We all know how challenging it can be to manage a constantly changing pipeline, but it's essential for reps to stay organized to ensure their opportunities are moving forward.
So, how can you ensure that your reps keep their pipeline current? Here are four tips to help them stay on top of their deals.
It’s falsely comforting to think of selling as a process in which one step follows logically after another. But although rigidly defined processes might be the best way of running a manufacturing production line, they fail to reflect the reality of any moderately complicated sales environment.
It would be convenient if things were simpler. But the brutal truth of the matter is that in complex B2B sales our customer’s buying processes are rarely linear, compounded by the fact that they are sometimes poorly defined and even if they appear to be well defined are not always well understood by the customer themselves.
Rather following a hypothetically straight path, many customer decision journeys zig and zag, go backwards as well as forwards, find themselves way off-piste, struggle to achieve consensus, can be redirected at the behest of a single powerful individual and can be abandoned at any stage along the way…
And then there’s the opposite effect when – typically during a formal procurement process following the issue of an RFP – when the whole system might have the appearance of being in lockdown with very tightly controlled vendor interaction, even if the reality is otherwise.
The convoluted nature of the typical situation is nicely represented (and quite possibly under-estimated) in the above diagram from Gartner. It’s no wonder that so many complex B2B sales opportunities fail to make the progress that the salesperson sometimes naively expects or hopes for.
There is no magic wand, but there are a few things we can do. The first is to accept that for any significant purchases, our customer’s decision-making journeys are inherently complex. The second is to accept that we will probably never achieve anything close to perfect knowledge.
But we can do our best to avoid being blind-sided by factors that we ought to be able to predict are likely to come into play. Rather than following a rigid, linear “sales process”, we first need to diagnose where our customer is in their decision journey.
As we’ve learned, this can change at any time and without notice. Some members of the decision group may be ahead of the curve, and some behind. It’s particularly important that we aren’t deceived by an over-enthusiastic champion into thinking that the group as a whole are further advanced than they really are.
Broadly speaking, the current center of gravity of the customer’s decision journey is likely to be in one of the following phases:
Unconcerned: The customer, by and large, is currently unconcerned about any of the issues we might be targeting and is not yet engaged in any form of active buying decision journey.
Exploring: Something has happened to draw the customer’s attention to one of these issues, and they are trying to establish the potential impact of the issue, what remedies might be available, and whether there might be a business reason to act.
Defining: Having agreed that the issue probably requires action, the customer now turns their attention to identifying potential options and defining their decision criteria, decision team and timeframe.
Selecting: The customer is evaluating the pros-and-cons of their shortlisted options, further refines the business case and seeking to identify their preferred option (which may end up being “do nothing”).
Verifying: The customer is seeking to verify their choice, to negotiate the best possible terms, to eliminate any remaining reservations and to secure the support of their colleagues for the project.
Confirming: The project and its associated business justification is submitted to the ultimate decision authority for final approval – and often finds itself competing for funds with other investment opportunities.
These descriptions are somewhat idealized. It is entirely possible that some projects rush through or skip some of these phases altogether. As we’ve acknowledged, the journey can stall, go into reverse or go forwards. But it appears that when key phases are not completed to at least a minimum level – for example, clearly defining the needs and process – that it is far more likely that the journey will subsequently fail.
Events that might throw the journey into reverse could include:
We can’t know where the customer is on their journey unless we observe their behavior closely for the relevant indicators. And we can’t assume that their next step will be forwards. But we can facilitate that movement by eliminating anything which is under our control or influence that could otherwise hold them back. We might even create value (and influence the outcome) by suggesting things that should be part of their decision journey.
The other key factor is the involvement and attitude of key stakeholders. As the authors of “The Challenger Customer” pointed out, consensus is often hard to achieve, and is one of the primary reasons why apparently promising projects end up going nowhere.
It’s probably unrealistic to expect that we can directly identify, engage and persuade all the stakeholders in a complex buying decision. But we need to do our best to recognize who and what we don’t know and take steps to improve our knowledge of and engagement with them.
The more we know about these stakeholders’ role in the process, their level of influence, their attitude towards us, their motivations, priorities and personal decision criteria, the better.
But even if we have engaged some of these other stakeholders, we’ll often find ourselves relying on a particular champion to promote the virtues of our solution to their colleagues – so we had better assess whether they have the necessary qualities to act as the “mobilizer” or change agent.
Even if they are not the ultimate decision authority (it’s obviously better if they are) , effective change agents need to have the reputation, ability and personal influence to be able to navigate the organizational politics and persuade their colleagues to align behind their preferred solution.
If we cannot be confident that our apparent champion has these attributes, we need to review our strategy and – probably – revise our level of confidence that we will end up winning the deal.
In this, and in all other matters, we will end up making better choices and securing better outcomes if we recognize that the environment into which we have to sell is complicated, non-linear, sometimes unknowable and rarely predictable rather than fooling ourselves into thinking that our world can be encapsulated in a simple model.
Please share your thoughts on these ideas – do they match your experience?
Usually, after a sales call, we ask ourselves, “Did I accomplish my objectives?” (That is if you assess yourself after the sales call.) It’s a critical question, we need to be purposeful and focused in each of our meetings with the customer.
One of the things salespeople worry about is their prospective client have information parity. They are concerned that their client will know as much or more than they do as it pertains to what they sell. One of the terrible lies perpetuated by pseudo-sales experts on sites like LinkedIn is that because buyers can research what they’re selling online, the buyer automatically has information parity, making the salesperson irrelevant.
Let’s look closer. First of all, if there is information parity, it’s not because the buyer has greater access to information. If this is true it is more likely that the salesperson doesn’t know enough to create a disparity. Second, it would be very difficult for the buyer to achieve information parity, especially by researching what it is they are buying.
Let’s use an extreme example to make the case here. Let’s say you sell ERP solutions (Enterprise Resource Planning). There aren’t too many things more complicated to buy or to sell then ERP. Changing systems is the same as having a quadruple bypass, a brain surgery, a root canal, and a colonoscopy all at the same time. The person buying ERP software is likely to buy it one time over the course of their career. Maybe twice, but only under duress, the undertaking being overwhelming and disruptive to the business.
If you sell ERP solutions, you and your company will have the experience of helping hundreds or thousands of companies understand the decisions they need to make to successfully implement a solution like the one you sell. This is business acumen and situational knowledge.
It’s likely you are going to come across prospective clients who have purchased what you sell from for five different companies over the course of their career. They will be educated buyers, with strong ideas about what the right solution might look like for them and for their company. But that being true, they will have only considered the solution as it pertains to what they want and what they need. This means they will not have the context of other scenarios and other situations that cause other people and other companies to make different decisions.
Much of what you learn serving other people will remain unknown to your prospective client, once again providing you with the ability to offer them your advice, your insight, and your experiences that provide them with new and potentially better choices.
Let’s assume you’re working with an extremely educated buyer. They bought what you sell in a number of companies, tried a number of different things, and know quite a bit. It still likely that you have an advantage in the information available because you work in your industry, and you know the trends that are going to impact what your prospective client buys, why they buy, and what they should be preparing for as they look at your solution now. By keeping abreast of the changes going on in your industry, you are a subject matter expert, and that provides you with the ability to speak about the intersection of your business and your client’s, bridging the lack of knowledge about what is changing in your industry.
Despite what you might read and hear about your prospective client doing research, it isn’t likely that they’re going to very easily catch up when it comes to having the depth of understanding necessary to make the best choice. The analogy would be believing that someone could offer you medical advice by searching the WebMD to diagnose your symptoms and prescribe a treatment plan.
This being said, it is your job to maintain greater subject matter expertise at the intersection of your business and your prospective client’s business. This makes it your responsibility to read, to study, and to pay attention to how you and your company serve your clients. If your prospective client knows everything you know, they do not need you to advise them.
"In The Lost Art of Closing, Anthony proves that the final commitment can actually be one of the easiest parts of the sales process—if you’ve set it up properly with other commitments that have to happen long before the close. The key is to lead customers through a series of necessary steps designed to prevent a purchase stall."
Buy NowThe post How to Maintain Information Disparity appeared first on The Sales Blog.
If you work with clients who are curious about inbound marketing you’ve probably heard them ask how long it takes. You might tell them that it takes a number of months before you actually start seeing a return. And, you might feel a little uneasy about giving them an exact date when they’ll start seeing some action because you don’t want to make promises you can’t keep.
So, maybe you tell them that the speed of the return is tied to the aggressiveness of the strategy. Understandably, you might feel like this is a little vague. Well, you’re not alone. Chances are the prospect feels the same way.
The good news is it’s vague for a reason. So, let’s pick this question apart and talk about a good way to answer it.
How long does inbound marketing take?
If a prospect starts talking about how long something’s going to take before that something has been determined, then we’re not off to a great start.
Remember this tweet?
Who are we?
CLIENTS!What do we want?
WE DON'T KNOW!When do we want it?
RIGHT NOW!— Kelly Vaughn in Portugal (@kvlly) July 21, 2018
To the prospects asking how long inbound marketing takes: Inbound Marketing isn’t the thing that “takes” any amount of time. It’s the goals that take time.
So the question should actually be “How long does it take to achieve X goal?”
If we at least know how to ask that question, we’re in pretty good shape. The next step will be figuring out how that goal will play with the current state of our website, lead generation, social media following, or whatever else is relevant to it.
Understandably, if we want to generate 100 leads per month and we’ve historically been generating 0, it could take a long, long time.
Alternatively, if the goal is to increase leads by 20% and we have clearly defined initiatives that have been generating them in the past, then we can accurately gauge how much of an increase in marketing velocity will be needed to support that goal. Consequently, nailing down a timeline will be much easier than in the first example.
Inbound marketing isn’t a practice that is ever completed. It’s not like you’re going to implement inbound marketing in a few days and think:
“Hey, we did it, we’re done. Nice work everyone. Let’s pack it in and go home.”
If this all sounds pretty basic, let’s look at some issues to avoid in goal setting. With that established, we can get on with setting goals, implementing a strategy that supports them, and launch and adjust to drive success.
Here are a few of the biggest issues I see when setting goals with clients.
With issues like the ones above, our first set of goals will be to set up our website and backend tools to capture information that we can use for setting realistic goals in the future.
This depends on how much needs to be done. For instance, if you need to rework your website conversion paths to support goals in Google Analytics, this could take a pretty long time to get spun up.
For most other projects, about a couple of weeks will be spent sharing access to tools and auditing them. Then, another few days will be spent configuring them and integrating them together. Lastly, we’ll need to generate data to base future goals upon. In this case, it will take at least one year to have rock solid data.
That said, you can start setting goals after a quarter, just be aware that if your industry is seasonal these goals will be somewhat anecdotal.
From here, it’s a matter of adjusting our marketing to meet our goals. Quarterly goal setting should get better, quarter over quarter. We’ll uncover issues, align sales and marketing, push more leads, or push fewer but more qualified leads. We’ll stop doing certain marketing initiatives that aren’t paying off and have strong data to guide our strategy.
And our inbound marketing strategies will get stronger and stronger the longer we work on them.
So, to answer the question “how long does inbound marketing take?”, the answer is “it depends on how strong you want your strategies to be.”
Social sharing plays a huge part in B2B and B2C businesses. If your content isn’t shared, no one sees your brand, and by extension, no one knows you exist. You become invisible and being invisible is being out of business.
Approximately 3 billion people use social media in 2018. Conclusion? Your audience is online and that’s why it’s more important than ever to understand social networks. They are the most efficient way to interact with your customers and increase your brand’s reach. But don’t fool yourself: social media is tricky and not always easy to figure out. Features, feeds, algorithms, they change all the time and newer and trendier stuff appears out of nowhere.
However, if you have a clear idea of where your content is most shared to, you can adapt your marketing strategy to increase your company’s potential reach and benefit from its results. But if you don’t really know how to measure social media sharing and need a few insights on the subject, check the following data points.
We’ve made an analysis of 110,013,562 shares over the last 90 days and analyzed where users were sharing content to. Here’s what we found:
– 71% of shares are made through copy & paste
Copy & paste happens when someone copies a link and pastes it into a private channel like messaging apps or email. This is what is called dark social. And since dark social is rising at an excruciating pace, four out of five posts are shared through private channels, it’s definitely something you should be aware. Yet, copy & paste sharing is, at times, a big problem for companies: they don’t have access this data. So, for a marketer who wants to know what kind of content has the most shares and engagement, you shouldn’t just stick with Google Analytics because, as you can see, most of your shares (71%!) are hidden in the dark. If you want to know how to track this shares and have a detailed representation of your customer’s real interests, check out this post.
– Facebook sees 320% more shares than Twitter
Facebook still is the largest social network in the world. It has 2 billion monthly active users (a quarter of the world’s population!) in comparison to Twitter’s “humble” 317 million. So, it’s no surprise that Facebook dominates Twitter on the absolute number of shares. If you have a B2B or B2C business, you should know that both networks perform great in terms of content shared and potential reach. But be aware that they are quite different: Twitter is more focused on providing real-time news and public microblogging. In fact, 75% of Twitter’s users check the site daily for news. So, if your audience likes to search for quick information or reviews and ideas, this is the place to find and target them. But don’t forget that Facebook has 2x shares than Twitter and, for a killer approach, you should use both.
– WhatsApp + Messenger + Email shares higher than Facebook
I don’t think anybody underestimates Facebook’s power and influence on the web. Zuckerberg got it right. However, many marketers forget that are some less obvious social media networks that, combined, provide as many shares as Facebook. It’s easy to understand what people are sharing on Facebook, we just look at their feeds. However, it’s almost impossible to make the same analysis for private networks, such as Email, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Yet, people tend to forget that their audience is also there. Facebook has approximately 2 billion monthly users against Whatsapp’s 1.5 billion, Messenger’s 1.3 billion and well, everyone uses email, right? So, if you have a business and are interested in gather data to make decisions, you should definitely add Facebook to your strategy because it’s a great platform for organic and paid opportunities. However, be careful not to forget that users tend to share more content on private channels like Messenger, Email and WhatsApp than they do on public ones.
For the ones who don’t know Flipboard, it’s part social app and part news app. Flipboard gathers content from social networks and blogs and displays these articles and posts into a magazine format. Its users can create magazines for themselves or subscribe to the magazines of other users. Flipboard has 100 million users and 15 million magazines. According to our data, Flipboard has 0.64% of the shares, whereas Google+ only has 0.19%. This is good news for publishers since private bookmarks drive traffic to them, traffic they often see as “Direct”. If you use articles as part of your social media strategy, you should consider using Flipboard because it’s a great way to put your content out there and reach your target audience.
