For many businesses, a common assumption is that more web traffic is needed to drive growth. Upon closer inspection, this is rarely the case.  

Sales is about selling, yet we see many building product companies working with a different definition. 

In some companies, salespeople spend most of their time keeping existing customers happy instead of finding new ones.

In other companies, they measure their success in terms of activity, like ‘How many people did you call this week?’ Which doesn’t focus on key sales goals and finding good fit leads.

These types of salespeople follow a simple approach:

1. We have a product we want to sell
2. There are customers who should buy it
3. If we call on enough of them, we’ll eventually stumble upon someone who will buy our products

Simple, yes. But not very effective or efficient.

Thankfully, there’s a better way. Here are 4 ways you can make your sales team more productive…

One of the most frustrating things that can happen for a building-product manufacturer is to lose out on a big sale to inferior products.

Why does this happen? And how can you prevent it? 

In full recovery mode from the setbacks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, 2022 was thought to be the year that the built environment fell back on its feet. The pressure was real!

With an increasing number of construction projects being approved, building product manufacturers had the opportunity to grow and aim for slightly more ambitious KPIs. Halfway through the year, it is important we ask ourselves where we are at and what tools we can use to ensure those KPIs are satisfactorily reached.

Steve Bookbinder, CEO, author, and sales coach at DM Training, explains how, every year, salespeople are asked for more. The most common request salespeople get from their managers is to be more productive, but truth is, salespeople are already productive. For Bookbinder, the key is not working harder, but smarter; it is to maximise the time salespeople have so they can do what they do best… Selling!

As a building products business, you may want to expand your pipeline, but it can be frustrating when you don’t know where to start.

Your pipeline may be full right now, but the construction industry is notorious for planning forward.

So, how can you win new work and establish connections in the construction industry? The solution is to use construction leads.

A construction sales lead is a term that is frequently used, but many people are unsure of what it actually is.

To obtain leads, it’s essential to understand what a construction sales lead is. This blog will run through the benefits of construction sales leads, as well as how to identify good-fit leads.

Despite the undeniable success of follow-up practices based on innovative marketing methodologies, such as inbound, salespeople within the construction industry, unfortunately, insist on holding onto outdated, spammy, and intrusive tactics.

In this post, we have gathered some of the most common mistakes we see when following up construction leads, as well as how to set up a lead management plan to avoid them.

The sales funnel described by HubSpot is “a metaphor for a traditional sales process from beginning to end.”, essentially it represents the journey your customer goes through when purchasing a product or service from your business.

We work with a range of businesses in the built environment, and the commonality amongst their challenges is that many don’t know how to align both marketing and sales teams to create synergy for business growth. This could be down to a lack of knowledge behind each process or simply not knowing which team works behind each stage.

In this blog, we’ll break down the Insynth funnel and define its structure, to inspire you to do the same for yours!

“We don’t do cold calling here!” says Dan Tyre during our Hubspot Pipeline Generation Bootcamp.

If you’re a building product business with limited resources, creating marketing materials for your sales team may not be your first priority. 

But I've seen many building products businesses whose marketing is actually working against their sales teams' efforts.

It’s not news to anybody that 2020 has brought challenges to all areas of business, including sales. With visiting and travel being restricted, people had no choice but to rely on phone calls, zoom meetings and email to follow up leads.

For the construction and building products specifically, this forced those that didn’t already, to provide BIM drawings, technical specification and virtual training online.

We’ll take a look at how the way selling has changed and why we’re better for it.

Sales and marketing alignment could potentially be the most important thing that needs to happen to your building product business. The data supporting how massively it can elevate your business’s sales and revenue speaks for itself.

• Sales and marketing alignment can trigger a 32% boost in year on year revenue growth,
• It can lead to over 200% growth in revenue attributed to marketing, and
• It can boost your sales win rates by 38% (Marketo)

When your sales and marketing teams align, your two most important departments can optimise their process as a whole. This means your entire marketing and sales funnel is working collaboratively, reducing costs and increasing business growth.

