Rnordman

We all want our audience to do something, be it to sign up for a new product or download an ebook.

This is why landing page best practices exist – to boost conversions.

That’s why this post brings you 15 of these tips in detail, covering everything from how the ideal headline formulas to how to design and position your call to action (CTA).

But first, the basics.

What is a landing page?

Like many marketing terms, “landing page” means different things to different people. Some think that it’s any page on your website which is reached from a search engine. Others define them as pages which capture visitor information through lead forms.

All of these descriptions are untrue. Heck, if they were then any blog post with decent SEO would be a “landing page” from Google, which would include so many results as to make the term useless.

Landing pages are lead generators – they’re a single page which is aimed to make the visitor perform a single action.

This could include (among other things):

• Signing up to a mailing list
• Creating a new product account
• Buying a product
• Booking a demo
• Browsing the rest of a website

Think of them as a focal point in your audience’s journey to do what you want them to do. Each landing page is tailored to both market and sell visitors on taking the action you want them to, whether it’s by entering their information, signing up for a new account, or paying to subscribe to a service.

The purpose of a landing page

Landing pages exist to promote a single course of action – they don’t try and push the audience to do everything that could benefit their creator at once.

It’s not about explaining every last detail or teaching new concepts. Visitors should “land” on the page and, through seeing the content, perform the desired action as soon as possible.

That’s not to say that you’re trying to trick the audience. An audience which genuinely wants to perform and benefits from the action is leagues more important than duping a greater number of signups who will never look at your stuff again.

Achieving this is where things get complicated as, even though you’re only trying to inspire one action, you need to account for the different users, backgrounds, interests, and experience levels that your audience will have. No matter who they are, if they fall into your intended audience, they should all want to perform the action you’re promoting.

That’s where the following 15 landing page best practices come into play.

Landing page best practices

Have a single purpose

One of the most important things to do when creating a landing page is to make sure that is has a single purpose. Don’t confuse the viewer by trying to make them do more than one thing.

If you want them to sign up to your mailing list, get them to enter their details. If you want them to buy a product, sell the product.

Don’t split their attention and try to make them do more than one thing.

I understand – it’s tempting to try and get your viewer to do everything you’d like them to while you have their attention. You’ve done the hard work of getting them to go onto your website, so why not capitalize on it while you can?

Two words; audience retention.

If you bombard the viewer with too many calls to action on a single page (especially a landing page) the only thing they’ll reliably do is to hit the back button and contribute to your bounce rate. It’s the same principle behind pop-up ads – you might get some more conversions but when the entire web page is designed to do that anyway you’ll push away more people than you convert.

Make the CTA obvious

One of the more obvious landing page best practices, it’s vital to make sure that your CTA is the most obvious thing on the page. If the audience can’t see it, they won’t do it.

The method for doing this will change based on the type of landing page and action being promoted but there are a couple of tried-and-tested techniques:

• Make your CTA a large button with clear text
• Use contrasting colors to make the CTA stand out
• Put the CTA in the center of the page
• Use arrows (or people) to point to the CTA
• If it’s a large page, have one CTA for your action visible on every full page scroll length
• Grey out the rest of the page for pop-ups

Most of these are self-explanatory but I’ll clarify the last two a little more.

Let’s say you have a homepage (which is a core example of a landing page). Chances are that you’ll want to include lots of information, pictures, videos, social proof, and so on to convince the audience to sign up (your one chosen action).

Instead of having just one CTA to “Sign Up” at the top and bottom of the page, include enough so that the user can see one of these buttons no matter what part of the page they’re scrolled to. That way the action is always there, ready to be taken as soon as the user is convinced.

Again, pop-ups aren’t ideal for a landing page but if you absolutely must have them they serve as a good example of drawing attention to a specific part of the screen.

Remove all unnecessary action options

While this follows the same thinking as “stick to one purpose per landing page”, you can go one step further and remove the potential for other actions to be taken.

Think of it as the other half of the equation; first, you stop telling your audience to do more than one thing, then you follow up by limiting their options to that one thing. You’re limiting the active CTAs and the passive opportunity to do something else.

Yuppiechef did just that when trying to optimize their Wedding Registry service landing page performance. Using Visual Website Optimizer (who also published the Yuppiechef case study), they tested the conversion rate of their landing page as it was compared to if they removed the website navigation bar.

This alone increased their conversion rate by 100%.

While you don’t have to remove literally every option, it’s certainly worth weighing up the value of each and every action opportunity on your landing pages and assessing whether they’re worth keeping. If they’re not at least equal in value to the main landing page purpose, get them out of there.

Use videos (where appropriate)

Videos are a fantastic way to promote a certain action while providing extra information, persuading arguments, social proof and more in an easy-to-view format. They’re also criminally under-used.

In a study of 1,000+ landing pages, Crayon found that only 14% of them used some kind of video content. Considering that videos have shown to improve conversion rates by up to 80%, that seems woefully low.

The lack of video content is probably due to how difficult it is to balance their function with how distracting they are. When using them on a landing page you need to be very careful and make sure that they fit with the flow of the page rather than hinder the audience from taking the action you want them to.

Ted Vrountas has written an excellent breakdown of video landing page examples and what they do (and don’t do) well. To summarize a few key points;

• Directly show the product/action you’re promoting
• Use screenshots if applicable
• Explain and demonstrate what the desired action will entail
• Have a CTA at the end of the video matching that of the landing page
• Try to avoid distracting or misleading content (eg, irrelevant animation)
• Have an obvious “play” button to show that it’s a video immediately
• Keep it short and sweet – have a 2-minute demonstration, not a 10-minute presentation

Show social proof

Social proof is powerful and widespread. Showing your audience what others think of you helps to reassure them that your action is the right one to take. Whether it’s from the mouth of a celebrity, a large brand which is also a customer or simply a collection of your current users, showing social proof is a tried-and-tested way to increase conversion rates.

However, that’s not to say that every landing page needs it.

Take our study of the top 100 startup homepages. This showed that, despite their success, a significant 29.29% of all examined pages did not contain social proof. This number increased to 40% when looking at homepages for non-developer tools.

This is because social proof is less useful when it comes to services like Amazon, Crunchyroll, and Postmates. Companies which serve as marketplaces (for products or online content) or to promote other services stand to gain more by leaping directly into the meat of their offer rather than providing a supporting comment.

It’s worth noting, however, that these are also exceptions to many of these landing page best practices. For example, a marketplace wants to provide as many CTAs as possible on its main landing (home) page to show the variety of goods or services on offer.

Branding should be immediately visible

While not every startup homepage had social proof, absolutely every example we examined had their branding elements immediately visible.

Whether by showing the brand name, logo, or another branding element, landing pages are a great opportunity to build brand recognition with the audience and make it more memorable in future. If people recognize and remember you, they’re more likely to come back and interact further, maybe purchasing another product or referring you to their friends.

It’s not difficult and is very hard to make distracting to the detriment of your landing page’s purpose. All that you usually need to do is include your brand’s name and/or logo at the top of your page.

As a quick note, it’s worth considering whether to make your branding elements link back to your homepage. On one hand, this gives the audience a chance to further familiarize themselves with you and take more direct action with the brand.

However, it’s not always worth giving the extra option. Remember; if navigating to your homepage isn’t much more valuable than the single purpose of your landing page, it might be worth cutting out that extra option. Not to mention that they don’t need a link to your homepage if they’re already on it – you’ll just be giving them an extra chance to lose interest.

Offer a demo (where possible)

Although it’s not always relevant, offering a demo is a great way to get your audience to interact further and calm any fears they have. This is vital, as landing pages that need a demo video (or offer) often come at a major point in the viewer’s buying decision.

Demos are best used when your audience has learned a little about what you’re offering (a service, some software, a SaaS product, etc) and knows what the general benefits are. The demo helps to clear up any remaining confusion about how the product works, what it does, and so on.

Again, not every landing page needs to offer a demo, but providing the opportunity to book one on a product’s homepage or alongside your “Create an account” button can truly work wonders for your conversion rate.

Show contact information

While this counters the “focus on one thing” practice from earlier, it’s still worth including some contact details on the landing page, even if they’re small and tucked away at the very bottom in smaller print.

Yes, your landing page is designed to fulfill one purpose, not to get people to “do X and then chat with us about it”. However, getting in contact with your company is almost always a good sign.

You want people to be curious about your brand and what it can offer. You want your audience to have a direct experience with your team because that means they’re more likely to remember you. This is especially true if your customer support services are up to scratch.

It also helps to limit your audience’s fears and/or confusion.

Think about it; if you’re interested in a subscription service but aren’t sure about the delivery details, you’ll want to clear that up before signing up. To do that, you need the contact information of the brand behind the landing page.

Admittedly, it’s better to have a landing page that answers all of your audience’s questions and fears without the need to contact you but this is another good part of giving contact information out. If you get a lot of questions about a certain landing page’s offer, you’ll be able to change the page in reaction and improve it.

Remove risk factors

While we’re on the topic of risk factors, it’s worth taking time to think about your landing page to examine what a viewer might be concerned or confused about.

Whether their confusion or fear is warranted or not, the more you can do to quell those feelings before they take root and scare away the viewer, the more likely they are to stick around and consider your offer further.

For example, some common risk factors which can be covered with a bare minimum of information are:

• Contents of the offer
• What the viewer needs to do
• Price points
• Benefits
• Social proof
• Timescale

These factors will change depending on the landing page and offer but the theory is the same for all. Provide enough information to satisfy perceived risks, as most viewers won’t take action otherwise.

Have 500+ words of content

You need enough information on a landing page to promote and explain what you want your viewer to do. Even though it’s preferable to make sure that they know everything beforehand, you should always prepare for every eventuality.

For example, let’s say that you want to promote a specific product. You write a Facebook post with a good photo and brief description, along with any offer currently available, pair it with a blog post and email to your mailing list, all of which have links to your product’s landing page.

Despite all of those links being surrounded by the relevant information, you can’t guarantee that everyone who clicks through will know everything they want or need to before making a final decision.

Whether a viewer reads everything before going to the landing page or just sees a photo they like and clicks on it, you need to provide all of the information required to let them make an informed decision. As such, it’s rare for a good landing page to have less than 500 words of content.

There’s no set upper limit to the word count but you don’t want to waffle on longer than necessary. Use 500 words as a rough minimum guideline, cover everything they need to know while promoting the action you want them to take, then quit while you’re ahead.

Use simple language

Another easy mistake to make is using language which is too complicated to easily read. The harder you make it for viewers to easily get the information they need, the more likely they are to click away and never come back.

This was another aspect we saw in our study of the best homepages for startups, where we found that the average reading grade for 100 pages was 6.61. Even the developer tool homepages aimed at a more specific and experienced audience only had a reading grade of 7.31.

It’s yet another case of making it easy to see what action you want them to take and why they should take it. The harder it is to see that, the worse your conversion rate will be.

As for some general tips:

• Simplify your words
• Use short sentences
• Avoid passive sentences
• Have a reading grade below 7

Test your own user flow

This best practice is more common sense than an industry secret. If you don’t test your own user flow on the landing page, how can you be sure that a new viewer will follow your own logic?

First, take note of all of the links that lead to the landing page. Consider the context of these links, what surrounding information is there, how specific and experienced your audience is, and whether you want to account for those who stumble across the page or link without reading around the topic first.

Next, boot up your landing page. With the notes about your audience, think about how obvious your CTA is and where your eyes are initially pulled. Try to imagine a viewer’s movements and logical progression, along with any points where they might hesitate or ask themselves a question.

These points of friction are the things you need to iron out.

If you find that the CTA isn’t the first thing your eyes are drawn to, the layout of the page or CTA needs to change. If you’re stopping to ask important questions or are left wanting for information, it’s time to add that into your copy without taking attention away from the main CTA.

Create multiple landing pages

Landing pages aren’t limited to being homepages or product descriptions. In fact, the more landing pages you can create for different purposes, the better.

Don’t take my word for it – Krista Bunskoek over at Wishpond has shown that websites with 30+ landing pages get seven times the leads of those with only 10.

If the action is important enough to promote to your audience, give it a landing page.

This isn’t just a bonus in terms of giving you things to promote in your own content – it gives your team a library of catered landing pages to draw from in almost any situation. Be it in casual conversation, customer support or as part of a new campaign, having specific landing pages is only ever a good thing.

Segment landing pages by user and traffic source

If you want to take your landing page web one step further, consider creating multiple landing pages for the same purpose but aimed at different audiences. This then lets you segment your user and traffic sources to send different people to specialized pages.

For example, let’s say you update your service and send out an email to let your mailing list know about the new features with a link to the landing page promoting them. You know, however, that not all of your mailing list is already using the service in general.

The solution? Send non-users the link to a landing page promoting the service in general. Highlight the updates along with the most powerful/commonly used features to show everything your service has to offer.

Then, instead of sending current users to the same generic landing page, consider pushing them towards a landing page geared towards promoting a higher paid plan using some of the benefits of the new features. That way you’re encouraging new signups while also promoting upgrades to your existing audience.

All it took was an extra landing page and a little segmentation.

Consider the nine headline formulas for startups

Pretty much everyone knows that your headlines matters. After all, nailing a good headline instead of settling with a generic or bad one can make your traffic vary by up to 500%.

The same is true of landing pages.

Just because you’re creating a page to promote a single type of action doesn’t mean that you can pay any less attention to your headline than in your blog posts and other content. If anything, you need to put more effort into honing and perfecting the headline than usual, as these are the pages which will be responsible for the majority of your conversions.

Thankfully, we’ve already done the legwork for you to work out a great headline formula.

After analyzing the copy of 87 startup landing pages, Ben Brandall found that their headlines all fell into one of nine categories:

• [Software] for [target]
• The [superlative] way to [goal]
• [Imperative][benefit]
• Better [purpose]
• [Software] that [benefit]
• [Benefit]. [Benefit]
• [Benefit] without [drawback]
• [Question]
• [Purpose]

As part of that analysis, we also created a headline generator. When you open the spreadsheet, click ‘File’ and then ‘Make a copy’ to give yourself a copy you can edit and use for your own titles. All you have to do is enter your software’s purpose, audience, and customer goal to get a list of 30 titles using the formulas above.

Create and update landing pages as you grow

Landing pages aren’t static – you can’t leave them as they are and expect them to perform anything but worse over time. Not to mention that even the best landing pages can step up their game through continuous improvement.

Whether you try out a new headline, update your copy, redesign the page entirely or test out one of the landing page best practices mentioned above, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of ways you can change, test, and improve your landing pages. All that’s left to do is go out and test them!