– 99% of shares are made in just 6 different networks
According to our data, the vast majority of shares (99%) are made through Copy & Paste, Facebook, WhatsApp, Email, Twitter and Facebook Messenger. If you want to invest in social media, you should without a doubt consider this data. Don’t try to do too much with limited time, just focus on the social networks you think are valuable for your business and that have the potential to expand your brand’s awareness. Many marketers and entrepreneurs make one huge mistake: their content is all over the place. They publish on 10 different social networks and hope to have amazing results in all of them. Less is more. So why should someone spend all that time and energy pursuing such an amount of social media networks? Not all of them will work for your business. It’s better to spend your time in the few that really add value to your brand. However, for you to know what’s working you should look everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Don’t forget private channels like Email, Messenger, and WhatsApp because they are a massive source of information to improve your business and your marketing strategy.
At Amity, we define persona as a description of a type of customer, including associated job titles, work responsibilities, current goals, pain points, etc., based on research of existing customers. You’ve probably heard of personas helping teams segment prospects and customers in a Sales and Marketing context. However, personas don’t need to be exclusive to those teams.
Having persona profiles for existing customers will help your Customer Success team work more efficiently and better predict the needs of different customers. It can also help your Sales and Marketing teams recognize good-fit vs. bad-fit customers before they get to the bottom of the sales funnel.
The goal of creating personas is to focus on the needs of your most important customers and how you can provide value to them. The goal isn’t to create a persona for every type of customer and try to meet all their needs.
To make accurate and effective customer personas, you need to conduct research about your customers. The data you compile will help you find patterns and map customers into groups based on similarities, which will eventually become your personas. Remember: don’t base personas on specific customers because that will severely impede the effectiveness and applicability of your personas.
The best way to gather information about your customers and how they interact with your service is to ask them. Surveying your customers will give you a more holistic view of their successes and challenges with your service. If it’s not feasible to survey all your customers, you should determine which customers represent the kind of personas you want to prioritize, and which customers are, realistically, the most likely to complete your survey.
We recommend you survey both successful and unsuccessful customers to create personas of both. This will help your team recognize customers that are more likely to churn and can help your Sales team prevent such prospects from becoming customers in the future, saving your organization time and money.
You can also survey your Customer Success team to see the customers from their perspectives. This will provide key information about what a CSM does to make customers successful and the milestones they look for in such customers, as well as early signs of unsuccessful ones.
Using this information, you can compile use-cases for your product based on customer personas. It would also be extremely useful if you created a playbook for each persona, allowing CSMs to better manage these kinds of customers moving forward.
When creating personas, keep the list short and limited to your most important types of users. This will make goal-setting for your different personas more realistic. You should try to make each persona up to one page long so they’ll be easier for your team to remember. This will also force you to include only the most important and relevant information for each persona. You can name your personas to make them more memorable and relatable for the rest of your team.
Successful and unsuccessful customers, though they can be personas on their own, could also be broader categories for different personas that fall into them. For example, ‘Champion’ and ‘Admin User’ can both be personas within the ‘Successful Customer’ category.
Test the personas on a broader scale than the people you surveyed to see how accurate your personas are and what you can improve. Don’t be dismayed if your personas don’t match your customers exactly. With the increasing diversity of customers in SaaS, it’s possible that your customers are a combination of two or more personas.
Depending on the kind of information you acquire during research, you may see your data naturally fall into categories that you can use in your persona one-pagers. Some sections we find useful are listed below.
This section will include the titles that people of this persona often have. Remember that a persona is not a reflection of a certain customer or role, so it’s natural for there to be multiple roles that fit the profile of a persona.
Though the people of a persona may have different job titles, they may have an overlap in responsibilities that make them all fit into a persona. These responsibilities may also correlate with their goals and pain points, so they’re important to note in the persona profile.
Here you will list the typical background in education and experience of customers who make up this persona. Do people of this persona usually have a master’s degree or just an undergraduate? Is it a combination of both? List that in this section so it helps your CSMs better understand the prior knowledge of your customers.
The goals of the persona are what drove your customers to seek a product like yours. Here you will write about the problems they’ve solved or are trying to solve with your service. Use-cases will be helpful in this section when CSMs are dealing with new customers who fall into the persona.
Goals can be personal or professional, meaning that the persona may be motivated to use your services for how it benefits their own learning, as well as the efficiency it drives in their organization. This includes short-term and long-term goals of the persona.
No product is perfect, so while you’re trying to improve your services and expand your capabilities, it’s important to be aware of factors that may lead a customer to churn. By creating a playbook for the persona, and/or including possible solutions or ways to manage these pain points, CSMs will be better equipped to deal with similar pain points of future customers.
Pain points, however, do not need to be exclusive to the customer-product relationship. You can also include concerns regarding company politics within the customer’s organization or certain departments they don’t get along with. Any indicator of churn would be helpful to put in this section.
Now that you have customer personas, you should share them with Sales, Marketing, and any other teams with personas so you can have consistent formatting and terminology. Then, you can share these customer personas with the rest of your organization to ensure everyone is aware and on the same page.
The two personas mentioned earlier, the successful customer and the unsuccessful customer can help your Sales team if they compare those to their various buyer personas. With both customer profiles, Sales will know what traits to look out for when finding ideal customers. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to include a CSM in the sales process because they may catch markers of bad-fit prospects that sales representatives don’t, which will save everyone valuable resources if that prospect became a customer on the path to churn.
By meeting prospective customers when Sales does, CSMs will see right from the get-go if their capabilities and the product will provide the right kind of value to prospects. Including CSMs in the sales process will also provide better insight for both the Sales team and the CS team regarding prospects. In turn, this will help both teams know what to include in CS personas and buyer personas.
Sharing CS personas with Marketing will help them lead the right kind of prospects down the sales funnel. Marketing can use the profiles to cater their campaigns and content towards persona-based segments. They can also leverage the unsuccessful customer persona by creating content that will teach prospects how to prepare their organizations and become good-fits for your service. With the successful customer persona, they can produce content that appeals to customers and teaches them how to maximize the value they gain from your service.
Don’t forget to update your personas regularly, such as once a quarter, to ensure the profiles are consistent with your business and your customers as you both grow. This will keep your personas relevant despite changes to your team, customer base, and product.
One of the reasons prospecting is so difficult is because most of us swim in Red Oceans, crowded markets with fierce competition (read my new column on Forbes for more on Red Ocean strategy). In the Red Ocean, success requires that you displace your competitor, taking their clients from them while working to protect yours from being taken from you. When your dream client already has a partner, they often believe there is little cause to meet with another salesperson.
Even if you have clear and compelling differentiation, unless your dream client believes that is true—or that it is even a possibility—gaining the Commitment for Time is difficult. Unless you know something that will benefit your dream client, it’s can be a real challenge to move your dream client to meet with you. To trade enough value in exchange for the time you are asking your prospective client to give you, you need to have some theory as to why they should change, even if you are less direct in your approach.
At some point in the past, your dream client changed from one partner to another partner. They didn’t go to the trouble to change for no reason. They changed partners because they were compelled by something—and someone—to do something to produce a better result. If your prospect is not already engaged in the process of changing, you have to provide the reason they should change for them. One of the places you might start this conversation is what has changed since they started working with their current partner.
What you know here provides you with a potential theory why your dream client should change what they are doing—and who they have as a partner in those results.
The truth about competitive displacements is that they take a lot of time and effort, both of which tend to be worthwhile investments because the clients you win tend to be large, strategic, and partner-oriented, all of which allows you to do your best work. When this is true, the time you spend working on being known as someone with ideas worth pursuing allows you to get way out in front of any opportunity for a displacement by nurturing the relationships you need. The time it takes provides you with an opportunity to share what is changing and why, building the case for change.
Answering these questions provides you with a theory as to why your dream client needs to change now—or soon will. If you are calling them with the intention of displacing your competitor, your product, services, or solution isn’t likely to be enough to cause them to fire their longtime partner. If you don’t have a better reason for your prospective client to change, they aren’t likely to have one either.
The post You Need A Theory for Why Your Dream Client Should Change appeared first on The Sales Blog.
Billions upon billions are spent on leadership training and development and studies demonstrate that many companies plan to increase this, with priorities including growing the succession pipeline, retaining high potential employees, and fostering innovation and creative thinking. Even with all of this investment, with the state of the leadership landscape, 77% of organizations are experiencing a leadership gap. Going beyond the typical skills you associate with leadership, in 2017 the Engagement Institute identified stressed leaders as a large cause of employee disengagement, however, stress is on the rise with as many as 8/10 Americans afflicted by stress.
We have been talking with several organizations who are looking at up-leveling their development initiatives to try and close the gap by looking at deeper levels of employee growth. Through our work researching authentic leadership, and most recently, what makes people perform and feel their best, we have seen some common behaviors emerge that separates those managers that enable their employees to do their best work, feel good, and feel valued, from…well…the rest of the managers. Given the manager’s critical role in employee engagement, experience, and performance, here is a summary of some of the patterns we saw.
We found that there are two elements to this, for which several core behavioral competencies are needed. Firstly, great managers tend to remove roadblocks that are impeding their employees. Of course, employees naturally will try to get something done if they need to, however, there are times when they have exhausted all options and they need to escalate to their manager to move forward. Roadblocks could come from policies, processes, or people (be that internal or external parties). Great managers work to remove roadblocks in the best way possible for the employee, the other parties involved, and the company. This may sound simple, but in fact, it takes a plethora of skills, including contextual awareness to understand the situation, communications to work through to the resolution, active listening to understand the issues, emotional intelligence to respond in the right way, and a leadership style that focuses on how they can best serve their employees. We have all seen those managers who remove the roadblock by “burning the bridge” so to speak. This leaves the employee in the awkward position of still having to work with those that were trampled on by their manager. We have all likely also seen those managers who believe it is not a part of their role to “get involved” with such activities. Both of these can have a negative impact on the employee’s engagement and productivity.
Secondly, while organizational politics regarding strategic plans and influence naturally exist within a business, when they become dysfunctional they can be damaging to morale, foster negative emotions, and impede business performance. Managers focused on their employees’ success tend to provide “air cover” which can be described as, “a leader’s ability to cover a subordinate long enough for that person to get through a tough period, turn things around, or move an initiative far enough along so as to be able to stand on its on”. This, in turn, not only allows their employees to focus on what they need to do, but also ensures their employees feel supported when taking on challenges, or risks, which can lead to greater levels of agility and creativity.
By enabling employees to maintain a focus on what they need to do to achieve their goals it helps them feel valued and maximizes the positive emotions they will feel from using their strengths and contributing their individual value to the bigger picture. Basically, you hired people because of who they are and what they can do, so…enable them to spend time doing it!
Another trait we found, was that these managers tended to know their employee beyond the transactional level of manager to employee. They took the time to genuinely connect with them as people, understand their desires, what inspires them, and what they need. This allows them to actively participate in their employees’ growth and leads to higher levels of satisfaction from the employee.
According to a survey from the American Psychological Association, the top determinant of employee satisfaction and trust in their employer is the timeless concept of supervisor support. They studied the impact of perceived supervisor support in career development on employee satisfaction, and the influence was profound. They found that employees who felt supported were twice as likely to feel satisfied and trusted the organization more.
Placing priority on knowing their employees, structuring feedback and opportunities based on individual values and needs, and spending the time to connect with their employees, enables these managers to identify and expose them to opportunities in which they can contribute their skills, expand their knowledge, be challenged, and cultivate new capabilities.
Beyond this development, managers focused on employee success, know when it is time for their employees to fly onwards to their next chapter. It can be easy, when you have a high performing, positively energized employee, to want to keep them on your team. However, great managers understand when their employee may need to move on to new challenges so that they can keep growing and not reach a demotivating plateau. For example, if you have a customer support employee who after some time is finding their role limited, you could work to move them laterally or upwardly into a new role where they can apply their skills to greater challenges that will help them continue their development. Staying connected to how your employee is feeling about their work, their growth and their short and long-term goals can help managers best identify when a change may be best.
A third trend was that these types of managers role-modeled the behaviors that demonstrated their organization’s cultural values and integrity. It is one thing to write down the values the organization has, present them, and talk about them…it is another thing altogether to demonstrate them through behaviors. It is likely saying “we communicate with transparency” and then employees finding out about something about the company from another source other than the company itself or their manager. That good old phrase, “actions speak louder than words,” is what these managers keep in mind. Behaviors we saw here included clear and timely communications, not throwing people under the bus, and taking accountability.
We all know the impact of an individual who is draining and always in some negative state, either complaining, frustrated, or angry. This is because energy is contagious. When managers role model positively energizing behaviors such as resilience, stress management, renewal, and compassion, it is contagious to those around them. When they role-model negative behaviors, it can foster workplace toxicity. A study by the University of Manchester’s Business School demonstrated that employees working for a toxic boss experienced lower rates of job satisfaction. Reporting in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Russell Johnson and colleagues found that experiencing such rude behavior reduces employees’ self-control and leads them to act in a similar uncivil manner. In fact, their study demonstrated that “people who are recipients of incivility at work feel mentally fatigued as a result… This mental fatigue, in turn, led them to act uncivil toward other workers. In other words, they paid the incivility forward.”
Ensuring there is a congruence between your managers’ behaviors and the organization’s cultural values ensures that the desired workplace culture is fostered.
In summary, while there are many skills and capabilities that set great managers apart, and many reasons why development initiatives are not seeing the desired returns, it is a good idea to make sure that your managers are:
Everyone has heard of the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle – 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers but RFM is the best way to determine the actual makeup of your customer base and provide insights to help improve your targeting, messaging and marketing ROI.
RFM analysis is the first step in helping you define customer segments within your portfolio of customers.
R – How recent was their last purchase?
F – How frequently do they transact with your brand?
M – What is their monetary value to the brand?
When combining these three parameters, you will have a strong understanding of not just the value of each customer, but an ability to communicate with the customer in a way that is personalized to them. You will be able to identify if a customer is about to churn or who is on the cusp of becoming a loyalist. It’ll even help you optimize your marketing dollars by allocating funds to segments that will make the biggest impact on revenue.
Now let’s get started. First, you will need some sort of unique identifier (e.g., email address, account ID, customer ID, etc.). Next, assign the following values to each customer:
Now that you have the RFM values, you will need to assign RFM scores to each customer. To calculate the score, sort the RFM values from highest to lowest then establish quintiles (five equal parts based on value ranges).
