During a breakfast meeting with Steve last week, he got right down to business. “Man we are hurting. We’re in the hurt locker, we’re down, and I have no money to try to boost sales in the last quarter. What am I gonna do?” With a pleading voice and a frown his mother would not be proud of, this was one concerned sales manager. 

“How many sales inquiries did Marketing give you, on average, per month for the last year?” I asked.

“Actually, that hasn’t been the issue,” he said. “We’ve had about 800 raw inquiries a month, but the salespeople are frustrated. No one is buying.”

“I know you use HubSpot. So, you’ve had about 9,600 inquiries…were they called?” I asked.

“They tell me they’ve been called,” he said through clenched teeth. “The reports show a lot “in process,” but I’m not sure the follow-up has been there. I have one quarter to go. I can’t ask the salespeople to call all 9,600 inquirers again; we only have 30 salespeople.”

My advice to Steve is that when sales are needed in the fourth quarter, first telemarket old leads (older than 3 months), generated on products in stock. On average, 50% of these inquirers are still in the market to buy, and he might not have to resort to losing tactics, such as price reductions or expensive sales incentive programs, which seldom work in Q4.

The key for Steve was to call the right people out of the 9,600, and to use an outside service, because he needed the new leads fast. We decided the service would call only:

1. Leads older than 3 months (those 3 months and younger are being called by his salespeople).
2. Leads who had not bought (obvious, but he has to sort these out).
3. Leads who had visited the website at least three times. This is a big deal!
4. Leads with a title.
5. Leads who had answered at least 50% of the profile questions on the web/exhibit/direct mail forms.
6. Leads who said they would be making a decision by year’s end.

This cut the prospect list by 70%. We decided these were the most honest, high-probability prospects.

The results were hot prospects (call me, talk to me, contact me ASAP) in 10% of those called and spoken with. One pass through, the list took about 200-250 hours. Sure, there were some who wanted information again, but those were not the high-probability people Steve needed. He told his salespeople we were recalling many of the leads older than 3 months, going back as far as 12 months.

The salespeople praised the “new” leads. A few of them said they were already working with the prospect, but most were grateful. The numbers aren’t in yet, but it looks promising. The telemarketing time amounted to about 250 hours, over four weeks.

So, don’t forget the “old” inquiries and leads. Segment them into high-probability buyers and recall them. The cost? About $16,500 (all in - including set-up, scripting and management).

Sweet.

I expect Steve will find it sweet too.

My life’s work has focused on enabling bias-free decisions by facilitating the human criteria that often distort decisions. Until now, I’ve focused on helping sellers gather and support the Buying Decision Path. But I’m moving beyond sales to leadership, change management, and decision sciences.

As I venture outside the field of sales I have been meeting decision analysts, coaches, and organization development folks who believe that decision making is different for them.

I’m here to tell you that all decisions, regardless of bias, industry, type or importance of the end result, have the same basic human components, separate from the analysis, weighting, or outcome of the decision sought.

1. Those responsible for the end result must have at their disposal the full fact pattern of their status quo (the rules, people, activities, culture, output, outcomes, beliefs). For sales, change, and leadership, everyone on the Decision Team must understand ALL of the systems elements that must be included for congruent change (or a new decision) to be effective. And all new decisions become a change management issue.
2. The system will have difficulty changing it perceives there is any possibility the underlying problem can be fixed by any element of the system. It’s the law of Homeostasis in action.
3. All – ALL – of those who will touch the solution must buy-in to the change (the new decision) and know how to bring in the new elements without disrupting the system. The system is sacrosanct, and must know how to end up congruent as part of any change or decision-inspired initiative.

ALL DECISION MAKING IS THE SAME AT THE HUMAN LEVEL
Regardless of the outcome, the type of decision, the import, the amount of change – i.e. is it a large implementation that involves many factors and people? or a small change that can be made by one person? – the steps are the same.

Regardless of the focus of the decision – whether it is for decision analysis to choose the best oil rig, or for a software implementation – all of the above steps must be taken. And to ensure bias and buy-in are managed adequately, everyone who will touch the solution must be involved at the human, internal criteria/beliefs place.

Information – that which we collect or share to sell solutions, or which we offer to lead an initiative or gather decision criteria – is the last thing that should be addressed. Unfortunately, we have a tendency to focus on this first, thus biasing the end-result.

What would you need to believe differently to be willing to put the people piece first? What skills would you need to add to what you are doing to delay the information aspect of your approach?

Contact Sharon Drew Morgen at sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com. For more articles on decision making, go to facilititingbuyin.com

How Do Decisions Get Made? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Have you built a pricing plan based merely on your costs?

Or have you built a plan that genuinely reflects the value and desired outcomes your customers gain?

There’s a big difference!

I never cease to be amazed at the companies that become more consumed with having a price that is slightly lower than their competition than they are with having a price that is all about the outcomes the customer will gain.

There are no shortcuts to a solid pricing plan.

And when you focus on the value you bring to the customer, you begin to see that price actually becomes a secondary issue.

This isn’t about gouging the customer by charging an unrealistic price.  Far from it!  What it’s about is recognizing what you offer is worth full price.

Why is it so important to have a solid pricing plan and stick to it?  A couple of reasons:

1. You protect profit.

If you get in a mindset that you can’t close a sale without discounting, you will consistently be shortchanging yourself on profit.  You may think you’ll make up for this lost profit through quantity (more sales at a lower price).  In the short-term and the long-term, though, such numbers will paint a different story.  And that story will be a sad one about all the profit you left on the table because you didn’t have a solid pricing plan.

2. You attract full-price customers.

You do not want the customers who are focused solely on getting you to drop your price as far as possible.  You want the customers with whom you have spent time demonstrating the value of what you offer.  Focus on their desired outcomes and how your product/service meets those.

3. You discipline yourself to keep your selling skills sharp.

If you always fall back on offering a discount in order to close a sale, you have less motivation to strengthen your selling skills.  Discounting should be your nemesis, avoided whenever possible.  Too many salespeople have made discounting their super hero… the “go to” alternative to getting out of a difficult situation.  A better approach is to have a solid pricing plan and strengthen your skills to sell according to that plan.

Shortcuts may be a good idea when trying to shave time off your commute to work. But they won’t do anything to help you succeed phenomenally in sales.

Copyright 2013, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.

This is an excerpt. To read the full article visit MarketingMagazine.co.uk

At OgilvyOne, we firmly believe that the starting point is always the customer. Customer engagement is in our DNA, informing what we do and how we do it. We make sure put the customer at the heart of everything we do. We use insight to understand the customer need at each step of the customer journey, as well as the needs of the business. And it’s at the intersection of those two needs that we have an engagement ‘sweet spot’ – an engaging customer experience that unlocks customer value for the business.

How do we reframe SoLoMo (Social, Location, Mobile) so it can unlock customer value? The answer is to put the customer at the heart of your solution by using insight to identify a clear customer need or problem, then asking yourself the following question.

Can the customer need be addressed by:

Community (i.e. people)? If so, social is the answer. For example, Giff Gaff sought to improve customer service (and cut costs) by making each and every customer a member of the customer service team. They help each other out, getting a much quicker and authentic response than they would from a traditional customer service department.

Content? If so, delivering entertaining and/or useful information is the solution. For instance, when Facebook launched their new timeline, Red Bull launched a timeline scavenger hunt inviting people to explore their history on the timeline. Not only was it fun, but it addressed the need for people to be entertained and immerse themselves in the awesome Red Bull brand.

Context (such as location)? If so, the answer lies in mobile. For example, Amazon’s quite brilliant mobile app allows you to go to a shop, browse products and then scan them in to compare prices on Amazon. In one swoop it addresses the customer need to investigate products tacitly, to get value and to finalise the purchase quickly.

Or a combination of two or all of the above?

So the next time you’re faced with a problem, I’d urge you to try the 4Cs approach above. Identify the customer need and then work out how Community, Content, Context or Combination can address that need. At worst it will stop you from falling into the trap of jumping straight to the tool that delivers the engagement. At best it will drive your business forward by creating engagement programmes that unlock customer value.

Matt Holt is Associate Director of Digital Strategy at OgilvyOne UK.

This is an excerpt. To read the full article visit MarketingMagazine.co.uk

I have written before about the only two reasons that you lose a sale;

1. You should not have been there (chasing this particular opportunity), or
2. You were outsold.

I know I have fallen at both of those hurdles.  Sometimes being outsold means you lost to the dreaded No Decision.  In fact according a report I read from CSO Insights this is happening 26% of the time. Ouch!

Now in most cases when the customer is making No Decision they are in fact making the right decision. They will have objectively evaluated the project, and decided that this particular project did not reach the required threshold of return, or was not as important as another more pressing initiatives.

But in some cases they are just afraid, and No Decision is taking the easy way out.  This No Decision will often be accompanied by phrases like; “I don’t think we have the right team in place to implement this project now”, “We need to learn to walk before we can run”, “I’m not sure the team is ready to embrace this amount of change.” In truth they are just afraid.

They might be afraid of making an investment for which they will be held accountable. They might be afraid of something that is new. They might be afraid of change. They might be afraid of upsetting the status quo lest it might threaten their own status.

In these cases they are not in fact making No Decision, they are making a decision not to fix a problem that is broken. They are taking cover in the status quo where they are less likely to be seen as the instigator of something that went wrong. Sometimes that is a consequence of organizational culture – and in other cases it is  individual responsibility being abbrogated, denied, or ignored. But, is it your job to tell them?

I’ve written before that ‘A bad buying decision usually has a greater impact on the customer than a lost sale has on the salesperson’.  I believe that to be true, and I further believe that it is the sales person’s responsibility to tell the customer if they think the customer is making a bad buying decision. It is part of delivering on the trust that you’ve tried to earn.

