Sales objections are part of the job. And salespeople commonly come up against the competitor objection when talking to new prospects. As soon as the buyer realizes the nature or function of your product, she says something along the lines of, "We already work with Competitor X," or "We already have a supplier for that."

To overcome the competitor objection, you must:

1. Figure out if your prospect truly has an existing vendor relationship or is simply not interested
2. Keep them engaged in the conversation long enough to show them the value of working with you (even if they've already purchased a competing solution)
3. Uncover weaknesses in their current offering or contract

Accomplishing all three can be tricky -- especially when you're on the phone and losing your prospect's attention by the millisecond.

The following responses will help you effectively overcome the competition objection so you can move forward with the sale -- or appropriately respond while keeping the door open if they end up choosing the competitor over your product.

10 Ways to Respond When a Prospect Is Already Working With a Competitor

1. "That's good to hear -- [competitor] is a great company. In fact, we share a lot of mutual customers. Companies that use both of our offerings often find that our product makes accomplishing [X goal] much easier, since it has [unique benefit #1] and [unique benefit #2]."

This response lets you differentiate your product from the competition without slinging mud. 

Plus, it opens the door for another conversation down the line. Once you've won the prospect's trust, you can start talking about a switch if that's in the buyer's best interest.

2. "At this point, I'm not asking you to rip anything out. I'd just like the opportunity to show you how we're different and how we've provided additional value to our customers. I can present some use cases of other companies like yours who work with us and with Competitor X. When is a good time to schedule a follow-up call?"

According to Bryan Gonzalez, business development manager at Procore, this response will give you the opportunity to prove what your product does differently -- and ultimately, show the prospect why they need it.

3. "Got it. Can I ask what type of evaluation process you go through to be sure you're getting the best service available?"

As president of Business By Phone Art Sobczak explains, you need to plant doubt in the prospect's mind before they'll ever consider changing vendors. They probably haven't thought about their decision to use the competition since they signed the contract -- this question will have them wondering whether it's still the right choice.

4. "Have they ever let you down?"

Founder of Trigger Event Selling Craig Elias recommends using this question to challenge the prospect's status quo. If the prospect says yes, follow up with, "How did that impact your business?"

Finally, ask what the vendor did (if anything) to make up for the issue and prevent it from happening again.

"Once you know more about the letdown, you can ask if they would like to work with a more reliable vendor they can have confidence in," Elias writes.

5. "That's great. What do you like best about working with [competition]?"

Asking the prospect to think about all the reasons they love the competition probably seems like a bad idea. But sales strategist Dan Fisher says this question actually prompts his prospects to explain what they didn't like about their vendors. The trick? You have to be patient.

"No matter what they say in response, wait seven to 10 seconds," Fisher says. "The silence will become uncomfortable -- and that's when the prospect will often offer up a negative comment or concern."

6. "I'm glad you're [dealing with X challenge, recognize the importance of doing Y]. How's it going?"

The first part of this answer validates the prospect, while the second gets them to open up. Once they're talking about their situation, you can figure out how happy they are with their current vendor. What's working well? What's not? Pay special attention to complaints that could be solved with your product.

Alternatively, try: "Oh, I'm familiar with [competition] -- we actually used them at my old job. Right now, I'm not trying to convince you to go with us instead. I think it makes sense to explore your situation first and see if [product] is even a good fit."

Mentioning you're a former user gives you instant credibility. In addition, many prospects respond well to this calm, friendly approach. Again, the goal is to simply get them talking about their situation.

7. "That's great. I'm wondering, however, if you're still struggling to overcome [X challenge]. I ask because I saw you [posted something along those lines on LinkedIn, tweeted about it, downloaded one of our ebooks on that, etc.] I actually have a couple suggestions for you related to that challenge -- would it make sense to schedule a call to discuss them?"

Of course, not every buyer will be so kind as to advertise displeasure with their current provider through a negative review or critical social media post. But if you take the time to research before reaching out and analyze the prospect's online behavior, you might get wise to a not-so-perfect fit.

For instance, are they seeking help in a specific area that your competitor should cover? If they're looking for help online, their current vendor clearly isn't solving all of their needs. Help the prospect first, and they'll be more receptive to hearing about your product later.

8. "Of course -- many of our current customers have used different suppliers in the past. But I'm reaching out to discuss ways you could [tackle business pain, increase results, maximize this investment]. Would you be interested in scheduling another call to talk about that?"

In modern sales, "Always Be Closing" has been replaced with "Always Be Helping." After you've helped the prospect with a challenge, they'll be more receptive to hearing about what your company has to offer. Even better, it's probably been a long time since anyone from their current provider called them up solely to offer some free advice -- so you'll start to look more attractive than the competition.

9. "Good to hear. I'm curious, what do you think makes the relationship work so well?"

Mike Schultz, president of RAIN Group, says this question is a non-threatening way to make the prospect open up. After they respond, you can probe further into the relationship by asking a series of "I'm curious to know" questions.

For example: "I'm curious to know -- what's their average response time when the network goes down?" or "I'm curious to know -- does your account manager call just to check in?"

When the prospect answers "no" to a question, Schultz recommends digging deeper to find ways you may be able to improve on their current service.

10. "How long have you been working with that vendor?"

This question allows you to learn more about your prospect's relationship with the competition without sounding too aggressive or intense. 

It's simple enough for him to answer, but you'll be able to intuit a good deal of information. For instance, if he says, "We've used them since our company was founded in 1996," that tells you he's probably experiencing some of the pains of a legacy system or an offering that hasn't scaled with their business.

On the other hand, if the buyer says, "The person who previously held my role set up the contract two years ago," you'll know he wasn't personally involved in the decision. There may be an opportunity to present your product as a more sophisticated, useful, or well-designed alternative that'll help him drive better results than the current one.

5 Ways to Respond When a Prospect Chooses a Competitor

If the customer comes out and tells you that they've chosen your competitor and signed on the dotted line, you have a limited window where you can keep the relationship positive and keep the door open for future conversations. The customer likely doesn't want a lengthy conversation about why they should choose you at this point, so while you can use these responses and prompts as guidance, if the customer makes it clear they want to end the conversation, respect their boundaries to avoid burning a bridge.

1. "I see. Do you have a contract with them?"

If the prospect is locked into a contract and you truly believe switching is in their best interest, you have a couple options. Help them off-set the costs of breaking it early by giving them a discount or showing them the ROI of the switch. Alternatively, find out when their agreement expires, and let them know that you'll reach out again a month or two before that date.

2. "I see. What results are you getting?"

There's always room for improvement. Once the buyer tells you the return they're currently seeing, you'll know what you're up against.

Imagine your prospect says the recruiting service she's using reduces average cost-per-hire by 30%. You might respond, "Clients who have switched to our firm from your current one typically drive down their average CPH by a further 10%. Would that have a significant impact on your hiring budget?"

If she says no, she's probably not the best fit anyway.

Alternatively, you can offer your help in improving their existing strategy -- no strings attached. Say, "That's great. I have a few tips that have helped my customers get their CPH even lower. Would you be interested in setting up another call to hear them?"

Once you've earned her trust and gratitude by helping her, she'll be far more receptive to your pitch.

3. "Ah, yes. We have a few clients who used to work with that vendor. Tell me, have you experienced any issues with [common vendor pain point]?"

This is a similar tactic to number one -- but it pulls at pain points a bit more. If you choose this response, always use challenges you've verified with several of their former clients. 

If your prospect confirms they've experienced similar issues, this is not an invitation to trash talk. Instead, focus on the solutions your product/service can offer instead. This keeps the tone positive and future-focused.

4. "Is your contact up for renewal anytime soon?"

It's best not to waste your prospect's time or yours. By asking whether their contract is up for renewal soon, you can gauge whether or not there's any reason for the conversation to continue.

If they've just signed a two-year extension, they're likely happy with the provider and unable to change vendors for the next 24 months. This is a good example of where a single question can tell you all you need to know. 

5. "Okay, I appreciate your time speaking about [Product] over the past couple of weeks. Would you mind if I made a note in my calendar to reach back out to you again in [a quarter; 6 months; a year] to see how things have been going?"

At this point in the conversation, the customer might have made it clear that they've signed on the dotted line, and that they aren't interested in purchasing anything from you or your company at this point. But it can't hurt to try to keep the door open.

Use this response to keep up a friendly relationship, to establish yourself as a conscientious salesperson, and to keep the lines of contact open. If the customer agrees, when you follow back up in the future, use it as an opportunity to hear how they're doing in their personal and professional life, and to establish yourself as an ally, before diving back into another sales pitch. At that point, you can use the first several responses on this list to see how they're finding working with a competitor -- and if they might be interested in switching.

There's a silver lining to hearing the "we already use Competitor X" objection: It means that half your work is already done. After all, you don't have to educate your prospect on their problem -- you just need to show them why your product is the best fit.

If you're looking for more objection-handling tips, check out this article on overcoming the dreaded, "It costs too much." Or try one of these customizable sales scripts for handling objections over the phone.

Effective referral programs are more influential than you may think. In fact, 82% of Americans seek recommendations from friends and family when considering a purchase. Additionally, 67% say they’re at least a little more likely to purchase a product after a friend or family member shared it via social media or email – for example, through a referral program.

“Empowering customers who love your products to help you with your marketing efforts is a strong growth driver.” –Gartner

While this is all very compelling, what types of results are real companies seeing from referral marketing?

Let’s take a look at two very different brands.

A global B2B software and services company in the tech industry faced a challenge most SaaS companies dream of: The business had a large base of loyal customers who were eager to spread the word about the service, but no way to measure and track those referrals. Without that capability, the business was missing out on valuable data and the opportunity to influence, track, incentivize, and scale word-of-mouth.

So they turned to referral marketing technology.

And three years later, the company saw a conversion rate from referrals higher than all other marketing channels combined.

Here’s a closer look at their success.

Another example is a socially-conscious fashion and lifestyle brand with Instagram-worthy products that was generating quite the organic buzz. Given the shareability and viral nature of the brand, the company knew referrals and word-of-mouth would be key components of its growth strategy.

So, early on, the company built a basic referral program in-house.

The problem? While that program delivered some results, it lacked the flexibility and functionality to customize referral incentives and commission structures, and it wasn’t set up to scale.

To address those issues, the brand set out to find a referral marketing solution. And in just four months, the company’s referral program has generated $50,000 in new revenue — a 400% return on its investment.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What can marketers take away from the success of these two very different brands?

Across a variety of industries, referral marketing is the go-to channel for growth. The best kept secret of the most successful referral programs is to treat your campaigns just as you would any other high-value customer acquisition channel — invest in process, expertise, and technology while incorporating it into every aspect of your marketing strategy.

Based on our learnings from both of these companies, here are 3 ways to run an effective referral program:

1. The program needs to be visible

A referral program should be hosted on a high-traffic page on your site, making it highly noticeable and easy to access. Adding a link in your navigation header, sidebar, or even a pop-up in the middle of your page will lead customers to take action and sign-up.

2. Understand your audience

The best referral marketing programs operate with a deep understanding of who they’re targeting, where those people are active, and which incentives will drive positive actions. Studying their motivations and preferences before you reach out is critical to success. If you offer the wrong incentive to the wrong audience in the wrong environment, your referral program will fail to generate results.

3. Customize and automate

Whether it’s email workflows or reward payouts, automate as many parts of your program that you possibly can. For example, keep your program members in the know with clear communication about the referral process. From triggering an email when a new member signs up to sending an email when a commission is approved, having an automated referral program workflow in place can cut down the time and resources your marketing team has to spend on sending out emails.

The most effective referral programs share a common thread

It’s the fact that referrals are fully baked into the sales, marketing, and customer support experience. Referral CTAs are included on the company’s home page, in blog posts, weekly newsletters, and social ads. Employee email signatures feature referral messaging. And the referral program is fully integrated with other critical applications and systems used by the entire company. For referrals to consistently deliver bottom-line results, they must be woven into who you are and how you operate.

A lot has been written about choosing the right words to lead prospects from browsing to buying. But there are important ways to visually lead prospects through the buying process. By the end of this article, you’ll know how to visually lead your visitors to your most-desired action, whether that’s a sale, a sign-up or a contact request.

A tale of two passport applications

A quick look at two pages about the US passport application process gives an idea of the difference visuals can make.

Here is the USPS (the Post Office) page:

It’s an endless stream of text…in a tiny font, no less. The only visuals are the three identical buttons, by which you can choose which endless stream of text to give you headaches.

The State Department page takes an almost opposite approach to the exact same process:

Here, you’ll find multiple visual clues to point you in the right direction. The bulk of the text is hidden behind step-by-step tabs. When you click on the tab, the information for that step is revealed. The user is not overwhelmed by the whole process at once.

When a visitor knows in advance what to expect, the process is much less scary. It’s much easier to say “Yes!” They don’t have much choice when applying of a passport. But they do have a choice when considering a purchase from you. So you have to help visitors feel at ease with what you plan to put them through.

Lead them with a visual list

Your sales process is probably less complex than applying for a passport. Few things are as complicated as passport and visa applications. So let’s look at a less-complex example you can follow. MyUKmailbox does a classic job of visually leading people through its process.

There are six steps.

• Each one is numbered.
• Each one has an image.
• Each one is color-coded.
• Each one has a quick text description.

The process looks easy and organized, removing almost all barriers to signing up. And, conveniently, the “Start now” button is placed right at the end.

Some people like more details, so there is a video for them. There is also a “show more” button for those people, similar to the pop-down information on the State Department’s website.

But the myUKmailbox visual clues are better than the State Department’s. While less artistic, they appear more organized, because they are in a list. The State Department’s do not look visually organized, with different sized boxes spread across two different lines. Furthermore, there are colors that do not follow through to the steps, although the numbers do.

Make it look simple, and you remove possible psychological barriers to signing up.

When your process is too complex for a list

Some processes are not simple. Sometimes there are options. The challenge is to make a complex process look as simple as possible. That’s why flow-charts were created. But flow charts can be as intimidating at a wall of text. This is the old Crown copyright permissions flow chart for Canada’s Department of National Defence, which I grabbed from the WaybackMachine:

This is the type of flow chart that gives people nightmares. There is no numbering of the boxes to match the numbering of the text. In fact, the boxes don’t even mirror the text.

The revised flowchart is much better:

The steps have been clarified, which created several more steps (from 5 before to 9 after). But the structure of the flowchart has been simplified, mostly because the same actions apply to more than one situation. The boxes are numbered to correspond to the new steps. “Yes” and “No” are color-coded, so it’s easy to follow. The shape and size of the boxes help distinguish their function for people, too.

If you see a pattern, this is it: color-code and number your steps to make them easy to follow.

When your process is too simple for a list

I offer a custom service. We write books, speeches, screenplays, etc. No two books are the same. No two speeches are the same. No two screenplays are the same. The lengths are different. Client goals and expectations are different. Clients want to work differently with our writers. And client information can be more or less (or not at all!) organized.

In other words, we don’t have a “process”. Our only process is to fill in the query form. But it’s still worth while leading people through it. And we do it visually.

The colors I chose are designed to get attention and create a sense of urgency. The yellow you see here is bright and it contrasts with the background. The red contrasts with the yellow, and red generally gives a sense of urgency. When you scroll, a red button follows you down the page, leading you to “Get my free quote”.

All the visual clues point to the most-desired action. Note that in the site banner, there is also a Get my free quote” button. Click it, and it takes you to the form. Three identical buttons, same shape and same color, in three places. All three give a single message to lead people through the process.

Honourable mention

I want to share one more example, just to get you thinking outside the box. Many companies offer different packages with different pricing and different options. There are typically basic, advanced and pro levels, depending on customer needs and budget.

BoomTown! has three packages. They are listed much like any other company would list its packages, one beside the other.

But the way Boomtown has visually and verbally designed its display is more like a process. Start small, grow, then grow more. It’s a process that preconditions new customers for future upgrades. I love it!

Key takeaways

What are the key takeaways from this review?

• Give people advance notice of the process you will take them through. When people know where they are going, they are less apprehensive about making the trip.

• Number the steps, and be consistent with the numbers.

• Color-code the steps, and be consistent with the colors.

• Use shapes and/or icons to distinguish the steps, and be consistent with them.

• Use simple text that matches the visual clues.

Whatever your most-desired action, you can move people through your process with visual clues. You’ll get higher conversions and those leads, subscribers or customers, will feel much more positively about their experience.

Remember when the price of Bitcoin reached record highs just shy of $20,000 last December? Or how about when Long Island Iced Tea Corp. shares soared 289 percent after rebranding itself as Long Blockchain Corp.? With all the hype, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Bitcoin and blockchain were just buzzwords for the same thing or that blockchain was “black magic” for boosting your stock prices.

In truth, Bitcoin and blockchain are two distinct technologies, the former built upon the later, and cryptocurrencies may not even be the most promising use for the blockchain technology. Transparent, reliable, and decentralized, blockchain has uses that extend far beyond Bitcoin. Here are seven that have nothing to do with cryptocurrency.

