Sales enablement continues to be a growing, evolving industry, and with those changes comes a level of uncertainty about how best to implement sales enablement solutions. From enterprise companies to middle-market firms to startups, alignment between departments is consistently an issue—as is overall organization and communication—making the implementation of sales enablement problematic. Obviously, companies want to increase the productivity of their sales teams and consequently increase revenue, but in today’s competitive business landscape it’s becoming more difficult to reach their sales goals. Treating sales enablement as a business within your business is one crucial step toward that goal.

How to Implement Sales Enablement as a Business within a Business

The Sales Enablement Society

Although the best practices of sales enablement historically have been difficult to define, the establishment of the Sales Enablement Society has done much to bring together various sales enablement practitioners and formalize the strategic processes and goals of sales enablement.

In order to make sales managers and representatives more productive and give them the ability to increase sales productivity, the Sales Enablement Society promotes this business within a business model. So, what exactly does that look like?

Establish a Central Location for Sales Enablement Programs

It’s not enough for a company to simply say it is dedicated and committed to sales enablement. The people running the enablement efforts for sales need to approach their processes, strategy, and implementation like any business. This ensure there is a centralized, defined department to handle these issues, and it identifies points of contact to deal with the enabling sales within a company.

Often, departments don’t know what sales needs to be effective. Other departments can even inadvertently work against the efforts of sales. By operating like a business, there’s a central place to identify, tackle, and solve these organizational miscommunications and issues. 

Alignment between Sales and Marketing and Other Department

Sales enablement is an incredibly effective way to bridge any existing gap between marketing and sales and ultimately make both teams more effective. However, a truly effective sales enablement program isn’t exclusive to marketing and sales divisions. It’s a whole-company approach.

For example, Human Resources needs to be involved because they’re crucial to hiring the actual sales representatives. If HR doesn’t know what to look for in a sales rep, they could hire people who will allow these enablement processes to fall by the wayside. Similarly, IT needs to be involved. They install and integrate many enablement tools for sales, such as your CRM, marketing automation functions, content catalogs, and more.

Three Steps to Implementing Sales Enablement

1. Identify internal stakeholders.

The first step is defining your internal customers, which will usually predominantly be the sales force. Just like any business, you have to understand your customers for success, so you must identify, define, and seek to understand the needs and barriers to success of the customers your sales  force is looking to help.

2. Identify business needs—and how sales enablement can address those needs.

For a sales enablement program to be effective, the company must first understand their overarching goals and then determine how enabling sales  can help facilitate those goals. Sales enablement goals must always align with overall company goals, which means specific enablement processes are going to be different for every company. This is part of why sales enablement is hard to pin down. The framework can be similar, but the specifics and the sales ennoblement playbook are always going to be contingent on the company.

As with any effective goal, you must define sales enablement services with measurable metrics. This will allow you to ascertain if your efforts are reaching goals and proving effective. Once you can quantify something, you can identify where errors are made and hiccups occur, and you have the framework to measure your improvement after changes are implemented.

Striving toward sales enablement goals is not a one-off process; it’s ongoing. The goals should be incremental, they should build on each other, and again, they must be measurable.

3. Define how sale enablement will affect the company’s bottom line.

When executives are presented with the possibility of implementing sales enablement, the first factor they consider tends to be cost. They see these measures as cost centers rather than revenue-generating potential. For enablement of sales to truly work, though, you need the full buy-in of the company’s higher-ups, and if you can prove the financial worth of sales enablement, your chances of getting that buy-in increase dramatically.

As with goals, there is no cover-all answer for every company. How to get executive sponsorship is always going to be customized to that business, but the overall approach should be tying sale enablement’s goals to revenue-related goals. This will prove the immediate and continued worth of sales enablement (through a financial lens). If you don’t speak in terms of bottom line and the pivotal metrics to gauge that progress, you risk executives dismissing  enablement of sales as nothing more than a costly addition to the company structure. 

