Sales professionals will be quick to tell you that a positive customer review goes a long way toward converting prospects into eventual customers. What better way to convince the market that you can walk the walk than to have satisfied customers tell your story for you? Conversely, negative reviews can be quite damaging. Data suggests that positive reviews influence the purchase decisions of 90 percent of respondents, while negative reviews influence around 86 percent.
But negative reviews and customer complaints can actually be good for business. Let’s look at some potentially counter-intuitive reasons why. Continue reading “How Negative Reviews Can Help Boost Your Business: If You Handle Them Effectively”
Webinars are still widely promoted online, but does the format still resonate with end users and, if so, which ones? Can webinars reach, and influence, a B2C audience or are they primarily used for B2B outreach? What emerging technologies are moving into the webinar space? These are questions marketers need to be asking themselves. 
The word “sales” often conjures up some very specific images. A man in a suit holding a briefcase going door-to-door selling encyclopedias or vacuums, for example. Or a guy hustling in a car lot. But as we know, sales is, in reality, a process. A process that ends with a pitch. The direct pitch to the customer or the final sales touchpoint is the last step in the sales process and is often referred to as “the bottom of the funnel” (BOFU). It follows TOFU (top of the funnel) and MOFU (middle of the funnel) activities that are designed to move the consumer down a pathway to a purchase. 
To a large extent, the sales and marketing world can be divided along two broad lines: business-to-business (B2B) versus business-to-consumer (B2C) and products versus services. Sales strategies for B2C services will differ from B2B services, which differ from B2B products, etc. There are best practices and pitfalls for each quadrant of possible scenarios created by this way of looking at sales and marketing.