let your idea stand out with this free tool from Evernote.

Content Curation/Trending Ideas

Image Source: Buzzsumo

Struggling to keep up with the speed and volume of online content? Take advantage of these free content curation tools to stay abreast with the industry’s trending stories and never miss anything important.

Ruzzit: place of the most shared content on the Internet along with their popularity score and on what social media platform

Buzzsumo: gives you the trending content and shows you how well it competes against another content

Feedly: compiles all news feeds according to category or source. It can be customized and shared

Flipboard: works similarly like Feedly. You can create your own compilation or magazine which other users can follow and share.

Google Trends: displays trending searches in real time

Hubspot Blog Topic Generator: looking for the next idea for your blog topic? This tool is for you for free

Portent: it’s like a mentor on how to make a viral post

Reddit: a forum/community where you can get real trending news from the common people every day.

Swayy: gives you the latest and most interesting news on the web. However, the subscription is only free to one dashboard user.

Others: Google What’s Hot | Twitter Trending | Quora  

Tip: once you’re ready to scale the marketing efforts for your company, check out these online business tools that content marketing consultant, Ryan Robinson recommends for growing your traffic.                                                             

Image Editors

Image Source: Canva

Push your social presence to the next level with free image editing tools that will enable you to instantly create stunning visuals and professional-looking graphics to make your stories resonate

PicMonkey: edit your pictures, make beautiful collages, or create professional-looking graphics, PicMonkey has it for free

Pixlr: easy to use online photo editor

Canva: beautiful image, video, menu designs and more – for your blog, Facebook page, or website

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Ease.ly: allows you to create stunning visuals, such as infographics, resumes, or marketing presentations. You can share your works for free as well.

Meme Generator: create a meme instantly in just three easy steps. You don’t even need to upload a picture. Also available in 4 languages.

Pablo: increase or make your social presence stand out with these beautiful, free images from Pablo

Place It: more than 2,500 mock-ups and videos across all devices for free

Recite: make any quote memorable and visually enticing with Recite. Just type your favorite quote and choose from the ready-to-use templates. After that, you can share it to any social network or email straight to anyone.

Social Image Resizer Tool: resizes and change the file format of any image for web use

Image Optimizers

Image Source: InstaMockup

Optimizing images no longer means losing on quality. You can enhance image clarity before compression using an HD photo converter, which helps upscale low-resolution visuals without compromising performance. Resize and compress your images to make them load faster and take less disk space with free image optimization tools.

Compressor.io: reduce or optimize any image you have without changing the high quality of the image.

Dunnnk: Dunnnk is never short of beautiful mockups for Android and iOS devices, all of which have high quality

Image Optim: compresses your images without losing the high quality so that your images can load faster.

Image Optimizer: free online image optimizer, compressor, and resizer. It has now a downloadable version allowing  you to work offline, and it’s all for free.

InstaMockup: a free iOS tool which allows you to create beautiful mockups and allow you to showcase your product in real environments. Available for both iPad and iPhone.

TinyJPG: allows you to compress and optimize your JPEG and PNG images

Smush.it: WordPress image compression and optimization tool

Blogging and Writing Tools

Image Source: Grammarly

Have your inspiration fairies abandoned you lately? Feeling stuck in a rut with your writing routine? Take note of these free blogging and writing tools that will bring the joy back to you.

A5.gg: a small note-taking tool which allows you to take notes using your browser. The best thing about it – it automatically saves your notes so that it is still there when you return.

CoSchedule: analyzes your headlines and suggests how you can write them better in order to drive more traffic to your website

Editorial Calendar: a WordPress blog management tool which allows you to see your blog posts in one place

Egg Timer: a simple online timer which you can repeatedly use for free

Blank Page: makes writing easy, simple, and hassle-free

Free Summarizer: summarize your long sentences that still makes sense

GPTZero: an online AI checker that analyzes any piece of writing and tells you how much of it might be AI-written, with clear, easy-to-read results.

Undetectable AI: a tool that rewrites AI-generated content to make it sound more natural and human-like, helping you avoid detection while keeping your writing clear and authentic.

Liberio: create and publish an eBook straight from Google Docs

Known: a social learning community which allows you to write and collaborate with others. You can also publish it and let the community give you feedback and advice. Perfect for authors who are just starting out.

ZenPen: gets you to write without any distractions is ZenPen’s ultimate goal. That is evident in its no-frill UI

Story Wars: allows you to collaborate and share stories with other writers from across the globe

WP Hide Post: WordPress plugin that lets you control what appears on your blog. You can even control which part of a particular blog can be seen by the readers.

Social Locker: another free WordPress plugin which asks your visitor “to pay” for the content you made through a share, a like, or a Tweet.

Medium: a free blogging platform

Hemingway: a writing app that automatically corrects the syntax of your sentences highlighting them with different colors so you know what specifically is wrong with it.

Grammarly: an online editor that corrects your grammar and sentence cohesiveness. It now has a downloadable version.

SEO and Website Analyzers

Startup Tools SEOMator

Image Source: Seomator

Don’t let a poor SEO performance drag your site’s performance down the drain. Try these free SEO and website optimization tools to collect feedback, analyze and improve your SEO strategy.  

Ahrefs: checks your backlinks and analyzes your website

Alexa Ranking: analyzes the ranking of any site by providing you analytical insights

Browseo: it gives you feedback how search engines view your site

Broken Links: you don’t have to worry about 404s anymore with this tool as it finds any broken links and redirects them to the correct page

Copyscape: analyzes content if it’s plagiarized or not

Google Pagespeed Insights: another of Google’s useful tools which checks how your site performs

Google: Analytics | Keyword Planner | Webmaster Tools | Trends                                                   

GTMetrics: this is the tool if you want to know how fast your website performance is

Hubspot Marketing Grader: get feedback for your marketing efforts

Keywordtool.io: search for the right keywords for your content

Moz Local: find your local listing on any search engine

Nibbler: tests any website’s performance, popularity, and more

OpenLink Profiler: analyzes and checks backlinks from any website to ensure that you get the freshest and the best ones

Open Site Explorer: also a link analyzer tool

Pingdom: tests how long your website loads

Quick Sprout: provides a comprehensive analysis of your website

SimilarWeb: analyzes and provides insights for any website or app

Seomator: Seomator is the Online SEO Audit Tool and Website Crawler for Website’s SEO Health. In other words, Seomator provides In-depth Technical SEO Analysis and SEO On-Page Testing Tool for Websites Optimization. Same time, Seomator is the Sales Automation Tool that could be implemented directly on a company’s website to automate and increase sales. White-label Reports deliver directly to customers and save hours of work and life.

SEO Site Checkup: checks how well your website’s SEO performs and gives you feedback so you’ll know which ones need fixing

SERPs Rank Checker: checks how well your SERP ranking and SEO performs

Shopify e-Commerce Report: free business tools to grow your Shopify business

W3C Validator: validates the markup validity of any Web documents on any file format

Woorank: screens and analyzes the SEO ranking of your website

XML Sitemaps: allows you to create XML, HTM, and Text sitemaps which can be submitted to any major search engines

Send, Collect and Verify Emails

Image Source: Mailerlite

Email made easy, at no additional cost. These free email tools will give you back your time and peace of mind: create, send, track and analyze your campaigns for free.  

Beefree: makes writing emails much easier

Canned Emails: ready-made email messages you can use

Contact Form 7: a free WordPress plugin which allows you to collect your emails

Hello Bar: a tool which enables you to attract more email subscribers

Mailchimp: allows you to send your emails to multiple recipients with just one click. It also has a premium version which enables you to send your emails to more recipients.

Mailerlite: track your emails and find out who has already read them

Mailgun: allows you to send free 10K emails every month

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Mandrill: send to 12K emails every month for free

ManyContactsBar: free contact form for your website

Scroll Triggered Box: free WordPress plugin that boosts your conversion rates

Sendgrid: allows you to deliver your emails to 12K people every month for free

Sendinblue: email management tool which allows you to send free 9K emails every month

Sumome List Builder: convert your visitors into customers and subscribers

ZeroBounce: is a free email verification tool allowing users to verify email addresses in real-time.

Social Media and Community Management

Image Source: Bitly

Your time can be better spent connecting with customers and building your brand than counting likes and shares. Automate your social media with these free online tools to amplify your promotional efforts and increase the engagement.

Addthis: enables you to get more likes, shares, follows, and conversions

App Review Monitor: get insights from the latest app reviews straight to your inbox or Slack account

Bitly: shortens your links so you can share and send them much more easily

Buffer Free Plan: allows you to schedule your posts to any social media network

Digg Digg: a free WordPress plugin that shares your content on all platforms with just one click

Disqus: build your audience by increasing your engagement and allowing discussions

Click To Tweet: tool that lets you get more shares for your blog posts and content

Filament: a customizable share bar

Free Survey Creator: lets you create a survey and acquire feedback for free

How Many Shares: monitor how many shares your content has in various social media networks

Crowdfire: a simple way of growing your audience

Klout: social media analytics tool which rates your social media influence

Latergram:  a perfect tool for your Instagram account which helps you schedule your Instagram posts

MyTweetLinks: increases your Twitter audience

Presskit Generator: creates a press kit for your app for free

Ritetag: Chrome and Firefox browser extension that analyzes your hashtag

SharedCount: lets you track how many shares, likes, and tweets your content has

SocialRank: Twitter management tool

Social Analytics: a free Chrome extension which allows you to get the social data of any URL from supported social networks

Sumome Share: automatically optimizes your share button to increase your website traffic

WordPress Pin It Button for Images: WordPress plugin which allows you to place a “Pin It” button to your images

WriteRack: the perfect tool to create a tweetstorm

A/B Testing and Growth Hacking

Image Source: Optimizely

Take the guesswork out of website optimization by basing your decisions on real data rather than your own hunch. A few proven growth hacks can take your business a long way.

GrowthHackers: lets you create a fast and sustainable financial and customer growth

Hello Bar: lets you test your call-to-actions and keywords

Petit Hacks: helps you grow your conversion rate by teaching you retention, revenue, and acquisition hacks

Optimizely: helps you optimize your app or website

Customer Service and Survey

Image Source: Typeform

Keep the customers happy and their feedback rolling in by using these free online tools.

Batch: helps you engage with your mobile customers better

Free Survey Creator: helps you create surveys and get feedback

Helprace: a customer service platform which allows you to create a personalized help desk and feedback portal. The tool is free for up to 3 customer service reps

Survey Any Place: allows you to create entertaining surveys and create awesome respondent experience

Tally: lets you create free polls

Typeform: a form and online survey builder

Guides and Courses

Image Source: Skillshare

It’s never too late or too early to deepen your well of knowledge. Immerse yourself in a new learning experience for free.  

Build an Online Course: teaches you how to create a free online course

Coursera: free online classes from Ivy League universities and other top educational institutions

Codecademy: learn how to code in a fun way

Closed Club: learn from the mistakes of failed startup ventures

Email Course for Sponsorship: a free course that teaches you how to get sponsorships

FirstSiteGuide: teaches you how to make a successful blog or website

Hackdesign: gives you a free lesson on design every week straight into your mailbox

Khan Academy: free online courses on STEM and more

KeepYourFriendsClose: a free e-Book that helps you retain your customers for the long term

Launch This Year: helps you how to launch your online business

MailCharts: a free course that teaches you how to create effective marketing campaigns

Mixergy: learn the secrets of the most successful entrepreneurs

Primer: a free marketing lesson from Google

reSRC.io: programming tutorials and resources

Rocketship.fm: another program where you can learn from top entrepreneurs

Skillshare: free online courses and projects

Startup Notes: short but meaningful lessons from successful startups notebook-style

Startup Talks: watch and listen trade secrets from successful startup entrepreneurs

The Lean LaunchPad: dreaming of creating a startup venture? This is the site where you can learn how

TalentBuddy: another site that offers free coding lessons

Discover Tools, Startups, and Collaborators

Image Source: Product Hunt

Connect with fellow entrepreneurs, get inspired by the real-world stories, and stay in the know. Have your own piece of wisdom to share? Join a dedicated community!

Angellist: invest, create, or work at a startup

Assembly: collaborate and brainstorm with other people anywhere in the world

Beta List: discover and connect with up and coming startups

CoFounders Lab: meet and collaborate entrepreneurs near you

Erli Bird: where you can find and recruit beta testers as well as collect feedback from Android and iOS users

Founder2be: looking for a partner for your startup? This is the best place to start

Product Hunt: find new products in the market every day

StartupLi.st: the ‘Facebook’ for startups

Startups List: a massive list of startups anywhere in the world

Newsletters

Image Source: Mattermark Daily

Enjoy a constant trickle of knowledge and advice in your inbox at no cost! Learn from industry experts one free newsletter at a time.

Design for Hackers: free newsletter for 12 weeks that includes lessons on design

Email 1K: a free 30-day course that teaches you how to grow your email list

ChargeWhatYou’reWorth: a newsletter that teaches you how much to price yourself and your services

Mattermark Daily: newsletter about founders and entrepreneurs

Product Psychology: newsletter that gives you valuable insights on user behavior

Startup Digest: a personalized newsletter that gives you information about startups around your area

UX Newsletter: newsletter about research, design, and creation

UX Design Weekly: gives you a UX design link every week

Other Useful Tools

Image Source: Ad Spend Calculator

Tame the numbers and cost calculations with the help of these free online tools.

Ad Spend Calculator: gives helpful advertising and marketing advice for startups

App vs. Website: gives you the pros and cons of building a website or an app

Foundrs: equity calculator for you and your business partner/co-founder

HowMuchToMakeAnApp: gives you an estimation how much it will cost you to create an app

Pitcherific: teaches you the art of making pitches that sells

RingCentral Meetings: provides the power to conduct HD video conferences and screen sharing as part of a complete business communications solution. Employees can hold face-to-face meetings in high definition and share screens or documents with anyone, anytime, anywhere. As part of a complete unified communications as a service (UCaaS) cloud offering, it empowers employees to connect with clients and enable collaboration between teams across locations—as if they’re all in the same conference room.

Startup Equity Calculator: gives you an idea how much salary you should give for new hires

StoryXpress: helps to create and hosts videos that generate leads

Design

Image Source: Dribbble

These free premium resources and tools will open you the door to the world of design. These free premium startup resources and tools will open you the door to the world of design.

Dbf: best design freebies for Dribble and Behance

Dribbble: a treasure trove of inspiration and design freebies

Freebbble: free high-quality designs from Dribbble

Fribbble: free PSD files and other design resources created  by Dribbble users

Freebiesbug: another website where you can find free PSD files and other resources from designers

Free Section of Pixeden: free high-quality web and graphic design templates. There’s also a premium version for $6 a month

Free Section of Creative Market: gives out free random items every Monday

Graphic Burger: mouthwatering designs for free from the professional design community

Marvel: online collaboration tool where you can create prototypes and share your design

Pixel Buddha: free premium resources from professionals for professionals

Premium Pixels: collection of free design resources and WordPress themes

Placeit Freebie: more than 2500 high-quality mockups and videos for iOS devices for free

Renderforest – free tools for everyone to create professional intros, animations, slideshows and music visualizations in minutes

365 Psd: free downloadable PSD every day

UI Space: thousands of high-quality handcrafted freebies

Freepik: free vectors, PSDs, images, and icons

Tech&All: free design resources, news, and PSDs

Linearity: is a graphic design software for the whole Apple ecosystem

SketchAppResources: free resources for the Sketch app

Web3Canvas: free design resources, tutorials, and more

Sources of Inspiration

Image Source: Awwwards

Don’t let a bad day turn into a bad life. Tickle your inspiration with these free tools and resources and restore your creative vibes.

Awwwards: website awards for best web design trends

Behance: website where you can showcase your design portfolio and search for others for inspiration

Crayon: free marketing resources

MaterialUp: free material design resources uploaded every day

FLTDSGN: your one-stop source for inspiration of websites and apps using flat UI design

Flat UI Design: flat UI design resource for websites and apps on Pinterest

Land-Book: find inspiration for your landing pages in this online gallery

Moodboard: lets you create and share your moodboard

Niice: search engine to find design ideas

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Site Inspire: free web design inspiration

UI Cloud: thousands of UI elements and kits in different categories

Ocean: get feedback for your designs from fellow designers around the world

One Page Love: find inspiration for your one-page website

Pttrns: a massive resource for mobile UI interface in a wide range of categories

The Starter Kit: resource for designers and developers

The Best Designs: the best design inspiration for you

UI Parade: free UI tools and design inspirations

Color Pickers

Image Source: Adobe Color CC

Make your design experiences a breeze by using these free color pickers to extract dominant colors from images, create vivid color combinations and palettes for free.

0 to 255: a  no-nonsense color picker that helps you find the perfect color variations and combinations

Adaptive Backgrounds: a jQuery plugin that allows you to extract dominant colors from images

Adobe Color CC:  a collection of color combinations

Bootflat: color combination collection for flat design

Brand Colors: discover the color combinations used by the most popular brands, such as Adobe, Amazon, and American Express

Coleure: absolute color management created with Sketch

Colllor: free color palette generator

Colorful Gradients: computer-generated gradients for free

Coolors: create and share color palettes in a matter of seconds. You can also save your work for future reference

Flat UI Colors: beautiful flat UI color palettes. The site is launching more colors soon as well as more tools for designers and developers

Get UI Colors: free cool color combinations for flat design

Hex Colorrrs: free HEX / RGB converter

Material Palette: allows you to create and export your material design color palette. The website also has free  icons and colors for material design.

