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Pitching yourself is a part of any small business. You don’t have to be a freelance writer or photographer to be in the habit of pitching yourself. After all, what is pitching except you trying to sell something. You have something that you think is valuable to someone, and you want them to buy it.

When you’re spending all your time drumming up business, it can leave you too exhausted or time cramped to do the actual thing you pitched. Pitching yourself is so much more than simply firing off an email. You need to craft a good idea, word it to draw attention, and find contact info or a medium that you want to pitch from (Instagram vs Twitter, for example).

Then, of course, there’s the seemingly endless follow up. You have to send a follow up email, or promote something to your audience at least 7 times before most people convert to a sale. This is possibly the most draining part of pitching and promotion.

Where is the balance? How can you keep business coming in and reserve the time for doing the actual work?

Pitch Fewer But Bigger Clients

Would you rather do 50 photo shoots a month for $100 each, or do 10 shoots a month for $500 each? I’d rather do the latter.

When you’re first starting to pitch yourself, you’ll be tempted to take anything that pays. And that makes sense- you might not have the financial runway to walk away from any money, no matter how small.

But pitching better paying clients is an easy way to get back some of your time. A larger project that pays more may still take a lot of time to create, but you will only have to send one invoice, instead of several. Working with fewer, better paying clients will save you endless amounts of business minutiae.

Don’t Try to Multi-Task

Humans can’t multi task. We can switch our attention from one thing to another pretty damn quickly, but multi-tasking is a myth. So don’t bother trying to do it. Block off time to accomplish one thing at a time. Pitch yourself (or focus on marketing, etc) for a set amount of time a day. Then block off time to get work done in the same manner. Allow for no distractions, and don’t allow yourself to fall into pitching when you should be creating.

Ask for Help

Outsourcing is a common tip from people who work for themselves. If you can’t afford to outsource just yet, try asking for help. Whether that’s asking your roommate to do the dished tonight so you have more time to crank out the work, or investing in a social media scheduler, asking for help is a great way to find more time in your day.

While social media is deemed to be the ‘sexy’ method of communication, the old ‘tried and tested’ email marketing campaign certainly isn’t dead. Far from it, in fact. Email is still said to be the most effective marketing channel, with more than half of all marketers preferring this method due to the positive effects on conversion rate. Newsletters and email campaigns are an essential part of advertising.

Successful Email Marketing

While many of us are using email in our promotional efforts, it’s important to remember that there is a massive difference between an email marketing campaign and a successful email marketing campaign.

One of the best ways to determine if your campaign is achieving what it’s supposed to achieve is to check the open rate of the emails you’re sending. Average open rates range from 14% to 24% depending on the industry, but these figures seem to be dropping quickly. It has been reported that in the space of just 4 years, the number of unread emails hanging out in the average email account grew by a whopping 300%.

New Life for an Old Campaign

If your email open rate is less than 14% or is less than the average for your particular sector, then that could be a sign that it’s time to make a few changes in order to derive more value from your campaign.

There are many changes that could be made as part of a ‘freshen up’; taking a new approach, tailoring your tone to adapt to reader evolution, or sending emails at different times of the day to see when your audience is most likely to want to read about your brand. However, there is one change that is perhaps the easiest of all: simply double-checking your contact list to ensure that all addresses are up-to-date.

The Problem with Emails

Not only does customer data deteriorate, but it deteriorates rapidly, especially when we’re talking about email addresses. Around 1 in every 3 people change email addresses every year, and these changes are expected to become more regular as job turnover rates hit a new high. If your open rate is particularly low, it may be because you’re sending to old, unused addresses that no longer get checked regularly.

Technological Considerations

Keeping your contact list up-to-date has always been important, but right now it is, perhaps, more important than ever before. Technology is advancing, and today’s email services are beginning to show signs of incorporating artificial intelligence (AI), and are starting to adopt machine-learning practices.

This means that today’s mail servers are remarkably clever. They know what sort of emails an account holder typically receives, effectively filtering out those that are determined to be unsolicited. If you’re sending emails to accounts that you don’t really have any sort of connection with in an attempt to reach out, chances are these emails won’t land in the inbox, but will instead be relegated to another tab. In many cases, you’re likely to see better results when you send to accounts that expect to hear from you.

And while we’re on the subject, avoid purchasing email addresses. There can be as many as 20% ‘bad’ email addresses within every purchased email list. That won’t do your open rate statistics any favors!

Email Campaign ‘Housekeeping’

While you’re thinking about making some refreshing changes to your email marketing process, it’s worth taking the opportunity to have a look at your emails through the eyes of your audience. Try to put yourself in your reader’s shoes and consider what it is that they want. Does your existing email template facilitate the inclusion of valuable, relevant information, presented in an attractive, engaging way?

If your open rate is acceptable, but your clickthrough rate seems to be suffering, carefully consider your template and look into ways that you can conduct a quick makeover for maximum effect. Experts agree that emails should be simple, clean, and orderly and that you should not only make what you’re saying crystal clear, but you should also say it quickly. Consider that mobile is preferred for reading email. Reading on-the-go has become the norm, and email design needs to fit in with modern behaviors.

Reader fatigue is very real. Don’t let your audience become bored. By refreshing your campaign and making some mall changes, such as adjusting your template and cleaning up your contacts list, you can really draw value from your email marketing campaign, getting your readers excited about your brand.

mohamed_hassan / Pixabay

This is the first in a series of 3 blogs, sharing some leadership lessons from the most successful sports teams that ever existed.
It is based on research that Sam Walker (founding editor of the The Wall Street Journal’s sports section) published in 2017 in his book: ‘The Captain Class’.

Finding Extremely Successful Teams

In the last 18 years I worked with many software and leadership teams. Every now and then these teams are awesome, highly energized and delivering high value products to their customers. However, most of them never get to taste this kind of success.

My gut feeling tells me that only 5% of these teams can be classified as extremely successful.
I felt a growing desire to answer two questions: “Can I measure how successful these teams are?” and “Can I find a pattern or magic formula that explains this success?”
Measuring the success of these teams is almost impossible, since in most cases my data is lacking, incomplete or the teams no longer exist.
Finding a pattern or formula is even more difficult without this measurement.
A little frustrated by this dilemma, I started looking for different ways to answer them.

A few months ago I was reading ‘The Captain Class’ by Sam Walker and I got really excited about his discovery!

As the founding editor of The Wall Street Journal’s sports section, Walker had access to a large amount of data on the most dominant sports teams in history.
From thousands of teams that ever won a title, he systematically eliminated those with some or incidental successes. He ended up with no more than 16 teams (which he called the Tier 1 teams), marked worldwide as the best sports teams that ever existed.

On this Tier 1-list are teams like the New Zealand All Blacks, the New York Yankees, Barcelona’s football team and the Soviet Unions ice hockey team. All teams that dominated for at least 4 consecutive seasons, winning every worldwide recognized competition.
Walker’s research exposes some very interesting lessons about leadership and creating successful teams.

The Formula to Extreme Success

Once the most successful teams were identified, Walker started looking for a success-formula.
He researched all probable causes that could have made these teams so successful:

• The presence of a superstar in the team
• The level of overall talent in the team
• The amount of financial resources
• The quality of upper management \ institutional excellence
• The impact of the team’s coach
• The team cohesion

Walker could not point at either of them as the linking pin between all teams in Tier 1 (called the Alpha Lions).
While investigating the influence of individuals to the teams’ successes, he made an astonishing discovery:
For all 16 teams, 1 person’s presence overlapped precisely with the success period: the team captain.
After an extensive search to find more overlapping factors, the team captain was the only factor that connected all 16 teams in Tier 1.

A Captain makes the difference between Good and Great

Walker’s research proves that having an inside-Leader (or team captain) is the most important factor in making a team successful.
It wasn’t strategy, management, money or superstar talent that made the difference: 106 Teams had similar characteristics but all ended second place (the so called Tier 2 teams). It was the presence of a Leader, fighting on the battlefield with the team, who made the difference between good and great.

Alex Ferguson, the legendary coach of Manchester United once said: “As hard as I worked on my own leadership skills, and as much as I tried to influence every aspect of United’s success on the field, at kickoff on match day things moved beyond my control.”

In Scrum, it is the Scrum Master role who has most overlap with the captains from Walker’s research.
In times of high pressure and when things get rough, the Scrum Master is the leader, working with the team from the trenches. For this reason he will have the most impact on the teams’ performance.
No coach, manager or process can help a team better in these circumstances than the Scrum Master.

To be continued…

So what kind of Leaders were these 16 team captains?
What are the character traits that separate these team captains from their peers in Tier 2?
How do these team captains compare to the role of the Scrum Master in Scrum?
How could I learn from this to create elite Scrum teams?

In my next two blog posts I will dive deeper into these questions. The subjects:

• Seven Traits of Elite Team Captains
• 6 Lessons to Learn from Elite Team Captains

The B2B marketing landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years. Digitalization has taken the B2B journey online and empowered buyers to self-educate and collaborate with their peers before ever speaking to a sales or marketing person. This shift has put increased pressure on B2B marketers to execute a strategy focused on demand generation and growing the lead pool.

As a B2B marketing manager, how do you deal with changing digital trends in marketing and deliver the type of growth your organization expects? The answer: inbound marketing.

An Inbound Marketing Refresher

Just to ensure we’re all on the same page, HubSpot defines the inbound methodology as:

Inbound marketing is about creating valuable experiences that have a positive impact on people and your business….By creating content designed to address the pain points and needs of your ideal customers, you attract qualified prospects and build trust and credibility for your business.

Now that we’re all on the same page, here are eight inbound marketing hacks your B2B company should be using right now:

1. Give Old Content New Life

Content development should always be seen as an iterative process. Your team has invested valuable time in creating content; don’t let that hard work stop there. Reformatting your existing content is a great way to give your hard work more longevity. Repurposing existing content into a different format (i.e., multimedia, infographics, blog posts, or even stand-alone social media posts) breathes new life into your content and gives you additional opportunities to engage prospects in the format that best aligns with their stage of the Buyer’s Journey.

2. Collaborate with Influencers

Reaching out and connecting with industry experts is a great way to boost your authority. Building relationships with influencers not only improves your industry standing but also increases the potential of your business being shared with a broader audience. Some ideas to get started include:

• Inviting an influencer to write a guest blog
• Hosting a joint webinar where you can both provide value
• Interviewing an influencer for your podcast

3. Fuel the Buyer’s Journey with Additional Relevant Content Offers

As marketers, we should constantly be thinking about the content we’re delivering at each stage of the Buyer’s Journey and making it clear what we want prospects to do next. Don’t create digital dead ends. Instead, offer your audience a next logical call to action to keep them continually engaged.

For example, if you’re writing a blog post about a specific topic, look to see if you have other complementary resources on a similar topic that dive a little deeper, perhaps a guide, white paper, or e-book that you could offer to give readers deeper insight and additional value.

4. Take that “Thank You” Page Up a Notch

Traditionally, people see thank you pages as merely the webpage that gives them the offer they requested to download or filled out a form for. However, thank you pages are another opportunity to offer value and engage with customers. Think about including an additional call to action, such as a survey, webinar or event invitation, or promotion, or using the thank you page to showcase new content offerings.

5. If You Can’t Create—Curate!

There is an endless amount of content in the digital universe. And although it’s important for your company to invest in creating your own valuable content, curating popular content that already exists is a great way to not only save your team time and energy, but it also helps:

• Position your business as helpful industry thought leader
• Increase outbound links to high-ranking pages
• Give you additional content ammunition for your other channels, such as social media accounts

6. Invest in Your Blog

Blogging should be an integral component of your inbound marketing strategy, period. In fact, B2B companies that blogged 11 or more times per month had almost three times more traffic than those blogging 0-1 times per month (HubSpot). These companies also saw four to five times more lead volume than those who blogged four to five times per month. Start creating your content calendar now.

One of the best things about business blogging is that your posts will continue working for you long after they’re published. Producing relevant, valuable content not only does wonders for SEO, discoverability, and traffic—but  it also has the potential to convert prospects into new leads for your business.

7. Use Video if You’re Not Already

In 2017, video became the most dominant form of native content on almost every social platform. Early adopters discovered it — and now platforms like Instagram, Vidyard, YouTube, and a host of others have taken it to another level.More companies are going to be investing time into creating huge quantities of video content. Social influencers like Gary Vaynerchuk have proven that video content doesn’t need to be high-quality or expensive, so your team should start thinking about how your team can start leveraging video today.

8. Don’t Forget About Social Media

Many B2B companies don’t think social media has a place in their marketing strategy. And although platforms like Snapchat or Instagram might not have a place in your industry, other social media platforms like LinkedIn might be powerful ways for your business to generate leads.

Social media is also a great place to watch and/or join the conversation about your industry, connect with other industry peers, and see what your competition is up to.

If you’re looking for social media tips, here is a blog with 20 tips on how to up your social game!

*Bonus Hack for Lean Marketing Teams: Content Atomization

For those not familiar, content atomization refers to the process of taking one content piece (most often a premium, long-form piece of content like an e-book) and breaking it into smaller, more digestible content pieces.

Content atomization is not only a great way to repurpose content to engage and convert your audience, but it can also bring that content to new audiences by adapting it for different channels and stages of the buyer’s journey.

Conclusion

B2B buyers are more informed now than they’ve ever been. And although their path to purchase is often longer, with more people involved in the buying decision, there is an incredible opportunity for B2B marketers to use inbound marketing best practices to win the hearts and minds of their prospects and find new ways to generate leads and revenue.

Now that you’ve learned some great hacks to try out in your B2B marketing efforts, which are you most excited to try?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. “Your buyer has changed.”

