Google, Apple and IBM are all able to hire the savviest and smartest people on the planet. But lately, the tech giants have decided a four-year university degree is no longer the best indicator of a candidate’s aptitude. In fact, 15 of North America’s top technology companies don’t require potential employees to have a post-secondary education, according to research by Glassdoor, an employment website. The trend is evident in Canada as well, with top employers like Shopify, an e-commerce platform, identifying talent in new and novel ways.

Companies now recognize that a degree doesn’t always signal talent. Often the most unique, creative, outside-the-box thinkers skip the conventional route meaning educational requirements remove some of the best candidates from the talent pool.  “When we started, a lot of companies were adamant that their hires needed degrees,” says Jeremy Shaki, CEO of Lighthouse Labs, which runs coding bootcamps. But in an industry with rapid growth, companies are now willing to consider these students with unconventional backgrounds. Shaki’s company has produced over 1,000 developers in the past five years. Thirty percent of students had no zero coding experience.  “They started to come back for more and more of these people,” explains Shaki.

Shaki has noticed educational requirements being phased out by many of the companies hiring his grads including Slack, Telus, MetaLab, Freshworks, TouchBistro, Perficient and Shopify.

MORE: What Netflix’s corporate culture can teach us about hiring—and firing

At Shopify, job postings have never demanded a university or college degree. But the company is even more open minded.  “We don’t require any background or specific amount of experience in any specific field,” says Anna Lambert, director of talent acquisition. Instead, we want someone who can make a impact.” In seven years and nearly 3,000 hires, Lambert’s watched a noticeable shift in the search for top talent. “There’s less focus on experience and more on your ability to do the job,” she says.

Lambert’s recruitment team includes someone who used to be a welder. “Her background is very different, but somehow totally applicable.” So how exactly can companies looking for new and different talent get people—like welders—to apply for seemingly unrelated gigs? Firstly, recruiters should brainstorm a list of required skills than a checklist of credentials. Too many people will see a call for specific experience and decided they aren’t qualified. Instead, try to make all people feel welcome. “A more inclusive job posting will show that you know experience comes in all forms—and you want that,” says Lambert.

Meanwhile, job seekers should recognize their own experience—whatever it may be—is valued and valuable. “Just because you don’t have a specific skill set, maybe you have something else that makes you great,” says Lambert. Don’t mention the degrees or experience you don’t have. “Focus on demonstrating the impact that you’ve had wherever you’ve have it,” she says. Then double down on the potential that your unique talents and experience will bring to a company that’s happy to have you.

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MORE ABOUT JOBS:

• Dear Workish: How do I set up a start-up with a good friend?
• 3 ways to catapult to the top and become CEO
• How to escape the job application black hole
• No, you can’t have a favourite spot—and other open-office rules

The post Want a job in Canadian tech? Don’t worry about that university degree appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Emerging-market stresses have been building since at least 2013. Investors may have forgotten the effect of the “taper tantrum” on the so-called Fragile Five – Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey and South Africa – a term coined by Morgan Stanley to describe their vulnerability to capital outflows. Monetary accommodation, lower current-account deficits and growth disguised the underlying challenges, attracting more capital to those markets.

The textbook recipe for an emerging-market crisis requires a large dose of debt and an associated domestic credit bubble, including misallocation of capital into uneconomic trophy projects or financial speculation. Then add: a weak banking sector, budget deficits, current-account gaps, substantial short-term foreign-currency debt and inadequate forex reserves. Season with narrowly based industrial structures, reliance on commodity exports, institutional weaknesses, corruption and poor political and economic leadership.

Based on these criteria, the number of emerging markets at risk extends well beyond Turkey and Argentina. Like Tolstoy’s families, each nation has different sources of unhappiness.

Total emerging-market borrowing increased from US$21 trillion (or 145 per cent of GDP) in 2007 to US$63 trillion (210 per cent of GDP) in 2017. Borrowings by non-financial corporations and households have jumped. Since 2007, the foreign-currency debt – in dollars, euros and yen – of these countries doubled to around US$9 trillion. China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa, Mexico, Chile, Brazil and some Eastern European countries have foreign-currency debt between 20 per cent and 50 per cent of GDP.

In all, EM borrowers need to repay or refinance around US$1.5 trillion in debt in 2019 and again in 2020. Many are not earning enough to meet these commitments.

Turkey and Argentina have twin deficits (combined budget and current-account gaps as a percentage of GDP) of 8.7 per cent and 10.4 per cent, respectively, that require financing. Pakistan has a twin deficit well above 10 per cent. Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Ukraine are at or above 5 per cent on that basis. In India, if state governments are included the number approaches double figures. Those gauges are rising in China, Malaysia, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Poland.

Then look at reserve coverage – foreign-exchange holdings divided by 12-month funding needs for the current account, short-term debt maturities and amortization of long-term debt – which measures the capacity to meet immediate foreign-currency obligations. Turkey and Argentina score 0.4 and 0.6 respectively, meaning they can’t cover their needs without new borrowings. Pakistan, Ecuador, Poland, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Africa have reserve coverage of less than 1. Chile, Hungary, Colombia, Mexico and India have coverage of less than 2. Brazil and China come in at 2.5 and 3.1 times, respectively.

Even where reserve coverage appears adequate, caution is warranted. Long-term debt becomes short term with the passage of time or an acceleration event. Forex holdings may not be readily accessible. Much of China’s US$3 trillion of reserves is committed to the Belt and Road infrastructure initiative. The ability to turn U.S. Treasury bonds and other foreign assets into cash is limited by liquidity, price and currency effects. Reserve positions are notoriously opaque: In 1997, the Bank of Thailand was found to have grossly overstated available currency holdings.

China and India face well-documented difficulties in their financial systems. The true level of Chinese non-performing loans may be several times the official 1.75 per cent. India’s NPL ratio is around 10 per cent of all loans.

Events in Turkey and Argentina show how these weaknesses become exposed. Global liquidity tightening, led by the U.S. Federal Reserve increasing rates and unwinding its bond purchases, reduces capital inflows and increases the cost of borrowing. Trade tensions, sanctions, the breakdown of the global institutional structure and rising geopolitical risks exacerbate those stresses.

Weaknesses in the real economy and the financial system feed each other in a vicious cycle. Capital withdrawals undermine currencies, driving down prices of assets such as bonds, stocks and property. The reduced availability of finance and higher funding costs add to pressure on over-extended borrowers, triggering banking problems that feed back into the economy. Credit rating and investment downgrades extend the cycle.

Policy responses can make things worse. Higher interest rates to prop up currencies (60 per cent in Argentina) may be ineffective. They reduce growth and aggravate the debt burden. Weaker currencies import inflation. Supporting the financial system and the economy pressures government finances. IMF remedies, which aren’t always effective, impose financial and human costs that many nations find unacceptable, prompting political and social breakdown. And the IMF’s capacity to assist may be constrained by concurrent crises.

Investors are assuming that critical vulnerabilities have been addressed.

Important changes made after the 1997 Asian crisis created different risks, however. Floating exchange rates and unrestricted foreign-exchange movement increase currency volatility and allow capital flight. While local-currency debt has increased, unhedged foreign-currency debt remains significant.

Higher returns on local-currency debt attracted foreign investors to India, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and Eastern Europe. But weakening currencies may drive them to exit, hurting all assets.

Turkey and Argentina may be special cases. But given the fundamental problems, other emerging markets are likely to come under pressure. As Herbert Stein’s 1976 law states: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Satyajit Das is a former banker whose latest book is “A Banquet of Consequences.” He is also the author of “Extreme Money” and “Traders, Guns & Money.”

Bloomberg.com

Chances are, you or someone you know has two or three or more ride-share, car-share, or bike-share services apps on their smartphone. The app-driven shared mobility services we regularly use today started popping up less than 10 years ago, and now it's hard to imagine life without them. Even taxi services are collaborating with ride-hailing apps.

But it might not always be like this.

We’ve been studying and analyzing personal transportation for a very long time and see the potential roadblocks ahead that may impact the livelihood of the shared mobility services we have all come to rely on.

History shows economics alone could swallow the industry

Ride-sharing isn’t new. Starting in the early 1900s, for a fee, entrepreneurial drivers would offer rides, an informal, unregulated arrangement with low overhead and decent profit. But regulatory actions imposed increased liability costs, which stopped operations for 90% of drivers in just three years.

Over the next century, shared mobility businesses were reinvigorated whenever there was a socio-economic downturn. Unfortunately, with every upswing, there was a movement to supersede it, such as the decline of gas prices in the 80s and 90s that encouraged car ownership rather than carpooling.

Predicting economic changes like these can help shared-mobility companies prepare for future consumer, driver, and local government actions and reactions that will impact the whole transportation industry.

Millennials' habits are evolving

Millennials are currently the biggest, albeit not the only, rideshare market. They are more likely to live in the city, have debt, not own a car, and be open to trying innovative technologies. Yet as these 20- to 30-somethings mature, many will earn more income, move to suburban areas that have free parking and cheaper insurance rates, and require more convenient transportation for their young families.

And although millennials are buzzworthy now, people of all ages are changing how they get from place to place. Analyzing life patterns of different generations will help shared mobility companies stay one step ahead in providing value when and where it's needed most.

Ride share companies are not taking advantage of analytics fast enough

Shared mobility companies are currently focused on gaining market share and creating a "wow" experience for consumers, which makes perfect sense. But these are not the only things that will garner success. Other significant challenges must be addressed to sustain long-term success, such as:

• How can we convince insurance companies to change their models, so that risk is shared appropriately between driver, consumer, and shared mobility company?
• How do we create a more efficient end-to-end transportation ecosystem that includes walking, riding, public transportation, and shared mobility?
• How can we deliver services to less dense or lower income areas while remaining profitable?
• How should insurance be set up for rideshare drivers who are off-duty or don’t have a passenger?

These are just a few of the challenges the future of success of shared mobility faces. The irony is, the data, technological analytics, and AI tools that help solve them exist, yet these resources have been greatly underutilized by shared mobility companies.

Changing the course of shared mobility

Starting and running a shared mobility company is an expensive endeavor, and apparently not yet a lucrative one. Real-world data and analytics can help shared mobility companies anticipate customer needs and behaviors, secure more sophisticated and targeted insurance plans that appropriately share risk and reduce costs, and create a more efficient transportation system to decrease congestion and pollution, while providing value where it's needed most.

Find out how Arity can uncover the value that data can bring to your company.

This post is sponsored by Arity. 

Join the conversation about this story »

The time you get with your clients and prospects is a gift. You dare not waste it. That means you need to plan your sales call, making the most of your time--and creating the greatest value possible for the contacts with whom you are meeting. Here is little framework you can use to do good work and move things forward. The Only Sales Guide You'll Ever Need The Lost Art of Closing Eat Their Lunch The Outcomes Planner  Sales Accelerator

What if you could optimize the time your sales reps spend personalizing sales emails? Based on customer feedback, we decided to look at where in the email personalization has the highest impact and how much time sellers spend personalizing.

This follow-up post based on our data science team’s ongoing research, we dive deeper into email personalization. ICYMI: We recently released findings from research that SalesLoft conducted around sales email personalization. Our data science team analyzed a data set of over 6 million sales emails and explored how the amount of personalization in an email impacted its performance.

This study builds on the previous research and answers questions about the optimal balance between effort and reward.

Get Personal Early

In this analysis, we examined the first location of personalization and its impact on opens and email replies. For our purposes, we define personalization as the deviation in content from the template that the email started with and the version of the email that was sent.

One of the first opportunities for personalization in an email occurs before the open: the preview pane. The preview pane (represented below in the area outlined in purple) is the area of an email that is potentially viewable prior to the recipient opening up an email. This area varies considerably by both the email client and the device the recipient uses to read the email. Due to this, we’ve used an average text range for convenience.

The location of the first personalization within the body of an email showed little to no impact on the probability that a recipient would open an email. As shown in the figure below, the probability that an email will be opened based on the preview text is about 30%. That probability very (very) slightly decreases thereafter.

Personalization’s impact on reply rates told a different story. When text is personalized early in the email, it has a positive influence on the probability of the receiver replying to the email.

In the figure below, we see that personalization in the first 200 characters has the most impact on increased reply rates. That means, on average, the most effective place to personalize is in the first two or three sentences. If you wait longer, you may have missed your chance. Not personalizing until the end of an email yields reply rates that are almost as low as not including any personalization at all.

Maximize ROI on Personalization Efforts

An important question sales leaders face is how much time their salespeople should spend on personalizing an email. The reward must be greater than or equal to the effort required. In other words, they need to see an ROI in the time their salespeople spend personalizing an email.

The maximum return on time spent personalizing replies hovers between 3.5 to 5 minutes. While there is no question that taking time to personalize your email communications is important, it’s clear that this should be limited to less than 5 minutes per email. Time spent beyond that is wasted effort, as illustrated in the graph below.

Personalizing At Scale

Exactly how much time should you spend personalizing sales emails? It’s not a black and white answer. It’s beneficial to think about personalization as existing on a continuum. Our research shows that some personalization is effective and worth a time investment. Your team’s habits around personalization should be proportional to the perceived value or importance of the target account. We outlined some initial steps around getting started with personalization in our previous post.

All of our research to date demonstrates that personalization consistently delivers positive outcomes. However, practitioners need to strike a balance between the when, where, and how much personalization to insert. Help your sales teams do this more efficiently. Provide templates or snippets of the strongest messaging for common questions or issues. These support pieces may include marketing materials such as case studies or content related to objection handling.

In our previous study, we uncovered that the optimal amount of personalization in a sales email is 20%. Based on the combined findings, personalizing about 20% of an email and spending no more than 5 minutes doing so would theoretically produce the optimal results.

We’ll be conducting further research to learn more. As a starting point, try templatizing email snippets containing “best practice” content. Making support content easily accessible across the sales organization will help enable personalization at scale.

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Learn more about the best practices of top performing sales reps in the research we sponsored for TOPO.

The post Analysis of 6M Sales Emails Reveals Optimal Time to Spend Personalizing appeared first on SalesLoft.

• A new report argues that quicker action on climate change could add more than $2 trillion a year to the global economy over the next decade.
• The report, from the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate (GCEC), argues that increasing investments in sustainable technologies would increase economic output globally by $26 trillion by 2030.
• "There's still a perception that moving toward a low-carbon path would be costly," Helen Mountford, the lead author of the report said. "What we are trying to do with this report is once and for all put the nails in the coffin on that idea."
• The report's release comes just months after US President Donald Trump signalled his intention to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

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Bold action on climate change could add more than $2 trillion a year to the global economy over the next decade, according to a major new report, which seeks to dispel the belief that tackling environmental issues will stifle economic growth.

The report from the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate (GCEC) on Wednesday argues that the world's politicians and decision-makers are "significantly underestimating the benefits of cleaner, climate-smart growth." It said the global economy could increase in size by $26 trillion by 2030, if more ambitious steps are taken.

Former heads of government, business leaders, and economists are all part of the GCEC's team, and have argued that the globe is at a crossroads, whereby it needs to fully commit to sustainable future growth, or see the earth suffer even more.

"There's still a perception that moving toward a low-carbon path would be costly," Helen Mountford, the lead author of the report said in an interview with Reuters. "What we are trying to do with this report is once and for all put the nails in the coffin on that idea."

Among the ideas presented in the review, which is backed by the World Bank's CEO Kristalina Georgieva, is the creation of around 65 million new jobs around the world by 2030, all focused around sustainable industries.

"The growth story of the 21st century will unlock unprecedented opportunities and deliver a strong, sustainable, inclusive global economy," the report said. "The benefits of climate action are greater than ever before, while the costs of inaction continue to mount. It is time for a decisive shift to a new climate economy."