New Flat UI Color Picker: a wide range of flat colors for UI design

Material UI Colors: a collection of material design colors for the web, Android, and iOS

Paletton: choose the right color for your website using this free color scheme designer

Palette for Chrome: a Chrome extension that enables you to create a color palette using any image. Just right-click the image and choose “Palette Creation”.

PLTTS: lets you easily find a matching color palette

Skala Color: a free macOS color picker that is compatible with any format. It automatically recognizes colors and can be applied with just one click.

Stock Photography

Image Source: Pexels

Inject some life and energy into your site by adding professional, natural-looking photos from professional photographers from all over the wall.

All The Free Stock: free stock images, icons, videos, mockups, templates, and more

Depositphotos: high-quality stock photography, vectors, and videos for professional design needs.

Spark Adobe:helps you create a perfect marketing plan

Bucketlistly: more than 5,000 free creative common travel photos from around the world

Cupcake: free photos from Swedish photographer Jonas Wimmerstrȍm

Designers Pics: another free stock photo resource

Death to the Stock Photo: free stock photo sent straight into your email every month

Free Nature Stock: royalty-free nature stock photos by Adrian Pelletier

Foodie’s Feed: free high resolution food photos for your food blog

Function: photo packs for free

Gratisography: another rich resource for high resolution photos for free

Getrefe: free high-quality photos in different categories

IM Free: royalty-free images and other web design resources for commercial use

ISO Republic: free high resolution stock photos for creatives

Jay Mantri: free-to-use high resolution photos by Jay Mantri. He also has contests where you can win free items

Jéshoots: free downloadable modern photos

Kaboompics: your get-to place for great photos

Lock & Stock Photos: free high-quality photos

Burst by Shopify: free photography for entrepreneurs

Little Visuals: delivers 7 free photos straight into your email every week

Life of Pix: free high-resolution photography from professional photographers from all over the world

Moveast: free images that chronicles the journey of a man going east

Mazwai: free creative commons high-definition video clips and footages

Magdeleine: get a free photo every day

MMT: free photos for commercial use. The collection is updated weekly

New Old Stock: curated vintage photos from public archives

Pexels: one of the best stock photos in the web updated daily, and it’s for free

Pixabay: free downloadable stock photos for commercial use

Picography: free images you can use for any purpose straight from Ireland

Picjumbo: free exclusive photos that have never been published straight into your inbox

Public Domain Archive: free vintage and modern high resolution photos every week

Paul Jarvis: 20 free downloadable high-res photos you can use

Raumrot: absolutely free photos you can edit and modify

Stock Up: tens of thousands of free stock photos across 31 websites

Startup Stock Photos: free photos, images, and vectors

Stokpic: free 10 new photos sent into your inbox every two weeks

StockSnap: high resolution photos free from copyright restrictions

Super Famous: free high resolution photos you can use for any purposes as long as you credit the owner

Snapographic: use these photos in any way you like for free

Splitshire: mouthwatering photos for free

The Pattern Library: free amazing patterns for your web design projects

Travel Coffee Book: free travel photos you can use in any way

Unsplash: free high resolution photos in a wide range of categories

Some more websites: Free Digital Photos | Morguefile | Public Domain Pictures | Free Stockvault | ImageFree | Rgbstock | Dreamstime | FreeImages | FreeRangeImages | FreePhotosBank

Icons

Image Source: Font Awesome

Refresh your website by adding some beautiful, high quality icons. These 21 online tools will help you to unlock and explore the potential of graphics.

Fontello: generate new icons and fonts for free

Flat Icon: more than 16000 of glyph vestor icons for free

Material Design Icons: an open-source glyph collection by Google with around 750 glyphs

Glyphsearch: search all free icons around the web

MakeAppIcon: creates any type of app icon for free

Endless Icons: free icons for flat design

Ico Moon: icon generator that gives you  more than 4,000 vector icons

The Noun Project: a collection of glyph icons from different artists

Perfect Icons: a tool that lets you create resolution independent icons

Icon Finder: free icons you can use in any way

Free Round Icons: Doodle Set | Flat Set | Vector Line Set

Icon Sweets: 60 Photoshop icons for your web projects as well as your iPad and iPhone apps

Make Appicon: create an icon for your app with just one click

App Icon Template: create royalty-free icon for Android, iOs, and OS X platforms

SmartIcons: more than 1,400 downloadable icons for free

Ego Icons: clean and simple vector icons

FlatIcons: lets you customize your icons for flat design

To(icon): more icons all your for free

Typography

Image Source: Typekit

An ugly, inappropriate font can suck the life out of an otherwise robust website. Take advantage of free typography collections and choose a font that helps you visualize your idea.

TypeGenius: provides a wide array of font combination for any kind of project

Font Squirrel: completely free fonts for commercial use

Google Fonts: open-source fonts by Google 100% free

Beautiful Web Type: another Google resource to help you find stunning typefaces

DaFont: fonts archive which can be downloaded for free

1001 Free Fonts:  a massive collection of free fonts

FontPark: another massive archive of free fonts for any use

Font-to-width: a tool that helps you fit typefaces in their containers without scaling them

Adobe Edge Fonts: an accessible collection of free web fonts

Typekit: a smaller collection but have some great fonts included

Coding and Design Tools

Image Source: Codacy

Drive your business growth with these 22 free coding and design tools at your disposal. Take your mind off complex tasks (like reviewing code) and watch your idea take form.

Hive: unlimited cloud service for free

GitHub: a development platform which lets you collaborate, create, and share software

BitBucket: code collaboration tool

Chisel: contains an unlimited fossil repositories for free with an ISC license

Visual Studio: find most of the tools for developers and designers here

Landscape: gives you an early warning before everything turns unexpectedly.

Swiftype: finds the right results to your searches by browsing all cloud storages. The free version, however, has a limitation

Keen.io: collects event data from anywhere, add rich custom attributes, and send it everywhere

Coveralls: analyzes your code and tells you which part is not covered with your test suite. 

Codacy: checks code style and tracks code accuracy throughout your sprints

Searchcode: helps you find billions of lines of codes

TinyCert: SSL certificates for free

Opbeat: tool for JS developers which analyzes and optimizes your app’s performance

Pingdom: monitors websites’ uptime

Rollbar: monitors any app for full-stack error. Supports all languages

Loggly: tool that helps you improve log management

Devport: turns your apps, GitHub repos, and websites into a portfolio

Getting Real: a free eBook that teaches you how to create better web apps

Peek: gives you a f-minute video of someone who uses your app or site

Creator: helps you create better and faster apps

DevFreeCasts: collection of screencasts featuring different developes

Cody: library of code nuggets for free

Other Design Tools

Image Source: UI Names

Small things can make a big difference. Save time and improve your design experiences with these smart online tools.

UI Names: gives you ideas of names for your mockups and designs

UI Faces: collection of avatar faces for your UI

Copy Paste Character: design resource you can copy paste

Window Resizer: tool that allows you to see your design in different resolutions

Sonics: user interface sound effects for free

Focus and Attention

Image Source: Noisli

Need a little bit more than moral support to hit your productivity levels? Take your pick from a bunch of free online tools that can dramatically improve your focus and attention.

Noisli: background sound generator that helps increase  your focus and productivity

Noizio: sound equalizer that helps you relax and focus

Defonic: helps you create immersive soundscapes

Designers.mx: listen to the music other designers are listening to while they work

Coffitivity: gives you coffee shop ambiance while working

Octave: free UI sounds for the iOS platform

Free Sound: massive database of sounds and other audio snippets

Sonics: free sound and sound effects straight to your inbox every week

Deep Focus: relaxing music to help you focus from Spotify

Self Control: (for Mac users)helps you block websites that can easily distract you while working

Cold Turkey: (Windows) blocks distracting websites while you’re working

Team Collaboration

Image Source: Slack

Take the hassle out of team collaboration and benefit from a smooth idea sharing and project management experience. These free tools will introduce you to the world of smart people management.

Trello: helps you collaborate much easier

Evernote: your digital workspace

Dropbox: free cloud storage for up to 2GB

Time Doctor: a time tracking software that claims to increase your productivity by 22% with features like powerful customizable reports that include web and app usage, optional screenshot monitoring and more. In inbound marketing where tasks are abundant, you have to make sure every minute counts. Time Doctor helps you exactly with that.

Yanado: task and project management tool inside Gmail

Wetransfer: allows you to transfer up to 2GB for free

Drp.io: fast image hosting and file transfer for free

Pocket: digital to-do later tool

Raindrop: bookmarking tool for Mac users

Flowdock: collaboration tool for a small team

Typetalk: easy to use instant messaging for team collaboration

Slack: team collaboration tool where you can share your ideas easily

HipChat: team chat for unlimited users

Google Hangouts: team chat and group video calls

Voveet: lets you have 3D conference calls with your team or clients

FreeBusy: helps coordinate the schedule of all team members

RealTimeBoard: online digital whiteboard

Witkit: secure and encrypted data storage with free 50GB of space

Any.do: team collaboration tool

Asana: team management and collaboration tool

Hubstaff Tasks: Easy Agile Project management software

GoToMeeting: free online meetings and web conferencing made easy

ProofHub: a tool design for remote teams tow work effectively

Freelancing and Remote Networking Tools

Image Source: Nomadlist

Bring your team together, upgrade your freelancing routine and tap into a community of nomads and entrepreneurs without spending a single dollar.

Founded X Startup Stats: gives you insight where to build your startup

Teleport: Startup Cities: planning to bring your startup to another city? Teleport helps analyze your budget and logistics for the move

Workfrom: find the best places to work remotely around the city where you are

Lastroom: team travel management tool made easy

Nomadlist: find the best cities in the world to live and work remotely

Internet is a bottomless treasure cove of fantastic free stuff — you just need time and patience to uncover the best pieces. Don’t stop at these 400 free online tools and resources, keep your eyes and ears open for new product launches and continue hustling like a real champ.

In this article, we’ll demystify the realm of sales, often misconceived due to Hollywood’s portrayal and societal perceptions. We’ll dive into the intricacies of modern sales processes, shedding light on how successful businesses use structured techniques, from leveraging buyer personas to utilizing CRMs. By the end, you’ll gain insights into how to streamline and optimize your own sales processes without revamping your entire business.

Key Takeaways:

  • The sales process is more than just making a pitch; it consists of structured steps from prospecting to nurturing.
  • Standardizing the sales process enhances efficiency and makes onboarding new salespeople smoother.
  • Incorporating tools like CRMs can greatly aid in automating and optimizing various stages of the sales process.
  • Researching potential clients is paramount, ensuring tailored pitches and understanding how one’s solution fits into their existing business processes.
  • Properly handling objections and ensuring a smooth closing process is vital for maintaining client relationships and reducing buyer’s remorse.

Sales can often be seen as the Wild West of business, thanks to many movies, books, and the general perception of the work. Salespeople, in turn, are often seen as loose cannons that passionately approach the entire process with only one goal – to close deals.

In reality, most modern high-performance businesses have a highly structured and effective sales process with aids such as buyer personas, templates, CRMs, etc. Some even collected data from social media such as LinkedIn, deeply involve marketing teams and create buyer’s journeys for potential customers.

Getting to such an efficient sales process takes a significant amount of time and effort. It is, however, entirely possible to get started on creating an effective sales process without having to completely overhaul your business. We’ll outline the basic steps that we aggregated from seeing how our clients use the CRM for making their own sales process in this article.

What is a sales process?

The sales process is something that your sales teams go through all the way from initial contact (e.g. cold calling) to closing the deal. It may be structured with a clear roadmap or completely hectic. A standardized sales process, however, is nearly always more effective than anything without structure.

Generally, a sales process can be separated into 7 parts:

  1. Prospecting.
  2. Lead qualification.
  3. Research.
  4. Pitching.
  5. Handling objections.
  6. Closing.
  7. Nurturing.

Each step of the sales process is essential in the customer journey. Slacking off on one part of the sales process can have a profound and direct impact on the bottom line.

A well-defined sales process has the benefit of allowing you to make the most out of each prospect. These are always either costly to acquire or limited in supply. Your sales activities should be optimized to cherish each opportunity and bring the most out of each potential client.

Finally, sales professionals will have an easier time integrating newcomers to their team if there’s an overarching strategy to follow. Getting the hang of the workflow, learning the ropes, and understanding the most frequent pain points is all made easier.

Get A Free Sales Process Manual

sales process manual

Optimizing the sales process

Prospecting

Prospecting is the process of acquiring new leads, which can be done through both outbound and inbound lead generation.  The former is more often performed by sales reps through various outreach methods such as emails, phone calls, and live meetings. Prospecting, by definition, is the first stage of the sales process.

Inbound lead generation, while still part of the sales funnel, is more often performed by marketing departments. Qualified leads are taken over by the sales team, but everything up to that point is acquired through ads, referrals, or organic promotions.

Most of the prospecting that sales managers and their teams do revolve around outbound lead generation. These can often involve sending emails, follow-ups, reaching out through social media and many other networks.

Additionally, there should be careful tracking implemented to keep tabs on each potential lead, avoid repeat engagements too early, and collection of metrics for performance. Entire email chains should be built and allocated to a set of steps to streamline the entire process. Sales teams can also use a scraper API to automatically gather company or lead data from public sources, enriching CRM records and speeding up prospect research.

Finally, the prospecting stage should be set up in a manner that it would be easier to pick up new sales employees. As much as possible should be standardized, including such details as follow-up emails, to make the sales process easy to pick up and get started with. Luckily, you can automate a lot of steps in prospecting or, at least, partly so with the proper tools.

Lead qualification

Once the prospecting stage is nailed down, a somewhat easier part of the sales methodology can be implemented. Lead qualification, while incredibly important for good conversion rates and the entire buying process, is significantly simpler to standardize when compared to other stages.

Lead qualification is all about identifying the customer’s needs and whether they can be matched by your solution. Qualifying questions, as they are called, can be sent over emails or over an early sales call (sometimes known as a discovery call). Using a platform like Mailgo can make this step smoother by automating personalized cold emails and improving deliverability, ensuring your qualifying questions actually reach decision-makers. While they can differ, commonly such questions are used:

  • What problem are you trying to solve?
  • How does it impact your day-to-day activities?
  • What solutions are you evaluating?

Additionally, some businesses won’t be able to easily reach decision-makers during the prospecting process. In these cases, adding a few questions that would ensure that salespeople are talking to the right person is necessary. These can be simple qualifiers like asking what is the person’s role in the company.

Finally, lead qualification should always be related to the ideal customer profile (ICP). Understanding how your leads fit into the ICP makes it easier to build a streamlined and successful sales process that will keep bringing in repeat business. When you standardize what data is most important for you regarding your inbound leads – Teamgate can automate your qualification by scoring your leads.

Research

Before delivering a sales presentation to interested leads careful consideration and tailoring are required. Unlike other parts of the sales process, research can scarcely be automated or standardized. It’s mostly something you trust your sales reps to do well.

Only general pointers can be given, as such. The end goal of the research process is to understand the business and the challenges of every potential new customer. Figuring out just the prospect’s needs isn’t enough.

One of the most important aspects of research is to understand how your solution integrates into the existing business processes of potential customers. Salespeople might need to get involved and ask a lot of questions, possibly even getting answers from different departments in the prospect’s company.

A well-conducted research process not only makes the sale much more likely to succeed but starts out customer relationships on the right foot. Your sales reps will be able to build the rest of the sales strategy to match both the technical and practical sides of the business while solving important pain points.

Pitching

Many would say the sales pitch is what defines sales. All of the other stages in the sales pipeline are simply preparation for the real thing. Hopefully, by this point, it’s clear that a good sales process is more than the pitch. It likely gets all the praise as it’s the most “visible” part of the sales cycle.

Yet, the pitching is still important and can make or break the sales cycle, unless you manage to find truly ideal customers and the deal is almost closed from the get-go.

An important part of pitching that many often forget is to have all of the stakeholders, not just decision-makers on the call or presentation. There are numerous personas involved in the buyer’s journey and if the product is highly complicated or technical, getting someone who understands the complexities involved in the process can greatly improve success rates.

Finally, many businesses overvalue the importance of the pitch in the overall picture of the sales methodology. While it’s what seems to deliver the results, all the preceding and next stages ensure that the time spent pitching isn’t wasted. And salespeople have to spend a lot of time to get a good sales pitch going.

Handling objections

Barely any sales cycle ends without any objection being thrown at sales reps, especially in the B2B sphere. No solution is perfect for any target audience. All solutions have some level of standardization, which means they will rarely fit perfectly into an existing business.

One of the most common objections is pricing, regardless of the product or service. There’s not a lot to be handled as it’s a numerical game that sales reps have to play. As such, it’s often wise to have pricing ranges implemented so that they can have some wiggle room when making deals.

