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There are few stories as important right now as the internet being ripped asunder by the increasing animosity between the U.S. and China. Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Alphabet, said last week at a private event in San Francisco that “I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America.”

He should know: Alphabet and its Google subsidiary are on the front lines of that split, experiencing a massive furor over the company’s Project Dragonfly to launch a censored search engine in the Middle Kingdom. It’s hardly alone though, with Apple facing militant criticism from Chinese netizens over its iPhone presentation and Facebook finding its application for a corporate entity on the mainland being returned and rejected.

At the heart of this split is the death of the internet as we once knew it: a unified layer for the transfer of human knowledge. As the internet has gained more and more power over society and our everyday lives, the need by governments worldwide to tame its engineering to political and moral ends has increased dramatically.

About four years ago, I wrote a piece called “From internet to internets” in which I argued that this sort of split was obvious. As I wrote at the time: “Across the world, it is becoming abundantly clear that the internet is no longer the independent and self-reliant sphere it once was, immune to the peculiarities of individual countries and their laws. Rather, the internet is firmly under the control of every government, simultaneously.”

Yet, the rules that countries like Spain put in place around media and news didn’t split the internet as I had predicted. The economic power of the U.S. and China did. Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu may have declined in value this year, but their combined market caps is still in the trillions of dollars. WeChat, which is owned by Tencent, has more than a billion users, and while only 10% of its user base is estimated to be outside China, the ties are growing as more countries build economic bridges with the mainland.

Sometimes, those bridges are quite literal. Through the Belt and Road initiative and fledgling institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China has provided massive outlays to other nations primarily around infrastructure, building partnerships and deepening economic ties.

That infrastructure is sometimes roads, but it can also be in areas like telecommunications. Huawei has made massive inroads into Africa, both in smartphones and in core infrastructure. Chinese-owned Transsion, which most Westerners have probably never heard of, is the dominant smartphone manufacturer on the continent.

Chinese-made telecom infrastructure. Chinese handsets. Increasingly Chinese apps. For all of the concerns of Congress and national security officials about Huawei and ZTE equipment entering the American or Australian markets, the real fight for the future of the internet is going to be in precisely these developing regions which have no incumbent technology.

That’s what has made the Trump administration’s strategy toward trade negotiations with China so miserable to watch. The focus has been on repeated rounds of tariffs that will ensure that Chinese goods — particularly in high-tech industries — are more expensive to American consumers, allowing domestic manufacturers to better compete. Yet, the policies have done nothing to ensure that American values around the internet are exported to continents like Africa or South America, or that Cisco’s equipment will be chosen over Huawei’s.

That might be changing at long last. The Financial Times reported yesterday that the Trump administration is preparing to double down on the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which offers commercial lending facilities to developing countries. It would be merged into another agency and given a much more rich budget (as high as $60 billion) to go and compete with Chinese financing around the world.

Maybe that measure will be successful in closing the strategic distance between the two countries. Maybe rumors that the administration is going to broadly double down on the trade war will lead to a much more comprehensive set of policies.

But along the way, regardless of what happens, these skirmishes will lead to a fracturing of the internet, and along with it, the death of the internet as a bastion and voice of freedom and knowledge for all people everywhere.

Microsoft is hosting its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida this week. And although Ignite isn’t the household name that Microsoft’s Build conference has become over the course of the last few years, it’s a massive event with over 30,000 attendees and plenty of news. Indeed, there was so much news this year that Microsoft provided the press with a 27-page booklet with all of it.

We wrote about quite a few of these today, but here are the most important announcements, including one that wasn’t in Microsoft’s booklet but was featured prominently on stage.

1. Microsoft, SAP and Adobe take on Salesforce with their new Open Data Initiative for customer data

What was announced: Microsoft is teaming up with Adobe and SAP to create a single model for representing customer data that businesses will be able to move between systems.

Why it matters: Moving customer data between different enterprise systems is hard, especially because there isn’t a standardized way to represent this information. Microsoft, Adobe and SAP say they want to make it easier for this data to flow between systems. But it’s also a shot across the bow of Salesforce, the leader in the CRM space. It also represents a chance for these three companies to enable new tools that can extract value from this data — and Microsoft obviously hopes that these businesses will choose its Azure platform for analyzing the data.

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2. Microsoft wants to do away with more passwords

What was announced: Businesses that use Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) will now be able to use the Microsoft Authenticator app on iOS and Android in place of a password to log into their business applications.

Why it matters: Passwords are annoying and they aren’t very secure. Many enterprises are starting to push their employees to use a second factor to authenticate. With this, Microsoft now replaces the password/second factor combination with a single tap on your phone — ideally without compromising security.

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3. Microsoft’s new Windows Virtual Desktop lets you run Windows 10 in the cloud

What was announced: Microsoft now lets businesses rent a virtual Windows 10 desktop in Azure.

Why it matters: Until now, virtual Windows 10 desktops were the domain of third-party service providers. Now, Microsoft itself will offer these desktops. The company argues that this is the first time you can get a multiuser virtualized Windows 10 desktop in the cloud. As employees become more mobile and don’t necessarily always work from the same desktop or laptop, this virtualized solution will allow organizations to offer them a full Windows 10 desktop in the cloud, with all the Office apps they know, without the cost of having to provision and manage a physical machine.

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4. Microsoft Office gets smarter

What was announced: Microsoft is adding a number of new AI tools to its Office productivity suite. Those include Ideas, which aims to take some of the hassle out of using these tools. Ideas may suggest a layout for your PowerPoint presentation or help you find interesting data in your spreadsheets, for example. Excel is also getting a couple of new tools for pulling in rich data from third-party sources. Microsoft is also building a new unified search tool for finding data across an organization’s network.

Why it matters: Microsoft Office remains the most widely used suite of productivity applications. That makes it the ideal surface for highlighting Microsoft’s AI chops, and anything that can improve employee productivity will surely drive a lot of value to businesses. If that means sitting through fewer badly designed PowerPoint slides, then this whole AI thing will have been worth it.

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5. Microsoft’s massive Surface Hub 2 whiteboards will launch in Q2 2019

What was announced: The next version of the Surface Hub, Microsoft’s massive whiteboard displays, will launch in Q2 2019. The Surface Hub 2 is both lighter and thinner than the original version. Then, in 2020, an updated version, the Surface Hub 2X, will launch that will offer features like tiling and rotation.

Why it matters: We’re talking about a 50-inch touchscreen display here. You probably won’t buy one, but you’ll want one. It’s a disappointment to hear that the Surface Hub 2 won’t launch into next year and that some of the advanced features most users are waiting for won’t arrive until the refresh in 2020.

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6. Microsoft Teams gets bokeh and meeting recordings with transcripts

What was announced: Microsoft Teams, its Slack competitor, can now blur the background when you are in a video meeting and it’ll automatically create transcripts of your meetings.

Why it matters: Teams has emerged as a competent Slack competitor that’s quite popular with companies that are already betting on Microsoft’s productivity tools. Microsoft is now bringing many of its machine learning smarts to Teams to offer features that most of its competitors can’t match.

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7. Microsoft launches Azure Digital Twins

What was announced: Azure Digital Twins allows enterprises to model their real-world IoT deployments in the cloud.

Why it matters: IoT presents a massive new market for cloud services like Azure. Many businesses were already building their own version of Digital Twins on top of Azure, but those homegrown solutions didn’t always scale. Now, Microsoft is offering this capability out of the box, and for many businesses, this may just be the killer feature that will make them decide on standardizing their IoT workloads on Azure. And as they use Azure Digital Twins, they’ll also want to use the rest of Azure’s many IoT tools.

How do modern buyers like to be sold to? Does cold outreach on Linkedin ever work? Is 1 to 1 video an effective selling medium? Does anyone pick up the office phone? A new sales engagement survey from The Bridge Group, Modern Sales Pros and Sales Hacker provides answers to all these questions and more, based on data from nearly 800 survey respondents. Without further ado, here are the top 5 takeaways from the survey. 

Top 5 Takeaways from The Ultimate Sales Engagement Survey

1. When it comes to reaching the ever-elusive C-suite, a phone call on the office phone is the best bet, right? Wrong! In fact, our new sales engagement survey found that the higher the title, the less likely the buyer was to have an office phone. Less than half of executives surveyed said they had an office phone, clocking in at just 44%.

2. If someone has their cell phone number in their email signature, that means it’s fair game for a call, right? Probably. 53% of respondents said they felt positively about receiving a mobile phone call from a salesperson if their number was in their signature. Still, as a best practice, we recommend going the Canadian route and getting a double opt-in on this one-–it’s always nice to ask first!

3. The older a prospect is, the less likely they are to want a call on their cell phone, right? Wrong! Check your ageism at the door. The age demographic who is least receptive to a call on mobile is in fact thirty-five to fifty-five year olds, the middle of the pack. When it comes to being called on their cell phone, under 35-year-olds and over 55-year-olds were the most likely to respond positively.

4. Does Linkedin cold outreach ever work? Yes–but only if you craft a truly exceptional personalized message. According to our survey, 55% of respondents will respond occasionally to a customized connection request from a salesperson. Even better? Executives were the most likely to say they would accept the occasion Linkedin cold outreach. So go ahead; add a note. It’s worth it.

5. Is Linkedin truly King? While Linkedin is definitely huge, the majority of our respondents still prefer good ole email as their number one communication medium of choice, including Marketers, Executives, and Sales Ops.

While these findings are fascinating, they are just the tip of the iceberg. Check your assumptions at the door and download the whole eBook “The Ultimate Sales Engagement Guide” here.

The post Top 5 Takeaways From The Ultimate Sales Engagement Survey appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Sales engagement, interactions between sales reps and buyers or customers, is overwhelmingly named by sales leaders as their top priority. They are focused on the quality and volume of sales reps’ engagement with buyers as they look to drive higher …

The post Sales Engagement – The Definitive Guide appeared first on TOPO Blog.

Dust off your old Bose 501 speakers. New devices are coming that will give traditional audio equipment a voice.

Amazon recently announced a mess of new Echo devices and among the lot are several small, diminutive add-ons. These models did not have a smart speaker built into the devices but rather turned other speakers into smart speakers.

Sonos has a similar device. Called the Sonos Amp, the device connects the Sonos service to audio receivers and can drive traditional speakers. There’s a new version coming out in 2019 that adds Alexa and AirPlay 2.

This movement back towards traditional speaker systems could be a boon for audio companies reeling from the explosion of smart speakers. Suddenly, consumers do not have to choose between the ease of use in an inexpensive smart speaker and the vastly superior audio quality of a pair of high-end speakers. Consumers can have voice services and listen to Cake, too.

Echo devices are everywhere in my house. They’re in three bedrooms, my office, our living room, my workshop and outside on the deck. But besides the Tap in the workshop and Echo in the kitchen, every Echo is connected to an amp and speakers. For instance, in my office, I have an Onkyo receiver and standalone Onkyo amp that powers a pair of Definitive Technology bookshelf speakers. The bedrooms have various speakers connected to older A/V receivers. Outside there’s a pair of Yamaha speakers powered by cheap mini-amp. Each system sounds dramatically better than any smart speaker available.

There’s a quiet comfort in building an audio system: To pick out each piece and connect everything; to solder banana clips to speaker wire and ensure the proper power is flowing to each speaker.

Amazon and Google built one of the best interfaces for audio in Alexa and Google Assistant. But that could change in the future. In the end, Alexa and Google Assistant are just another component in an audio stack, and to some consumers, it makes sense to treat them as a turntable or equalizer — a part that can be swapped out in the future.

The world of consumer electronics survives because of the disposable nature of gadgets. There’s always something better coming soon. Cell phones last a couple of years and TVs last a few years longer. But bookshelf speakers purchased today will still sound great in 20 years.

There’s a thriving secondary market for vintage audio equipment, and unlike old computer equipment, buyers want this gear actually to use it.

If you see a pair of giant Bose speakers at a garage sale, buy them and use them. Look at the prices for used Bose 901 speakers: they’re the cost of three Apple HomePods. Look at ShopGoodwill.com — Goodwill’s fantastic auction site. It’s filled with vintage audio equipment with some pieces going for multiple thousands of dollars. Last year’s smart speakers are on there, too, available for pennies on the dollar.

For the most part, audio equipment will last generations. Speakers can blow and wear out. Amps can get hit by surges and components can randomly fail. It happens, but most of the time, speakers survive.

This is where Amazon and Sonos come in. Besides selling standalone speakers, both companies have products available that adds services to independent speaker systems. A person doesn’t have to ditch their Pioneer stack to gain access to Alexa. They have to plug in a new component, and in the future, if something better is available, that component can be swapped out for something else.

Amazon first introduced this ability in the little Echo Dot. The $50 speaker has a 3.5mm output that makes it easy to add to a speaker system. A $35 version is coming soon that lacks the speaker found in the Dot and features a 3.5mm output. It’s set to be the easiest and cheapest way to add voice services to speakers.

Amazon and Sonos also have higher-end components nearing release. The Amazon Echo Link features digital and discrete audio outputs that should result in improved audio. The Amazon Echo Amp adds an amplifier to power a set of passive speakers directly. Sonos offers something similar in the upcoming Sonos Amp with 125 watts per channel and HDMI to allow it to be connected to a TV.

These add-on products give consumers dramatically more options than a handful of plastic smart speakers.

There are several ways to take advantage of these components. The easiest is to look at powered speakers. These speakers have built-in amplifiers and unlike traditional speakers, plug into an outlet for power. Look at models from Edifier, Klipsch or Yamaha. Buyers just need to connect a few cables to have superior sound to most smart speakers.

Another option is to piece together a component system. Pick any A/V receiver and add a couple of speakers and a subwoofer. This doesn’t have to be expensive. Small $30 amps like from Lepy or Pyle can drive a set of speakers — that’s what I use to drive outdoor speakers. Or, look at Onkyo or Denon A/V surround sound receivers and build a home theater system and throw in an Amazon Echo Link on top. As for speakers Polk, Klipsch, Definitive Technology, KEF, B&W, and many more produce fantastic speakers that will still work years after Amazon stops making Echo devices.

Best of all, both options are modular and allows owners to modify the system overtime. Want to add a turntable? Just plug it in. That’s not possible with a Google Home.

Technology doesn’t have to be disposable.

These add-on products offer the same solution as Roku or Fire TV devices — just plug in this device to add new tricks to old gear. When it gets old, don’t throw out the TV (or in this case speakers), just plug in the latest dongle.

Sure, it’s easy to buy a Google Home Max, and the speaker sounds great, too. For some people, it’s the perfect way to get Spotify in their living space. It’s never been easier to listen to music or NPR.

There are a few great options for smart speakers. The $350 Apple HomePod sounds glorious though Siri lacks a lot of smarts of Alexa or Google Assistant. I love the Echo Dot for its utility and price point, and in a small space, it sounds okay. For my money, the best smart speaker is the Sonos One. It sounds great, is priced right, and Sonos has the best ecosystem available.

I’m excited about Amazon’s Echo and Sub bundle. For $249, buyers get two Echos and the new Echo Sub. The software forces the two Echos to work in stereo while the new subwoofer supplements the low-end. I haven’t heard the system yet, but I expect it to sound as good as the Google Home Max or Apple HomePod and the separate component operation should help the audio fill larger spaces.

Sonos has similar systems available. The fantastic Sonos One speaker can be used as a standalone speaker, part of a multiroom system, or as a surround speaker with other Sonos One speakers and the Sonos Beam audio bar. To me, Sonos is compelling because of their ecosystem and tendency to have a longer product refresh cycle. In the past, Sonos has been much slower to roll out new products but instead added services to existing products. The company seems to respect the owners of its products rather than forcing them to buy new products to gain new abilities.

In the end, though, smart speakers from Apple, Sonos, Google or Amazon will stop working. Eventually, the company will stop supporting the services powering the speakers and owners will throw the speakers in the trash. It’s depressing in the same way Spotify is depressing. Your grandkids are not going to dig through your digital Spotify milk crate. When the service is gone, the playlists are gone.

That’s the draw of component audio equipment. A turntable purchased in the ’70s could still work today. Speakers bought during the first dot-com boom will still pound when the cryptocurrency bubble pops. As for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, to me, it makes sense to treat it as another component in a larger system and enjoy it while it lasts.

There are a lot of people out there who will be happy to tell you that you should never bother cold calling. Typically these people are either bad at doing it themselves, have never sold professionally or stand to benefit in some way from discouraging you from doing so.

Of course, I don’t believe that sales people should abandon all other forms of selling in favor of cold calling. There are different mediums one can use to create new opportunities, and it doesn’t make sense to eliminate one medium simply because another medium is available. There is simply nothing about any medium that makes it an exclusive choice. Like a toolbox, you use different tools for different purposes.

Cold calling, if you do it well, can help you prospect, develop relationships and boost conversions. In this guide, I’ll walk you through exactly why cold calling is still important and how you can learn to be an effective cold-calling powerhouse in no time.

Chapter 1: Cold Calling is Dead: A Rebuttal

Sales people can often be divided into two camps: those who still do cold calling and those who believe that social selling has replaced it. Usually those in one camp feel that their method is best and the other is useless. The folks who like social selling have set up cold calling, something salespeople don’t like, as a straw man to have something to rail against to gain clients. This is simply not an effective way to approach sales.

My friends at Sales for Life published this post as evidence that cold facing its demise. Here are their claims laid out along with some evidence to the contrary.