The GCEC's report asks governments to prioritise four key areas of sustainability over the coming years to ensure that the economic boost it believes is possible actually materialises. They are:

• "Ramp up efforts on carbon pricing and move to mandatory disclosure of climate-related financial risks;" 
• "Accelerate investment in sustainable infrastructure;"
• "Harness the power of the private sector and unleash innovation;"
• "Build a people-centred approach that shares the gains equitably and ensures that the transition is just." 

The report's release comes just months after US President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change, an accord signed by virtually every single nation on earth.

At the time, Trump cited the "draconian financial and economic burdens" that remaining in the agreement would place on America. He believes, for instance, that moving away from fossil fuel usage will cripple the coal mining industry, and cost 2.7 million US jobs by 2025.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: INSIDE WEST POINT: What it’s really like for new Army cadets on their first day

SaaS companies have finally woken up to the importance of pricing. Nearly two-in-three SaaS businesses we surveyed changed their pricing in 2017, according to OpenView’s 2018 Expansion SaaS Benchmarks survey. And it wasn’t only small companies that changed their pricing. Even among companies with $20M+ in ARR, more than 60% changed their pricing at some point in the last year.

For companies that changed their pricing, these changes had a substantial positive impact on revenue growth – but the impact was far from consistent. The average pricing change resulted in a 20-25% improvement in ARR. But one-in-four companies reported a 50% or greater improvement just from pricing! On the flip side, one-in-six saw less than a 10% increase.

After personally leading or supporting 40+ pricing engagements over the past 9 years, one thing has become abundantly clear: Successful companies are ones that have devoted significant time and effort to the implementation of pricing changes.

Look, pricing changes are notoriously difficult and even still most people underestimate what’s required. A pricing change is a great leap into the unknown and requires folks to ‘disagree and commit.’ It demands buy-in and cooperation across nearly every department spanning Product, Finance, Marketing, Operations and Sales – something most organizations are pretty bad at as a general rule. And, a pricing change tests a company’s capacity to effectively train and enable their customer-facing teams, which too often is an area of underinvestment.

But it is possible! Let’s take a look at a recent example of a pricing change gone right.

Case Study: Inside Deputy’s Successful Pricing Revamp

Deputy, a Sydney-based workforce management startup (and OpenView portfolio company), recently embarked on a significant pricing change and the results were even better than expected. I had a chance to sit down with Craig Harris, Deputy’s COO and architect of their pricing revamp, to discuss why Deputy changed their pricing and what made the initiative so successful.

But before we get into Deputy’s pricing change, it’s worth noting their somewhat unique, product led go-to-market model. Deputy was founded in 2008 and has 70,000 customers across 70 countries around the world. While Deputy’s core solution works for even extremely large enterprises, its core business is SMB and 100% of business comes in through their website.

“We get a lot of referrals from our customers and so our focus is all about how do we effectively drive our site visitors to a free trial and then convert those free trial customers into paying customers,” Craig explained. Given that go-to-market motion, Deputy historically focused on driving a high level of product utilization and resisted charging for additional features. Any friction or reduced conversion due to pricing would be a non-starter; it could kill the product led, viral loop that Deputy worked so hard to build.

Despite their reluctance to revisit pricing strategy, Deputy’s board challenged them to consider a price increase. Craig noted that “from where they stood, [the Board] could see the additional value we provided over the years…and that was evidenced through strong NPS scores.”

Craig’s first step was to conduct a comprehensive market research program to gauge customers’ views on Deputy’s affordability and to understand how Deputy was priced relative to competition in each core market. The research proved that Deputy was perceived to be cheap relative to the value they were providing. It also showed that customers had an appetite for the addition of annual prepaid plans, something Deputy had previously avoided given their focus on reducing any barriers to new customer growth.

Armed with these insights, Craig and the Deputy leadership team made the decision to both increase prices and introduce an annual prepaid option. Now he had to implement it.

Craig focused on two key aspects of implementation: the rollout strategy and communication plan.

The Rollout

For the rollout, he opted to apply the pricing increase to just new customers at first. That was his way of de-risking the move. But there were still a number of details to work out. For instance, Deputy had to ensure that the annual plan didn’t create a disincentive for a customer to continue to expand their user base, which would hurt expansion revenue. Craig’s solution was to give customers the option to opt in and expand their annual plan to include that incremental number of users or just pay an overage amount each month.

Communication

Communication strategy was, arguably, even more important to success, according to Craig. “That starts with having a clear plan of how you’re going to communicate with your customers and prospects,” he said. “But just as important is how you frame this with your employees who are going to be engaging with customers on the sales side, in marketing, and through to CX.”

His advice is to be really clear on why you’re doing this. Explain all of the work that’s been done to add more value to the product and demonstrate that you’re committed to providing a continuous uplift of capabilities in the future. (You can read Craig’s pricing announcement here).

Craig also recommends preparing for any scenario with clear positioning statements and escalation paths. Deputy was lucky that their pricing change went off without a hitch, but wanted to ensure that they were able to respond to any potential concerns that could arise.

The results speak for themselves. Despite raising prices of their monthly plans by 25-33%, Deputy didn’t see a drop off in trials or conversion rates. Meanwhile, annual plans had higher adoption than expected, helping both cash flow and retention rates. All in all, it was a huge success.

Tips for Implementing a Pricing Change

Reflecting on my experience with more than 40 pricing engagements, here are four tips to ensure smooth implementation of a pricing change.

1. Designate a clear owner for the initiative. This person doesn’t do everything themselves, but rather quarterbacks the project, owns the roadmap, and keeps each department engaged. The best role is typically a PM and could also be a PMM or Operations Lead.

2. Set up weekly, cross functional meetings. The meeting would review the agreed-to plan and results against milestone goals, discuss/resolve any issues, and sort out any necessary adjustments. These must be attended by key people across departments and each person must report on their progress and any impediments. The committee may be repurposed from one that already exists (e.g. Product Committee or Product/GTM Committee) or may have to be created expressly for this purpose.

3. Pay special attention to communication, internally and externally. It’s especially important to frame why you’re making these changes and how they benefit customers in the long-term. Ensure that the appropriate teams (Sales, Marketing, CX) are adequately prepared to explain the pricing change and react to different scenarios.

4. Track objective metrics/KPIs to de-risk and instill confidence. There’s a lot of anxiety that comes with pricing changes – much of which never comes to fruition. It’s important to find ways to de-risk the pricing changes, whether that’s by testing new pricing before rolling it out fully or launching with new customers before migrating existing ones. Build confidence by keeping track of success stories and the impact of pricing changes on KPIs like win rates, average deal sizes and customer retention.

Have you gone through a successful pricing change? What advice do you have for other SaaS companies? Let us know in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!

The post How to Actually Implement a Pricing Change appeared first on OpenView Labs.

"Thanks for your consideration." In sales, those words are a white flag. They signal a competitor has won the business, and it's time for you to pack it up and head home. But before you call it a day or ask them what you did wrong, consider these alternative follow-ups and the opportunities they present.

After all, you're in sales for a reason — and it's not because you give up easily. These seven ways to say, "Thank you for your consideration," help you identify your next move.

Here are some "thank you for your consideration" alternatives you can use with your prospects.

1. "Thank you for your time."

Depending on how far along the prospect got in the sales process, chances are they invested a good amount of time considering your offer. Even if they go with a competitor, acknowledging and thanking your contact for the time they spent learning about your product can be an impactful way to build relationships.

Though this prospect may not have purchased from you this time around, they will understand that you value and respect their time, leaving a positive impression that could lead to a sale at another time.

2. "Have you actually executed the contract yet?"

You'd be surprised how often a prospect will tell you they've chosen another vendor before actually signing a contract. And if no ink has been spilled, it's not a done deal. If they reply, "Well, the contract is with our legal department," or "We're just waiting on the final documents to be sent over," the deal isn't done.

Check with your manager and — when appropriate — throw a big discount at them. In this scenario, you've already lost the upper hand. Your prospect knows you're desperate, so trying to shortchange them on price or remain coy about what you can offer is futile. Offer them your biggest discount to try to jolt them into reconsidering your bid.

And be willing to walk away if your manager nixes a price cut. You've got better things to do than beg for business with nothing left to bargain with.

3. "Price and terms aside, which vendor had the best technology?"

Many salespeople use this time to ask, "Is there anything we could have done better?" or "Were there features we were missing that gave [Competitor] the upper hand?" Don't do this. What prospect — after working up the courage to tell you they're going with a competitor — is going to tell you your shortcomings?

Instead, ask, "I appreciate you letting me know. Can I ask, pricing and terms aside, which vendor had the best technology?" This gives you helpful, honest information, without putting your prospect on the spot. Hopefully, you're able to end the moment by having them say something positive about you.

And if they think the competitor's product is better, say, "I appreciate the opportunity to compete," and move on. When your prospect has done their due diligence and selected another vendor, you must honor that decision.

If you're looking for feedback on what you could have done differently or better, turn to current clients. They're invested in your product/service improving and are motivated to give you the hard feedback you need.

4. "Can I touch base in 12 weeks to see how the transition went?"

Another trap I see salespeople fall into is trying to re-engage with prospects six months after they've chosen another vendor. I question these reps' motive. Best case scenario: the prospect is unhappy but can't sign with another company due to their contract, which is likely at least one-year long.

It also sends the message you have enough free time to reconnect with closed-lost business. Why are you honoring dead deals instead of pursuing new ones? Think of it this way: if your ex gets married, you're not going to reach out six months after the wedding and ask if they're interested in pursuing things with you again. Apply that tenacity to new business instead.

What you can ask during the initial breakup conversation is, "Would it be alright for me to touch base in 12 weeks to see how the transition went?" Follow that up with, "If you tell me it went well, you won't hear from me again. If it didn't go well, I'd love another chance to win your business, when your contract is up."

This sets expectations you're not lurking in the corner waiting for them to need you again. Instead, it's straightforward and reinforces you care about their best interest and success.

5. "Thank you for the opportunity to earn your business."

If it doesn't look like a deal will move forward, sincerely thank the prospect for their time. Take it as an opportunity to let them know that you're there to help address any questions or issues in the future.

Just because you won't be working with them right now, doesn't mean they won't come back when the time is right. With this message, you further develop your position as a trusted advisor and end your correspondence on a good note.

6. "I appreciate your time and consideration."

No matter what direction you plan to take the conversation, letting your prospect know how much you appreciate their time and consideration is a respectful approach.

After letting your prospect know how much you appreciate their consideration, you can naturally pivot to ask what factors contributed to their decision to help you gain more clarity and refine your sales process for the future.

7. "Hoping you’ll consider us for your business.”

If you want your prospect to consider your company for future deals, say so. Offer to discuss other products or services with them that may be a better fit.

If you lose a deal to another vendor, you've lost a full sales cycle. The only thing worse than putting three months into a dead deal is putting three months and one day into a dead deal. A new outreach call is better than nursing a lost opportunity. So, when in doubt, turn to these alternatives to "Thank you for your consideration," and move on to bigger and better things.

Looking for other ways to enliven your correspondence? Check out these "Hope You Are Doing Well" Alternatives, Nine Alternatives to Using "Dear Sir or Madam," 15 Alternatives to "As Per Our Conversation," and 12 Less Stilted Ways to Say "Thank You for Your Understanding."

A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review

Reading the NY Times article “Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture,” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital.

And while the “first mover advantage” was the rallying cry of the last bubble, today’s is: “Massive capital infusion can own the entire market.”

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Fire, Ready, Aim
Jeff Katzenberg has a great track record – head of the studio at Paramount, chairman of Disney Studios, co-founder of DreamWorks and now chairman of NewTV. The billion dollars he just raised is on top of the $750 million NewTV’s parent company, WndrCo, has raised for the venture. He just hired Meg Whitman. the ex-CEO of HP and eBay, as CEO of NewTV. Their idea is that consumers will want a subscription service for short form entertainment (10-minute programs) for mobile rather than full length movies. (Think YouTube meets Netflix).

It’s an almost $2-billion-dollar bet based on a set of hypotheses. Will consumers want to watch short-form mobile entertainment? Since NewTV won’t be making the content, they will be licensing from and partnering with traditional entertainment producers. Will these third parties produce something people will watch? NewTV will depend on partners like telcos to distribute the content. (Given Verizon just shut down Go90, its short form content video service, it will be interesting to see if Verizon distributes Katzenberg’s offerings.)

But NewTV doesn’t plan on testing these hypotheses. With fewer than 10 employees but almost $2-billion dollars in the bank, they plan on jumping right in.

It’s the antithesis of the Lean Startup.  And it may work. Why?

Dot Com Boom to Bust
Most entrepreneurs today don’t remember the Dot-Com bubble of 1995 or the Dot-Com crash that followed in 2000. As a reminder, the Dot Com bubble was a five-year period from August 1995 (the Netscape IPO) when there was a massive wave of experiments on the then-new internet, in commerce, entertainment, nascent social media, and search. When Netscape went public, it unleashed a frenzy from the public markets for anything related to the internet and signaled to venture investors that there were massive returns to be made investing in anything internet related. Almost overnight the floodgates opened, and risk capital was available at scale from venture capital investors who rushed their startups toward public offerings. Tech IPO prices exploded and subsequent trading prices rose to dizzying heights as the stock prices became disconnected from the traditional metrics of revenue and profits. Some have labeled this period as irrational exuberance. But as Carlota Perez has so aptly described, all new technology industries go through an eruption and frenzy phase, followed by a crash, then a golden age and maturity. Then the cycle repeats with a new set of technologies.

Given the stock market was buying “the story and vision” of anything internet, inflated expectations were more important than traditional metrics like customers, growth, revenue, or heaven forbid, profits. Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan. The mantra of “first mover advantage,” the idea that winners are the ones who are the first entrants in their market, became the conventional wisdom of investors in Silicon Valley.“ First Movers” didn’t understand customer problems or the product features that solved those problems (what we now call product-market fit). These bubble startups were actually guessing at their business model and did premature and aggressive hype and early company launches and had extremely high burn rates – all predicated on an IPO to raise more cash. To be fair, in the 20^th century, there really wasn’t a model for how to build startups other than write plan, raise money, and execute – the bubble was this method, on steroids. And to be honest, VC’s in this bubble really didn’t care. Massive liquidity awaited the first movers to the IPO’s, and that’s how they managed their portfolios.

When VC’s realized how eager the public markets were for anything related to the internet, they pushed startups with little revenue and no profits into IPOs as fast as they could. The unprecedented size and scale of VC returns transformed venture capital from a financial asset backwater into full-fledged player in the financial markets.

Then one day it was over. IPOs dried up. Startups with huge burn rates – building leases, staff, PR and advertising – ran out of money. Most startups born in the bubble died in the bubble.

The Rise of the Lean Startup
After the crash, venture capital was scarce to non-existent. (Most of the funds that started in the late part of the boom would be underwater). Angel investment, which was small to start with, disappeared, and most corporate VCs shut down. VC’s were no longer insisting that startups spend faster, and “swing for the fences”. In fact, they were screaming at them to dramatically reduce their burn rates. It was a nuclear winter for startup capital.

The idea of the Lean Startup was built on top of the rubble of the 2000 Dot-Com crash.

With risk capital at a premium and the public markets closed, startups and their investors now needed a methodology to preserve capital and survive long enough to generate revenue and profits. And to do that they needed a different method than just “build it and they will come.” They needed to be sure that what they were building was what customers wanted and needed. And if their initial guesses were wrong, they needed a process that would permit them to change early on in the product development process when the cost of changes was small – the famed “pivot”.

Lean started from the observation that you cannot ask a question that you have no words for. At the time we had no language to describe that startups were not smaller versions of large companies; the first insight was that large companies executed known business models, while startups searched for them. Yet while we had plenty of language and tools for execution, we had none for search.  So we (Blank, Ries, Osterwalder) built the tools and created a new language for innovation and modern entrepreneurship. It helped that in the nuclear winter that followed the crash, 2001 – 2004, startups and VCs were extremely risk averse and amenable to new ideas that reduced risk. (This same risk averse, conserve the cash, VC mindset would return after the 2008 meltdown of the housing market.)

