You now have a specific area to share knowledge, best practices or anything you wish to support your customers with. There are numerous benefits for capturing your support content within the Google+ platform:

• Social value. Content which points back to articles on your site can continue to drive both social and SEO value. They invite opportunities for +1′s.
• Knowledge base. Email is a one-to-one, private conversation. You open up the conversation by broadcasting to a larger audience. Furthermore, the history can be searched and explored for past answers.
• Tribe building. Your customers can be part of a select audience that receives special advice, insights or offers. It revolves around your content that you provide ongoing in a private circle. It is a forum with benefits.
• Thought Leadership. Posting your content and sharing it with a select group continues to position your leadership. Share insights that help to benefit your customers – increase their health, grow their business or help them grow. It is a platform that allows you to provide value.
• Interactivity. The dialogue around a problem can be expanded to benefit a group and commenting back and forth creates passion, clarity and resolution to challenges everyone is facing.

There are lots of different systems for building support or help desk systems. However, consider using Google+ and explore the use case. The platform itself has intrinsic leverage comparatively. It makes it easy to stay connected and to deliver ongoing service and loyalty for those that pay you for your products and services while getting real feedback quickly.

What do you think?

When a buyer is wanting something, they search and look specifically for their desired product or service. The choices may be numerous. Your competitors are just a click away. If they click off of your website, then you can easily be forgotten in their continual navigation.

Imagine what you do when you do start to hone in on some choices after searching. You gravitate to places of value. You are seeking validation. Here is how validation works within an inbound marketing process:

• Content Which Educates. Sellers think about what they sell all the time. They forget that buyers think about many diverse things and have limited attention. They are new to a domain you are fluent and obsessive about. They don’t even know the right questions to ask. If you have content which educates then their searching and navigation continually draws them into your rich resources to help them understand value and orient themselves to your industry.
• What Others Say. When the buyer decides that you are worth engaging because of what they see and feel from your inbound marketing systems, then they find validation in what others say. Testimonials, social media and other forums and sites which lend opinion about you are important. They build a picture of your credibility. It’s all out there. Be sure your goodwill and success stories are captured and searchable.
• Congruence. We have all experienced businesses which have remarkable marketing but they disappoint when the first touch point with the customer happens. Unresponsiveness, uncaring, rudeness or complexity create incongruence with the message. Validation requires that what the buyer experiences aligns with what they expect from what they read and research.

There are anonymous visitors that are checking you out right now and trying to decide if you provide value and are a good choice. If you can think through each step of your process with these points in mind, then trust grows and you win new business. Fix the broken links and work it continually. The battle for our customers’ minds and business is relentless.

How can your own process work better?

If you court your buyer too early, you can violate trust.  It is intrusive and unsynced with how they would prefer to move through the process of buying.

At some point, a switch occurs.  When the buyer feels ready, they move into engagement.  Selling becomes easy at this point.  The hard work beforehand is a process.  The actual sale is an event.  Create a personalized, predictable and relevant process and you create repeatable events for your business.

Here is the heavy lifting that marketing automation does before the event of a sale:

1. Creates Awareness:  The marketplace is saturated and noisy.  Marketing automation gets past this noise by connecting with the buyer in an impactful and precise way based on their behaviors and preferences.  It is targeted when a well-designed marketing strategy has been implemented.
2. Educates: Assume you know much, much more than your buyer.  You think about your product or service all the time.  Your buyer is buying when they need something.  There is a long list of items they have and you are one item in time and attention they are focused on.  They want to learn as much as possible, preferably from you.  Your marketing automation strategy should empower the buyer with knowledge which you have.
3. Builds Trust: Your brand becomes part of the flesh and blood of your marketing automation system and touchpoints.  Frequency helps to spotlight your brand.  Insight and expertise positions you in the mind of the customer as the leader.  They want to pick the leader.  Effective marketing automation strategies build trust by positioning your leadership and your care by adding value as they are learning.
4. Measures Interest: You can’t keep calling your unseen buyer.  However, their digital body language is telling you many things if you can capture it and analyze it.  You can see what content they are interested in, how they move through a decision tree and the level of interest they have ongoing.  Scoring what is invisible and surfacing it for sales readies the conversation your company will eventually have.
5. Qualifies Leads: If your expensive sales team is wasting time talking to people that will never buy, then it is a waste of resources and money.  Allow your system to direct such uninterested prospects to some kind of referral nurturing campaign.  The workload for your sales team can be focused and cut down by seeing your marketing automation system percolate with the most qualified leads.
6. Positions The Sales Meeting: Imagine someone who is already sold.  They are ready to do business with you.  They know your value proposition and they trust you.  This is the result of marketing automation executed well.  Your buyer feels like they know you because of the hard work of your marketing automation processes.

