So….2020 probably isn’t going quite as you’d planned. The COVID-19 pandemic has completely upended our way of life and caused massive disruption in nearly every industry and business.

For marketing and sales teams, this means, among other things, that in-person lead generation activities, like trade shows, conferences, and networking events, are canceled for the foreseeable future. 

Thousands of companies are struggling to figure out what to do next. Many B2B companies rely heavily upon in-person events to generate leads, and the COVID-19 crisis has created an alarming gap. 

Marketing automation adoption continues to grow among marketers in 2020, with most marketing teams now using at least one automation tool as part of their tech stack.

Building a smart marketing automation strategy is a great way to generate remarkable marketing results and revenue growth in 2020. Like most things in digital marketing, being strategic and thoughtful in your approach to marketing automation is the best way to proceed. A sloppy or on-the-fly approach without a thoughtful, buttoned-up strategy is almost certain to create headaches and hurdles down the road. And it certainly won’t be scalable.

Customer reviews are a vital part of an effective digital marketing strategy today. That's because today's consumers simply don't trust brands. Instead, they rely on the opinions of their peers to help guide their purchasing decisions. It's becoming more and more important to pay attention to and get proactive about monitoring your online reputation if you want to compete with others digitally.

If you're interested in crushing your 2020 growth goals, a killer inbound marketing plan is a no-brainer. Inbound marketing is an impressively powerful lead generation strategy, and as marketing technology advances, the opportunities for impressive results with inbound continue to grow rapidly.

The most challenging aspect of creating an effective inbound marketing plan is usually just knowing where to begin. So we've created this easy-to-follow 10-step guide on how to create a powerful inbound marketing strategy that will rock your organization's sales and marketing world in 2020 and beyond.

No matter your organization or industry, your website is the digital epicenter of marketing and sales activity.

How do you ensure that your website not only speaks clearly and directly to your target audience, but that it also actually influences their behavior, getting them to convert on a form or complete another desired action established by your marketing team?

These five steps will outline a blueprint to develop an inbound website - one that will be irresistible to your target customers.

When it comes to boosting your website's conversion rate, you can focus your efforts on several areas to see results almost immediately. Every website is unique, but some tried-and-true best practices within conversion rate optimization prove to increase website lead generation for pretty much everyone.

Try these seven proven ways to boost your website conversion rate and start getting more leads from your existing website traffic. These tips will generate improvement for almost any website, particularly when implemented all together.

Managing a blog for your brand is an awesome way to generate traffic and leads. But very few teams know exactly what to focus on in their blog to get the impressive results they're really looking for. 

You can use these high-impact, low-effort tips to improve conversion performance on almost any blog.

Editor's Note: This blog was originally published in July 2018 and updated in May 2019.

HubSpot CRM is a great tool to help sales leaders gain visibility into their pipeline and to implement measurable change in their organization.

Click here to get the HubSpot CRM. It’s free and it’s awesome, we promise.

Setting up well-defined deal stages is an important first step to gaining insight into your sales funnel and improving sales team performance.

Setting yourself up for success within HubSpot is a critical process. HubSpot contains a powerful set of tools to help increase lead generation and customer acquisition, but it's not a magic button that is ready to go from the gate. You need to properly configure your system to make it work well for your organization, and that starts with properly mapping your sales process using lifecycle stages, lead statuses, and deal stages.

One key trait that identifies all high achievers is that they take action. They don't just talk about ideas; they do. Winning teams practice the art of implementation relentlessly. 

It's not particularly surprising, then, that successful implementation of a strategic marketing plan is one of the biggest challenges consistently facing marketing teams. 

Failed implementation is a stressful situation for any member of your marketing team, but it's marketing leaders that end up taking the brunt of the blame when a marketing plan fails to launch. Organizations regularly cite failure to execute a strategic plan as their primary reason for firing a CMO.