As described in the HBR article “Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything,” we developed Lean as the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack where entrepreneurs first map their hypotheses about their business model and then test these hypotheses with customers in the field (customer development) and use an iterative and incremental development methodology (agile development) to build the product. This allowed startups to build Minimal Viable Products (MVPs) – incremental and iterative prototypes – and put them in front of a large number of customers to get immediate feedback. When founders discovered their assumptions were wrong, as they inevitably did, the result wasn’t a crisis; it was a learning event called a pivot— and an opportunity to change the business model.

Every startup is in a race against time. It has to find product-market fit before running out of cash. Lean makes sense when capital is scarce and when you need to keep burn rates low. Lean was designed to inform the founders’ vision while they operated frugally at speed. It was not built as a focus group for consensus for those without deep convictions.

The result? Startups now had tools that sped up the search for customers, ensured that what was being built met customer needs, reduced time to market and slashed the cost of development.

Carpe Diem – Seize the Cash
Today, memories of frugal VC’s and tight capital markets have faded, and the structure of risk capital is radically different. The explosion of seed funding means tens of thousands of companies that previously languished in their basement are getting funding, likely two orders of magnitude more than received Series A funding during the Dot-Com bubble. As mobile devices offer a platform of several billion eyeballs, potential customers which were previously small niche markets now include everyone on the planet. And enterprise customers in a race to reconfigure strategies, channels, and offerings to deal with disruption provide a willing market for startup tools and services.

All this is driven by corporate funds, sovereign funds and even VC funds with capital pools of tens of billions of dollars dwarfing any of the dollars in the first Dot Com bubble – and all looking for the next Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, or Alibaba. What matters to investors now is to drive startup valuations into unicorn territory (valued at $1 billion or more) via rapid growth – usually users, revenue, engagements but almost never profits. As valuations have long passed the peak of the 2000 Internet bubble, VC’s and founders who previously had to wait until they sold their company or took it public to make money no longer have to wait. They can now sell part of their investment when they raise the next round. And if the company does go public, the valuations are at least 10x of the last bubble.

With capital chasing the best deals, and hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into some startups, most funds now scoff at the idea of Lean. Rather than the “first mover advantage” of the last bubble, today’s theory is that “massive capital infusion owns the entire market.” And Lean for startups seems like some quaint notion of a bygone era.

And that explains why investors are willing to bet on someone with a successful track record like Katzenberg who has a vision of disrupting an entire industry.

In short, Lean was an answer to a specific startup problem at a specific time, one that most entrepreneurs still face and which ebbs and flows depending on capital markets. It’s a response to scarce capital, and when that constraint is loosened, it’s worth considering whether other approaches are superior. With enough cash in the bank, Katzenberg can afford to create content, sign distribution deals, and see if consumers watch. If not, he still has the option to pivot. And if he’s right, the payoff will be huge.

One More Thing…
Well-funded startups often have more capital for R&D than the incumbent companies they’re disrupting. Companies struggle to compete while reconfiguring legacy distribution channels, pricing models and supply chains. And government agencies find themselves being disrupted by adversaries unencumbered by legacy systems, policies and history.  Both companies and government agencies struggle with how to deliver innovation at speed. Ironically, for this new audience that makes the next generation of Lean – the Innovation Pipeline – more relevant than ever.

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Lessons Learned:

• When capital for startups is readily available at scale, it makes more sense to go big, fast and make mistakes than it does to search for product/market fit.
• The amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to do is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital.
• Still, unless your startup has access to large pools of capital or have a brand name like Katzenberg, Lean still makes sense.
• Lean is now essential for companies and government agencies to deliver innovation at speed
• The Lean Startup isn’t dead. For companies and government the next generation of Lean – the Innovation Pipeline – is more relevant than ever.

What is Customer Success and why do you need it? This mini guide talks about this and more. Also inside are actionable steps to get started with CS!

Gain a new customer, you increase revenue. Lose an existing one, your company’s sales potential drops. What happens when you lose more customers than you gain?

Doomsday — and the painful clarity of failure.

It may happen sooner or later, but failure is the only prospect a business faces when customer loyalty plunges.

It was in this context that the field of Customer Success (CS) emerged in the final years of the 20th century. The creeping fear of failure drove many business leaders in the tech sector to build a reliable safeguard against runaway customer attrition rate (churn).

The solution was powerful in its simplicity: Your success ultimately depends on the success of your customers.

To prevent business failure, keep your customers winning at the things they care about while using your product. Only then will they stay loyal and keep replenishing your cash flow.

Guide overview:

1. What is Customer Success?
2. Why do you need Customer Success?
3. Customer Service/Support vs. Customer Success
4. Sales and Customer Success
5. Marketing and Customer Success
6. Metrics and KPIs
7. Getting Started with Customer Success

What is Customer Success?

Customer Success is the business solution for keeping customers loyal by meeting or exceeding their expectations about your product or service.

It may refer to a formal field, an organization, a methodology or a culture depending on context. But the mission of Customer Success remains the same. Focus on helping customers consistently achieve the outcomes they desire throughout their journey.

Related: The Essential Guide to Landing Your First Customer Success Job

Why do you need Customer Success?

The tide has turned. Sellers don’t call the shots anymore. Buyers do.

In the buyer-centric digital economy where access to product information is just a touch away, the likelihood of business success depends primarily on the buyer experience.

Here are some eye-opening facts:

• Customer experience will topple the product itself and its price tag as the key brand differentiator by 2020, according to a Walker study.
• Nearly 9 out of 10 buyers are willing to pay more for a product if they receive a better customer experience, based on a study by Oracle.
• Gartner projects that the vast majority of businesses (89%) will compete mainly on customer experience.
• An Accenture study found that the cost of customer attrition due to poor customer service in the U.S. alone was at $1.6 trillion.
• Businesses that prioritize customer experience outperform competitors by as much as 60% in terms of profit generation, according to the Gartner Group.
• Bain & Company found that companies providing excellent customer experiences grow their revenues 4-8% better than market average.

Beyond delivering demonstrable business benefits, Customer Success has become indispensable. It has become a core element in the processes that —

• Drive revenue
• Mitigate churn rate
• Improve long-term competitiveness

Customer Success vs. Customer Service/Support

CS is a relatively new field and is preceded by customer service/customer support.

However, Customer Success and Customer Service/Support have distinct rationales even when they might overlap in some aspect or function.

Both units/fields focus on the customer. But they differ in several key areas:

While Customer Service/Support adopts a reactive strategy for customer engagement, Customer Success is highly proactive.

For example, Customer Service reps help address user issues through a user-initiated hotline, with the aim of:

• Guiding customers in how to properly use a service/product
• Troubleshooting known issues about specific products or services.

The aim is to fix specific problems reported by users in order to prevent frustration and improve satisfaction.

On the other hand, Customer Success looks at the bigger picture and adopts a long-term strategy for customer engagement. They assess issues from the vantage point of a customer — not from cost-vs-benefits lens of the organization.

Customer Success takes effect well before specific problems are reported and well after customer satisfaction has been affirmed.

That’s because for a Customer Success team, satisfaction is just the minimum. The ideal behind Customer Success is to make customers so successful in using your products that you transform them into fiercely loyal brand evangelists.

Customer Success and Sales

Where Sales often focuses on the (hopefully) one-time process of moving an entity through the sales pipeline, Customer Success focuses on a cyclical relationship with the customer.

CS impacts top-line revenues by helping:

• Reduce churn rates
• Drive renewals
• Inspire new sales (upsell, cross-sell)
• Establish income streams
• Convert new brand advocates.

The key moment of truth for Customer Success is typically the renewal, which can be driven by Customer Success, Sales, or a Renewals role.

Upsells and cross-sells can also be driven by a variety of roles and at moments throughout the cycle. They are almost always initiated by Customer Success and predicated on delivering value to the customer prior to the “ask”.

Based on their experiences, many business leaders have come to think that a company’s revenue potential highly depends on how effective its Customer Success strategy is.

Writing for Forbes, entrepreneur Alex McClafferty even claimed that CS is the best kept secret of hyper-growth startups.

Meanwhile, Sixteen Ventures’ Lincoln Murphy pointed out the importance of orchestrating the alignment between Customer Success and Sales:

At the end of the day, Customer Success goes beyond ensuring customers remain happy using your products and services. It also involves translating your customers’ successes into a platform for orchestrating repeat business, recurring income, referrals, upsells, cross-sells, and brand advocacy.  

Customer Success and Marketing

Like many other organizational units, B2B Marketing has evolved as the business landscape shifted towards a buyer-centric model. In the B2B space, this has led to the widespread adoption of buyer-focused customer engagement.

Functionally, Marketing shares ownership of the following areas with Customer Success:

• Ideal Customer Profile
• Buyer Journey
• Customer Experiences
• Product Advocacy

Because the operational roadmap of the two units intersect in these key areas, a unified strategy and a strong alignment between Customer Success and Marketing is crucial.

More than information exchange and collaboration, this can be accomplished through:

• Mutual transparency,
• Synced assets
• Joint campaigns
• Cross-team members
• Complimentary performance metrics
• Shared goals/experiences.

Customer Success Metrics and KPIs

Customer Success can and should be measured. This is the only way to drive operational improvements.

While the ideal set of metrics varies across sectors, operational models, and specific companies, here are some Customer Success metrics and KPIs that can be adopted:

1) Churn Rate

This is the percentage of your customers who quit or stopped subscribing to a product or service during a given period.

Formula: Monthly Churn Rate = Number of Customers Lost in Current Month / Number of Customers in Previous Month

2) Churn Rate Reduction/Expansion

This metric checks whether improvement efforts  on customer retention over a given period were successful or not.

Formula: Churn Rate Reduction = Churn Rate for Current Period – Churn Rate for Previous Period

3) Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Churn

This is the percentage of revenue lost to total revenue due to customer churn (including losses due to service downgrades)

Formula: MRR Churn = Lost Revenue due to Customer Churn and Downgrades in Current Month / Total Revenue in Previous Month

4) Revenue Expansion

This metric is the opposite of churn and shows how much existing customers are upgrading their subscriptions or signing up for additional services.

Formula: MRR Expansion = New Revenue from Upsells/Cross-sells in Current Month / Total Revenue in Previous Month

5) Portfolio Growth

This metric show whether existing customers subscribed to additional or upgraded services, and whether there’s a net positive business growth.

Formula: Portfolio Growth = MRR Expansion – MRR Churn

6) Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

This is among the most popular methods of measuring customer satisfaction. The method uses the survey format and an arbitrary scale (usually from 1 to 5, or from 1 to 10) by which respondents (customers) can grade or rate a service/product.

The survey usually includes questions such as “How satisfied were you with the features?” and “How well was the experience to your liking?”

7) Customer Onboarding Cost

Often booked as part of Customer Acquisition Costs, this metric computes the total costs in terms of time and money required to onboard, train, and support customers using your product.

8) Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This metric is similar to CSAT in that it uses the survey platform and an arbitrary scale to gauge the likelihood of customers sharing the good news about your product.

9) Referrals

This is the natural outcome of an excellent Net Promoter Score. These are generally new customers brought in that are booked as referrals from existing customers.

10) Customer Health Score

This is the metric that tells whether a customer enjoys using your product or whether she is ready to bail out. Different companies adopt different methods and sets of criteria for computing their Customer Health Score.

Some of the more commonly used customer health indicators across companies and sectors include: product usage rate, account growth, length of time as customer, number of completed renewals, number of upsells, number of cross sells, community involvement, CSAT, NPS, and volume/depth of customer interaction.

Customer Maturity — the ability of the customer to realize the value of the solution based on their own internal speed/knowledge/technology etc., is outside of the control of Customer Success but another important consideration when investing time and energy based on the Customer Health Score.     

Getting Started with Customer Success

Any organization looking to drive revenue growth over the long term cannot ignore Customer Success.

If you have yet to institutionalize Customer Success in your organization, here are some points to consider:

1) Define what CS means to you

Clearly define what “success” means to your customers as they move through each stage of the customer journey.

2) Make it people-centric

Put people at the core of your Customer Success apparatus — from product development, strategy formulation, team building, customer experience map, and performance measurement.

3) Customize it for your business model

Formulate a Customer Success strategy that fits your business model, customers, and goals. While Customer Success might be subjective in some areas, actual results are not. That means your CS strategy must aim to deliver measurable benchmarks of success.

Your Customer Success Strategy should integrate these:

• A roadmap showing the current state of customer experience leading to a desired state.
• The processes, channels, and resources needed to effect the desired change.
• An operational plan for establishing a customer success culture across the organization.
• A performance assessment schedule to fine-tune progress.

4) Define your Customer Success Process

• Determine your company’s ideal customer persona
• Identify the stages and milestones of the customer journey
• Automate workflows
• Formulate reward programs
• Schedule customer surveys
• Establish a customer communication plan

5) Build a focused team

Build a dedicated and competent team to spearhead Customer Success. Each person on the Customer Success Team should have the necessary skills and training that will enable them to proactively facilitate the experiences customers desire.

A Customer Success Team primarily performs the following functions:

• Provide value that makes customers happy and compels them to stay.
• Train customers how best to use your products so they can achieve success faster, easier, and in a much bigger way.
• Create positive mood for renewals, upsells, cross sells, and referrals.
• Work with clients to iterate existing solutions or create new ones.

6) Don’t compromise on tools

Future-proof your Customer Success organization with forward-looking tools, tactics, and technology.

The Customer Success Stack involves your company’s CRM platform as well as the software systems used by finance, marketing, and sales.

The technology tools you need depend on your market, strategy, process, and budget. Some of the top-rated Customer Success Tools in the market include Gainsight, ChurnZero, ClientSuccess, FullStory, and STAMP.

Change the Rules with Customer Success

Inward-looking businesses run the risk of encountering doomsday sooner than later.

New economic realities compel businesses to focus instead on the journeys of their customers and how their customers envision success.

By accurately mapping your customers’ route to success, you are also blazing the trail that leads to yours. Execute your Customer Success plan perfectly to make it easier for customers to keep using your services.

Customer Success is not an option. It has become a baseline for the world’s most successful companies to drive higher revenues, stronger brand loyalty, and sustained business growth.

The post What is Customer Success — A Smart & Actionable Guide appeared first on Sales Hacker.

In the world of B2B marketing, it’s easy to follow the leader. The problem with this, however, is that when everyone starts doing the same things marketing-wise…it gets a little, well…boring.

If you really want to stand out to your B2B prospects, you have to be willing to experiment with new, out-of-the-box marketing ideas that get your brand noticed.

From taking a hard look at your brand voice to building new communities from scratch, thinking beyond the norm can help you break out in a bold way (that produces results.)

Let’s explore this topic a bit further and look at a few non-traditional B2B marketing ideas you likely haven’t tried before.

1. Redefine your brand voice

So often B2B marketers are focused on the next big tactic or trend. But what about the foundational elements? Taking a hard look at the core pieces of your marketing (like brand voice, for example) present an opportunity to radically improve things.

“Think of your company as a character in the story you’re telling with your customer. Give them a backstory, goals, quirks, pet peeves. Too many B2B brands are concerned with being ‘professional’ and they come off as jargony and robotic as a result,” said writer Alaura Weaver.

When re-evaluating your brand voice, think about your target audience and what they need to hear. Then document your new approach, with notes on changes:

• Tone within emails and blog content (Is it educational? Friendly? Quirky?)
• Personality and the conversational nature of content (Does the voice sound like it’s coming from a smart friend or a lecturing adult?)
• Relatability (Does the brand voice sound like the customer’s own voice?)