Touting the features and functions of your product in static sales presentations won’t help your sellers hit their quotas. Leading value-driven sales discussions that address your buyer’s challenges while demonstrating the financial impact your product or service will have on their business will. Today’s sellers need to elevate the sales conversation from transactional to interactive to stand out and meet buyer expectations. While implementing a sales enablement technology can help you accelerate your sales transformation journey, it’s only a piece of a much bigger picture. (Source)

In Sales Hacker’s 2018 Sales Tech Landscape, the company counts over 830 vendors – a 15% surge over 2017 ¹. With sales tools ranging from sales engagement to productivity and enablement, to sales intelligence, pipeline and analytics, and people management, the sales tech landscape profiles hundreds of companies that exist solely to help you digitally transform your business for improved buying experiences.

With so many technologies available, it can be difficult to identify what you truly need and prioritize the different deployments within your overall strategy. Selecting a sales enablement technology to anchor your sales tech ecosystem is a great start on your journey to total sales transformation, but you’ll want to ensure the platform you choose is flexible and future-proof. Here’s why:

1. You can and should protect your existing sales tech investments.
Digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight. Chances are, you’ve formulated your strategy and are continuously investing to keep up with the ever-changing needs of your business. You’ve taken a phased approach to implementing new sales technologies to ensure successful deployment, proper onboarding, and maximum adoption. Working with a vendor that can easily integrate with the CMS, CRM or LMS you’ve already implemented saves you money, time, and resources. But your project becomes increasingly complicated if you’re forced to move to a vendor’s preferred platform or stuck using disparate systems due to a total lack of integration.

2. A best-in-class Sales Enablement solution that seamlessly integrates with other best-in-class sales technologies is greater than a solution that claims to do everything or a lot of things, but does them just average.

As the sales tech space continues to grow, you’ll undoubtedly see more and more companies building in new functionality or acquiring other vendors to stay competitive. Keep in mind, experience is everything. Focus on identifying and selecting a best of breed sales enablement platform that increases the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales and marketing teams and truly helps them elevate their sales approach to offer buyers a value-based sales experience.

Beware of companies that hastily integrate acquired technologies as “press release” integrations or build mediocre functionality into their product to “check the box” and claim they can “do it all”. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for sales transformation. Focus on the handful of capabilities that will move the needle for your company and find the vendor that is best at those things. This is more important than understanding all of the features available as many of those will be rudimentary or underdeveloped just to “check the box.” Every sales enablement platform is unique — find the one that is unique in the ways that are most important to you.

3. Your sales transformation strategy should be future-proof.
There are always going to be new and emerging solutions available to increase efficiencies and help your sellers win. Deploying a best-in-class sales enablement technology means selecting one with the flexibility to seamlessly integrate with other best-in-class sales technologies and putting it at the heart of your ecosystem. This will ensure you not only protect your existing investments, but also future-proof your solution by offering your company the ability to take advantage of new and cutting edge technologies for maximum sales effectiveness and more deals won.

This article originally ran on Mediafly.

We see a lot of market segmentations in our work. Often these segmentations are the weakest part of the marketing plan. Many B2B market segmentations are limited to firmographic data and in some cases are simply a list of industry verticals. These segmentations are meant to divide the market into neat little buckets - the primary purpose being finding a market that fits the offer.

Most companies, whether early stage or mature, have undertaken some level of market segmentation. But more of than not, the use case for these segmentations are restricted to high level marketing functions, creating buyer personas or to organize sales efforts. Market segmentation is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used to inform offer differentiation and develop value-based pricing for sustained competitive advantage. Firmographics-only market segmentations do not generally translate into actionable insights. It is hard to use them to create effective pricing and business strategies that result in offer stickiness and healthy unit economics (Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition Costs).

Most companies reach out to us when they encounter pricing issues with an existing offer or when they are trying to figure out pricing for a new offer. There is a deep connection between pricing and underlying market segmentation. Pricing issues are often symptoms of other more deep-rooted segmentation problems. In a lot of cases, organizations are focused on fixing the symptoms such as poor conversion rates and poor unit economics and not on addressing the root causes of the problem.

The following are a few common pricing problems that we see in our work:

1. A new offer is being brought to market but there is a lot of confusion around how much to price the offer.

Early stage companies more often that not set an arbitrary price using competitor pricing or their own costs as a benchmark. More mature companies set an arbitrary price using the pricing of their existing offers and/or competitor pricing as a benchmark. For mature companies, the downside of getting the pricing wrong for their new offer is higher, as they may end up hurting the brand for their existing offers.

Market segmentation is the foundation to value-based pricing. If the segmentation is wrong at the get-to, it will be hard to get anything else right. Before considering pricing, we should consider:

• How the offer creates emotional and economic value for different customer segments

• If the value created is  differentiated enough relative to the customers’ next best competitive alternative

• For a differentiated offer, which customer segment should be targeted based on business objectives
  

2. An existing offer is well received and the organization has been able to periodically raise prices without pushback - but the organization does not know where the pricing cap is.

There is anxiety around not knowing whether they are leaving money on the table, or if they are close to crossing a threshold that might alienate their customers.

These are symptoms of inadequate market segmentation. Good market segmentation identifies customer segments that derive economic and emotional value the same way and display similar buying behaviour. We cannot monetize what we do not know. Blindly raising prices without truly understanding how much and in what way an offer creates value is just tempting fate.

3. An existing offer is getting pushback and the organization does not know why.

The knee jerk reaction to customer pushback is discounting, which leads to an inevitable race to the bottom.

An organization cannot focus on improvement if they do not know what to fix. They have to start with market segmentation to understand why there is pushback and how to create a differentiated offer relative to their customers’ next best competitive alternative.

Companies come to us to fix a pricing problem, but most “pricing problems” can be traced back to a “segmentation problem.” Before we can “prescribe” a pricing solution, we need to diagnose the root cause of the symptoms, and that starts with value-based market segmentation.

The Ibbaka approach to market segmentation has had a proven track record of success because:

We take a cross-functional approach to value-driven segmentation

We work closely with our clients’ Product, Marketing and Sales teams and take an iterative approach to crafting in-depth exploratory surveys and interviews to capture emotional and economic value creation for an offer. Our focus is to uncover how value is being created for different sets of customers -  not just the firmographics, geographies or industry verticals. We let the market tell us if and how value is being created. The end goal is to understand what drives economic and emotional value creation for our clients’ customers and use that knowledge:

• to recommend meaningful offer differentiation

• craft value messages for target segments

• design pricing to a capture a fair share of the value created

Our expertise lies in finding hidden patterns in data

We make a conscious effort to take out confirmation bias in our segmentation research work. Data collected through surveys and interviews is analyzed using our proprietary data analytics software. Our algorithms identify market segments based on underlying patterns of economic and emotional value creation as well as buying behaviour that would otherwise be difficult to find. Our segmentations are rich sources of data that shed a light on how segments meaningfully differ from one another. This enables us to design offers and pricing architectures that result in healthy unit economics.

Good pricing starts with great segmentation. At Ibbaka, we believe in creating a community around sharing pricing best practices. We designed a free online Self-Assessment tool to provoke thinking around your organization’s segmentation and pricing strategies.

We are also conducting ongoing research into the pricing of innovation. Share your thoughts and experience in this survey.

 If you have a question about market segmentation or pricing, contact us at info@ibbaka.com. We are always happy to have a chat.

Since your prospects don’t care about what you sell, why are you starting off your prospecting calls explaining what you sell? Read the memo — your customers don’t care! Do I need to start revoking your sales privileges to get you to understand?

Recently I had a call from a guy who wanted to sell me raw land. Wow, that’s just what I woke up this morning thinking. All morning I was sitting around waiting for someone to call to sell me raw land somewhere in western Nebraska. You can’t teach stupid. For some it just comes naturally, but that’s the only thing that comes out of bad prospecting phone calls.

It’s not about what we sell; it’s about the outcome we help customers achieve. Check out this video where I share the story of a person who thought they could get companies interested in yoga classes:

Your goal is to lead with a question or statement about what the prospect will see of interest to them, and I’ll remind you again — what is of interest to them is not what you sell!

Now you’re wondering, “How do I know what is of interest to people I call?” It’s simple. It starts with thinking of every other customer you’ve sold to and thinking through the outcomes they achieved. When you have a list of the outcomes your other customers have achieved, then you will begin to see a pattern as to the value of what you sell.

Second step is to take this list of outcomes you’ve helped customers achieve and begin bundling them together by the type of customer you sold to. Doing this will allow you to now begin to see patterns in how you help customers.

Breaking down into “customer buckets” will now allow you to see what is going to be of value to prospects you call. You’re now in the home stretch, as the last part is now building out questions or short statements you can make to help you make your prospecting calls engaging. That’s your goal with a prospecting call. It’s about creating engagement. It’s not about doing an information dump.

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

Growth hacking strategies can provide rapid results, but if your company can’t carry that momentum, all your efforts will be for naught.

You can’t employ growth hacking techniques if you don’t know how they’ll work in the long run. The entire point is to increase a measurable growth target—not to grow as much as possible and sort out the details later. If you don’t know your objectives, your strategy won’t create the results you desire.

A solid growth hacking plan is essential: It’s the only way to drive both immediate impact and long-term success. Your first step should be your strategic alignment, which occurs when you select the right key performance indicators in your acquisition funnel. The tactics to meet that goal come next.

This is where growth hacking really shines. It’s all about experiment-driven strategy, blending concrete goals and forward-looking tactics to create a sustainable, effective, and long-term growth hacking plan.

What Is Growth Hacking?

The origin of growth hacking was born at Dropbox when the company’s acquisition strategy was failing. The company wasn’t growing quickly enough (or raising enough money), and it was about to go out of business.

Rather than continuously throw out strategies that weren’t driving growth, Dropbox invented growth hacks. The first hacks were basically just referral strategies, but they set the stage for more complex, effective tactics down the road.

Dropbox only discovered that its original strategies were failing because it took a transparent, scientific approach to measurement. The company knew its strategy had failed because it saw major drop-off points in its acquisition funnel. When Dropbox leaders looked at the economics, they realized that no matter how much they optimized, their current course would not lead them where they wanted to go.

That’s all growth hacking is: a framework to launch high-impact, sometimes creative tactics that get you what you want—improved funnel metrics that drive commercial growth. A true growth hacker can build a strategy that leverages data-driven experiments and scalable processes to demonstrate how to meet the company’s goals over time—not just in the moment.

How to Design an Effective Growth Hacking Plan

Growth hacking strategies look different for every company. You first need to find a winning combination of market, analysis, testing, and automation that fits your unique needs. Once you identify the marketing technique that fits your company, you can turn to growth hacking to amplify its power.

Strategy Leads the Way

First, double down on the strategy. Take strategic assumptions and tactics you tested successfully and transform your tests into your control group. Now, your original targets are no longer your goals, but the baseline expectations from which your growth hacking tactics will arise.

Fortunately, growth hacking offers plenty of options for improvement. You could go after retention, using marketing techniques to create repeat customers; SEO, optimizing your web content to boost inbound traffic from search engines; or advertising, eliminating channels with poor performance and pouring more money into effective media. You could also focus on sales, viral marketing, conversions, public relations—anything that increases your KPIs is subject to growth hacking.

The key lesson is: Always continue testing. If something works, make it work better. If something falters, cut the wasted effort and direct it somewhere more productive.

Measurement as a Decision-Maker

Throughout this process, prioritize measurement. You can’t test something if you don’t know how to gauge when it works. Look to the past to gather historical performance numbers, and start asking questions. Why did one KPI grow while another faltered? Which data segmentations generated the best results? Which marketing channels were effective, and which didn’t live up to the hype?

With a firm grasp on history, move to the future. Identify the goals you want to achieve, discern how far away you are from hitting them, and determine what needs to happen to reach your ideal KPIs.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, but growth hacking strategies are designed to be flexible. As you go, ask yourself why parts of the process aren’t working as intended. Maybe you struggle to implement new strategies quickly, so you need to learn to deal with analysis paralysis. Maybe clients keep stalling on approval of creative assets—could you provide better guidelines?

When you find the winning combo, double down on it. Manage it, keep it in the market, scale it, and keep testing. Growth isn’t stagnant; it’s dynamic. As you scale, you’ll eventually hit points of diminishing returns. Before your efficiency and ROI start dropping as spend increases, start looking for the wins of tomorrow by testing frequently and adjusting as needed.

Great growth hacking plans operate in a system. When you don’t know what to do, the set of growth hacking rules you establish ahead of time can guide your decisions. Set guidelines to focus on the best opportunities (and metrics to know what those opportunities are). Establish measurements to tell you when a tactic becomes intolerably ineffective. The more you measure and plan, the better you’ll respond to changes.

Execute & Experiment

The final piece of the puzzle is execution, where you take all your analysis and strategy and put your growth hacking plan into action. Only you know what that looks like, but if you set a firm plan and measurement strategy, you’ll know when it’s right. Then, you can do it all over again, continuously experimenting and refining your way toward scalable growth.

Growth hacking might not be as attractive a phrase as it once was, but don’t let the social media scammers fool you. Growth hacking remains an effective and efficient strategy for businesses that desire rapid expansion. With the right combination of strategy, analysis, and tactics, you can accelerate your growth today without sacrificing your ability to manage that growth tomorrow.

The post Growth Hacking Promotes Rapid Development—But Can You Sustain It? appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Images are a vital piece of the content equation. After all, posts that feature images produce 6.5x higher engagement than text-only posts. That said, you can’t just write a post and slap whatever images you want into it if you want to make the greatest possible impact. So, how do you choose the right images to go along with the content you create? Check out these tips to up your content creation game.

Three Factors for Choosing the Right Images

• Does it fit your brand? Everything you put online needs to enhance your brand. Anything that links to your website or mentions your company name should tell a story about your company. If you’re in the health and wellness industry, focus on images that promote strength and vitality. If you’re in the education business, focus on images that speak to success and intelligence.
• Does it convey your message? Choose images that make sense to the content you’re producing. If you’re writing an article about how to make the best pizza crust, it makes sense to have an image of piping hot pizza. If you’re writing about dogs, skip the pizza – unless of course you can find an image of a dog stealing pizza. Then, you’re capitalizing on an image conveying emotion.
• Is it engaging? Any image you use should capture attention. This means you need vibrant, bright, colorful images, unless of course there’s some brand-related reason to avoid it.
• When possible, feature people. Data shows 60% of the best-selling images with people feature a single subject. 20% of them contained two or more subjects. Candid photos sold almost 2x as much as posed shots – and 85% of the images feature the subject looking away from the camera. Ultimately, the best marketing seeks to forge a personal connection between your brand and the customer, so including people in your visuals helps. And why do the candid shots do better than posed? It makes easier for your customers to visualize themselves as the person in the photo.

