One of the most common — and also among the most important — questions that prospective customers ask us is: “How do we get more traffic to our website?” Now, we know that we’d get kicked out of finishing school for answering a question with a question. But nevertheless, our response to this is: “What is your blogging strategy?”

If you’re an owner or decision-maker in a B2B organization, then you might be standing on the sidelines of this whole “inbound marketing thing,” waiting and wondering if it’s really something that you should be doing. In three words: yes, you should.

The world is full of terms, phrases and expressions that, upon closer inspection, would benefit from a re-boot.

For example, we park on driveways, yet drive on parkways. We send cargo by ship, and shipments by car. And we call certain digital properties “landing pages,” even though we don’t want leads to merely land on them; instead, we want to convert them into qualified prospects and ultimately, into profitable and loyal customers.

While some lead nurturing configurations — such as those in B2B contexts — are as complex and intricate as air traffic control tower flight paths, essentially lead nurturing is the process of identifying, qualifying and then ushering prospects forward on the buyer’s journey towards a purchase. There’s nothing mysterious or controversial about this, and the costly mistake that many businesses are making here isn’t about concepts. Rather, it’s about prospects.

If you ask B2B sales reps what they want most in their professional life, it’s typically not a new device, an innovative software program, or even a bump in salary or an extra week of vacation. What they want are leads, leads and more leads, so that meeting -- or exceeding -- quota is the predictable norm; not the exception.

There’s a strange thing about the phrase target market that is arguably responsible for more business failures than any other cause: focusing on the “market” part, and ignoring the “target” part.

If you run a B2B sales team, then the sales reps and channels partners on your roster have a message for you, and they’ve asked us to put it in capital letters because it’s pretty important: PLEASE GIVE US MORE QUALIFIED B2B LEADS!

As noted in a study by USC professor and author Steve W. Martin, high-performance sales organizations aren’t necessarily those with the most resources or coveted rain makers. Rather, they’re leveraging something that all businesses can benefit from, regardless of whether they’re small start-ups or large enterprises: an optimized sales team structure.

Just how big and important is the service sector? According to Bloomberg, it represents a whopping 77 percent of private sector output in the U.S. It also supports hundreds of millions of jobs, as the numbers are only going to increase as the years march on. Basically, services are to the 21^st century what manufacturing was to the 20^th century.