Cold Calling has a poor conversion rate and only 28 percent of cold calls engage in conversations.

The article uses Keller Research Center’s research to show cold calling has a 1 percent conversion rate. What they failed to mention was that this research was based on real estate agents, not B2B sales professionals. Even so, if I could speak to 3 out of every 10 people I connected with, that would be more than enough.

Forrester says 37 percent of order takers and 27 percent of explainer archetypes will be displaced.

People hate cold calling for the same reason that people become order-takers and explainers – because they are conflict averse. Hiding behind social platforms and using emails also puts you into the category of being an order-taker or explainer.

B2B e-commerce will top 1.1 trillion dollars and account for 12.1 percent of all B2B sales.

That number will grow regardless of whether you ignore cold calling or not. It doesn’t reflect anything about the opportunity you are missing out on by ignoring cold calling.

Nine out of ten top-level decision-makers don’t respond to cold outreach.

Again, if you have nothing worth their time, this is true. But that only speaks to your skills, not the medium. If your competitor picks up the phone and engages them and you don’t, this will hurt you.

75 percent of B2B leaders say that they regularly use social media in their decision-making process.

Of course they do. That’s why using the phone in addition to social media is the best approach.

Salesforce reports that 74 percent of buyers choose a salesperson who is first to add value and insight.

But how do you actually get your value and insight seen in all the clutter on social? The fastest way to get in front of a client is still cold calling.

84 percent of B2B leaders start their buying journey with referrals and cold calling cannot reach the vast majority of B2B decision makers.

Seriously? The same folks that fear the phone are even more timid when it comes to asking for referrals. Why wait passively for your pipeline to fill up when you can take action with a call?

Forrester says 70 of execs say salespeople are unprepared to answer their questions, and “there is no way a salesperson on a cold call can be as prepared as a social seller.”

This could be true for people who are simply bad at cold calling. Get better at it and you will have an answer for every question.

The average salesperson makes only two attempts to reach a prospect.

“Success in social requires many touch points through a variety of channels.” That isn’t success in social, it’s success in prospecting and developing relationships. One of those touches should be the phone. Another should be face-to-face. Use social, too.

None of the information they provided offered a relevant argument against cold calling – it only backed up the fact that people just don’t like to do it, not that it doesn’t work.

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Chapter 2: Combining Cold Calling with Social

Should you be using social selling? Or should you be cold calling? There are two camps here.

One feels that you should never ever pick up the phone to call people at work, you should never interrupt someone to ask for an appointment and you should never ask someone to buy something. Never be closing, always be connecting. That way you can let the buyer decide when they are ready to listen further or make a commitment.

The other camp says that the phone is still an important tool and if you want speed to results you pick up the phone and call proactively targeted clients so you can go in and get face-to-face and start developing an opportunity. This group will also tell you to use social selling. They’ll tell you to get referrals. They’ll tell you to go to social networking events, conferences, trade shows, etc. They’ll tell you to use every single method available to you, in addition to cold calling, to prospect in order to achieve a balanced approach that fits your business.

So who’s right?

It has to be the group that says you should cold call. It’s faster, more effective and better at filling your calendar with appointments quickly. Social selling is a long game that results in a lot of wasted time and wasted opportunity. There really is no debate. Every single expert will tell you that you need to use every method available to you and that is the best way to ensure that you get the results you need. Not everyone uses LinkedIn. Not everyone goes to networking events. By utilizing all of the methods available to you, you WILL see improved results.

I have won major accounts with relationships that were begun on social media, including LinkedIn, Twitter, and this blog. Social media and inbound marketing are helpful and sometimes effective tools.

But it is criminal negligence to suggest to salespeople that they no longer need to make cold calls (or pick up the telephone).

If you’re a young person and you are uncomfortable of the cold call, getting comfortable with the phone will help you get results faster and build your pipeline. If you’ve been in the business for a while, you also need to get a killer LinkedIn profile as well as getting on the phone.

Both social selling and cold calling together are better than each one alone. It’s simply common sense.

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Chapter 3: The Truth About Scripts and Cold Calling

Listen, we all know that using scripts can go horribly wrong. When I first got into sales, I was given a cold calling script. It consisted of a bunch of index cards collected into a tiny binder. Each card had tabs that were labeled with a prompt. The idea was that, as your prospect came up with an objection to meeting with you, you could flip to the corresponding tab and find the language you needed to overcome the objection.

On my first or second day of calls, I was met with a prospect who interrupted me in the middle of the pitch and said “Hey, you’re reading from a script. Call me back when you don’t need to read from a script.” The tabs couldn’t help me with that one.

Sales prospects are never going to have any confidence in you if you sound like you are reading from a script, it’s true. But scripts aren’t magic. You have to get comfortable with them with practice and over time. As I continued to make calls, I found it super effective to have access to effective language so I didn’t feel as blindsided when objections came up. As my competence and confidence grew, I found I didn’t need the cards at all. But they were a huge crutch in the beginning.

You Are Already Using Scripts

The fact is, you are already using scripts whether you believe it or not. Unless you are having a completely different conversation every time you speak to a client, you are depending on a script. Even when you are engaged in a conversation with your dream client, you are likely still using some stock answers to common questions and concerns. Scripted language is not supposed to read like a script. The idea is that they provide suggested language that you then take the time to learn so you can better finesse your response to each client.

Take the Time to Craft and Rehearse Your Message

If you’re new to sales, writing scripts is a good exercise in making sure you are on point and have a clear and concise message. And if writing scripts is old hat for you, remember that it is still helpful to revisit your language and make updates now and then. Taking the time to think about the language, writing it down and rehearsing it will build your confidence and competence.

Try this. Make a list of common client and prospect communications you make and sketch an outline of key points and key questions you want to ask. Always keep your ultimate goal in mind. This will greatly improve your ability to make cold calls and your confidence in doing so.

Don’t reinvent the wheel here. Reflect on what has worked for you in the past. What opening has worked the best for you in the past? What story best illustrates the point that you need to make? What funny anecdote always breaks the tension? What transitions work the best?

Make sure you have a great sales call opening, a great value proposition, a spectacular and differentiating set of needs-analysis questions that prove your business acumen, a presentation that defines and validates your ability to achieve results, and tried and true commitment obtaining language.

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Chapter 4: Why People Fail at Cold Calling

Cold calling works – if you are doing it right. However, there are many reasons why people fail to make it work. Let’s take a look at some of the main ones.

You’re not making enough calls

If you make 6-10 calls per day, it’s not enough to give yourself a fair chance at success. To make cold calling work you need an a researched target list and 60 to 80 fast calls. That will ensure that you get appointments and also that you get better faster.

Weak value prop

If your cold calls aren’t bringing in results, there’s a good chance your sales call value proposition isn’t compelling. Asking if I can “stop by, to introduce myself and my services” isn’t really something most people would jump at. To make cold calling work, you have to ask for a meeting where your dream client really sees the value they stand to gain.

Asking for big commitments early on

It’s easy to frighten your client off with an open-ended “ask” right away. Even asking for an hour can be too much sometimes. Instead, ask for a smaller commitment, like 20 or 30 minutes to make it more palatable. That way they can say yes but also escape early if they don’t see any value.

Asking for a meeting just once

It’s good to go in expecting a “no” to your request for a meeting on your first attempt. Your dream clients says “no” to everyone who calls, not knowing how to decipher who is worthy and who isn’t. The first attempt will be met with an objection and then you need to follow it up with a second attempt.

You aren’t resolving their fears or concerns

Prospects will tell you they already have someone, that they don’t need your service, that they don’t have time, etc. It’s unlikely that any of these are actually true. Their real concern is that you don’t have any real insight, you can’t really help them, etc. You have to make them believe that these things aren’t true.

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Chapter 5: Planning and Preparation for the Cold Call

Every interaction with your clients counts. The first cold call is where you need to sound like someone who creates value for their clients. It will determine whether or not you are someone worth spending more time with or whether they should object. This means you have to prepare for sales calls and plan for them like they matter.

Develop Solutions

The way you develop solutions needs to be more collaborative. It needs to include more stakeholders from diverse areas of the business. Less is just pitching.

Negotiate Value

You owe it to your client, your company and yourself to not allow your client to underinvest in the result they need. Offering discounts means that you are allowing your client to underinvest. It means you are depriving your company of the profit necessary to produce the results that you want to give your client. It also discounts the value you create.

Take the Time to Craft and Rehearse Your Call

A call should never sound rehearsed. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get super comfortable with all of the language you need to make it work. Make a list of the common questions and objectives that you typically hear during sales calls. Start with the objections you hear during your prospecting activities. End with the objections you hear late in the process when your prospects and dream clients are resolving their concerns. Write down everything in between in an outline.

Repeat the process above. Choose the most powerful words, phrases, and stories that help to resolve concerns. Reflect on what has worked in the past and keep a running diary of new questions and concerns and your responses.

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Chapter 6: Six Principles for Cold Calling

If you go into cold calling with these six principles in mind, you will succeed.

You Are Going to Hear No. Don’t Believe It Means Anything.

Your clients have no way of knowing who is worth spending time with so they will say no to everyone across the board the first time they hear from them. Those that are great at cold calling and telemarketing don’t attach any meaning to the word “no.” It is simply part of the dance.

Your Dream Client Receives Lots of Calls. You Have to Differentiate Yourself.

You have to differentiate yourself from your many competitors. Often, they are trying to sound professional. You need to sound different. Being real, being conversational and being authentic will help you differentiate yourself. If you don’t sound passionate about meeting with them and helping them, you will blend in with everyone else. Be yourself and be confident.

You Have to Prove You Are a Value Creator. Not a Time Waster.

You have one chance to make a first impression and convince a client that you are going to offer them value. If you say: “I’d like to sit down with you for fifteen minutes to see how we might be able to help reduce your overall cost of _________ and improve your __________ results,” you sound like a value creator.

You Are Already Using a Script. Write a Better One.

Even if you don’t use a written script, chances are, you are saying about the same thing on every call that you make. Improving your script improves your results.

It is tremendously helpful to go through the act of writing down what you intend to say before you say it. It helps build the language into your nervous system; it makes the language part of you.

Your Goal Is an Appointment. Nothing Else.

Your goal is just to get an appointment. If you answer a client’s questions without leading the conversation to an appointment, they will say no. If you tell them you can provide them with that information along with details on how you can help them, it’s more likely that you’ll get in the door.

You Are Going to Have to Push if You Want an Appointment

It will be rare to reach the contact you need on your first call. If you really want the appointment, you are going to have to call more frequently than feels comfortable to you. You have to be persistent and resilient.

Lots of salespeople are challenged by having to make cold calls. But there are some principles that, if taken to heart and adopted into your practice, can make your cold calling a lot more effective. The only way to ensure that you are making contacts and driving sales is by pursuing every opportunity available to you – and cold calling presents incredible value.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Cold Calling appeared first on The Sales Blog.

The internet and evolving technologies have dramatically changed the way people do everyday activities like researching, shopping, and banking. The common practice before was going to a physical store to learn more about a product, canvas, and finally purchase. Now, it’s possible to do everything in a few clicks using a smart device. People don’t even have to leave their homes.

Because of these innovations, the consumer buying behavior has changed. The internet has become an authoritative source of information for buyers and an avenue for marketers to advertise their products. To retain customers and increase sales, many brick-and-mortar stores have put up an online version of their shop to keep up with the demands of their customers.

To optimize your marketing efforts and digital presence, it’s important to know how your customers behave online. For instance, research shows that 89% of shoppers look for photos of a specific product online, and this could influence their decision to buy the item. That already suggests that people trust the internet and would consult it first before going to the mall to shop.

Smartphones have also become a shopping assistant to most people. Nearly 60% of shoppers use their devices while in the store so they can get more information about the item, compare prices with other brands, or look for better deals. People have come a long way from relying on salespeople for product information.

Businesses have seen fit to adapt to these changes-and rightly so. Failing to adapt can only result to being left behind by your competitors. Hence, aside from employing digital ads, brick and mortar stores are setting up their e-commerce websites or listing their products in online marketplaces.

This infographic by Connext Digital Illustrates useful data that can help you create better marketing strategies for your business, such as the factors that influence shoppers’ buying decisions and the specific times they consult the internet. Here, you will learn more about the behavior of your target market and how your business can keep up with the competition.

By Swati Sinha

Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, once said: “Some people call this ‘artificial intelligence,’ but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So, instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.”

The era of augmented intelligence (AI) has been a gift for sales teams. And, if you’re not currently leveraging the vast amounts of data generated every minute from multiple sources and platforms for enhanced customer engagement, you are losing to your competitors: Gartner has predicted that global business value derived from AI will reach $3.9 trillion in 2022. And a study published in MIT Sloan Management Review reveals that 76 percent of early adopters are targeting higher sales growth with machine learning.

Augmented Intelligence Makes Sales Smarter

Early adopters are using AI to complement – not replace – their sales teams. There are many fantastic benefits of running a sales organization enhanced by augmented intelligence, including the following.

Benefit #1: More time selling. A recent article by McKinsey Global Institute states that 45 percent of time spent on sales-related activities can be cut down using AI. So, sales reps can spend more time selling and closing instead of completing routine, time-consuming jobs.

Benefit #2: Creating synergies. A major point of contention between sales and marketing is seamless continuation in customer engagement and lack of lead conversion. With the help of AI, marketing and sales won’t miss on strong leads and opportunities.

Benefit #3: Customer loyalty. By having better customer intelligence, sales reps can build long-lasting relationships with customers.

Benefit #4: Lower costs. By automating routine tasks and intelligent forecasting, organizations can optimize resource allocation, lower costs, and shorten the sales cycle.

Transform Your Sales Organization

Your sales organization directly impacts revenue and profit, and machine learning will help transform a sales organization from being reactive to proactive – and from intuitive to prescriptive. It can guide the sales journey from identification to customer retention.

Four Key Areas Where AI Can Be a Big Boost

How does this work? Let’s look at the four key areas where AI can make a significant impact for sales teams.

Area #1: Prospecting and Sales Leads

First, massive digital and social data on customers provides collective insights that can be used to identify prospects and strong leads. AI can also provide insights for upcoming customer meetings – and schedule them, too. Following up with cold leads can be discouraging and a waste of time for a sales rep, and this process can be customized and automated with AI.

Area #2: Customer Cultivation and Acquisition

Marketing has already seen the success of personalized messaging versus generic. Similarly, conversations between sales reps and prospects will improve if focused on areas that are most likely to be relevant to them.

Most sales conversations take place via email or phone. Natural Language Processing (NLP) can guide sales rep conversations based on customer information and honest signals. Over time, machine learning can assess, via feedback loops, what is working and what is not and can accordingly guide the rep further. Machines can also generate training plans based on the activities of other star sales reps. 

Timely deal offers are key to the success of any deal, and an AI-guided sales rep will have all the information needed to close sales. Based on past sales data, custom pricing can be recommended to help win deals. Machine learning can provide guidance regarding discounts and commissions by analyzing the success of previous discounts that worked. All this information can then be used to generate proposals and contracts (with confidence rating) and systems can initially ask sales rep to review the proposal/contract – which can improve and be automated over time, based on feedback.

Machine learning can also recognize the signals of what a converted lead or opportunity looks like and flag it for the sales to focus on them and not spend time spent on deals that would likely never convert.

Area #3: Customer Retention

Depending on the industry, the cost of acquiring a customer can be 5-25 percent higher than retaining them – and increasing competition will further increase the cost. Identifying signals from customers before they churn – and taking proactive steps to retain them – will increase the lifetime value of customers.

Area #4: Sales Operations

Machine learning can help sales operations improve in the following ways.

• Sales training – Machine learning can guide managers with sales coaching, a key to building strong teams. At the same time, AI can generate a personalized training plan by analyzing all the actions taken by sales reps (such as written and phone communication follow-ups) and compare them with the processes followed by star performers. It can then provide guidance on corrective measures.
• Sales reporting – Sales managers can view team performance (such as deals missed or quota met) in real time and take prescriptive actions to keep reps on track.
• Sales forecasting – AI can forecast revenue at a macro level for sales managers by providing insights into sales trends, segmented by sales organizations, sales reps, etc. This can help optimize resource allocation to build healthy pipeline, analyze team performance, and be cost-effective.

Conclusion: Why Sales and AI Are Best Friends

AI can’t replace the value of human interaction when it comes to building relationships with customers, but it can make them smarter and more productive through guided selling and automating the operational job, allowing sales reps to focus on their primary job: delivering value to customers and building loyalty that leads to organic revenue growth.

Swati Sinha is a senior director of global solution marketing at SAP for Sales Cloud. A seasoned enterprise software professional with varied experience in product marketing, product management, and engineering, she has worked with organizations both large and small. She is a technologist at heart and empathetic by nature, which gives her the ability to understand customer needs and tell a story about how technology can solve their business problem. She has an MBA and a master’s degree in computer applications. In her free time she likes to connect with her community and support charities.   

The post Why Augmented Intelligence Is a Salesperson’s Best Friend appeared first on Sales 3.0 Conference.

Sales productivity — the time your team spends selling — has decreased. According to LinkedIn, salespeople spend less than 30% of their time actually selling. Administrative tasks and non-selling responsibilities are weighing your salespeople down.

Increasing your team’s productivity is essential for increasing your company’s revenue. In this article, you’ll learn the ins and outs of sales productivity. That includes tips to increase the time your sales reps have to spend selling.