Narrowing Down Top Contenders

After you’ve located some images that could fit your project – whether it’s an ebook or a blog post, it’s time to do some homework. Make sure your competition isn’t using the exact same, or even a similar image – as you don’t want to look like a copycat. Aim for images that match your brand, as colors can help differentiate your brand from your competition.

Where You Can Source Images for All Your Marketing Efforts

Unless you’ve got a photographer or graphic designer on hand to help you create all your own images, you’ll be using stock imagery. The time and effort spent to create your own images can help set you apart from your competition and strengthen your brand – but stock photos do have their place. (It’s not for your product photography!)

Since original image creation takes time and money, many companies rely on stock imagery to take care of at least some of their needs. There is no shortage of websites that offer free or low-cost images you can use. These include:

• Pixabay
• Pexels
• Stock Free Images
• Shutterstock
• Adobe Stock
• Stock Unlimited
• iStock
• Getty Images

No matter which source you use, pay attention to the usage rights, and include any required attribution to protect yourself from potential legal trouble down the line.

That said, you can also use tools like Canva or PicMonkey to create your own images for free or cheap, without keeping a graphic designer on retainer. (We made the one you see featured in this post using Canva – starting with one of their free images.)

Is There a Magic Number of Images You Should Use?

The number of images you use is highly dependent on the content you’re creating. Shorter blog posts can get away with just a single image, while longer ones may require multiple images to illustrate a point or break up the text for better readability. What matters is that each image serves to enhance your reader’s experience. Don’t just throw images in for the sake of adding images.

Pay Attention to Image Size and Quality

Just like there’s no magic number of images to use in any particular medium – the size and quality of your image will also depend on where it’s being used. You’ll need higher resolution images for your print materials than you will for your online materials. The higher the resolution, the better the quality, but the larger the file size – so it affects page load time, which we know can have a dramatic impact on not just your customer satisfaction, but your SEO as well. We’ll write a more in-depth post on image size and quality sometime in the new future, but in the meantime, you can take a look at these guidelines straight from the WordPress Codex.

Name Your Images with SEO in Mind

The images you use in your online content will be indexed in Google Images, just like the content itself is indexed in Google. That’s why using keywords in the image names, where it makes sense, can help boost your ranking and drive leads to your website.

Name your images in ways that fit your content but allow them to be specific. “Cute dog” may be enough to describe the photo. But, taking it one step further to “Cute dog eating healthy pet food” is much more likely to place your image up high for search results from people who are looking for healthy dog food options for their furry friend. Taking the time to name your images properly can do a great bit of work in helping interested people find your website. It’s also important that while you’re naming images, you take the time to add the necessary alt text to describe the images. This helps with SEO, but also allows people who are using screen readers to surf the web to get a better idea of what your page looks like.

Images bring your content to life – whether it’s a blog post on your website, or a brochure you hand clients when they physically visit your office. The right image selection can make or break you when it comes to reaching goals with your content. Make your image selection count – your profits, and your customers, will thank you.

A) WAITER’S PAD HACK

There are two uses:

BUSINESS MEETING:

Everyone pulls out their fascist Moleskine notebooks and you pull out your waiter’s pad.

First thing that happens is the alpha male in the room says, “I’ll take fries with that burger”.

This bad joke happens 100% of the time. Homework assignment: come up with the best joke in response.

Second thing that happens: “Why do you have a waiter’s pad?”

Answer:

1. It’s easy to write notes.
2. Easy to keep track of the names around the table (since at the top of a check are tables which you can write names to remember).
3. They are cheap. 10 cents a pad with the right supplier.

This makes you the center of attention at the meeting. It says you are serious about taking notes.

And most important, it shows you are frugal and will care about not wasting people’s money.

A waiter’s pad is MONEY IN THE BANK.

Second use:

RESTAURANT:

When I sit down, I simply pull out a waiter’s pad and put it next to me on the table.

Now the waiters think I’m in “the biz” and I never have any problems with service.

This is not even a one-minute hack. It’s a 10-second hack.

B) LIE DETECTION HACK

If someone does not answer your question, they are lying.

Example: “Hi honey, where’d you go last night?”

Your honey: “I was out with friends.”

Notice: he or she did not answer the question. Which means somewhere in there is a lie.

Example: “Are all expenses included in this estimate?”

Answer: “Sure, unless we see something unusual.”

Did not answer the question. So you will be paying more.

This technique always works. Great for people who are paranoid (like me).

C) LIE DETECTION HACK #2

You’re sitting and one person has a rolling chair. You ask a bunch of easy questions. They answer and sit still.

Now you ask harder questions. Like, “Hey, where were you that night?”

“I was at home.” And they start to roll away on the chair.

Lying.

This works for anything with these two conditions:

1. It’s easy for them to move.
2. You can ask easy-to-answer questions to start to establish that they are sitting still when truthful.

This is a very common interrogation technique.

Both of these were told to me by a former DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) interrogator who now runs his own private intelligence agency.

D) NETWORKING HACK

Even if you don’t smoke, always carry around a pack of cigarettes.

Situations where this works:

1. Smoking break. Someone you want to network with is at a restaurant and takes a smoking break. You can follow them outside and start a conversation.
2. The back-technique. You leave your cigarettes behind right before someone you want to network with is sitting down (at a restaurant, club, meeting, etc.). You go back, “Ugh, left my cigarettes here.” And you start to talk.

Believe it or not, everyone in the CIA carries cigarettes around all the time for this reason.

This was told to me by a former “black ops” soldier who wouldn’t tell me “yes” or “no” when I asked him if he was still in the CIA.

E) INTERVIEW / SPEAKING HACK

You start off saying, “I’m sure the others you’ve interviewed have all been great and qualified.” Or.. (for speaking), “Let’s give a hand for all the others before me.”

THIS IS AN IMPORTANT COGNITIVE BIAS:

This is called “choice ambiguity bias”.

When you say the word “other”, the audience lumps everyone into one aggregated being.

Or your potential boss lumps everyone into one aggregated (and forgettable) person they interviewed.

They literally won’t be able to remember anything about the others before you and you will stand out.

Related to this is recency bias. Try to be the last person interviewed or the last person to speak on the agenda. The most recent person is always the most remembered and if you combine this with choice ambiguity bias, you will create the most memorable impression by far.

All of this was told to me by a professor of cognitive biases when I needed help winning a public speaking contest.

F) WRITING HACK

What’s great about this hack is that even if you know the rule, it still works:

After you write ANYTHING, take out the first paragraph and the last paragraph and it will 99% of the time be better written. I did it with this post, for instance.

G) EMAIL HACK

I do this every day.

I go back seven–10 years in my email history (I store everything).

There are many emails I haven’t responded to. In my inbox (not my spam box), I have 271,109 unread emails at this moment.

I go back to an email I didn’t respond to and I respond as if the email was sent to me five seconds ago.

Like: “Sure, I’ll meet for coffee on Tuesday!”

This almost always results in a new connection/fun meeting/whatever. Note: most jobs.

One time I did this when someone in 2004 sent me an email saying, “Hey, James, I bought you “jamesaltucher.com” for your birthday.”

I finally wrote him in 2010. We’re good friends now AND I own “jamesaltucher.com”.

The longest email response delay I did was 12 years.

H) THE ONE SECOND HAPPINESS HACK

Happiness = Reality / Expectations.

You can’t change your reality quickly. But you can change your expectations in a second.

When my wife left me, I couldn’t change the reality. I couldn’t make her stay.

I was sad, scared, miserable, depressed.

But I could change expectations. I could say, “perhaps this is for the best” and figure out the reasons why and have hope for the future.

I’m not saying it’s easy to do that in a second. But it’s possible. And that changes immediately how happy you can be.

We are all dealt a new hand of cards every few seconds. You play the hand you are dealt instead of whining about it. That’s how to win.

My therapist once told me this. She’s the best.

I) THE 5/25 RULE

This is from Warren Buffett.

He told me this when we were jet-skiing in Hawaii.

He said, “Take your top 25 things you want to do in life.”

Then, “Put the first five to your left and the next 20 to your right.”

“NEVER NEVER NEVER look at the bottom 20 again.”

Why?

Because the bottom 20 are all things you want to do. So they will distract you from the five things you want to do the MOST.

By the way, I was kidding about the jet skiing. That is clearly in his six–10 and not in his top five. And it’s not even in my top 1,000.

J) THE LOVABLE RULE

There’s a saying that’s now cliché: “You are the average of the five people around you.”

Fair enough.

Harold Ramis also says, “Stand next to the smartest person in the room.” So he stood next to Bill Murray and made Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters, and Groundhog Day.

(Sitting next to the smartest person in the room)

Again, fair enough.

But not enough.

BE THE PERSON that people want to stand next to.

Everyone is looking for their five. Everyone is looking for the person to stand next to.

Seth Godin once asked me, “What books do people buy?”

I didn’t know.

He said, “They buy the books that are already on the bestseller table.”

Be the sort of person who is on the bestseller table.

Again, while kite surfing in the Mediterranean, I asked Warren Buffett, “How do you define success?” And he said, “By how many people love you.”

And then he said, before I could ask, “You get people to love you by being lovable.”

K) THE ADVICE HACK

This hack has helped me so much I’m almost afraid to share it.

Let’s say you want something (call it “X”) from a person (call the person “Y”).

Ask Y for advice on how to get X.

For instance, let’s say you get a job offer and you are negotiating a salary. Your new boss asks how much you want to get (he’s trying to get you to put a price first).

Now use the advice hack.

You say, “Listen, I’m good at what I do, which is why you are hiring me. But you are the pro at managing and negotiating. If you were me how would you negotiate here?”

You can even throw in an anchor bias by saying, “If you were me, how would you negotiate here, given that I’ve heard (say very high number) is a reasonable number.”

You’ve just done several things:

• Reaffirmed their status above you (everyone likes that).
• Anchored them on a high number (you won’t get it but the number you get is now going to play off a high “anchor”).
• Asked them to guide you specifically on how to get what you want. Since they are giving the advice, they won’t deny you once you follow it.

I’ve used this when negotiating with customers, investors, bosses, publishers, even getting podcast guests.

And if I get rejected for something important to me, I use this hack. (“What advice would you give me if I wanted to pitch this again to someone like you?”)

I’ve been using this technique for 25 years.

L) LEAVE THE SMARTPHONE AT HOME

Yuval Harari (author of Sapiens) told me he didn’t have a smartphone. I drilled him on this and then I’ve been trying it myself ever since.

The average person touches their smartphone 2,600 times a day!

The average person is using their smartphone for 4 hours and 40 minutes a day!

People think it might help with productivity but it doesn’t. Most of the time we’re checking mindless social media, liking Instagram photos, reading useless news, playing games, etc.

I take a book with me when I go out. So I’m now reading and thinking a lot more.

And when I get home I catch up on my emails and social media messages: since I’m focused on it at that point it takes me just a few minutes instead of spreading it out throughout the day.

I probably save two or three hours a day with this one hack. And I read a lot more and enjoy my downtime more (no pressures to respond to messages all day long).

I have more.

Let me ask you for advice!

I want to build up my Instagram presence. Should I post one hack a day on Instagram? I hope you can follow me there because I post lots of hacks there.

M) “BECAUSE” HACK

This is incredibly useful.

There’s a study that showed that if you say:

“You should pay me more because I will work harder” you are more likely to get a raise than if you just say “You should pay me more.”

BUT EVEN MORE INTERESTING….

People don’t even care what you say after the word “because”. This is the “because placebo”.

If you just say “You should pay me more because you should pay me more” then the results were EXACTLY the same as when you gave a valid reason and still handedly beat out the line “You should pay me more”.

So always use “because” when you are asking for something and you don’t have to have anything after the “because”.

I don’t consider these “life hacks”.

I do these things every day. And I am constantly studying more ways to improve my life.

I love writing. I love doing stand-up comedy. I love succeeding at business and helping people.

I use these tools and many more so I can have more time and opportunities to focus on the things I love.

When I focus on the things I love, I can say I have FREEDOM. The more time per day I am making decisions based on my loves, the more freedom I have.

These “one-minute hacks” give me freedom.

Because.

The post One-Minute Life Hacks appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World by Bethany McLean, Columbia Global Reports, 138 pages, Paperback, September 2018, ISBN 9780999745441

The white sands of Wisconsin are being dug up, mixed with water, polymers, and surfactants—things like hydrochloric acid, guar gum, biocides, 2-butoxyethanol, and radioactive tracer isotopes—and injected deep into the shale rock formations of places like Texas and North Dakota. It seems like an odd thing to do, but there is reason to it.

The shale revolution has been hailed not only as an American economic success story, but as the path to national energy independence and greater geopolitical security. The phrase “Saudi America,” which Bethany McLean employs as the title of her new book, was coined by former director of Italian energy firm Eni, who has predicted that the oil and gas boom in production in this country means that “the U.S. could one day rival Saudi Arabia’s fabled oil production.” It is a boom that has changed the American landscape—both literally and economically.

Before long, the boom would begin to reshape the U.S. economy. Between 2011 and 2014, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources handed out more than a hundred permits for sand mines. Frackers had discovered that great quantities of “Wisconsin white” seemed to work best as proppant. From 2009 to 2012, the amount of sand shipped by railroads more than doubled, mainly due to frac sand, according to the American Association of Railroads. Rail giant Union Pacific even started a program called “Sand 2 Shale” to expedite the shipments of sand.