There are two ways to sell – you call people or they call you.  Calling people has natural limits.  You can only do it so often.  It is linear and inefficient.  It takes manpower and will power.

People calling you can scale as a business process.  It affords you better opportunities with higher levels of effectiveness.

Take a look at your selling process.  Think through how it works and what you would want your buyer to experience.  Imagine a process which connects personally and moves the buyer forward towards the sale.

What would stop you from implementing such a system?

Marketing automation works.  Engaging and nurturing leads with a real-time, personal process keeps attention, builds trust and wins business.  Our team has built many successful marketing automation systems and campaigns.  It becomes a vital asset to the business of our customers.

But, not all marketing automation works.  Typically, a company hears about the promises that marketing automation brings and then proceeds to try and make it work.  Here are a few reasons why failure happens and how you can avoid them:

1. Lack of Talent

If you only have traditional marketing people on your team that are adept at advertising or PR campaigns, then this is the number one reason for failure.  Marketing automation is hard, not easy.  It requires a combination of skills including IT, developers, copywriters, analysts, copyeditors, project managers, graphic designers, web developers, video editors and creative strategists.

It is an expensive payroll to bring all these roles together.  It is hard to find this all in one person.  Choosing self-service rather than full-service may already doom your project to failure if you don’t have the right talent.

2. Poor Marketing Strategy

We approach our marketing automation projects with strategy first.  A marketing automation campaign roadmap needs to be well established to define what the buying process looks like.

Putting a bunch of forms together that do a bit of lead scoring is like driving a race car at 35 to the grocery store every day.  It was designed for so much more.

3. Fear Of Failure

The likelihood that your marketing automation campaign will immediately convert leads to customers is rare.  We are dealing with human beings and seeking to get to their motivations and decisions.  The goal is not to launch something perfect.  The goal is to launch something that is measurable and connects.  In so doing, you can continue optimizing and refining.

If we see a major drop in a lead process for downloading content, then we address that step with both art and science to drive the next step.  Marketing automation teaches you what works and connects.  It is an iterative process which requires commitment.

4. Silos Of Marketing And Sales

When the salesperson engages and with what message is a critical component.  If there has been a tradition of marketing and sales working separately – the former creating demand and the latter closing deals – then this has to be quickly overcome in the project scope and implementation.

Sales team members need to be brought into the project for launching a campaign and understand the experience prospective buyers are undergoing before they call for a meeting.  They have to be able to read their digital footprints in the team CRM system, not just the analog outbound sales activities.

5. Leadership Gap

Give me a leader over a marketer any day.  This is a critical component to making marketing automation work.  There is a team of talent that has to be managed, business processes to be defined and systems that need engineering.  A creative, technical, business leader will drive success.

We have seen too many junior people try and take the reigns and they are the root cause of failure.  The vision, strategy and execution all have to come together for success.

Beyond Features And Benefits

Note that there was not commentary on the features and benefits of individual marketing automation software systems.  Marketers like to look at those because it takes the lens off of ourselves.  After all, technology cannot fight back.

We can interchange marketing automation campaigns between systems easily and make them work.  The systems today are remarkable and are far above the thresholds for effective strategy for results.  It is unlikely the features will be exhausted in the array of different software available today.

It comes down to whether you can drive any of these systems, connect with the buyer and create a buying experience which is personal, relevant and timely.  Avoid the failure points and ensure your team, whether in-house or via partnership, can take this powerful instrument and make music rather than noise.

Feel free to comment below.

Inbound marketing has the following conversion points:

1. Visitors: These are a high quantity of people that find you from search or marketing efforts.  They visit your site and will engage your content if it is relevant and remarkable.  If you do not meet this criteria, then you lose visitor stickiness.
2. Leads: A lead is someone who chooses to exchange their anonymity for something of value.  As trust is built from your content, then their eagerness for a higher level of value means that they identify themselves.  They will give you their email address and name when they get access to white papers, video, guides, ebooks and other quality produced items that help them solve a problem.
3. Prospects: These are people that move through the marketing funnel and say, “Yes,” to engaging your sales process.  They agree to a meeting, a trial of software or purchasing an item.  High trust and/or high pain has created this opportunity for your business.