In all of this post I have assumed that there was a real problem that the customer wanted to fix, the issues were identified, you were speaking the people who had the power to make the decision, and you had developed a joint vision of the desired end-state.  Then the customer got cold feet.

But how do you tell the No Decision customer that they have made the wrong decision – without it appearing as mere sour grapes, or that all you care about is selling them your solution?

• First, be honest to yourself and about yourself. Acknowledge that you have failed to provide enough evidence to the customer to make them comfortable to make a positive decision.
• Second, restate the problem you think the customer was trying to solve and the impact of No Decision
• Third, withdraw from the sale, pointing out that this maybe the impetus for the customer to act (and maybe buy from your competitor.)   This is in the best interests of the customer. Maybe you’ve nothing to lose anyway, but that’s not the point. The point is that you must maintain your integrity.Your initial contract with the customer prospect was to help them solve their business problem.  That’s where you started and that’s where you should finish.

You have two other alternatives to this approach. (1) You can do nothing except walk away and lick your wounds. That serves neither party well, or (2) You can seek other (perhaps more senior) people in the organization who will reverse the No Decision made by your contact – but that’s the subject of another post.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. This is not a simple question.

There is a way you can predict which skills will carry the most clout in the future workplace.

Ask yourself whether those skills could be replicated through the use of machines or offshore workers. If your answer is "yes" to either of these questions, Laurence Shatkin, Ph.D., a career information expert, says your future career might be headed for trouble.

To identify these transferable skills, Shatkin used the statistical procedure known as correlation to measure how closely median income correlates with 35 Occupational Information Network skills and the 747 occupations that are identified by the U.S. Department of Labor.

"Basically, when something changes consistently, it results in a higher correlation," Shatkin tells Business Insider. “Correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, but it does happen so often together that sometimes it does.”

For example, heavy smokers tend to be sick often. Before researchers had proof that smoke is harmful to the body, they knew that there was a statistically strong correlation between smoke and certain diseases. It's not always true, but it happens enough to pinpoint an affiliation.

Most of the transferable skills that Shatkin identified with the highest correlations (1.0 being a perfect correlation) tend to be soft skills, such as "judgment and decision making," "complex problem solving," and "active learning." That's because these soft skills are harder to automate, he says, meaning it's difficult to outsource these jobs to foreign workers or have machines replace humans to complete the tasks.

For example, "anything that requires public speaking, you can't really send that to a foreign worker," Shatkin explains.

Skills with the lowest correlation include equipment maintenance, repairing, installation, and troubleshooting, which all require some form of training (and re-training) to efficiently do the job.

Below, Shatkin gave us permission to post his list of the most valuable transferable skills:

SEE ALSO: Companies Are Putting Sensors On Employees To Track Their Every Move

Join the conversation about this story »

The grumblings about Steve Ballmer's job performance have been so consistent over his 13-year tenure as Microsoft CEO that it was a huge surprise when he finally announced he was stepping down within the next 12 months.

Though it was portrayed by the company as a planned retirement, Ballmer may have been forced out ahead of his preferred timeline. 

Now the stakes are incredibly high for Microsoft to name a successor who can take what's still an incredibly valuable, but less and less relevant, company and turn it into an industry leader again. 

Though there are obviously many company-specific problems that the board and leadership team have to consider, here are a few ground rules the company needs to follow to avoid another decade of stagnation:

Pick someone who's confident.

Research shows that very confident, even overconfident CEOs, are more likely to take their company in a new technological direction. They underestimate the probability of failure and are more likely to pursue innovation rather than the status quo. 

This dovetails nicely with one of Microsoft's biggest current issues — the fact that it's been slow to come up with innovative products, and has failed when it's tried to challenge others on their home turf. Think Bing vs. Google and the Surface versus the iPad.

The obstacles to innovation are very large, as Christopher Mims at Quartz points out. So many large and institutional investors own the stock that there's enormous pressure to avoid risks and deliver a steady dividend. And the company's products are so widely used and entrenched that users are resistant to any change.

Someone with the confidence to push past those obstacles and push for real change is needed, even if they're more likely to fail in some instances, and even if it means killing some profitable businesses. 

Ballmer was always confident and frequently brash. But it was obvious that he was a business guy. The result is that Microsoft's revenue has grown massively, but its future as a technology company looks bleak. Moving forward will require someone with that same confidence.

Don't rush to hire a superstar or an outsider.

There's a temptation to go and pick up a "name" CEO, someone who will fire up shareholders, employees, and the media. It's a strategy that can work sometimes, as it has so far with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. 

Given the size and profile of the job, Microsoft will have its pick in a lot of ways.  

But for CEOs, past performance isn't a guarantee of future success. In fact, research finds that award-winning CEOs, the ones who massively outperform and become media darlings, actually end up doing worse after getting recognition.

They spend time on activities outside the company, write books, and take board seats. They lose a sense of urgency, and the company suffers. 

Better to pick somebody with a strong track record, the right skills for the company, and the abilities that correlate to success, particularly the ability to execute on plans rather than just talk about them. 

Outside hires are exciting, Mayer being the prime recent example. And Microsoft is under more perceived pressure than most because Ballmer was so clearly an insider, closely identified with founder Bill Gates.

But insiders tend to have longer tenures as CEOs, and perform better than outside hires, according to Booz & Co.

That comes with a qualification: The tendency with inside hires is to tap people who have been "filtered," as Harvard Business School professor Gautam Mukunda calls it. They've gone through all the company's businesses, met every test, and managed large organizations. When promoting an insider, it's important that they're not so entrenched that they've lost perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the organization.

The company's better off going with somebody with the experience and company-specific knowledge that tends to make insiders successful, who hasn't been turned into another generic leader who will keep the company on its current path. 

Make culture change a priority.

If there's one thing to point to about Microsoft's failure, it's that the company was unwilling or afraid to invest in businesses that might hurt its core. A recent Wall Street Journal piece points to the fact that Ballmer killed investment in an innovative new tablet to redirect Microsoft into a new version of Windows.

That caution has led to a succession of extremely profitable businesses, that are now starting to decline.

A serious cultural shift is required. By reorganizing a culture that, by all accounts, made collaboration extremely difficult, the organization has made a start, but only that.

"I don't think it's Steve stamping it out from above; it's the culture stamping it out from below," an executive told the Journal. 

The reorganization won't be enough. There's a culture problem down at the employee level. The way the company currently motivates people is one example. For a long time it used "stack ranking," where a certain number of people in a high-performing team were always rated "poor" in an effort to increase competition. It just pitted people against each other. 

Beyond the day-to-day, there's a perception about the company that will be hard to erase — that it's a place where ideas go to die.

It's the reason talent flows away from and not into Redmond, and any new CEO has to completely change that.

As part of consulting firm Booz and Co.'s annual CEO turnover study, HBS professor Clayton Christensen helped a group of the consultancy's partners break down the core attributes of CEOs who respond well to industry disruption:

• The CEO has to take personal responsibility for the situation, and move quickly.
• They have to break down human inertia and complacency — make it clear that what happened in the past won't work, and impart what the future plan is.  
• Find out who's on board, and quickly remove those who aren't.
• Keep the group of top leaders, the real decision makers, extremely small.

The business strategy is incredibly important. But finding someone who can articulate exactly what behaviors they want from employees and managers, and who has a plan for making them happen across the organization, might be even more crucial.

Join the conversation about this story »

The term “sales process engineering” was defined nicely in a paper written by Dr. Paul Selden in 1994:

Sales process engineering is the systematic application of scientific and mathematical principles to achieve the practical goals of a sales process. 

Engineering is practical. It applies whatever scientific knowledge is available and relevant to a given problem. In sales process, the problem is to get people in your target market to take actions you want them to take. Such actions could include giving you their attention, their information, their trust, and ultimately, their money.

 This is quite a different problem from manufacturing production, which is to add value to materials until they meet a specification. Where manufacturing converts physical products to a desired state, sales process engineering communicates messages that are relevant and timely enough to influence their intended recipients.

 Not all communications have the desired effect, of course. In fact, where manufacturing productivity is typically measured in defects per thousand or million opportunities, sales and especially marketing messages are often measured in successes (or responses) per thousand or million attempts.  

Thus sales process engineering is characterized by: 

• Voice of Customer research to discover how the customer goes about solving their problems from both a common (marketing) and specific (selling) standpoint.
• Use of operational definitions around the units of production, the flow of work, and observable qualification criteria (quality attributes)
• Respectful agreement within a team around how the work should be done (sometimes called standard work, though other names for this are often used).
• Empirical approaches to problem solving, analyzing quantity and quality data with mathematical and scientific tools to visualize the flow of value, bottlenecks, waste, and to detect signals in the noise.
• Systemic and pragmatic tests to verify assumptions and determine such practical information as process capacity and operating limits.
• Conservative, transparent messages that ensure value can actually be delivered and the customer relationship can be sustained.

Engineering work is typically project oriented, i.e., there is a beginning, middle, and an end. Sales and marketing, like production, is never ending. It implies a constant requirement to perform. I like the term sales process excellence because it connotes that the sales function happens continuously, that people have to try. Sales is a performance art, after all, and it can be continually improved.

I often talk with excellent salespeople who are trapped in companies that behave in very un-salesperson-like ways. The challenge for them is to get the entire organization (not just the sales department) aligned so it can identify, deliver and sustain customer value.

Often this work begins at home, helping the sales department get its house in order. Sooner or later, however, improvement work tends to point out root causes that cross functions, such as when the marketing department needs to improve the kind of prospects produced by lead generation campaigns.

The thing is you need both project work (sales process engineering) and continuous improvement to sustain and extend the gains. Either one can get the ball rolling.

http://www.salesperformance.com/Content/Articles/Paul%20Selden/What_is_Sales_Process_Engineering.pdf

An entrepreneur who had to pivot more times than he'd like to admit explains how to keep up your confidence when the unexpected happens--again and again.

