“It’s All A Matter of Perception” VII (Photo credit: LauraLewis23)

One of the most elusive buyer insights to attain is getting to know what your buyers think. It can be so hard; businesses can tend to sweep it under the rug for next year’s list of initiatives. This can be a foolhardy approach. Without knowing it, your own marketing and sales tactics can affect how buyers think – in a negative way.

Static versus Dynamic

For marketing and sales executives, the grind of strategy development, tactical planning, and budget planning can be grueling. Once completed, within the fiscal calendar used, it is a sigh of relief. It can also cause static thinking. Meaning, the go-to-market strategies and tactics put into place are viewed as “in place” for the full fiscal calendar year. Another words, they remain static.

In today’s B2B world of rapidly changing buying behaviors, to remain static is loaded with peril. It is becoming more subject to complex and dynamic market forces. And, not knowing how your buyer’s thinking is changing can result in significant downsides. Today’s executives must incorporate dynamic thinking into how they validate the effectiveness of their go-to-market strategies. Just as well, dynamically gain insight into how their buyer’s thinking may be changing.

Too Dependent

For years, marketing and sales executives have relied on looking at go-to-market effectiveness through two primary areas. From analyzing quantitative data and getting feedback from sales. While both are beneficial, neither can provide a full understanding of how and what buyers think. Feedback, such as from surveys, is usually from existing customers only. Not prospect buyers. Leaving a significant gap in understanding.

This type of dependency, on quantitative and sales feedback, can lead to a widening chasm between what a B2B organization may think and prospect buyers think. Leading to a lack of understanding of how buyer perceptions are developing

Unintended Consequences

Marketing and sales executives need to view buyer perception as not something just to find out about. But as something which is developed as well as managed. Not doing so can result in unintended consequences, which can be devastatingly negative. The worst part is finding out about these unintended consequences well after they have taken root. Here is a case in point to ponder:

A high tech company with a rich history in research and development, embarked on a new content marketing program. The program called for de-emphasizing engineering and R&D related content and push content towards C-Level thought leadership. After about 14 months, things started to go awry. Their acquisition as well as retention rates dropped. More alarming was once solidly entrenched offerings became suddenly at risk with a few unexpected customers jumping ship to competitors. What happened? The organization sought answers through win/loss interviews and customer surveys. Based on these, they hypothesized their competitors were winning on price, new messaging, and new products. Not satisfied, they began conducting on-site qualitative buyer insight research in various parts of the country. A profound and deep buyer insight was uncovered. Buyers, including the desired C-Level targets, had developed a perception the organization was no longer investing in research and development. Which was an important, often unarticulated, element of how buyers viewed the strength of the firm. They had created their own problem, not competitors as assumed. They had, in fact, increased their R&D investment the previous year. By de-emphasizing R&D in their content marketing programs as well as sales messaging, they had caused erosion in the perception of being an organization that can be trusted to invest in R&D. It is taking a while, but their road to recovery is unnecessarily hard.

This is a real example I experienced first hand. It shows how unintended consequences of go-to-market strategies can result from not being on top of buyer perceptions. You see here two big issues. One, a decision regarding a content marketing program was not informed by buyer insights nor validated. The second is no efforts were made to assess and manage how buyers perceived this new content marketing program.

Prevent Unintended Consequences

To prevent repeating the story shared above, executives today must think about as well as plan for making buyer insight research an integral part of their go-to-market strategies and tactics. This includes the important element of understanding and managing how buyer perceptions are being formed. You can do so by implementing these four steps:

1. Commit to buyer insight research as an integral means of assessing and validating got-to-market strategies
2. Build in time to utilize buyer insight research as an upfront planning practice to validate got-to-market plans (you may find the use of a Buyer Insight Map™ to be helpful)
3. When executing go-to-market strategies and tactics, build in various assessment points to include monitoring buyer perceptions
4. Use buyer personas as a communications platform for shared common understanding of buyer perceptions. Focus on how marketing, sales, service, and operations can both impact buyer perceptions and play a role in assessing

By viewing buyer perceptions as an element of go-to-market effectiveness, leaders can stay one step ahead of competitors. Buyer insights at this level allow you to be nimble and make quick changes to adapt to shifts in buyer behaviors and perceptions. It also serves as a means for validating go-to-market strategies. Both marketing and sales will benefit by a shared common understanding of how they can address and build positive buyer perceptions.

Buyer perception is a powerful determinant in purchase decisions. Following these steps will go a long way towards ensuring you come out on the positive versus the negative side of perceptions.

(I welcome further conversations to help you validate and assess buyer perceptions. I am very interested in getting your thoughts and perspectives on how buyers think today. Please share widely – your peers and colleagues are wondering what buyers are thinking about their go-to-market strategies.)

map-icon_500x500 (Photo credit: Shmector)

(This is part three of a three part series on the use of Buyer Persona Stories™, Buyer Persona Scenarios™, and Buyer Persona Story Mapping™ to drive effective content marketing strategy.)

Getting to see the big picture about customers and buyers today is not easy. It can be like sitting in an old stadium trying to peak around a column to see the field. When you cannot see the whole field, you are missing the action. With buying behavior changing rapidly each quarter, not having the big picture on the actions of buyers can set back an organizations significantly.

In part one and two of this series, I reviewed the use of Buyer Persona Stories and Buyer Persona Scenarios. These powerful techniques allow you to build the chapters of your buyer’s complete end-to-end story. Getting to know the sub-stories and the important buying scenarios of your buyers in order to shape an effective content strategy and content marketing plan.

A Collection of Short Stories

Having a big picture means having not only a good visual but also good contextual understanding. Buyer Persona Story Mapping™ helps to provide a visual backdrop as well as the situational contexts needed to understand buyers today. Like a collection of short stories, this mapping technique allows us to gather the goals, activities, key moments, stories, and scenarios of buyers into a story-mapping framework.

A Modeling Framework

When we can map the stories of our buyers, they allow for teams to work on the big picture. While this modeling framework has multiple uses, the focus in this series has been on content marketing effectiveness. Teams can be free of the business jargon and frame of references, which can hinder content creation. And, get focused on the practical stories of buyers.

There are several key elements, which help to complete Buyer Persona Story Mapping:

1. Buyer Personas: this is our target character in our buyer’s story. A good place to note you may need to complete a story mapping for each buyer persona derived from buyer insight research and buyer persona development.
2. Persona Buying Cycle: the purpose here is to introduce the important element of time. Like all good stories, there is a timeline. This view helps us understand the top-level epic story in play. There are other views also which can be used. Shortened or lengthened. My comment on the fervor around buyer’s journeys is rather than focus on the increasing “battle of the buyer’s journey”, focus on what takes place below the timeline.
3. Buyer Persona Goals: as has been reiterated throughout this series, the core essence of buyer persona development is buyer goals. A goal driven mapping process helps us to understand what buyers are trying to accomplish as they progress through time, activities, and situations.
4. Buyer Persona Activities: we want to highlight key activities and actions taken as buyers move along a timeline and identify the actions taken, which move them to the next stage or part of their buying cycle.
5. Buyer Persona Stories: this technique, as shared in part one, allows us to focus in on how buyers are involved in sub-stories. These sub-stories focus us on their goals and the key topics most relevant to what they are trying to solve or accomplish.
6. Buyer Persona Scenarios: this modeling technique provides the context needed to understand how goals, activities, and sub-stories come together during a certain stage of the buying cycle.

(The Buyer Persona Story Mapping modeling framework is shown below. It is available by link below for your review. I am also available for helpful discussions on how to make use of this approach for content marketing effectiveness.)

Buyer Persona Story Mapping

A Team Effort

The Buyer Persona Story Mapping framework is designed for teams to work in collaboration. It provides a framework for discussion and brainstorming. To be efficient, it requires key insights, which come from buyer insight research and buyer persona development. It also should make evident how buyer personas in general have less to do with description and more to do with being a vehicle to understand buyers in practical ways.

From the point of view of content marketing effectiveness, here is how the modeling tools introduced in this series can help:

• Crate the language of content around helping buyers accomplish their goals
• Understand content media preferences specific to buyer activities and actions
• Understand how content should be developed to fit into a buyer’s story as they go through certain buying activity scenarios
• Content creation become a connected story told to buyers rather than a series of disconnected media presentations
• Provide the context needed for teams to work in unison around helping buyers accomplish their goals and activities, which lead to action
• Create a platform for removing the barriers of inside-out thinking and serves as the shift to outside-in thinking
• Know what buyer’s value in terms of content and results

Advancing to the Next Level

The intent of this series is to help marketing and sales leaders develop a path towards improving the effectiveness of their content marketing plans and strategy. Also, it is designed to bring more benefit to buyers, who are increasingly voicing their dissatisfaction with the volume of unhelpful content being shot-gunned their way.

By getting teams focused on practical ways to understand the stories of buyers, you can do what has been part of civilization for many centuries – use content to tell a good story.

(The Buyer Persona Story Mapping™ framework is available here for you: Buyer Persona Story Mapping. I welcome further conversations to help you use this framework to understand the stories of your buyers. I am very interested in getting your thoughts and perspectives on this powerful framework. Please share widely – your peers and colleagues are trying to get on the right road to content marketing effectiveness.)

English: The start of the 200m at the 2006 Prefontaine Classic at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon. The winner was ultimately Wallace Spearmon in a time of 20.27. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today’s buyers are afforded sources of information, systems, and tools, which help them to make the right purchase decisions. Depending on the complexity of challenges faced, buyers may be seeking simple answers or complex custom solutions. For B2B buyers, the nature of buying itself has changed. This puts pressure on B2B marketers and sellers to evolve and get in lock step with buyers. Many are behind the pace of buyers.

Statistics Losing Meaning

Over the past year or two, we have had many statistics proclaimed about the buyer’s journey. Stating buyers are from 50% to as much as 90% through their buyer’s journey before engaging sales. Since there are so many of these statistics now, I don’t think the actual number makes any difference. What does matter is the more overarching development. B2B buyer behavior includes a consumerization shift towards researching extensively what they need to solve or achieve. This could be almost entirely online or almost entirely via a sales representative. Or, it may be a hybrid of both.

Is your organization adapting to this shift? Or is your organization so bought-in to one of these statistics, adaptation means – marketing automation. The use of marketing automation can be beneficial and help generate new opportunities. To reap benefits though, it needs to be aligned to the critical path-to-purchase of your buyers. Today’s B2B organizations have to be careful about thinking in terms of technology adaptation versus buyer adaptation. To get this right, buyer adaptation should inform technology adaptation.

What has to be considered is this: is the rush to technology adaptation hindering the progress needed to catch-up to evolving buyers today? Indeed, this is something to ponder. And, it provides a clue as to why some B2B companies struggle with effectiveness and efficiency when making use of technology such as marketing automation.

Catching Up

The good news is B2B organizations can catch-up to how buyers are evolving. Focusing on buyer adaptation in earnest can elevate an organization’s capabilities in two areas. The first beings how to operationally orient the organization around customers and prospect buyers. The second is gaining knowledge on how to implement and make use of the automation available to them. Bringing them in closer alignment to the pace buyers are evolving at.

