Rnordman

If it is true that attention spans are short and time is at a premium in face-to-face meetings, that rings doubly true when you present on the phone. On the phone, with a no or not interested just a hang-up click away, every word you say counts,...

A quick Google search or skim through your favorite sales blogs will show article upon article about how to hire the perfect reps, increase customer retention, and write the perfect sales job description – for good reason.

Even right here, on the HubSpot Sales Blog, I know an article on "How to Hire the Perfect SDR" will almost always be a hit. In fact, two of our top-performing posts of all time are "60 Sales Interview Questions to Ask Sales Rep Candidates" and "12 Common Sales Job Interview Questions and How to Answer Them." They bring in tens of thousands of organic views to our blog each month, which means thousands of people actively search for this information regularly.

But what if this isn't a good thing? What if it's time we stopped writing off high turnover rates simply because it's a tough job full of high standards and a lot of rejection. What if we spent less time learning about how to interview the perfect sales rep and more time on developing and investing in the reps we have?

What if the biggest threat to sales teams isn't losing clients, but losing our teammates themselves? In this article, we'll discuss:

• What Makes A Well-Managed Sales Team?
• How to Manage a Sales Team
• How Fast Are Salespeople Churning?
• Why Are Reps Actually Leaving?
• What Can Sales Managers Do About Sales Turnover?

 

What Makes A Well-Managed Sales Team?

According to DDI’s Frontline Leader Project, 57% of workers have left a job because of their manager. When it comes to retaining talented SDRs, we can’t underestimate the importance of having an effective sales manager. Here are some qualities of well-managed sales teams.

1. Effective Communication Skills

Well-managed sales teams have effective communication norms in place. While the ability to clearly communicate is an important skill for employees and managers, having clear processes and standards around communication makes a huge difference for sales teams specifically.

Team members should know how to best get a hold of and share information with their leaders and with each other (such as Slack, email, stand-up meetings, etc.). When teams have clear communication norms, it makes collaboration and raising concerns easier and more effective.

Sales managers can take the lead to facilitate the necessary conversations to establish these norms with their teams.

2. Clear Expectations

In addition to having clear communication norms, winning sales teams have clear performance expectations that are understood and met by reps. Managers can determine what expectations to set with their reps by beginning with the end goal in mind.

Analyze relevant data to outline what the desired results are for a rep working on your team. Then identify what actions reps would need to take to achieve these results. These actions should provide the foundation for your rep’s performance expectations.

Once the expectations are set, make sure there are mechanisms in place to measure progress. With all of these things in place, your team should review performance expectations and their progress regularly, and adjust behavior as needed.

3. Coaching and Mentorship

The ability to provide mentorship and support for reps is one of the most important aspects of a sales manager’s role. Companies that prioritize coaching see significantly higher win rates and quota attainment stats. Here are some ways sales managers can provide the necessary support to their reps:

• Holding regular one-on-one meetings and office hours where reps can ask questions and talk through performance concerns.
• Incorporate effective training methodologies into onboarding programs.
• Provide tailored development plans for reps as needed, focusing on the specific skills they need to improve.

4. Consistent Feedback

Feedback is essential to a sales team’s success. All members of the team should feel comfortable giving both positive and direct, constructive feedback. Some ways sales teams can incorporate more feedback into their regular processes are:

• Call reviews: Sales teams can set up mock sales calls to practice listening in and giving one another feedback on their approach. Managers can also provide feedback for reps on real calls they’ve had with potential buyers.
• One-on-one meetings: During regular one-on-one meetings, managers can use that time to provide feedback to reps individually, and can ask for the reps to provide feedback on their management and leadership style.

Now that you know what a well-managed sales team looks like, here's how you can manage performance by following these steps inspired by sales executive Norman Behar's work:

1. Prioritize onboarding.

It's tempting to throw reps into selling with a wink and a prayer, but while it might solve for your immediate goals, it will be detrimental to your long-term growth and rep success.

Create a comprehensive new hire onboarding checklist and facilitate each new rep's completion of that checklist and accompanying trainings.

2. Communicate performance expectations.

Set rep expectations early and check on those expectations regularly. For example, if you expect reps to make 15 prospecting calls a week, ensure that expectation is clearly outlined in their onboarding documents.

Don't simply tell them once and expect them to remember. Make those expectations a normal action item to check in on in their routine one-on-ones.

3. Monitor and manage specific behaviors.

Reps may fall into specific habits or behaviors without realizing it. Sit in on one of their calls or demos at least once a quarter and provide feedback on what you witness.

If they're not great at wrapping up the call and touching on next steps, make an actionable recommendation that they shadow a rep who closes meetings exceptionally well.

In addition, if manually sourcing insights from call recordings seems like an insurmountable task, consider using software such as HubSpot's Conversation Intelligence, which uses AI to search for keywords mentioned on calls, uncover performance patterns, and even trigger actions with your CRM.

4. Set goals and monitor results.

Every salesperson needs goals. Period. Determine what key performance indicators (KPIs) are important for the growth of your business and set realistic quotas and goals around those KPIs.

5. Provide regular feedback.

Feedback is crucial to improving and growing. Make sure you're not the only person giving your reps feedback. Set up a monthly or bi-weekly "film review" where a new rep is in the hot seat each week receiving constructive feedback on how to improve and what they're doing well.

6. Invest in ongoing training.

Don't stop at onboarding. Have great reps present lunch-and-learns on the skills they excel at, encourage reps to identify conferences and seminars that will contribute to their professional development, and bring in speakers/coaches who will build the team up.

Training is an investment in the present and future of your company's success. Make sure it's a priority.

7. Establish compensation expectations.

Don't wait until your rep brings up compensation to discuss it. This should be an ongoing conversation you're having with all your reps to ensure they're feeling valued and rewarded for the work they do.

If their work isn't meeting the compensation guidelines, that's when another conversation about their performance should happen. Don't wait until that conversation revolves around putting them on a performance improvement plan.

"Going back to our example on new customer acquisition," he says, "A manager can now communicate the number of new customers they would like the salesperson to acquire, the specific behaviors that will lead to those results, and the timeframe for completion."

Most importantly, Behar recommends managers provide ongoing feedback. "This should include offering encouragement based on achievement of key behaviors (e.g., "set 10 first time appointments last week"), and proactively discussing any performance gaps (e.g., "I thought you were going to submit your account plans last Friday and I haven’t seen them yet") while there is still time to course correct," he says.

The last thing any employee wants is to be caught off-guard or to only hear feedback about their performance when they’re being evaluated. Try incorporating monthly or quarterly conversations into your operating rhythm so reps have a chance to address performance issues before it’s too late.

Now, let's talk about what's at stake if and when sales organizations experience turnover at a high rate.

How Fast Are Salespeople Churning?

A 2018 report by the Bridge Group shows average rep tenure sits at 1.5 years. That might not sound too bad – but when you consider average SDR ramp time is currently 3.2 months, you're already down to a little over one year (15 months) of full productivity from your average sales rep.

In 2010 — a mere eight years ago — 44% of respondents reported an average sales tenure of more than three years. Today, a mere 8% report that kind of longevity in their sales jobs.

Why Are Reps Actually Leaving?

Why are salespeople churning at such alarming rates? Let's look into the key factors:

Job satisfaction is low.

A 2018 survey by Marc Wayshak reported only 17.6% of respondents rate their job satisfaction as "outstanding" and a whopping 47.1% rated their jobs as just "good."

In the same survey, salespeople who spent more time on sales-related activities enjoyed their jobs more. In fact, there was a notable jump in job satisfaction between reps who spent three hours or less on sales-related activities and those who spent four or more hours each day on sales-related tasks. Those who spent four or more hours on sales work rated their job satisfaction at a 3.8 out of five.

Culture and management expectations are high.

Wayshak's study also showed company culture and management effectiveness matter a lot to salespeople. They're so important the average rep rated these two factors as more important than base compensation, commission, job role, and job flexibility.

Sales stereotypes are alive and well.

Reps know they aren't liked. A word cloud in Wayshak's study showed the most common words respondents used to describe their average buyer's perception of them were "pushy," "untrustworthy," "annoying," "time," and "greedy." Ouch.

Promotions take longer than the average tenure.

Lack of promotion might also be a reason reps churn quickly. The average rep tenure sits at 18 months and the average time a rep spends as an SDR prior to an account executive promotion is between 13-18 months. It's not much of a leap to say reps are impatient for a promotion and jump ship before their managers get the chance to offer them one.

What Can Sales Managers Do About Sales Turnover?

So we know the issues. What can be done about it? Here are some solutions:

Hire more experienced reps.

The same Bridge Group report found hiring more experienced reps led to longer average tenure and more months spent functioning at full productivity. While it might be tempting to hire a BDR right out of college for a lower cost, consider investing in a rep with a few more years of experience and the know-how to hit the ground with a shorter ramp time.

Prioritize culture and management training.

Based on Wayshak's finding salespeople value good company culture and great managers more than compensation, consider spending more time and resources on training sales leaders and promoting a healthy, supportive, and growth-driven culture on your team.

A CSO Insights survey reported the average sales leader spends just 20% of their time helping their team close deals. No one wins in this scenario. Your deals suffer, and your reps view their opportunities for mentorship and career development as few and far between. Which brings me to my next point.

Communicate clearly around promotions.

Talk to your reps regularly about how they're doing and where they're tracking on the path to promotion. Millennial salespeople are part of the fabric of our current workforce — and 25% recently said they plan to leave their current job within a year. In the same Deloitte survey, 44% said they planned to leave their job within two years.

Give them a reason to stay. That starts with never leaving them wondering where they stand on performance or career path. Provide consistent feedback and meet with them regularly in one-on-one meetings to see how they're doing — beyond their quota.

Manage rep performance.

Behar says, "While there's a lot of emphasis placed on sales coaching and leadership, the most fundamental skill sales managers need to develop is often overlooked: The ability to manage sales performance."

Many organizations take it for granted that their managers know how to effectively manage performance. Unfortunately, this is a huge mistake.

While many sales managers may have produced excellent results in their prior roles as sales reps, Behar says this doesn’t necessarily translate into the ability to get their teams consistently generating great outcomes.

He suggests the problem lies in the focus on results as opposed to the sales behaviors creating results. Wayshak's survey saw 81.6% of top performers spending four or more hours on sales related activities such as asking for referrals, prospecting, taking sales meetings, and following up. Each of these is a behavior, rather than a result.

This issue, Behar says, is driven by today’s CRM systems, which provide real-time measurement and reporting of results.

"While it's helpful to monitor this information," Behar explains, "It's important to note it's rear-view data. These metrics are based on events that have already occurred as opposed to the underlying behaviors (leading indicators) that drive outcomes."

Manage the right behaviors.

Many reps are goaled on the number of pitches they give. But this not be the right behavior to track. In Wayshak's survey, only 7% of top performers reported pitching regularly, while 19% of non-top performers reported pitching their offering regularly. A pitch doesn't necessarily equal a successful or meaningful behavior.

Behar explains sales organizations should carefully think through the key results they want to monitor and determine what behaviors will drive these outcomes. "The key distinction to keep in mind is that results (lagging indicators) should be monitored, while behaviors (leading indicators) should be monitored and managed," he says.

Here's an example highlighting the difference between results and behaviors:

• Desired result: New customer acquisition
• Key behaviors:
  • Developing a territory plan including a comprehensive list of prospective customers
  • Creating account plans that map the key decision makers and influencers
  • Setting first time meetings with prospective customers
  • Adding new opportunities to sales pipeline

Behar notes, "It's important to limit the number of key results you want to monitor. Too many desired outcomes could lead to an exponential number of behaviors." He explains, "For instance, if a sales organization decided to monitor 10 results and each result tied to four behaviors, managers would need to monitor and manage 40 behaviors — that's not sustainable."

From a practical standpoint, Behar suggests focusing on the two or three most important results and manage the corresponding eight to 12 behaviors that drive those results.

Ultimately, sales managers live in a results-based world but their ability to achieve those results depends on managing behaviors. Acknowledging this distinction is critical to your sales team's success — as is increasing rep retention and happiness.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in November 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

If we’re driven by data and interested in statistics, there are a wide range of sales metrics we can choose to monitor. Assuming that we have collected the data in the first place, we can measure win rates, sales cycle velocity, changes in deal value or close date and all manner of other indicators.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ” ~ Alvin Toffler

I often think about that phrase, “What got you here won’t get you there.” It’s a powerful reminder that you can’t rest on your accomplishments for long. Someone out there wants to eat your lunch, or the world around you at large is relentlessly making your achievement meaningless every day.

One strategy if you don’t want to have to keep innovating is to find a commoditized required industry and camp out. Society needs trash removal, utilities, cleaning, bookkeeping and bandages. Cash flows continuously in and out of those boring businesses and the entrenched players don’t have to pivot too much. That is as long as there is not someone reimagining how to lower costs and increase conveniences for customers.

There are things I was an expert in previously that are simply foregone memories now. There’s too many areas where the world has become more efficient that has forced me to have to “learn, unlearn, and relearn.” And that’s fair. Everyone is subject to the requirement to being relevant and valuable. You have to keep proving your place and worth in this world of endless options.

One way to measure ongoing staying power is to think about how much you are personally growing.

How many books per month have you read?

How many people have you met in the last week?

What new ideas are you sharing?

You have to keep learning, testing and sharing. In this mode, you have to think of value as something to apply and discard when the game has changed.

The last thing you want to be is illiterate among so many that are taking initiative every day to become better and offer something timely and powerful. That’s the game today for value creators.

Facebook ads are one of the most cost-effective ways to get attention on your brand these days. Not only are they affordable, but the potential reach is huge.

Unfortunately, though, not many small businesses are getting the most from their Facebook ads! A survey released by website builder Weebly indicated that 62% of small business owners feel their paid ads on Facebook are missing their target. That’s not a very comforting statistic when you consider how many small businesses currently use and advertise on the platform.

The potential is there, however, for small business owners to harness the power of these ads to reach billions of people across the world – and, more importantly, the specific segments of people who would be most likely to become your next customer. While it can be challenging, at first, to get the hang of things, once you do it’s more than worth it.

This cheat sheet is meant to help you get the most from Facebook ads in an easy-to-understand format. It will cover basic Facebook advertising guidelines including:

• Facebook ad types
• Facebook ad costs
• Facebook ad targeting
• Facebook ad copy and creative
• Staying competitive on Facebook
• Analyzing your Facebook ad results

Types of Facebook Ads

It’s vital to have an understanding of what you’re working with when getting started with Facebook ads. To that end, let’s start with the different ad types available to you.