If your brand voice doesn’t currently have any documented notes on the three above elements, it may be time to reconsider your approach.

2. Build a community

“Many businesses think of “community” as their social media presence and the engagement that happens there. But in reality, you can go much further than that with a Slack group, Facebook group, etc.” said marketing expert Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré.

By building a private area for customers to interact more closely with each other and with the brand, communication flows more freely and connections form stronger bonds. In a way, it’s building your own “sandbox” of sorts.

For example: When ProdPad launched a Slack channel, they found that it fostered a sense of community not only between the brand and customers, but between customers as well. Engagement rose across the board, and customers started to feel more like friends.

Whether it’s a custom built area of your site for VIPs or a Facebook Group, these micro- communities are a marketing tactic that feel more like helping than selling.

3. Start a podcast

Podcasts have been steadily increasing in popularity over the past five years. A quick look at the Google Trends data for the term ‘podcast’ illustrates this visually:

So what does this mean for B2B marketers?

In marketer Patrick Hodgdon’s experience, it means more visibility and prospects:

“Starting a podcast is a huge opportunity to open doors and build valuable relationships via old outreach. We saw a podcast add $200K to a $1M pipeline in 3 months, and it also helped generate 100K views on LinkedIn with content repurposed as posts.”

He went on to explain that it made a major impression on guests to the podcast as well.

One guest said this: “I’ve seen teams of marketers in this space do less over the past 10 years than you were able to do with the podcast in less than 6 months to position the company as a thought leader.”

Marketer Jay Acunzo has also seen huge success from podcasting: He’s created a following of thousands of listeners, earned countless 5-star ratings on his show, and has grown his ethos as an expert and authority on marketing.

The bottom line: With the help of automation tools that remove the heavy lifting from podcast creation, you can quickly launch a new marketing approach that most other B2B brands still aren’t even considering.

4. Leverage a Voice of Customer program

Marketer Sue Duris said that while still largely underutilized, Voice of Customer (VoC) programs are a powerful, effective way to drive results and give customers a voice.

“User or customer-generated content is free marketing for us, and it has a larger ROI than any other marketing program we could come up with. It’s an opportunity for customers to promote us to their networks and, let’s face it, would-be customers are more likely to engage with customer driven content than corporate driven content,” she said.

Data echoes this sentiment. When McDonald’s launched a VoC program in 2015 and acted on the findings of those efforts, they saw a 5.7% increase in in fourth-quarter sales. Not too shabby, right?

Sue explained that launching a VoC program might include various elements such as:

• Blog posts around what different customers’ ‘Aha!’ moment was with your product
• Videos of your customers’ favorite product features
• Leveraging user-generated content (photos, testimonials, etc.) throughout your website as social proof

Think about how you can better make sure of customer insight you already have and make your marketing efforts a mirror for customers.

5. Use interactive content to better align sales & marketing

One of the biggest pitfalls of B2B marketing is that so often, there’s a misalignment between sales and marketing–and both teams end up wasting time and effort on leads that don’t convert.

One out-of-the-box approach you might consider is interactive content as a solution for this.
In one case study, Paycor saw major success with this approach–improving their opportunity to closed deal rate by 38%.

“Today’s buyers have very different expectations for marketing and sales experiences, and successful organizations need to set themselves up to be able to meet those expectations. Not only do we see better leads come through at the top of the funnel, but sales is having better conversations that lead to better deals and happier customers,” said Alex Schutte, Head of Digital Marketing at Paycor.

So what does interactive content mean in the B2B setting? It’s things like:

• Interactive assessments (to gauge a prospects interests/needs)
• Interactive quizzes (to drive up engagement and spur data collection)
• Interactive calculators (to tease out a pain point and then present a solution)

Here’s one example of an interactive quiz from Boston Scientific:

The great thing about any kind of interactive content is that it allows the marketing and sales teams to gather important information about prospects, which improves lead scoring and lead conversion down the road.

6. Partner with an influencer

In the past, influencer marketing was largely used within the B2C setting. Today, however, a few B2B brands are dipping their toes in the water–and are seeing success with influencer relationships.

American Express, for example, partnered with influencers on Instagram for its #AmexAmbassador series, which targeted C-suite executives in charge of business purchasing decisions. These campaigns helped build contextual ethos for the brand and acted as a form of social proof, with external sources validating the product/service at hand.

The secret to success seems to be finding the right influencers for your B2B marketing campaign. Look for a relevant figure within your niche who has upwards of 50K followers so you can be sure your reaching a large, engaged audience.

However, if you’re hesitant to jump into influencer marketing with a large marketing budget, consider going the route of micro-influencers first. These are often more niche with smaller audiences (whose costs and requirements are considerably less.)

Break free with fresh B2B marketing ideas

With the ideas we’ve covered here, you can take a fresh approach to your B2B marketing efforts and break free from the herd. Standing out with unique efforts can feel daunting at first, but with a smart approach and a willingness to test and experiment, you may very well find home-run tactics that drive incredible results for your brand.

 

B2B marketers are certainly aware that business marketing data degrades quickly. Most know that there is no such thing as a “good list”. Keeping data clean is critical to lead generation success. Yet, it is frequently done wrong.  

To reveal segments with higher probability of generating leads, compare your marketing database, which could number thousands of contacts, to your customer database. For example, after sorting your customers into categories, you may find that most of them fall into three SICs and one revenue range. Next, extract contacts from your marketing database with the matching three SICs into separate test groups in addition to one or two other groups that seem like they should perform well.

Break each of the resulting segments into small discrete lists of a few hundred names, test each segment with marketing activity including tele-prospecting calls. The categories that match your customers have priority. Rank by other pre-determined classification, such as company type or region. Focus on the top two segmented and prioritized lists, then move down.

The sales opportunities generated from these small tests will reveal predictable segments that warrant building full marketing programs. The test phase confirms the market segments that are more likely to buy and are therefore worthy of marketing investment and resources.

The process doesn’t end with a single round of data cleanup, segmentation and prioritization. Ongoing testing to differentiate characteristics reveals the most valuable segments. This knowledge can be predictively applied to generate higher return on future programs.

So, instead of contacting all names in the databases or tossing out every name and starting over, use segmentation and prioritization techniques to focus on the quality list segments and predict the likely success of B2B marketing programs. Continued deployment of this predictive relational equation helps marketers:

• Balance return against investment and determine optimal program deployment
• Develop the intelligence to fully fund the right model for future programs

The PointClear Relational Segmentation approach provides companies with the market intelligence they need to fully fund and roll out programs targeted to high-return segments. This model has increased individual campaign results at PointClear by up to 50 percent and simultaneously decreased costs by as much as 35 percent.

Want to know more? We have an ebook that provides more information. 

• Business Insider spoke with 42 Tesla employees about what it's like to work at one of the world's most ambitious and controversial companies.
• Their famous CEO, Elon Musk, is a visionary, but also unpredictably demanding, the employees said.
• They talked about long hours and an intense work environment that some call "the Tesla life."
• They described an attitude of worship that some employees have toward Musk, likening it to a "cult."

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One weeknight in the spring of 2016, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, walked the floor of his car factory in Fremont, California. He was not alone.

On his arm was an attractive brunette wearing a dress and heels that clacked as they strolled across the gleaming white floors. Neither wore protective gear, such as a hard hat or glasses, as they toured the facility. A puzzled factory worker  watched the pair enter a conference room where a romantic dinner for two complete with tablecloth awaited them.

The 5.3-million-square-foot Fremont factory, where Tesla builds its all-electric cars, is one of the world's most advanced automotive production facilities, employing about 10,000 people. It's also been the center of drama as Tesla struggles to meet demand for its vehicles.

But for Musk, Tesla is a personal kingdom where the boundaries of home and work are blurred and the method in the madness is never entirely clear.

"Elon basically does what he wants, whenever he wants," the person who witnessed the apparent date told Business Insider.

To some who work at Tesla, that's fine. Musk has a loyal following of employees who believe that if he asks them to do the impossible, they can do it. At 47, Musk has defied the skeptics and dragged electric cars into reality through the force of will, grit, and stubbornness. Those who work for Musk liken it to a drug.

"My favorite thing about the job is to take that thing that seemed impossible and blow it up," said Marco Batra, a six-year Tesla veteran and the manager of field service operations.

Tesla employees also said they love the company's mission: making beautiful electric cars and solar products, healing the earth, and disrupting the old world along the way. It's a noble cause that inspires many to give it their all.

"This is the future," said Branton Phillips, a material handler for Tesla Production Control at the Fremont facility. "I like the whole image, what we're doing, the mission. We're making history."

It's exactly the type of hungry "startup culture" that larger, more established corporations are forever striving for.

And it might also be Tesla's biggest weakness. The scrappy, feel-good company, built in Musk's image, also bears many of his flaws — a place where long hours, chaos, callousness, and contradictions can grind workers down, many employees said.

In an effort to hit lofty delivery goals set by Musk, Tesla has burned through a stunning trove of cash and materials — $3.4 billion in 2017 and another $1.05 billion in the first quarter of this year — while posting record losses. The rate of spending appears to be slowing, but many fear the company could still run out of money before the end of the year. Meanwhile, Musk has already backtracked and abandoned a highly public, and always a bit unlikely, attempt to change the company's finances by taking the company private, an idea he revealed in an ill-advised tweet.

Now, as pressure mounts, Musk's management style is under scrutiny, and a growing number of employees and investors are wondering whether it's time for the company to grow up.

Business Insider spoke with 42 Tesla employees to learn what it's like working for one of the world's most ambitious and controversial companies.

All the people we spoke to are either currently employed by Tesla or have been in the past year. They've held a variety of jobs, from entry level to managers, in engineering, production, and sales, at the Fremont headquarters and factory, the "Gigafactory" in Nevada and other locations. Some requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, while others were authorized by Tesla and spoke with us in unmonitored, private conversations.

Long hours, busy toilets

Jonathan Galescu, a welder who works on the Tesla Model X car, starts his shift at 5:50 p.m. and spends the next 10 to 12 hours fixing body problems on cars.

Tesla tests and fixes cars on the assembly line as they're being built. Galescu spends his shift walking — sometimes running — alongside the cars and welding as he goes, he said.

Galescu started at Tesla four years ago and has seen many idealists crash headfirst into the realities of working there.

"People quit within the first two hours, people quit after a week. There was one guy who was fresh out of high school, 18 years old, never had a job before and was excited to work: 'I want to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day!' By about the fifth day, he was on the floor crying," Galescu said. The guy quit soon after.

Galescu is part of a group pushing to bring a union into Tesla. He sounds exhausted and more than a little fed up, exactly what you'd expect from someone who believes he's worked too many hours in unfair conditions.

Some 260 miles away, at Tesla's 4.9-million-square-foot Gigafactory, insiders describe a loud hive of activity.

Bathrooms at the facility — which employs over 2,400 people and could eventually house 10,000 — are scarce, often messy, and the lines to use them can be long, several employees told us.

Once, someone recounted, the men's bathroom was so busy that an employee put toilet paper down next to a clogged toilet and defecated right there.

Yet many employees quickly adapt to the giant facility. "Yeah, you don't try and use the bathroom 15 minutes before a shift changes," George Stewart, a battery production lead at the Gigafactory, said, laughing. He called the situation no big deal. "The lunch room feels like high school, it's so crowded."

The work is fast-paced and unpredictable. Making the numbers supersedes everything. Employees can be drafted without warning and put on an unfamiliar production line with a few minutes of training. During "burst builds" the production system is revved up to test whether it can perform at a certain rate.

The happiest Tesla employees, including Stewart, described themselves as workaholic types who want to work 70-plus hours a week.

"You get a bunch of passionate, competitive people in the room — it's almost like this self-inflicted, bar-raising behavior," Barta, the field manager, said. He puts in so many hours he's been known to sleep overnight at work.

And some hourly production workers said Tesla was an easier and more lucrative job than their alternatives.

"A lot of people say it's hard here, but I started out doing tile at minimum wage, carrying 50- to 60-pound boxes up a flight a stairs," Miguel Carrera, a manufacturing tech lead, said. He voluntarily works extra shifts to pull 70 hours a week in Tesla's outdoor makeshift Model 3 production area in Fremont. "This is nothing."

He went on: "Two years ago I was sleeping in a car. I've been here two years now, and I'm getting ready to buy a house. A lot of things have come together for me from this company, for me putting in the hours. To me, this is the best company ever."

But to really understand Tesla, you have to understand how employees feel about their larger-than-life leader.

The 'cult of Elon'

It's time for the quarterly all-hands meeting, and people are standing around nervously like groupies waiting for a glimpse of Musk, their famous CEO. As he walks to the front of the room, employees burst into vigorous applause.

"There's a big cult-like following for Elon," one software engineer said. "No company have I worked for, in our quarterly meetings, do you clap when a CEO walks into the podium. So that's just something that people do at Tesla."

Born and raised in South Africa, Musk came to the US during his college years and soon found success as one of the original members of the "PayPal mafia," the group of founders who created the electronic-payment system. In 2008, when electric cars were still considered an oddity for tree huggers, Musk produced the beautiful Roadster. Not only was it electric, it was fast. In 2012, Tesla made more waves with its Model S luxury sedan. And today, Tesla is challenging the industry with its mass-market Model 3.

His other job, as CEO of rocket company SpaceX, which ushered in the commercial space industry and aims to bring humans to Mars, helped catapult him to rock-star status worldwide.

At Tesla, Musk can be seen anywhere and everywhere — standing behind a production worker, peering at a robot, or dressed in protective garb in the clean room. Some of his admirers post themselves in special spots in the factory to catch a glimpse of him walking by with his senior staff in tow.

At 6-foot-2, with broad shoulders, Musk is an imposing man. "I ran into him a couple times. He's like this force field," a former internal communications employee said. "You could almost see the air parting."

Employees described him as everything from aloof and intimidating to friendly and emotional. His discussions are littered with f-bombs, and he's been known to give bear hugs to production workers when the company reaches a milestone.

Musk works so many hours in Tesla's 24/7 production world that virtually everyone has a story about finding him with pillow and blanket asleep somewhere — on the factory floor, under a desk, in a conference room. He recently said in an interview that he was so exhausted from this past year at Tesla that he sometimes uses the sleep aid Ambien.

Some people said they were afraid of Musk, adding that their bosses have warned them not to go near him or take his picture, though he has been known to graciously pose for selfies.

If you can convince Musk you have an idea that will benefit Tesla, he won't hesitate to make it happen, said one field manager, who told Business Insider that he's met with Musk on several occasions.

A human can do the job faster than a robot? The robot will vanish, said Juliese Batiste, a Model 3 production lead. When the ergonomics team wanted to demo wearable chairs that allow production workers to sit while working, Musk gave the nod, said Mike Kirschner, a senior ergonomics program manager.

But Musk is always 10 steps ahead, the field manager said, forcing you to think faster and bigger than you would otherwise.

That's the thing about Musk. He promises the impossible, and often pulls it off. He's taken two companies in capital-intensive industries with incredibly high barriers to entry — electric cars and space transportation — and turned them into viable businesses.

By demanding so much, Musk leads people to exceed their own expectations and create new ways of accomplishing tasks.

"We came up with stuff that, when we first thought of it on paper, it wasn't possible. And Elon's pushing does get you there," a mechanical engineer said.

A software engineer said: "Elon is an amazing visionary. He was so right about what five years or 10 years should look like and what is possible. He is super inspiring. He challenges people and pushes them to do things they don't think they can do and is really great in some ways."

But, people told us, there's a cost for pushing people so hard.

'The Tesla life'

Some employees call the work grind "the Tesla life," meaning you're expected to put your life on hold at crunch time, giving everything you've got to the company.

In fairness, that's not so different from the expectation at other Silicon Valley tech firms, from startups to the giants.

