Rnordman

It’s been said that in sales differentiation, asking questions is an art, an appealing expression requiring craftsmanship and finesse. It’s also been said that asking questions is a science, a systematic process requiring knowledge gained through observation and experimentation.

In selling, there are two schools of thought when it comes to using questions as a way to connect with buyers and advance sales to a close. You can find numerous books and training courses on this subject, and every one of them will lean one way or the other.

StockSnap / Pixabay

In any high-value complex B2B sales environment involving new projects with multiple stakeholders, the buying behaviors and motivations that drive your customer’s decision-making journey are inherently complicated and may be impossible for the average salesperson to ever completely understand.

For anything other than inevitable purchases, your customer typically has a number of potential options – each with their respective pros and cons. Each of the individual stakeholders are also likely to have different personal motivations, priorities and decision criteria – often making it hard to establish consensus.

It’s perhaps no surprise that so many apparently promising sales opportunities end with the customer either deciding to do nothing or to postpone the project until some often-undefined future date. And it’s no wonder that many studies have found that “no decision” is now the most common outcome for such projects.

There are four key factors your salespeople need to be aware of when it comes to understanding B2B buying behavior: status quo bias, loss aversion, decision paralysis and the impact of early influence. Let’s consider each of these factors in turn…

Status quo bias

Based on ground-breaking research by Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman (author of the best-selling “Thinking, Fast and Slow”), the status quo bias effect recognizes that change is usually perceived to be risky.

So unless your customer has an urgent and compelling reason to act, they will usually prefer the comfort of the status quo. It’s no wonder that so many apparently promising sales opportunities end with the customer deciding to “do nothing”.

The implications for value selling are clear: if you are to persuade your customer of the need for change, you need to help them recognize that the status quo is unsafe. You need to contrast the threats, risks and consequences of their current path – the cost of inaction – with the potential benefits of realizing the significant opportunities that lie before them – the value of change.

Why this is important: when your customer fails to recognize sufficient contrast between their current situation and their future potential, they are likely to stick with what they know.

Loss Aversion

Kahneman’s research also found that decision-makers were 2-3 time more likely to take decisive action in response to the threat of loss than they were in response to the opportunity for gain. This runs counter to the instincts of many less experienced or less effective salespeople, who tend to be far more inclined to focus on the opportunity for gain than the threat of pain.

The implications for value selling are clear: you need to leverage loss aversion (and challenge their status quo bias at the same time) by helping your customers to recognize all the potential current threats to their business performance.

This requires that you encourage them to confront the undervalued implications of issues they may already be aware of, as well as introducing new and previously unrecognized threats to their strategic business goals.

Why this is important: selling the upside of implementing your solution may not be enough to persuade your potential customer to place an order with you. You will significantly improve your chances if you also help them to believe that staying as they are is an unacceptably risky strategy.

Decision paralysis

Research published by the CEB in “The Challenger Customer” found that the chances of a positive purchase decision declines in proportion to the number of stakeholders involved in the process. When a single individual is involved there is an 80% chance of success, but the number declines rapidly until – when six or more stakeholders are involved – the chances of reaching consensus about whether and how to act fall below 30%.

The CEB’s latest research shows that the average number of stakeholders in a typical high-value complex B2B buying decision has steadily risen to 6.8 – and that number continues to rise. The implications for value selling are clear: if you cannot identify and support a powerful champion and help the buying group as a whole to achieve consensus around their preferred option, their decision-making process is likely to slow down, stall or be abandoned completely.

Why this is important: The most common outcome of a complex B2B buying journey is now a decision to “do nothing” – and the most common cause is the failure of a large and unwieldy decision-making group to achieve a consensus for change.

The impact of early influence

BANT (budget, authority, need and timeframe) used to be a popular means of qualifying sales opportunities. It encourages salespeople to disqualify early opportunities that are not yet formal projects. This is a thoroughly dangerous conclusion: Forrester found that the vendor that did the most to shape the prospect’s vision of a solution wins 3 out of 4 subsequent purchase decisions.

Vendors that instruct their salespeople to only pursue BANT-qualified opportunities put themselves at a huge disadvantage. The implications for value selling are clear: salespeople need to be encouraged and enabled to proactively target and engage early with people and organizations that satisfy their “most valuable opportunity” profiles and to invest in influencing the prospect’s agenda before the emergence of a formally-defined and funded project.

Why this is important: it’s important to ignore the naysayers who claim that the average B2B buyer is 57% of their way through their decision process before they want to engage with a salesperson. This has never been true of complex high-value first-time B2B purchases. The sales person who does the most to shape the prospect’s vision of value from an early stage emerges with a huge competitive advantage.

Adapting your sales strategy

So – how should you adapt your sales strategy to take account of these 4 key factors? Here’s what I recommend:

• Equip and encourage your salespeople to promote the need for change before they promote the benefits of your solution – and if their prospect appears to be interested in your solution but has no significant business reason to change, coach your salespeople to rigorously qualify any such opportunities before committing any significant resources in pursuing them

• Coach your salespeople to focus on their prospective customer’s cost of inaction as much as on the benefits of implementing your solution, thereby reducing the risk that your customer might like what you have to offer, but decide to stick with the status quo and do nothing – because what they are doing today is at least adequate for the immediate needs

• Insist that your salespeople identify and where possible engage with all of the key stakeholders – and if they are over-dependent on one customer contact in any significant opportunity, red-flag the deal as having a very high-risk factor and look for alternative creative ways of reaching and influencing the other members of the decision group

• Systematically profile and target the most likely business sponsors within organizations that match your ideal customer profile, and seek to proactively influence their thinking from the earliest possible stage in their decision journey

Being aware of modern B2B buying behavior – and taking steps to deal with it – is just one of the recommendations in our latest step-by-step guide to implementing an effective value selling strategy.

Breaking up is hard. Especially when you’ve put in so much work to keep someone interested and invested in your relationship. When someone unsubscribes from your email list, it hurts. Kind of similar to when Josh from ninth grade asked you to prom only to stand you up on the day because Kim from tenth grade wanted to go with him.

Oh, the drama!

Let’s be honest – You can hunt down Josh and hound him to answer you. You can’t do that for every customer who unsubscribes from your mailing list. All you can do is hunker down and figure what you did wrong.

Understanding the problem

GetData surveyed over 500 internet users to learn the most common reasons why they’d unsubscribe from email newsletters, and mostly everyone said they received too many emails and a lot of emails looked like spam.

Let’s take a deeper look at the why, and what you can do to stop them and others from unsubscribing in the future.

1. Readers lose interest

Let’s start off with an easy one – Your readers are losing interest in the content you’re sending, and this could probably be because your content isn’t relevant to them. Or maybe it was once upon a time, but their tastes and preferences have changed and they’re looking for something else.

Your readers could also be unsubscribing because you’re sending them too much content in your emails. A newsletter that’s 6000 words long = bad. Sending a two-line newsletter = also bad. But this discussion of ‘too much’ or ‘too little’ hinges mainly on the quality of content you’re sending.

2. You’re sending too many emails

Last year we asked 1400 readers why they unsubscribe, and 69% of them said they receive too many emails from a business.

Any email inbox is a coveted space, with far too many brands fighting for attention. Sending multiple emails a week can be noble, but there’s a fine line between reaching out and spamming your readers. No one likes to look at their inbox and think, “That’s the third time you’ve emailed me this week!” Don’t be that brand.

Find a frequency that works for you – Whether it be a monthly newsletter rounding up your top blogs or a giveaway announcement. Save your impromptu emails for when you’ve got something exciting to announce or an upcoming sale. Readers will be more likely to engage with those emails.

3. You’ve got your segmentation all wrong

This happens more often than you think. You ended up adding the wrong readers to a list that is not relevant to them at all. It’s like sending a dog owner details on where to buy fish food.

Wrong segmentation has a high risk of making customers unsubscribe from your emails. Use your knowledge of your customers to talk with them one-on-one, taking your personalization to the next level.

Even established brands make mistakes. Shutterfly once sent an email to its entire list congratulating them on their newborn children – including people that didn’t have any kids. Due to the sensitive nature of this topic, it was picked up by media and discussed at length on Twitter and Facebook.

Shutterfly swiftly followed up on this mistake with a formal apology email from their chief marketing officer, who explained what happened and invited concerned subscribers to email the company.

We have a helpful email marketing checklist that will allow you to avoid mistakes like these.

4. Your emails look and sound spammy

Spammy emails either get weeded out by email spam filters or don’t get opened by the reader because they look fishy. It all begins with your subject line. In fact, 33% of email recipients open emails (or don’t) based on subject lines.

Here’s an actual screenshot from my personal Gmail:

While the nerd in me is interested in everything IBM does or says, I really don’t remember even signing up to receive their emails and turns out, the email isn’t even from them!

You can’t make this up. This reeks of spam.

The best subject line or email content all depends on your audience. For some audiences, an emoji will make them click and be happy. For other audiences, the same subject line might make them go hunting for the unsubscribe link.

You need to tailor your content according to what your readers want. Knowing your readers’ interests and needs, and not sensationalizing your subject lines, will make sure your emails stay out of the spam folder and your readers will open your emails.

How to avoid losing subscribers

First and foremost, create a permission-based email list. Include a checkbox that encourages users to opt-in to your mailing list. You could also implement an email sign up form that allows users who don’t want to make a purchase right away to give you their email addresses. You can add this form on your website or blog and even in your bios on social media.

Offering incentives to people who sign up for your list can be a great way to get their emails. You could add the new folks to a previously created drip email campaign that will send them relevant content in a timely manner. This could be anything from free resources to a three-email long course they can view and download via your emails.

Use your personal experience to guide you

Chances are you have been on the “unsubscribing” end before, so you know what that feels like. No matter what you decide to do, don’t sweat too much. If someone is bent on unsubscribing, they will. Just make sure to provide adequate value to readers and let them know the kind of content they will be receiving from you, preferably before they sign up, so they know what they’re setting themselves up for. Avoid spammy-looking content and words and check to make sure you’re sending the right content to the right people.

Remember: People unsubscribe for a reason. But it’s always best to be safe than sorry. Check, re-check and re-re-check your email campaigns to make sure you’re not giving people a reason to unsubscribe. Because once they’ve clicked that link, like Josh, they’re gone. Forever.

Right now, there is a tsunami that’s coming to wipe out thousands of SaaS companies.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the three tidal waves coming ashore and show you how to avoid their potentially disastrous consequences.

The Three Tidal Waves Coming for Your SaaS Business

Tidal Wave 1: Buyers now prefer to self-educate.

This isn’t limited to the B2C space. Three out of every four B2B buyers would rather self-educate than learn about a product from a sales representative, according to Forrester.

Let me ask you two questions:

1. Would you like to see and use a software product before buying it?
2. Or would you prefer to go through a lengthy sales process to see if it’s a good fit?

If you’re like most people, you’ll opt for trying out the product on your own. This doesn’t apply just to small and mid-size businesses. As Aptrinsic notes, “Enterprise buyers also expect to try and evaluate software in an easy, frictionless way.”

Trying out a product through a free trial or freemium model is less hassle and can help you decide quickly on a product. Do you agree?

Tidal Wave 2: Startups are more expensive to grow.

In one sense, this is counterintuitive: It has never been cheaper to build a SaaS company. (HackerNoon even goes so far as to claim that you can now build a SaaS product with $0.)

However, because of this low barrier to entry, there’s no shortage of competition. As a result, argues Andrew Chen, it’s becoming more expensive to acquire customers. Just take a look at these three channels:

• Facebook: 171% Increase in Cost per Thousand Impressions, or CPM (2017)
• Twitter: 20% Increase in CPM (Q4 2017)
• LinkedIn: 44% Increase in CPM (Q2 2017)

There are other channels, of course, but these numbers give us a hint that, well, marketing isn’t getting any cheaper. According to ProfitWell, customer acquisition costs (CAC) have increased by over 55% in the last 5 years:

At the same time, customer willingness to pay for features has dropped by 30% during that same period:

So, on one hand, we have rising costs; on the other, we have a lower willingness to pay. You don’t have to be a financial whiz to understand that this means your expenses go up while your profitability goes down.

If you have high churn in your SaaS business, this tidal wave may be lethal. Wouldn’t you agree?

Tidal Wave 3: Product experiences have become an essential part of the buying process.

If you’ve used Slack or Dropbox, you’ve witnessed this first-hand—you didn’t read a lengthy white paper on the benefits of strong internal communication or cloud-based file sharing. You wanted to see the damn product in action!

Wouldn’t you agree?

If you’ve been agreeing with everything that I’ve said so far, you’ll also agree that these tidal waves aren’t stopping anytime soon. They’re here to stay. Consumers (like us) demand it.

Now, your SaaS platform might be able to weather one of these tidal waves, but do you really want to take a chance on surviving all three?

To put your SaaS in the best position to win, you need to pick a go-to-market strategy that will place your SaaS on high ground.

Put Your SaaS Go-to-Market Strategy on High Ground

First off, what is a go-to-market strategy? A go-to-market (GtM) strategy is an action plan that specifies how a company will reach target customers and achieve a competitive advantage.

Before we dive into which SaaS GtM strategies might work best for your business, you need to take four elements into account:

1. Battle environment (i.e. market conditions) and competitive positioning
2. Target or enemy (i.e. ideal customer)
3. Weapon of choice (i.e. product offering and pricing)
4. Tactical plan (i.e. customer acquisition process and channels)

Knowing each of these elements will help you choose a GtM strategy that will acquire, retain, and grow your customers in the most capital-efficient way.

Other strategies, in contrast, are ripe for disruption and put you at risk.

Is your SaaS Go-To-Market Strategy at Risk?

Two classic SaaS GtM strategies are at risk of being disrupted: the sales-led and marketing-led GtM strategies.

1. The sales-led GtM strategy

Tidal Waves	Safety Zone
Tidal Wave 1 – Self-Educate
Tidal Wave 2 – Rising Acquisition Costs
Tidal Wave 3 – Product Experience

What is a sales-led go-to-market strategy?

A sales-led go-to-market strategy is a growth engine that leverages a sales team to reach their target customers. Essentially, if you want to make a sale, the whole process starts and ends with your sales team.