Most other objections are related to either technical details or some unique business proposition. If you look at the data after some time, however, you will likely notice that most objections are similar and many repeat themselves. As such, common answers should be drafted.

Closing

Everyone’s favorite part of the sales process. Although much shorter than others, there are still some best practices when it comes to building an effective one.

Having pre-drafted contractual agreements that can be adjusted with some minor changes will save sales professionals and legal teams a ton of time. If there’s little variation in the product or service being sold, agreement templates can be widely used to cover most operations.

Additionally, make sure the new customer is carefully onboarded and moved to an account manager if such resources are available. Part of closing a deal is helping the customer ease into the process and do not have buyer’s remorse.

Nurturing

Few businesses nowadays are pure “fire-and-forget”. Customers need to be nurtured if you want to receive continual business and loyalty to your brand.

Two important aspects of nurturing exist – one is constant customer care. Your account manager or customer support team should be available to help on absolutely every issue or challenge. These teams, when presented with the opportunity, could also attempt to cross-sell or upsell the customer.

Finally, make sure to nurture a two-way relationship. Ask the customer to write testimonials or, if you’ve helped each other in a significant way, for a case study. Getting the customer involved in businesses will build longer-lasting relationships.

Conclusion

Sales aren’t the Wild West it may have once been. While there’s still plenty of room for self-expression and creativity, it produces much greater results if a sales process map that defines the structure is created.

Building an effective sales process might seem stifling at first. Once everyone gets used to it, however, it becomes hard to imagine the possibility of working otherwise. Even if the sales team may fight it at first, it ends with them receiving more commissions in the long run due to better performance and improved KPIs.

Header image created by vectorjuice find more of his work at- https://www.freepik.com/vectorjuice

Over the last ten years or so, the marketing world has been flipped on its head.

The tactics that most businesses considered solid lead magnets, like taking out ads in popular newspapers or running TV commercials, have lost their appeal and been replaced with more acceptable forms of promotion, such as value-packed blog posts, podcasts, and social media campaigns. The shift has created a heated debate among marketers – inbound vs outbound marketing (and which is better?), starting a new chapter in the history of marketing.

With most businesses adopting an ‘inbound first’ strategy today, outbound marketing has taken a back seat, but it would be unfair to write it off completely. If you’re struggling to decide which approach would generate better results for your business, let me walk you through the most important aspects that you need to take into consideration.

When it comes to choosing a side in the inbound vs outbound debate, it’s best to have all the facts straight and think through all the possible scenarios; maybe a combination of both would work wonders for you?

Key Takeaways

  • Direction of Communication: Inbound marketing involves attracting customers to your business, often through content creation, SEO, and social media engagement. Outbound marketing, on the other hand, involves reaching out to potential customers through direct methods like cold-calling, traditional advertising, and email marketing.
  • Customer Interaction: Inbound marketing focuses on creating valuable content that pulls in customers and encourages them to interact with the brand voluntarily. Outbound marketing typically involves pushing messages to a broad audience, with less emphasis on two-way interaction.
  • Costs and ROI: Inbound marketing often requires a lower budget and yields a higher ROI over time, as it relies on building long-term relationships with customers. Outbound marketing can require significant upfront costs, especially in traditional advertising, with a ROI that can be more difficult to measure.
  • Longevity of Impact: The content created in inbound marketing can continue to attract and engage customers over a long period, while outbound marketing methods often have a more immediate but shorter-lived impact.
  • Targeting: Inbound marketing strategies tend to attract a self-selected audience actively looking for the type of product, service, or information you provide. Outbound marketing casts a wider net to a broader audience, which can result in reaching individuals regardless of their current interest level in what you’re offering.

Contents:

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a very broad term, but, in essence, it refers to all the marketing efforts that are geared towards earning customers’ interest and aligning with their needs rather than pushing your product or service no matter what.

It’s a relatively new marketing approach that emerged as a result of changing buyer expectations and can be seen as a product of the modern world. The rise of the internet and social media prompted marketers to look for new ways to engage with potential customers that relied more on the ‘pull’ than ‘push’ factor. According to Content Marketing Institute, 80% of decision-makers prefer to learn about a new brand via an article series rather than via ads. This speaks volumes about why inbound marketing has become the go-to approach, with 3 out of 4 marketers across the globe prioritizing inbound campaigns to outbound marketing. Implementing sophisticated inbound marketing strategies effectively requires specialized expertise and resources. For businesses looking to leverage these modern approaches without the overhead of a full-time executive, a fractional CMO agency offers a flexible and experienced solution.

Inbound Marketing Methodology

Image Source: HubSpot

Blogging is inbound marketers’ bread and butter, with 60% focusing their efforts on creating valuable blog content. Other inbound marketing projects include, but are not limited to, SEO optimization and improving organic presence, content distribution and amplification, marketing automation, interactive content creation, long-form content (eBooks, guides, whitepapers, etc), visual content creation (infographics, slides, etc), online tools, how-to videos, webinars, and more.

The sole purpose of creating all this content is to ‘get found’ by potential customers who are actively looking for information online. Inbound marketing is designed to help businesses to better align with the natural search process of a modern buyer (search engines, referrals, social media, etc) and facilitate the buyer’s journey instead of interrupting it. Digital catalogs are also increasingly used in inbound strategies, as they help buyers compare products and access key information during their research.

For businesses targeting specific geographic areas, local SEO is especially crucial—many opt for specialized services like SEO services in Virginia (or wherever they may be located) to boost their visibility in regional search results and attract nearby customers.

Since it allows a more targeted form of advertising, enabling a business to connect with a prospect in the ‘moment of relevance’, which is the time when a buyer is searching for a particular product, service, or information, inbound marketing campaigns cost 62% less per lead than traditional outbound marketing.

What is Outbound Marketing?

The main goal of an outbound marketing campaign is to market to the masses in hopes of grabbing the interest of a small number of people who actually need your product or service at that time. Considered a more “classic form” of marketing, outbound marketing has been around, literally, forever, with the earliest example of billboard advertising being traced to Pompeii, which had its walls blanketed with promotional messages.

Outbound marketing techniques focus on pushing the message out, without taking the buyer’s journey into consideration. It most often employs well-known (and highly disliked) techniques, such as TV commercials, cold calling, direct mail, pay-per-click ads, print ads, email blasts to purchased lists, and billboards. For law firms aiming to reach a broader audience, implementing targeted PPC for lawyers can be an effective outbound marketing strategy. By crafting specific ad campaigns, firms can connect with potential clients actively seeking legal services, thereby enhancing their outreach efforts.

As an “in your face” kind of approach, outbound marketing has been suffering a decline in popularity among both advertisers and consumers ever since consumers got a taste of a more personalized shopping experience online.

The Pros and Cons of Inbound and Outbound Marketing

The advent of technology and rapid social media adoption has led to a seismic shift in consumer behavior, which, in turn, has propelled marketers to become more innovative and user-centric. The inbound vs outbound discussion is a slippery slope since no one can wholeheartedly claim that one is better than the other; both approaches have their own pros and cons and your final decision should be informed by the needs of your business. Yet, in general, a quick overview of the good, the bad, and the ugly can be drawn to highlight the most prominent differences. Next, we’ll review the main advantages & drawbacks of inbound & outbound marketing.  

Inbound vs Outbound Comparison

Inbound vs Outbound marketing comparison. Image Source: Invoiceberry

Advantages

Inbound marketing: 

  • Non-Disruptive Marketing: Inbound marketing is often appreciated by consumers as it doesn’t feel intrusive. Instead, it educates and entertains, forming connections with consumers at the right moments.
  • Targeted Campaigns: Inbound marketing strategies are often closely aligned with the sales funnel, allowing for precise segmentation of prospects. This enables the personalization of content, thereby increasing conversion probabilities.
  • Increased Purchase Value: According to Annuitas, nurtured leads (a key focus of inbound marketing) result in a 47% higher purchase value compared to non-nurtured leads.
  • Long-Term Lead Nurturing: Inbound marketing recognizes that only about 25% of generated leads are ready for purchase within 12-24 months. The remaining 75% require nurturing, which inbound strategies are designed to provide.
  • Attracts High-Quality Leads: Inbound marketing primarily attracts consumers who are actively seeking solutions to their problems or ways to address their needs. These individuals tend to be further down the buyer funnel, thus requiring less time and investment to convert, providing better quality leads.

Outbound marketing: 

  • Face-to-Face Marketing: For B2B marketers, outbound strategies often involve face-to-face marketing, which is a powerful tool for enhancing brand awareness and nurturing business relationships.
  • Effective in Trade Shows: Outbound event marketing, including trade shows, is favored by 80% of B2B marketers as a means to increase brand awareness through personal interactions.
  • Broad Reach: The capacity to reach large audiences through brand advertising campaign makes outbound marketing tactics appealing, especially for companies with significant advertising budgets.
  • Long-Term Brand Recognition: Although immediate ROI might be smaller, companies with sufficient resources often use outbound marketing in hopes of attaining long-term brand recognition and market presence.

Disadvantages 

Inbound marketing:

  • Time-Intensive: Inbound marketing strategies require a significant time investment to yield noticeable results, as they involve building long-term relationships with customers.
  • Effort in Content Creation: Marketers need to dedicate considerable effort and creativity to produce unique, valuable content that can attract and retain the attention of potential customers.
  • Delayed ROI: Expectations for immediate success should be tempered, as it often takes at least 12 months for inbound marketers to see a substantial return on their investment.

Outbound marketing:

  • Broad Targeting: Outbound campaigns typically target large groups of people, many of whom may not be ready to make a purchase. This can result in lower-than-expected quality and quantity of leads.
  • Interruption Marketing: Often referred to as ‘interruption marketing’, outbound strategies may elicit negative responses from consumers if not carefully crafted and implemented.
  • Additional Expenses: Outbound marketing frequently involves extra costs related to printing, mailing, production, and more, which can inflate the overall marketing budget.
  • Limited Lifespan: Once an outbound campaign ends, its benefits generally cease as well, unlike inbound marketing where content can continue to draw in customers over time.

How to Get Started with Inbound Marketing

The secret to inbound marketing success is knowing your customer. For your campaigns to be successful and generate leads, the content must be easily discoverable, tackle issues that consumers are dealing with, and create value either by educating or entertaining the reader. Yes, easier said than done, but in the online world, all roads lead to market research.

The first step when starting any new marketing program should always be to carry out an audit of your current strategy and performance. Take stock of the marketing assets you have at the moment (i.e., website, blog content, social media accounts, videos, printed content, etc.), and evaluate your budget and team capabilities to have a clear idea of where you’re standing. Once you have a comprehensive overview, spotting gaps, and content opportunities will be a piece of cake.

The next step is research. Familiarize yourself with your target audience, their interests and pain points, the channels they use, and the types of information formats they prefer. Understanding what your prospects are attracted to will be a huge help when you start thinking about content creation. In the beginning, it’s enough to establish rough buyer personas that you can continue to update and improve once you kick off the campaigns, but keep in mind the most important questions that you’ll need answers to:

  • What is their demographics?
  • What is their role in their company, family, community, etc.?
  • What are their desires and aspirations? What are they trying to achieve?
  • What pains and problems are they trying to solve? How can you help them?
  • What’s their story?

Developing buyer personas brings a lot of clarity and direction to marketing campaigns, so don’t skip this step however tempting it may seem.

Tying this information to your customer’s buyer journey is also key. To be able to target your buyer personas, you must know how they become aware of products like yours, how they compare and consider them, and how they make buying decisions. This will provide you with the much-needed context of how to string all the information together. According to Kapost, companies that craft buyer persona-driven content see a 45% increase in their volume of Sales Accepted Leads (SALs).

Next on the list is defining your marketing goals. It’s an integral (and obvious) part of any marketing campaign, yet many fail to recognize the risks that come with skipping this step. Without setting clear goals from the beginning, you won’t be able to measure your campaign’s performance and determine its success or failure. So use the SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely) goals methodology to align your campaigns with your business needs.

Inbound vs Outbound Marketing SMART Goals

With that out of the way, you can start putting your marketing plan together. This comprehensive document should be a living, breathing thing that you update as you collect new information and sync with your audience. Based on your buyer personas and campaign goals, work on your content strategy and conversion paths. Your content strategy needs to address the following aspects (not a definitive list):

  • Your value proposition (why should they choose you and not your competition?);
  • The keywords your prospects are using to search for your and similar products or services;
  • How frequently do you need to publish new content?
  • What kind of content do your prospects want and in what format?
  • What channels should you be using to distribute your content?

When it comes to conversion paths, make sure you map your content strategy to your sales funnel. Prospects at different stages in their buyer journey will require a different type of content to progress further – this will range from purely inspirational and educational generic content to raise awareness and attract new leads, to more product-focused content that’s optimized to drive conversions. So when you get to this part, consider the following questions:

  • How will you generate leads?
  • What ‘lead magnets’ will you use to attract new prospects? What content offers will you make to nudge them down the sales funnel?
  • How will this path be implemented on your website? This requires you to think about CTAs, landing pages, emails, forms, etc.

Now, all that’s left is to put these plans into action! To establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and get found in search engines, start creating unique, compelling content. Blogging, social media, premium content (lead magnets, such as tools, calculators, long-form, videos, etc.), and content outside of your website (guest blogging, podcasts, etc.) are the most effective tactics that you can try.

P.s. don’t forget to promote the hell out of your content!

How to Get Started with Outbound Marketing

Getting started with outbound marketing can be challenging. But it’s important to remember that a well-rounded marketing mix that draws on both inbound and outbound marketing tactics is a surefire way to hit the lead gen jackpot; in other words, it’s worth the struggle.

The main difference with outbound marketing campaigns is that you actively go out to look for prospects, usually via paid channels. Different outbound marketing tactics will call for different levels of preparation and input, but they can be a great way to amplify your inbound efforts and target specific opportunities. 

Inbound vs Outbound Marketing - How to Get Started

Marketers often turn to outbound tactics when the organic reach of their inbound campaigns is too low. For instance, if you write a 30-page ebook on a hot topic and create a special landing page for it offering a free download (or an exchange of content for an email address), a couple of leads per day simply won’t cut it. For your hard work to yield results you need to go out and shout about this great piece of free content to everyone and anyone who’s willing to listen. That’s where outbound marketing comes in.

Social media ads, pay-per-click advertising, email prospecting, event marketing, content syndication or direct mail – any one of these tactics can be used to push the message out to a wider audience and attract new potential customers. In order to target the right audience through the right channel, you need to evaluate your content offer and determine who’s most likely to take you up on it and what’s the best way to reach that segment of the market. 

Improving Your Inbound and Outbound Marketing Game

A combination of inbound and outbound marketing tactics is what drives the best results for most of the companies. Although these two approaches are often pitted against each other, aiming to calculate the ROI separately, there’s no reason why marketing efforts should be measured and compared that way. After all, they’re geared towards the same purpose. So instead of focusing on the inbound vs outbound debate, let’s look at how you can mix the different tactics to upgrade your marketing game.

Try content syndication to drive more traffic. Content syndication is the process of promoting your content, such as blog posts, videos or long-form pieces on third-party sites. These content ads are typically displayed at the bottom of the articles in the “Similar Articles Around the Web” section. When displayed on sites like Forbes, CNN, or similar outlets, high-quality content can drive quite a bit of traffic and help raise brand awareness.

Invest in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to amplify your inbound campaigns. PPC can take two types of forms – AdWords ads and display ads which appear on search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, or social media networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. PPC ads can achieve great results in driving targeted traffic to purpose-built landing pages or special offers that relate directly to the search terms used by prospects. By using highly optimized ad copy, marketers can target specific keywords and attract higher-quality leads. You could even considering booking a Google Ads consultation with an expert to assess if you’re PPC campaings are leaving money on the table.

Automate your email marketing. Aligning your content strategy with your sales funnel will help you craft relevant content based on where in the buyer’s journey your prospects are. Automated email marketing campaigns will enable you to send that content at the right time and with the right offers, turning lukewarm leads into hot prospects and reducing conversion time. With the smart email marketing tools available to marketers today, even outbound email campaigns can be segmented and hyper-targeted. This further closes the gap between inbound nurture campaigns and outbound email blasts, the main difference being that inbound campaigns benefit from opt-in email lists.

Adopt a CRM system. Marketing automation and customer relationship management go hand in hand. Adopting a CRM will help you focus on providing value to the customers, personalizing and improving their experience with your business, and streamlining the buyer journey. Bringing together the customer data and all touch points will help you make sense of customer behavior and anticipate their needs. The insights you gather by using a CRM will not only help you cultivate stronger relationships with your current customers but will also contribute to developing both inbound and outbound campaigns in order to attract new leads.

Best Resources for Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Modern marketers are obsessed with optimizing and automating their efforts to achieve the best results in the shortest amount of time possible. So it’s no surprise that there are hundreds of useful tools and resources out there designed specifically to make marketers’ jobs easier. Here’s a list of some of the most popular resources that might come in handy.