Based on the combination of scores, you can now determine which customers are the most valuable. For example, your most loyal customer will have a Frequency score of 5. Depending on their Monetary Value, they could potentially be one of your best customers or have potential to become one of your best. Conversely, if you have a group of customers with an RFM score of 111, you could optimize your marketing ROI by suppressing this segment from campaigns. Worried about losing your best customers? Create churn mitigation strategies for those that have a Recency score of 2 with a Frequency and Monetary score of 4 or 5.
As you develop your RFM Model and customer segments, the final step is to establish necessary actions and messaging for each customer segment. How will you message the customer? What is the metric that will drive overall spend, and what offers or selling propositions will work best? When is the optimal time to communicate with the customer? Is the total customer spend driven by high frequency or high spend per visit? Finally, as you roll out your RFM tactics, test and evaluate if customers are migrating to the desired segment based on your actions.
While RFM modeling takes some time, effort and data technology to setup, it is extremely useful for a variety of businesses, ranging from retail to nonprofits. Consider building your RFM program and leveraging it for actionable consumer profiling/modeling, refining direct response communications, improving customer LTV, proactive churn mitigation, richer loyalty programs, relevant remarketing/retargeting, timely trigger programs, data-informed product development and launches, and most importantly, revenue optimization.
The post Deficit Learning, and The Rise of the Just-in-Time, Situational Salesperson by Tim Riesterer appeared first on Corporate Visions.
Do you remember the last time you had to change a flat tire? (Okay, maybe you just called AAA, but let’s just imagine you’re going to address this roadside crisis on your own).
Chances are, it’s been many years since you had to do this. As a result, when it happens, you’ll probably need to refresh your knowledge by dusting off the old owner’s manual or looking it up online.
And that’s okay. Why? Because let’s face it: you learn best when you’re in a deficit. You learn best when you need to learn something—not when knowing something might just help you, but when it absolutely will.
Salespeople are no exception. And, there’s a term I’ve developed for this baptism by fire approach to learning: I call it deficit learning. This is the learning approach that salespeople need when they have a skills gap or an acute performance need that they can’t afford not to address now.
After all, messaging and skills training that’s inflexible and event-based won’t be of much help when you need to respond to a challenge right away. Those challenges might include:
Research shows these different situations call for dramatically different messaging, content, and skills training. One-size-fits-all messaging won’t cut it today. After all, it’s the buying situation and circumstances your buyers and their companies are facing—not their role or responsibility—that dictates their buying decisions. And that’s why “just-in-case” messaging and skills training—which reps may or may not need—will have limited impact. What they really need is just-in-time training that’s flexible, situational, and tailored to the key buying situations your prospects and customers are up against.
The technology to make just-in-time, situational learning a reality has been ready for a while. It’s the messaging, content, and skills—and the research to validate them—that have been lagging behind…until now.
In this webcast—Coaching the Just-in-Time, Situational Salesperson—I discuss what it takes to get salespeople the training they need, right when they need it. You’ll learn what it takes to get reps situationally ready and fluent to have the right conversation at the right moment—so you can be at your best no matter what selling challenge you face.
Thank you for reading this post from Corporate Visions - Differentiate Your Marketing Messages and Sales Conversations.
It’s that time of year again. Parents all over the United States have a certain spring in their step and are turning their thoughts towards carpools, school uniforms, sports registrations and new school supplies. After you finish searching the aisles of your local office supply store for just the right brand of notebook, take a few moments and focus on your supply needs. Are there tools that you could use to run your business more efficiently, identify better leads, or target the areas on your website that could use some attention? Yes. Yes, there are. And since nobody seems to send a “back to school roundup” flyer for small business owners, I’m here to share the tools that I’m packing in my virtual backpack to get ready for the new school year.
Hotjar
Wouldn’t it be great to hover over a prospect’s shoulder as he or she navigates your website? With Hotjar, you get all the information gleaned from “watching” site visitors navigate your website, with none of the creepiness (or questionable legality) of actually having to snoop around a stranger’s home or office. Hotjar creates a “heatmap” of users’ visits to your site and also records individual visits in video format for you to watch whenever you choose. The end result: you get to see exactly what works on your site and what areas could use some love. Best of all? While Hotjar has a variety of pricing plans, the free version gives you access to videos and your site’s heatmap.
Unless
I don’t know about you, but I value finding opportunities to include personal touches in my business communications. Unless, a service that allows users to create custom landing pages based on certain parameters, is a great option to provide site visitors with a personalized experience starting with their first visit. Segmenting your audience, and creating a message that will resonate with each group, is a minor change that can have a major impact on conversions. We are using it for all sorts of personalization needs both for clients and our own website. Not bad for $9.00/month.
ConvertFox
If a prospective client wants to initiate contact with me, I want to be available to her. My phone number is on my site, so is my email address and a project phone. What if she wants to “chat online”? Enter ConvertFox. ConvertFox is a complete client communications package that includes chat, email, and other features. While I haven’t found the email function to be quite ready for primetime, the live chat feature is a fantastic addition to my website and gives users another way to reach out to us. It collects an email address so you can get back to the prospect if you aren’t at your desk at 2 AM. And, like Hotjar, the free version can cover basic needs.
Leadworx
Now, if you’re looking for the professional equivalent of the big box of Crayola crayons, consider splurging on Leadworx an advanced analytics tool that identifies and tracks visitors to your site and provides insight into how visitors behave while they’re on your site. Although a bit of a splurge, Leadworx can provide invaluable focus to your outbound campaigns. Instead of wading through lists of cold contacts, work with a list of contacts who have already visited your site.
These are the tools that I’m using and loving right now, but I’m sure you have your own tools that you can’t imagine running your business without. I’d love to hear more about them!
The following interview was originally published by the CMO Council in the August 2018 edition of their Marketing Magnified e-journal. They asked me eight great questions about martech for marketing executives. These are my suggestions in reply.
In many ways, we’re living in the golden age of marketing technology. There’s a jaw-dropping amount of innovation happen across the entire marketing landscape, and this gives marketers tremendous choice, leverage, and opportunity.
But the volume of choice and the rate of change within the landscape is, frankly, quite challenging for even today’s best marketing leaders.
There’s too much out there to carefully examine it all. And the high-level descriptions of many solutions can come across as a basket of buzzwords that are hard to distinguish from one another. You really need to dig below the surface to understand what their capabilities and constraints are.
However, this is a super important facet of modern marketing. You can’t throw your hands up and say, “it’s just too complicated.” Or relinquish your decision-making responsibility to the IT department or a single, most-favored vendor.
Technology management has become a strategic part of marketing’s mission.
You can’t relinquish your decision-making responsibility to the IT department or a single, most-favored vendor.
You need to establish structured programs for discovery, qualification, implementation, and — I’d also add — ongoing maintenance and re-evaluation of marketing technologies across your department.
In most organizations, this is the role that a CMO’s head of marketing operations and technology can take on. It’s more important than ever to have someone excellent in that position, with the necessary authority and resources to do the job right.
As with most technology adoption, it’s a bell curve out there. About 25% of enterprises are doing this really well, and another 25% are generally on track. The other half are behind.
That’s a hard question to answer. It’s a bit like asking whether artists are having more success with oil painting, sculpture, or photography. The tools are advancing in all categories. It’s really a question of how good different marketing organizations are at applying them in the right context.
Some companies have become masters at wielding content marketing to drive business, from top-ranking organic SEO plays to engaging and influential video programs. Others have built superb social communities. Others have optimized ecommerce experiences, from desktop to mobile to chatbot messaging platforms.
Where a particular marketing team should develop expertise depends on their market too. Most B2B companies should have strong account-based marketing (ABM) capabilities. On the other end of the spectrum, most retailers should have compelling loyalty programs and, if they have physical locations, be pushing the in-store experience forward.
Where a particular marketing team should develop expertise depends on their market.
Generally speaking though, almost every marketing organization benefits from getting their data in order. A “single source of truth” for customer data has become increasingly valuable, both to power more personalized customer experiences and have the data governance mechanisms necessary to comply with new privacy regulations. Good data is also necessary to feed good analytics, which are increasingly using machine learning algorithms to bring more predictive firepower to marketing’s arsenal.
As mentioned earlier, I’d say about half of the companies in the market are doing a good — or very good — job of building effective marketing technology stacks. This has steadily become a core competency in a lot of enterprise marketing organizations.
There still tends to be a disconnect in most companies when it comes to empowering the broader marketing team to leverage these tools.
However, there still tends to be a disconnect in most companies when it comes to empowering the broader marketing team to leverage these tools. Even if you have a fantastic marketing technology and operations team, who architect and implement a world-class marketing stack, there can still be a struggle with getting deep adoption of these tools across the full marketing organization.
It’s not just about training, although that’s important. It’s about giving teams greater permission to experiment with using these tools for new ideas. That sort of bottom-up experimentation is a new motion for many marketing organizations.
It’s one of the reasons why I advocate for agile marketing management methodologies. You need to give people the freedom to try their own ideas with these technologies, to iterate and learn. And then, to follow through, you need to create mechanisms for cross-pollinating those learnings across teams.
Human capital (people) and organizational capital (processes) are where the magic happens in transforming amazing technology into amazing marketing.
Marketing analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik once recommended that companies invest 10% in their tools and 90% in their people. I’d probably nudge the ratio closer to 20/80, but the point is the same: human capital (people) and organizational capital (processes) are where the magic happens in transforming amazing technology into amazing marketing.
The classic enterprise software business model is expensive — both in its licensing costs, which we’ve simply converted into subscription costs in the cloud era, and in its consulting costs with the army of high-priced service providers that are typically required to implement it.
In some cases, those costs are justified. But not always. There are three factors to consider.
First, what are the costs of the software itself?
This isn’t just the initial negotiated price, but an understanding of what’s likely to happen at renewal points. What have other customers of that vendor experienced? How much leverage will the vendor have over you with different kinds of lock-in?
If it’s a subscription-based business, how does pricing scale per seat? What constitutes a “seat?” Are there overages associated with usage or storage? What level of onboarding and support is included, and what triggers additional charges? You want to map this out pretty thoroughly before you sign.
Second, what kinds of services are going to be required to implement, operate, and maintain the software?
A classic example is CMS platforms. The web experience platform itself can be quite pricey, but those costs are usually dwarfed by the fees of agencies and service providers to build a website — or even just port or upgrade an existing site.
You should look carefully at comparables here: what’s the range of costs that companies similar to yours have spent? Keep in mind how much of the resources were in-house vs. contracted or out-sourced. And again, it’s not just the initial cost outline in a proposal. It’s the cost over time with likely change orders and other “unforeseen requirements” factored in.
The upside of technology advancing so quickly is that there are often new entrants and approaches in the market that are designed to disrupt the cost-benefit curves of legacy enterprise software.
Third, given the above, is it strategically worth it?
How have you modeled the return on your investment? Are there alternatives that may provide most of the same value at dramatically lower cost? Which of those alternatives have you really examined?
Keep in mind that the upside of technology advancing so quickly is that there are often new entrants and approaches in the market that are designed to disrupt the cost-benefit curves of legacy enterprise software. And with technology’s exponential growth curve, “legacy” isn’t necessarily decades-old anymore — what dominated a market even five years ago might now be eclipsed by something better.
“Legacy” isn’t necessarily decades-old anymore — what dominated a market even five years ago might now be eclipsed by something better.
Above all, you want to design for change with your marketing stack. The easier and cheaper you can make it to add or remote components in your stack — or substitute alternatives as better options become available — the greater control you’ll have over your martech costs.
You need an excellent marketing technology and operations team as a pillar of your marketing organization.
You can’t delegate this to IT. While your marketing tech and ops team should certainly work with your IT department, to leverage their insights, to interface properly with their systems and services, and to adhere to company-wide technology and data governance practices, the responsibility for understanding how martech is successfully applied in the marketing department, to deliver outcomes towards marketing goals, must rest in marketing’s hands.
The responsibility for understanding how martech is successfully applied in the marketing department, to deliver outcomes towards marketing goals, must rest in marketing’s hands.
Marketing technology management is now a core marketing capability. It’s tied to the ways and means in which you execute and analyze modern marketing campaigns. As a result, you simply can’t outsource such core capabilities without exposing yourself to existential risk.
It’s like the old Groucho Marx line, “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?” The answer is in the question. Who should lead marketing technology? Marketing.
But it can’t be run in an ad hoc fashion either. Just because it’s a marketing-based team, doesn’t mean it can skirt around the best practices of technology lifecycle management. Your marketing tech and ops group needs to have strong technology management chops and approach their mission in a structured and disciplined fashion. It’s a pro-level game.
Just because it’s a marketing-based team, doesn’t mean it can skirt around the best practices of technology lifecycle management.
Most AI is machine learning, which is a collection of relatively commoditized algorithms for finding patterns in a data set and extrapolating — i.e., predicting — future outcomes from those patterns in the past. Lead scores, churn propensity, next-best actions, etc.
It’s actually pretty straightforward, and it’s simply the availability of fast and cheap computing and storage in the cloud that has enabled machine learning to suddenly blossom everywhere. (Thank you, Moore’s Law.)
The challenge with machine learning in marketing is the data. It’s not the lack of data. We’re awash in data. It’s the fact that, in most marketing organizations, that data is relatively low quality.
Marketers have historically not invested much in data quality because you could “make it up in volume” — just target a wider campaign and write off the junk within as an acceptable cost of doing business. You have a ton of data with out-of-date contacts, poorly tagged interactions, disconnected silos of agency or channel-driven campaigns, gaping holes in contacts with sales and service organizations, etc.
Low quality data has a high cost when it comes to machine learning: it causes these prediction algorithms to spit out the wrong answers.
While that was acceptable in advertising and email marketing, low quality data has a high cost when it comes to machine learning: it causes these prediction algorithms to spit out the wrong answers. Garbage in, garbage out.
Because the internal workings of many of these algorithms are not obvious to the casual observer — you’re not going to peer into a neural network and recognize that the connections between two nodes are obviously incorrect — it’s nearly impossible to know that you got a wrong answer out of the machine. All you know is that, over time, the predictions you were relying on aren’t delivering the outcomes you expected.
But by then, it’s usually too late.
When you apply automation to these predictions, without a human in the loop or at least some sort of human auditing and monitoring at regular checkpoints, then those predictions born from bad data can propagate into bad customer experiences.