• What is Sales Productivity?
• Why Should Sales Productivity Be Measured?
• Sales Productivity Challenges
• How to Measure Sales Productivity
• How to Improve Sales Productivity
• Sales Productivity Tools
• Other Helpful Tips
• Maximize Your Sales Productivity

Why Should Sales Productivity Be Measured?

Sales productivity directly impacts your bottom line. If sales productivity is low, salespeople are not generating enough revenue to cover their costs. In some cases, a low sales productivity rate can even mean that a company is losing money.

The average sales rep spends only a third of their time selling. The rest of their day is eaten by administrative tasks. That includes emails, research, training, internal meetings, and data management.

The solution is two-pronged. You’ll need to

1. Find ways to increase the time reps spend selling.
2. Ensure the time actually spent on sales maximizes efficiency.

By tracking sales productivity, your company can make changes to its processes and strategies that can increase the number of deals closed.

Improving productivity can also have a positive impact on morale. Reps are happier because they spend more time doing what they love and less time doing what they don’t — while generating more income in less time.

Sales Productivity Challenges

Before sharing the key to increasing sales productivity, let’s look at the three root causes of the problems sales organizations have dealt with for decades.

1. Complexity

Selling is more complicated today. There are more touch points involved, and buyers are more sophisticated. Plus, the technology that reps use changes almost daily.

2. Chaos

Entropy is always increasing, and so does the chaos involved in managing today’s selling interactions. Differences between sellers are increasingly nuanced. Despite record investments in data and analytics, sellers face more uncertainty than ever.

3. Context

Online decision-making has blown up the alignment and synchronicity that existed in traditional buy/sell situations. This has put salespeople at a contextual disadvantage. When combined with modern demand generation strategies, salespeople spend more time managing administrative tasks than managing the sales process.

How to Measure Sales Productivity

Efficiency and effectiveness are two ways to understand your team’s productivity.

Sales efficiency measures how many opportunities a representative converts into actual sales.

This can help you understand the steps in your buyer’s journey and potential barriers to purchase.

For example, over one in five sales professionals say that the length of the sales process is the reason prospects back out of deals. If your team is impacted you can focus on finding ways to remove unnecessary steps from your sales process.

Meanwhile, sales effectiveness measures how well salespeople close deals and generate revenue. Effectiveness can help you understand how well your sales activities work. For instance, 61% of sales professionals found setting up face-to-face meetings was the best way to convert B2B customers in 2022. This would show that these meetings are effective.

Within these categories, your team can focus on more specific metrics. The number of sales made per hour worked is one of the most popular measurements. This metric can help you see how effective your sales team is at generating revenue during their time spent selling.

Another way to measure sales productivity is by looking at the number of sales made per contact. This metric can help you see how well your sales team converts leads into customers.

Finally, you can also measure sales productivity by looking at the number of sales made per salesperson. This metric can help you see how effective your sales team is as a whole and identify areas where you need to improve.

Understanding your team’s performance can help you identify — and resolve — a productivity slump. See the most popular metrics sales teams track in 2022, according to survey data from HubSpot.

How to Improve Sales Productivity

1. Provide training.

One way to improve sales productivity is by providing sales training and development programs. These programs can help salespeople learn new skills and strategies that can make them more effective at generating revenue.

2. Implement software solutions.

Sales automation software can help free up your team’s time. Find software that can assist with administrative tasks. Additionally, sales intelligence tools can help salespeople gather data and information about their prospects so that they can close more deals.

3. Use incentives.

If morale has created a barrier to productivity, you can use incentives to help keep your team motivated. Sales contests and commission structures can motivate salespeople to sell more and close more deals.

Sales Productivity Tools

There are several sales productivity tools that can help increase efficiency. We’ll dive into popular solutions below to help you discover the best options for your team.

CRM Systems

A customer relationship management (CRM) system can help your team track leads, deals, and customers. CRMs can also provide salespeople with information about their customers so that they can sell more effectively.

Here’s an example. CRMs like HubSpot allow you to search a prospect by name. From there, you can find out what company they work for, the company size, and any previous outreach that they have received from your team.

Of sales leaders, 22% cite leveraging their CRM to its fullest potential as their top goal in 2022, according to research from HubSpot.

Sales Automation

Sales automation uses software to automate repetitive tasks so your team can spend more time working directly with prospects and closing deals. That often includes emailing prospects, scheduling sales meetings, and creating sales reports. Our recent “State of Marketing Report” found that 45% of sales team use automation.

Sales Intelligence Software

Sales intelligence software gathers data and information that can help facilitate the sales process. That includes tethering industry-specific talking points for contacts before you being outreach.

Sales intelligence tools can also help your team find contact information, track prospects’ social media activity, and identify buying signals. Popular options include LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo SalesOS, and Apollo.io.

Other Helpful Tips

Sales productivity can be improved with a targeted approach. Here are a few additional ways that you can improve sales productivity across your organization.

1. Map the customer acquisition process.

The more complex your offering, the greater the variance and complexity in your customer acquisition process. While creating a repeatable process when the process is different every time may seem like an insurmountable problem, in reality, it’s not. The key is to view the process through an “object lens.”

Don’t build out your methodology from A to Z; instead, map the system and find the waypoints. Mapping the system in this manner enables you to find those key inflection points where adjustments occur.

This enables you to make your repeatable process a series of repeatable mini-processes that can be plugged in as needed.

2. Create a clearly defined service-level agreement (SLA).

Great selling organizations have crystal-clear service-level agreements that define what every lead definition means, the protocols for managing those leads, and what’s expected from every aspect of the revenue generation team.

A strong SLA enables everyone — especially salespeople — to spend their “thinking time” focused on selling situations, rather than figuring out what to do and when to do it. This creates greater discipline and velocity.

3. Design and execute contextual plays.

Sales reps either execute their sales cadences like a poorly programmed bot, or they’re forced to spend so much time thinking about what to do they have no time or brainpower to focus on the conversation taking place.

Contextual plays free up a sales rep’s genius to engage with their most important asset: the prospect/customer.

4. Integrate and automate your playbook.

Playbooks are powerful. If you don’t have a defined and documented playbook, you’re at a disadvantage.

However, if your sales reps have to think about or refer to the playbook, your playbook isn’t going to work. Reps shouldn’t have to think about the playbook. The playbook should be integrated and automated within the existing systems.

Maximize Your Sales Productivity

Sales productivity is an important aspect of your business. By tracking sales productivity, companies can make changes to their sales process and sales strategy to help salespeople be more effective in their jobs and close more deals. Implementing these changes can help you increase sales and revenue for your business.

The key to maximizing the productivity of your sales team is to provide them with the right tools and resources.

Sending a cold email is like stepping into the ring with your prospect. You might throw a few good punches and win their attention in the first round. But if you don’t keep fighting to the very end, you’re ultimately going to lose.

Your Call To Action (CTA) is the KO punch. It’s what determines whether the person responds to your email and moves through your funnel or sends it to the trash.

But writing a killer CTA is deceptively complex. And something that many sales reps are making serious mistakes with.

Ready to master your cold emails and convert more customers? Download our top cold email templates and hacks for free.

The 5 biggest mistakes you’re making in your sales email CTAs

The reason you’re sending anyone a cold email is because you want them to take an action. That’s it. Of course you want them to open it, read it, and connect with what you’re saying. But if they get to the end of your email and say “what now?” you’ve failed.

If your prospects are leaving your emails without taking an action, you’re most likely committing one of these cardinal sins of CTA writing:

1. You don’t have a CTA: If you don’t tell your prospect what you want them to do, how can they take the next step? (Yes, people still make this mistake.) Always include a CTA. Even if you think the email is clear enough, add one anyways.
2. You have too many different CTAs: More CTAs won’t increase your chances of getting a conversion. In fact, the more you ask of someone in a cold email, the less likely they’ll do anything.
3. Your CTA is confusing or unclear: If your CTA isn’t specific enough in what the person needs to do, they’re going to leave. If you want someone to pick a time for a call, give them dates and times. If you want them to click a link and take an action, say that.
4. Your CTA is too hard of a decision: Difficult decisions create friction, and that’s the last thing you want in a cold email. Even if someone’s interested in what you’re saying, if the CTA puts pressure on them, they’re going to pass.
5. Your CTA is asking for too much: You haven’t yet earned the right to ask too much of your prospect in a cold email. If your CTA is asking for sensitive material or for the prospect to invest serious resources, it’s too much. And they’re not going to do it.

The beautiful thing about a strong and effective CTA is that you can work it into all of your sales emails. Our CRM with integrated emailing allows you to test your CTAs at scale. Simply update a CTA in your emails, and use our built-in reporting features to determine which CTAs are most effective.

Once you've determined which CTAs are most effective, you can apply them to email templates, and use our Email Sequences feature to automate your email follow-ups.

Rather than having to manually follow-up, you can simply set it up once, and let our email automation tool handle the busywork for you. 

Now that you know the operational part of winning email CTAs, there's one more thing to master:

How to craft the perfect CTA for your sales emails

The best cold email CTAs do the exact opposite of all those mistakes we just listed. They’re simple, straightforward, and reasonable requests. They reduce friction. And they’re focused in what they ask.

Here’s a few examples:

Use the 1, 2, 3 email hack if you haven’t been getting a response

Let’s say you’ve been following up with a prospect and haven’t gotten any response. In this scenario, you want to make your CTA so simple it would take more effort not to answer it.

One technique that works well is our 1, 2, 3 email hack where you present the reader with 3 clear options and say:

“Just hit reply and give me a number: 1, 2, or 3.”

As a reader, I only need to hit 3 keys to respond. Reply. 1, 2, or 3. And send. That’s it. There isn’t a simpler CTA in the world.

Give specific dates and times if you’re asking for a call or demo

Now, what if you need your prospect to schedule a time for a call or a demo? You might think it’s a good idea to leave it up to them to pick a time that works on their schedule, but a CTA that says “let me know when you’re free” creates too much friction and isn’t going to inspire action. Instead, give the prospect clear and specific options to choose from:

“Does next Tuesday at 11am or Thursday at 3PM work for a 15-minute call?”

By offering 2 options, you’re doing the work for them and all they have to do is say yes or no.

Make complex requests incredibly simple

Lastly, if you’re asking someone to take an action that requires some effort—like signing up for a trial and using your product—your CTA needs to be especially compelling. This means personalizing the link you send them and making the action as simple as possible. For example, you might say:

“Here’s a unique link that’s expiring soon that will give you an extended 30-day free trial. Just click this link and in one minute you’ll be able to test the product and see the results I’ve been talking about for yourself.”

Use the rest of your email to support and enhance your CTA

Your CTA is the most important part of your cold email. And the rest of your cold email copy should support it. By the time the reader gets to your CTA, they should be ready to pull the trigger.

First, you can use the copy directly before your CTA to give social proof. If you can prove your value before asking something from your prospect, you’ll have a much better chance of them saying yes. Try adding some reputable companies you’ve worked with and the results they’ve seen.

Next, use the P.S. after your CTA to address objections. If a prospect has gotten to the end of your email and is still unsure, you need to address any issues they might have. What are the most common objections you hear from customers? Use the P.S. at the end of your email to show that you’re aware of those issues and can show why they shouldn’t be an issue.

The best CTAs make it easier to say yes than no

If you want to increase the success of your cold emails, you need people to know what you want from them. And then ask for it.

If you’ve done the work to get someone’s attention, why throw the fight when you’re about to win? Use just one CTA. Keep it simple, straightforward, and reasonable. Make it easier to say yes than no. And optimize your copy around it to show social proof and handle objections.

Ready to take your cold emails to the next level? Download all of our best cold email strategies and templates for free.

Download "Cold Email Hacks 2.0" Free

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on the KIA CX Consulting blog here.

I relish the time onsite with customers, especially when they are in my “own backyard” so to speak.

That “AHA” moment when a group sees the power of customer centric thinking and starts to design their agile playbook around the customer journey is something I will never tire of.

Two weeks ago, with one of my Toronto clients, was no exception.

We spent two intensive days creating a customer journey map and then outlining the supporting business model to operationalize it.

The challenge in this particular case (the most common I see with product vendors) was again pulling up out of the product weeds with their customers and driving adoption using the bigger picture as context.

We spent a considerable amount of time looking at their customer’s daily business lives and from that viewpoint, what they are trying to accomplish, to understand how to align the product vision with messaging that would resonate to drive adoption and then expansion.

It was an intellectually taxing two days but the mental exercising was well worth the effort!

The resulting customer journey and corresponding playbook is one of the best I have seen to date which is exciting as they are now starting to proceed with operationalizing the plan.

The first major initiative that we identified as a huge game changer for the Customer Success team, and which will start to reap benefits right away, is defining a Customer Success Plan (CSP).

In addition to facilitating a more effective adoption rate (they want to address retention), a CSP that aligns with the overall product suite will help grow the business by essentially mapping out the expansion strategy.

Why are Customer Success Plans critical for efficient adoption and effective for ongoing expansion?

A solid CSP encapsulates the vendor’s vision for the product and its associated value proposition, in a simple yet powerful visual that consists of the tactics the customer should execute in the product, in order to achieve the business outcomes that they desire.

By incorporating the notion of progress towards business objectives with the use of effective visuals, CSPs provide Customer Success Managers (CSMs) with a means to project manage the customer, keeping them focused and accountable to reaching their goals.

When the CSP visual and corresponding tactics incorporate the overall vision for the product, making it easy to use more of it, the CSP also serves as an effective tool for expansion.

That is, articulate your company’s full product vision in a manner that can be accomplished by following easy to understand and execute tactics, and you will have more customers doing them.

Bottom Line

Customer Success Plans are critical for Customer Success.

They are a means by which CSM’s keep the customer on track to successful adoption by keeping them focused on, and accountable to, achieving their overarching, intended business outcomes.

In addition to offering a smoother adoption experience, the CSP also offers the CSM an effective way to demonstrate business value realized, to the customer.

The best CSPs incorporate the whole product vision in a simple to understand, visual format that motivates customers to execute the necessary tactics to achieve initial, intended value and then recognize that they want to do more for ongoing value realization.

Used in conjunction across the customer’s entire journey and maturity levels, CSPs then also form a critical element to an effective expansion strategy.

Now that’s a success plan!

The post Customer Success Plan: Key for Adoption and Expansion appeared first on OpenView Labs.

The Disconnect Between ABM Strategy and Technology

Perhaps the most universal challenge facing marketing and sales teams today is the disconnect between strategy and technology. Adopting a target account strategy is a no-brainer for most organizations. It only makes sense to dedicate a subset of your resources to the companies that are most likely to become successful, lucrative, long-term customers.

But here’s the problem: as teams take an account-based approach, many have struggled to find technology that meets their needs.

Despite the proliferation of ABM, the fact is, it’s still in its infancy.

According to a recent Forrester survey of B2B marketers, more than a third said they are experimenting with an account-based approach or getting started with ABM in 2018. This massive uptick in early-stage adoption is in large part thanks to the proliferation of ABM technology in recent years.

But not all ABM solutions are created equal. As the category grows, it’s important marketers understand which capabilities to look for and expect out of an account-based marketing platform.

The Emergence of Account-Based Technology Platforms

We recently hosted a webinar with Eric Wittlake, senior analyst at TOPO, about the five big realities of account-based today. During the webinar, Eric discusses the state of account-based marketing, common traps that B2B teams fall into, and ABM best practices based on TOPO’s extensive research.

In Eric’s words, account-based is hard right now.

He explains that there’s little existing infrastructure to support a target account strategy. Go-to-market teams have gotten good at piecing together different tools to create their tech stacks, but these fragmented solutions mean a lot of manual work for marketers and sales reps.

Fortunately, it’s getting easier.

What will become key to successful implementation are account-based technology platforms that are built to be account-based from the beginning.

Account-based platforms will prove key to managing and measuring campaigns and programs at the account level. Traditional automation tools are not going to cut it. That’s because they’re not designed to manage a target account list over time, and they force you to manually manage program execution across multiple channels. This creates a barrier to effective activation and reporting.

“An account-based platform should be addressing [your] major workflow issues and challenges, and [it should] ease them,” Eric explains. If it doesn’t, he says, it’s just another tool that will consume your team’s time.

On that note, what should you look for in an ABM platform?

Top 6 Criteria to Look for in a Scalable ABM Platform

With Eric’s thoughts on ABM platforms in mind, these are the top six criteria we believe B2B teams should seek out as they’re evaluating account-based marketing platforms.