Sales and marketing alignment is more important than you might first consider. When sales and marketing teams are misaligned, it can be detrimental for business growth and lead conversion.

Following up with Barbour ABI and Glenigan leads is a bit different than following up leads from other sources.

These services provide very targeted searches. But on the other, the results can be quite overwhelming. Where do you start with 1000's of leads?

So you subscribed to Barbour ABI or Glenigan? Or maybe you’ve been a subscriber for a while.

Lead nurturing is the purposeful process of engaging a defined target group by providing relevant information at each stage of the buyer's journey. It focuses on marketing and communication efforts to listen to prospects, and provide valuable information and answers.

Effectively you’re guiding prospects to eventually purchase from you, but in a way that's helpful and not sales driven. The more a lead is nurtured, the more knowledgeable they become about your specific product.

This ultimately creates a more qualified lead, ensuring the sales team get involved at the right time, when the lead is ready to purchase.

This week I interviewed Leigh Simpson, the founder of Project Prospecta, to learn where the idea came from.

The construction industry is undergoing a thorough transformation. Since COVID-19 hit, construction leaders have been consistently working to improve the digital outreach of their companies. 1 in every 2 construction professionals considered the sector to had been painfully slow at adopting innovative techniques, and that could account for the tight benefit margins of the industry in the last few years.  

Cold calling is one thing. Cold calling during a pandemic is another. One sales rep I talked to said receptionists are taking 20 minutes to transfer calls and many of his contacts have been furloughed.  That’s tough.

It’s widely known that, for architects and design professionals, CPD is a vital part of career development. Many professional institutes (such as RIBA CIOB, RICS, RTPI, CIAT, ICE, IStructE) now require members to undertake a minimum number of CPD hours each year.

It’s no doubt that a lot has changed in the past few months. The COVID-19 outbreak has shaken the B2B sales force – with unprecedented speed and scale – across the globe.

However, as with most things,

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

In other words, times of great challenge often create amazing opportunities to transform the way we, as sales leaders, do things. Many within building products and construction would argue that this is exactly what the industry needed to give it a push towards a more digital future.

One example of how we’re adapting is the new dynamics that virtual selling has brought to the table – in the form of video interactions.

But, more specifically,

How is the COVID-19 crisis changing the future of sales within building products and construction as we know it?

Today we’ll be exploring two ways that this pandemic has accelerated the future of sales within the industry. Read on to find out more…

As people are returning to work and a sense of normality returns, you might need to re-access the way you sell whilst bouncing back. Your business might have triumphed during this crisis or been at it’s lowest depending on the sector you provide to.

1: Selling Solo

Being an old-skool salesman I thought I knew it all. Results were powered solely by my own hands and my own way of thinking. My way had always worked, hitting the phone as hard as I could, sniffing out buying signals in order to get that next sale. I didn’t need anyone apart from my own desire, and I had bucket loads of that.

As an experienced Salesperson, I had my own methods and philosophy which worked and had made me a success in the past. I had been a top biller for many previous employers, and the notion that one book could change my thought process was unthinkable.

I remember the first time my CEO introduced me to Keenan’s “Gap Selling”. At first, I had my doubts: yet another sales guy trying to tell me that his way is the best.

It’s a sad fact that Covid-19 has brought about an abrupt halt to people’s livelihoods. Individuals are being furloughed-and in some cases-even losing their jobs.

With that in mind, the construction marketer needs to be aware that people just aren’t as contactable as they once were, and this means that you may have to adjust your strategy in order to reach out to the right people.

From an email marketing perspective, those who have sadly lost their jobs will have inevitably had their email accounts switched off, meaning that your email campaigns will not achieve the level of engagement you’re aiming for, causing your bounce rate to soar. 

We want to avoid this at every possible opportunity as a consistently high bounce rate will cause you to get penalised by your service provider-affecting your ability to send future campaigns. And of course, you want people to actually read your emails.

This blog sets out to give you some useful tips and tricks to reduce your email bounce rate, ensuring the right people read your emails.