Predictions born from bad data can propagate into bad customer experiences.
The number one mission that marketing organizations must embrace to take advantage of AI and automation is to get their data quality up. You need the right technology and the right data governance in place — but the latter is arguably harder to implement than the former.
However, the good news is that compliance with new privacy regulations, such as GDPR, is already pushing most companies to put better data infrastructure and operations in place.
Never waste a good crisis. Use this as an opportunity to up-level your data quality capabilities. It will pay big dividends in your AI and automation efforts.
The obvious stakeholders are the marketing teams that will be leveraging these technologies and the IT teams that set govern the company’s overall data and technology standards and compliance. Just because a marketing tech and ops team should take the lead with martech, doesn’t mean that IT should be out of the loop.
Just because a marketing tech and ops team should take the lead with martech, doesn’t mean that IT should be out of the loop.
There’s a difference between management, which in martech should generally be marketing’s responsibility, and governance, which should almost always include transparent IT oversight.
You will likely have different marketing teams who are the stakeholders for different kinds of capabilities. The social team should naturally have a large say in the social media marketing and influencer tools that you use.
But don’t limit participation in the process to the primary users. Consider the adjacent teams as well. For instance, an ecommerce team would also have a vested interest in your social media marketing technology, since it will drive traffic and play a big role in social feedback loops around online store interactions.
Make sure you look at all such adjacencies across marketing, as they often reveal some of the most important use cases for a particular capability in context.
But one of the most exciting trends in marketing today — well, really, across the entire business organization — is the breaking down of silos between departments that touch different facets of the customer’s experience. Marketing, sales, customer service, and product teams are increasingly collaborating on their intersections to deliver greater continuity to customers.
One of the most exciting trends in marketing today is the breaking down of silos between departments that touch different facets of the customer’s experience.
A big part of making such cross-departmental customer experience collaborations work is aligning departmental systems and data with each other.
You don’t necessarily need everyone running the same tools — different departments have different needs — but you want to make sure the right data is being synchronized across them and that digital activities run by one group that will impact the customer experience touchpoints of another department are clearly mapped out for both. They should be enjoined as stakeholders in the relevant marketing technologies.
If you don’t already have a cross-company customer experience committee — or “working group,” if you prefer that label — with leaders from each of these departments, you should get that launched immediately. Cross-departmental customer data and systems should be one of the permanent topics on the agenda.
Modern marketing leadership is the most challenging role in business today.
Marketing executives are being to tackle technology management, analytics, financial modeling, change management, cross-company collaboration around customer experience, and more — all on top of their existing responsibilities for content and communications, brand stewardship, demand generation, advertising, market research, and so on.
You’ve got to be an Olympic star to manage all of these facets well. It’s a hard climb.
However, there’s no better role you could take to prepare for leading an entire company in the future. Today’s successful CMOs will be tomorrow’s CEOs. If you can master marketing in this environment, there’s nothing you can’t do.
Today’s successful CMOs will be tomorrow’s CEOs. If you can master marketing in this environment, there’s nothing you can’t do.
My advice to CMOs who want to play a more defining role in digital transformation across their company: think like a CEO. Look beyond the walls of the marketing department and reimagine marketing as a much more distributed capability.
Everyone in the company is engaged in marketing to some degree. How do you empower them and coordinate their contributions to create a remarkable brand through remarkable customer experiences? Even if — especially if — they aren’t officially a part of the marketing department.
That’s the kind of marketing leadership that legends will be made of.
Thank you to the CMO Council for interviewing me on these topics. Want to learn how other marketing executives are leading their martech transformations? Join us at the MarTech conference in Boston, October 1-3.
The post The CMO Council asked 8 good, hard questions about marketing technology management appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.
In addition to our Sunday App of the Week feature, we also summarize some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the Web each week. We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please add it to the comments below.
7 Prospecting Secrets You Need to Know
Some secrets you make have overlooked when it comes to prospecting. Thanks, Mark Hunter.
What Red Bull can teach you about creating new markets
A great example of how a company created a new market to sell their product. Thanks for the article, Tiffani Bova.
How to Run Contests That Encourage User-Generated Content
A look at using promotional contests to keep your audience engaged. Great insight, Neil Patel.
Why You Need to A/B Test Voicemails
With voicemail drop now it opens up the door to test messaging. Thanks for your thoughts, Zack Cronin.
How to Build a B2B Content Library: A Beginner’s Guide
Some guidelines for beginners when it comes to building a great B2B content library. Thanks for the advice, Gilad Maayan.
Scoping Qualified Prospects for B2B Lead Generation: Shotgun or Laser?
A shotgun blast impacts a widely affected and less targeted area, while a laser beam is precise and accurate to its aim. But which approach will get you the most qualified leads? Thanks for your thoughts, Dan McDade.
How to Practice Ethical Decision Making at Work
Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s right and wrong in the workplace, here are some great tips for making the most ethical decisions. Thanks, Caroline Forsey
Advice For The New Sales Manager, What You Need To Know
Some great advice for beginner sales managers. Thanks for the tips, David Brock.
If You Work for a Company that Doesn’t Believe in Marketing, Resign
A look at why marketing is so essential for a business to be a success. Great insight, James Obermayer.
The New Rules of Building Consensus
Some great rules to live by when it comes to making decisions in B2B. Thanks for your thoughts, Anthony Iannarino.
The post B2B Reads: Prospecting Secrets, Contests, and Red Bull appeared first on Heinz Marketing.
After speaking to tons of business owners, I realized that most businesses owners started or purchased their business for one (or more) of these three reasons:
Reason #1: They wanted control over their time and destiny.
Reason #2: They have a creative passion/desire that they have wanted to share with the world.
Reason #3: They wanted to make more money.
Myself? It was pretty much a combination of all three.
However, many of these same business owners that I talk to are frustrated with their business, and that’s because the reasons why they started their business in the first place hasn’t happened yet:
They don’t have as much control over their time and destiny as they want.
Their creative passion is being stifled by the headache of the “business side” of the business.
They’re not really making a lot of money.
This. Stinks.
These business owners pour so much time, energy, and money into their businesses, but at the end of the day, they feel burned out. They feel trapped. They feel like they’ve been duped.
Why?
Because they find themselves owning a job.
They own a job without the benefits that come with a job – like a steady paycheck, health benefits, and two weeks paid vacation.
They own a job and get all of the negatives that can come with a job – like the feeling of being trapped, having to work 60+ hours a week, and sometimes having to work for people that they really don’t like (i.e. horrible clients).
Something’s got to change.
These owners aren’t experiencing the joys of business ownership – like having control over their time, sharing their passion with the world, and, of course, making money.
Think you might own a job instead of a business? Here are five ways to know for sure and ways to help you change things around:
Many business owners start a business because they are an expert at what the business does. Someone that loves to cook starts a restaurant. A dentist starts a dental practice because they are trained in dentistry.
The problem: the business is 100 percent reliant on you.
You can’t take significant time off because they business is dependent on you and your expertise.
A solution: Create systems in your business that are trainable and repeatable. Think of your business as if you plan to franchise it one day. You can’t possibly be at every location all the time. How would you train the management and employees to run each location?
If you work you get paid. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid.
This is especially troubling for service-based businesses where billing is directly linked with time spent. The only way to really scale is to add additional employees or constantly increase your pricing.
A solution: Productize your service offerings as much as possible. Instead of customizing solutions for each client or customer, create standard offerings that can be turned into a system (see above) that other employees can learn.
Scaling means that you can increase sales without having to proportionally increase expenses.
If you can’t grow sales without taking on a ton of additional expenses then you are not able to scale, and therefore, you are getting, or will most likely get, trapped in a never-ending cycle of constantly treading water; you’ll sense that you’re never really moving forward. At least, certainly not the way you want to.
A solution: Each aspect of your business (marketing, sales, operations) must be optimized and made as efficient as much as possible so that each aspect can take on more without adding additional expenses.
In other words, all of your pay is coming from the profits of the business. And if you don’t make a profit, you don’t get paid.
If your pay almost always comes from the profits of the business (especially if you are actively working in the business fulfilling a position) that means that the business is not efficient enough to be able to afford your position.
A solution: Increase your Gross Margin and reduce operating expenses as much as possible so that you can afford to pay a salary for your position.
Cash flow that is growing means that you have more money in your bank account after all of your expenses and debt has been paid compared to last year.
Cash flow is crucial: you won’t stay in business for too long without cash flow growth. And, if you want more control over your time, to show the world your creative passion, and to make more money, you’ve got to improve your cash flow.
A solution: Think of your business like a machine in a manufacturing plant. The entire job of the machine is to produce cash, and to do so without your having to operate the machine manually.
In other words, if you walk out the door to go on vacation or simply take the day off, the machine will continue to run at full capacity. It will continue to crank out cash.
To own the business you dreamed of instead of a job (or the unintended job you may currently have), you’ve got to turn and focus, and always focus, on the one thing that trumps all other “to-dos” in the business side of your business: do whatever it takes to increase the amount of cash “your machine”, your business, manufacturers.
When you have a machine that produces a good flow of cash, then you will have something truly valuable: the life you imagined when you started your own business.
Who wouldn’t want that?
Featured Resource: Grab my free guide that will show you the #1 way to solve all of your business problems. Written by a small business CFO. This is not hype – this works. Click here to have it emailed directly to you.
Are you familiar with the concept of a buyer persona? You may have heard or seen the term used in various marketing articles, webinars, and conference talks. If you’re not really sure what a buyer persona is and why it’s important, we’re going to clear that up in this blog post.
A buyer persona is a detailed snapshot of your ideal customer. It’s created by analyzing the kind of individual who would be most likely to buy your product or service. The more detailed you can make it the better. Start with their function within their organization – what’s their title, job description, buying and decision-making power? Round it out with the business challenges they face and the solutions they might be looking for to address them. What are their specific concerns, attitudes, and criteria for choosing a “cure” for their “pain”? Why would they choose you – or your competition?
The most effective buyer personas are created through research, surveys, and interviews of your target audience. That includes a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside your contact database who might align with your target audience.
Many marketing agencies have ad-hoc methods for conducting and creating buyer personas. Each is different and the quality of the results really depends upon the interviewing skill of the person conducting the interviews. We love and use the methodology created by Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute. Her Masterclass provides the student the methodology and the tools to record and produce expertly developed buyer personas. What’s more, her methodology connects seamlessly with Bristol Strategy’s content strategy service since it identifies the triggers that cause the persona to buy and insights into how they perform their research online.
The following infographic about buyer persona development tells the story. This image is of only a portion of the infographic which describes the “5 Rings of Buyer Insight.” Click on the image to view the full infographic.
Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of the ideal buyer. You can even establish multiple buyer personas, based on the various markets you’re in and the product lines or services you offer. Buyer personas help you better understand both your current and prospective customers and make it easier for you to tailor your marketing efforts to their specific needs, concerns, and buying behavior.
For example, your ideal customer might be a young, entrepreneurial business professional in a C-suite or other management position in a woman-owned small business (WOSB). The “typical” buyer persona might look like this:
“Abigail, 32-years-old, is a CEO or COO in a WOSB, holds an advanced business degree, and is confident in her decision-making abilities. She is not afraid to make risky business decisions based on perceived value, not a ‘safe bet.’ Return-on-investment is very important to her.”
But is that enough to create valuable content? We say no, because it does not really provide enough insight to develop a clear view of your target buyer.
Each tab in the referenced buyer persona document above demonstrates real understanding of the ideal prospect. From this detailed view we can now create a content strategy that attracts and converts your ideal prospects! We like to develop enough content that addresses the problems and solutions the prospect is searching for, after all, 80% of all internet searches are information gathering in nature according to Google.
Because, at their most basic level, buyer personas enable you to effectively target and personalize your marketing messages and outreach channels for specific segments of your target audience.
For example, instead of sending the same lead-nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about those different personas and the specific “pains” they might be experiencing. The more targeted the content you create, the more valuable it becomes to the prospect, and the more effective it is in converting prospects into customers.
The more you understand your buyer, the better prepared you are to provide valuable content for their purchasing research. Personas enable your business to better understand the ideal customer, what job functions they perform, where they spend their time online, their professional priorities and what criteria they use to make purchasing decisions.
Buyer personas, when combined with marketing automation, significantly improve the engagement rate of prospects. How? By delivering the right content to the prospect at the right time in their journey through the inbound sales funnel. Marketing automation software provides you with powerful targeting capabilities enabling more granular, persuasive personalization of your content.
Without any type of personalization, marketing automation can make your brand sound generic and your business uninterested in the prospect. After all, who’s impressed by receiving a “Dear _____” message filled with boring, general, unfocused sales information? But when personas are used in tandem with automation, the software helps you create material that speaks to prospects on something very close to an individual level. And when the content of a message is appropriately timed to the right stage in the prospect’s sales funnel journey, it is exponentially more powerful and persuasive.
By creating and combining personas with automation software, you’ll be able to practice marketing that’s both data driven and effective at addressing the concerns of your prospects. That encourages them to trust and engage with you, deepen the relationship, and become loyal customers.
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All of us like to be noticed. We like our good efforts to be recognized, and our hard work acknowledged. This is a basic truth about human nature, and it’s something most leaders know intuitively: If you want to retain your best employees, one thing you should always do is show them some recognition.
There are many ways to recognize employees, and the most basic is to offer them a pay raise (or perhaps a bonus). I am very much in favor of giving raises when they’re deserved, but realistically, your company can’t always afford to recognize high achievers with salary increases, or even one-time bonus checks. So what can you do when you want to bestow some well-earned credit on your employees, but just can’t afford to do so with cash?
Giving Recognition (Without Giving a Raise)
I understand that these things don’t necessarily mean as much as money in the bank, yet they do represent some ways to honor employees whenever honor is due. And, they don’t cost you anything.
Successful leaders and entrepreneurs are valuable sources of motivation. When I feel like I need guidance, an inspirational quote can inspire me to do my best work. That’s especially true when they come from my favorite leaders — like Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, and Walt Disney.
Many of these experts condense their life experiences and wisdom into short quotes that are meaningful and encouraging. I feel like I’m skimming a biography and jumping to the juiciest parts. So, I gathered a list of my favorite quotes so you can reap all the benefits without the search.
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Whether you seek short motivational quotes about life or positive quotes to post online, these great quotes can help. Discover the most famous, motivating quotes in this post.
My favorite quotes contain messages that provide wisdom. I can carry these messages with me daily and find inspiration to be the best version of myself. You’ll notice below I’ve gathered bits of knowledge from activists, leaders, and authors.