According to Facebook, there are 11 basic kinds of ads available on the platform. These include:

• Video – Video ads that feature sound and motion (more on Facebook video ads here)
• Image – High-quality but simple visual ads (more here)
• Collection – Ads that showcase products from your store’s catalog
• Carousel – Display up to 10 videos or images in the same ad, each with its very own link (more on Carousel ads here)
• Slideshow – Ads that use sound, copy and motion to tell brand stories
• Canvas – Mobile-optimized and full-screen experiences for your customers, directly from ads (more on Canvas ads here)

• Lead Generation – Carousel, image or video ads that present your leads with a form, after they engage with your ads (more on Lead Ads here)
• Offers – Ads offering discounts
• Post Engagement – Ads meant to boost page posts to obtain more engagement
• Event Responses – Video or image ads designed to drive awareness and responses for events
• Page Likes – Ads intended to drive page likes and engagement

Which ad type you choose will, naturally, depend on your business type and what your marketing goals are, so be sure to establish your goals first.

Facebook Ad Costs

Facebook is outrageously popular for businesses, even in the wake of bad press about how it handles your data. Much like the auction for Google ads, there’s a bidding process to determine where your Facebook ad appears and how much you pay per click. You’ll indicate how much you want to hand over for precise actions on any given ad, such as views, conversions, clicks, etc. You can manually adjust it or have Facebook automatically make calculations for you, based on your specifications.

Various factors can affect your Facebook ad costs, including the following:

• When your ad campaigns run (time, date, during peak hours when competition is fiercest)
• Your specific audience
• Your Relevance Score
• Ad placement
• Your bidding method (set a bid limit on every unique bid or just set your average bid)

As you can probably guess, ad costs therefore can vary quite a bit.

Still, if we look at the averages, we can see some interesting information.

WordStream analyzed hundreds of client accounts to calculate the average cost per click (CPC) and cost per action (CPA) on Facebook for eighteen different industries. They found that the average across all business types was $1.72 per click and $18.68 per conversion.

These are averages, so yours, based on your unique campaigns, could well be different.

What if you’re outside the US? AdEspresso performed a study where it looked at 2017 data to gauge average ad costs in the U.S. and other areas. Here are the findings, in US dollars:

• CPC average for all countries – $0.97
• CPC average targeting those 65 and up – more than (Q1) $0.70
• CPC average targeting those between 13 and 17 (Q1) = $0.11
• CPC average of Instagram ad placement (Q4) – $1.15
• CPC average of Facebook ad placement (Q4) – $0.50
• CPC monthly average – $0.40
• CPC average on Sundays – $0.40
• CPC average on Tuesdays and Thursdays – $0.50
• CPC average of targeting women (Q4) – $0.64
• CPC average of targeting men (Q4) – $0.50
• CPC average of optimizing for link clicks (Q4) – $0.44
• CPC average of optimizing for impressions (Q4) – $3.79
• CPL (cost per like) average for page like campaigns – $1.08
• CPL average targeting those 55 and up (Q4) – $0.33
• CPL average targeting those between 13 and 17 (Q4) – $0.04
• CPL average per month – $0.12
• CPL average per week (Q4) – $0.14
• CPL average cost for women – $0.16
• CPL average cost for men – $0.11

Looking at ad costs on the platform helps you get a sense of how much of your budget Facebook marketing will eat up. There are, of course, always ways to adjust your targeting and other strategies to lower your Facebook ad costs.

Facebook Ad Targeting

Now it’s time to delve into ad targeting. Here’s where you identify your audience and ensure that the ad content you serve up to them actually appeals to them.

How well you’re able to identify your audience will have a meaningful impact on how much you spend on ads, your ROI, and their overall effectiveness. It pays to spend extra time to accurately define whom you’re targeting.

Facebook lets you go pretty deeply into the traits that define your audience. The extensive targeting options include (but are by no means limited to):

• Gender
• Age
• Location
• Language
• Interests
• Behaviors
• Life events (such as “recently married”)
• Education
• Job title
• Income
• Political affiliation

These demographic qualities help you narrow down who will see your ads.

For example, if you’re trying to market to teens on the west coast who speak different languages and are interested in entertainment products, your ad-targeting breakdown might look something like this:

• Male/female
• 13 to 19
• Washington/Oregon/California
• English/Spanish
• Entertainment > Live events > concerts

Naturally, narrowing down your audience to those more likely to be in market for your offerings gives you better results than just showing your ads to anyone.

Facebook Ad Copy & Creative

Facebook advertising is just like any form of advertising: the quality of your ad copy and creative goes a long way toward determining your ROI.

One of the most important skills you can master in advertising is the art of persuasion. Famous psychologist Robert Cialdini’s 1984 book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, laid out six unique principles to help marketers convince and convert with greater success. They are:

• Reciprocation
• Social proof
• Commitment and consistency
• Scarcity
• Authority
• Liking

It’s a good idea to infuse your Facebook ads with some of these timeless persuasion principles. For that, you have to consider how you can grab your audience’s attention and persuade them to click using various elements of your ads, such as:

• The headline (make it short, clear and memorable)
• Placement (more on optimizing your Facebook ad placements here)
• Images (go with vibrant, eye-catching imagery)
• Value proposition (what makes you different; the unique value you bring)
• Call to action or CTA (use an action-oriented, crystal-clear verb to drive action)

How can you use the principles of persuasion in your Facebook ads? For example, reciprocation can be as straightforward as telling people they can get a free report or ebook if they complete your lead form, while social proof can be something as simple as the number of reactions, shares and comments your ad racks up over the course of its run. More creative, engaging ads tend to get more likes and shares.

Here are some more tips on writing great Facebook ads.

Outdoing the Competition on Facebook

It’s always fair game to see what your competitors are doing—and try to best them. After all, if you can deliver better content to your customers, then you attract their attention and more.

Your competition’s Facebook ads are a goldmine of inspiration for what you can do better in your ads. Simply analyze what their ads are doing right and where there’s room for improvement. Then, implement that in your own ads, especially if you’re competing for the same audience.

Case in point: Skillshare and Udemy are both online learning platforms where courses and how-to videos are available.

Whereas Udemy has an ad touting lifetime access to one course with a 100% money-back guarantee, Skillshare touts unlimited access to all of its courses, all for the price of just $0.99 for two months.

Checking out your competitors’ ads might give you ideas for new value props, CTA’s, or emotional angles to test in your own Facebook ads.

Learn more strategies for competitive advertising on Facebook here.

Facebook Ad Reporting

After you’ve gone through all this trouble to familiarize yourself with how Facebook ads work and hopefully implemented some campaigns, you can’t just expect them to do all the work for you while you sit back. You have to take an active role in your campaigns even when they’re underway, so that you can ensure that you’re getting a good ROI from your ad spend and efforts.

Start monitoring results as soon as you’ve launched one of your ad campaigns. Don’t wait until the campaign has run its course to determine if it was hitting all the right targets or not.

Just head to your Facebook Ads Manager to look at your ads’ performance in real-time. The beauty of monitoring in real-time is you can also respond in real-time by adjusting underperforming ads. Within the Ads Manager, you can easily edit your ads to tweak them to reach better performance.

For example:

• If an ad’s engagement level is disappointing, try improving the copy or the visuals used in the ad to make it more stimulating and persuasive
• If an ad’s reach is lower than you expected, try to expand the audience in your targeting parameters
• If an ad’s conversions aren’t where you want them to be, try improving your call to action by using a more action-oriented verb, or working to improve your Facebook ad landing pages

A final note on tracking Facebook performance: Instead of putting an emphasis on vanity metrics like engagement and the like, you should be focused on tracking the metrics that really matter: sales and ROI or return on ad spend (ROAS). If your ad campaign gets you a lot of reach, clicks and conversions, but you’re actually losing money per sale when you figure in all your expenses, then the campaign’s no good.

That’s why you need to track ad performance and sales first and foremost during the course of your campaigns.

You Can Make Facebook Ads Work for You

Facebook ads have a proven track record of success for small businesses. The fact that they’re cost-effective makes them business-friendly and is just another reason to use these ads. However, not many business owners are using these ads to their full potential—not even close!

If you decide to jump headfirst into Facebook ads, you have to have a solid grasp of how the entire platform works, how much you’ll likely spend, the different ad types, optimization strategies, and the need to monitor your ads closely.

Only then will your business get the most from this great platform.

I once had a friend who asked a company to come in and observe their sales force to understand what their highest achieving sales reps were doing so they could uncover what would need to change for the rest of the sales force to improve their results. As it turned out, the only thing the lower performers would have had to do to improve their performance was to wait until their peers left the company and inherit their clients.

There is a lot you can learn from high performing salespeople. But there are also problems with trying to model your top performers directly.

High performing salespeople’s effectiveness allows them to win more deals with less activity than their peers.

One of the primary challenges you have when you use them as a model is that it is difficult for most reps to model their effectiveness. Some top 20% salespeople produce greater results with less activity. In many cases, poor performing salespeople find themselves in this category because they aren’t doing enough of the work necessary to create new opportunities (i.e. prospecting). Coupling low activity with a low effectiveness, using something like win rate as a measurement, only worsens their performance.

Producing better results means pulling the Gaussian curve to the right, moving every rep towards the best performance possible. More activity provides more opportunities to learn, to make distinctions about what works and what doesn’t, and more coaching to improve their effectiveness over time.

Many high performing salespeople have very strong intangibles, many of which are difficult to replicate.

Here we run dead into the old question about whether salespeople are born or made. The answer is that salespeople can be made. But many are born with a set of intangibles that make selling easier for them.

Some people are charismatic, possessing the intangible that causes people to be attracted to them very quickly and with no effort on their part. Others have very fast rapport skills, allowing them to connect with people, causing them to engage with these reps without needing time to develop the relationship. Other salespeople have the type of business experience and demeanor that looks like executive presence and allows them to have their advice heard, received, and taken.

None of this is to say that one must have all these intangibles to succeed, and there as many different types of clients with different preferences when it comes to what the right partner looks like to them.

But the intangibles that make success easier for some than others are difficult to replicate in others, meaning that you may not be able to model some of what make them successful.

High performing salespeople win larger deals and their success gives them more time and space to focus on larger deals.

One thing you’ll notice about the top of any stack ranking of salespeople is that they didn’t get there by winning a lot of small deals. I would like to write that it is rare that you see a rep at the top of the stack with small deals, but because I have never seen that myself, I am not sure it has ever happened.

The best performing reps tend win large deals—and with higher success rates than their peers. It takes time for salespeople to learn to sell larger, more complex deals-especially those that require consensus from a large group of stakeholders. Learning requires an investment in development and coaching. One of the reasons successful reps do well is because they win large deals, and winning these deals provides them with the time and space to pursue other large deals, a luxury other reps cannot afford.

There is much to learn from people who produce a result you want. But not everything is easy to replicate, and not many are achieved without great effort—and time.

The post The Problem with Modeling Your Best Sales Reps appeared first on The Sales Blog.

An insightful comment from CMO Joe Chernov on Twitter:

“In B2B, demand generation is typically a misnomer. Marketers capture demand vs. generate it.”

What does that mean exactly? I haven’t asked Joe directly, but I believe he means that, in the absence of a genuine need for a product or solution, marketing rarely creates that need. More often, marketing – or, more specifically: demand generation — captures engagement from someone either outright shopping for a product, or, at a minimum, feeling the particular pain that the marketer’s product can solve.

Why does this matter? It matters because if we as B2B marketers develop messages and content and campaigns that assume otherwise – namely, that we are somehow going to generate demand and interest for our product in the absence of a genuine need (an issue especially prevalent in ABM) – those campaigns will fail to generate the results we’re looking for.

Even if your product is trailblazing a new category, or solving a problem that few companies know they have, you can still orient your marketing to capture demand. For example:

1. Don’t ask people if they have an issue. Just tell them how to solve it.

Consider these two subject lines:

Suffering from low bandwidth? It’s time to look at 5G Wireless.
Now: a simple way to increase wireless speeds up to 10X.

The first puts the onus on the reader to confirm that he or she has a problem in the first place. Maybe that reader has low bandwidth and just doesn’t know it. Maybe he or she has low bandwidth but is perfectly happy with the status quo. Either way, if the answer to your question is “no,” you’ve lost.

The second subject line delivers a tangible benefit regardless of whether the reader perceives he or she has a need. As the reader, I might be perfectly happy with my middling wifi connection but if I can increase that speed by 10X, I may decide to engage with your campaign anyway.

2. Avoid the word “why”.

Saying “Why you need …” is one of the quickest ways to lose a potential customer. No-one wants to be told why they need anything. Instead, just assume the person you’re talking to has the relevant need, and focus on the benefits from taking action:

Discover an easy way to cut HR costs by 50 percent
5 tips for retaining your most valuable employees

You’ll generate higher engagement, and greater results, by appealing to a prospect’s aspirations, and potential for improvement, as opposed to making the case for a need that your prospect may not think exists.

Photo by Aaron Sebastian on Unsplash

There’s no such thing as a born salesperson.

What there are… are people with empathy and learned charisma who choose to work hard.

If you show up and show up and show up, and care enough to learn to connect, you will have a skill for life.

In the meantime, consider getting yourself hooked on 30 minutes a day of audio that trains you to sell. It takes a while, but it’s learnable.

Zig Ziglar, Anthony Iannarino, Dan Pink, Brian Tracy, Frank Bettger, Jill Konrath … anyone who will help you learn the long-game, the generous long game.

The invention of the Internet has brought the world to our fingertips. You can do practically everything online from research to business to socializing to paying bills to ordering groceries (or takeout) to be delivered right to your door. But that doesn’t mean that more traditional methods of doing these things have been eliminated. There are still times when you want that personal connection and interaction.

The same goes for your resume. While it’s great to have everything available online on a platform like LinkedIn, it’s still good to have a traditional hard copy or Word version of your resume as well. Both serve different purposes and can complement one another.

Benefits of a Traditional Resume

When you’re job searching and applying to different positions online, it can be helpful to have a document that you can tailor for each role. This is very easy to do with your resume; swap some keywords, customize your summary to focus on strengths the employer is looking for, move a few bullet points around, and ta-da! You have a targeted resume.

You can also take copies of your resume with you to job fairs, provide them to people you network with, or use them for some background when speaking at an event or applying for a board position.