When IoT meets blockchain

Colossal buzzwords collide: Blockchain may hold the key to solving IoT (Internet of Things) security woes. Keeping data secure across a distributed network of IoT devices has always been a major concern for the technology. IBM has a blockchain platform geared toward building security into distributed networks of IoT devices. Blockchain’s distributed ledger system is perfect for providing identification, authentication, and encryption to complex IoT deployments. Having a distributed ledger keeping track of IoT devices, their interactions, and their operating state (e.g. goods tagged for rework in a supply chain) makes it more difficult for hackers to intercept and tamper with data.

Data sharing and storage

The inherent security that comes from managing transactions through a distributed ledger isn’t just for cryptocurrencies; it can be generalized for any exchange of data. Naturally that means the data industry can benefit. Storage marketplaces such as Sia use blockchain to provide low-cost cloud storage that leverages a distributed network of underutilized hard drive capacity around the world. Since you control your encryption keys, no third party, even the company providing the physical hardware for storage, can access your data, making file transfers secure. Storage infrastructure company Arweave takes the decentralization a step further with blockweave, a type of blockchain that enables permanent, low-cost, on-chain storage.

Smart supply chains

Blockchains and supply chains are a natural fit. A single shipment in a modern global supply chain can pass through hundreds of interactions across multiple people, organizations, and countries. Maintaining traceability and security of goods across complex supply chains has always been a major concern. Some businesses have been quick to adopt the technology. Hyperledger Sawtooth demonstrated how a seafood supply chain project could be built on its platform. Moyee Coffee and FairChain have teamed up to use blockchain to help keep fair trade coffee fair. Blockchain technology can build trust into the supply chain by providing a secure, distributed ledger that tracks information on goods, services, and transactions.

Patient-centric healthcare and personalized medicine

Imagine how convenient it would be if you could have a full history of your health? Doctor’s visits, allergies, medications, and other information would be accessible from any hospital terminal in the world. One major obstacle to such a future is the need to ensure that only the right people have access to that data. Some companies are turning to blockchain to address this security concern. European electronic health data management platform Iryo seeks to create an international network of clinics that securely share data over blockchain. Nebula Genomics is banking on blockchain to help people secure their personal genomes, which can be used to create personalized medicine and health plans.

Smart contracts, IPs, and land titles

Immutable and transparent, blockchain is perfect for legal contracts. The distributed ledger system provides transparent and secure means of creating legally binding contracts without middlemen. OpenLaw leverages blockchain to do exactly this, allowing parties to sign documents electronically. NKOR is helping individual content creators protect their intellectual properties (IPs) by making the content they share traceable via its blockchain-powered platform. In India, where property rights disputes are commonplace due to poor recordkeeping dating back to colonial times, the government plans to use blockchain technology to serve as a distributed ledger for storing land titles and other property rights data.

Insurance industry

Blockchain is perfect for streamlining the insurance industry. DocuSign helped Visa launch a blockchain proof of concept in 2015 that made leasing and insuring a car simple and efficient. Allianz is pioneering a blockchain prototype for the captive insurance market. Everledger uses blockchain to prevent fraud among buyers, sellers, and insurers in the diamond business by laser-etching a digital fingerprint (containing details such as serial number, clarity, and cut) into each diamond and transcribing it into an immutable ledger.

Digital IDs

Blockchain may one day replace our social security numbers with digital IDs. Identity theft is on the rise around the globe, and high-profile security breaches such as the Equifax breach have gotten some thinking it’s time to get smarter about identification. The ID2020 Alliance is a global initiative among public and private entities to tackle the identification of 1.1 billion people across the world who live without an officially recognized identity. As a member, Microsoft is developing a blockchain-based ID system on top of its existing authenticator app. The goal is a decentralized ID system built on an open-source standard accessible to all.

Marketers, by their nature, are constantly looking for ways to improve everything they do. Marketers are constantly reading industry publications, participating in events, and always on the hunt for the latest technological innovations. Sales enablement solutions are one of the areas we can see marketers’ hunger for constant improvements shine through.

However, not all sales enablement solutions are built the same. There are plenty of platforms that can do some things very well. But to truly get the most out of a platform, sales enablement solutions need to exhibit characteristics of smartness and intelligence. We’re not necessarily talking about just artificial intelligence, but rather sales enablement solutions that are built from the ground up in a smart way that ultimately improves the day-to-day lives of marketers.

Here are the top 4 ways smart sales enablement solutions move the needle for marketers.

Content Recommendations

If you’re a marketer you’ve undoubtedly handled countless calls, emails, and instant messages from sellers asking where, or if, a piece of content exists. You then have to take the time to dig through your repository or explain to them where to find it. This isn’t an efficient system to say the least.

Smart sales enablement solutions solve this headache by providing marketers a way to make content situationally aware. Situational awareness means that the system knows who the user is, what opportunities they’re working on, what stage they’re in, what industry (and more). That awareness assures that a smart solution can surface content for that situation without 1-on-1 interaction with a marketer every time.

Marketers can rest easy knowing that sellers will always receive the exact right recommendation for content to send to buyers, because the smart sales enablement solutions leverage the vast amount of data they capture to make the perfect recommendation. The sellers will be notified about the latest and greatest pieces of content no matter where they are – CRM, their email application, or out on the road.

Targeting the content to the right personas and surfacing the perfect piece at the exact moment is the power that smart sales enablement solutions offer marketers.

Content Personalization

Too much of marketers’ time is spent creating one-off request for sellers. There is always going to be a need for a personalized piece of content and the due date is yesterday. Buyers, now more than ever, require highly-customized content that speaks directly to their needs.

The bad news is that there are simply not enough hours in the day to fulfill all these requests. The good news is that smart sales enablement solutions completely solve this issue for marketers. Any solution worth it’s weight will provide marketers with a tool they can use to componentize content. For example, a marketer can take a presentation, lock down important brand assets that can’t be edited, and give sellers the power to customize certain fields with data from outside sources, different offerings, or any other piece of information relevant to the buyer.

Automation and componentization make impossibly hard tasks incredibly easy and save countless hours for both marketers and sellers. With a few clicks a compliant, data-driven, highly-personalized piece of content is created. By tying into different data sources like CRMs or any other data platform, marketers no longer have to manually update data-reliant content on a consistent basis.

Empowering sellers to create their own approved custom piece of content is one of the most powerful things smart sales enablement solutions offer.

Proactive Content Management

Content management today is very reactive. Many times marketers are only clearing away old material or updating management structures when a problem crops up. That simply won’t cut it nowadays. Global sales forces need to know that the content they have access to is the most up-to-date and effective as it possibly can be.

So how do smart sales enablement solutions solve this problem? Smart solutions once again leverage the vast amount of data they collect about content to generate informed recommendations about what to do with content. Most organizations are data rich and insights poor, real value is derived by taking that mountain of data and gaining insights into what it all actually means. Using this information marketers can properly target the right content, to the right team personas, in the most effective way(s) possible to increase engagement. Converting data into actual value is incredibly hard, so your platform should do this for you.

Additionally, smart sales enablement solutions empower marketers to collaborate within the platform, establish workflows, and manage approval processes. If you shudder at the thought of content management, smart sales enablement solutions completely remove any worry you have. Spend more time focused on getting things done vs. figuring out what should be done.

Insights that Drive Business Decisions

As a marketer, imagine getting a pop-up recommendation that a piece of content hasn’t been used in months. Makes it pretty clear cut that it should be tossed. Or, even better, imagine getting a notification that one piece is going like hotcakes—sellers love it and buyers are engaging with it. All of a sudden you know what content performs best and can begin devising strategies that reflect real world results.

One of the holy grails of marketing content is deriving the actual ROI of a piece. Smart sales enablement solutions give marketers the tools to finally unlock those numbers. By connecting content to how it moves deals through the buying cycle, marketers can finally point to their content and say exactly how much revenue it’s driven.

Smart sales enablement solutions give marketers access to tools and insights that will literally change their lives. These platforms drive valuable business decisions by using real-live data, converted to insights, to make better and more informed choices. Doesn’t that sound pretty good to you?

Do you get voicemails from anyone other than your mother or grandmother? With the prevalence of email and text messaging, voicemails can seem somewhat antiquated. On the rare occasion that I do receive a voicemail, the caller tends to ramble on without providing anything interesting enough to warrant a response.

So why should you bother leaving a voicemail? According to a recent study, leads are 34% more likely to convert when they receive two voicemails on six missed calls. When 97% of sales calls go to voicemail, the ability to leave a sales voicemail that works can be the difference between making a connection and losing an opportunity.

Voicemails play a critical role in sales prospecting. However, like any aspect of the sales process, it takes practice and skill to create the perfect voicemail. Below are 8 tips for leaving a sales voicemail that will pique interest and earn a callback.

8 Ways to Improve Your Sales Voicemails

1. Smile like you mean it

One of the first cold call lessons I was given was to smile while delivering my pitch. Obviously, the prospect couldn’t see me, but they could pick up on my energy. No one wants to hear a monotone message. It won’t grab the person’s attention and it doesn’t impart a good impression of your company’s brand.

Show some excitement and deliver your message as if you were talking to the individual in person. It sounds cheesy, but you can actually tell when someone speaks with a smile on their face – even over the phone.

2. Lead with something relevant

You have approximately 2 seconds to grab a prospect’s attention. “Hello. This is Jim Bob with XYZ company, and I’m calling because…” isn’t exactly an attention-grabbing hook. It gives the impression that a sales pitch is coming and the listener is likely thinking: “I’m not interested and I wish you’d take me off your list.”

Begin the conversation with something relevant to the prospect. For instance, “Hey Tony, I’ve been doing some research on your company, and I think can shrink your costs up to 25%.” sparks interest by demonstrating you may be able to provide something of value.

3. Keep the message short

Once you’ve captured their attention, it’s important not to ramble. The ideal length of a voicemail is less than 20 seconds. Brief, purposeful messages are always better than selfish monologues. Keeping it succinct enables a prospect to quickly decipher the message and decide if it’s worthy of a callback.

A short message forces you to get to the relevant points quickly. You want the receiver to take action, which requires a compelling reason. It’s highly unlikely that you’re going to sell someone over voicemail. The purpose of your 20-second message is to create interest. Not to mention, brevity shows you respect the person’s time.

4. Be clear – literally

It may sound obvious, but make sure you speak clearly when leaving a voicemail. Speak slowly; make it easy for a prospect to understand you and the value of your message. Articulating your words makes you appear professional and knowledgeable. To the prospect, that translates to you potentially being a good use of their time.

Even if you are a champion at enunciating, ensure that your microphone isn’t too close to your mouth and there isn’t background noise. The last thing you want is for potential clients have to listen to the voicemail three times, just to write down the callback number.

5. Name drop

Referencing a peer or mutual connection in your voicemail improves the odds of getting a callback. Studies have shown that 92% of buyers trust referrals from people they know. It’s logical that if a prospect hears a familiar name in a voicemail, they’re more likely to respond.

Social selling is a powerful sales tool. Why not use it to your advantage in a voicemail? Identify mutual connections on LinkedIn and leverage those contacts to increase your odds of eliciting a response from a prospect. Establish the common connection early: “Janet. You used to work with a college friend of mine at XYZ company. This is Jim Bob.”

6. Promise (and deliver) a follow-up email

Send a follow-up email after leaving your voice message. An email gives a prospect options by allowing them the opportunity to respond without picking up the phone. We all have busy schedules; finding time for a phone conversation can be a challenge.

With an email follow up, you can (briefly) reiterate your message add a link where they can learn more before taking a meeting. Whether the prospect responds via email or phone, they’re responding. That’s the goal of leaving a voicemail in the first place.

7. Leave a voicemail late in the day

There’s one good reason to call when a prospect is likely wrapping up the workday? Because no one else is! A study by MIT compiled data from thousands of sales calls and discovered the best time to call a prospect is between 4:00 pm and 6:00 pm.

Calling at the end of the day may give you the best odds to connect with a prospect. If they don’t answer, your voicemail will be the first thing they hear when they get into the office in the morning. Prospects are more likely to remember a voicemail at the beginning or end of the day, which increases your odds of a return call.

8. Don’t beg for a callback

There’s no shortage of dating analogies and sales. Here’s another one for you: whether you’re trying to landing a date or a meeting, don’t beg. “Please give me a call as soon as possible” sounds needy, and is unlikely to yield a response. Desperation is unattractive in either arena.

How you finish your voicemail is almost as important as how you begin it. Confidence and optimism are more likely to result in a callback than desperation. Finish the message assuredly and be sure to restate your information: “Let’s talk soon. You can reach me at 867-5309. Again, this is Jim Bob.”

Next Steps

Leaving an intriguing voicemail improves your odds of receiving a response, but what is your follow-up strategy? In a perfect world, prospects would listen to your voicemail and respond right away. In reality, they may get busy and leave it sitting in an inbox.

Don’t give up! It takes an average of 8 phone calls to reach a prospect. Sellers are well-served by perfecting the art of leaving a voicemail. Practice different techniques, test multiple variations, and use a variety of mediums for follow up to increase your chances of successfully connecting with a prospect.

Learn more about the best practices of top performing sales reps in our latest research.

The post 8 Ways to Improve Your Sales Voicemails appeared first on SalesLoft.

Don’t get me started!  The list of myths salespeople and sales managers believe will drive anyone crazy.  These are just a few of the ones I’ve heard, and worse yet, have seen people believing:

1. Mistaking quantity for quality when it comes to leads.

2. Believing just because you’re thinking about a prospect that they are thinking about you.

3. Thinking all leads will become great customers.

4. Believing it’s important to keep every lead in your sales pipeline.

5. Believing the sales manager needs to be present to close all big deals.

6. Subscribing to the idea the more emails you send out, the more customers you will get.

7. Thinking that posting more on social media and getting a lot of “likes” and “shares” will lead to a lot of customers.

8. Thinking having a 10-step selling process must be better than a 3-step selling process because it’s 3x as long.

9. Insisting if it’s a long sales call, it must be a good sales call.

10. Believing the way to close a stuck deal is to lower the price.

11. Thinking you must start sales presentations by doing an overview of your company and how great you are.

12. Believing people are too busy to talk on Mondays and Fridays, so it doesn’t make sense to prospect on either of those two days.

13. Thinking if you push hard enough, you can get the prospect to buy.

14. Believing people will always buy more from you at the end of your quarter.

15. Thinking a prospect who states “just send me some information” is ready to buy.

16. Thinking the random person who calls you and asks you for your price is going to be your next great customer.

17. Believing the best way to get a customer that has gone silent on you to respond is by offering them an amazingly low price.

18. Thinking you can close a customer with a one-time low price and make it up with them the next time they buy.

19. Believing if the prospect didn’t respond on your first call, there is no sense in following up again.

20. Thinking you can turn a lead into a customer by contacting them once a quarter for two years.

21. Thinking nobody answers the phone and the only way to prospect is by email.

22. Believing spending all day catching up on your “paperwork” will somehow magically result in having more customers.

23. Believing it’s the responsibility of your manager to motivate you.

24. Thinking how much more successful you would be if the products you sold weren’t so lousy.

25. Believing its the job of marketing to provide you with all of your leads.

26. Thinking the reason you can’t close more sales is because it’s always somebody else’s fault.

27. Subscribing to the belief all customers are stupid.

After reading this list, you’re thinking how glad you are that you are not guilty of believing any of them, right? As you read the list, you can’t help but think of others you know who do believe those myths, right?

Think again. At one time or another, you have most likely been guilty of believing at least a few of them.  Worse yet, there are times even now when you allow yourself to believe some of them.

Sales is a contact sport. It takes contact to make a sale.  In the end, you can throw out every theory and every idea, because it comes down to one thing, and that is you having a conversation with another person.

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

Many of the world’s most visible brands understand the value of using their websites as salespeople, marketers, and ambassadors to the world around them. Easy to access and designed to be intuitive enough for anyone to use, these sites provide amazing experiences on a consistent basis, that earn the respect and business of their respective customers.

Unfortunately, many businesses fall short when delivering their message to visitors. Whether the site is slow to load, or full of broken links, or confusing to navigate, lots of issues can send potential customers to your competition. With that in mind, we created this list of 15 marketing mistakes that most businesses make on their websites.

1. Your site doesn’t load quickly enough

Site speed is a major factor when people browse the internet. When a site takes too long to load (10 seconds on desktop, 3 seconds on mobile), people tend to hit the back button, and move on to the next site.

Visitors expect a quick loading page, so here a few things to consider when improving page speed:

• Reduce your image sizes to below 150Kb to prevent large images from slowing your website to a crawl.
• Reduce the number of scripts and plugins, and look to compress and minify your use of Javascript and CSS, or place them toward the bottom of the page, so the site content can load before any render blocking scripts.
• Get a website hosting plan that fits your needs, and don’t try to scrimp on costs. Otherwise, you’ll be delivering a sub par experience to your visitors, and it’ll cost you a lot more business in the long run.