Yet, at Tesla, crunch time never seems to cease. "Elon tells you: 'This is what we're doing. We're launching this today or in two weeks.' If it comes from the CEO and he makes this public, you have to do it," a software engineer said.

The long, unpredictable hours affect every corner of Tesla's operations, from software and mechanical engineers to the folks in solar sales or on the production line.

At first there's a certain thrill to it. The goal is to create things that have never been done before.

"They are constantly introducing new ideas, new ways of doing things," one mechanical engineer said. "It's like a drug that you can't see yourself living without. You know it's sad, but you're enjoying it so much because you're being told you're changing the world and your contributions matter."

But Musk's deadlines can also seem random, even mean-spirited, to those tasked with achieving them.

"He'd order a project and we'd say, 'We need 10 weeks,' and he'd say, 'You get six.' And then two weeks later, 'We need it two weeks earlier than that,' so you end up with four, just to hit a number. It's an impossible workload. They're burning people out like crazy," the mechanical engineer said.

Indeed, Tesla's work-life balance scored 2.6 out of 5, according to Glassdoor user reviews, far lower than other car companies. And the average employee tenure at Tesla is 2.1 years, which is at the low end compared to other tech companies such as Apple, where the average tenure is five years, according to data gathered by LinkedIn.

A fear of getting fired also permeates the atmosphere. Musk has been known on occasion to "fire people on the spot," one mechanical engineer said. A production-line worker spoke of a whole team that was dismissed. Then there were the June layoffs for Telsa's solar-energy employees, who were called into a prework conference call and laid off en masse during the call.

"I had a running joke with a buddy of mine on my team," one solar salesperson said. "Every time we saw each other we would grin and say, 'Oh, what a surprise that I see you this time! I thought one of us would be fired by now."

'WTF' emails

Many employees said they believed Musk's heart was in the right place, but, as with other "geniuses of the world," he is "not the best leader," as one put it.

Others said that working at Tesla means subscribing to Musk's vision — without exception.

"You're not there to be creative. You're there to fulfill his mission," a software engineer said. "If you don't understand that and you're talking about your feelings, you're probably going to get fired."

A former VP who reported to him said, "He is terrible, terrible at execution and terrible at management. The entire management structure at Tesla is impotent and terrible. There are exceptions, but, on average, most managers at Tesla have no idea what they're doing."

For some people, Musk's "open inbox" policy, intended to show the CEO's receptiveness to feedback, is a prime example.

The CEO invites any employee, at any level, to write him directly with thoughts or concerns. A lot of employees said they love this.

"Tesla is open to communication lines to all levels of management," Cheryl Blackwell, a security manager for Tesla's Buffalo, New York, facility, said. "There is no chain of command. I never feel like I can't go to a person [with ideas]."

But some complained this system could do more harm than good. Another former executive claimed that Musk would forward employee emails to the VP in charge with a simple three-letter directive: "WTF." Panicked recipients would stop what they were doing and research the issue.

"It would cause huge scrambles, and you would spend days chasing down some issue that wasn't a real problem," this person said. "Giving people a license to email Elon created a bunch of problems with everyday work. There's a reason why the chain of command exists."

Fear of the tweet

If Musk's WTF emails can trigger a fire drill, it's nothing compared to his tweets.

With his outspoken personality and an itchy trigger finger, Musk routinely picks public fights and makes promises about all sorts of amazing new products, features, or milestones.

Sometimes his tweets land him and the company in serious trouble, such as the infamous "funding secured" tweet, which has led to an SEC investigation.

And much of the time, these public pronouncements are made before Tesla employees, including the people directly responsible for the tasks, have been informed. After a tweet, some employees look at each other, exasperated, and say, "Oh, so that's what we're doing now?"

For instance, in June Musk fired off several tweets boasting about the specs for an electric pickup. The level of detail Musk announced was a surprise to some insiders.

A manufacturing employee recalls another incident: "One of the guys I worked with was part of the calculations for car performance, and he'd come in the morning, just shake his head, and be, like, 'Did you see Elon's last tweet? He wants to add rockets to the car now.' Just shaking his head, like, you've got to be kidding me."

Sure enough, on June 5, during Tesla's annual shareholder meeting, Musk really did announce that Tesla's engineers would have to put rocket thrusters on the new version of the Roadster, set to hit the market in 2020. He also promised that some Model 3 customers would get their cars months faster than the official delivery time on Tesla's website.

Some employees defended Musk's tweet about going private, praising it as part of the CEO's commitment to transparency. But the unpredictability of Musk's comments on Twitter has caused some members of the company's board to urge him to refrain from tweeting, the New York Times has reported.

Read more: Some Tesla employees are disappointed that Elon Musk isn't taking the company private: 'We have so much external pressure'

When asked about Musk's management style, Tesla pointed to its mission. "What Tesla is doing is incredibly difficult, as evidenced by the fact that Ford is the only other US car company to never have gone bankrupt," a Tesla spokesperson said.

To judge Musk's effectiveness, Tesla said to look at his history. He drafted a master plan in 2006 to build a sports car, use that money to build a more affordable car — the Model 3 — and offer zero-emission energy products.

The safety zone

Some workers say they're worried about more than just burnout because of Tesla's unconventional operations.

Tesla's factory safety record is one of its most controversial issues. In April, The Center for Investigative Reporting reported that Tesla's total injury rate was significantly higher than the industrywide rate in 2016, the latest year for which data was available.

Factories can be dangerous places and Tesla said its record isn't perfect. But a spokesperson said its past years' record no longer reflects the company.

"There should be absolutely no question that we care deeply about the well-being of our employees and that we try our absolute hardest to do the right thing and to fail less often. When it comes to safety, our record is on par with other automotive companies, and we improve with each passing month and will keep doing so until we have the safest factories in the world by far," the spokesperson said.

An engineer at the Gigafactory said he believed that Tesla's reputation for poor safety was more like a hangover from its earlier days, and said today the company has "put in safety systems."

Several other current employees told us the same. While injuries may happen, safety, particularly over the past year, has been a major emphasis, with workers getting constant reminders, training, and new procedures.

A software engineer said the engineering managers who work on the production lines are "conscientious people" who care deeply about the workers and are always looking for ways to improve the process.

For instance, the Model 3 production lines, the latest to be built, include fancy ergonomics adjustments. Employees can wear sensor suits that track their movements to minimize repetitive stress injuries. Workstations can be raised up or moved about to adjust to the worker, Crystal Spates, a Model 3 production manager, said.

The company has hired six athletic trainers to help workers who complain of aches and pains, showing them stretches, exercises, how to use athletic tape, and more, Kirschner said.

Still, some of the blue-collar workers we spoke with said they witnessed accidents in the years they worked there, or had accidents of their own, ranging from minor to serious. Phillips, who is among the employees pushing for a union, said in his four years at the company he has witnessed "one, two, three, four stretchers in the last couple of years come by me."

There's some evidence to back his claims. A report from the Fremont Police Department, received by Business Insider, showed more than 300 911 calls made from the Fremont facility between January 2016 and March 2018 involving a wide variety of alleged issues, such as intruders on the property and suicide threats.

Of those 300 calls, 11 involved claims of accidents and six involved claims of accidents with "no visible injury."

That compares to nine 911 calls during the same time period — including claims of accidents and a trash fire — at General Motor's 1,200-employee, 4.3-million-square-foot factory in Lake Orion, Michigan, which manufacturers its electric competitor, the Chevy Bolt EV. These factories are not identical, so there may be many reasons the number of 911 calls differs between the two. (For details on the 911 calls, see the related graphic below.)

Several people said they believed one reason for Tesla's murky reputation is that it hires a lot of workers with no previous factory experience and trains them internally. We talked to factory workers with backgrounds from construction to home finance.

Employees said such a workforce helps Tesla think outside the box. But it also has drawbacks.

"In general, every factory is a little dangerous, especially if you have a workforce not used to a manufacturing setting and you're getting people off the streets who may have been at McDonald's or Starbucks," Kirschner said. So Tesla drills them on safety procedures, he said.

If an incident happens, employees are instructed to call internal security and wait for someone to arrive. Security personnel administer first aid, if needed, or take the person to a company nurse. The nurse may call 911.

The disturbing part to Phillips is that, "whatever is happening with them, believe it or not, the line continues."

Although Tesla's production line always stops in order to remove the person from harm's way and call for medical attention, the line does return to business. In other industrial settings, if the accident is serious enough, workers who see the incident could be sent home, Phillips asserts. "Because nobody can keep their mind on their work when they've seen something terrible happen to somebody," he said.

911 calls made to Tesla's Fremont factory versus GM's Lake Orion factory

Time to grow up?

While Tesla's happiest employees love the company like a second family, not everyone feels that way. Tesla is facing several lawsuits from employees alleging safety violations, harassment, and more. Tesla denies the validity of the lawsuits, making counter allegations against the people suing and the circumstances cited in their suits.

Meanwhile, two Gigafactory employees are attempting to register as official whistleblowers with the SEC, one of whom Tesla is suing on claims of hacking. And some employees, like Galescu and Phillips, are trying to unionize.

If things don't go Tesla's way, it could find itself mandated by courts or outside influences to make all sorts of changes.

Those who have worked closely with Musk said that the company doesn't have to be battered that way. The solution may be simpler: Have Musk remain as the visionary strategist but assign day-to-day operations to a capable, empowered COO, much like SpaceX has in Gwynne Shotwell.

"SpaceX had Gwyn — Tesla never had a COO," a former VP said. Musk "was never able to relinquish control." So Musk has been doing what he's famous for doing: "He micromanaged."

Finding a COO that could do the job without running afoul of Musk and getting fired can't happen unless Musk himself sees the light.

Just as with other companies Musk has founded, Tesla's board is stacked with Musk loyalists, including his brother, Kimbal Musk; longtime friend and financial backer and VC Steve Jurvetson; and early Tesla investor Antonio Gracias. Tesla said the latter two and the rest of the board qualify as independent directors, according to NASDAQ rules. But both of them have also invested in other Musk companies, such as SpaceX and SolarCity.

After the "funding secured" tweet fiasco, the board may have become more motivated to find a qualified No. 2, whether Musk is on board or not, sources told The New York Times.

As one mechanical engineer said of Musk and Tesla, "I respect the guy, [but] I think the best thing that he could do is step away from the CEO position and be the innovator. But he still thinks of it as a startup."

And with 40,000 employees, it isn't. "I'm sorry — it's got to mature," the engineer added. "It's got to be a company."

For those giving their all for the mission, they say the work, sweat, and tears are worth it.

"Tesla is doing things that not a lot of people are doing. We're taking on challenges because we want to accelerate the world into sustainable energy," said Jennifer Lew, a robotics engineering manager in Fremont. "If you are thinking about joining Tesla and are prepared for the intense work, I can say it's been a really good experience. All the challenges of ramping up these production lines? I couldn't have done that somewhere else."

Are you an insider with a story to tell about Tesla? We want to hear it. Contact us at jbort@businessinsider.com.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: NYU professor says Facebook should pay taxes for making us less productive

Conventional wisdom doesn’t hold. It’s time to bust this myth!  The long-standing belief is you need to have a big fat pipeline. It’s what our bosses have told us for years.  I remember as a salesperson keeping prospects that weren’t going anywhere in my pipeline to simply keep my boss happy.

Fat pipelines only wind up doing one thing — they create havoc and keep you from truly selling.  The fat pipeline requires too much time and effort just trying to keep the leads straight.  The result is you don’t have enough time to spend on your best prospects.

For years in my keynotes and training, I’ve advocated the best approach is to have a narrow pipeline to give you the time you need to spend with your best prospects.

Check out this 91-second video where I talk about this issue while keynoting at the Growth Acceleration Summit hosted by Zoominfo:

 

The acid test I use is to look at the % of deals you have to discount to close.  I use this as a key metric because it says two things.

First, it says if you’re having to discount, it means you have not been able to get the customer to understand the value of what you offer.  This is due to you not being able to spend enough time with them.  Second, discounting to close means you may be prospecting people who don’t fit the profile of your perfect customer.  This is due to you not segmenting your leads fast enough to narrow your list to only those that fit your perfect profile.

Ten years ago I subscribed to the fat pipeline theory, but times have changed and the ability to identify leads has never been easier thanks to the internet.  This ease of list building has resulted in pipelines becoming bigger, but that doesn’t change the reality that you still only have 24 hours in a day.  Go ahead and load up on all the hacks and apps you want. It’s not going to change the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day.

Narrow pipelines are the new norm.  It’s not a game of leads; it’s a games of leads that match up to your perfect profile.

Yes, I’m aware as you read this you might be ready to go ballistic with me or minimally be upset as to how your boss would take this should you share this post with them.  Hit me with your toughest concerns. I’ll be happy to answer and share with you more on this issue.

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

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

Content Marketing is something you hear a lot about these days – but what about content for sales? Nobody is denying that content marketing is effective for brand awareness and trust building, but B2B sales conversations require more than just awareness.

This episode features Bernie Borges, host of the Social Business Engine podcast recording a solo episode as he prepared to travel to the 8th annual Content Marketing World conference where he is speaking again. In this episode he explains why companies should be thinking not just about content marketing but also about content for sales. He shares convincing statistics that demonstrate how a more intentional focus on content for sales could make a tremendous difference in helping salespeople create more conversations with their desired audience. You won’t want to miss this one!

What Are The Most Popular Ways Marketing Sets The Stage For Sales?

A recent Content Marketing Institute study reveals the most popular types of content that marketing departments are producing. They are…

• Social media posts – 94% (not really content, but the promotion of the content)
• Case studies – 73%
• Pre-produced videos – 72%
• E-books & white papers – 71%
• Infographics – 65%
• Photos/images – 56%

These are the things that are getting attention and building brand awareness, but they only matter if they are driving profitability and sales opportunities. Find out how content for sales takes up the baton after marketing has done its job in building brand awareness and top of the funnel leads, on this episode.

Content Marketing VS Content For Sales – Do You Know The Difference?

Profitable customer action is the end goal of content marketing. But as we all know, the content marketing approach is a “slow game,” one that builds top-of-mind presence for brands and establishes a basis for trust with buyers over the long haul. To accomplish this, content marketing has to be done via an omni-channel approach (multiple channels of distribution) and is done on a “one to many” basis.

Content for sales is also aimed at obtaining profitable customer actions but has a significantly different approach. Content for sales is used to create or sustain sales conversations, which are not carried out through a one to many approach like content marketing. Sales conversations happen on a one to one basis – one in which the content being used is leveraged in a more personal and powerful way by salespeople. With such a marked difference, it’s important to understand the most effective ways to approach content for sales, which you’ll hear as you listen to this episode.

What Is The Role of Content In Helping Sales Pros Improve Quota Achievement?

Recent studies show that 94% of buyers consume several pieces of content from the company they wind up buying from. Think that through – if your buyers are doing their research via content you provide them, isn’t it vital that your company HAS valuable and informative content in order to move their buying decision along?

What types of content should you be creating for salespeople to use to create conversations? There’s no study that definitively shows what works best, but Bernie shares from his experience with clients, podcast guests, and conversations at conferences that these are some of the best forms that content for sales can take:

• Internal podcasts
• Case studies
• Use case examples
• Competitive intelligence
• Research reports
• Calculators
• Technical papers
• Industry-specific papers
• Inspirational content to attract conversations
• Third party content
• Personalized video

You can hear Bernie explain each of these and how he sees B2B salespeople use them effectively, on this episode.

The Powerful Edge You Can Give Your Sales Team Via Content For Sales

As Bernie wraps up this episode he highlights some important principles for producing effective content for sales…

#1 – Content for sales should be vaulted! Your sales team needs to know they have exclusive content their buyers are unable to find anyplace else. That way they can present the content as an expert consultant and in a controlled environment during their sales conversations.