1. Account Targeting Functionality
   Identifying and prioritizing the right accounts for your organization is foundational to a successful ABM program. Look to a platform that leverages AI-based technology to assist in identifying your best-fit accounts and building tiers and lists. This will save your team a ton of time previously spent consolidating data from different sources and staying on top of each account segment.
   .
2. Centralized Source of Truth
   Silos are the death knell of an effective ABM program — and a good platform should help eliminate them by serving as a central source truth for everyone on the revenue team. Marketing, sales, and customer success should all be able to leverage the platform to get a clear picture of any given account at any time. Since ABM is about expanding relationships with accounts by deepening engagement over the course of the lifecycle, cross-functional teams need to have visibility into engagement data and where each account is in their lifecycle. This will help you prioritize engagement, understand an account’s journey, and predict when an account is at risk.
   .
3. Account-Based Advertising
   Any ABM platform worth its salt should support multichannel, account-based advertising. It should make deploying highly targeted, personalized ads to engage decision-makers across an account’s buying committee easy. Digital ads are critical because they allow you to proactively engage your target buyers at scale, even when those buyers are unreachable via other channels. When you’re focusing on quality over quantity, traditional ads aiming for volume no longer fit the bill.
   .
4. Real-Time Engagement Data
   In ABM, engagement insights can tell you when a target account is hot. A platform that alerts your team, in real time, to which accounts are showing spikes in engagement and what specific content they’re engaging with can empower your team to strike while the iron is hot with timely and relevant outreach. Your ABM platform should provide insight into both known contacts and anonymous contacts that aren’t in your database. This will allow you to identify, prioritize, and increase velocity on your hottest accounts, even when buyers within those accounts haven’t filled out a lead form.
   .
5. Full-Funnel ABM Analytics
   Marketing and sales teams are typically under the microscope because they’re on the hook for demonstrating ROI. But ABM in particular tends to be under tougher scrutiny because it’s a new methodology for a lot of organizations. With that in mind, you want a platform that allows you to clearly measure the success of your program, make data-driven decisions to better optimize campaigns, and show how you’re driving pipeline and revenue from target accounts.
   .
6. Customer Success-Driven
   While best practices in ABM are advancing, most companies struggle with how exactly to implement an account-based strategy and drive alignment among their team. The customer success piece is crucial in achieving ABM success, particularly as most organizations are just beginning to pilot their programs. Look to a partner that provides resources, implementation and strategy support, and a stable of integration and technology partners.

There are a lot of moving parts in the ABM process — from account selection and engagement insights to orchestration and reporting. In an ideal world, an ABM platform should help you streamline this process, avoiding the operational and technical lag that can come from having to integrate countless individual tools before you start generating results.

Until recently, however, only ABM point solutions existed, which made it really hard to implement account-based strategies. Now, numerous vendors have emerged as ABM platforms, which is a great sign for the category and for those invested in ABM.

But the challenge is these platforms all vary widely in features and functionality. There’s no true apples-to-apples comparison, which has made it hard to know which is the best solution for your organization.

Planning season is well upon us and I’ll bet there are more than a few leadership teams hoping find a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program under the budget tree for next year. What’s not to like? VoC programs drive more sales, reduce service escalations, improve user experiences and have us sprinkling delight and enchantment across the land!

Okay, so VoC is a big advantage, but the last time I looked around most non-retail workplaces, the hardest thing to find was an actual customer. Probably this is because it’s illegal and ethically questionable to keep customers locked up for any length of time, and so their voice needs to come through other conduits.

Sales will almost always step up as the voice of all things customer, but the voices they’re hearing are often the ones in their heads related to what it will take to make quota that month.

Who Owns the Customer Voice?

Your Sales Squirrels will go on and on about how customers want this one thing that the product team hasn’t yet added; carefully omitting the many things in the product that customers also want. Once added, oddly, customers will not care anymore and your sales team will say the VoC is about price or some other thing.

Let’s move down the hall and see what the customer service people are hearing. After all, who spends more time listening to customers than the service and support people? They will tell you all about the VoC. Apparently, none of your products work, your billing is inaccurate, your instructions are unintelligible, your shipping is slow and your website sucks.

All of which may be entirely true, but customers are somehow still giving you money and phoning you up to talk about the experience. The insights from your customer service teams are incredibly valuable and speak volumes about what is going wrong. It’s a little less helpful in terms of understanding what is going right. Or what is going okay enough that it’s not worth a phone call. Or what is so tragically wrong your customer has stopped speaking to you and is working on finding a replacement.

Of course, the product management group has Six Sigma’d the heck out of the VoC which means all they’ve really done is ask about a tiny set of possible product features as part of their agile sensing so they can get to the next build sprint. Moving on…

The marketing department, which usually seems to get stuck with owning the VoC, is even more removed from actual customers. Marketers are secretly a bit terrified of them, truth be told. Customers have this habit of expressing themselves in ways that don’t turn into the hoped-for testimonials, big Net Promoter Scores and case studies, but instead require a lot of apologizing and escalating.

Customer Voice Quality vs. Quantity

Marketers charged with owning the VoC will generally start by pushing the shiny red research button. They will correctly note that sales and service feedback is selective, based on a single-digit sample size and focused on a particular transaction, versus the whole experience enchilada. Nothing corrects for small samples better than a big old research project. Marketing will bring that aggregated quantitative bundle of joy known as the customer feedback survey to the table. It will have all kinds of data points and, done well, can spin off dozens of doomed initiatives to address the things that are probably unaddressable since you didn’t bother addressing them already.

But the sales and service teams will counter with the fair observation that the numbers don’t really speak to the actual experience your customers are having and may miss the nuanced bits where competitors are ready to pounce. Is that a focus group I smell?

Customer focus groups are a fantastic way to tease out all that qualitative goodness the big old quant study just can’t deliver. And here we have it. At last. Real customers with real voices in an overlit room being observed by the sales, service and marketing people who are eating bad Thai food behind the glass waiting for the VoC to come loud and clear through the speakers.

We all know that focus groups, even the most exquisitely moderated ones, are drilling down on a very small number of elements and will, at best, be directional for specific things like product design, branding, customer service expectations and so on. So it’s a voice, but not really the full VoC, unless you’re able to do lots and lots of them. But how to scale a conversation with many people at very little cost?

Hmmmm.

Let’s give that Twitter thing a try, shall we? While we’re at it, what are they saying on Google, Amazon, Instagram, Facebook and all of our other feeds? What’s the buzz on those industry forums? Surely we have found, at last, the VoC.

Well if your customer base is composed entirely of angry people who are thinking of suing you, disgruntled current employees, disgruntled ex-employees, past customers who did not sue you, but are still mad, the guy who was cut off by your truck the other day, your competitors’ summer students, your summer students and some well-meaning parents trying to helicopter at a discrete distance, then sure.

Otherwise, all those social feeds are pretty much the folks at the edges of your VoC, plus a few who got lost on the way to complaining about someone else’s products and services. Also some crazy people.

Screaming Truth at Power

How about some face time with our Overlords? Nothing like a speak-truth-to-power sort of thing to draw out the customer voice. Let’s get our CEO on the road, fill some rooms with some average customers and let ‘er rip. What could possibly go wrong?

Let me help you out there. First, the people in the room will not be “average” customers. They will be hand-picked by sales or customer service for their past behavior as docile payers of bills and signers of contracts. Or maybe they won’t be customers at all, but shiny prospects who need to clap eyes on the CEO to get the deal done.

The very best we could hope for is one of these people having an unplanned outburst during the Q&A period following the CEOs presentation. Which is, of course, the very worst thing your CEO can hope for. Trust me on this; I have been the flack-catcher for many ambushed CEOs and I can assure you they aren’t amused when that happens. They prefer the gentler customer voices.

If the in-person thing feels a bit too touchy-feely for your Overlords, how about getting them to personally read and reply to customer emails? CEOs at Apple, Zappos and Amazon look at customer emails and helpfully send them along to their senior leadership teams to solve.

Which sounds very nice and all action-y and hands-on-y, but is that really what you want your most senior people doing? Really? No, really? If you are paying someone seven figures and filling up their day with tracking down someone’s orthotics then you have got way bigger issues than needing a VoC program.

That said, your six- and seven-figure folks should be living and dying by the collective feedback of your customers. It should be the alpha and omega of all that strategic planning and active listening stuff they’re doing. But if their view of customer feedback is the five email complaints they were asked to solve (by which I mean delegate) that week, then it’s safe to consider their understanding of such things to be a little wobbly.

I could go on. We could go out and hug our haters (which we should) or hand out cookies to our biggest fans (also a good idea), or ask customers to punch a happy or sad face button on the way out the door, but not one of these, or countless other random acts, is going to deliver the voice of the customer we so desperately need to hear.

The Customer Voice Chamber Choir

I’m sorry to say, it’s just not that simple. Just as you have multiple personas for your buyers, another set for your product users and maybe even a bunch more for your influencers, so too do you have multiple realities when it comes to customers. There is no “average”, no “typical”, no amalgam, no archetype.

The song of the customer is sung by a choir, not a solo act, which is why it’s so complicated to listen to. It requires us to focus, to work to pick out the different parts, parse out the lyrics, hear the harmony, the melody, the beat. We need to listen for patterns and run toward the complexity of it all with a goal of making sense.

The idea that one group in an organization can “own” the VoC is as unworkable as having one audience member listen to an opera and tell the rest of us what was in the libretto. Everyone in all parts of the organization is responsible for listening to all the customers in the ways that make sense, and to record what they hear.

As with the choir, things will tend to go a bit off the rails if nobody is waving their hands and pointing at the sheet music. In organizations we call this alignment. The voice of the customer comes at us through multiple speakers, multiple media and not always with all the notes, words and intonation as obvious as we might hope.

Sometimes we’re hearing the choir in a concert hall, but sometimes it’s a car with catalytic converter issues and a giant sub-woofer lurching by at three in the morning. Attention must, nevertheless, be paid.

So if you’re the poor sucker who was still standing when the VoC program music stopped, your first task is not to hire one of those vendors or go find a new ERP solution (though both are excellent strategies if you really just want to look busy for a few years). Your first order of business is to figure out where the voices are coming from, who’s singing, who’s not signing and how your organization will agree to listen politely.

There are a number of popular concepts that can be rolled up into an idea that is more descriptive of the skills and abilities needed to succeed in B2B sales today. One of those concepts is the Challenger sale, the idea that success depends on being able to teach, tailor, and take control of the conversation. Another favorite is the idea of insight-based selling, in which one knows enough to provide advice and counsel due to their unique insights.

For a long time, I have used a lot of different ideas to try to convey what differentiates those who succeed from those who struggle, including business acumen, situational knowledge, chops (everyone’s favorite), trusted advisor, good counsel, peer, and strategic partner. I’ve also referred to what I call Level 4 Value Creation , the idea that one is both super-relational and strategic.

As I have been reading and recording the audio book for Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customer Away From Your Competition, I notice how much of the modern approaches to sales are built on change. I am not sure how many times I use the word in the book, but the frequency is significant—even for a book on competitive displacements.

Why Change

When salespeople are at their best, they help their clients change their view of what’s possible. When you think of anyone who has made a difference in your life helped you see you could do better. We sometimes we help them change how they see their business, their strategy, and their future results.

How to Change

We also help people change how they do things. We help them change in the areas our solutions touch, including their operations, their sales and marketing, their financial operations, and their customer service. While we talk a lot about “why change,” a good part of our ability is around the “how?”

Changing Minds

In one of the most difficult outcomes we often have to achieve, we change people’s minds. We change their minds about who they should select as a partner, changing their preference to us from our competitor. Equally difficult and little considered, we change what should be their top priorities, creating a compelling reason to make the change we recommend in front of other competing priorities.

The ability to help people change has always been something the best salespeople have possessed in amounts greater than average (which is why many great leaders are salespeople). But what all the modern approaches have in common is they all express that what is required to help people change has changed—and dramatically—over the last decade.

If you want to help people change, practice what you preach and go first.

The post What’s Changed in B2B Sales appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Even though laptops cost less than ever before, your best bet when looking for cheap computers is to stick with a desktop PC. Usually it costs far less to build your own PC than buy one off the shelf, but the price difference is negligible when talking about budget computers.

Before you start, the inevitable question is about whether you need a desktop computer or a portable laptop. Each person’s needs are different, so read this to figure out if you should get a desktop or a laptop computer.

A Quick Word on Hidden Costs

Going by the comments on Amazon and other sites, the words “desktop computer” make buyers expect to get a PC that’s ready to go—with a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and the works. It’s a rude shock to open the box and not find a monitor or any other peripherals.

So please note, desktop computers don’t include monitors or peripherals.

Some common extras you may need to buy include an LCD monitor, keyboard, mouse, an optical drive, and a Wi-Fi dongle or adapter. If you’re building your own PC, chances are you will need to buy Windows 10 too, which can be a big chunk of your budget.

In this article, if any recommendation is likely to have some hidden or extra costs, we will note it accordingly.

1. Minix NEO Z83-4
The Cheapest Desktop PC You Should Consider

MINIX NEO Z83-4, Intel Cherry Trail Fanless Mini PC Windows 10 (64-bit) [4GB/32GB/Dual-Band Wi-Fi/Gigabit Ethernet/Dual Output/4K]. Sold Directly by MINIX Technology Limited. MINIX NEO Z83-4, Intel Cherry Trail Fanless Mini PC Windows 10 (64-bit) [4GB/32GB/Dual-Band Wi-Fi/Gigabit Ethernet/Dual Output/4K]. Sold Directly by MINIX Technology Limited. Buy Now At Amazon $173.91

• Processor: Intel Atom X5-Z8350
• GPU: Integrated Intel HD Graphics
• RAM: 4GB DDR3
• Storage: 32GB eMMC
• OS: Windows 10 Home
• Notable Features: Mini DisplayPort and HDMI for dual monitor setup
• Hidden or Extra Costs: LCD Monitor, keyboard and mouse, external optical drive, portable hard drive

Your search for a cheap desktop computer will always lead you to a mini PC. There are plenty of options below $200, but you should steer clear of them. The best cheap mini PC to buy off the shelf is the Minix NEO Z83-4, so start there.

Minix isn’t a well-known brand, but this product is recommended strongly by both customers as well as seasoned tech reviewers. It does the little things right, like having a good design that dissipates heat well even without a fan. Minix has even thrown in a VESA mount so you can attach the entire PC to the back of your monitor, freeing up space on your desk.

The limitations are obvious. Windows 10 takes up most of the 32GB of storage, so you’ll need an external hard drive with it, or use online storage drives. The processor is also not the best you’ve seen. It gets the job done for common tasks, but don’t ask too much of it. And the box can’t be opened to upgrade parts. Hey, at this budget, you expect some sacrifices.

There are other excellent mini PCs you can pay more for, but if you’re looking for the “cheapest but good enough” option, then the Minix NEO Z83-4 is the one to buy.

Note: If you’re looking to buy this for business or office use, the Minix NEO Z83-4 Pro gives you a Windows 10 Pro license for an extra 20 bucks. Apart from that, the two devices are identical. If you don’t need Windows 10 Pro, stick with the regular NEO Z83-4.

2. Zotac ZBox CI325 nano
The Best Cheap Desktop for Most People

ZOTAC ZBOX CI325 Nano Fanless Mini PC Intel N3160 CPU Intel HD Graphics 4GB Memory 32GB SSD Windows 10 (ZBOX-CI325NANO-U-W2B) ZOTAC ZBOX CI325 Nano Fanless Mini PC Intel N3160 CPU Intel HD Graphics 4GB Memory 32GB SSD Windows 10 (ZBOX-CI325NANO-U-W2B) Buy Now At Amazon $234.99

• Processor: Intel Celeron N3160
• GPU: Integrated Intel HD Graphics
• RAM: 4GB DDR3
• Storage: 32GB eMMC
• OS: Windows 10 Home
• Notable Features: Upgradable slots for SSD and RAM
• Hidden or Extra Costs: LCD Monitor, keyboard and mouse, external optical drive, extra hard drive

There is very little to set apart the Zotac Zbox CI325 nano from the Minix NEO Z83-4. At first glance, it’s not worth the extra $70, but there are a few compelling features.

The big differentiator is that the Zotac Zbox CI325 nano is easy to upgrade. You can open the Zbox to find neat slots to add a fast 2.5-inch SSD for extra storage. There’s also an additional memory slot to upgrade the limited 4GB RAM. These are nice touches, since the Intel Celeron N3160 can benefit from the extra RAM while multi-tasking.

But upgrades aside, there isn’t much else here. Sure, the Intel Celeron processor outperforms its Atom sibling, and the overall build quality of the Zotac Zbox CI325 nano is a bit better. Are these worth $70 more though? That’s up to you.

3. Intel NUC NUC6CAYH
The Best Cheap Desktop Intel Mini PC

Intel NUC NUC6CAYH Mini PC/HTPC, Intel Quad-Core J3455 Upto 2.3GHz, 4GB DDR3, 1TB HDD, WiFi, Bluetooth, 4k Support, Dual Monitor Capable, Windows 10 Professional 64Bit (4GB + 1TB HDD) Intel NUC NUC6CAYH Mini PC/HTPC, Intel Quad-Core J3455 Upto 2.3GHz, 4GB DDR3, 1TB HDD, WiFi, Bluetooth, 4k Support, Dual Monitor Capable, Windows 10 Professional 64Bit (4GB + 1TB HDD) Buy Now At Amazon $279.99

• Processor: Intel Celeron J3455 Quad-Core CPU
• GPU: Integrated Intel HD Graphics 500
• RAM: 4GB DDR3 1600MHz
• Storage: 1TB
• OS: Windows 10 Home
• Notable Features: Several HDD or SDD Options
• Hidden or Extra Costs: LCD Monitor, keyboard and mouse, external optical drive

Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC) mini PCs have become a favorite of reviewers, modders, DIY experts, and anyone who likes a desktop PC in a small form factor. There is a wide range of specifications available in this same tiny box. You should want one too.

The NUC6CAYH model is powered by the quad-core Intel Celeron J3455 processor, one of the better low-powered CPUs Intel has produced over the years. If that’s not enough, the combinations available on Amazon let you go from the basic 4GB RAM + 1TB HDD up to 8GB RAM + 512GB SSD. Choose the combination that best fits your budget. In my opinion, the 4GB+1TB HDD, 8GB+1TB HDD, and 8GB+256GB SSD are the best value for money.