To be successful at aligning with the evolving buyers, I suggest the following four steps be taken:

Step 1: Commit the organization to the customer and prospect buyers

I have sat in many meetings, as you have, where we hear the same proclamation of commitment made over and over. You know them: “we are committed to providing the best product”, “we are committed to providing the best service”, we are committed to providing the best experience”, and etc. What they have in common is their internal focus. Executives need to stand up and make a serious commitment to customers and buyers – and prove it with how-to actions.

Step 2: In-depth Customer and Buyer Understanding is the Plan

A serious commitment to customers and buyers means you need to get to know them. You need to know their goals, motivations, needs, challenges, objectives, and more. This is true both on a company level as well as a buyer level. It means committing to quantitative buyer intelligence and qualitative buyer insights. This needs to purposeful for it drives step 3.

Step 3: Strategies are Customer and Buyer Informed

A commitment to customers and buyers involves ensuring the organization’s marketing, sales, service, and operations strategies are guided and informed by buyer insights. I advocate encapsulating strategies with front-end and back-end thinking. On the front-end, buyer insights are informing and validating strategies. On the back-end, buyer insights are assessing and monitoring strategies.

Step 4: Develop Customer and Buyer Knowledge-Base and Communications Platform

Getting the entire organization committed to customers and buyers calls for moving beyond training to making customer and buyer insights available just in time. There are many moments of truths which customers and buyers can encounter. It pays to have the enterprise ready no matter where they are.

To develop what it takes to catch up as well as keep up with the evolving buyers of today, B2B organizations can go a long way by following these four steps. It does not happen overnight. However, the first step is critical. Committing to the customer and buyer as well as laying out the path to getting in step with them means a journey which can be taken together. And, prevents you from being on a different path than your buyers.

(Schedule time with me and a conversation to help you catch up with evolving buyers. I am very interested in getting your thoughts and perspectives on the obstacles, which can be slowing you down. Please share widely – your peers and colleagues are running as fast as they can to catch up.)

Lead generation and nurturing are important for new leads, but if you’re not pursuing those strategies with existing buyers, you’re missing out on low-hanging fruit.

How do you generate and nurture leads once you’ve already made a sale? By turning your new buyers into brand evangelists. And how do you do that? You have to earn it.

During buyer persona interviews, spend some time assessing the buyer’s current situation. Try to determine how buyers want to continue to be marketed to, and what they’re excited enough about to (potentially) evangelize to their own networks.

To drive retention content, ask the following:

1. How has your experience with our product been since you started using it? Anything you really like?
2. Have you seen any measurable results?
3. How have others on the buying decision team responded to the product being in use?

Once you have some answers, turn them into a content strategy for existing buyers. The goals of your strategy are two-fold. First, you want to retain them; second, you want them to act as magnets within their own networks, showing so much satisfaction with your offering they recommend it to others.

How to Create Content that Drives Customer Retention

• Keep providing value. How are you communicating with buyers post-purchase? Are you continuing to offer educational content around your product and promoting it to them via segmented delivery? If buyers seem unimpressed with your attempts to “stay in touch,” find a way to be more relevant.
• Bring buyers into the fold. If you sense that buyers would make good interview subjects for blog posts or participants in Twitter chats, reach out to them with specific requests. People generally enjoy talking about their experiences and are flattered when asked to offer advice or help.

Acquiring new customers is always more expensive than keeping existing ones, so the content you produce for this stage of the buying cycle is significant. Keeping these customers on a separate lead nurturing track can also contribute to your pipeline in terms of leads generated via referrals and shares from within the existing customer base. It’s important to see the value of creating a content strategy for existing users, simply because it really pays off.

Have you enjoyed this buyer persona series? Share what you’ve learned from my blogs in the comment section!

Photo credit: Pandorea

We recently published a new eBook entitled Marketing Essentials: Developing a Kick-Ass Editorial Calendar and, as with all of our content pieces, we sent it out in a series of segmented email blasts to our house list.

The first two sends went fine with no feedback whatsoever, positive or negative. But yesterday, after sending the blast to our third group of subscribers, we got a few complaints about our use of “profanity” in the subject line. Some even went so far as to call us “unprofessional” and “obscene.”

Now, hold on. Kick-ass? That’s hardly profane or obscene. It’s not politically incorrect, it’s not insulting to any particular group of people or even to humankind in general, it’s not sexist, racist, defamatory, libelous, contemptuous or disrespectful. Distasteful? Arguably. But you’d have to argue really hard. Then again, it was our email, so we’re biased. But we aren’t the first to use the term ‘kick-ass’ in a blog post, email or marketing collateral, and I’m sure we won’t be the last.

You know the saying: everyone has an opinion [omitted: an inappropriate and profane analogy]. And they’re certainly entitled to theirs. But what’s obscene or offensive to one person could be totally acceptable to the next (okay, there are some agreed-upon big no-nos but for the most part…it’s a matter of opinion). But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that, yes, our email subject line was inappropriate.

This begs the question: did it work? Did our kick-ass email actually kick ass? We analyzed the open rates, click-through rates, complaints and unsubscribes (as we do with all of our emails but of course these were of particular interest) to determine if using ‘kick-ass’ in our email marketing was a mistake.

Here’s a breakdown of the Emails in Question compared to our previous two pieces of content, How to Calculate the ROI of a Social Media Campaign and 5 Ways to Generate Leads From Your Facebook Page:

We segment our list between agency marketers and B2B marketers (and then split each up into two sends, totaling four sends per content piece). In terms of open rate and click-through rate, the kick-ass piece performed better among agency marketers but was outperformed by our Social Media ROI eBook among B2B marketers.

Looking at complaint and unsubscribe rates, the kick-ass piece performed the same for complaints as the other two pieces (all having a 0% complaint rate) and was second lowest by only .05% for unsubscribe rate among agency marketers.

For B2Bs, again, the Social Media ROI eBook has it beat for lowest unsubscribe rate (it’s a great eBook), but the kick-ass piece scored the lowest complaint rate by at least 1.5%.

Will we use ‘kick-ass’ in all of our future emails? Not likely. But we aren’t ruling it out, either. The data speaks for itself and although a few people complained, the majority didn’t seem to mind.

What do you think about being bold in email subject lines or other marketing campaigns? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

The post Profanity in Email Marketing: Do Edgy Email Subject Lines Improve Open Rates? appeared first on Optify.

As a sales rep, I spend a ton of time on LinkedIn. As time goes by, I keep running into more examples of what not to do with your LinkedIn headshot. You may have noticed that LinkedIn has gotten much more aggressive with putting people (and their profile photos) in front of us, from email alerts to relentless connection suggestions to the never-ending nagging to endorse the skills and expertise of those in your network.

So your photo is not just sitting statically on your profile page—it is getting passed around LinkedIn like a platter of hummus in a bazaar.

Last July, a piece I wrote called 19 Reasons Your LinkedIn Headshot May Be An Epic Fail was published on this site and generated a tsunami of comments. It truly seemed to resonate widely, as just about everyone has a LinkedIn profile, and apparently we all care a LOT about the same question: Do I look good/smart in my headshot, or am I hopeless dork?

Therefore, I call again on all working warriors to look again at the image you present to the digital universe. Here are 19 MORE reasons your LinkedIn headshot may be an epic fail.

1. Manischewitz-ing It

Senior manager of email marketing by day… white wine sipping/sunglass-sporting/polo shirt-wearing dude by, um, day. Apparently, you code those HTML emails at night while you savor the California daylight for wine tasting. Can I really trust your CAN-SPAM acumen, Monsieur Chardonnay?

2. Cuz I Fear No Sharks

Thanks a bunch to my colleague Courtney Bosch for finding this absolute gem. I REALLY wish I could link to this photo to properly call out this guy, but propriety (and MarketingProfs’ editors) restrict my doing so. Scuba Duba Man, Art Director, I love your shot in full scuba gear—but not for the reasons you do, I’m sure. Seeing that large shark swimming right behind you while you remain so calm … you’re an aquatic stud! Now, it’s true that anyone with “Art Director” in their title has more leeway to be creative with their headshot (and many of you types do indeed take full poetic license), but in this case, all I keep thinking is: Go, shark, go.

Memo to anyone using a photo of himself in scuba gear as their business photo: Unless you are in the scuba business, just don’t do it. And even if you do provide such marine services, maybe hold off on showing your mug covered with a big mask.

3. Busy Sidewalker

For a young and put-together consultant at a major firm with international experience, I’m questioning the choice of a close-up headshot on that busy urban sidewalk, especially with that stranger/gentleman walking right past you. I’m dizzy just looking at the hectic nature of that streetscape.

4. Thoughtful Sideways Glancer

This is a variation of my item #3 last year (“Sears Portrait”). As a “Lecturer” at a major public university, sitting down looking uncomfortable in that suit and tie, why are you staring off to your right? Have you been told that the left side of your face is your good side? I’m going to bet real money that it in fact resembles the right side of your face very closely. Try playing it straight next time.

(List continues below the slideshow.)

5. Nerd Badger

Standing stiffly in front of what looks to be a hotel lobby window, wearing your “nerd badge” (affectionate term used for any generic conference-attendee badge hanging off of a dull lanyard) is, I can safely assert, not your best look. Remember, LinkedIn gives us a small box within which to work. So do 1.) not waste 67% of the space on a potted plant and car parked in street visible through the window behind you and, more importantly, 2.) NOT wear a nerd badge! Let’s see YOU, close-up, sans badge.

6. Where Everybody Knew Your Name

I should give you a break, “recent College Grad with a year of work experience.” (Memo to Self: Write next about what not to say in your profile headline), but you graduated in 2010. That was three years ago. It’s time to lose that photo of yourself in jeans sitting crotch-forward astride a chair in a poorly lit and otherwise unremarkable bar. The lovely girl sitting behind you like you are riding a Harley together isn’t helping either.

7. My Bunny Haz Cute

I love bunnies, especially those sporting a tiny knitted cap over their adorable ears. Sigh! And especially if that knitted cap is of a rooster with a big red comb. OMG! You must work for some kind of rural veterinarian who knits by night. Wait, no … I see you’re a “writer.” What a letdown. I hope you at least author cute children’s books.

8. How Confused Can I Make You?

A strange combination of Fails # 17 and 18 from last year’s list, with a twist. There you are (I think), standing alongside another gentleman. His arm is firmly but awkwardly on your arm or ribcage (or vice versa), all the while this long shot makes it impossible to see what you really look like. But you made sure to include that huge NASDAQ signage on the podium-thing in front of you both as well as the big-lettered company name on the sign above you. That company name that DOES NOT correlate to any company listed in your profile! You’re making me nuts with that omission! Why are you posing there?! Did this company (that you don’t talk about) go public? Why do I care if it did? And is that other guy holding a gun in that hand of his lodged in your midsection?

9. And He Signed My Chest, Too

Okay, let’s acknowledge a universal truth: Who doesn’t love Arnold Schwarzenegger? I have a photo of myself with him too (true story!). Well, actually my photo is with his Madame Tussauds wax copy, which showed that he is surprisingly not that tall, right? Plus, the wax copy I posed with has about as much acting talent as the real person—BOOM!

But I digress … the difference is that my photo with Arnold is buried in an old shoe box where it belongs; it would never serve as my headshot on a business network. Tell me, how does the fact that you once met the former Governator at a trade show (I see your nerd badge, dead giveaway!) make you someone I want to buy auto data from?