Let these words give you hope and motivation to keep going, even when things are hard.
1. “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
2. “Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.” – Mother Teresa
3. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
4. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
5. “Do one thing every day that scares you.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
6. “Well done is better than well said.” – Benjamin Franklin
7. “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.” – Helen Keller
8. “It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.” – Aristotle
9. “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
10. “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde
Getting overwhelmed and stressed is a part of life. I feel my heart pound faster when I’m against tight deadlines at work or facing challenges outside of the office. These famous quotes remind me that life is beautiful and we should live it to the fullest. On the tough days, I find that these bits of optimism make all the difference.
11. “If life were predictable, it would cease to be life and be without flavor.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
12. “In the end, it‘s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” – Abraham Lincoln
13. “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
14. “You will face many defeats in life, but never let yourself be defeated.” – Maya Angelou
15. “Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.” – Babe Ruth
16. “Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.” – Oscar Wilde
17. “The only impossible journey is the one you never begin.” – Tony Robbins
18. “In this life, we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.” – Mother Teresa
19. “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.” – Albert Einstein
20. “The purpose of our lives is to be happy.” – Dalai Lama
21. “You may say I‘m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us. And the world will live as one.” – John Lennon
22. “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” – Mae West
23. “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
24. “Don't worry when you are not recognized but strive to be worthy of recognition.” – Abraham Lincoln
25. “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” – Nelson Mandela
26. “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” – Confucius
27. “May you live all the days of your life.” – Jonathan Swift
28. “Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.” – Hans Christian Andersen
29. “Do not let making a living prevent you from making a life.” – John Wooden
30. “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined.” – Henry David Thoreau
For more quotes like the one above, download our kit of 250+ famous quotes.
I’m a planner who loves to think ahead. But, even with all of my efforts, life throws me curveballs, and I need to figure out the best course of action. That's when I turn to these inspirational quotes.
Whether you're stuck in a creative rut or feeling down after a professional setback, these words can propel you to move forward.
31. “Keep smiling, because life is a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about.” – Marilyn Monroe
32. “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus
33. “In three words, I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.” – Robert Frost
34. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
35. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” – Helen Keller
36. “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.” – Dr. Seuss
37. “Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.” – Charles Dickens
38. “Your time is limited, so don‘t waste it living someone else’s life. Don‘t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” – Steve Jobs
39. “Life is trying things to see if they work.” – Ray Bradbury
40. “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas A. Edison
Who likes failure? When I make mistakes or don’t actualize my plans, I feel the sting. However, everyone experiences failure — even the most successful people. When I fail, I remind myself that outstanding leaders learn from these setbacks. They never give up and push forward instead.
If you’re down after a recent failure, I recommend checking out the quotes below to get inspired. These pearls of wisdom will motivate you to continue working toward your goals and be the most successful version of yourself.
41. “The secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well.” – John D. Rockefeller Jr.
42. “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” – Thomas Jefferson
43. “Success is not final; failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that count.” – Winston S. Churchill
44. “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney
45. “Don't be distracted by criticism. Remember — the only taste of success some people get is to take a bite out of you.” – Zig Ziglar
46. “Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.” – Henry David Thoreau
47. “Everything you can imagine is real.” – Pablo Picasso
48. “If you want to make your dreams come true, the first thing you have to do is wake up.” – J.M. Power
49. “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” – Colin Powell
50. “The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won‘t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.” – Barack Obama
51. “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
52. “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” – Herman Melville
53. “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
54. “The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.” – Colin R. Davis
55. “Always remember, your focus determines your reality.” – George Lucas
56. “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it‘s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” – James Cameron
57. “If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.” – Steve Jobs
58. “To be successful, you have to be selfish, or else you will never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish.” – Michael Jordan
59. “Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine.” – Nikola Tesla
60. “Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.” – Albert Einstein
61. “Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.” – John D. Rockefeller
62. “Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.” – Abraham Lincoln
63. “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
64. “When you undervalue what you do, the world will undervalue who you are.” – Oprah Winfrey
65. “If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.” – Thomas J. Watson
66. “If you genuinely want something, don't wait for it — teach yourself to be impatient.” -Gurbaksh Chahal
67. “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” – Vidal Sassoon
68. “If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.” – Jim Rohn
69. “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” – Alexander Graham Bell
70. “In playing ball and in life, a person occasionally gets the opportunity to do something great. When that time comes, only two things matter: being prepared to seize the moment and having the courage to take your best swing.” – Hank Aaron
Need some words of encouragement? Look no further than these famous quotes from some of the greatest leaders, thinkers, and innovators of all time.
Beyond that, I’ve found that these quotes are so famous that they pop up in daily life. I’ve found myself nodding along and feeling assured when I know the person who said the words first. If you’re looking to know where a truism came from, you can check them out below.
71. “Believe you can, and you're halfway there.” – Theodore Roosevelt
72. “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
73. “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou
74. “The question isn‘t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” – Ayn Rand
75. “Winning isn't everything, but wanting to win is.” – Vince Lombardi
76. “Whether you think you can or you think you can‘t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford
77. “You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.” – Wayne Gretzky
78. “I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples.” – Mother Teresa
79. “You become what you believe.” – Oprah Winfrey
80. “The most difficult thing is the decision to act; the rest is merely tenacity.” – Amelia Earhart
81. “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” – Anne Frank
82. “An unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates
83. “Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” – George Addair
84. “Dream big and dare to fail.” – Norman Vaughan
85. “Courage is grace under pressure.” – Ernest Hemingway
86. "It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.” – Laura Ingalls Wilder
87. “Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, ‘I‘m possible!’” – Audrey Hepburn
88. “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius
89. “Don't find fault, find a remedy: anyone can complain.” – Henry Ford
90. “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” – John F. Kennedy
91. “I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear.” – Rosa Parks
92. “I didn't fail the test. I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.” – Benjamin Franklin
93. “If you‘re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.” – Sheryl Sandberg
94. “With great power comes great responsibility.” – Stan Lee
95. “I would rather die of passion than of boredom.” – Vincent van Gogh
96. “If you look at what you have in life, you‘ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you'll never have enough.” – Oprah Winfrey
97. “Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” – Gloria Steinem
98. “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” – Napoleon Hill
99. “First, have a definite, clear, practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends: wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.” – Aristotle
100. “Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover.” – Mark Twain
The desire to quit is ever present in the face of loss or obstacles. But why quit? When challenges rear their heads, these famous motivational quotes keep my chin up and fuel my drive to win.
101. “The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” – Mark Zuckerberg
102. “Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.” – Oprah Winfrey
103. “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and by falling over.” – Richard Branson
104. “It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” – Bill Gates
105. “High expectations are the key to everything.” – Sam Walton
106. “Don’t you dare underestimate the power of your own instinct.” – Barbara Corcoran
107. “Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.” – Ray Kroc
108. “The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people do all the things unsuccessful people don’t want to do.” – John Paul DeJoria
109. “Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.” – John D. Rockefeller
110. “The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of a mistake.” – Meg Whitman
There are only so many hours in a day, so I try not to waste any of them. A big part of accomplishing my ambitious to-do list is staying motivated. I like to listen to pump-up music or a meditation tape to get into the right headspace. Then, I can enter my flow state.
Another way to get ready for that race against the clock? Check out these quotes on time.
111. “Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.” – Sam Levenson
112. “Time is money.” – Benjamin Franklin
113. “Time waits for no one.” – Unknown Author
114. “There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.” – Brian Tracy
115. “All great achievements require time.” – Maya Angelou
116. “You may delay, but time will not.” – Benjamin Franklin
117. “Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.” – Jim Rohn
118. “The trouble is, you think you have time.” – Jack Kornfield
119. “Either you run the day or the day runs you.” – Jim Rohn
120. “Never leave till tomorrow that which you can do today.” – Benjamin Franklin
121. “Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four-hour days.” – Zig Ziglar
122. “A goal is a dream with a deadline.” – Napoleon Hill
When I’m having trouble finding motivation, reading the words of other people can give me the boost I need. If you found this list of famous quotes insightful, you'll love these posts too:
Whether you're pursuing success as an entrepreneur or in sales, the experiences and lessons of others are valuable resources. Use these quotes to find the perfect words to fuel your ambition, ignite creativity, and remind yourself that success is within reach.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in August 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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Abandoned Call Rate (ACR) is a metric that can apply to a chat connection and to telephone contact between a customer and a service desk agent. It is an important metric—one that virtually every service desk manager tracks. ACR provides a direct measure of the number of callers who do not receive the service they need and expect after being placed into an on-hold queue. In the case of chat support, it measures the rate at which customers abandon the chat window while waiting for an agent to respond. To track the effectiveness of each communication channel, it is generally recommended that separate ACR metrics be established for each channel.
In either case, high ACR values negatively affect customer satisfaction and, when ACR is too high, it can lead to negative social media exposure and even to loss of revenue for the company or the brand.
Definition of Abandoned Call Rate
An abandoned call is one in which the caller terminates the connection before reaching a service desk agent. However, consider the following when designing the ACR metric:
The caller hangs up while still navigating the IVR system of menus. This does not constitute an abandoned call.
The caller hangs up during a window of a few seconds after being placed into a queue. Such callers may drop off because they inadvertently chose the wrong IVR menu, or otherwise believe they have made a mistake. These disconnects can be monitored through the ACD system and may be set to three seconds, five seconds or some other value. Be cautious and realistic, though, in setting that “few seconds” threshold. For instance, extending that window to, say, 20 seconds, will give you a false picture of your ACR because some callers are unwilling to wait for anything less than a nearly immediate connection to an agent. Ignoring disconnects for 20 seconds would grossly under calculate your ACR.
Note however: If the ACD informs the caller of his or her position in the queue and/or the estimated wait time on hold; and, if the caller hangs up within a few seconds thereafter, the disconnect should be considered an abandoned call. Some callers do hang up upon hearing how long they have to wait. They are simply abandoning now, rather than waiting to abandon later.
On the other hand, if the ACD system notifies the caller of wait time or queue position, then offers to schedule a call back which the caller accepts, the disconnect should not be considered an abandoned call.
Formula for Calculating Abandoned Call Rate
ACR is expressed as a percentage. ACR = [ (Number of calls abandoned during a period of time) ÷ (Total number of calls during that period) ] * 100.
Example:
The service desk receives 1,000 calls in a given period and the ACD records 110 disconnected before reaching an agent. This would yield an ACR of 110 ÷ 1000 = 11%
However, this simple formula does not account for the situations noted in items 2, 3 and 4 above, which is why many service desks use a somewhat more elaborate formula.
ACR = [ (Number of incoming calls) – (Number of calls abandoned within a few seconds of being placed in queue) – (Number of calls handled properly) ] ÷ [ (Number of incoming calls) – (Number of calls abandoned within a few seconds of being placed in queue) ] * 100
Example:
If the service desk receives 1,000 calls in a given period as in the previous example…
and 30 are abandoned within a few seconds of being placed in queue…
and 890 calls are handled properly, then…
the ACR stated as a percentage is: [ (1000-30-890) ÷ (1000-30) ] * 100
Simplified, this shows 80 of 970 calls were abandoned, which equals 8.2%.
Impact of High Abandoned Call Rate Scores
Before discussing the impact of high ACR scores, the question “What is a high ACR score?” must be answered. Many in the service desk business point to two percent as a goal and five percent as acceptable, however there is no industry-wide “ideal” ACR score. Generally, ACRs in the two to three percent range have little impact on customer satisfaction; two or three abandonments per 100 callers won’t usually do much damage. However, getting into the ten to twelve percent range—one of every eight to ten callers abandoning—can begin to damage the customers’ perception of the service being rendered. Abandonment often brings downtime and reduced productivity to customers, which, in this day of social media, can translate to negative postings about the company’s ability to support its customers.
Service desk managers often look at increasing the agent headcount to solve high ACRs. Adding people to the service desk is costly, though, and should be considered against the expected reduction in the ACR. For instance, adding one new agent to a five-person service desk increases the payroll, benefits and training outlay by 20 percent (assuming all are paid equally). Does reducing the ACR by, say, three percent warrant a 20 percent increase in expense? Each service desk manager needs to answer that in terms of his or her operation.
There is a direct relation between Average Speed to Answer and Abandoned Call Rate that is intuitively clear. No one likes to wait on hold for extended periods of time, and a portion of those callers will abandon the call either frustrated and annoyed, or in hopes that calling at another time will connect with an agent more quickly.
Likewise, callers sometimes choose a chat window to get support, but abandon it and then call by phone, hoping for a quicker connection and resolution. If ACR metrics are kept on both channels of communication, inefficiencies in each become more visible.
How to Monitor Abandoned Call Rate
Generating the ACR metric is usually a feature of the ACD or service ticketing software package in use. However, each of those systems, and others that may be in place to handle various service desk functions, require separate log-ins and credentials while only addressing individual segments of the overall service desk operation.
A more efficient approach in monitoring ACR scores—as well as the metrics and wealth of data each stand-alone software package generates—calls for an approach that combines the output from all relevant service desk applications into a single view, regardless of the technology in place. This enables you to monitor call center and service desk operations with real-time performance metrics and automated reporting, giving the ability to manage by the metrics no matter which ITSM system produces them.
This article was originally published on the RDT Metrics blog and reprinted with permission.
The Winning By Design Blueprint Series provides practical advice for parts of a SaaS sales organization. In this blueprint, we provide insights into the best prospecting methods for different go-to-market (GTM) strategies.
If you’re selling car tires, anyone with a car is a fit. And if someone has worn tires they have a pain. To find the people who have worn tires can be hard. However, you may able to identify people who ski by identifying those who have ski-lift passes or have a ski-box on the roof of their car.
In that case, they are likely to have a pain thus they are an MQL. Following a short conversation, you may learn that they go up the mountain a couple of times a year and that they hate putting on chains. Thus making them a sales qualified lead.
Furthermore, you learn that they are going next weekend with a snowstorm coming in, hinting at a Critical event. That turns them into an SAL.
To create or develop an SQL, there is a series of variables:
These variables can be used to create SQLs/SALs with four different approaches:
An inbound lead is also referred to as a Marketing Qualified Lead. There is a common misunderstanding about what an inbound lead is. Let’s clarify.
If we look at when you can say “How may I help you?” the following stand out as true inbounds:
What all of these have in common is that they are time sensitive.
B2C statistics indicate a sharp drop-off in response rate beyond two minutes. We’re all familiar with the frustration when the confirmation email does not arrive immediately.