• Pros: Ability to close high Lifetime Value (LTV) customers. Perfect for hyper-niche solutions.
• Cons: Expensive customer acquisition cost (CAC) and hard to scale.

A big downside of the high-touch sales model is that the CAC is out of control, and the sales cycles are extremely long. As you can see in the graph below, high-touch sales is a leading indicator of CAC.

A high-touch sales process can balloon customer acquisition costs. (Image source)

To make sure the high-touch sales model remains profitable, the LTV naturally has to be high enough to recoup the cost of acquiring each new customer.

To reach that LTV, most sales-led businesses have to charge their customers a hefty premium. That premium price isn’t because the solution is more valuable but because the customer acquisition model is more expensive.

A sales-led strategy passes costs to consumers that have no connection to product value. (Image source)

If you currently use a sales-led GtM, a competitor with a more efficient customer acquisition model can deliver a more affordable price tag and steal your market share. To put yourself on higher ground, the next best SaaS GtM is a marketing-led GtM.

2. The marketing-led GtM strategy

Tidal Waves	Safety Zone
Tidal Wave 1 – Self-Educate
Tidal Wave 2 – Rising Acquisition Costs
Tidal Wave 3 – Product Experience

What is a marketing-led go-to-market strategy? A marketing-led go-to-market strategy is a growth engine that leverages a marketing team as a key lever to drive demand for a product.

The marketing team is responsible for driving Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) while the sales team works to further qualify these leads as Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).

• Pros: Lower CAC than a sales-led GtM strategy.
• Cons: 98% of marketing qualified leads don’t result in sales.

Marketing-led GtM is much more efficient than the traditional sales-led GtM; however, when it comes to customer acquisition, it has a big leak. According to SiriusDecisions, 98% of marketing-qualified leads never result in closed business.

One of the reasons this conversion rate is famously awful is that the MQL model has hidden flaws:

1. It encourages marketers to gate content to hit their MQL goals.
2. It focuses on content consumption as a leading indicator of intent.
3. The entire process rewards creating friction in the buying process.

As a result, there is often a disconnect between marketing and sales. Should we really be surprised though? Does downloading a whitepaper mean you’re ready to buy?

Absolutely not.

That said, the marketing-led GtM strategy isn’t the worst option, but there’s still lots of room for improvement. If you want to create a SaaS business that can weather a tsunami, you may want to consider adopting a product-led go-to-market strategy.

Why SaaS businesses are adopting product-led go-to-market strategies

The future of growth belongs to product-driven companies. At HubSpot, we realized this a few years ago, which is why we disrupted our own business model before anyone else could. – Kieran Flanagan, HubSpot

Over the last five years, countless SaaS businesses have switched from a traditional sales or marketing-led GtM strategy to a product-led GtM strategy.

These are just a few great stories of notable companies that have made the switch.

• HubSpot, VP of Marketing Kieran Flanagan
• DataMiner, CMO Tom Wentworth
• TradeGecko, Product Manager Lucas Neo

What is a product-led go-to-market strategy? A product-led go-to-market strategy relies on product features and usage as the primary drivers of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.

Tidal Waves	Safety Zone
Tidal Wave 1 – Self-Educate
Tidal Wave 2 – Rising Acquisition Costs
Tidal Wave 3 – Product Experience

This is the strategy that many well-known SaaS companies have adopted successfully, including Grammarly, Slack, and Dropbox.

Gokul Rajaram of Square, another example, summarizes the rationale: “Truly great software businesses are self-service first.”

• Pros: A significantly lower CAC, wider top of funnel, and rapid global scale. Works great with a large total addressable market.
• Cons: Hard to implement correctly.

Product-led SaaS businesses have an unfair advantage and enjoy access to a dominant growth engine and significantly lower CAC.

Dominant growth engine

Free software gives you the option to scale faster than your competitors in two powerful ways:

1. Wider top of funnel: A free trial or freemium model opens up your funnel to people who are earlier on in their customer journey. This is powerful because—instead of prospects filling out your competitor’s demo requests—they’re evaluating your product.
2. Rapid global scale: While your competitors are busy hiring new sales reps for each region under the sun, you can focus on improving your onboarding so that you can service more customers around the world in a fraction of the time.

A significantly lower CAC

Free software also builds a moat around your business in three ways:

1. Fast sales cycles: By having your prospects onboard themselves in your product, you can significantly reduce your prospect’s time-to-value and sales cycle. Once people experience value in your product, the next logical thing to do is upgrade. The quicker your users can accomplish a key outcome in your product, the quicker you can convert your free trial users into paying customers.
2. High revenue-per-employee (RPE): Software was always built to scale well, but with a self-service approach, you’re able to do more with fewer people on your team. Less hand-holding means higher profit margins per customer.
3. Better user experience: Since your product is built for people to onboard themselves, the overall support requests are often minimized while the user experience benefits.

As you can see, using a product-led GtM strategy gives you an unfair advantage in your market. But it doesn’t stop there.

According to OpenView Ventures, product-led SaaS businesses are valued more than 30% higher than the public-market SaaS Index Fund.

Conclusion

This is not for everyone. One thing I hope you’re not inferring from this article is that you need to be a self-service business. If you don’t know what you’re doing, adopting a product-led GtM strategy might kill your business instead of helping it.

Many ambitious entrepreneurs have tried and failed. Rob Walling, the CEO of Drip, offers a warning: “Freemium is like a Samurai sword: unless you’re a master at using it, you can cut your arm off.”

Part of the reason many SaaS businesses fail at transitioning from a traditional GtM strategy to a product-led one is that there’s no battle-tested playbook. You need to figure out whether a free trial or freemium model will work for your business.

To help make this process easier, I recently worked with the brilliant CXL team to create an entire course on product-led SaaS growth. The course can help you:

• Put together a successful product-led growth strategy that will get quick wins under your belt before the course is even finished.
• Avoid painful bottlenecks when it comes to acquiring and activating free-trial and freemium users.
• Help more people experience the core value of your product and (actually) want to upgrade.

Now, I’m curious. Is your SaaS go-to-market strategy tsunami-proof?

Believe it or not, the 2018 holiday season is already right around the corner. Any day now, malls and stores across the country will be filling up with parents, friends, and spouses hunting down perfect gifts for all the special people in their lives.

Retailers, for their part, have stocked up on items they believe are likely to sell out during the holiday rush. And the holidays are a perfect time to take advantage of all that sophisticated personalization tools offer—from recommendations for products they’ll love, but haven’t heard of yet, to holiday gift ideas for friends and family members.

But while an aggressive holiday campaign may provide a touch of temporary relief from sales pressure, it pays to remember that impersonal email marketing always does far more harm than good. Top retailers, on average, send 1.09 emails per day to their email subscribers. If you received several irrelevant emails from a brand, how would you respond?

At best, those impersonal emails are likely to be ignored. At worst, they can cause you to lose the hard-earned trust loyal customers have learned to put in your brand — and prompt customers to shop elsewhere. When an email is not personalized to them, 52% of customers say they’ll find somewhere else to go.

Reality check: When it comes to effective email marketing, the only reality that matters is the one your subscribers live in — and if you aim to meet your holiday goals, you need to understand your customers and what they find relevant.

Personalization is highly profitable

Winter holidays aren’t the only time that retailers face the challenge of meeting unusually high sales quotas. Just about every month of the year includes at least one weekend with higher-than-usual shopper turnout — so it’s no surprise that inventory managers stock up heavily for those retail rushes, and need effective tools for achieving their sales goals.

A great holiday-focused sales strategy can work wonders, but problems start to creep in when retailers get a bit too focused on their merchandising agendas at the expense of their customers’ actual interests, needs, and aspirations.

Customer-focused marketers recognize that, in most cases, these two approaches can feed off one another, creating a cycle of customer loyalty and profitable sales. It costs 25 times less to sell to an existing customer than to win a new one — and personalized email marketing returns more than 20 times the value of every dollar spent.

In fact, many customers are willing to pay up to 20 percent more for personalized products, and are also happy to pay a premium for the privilege of shopping with brands they know and trust. This means the wisest strategy for long-term profit is one that puts customers’ needs and goals first, and focuses on personalization as a key driver of sales.

Ordinarily, many retailers demonstrate a clear understanding of this principle. More than 75 percent of all business enterprises now invest in some form of personalized marketing, and that number continues to climb every year as more businesses discover the benefits for themselves.

Unfortunately, though, the pressures of holiday sales bring out the worst in some marketers, pushing them toward one-size-fits-all campaigns that quickly fall into stale, ineffective tactics — and actually hurt the company’s bottom line as a result.

Sales pressure hurts performance

For many retailers, big sales aren’t just about pressure to sell — they’re about pressure to sell specific quantities of specific items. When execs predict that a certain shirt, or toy, or household item will sell out during an upcoming sale, they fill up warehouses and store shelves with all the items they’ll need to meet customer demand. But the challenge of connecting those products with the right customers falls to marketing teams, who need personalized offers and recommendations to create moments of delight in every email they send.

As retailers come under intense pressure to hit sales targets for highly stocked (or even overstocked) items, even the savviest marketers can forget that a full 75 percent of email revenue is generated by triggered campaigns rather than one-size-fits-all campaigns — and can give in to the urge to drown every customer’s inbox in offers for hot-ticket items.

The truth is, though, that batch & blast campaigns perform significantly worse than personalized ones, by just about every possible metric. They generate fewer clicks, lower engagement, and more unsubscribes than personalized messaging — and they’re far less likely to lead to purchases at premium (i.e., non-sale) prices.

Every time a retailer chooses an impersonal path to marketing, they’re choosing to live in their own reality, instead of the reality their customers experience. Focusing on sales agendas above the desires of their subscribers means these retailers risk hurting their own bottom lines — not only by losing sales, but by losing loyal customers they’ve invested heavily in acquiring.

To break free from this cycle, retail marketers need to take a step back before they hit that “Launch Campaign” button, and remember that focusing on the customer always leads to greater sales performance over time.

… is not the same as low price.

The price is obvious. It can be seen from a mile away. But value is more subtle. It often needs to be experienced to be understood.

The price is the same for every person who buys that item at retail. The value is different for everyone.

Low price is the last refuge for marketers who don’t have the patience or guts to demonstrate value for those that need it.

       

As one of today’s most efficient and successful online marketing strategies, influencer marketing will continue to grow and evolve well into 2019. What started as “celebrity” influence has grown into a dominant industry with influencers boasting audiences and engagement of all types and sizes.

Studies have shown that 94% of marketers believe influencer marketing delivers 11x more ROI than traditional forms of digital marketing. It can be used to meet various marketing goals, including building brand awareness, increasing customer loyalty, distributing content, attracting followers and driving sales.

Trends for 2019

While influencer engagement will continue to trend upward in the coming year, what will evolve is how influencers prefer to be compensated. While nearly 70% prefer monetary compensation, a growing number of influencers are becoming open to other forms of payment, including affiliate partnerships.

Today, influencer engagement is synonymous with Instagram, but there is much room for growth in other channels, depending on your target audience. While 99% of influencers are on Instagram, 70% are on Facebook, 46% on Snapchat, 42% on Twitter, and 37% on YouTube.

When choosing the platform for an influencer campaign, consider how many of your target customers can be found on the platform, and the potential engagement an influencer can generate. Because the better the engagement rate, the more effective your influencer marketing will be.

And whether it’s Instagram Stories or Facebook Live, video content created by influencers is one of the most impactful, converting forms of content you can provide. So, look for ways to deliver video content in a way that entertains and delights your audience.

Finally, many influencers are beginning to recognize the benefits of building closer, more focused long-term relationships with brands, rather than juggling multitudes of one-off engagements, and are adjusting accordingly.

Influencer Engagement for Small Businesses

While influencer engagement often brings to mind large brands, especially in the wake of the Colin Kaepernick agreement with Nike, don’t let these million-dollar deals dissuade you from seeking influencer campaigns for your own smaller brand.

Influencers that best fit smaller businesses may have micro-influencer status—meaning they have less than 25,000 followers (and typically less than 10,000) —but they also carry significant influence (4%) over that smaller audience. That influence translates into action, with 82% of people reporting they are likely to follow a recommendation made by a micro-influencer. When compared to the 1.6% of engagement that celebrity endorsers experience, you can see how these smaller, more cost-effective influencers provide a significant marketing benefit to smaller brands.

Micro-influencers typically mention brands three times more frequently than celebrity and mega influencers in a way that feels authentic and not forced. That equals more exposure to your target audience for a smaller budget. Cosmetics giant L’Oréal discovered thisrecently when Gartner L2 conducted a study on their recent Champs-Élysées fashion show.

Jugos, a natural beverage company in Boston, works with smaller influencers to spread the word about their drinks. This particular post received 570 likes and 81 comments on an Instagram account with just over 19,000 followers. So don’t sweat the small stuff. If the influencers are reaching your target audience, then you’ve hit the jackpot, no matter how large or small their audience may be.

Identifying the Right Influencers

Quite often the most challenging part of any influencer engagement is finding the right influencers. Selecting the right influencers is critical because once you’ve tapped someone to share their opinion on your product or service, that person becomes an extension of your brand.

So make sure to do your due diligence. Review an influencer’s previous posts to determine whether they’ll be a good reflection of your brand’s mission and vision. Make sure they are authentic and transparent. Because while you can afford to work with influencers who don’t have large followings, you may never recover from aligning with the wrong influencer.

Tools like Buzzsumo, TapInfluenceor Moz’s Follerwonkcan help identify potential influencers by searching relevant keywords and hashtags and filtering the results according to influencer score, engagement, and other interactions.

Building Ongoing Relationships

When building relationships with your influencers, it’s important to make sure your brand is relevant to their followers, and vice versa.

Take the time to follow the identified influencers before reaching out, and make sure their posts align with your brand. Like, share and comment on their posts to begin building a relationship before approaching them regarding an engagement. They’ll undoubtedly spend time checking out your brand when they see that you’ve shown interest in them.

Once you’ve begun to build a rapport and you’re ready to reach out, transparency and clearly defined expectations will go a long way toward building trust with your potential influencers. This includes clarifying your brand messages and brand voice, while also giving influencers the freedom they need to create relevant, authentic posts about their experiences with your brand.

Finally, be realistic in your compensation. Think about what you would pay for content that would result in a similar ROI.