10. Schrute Lives

As Schrute-memes go, you picked a pretty good one, it says: “I am not human capital.” Profound indeed. I guess that means something to you —perhaps you’re an HR specialist or recruiter? Alas, no. You’re in marketing. Hmm, maybe you ARE just human capital. I confess, I have a similar photo of Dwight Schrute with a funny caption (mine says “Fact: I Rule”—oh how it makes me chuckle). But I use that pic as the avatar for my fantasy football team and, repeat after me, “not as my professional headshot!”

Bonus points: LinkedIn’s scary-good algorithm on your profile, under “People Also Viewed,” listed another person with your same sensibility. Her profile photo is of Yoda captioned with: “Human Capital I Am Not.” Oh that Yoda, what a funny talker you are! But at least she is in HR, so while it’s still a bad idea, there is a connection. What’s your excuse, again?

11. Proud as a Network Brand

Dear Bus Dev VP, I cannot figure out what’s up with this twosome pic of yourself (I presume) and a pudgy tween huddled up close to you outside on a Manhattan city street. It gets weirder the more I look. First, there is an old-timey 1950s-style microphone like the kind Letterman has on his desk in front of you. Also, the photo shows a small-print caption that says “Mondays and Tuesdays on NBC.” So, you and your niece had a nice time at 30 Rock once, eh? You may know social media engagement metrics, but you’re an enigma to me.

12. Orange You Glad I Glow?

Have you ever seen someone posing in front of a VERY orange wall/background for their headshot? Well, I just did. And I’m reminded of that line from Anchorman: “I’m not mad, I’m impressed.” That piercing citrus background makes your skin positively glow. Dude, you are GLOWING. Orange! Because you’re standing right next to a deep orange wall, so that will happen to you. Good thing you work for Sunkist …Oh, but of course, you don’t. Why a Chief Revenue Officer at a “retail search exchange” made that call I won’t know but until I figure it out, bartender, please fix me a screwdriver. Make it a double.

13. But These Shoes Are Fierce

For a Managing Director, you chose a photo of yourself that epitomizes Fails 1 and 2 from the 2012 article: Terrible lighting and Blurry. Yet your unique wrinkle on those timeless errors is that you are wearing a white shirt, short blue shorts. and BRIGHT pink shoes (which are positively glowing in that very dim light). To cap it off, you’re posing in what looks like a deserted hotel mezzanine and one can barely see your face (what with the low light and blurriness).

Yet, let me say, even from that tiny sliver of visible face, I can tell that you actually are quite photogenic (that’s code for “cute”). So please, get a wardrobe consultant and Take Two.

14. Sepia Isn’t Just for Instagram

Photo filters are everywhere these days, and sepia is no doubt a standby. But unless you are trying to sell me on a ghost town tour, and as an HR Director it seems that you’re not, I highly recommend using that same very nice close-up picture but without the funky tinting.

15. West Siiiiide!

Let’s go out on a limb and suggest that Ocular Sales Reps don’t help their cause by doing the whole hand-jive thing like they are Snoop Dogg circa 1995. “Laid back, with my mind on my money …”

16. To Be My Lawfully Wedded Husband

Okay, darling, I will confess that you look absolutely gorgeous in your strapless white wedding gown and headpiece. Your lovely brown hair is curling so gently on your shoulders. And that bright outdoor light behind you—just angelic. My disconnect is that you’re a sales rep for big pharma. Now, to be fair, the reputation of pharma sales reps is well-established. Apparently, male doctors tend to buy more willingly from young female sales reps. Why that is the case is a total mystery. Okay, sure, I’m in Sales; I get it. You need every edge. But, um, might it hurt your chances to so publicly tell your prospects that you are happily married?

17. Logos Rule, Photos Drool

Apparently more than one of you out there in the high finance world believe that a logo of a silhouetted lion sitting inside of a circle is the way to show the world your profile photo. Again …that’s YOUR. PROFILE. PHOTO. Not… Your. Company. Logo.

The crop of that element of your company’s fierce logo tells me at least that you are all about the Benjamins. Or the Marlin Perkins.

18. Hello My Baby Hello My Darlin’

Ah, the straight close-up of a toddler/baby face. Now, is this you, or your child, or someone else, or..? I think it’s YOU (I have to say that because I already called out the “my cute pet/child” faux pas last time). But, as the owner of a design/photography studio, is this the best work you can summon? A black and white close-up of a toddler, that isn’t even cropped correctly making her look even smaller all scrunched up in the center of the profile box surrounded by lots of empty space?!

19. Tat-tacular

I had to search deep for this one but I fear it may be more common than I imagine. To the Community Manager with her profile entirely written in Portuguese, please may I suggest: Do not flaunt your tiny-script-font wrist tattoo at us. In addition to not being able to READ the wording, your arm is just at an awkward vertical angle. This drives me to alternately want to zoom in to try and read this profundity permanently inked under your watch, or sit back and cluck-cluck/tsk-tsk “at the kids today.” Mostly the latter.

As I concluded in this piece last year, if any of these 38 Photo Fails is you, I implore you to find a professional portrait photographer. You will be amazed. Like most people, I dreaded this concept but then when I saw what was accomplished I was a full convert. Remember, it’s not just on LinkedIn that we all need to look our business-best, think of the increasing number of places our digital presence requires us to shine.

iPhones and their competitors do take increasingly better photos with every upgrade, but for best results, save them for Facebook and hire a professional. It’ll be the best money you’ve spent all year, and as a bonus you can release your inner super-model for an hour or two during the photo shoot itself. Good times!

Another post in my “Make It Repeatable” series, this one is all about how and when to gauge the right balance of repeatability at startups and early-stage companies. Like almost everything else in business, there’s an 80/20 ratio (80% of the benefit is derived from 20% of the effort) in driving repeatable, and then automated, processes early in a company’s lifecycle.

After that crossover point, call it good and focus energy elsewhere in the business for a time. Otherwise there’s the risk of pouring resources into wasted and over-engineered efforts at a time when wasted resources and opportunity cost can never be recovered. I’ve seen that “right balance” go both ways at a company I co-founded and three other early and growth stage companies, including here at Optify.

In my experience, it’s the inflection point between a repeatable but somewhat more manual process and the investment in automation of that process where resource investment can go quickly to diminishing returns if not proactively managed. I’ve seen very sharp and energetic but also inexperienced folks drive a project beyond diminishing returns and waste resources without even realizing what’s happening.

With that, here are some startup tips for making your processes repeatable without diminishing returns:

Where to put the primary focus on repeatable processes

The entire goal of making a process repeatable is to first establish viability for the business, quickly followed by being able to scale the business. One of the most valuable areas of executive team input throughout a startup, early stage, and expansion stage of a business is to constantly determine which processes are currently on the critical path of holding back the business, and then to invest company resources there. It’s a moving target in these very dynamic stages of a business lifecycle, so mentally plan on this effort being a journey much more than a destination.

My background is in software since the mid-1990s and, over the past 12 years, software-as-a-service (or “hosted” as it was called back in 2001). I’ll therefore provide what I hope are some tangible examples below more specific to software and tech. Most of these examples, however, can be applied — with a little abstraction — to nearly any product or service business.

Product management at early stages

There’s a lot of glamor associated with starting a company, as there should be. It has to be a passion in order to put the effort in to make it happen. But the number of people who have actually done it, been there to take the plunge when nothing exists, is a tiny smattering of those who write, blog, invest, and otherwise are proponents of the startup hype. The massive effort required to get the first version of the product launched and those first few customers aboard cannot be underestimated.

At this stage, therefore, the primacy of getting some (any) product out the door and a few of those first customers is life and death to the business. Here repeatability needs to be planned for more than executed in a few key areas of the product.

Product planning for repeatability at startup phase

The vast majority of product development effort is going into actual functionality that a customer can touch and experience at the early stage. The drumbeat is for that functionality to meet the “minimum viable product” requirements of the first few beta customers.

As a result, this product development effort is very often a quick and dirty prototype in terms of everything except the front-end functionality. This development paradigm can lead to significant challenges later if the following three items aren’t at least planned up front to allow much more repeatable and scalable processes later.

1. Provisioning

Just the process required to create a new instance of the application, under what scenarios different users with different admin levels need to provision sites, default settings for a new site, etc. can be critical to plan for, even assuming most of those scenarios won’t be coded immediately. If the key use cases and requirements are outlined up front, the provisioning system can be architected to be flexible enough up front to support these use cases at much greater scale later. If not planned, a straight-line provisioning system for the immediate startup use case will be coded, which in turn becomes an architectural foundation by default that is extremely expensive in time and development resources to dig out and replace with a more robust model later.

2. Key administrative controls

Most product teams have very little interest in administrative controls early on, but ultimately these are critical to the user experience. Some product management forethought as to where these controls will ultimately be stored, categorized, and rendered should be thought through up front. Otherwise, they will be ignored and little pieces will show up in many different places as developers in a hurry on other features shove them anywhere.

3. Security levels

Security authorization and access at this stage is often a “best guess” because the product team just doesn’t know all the different use cases that will appear over time. However, it’s time and money well spent to find an experienced product or engineering exec on a consulting project to take a good cut at a product plan for user authorization levels that can be baked in foundationally to save a lot of pain as soon as more than a few customers come aboard.

Since none of these areas are seen or experienced for the first few customers, they are generally not regarded as “valuable time spent” by a young, aggressive team. Discipline is required to even put some planning and foundational architecture effort towards these items at a time when there is massive pressure to just push a tangible product out the door.

My recommendation: find an experienced product manager or engineering director to add to the team who, in a past life, has had to live with that lack of early planning and the pain of unwinding it later. Usually that person can enforce enough discipline for some of the basic forethought and foundations above if he or she is empowered to do so.

Be aware that all of the above items will still be quite raw and manual in nature early on, requiring intervention from the customer support team to set up an account or toggle administrative setup items, for instance. Once some of the use cases are validated with a good sampling of real customers, it will make more sense to put these controls directly in the hands of customers (obviously requiring more development resources, in-app documentation, etc).

Billing and collections

A process area that rarely gets enough attention in early stage companies is actually billing and collections, or more simply put, actually getting paid by customers. At the very early stages, product teams want feedback from any user, paying or not. Sales teams are trying to get contracts signed or terms agreed to electronically, at which point victory is declared for that customer. Billing and collections can too often be an after-thought despite the absolute necessity of these processes for generating cash flow.

A good finance team, especially the first controller, will bring a lot of value to the business by standardizing key aspects of billing and collections. This includes standardizing payment terms, actions taken upon late payments, timeliness of billing and intervening quickly on aging invoices. In early stages, none of this needs to be automated, and in fact automation is often a waste here because there are too many moving pieces early on.