It is this revolution that renowned journalist McLean—author of classics like The Smartest Guys in the Room and All the Devils Were Here—has turned her attention to in Saudi America. What she finds is that it wasn’t so much the combination of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling that sparked the revolution—as necessary as those technological developments were—but the financial crisis of 2008, and the historically (long-lasting) low interest rates that followed.

When she dug into that story, she began to doubt the excited exaltations of politicians and the press.

The biggest reason to doubt the most breathless predictions about America’s future as an oil and gas colossus has more to do with Wall Street than with geopolitics or geology. The fracking of oil, in particular, rests on a financial foundation that is far less secure than most people realize.

The most vital ingredient in fracking isn’t chemicals, but capital, with companies relying on Wall Street’s willingness to fund them. If it weren’t for historically low interest rates, it’s not clear there would even have been a fracking boom.

As one energy investor said: “If companies were forced to live within the cash flow they produce, U.S. oil would not be a factor in the rest of the world, and would have grown at a quarter to half the rate it has.” McLean uses the complicated legacy of Aubrey McClendon as a personification of the revolution. Forbes once listed him as America’s 134th richest person, worth over $3 billion, but his fortune was leveraged with so much debt that when he died in a fiery car crash, he was essentially broke—evidenced when Wall Street vulture funds swept in to purchase the debt he had accumulated “for less than 50 cents on the dollar.”

It was early 2016 when oil tumbled from a high of $100 a barrel to $26. McClendon’s death, Mclean notes, acted “as the punctuation marking the end of an era.” But, in an industry notorious for its boom and bust cycle, a whole lot of people got incredibly rich off the initial boom in the aftermath of the recession, and another boom wasn’t far behind.

As McLean writes:

While the media focused its gaze on the high priests of technology like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, unknown tycoons quietly raked in millions.

But as investment manager Jim Chanos says, “The industry has a very bad history of money going into it and never coming out.” David Einhorn, founder and president of Greenlight Capital, looking at the financial statements of the sixteen largest publicly traded frackers, confirmed that sentiment with actual numbers:

Einhorn found that from 2006 to 2014, the fracking firms had spent $80 billion more than they had received from selling oil and gas. Even when oil was at $100 a barrel, none of them generated excess cash flow—in fact, in 2014, when oil was at $100 for part of the year, the group burned through $20 billion.

Oil, as we all know, would not remain at $100 a barrel. Maya Rao’s Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier is a great social history of the bust as it rippled through North Dakota and jobs disappeared. On a global level, McLean reports, the oil and gas industry “shed almost half a million jobs during the bust.”

That spring, the Kansas City Federal Reserve concluded that “current prices are too low for much long-term economic viability of shale oil production.”

The bust was largely the result of a decision made by OPEC, in November of 2014, not to cut oil production as price of oil began to drop (at that time to $80 a barrel). It was a decision that arguably hurt their own interests, as it hurt the price of oil from which OPEC members’ government revenues largely flow, but it was a death knell for the U.S. shale industry, which spent “as much as five times” to extract oil in the capital-intensive process of fracking as most other oil producing nations. But 2016 would be a seminal year in the fracking industry, whose boom and bust pendulum swung forcefully back to boom after a deal was struck between Saudi Arabia and Russia to finally cut production. Investor Simon Lack wrote in Forbes that this series of decisions on OPEC’s part “turned out to be a colossal miscalculation, which led to the spectacular triumph of American free-market capitalism over 40% of the world’s oil output,” stating, “The Shale Revolution reflects America’s dynamic capitalist economy at its very best.” A senior fellow at the Hudson Institute wrote, “Above all, it [the production cuts] means that America has truly reemerged as the world’s energy superpower.”

But, as I read Bethany McLean’s succinct history of events, I came away wondering if you can really call yourself a superpower if your economic success is based on others’ decisions and an industry that—despite its prodigious production and the massive personal fortunes it has created (fortunes which have gone to purchase the Buffalo Bills, the Texas Rangers, and the Seattle Supersonics, which Aubrey McClendon relocated to Oklahoma City)—has still largely failed to turn a profit:

The private equity titans have made fortunes—but not necessarily because the companies they have funded have produced profits. Some of the returns that the private equity firms have generated have come from selling one company to another … or in taking a company they’ve funded public. For a long time, the value the public market was willing to afford a fracker was based not on a multiple of profits, which is a standard way of evaluating a company, but rather as a multiple of the acreage a company owns. It was a bit like the old dotcom days, when internet companies were valued on the number of eyeballs. The attitude is invest-and-flip, not buy-and-hold.

“I view it as a greater fool business model,” one private equity executive told me. “But it’s one that has worked for a long time.”

There is one company, EOG Resources (a company that, ironically—considering McLean’s documentation of its collapse in The Smartest Guys in the Room—was spun out of Enron) that comes across as financially sound, and is worth more today than Enron was at its peak as a result. Its CEO, Bill Thomas, sees the industry, unsurprisingly, as “an enormous advantage for the U.S.” And, in at least one way, it has been: the glut of cheap domestic gas and oil has been a boon for U.S. manufacturing, especially the refining and chemical industries. It is such an advantage, McLean explains, that “German industrial trade group BDI even warned that America’s cheap natural gas could put European firms at a serious economic disadvantage.” McLean continues:

The impact on U.S. manufacturing can be see in plans such as ExxonMobil and Saudi Basic Industries (a major Saudi Arabian producer of petrochemicals) to invest $10 billion to create a massive plastics and petrochemical plant in Corpus Christi. Or Big River Steel’s $1 billion steel mill in Osceola, Arkansas. Or Total’s $2 billion ethane cracker plant in Potter Township, Pennsylvania, on the edge of the Marcellus. … Or another Shell petrochemical complex that has sprung up along the Ohio River in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. Since 2010, over three hundred chemical industry projects worth worth over $181 billion have been announced in the U.S., according to the American Chemical Council, a trade group representing chemical companies.

Yet, while investments in fossil fuels like oil and gas are booming in the U.S., and support for even coal shoots up under the Trump administration, other countries are investing in less finite (see, renewable) energy resources.

According to a Bloomberg report entitled Global Trends in Renewable Energy, China is now the leading destination for renewable energy investment, accounting for 45 percent of the global total in 2017. In contrast, investment in renewable energy in the U.S., which was already well below China, declined last year.

And as “Saudi America” doubles down on dirty energy, Saudi Arabia itself is trying to plan for the future:

As America celebrates its supposed crushing of OPEC, the Middle East is planning for the future. Saudi Arabia, for instance, is planning not just to build Saudi crown prince [Mohammad bin Salman’s] new city powered by renewable energy, but also to spend $50 billion on a massive push toward solar. … Even Saudi Arabia is trying to move its economy away from fossil fuels in order to generate as much money as they can from exporting oil—until the day it’s all over.

McLean exposes the faulty foundation not only of our supposed energy independence, but of the very desire for it. The idea that we’d be more secure if we did not rely on volatile regions of the Earth for our energy supply is alluring, but what happens to global security when the U.S. exits those markets? What if, rather than greater national security, it actually undermines it? As a Brookings report rather snarkily stated, “Oil remains the most efficient mechanism for translating economic [risk] into geopolitical risk.”

Charlie Munger, famed investment partner of Warren Buffett, believes there is an even better reason to continue paying more for foreign oil, namely to preserve our own reserves for use in the “pesticides, nitrogenous fertilizer and other agricultural products that are made through use of hydrocarbons,” and which current agricultural practices rely upon.   

The sloganeering of “drill, baby, drill,” and the false, geopolitically-fraught hope of energy independence it implies, ignores these basic business, economic, and existential human realities. In exposing them, McLean offers hope for a more reasonable discussion, a more sustainable and profitable industry, and, perhaps, a more integrated energy policy.

I think it’s pretty much a universal truth that trading 1 full size candy bar for 4 snack-sized chips is a good deal on the post-halloween candy market. And that those little rolls of smarties or rockets aren’t gonna get you a whole heck of a lot…

We grow up with the concept of trading. We trade candy, lunches, baseball cards, stickers. We understand the market. What has value. What the hot rate items are. How to build our bargaining power by strategically withholding some of our supply.

And then we get to be adults and we start doing ‘proper’ negotiations and our comfort with trading goes out the window. Here’s why we need to get back into it, and how to do it effectively in your negotiations.

Getting into the rhythm of trading is a must – because it very purposefully helps protect us from our tendencies to give too much away in hopes of landing a deal. If you’re across the negotiation table from someone who’s a-ok with take-take-taking…then you’ll be give-give-giving. The result? Sure – you get a deal. But there’s so little value left for you that it’s really not worth anything to your business. You’ve shared too little or paid too much, you’ve risked your operations, you’ve jeopardized the sustainability of your business…all because you gave without taking.

When you’ve prepared for your negotiation – researched, found your BATNA, established the MDO and LAA (I’ll link to those videos when they’re live) you’re going to have a whole heap of different variables that could come into play during a negotiation. And strategically, what you need to do is play with those variables. It’ like dumping out a bunch of lego building blocks. There are many ways they could come together to create a final product, and it’s your job to find those possible combinations.

For example:

If you purchase 100 units, I can meet a price of $50 per unit.

If you commit to a 3 year agreement, I can assign a senior consultant.

If you waive the moral rights clause, I can meet a June 1 project delivery.

Notice – in each of those, you’re linking what you can give, to something that you’ll take from the other person. It may sound pedantic to practice phrasing them like that – but it helps you get into the routine of always having the giving and receiving actions linked in your offers.

Want to take trading to the next level in your negotiations? Mix up what variables you’re pairing together. It’s not always volume and price. It could be volume and delivery, volume and resources, delivery and engineering support. Just like those legos. It’s not always red and blue that need to click together. Get the best result by getting creative in those combos.

Your challenge this week is to come up with 3 trading phrases for your very next ask.

If you do x, then I can do y.

Get yourself into that trading rhythm

Got it? Good. See you next time.

LinkedIn is more than a social networking site – it’s an incredibly powerful tool to attract the likes of employers and marketing headhunters.

An impressive LinkedIn presence is mandatory if you want to grow your career and personal brand. It can be one of the most powerful assets for professional development and new opportunities. When used properly, you can maintain a flow of intriguing marketing job opportunities coming past your radar – even if you’re not actively in need of work.

What Marketing Headhunters See in the Most Impressive LinkedIn Profiles

There’s no question that recruiters for marketing positions heavily rely on LinkedIn to recruit top marketing talent. It has become a central hub for employers, recruiters, and candidates to connect and engage with each other.

Do you want to create an incredibly impressive social media presence? We’ve put together some tips to ensure your LinkedIn profile is in optimal shape and stands out against the crowd:

Make It Easy to Understand

LinkedIn can be viewed as an informal resume, so it should be treated as such. The language and vocabulary you use need to be professional but easily understood by everyone. For instance, HR managers and recruiters who aren’t familiar with marketing vocabulary will have a tough time understanding your skills and experience if your profile’s flooded with marketing-related jargon.

We recommend avoiding overused jargon and buzzwords. However, you should be integrating relevant keywords so that you increase your visibility. For instance, if you’re a Brand Strategy Consultant, you’ll certainly want to focus on that as much as possible. But you’ll also want to add related skills and keywords like Branding, Brand Management, or Reputation Management depending on your experience and specialty.

Keep It Consistent

Marketing headhunters often see an inconsistency between candidates’ profiles and honest experience. You want to ensure everything you present on your LinkedIn aligns with your resume and real expertise. Otherwise, you taint your credibility and integrity.

To avoid providing information that can be misleading, make sure your LinkedIn accurately reflects your experience and skills. Refer to your job description and assess what your key responsibilities are. Your profile doesn’t have to look exactly like your resume, but it shouldn’t be far off from it.

Demonstrate Your Value

You want people to know that you’re good at what you do, don’t you? Your LinkedIn should demonstrate the impact you’ve made in previous roles and the value you can add to any organization. Proving your value should be the main priority of optimizing your LinkedIn profile.

Market yourself as a high performer and the most attractive candidate. Include quantifiable numbers, case studies, and presentations that prove success. Position your expertise to demonstrate how you can help organizations solve challenging business issues.

Don’t forget to show off your personality and make your profile engaging! Be active and social, and make sure you’re connected with relevant groups, pages, and influencers in your industry. You need to look consistent, engulfed and ingrained in your specialty and field. Engage with your community – you want to become a credible thought leader and validate the impact you have.

Don’t Give Out Too Much Information

In order to ensure your profile isn’t overwhelming, don’t feel compelled to put everything you’ve done on display. Highlight key achievements, and give enough insight into your skills and experience to demonstrate the value you can add.

Those who land on your profile on mobile won’t have a good experience scrolling through massively long paragraphs or bullet points. That’s why it’s important for your profile to be concise and easily digestible. Your profile should be an informative glimpse into the impact you can make in an organization. Make sure your information is brief and to the point, and save the bulk of it for your resume.

You additionally want to be cautious of giving away too much confidential information about your company. Competitors can easily pry and leverage information to their own advantage.

Percentages are a good way to provide quantifiable evidence while masking confidential numbers. For instance, you can say you grew lead conversion rates by 20% in the past year instead of providing the actual numbers. When you move on to the next step and talk to marketing headhunters, you can then provide more contextual data.

Yes, Visuals Matter

LinkedIn lets you add photos, videos, and media to your summary. This way, you can show real examples of your work rather than just talking about them. Simply go under ‘Add profile section’, open the ‘Intro’ tab, click the ‘+’, and scroll down to the bottom.

Whether it’s your profile picture, banner, or any rich media like videos or presentations you choose to share, make sure your profile visually speaks to your capabilities. These features, in particular, stand out considering there aren’t too many places on your profile to add graphics or images.

Recruiters for marketing jobs will develop their first impressions of you based on how your profile looks. So, it’s important to make sure every visual you include is high quality and relevant.

For example, if you’re a creative marketer, you’re likely going to showcase work samples and include a link to your portfolio. Doing so helps inject personality into your page.