#2 – Content for sales should map to the buyer’s journey and be specific to the buyer’s persona. It cannot be a “one size fits all” approach.

#3 – Assessment is vital. There are ways to effectively track content for sales by using UTMs to ensure each piece of content is unique to each individual. Use content libraries and distribution platforms internally then measure the contribution the content is making to the sales pipeline by using marketing automation technology.

Bernie explains each of these steps in detail on this episode and how a content for sales approach can help salespeople have more conversations with qualified buyers, which is an important step on the journey to achieving quota.

Outline of This Episode

• [2:38] Do you know the difference between content marketing and content for sales?
• [8:30] Overcoming the “Glass Building” syndrome
• [11:06] The most popular type of content that comes from B2B marketing
• [12:23] The type of content we should make useful as “Content For Sales”
• [16:29] Why content for sales should be vaulted content
• [18:52] The simple concept of how to gauge the effectiveness of content for sales
• [20:07] How YOU can be a guest on the Social Business Engine podcast

Resources & People Mentioned

• The Digital Selling Benchmark Assessment Report
• Viveka Von Rosen – Chief Visibility Officer at Vengreso
• CSO Insights Buyer Preferences Study
• The Content Marketing Institute
• DemandGen Report 2018 Content Preferences Survey
• McKinsey Study About Marketing and Sales
• Content Marketing Institute Study About Most Popular Forms of Content
• Episode 220 with Henry Menke of Balluff
• Episode 204: How Content For Sales Creates More Sales Pipeline
• OneMob
• Previous episode with David Meerman Scott: The New Rules For Marketing
• The Selling With Social Podcast with Vengreso CEO, Mario Martinez, Jr

Connect With Bernie and Social Business Engine

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

Subscribe to Social Business Engine

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One of the single most important concepts in marketing and sales is the “Ideal Customer.”  Yet it’s an area too few focus on.

When I pose the question, “Who’s your ideal customer,”  it’s usually met with an eye roll and sigh.  It’s usually answered with:

“It’s the organizations that buy our products…..”

“It’s the enterprise….”

“It’s a C-level executive…”

“Every company can use our product…”

“We sell to [insert the name of an industry or market segment]……”

The reality is, not everyone can or should be our customer.  Defining our ideal customer enables us to focus on those that are the best fit for our solutions and our companies.  Inevitably, they are the most profitable because they recognize the value we create with them.  Our win rates are higher, customer satisfaction should be higher, our ability to grow our relationships with them should be higher than with any other segment.

In contrast, our “customers from hell,” are probably far outside our ideal customer profile.  These are prospects in which we invest lots of time, struggle to win, inevitably win through deep discounting.  And then we have to support them, trying to make them happy.  Sure we’ve gotten revenue from them, but they are the most problematic and likely to be the least profitable.

We need to be rigorous in identifying the characteristics of our ideal customers.  It’s not just the overall demographics of the company/individuals that we seek to define (e.g. Fortune 500 industrial products company VP’s of manufacturing, VP’s of development, etc……)  We have to drill down more deeply into the “persona” of the company.  There are certain operating styles–two companies may have nearly identical demographic characteristics, but very different operating styles.  Differing attitudes to change, innovation, strategies for serving customers, risk profiles, attitudes on collaboration/partnering, transparency, and so forth.

All of these become elements of our ideal customers.  There’s some grouping of these that matches and aligns with what we do.  Identifying these, focusing on them maximizes our ability to win and serve those customers profitably.  Viciously disqualifying opportunities with customers outside our ideal customer profile maximizes our productivity.  Sure they may be buying–but they are highly unlikely to buy from you.  Why waste time on an opportunity that you are very unlikely to win?  Wouldn’t that time be better invested by working on opportunities that are in our sweet spot?

The fastest way to improve your win rates and sales productivity is focusing on your ideal customers.

 

How do you influence sales people when you don’t directly impact their compensation?  This is an age-old struggle many firms have had with the indirect channel…   The key we have found is to understand two key factors important to indirect

The need for highly effective presentation skills is profoundly evident in the workplace today.

Every day, in businesses all over the world professionals find themselves presenting in:

• Meetings
• Conference calls
• Conferences
• Networking functions
• Important staff and management updates
• Pitches to clients

Outside of those scenarios, arguably every conversation is a presentation. There is rarely a moment in business today where we are not trying to engage, influence or persuade someone.

Thankfully, history is fraught with invaluable lessons for us in terms of what works and doesn’t work so well in achieving our communication goals. Despite that knowledge, it would be arrogant and remiss of any training professional to impose those lessons on others without understanding their specific challenges and aspirations.

Why?

Presenting our ideas to colleagues or clients with confidence, clarity and authority isn’t easy.

Whilst many organisations still describe it as a ‘soft skill’ an increasing number of professionals disagree and consider it one of the hardest skills to master.

It’s not something most of us are taught to do at school, college or university. We arrive in the workplace and just because we become experts at what we do it’s expected that we can speak about it with ease.

It doesn’t work that way!

The reasons public speaking and presenting can be difficult for so many people is long and often complex. Whether the challenge stems from anxiety, introversion or perfectionism we all need three things:

– To be taught the skill

– To receive feedback

– To be supported

When it comes to the first element contrary to popular belief ‘one size does not fit all’ when training people in the art of presenting. At Mindful Presenter our core passion and mission are to help professionals to find, value and express their true voice, with impact and authenticity. We fulfil the critical first need by coaching and training professionals but we need the help of leaders and organisations with the remaining two.

Despite how much time, energy and focus we invest in achieving our goal, sometimes there is a greater force at play. That force is a cultural and leadership energy which occasionally stifles free, honest and open communication that respects the individual.

Many of the requests we receive to craft and deliver presentation skills workshop include words such as:

‘We would like to help our team get better at ‘influencing and engaging others’.

‘We need to improve the communication skills of our people’

In a world where we are overwhelmed with noise, information, pressure and social media any call to help people communicate more effectively is a noble one.

That said, on its on it isn’t quite enough. When we ask leaders what they actually mean when using terms like influencing, engagement and communication many struggle to articulate and expand on the generic terms.

How can you help?

In a business world that is increasingly struggling to connect emotionally as well as intellectually every organisation with a desire and commitment to improving communication is ahead of the game.

That said, rather than identifying ‘presentation skills’ as a generic development need we urge HR leaders and learning development professionals to delve deeper.

That doesn’t have to be as arduous as it may sound; it simply entails being able to answer a few vitally important questions:

– Has the organisation told the team in detail what they believe their current communication strengths and perceived challenges are as individuals?

– What does the business need and what is missing in the way your team present and speak to each other today?

– What does influence and engagement mean to you as a business and where and why specifically do you feel your team may need help.

– Is there a gap in what the organisation believes the team needs and what they actually need and want?

– Does the organisation have the leadership and organisation culture to support the way they want their team to speak in a safe and supportive environment?

Here at Mindful Presenter we passionately believe that public speaking and presenting is the most important skill in the world today.

Training and coaching offer enormous value in helping professionals to present their ideas with confidence and impact. You can help your team immensely by answering the above questions long before you seek a training provider.

That’s just the beginning of the journey as once the team have had the highly tailored and specific training you’ve identified, your role continues outside of the training room.

When they get home

– Take them to lunch

Within a week of your team returning from the presentation skills training workshop or coaching they attended take them to lunch and listen very carefully. Find out exactly how you can support them in using what they have learned that they believe would be helpful. Ask them what they need from you. Find out if there is anything at all that may prevent them from using the new principles they believe would make a difference.

– Lead by example

Avoid the culture of ‘do as I say, rather than as I do’. In other words, they can go on the best training program in the world but if they come back to follow your lead as a bad presenter nothing will change. Have the courage to get help yourself too if you need it rather than expecting everyone else to change but you.

– Keep the communication doors open

Create a climate of trust and support by encouraging people to speak openly and honestly about where they still need help. Find out what’s helping and hindering them to be themselves and speak with confidence.

– Find them a mentor

Support their development by finding the right person to mentor them. Find that person who presents the way they would like and need to speak and let them learn from their experience.

– Feedback; don’t judge

Give them clear and respectful feedback and be very open to receiving feedback in return. Don’t wait for months or until their performance review to let them know the impact they are having on others, create a culture of trust.

The question is, does your leadership or organizational culture support or stifle high impact presenting and communication?

For a long time, salespeople have been taught and trained not to disclose their pricing when asked. Instead, they have been directed to require their prospective client to engage in the discovery process with them, allowing the salesperson to gain the information they need to provide pricing. It’s a very logical idea that one should know what they are pricing before doing so, but that logic tends to elicit an emotional response.

Why Can’t You Say It?

The fact that you are unwilling to disclose your price can signal to your prospective client that it is so much higher than your competitors that you dare not disclose it for fear of chasing them off. If you are afraid of your price, then maybe they should also be concerned.

Even more troubling is that fact that you don’t seem to believe that your price is appropriate for the value that you create, or you’d be more likely to share it. The Mercedes dealership doesn’t hide their prices. Neither does Tiffany’s. Any brand that is differentiating and creating value understands that higher prices are a signal of greater value.

The fact that you won’t share your pricing is a lack of transparency. You look like you are hiding something negative. What kind of partner are you going to make if you are going withhold things that your dream client will perceive as a negative? One of the ways you build trust is to deal with things that are negative in a frank and candid way.

But in this case, your price isn’t a negative at all. In fact, it’s the way you capture enough value to generate the better results for your clients. Without their investment, your company can make the investments in creating compelling, differentiated value, the value worth paying more to obtain.

Sooner. Not Later.

There is no way you are going to win a deal with a higher price by hiding that fact from your client. By hiding it, you create doubt. By sharing the price, you create confidence in what you sell.

When asked, you say, “Based on the little that we know now, the price is likely somewhere between $100,000 and $140,000. If you are willing to answer a few questions to make sure I understand what you need, I can dial that number in from you.” If your prospective client says, “That’s more than we’ve heard up to this point, you reply, “I understand. Our price is little higher, but as we talk through what you need, I’ll share with you the investments we make to produce better results, and we’ll see if it makes sense for you to make the same investments.”

If you don’t want your prospects to believe your price is higher than you can justify, don’t be the cause of that belief.

The post Disclose Your Pricing When Asked appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Technology has surely proven its impact on the world. For nearly two decades now, it has paved the way for communications with customers to become easier, for employees to have a better working dynamic, and the company to have a stronger information security system. Technology has also helped in expanding a company’s research capacity.

All that and more prove that with the integration of modern technology and IT infrastructure, your company can have access to various resources that will give you an edge among your competitors in the industry.

As business owners started seeing the benefits brought by modern technology in other companies, they too began implementing changes within their organization. While these developments are aimed to provide imperative growth within a company, not every business can adapt as quickly. Thus resulting in the birth of IT myths that are circulating among many industries. But, for every business to succeed, it’s crucial to know which IT beliefs hold true, and which ones to forgo.

A good example of an IT myth is the idea that setting up a new business is better than reshaping an old one. As the online market continues to reshape how people do business, would it really be better to start all over again than to revamp what you’ve worked so hard to establish?

Another IT myth to debunk is the idea that IT infrastructures simply cost too much and fail to add much value to a business. Is there no longer a need to know more about IT infrastructures and what they can potentially offer to your business? Understanding the IT needs of your business precedes cost analysis. After which, you can implement cost-cutting techniques that will help ensure the efficiency of your IT system.

One should never assume anything unless it has been proven. The same teaching also applies to IT myths. Not only will you be able to uncover facts from fabrications, you’ll also dive deeper into research about IT services and what they can do for your business.

If you have plans for outsourcing IT services for your company, breaking or confirming myths helps you set the right standards and expectations for it.

From a business perspective, rather than see these IT myths as discouragements or hindrances to the success of your business, look at them as opportunities for your company to develop.

If you desire for your business to grow and attain real value, there must be a precise alignment of your business and IT strategies. One way to do it is to break those some of the most common IT myths that surround their industry. Check out this infographic that confirms and debunks 7 common IT myths.

Do your eyes get blurry when you’re standing in the pharmaceutical aisle trying to decide which product is right for you? Mine do.

During my last shopping trip, I encountered 34 options for toothpaste, 93 lipsticks, 62 eyeliners, and 42 colors of nail polish from one brand alone. Then there were 23 skin creams, 36 cleansers, 29 moisturizers, face mists, skin tints, etc.

There are so many choices! How on Earth am I supposed to pick?!

Even if you’ve never heard of choice overload before, you’ve likely experienced it first-hand:

Waitrose’s report on trends found that 64% of consumers always or occasionally feel overwhelmed by choice, and a recent consumer report discovered that already 54% of consumers experience so much frustration that they abandon e-commerce sites if they can’t choose.

But why exactly do consumers have a problem with choice? Isn’t choice supposed to be the purest expression of free will?

As a brand or retailer, you likely carry more than two products so that you can give consumers exactly what they want: the agency, autonomy and freedom to choose that one product that’s just right for them.

The issue with choice is that while it can be liberating, at its core, it is closely linked to the feeling of loss. If your customers choose something, it inherently means sacrificing something else.

Making trade-offs can cause decision anxiety and decision aversion, especially if there are potential negative consequences and risks associated with one’s decision, such as using the wrong product on your skin or spending too much on a product that’s not worth it.

If consumers cannot make a decision, it is extremely unlikely that they will make a purchase.

Undoubtedly, choice is becoming a real problem for brands and retailers that needs to be faced head-on. The negative impacts (fewer sales, reduced customer satisfaction, and higher return rates) will only exacerbate in the current market environment.

To help mitigate how choice negatively impacts your business, we examine the main causes of choice overload and explore ways how you can optimize the choosing experience in your stores by better assisting your customers.

Why Choice Is So Difficult

1) Decision-making timeline

For over a decade, numerous scholars have researched the psychological effects of “choice overload.” They found that, while people want choices, the ever-expanding array of options discourages them from making purchase decisions.

Barry Schwartz, a psychologist, described this phenomenon in his famous book as “the paradox of choice”: While we consider variety to be a good thing, at the same time, it makes our decisions more challenging.

But there’s more to it.

Newer research by Stanford GSB marketing professor Itamar Simonson sheds more light on this paradoxical-seeming consumer behavior:

“People like bigger selections – but a lot depends on where they are in the decision-making timeline.”

Having a lot of choices is great — until it’s not.

For example, if a person is contemplating whether to buy a new car, a larger selection is more likely to increase their interest in purchasing a car. If, however, a person needs to decide which specific car to purchase, a large selection lowers the likelihood of them buying anything at all.

2) Mental Fatigue

In 2010, Jonathan Levav and Shai Danziger examined parole rulings of highly experienced judges and found an interesting pattern: prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70% of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10% of the time.

The study result showed that decision-making is taxing and means substantial cognitive effort. Several other similar experiments that involved gift shopping, buying Dell computers, buying suits and purchasing cars confirmed this assessment.

The more decisions people must make, the more reluctant they become to make trade-offs and compromise, which is a crucial function in decision-making.

Big decision, small decision, they all add up.

People make many decisions every day, and with each decision, it becomes harder for the brain to carefully weigh the consequences. Our brain will look for shortcuts as soon as decision fatigue sets in or if we feel pressured by time.

It makes us settle for the path of least resistance, the default option, which is not always the best choice. This can result in people making predictably bad decisions, feel greater levels of regret and lower their satisfaction with a choice.

In reality, choice overload is not so much about the absolute number of options but rather about the complexity of the decision-making process and the ease with which customers can compare their options.

How you align your assortment and present options can help you simplify and facilitate consumer decisions.

a) Highlight the dominant option – consumers are more likely to make a purchase from an assortment when it contains a dominant option.

b) Curate and personalize – consumers are more likely to purchase from smaller assortments when these assortments are curated to include the most attractive options from a larger assortment.

