When you run an influencer marketing campaign, how do you measure success?

This is a question that leading brands have struggled to answer, even as influencer marketing has become more transparent, data-driven, and strategic. Although influencers often drive immediate sales, those revenues don’t always tell the full story — influencers are great at introducing brands to new, potential customers, but they aren’t always the last click, which can make their impact difficult to measure. To see their full ROI, brands are now looking beyond the dollars generated by a single campaign, and toward the overall customer journey, which can encompass as many as 30 touchpoints between inspiration and purchase.

Our experience managing influencer collaborations over more than four years has shown us that bloggers are often the first touchpoint. They connect brands with customers, instill trust, and inspire shoppers to buy, but because shoppers often make their purchase outside those interactions, influencers are often cut from the very path to purchase they set in motion.

To understand whether influencers are converting, it’s important to look at the customer journey through every touchpoint. Here’s how to do it:

Think Beyond the “Last Click”

The first step is casting off the last-click conception of influencer, which ignores a large part of the conversion story. With a more nuanced understanding of attribution, marketers often find that certain partners are better for introducing a brand into the minds of consumers—say, a mention by a respected blogger in a given space—while other channels work better for closing sales. For example, an eCommerce platform with detailed product comparisons or discount codes is more likely to inspire a purchase, but a consumer is not likely to land there first when seeking outfit inspiration. Acknowledging that all these disparate touchpoints contribute to the customer conversion journey – not just the click that leads them to the shopping cart – is vital to accurately measure the ROI of any influencer marketing campaign.

28 wearing @halebob_official #birthday #pittsburgh #ootdsubmit #shoppinglinks #ad

A post shared by J E N N A B O R O N (@jennaboron) on Jul 10, 2018 at 3:22pm PDT

The above campaign by fashion brand Hale Bob is a great example. After seeing this collaboration with Jenna Boron (@jennaboron), followers casually scrolling through their Instagram feed weren’t likely to make a purchase on the spot; but they might seek out Hale Bob eCommerce site when searching for the perfect summer jumpsuit. In that scenario, Jenna’s content still inspired their purchase.

Tracking conversion starts with understanding the customer journey from inspiration to purchase. A customer who learns about a new product from an influencer might then browse the brand’s eCommerce site, bookmark the product page, then ultimately buy from a retail store on impulse. Finding ways to track that journey is part of accurately tracking conversion. Thankfully, we now have much better insights and metrics than we did even a few years ago to pinpoint an influencer’s role in converting followers into customers.

Use the Right Metrics

As you look at the whole customer journey, here are influencer metrics and data points to help you measure conversion:

Coupon Codes. Although coupon codes will only help you track conversions for online purchases, they can be incredibly helpful for tracking customer behavior. Coupon codes can even help you determine the natural length of time between a collaboration and a transaction by incentivizing shoppers to tie their purchase back to the influencer. You can make coupon codes even more effective by tying them to an affiliate campaign. Shopping Links, for example, is integrated with over 15 different affiliate networks, so your chosen influencers can easily generate affiliate links directly through their accounts.

Instagram Story Swipe-Ups. Instagram Stories traffic is another effective way to measure conversion, which is why we encourage brands to include this platform as part of their collaboration brief.

Engagement. Engagement is also a key metric to track, but it’s important to distinguish between types of engagement. Followers often double-tap images without making a purchase, which can inflate the value of “likes,” but more active engagement, such as comments, shares and interactions with Instagram Stories, can be valuable indicators of future conversion.

SWIPE LEFT Work wear that will make you want to PLAY up now on the blog! And guess what? This top with the epic sleeves is only $35! Shop it now in profile link OR Stories! @marksandspencerau #iheartbargains #sp @shoppinglinks I’m wearing a shirt 10 in skirt and top.

A post shared by Chelsea Thomas (@iheartbargains) on Jan 30, 2018 at 8:06pm PST

The above collaboration between Chelsea Thomas (@iheartbargains) and MARKS & SPENCER is a great example of how comments can contribute to conversion, particularly when followers tag other users, introducing the brand to new consumers.

Actions. One final way to track conversions is by following specific actions that indicate a likely future purchase. These actions could include signing up for your newsletter, joining your loyalty program, or following your brand’s social accounts. Conversion pixels can help you track the actions of an influencer’s followers after a campaign and tie those actions to a specific influencer.

Working with the right influencer marketing platform can also help ensure you have the tools to track conversion. Thanks to sophisticated tracking through different eCommerce carts and integration with multiple affiliate networks, we can track conversion even when it occurs early in the customer journey.