Conversion

Think about when you buy.  It is a process which starts with awareness moves through education and then escalates to action based on trust.

If you disrupt the natural buying process by injecting your salesmanship or not providing a logical next step, then a conversion point is affected.  In our attention economy, it is difficult to regain ground.

Each of the steps need to be monitored and walked with analytics that reveal how your buyers are moving through the funnel.  As you are building your process, it becomes an exercise in refinement and iteration.  Here is what to look for:

• Content Interest.  Understand what your visitors are looking at specifically and how deep they delve.  Their affinities will provide insight into how to create further content which builds upon the initial search.
• Call To Action Value. Your value piece to generate a lead takes up valuable real estate with each content piece.  Ensure there is a logical and attractive next step to your call to action.  Analyzing the number of new emails you get will determine success.  Drive the ratio between Leads to Visitors by carefully reviewing where the drop offs are between the content consumption and the actual sign-ups for your value pieces.
• Nurturing.  Continue to build momentum and trust with Leads by delivering ongoing value and nurturing.  Timeliness and personal messages which connect based on their behaviors are required.  This is an intelligent marketing automation process that has responsive engagement with the prospect.  Nurturing is the appropriate strategy where premature sales engagement might otherwise be used.

You may be getting visitors, but converting them to viable sales opportunities requires focus and systems to drive the conversion points.  These areas of iteration will be the crux points for making your inbound marketing strategies and systems a continuing asset for lead generation and lead conversion in your business.

What areas can you optimize for helping visitors become prospects?  Feel free to comment below.

While corporate speak has continuous internal eddy currents focused on nomenclature and smart talk, results are what will matter at the end of the day.  Repositioning how marketing automation sounds may make it more amenable to certain high level executives.  However, at the end of the day, what matters is less about automating marketing processes and more about marketing in the new economy.

The problems persist:

• Buyers buy when they are ready
• We do not like to be interrupted
• Advertising is dead
• Buying is self-service
• Selling is typically a formality
• Products and services are bought, not sold
• Buying can be quantified
• Traditional marketers cannot hide

It’s a brave new world.  Your marketing automation tool is not going to grow revenue by itself.  The team behind the system has more to do with success than which tool they use.  How your content is presented and how you iterate to create a logical, relevant and personal path for the buyer is what will create the value from such systems.

As you are seeking to adopt or implement a marketing automation system, remember the strategy is a thousand times more important than your tool.  Tools make for great psychological pillars.  They comfort us and buttress us with comfort.  However, you still have to build campaigns, content and logic which connects and helps buyers buy.  Design, writing, analysis and leadership are the costs which should truly be captured in the discussion.

Call it what you may, but I will take a great marketing strategy over a marketing automation system any day.  With talent, I can make many of the systems get the same result.

What are your thoughts?

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As a content marketing agency, we focus heavily on the buying process in recognition of the new rules of marketing.  Products and services are bought, not sold.  The access to information today makes it easy for buyers to understand what they want before they have to talk to a salesperson.  Here are four strategies we focus on with customers for effective content marketing to generate leads and win new business:

1. Get Found Online

When you want something, you search.  Google is the gateway to buying.  You are looking for something specific when you search from the millions of pieces of content out there.  As a buyer, your search hones in on results from the first page and possibly the second.

As the seller, you need to be found.  Getting found is highly competitive and requires strategy around the keywords of your content, your site authority and your relevance on the web.  This is all without losing the natural tone and connection of your content.

Your content must be focused with embedded keywords which allow you to get found.  Your systems must support your authority and relevance online.  For your content to count, it must be found.  Ensure your systems support this critical criteria.

2. Educate The Buyer

Getting found gives you an initial opportunity to connect. Your content has to provide ideas, strategies, steps or something tangible.  There must be action and purpose to engage the attention and desire of the online buyer.  Rarely will a person just click on something they find and just buy.  The pain has to be immediate and high.  Yet so many companies are set up with a “Buy Now” only option.  It’s ridiculous.  The majority of your visitors are not ready.

They are looking to get educated first.  Thus, your content which helps you get found should provide such value.  Educate them on how your products, services and market work.  Explain the parameters for making a decision for what you offer.