Plus, you can stylize your resume to fit your preferences. You choose the font, layout, bullet points, bolding, sections, and other customizations. You have some flexibility in deciding exactly what it looks like and what employers see. LinkedIn is more standardized and uniform, though there are some opportunities to customize actual content.

Benefits of LinkedIn

LinkedIn allows you to make your resume accessible and searchable to different recruiters and companies. They can find you based on keywords, job titles, location, and other information. Not only can you search for jobs on the site, recruiters can find you for jobs they think you may be a good fit for.

On LinkedIn, you can also connect with other professionals that you know. Colleagues and friends can endorse your skills and leave feedback about their experiences working with you, which can provide hiring managers with more insight into who you are.

There is also the option to upload attachments, link to websites, and add other information to your LinkedIn account that you can’t do with a resume. This is helpful if you have online assets you want to showcase. You can also post blogs or articles that show you are a thought leader and stay up-to-date with what is happening in your industry.

However, LinkedIn is also limited in its customizability in that every profile is presented exactly the same. You can’t adjust the font, style, or order of how things show up. It also doesn’t make sense to be constantly updating and customizing your profile for different jobs.

Benefits of Having a Resume and LinkedIn Profile

Together, these resources can make you more accessible and searchable as you look for different jobs. They offer a hiring manager information in a variety of ways and allow you to expand your network. Once a hiring manager reviews your resume, they often do an online search to see if everything matches up – and your LinkedIn profile is one place they’ll look. Plus, you can see if you have any connections with the company that can help you get a foot in the door.

As more functions and operations become available online, don’t underestimate the importance of having a traditional resume that you can use to market yourself as well.

Stuck working in a sales position where you’re expected to make cold calls from your city’s business journal’s “Book of Lists”, purchased lists from a broker, association member roster or chamber?

Notice the word “stuck.” It’s the operative word in the sentence. If your sales process has not evolved continually over the last few years, not only are you stuck, your company is too. This post isn’t a one trick pony rant on the value on “social selling” (one of my least favorite terms), and it’s superiority over cold calling. Instead, it’s a call to think carefully about how you begin a right-approach sales process and increase the likelihood someone will interact with you on any level. Hey, even a no is better than an ignore.

It’s both naive and arrogant to think that a sales process that worked ten, twenty or thirty years ago will continue to work in a world where people connect, talk, engage and interact on multiple channels.

Here are some recent observations:

A CEO of a large construction company says he doesn’t use LinkedIn, but when someone calls or is referred to him, he goes to LinkedIn to see who this person is and then decides, based on what he can see on their profile, whether or not he will return the call.
Hmmm, I submit he does use LinkedIn as a critical activity; qualifying and vetting people and opportunities. If you don’t pass his LinkedIn sniff test; you might be out before you even get in.

An experienced CMO of a conservative organization was a LinkedIn naysayer until he heard from a panel of clients at a conference that they vet their prospective partners and suppliers in all areas, including legal, through LinkedIn and warm connections.
I’ve always said it’s irrelevant whether you like LinkedIn; it’s not about you. It’s about whether your clients and candidates use LinkedIn to vet you that makes it relevant to you.

A current client wants to know why the very CEOs he’s interested in talking to don’t answer their phone. Our client, well over 50, highly successful and confident on the phone, is less skilled thinking of what to say next via a LinkedIn message.
His ideal client is a CEO with less than five years of experience. Yes, that probably means someone no older than their mid-forties. The truth is that CEOs today probably travel more, may not have a landline, don’t answer unknown mobile calls and rarely listen to their voicemail. However, they most likely run a good portion of their business from their mobile device.

A client gives us a list of people from their CRM with no reference on how old the list is, where it came from, and what it is about that person that makes them a potential “lead.”
When our team looks at that list in LinkedIn, most no longer work for the company, some are not on LinkedIn or have modest if any, social clues, some have retired, or worse, some have passed on. Regardless, the list is dated and not worth much for cold calling or anything else. A dated list that has been curated by someone else and in a “database” is not as valuable as a user-generated profile in a social or professional network.

Have you noticed that more and more reporters and journalists reference someone’s LinkedIn profile as proof of who the person they are reporting on is? Inc., The Wall Street Journal, and other pubs use LinkedIn as a go-to source of background for individuals.

Doesn’t the term “cold calling” or “dialing for dollars” sound so, I don’t know, callous and antiseptic when we live in such a connected, networked world? Someone recently came in for an interview and asked me how many cold calls he would be responsible for making in a day and how his cold calling success would be measured? He wanted to know the stats I had on the number of calls in a day that resulted in next steps including meetings, proposals, and closed business. All good questions if cold calling is the core of the sales process. For us, it’s not. For most, today, it’s not.

I have a strong network defined by connecting with decision-makers, executives, and influencers who serve as connectors. When I showed him my calendar filled with mostly calls, 95% of which are scheduled, he was a bit taken back. I don’t need to make 100 calls a day (I have in other positions long ago) to end up with ten calls and one new client. Instead, I can have 10 or 15 calls in a week and create engagements with four to six new clients. A much better return on effort.

The key is to continually have qualified calls with the right people on the right channel. It typically begins on LinkedIn or by email as an introduction then moves to the phone or video call. If local, it may include a face-to-face meeting.

If someone calls me, I may call them back, or even text them to acknowledge their call and then ask when it’s convenient to talk. Telephone tag in 2018 is crazy to me. Who has time to do that?

We’ve made so much of personas over the last few years, and it’s good that we’ve given our best clients a face. However, I think perhaps we’ve gone a bit overboard. Some personas are so defined they dismiss the likelihood that some of the characteristics may change quickly. Decide what’s important to this person and where they like to engage with you and suddenly you have found common ground. The channels we prefer to communicate in services to help us communicate better.

If your job is to make 100 calls a day, make sure you are then calling 100 people who are at least likely to use the phone, have a landline and check their voicemail regularly. Now, if your ideal prospect is someone who is younger, mobile and socially wired (pun unintended) making a 100 calls to get ten meetings is going to seem like walking through the Mojave without water every day.

If I were you, I would outline a plan to incorporate the plan your fearless leaders believe reigns superior because it always has, with an additional strategy of building a strong network, providing context for yourself and your company, starting and staying on course with professionally conversational comments and questions. No pitching allowed. You haven’t earned the trust to do that yet, especially if you are new to the sales profession. Preferably, find a story or two about the successes your company has provided and work those until you have your own stories to share.

Let your fearless leaders know you are willing to work this new strategy on your own time if necessary. To me, that says you are committed and ready to go the extra mile. It should say this to your company as well.

Whether your job is to set appointments, answer inbound inquiries or to generate, introduce and close business, designing a new sales strategy is necessary for your success and your company’s continued growth. Measure your results for cold calling separately from growing your network and engaging channel appropriately for 30, 60 and 90 days. See where you generate the best results. I venture to say that if you are like most of our clients, you will create better results using LinkedIn than cold calling. Test, measure and share your results with the powers that lie in your company. It’s the best way to teach some old dogs some new tricks.

P.S. This blog assumes you’ve done the upfront work. Before we begin to work with a client on outreach or even strategy, we do the following:

• Work with them to develop a client-centric LinkedIn profile that highlights who they are and what they do
• Downloaded their current network for review and next steps
• Craft messaging ideas that save time and get the right message to the right person at the right time

Have you done those critical steps yet? If not, start there and check out our other blog posts on those topics to kickstart your new sales efforts.

If you’re a CPG or Manufacturing company, you’ve likely noticed your buyer has changed. They’re increasingly digital, reading about products and services online, and engaging with your sales reps later in the buying process than you’d probably like to admit. When that first human sales interaction happens, they’re expecting more than a static sales deck with information they’ve already found on their own. They’re expecting someone to make their decision an easy one – for a seller to differentiate themselves and their offering by effectively communicating the value the solution will bring to the buyer’s business. How will it impact their average order value? Increase their ability to cross-sell? Help them hit their revenue targets?

To win, modern sellers need to be prepared to lead these consultative, value-driven sales discussions with real-time data and insights. And while many companies are beginning to recognize this need and equip their direct sellers with the sales enablement technology and training necessary to succeed, there remains a staggering gap in resources for indirect sellers.

According to a Forrester Consulting study, commissioned by Mediafly, the B2B companies they surveyed work with an average of 176 partner companies, and indirect channels contribute to nearly half (49%) of total company revenue. Yet B2B enterprises enable their indirect sellers with access to devices and software at rates 1.4x to 1.7x lower than direct sellers. And while 68% of these companies provide presentation templates to direct sellers, only 48% provide the same collateral to their indirect or partner sellers. Um…what?

Yes, you read that right. A vast majority of B2B enterprises are putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage by intentionally neglecting to equip a portion of their sales force with the tools they need to win deals. Meanwhile, companies that elect to offer their channel sales teams the same sales enablement platforms offered to their direct sellers are up to 2.3x more effective at achieving their sales goals and report 1.4x higher revenue growth.

The bottom line? Implementing a robust sales enablement technology for both your direct and indirect sellers pays off. Here’s why:

B2B enterprises need to enhance the sales experience to stay competitive.
According to the Forrester Consulting study, “Winning high consideration business deals now requires sophisticated, consultative, and technology-abled salespeople.” Digital-first buyers are demanding, and B2B companies need to transform their sales processes across all channels to meet their high expectations. Companies seeking to drive growth by enhancing the sales experience and deepening customer relationships can and should implement a sales enablement technology that incorporates interactive sales tools like ROI and TCO calculators, dynamic content, and machine learning into the platform to help their sales reps cultivate a more personalized and insights-based sales experience that resonates with buyers. Companies that supply sales enablement platforms to partners are 1.5x more likely to report an increase in customer lifetime value, 1.4x more likely to report an increase in average order values, and 2.1x more likely to see an increase in customer references.

Sales enablement platforms offer B2B enterprises greater visibility into the sales experience.
CPG and Manufacturing firms rely on partner sales representatives to communicate their brand proposition, but how many of these companies actually understand what that experience looks like for their buyer? Is it consistent with the messaging your direct sellers have been coached to communicate? In the study commissioned by Mediafly, Forrester Consulting found that less than half of Sales Enablement leaders (45%) are confident in the level of brand consistency delivered across channels during the sales process. The study also revealed CPG industry respondents have the least visibility into the sales process, with 21% of respondents knowing too little to even evaluate the consistency of B2B buyer experiences.

With a sales enablement technology in place, B2B companies can rest assured that all sellers with access to the platform can accurately represent the brand with the most up-to-date and relevant content. Integrating the platform you choose with your CRM enables you to capture the content presented in meetings to better understand what is being used and the impact it has on sales performance. With built-in machine learning capabilities, a sales enablement platform can automatically recognize that a meeting has taken place and duplicate data in the appropriate CRM record, offering you a deeper look at how that content correlates to revenue. As a result, companies with a sales enablement technology in place can forecast more accurately and are 2.3x more effective at achieving their sales goals.

Partners who lack resources have a hard time selling your products.
Indirect sellers have a harder time advancing sales than direct sellers do thanks to limited content, training, and access to technology. The Forrester study found that channel sellers have 1.3x to 1.6x greater difficulty getting customers to take the next meeting and also struggle to engage higher-level stakeholders in meetings. Implementing a sales enablement technology can level the playing field between direct and indirect sellers and increase the likelihood that a channel seller will effectively sell your product in a crowded and competitive marketplace. In fact, partners with access to interactive sales tools including health assessments or calculators that capture the buyer’s input in real-time and help the seller to guide more personalized discussions find it twice as easy to accelerate deal closure and 1.8x as easy to get high-level stakeholders involved in sales discussions.

This article originally ran on Mediafly.

Computers are non-negotiables for any thriving business. Small enterprises to large companies have them. It follows that IT sales experts are in-demand.

While selling IT products and services can bring you immense good fortune (if you earn uncapped commission), it’s not an easy sale.

The world of computers and networking is dynamic, continually changing. It can be confusing and overwhelming to the layman. Hence, it is your job as the IT sales expert to guide your clients to make the best decision for the sake of productivity, efficiency, and growth of the organization.

What Makes IT Selling Difficult?

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A career in IT sales is good because there are plenty of job opportunities in this global industry. However, IT selling is highly-technical. You need to convince your clients that something they barely understand can provide a significant value to their organization. You could be a great salesman before you enter the IT sector only to find it’s a world of new knowledge itself. If you want to succeed in IT sales you must have these qualities:

• Excellent selling skills
• A passion for IT issues
• Negotiation skills
• Excellent Time-management and Self-management skills
• Report writing and proposal writing skills
• Presentation skills
• Team Player
• Most important, strong technical knowledge

It Matters What You’re Selling

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IT Selling can be categorized into three: Hardware, Software, and Services, each of which comes with challenges. If you want to have experience in all three, you may find that it’s an entirely different ride every time.

Hardware sales are the easiest to understand and sell; primarily because you can see it and touch it. Computers, monitors, routers, and servers fall under this category. However, it is a vast market with a lot of competition. The profit margin of hardware sales continues to contract as the industry moves forward to go hardware-free.

Software sales require specialization. Much like selling custom products, software can be expensive. To be effective, IT sales professionals need to know an industry-specific software inside and out. Income can be promising, but the sales cycle is often lengthy and complicated.

IT Service sales is the most profitable of all three. It combines hardware and software solutions bundled with installation and perhaps maintenance and servicing, all in one package. As an IT service sales professional, expect to work with experts in various areas of the IT sector as a team.

Facing the Difficulties of IT Selling

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There is nothing easy about IT selling, but it is highly-rewarding as you influence a positive change in an organization. When issues in the sales cycle arise, you may be tempted to avoid the issue and hope it will resolve on its own.

However, an objection can be a golden opportunity to reassure your client that you are an expert and the best person to help them with their problem. If you are currently faced with a decision maker who is only half-convinced of your proposition, here are the five common objections you should study and learn to overcome:

1. Cost

Price is a primary concern of IT professionals. These people are working with budget constraints—even more, limited in the case of small enterprises. Consider offering a lightweight solution that is effective and suitable to their budget. Be creative in your value proposition and convince your client of the long-term cost savings that will balance the upfront cost in time.

2. Necessity or Luxury?

When you are selling an upgrade, automation or software coverage, you may have to deal with a skeptical client; again with a limited budget. You have to be the expert that can tell your client when a system is cutting-edge and when it is already outdated. Emphasize the speed of software evolution.

Also, convince your customer of the cost-efficiency of buying the product or service. For instance, a software upgrade can increase performance and security, eliminating the need to buy new hardware.