Do you have any landing page tips to share? I’d love to see them in the comments below.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on Inc. here.

Declaring the end of something — whether it’s brick-and-mortar retail or Facebook — always grabs attention, which is why people make such declarations. So when Work-Bench’s latest report predicted the end of Software as a Service (SaaS), a software licensing and delivery model employed by many of today’s best known technology providers, many took notice.

The gist of the report is that containers and microservices have made it easier for companies to create their own homegrown solutions instead of contracting with a SaaS vendor. SaaS thrived in an era when making your own software was hard, the report states, but thanks to containers, software can be installed anywhere and go live in minutes.

One example of this market shift is Mattermost, an enterprise-grade virtual private cloud (VPC) alternative to Slack that’s cheaper and more secure. Another example is Contentful a decoupled and developer-friendly alternative to a traditional CMS. “Enterprises already prefer VPC to SaaS for enterprise tools,” the report states. “We expect business software to follow suit.”

The report makes a valid point. But I disagree that these factors comprise an existential threat to SaaS. The world as we know is shifting, but to say we’re completely moving away from SaaS only tells part of the story. It’s important to understand the value of SaaS to your business and why using out-of-the-box solutions and ready-made tools are here to help and likely not going away any time soon.

Here’s why:

1. Microservices and containers help SaaS companies too.

While it’s easier than it used to be for corporations to create their own software solutions, it’s also easier for independent software vendors. As some SaaS vendors themselves have noted, using microservices allows them to hire fewer programmers and save money. They can also help speed time to market. The real question is whether you get to the point where the additional value a software vendor can provide is lower than it used to be. I don’t think we’re near that point.

2. Maintaining software is a headache.

Creating your own software solutions is the fun part. But debugging it, making sure it works, figuring out how to make it drop-dead easy for your users to use, determining how to create more value for users, and refining the software all take constant work. Some companies are adept at this while others would rather avoid the headache and the cost (which can often run as high as 75 percent of TCO). The fact is that companies have always been able to create their own software and there will always be the option to rely on third parties to do it instead (see the success of Salesforce.com, WordPress and other out of the box solutions).

3. Creating your own solutions doesn’t always make sense.

Businesses constantly face the option of DIY or outsourcing. That goes for pretty much everything they do, ranging from accounting to transportation to programmatic advertising. The calculation is based on assessing your resources and your core skills and it boils down to focus. When it comes to software, it usually makes sense to use someone else’s solution for some things. For instance, there’s no need to create your own spreadsheet because there are some great ones on the market that don’t cost much (or in the case of Google Sheets, are free).

4. SaaS provides economic value.

The Work-Bench report argues that SaaS won’t face an imminent demise largely because of inertia — businesses that use such services have an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rationalization for staying with what they know. I think that the lure of SaaS goes beyond that though. Apps that help you execute your business more efficiently have an economic value. While a DIY software system may have bugs and require IT intervention, that’s usually not the case with SaaS solutions, which are constantly stress tested and have dedicated teams that ensure that they run smoothly. With some popular SaaS products — like Salesforce.com – there’s also value in using something that is an industry standard that has a small or non-existent learning curve for new employees.

My final point is that the idea of the cloud replacing SaaS is a semantic sleight of hand. Whether it’s microservices or Salesforce.com, both are software as a service. To underscore the point, Salesforce offers microservices via its Force.com unit.

What we’re seeing, in other words, isn’t the end of Software as a Service as we know it, but rather an expansion of the definition of SaaS and a vast improvement of what such services can offer. That doesn’t spell the end of a market, but may instead signal a new beginning.

The post The end of SaaS? Not so fast. appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Corporate directors and executives alike recognize that today’s pace of change continues to accelerate and that firms need to innovate to stay ahead. But are boards doing enough to support innovation, as they should? We conducted a survey of over 5,000 board members from around the world to find out.

We found that, overall, innovation does not rank as a top strategic challenge for the majority of boards. Although directors in certain industries are more aware of the threat of disruption, the widespread lack of board-level engagement in innovation processes could be a major blind spot and a potential liability.

Setting Priorities

We found that concerns about innovation fall behind other issues for most directors. Fewer than one-third (30%) of respondents to our survey see innovation as one of the top three challenges their company faces in achieving its strategic objectives, and just 21% think that technology trends are a major strategic challenge. Innovation ranks fifth, after more-conventional concerns such as attracting and retaining top talent and the regulatory environment.

Boards’ abilities to foster innovation clearly fall short when compared with their other activities. When we asked directors about the effectiveness of their board’s processes for supporting innovation, 42% rated their processes as above average or excellent. In contrast, 70% of respondents think their boards have effective processes for staying current on the company; 69% for compliance; 66% for financial planning; and 55% for risk management — although we should note that managing risks is a crucial consideration when pursuing innovation. Still, it’s telling that board members rate their boards better on risk management than on innovation.

When we examined responses by industry, we found that directors in the health care and IT and telecom industries were most likely to consider innovation a top strategic challenge for their firms. These firms also had higher-rated processes for innovation. This isn’t all that surprising given the level of innovation activity in these sectors, but directors operating in similarly disrupted sectors should take note. Only 13% of directors in the energy and utilities industry consider innovation to be a major strategic challenge, but the swift growth of renewable energy companies and such developments as the use of drones for monitoring oil and gas production suggest that no industry is impervious to the forces of innovation.

We also found that a focus on innovation tends to go hand in hand with longer-term time horizons. Companies that are organized around creating and enhancing value over the long term were more likely to have boards that prioritize innovation, as compared with companies that are primarily focused on achieving short-term results. Laying the foundation for innovation requires a forward-looking mindset throughout the firm and the board.

The effectiveness of board processes for supporting innovation is also positively correlated with overall board performance. In other words, the boards with strong innovation processes tend to be the ones that are performing well on all fronts.

Director Recruitment and Skills

In light of boards’ lackluster performance on innovation, are they proactively taking steps to address their weaknesses? Recruiting directors with technological expertise is one avenue through which boards can boost their innovative capabilities. When we asked directors which three areas of expertise they prioritized when filling their most recent open board seat, just 13% highlighted tech expertise. Instead, boards typically looked for expertise in their firms’ industry (51%), strategy (34%), and financials (30%).

Again, we found differences among industries. Just over one-fifth (22%) of boards operating in the IT and telecom industry sought tech expertise when filling their most recent board seat, higher than in any other industry. We also observed that boards of larger companies were more likely to seek new directors with technological expertise. When we drilled down, we found that boards with more members and boards that were more effective overall were also more likely to prioritize tech expertise, suggesting that boards might need to meet a certain size and performance threshold before they start branching into skills such as technology. In the words of one director, there is an “imbalance between the need to focus on governance and compliance, while the importance of innovation and disruptive influences are noted but less focused on.”

When we asked directors what they found most challenging in their role as a director, one-third (33%) reported that they struggled with keeping on top of new technologies. This proportion was similar for men (34%) and women (31%), but was much higher for older directors (39%) than for younger directors (27%). Fostering diversity in demographics is one pathway boards can use to ensure that a wide range of viewpoints and areas of expertise is represented.

How Boards Can Foster Innovation

To address the knowledge gaps and get up to speed on new initiatives within the firm, directors suggest organizing site visits and tours, participating in innovation sessions and workshops within the firm, and “doing their homework” on industry trends.

Directors should also take stock of how time is spent at board meetings and reallocate discussion time as needed. As one director noted, “We spend a lot of time on operational strategy — growth, acquisitions, etc. — [and] not much on risk, people, innovation.” Periodic reviews of board agendas can help to carve out and protect time for discussions around innovation.

Boards also need to have honest and thorough discussions about the board’s weaknesses and needs when formulating criteria for new directors. Some might even want to consider increasing their membership to ensure that they have the skills they need as a team and that they represent a wide enough array of perspectives.

About the Research

To better understand the competitive landscape, directors suggested engaging with management. They should ask such questions as, “In what areas and where will technology innovation impact our business?”; “How are you incorporating the latest customer and technology trends in your innovation strategy?”; and “How can this company devote adequate resources to innovation in its product offerings in light of debt and capital requirements?”

Finally, boards should always be checking that they have the right CEO in charge. A CEO who focuses on short-term results at the expense of creating long-term value might not be making the right decisions and investments to promote vital innovation within the firm.

We know we have to align our marketing and sales processes with the customer buying journey.  That used to be simple when we considered the buying journey to be relatively linear.  However, current Gartner research shows a completely different picture of the customer buying journey, one that can only be characterized as “Chaotic.”

How do we deal with the chaotic buying journey?  Particularly, when this journey is unique for each customer and dynamic?  How do we layer the fact that during this journey,  customers will seek information through multiple channels, simultaneously?

Some posit, we have to provide very granular, relevant information, intersecting the customer at any point, with just the right information, available through multiple channels, targeting the right person, at the right time.  The term “buyer enablement” is used, much like we think of sales enablement.  Just like sales enablement, if we provide the right content, training, systems, tools, we can enable the buyer to navigate the process (theoretically, that’s what sales enablement is supposed to do.).

Except the sales enablement model works on a completely different premise.  It assumes, the sales person will be selling the same solution(s) repeatedly.  It leverages the fact the sales person sees similar situations, daily, learning and improving each time they engage customers, getting coaching to help them improve and improves with practice and coaching is critical to the sales enablement model.

We know a sales person using the best sales enablement tools (content, training, etc) is going to struggle in the very first instance of trying to sell whatever it is they are selling, they need lots of times at bat and practice.

But buyers are different, they don’t buy frequently, they don’t get the chance to learn and improve with successive iterations of buying, unless they are in procurement.  So a model based on a sales enablement model is highly unlikely to be effective.  In fact it has a danger of confusing buyers even more.  Imagine everyone on the short list of considerations implements their own buyer enablement model, each well intended, but inundating the customer with more and more information.  Do we have a risk of making things more complicated or are we helping simplify the buying process?

Another concern I have with the concept of the “chaotic buying process,” is why should buyers and sellers accept this?  Why do we build our engagement process around the principle, “it is what it is, so we just have to deal with it….”

We don’t manage chaos/complexity by accepting it.  We, whether we are buyers or sellers, need to look to simplifying the journey.  Since buyers aren’t buying everyday, it’s tough for them to do this.

This is where sellers can create tremendous value for buyers.  Recognizing the natural dynamics of the customer buying process is to become chaotic, sellers can offer a lot of guidance to help customers reduce that chaos, to manage, more effectively the journey they are on.

Rather than becoming “just in time information concierges,” supporting the customer in their chaotic buying process, the real job of the sales person is to help remove the complexity and chaos, enabling the customer to manage their journey more effectively.  Perhaps, with sales help, the customer journey can start looking less chaotic.

When we think of Fall, many of us think cooler weather, earlier sunsets, and apple picking. But for the majority of small business and nonprofits, this time is used to prepare for and launch into the race towards year-end goals.

Timing is everything, which is why it is important to take this time to really develop strong relationships with your customers and supporters. If you wait too long to build this trust, it could be too late to affect your year-end goals.

The importance of relationships

“Would you mind giving me a ride to the airport?”

The answer to this question relies on one very important factor—who’s asking?

Your reply to a complete stranger is going to be different than the reply to a long-time friend.

It’s the nature of the relationship that colors the response and the actions you take.

The better the relationship, the easier it is to say, “Yes!”

The same is true for email marketing. When you allow your email contacts to get to know, like, and trust you, over time you’ll find yourself with more relationships that lead to, “Yes.” This means repeat purchases, referrals, and long-time loyalty.

Let’s take a look at how to make the most of your email marketing relationships so you can grow your organization.

Understanding where email fits in

Many online relationships begin on a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter. Each social network offers its own strengths. And these networks are great because of the social word-of-mouth that happens when you’re engaging with your connections. This engagement does two things:

1. Strengthens relationships with your existing audience

2. Puts you in front of a new audience

Both good things, but due to the nature of these networks, you don’t have much control over who sees your updates or even when they see them. Not to mention these connections aren’t necessarily yours. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and any other network can make changes that impact your ability to connect. And in a worst-case scenario, the social networking site could go away completely, which means you’re left with nothing.

This is why you should always be looking to eventually move these social connections to your own turf, your email marketing list. Now you control the experience and you don’t need to worry about losing these connections because they’re your contacts. The only way you can lose them is if they unsubscribe.

How to entice social connections to become email contacts

In most cases, you’ll want to offer some type of free resource on your website in exchange for an email address. This could be a special report, a guide, behind the scenes information, or some type of special discount for email subscribers. Choose something that gives immediate value to your email subscribers. And in order to keep them on your list long term, you’ll want to think about how you can consistently deliver information that keeps them engaged so they want to come back for more.

Treat your email contacts special

Chances are you already provide a great experience for your customers or supporters when you’re face-to-face. Let email marketing extend that experience. When someone takes that step to subscribe they’re saying, “I’d like to get to know you better.” They’ve invited you into their inbox. You don’t want to abuse that relationship by constantly promoting your products and services.

Create a compelling newsletter

You want to create a newsletter with content your subscribers aren’t going to get anywhere else. What this information depends entirely on your industry, your company goals, and what will move your readers to action. A great rule of thumb is to create relevant content your readers will find interesting, useful, or otherwise entertaining. Stuff that could stand on its own even if you had nothing to promote.

Over the long term, you’ll build a stronger connection

As the connection with your subscribers grows, so does the likelihood of them connecting with your business or organization. And the benefits of this connection can come in many forms, possible collaborations, new opportunities, people spreading the word about you, and gaining new and repeat customers, donors, or volunteers.

Don’t underestimate the power of email marketing relationships

• Email marketing allows you to control the message, when it goes out, and who receives it.
• Subscribers have actively made a decision to give you permission to contact them which means they’re interested in what you’re offering.
• You’re able to build stronger relationships with people, and people do business with or help people they know, like and trust.

Just remember…

Someone has made the choice to join your contact list. They’ve given you their email address and most importantly, they’ve agreed to give you their attention. That attention can prove invaluable if the relationship is treated with respect.

So if you work hard at building these relationships now, you’ll not only gain more customers and supporters, but you might even be able to get a ride to the airport next time you need one.

Ready to get started?

Kick-off this season by building these relationships and you’ll be able to finish out the year strong. It’s time to get back to business with email marketing.

Lalmch / Pixabay

A study of over 100 subscription businesses found that companies that had customer success teams experienced 24 percent less churn than those without them.

It makes sense. If your customers are achieving the desired results with your product or service, they are less likely to stray.
Whatever your business model, subscription or otherwise, customer loyalty is essential for producing a revenue stream that doesn’t dry up. That’s because research shows 71 percent of B2B customers are at risk of switching vendors.