You may think about what you do for 40 plus hours per week.  Your buyer has you on a list of many other things they are concerned with.  Don’t assume they know what you know.  Help them understand and learn terminology, what to consider and how to make a decision.  This positions your buyer to feel empowered and confident for any ensuing conversations they may opt towards.

3. Package Your Value Systematically

Your content should be layered in such a way to provide increasing value.  We call this a “breadcrumb trail” at AscendWorks.  If you are found and the buyer finds credibility in your public content, then offer richer knowledge and value with private content.  The most effective way to manage this is with a marketing automation system.  Video, white papers, ebooks and an assortment of packaging for content needs to be positioned for those who want more and are serious.

Your strategy should include an opt-in and measuring of subscribers and downloaders.  In this way, automated and personal follow-up can occur with a lead who has made themselves known.

Ensure your second layer of content is organized and managed in a system that can capture leads, follow-up with interested buyers and score buying behaviors.

4. Implement Automated Lead Scoring

As users frequent your content or act on calls to action with your public or private content, they increase in value to your organization.  This value should be captured in real-time and measured.  All leads are not equal.

At different points, follow-up in the form of even higher levels of value or direct contact should naturally be introduced into the buyer’s experience.  Lead scoring accomplishes this within a marketing automation system setup.  Architect a decision tree which provides the right follow-up at the right time, either digitally or directly.  Ask yourself, “Would I welcome the timing of this communication or call?” to avoid selling prematurely.

If content is part of the touchpoint, narrow it to be highly valuable by helping the buyer with an increase in revenue, productivity, joy, knowledge or what is truly tangible.  You must know what is important to the buyer and deliver.

Real Value

All businesses are in the content marketing business.  We have enormous choice.  With choice, we need education.  If you can set up your systems and provide real value with thought leadership and concrete strategies, you will win fans and buyers.  There are no shortcuts.  The winners today spend a lot of time connecting and having a direct dialogue with buyers.  This process takes shape much earlier and is initiated by the buyer online.

How would these strategies help you grow your business?

Old Mindsets

Premature selling is the root cause of many organizations who have not transitioned to the new economy.  Their old mindsets have them doing the following:

1. Interrupt prospects
2. Continual follow up
3. Sell, sell, sell

Effort is confused with results.  Success is a low percentage.  Typical numbers may be 2 out of 100 cold calls get a meeting or 2 out of 100 mailers got a call.  All the while, the question of what happens to your brand with the other 98% is ignored.  You damage your brand.  You don’t get a second shot to make a first impression.  But, that matters little to someone who only cares about selling.  It’s part of the delusion in a sales mindset.  The carnage and failure rate is ignored.

What About Buying?

Think about how you buy.  When did you want a salesperson to call you about software, services or products you were not sure you needed yet?  Likely later, rather than sooner.  Here is how a buying process works:

1. Have need
2. Search for need
3. Become aware of offerings
4. Educate myself
5. Look for value and content
6. Subscribe
7. Request meeting
8. Confirm credibility
9. Buy

The buyer is largely in a self-service mode to get to the goal you both want – a sale.  How is this process managed effectively today?  Marketing automation systems which are set up with multiple campaigns that nurture the buyer based on their preferences help your brand build trust in the mind of the buyer.  It helps the buyer become ready to engage you and purchase.

Types of Marketing Automation Campaigns

Let’s assume that the various marketing automation systems today can get the job done of nurturing and building trust.  You will likely start with some standard automated marketing campaigns which are based on specific buyer profiles.  In our marketing automation consulting, here are a few which nurture and convert leads to customers:

Education Campaign

Nurture by providing education on your industry and offering.  Buyers think about your value offering a fraction of the time your company incessantly talks about itself.  Help them with the knowledge gap by providing valuable information which allows them to be in an intelligble conversation with your sales team.

Use Case Campaign

Help the buyer see the use cases of your offering and the success stories.  This builds a picture for identifying with your product or service in solving their problem.  The envisioning should make your value proposition indispensable with regards to your competition.  You must establish leadership and uniqueness.

Branding Campaign

If you are in an unknown category, this campaign should drive your leadership position.  Capitalize on the PR and credibility you have established in your market space and educate the buyer on your category.

Buying Campaign

Explain what it means to be a customer and how your team supports and brings added value in the context of ongoing relationship.  This helps build relationship in the mind of the buyer and trust.  Explain your processes and create transparency with how your service delivery is different and reliable.