Compensating with product is still a part of the influencer economy – particularly with micro-influencers or high-value industries like travel – but most influencers now expect to be paid as any other creative marketing resource.

You can also offer other forms of compensation, including exclusive event access, a unique look at a product or study before launch, or promotion of the influencer’s own platform.

The Importance of Measurement

When done correctly, influencer engagement has the power to extend your brand’s reach, but you’ll never know by how much if you don’t measure your results.

Using personalized URLs, customized coupons and unique promo codes with tracking links help track engagement scores and possibly purchase decisions. You can also monitor hashtag use and specific keywords within each platform to determine the engagement for each. One tool for tracking hashtag reach is Keyhole, but you’ll want to be sure you’re using a proprietary hashtag to see the most relevant results.

Influencer marketing shows no signs of slowing down in the immediate future. As it continues to grow and develop in 2019, brands need to first and foremost research and identify those influencers who align with their marketing objectives to generate impactful campaigns that are believable, transparent and honest. If not, the trust you’ve spent years building for your brand will be gone in an instant.

After a deal closes, the customer relationship is still in its infancy. Beyond renewals, existing accounts present a great deal of new revenue and partnership opportunities for sales pros who understand their continued role managing customer accounts strategically.

In this space, Strategic Account Managers identify and create opportunities by positioning solutions aligned with customer goals, challenges, and initiatives. By focusing on strategic account management, sales professionals can grow accounts and enjoy other benefits, including:

Once the deal has been closed, the company needs to be able to dedicate efforts on maintaining and growing these relationships. In doing so, existing accounts can grow, offering many benefits, including:

• Shorter sales cycles
• Reduced acquisition costs
• Priority relationships
• Greater access to decision-makers

It is important to note, that in an ideal state strengthening relationships with valuable accounts should come from dedicated support in the form of Strategic Account Managers so sales reps can focus on closing new deals.

In this post, we’ll ways your company can leverage strategic account management in your pursuit of opportunities with existing customers.

Strategic Account Manager Job Description

Ready to add a Strategic Account Manager to your team? Here’s a job description to help you find a qualified candidate.

[Your Company Name] is hiring a Strategic Account Manager.

This role is responsible for managing relationships with our most valued customers. As a Strategic Account Manager, you will oversee customer retention, satisfaction, and revenue growth strategy.

In this position, you will:

• Serve as the main point of contact for your assigned accounts.

• Get to know your assigned accounts to understand their opportunities and challenges.

• Identify how our company can support the customer’s opportunities and challenges.

• Monitor the satisfaction level of your customer accounts and report progress to internal stakeholders.

• Be on point as the internal company contact regarding your customer accounts.

Skills and qualifications:

• Must have hands-on experience and demonstrated success managing multiple key customer accounts.

• Strong relationship-building skills to build trust and rapport with customer account stakeholders.

• Effective written and verbal communication skills.

• Excellent customer service skills.

• Data reporting and analytical skills; must be able to pull and analyze key metrics to measure the results of customer retention and satisfaction.

• Creative problem-solver.

• Sales experience — meeting quota should be the norm.

Strategic Account Management Process

To ensure success implementing the strategic account management process, consider these best practices.

1. Focus on the right customers.

Growing a current relationship starts with smart customer selection. Salespeople must take the time to determine which of their accounts represent the most significant opportunities. How? By finding the overlap between the customer’s strategic initiatives and your solutions.

In this early stage, examine "hard" factors — including revenue generated and product mix — and "soft" factors, such as level of access, relationships, and buying behavior.

Consider the divisions, departments, and locations within a target account. The best opportunities aren’t necessarily found in the accounts that have spent the most. In fact, these accounts often represent fewer sales opportunities because they’ve spent so much. Look for the accounts with the most significant potential for future purchases.

2. Analyze customer needs.

Targeting an existing account requires as much foresight as targeting a new one. Though salespeople already have access to some stakeholders, it’s still crucial to build a plan. This process begins by understanding the buyer’s journey, which helps sales professionals align their activities to the customer’s place in the buying process.

Of course, the buyer’s journey begins when they encounter a challenge in their pursuit of long-term goals and short-term objectives. The value of expanding existing accounts is it places the sales professional on this path early. You’re there to greet your customer when they arrive, so to speak.

In these initial stages, sales professionals can shape the customer’s thinking and properly frame their needs. This level of influence comes from salespeople who become trusted advisors. Reaching this point means you’ve provided insight to the customer and have taken the time to understand their business.

A trusted advisor can even be the person who triggers the buyer’s journey. This position is powerful and influential because, as McKinsey says, "research has found that journey performance is significantly more strongly linked to economic outcomes than are touchpoints alone."

3. Align with the customer.

A compelling solution is not enough. Salespeople need to be better than the competition. They must find alignment with the customer, so the value of the solution resonates with their business need. This step is critical, because it differentiates their solution from competitors.

Creating alignment involves stakeholder analysis. Sales professionals need to understand who will make the buying decision. Some of these stakeholders will have an existing relationship with the sales professional. Others will be new.

Taking a strategic approach means engaging established relationships to expand to new ones. The process is ongoing because stakeholders enter and exit the picture.

4. Engage customer needs

Business drivers change — and that’s a good thing. These changes are exactly why the business needs solutions in the first place. To track these changes in real-time, however, salespeople must keep the customer engaged. Without a high level of communication, they risk presenting solutions and insights that don’t resonate with their customer.

Regular dialogue clarifies evolving needs and boosts profitability, because fully engaged customers are more profitable than average customers. According to findings from Gallup, 40% of customers who are highly satisfied with their account manager are deeply engaged.

5. Measure success.

Strategic account managers must be able to demonstrate success to both their customers and stakeholders within their company. Customers who engage in a long-term partnership with an account manager expect a personalized experience that will help them achieve their goals and keep their business running smoothly.

Using a CRM to track customer communications can help Strategic Account Managers stay on top of their valuable partnerships.

When you are able to measure and document successful conversations and support initiatives for your customer, you gain valuable insight on how to continue having a fruitful partnership.

Additionally, those who manage strategic accounts must be able to measure and report success to their company’s stakeholders. If a company is allocating resources to strategic account management, there is an expectation that the account will be able to generate significant revenue to justify the investment. Strategic account managers must be able to demonstrate success for their company.

Strategic Account Management Planning Tools

With so many inputs to consider in the strategic account planning process, it’s important sales professionals have the right tools to manage and track their research and relationships.

There are many options for account planning tools and templates. Selecting the right tool is important, because your team needs a tool that’s robust enough to capture all critical customer information and lean enough to be put to practical use.

As you evaluate strategic account management tools and templates look for these key components:

1. Industry Analysis Tool —Include a component that supports examination and documentation of external industry issues that may impact the customer.
2. Customer Relationship Analysis Tool —Include a component that documents history with the customer and avenues for expansion -- like untapped business units and new divisions.
3. Customer Strategy Map —Include a component that captures the customer’s strategy to determine which of their objectives and initiatives connect with the solution’s capabilities. List the customer’s goals, challenges, and culture.
4. Stakeholder Assessment Tool —Include a component that helps your sales professionals categorize identified stakeholders by their role, level of influence, and alignment with the solution.
5. Competitive Assessment Tool — Include a component where your team can review your competitive position from the customer’s perspective to identify ways to articulate your unique value.

To begin the strategic account planning process, check out HubSpot’s sales tools to facilitate mutually beneficial customer relationships and grow your business.

Ready to learn more about how account management can benefit your business? Check out this post to learn the difference between account management and sales.

Mediamodifier / Pixabay

Sales technology has become increasingly popular over the last few decades, and it continues to be one of the best ways to help salespeople meet their goals. Without a doubt, sales is becoming more technology-driven as more companies are beginning to invest and incorporate the new science of S.T.E.M or Sales Technology Engagement Management into their sales teams.

Sales reps are usually expected to sell more and sell faster, which means they have to take advantage of these technological shifts. Many salespeople feel that their sales process is disrupted because they’ve had to change how they engage with customers, coworkers, and prospects. However, the new science of sales technology enablement management (S.T.E.M) allows salespeople to work smarter and efficiently by arming sales reps with technological tools to smoothly navigate each phase of the sales process. Understanding S.T.E.M and how it can work for sales teams is critical to enhancing the productivity of your sales force.

Why S.T.E.M Is Essential

Sales Technology Enablement Management is a necessity now because technology isn’t slowing down or going away. The way companies keep up with sales technology impacts the way sales teams work together and how they interact with customers. Learning how to master the new science of S.T.E.M is critical to the success of sales teams.

For the most part, sales reps want to learn the new technology and use it because they know it can help them work smarter. The demand for sales representatives with S.T.E.M skills has been more important now more than ever due to the ever-increasing amount of information that is available to both buyers and sellers. The new science of S.T.E.M. has changed the selling landscape tremendously by allowing access to data and insights that were not as accessible before. This access to data has leveled the playing field for sellers and buyers alike.

Finding Solutions with S.T.E.M

Getting real or quantifiable results are based on science. Sales Technology Enablement Management means that you have a plan in place and a strategy that works. You must ask plenty of questions. Sales reps must determine what their target audience is and what they need. You also have to research everything, determine a hypothesis and then test the hypothesis.

During the testing phase, you should gather appropriate information and analyze the data to determine the outcome. Talk with others in the firm about your results and determine if that is a viable solution. If you think it could be better, you’re more than welcome to research a little more, create a new hypothesis, and test it, as well. Continue with the process until you find something that works for you and your team. In some cases, it may require a few tweaks to the overall strategy, or you may have to change everything completely.

S.T.E.M and The Evolution of Sales Teams

The new science of S.T.E.M. is critical to improving modern sales teams and their sales strategies. New S.T.E.M technology supports sales teams by allowing them to utilize technology that can enhance sales productivity and analytic skills. While traditional selling practices should not be abandoned, implementing S.T.E.M. best practices with sales training shows great promise for enhancing productivity and overall performance of sales teams.

A lot goes into running an ecommerce business.

So, you’re a solo entrepreneur selling marked-up wiffle ball bats that you find on clearance at sporting goods stores. Or, maybe you’re an artisan with a small team of workers who craft high-quality picture frames. Perhaps you’re a large coffee maker manufacturer that handles tons of orders on a daily basis.

Regardless of what products you move and how you source them, you have a lot on your plate. You need to develop your product. You need to optimize your Facebook advertising campaigns. You need to manage your business’ finances.

Translation: you don’t have time to manage inventory, pack and ship every single order, and oversee customer service processes. Whether you’re already selling on Amazon or you’ve seriously considered it, there is a solution: Fulfillment by Amazon, or FBA.

What is Fulfillment by Amazon?

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is one of two core fulfillment options offered to Amazon sellers. The other is called Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM)—a system by which the seller (you) takes care of packing and shipping orders directly to customers. FBM sellers essentially use Amazon as a place to reach consumers and generate demand.

Amazon actually sums up FBA pretty well in Seller Central: “You sell it, we ship it.”

Here’s how it works.

FBA Step 1. Send your products to an Amazon fulfillment center.

It goes without saying that the products you’re sending to Amazon should already be listed in your Seller account. You don’t want your products sitting in an Amazon warehouse if they’re not, uh, for sale on Amazon.

You’ll need to label all your products, which you can do independently or through Amazon’s FBA Label Service. Then, you ship your inventory either through Amazon or with a carrier of your choice.

FBA Step 2. Amazon takes care of storage.

When your inventory gets to the warehouse, Amazon scans the labels you attached, weighs and measures each package, and stores everything accordingly.

You’ll use online inventory tracking to stay on top of your stock. It’s up to you to ship more inventory to the warehouse when necessary.

FBA Step 3. Somebody orders your product on Amazon.

Amazon takes care of picking the product from inventory, packing it for shipping, and sending it to the customer.

Plus, after the order has been placed, Amazon takes responsibility for customer service.

How Much Does Fulfillment by Amazon Cost?

When calculating the costs of using Amazon FBA, there are several categories of fees to take into consideration. Let’s look at each category in turn.

General Fulfillment Fees

The fees you’ll mainly be dealing with are general fulfillment fees, which depend on two factors: the size of your product and the total shipping weight.

Standard products are things that weight a few pounds at most: a wallet, a sweater, a tea kettle, and so on. These are grouped into four tiers:

Then, there are oversize products: a microwave, a TV, a comically large tea kettle, etc. Again, Amazon groups these products into four pricing tiers:

Now, it’s time to calculate the shipping weight.

For standard products weighing under 1 lb. and special oversize products (weird grouping), the shipping weight is simply the sum of the product weight and the packaging weight.

Shipping weight = product weight + packaging weight

For everything else, the shipping weight is the packaging weight plus the product weight OR the dimensional weight (whichever is greater).

Shipping weight = product weight + packaging weight

OR

Shipping weight = dimensional weight + packaging weight

BY THE WAY

Dimensional weight = (length x width x height) / 139

Let’s say you sell a lunch box that weighs 2 lb. on its own. That makes it a “largest standard product.” The dimensions are 12 x 6 x 6 inches, creating a dimensional weight of 3.1 lb. The dimensional weight is greater than the product weight, so that’s what Amazon uses when calculating your total shipping weight.

A dimensional weight of 3.1 lb. plus a packaging weight of 0.9 lb. makes a total shipping weight of 4 lb. Because the lunch box is a “largest standard product,” the FBA fee is $4.71 plus $0.38 per lb. over 2 lb. The lunch box is 2 lb. over 2 lb., so the total shipping cost comes to:

$4.71 + ($0.38 x 2) = $5.47

Storage Fees

Amazon charges you money based on how much space you take up in the warehouse. Your storage fees are based on the volume (cubic feet) you occupy, and you’re charged every month.

For example, you’re charged your September storage fee a week or two into August.

Fortunately, this math is a lot simpler than the math we just did:

You can figure out how many cubic feet a given package takes up by dividing the volume (length x width x height) by 1,728 (12 x 12 x 12). So, if one package measures 16 x 10 x 10 inches, that’s a volume of 1,600. Divide that by 1,728 and you get 0.93 cubic feet—or 64 cents.

You may wonder why it’s more expensive to store smaller products. Amazon says it’s more difficult and costly to store these products in proper fashion. We’ll take their word for it.