Instead, the focus needs to be on processes that are repeatable and avoiding too many exceptions and one-offs for this customer or that one. Figuring out what works best for billing in your target market is critical. Here are a couple of basic examples:

• If your target segment has large customers, focus on less frequent invoicing – worst-case quarterly – and always in advance of the period. Why? Because big customers have big, slow accounts with payable bureaucracies which seem to always slow pay and never have regard for the cash flow needs of small vendors. So your process has to take into account that you will be doing great to get paid in 45 days from these types of customers. Billing at the beginning of the quarter (or beginning of the billing cycle more generally) means you can actually collect cash sometime in the middle of the quarter. Billing at the end of the quarter for a product or service and getting paid 45-60 days later really sucks by comparison.
• Some very different processes apply when working with small businesses or international customers. For instance, sending invoices to either of these types either by snail mail or email is very painful. They are often being billed monthly for relatively small amounts of money, so moving them quickly to credit card processing is important. That credit card handling can still be manual in terms of running all the valid cards each month, but dialing in the process and the expectations with the sales team to only accept credit cards is important.

Even with those concepts in mind, trying to fully automate a billing process via automated credit card processing from the product or automated creation of invoices can quickly get to wasted effort in early stage companies.

Figure that all three of the product roadmap, pricing, and packaging of the product will need to be iterated frequently in the first few years while the company is still gauging its market. Trying to automate billing during that period will often not contemplate new product bundles, different pricing for certain sub-segments, or other exceptions that quickly invalidate much of the automation work or continually drain resources to manage and update all the automated rules.

Planning for repeatability without undue resource expenditure

I just provided a few examples above, but I will repeat my premise that one of the management team’s biggest value-adds in early stage companies is finding bottlenecks – usually a bottleneck is a broken process – and allocating just enough planning and resources to alleviate that bottleneck.

As in my examples above, many of the bottlenecks are already well known and should not be surprises. Others will be very specific to a market or product. In either case, keeping that balance of streamlining processes while not trying to immediately automate everything can add up to a jackpot of downstream leverage for your business.

The post Startup Tips: Make It Repeatable, But Beware of Diminishing Returns appeared first on Optify.

Here on the Econsultancy blog, we’re going to start teasing you with details of the week-long siren of excellence and japes that is the Festival of Marketing (8-10th October in London).

One of the many components of the Festival is PUNCH, the event where marketing meets the new creative. To quote our website, ‘in today’s increasingly saturated media landscape, creative power matters more than ever’.

So, to celebrate this event, and to give you something pretty to look at while you let your mind wander, I’ve listed some of my favourites in the world of creative in marketing.

Social

Tacobell

In the words of David, our intern, Taco Bell’s Twitter account ‘doesn’t feed out generic, bland, and often repetitive info’.

Instead, those with the keys to the Taco Bell account engage in a mesmerising mix of humour and hyper engagement, crucially targeting a young demographic in a way that no other fast food joints have mastered.

Taco Bell engages with folks like ‘Instagram ‘Star’ Acacia Brinley whose posts attract hundreds of people in a demographic where cheap food, quick-to-purchase ability, and a good metabolism are all part of an average day’.

These words are from our intern, David, who is bang in the middle of this demographic, has lived in New York, and earlier asked me if I knew who the Rizzle Kicks were(?).

Here, from the past few days, are two of the more anodyne replies from Taco Bell, but even these make me laugh, and are proof of constant engagement.

I’ll let Buzzfeed show you just how good Taco Bell is when engaging with celebrities and playing the lark. Check out Taco Bell’s feed and enable all tweets to show, and you’ll see how active the account is when compared to [pick other fast food joint].

Guerrilla(esque)

Rockstar Games set my heart aflutter with this mural in New York, earlier this year.

Within an hour of the non-completed mural being tweeted, over a thousand visitors had travelled to see the box art.

As our intern, David, succinctly puts it ‘murals are not a new thing, which is exactly why this is creative and fun – in a hipster world, looking for not-so-original, originality’.

It’s old school, basically, and it blurs the line between the game and the reality, which is exactly what sandbox games are about. It fits perfectly with the product and can then be shared online.

Video

Lululemon is the biggest yoga-inspired retailer, selling clothes and accessories.

Their videos are great and fairly low-fi. Sh*t Yogis Say is a brilliant example of ‘viral’ content, having been viewed more than 2m times. Namaste. I love pigeons.

Lululemon got a decent amount of publicity for being one of the first brands to use Instagram video. Again, it’s low fi and fun, but puts yoga incontrovertibly at the centre of the communication. 

Out of home

I have to include Google. OK, this is classic out-of-home advertising, old school marketing if you will, but I think we can agree that when it’s done well, it’s unbeatable when it comes to ‘brand tingly feeling’.

These ads, seen last year on London Underground platforms, are brilliant. They remain both out of the ordinary and commonplace, with the phonetic spellings redefining both where you are standing (on your previously oh-so familiar commute) and the product you use likely every day.

Granted, you can’t search underground without having access to the TFL WiFi, but this is predominantly an awareness campaign, and not about acting right now.

Cross device

Dulce Vida Spirits

Yes, that’s right, organic tequila has made it into this blog post. After all is said I done, I do live in ultra hip East London, which is coincidentally where the Festival of Marketing will be taking place.

Dulce Vida has a responsive website that looks, frankly, beautiful, and terrifying in its capacity to encourage tequila purchasing both from desktop and mobile.

To be honest, the website does have some glitches, and links to other US liquor retailers instead of selling directly, but it’s still beautiful, and includes nicely formatted info on process, sustainability and cocktail recipes.

Check out Starbucks for a big hitting version of a beautiful responsive website.

Immersive

HTML 5

Here are the two ends of the HTML 5 spectrum. From last year's incredible storytelling and publishing for Brandon Generator (ok, not strictly marketing unless you look at it from the perspective of Interet Explorer, who designed the work for IE9), to a Solar Panel website, that attempts to stand out from the hegemony of static service company websites. 

As HTML5 is used more, the challenge of making immersive experiences for the good of  user, and not just to show off, will be taken up by more and more marketers and web designers. Currys' great responsive website has HTML 5 elements within it, and is worth taking a look at to see the near future of responsive and immersive websites.

Disclosure: we have a brilliant new intern, David Olshanetsky (name of a ballet dancer, mind of an entrepreneur) who has compiled much of this list. If you want to give him some love, you can find him on Twitter. 

Econsultancy's Punch event is where 'Marketing meets Creative in the age of data and insight'. Curated by Creative Review, this event showcases the best of insight-driven creative. This event forms part of our week-long Festival of Marketing extravaganza.

Many of you reading this will have the big challenge of needing to connect with and win very senior executives as clients.

Today’s More Clients TV Q&A looks at the most effective ways of connecting with senior executives in both the long and short term:

 
And if you can do me a favour it’d be much appreciated…subscribe to the More Clients TV channel on youtube:

The post How To Win Senior Executive Clients appeared first on Get More Clients: Proven Strategies to Attract and Win Clients.

The following is a guest post by Kevin Ashton, the co-founder of the MIT Auto-ID Center, which created a global standard system for RFID and other sensors.

He also created the Internet of Things.

Enter Kevin

A Hungarian psychology professor once wrote to famous creators asking them to be interviewed for a book he was writing. One of the most interesting things about his project was how many people said “no.”

Management writer Peter Drucker: “One of the secrets of productivity (in which I believe whereas I do not believe in creativity) is to have a VERY BIG waste paper basket to take care of ALL invitations such as yours–productivity in my experience consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to spend all one’s time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do, and to do well.”

Secretary to novelist Saul Bellow: “Mr. Bellow informed me that he remains creative in the second half of life, at least in part, because he does not allow himself to be a part of other people’s ‘studies.’”

Photographer Richard Avedon: “Sorry–too little time left.”

Secretary to composer György Ligeti: “He is creative and, because of this, totally overworked. Therefore, the very reason you wish to study his creative process is also the reason why he (unfortunately) does not have time to help you in this study. He would also like to add that he cannot answer your letter personally because he is trying desperately to finish a Violin Concerto which will be premiered in the Fall…”

The professor contacted 275 creative people. A third of them said “no.” Their reason was lack of time. A third said nothing. We can assume their reason for not even saying “no” was also lack of time and possibly lack of a secretary.

Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation. The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time. No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.

Saying “no” has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined. No guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations. The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know. We are not taught to say “no.” We are taught not to say “no.” “No” is rude. “No” is a rebuff, a rebuttal, a minor act of verbal violence. “No” is for drugs and strangers with candy.

Creators do not ask how much time something takes but how much creation it costs. This interview, this letter, this trip to the movies, this dinner with friends, this party, this last day of summer. How much less will I create unless I say “no?” A sketch? A stanza? A paragraph? An experiment? Twenty lines of code? The answer is always the same: “yes” makes less. We do not have enough time as it is. There are groceries to buy, gas tanks to fill, families to love and day jobs to do.

People who create know this. They know the world is all strangers with candy. They know how to say “no” and they know how to suffer the consequences. Charles Dickens, rejecting an invitation from a friend:

“‘It is only half an hour’–’It is only an afternoon’–’It is only an evening,’ people say to me over and over again; but they don’t know that it is impossible to command one’s self sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes–or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometime worry a whole day… Who ever is devoted to an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see you, but I can’t help it; I must go in my way whether or no.”

“No” makes us aloof, boring, impolite, unfriendly, selfish, anti-social, uncaring, lonely and an arsenal of other insults. But “no” is the button that keeps us on.

###

This post originally appeared on Medium.

I have mixed relationship with corporate technology given my first hand experience of it. It is true that technology is essential and it brings many benefits. It is also true that most corporate technology is complex and expensive to set-up and operate. Last, and perhaps most important is that it does not show up as being usable nor useful to the people on the front lines that have to use the technology. Put differently, from the user perspective the disadvantages outweigh the benefits. A great example of such a technology is enterprise CRM systems. Can Vizolution prove me wrong?

I met up with Marcio Rodrigues, Customer Propositions Director, at Vizolution to learn about this technology. Here is what I learned:

• Vizolution technology is being used by three of the top five UK banks and two of the top 5 insurance companies;
• According to customer surveys, customers (95% of them) like the experience that is generated through Vizolution;
• By using this technology financial services companies have increased sales conversions anywhere from 14% (mortgage conversion) to 93% (life insurance and critical illness); and
• The folks in compliance love Vizolution as it sends/receives files using 128 bit encryption, allows complex issues to be explained properly, and enables a consistent sales process.

Ok, the banks and insurance companies like it because it improves sales conversion and improves compliance. What I was interested in was the customer. Why do customers like it? What does Vizolution bring to the customer experience? This is what I learned:

• By being able to see what the sales agent is talking about customers feel more engaged in the process;
• The on screen visuals make it easier for the customer to understand the financial product being discussed; and
• The process of signing-up for a financial product is so much easier and quicker – there is no waiting for the paperwork to arrive by post, reviewing and signing it, waiting for approval.

By now you might be wondering what is Vizolution and what does it do. As I understand it, Vizolution:

• Is patent pending software that allows businesses to engage their customers in sales conversations through an instant, easy, screen sharing session via the internet;
• Is simple and quick – with just one click the sales agent can initiate a Vizolution session and it is just as easy for the customer; and
• bypasses the typical issues in installing screen sharing software locally and navigating around-through corporate firewalls.

My last question to Marcio was on costs: purchasing, installation, and use. What I can tell you is that the pricing showed up for me as being modest even cheap given the difference that this technology has made to sales conversion rates. At this point I could not help being a ‘strategic consultant’ and so I advised Marcio and his team to rethink the pricing!