For all the work that goes into crafting business plans, it seems--at least based on the entrepreneurs I meet--that very few start-ups wind up being the business that was first imagined by its founders.

Art Papas, co-founder and CEO of Bullhorn, a recruiting software company, is a great example.

Here's another in my series where I pick a topic and connect with someone a lot smarter than me. (There's a list of some previous installments at the end of this article.)

I'm not a huge fan of the word "pivot," but clearly you've done that more than once.
Bullhorn has an interesting history. We're not that start-up that had an idea, went out and implemented it, and found success. We were much more the product of iteration and failure.

You always hear that failure is so wonderful, but I beg to differ. We had raised angel investment on an original idea, a dot-com, creative marketplace where companies could go online, kind of like Elance but in the creative space: graphic designers, writers, and illustrators. In many ways it was like Behance; we were Behance before Behance was a twinkle in its founder's eye.

The challenge was we'd go to creative departments and say, "Hey, you can hire freelancers using our platform!" They'd say, "That's great--but we don't want to use the Internet to do it." They'd point to a guy in the corner and say, "That's the only guy with Internet access." 1999 was a little too early to be selling what we were selling.

So what did you do then?
We came up with software for marketing departments to use to run their business. That idea helped us attract a Series A round.

That idea failed too.

I don't think there was a need for what we were building. We invented something assuming people had a problem. We didn't build something because people said, "Hey, we have a problem."

Then someone turned us on to a staffing firm that was having all sorts of IT problems. He had a real need for a database system to connect his offices--and we had our first real client. That established a line of sight to building a big business.

Building software for staffing and recruiting firms became what we are today.

I'm sure your investors were happy you finally landed a client.
Somewhat. When we went back to our investors and said, "Hey, we've got it, we're going to be staffing and recruiting software giants someday!" they said, "Hey, you cried wolf once already." They didn't believe it and I have to admit I had to wonder.

I kept waiting for proof we were going to be successful. I didn't believe we would be a big business someday. If you had said we would have 300 employees, offices in three countries, year over year growth of approximately 50 percent, and we would be leading our market, I would never have believed it. I was so beaten down from having failed with these other concepts.

That's one problem with all the "fail often" rhetoric; confidence, once lost, can be hard to regain.
Yes, and my concern prevented me from going back and thumping the table to ask for money. It took me two years to realize we'd created a really big business.

Sure, we were growing really quickly, so we had no real problems raising capital, but frankly we did it later than we should have. If we had raised capital in 2003 when it was clear we were gaining momentum--and really gone for it--we would be so much further along than we are today.

Those extra two years would have been really helpful.

That's an interesting take. A lot of people say they wish they'd waited longer to raise additional capital.
I knew we would build something. I definitely wanted to prove we were right. But I still had doubts. After so many successive failures, it's hard to be totally confident. Imagine the conversation with your investors when you say you need to pivot and go into something new. At a board meeting, when we were running out of capital, I presented this new vision, showed we had customers, but they were somewhat nonplussed. I think they were, understandably, reacting to 2001 and 2002. Many Internet investments they had made wound up being goose eggs.

Saying you were wrong but now you will be right--that's a very tough conversation.

So say I'm an entrepreneur, I've had to pivot a few times, I'm slightly gunshy, and I'm hesitant to either raise or raise more. What would you say to me?
Once you gain a little traction you have to be willing to suspend disbelief.

Entrepreneurs overvalue the suspension of disbelief before they have created something. "We're going to be huge..." but you don't have traction yet.

Then I meet with entrepreneurs who have created something but they're doubtful they can raise capital, they're worried investors won't like them. Those are the people you want to shake and say, "Hey, suspend that feeling if you want to build a big business."

There's a time to let the voices in your head tell you it's not working and there's a time to shut them off. Once you take off, you have to shut off the voices.

As an entrepreneur you're invested in your own success, so why hedge?

Check out other articles in this series:

• How to build your own talent pool
• Inside a completely transparent company
• Why 'going green' won't be optional in the future
• Is it better to train or hire great talent?
• The keys to maximizing your return on sponsoring events
• The ins and outs of franchising with Noodles CEO Kevin Reddy
• How Ashley Madison's founder built a business everyone loves to hate
• Julia Allison on building a great personal brand
• Eric Ripert on how to build a classic brand

Great marketing begins with great marketing plans. Here are three tips to jumpstart your marketing planning to ensure you see results.

You’ve scheduled the retreat. You’ve got a banker’s box chock full of Sharpies and Post-Its. And you’re ready to get to work on another year of marketing planning.

But before you clear the schedules, reformat the corporate template, and ask your creative team to come up with a snappy “2014 Plan to the Summit!” theme and logo, consider this: nine out of ten strategic plans fail to be implemented successfully, according to research done by the Bridges Business Consultancy. Yikes.

It is not exactly surprising though, is it? As marketers (and business people, for that matter), far too often we keep working a plan until it is “done,” at which point it gets printed, put in a binder, filed on a shelf, and promptly forgotten as we return to the daily routine of e-mails, meetings and short-term deliverables. We fail to truly prioritize, communicate, or execute our strategic plans in meaningful ways. And this is unfortunate, because killer strategy is often what separates winners from losers--in marketing and business alike.

So, granted that there is something flawed with how we transform marketing plans to marketing action, let’s take a fresh look at this entire process. Here are three secrets to making better use of your organization’s people and resources as it relates to your marketing planning (and beyond).

1. Create a Planning Plan
Yes, create a plan about your planning process. It might sound crazy, but before you fire up the planning engine, stop. Really think about what you’re hoping to get from this planning exercise. What are the guideposts? Mandatories? Parameters? Where do you really want to go as a result of this plan--as an organization, business unit, or brand? If it’s a year (or three, or five) from now, how will you know that your plan “worked”? And what are you willing to risk or invest to get there?

Further, given that one of the principle virtues of planning is setting aside time to put the important ahead of the urgent, what are the areas in which you’ve been craving strategic exploration? Key trends? Key concerns? Key opportunities? Potential white spaces? By starting with a “planning plan,” you can make sure that you’re building a process that can efficiently and effectively reach your desired outcomes.

2. Create an Execution Plan
Sad, but true, many organizations simply fail to migrate from “big thinking” to “detailed execution planning.” While there is a wealth of research on this topic alone, at the risk of making the complex overly simple, I would submit that there are three keys to effectively shifting from “thinking” to “doing.”

The first is to prioritize. Most organizations have ambition that exceeds their bandwidth. When you complete your marketing plan, take a step back and create clear priorities--perhaps as simple as boiling your work down to the top two or three new initiatives for the year.

Number two is to delegate. Far too often, marketing plans don’t leave the hands of their authors. If you haven’t included key managers in the planning process (which is another discussion altogether), now is the time. Delegate both responsibility and authority. Create clear expectations and timelines. And build an ongoing management protocol to help them succeed.

Finally, magical number three: communicate. If your organization doesn’t know what they’re expected to accomplish, how will it ever happen? In our culture of “what have you done for me lately?”, every marketer has an overly-full plate. And unfortunately, communication is often the first thing to go. Remember, when it comes to execution, creating space for a clearly-articulated vision, rich dialogue, and ongoing feedback loops is critical to success.

3. Create a Culture Plan
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Tom Peters sure got that one right. Culture is what truly drives the day-to-day behaviors of an organization. As such, it’s important to think about how your culture fundamentally thinks about planning. Is it valued? Or do eyes roll when the issue is broached? Does your process start with last year’s spreadsheet (which you call a plan), or is it overly dreamy and never drives to action?

Take some time to reflect on the role of planning in your culture (and your culture overall as it relates to strategy). And based on what you learn, again, put together a thoughtful approach to addressing the critical issues that your organization is facing.

The bottom line is that without vision, inertia prevails. If you think of marketing planning as “painting an inspiring, yet actionable picture for the future” instead of “going through our internal planning process,” what might it look like? How might data and insights inform possibilities and innovations? How could you create an efficient, effective planning process that is stimulating, powerful and, dare I even say, fun?

There's only one way to find out: Start planning.

Turning your brainstorms into business requires fact-based analysis across five key areas.

Whether you're starting a new company or building a new business within an existing organization, the hardest step is getting out of the starting blocks. Ideas come easy. The challenge is turning your big idea into a business.

We are working with one company has grown over the past decade from a successful startup to a large company with more than $1 billion in revenue. Leveraging an advantaged customer offering in the healthcare space, the management team focused all its efforts on the core business to grow into a large company. Ten years later, they're looking for a return to that entrepreneurial mentality to capture significant opportunities outside of their core in adjacent products and markets.

The company's board is hungry for a resurgence and sees a number of new markets and businesses that they could sink their teeth into. For the next board meeting, our goal is to lay out three to five of these "big ideas" they might pursue, validate those ideas, and then decide the path forward for each.

This approach requires a fact base that justifies why each idea is worth exploring further. For each big idea, we are aiming to answer questions across five key areas:

1) Customers: Who are the customers we might target? What are their unmet needs?

2) Market: How big is the market? How quickly is it growing? In what ways is it evolving?

3) Competitors: Who are the key competitors? For each, what do they offer and how do they deliver it? What are the competitive dynamics in the market?

4) Strengths: Where is the space we can operate? How can we profitably differentiate ourselves?

5) Opportunity: What is the "size of the prize"? What portion of the market can be captured with this new opportunity?

The most important thing about this exercise is to provide options for the management team to pursue. They will need to weigh these opportunities against one another, but also against the needs to grow their existing core business.

The takeaway for entrepreneurs and other business builders: Instead of focusing on one "big idea," consider a number of ideas and assess the opportunity for each across these five key areas.