Given these statistics, it’s not surprising that many companies focus their customer success programs on increasing loyalty. And while building loyalty bears fruit by lengthening the average customer lifetime, there’s a growth avenue that businesses often ignore. That’s the opportunity to increase annual sales with accounts by cross-selling and upselling. If you use these techniques with the goal of helping your customers to solve problems, you will boost loyalty and solidify your relationships.

Creating the Customer Success Program
To ensure customers are accomplishing their goals and deriving full value from your products and services, you can build a team that is solely responsible for this objective. Alternatively, you fold the responsibility into those of your inside sales team. If you don’t have the resources to build a customer success program internally, or the function does not fit comfortably in your organizational structure, you might want to outsource it.

Elements of a Customer Success Program
An effective way to help your customers to thrive is to have inside salespeople make courtesy calls to them on a regular basis. Let your business’ needs dictate the frequency of those contacts.

Here’s how such customer calls can help businesses:

• Problem Resolution

Inside salespeople may discover clients are battling with software glitches, machine malfunctions or late deliveries. They can raise such issues with the departments responsible for them and ensure they are addressed.
You may think these issues fall within the charter of the customer support team. However, while this team may know about them, it’s entirely possible they gave the customer the runaround or only provided a partial fix. This sometimes happens because customer support is often rewarded based on the number of tickets they close out, not for growing customer revenues. This compensation structure may lead them to take a Band-Aid approach. On the other hand, an inside sales group with incentives based on customer growth is more likely to be interested in supporting a long-term healthy customer relationship.
Another scenario is that the client may not have even called your company to voice their concerns. By reaching out, your business can be proactive in resolving issues rather than allowing them to fester.

• Value Enhancement

Even if a customer is completely satisfied, if he or she is unaware of a feature or does not know how to use a useful function, they may not fully appreciate the product.
Thus, reps can become value-added partners, offering demos, tutorials and informative content to aid in product use, showing clients how to get the most out of your products.

• Upselling

Any business that fails to upsell current customers is effectively leaving money on the table. After all, it’s easier to sell to an existing account than a new one.
Upselling is such an effective tactic that many companies now bundle their services in pricing packages to make choices simple — the good-better-best strategy. The fully-loaded package comes with the most features and the highest price. These packages naturally pave the path to upselling.
You don’t want to force your rep to upsell during every customer interaction. However, when they take on a consultative role to help solve problems, opportunities arise naturally. Perhaps during the conversation, the rep discovers that a company needs some features of their SaaS solution customized. Their package doesn’t allow that, but an upgraded one gives them all the customization they need.

• Cross-selling

It’s easy to understand cross-selling if you look to the consumer world of Amazon. Their algorithms look at your purchases, compare them to those of other consumers and come up with suggestions based on their data. You see the phrase “You might like…”
Like Amazon, you should already have an idea of which of your products tend to work best together. When your inside sales reps talk with customers, they can ask questions to see whether clients might benefit from such complementary products. If so, recommending them becomes a service to your customers rather than a sales pitch.

• Referral Selling

If your solution can be utilized in different departments or functions within a company, why not leverage your current relationships and ask them to refer you to the other stakeholders? Of course, you need to first have a happy customer, otherwise they will think you are crazy for asking. If your company is already on the books as a vendor and if you can solve a pain or fill a need for another department, it’s a “no brainer”!

• Relationship Building

When you take the long-term view of customer relationships, always working to help them achieve their goals, you’re likely to build a strong bond. Becoming a trusted partner is essential for customer loyalty and growth.

• Keeping Data and Clients Up to Date

An important side-benefit to your inside sales reps’ outreach is that they are frequently in touch with customers. That means they are aware when John Smith leaves or receives a promotion and Gina Duncan fills his spot.
Not only can they update the database, but also they can discover whether John brought Gina up to speed on why he invested in your company’s solution. If not, your reps can fill her in on his rationale.
As you can see, focusing on the retention and growth of current customers ensures the health of your long-term revenues. It helps you ensure that their problems are resolved, they are receiving the full value of your products, and they are maximizing the use of your products and services to meet their needs. All the time, you’re strengthening your relationships and ensuring an up-to-date, accurate database.

Every day, millions of outreach emails are sent by entrepreneurs and small businesses around the world. In fact, I have a bunch sitting unopened in my inbox right now. The sender is hoping to catch my attention, so we can work together in a way that grows their business. But here’s the cold, hard truth: I won’t reply to the majority of these messages. I’ll put most in my trash folder.

The Most Important Lesson of Sending Outreach Emails

When I first started out in sales 15 years ago, my outreach emails were also ineffective at driving action. I was wasting my time writing messages that ended up in people’s trash folders. That was, until I learned one important lesson: The true goal of any email outreach is to build meaningful relationships with the person you’re hoping to contact. It isn’t to bombard them with offers until they magically decide to purchase from or collaborate with you. Once I realized this, my outreach emails started to get opened. Since then, I’ve scored business opportunities with everyone from startup founders to Fortune 500 executives. I’ve figured out what works and what doesn’t. That’s why I put together relationship-building email templates inside our product at Close.io. These templates help hundreds of thousands of sales professionals increase their open rates, start more conversations, and drive more sales. So whether you’re looking to secure a spot as a contributor for a major online publication, book yourself on someone else’s podcast, or land your next big client, outreach emails are a necessity in today’s business world. Follow my 5 tips below to learn how to effectively write them so they don’t end up in someone’s trash folder. (Heads up: An outreach email is different than email marketing. You send an outreach email to a single recipient who has no prior relationship with you. Email marketing, on the other hand, is a message sent to a mass audience that has opted-in to receive your content.)

1. Use mutual connections

Did you know that 92 percent of people trust referrals and recommendations that come from people they know? When sending outreach emails, remember that you’re probably not the only one emailing with a similar request. (Let alone the only one pitching them that very same day.) So whenever possible, leverage your personal or professional connections who have a more direct relationship with your intended recipient. Then, ask them to make an introduction. I recommend researching your recipient’s LinkedIn profile to find mutual connections. You can also follow them on Twitter to see if you have any followers in common. If they have a blog, check out who contributes as a guest. If they have a podcast, see who they’ve interviewed. You may just uncover a common connection. You’re not always going to have a mutual connection that can just fire off a quick intro, so look to see who you might build connections with that could influence your target recipient.

2. Write the world’s most intriguing subject lines

Surprisingly, 47 percent of people decide whether or not an email is worth reading based on the subject line alone. At most, you have a little over a second to make them want to open your message. Try to create as much intrigue as possible. You want your reader to think, “Really? Why?” as soon as they read your subject line. While there are a variety of ways you can do this, in my experience the easiest way to create intrigue is to either challenge a commonly held belief they may have, or simply ask them a question. Here are several examples of effective, intriguing subject lines:

• Interested in being on my podcast, [first name]?
• Can I feature you in an upcoming blog post?
• Are you looking for speakers for [name of event]?
• Why I think you’re the perfect person for my next podcast
• I want to run an idea by you, [first name]
• Question for you, [first name]…
• I surveyed my audience, and they asked for you…
• I just had [name of influential person] on my show… care to jump on as well?

Strive to make your subject line as specific and personal as possible to show you’ve done your homework. Even more importantly, make sure your subject line reflects what the reader will find inside. This is by far one of the easiest ways to establish trust with your prospect. Without that foundation of mutual respect, nothing else is likely to materialize with the relationship.

3. Personalize your email and get to the point quickly

When sending outreach emails, remember that you’re hoping to speak with one specific person, which means you want to personalize your pitch as much as possible. In my own inbox, I always see emails with paragraphs of text about the company’s mission and values, and why they’d be so perfect to work with. The reality is that most professionals don’t care about that—and they have no reason to. The only thing prospects care about is how you can help them. For example, if you want to secure someone on your blog, podcast or webinar, be sure to include the following in your outreach email:

• Introduction
• Why you’re reaching out to them (what type of partnership or opportunity are you pursuing?)
• What’s in it for them (e.g., How many readers will see their blog post on your website; How many leads they can expect by being a guest on your webinar or podcast)
• How you’ll help promote them and their business throughout the partnership
• Why your audience is the right fit for them.
• Make the ask

If you want to secure a spot on someone else’s blog, podcast or webinar, be sure to include the following in your outreach email:

• Introduction
• Why you’re reaching out to them (what type of partnership or opportunity are you pursuing?)
• What value you can provide to their audience (e.g., education, service, products, etc.)
• Why you have the right experience to be featured on their site or show (e.g., give examples of other blogs, podcasts or webinars you’ve contributed to in the past)
• Make the ask

If you want to tell someone about your business, products, or services, be sure to include the following in your email:

• Introduction
• Why you’re reaching out to them
• Show you’ve done your research (highlight something you both have in common, like an alma mater or a past work colleague, or highlight something they’ve worked on recently that you enjoyed)
• Make the ask

Keep your email short and to the point. Your prospect is busy. Make your pitch concise and stick with just the essentials they need to know upfront. That way, they can make a quick decision about whether they need what you’re offering.

4. Nurture ALL contacts

One of the most frustrating aspects of email outreach is deciding your best course of action when a recipient doesn’t engage with your messages. The reasons for a recipient dropping off the map could be numerous — maybe they don’t have the time right now, they just never bothered to reply, or they’re simply not interested and haven’t explicitly told you that. Whatever the reason, you may be tempted to shrug your shoulders, write them off in order to pursue a new opportunity, and never follow up with them again. But that’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make. According to a Rutgers University study of 224 executive MBA students who reached out to dormant connections—people they hadn’t spoken to in at least three years—for help with an important project, researchers found that not only were the dormant contacts useful, but they were often more helpful than active connections. The study further suggests that the novelty of seeing an old friend, previous co-worker or former classmate pop back into your inbox, tends to spur people into taking quicker (and more enthusiastic) action than with existing relationships that already have an ongoing value exchange. This means you shouldn’t abandon an opportunity as soon as they stop replying to your messages or even after they say they’re not interested at this time. Instead, take a relationship selling approach and keep the opportunity on file for quarterly check-ins. Just because someone says, ‘Not right now’ or drops off the radar today, doesn’t mean they won’t be a good fit a few months down the line. Since the last time you got in touch, their circumstances (or yours) may have changed, and you may be able to better address their past objections. Before you begin sending outreach emails to every dormant connection you have, consider the fact that they might not remember you from that one conversation you had over a year ago. Treat them as a new prospect again. Always begin your reconnection email with a quick reminder of how you met or where you worked or collaborated together. Establish a clear context around why you’re reaching out today.

5. Use other channels beyond email

Despite the fact that 86 percent of business professionals prefer to use email when they communicate for business-related purposes, be wary of relying on email too much in your outreach. For some people, email might not be their preferred channel of communication and you’ll have a better chance of getting their attention if you speak to them over the phone, in person, or on social networks like LinkedIn or Twitter. If your prospect doesn’t respond to email, try one of the following:

• Follow them on Twitter and send them a DM.
• Send them a message on LinkedIn.
• Private message them on Facebook.

Start by introducing yourself and what you do. Ask them a question, or comment about something they recently worked on. This helps create common ground and trust, and sets you up for further conversations. When it comes to bigger opportunities, like complex co-marketing partnerships, there’s typically a lot more back and forth that occurs. In this scenario, phone calls may be much more effective at building trust and securing the opportunity. Use email for following up on conversations and nudging a prospect closer to locking in the opportunity.

The key to successful email outreach

Targeted email outreach is an effective way to create and nurture opportunities that can help you grow your business to new levels. The key to successful email outreach is to focus on creating conversations and building relationships without the immediate expectation of a quick transaction. If you can do this, you’re well on your way to email outreach success.

In a world where Netflix gives you recommendations for shows you’ll love, and Spotify gives you ‘Discover weekly’ playlists, it’s about time B2B marketers and salespeople took personalisation seriously.

That means businesses need to lean more on advanced technology and smarter buyer insights to engage modern B2B sales prospects. However, many businesses are still using old, ineffective methods that are not only wasting time, but could be pushing potential customers away. Today, buyers have no patience for generic pitches at inconvenient times. They want to do the research themselves. They want to be helped, not sold to. And they want content to help them make their decision.

Buyers want sales and marketing experiences that are focused on them, not you.

Interruption vs permission

In a post-GDPR, post-Cambridge Analytica debacle world, it has become more difficult for interruptive marketing and salespeople to be taken seriously. Not only are we bombarded with thousands of messages every day, but Salesforce research found that 85% of prospects and customers are dissatisfied with their on-the-phone sales experiences. How many times have you picked up the phone to a cold caller, to very quickly find out that the product does not match your needs at all and the seller has very clearly not done their research?

Buyers can give you permission to be contacted – not just literally through opting in – but by repeatedly engaging with your brand and content, there’s clearly some sort of intent. Buyers are more educated than ever before, and are likely to Google search, sign up to a newsletter, and look up your company’s social media accounts before they buy. In fact, Google research shows that 71% of B2B researchers start their research with a generic search, and they do 12 searches on average prior to engaging on a specific brand’s site.

The responsibility of sales and marketing

Personalising the user journey is both the responsibility of sales and marketing. By using a powerful CRM, businesses can avoid alienating and confusing leads and prospects, and offer them content, resources, and a sales approach that tackles the buyer’s pain points and makes it clear that your business offers the solution.

65% of business buyers say they’d switch brands if a company didn’t make efforts to personalise their communications. That’s a hell of a lot. And it’s proof that B2B buyers don’t just like a personalised experience – they demand it. And technology, strategy, and data enable it.

Take a look at our infographic below to see what prospects and buyers want from their sales and marketing experience, and what they usually receive.

Image source

After speaking at a conference recently, a sales manager approached me to say how his company is seen as the premier company in their industry for their quality and service.  He went on to say how everyone loved them, and then he dropped the bombshell.  He said the big reason they were the leader was because they would cut their price to match any competitor’s price.  With that statement, I lost it!

My response to him was, “If you’re the leader in service and quality, then why do you have to cut your price to match everyone else?”  His response shocked me even more.  He said, “If we didn’t cut our price, then we’d lose a lot of business very quickly.” With that statement he proved that his statement about quality and service was a sham.

If you’re the leader, then act like the leader and lead with your pricing, and that means no discounts!  People will pay for quality. In the end they don’t want cheap prices. They want solutions to their problems.

Check out this video where I talk about how the value you offer will determine the price you get:

Sales leaders don’t discount!  What part of this do you not understand?  Leadership commands a premium price!   Clearly this sales manager’s company was not the leader he thought they were.  If they were, then he wouldn’t have to be matching every other price in the marketplace.