Removal Order Fees

You can pay Amazon to return some (or all) of your inventory to you. Alternatively, you can pay them to dispose of whatever products you haven’t sold or won’t be selling going forward. Either way, you’ll be charged on a per-item basis.

Miscellaneous Fees

• Unplanned preparation fee: If you send your inventory to an Amazon warehouse without the proper labeling or preparation, they’ll fix it and charge you accordingly.
• Returns processing fee: If a customer returns something to Amazon and it qualifies for free returns, Amazon will charge you a returns processing fee equal to your original fulfillment fee.
• Long-term storage fee: If your inventory stays in an Amazon warehouse unsold for longer than six months, you’ll be charged. If you don’t expect something to sell before the six-month mark, you can ask Amazon to return it and pay the removal orders fee.

The Advantages of Fulfillment by Amazon

After discussing almost nothing but fees for the past several hundred words, you may be thinking that FBA benefits Amazon and only Amazon.

Not so fast, partner.

FBA Advantage #1: More Time to Grow Your Business

Using Amazon FBM means handling all the inventory, the labeling, the packing, the shipping, the tracking, and the customer service. If you’re operating your ecommerce business out of your living space or a small office, you likely don’t have room for all that noise.

Plus, by handing off those responsibilities to Amazon, you give yourself way more time to focus on the things that improve and grow your business: product development, market research, online advertising campaigns, SEO, partnerships, and so on. If you can’t allocate enough time and energy to these practices, your business simply won’t be sustainable.

FBA Advantage #2: Earn Consumers’ Trust

Americans love Amazon. More importantly, Americans trust Amazon. When you order Scooby-Doo slippers with two-day shipping, you sleep soundly knowing that your feet will be both cozy and whimsical in 48 hours.

As an FBA seller, your product listings will prominently display “Fulfilled by Amazon” for all prospective buyers to see. The effect this has on your sales is irrefutable—shoppers automatically trust you more. And shoppers like to buy from sellers they trust.

FBA Advantage #3: Automatic Prime Eligibility

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. households have Amazon Prime. Overall, nearly 85 million consumers are using the premiere service.

Nobody who pays for Amazon Prime is going to buy products that aren’t Prime eligible. Why settle for standard shipping (5-8 business days) when you can get your mason jars in a fraction of that time? Plus, the Prime logo taps into that trust factor we just talked about.

Don’t miss out on tens of millions of trusting, eager consumers.

FBA Advantage #4: The Coveted Buy Box

The Amazon buy box is the white box on the right side of a product details page where the “Add to Cart” and “Buy Now” buttons live.

In other words, it’s where the money is made on Amazon. To be precise, 82% of Amazon purchases made on desktops are done through the buy box. That number is even higher for purchases made on mobile.

Amazon uses an algorithm to determine which seller is represented in the buy box and for how long. The details of the algorithm are for another blog post, but one factor is pertinent here:

FBA sellers get a lot of preference when it comes to the buy box.

The Disadvantages of Fulfillment by Amazon

We should be clear—Amazon FBA isn’t a celestial bounty of good times and warm hugs. Before opting for this fulfillment option, you should understand the two principal disadvantages.

FBA Disadvantage #1: Fees on Fees

As you may recall from a previous section of this blog post, Amazon FBA costs money. In fact, all fees considered, the costs can run pretty high.

Although we’re of the opinion that these costs are ultimately worth it, we understand that your business may not be in a position to take them on in addition to essential expenses like manufacturing and marketing.

FBA Disadvantage #2: Forfeiting Control

It’s not (that) weird to think of your ecommerce business as your child. You’ve built this thing from the ground up, and you’re rightfully proud of that.

As such, you may not be ecstatic about the idea of handing over the reins for storage and shipping. If a lack of personal oversight and control makes your uncomfortable, Amazon FBA isn’t for you.

So, is Fulfillment by Amazon Worth It?

The answer to this question really comes down to three factors: how much you’re shipping per month, how big your profit margins are, and how niche your market is.

You need to move at least 40 items per month to qualify for FBA. If you’re just barely hitting that minimum threshold, it may not be worth the hassle (and the fees) of preparing your inventory according to Amazon’s strict guidelines. You’re probably better off handling these responsibilities by yourself, or through a smaller fulfillment company that’s more flexible.

FBA isn’t a good idea for ecommerce sellers with small margins. If you’re not making much money per sale, it’s a safe bet that FBA fees are going to bring your margins down to zero, if not into the red. Although shipping everything on your own isn’t free—in terms of money or energy—you shouldn’t take on any fees that aren’t essential to your business.

Sellers of super niche products (e.g., vintage zines geared towards old-school goth music fans) don’t necessarily need FBA, either. Remember that one of FBA’s biggest advantages is the eligibility for Prime. If an Amazon shopper sees a bunch of fairly identical products, and only a handful of them are Prime eligible, she’s going to immediately write off those that are ineligible.

But, not that many people use Amazon to sell ‘70s goth zines. The people who are in the market for your niche product probably don’t care that much about Prime eligibility; they’re just happy to have found what they were looking for.

Now, if you’re a seller in a competitive market who moves tons of items per month and drives sizeable margins, then yeah—FBA is a fantastic investment. It’s a surefire way to free up your schedule, earn prospective buyers’ trust, and win more sales on the product details page.

Today, Hinge is excited to announce the release of a new study on professional services buyer behavior. This study conducted by the Hinge Research Institute provides insight into how professional services firms can win new business and grow faster by better understanding their buyers.

Buyers of professional services today have changed significantly in the last few years. As they face new challenges in the marketplace and try new ways to find and vet service providers, buyers’ criteria for evaluating potential vendors has evolved. If you want to stand out in an increasingly competitive marketplace, it’s critical to understand target client behavior and tendencies.

In this post, we’ll explore some key takeaways from this research and how they fit into our understanding of the professional services marketplace.

About the research

This study has deep roots. For the past decade, we’ve been working hard to understand professional services buyers:

• In 2009, we published our original buyer study in which we interviewed 137 buyers of professional services.
• In 2013, we published Inside the Buyer’s Brain: How to Turn Buyers into Believers, a book based on a new study of 822 buyers and 533 sellers of professional services.
• And now in 2018, we’ve released this study: Inside the Buyer’s Brain: Understand your buyers. Win more business. It details the perspectives of 1,475 buyers and 3,005 sellers in a changing marketplace.

We matched buyers to their respective sellers, which allowed us to study both sides of the relationship.

A broad mix of professional services were represented in the sample. Many firms we studied also sell to government buyers, who made up 35% of our buyer sample.

We noticed many differences between industries and among government buyers. Those detailed breakdowns can be found in the full report.

Key findings

1.) Relying on referrals alone is becoming a risky marketing strategy.

Even though buyers today believe themselves to be more likely to refer, the rate at which they actually make a referral is down slightly from 74% in 2013.

One possible reason for this decline is that is that more and more buyers are searching for service providers in other ways. In 2013, more than 70% of buyers reported turning to their network when they needed a new service provider. While referrals remain the top search method, less than 60% of today’s buyers ask for referrals — a 15% decrease.

At the same time, web search is becoming an increasingly popular tool, with nearly 1 in 5 buyers turning to search engines to find service providers. Soon, Google could be the top referral source for professional services.

2.) Buyers are placing a higher importance on expertise in the selection process.

Relevant experience and expertise are the top criteria buyers use to evaluate potential service providers. This has changed since 2013, when we found a good general marketplace reputation, price and cultural fit to be the top three selection criteria.

This suggests that if firms are able to successfully differentiate themselves around subject matter expertise they have a better chance of getting on a short list of finalists.

3.) Buyers see professional service providers as more relevant and valuable today

In 2013, 19% of buyers viewed their service provider as highly important to solving their challenges. Today, that number jumped to more than 29% — more than a 50% increase. Similarly, buyers are 33% more likely to view their service providers as highly valuable today (68.6%) than five years ago (51.4%).

More buyers believe their service provider is highly relevant to solving their challenges and more buyers see their vendor’s services as highly valuable. These are strong indicators that even in a crowded, competitive marketplace, demand is strong.

4.) Increased competition is eroding brand strength.

We know from our 2018 High Growth Study that increased competition from both larger and smaller competitors is a top challenge facing professional services firms today. From the buyer’s perspective, more vendors means more leverage in negotiating price. From the seller’s perspective, this commoditization makes it difficult to differentiate their firm and sustain high margins.

The impact of this hyper-competitive environment is clear. Average brand strength among professional services firms dropped nearly 10% in the last five years, driven primarily by a 25% decrease in firm visibility.

In past research, we found increasing firm visibility to be the top marketing priority of professional services firms — a goal that may be easier to set than achieve.

5.) While competition is fierce, firms still don’t know whom they compete against.

Buyers and sellers of professional services differ in whom they view as competitors. On average, there is only a 30.1% overlap in identified competitors — up from 25% in 2013.

This overlap varies by industry. Consulting firms saw the stiffest competition, with the average firm able to identify only 23% of competitors. Meanwhile, accounting and financial services firms correctly identified 37% of their competitors.

In prior studies, we found that researching the competition was a top marketing priority of professional services firms. Firms that invest in understanding the marketplace can more easily pivot and position themselves to address emerging needs before their less-well-informed competitors can adjust.

Add failure to Product Management, the same way it is built into Sales

Failure is built into sales. The sales person reaches out to ten prospective customers, three of them come back to her with some sort of answer, two actually engage in a meaningful discussion and one prospect eventually turn into a customer and signs the deal. So all in all, for nine prospects, the sale process failed.

Building a product is usually not a single event that can be tagged as ‘success’ or ‘failure,’ but a process with many steps, similar to a sales cycle. During this process, we should add many checkpoints that we can learn from; Not just from the ‘successes’ of it but even more from the ‘failures.’

Another way to look I like to look at it is the difference between the regular season and the playoffs. The regular season is all about the numbers and the calculated failures, while in the playoffs every game counts, it is all about winning what you have right now in front of you or be out the door.

Well, not everything is the playoffs…

How can we take a little bit of that calculated risk, “failure-for-focus” into our Product Management work?

Probably by using MVP, Agile, AB-Testing, and other short-cycle, “testing the waters” methodologies.

The Person is the center, not the Process nor the Product

Selling is all about creating a personal connection between the seller and buyer. One buys from someone they trust, and one can sell once they understand buyers motivation. It is a person-to-person interaction.

In Sales, it is very clear that there is a person on the other side of the computer, phone or table. In Product Management, it is easier to forget that. It is sometimes easier to see the product or the technology rather than the people who use it.

When creating and designing products, we must have the user in mind. Someone is going to use that product, and we should try and put ourselves into his or her shows the best we can.

In both cases, Sales and Product Management, the people on the other side and their thoughts are extremely important and the key to being successful.

Similarly to sales reps constantly reflecting about their engagement, the correspondence with the buyer and a lot of what was going on in his or her mind during that process, Product Managers should do for their users, before, during and after the product development process.

It must be an innate part of our work, getting into the head of the users.

In Product Management, like in Sales, Focus on Values, Not Features

A good sales rep is trying to sell the value that the product brings to the world, not just the list of its feature. Why is that? Because a value is something a human can relate to, and we already agreed that in sales the person is in the center.

So the sales rep will start from the values, and it will be his or her anchor along the process. Is it always the anchor for the Product Manager?

A good product is there for one that creates value for its users, and the Product Manager’s job is to materialize that.

Every product and feature in our roadmap or plan should have and be part of a clear “what is the value that this brings to the customer” statement. An anchor.

It is that anchor that the salespeople will have to use later on.

V for Values

Starting a role as a Sales Development Representative (SDR) in the modern business world can be a dizzying experience. Companies are demanding individuals in this position get “ramped up” as quickly as possible, but it’s not always clear how new reps can accomplish the mission. This can lead to SDR burnout, confusion and, ultimately, failure on the job.

On the flip side, a confident, well-trained SDR can produce a wealth of new business leads and help a firm grow fast. This requires more than just product knowledge, though. It requires extensive grounding in sales development techniques and best practices.

So, what can modern SDRs do to help speed the ramp up process along and set sail on the path to full sales productivity quickly? What follows are a few strategies I’ve personally used to help increase my sales IQ, speed my ramp up time and become a highly productive SDR in a short period of time.

Play the Hand You’re Dealt

The opening move for every chess piece in this position is to take full advantage of whatever your company provides in terms of sales training. For me, that meant immersion in the comprehensive SDR training program at memoryBlue. This program is designed specifically for hungry individuals that are relatively new to sales, and it was an eye-opening experience! The amount of information an employee takes in and retains is incredible. I had absolutely no clue how many different aspects of sales came into play when cold-calling sales prospects. Every single day at memoryBlue, new hire employees have a training activity covering a different element of sales. This training program kick-started my sales career into gear and made sure I formed good habits right from the start.

The environment in our office is electric, and the amount of opportunities to learn something new are endless. Between structured studies, group sessions, one-on-one coaching sessions, and more, my sales skills took root quickly. As I emerged from the intense early training period, I felt energized and set on the right path. But I also knew that my learning process was only getting started. Like a pro athlete dedicated to their craft, I wanted to go above and beyond to continue cultivating my budding skillset.

I decided to jump into two different sales books which I believe have vastly helped my sales approach. The first book is titled, “Never Split the Difference” by Chris Voss and the second is titled, “The Power to Get In” by Michael A. Boylan. Each of these books had a specific impact on my SDR ramp up time, but for different reasons.

Prospecting Power: Open Up!

It’s not rocket-science: Sales Development Representatives are generally tasked with generating prospect curiosity towards a product or service. That’s it! Get a prospect curious and understand their pain. But try telling a new SDR, floundering for conversation starters with people they’ve never met before, that this is an easy task. They’ll probably ask what planet you’re from.

During the first couple of weeks at memoryBlue, my life felt a bit chaotic. The thought of cold-calling a perfect stranger was nerve-wracking, and to it took me two weeks to book my first sales qualified lead meeting (while that’s not atypical for some new sales pros, it honestly felt like an eternity). I was overthinking every call, my conversations felt like surveys, and I was trying to figure out a way to ask open-ended questions to keep the conversations flowing in an effortless way.