Instead of overwhelming customers, display only a subset of options that will most likely appeal to them, ones based on different personas and interests.

c) Categorize – avoid displaying highly-differentiated products together as it decreases the purchase probability.

Every decision a customer makes involves comparing multiple attributes. Whenever they now have to compare highly-differentiated products with many different attributes, the decision complexity increases exponentially, making it much more difficult for consumers to make a decision.

Instead, clearly categorize options based on features important to your customers.

d) Don’t force trade-off decisions – assortments with complementary product attributes tend to decrease purchase likelihood.

If combining product attributes of different products would create a more superior product, such as cavity prevention or teeth whitening in toothpaste, they become complementary.

Aligning these products next to each other forces consumers to make a trade-off decision between options that are perceived as equally important (tartar control or whitening or breath-freshening?), making the purchase decision harder.

3) Preference uncertainty

Experiments show that companies can significantly reduce decision anxiety and consumer confusion if they offer decision support systems based on personal preferences and allow customers to define their preferences before making a choice.

Research by The Kellogg School of Management found that consumers with articulated preferences (experts) are more likely to choose from a large assortment than individuals without articulated preferences (novices). Consumers are more likely to feel overwhelmed by choice if they are unfamiliar with a product category, don’t have enough knowledge about the attributes, or don’t have a clear preference to dictate their decision.

How much do your customers already know what they want?

Typically, a large part of your visitors will be novice consumers who have just discovered your site or have been referred. You can attenuate the negative effects of choice if you help them articulate their preferences prior to them making a decision.

For example, before presenting a list of different products to novices who are in the market to buy, car manufacturer websites should ask consumers to answer several basic questions to help them articulate their needs and preferences.

Interactive car finder assistant

A similar approach can be found when dealing with financial institutions that ask new customers to define their goals before showing them suitable offerings, such as credit cards, insurance plans or checking accounts.

Credit card finder demo

This kind of support makes it easier for consumers to make a choice from a large array of options, minimizes regret, and increases their satisfaction with a choice.

It is clear that today’s consumers require assistance. They are confronted with ever-growing choice and have to make multiple decisions every day, some smaller, some larger, some easier and some more difficult.

It’s on the brands and retailers to remove the growing pain point of choice overload and provide customers with relevant, meaningful, and immediate assistance as they seek to make a decision.

To sum up, these five key decision support strategies can help you reduce choice complexity and simplify the decision-making process to increase purchase likelihood, improve customer satisfaction and lower customer churn:

1. Reduce the number of available options for consumers with a purchase intent
2. Help customers, especially novices, to articulate their preferences and needs
3. Limit assortment sizes through curation and personalization
4. Optimize the way you organize options
5. Highlight the dominant option and point out key product differences

This article has been originally published on Guided-selling.org.

I don’t need to convince anyone that, for SaaS companies, recurring revenue is a make or break, or that keeping customers for the long-haul and achieving negative churn is the new measure of a company’s ability to grow and thrive. But what you may not know is that none of that is possible without successful user adoption.

User adoption is the process of ensuring each of your users is successful in using your product to achieve their business goals. When managed effectively, it leads to higher retention rates and drives new growth opportunities for your business.

Now you know that user adoption is the foundation to driving long-term revenue, and successful onboarding is an essential part of that journey. What is unclear, however, is how well companies are executing on their onboarding and user adoption initiatives. How well are companies prioritizing adoption, measuring it, and improving on these efforts?

To find out, we conducted a survey and developed the 2018 User Adoption & Customer Onboarding Benchmarking Report. In it, we uncovered three key trends that illustrate notable disparities between the perceived importance of user adoption and how companies are currently executing and measuring their efforts. The majority of our respondents came from Customer Success (65%) roles in the B2B market (72%).

The most shocking finding from this research was that 74% of people we surveyed spent half of their week dealing with user adoption challenges, but almost half of all respondents say they have no user adoption strategy in place. This finding reveals that SaaS professionals in customer success, product, and even sales and marketing, are spending a tremendous amount of time on user adoption, but they’re doing it without a strategy driving the execution.

Here are three specific trends we uncovered as well as a few recommendations for companies on how to close the gaps in their analytics and strategies that will result in user adoption excellence.

Trend 1: Companies want onboarding at scale.

The onboarding phase is where first impressions and quick time-to-value, critical to true user adoption, occur. Often people make the mistake of having onboarding be product-focused, when it should be customer-focused. Onboarding is the place where and time when product owners help users discover their best features as fast as possible with the ultimate goal of having those features drive business value for the customer. It is the “inflection point” for user adoption.

With these concerns in mind, 70% say that improving onboarding is a top priority this year, and 26% indicate that they are specifically looking to develop a more self-service/high-tech onboarding model.

This makes sense as 72% of onboarding teams consist of 1-10 people. Teams are relatively small and can easily become too overloaded to maintain a white glove approach for long.

For companies that want to better scale their onboarding, start with automating just a few areas, then learn and grow from there about what works best for your users. Many teams that rely on a high-touch strategy today often fear automation because they worry about “replacing” the personal touch today with “robots” or automated responses that won’t land well or miss the mark with their audience. My suggestion is to start with tech touch not as a replacement, but as a supplement or reinforcement to what you are doing within your high-touch strategy.  Remember, people often need to hear things multiple times for new habits to stick. Think of tech touches as helping to reinforce these new habits.

Trend 2: Companies struggle to measure user adoption.

Measuring the degree to which users are successful in using your product to achieve their goals, i.e., how quick a customer gets to their WOW moment, and the payoff with your product, is as essential as it is challenging.

User adoption requires a holistic approach to measurement. It means thinking of your onboarding strategy as not just getting folks to use more of your product, but to ensure that they are getting business value. To that end, your measurement must align with your customer’s expectations and thinking.

Tracking the success of onboarding efforts, time-to-value (TTV), and ongoing user sentiment must all be considered. But, companies find it hard to measure user adoption because they aren’t tracking these metrics or don’t know where to look to find it.

Only 33% of respondents said they have visibility into their users’ onboarding progress. This is not surprising considering 18% said they are not evaluating their onboarding process at all, and 48% rely solely on informal calls with customers. This is a missed opportunity for companies to ensure they are delivering value on their customers’ expected business outcomes.

Many respondents indicated a lack of “visibility,” “data,” “VoC,” and “user analytics” as their biggest challenge in improving user adoption. Without the proper data or a way to disseminate that data to the right contact within the organization, companies will struggle to understand their benchmarks or areas for improvement.

Since almost three-fourths of respondents indicated that improving adoption is a high priority this year, focusing on establishing a proper metrics methodology and addressing gaps in data is a great place to start. Start by making sure that you are aligning your customer’s usage to business value. The expectations they set for the relationship with your business may become your KPIs for success.

Trend 3: Companies have little focus on and accountability to user adoption.

One notable problem appears to be a lack of accountability. Only 19% of respondents said they have a dedicated onboarding team.

This means most companies are without anyone truly accountable for ensuring their customers are adopting their product successfully. Respondents cited issues like “workflow confusion,” no “concise user engagement program,” difficulty securing “internal resources,” “management support,” and “funding” as reasons.

Thus, it’s not surprising that many struggle with prioritizing and gaining visibility into user adoption patterns.

Companies are unable to align the why (the reason the user bought) with the what (those things the user does inside the product) to provide that “aha” moment ROI to justify renewal.

It’s clear that companies do care about improving their user adoption and onboarding efforts. Yet they are overlooking significant gaps in their analytics and strategies, resulting in processes that are not scalable, data-driven, and unified. To correct this, here are a few recommendations for how companies can get started:

Ensure adoption is a top-down, cross-functional initiative.

If your user adoption strategy is not being directed by leadership, it likely has no formal processes in place, and is not a top priority at your organization. Since successfully driving user adoption needs to come with a range of KPI’s and the ability to track users’ performance across a range of functions, it should be an organizational effort, with a cross-functional adoption team leading the way. Start by getting key stakeholders from all functions (like customer success, product, sales, marketing, and operations) together to document the user journey so you can begin to identify gaps.

Institute dedicated training and implementation resources.

Onboarding is a significant milestone on the journey to adoption, so it is best to have a leader, plan, and team focused on doing it right. While 19% of respondents have dedicated onboarding teams, many more lack a dedicated adoption plan and leadership. Understand the onboarding investment and timeline across each customer segment and ensure those individuals responsible for onboarding have sufficient resources to effectively perform the necessary activities required.

Introduce a high-tech approach where possible.

We know high-tech models are more scalable and proactive than high-touch approaches. Look for opportunities to replace current high-touch workflows with tech-touch engagements. The right technologies can help you keep an objective, data-driven view of your clients so you can better assess users and develop strong user adoption strategies based on their needs. Not to mention that proactively creating these automated engagements also frees up precious time and gives customer success managers more time and ability to act as a strategic partner to their customers. 

Keep an eye on more applicable KPIs.

Sign-ups and usage alone as KPIs are not enough to know whether you’re delivering value and driving successful adoption. Not knowing the full picture can often lead to false positives or a false sense of security. Ensure you’re being holistic with your measurement efforts by also tracking time-to-value (TTV), desired outcome achievement, customer sentiment, and a smooth customer experience.

The above benchmarking analysis gives insight into how others are (or are not) addressing user adoption effectively. To understand where you fall in comparison, ask yourself – are you driving long-term user adoption or merely short-term usage?

To read more about our findings, download the full report here.

The post Top User Adoption & Onboarding Trends for 2018 [Report] appeared first on OpenView Labs.

How to Integrate Sales and Marketing to Grow Your Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

It’s an age-old notion that marketing and sales teams don’t get along. Like rival football teams in a teen movie, the marketing team sees themselves as the heroes—creating forward-thinking ideas and campaigns that will open up a whole new world of potential clients and drive tremendous growth—while the sales team thinks what they’re doing is the real work—coaxing customers along, catering to their needs, closing the deal and actually bringing in revenue.

But just like in a great teen movie, the moral of the story here is that when the two teams can put aside their differences and work together, they can accomplish really amazing things for your business.

Creating harmony between sales and marketing might be easier said than done, but it is definitely possible. Here we take a look at some tips for integrating sales and marketing in a way that will lead to healthier revenue and happier teams.

Foster Friendship

It may seem obvious, but people will work better together if they know and like each other. Because there is typically a rivalry between sales and marketing teams, there’s a lot of value in bringing these two groups together. You can do it however you’d like: an informal lunch gathering in the office, an after-work excursion to a bowling alley, or an overnight offsite to a nearby hotel with hiking or fun outdoor activities.

No matter what your budget is, there are real, tangible benefits in bringing these teams together and creating a convivial environment. Happiness can lead to success in various aspects of life, and work is no exception. Happy employees are more engaged, productive, and do better work.

Not only does this productivity and engagement help your bottom line, it also makes being at work a more pleasant experience for all, and isn’t that a win-win?

Create an Inclusive Strategy

Once you’ve built a bridge between these two teams, you’ll want to share your comprehensive business strategy. This should be the grand, guiding vision for all employees in your company, including those on the sales and marketing teams.

Present this strategy to both teams together, and then open things up for discussion. How does their day to day work feed into the larger strategy? How can the sales and marketing teams collaborate to work towards achieving the business’s overarching goals? What are the strategies of the two teams, and then what are the tactics they’ll use to achieve results?

Getting these teams talking about how they fit into the larger picture can encourage them to think about collaboration not just as a nice to have, but as a must have in order to serve the business as a whole.

Encourage Communication

Now that you’ve got the teams talking, keep those lines of communication open, and create a clear system for the sales and marketing teams to transfer leads. Where in the marketing hourglass does it make the most sense to get the sales team involved?

Will all of the channels through which marketers can reach prospects nowadays, your marketing team has the know and like portion of the funnel covered. But things tend to get a little murky by trust and try.

Some people will be willing to take online reviews, social media posts, and offers like white papers or webinars as enough to convince them to become a customer. Others will need a bit more hand holding in the form of sales presentations, demos, or just someone to talk to before they commit.

You want to make sure that these prospects who are on the fence actually end up getting in touch with a sales person. They’re so close to converting, and if your sales team is responsive and provides them with just a little bit more personalized information, their business is yours.

This means you need to create clear internal processes for identifying these people and getting them in touch with the sales team quickly and efficiently. Consider establishing a channel on Slack or a similar messaging system so that the sales and marketing team can easily communicate. A shared inbox tool like FrontApp can also empower your team to see the interactions a prospect has already had with your company, and allow others in your organization to quickly and easily pick up where their colleagues left off.

A seamless transition between marketing and sales efforts will help to build trust on the prospect’s end, and is one of the factors that can help you close the deal.

Share The Data

Marketers are constantly collecting new data on how customers are interacting with the company and on how effective their marketing efforts are. Salespeople are in constant communication with customers, and have lots of real-world data they’re picking up from these interactions.

This means that sales and marketing teams should be sharing data to identify trends that can help both of them improve their respective approaches.

For example, if marketers are seeing that a particular call to action on the website is getting a lot of traction, they should share that data with the sales team. It means that something about that messaging is resonating with customers, and salespeople can tailor their approach to include that same messaging when speaking with clients or prospects.

Similarly, if the sales team is hearing the same feedback, good or bad, from a lot of clients, they should be sharing that with the marketing team. If customers are saying they’re unhappy with a specific product because it doesn’t do what they were expecting it to based on what they read on your website, that’s an issue with the marketing language.

Marketing teams are likely using Google Analytics or a similar tool to collect their data, while the sales team is probably using a CRM platform. Providing the each team with access to the other team’s data can allow them to understand the customer from a new perspective and (hopefully) improve their approach to their own work.

Reward Good Work

Sales teams have historically been rewarded for their work with incentives. This is part of what can feed into that classic marketing/sales rivalry. While the marketing team is attracting new prospects with their work, it’s the sales team that closes the deal and gets the glory (and the financial reward).

I’m not saying take away incentives from your sales team. There is an art to motivating salespeople, and it involves a different approach for your different tiers of workers; some are stars, while some are laggards, and they need to be handled differently.

What I am saying is that it’s helpful to incentivize your marketing team, too. But the approach here has to be different. It can’t be commissions based on sales; instead you should identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and create a bonus structure around them.

Something easily measurable, like traffic or visibility, is a good place to start. Create a bonus structure around site traffic that’s driven by marketing content, or provide a monetary reward when you hit a certain number of followers on a social media platform. From there, you can broaden out and consider other KPIs.

It is possible for the sales and marketing teams to put aside their differences, integrate their approaches, and live in harmony. And it’s imperative that small business owners and leadership do what they can to encourage open communication and collaboration across team lines. Not only will this make for happier teams, but it will also make for a healthier business.

What is card shimming?

Card shimming is a new scam that targets debit and credit cards equipped with EMV chip technology. This scam is similar to traditional card skimming hacks where criminals place fake card readers on point-of-sale systems (POS) and ATMs.

The name comes from the paper-thin shim used to capture the data from your card chip. However, card shimming is less common than skimming because it’s much harder to leverage chip data for fraud than magnetic stripe data.

The Move to EMV

In 2012, the payment card industry introduced EMV chip technology in the United States as a security improvement for credit and debit cards, short for “Europay, MasterCard, Visa.”

Non-EMV cards contain data inside the magnetic stripe, protected by a CVV security code. The big difference between magnetic stripe and EMV cards is that chip data cannot be replicated.

Card skimming has been successful because the magnetic stripe and security code can be cloned to make new cards. However, the move to EMV has helped prevent fraudsters from cloning physical cards simply because chip data is unique to each individual card.

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Reports of card shimming first surfaced in Mexico and Arizona. But the first instance of card shimming in North America was discovered by a retailer doing regular checks on their point-of-sales systems.

When the test card did not slide into the machine smoothly, the employees took the machine apart. To their surprise, they found a shim inside the card reader.