Companies are used to paying for trainings and new technologies in the hopes of increasing revenue down the line. You need to show that enabling sales can provide the same value and remove those underlying barriers to revenue generation.

Remember also that establishing sales enablement doesn’t need to come with huge overhead. It doesn’t necessarily require hiring an entire new team. People already within the organization can take on these roles—with the possibility of one or two new hires to facilitate the process. 

One Common Barrier to Sales Enablement Success

A consistent issue that companies run up against when trying to implement sales enablement as a business within a business is that people look at the traditional hierarchy and organization of a company and try to find where sales enablement fits. They want a  enablement program for sales to plug into an existing slot within their organizational structure. However, this mind-set often leads to departments operating as individual, disconnected “islands.”

Instead, a company should streamline the communication channels between these departments. In this way, the traditional organizational structure is a huge barrier to success. Sales enablement should not be viewed as its own separate division. Although it will be operating as a business, it must interact with all departments to improve the salespeople’s ability to sell and improve other departments’ ability to facilitate sales in that goal.

Although more and more companies are paying attention to and implementing sales enablement programs today, many businesses are still not fully capitalizing on these methods. By and large, the majority of companies are just implementing bits and pieces of sales enablement rather than a full strategized intiative, which necessarily leads to diminished results. With that in mind, the following are ten of the most common mistakes companies make when attempting to successfully plan and implement sales enablement strategies.

Sales Enablement Problems: 10 Mistakes You Could Be Making

1. Failing to train sales representatives how to effectively use content.

You can have the best content possible, but if your sales team doesn’t know how to use it effectively—or even find it—it simply does you no good. You must, therefore, implement a system to train your sales staff regarding where this content catalog is and how to use it.

On top of these logistical points, training should also cover the strategy behind content creation. This ensures your sales team can effectively help create that content and use it during a sales call. Your salespeople should be well versed in the following:

• The sales cycle—what it is and how to identify what stage a lead is at.
• Your buyer personas.
• How to use content within the sales cycle in order to take a more consultative approach to selling.
• The technological resources at their disposal to answer prospect questions and facilitate selling (content catalog, CRM, LinkedIn, and so on).

2. Implementing systems where deals get stuck in the sales process.

Poor or incomplete strategic planning can cause deals to stall somewhere in the sales process. Common mistakes range from not granting your salespeople access to the data or systems they need to effectively communicate with a lead to not training those salespeople about the different stages of the buyer’s journey and how to use content to facilitate selling at those different stages.

By creating content that’s targeted to your specific buyer personas at each stage of the buyer’s journey and training your sales staff how to effectively use that wealth of content, that created content should help your salespeople seamlessly drive leads through that sales funnel all the way to conversion. 

3. Lacking systems that educate sales about your content system and how to access it.

A fantastic shared content catalog means nothing if your sales team doesn’t know it exists or doesn’t know how to quickly and easily use it.

Therefore, keep the following pointers in mind regarding your content system:

• Everyone should have access to the shared content catalog, CRM, and other sales enablement tools.
• Content should be organized according to specific buyer personas and stages of the sales cycle.
• Every piece of content should have a quick description to alert the user what he or she is looking at. Online, this description could be a meta description. (Remember, a salesperson doesn’t have time to wade through one hundred pieces of content looking for a specific article. It needs to be intuitive and quick.)

4. Focusing on traditional high-level sales procedures.

Sales enablement programs can sometimes receive pushback because salespeople think it means overhauling their “traditional” sales techniques. That’s not the case! Sales enablement is about maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales team by facilitating their sales processes.

If you’re implementing sales enablement but sales and marketing aren’t talking and meeting at least once a month to share feedback on what’s working and not working and strategizing for future content, you’re setting yourself up for little to no positive results.

This collaborative approach to content creation can feel new and different, but at its heart, it’s about utilizing the shared knowledge base of the people on your team in order to do their jobs to the best of their abilities and address the needs, questions, and concerns of potential customers to facilitate lead-to-customer conversion.