As I was reading “Never Split the Difference,” I came across a section of the book that covered the concept of “calibrated questions” (pg.153). The idea is simple, but it changed the way I approached every single prospect conversation afterwards. When discussing strategies to get, and keep, people talking, Voss states, “Avoid verbs/words like ‘can,’ ‘is,’ ‘are,’ ‘do,’ or ‘does.’ These are closed-ended questions that can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” too easily. Instead. he suggests starting a conversation with who, what, when, where and how – these words inspire your counterpart to think and speak expansively. In that moment, I realized it was impossible to have the perfect follow-up question to every statement during a cold call. In most cases, all I had to do was ask a simple open-ended question to keep the conversation flowing. Implementing this small trick quickly opened doors and broke down barriers for me in a more efficient way.

Let Your Prospect Do the Talking

As I steadily progressed in the SDR role, my approach became more nuanced and my confidence grew. But one word of caution: even as my cold calling confidence expanded, I still made mistakes. On countless occasions, for example, I needed to remind myself of the “80-20” rule (a concept I learned in memoryBlue’s training program, where the prospect should speak 80% of the time during the call), because I have a tendency to overwhelm prospects with too much information at once.

Author Michael Boylan discusses this effect in his book, “The Power to Get In,” which he refers to as, “Shotgunning Information.” This is the idea that a sales professional sometimes provides so much information to a desired prospect (during the initial conversation) that they accidentally give the prospect the ability to disqualify the call before really understanding a product or service. A better move for sales professionals, especially on a cold call, is to just provide a rough framework of the product or service so it creates a curiosity in the prospect. This curiosity will be enough to produce a follow-up sales meeting and potential next steps.

Combing through books like Boylan’s masterpiece are one way I added on quickly to my learning process, and expanded my sales knowledge outside of work activity.

Utilizing Your Peers and Remaining Persistent

Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a new-comer to sales, there is one aspect to the job that is invaluable to quick growth: tapping in to the knowledge of your teammates and co-workers. This can include listening to a peers’ calls, spit-balling ideas back and forth, asking for call preparation help, seeking voicemail/email ideas or more. It is a free tool that everyone can and should use. I’m relentless about asking peers for advice and help, and it’s created a positive vibe where we have a culture of mutual support within my team. Never forget to harness the power of your peers while you ramp up as an SDR.

Sales feels like a roller coaster at times with revolving highs and lows. It’s the appetite and determination within you to grow that has to stay the same. This quote from Denis Waitley, a well-known American motivational speaker, writer and consultant, embodies the idea that you need to remain committed to the development process:

“Success is almost totally dependent upon drive and persistence. The extra energy required to make another effort or try another approach is the secret of winning.”

Personally, that’s where I find the beauty in sales. It’s the fire inside that drives a person to be successful. And the high energy environment at memoryBlue helps instill and maintain a mentality to succeed. Amongst my peers, I am known as the “Relentless Rescheduler,” in that nearly 40% of all of my booked next-steps sales meetings have been rescheduled due to unforeseen circumstances. I choose to not let these good opportunities wash away, primarily by staying vigilant with the prospects and getting a new meeting time reset.

Persistence and motivation are key, especially as an SDR. Sales professionals will find that they get ramped up far more quickly when they keep up a strong supply of both qualities. Take every single opportunity you have worked for, and make sure you have done every single thing possible to make sure you reap the rewards.

Keep Pushing Forward

When I began my high-tech sales development career, I had the passing thought, “What did I get myself into?” I had experience with face-to-face sales, but when it came to cold-calling prospects, I felt like a fish out of water. It was during my first week as an SDR when I realized I needed to learn as much as I could about sales as fast as I could.

“Always Learning” is an idea that might seem like a no-brainer, but too many sales pros fail to embrace this notion as fully as they should. Because other than the copious amounts of training we receive within memoryBlue, it’s also the effort you make outside of the office that correlates to quicker positive results in sales. There is an endless amount of material available in today’s world to help improve your approach. Why not take full advantage of these resources and improve quickly?

Within the span of eight to nine months, my sales techniques have completely changed from night to day, mostly due to continuous learning and a hunger for new opportunities to grow. If you want to ramp up quickly as a sales professional, take my advice and use these sample strategies as a guide for your own development. Your growth doesn’t have to take a long time or be born solely from the school of hard knocks!

Just because a lead looks like a customer and smells like a customer doesn’t mean it is necessarily going to become a customer.

Recently a person showed me all of the “leads” they received from a trade show. I should correctly state, leads the salesperson received from the Marketing team that was at the trade show.  When I asked what made them leads, his response was, “Last year we got a lot of new customers from this same show, so they must be good.”

Well, that settles the issue, right?

If the trade show was great one year, it must be great every year thereafter.  I’ll remember that next time I walk into a Sears store. I’ll just keep repeating to myself, “Years ago this store used to have to what I was looking for.”

Leads change and, more importantly, customer expectations change.  You can fall into a deep hole pretty quickly thinking all leads from a specific source are all good.

This issue runs rampant with Marketing Departments that are quick to mimic over and over again lead generation tactics that are simply not effective.  This is a big reason why I say Sales must own the prospecting process.

If there’s a change in the quality of leads, the group that is going to find out first is Sales, because they’re the ones charged with turning leads into customers.

Who owns the lead generation process?  Check out my 2-minute “rant” on this issue:

Bad leads come from using the assumption you can build a profile as to what a lead looks like.  Big mistake!  Don’t build it based on the profile of who they are, etc. Build it based on the outcome they receive.

When you base your leads on outcomes you provide, you will get yourself much closer to the perfect customer.  Question you’re asking is, “How do I go about doing that?”

It’s quite simple. You ask as part of the lead generation process.  The last thing you want are leads you can’t do anything with, so the earlier you cut to the chase, the more time you will save.

Let me share an example from my own lead generation process.

A key part of my job is speaking at sales kick-off meetings.  It would be easy for me to say anyone who is having a sales kick-off meeting would be a perfect lead for me.  Bad assumption!

A company having a meeting may fit the traditional profile of having a meeting, but it doesn’t address the outcome.   The outcome I want to see in a potential lead is one where they’re challenged in finding new customers or minimizing the need to discount. These two outcomes are what I deliver. It’s not the meeting. That’s merely a physical activity. When I find this is the outcome they’re in need of, then I know it’s a great lead I can most likely turn into a customer.

Your objective is to use the same process I use to narrow your leads.

Focus on the outcome, not the traditional profile. When you do this, you’ll find yourself with better leads for one simple reason — you’ll have fewer of them.  Yes, you read it correctly — fewer but better leads. And this is why Sales must own the lead generation process. As long as Marketing owns it, they will play the numbers game.

To you it’s not numbers. It’s quality.

Back to my example about sales meetings and having an outcome of getting better leads or avoiding the need to discount.  If this is you, let’s talk about how we can work together to get your sales team identifying the right prospects they can close at full price.

And don’t forget that a coach can help you excel in your sales career! Invest in yourself by checking out my coaching program today!

Copyright 2018, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

Email can be overwhelming.

In fact, The Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, estimates that the average business user receives 125 emails a day.

That’s a lot of noise.

And yet.

Despite the explosion of so many other communication channels, like social media and instant messaging, email is still king.

Don’t believe me? Research by HubSpot found that 86% of professionals prefer to use email for business communication. And email use is only growing: The number of active email accounts is expected to hit 5.6 billion by 2020.

Maybe that’s because companies still see an incredible return on investment (ROI) from their email marketing spend ($44 for every $1 spent).

Bottom line?

Email isn’t going anywhere.

So how can you leverage this information as part of your marketing strategy?

When you think of content marketing you probably think of things like white papers, case studies, or blog posts. And those are definitely key components of a sound content marketing strategy.

But there’s another piece that’s powerfully effective, and yet often gets overlooked:

Email newsletters.

Email is a core component of every content marketer’s toolbox, and when done right, a good email newsletter strategy can strengthen your relationship with your audience.

So What Is an Email Newsletter?

An email newsletter is an email that goes out on a regular basis to a list of subscribers. It usually contains educational content, either about the business or the industry.

So what’s the difference between an email newsletter and other types of marketing emails?

• Newsletters are delivered regularly and contain primarily educational and informational content — and its purpose is to stay in touch (and top of mind) with the recipient, and maintain a relationship over time.
• A marketing campaign or drip sequence, on the other hand, typically includes a strategic series of emails delivered on a calculated timeline — and its purpose is to persuade the reader to take a specific action.

While many brands in the B2C world use email newsletters to stay in touch with their customers, they’re especially valuable in the B2B space, where the sales cycle is longer, and businesses need more time to nurture their leads.

I’ve talked before about the value of creating educational information for your audience. Well, the same principle applies with email newsletters — you’re just using a different vehicle to deliver relevant content to them where they already are — in their inbox.

You can even use your email newsletter to drive traffic back to your site and your most popular articles (as long as they’re relevant — which of course they are!). Just remember: The idea here is not to sell — the idea is to build relationship.

Showcase Workshop does a fantastic job of this with the email newsletter they send to their Showcase users. It’s full of fun facts, delightfully displays their company personality, and provides helpful tips and inspiration that is highly relevant to the audience reading the newsletter.

Why Email Newsletters Still Work

The beauty of an email newsletter — when it’s done right, of course — is that you don’t have to work at being “found.” You already have your audience’s attention.

When someone subscribes to your list, they’re expressing an interest in what you have to say. By giving you permission to show up in their inbox regularly, they’re also giving you the opportunity to prove your value.

And that is the start of building a relationship with them.

You Can Build Trust

What’s the first rule of content marketing?

Give more than you get.

Being allowed to show up in your audience’s inbox on a regular basis is a golden opportunity to do just that.

When you provide valuable, relevant content to your audience — and ask for nothing in return — you establish credibility and trust.

The great thing about an email newsletter is that it doesn’t have to be long. In fact, you can use it as a vehicle to showcase some of your recently published or most popular content pieces.

Intercom does a great job of this with their weekly newsletter, Inside Intercom. They always start with a story from the Intercom trenches — how they grew their business or a “lessons learned” moment — and include a link to a longer article on their site. But they go on to include a round-up of some of their other featured articles.

Their content is helpful and insightful to their audience, and not directly related to the product they’re selling. And they’re driving traffic back to their website, where there might be more opportunities to engage.

Another way to build trust?

Share other people’s content.

If you’ve seen a good article on the internet that’s relevant to your audience, you can bring it to their attention in your email newsletter. It’s generous while establishing your bona fides as a well-connected expert in your space.

Intercom does this in their newsletter with a “What We’ve Been Reading” section, but other top-notch businesses do it too. In fact, Moz publishes a semi-monthly newsletter called The Moz Top 10 that showcases the 10 most valuable pieces of content they’ve come across for SEOs.

Source: Buffer

You Can Make It Personal

We’re all human beings. But I sometimes see too many companies in the B2B space get caught up in technical jargon and selling their “best-in-class” solutions.

No matter how complex and technical your industry, your email newsletter doesn’t have to be buttoned-down and full of corporate-speak. In fact, it’s a great opportunity to be more personal. More … human.

Even a small touch, like using your subscriber’s first name, can make an email feel more personal. And if you’ve segmented your subscriber list, you can provide even more tailored content.

But even if you don’t go the full “personalization” route, you can still use your newsletter to show your personality.

Invision does a great job of this with their newsletter. Check out the CTA on this button linking to an article on how to build a design portfolio:

Source: Invision

Still other brands use their email newsletters to showcase a quirkier side. CB Insights is a company that sells business intelligence to venture capitalists and C-suite executives — pretty serious stuff. Yet their newsletter is anything but.

Check out this newsletter that opens with a news item on bananas, and then moves on to a discussion of blockchain:

Source: CB Insights

Not every brand could get away with this, but with close to 500,000 subscribers, their approach seems to be working.

You Can Iterate

One of the best things about email as a marketing channel is that it’s measurable.

Here at Horizon Peak, we’re big on measurable results. It’s how we know our content is working for our clients.

Most email software platforms can give you a ton of insight into your subscribers’ behavior, from open rates to click-through rates, to spam complaints. That information is gold.

Not only does it tell you what is resonating with your audience (and what isn’t), but it gives you a chance to adjust.

The interactive element of your newsletter — the links you include, the CTAs — can act as a feedback loop on what you’re putting in it. And the more often you send your newsletter out, the quicker you can gauge response and make necessary changes.

Your Email Newsletter Is Like a Friendly Hello

Email newsletters work because they satisfy a core element of good content marketing: They deliver valuable information to people who are hungry for it.

But an email newsletter isn’t just another medium for serving your audience. It’s another channel you can use to nurture your leads and stay top-of-mind outside of the purchase cycle.

By showing up in their inbox on a regular basis, with insightful and helpful information, you continue to establish trust and credibility. You build a relationship.

And relationships are what make the business world go ‘round.

Free-Photos / Pixabay

When 160 multi-industry marketing executives were surveyed on how they intended to invest marketing resources, many cited new marketing technology (MarTech) purchases.

The most common technologies demand generation marketers will test and deploy this year include account-based marketing technology (58%), multichannel lead-nurturing (41%) and content planning/syndication tools (37%). However, before expanding your technology stack with newer solutions such as these, it’s important to make sure your current tech ecosystem comprises the foundational systems needed to ensure such investments will work.

The 5 Essential Tools for B2B Lead Generation

Tool #1: Marketing Automation

Automation is at the core of effective B2B demand generation. The most effective B2B marketers rely on a marketing automation platform (MAP) to create a personalized, multichannel customer experience at scale, converting contacts into marketing-qualified leads (MQLS) and sales-accepted leads (SALs) into sales pipeline opportunities.

All good marketing automation solutions include the following three criteria:

1. Automate email (and potentially social media, SMS, and/or digital ads)
2. Allow dynamic segmentation of campaign targets
3. Contact targets after specific actions or periods of time

The majority of MAPs also integrate with CRM and other technologies in the B2B MarTech ecosystem. There’s no shortage of vendors within this space. Even the most particular marketer with very specific needs will find many of good options to pick from.

Tool #2: CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms may be a sales technology, but B2B marketers can’t build out a MarTech stack without this core system in place. According to Gartner, CRM became the single-largest software market in the world in 2017. You simply can’t effectively manage and scale demand without a CRM.

There are over 200 software vendors and options offering a solution marketed as CRM which includes specific sales tools and a unified customer and opportunity database.

