Marketers who want to connect with prospective clients in a meaningful way must first take the time to understand what the prospects are going through. With this understanding, inbound marketing and sales pros alike can personalize communications with buyers. Putting marketing and sales communications in the buyer's context helps to bring value to the interaction and will move them closer to doing business with your organization. Sounds easy, right? It's a bit trickier than it sounds.

Way back in 1987, four years before the World Wide Web was born, developer Steve Wilhite and his team at CompuServe came up with everyone’s favorite filetype: the Graphics Interchange Format aka the GIF. While very few of us will argue about the awesomeness this file type, which allows us to share silly little short animations, a surprising number of us have strong—and opposing—opinions on how to pronounce the acronym of this ubiquitous file type. Is it a hard G like “graphics”, or is it a soft G like the word “giraffe”?

For anyone that has been in sales for at least five years, you've likely recognized that the way we prospect and sell has drastically changed. The days of using the phone and email as the singular sales strategy for connecting with prospective clients is long gone. Digital media has become an important part of the buyer's journey and it is critical for salespeople to meet their prospects where they are by implementing a social selling strategy.