2. You’re giving your users too many choices and calls to action

Often times, we assume that if we offer a wide selection, people will be more likely to make a purchase. However, this can backfire for businesses. Too many choices can confuse a visitor, leading to analysis paralysis, where no action is taken.

A great example of this is a Columbia University psychology experiment where participants were asked to make purchases at 2 jelly stores: one with 6 options of jelly, and one with 24 options.

Contrary to common sense, sales were higher at the jelly store with fewer options, and not by a small amount. Experimenters found that the store offering only 6 options generated nearly 10x the sales as the store with 18 more choices. Sometimes, presenting too many options for consumers can be detrimental to the bottom line.

In short, make it clear what the next step you’d like your visitors to take and remove elements & CTA’s which might distract from the desired goal.

3. Your website isn’t mobile friendly

Mobile traffic accounts for more than half of all internet traffic nowadays. Having a mobile-friendly page shouldn’t be an afterthought; it’s a necessity for business in the 21st century. Make it easy to view your site no matter what device someone is using. Because if they cant view your site, they’ll visit someone else’s.

Another important point to consider: People convert differently based on device. For example, If you have a long form that you want people to fill out, desktop users might have no problem with the request, but many mobile users will immediately bounce from the page. To avoid losing these prospects, offer an option to email a link. It’s far easier for a person to give out an email, and follow up later, than it would be to fill out a 10-minute form on a smartphone.

4. You’re keyword stuffing and your copy wasn’t written for humans

Keyword stuffing makes websites look untrustworthy. Whether it’s a title tag that’s stuffed with a target keyword multiple times in an attempt to “rank better” in Google, or if your site is full of pages that have the same awkward phrase repeated multiple times, spammy sounding copy can make visitors feel apprehensive and think twice about doing business with you. Write clear and compelling copy, and save the stuffing for Thanksgiving.

5. You’re using generic stock images

When it comes to images on your website, you have 2 legitimate options: Take your own pictures, or pay a photographer. Stock images look cheap and reduce credibility and trust. No one believes that stock images accurately reflect your business, especially when they’ve seen the same images hundreds of times on other websites.

Take photos of your actual office, storefront, and the people who work there. When clients actually visit your business, they’ll have the feeling they’ve been here before, which can help build trust and rapport.

6. You don’t have your local listings set up and you don’t update them

Are you updating your local listings after you move or change numbers? If not, your old customers and prospects aren’t reaching you. In addition to losing trust in a brand, many people won’t bother to keep looking, and instead reach out to the next business on the search page.

Keeping your NAP info up to date on all the local listing pages so that when it comes time for a prospect to do business, they can reach you the first time, every time.

7. There are way too many redirects on your website

Excessive redirects make your links seem untrustworthy to visitors, and difficult for search engines to spider and index. After changing or removing a page from your site, update the links across the site in order to reduce redirects to one hop, or just update the link to the newest location. Otherwise, who knows where your prospects will land, and if a search engine will index your pages properly.

8. Your website is full of interruptions (popovers, pop-ups, autoplaying)

Despite several marketing “gurus” claiming that escape popovers, pop-ups, and autoplaying videos are a great way to generate leads, these intrusive approaches are annoying to most visitors, and leave a negative impression of your brand. Avoid using disruptive approaches to coerce actions from your visitors and instead, focus on delivering a clear and compelling message, and a memorable experience.

9. Your web design is just… bad

If your site is difficult or confusing to navigate, visitors tend to leave and don’t come back. If all of your valuable pages are hidden behind menus and submenus, most visitors aren’t going to go on a discovery mission to understand your site’s structure just to find what they are looking for. Make it easy for visitors to navigate your site with easy to understand links, a clear navigation structure, sitemap, or other methods to ensure that people can find whatever they’re looking for quickly and easily.

10. There’s no way to easily get in touch with you

If there’s no email for support questions, no phone number for emergencies, and no chat for questions people have while browsing, visitors will go to other sites where someone will help them. Be easy to contact, by making your contact information easily accessible and visible. Just remember: If people can’t reach you, they can’t do business with you.

11. Your forms are too long

Although the sales department might want a dossier on each lead, people are reluctant to fill out long forms full of personal information. Some of the information you could be asking for may be unnecessary, difficult to find, or not even relevant.

Cut your forms down to the bare necessities, collect only the most important info, and ask for more information after you’ve made a connection with an introductory email or phone call. Not only will you generate more leads, you’ll also build trust by creating a personal connection.

12. You’re promoting your website to bad email lists

Rented or purchased lists are completely worthless. None of the people you’ll reach know about you, they haven’t interacted with you, and now their first impression is receiving junk email from you. Consider what you do with unsolicited mail, and imagine 100,000 people doing the exact same thing.

Collect your own lists using innovative approaches, like offering a guide or whitepaper, and only email people who have opted in for communications with your company. Otherwise, the risk of blacklisting, loss of reputation, and flagging as spam may happen.

13. People are landing on your website from poorly targeted ads

Know your target audience. Don’t try to reach large audiences without a large budget. Focus on the best customers and build a specific persona. Narrowcasting is the opposite of broadcasting: the idea of sending your message to a small but very well aligned group. Focus on narrowcasting to your prime potential customers, rather than reaching a large swath of people and hoping that some are interested.

14. You never tested your website performance

Sticking to what you’re comfortable with leads to diminishing returns over time. Go ahead and try out a new promotion, marketing channel or processes. Test new copy, images, color schemes, CTAs, or landing pages. Run experiments on your ideas in a structured way, so that you can come to accurate conclusions about what works, what doesn’t work, and what could be tested in the future. In short, be curious, and always be learning.

15. There’s no personalization

By using personalization data, you make it easier to forge a connection with potential clients and customers. By adding something as simple as a person’s name to an email subject line, you can improve open rates, engagement rates, and even conversion rates. Use the information your visitors and customers provide (name, location, interests, etc) to create an engaging, unique experience. It sure beats greeting everyone with “Hello website visitor!“

What’s next?

By taking initiative and focusing on improving the experience your prospects have with your website, you can improve trust, demonstrate value, and ultimately generate more sales and customers.

Marketing has funnels, sales has funnels, but customers? Customers don’t have funnels.

Customers have journeys.

While that journey might follow some sequential steps you have planned, it probably won’t fit neatly into those steps every time. Especially on large deals, closing a sale can take a long time, with lots of back and forth that could go on for months.

In that time, the prospect will probably check their email hundreds of times, spend many hours scrolling through social media, attend trade shows – all of which present opportunities for you to continue marketing to them.

For example, let’s say you have some ideal prospects attending next month’s industry conference. How do you think they would feel if your marketing team recognized them and said hello?

Here’s how to integrate sales and marketing to not just close more deals, but to land more ideal customers.

Why Integration Is So Important

Integrating your sales and marketing teams will help give potential customers a more seamless and natural experience. And it’s not just the customer who will benefit. By better understanding the complete customer journey, these two teams will be able to better execute within their own pieces of the puzzle.

When sales knows what kind of marketing a prospect has been exposed to, they’ll be able to manage expectations. And when marketing understands prospects’ most common sales objections, they can better craft marketing to capture more leads. In other words, both teams will be able to learn and become more effective.

By sharing data and accurately attributing credit, you’ll be able to measure your company’s results more effectively. 

Best Practices for Integrating Sales and Marketing.

I’ll be honest with you – this integration won’t happen overnight. Most people are resistant to change, so it will require a process of trial and error. But I have five tips for you today that will make the whole process go a lot smoother and quicker.

1. Intermingle Data from Both Departments

If your organization is large and siloed, this can be one of the most challenging steps. However, it can also be the most rewarding.

In 2017, 20% of marketers said that big data was the most important marketing tool out there:

(Source)

So why hinder them?

Right now they’re optimizing for things like traffic, email signups or free trials. Those are all great KPIs, but you know what would be even better? Sales and revenue.

Of course, you can’t hold the marketing team directly responsible for the job of your sales team, but you can help align them with sales by connecting your data and allowing them to see where leads end up.

For example, they may have a great low-cost campaign on Facebook that is driving tons of leads. But few of those leads end with a closed deal. By connecting the data from marketing to sales, however, that would become apparent and you can stop wasting resources on campaigns that don’t bring in customers.

There are several integrated CRMs like Salesmate that help companies with this:

2. Use a Consistent Process when Handing Over a Lead to Sales

The specifics of this process will be different for every company, but it should be clear and documented. Specifically, there should be a obvious signal telling sales when to get involved and where to find all the information they need.

They should be able to see what marketing materials the customers had as well as any demographic data collected in the process (remember, intermingle your data!).

The sales team also needs to update these accounts with notes as they go through the process so that marketing is up to date if they need to jump back in. If the deal doesn’t close, sales should make a note about why the deal fell through so both teams can analyze and learn from their results.

3. Foster a Collaborative Work Environment

One of the hardest parts of any cross-team integration is changing the culture – especially when it comes to individuals’ attitudes and ideas about others.

For integration to work, it’s important that both teams feel like they are in this together, not opposing one another. Trust and communication are keys to facilitating this (not to mention fair compensation models – more on this in a bit), and as I mentioned above, a written process can help facilitate this. However, written processes doesn’t do much to foster collaboration and don’t  generate new ideas or improvements. In fact, they can do quite the opposite.

That’s why you should consider having regular collaboration meetings where both departments come together to look at recent results, problems, and questions. Then work together to find ways to experiment and enhance the process. Two heads are always better than one, right?

4. Create a Rotational or Shadowing Program

Rotating salespeople into your marketing team and vice versa can help each one understand the other’s perspective a bit better. This helps to build trust, understanding and a collaborative environment.

It can also help them give customers a more seamless experience since they know the entire journey they go through, rather than the little piece they would normally see. It also gives more people a chance to see the process with fresh eyes, which can lead to new improvements and recommendations.

I highly recommend that all new hires get to experience both departments for a few weeks before moving into their permanent role. Many large companies require marketing hires to spend 6-12 months in a sales role. I see no reason the reverse shouldn’t be true.

Rotational programs have tons of benefits in general. Check out this short video from Cleverism:

In addition to new hires, it’s also important to do this with existing employees if departmental integration is a new direction for you. A program like this can take many different forms.

At a minimum, you should have some shadowing days where a member from one team (say sales) will spend a few days watching and learning what the other team (marketing) does all day. If your organization can handle it, you can also consider longer rotational programs for employees interested in working in a new department for 3-6 months.

While productivity might decrease since the employee has to ramp up to new skills, tools and colleagues, it won’t take as long as a fresh hire and this should pay itself back by improved collaboration and integration following the rotation.

5. Establish a Balanced System of Incentives

Having shared team incentives can help bring the teams into alignment. For example, you can offer a shared sales commission that is equally distributed among members of both teams based on deals closed each quarter. This ensures that marketing is incentivized to work toward KPIs that move the sales needle, not just vanity metrics like traffic or brand impressions. It also encourages sales to work with marketing to help them improve their efforts.

However, the key is to strike a balance between personal and individual incentives. If they don’t feel like their individual efforts have a significant impact on their individual rewards, employees may not be as motivated to give it their best, since their bonus is the same with or without their going the extra mile.

The answer is usually some combination of shared revenue-based commissions (the overall team goal) with individual incentives based on KPIs specific to that role. For example, sales would receive sales commission but a content marketing manager might get measured by website traffic or the number of leads captured.

Conclusion

At my digital marketing agency, Single Grain, we focus on results and ROI. That’s why we encourage our teams and those we consult for to work with sales operations to make sure that marketing efforts are driving real sales.

This isn’t always easy. Any time you bring two groups of people together, there will be some friction. The process isn’t simple, but it’s worth it.

With aligned goals, understanding and incentives, the two teams will operate with increased performance and agility. Problems will have better solutions. Prospects will feel more attended to. More deals will close.

As technology blends the roles of marketer and salesperson more and more, it doesn’t make sense to keep them isolated in their own silos. Marketing and sales team integration lets you design a journey and process around the customer, not departments or job titles.

Customer-centric strategies always win!

The post How to Integrate Sales & Marketing to Close More Deals appeared first on OpenView Labs.

• A good boss shows you the ropes of your industry and guides you in achieving your long-term goals.
• Though you may have had both good and bad bosses, you've most likely walked away with valuable lessons that have stuck with you from a memorable boss.
• Natalia Lusinski had bosses who taught her meaningful lessons — like that it's OK to say no and to follow her passions — that helped her get to where she is today. 

Chances are that through your career, you've had both good bosses and not-so-good ones. Either way, you probably walked away from each experience with valuable lessons.

"The relationship you have with your boss or supervisor can have an impact on your career — and life — for years to come," Teague Simoncic, a career coach with Ama La Vida, told Business Insider. "On a day-to-day basis, the way your boss handles conflict or difficulty can teach you a lot about how to handle similar situations in the future."

Simoncic said that all in all, the best bosses are role models and sources of inspiration who may have helpful input on how you can achieve your long-term goals.

"Taking time to develop a meaningful connection to your boss can help lead to lifelong career growth and opportunities," she said.

Here are seven lessons I learned from the best bosses I've ever had — lessons that continue to help me in both my work and my personal life.

SEE ALSO: 5 signs your boss doesn't like you as much as you think

1. I learned effective time-management skills.

I used to work as a writers' assistant and script coordinator on TV shows, doing everything from taking notes in the writers' room and keeping track of storylines to creating episode outlines and proofreading scripts.

I was usually the last person to glance over the final script and would then email it to a crew of about 100 to 200 people. (No pressure!)

At one of my first jobs, my supervisor was a time-management superstar, fielding more than 100 phone calls and countless emails each day. I happened to sit next to him and started emulating the way he prioritized tasks.

For instance, in addition to using an online calendar and to-do list, he had a master handwritten one next to his computer, with tasks organized by most to least important. As he completed tasks, he highlighted them, color-coding them by subject — some in yellow, some in green, and so on.

Today, I still use his time-management and prioritization system. Though I have a color-coded Excel chart for my writing deadlines, I still keep a master handwritten to-do list next to my laptop.

2. You can ask for help if you need it.

I used to hate asking people for help. I believed that I could figure everything out myself.

But when I saw one boss asking her boss for help (I previously thought she knew everything) I realized that asking for help isn't a weakness — it's necessary and can help you complete your tasks more efficiently.

3. It's OK to say no if you cannot do everything yourself.

Sometimes bosses will give you a seemingly endless number of to-dos because in the past you've proved that you can do it all — why wouldn't they pile on more responsibilities? However, if you focus on quantity more than quality, the latter may suffer.

At one TV-production job, I felt bad about saying no to any request and was completely burned out as a result. When my boss learned I was the last person in the office each night, she told me to delegate tasks to a coworker if I had too many things on my plate.

Saying no is critical if you want the quality of your work to speak for itself.

rawpixel / Pixabay

If anyone has to be efficient, it’s probably sales reps. After all, they spend a lot of time traveling, communicating, and meeting with prospective clients and customers. Because of this, they don’t have a whole lot of time to spare.

Since time is such a valuable commodity for salespeople, it’s understandable why they need to be extremely productive. But, how can they be as productive as they are expected to be?

They Can Start by Trying Out These Eight Productivity Hacks Top Sales People Use:

1. Set the why, not goals.

We’ve been told time and time that having goals will boost productivity. Here’s the main problem with goals; they often lack intrinsic motivation.

When you set a goal, you have to have a strong inner why behind it.

Why do you wake-up in the morning? Why do you want more sales? Why do you want to make more money? Why do you want to be your organization’s leading salesperson?

When you don’t know your why, then you’re going to have a difficult time crushing it and staying motivated. Knowing why keeps you pushing forward when times get tough.

If you want to learn more, I strongly recommend you watch Simon Sinek’s TED Talk.

2. Batch admin work.

“Don’t get in the habit of making a call, leaving a voicemail, then disrupting your phone time to record the conversation in CRM, send a follow-up email, etc.,” suggests Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing. “Batch work items together to get and keep yourself in a groove.”

“For example, make 10 calls all at once. Keep notes on a pad of paper for any unique follow-ups. Then do all of your CRM and follow-up work at once. This batching of activities is proven to be faster and more efficient than doing everything in a linear sequence over and over and over again.”

3. Take control of your environment.

Stay away from negative people who drain your energy. Get enough positive people in your life. Create an inspiring and stress-free work environment.

Those are all simple tasks that you can start doing immediately.

For example, uninstall social media apps that are distracting you. Put your phone on airplane mode, set clear “business hours,” and say “no” when you’re swamped.

Instead if having lunch with Debbie Downer, schedule a date and time with Positive Patty. Make sure that you have a clean, organized office with the must-have essentials. When it’s time to sleep, set your room so it’s cool and dark so that you can get 6-8 hours.

4. Focus on results-oriented activities (the 80/20 principle).

The Pareto principle is the idea that 80 percent of your results are going to come from 20 percent of your efforts. In other words, it’s used to where you’re most effective so that you only concentrate on those areas.