Send us your questions about building your "big idea" into a business. We can be reached at karlandbill@avondalestrategicpartners.com.

Quantity rarely trumps quality--especially on Facebook. A new study examines how publishing too frequently can alienate followers.

Mae West famously said, "Too much of a good thing is wonderful!" But is it really? Excess often leads to problems because a normally functioning system--whether the human body, an organization, or an ecosystem--becomes unstable. Push too far in one direction and you'll see something pushing back the other way.

The same is true for social media marketing, according to a recent report by social media software management vendor Expion. An analysis of 16,000 Facebook posts for 50 top retail brands during the first half of 2013 suggests that an emphasis on quantity over quality won't go far.

Marketers often push for volume. They want to maintain a "relationship" with customers, so they claim. In reality, they want to increase the number of sales and marketing messages, thinking that this will grow business.

As a group, the 50 top retailers had increased their collective posts over the last few years. Volume increased from the first half of 2011 to the second half of 2012 by about 50 percent. The number of postings was roughly flat between the end of 2012 and first six months of 2013.

The average number of fan actions per post also increased over time, roughly mirroring the increase in the number of posts, but then dropped between the second half of 2012 and first half of 2013. The Expion graph below shows the trends.

On Facebook in particular, you might understand why companies increase volume of posts. Not only is there the underlying sense that more is better, but a recognition that not all people will see all posts from brands they like. And there seems to be a positive correlation between volume and reaction--for a while. But then notice the reversal. Also, Expion saw the biggest decline in the growth of brand fans on Facebook and the total number of fan actions for those top 50 retail brands.

As the company writes about the trends, "...either fans are less engaged or retailers are publishing less-appealing content." According to Expion's numbers, only two of the top 10 high-volume brands saw a growth in fan actions, with the other eight seeing a decline. Here's a suggestion: companies are exhausting consumers.

Think of your own experience on various social media. What happens when you have one person or entity creating a large volume of posts? Chances are you get tired of them, even if you do like the material. It's like having nothing but creamed spinach to eat. You might like it now and again, but it becomes numbing as a constant staple.

Something similar happens in posts. Someone may be a prolific poster, but eventually you can get to the point that it's too much. Your eyes drift over the mass of words because they've become an abundance of creamed spinach.

Marketers should use key analytics wisely. When you reach a point that engagement starts to slow, certainly check the quality of the posts. But try backing off the volume some.

Content marketing requires more than creating some content. Almost anyone can create content: just write some lines about an idea, concept or a solution for creating content. However it is unlikely you will score high and attract many readers with your content.

1) Give information
Your content needs to contain some useful information. It has to have some practical value for the content consumer.

2) Being entertaining
The presentation of your content should be in an entertaining format or the content itself should be entertaining. This could be like a story or fairytale.

3) Generate emotion
Above all your content should create some kind of emotion as this will increase the chance to be remembered and the level of sharing amongst friends.

4) Getting engaged
As people love to talk about themselves, your content should allow or enable people to speak more about themselves. Making them interesting.

5) Social currency
If people can make themselves interesting through reusing your content you will get more exposure through the word of mouth as they will be your advocates.

6) Events linking
If you can link or relate your content to events that happen often, people are likely to remember your content

How good does your content score ?

More has been written about Google+ over the past 26 months than almost any other social media site.  While Google+ has had its share of press, there are still many skeptics.

In the face of the sheer amount of time consumers spend on Facebook and Twitter, how do brands solve the dilemma of where to spend their time and how to justify their presence on yet another social network?

In the Internet Age, people seem to suffer from short-term memory loss. None of the mainstream social media platforms experienced overnight success. As proof, just watch the movie, The Social Network, about Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

From cars to candy, big brands are proving that Google+ can be an important part of their digital marketing strategy. There are massive strengths, especially for brick and mortar retailers with both online and physical locations. Those brands that are making Google+ work for them operate more like true community managers.

Social media success doesn’t happen overnight and without effort. For those brands that recognize Google+ represents a social layer of Google overall, it’s a great way to engage fans and promote products, especially, using a multitude of digital content. In fact, that’s what the following brands have in common: the ability to connect visually and viscerally with their fan base.

Ferrari

No one will argue that the Ferrari is one of the finest machines produced on the planet. Who doesn’t remember that scene from Scent of a Woman? We were all rooting for the Al Pacino character to convince the showroom salesperson to let him take the car for a spin.

Ferrari’s official Google+ page doesn’t disappoint either. They give their fans a way to get up close and personal with not only the brand, but also with the Formula I drivers. (I can’t quite say they’re customers as the base price on a 2013 Ferrari tops out at $203,604.)

From hosting video chats to encouraging followers to carry their passion with them with official Ferrari apps, this worldwide brand has found a way to extend its reach by sharing content in a variety of formats to it’s 4 million plus followers on Google+.

BMW

Another finely engineered automotive import, BMW does a great job of cross-channel promotion. They make the effort to engage their fans on every level. They invite you to get on the track with the BMW M Experience; tag your Instagram uploads to get featured on BMW’s profile page; post high-quality images of concept cars and videos of how real people transformed their barn into a BMW 3 series collection. They’ve even embedded the brand into a Playstation iconic game, Gran Turismo.

With 4 million followers, the Official Google+ Page of BMW delivers on its brand promise of delivering sheer driving pleasure. And they appear to be doing it across gender and generations.

Cadbury

This chocolate brand made news after Google+ starting allowing brands to create their own pages in 2011 Q3, representing the first time the network had been used for a product launch. They’ve been doing a lot right ever since.

On one hand, you can ask, “Who doesn’t love chocolate?” but the brand has not rested on its laurels. It posts several updates a day, much of which is repurposed from other platforms though it seems some of the content is unique to this platform. Playing to the early influence of Google’s own staff, Cadbury produce customized Dairy Milk chocolate bars with some of their names on the wrapper to celebrate the launch, according to Cadbury social media and community manager, Jerry Daykin.

They’ve been successful by taking the features that make the network unique and being willing to experiment with them. For example, one thing Google+ does particularly well is to showcase video and photo content prominently. The ‘What’s Hot’ section on Google+ is almost entirely dominated by visual topics, which Cadbury uses to good effect, creating simple Google+ specific imagery.

Although the network is becoming more mainstream, Cadbury leveraged the early adopters of photographers and a tech-friendly crowd to attract, engage and convert consumers to brand ambassadors.

H&M

Although Google+ still suffers the stereotype of attracting tech types primarily, fashion brands are also making a splash thanks to the platforms focus on visual imagery. With a name like H&M, this brand could be mistaken for an industrial electrical supplier.

But, with over 3.3 million followers, this fashion brand is staking out its turf on Google+ with a mix of style, music and a little David Beckham to boot. How can you go wrong with a combo like that? Incorporating behind-the-scenes videos of Beckham Bodywear collection photo shoot plus great visuals of fashion-forward clothing and accessories, this retailer has created an entire lifestyle that followers are getting behind in a big way.

As with any medium, from the early days of television to the heyday of print to the lightning speed of change the digital landscape represents, you’re only limited by your creativity in seeking new ways to engage with your customers. Building a business case for another social network, and establishing yourself on it, is never easy. We thought identifying examples of success might help.

What are the challenges and successes you’ve experienced using Google+?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | How Top Consumer Brands are Successfully Using Google+ | http://www.toprankblog.com

There is a very real knowledge gap in the early stage start-up game, on both sides of the table. First-time entrepreneurs lack the seasoning to captain a steady ship through turbulent waters. Inexperienced friends and family (and, increasingly, crowdsourced investors) lack the ability to gauge the viability of a business, or to mentor naïve entrepreneurs.

This knowledge gap, I have come to believe, is best filled by savvy incubators. However, there are over 7,500 business incubators around the world. Most of them fail.

The first business incubator in the U.S. opened in 1959 and is still operating. In the last couple of years, we have seen a renaissance in the incubator business. Pioneered by YCombinator, Silicon Valley's flagship incubator led by Paul Graham, incubators have come back with a vengeance. YCombinator has seen some significant successes, including Airbnb, Dropbox, and Heroku. It has fueled a bit of an incubator bubble, I must admit. Incubators are now a global phenomenon, and there isn't a major city in the world where an incubator isn't cropping up.

For incubators to live up to their full economic potential, they need to overcome two pitfalls: they need to provide real value, not just office space, and they need to measure success in more than just outside funding.

Adding Real Value

During the dot-com era, every law and accounting firm decided they were going to become incubators. Many of those efforts failed. Charles D'Agostino, executive director of the Louisiana Business & Technology Center at Louisiana State University, offers some analysis: "Incubators do work, but they must be more than a real estate entity offering executive suite services. Effective incubators provide business counseling and management assistance to their client firms. The value-added business services differentiate them from an office suite."

Indeed, as I investigated why incubators fail, I was astounded to find that many incubators assume that cheap real estate, co-working spaces, used furniture, plus a phone and Internet connection equate with business incubation. Jim Flowers, president of the Virginia Business Incubation Association, says, "They mistake cheap floor space for meaningful program content."

Well, it isn't. Neither are discounted legal services, accounting, or other kinds of commodity services.

Two things determine whether a business can get off the ground successfully and sustainably: a validated market opportunity with customers willing to pay for a product or a service; and a product or service that addresses such an opportunity. The only incubators I consider "real" are the ones that help entrepreneurs achieve these two goals.

Adds D'Agostino, "Incubators must evaluate the management capability of the entrepreneurs and assist in finding management for these companies. Especially when the entrepreneur is a technologist lacking business skills, it is critical that the incubator assists the owner in finding managers that have the skills necessary to manage a successful entity and take it to the next level."