Being a sales leader is not just saying the words; it’s doing the actions that go along with it.  If you can’t back up your sales leadership beliefs with prices that go with it, then guess what?  You’re not a sales leader.

Sales leadership is not for everyone. If was a sales leader, who would they be leading?

Leadership is about setting the standards for the industry. It’s about being on the front end of impacting the marketplace.  Leadership is about people coming together throughout the supply chain to create superior outcomes.  For those who do that, your customers will pay full price and many times they will pay a premium.  They’ll do this for one simple reason. They know in the end it’s not the price one pays for something, but rather it’s the value one receives from what they buy that determines the real outcome.

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

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

No one can ignore the power of social media in creating and sustaining a successful business. The problem is that there are so many different platforms, and managing all of them requires a team that most small business owners cannot afford.

The good news is that there are tools for small business social media management which are inexpensive and easy to set up. Read on to find out what your options are and choose the one that’s most appropriate for your business needs.

Buffer

When you want to share some exciting news about your business, or a photo or video, it can be incredibly time consuming to post it on each individual platform, like Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter. Buffer is a great resource that can automatically share content on a multitude of platforms, and offers both free and paid plans.

You can add all of the content at a time that is convenient for you, such as early morning or evening, and then create a schedule to stagger the posts to be shared at optimal times. After the content has been shared, Buffer will offer analytics of how well each post performed.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a great resource to help you with social media that may take may take some time to learn to navigate, but it’s well worth it. Although there are limited free features, you will have to pay for most services.

Hootsuite lets you to add content and store it in their Cloud, that will allow your team to share it when the time comes. However, the tool’s main benefit is its comprehensive analytics, which allows you to analyze conversations and results across channels and compare them. You can even utilize demographics to filter conversations about your brand by location, language, etc.

Agorapulse

Calling itself a Hootsuite alternative, Agorapulse offers some great features. It analyzes your social media platforms 24/7 and alerts you in real time when something needs your attention. Plus, you have the ability to automate the moderation process by creating certain rules.

This tool helps you maintain good relationships with your audience by storing all of the interactions you have had with your followers, such as their comments, likes and messages.

Plus, you can compare your page to that of your competitors to give you an idea of what is working or not for them and help you improve your social media reach.

Feedly

The main point of creating social media pages is to engage with your target audience. However, most businesses don’t have enough information to come up with several posts a day, and different ones across various platforms at that! However, that is what’s needed to keep the public interested.

An easy way to fix this challenge is to share other interesting and relevant content that your followers would enjoy. This is where Feedly comes in—instead of subscribing to dozens of other sites or platforms and perusing their content, this Feed Reader collects content from various sites and presents it to you in an easy to read format. You can then instantly share it on your social media!

There are many great tools and resources that can take your social media management to the next level and help you engage with current and potential customers. The truth is that it may take a financial investment to set up accounts with some of these resources, which is why a small business loan can help. IOU Financial is committed to helping small businesses grow and thrive; contact us today to learn more.

At SalesLoft, we love to look at data to help our customers succeed and to hone our own sales engagement processes. Mostly, we look at big data, such as our analysis of 200 million sales interactions to optimize cadence design.

However, we also look at ‘regular data,’ in this case our internal operational data, to understand what is working and what is not.

Recently, we got curious about email response rates by touch count.

To understand this concept, we pulled all email touches sent by our sales development representatives (SDRs) and new business sales executives (SEs) over the past 12 months. We counted an email as a 1st email touch if no emails were sent by a given SDR or SE in the prior 35 days. (At SalesLoft, you lose the account if you don’t engage an account at least once in a 30 day period. We also impose limits to the number of accounts each sales professional can own so that SDRs and SEs do not “camp” on accounts.)

Two of the questions we had:

1. Might touch #2 have a higher response rate than touch #1 since the prospect has been warmed up by the 1st email and /or by other engagement?
2. How rapidly do response rates fall off?

Here is what we found.

Email reply rates vary widely based on context – prospect personas, calls-to-action, etc. Therefore, the graph above shows response rates relative to the response rate of the 1st email touch.

To make this more concrete, consider the following example:

Email #1 response rate = 20%
Email # 2 response rate = 13.4% (67% of 20% = 13.4%)
Email #3 response rate = 10% (50% of 20% = 10%)
And so on…

In case you are worried about your own response rates, the 20% number we used in this example is an arbitrarily high number for outbound prospecting emails. After all, most studies show that open rates, inclusive of emails sent to skeptical prospects and warm clients, hover between 20% and 30. Response rates are, of course, much lower than open rates.

Question 1: Might email #2 have a higher response rate than email #1 since the prospect has been warmed up by the 1st email and /or by other engagement?

The answer to the first question we posed is that response rates drop by a third from email #1 to email #2. This does not mean that warming prospects up with non-email touches does not matter. It just means it is very unlikely that one can warm someone up so much that email #2 reply rates exceed those of email #1.

In the data, you’ll also notice ranges of touches with similar relative response rates. Take touches #3 and #4 which are both 50% of email #1. In our data, the rates for touches #3 and #4 were not statistically different from each other but were statistically different from touch #2 and from touches #5 and #6.

Question 2: How rapidly do response rates fall off?

On the second question, response rates, as expected, continue to fall with more and more touches. By the 28th touch, the reply rate drops to 14% of the reply rate experienced in touch #1. In our arbitrary example, the reply rate would decay from 20% for touch #1 to 2.8% for touch #28.

In case you are thinking, “Holy cow, 28 email touches! Really?” the answer is yes, we do sometimes execute long duration personalized nurture campaigns. If one sent 28 emails over a short duration, you’d have a lot of angry prospects opting out and bashing you on social media.

The ultimate value of this sort of data is in predictive modeling. Let’s say you did a 5-touch campaign to 100 clean email addresses with an initial (again arbitrarily high) response rate of 20%.

As Table 1 shows, the unique person response rate for the 5-touch email campaign is 48.6%.

Since that feels high (it is), let’s take this analysis one level further and model the unique person response rate for a 5-touch campaign. To do that, we simply recalculated the above table for various email #1 response rates.

Figure 2: Expected unique person response rate to 5-touch email campaign vs email 1 reply rate

Here is what the chart above says. As we learned before, if you run a 5-touch email campaign where the 1st email had a 20% response rate, then you would expect a 48.6% unique person rate based on unique people engaged. If email #1 instead had a 10% reply rate, then you’d expect 27 people to reply. Finally, if email #1 had a 1% reply rate, then you’d expect just 3 people to respond.

This article simply focuses on email campaign reply rates. With sales engagement platforms like SalesLoft, you’ll soon be able to get predictive reply rates for multi-touch, multi-channel campaigns based not only on your data but also on the anonymized data of other other customers.

Ultimately, sales engagement platforms will recommend modifications to your language and cadence structure to optimize your overall reply rates.

If this all seems a little rocket-sciency, then your SalesLoft sales, implementation, and customer success team are “standing by” to help you optimize your cadences.

Looking for more information about best practices and examples for email cadences? Don’t miss our new eBook, Best Practices & Benchmarks for Sales Cadences.

The post Sales Email Response Rates By Touch Count appeared first on SalesLoft.

This xkcd comic reminds me of the way I make up my mind about things, and also how easy it is for other people to convince me to change my mind based on their curve-fitting biases.

This post is not a dry feature-by-feature comparison, nor does it include a winner-take-all verdict. Your business won’t benefit from either of those things.

Instead, we’re comparing Mixpanel and Google Analytics in the terms that drive business growth—identifying the core use cases for each tool and the business problems they solve, while highlighting the features that make it possible.

Anything else is merely a list of data points. That’s as useful as analytics without analysts: troves of data but no actionable insights.

The core use cases

• Google Analytics is the standard for measuring acquisition—identifying the sources of traffic to your website or app. Google Analytics also tracks on-site behavior through events and goals. It does not, however, de-anonymize data. User ID tracking allows you to track the behavior of individual users, but their identities remain unknown.
• Mixpanel, in many ways, picks up where Google Analytics leaves off. It has robust, user-centered tracking that connects company CRMs to the online behaviors of real people—and enables you to send targeted messages to them, at a group or individual level. Mixpanel’s event-based tracking is fundamentally different than the Google Analytics pageview model.

Google Analytics switched its default metric from “sessions” to “users” in 2018, mirroring Mixpanel’s emphasis on users over pageviews.

Most businesses, even Mixpanel’s paying customers, retain Google Analytics. It’s free, after all, and, at the very least, offers the chance to corroborate data across two platforms.

• When Google Analytics makes the most sense: If your business relies on its website solely for marketing purposes—to attract visitors and generate leads—Google Analytics provides most of your actionable data. You’ll be able to see which channels (paid, organic, social, etc.) have the highest conversion rate and identify the content that earns the most interest from your target audience.
• When Mixpanel makes the most sense: If your website or app is your product, however, Mixpanel offers the granular detail that’s essential for monitoring user behavior. You’ll be able to see which acquisition channels are best for long-term retention or lifetime value, not simply those that drive initial conversions.
• When it could go either way: Other companies—like ecommerce sites selling physical products—may straddle the use-case gap. The size of their business, the number of products, the length of the buying cycle, and other variables may determine whether Mixpanel can deliver a strong ROI.

In the end, the more user data you have to push into Mixpanel—and the more that data shapes your business decisions—the more value you’ll extract from it.

The business problems that Google Analytics and Mixpanel solve

Hundreds of user reviews of both platforms on G2 Crowd reveal the key benefits—and shortcomings—of each. (Image source)

Acquisition

1. “We don’t know where our traffic is coming from.”

G2 Crowd, a business technology review site, has almost 3,000 reviews of Google Analytics. When we analyzed all of them, the patterns were easy to spot, one phrase above all others: “…traffic is coming from.”

That phrase alone—there were other, similar ones, too—appeared 53 times. Google Analytics excels at revealing your traffic sources. In the words of hundreds of reviewers, Google Analytics was essential to “identify channels,” “track campaigns,” and monitor “traffic flow.”

“Google Analytics is definitely better at measuring traffic,” noted Dan McGaw, the founder and CMO of Effin Amazing. Other digital marketing experts I asked seconded his opinion. Google’s dominance of the ad market has bolstered its primacy for acquisition metrics—integrations with Google Ads (search and display) are comprehensive and seamless.

Mixpanel also tracks acquisition sources but, in its tracking and reporting, emphasizes what those users do, not the raw visibility of web pages. As Mixpanel’s Aaron Krivitzky explained:

[Cost per Acquisition] and [Cost per Click] are important, but they tell you nothing about user retention, they tell you nothing about lifetime value, and they tell you nothing about the actual end-user sentiment, behaviors, or experience.

For high-traffic sites or short-lived apps, the need to understand real-time acquisition paths and performance offers a point of separation between the two tools.

2. “We need to know how our site (or app) is performing right now.”

A small subset of businesses may have unique acquisition strategies that depend on real-time adjustments to copy, design, or resource allocation. All Mixpanel reporting is real-time; Google Analytics has real-time reports that, after a few hours, filter into core reports.

Fully integrated, real-time access to data has potential benefits for large media sites:

• The Huffington Post tests multiple headlines for articles. After a few minutes of data—a meaningful amount, given the site’s traffic volume—they discard the less-popular headline.
• Real-time analytics help streaming video services shift resources based on demand. If, say, a season finale or critical moment in a sporting event risks overwhelming servers, real-time analytics can tip off technical teams to the need before issues affect users.

Real-time reporting can also help large ecommerce companies manage their products. “Mainly it’s an inventory issue,” according to Steve Kurniawan of Nine Peaks Media, “although it can also help other things like tracking product deliveries and negative reviews.”

There are other use cases, too, such as app developers seeking to maximize the value of users for a viral game with a lifespan of days or weeks. Real-time data can validate near-constant changes to keep users engaged.

Still, the use-cases for real-time reporting are limited. For most Mixpanel users, the platform’s most meaningful feature is its ability to tie actual prospect and customer data to online behavior, providing greater insight into the experiences that affect engagement, conversion, and retention.

Engagement, conversion, and retention

3. “We can’t connect analytics data to our real-life customers.”

“Mixpanel is a great tool for tracking user behavior and acting on it,” affirmed McGaw. Realizing those core benefits—tracking and acting—requires stitching together online actions at two levels:

• From device to device. Google Analytics has cross-device tracking. However, its system relies on cookies and User IDs, and includes only those “who have opted in to personalized advertising.” For companies with a SaaS platform or app, that system may not be enough. In McGaw’s experience, “If you have a web app and mobile app, Google Analytics is pretty shitty at tying those users together.”
• From user to human. Google Analytics’ User ID policy prevents this second connection, providing the sharpest break between its capabilities and those of Mixpanel. By connecting companies’ user data to its analytics, Mixpanel can build analytics cohorts based on CRM data and push messages to high-value segments.

What do these differences look like in the real world? Saas consultant Sid Bharath gave an example:

Let’s say Google Analytics shows that paid search has the highest conversion rate. With this data alone, it seems like you should double down on paid search.

However, if you had Mixpanel in there, you could see how those converters interacted with your software. So you could filter by paid traffic, and it may show that these customers actually churn at a much higher rate, or they’re not as engaged as organic customers.

At Mixpanel, Krivitzky has seen potential clients come to him with similar business needs: “How do my end-users use my app? Which features are sticky? How common is X use case versus Y?”

In addition to identifying high-value cohorts, Mixpanel also lets businesses send targeted messages to those same users—a benefit noted regularly across more than 200 product reviews from G2 Crowd. “With Mixpanel’s cross-device marketing automation suite,” noted McGaw, “You can email, text, push, and pop up across devices to provide a pretty amazing experience.”

Mixpanel allows businesses to send messages to real people based on online behaviors.

4. “We don’t understand our customer journey well.”

Both Google Analytics and Mixpanel offer conversion funnels. Mixpanel funnels—based on feedback from experts and hundreds of reviews—are more user-friendly to create and more granular in their segmentation. (Notably, Mixpanel funnels also apply retroactively to data.)

Google Analytics funnels and Behavior Flow visualizations lack the customization of Mixpanel funnels, which allow segmentation by user characteristics.

Creating segmented user groups based on broad demographic data is possible in Google Analytics; however, it requires applying a segment to the Funnel Visualization, rather than embedding that segment in the funnel itself.

Mixpanel users can set up custom funnels by selecting any series of user behaviors.