For salespeople, Avidian Technologies states that you can do this by:

“Mentally go through your daily responsibilities. Which ones have the highest conversion rate? Which ones have proven to lead to long-term investments from clients? Which ones make up the bulk of your income?”

After that, narrow your list down to the top three-five tasks. That is your 20 percent that brings in 80 percent of your business. Brainstorm ways to focus more time and attention on these activities.

“Are referrals making up 40 percent of your total sales? It’s time to think of ways to meet with clients and drum up more referrals. Do you do your best work on the golf course? Make a plan to do it each week, and watch your sales numbers soar.”

You may be saying that sound all well and good, but there’s still tasks that have to be completed that lead to few opportunities. I’m talking about making phone calls and sending emails. These tasks can be delegated, outsourced, or automated.

5. Schedule regular “distraction time.”

“Long days at the office can be tough, and if you don’t give yourself time to relax or unwind, you’re going to burn out,” writes James Meincke, Marketing Manager at CLoserIQ. “Try adding specific “distraction time” to your schedule.”

“This could be anything from checking your phone, hitting up social media, going for a walk, calling a friend, etc. Every few hours you should have at least a few minutes to let your mind take a break. By scheduling these “distractions,” it will help you keep them out of your work time.”

6. Frenemies.

“Salespeople are almost always taught to connect with their prospects on Linkedin,” writes Max Altschuler of Tout. “What they aren’t taught are how to configure their privacy settings. Therefore, if you are connected to someone and they haven’t fixed their settings, you can see when they have a new connection.”

The first step is to “go out and connect with reps at your competitor’s companies. Most of them probably haven’t played around with their settings and won’t think anything of it when you asked to connect. Once you’re connected, just wait to see who they connect with.”

You’ll be notified via news feed whenever they connect with a prospect. Then just send a very well timed email. Altschuler warns, “Just don’t mention how you knew to send them an email at the perfect time.”

7. Role playing.

Whether you’re cold calling/emailing or making your pitch in-person, practice makes perfect. The best way to practice is to role play with a friend, family member, or colleague.

“Role-playing is an underused strategy when it comes to improving your chances of success in sales,” states Melinda Chen. “Every single entrepreneur should have someone to practice their sales pitch with.

Practicing your call with someone will help you feel more and more comfortable with your script. It is also a great opportunity to get valuable feedback.”

“If possible, work with a sales trainer to refine your sales script. Or, simply ask your friends or family to listen to role play with you.”

8. Compartmentalize your calendar.

Salespeople live and die by their schedule. That’s why they take the time plan their week in advance. For example, Anthony Iannarino, author of The Sales Blog, says “I capture everything I need to do for the coming week on Saturdays, and I plan my upcoming week on Sundays.”

The next time you’re creating your schedule, compartmentalize your calendar by each day, week, month, quarter, or year. Don’t forget to block out sections of time for: lead generation, prospective and buyer follow-up, meetings. Include a little personal training and development, emails/phone calls, and client presentations. Most importantly, block out personal time as well.

By scheduling time for specific activities on your calendar, everyone is well aware of what and when is going on. Sounds simple. But it’s an effective way to stay on-top of things.

Writing a press release isn’t rocket science — but when you don’t do it on a regular basis, it can be a bit challenging. But with the right tools, you can avoid any pitfalls and make your press release writing a lot easier.

Before we look at the tools that will help you to create better press releases, let’s focus on some of the major mistakes you should avoid in your writing.

The 4 Culprits of Sucky Press Release Writing

1. Euphemisms

Euphemisms are innocent words that we use to replace ones that might be more offensive. A great example would be replacing “She died” with “She passed away.”

In press releases, this kind of word play could raise more questions than answers — or just seem blah. This could be problematic for journalists. In the end, if a press release is too confusing or just plain boring, it is tossed aside in favor of a more straightforward, engaging option.

2. Hyperboles

This term, often used in poetry, uses exaggeration to make a point. A common way that this works its way into press releases is to endow human characteristics to a product to make it more appealing. For example, “It’s so intuitive that it knows what you’re thinking before you do.” It definitely catches your attention, but often comes with a healthy dose of skepticism.

In the end, it’s better to leave hyperbole to the poets. When writing your press release, don’t exaggerate anything. It will only harm your reputation as a trustworthy source. Give it to them straight, with no overstatements.

3. Industry Jargon

Outside of your industry, few if any will understand your lingo. For instance, if you’re not plugged into the business world, will you understand what “core competency” or “buy-in” is? Chance are no — and you’re not going to want to google every unfamiliar term you come across.

So skip the jargon and focus on making your press release accessible to everyone, inside and outside your industry.

4. Gibberish

We can basically boil this term down to nonsense. This is when you use pretentious terms that weigh down your press release. “Streamlined technology.” “Precision targeting.” “Innovative design.” At first, these terms may look flowery and attractive, especially to a marketer who is trying to hype up a product. But when you’re reading a press release, it just gets in the way.

Instead, stick to the facts. Be detailed but steer clear from pretentious wording and hyped language.

Now that you know some of the hazards to avoid in your writing, let’s talk about some of the free PR tools that can help you make your press release the best it can be.

8 Free PR Tools That Help When You’re Writing a Press Release

1. Grammarly

There are few elements that are as important to your press release as spelling and grammar. Such careless mistakes appear unprofessional — and could mean the bitter end for your release.

This tool makes it easy by giving you helpful suggestions for spelling and grammar — and keeping a running tally of mistakes so that you always know where you stand. It also integrates with most writing programs and apps.

2. Hemingway Editor

Looking for another editing tool? This one might be more to your taste — especially if you’re more visual and want more detailed correction.

The Hemingway Editor color codes each grammar and spelling mistake as you go so you can see exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it. From run-on sentences to adverbs that could weaken your sentences, it has helpful suggestions to improve your writing.

3. OneLook Reverse Dictionary

It’s easy to fall into a word rut — using the same word over and over again. This can be dangerous when it comes to press releases. if you do it too much, your audience will likely notice and lose interest.

This tool goes beyond a simple thesaurus — it can look up words based on their definition. For example, if you enter the phrase “speak softly,” it gives you such options as murmur, whisper, coo, etc. This allows you to avoid redundancy and spice up your press release with new words that engage your audience.

4. Cliche Finder

Cliches can add a whimsical touch to your writing. But when you write press releases, cliches can get in the way and muddle your main message. After all, you want to differentiate your company or yourself in a release.

Just enter your press release into Cliche Finder’s editor and it will conveniently list all of your cliches. This helps you to improve your writing and avoid the cliche pitfall.

5. PR BuzzSaw

Buzzwords: The bane of every industry. And for journalists, who have to comb through press releases every day, these buzzwords can be like nails on a chalkboard.

I appreciate the description that PR BuzzSaw uses to describe its product: “This free tool automatically hacks PR buzzwords out of press releases to make life more bearable for Britain’s hard-working journalists.”

Use this tool to clean up your press release of the most annoying buzzwords, and present a final copy that journalists will happily devour.

6. StayFocusd

Ever wish you could just sit and write, without distractions? StayFocusd allows you to figuratively close the door to the hectic world of the internet, and focus on your writing.

How does it work? This Google Chrome extension allows you to disable web browsing so that you can focus on the task at hand. You can set it to block every web page or leave select ones available. You can even pre-set what kinds of pages are open to you, leaving distracting games and other distractions out of reach.

7. Wordcounter

Word count is an important part of your press release. You want to make sure it is a reasonable length without being long-winded. While most writing programs come with a word count feature, they can be buried in the drop down menu; besides it’s a hassle to constantly stop writing to check your progress.

Wordcounter is an easy solution that enables you to keep track of your word count with a mere glance at the top of your screen. Write your press release in its editor, with a big, bold word and character counter at the top so you never have to leave your work to check on it.

8. Answer the Public

It won’t matter how much work you put into your press release if no one reads it. People will read your story only if it interests them and touches their lives. So what can you do to make your news more appealing, short of reading minds?

This free tool will tell you what is on people’s minds by telling you the most common things that they’ve searched for on Google. This can be a great way to make your press release more relevant to your target audience.

For instance, if your press release is about a new launch of your accounting software, you might enter the term “accounting software” into this tool, and see what people are asking or searching for on search engines — and incorporate that information into your release.

In review…

Simple and free press release tools can really kick your press release writing into high gear. So the next time you’re writing a press release, remember to take advantage of these and other writing tools.

What PR tools make writing press releases easier for you? Let us know in the comments below.

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 [by the way, you can click on the above image to see a larger version].

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 sales person sometimes naively expects or hopes for.

No magic wand

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 firstly 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.

The decision journey

Broadly speaking, the current centre 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 idealised. 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:

• A new and powerful stakeholder re-examining some of the previous decisions of the stakeholder group
• A persuasive sales person convincing the stakeholder group that they need to revisit their decision criteria
• The emergence of another competing project that is seen to be of more urgent importance

We can’t know here the customer is on their journey unless we observe their behaviour 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.

Stakeholder engagement

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 recognise 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 “mobiliser” 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 organisational 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.

The dangers of over simplification

In this, and in all other matters, we will end up making better choices and securing better outcomes if we recognise 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?

This article was first published on LinkedIn.

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS ARTICLE, YOU'LL PROBABLY ALSO APPRECIATE:

READ: Introducing the Value Selling System

READ: In complex B2B sales, stakeholders have more than one dimension

DOWNLOAD: The Essential Principles of Value Selling

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

Did you know that your customers love newsletters? Recent polls have shown that 90 percent of consumers prefer to receive company updates from email newsletters. But that doesn’t mean that you can phone in your next email. If you want to build a strong relationship with your subscribers and ensure that they look forward to your messages, you have to keep brushing up on email newsletter best practices. Now that summer is drawing to a close, it’s time to take your newsletter back to school. Follow these tips to create compelling newsletters for the fall season and beyond.

Make sure your newsletter is scannable

This newsletter design best practice should be at the top of your mind all year long. But if you’ve slipped up, and have accidentally been creating overly long messages or cramming text and photos together in your emails, now is the time to hit reset on your design process. The holiday season is a major revenue driver — and it’s right around the corner. You don’t want to turn off readers before you even have a chance to launch your promotional campaigns in the winter. So, start creating newsletters that are easy to scan.

• Break up content into small blocks of three or four sentences to make it easier for subscribers to mentally process information.
• Create bulleted or numbered lists when appropriate (i.e., when listing tips, writing out steps for a how-to or presenting brief company updates).
• Use headlines for each section, so readers can quickly get the gist of the email before they dig in.
• Don’t skimp on the whitespace. Give your readers’ eyes a break by making sure there is plenty of blank space surrounding text, images and graphics.

Remember, you could have great content with tons of useful tips and information, but if it’s all buried in a wall of text, it’s likely to be ignored. Check out this email from Tasting Table to see how the company balances whitespace, images and text:

Create a fall-themed how-to, checklist or guide

The goal of a newsletter — and really all content — should always be to add value to the lives of your readers. If your content isn’t going to entertain, inform or solve a problem, there’s no real reason for anyone to click on your messages. Of course, it isn’t always easy to come up with compelling ideas, but the good news is that you have a built-in theme and jumping off point with seasonal newsletters.

Think about all the ways that your business is uniquely equipped to help subscribers prepare for the season. A clothing retailer could celebrate the return of sweater weather with a fall trend report, a plumber or contractor might provide tips on weatherproofing homes, and a landscaper could offer autumn pruning and gardening advice. Consider what your readers want this time of year and create educational content that will help them satisfy that need.

Have fun with copy

Want to add some flair to your newsletter copy? Get punny. With seasonal content, there are so many opportunities to weave in puns, emojis and fun phrases. Subject lines and headlines are the best places to try out your clever fall wordplay. In this example from Petco, cute, fall-themed headlines are used to present holiday pet tips:

Get started now

The early bird gets the email clicks, so start creating your newsletters well before they need to be sent. Doing so will give you ample time to review messages before they go out, enabling you to check for any typos and perfect your email layout. It will also make life a little less stressful. You have so much to do to keep your business running smoothly, and you shouldn’t have to scramble to get your emails out on time.

Be mindful of upcoming events, promotions and other important dates that you want to mention in your newsletter. For the fall, that might include Veterans Day, Halloween, the beginning of basketball and football seasons, and Thanksgiving.

Newsletters are a great way to keep in touch with your target customers, boost website traffic and highlight the benefits of using your products and services. Make sure your subscribers are enjoying your messages by referring to these newsletter best practices all year long.

Abandoned shopping carts are like stood up date nights.

The first impression was great, interest was initiated but then the final action – shopping/meeting – was abandoned at the last minute. That’s disappointing right?

Well, I can’t really help you here with making your dates work, but what I can help you with is using email marketing to transform abandoned carts into successful purchases.

A study by the Baymard Institute revealed some interesting but highly shocking facts. It showed that around 69% of shoppers abandon their cart, but the shocking part is that this amounts to approximately $260 billion in revenue loss for online retailers.

Now that’s a lot of potential customers that you are losing out on. But hey, remember I said I got this? I wasn’t kidding!

Once a potential customer abandons their shopping cart, it’s what you do next that makes the difference. As the owner of an online retail store you need to make sure you are doing everything at your end to pull these shoppers right back to your store and complete that order. And that brings us to using email marketing campaigns to send out great abandoned cart reminder emails.

Abandoned cart emails DO work

Salesforce data established that a whopping 60% of shoppers have returned to complete orders after receiving an abandoned cart email.

Email marketing allows you to meet your customers where they go every day- their inbox. So, let’s look at this way: people browsed through your products, liked them, added them to their cart and then got distracted, forgot about it or drifted away for some reason. Now, what do you do? Just be disappointed or make a move?

This is your chance to send them an Abandoned Cart Email. This is an email that will serve as a gentle reminder about the things your potential customers showed interest in and almost bought. Even something as simple as, ‘You have some products added to your cart. Complete your order now’ may be enough to bring attention to the products that your customers had considered buying and finally make the purchase.

In fact, some of the best abandoned-cart emails are just that- simple, to the point, and enticing.

How to write the best abandoned-cart emails

When it comes to writing great abandoned cart emails, don’t ignore the need for an equally great design. Design your email template in a way that it resonates with your brand, catches the attention of the reader and enhances the written part, rather than takes away the attention from it.

Not every brand has the same voice, so your abandoned cart email campaign can’t be the same either. There are no fixed formulas here!

Consider how you usually approach your customers. Do you have a professional and formal approach or is it more conversational and friendly? It’s important that your customers recognize your brand as a familiar face in their inbox.

For example, if your weekly newsletter starts with a formal ‘Good Evening Sir’ but your abandoned shopping cart email starts with something like ‘Hey, Crazy Shopoholic!’ it might take your customers by surprise. Now this may work with some, but your loyal customers might feel a little disconnected.

Another important thing to consider when writing the best abandoned cart follow-up emails is the nature of the products and services you sell. For example, if you are an online store that sells pharmaceutical products you might want to be subtle with how your emails read.

That said, it’s your business and no one knows your customers better than you do. Sprinkle some fun, add a dash of cheekiness and don’t shy away from telling your customers how much you miss them. Yes, go all out!

Top 10 best abandoned-cart email examples

Alrigh,t let’s jump into some abandoned cart email examples. What to say, how to say it and how it looks are all very important here.

1. Add value to your email

Sometimes, the only reason the cart gets abandoned is that the customer may look for a better offer. You know how sometimes you really like something but that tiny voice inside your head tells you ‘Am I spending too much?’. You could add a discount or unique coupon code for the customer on completing the order, within a set time, to not just add value but also create a sense of urgency.

2. Use trending memes and GIFs

Memes and GIFs are a rage, especially among millennials who turn to the internet for everything. Look for trending memes and GIFs, a picture or even something funny to get the reader’s attention. You could use phrases like ‘Where did you go?’ or ‘Why did you leave me?’ to highlight the sense of being abandoned. If you have the creative abilities, you could even create your own memes or GIFs.

This could be followed by the abandoned items, an added discount code or even other similar product options.

3. Ask a question

Asking a question is the start to a solution, and in our case, to make a purchase. Send a triggered email that directly asks customers if they have forgotten about the cart, are still deciding or are looking for something else. For example, you could ask the question: ‘Still thinking it over?’

4. Say it like you mean it!

You are sad your customers walked away without completing the order – so tell them. You want them to come back – so tell them. You miss them – so tell them. You get the idea. Be direct and they will be encouraged to take an action.

5. Create a sense of urgency

Most online shoppers take immediate action when they feel a sense of urgency. Be it something as basic as ‘Hurry! Sale ending today’ or being more specific by telling them that the products in their abandoned cart are selling fast and may run out of stock soon.

6. Make them visualize

Imagine this, your customer has abandoned a lot of travel related stuff in the cart. Make them visualize how going ahead and buying these abandoned items will make for a great vacation. Allow your customers a visual peak into how the products will add to their experience using imagery.