Once you’ve picked your combo, you only need to hook up this PC to any monitor, keyboard, and mouse to start using it. Windows 10 is pre-installed, and the hardware is decent enough for most home and office tasks.

4. Acer Aspire TC-780 Desktop
The Best Cheap Desktop for Home and Small Offices

Acer Aspire Desktop, 7th Gen Intel Core i3-7100, 8GB DDR4, 1TB HDD, Windows 10 Home, TC-780-ACKi3 Acer Aspire Desktop, 7th Gen Intel Core i3-7100, 8GB DDR4, 1TB HDD, Windows 10 Home, TC-780-ACKi3 Buy Now At Amazon $349.99

• Processor: Intel Core i3-7100U
• GPU: Integrated Intel HD Graphics 630
• RAM: 8GB DDR4 2400MHz
• Storage: 1TB HDD
• OS: Windows 10 Home
• Notable Features: Support 802.11ac Wi-Fi, includes keyboard and mouse, includes optical drive for CDs and DVDs
• Hidden or Extra Costs: LCD Monitor

The Acer Aspire TC-780 Desktop perfectly fits the needs of anyone looking to buy a desktop computer with as little hassle as possible. It includes everything that someone in a home, home office, or small office would need.

One of those features is the integrated support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi support isn’t even common on several motherboards for budget PC builders yet, so it’s nice to see that Asus has bundled it rather than making you buy a Wi-Fi adapter or card.

The processor isn’t the best possible at this price range, but when coupled with the 8GB of RAM, it’s good enough to handle those whose needs are browsing the internet, email, MS Office, and some light multimedia.

Overall, the TC-780 makes sure there aren’t hidden costs. You get a computer, you get the mouse and keyboard with it, and you aren’t spending on extras like a Wi-Fi dongle or a copy of Microsoft Windows 10. Simply attach it to a monitor and you’re ready to go.

5. Asus Chromebox 3
The Best Cheap Desktop PC With Chrome OS

ASUS CHROMEBOX 3-N017U Mini PC with Intel Celeron, 4K UHD Graphics and Power Over Type C Port, Star Gray ASUS CHROMEBOX 3-N017U Mini PC with Intel Celeron, 4K UHD Graphics and Power Over Type C Port, Star Gray Buy Now At Amazon $232.42

• Processor: Intel Celeron 3865U
• GPU: Integrated Intel HD Graphics 610
• RAM: 4GB DDR3
• Storage: 32GB eMMC
• OS: Chrome OS
• Notable Features: Chrome OS runs better on such low-powered hardware
• Hidden or Extra Costs: LCD Monitor, keyboard and mouse, external optical drive, portable hard drive

Microsoft Windows ends up inflating the price of several small PCs. If you’re ready to ditch Windows and go with Google’s free operating system, then the Asus Chromebox 3 is an excellent mini PC with Chrome OS.

The hook of this device is that Chrome OS runs better on such low-powered hardware. The Intel Celeron 3865U processor and 4GB of RAM would struggle with Windows, but Chrome OS is smooth with the same specifications.

Unlike Chrome PCs in the past, the Asus Chromebox 3 supports Google Play Store, which means you can install essential Android apps on Chrome OS. The device will also support Crostini, the new Chrome OS update that lets users install Linux programs.

Given what you can install, the 32GB of storage will be insufficient. You will want to add some extra storage space by using one of those three USB ports.

Build or Buy? The Answer Might Surprise You

The most surprising thing about this article is the lack of “build it yourself” PC options. Generally, those work out cheaper than buying a pre-assembled computer. Trust me, I was as shocked as you were to find that for budget PCs like these, it’s cheaper to buy readymade units.

The big reason behind this is Windows 10. Microsoft sells Windows 10 for around $100, but manufacturers like Zotac and Acer save on this cost by buying licenses in bulk. When the margins are so small, Windows is the difference, making it cheaper to buy than build a PC in this case.

Read the full article: 5 Dirt Cheap Desktop Computers for Students

Sales forecasting is an important activity for every sales force. Yet, few organizations are happy with the accuracy of their forecasts. Despite spending a lot of time and effort on the task, revenue predictions frequently, well, suck. And no amount of pressure from senior leadership seems to improve the issue.

So, what causes all these terrible forecasts? And, more importantly, what can you do to improve forecasting outcomes? Vantage Point has conducted research into forecasting and discovered two fundamental issues.

You’re Using the Wrong Forecasting Framework

Many sales organizations use a forecasting framework that doesn’t reflect the way their salespeople sell. Our research shows 85% of B2B companies use a forecasting approach based on a pipeline of opportunities that are given an estimated deal size, slotted into a stage of the company’s sales process, assigned a likelihood of being won, and forecasted at a future close date.

Setting aside the many problems with how this opportunity forecasting method is executed, let’s focus on a more fundamental issue that cripples many sales forecasts: it’s possible you should be using a forecasting framework other than this classic pipeline forecasting approach.

Our study of 62 global sales organizations discovered 74% believe their forecasts should be based on something other than a pipeline of opportunities; however, only 34% of those same companies use alternative approaches.

If your forecasts are based on a model that isn’t relevant for your sales force, it’s easy to see why your forecasts suck. You’re developing forecasts using data and assumptions that don’t reflect what’s actually happening in the field.

It would be like trying to read this article while moving your eyes from right to left rather than left to right. Similarly, many companies try to shoehorn their forecasts into an opportunity-based model with stages and percentages when it just doesn’t make sense to do so. Unsurprisingly, these forecasts don’t make sense either.

Alternate ways to conduct a revenue forecast

There are at least two other methods of sales forecasting proven to return better results:

• Account level forecasting: Use this if you have a business model where a high number of deals flow from a handful of existing customers.
• Territory level forecasting: Use this if your salespeople cover geographies with dozens or even hundreds of accounts.

So, if you’re using a traditional, opportunity-based forecasting model and suffer from erratic forecasts, consider whether you should be using a different method to develop your forecasts -- one that more closely reflects the selling motion of your sales team. Otherwise, you’ll continue to invest large chunks of time in an activity that will never yield better results. And that sucks worse than the actual forecasts.

You’re Making Random Assumptions

A second issue crippling sales forecasts is random assumptions. Regardless of your forecasting methodology, you need to do some math based on a set of assumptions -- and what those assumptions are matters.

For example, if you base your forecast on a pipeline of opportunities, you must assume a deal size, likelihood of winning, and close date. If these assumptions are way off, your forecast will be as well.

The surprising thing here is sales organizations have plenty of historical data to inform the most likely deal size, win rate, and sales cycle length for a particular type of opportunity. Yet, salespeople are allowed to plug in their best guesses -- as viewed through their optimistic eyes.

I once knew a salesperson who always claimed his outstanding proposals were 75% likely to close. When I asked whether he actually won 75% of his proposals, he responded, “No, probably more like 30%.” Oh, how’s that forecast looking? Let me guess.

If you have historical data to help eliminate the randomness of the assumptions feeding your forecast, use it -- especially if you have a high volume of deals in your forecast.

The law of large numbers dictates the variations in individual deals will average themselves out to the most likely outcome. Sure, that $100,000 proposal might be 75% likely to close on December 31st -- but, probably not.

Tighten up that forecast

There are many factors that influence the accuracy of a sales forecast. If you’re basing yours on the wrong methodology and you’re populating that with faulty assumptions, you’re off to a bad start.

Adding a little rigor to your forecasts will go a long way in improving their value as a communication and planning tool. Everybody wants more accurate forecasts, and everybody spends a lot of time doing it. Some just do it better than others -- by design.

There are a number of popular concepts that can be rolled up into an idea that is more descriptive of the skills and abilities needed to succeed in B2B sales today. One of those concepts is the Challenger sale, the idea that success depends on being able to teach, tailor, and take control of the conversation. Another favorite is the idea of insight-based selling, in which one knows enough to provide advice and counsel due to their unique insights.

For a long time, I have used a lot of different ideas to try to convey what differentiates those who succeed from those who struggle, including business acumen, situational knowledge, chops (everyone’s favorite), trusted advisor, good counsel, peer, and strategic partner. I’ve also referred to what I call Level 4 Value Creation , the idea that one is both super-relational and strategic.

As I have been reading and recording the audio book for Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customer Away From Your Competition, I notice how much of the modern approaches to sales are built on change. I am not sure how many times I use the word in the book, but the frequency is significant—even for a book on competitive displacements.

Why Change

When salespeople are at their best, they help their clients change their view of what’s possible. When you think of anyone who has made a difference in your life helped you see you could do better. We sometimes we help them change how they see their business, their strategy, and their future results.

How to Change

We also help people change how they do things. We help them change in the areas our solutions touch, including their operations, their sales and marketing, their financial operations, and their customer service. While we talk a lot about “why change,” a good part of our ability is around the “how?”

Changing Minds

In one of the most difficult outcomes we often have to achieve, we change people’s minds. We change their minds about who they should select as a partner, changing their preference to us from our competitor. Equally difficult and little considered, we change what should be their top priorities, creating a compelling reason to make the change we recommend in front of other competing priorities.

The ability to help people change has always been something the best salespeople have possessed in amounts greater than average (which is why many great leaders are salespeople). But what all the modern approaches have in common is they all express that what is required to help people change has changed—and dramatically—over the last decade.

If you want to help people change, practice what you preach and go first.

The post What’s Changed in B2B Sales appeared first on The Sales Blog.

We know the importance of the marketing and sales process. It provides us a structured, disciplined approach to engaging our buyers. In theory, it should help us help the customer in navigating their buying process.

Sounds good, what could be simpler–start at the beginning, go step by step through each stage, reach the end when the customer does, get an order, move on.

The problem is, the customer buying process is not a structured, linear process. In fact, it could be described as chaotic.

All of a sudden, something doesn’t make sense. We can start to see the disconnect between how we engage the customer and the the way they buy.

Marketers and sellers always assume our customers go through a fairly straightforward process: Identify a problem or need to change, determine requirements, and priorities, determine needs, assess alternative solutions, select a solution, implement.

As a result, we’ve designed our marketing and selling processes to align with the “straightforward” buying process. And it isn’t working, because this isn’t the way our customer buy!

What’s this mean for marketing and sales, what’s this mean in how we engage our customers?

Some thoughts:

1. Buying is much more difficult than buyers or we have ever understood. Which explains why so many buying initiatives end in no decision made.

2. Applying a straightforward, “linear” engagement process is actually very ineffective and inefficient in “helping” the buyer. The steps we go through in our marketing and selling processes are likely to be out of alignment with where the customer actually is today, and where they are likely to be tomorrow. Where we are trying to be “helpful,” we may not actually be being helpful.

3. We need to look at the information we provide, how we provide it, when we provide it, and the format/context in a different way. We have to leverage multiple channels of consuming information in a consistent manner–customers will be leveraging online, traditional, partner, and sales channels through their buying process. We need to provide information access across all the channels, so the customer can choose whatever is most appropriate.

4. The concepts of “just in time,” or “on-demand” become more important in providing information than ever in the past. Providing the right information and engagement, wherever the customer is in their process, is important.

5. There are profound implications for how marketing and sales work together, through the entire process. I’ve always talked about the requirement for marketing and sales processes to be interleaved through the entire buying process, rather than the “we catch ’em, you skin ’em” approach used by most organizations. Not only do we have to think about the content, but our organizational structures, role definitions, metrics need to be changed to better align with being able to respond to customer “chaotic” buying processes.

6. Nimbleness, agility, lean become watchwords with how we work with and engage our customers. We must refocus sales and marketing to become much more nimble and agile, in reality not in lip service.

7. Having said all of this, helping provide greater clarity for the customer–wherever they are in the buying process, helping them more effectively simplify their buying process–reducing the chaos is critical. It may become the most critical role salespeople play. Skills of project management, resource management, critical thinking, problem-solving will become critical in helping the customer “make sense” of what they are doing.

With the last point, I’ve taken a great departure from a lot of the current writing about the chaotic buying process. Many think the role of the salesperson becomes that of an information source, providing the right information at the right time as the customer navigates their process. It is based on a flawed assumption that this process is what it is and will not be improved.

Just because the process is chaotic, doesn’t mean that’s what the customer likes or wants. A part of this chaos is they don’t know how to buy. Part is their worlds are very dynamic and constantly changing–priorities are shifting, roles change. Requirements are constantly shifting, they may be trying to pin down requirements/processes on shifting grounds (the equivalent of changing a tire on a race car while it is still traveling on the race course.)

Recognizing what “is” with the customer doesn’t mean it’s good for the customer and it’s what they want. Providing clarity, structure, and simplification, helping reduce the chaos is, perhaps, the greatest value salespeople can provide.

But first, we have to recognize this ourselves, realizing that our current linear/structured ways of engaging the customer aren’t helpful–wasting customer time/resources, as well as ours. We have to realign our organizations and work efforts, enabling our people to more effectively help our customers reduce the chaos and simplify their processes. We have to give our people the skills, tools, programs, and resources that enable them to execute in this chaotic environment.

This is a huge challenge for all of us, but if we are to drive value and engagement with our customers, we have to re-assess everything they do and what we do with them.

Olive ("Open Library of Images for Virtualized Execution") is an experimental service from Carnegie Mellon University that stores images of old processors, as well as the old operating systems that ran on top of them, along with software packages for those old OSes; this allows users to access old data from obsolete systems inside simulations of the computers that originally ran that data, using the original operating systems and applications.

This is a very powerful model for maintaining access to old data formats; while modern apps are often capable of parsing old data formats, they have well-understood shortcomings. For example, buggy versions of old apps may have been able to understand the corrupt files they created, but newer programs may only parse the old data if it was written to "spec." Attempts to overcome this with "bug-compatibility" and "quirks modes" are imperfect substitutes for actually running the old code, bugs and all.

it's also a powerful rebuttal to the lazy idea that digitized data is inherently less stable than, say, print records. We often hear about how obsolete file-formats, media and computers are causing "digital decay" of our old data, but the story is much more complicated than that.

Old storage media is definitely unstable. Magnetic and optical media literally rots, delaminating and decaying. I/O devices like tape drives and disk drives go out of production, break down, get scrapped, and can be next to impossible to find, creating races against the clock to find a device to read out old media before it decays beyond use.

But once that data is on a modern hard-drive, the whole story changes. Mass storage gets vastly cheaper with every year (the rate at which mass storage is improving puts the rate of progress in computer performance and network bandwidth in the shade). Data stored on your PC or in a data-center is relatively easy to preserve: the next system you buy will have much more storage than the system it replaces -- we've really reached the end of the era of "offline storage" of data that can't be accessible at all times (the exception being some very large-scale scientific experiments that generate petabytes or even exabytes on every run).

Live storage is very robust. Not only do modern drives self-monitor, automatically moving data from unreliable sectors to reliable ones, but redundant, self-healing arrays have gotten faster and more reliable -- and with storage being so cheap, backups have gotten more robust and commonplace than ever.

It's true that printed records don't usually require special equipment to read back, and high-quality paper is stable for hundreds or even thousands of years. But paper burns, it can't be (readily) encrypted, it's hard to back up (especially hard is maintaining concurrent, offsite paper backups that are geographically isolated from wars, natural disasters, etc). Live data can be cheaply instantaneously mirrored on servers all over the world, in an encrypted state that allows you to maintain the privacy and integrity of the data, even when the entity hosting a backup copy can't be trusted. Cheap paper and cheap ink rots just as fast (or faster) as cheap optical and magnetic media -- but paper doesn't automatically sense when it is starting to fade or crumble and rewrite its contents onto pages that are in better shape.

The thing paper has that data has historically lacked is an execution environment. With visible light and a flat surface, you can read documents from the age of the Enlightenment. But until recently, reading files generated for the Apollo missions or even the Apple ][+ was a tricky business.

That's why emulation is so important: emulation does for file formats what mass online storage did for storage media, hitching it to the screaming price/performance curve of computing, doing away with the delicate and imperfect business of figuring out how to parse formats designed by dead people for computers that don't exist any more.

As exciting as Olive is, it's not perfect. The operating systems and applications needed to parse old data are tangled in copyright thickets. Though the code involved has no commercial value (most code exhausts its commercial life in years, or at most, decades) software attracts the same copyright that literary works enjoy: 90 years for works "created" by corporations, life plus 70 years for works created by "natural humans." These terms mean that Olive risks enormous copyright damages if it is widely offered, so it is only available to small group of insiders.

There's no easy way to break through this thicket. There is no reasonable economic rationale for software copyright terms in the 100-year range. As a Microsoft VP for Software once candidly admitted, Microsoft would pay its programmers to make exactly the same amount of code if software's copyright term was 10 years as if it was 100 years.

In the meantime, there are plenty of living, breathing copyright proprietors (and scientists, academics, and everyday users) whose data (and games, and art) is stuck inside proprietary file formats that can only be accessed if the copyright thicket can be cleared -- if they can convince the absentee inheritors of the assets of long-defunct corporations (or the managers of thriving businesses who have more urgent issues than the licensing of 30-year-old OSes) to help them.

What else can Olive do? Maybe you’re wondering what tools businesses were using shortly after Intel introduced the Pentium processor. Olive can help with that, too. Just fire up Microsoft Office 4.3 from 1994 (which thankfully predates the annoying automated office assistant “Clippy”).