Inbound marketing tools and resources

Must-read blogs:

Tools & resources:

  • Buzzsumo – find trending content on any topic
  • Keyword Planner – research the best keywords for your content and ads
  • Lead Scoring – rank your leads according to their likelihood of conversion
  • Unbounce – quickly build custom landing pages for your campaigns
  • SumoMe – build your email list and drive more traffic
  • Visme – add movement to your brand strategy with videos, animations, infographics, and more.
  • HubSpot Blog Topic Generator – easily generate a week’s worth of blog topic ideas
  • CoSchedule – organize your entire content marketing strategy in one neat calendar
  • Canva – create beautiful graphics for your blog and social media
  • Buffer – schedule and automate your social media posts
  • Marketo – automate your marketing efforts

Outbound marketing tools and resources

Tools & resources:

  • LeadGenius – identify and generate more leads
  • SmartDialer – all-in-one phone call service
  • Yesware – try email automation and tracking
  • Outbrain – experiment with content syndication

Inbound vs Outbound: the verdict

The best answer to the common question, “Should we be deploying inbound or outbound marketing tactics?” is a simple “yes”. One should not be replaced by the other, as the real magic happens when the two approaches are merged into one coherent strategy.

If you’re trying to decide which approach should dominate your strategy, be sure to address the following questions:

  • How soon do you need to see results? If your business needs an urgent uplift, you’ll probably be better off running a few laser-focused outbound marketing campaigns as they can produce immediate effects.
  • What’s your marketing budget? Big and bold outbound marketing campaigns, such as TV ads or adverts in underground stations, can have a tremendous effect but will also cost you a leg and an arm.
  • What are your competitors up to? Keeping a close eye on your competition will help you identify and capitalize on overlooked marketing opportunities. Remember that it is better to differentiate your business from your competitors than to engage in head-to-head competition.

Ready to take your inbound and outbound marketing to the next level? Request a demo or start a FREE trial today!

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FAQs: Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

1. What is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?

Inbound marketing focuses on attracting customers through content and interactions that are relevant and helpful, whereas outbound marketing involves reaching out to potential customers through more traditional advertising methods like TV ads, cold calls, and direct mail.

2. How does inbound marketing attract customers?

Inbound marketing attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. It includes strategies like content marketing, SEO, social media engagement, and email newsletters.

3. What are some examples of outbound marketing techniques?

Examples of outbound marketing techniques include TV and radio advertisements, print ads in newspapers and magazines, direct mail campaigns, cold calling, and online banner ads.

4. Which marketing strategy is more cost-effective: inbound or outbound?

Inbound marketing is generally more cost-effective in the long run because it focuses on creating lasting relationships with customers through valuable content, while outbound marketing often requires ongoing expenses to maintain visibility and reach.

5. Can inbound and outbound marketing be used together?

Yes, many businesses use a combination of inbound and outbound marketing strategies to reach a wider audience and maximize their marketing efforts. This approach is often referred to as a hybrid marketing strategy.

6. What are the main benefits of inbound marketing?

The main benefits of inbound marketing include higher trust and credibility, better targeting and personalization, long-term sustainability, and higher ROI due to its focus on providing value to potential customers.

7. What are the primary goals of outbound marketing?

The primary goals of outbound marketing are to create awareness, generate leads, and drive immediate sales by broadcasting a message to a broad audience, often using interruptive methods.

8. How does SEO play a role in inbound marketing?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is crucial for inbound marketing as it helps improve the visibility of your content in search engine results, making it easier for potential customers to find your business when searching for relevant information.

9. What metrics are used to measure the success of inbound marketing?

Common metrics for measuring inbound marketing success include website traffic, lead conversion rates, social media engagement, email open and click-through rates, and content performance analytics.

10. What challenges might businesses face when implementing outbound marketing?

Challenges of outbound marketing include high costs, difficulty in measuring ROI, potential for audience annoyance, and lower engagement rates compared to inbound methods.

11. How can social media be leveraged in inbound marketing?

Social media can be leveraged in inbound marketing by sharing valuable content, engaging with followers, participating in relevant conversations, and using social media platforms to drive traffic to your website or blog.

12. What are some key components of a successful inbound marketing strategy?

Key components of a successful inbound marketing strategy include content creation, SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, lead nurturing, and analytics to continuously improve and refine efforts.

13. How do customer personas influence inbound marketing tactics?

Customer personas help tailor inbound marketing tactics by providing detailed insights into the needs, preferences, and behaviors of your target audience, allowing for more personalized and effective content and interactions.

14. Are there industries where outbound marketing is more effective than inbound marketing?

Outbound marketing can be more effective in industries where quick, widespread awareness is needed, such as new product launches, political campaigns, or industries with less online presence and digital engagement.

15. How does content marketing fit into the inbound marketing framework?

Content marketing is a core component of inbound marketing, involving the creation and sharing of valuable, relevant content to attract and engage a clearly defined audience, ultimately driving profitable customer actions.

In this article, we’ll delve into the concept of Customer Success strategies, primarily seen in SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses, and how these strategies can be adapted and implemented in non-SaaS enterprises. Through the use of various metrics and engagement types, even businesses outside of the subscription model can harness the power of customer success to optimize their client interactions and overall business growth.

Key Takeaways:

  • Customer Success is not solely for SaaS companies; non-SaaS businesses can also benefit from its strategies.
  • Metrics such as Churn, Customer Lifetime Value, and Net Promoter Score are essential tools to assess and improve customer experience.
  • Segmenting customers based on factors like their Customer Lifetime Value or onboarding status can drive more tailored and effective engagement strategies.
  • Engagement types, ranging from on-site visits to best practices meetings, can be customized based on the value and needs of the customers.
  • Achieving Customer Success is rooted in truly understanding your clients and building a foundation of trust.

In the previous our blog we have been talking about how to Guide Your Customers To Their Desired Outcome.

Customer Success is the SaaS answer to some of the challenges that the subscription model presents. Can non-SaaS businesses benefit from Customer Success strategies as well?

In the subscription model, the need to keep customers successful and happy throughout every single interaction with the company is urgent. In addition, there is a high focus on using customer data to implement key metrics in order to improve the product and customer experience. How does this translate for non-SaaS?

What gets measured can be managed

Metrics

The use of metrics is not exclusive to SaaS companies. Granted, the cloud unlocks significantly more data to assess than that available for non-SaaS businesses. However, through sampling, surveys, automation and precise measurements, non-SaaS businesses can benefit as well.  Here are some metrics to consider:

Churn:

Gainsight reports that “On average, companies with a dedicated Customer Success team have a 24% lower churn rate than companies without Customer Success”.

It’s completely normal for any business to have some customers leaving, but it’s important to monitor it closely to prevent it from getting higher.

The basic formula for monthly churn is: Number of churned customers divided by total number of customers.

churn teamgate (1)

Customer Lifetime Value:

How much are your customers worth? Are you spending more to acquire new customers than they are worth to your business? How can you tell if your customer success hacks strategies are increasing customers’ value?

CLV is one of the most common metrics used to asses Customer Success and customer retention. A customer who achieved their desired outcome is more likely to stay longer with your business and purchase more services.

CLV TEAMGATE (1)

For example, the CLV of a customer who spends $50 per month for 5 years would be:

$50 x 12 months x 5 years = $3000 in total revenue or $600 in yearly revenue.

Net Promoter Score:

NPS is a metric used to measure customer advocacy. Although the effectiveness of this metric has been subject to ongoing debate, it remains commonly used in the corporate world.

Of course, churn, Customer Lifetime Value and Net Promoter Score are few example of the myriad of metrics that can be implemented. The folks at Groove have written extensively about the metrics they use to optimize Customer Success. Groove remains a SaaS startup, but their methodologies can be applied to any non-SaaS business as well.

net-promoter-score-teamgate-1

How We Measure and Optimize Customer Success Metrics in Our SaaS Startup

How One SaaS Startup Reduced Churn 71% Using “Red Flag” Metrics

Segmentation

As we previously discussed  on our blog, segmentation is essential to seamless integration of CRM into business workflows. Similarly, segmentation is key to managing customer success. However, the segmentation strategies that work for sales and marketing automation might not have the same result for customer success.

For example, it’s possible to segment customers according to their Customer Lifetime Value. By doing so, a business can determine whether a low-touch or high-tough approach to engagement would be appropriate.

It is also possible to segment customers according to their onboarding status. Let’s consider a gym offering free two weeks membership for example.  It’s possible to segment leads/customers in this example into various categories:

  • Customers who redeemed the offer.
  • Customers who didn’t.
  • Customers who used more than 4 sessions.
  • Customers who used less than 4 sessions.

This would allow the gym owner (or customer success manager) to uniquely target each particular segment for potential trial-to-paid conversion. Leads who haven’t redeemed the offer might be worth pursuing, but the ones who have used the trial extensively are more likely to convert into paying customers. In addition, those who have used the gym but not frequently present a good opportunity for customer surveying/interviewing.

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Engagement Types

Engagement refers to the way and the frequency with which your customers will be contacted.  There is obviously no one-size fits-all approach to engagement, but some models persist throughout businesses.

For example, high value customers might warrant a high touch approach. In a Gainsight article, the following engagements are suggested for high-value customers:

  • On-site visits
  • Quarterly Business Reviews
  • Annual Health Checks
  • Monthly Best Practices meetings

Customer Success, after all, remains about knowing your customers  and earning their trust.

Would you like to know your Customers better? Start your Teamgate Free Trial today!

In this article, you’ll get a comprehensive guide to 100 powerful inbound marketing tools that can skyrocket your business growth. We’ll explore a variety of tools to automate, optimize, and enhance every facet of your inbound marketing strategy, ultimately leading to more leads and prospects.

Key Takeaways:

  • Learn how to streamline your marketing efforts using a multitude of automation tools.
  • Discover the importance of analytics and the top tools to get the most detailed insights into your marketing performance.
  • Uncover the potential of blogging and SEO tools in increasing your online visibility.
  • Understand how design and visual resources can play a pivotal role in your inbound marketing strategy.
  • Get introduced to the best tools for managing leads, social media, and streaming.

Nothing makes a marketer happier than seeing their efforts and hard work pay off. And there’s little we wouldn’t be prepared to do to see those leads trickling in.

We’ll write eBooks, spend weeks chasing influencers for three-line quotes and comb through pages and pages of data to string together sleek-looking infographics to get the prospects to notice us. Because every lead counts.

So let’s face it, if there was a way for us to amplify our inbound marketing efforts and raise the lead gen game, we’d snatch that opportunity with no questions asked.

And as the luck has it, we’ve gathered one hundred powerful tools that will help you automate, optimize and enhance your inbound marketing strategy and win more business.

Make yourself happy, dig in.

Research tools

  1. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a powerful tool for content marketing and is particularly helpful with finding trending content by any topic. It saves a lot of time that you would usually spend on browsing and googling popular topics. Buzzsumo will also show you many convenient statistics, like how many people are talking about a specific subject.

  1. Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner is a completely free tool created by Google that researches the best keywords for your ads, video ads, etc. With this tool, you can build a completely new campaign or improve an existing one. It is an effective tool for both experienced and completely new advertisers.

  1. Looking for a new Entry

This used to be Klout.

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  1. Mention

Mention makes sure you keep track of all the real-time social media mentions and always stay in the know of what people are saying about you online. It also lets you follow and analyze your competitors and similar businesses. Mention also has some awesome features like Custom Insights and Find Influencers.

  1. TrustRadius Trustmap

The TrustRadius marketing TrustMap is a two-dimensional chart that compares marketing products based on end-user satisfaction ratings and research frequency by prospective buyers. You can use the tool to compare different marketing tools and read authentic reviews from real users.

  1. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is one of the best online survey tools used by millions. With this tool, you will gather useful information and insight about your target audience and clients by creating original surveys. Choose from more than 15 different question types, branding options and much more.

  1. AYTM

AYTM is another survey tool that provides professional market research. The main key components and features include the survey platform that lets you host, program and analyze your surveys, a proprietary panel with an access to 25 MM all over the world and the research services.

  1. Quora

Quora is a well known question-answer type of website that makes any research much easier. Here, questions and topics can be organized into boards that can be followed – this will help you keep up with your competitors and news in your market. With Quora, you can also follow relevant questions and discover many other ways to do research.

Analytics tools

  1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very popular and effective analytics tool provided to you by Google. When integrated with Google AdWords, it becomes an even more powerful tool that lets you analyze and track your website and conversions. The main analytics data is displayed on the main page of Google Analytics, but you can also find and use such features as Advanced Segments, Location Demographics and much more.

  1. Hotjar

Inbound Marketing Tools Hotjar

Hotjar is an amazing tool for analyzing the online behavior of your users by studying heatmaps, visitor recordings, feedback polls and conversion funnels. This tool combines two most important things – feedback and analysis to make the analytics as accurate as possible.

  1. SumoMe

SumoMe is an extremely user-friendly WordPress plugin that can serve as an efficient analytics tool. The main goal of this tool is to help you grow your website traffic and email list. It offers many free tools for you to choose from, so by using them, you can analyze your content, users, visitors and much more.

  1. Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics is a part of Adobe Marketing Cloud (AMC) that offers many online marketing tools. With Adobe Analytics, you can assemble, coordinate, organize and analyze your customer’s activity. Real-time analytics, segmentation, and predictive marketing through all Adobe channels.

  1. Ubersuggest

Want more traffic? Ubersuggest shows you how to win the game of SEO. Just type in a domain or a keyword to get started.

  1. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is another brilliant online application to analyze user activity on your website. This tool suggests useful features like heat maps, scroll maps, overlay reports, and confetti, which lets you determine all the clicks that have been made on your website and analyze them by search term and referral sources.

  1. Matomo

By choosing the ethical alternative, Matomo, you won’t make privacy sacrifices or compromise your site. You can even use Matomo without needing to ask for consent

  1. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a very advanced analytics tool that gives you the opportunity to analyze every action your user takes – not just the clicks. With this tool, you can also see when someone uploads a picture, shares a post, etc. Here you can also experiment with the A/B testing to reach the best results.

  1. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a universal tool for any insights – both web and app. It works with a wide range of sources to receive as accurate data as possible and convert it into useful insights. SimilarWeb offers website analytics, industry analytics, and app analysis. Besides all this, you can also see traffic and engagement data and much more.

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  1. Quick Sprout

Quick Sprout suggests a direct connection with Google Analytics to offer you a reliable and accurate information and data. This tool will help you understand and use Google Analytics to the maximum – you will be informed about important activity on your website every day and receive personalized website alerts.

Blogging tools

  1. Triberr

Triberr is both a tool and a community to help you grow the traffic on your blog. It is segmented into categories called “Tribes” that are differentiated by topics. You can follow the tribe you are interested in to see all the newly published posts, interact and engage with other bloggers.

  1. WordPress

WordPress is a very popular and widely used tool for website and blog creation that has a wide range of templates and plugins for you to choose from and use for your own benefit. It is a very powerful tool, yet very user-friendly and easy to use. It is so huge that it supports more than 60 million websites.

  1. Grammarly

Inbound Marketing Tools Grammarly

Grammarly is a proofreading tool that can also be used as a plagiarism-detection application. Besides creating content and driving traffic to your website, it is also crucial to make sure that your content is free of grammar mistakes, so this super simple tool will help you out with that. Its AI-driven engines check plagiarism and detect AI text patterns to improve your texts’ structure and readability. Multiple features and stellar user-friendliness make Grammarly one of the best tools for content creators on the market.

  1. Yoast

Yoast is a SEO tool for WordPress users. Its main cause is to help people with their website optimization through many different courses, e-books, software and plugins like Yost SEO, Video SEO,  Local SEO, News SEO, Local SEO, Yoast WooCommerce SEO and other analytics, metric, comments, and functionality plugins.

  1. Readability Test Tool by WebpageFX

Readability Test Tool is an application to check the readability of a specific article, post or the entire website. You can check it by entering the URL of your content and clicking the button “Calculate Readability”. The tool is useful not only for bloggers but also for SEO experts, copywriters, and other specialists.

  1. Portent Title Maker

Portent Title Maker is a great tool when you need to come up with an original idea for your article title name. Simply enter your subject in the field and choose one of the generated titles. To get the best results from this tool, don’t capitalize keywords and use singular version of your keyword.

  1. Hubspot Blog Topic Generator

Hubspot Blog Topic Generator helps you create great titles for your post. When you visit the website, you will have to enter three nouns that describe what you’re writing about (or what the article is about) and press the button below. You will then be given a few popular blog topic ideas that you can use for your piece.

  1. Toggl

Toggl is a perfect tool for busy bloggers who like to keep on track with their time management. With this tool, you can see how much time you spend on each task and discover what is most time-consuming. Here you can also track how many time you spend on different projects, clients and analyze reports.

  1. Hemingway App

Hemingway App is an advanced text editing tool that is also available as a desktop app. It highlights your sentences in different colors that indicate sentences that are too hard to read, phrases that have simpler alternatives, etc. In the online mode, you can also edit your document and the desktop version offers such cool features as publishing directly to WordPress and much more.

Design tools

  1. Picsart

Picsart is an all-in-one platform where users can create, customize, and share images and videos with ease. It combines powerful editing tools, AI features, and a wide range of creative assets to help bring any idea to life—whether it’s for social media, marketing, or personal projects.

  1. Freebiesbug

Freebiesbug is a website where designers can find a number of free graphic resources for their designs. It is full of app designs, icons, mockups, website templates, illustrations, fonts, sketches and much more. You can browse by the category, use the search field or upload a freebie of your own.  