7. Ask – don’t push

Customers appreciate being asked and gently reminded but no one likes aggressive and hard pushing. Don’t demand an action in your cart recovery emails, rather be polite and ask if they would like to go ahead and complete the purchase order.

8. Extend an invite

You could look at an abandoned cart email as an invitation. Invite your customers to trace their way back to your shop, specifically the abandoned cart. Asking them to come back also reminds them as to why they were there in the first place.

9. A gentle reminder email

Your abandoned cart email doesn’t always have to be super funny, dramatic or creative. Even a simple and gentle reminder email can do the trick and get your customers back to shopping and take the action of completing their orders. The design element of your email templates plays a vital role here. Use big and clear fonts, light tones and not more than 2-3 colors to give it a gentle appeal.

10. Show how much you care

Why did the customer abandon the products in the cart? Most likely they just got distracted or forgot about it, but what if there was a bigger issue? What if they got confused about a product or did not really understand its value completely? Ask your customers why they left products in the cart to not just remind them but also show them that you care. ‘Can we help you pick?’, ‘Would you like some assistance?’, ‘Is there something we can do?’; using these terms shows that you are available in case required.

These are my top 10 ideas for abandoned cart emails. Each of these focuses on a different aspect or solution for the customers. Some of the best abandoned cart emails are all about the simplest of words that act as powerful reminders.

Key elements of great abandoned cart emails

The best abandoned cart emails are creatively unique but similar when it comes to the key elements that make them so successful. What are these key elements?

Copy

What you write in your abandoned cart email is what makes the most impact. Keep it crisp but catchy.

Design

No matter how impressive your offer is, if the first look- the design- is not appealing, chances are customers will walk away almost immediately. Use pleasant and relevant images, easy-to-read fonts, dark text over light background and no extra fuss.

Call-to-Action

You need to have a clear call-to-action button to tell your customers where to go and what you want them to do next. Link the call-to-action button to the right page and make it stand out. This is a surefire way to not only increase click-through rate, but also overall conversion rate.

Second chances do exist

It’s all about the effort and it’s all about making sure that the effort does not go unnoticed. Start making the effort and reach out to customers who have ‘abandoned’ you. Show them that you are willing to do all it takes to bring them back and delight them.

Remember I said abandoned carts are like stood up dates? Well, the good news is you can always make another move and woo them right back using a well-thought out shopping cart abandonment strategy. Just make sure they are glad they did.

Back in 2006, McDonald’s saw its growth stall. The fast-food chain decided that the problem was its limited menu, so it tried out a great many new items and ended up doubling the offerings. But sales hardly budged. Finally, in 2016, it took a new tack. It went back to basics, dropped most of those additional items, and instead extended its popular breakfast offerings. Sales finally jumped, with same-store revenue up 6% in 2017, and the stock rose by 40%.

It turns out that what its customers most wanted was not a broad menu, but all-day breakfast. Executives had actually heard this request all along. But they had dismissed it, because it would require the restaurants to upgrade and reorganize their kitchens. The added lunch and dinner items, by contrast, involved relatively few adjustments.

Only when the less-expensive solution failed were executives finally willing to try the extended breakfast. But to make that change, they first had to restore a simpler menu — otherwise the massive variety would have overwhelmed even the upgraded kitchens. They had to work in sequence, meaning they had to streamline the operation first — before they could launch their new growth effort.

The lesson: Growth is best achieved by making things simpler for your customer rather than for you.

The underlying trouble had been McDonald’s working from an inside-out perspective: what fit with its current infrastructure and operations. It had tried to listen to customers, but paid attention only to what was workable within its existing capabilities. Incrementally expanding the lunch and dinner menu was an easy call, as some customers were in fact looking for specific new items or a more varied, healthier menu.

An outside-in perspective would have pushed McDonald’s to understand the expanded menu’s effects on customer experience. While some customers would appreciate the abundance of choices, many more were likely to be frustrated by the slower ordering, especially in the drive-through, due to the inevitably more complex kitchen preparation. Since speed had always been a competitive differentiator, this effect was especially important, and probably canceled any sales gain from the greater choice.

After all, McDonald’s competes in the “fast-food” category, which means most customers visit the restaurants as a quick way to get tasty, affordable food. The all-day breakfast had deep appeal and by upgrading and reorganizing the kitchens, McDonald’s could satisfy this long-standing customer request without slowing overall service.

Product expansion is often used as a path to growth, but it can have unintended consequences for other aspects of the business — including the customer experience central to the company’s value proposition. Indeed, current trends are moving away from broad offerings in many industries. A recent poll had 64% of consumers saying they would pay more for a simpler, more convenient experience. The trick is, growth strategies have to fit the company’s current context, especially its brand promise and its target market. Once they have a strategy to fit the context, they can sequence out the various steps to implement it.

Even when companies do want to expand their product offerings, internal preparation and sequencing can matter more than the innovation itself. PayPal, the electronic payments giant, found itself at a crossroads in 2015. The company had been a star of the dot-com boom, eventually selling to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. There it had become the market leader for e-commerce payment processing, but by 2015 it had some formidable rivals. EBay decided to spin off PayPal and, by 2020, use a different payment processor. The newly independent company had to decide whether to maintain its current growth path or commit to something new.

The firm’s leaders, convinced the U.S. market for e-commerce processing was saturated, went with the latter. Instead of just being “a button on a website,” they wanted to provide a platform for a variety of financial services while expanding beyond U.S. consumers. But to get there, they needed to understand their future customers, where they would be located, and what services they would want. This focus on what PayPal called the “unbanked” and underserved customer led to a crucial move. The company reorganized itself into two groups, one for consumers and one for merchants. Each was set loose to develop or acquire products to satisfy those markets.

That move enabled the company to compete in the rapidly emerging fintech space. Back in 2013, PayPal had acquired the parent company of Venmo, the mobile app that enables people to transfer money even without bank accounts. Now the company was able to build it up with the ease of use intrinsic to PayPal’s strong brand. The consumer group also acquired Xoom, a site that facilitates international transfers. Meanwhile the merchant group developed Working Capital, an in-house experiment in small-business lending that PayPal had also started in 2013. These intensive efforts were possible only because the company had first decentralized its operations and freed the groups from simply supporting the flagship product. They could focus on the next billion customers coming online.

Investors were skeptical about the new strategy, and the stock went nowhere for two years. But the new approach steadily gained momentum, and the company regained its growth trajectory. Total payment volume across the company rose 25% in 2017 alone — causing the stock to double in price. By first revamping the organization, PayPal had enabled its people to achieve remarkable growth.

Boosting growth requires intentional decision making that starts from the outside in. That doesn’t only mean being customer-centric. You have to reframe your strategic moves to serve those customers around the current and future market context, not the past. You also have to resist the temptation to try everything with your customers and hope something will stick. You need to understand trade-offs, and resist seemingly attractive moves that have undesirable long-term consequences. When you do decide on a plan of attack, you have to carefully sequence your moves to avoid overwhelming your organization or your customers. At every stage of strategic planning, this requires hard thinking from the outside in, but it will assure that your growth will climb upward and onward.

When one designs a sales process, it is normally presented on a slide, beginning on the left side with a box, normally titled “target.” It ends on the right side of that same slide with the box titled “won/lost.” It is shown to be a linear process.

We generally follow the same format when we present the buyer’s journey, another orienting generalization with real value, even if it is not as straightforward for B2B as it is for B2C. That process is also shown as something linear, with a straight path that is predictable and easy to follow.

Some sales organizations have decided to pay less attention to their sales process, preferring instead to believe their role is to facilitate the buyer’s journey. Others are slavishly devoted to their sales process without much regard for where the buyer is in their process, driving hard to move through their sales process, buyer be damned. Still others work diligently to line up these two processes. That, however, is not easily done.

Not a Journey, but Journeys

When you look at the major, disruptive trends in complex B2B sales over the last couple decades, none of them might be as important or as difficult for sales organizations as the number of stakeholders involved in a single opportunity. Not only do more stakeholders slow the process, more people involved in a decision tends also complicate things by revealing conflicting interests and internal priorities that are often at odds.

As it pertains to lining up a sales process and a buyer’s journey, more stakeholders immediately destroy almost any approach one might take.

Maybe the executive leadership understands the nature of their problem and is highly compelled to change. This is a wonderful occurrence if you’re the one calling on executive leadership in this hypothetical, especially if you have their support. But, what if at the same time their IT department is wedded to the status quo and willing to defend to the death any attempt to change things? These two groups are out of alignment in any buyer’s journey, and recognizing where each group is in your sales process isn’t all that likely to help you sort out their differences.

Complex, and Increasingly So

Because the buyer’s journey is nonlinear, the sales process is now nonlinear as well. Complex B2B sales is ever more complex.

I wrote The Lost Art Closing: Winning the 10 Commitments That Drive Sales, to provide salespeople with the commitments that are generally needed to help people and organizations change. The commitments provide a bridge between the sales process and a buyer’s journey, acknowledging the fact that different stakeholders may be in very different places when it comes to their buying journey, and providing some guidance on what to do to help move them forward.

Essential Reading!

Get my latest book: The Lost Art of Closing

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

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The post Marrying Up the Sales Process and the Buyer’s Journey appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Economist Milton Friedman said the main purpose of a business is to maximize profits for its owners (for a publicly-traded company, it’s for the stockholders).

Jim Cathcart says, the purpose of business is to “make life better for someone.” He means create a product that solves a need, and where profit is the result. 

Peter Drucker is more widely quoted as saying "Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business."       

With today’s wide choice of communications channels, it isn’t difficult to take someone’s definition, such as Drucker’s, and poop all over it with your own opinions, designed to meet your own needs (yes Friedman and Cathcart come to mind, sorry Jim).

Personally, I think Drucker’s definition stands the test of time. A business must have customers and must market its products (I take that to mean sales and marketing) and innovate. Businesses without innovation die. We see that with formerly rock-solid companies that fail to innovate fast enough to compete. Ford is one such company, desperately trying to innovate and catch up to rivals who saw the digital demands of customers in the marketplace 3 to 5 years ago.With today’s wide choice of communications channels, it isn’t difficult to take someone’s definition, such as Drucker’s, and poop all over it with your own opinions, designed to meet your own needs (yes Friedman and Cathcart come to mind, sorry Jim).

Taking Drucker’s thoughts, ask yourself: “Is our company a marketing company with innovative products, or just a company with products whose marketing is considered overhead? Does our company make a half-baked effort in sales while ignoring the fact that marketing means both sales and marketing together?” 

Ask Yourself

“Is our company a marketing company with innovative products, or just a company with products with marketing that’s considered overhead?”

I guarantee you, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff has fine-tuned the marketing of his flagship CRM product with killer innovation. Have you ever tried to market and sell against Salesforce? If their salesperson is in the mix, they never give up. They may not win, but they never give up, which is how they have grown. They do not take no for an answer.  Tell them no and they cheerfully continue selling and contacting you.

My point isn’t about Salesforce, but the opposite. There are too many companies that think a great product is all it takes, then they begrudgingly address the other half of the equation, namely marketing, by only selling, and not marketing. 

“If you work for a company that doesn’t believe in marketing, resign.”

If the company resents every dollar it spends on marketing, resign. If it doesn’t support salespeople with the latest digital tools, CRM and marketing automation programs, and provide Sales with qualified leads, resign. Do not waste your creativity and talents on a backward enterprise that’s bound to fail. Resign. And when you interview with the new company ask them one question, “Do you believe marketing is necessary or is it overhead?”

Sales-Qualified Leads.

In the B2B sales funnel, they’re the key that unlocks the door to a sale. They’re the leads that have been carefully and skillfully nurtured. They’re the ones, that with the right discussion points, could turn a prospect into a sale.

Or at least they should be.

But, in the world of modern marketing – with dozens of digital and traditional channels – it can be challenging to build a lead gen funnel that delivers quality – and that’s an important clarifying adjective – quality sales-qualified leads (SQL).

Study after study tell this story:

• Only 25% of the leads marketers generate are high enough quality to immediately advance to sales.
• 61% of B2B marketers name generating high-quality leads as their biggest challenge.
• Two-thirds of lost sales are as a result of sales reps not properly qualifying their potential customers before taking them through the full sales process.

For more very telling lead gen stats, check out this post, but I think you get the point. Developing a reliable demand gen funnel that’s rich with sales-qualified leads is a common pain point among marketing and sales teams.

In this post, we’ll outline four steps to help up your game on sales qualifying performance. Let’s dig in:

1. Know What You’re Looking For: Define Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

At a high-level, sales-qualified leads are prospects that have indicated a serious interest in purchasing your products or services. An SQL has been researched and evaluated by both the marketing and sales teams and determined that the individual has serious potential to convert into a paying customer. They are bottom-funnel leads.

In order to improve SQL performance, the first step is to clearly define what you’re looking for in a SQL. We’ve discussed sales and marketing alignment in depth in other posts (here and here and here). This step is about bridging the gap between sales and marketing, getting the teams on the same page, and then using that framework to put strategies into place that accomplish shared objectives.

The target audience for every company will be unique, but there are certain criteria that is generally defined for SQLs. A common framework used is budget, authority, need, and timeframe (BANT). In other words, answer the following questions:

Budget. What is the budget necessary for your solution/product? You don’t want the sales team to waste time engaging with leads that don’t have the budget available to become customers.

Authority. What are the job titles of your target customers? For existing customers? Creating buyer personas for your solution can be helpful here to narrow in on your target audience.

Needs. What are the needs your product or solution solves? Identify the capabilities and differentiating factors of your solution. The goal is to match your product with sales qualified leads that have articulated that need.

Timeframe. B2B sales funnels are typically longer and more complex. Obviously, SQLs should have a sense of urgency and be ready to buy, but depending on your solution, that timeframe could vary from implementation next week to six months out. Know when is the right time to start engaging with SQLs.

2. How Ready Is Your Lead: Identify Sales Funnel Stage

Determining how ready a lead is – how close a lead is to potentially converting — is tricky business. The traditional method of understanding where a lead is along the funnel used to mean marketers bombarding prospects with messaging, then picking out the few that engage with those efforts the most and tailoring future marketing efforts accordingly. It’s pretty inefficient – and incessant emails (or phone calls) can irk promising leads.

Potential customers are busy, and they’re taking time out of their day to research solutions or view content because they want something. Building a buyer journey that provides valuable information at every stage of the funnel accomplishes two things. First, it provides the prospect with the means to progressively engage with your brand as they research solutions to their problem. And second, having content designated for particular parts of the funnel helps inform the sales team’s understanding of the where the prospect lands in the sales funnel.

3. Understand Your Prospect: Motivations, Challenges, and Budget

If you want to make a new friend, ask them about themselves. We’ve all heard that advice. And the same principle applies in demand generation marketing. Use the sales funnel to get to know your prospects. Provide them with opportunities to interact with your company and self-identify key criteria that ties back to your SQL definition.

With strategic engagements in place, marketers can better facilitate engagement down the sales funnel, score leads accurately, and send the right leads to sales teams.

Use this roadmap to identify your company’s specific sales-qualifying questions that could be incorporated into your content and demand gen efforts.

4. Close the Deal: Tailor the Sales Conversation with Data

In order to determine whether or not a lead is ready to convert, marketers first have to recognize whether prospect behavior indicates interest in the product or service, or intent to make a purchase.

(Source)

As the graph above shows, specific behaviors indicate different prospect intentions. Using content marketing, relevant and fluid engagements can be incorporated into the sales funnel to hone in on the engagements that indicate intent to purchase.

From there, marketers can quickly and accurately separate leads that indicate they’re ready to be connected with a sales rep from the leads that are still researching a product or service.

Take this scenario: You’re trying to qualify two separate leads based on the behaviors they’ve made while engaging with the brand. One lead downloads several ebooks, attends a webinar, and engages with numerous top-funnel blog articles. The other lead has visited your pricing page several times and spent the majority of engagement efforts looking at case studies related to that lead’s industry.

It’s clear which one is researching and which is showing intent to purchase. The latter is your more likely your SQL.

The next step is to to reflect your knowledge and understanding of the customer, which has been gained through their various interactions with your company. Sales should use this information to have more insightful and relevant discussions with prospects.

Where Interactive Content Fits into Sales Lead Qualification

Modern marketers are taking an automated, highly targeted approach to the way they interact with their leads, and as a result, the lead qualification process is changing. The days of marketers taking a “more is better” approach to their qualifications is over. Now, marketers have to focus on generating the right leads—leads that are ready for sales and have a high chance of converting.

So, where does interactive content fit into all this?

Interactive content is a tool that provides marketers with more opportunities to engage prospects, which in turn, gives them a more opportunities to understand those prospects better throughout the nurturing process.

Interactive content enables a two-way dialogue between a business and a potential customer. It can have a place in each of the steps described above – and can play a supporting role in improving SQL performance.