My take is that technologists can, actually, be taught these skills. Hiring managers may often be expensive, but high IQ engineers have historically been very good at picking up business skills with the right mentoring. So getting to the next level is well within their capacity, and the role an incubator ought to play is to guide them in that process.

The only "next level" worth getting to for a start-up is a validated business idea that has the endorsement of reference customers, and a product that caters to their needs. The rest — an office, legal documents, QuickBook files — don't build valuation or business value. The benchmark incubators should be measuring themselves against is simply their success in helping clients validate businesses, gain reference customers, and complete at least a minimum viable product.

Success is More Than Funding

Most incubators use funding as a success metric, which is a somewhat flawed criterion. Over 99% of companies should operate as organically grown, self-sustaining businesses — bootstrapped, without external financing. For them the goal is to achieve customer validation, not financing. Yet if the incubator uses financing as its success metric, it will try to force inexperienced entrepreneurs into an unnecessary financing round. And more often than not, they will fail.

YCombinator has mitigated this by partnering with venture capital firms like Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and General Catalyst, such that every single company in their portfolio gets $80k in seed financing as they graduate from the incubation program. But most incubators in the world do not have that luxury. Nor do they have the deal flow deserving of such guaranteed financing.

Of course, where funding is appropriate and relevant, helping entrepreneurs connect with angel investors and venture capitalists is an important service. Equally important is to provide education on what is and isn't fundable.

Will this new generation of incubators perform better than the previous ones?

It remains to be seen.

My primary conclusion is that incubators need to be decoupled from financing. While they need to continue to act as a bridge to capital, predicating their success on getting businesses funded will keep them focused on trying to find the less than 1% of start-ups that are fundable. In other words, coming to the rescue of victory!

The other 99%, then, continue to be ignored.

A scalable incubation model for the other 99% is a requirement for the next rev of capitalism.

As the leader of a company, you need to know how to sell to customers, clients and potential employees.

Being able to sell is one of the most important skills you can have. It’s amazing how many business owners don’t realize how crucial this is, because they don’t see themselves as being in sales. But if you’re going to be the leader of a business, the skill is essential.

When you think about it, everything you do in business involves sales. Either you’re selling directly to a customer, or you’re selling people on coming to work for you, or you’re convincing a supplier to carry your product. The sales skill is absolutely critical and you ought to have a clear understanding of the process.

The good news is you can learn to sell. You’re not going to get everything you need to know about sales from reading this column, but there are four things you should investigate and understand:

Stay out of "MaybeLand"

A mentor once taught me that MaybeLand is the worst place to be in the sales process. "Yes" is the best answer and "No" is the second-best answer. You need to know you’re spending your time the right way, so you want to qualify customers and know when a prospect is real. You want to see buying signs that show they’re interested. Are they calling you back? Asking lots of questions? If they’re just asking you to send a brochure and saying they'll call you back, it might be time to move on.

Ask for the Sale

Just like my kids won’t make the play or the baseball team if they don’t try out, you very rarely will make a sale if you don’t ask for it. The more you do it, the more comfortable you will become and the more you will develop your own style and approach that works for you.

Understand the Timeline

If you’re selling basic office supplies, you may be able to walk in, give a short presentation and ask for the sale. But if it’s something requires more commitment, like accounting or consulting services, the client might want to get to know you better. That means your goal in the first meeting may be to get to the next meeting, not necessarily make the sale. You have to learn not to jump the gun. Instead, always end the conversation with an ask to go to the next step.

Listen to the Customer

The best sales reps have big ears and a little mouth. The more you’re able to listen and ask questions, the better you’re going to be at meeting the needs of the client or customer.

These lessons are true regardless of the organization. Whether you’re directly selling a commodity or doing fundraising for a nonprofit, the same principles apply. No matter what your business is, you need to know how to sell.

With so much emphasis on quality content these days (and rightfully so!), it's easy to forget about some of the other things that make an effective blog tick. But let me tell you -- building a successful business blog isn't just about creating content. And if that's the only thing you're focusing on, you're definitely not using your blog to its fullest potential.

What I'm talking about here is blog optimization. Not in terms of search (although that's important, too), but rather in terms of using your blog to move prospects through the marketing funnel.

So how do you optimize your blog for every stage in the marketing funnel? Well, we've already written posts about how to optimize for nurturing casual visitors into dedicated subscribers, and how to optimize for nurturing your current leads ... but what about those inbetweeners? No, I'm not talking about the British sitcom. I'm talking about those people who are active subscribers, but not quite leads for your business yet. Well, those inbetweeners are exactly who we're going to focus on today.

Let's take a look at some effective, contextual ways to optimize your blog to nurture those subscribers into valuable business leads.

How to Nurture Your Blog Subscribers Into Business Leads

Warm Up to New Blog Subscribers With a Welcome Email

Don't just start shoving lead conversion opportunities down your brand new subscribers throats right off the bat. Start warming up to your new subscribers with an automated welcome email. Use this email to show recipients how much you appreciate having them as subscribers, remind them what they signed up for, and let them know about any other action items.

For example, if you offer email frequency options (e.g. instant notifications vs. a daily, weekly, or monthly roundup), let subscribers know how they can change their preferences to suit their needs (more on this next). You can also encourage your subscribers to follow you in social media for additional content updates -- a great way to increase your social reach. Finally, if you already have some personal information in your contacts database about your subscribers, use it to personalize the email.

(Note: HubSpot customers on the new COS can easily set up this automatic welcome email using Workflows.) 

Provide Subscriber Frequency Options 

If your blogging software enables you to offer various email frequency options, make sure your subscribers are aware of them! The fastest way to turn off some blog subscribers is by bombarding them with an email every single time you publish a new post. While instant post notifications may be the preference for some, others might prefer just one daily, weekly, or monthly email roundup of your recent content (all of which are options with HubSpot's new Blog COS).

So let them know how to change their frequency preferences -- and that they're welcome to do so at any time. Create a special landing page for this very purpose, and link to it in your welcome emails as well as in the footer of your individual subscriber emails.

Segment Smart Calls-to-Action (CTAs) on Blog Posts by Lifecycle Stage

One of the most effective ways to optimize your blog for visitors in different lifecycle stages is through the use of dynamic CTAs (we call 'em Smart CTAs). With Smart CTAs, you can segment which offers get displayed to what site visitors in your blog CTAs, making for a much more relevant, contextual user experience. For blog visitors who aren't yet leads, you'll want to display very top-of-the-marketing-funnel, low commitment, educational offers -- like ebooks, webinars, tip sheets, checklists, templates, etc. -- since they're just starting to get to know your business and what you offer.

Based on the Smart CTA segmentation above, this is the CTA you'd see if you weren't yet a lead and you came to a blog post using this Smart CTA group:

(Note: If you're a HubSpot customer, you can segment by list rather than by lifecycle stage to achieve more granular segmentation.)

Use Other Blog Real Estate for Smart CTAs

Individual blog posts aren't the only places for Smart CTAs on your blog. You can take advantage of other blog real estate, like the top and sidebar of your blog, to display Smart CTAs, too -- like HubSpot Partner IMPACT Branding & Design does on its blog ...

Include Smart CTAs Within Subscriber Notification Emails

While we're on the subject of Smart CTAs, how about your subscriber emails? If you have control over the design of these notification emails to your subscribers, you might consider including Smart CTAs in here as well. Just keep in mind that the main point of your notification emails is probably to drive subscribers back to your blog, and by including a CTA, you may end up sacrificing some blog traffic for traffic to your landing pages. Depending on the goals you have for your blog, this may or may not be a good tactic for you. 

Create Marketing Offers to Align Closely With Blog Content, & Vice Versa

Another great way to amplify the lead generation effectiveness of your blog is to closely align your lead gen offer content with your blog content. By creating relevant marketing offers that complement your blog content, you'll naturally transition your readers into a lead conversion opportunity. The opposite is true as well. If you have a new lead gen offer, brainstorm content ideas that can be used to promote your new offer.    

Include Text-Based CTAs Within Blog Copy 

Last but not least, don't be afraid to call out your offers within the copy of your blog posts. Just make sure the offer is educational in nature and relevant to the content of your post. These text-based CTAs should be meant to provide additional, helpful resources to your readers. The bonus for you is, they also happen to convert visitors and subscribers into leads. :)

In what other ways can you nurture your blog subscribers into business leads? Share your tips in the comments!

Moving to a new city is always interesting (trust me, I’ve done it a few times).

It’s all about exploring new places and trying new things.

This last weekend my better half and I decided to venture into the ‘big smoke’ to see what was what. The decision was made easier because of the rubbish weather here recently. So, indoor activities we top of the bill.

Coupled with the need of a bit of retail therapy we decided to go to the mall.

Which mall? Good question.

We didn’t know.

The first choice was the underground center.

That wasn’t underground! (Confused us also.)

The second mall we went to was indoors (hallelujah) but after parking up we found out that it wasn’t really a mall at all. More a food court.

As we sat down eating we were faced with a conundrum. Where to go next?

Having just paid for all day parking I suggested we ‘go on an adventure’ and take the Marta (train/subway) to the next mall. Yes, good idea I thought.

It ticked a number of boxes…try something new. Tick.Experience ‘big city life’ by using the subway. Tick. Don’t worry about parking again. Tick.

We were on a winning path.

Fast forward 3 hours later and we’re standing in the rain waiting for a bus to take us back to the train so we can go find our car with the same ‘hole’ burned in our pockets for travel as parking costs.

Sense of achievement? Wavering at this point.

Could we do it better next time? Yes.

How? Probably drive.

Measure The Steps That Contribute To The Desied Outcome

Like our little escapade, in business, it is well advised to measure success to provide relevant information that we can act on to improve results.

Simple.

However, there are two ways that results can be measured. These are known as Leading and Lagging Measures. Or, more simply put, proactive vs reactive measures.