The Bottom Line

Influencer marketing can have a significant impact on conversions in ways that aren’t obvious. Effective at “top funnel” interactions, Influencers introduce customers to your brand, cultivate trust and loyalty, and keep your products top-of-mind when shoppers are ready to buy, even if they aren’t involved in that last click. Tracking the role that influencers play in the overall customer journey by measuring sales from coupon codes, Instagram Story swipe-ups, engagement, and other individual actions along the path to purchase, can help you gain a better sense of your influencer marketing ROI, and how well your influencer collaborations are truly converting.

A version of this article first appeared on the Shopping Links blog.

It was quite a week for Slack, wasn’t it? The enterprise communications platform confirmed this publication’s earlier report that it had scored another $427 million investment on an over-the-moon valuation of over $7 billion. Slack took a market that had once been in the doldrums and turned it into something significant by making itself more than a communications tool.

It changed the game by making itself a work hub. Through APIs and UI updates, it has made it simple for countless third parties (like Evernote) to integrate with Slack and provide the long-sought workplace hub for the enterprise. Instead of task switching, you can work mostly in one place and keep your focus on your work.

It’s quite a value proposition and it has enabled Slack to raise $1.2 billion (with a b) across 11 funding rounds, according to data on Crunchbase. They have grown to 8 million daily active users. They boast 70,000 teams paying to use it. Whatever they are doing, it’s working.

Competing with corporate behemoths

That said, Slack’s success has always been a bit surprising because it’s facing off against giants like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Cisco, Salesforce and many others, all gunning for this upstart’s market. In fact, Microsoft is giving Teams away for free to Office 365 customers. You could say it’s hard to compete with free, yet Slack continues to hold its own (and also offers a free version, for the record).

Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t require customers to use any particular toolset. Microsoft Teams is great for Microsoft users. Google Hangouts is great for G Suite users. You’re already signed in and it’s all included in the package, and there is a huge convenience factor there, but Slack works on anything and with anything and companies have shown there is great value in that.

The question is can Slack continue to play David to these corporate behemoths or will patience, bushels of cash on hand and a long view allow these traditional tech companies to eventually catch up and pass the plucky newbie. Nobody can see into the future, but obviously investors recognize it takes a lot of capital to keep up with what the competition is bringing to the table.

Expanding their reach

They also clearly have some confidence in the company’s ability to keep growing and keep the titans at bay or they wouldn’t have thrown all of that moolah at them. Up until now, they seem to have always found a way, but they need to step up if they are going to keep it going.

Alan Lepofsky, an analyst with Constellation Research, who keeps a careful eye on the enterprise collaboration market, says in a recent video commentary that it’s great they got all this money, but now that someone has shown them all of this dough, they have to prove they know what to do with it.

“For Slack to continue to be successful, they need to expand beyond what they are currently doing and really, truly redefine the way people communicate, collaborate, coordinate around their work. They need to branch out to project management, task management, content creation — all sorts of things more than just collaboration.”

What comes next?

Lepofsky says this could happen via a build or buy scenario, or even partnering, but they need to use their money strategically to differentiate the product from the hefty competition and stay ahead in this market.

The other elephant in the room is the idea that one of the competing mega corporations could make a run at them and try to acquire them. It would take a boat load of money to make that happen, but if someone had the cojones to do it, they would be getting the state of the art, the market share, the engineering, the whole package.

For now, that’s pure speculation. For now, Slack is sitting comfortably on a huge cash pile, and perhaps they should go shopping and expand their product set with their newly found wealth, as Lepofsky suggests. If they can do that, maybe they can keep the technology wolves from the door and make their way down the path to their seemingly inevitable IPO.

Your Sales Team is Poorly Positioned

Your salespeople are poorly positioned and that is stretching out your sales cycle and preventing deals from closing.  

I know, I’ve been coaching their deals. Their deals are stuck.  

Your salespeople are starting off too low in the organization and not finding enough of the buyers which is leaving them poorly positioned.  

The 1 or 2 buyers they know are ghosting them. (By ghosting, I mean that things were going great and then, all of a sudden, silence.) 

You and I both know this statistic, the number of people involved in a B2B purchase has climbed from 5.4 to 6.8 (Gartner). 

Yet, your salespeople are trying to close 6 and 7 figure deals working with 2 or 3 buyers who are manager level. If one goes silent or leaves the company, they are stuck.  

You know it’s true. Go look at the opportunities they have in their funnel/pipeline and ask them who they have relationships with.  

They continue to make the fatal mistake of contacting 1 or 2 people before they have done the research and found all the potential buyers, including what Miller Heiman Group calls the Economic Buyer. The person who allocates the budget to make the purchase.  

They are poorly positioned and surprised that the deal isn’t moving forward.  