Tool #3: CMS

A content management system is, by Margaret Rouse of Search Content Management’s definition, “a software application or set of related programs that are used to create and manage digital content.”

The important part of Rouse’s definition may be “related programs.” Your CMS should be flexible and easy to use. Optimally, it should also include tools for SEO, analytics, landing pages, conversion optimization and one-to-one content experiences as part of the software application. Depending on your CMS, this category could be one tool, one tool and plugins, or one tool and many other applications.

Whether you use WordPress, Hubspot, Drupal, Joomla, or one of the other dozens of CMS options, your B2B marketing team needs a tool that supports an agile approach to managing and scaling your website. Once again, there’s no single solution within the CMS category which is “best” or “right.”

B2B marketers need a CMS, but that’s just one piece of the puzzle. They also need tools for website visibility, on-site conversions, blogging, web analytics, personalized content delivery, website forms and other aspects of website demand generation.

Tool #4: Demand Orchestration Platform

30% of B2B marketers now say pipeline influenced is their top performance metric, according to DemandGen Report’s 2018 Benchmark Survey Report.

27% of respondents say they now face specific account-, lead- and revenue-based quotas. By comparison, the primary success of just 14% of B2B marketing programs is measured in traditional “volume” metrics – total leads or inquiries.

If you’re being hired to scale a marketing organization’s contributions to pipeline or revenue, efficiency and effectiveness are the two pillars on which your MarTech stack should be built. Accordingly, B2B demand gen marketers need a demand orchestration platform to streamline and automate top-funnel programs and processes from one place. Not only does a demand orchestration platform provide efficiency and greater program insight, it also ensures you’re only generating actionable lead data for your down-funnel efforts – such as lead nurturing and scoring – which, in turn, results in more conversions, opportunities and revenue.

Tool #5: Project Management

Demand marketers aren’t just responsible for generating leads. They’re responsible for full-funnel B2B marketing success, including tracking opportunities throughout the entire sales cycle, elevating sales-marketing alignment and collaborating with the customer success team. B2B marketing organizations are also using an increasing number of channels, tactics and partnerships to drive full-funnel results – which means a lot of moving pieces.

As a final core component of the bare-minimum B2B MarTech ecosystem, we suggest a project management tool with task-tracking functionality, especially if your organization is relying on a demand generation consultant or other third-party collaborators to coordinate complex campaigns.

Project management apps are a huge category of technology, and the “right” solution is really a matter of preference and whether you’re using the app for visibility or more complex operation analysis and budget forecasting. The options available in this category range from highly complex software such as Jira or Microsoft project designed to meet the needs of enterprise software development to lightweight apps like Trello.

The Right Tools is Only One Aspect of B2B MarTech

Do you need the right tools in place for effective B2B lead generation? Absolutely.

However, having the right tools is only one part of using technology effectively for lead generation.

B2B marketers need to create a comprehensive technology blueprint which answers each of the following questions:

1. Which marketing technologies have already been adopted?
2. How do these technologies connect and not connect?
3. Which processes do these technologies support?
4. How does our MarTech support our customers and prospect?

With a knowledge of how MarTech maps to people, processes and B2B lead generation goals, demand gen marketers are best equipped to make future tech investments and adjust operations to create customer value in the future.

Are you struggling to make sense of how your marketing technology spend is translating into marketing-attributed revenue? Mapping your map your marketing tech stack to people and processes is the secret to making informed MarTech decisions. Download the free workbook–“The Marketing Tech Blueprint” to get started today.

FotografieLink / Pixabay

You may have a stellar strategy and vision to exponentially grow your company into something that’s larger than you and your leadership. However, all your efforts would be in vain if you don’t have the capacity to implement those strategies. Does your organization really have the capacity to achieve your vision? Is there depth in your leadership team to see your vision come to life?

1. Recruiting and Retaining A-Players

The capacity to deliver hinges on your ability to recruit, develop and retain A-players. Take Netflix’s success story for example. A large part of it can be traced back to the culture they have developed and their talent philosophy. They only hire people that are responsible and possess the following characteristics:

• Self-motivating
• Self-aware
• Self-disciplined
• Self-improving
• Those who act like a leader
• Those who don’t wait to be told what to do
• Those who pick up the trash lying on the floor

Netflix believes that responsible people thrive on freedom making them more creative. They are also able to respond and adapt faster to changing situations.

2. Picking the right Line Managers

Line managers collectively have the largest impact on the performance of the organization. The better your line managers are selected, trained and guided the greater the performance of their subordinates. The difficulty of course is that every company has many line managers each with their individual styles, preferences and habits. Your success will depend on your ability to get line managers to consistently display the following behaviors:

Grow People

• Demonstrate a credible commitment to an individuals development
• Leverages employee “fit” and get the best out of each individual
• Provide fair and accurate informal feedback and emphasize employee strengths in performance reviews

Drive Performance

• Put people in the right job at the right time
• Clarify performance expectations and hold people accountable
• Connect employees with the organization and its success
• Provide solutions for day-to-day challenges

Build Teams

• Commit to diversity and team building where trust, honesty and integrity are the main characteristics
• Recognize people daily
• Help team members to build a high quality network of colleagues

3. Resources

One important component required to deliver on your organization’s aspirations is the availability of resources. This includes financial resources, machinery, plants, tools, IT systems and offices as well as the infinite availability of information and the ability of a company to share it across the organization.

Organizational knowledge in my experience is the least valued asset of any company, even though it should be the highest. An organization should be able to capture knowledge and share it with whoever needs it. Of course with web 2.0 technology such as MindTouch, Wikispaces, and MediaWiki, there are no reasons why your organization should not be able to leverage its most valuable asset and safeguard it for future generations.

4. Collaboration

Sports provides ample opportunities to highlight the importance of collaboration and the power of teams. Only a week ago Atletico Madrid, a football team that costs GBP 30 mln beat Chelsea, a team that costs 6 times that much on their home ground by 3-1. Of course sports analogies do not always translate well into an organization and in my experience silo’s still rule the workplace (though this is such a hot topic that I will spend a complete blog on this in the future). Physical work distance is a scientifically proven barrier to collaboration and common agendas, personal relations, ability to deal with conflict, to hold each other accountable and to ‘take one’ for the team are all components in strengthening teams and collaboration.

With an inspiring vision, clear strategy and capacity within the organization, your company will most likely churn out reasonable results. However, the magic to transform your company into a high-performer is still missing. That final ingredient is Commitment, the desire to achieve the impossible. Add this final ingredient to the mix and you’ll have built a company that can truly grow exponentially.

When you present to a live audience either on stage or on camera, you have an opportunity to change the way they think, feel, and act. But what happens when the camera stops rolling or after you walk off stage is even more important. How do you continue to engage your audience and drive them to action? The answer: email marketing. With email marketing, you can continue to build upon the relationship you formed during your speech and create a stronger connection with your audience. During our recent webinar with speaking pro Michael Port, he shared his secrets to building an email list from speaking events. Port has inspired audiences from the stage for more than a decade. He was a professional actor. Now, he’s the founder of Heroic Public Speaking and coaches some of the world’s best speakers. Below, learn Michael’s 3-step system for building an email list with your speaking opportunities. (Want to watch the entire recording of Port’s webinar? Register here.)

1. Create a curiosity gap.

People tend to take action when they have a desire to achieve or learn something. You can create this desire (and use it grow your list) with a curiosity gap. A curiosity gap is when there is a void between what someone knows and what they want to know. And according to Port, it’s important to create one with every speaking opportunity you have because it’s what drives your audience to take action. To create a curiosity gap, answer the “what” and “why,” but don’t give your audience the “how” yet. You want them to think, “That sounds awesome! But how do I do that?” Here’s an example: A sign up form is a tool that allows you to easily collect subscribers. By optimizing your sign up form, you can triple your subscriber growth and double your revenue. By creating a curiosity gap, you’ve now piqued their interest. You’re ready to move to the next step: filling the gap with a tool or resource.

2. Fill the gap with a tool or resource.

Once you’ve created a curiosity gap and your audience is looking for a solution, give them a tool or resource to fill the gap and satisfy their need or desire. (In step 3, we’ll explain how to deliver this tool or resource to your audience from the stage.) When creating your tool or resource, Port suggests staying away from denser pieces of content, like ebooks, white papers, and reports. In his experience, these aren’t as effective at generating email leads from the stage because they are denser pieces, requiring much more time to consume. Audiences want content that are easier to digest. Instead, offer shorter tools, like tips, formulas, grids, calendars, and templates.These tend to convert more audience members into email subscribers. You could also test this theory with your own audience. Offer up a simple, easy-to-consume solution and another more in-depth, time-consuming solution. Different audiences will prefer different tools and resources. For instance, an audience of medical doctors may want a published research document or white paper. An audience filled with social media marketers may want a content calendar download. Continuing with the sign up form example from before, the “how” is: With my simple checklist, you can optimize your form in minutes. Port also recommends that you make sure your tool is specific to the lesson you’re teaching from the stage. And mention your tool a couple times during during your presentation, like halfway through and at the end.

3. Build your list and nurture your audience member.

Now that you’ve introduced the tool or resource that’s going to fill your audience’s curiosity gap, you’re ready to invite them to subscribe to your list to get it. Building a list from the stage is different from building it online. Your audience likely won’t have their laptop ready to visit a website and opt in. And even if they did, typing in an address while they’re listening to your presentation is distracting. But what almost every audience member will have is a mobile device. That’s why you should use a tool like Call Loop, EZ Texting, Textiful or Join By Text to invite your audience to join your email list and receive the tool or resource you’re offering. Here’s how these tools typically work:

1. Ask your audience to text a phrase (e.g., OPTIMIZE) to a specific phone number (provided by the texting service you use).
2. After your audience texts the phrase to the phone number, they will receive a response on their mobile device that asks them to respond with their email address.
3. Once they respond with their email address, they will be added to your email list automatically and receive your welcome email.

Step up your speaking game at Heroic Public Speaking LIVE

Need more help with your public speaking? Join Port and his team at Heroic Public Speaking LIVE, October 1 to 3 in Philadelphia, PA. The AWeber team will be there as a sponsor. Come meet up with us to learn how to use email marketing to reach and connect with your audience off stage. Not sure how to get more leads? Struggling to create a profitable email strategy? We can help. At AWeber, we’re not just an email marketing platform — we’re a team of email experts that want to see you succeed. You can contact us day or night to get all of your questions answered. Start your free 30-day trial of AWeber today.

For all those who work in professional pricing roles, or who aspire to do so, the Professional Pricing Society is our community. It is where we go to meet our peers, learn what other people are doing, and to get the ideas that will change the future.

Please take our survey on Pricing and Innovation

The Professional Pricing Society, or PPS as it is known in the trade, has a wonderful website with a lot of resources, puts on a series of conferences (the next one is in Dallas, Texas from October 23 to 26) and manages the Certified Pricing Professional (CPP) credential.

Ibbaka is a member of the PPS and we attend their events whenever possible.

Earlier this month, we spoke with PPS president Kevin Mitchell about the past, present and future of this important organization.

Ibbaka: Tell us about the background of the Professional Pricing Society.

Kevin Mitchell: We began to get organized in the late 1960s and have been formally in business for about 35 years. The PPS was started by my father, Eric Mitchell, who was a pricing consultant for companies like Ford, Xerox and Intel. Early on, he realized how important it would be to build up shared expertise with a community of experts. The pricing community was much smaller back then, and he knew most of the key people. He started things off with The Pricing Advisor Newsletter and things grew from there. Eric retired over 2007 and 2008 and I took over at that time.

We began hosting conferences in Chicago in the early 1990s. Chicago remains an important place for us and we frequently have our spring conference there.

After 9/11, when travel contracted, we began to offer online learning, which has been very successful for us. Then in 2005, we expanded to Europe. Our European event will be in Amsterdam this year from November 28-30.

Since taking over in 2007, I have expanded our presence in Asia Pacific and in Latin America. I have also worked to build our community using social media and invested more in our professional development resources.

Ibbaka: The Certified Pricing Professional (CPP) program is an important part of what the PPS brings to pricing professionals. Tell us more about this program.

Kevin: The idea came from PPS Board of Advisors Member Richard Lancioni who was at Temple University. As pricing advances and becomes more professional it needs certification. People need to be able to offer proof of their expertise. We think of the CPP program as being similar to to a CPA for accountants or a CFA for financial advisors.

We designed the program with the input of both academics and professional practitioners. It is has a strong theoretical grounding but is very practical and is focussed on the real needs in the field. There are more than 1,200 people who have earned the CPP designation and more than 4,000 who have earned some credits.

Over the years, we have extended the material online and most people combine online with in-person learning.

Our goal for the program is to get pricing recognized as a profession in its own right and to build a common body of knowledge.

Ibbaka: What plans do you have for the CCP program in the future?

Kevin: We have been speaking a lot with Chief Human Resources Officers (CHRO) and Learning and Development Leaders who are looking at making the CPP part of their own programs. We are able to partner with these organizations and customize to make sure it meets their needs.

We are also planning to offer parallel paths such that there is a version of CPP for sales people, product managers and finance.

The program is being enriched with more advanced content and we are going to create a more advanced certification for top practitioners.

Ibbaka: How does PPS support the community of pricing experts?

Kevin: Our role is to be the nexus of the community and to be the first place that people come when they are tapped on the shoulder and asked to take on a pricing role.

One of the first things people do is to attend a PPS conference. More than 500 people come to events in North America, 300 in Europe and 150 to our events in Latin America and Asia Pacific.

We are in close contact with the thought leaders in the pricing world and an important part of what we do is to connect these thought leaders to the people who need their ideas and expertise. At PPS, we are the connectors and not the providers of expertise or services.

Ibbaka: How is the pricing profession evolving and changing?

Kevin: Pricing is getting a lot more attention. This is true at the board and executive level. Directors are asking more and harder questions about pricing. One can also see this in analyst calls. The best analysts are asking pointed questions about pricing strategy and execution.

As a result, pricing is getting more resources. One can see this in everything from the adoption of software to investments in training and increased head counts. This all translates into more influence for pricing professionals and improved career opportunities.

Given the power of pricing and its ability to impact business results there is still a lot of room to grow.

