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.

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?

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.

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. 

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 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?

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...

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?

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).