It Doesn’t Have to be This Way  

You could be helping your salespeople get positioned and close these complex deals.  

The complex sale is more difficult for many reasons. But, the main one is there are many buyers involved. It’s tough for your salespeople to develop relationships with all the buyers, navigate the buying process and bring everyone to consensus, so these deals have a lower close ratio.  

We know the problem is that salespeople are not communicating with the many buyers involved in the decision and in many cases, don’t know how to find them or build relationships with them. That leaves them poorly positioned.  

We know that opportunities get stuck for other reasons, but in the end, if you have great relationships with the right buyers you will know why the deal is stuck and you will have buyers that are willing to help you navigate.  

13 Questions to Ask

When an opportunity is stuck, ask these questions. The answers will reveal what you need to coach your sales reps or your account teams to do next.  

1. When was your last meeting with the buyers? 
2. Who did you meet with? 
3. What did you do to prepare for that sales call? 
4. What was your objective for the call? 
5. Who else will be involved in the decision that wasn’t at the meeting? 
6. What did you do to bring value and insight? 
7. What other solutions are they considering? 
8. Where are they in the buying process? 
9. What is their timeline for implementation?  
10. When will they make a decision? 
11. What actions did they commit to? 
12. What actions did you commit to?  
13. What are the next steps? 

These questions will help both you and the salespeople understand more about the status of the deal. Far too often, salespeople get way ahead of the prospect, they predict a close date based on their quota instead of on the customer’s needs. Close dates come from customers, not from quotas. 

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The only way to know when a deal will close is to ask the customer.
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Salespeople must learn to ask for the implementation date and a time by which a decision will be made in order to know the close date. They won’t get accurate information if they are poorly positioned.  

Salespeople will be more inclined to get the needed information if they know you will be inquiring about it. The problem comes when they don’t know how. You need to show them.  

Sales leaders will have fewer surprises if they make these questions part of their coaching routine. The benefits include:

• A shorter sales cycle
• More effective selling
• Better close ratios
• More accurate forecasting  

Of course, you want to know when the deal is going to close, but instead of asking, “When is the deal going to close?” start asking, “How are you positioned to close the deal?”  

By getting involved earlier, asking questions and coaching for better positioning, you’ll have better results.  

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Don’t let your sales team be poorly positioned! Schedule your FREE 30-minute Conquer the Complex Sale Strategy Session. Just follow this link.

The post Poorly Positioned: Ask Your Sales Reps These Questions to Close More Deals appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

Perhaps more than anyone else in the world, Tamara Schenk knows sales enablement. She has been conducting research and publishing studies and research-based blog posts on the topic with CSO Insights for many years and is the top expert to consult when you want hard data and deep insights.

It’s important for your personal brand to be prepared for the latest marketing trends online. In order to accomplish this we need to have specific systems and instructions in place. Scrum methodology and agile marketing both help you to prepare for the future and have an effective strategy in place.

Is your management team to be quick to respond to your online community? Timing is everything when it comes to monitoring and communication, which can lead to missed golden opportunities.

Today a personal brand should be actively engaged on social media, tracking content and staying on top of the latest trends. Knowing the needs of your audience is also important along with staying flexible in your overall marketing plan.

How Scrum Can Work for Agile Marketing

Utilizing the Scrum leadership principle to organize your team and content marketing can help better capture the needs and desires of your audience along with improving upon what you already have. Here are several ways to accomplish this:

• Set a deadline with flexibility – Be open for any changes in technology and on social media, which happen frequently. Create goals at the end of each deadline to track your progress and to provide further actions to your workflow that can help improve the process.
• Keep a regular content schedule – Publishing on a tighter timetable can help your brand focus on the most popular topics or trends for your niche. The aim is to give your audience the most valuable and relevant information that they are interested in reading and sharing.
• Gather your team daily – Take some time to brainstorm and go over what is working, and what can improve. You don’t want anything to stand in the way of being effective. This process will help you to clear up any misunderstandings and keep everyone on task.
• Plan for unexpected events – Social media is driven by customer communication and feedback. A successful agile marketing campaign involves being ready for whatever happens next along with special attention to social media conversations and activity.

Agile marketing involves team collaboration, planning, and flexibility. These steps will help you to create a more cohesive team, encourage creative ideas, and build a successful brand online.

A basket of sensors buried in the pavement will measure the speed, weight, and trajectory of vehicles that pass over it

Any SEO pro understands the importance backlinks play in their online ranking strategy. In fact, as far as local optimization goes, link signals have been shown time and time again to be the most influential organic ranking factor.