If we’re measuring revenue and the quarterly/monthly target then we know there is a target of $x.

For those of us that are reactive (Lagging Measures) the time period passes, we look at the revenue achieved against the target and evaluate how well we did.

More often than not the goal is not achieved.

Cue the scratching of heads and a brainstorming session to work out what could be done to ‘make things right’.

Ideas are thrashed out similar to a parliament session in England with lots of jeering and calls for order.

Then, with a decision made everybody goes about their daily work until the time period passes again and the process of evaluation starts again.

Leading Measures Empower Businesses To Be Proactive In Their Action

There is no right or wrong. Best practice suggests that it is more efficient to be proactive in measuring results so that informed decisions can be made, in real time, to enable the best chance of reaching the desired outcome.

In Leading Measures, we measure the steps that contribute to the outcome/goal.

This involves detailing key performance indicators that can be measured in a real time bases.

For example, a business works towards a monthly target of $x. To achieve that goal they identify certain factors that contribute to that being achieved such as number of proposals, number of meetings etc.

At any point they are in a position to evaluate the chance they have of successfully reaching the outcome based on the performance, the facts, that they are seeing. If they aren’t having enough meetings? They know to modify the activity that will result in more meetings.

Simple.

For us? We know for next time we take an escapade across the big city what factors have an impact on us achieving the desired outcome. That, by the way, is not waiting for a bus in the rain for 30 minutes.

Sales Training Article: Levels of B2B Selling

By Geoffrey James, INC - Sales Source

Image courtesy of Renjith Krishnan from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

When it comes to selling to businesses, there are four levels, three of which usually fail and one of which always works. Here they are:

1. Selling your company.
You attempt to convince the customer to do business with you because your company's management is so smart, based upon executives biographies and the business successes they've had in the past. The customer thinks: "Gee, these guys are full of themselves."

2. Selling your products.
You attempt to convince the customer to buy your products because they have valuable features and functions that are obviously superior to the features and functions available from your competitors. The customer thinks: "Hmmm..., what does that mean to me?"

3. Selling a solution.
You work with the customer to uncover and clarify problems. You then propose a customized solution that can solve those problems, based upon the products and services you provide. The customer thinks: "Okay, but why is this a priority right now?"

4. Selling results.
You show the customer how you can help them achieve their financial or market growth goals by making them better able to sell to, and provide support for, their own customers and potential customers. The customer thinks: "Great! How soon until we start?"

Need some help with your sales performance? Take a look at the sales training workshops available to you and improve sales performance.

Read more sales training articles from CustomerCentric Selling® - The Sales Training Company.

Many CRM systems out there are revenue and pipeline oriented. As a result, many sales reps are focused on meeting their projected close date for their boss (aka a quota reminder) and the projected revenue of the customer they’re trying to close. Their goal then becomes to close this deal as quickly as they can and move on to other fish. Does this sound the workings of customer-focused company? Absolutely not. It’s not that your sales rep isn’t good at their job, but the CRM system they’re working with is setting them up for mediocrity.

How can I set up my sales team for success?

Now, more than ever, customer engagement and understanding the customer needs are crucial to the sales process. Without the extra insight to focus on the customer’s goals and needs, their move is usually the same: provide a generic description and demo of what the product does, then hope to close the deal. To give your sales team the extra advantage, the CRM system needs to be set up to help them make a customer-focused sales call. By providing information about the customer’s environment, challenges and needs up front, this enables your sales rep to connect the dots between the customer’s priorities and the solution. Their goal the becomes to help the customer.

Time to reevaluate your current CRM

What do your salespeople see on their screens? Close deal deadlines? Value of accounts? Company information? Or challenges and goals? If you find the data they’re working with is more company-focused than customer-focused, you may want reevaluate whether or not your CRM could be sabotaging your sales team.

To help your sales team be more customer-focused, here are some data insights (outside of numbers) you might want to have readily available for them whenever they turn on their CRM:

• Capture personas of the people they’re interacting with – they might require different approaches (e.g. prefers email, prefers lunch meetings).
• A list of the customer’s goals and challenges and an understanding of the team. (e.g. who’s the decision maker, who’s the user)
• Company culture or landscape. (e.g. corporate style or start up)
• Latest company news – context on common ground makes it easier to connect.

If analyzing behaviors and being able to segment that data for everyone in your team to view and utilize are what you’re looking for, leave us a comment below and we’ll get right back to you!

Weather forecasters have been describing the last few days as fall-like, and I love it! It’s been beautiful out, and while I’m sad to see the summer days fading away, I am excited for cooler, fall days ahead. The summer has been filled with beach days, summer vacations, warm weather, and unfortunately, some slower times in the sales world. We’ve seen a slight decrease in the amount of leads we’re getting from clients for follow-ups, and out-of-office replies are flooding inside sales reps’ inboxes, making it a bit more challenging to get prospects live on the phone.

The good news is, we are quickly approaching what I think is the best time of year – September! Kids are going back to school and everyone is facing the reality of diving back into their work. Teams are starting to scramble to figure out how they are going to allocate the remainder of their funds for the year. It’s the perfect time for sales reps to attack, qualify and set as many appointments as possible. The challenge for sales managers is to figure out the trick for motivating their teams to get excited about the fall months and out of the summer mentality that “It’s typical for the lead flow to be down.”

As sales managers, it’s crucial to keep everything fresh, maintaining the appropriate level of engagement from their teams and then some. Below are a few ways to increase sales reps’ motivation, especially when they are finding it tough to get back into it after the sweet days of summer:

Kick off new, innovative incentive programs. It’s always exciting to kick off a new incentive program and to see the reactions flood through the office. New ways to earn additional money, outside of regular commission, are perfect ways to entice your reps. We recently kicked off a referral program for reps where they are focused on networking to bring in brand new customers. The level of engagement has been excellent – I can tell not only by the leads that are starting to show, but because of the questions reps been asking and the go-getter attitude they have about the program.

Introduce new tools. New technology is exciting for most every sales rep in the industry. They want to learn more and more about new tools they can use to make their lives and jobs easier, better, and for lack of a better term, “cooler.” I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of content recently about how to motivate and manage millennials. Odds are, many of the members on your team are millennials and require a bit of a different management style to keep them involved and “in the Know.” Introducing new tools to keep them motivated as the summer winds down is a great way to keep them engaged.

Roll out a long-term contest. While September and October were always my favorite months on the phones because prospects were planning budgets, November and December were sometimes more frustrating because prospects were beginning to use the “Call me back after the new year” excuse. In order to think ahead but also motivate your team to get a strong start in September, think about how you can utilize some long-term contests to motivate them. For instance, why not put a contest in place that’s focused around which individuals can get the highest amount of qualified opportunities to sales by the long weekend in November for Thanksgiving? Even if you might not have budget left for a direct monetary award, giving additional PTO is a huge motivator for inside sales reps, especially as the year comes to an end and they are low on vacation days.

Before we know it, we are going to be reading and writing blog posts about the holidays, and the potential of sales slowing down again. Before we get there though, let’s focus on September and the fall months and on what we can do now to motivate our teams to drive as many qualified appointments as possible. Kicking off new incentive programs, introducing new tools, and rolling out long term contests are great methods to accomplish this. How are you motivating your teams as we say good-bye to summer?

 

 

A BLOG!

If you expect to continue to be a great sales person and remain at the top of your game, then it’s time to start your own blog. Waiting any longer will relegate you to the middle or even worse, the back of the pack.

Why a blog?

The answer to that question is in three parts:

1. We are in an information world and information (content) has never been more important to sales. Content creators are at the top of the information world. Everyone else is looking up. 
2. Personal brand is everything. Developing, cultivating and promoting our brand has moved online. Being “known” for our expertise, capabilities and insight is crucial to selling and is only increasing. Being anonymous is becoming a liability. People want to know who you are.
3. Reach is quickly becoming the greatest non-tangible asset a person can have. The Internet has created a world wear anyone is just a click away. Therefore, he or she with the greatest reach wins. This is even more valuable in sales. Having the ability to reach 100′s, 1000′s or 100,000′s of people is gold and it’s worth even more for sales people. The greatest sales people will have an audience.

I’ve been saying for years that sales people need to blog. It was smart and forward thinking then. Anyone of you who started a blog, have kept at it AND it’s still relevant good for you.  For those of you who are still on the sidelines, it’s time to jump in.  2014 is the year of the sales blog. 2014 will be the year that separates the average sales person from the great ones, because the great ones will have gained a truly competitive advantage while the rest will be trying to catch up.

The benefits to blogging go beyond the external ones mentioned above. There are also a number of huge sales related benefits that make blogging a no brainer and increase the ability of sales people to make more sales, more money, and accelerate their career.

New Clients - When you have a blog, Google starts crawling it. Your blog then ends up in the search engines. Therefore, if you’re smart and you’re blogging about the industry, the products, the market, the problems and the challenges of your space, you increase the chance that new customers and new prospects find you. Today, if you don’t blog, you’re the equivalent of a nobody. Unless a client or friend recommends you, no on has a way of finding you.  There are no ads out there that say; Call Tammy at TechCorp. If they call into your company, you might get assigned a good lead, you might not. When you have your own blog, prospects have a way of finding you. They have a way of connecting with you and engaging with you and this means more money. Here’s a vision for you. Imagine how different your sales business would be if you created a blog that made it to the first page of Google search under the keywords your customer searched most for the products and services you sell? How would that change things for you?