5. Sending sales content as e-mail attachments.

This might not seem like a big deal, but e-mail attachments are not the ideal vehicle to send sales content. There’s no way to organize that content, e-mails are easily lost in the shuffle or inadvertently deleted, and it’s not possible for everyone to access that content later in a centralized content catalog system.

6. Creating content that is not specific to your buyer personas or the buyer’s journey.

If you’re creating content, you might think you’re ahead of the game, but that’s not necessarily the case. Creating an onslaught of content is not effective unless that content is highly targeted to your specific buyer personas. Beyond that, you need content that addresses the problems, challenges, and questions of those buyer personas at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

To be effective for your sales team, the content you create needs to be highly relevant to the prospective buyers they are interacting with every day.

7. Having an unorganized or incomplete sales enablement program, which costs your sales team time and loses you buy-in.

This is one of the most common ways companies fall down in terms of sales enablement.

If you implement bits and pieces rather than a full sales enablement strategy, you can needlessly cost your sales team time within the selling process. If, for example, they aren’t trained about how valuable the sales content can be during lead nurturing or they can’t easily and quickly access content within a shared content catalog, it will be difficult for the sales team to see the value in these sales enablement processes. Once the sales team can’t see the value, you will almost certainly lose buy-in.

Buy-in of team members is critical to the success of your sales enablement efforts. Failure to get that often means failure to find success with sales enablement.

8. Not having a sales-level agreement (SLA) in place between marketing and sales.

An SLA is a document created collaboratively between marketing and sales that makes their shared goals and objectives plain and explicit. It essentially lays out what goals sales and marketing are going to work toward together, and because it’s created with both parties, it addresses the concerns, needs, objectives, and collective knowledge of both your sales and marketing teams.

If your sales and marketing teams aren’t talking, working together, and striving for shared goals, your sales enablement efforts will simply never take off.

9. Failing to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for specific goals within the SLA.

A good SLA will incorporate relevant KPIs to ensure you can track your goals and ascertain how well you’re actually achieving or working toward those shared goals.

Sales and marketing should report monthly on these KPIs. This tracks progress, but it also helps identify core challenges and problems. By reporting monthly, these challenges can be identified and resolved quickly—before they significantly impact the teams’ ability to reach shared goals. Don’t forget to implement a quantifiable benchmarking system to ascertain if goals are truly progressing and being achieved. 

Just as content should be mapped to the buyer’s journey, your goals should also be linked to achievements at every stage of the sales funnel. That means reporting should be done in the context of achieving goals throughout the sales cycle.

10. Not having the right technological infrastructure in place.

Technology is an important and integral part of sales enablement. It makes things quicker, easier, and more effective for your sales and marketing teams.

The most common technological tools include the following:

• A customer relationship management (CRM) system to track and manage lead engagement with your company (website page views, documents downloaded, and so on).
• A shared content catalog.
• Marketing automation tools to make sales interactions more efficient.

These tools help further qualify leads and inform the sales person about how to best start the conversation with that particular lead.

Sales enablement, as an industry term, has been around for quite some time, but there’s still a lot of confusion about what exactly it entails and how best to implement a sales enablement strategy. Part of that confusion stems from the fact that sales enablement is going to manifest differently in every company. There is no coverall application that will work for every business. Instead, you have to take the idea of collaboratively working toward shared goals and apply it to the specific tactics that will work to align your sales and marketing teams, increase the productivity of your sales reps, and ultimately increase company profits.

If you’ve recently decided to embark on an inbound marketing program for your company and deciding to use HubSpot, it’s very likely you’re currently asking yourself what HubSpot license level is right for you and your business. First off, whatever level you select, you can rest easy knowing you’ve made a big push toward aligning your marketing and sales teams. The automation, content tools, SEO applications, analytical tracking, CRM, the integration of sales and marketing tools, and the various sales enablement features of HubSpot mean you are better positioned to have more success with your inbound marketing. HubSpot’s strength is in having an all-in-one inbound markeitng and sales solution. Now, it’s just a matter of selecting the HubSpot license level that best serves the needs of your business and your current marketing efforts.