That’s why many marketers turn to email marketing to get links— oftentimes epically failing. They ping your contact@mycompany email with annoying, super-sketch link exchange proposals:

“Hey, my name is Bobby and I thought you might like this article I wrote. Will you link to it in your article? I’ll link back on my website!”

It’s because of these lazy, mass-sent messages that link building emails get deleted. But when utilized correctly, email marketing can be a powerful tool for building backlinks.

Before we begin to teach you how to craft authentic emails and build better quality inbound links, here’s a quick warning:

This Kind of Link Building is Not for Lazy, Impatient Marketers!

Email outreach is not going to produce the instant rewards that buying backlinks does. It’s time-consuming.

Those who purchase “$1,000 backlinks for $10!” don’t do any work themselves. They set aside five minutes to find an overseas SEO “expert” on Fiverr.

In order to get backlinks without seeing spammy, you will need to do your own research and execution.

Keep these things in mind before choosing to do linking building through email:

• You are unlikely to have a high-yielding return. // You may devote three or four hours a week to your link building campaign, only to get three or four connections out of it.

• You will have to do research and strategize. // You must be willing to learn a few things about each company you want a link from and do all the thinking for them. You will have to craft personalized messages with suggestions for how they use your content to complement theirs.

• You will have to wait to see results. // You may wait days at a time before someone gets back to you, or weeks following up with prospects.
• You may have to test different types of content or link building strategies. // Different forms of link building work better for different companies. Here’s 12 Link Building Strategies for a Year’s Worth of Tactical Testing to experiment with what tactic works best for you.

All these things sound challenging, but here’s the silver lining:

• You are more likely to gain higher quality backlinks. // The idea is, these links will be more valuable than the random pool of links you’d get from a paid backlink builder. You hand-selected brands you trust, with well-rounded expertise and credibility.
• Your new links will seem more “natural” to search engines. // Links from unrelated, foreign websites can cause Google to second guess your legitimacy and potentially penalize you on the SERPs. For example, if you sell computer parts and a cosmetic company links to you, Google might think something’s fishy. Because you took the time to choose domains that closely relate to your content, these website connections will be authentic.
• You are in control of your off-site SEO! // Unlike other “black hat” link building services, where you get a random batch of links that could be inappropriate or low quality, when you choose to do your own outreach, you are behind the wheel of your linking strategies. You’re able to research your target’s domain authority, ask them to use specific, keyword-laiden anchor text and know where exactly the link will be listed.

With all that being said, let’s explore some ways you can leverage email to gain quality inbound links.

Step 1: Choose Your Share-Worthy Content

Your email campaign will require something of value to offer a potential linker. Use amazing pieces of content like your super in-depth pillar pages, top performing articles, a helpful video, new infographics or anything really!

Start off by looking at your proudest content— the pieces which have received a lot of feedback and traffic. Confirm their popularity with SEMRush, narrowing your list down to the ones with the highest number of inbound links.

Decide to Go Broad or Get Specific

Once you have some content you’d be confident sending to potential linkers, look at how each piece addresses its topic. Is it broad, like an article explaining the basics of your topic, or is it specific?

For example, if your business sells sheds, do you want to email a generic infographic about different shed styles— or, do you want to hyper-focus on people who are considering converting their sheds into “man caves” with a Slideshare of inspirational ideas? Pick ONE piece of content to direct link lovin’ to.

If, after a lot of thought, you realize you need to create the right content for your plan, that’s okay! Make sure you crank out something you yourself would link to, or keep creating more content until it’s truly remarkable.

Step 2: Do Some Cherry-Picking on the SERPs

Now you have to find your targets, which you can do with a few strategic Google searches.

Open up an Excel or Sheets spreadsheet and make a column for Domain Name, URL, Contact Person Name, Contact Person Email/Phone, Date Contacted and Notes.

Hop over to Google and start searching for related keywords by clicking on sites on page one and two of the SERPs. If you decided to focus on man cave shed ideas, look up keywords around designs, DIY inspiration, creative uses for sheds, etc.

Dig through each ranked page and look for a way to leverage it. If you think they might be interested in your content, add these ideas to your Notes tab with the site’s domain, exact URL and a contact method.

Remember, a generic email sent to a company’s “contact” email will likely be transported immediately to a spam folder or reviewed by someone who’s answering direct inquiries and doesn’t care about link building. Look for someone in marketing and send it directly to them!

Search a handful of keywords until you’ve compiled a list of maybe 25-50 probable contacts. Next, use SEMRush (or the MozBar plug-in while you’re on each site) to look up their individual domain authorities (DA), the individual page authority and their number of backlinks, to help you narrow down your list. Aim for DAs higher or close to your website’s own score.