Likewise, IT support can save your customer on the cost of purchasing upgrades in the future. In particular, if your customer does not have a valid application software coverage, their company would have to pay more to upgrade their applications. Incompatibility of current applications with future network additions also leads to additional costs.

3. Complexity

Another primary concern is that it may be difficult for employees to learn and adapt to the new system. Introduce solutions that are user-friendly. These customers require plug and play products. If training is necessary, ensure that they will be guided throughout the process and emphasize sustainability.

4. Integration with Current System

Most companies will avoid a complete overhaul and replacement of their current systems. Your goal is to show them how they can improve performance and efficiency with ease. Introduce solutions that integrate seamlessly with their system for little cost and downtime.

5. Employees

A company that employs in-house technicians can make it harder for you to sell your IT solutions to them. Emphasize that your goal is to support their in-house team and help identify and resolve issues quickly. Open them to issues that are outside the scope and experience of their in-house techs. You may be offering solutions that increase employee efficiency through the delegation of menial and repetitive tasks. Hence, they can focus on more important business matters.

In Conclusion

There are times when you will encounter clients that resist change. Win them over to your side, guiding them through solutions that can help them succeed in their business. An effective IT sales professional will listen to a client’s concerns and flawlessly provide the answers as the expert they can count on.

This article originally posted at The Savvy Marketer.

In addition to our Sunday App of the Week feature, we also summarize some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the Web each week. We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please add it to the comments below.

3 Attribution Considerations for B2B Lead Generation
Three attribution modeling concepts and the paid credit metric to help marketers better understand their marketing campaigns. Great article, Manny Rivas.

What’s Your Answer? 25 Questions from Content Marketing Experts
Some of the best questions the presenters at Content Marketing World have been asked about content marketing. Thanks for putting this together, Ann Gynn.

The Biggest Barriers to Successful Marketing Attribution
One of the biggest barriers marketers are seeing today are technology and data changes. Here’s a look at a study on the subject. Thanks, Ayaz Nanji.

Building a servant-led culture
Some advice for building a culture in your business that is based on service to one another as well as your suppliers and customers. Great insight via Lead Change.

10 Reasons Your Content Marketing Has Failed
Nobody wants to fail, but it happens all the time. Here are some tips that might help your content marketing fail less. Thanks, Brian Sutter.

The New Rules of B2B Sales
A look at some of the new rules of B2B sales that have nothing to do with the new shiny digital tools. Thanks for your insight, Anthony Iannarino.

Bots and Automation Don’t Automagically Create a Great Customer Experience
A look at an example when automation didn’t give the greatest customer experience. Thanks for your thoughts, Scott Brinker.

The 7 Storytelling Secrets of Successful Salespeople
We know storytelling is key in successful salespeople, but how do they do it so well? Thanks for the tips, Bob Apollo.

B2B Marketing Analytics Is Broken. Here’s How To Fix It
While data quality and consistency are important, B2B marketers might be looking at the wrong data to drive revenue. Great article, Raviv Turner.

Why Sales Needs Fewer Leads
Your sales team probably needs less of those unfiltered, unqualified leads. Thanks for the advice, Dan McDade.

The post B2B Reads: Attribution, Barriers, and Storytelling appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

“Build it and they will come!”

We see this (and other pithy advice) work all the time in Hollywood, but unfortunately not so much in the real world of sales or entrepreneurship – especially when it comes to business websites. I often coach start-ups and entrepreneurs who have fallen for the logic of Hollywood, and the result is stalled success at a minimum and people walking away from their dreams in the extreme.

I am a firm believer in the value of a website to generate business, and my own income is largely dependent on the success of websites I built for my businesses starting in 1999. But far too many new businesses focus on building their website as if it were some magical magnet that will bring traffic, rather than the true reality which is the inverse: Successful business leaders bring traffic to the website.

Yes, there are wild success stories of websites and products going viral and catching attention in creative ways. However, this is the unlikely scenario. Just like the front door of your business, it is your job to bring traffic to it. Your website is more likely to serve as your virtual showroom and your struggle is the same as every other business – to create a bigger identity.

Do you have a service to provide or a product to sell? Yes, build a website. If nothing else, it will serve as a way of enhancing your credibility when customers do search the web for you. Yes, get in directory and listing services, they can enhance your identity and bring you some new customers.

The problem I see in many situations is people spend an enormous amount of time and money building a website believing that somehow the investment in this is the single most productive use of time. It has been my experience that in every business I have owned, from restaurants to online educational services, the best use of my time is building relationships – with real people in real places.

 

 

Making it to every Chamber of Commerce event is more productive than skipping a meeting and trying to find the perfect font. Fonts don’t buy products, people do. Clients and customers are found in community meetings. I go to meet-up groups because in every group I attend, decision makers are present and are more likely to decide to pick me than someone they have never met.

I am a big fan of old school prospecting. If you do not have enough customers, redesigning the contact page on your website is not going to bring you new leads. But by taking your printed flyer and business card to every office in your building, popping into the reception area, and introducing yourself you will create the solid personal connection necessary to turn a skeptic into a believer.

I worked with a professional recently who complained the phone just wasn’t ringing. He was in a six-story office building with at least 50 other offices in the building. I asked him if he had ever been in any of the other offices and he said no. I told him to take his card and flyer and go to every business in the building and say, “I am your neighbor and I just wanted to find out a little bit more about the services you provide. These are my services.” He finally did it – in part because I told him I would not coach him anymore without actually following the advice he was paying me for.

The result? He booked two new clients within a week from his meet and greets, and several more in the weeks that followed. One of the downsides of the Internet is that we have tried to move everything onto social media, but nothing works better than building real relationships with real people. His building had 6 floors and 50 offices, but it was next to two other buildings with 100 more offices a piece. All of this is are in a neighborhood with probably thousands of easily accessible people. A couple weeks of old school prospecting like this, and one could potentially generate enough business to last a year.

But what holds us back for doing it this way? Some of it is our misbelief that the Internet makes it easy for us. It doesn’t. It gives us the illusion of being busy in most cases and the illusion of prospecting, but the real work is done in real relationships.

Audible, the audio-book publisher, created a niche in 1994 and has dominated the market. Eventually, the founder (Don Katz) sold to Amazon and took a $300 million payout. Even though both Amazon and Audible are clearly Internet companies, the connection that eventually led to a deal was in a relationship Katz fostered early on with Jeff Bezos by flying to Seattle and having coffee with him.

Real world sales and marketing is predicated on community, and the only way to be a part of the community is to actually be a part of it. When this is done, your website will service you well, because you will be the driver of traffic, rather than the mythical SEO fairies so many of us have continued to believe in.

If the whole, entire company supported revenue generation, how strong would your customer care or customer service team be?

Would nothing ever slip through the cracks?

If everyone supported revenue generation, how easily could we detect a disgruntled customer about to leave us?

If your company hasn’t already adjusted its HR practices to accommodate millennial preferences, it should probably take a look at what it will need to do in the future to retain talent.

Why? There are two major drivers pushing for change in today’s workforce. One is the pending worker shortage, which will soon be forcing many employers to scramble for employees, if they aren’t already. Earlier this year, the record 6.7 million job openings in the U.S. officially exceeded the 6 million who are unemployed, according to CNBC. And a JP Morgan Chase poll earlier this year found that 52 percent of execs at mid-sized U.S. businesses are concerned about the limited supply of job applicants in general, while 50 percent are worried about their lack of skills or training.

Secondly, the fact that millennials now make up the biggest working generation (by 2020, they’ll represent 50 percent of the U.S. workforce) means they’re in a good position to flex their collective clout and seek the elements they want in an employer. And research shows they prioritize different aspects of work than the generations preceding them.

If you rely on millennials ages 22 to 36 to help run your business, you may wish to be aware of the following facts about millennial workers and consider the following suggestions for addressing their needs.

• Many millennials have more job options. Depending on your industry, your best talent may be heavily sought after by your competitors. That may require you to step up your employee offerings to attract young people to your company, perhaps boosting salaries and benefits and adding new perks. You should also review your recruiting techniques, ensuring that you’re optimizing all channels available (including social media) and making your application process fast and friction-free.
• Millennials want continual feedback about their job performance. That may mean regular “check-in” sessions with their mentors or supervisors instead of few-and-far-between annual reviews. Another helpful tool may be a digital channel rewards system that automatically offers workers company-wide recognition and a monetary or non-monetary prize for achieving certain milestones. “It turns out that young people, while enthusiastic workers and successful employees, have a lot of anxiety and uncertainty about their work,” advises Anna Bahney on CNN Money, pointing to a recent study on millennials by researcher Department26. The study itself reports: “When they can’t see a tangible impact, when there’s no path in sight, or when more is expected without some sort of reward, the millennial paradigm is threatened, and they have no qualms in cutting their losses.”
• Millennials value experiences over money accumulation. The study also determined that members of this generation place more importance on the quality and meaning of their current lives — and their sense of freedom — than accruing a “nest egg” for retirement. “If they can pay their bills and travel a little, what matters most is that they are doing something inspiring that they feel passionately about,” notes study author Betsy Wecker in the CNN article. Adds Bahney: “Young people will walk if they don’t see the meaning in it — no matter how much they are paid.” For employers, that may mean working harder to ensure you’re creating an enjoyable workplace, that your people have access to a healthy work-life balance and that they’re feeling appropriately challenged in their roles. You can also create a better sense of engagement if you’re clear about what the company is trying to accomplish, how each person contributes to the overall goal and why everyone matters.
• Millennials want to feel empowered. The study shows that they seek workplaces where they feel trusted and have a certain level of ownership over their own work. That’s really just common sense; few people like to feel micromanaged, and everyone likes to feel their skills and talents are being used to maximum effectiveness. For that reason, employers may wish to enact flexible and/or at-home work schedules that enable their people to tailor their workloads according to their personal routines and energy levels. “For millennials to feel fully empowered in their roles, they must be treated like the entrepreneurs they imagine themselves to be,” reports the study. “The thought of not being granted flexibility in exchange for hitting performance metrics is absurd to millennials.”

Most marketers will say that the “prime directive” of marketing is to drive revenue growth. But in reality, revenue growth is a by-product of creating value for customers and providing great customer experiences. Paradoxically, the best way to grow revenue is by not making revenue growth the primary marketing objective.

In life and in business, some of our most important goals are best pursued indirectly. All of us want to be happy, but we can’t achieve happiness by trying to be happy. Psychologists call this the paradox of hedonism or the pleasure paradox. The psychiatrist Victor Frankl described the pleasure paradox in the following way: “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself . . .”

Business success is obviously different from personal happiness, but variations of the pleasure paradox also exist in the business world. The British economist John Kay has called one of these variations the “profit-seeking paradox,” which holds that the best way for a business to maximize profits is by not making profit its primary driving goal.

Although they never used the term, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras described the profit-seeking paradox in their best-selling book Built to Last. Collins and Porras compared the long-term financial performance of several pairs of companies in the same industry. In each pair, the core driving objectives of one of the companies (the “visionary” company) were mostly non-economic, while the other company was primarily profit driven. Collins and Porras found that the visionary companies were more profitable than the profit-driven companies. The authors wrote:

“Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one – and not necessarily the primary one. Yes, they seek profits, but they’re equally guided by a core ideology – core values and sense of purpose beyond just making money. Yet paradoxically, the visionary companies make more money than the purely profit driven companies.”

Another variation of the pleasure paradox – what I call the revenue growth paradox – is particularly applicable to marketing. The existence of the revenue growth paradox means that, like profit, revenue growth is best pursued indirectly, and that the most effective way to drive revenue growth is to not make it the primary direct objective of marketing efforts.

The revenue growth paradox exists because revenue growth is a by-product of doing other things well, the two most important of which are creating meaningful value for customers and providing great customer experiences. Therefore, the most effective way to grow revenue is to find ways to create more value for customers and improve customer experiences.

Marketing can and should be deeply involved in creating value for customers and delivering great customer experiences. When it comes to marketing communications programs, the key – especially for B2B marketers – is to consistently provide what Jay Baer calls “massively useful information.” In addition, marketing – along with sales – should be well positioned to understand customer needs and challenges, and thus help identify opportunities for creating more customer value.

This doesn’t mean that companies shouldn’t have revenue growth targets. But it does mean that marketers and other business leaders must recognize that the key to achieving those objectives is to focus on the conditions that cause revenue growth to occur. Such an indirect approach may not feel comfortable to some marketers, but we have compelling evidence that it works.

For example, a 2018 study by Forrester Consulting found that companies with mature customer experience (CX) practices – what Forrester called experience-driven businesses, or EDBs – reported top-line revenue growth in 2017 of 15%, compared to an average of 11% for the other companies in the study. This research also found that the EDBs had 1.6x to 1.9x higher year-over-year growth in customer retention, repeat purchase rates, average order value, and customer lifetime value, compared to the companies with less robust CX practices.

In many ways, growing revenue is like growing corn or wheat or vegetables. Farmers don’t directly “make” their crops grow. They till the soil, add fertilizer, and sow the seeds. They keep the field free of weeds and insects, and they may irrigate when needed. In other words, farmers focus on creating the conditions that are conducive for the growth of healthy crops. Then they allow nature to take its course.

Revenue growth occurs under the right conditions, and many of those conditions can be controlled, or at least influenced, by the actions of marketers and other business leaders. So the real key to driving revenue growth is to focus on creating those growth-inducing conditions.

Image source: OTA Photos (tradingacademy.com) via Flickr CC.

Originally published here.

Email marketing is an important strategy for companies to connect with their current and potential customers. “Every $1 spent on email marketing produces $44 in return, probably because 58% of adults wake up and immediately check their email,” according to a source.

Most business owners know the importance of collecting emails from individuals who visit their physical locations or their websites. Whether you create social media contests or offer newsletter sign-ups, there are many ways to collect emails to be able to reach out at a later time.

The challenge to email marketing is there is so much competition in the inbox as most people get dozens, if not hundreds, of emails per day. How do you prevent your email from going straight to spam and encourage people to actually open and read it? With this tips!

Include the Person’s Name

To help your readers cut through the clutter, make your email stand out by including their name, or they business name right in the subject line.

Examples of this include:

• Amy, Start Off the Fall Season with a Fresh New Hairdo!
• Paul-Find out How You Can Save 20% on Your Car Maintenance
• Learn How Restaurants Such as Cheesecake Factory Increased Sales With 3 Easy Steps

Establish the Value of Your Offer

As you have seen in the previous examples, the subject lines didn’t just include the recipient’s name, but also clearly showed the value of the email offer. Online users are so bombarded by various online messages, that they are used to spending just a few seconds assessing what is relevant to them.

