6 Small Business Tips for Expanding Your Pipeline

The customer and seller dynamic has changed considerably due to the rise of digital. Not so long ago, if a buyer wanted more information about a product or service, they would need to contact a salesperson to learn more. Now, a buyer can obtain a plethora of product information, demos, pricing information, product and company reviews and see if he or she is already connected with a company employee in a matter of seconds. Today’s buyers are more empowered and are opting to pre-qualify their vendors before reaching out. This shift has made prospecting more difficult. Contact them too early, and you risk alienating them; contact them too late and you risk losing the conversion. What’s a company to do?

The answer is simple: sales teams need to change the way they sell. Instead of casting a wide net, cold-calling and hoping something will bite, it makes sense for small businesses to focus their sales and marketing efforts on very specific targets that have better returns. It sounds a little counterintuitive, right? Narrow down your targets in order to expand your pipeline? But it’s true. Focusing on delivering the most relevant messaging to the right people at the moment they need to hear it will help you fill your pipeline faster. In our new e-book, Expand Your Pipeline: 6 Small Business Tips for Growing Your Prospect Base, we show you how with the right tools, your sales team can sell smarter and save time.

YouTube Marketing: A Small Business Guide

As my series on using social media marketing platforms to market your small business comes to a close (check out past installments on Facebook, Twitter,Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn), we arrive at what is possibly the most niche platform in terms of content: YouTube.

If you want to use YouTube to market your small business, you’ll be creating videos, plain and simple. While this seems obvious, it’s worth noting that while social platforms like Facebook lend themselves to creating, posting, and sharing a variety of types of content (videos, images, long-form text posts, short updates, and so on), creating content on YouTube means you’ll be investing your time in video production and video production only.

This note isn’t meant to dissuade you, but rather to point out that a strong interest in creating video content is necessary before jumping into YouTube. Don’t just start a YouTube channel in an effort to take advantage of all possible forms of social media marketing if you aren’t actually interested in making videos. The process of creating videos is time-consuming and has a bit of a learning curve, so make sure that this platform is one you really have time for and interest in.

With that out of the way, let’s get started.