What HubSpot License Level Is Right for Your Business?

An Important Note about All HubSpot License Levels

Regardless of the level you choose, no paid package will solely be a marketing or sales tool. Part of the appeal and success of HubSpot is that it works to bridge that gap between marketing and sales, effectively providing a platform that aligns those two groups and better prepares them to reach shared goals.

Even with HubSpot Basic markeitng software, it’s a powerful marketing and sales tool that provides features such as a shared database, allowing marketing and sales access to the same contact information that automatically updating relevant fields in individual connect records.

What Factors Should Influence Your HubSpot Licensing Decision?

The HubSpot level that is ideal for your business depends on a number of factors, but first and foremost, it’s important to remember that those factors are not set in stone. As your business grows and changes, you do have the ability to upgrade and easily integrate all your HubSpot portal data. 

Some of the deciding factors to consider when selecting a package include the following:

• The size of your company (number of employees).
• Current and projected monthly traffic to your site and/or blog.
• Number of email campaigns you send out on a monthly basis.
• Contact list size.
• Marketing budget.
• Do you require markeitng automation.
• Content strategy 

The HubSpot License Levels: Basic, Pro, and Enterprise

HubSpot currently offers three license levels for their software: basic, pro, and enterprise.

• Basic – Generally for small businesses or those just starting to create strategic content through inbound marketing efforts. This package includes features such as the marketing analytics dashboard, social media suite, e-mail marketing, and content creation (and optimization).

At the basic level, you can also integrate your HubSpot CRM with powerful application such as PandaDoc, a sales enablement tool that allows you to write, send, analytically track, and get legally binding e-signatures on proposals, quotes, and other documents. 

The one drawback- you don’t have markeitng automation capabilities.

• Pro – The most popular choice. It provides everything basic includes, but arguably the largest difference is pro provides marketing automation, Salesforce and other third party integration, and custom workflows. As your leads increase, this automation ability lets you more efficiently and successfully nurture potential clients through the sales funnel.

Other included features include: many more templates (for e-mails and more), sales software that facilitates integration of assets, calendar tool to more easily schedule meetings, sequence creation to create sales or marketing workflows, and more.

• Enterprise – Primarily for large, established companies. It provides everything in pro but with extra features, such as A/B testing (to determine the best conversion success among various calls to action, e-mail templates, landing pages, etc.), predictive lead scoring, enhanced reporting tools, and more.

Pricing:

Basic: $200/month ($600 required onboarding fee)

Pro: $800/month ($3,000 required onboarding fee)

Enterprise: $2,400 /month ($5,000 required onboarding fee)

Signing Up—and Paying—for Your HubSpot License Level

Once you’ve selected the level that’s relevant for your company, there are a few things to know about the payment process.

First, HubSpot operates as a yearly license. That means you must financially commit to a twelve-month requirement.

Payment for your plan can be made as a monthly charge, or you can pay for that year up front.

What If You’re Not Ready to Commit to a HubSpot License?

Depending on your business and your marketing budget, HubSpot might seem like too much of a financial burden. If that’s the case, remember two important things.

One, HubSpot is an investment. It helps you track your successes, optimize your content, and better nurture your leads though the buyer’s journey. All this ultimately works toward the goal of increased revenue, which means the underlying idea is that HubSpot will eventually pay for itself in increased clients and associated revenue. 

Two, if you’re hesitant about the value of HubSpot, you can try the marketing package for a free thirty-day trial. If you’re not convinced the software is right for your business after that month, you aren’t committed to paying anything.

There are also free features of HubSpot. That includes:

• HubSpot Leadin. A free lead capture and contact insights tool.
• Sales CRM. (The marketing CRM is part of the pay service.)
• HubSpot Sales. (This is free up to a point. Features such as tracking and unlimited templates are part of the pay service.)