As such, creating an intriguing email subject line is the biggest determinant of whether your email will be read or tossed into the trash bin.

Utilize the Four U’s Approach

To write a great email headline, follow the Four U’s Approach, which directs the writer to:

• Be Useful: How can your email improve the life of the reader, make something more affordable or easier?
• Be Ultra-specific: What exactly are you offering?
• Be Unique: How will you set yourself apart from the competition?
• Be Urgent: Why should they respond right now and not ignore the email?

Connect on An Emotional Level

The three steps above helped the reader open and read your email, but how do you get them to act? Whether you want them to make a purchase, sign up for an offer, share your content, etc., try to establish an emotional connection with readers to help this happen. As half of all purchasing decisions are driven by emotional connections, emotional marketing is key to raising your sales.

Instead of simply listing an offer, incorporate a funny anecdote or share an experience with your readers. Include elements from stories, such as a beginning, middle and end and possibly even a moral lesson. Use this approach to inspire your audience to take action or simply to let them know how important they are to you!

Pricing can be a complicated and confusing topic. Instead of diving head first into choosing pricing models and setting prices, it is crucial to understand the basics. In this post, I have outlined the five must read blog posts for a crash course in pricing.

 

Blog 1: Don't set prices. Design pricing!

   

First we can take a look at how pricing is designed. This quick checklist shows the best practice and how it should be applied to pricing. Don’t worry if you are not familiar with all the terms used, as the key concepts will be expanded upon later.

 

Blog 2: Why does emotional value matter in B2B?

   

Now that we have an overview on how to design pricing, we can learn more about the terms used. In the B2B environment, there is a greater focus on economic value: the exchange value of a product or service. There are six basic categories for economic value drivers: increased revenue, reduced expense, reduced operating capital, reduced capital investment, reduced risk, and increase options. It is also essential to understand emotional value. This blog post explains the concept and its importance within B2B.

 

Blog 3: Finding it difficult to segment your market? Your offer may be undifferentiated.

   

Next is to understand market segmentation. This blog explains how market segmentation ties into value-based pricing and the significance of differentiating. If we start by asking ourselves the right questions, we will be more successful when it comes to segmentation and creating differentiated value.

 

Blog 4: When is 'user pricing' a good pricing metric?

   

Now that we know how to use emotional and economical value to properly segment, we can learn more about value and pricing metrics. This blog post uses the example of paint to help explain these two key concepts.

It is now a good time to review the key terms in the glossary links provided if any of them are unclear. The terms being: emotional value, economic value, market segmentation, differentiated value, value metrics and pricing metrics. Once we have a full grasp of the concepts and terms introduced, we can finally revisit pricing design.

 

Blog 5: Building your pricing model - what matters

   

This blog introduces how to use value metrics as the basic material for a pricing model, which leads to designing packages targeted towards specific market segments. Following this is the three basic ways to think about pricing design and packaging.

By understanding these key concepts in pricing, we can put all the parts together and design our pricing model. Here, we have opportunity to innovate and optimize prices. Ibbaka has the expertise in market segmentation and value-based pricing with service design and design thinking. Contact us at info@ibbaka.com to discuss how we can work with you to design your pricing.

One of the reasons why B2B sales is so complicated is because of the many blind spots it involves that can ambush sales deals. You might optimize your prices and meet compliance regulations or you might have the best sales tools at your disposal. Yet, all else can fail if you don’t know what to do and what not to do in B2B sales

And no matter how much it’s drummed up about, I don’t believe there are any shortcuts to accelerating your sales funnel.

What I believe is that B2B sales professionals should have the humility to accept it when things don’t work out. And in those times, they should detach themselves and walk away from the deal.

In this post, I am going to highlight the seven hidden traps in the B2B sales process that might be holding you back.

1. Chasing only enterprise deals
2. Not asking the hard questions
3. Overselling your product
4. Rushing your prospects
5. Limiting sales to just phone and emails
6. Keeping it one-to-one
7. Never asking for the sale

1) Chasing Only Enterprise Deals

More often than not, businesses struggle to make their profits soar because they waste time going after the wrong product/market.

However, another often overlooked area of B2B sales is where businesses try to prospect to the wrong set of the audience within their niche. There’s a general tendency among most frontline sales teams to sell to enterprises and become the next Salesforce.

It’s great to dream about bagging enterprise deals with the Fortune 500 companies. But only if you have the capacity or if your product is specially developed to solve their problems.

Starting off with SMB sales can be an advantage

But it’s mostly easier to target your sales strategy towards SMBs. Their needs are simpler, they are easier to satisfy, and the cost of customer acquisition is lower.

Relatively speaking, SMBs are also more capital efficient because of the low stakes involved. The other advantages of selling to SMBs is that over time businesses can gain experience in developing enterprise-grade software while beefing up their go-to-market strategy for SMBs.

Enterprise customers also tend to evaluate a seller company’s credibility, their growth trajectory in the industry, and their product’s competitive advantage. Gaining more experience by selling to SMBs lets you earn a good standing in the market and build good relationships that will eventually be helpful in all of your future sales.

Trying to sell to everyone and anyone is tempting, but it’s a fool’s errand. Be hyper-focused in your sales approach.

2) Not Asking The Hard Questions

Sometimes B2B salespeople in their discovery and demo calls become tunnel-visioned. Their motive is limited to finding out if a customer is interested in their product.

They struggle to ask the right questions which might reveal valuable answers or stick to sales qualifying scripts that sound stiff.

One way to overcome this situation is by giving them the headstart to ask questions about your business.

It sucks to get a “yes”

Listen carefully to their questions and ask your own to get more clarity on what they want. It’s better to let your customers talk, rather than to do all the talking yourself and expect a “yes”.

Asking the critical few from the trivial many questions will shorten your negotiation time and enable prospects to make faster decisions.

Ask them:

• How badly do they need a product like yours
• What they are trying to solve
• About their expectations out of the product
• If they have a set budget and timeline
• Who makes the final call

3) Overselling Your Product

Maybe it’s because of daunting sales goals or the bad sales pitch ingrained in them, but a lot of sales reps tend to oversell.

Here’s a personal anecdote on why this doesn’t work.

A few months back, our marketing team was considering buying a tool for organizing our blog editorial calendar. We shortlisted but soon abandoned the one tool we had come very close to buying. It was information overload! Way too many features for the kind of needs we had.

This one time, the rep demoed features like social media co-scheduling, campaign management, cross-platform integration, etc. We just didn’t need such an extensive tool.

Had the sales rep taken the time to understand our requirements before overwhelming the team with all that information, we may have bought the tool after all.

Sell the ROI of your services, not the features.

4) Rushing Your Prospects

By definition, the sales cycles in a B2B context are longer and require a LOT of back and forths. Most sales reps tend to be hard on their heels and end up chasing customers away.

When customers download a content upgrade from your website, it doesn’t automatically qualify them as leads. It’s great to “follow up” with them, but keep in mind that they might not be your likely prospect at all.

“Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.” ~ Zig Ziglar

Following up also doesn’t mean you have to send emails to your leads every second day.

It will make you look like the well-meaning yet, pesky retail store clerk who follows a customer around from aisle to aisle, asking them if they need any help.

By contrast, nurturing your prospects is a far better approach than following up. Try to understand what your leads are looking for. If your product matches their expectations, add value to their research and offer them resources.
This way, your follow up becomes persistent but polite and doesn’t come across as annoying.

5) Limiting Sales To Just Phone And Emails

We’re not suggesting you fly down to your lead’s hometown and start pitching. However, there’s very little merit in sticking to just phone or email sales.

For instance, when leads come to your brand through a webinar, it doesn’t always make sense to break their experience by calling them.

There are new hurdles to email outreach, like the freshly-minted GDPR for example.

And let’s face it, phone and email are not the fastest, most effective channels to respond to your customers.

Instead, you can give them an integrated customer experience by creating a truly omnichannel sales funnel. This might include their interactions with your website, live chat agents, product marketers at a business event, online ads, social media pages etc.

Let’s consider the Forrester report that found that B2B buyers’ expectations are also shifting towards an omnichannel experience. And because live chat is becoming increasingly popular, you can use it for your FAQs and help articles too.

6) Keeping It One-to-one

The smartest salespeople know the fastest way to close a sale is to find their way to the right people in the deal. B2B sales cycles are not only longer but also complex because, on an average, there are more than 5 people involved in a purchase decision.

The buyers are partly at fault with this because they might not realize the significance of including their peers in the buying process.

This can happen for multiple reasons. Maybe they don’t want to bother their higher-ups in the trial phase or maybe they assume that a salesperson has all the answers.

As a diligent salesperson, you should be quick to loop in key decision-makers from your end too. They could be product managers or software developers who can answer technical questions. Getting experts to talk to customers helps them engage more deeply with your product and understand your offerings better.

Expand the sphere of decision-making by trying to identify and include key stakeholders on the prospect’s side and yours.

7) Not Asking For the Sale

Your prospects are never going to say they are ready to purchase. And a good chunk of sales reps shies away from asking them if they are. This is ironic, given that selling is their job.

Asking for sale is not like asking to sign a contract. Assuming that you had a great round of sales calls with the customer, it’s absolutely natural to ask for a sale.

Worst case scenario, they will say no or delay their answer.

If you are wary about popping the question, you can first ask them to give feedback on how their buying journey is going so far. If they give you an affirmative, chime in with a proposal for next steps.

Remember, asking for the sale doesn’t guarantee the end of a sales process. In fact, it might work as an ice-breaker for negotiations or discuss your SLAs etc. Therefore, ask for a sale to bridge into the more interesting phase in your sales process.

Summing Up

B2B sales is already challenging because the market is largely resistant to change. The buying takes longer and involves multiple decision makers. But when you have additional blind spots in your B2B sales process, it leaves you with little to no results.

Knowing about and being more aware of these common pitfalls is a great way to improve the way you sell. It’s what Stephen Covey refers to as “sharpening your saw” periodically in order to work smart and not just hard!

The post What Not to Do in B2B Sales — 7 Signs You’re About to Kill the Deal appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Success doesn’t come easy — even the most dedicated entrepreneur sometimes finds it tough to stay on track. It’s hard for businesses to keep their employees motivated all the time. I even find myself struggling with motivation on days when challenges feel insurmountable.

When I’m experiencing a rut, I look for sources of inspiration. That’s where motivational quotes come in. A good quote can remind me of why I love my role and the goals I want to achieve.

To keep your eyes on the prize, I gathered the 100+ top motivational quotes that can keep you going. Post these quotes on your office desk, send them in morning emails to your employees, or use them in your messaging system. Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

• Short Quotes About Hard Work
• Inspirational Quotes About Working Hard
• Encouraging Quotes
• Motivational Quotes About Hard Work
• Deep Quotes About Success
• Quotes About Perseverance and Hard Work
• Positive Quotes About Working Hard
• Hard Work Pays Off Quotes
• Funny Motivational Quotes
• Team Quotes on Hard Work

Short Quotes About Hard Work

Sometimes, I want bite-sized bits of information. I don’t want to read a novel (or even a paragraph) for that dose of inspiration. If you’re in a rush, check out my favorite short quotes about hard work.

You can write these quotes on your desk or use them as a daily motivation for your entrepreneurship journey. When it comes to a mantra, the shorter, the sweeter.

1. “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” — Tim Notke, Basketball Coach

2. “Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.” — Coco Chanel, Fashion Designer

3. “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” — Maya Angelou, American Poet and Civil Rights Activist

4. “If your teacher, coach, or mentor believes you can do something, you’re more likely to do it.” — Gwen Moran, FastCompany

5. “Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.” — Pele, Brazilian Soccer Player

6. “People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.” — George Bernard Shaw, Playwright

7. “I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near.” — Margaret Thatcher, Former Prime Minister

8. “You can't get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.” — Alan Alda, Actor

9. “I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.” — Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the U.S.

10. “Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.” — Sam Ewing, Author

Inspirational Quotes About Working Hard

Every day has its highlights, but I usually feel a slump on Wednesday. When I’m feeling down during the mid-week, I use these quotes to find inspiration. I find it helpful to learn from the most successful person’s wisdom.

These quotes are also the perfect way to motivate your employees at the start of the month or when they have bigger goals. Try passing them along to your teams on Slack or via email.

1. “Whatever we believe about ourselves and our ability comes true for us.” — Susan L. Taylor, Journalist

2. “Sometimes, you have to give up. Sometimes, knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop.” — Phil Knight, Co-Founder of Nike

3. “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton, Mathematician, Physicist, and Author

4. “The only thing standing between you and outrageous success is continuous progress.” — Dan Waldschmidt, Business Strategist

5. “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” — Thomas Jefferson, American Founding Father

6. “If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.” — Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple Inc.

7. “Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.” — Tony Robbins, American Author and Speaker

8. “On any given Monday, I am one sale closer and one idea away from being a millionaire.” — Larry D. Turner, United States Army Lieutenant Colonel

9. “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” — Stephen King, Author

10. “Impossible is just an opinion.” — Paulo Coelho, Brazilian Lyricist and Novelist

11. “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Journalist, Speaker, and Author

Encouraging Quotes

Not every professional endeavor results in a big win. Trust me, I’ve had my fair share of missteps that have taught me valuable lessons. In these challenging moments, I always need a bit of additional encouragement.

A little celebration also helps me want to keep going after achieving a big milestone. I’m reminded why I want to keep going and how driven I am to achieve my goals.

Encouragement is vital for everyone. These encouraging quotes will inspire you to keep going and never give up.

1. “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” — Muhammad Ali, Boxer and Activist

2. “There are no traffic jams on the extra mile.” — Zig Ziglar, Author

3. “All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.” — Walt Disney, Entrepreneur

4. “The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it.” ― Epicurus, Greek Philosopher

5. “You are your greatest asset. Put your time, effort, and money into training.” — Tom Hopkins, Author

6. “There will be obstacles. There will be doubters. There will be mistakes. But with hard work, there are no limits.” — Michael Phelps, Olympic Swimmer

7. “I can say the willingness to get dirty has always defined us as a nation, and it's a hallmark of hard work and a hallmark of fun, and dirt is not the enemy.” — Mike Rowe, Television Host

8. “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” — Babe Ruth, Baseball Player

9. “Do or do not. There is no try.” — Yoda, Jedi Master

Motivational Quotes About Hard Work

While everyone needs rest and breaks, hard work is essential to achieve lofty goals. When I’m looking to push through or need some extra motivation, I turn to these quotes to help get me through. Sometimes, I set them as my phone background, so I have a little reminder in my pocket.

