When should startups start digital marketing, content marketing, or inbound marketing? It doesn’t matter which synonym you choose to anchor your businesses future too.

For most companies that hope to compete and grow in the next several years, you basically have three choices for how you can address marketing, demand generation, keeping the top, middle, and bottom of your funnel filled at healthy levels -- levels that make your sales team, CEO, and leadership team happy.

Many small companies have a single in-house marketing person or are about to hire their first in-house marketing person.

A lot of times the CEO does not realize the changes in buyer behavior, where as much as 70% or more of their research and decision making is now over before they are ready to speak with you.

Outbound marketing, or traditional marketing, relies on interrupting people in an attempt to get them to listen to you.

What’s a great example of outbound marketing? You turn on prime-time television, watch a 30-minute sitcom, and realize every seven-to-nine minutes you are interrupted for one-to-two minutes by several companies’ self-serving messages.

A business is not done once it generates a client or revenue source.

We live in a world where what you say about your brand is no longer what your brand is. Google coined this instance the ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth).

If you want to think of some parallels between Spotify, Netflix, and Sirius Radio versus where most of the SMBs are, the one thing they all have in common is their recurring revenue business models.

The super important aspect of a recurring revenue business model is making sure when a prospect jumps over from an opportunity to a new client; you continue delighting the heck out of them. 

At the end of the day, the goals for sales should be to get found early:

• By the right buyers
• In the right places
• At the right time
• In the right context

Do businesses need a website lead generation program to support sales? Yes. 

When considering what we can do with website content, customer service, and marketing to engender trust, there is a whole bunch of things people are typically looking for to determine whether we are building trust at scale (ordered from most trustworthy to least trustworthy):

• Information from a services/customer service group
• Information from a marketing group
• Information from a sales group
• Information from a PR group
• Information from an advertising group

Hubspot’s 2016 Inbound Sales Day featured its very own CEO, Brian Halligan, to explain how sales have evolved and why it is prudent salespeople follow. In an interview with Michael Pici—Hubspot’s Director of Sales—Halligan explained the difference between sales when he initially started his career (in the 90’s) to today.

“In the 1990’s everyone had a phone on their desk,” explained Halligan, “When you called them something very interesting happened… the phone rang on their desk, they didn’t know who it was from, they picked it up anyway.”

According to Hubspot’s 2016 State of Inbound Report, the biggest challenge for companies around the world is generating traffic and leads. This problem likely stems from the marketing division, who are typically responsible for generating leads for the sales team.

In turn, the buying stage the sales department struggles the most with is the very beginning. This likely stems from the marketing department passing poor leads to the sales division or from the sales division approaching the prospect too early in their buyer’s journey.