The customization and comparative intuitiveness of Mixpanel funnels—which can be set up simply by defining a series of steps—were a common highlight in user reviews:

“Easy ability to create funnels”

“Easy to set up events and funnels”

“Easy to set up powerful user funnels”

“Easy to understand user interface for funneling”

In contrast, Funnel Visualizations and Behavior Flows in Google Analytics were a frequent frustration: “Trying to set up goal funnels is an exercise in mania.”

Google Analytics funnels are notoriously difficult to set up and interpret.

The difference between technical capacity and ease of implementation is not trivial. It speaks to the importance of actually using analytics tools—not just having access to the data within them—and hints at some of the data-centric problems the C-suite often looks to solve.

C-suite level

5. “We don’t know the impact of each marketing channel.”

Cross-channel attribution extends beyond first and last clicks. For large organizations, stronger attribution can help demonstrate the ROI—or lack thereof—for multi-million-dollar television campaigns or in-store promotions.

The Google Analytics 360 Suite offers extensive attribution tracking. “Some clients ask us to design and implement marketing attribution models for them,” recounted Kurniawan. “In these cases, we use Google Analytics 360 Suite, which offers an amazing custom marketing attribution feature.”

In contrast to standard Google Analytics, which uses a last non-direct click attribution—thereby attributing 100% of the conversion to some online source—Google Analytics 360 accounts for television ads’ impact on online behavior and also folds in-store purchases into conversion data (crediting online sources for offline purchases).

That benefit comes at a cost—starting at $150,000 per year. For many organizations, no matter how accurate the insights, the ROI simply isn’t there. (Mixpanel, whose paid version starts at $999 per year, charges by the number of data points tracked; costs can quickly scale into a four-figure monthly fee, especially for SaaS or app companies that offer freemium models.)

6. “We need to make data collection more efficient.”

In some cases, the technical capacities of Google Analytics and Mixpanel are similar. The value of one tool over the other depends on the technical abilities of those using the platform.

Several Mixpanel users—in in-house and agency settings—viewed the user-friendly components of its analysis as true cost savings because they reduced the amount of human labor necessary to create and interpret reports.

Nishank Khanna, the CMO of Clarify Capital, explained why they added Mixpanel to their analytics suite:

We were using Google Analytics for years, until it became a chore to track custom event-driven data. As our business needs for analytics grew more sophisticated, we needed to easily define events to track, ensuring a flexibility that promotes focused and meaningful analytics.

We found that in Mixpanel, and the time saved was day and night.

Khanna’s experience wasn’t unique. As Kurniawan confirmed, the ease of implementation is, at times, more important than the technical differences:

Technically, for event tracking versus pageview tracking, both Mixpanel and Google Analytics can do them very well given enough effort. So it’s a matter of ease of use: Setting up event tracking is significantly easier on Mixpanel opposed to Google Analytics.

In our case, since we set up marketing systems including analytics for clients, some (well, most) of them are not tech savvy. Ease of implementation is very important so we don’t have to go back and forth often.

Throughout user reviews for both products, definitions of “easy” and “hard” varied. Complicating matters, an “easy” setup often meant easy data collection—not easy interpretation.

The paradox was clear. Some Mixpanel reviewers lauded its easy setup; others lamented its challenges. Google Analytics was “great if you have no experience” but also only useful “if you have experience.” Just because you can gather data quickly doesn’t mean you’ll know what to do with it.

No product feature or technical capability can replace human interpretation, at least not yet. Both Google Analytics and Mixpanel have rolled out systems to automatically push alerts or pull insights from their platforms.

Mixpanel (left) and Google Analytics (right) have both rolled out automated alerts to make data more accessible.

Conclusion

“Mixpanel is most valuable for companies who need to track revenue over a long period of time, or really know how their users use their product,” summarized McGaw.

In other words, What percentage of your business decisions are driven by things that happen after a website visit or form fill?

If the stopping point in Google Analytics is only the midpoint (or less) for your customers’ online experience, Mixpanel can extend and deepen the analytics portrait—tracing individual users or cohorts all the way back to their initial interaction.

Still, the question of which analytics platform to use doesn’t hinge on these two alone. Others, like Amplitude, Kissmetrics, and Heap, also gather and aggregate user and product data.

All require an investment beyond the tool itself—one in human capital—to translate data into the product improvements and user satisfaction that make analytics meaningful.

Discount eBook promotions are like cilantro, or tequila, or oysters!

What I mean is, when I talk to authors about this strategy it seems they either love them or hate them.

When you find your stride with discount eBook promotions, and by that I mean you’ve pretty much figured out what works for your genre and reader market, they can be insanely lucrative, and quickly turn into a cornerstone for your continued book discovery.

But if discount eBook promotions still leave you confused, frustrated, and with an overall bad taste in your mouth, my goal is to encourage you to try this again, but after making some smarter decisions about how you should be pricing your book.

The Beauty of Free Discount eBook Promotions

Free discount eBook promotions definitely aren’t required to gain fantastic exposure, and I know a lot of authors have a hard time stomaching ‘free’ anyway.

But believe it or not there are some valid reasons for why including some free promotions throughout the year can really help you out.

Your goal is to simply get books in as many hands as possible

Don’t think this is beneath you. Sometimes you really just need to shoot for downloads and page views. BookBub has reported that free discount eBook promotions see 10x more downloads than those who run promotions at other price points!

This is a great strategy for new authors who really just need to get their name out there. It’s also a great way to convince people to give you a chance when you don’t have a lot of reviews yet.

People are busy and the free time they dedicate to reading is precious, so they want a sure thing. If you don’t have the street cred yet to be a sure thing, help them feel better about giving you a shot by giving them a chance to check out your book for free.

Your goal is to increase sales for a series

Regularly doing discount eBook promotions to make the first book in your series free is a great way to introduce people to the entire body of work, and assuming you wrote a damn good book one, they’ll of course come back for more at retail price once they’re hooked.

So this piggybacks off of the “books in hands” strategy above, and it’s really quite simple.

Write a great series. Let people get started for free. Get ready for them to come back and buy the follow up titles at full price.

Another great BookBub stat: authors who make the first book in their series free see 8x higher sales of the other books in the series. This is legit.

Your goal is to drive attention to a new release

Assuming your Amazon presence is top notch (if you’re unsure check out the dedicated Amazon section of our blog), doing a discount eBook promotion for a backlist title is a great way to bring more attention to your new release.

Seems risky? Then here you go – update the book description for the backlist title you plan to discount so you’re also announcing your latest release.

Too many authors leave sales opportunities on the table by not using all the features of their Amazon book page as a cross promotion tool.

Your goal is to sell more books long term

Book buyers are creatures of habit, and once they like one book by an author, they’re highly likely to purchase additional titles.

So if you’re looking to draw more return buyers, run some free discount eBook promotions for your best performing books, those with the best and most numerous reviews, to lure them in and convert them to fans.

Discount eBook promotions require smart planning, here’s a pricing guide via @bookgal…
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When a $.99 Promotion is the Best Move

Discount eBook promotions that offer your book for $.99 also have their place in your book marketing arsenal, but just like free, it’s about making smart decisions that take into account your book marketing challenges and your book marketing goals.

Your goal is to hit a bestseller list

This is a delicate dance. Yes, we all want to hit the bestseller list, so be sure you’re being realistic about your qualifications for being able to do this with a discount eBook promotion.

For starters, you have to have a stellar book that’s already getting really great reviews.

You should also be ad stacking, which to me means you’re supporting your discount eBook promotion through lots of other channels and cross promotion strategies. Simply changing the price and waiting for the sales to roll in won’t cut it.

Basically what you’re doing here is opting for the lowest discount possible that doesn’t make you ineligible for bestseller lists, and you’re supporting that discount by pushing as many people to the limited time offer as you possibly can using all the tools in your arsenal.

As I said, you have to be committed to do this, pull out your book marketing planner and seriously design an entire plan around a bid for a bestseller spot.

Your goal is to push your series but you just can’t do free

There are numerous reasons why some authors can’t/won’t do free discount eBook promotions, and if you’re dead set on this I probably don’t have anything up my sleeve to convince you at this point.

That being said, you can follow this same principle but with a $.99 first book instead. It may not have quite the power as free, but you can rest easy at night that you’re not giving anything away.

That’s what it is, right? Tell me in the comments why you don’t do free!

Sometimes You Just Have to Go Higher

There are definitely some considerations for pricing your book at $1.99 or  higher for limited time discount promotions. Again, it’s all about being smarter about when and why you’re making your decisions.

And remember, you’re not being asked to pick one and resigning yourself to that strategy till the end of time. Like any other book marketing approach, you need to do some testing before you find your stride, and it’s almost always a combination.

Your goal is to drive some revenue with your first book

You may have a puzzled look on your face at the above because it seems like a no-brainer, but I’ve talked about this before, you can’t simply have big goals. You have to also recognize the steps it takes to reach those big goals – goals like more sales.

Take a new author with only one book, for example. That author will likely want to alternate between free discount eBook promotions and higher ones, so they’re bouncing between focusing on big exposure and more downloads, and actually pulling in some revenue to keep the train moving.

Bookbub reported that discount eBook promotions priced at $2.99 have on average generated more than 200% more revenue than those running at $0.99, even though the volume of unit sales is lower.

But keep in mind, it’s all about numbers, and trying a combination of approaches.

These statistics also include authors with big platforms and established followings, so they can get away with pricing their limited time discounts a bit higher.

Simply put, don’t walk away from this thinking all your dreams will come true by simply running a $2.99 discount promotion! But it’s good to test it.

Your goal is to promote a bundle book or omnibus

More and more authors are opting to create boxed sets of their books, and with my full support, I recommend this strategy to nearly every author that comes to me with a series.

But of course it’s tough to consider giving away multiple books for free or only $.99. Especially if it’s your only series. So if you’re in this position, yes, don’t feel pressured to go to low with your discount eBook promotions for the omnibus, as long as the $2.99 price point is still a great deal compared to buying the books separately, potential buyers will take notice.

Your goal is to give a boost to an already successful book

Hey congrats, your book is doing well! We should all be so lucky! But before you get too comfortable make sure you have a plan for when the buzz starts to wane a bit.

Well-timed discount eBook promotions at the $2.99 price point, for books that are already seeing steady success, are a brilliant way to milk what you’ve already achieved to bring in even more downloads and keep that Amazon algorithm on its toes.

Your goal is to promote your nonfiction

If you’re in a nonfiction category that regularly commands a higher retail price point, so cookbooks, coffee table books, and more technical and very industry specific business books, as a few examples, you can get away with a higher price point for your discount eBook promotions as well.

Just be realistic about whether your retail price is higher because that’s the industry standard and what readers are expecting, or because you’re trying to work the system or find a loophole to ROI.

If you’re truly unsure what’s “normal” for your genre check out the bestseller lists and see what price points seem most consistent, taking household names and celebrities with a grain of salt because they’ll skew that a bit.

What To Take Away From This Piece

My goal was to encourage you to continue using (or come back to) discount eBook promotions but in a more lucrative way – and I hope I’ve done that – or at minimum challenged you to consider whether you’ve been making smart decisions, or just trying things at random.

There’s a lot that’s very unpredictable about becoming an author, publishing a book, and hoping people buy it and read it, but with some planning and some smart analysis of your goals and challenges, you really can diminish a lot of the guesswork.

Pricing is key to smart eBook promotions, here’s a straightforward guide via @bookgal…
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When Value Props Flop

It’s easy to know when your value prop is working because it’s resonating with the people you are talking to, and they are responding. They are saying things like “I need that” or “Can you do that for me?” (music to my ears.) When you receive a response like that it means you have identified your customer’s problem or an opportunity that is exciting to them, they understand it and they want it.

But, sometimes you don’t hear that, and that’s when you know something is wrong with your value prop.

Here is how you know when your value prop has flopped:

1. You get a blank stare when you use it.
2. You have to explain to them why it’s a “Win-Win.”
3. Your contacts don’t answer your emails.
4. Your contacts don’t answer your phone calls.
5. Your contacts won’t introduce you to the other buyers even when that would help your contacts get what they say they want.
6. They have other priorities or don’t have a budget right now.

4 Reasons Value Props Flop

1. Your value prop is seller focused.

For value propositions to be effective they have to be outward focused; ideally, customer-focused @LizRHeiman
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If your value proposition is focused on your company or product and what it does, it is what my friend Lisa Dennis calls “Inside Out.” That means it is looking inward instead of outward. For value propositions to be effective they have to be outward focused; ideally, customer focused. Value propositions that work focus on the problem or opportunity your customer has, then explains how you solve it and what is unique about that. They always start with the customer.

2. Your value prop doesn’t highlight true differentiators.

An effective value proposition differentiates you, your company and your products from all other solutions out there @LizRHeiman
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An effective value proposition differentiates you, your company and your products from all other solutions out there. The problem is that most companies can’t figure out what their differentiators are. One easy way to do that, short of asking your customers, is to imagine that you are giving your customers a list of strengths and after each one, they say, “So what? What does that do for me?” and then when you answer they say, “Prove it!” If it is something that is true of your company and not your competitors, and your customer cares about it, and you can prove it’s true, you have identified a differentiator. The “How we do it differently?” or “What is Unique about the way we solve your problem?”

3. Your value prop doesn’t focus on the buyers and their problems.

Customers are focused on problems and opportunities. They don’t care about your product unless it solves a problem for them. #ValueProp @LizRHeiman
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Most sales and marketing messaging is focused on product, features, and benefits. Customers are focused on problems and opportunities. Customers don’t care about your product or how it works unless it solves a problem for them or provides a critical opportunity. If they aren’t feeling real pain or don’t see real growth opportunities, then nothing you say about your product will resonate with them.

4. Your value prop hasn’t been personalized.

If your value prop doesn’t speak specifically to the problem your buyer needs to be solved, then it isn’t going to be effective @LizRHeiman
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What matters to the CEO is different than what matters to the CFO or CMO, CSO etc. Very few value propositions are one-size-fits-all. If your messaging doesn’t speak specifically to the problem your buyer needs to be solved, then it isn’t going to be effective.

If you want to learn about writing and using value propositions that work, Alice, our good friend, Lisa Dennis, value proposition expert, and author of Value Propositions that Sell  and I have a webinar just for you. Watch it now.

The post 4 Reasons Value Props Flop appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

Can you use automated marketing and CRM (customer relationship management) software to regain some control of the sales process? Experts believe that it is possible to use the tool as a way of positioning yourself advantageously in your niche. Here is how it works.

Outbound versus Inbound Marketing

The old sales model put the sales professional firmly in charge of the process. This expert was the gateway to information, product specs, and pricing structures. Nothing happened unless the salesperson made it happen. Then inbound flipped the script. The internet now provides the data to the consumer without the need for conversations with salespeople.