1. “Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.” — Oprah Winfrey, TV Host

2. “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.” — Michael Jordan, Basketball Player

3. “There is no royal flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it, for whatever success I have attained has been the result of much hard work and many sleepless nights.” — Madam C.J. Walker, Entrepreneur and Activist

4. “If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it.” — Elon Musk, Entrepreneur

5. “The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses — behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.” — Muhammad Ali, Boxer and Activist

6. “If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant. If we did not sometimes taste adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.” — Josh Billings, Humorist

7. “We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.” — Arianna Huffington, Co-Founder of The Huffington Post

8. “Obstacles can't stop you. Problems can't stop you. Most of all, other people can't stop you. Only you can stop you.” — Jeffrey Gitomer, Author

9. “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.” — Charles R. Swindoll, Author

10. “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” — Thomas Edison, Inventor

11. “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” — Arthur Ashe, Tennis Player

Deep Quotes About Hard Work and Success

We all know that working hard reaps rewards, but sometimes, I want to get a little more philosophical. These quotes go beyond the surface to get into the nitty-gritty of how to achieve success. I use these quotes to remind myself how hard work leads to big wins.

1. “Never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations.” — Dr. Mae Jemison, Engineer

2. “Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.” — Dale Carnegie, Writer

3. “You’re not obligated to win. You’re obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.” — Marian Wright Edelman, Civil Rights Activist

4. “Success isn't always about greatness. It's about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.” — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Actor

5.“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” — Thomas Paine, Political Philosopher

6. “Success is not final; failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston S. Churchill, Politician

7. “When you do more than you’re paid for, eventually you’ll be paid for more than you do.” — Zig Ziglar, Author

8. “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” — Vidal Sassoon, Businessman

9. “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, `Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” — Martin Luther King, Activist

10. “Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” — Dale Carnegie, Writer

11. “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” — Colin Powell, Politician

12. “If you start thinking you are good at something, that's often the day you stop trying to be better and open the back door for someone to come after you. That's why we always aim higher. We never feel like we're done.” — Drew Houston, Entrepreneur

13. “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.” — Booker T. Washington, Activist

Quotes About Perseverance and Hard Work

Business has ups and downs. Trust me, I’ve seen them throughout my career. Perseverance is how I make it through — whether initiatives are hitting their goals or lagging behind. These are my favorite quotes about perseverance and hard work that I turn to when the going gets tough.

1. “He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.” — Nietzsche, Philosopher

2. “Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other.” — Walter Elliot, Linguist

3. “A bend in the road is not the end of the road, unless you fail to make the turn.” — Helen Keller, Activist

4. “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all.” — Michelangelo, Artist

5. “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” — Robert Collier, Author

6. “It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.” — Albert Einstein, Inventor

7. “As I look back on my life, I realize that every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being redirected to something better.” — Dr. Steve Maraboli, Author

8. “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Author

9. “If you‘re in a job that you hate, don’t be scared of seeking out something that might be riskier. Anything can turn into something with passion and hard work.” — Whitney Wolfe Herd, Entrepreneur

10. “Don‘t run before you can crawl. It’s a very hard business, full of many, many extremely creative, talented people who work hard and still fail. If you have the basic building blocks behind you, you're much more likely to do well.” — Anna Wintour, Fashion Editor

11. “It’s so freeing, it’s beautiful in a way, to have a great failure, there’s nowhere to go but up.” — David Lynch, Director

12. “If you are patient...and wait long enough...Nothing will happen.” — Jim Davis, Cartoonist

13. “Without labor, nothing prospers.” — Sophocles, Philosopher

14. “Great companies are built in the office, with hard work put in by a team.” — Emily Chang, Journalist

15. “If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you – like a fever. ” — Sam Walton, Business Person

16. “The only difference between success and failure is the ability to take action.” — Alexander Graham Bell, Inventor

17. “Great things come from hard work and perseverance. No excuses.” — Kobe Bryant, Basketball Player

Positive Quotes About Working Hard

To keep the trail of hard work going, you need to have a positive mindset and attitude consistently. Use these positive quotes for your employees through the middle of the month to keep their morale up.

Beyond that, I love that these quotes have a positive spin. I find that my favorite pearls of wisdom leave me feeling better than before.

1. “I don’t believe in failure. It’s not failure if you enjoyed the process.” — Oprah Winfrey, TV Personality

2. “It is amazing how much you can accomplish when it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.” — Harry S. Truman, U.S. President

3. “The only one who can tell you ‘you can’t win’ is you, and you don’t have to listen.” — Jessica Ennis, Athlete

4. “You may be the only person left who believes in you, but it's enough. It takes just one star to pierce a universe of darkness. Never give up.” — Richelle E. Goodrich, Author

5. “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” — Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer

6. “Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt, U.S. President

7. “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” — Maya Angelou, Poet and Activist

8. “There is always light. If only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.” — Amanda Gorman, Poet and Activist

9. “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” — Joseph Campbell, Writer

10. “A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job.” — Michael Larsen, Mathematician

Hard Work Pays Off Quotes

On busy days, it’s important to remember that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Hard work always pays off! I use these quotes to inspire my team (and myself!) to keep moving forward.

1. “Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice.” — Henry Ford, Inventor

2. “Work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen.” — Conan O’Brien, Comedian

3. “The hard work definitely paid off, and hard work always does.” — Gabby Douglas, Gymnast

4. “I strongly believe if you work hard, whatever you want, it will come to you.” — Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Musician

5. “Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.” ― Abraham Lincoln, U.S. President

6. “Confidence and hard work is the best medicine to kill the disease called failure. It will make you a successful person.” — Abdul Kalam, Indian President

7. “Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it.” — George Halas, Football Coach

8. “There will be obstacles. There will be doubters. There will be mistakes. But with hard work, there are no limits.” — Michael Phelps, Olympic Swimmer

9. Luck is not chance, it’s toil; fortune’s expensive smile is earned.” — Emily Dickinson, Poet

10. Happiness is the real sense of fulfillment that comes from hard work.” — Joseph Barbara, Mobster

Funny Motivational Quotes

Why so serious? Sometimes, I need a laugh to lighten the mood. That’s where funny, motivational quotes come in. I use these quotes when I need a giggle or want to bring a smile to my colleague’s face.

1. “People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” — Winnie the Pooh, Fictional Character

2. “Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?” — Edgar Bergen, Comedian

3. “I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.” — Lily Tomlin, Comedian

4. "If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in the dark with a mosquito.” — Betty Reese, Reese Witherspoon's Mother

5. “Be a positive energy trampoline — absorb what you need and rebound more back.” — Dave Carolan, Soccer Coach

6. “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing —that’s why we recommend it daily.” — Zig Ziglar, Author

7. “Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” — Thomas Edison, Inventor

8. “A diamond is merely a lump of coal that did well under pressure.” — Henry Kissinger, Diplomat

Team Quotes on Hard Work

Things are better when we work together! I love the people I work with, and teamwork makes all the difference when collaborating on tough projects. We can increase productivity, job satisfaction, and even each person's performance. These team quotes will inspire you to achieve success and stay together.

1. “Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much.” — Helen Keller, Activist

2. “Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” — Andrew Carnegie, Philanthropist

3. “I invite everyone to choose forgiveness rather than division, teamwork over personal ambition.” — Jean-Francois Cope, Politician

4. “Teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.” — Patrick Lencioni, Author

5. “The best teamwork comes from men who are working independently toward one goal in unison.” — James Cash Penney, Entrepreneur

6. “Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” — Vince Lombardi, Football Coach

7. “The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.” — Babe Ruth, Baseball Player

8. “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” — Michael Jordan, Basketball Player

Start Achieving Your Goals Now

Success doesn’t come easy, but it’ll be so much sweeter when it comes. In the future, your own story of overcoming obstacles might encourage other entrepreneurs. Your hard-fought wisdom will benefit someone else.

Do you know what sales leadership is all about? It’s about doing these 3 things:

1. Identifying the vision

2. Removing barriers

3. Inspiring people to get on board

Think about these 3 things, as they are the same whether you are leading people or selling to a customer.

A few weeks ago I ran into a good friend who spent nearly 20 years in sales leadership roles with a Fortune 100 company.  Galen Bingham has seen it all, and in this short video he explains the 3 things needed to be a sales leader:

 

Take a look at the 3 and ask yourself where you excel and where you fall short. Being seen as a sales leader is never an end game. It’s always a work in progress, as each day brings new challenges and new insights.

In the video, Galen and I discuss whether a customer will see these 3 things in a salesperson.  Our opinions are different. You might say Galen is the realist and I’m the optimist.  If you are to be seen by your customers as a sales leader, the customer must see all 3 of these in you all the time.

The bigger question you need to ask is, “What is the value of these three 3 to my business?”  If you’re an account manager dealing with a limited number of accounts, the value is huge and immediate.  If, on the other hand, you’re one who prospects, you might think they don’t have as much value, but I will contend otherwise.  Customers can read you more than you realize, and if your motives are on you making your number, they will sense it.  If, on the other hand, your focus is on these 3 traits, it will become clear you’re focused on them.

Check out Galen. He’s the real deal — a very smart and classy person who is making an impact on others:  http://www.galenbingham.com/

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

Listening to your team's sales conversations is one of the most impactful uses of your time as a sales manager or leader.

We’ve all had those days. No matter how hard you try, you can’t focus. Everything is harder than usual and heaven forbid anyone needs you to be creative.

It’s demoralizing, stressful, and makes you incredibly inefficient. That’s why it’s important to know how to get inspired.

A word of warning, however, as this post will give you techniques to help consistently find your inspiration. These tips won’t always work (everyone’s muse is different) and so it’s best to take these practices and experiment to see what works for you.

We’ll cover useful practices such as:

• How to keep a positive mindset and be more productive
• Actions to inspire you whether you’re alone or with others
• How to recapture that spark once it starts to fade
• Changing your routine (how, when, and why)

But enough blabbering – it’s time to get inspired!

How to get inspired

Accept that it can’t be forced

Inspiration cannot be forced. Anyone who says otherwise hasn’t spent hours laboring over the same piece of work with nothing but a blank mind full of frustration.

The sooner you accept this, the easier it will be to capture that lightning in a bottle and get inspired once more.

I’m no psychologist but I seem to produce my best ideas and work at the most unexpected times. The harder I try to force myself to generate ideas, the harder it is and the worse the final results tend to be.

So accept it.

Take a deep breath in, blow out your frustration, and start on something else. If possible either take a break or work on something less creative to let your mind recuperate and process the information you’ve given it.

Speaking of which…

Take a walk

My grandad always said that a walk in the fresh air would “blow away the cobwebs” and help rational thought to shine through. While hardly scientific, it’s hard to argue with the result.

One of the most common ways I get stuck in a rut is by sitting behind my desk for hours, moving only to refresh my drink and go to the restroom. It’s easy to convince myself that I can take a proper break once I’ve pushed through one more task, only to have that cycle into hours of further work.

It doesn’t matter how much of a roll you’re on – the longer you go without a break, the more inefficient your work will be. This is especially true for creative work which needs some degree of inspiration to carry out.

Go outside. Stay off your phone. Take a slow walk and enjoy the scenery. Let your mind wander but try to avoid focusing on any topic too hard.

In short, give your head a break. You’ll need it if you want to generate good ideas once more.

Listen to instrumental music

After years of experimentation, I can safely say that almost any instrumental music can help your focus and creativity while working.

From classical to electronic, chiptune to game soundtracks, I’ve tried almost everything in my efforts to help stay focused and keep my mind engaged. That way it’s easier for me to clear out my tasks before they stagnate and grind me to a halt.

As for why instrumental music is good for this, you don’t want to be listening to something which is too distracting. While it’s different for everyone, most find that anything with a singer (or too fast/heavy a beat) catches their attention and breaks their train of thought.

Again, it’s different for everyone, but I’ve found that most instrumental music will work so long as it’s not too loud, doesn’t have a heavy beat, and you change the genre of music every so often.

The whole point is to help your mind relax and flow into that ideal state of inspiration. That’s difficult to do if you’re lost in your background music or so used to it that it has no effect.

Change your routine

Routines are fantastic. They’re a powerful tool in helping us create good habits, eliminate bad ones, and get the most out of our time. Heck, having a daily routine is often the best way to keep yourself organized and focused.

However, much like listening to the same song on repeat, a stagnant routine will only hurt whoever is using it.

Doing the same thing, day-in and day-out is a great way to get frustrated with the routine and allow your mind to tune out and avoid engaging in your tasks. Ideas are hard to come by because you’re so used to doing things in a certain way that there’s seemingly no need to change anything or think of something new.

That’s why you need to break your routine every so often.

I’m not saying you have to take up a new extreme sport every month, but even a small change to your regular routine can truly work wonders for keeping your mind engaged.

Not to mention that the best way to generate new ideas is to supply yourself with new sights and experiences (more on that below). So, instead of the usual routine, try switching things up no matter how small the change is.

If you commute, try going to work a different way than usual and taking in the sights. If you work at home, why not use a different room or head out to a coffee shop for the day? Hell, even changing the grocery store you visit can be great for new ideas.

For example, if you use a scheduled checklist for your daily routine you could just edit the template in minor ways to keep the recurring checklists fresh and engaging.

Fuel the body, fuel the mind

Have you ever skipped breakfast and then noticed how bad your work day went? That’s because your body didn’t get the fuel it needed to perform its tasks.

The same is true of your mind. If you want it to generate ideas, you need to give it something to work with. New experiences and/or knowledge is the only way to do this.

For example, take Sting – one of the best-selling music artist of all time. He didn’t come up with so many well-known songs by sticking to the same routine. Englishman in New York, for example, was written after spending several days with famous gay author Quentin Crisp (the titular outcast) who had moved there from London.

Here are a few easy ways to give your mind the fuel it needs to get inspired:

• Read a book related to your desired topic
• Learn about key figures in the field
• Check out their work and why they’re popular
• Listen to podcasts while you travel
• Set up an RSS feed to help you read more

The more you know, the easier it will be to come up with new ideas. Speaking of which, if you’re looking for marketing ideas than check out Lauren Holiday‘s post on the best marketing resources – it’s a great list that’s helped our team out of some tight spots.

