If you’re running a business and you want to increase your efficiency in closing those big ticket sales, then you should practice account-based marketing. ABM is a B2B strategy where marketing and sales work together to close big, complex deals at a discrete number of target accounts. And the higher your price point, the more likely ABM will be worth your while. Anni offers up three things to focus on when starting ABM at your company.

It can be tempting to just guess which type of content will entice visitors most and eventually convert into leads. But basing your marketing decisions off a hunch is risky business. A/B testing helps you compare two versions of something against each other to determine which one performs better. And Anni lets you in on the three things you should start A/B testing right now.

There’s one question that haunts every marketer: “What’s the ROI of this marketing campaign?” But with so much data to sift through, where should you start? Multi-touch attribution ties marketing actions to revenue. It tells you which interactions someone had with your brand on their journey to becoming a customer. Anni walks through the six different types of multi-touch attribution reporting and helps you decide which one is right for your company.

This season, we’re looking at advanced marketing techniques. And one of the most advanced ways to market, sell, and service customers involves the use of artificial intelligence. We break down how to correct duplicate data and clean up the rest of your data efficiently using AI and machine learning. While AI might not be our sentient overlords just yet, it can help companies serve the right content, to the right customers, at the right time, right now.

Smarketing combines sales and marketing. Great. Easy etymology. But what exactly does it mean? Smarketing is a team meeting, where your sales and marketing teams come together to collaborate on a shared project and solve problems. We go inside HubSpot headquarters with Alex Girard as he sets out to put on HubSpot’s next Smarketing. Not only have we never pulled the curtain back on this type of meeting, it’s also our first attempt at a live, remote Smarketing. As such, things don’t always go...

Your company needs to have a clear revenue goal. But unless your teams know how to contribute to it, your goals aren’t going to do you a whole lot of good. So you'll need to help marketing and sales each understand their role in achieving that goal. And the best way to do that? Implement a service level agreement, or an SLA, between the two teams. An SLA means Marketing promises a certain number of leads to Sales, and Sales promises to contact those leads within a certain timeframe.

Marcus Sheridan was burnt out. Each day, he was waking up early, driving two to three hours, sitting at a sales appointment for two to three hours, and driving home for two to three more hours. He didn't get to see his wife. He didn't get to see my kids. What was eating away at his time? Not getting to work with more qualified buyers. So to solve that, Marcus redefined his content strategy and starting selling at an 80 percent close rate.

Marketing qualified leads, or MQLs, are leads that are both a good fit for your offering and are ready to have a sales conversation. But what about hand-raisers, or good fit but unready sales leads, or poor fit leads? We’ll set up a lead qualification matrix to help you sort through good fit and poor fit leads, based on sales readiness. That way, you can send the best leads to sales, and leave the rest for marketing to continue nurturing.

We’d all like to believe that everyone’s a good fit for what we’re selling. But that type of thinking will only end up wasting countless hours and angering countless more prospects. You need to qualify which leads are a good fit and which ones are a poor fit. This episode, we walkthrough how you can align marketing and sales in pipeline creation and create an ideal customer profile.

Look, audacious goals can inspire people and teams to accomplish things they never thought possible. Dream big! Right? But ridiculous, ludicrous goals can also crush a team's morale. We help you define your company’s vision, set achievable goals, and align your sales and marketing along the way.

What’s actually involved in making a sales enablement strategy? We break out the three key elements -- a clear goal, a target buyer, and a content strategy -- to help get you on your way to implementing a successful sales enablement strategy at your company.

The internet has completely changed the way we sell. Buyers are more informed and now hold all the power in the sales process. Sales enablement is all about bringing marketing and sales together to keep up with today's empowered buyers. Your sales team needs processes and high-performing content, and marketing is just the department to give it to you. But first, you need to align both teams.

This season, we’re looking at how to develop a marketing-driven sales enablement strategy for your company. And the first thing you might be asking yourself is, ‘What exactly is sales enablement?” Well, great start. Sales enablement is the processes, content, and technology that helps sales teams sell efficiently and at a higher velocity. You can think of sales enablement as a cohesive unit, between your sales and marketing teams, with its own shared language and goals.

Marketers have gone from optimizing for desktops, mobile, and now … it’s all about voice. Matt and Jorie talk about the rise of voice search, how it will change your content strategy, and what you can expect to to come in the world of content and SEO.

The internet was built on links, and link building is still an incredibly important aspect of a successful SEO strategy. But it’s not as easy as it once was, and there are no quick wins in improving your site’s authority. In today’s episode, Matt and Jorie go through the history of backlinks in SEO and explain how you can create content people want to link to.

When it comes to content, you can’t just set it and forget it. You need to create a system for checking on the health of your content, identifying what’s the core issue causing a dip in traffic, and figuring out how to fix the problem. In this episode, Matt and Jorie, talk about how to use your existing library of content to get better results.

Mastering international SEO can seem like an insurmountable task. There are a lot of options to consider and the best advice is tailored to your specific site. In this episode, Matt and Jorie do some fact-checking and break down the options for creating an international site structure and marketing plan. Plus, Matt explains how to begin building authority, in whatever language or region you’re looking to break into.

There are a lot of marketers working off decade-old advice for SEO and optimization. With more competition and more distractions online, you need a new playbook to get the biggest return for your content marketing. In this episode, Jorie and Matt talk about how to update your content strategy and drive more organic traffic for the keywords that matter most to your business.

Featured snippets are taking over search results and creating new competition to rank in position zero. In this episode, Jorie and Matt explain what featured snippets are, why they matter, and how to create content that’s optimized for them. They also talk about the ripple effect featured snippets have had on how the web works and what it means for the future of SEO.

Marketers can’t just focus on ranking for text-based content anymore. Today, search engine results pages are more diverse than ever — from images to video to knowledge boxes and more. In our first episode of Skill Up, Jorie and Matt dig into all of the different ways Google is serving up different content types and how searcher intent should inform your SEO strategy.