  1. Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark is a tool by Adobe Systems that offers three different design apps: Spark Page, Spark Post, and Spark Video. Here you can create social and website graphics like Travel Journals, Quotes, Announcements, Advertisements, Pitches, Animated stories and much more.

  1. Xtensio

Xtensio is a platform every team or business needs to create beautifully crafted online presentations, reports, slides, or any documents. It functions with an easy-to-use drag and drop feature so users can do customization, living up to their brands.
Apart from being user-friendly, it ensures real-time collaboration and privacy of shared documents.

  1. Marvel

Inbound Marketing Tools Marvel

Marvel is a prototype creation tool for apps and websites. You can create straight in Marvel or transport your images from the cloud storage, Sketch, or Photoshop. The tool has a user-friendly editor that lets you link your designs and create prototypes for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, Desktop, and Android.

  1. Ceros

Ceros is a cloud-based tool with a digital canvas that can be accessed by the entire team. Ceros allows you to create amazing, interactive infographics and animated designs. The tool is very convenient for both designers and marketers. After creating a unique design, you are able to see the insights of its performance.

  1. Figma

Figma is a collaborative design tool that gives you the ability to work on a design together with your team. Here you can create icons, interface design, responsive layouts and much more. Figma is very easy to use so you won’t waste your time trying to understand the tools and it also allows the integration with Sketch app.

  1. Fuse

Fuse is a design tool for creating apps on Android and iOS. An effective and quick way to create for teams, developers, and designers. With Fuse, adjust animation, UI, layout or anything else you like and test changes in real time. It makes it easy for people that are new to app development and is also very useful for the experienced ones.

  1. Placeit

Placeit offers more than 2500 mockups and demo videos. It is super quick to use and works as a great substitute for Photoshop when you want to place a screenshot of your website on a screen of a computer or a phone. You can choose between many different devices or simply use the search field.

  1. VSCO

VSCO is a very popular photo editing app available for both iOS and Android. It lets you edit your photos and images, add many different trendy filters and share it with other users of the app. The app is widely used by photographers and the youth and constantly updated by its developers.

  1. PicMonkey

PicMonkey is an online tool for design making and photo editing. It has some paid features, but even without them, the tool is pretty powerful. Besides designing and editing, you can also create beautiful collages, or use the “Touch up” feature that can whiten teeth or remove wrinkles in a photo.

  1. Infogr.com

Infogr.com is an application meant for creating stunning, interactive charts and infographics. You are free to choose between more than 35 charts, over 500 different maps and over 20 ready-made templates for infographics. Besides that, you can edit the style, colors and many other things in your design.

Visual resources

  1. Unsplash

Unsplash is a photo stock library that lets you download, edit and use all the photos for free without any copyright. The website is believed to be one of the leading photography websites in the world. Here you can browse new photos, view collections or simply use the search field.

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  1. Pixabay

Pixabay is an international website that offers more than 870,000 stock photos that are completely free. Here you will also find vectors, illustrations, and videos of high quality. All of the content you will download on this website is completely copyright free, so feel free to edit and distribute it the way you like.

  1. StockSnap.io

StockSnap.io is full of beautiful stock photos in high quality. It is also copyright free so no contribution to the author is required. When you visit the website, you can see the most popular searches that are displayed as tags under the huge search field. You can also view the trending and recently added photos or add them to your favorites.  

  1. Life Of Pix

Life Of Pix is another brilliant place to find free stock photos. Some photos are features, so you can browse them straight away when you visit the website or choose to use the search field. If you find it time-consuming to preview photos on a big display, you can simply switch to a different viewing display.

  1. SplitShire

SplitShire is a great resource of visual content: free images, photos, and videos. Besides the search field, you will also discover many convenient categories to choose from: animals, fashion, landscapes, mockups and much more. In free videos section, you can scroll down and view all the amazing video content that you can easily download.

  1. Death To Stock

Inbound Marketing Tools Deathtostockphoto

Death To Stock has a lot of content you can use for your creative projects and designs. It has a very convenient feature where you can subscribe to receive a monthly email with beautiful photos. On the website, you can also browse themed photo packs on a specific subject.

  1. PhotoPin

PhotoPin is a completely free tool that might come in handy both for designers and bloggers. In PhotoPin you will find millions of photos with Creative Commons licensing. A very neat feature that this tool offers to its users is that when you download a picture, you receive a contribution link at the same time, so there’s no need to search for it separately.

  1. Freepik

Freepik also offers some free stock photos but is mainly focused on free vectors, icons and PSD files. This website is probably one of the most popular free graphic resources among experienced and new designers. You can use the search field, or browse the vectors by popularity or recency.

  1. Flaticon

Flaticon is probably the biggest database full of icons in PSD, EPS, SVG, PNG and BASE 64 formats. Here you will discover more than 310,000 icons that can be customized to a specific color code before downloading. If you are working on a specific project and you need your icons to have the same style, you can find some icon packs as well.

Automation tools

  1. IFTTT

IFTTT is an amazing tool that lets you connect and create chains of applets. Applets are useful features that different apps are able to offer to their clients. For example, using a certain applet, you can set it up to receive an email when an Instagram picture with a chosen hashtag is posted.

  1. Zapier

Zapier is a great web automation tool for busy people that seamlessly connects one’s apps and automates the processes. Apps are linked in seconds and when data is shared, Zapier passes the data to “Zaps” that represent your workflows. This will help you to finish your tasks and processes faster than usual.

  1. Moosend

Moosend is a powerful email marketing and marketing automation tool. Its features are easy-to-learn and easy-to-use and it promises a minimal learning curve with maximum potential, due to its sophisticated automation, personalization and analytics features.  From designing beautiful email newsletters and landing pages with zero code knowledge to segmenting your email list and making educated decisions through data and analytics, this all-in-one marketing platform gives your business more for less.

  1. Skyvia

Skyvia is a tool that offers a cloud data integration service. It also lets you backup, manage and access your data from all your apps by using only one tool. Cloud data management is processed through SQL so you don’t need to bother about native web API’s of different cloud sources.

  1. Looking for new tools recommend

This used to be Hooks

  1. CloudHQ

CloudHQ synchronizes your apps and your data and lets you integrate your apps with cloud platforms you are using at the moment, including Google apps, like Google Drive and Google Email. The tool offers real-time backup of any data that is in your cloud. It also lets you integrate your dropbox with Evernote, Gmail, Sharepoint, and Basecamp.

  1. Automate.io

Automate.io is a tool that is able to connect all the apps that are located in your cloud. This helps you to automate such processes as marketing, business, and sales. Automated processes include sending automated emails, automate follow-ups and much more.

  1. Looking for new tools to recomend

This used to be CloudWork.  

  1. Integromat

Integromat is a powerful workflow optimization and automation tool. With it, you will be able to connect different devices, apps, and services. The main advantage of this tool is that it can integrate and automate almost any app that’ been created. It can be used in various fields: social media, online stores, customer support and project management.

Management tools

  1. Teamgate

Inbound Marketing Tools Teamgate

Teamgate is a powerful CRM tool that can be developed especially for you and your team – no matter whether you work alone, run a small business or manage a big team. It helps you curate and plan daily tasks, schedule your calls and appointments, create individual goals and view how close you have gotten to your goal. It also has a neat feature where you can view insights of your team’s sales score and an evaluation on how much better or worse you are doing compared to last year, month or week.

  1. Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is a widely used management tool because of its many features and other tools like CRM, task and project management, document and time management, calendars, chats and much more. It also offers a telephony service so you can call anywhere – domestically or internationally.

  1. Copper

Coppers CRM is a user-friendly, simplistic management tool that is focused on teams and interactions. It makes it really easy to keep on track with what your team is working on and keep an eye on the sales.

  1. Zendash

Zendash makes tracking your marketing performance simple and efficient. With its user-friendly dashboards and seamless integrations, it brings all your analytics into one place. Use Zendash to gain valuable insights, optimize your inbound campaigns, and make smarter, data-driven decisions to grow your business.

  1. Salesflare

Salesflare is a CRM that stands out due its focus on technological development. The tool is integratable with Office 365, Gmail, iCloud, Zapier and Exchange. It offers useful insights on sales and assists you with follow-up opportunities. The Salesflare takes care of all the data input so you can focus all your attention on sales and profits.

  1. Act!

Act! is a CRM and a brilliant management tool for managing customer relationships and contacts. This CRM is mainly meant for individuals, sales teams, and small businesses. Here you can choose between three different plans to suit your needs: Act! Pro, Act! Premium and Act! Essentials.

  1. Insightly

The name of this CRM tool speaks for itself – it can offer you many useful insights on your sales, team workflow and many other aspects. The tool is also packed with an array of great features, such as contact and lead management, task, events, reports, email integrations and so much more.

Lead collection tools

  1. AeroLeads

AeroLeads is one of the most powerful prospecting software on the web used by over 5000 businesses. It finds all the details of a business or person that includes Email, Name, Phone Number and social profiles. It also provides you with the service of giving you the email list or email database as per your requirements.

  1. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is an amazing and very popular lead generation tool, especially for WordPress. It helps you convert visitors into subscribers by creating convenient and smart signup forms. It works with MailChimp, AWeber, Infusionsoft, GetResponse, Constant Contact and many eCommerce platforms

  1. Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder is a simple lead collection tool that helps to turn your visitors into subscribers. It is mainly focused on the B2B market and works by connecting to your Google Analytics account where it collects useful data about your website visitors. Offers integration with MailChimp.

  1. Leadpages

Leadpages will generate leads through social media, emails, web and text messaging. Here you can choose from a selection of high quality and performance templates and then customize them to your own taste. The customizable templates are mobile friendly and the tool itself can integrate with MailChimp, Salesforce, Infusionsoft and many other tools.

  1. Leadformly

Leadformly is a website that lets you create interactive lead generation forms and use them to capture more leads. After you choose a template you like, you can redesign it as you wish, then simply add the embed code to your website and wait for the results. It integrates with Salesforce, Sugar CRM, Infusionsoft, MailChimp, HubSpot, Marketo etc.

  1. Lead Forensics

Lead Forensics is a tool that will turn anonymous traffic into leads. With this tool, you can identify the leads in real-time and reveal such information as contacts, business name, financial data, demographics, etc. It also lets you analyze each case from the first click to sale.

  1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn has a special tool called Sales Navigator that is packed with features focused on social selling. It gives you custom lead recommendations, imports Salesforce data, constantly informs you with real-time sales updates and lets you measure your social selling stats and efforts. On their website, you will also find success stories and useful resources.

Social media tools

  1. Buffer

Inbound Marketing Tools Buffer

Buffer is a social media scheduling tool for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+. It will help you to save loads of your precious time and focus on your strategy.  You can easily schedule by using the website, installing the browser extension or on the go – with apps for iOS and Android.

  1. Quuu Promote

Quuu Promote enables you to share and promote your generated content via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+. The entire system consists of three steps: first, you create a post using URL address, second, you select the most relatable topic and lastly, monitor and track your promotions via Quuu.

  1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is social media management tool that works with more than 35 popular social networks. It has many different tools that include Publisher, Engagement, Analytics, Insights, Campaigns, Platform, Amplify, and Ads. These tools are best for fields, such as social selling, marketing, customer service and Employee Advocacy.

  1. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a tool for social media planning and scheduling. One of the cool features of MeetEdgar is that it does not throw away your published posts, but keeps them in a safe library so you can analyze, edit and repost them later. Here you can also place your scheduled posts in different categories.

  1. Looking for a new tool

This Used to be Mentia

  1. Tagboard

Tagboard is a social search platform based on hashtags. It searches through social media content and finds relevant content in seconds. The tag search is processed through such platforms as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr. A very convenient feature is that you can automatically promote any posts you like.

  1. SharedCount

SharedCount is a very simple service and a tool for social media analytics. Its main feature is to quickly track URL shares and likes across the internet. After you enter the URL of your post, you will see how many shares, likes and comments it has collected on Facebook and how many times it was shared on Google+, Twitter, Diggs, LinkedIn, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, and Delicious.

  1. Agora Pulse

Agora Pulse is an amazing yet simple tool for social media management. It brings all the most popular social media networks to one place where you can easily track and manage the engagement. The tool offers many useful stats and insights and has a feature that allows you to run contests and promotions.

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  1. EveryPost

EveryPost is a simplified social media publishing platform and an app for both iOSand Android. With this great tool, you can manage your content, edit your posts, collaborate, schedule, publish and study the social media analytics to come up with even greater solutions for your business.

  1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a powerful social media management tool. It has many advantages to offer: Smart Inbox, Monitoring, Social CRM, Publishing, Analytics, Collaboration, Account Structure and Mobile – all these features in one simple tool. Sprout Social works perfectly for social customer service and social media marketing as well.

  1. Bitly

Bitly is a widely used and well-known URL shortener. Nothing is uglier than a long URL on social media or your website. Besides its main features, Bitly lets you optimize and share the links via Bitly, API or other partner integrations. With this tool, it’s also possible to track link analytics and stats.

  1. Tailwind

Tailwind is a free scheduling platform for Pinterest and Instagram. With this tool, you will be able to discover new interesting content, schedule your social media posts in advance, curate conversations and study analytics to reach better results in the future. You can use the free version or choose from plans meant for small businesses and large organizations.

  1. Tweepi

With Tweepi, you can Tweet faster and more efficiently. This tool was specially developed for one social media channel only with a greater focus on it and its capabilities. In the year of 2017, it already has more than 1,500,000 users. With this tool, you can follow relevant users, follow back, schedule tweets and much more.

SEO tools

  1. Übersuggest

Übersuggest is a tool that generates loads of keyword ideas for you. Simply enter one of the main keywords that describe your business and receive hundreds of similar suggestions. Besides that, you can also choose other options, such as browsing in the web, images, shopping, YouTube, and News section.

  1. Moz

Inbound Marketing Tools Moz

Moz is a great SEO tool and a software that performs 5 billion searches each day. It has two main services: one is called “Moz Local” and focuses on local searches by using your location information. The other service is called “Keyword Explorer” that lets you find the best keywords and offers many intuitive suggestions.

  1. SEMrush

SEMrush is another tool to help you find more keywords that are relevant to your business. Besides this useful tool, SEMrush can also offer SEO audit, position tracking, semantic core collection, backlink audit and much more. Next to SEO, the company also works with paid traffic, social media, content management and PR.

  1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a tracking tool for mentions across the internet, keywords, and backlinks. By using Ahrefs, you also gain access to other tools, such as position, size and content explorers, position tracker, crawl report and alerts that make sure you never miss a new mention.

  1. Backlinko

Backlinko is a place where you can find many marketing and SEO tips, tricks, guides, ebooks and blog posts about it. In general, the website helps you master the link building process, lift up the user experience, optimize and promote your content. You can also sign up for free updates and the newsletter to make sure you don’t miss a thing.

  1. Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a tool with the main focus on longtail keyword search. While researching the keywords, you can choose a specific time period and region so that the result would be more relevant. This tool also lists some advantages why it’s better than Google Keyword Planner: not grouped keywords, results are not banded, SERP comparison and much more.

  1. Keyword Tool

Keyword Tool is a substitute and an alternative for the Google Keyword Planner. It finds the most searchable keywords that your potential customers type into Google Search Box. Every search term is estimated to receive at least 750 keyword suggestions, it is absolutely free and you can freely use it without any registration.

  1. Looking for new Adition

Used to be Keyword Eye

Streaming tools

  1. Crowdcast

Crowdcast is a simple and dynamic streaming tool that lets people share content via webinars, live courses, summits and Q&As. It’s very quick and easy to get started because you don’t have to download any files, the setup is very easy and there’s only one URL.

Livereacting is a platform that helps to boost your social media presence by creating and scheduling an engaging 24/7 live stream. It provides tools to automate interactive content, such as polls and quizzes, to maintain continuous audience engagement.

  1. Bambuser

Inbound Marketing Tools Bambuser

Bambuser is an interactive platform for live streaming. It benefits from another tool called “Iris” that focuses on simple mobile live videos. This tool can help you to create professional live videos, organize and manage them via Content Dashboard, and publish them through Player SDKs.

  1. Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts is a very popular streaming tool provided by Google. Through this tool, you can message your team or a single person, make a video or an audio call. In one chat, you can connect up to 100 people which is a pretty large number. To make your interaction even more fun and accurate, you are free to use emojis, maps, photos, stickers, and GIFs.

  1. Tinychat

Tinychat is a simplistic live video chat platform that can also be used as an app for iOS and Android. It is called a video chat, but it does not obligate you to participate in a conversation, you can just observe and watch. To start a chat room, simply click on the bright blue button that says “Instant Room”.

  1. Livestream

Livestream is a powerful and a highly developed live streaming tool. It has a high-tech live video solution with tracking and analytics so you can track the engagement, end to end hardware and software, 24/7 support and many different product solutions, developed for distinct needs.

  1. Twitch

Twitch is a streaming website with more than 9.7 million daily users and mainly focused on video game streaming. It has a few listings that show the most recent top live channels, Top PS4 Channels and Top Xbox One Channels. To start streaming, you can try a free trial to test out the features. 