Almost every business in building product and construction has been planning for the inevitable impact that COVID19 will have on our industry. It's unexpected, and sadly for most, unplanned for. In these uncertain times, a strong sales and marketing strategy is your closest defence to ensure that you come out of this the other side. 

But, how does a strong sales and marketing strategy look like for building products and construction?

With the coronavirus pandemic continuing to spread, you’d be forgiven for thinking, how will this affect my building products and construction business?

We’re unsure on how long it’ll last and the true extent of its severity, but one thing’s for certain: it will have a lasting impact on the industry.

And we’re not only talking about the distance it’s placed between us and our prospects. COVID-19 has forced us all to think about new approaches to how we work and the steps we should take to protect ourselves and our business.

No doubt, most of the articles you’ve read on coronavirus will have all been doom and gloom and ‘panic stations.’ Here, our intention is clear:

My Dublin visit to the HubSpot head offices was over. My brain felt comfortably loaded with the wealth of knowledge and training that I had undertaken.

Dan Tire, ‘The Boom Man’ as he is so affectionately known, had excelled himself. It had been a pleasure to be in the company of the individuals I admire most within the sales world.

As I sat in the window seat of Ryanair’s Boeing 737-800 aircraft, I wondered if this was how Bruce Lee felt when he first met IP Man.

It was fun. We worked hard.

But I knew the hard work had only just begun.

As an inbound marketing agency that specialises in the building products and construction industry, one of our main aims is to educate our audience. Part of the ‘education’ process involves producing high-quality, free resources aimed at up-skilling your front-facing teams.

The resources that we’ve produced this year will be shared in this post.

Segmentation is often described as a foundational piece; a cornerstone of any marketing strategy.

Correctly segmenting your market can draw focus to where your sales efforts will have the best return. We take a deeper look into segmentation, why it’s important and how many segments you should have.

Continuing with our series on construction marketing strategy, this post sets out to assess the current state of marketing within the building products and construction industry, and what you can do to ensure a successful and prosperous 2020… and beyond.

You’ll find many posts out there that talk about marketing in 2020, and you’ll no doubt be bombarded with buzzwords like KYC, Digital Marketing Transformation and insights-driven marketing.

These words all have their place in the marketing sphere, but they don’t necessarily resonate with the challenges that the building products and construction industry face. So, we’ll set out to assess the current state of marketing within your industry, allowing you to progress further and smash your goals.  

We want your opinion of the marketing channels and resources you love and find most useful for promoting your building product brand.

We’re kicking off a series of blogs about building awareness amongst specifiers and installers in the building product space.  Rather than just giving you a bland overview of “what the experts say”, we thought it would be great to get your thoughts too.

To get featured, all you need to do is pick the blog, or blogs, that you want to be included in, follow the link and answer a couple of questions.  Leave us your website URL and Twitter/LinkedIn handle and we’ll drop a nice backlink into the blog for you and mention you in our social promotion.

We’re looking forward to you sharing your knowledge with our audience. Don’t be shy.

Searches for sales enablement has grown almost 50% over the last two years. Aberdeen found that 74% of high-performing organisations have strong sales and marketing alignment; a key aspect of sales enablement.

Although impressive statistics, correlation does not always imply causation. Many sales directors have invested in training, technology, and content that’s supposed to help their sales team perform at higher levels. The benefits don’t materialise or are marginal at best.

Why are some companies reaping the rewards while others feel like they’re pouring money down the drain?

We take a look at what sales enablement isn’t and how to get started with sales enablement that’ll actually be worthwhile for your team.

Targets, pipelines, prospecting, closure rates, deal sizes, the list goes on. Your sales team has a lot of things to think about throughout the sales process. Sales enablement can feel like it’s adding to the overload of information, tactics and tools out there.

Fortunately, it’s very simple. It’s about making selling as easy as possible by providing salespeople with everything they need to move the sale forward.

Are customers frequently asking what similar projects you’ve worked on? Create a case studies section, by sector, on your website and now your sales team will now have a standardised document to share with customers.