For example:

With the SQL framework developed in step 1, create a top funnel asset, such as an ROI calculator, that provides value to the audience, while answering some of your key sales-qualifying questions. In a traditional sales funnel, it getting to those answers could take a dozen emails or multiple phone calls.

An interactive assessment can give you key insights to help demand gen marketers identify where a potential buyer is in the buyer journey.

A straightforward form fill on a whitepaper download gives you a lead’s contact information, but something like an interactive PDF gives you a chance to ask your prospects more relevant questions that help to quality – or disqualify leads.

With all the insights gained in a nurturing process with interactive content, sales teams go into a customer discussion with a deeper understanding of the prospect’s specific situation and challenges. With better insights, come better conversations – and improved chances of turning SQLs into conversions.

Marketing has funnels, sales has funnels, but customers? Customers don’t have funnels.

Customers have journeys.

While that journey might follow some sequential steps you have planned, it probably won’t fit neatly into those steps every time. Especially on large deals, closing a sale can take a long time, with lots of back and forth that could go on for months.

In that time, the prospect will probably check their email hundreds of times, spend many hours scrolling through social media, attend trade shows – all of which present opportunities for you to continue marketing to them.

For example, let’s say you have some ideal prospects attending next month’s industry conference. How do you think they would feel if your marketing team recognized them and said hello?

Here’s how to integrate sales and marketing to not just close more deals, but to land more ideal customers.

Why Integration Is So Important

Integrating your sales and marketing teams will help give potential customers a more seamless and natural experience. And it’s not just the customer who will benefit. By better understanding the complete customer journey, these two teams will be able to better execute within their own pieces of the puzzle.

When sales knows what kind of marketing a prospect has been exposed to, they’ll be able to manage expectations. And when marketing understands prospects’ most common sales objections, they can better craft marketing to capture more leads. In other words, both teams will be able to learn and become more effective.

By sharing data and accurately attributing credit, you’ll be able to measure your company’s results more effectively. 

Best Practices for Integrating Sales and Marketing.

I’ll be honest with you – this integration won’t happen overnight. Most people are resistant to change, so it will require a process of trial and error. But I have five tips for you today that will make the whole process go a lot smoother and quicker.

1. Intermingle Data from Both Departments

If your organization is large and siloed, this can be one of the most challenging steps. However, it can also be the most rewarding.

In 2017, 20% of marketers said that big data was the most important marketing tool out there:

(Source)

So why hinder them?

Right now they’re optimizing for things like traffic, email signups or free trials. Those are all great KPIs, but you know what would be even better? Sales and revenue.

Of course, you can’t hold the marketing team directly responsible for the job of your sales team, but you can help align them with sales by connecting your data and allowing them to see where leads end up.

For example, they may have a great low-cost campaign on Facebook that is driving tons of leads. But few of those leads end with a closed deal. By connecting the data from marketing to sales, however, that would become apparent and you can stop wasting resources on campaigns that don’t bring in customers.

There are several integrated CRMs like Salesmate that help companies with this:

2. Use a Consistent Process when Handing Over a Lead to Sales

The specifics of this process will be different for every company, but it should be clear and documented. Specifically, there should be a obvious signal telling sales when to get involved and where to find all the information they need.

They should be able to see what marketing materials the customers had as well as any demographic data collected in the process (remember, intermingle your data!).

The sales team also needs to update these accounts with notes as they go through the process so that marketing is up to date if they need to jump back in. If the deal doesn’t close, sales should make a note about why the deal fell through so both teams can analyze and learn from their results.

3. Foster a Collaborative Work Environment

One of the hardest parts of any cross-team integration is changing the culture – especially when it comes to individuals’ attitudes and ideas about others.

For integration to work, it’s important that both teams feel like they are in this together, not opposing one another. Trust and communication are keys to facilitating this (not to mention fair compensation models – more on this in a bit), and as I mentioned above, a written process can help facilitate this. However, written processes doesn’t do much to foster collaboration and don’t  generate new ideas or improvements. In fact, they can do quite the opposite.

That’s why you should consider having regular collaboration meetings where both departments come together to look at recent results, problems, and questions. Then work together to find ways to experiment and enhance the process. Two heads are always better than one, right?

4. Create a Rotational or Shadowing Program

Rotating salespeople into your marketing team and vice versa can help each one understand the other’s perspective a bit better. This helps to build trust, understanding and a collaborative environment.

It can also help them give customers a more seamless experience since they know the entire journey they go through, rather than the little piece they would normally see. It also gives more people a chance to see the process with fresh eyes, which can lead to new improvements and recommendations.

I highly recommend that all new hires get to experience both departments for a few weeks before moving into their permanent role. Many large companies require marketing hires to spend 6-12 months in a sales role. I see no reason the reverse shouldn’t be true.

Rotational programs have tons of benefits in general. Check out this short video from Cleverism:

In addition to new hires, it’s also important to do this with existing employees if departmental integration is a new direction for you. A program like this can take many different forms.

At a minimum, you should have some shadowing days where a member from one team (say sales) will spend a few days watching and learning what the other team (marketing) does all day. If your organization can handle it, you can also consider longer rotational programs for employees interested in working in a new department for 3-6 months.

While productivity might decrease since the employee has to ramp up to new skills, tools and colleagues, it won’t take as long as a fresh hire and this should pay itself back by improved collaboration and integration following the rotation.

5. Establish a Balanced System of Incentives

Having shared team incentives can help bring the teams into alignment. For example, you can offer a shared sales commission that is equally distributed among members of both teams based on deals closed each quarter. This ensures that marketing is incentivized to work toward KPIs that move the sales needle, not just vanity metrics like traffic or brand impressions. It also encourages sales to work with marketing to help them improve their efforts.

However, the key is to strike a balance between personal and individual incentives. If they don’t feel like their individual efforts have a significant impact on their individual rewards, employees may not be as motivated to give it their best, since their bonus is the same with or without their going the extra mile.

The answer is usually some combination of shared revenue-based commissions (the overall team goal) with individual incentives based on KPIs specific to that role. For example, sales would receive sales commission but a content marketing manager might get measured by website traffic or the number of leads captured.

Conclusion

At my digital marketing agency, Single Grain, we focus on results and ROI. That’s why we encourage our teams and those we consult for to work with sales operations to make sure that marketing efforts are driving real sales.

This isn’t always easy. Any time you bring two groups of people together, there will be some friction. The process isn’t simple, but it’s worth it.

With aligned goals, understanding and incentives, the two teams will operate with increased performance and agility. Problems will have better solutions. Prospects will feel more attended to. More deals will close.

As technology blends the roles of marketer and salesperson more and more, it doesn’t make sense to keep them isolated in their own silos. Marketing and sales team integration lets you design a journey and process around the customer, not departments or job titles.

Customer-centric strategies always win!

The post How to Integrate Sales & Marketing to Close More Deals appeared first on OpenView Labs.

I meet too many salespeople who think networking with people they know is the same thing as prospecting. Don’t kid yourself!

In my book, “High-Profit Prospecting,” I give you specific step-by-step processes to help you not only feel more comfortable prospecting, but also to do it with regularity and enthusiasm.

Invest in yourself with my book, and I am confident you’ll see your pipeline grow not merely with quantity, but with quality!  Quality prospects are what lead to high-profit sales.

And don’t forget how 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

Organizations with highly-engaged employees routinely outperform those with greater numbers of disengaged employees. They not only post higher earnings, but also recover faster from market-induced setbacks. It seems self-evident, then, that companies would have a vested interest in taking every step possible to keep their employees actively engaged and committed to their work.

Despite this, research has shown that over two-thirds of employees are either disengaged or, at best, indifferent. Low engagement rates contribute to diminished productivity and increase the likelihood of turnover, causing many otherwise promising employees to depart for more favorable opportunities elsewhere. Fortunately, there are many strategies that organizations can implement to help boost engagement.

1: Provide a Road Map for Success

Knowing that they have a clearly-defined future is a major factor in whether or not someone decides to leave an organization to look for new opportunities. This is especially important for millennials, who change jobs more frequently than previous generations and routinely identify development opportunities as a key factor in their career decisions. By holding regular career discussions with employees and asking them where they see themselves in the future, companies can create plans that help them develop the skills they need to take on additional responsibility in the future.

In addition to boosting retention rates, this emphasis on development also boosts engagement since employees are more likely to see their role in the organization as important and valued. They take greater ownership over their responsibilities while also keeping an eye on the future. Knowing that the work they do today will benefit their career tomorrow, employees who feel they have a clear advancement path in the organization can avoid feeling like they’re stuck in the same position with no end in sight.

Also, facilitating development helps to build trust because it demonstrates that the company values and appreciates its employees. With that sense of trust comes a greater commitment to the organization’s mission and improved engagement.

2: Recognize Good Work

It’s one thing to show support for employees through development opportunities, but such measures are only one of the ways that companies can demonstrate how they values employees. Cheering on successes and highlighting accomplishments might seem like a minor gesture, but it goes a long way toward showing employees that the work they do matters.

Gallup research has demonstrated that 2 out of 3 employees feel that the good work they do goes unrecognized. This figure should be particularly worrisome for companies since employees who feel underappreciated are twice as likely to quit. Considering that recognizing good work is such a low-cost strategy that can be implemented on a daily basis, it’s rather remarkable that so many organizations are falling short in this regard.

Encouraging employees and celebrating accomplishments doesn’t have to come exclusively from leadership. Positive feedback and recognition from colleagues can also help boost engagement by creating a sense of trust and camaraderie throughout an organization. When employees have a positive emotional investment in the success of their teammates, they’re more likely to be engaged in their work to further that success.

3: Establish Two-Way Communication

No one likes being kept in the dark. Organizations that operate under a veil of secrecy and keep employees on a strict “need to know” basis tend to struggle with low engagement and retention rates. People want to know about decisions that affect them, what is expected of them, and information that may be relevant to their tasks.

But simply sharing information isn’t enough to promote engagement. Employees need to know that communication flows both ways. If they can’t take their concerns or ideas to leadership, they will likely feel ignored or unvalued. This goes beyond simply having an open door policy. Being able to voice concerns is one thing, but knowing that someone is there to genuinely listen to them and take them seriously is quite another.

Effective leaders are generally proactive communicators who encourage people to speak out and let everyone know they’re willing to listen. They make themselves as accessible as possible and don’t treat information as leverage to further their own ambitions.

4: Provide a Sense of Purpose

For many employees today, especially millennials, it’s not enough to simply show up for work, perform a task, and collect a paycheck. They want to feel that the work they do matters, that it has some purpose beyond simply turning a profit. In addition to their own personal contributions, they want to know that the organization they work for is committed to values and goals that they share.

If employees can’t reconcile their personal values with those of their company, they will become disengaged very quickly and likely begin their search for another position elsewhere. It’s incumbent upon organizations, and especially leadership, to communicate their values and mission statement clearly and explicitly. Furthermore, they must show employees how their contributions actually make a difference in whether or not the organization accomplishes its goals. When employees connect their workplace to their personal values, they’re more likely to be engaged in their work and demonstrate a greater level of personal investment in the company’s success.

In order for organizations and leaders to retain the respect of their employees, they must treat them with respect and fairness while also holding themselves to the same standards. Employees want to know that they will be judged primarily on their performance rather than factors outside their control. They also expect that rules and procedures are there to be followed, not discarded at the earliest, inconvenient opportunity. This is especially important for leaders, who very often set the standard for behavior by example. If employees get the impression that the rules do not apply to some people, they are more likely to become disengaged and refuse to hold themselves accountable for their actions.

Companies also need to make sure that their expectations are realistic. While engaged employees will often take on a heavier workload than their less engaged peers, leaning too heavily on them can burn them out or lead to resentment. Similarly, if even routine tasks seem to be overwhelming, employees can become frustrated and seek more reasonable opportunities elsewhere.

An engaged workforce is an invaluable asset for any organization, but it’s also a very precious one. Any breach of trust could easily undermine that engagement and cause drastic decreases in productivity, profitability, and retention rates. By keeping a focus on ways to boost engagement, companies will create a positive work environment that makes people want to commit its success both in the present and for the future.

Ten to twenty years ago, career choices and opportunities for women were extremely limited. While we’ve made incredible progress over time, the opportunity for women to reach the top of the corporate ladder is still met with some underlying challenges.

To this day, the trajectory of growth for women in leadership roles is quite different from their male counterparts, and women are under-represented in the C-suite. However, the major movement to push the professional development of women in the marketing world is making an impact.

As a marketing recruitment and staffing agency, we come across many women across all levels who feel reluctant to push through the glass ceiling in the industry and find it difficult to pursue their career goals. Many of them are younger professionals who underestimate themselves or are more senior-level professionals who have tried time and time again, but haven’t been able to reach their definitions of success (just yet, at least).

Related Video: Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders | Sheryl Sandberg

Video by TED

Top Marketing Recruitment Firm Shares 8 Important Things Successful Women in Marketing Do

Regardless of how you felt in your past jobs, know that every role has come into your life for a reason. You may not realize it just yet, but these are all lessons that will mold you into who you are – personally and professionally. So, trust the process and be the strongest advocate for your own professional career development.

Do a Self-Assessment

You won’t get what you want if you aren’t sure of what your focus is. Take time to reflect on what your strengths and skills are, and where you want your career to go. From there, create a plan and strategize what you need to do to reach your career goals.

As you create a roadmap for your career, focus on things and ambitions that are valuable to you. Don’t try to force yourself into being someone you’re not – stay true to yourself. Focus on being the best authentic version of yourself and always maintain your core values and beliefs.

Are you truly ready for that promotion or that new project you’ve been trying to get your hands on? What gaps do you have in your skill set that may be preventing you from progressing? Making sure you’re on the right path by building skills you may be missing is important in moving ahead.

Ask for What You Want

Don’t settle for positions or roles that undervalue your capabilities, and don’t be passive when it comes to reaching for new opportunities. Actively go after what you want and create your own opportunities.

Don’t underestimate yourself – seek self-promotion and get the pay that you deserve. However, understand the fine line between being confident and arrogant. If you’re extremely over-confident, you can come off as abrasive and vain.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to say yes to everything that’s asked of you. If you have competing priorities, make sure you have a good balance of being a team player and taking on projects that are beneficial to your role and career development.

Simply put – believe in your skills and believe that you can have it all. From there on, go fiercely after what you deserve!

Build Your Network

Free-Photos / Pixabay

Don’t overlook the value of making deep relationships with colleagues, peers, and managers. Take the time to get to know people on a personal level and nurture these relationships. These genuine connections will be worthwhile for you personally and professionally.

Build relationships not only just within your department but cross-functionally in other departments, and outside of your organization. Build a network with other women who are also on the trajectory for professional growth. There are many organizations and events established to help women cultivate their careers and progress forward. A solid network is valuable for exchanging ideas, business opportunities, and learning best practices and the latest trends.

Go to as many networking events as possible and diversify your connections. Look into getting involved with volunteering and non-profit organizations. Doing so will broaden your perspective on life and give you opportunities you never had before.

Make every interaction count; you never know what doors can open up for your future!

Earn Your Seat at the Table

How are you marketing yourself? What do you want people to think of you in and out of the office?

You’re ultimately responsible for your own career, and you can’t expect to have success handed to you. You must bring your goals and aspirations to fruition; so if you know what you want, go beyond the call of duty to get it.

You have to focus on building your own personal brand, and proving your capabilities as a marketer to employers and your company by creating results. Show initiative and take risks, and always challenge yourself to do better. If you fail, it’s not the end; rather, it’s the only path to success. Just pick yourself up and try again.

Maintain your integrity and always treat others (that are above and below your seniority) with respect. By working hard and being proud of how you achieved milestones, you will look back and feel that you’ve had a fulfilling journey.

Find a Mentor

Having a person to mentor you and provide their personal experiences to help develop your career is incredibly valuable. The majority of successful people in the world are where they are because of guidance from mentors and leaders.

Take a look at women-leaders in organizations – is that where you can see yourself? Don’t hesitate to reach out to other women in your organization and in the industry. There are so many who are willing to mentor and guide other women because they genuinely enjoy it.

Leverage every opportunity you get to learn from other women and ask for advice. This is a great way to get advice from people who have been in your position and learn from their experience.

Don’t Ignore Your Gut Feeling

Women face the challenge of feeling like they can’t have it all – a full-blown career, a social life, a family, and everything in-between. However, as a marketing talent agency who has placed many successful women in top-level positions, we know you can.

We also know that women have high emotional intelligence that allows them to understand and analyze people and situations on a deeper level. Some may think this is better referred to as a woman’s inherent intuition.

Whatever you want to call it, always listen to your gut feeling. If you have a feeling that a certain company isn’t the right place to work, don’t ignore it. Being emotionally intelligent and listening to your intuition is highly important when it’s used to make career choices.

Be a Lifelong Learner

Don’t allow yourself to become complacent in your professional development and don’t let your learning stop within the confinement of work.

