Being articulate and being a good listener are two skills that are important for salespeople to be successful, but there is one skill that is even more important to master.

Salesforce offers small businesses the capabilities of an enterprise-level CRM. Small and medium-sized businesses should utilize specific aspects of the software to help them acquire and retain customers, as well as boost sales and manage contacts.

Sales is like cooking. You can serve fast food at fast-food prices, but it’s a tough way to make a living. If you want to serve a gourmet meal, however, it takes time to prepare it right.

The ultimate goal of an inbound organization is to build great customer relationships by delivering an exceptional buying experience. Here are three ways to create a company strategy using inbound principles.

Most marketing teams today lack two crucial tools: 1) enough of the right data and 2) actionable intelligence and insights firmly rooted in that data. If you don’t make the effort to understand who you’re marketing to before you get started, there’s no way you can possibly offer them something that speaks to their needs and wants.

Responding to RFPs can be a daunting task if an organization hasn’t streamlined and intelligently automated some of the steps. For some companies, the process is also putting them at serious risk for non-compliance, which exposes them to the potential risk of huge, multimillion-dollar penalties on top of losing new business deals.

Small business owners can learn a lot from analyzing what drug dealers do in terms of defining their target market, performing marketing activities, and building relationships.