Inbound sales techniques have changed the dynamic. Rather than being in control of the sales process, the seller now functions more as a consultant. In some cases, s/he becomes a facilitator for a transaction. This opens up a new role possibility for your sale staff: lead generators.

Inbound-Centered Automated Marketing and CRM Software Offers Tools that Today’s Consumers Respond To

The old model thrived on interruptions. Examples were the salesperson at the door and the pop-up ads on the website. However, prospective buyers do not respond well to these marketing models. While your business pays a lot of money for disruptive ads, the consumer tunes them out.

The trick is now to be there when a shopper starts asking questions. You know that this requires an optimized website with local SEO, blogging, and other means of attracting attention. You need to answer the questions that prospective buyers are asking of the internet at large. Doing so leads to website visits.

The shopper is now reading your materials. S/He may provide information in return for a more personalized browsing experience. At this juncture, CRM software comes into play.

• Track lead conversion. How do you know if your current system is providing you the return on investment that you are looking for? The software lets you track the conversion of qualified leads, which shows if – and where – there is a disconnect.

• Boost sales. Never lose touch with another qualified lead again. Emails are easy to miss or accidentally erase. Website forms may reset. The database of CRM software offers a far more permanent storage solution for your sales prospects.

• Connect the right sales rep with the consumer. Make sure that the sales rep with a vast knowledge of green widgets connects with the shopper in need of this product. This frees up your expert in widget accessories to communicate with a buyer who wants to boost her or his enjoyment of the product with the right secondary add-ons.

• Enhance marketing opportunities. Your sales department and marketing professionals now talk to each other. Marketing experts learn what approaches are working well for the sales team. Conversely, they find out quickly which advertising strategies are having little effect on the targeted consumer group.

• Follow up with buyers. You closed the deal, but you are not done. Even if you sell high-quality consumer goods with a low chance of needing a replacement any time soon, continue to cultivate your customer relationships. A buyer may want to purchase a second product for a family member. There may be opportunities for upsells in the future. Staying connected is a snap with the right CRM software package.

Harness the Power of Automated Marketing and CRM for Your Business

MaaS Pros offers you insight into the inner workings of its software solution with a demo. Learn how to create contact documents, emails, and other interactivity based on your input data. Find out how easy it is to duplicate the process for a targeted consumer base. Moreover, explore why automation is the way to go with a consumer base that is becoming deeply segmented based on a broad range of sales-specific values.

Originally published here.

Every year around this time, I see a lot of messages that look like this:

This isn’t a rep who is failing and has to make a move… it’s a talented person who will be actively open to/looking for a new role because something is missing in his current one.

Folks, there is a strong chance you have reps in your own startup that are thinking this exact thing right now. And it’s not good, because it is VERY expensive to churn salespeople – especially the good ones.

It’s not all doom and gloom though – you can flip this script if you do the right work now to close out the year without hemorrhaging your prized sales performers.

Here’s what I recommend.

Why your salespeople are leaving at the end of the year.

It’s been said that “people don’t leave companies, they leave bosses.”

I couldn’t agree more. But the opposite is true too (and I’ve seen this with several of our clients) – people will hang on through thick and thin if you’re a great leader.

While not specific to sales, a recent survey of 10,000+ professionals by LinkedIn more or less confirms this:

The top four reasons people leave are all controlled by leadership (Courtesy of LinkedIn)

My experience tells me that these points are especially accurate for all-star salespeople. That’s because, to paraphrase Simon Sinek, “they see compensation as a result, not an end.”

They know that the real game they need to play is to better serve their customers (they’ll get paid if they do). And they’re always growing/looking for new ways to do that!

But if leadership is getting in the way of them doing that for any of the areas above, they’re not going to stick around for the long haul. They’ll wait for their commission check and make a move.

Here’s exactly what you need to do as Q3 winds down to keep your people engaged and fired up about working towards your mission.

How to stop a Q1 bailout.

Leaders, I promise, I come in peace and not accusing you of being bad. I’m simply trying to call attention to something I see happening every year around this time, so you can double down and avoid some pain.

Each point below I’ve seen the best sales leaders incorporate year round, not just at this point in the year. Embracing these practices as a leader regularly will pay off and you won’t have to worry about a looming exodus again. 

Get out in the trenches with your team.

The only way you’re going to know what’s not working and why people are disengaged is to walk a mile or two in their shoes, right? That’s why the best sales leaders I’ve ever worked with are always out in the trenches with their people every day. It’s what keeps them in tune with what is going on at all times!

A great example of this done right… the CEO of a partner whose software we use sells alongside his team (closing $1M+ himself every year). And they love him for it because he speaks their language fluently and is out there in the mix each and every day.

This serves him well in a variety of ways – not only does it help him enable the sales team, but it helps him understand exactly what his buyers want, how they feel, and why.

Which helps him make more informed decisions as the leader of his company!

That said, roll up your sleeves and help them close deals (and give them credit if you do – the last thing you want to do is suck the life out of them because your ego got in the way).

Focus on building a community of people through mentorship and coaching. Be an asset to your team – the only way to do that is to be involved and aware.

The more you are the more they’ll trust you!

Ask great questions and act on their responses.

Listening (I’m talking about real, active listening) is an essential tool for engaging your people when you’re out in the trenches with them. Trust me, the best reps can spot your lack thereof a mile away, killing any credibility and trust you have.

Your people aren’t always going to be straight with you on what they need to stick around (or if they’re even considering leaving in the first place). You’ll need to pay attention to the space in between.

Find out what things are keeping them from doing their best work and then fix them. Create psychological safety through listening to truly understand the situation (don’t react on emotion). More on that below.

Block and tackle on internal barriers you find.

I can almost guarantee you that there are a few things that could be corrected internally to make your team’s life easier. Don’t assume you know what is broken – go find those them and turn them around.

While there’s no way to tell you what those things are for your team, there are a couple things I see regularly that push salespeople to make a jump.

Product vs. Market fit.

As much as it’s popular to try to find the person who can sell water to a whale, the reality is it’s not a great business model. It’s awfully hard (read: impossible) for your people to sell something to a market that doesn’t want it. Find out what’s keeping the market from being interested and fight the internal battle with Product or executive leadership to make changes.

Your sales process is getting in the way.

An unnecessarily long sales process can get in the way of your reps closing business. Find ways to shorten the process without cutting the wrong corners and experiment with new ways to shave time off the process. The best place to learn how to do this? Ask your people!

It’s too hard to get paid.

I see a lot of startups whose comp plans require a supercomputer to calculate commissions. This is the opposite of what you want. Make it easy for your people to get paid and more importantly understand how they get paid. It should also be easy for you to track and administer while we’re at it.

Comp plan adjustments for the following year.

I see (and have experienced myself on more than one occasion) way too many startups that think it’s a great idea to jack up sales numbers for the following year because their reps are killing it this year. This is the worst thing you can do unless you genuinely have a reason to adjust. Otherwise, watch your top performers give you the pink slip.

Own the ‘ick’.

The most respected leaders I know are exceptionally good at owning what’s broken, calling it out, and creating a solution that moves everyone forward without dwelling on the negative. You’ve got to be more than a cheerleader – roll up your sleeves and help your team thrive.

Take your eye off what’s broken and focus on the potential.

While you need to address problems proactively, keep in mind it’s even more important to challenge your team to consider what is possible if you want them inspired to kick butt every day. It’s exhausting when all you hear about is the things that are broken!

So ask your team what it would look like if they could wave a magic wand and have it be perfect. Get them to dream a bit, and then act on some of that feedback! Even better, show them firsthand what it looks like to be creative to uncover better ways of doing business well.

If your team sees you putting their suggestions into action they are going to love it, respect it, and want more of it. Trust me, nothing got me more fired up than to see my boss taking my advice and putting it into action – I know your people will feel the same.

Know your “why” and rally your team around it.

If you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing, how are your people going to? Take some time to nail down your vision and how to articulate it to your team. Even better, incorporate this into your hiring process to ensure you’re aligned right out of the gates. I’ve seen this totally transform businesses… don’t skip over this point!

Final thoughts.

Really, this is all about my first point above: get in the trenches and diagnose. Then act on what you find!

The only way to make sure your people stick around year after year is to do regular discovery and make sure you’re ahead of any potential issues that are going to arise. And the better you do this, the more your team will respect and trust you.

Not to mention the less likely they are to start entertaining the thought of heading elsewhere!

The post The sales rep exodus is coming… here’s how to stop it. appeared first on OpenView Labs.

As a marketer, we often have a few different ideas of what “success” at work means. Caught in this radical digital age, it’s a common belief that your marketing skills are measured by how much you increase page views, sales, open rates, leads, customers—or other numeric metrics— as proof you deserve your paycheck.

Although these goals certainly matter, they’re not the only way you can win as a marketer. The problem is, they’re often the ONLY way us marketers—and sometimes consequently, our clients or customers— judge our worth.

Here’s the reality: there’s more to your marketing success than achieving these milestones. We’re here to make sure you define success in a way that means something to you, your company and those you serve. No special secrets, no steps, just a shift in perspective.

Recognizing the Difference Between Success & Achievement

Although often used synonymously, these two terms are not the same.

An achievement is something that you reach, and once you reach it, you’ve met a tangible goal. Even if a goal is SMART, it’s still a time-bound objective that has a clear end. Oftentimes in business, this means a quick celebration (or, sometimes, grievance) and an equally quick “onto the next goal” mentality.

Success, by contrast, is a state of being. It’s a feeling.

Unfortunately, we fall victim to labeling someone as successful or not based on the money they make, their perceived status, their Instagram photos in Malibu. #success #fabulous #winning

Really, success is less tangible and more elusive than an achievement— it’s a subjective opinion, meaning different things to different people.

Getting “X” amount of organic traffic this week: that’s an achievement. You may see a steady increase in organic traffic as a major win, but if your client or marketing team doesn’t see the long-term value and, instead, wants more leads, you might be failing in their eyes.

So what makes a marketer “successful” at their job? Let’s look past the cliche marketing metrics and explore three other ways you can foster a feeling of success at work.

1. Success Could Mean….Maintaining a Positive Relationship with Clients/Customers

It’s easy to think you’re only slaying at your job if you rock a crazy ROI. But, contrary to popular belief, ROI isn’t just about money.

As award-winning speaker and bestselling author Joey Coleman asked in our Wayfinding podcast, “What’s the ROI of buying your wife flowers?” We give our loved ones gifts to make them smile, to delight them, to improve the way they feel about our relationship. This isn’t something that can be calculated or assigned a metric, yet the rewards are instantaneous and, oftentimes, long-lasting.

Not only will surprising your wife with flowers likely mean a big hug, kiss and enthusiastic “thank you!,” but the effects of this feeling could last for days, even months, ultimately being the driving factor behind that steaming steak sitting on your dinner plate or the way she talks you up to her parents.

That’s because people tend to remember the way you made them feel long after any action you take. As Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

A client or customer needs to feel like you care, that you are helping them grow their business or reach their goals, and this goes beyond producing data charts and making them money.

Fostering This Idea in Your Workplace

There are numerous ways you could show your team, customers or clients that the relationship matters to you.

• Give ‘em a call. // At Impulse Creative, our inbound marketers pick up the phone every week and call each client personally. It’s not a flat, scheduled email reporting progress, it’s not an “I goofed something up and need help” emergency. It’s more like “Hey, friend. You’re on my mind.” Add a check-in call to your weekly calendar, better yet, an in-person meet-up or video chat, to stay connected and invest in your partnership or evangelists.

• Rate their emotional “feel” after each interaction. // Inside each project in our time tracking system, Asana, every employee creates a “Status Update” after a client interaction. They choose a color— green, yellow or red— to rate the client’s attitude and add notes about what was discussed, the clients concerns, etc. Next time a marketer talks with them, they understand the dynamic and can be mindful of nurturing the relationship. Create a system to be retroactive, instead of reactive, and stay unified as a team in respecting your client or customer’s feelings.

2. Success Could Mean….The Gift of Done

As marketers, we want to please our customers, but sometimes a quest for perfection can hold us back from making progress or moving forward.

Although you might feel like you’re winning by making it the “best,” a late delivery is still a broken promise. Additionally, your client may view the extra effort as a waste of their time and money, or worse, think of you as undependable. Plus, the looming project may feel like brick in your stomach.

A successful project could just be a completed project that’s improved upon later.

It’s great to be thorough, but when projects drag on way past expected deadlines, you’re forced to hustle to ship that deliverable. Don’t be paralyzed by perfection. Get it to a state of “great,” not “perfect,” and grant yourself the gift of done.

Fostering This Idea in Your Workplace

In order to get something done, you have to maintain deadlines and establish what takes priority.

• Schedule ahead. // At Impulse Creative, we all have a rolling list of our tasks in the platform Asana, which we sort by due date, so there’s no excuse for ignorance of expectations. Outline the time you think you’ll need to complete a project in your calendar with some wiggle room to spare.

• Choose what to cut. // Be conscious of what matters most and ditch lofty “nice to haves.” Oftentimes, this is something that wasn’t originally promised and an expectation you set for yourself. Will that design idea take an extra hour you simply don’t have? Cut it. When you choose the things to cut in advance, it’ll remove the sting of shame— also, it’ll give you a nice list of upsells for later (*wink wink*).
• Remember to implement Growth-Driven Design. // Sometimes you need to see a project for what it is, ship it and dress it up later. That’s called Growth-Driven Design— or rather, to launch something better than it was originally, with the intention of making gradual, consistent improvements. This way, you keep the process moving instead of halting launch until everything is just perfect. Review your resources, time and goals. Save the more elaborate add-ons and ultimate vision for later, after you have data support the benefit.
• Create consequences or rewards. // Employees who’ve been with Impulse Creative for over a year are eligible for profit share. More clients and larger retainers mean bigger kickbacks for our team at the end of each profitable quarter. This is a positive incentive, and we’ve found reward to be more effective than fear-tactics, but outlining clear consequences of an incomplete project or unhappy client could be the extra encouragement needed to finish strong. Consider all the ways you could press your team to dig deeper.

3. Success Could Mean….Finding & Supporting Your “Why”

We all dream of the job where we wake up excited to work, because we’re doing the thing we love, or something that means something deeper.

Author Jon Acuff said it best: “It’s not the work we do that inspires us…it’s the cause we come to work for.” For some companies with a clear sense of their mission and vision, simply advocating their cause is a daily victory, instilling in them a strong sense of purpose.

But many companies are unclear on their greater purpose, and without their big “Why,” they become so consumed by profits and gradually lose their customers— oftentimes closing their doors after a few short years of business.