We are seeing three main roles in pricing emerge. There were more clerical roles, where people manage price sheets and pricing software; analytical roles where people dive into the data to find patterns and look for ways to optimize pricing; and finally there are people taking strategic roles who are seen as executives helping to guide the company’s overall strategy using the pricing levers.

As pricing plays a larger role the pricing function is expanding to include things like margin improvement, customer success and performance on key unity economics like customer acquisitions costs and the lifetime value of a customer.

After the 2008 crisis, people were looking at how to cut costs. This is now changing. The leading companies are much more focused on how they can create and capture value. There has been a noticeable shift from cost to value.

Ibbaka: How is the Professional Pricing Society helping pricing professionals respond to these challenges?

Kevin: We are expanding the range of our workshops. If you look at what we have planned for the fall conference in Dallas we cover things like big data, artificial intelligence and very importantly data monetization.

You will soon see a lot more online courses on advanced topics as well.

The decision to offer an advanced version of the Certified Pricing Professional accreditation is another example. As pricing becomes more central to the business, more strategic and more closely connected to other business functions we all need to work together to take pricing to the next level.

Ibbaka: Thank you Kevin. The PPS plays an important role for all of us and we look forward to supporting you and our fellow pricing professionals.

Big Tech companies -- like all the apex predators of all the world's concentrated industries -- is swimming in cash; but unlike those other firms, Big Tech is not using the cash merely for financial engineering; it's doing actual engineering, sinking $80B this year into capital expenditures that will form a wall around the industry's incumbents, which new firms will have to scale in order to challenge them.

The new equipment includes robotic manufacturing plants, huge data-centers, undersea data-cables, and other infrastructure that might have been provided by a patchwork of service firms in an earlier era.

The focus on infrastructure spending is a mixed bag: owning tech infrastructure is always a gamble, betting that it won't go obsolete before the owners have finished amortizing its purchase; if there are major breakthroughs in any of these technologies, new companies can avail themselves of them without having to take a painful write-down on last-generation tools.

And of course, infrastructure spending does not contribute to inequality the way stock buybacks do.

But Google parent Alphabet Inc. and the other four dominant U.S. technology companies—Apple, Amazon​.com, Microsoft, and Facebook—are fast becoming industrial giants. They spent a combined $80 billion in the last year on big-ticket physical assets, including manufacturing equipment and specialized tools for assembling iPhones and the powerful computers and undersea internet cables Facebook needs to fire up Instagram videos in a flash. Thanks to this surge in spending—up from $40 billion in 2015—they’ve joined the ranks of automakers, telephone companies, and oil drillers as the country’s biggest spenders on capital goods, items including factories, heavy equipment, and real estate that are considered long-term investments. Their combined outlay is about 10 times what GM spends annually on its plants, vehicle-assembly robots, and other materials.

Tech Giants Spend $80 Billion to Make Sure No One Else Can Compete [Shira Ovide/Bloomberg]

(via /.)

We continue to organize our sales and marketing initiatives around what makes us more efficient or old views of how customers buy.

Classically, marketing’s focus is on creating interest and awareness, then driving demand.  The work toward MQLs, turning them over to sales, hopefully as SALs, saying “Good luck and godspeed!, we caught ’em, you skin ’em.”

Sales picks up the process, SDRs call to qualify the opportunity, they hand the lead to an account manager who gets more information, the customer is handed over to a pre-sales person for a demo, then someone else try to close them.

The overall marketing/sales assembly line takes customers through this linear process, all oriented to moving the customer through a buying decision.

Of course there are variants to this, there may be an account focus or orientation, there may be some sort of nurturing loop for customers that are not ready to buy, but as soon as we can we want to drop them into our marketing and sales assembly line.

Except our assembly line/linear customer engagement model doesn’t reflect how our customers buy.  Our customers aren’t engaged in a linear buying process, in fact, when we start mapping it, the process is very complex.  It’s a series of starts, stops, changes, reassessment, abandonment, restarting, stopping, going backwards, restarting, changing scope, adding new buying team members, more changes………

But we aren’t structured to be able to respond to the customer’s chaotic buying process.

How do we rethink things to have half a chance of intersecting the customer wherever they are at and trying to move them forward?

1.  We know the customer will leverage multiple channels, simultaneously, for information at they go through the buying process.  Marketing needs to start thinking about their role through the entire process–not just creating awareness and driving demand.  What content, programs, systems, tools can they provide to intersect the customer in impactful ways through the entire process (perhaps even into implementation).
2. Likewise, sales shouldn’t be waiting for marketing to create awareness and demand.  Sales may be the first point of contact as a customer is beginning or restarting, a buying process.
3. Sales and marketing must both mirror and complement each other, in engaging the customer through their buying process.
4. Helping the customer simplify their process—trying to put order to what the customer is trying to achieve, removing the complexity–becomes one of the greatest areas of value we can create in helping the customer more effectively navigate their buying journey.  The chaotic buying process is not something customer do by design, it’s a reflection of the reality customers face in trying drive change in their organizations.  This presents a huge opportunity for vendors, whatever can be done to help customer understand what they need to understand, helping them simplify the buying process, navigating the journey far more easily.
5. Simplifying and helping customers more effectively navigate the process requires new selling skills.
   1. Curiosity, the drive to understand what the customer faces–from a business point of view, from a personal point of view, seeing what they face as they try to navigate the buying journey.
   2. Project management, helping the customer better structure what they are doing, establishing a work plan, goals, a process, helping guide the customer through that structured approach.
   3. Resource management, knowing how to most effectively leverage the right resources, in the right way, at the right time through the buying journey.  Whether it is the customer resource, your own company resource, or even external resources–all must be leveraged effectively to simplify the process.
   4. Critical thinking/problem solving skills, the ability to analyze the complex dynamics impacting the customer buying process.  The ability to understand the complexity the customer faces, the ability to simplify the process, teaching the customer how to better structure what they are trying to do and how to more effectively achieve their goals.
   5. Empathy/EQ, these have always been important sales skills, but they become more important in understanding what the customer is going through in the chaotic buying process.
   6. Patience.  Most sales people are in a rush to close.  The chaotic buying journey changes everything.  Whatever we can do to simplify the process and help customers more effectively navigate that process.  In the rush to close, sales impatience will have a greater adverse impact on the overall process and the outcomes of the process.

What’s this mean for sales and marketing organizational structure?  I’m not sure I know, but I suspect we will require must closer integration of the functions–possibly bringing the organizations together.  Complexity within our own organizations will increasingly become a factor impacting our ability to work with customers in their own complex journey.  I suspect we will have to dramatically simplify our own organizational structures, more clearly define roles/responsibilities, and reduce the fragmentation/handoffs in the process.  Anything else and we get paralyzed by the complexity of our own operations, incapable of dealing with the chaotic buying process.

For very complex buying decisions, chaos will be the biggest factor impacting our customers.  Helping our customers effectively navigate this, reducing the complexity means we will have to rethink everything we do as sales and marketing professionals.

As anyone who has worked with me or read my articles, I am passionate about ensuring that sales and marketing are aligned in a common cause. But that's not enough: We need to ensure that marketing, sales and customer success are all working together to improve lifetime customer value.

I am delighted to invite David Jackson, CEO of TheCustomerCo - a widely recognised expert in the area of customer focused organisations and the former CEO of Clicktools (an Inflexion-Point client) to share his perspectives on the subject.

Working with Management Today magazine, David introduced and managed the UK Service Excellence Awards (subsequently renamed UK Customer Experience Awards) and is the author of 'Dynamic Organisations' and 'Becoming Dynamic', both published by Macmillan. Avis CEO Alun Cathcart described David's work as "essential reading for all those who lead organisations in the 21st century".

Over to you, David:

It’s often not long into the life of any business when marketing, sales and customer success spend time blaming each other for missed revenue and retention goals: time that would be much better spent attracting, winning, retaining and growing customers. It is a problem I faced as CEO of Clicktools, a SaaS company I founded in 2000. The problem was one of my own making – I had failed to knock heads together and get the whole company working together to improve lifetime customer value and net revenue retention. The solution involved getting marketing, sales and customer success to agree three things:

1. Targeting the issues, organisations, roles and trigger events that will enable the organisation to address the most valuable customers at the most appropriate time - captured in an Ideal Customer Profile. ICP has two parts: a description of the target companies and the key roles involved in buying and using the product. In my mind, it goes much further than a buyer persona with detail that shapes segmentation, content strategy, success plans and messaging
2. An end-to-end buyer/customer engagement journey that starts long before the sales cycle, extends throughout the life of the customer, advances the customers buying decision and delivers customers’ goals. The key here is an outside-in approach. Each step is founded on the buyer/customers’ tasks and challenges.  From there the engagement journey develops the messaging, help and resources the company needs to help the customer complete each step successfully.
3. Metrics and performance related pay that focuses on key outcomes over narrow activities. All too often companies shoot themselves in the foot by developing a multitude of narrowly focused commission plans that encourage actions and behaviours that are good for the individual but damage the business. 

The result of implementing this approach at Clicktools was significant improvements in key metrics:

• ARR increased 180% from both improved new business and retention
• Quota attainment grew 150%
• Lead:Win ratio improved from 1:18 to 1:12
• Cost per lead fell by 24%
• Average order value increased seven-fold.

Too many CEOs, me included, delegate the design of the buyer/customer journey to individual departments, thus creating or perpetuating problems. I believe every organisation is perfectly designed to achieve the results it does: if you want different results, do something different. The CEO is the one person with responsibility across the whole business and one of their key roles is chief organisation designer. Purposeful design and strong leadership can deliver alignment and its associated performance improvements. My advice to fellow CEO’s is to recognise the responsibility and create the opportunity to improve performance. I know it can be done: I have done it. So can you!

David has written a more detailed executive briefing describing each of the three elements in greater detail. You can download a copy here. I am sure you will find it a very worthwhile read!

I’m so tired of the stupid and annoying emails salespeople send to buyers and prospects and so are they.  It’s time to stop. You’re emails and your cold outreach suck. They don’t offer value, they just beg your prospects and buyers for their time. It’s pathetic.

I did this video to help you understand how to create emails and cold call messages that don’t make you a digital beggar and improve response rates.

To help, you can download the ebook on how to create emails that actually get opened here. http://info.asalesguyconsulting.com/ebook-sales-emails-worth-opening

and

The email core card here: http://info.asalesguyconsulting.com/sales-email-response-probability-scorecard

Stop being a digital beggar, you’re better than that.

The post Your Outbound Emails Suck – Stop Being A Digital Beggar! appeared first on A Sales Guy.

If you are a marketer, you probably already know a lot about referral marketing; but, do you know its value? According to statistics from InvespCRO, referral marketing leads convert 30% better than leads generated from other marketing channels.

Infographic source

Referral marketing’s online presence is on sharp rise. From statistics, referral channels can deliver higher value compared to other channels. As a matter of fact, customers referred by other customers are 4 times more likely to refer more customers and 37% more likely to remain loyal customers. when you involve a referral in your sales, you are likely to experience 41% higher conversion rates. As you can see, referral marketing is very powerful and critical marketing tool that you can utilize to improve your sales and ultimately, conversions.

In another interesting research by the Havard Business Review, the lifetime value of a referred customers is 16% higher than the non-referred customer. Also, referred customers are cost less to acquire than non-refereed customers.

In fact, the Harvard Business Review states the lifetime value of a referred customer is 16 percent higher than that of non-referred customers. Referred customers also churn 18 percent less than non-referred customers. That’s why it’s important to properly incentivize your referral sources.

The best referral starts with your customers

Trust is a critical component when you are trying to generate leads and nothing makes this easier than referral marketing. Nearly 84% of customers will trust recommendations from the people they know. Think about it: your customers are people who are already using your products and services. Chances are if they like the products, their friends and colleagues will trust them because they have already tried the products.

Formalize your referral program

Many companies make the mistakes of treating referrals casually. Since referrals are bringing you so much business, why not formalize your referral marketing strategy?What you need to do from your end is probably to offer incentives so that they can spread the word about what they like about your products. You need to find a way of rewarding customers who want to spread the word and make the experience as smooth as possible. Programs like these work magic because they have that personal touch.

When you ask a client to refer a friend, it creates an expectation in them that you are working closely with them and you value them. As a result, your customer will not only get excited about your company, they will develop a positive perception about your company.

The price of flash drives and solid-state drives (SSDs) steadily increased over the last decade, but recently we’ve seen a change in that trend. For the first time in a while, prices are starting to go down. You can now buy new hardware for less money than ever before.

But what’s causing the price decrease? Should you buy now or will prices drop still further? And which products offer the best deals today? Let’s take a look.

Why Are SSDs More Expensive Than HDDs?

Generally speaking, SSDs are a better product than hard disk drives (HDDs). They have access speeds that are nearly 100 times faster, their lack of moving parts results in better reliability, and they draw less power than HDDs. Plus, they are quieter, smaller, and cooler.

But none of that necessarily explains why SSDs are traditionally so much more expensive than their counterparts. There are a few factors that push up the price of SSDs.

1. The Manufacturing Process

SSDs are considerably more “high-tech” than their HDD counterparts. HDDs consist of a simple circuit board with a few chips, a couple of motors, and the read/write parts.

On the other hand, SSDs deploy billions of memory cells and many chips, each of which needs associated logic. Creating those cells and semiconductors is much more complex; it’s more labor-intensive and requires a far higher level of perfection.

All that combined leads to greater manufacturing costs, and thus higher retail costs.

2. Supply and Demand

Historically, consumer demand for SSDs has been considerably lower than demand for HDDs. As such, market economics dictate that manufacturers need to charge more to cover the production costs and make a profit.

The second issue is the mobile market. Lots of SSD large manufacturers have focused on making proprietary SSDs for smartphones rather than traditional 2.5-inch drives for computers.

As a result, smaller manufacturers need to pick up the slack. But thanks to favorable supplier contracts, the large SSDs have the power to stockpile the required production materials.

Consequently, smaller manufacturers making PC drives need to pay more for components, and they pass that price onto the consumer.

3. Growth of the Sector

While consumer uptake of SSDs has been slower, the enterprise-level use of SSDs and flash drives is skyrocketing.

To keep up with demand, manufacturers need to build more factories. The cost of new factories needs to be amortized, and thus is included in the retail cost of the drives.