Have a Third Party Review It

It can be easy to overlook minor typos or grammatical errors when you’re endlessly gazing over your profile. It never hurts to have an extra set of eyes take a look at your page and offer feedback. This can be from a mentor, a trusted peer, or even a family member.

Can they recognize your capabilities as a marketing expert? Hearing different perspectives from various people will provide some helpful recommendations to enhance your profile.

Update It Consistently

It’s easy to neglect your LinkedIn if you’re not looking for a new job. But if the time comes, it’s good to make sure you’re not scrambling to add all of the projects and jobs you’ve worked for the past three years.

Consistently assess and update your profile, especially if you’re planning to seek other opportunities. This way, it’s easier to manage so that you don’t forget important details or include any outdated information. Key features like your professional headline, summary and location should always be up to date. Doing so will increase the chances of employers and marketing headhunters finding you.

Additionally, if you’re engaged in your current job and looking for new opportunities, you want to be discreet. If you all of a sudden give your profile a complete makeover, your boss may pick it up as a signal that you are indeed open to other jobs. LinkedIn gives you the option to let recruiters know you’re open to new roles, but can’t completely guarantee that your current employer won’t find out.

Be Responsive

There’s essentially no point in having a LinkedIn profile if you’re going to ignore and disregard those who message you. It’s a networking site at the end of the day… So network! If people are reaching out to you to make connections or introduce open roles, take the time to communicate with them. You never know how the connections you make now will impact your career down the road.

Conclusion

Setting goals for your LinkedIn profile can help you grow your network and improve your presence on the biggest social network for marketing professionals. Approach it as you would approach any marketing project or campaign by building a strategy and KPIs to meet.

Constantly optimizing your LinkedIn maximizes the chances of opportunities coming to you, so you don’t have to wait around when the time comes for you to seek a new position. Doing so will allow you to showcase your expertise in the best way possible and take your career to new heights like never before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some thoughts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But is that all?

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

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

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

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

And more information doesn’t necessarily help.

In this context, how can sales people be most helpful.

I think it’s adding “meaning.”

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

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

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

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

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

This is what drives buying success.

This is what drives sales success.

By Mark Schaefer

The idea of values based marketing  is certainly picking up steam. The most explosive example was the Nike-Kaepernick project of course, but today I’d like to show how this seemingly risky strategy might result in long-term competitive advantage, especially if you’re the first in your market to do it.

The Eagle has landed

One company that has been working on this values based marketing approach for several years is U.S. retailer American Eagle. The company spends an extraordinary amount of money on consumer research and has even hired teens for their executive office to keep the company from doing anything that might alienate its core audience (college-aged Americans).

Here are some of the values based marketing initiatives AE has launched over the past couple of years:

• After a shocking shooting at a Florida high school, the company sent an email blast to its customers encouraging them to participate in anti-gun rallies. It posted a photo of a large rally to its 2.7 million Instagram followers.
• AE stopped using photo-shopped images of models with unachievable body types. It launched a platform called AE X Me which taps real customers, based on their Instagram posts, to become brand ambassadors. The photos in the campaign are created in schools and gritty neighborhoods of its real customers.
• The brand launched a special project called “It Gets Better” to place a spotlight on civil liberties and empowering LGBTQ youth. It developed a special fashion line called “The Pride Collection” to fund the civil liberties efforts. The company is using transsexual and same-sex couples in its ads proclaiming, “love is love.”

Predictably, these politically-oriented moves were controversial. On Instagram, it was clear the brand had alienated quite a few people. “Stay out of politics, and do what you’re good at … selling clothes,” wrote a user underneath the brand’s anti-gun post. In fact, there have been live protests against the brand in some cities.

Why would a brand invite this kind controversy?

The pull for values

Because that’s what their customers want.

The company’s decision to support the progressive causes of its target audience (ages 15 to 25) did not come casually. American Eagle researchers found that young adults think of themselves as diverse, politically involved, and interested in engaging with people outside of the digital realm (yes, they like shopping in stores). That diversity extends to ethnicity, sexuality, and even body image.

By aligning closely with the values of their core college-aged constituent, they are trying to cement themselves into the hearts of their customers.

Friedman would have a fit

In business school, most of us grew up on lessons from the Nobel-prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and his admonition that a firm should only engage in activities that increase shareholder value. We learned that business was one thing, and society was another. Here is one of his most famous quotes:

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud”

Obviously, the world is changing. Businesses are beginning to question how they contribute value to their employees, communities, and nations beyond profits and a stock price. Business leaders are re-thinking their responsibility to the world and the reasons their companies exist.

We are witnessing an important shift in business history, and it’s just beginning.

The numbers support values based marketing

There is a lot of research emerging to validate this new business approach, but in summary, taking a stand that aligns with customer values may be one of the last strategies we have to gain loyalty in a shop-around society,

Edelman showed that 67 percent of consumers will try a brand for the first time solely because they agree with its position on a controversial topic and 65 percent said they will not buy a brand when it stays silent on an issue they consider important.

When brands speak out they are rewarded. Nearly a quarter of all consumers will pay at least a 25 percent premium when their values align with a brand and 51 percent will buy the brand exclusively based on shared values.

The numbers are convincing. Taking a stand – with due diligence – is one of the few remaining paths to loyalty, advocacy, and even premium pricing.

American Eagle is a good case to examine because it has been working its value based marketing strategy for several years. In an industry experiencing cataclysmic disruption from Amazon, its stock price is on a roll. Of course we can’t assume this marketing strategy is the only cause of their impressive run, but the company is doing something right:

The end of loyalty

While taking a polarizing stand may help sell shoes and jeans to teens, it’s not for everybody. Not many management teams I know of are ready for a media backlash and watching their products being burned in the streets.

However.

The days of loyalty are over.

Research from McKinsey and others shows that across a broad range of industries, only 13 percent of consumers are loyal to a brand, on average. In some categories like shoes, cosmetics, and financial services, it’s even lower than that, and in a precious few industries like automotive and insurance it’s somewhat higher. But on average, a full 87 percent of consumers shop around, a dramatic change from even 10 years ago.

The cold, hard fact is, taking a stand that aligns with consumer values may be the only way to earn loyalty today.

Values based marketing and competitive advantage

This begs an important question. Nike was the first in its category to make this move and wants to “own” the values of its core audience. The research would indicate this was a smart move. Now, what is their competitor Adidas supposed to do?

The values based marketing strategy is a long-term play, and it remains to be seen whether it works for Nike. But at least for now, the market has responded with positive support. The company lost $4 billion in market value the day after the ad campaign was announced, but the stock price recovered — and more — within a few days.

There is evidence that Adidas also flirted with a Kaerpernick arrangement. Now, is it locked out? Would a values based marketing campaign by Adidas seem un-original, or even desperate?

An analyst said this of Nike competitor Under Armour: “Under Armour is struggling to define itself in an increasingly crowded and competitive market. I think this comes through in a lack of directional and punchy marketing. Only a strong brand takes risks and puts out powerful messages. Nike has the confidence to do that, Under Armour less so.”

There are only so many “values” to go around. American Eagle’s research led them to a highly-focused strategy supporting gun control and civil liberties. I don’t think a competing retailer in their category could now mimic their aggressive and consistent strategy. They are owning the hearts of core customers by aligning with their values, and also by being the first to do it.

The issue of congruency

A values based marketing strategy will only work if the values aligned — not just with the consumers, but also with the company itself.

According to Bloomberg, the Kaepernick ad has already generated $43 million in media exposure for Nike. OK. So far, so good.

But if Nike wants to permanently tap into a youth market demanding social change, they must be congruent with their actions. They must follow through on their own message of sacrifice. They must share their immense wealth with those they’ve exploited in deplorable factories. It means investing money into their workers and providing safe, well-paying jobs with benefits. It means compensating designers for their work. It means divesting from any links to police or brutal labor practices at home or abroad.

Human rights, racism, civil liberties — these are extremely complex issues that aren’t going to be solved through a sensational ad campaign.

The difference between American Eagle and Nike — at least so far — is that AE has placed its money, its influence, and its workforce in service of the values they also display in their marketing.

Values based marketing is not for everyone. But if you have the business case to do it, and more important, the congruent company culture to do it, it might be the last opportunity you have to create loyalty, new demand, and even higher pricing for your products.

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

The post The first-mover advantage of values based marketing appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

       

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Unless you really like sending hundreds or thousands of follow-up emails manually, you're going to love this new feature in Close.io: email sequences for salespeople.

What are email sequences?

You've probably heard of drip campaigns, automated emails, or auto-responders. They typically involve dedicated (and often expensive) apps, usually complex integrations with your CRM, and more often than not — a lot of fiddling with templates, layouts, and previewing emails for different email clients.

Our email sequences feature is designed exactly for people who know they need something like that, but don't have the time, expertise, or additional budget to deal with all this hassle.

Put simply, an email sequence is a series of emails — written in the normal way you write follow-up emails — that are automatically sent to prospects and leads over the course of days or weeks.

How do they work?

Let's say you attended an event over the weekend and came back to the office with a batch of fresh leads to reach out to. 

Normally, you'd have a Smart View set up to filter these leads into a list that you'll call or email one by one. When they don't respond (which let's be honest most will not) you'll need to remember to follow up with them in a few days or weeks. 

Now you might automate the reminders process, say with tasks or email follow-ups but you still need to write the individual emails and send them. True you'll probably copy-and-paste (or use email templates) but that's still not a great use of your time.

Enter the magic of automation: write your sequence of emails once and all prospects that match your criteria will automatically receive your thoughtfully written and valuable emails.

You can enrol one person today, ten people tomorrow, and a thousand people next week — they’ll all get the right email at the right time.

Email sequences optimized for sales

Our goal is to make you the most effective salesperson possible, so we’ve optimized our sequences for sales. 

Here are the things that make our email sequences feature really stand out for sales teams:

• The emails look and feel like a handcrafted email written specifically for the person receiving it.
• We randomly assign a unique time of day for each email in the sequence. We’ve found that this makes the experience feel more natural and improves your reach rate.
• When a prospect replies they are immediately opted out of further emails. Now you have the opportunity of putting your full attention on the prospect without any additional, distracting emails. If on the other hand they are writing to be opted out — well no further work needed on your part.
• What about out of office replies? We automatically ignore autoresponders so your sequences will keep working.
• Emails you create to be used in sequences are automatically available to be re-used by yourself — and your team — in other sequences or regular emails. So when something works, you can scale it up.

Email sequences let you stretch your creative brain once: write a great series of emails and benefit from that creativity every day.

Creating email sequences

Choose a name, pick templates, add as many steps as you like.

You can start sending a sequence immediately after you add someone to it or after a delay (specified as a number of days).

When you’re ready to add contacts to a sequence, you have two options:

1. Enroll a single contact to a sequence (say after a missed call)
2. Bulk enroll an entire Smart View or a search result

Both are literally one-click actions. Equally simple is pausing and resuming sequences: on a per-lead basis or for an entire Smart View.

For those of you who want a little more power and customization, we’ve also added custom triggers and actions to our Zapier integration. You can enroll a contact in a sequence when the lead status changes, or pause a sequence when you make a call to that contact.

Try email sequences for free

Email sequences are available to Professional and Business plan customers. If you're not yet a Close.io user — now's the best time to start a full-featured 14-day free trial to try email sequences.

If you're already on our Basic plan, reach out to our success team to arrange for a demo.

Not all leads are created equal. Learning how to run a discovery call is essential to anyone using inbound selling. The discovery call will help you find out whether your lead is a good fit and help make sure that you close the right customers. In this video, I’ll go over the do’s and don’ts of customer discovery and share some helpful templates as well.

Video Transcript:

Hey, thanks for checking out our channel. If this is your first time watching, maybe you’ve been watching a while and haven’t yet hit Subscribe, we’d love for you to do so now. We’d love you to join our community. We publish new content each and every week to help you get the most out of your digital marketing and sales strategies and grow your business the most fluid and organic way possible.

So we’re going to be talking today about customer discovery. This is typically the first or an early stage conversation that you have with a lead or a potential customer. Now a lot of people, when they get a lead and they have that first call, their number one goal is to sell, right? We want to always be closing. That’s a quote that’s really, really popular, especially in the sales industry. But the reality is customer discovery shouldn’t be what we think it should be. We need to switch our viewpoint on this. This is something that I had to work very hard on. As a result, it’s helped me close better customers, and helped me stay away from bad fits for my company.

So my name is Ryan Shelley, if you don’t already know me. I’m the owner of Shelly Media Arts, or SMA Marketing. We’re a digital marketing firm that focuses on organic visibility. We help businesses grow leads, we do inbound marketing and SCO. We help brands grow online. Some of my credentials include that we’re a Hubspot agency, we’re Hubspot Gold partners, we’re a Databox agency as well. We’re big on data and using data to help us make decisions. We’re a premier partner there. I’ve earned, in a word, a master certification in business intelligence.

I’ve been in the search world since 2009. I really enjoy SCO and helping brands, and people grow their organic visibility. The thing that’s really cool about SCO is you can generate a lot of high-quality leads, but not all the leads that you generate are going to be perfect fits for your business. So let’s talk a little bit more about customer discovery.

What is the purpose of a discovery call or an email conversation? That’s a great question. A lot of people think, “Well, it’s discovering, ‘Is this customer … How can we close them?'” Maybe we’re going to discover ways that we can do business with them. While those are all maybe parts of a discovery call, the reality is the purpose of a discovery call is to disqualify the lead. Your goal is to do everything you can to find reasons why you shouldn’t do business with this specific person.

Now you don’t do it in a punk way or in a way that’s not respectful, but what you’re doing is you’re trying to do your homework to make sure that you don’t bring on somebody who’s not a good fit. If you can’t disqualify them, they’re probably going to be a great fit for your business. So that’s the purpose of a discovery call.