But sometimes you may get frustrated if the phone immediately rings. For example, if you download that 40-page white paper, you don’t want to be called immediately!
Over the years, we have noticed that the following are commonly mistaken as inbound leads:
The above three actions provide great context for an outbound call but they are NOT a time-sensitive inbound.
In order to respond to an inbound, we respond within minutes.
As a result, we have a simple formula left. This means you can simplify an inbound to the number of taps across different channels.
Putting a series of taps or touches together across different channels is referred to as a sales sequence or cadence.
Below is an example of such a sequence in which an SDR is reaching out to a person —
All in a single day. Clearly, this makes it very intrusive, and thus can only be used when a client has reached out to you asking for help. This is also known as a hand-raise in trade language.
In order to provide a response in less than five minutes, you must always be “on.” Many organizations struggle to staff an organization for this. So how do you respond within five minutes to a request for a meeting on Sunday night at 2 am? You can use a setup in which tools provide you an effective response time in an efficient way.
In this case, an inbound request results in an immediate Email (#1). This email contains a brief Thank You message and instructions to pick one of two Calendly links in the email; a 15-minute call or 30-minute demo, for example.
The customer clicks on the link of choice, books a call/demo, and receives immediately a confirmation email (#2). This email contains the confirmation, and some valuable insights to get the client going immediately. Think of a demo video, and/or white paper.
The sequence in the above figure provides a response in less than five minutes and can be implemented almost immediately with little to no cost.
Many sales organizations do not have the luxury of fielding hundreds of inbounds each day.
These companies need to reach out to prospective clients to interest them to take a look into their solution. For this, you need to orchestrate an outbound prospecting campaign.
An outbound sequence consists of a number of taps across different channels such as social, media and phone taps AND across multiple days. The efficiency of tools that can automate an outbound campaign of a thousand messages easily traps you into believing this is effective.
However, every company today, big and small, is creating these campaigns.
Below, we are creating a sequence based on Winning By Design principles:
The outbound prospecting approach is focused on reaching a single person, often in a particular role, across a number of companies.
This may work well in a market with an unlimited number of companies to sell into. However, most B2B businesses sell in a relatively small market.
In Account Based Sales, you select only a few accounts, say 5-10 per account executive. The marketing qualified accounts (MQAs) are pre-selected to be a fit for your service.
Within these accounts, you need reach out to multiple people across the organization.
Most often, we deal with three different types of people on the prospect’s side — an executive, a manager, and a user.
Hierarchical —
In this approach, it’s paramount to understand that you cannot reach out to all three at the same time with the same “pitch” or “value proposition.”
You have to line up the right kind of insights to match the value proposition for each individual stakeholder.
Over the years, the hierarchical approach has run into some specific issues.
This is where our second approach works better.
Chronological —
In this approach, we ensure that the right steps are taken at the right time.
And by the most qualified person on our team.
In some cases, you may decide you wish your CEO/Founder to be involved to address some of the senior decision makers. This adds another dimension to the equation.
Multiple people involved on your team targeting multiple people on their team requires clear orchestration.
What you want to avoid is a single-threaded relationship. You don’t want an account maintained only by a champion on the customer side and your account manager.
We call this a 3 x 3 account — a term coming from organizational selling. It refers to three people on your team working with three people on your prospect’s team.
Content-based prospecting can be used to create interest with new accounts OR develop interest with existing accounts.
In this approach, we curate and create content around pain, impact and critical event.
The prospect who experiences the pain is expected to engage with the content as organic or paid search points them to the content. Sales Development is no longer sets up meetings but distributes content where these leads can find them. In effect, content is used as the “outbound” call.
The development rep monitors those that engage with the content before reaching out.
Once a contact has been established with a company, a more dedicated approach can be deployed. In this approach, an SDR prepares the right content for each person/role in the account. It’s a form of ABM that can be used by Account Executives rather than Development Reps.
Each of the aforementioned prospecting approaches is different in terms of efficiency and effectiveness;
In the figure below you see the different prospecting processes mapped to effectiveness and efficiency. As presented in earlier blueprints, the decision to use a specific approach needs to be data-driven. For this, you need to obtain conversion rates and investments made for each approach.
To scale growth, a company must determine which prospecting method it’s going to apply.
Similar to its product, its GTM must be design based on data obtained during testing. Each of these methods is modeled against the best customer experience. For online sales, that may be optimized for speed and local sales for complexity (integration into the existing infrastructure).
Identifying the effectiveness and efficiency of each of the different prospecting approaches must be part of the product/market fit phase.
The post Best Prospecting Methods — 4 Ways To Stop Second-Guessing How You Prospect appeared first on Sales Hacker.
By Carolyn Betts Fleming
With the right sales operations strategy in place, sales teams can perform their jobs at the highest level, work efficiently, close more deals, and generate as much revenue as possible. This involves leveraging the right data and insights, streamlining and prioritizing leads effectively, and, of course, utilizing the appropriate technology to keep things running smoothly.
But that’s just a broad overview. In reality, developing a sales operations strategy isn’t always this straightforward. In fact, it can be downright challenging. Often the best approach to such an initiative is to learn from others who have “been there, done that.”
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Below are five tips that should help you get your ducks in a row.
#1: Identify your main objective.
At the end of the day, the most critical role of sales operations is ensuring sales reps have the resources, tools, and processes they need to be productive. Accordingly, all tasks performed by sales operations should support and feed into this objective – whether directly or indirectly. Refocusing on what’s most important may mean re-evaluating time-consuming tasks or saying no from time to time – whatever it takes to make sure sales operations’ main priority is consistently being met.
#2: Align sales and marketing.
Misalignment between sales and marketing is certainly nothing new, but effective communication and collaboration between the two is essential to your company’s success. That’s why the first step in creating a sales operations strategy is to get these two teams on the same page. Technology can help make this easier. For instance, contract lifecycle management platforms can cut down on negotiation time, thereby improving efficiency.
#3: Facilitate easy access to content.
One of the sales team’s most precious resources is time. That’s why a significant component of your sales operations strategy should be identifying and implementing time-saving processes, workflows, and tools. One key focus should be content. Finding relevant content to share with prospects is a time-consuming but critical task. Sales operations can make a huge impact by organizing and maintaining a comprehensive, centralized database of content that makes it fast and easy for sales reps to get the information they need when they need it.
#4: Enable efficient qualification of leads.
The next essential component of a sales operations strategy is developing an effective lead qualification process. Poorly qualified leads are a huge waste of time and energy for sales reps and can directly impact the company’s bottom line. It’s up to sales operations to foster a process that evaluates and prioritizes leads based on certain criteria. When only top-quality leads make it through the pipeline to sales reps, they’ll be able to close more deals faster and generate more revenue as a result.
#5: Implement and maintain CRM and other systems.
Last, but certainly not least, a sales operations strategy should involve the implementation and maintenance of CRM and whatever other systems, tools, and technologies help optimize the sales team’s efforts. This involves making sure all data entered into these systems is accurate. It may also involve evaluating and adopting time-saving tools such as automation.
At the end of the day, the sales team will look to operations to help them perform at their very best. Developing and implementing a sales operations strategy that includes the above key components will help sales reps optimize their time, maximize efficiency, and consistently crush their revenue goals.
Carolyn Betts Fleming is founder and CEO of Betts Recruiting, a leading recruitment firm for revenue-generating, marketing, and people operations roles.
The post How to Build Your Sales Operations Strategy appeared first on Sales 3.0 Conference.
You’re being challenged every day as a business owner or business leader. There is never enough time in the day to complete what you know you need to. I’m no different.
Below are 5 questions I ask myself and I ask my clients regularly. If you’re like most people, it will be hard to say you have definitive answers for more than a couple of them.
1. What is the “value of the value” I provide my customers? How do I know this to be true?
When I say “value,” I mean, “How does what I provide my customers help them?” The value is not your cost. It’s the benefit the customer receives. Knowing this is key, as it allows you to understand who you need to be prospecting and where you can be of the most benefit.
2. What is the % of business I get that is a result of my salespeople creating the opportunity with the customer vs. merely getting what they give us?
This question stops everyone in their tracks, as we want to think our sales team is great, but far too often, the business they’re getting is because it’s being handed to them. I hate to sound cold, but that’s the real world. What you need are salespeople who do an outstanding job of listening, probing and punching through barriers to determine new opportunities that never would have been uncovered any other way.
3. What is the % of business we get each year by way of referrals from existing customers and is the trend growing?
A measurement of the quality of service any business provides is what current customers have to say about you. One way to measure this is by the referrals you receive because customers can’t stop talking about you. If this % is not on an upward trend year after year, then it means something is not working right in how you deal with customers.
4. If our biggest customer were to leave, what would we need to do to replace their business and how long would it take?
Go ahead and admit it. This is a question you really don’t want to think about, but you sure have thought about if you have ever had it happen. Regardless of the business you’re in and regardless of how good you think your customers are, it will happen. It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when. And it’s best to be prepared for it when it does happen.
5. What is the margin potential in our pricing and what are the processes we use to measure this?
Of the 5 questions, this one can have the biggest impact on your bottom-line. How confident are you in your pricing? If you’re like most companies, there’s far too much “legacy thinking” in your pricing than you realize. The price you charge now is a reflection of the price you charged a few years ago, but why does it have to be that way?
Your price must reflect the value the customer receives and not your cost to produce. The stronger your sales organization is, the more margin potential you will have. This is a key reason to be investing in your sales organization. A key measurement you can look at is the % of business being done at full price or even above full price.
Are you guilty of spending all of your time working in the business and not spending anytime on the business? Business growth occurs not due to financial capital, but rather it grows due to intellectual capital. Maybe it’s time to be investing more in the intellectual resources of your company by starting to dig deep into these 5 questions.
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
In today’s highly competitive technology environment, the key to success is to differentiate your company with the products and services you sell and the relationships you build.
MSPs, CSPs, VARs and other IT service providers are differentiating themselves by developing their own solutions and adding an ISV component to their existing business. But, since many of these companies are not able to quickly scale sales for their new solution, they are including the development of an indirect reseller channel into their go-to-market plan.
A channel partner program enables new ISVs as well as established IT vendors to go to market more quickly with a team of professionals who are already knowledgeable and well equipped to help make the new vendor’s solution a success.
Your goal is to build a channel partner program that is appealing, uncomplicated, and a win-win for both you and your channel partners. Identifying, recruiting, onboarding, and supporting your ideal partners will enable you to penetrate the market more quickly and establish a significant competitive advantage.
In part 1 of our Channel Sales Roadmap, we uncovered how a comprehensive channel strategy can drive sustainable growth. In part 2, we discussed internal channel preparedness. In this third installment of our Channel Sales Roadmap, we will help you build your channel partner program by identifying, recruiting, onboarding, and supporting your partners.
Once you have evaluated the readiness of your internal teams and are confident that you can successfully execute a channel sales strategy, it is time to take the first steps toward building your partner network.
Just like correctly identifying a target customer is critical to the success of a direct sales team, identifying your ideal channel partner is critical to the success of indirect channel sales. What are the characteristics of your ideal channel partner? Consider details related to:
These elements are the foundation for your evaluation process. With them, you can develop a short list of the top channel partners with whom you would like to engage to determine if a business relationship would be mutually beneficial to both parties.
Once you have created your ideal partner profile, use the information to develop a partner selection checklist. This will enable you to conduct an in-depth evaluation of each potential partner against the criteria you have put in place. The checklist should help you uncover:
This checklist of selection criteria is a starting point in your evaluation process and can be changed depending on your type of business, customer base, product offering, and markets served. Gauging a potential channel partner’s strength, expertise, market exposure and alignment with your business goals will help you better understand their capacity to achieve early and rapid sales growth.
We have created a partner selection checklist which you can use as a template to evaluate your potential channel partners or as a reference when creating your own.
The critical component of step 1 in launching your partner program is to build a relationship with potential partners. You would not marry someone without getting to know them first. The same is true when building your partner network.
To interest potential MSPs, VARs or other IT service providers in joining your partner program, you may have considered email marketing, PPC campaigns, or webinars. If your company has a well-known name like Microsoft, VMware, McAfee, Cisco or others, this might work. If your company is not a well-known brand, it will not. Potential partners will not be drawn in by an online ad campaign for a company they know nothing about.
You will need to get out of your office and build real, personal relationships. Attend conferences, speak at industry trade shows and participate in other live events. This will enable you to position yourself and your company as a leader in your market and a business to which potential partners should take a second look.
When evaluating potential channel partners, it is not uncommon for a new vendor to take a less assertive role and let the potential partner ask all the questions about how the business relationship will work.
Remember, this partnership is a two-way street. Your due diligence should be as in-depth as that of your potential partner. Interview them as actively as they interview you.
These are just a few of the questions you should ask when evaluating the effectiveness of a potential partner and how successful they may be in selling your solution. Often, the vendor is so anxious to develop the channel program and onboard new partners that they overlook certain red flags which could have easily been uncovered with a few simple questions.
On average, channel partners resell the products and services of 14-18 different vendors, so it is also important to understand what they are looking for in this relationship. The goal of most partners is to find a product/service that will complement their other solutions and help enhance their portfolio while at the same time differentiating their company from their competitors.
The challenge is not actually finding potential partners. There are tens of thousands of MSPs, VARs, and other IT service providers who could be potential candidates. The challenge for a relatively unknown ISV is to persuade partners to join your program.
Make sure you have established your value proposition. What makes your solution, your company and your channel program so much better or different than your competitors? What do you bring to the table that others do not?
For an unfamiliar brand, one of the ways to do this is to let others speak for you. As you onboard new partners and they become successful at selling your solution, use their success stories in partner case studies, webinars, podcasts, newsletters, and other marketing materials. Reading about their success in a case study or hearing them speak on a webinar provides potential partners with first-hand insights into the current partner’s experience, their relationship with your company and how new partners can also be successful by working with you.
Before you complete the recruitment process, sign an agreement, and begin the onboarding process, there are critical issues to tackle to ensure that both parties are on the same page and will be successful in traveling this road together. Here are 6 important questions to consider. I’m sure you can think of many more.
Do not simply assume that either you or your partner will be responsible for generating leads. Evaluate your business, go to market plan, and buyer persona to make an informed decision.
If you have chosen to build a partner program in an industry you already know very well and your solution will be sold to a type of customer with whom you have had experience in the past, then it may be beneficial for you to generate the leads and distribute them to your channel partners to close.