According to The State of Sales Enablement, 90% of marketing content goes unused by sales. Reps are often unhappy with what marketing is producing and create 40% of all enterprise content themselves.

Not only does this leave less time for sales teams to sell but also its wasting time and resources (through duplicated or unused content) in often an over-strained marketing department.

This issue frequently goes undetected, according to the same report the perception is that marketing creates 80% of content whereas, in reality, that figure is more like 30%. The remaining 70% is created by sales (40%), engineering (10%), services (10%) and other (10%).

What if everybody on your sales team understood the needs of your customer, the problems they face and how your company solves them? Better yet, what if they loved your solution, shared your vision and immersed themselves within your sector?

How do you bridge the gap between this idealistic view and reality? You need to support your sales team with processes, you need content, training and technology. How do you get these things?

Over the last few years sales enablement as a business buzzword has taken off. We take a deeper dive into the definition, whether it's here to stay and what it means for your business.

Building product companies with sales enablement in place have benefited from higher win rates, larger deal sizes and faster sales cycles. In an environment where project delays can be inevitable, organisations with sales enablement in place have a much more predictable sales cycle.

While getting inbound leads through your website might be the easy part, assessing whether they are ready for a sales conversation can be trickier.

Mastering this will help you waste less time with poor fit prospects or annoying those who are not yet sales ready.

Before beginning this process, it is important to recognise the stages of your customer journey. This will help with identifying prospects who are ready to buy and those who may need more help or nurturing.

Once you’ve identified a number of good fit leads, you can begin the sales qualification process by taking a look at your prospect’s level of engagement with your website and marketing content.

In the building product and construction industry, there are a number of factors that can disrupt the sales process. Losing out on specification to a competitor, projects being delayed and legislation changes.

A shorter sales cycle can free up time to generate additional leads. Ultimately improving your sales pipeline and helping you achieve your targets.

When you’ve got more deals progressing through your pipeline, the sales cycle will feel shorter. Done well, it can also become your competitive advantage.

Here are five effective techniques to speed up your sales cycle. 

With an estimated 39% of sales people missing their targets every month, any tool that you can use to help your team succeed has to be seriously considered.

One key problem that many sales teams has is getting access to key information and knowing how they are doing hour by hour, day by day. 

Using ‘live’ reporting on dashboards can fix this, increasing competition amongst the sales team,  improving focus and raising team morale - all leading to an increase in sales.  Learn more here.

According to research by HubSpot the top sales priorities in businesses are closing more deals, improving sales funnel efficiency and improving sales technology. In a study by LinkedIn, 82% of top sales people cite tools ‘critical’ to their ability to close deals.

With so many tools on offer, it can be difficult to decide on what is best for you and your team. We thought we’d tackle those top priorities by listing some of our favourite tools.

Include are tools for prospecting, sales intelligence, lead capture, video and more. Each are listed with a free trial so you can decide what works best for you. 

A lot of time, effort and money is spent on gathering construction marketing leads each year. For building product companies, this may be through trade magazines, building product directories, online marketing, emails, tradeshows or a combination of these. Often, they all point back to one place… your website.

Taking a mystery shopper approach, in our The State of Building Product Digital Marketing 2019 Report, we discovered that 80% of building product companies didn't respond to a product enquiry through their website in any way. Of the 20% that did, only 6% answered the phone to enquire about our requirements and offer additional help.

From our conversations across the construction industry, it’s clear that building product Sales Leaders view content marketing with suspicion, feeling it could hinder their chances of getting in front of prospects and customers.

Once we explain the benefits to them and their teams of a well executed inbound marketing strategy, they soon understand the potential to help them improve lead generation and lead quality.

Making their sales team busier, more respected in their sector and getting them in front of more influential decision makers and specifiers.

Read on, to find out how we explain the key benefits to sales of inbound and content marketing.

Fear is one of the most common reasons people procrastinate on taking action towards their goals. Psychologists like to say that fear means False, Experiences, Appearing, Real. We want to provide you with actionable steps to help you in the process of overcoming your fear of cold calling. 