Perhaps you just want to spend a nostalgic evening playing Doom for DOS—or trying to understand what made such first-person shooter games so popular in the early 1990s. Or maybe you need to redo your 1997 taxes and can’t find the disk for that year’s version of TurboTax in your attic. Have no fear: Olive has you covered.

On the more serious side, Olive includes Chaste 3.1. The name of this software is short for Cancer, Heart and Soft Tissue Environment. It’s a simulation package developed at the University of Oxford for computationally demanding problems in biology and physiology. Version 3.1 of Chaste was tied to a research paper published in March 2013. Within two years of publication, though, the source code for Chaste 3.1 no longer compiled on new Linux releases. That’s emblematic of the challenge to scientific reproducibility Olive was designed to address.

Carnegie Mellon is Saving Old Software from Oblivion [Mahadev Satyanarayanan/IEEE Spectrum]

(via /.)

Did you know that 65% to 75% of new products fail or miss their revenue targets? Why do you think that happens? Because they fail to understand what their customers truly want and instead follow a one-size-fits-all approach.

Today, personalization is one of the most effective ways you can truly attract new customers and retain your existing customers. In fact, 59% of consumers who have experienced it, say that personalization has a great impact on their purchase decisions.

However, it’s not just limited to the way consumers think. 88% of marketers have noticed significant improvements in their business with personalization. 53% of them have reported that they gained a lift of over 10%.

All of these statistics suggest that it’s high time for brands to get to know their customers really well. Customer segmentation based on the needs, interests, habits, and preferences of your customers is the key to providing exceptional customer experiences.

However, many marketers still have a long way to go to get there. In this post, we’ll discuss four types of customer segmentation that can help you achieve your marketing goals.

How Customer Segmentation Can Help You

Before we talk about the most effective types of customer segmentation, let’s take a quick look at how customer segmentation can benefit your brand.

1. Develop Effective Retention Strategies

Did you know that $1.6 trillion was the estimated cost incurred by businesses due to lost customers in 2016? And, once customers leave, 68% of them don’t ever go back to the same brand again. If that doesn’t motivate you to retain your customers, maybe you should also consider that acquiring new customers is 5X as expensive.

Customer segmentation can help you develop more focused strategies to retain customers. For example, you may want to identify your top-paying customers and create exclusive offers for them. Or you may even want to re-engage people who haven’t purchased in a while. The possibilities are endless.

2. Provide Superior Customer Experience

81% of consumers reported getting frustrated working with brands that don’t provide a good customer experience. A bigger concern is that 44% of customers who are unhappy with the experience will vent on social media. This can harm your reputation and your credibility. So providing an amazing customer experience needs to be a top priority for your business.

You can solve this problem by using customer segmentation. You can create various customer segments based on individual preferences and tailor your communication accordingly. Simple things like personalized product recommendations, discounts, or reminders about their wish lists can make a big difference.

3. Better Ad Targeting

Marketing messages sent to well-thought-out customer segments have seen 200% greater conversions than those sent to a general audience. If you can create well-defined customer segments based on common attributes, you can get better results from marketing.

For example, segmentation based on the lifecycle of a customer can help you send the right messages that matter the most to them. If you create customer segments based on the social channels they frequent, you can engage with them at the right place and time.

Tools such as Google Analytics, Matomo, or Yandex can help you create customer segments effectively.

The Most Common Types of Customer Segmentation

Once you’ve collected enough data about your customers, use it to divide your customers and prospects into segments. Here are four types of customer segmentation all marketers should know of.

Type #1: Demographic Segmentation

63% of marketers agree that audience segmentation is extremely valuable in providing a great customer experience. And, one of the most common types of customer segmentation is to segment customers using demographic data.

You can consider parameters such as age, generation, gender, education, occupation, income, marital status, or ethnicity to create customer segments.

It is easier to acquire and measure data for demographic segmentation than other types of customer segmentation. A simple way to gather data is to ask your customers or email subscribers to fill out a form like this.

Image via Old Navy

NIVEA Sun grew their portfolio to 40 different product variations to meet the needs of their customers. They used demographic segmentation to segregate their customers and analyzed their buying behaviors to create a profitable range of products.

For example, men chose convenience when it comes to sun care products while women chose luxury. The choice of a product also depends on people’s occupation because that decides how long they spend in the sun. Using an effective segmentation strategy, NIVEA Sun was able to provide more value to their customers.

Type #2: Geographic Segmentation

Geographic segmentation involves grouping customers by country, state, region, climate, or market size. You need to tailor your messages to various geographic segments keeping in mind the local culture or weather.

For example, Porsche offers different kinds of product mixes based on the geographic region they cater to. They offer a higher percentage of convertibles in their product mix to consumers from the warmer south or southwest regions of the US compared to the north.

Modifying your offerings and marketing messages for different geographic segments provides greater value to consumers and encourages them to buy.

Type #3: Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral segmentation involves segmenting customers based on the way they interact with your brand.

Perhaps you can create a segment for consumers who have added products to their cart but did not complete the checkout. Or ones who didn’t even add any products to cart but simply browsed. You can also group by products or services they bought or showed interest in.

Some common variables that determine behavior segmentation include:

• Occasion: Segmentation based on purchases for a specific occasion such as weddings, Christmas, or Halloween.
• Usage: Segmentation based on the frequency of their purchases.
• Thought Process: Segmentation based on the driving force behind their purchase decisions.

Also, the lack of a behavior such as an incomplete survey form or an abandoned cart allows you to re-engage consumers using personalized messaging.

For example, Amazon has mastered the art of targeting their customers based on their recent purchases and recently viewed products.

Image via Amazon

Type #4: Lifecycle or Customer Journey-Based Segmentation

Apart from understanding buyer preferences and interests, you also need to know which stage of the buying process they are in. This type of customer segmentation is called lifecycle or customer journey-based segmentation.

You can create various segments such as consumers who have visited your online store but haven’t made a purchase. Or customers who have bought only once in the last 12 months or haven’t bought in the last 12 months.

Customer journey-based segmentation provides you with a powerful approach to target them with more relevant and useful recommendations.

For example, the following screenshot is that of an email from Old Navy, sent to customers who haven’t visited the website for a while. As you can see in the email, they offer irresistible offers and discounts to encourage customers to make a purchase.

Image via Old Navy

Final Thoughts

Effective customer segmentation can help you stay relevant and valuable to your audience and ahead of your competition as well. The above-mentioned types of customer segmentation can help you target, attract, and sell more effectively.

In fact, some marketers are now trying to move away from segmentation to provide a one-to-one customer experience that’s completely personalized to each customer. However, there are many roadblocks in this strategy, the most prominent one being creating content and compelling offers.

Until we have a solution to that, you can incorporate these types of customer segmentation into your marketing strategy and witness a dramatic change.

Do you know about any other types of customer segmentation? Please feel free to share them with us in the comments below.

When I first started working in the professional world, I was asked to do a number of tasks that, at the time, were difficult for me. Only later did I recognize the value.

The Vision Board

Another leader had me make a vision board. Because this idea has gone out of fashion, I’ll share what a vision board is for you here. It’s a giant piece of poster board on which you glue pictures of the things that you want in your life. It might be a house, or a car, or a vacation. You placed your vision board right in front of you as a reminder of what you wanted in your life.

Most people don’t spend the time to decide what they want their life to look like, drifting on the currents as the world pushes them this way and that. The vision board deserves revisiting.

A Mirror and a Script

Very early in my career, I was required to make cold calls while looking at myself in a mirror that was provided for me. My company also provided me with a script. The mirror helped you understand the level of energy and enthusiasm you were bringing to the call. Your low energy sounded like a lack of interest on your part—and it showed in the mirror. Simply smiling when you make a call changes the energy of the call, improves how you are perceived, and increases the chances you gain the commitment for time, i.e. a meeting.

The script was tight, focused only an appointment and a value proposition. It included the five objections you were certain to here, and those objections never failed to appear during the call. Knowing how to deal with them provided a higher level of confidence.

Recording a Sales Call

One assignment I was required to complete was difficult and intimidating. I was required to find a prospect willing to record my sales call with them. As if it wasn’t difficult enough to get a meeting, I also had to sell the fact that I was going to record the interaction. I found a prospect who was willing to allow me to record my sales call, and the call seemed to go well—until I watched it back with my manager and my peers.

I was unfocused, off point, and trying way too hard to make something happen. Some of my poor performance was due to the camera, but the real cause was my lack of preparation and control. It would have taken me a lot longer to correct these things had I not had the pain of reliving the call in front of my peers.

These tools that were lost should be found.

The post Old School Tools Deserving of a Comeback appeared first on The Sales Blog.

The late Nobel Prize winner Michael Smith was a good, but not spectacular, student who narrowly missed being sent to work in the trades.

Really, nothing about his Nobel adventure went to script.

As a student of modest means from a state-run elementary school, Smith needed to perform well enough on his exams to escape a life devoted to welding or stone masonry.

He qualified for a reputable academic boarding school in his home town of Blackpool, although his mother had to forcefully persuade him to attend with “snobs,” he recalled. Boys can be cruel, and they were.

But during those years, he fell in love with the outdoors as a Boy Scout, a love that eventually led him to settle in British Columbia, Smith wrote in his Nobel biography. He worked in Vancouver during the late 1950s, but left for the University of Wisconsin in 1960.

He made it his mission to return.

His academic career flourished after he secured a position at UBC in 1966. It was there that Smith’s ground-breaking work in molecular biology helped kick down the doors of genetic medicine.

Smith’s technique for reprogramming genes — what is called “site-directed mutagenesis” — earned him the 1993 Nobel Prize for chemistry, the first ever awarded to a resident of B.C. (Technically, he shared the prize with American biochemist Kary Mullis.) The honour came 25 years ago.

While it wasn’t exactly an accident, Smith wasn’t trying to usher in a new scientific era in which the very code of life could be rewritten.

He had no desire to create this tool for anything but his own purposes, said molecular biologist Brett Finlay. “He wanted to know how to change a particular base pair in an enzyme he was studying.”

Smith developed the technique as a way to solve his own problem and later said he could never have anticipated other advances in genetics that made his new tool so transformative.

Up to that point, changing DNA meant blasting it with radiation or chemicals to create mutations, but it was imprecise in the extreme.

“He really changed our way of thinking about DNA,” said Finlay. Today’s cutting-edge gene-editing tool CRISPR is “an extension of the work Smith did. It opened a whole frontier.”

Ridiculously powerful

The academic world seemed skeptical of its value at the time. Smith wrote a paper on the technique, which was rejected by the top academic journal Cell for not being of broad interest, said Finlay. The paper was finally published in 1978 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Finlay was recruited by Smith when he was putting together the UBC Biotechnology Laboratory — now known as Michael Smith Laboratories in honour of its founding director — with the “radical” notion of bringing engineers, animal and plant scientists together.

Michael Smith was exuberant about discovery. Anyone’s discovery.

“He would come running down the hall with a photocopied journal article saying, ‘Look at this, isn’t it neat?'” recalled Finlay.

Monday to Friday, Smith would be up and out of the house before it was light and come home in the evening absolutely exhausted, according to his son, Tom Smith. But he also thoroughly enjoyed his leisure time.

“As kids, we were lucky enough to grow up in Vancouver, with the mountains, the ocean and the outdoors. That was something my dad was passionate about besides his work,” said Tom.

When the Nobel committee finally got around to lauding Smith’s work, Michael wasn’t the first to hear it. The committee didn’t have his phone number.

“There were several Michael Smiths in Vancouver who got the call of congratulations from the Nobel committee before he did,” recalls Tom. “There are a number of them in the phone book.”

Michael Smith told The Vancouver Sun at the time: “I was lying in bed stark-naked, listening to the radio to find out if the Blue Jays had won last night, when the news came on about the Nobel Prize.”

And that’s when everything changed.

Every cell in the human body contains genetic and operating instructions for every other cell in the body and how they interact to function as a human being. Smith figured out how to edit the code.

That is every bit as ridiculously powerful as it sounds.

“You really need to step back to understand the enormity of the thing he is credited with creating,” said cancer researcher Marco Marra, UBC Canada Research Chair in Genome Science. “All life is reliant on genetic code.”

Smith’s technique allows researchers to make any change they want to DNA, turning cells into living laboratories for research into genetic disease.

“It is a hugely powerful and widely used technique in genomics and biology, and it has changed the world, literally,” he said.

Building an ecosystem

Smith did not flip through a Lamborghini catalogue on the way home from Sweden after receiving his medal and $500,000 in prize money. In fact, he gave nearly all of it away for schizophrenia research, Science World, and in support of women in sciences.

The Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, founded in his honour in 2001 a year after his death, continues that legacy as does Genome BC, which he helped found.

Jennifer Gardy is one of a handful of scientists who have completed the “Michael Smith trifecta,” winning a Michael Smith Foundation scholarship to complete her PhD, a Michael Smith post-doctoral fellowship, and a Michael Smith Scholar Award.

“His key legacy has been establishing infrastructure in which science can thrive here in British Columbia,” said Gardy, Canada Research Chair in Public Health Genomics.

In addition to the program he built at UBC, Smith founded the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre.

Smith also had a knack for identifying top talent and he used Vancouver’s unique beauty and outdoor lifestyle — not to mention his condo at Whistler — as a recruitment tool.

“He created the technological platforms we all use to do this work,” said Gardy. “But he also understood the need for talented people to populate this ecosystem.”

Smith knew as a Nobel winner, he would have influence and the opportunity to build something special, which is just what he did.

“His name was synonymous with research and discovery and doing good,” said Marra. “Everyone wanted to be associated with him.”

A meeting between Marra and Smith in his office was interrupted by an unscheduled phone call from then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

“He covered the mouthpiece and told me he should probably take the call,” he said.

rshore@postmedia.com

What to know about email header and footer design

Email marketing is a great way to communicate with your subscribers, engage readers and improve conversion rates. Often, the first thing that comes to mind is the bulk of the email (the body), but there are other crucial parts to a successful email. Let’s dive in, head first.

Starting off strong

What is an email header?

It’s the first thing people see when they open up your email. And, as with a date or a job interview, your header hopefully makes a good first impression. Good or bad, a header sets the tone for the rest of your email’s communication with your customers.

Things a good email header does:

• Identifies your brand: Recipients have a clear idea who sent the email, and the header matches the “from” field in the email
• Simplifies information: A header is short and sweet for easy scanning and to get maximum attention
• Applies across campaigns: It works with many email campaigns and can be used across them for consistency

Email header design elements to include:

• Logo/business name: Besides reinforcing who the email is from, it improves brand retention; the more places your logo appears, the better.
• “View in browser”: This is a link that allows people to see your email if it’s not showing up correctly in the application.
• Navigation: While up to your discretion, navigation can help if you’re an e-commerce site and want people to explore promotions.
• Images: Eye-catching images at the top can grab a reader’s attention; Keep in mind that if you want to have a versatile header, you’ll have to be careful that the image is one that can be used across email campaigns.
• Preview: A preview line — like a second chance at the subject line — helps set expectations.
• Links: Anything that can help users reach relevant pages or promotions easily.

Design tips:

• Make the header short: It shouldn’t take up the whole screen because you want readers to be able to see some of the body of the email as well.
• Keep it simple: It should be easy for readers to focus on the intended message of the email.
• Mix and match: Feel free to try different designs, but once you find one you like, remember that consistency is a good thing. Let your brand form an image for readers so they know what to expect from your emails.
• Don’t forget your newsletter: These tips can be applied to a newsletter header as well.

Email header example:

Ending with impact

What is an email footer?

It’s the last thing people see on your email, so essentially it’s your the last chance to provide value to your readers. Like the walk home on a date or the open questions at the end of the interview, you want to have something thoughtful to say to keep readers interested in learning more when the email is reaching the end.

Things a good footer provides:

• Clarity: It’s easy to read, not full of unrelated information or complicated words.
• Transparency: Readers understand what they’re being shown and why (think terms and conditions when they engage with a promotion).
• Assurance: Puts people at ease because they have next steps and resources to go on their way.

Email footer design elements:

• Contact info: Make it easy for people to find your website and physical address, and how to email or call should they require further information or help.
• Additional resources: Links to social media, articles or products that pair well with your email subject.
• Fine print: Put things like promotion details, copyright and links to your privacy policy.
• Unsubscribe button: This should always be visible and in accordance with CAN-SPAM and GDPR legislation.
• Links: Consider providing links to user profiles, a way for readers to sign up and an option to view the email in a browser

Design tips:

• Minimalism: What makes the most sense to give readers at this point? If you’re telling them about an in-store event, maybe you don’t need to include articles or detailed terms and conditions.
• Chronology: Put the information in order based on what’s the most important to your email and what you want recipients to see or take action on.
• Color: Use a background color or padding for the footer so that it’s easy to tell that it’s separate from the body content.
• Light text: They’ve already read your email and may need just a bit more to take action, so don’t surprise them with text-heavy paragraphs. Instead, take a look at what information you need to include and whether any additional links or copy would be useful.

Email footer example:

When you’re building your next email campaign and trying to get the design just right, go beyond the body copy and take note of what’s happening above and below. Start and stop your emails simply, leaving your customers feeling informed, satisfied and, most of all, interested.