Fostering This Idea in Your Workplace

Getting clear about how you help people and telling your story to your customers, or for your clients, could be the key to your marketing success.

• Discover your why. // What drives the purpose of your business? If it’s money, an elusive idea of success connected to metrics or something for your personal benefit instead of someone else’s, you need help finding your why. At Impulse, we aim to help navigate others onto a path to improve their businesses. Need help conceptualizing your purpose? Check out this article.

• Build our core values. // Your company’s core values are the guiding lights of your business operations, and should support your mission and vision. If your company doesn’t have any, create a few for yourself. The link in the bullet above can help you with that. Here’s our values for reference too, all clearly spelled out and actionable.

The Key to Success

Look past the insecurities that get in your way and the achievements that may or may not drive ROI. Ask yourself what’s valuable to you and those you influence. Remember, this value is a feeling, not a calculation, and the perception of success varies from person to person.

Branch out beyond traditional marketing metrics and define success in a way that matters to you and your customers, getting real about what’s important and ensuring both parties are winning or losing together, not separately. That’s the secret to becoming a “successful” marketer.

Need some help discovering your “why?” Download The Brand Plan. This step-by-step workbook can help you conceptualize your why and find daily success in supporting a greater cause.

Here's the recording of today's webinar about how to build and manage a remote sales team, with InVision's Ryan Burke, Process Street's Salvatore Tocco, our own Nick Persico and Steli.

In today's webinar, we heard from Ryan, Salvatore, Nick and Steli about all of their experiences (and most actionable advice) for building, transitioning to and successfully managing remote sales teams.

Whether you're considering making the switch to running a remote sales organization at your company, or you're looking for ways to better-manage your existing remote sales team, then this webinar is a must watch.

Tune in to watch a full recording of the webinar right here:

Shout out to our awesome co-hosts on today's webinar!

• Ryan Burke of InVision
• Salvatore Tocco of Process Street
• Our own Nick Persico here at Close.io

Ryan is the SVP of International Sales at InVision, the digital product design platform powering the world’s best user experiences. With customers like AirBnb, Amazon, HBO, Netflix and more, InVision is redefining the way companies design, create interactive prototypes, collaborate, brainstorm and execute on their next big ideas.

Salvatore is the Director of Sales at Process Street, the simple process and workflow management tool that helps teams from companies like LinkedIn, Cisco, Sheraton and thousands of startups & SMBs to successfully manage (and improve) recurring checklists, processes and procedures.

Nick is the Head of Revenue here at Close.io, where he leads our sales and success teams in helping thousands of inside salespeople close more deals with our CRM product. Designed by and for salespeople with the goal of maximizing sales productivity, Close.io is the only CRM on the market with built-in calling and a wide range of other features including automated email sequences, SMS, reporting, call automation and more. 

Want more webinars like this?

Who would you like to hear from next?

Comment below and let us know 😊

Have you ever heard someone say, “Music was so much better in the 1960’s?” It’s easy to scroll through a list of hits from this era and agree -- but this is a prime example of survivorship bias.

As the decades have passed, only the best and most popular songs from the 1960’s are remembered, replayed, and shared. Simply put, the Nickelbacks of the 60’s have been forgotten.

It’s also true that today’s music industry makes it easier than ever for us to listen to and discover large quantities of music. So, we hear a higher ratio of bad music along with the good.

But what does any of this have to do with founding a business or running a successful sales team? And what exactly is survivorship bias? I’m glad you asked.

Also called “survivor bias,” this phenomenon refers to the human tendency to study successful outcomes and ignore the accompanying failures. Because of this, we adopt opinions, structure businesses, and make decisions without examining all the data, which can easily lead to failure.

Check out this TED Talk for more on the survivorship bias.

So, how can we avoid the survivorship bias in business? Here are nine common examples of survivor bias -- and suggestions on how to guard against each one.

Examples of Survivorship Bias

1. “Planes coming home from battle have bullet holes everywhere but the engine and cockpit, so we should put armor everywhere but the engine and cockpit.”

While this example doesn’t have a direct correlation to business, we’ll start here because it’s often considered the birthplace of the idea of survivor bias.

In World War Two, the allied forces wanted to add protective armor to their war planes. Because resources were strained, they couldn’t add armor to the whole plane. So, experts had to decide which areas were most vulnerable to attack and would benefit most from additional protection.

To decide where to allocate the armor, they studied planes that had been shot but successfully made it back home. They found these planes had incurred no bullet holes to the engine or cockpit, so the obvious train of thought led them to place armor everywhere on the planes except for the cockpit and engine.

Luckily, mathematician Abraham Wald pointed out the flaw in their plan: they were only analyzing the planes that had made it home safely. The location of the bullet holes was not fatal to the planes and, therefore, the aircraft hadn’t been brought down. He recommended the military attach armor to the areas where the surviving aircraft had no bullet holes instead.

By analyzing the planes that had failed, Wald birthed the idea of the survivorship bias -- and likely saved many lives.

2. “Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college and became millionaires, so will I.”

A quick Google search of “Successful founders who dropped out of college,” will turn up some of the biggest names in the world. Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerberg are all examples of entrepreneurs who had an idea, took a leap, and, miraculously, became successful.

But by equating their success to hard work alone, we ignore a very important fact: for every successful college dropout, there are hundreds, if not thousands, who weren’t as lucky.

The founders we put on pedestals worked hard, but there were also many circumstantial events that paved their way to success. In fact, research shows the majority of the United States’ most successful businesspeople graduated college -- 94%, to be exact.

Assuming a college degree isn’t necessary to be successful is an example of survivorship bias. While it might not be right for everyone, it’s important to look at all of the available facts before coming to a decision.

3. “If I read the biographies of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, I’ll understand how to be successful.”

“The Morning Habits of Successful People,” “The Six Characteristics All Billionaires Have in Common,” “The One Thing Jeff Bezos Says Made Him Successful.” How many of these articles have you clicked on? Consider me guilty of opening these and many others.

We love the idea that by learning about our idols, we’ll be able to emulate their success. The problem is that these articles -- and even deep-dive biographies -- don’t present all the data necessary for us to mirror their success. We overlook the variables not visible to the average reader and make decisions with incomplete data.

While it’s hard to find books on the hundreds of people who likely tried and failed to create Amazon before Bezos did, it’s important to remember attempting to recreate the success of the successful won’t necessarily translate into similar results. Sometimes hustle isn’t enough and circumstances take over.

4. “If I pattern my company after Warby Parker, I’ll be successful.”

“The next Netflix.” “The Uber of [fill in the blank of an industry].” You’ve likely seen these phrases used in reference to buzzed-about new startups. But, according to the United States Small Business Administration, only two-thirds of all businesses survive two years, half of all businesses survive at least five years, and one-third of all businesses survive at least 10 years.

The odds are not in your favor and modeling your company after one that’s been a success doesn’t guarantee you’ll achieve the same level of success.

This version of the survivorship bias leads many founders to try to fit their business into a model that just isn’t right for the current market, their audience, or their growth stage.

When starting a new business, draw inspiration from the companies you admire, but assess the market to understand how you must evolve for the well-being of your idea.

5. “My product is better than their product, so I’ll succeed.”

Did you know TiVo is still in business? This digital video recorder was one of the first on the market and, arguably, is still one of the best. At its height, it was so popular, it became a verb. And most of our parents are probably still telling us they TiVo’d “The Amazing Race,” when we know they’ve been using DVR for at least five years.

TiVo is a great example of when a better product doesn’t beat ease, brand loyalty, or market flood. Don’t assume that because you’ve created a higher quality product or service, your customer will naturally choose you (case in point, when Sketchers edged out Adidas in market share a mere three years ago).

You must consider the other variables not immediately visible to you to avoid the survivorship bias.

6. “Sales team X used these email templates to increase close rates by 35%. I’ll use these templates and get the same results.”

Almost as prevalent as articles about successful people’s morning routines? Articles telling you how one company made a single change and saw exponential returns -- and how you can too.

But if survivorship bias teaches us anything, it’s that we must consider the other businesses who tried the same fix and saw lackluster results.

Sales team X could have seen a 35% close rate by using these templates -- but what might not be included in the article is they also brought on a new sales executive, changed their compensation structure, and happened to close a few big deals that had been stalled for months.

To assume their 35% close rate increase was due solely to these templates -- and to assume they’ll work the same way for your business -- will likely lead to disappointment.

7. “I’ll calculate ARR based on our current customers.”

If you’re calculating annual recurring revenue (ARR) based on your current customer base alone, you may be poised for a harsh reality when your actual revenue comes up short.

While focusing on current clients is key to business planning, survivorship bias encourages us to study the customer churn rate of the same time last year and factor that into our ARR calculations.

This gives us a more accurate picture of what the company can expect to bring in and avoids disappointments or unexpected cash flow shortages down the line.

8. “If I focus on my unhappy customers, I’ll be able to retain them and decrease my churn rate.”

If you wait until an unhappy customer complains before engaging with them to reduce churn, you’ve likely already lost their business. Research shows about half of SaaS users initiate the cancellation process two or more weeks before their accounts are deactivated.

So, don’t assume everything is great with your customer, simply because they’re not actively sending angry emails. Instead, use tools like the Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) to measure customer satisfaction and growth potential.

By taking the pulse of your current, happy clients, you can spot earlier signs of unrest and proactively address customer issues as they arise -- instead of when they already have one foot out the door.

9. “Our customers are requesting these features, we should add them to our product/service.”

Feature creep! It’s a stumbling block most founders face during the lifespan of their company. It’s what happens when you begin to build or implement product or service features outside your company scope, simply because you’ve received requests from your customers.

While it’s important to keep a pulse on the market, your competitors, and the needs of your customers, it’s equally important to stay focused on your core company mission.

If these additional features detract from the growth of your core product/service, they’re not worth the time and effort they’ll require -- or the few clients they’ll earn you.

Don’t simply study the benefits of adding these features to your offering, consider the survivor bias and review the addition of this feature from all angles.

Survivorship bias encourages us to think about problems in different ways -- which is something entrepreneurs are usually pretty good at. Make sure you have all the data available to you before you make a decision. It might mean the difference between a business that succeeds and one that does not.

Reps spend hours each week working on giving demos, overcoming objections, and closing deals. But there’s one skill that is more important than ever before, yet few reps spend the time to improve: writing.

Yes, we all took writing class in high school, but let’s be honest – how much did we really pay attention? (Sorry Mrs. Wilson). Clear, concise communication is one of the most powerful tools a rep can develop. But don’t take my word for it.

In today vlog, I asked Ralph Barsi, who runs global sales development at ServiceNow, “How can reps improve their writing skills?” His answer is no point, as always. It’s brief, actionable, and packs a powerful punch.

Enjoy!

Resources Ralph mentions:

On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Writing That Works by Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson
On Writing by Stephen King

TRANSCRIPT:

Brandon:
How can reps improve their writing skills, and should they in the first place? Hey, everyone. Brandon Redlinger here, Director of Growth at Engagio. And today I’m stoked to be talking with my friend, Ralph Barsi. And he leads Global Sales Development, over at ServiceNow. He’s just one of those guys that, if he talks, you should listen, you know? If he writes, you definitely need to read it. So, let’s hear Ralph’s thoughts around this.

Ralph:
Hey, Brandon. Thank you so much for that question. I’m gonna do my best to keep my response brief, because that’s what e-mails need to be today. So, my answer is yes and yes. It’s critical that we start being mindful of the aesthetics of our e-mails, since most decision makers and influencers are reading them from their mobile device, oftentimes walking from airport terminal to airport terminal.

Let’s be aware of that stuff. Let’s make sure that our subject lines are personal and include their first name. Let’s make sure that we have no more than five sentences in the e-mail, and the e-mail focuses mostly on them, versus us and our product and offering. Make sure to ask a question in the e-mail. Include a question mark, because it’s going to evoke a response. Otherwise, it’s simply words on a page that the reader doesn’t have to respond to.

I think, if we start thinking and writing in terms of tweets and texts, we’re gonna move the needle. So, look at the “What’s News” column, on the cover of every Wall Street Journal. Writers are covering 30 to 40 stories from around the globe, in a very thin margin, because every word has earned its right on the page. We need to do that in our e-mails as well.

A couple of books I’d recommend to everybody include “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser. The second would be “Writing That Works” from Ken Roman and Joel Raphaelson. And the third is [“On Writing”] from the famous author, Stephen King. He actually wrote a memoir on the craft of writing that’s worth a read, so invest the time in that.

Note that all sales roles and job descriptions require exceptional verbal and written communication skills. There’s a reason for that. Those who are clear writers are clear thinkers, and that’s what our customers, prospects, and suspects are looking for, if they want a world-class experience working with us.

All right? So, hopefully, that helps, and looking forward to hearing more questions. Thanks, Brandon.

We all want more referrals from our clients. So what’s the disconnect? In this short video blog from Hinge, Lee Frederiksen outlines three reasons why your clients may not be referring you.

Transcription:

Let’s face it, we all want more referrals, right? But sometimes we wished we would get more from our clients. So why aren’t they giving us more referrals? Well, the number one reason is that they haven’t been asked. Now, just a second, you might be confused here. It’s not that you haven’t asked them for a referral, no. What happened is their friends haven’t asked them. You know how people come up to you and you say, “Hey, do you know a good accounting firm? Do you know somebody to help me with my compensation study?” Those kinds of things. So the key here is helping them know when to refer you, helping them understand when you’re a good fit so when your buddies do ask them, they can make the referral. The second reason is that they haven’t had enough experience with you yet. That one is solved by simply letting time pass and doing a good job with them. Because most clients are actually pretty happy with their service providers once they have enough experience and get to know them. The third reason is that they’re not satisfied. That’s only about 3% of the people. We hear an awful lot about focusing on client satisfaction and that is important, but if only 3% of the people who make referrals are unhappy that means that there are other ways to get referrals. If you wanna learn more about getting referrals, always suggest the referral marketing course in Hinge University. You’re gonna learn some of the interesting new data that’s been out, helps you accelerate referrals and keep those you get. Go to hingeuniversity.com/referralmarketing. We hope to see you there and getting more referrals.

In today’s coaches corner, we’re discussing how to achieve better consistency in win rates, cycle times, and deal sizes across your sales team.

A coffee, a vacation overseas, a pizza, a brand new wardrobe; you can now buy any of these items and many more, through chatbots. That’s right, chatbots are not just for customer support or answering frequently asked questions. Chatbots have the ability to take online orders and even help your consumers find the exact product they’re looking for. Imagine having a ‘salesperson’ powered by artificial intelligence that can drive sales for you day and night, every day of the year? It almost feels like a dream.