If you want to learn more about Vizolution then I suggest that you contact Marcio. His email address is marcio.rodrigues@vizolution.co.uk

If you have used this software solution either as a manager, a sales agent or a customer then I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment.

Please note that I am taking a holiday over August and as such I do not expect to be writing any posts until September. I thank you for reading and hope you make August a great month for yourself and all the people you ‘touch’.

Disclosure: I am happy to write about Vizolution as it occurs to me that this is a simple useful technology. I am not being paid, in any way, for writing this post. Please note that I am not promoting Vizolution and with every technology I encourage you to do your research before you buy.

Each and every work week at lotus823 is kicked off by a roundtable staff meeting and of course plenty of Diet Coke to go around.

Once our co-founder David Hernandez is able to bring the buzz of the room down, he walks us through each of our current business development opportunities for the agency.

Instead of jumping to discussing brand strategy or services, David always gears the conversation into a discussion about our personal relationship with the potential client contacts and what they would like to accomplish for their team and for the brand.

The focus is on building a relationship, not rushing to close down a lead.

“People like doing business with people,” David reminded us at the meeting.

Every sales professional understands that listening to your customer and building genuine relationships is the key to business development. Despite carrying out traditional methods of communication to maintain these relationships, it can be tough to keep up.

That’s where your social media marketing team steps in.

Integrating your business development goals with your social media marketing team is crucial to maintaining your relationships both offline and online.

3 Steps to Social Listening in the Sales Process

1. Google Alerts – Marketing pros have these free search alerts set up to monitor their brand name, products, and client-facing personnel. Stay updated with the latest news releases, product announcements, and staff changes by setting up the free alerts for all your inside sales prospects. Bonus tip? Set them up for their top competitors as well and offer real-time strategy tips as soon as any competitive news is posted.
2. Influencer Outreach - Share the inside sales prospect list as well as the media outreach list with your social media marketing team. They should be following each of those brands and influencers on all of your company’s social media channels and engaging with their content. Shares, likes, and follows are social media currency, and it does not go unnoticed. Pay special attention to Twitter chats and LinkedIn groups.
3. Visitor Intelligence Software – Often, our marketing goals and sales goals aren’t always aligned. The marketing team is focused on big picture branding, while the sales team wants to drill down to the hot leads. Integrate the two through visitor intelligence software such as Optify. Both teams can receive daily emails with information on which inside sales reps’ prospects visited their website through a reverse IP lookup that offers full firmographic data plus that specific visitor’s history within your website. Take it a step further by putting certain prospects on a watch list so when they do come to your website you receive an alert.

These social media listening tips don’t just aid the sales team in online monitoring of their prospects, but it also integrates their process with the marketing team’s current goals and data usage. Syncing these two powerhouses not only creates a spark for your internal staff, but it also presents to the client a unified team that is paying attention from the start.

We call that integrated bliss.

Listen to Aaron on an ITunes Podcast, where Rod Sloane interviewed him in the “The Sales and Marketing Alignment Podcast”: “In Episode 67, Rod Sloane talks to Aaron Ross the author of Predictable Revenue. Aaron share how to triple your pipeline with the $100 million best practices of Salesforce.com”

Read more on ITunes: Listen to Rod Sloane Interview Aaron on the “The Sales and Marketing Alignment Podcast”…

The post ITunes: Listen to Rod Sloane Interview Aaron on the “The Sales and Marketing Alignment Podcast” appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

As a sales leader I used to have to hire sales people. I found out some interesting things over time and wanted to share my statistics in hopes that you who “listen to your gut only” could most likely improve results.

As a younger sales manager, I was wrong 75% of the time when hiring who I thought would be a stellar sales producer using my gut.

Over time, my stats got better – to 50%. It wasn’t just mine, but my co-leaders when we made a joint decision. We were WRONG half of the time, and we were all very successful as former sales reps ourselves. We knew the industry and the job requirements, and we went with our gut

Keep assessment tools in mind when hiring – they are getting easier and are less costly with quicker results and a very high rate of accuracy.

DO use your gut when you think there is a problem or an issue with your customer or with your prospect. My stats were great in that category. If you think something is wrong, ask your customer.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Lori Richardson is recognized as one of the “Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2013″ and one of “20 Women to Watch in Sales Lead Management for 2013″. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside and outbound sellers in technology and services companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog and the “Sales Ideas In A Minute” newsletter for sales strategies, tactics, and tips. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

The post Listen to Your Gut – Statistics in Sales appeared first on Score More Sales.

What makes a great salesperson?

I asked my dad, a career salesman who retired as VP of Sales for Lilly Software (acquired by Infor), a midmarket ERP company that grew exponentially in its time.

“Great salespeople take pride in listening for what the problem is,” he said. “If I’m a good listener, a good questioner, I can find that out and present a solution to your greatest problem and in the order of priorities you established.” That sounds more like a doctor than – well, the popular perception of salespeople.

Now that I look back on it, listening was at the heart of every great sale I’ve witnessed over the years. A few great sales tales stand out for me.

One is the Tale of the Surprise Visit, which happened at a manufacturing tradeshow in the UK. In walked an existing prospect who said “Guess what? The CFO decided last minute to attend the show. He’ll drop by your booth tomorrow to say ‘hi’.” This CFO had already requested an RFQ which was due the week after the show. But a senior salesperson and senior marketer ordered a pizza, sequestered themselves in a hotel room, wrapped up the RFQ at about 5 a.m. and surprised that CFO with it the next morning. Now, an RFQ is no simple matter of checking off boxes on a questionnaire, or copying paragraphs of descriptors from marketing materials. It’s a strenuous matching of problems with solutions such that it gets the attention of that CFO or whoever the nay-sayer is. “Long night,” I said, empathizing with that senior salesperson. He shook his head. For him it had been a great night.

The Tale of the IT Nay-Sayer also happened at a tradeshow. The sales team from a mid-range ERP package (either Epicor or RedPrairie, I can’t recall which) was toasting one of its people in a hotel bar for a “hell of a turnaround.” It seems a prospect had sent its IT director to screen ERP vendors – bad news. IT directors see ERP implementations as problems, not as solutions to problems; they’re an endless nightmare of downtime, consulting costs and pushed-to-the-limit IT labor, followed by maintenance and upgrade costs. Rather than surrender, the salesman realized he had two sales to make, the first solving IT’s challenges, the second solving the organizational challenges. It turns out this protective IT director had suffered through tough ERP implementations before, but had no experience just how much implementations had improved, between commercial off-the-shelf solutions (COTS), or software-as-a-service (SaaS). The IT director OK’d a demo with the COO for the next week. Not sure what happened, but I like to think that deal closed.

The Tale of the Overeager Sponsor is a strange one. The salesperson realized that his sponsor, the assistant COO of an apparel retailer, was too enthusiastic. The product was an RFID inventory system, those tags retailers use for security and inventory. Once he learned what RFID could do, the sponsor was bedazzled! Damn the costs – RFID could save the company millions in inventory-taking labor and losses to theft! It must be implemented system wide, at every store, ASAP! But he was not the decision maker, his boss (the COO) was. And, the COO was not interested in inventory taking or theft, but in logistics and supply chain tracking, something else RFID could do. This salesperson talked his sponsor down off of a cloud, and the two presented RFID as a logistical solution for warehousing and shipping. He made that sale. And he made an upsale nine months later, when the retailer implement RFID at two of its stores in a pilot program, before taking it company wide over three years.

The Tale of the Really Happy Place returns to my dad, who was at the time VP of sales at an enterprise software company. And it doesn’t end in a sale. The prospect was a Florida theme park that needed a warehouse system for its merchandise. (Not saying which theme park it was, just that it billed itself as a really happy place, possibly The Happiest Place on Earth.) Someone at this happy place told my dad, “You’ll fly down on August 5^th. That’s our high season and our hotels are booked, so you’ll stay in Georgia. And you’ll be at our offices at 9 a.m. on the 5^th,” to which my dad replied, “No I won’t.”

What was missing in this case, said my dad, was a sense of partnership. “If someone sells you a car or a washing machine, you buy it and you leave, there’s no partnership. But ERP is a long-standing relationship of maintenance and problem solving together. Someone who dictates what the salesman’s going to do isn’t interested in a partnership. And there was just no respect for sales and the salesperson’s time.” My dad filed the Happy Place under “life’s too short,” and made the next sale instead.

There are dozens of elements to a great sale (and a great salesperson). But listening is at the top of the list. And listening goes both ways.

Image Credit: http://www.aspirekc.com/images/c024a06384ad_1043B/not-listening_thumb.jpg

A little while ago, Amanda from Lattice Engines interviewed SaaStr on Sales and Marketing Alignment and related topics. While I hate the term “alignment” from my days as a F500 VP, if the term every were to be used in a useful way in a SaaS start-up, it’s the way your VP Sales and VP [...]

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

As most of this community knows, I spent the last week at a mogul ski camp. I spent 6 days on the snow looking to improve my bump skiing.

Here is one of my training videos. My coach asked me not to use my poles and hold my hands up higher. He noticed I was too noisy with my poles and held my hands too low. The boa on the other hand rocked!

It worked, despite not using my poles it was one of my most technically sound runs (in spite of two obvious separations).

After my first day at camp, I realized there was so much I didn’t know about bump skiing that I decided NOT to participate in the park training I had originally singed up for.  I wanted to focus solely on my bump skiing.

This is what my bump skiing looked like on day one.  I wasn’t bad a mogul skier.

By most accounts, I was a very good bump skier at the beginning of camp and could out ski most people in the bumps.  But, the truth is, after starting the camp and comparing myself to the best, I quickly realized I’m not that good and have a long way to go. My line wasn’t very direct. My hands were too loud. My timing was and is still way off.  I’m initiating the turn way to early. My absorption isn’t good. My feet aren’t under me enough, etc.  I could go on and on.  It was awesome and humbling to ski with and learn from the best in the world. I learned a ton! One of my coaches was Eddie Hicks, from the Canadian Ski Team.

This what Eddie looks like when he skis. It’s the 2011 World Cup comp in Canada.  He’s even better now.

It’s no different in sales.

I’m sure most of you think you’re pretty good. You’ve made quota most of your life. Your customers like you. You make it to Presidents Club almost every year etc. By most accounts, you are good, but you’re not that good and until you accept it, you’ll never get better.

If you could video sales people, like you can video bump skiing, I know I could find problems with your prospecting, with your timing, with your ability to challenge, set up the call, to teach the customer, to steer the sale, to educate the client, to prospect, to position the product or solution, to read the customer and more. Sales, like skiing, is a highly technical, complex pursuit. It can never be truly mastered. The best accept this and look to push the limits. They accept and embrace there is always more to learn. They surround themselves with the  best sales people, coaches and information. They embrace their flaws as a positive and see them as a way to grow and become better.

I knew I had a lot to learn when I chose to go to Momentum Ski Camp. What I didn’t know was how much I didn’t know and how bad I really was. And, that was the best part of the trip.

If you want to be better at sales. If you want to get to the next level accept you’re not that good, because you’re not.

Sales is a vital part of any organization -- if you’ve got a product or service, you’re going to need someone to sell it. Especially in the world of complex B2B sales, having a team of great salespeople is the difference between making or missing revenue goals. In my position, having a great sales team is the difference between sleeping or lying awake night.