On the other hand, the cost of making HDDs has long since been amortized by the manufacturers, leading to lower prices.

Why Is the Cost of SSDs Falling?

While SSDs do still cost more than their HDD counterparts, the costs have been falling rapidly over the last 12 to 18 months. The price of NAND flash—the type of memory used in SSDs—is expected to decrease by 10 percent per quarter starting in the third quarter of 2018.

The decline is curious. Quarter three is usually a time of rising prices, as computer and smartphone manufacturers start to stockpile products ahead of the Christmas rush.

So what’s going on? Experts think three factors are helping to force prices down:

1. Smartphone Sales

In 2018, smartphone sales have remained reasonably flat. This has led to an oversupply of NAND flash, thus driving down prices.

2. Notebook Sales

The first half of 2018 saw above-average notebook sales. As a result, demand has dropped in the second part of the year, again leading to an oversupply.

3. Server SSDs

For manufacturers, a server-grade SSD is more profitable than consumer-level SSDs. This has led to more manufacturers entering the sector, thus increasing both competition and supply. Again, these two factors help to lower prices.

All told, demand for SSDs and NAND flash memory is expected to drop 15 percent between January and December 2018, while supply grows by 45 percent.

The theory is borne out by the facts. Look at the cost of the Samsung 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD on Amazon (via CamelCamelCamel). The price has been on a steady downward trend throughout 2018. The current price is almost half of what it was in January:

Will the Price of SSDs Continue to Fall?

Now we come to the million-dollar question. If you’re in the market for an SSD, should you buy it now, or wait and see if the price goes down further?

Of course, it’s impossible to know this with 100 percent accuracy. But we can use the information available to us to make a prediction.

DRAMeXchange—one of the leading marketplaces for buying NAND flash memory—predicts that prices will continue to drop until at least mid-2019. Computer sales are traditionally slower in the first six months of the year after Christmas, while IDC thinks smartphone sales won’t pick up until after the summer.

What happened to #SSD prices? 500GB for €79 now. #damn #fasterharddrive #prices

— Arne (@ArneKuilman) September 9, 2018

Of course, holding off on your purchase also means some new technologies might be available by the time you get your wallet out.

In late 2017, we saw the arrival of new, higher-capacity NAND flash. During 2018, three-level (TLC) and quad-level (QLC) flash have become increasingly available at lower prices. That trend is likely to continue.

You also need to consider the continued growth (and lowering price point) of ultra-fast NVMe SSDs. They can read data four times faster than the SATA SSDs and can locate the data on the drive 10 times faster. Indeed, if you’re in the market for a new computer, you shouldn’t really consider any other form of storage media.

Our SSD Recommendations

If you want to buy a new SSD right now, which products are emblematic of the current low NAND prices?

We’ve already mentioned the Samsung 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD, but you should also consider ADATA’s ASU650SS-960GT-C SU650 3D-NAND 2.5″ SATA III drive (approximately $0.146 per GB).

Team Group’s 480GB L5 LITE 3D 2.5″ SATA III 3D NAND drive (also $0.146 per GB) and Patriot’s Burst SSD 480GB SATA III SSD ($0.150 per GB) are both good choices as well.

Learn More About Data Storage

Ultimately, current SSD NAND prices represent some of the best value-for-money that we’ve ever seen in the market. There’s no question that it’s a great time to purchase.

If you’d like to learn more about internal storage before making your decision, check out our comparisons of NAND and eMMC flash memory and PCIe vs. SATA SSDs.

Read the full article: Is It Time to Start Buying SSDs and Flash Drives?

Sales Training Options to Help Your Small Business Succeed written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Having an effective and engaged sales team is one of the keys to guaranteeing your business’s success. Some people are natural sales men or women—they have the gift of gab, the ability to easily connect with others and win their trust, and are adept at juggling leads and following up with prospects and existing customers alike.

For most of us, though, sales skills need to be developed. Things like cold calling, making an effective pitch, and understanding prospecting strategy are not always intuitive, and so it’s critical that you offer your team training in various areas so that they can become the confident, well-rounded, skilled salespeople that will perform best for your business.

Cater to Your Team’s Strengths and Weaknesses

The first step here, of course, is to understand your sales team’s strengths and weaknesses. Now, these may be different for each person on your team. Maybe you have one person who doesn’t have any trouble picking up the phone and chatting with strangers multiple times a day, but who lets follow-up requests sit in his inbox. Meanwhile, you have another team member who’s skilled at managing relationships with existing customers and making up-sells, but who struggles with her demo presentations to prospects.

A good jumping off point is finding a sales training program that can cater each team member’s individual needs. Hubspot has a great list of sales training courses that cover a wide range of topics and are accessible at a variety of price points.

Providing your team with access to a generic course that can help them brush up on the skill or skills that need the most work is a great way to start getting everyone on equal footing.

Create Your Own Course

While having a general understanding of sales techniques is important, you’ll also want to create a course specifically for your business’s sales team. Each business has its own approach, and you’ll want to share tips and tricks, plus help them avoid pitfalls, that are unique to your business.

The first step here is to ensure that your team understands your value proposition. This is the driving force behind why you started your business, and it’s the reason that your salespeople are selling the good or service you offer. Trumpeting your value proposition empowers your team to motivate every action they take with that “big picture” idea always in mind.

From there, you want to make sure your salespeople understand your process and approach to sales. Is there a specific CRM tool you use and a way that you want information recorded? Do you have a script for cold calling or emailing? Do you have a set list of answers to questions frequently raised by prospects? Is there a system in place for alerting managers to potential issues that crop up with unhappy leads or customers? And how does your set approach incorporate the marketing team in the sales process?

When you have a clear and established set of systems and processes in place for your team, you provide them with a context in which to work, which then frees them up to focus on the art of selling and closing the deal.

Act It Out

One of the most daunting things about interacting with prospects or customers is that a salesperson can never predict how exactly the conversation will go. Experienced salespeople have seen and heard it all, but if your sales team is newer to the game (or just unfamiliar with sales at your particular company) they may feel intimidated by the unknown.

Much like a new airplane pilot starts out in a flight simulator before getting behind the wheel of an actual plane, you can start the greener members of your sales team out with role playing. Put together a list of the types of tricky prospects your salespeople might encounter: The one with lots of questions, the one who doesn’t want to pay full price, the one who declares they hate the product. Create a rough outline of a script for each scenario that details the points you want the “prospective customer” to hit. Then, get the whole team together and pair up members of the team, having more senior salespeople playing the customer and the newer team members acting as the salesperson.

When the role play wraps up, ask colleagues to weigh in on what the salesperson handled well and what they could have done better. Then have the pair reverse roles and replay the scenario, so that everyone can see firsthand how the salesperson incorporates the suggestions from their colleagues and artfully dodges those common pitfalls.

Start a Book Club

There is a lot of value in a great business book. Sometimes courses get monotonous, but a well-written book with compelling arguments and case studies can help a concept jump right off the page, and it can inspire the reader to try a new approach or tackle a new challenge.

Consider putting together a reading list for your team that includes titles by some sales experts you really admire. If someone on your team is excited about a particular book, hop on Amazon and order it for them. Make it as easy as possible for them to encounter fresh, new ideas that can revitalize their sales approach.

You might even take things a step further and set up an actual in-office book club. Select a title for everyone to read, and then gather the group together a month later to discuss. Come with your own questions and topics to help guide the discussion, and allow your employees to share their impressions, what they learned, and how they think they can implement some of the tactics or approaches covered in the book in their day-to-day work life.

If you’re looking for a good read to get your started, I’d recommend the following:

• Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer
• Agile Selling by Jill Konrath
• Exactly What to Say by Phil M. Jones
• How to Get a Meeting with Anyone by Stu Heinecki
• The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
• Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount

Make Mentors

One of the best ways to learn sales techniques is to watch someone else do it skillfully. If you have a team with some more seasoned salespeople and some other who are less experienced, creating a mentorship program can be a great approach.

Pair each novice up with a mentor. Allow them to listen in on their mentor’s sales calls and to tag along for in-person meetings and pitches. Learning from a pro in the field is one of the fastest ways to help develop a rookie’s technique. Also ask your mentor to provide feedback to their mentee; have them establish a monthly sit-down over coffee that encourages an open dialogue between the veteran and the beginner.

Studies have shown that mentorship programs have benefits for both the mentors and the mentees. Your novice gets to learn new skills, and your veteran gets to develop leadership skills that prepare them for even greater career growth.

You have plenty of options when it comes to sales training. From the preexisting courses on particular topics to more customized, in-house training programs, you should be able to strike the right balance and create an environment that empowers your team to succeed.

If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Sales.

When companies expand into foreign markets, they need to gain the trust of local business partners and prospective customers in order to succeed. The most common ways of doing this are to send executives to build personal relationships with international business partners and to hire local distribution partners — or independent, third-party intermediaries — to represent their products or services overseas.

Both of these approaches, however, are time-intensive, requiring executives to spend weeks or months in foreign markets. And they can be very expensive — in addition to overseas business travel, local distribution partner relationships require significant up-front investment to get started and to manage effectively.

A New Type of Local Partner

The rise of social media has created a new type of local partner: local digital influencers. These people are local thought leaders on social media with loyal followings of online fans. They spend their days developing new content — videos, photos, blog posts, and podcasts — and engaging their followers. They build active communities both online (on different platforms) and offline (at events) around seemingly any topic imaginable — everything from beauty to AI to e-sports. Their audience turns to them for industry insights, new product information, and recommendations.

They already have the trust of thousands, if not millions, of your target customers. So why not weave your brand into their story, rather than telling yours from scratch?

This practice, called influencer marketing, is more than simply paying models and celebrities to promote a product on Instagram. Influencers are much more than the “Instafamous”: They are diverse individuals with established expertise, expansive platforms, and refined strategies of engaging target audiences and shaping their behavior. For example, consider Dez Blanchfield, whom I interviewed. He’s an emerging technology influencer based in Sydney who partners with global technology brands like Ericsson, Telstra, and Dimension Data to educate B2B buyers about their solutions, through conducting interviews with company executives, collaborating on customer webinars, and producing live social media broadcasts of corporate events.

Another example is Tao Liang, a Chinese influencer who produces content about handbags on popular local social media platforms WeChat and Weibo. Known as “Mr. Bags,” Liang previously collaborated with several foreign handbag makers, including Italy’s Tod’s, where his WeChat promotional posts generated 3.24 million RMB (nearly $500,000) in sales of a limited-edition handbag in just six minutes.

While business-to-consumer (B2C) firms in industries like fashion, beauty, toys, and consumer electronics have traditionally spent the most on influencer marketing, collaborating with a variety of different influencers across multiple campaigns, B2B firms are also increasingly turning to local influencers to engage their target customers.

Since high-priced technology solutions require multiple rounds of relationship-building, often prolonging sales cycles for B2B products, a community of relevant local influencers engaged over an extended period of time can add value by providing expert third-party content and leveraging their existing relationships of trust. For example, IBM manages a global network of “IBM Futurists” who are subject matter experts on emerging technologies, commerce, and marketing. IBM’s influencer relations team actively manages and builds its Futurist community, engaging influencers in different parts of the world to participate in events, coauthor educational white papers specific to the influencer’s expertise, and co-host webinars for local audiences.

It’s not just large multinational companies that are using the global rise of local influencers to accelerate their international growth. Today, small and medium-size companies — particularly in the e-commerce sector — are capitalizing on the trend as well. For example, one American online education company I spoke with, specializing in early childhood education, developed online relationships with Chinese childhood education influencers on the social media app WeChat.

After building relationships with targeted WeChat influencers, the company’s marketing team developed an affiliate sales model through which the influencers promoted their product licenses, and then both sides split the generated sales. It was the start of an extremely successful influencer relations program — in the first 24 hours alone, one of their WeChat influencers sold $100,000 worth of product licenses that retail for approximately $100 per year. The influencer relations program has become a core component of the company’s China market strategy — now the firm’s largest market outside the U.S. And they still do not even have a physical office there.

Building an Effective Influencer Strategy

Companies have three options when deciding how to develop their influencer marketing programs:

• A local strategy with local implementation: Local marketing teams define how their local organization will work with influencers in their country, and then the local marketing team puts plans into action.
• A global strategy with local implementation: Global marketing teams establish a framework and common standards for working with influencers; however, local teams in each country have autonomy to localize the approach in market.
• A global strategy with global implementation: Global marketing teams establish a framework and common standards for working with influencers, and it is applied consistently in all countries where the influencer programs are deployed.

The experts I interviewed for my book — ranging from influencer relations executives to senior marketers to external agency leads — recommended global-local as the best of these three options. In this approach, headquarters establishes a strategy that is subsequently tailored for local markets. Headquarters has more resources to dedicate to developing best practices for identifying influencers, defining specific methods and goals for influencer collaborations, and tracking ROI. But a centrally managed global-global approach is less effective because some degree of localization is essential to incorporate country-specific nuances, such as local preferences around social media and local cultural norms. And a fully local approach would mean that local teams cannot benefit from experience gained from other markets or economies of scale.

Employing a global-local strategy enables companies to leverage cross-national experiences, while guaranteeing that a consistent strategy is applied in all markets. At the same time, local implementation ensures that people with the right understanding of the local market are able to translate global vision in a way that resonates locally.

Global Models Change, but Trusted Relationships Remain Constant

Trust has been and will remain essential to the success of international expansion initiatives. It is widely agreed that local connectors are a critical part of establishing this trust in foreign markets. What needs to be updated, however, is our understanding of who these local insiders are. The rapid growth of social media worldwide has created local digital influencers: thought leaders with subject matter expertise and loyal followings of online fans. These individuals can open new doors for foreign businesses by leveraging their existing relationships of trust and using their authentic voices to win new overseas customers.

Think about the influential voices in your industry. If you work in a tech firm, you may turn to the commentary and recommendations of a prominent local industry analyst known for her insights on emerging technologies like blockchain, cloud computing, or augmented reality. Or if you work in the cosmetics industry, you might identify a local content creator who produces video tutorials tailored for the unique local standards of beauty within your target foreign country.

At the end of the day, digital influence is an extension of the age-old practice of word of mouth — now via new virtual platforms to reach mass audiences in localities around the world. It’s time for marketing departments to recognize the potential of these new local voices and engage them to accelerate global expansion.