Expertise and Personal Development – In order to blog regularly you need topics. The first 5, 10, 25, or even 50, posts aren’t that hard. But what happens after that? Most bloggers start to fizzle out and this is the worst thing they can do. In order to maintain a good blog overtime requires you know your shit and continue to come up with new topics. The best and only way to do this is to read, read, read, and read some more. Read blogs, read ebooks, read books, read white-papers, etc. Once you’re done reading, in addition to reading, watch videos, Ted Talks, and sit in on webinars. The benefit of this type of commitment is you learn a lot and become a thought leader. In your effort to deliver a high-quality blog, you obtain tremendous amounts of knowledge about your space, the industry, your products, your solutions, the competition, etc. You expand your knowledge base exponentially and inevitably acquire more knowledge and information than your prospects and customers.

This increases your value to your customers via the blog AND during the selling process. The more you know, the better sales person you become. Nothing helps you learn more than a commitment to a great blog.

Improves Your Teaching Skills - A great blog teaches. If you don’t intend to teach via blogging, don’t waste your time. A blog that doesn’t teach readers anything, is a waste of time (exception to the rule is informing, examples news blogs and gossip blogs). The role of sales is to teach rather than tell or inform and has never been more important. Prospects and customers are 50-70% through the buying process before they start reaching out to sales people. Your ability to bring value to them at that stage is in your ability to teach them something new, to educate them on how to get the most out of your solution. Blogging regularly puts your mind into teaching mode. It forces you to live in your prospects or customers head. It makes you spend your time looking at things from their perspective, their vantage point. When you do this, you see things differently. You see the gaps and you’re able to offer valuable insight and information in a way that broadens their perspective, their knowledge and their understanding is enhanced. Teaching is a key skill in today’s selling world and blogging makes you better at it.

Crazy Social [Media] Skills – In order to get killer readership to your blog, you need to have a strong social media presence. The best blogs are shared across Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and Google +.  A blog can’t be successful if it’s not attached to a strong social media presence. If you’ve been lagging in the social selling, social media arena, nothing will accelerate that commitment than a blog. Social media is the highway to blog readership. Blogging will increase your social media reach by increasing your number of followers. It will drive more shares as readers share your posts across their social networks. If a blog is the location, social media is the highway. It gets everyone to you.  Leveraging social media to market and promote your blog will elevate your social game big time.

Your online presence will never be the same.

Career Development and Advancement - When you have reach and when your audience respects your knowledge around a subject or topic, you become in high-demand. Imagine you have 4,000 visits a month to your blog and you start to think you’d like to make a change. A single post expressing your intentions and boom, you’ve got people’s attention.  Recruiters are following you and know who you are. The competition is following your blog and reaching out when they need that new V.P. or the new Sr. Account Executive.  When you document your knowledge and become a thought leader, demand for you, your knowledge and reach grows. You’ll never need a resume again.

There aren’t many opportunities in your career that come along promising huge competitive differentiation. There aren’t too many opportunities where one change, albeit a big one, can fundamentally catapult your career, your presence, your knowledge, your reach, and your place in the sales word. There is one now, you just have to grab it. It’s called blogging!

Blogging is a game changer and for those who see it and capitalize on it will be the winners. Blogging is somewhat of a paradox. It’s a silver-bullet, at the same time, it won’t be an overnight success.

The benefits of blogging are huge. As sales people, it’s time to take advantage of this incredible medium.

The Negative Commentary:

95% of you who read this, even those of you who agree, will NOT capitalize on this opportunity. You won’t start a blog. You will procrastinate. You will say you don’t have time. You will start one only to abandon it in just a month. Less than 5 of you who read this will actually start and stick with a blog and in a funky kinda twist, that’s why, for those who start one, you will be the clear winners.

If you do start one. Send me the link and I’ll share it on this blog so everyone knows.  If enough of you start one, I’ll start a page on this blog dedicated to those who start blogs and add everyone who starts one to it.  Now that would be kinda cool.

Whaddya say, can we make it happen?

I’m claiming 2014 as the year of the sales blog. It’s gonna be big! Who’s in?

The answer depends on several factors, some of which can be hard to determine. Consider this: High turnover among sales staff may appear on the surface to be a bad thing. But if the skills of entry-level sales reps are adequate for the business you’re in, turnover may simply signal that your sales staff have done well and are now ready to move on. Why pay more for experienced talent if it’s not necessary?

On the other hand, don’t assume that your sales team is productive just because they are making their goals and not complaining. Perhaps they’re content to mine the established customer base because your compensation plan doesn’t encourage them to develop new business. An extra incentive for new accounts could motivate the sales staff and increase your market penetration. Then again, if they are paid more for new business, will they just go for the easy sell, pushing the cheapest item on the sales floor simply to get that new customer bonus? In that event, you’ll be paying them more for generating less revenue!

In Is your sales comp plan working for you? we covered the basics of how to evaluate your sales comp plan. Here are some additional considerations in evaluating your plan.

The key to assessing your sales comp plan is to measure it against the goals of your business strategy. Ask yourself:

1) Are your sales people demonstrating the behaviors you want to see?

The plan should be structured to reward the behaviors that are most likely to drive the strategy and achieve your business objectives. If the answer is to sell more big ticket items, and you are not seeing this, then you need to be sure your plan incorporates generous incentives for selling the right products and services. If the answer is to help your business serve a new demographic, then think about including a bonus for the rep who opens the most new accounts.

2) Am I losing reps to competitors who pay more?

People leave for a variety of reasons, and in some cases this is a good thing, but if you are losing good people to competitors and you think compensation might be the reason, ask yourself this: is your compensation plan competitive in today’s talent market? In other words, if you have to hire new sales staff, will you be paying enough to entice the best people to come to work for you?

3) Does the plan seem to effectively motivate some reps and not others?

You want the plan to motivate everyone on the sales team and to be perceived as fair, but different people are motivated in slightly different ways particularly as they mature and life situations change. Does your plan work for all sales people, the old hands as well as the up and comers?

4) Is your cost of sale inline with your business goals?

If you have a plan and stick with it in spite of fluctuating market conditions and changing sales volumes, you might find that your costs are too high relative to your output (your CFO will usually give you plenty of warning that this is happening) and you may need to make sure your sales comp plan scales effectively with sales production. Basic commission at the low end and accelerators at the higher end of performance can be a great motivator for reps while keeping costs inline with business goals.

Taking the time to answer these four questions will go a long way toward determining if your sales compensation plan is or is not effective.

To your success!

I recently suggested that seeking to achieve “customer delight” may be a misguided and ultimately unprofitable strategy for customer service organisation organisations. I’d now like to share another potentially controversial idea: that focusing on satisfying your prospects apparent needs may be an equally misguided strategy.

To be clear, I’m only referring to well-defined needs that your prospect is already aware of, not all those latent pent-up needs that they may not currently be aware of or concerned about. And I’m thinking particularly of high-value B2B sales environments with lengthy and complex decision making processes, not short-cycle, low-value transactional sales.

Why look for undefined needs?

Here’s the problem with focusing too high a proportion of your sales and marketing energies on identifying prospects with existing well-defined needs: in most cases, they will either already be in an active buying cycle (in which case some other vendor’s fingerprints are probably all over their requirements) or they may have already concluded that the issue, although interesting, isn’t urgent and therefore not worth spending money on.

The already-in-an-active-buying-cycle-problem, by the way, is why insisting that your sales rigorously BANT qualify opportunities before investing time with the prospect is a counter-productive strategy: by the time most opportunities fully tick all four BANT boxes (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe), their decision criteria have usually already been influenced by other vendors who got in early.

The not-worth-spending-money-on-problem can be equally challenging, unless you can persuade the prospect to expand the scope of the problem (and therefore their needs) to embrace some urgent - and much more valuable - new dimensions. Either way, focusing on needs your prospect is already aware of can dramatically restrict your addressable market - and it doesn’t do a great deal for your sales win rate, either.

It's time to Challenge your prospects

So what’s the answer? Well, as the authors of The Challenger Sale suggest, it is to focus your energies on issues that your prospects may either be unaware of, assume cannot be solved, or believe that their current approach to solving them, no matter how inadequate, is the best available to them.

In doing so, it’s pretty much inevitable that you will take their thinking beyond their current perceptions of what they need. By educating them on new possibilities, they may come to conclude that their initial perceptions about what the problem was, what the consequences were, or how the problem could best be solved, were wrong - and they can come to regard you as the expert that can take them forward in the right direction.

Unsticking the Status Quo

You need to challenge their assumptions, to offer them fresh perspectives, and to highlight the potentially economic (and other) consequences of sticking with the status quo. You need them to believe that the costs, consequences and rewards of taking a new approach - with your guidance - outweigh any risks that may be involved.

Let’s be clear: changing from what they are doing today to your solution will involve them in some degree of risk. Any change involves risk. But so does sticking with what they have got today. By helping them take a fresh perspective on what they really need, and helping them avoid the inevitable landmines that could lie in their way, you can dramatically change the balance of their risk and reward.

A less risky strategy

And while we’re talking about risk, what about the risk to your sales and marketing productivity that would inevitably be caused by choosing to focus on asking your prospects what they need and then jumping through hoops to suggest that your offering is best at addressing it?

That approach may work for Systems Integrators (and customers with deep pockets), but if you are a B2B-focused organisation wanting to take replicable solutions to market, you’re much better to focus on uncovering or creating issues that are going to prove critical to your prospects, and which you can show how you can solve better than any other approach open to them.

So please don’t (just) base your sales strategy on asking customers what they think they want. You’ll do far better focusing on issues that if your prospects only knew enough about them, they would conclude that they had to do something, and that your organisation was best placed to help.

Does this describe your marketing funnel? Your top-of-funnel efforts are generating interest, you’re getting inbound traffic and plenty of leads, but too many just stall out in the middle of the funnel and never make it to that engagement with sales.

The problem could be trying to convert too soon (on your timetable instead of the buyer’s) or it could be lack of engagement. In either case, nurture marketing is the strategy most likely to solve the problem. Begin by thinking of a simple series of progressive steps as a process, then define how that process should flow (from the point of view of your buyer), then implement the process.