I jumped into 8 weeks of sales training with Mr Dan Tyre, HubSpot’s first sales executive of the now multi-billion-pound company, serial investor and co-author the ‘Inbound Organization’. If anyone was going to dispel the common preconception that top salespeople are born with certain personality traits and sales can’t be taught – this was the right person for the job.

Attracting over 26,000 visitors and 500 exhibitors, Futurebuild 2019 in London is a much-anticipated event for the construction industry.

Insynth have been running a blog series on the upcoming SEO trends of 2019 that your construction marketing team need to embrace in order to succeed in the Google rankings.

In this final instalment, we’ll be exploring image search. This developing search method allows users to carry out organic search using there camera.

For SEO professionals in the building products sector, this is a game changer for how you’ll carry out your construction marketing strategies.

Read on to find out more…

The new year is now well underway. For many SEO professionals in the construction marketing industry this is the time to start looking forward to the upcoming trends for 2019 and leverage the latest techniques to dominate in the SERPs.

It’s a well-known fact that search engines are getting more intelligent every day. If you want your building products company to achieve top rankings in 2019, you need to be ready for the latest SEO trends and developments that are coming up.

Read on to find out more…

Whether you’re a manager handling an exceptional sales team, an executive looking after a whole sales organisation or a sales rep looking to hit your numbers, 2019 is a fresh start. However, it may not be wise to leave 2018 completely behind you.

One of the biggest frustrations that senior commercial and financial teams have with marketing is their lack of accountability and vagueness when it comes to planning and ROI.

All too often, objectives are woolly and ambiguous, with no real clarity over what the expected outcome will be in a measurable and time bound fashion.  This is where SMART goals can help build your credibility as a marketer and pull together your marketing activities around an overarching objective.

One of the first things  that you’re taught in sales is that you have two ears and one mouth and to use them in that order.

However, you shouldn't use your mouth at all at crucial points in your sales conversations

Learn how silence can unlock a sales opportunity and when to use it.

To further our mission to bring inbound to the construction industry, Insynth Marketing are thrilled to introduce Luke Monterosso, who joins the team as a Business Development Manager. 

Luke is responsible for growing their client base by introducing sales & marketing professionals from the building products industry to the Inbound philosophy.

Read on to find out more…

Growth.  It’s compelling, alluring and addictive.  It’s also tough.

It’s getting harder to generate more leads, win more customers, up-sell, cross-sell, increase market share and make more profit using the tactics that were so successful just a few short years ago.

It was Einstein who famously said, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

So, is your reluctance to alter your approach, tactics and mindset in your quest for increased growth madness?

Did you know that you could be losing business because your sales team are wasting their time on tasks that don’t involve selling?

Scary right?

Over half of a sales person’s time is spent not selling to your customers. Your building products company could be losing business as a result.

Read on to find out more about Insynth’s examination of how sales team’s time is being misplaced.

Insynth have teamed up Competitive Advantage to offer an extended early-bird discount to our blog subscribers for their one-day course on “Creative Demand Through Specification”!

Read on to find out more about this training and how you can get an exclusive discount...

Hosted by Andrew Tarvin, a humour engineer from New York, Funny To Money educated the Inbound 2018 audience about how using humour in your marketing can the key to succeeding in both your sales and marketing efforts.

Funny To Money, although geared towards sales, was full of information that marketers could employ in their content strategies to attract new customers to their company. 

Humour is important to a marketers because making people laugh makes people want to sit up and pay attention to your message. Including your brand message in your humour marketing is an effective way to draw people into your company while having fun along the way.  

53% of B2B buyers said they would prefer to gather information online and not have to talk to sales (Forrester Research, Inc). The unpleasant truth is, most people don't want to talk to you.

Gaetano DiNardi's session at the Inbound 2018 conference teaches important lessons in leveraging technology to build a modern sales process to maximise results.

Here's what you can apply from Gaetano's lead generation tips and tricks.

