The busiest shopping season of the year is about to begin! People who celebrate Christmas, Kwanzaa or Hanukkah will spend an average of $804.42, up nearly 5% over last year's $767.27. Is your business ready to grab a few of these holiday shopping bucks? The awesome folks over at SociallyStacked have created the below infographic that's packed with valuable holiday shopping trends for 2014 and offers some great advice for capitalizing on your marketing efforts during one of the busiest buying times of the year.

Are you looking for effective marketing strategies to increase online sales for your business? With the holiday season fast approaching, now is the time to ready your website for the surge in eCommerce as people begin looking for gift ideas. Thankfully, ReferralCandy has created the awesome infographic below that's filled with marketing tactics and tools you can use to give your products a timely sales boost.

The sales follow up after communicating with a prospect is a fragile thing. You don't want to come off as annoying or too aggressive in your pursuits. Instead of always second-guessing your decisions and worrying about losing a potential sale, the trick is to plan ahead for sales success. The great people over at Breakthrough Email and Signals put the sales process to the test in a big way, keeping track of over 1,000 meetings, 15k emails and $100 million in sales for 7 years. With this research, they pinpointed the most common follow-up problems that a salesperson has and provided solutions to help you move your prospect along the sales funnel with ease.