At the very least, I would recommend using Leadin as  you start your inbound markeitng program. Providing you the ability to capture leads, manage leads in one place and analyze your markeitng efforts.

HubSpot Support Makes the Mark

Strong software support is vitally important to any organization. Especially with the sophistication of today’s tools and over level of functionality. This is were HubSpot really shines. The ability to quickly call or email a HubSpot support rep, and in most cases receive a thorough response quickly is invaluable. Their attention to detail and willingness to find  solution to your problem is refreshing. 

Also, they have  great deal of support documentation and videos that can quickly get you the response you need. 

HubSpot Licensing: Look before You Leap

While most people do choose the pro level, reasoning that it offers the most value for services provided, the important thing to consider is what will provide the most value for your organization and ability to scale with your marketing and sales divisions. What will benefit your marketing team, sales force, C-level executives, and everyone between?

It’s crucial to give this forethought because jumping into a package could mean you’re needlessly overpaying for services you don’t yet require, or it could mean the software isn’t as effective as possible because the package is not comprehensive enough.

Remember, though, every HubSpot license level offers content optimization tools, seo capabilities, landing pages, call-to-actions, email campaigns, social media tools,a lead management system, CRM and analytics, increase the productivity of your sales and marketing teams, and better align those teams to work toward shared goals. Choosing the right level, therefore, comes down to where you are in your web traffic, lead generation, lead nurturing and revenue generation goals. As your inbound marketing efforts expand and create more opportunities, HubSpot is able to scale with your increased success.

As any inbound marketing agency knows, a full inbound program involves a full spectrum of change within a company. When implemented to its greatest effect, though, inbound marketing facilitates both the marketing and sales teams. Therefore, one way for an agency to maximize its effectiveness is by offering sales enablement services. What are the benefits of these services, and why should you give special consideration to employing these tactics in your agency? Read on for all the benefits and positive consequences of investing in sales enablement.

Why Inbound Marketing Agencies Should Offer Sales Enablement Services

The Bottom Line: Sales Enablement Helps Inbound Marketing Agencies Increase Profits

There are lots of qualitative reasons for agencies to invest in sales enablement, but there are also quantitative reasons. After all, sales enablement is all about implementing methods and tactics that maximize the productivity of the sales team. When that happens, revenues increase, and your agency is simply more likely to retain (and increase) retainers by keeping clients longer.

Sales enablement is one of many ways to help manage leads better, and that directly relates to closing more deals and increasing profits.

How Sales Enablement Bridges the Gap between Sales and Marketing

While salespeople have traditionally thought of themselves as a somewhat separate group, inbound marketing illustrates that any lack of alignment between marketing and sales teams is a surefire way to be less effective with that inbound campaign.

Therefore, if your agency can demonstrate that they bridge this existing gap, your clients are more likely to see greater success, better results, and increased profits.

Inbound marketing—when it incorporates proper sales enablement—allows sales and marketing to work collaboratively and pull from their communal knowledge base to better address the concerns of leads, educate their potential customers, and provide value through strategically devised content.

This collaboration should permeate every aspect of the inbound campaigns, from the initial strategy that goes into identifying buyer personas to the creation of the actual content and sales collateral. The two groups should even work together to determine the parameters of their lead-qualifying system, so everyone is on the same page as to when a lead should be handed from one group to the next and successfully taken through the sales cycle.

If your agency does this consistently for your clients, you have a much greater chance of finding long-term success with those clients.

1. Sales enablement Facilitates Sales Buy-In

Inbound marketing and its collaborative techniques only work if you have total buy-in from every group involved. If marketing doesn’t believe in the power of the campaign being initiated, that campaign is put at a serious disadvantage. By the same token, sales needs to also be fully invested in all inbound efforts.

Because sales has traditionally been somewhat separate from marketing, it’s perhaps even more important to ensure you get that buy-in from the sales members. Focusing on sales enablement—that is, making it a priority to facilitate the sales team reaching its goals—is one essential way to accomplish that.