How do you go about that? Let’s talk about the interaction that you’re going to have. Now most of the time, this is going to be done through a telephone call. I highly recommend that you use telephone. Talk to people. Business is personal. When you have that conversation, you don’t have to put emotions behind the words like you would in an email. Use the phone. It’s going to make this way easier for you.

The first thing you want to do is validate your research. You should be asking questions and making sure that you have got an understanding of their organization, that you know who they are, that you know who the players in their organization are. It should be a red flag if you’re talking to somebody in a low-level position at a company who doesn’t have purchasing power. You probably shouldn’t even be on that call with them. The only thing you should be doing then is saying, “Who can I talk to that can pull the trigger?” Otherwise, you’re wasting your time, and you’re wasting their time because you can’t do anything. They don’t have the ability to actually make a decision. So you want to validate the research and get a better understanding of their organization, and honestly their role in the organization.

Then you’re going to want to identify goals. You want to get deeper into their goals and find why they want to work with you. What problems are they trying to solve? What are some things that you can do to help them along immediately? If you are a good fit for them, what are these areas? If they don’t have goals, again, that might be a red flag for you, saying these people don’t really know what they want. That can be a very hard customer to work with, a customer who knows they have a problem but has no idea exactly what they want or even what their timeline is. So make sure you understand that they do have goals. That’s going to help move the process along a lot faster.

You want to be able to clarify pain points. Do they even understand where their pain points are? Where are they at in that buyers journey? Sometimes somebody comes in and they’re feeling a pain, but they’re not sure what’s causing the pain. They may be trying to address a symptom at the root cause of the pain. So you want to be able to hone in and find out what those setbacks are, what their pain points really are, and what is causing them not to achieve the goals that they want to achieve. Having the ability to clarify pain points is going to help you understand whether or not you have a solution for them. If you don’t have a clear idea of what they’re trying to achieve and they’re not sure, then you’re not going to know if you’ve hit that goal or not.

By identifying and labeling, naming the pain points, you’re going to be headed in a right direction. Again, a red flag would be somebody who knows they have a problem, but can’t really identify it. Doesn’t understand what it is, and worse, can’t convey that in a way that can help the sales rep understand it. You may have a good solution, but if it’s a good fit for their pain point, it’s probably not a good fit for your business.

Now, one of the ways that you can build your credibility is providing tactical suggestions. We use these in a discovery call to say, “Have you ever thought about X?”, or “Have you ever thought about Y?” “What if you used your blog to enable your sales team to get more content to a customer?” There could be a lot of ways that you could provide a suggestion, depending on the product or service that you’re offering. It shows that you value working with people, and that you help them solve problems, and you’re not having them pay for anything. You’re giving them some free advice. That, again, builds rapport, builds trust.

Also, listen to how they respond to that. Some people will say, “Hey, thanks. That was really great.” But people who are maybe defensive when you give them some sort of advice or tactical suggestion, or maybe act like they know it all, again, these are red flags that you might want to put up in the air if you’re having this conversation. Again, because you want to make sure that the people that you’re closing are customers that are going to work for your business as well as somebody that you’re going to be able to provide value to.

The next steps are also really important. If a prospect wants to see a demo or something, you want to nail those times on the discovery call then. So if it’s a good fit, you want to set the meeting up for the next call, which would be that demo or the deeper discussion right then on that call. Now, if they’re not a good fit, and you know it, you probably want to close the conversation right then as well. Say, “Hey, this is really great. Based on the conversation we’ve had today, I’m not sure if we’re the best fit for you.” That way you can break the ties, and you don’t have to waste time in this awkward in-between phase, then wait for somebody to not respond. That happens a lot, where they’re not a good fit, but neither person knows how to close the loop. Offer the next step. Either move them forward in the buyer’s process, or cut them off and move them off of your radar, and focus on the people who are going to help you generate the business that you need for your company.

Email is a great way to follow up or continue the conversation, or nail down that first meeting. Now you shouldn’t be doing all of your meetings via email. You shouldn’t be doing all your discovery through email, but you can use email effectively in discovery, in follow-up and engagement. So let’s look at a couple templates here.

So this first one is all about adding business value. The contact first name, things of that … Those are customizable options. The reason we use templates, again it’s going to help us to move the process along faster, so you don’t have to write the same thing over and over again. But we also want to make sure that we customize the template, so that we’re not generically throwing the same information out to everybody.

Again, this one’s all about adding business value. So you address the person by their name, “Working with other companies like yours, one of the key issues that they struggle with is this.” This is really good for setting up that first discovery call, where you can pull out some key issues, understand that you know the industry a little bit. “Last year we’ve helped a number of companies do this, and see the results that we’ve had. If this might be a challenge that you’re experiencing, let’s set up a quick call.” Again, this is going to help you set up that discovery call. This can be very powerful because it brings in some empathy. It helps you align with them and lets them know that you understand their industry and you also understand the pains that they’re going through.

Now if you’ve got an inbound lead, you’re doing inbound marketing, you’re going to be able to see some of this stuff, depending on the software that you have. So if you have Hubspot, you’re able to see the interactions that people have with your website. So you can, “Hey, you visited our site and you downloaded this piece of content. Did you download this just to learn about the topic? Or are you looking for a way to solve that problem?” This is where you can build that relationship early on and start to add in some tips. Let them know if you’ve thought about this.

So this is early on. You’re having that interaction. Maybe you’ve chatted with them before. Maybe you’ve had a call with them and they didn’t really take the first step, but then they went back and downloaded some content on your website. Here you can give some tips, and then you can say, “Hey have you thought about X or Y?” Again, it puts you in the position as a thought leader. It puts you in the position as a guide. It’s not really sales-driven at the moment, it’s relationship-driven. You’re not asking them for a meeting, but you are asking them to respond, “Have you ever thought about this?” You’re building that communication, you’re building that relationship.

It’s very important to build the relationship. Just because we do things online and we can interact via really never having to talk to somebody, it’s still important. Especially when we’re selling higher ticket items. You have to have those conversations. You have to be able to walk somebody through that, and let them know that, hey, you value them as a person. This is a great template to do that with.

Quick lead introduction. This is something very early in the stage. Maybe you saw them view a page or download some content, or visit a blog or something. You wanted to check in to see if they found what they were looking for. Give them some other resources, and then say, if you’ve done some prospecting, set up a time. You want to set up times that you’re available.

If you’ve got a calendar link, that works really well. But what I’ve also seen is today everybody has calendar links … A lot of people do, not everybody, but a lot of people do. It can still put the ball in the court to go and schedule a time. It can kind of seem impersonal, like non-personal. So instead, I really like to say, “Hey, would you like to talk tomorrow at 10:00 a.m.?”, or “Would you like to talk tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. or 2:30 p.m.? Let me know if those work for you. If not, let’s find another time.” So this is a way, just to build that relationship, get somebody on your calendar so you can take that next step into a discovery call and kind of figure out if they’re a good fit for your business or not.

So if you’ve got any questions about the discovery call or the templates that we walked through in this video, please comment below. You can also shoot me an email, that’s my email address. Or hit me up on Twitter. I’d love to continue the conversation with you there. Until next time, Happy Marketing!

freeGraphicToday / Pixabay

Giving a sense of meaning is becoming more and more important to attract and engage talent. We all want our work to matter. One of the most powerful motivators is knowing that you are making a difference in the world. Of course you can work for a company that:

• has integrated ‘doing good’ in their business model,
• exists with the sole purpose of serving the community (government or NGO),
• has products which play a vital role in health (healthcare or pharmaceutical), or
• focuses on the development of society (financial institution, education, or art).

However, most of us work in organizations where there is no obvious correlation between the product and services the company provides and the impact it has on society. How would a fast food organization ‘do good’? Shake Shack is trying hard with the Better Burger revolution. Or a cement company? Lafarge is tying it to build better cities. How about your local accounting firm’s contribution to society? EY is aiming to build better workplaces.

So how can you help your team do good by making a difference in the world if you represent a tobacco company’s accounting department, a software company’s developer, or a delivery company’s logistics team? I guarantee you, every company can contribute to society – no matter what industry they work in.

Willingness to Do Good

The first step to align your team to a purpose that’s making a difference in the world is realization. The purpose is no doubt larger than the immediate contributions they make to the organization. But the realization is that not only will society and the organization benefit from it, but specifically the team and its individual members as well.

The second step is then of course to sit the team down and start a conversation on how they want go about making a difference in the world. What will the team collectively do to create a purpose that not only serves the company but also the world.

Defining the Purpose

In facilitating teams to come up with their purpose I follow this process:

First, I ask them to recall a moment when they were proud to be associated with the team and organization. After they’ve shared this I ask them why they would like to be a part of this team’s future. This establishes an emotional connection with the past and the future. I then focus on how each member thinks they add value to the company and what role the team plays in the overall company’s vision. Lastly, I facilitate a discussion challenging them to think beyond the company and conceive ways they as a team can impact the society.

An accounting team can come up with a purpose that aims at being a role model of transparency and hold exemplary integrity in reporting in their business environment. A logistics team can come up with trying to reduce the carbon footprint of their operations. A factory team can focus on supporting communities outside their manufacturing facility. A purchasing team can help develop local suppliers adhere to global standards. A credit card sales team can aim to educate people on being financially responsible. You get the idea.

In my view every team, irrespective of their skill, can make a connection between what they do and making a difference in the world. Maybe the larger purpose isn’t obvious at first. If you keep on peeling the ‘proverbial’ onion, answers will come up. Sure it may not mean a lot to people outside the team, but since they identified and articulated it themselves, it would hold importance to people within the team. It will also have a significant impact on how committed individuals will be to their teams and how engaged they are to deliver on that purpose.

How to Add Sales to Each Stage of the Customer Journey written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

When you think of your business’s sales strategy, you may be tempted to think of it as only relating to the actual transaction where a customer pays for the good or service you offer.

However, businesses today can’t think of their relationship with their customers as a linear one. Instead, people have the opportunity to interact with your brand in a wide variety of ways: on your website, in-person, over the phone, via email, in Google search, or on social media. And they go through different phases, from just coming to know of your product to (hopefully, eventually) being a return customer who refers others to your business. The sum of all these interactions with your brand is what we call the customer journey.

Because this journey is not a straight road, your sales team can play a role in each phase of the journey. As you think about building an hourglass that addresses marketing needs for prospects and customers at each phase, you should also consider how your sales team fits into the hourglass model. Whether someone is hearing about your brand for the first time or is making their 50th purchase, your sales team has something to offer them.

We’ll take a look at the stages a customer goes through on their journey of interacting with a brand, and how sales can play a role in each phase.

Getting to Know You

When someone is just encountering a brand for the first time, you have a tremendous opportunity but also a great responsibility. They know nothing about your business, so it’s up to you to create a cohesive image that quickly, easily, and clearly communicates who you are, what you do, and why you do it better than anyone else in the game.

These early stages of brand discovery—the know and like phases of the hourglass—are often thought of as the territory of the marketing team. Creating advertising campaigns, compelling calls to action, and social media profiles fall under their purview, but sales has a role to play even this early on in the customer journey.

Outbound marketing efforts may well include your sales team. If you undertake telemarketing or cold calling, have a booth at a trade show, or have a giveaway of branded items at a community event, these are opportunities for your sales team to be the first point of contact with prospects.

While outbound marketing techniques have become less popular in recent years, if it’s done correctly, it can help you to create positive associations with your brand in the minds of prospects. The key here is in making sure that you have a sales team that’s comfortable with having a conversation that touches on the important differentiators for your brand, but at the same time doesn’t feel scripted. With the right sales team in place, it’s possible to create positive personal connections with prospects immediately, and that really allows you to stand out from your competition that’s relying solely on inbound techniques.

Coming to Trust You

A recent survey from Wantedness.com found that, in the U.S., 79 percent of consumers said they would only do business with brands that show they understand and care about “me.”

The trust and try areas of the hourglass are where there’s the greatest crossover between your marketing and sales teams, and so they should be working in tandem to create that highly personalized approach. In order to be most effective, they need to have access to each other’s information: sales needs to share their CRM data, while marketing should provide a window into their analytics.

While some prospects will react well to personalized email campaigns and targeted paid advertising on Facebook, all managed by the marketing team, others will need a bit more hand-holding from someone in sales.

Having a call to action button on your website that makes it easy for prospects to request a demo and get in touch with a member of your sales team can help funnel those prospects that need a little extra attention to the appropriate salesperson. Additionally, creating a shared inbox for your marketing and sales teams will allow your marketing folks to easily hand off prospects that would like more, detailed information to the sales team.

The Moment of Truth: The Purchase

This is what the sales team has been waiting for. After playing a role in introducing prospects to the brand and being responsive to their questions in the trust and try phases, the prospect is finally ready to convert.

Of course, the buying phase of the customer journey where the sales team plays the most obvious role. It’s also a point that some business owners take for granted. Just because someone has become a customer does not mean they can now be forgotten.

As Joey Coleman and I discussed in a podcast episode, creating a standout customer experience is an important part of taking people from one-time customer to repeat client. The sales team needs to make sure that the first time someone buys from you, they have an optimized experience. That means automated updates on their purchase, an easy way to get in touch if there’s an issue, and a proactive approach from you.

If your sales team is able to provide a stellar experience for a customer’s first time buying from your company, they’re a lot more likely to come back again. The trick here, of course, is that the stellar experience needs to be repeated on each subsequent interaction. Your sales team can never take a customer for granted, because if they do, that customer will eventually drift away to a competitor.

Part of the trick here is to establish crystal clear processes for your sales team’s interactions with customers. Make sure you have a customer service platform in place to ensure that any issues are being addressed in a timely manner and that efforts are not being duplicated (which wastes your team’s time and frustrates and confuses your customer). Consider a platform like ZenDesk, which allows you to track customer support requests across channels.

Building a Referral Engine

The final stage of the hourglass gives your customers the opportunity to generate new leads for you. When you empower your sales team to effectively generate referrals, you can build an engine that fuels your business growth for years to come.

Encourage your sales team to be proactive about gathering referrals. If they have a positive interaction with a customer, have a formalized process in place for getting a written review from that person.