Imagine that a visitor to your site engages one of these funnels or another custom developed marketing automation process.  Their nurturing can be measured for effectiveness by ongoing scoring and triggers in your CRM system.  The respective buying funnel should be designed to help a smaller sales team engage when your system tells you who is ready.  You will see the digital behaviors each nurtured lead has in their contact record.  Clicks on your content, subscribing to additional value pieces or response to a call to action are more valuable in this system than a follow-up phone call with the buyers’ guard up.

By the time sales engages, your buyer should relate to you and your brand with high trust.  They know you and trust you because you provided value which connects in a relevant, personal and timely way.

What are the campaigns you believe your buyers care about and need to say, “Yes?”  Feel free to comment below.

Define Your Category Specifically And Narrowly

Being broad in your categorization is a losing strategy.  It opens the door for comparison.  If you say you are a car dealer, then you are generic in the mind of the buyer.  If you specialize in exotic European cars, then you are in a category of few.  If you are the premier Ferrari dealer in the southwest region of Texas, then you are special.

Your category will either dilute you in the mind of the buyer or specialize you.  Being special affords you the opportunity to position with expertise.  There is not a lot to comparison shop with.  At AscendWorks, we define our category as the leading inbound marketing strategy consulting company.  We have not met anyone who puts the process of lead generation, lead nurturing and lead conversion together in an integrated process and strategy as we do.  It is a narrow category in which we are the leader.  We have mastered it over years and our customers understand this brand.

You are always asked what you do.  Be sure to use the opportunity to be specific and narrow in your definition.  If you are being compared in the mind of your customer, then listen carefully and further refine your definition.

Brand By Leadership

If everyone needs what you offer, then you better be the leader.  The leader is the perceived expert and first in the category.  Establishing leadership today is done with content and PR.  Are you talked about and are you written about?  The reason is that our fingers do the walking today.  We search for what we are looking for.  We are looking for authority, credibility and leadership when we buy.

The world is not fair or balanced.  It is highly imbalanced.  You do not recall who took fourth at an Olympic event, PGA golf tournament or Grammy awards.  The first place winner is disproportionately lauded and celebrated.  First is the brand leader.

Thus, if you define your category narrowly and you are the leader, then your position in the mind of the buyer affords you disproportionate attention.  This is even more important today.  With the internet, the imbalance is further wedged between number one and two.  Facebook, Twitter and Amazon get to take the spoils of their respective categories.  They are first.  Second is not even known well.  Their leadership amplifies their winnings.

Likewise, your opportunity to be the leader should be a primary strategy to position your brand.  Leadership is not cheap.  It is hard work and a relentless push towards positioning with authority.  The prize is worth it.

Provide Meaning For Your Brand

When I say your brand, I should have clarity about its meaning.  We use phenomenal brands in our vocabulary.

“Pass me a Kleenex.”

“Can you Xerox that?”

“FedEx it to me today.”

Millions of dollars have been spent to use these simple names as part of our lexicon.  They become verbs, adjectives and proper nouns.

as-cend-works [uh-send-wurks], n. the leading inbound marketing strategy consulting company.

Everything you do in your marketing is to create meaning for your brand.  The colors, content, work, service is to drive the shorthand definition in the mind of the buyer and help your customers tell others the meaning of your brand simply.

It used to be that marketers could throw dollars at you to drive this meaning.  Today, your market will respond with your hard work in content, social media and relentless work on your systems for driving your brand definition.  Consistency and clarity is key.  Your products and services merely reinforce the idea you germinated in my mind.  Ensure your marketing systems are set up to position you and define you specifically.

Keep Brands Separate

Zappos sells shoes.  Apple sells consumer computer devices.  If Zappos starts to sell what Apple sells and vice-versa, then there is brand confusion.  They would both be disadvantaged.  In our minds, we know Zappos for what they do and Apple for what they do.  If they wanted to enter into new markets, it is better to narrow the category and create a new brand, otherwise, they dilute the power of their own brand in our minds.

It is a lot of work to maintain many brands, much less just one.  If your products or services compromise clarity about one brand offering, then do not meld them together.  Protect the definition of your brand and build a new one.