2. Align Content Strategies with Markeitng and Sales

With sales buy-in its imperative that you have them involved in the content strategy process. Especially when it comes to creating buyer personas and specific content for sales.

Sales is the front-facing side of any business and they have valuable insight into prospective customers challenges, needs, desires and roles. 

Sales input will provide you much better results when developing a content strategy, developing buyer personas for different stages of the buyers journey and creating effective sales collateral.

3. Incorporate Technology into Your Sales Enablement Efforts

Another important way to demonstrate to your clients that you give sales enablement its proper emphasis is by utilizing the technology that is best going to aid sales teams.

One essential tool is a CRM, and as an agency, it’s important to walk all your clients through how to maximize this powerful software.

Failing to harness technology for your clients can lead to inefficiencies and lessened success with the campaigns. To get the most out of you and your clients’ inbound efforts, the relevant technologies should play roles in the campaigns from the outset.

4. Provide Coaching and Training throughout the Inbound Marketing Campaign

Inbound marketing can mean a lot of changes for a company. Genuine collaboration between marketing and sales might be a somewhat foreign concept. The technologies to streamline inbound efforts might also seem unfamiliar.

Whatever aspect your client needs a helping hand with, a successful agency will be there to answer questions, provide guidance, and offer any coaching or training necessary to make inbound marketing make sense and work for that particular client.

There’s a widely held misconception regarding inbound marketing, and that’s the idea that it takes a long time to get any effective inbound marketing campaign off the ground.  While it’s true that inbound marketing is a building process that takes time to see concrete results, it is very possible to plan, strategize, and implement an effective campaign in a three-month window.

How to Launch an Inbound Marketing Campaign in Three Months

A Step-by-Step Guide to Effectively and Efficiently Starting Your Inbound Marketing Efforts

1. Create a core brand positioning strategy and message.

The first thing you want to do is create your brand positioning strategy. This statement identifies who you are, positions you within your market, and conveys your specific value within that market.

A good brand positioning statement clearly aligns your marketing and sales teams toward common goals and heavily informs your strategic, targeted content creation.

2. Determine if you’re going to outsource or tackle your inbound marketing campaign in-house.

Once you have your foundational brand positioning statement, the next step is to figure out who in your company will be doing what for the inbound marketing campaign. Some positions to consider include the following:

• Inbound marketing strategists (including SEO strategists).
• Copywriters.
• Designers.
• Web developers.
• Internal account managers.
• Paid ad specialists (to drive demand generation).

If you don’t have the right people in-house for every aspect, don’t worry. You can use a third party for none, some, or all of this process. Those third parties can be inbound marketing agencies or consultants, freelancers, or even individuals with relevant skillsets.

However you choose to divvy the work, you want to ensure you have the right people to deliver on your strategy. That means excelling at the individual task but also having a big-picture mind-set in order to ensure your work properly aligns sales and marketing and pushes the whole team toward common goals.

3. Define your projected goals and what you want your inbound marketing efforts to achieve.

If you don’t have explicitly created goals, you have no way of gauging how effective your inbound marketing efforts have been. Therefore, it’s important to understand and define both your goals and business objectives (as they relate to inbound marketing). Also remember to create short-term goals as well as long-term goals.

For the greatest chance at success, make sure to only choose SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.

When you’re in the process of creating these goals, it’s imperative you have the input of both your sales and marketing teams. These goals should be shared and beneficial to everyone on the team, so you need that valuable input from all sides of the company. A service-level agreement (SLA) should be created between marketing and sales to facilitate the creation of these shared goals.

4. Define your industry verticals and your buyer personas.  

A crucial aspect of inbound strategy is identifying what industry (or industries) you will be targeting and what specific buyer personas relevant to that industry you will be creating content for.

If you are a small or even medium business, be extremely targeted with your initial inbound marketing efforts—especially if you want to be as effective as possible in that first three-month window. That means focusing on no more than three verticals with your inbound efforts, as diverting your time and resources in too many directions can dilute your results.