In the distant past, salespeople were a primary channel for educating customers about solutions and providing information. Customers had few convenient channels to learn about solutions and new approaches to their business. Trade shows, magazines, meeting with peers also provided some of this information, but salespeople had always been critical for information delivery.

Fast forward to today, customers have many sources of information about solutions. Company websites, industry websites, peer discussion groups, other web-based and traditional channels have become key sources of information for prospects and buyers.

Data shows customers relatively agnostic about which channels they use. Additionally, the research shows customers tend to leverage multiple information channels, simultaneously.

As we look at our buyer enablement strategies, it’s important to recognize these trends. We need to, thoughtfully, provide timely, contextually relevant, and impactful information to customers through multiple channels. We have to be consistent in what we communicate and how we communicate through each of those channels. Customers want to see a consistent, high-value message through each channel they leverage.

As one might guess, salespeople continue to be one of those information channels customers continue to leverage. As a result, we must make sure the information they deliver is consistent with each channel the customer leverages. Nothing can be more devastating in the way we engage our customers, than to have the salesperson communicating something different than what they are seeing through other channels.

Too often, in our content and information delivery strategies, we overlook the role of the salesperson. As a result, we miss an important opportunity to reinforce and amplify what we are communicating to customers.

But is that all?

Are salespeople just conduits for delivering information to our customers? Or do they play a more important role?

If all buying involves is collecting and analyzing the relevant information, then perhaps the way we help facilitate the buying process is optimizing the information delivery channels, particularly what and how salespeople deliver information.

Unfortunately, buying is much more complex. It involves far more than analyzing information about alternative solutions or approaches to improving business performance.

It turns out the toughest parts of buying involve much more than getting the right information. It is about effectively managing the human to human interactions through their buying process. Buyers need to align priorities, agendas, goals among an ever increasing number of people involved in the buying process. They do this in a fluid environment, shifting priorities and lower tolerance for risk/change. They face uncertainty, confusion in working within their own buying teams. They are overwhelmed and overloaded.

And more information doesn’t necessarily help.

In this context, how can salespeople be most helpful.

I think it’s adding “meaning.”

By this, it’s translating information into something specific to the buyer at a point in time–it’s not about the information or data, per se, but rather about what it means to the individual or buying team. What does it mean personally, how do we overcome fears, uncertainty, how do we capture the hearts and brains–simultaneously.

Buying is still an emotional process, but too often we ignore this, thinking it is brain driven/intellectual. But if it were, why would two intelligent people come to different assessments of the same data/information.

Buying, as logical as we want to make is still messy–because it is about the interactions and dynamics of people communicating (or communicating poorly) with each other.

Salespeople provide the single critical bridge to these human to human interactions. They provide the ability to engage not only the minds of customers, but their hearts. Salespeople translate data to meaning for each person involved in the buying process.

We need to recognize that salespeople have a much richer role in buying than as information concierges. We need to develop their skills and capabilities in creating meaning for customers, connecting with other humans, creating order out of all the “messiness” that occurs as people work with other people.

This is what drives buying success.

This is what drives sales success.

I took my annual pilgrimage to the Inbound Conference during the week of September 4th. The week began with the Hubspot Partner Day event on Tuesday. This day provided me with the opportunity to meet with other partners and gain a preview of the new Hubspot’s marketing plans and their newly released products and new features.

The Inbound Marketing Conference ran from Wednesday through Friday. My typical approach to the conference is to sign up for sessions in advance that follow a set of themed topics. The themes I selected this year are Facebook (ads and video), video marketing, sales enablement, and Hubspot product features. I also attend the keynote presentations with particular interest in the presentations by Hubspot leadership.

It is my goal in this article to share what I have learned, which is only a small subset of what was available at Inbound18, for your educational pleasure. Since this is a significantly longer article than I usually publish, I have added a clickable index below so you can zero in on the topics of your choice. Enjoy!

Inbound18 Marketing and Sales Tips:

1. An inspirational speech by Beth Comstock about personal development and change
2. A super presentation by Keenan (aka The Sales Guy) about problem-centric selling and how it relates to content strategy
3. Mari Smith (a self-described queen of Facebook) discussion about video marketing on Facebook
4. The Hubspot keynote by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah and the Hubspot product features launched at Inbound18
5. One of my favorite new Hubspot product features – video marketing on Hubspot
6. What they don’t tell you about Conversion Rate Optimization by the Queen of CRO
7. How to drive lead generation with Facebook Ads by a partner manager at Facebook
8. SEO in 2018, Strategies and Tactics by the top SEO expert at Hubspot
9. Is the keyword dead – the role of intent in SEO
10. Summary of Inbound 2018

Imagining your future with Beth Comstock

The first inspirational keynote was by Beth Comstock (@bethcomstock), the former vice chair of General Electric and author of the book “Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change.” In her presentation, she shares that people hold themselves back by fear of failure. She suggests three elements of imagining the future you want and then going after it, but first, you must:

1. Give yourself permission to change whatever aspect of your life you would like
2. Discovery – build confidence in your imagined future because it is only through thinking through your imagined future that you can create a path to achieve it
3. And take the leap to make it happen

This concept applies to your personal and professional life. Change requires risk. You should be prepared to fail. Her messages rang true to me because my experience with several startups required risk-taking, so I am accustomed to taking risks, but strategy and planning must come first, was the message for the marketing professionals in the audience. When you fail, you learn lessons you will never forget. There is a lot more to learn from her talk. Please check out Beth’s presentation here and explore her book here.

Problem Centric Selling and How it Applies to Content Strategy

The first breakout session I attended was by “Keenan,” a self-described sales expert. I can tell you that his message resonated with me and he was a very dynamic speaker. His point is, every sale starts with a problem. We understand intuitively that our prospects have salespeople bombarding them with requests for meetings so they can pitch their products. It is the rare sales rep who takes the time to understand the core problem the prospect has and helps them understand the solutions in a way that gives the sales rep the power and control of the sales process.

Keenan had a straightforward framework for managing the interactions with prospects. He breaks it down into three elements:

1. Understand their problem. One that may be worth them investing resources in solving. He shared that most sales reps do not spend enough time exploring the current state and this will become evident in a moment why more time should be spent here.
2. Explore the impact of not solving the problem. This enables the rep to accurately establish the value your solution delivers to the prospect because it is the gap between the current state and future state that represents the value and represents the ROI.
3. Understand the root cause of the problem. By identifying the root cause of the problem, this is where you create credibility for yourself and your business. Often businesses improperly diagnose the cause of their problem and attempt to implement solutions that do not really work. Diagnosing root cause builds trust.

It’s all about change. Change is the root of every sale you make. Most salespeople start at the future state. If you do not identify the gap (between the current state and the future state), then you don’t know the value. Understand the current state and future state so you can represent the value accurately to the prospect. In the end, he summarized by saying that Problem Centric Selling gives the sales rep control of the sales process.

How do Keenan’s teachings relate to a marketing strategy for Content Marketing?

It is quite simple. As your business explores those problems (triggers) and root causes that cause prospects to buy from you, choose the top triggers and create content clusters about each trigger. This is an important content marketing strategy for any Inbound Marketer. Check out our content strategy process to learn more.

Video Marketing on Facebook by Mari Smith, the Queen of Facebook

A perennial favorite presentation is by Mari Smith. This year, the title of her performance was titled “Facebook Video Marketing: How to Optimize Results Using Video on Demand (VOD) and Live Broadcasts. According to Mari, Facebook is striving to become a video TV platform like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and others because viewers love to watch a video. They are targeting Facebook Messenger for conversational commerce and voice, not just chat. Instagram is not being left alone. They are planning an Instagram standalone shopping application.

According to Mari, videos that are uploaded natively onto Facebook get much better results than videos that are shared through links (example, YouTube video). I can understand this because each platform wants exclusive content. I have seen the same effect with LinkedIn. I have experienced a 400% better visibility and engagement for native videos on LinkedIn than when I create a post with a YouTube video. Digital media in the form of video is extremely useful for marketers, and using it natively on each platform is clearly the best way to benefit from it.

Similar to the way YouTube embeds advertising into videos on their platform, Facebook will soon do the same. Mari mentioned that these “Video Ad Breaks” which are 5 to 15 seconds in duration are an opportunity for advertisers to get more exposure.

Instagram video is also becoming more important for stories and advertisers. She suggested that we all should create the video in a vertical format. Well, if you are like me, video production can be challenging enough to create a standard video, never mind also creating a vertical one. Wouldn’t you know that she had a great suggestion to address the multi-format video need? Try out wave.video because it can simultaneously help you to develop and render video in multiple formats.

Her summary point is that marketing leaders should embrace video in their marketing strategy and plan the extra time to publish them natively on each platform in the most optimum format and aspect ratio.

Hubspot Keynote by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah

Like previous years, Hubspot CEO, Brian Halligan’s (@bhalligan) presentation was both insightful and entertaining. If you are interested in watching the keynote, you can find it here.

Brian made this important point during his talk – The largest influencer of buying decisions is referrals from friends and colleagues. Because of this pivotal point, businesses must delight their customers to grow. I think this point was always a factor in buying decisions. His point is that many of the other elements in the buying process have lost credibility over time, so referrals have become a much more significant factor.

Customers Choose to Buy Based on Feedback From Their Friends

The implication of the referral-based buying journey, according to Brian, the traditional sales funnel is broken. He described the new business dynamic and representation of the customer engagement model like a flywheel. It has a sense of leverage, force, and momentum as customer delight for business growth. Your business has forces that help to propel the flywheel faster and business issues that create friction in your business model. This is the image he showed during the conference when unveiling the flywheel business model concept.

Businesses who have implemented inbound marketing (versus outbound marketing) understand that your investments in inbound establish momentum since the content, nurturing emails, premium content offers and each digital marketing funnel you create, delivers recurring organic value, visits and leads for your business.

We agree with the influence of customers on new and repeat business. We decided to create a customer-centric view of the flywheel. I like this version of the flywheel better because:

• It has the customer at the center because we should all be focused on customer success.
• Around the customer is the journey each prospect goes through as they traverse the “Buyer’s Journey” of information as they address their problems and informational needs.
• Around that are the actions that marketers must take to bring prospects to their business, engage them with helpful information and once they have become a customer, take steps to delight them and keep your company top-of-mind so they refer their friends to your business.
• And finally, the outer section describes their journey from strangers to prospects to customers to promoters of your products and services – which is where you want them based on the new purchasing bias as described by Brian.

Dharmesh Shah, Hubspot CTO (@dharmesh), gave a presentation that supported the concepts introduced by Brian about creating customer delight with every touch. He focused on the idea that businesses who operate with a moral foundation and “solve for the customer” will Grow Better. He discussed these concepts in depth while sharing both personal and business examples of growing better. It was a feel-good story.

The irony of this message is, shortly after the conference, enterprise customers lost capability when Hubspot rolled out the new features they launched at Inbound to customers. Following Dharmesh’s own advice to Grow Better, the company publicly apologized for their error, communicated their efforts to resolve the issue. Frankly, every business makes mistakes. It is the ones that own up to it and focus on helping clients that build stronger bonds with them.

A New Hubspot Product Feature – Video Marketing with Hubspot

One of the new features that Hubspot announced for Professional and Enterprise customers is the ability to host videos for marketing and sales on Hubspot. We have all used videos with Hubspot, but we had to use platforms like Wistia, Vimeo, YouTube and others to host the video and then insert an embed link (or code) into the website content.

Hubspot has partnered with VidYard to provide features for their hosting implementation. That is the technical bit. The exciting bit for marketers and salespeople is what you can now do with video and the simplicity of doing it.

Anyone who has implemented Inbound Marketing knows how vital analytics are to success. This integrated video solution brings all of the video analytics into the platform. You can now see how much of each video any individual visitor viewed. Businesses can also trigger workflows based on video behavior which opens up many exciting nurturing options.

The use of explainer videos is on the rise. Understanding how much your audience views the video can help businesses update videos for better engagement. And lastly, marketer’s can embed CTAs and forms within the videos.

The use of video in sales

Sales teams have discovered that using a brief person to person video really helps the engagement with prospects. When doing a cold outreach email, most prospects will most likely delete your email. If you create a custom video – it does not have to be polished or well produced – they most likely will be curious about the video and watch it. If your elevator pitch addresses a problem they have – see the problem based selling section above – then your engagement rate for your emails should skyrocket. If you would like to learn more about the launch of the Hubspot video capability, check out this link.

What They Don’t Teach You About Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Ayat Shukairy (@ayat) “The Queen of CRO” gave a great talk about Conversion Rate Optimization to an eager group at Inbound18. For those who may not know what CRO is, it is a process and methodology to increase the conversion rate of an offer in any digital platform. It could be on a website or phone browser, in mobile apps, through email marketing or any application where you are trying to get a casual user to convert on an offer. The better job you do with the click-through rate and conversion to a sale, the better the ROI on your marketing program.

Ayat shared her methodology for CRO using the acronym S-H-I-P as shown in the image below. S-H-I-P stands for Scrutinize – Hypothesize – Implement – Propagate. The nice aspect of her methodology is she describes clear steps behind the science behind doing CRO correctly.

The funny thing is that many websites don’t have conversion paths at all! Many just have a contact us form on their website as the primary method for visitors to convert into a lead. For those of you that are CRO beginners, here are a few CRO articles we have published recently:

• How CRO Makes A Smarter Inbound Marketing Methodology
• Why Conversion Rate Optimization is More Important Than Ever
• 7 Common Problems with Inbound Marketing and How to Solve Them

How to Drive Lead Generation with Facebook Ads

This breakout session was lead by Doug Weiss, the lead of product partnerships at Facebook. This is the first time I saw a presentation by a Facebook employee about the platform. His insight provided a fresh perspective, but my antenna was up for any company bias in his presentation.

Doug shared statistics about user behavior. According to Facebook, users spend 5 hours per day on mobile devices, up from three hours just two years ago. That is a lot of time. Facebook has five products with a billion people on their mobile apps every month. We are most familiar with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Facebook Groups.

Although we think that the world has already shifted to mobile for commerce, Doug also mentioned in the US, 90% of business is done offline but influenced by digital and mobile device use. The influence in purchase decisions, especially from organic search is well known for B2C and B2B businesses.

Doug’s mission was to promote the value of Facebook Lead Ads. These types of ads are the kind where the user can fill out a form on Facebook, not your website. You may think; “I have all of my digital funnels on my website, why would I want to break it by moving the form to mobile?”

The Answer to Why you Should Adopt Facebook Lead Ads is Twofold:

1) Facebook completes the fields automatically because they know about the user thus eliminating the need to complete most or all of the form.

2) Businesses can automatically integrate the data from Facebook lead ads into their marketing database.

Hubspot provides this capability out of the box. Doug shared the statistic that standard forms filled out on a mobile device take 40% longer to fill out than on a desktop. If users are moving online behavior to mobile, then it makes sense that businesses should make it easier for companies to engage.

We’ve been supporting clients with Facebook ads because the targeting is very precise, so businesses do not pay for advertisement placements to people who are not their target prospects. We have also found these advertisements to be cost effective and produce a positive ROI. When running ads, don’t just look at how users interact with your ads, also measure the downstream conversion metrics and ROI.

Testing and analytics are essential for every online advertisement program. Plan a testing phase before committing to a substantial investment to be sure the investment will produce the best results. This image shows the behavior of beginners versus experts and the relative results of each.

SEO in 2018, Strategies and Tactics

A perennial favorite of mine is the presentation by Matthew Howells-Barby (@matthewbarby) & Lars Osterberg (@larsosterberg) of Hubspot. Matthew is their top SEO expert at the company and has driven many changes that have increased organic results at Hubspot.

Matthew offered these high-level points:

• You don’t need to obsess over keywords in SEO
• Shift your thinking to topics you want to own, not just keywords or phrases
• Google Search Console (GSC) gives queries someone typed into search where your content appeared and also tells you the number of clicks each link received – the crux of the point is to think beyond the individual keywords
• Create topically related content – think topic clusters

He further added for SEO to be done right, increase topical relevance, reduce content bloat, and improve technical SEO.

For topical relevance, be sure to create topic clusters with the core pillar content and related content around it with links to the pillar content.

To reduce content bloat, review your website pages which are receiving little or no traffic and either delete them or merge or refactor multiple articles into one and publish as new.

For technical SEO, you need a tool to analyze your website and provide lists of items to fix. We like and use SemRush and create SemRush projects for each client to monitor site SEO even after we have addressed all of the open issues.

Is the Keyword Dead – the Role of Intent in SEO

Closing out this article about Inbound18 is a summary of a presentation by Everett Ackerman (@everettackerman), SEO/SEM expert at NewBreed. He did a great job of describing the changes in the Google search engine algorithms but emphasized the August 2014 launch of Hummingbird.

His advice is to focus on the goal of the searcher, make sure the content can build trust and help them solve their issues and problems, and then think about keywords in three areas

• Navigational – make sure what you say in title and meta description aligns with the topic
• Transactional – be sure to include middle and bottom of funnel offers
• Informational – make sure your content helps them solve their problem and is educational

Like others in the conference, Everett also emphasized creating content in clusters as we have written about in the past and as Hubspot now enables in their platform to quickly develop clusters and track each content cluster’s performance and contribution to sales.

Summary of Inbound 2018

I hope you find this article, although very long, as a great resource about the few sessions that I was able to attend the Inbound18 conference in Boston. I will freely admit that I have already purchased my ticket to Inbound19 marketing event next year. For me, life is a constant journey for learning and improving. Inbound for me is a tremendous resource for education and engaging with like-minded business owners.