But maybe you’re worried that chatbots are a cold and impersonal feature that your customers wouldn’t be interested in, think again. Studies show that 45 percent of consumers don’t care who they interact with – live agent or chatbot – as long as the service is effective, accurate, and handled quickly. So how do companies use chatbots to boost their online ordering and can you do it too?

Let’s dive into these seven examples of companies using chatbots for online ordering, and how you can do the same.

1. Online Sales Associate

Sephora is one of the pioneers of chatbots. Their chatbot on Kik, a popular instant messaging app, is a great alternative for their customers who want more convenience and personalization in online ordering.

Sephora Kik Chatbot. https://www.abetterlemonadestand.com/ecommerce-chatbots/

Instead of having to go into one of their locations and speak to a sales associate or browse their online shop without the help of an expert, users can get personalized product recommendations after answering a few quick questions about their preferences. After Kik users find the perfect product, they can then make a purchase without ever leaving the app.

2. Restaurant Delivery Service

Ordering pizza has always been a pretty painless process, but it’s never been as simple as it is now with the introduction of chatbots. Pizza Hut allows customers to order pizza straight from social media, on Facebook or Twitter messenger.

Pizza Hut Chatbot. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/9-great-examples-of-how-brands-are-using-chatbots/524138/

The chatbot will also let users know about any promotions they have going on and answer frequently asked questions. You can even save your favorite pizzas with the touch of your finger for easy re-ordering.

3. Restaurant Pre-Ordering

Never wait for your Subway sandwich again. Subway’s chatbot allows customers to order ahead of time so they can avoid waiting in pesky lines and get their sandwich faster.

Subway Chatbot. https://www.topbots.com/project/subway-food-ordering-bot-review/

With Subway’s Facebook Messenger chatbot, users can customize their sandwich just like they would at a physical location. Plus the tone of their chatbot is fun and engaging, making it seem like you’re talking to a real person instead of a robot.

4. Online Personal Shopper

For the fashion and sneaker obsessed, Nike’s Facebook Messenger chatbot is the perfect way to find a new favorite style. Their chatbot allows users to browse different style options and create looks they love, which they can then purchase through the app.

Nike Chatbot. https://www.topbots.com/project/nike-sneaker-style-facebook-bot-review/

The chatbot also features the option to customize your very own sneaker based on the color scheme of a photo you upload, making it a fun way to order something that’s completely unique.

5. Customer Service Agent

Staples is making customer service even easier for their customers with their Facebook Messenger chatbot. Customers can ask the chatbot frequently asked questions or ask about the status of their shipment, for instance.

Staples Chatbot. https://www.topbots.com/project/staples-facebook-bot-guide/

And if customers are looking for a specific product, the chatbot can help them out with that too by providing them a link to the product along with a ‘Shop Now’ button so they can easily buy the item they’re interested in.

Want a chatbot for your business?

Now you might be thinking that you would love to have a chatbot for your company but you don’t know the first thing about how to do it or if it would work for your small business. Don’t worry, your business can have a chatbot too and you don’t have to know a thing about code or spend a ton of money to have one.

There are some awesome tools that will help you create your very own chatbot including MobileMonkey, ManyChat and Chatfuel which lets you build a Facebook Messenger chatbot without coding. You can use the editing tools to design your chatbot, easily set up conversational rules in the dashboard and configure your chatbot to accept in-bot payments.

So what are you waiting for? Start using chatbots for your online ordering now and watch your sales skyrocket. By providing your customers the highest level of convenience, they’ll choose you over the competition time after time.

We’ve heard for decades that we should only hire A players, and should even try to cut non-A players from our teams. But not only do the criteria for being an A player vary significantly by company, it’s unrealistic to think you can work only with A players. Further, as demonstrated by Google’s Aristotle project, a study of what makes teams effective, this preference for A players ignores the deep value that the people you may think of as B players actually provide.

As I’ve seen in companies of all sizes and industries, stars often struggle to adapt to the culture, and may not collaborate well with colleagues. B players, on the other hand, are often less concerned about their personal trajectories, and are more likely to go above and beyond in order to support customers, colleagues, and the reputation of the business. For example, when one of my clients went through a disastrous changeover from one enterprise resource planning system to another, it was someone perceived as a B player who kept all areas of the business informed as she took personal responsibility for ensuring that every transaction and customer communication was corrected.

How can you support your B players to be their best and contribute the most possible, rather than wishing they were A players? Consider these five approaches to stop underestimating your B players and help them to reach their potential.

Get to know and appreciate them as the unique individuals they are. This is the first step to drawing out their hidden strengths and skills. Learn about their personal concerns, preferences, and the way they see and go about their work. Be sure you’re not ignoring them because they’re introverts, remote workers, or don’t know how to be squeaky wheels. A senior leader I worked with had such a strong preference for extroverts that she ignored or downgraded team members who were just going about their business.

You and Your Team Series

Retention

What did you want to be when you grew up?

A doctor? A teacher? A lawyer?

If you asked a child this question today, odds are you wouldn’t hear any of those responses. In a recent survey, 75% of children said that they want to grow up to be a vlogger – or in other words, an influencer.

Of course, as with any career associated with fame and fortune, only a handful of those who dream of being the next big thing will ever make it.

In fact, even now there are countless bloggers, vloggers, and podcasters who consider themselves influential, but aren’t.

So what constitutes an influencer? And how can you make sure you’re picking the right influencer for your brand?

There’s more to being an influencer than having thousands of followers (especially when those numbers are so easy to fake).

Needless to say, influencers influence. Their followers actually engage with their content, listen to what they have to say, and take action as a result of their requests or recommendations.

This means the right influencer for you – i.e. someone who not only has a decent-sized following, but who also has an engaged following that fits your brand – can be invaluable to your content.

In fact, one in three consumers reportedly trust the words of an influencer over the brand itself.

That said, that isn’t the only reason getting influencers involved in your content is so important. There are a number of ways they can be invaluable to its creation and distribution.

They Probably Know Things You Don’t

There’s no doubt that some influencers gain their fame by faking it, but those aren’t the influencers you want to be working with, regardless of how many followers they have or how engaged those followers are.

When researching influencers, do some digging to find out whether they legitimately know their stuff. Read their blog. Watch their YouTube content. Listen to podcasts they’ve appeared on (or host themselves).

This is vital, since influencers who are more knowledgeable than you can add value to your content by contributing tips or sharing information that’s brand new to you, or that you hadn’t considered including.

This is great for you (it makes you look more authoritative, even if the information has clearly come from the influencer) and it adds value for your audience.

They’re Invaluable to Content Distribution

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the more people you reach with your content, the more effective it will be. More eyes means more brand awareness and more shares (which in turn leads to more shares and more visibility – a cycle that, all being well, will continue).

Better yet, the more people who see your content, the greater the odds it will lead to other wins, like links, email subscribers, and sales.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult for you to start that chain reaction if your brand is largely unknown and your social media accounts have only a handful of followers.

This is where influencers come in.

When we see an influencer sharing a piece of content, we’re far more likely to reshare it than if we see the content being shared by someone unknown, even if we don’t bother looking at the content ourselves (admit it – we’ve all done it)!

This is primarily because if we trust the person sharing the content, we trust the content will be worth resharing.

However, while influencers do typically share content they’re involved in, you can’t count on it.

So what can you do to up the odds that influencers will play a part in content distribution?

One option is to make sharing the content part of your initial arrangement. Unfortunately, this condition is only really fair if you’re paying an influencer for their involvement. If you’re asking them to help out of the goodness of their hearts, you can’t expect anything else from them.
Sure, you can ask if they would mind sharing it, but you can’t assume they’ll oblige.

So, if you’re not compensating influencers, bear this in mind: the quality of your content will make a big difference in whether or not they’ll push it out to their following.

Influencers are much less likely to share their contribution to “50 Growth Tips from 50 Marketers,” for example, than a quality ebook. Influencers only want to share great content, and if anything, they’ll be less likely to share something substandard because they won’t want to advertise their involvement.

They Increase Your Authority

Simply put, working with an influencer earns you a “seal of approval” and makes you more influential in the eyes of your target audience.

In other words, it’s authority by association.

If an influencer is seen to endorse you, their audience is more likely to buy into what you have to say, to follow you, and to (potentially) purchase from you.

It May Lead to Other Opportunities Down the Line

Don’t “use” an influencer to your advantage and then disappear. Use this initial partnership as an opportunity to build a genuine relationship with this person.

Do that, and odds are it will lead to bigger and better things in the future – things like:

• More detailed contributions to your content
• Speaking opportunities
• Distribution of content (whether or not the influencer in question was involved)
• The chance to collaborate 50/50 on content – i.e. create an ebook together, speak on a podcast, or appear in a YouTube video

How to Get Influencers Involved in Your Content

So you want to get an influencer involved in your content, and based on the number of followers they have, how engaged those followers are, and how relevant the influencer is to your target audience, you’ve drawn up a shortlist of who you’d like to work with …

What happens next?

While there are agencies that can organize campaigns for you, going down that road limits your options. It also, of course, entails paying for an influencer’s involvement and chances are, you’ll be paying more than necessary, compared to going direct.

So what’s the alternative?

Start by tracking down the email address of everyone on your shortlist (you can do this en-masse using a tool like Voila Norbert). Then, once you’re ready, send a personalized pitch to influencers you want to work with. You can also streamline the process of contacting influencers and manage campaigns more effectively with platforms such as Mailshake.

In your pitch, briefly detail:

• The project you want their involvement in
• What you’d ideally like their involvement to consist of – this could mean contributing to a blog post you’re writing, but it could also entail things like writing a guest post for your blog or appearing on your podcast or YouTube channel
• Why you think they’re a great match for this project (in other words, butter them up)
• Any compensation you can offer (if applicable)

This approach is a little different than what I’d advocate using in most outreach emails.

In the majority of outreach emails, it’s critical to highlight what’s in it for the recipient. However, unless you’re offering some sort of compensation, the influencer doesn’t get much from participating.

They’re an influencer because their audience is bigger than yours – they don’t need to help you, and they have little to gain.

You have to make them want to work with you because you’re a likeable person who follows what they do, and has a genuinely interesting project for them to be involved in.

Your email should be about them, but it shouldn’t be about what’s in it for them (unless you’re offering actual compensation).

Have you ever had influencers involved in your content? Do you have any tips for getting them involved, or getting more out of their contributions? It’d be great if you could share your tips in the comments below.

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LinkedIn posts effectiveness is somewhat of a mystery. As Bernie’s guest, Scott Ayres says, “LinkedIn is like the Uncle who always comes to the family reunion with a great casserole, but you forget is there.” So Scott and his team at Agorapulse decided to do a social media experiment to see exactly what post types are effective on LinkedIn.

Scott is a Content Scientist for Agorapulse – he runs experiments as part of the company’s Social Media Lab. During this conversation with Bernie you’ll hear how he runs experiments using different content on the various social media platforms, verifies it through the expertise of an actual data scientist, and publishes the results.

Scott’s findings from a recent experiment about LinkedIn posts is the special topic of interest for this episode.

Sales Professionals Need Social Best-Practices Based on Data, Not Anecdotes

Any Google search for “How to post effectively on LinkedIn” or “LinkedIn best-practices” will provide hundreds of results, but how do you know which of the posts returned are actually trustworthy?

The leadership at Agorapulse, a social media scheduling tool, has dedicated a significant portion of its monthly budget to run data-driven social media experiments through what they call “The Social Media Lab.” Scott Ayres leads that team in carrying out all kinds of tests and trials based on this pattern:

Problem -> hypothesis -> research -> findings

With the help of an actual data scientist who is on staff at Agorapulse, the team is uncovering best-practices and publishing them publicly for anyone to learn from. Our team here at Vengreso is very keen on LinkedIn, so Bernie asked Scott to elaborate on the findings from a recent SML experiment about the kind of LinkedIn posts that perform best. You will find the results surprising.

Text-Only Posts on LinkedIn Are Viewed Massively More Than Others

One of the principles you hear touted about using social media effectively is that it’s a visual medium – so posts that include images, gifs, videos, etc. are more effective. Scott Ayres wanted to test that hypothesis, especially as it has to do with LinkedIn. His team at the Social Media Lab used three accounts with large followings to test the following hypothesis – Text-only posts would garner the lowest amount of views.

The team posted a variety of content types over a specified period of time, and tracked the engagement for each. What were the results? In Scott’s words, “Text-only posts on LinkedIn had an increase of 1,069% views.”

That’s the type of data that helps those of us in sales and marketing understand how to garner better engagement for the sake of establishing relationships and uncovering needs. Listen to this podcast to hear more about how posting on LinkedIn create more sales conversations.

How Effective Are Hashtags on LinkedIn?

It hasn’t been around for long, but LinkedIn now supports the use of hashtags. It’s easy to forget that the functionality even exists on LinkedIn but those who are utilizing hashtags are seeing great results – and the data Scott and his team have been able to compile from their experiments prove it’s not just anecdotal.

The Social Media Lab experiment about LinkedIn hashtags shows that posts using at least one hashtag get 29.59% higher impressions. Based on those findings, Bernie and Scott discuss the ways hashtags can be used to coordinate sharing efforts by a sales or marketing team, how searches can be made using hashtags. If you’re interested in increasing your activity on LinkedIn and think hashtags could help you do that, listen to this episode to get Scott and Bernie’s advice on the issue.

Featured on This Episode

• The Social Media Lab Podcast
• Agorapulse website
• Scott on LinkedIn
• Scott on Twitter

Outline of This Episode

• [0:43] The fun job Scott Ayres gets to do for Agorapulse
• [2:55] What is Agorapulse? – An amazing social media tool and a social media lab
• [6:53] The criteria behind choosing social media experiments to run
• [10:12] LinkedIn Post types: Is LinkedIn like the other sites?
• [13:13] The hypothesis behind the text-only post advantage
• [18:23] The new hashtag experiment Agorapulse has run recently

Resources & People Mentioned

• LinkedIn experiment discussed on this episode: https://www.agorapulse.com/social/linkedin
• Melonie Dadaro’s book: The LinkedIn Code
• Measure your LinkedIn Social Selling Index
• Viveka von Rosen
• Hashtag examples: #VengresoVids #VengresoPics
• www.DigitalSellingBenchmarkReport.com
• The Selling With Social Podcast with Vengreso CEO, Mario Martinez, Jr

Connect With Bernie and Social Business Engine

• https://www.facebook.com/socialbusinessengine/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernieborges/
• https://twitter.com/bernieborges
• https://twitter.com/sbengine

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