Think about the buyer.  Buyers think simplistically.  We use shorthand and stereotypes.  Grasping something like a hybrid motor scooter and bike only compromises our own thoughts.  It is heavy like a scooter and light like a bike?  It is great at nothing, then.  Your own brand is that important.  It needs uncompromising focus, definition and leadership to win in the mind of the buyer.  Don’t compromise.

Branding Is The Strategy

You want both – a quality product or service offering and a remarkable brand.  They’re not a trade-off.   There are numerous stories of great products and services that fail.  Look at the reason.  It is a poor brand.  Being great but not being perceived as great means losing in business.  Being the purist and insisting on your intrinsic value misses the customer completely.  We can’t make prospects buy.  They buy based on their perceptions and emotions when they pick you or your competitor.  They buy the brand.

What is your brand and how would you like to be known with your customers?  Feel free to comment below.

Here are the three parts of an effective inbound marketing system which need to be in place.

Lead Generation

With so many choices today, you must be found by someone looking for you.  Getting found is based on your lead generation systems that position your content and syndicate it on the web.  There are a lot of scams focused on the mechanics.  Getting found is first and foremost weighted by remarkable content.  Without remarkable content, all the tricks of the trade erode your brand, your SEO ranking and your reputation.

People need to be able to tell others about the value they found in your content.  It should help them solve a problem, have greater enjoyment or enrich their education process.  The consistency of your content allows you to have an audience which will promote you with their easily distributable network.  It all works exponentially.  The few who consume your content are the ones that matter.  They know the many who are seeking their position as the curator.

The number one goal is to create awareness and get found.  Visitors to your site are the specific goal.  It is step one.  You better know what you are doing and you better be committed to consistent, relevant and remarkable content.  Nothing else can replace this.  The good news is that if you have this in place, your competition will have to work awful hard to unseat your enviable position.

Lead Nurturing

After a visitor comes to your site, they may be in and out of the site if there is nothing to lead them.  You must have a call-to-action that is relevant, timely and personal.  It needs to lead to a nurturing process.  The nurturing process engages an unready buyer.  By the way, most of your visitors are unready buyers.  When we think of something, we typically search for it quickly.  We start educating ourselves.  In the process, we may be clicking on and off many websites until we find what we are looking for.  If your site is not leading your buyer, then it is another blur in the mind of the visitor.

Your nurturing processes should be specific to the buyer profiles which you are seeking.  The problem they are trying to solve along with the education and value proposition need to be part of the communications and follow-up from your marketing automation system.

If you lack lead nurturing, it is likely because you are in the selling mindset rather than they buying mindset.  You will miss many opportunities having only one proposition – buy now.  Many may buy later if you date them well.  The key here is to convert your visitors to leads.

Lead Conversion

This is the step most selling organizations jump to first.  They convert before they have permission.  Lead conversion is a formality after the first two parts of an integrated inbound marketing strategy.  The process is continuous and works together.

In the old economy where products and services were sold, we built up sales organizations, processes, presentations, pipelines, and the infrastructure to support outbound efforts.  Today, the customer buys when they are ready.  Helping them become ready is part of lead conversion.

Typically, your anonymous visitor raises their hand.  You exchange anonymity for value.  They are nurtured.  Then, they want to take a next step because trust has been built.  Your brand starts to mean something.  Then, a presentation of your value proposition is done personally, online or in an automated way.  Getting to “Yes” happens after the presentation.  Proposals, pricing, negotiations and credibility checks are done.  You are on the path.

Lead conversion requires access to the give and take around your value proposition.  The sales funnel tightens in this phase.  Your inbound marketing produced the mindset of the buyer you are seeking to do business with.  They are choosing to move from being a lead to a customer.

Getting A Customer Requires An Integrated Approach

There are plenty of examples of brands that do not get it.  People do not want to be sold.  You don’t like it either.  So why do it?  Two reasons come to mind – disconnection and laziness.  Disconnection from how people really approach buying means that you will set up a system about you rather than about who you are trying to win.

Laziness because the hard work or the price to pay is formidable.  Instant gratification gets in the way of a system which produces a predictable result.  Try being a buyer for a day and think like your buyer.  Once you see the ease of price comparison, clicking around and finding what you are looking for, the option to be airtight in your marketing approach as an inbound integrated system will become all too obvious.  You are not in control.  Your buyer is and they are wanting you to make it easy for them long before they even talk to you.

How is your own sales and marketing process working for you?  Feel free to comment below.