During the breaks between sessions, I had the opportunity to speak with people from several companies and industries who are implementing Inbound for their business with the goal of growing. I love that these people are so passionate about how it can help them grow and engaged in the community.

If you are in need of advice regarding how to improve your inbound results, please request a free inbound Marketing assessment. We love helping businesses grow.

How do you talk about your company to customers? How do you service clients? How do you onboard new employees when they join your business? In short, what is your framework for success across your business?

Playbooks are used within companies for a range of different purposes, across training up new sales representatives or as an onboarding resource for new employees. They are also used to train employees on how to position new products or services.

So, do you have your processes documented in a Company Playbook?

What is a Company Playbook?

A company playbook is where you document ‘how you do stuff.’ And perhaps a bit of why you do that ‘stuff,’ what that ‘stuff’ is, how you ideally want it communicated and performed, and who does it, and when and where.

So, here’s an example. Say you own a restaurant, you might have a Company Playbook that talks about your restaurant, why it was started, what you serve and why, why you’re the best and the experience you aim to deliver to customers, and your mission and values. Like an intro to your company.

But you might also have an Operations Playbook – potentially a couple of them, relating to different areas of the business. So you might have an Operations Playbook that relates to customer service; detailing how serving staff should greet customers when they come in through your restaurant doors – do customers wait to be seated, or do they find their own tables? Who is responsible for showing a customer to their table – a particular staff member or any staff member who sees a customer waiting? What is the process if a queue starts to form?

An Operations Playbook documents what you do, how you do it and who should be doing it – all documented in one place.

What are the different types of playbooks?

Sales Playbook

A Sales Playbook is your crib sheet for your product, service or company. Some organisations have just one Sales Playbook, while some have a Playbook for each product they sell. It is like a simple guide for anyone selling your product or service which educates them on how to position your product, the challenges customers are facing in the market, and how to align your product to those challenges, and manage common objections – plus a whole load of extra useful sales information.

Company Playbook

A Company Playbook is a guide to your company – basically, what your company does and why. It usually includes a company overview, company history, what you do for your customers, how you engage with your customers, your mission and value statements and how you operate.

Operations Playbook

An Operations Playbook is all about how you deliver your services to customers. So, for example, an Operations Playbook for a restaurant might explain the steps that waiting staff go through when looking after a restaurant guest, from whether guests wait to be seated, to how you greet new customers. It’s your playbook for how to operate.

Reseller or Channel Playbook

Many organisations create Channel Playbooks for their reseller community to give them the information and tools to go and sell their products – all in one central playbook structure. This can be a mix of a company playbook and a sales playbook – demonstrating how to sell particular products and services and how resellers should engage with the vendor and partner ecosystem.

Why do you need a Playbook?

How do your teams handle common customer objections? Can everyone pitch your solution or product succinctly? Is your sales messaging consistent?

We often speak to organisations who have all of this information, but it’s disjointed – sitting in brochures, websites and customer proposals. For example, a sales playbook brings this information together into one document for a consistent approach to sales success.

Having everything codified and documented into one place shows your employees that you have a set framework for success – this is what a successful process looks like, this is what a happy customer looks like, and this is what a successful sales process looks like.

It also helps you to spot issues in your operations – and the playbook should be a living document that gets updated regularly. For example, perhaps you keep getting asked by customers at your restaurant for a jug of water for the table. Perhaps you should integrate automatically providing guests with a jug of water and glasses on arrival – to speed up operations and improve customer service.

What should you include in your playbook?

Depending on the type of playbook you are creating (sales playbook, operations playbook or company playbook), the sections you should include will differ.

For sales playbooks, my company, Contemsa, put together a free guide of the Top Ten Sections to Include in your Sales Playbook and we also have handy templates ready to go that you can fill in to create your own playbook.

This is a good place to start, and will give you some ideas for what to include in your sales and operations playbook too.

So, start thinking about how to build your company playbook to define a framework for success.

A version of this post was originally published here.

We all know price has a lot to do with winning a share of Amazon’s Buy Box, but perhaps merchants place a little too much importance on price. Instead of worrying so much about having the lowest costs among your competitors, my company, RepricerExpress, recommends avoiding a price war as a technique for coming out on top. It rarely works out for the best, and we’ll take a look at why that is.

Repricing on Amazon Wars: Pyrrhic Victories All Around

There are three people affected in a price war: you, your competitor(s), and your buyer. While the damage to you and your competitors is obvious — slashed prices going so low it starts to affect your profit margin — the reality is a little less clear for your buyers.

It may seem like a curious point to make that buyers also get hurt in price wars, as how can someone who gets the product they desire for the lowest price possible be losing out? While on the surface it seems to make sense, going a little deeper, we can see it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

First, your buyers will come to expect those kinds of prices from you all the time. If you don’t provide them, because you’ve gotten into a pricing war with your competitors, your buyer knows all they have to do is shop around and someone will have the price they want. And lastly, over time, consumers will begin to equate ‘cheap prices’ with ‘cheap products’ and will be cutting themselves off from an awesome merchant with a nicely varied inventory. It may not be a fair label, but we as humans have a built-in tendency to associate lower prices with lower quality.

Long-Term Sustainability Will Be Difficult

We’re not saying to never use pricing software on your products drastically, as that can actually be a very good strategy. If you want to move a slow item or entice buyers into picking up an expensive item, you can price a product really low and either a) move it at record speed or b) price it low as part of a pair and move twice the amount of inventory.

It’s sort of like having a sweet tooth for chocolate. It’s nice to indulge in it here and there because it feels like a treat. But when you start having chocolate every day, the appeal of it goes down and there’s no reason to think of chocolate as being for a special occasion. Your dentist will also have a word with you and tell you it’s probably a good idea if you back off the chocolate a little bit.

Price slashing is the same way. Everyone gets excited about it when it happens sporadically and you won’t get the ecommerce version of a cavity from it. Start reducing your prices to rock bottom all the time, and you’ll soon be pricing yourself out of business.

It Almost Never Works Out to a Win For You

Let’s assume that you’re one of the rare few for whom the previous arguments just don’t apply. For whatever reason, lightning never hits and you’re able to successfully dodge pitfall after pitfall. It’s kind of tempting to think your luck will always run this course, isn’t it?

Except it won’t.

The curse of being this lucky is eventually you’ll get so big, the really big players will want to squish you. Think of what Walmart would do if they found out you were responsible for their losing 10% of their customers each year. They wouldn’t very well just sit by and let you scoop them up. Instead, they’ll do everything in their power to make sure you’re yesterday’s news.

Now, we’re not saying to not grow your company really big and be as successful as possible. We’re saying to not take the route of selling things as cheaply as possible to attain that goal. You’ve seen countless examples of how the short and fast path is almost always a recipe for disaster (e.g. the US housing crisis, the dot-com bubble fiasco, etc.), whereas slow and steady means building a solid foundation, which will serve you much better in the future.

Originally published here.

Considering the amount of time the average American spends on their phone, it’s no surprise SMS marketing is the most powerful way to communicate with Prospects, Customers and VIPs!

Companies in every kind of industry use SMS messages (AKA: texting) to tell consumers about their latest updates, news, deals, discounts, product releases, and more.

Maybe you have a bit of experience with sending SMS messages yourself… but you haven’t been getting the SMS results you hoped for.

If so, it’s time to take a look at your Customer and the CTAs (Calls to action) you are using!

Often times, it’s the CTA on an SMS message that will make or break the success of your campaign! Keep reading for the powerful CTA ideas…

10 Powerful CTAs You Must Use!

If you want to turn your text subscribers attention into action, then test out these calls to action.

1. Click Here to Discover More

A simple click can turn into so much more. All it takes is one link to lead your audience from their phone’s sms messaging system to your website.

But, you have to make sure you send them to the right spot!

Don’t just take users to your homepage. Show them something they may not have seen before – like a new payment feature in the app or a brand-new product that’s available on the website. Maybe lead them to fresh content like a new blog post or podcast, or video.

Share the link and tell them to “Click Here to Discover More!”

Now here’s another great CTA…

2. Reply with (___)

If you’ve been doing a lot of “click here” in your SMS campaigns, it’s time to switch it up.

Tell users to reply to your message instead. This is a great way to get the conversation going with your audience and to gather their feedback.

Two ways this can work…

First you can ask them a question or for their opinion. this often times will generate a bunch of responses and engage people in a conversation.

The other thing you can do is set up a keyword… and ask people to reply with the keyword. For example if you launched a new product, you can text everyone with some info say “Reply with NEW” to get more details. Set your system up so people who respond with “New” are added to a new list where you can drip them targeted info about your new product.

Now, here’s a great CTA for selling product…

3. Enter (___) at Checkout

For text message campaigns that are all about the sale, include a discount to entice your audience even more. Give them a special code to use at checkout for free shipping or a discount off their purchase price.

Just make sure you are explicit about your terms and conditions, though. You don’t want to give users an expectation that they have 20% off their entire order just for them to realize it was in fact 20% off one item.

Another great feature of this call to action is you’ll see how many of your texting subscribers use the special code!

Here’s a Hot Tip… Make sure your offer has an expiration date in the text… you don’t want people trying to use your discount code 10 years from now!

Up next is a Powerful CTA that isn’t used very often…

4. Show This Text

What if you own a brick and mortar location, like a restaurant or small boutique? If web purchases aren’t yet available for your business, tell users to show their text messages when they order… or get to the counter.

This way, they can still feel special, and you can still drive sales.

There’s no reason you can’t use SMS messaging as a brick and mortar business, you just have to get creative about how to make it work for you!

Now here’s another great CTA…

5. Go to (___)

Sometimes, brick and mortar businesses and online companies alike will partner with other organizations. They may be hosting a special event or sponsoring a charitable cause and want to get as much of a turn out as possible.

If you find yourself in this situation, tell your SMS recipients about the upcoming event!

Send a text to them a week or two before the event happens then send a couple more reminders as it gets closer to the big event.

This doesn’t guarantee that everyone on your text messaging list will show up, but it does help get more foot traffic than other forms of messaging.

ANOTHER HOT TIP: Add a link to a google map in your text message so people know exactly where to go!

Now, I love this next CTA and use it all the time…

6. Subscribe for Free Today

Another smart SMS CTA to use is a subscription command! This can do wonders for your digital marketing strategies and your overall success as a business, too.

When users subscribe to your texting list or email newsletters or blog, they’re helping you expand your digital footprint. Every inbox that your content goes to is another link placement that leads back to you.

Plus, this is a chance to show off more of your brand.

Users are bound to open the emails you send them and read the posts you write. Even if they don’t pay attention every single time… remember the old marketing saying “Repetition is Reputation!” The more Clients see your content, the more they engage, and build a deeper relationship.

It’s a great way to increase brand loyalty!

Now I haven’t seen this next CTA used too much, but it’s a powerful one…

7. Check Your Progress at (___)

Keep in mind that conversions aren’t a one-time thing.

You have to keep users coming back if you truly want your business to grow. Part of this means helping them understand what they’re getting out of your product.

Say you own a gym or have a nutrition line. Maybe you just launched a personal finance app or you’re passionate about helping consumers reach their goals.

These are all things that people have to track.

You can engage with them by simply reminding them to track their progress. For example, I know one sandwich shop sends me a reminder of how many more times i need to stop in before I get my “Next Sandwich Free“! You can bet I pay attention to that text!

Reminding users of their buying journey is a powerful way to ensure they stay engaged!

Now here’s another call to action along those same lines…

8. Earn More with (___)

Some goals are financial – like giveback apps, crowdfunding systems, and loyalty programs. If your business is involved with any of these, tell your customers how they can make the most of what they’re earning.

This is a nice alternative to a checkout discount.

Instead of making people buy something – even if it is for less – find ways to show them how to utilize what they already have.

Two more CTAs to try…

9. This Offer Ends Soon

It’s always good to add a bit of urgency to a CTA.

Sometimes, all you need to make your text message hit home is to tell users it won’t be around forever. Give them a deadline for when the offer you’re promoting runs out.

The smaller their window is to act, the better.

This spikes the sense of urgency even more and makes them want to act right away.

This is really powerful for sales events, or free giveaways… or just simply getting people to act!

Now for the last CTA today…

10. Join Today

The final CTA worth sharing with your audience is “join today”.

This is particularly effective for businesses that are about to open but haven’t yet, or that are still getting the word out about their new business.

“Joining” could mean anything. It can apply to a new gym in town or a loyalty program that your restaurant or coffee shop just rolled out.

It also works for startup firms who are trying to create a movement in their industry. You can also use it for newsletters, clubs, or facebook groups!

The possibilities for this CTA are endless if you know how to spin it right.

Use these SMS CTAs Today

It’s one thing to read about effective SMS CTAs in theory and another to see the results they can drive for your business. Go through this list one more time and pick out the Calls-to-action that offer the most potential for your SMS campaigns… then use them!

Today’s article should give you some great ideas on how to use CTAs to drive customer engagement. To learn more about getting started with business texting, or to learn how to promote your small business check out our special report… “The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Marketing.”

By Mark Schaefer

Earlier this year I vacationed in the Cycladic Islands of Greece. It was a thrilling trip and one of the most beautiful places on earth.

However, it also inspired a marketing lesson. Of course. I am so weird that way.

All of these islands were formed by volcanic activity millions of years ago and have a similar landscape and climate. They are so close together that you can normally see neighboring islands from any ocean vista.

And yet, they are all so different! Over the years, each tiny island developed its own micro-culture of food, art, history, customs, and stories that are an endless source of local pride. You could visit 25 islands and find 25 fascinating micro-cultures.

And, that is a depiction of our modern customer world, as well.

The Like-Minded Islands

Technology has allowed our customers to self-organize into like-minded islands. The islands are unique places of love, support, shared values, and community pride. They are populated by friends, families, trusted experts, and maybe even a few visitors known as “influencers.”

Like inhabitants of any small island, communication travels quickly, there is a strong shared history, bonds of trust, and a wariness of strangers. For fun, most people travel back and forth to nearby islands to visit friends with other shared interests.

Businesses are desperate to be invited to these clannish consumer islands. They’re convinced the islanders would buy their goods and services if they would only give them a chance.

In the days before the formation of the Like-Minded Islands, businesses loved mass marketing. This meant companies would:

• Send unwanted newsletters
• Litter the landscape with tons of direct mail pieces
• Bother customers with endless email blasts
• Interrupt their day with automated telephone calls
• Spend millions of dollars on content customers are far too busy to read
• Create snappy social media images hoping customers would “engage”
• Interrupt their entertainment with repetitive ads

Now that the islanders are in control and can determine who can come on to their island, none of this works any more. Who would want that stuff? In fact, these clever islanders are even developing technology to block and drown-out every un-wanted interruption. Some of it still leaks through, but it’s only a matter of time that people will be able to peacefully live their lives without annoyances from bothersome marketers.

What should a marketer do? Some are still clinging to advertising and the old ways since they have done that for decades. It’s familiar. They may fly over the island with a banner ad hoping somebody will look up and notice. But by and large, things are far too busy and interesting on the island for anybody to care. It’s just noise.

Ask the islanders

Let’s take this one step further. What if we asked the islanders what our businesses would have to do to earn an invitation to the Like-Minded Islands? What would they tell us? It might be something like:

• Be a friend. Fit in and belong. Be useful.
• Respect our time, our freedom, our privacy.
• Come alongside us and be there when we need you.
• Show us that you share our values, even if it makes you unpopular on other islands. If we’re going to be loyal to you, you have to be loyal to us.
• Be a great neighbor and help us even when we’re down. Especially when we’re down.
• Create some fun experiences that show us what life is like beyond our limited view of this island.
• Don’t just tell us you’re great and you belong here. We want to see it — here and now on this island. That is the only thing we’ll believe.
• Never, ever, interrupt us, annoy us, or show up uninvited. That’s just rude.

This is a pretty rational and realistic perspective, isn’t it? It suggests an approach to marketing that is sensitive to human values and community needs.

Our marketing is not our marketing

Here is a magical and glorious reality. If you’re invited to an island, your “marketing” can stop. Once you belong, the islanders do your “marketing” for you. They tell their family and friends how cool and helpful you are. They’re seen around the island hanging out with you. You’re part of the daily routine. The islanders will stick with you and fight for you even if you are attacked by competitors.

In this new consumer world, we’re no longer in control of any “sales funnel” or “customer journey.” The best we can hope for is to be part of a conversation that leads to an invitation to an island.

Marketing success on the islands

Look at your own company. Is your marketing more closely aligned to the top list of tactics or the bottom list? If you’re still doing the same sort of interruptive marketing you did 10 years ago, or even two years ago, you’re on a slow road to obsolescence.

My view is that marketing is so expensive and ineffective for many companies because they’re clinging to the past, the top list.

Becoming “locked-in” to marketing tactics like these that may not work any longer might be due to outdated agency relationships, organizational resistance, cultural obstinance, lack of skilled leadership, relentless bureaucracy … or some combination of all these factors.

But the undeniable fact is, we must transcend whatever obstacles are in our way and adopt a radical new mindset because the customers are in control.

Welcome to the islands.

These ideas will be explored deeply in my forthcoming book “Marketing Rebellion” which will be published in February, 2019.

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world.  Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

Original photo from Santorini by the author.

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