If you are entering a new industry vertical such as healthcare and are transitioning from SMB sales to enterprise sales, it would be beneficial to let your new channel partners take the lead. They already have large healthcare clients and know how to sell to them, so your partners will be more successful in generating qualified leads on their own.
To achieve sustainable growth, it is critical to remain in constant communication with your channel partners.
Some channel partners will prefer that they speak with you directly via phone or online video chat. Others might prefer to receive a less frequent newsletter which they can read at their convenience. Regularly scheduled social media posts, monthly update calls for the entire partner community, emails or other means of communications may be appropriate.
Communicating in the way that is most effective for your channel partners will result in a more valuable experience for them and enable your messages to rise above the noise of their other vendor partners.
If you are just starting to build your channel partner community and are anxious to sign up your first three or four partners, the tendency will be to accept any company that has shown the least bit of interest in your solution.
But, have you vetted those companies sufficiently to know whether they are ready to become your partner? Do they have the infrastructure – people, technology, and resources – in place to support your solution? Is their billing system able to process and invoice new customers? Can their existing technical team be trained to support your solution, or will they need to hire an additional team?
This is one of the most contentious aspects of any vendor-partner relationship.
On one hand, this is your product or service. You developed it and are allowing your channel partners to resell it. You want to make sure that the correct marketing messages are presented to your target customers in the appropriate way and at the appropriate time. Since this is your offering, no one knows better than you what the right messages are, what the right timing is and how to successfully close the sale, right? Not necessarily.
You have most likely chosen to implement a partner program because you want quicker access to an existing customer base who may already have purchased complementary products or services with which your new solution would fit perfectly. The partners with whom you work have built long-standing personal and business relationships with these customers. The clients trust them and the recommendations they make.
Getting in between the relationship your partner has with its client will not help you close more sales and will actually alienate you from your partner. If they ask you to participate in a customer call, invite you to join them in an on-site meeting or conduct a joint marketing campaign, that’s wonderful. Just remember that it is your partner who should take the lead.
When selecting a potential channel partner, it is important to choose a company that already sells complementary solutions to your target audience. This enables your partner to:
Spending time to onboard a channel partner who has an incompatible portfolio is a waste of time. They will not be able to cross-sell additional services and efficiently scale their sales efforts across their entire customer base. The addition of business continuity, security, AI, or marketing automation solutions, for example, enables your partner to enhance their portfolio, differentiate their offering, and become a single source for their clients’ technology needs.
It is critical to focus your time, effort and resources on the onboarding process your partners will go through to become skilled at selling, supporting, and marketing your solution. Although the first 3-6 months of channel partner enablement are critical, the full onboarding process could last a year or more. This is the period when you lay the foundation for their initial and ongoing success.
All of the resources you develop to onboard and engage your partners should fall into two categories: 1.) Resources for channel partners to use themselves to better understand, sell, market and support your solution. 2.) Resources for end-user customers that channel partners can customize to help sell to and support their clients.
Having these materials and resources in place will enable you and your partners to hit the ground running and have a much greater chance of success. Here are some that you should consider:
The most effective way for your partners to be successful is for you to build a dedicated partner success team. These employees, focused solely on onboarding and enabling your channel partners, will focus on building a personal relationship with each partner, understanding their sales process, training them on your solution and how to sell it, training the technical team on how to support it, and helping them market it. This may include actually participating in sales calls, going with the partner to a joint sales meeting or sitting with the support team to assist in solving customer problems.
It is critical that you show your partners that you care about their success and are willing to put in the time and effort to help them be effective in selling your solution.
It is about the relationship you have built with your partners.
A partner portal is a secure, online site which provides your channel partners with access to resources like training slide decks and videos, marketing materials and campaign templates, co-op and MDF funding approval forms, price lists, sales collateral, special partner promotions, a lead tracking database, reseller agreements and many other tools available to help them be successful.
A partner portal has become a standard component of a channel program. But, for some vendors, it can be used as a crutch. It should be a tool to enhance your entire program. Unfortunately, some vendors apply a “set it and forget it” attitude. These vendors believe that if they include a few training slides, a piece of sales collateral and their company logo, they can abandon their ongoing responsibilities, let their channel partners fend for themselves and they will still be successful.
Your partner portal can be a terrific resource, but it is just one component in a larger channel program. It does not take the place of that personal relationship which needs to be built and nurtured from the start.
Whether your channel partners are small IT consultants and cloud solution providers or larger MSPs and VARs, customizable marketing materials can be beneficial to them. This refers to the ability of your channel partners to download professional marketing materials you create and add the partner’s own company name, logo, contact information or other data before it is distributed to customers.
The benefits to smaller channel partners include:
Larger partners who have a marketing team on staff may want to differentiate themselves by developing their own collateral or other materials which present a unique combination of services to their customers. In this case, they may not be interested in utilizing your materials as is but may choose to incorporate your marketing messages into their own pieces. This ensures that the message is accurate and appeals to potential customers but is combined with their own brand positioning and competitive differentiators to help them stand out in a competitive market.
Placing your internal channel management team in the field so they are physically closer to the offices of the partners they manage will enable them to provide technical support and sales training in your partner’s office. Live and in person training is significantly more effective than pre-recorded video instruction (although that is sometimes required). It also enables local partner account managers to regularly sit in on sales meetings, actively listen to sales calls, and travel with sales executives to customer offices for joint meetings.
This in-field support will deepen the channel partner relationship and enable them to see your company as a true business partner committed to their success.
Offering financial assistance for partner marketing campaigns is another component of a successful channel development strategy which demonstrates that you are willing to step up, “put your money where your mouth is” so to speak and make a financial commitment to your partners’ sales and marketing efforts.
In very simple terms, co-op funds are monies given to all channel partners as an incentive to sell more of your product or service. It is a percentage of previous sales. Once given, the funds are owned and controlled by the channel partner and can be used by them to create new marketing campaigns.
Market Development Funds or MDF funds are given to select partners. As the name implies, the funds are usually given to develop a new market or product offering – for example, entering a new geographic territory, transitioning from traditional small business customers to mid-size and enterprise customers, or targeting an industry vertical such as healthcare, legal, education, financial services or non-profit organizations. The funds are usually given to partners in whom the vendor has confidence that their expertise will enable them to successfully sell the vendor’s solution.
Before you hand over the MDF funds, be sure to meet with each channel partner individually to discuss your goals, how the partner will use the funds, what marketing activities they will conduct, if there will be any special sales promotions and how frequently the partner will report back to you on the success of their campaigns, sales goals, and overall ROI. Unlike co-op funds, MDF funds are controlled by you, the vendor, and can be taken away if you do not believe that the funds are being used as originally agreed upon.
Not all partner programs contain co-op or MDF funds but, for those that do, it can be a win-win for both the vendor and their channel partners, increasing revenue for both companies.
As each channel partner comes on board, you will need to regularly evaluate their progress and success. It is important to put formal metrics in place to provide you with insight into their progress.
During the first 60 days, the metrics may measure the various types of training received, any technical certifications required and integration of your solution into the partner’s sales, billing, and marketing systems.
As time goes on, metric may change or new metrics may be added. They could include the number of support requests which were closed on their first call, how many qualified leads converted to customers and a monthly forecast from each member of the partner’s sales team.
Consider the metrics that you would require of your own internal sales, marketing, and support teams. Although not actually employed by you, your channel partners are an extension of your team and should be asked to meet similar milestone and performance metrics to drive steady growth.
Since 75% of all world trade is conducted through an indirect channel, the opportunity for you to build and grow a successful partner network is significant. But, the challenge for today’s ISV, VAR, and MSP developing their own IT services is that new technologies like SaaS, cloud, AI, and IoT are continually changing how business is done.
Today’s strategy requires an authentic collaboration between vendors and resellers to be able to anticipate, pivot, and evolve as market forces and customer needs change. A true partnership with shared values, ideas, insights, and goals will enable you to withstand and overcome those changes and challenges and deliver long-term, sustainable growth.
lakexyde / Pixabay
Industry 4.0 is bringing digitization and connectivity to every aspect of your business. But many manufacturers getting ready for the digital age are still not clear on what people, processes, technologies and strategies to adopt, and when to do it. Even worse, many manufacturers believe that Industry 4.0 is ‘just an IT thing.”
Thomas recently wrote a terrific article called How To Adopt Industry 4.0 In Your Shop, and in it they suggest that:
“Many manufacturers perceive Industry 4.0 adoption as more of an obligation than an opportunity, something to be relegated to an IT department rather than presented as a strategic, company-wide initiative.“
In order to fully realize the benefits of Industry 4.0, and pull ahead of your competition, you’ll need to include marketing. Digital marketing and marketing automation will connect you to your customers, help you understand what they want, and deliver a customized, personalized experience.
If the rest of your operations and processes are rocketing toward the future, it’s not a good idea to leave your marketing efforts stuck back in 2011. It’s time to connect, optimize and automate your marketing so you can move faster and check your competition in the rearview mirror.
The marketing department of the future is:
Digital marketing can help manufacturers understand what buyers are doing at every stage of the funnel–and how to meet them where they are with the right information. All of your efforts are trackable and measurable, allowing you to make data-driven decisions and react faster to change in the marketplace.
You can run all of your digital marketing on software platforms like HubSpot –and get real-time insights into every interaction your customers have with your brand online. Imagine – your sales teams could be immediately notified when a prospect or customer interacts with you, and can answer them with contextually relevant, personalized content.
For companies still relying solely on trade show attendance and print media, there is an ocean of opportunity for improvement. Putting together basic digital marketing infrastructure, and understanding how to leverage it to attract leads, nurture them and turn them into customers, is the first step toward digitizing your marketing.
Here’s a look at a basic infrastructure:
Once your digital marketing infrastructure is set up, you’ll layer content, and analytics on top of it. You’ll test and recalibrate based on those analytics, and make data-driven decisions about where to invest and what to abandon, what’s working, and what’s not.
You’ll combine your owned media tactics (like your own company blog) with paid and earned media tactics (such as a guest blog on an industry site) with your outbound activities (like print media and events) to create a complete marketing program. The best part of digital marketing is that it’s measurable. So you’ll always know your marketing ROI and be able to budget in a more proactive way.
Digitizing and automating your marketing efforts will improve your efficiency with lead generation and lead nurturing. It will help align your marketing and sales teams, and keep your funnel full. And it’s an easy on-ramp into some of the concepts of Industry 4.0, as well as a great place to make an immediate impact on your business.
The last few months I’ve been overwhelmed, and it’s calling to my attention the struggle of staying focused. I know you’ve been there before or you’re dealing with the same issue now, too.
It’s impossible to be focused until you know what to be focused on, and that’s the problem most people suffer from. The number of priorities and the number of people demanding attention never seems to stop. When you combine the priorities you have with existing accounts and the need to prospect, it feels as if the hamster wheel is in overdrive.
Everyone is quick to say how it is a time management issue, which is totally incorrect. The issue is a priority management problem. It’s the objective you have of wanting to view everything as a top priority. Becoming focused is about narrowing the list of priorities and realizing success is far more achievable by accomplishing one or two major things well than by plodding through many.
The customer you’re talking to today has the same issue, and the fellow employee you just talked to has the same issue. Let’s be real and admit everyone has too many priorities.
What is the answer as a sales leader? It comes down to one thing and that is a determination of singling out who is the biggest priority for you and how can you help them achieve their priority.
If you’re an account manager, it might mean helping your biggest account with the biggest priority they have that you can impact. If your focus is prospecting, it might be the new prospect you uncovered last week — dedicates some focused time to them. It’s not about quantity of priorities; it’s about the quality of the priorities. By this I mean the impact you will make on this person by focusing on them.
Narrow your focus by narrowing your priorities. By doing so you will achieve more and do it better. Make it your goal to not just complete something, but to complete things by making a difference. I see this as being 100% congruent with my definition of sales leader, as their job is to help others see and achieve what they didn’t think was possible.
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
Ramona Smith, a 31-year-old high-school teacher from Houston, won the Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking last week, beating out 30,000 other speakers from around the world in the six-month competition.
Smith is a relative newcomer to the public speaking scene. She joined her local Toastmasters club in 2014, and never before reached the semi-finals of the yearly competition, when the top 100 speakers are invited to deliver speeches at the annual Toastmasters convention, held in Chicago this year.
But Smith refined her skills over the course of four short years, leading to her rapid ascent.
In an interview with Business Insider, Smith explained the ways she's improved her delivery, and it's great advice for anyone trying to work on their public speaking skills.
One of the biggest improvements Smith said she's made was in her movements.
"I used to pace for no reason," Smith told Business Insider. "My movements weren't on purpose. I didn't have intentional movement."
"But I learned that you need to move with each point. So plant your feet, say what you have to say, move on to your next point."
On the championship stage, Smith used movement to strategically reinforce the theme of her winning speech.
Titled "Still Standing," Smith's speech used the metaphor of a boxing match to explore how she overcame adversity at three points of her life — dropping out of college, divorcing her husband, and failing on the speaking circuit. Each moment was another "round" in the boxing match, and Smith walked to a different area of the stage to introduce each one. She later returned to the same spots on the stage to discuss how each moment had impacted her life.
"That brought it full circle," Smith told Business Insider. "I think that's kind of what tied it all together."
Throughout her seven-minute speech, Smith assumed the role of a boxer — she shimmied across the stage, threw jabs, hooks, and crosses at her imaginary opponent, and even mimicked getting punched in the face to drive home the pain she felt throughout her life.
At an earlier point in her career, Smith would have been scared to commit to the role. But remembering a lesson from acting classes she took years ago helped her overcome her fear.
"My acting coach would tell me, 'Stop being afraid to look stupid,'" she told Business Insider. "I would hold back so much, because I was afraid people would laugh at me or that I would look stupid."
"When I got on the stage, I said, you know what? I'm just going to do whatever feels good. I'm going to do whatever feels right. I'm not going to care about what happens."
Her commitment allowed her audience to become absorbed in the speech, and helped them relate to her, she said.
"Just that free body language and not being afraid to look silly and just kind of let loose, I think that helped, because it's like, 'Oh, well, she's this professional speaker on this stage, but she still has this human side.'"
Another big change Smith said she's made over the years was learning to ask her audience questions and pausing long enough for them to think of an answer.
One of Smith's old speaking coaches recommended she ask an open-ended question to her audience once every minute or minute and a half to keep them engaged.
In Smith's seven-minute speech, she asked questions like "Can you think of a time that life tried to knock you down?" and "Who was your toughest opponent?" — pausing after each one.