Talk to yourself

Yes, it sounds odd, but if you work remotely or spend a lot of time by yourself it can be incredibly useful to talk out loud.

I, for example, speak each sentence as I write it whether or not I’m using dictation software. This helps me to check that my work makes sense and flows nicely, reducing the need to perform major edits.

The idea here, however, isn’t to make your tasks more efficient or to find some magic shortcut. We’re looking for inspiration, and a great way to do that is to start a new train of thought which can then be followed to its logical conclusion.

Take my article on call to action examples. Without speaking out loud and teasing the ideas out of the source material, that article would be the same as everything else on the topic – a vague and only mildly useful account of why contrasting colors make for good buttons.

Instead, I was able to trace back the most likely motive for each CTA and thus provide a more valuable insight as to what they were designed to do and how they attempted to achieve that.

That or I like hearing the sound of my own voice. Either way, give it a shot.

Getting inspiration from others

Sometimes it’s not enough to rely on yourself for inspiration. Indeed, it’s often a great idea to get a second opinion on your work and thoughts, as this will let you cover several viewpoints and use experience beyond your own.

As such, here are a few tips on how to get inspired with a little help from others.

Note that most of these exercises can be performed with anyone, so you’re not limited to fellows or experts in the field. Getting a fresh viewpoint is often just the ticket for tackling the topic from a much needed new standpoint.

After all, it’s all too easy to talk from experience which your audience might not have or even appreciate.

Meet with others in the target field

The quickest way to get inspiration for a new project or theory is to talk with others who are in the related field. This lets you learn from their greater (or different) experience to your own and provides a separate viewpoint on the topic you want to cover.

If you can meet with someone more experienced than yourself it can also prove to be a great learning experience, and I’ve already mentioned how knowledge is key for inspiration.

The meeting doesn’t have to be long or physical – a quick chat on Twitter is by phone can be enough to help you out, depending on how complex the topic is. In fact, due to the other person’s limited free time, social media is often the best way to reach out to someone who you’re not already acquainted with.

Alternatively, you could use a video conferencing app to get the most out of your experience. For reference, here’s a handy table from our review of the top apps.

Either way, link up however you can and chat about anything and everything relating to the topic you want to get inspiration for. If you’re lucky they may even supply some ideas of their own which you could use.

Bounce ideas off anyone who’ll listen

Failing a meeting with those in your target field, it’s still a good idea to spend time with (and bounce ideas off of) anyone you can.

Friends, family, you name it. If you’re comfortable talking to them and think they might be able to understand the topic, don’t hesitate to dive in and ask them what they think.

Much like meeting with colleagues, this is a great way to get a fresh opinion on any ideas you have and help decide whether they’re worth pursuing. Plus, it’s always useful to have someone else to help develop any ideas and get you inspired.

Even if they can’t contribute ideas of their own, it’s useful to take the opportunity to explain the topic in detail, as this has its own benefits. Speaking of which…

Explain or teach something

It’s also worth meeting with people who have little to no understanding of what you’re talking about or focusing on, as this will let you attempt to explain the idea (or teach the concept) from the ground-up.

While this is more of a side-note for once inspiration has struck, it’s nonetheless a brilliant way to define your ideas properly and figure out whether they’re worth pursuing. If the idea doesn’t make sense to them or you upon explanation, chances are that you’ll need to change your perspective a little or start from scratch.

The value of this does depend on what audience you’re aiming to address, as a more technically proficient one might not need the high-level introduction that the person you’re talking to will. However, it’s all too easy to get lost in the details of your idea and ignore glaring faults in the big picture.

These issues can be avoided easily – all you need is someone else to say “that doesn’t make sense”.

Listen

Whether you’re meeting with someone for a chat or sitting in a coffee shop and watching the world go by, it always pays to sit back and listen.

If you’re in conversation then focusing on the other person’s words is not only polite but the only way to make sure you get everything you can out of the interaction. A conversation that you don’t listen to is just wasted time, after all.

Plus it’s always fun to listen to strangers as they go about their lives.

Most of what you’ll hear will be useless but I’ve had many a great idea inspired by snippets of conversation I’ve overheard in passing. From topics to cover to viewpoints to consider and factors you’ve overlooked, it’s silly not to take advantage of everything that’s going on around you.

This also plays into how new experiences fuel inspiration; chances are that most people will have different experiences to your own.

Tips for getting inspired

While I’ve already covered the primary methods of getting inspired and getting in the right mindset to let the ideas flow, there are a couple of things you can do to help the process along.

Now, as with most of these techniques, these won’t work for everyone and so you’ll need to test them and see what’s best for you. I find that new hobbies, altered targets, and the ability to just start writing have been most useful but it’s worth trying all of them sooner or later.

Plus, if you’ve used these techniques for a while and find your inspiration lacking once more, the best thing to do is mix up your routine (as mentioned earlier). If you originally found inspiration with painting, try going for a swim every other day, and so on.

Pick up a new hobby

The single most useful tip I have for kickstarting your failing inspiration is to pick up a new hobby.

While the other tips above are more consistent, I tend to get frustrated with myself for the way a regular daily workflow saps my creativity. I’ll find a new way to get inspired and keep it up, only to have my output drop again a few weeks later once the novelty has worn off.

New hobbies largely help to stop that from happening. This is due to both being a new experience for your brain to process and to breaking up your regular routine to stop your own stagnation.

Plus, in the modern age of the internet there’s no excuse for not giving something a go.

For example, in the last year and a half I’ve taught myself how to:

• Play piano (badly)
• Speak Italian (even worse)
• Crochet (to my housemate’s amusement)
• Whittle (to my nephew’s amazement)
• Play various songs on guitar (I’ve played for years but new songs are a good refresher)
• Play various video games

As you can see, it doesn’t have to stick for long, be difficult or a big project or even be successful. The main value is in supplying the new experience to draw from with your inspiration.

If you’re unsure as to what to pick up, I’d recommend starting with a musical instrument which is easy to pick up and play, such as a guitar, harmonica, or even violin. Remote work allows me to keep my guitar by my desk and play a few chords while thinking of my next post and (believe it or not) Einstein did the same with his violin.

You wouldn’t bet against Einstein’s methods, would you?

Exercise (trust me, it works)

I’ve never been a sporty guy. Despite being a “Small” for the first time in my life, I still don’t exercise to any regular degree.

However, even I will attest to the power of exercise in fueling your mind and generating ideas. Not to mention the positive mood boost that comes with a pounding heart rate.

I’ve talked about this already in our post on office exercises but you don’t need to do anything fancy. Literally anything is better than nothing, even if that means a short walk during your work break or 10 minutes of jump rope every other day.

Plus, even if it doesn’t help to clear your head and get you inspired, it’s a lot more interesting (and healthier) than sitting in an office chair all day.

Test methods of creative work

Following the same theme of breaking up your routine, try varying the way you do your creative work or take notes. This can make doing the same work feel different enough that it once more becomes engaging, and can help to highlight connections and points that you may not have reached otherwise.

Some methods you could try out are:

• Talking yourself through an argument
• Bouncing ideas off of others
• Brainstorming (on a board, some paper, or in a notepad)
• Bullet journaling

The method itself doesn’t matter too much if all you’re looking for is inspiration. While brainstorming might be better than bullet journaling for single sessions, the value for us is in getting your train of thought started.

Once you have several starting points it’s just a matter of clarifying them and seeing which is the best to take further.

Just start writing

Speaking of getting to a starting point, if you’re struggling then it’s often best to simply start writing. Starting is always the hardest and most overwhelming part of any project, so it’s best to get that step out of the way as soon as possible to give yourself a chance to build momentum and let your flow guide you through the rest.

Don’t know what to write? Write about not knowing.

Write about what you had for breakfast. Compare it to yesterday. Remember that time the toaster needed replacing after getting angry with a (then burnt) crumpet.

Point is, it doesn’t matter what you write about at first. Just start writing and let your brain do the rest.

For example, this post was originally scheduled to be about the golden age of productivity. After struggling for hours to come up with an angle, I wrote most of this article in a single afternoon out of frustration from my lack of inspiration.

Don’t beat yourself up

One of my biggest problems used to be that I would beat myself up over not doing as well as I thought I could be. This would cause my mood to dip, which would slow down my work, which would make me even more stubborn and critical, and the cycle continued.

This is a terrible way to work.

Not only are you stressing yourself out but the speed and quality of your work will suffer due to that stress. Instead, it’s much better to accept what you’ve done, put it into perspective, and be thankful for any small victories.

It’s hard enough to get inspired when you’re in a good mood, let alone when you’re in a self-imposed mental deadlock because you accidentally daydreamed for the last 20 minutes.

Try reducing/altering your targets

Another factor which severely impacted my stress levels, quality of work, and general inspiration was the work targets I’d imposed on myself.

On a good day, I know that I can comfortably write around 2,000 words of content. This turned into the thought that I should always be writing 2,000 words each day because, in my mind, I had no excuse not to.

The result was obvious in hindsight – a lot more stress, extended hours, and unintentionally padded word counts. I wouldn’t waffle but I’m certain my work could have been more direct.

Nowadays I aim for 1,000 words per day and my workflows much easier for it. Ideas come naturally due to the lower stress, projects are easier to start due to the lower expectations weighing down on me, and as a result, my momentum picks up sooner.

Ironically, by reducing my target word count by half per day I’m often getting the same amount or more done. Equally, this means that on truly terrible days where all I can muster is a few hundred words among research, running through my editing checklist, and other tasks, it’s easier to let the failure go and start with a clear head the next day.

Inspiration isn’t consistent – the key is to keep trying new things

As I’ve said time and again, the main thing to remember is that inspiration and creativity aren’t consistent. If there was a set formula or some easy “hacks” to kickstart a great idea I wouldn’t be writing this post and you wouldn’t be reading it.

Sure, it’s disheartening when your new routine that worked so well starts to become the norm and you run into the same problems once more. Nevertheless, that’s just how things are – the key is to keep trying new things and to accept that you’ll have good and bad days.

Don’t get frustrated and beat yourself up over it. Take a break, relax, then try something new to get inspired once more.

How do you get inspired? I’d love to hear any tips you have in the comments below.

Every busy entrepreneur knows that efficiency is their best friend. If you fail to maximize your efficiency, you’ll struggle to accomplish all your tasks in a day. This translates to being unproductive – and we all know how obsessed entrepreneurs are with productivity!

Looking for some tips? Here are 11 time-saving hacks for busy entrepreneurs:

1. Plan your day the night before

Every day is a new day. That said, when’s the proper time to plan for your day? Most people plan their day in the morning, or even worse they plan it on the fly.

If you want to wake up every day with a clear plan of attack I suggest preparing the night before. All it takes is 10-20 minutes to plan your day before you fall asleep. When you wake up all you need to do is take a look at the schedule and go get it done!

2. Take breaks

We get it, you’re an entrepreneur so you need to be working 24/7. The truth is nobody can operate at their full potential for an entire day. We simply need to take breaks.

The best approach is to schedule breaks into your day so they don’t disrupt your workflow. For example, I take three 10-minute breaks every day. I even schedule them on my calendar so I don’t book a meeting during my break time.

3. Wake up earlier

If you wake up earlier, you’ll get more done during the day. It’s that simple. Not to mention, the early mornings are the only time of the day you’ll truly have to yourself. This is the perfect time for deep thinking and reflection. For busy entrepreneurs, this is an extremely important practice.

If you’re not a morning person this one may be tough, but it doesn’t mean you should forego it. Try taking it one step at a time. Shoot for your ideal time to rise, preferably around 5:30 – 6:00AM and slowly work towards that by waking up 10 – 15 minutes earlier each week. Eventually, your body will adjust to the new time and you’ll never have to look back.

4. Handle the most difficult tasks first

Staying efficient throughout the day is all about balancing your energy. That said, should you be saving your hardest tasks for the end of the day? The answer is a definite no.

If you want your day to run smoothly, it’s always best to tackle your most difficult tasks first. That way you have the rest of your day to look forward to!

5. Set timers

If you constantly find yourself daydreaming while trying to complete tasks you may consider using timers. Setting a timer keeps you focused and gives you incentive to work faster. You’ll understand you have no time to waste and it’ll serve as a reminder to stop daydreaming and get back to work!

6. Banish your smartphone

Smartphones are the best and worst thing for our productivity. Sure they allow us to constantly stay connected and work remotely. However, they’re also a dark hole when it comes to the endless distractions.

The best strategy here is to turn your smartphone on silent and leave it more than an arms length away. This way you won’t impulsively check Instagram every 10 minutes to check in on our friends.

7. Try an audiobook during your commute

Entrepreneurs know that knowledge is power. One of the best ways to broaden your knowledge is to read books. Unfortunately, reading tends to take up a lot of our time. A great alternative is to try an audiobook or podcast during your commute hours. This way you can continue to obtain knowledge during hours of the day that would otherwise be wasted.

8. Get rid of multitasking

Multitasking is just plain bad. It gives us the misconception that we’re finishing multiple tasks at once. In reality, we’re taking longer to complete each task than if we were to handle them individually. Your brain simply cannot focus on two things at the same time. Focus on one single task and only move on to the next once it’s completed.

9. Batch small tasks

A great time management strategy to use is the idea of time blocking. Time blocking is when you block off certain chunks of time on your calendar to accomplish certain tasks. This way you allot specific hours of the day for certain jobs, rather than tackling everything at once.

The idea here is that you batch similar tasks together and block out specific times on your schedule to accomplish them. When it comes to your smaller more trivial tasks, it’s always best to batch those in the same block.

10. Stop being a perfectionist

Many of us struggle with the idea that we always need to be perfect. Whether it’s a simple sales proposal or an investor presentation we’re always trying to make it better. The truth is, there’s a point where it’s good enough and any extra effort is a waste of time.

Is the investor really going to care what font you use? Do you think they’ll invest based on the images you used on your marketing slide? The answer is usually no, and it’s important to recognize this no matter what you’re putting together.

11. Make decisions right away

Every successful entrepreneur can attest to the fact that decision making is one of the most important skills to have. Every top CEO in the world makes 10 decisions a day that many lose sleep just thinking about. The reason why they’ve put themselves in such a top position is because of their ability to make a decision right away and live with the consequences.

The worst thing you can do is spend hours and hours looming over a decision and playing out every possible outcome. Take a few minutes to think things over, weigh the pros and cons, then make your choice. Sure some will be the wrong decision, but those are when we learn the most.