Getting into Sales can be high risk -- but also high reward. There's lots of demand for great salespeople; in fact there is more demand for sales talent than is available to fulfill it these days. What's constantly debated at most companies (including HubSpot) is: "What is the difference between a regular salesperson and an exceptional one?" What philosophies, skills, values, and methodologies do the latter use to get ahead and stay ahead?

To find out, Niti Shah and I asked a few of our sales executives, managers, and representatives that same question. What we got was an outpouring of great advice addressing everything from how to talk to a prospect, to the value of leveraging internal resources, to the importance of being dedicated, to constantly improving skills and knowledge. They all reflect a common theme: at the end of the day, Sales should be about helping prospects. 

Here's how the HubSpot sales team puts our helpful sales philosophy into action. 

1) Form Real Relationships

Arjun Moorthy, VP Business Development & Channel Sales 

"Be genuinely curious about your prospect's professional and personal life so you can form real relationships. Don't ask questions just to figure out if you think they'll be likely to buy your product. Ask questions so that you can truly understand what your prospects are dealing with and what they'll need in order to be successful with your solution. If you are indeed able to help them with their goals and challenges, you'll have built the trust required for them to buy and stay with you."

Melanie Collins, Business Development Manager for Media, Publishing, and ISV Partner Program

"Treat a prospect as if he or she will be your best customer. By adopting this philosophy, you force yourself to give all prospects the same level of consultation during the sales process and provide them with a solution that truly matches their needs and goals. Happy prospects become happy customers who may refer business to you within or even outside their organization. Down the road, they are also more likely to take you with them when they move companies. By treating every prospect this way, you’ll not only find great clients, but also establish a wide network of trusted contacts over the years."

Corey Beale, Director of Sales 

"Create cross-departmental relationships. In the long term, a lot of salespeople miss out on strategically setting up internal relationships with people in other departments at their organization. It’s likely that there are dozens of people in your organization who can help you achieve your personal and professional goals. Sometimes their help comes in the form of hopping on a sales call with you if their expertise could be helpful to one of your prospects. Other times it can come in the form of being your mentor for career conversations that broach topics beyond Sales. If you can balance your long-term relationships with short-term quotas, you'll find that your success grows in both respects."

2) Truly Believe in What You’re Selling

John Dukes, Sales Manager

"People can tell when you are saying something you really believe in versus something you don’t. Be confident about what you’re selling and talk to a prospect as if you were sitting down with your best friend face to face. Emotional involvement of the prospect -- though only part of a successful, consultative sales process -- is still a very critical piece. If you aren’t excited and passionate, how can you expect your prospects to be? Numbers and facts alone will not inspire a prospect to act unless they are emotionally invested in changing. The best salespeople know their products and services can help a willing customer reach their goals. A great salesperson is truly fulfilled when they can accomplish that."

3) Be a Consultant, Not a Salesperson

Mark Stoddard, International Channel Sales Manager 

"It's much better for the prospect if the salesperson diagnoses a problem and works with their prospect to solve it. When you’re just starting out as a salesperson, you are often tempted to go into a call with prospects eager to pitch your services, and then ask for the sale. Most of the time, the pitch does not resonate for some reason that the salesperson never uncovers. The prospect then gets turned off because the salesperson seems only interested in helping themselves, not helping them. It's also not in the best interest of the salesperson as it causes a lot of "deal chasing." Deal chasing leads to stressful nights because you don't have any insight into why a prospect doesn't bother answering questions or returning calls. How do you avoid this? Instead, learn to think like a consultant and seek to really understand your prospects’ goals and challenges. Once you learn to understand and diagnose the problems your prospects are facing, you can problem-solve together. The value of your product will be much more apparent to the prospect, sometimes without even a need for a pitch."

Dan MacAdam, VAR Channel Account Manager 

"It's important to invest time at the beginning of the sales process to really understand the prospect’s business. Ask about the company’s objectives, goals, and challenges. The tendency is to want to speed through the "qualification" stages and get to what most people refer to as "selling" or presenting the solution. You need to resist that temptation. Sometimes, it makes sense to schedule an extra exploratory call if you don't feel like you fully understand the prospect’s needs and the factors affecting his or her decision-making process. If you rush, the things you missed will inevitably come back in the form of objections after you've presented an incomplete and less-than-customized solution."

4) Be a Good Listener

Danielle Herzberg, Senior Sales Manager

"Let the prospect do the talking. If you have trouble pressing 'mute' internally, then press the 'mute' button on the phone after asking your prospect a question. It will let them articulate their thoughts in full and can help you guide them toward their own conclusions. Initiate a dialogue with a prospect by asking him or her some open-ended questions that can't simply be answered with a single word. Ask questions like, 'Tell me more about what an ideal customer looks like for you,' and then follow up with 'Why's that?' Show them that you've listened to a long-winded answer by paraphrasing what they've said, and use this summary to transition into a relevant follow-up question. The trick is to ask questions on the call without making the conversation feel like an interrogation. Once you mastered that, you're well on your way to properly determining whether your product or service can truly help the individual you're speaking with."

John Sherer, Partner Strategist

"Asking questions and listening carefully are incredibly important to being a successful salesperson. One carefully worded question could help you uncover the needs and wants of a prospect way more effectively than what you think is a convincing pitch. Also, when listening, leave out affirmations like 'aha' and 'yes.' Affirmations like these distract and interrupt your prospect's train-of-thought and show that you're impatiently listening, just waiting for your turn to speak."

5) Be a Curious Skeptic

Brian Bresee, Channel Account Manager 

"Be honestly curious and helpful. Ask 'Why?' A lot of qualification calls sound like a one-sided interrogation instead of a two-way dialog. Questioning with curiosity allows you to challenge a prospect's assumptions without offending them."

Jeetu Mahtani, International Managing Director 

"To be most successful as a salesperson, you need to be skeptical about what your prospects are saying even if they're saying what seems like all of the right things. Prospects will often tell you what they think you want to hear just to get to the part of the sales process where you talk -- that's when the pressure is off of them. Most prospects don't want to reveal challenges or share the consequences of their challenges for a variety of reasons. They could be embarrassed, be afraid of repercussions of acknowledging issues, or may want to try to figure out the solution themselves. What do you do in these situations? Use storytelling and positioning statements to help prospects realize that you can help them with their challenges and that it's worth the risk to reveal their struggles with you. You need to learn how to uncover these things even when prospects don't want to share. Otherwise, you could be presenting the wrong solution or pitching unnecessarily, wasting everyone's time and destroying your credibility as a helpful salesperson in the process."

6) Leverage Your Resources

Alexandra Curtiss, Senior Inbound Marketing Specialist

"Everyone loves to help salespeople sell. Bring in leadership, technical resources, or someone in your prospect's role from within your own organization to make your prospect feel like a VIP. Prospects will love having your coworkers on the call -- they'll trust your coworkers to bring a different perspective with a lower perceived bias. You can also use executive connections as a carrot to be traded for a meeting with one of their executives if you are stuck at the influencer level. And, pulling in resources is a fantastic way to network with other people in your company. If you do your diligence and the necessary legwork to make sure the connection is a successful call, you will build your own credibility quickly with your prospect and within your company."

7) Be Open to Learning

Mark Roberge, SVP of Sales and Services

"Be coachable. Are you open to new methods and advice? Do you apply what you’ve learned to your sales pursuits? In interviews, I often role play a specific sales scenario with the candidate, ask them to self-assess, and then provide them with coaching. I then ask them to do it again. Many candidates fail this test because they aren't great at self-assessing shortfalls and absorbing the takeaways I give them. Some just revert back to their way of doing it and miss the whole point of the exercise. Based on my experience of hiring and managing hundreds of salespeople, this lack of coachability is one of the biggest reasons I see salespeople fail. But, when salespeople embrace learning, critical feedback, and coaching from other people, they make immense progress on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. We hire lots of salespeople who have never sold before, yet they become some of our best salespeople because they are so coachable. Ask yourself if you're coachable and how much of a difference it could make in your sales career if you were."

Andrew Quinn, Director of Training and Development

"Keep learning. If you can't name a sales book that you've read and how you've applied it in a previous job, you're doing a disservice to yourself, your prospects, and your profession. Actively seek out ways to learn from others outside of your day-to-day job: books, coaching, blogs, and peers can all be extremely valuable sources to learn from. Without a commitment to learning from others, you will not improve as a salesperson. Curious salespeople not only seek out learning from others, but they are also good at understanding and uncovering their prospects' needs during the sales process. Curiosity increases earning potential deal-by-deal and year-by-year."

Sales is a great way to jumpstart your career, increase your earning potential, and grow as a person. You have the chance to wear many different hats in a fast-paced, high-stakes, high-impact role. You have to be an expert on every facet of your product and company. You have to be a great listener, a consultant, a problem-solver, a challenger ... all in a friendly, helpful manner. My advice to you? Grab a mentor, leverage your resources, always seek to learn new things and improve your sales skills, and most importantly: always strive to help -- not sell -- your prospects. Do this and you'll go far. 

What do you think makes a successful salesperson? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.

Answering the question "What do you do?" seems like it would be easy, but it's more difficult than you think - especially if you haven't put much thought into how you would respond. Here's one common sales pitch example that will send prospects running for the hills.

The Rambler Sales Pitch

Much as I dearly love most Ramblers, they do drive me (and most everyone else) crazy. As you can imagine, Ramblers babble on-and-on, seemingly unaware of their affect on prospective buyers. Based on my observations, there are two types of Ramblers.

1. Floundering-For-My-Niche Ramblers

These Ramblers lack a clear target market and value proposition. Their response to the “What do you do?” question is usually lengthy and scatter-brained.

Example of their sales pitch: “I do a lot of things. I’ve done lots of sales training in the past. But lately lots of my customers have been asking me to do facilitation. I’m really good at helping companies launch new products.

"Sometimes I write their marketing copy; sometimes I do PR. It really doesn’t matter. I like doing both – and I'm good at both. I’m doing this neat project right now for a client – it’s mapping the various futures for their markets so I’m into strategy development too.”

Why it’s a problem: The floundering Ramblers share everything they can do – hoping that something they say piques your interest. They don’t want to close down any opportunity to generate revenue. Unfortunately, their sales pitch has just the opposite affect. People much prefer to work with specialists. Also, what these Ramblers don’t know is that they project a sense of desperation and ‘lost-ness’ that’s unattractive to most all buyers.

2. I-Love-My-Subject Ramblers

Ask these Ramblers what they do and you’ll wish you never had. Typically they’re highly involved with their products or processes –and really love them. When they start talking, they don’t want to stop.

Example of their sales pitch: “We do process re-engineering with the various department, divisions, business units and subsidiaries from organizations as well as the numerous contractors that provide products and services that go into the development of your own branded and unbranded products. We initially start by doing a comprehensive assessment of the multiple groups involved in the process, covering questions such as …”

Why it’s a problem: Boring! While these Ramblers are certainly specialists, they say so much that you don’t know what’s important or relevant in their sales pitch. And the last thing you want to do is ask them another question because they may bore you to tears.

How do you answer when someone asks you what you do? Are you rambling on with out purpose, or do you have a clear and concise plan on what to say? Take the time to create your best sales pitch - it will open the door to many more sales opportunities.