Watch webinars, read trade publications and business books. Attend conferences and seminars, and keep up with influencers and thought leaders in your industry. Try to work in different departments across your organization to strengthen your overall business skills and capabilities.

Get to where you want by being self-taught and taking charge of your own education. You can’t ever have too much knowledge, especially in marketing.

Support Other Women and Diversity

At the end of the day, you want to make sure you’re advocating for diversity to make room for other women like you to have opportunities for career growth and leadership roles.

If you’ve found success by working hard and have gotten the guidance of great mentors, pay it forward by meeting with other women who may be in positions similar to yours. Take the time to help others and share your experiences.

Give support, encourage others, and be an active part of the movement to help women thrive. The impact you have on other women can be one of the key drivers that contribute to success in your long career journey.

Conclusion

You won’t reach ultimate success overnight. And if you’re extremely motivated in reaching your maximum potential, you’ll realize that you’ll always want to improve and get better overtime.

Take smart chances, keep learning, and take advantage of every opportunity you have. Remember that how you treat others will largely impact the trajectory of your career and all of the choices you make steer you in the direction you’re supposed to be in. Every role and opportunity shapes who you are and the professional that you are today.

Strap in and enjoy the ride!

In complex B2B sales, there’s a common recognition that multiple stakeholders are almost always involved in the decision-making process. Research by the CEB (now part of Gartner) found that the average number was 6.8 and rising.

In some deals, that number is even higher, and it’s increasingly rare for a single decision-maker to be able to drive through a significant business purchase without the active involvement of their colleagues.

Few sales leaders would disagree with the importance of identifying, engaging and assessing these stakeholders. But many sales methodologies take an over-simplistic approach, attempting to categorize these stakeholders along a single dimension…

An over-simplistic approach

Some, for example, choose to emphasize the role the stakeholder plays in the buying process: are they the economic buyer, the business sponsor, the technical buyer, or merely an influencer?

Others attempt to assess the stakeholder’s degree of influence over the buying process, and yet others attempt to assess the stakeholder’s attitude to us.

Yet others attempt to characterize the primary contact as go-getters, skeptics, friends, teachers, guides, climbers or blockers.

And some mix up these internal and external-facing factors into a somewhat confusing one-dimensional mash-up.

In truth, all of these factors are important, and any attempt to channel our assessment of stakeholders along any single dimension is inevitably an over-simplification.

That’s why any effective assessment of the stakeholder group needs to take into account a number of different factors – their role in the decision, their influence over the decision, their attitude towards us, their top business priority as it relates to the current project, their single most important decision factor and our key value to them.

Identifying and engaging the stakeholder group

But, of course, we can’t start to assess these factors until and unless we manage to identify as many as possible of these stakeholders. Asking our current prime contact whether they are the ultimate decision maker won’t always return an accurate answer.

Sometimes, we’ll need to take a lateral approach, by asking – for example – which other roles and departments are affected by the issue, or by asking our contact to describe how other similar decisions have been made in the past.

If we haven’t identified a significant number of stakeholders, we’re probably missing some important people. If we remain stubbornly single-threaded through one individual, we inevitably will be.

We may need to persuade our prime contact that it is their interest to collaborate with us in opening up access to their fellow stakeholders. It’s easier to do this if they are genuinely serious about making change happen and see us as a credible option. If neither of these things are true, we’ve got to wonder whether the opportunity is real or worth pursuing.

We will probably need to earn the right to engage these stakeholders by sharing valuable experience and offering valuable stories and insights that they see as being relevant to their role. We’re far less likely to succeed if we come across as just another pushy sales person.

A multi-dimensional assessment

Once we have engaged these additional stakeholders, we need to consider the following:

Their role in the decision process

Is their primary role one of an economic buyer, business sponsor, technical buyer, one of the other key contributors, a negotiator (legal or procurement), an influencer or merely an information gatherer?

Their influence over the final decision

Are they the dominant influence – able to make or break the project or do they have a strong, average, weak or non-existent influence over the final decision?

Their attitude towards us

Are they a full-on champion for our cause, or are they positive, neutral, negative or a potential blocker?

Their top business priority

What is their single most important business priority when it comes to this specific project? How will they and their department benefit from our solution? How will they and their department suffer if the status quo were to prevail?

Their key decision factor

What is the single most important factor influencing their decision when it comes to this project? And how does each individual stakeholder’s key decision factor relate to that of their colleagues?

Our key value to them

What is the single most valuable thing that our proposed solution will deliver to them? How does this affect their personal and department performance?

The inevitability of imperfect knowledge

It’s hard to assess all of these factors accurately for every single stakeholder. It’s likely that some of the factors will be unknown. But knowing what we don’t yet know can help to establish what we need to know next. And having a partial understanding is a heck of a lot better than no understanding at all.

If we are to take this exercise seriously (and it’s of little value if we don’t) then we need to avoid wishful thinking or guesswork. It’s better to acknowledge that we don’t know than to make it up.

Imperfect knowledge is a lot better than none at all. When we look back on deals that we have lost, it won’t be unusual to conclude that part of the reason is that we failed to understand or navigate the prospect’s internal politics.

That’s why our stakeholder analysis always needs to have more than one dimension…

While most companies put extensive effort into obtaining new customers, it’s just as important to put that same high-level effort into keeping them around, making successful customer onboarding must. This nurturing process helps new users become familiar with your product, typically including things like ongoing guidance, tutorials and celebrations of milestones. Your onboarding process gives customers support from the get-go while setting a positive tone for your relationship going forward.

Why is Onboarding Important?

Customer onboarding can increase customer lifetime value, decrease churn, and transform new users into ongoing, loyal supporters of your product and brand. A successful onboarding strategy can also help to combat some scary stats:

• 75 percent: Amount of new users companies typically lose within the first week
• 40 to 60 percent: Amount of free trial users that try a product once and never return
• 5 percent or higher: Churn rates for the majority of SaaS companies

How to Onboard Your Customers

Creating an effective onboarding strategy starts by keeping the end in mind. Each step in your onboarding plan needs to contribute to your overall goal of transforming new users into lifelong promoters and fans.

Understand Your Customer

The better you understand each of your buyer personas, the better you can create an onboarding process that addresses each one’s exact needs. Become familiar with each pain point, obstacle and challenge they face, along with solutions that produce optimum outcomes.

Set Milestones

Determine what new users want out of your product, and then map out a plan to get them there. Set success milestones at key points along the way, ensuring each milestone you create is one you can help them achieve on time every time.

Onboard Internally

Take your company team members through the customer onboarding process to give them a better idea of each customer’s needs, pain points, background and story. Aligning your team in this way can improve the flow and implementation of new ideas while making the customer an integral part of everyday functioning.

Build the Relationship

You’re not just making a sale. You’re creating a partnership. Growing a relationship involves actions like assigning account managers, regularly checking in, interacting on social media and otherwise doing things that regularly strengthen trust and illustrate product value.

Gather Data, Measure Success

Data is crucial for measuring customer success with your onboarding process and beyond. It’s also a must for measuring customer satisfaction. Key metrics to track include churn rates, customer lifetime value (CLV) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Measuring retention metrics within specific time periods are also useful for finding out when customer churn is most likely. This lets you adjust processes within that time period that may decrease churn rates.

6 Useful Tips

A number of useful tips can enhance your onboarding experience even further.

1. Personalize the Experience

Some customers may want one-on-one guidance during onboarding, while others prefer to figure things out on their own. Tailor your onboarding process to meet their exact needs and desires, creating an individualized experience for customer success.

2. Provide a Step-by-Step Breakdown

Give new users a slow, steady and selective flow of information as they acclimate themselves to your product. Ask them to complete one task at a time, giving them clear instructions for each task.

3. Make Your Product Indispensable

The sooner you can get new customers into the groove of using your product on a regular basis to achieve their goals, the more quickly they can come to realize how essential it is for their success. Aim to get new customers using your product several times during the first week to establish a regular pattern of activity.

4. Stay in Constant Communication

Be at the ready for customers if they have any issues as they’re learning the ropes. Sticking with them every step of the way enhances their experience while letting you identify any gaps in your onboarding process.

5. Make Goals Customer-Centric

Different customers will have different goals, depending on their desired outcome. Help each customers set measurable goals unique to their specific situation, along with measurable benchmarks to achieve along the way.

6. Celebrate Small Wins

Whether you do it over the phone, with an email or through a celebratory notification that’s triggered when a milestone is hit, acknowledge the small successes.

While your official onboarding plan may go into action may kick off when someone buys your product, the onboarding process actually starts the first time someone interacts with your brand. Every interaction is a chance to make a favorable impression while gathering information you can use to continuously improve your onboarding experience. Customer service software like HubSpot Service Hub can help you make every interaction a memorable one.

Prospecting can be tedious and time-consuming, but it’s something that has to be done to keep pipelines healthy.

However, while sales reps can’t avoid prospecting, they can certainly make it easier for themselves. By having a go-to list of places to find prospects, and a procedure for each platform, we no longer have to wonder where or how to find prospects.

Here are nine ways salespeople can find prospects fast and keep filling up their pipelines month after month.

Where Do Salespeople Find Prospects?

1. Job Boards

Job listings are windows into understanding prospects' needs. For instance, if you notice that a company is hiring an HR benefits analyst and you provide compensation services, this is a good organization to reach out to. They are likely struggling with benefits and would be interested in hearing from someone who can help (read: you).

In addition, new jobs are often trigger events for buying new products or services. If you notice that a company is hiring an executive or senior employee in the function you sell into, keep an eye on when the listing goes down. Then search for the newly-hired decision maker, and send your pitch.

Job boards to look at include:

• Glassdoor
• LinkedIn
• Monster
• CareerBuilder
• Zip Recruiter
• Indeed
• Simply Hired

2. Twitter

The key to making the most out of Twitter is to have a list of the top three or four keywords your target prospects care about. Then run Twitter searches on variations of those keywords to find people who are talking about those topics.

Some people might be asking questions. Others might be complaining about how difficult something may be. In any case, you can jump in and add value to the conversation -- and potentially pick up some prospects along the way.

Once you have a few leads in mind, use private Twitter lists to keep an eye on them, as well as other relevant people.

Here are some Twitter lists you might want to create:

• Prospects within your territory that you want to keep tabs on
• Bloggers and media that report on companies in your territory so you can find out about new companies
• VCs in the territory to find out what they’re investing in and what funding round companies are in

3. Business Journals

Local business journals cover news on big events happening at companies in the area, whether that be a lawsuit, a new location, or additional funding. By keeping an eye on these events, you can find out about businesses you might not have heard of and discover relevant trigger events on which to base your outreach.

These trigger events can be used as a point of reference when you send your first email or make the first call to your new prospect.

4. Industry Blogs and Forums

I’m a marketer in the software industry so I’m subscribed to forum newsletters like GrowthHacker.com and related forums like Product Hunt. I also subscribe to newsletters of entrepreneurs in the software industry.

These newsletters keep me up to date about new companies and often contain case studies of businesses that are doing well.

There are three benefits to subscribing to these newsletters:

• Find out about new companies
• Learn about successful companies
• Stay up to date on industry trends and strategies

If you don't find a new prospect directly through blogs and forums, the knowledge you gain will help point you in the direction of leads. For instance, you might discover that everyone in your target industry is struggling to deal with a certain new compliance law.

You can then search for the name of this law on Google or LinkedIn, and surface active conversations prospects are having. Join the debate, and pick up some valuable leads.

5. LinkedIn

If used correctly, LinkedIn can be a gold mine of prospects.

In addition to the job listings, LinkedIn groups are full of people looking for help. You can head to the "Discover" section of your groups homepage to source new industry related groups to join.

Join relevant groups, add to the conversation, and help the community. While it wouldn’t be a good idea to go in and sell right off the bat, keep these individuals and companies on your list of prospects to monitor and engage with.

If you know your ideal buyer persona, you can easily find people who match that criteria with the help of advanced search. Whether you search by location, the company they work at, their industry, or language they speak, it's easy to find specific communities of people. And if you've already found a company you want to get in touch with, you can search for people at that business to contact.

Once you find companies that you'd like to pursue, follow the organization's profile for updates and trigger events that will help you customize and personalize your messaging.

For more on LinkedIn prospecting, check out this article on LinkedIn Sales Navigator secrets, and this one on little-known ways to find new prospects on LinkedIn, and this one all about how to send a LinkedIn message to absolutely anyone.

6. CrunchBase

CrunchBase provides information on funding, company exits, and tech events. Note: This only applies to public companies, so if you sell to private organizations, this site won't be of much help to you (outside of gathering competitive intel).

When a company gets money, that money needs to be spent. See where I’m going with this?

Find out which companies recently got funding and then research whether or not any of these organizations would be a good fit for your product or services.

We can also use the advanced search feature to narrow search results down to companies within our territory or category.

7. Local Chamber of Commerce Website

While it might not be the most enjoyable website to peruse and the listings may not be totally comprehensive, your local Chamber of Commerce website offers a directory of local businesses.

The Boston Chamber of Commerce business directory organizes businesses by industry. This is perfect if you know your ideal customer persona.

8. HubSpot CRM

Wouldn't it be great if you could source new prospects directly from your CRM? HubSpot's free CRM tool offers just this capability. By clicking the "Companies" tab, salespeople can search a database of companies and filter results by location, industry, and employee count.

Click here to try it out for yourself.

9. Quora

Quora is a Q&A platform where users post questions, source answers, and “upvote” good responses from community members -- giving these answers more visibility and authority.

Sound like Reddit? There are some important differences to note. Mainly, while Reddit lets users be anonymous, Quora has users link their profiles with Facebook or Twitter accounts. This increases user accountability and has elevated Quora's reputation for business networking.

Simply create an account, follow "channels" relevant to your industry, add your own areas of expertise, and follow other users.

As a best practice, follow other salespeople in your industry and buyers or clients you currently work with. View questions they're asking and threads they're currently involved in to get greater insight into other valuable channels to join.

From there, start asking genuine questions and providing answers when appropriate. Just be sure you're adding value before dropping a pitch. Never be overly spammy or repetitive. And share links sparingly. Check out this article for more on sales prospecting on Quora.

When talking about qualified leads -- there's no such thing as "fast prospecting." It takes time to build mutually beneficial relationships and develop the rapport necessary to reach out to a prospect for the first time. But these sources will give you quick access to large pools of leads just waiting to be developed into your next qualified prospects.

You’ve just launched a gorgeous campaign with all the design bells and whistles. The copywriting is art and the experience intoxicating—so say your design and content team.

The day of launch has everyone excited. The marketing team smells a win at Cannes Lions and the sales team anticipates Glengarry-level leads. But wait, what’s that? Nothing? Nothing!

It looks like you’ve got a bad case of Invisible Content Syndrome.

Just about every marketer experiences the dichotomy of creation / promotion with an increasing focus on making the best content possible. But then what? Many time-strapped marketers are resolved to hit publish, schedule some social shares on brand profiles and maybe throw a few bucks towards social ads. But is that enough?

Back in 2012 Americans were consuming an average of 63 GB of media on a daily basis. I can only imagine how much it is today. Enough to make last minute social shares and ads a crapshoot in terms of making sure your content is seen by the audience you intend and when it’s actually going to be useful for them.

Invisible Content Syndrome isn’t a new idea, of course. Sonia Simone from Copyblogger wrote about it back in 2010 (which I just discovered this week) offering solid tips on how to beat it. When it comes to solving for invisible content, creating channels of distribution for content marketing is something I’ve been focused on a very long time—here’s a post on the topic from 2007.

Fast forward to 2018 and today’s world of information overload and the multitude of device options for consuming information makes standing out even more challenging. Content promotion can’t be effective if it’s an afterthought. Your best practice would be to make promotion part of content planning.  To provide you with a helpful resource, I’ve compiled a list of content promotion ideas for you to consider during your content planning so you can be the best answer for your customers, when and where it matters most.

50 Content Promotion Tactics to Cure Invisible Content Syndrome

1. Collaborate with influencers. I have to put this one first because it’s become an incredibly effective way of delivering mutual benefit for everyone involved. Brands get exposure to influencer audiences as they promote the result of their collaboration, influencers get exposure by association with the brand and consumers get really useful content from people they trust. There are a multitude of variations on working with influencers for content promotion and you’ll see some of them further on in the list.

2. Create modular content for repurposing. Another highly effective approach is to identify topical segments of your main content and cluster them together for variations on the theme in repurposed content. If your content is about topics X, Y and Z then you can take all the ideas about X and either: publish in a different format like turning a blog post into an ebook as I’ve done down below, or add some new insights about topic X to those from your original content and publish it as a deeper dive on the subject.  Repurposing has many different options and I’ll bring a few more up further in the list.

3. Ping journalists about research content before you publish. This is a great idea I learned from Steve Rayson of BuzzSumo. If you’re doing a research project, identify publications that match editorially and reach out to a relevant journalist in advance to see what questions they would like answered in the research. When the report publishes, share with the Journalists and they’ll inevitably help promote the thing they contributed to. You can sign up for services like HARO and wait for opportunities to find you or seek them out with a service like Muck Rack.