Customers will also be more likely to refer you if you remain top of mind. Your sales team should be using a customer data platform to track interactions with customers. If you haven’t spoken to one in a while, have your sales team reach out. A personalized email or phone call might not only bring them back to make another purchase themselves, it will also position you to be the business they recommend later in the week when their friend happens to ask if they know a company that does exactly what you do.

If you think of your sales team as a group that only springs into action the moment someone wants to make a purchase, you’re missing out on the enormous potential that they have to support your business throughout the customer journey. When deployed correctly, your sales team can be by your customers’ sides each step of the way, which only serves to strengthen their relationship with your brand and makes them more likely to establish long-term connections with your business.

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

A CEB Gartner study completely contradicts what has been conventional wisdom in SaaS, that strong customer service is a critical part of a sales team’s ability to not just retain clients but grow and accelerate account revenue.

The study titled “Driving Account Growth through Smarter Account Management” found that while better than expected customer service helps retain a sales account, it doesn’t actually impact the degree to which the account grows.

Indeed, 88% of account managers that were surveyed believe providing above and beyond service is the surest way to drive growth.

The wider research, however, found absolutely no connection between the level of service provided to a customer and the likelihood that the customer will buy additional products or services.

In fact, existing sales channels have taken on responsibility for cross-selling newly acquired business products and sales leaders report a 2.3x increase in the size of their sales teams’ portfolio.

With more products to sell into an account base, one might think there would be more opportunities to expand sales within the account, but that has not been the case. A paltry 28% of sales leaders report that their existing account channels regularly meet their growth targets.

The Vice President of a Life Sciences Company echoed this sentiment, “The potential for cross-sell and portfolio expansion with our clients has never been higher, but we just can’t seem to execute.”

As the head of marketing for a B2B sales recruiting company, the report confirms what we have been hearing from our clients and their rapidly changing recruiting needs.  

Here are 4 keys to help your team cross-sell:

• TEACH YOUR CUSTOMER SOMETHING NEW: The CEB Gartner report concluded that “customer improvement” increases the likelihood of revenue growth by 45%. Customer improvement is essentially a quasi-business consultant role.  It is the ability to lay out a clear vision of how purchasing additional products or services will improve their business model in the aggregate.  This means that sales leaders and reps must learn their client’s business model inside and out; they must understand their competitor’s business models; and understand key points of differentiation across the market landscape. They must show the client something new that – despite their due diligence — they were unable to realize on their own.

• KNOW YOUR BUYER’S GOALS AND PAIN POINTS: To cross-sell and up-sell, it is critical to understand the person you are selling to. To do this, build detailed customer profiles for all company accounts. These should identify the buyer’s role within their organization as well as their goals and pain points.  By appealing to what will make your buyer look successful in addition to helping his company succeed will increase the chances of more sales.  By arming your sales reps with this knowledge, they will be able to identify which products or services to cross-sell or upsell that are most relevant to each customer’s unique interests.

• PRIORITIZE YOUR TARGETS: To know your client better than they know themselves, more time and effort will be required. It is therefore necessary to prioritize your stable of customers and know who to focus on. Those that are poised for growth, are highly profitable and appear to want a long-term relationship should be top priority.  Conversely, less time should be spent on customers that are the least profitable yet demand a tremendous amount of time and effort. By working with stakeholders across your organization, this recalibration will lead to more sales and profits.

• HIRE THE NEW TALENT: Principal Executive Advisor at CEB Granter Brent Adamson said, “Sales leaders and CEOs often attribute that failure to grow to a talent problem. Account managers just aren’t cut out to sell. First, while they’re specifically tasked to drive growth, they’re simultaneously tasked to prevent loss and the latter always takes precedence.” The truth is it has become more complex than simply finding big-game “hunters” or nurturing “farmers.”  Successful SaaS sales reps – those that both retain and grow accounts – are a hybrid of both. They are business consultants, customer service specialists and big game hunters rolled into one.  Based on your specific customer, hire a candidate that can put themselves in the customer’s shoes and become a trusted advisor that can pinpoint the right solutions.  To find this person, it is critical to have a scientific and rigorous recruiting process in place.

If the Gartner study showed us one thing, it is that change is not only constant, but it moves faster than a freight train. Business leaders and sales teams must be agile enough to adapt in time. Those who are not focusing on the latest trends will have a hard time keeping pace within their respective industries.

The post Why Your Sales Teams Can’t Cross-sell appeared first on OpenView Labs.

What if there isn’t a sales process? What if instead of a single process, there were processes that better served the prospective client and the sales organization?

What if there isn’t a buying journey? Maybe there are buying journeys, taking into account the different needs of different individuals and groups?

What if there wasn’t a methodology for some part of client acquisition because there were methodologies that provided a range of approaches and better ensure a specific outcome?

What if instead of locking salespeople into a one size fits all approach to every engagement, we unlocked them and provided them with an understanding of the choices available to them and how to better make those choices?

What if instead of treating all clients the same, or trying to anyway, we developed theories instead of a single theory as to why and how they should change, theories that better matched their circumstances?

What if instead of things being black and white, we enabled people to work effectively in the areas that are the many shades of gray that reality produces?

Shades of Gray

It would be much more difficult to teach salespeople how to look at a client acquisition through the lens of multiple processes but having choices would likely improve their results. There is already more than one path to the customer verifiable outcomes that underlie so many sales processes. There also seems to be greater certainty that we have closed gates to stages even when we achieve these outcomes.

If the experts are correct that there is an increasing number of stakeholders in an average deal, then there are undoubtedly multiple buying journeys and not a single journey. There are different stakeholders at different stages along any path, and there are groups outside of the recognized paths already. If it’s difficult to teach and train people to understand where people are on their journey, it’s likely more difficult to win by believing everyone is together in the same place and at the same time.

More methodologies can be cumbersome and confusing. However, more choices as to how to engage provides the ability to match the approach to the circumstances and context.

One of the reasons many salespeople struggle to produce good results is because they commit to an approach they believe (and have been taught, trained, and coached) is correct for all circumstances. When the one right way doesn’t work, the salesperson needs additional choices that would allow them to take further action.

We make a mistake when don’t teach, train, coach, and develop salespeople to recognize different patterns and identify the range of choices available to them.

Essential Reading!

Get my latest book: The Lost Art of Closing

"In The Lost Art of Closing, Anthony proves that the final commitment can actually be one of the easiest parts of the sales process—if you’ve set it up properly with other commitments that have to happen long before the close. The key is to lead customers through a series of necessary steps designed to prevent a purchase stall."

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The post Unlocking New Choices in Sales appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Last week I wrote a post on LinkedIn. The topic was salespeople making connection requests and immediately pitching the person with whom they have just connected. As someone who believes that outreach is critical and that salespeople have been misled into believing that can succeed with inbound alone, I am not bothered by an attempt to acquire an appointment. It’s the approach that bothers me.

Let’s start with the approach. The text of the message that follows the connection request is always too long, provides a detailed list of offerings (something you know as being Level 1 value, the lowest level of value), and requests that the receiver click a link to schedule a meeting themselves (as if!). There is literally no hint of value in anything in their message. Which brings us to the next problem.

In my second book, The Lost Art of Closing, I included two big ideas that come before the 10 commitments. The first is the idea of controlling the process, which is the idea of helping the client make the commitments they need to make to get the results they want. The second idea is that it is the salesperson’s responsibility to trade enough value to earn the right to the commitment they are seeking.

The “connect and pitch” approach violates the idea of Trading Value. There is no promise how the receiver will gain from a meeting. And for all of you in SAAS, this is the key to why your demos bail out on you; they didn’t believe there is enough value to show up for the meeting.

There are certain rules that are easy to recognize and difficult to break. You can’t really break these rules, rather, you break yourself against them. When you try to make difficult things easy, the shortcuts tend to prevent you from achieving the outcome you want. Worse, when you try to get what you want by taking the lazy approach, your lack of effort ends up costing you the very results you want.

In a Universe that seems to be ruled by causation, it’s a good practice to focus on the best and right cause when you want to create an important effect.

The post Lazy Prospecting appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Who thinks of networking in macro or micro terms? Probably no one and that is why I want you to think about it that way. We are always asking clients about their networks.

Who are you connected to?

How well do you know them?

Are they good referral sources for you?

If you don’t know your 1st-degree connections, what value can you possibly provide to them or they to you?

I see the trend swinging back to only connecting with people you know especially for those in senior positions in a company.

In a workshop with key executives from a variety of companies, we spent about 45-minutes in LinkedIn’s Settings & Privacy area reviewing the most important settings so that the executives could reduce the number of random invitations and sales messages.

They recognized the need to be on LinkedIn, look good and share content. However, they felt bombarded by the continual barrage of invites, InMails, and messages with unsolicited sales pitches. By tweaking their settings, they can quiet some of the noise at least.

These executives also seemed vigilant about only connecting with people they know.

So, I consider them more micro-networkers than macro-networkers.

Determining what you need to accomplish on LinkedIn is step one in determining what type of networker you will be on LinkedIn. Remember, have a plan. Go big or stay small, they both have value depending on what your intent and business objective is.

Recruiters and salespeople usually have the most extensive networks. However, a salesperson who sells complex or niche B2B solutions, products, or services may not need as extensive a network as someone selling more commoditized products and services.

Business development and sales development professionals have a different focus than traditional salespeople whose role is to close the sale. BDPs and SDRs are top of the funnel creating interest and trying to initiate a conversation. Good BDPs are continually connecting and opening doors, so their strategy is a macro-networking strategy. Great BDPs take their macro-networking to the next level, micro-networking. They go deep with a portion of their network, their Centers of Influence and connect people they know with one another.

Going wide then deep is how BDPs and SDRs stand out. They’re always connecting the dots and thinking about how they can add value to others inside their companies and beyond.

In an upcoming post, I’ll be talking with Jim Ries, Director of Development at Offit Kurman, a full-service law firm in the Mid-Atlantic region. Jim is the consummate business development professional combining broad stroke networking with interest and follow-up with those he meets, adding more to the exchange than just a polite nod. He asks how he can help and introduces people to one another because he’s genuinely interested in people, their businesses and helping them out when he can. Jim creates stickiness and is a Center of Influence within his network. He is one of the first people I think of when talking about networking.

Consider your networking strategy and think about who, how and why you are connecting. How can you add something worthwhile (value) to others before you ask for something?

You may have your industries leading product/service and want your ideal customer to know how it will serve them, however, you jeopardize future opportunities by rushing in too soon.

Stop yourself and think before connecting.

Merio / Pixabay

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach to driving engagement with target accounts. Jon Miller, CEO and Co-Founder at Engagio, defines ABM as,

“Intentional go-to-market activities that coordinate personalized marketing and sales efforts to open doors and deepen engagement at a specific account.”

In an ABM strategy, marketers tailor the activities within each target account campaign to the specifics of that organization and its decision-makers.

While ABM shares several metrics with more traditional marketing approaches – such as funnel conversion rates – target-account strategies do have their own specific metrics as well. Here’s a breakdown of the most common metrics to track to ensure a successful account-based strategy.

The 2 Types of Account-Based Marketing Metrics

Type #1: How to Measure ABM Before the Sale

1. Web Traffic by Target Account

Web traffic and domain visits from target accounts is an important pre-sale awareness metric at the top of the demand funnel. Using reverse IP lookup tools, create a list of IP addresses for your target accounts. If web traffic from target account IP addresses is increasing, it’s an indicator of heightened awareness.

Formula: (Target Account Website Visits/Total Website Visits) = Web Traffic by Target Account

Use IP-verified website visits to understand how your target accounts and decision-makers are engaging with your content and the success of your attempts to generate awareness. The total website visits from target accounts can be an indicator of the overall health of an ABM strategy and awareness-generating activities.

2. Target-Account Reach

Target-account reach is a measure of the percentage of decision-makers at a target account who are engaged. This metric is more akin to a series of parameters, as opposed to a single metric. While there are formulas to provide a breakdown of target account reach, it’s generally best measured with the help of ABM technologies and tools.

Formula: (Decision-Makers Engaged/Total Decision Makers at Target Account) = Target Account Reach

Target account reach can be used to understand where ABM effort is yielding returns and where different strategies are needed. When drilled down to include attribution, it can reveal the types of content (such as webinars or email) that are successfully generating engagement. Within a large, sophisticated ABM strategy, marketers may be able to connect content formats and campaigns to successful engagement by account type or job title.

3. MQA and SQA and Pipeline Opportunities

Marketing-qualified accounts and sales-qualified accounts (MQAs and SQAs) are very similar to the traditional B2B metrics of MQLs and SQLs, but their role in an ABM metrics strategy is slightly different. This metric ensures you take a more holistic approach to the entire organization, which is crucial. You may have one target-account decision-maker whose heightened engagement with your content and sale team would put them in the SQL stage, but if there are 5 other decision-makers on the buying committee who have never heard of your company, it’s not exactly fair to categorize the account as sales-qualified.

Definitions: Generally, MQAs and SQAs are qualified by various engagement-scoring criteria:

1. An MQA is an account that has reached target-engagement criteria, aggregated across account decision-makers within a given period, to be marketing-qualified.
2. An SQA is an account that has reached target-engagement criteria, aggregated across account decision-makers within a given period, to be sales-qualified.

MQAs and SQAs are high-value ABM metrics when viewed in aggregate and over time to understand how target account engagement is trending over time. These measures can be used to forecast revenue performance, understand the impact of ABM activities and perform influenced-based analysis of ABM campaigns.

4. Deal Velocity

Deal velocity is an ABM metric similar to measures of lead velocity used in traditional B2B demand generation settings. However, much like many other ABM metrics, its role and insights are different. Deal velocity is a measure of how quickly, on average, target accounts move from the MQA to closed-won customer stages of the ABM funnel.