  1. YouNow

YouNow is a broadcasting tool where people can stream live. On the left corner of the website, you will always find trending topics and in the middle section – trending broadcast that you can view freely. It is completely free and available both for iOS and Android as an app.

  1. Youtube

Youtube has a live streaming section called “Live” where you can stream videos of your own and watch other live streams of people gaming, playing music, racing, etc. You can choose between two different streaming options: “Stream now” that lets you send content and stops it at the right time and “Events” that gives you more over the content.

While working on these outstanding tools, you also need the right peripherals. One of the key things you need while working on marketing tools is AirPods. Whether it’s about watching marketing tutorials on YouTube or editing a sales video, good sound quality is necessary. Buy Airpods online or from a store and to make the buying easier, this guide on AirPods generations is important. From AirPods first generation in 2016 to the latest fourth generation in 2024, there have been major changes in them. Knowing how things have changed and what the key differences are between various generations is an important factor to consider before buying.

Final Thoughts

Growing a business is a day-to-day mission and we should take all the help we can take. Leveraging the right inbound marketing tools is crucial for the success and growth of your business. These tools not only help streamline processes but also optimize and enhance the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

Make the most of the insights you’ve gained from these 100 powerful inbound marketing tools and watch your business soar to new heights.

Now that you’re armed with this knowledge, take the next step to further boost your marketing efforts – try Teamgate CRM.

It’s an innovative solution designed to perfectly align with your inbound marketing strategies, ensuring you harness the full potential of every lead and customer interaction.

Black Friday is a shopper’s dream and worst nightmare. The mass of  post-Thanksgiving ads  has already begun, with retailers large and small offering deals on just about everything.

Aside from the fact that it’s now common thing to offer a discount, there are strategic reasons (or companies think they’re strategic) why companies choose to cut their prices. Business should understand what this strategy sometimes works as ‘destroyer of your sales’.

The main thing is that discounting doesn’t just affect the B2C industry. B2B companies offer discounts on their products or services as well. But should they? WalletHub surveyed 8,000 deals from 30 of the biggest U.S. retailers’ 2015 Black Friday ad scans and identified the retailers offering the largest advertised discounts for each product category such as “Jewelry” and “Appliances.”  Maybe this is the answer for B2B companies.

discounts2

Instead of focusing on great  aspects of the product or service, they immediately move to the price. Companies offer a 20% off discount for all new customers. And what they get? An imitation of sales. Where the real problem lies isn’t with generating the new customers and sales, it’s what that discount in price represents and attract unqualified leads.

Products or services from B2B industry (especially SaaS) usually needs more attention, more involvement and engagement. This is not about ‘instant purchasing’ which is all about Black Friday. Other reason for not giving discounts is that as soon as you lower your price, your customer will expect to see the same thing next time. The last thing you should want in your sales conversation is to have the conversation focused only on price.

While talking about Teamgate, we believe that great products do not need discounts. Great products need to be tested. When you’re offering a discount on your service or product, what is that saying to your potencial client? It’s saying that you don’t believe enough in what you’re selling. You are trying to attract customers because of the price and discounts, not because of the product or service quality.

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From the client perspective, the main question is if all the deals are great and effective? Personal finance website NerdWallet analyzed 21 Black Friday advertisements and found that 20 retailers listed at least one product for the exact same price in 2015 as in their 2014 ad. That translates to an overwhelming 95% of retailers repeating Black Friday deals this year. So do not take it straightforward even if its B2B product or service advertisement for Black Friday.

Have a fresh Black Friday and Choose Value Over Discounts.

Black-Friday-Teamgate

Begin with the end in mind. It’s a well-known mantra for many business owners, and an effective mindset when setting visions and helping identify the necessary steps to achieve them. It’s a philosophy that provides clarity, efficiency, and purpose, and can get you to those leads that you never thought were available.

In terms of lead generation and marketing, the “end” would be a working list of potential subscribers who are likely to become loyal customers. This crucial list should give you insightful information into each individual—their name, age, gender, location, purchase history, and other bits of data that you can capture through online and offline interactions.

Think of a business that doesn’t need to do cold calls and direct, hard sales. That’s a business that is probably doing well in terms of online lead generation. They know their target audience, where their subscribers spend their time on the internet, and what types of sponsored ads and materials pique their interest. 

In this post, we’ll walk through the different ways how you can leverage lead generation for your business

1. Learn how to use lead magnets

Offer lead magnets to your potential subscribers in exchange for their email address. You can embed these lead magnets into pop-ups on your website’s homepage or through links on your social media accounts. Businesses often use the following types of lead magnets, which are almost always free-of-charge:

      • Resource kits. Establish expertise in your niche by coming up with a well-written downloadable ebook, podcast, or a small resource kit about what you do. However, don’t make the material all about your specific business and products. Make sure that it’s educational and something that your subscribers will surely enjoy reading. Check out the example below:

Source: Home Design Lover

      • Promotions. Coupons are a popular and effective lead magnet, especially if they offer discounts or freebies. As a business owner, you already know by now that customers’ willingness to pay significantly increases with even just a small price slash. Here’s how Blue Apron did it:

Source: Blue Apron

2. Offer gated content.

Gated content is very much like lead magnets, only it can be accessed by providing more information on top of the email address. Sometimes, even though it’s rare, gated content has a cost. 

Gated content is best integrated into email marketing campaigns and may come in the form of more detailed resource materials and bigger discounts. 

Here are more specific types of attractive gated content:

      • Content or subscription upgrades 

If a customer is interested in your product or service, they will likely be willing to pay for something that offers more. Try to identify customers who are frequent readers of your blogs or  regular buyers of a specific product. Let them know you have a better offer or promotion and that it’s on sale today.

      • Whitepapers

A welcome ebook is good source material, but wait until your customers read a full-blown whitepaper about your service. The whitepaper is usually written by the business owner with the help of experts.

Below is an email with gated content:

Source: Hinge

3. Monitor your performance.

Who are your closest competitors? Chances are they are also browsing your website, looking at your social media profiles, and analyzing your marketing strategy. Try to be one step ahead of them and offer your potential subscribers something unique and innovative. You can also check out how similar businesses in other countries are doing lead generation, and mimic their best practices (in your own way).

4. Identify website-based tactics.

There are a number of ways to use your website as a lead generation tool. Here are some key reminders:

      • Come up with a visually appealing design consistent with your brand identity and messaging. Use video and audio, if possible.
      • More than design, make sure your website offers as many lead magnets as can be integrated into the website.
      • As an online user yourself, you know that ads can become annoying. Your lead magnets should not all be pop-ups but should be placed in strategic areas where visitors can see them, but they aren’t disruptive. These can be through sidebars, slide-ins, and top bars, or through a dedicated page on your website.
      • Learn how to do search engine optimization (SEO) and how your content can be tailored for the web.

Pet retail store Life’s Abundance used a content slider that visitors can navigate by clicking the left and right arrows or by waiting a few seconds for it to change into the next offer or lead magnet:

Source: Life’s Abundance

5. Personalize, personalize, personalize.

Effective lead generation understands that products and services are not one-size-fits-all. Successful businesses are not afraid to request more information from their visitors to give them a highly customized experience. This will drive more conversions than if irrelevant products were mixed with interesting ones and offered to customers in one go.

For example, energy innovation ecosystem Turning Tables asks visitors to answer a little survey before they can be reached with any inquiries:

Source: Turning Tables

You can also draft specific trigger emails that will automatically send whenever visitors complete a specific activity, such as signing up for an event, downloading a podcast, or purchasing a discounted product.

Wrap up

If you want to begin with the end in mind and generate as many leads as possible, identify specific and clear goals such as:

  • The number of subscribers you want to achieve within a specific timeframe
  • Feasible sales targets for each month
  • Email open, click-through, and forward rates
  • Type of customers you want to attract

It’s also important for your business to have a feedback and tracking mechanism, so you know which leads are working and which ones need to go. Your teams should also be able to filter out leads that are not cost-effective for your business, even if these are highly appealing and have worked for more well-known brands.

The number of lead generation strategies continues to expand, and many businesses have already explored tactics such as drip campaigns, exit-intent boxes, and referral programs. These tools can be integrated into your overall email marketing strategy, which will eventually increase your chances of acquiring those highly valuable leads and customers.

 

Changes in how you collect, manage, store, and transfer data are about to be introduced and will affect how you and your sales team do business. Are you ready for that change?

Welcome to GDPR

May 25th next heralds a major change for EU residents and how their personal data is handled. The about to be enacted EU GDPR (EU General Data Protection Regulation) is a game-changing EU data protection protocol which governs the rules for those gathering, handling or storing the personal data of EU residents.

This enactment holds special significance for sales teams and those charged with the handling of personal information during the sales process.

Regardless of how you go about your day to day selling it’s a safe bet that you will be charged with the management of large amounts of personal data. But, are you aware how the new GDPR will affect you, and your daily business?

What are the new laws?

The new laws are ultimately designed to protect every EU individual’s personal data, and offer legislative guidance to organisations on the manner in how they may, and may not manage the personal data of individuals. As it has been described by many, the new GDPR 2018 is all about good data hygiene, being aware of the data you collect, how it is used, and how it is protected.

New technologies have come into play since original data protection laws were introduced. The revised GDPR compliance will aim to take account of these new technologies and practices, with the aim of putting data control back in the hands of the individual. It will also offer a clearer picture to companies which need to comply with data protection laws in the EU, and introduce a single set of privacy laws with which they need to comply.

The new GDPR extends far beyond the EU borders, and will affect any company or individual storing, managing, or handing the information of an EU resident, regardless of where they are situated worldwide. Even beyond the EU borders, non-compliance with the new laws will be enforced regardless of location, with significant penalties, which may be as much as 4% of a company’s global gross revenue – or up to $20 million, whichever is higher.

Who will be at risk?

As mentioned; anyone gathering, handling, storing, or managing personal data of EU residents will need to be in compliance with the GDPR 2018. In particular, the governing authorities see salespeople as prime data-controllers who will be most affected and scrutinised under the legislation. Being ill-prepared for these changes offers no protection to any sector of the market.

GDPR implementation

With 99 articles to negotiate in the new EU data protection laws, the GDPR can appear overly daunting to any sales team. However, there is no need for undue panic. But, the more you fully understand the new laws, the better it is for you and your sales team. However, here are some simple tips which those involved in sales might need to take note of:

1. Collect only the data you need

Within the new GDPR, there exists a list of acceptable reasons for the collection of data which you do not need. One of those reasons is NOT ‘that the information may be useful in the future’.

To comply correctly with the GDPR, it is best to design, and implement a data gathering process which eliminates the collection of unnecessary data. Plus, keeping data gathered to an absolute minimum makes the salesperson’s job easier, with less information to trawl through while lead hunting.

If you need a subject’s data in order to fulfill a contract, or for your legitimate interests, all should be well. As long as you have defined and explained your need for this data collection with the subject and they have subsequently agreed, in compliance with GDPR consent regulations.

However, collecting this information, and the consent to collect the information, can be a difficult task. Consent has to be freely given, clearly-defined, well-informed, and explicit. This information needs to come willingly, and through affirmative-action – the inclusion of pre-ticked boxes in no longer permissible. Consent for the collection of this data needs to be recorded, and must come with the ability to remove the data should the subject request.

The new EU general data protection regulation requires that companies look carefully at their data collection practices; what they collect, how it is used, and how this data is available and used throughout their whole organisation. They need to be fully aware of what data their customer services are collecting (names, emails, address, contact numbers, etc.) They also need to know what data is being collected in order to fulfill orders (credit card numbers, purchasing history, billing addresses). Also, which types of data is being collected on websites, apps, and connected devices (cookie-tracking, and cross-device tracking). Companies will have to take this process very seriously, and have a full understanding of that process.

2. Openness about your data collection and readiness for data subject requests

The privacy rights of the subject are at the heart of the GDPR. Sales managers and sales personnel are responsible for clarifying to their customers what you will do with their data, and why you will do it.

Additionally, you will need to be completely prepared for customer requests to have access to all of their data when they require it. This process needs to be open and easy to access with the clear ability to delete data on request.

3. Secure and deletable data

Security is paramount to your customers’ privacy. The new GDPR implementation insists that a stringent code of pertinent security measures are in place. This must consist of industry standard security protocols with assured access control, and strong password safeguards.

GDPR compliance
You can permanently delete your records from Teamgate

You should also take into consideration what protocols should be followed when data needs to be deleted, and implement a secure and transparent system to make this happen. Deletion of such data should be automated once certain predetermined conditions and criteria have been met.

GDPR and sales functionality

Cold-calling

Cold calling, for the purpose of lead generation, is at present permissible, however, best practice would be to ensure that all calls are noted and recorded in a secure manner; with dates, times, personnel involved, and call subject noted.

In addition to the recording of the above information, notes should be taken on whether the subject was open to the contact and a willingness to make further contact. Within your Sales CRM, this functionality already exists via the many communications and record keeping integrations. These measures help to ensure full GDPR compliance.

Cold-emailing

This is not as clear-cut as the cold-calling process, and one which will see further changes in the near future (within the next 12 months). As it stands, the EU GDPR permits the process of cold-emailing for the purpose of direct marketing, but be aware that these protocols are subject to change and a new ePrivacy Regulation will replace the current ePrivacy Directive. The word to the wise is to be extremely careful regarding your cold-emailing process. How you operate this process will be measured by your interests, and your subject’s right to privacy. If your reasons for contact are not copper-fastened, and you can not reasonably outline the reasons why this subject may want to receive your contact, you may be in breach of legislation.

This heralds good news for the individual and puts an end to purchased marketing lists. If, in the past, your business relied on this form of lead generation it will spell and end to that practice and you will need to employ a new system before the implementation of the new GDPR. It is expected that the number of new opt-in leads which you do manage to generate will be smaller, but of a remarkably higher quality.

One exception to the rule is that you may still reach out to subject’s whose email you have already acquired through the process of a completed sale – unless the subject has specifically denied and refused this option, and which you have recorded in your communication history. And, in addition, you will be required to prove that the email contact you send is concerned directly with products, features, customer notification, or updates related to the initial completed sale.

Tracking of emails

A historical email tracking system – usually within your sales CRM – offers sales teams highly valuable information regarding future actions which may be taken with any lead. From now on, any data collected via email interactions will be regarded and viewed as personal data and is subject to the laws of the new GDPR. Email tracking is of specific interest to the GDPR governing bodies as the subject is unaware of the tracking process, and is a fundamental breach of their privacy. This is bad news for sales teams as the process demands that prior GDPR consent is requested and gained in all cases.

Email tracking is one of the ‘grey-areas’ of the new GDPR, as it is still uncertain as to how the practice will be policed and enforced effectively. It is best to follow the general policy of the GDPR, which is one of transparency and openness. The more information you record, store, and hold open and available to the public, the easier it will be to avoid any future problems, or penalties.

The soundest, and safest policy to stick to is if you and your business keep in mind that an individual has the right to access their personal data, they have the right to have it corrected on request, they have the right to ask for their data, and they have the ‘right to be forgotten’ – that is, to have their data erased on request.

The advantages of Teamgate and GDPR

The people behind Teamgate Sales CRM have been ‘early-risers’ when it comes to compliance with GDPR. Since news of the inception of GDPR, and the EU data protection protocol was announced, Teamgate has been in preparation for changes which will come into play, and any other future changes which may occur.

We have tried to take into consideration all aspects of the new legislation and to clarify and ease the data management process within our organisation, and within our sales CRM. Along with the technical aspects and changes which will occur with the introduction of the GDPR, we are also engaging in staff training programmes to ensure full compliance.

Should you require any additional information on Teamgate’s commitment to the proper implementation of the GDPR please contact our support team who will be happy to offer you advice, and guide you through the whole process.

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Leadership and leader skills – we hear these terms in every job interview and description. You might think that leadership questions are relevant only for managers but that’s not true. Most companies are looking for people with leadership potential even, for entry-level positions. In particular, small businesses and startups – they need leaders more than any other business to create and motivate a team in a hectic environment.

The biggest confusion remains with the term ‘leadership’ – what exactly does leader mean and what skills should a leader have? If we delve deeper into the term ‘leader’ we will discover that it covers much more than just a ‘personality trait’.  The newest findings in neuroscience help us to understand how the brain works and how it can help control mental processes in order to become a better leader. We’ve teamed up with Claire James, the Managing Director of Pivotal Moment Transitions who talked us through internal mechanisms of a leader from the neuroscientific point of view. Below you’ll find an overview concerning the subjects of good and bad leadership and what you can do to take your own leadership skills to the next level. You will also gain an insight into why great leadership skills are some of the most sought after in every facet of modern business.

1) How would you define a great leader?

It’s a funny old thing, whilst there is considerable and often common consensus on what makes a bad leader, there’s usually less agreement on what makes a good one.  This may be because each of us has our own individual style of leadership; each with strengths and weaknesses and areas for personal development.  Therefore, some contexts and organisational structures or cultures may suit one type of individual leader, whilst others do not.

However, there appears to be some personality types which are currently over-represented at leadership level than they are in the general population.  For example, Oxford University Press – UK specialists in the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®), a psychometric assessment based on the theories of renowned psychologist Carl Jung – contains some interesting data on the subject.