4. Republish / syndicate on a different channel. Publish the original content on your brand site or blog, then the author can republish that same content on LinkedIn Pulse with a citation and link to the original at the end. An alternative would be to republish on Medium following the same citation advice. A different channel will likely have a different audience and when the content you’re working with happens to be mutually relevant to multiple channels where you publish, why not share?

5. Repurpose the original in a different media format. A substantive video could be turned into multiple blog posts with still images used as graphics in the posts. The audio from the video might be useful in a podcast format and further screen grabs from the video could be used for social shares.

6. Deconstruct the original content and personalize for a different audience. In many types of content there are universal truths —things that are true for each audience segment or vertical market a brand is after. Strip away what’s personalized in your content for a specific audience leaving these truths. Then add in content specific to a different vertical or audience and publish appropriately. The additional content that results becomes more content promotion opportunity.

If you want your content to be great, invite your community to participate. @leeodden

7. Survey your social networks with one simple question. Then compile answers into a blog post, citing the contributors. Announce the published content to your network and those that contributed will appreciate the attribution and help promote it.

8. Reassemble modular interviews into new content. Identify a group of 10 industry experts / influencers and interview them. It’s often best to start with just one question as mentioned above, then follow up to ask more. Make 3-4 of the questions very specific and designed to evoke tactical answers. Be sure to use SEO keywords in the questions. Publish each of the 10 interviews a week or month apart. After that, take all the answers to one of the tactical questions and assemble into a new post about that very specific topic. Add a your own insights or capture tips from a few new influencers to spice it up and don’t be afraid to publish as an infographic, motion graphic or eBook. Do the same for the other tactical questions and answers as well. New formats give you new publish and promotion opportunities.

9. Write guest posts for industry blogs. Take the main theme of your content and customize a story for relevant industry blogs. Tools like BlogDash can be helpful for finding the right blogs. The contributed blog posts need to be written in a way that linking to your original content makes sense as a reference. This is most meaningful when your original content is not a blog post itself, like a video, report, ebook, infographic, microsite, interactive experience, motion graphic, etc.

10. Pitch industry publications with exclusive stories. With bigger content assets and especially those involving research or truly newsworthy information, it pays to identify industry publications and pitch story ideas. With enough advance notice, you can see the upcoming themes for a publication in their editorial calendar. If a staff journalist is unresponsive, research contributing authors with story ideas. Your story is the content—but you might also be able to link back to useful resources that support the facts of the story. The more unique, robust and engaging, the more likely a relevant resource on your brand site will be linked to by the publication.

11. Pitch for podcast interviews. Podcasting is growing fast and while I’ve never used a pitching service myself, they do exist. You can also search iTunes and other sources of podasts for relevant shows or use a service like RadioGuestList. Then reach out to the owner with your idea for an interview. As above, the more unique, robust and engaging a relevant resource on your brand site is, the more likely it will be linked to by the podcast.

12. Share with communities. Tap into smaller community websites or forums to share your content. However, don’t just arrive, drop a link and leave, expecting the community to respond. You’ll need to invest time in finding the right communities and then build credibility before sharing links to your content.

13. Make content sharing easy. Nothing scales social sharing like making sharing easy. Use click to tweet links in PDFs, reports and blog posts to make it easy for people to share with a single click (or two). Also format your content with quotes to make it shareable.

14. Add your last article to your email signature and out-of-office messages. I learned this one from Jason Miller at LinkedIn.  Below your contact info in an email signature, include the title and link to your latest blog post or content project. Do the same with one, two or three in your out of office message.

15. Make a video on LinkedIn announcing your content. Ann Handley did this recently when she announced the keynote speakers for B2B Forum and it had tens of thousands of views.

16. Use Facebook Live to announce you’ve published new content. This is a smart tip from David Zheng. When you start Facebook Live, a notification is sent to all your followers and fans. Then you can show a featured image and talk about the key points of the post. You can also ask viewers to head to your site to finish reading it or to implement the tactics you talked about. A related suggestion is to create an Instagram or Snapchat story to announce your new content and why it’s useful.

17. Send an email to your email list. Of course you might already be using an RSS to email service with your blog, so this is not that. But if you have a general email newsletter sent on a regular basis, a dedicated email announcing something new and relevant can be very effective for visibility of the content you want to promote.

18. Monitor social networks for questions and answer them with your content. When a question pops up that could be answered with content you’ve created, you have a legitimate reason to share a link. You can set up notifications with services that scan social channels like Twitter or specific forums.

19. Track competitors for inspiration and opportunities. Services like RivalIQ help identify breakout social posts and content from competitors so you can see what they’re doing that’s working. Social media monitoring tools that track competitors can help you see opportunities to promote your content as an answer when a competitor is involved in the discussion. This can be tricky, so be careful and be relevant.

20. Twitter Chats. You can either create a Twitter Chat yourself or start participating in relevant industry Twitter chats. The question and answer format is ideal for sharing relevant and helpful links to your content. Just don’t overdo it. Also, curation of Twitter chats are a great source of content you can publish on your blog with links to the promotable content you want to share.

If you want to be in the media, become the media. @leeodden

21. Start a podcast. If you’re not having luck getting picked up by other podcasts, maybe you should start one. I’ve been saying for many years, “If you want to be in the media, become the media.” A podcast can become just that: a platform where you can showcase useful insights and content, including your own.

22. Start a blog. Many of the tips already posted here assume you have a blog, but if you don’t, then start one! There are several blog platforms to choose from including WordPress, Tumblr or Medium. On your blog, you can curate other content as news when you’re not publishing yourself. The blog and your useful content can become a hub for your content marketing efforts to create and promote useful information that inspires your audience to do business with you.

23. Tap your community. Active engagement amongst a community means permission to share what’s important to you – including your most recent amazing content. It matters less where the community is—social networks, forums, private groups or a Slack channel and more that you are creating value for the community be sharing relevant and useful content. If they like it, they’ll share it.

24. Activate employees. An email or platform notification sent to your employees about a recently published content masterpiece is a great way to provide them with source material for their own social sharing. Your staff also represent a potentially effective distribution channel for your content as well.

25. Link to new content from content already published. When new content is being created, part of the process should be to research what has already been published on the topic. Redundancy is no good for people or search rankings after all. But complementary content does make sense to link up. Link to your new content (as a related topic) from on-topic content that is still getting traffic from search, social and links to provide a little positive lift.

People will work for a living, but they’ll die for recognition. @leeodden

26. Mention new book authors, analysts, influencers and journalists. People in the game of exposure appreciate being mentioned in relevant ways on other websites. The monitoring/alerts those mentions will create can result in clicks to inspect the source content. Because your content is amazing and you have cited the individuals in the most relevant way, there’s a good chance they will share or even link from their own blogs.

27. Upgrade the competition.Find the most popular online content on your topics of interest and create something even better.  Go deep and invest in the design of the information. Link to the content you want to promote from this robust deep dive on the topic.

28. Paid social promotion. Organic is great, but sometimes paid is better. The audience targeting options with major social networks can help you direct qualified traffic to your content. For that, use Facebook or Instagram Ads, Promoted Tweets, Sponsored LinkedIn Content, Sponsored InMail or Text Ads to promote your content to exactly the audience you want to reach.

29. Retargeting. Use a service like AdRoll to tag your content so when people visit and leave, you can display retargeting ads to them for your content as they visit other websites.

30. Promote with native advertising. Another way to pay your way to exposure is  to use a service like Outbrain Amplify to get your content recommended on premium sites, including CNN, People and ESPN.

31. Paid search. The vast majority of all research online starts with a search engine. Find the right keywords for your content and PPC ads could provide the right amount of lift in visibility.

32. Create or buy a niche site. Returns require an investment and sometimes the long game means investing in a niche microsite or even purchasing an existing niche site that is focused on the topic you’re after. Along with the past content is a community of subscribers that you can tap into for exposure to your content.

33. Update and optimize old content. When we do content audits, one of the things we look for is to identify content that has potential – the right  mix of maintained search popularity and and opportunity to be updated. When you find those candidates for updating, optimize them for search and social shares.

34. Creative interactive experiences. Create a quiz, poll, calculator or similar input/output experience using a platform like SnapApp or Ceros that can create interest and then send visitors to your content to dig in deeper to the topic. We worked with Ceros to create an interactive infographic for a research report and both the referrals and the conversion rate to download the report have been amazing.

35. Tap into event streams. Find relevant conferences and their hashtags to follow. Create, or better yet, repurpose content specifically for the audience attending the event. During the event, share your useful and on-topic content with the the community following the hashtag. Don’t overdo it and your shares must be on-topic and relevant.

36. Optimize for organic search. Of course, this is the slow burn of content amplification tactics, but if you are smart and diligent about making your content both Google and people friendly plus you are publishing regularly, you can increase the frequency Googlebot visits and crawls of your site. That means new content you publish can show up in search results within hours.

37. Partner marketing. Identify other companies that are non-competitive but share similar audience objectives. Incorporate your content with theirs in a joint venture whether it’s a webinar, research study or and online / offline event. Each of you will gain exposure to a new audience in a credible way.

If you want better marketing, be the best answer wherever your customers are looking. @leeodden

38. Create an answer engine. Mine your site search for questions visitors search on and develop content that answers those questions. You can use other sources of customer questions like feedback forms and tools like AnswerThePublic.com, BuzzSumo and StoryBase. Q/A format content that follows a specific topic can be do well in organic search. Link to your new content from those pages where relevant. You can also seek out questions on sites like Quora and answer them citing and linking to your more in depth content on the topic.

39. Affiliate program. Give niche and microinfluencers an incentive to share your content by offering an affiliate program that rewards them for the completion of each goal action, whether it’s a download, subscription, inquiry or transaction.

40. Sponsor blog posts. Find blogs that accept sponsored content or a sponsorship message (properly disclosed of course) and include nofollow links to the content you want to promote.

41. Remarketing for influencer audiences. Target those who visit your website from a tracking link shared by an influencer. Few convert on the first visit, so retargeting those visitors with your relevant content can be an effective way to promote and inspire them to take the next step.

42. Reshare the content that has performed the best. Use social share metrics from BuzzSumo or other data like pageviews, leads or sales attributed to your best content to decide what to re-share days or weeks after it was published. In fact, I’ll often query what the top content of the quarter or month has been and schedule a reshare with modified text.

43. Sponsor an influencer’s channel. Some influencers are publishers and make available their channels for sponsorship. Usually the influencer creates the content and there’s a disclaimer that a brand has sponsored an individual piece of content. But with the right influencer, it could be a full day or even a week.

44. Purchase an ad in an email newsletter. Ads are everywhere and one of the most effective is email. Research ad opportunities within industry email newsletters and buy a placement that directs visitors to your useful content. Ads can be spendy, so it might be worth focusing on niche newsletters.

45. Syndicate to Industry Associations. Acronymed organizations are always looking for useful content to share with their members. Find the right associations for your brand and reach out to see if they would be interested in sharing your relevant content via their email newsletter or posting to the organization blog.

46. Get visual with video. If a picture is worth a thousand words then a video must be worth millions. Spice up your content with a video sidebar or summary and it will increase the likelihood of sharing and receiving links substantially.

47. Comment Marketing. This is an area that must be tread carefully, but if done well, can be very effective. Find content that matches the topic of your content to promote and seek out opportunities to share useful, on-topic comments that include a link to your more in-depth resource. Don’t limit your comments to blogs. Consider mainstream business publications as well – especially those that accept new authors eager to get comments about their contribution.

48. Link building. Find the top ranking content on your topic, then research who is linking to those URLs. Reach out to the link sources and invite them to link to your robust content as well. This approach is too often used and poorly executed, so wins will be few and far between. But it doesn’t take too many links from reputable sources to have a positive impact on the visibility of your content.

49. Sponsor events. Many events will provide opportunities for sponsors to share more than a log0 – content on the conference blog, via attendee newsletter or even in print included in the schwag bag.

50. Make a big ass list like this one! Comprehensive, useful resources often represent content that is worth sharing and linking to. Hopefully readers will feel that way about this post.

Besides this fine list of content amplification tips, I’ve also put together an eBook of recommendations from 10 top marketing influencers and professionals including: Ann Handley, Mike Stelzner, Joe Pulizzi, Mike King, Cathy McPhillips, Sujan Patel, Ursula Ringham, Larry Kim, Carla Johnson, Andrew Davis.  That’s right, walking the talk!

If you’re attending the Content Marketing World conference in Cleveland during the first week of September, you’ll want to see if there are any spaces left for this workshop.

Tuesday, Sept. 4th:
Rocket Science Simplified: How to Optimize, Socialize and Publicize B2B Content

I will be covering:

• How to use a “Best Answer” strategy to activate content integration
• How to use keyword & question research to ignite content planning
• How to use Power Pages and SEO best practices for organic liftoff
• How to use the magic of repurposing social content for promotion
• How to use outreach tactics that will fuel blog and media coverage of your campaigns

Basically, much of what you need to know to make sure your content is visible and not just good looking.

Wednesday, September 5th I will be giving a presentation for B2B marketers on influencer marketing:
The Confluence Equation: How Content and Influencers Drive B2B Marketing Success.

What’s the secret formula to scalable, quality content? Find out how B2B brands, big and small like SAP, Dell, Cherwell and DivvyHQ are able to create more awareness, engagement and pipeline with the confluence equation. In this presentation you will:

• Learn the Influencer Marketing Maturity Model and where your brand fits
• Explore how a modular approach to influencer content can fuel cross-channel campaigns
• Learn how to get the best of both worlds: campaigns and always on programs
• Understand which technologies are available to facilitate influencer identification, engagement and performance reporting

Joining me at Content Marketing World is Ashley Zeckman, Digital Strategy Director at TopRank Marketing. She’s going to be busting some influencer marketing myths in her presentation.

Thursday, September 6th:
Influencer Marketing is only for B2C Brands (& Other Lies Your Parents Told You). Here’s what you can expect from Ashley:

• A dive into 3 stories of successful content and influencer marketing in action.
• Steps for creating a stellar experience for your audience and your influencers.
• Scrappy ideas for collaborating with influencers when you have limited time and resources.
• Bonus: Formulas for determining content and influencer marketing ROI

But wait, there’s more! We have more TopRank Marketing team members attending the CMWorld conference including Account Manager, Jane Bartel, Senior Content Strategist, Nick Nelson and Content Strategist, Anne Leuman who will be on hand attending sessions and live-blogging. Be sure to follow us on Twitter at @toprank and check out our live conference coverage here on the Online Marketing Blog.

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2018. | 50 Content Promotion Tactics to Help Your Great Content Get Amazing Exposure | https://www.toprankblog.com

The post 50 Content Promotion Tactics to Help Your Great Content Get Amazing Exposure appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Content marketing is an all-encompassing term that has peaked and fallen off in years past. But just because use of the term is on the decline, doesn’t mean that successful content marketing strategies are any less effective.

In fact, the companies that are succeeding with content are using it to drive more sales, more loyalty, more brand awareness, higher levels of community engagement, and more.

But too many companies are still wasting their time doing content for content’s sake. It’s time to take a hard look at the return on investment of your content marketing efforts. What is it doing for you? What value is it adding?

If your content marketing is barely moving the needle, you need to make some changes. And if you are not ready to throw in the towel for good, you need to test some new practices that have potential to improve your results.

Here are three things you can do to get more about of your content marketing efforts:

1) A/B Test Your Headlines

Just like we test different subject lines for our emails, in an effort to get more people to open and read them, we should test different headlines for any piece of content.

A good headline makes all the difference. The right headline grabs attention and leads a user to view the piece of content we publish.

And though there are countless resources for best practices when it comes to headline writing, the only way to know for sure what headline will attract more readers is to test them in the real world. A free tool like Google Optimize will allow you to test multiple headlines for every article and settle on the one that gets the most visits, clicks, reads, conversions, etc.

2) Make It Easy to Share

The sites that succeed with content benefit from engaged readers/users. As a company, there is only so much that you can do to promote your content by yourself. To get real results, you need to leverage the virality of the web.

Content that is easy to share is more likely to get shared.

Making your content easier to share is not hard. There are existing plugins you can add to your website that allow people to publish to their preferred social network with one click. And you can (and should) customize the way your content appears when someone adds them to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and others.

3) Invest in Media

Too many marketers treat content as a one-size-fits-all process. We write blog posts and articles and hope they get shared. But this outdated vision of the web is bound to fail.

Today, there are so many different formats to experiment with, that if you only write articles, you shouldn’t expect to succeed.

It may take more time and money to create engaging video content, live video, Snaps, images, and infographics, but this is exactly the type of content that gets shared. The content and the audience should determine the format, not the team you have or the budget you’re working with.

If budget and people are limiting factors for your company, perhaps you should invest elsewhere and ignore content marketing for now.