Download my Attracting More Customers ebook to discover how to tell prospects what you do in a compelling manner instead of driving them away.

New sales reps

How can a new salesperson gain credibility? When we pose this question to sales reps and sales managers, the responses we hear share a common underlying message – get on the customer’s side of the table.

Now this idea is expressed in a variety of forms such as: understand the customer needs, do what you say you are going to do, don’t pretend, or don’t over promise and under deliver. However, the underlying lesson is you must get on their side of the table and convince the customer you know and care about them and can help them go where they want to go.

If you are a brand new sales rep that is a herculean challenge. After all, you just arrived – you don’t know the customers, you have less than a complete understanding of the products, and you are not accomplished in the fundamental skills of selling.

But all isn’t lost on the credibility front: there are two sources of credibility – personal credibility and company credibility.

Personal credibility is limited at first and takes time to build. The good news is new sales reps don’t need to make a big impression immediately. Rather, new sales reps should create a plan that allows them to build their personal credibility over time, avoid the big upfront mistake, and leverage the credibility of the company.

When it comes to avoiding the big mistake and leveraging company credibility, a couple of points to highlight are:

• Find every human and material resource you can to help you learn about the customers and your products and skillfully leverage them.

• Find someone who knows how to sell and get them to provide mentoring.

• Find out about the company’s past successes and translate them into stories you can use – until you develop your own stories.

• Get a list of the smartest blogs and books on selling and read – you can’t get smart without reading and fortunately today there is a lot of great stuff to read.

Selling is a terrific profession. Unfortunately too many salespeople are lost because at first they don’t succeed. This credibility issue is one of the culprits – perhaps it need not be.

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.

Are you getting the most out of your sales efforts? Get out your calculators--here's a formula to help you figure it out.

I'm a fan of Tim Ferriss' "The 4-Hour Workweek" and other books about hacking life. That's what Tim calls it, hacking. The term refers to getting a higher yield of outcome for your time invested. We all want more for less and in the world of sales we want more success for fewer hours.

The first step in figuring out how to do this is by breaking down each outcome into its contributing components. I refer to this as "optimizing the power curve." Essentially, this is just a way of figuring out which of your activities has the most impact in creating your ideal outcome.

I have a tool that you can download for free that gives you a fill-in-the-blank approach to this. You can download it here.

Here's how it works:

Step 1--Separate your revenue projections into three categories:

• Current book of sales
• Average new accounts you land
• Big sales

For each one, determine what the average amount of revenue an individual account will generate for you in each of the three categories.

Step 2--Estimate how many accounts you have--or will have--for each of those three categories.

This is an important step, because it not only checks the revenue coming into your company, but it also quantifies the amount of time going out to land and support each of those accounts.

Step 3--Calculate the total value for each of the three categories of revenue. It should be as easy as multiplying the number of customers by the estimated average revenue. You can cheat on your current book of sales by looking at the history of their purchases and your projections. The others will need to be calculated.

Step 4--(More math...) Calculate the percentage of sales revenue each category represents. It's not trigonometry. Just add the revenues of the categories from Step 3 to get your total. Then divide each of the categories individually by that total to determine the percentage of sales each category represents. Hint: If you add the three percentages and it equals 100%, chances are you did it right.

Step 5--Gut check. Estimate how much time you are CURRENTLY spending on each of the three categories of revenue.

If you want a better yield, you have to determine if you have the right inputs aimed at the highest-yield outputs. In words, are you spending the right amount of time in the right categories of revenue? If your revenue percentages and your time percentages match up, you are on the right track.

Do the worksheet that I provide for download, here, and see how you match up. Are you maximizing the value of your time or are there some things you need to revisit to better optimize your power curve?

When the going gets tough, the marketing budget gets going; so when times are hard, marketers everywhere pull on their thinking caps and ask one question: how can I generate more leads with less budget?

Since the rise of the digital age it’s become much easier to make more out of a budget better off kept in a jam jar under your bed. So instead of running for the hills, consider one of these top penny-pinching tips that are sure to give your online marketing a boost.

Tip 1: Make the Most out of Landing Pages

Landing pages; the woefully misunderstood online portal to lead generation. So, what are they? They are focused, customised digital sales pitches, designed to transform your website visitor into a business lead. A good landing page targets a specific audience and allows you to capture a visitor’s information through a lead-capture form.

And when it comes to landing pages, it’s all about more, more, more!

• Businesses with 31 to 40 landing pages get 7 times more leads than those with only 1 to 5 landing pages

• Those with over 40 landing pages get 12 times more leads than those with only 1 to 5 landing pages

• 44% of clicks for B2B companies are directed to the business’ homepage, not a special landing page

Tip 2: Crack Social Media Marketing

Social media is big, really, really big. In fact, it’s been predicted that by 2016, Facebook may be the largest country on Earth. With an additional 130,000 people signing up for a Twitter account each day, it’s easy to see why businesses are tackling social media head-on. To get started, create profiles on the places where your prospects hang-out and start talking.

• The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55–64 year age bracket

• Every second 2 new members join LinkedIn

• 93% of marketers use social media for business

• Almost half of online customers expect brands to provide customer service on Facebook, but only 23% provide it

• Social Networks Account for 23% of time spent online

Tip 3: Content Rules the Waves

Content: the marketing buzzword of the past two years. Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing and Lifecycle Marketing have done away with the older, push marketing techniques and in their place left pull marketing.

Pull marketing is a technique that uses intelligent, high quality content to encourage people to visit and seek out your website and products, rather than showering them with thrice daily emails and a daily telephone call to boot.

To really crack online lead generation, you need to distribute lots of content, and not just any old content. Only high quality, fresh and relevant content will do. This is where blogging really comes into its own.

• 27,000,000 pieces of content are shared each day

• 54% of brand don’t have an on-site dedicated content director

• Each month, 329 million people read blog content

• Content from reputable sources is most shared

• Clicks from shared content are 5 x more likely to result in a purchase

Tip 4: Blogging

From fashion forward teens, to amaterur chefs and even Gwyneth Paltrow, blogging and bloggers are taking over the digital landscape, and if you haven’t started yet, start now!

For good old fashioned B2B lead generation, blogging’s become the reliable wingman that will stand by your side come rain or shine.

• Companies that blog have 434% more indexed pages

• Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links

• 81% of U.S. online consumers trust information and advice from blogs

• B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not

• 61% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog

• Once you write 21-54 blog posts, blog traffic generation increases by up to 30%

So is it worth it?

Simply put, yes. Diving into the deep end of social media marketing takes time and a little thought, but that’s it. For new and established businesses the digital landscape opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

By developing and implementing a smart and flexible social media strategy will transform your business and prove that social networks can deliver lead generation.

For a more detailed look at how you can generate more leads for less, read our How to Generate Leads from Social Media eGuide.

If your sales organization is like most, you’re required to use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to keep track of sales activity and project revenue. But if you’re a sales leader, you need to ask yourself, “is our investment in CRM helping us hit our numbers?”

According to recent research from Corporate Visions, although 87% of B2B sales and marketers polled said they were required to use a CRM system, 79% agreed that they simply “check the boxes” and believe those systems don’t provide them with useful assistance for closing business.

All this is taking place in an environment in which:

89% agreed that price pressure from buyers has increased in recent years, and

46% feel that when they bring in executives to help close important deals, they’ve already given away too much – leaving their company with lower profitability.

Want to know more? Find the research highlights here.

If your purpose for exhibiting at a trade show is, “Well, we can’t NOT be there – our absence would raise questions,” we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeves that will help you turn a passive presence into a lead-generating event.

Trade shows 20 years ago were a big deal and a significant part of a brand’s marketing plan; today, they suffer from low turnout and lack of real lead-generation power. In 2012, the Chicago Tribune reported that McCormick Place, one of the country’s largest convention centers, saw total trade show attendance down nearly 10% from the prior year, and overall has been trending down since 2009.

But they’re here to stay, probably, so the question isn’t, “Should we go?” but “How can we make it work harder to generate leads?”

Most attendees’ memories of trade shows are aisle after aisle of small groups of bored salespeople pacing around awkwardly waiting for someone – anyone – to come to their booth. I’m exaggerating to make a point, but this example isn’t too far from the reality. But, what more can you do than stand and wait? You can turn your interactions and your handouts into opportunities to direct people to that critical “next step.”

How To Get Trade Show Attendees To Take The Next Step

1. In addition to “increasing leads and sales,” your next show should include the goal of increasing traffic to your website. This goal reflects how people make purchase decisions today (70% of B2B purchases start with Internet research on companies, products and vendors) and how leads are generated – according to MarketingProfs, websites are the leading B2B method for generating leads.

Those visiting your website have the chance to learn more about what you offer, why you’re different, your products’ features and benefits, and much more. But don’t just send them to your home page; define where on your website you want them to go. For example:

• to a video that demonstrates your product’s performance and durability
• to a webinar that outlines the benefits of your process
• to a downloadable presentation that discusses the drawbacks of a more widely accepted process
• to a downloadable tip sheet that provides pointers to help readers evaluate cost-in-use

But don’t send them to that piece of content just yet; send them first to a landing page where, in exchange for that valuable piece of content, they’ll give you their contact and other relevant information.

2. Use your landing page to gather and qualify leads. Customize that landing page just for attendees to give you a clear picture of how well your trade show efforts performed, with form fields that relate to their visit to your booth. For example, you could include questions that tell you how ready the prospect is to buy and what hurdles you may have to overcome, like, “When do you anticipate replacing your system?” “What is your role in the purchase decision?” and “What brand are you currently using?” Ask whatever other questions help you understand their situation and challenges, and that guide your efforts to help solve them.

3. “Mobilize” your booth and collateral. Our world is becoming increasingly paperless, yet people still like to walk out of a booth with something in hand to remind them who you are and what you do. But that piece of collateral doesn’t have to be passive. Make it simple for visitors to go right from that handout to your website by including a QR code that can be read with a smart phone, then takes visitors to the landing page you want them to visit. With digital printing, it’s easy to print only as many brochures as you’ll need, so there’s no waste involved in making that QR code audience-specific and unique to the show.

Signage, brochures, name tags, tote bags, and presentations should all include the code. Even if the visitor doesn’t read the landing page immediately, it’s stored in his or her phone (within the browser history) to quickly access later.

QR codes are simple to create using any number of programs available free on the Internet. A few sources are:

• goqr.me
• qrstuff.com
• visualead.com

QR codes can even be printed on your giveaways: coffee mugs, hats, t-shirts – even chocolates! The code can also be turned into a rubber stamp that you can apply anywhere (on their hands?). QR codes can be linked to not just your website or landing page, but to your LinkedIn Company Page, a Dropbox file, or Skype call, too!

If you choose not to incorporate a QR code, make certain the URL of your landing page is displayed prominently and across all your materials (and truncate that URL using a URL shortener, like bit.ly or tinyurl. Even if you do feature QR codes, you’ll want to identify the URL in case some visitors don’t have QR code readers installed on their phones. (We ran a trade show promotion for a client a few years back that relied on QR code readers and, to ensure a high level of participation, we helped any interested visitors download free readers).

Tell visitors what you’d like them to do. Over and over again. Make sure your goal is clear in your messaging throughout your booth, in your conversations, and on all the materials you hand out. Getting people to learn more by visiting your website is your call to action – shout it loud and proud!