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Their research shows that if you tend to make decisions based on logic, rather than values or feelings (what’s known as a ‘Thinking’, rather than a ‘Feeling’ preference), and are more planful than emergent in how you like to organise yourself and the world around you (known as a ‘Judging’ rather than a ‘Perceiving’ preference), then you will find a larger proportion of people with these same preferences in management roles, than is representative of the population in general.

This may well be the legacy of a command and control style of leadership, combined with the tendency for leaders to recruit in their own image. It will be interesting to see how this changes as fresh generations come through the ranks.  ‘Millennials’, for example, appear to be much more interested in the concept of ‘purpose’ in their jobs than purely money or status. They are also less likely to accept dysfunctional behaviour by a manager or leader which a 1970’s youth may have seen as par for the course.

2) Why do companies need leaders?

Interestingly, there are already new breeds of organisational structures emerging which do not appear to need leaders in the traditionally recognised sense. Power in varying degrees (whether in relation to strategy and vision, or more basic decisions; such as sundry purchases) is distributed throughout the organisation.

These organisations operate without the requirement of a central control system. Instead, individual cells (individuals and teams) flex, transform and grow in response to the context in which they find themselves; constantly adapting in small, incremental ways to find the best route to surviving and thriving.  In fact, this is also how ‘neuroplasticity’ – or changes in the brain’s wiring – works. For more on this and how some of the world’s most successful organisations are choosing this approach take a look at the work of Frederic Laloux and his book ‘Reinventing Organisations’.

3)  Do you believe that some people are ‘born leaders’, or is leadership a trait which can be taught or learned?

I believe (and neuroscience would also suggest), that the answer is a combination of both; and then some!  We know that whilst some behaviours are strongly affected by inherited genetics and neural patterns created through our upbringing, we can also learn to adapt and to ‘upskill’ through awareness and a willingness to ‘take a chance’, putting new approaches into practice.

Again, context is important. There will always be some who are more comfortable taking the lead in certain situations than others. What I think is most critical is that people be given the leeway to lead in a manner which feels ‘right’ for them and who they are; whilst staying authentic, or true to themselves.

neuroscience behind the leadership

In my own career I have known leaders with vastly different styles who have managed to be equally effective at inspiring those around them to attain their highest level of performance. I believe that leaders who are most effective are those who find their own individual style, and who are also open to others finding their own style, however different that may be.

Neuroscience demonstrates that for any kind of personal growth and learning, awareness of patterns is key. That’s why, at Pivotal Moment, when we are working with leaders. We use psychometric assessments like the MBTI®, the Enneagram, or the Hogan ‘Bright Side’, ‘Dark Side’ and ‘Inside’. These all get to the heart of neurological and behavioural patterns that are inherited or that have developed through our early life experiences, enabling us to identify where they show up and how they serve us or get in the way. We can then use awareness to focus on new ways of being and doing as leaders.

At Pivotal Moment, we specialise in harnessing the ways in which the brain most easily makes sustainable change. We include in our portfolio of leadership coaching programmes, the Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching for guaranteed and measurable leadership growth. Marshall Goldsmith has been recognised multiple times as the world’s No 1 Coach and has been acknowledged as the World’s No 1 Leadership Thinker by Harvard Business Review. His coaching system taps into the power of stakeholder support to assist a leader in growing in 1 to 2 key leadership areas over the course of a year to 18 months. This process has developed hundreds of the world’s top leaders across 5 continents. It comes with a ‘No growth, no fee’ guarantee.

4) Do you think it’s harder to be a female leader of the company and how can that be changed? (A lot of women working in tech’ and startup companies are still finding it very difficult to be taken seriously)

Again, the MBTI® research shows that many more women report a preference for ‘Feeling’, rather than ‘Thinking’; 76% v 24%.  In men, they found a split of 56% ‘Thinking’, 44% ‘Feeling’. Given what we noted earlier about those with a preference for ‘Thinking’ being over-represented at management level, and people tending to recruit in their own ‘psychological image’, this may in part explain the difficulties that women experience in rising to the leadership level.

Other studies have shown that there is a significant confidence gap between men and women; men tend to overestimate their competence, and women to undervalue their knowledge and skills. A study in London in 2012 also identified that women are not sponsored by senior leadership in the same way as men. Men were found to be better at promoting themselves and their achievements and to at using networking and the power of a sponsor to climb the corporate ladder.

Women were found to play what’s termed ‘Secret Cinderella’, i.e. “If I do a great job, the prince will surely turn up on my doorstep and try my foot in the glass slipper of senior management!”. Sadly, in cultures where you are expected to self-promote and shout your wins from the rooftops, these ‘Cinder’s’ often remain invisible (and unheard) within the talent development, high potential processes.

This is a great shame when studies have shown that a single woman on a Board will bring measurable benefits to the business, whilst 3 create a critical mass that delivers a marked diversity bonus through more fundamental change in the way that the Board works.

In the light of this, Paul Brown, Professor of Applied Neuroscience at Monarch Business school, and colleagues, reflect that “This points to the need for women to stay true to their own values and styles of leadership, to be authentic. Trying to behave like a male leader will only work if that is a genuine expression of who you are”. (from ‘Neuroscience for Leadership: Harnessing the Brain Gain Advantage’, Tara Swart, Kitty Chisholm and Paul Brown). This ties in with my own experience of effective leadership being about finding your own unique style and living it.

It would seem, therefore, that women would benefit from: getting clear on their strengths, skills and achievements; getting comfortable talking about them; using the power of networks; and recruiting a sponsor in the organisation to actively support their promotion (in all senses of the word!).

5) How would you briefly sum up what we know about becoming a great leader?  

Whether you’re a man or a woman, leading others is something that all personality types can potentially do well. The key to honing your leadership skills is through: cultivating self-knowledge; awareness of your patterns and where they serve or get in the way; understanding how you impact others; and seeking regular feedback and feedforward from all those with whom you interact.  

You must also act consistently upon what you discover!

This takes courage, humility and discipline (and may be facilitated by the support of a great mentor and/or coach).  However, the evidence abounds that the rewards in terms of individual, organisational and societal growth are worth every moment of inner reflection, each brave glance in the ‘feedback mirror’, and all your tiny steps, or indeed, great leaps, towards your very best self…

And there’s more! We have a bonus test to find out how great of a leader you are. Just to give you a heads up, our Teamgate CEO Marijus has completed the test and got a “True leader” result. That’s something to be proud of! Try it out yourself and let us know your results in the comments.


About the author:

claire james Claire James is Managing Director of Pivotal Moment Transitions and a developer of leaders and organisations using the power of applied neuroscience.

Pivotal Moment works UK-wide and internationally to help create audaciously successful leaders in organisations where people love to work.

For a complimentary, 45-minute leadership strategy session with Claire, please contact her by phone on 0203 239 1334 or by email at [email protected].

Every achievement is great. But today we are especially delighted about this one!

A well-known software marketplace Capterra.com which helps businesses to find the right software, placed Teamgate on Top CRM Software Roundup report as one of the Most Affordable & User-Friendly CRM Software!

This report focuses on combination of three categories: affordability, user-friendliness, and popularity.

On September 25 of 2015 Capterra was acquired by Gartner Inc.  (NYSE: IT)

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Teamgate Capterra Top CRM Software Roundup Report

Related: Teamgate has Earned #1 Spot on Capterra new Top 20 Most User Friendly CRM Software list

The Report

Capterra has Top 20 reports on different topics – such as affordability, user-friendliness, and popularity. But the fact is, when most people buy software, they’re usually looking for a combination of all three of those qualities in one solution.

Right above you can find an infographic where all of these reports intersect and also see which CRMs have made one or more of Capterra’s Top 20 reports. The middle of the infographic indicated Capstone solutions – CRMs which made it to all three reports.

You can check out all these solutions and more in Capterra’s Customer Relationship Management Software directory.

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For an original report on Capterra, click here.

If you run a small to medium-sized business, you’ve probably heard of lead scoring. We are sharing a set of lead scoring best practices which will help to improve sales conversion rates of your company. Lead scoring is not something you can set up overnight, but you can get started today with careful thought and evaluation of your customers. It may also be a good idea to invest in a lead scoring software to automate the process. We’ll discuss this in more detail, but let’s start from the beginning. 

How Does Lead Scoring Work

Lead scoring is a methodology used to help sales teams closing more leads. It’s a process that involves both marketing and sales, as each team must decide which leads should be qualified as the ideal ones. Lead scoring is used in conjunction with the inbound marketing tactics, such as building a social media following, blogging or offering free guides, to decide which of your leads are ready to convert.

Instead of pursuing every lead you have, you may rank your leads according to their value for your business and decide which ones to follow up with first. This allows you to prioritize and invest more of your energy into leads that matter most.

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Why Would I need Lead Scoring?

It’s all about making your sales process more efficient. If your sales team doesn’t have enough leads yet, then lead scoring is not necessary. Instead, your marketing team needs to put more focus on the lead generation.

However, if there are more than enough leads, rather than following up on each one, simply assign values to your leads. This will help to decide which ones are ready to convert. Set the criteria, then use analytics and lead sign-up forms to collect the relevant data. As a result, you will be able to pursue only those leads that are most likely to convert.

Which Companies Need Lead Scoring?

lead scoring best practices for companies

Every organization is different and some may not require lead scoring at all. The best practice to follow is to identify whether your company is struggling with leads conversion or not. Companies that want to boost their sales conversions, and have more leads than they can pursue, most probably, need lead scoring. 

Setting Up Your Lead Capturing Forms

In order to score your leads, you have to know who they are. So, to start tracking your leads you would need a lead capturing form. This is a form on your website which offers a way for customers to sign up to hear more about you and your products. This data is then captured and funneled into your lead scoring or CRM (customer relationship management) software, where you can begin tracking interactions of your potential customers.

Optimizing Your Lead Capturing Form

Put forms on your landing pages where your prospects can see it. This could be combined as a gateway to some content that your target customers will be interested in engaging with, such as an ebook or a PDF that they can download. In exchange for this content, customers should provide their name, email address and a few details about themselves.

Note: If you ask your leads to fill in too many fields, you may fail to capture them as people may not want to sign up. If you ask for too few details, the quality of your lead data can suffer as well. Make sure you ask for relevant details about your customers by linking the fields you include with your lead score criteria, which we’ll go into next.

Deciding Upon Your Lead Score Criteria

lead scoring best practices criteria

You can find out what sort of characteristics your customers normally possess by analyzing your current customer base. They won’t be identical to the future prospects but they are your best source of inspiration. You can also work with your sales and marketing teams to create descriptions of your ideal customers. It could be that they are a CEO of a mid-sized tech company, or a Marketing Manager of a small health food supplier. You can have more than one type of ideal customer.

There are a number of factors you need to take into account when deciding upon your criteria, but the best practice is to follow a points-based system. You need a) demographic information and b) behavioral intelligence for your leads. First, you will be focusing on the characteristics of your ideal customers who are worth to be pursued as leads. Second, you’ll be looking at how these customers are behaving to see who is ready to be contacted by your sales team.

a) Demographic Information

After you have decided upon the characteristics of your ideal customers, you can start to set up your lead score by assigning multiple values to criteria, such as job title, industry, company size, country, marketing source, links with competitors, and more. Demographic information about a lead can identify personal information, such as job title, company information (e.g. number of employees), relationship to your organization (e.g. past customer), and others.

When considering which demographic information to choose to evaluate your leads, you may want to include some basic criteria which must be met for them to qualify or disqualify as a lead. For example, you may instantly disqualify someone if they are a student.

b) Behavioral Intelligence

After you have decided upon the essential criteria for determining your lead score, include some key behaviors for your leads to engage in, these will also contribute to their score. This is where it is really important to have the appropriate software to track the behavior of your leads. For example, if you send them an email, you need to track whether they’ve received it, opened and clicked on it. Or, if you post some content on social media, you want to know whether they saw it, how long they spent on the page, if they shared it on social media, and so on. You can also decide on behaviors that deserve a negative score, such as if they unsubscribe from your mailing list.

Identifying Leads to Pursue

You need to set up a points-based scoring system when evaluating your lead criteria for each potential customer, typically a scale between 1 and 100. With this in mind, score your leads based on how closely they match your ideal customer profile, based on the demographic information and behavioral intelligence.

lead scoring best practices leads to pursue

For instance, if one of your leads is a CEO of a mid-sized tech company, but they haven’t demonstrated any engagement behaviors, then your lead might score around 50 points. A similar company that fits the demographic criteria and has somewhat engaged with your company can be awarded 75 points, which is a trigger to your sales team to contact them.

There is a number of systems you can use to score how close your leads are to converting, ranging from the letters A, B, C and D, to Hot, Warm or Cold, or in numbers from 1 to 4. Then you may assign each label a range on your scale. Pick a system that feels most natural to your company and easiest to work with.

Other Purposes of Lead Scoring

In your process of scoring leads, some potential customers may not quite qualify, but you can identify and target the leads which need nurturing. If you have the right software, particular lead scores can trigger automation. For example, once a lead passes a certain score, an email is triggered to invite your lead for a demo of your product.

You can also use lead scoring to get to know your potential customers better. Paying so much attention to your target market is always great because you may uncover surprising insights. Test different marketing messaging with your leads to see which ones work best, and optimize your marketing strategy. 

Choosing Your Lead Management Software

Having the right software is key to success with lead scoring. If you lack the capabilities to properly analyze your leads, you won’t get very far. The type of lead scoring software that you need will depend on your company. Compare different options based on price, functionality and size with reviews from trusted sites such as Capterra or Software Advice. 

lead scoring best practices choosing the right software

Teamgate offers lead scoring as a part of our cloud-based intelligent Sales CRM for small and mid-size teams. With its user-friendly interface, Teamgate is a great sales stack for today’s business that helps you convert more leads. 

The software is changing all the time and becoming more sophisticated, with some solutions beginning to use AI and bots to engage leads. For example, software can determine if your lead is highly engaged or a student doing research. A virtual sales assistant using AI technology to email the leads can interpret their responses and alert your sales team. 

Smarten Up Your Teamwork

Know who your leads are, track when they’re ready to buy, and make your sales team contact them. Lead scoring streamlines this process so you’re only focusing on high-quality leads who are most ready to convert. The key is capturing your data with the right software, optimizing your website with properly prepared content and forms, and integrating your software solutions so your leads don’t fall through the cracks. It is a team effort, but totally worth it for the boost you’ll see in your sales conversions.

If hot leads aren’t converting, then you might need to take a look at the products and services you’re offering. Check whether they’re suitable for your target market and if your pricing is appropriate. Don’t get discouraged, but remember that analyzing your leads and scoring them is the beginning of streamlining your sales process. 

2016 has been an incredible year for Teamgate with a wide range of the fresh market opportunities, significant investment and new experiences. Since the learning from industry experts and networking is one of the most important leverages for doing business, in this blog post we look back over all attended events in Europe and put together a list of the TOP hottest startup conferences this year. Also, as there are so many top-quality conferences and events for startups and tech companies, the interviews with few of the organizers as well as many lessons learned and other important details are included, too! 

GOOGLE CAMPUS WARSAW

Warsaw, Poland, January 7

2017 has already started with Google Campus Warsaw. Despite the fact, this year’s campus is already over, we highly recommend to save the date for the next year’s event.

We have been chosen to participate in this weekly campus organized by Google. It was a week-long session with pitching workshops, design thinking training, theoretical and practical sessions. Everything was so impressive because the event featured speakers from Google and Facebook.

Startup Events Campus Warsaw Teamgate

Image source: ITKeyMedia

We have the training sessions held by experts such as Marcus Corah, Rafal Kudriawcew, Wolfgang Oberauer and others industry’s stars. You know, it is super cool to work together with such professionals and be inspired. Moreover, this event not only gives an opportunity to learn but also brought large groups of entrepreneurs with the same interests together in order to create a network.

Lessons learned:

As the event has been planned so precisely almost without any free time, we really recommend to participate there for a whole team (or at least 3-5 member of the team) in order to reach the maximum.

Campus Warsaw 2016 Presentation

Image source: Teamgate

Therefore, as we came three of us, we were able to attend as many events as we would like to. For example, one team member was dedicated to networking, another one to pitching and presentations and the third one to learn and improve his own competencies in order to share the knowledge with the whole team later on. Actually talking about this kind of events, it is always worth to remember that know-how and priceless experience which have to be absorbed is simply “walking around”, so you just need to grab the opportunity, meet people and talk-talk-talk.

[optin-monster-shortcode id=”kandoug21absj0ox”]

Finally, we all know that sometimes you are not able to spend as much time with your colleagues as you would like to, so these events are a great opportunity to discuss with your co-workers about future plans or just drink a couple of beers. So, one more lesson learned is to use this kind of trips for teambuilding, too.

Worth to know:

Google Campus Warsaw is located in the Praga district of Warsaw, in a place where 118 years ago the idea of the Polish “Koneser” distillery was born. The whole district as a former industrial area is impressive especially to unexpectedly found the modern office space inside these factory buildings.