Why No One Gives a Shit About You or Your Company

Bringing insights from his new book Gap Selling, Keenan, CEO of The Sales Guy talks at Inbound 2018 about why the only thing that drives sales is the creation of value.

One of the core principles of construction inbound marketing is aligning your marketing and sales teams so that you can provide holistic services that close leads and delight your clients. 

When your sales and marketing teams are aligned, your brand message will be amplified and your services will be more consistent, helpful and customer-centric. 

This is why marketeers in smaller building product companies wear many hats when driving growth for their clients.  One of these hats is the sales services hat.

But you don't have to be a sales guru to provide value to your prospects...

With new technology appearing increasingly frequently, promising to disrupt traditional methods of sales and marketing and make business success a breeze, it’s easy to be tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater and overlook some of the main principles of growing your business.

No matter how you deliver your message and what methods you use, it’s important to remember to use technology to support your sales and construction marketing strategies, not replace them.

One of the biggest challenges of sales management is figuring out how involved you need to be with your team.  Too much and you can be accused of interfering and getting in the way.  Too light a touch and activity can start to stray away from your carefully constructed sales strategy.

So how do you get the right balance, and where should you and your team focus your time and energy to make the biggest improvements to your sales performance?

If you want to hit your sales targets this month, this quarter, this year and beyond, you will need to consistently produce the right results. 

The problem is that many business owners and entrepreneurs can find it difficult to understand their sales pipeline and know where to focus their efforts and resources to really build the sales engine that will produce repeatable results week after week, month after month. 

This simple formula for sales success will show you where to focus your efforts and help you grow your business with more consistency and a scientific approach to performance improvement.

In one of our recent blog posts, we discussed how long it takes for content marketing to work.  Blogging frequency and quality were the key topics, but it led to questions about more subtle signs that things are starting to work.

So, here’s a quick list of the sort of signals that you should be on the lookout for when starting out on your construction inbound marketing journey (we'd love you to add your own ideas in the comments at the end of the post).

Business guru and well-known provocateur, Tom Peters once addressed a crowd of over 400 sales and marketing executives saying: “I hate sports analogies. They’re just a bunch of male macho…” Yet, in the world of sales and marketing, sports analogies are de rigueur and tossed around like a rugby ball during at Twickenham.

To properly understand the difference between sales and marketing, however, another analogy seems more suitable: that of musical theatre. Salespeople are the performers in a West End musical, whereas marketing folks are the set designers, producers, and choreographers.

Our regular website audits and reviews are consistently highlighting missed opportunities and common shortcomings of building product websites.

The way that specifiers and buyers search and select products is evolving quickly and construction marketing professionals need to adapt or risk losing market share and sales to smarter operators.

I was recently walking on the Cornish Coastal Path; it's a beautiful, windswept trail with plenty of challenging climbs and descents.  On one particularly steep ascent, I remembered a tip I read many moons ago in a mountain biking magazine.

The tip was about tackling long arduous climbs: it described how if you only focus on the top, your mind will begin to doubt that you can get there, and you are more likely to fail.  However, if you look just a few yards ahead, far enough to avoid any obstacles, you will grind out the climb almost without fail.

The trick is to focus on the task ahead, only occasionally glancing up to make sure that you are on track to achieve your ultimate goal.  I applied this trick and tackled every climb comfortably.

The experience brought to mind how setting short-term goals can be the perfect way to crush longer-term targets, and this is why.

A conversation we always have with our clients when discussing their content marketing strategy is,  "are you open about price on your website?".

Most of the time we get an uncomfortable response, something like;

• "No, we don't want our competitors to find out how much we charge"
• "We prefer to talk to our customer face to face about price", or
• "Until we know exactly what customer wants, we can't give them a price"

Now, that's all well and good, but let's look at those arguments one-by-one and challenge the thinking behind them.  Then we will tell you why talking about price on your website can drive efficiency, increase conversion rates, win you new business and should be a key element of your construction marketing strategy.

Are you finding it harder to book a sales appointment?

Booking sales meetings used to be the key to sales success. Now it is almost impossible to fill your diary. What is happening, and how can you change things?