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Rare, yet still a threat to card-not-present transactions

The nature of EMV technology makes this scam a rarity among most payment card readers. However, the data can still be leveraged in card-not-present (CNP) sales.

While the chip and magnetic stripe hold the same data, they are tied to two separate security codes. Magnetic stripe data is tied to your card’s CVV code, whereas the chip data has its own iCVV code.

Industry standards require card issuers and retailers to check both the chip and magnetic stripe security codes before authorizing a transaction. Therefore, most card readers should be safe from this type of attack so long as they follow the payment card industry’s best practices.

But card shimming can still lead to CNP fraud – such as online or mobile app purchases – where chip and iCVV data is not needed. Older payment card systems and ATMs may also be at risk if they have not kept up with EMV security standards.

What should I do?

While this scam is rare, it’s never a bad idea to look before you swipe. Use these tips to help keep your payment cards safe from card skimming and shimming scams:

• Look for signs of tampering. Avoid using ATMs or card readers that appear damaged or dismantled.
• Conceal your PIN. Cover the keypad when entering your PIN. Criminals may install small cameras near ATMs to capture your four-digit card PINs.
• Move to tap-and-go. Many card companies have begun switching to contactless payment to combat POS and ATM tampering.
• Notify retailers of suspicious card readers. If your card does not go into the machine smoothly, or it gets stuck, the card reader may have been tampered with.
• Check your financial statements regularly. Contact your financial institution immediately if you notice suspicious transactions or other activity related to your accounts.

Clothing retailers would love for you to buy their threads online, cutting out the costly brick-and-mortar middleman. But there's been no digital equivalent of a fitting room, so companies take losses by offering liberal return policies; your average consumer will order two or three of the same garment in different sizes, returning the ones that don't fit--at the company's expense.

To solve this, a Japanese company called Start Today has designed a piece of clothing that they'll send to you for free, and which you're never meant to wear in public. Their Zozosuit is a black, tight-fitting full body suit covered in 350 white markers. 

Put it on, and slowly rotate in place while a non-judgmental friend snaps photos with a smartphone. The company's algorithm then turns those images into an accurate 3D scan of your body, allowing you to order precisely-fitting clothes from one of Start Today's "Zozotown" e-commerce platform, which encompasses about 6,400 clothing brands.

It's a clever idea, and the Zozosuits only cost the company $9 to make. You'd just better pray that no one hacks your phone and releases those images of you spinning around while dressed like Andy Serkis.

It is easy to underestimate the value of a deal. When you enter an opportunity into your CRM, the value tends to be based on the contract you are negotiating or your prospective clients annual spend in your category. What those metrics overlook is the lifetime value of the prospective client, should you win their business in a way that allows you to be something more than transactional.

If, for example, your company keeps the clients it wins for seven years, then a $1 million annual spend is really $7 million if they are retained at your average retention. The reason this concept is important is that it provides a different context for how you pursue your dream clients. This is not to say that a $1 million account isn’t going to be worth your time and attention, but that a $7 million account will provide you with a different level of focus and intention in your pursuit.

Playing to Win. Big.

If you are playing for $7 million, you may be much more thoughtful and planning every interaction with that prospective client, ensuring that you create the requisite value to earn the right to continue on in the process of helping them change. Instead of winging it, believing that you have made hundreds-if not thousands-of sales calls before and that preparation is unnecessary, you will give your plan the time and attention it deserves.

When you take a longer term view of the value of the deal, recognizing that $7 million may require more of you, you will spend more time with your leadership team, with your manager, and with your operational team building the best possible solution, differentiating yourself from your competitors, and putting your best possible offering in front of your prospective client. You will spend more time strategizing to ensure you have a plan to win, and you’ve done everything in your power to mitigate the possibility of a loss.

More than anything else, you will spend more time with your prospective client, and that time will help you build consensus within the organization and resolve their concerns, giving them the confidence that you are the right partner to help them with the change initiative you are proposing. In a world where everyone hides behind three screens, having a presence is a differentiator in a competitive advantage.

Playing for Keeps

It’s not that $1 million isn’t a large deal; it most certainly is. But a $7 million deal is even larger, and it provides you with a greater focus when you recognize the greater stakes for which you are playing.

The post Competing for the Real Value of a Deal appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Are you struggling to find digital marketing strategies that work for your business? Are you so overwhelmed with all the options and worried you’ll waste money on campaigns that will fail? Don’t worry; we understand how difficult it can be to figure out what types of advertising your audience will respond to.

The world of digital marketing is ever-changing; it’s hard to keep up, and it can be especially difficult for new businesses to navigate. Luckily you can learn from mistakes commonly made by other companies so that you can avoid making them yourself and stop wasting precious marketing dollars on campaigns that don’t give you any results.

Start improving your ROI today, here are five common digital marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Overspending on Google and Facebook ads.

Many new companies throw a bunch of money into Google or Facebook ads, hoping that it’s the magical solution to getting them thousands of new customers and skyrocketing their sales, only to get little to no results and realize they’ve wasted a ton of cash. In fact, according to the Association of National Advertisers, only 25 percent of money spent on digital ads reaches real people.

In reality, we all know that consumers hate ads. Instead of wasting money hoping that someone will see an ad for your company online and click on it, you should be spending your time and money on providing value to your audience in exchange for their attention. In a world that’s content-driven, providing content that is useful, engaging and entertaining is what you should focus on, not how many impressions you can get on a traditional ad.

2. Not using retargeting pixels.

A user who visits your website and never returns is a missed opportunity. You spend all this time driving traffic to your site but rarely do users make a purchase the first time they visit a site. In fact, the average shopper makes nine visits before deciding to buy. If you’ve ever wondered how you can get those one-time visitors to your website, to return again and again, then using retargeting pixels is a digital marketing strategy you don’t want to miss out on.

Retargeting is a pixel that you can add to your website that will lure users back to you. Once a visitor leaves your site, retargeting pixels will “follow” that person around the web and display highly-specific ads on Facebook or Google that convince them to return to you. Retargeting will not only get you more repeat visitors but will increase your conversions too.

3. Not researching keywords for your blog.

Keywords are how your business will get found on the web. There are a ton of people on the internet googling solutions to their problems that your company can solve with engaging content. But your content will never show up in their search results if you’re not using the right keywords for your blog posts.

Google is responsible for 94 percent of total organic traffic, that’s why it’s essential that you research keywords for every blog post you write. You can use a tool like UberSuggest to look for high-volume, low-competition keywords that you can rank for. Think about what your target audience would be searching for on the web and how it relates to your business. For example, if you’re a hair stylist looking to book more weddings, research keywords, and phrases related to wedding hairstyles that you can incorporate into your content to ensure you’re easily found by your ideal customers.

4. Not converting blog traffic into customers.

Blog posts are a great way to drive traffic to your site, but you don’t just want a ton of readers, you want a ton of customers. If you want to get a boost in your conversions, you need to optimize your blog posts to convert readers into customers. Your blog posts need to be useful to your readers but not focused too much on selling yourself or your product. Instead of pushing people to buy, which will rub them the wrong way, you can pull them into buying by providing them with great content that showcases your expertise.

The next step to converting your readers is to get them on your email list. You can quickly grow your email list using exit-intent popups that will grab your visitors’ attention and offer a freebie in exchange for their email address. A content upgrade like a free PDF or mini-ebook will give your readers a taste of what you can offer and will help them build a trusting relationship with your business. The users that are a part of your email list are loyal followers of your content and they’ll be easier to convert.

5. Not promoting your content.

You spend hours creating awesome content that your target audience will love, post it on your website, sit back and wait for people to show up to read it, then you wonder why your posts get only a couple likes or shares. This brings us to another common digital marketing mistake many new companies make: not promoting your content. You need to promote your content on a number of different platforms, numerous times, in order for it to be seen by all of your potential customers.

Share your content first and foremost with your biggest fans, the people on your email list. These loyal followers get excited each time you put out new content, making them the most likely to read it and share it on social media first. Next promote your content on multiple social media platforms at pique times and even visit sites like Reddit and Quora, where you can join in on conversations related to your industry and promote your helpful content that leads users back to your website.

Digital marketing doesn’t have to be scary. By making yourself aware of the most common digital marketing mistakes, you’ll avoid burning a hole in your pocket and can get back on track to attracting new customers and increasing conversions.

In modern sales automation, it’s easy to make your small team of five feel like an army of 50 reps. But more volume isn’t always the answer to successful campaign outreach.

If you have email automation and dialing tasks queued up for your sales team -- but are wondering how to turn the corner with automated outreach, this post is for you. I’ll dive into the tactics and tools used by some of the top sales campaigns out there.

Here’s how you can turn your sales outreach from good to great -- plus some helpful email campaign templates you can implement today.

1. Built-in dial analysis

What separates the best calls on your team from the worst? If the answer doesn’t jump to mind right away, you have a problem. It’s important to know the calls that get demos and deals vs. those ending with upset prospects or hang ups.

Dial analysis tools like Rambl answer this question for you. You can see when certain topics are coming up (i.e., competition, budget, and timeline) and monitor for certain keywords (i.e., cost, specific features, and point points).

One of the best features of dial analysis is that it gives each of your reps the ability to see their performance from the perspective of listen time and follow up. Sales leaders also receive full access to analytics, so they can make changes on the fly.

Head of Sales Andrew Johnson says, "Dial analysis gives me visibility into the conversation quality my reps are having on the phone. With this information, I can see calls are qualified and whether our call playbook is working. Our reps love it too -- it’s streamlined their process, so they spend more time on calls and less on data entry and logging calls in our CRM."

2. Automatic contracts

Are your SMB reps spending too much time on the wrong prospects? Deals that will never have an average revenue per account (ARPA) worth your time can still add value to your company -- but you don’t want to use account executives on unprofitable accounts.

What if certain leads could self-select into your closing process? Tools like PanaDoc enable you to add lightweight contracts right into your workflow. This lets your reps focus on larger, more complex deals and relies on a low-touch/no-touch model to bring in SMBs.

With auto-contract sending as part of your workflow, you can have certain customer types (those that raise their hands) pinged with the right information to make a buying decision when and where it’s convenient.

Additionally, these tools enable you to send one-pagers and PDF content as part of your workflow.

3. Hand raises

How does your team handle content engagement? When a prospect engages with an email -- you usually know it’s done its job. Once you get the prospect on your website, it’s time to get your BDR team engaged.

Dialing a prospect after they’ve self-selected (i.e., clicked on your content which signals they deem it relevant) gives you the opportunity to connect with a prospect at the right time in the buying cycle.

This can be achieved by using text alerts on HubSpot Sales. A text alert can be set to notify the campaign owner any time a prospect performs a certain action.

For example, if someone clicks your email and visits the pricing page, you might trigger a text alert to the relevant BDR, so they connect with the prospect to field questions and qualify the opportunity.

4. Direct mail campaigns

What do you do when leads don’t respond; Put them back into a nurture drip campaign? Before throwing in the towel, give your contact one last push through a new channel.

Direct mail has come back into the forefront in recent years as a great way to get through all of the noise prospects have in their inbox. How can you get direct mail to tie in to your sales automation?

Tools like Inkit make it easy to automate direct mail helping companies leverage exploding offers and promos to the tune of a 8.9% redemption rate. That makes for one nice revenue boost.

These systems integrate directly with your outreach cadence, your HubSpot CRM, and your other conversational commerce channels (i.e., chat).

5. Automated email sales campaigns

Brandon Redlinger, director of growth at Engagio, says, “Marketing automation is perfect for nurturing campaigns and email newsletters. But when it comes to sales -- especially if you’re doing targeted account selling -- pure automation is dangerous.”

There are too many moving pieces in top-of-funnel sales, and Redlinger says if you mess them up, you instantly lose the trust of your prospects and will be condemned to the spam folder.

He preaches the importance of coupling an understanding of the dangers of too much automation with a powerful platform that streamlines the personal elements of your outreach efforts. Here’s Redlinger’s strategy for creating the perfect automated email prospecting strategy.

Create Your Campaign Templates

For your first warm outreach email, follow these guidelines to boost your chances of getting a reply:

• Keep it short: People don’t have much time to read, let alone respond to your email. Aim for no more than three to five sentences.
• Open strong: Mention a common professional connection or interest, offer congratulations on a new job or award, or send a relevant piece of content.
• Offer a compelling value proposition: Distill the value of your product into one sentence.
• Include a call to action: What action do you want your prospect to take next? Ask a specific question or give them instructions on how to follow up.
• Sound like a real person: Remember, people want to connect with other people. Buyers are much more inclined to answer an email that says "Hey prospect, did you have a chance to check the whitepaper I sent? Let me know!” than one saying “Dear Mr. Prospect, I would like to cordially invite you for a brief demonstration of our product. Sincerely, Mr. Salesman.”
• Choose a relevant subject line: Don't slap on a completely irrelevant subject line.

Here’s a template for your first warm outreach email campaign.

Subsequent touchpoints should not be “Just checking in," or “Wanted to follow up.” Instead, formulate a legitimate reason for following up. Here are four great reasons to follow up that will make you a welcome guest instead of an annoying pest:

• Re-emphasize business value: It’s all about what you can do for them. Find a different way to show value. Talk to a different pain point.
• Offer insights: Share a different perspective on their problems or a novel idea for how they can reach their goals.
• Educate: Not every follow up should be a pitch. Instead, offer a piece of valuable content, like a whitepaper, ebook, or webinar recording.
• Share news: Why do you think social media is so addictive? People don’t want to miss out. Follow up with news in your industry, product updates, or news about their competitors.

After some time has passed and you haven’t received a response, a big mistake is thinking the lead is now dead. But that's not true -- it might just be a matter of following up a few more times. Here's one of my most effective follow up emails for 30+ days out.

That’s it.

It gets great responses. Some people thank me for reaching out, others politely say no. Both are valuable answers because I now know the status of that lead.

Set Up Your Campaigns

Here’s where you’ll apply a custom cadence for each campaign touchpoint. Set up different campaigns for various segments of your list. The more you can segment your list, the better your chances for a reply.

If you have a large list, start A/B testing different aspects of your campaign to find the best outreach plan. Here are a few suggested variables to test:

• Number of touches
• Time between touches
• Subject lines
• Social media mix
• Calls to action
• Top-down vs. bottom-up approach
• Language and tone

Add Your Leads

It’s time to start importing your leads and dropping them into appropriate campaigns. If you’re using the right platform, at the end of each working day you can drop the newly discovered leads into ongoing campaigns without having to start a whole new campaign. The trick here is to make sure you don’t have the same leads in different campaigns.

Launch Your Campaign

Make one final pass through your list and templates to ensure there are no missing variables -- then hit send.

Analyze and Adjust

After you’ve given your campaign enough time to run, take a step back and see what’s working and what’s not. Hopefully you have benchmarks to compare how each touchpoint and campaign is performing. If not, don’t worry. Start tracking now so you can run a data-driven prospecting campaign.

A cautionary note: Beware of “industry averages,” which are often inflated. Companies sharing benchmarks are usually those doing well. Furthermore, many of these companies are much further along in their testing programs. So, aspire to benchmark numbers but don’t be held captive by them.

These tactics and tools are all about helping your reps work smarter not harder. Sales requires a lot of volume to get results -- but that doesn’t mean more volume is always better.

Sometimes what your outreach really needs is better insight on what call types and content are getting the most traction.

Other times, it’s about adding a touchpoint and remembering not to throw in the towel too soon. Either way, the determining factor for having your sales cadence turn the corner is your ability to iterate and try new tactics. So, go ahead and drive some pipeline.

Did you know it’s your job to help others be great too?  When you do this, you not only help them, but you also help yourself.

Do what you can this week to help your customers, co-workers and peers be more successful.

Check out the video to see what I mean

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

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