"Those pregnant pauses are so important," Smith told Business Insider. "I really look at them like I'm waiting for an answer."
The last and perhaps most important area of improvement for Smith was learning how to talk slower.
A naturally fast talker, Smith said her speed was the biggest concern for the judges who evaluated her in the weeks leading up the Toastmasters competition. Making a conscious effort to talk slower, even if it meant cutting content from her speech to stay within the seven-minute time limit, took her speaking to the next level.
That adjustment was critical on the international stage, where many of the competitors and audience members speak English as a second language, she said.
"If I say something too fast, it's going to sound like something else to them," she said. "So being able to slow down and enunciate — I have to practice that and be more aware and cognizant of that when I'm giving these speeches."
DON'T MISS: The world champion of public speaking says every line of a speech should answer the same question
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Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on Medium here.
As your company grows from 10 to 200 people, new challenges begin to pop-up every day— like structuring your management team, sharing information internally, aligning your board/managers/employees while also keeping the team focused on the right goals.
Do you recognize any of these?
If so, then, you need to read the following article and build your own management rituals with your team.
To be honest, I have experimented with a lot of methodologies over the past 20 years— first, as a CEO/COO of different software companies, and then as an operating partner at Serena (OKRs, holocracy, fully asynchronous communication, holding one-on-one meetings).
One of my major takeaways from these experiences is that you cannot scale heavily without aligning and co-constructing within your team. As a result, I have honed a management system, comprised of rituals, in order to achieve this balance.
Let this management system serve as food for thought in your journey to finding your own rhythm and rituals. But, be aware that if you don’t find the right governance with your team, then you will end-up with real difficulties.
The good news is that it’s easy to fix if you just maintain a good process.
Why do I use the term “system”?
To align and co-construct your team, you really need to establish a system of scheduled specialty meetings from the first day of the year until the last – and you need to stick to it.
These specialty meetings consist of the following:
Let’s start from the top.
The main objective is to use creative collaboration to establish your operational roadmap for the next 2 – 3 quarters.
Invite the major key holders (C-level + other vital team members):
Each division has to be well represented. However, it’s not necessary to have multiple people from the same division for a 2-days off-site session.
Why book 2 days?
Believe me, one day only allows time to discuss the current challenges of the company and next steps. There’s no time to set up the next steps.
Some other (pre) off-site recommendations:
At the end of this meeting you should be ready to deliver:
Also, at this time we all need to examine operational efficiency, it is a good time to rethink the optimal team structure and organization in each department to see if some improvements can be made.
And just dream about the outcome:
Everyone knows exactly what they have to achieve in the next quarter(s) – and has personally committed to do it.
At the end of the off-site meeting, your team should look like this:
To make sure that the plan defined together during the off-site will actually happen, it’s essential to have a regular follow-up. After having experimented with a few different frequencies, I would recommend every 2 weeks with the same attendants as the off-site for a 1.5-hour meeting:
What’s the difference?
A project review is a great motivational tool as it keeps track of all that is being accomplished. The managers discuss the orange and red issues between themselves and to table any discussion that gets too long agreeing to discuss later in smaller committees.
A milestones review occurs before each board. This discussion about the company goals set by the attendees is to be shared during all boards and company global team meetings.
Guidelines to discuss progress: Green = “on track”, orange=”late”, red=”off-track”
Schedule hour long, one-on-one meetings with everyone who directly reports to you to review operational issues, progress and difficulties. Make sure they properly follow their own business KPIs so that you can have data driven discussions. For example, pipeline volume, win ratios, MRR vs. budget with your VP sales.
The objective of these meetings – everybody has to be aware of the company’s current situation but also its vision and mid-term goals:
1. Share KPIs
2. Every department presents their own milestones and highlights the key projects
3. Off-site meeting feedback
Explain what happened during the 2 day off-site and reassure other team members who can get stressed out about not seeing the management team in the office for 2 days
4. Present the long-term vision
Share the mid and long-term vision, at least, every quarter after the off-site using the agreed upon framework
5. End of year budget process
Budgeting should not be a long exercise at a startup, but it helps to step back once a year and rethink you structure, organization, costs, and overall effort. So, take this time with your team in a well-prepared off-site meeting. It’s also a good exercise for the whole team to analyze last year’s figures and to make informed decisions.
When do you need to start your budgeting process?
Example of a simple budgeting process:
1. CEO
2. Each C-level
3. CFO (or CEO)
4. Prepare for budgeting the off-site meeting
It’s almost the same exercise as the one described for standard off-site meetings but with a specific goal: building a budget understood and agreed upon by everyone in the management team:
5. 2 days off-site budgeting meeting
6. Board validation
The last step of the process is to get formal board approval: simply present the framework for the next year, the key assumptions you’ve made and the outcome: P&L and cash forecast.
Now that you are a champion of quarterly off-site meetings, including the budgeting process, it’s time to move to the next internal governance level. Time to convey your first strategic meeting. Always the same format: 2 days to have enough time to discuss, wrap-up and define next steps. But, it’s time to open the circle up to new participants. In the end, the idea is to have a 360° vision of your position in the market, to be challenged by strategic advisors who know the market, have a good understanding of the company’s current situation and some competitors insight.
This is a team effort. Ask them to challenge you, prepare your management team for this exercise. And, in turn, be open to their challenges.
Participants
Strategic Meeting Agenda
You have now set-up a full internal governance system! You have built a true management TEAM able to build a meaningful plan together to address any company challenges. You are ready to address the day-to-day issues, the next milestones, the budgeting topics but also strategic vision and ensure company alignment.
You are now ready to “do what you say and say what you do”. I’m sure that Gartner will recognize you in the top right corner of the magic quadrant for your vision and ability to execute.
The post The Art of Management Team Rituals appeared first on OpenView Labs.
If that snippy coworker is being passive-aggressive in an email (again!), resist the urge to send an equally snarly response.
"The goal of the passive-aggressive person is to get someone else to visibly act out the anger that they have been concealing," social worker Signe Whitson, author of "The Angry Smile," told Business Insider. "Any time their covertly hostile email is responded to with overt hostility, the passive aggressive person succeeds."
Don't fight fire with fire. If you do, you're just falling into the passive-aggressive person's trap.
Instead, Dr. Neil J. Lavender, author of "Toxic Coworkers: How to Deal with Dysfunctional People on the Job," said you should focus on what you need to do to complete the task at hand, rather than "majoring in the minors."
"If the email is requesting you to turn in a report, then turn it in. If you need to return a phone call, then return the phone call," Lavender told Business Insider. "Don’t get 'mired in the minutia.'"
Adobe found the nine most-hated passive-aggressive email phrases in a recent survey. Below, take a look at some key phrases you can use to diffuse the situation when one of those emails lands in your inbox.
SEE ALSO: 11 signs your boss is passive aggressive
With 25% of workers saying this is the most annoying email phrase, "Not sure if you saw my last email" was by far the most disliked phrase in Adobe's survey.
Lavender suggested beginning your note with, simply, "Thank you, I did receive your last email and..."
Whitson recommended leading your response with an equally brief, "Thanks for the reminder."
This might be a sign that your worker is trying to create a paper trail from your in-person talks.
"A simple, 'Thanks for the recap' will go a long way in keeping a friendly workplace and rising above someone else’s covert anger," Whitson said.
I’ve been away from the blog for a bit. Three continents in 10 days, sitting in yet another airline lounge waiting my next flight. I’m clearing email that has piled up over the just completed transatlantic leg.
There are two I’ve just deleted from my inbox. Each is from a supplier that I have had long relationships with. Each is up to their annual demonstration of how stupid they think their customers are.
The first is my renewal to the Harvard Business Review. I’ve gone through this annually for at least 10 years. My current subscription is ending and they are encouraging me to renew. I click on the link, I’m offered another year at a certain amount. I go to the web site, looking and the subscription price for a new subscriber. As has happened year after year, my renewal is 40% higher than if I subscribe as a new reader. (Maybe they are trying to drive me away). They even toss in a few goodies for the new subscriber.
Ironically, I devour every issue of HBR. There are so many articles about the “new buyer,” how they are smarter, how they research, how we can’t take them for granted. They publish articles about customer loyalty and retaining customers. I read them closely.
It seems the managers of HBR don’t learn from their own magazine.
No problem, I still subscribe, except every year it’s as a new subscriber. I’m really not as stupid as they think I am.
Another comes from my car leasing company. They are playing the same games they play every 3 years. I’ve bought the current version of the same car for about 20 years. Every once in a while, I decide to be wild and crazy, and get a different color, most of the time I revert to black.
My lease is coming up. I’ve been deluged with offers from the manufacturer’s finance company, as well as dealers knowing my lease is ending. “Get the current model of your car for the same payment you are now making…….”
The problem is, the dealers they are pointing me to offer the same car for significantly less than the offer from the leasing company. And that’s published offers, one wonders what the offer would be if I even breathed the phrase, “could you do better….?”
Perhaps, somehow these companies have been monitoring my traveling and think in a momentary jet-lagged stupor, I may accept their outreach. But in reality, I think they really don’t respect their customers, thinking of them as stupid. (You might ask, why do you keep buying–I do like the products, I know I will get them at a reasonable price, but I just have to wade through their stupidity.)
We know buyers are smart. We know, through their entire buying process they continue to research and learn. (HBR tells us this)
So if we know these things, why do so many companies continue to ignore this, and treat customers and prospects as idiots?
Whining over, perhaps some of this is the jet lag talking. They are calling my next flight……. (At least I’m restraining myself from whining about airlines, that would be too depressing.)
In the modern digital marketing landscape, it takes as many as 13 touch points to turn a target visitor into a qualified lead. An estimated 57% of the buyer’s journey happens before the business buyer reaches out.
Numbers like these, along with the real people behind them, emphasize a very important point. You need an intentional, conversion rate optimized system to convert a blog visitor into a viable lead.
Without it, it’s impossible to get a healthy ROI on your business blogging efforts.
Are you struggling to get measurable results with your blog? These 8 B2B lead-generation strategies will help you maximize your blogging ROI.
Who here hates pop-ups?
There’s not a single more effective way to drive your target audience away with record speed. But when a pop-up demonstrates that you value user experience, it becomes a very effective tool for B2B lead-generation.
Instead of the lightbox that appears when someone enters the page, put your popup on a delay. Give someone an opportunity to browse your blog first.
A Nielsen Norman Group study found that blog articles experience a negative aging effect. The longer you can keep someone on the page, the less likely they are to leave.
Getting the target audience invested quickly keeps them on the page. Showing a B2B lead-generation form too soon disrupts this critical dwell time.
Create the perfect balance of information and promotion to earn that lead.
It doesn’t take long since over 1/2 of people are skimming the blog for specific, useful information rather than reading top to bottom. But what is the ideal time to show that popup?
Turn to your page analytics to find out. How long does the average person stay on the page? Set your popup to appear 60% into the average visit time. Or show them a “before you go” popup as they’re leaving the website.
Do you have a client case study that your target audience will find useful? Take this opportunity to showcase the results you can get for clients. Take them step-by-step through how you did it. Demonstrate the value of your service.
Keep only your most proprietary trade secrets and share the rest. Your target lead may download the case study intending to do it themselves. But we all know that learning how to do something and doing it are two different things.
Offer the downloadable case study in exchange for an email, name, job role and company. Keep that form short. You can get more information later for email segmentation and nurturing.
Entice the visitor with the results. Offer to tell them how you did it like this:
We Quadrupled This Client’s Qualified Leads in just 6 months.
Find Out How We Did It!
A well-researched market report is invaluable to a potential lead. It’s hard to pass up. There’s a ton of information to be found online for free. But industry-specific, consumer analytics and other insights aren’t so easy to find. And the analysts who own them understand their value.
They charge accordingly.
When you make this sought-after information free in exchange for contact information, you not only generate a viable lead. You get this otherwise casual visitor invested in your brand, expertise and client results.
The downloadable eBook can very easily be thought of as “played out”. They’ve been used for lead-generation for years. And honestly, most of the eBooks that people offer are little more than a glorified blog post.
In order for an eBook to be an effective B2B lead-generation tool, it must:
Quality is more important than quantity. But quantity in a no fluff format will appear to be of greater value than an over-simplified piece of content. A minimum of 10K words is ideal for a lead generating eBook.
It’s short enough that someone will likely read most of it. But it’s long enough to demonstrate that you value this prospect’s time and interest.
As a business blogger, you’re likely following blogging best practices to improve your SEO and lead-generation capabilities. You’re publishing several blog articles a week. Many of them are likely the recommended 2000+ words of information-rich content needed to rank well in search engines.
These blog articles are great for your website visibility and engagement. But they can also make it harder for a person who follows your blog to find what they’re looking for when they’re looking for it.
Convert this fan into a paying client with the right B2B lead-generation strategies in place.
Create a helpful document that leads people to exactly what they’re looking for. Add each of your blogs to a category.
These may be your blog’s categories. Or they may drill down to be even more helpful in navigation.
Include 50-100 word summaries for each blog. In most cases, these will be your H2 headings.
Once downloaded, a person can search for keywords in the document. They can click a link to go straight to the content.
Add-on services or products entice people to sign up. Offer the visitor a free upgrade for an existing or future service when they sign up.
Send them the redemption information automatically. Be sure to put an expiration date on it to shorten the lead-nurturing cycle. But don’t make it so short that they unsubscribe when you send your first communication.
A free trial or downloadable with in-app purchases is another great way to collect a lead through your business blog.
This no-obligation micro-conversion gets people more invested in your brand. It prepares the way toward a full conversion.
Offer the full version for a limited time. Or give them select features that showcase your brand. Offer them a compelling discount toward the end of the trial option to stop sales funnel leaks. Make buying it now a no-brainer.
It all starts with the topics you cover in your blog. You can write the most compelling social media headlines possible. But if the topics aren’t those that your target is looking for and wants to click, any B2B lead-generation efforts will fall flat.
The top of the funnel is broken and in need of repair.
Choose topics that:
Explaining your services or what you do is always secondary to your buyer’s needs in the critical top-of-funnel. Research your target to determine what blog topics to cover.
Optimize Your Blog for B2B Lead-Generation
You’re well on your way to maximizing your blog’s lead-generation power. Only use user-friendly popups. Showcase the results you get for clients through an in-depth case study. Create an eBook that your prospect can instantly use to get results. Get them invested in your brand with a free trial.
For more actionable tips to maximize your marketing efforts, follow this blog.