A. First, define the lead flow

Lead nurturing is like a series of interactions in a flow chart. Incorporating trigger-based steps can dynamically adjust the communication with the lead in real-time, making the process very responsive to the buyer. But even for simple campaigns the rules can become complex; fortunately, marketing automation can manage the process so it stays on track and visible.

• Step 1: Determine your audience

Review your customer base and see what your good customers have in common, then think about how to segment a similar audience of potential buyers so you can speak to them in a way that feels personal. Your segmenting factors could have to do with size of company, location, industry, problem faced, and so on. Be sure to pick a segment that’s large enough and funded well enough so that you can get a return on your investment in nurture marketing.

• Step 2: Align content to the target audience

In this step, you align value-added resources and content to the different stages of the buying cycle. This content is delivered in different communication mediums over a series of interactions throughout the campaign. Take the time to identify existing content or develop new content that’s specific to the various stages in the lead lifecycle.

Don’t start using selling messages too early. You want this series of communications to be buyer-centric, focused on their problems, not your product or service.

A content matrix helps you determine the existing messaging and assets that can be used in the nurture campaign. Content should be unique to the target audience and the way they frame the challenge. If you’re targeting an industry, use their terms and language.

• Step 3: Select multiple mediums for the nurture dialogue

A lead nurturing campaign should encourage prospects to interact, not just consume information. If they can engage with you, often their behavior will tell you when they’re ready to talk to sales. Are they opening emails? Downloading white papers? Visiting the website? The most common mediums for communicating with prospects include:

• Email. Emails in nurturing campaigns should include links to content or resources hosted on the website. Marketing automation tools can track click-through performance on email campaigns. Ideally, email activity can be used as a trigger to initiate the next step in a nurture campaign.
• Websites. Your website will gather information and be the primary source of explicit data (provided by the prospect, often in registration or sign-up forms) and implicit data (derived from watching prospects’ behavior online and inferring information about the products or services they need). Most marketing automation systems include both nurture marketing technology and web analytics that track and record individuals’ behavior and actions.
• Thought leadership. Value-added resources such as white papers, third-party research studies, and articles should be used at the early stages of nurturing campaigns. Don’t pitch your products or services; just provide useful information. This can convince the prospect that your company is a trusted advisor, and a good source of information for defining a problem or discovering possible approaches to solving that problem. Companies classified as a “trusted advisor” to a prospect are two-to-three times more likely to win the business.
• Phone calls. Direct contact with sales development reps can be a nice value-add. At early stages, reps should just touch base to see if they can offer value or follow-up on a resource. Actual selling should be reserved for prospects who display signals that indicate they’re ready to buy.
• Promotional and product information. Save product information and promotional offers for the final stages of the nurture flow, when prospects are becoming ready to solve the problem.

B. Build the lead nurture flow

Timing and cadence are important. Depending on the complexity of the sale and the lead’s buying cycle, the entire campaign could last weeks, months, or even years. The best way to determine how many interactions are appropriate and how long the campaign will run is to talk to your sales team. Study the good deals that closed with the best customers and work backwards:

• How many touches does it usually take to close a sale? What type of touches work the most often?
• What are the key pieces of information that salespeople delivered, and when?
• What are the most commonly asked questions from prospects, and when?
• Do we need to educate a new market, or are we targeting an industry or segment with a widely accepted understanding of the problem we address?
• What do our advocates say about the products/solutions we sell? What’s the perceived value in the minds of those who bought?

Once it’s all lined up: Your target audience, steps, content, and cadence – it’s time to do a road test. Go live with a small portion of your target list, and analyze what’s working and what isn’t. Adjust accordingly, and roll your campaign out.

As you begin to experience nurture marketing success, you’ll find your mid-funnel stays robust and your sales people should be able to close these well-prepared leads more quickly. Two things to remember:

• Keep your campaigns as simple as you can; don’t complicate them unnecessarily. You may wish to build a parallel nurturing campaign with a few key differences rather than over-complicate a simple one.
• Keep experimenting and testing. The economy is dynamic and ever-evolving; your campaigns should be as well.

Want more information about lead nurturing? Check out Act-On’s Lead Management Resource page, where you’ll find white papers, blog posts, videos, and on-demand webinars on all aspects of lead management, including nurture marketing.

Bubble gum machine image by Cody Davis Photos, used under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

The problem with Twitter is figuring out how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

With few rules, fewer leaders, and very little structure, it’s not surprising that many marketers don’t know what to do with it. However, generating leads on Twitter can be amazingly effective.

Twitter is all about relationship building, which makes it very easy to turn followers into valuable prospects, clients, and brand champions. Generating leads on Twitter is possible when you have a strategy.

Here are 6 tips for generating leads with Twitter:

#1. Follow selectively

Twitter is what you make of it. If you’re not careful, it can lead you down multiple rabbit holes. That’s why you should focus on interacting with people or brands that add value to your business when your aim is generating leads on Twitter.

It’s hard to attract and retain people’s attention on Twitter, so the trick is to mainly interact with those who are interested in your knowledge and expertise.

#2. Listen carefully

When you first start using Twitter, listen carefully to discover the interests of people in your industry so that you can approach them with relevant conversations that can lead to long-term relationships.

Remember that sales opportunities don’t happen overnight. Rather than bombarding people with sales messages, try to focus on content that your target audience would find interesting at various stages of their buying process. Ideally, this content links back to your website, where you can further engage with them using marketing automation for lead management.

#3. Use Twitter lists

A twitter list is a curated group of Twitter users that is based on specific characteristics, e.g., key prospects, local media, customers, industry peers, competitors, etc. You may create your own list or subscribe to lists created by others.

Lists help you to organize your followers and apply a strategy around your interactions with them. Since you will follow different people for different reasons, organizing them based on their usefulness helps you to focus on different engagement strategies that benefit your brand.

#4. Provide compelling content

Learn how to craft compelling tweets that contain engaging messages and link to useful content that help your followers gain knowledge about your expertise.

Tweets that revolve around your products and services won’t get much attention. But tweets that offer advice on how to solve a prospect’s problem or improve their situation will help to extend your reach and establish thought leadership in your industry.

#5 Use hashtags

It can be easy to get lost in the masses of content on Twitter. While it may be tempting to watch cute cat videos and get caught up in the latest memes, it’s important to stay focused on relevant topics to your business. One of the ways to filter the noise and find relevant conversations is to use hashtags.

Hashtags are words or phrases prefixed by the pound (#) symbol, which allow users to follow specific conversations based on keywords. One of the most effective ways to find leads using hashtags is to participate in Twitter chats. These are moderated, subject-focused conversations used for educating and informing your audience. There are many Twitter chats that revolve around business-specific hashtags. Use the hashtag discovery tool to find a hashtag that is relevant to your business and start using Twitter chats to engage with prospects

#6. Use the Lead Generation Card

Recently, Twitter announced an addition to its suite of Twitter Cards called Lead Generation Cards. It is a new type of Twitter Card that allows marketers to collect leads directly within a tweet and is similar to having a landing page within a tweet. The landing page is designed to drive more social media users to particular brands that match their specific needs and interests.

Currently, the Lead Generation Card is only available as a feature of Promoted Tweets – a paid feature of Twitter Ads. Users don’t have to fill out a form. Their information, i.e., name, email, and username are pulled directly into the card. To learn how the Lead Generation Card works, go here.

Your Turn:

Are you using Twitter to generate leads for your business? Share your experience with us in the comments section below.

Let’s face it: sales tracking gets tedious, fast. From riding reps to keeping their accounts up to date to endless pipeline update calls, who has time to track all of that activity at the end of the day? For most sales managers, the answer is often “not me.”

We hear from sales managers who spend a lot of time trying to figure out sales tracking tools that just don’t seem to gel with their business and what they’re trying to accomplish. Many CRM platforms boast a wide range of capabilities – but figuring out how to get a tool to display the pipeline in a way that makes sense to your sales team can be quite the undertaking. And we all know how difficult it can be to drive adoption, especially when the tool that’s supposed to save you time is difficult to use.

So how could sales tracking possibly be easy? Well, I’m here to tell you that it actually can be. Here are a few tips to get you started:

Keep it simple

How many stages are in your current sales cycle? Five, six, or even more than that? Keeping your sales tracking system simple encourages your reps to use the tool to the extent they should, because it’s easy for them to do so. The more complicated your processes are, the less likely it is that your reps will adhere to the standards.

Your sales tracking tool should help you keep it simple. Features like a drag and drop interface make it easy for reps to move deals through the pipeline. Make sure the CRM platform also offers a way for sales management to check in (and, you guessed it, this feature should be simple to access and understand, too!)

Make sure you match

So you’ve trimmed your sales stages to the bare necessities in your best effort to keep it simple (or made it really clear what each one means). Does your sales tracking tool match? Making sure that there are an equal number of stages that are labeled the same is a very important connection to increase ease of use for the reps on your team. Not having to take that extra time to decipher what a stage really means to your business helps keep sales tracking simple.

In addition to increasing ease of use for field reps, making sure your tool matches your process helps sales managers understand the status of each and every deal, so they can coach quickly and effectively.

Create report templates

The easiest way to get a quick snapshot of your sales team’s activities is by running a few reports. The best CRM tools will allow you to build reports the way you like them, with the data that matters, in a layout that makes sense to you. If you haven’t already, head to your sales tracking tool and set up some default templates that you look at weekly. These sales reports will allow you to understand your team’s pipeline, recent sales, upcoming sales and where your team may need help in minutes.

If you’re looking for an easy-to-use, minimal sales tracking app that makes it simple to keep a pulse on your team, check out Base’s free trial. Base will help you set up your tool to match your sales process and includes prebuilt visual reports – so you can see what you team is up to at any time.