Blog originally published Sep 4, 2018.

Having a healthy stream of leads coming in from your website is a great first step toward generating revenue attributable to your marketing efforts. But turning those leads into customers requires a bit more strategic attention.

Lead scoring is a valuable tool that any sales and marketing team can implement to close more customers. Lead scoring is a system that ranks your prospects based on their perceived value to your organization. It is an automated way to identify and hand off your hottest leads to your sales team so they can work their magic and close more deals.

There are now thousands of apps that seamlessly connect with HubSpot, plus tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands existing API configurations with custom apps that exist to help companies grow better.

Every organization has its own set of priorities when it comes to infusing HubSpot across its specific tech stack; however, there are a number of high-value, free-version apps every company can connect to HubSpot in order to extract more value from the platform. We've outlined six of these free apps to get you started maximizing your HubSpot investment. (and a bonus with Google Sheets at the bottom!)

If you've been noticing a diminishing return on your cold calling investment, you're not the only one. Digital technology has massively disrupted the way business communication is conducted, and sales teams are seriously feeling the impact. 

The harsh reality for many sales teams is that in today's modern marketplace, cold calling just isn't sufficient to hit your sales and growth goals.

The HubSpot growth stack includes tons of useful tools for sales and marketing teams. One of its most powerful and intriguing features is known as the Prospects tool. It's a tool that's been around since the very early days of HubSpot, and it's one of the most interesting features to both new and existing HubSpot customers.

Understanding the potential power of the HubSpot Prospects tool and how to leverage it gives marketing and sales teams a huge competitive edge.

The world’s most popular marketing automation platform, HubSpot, is primarily known for its ability to help marketing teams, but there are so many powerful facets of the software that are designed to supercharge sales for your company.

Many sales leaders are cautiously optimistic about marketing automation software like HubSpot, but they're just not sure how the technology applies to them. 

HubSpot includes a full set of sales productivity tools that help streamline and speed up your sales process. These technology tools allow sales teams to spend more time selling, shortening average sales cycles and increasing sales team happiness. Let’s take a look at some of the top tools helping sales teams fuel performance.

Marketing automation exists primarily to help companies generate revenue. Because, really, what's the point of marketing if it's not generating revenue? The way we see it, marketing shouldn't even be happening at your company if it's not strategically generating revenue in a predictable and scalable way.

Technology in the marketing and sales space is evolving rapidly, with more capabilities and innovations emerging every day.

The disruption potential of these major technologies is tremendous. In a space that has already been massively revolutionized in the era of digital, marketing and sales leaders must prepare to adapt their technologies, business models, and personnel in order to keep up with the future.

Here are four of our favorite emerging technologies on a path sure to intersect with marketing and sales very soon.

Websites can serve a number of different purposes. But, if your B2B website isn't helping you to acquire new customers, then it's not doing its job.

Almost all companies have a website, which is a great start. Some even look really nice. But just having a nice-looking website isn't enough to generate leads and acquire new customers for most businesses. You need to take a strategic approach to attracting visitors, converting leads, and closing customers in order to truly impact revenue growth in real life (IRL).

Sales and marketing leaders should leverage their most valuable digital asset to generate leads and acquire customers, and your website has the potential to be your most powerful sales and marketing tool. This is true even for companies that handle the majority of their sales process offline - on the phone with a sales rep, for example. 

Regardless of your industry or audience, the elements required to turn your website into a lead generation and customer acquisition tool are essentially the same. Implement these steps to start using your B2B website to generate leads and close customers.

Many sales teams sheepishly admit they’re not the greatest when it comes to following up with trade show leads.

I get it, believe me. When you attend an industry trade show, your time there is a whirlwind of introductions, conversations, and contact info exchanges. You come back with an overwhelming stack of business cards, set of notes, and host of new LinkedIn connection requests. Not to mention the stack of unopened emails in your inbox and other work that has piled up while you've been out of the office.

To be clear, highly-qualified leads that are ready to make a purchase right away are not usually a problem. Where many sales teams fall short, though, is in the follow-up, management, and nurturing of qualified trade show leads who are not ready to buy just yet.

Luckily, this is an area where marketing automation tools like HubSpot can really shine. Here’s how sales, marketing and technology can work together to master the art of trade show lead follow-up and turn trade show leads into customers.

Sales teams often face a special set of challenges. Technology has fundamentally changed the way that people buy, and sales teams in every industry are feeling the impact. Cold calling is often ineffective, and many other traditional sales approaches are returning diminishing results as well.

With constant pressure to hit their numbers, sales teams start to panic, and performance starts to dip. As a sales leader, you must act quickly to resolve the issues your team is facing in order to improve sales performance. 

Your first step should be diagnosing the problem that your team is struggling with. Read on to explore four of the most common struggles of sales teams and ways to solve them.