Formula: ([Total Opportunities x Average Deal Size x Conversion Rate]/Sales Cycle Length) = Deal Velocity

Deal velocity is valuable within an ABM strategy for planning. It can be used to understand the sales cycle length and how changes to the ABM strategy or account targeting parameters can change this critical metric.

When deal velocity is measured actively, it can inform data-driven ABM planning and increasing marketing-attributed or -influenced revenue. Finally, ABM can be drilled down by activities, channels and verticals to understand which campaigns have an impact on deal velocity.

5. Average Contract Value

Average contract value (ACV) is an ABM metric that has similarities to B2B analytics such as customer lifetime value (CLV) or average deal size. Measuring average contract value can provide insight into profitability for strategic ABM planning and reveal how changes in strategic direction affect profitability.

Formula: [Total Customer Contract Value/Total New Customers] = Average Contract Value

Use average contract value to track changes in the value of a new closed-won account over a period. Drill-down by target account industry or other account parameters to optimize targeting criteria in future quarters.

Average contract value can also be a highly valuable ABM measurement after strategic organizational changes, such as the introduction of new product lines or expansion into new geographic territories.

Type #2: Post-Sale Account-Based Marketing Metrics

1. Cross-Sells and Upsells

Cross-sells and upsells can increase the value of account contracts. Tracking cross-sells and upsells within an ABM strategy can be an indicator of customer satisfaction, customer marketing efforts and the efficacy of the customer success team.

Formulas: (Total Customers Cross-Sold/Total Customers) = Cross-Sells
(Total Customers Up-Sold/Total Customers) = Upsells

Use this intelligence to understand how effectively your organization has invested in customer education and marketing efforts. To understand your potential for these opportunities, create a list of upsold or cross-sold accounts and identify common criteria such as company budget, size or other factors to create qualifying parameters. This parameter can be used to project a third related and valuable metric: potential for upsells and cross-sells.

Potential cross-sells and upsells refers to the percentage of existing customer accounts which qualify for upselling or cross-selling activity which have not yet upgraded or added to customer contracts.

With this intelligence, marketers can invest in ABM efforts towards existing customers and work to deepen understanding of highest-potential customer accounts with the sales and customer success team. By working to minimize the number of customer accounts which are qualified for upsells and cross-sells but haven’t yet purchased additional products or services, organizations can create a shared success metric for post-sale success.

2. Referrals

Referrals may be among the most comprehensively necessary and holistic measures of post-sale success in ABM and B2B marketing as a whole. Referrals are a hallmark of customer satisfaction with the product, service and customer service experience. Customer referrals are also a notoriously high-potential source of revenue for many B2B marketing organizations. According to BCG, consumers trust word-of-mouth recommendations 2-10 times more than branded marketing.

There is no single metric for referrals. Organizations should understand the percentage of the current customer base which results from referrals and the portion of the customer base who are actively referring to their peers.

Formulas: (Referred Customers/Total Customers) = Percent Referred Customers
(Customers Who Have Referred a Peer/Total Customers) = Percent Referring Customers

These two metrics can reveal customer satisfaction, especially when tracked over time. When customers are actively recommending your brand to professional colleagues, it’s an indicator of success and happiness with their experience.

In addition to these two measures, ABM marketers should measure the CLV of referred customers compared to the lifetime value of customers won directly through ABM activities.

(Total Customer Spend/Total Customers) = Average Customer Lifetime Value

Cross-industry research reveals that referred customers are generally more loyal and spend more than customers won through traditional marketing activities. Understanding the average value of referred accounts can enable ABM marketers to ramp up loyalty programs and referral-reward initiatives when necessary.

3. Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is not a strictly ABM metric. It’s among the most valuable measures of customer satisfaction, and it has a place in B2C, B2B, demand generation and ABM strategies. NPS is measured through regular customer satisfaction survey efforts, centered around the all-important question:

“How likely would you be to recommend this brand to a friend or family member?”

Definitions

NPS, according to Satmetrix, is a comprehensive measure of customer experience and a valid predictor of business growth. Customer satisfaction survey results are categorized as follows:

• Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal brand advocates who will continue purchasing and generate referrals.
• Passives (score 7-8) are unenthusiastic customers who may be won by a competitor’s offer.
• Detractors (score 0-6) are dissatisfied customers who are likely to churn and can damage the brand through negative word-of-mouth.

ABM marketers should ensure the customer success team is conducting regular NPS surveying and sharing survey results with sales, marketing and customer success teams. Customer marketing and outreach can be effectively segmented by NPS category to maintain relationships with promoters, improve relations with passives and salvage damaged relationships with detractors.

Putting Account-Based Marketing Metrics to Work

A successful ABM strategy requires different activities, technologies and mindset than traditional B2B marketing or demand generation. Logically, it follows that ABM marketing should be measured using different metrics than a conventional B2B program.

In addition to ABM metrics for measuring pre-sale success and revenue potential, B2B marketing organizations should monitor post-sale metrics to track customer satisfaction and program results. By monitoring the entire ABM funnel, marketers can continually optimize outreach activities and improve customer relationships.

Are you just beginning your ABM journey? For access to the advice, templates and guidance you need to plan and execute a successful account-based marketing program, download the free 2nd Edition ABM Program Development Workbook.

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Plenty of ridiculously talented coaches absolutely loathe doing their own sales. I actually enjoy promotion and sales myself, but I totally understand that it’s not for everyone! That delicate balance of persuasion and compassion, active pressure and passive encouragement is a tough one to strike. It comes naturally to some of us, but for others, it’s like pulling teeth.

Which means that when coaches contemplate outsourcing, sales often floats to the top of their wishlist. How fabulous would it be to focus on creating offerings and let someone else worry about racking up the sales?

I firmly believe that delegating workloads you hate (or just don’t excel at doing) is a crucial business-building, burnout-avoiding strategy…but here’s the thing:

Outsourcing sales activity must be done with care. Remove yourself from the equation without some key mechanisms in place, and it can all go wrong in a heartbeat.

So if you’re hoping to outsource your own sales efforts, here are 5 things that I STRONGLY recommend having in place first!

Before you outsource sales: Build a fantastic funnel

Yes, it’s true that some sales geniuses can help you generate leads … but if you haven’t been able to produce a handful on your own, it might be too early to hire sales support.

You must have enough leads coming in to justify a team or your brand new contractors may end up twiddling their thumbs! Before you outsource, create and test your sales funnel to ensure it works. Then once it’s in place, keep it humming along so your sales force can work their magic on potential clients and partners.

Before you outsource sales: Write and test your script

Without a proven script, you’re asking your sales team to fly blind. You must be able to consistently sell your offerings on your own before you can teach someone else how to do it.

And that means writing a script, testing it on your customer base, and making certain it hits the right notes to bring in a steady stream of business.

Before you outsource sales: Track your program results

Hard truth time: Tasking a freelancer with selling a brand new, totally untested product is a risky move. That person’s job is to persuade and convince new clients to buy, which will be far easier to do with the help of stats and validation from previous successful rounds.

If you want to outsource your sales, do so with with a program that gets measurable results and that a sales rep can get behind. Handle the newbies yourself until you’re sure they produce the outcomes you promise.

Before you outsource sales: Create a strong infrastructure

If you’ve been selling programs, products, and coaching services yourself already, you might have a few systems in place to keep everything flowing smoothly. Before you hire sales help, however, you need a totally solid infrastructure in place.

Build simple systems for appointment scheduling and feedback, create intake forms and call records, script out follow-up calls and create flowcharts. Make sure your freelance sales team has every tool they need to usher a new customer from initial purchase to glowing online review!

Before you outsource sales: Ensure you can scale

Another important reason to assign contract sales folks to proven products? You’re bringing them onto your team to help you build and scale. You want them amplifying and selling your strongest offerings, so you also need to ensure those offerings have the flexibility to grow. If your program is already at capacity, bringing on more sales staff is a needless expense. Simple as that.

Sales activities are definitely best left to people who excel at and enjoy them. If that’s not you, by all means delegate and outsource! But before you do, make sure your products and your entire business are ready for outside support. Doing so will help both you and your freelance sales team succeed.

The primary goal of sales enablement must surely be to increase sales effectiveness by progressively reducing the performance gap between our best sales people and the rest, measured by revenue and other tangible metrics.

But it seems to me that a number of sales enablement programmes (typically the less successful ones) have made insufficient efforts to understand the winning behaviours of their top sales performers, or to package these learnings into simple practical and usable tools that can equip competent but otherwise under-performing sales people to embrace these best practices.

It’s a mistake to assume that top performance is largely driven by innate personal abilities that cannot be coached or taught. Of course, that’s often a contributing factor but let’s not ignore another key attribute of top performers: they often have a particularly well-developed ability to learn from their experiences and to adapt their behaviours accordingly.

They avoid repeating the same mistakes, and they are continually on the look-out for new ideas, tactics and techniques that will serve to improve their sales performance. It’s true that they sometimes appear to be “unconsciously competent” when directly asked about what they do differently, but in my experience a combination of intelligent questioning and thoughtful observation can uncover the secrets behind their success.

Their winning formula almost always includes some predictable elements: for example, they have typically learned through experience which issues, organisations and roles to target, and how to identify the trigger events that signal that it is the right time to engage one of these prospective customers.

Top performers typically use these often often-informal “ideal customer profiles” to assess inbound leads as well, but they also shine in the quality of their opportunity qualification. They know what to look for, they qualify hard and often, and they are unafraid to discard poorly qualified opportunities because they know that their time can be better spent elsewhere.

The discovery process is, of course, a key part of this qualification exercise. It’s my observation that top performers invest more time in discovery, ask better questions, listen more effectively and drill more deeply into their prospective customer’s issues, opportunities, risks and obstacles.

They take the time to understand the consequences of all of these factors on the customer - and often are able to introduce fresh insights that help their prospect to recognise the need for urgent action. They resist the itch to pitch their “solution” prematurely - and when they do, they tend to be much more effective than their peers at connecting the business value of their solution with the business issues and priorities of their customers.

And one more thing - they tend to be much better at handling objections. This is partly down to their ability to pre-empt many potential objections, but they have also learned how to deal with many of their customers frequently asked and potentially tough-to-answer questions.

What has all of this got to do with sales enablement? To my mind, it lies at the very heart of the function. Our sales enablement programmes must reflect the winning habits and hard-won lessons of our top sales performers. They must reflect real-life experience, and incorporate simple and effective training, tools and checklists to help the averagely competent sales person put them into practice.

Our core sales enablement materials and messages must feel like they reflect the accumulated experience of the most highly-regarded members of the sales team rather than content that appears to have been made-up by some “expert” in marketing without sufficient regard for the real world of selling.

That means that our sales enablement programmes must include the active involvement and participation of our most respected sales performers. Without them, we run the risk of producing a bunch of content that might look attractive but which neither changes sales behaviours nor significantly improves sales performance. And that feels to me like something of a wasted opportunity...

This article was first published in the September 2018 issue of the International Journal of Sales Transformation. For a limited period, you can sign up for a free digital subscription to this excellent publication.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales, an award-winning blogger, a confident and entertaining event speaker and workshop leader, a regular contributor to the International Journal of Sales Transformation and the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the B2B value-selling experts.

Following a varied and successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates Bob now works as an adviser to some of today’s most ambitious B2B-focused sales organisations, equipping and enabling them to accelerate revenue growth and transform sales effectiveness by implementing the proven principles of value-based selling.

Are you old enough to remember the first version of the internet? You’d do an internet search, and about 20,000 items came back as “relevant”? Maybe you searched for “cat videos” and you got website listings of all cities with the letters “c-a-t” in them, or you got a bunch of links to videos of clowns. There was no real rhyme or reason to the search results you got back. But now, with content and context-based search, you can pretty much be guaranteed that the information you search for will show up on the first page of your search results.

We’ve made great improvements in search by being able to give you what you want so why haven’t we made those improvements when we deal with buyers? Why shouldn’t we give prospects the same courtesy of sending them to the right people at the right time when they visit our site or participate in programs? Do they really need to see clown videos before they get to the cat video?

Do All Leads Need to Go to SDRs?

Marketing tirelessly gets prospects interested in learning more about your products or services and then routes them to sales for follow-up. Sales development reps (SDRs) get all the leads and start calling and emailing—over and over again until they get a response. We rarely take those prospects who are in our ABM campaign into consideration, an ideal customer profile (ICP) company, those who are already customers but are interested in add-ons, VPs who are interesting in finding out more about your product, those who are looking for your business development team…the examples go on and on.

Here are some sales stats that you may find shocking:

• According to Forrester, 68% (of prospects) want to connect with sales during the consideration stage, after they’ve researched the options and come up with a short list
• TOPO states it takes an average of 18 calls to connect with a buyer
• And only 24% of sales emails are opened

What do these stats tell me? Once a prospect has created their short list or is ready to buy, they want to get the show on the road and don’t want to be bothered by vendor processes to route a lead. They tell me that we can do a better job delivering the right content by the right person at the right time. Experience truly matters!

Lead Routing Based on Context

Here is where context-based routing comes into play. Why don’t we route leads to the appropriate person for follow-up? It’s just like sending cat videos to those who look for cat videos, and not sending them clown videos. We want the buyer journey to be easy and enjoyable, so let’s make it that way.

No longer do all leads from marketing have to go through SDRs. We can now route leads based on context such as company name, company size, company type—pretty much anything you want. Give the prospect what they want—salespeople who can help them, not every other buyer, but them. Them as an individual.

The Old Way of Routing Leads

The Ideal Way to Route Leads with Context-Based Routing

Context-based routing has begun to change the way we deal with leads just as context-based searches changed the way we get information on the Internet. Buyers are much more educated now, and we have to give them what they want, not what we want to give them. If we stick to our old ways of delivering cities with “c-a-t” in them, the buyer will move to the next vendor.

To find out how you can give your prospects the best experience by sending them the cat videos they want, watch the Marketo and LeanData webinar with Clari and Ceros on how sales and marketing can drive better pipeline conversions through working together.

The post How to Treat Your Buyers Like Cat Videos appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.