Startup Events Google Campus Warsaw Teamgate Imagery

Image Source: Liebrecht&wood

By the way, as Google Campus Warsaw is a part of global Google Campus community, you can easily choose the most suitable location for you, whether it is Warsaw, London, Madrid, Tel Aviv, Seoul or even São Paulo in Brazil.

SALES INNOVATION EXPO

London, UK, March 28-29

It is our next big event taking place on March. Sales Innovation Expo is one of the largest and most important events gathered sales experts around the Europe.

Sales Innovation Expo 2016

Image Source: Sales Innovation Expo

Edward Lawrence, this conference’s director, says that the event is a perfect place for startups giving an access to the most recent market intelligence and research as well as the latest tools available on the market today.

“If you are serious about growing your business, there will be no better platform in the UK to network and be educated by like-minded business people”, Edward Lawrence says.

With 70 of the industry’s well-know companies exhibiting, 95 expert speakers, and 10.000 visitors per day, we have participated in last year’s event, too. Actually, we would say that it was our first such a large-scale international exhibition.

We had a display booth and a good place where to set it up. But unfortunately, we didn’t do our homework well enough. We simply did not schedule business meetings before the conference begins, so we just had to catch our prospects and partners directly at the venue. Of course, it wasn’t so effective as it could be.

In any case, this event allowed us to successfully close the several deals as well as better understand the UK market. Indeed, it was the largest foundation in the development of a new company’s branch office in the UK.

Lessons learned:

The first one lesson as we have already mentioned is to do your homework well by arranging as many business meetings as possible in advance.

Startup Events Sales Innovation Expo 2016 Teamgate

Image source: Teamgate

Despite the fact, this kind of exhibition can be the opportunity of a lifetime, let’s face the fact that usually startups don’t have the big budgets while market leaders do. So, it’s worth to be smart enough about your budget. For example, consider the chance to order booth directly in the UK instead of carrying it out from your country. That can allow you to spend approximately 7 times less. Actually, it’s a lot! Furthermore, we could also recommend to order all the necessary furniture (table, chairs, etc.) on site. On the basis of our calculations, it is considerably cheaper, too. Finally, remember that in this game isn’t always about who spend the biggest amount of money but rather who does their homework better by being more prepared.

Worth to know:

All these exhibitors, seminars and networking opportunities are completely free to attend. You are able to book your tickets here. 

PIRATE SUMMIT

Cologne, Germany, September 6-7

This is one of the craziest events where we have participated yet. Pirate Summit, often called Europe’s “Burning Man”, is an event designed for early-stage startup founders.

The aim of the two-day event is to gather around 1.000+ participants including 650 startup founders, 200 leading investors, 150 corporate and media executives. During this event, the startup has every chance to meet and talk with representatives from the biggest European venture capitals funds, well-know investors and other startup-world-stars. Moreover, pirate theme, startups’ “Walk The Plank” pitch competition, and passionate tech savvy crowd create an unlikely atmosphere. 

Startup Events Pirate Summit 2016

Image Source: Pirate Summit

It’s funny to remember how we have been shocked after we realized what kind of crazy event it is (and we are not even talking about its after-party yet). Actually, we were ready to expand our network by pitching to investors and meeting them face to face, but surprisingly, it was the opposite! Venture capitals funds, angels, and other investors presented themselves in front of a massive startups’ audience by trying to convince them to cooperate. That feeling was awesome!

Also, one of the most pleasant parts of the summit is a chance to meet all the important people without wearing a suit and talk with them about business in an informal and friendly way. It inspired us a lot and turned to continue our work with even bigger enthusiasm!

When we talked with Melanie Malurday, the representative of Pirate Summit, she said that this year they plan to focus even more on networking opportunities.

“Pirate Summit strives to connect early-stage founders and investors to create meaningful connections. All participants are handpicked from thousands of applications or personally invited to offer networking on the highest possible level of influence and quality. We would like to make sure that every participant leaves the Pirate Summit with new meaningful connections and two fantastic days to look back at”. In addition, according to her, it is expecting to welcome about 1.200 participants this year.

Lessons learned:

As a startup, you have to be always prepared for anything. At this case, to play by the new rules of the game – instead of pitching by ourselves, listen to the pitches from investors. Believe us, it can easily break your balance – at least for a while.

Also, one of our suggestions is to take part in summit’s after-party. Despite the fact, that this event is very informal, an amazing party lets you establish the even more personal relationship. As organizers say “you will meet like-minded people and celebrate entrepreneurship with your next potential business partner, investor or friend.”

Startup Events Pirate Summit 2016 Germany

Image Source: Pirate Summit

Besides, you simply have a chance to party hard with your colleagues, too. After all, “work hard, play harder” we would say. 

Startup Events Pirate Summit 2016 Teamgate

Image source: Teamgate

By the way, be ready to spend an extra time by trying to find the most suitable and cost-effective plan to reach Cologne.

Worth to know:

The event takes place in Odonien, the wicked and legendary republic of pirates, dinosaurs, and other creatures. As the organizers want to skip the formalities, during this event it is not desirable to wear a suit. “Please leave your fancy suits at home. We would like to dress as pirates as possible instead”, organizers note. By the way, it’s not a joke, because all the suit-guys have been kind of mocked in order to force them to change their fancy clothes.

Also, please keep in mind that the mobile app will be created this year, too. “We are working on our own networking app for the Pirate Summit, which will allow us to adjust the networking process to the specific needs of our participants. The goal is to create even more meaningful connections”, says Melanie Malurday. So, it is definitely worth to add this event to your list.

More information about the summit, please find here.

LATITUDE 59

Tallinn, Estonia, May 25-26

Estonia is known for Skype, for its e-Residency and digital society in general. Therefore, Latitude 59 is the flagship startup and tech event of the world’s first digital society. Today the event attracts more than 1.500 participants including startups, entrepreneurs, and investors. 

Startup Events Latitude59

Image Source: Latitude59

It was amazing to listen to an inspiring speech from the Minister of Entrepreneurship and Information Technology (just look, Estonians even have the Minister of Entrepreneurship and Information Technology!). Also, we were no less impressed by listening the Prime Minister of Estonia and his ability to talk with startups in our language.

The strong synergy between startup business and the government was seen clearly. Overall, it was totally obvious that Estonia has a clear picture to became a part of a global startup ecosystem.

Startup Events Latitude59 Teamgate

Image Source: Latitude59

Lessons learned:

Let’s not confuse ourselves by thinking about Latitude 59 as a small regional event organized only for Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and in the best scenario for Finns, too. It’s a quite big international event with participants not only from the Baltic region but from Western Europe, Russia, US, and Asia, too. So, we advise you to consider it and be prepared for the event well enough.

SILICON VALLEY OPEN DOORS (SVOD)

State of California, US, May 24, 2017

Despite the fact, 2017 event has been located to its homeland, Silicon Valley Open Doors (SVOD Europe) was one of the most informative events for startups in Europe. The key purpose is to gather only 25 the hottest startups around the Europe in order to pitch their products and services to prospective investors. Moreover, the program also includes speeches from a brilliant lineup of guests from Silicon Valley.

Startup Events Google SVOD Teamgate

Image source: Teamgate

We definitely say this event acts as an alternative to traditional, crowded conferences. It is a quite intimate and cozy meetup held at Google’s European Headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. Therefore, we had an opportunity to look around in Google office as well as talk and consult with various mega-company’s experts. The chance to talk with Google employees does not appear every day, so we learned a lot even during this short period of time.

Furthermore, as we use many Google products, it was a great chance to discover the new solutions which could be used by our employees to solve their daily task.

Lessons learned:

Networking is one of the most important things you do in order to help boost your business. Therefore, during this kind of event, the initiative and intention to meet and talk with high-profile investors, founders, CEOs, and other leaders from Silicon Valley should come from your side. So, don’t be afraid to start first!

Startupmn Eventsm Silicon Valley Open Doors Dublin

Image source: Teamgate

Also, we would like to advise to use your free time as efficiently as possible. If you just have a free time, don’t forget to plan the meetings with your clients and partners around the city. From our point of view, the startup have to always demonstrate the initiative and take actions first. Consequently, as we had a little time, we contacted our partners Zendesk and Intercom in order to visit their offices and meet the representatives in person. Believe us, it was such a great experience and a nice example how easily the network can be built.

Worth to know:

As we already mentioned, this year SVOD came back to the US. Nevertheless, perhaps it is even more important (and definitely more catchy!) to plan participation in the upcoming event, too. Here you can find more useful information.  

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LEARN, MEET, NETWORK, AND SHARE

If you’re still asking why startups should attend tech conferences, the answers have been presented earlier. In addition, we can just add these magic words: learn, meet, network, and share.

Besides, the various kind of information is so easily accessible nowadays, the conferences and meetups are an ideal place to meet the potential investors and partners in person by pitching them face to face. Moreover, as we have already mentioned, the greatest experience and know-how come together with people. So, participating in exhibitions, conferences and summits can be a really pleasant, quality and fast way to grasp the pulse of the market. After all, we all know that the best solutions and deals are still discovered offline.

Have we included your favorite? If not, feel free to provide additional input in the comment section below.

We are excited to share some more fantastic news with you!

2017 started great for Teamgate as we were recognized as a FrontRunner for Customer Relationship Management on Software Advice, powered by Gartner Methodology.

With a Capability score of 3.69 out of 5 and a Value score of 4.11 out of 5, Teamgate landed as a Contender in the FrontRunners quadrant.

FrontRunners Quadrant January 2017 CRM

Related: GetApp announced Teamgate as #2 of the top 25 CRM apps and Teamgate Receives A Very Positive Review From CompareCamp

Gartner’s quadrant FrontRunners for CRMs

The FrontRunners quadrant, powered by Gartner Methodology, provides a data-driven assessment of products in a particular software category to determine which ones offer the best capability and value for businesses. It helps business leaders to make the right decision when choosing which software to buy.

On 2016 September, Gartner launched a new type of quadrant called FrontRunners. It is released for four software markets, which are (1) CRM software, (2) Project Management software, (3) Help Desk software and (4) Applicant Tracking software.

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All products that qualify as FrontRunners are top performing products in their market. They have been evaluated and given score for Capability and Value. Capability (x-axis) starts at 3.60 and ends at 4.60, while Value (y-axis) starts at 3.60 and ends at 4.70. FrontRunners evaluate the top 20-30 products in a quadrant format and it is completely data-driven with no analyst interpretation, also, it is heavily influenced by user reviews.

During the first half of 2017, Gartner is planning to launch FrontRunners quadrants for 24 software markets.

FrontRunners Badge Gartner 2017 Software Advice

The content for the FrontRunners quadrant is derived from actual end-user reviews and ratings as well as vendor-supplied and publicly available product and company information that gets applied against a documented methodology. The results neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or any of its affiliates.

Quadrant Methodology

As it was mentioned above, the FrontRunners methodology assesses and calculates a score for products on two primary dimensions: Capability and Value. Here’s how they both are calculated.

The Capability score is an overall weighted average of scores including:

  1. End-user ratings of 1 to 5 stars on the product’s functionality.
  2. End-user ratings of 1 to 5 stars ratings on the product’s ease of use.
  3. End-user ratings of 1 to 5 stars on the product’s customer support.
  4. A score, relative to other products in the market, for the product’s inclusion of key functionality for the software category.
  5. A score, relative to other products in the market, representing the number of other products that integrate with it.

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The Value score is an overall weighted average of scores including:

  1. End-user ratings of 1 to 5 stars on overall satisfaction with the product.
  2. End-user ratings of 1 to 5 stars on how valuable users consider the product to be relative to its price.
  3. End-user ratings of 1 to 5 stars on how likely they are to recommend the product to others.
  4. A score, relative to other products in the market, for the size of the product’s customer base.
  5. A score, relative to other products in the market, for the number of professionals in the market who have experience with the product (e.g., users, developers, administrators).
  6. A score, relative to other products in the market, representing the total number of user reviews across the three Gartner web properties.
  7. A score, relative to other products in the market, representing the average number of times per month internet users search for the product on Google.

For a full report and methodology on Gartner’s FrontRunners quadrant, check out the information on Software Advice.

Despite the fact that the word love has been used, there is no romance or sentiments of any kind. Just numbers. Working in such a competitive market with 100+ newcomers (the new Software as a service business companies) coming every week, we truly believe in the advantages of SaaS business as well as trust in their solutions. Also, by leading Software as a service company by ourselves, we use more than 20 different tools for various daily activities such as marketing, customer success management, lead generation, development management, analytics, billing, and so on. All of these tools are SaaS-based solutions. Furthermore, Teamgate, the FrontRunner for Customer Relationship Management according to Gartner, uses its own Inbound Sales CRM for lead generation and qualification, sales and customers management, analytics and reports, etc., too. So, that is where the love for SaaS-based solutions comes into place.

SaaS shows no signs of decline by being the best-known branch of cloud computing. According to the latest data from Synergy Research, operator and vendor revenues across the main cloud services and infrastructure market segments hit $148 billion in 2016 growing at 25% annually. Also, Forrester Research predicts that SaaS & Cloud is going to reach $241 Billion in 2020. As SaaS is one of the most popular and innovative tools that has been developed for business, it seems that the market loves and trusts SaaS solutions, too. And there are the TOP reasons why:

Seamless integrations

Web technologies are friendlier for the various integrations compared with on-premises software. As enterprises turn to an API strategy in order to drive B2B integration, the fact that SaaS tools can be easily integrated with Multiple Apps (API Strategy) is one of the main advantages. Moreover, these actions usually are free of charge. So, this is one of the key reasons why SaaS solutions have so many integrations and became so popular.

Teamgate API

The growing business usually is a great example of the various integrations by showing great demand for it. The integral solutions when sales are combined with marketing to follow a Smarketing approach when the support service is upgraded to the Customer Success Management and the significance of the big data shows how many specific tools have to be integrated with each other. In this scenario, the SaaS solutions became a priority as most of the providers develop API strategy as well as want to follow its standards and the best practice. Furthermore, the integrations can be a valuable sales channel, too.

There are the reasons why SaaS solutions are usually integrated into other SaaS or multi-integral platforms such as Zapier which lets you easily connect using web apps and conduct needed integrations.

Freedom of choice

It is so common to feel at least a little bit stressed when you have to make important decisions regarding your business. Whether it is a strategic sales plan or internal communications issues.

If your attention is brought by dozens of SaaS tools developed for your business management, it is one of the easiest questions on the horizon as you are always welcome to try the free trials out. It means that you can try 5 or even more different tools per day, 20+ solutions within a week, and so on. The examples show, that if you are new in marketing, you can easily start with an e-mail campaign management tool, for instance, MailChimp. Though, after some time it is likely to start looking for something more powerful like HubSpot or Marketo. In principle, this is a quite attractive way to gain knowledge about the market by choosing the best solution.

Finally, even if you have already subscribed to a tool and found that it is not exactly what you were hoping for, you are always able to cancel the subscription. Basically, that is the way (by providing the opportunity to try it out and choose) SaaS business attracts prospects. 

Mobility & mobile apps

Today even the smallest SaaS business has a mobile app. Having just a web presence is no longer sufficient. Nowadays you must be able to carry your business management tool wherever you go or whatever you do. Your business should be with you on the go, 24/7.

Primarily, it is happening not only because of the importance of mobility. It is happening because of web technologies. Technology advancement allows the development of mobile applications easier and more competitive. Thus, companies with futuristic ideas can materialize their ideas faster. 

Rapid development & delivery

With the view of a rapidly changing business environment, the business must respond to new opportunities and competition. Consequently, the quick development and rapid delivery is one more advantage of SaaS. SaaS does not force you to wait for a new upgrade as you are used to doing that in order to get Windows on your PC.

For example, here at Teamgate, we use 20+ different apps every day. So, every single day we stay tuned for the new update, new feature innovations, APIs, new integrations, etc. at no additional costs. Despite the fact, that sometimes it might be overwhelming to deal with so much newness, there is also the ability to benefit from new features by staying first on the front lines. 

Related: Reasons Why Sales Stack is Non-Optional for Startups

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Tools to meet the needs

You might disapprove of what we say, but the real-life-based example shows that 5 different tools are better than 1.

At least to write and publish this article, to monitor and capture the leads takes us to use 5 different tools. The most important aspect of choosing the all-in-one solution is the fact that you just simply do not need it all. Let’s be honest. Does Dave from your sales department really need the same things/tools/features that Marry from marketing has? The different departments in your organization, as well as the different roles, have separate goals. Therefore, possibly they need to use the different tools in order to achieve these goals.

5 Specific Tools are Better Than 1

Ask your team leaders or managers to pick the right tools for their teams. Integrate them into one perfect solution afterward. Finally, if you are still not able to make it work, ask your providers for assistance. That is why we call it – SOFTWARE AS (AND) A SERVICE.

Related: Steps for Writing a Winning Sales Proposal in a SaaS

Get a holistic view of your sales

If you’re looking for a SaaS-based solution that gives you plenty of integrations, mobility and rapid development, an Inbound Sales CRM Teamgate offers a solution that can empower you to get a 360-degree view of the whole sales process. Also, it offers freedom of choice by giving you a 14 day free trial.

Have a question? You can always contact us or join our Facebook page to get an answer!