Takeaway

While trade shows are a traditional “push” marketing tactic that some say is a costly dinosaur, they’re still a part of most companies’ marketing efforts – and can be made more effective with the use of non-traditional tactics. Make increasing traffic to your website landing pages a goal, implement simple ways for visitors to get there. With great content waiting for them, you’ll see leads from the tradeshow converting and turning into customers.

Email marketing should be a part of your online marketing efforts, too. Once you get attendees’ contact information, use their email to send follow-up offers of content related to the content they already showed interest in. And, to make your email marketing even more effective, check out our free download below! Or, use your smartphone’s QR reader to snap the QR code at the top of this post!

Sales Training Article: Are You a Sales Mentor?

By John Holland, Chief Content Officer, CustomerCentric Selling® - The Sales Training Company

Like many salespeople, I was fortunate to have a mentor at the start of my sales career began. It was not my manager, someone that "managed" to the numbers by dictating how many calls should be made, how many demos should be given, how many proposals should be generated and ultimately that revenue meet or exceed quota. Jeff was great with what and how much to do. Notable by its absence was any coherent suggestions about how to do it.

Dick McManus had been selling for 30+ years. His long track record with the company had earned him the right to have a staff job as he waited for retirement. Even though I met him late in the fourth quarter of his sales career, he was the best salesperson I ever met. Dick somehow decided to take me under his wing, make calls with me and strategize on opportunities. He was the single largest reason for my early successes in selling.

A large part of my motivation in accepting a sales management position was a feeling that I should "pay forward" the tremendous help Dick provided me. In hindsight, I took a similar tact in making calls with my direct reports, strategizing and attempting to instill knowledge and skills that were more intuitive than tightly defined.

It is now remarkable to realize how much more efficient it can be if there is an underlying process to define a seller's role, a common set of skills, positioning of offerings to achieve business goals of specific job titles and measurable outcomes. All of this amounts to being able to "sell on purpose" vs. sell intuitively.

In looking at the changing landscape of how buyers can leverage the Internet and social networking to minimize a seller's influence on buying decisions, it would appear companies should be grappling with how to change selling approaches to synch up with the way buyers want to buy. Most everyone agrees that buying is changing ("what"). Few organizations have a coherent plan ("how") to allow sellers to align with the new behaviors of buyers.

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.

It does not reflect the way your customer buys. They are experiencing a different buyer.

You are winning deals but not as fast as years prior. Deal size is not growing as expected. As a sales leader, you know the importance of field execution. A big part of execution is how the team uses the sales process. The process is adopted, but the results are not evident.   

You are asking yourself, “Is Our Sales Process Good Enough?”

This post will help you answer this question.

Your Challenge

During the research for this VP of Sales event, over 5000 sales leaders shared their biggest obstacles.

VPs told us Sales Process execution has surfaced as a bigger execution gap than years past.

The sales force is trying harder to execute and not seeing a return. While execution matters, if you have a dated process, you will not generate a result. Add to that, the impact on your reps.  'A' players stop running a process just to check the box. It needs to reflect reality and help them make the number in less time.

Your Team’s Challenge

You are running one sales process. Yet, you sell multiple products to multiple buyers. These buyers have become more advanced. They have different buying processes. They view their problems in a different way. So it seems like common sense that you would deploy a different sales process. So why don’t you? There are many reasons:

• You have had a hard enough time getting the current process to be executed.
• Your sales ops team can’t be expected to have multiple sales processes in the CRM.
• Training reps on more than one process is time consuming and hard.

What options do you have?

1. Bury your head in the sand and keep running a play that doesn’t work.
2. Embrace the fact buyers have changed. You need to respond with a modern sales process.

If you are willing to explore #2, keep reading.

Your Buyer

VP of Sales that have fixed this problem have realized the shift that has happened. They have recognized they now sell to an informed buyer.  This informed buyer is equipped with information and tools at their fingertips.  The informed buyer is evolving rapidly. If you don’t constantly update your sales process, there will always be friction with the buyer. As a result, deals stall, shrink or fall out of the pipeline. These are deals you should be winning.

Your Solution--Modernized Sales Process

The sales leaders that have answered the question “Is our Sales Process good enough” have gone to an Agile Sales Process. Agile is an approach borrowed from software development. Imagine rolling out a new product and never testing it. Agile is built on the same philosophy. It is focused on speed and flexibility. The focus is on the transfer of knowledge and adapting to a rapidly changing buyer environment. You must build your sales process for change not a static moment in time. It is focused on customers and built by the team. Here is how:

1. Buying Process Map - You have to understand how your customer makes a purchase decision.  It is customized to the market segment, product and buying persona. Your goal is to come up with a working prototype.
2. Field Testing - The prototype is tested in the field by sales people. The output of testing is proof of what works and feedback on what doesn’t. 
3. Leadership Validation and Testing - The prototype is presented to sales leaders who test it and provide feedback. Front-Line Sales leaders are the key to adoption. They need to contribute to the process so ownership begins to transfer to them.  .
4. General Release - You are now ready to release it to the field. Adoption rates will be high because members of the sales force have proof it works. Leadership has also blessed it.
5. Adoption - You now run your adoption plan. This involves activities like big deal reviews and rep led training. You would use and weekly win/loss reviews via customer interviews. Monthly sessions to discuss changes in key buyer persona behavior is a norm. In doing so, you are constantly updating and modifying the process to respond to market changes.

The sales team now views sales process as a system that is always changing. They are expecting modifications from V1 to V2 to V3 as the buyer changes. They become more nimble and more adaptive to change.

What Should You Do Now

Download the Is my Sales Process Good Enough Assessment. You will receive 3 benefits.

1. Identify your sales process gaps.
2. Prioritize which gaps will have the largest  impact in making the number.
3. Steps to modernize your sales process and improve results next quarter.

Results You Can Expect

To see before and after results from companies who implemented an Agile Sales Process, register for this event: How To Make Your Number in 2014: A Sales Strategy You Can Execute. When you do, you will receive access to the Is My Sales Process Good Enough Assessment tool to evaluate how good your sales process is.

1. Results in half the time.
2. Your success rate doubles due to early rep utilization.
3. You drive adoption via field testing, leadership validation and a train the trainer approach.
4. You win more head to head deals. The competitors using yesterday's sales process cannot compete.

Give your sales force an adaptive sales process aligned to the buyer.

Author: Matt Sharrers

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Currently, I am working with two clients at AG Salesworks. I’ve been working with one client since February, and with the other client for only about two weeks. The transition from one client to another has to be smooth, and the focus on both clients needs to remain equal. It can be a stressful process to learn a new product and new style of communicating with sales reps and marketing contacts, but if you are organized and plan your days, then the process of ramping up will be easy.

1. Create a sales card that has all the relevant information into one place. This includes the basic company fast facts, competitors, key qualifying questions, and a short script. The sales card is a good tool that helps you keep information handy on the first few dials for a new client. Spending some time making this card and then reviewing with either your manager or others working with your client can help you gain the knowledge necessary to be successful.
2. Listen in on calls or roleplay. If the company already has a client within the business, sit in on his or her calls to hear the best practices for selling that particular product or service. However, if it’s a brand new client, you won’t have that option. Instead, you can do role plays with the sales reps and marketing contacts to decide the best approach. Sometimes role plays can be uncomfortable, but they are worthwhile to help create a flow of conversation.
3. Learn to balance your time. If you are ramping on a new project while still working with another, you need to balance time well. Having tasks created for the current project will make the day more organized and you’ll have more time to do some research for your sales card and script. The last thing you want is to fall behind with activities and leads for a client due to a new project coming on board.
4. Learn the outside sales reps’ processes. Once you’re ramped up on a new client, this can take some time. All companies and reps work differently, whether by means of communication, scripts or introductory calls. For one client, I use an IM tool to keep in touch throughout the day. For my other client, we speak on our weekly client calls and one-off emails. It is a good idea to ask what the best way to get in touch will be in case there are questions from prospects or even if you need to connect for a few minutes and discuss a lead. As sales reps, it is our job to make sure our clients are receiving qualified leads, and part of that process is communicating with them to learn what information they expect from you. I like being able to IM one client and get a response immediately, but I do not mind emailing or speaking on the phone either. You have to make it easy to connect so your client feels comfortable with you making dials on their behalf.

What are some tips you have for ramping up new projects and communicating with reps?

Recently, it seems that everywhere I look I come across more and more instances of customer service, and it makes me realize how crucial customer experience is when it comes to retaining business. Unfortunately, customer success sometimes gets overlooked because time seems better spent on the obvious – running the operational day-to-day tasks of an organization. Just recently I took on the responsibility of customer success at our organization, and I have been thinking a lot about what the key components are to driving customer care for inside sales.

As I started thinking about a strategy for better customer service at our organization, I asked myself, Where do I even start? I went back to basics and thought about the key characteristics of successes I have seen in my experiences, both at my organization and as a customer. I’m fairly new to this, so I am not claiming to be the expert; however, I feel that once you identify the key components that are crucial to making your customers happy, you can create a business plan and strategy to roll out. Here’s what I feel are the key elements when it comes to providing the best customer service:

1. Be Consistent. I remember attending an Oz Principle workshop that was all about creating consistent experiences for employees, because their experiences are what shape their beliefs and happiness at their organization. The same theory goes for experiences with customers. Customers want to know they are going to receive a certain level of service every time, throughout all stages of their engagement with you and your company. Once they see consistency, they will not only return as a customer, but they will refer others as well.
2. Be Reliable. Customers need to know they can count on you and that you won’t let anything slip through the cracks. If they email with a request, they should receive a response as soon as possible. Oftentimes, even if I receive a request that I know will take some time to complete, I still send a note back to customers letting them know I have received their request and will get back to them by the end of day or the end of week, just so they know I am not neglecting their email. The key here is to follow through with your promises. I think of support at Salesforce.com when I think of being reliable. Whenever a case is opened, customers receive an email that says when to expect a response, which is usually within two days. They have never let me down, and I can always rely on them to get back in touch with me.
3. Be Proactive. It’s easy to handle challenges that arise with clients as they come up. However, there is something to be said when you are able to pinpoint any problems or issues well before they come to a head. The best way to be attentive to these needs is to be proactive. Whether you have a representative or even an executive from your company, check in with customers over the phone or through a survey. Odds are, you will be able to nip any issues in the bud before the customer decides to go elsewhere. I experienced an example of this over the weekend when I attended a wedding in West Virginia. Upon checking into the hotel, I was given a customer experience survey to complete before I left. I also had three members of the staff ask me about my experience before I left, and I was there for less than 24 hours. My stay was excellent, but it was probably due to the hotel’s ability to reach out to customers on an ongoing basis to fix any issues. While I probably wouldn’t choose to go to West Virginia for vacation, I am definitely considering going back to the resort based on my experience.

Customer success is key to business success, and that connection is very interesting to me. If you’ve read my blogs before, you may know I write some blog posts because a topic is new to me and I would like to learn more! In this case, I want to hear your feedback when it comes to launching a customer service strategy. What has worked? What hasn’t? What recommendations can you share?

Thanks to our friends over at Work.com for helping us with this infographic.

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The data in this infographic is based largely on the Dealmaker Index Global Sales Benchmark Study.