Once you’ve identified the vertical or verticals you want to target, identify the relevant buyer personas. (A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It can include information such as age, gender, income, geographic area, and so on.)

Your content should be created around these buyer personas and every stage they go through on the buyer’s journey. In this way, you have targeted, relevant content to answer questions, provide information, and address concerns of your buyer personas at the top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel.

Don’t forget, you might be dealing with different personas at different stages of the sales cycle. For example, maybe a manager will be making decisions at the middle of the sales funnel, but a C-level executive will be making the final call at the bottom of the sales funnel. If that’s the case in your vertical, your buyer persona strategy and associated content should reflect that.

5. Assess your current website and content for its alignment with your inbound marketing strategy. 

More than likely, your existing website copy and content will not perfectly align with your newly defined brand positioning statement and marketing strategy. Therefore, you’ll have to determine what content you can repurpose to target those buyer personas (at each stage of the buyer’s journey) and what pieces you’ll need to create from scratch.

6. Build your inbound marketing and inbound sales strategy.

With all the groundwork laid, it’s time to put your concrete strategy together.

Once again, for content, you want to assess what you already have and then repurpose or create from scratch content that targets your buyer personas throughout the buyers journey. (This strategy will include SEO tactics, such as keyword research.) You will want markeitng  and sales involved in the content development process. Markeitng will drive the content development process for marketing and sale collateral. Sales should be involved in input for the content creation process, with their detailed knowledge of prospects challenges, needs and desires. 

From there, you want to put together your conversion paths for both markeitng  and sales. This includes how you plan to generate leads and then nurture those leads through the sales cycle, aided by tools such as calls to action, landing pages, thank you pages, e-mails, and so on.

Once those elements are in place, you’ll then assess what technology you require to effectively and efficiently implement that strategy. This can include everything from customer relationship management (CRM) tools and marketing automation software to a shared content catalog and analytical tracking software. Integration of technology is a crucial piece because it allows you to more efficiently utilize and maximize your strategically created content.

7. Ensure you promote strong conversion through your website.

Your website is arguably one of your most powerful marketing and selling tools.

To be maximally effective, it should contain the following elements:

• Aesthetically pleasing, clean pages.
• To-the-point content and graphics.
• Easy-to-navigate structure.
• Sound SEO strategy within the pages as well as optimized content.
• Calls to action that lead to landing pages for specific pieces of content.
• An educational blog that promotes nurturing a lead through the sales cycle.

Strong conversion architecture doesn’t happen without planning and forethought. Make sure your site is consciously designed to align with and promote your inbound strategy, lead generation efforts, and lead conversion.

8. Publish optimized, strategic content at least twice a week.

Content can mean a variety of things, such as the following:

• Blog posts.
• Videos.
• Premium content, such as e-books or whitepapers.
• Case studies.
• Interactive tools, such as calculators..

Especially in this first three months, when your SEO rankings are more likely to be low, don’t forget paid advertising is one way to garner leads before you start organically earning visitors to your site.

9. Promote your published content through a variety of channels.

Your content can be as strategic and optimized as possible, but if you don’t then promote it, fewer people are going to be interacting with that content. Therefore, you should focus on the following:

• Build your social media channels in order to promote your content.
• Participate in relevant forums.
• Make a subscription option for your blog.
• Utilize the power of e-mail campaigns.
• Promote your business through paid advertising.

10 Review your site, blog, and content analytics weekly.

You want to constantly evaluate and assess how your various tools and individual pieces of content are performing. By doing this careful analysis and data examination, you can ascertain what needs to be changed versus what’s garnering success, and you can use those cues to inform your subsequent content creation.

See What Your Inbound Marketing Can Accomplish in Three Months

While a steady supply of leads and site traffic is often the result of your inbound marketing efforts over time, that doesn’t mean you can’t strategize and implement the solid foundation of your inbound marketing campaign in a much shorter window.

As long as you’re deliberate and methodical about the ten steps listed, you can be on your way to sustainable lead generation and lead conversion in a few short months.