If you’re a busy entrepreneur, make sure you try some of the time-saving hacks listed above so you can get more out of your day!

A list of digital hacks and tools for full-stack marketers First of all, think through your most tedious, low-skilled, weekly tasks. If you find them cumbersome, chances are, other marketers are bound to have felt the same frustrations as you. …..

The post The latest hacks and tools for full-stack marketers appeared first on Smart Insights.

Are you a company that evaluates your pricing as part of an annual process?   Congratulations, you are in select company.  The majority merely glance at the competition, evaluate their price, and make minor adjustments.  The better organizations look at their solutions

If you want to succeed in the increasingly competitive world of ecommerce, you have to work hard to build trust with your target audience.

In ecommerce, trust is not something you can build once and secure forever. Building trust requires constant attention and effort. It’s not easy and it takes a lot of work, but if you can do it, the rewards can be big.

When people trust you, they buy from you, they spend more with you, they become loyal to you, they refer others to you, and they help keep your business alive and growing.

So, how do you do it? There’s no perfect equation that is guaranteed to work for every ecommerce business, but there are a number of common tactics worth trying.

Here are 7 trust-building tactics you can experiment with at your business this year:

1. Product Videos

One of the best ways you can start building trust when you’re in the ecommerce business is to produce, publish, and share videos of the products you want the people in your target audience to buy.

As an ecommerce business owner or marketer, it’s important to remember that your prospective customers don’t get to shop online the same way they would in an actual store. They can’t hold your products in their hands or see them up close and in-person. They can’t feel them, hear them, or smell them either.

That’s why, in ecommerce, you have to work extra hard to build trust and convince people that your products are worth buying.

Product videos can help you fill the gap that exists for consumers when it comes to shopping online. Videos allow viewers to see your products up close and from multiple angles. They also give you the opportunity to shape the story or experience you ultimately want your prospective customers to feel when they are researching and deciding whether to buy your products.

Videos are powerful selling tools. Consider the following:

• Almost 80% of people state that product videos give them more confidence when purchasing a product (Wyzowl).
• 73% more visitors who watch product videos will buy and 57% are less surprised by products with video (HubSpot).
• Businesses that use videos see on average 34% higher online conversion rates than those without videos (Wipster).

Want to learn more about how to start creating product videos for your online store? Check out this comprehensive guide from BigCommerce.

2. Brand Stories

Another great way to build trust with your target audience is by shaping and sharing stories about your brand, Brand stories help your prospective customers understand who you are, what you believe, why you’re doing what you’re doing, and what the future looks like for your business and products.

Brand stories can also be used to give consumers a better idea of how your products are made, where they come from, who handles them, and what makes them different.

Online consumers today aren’t just looking for the right products to buy—they’re also searching for the right businesses and missions to support. As an ecommerce entrepreneur, it’s your job to establish, maintain, and nurture authentic relationships with your past, current, and future customers. Brand storytelling is one way to do it.

Some examples of brand storytelling content include things like:

• About pages
• Origin story videos
• Interviews with founders and employees
• Company timelines
• Photos from then and now
• About us content on product pages
• Brand story supporting material in product packaging

To start developing more brand storytelling content for your ecommerce store, dig into this resource and this resource from the Sellbrite blog.

3. Original Content

You can also build trust by leveraging yourself as a trusted resource for the people in your target audience. These days, online shoppers aren’t just using search engines to find products—they’re also using search engines to find answers and gather potential solutions to their problems.

As an ecommerce business owner, you have the opportunity to position yourself and your brand as a resource they can turn to when they need help. That’s where content creation comes into play.

Here’s a list of the types of content you should be creating for your audience in order to start building trust and seeing actual ROI from your efforts:

• Niche Topic Content – Content that relates to a specific topic or theme that you and your customers are passionate about or interested in. For example, if you sell athletic clothes, you might write content about running or working out. If you sell camera equipment, you might write about traveling or adventures.
• Community-Driven Content – Content that very specifically serves the people you’re regularly interacting with on places like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. With this type of content, you’re responding to questions or conversation topics with rich, original content that aims to help and answer questions.
• SEO Content – Content that targets specific keywords or keyword phrases that you want to rank for in search engines like Google. The key here is to create content that your target audience can find when they are using Google to find answers or solutions to their challenges.
• Product Education Content – Content that helps answer questions that your target audience might have about your products. How-to articles are good examples of product education content.
• Media-Rich Content – Content that blends text with original photos, videos, GIFs, and other graphics in an effort to stand out and attract the people you’re trying to reach.
• Storytelling Content – Content that tells stories about your company, your products, your founders, your employees, and your customers.
• Partner Content – Content that comes from or features your vendors or partners.
• FAQ Content – Content that simply lists answers to common questions that your target audience about your products or the industry you’re operating in (example: running).

Want to start investing more in content marketing for your store? Check out this recent post that we published on the Sellbrite blog about content hubs and landing pages.

4. Live Chat

Live chat is another great way to build trust with online shoppers from the moment they land on your website for the first time. Consider the following about the relationship between brands that offer live chat and online shoppers:

• More than 42% of online shoppers prefer live chat option to solve the issues and queries during online shopping (J. D. Power).
• Roughly 44% of online customers say that having questions answered by a live person while purchasing something is one of the most important features of a website (Neil Patel).
• Over half of consumers are more likely to repurchase from a company who offer live chat support, and 79% of businesses say offering live chat has had a positive effect on sales, revenue, and customer loyalty (Kayako).

Implementing live chat on your ecommerce gives you the opportunity to create the right first impression with website visitors. It also makes it easier to establish and nurture relationships with potential buyers. Live chat can be a great way to show people that you care.

To add live chat to your ecommerce site, follow these steps:

• Step 1: Research tools – Do some research on the different live chat tools that exist (Kayako, Drift, Intercom, Zendesk, HubSpot), and find one that you’d like to add to your website.
• Step 2: Build your team – Ask one of your existing employees to build out and manage the live chat strategy for your business. If you don’t have anyone internally that can help, hire someone who has experience doing it in the past.
• Step 3: Create guidelines – Create documentation that help your live chat agents understand how they should be communicating with people they interact with through live chat. What voice or style should they use? How soon should they respond to messages and how soon should they resolve them? What should they do if they don’t have the answer? How should they help an unhappy visitor or customer? These are questions you should know the answer to and share with your team when you’re ready to turn live chat on.
• Step 4: Set goals – Set goals around number of chats resolved and the amount of time it took to resolve them. Track performance and help your live chat team improve.
• Step 5: Evaluate efforts – Check in with your team from time to time to find out how live chat is going. Adjust your strategy and team accordingly if needed.

The key with live chat is to be consistent, so don’t invest in it until you’re ready as a business and team. Once you start offering it on your website, your visitors will expect to hear from you within seconds. If you’re not prepared to manage it, hold off until you have the right resources in place.

5. Personalized Emails

Personalized emails can also help you build trust with potential and past customers who might be interested in purchasing products from you.

Think about it: online consumers are getting absolutely flooded with email campaigns from virtually every brand, business, and online store they’ve interacted with in the past.

It’s your job to make your emails stand out. A simple way to do it is by adding personalization to your campaigns instead of sending the same generalized email to everyone on your list.

You can personalize emails in a number of ways. Here are some ideas:

• Send customized thank you emails to each person who places an order through your website.
• Add first name greetings to the promotional emails you send out.
• Reach out on a one-to-one basis and get feedback from your newest or most loyal customers on what their buying experience was like.
• Provide personalized product recommendations based on their search history or past purchases.
• Send personalized email campaigns to different segments of your audience based on seasonality, weather, holidays, or sports teams.

To learn more about how you could be adding more personalization to your marketing campaigns, dig into this comprehensive guide.

6. Free Samples

Another clever way to build trust with the people who might purchase products from you is by offering to send them free samples of your products.

There are a few reasons why sending samples is a worthwhile tactic to test with your audience:

• Reason #1: It allows you to build a list of potential customers that you can market to through email, social ads, and direct mail.
• Reason #2: It proves to your audience that you aren’t hiding behind anything, and you aren’t trying to trick them into buying from you. You’re able to show them that you stand by your products and you simply want to help.
• Reason #3: It creates buzz and brand awareness for your business. People love the idea of getting free stuff, and once they find out you’re willing to send out free samples, word will quickly spread.

If you’re not in a position to send free samples to your audience, consider offering some sort of “try-before-you-buy” option. This kind of strategy, made famous by brands like Warby Parker, allows consumers to decide whether or not they want your products, and puts minimal financial strain on your business.

7. Badges, Grammar, Links

The final actionable tip for building trust with your audience relates to your website as a whole. Because online consumers are visiting so many websites in a given day, yours needs to be at the top of the list as far as security and reliability goes.

Online consumers, in general, have a pretty good idea of what to look for when trying to decide whether or not to trust a website with their personal or financial information.

Here are 3 areas you can optimize in order to ensure that you’re giving off the right impression to those who land on your website:

• Area #1: Trust Badges – To help online consumers understand that you’re committed to keeping their information safe and secure, add security badges and language that reinforce and remind visitors about the tools you’re using to protect them throughout the buying process.
• Area #2: Grammar – To add credibility, ensure that there are no typos, misspellings, or grammar issues on your website. These are usually easy red flags for online shopping when trying to decide how legitimate or professional your company actually is.
• Area #3: Links – It’s also important to ensure that all the navigation links and linked text and photos throughout your website goes to working, up-to-date pages. Broken links or archived pages can be another red flag that online consumers watch out for when deciding whether or not to trust you.

As a rule of thumb, audit your website every month to ensure that it continues to meet your own standards as well as the high standards and expectations that most online consumers have today.

Over to You

What are you doing to build trust with your website visitors and returning customers? Tell me in the comments below.

Crafting your channel program should be a very deliberate activity. Although you may start with the channel in an opportunistic model, building a program with careful thought and purpose will serve the business in the long run. I’d like to offer you a simple three-stage process model to help you build strategic, competitive channel programs and put you on the path to sustainable revenue from your indirect channels.

In this process model, the first phase is Assessment to structure the program, the second phase is Validation to implement the strategy, and the final third phase is Growth Levers to scale your operation. Each phase is designed to build upon for the next, and should be active only for a set amount of time to keep you moving in the right direction.

Phase 1 – Assessment

Assessment is where you outline the commitment necessary to structure the business for the channel, as well as identify the specific steps to take in launching the channel strategy in an accelerated manner. There are specific functional areas you will want to explore in your assessment and develop a strategy for each of these areas. For example, it is helpful to understand:

• How your product sells, and how easily that can be transferred to partners
• Understand the internal roles and investment needed to support the channel
• Understand your end user profile and value propositions around that profile
• Validate the practicality and legality of selling thru the channel
• Your chosen go-to-market path and profiles of the partner targets you seek
• Competitor strategies and results

The Assessment phase should not take a long period of time to move through. In fact, if you’ve been opportunistic with your channel plays you may understand most of these things already. Once your business can articulate and document the items in the assessment phase, you are ready to move on.

Phase 2 – Validation

The second phase is Validation where you focus on initial execution and measurement of the program or initiatives outlined in the Assessment phase. A timeline with actions and anticipated results should be used to measure your success. This is a great time to incorporate feedback into your program and allow for early diagnosis and course corrections. During this stage, it is helpful to understand:

• Key performance metrics and identify any areas of conflict or where your strategy fell short
• Mechanisms for both promotion and feedback, and incorporating both back into your strategy
• The concept of channel engagement and how best to support that, which could mean investment in a channel technology stack

The onboarding structure for partners and training delivery methods

The Validation phase is your testing grounds to be sure you’ve got the right strategy in place. You are ready to move on to the next phase when you’ve got a proven strategy, documented processes, and a clearly defined value proposition for the channel.

Phase 3 – Growth Levers

The third phase identifies Growth Levers in your business where you can scale your operations to sustainable revenue streams. During this phase, you should focus on the growth elements needed to take a successful channel start and evolve into a sustainable revenue stream. As you look at the different levers to push and pull in your program, you may explore:

• Changes to your organization, roles and responsibilities
• Changes to your support structure and introduction of new roles and responsibilities
• Introduction of new tools and resources
• Business intelligence, scorecards and business reviews
• Demand generation tactics, leads and marketing platforms

While the other stages may be relatively short and have a defined beginning and end, this stage can stop and start again as the needed by the business. All growth levers are not pulled at once, as you have to adjust and see what the result is, then adjust again. For that reason, you can find yourself in and out of this phase infinitely. As a good practice, if you’ve been out of it for a long time, it’s good to deliberately go back into this phase to see what else can be done to make your channel even better.

This 3-phase engagement model will take you though all the necessary steps to build a competitive channel program for your business and keep you fine tuning that strategy. While this is not an exhaustive list, and there are many more details in each category, the principal stages and high level discussions will keep you on the right path to channel success.

The post 3 Stages of Competitive Channel Programming appeared first on OpenView Labs.

  

A shotgun blast impacts a widely affected and less targeted area, while a laser beam is precise and accurate to its aim. Both have their place in sales and marketing. Which style works best for qualified lead generation and provides a lower cost per lead?

The most effective sales people, appropriately nicknamed hunters, are laser-focused on results and seek the most qualified leads from their marketing team. They often bypass the shotgun blasted leads generated by broadly targeted campaigns, like webinars and direct marketing campaigns. Justifiably, sales teams consider the majority of marketing leads unqualified—not worthy of the effort to uncover the few that are sales qualified. In fact, fewer than 7% of leads that are passed on to sales from marketing meet the qualifications for true and actionable leads. 

Alternatively, starting with highly targeted prospect lists, laser-focused outbound marketing campaigns provide sharp-shooter sales teams with fully qualified leads. Starting with multi-touch marketing activities centered on exploratory phone calls and nurturing emails result in a pinpoint set of leads. These efforts allow sales professionals to concentrate on closing highly qualified leads versus prospecting through responses.

Our infographic (download below) compares single-touch marketing campaigns that use a shotgun approach versus multi-touch, multi-media campaigns that center around laser-targeted outbound calling. The illustration shows the levels of action required to sift through and pass-on qualified leads to sales. 

The laser targeted approach holds sales accountable for every lead. And most importantly, outbound calls combined with nurturing emails result in significantly higher close rates and lower costs per lead.

DOWNLOAD THE INFOGRAPHIC >>

Is your sales team prospecting or selling?

Are your sales reps laser-focused on closing only sales qualified leads?  

 

For more insights into the B2B sales and cost per lead read our white paper: How Much Should a Sales Lead Cost?