Again, it’s better to have a short, highly-qualified list of 25 really promising targets than 100 shot-in-the-dark prospects.

Make Friends with Your Competitors, When Appropriate

We understand that not all competitors are going to be thrilled about the idea of promoting you on their website, but supporting one another could be a mutual exchange, so try to leverage these competitive relationships whenever possible.

If your service complements theirs, instead of directly rivaling it, even better! For example, if you sell sheds and are sending out your man cave article, reach out to a bar-installer who would be able to help them organize your clients’ liquor cabinet inside their caves. Get creative!

Step 3: Crafting Your Link Building Email Template

Remember, even via email, you want to facilitate a human-to-human interaction with someone.

Here are a few ways to personalize your message:

• Address someone in particular. // Find the person who wrote it and send the email directly to them, using their name in the message (psychologists argue this rapidly builds a connection). If you can’t find a name, and would be forced to send to a generic email, cross it off your list.

• Expand on something you’ve learned from the article. // Don’t just say you liked their article or website. Snooze. Pick out a particular point and be genuine. Give them an example of how it helped you. If you can’t pick out one thing you’ve learned for their content, cross it off your list.

• Don’t send your content right away. // Preview the fact that you have something that they might find helpful, but don’t shove it in their face. Ask them if they want to see it to consider using or learning from it? That’ll at least get the conversation going and elicit that first reply.

Try something like this:

“Good morning, Gloria!

My name is Jenn, and I wanted to thank you for sharing all these incredible photos of the man cave shed conversion you did for your husband.

I’m so glad you recommended putting a big cork board behind the dart board. I would have nicked up the whole back wall!

One of my clients actually added a pool table inside their shed, and I don’t think they realized how much space those things take up. He actually wrote an article that includes all the measurements and techniques for getting it inside with the least hassle. Would you want to see it? It might be something that you could reference in your piece to or consider as your next upgrade!

Let me know if you want me to send it over! Again, thanks for the advice.

Jenn”

• Expect to wait a little. // Give your prospects a week before following up, and when you do, only follow-up ONCE. If they aren’t interested and you keep harassing them, you will be that annoying, spammy marketer.

• If all else fails, pick up the phone. // This article is all about how to use email to get backlinks, but email just doesn’t win with everyone. Try a similar approach to what you said in the email but make it more conversational. Actually talking to the person could be exactly what you need to make a connection.

Take Control of Your Rankings

Your search engine optimization team can’t neglect developing powerful backlink campaigns if you want your site to appear on page one of search.

Although backlinks are an important ranking factor, there are a handful of other reasons why you may not be getting the organic traffic you desire.

Discover the top eight reasons you might not be appearing on Google in The Best Google Ranking Casserole for Local SEO ebook.

Most business owners recognize that communication skills are incredibly important. Whether it’s obtaining funding, pitching new products, hiring the right team or taking exploratory meetings, sharing your ideas and vision clearly is critical for the growth and development of the brand.

Without question, one of the most effective means of communicating your ideas is through public speaking. Now, before you break out into a cold sweat at the mere idea of speaking in public, understand that public speaking is a great way to boost your reputation and your business. So, getting over any fear you may have is well worth it.

Here are several reasons why public speaking is good for you and your brand:

Be Seen as an Expert

Public speaking allows you to show off your knowledge. What good is it to have knowledge and expertise in a particular field or industry if no one knows about it? Public speaking allows you to position yourself as an authority within your industry.

Network

Public speaking events are a great way to connect with others in your industry. Whether it’s through participation from the crowd or meeting other speakers during the event, you can form connections that can help you and your brand excel. You may never have had the opportunity to meet these potential partners and consumers if you rely solely on online advertising.

As a bonus, you can also gain valuable insights, viewpoints and more knowledge while connecting with others. It’s always a good idea to expand your knowledge base.

Be Memorable

Long after the chairs are restacked and the microphones are put away, you and your brand will be remembered. This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how your presentation went. So, remember to create content that is relevant to your audience and practice!

Humanize Your Brand

Today’s consumers want to know the human beings behind the brand. While you can attempt to share yourself with your prospects online through your blog, videos and social media pages, there is no better way to be seen as human than in person. Consumers trust a brand far more when they can make a personal connection.

Create Brand Ambassadors

Business owners know there is generally no better form of advertisement than word of mouth. When one person hears from a friend or family about an awesome business, they have complete faith in said business.

When you give a memorable presentation, you leave the audience feeling excited, even electrified, about your brand. Event attendees are more than likely going to share information about you to anyone they know who is in need of your products or services.

Expand Your Brand’s Reach

Marketers know you should always repurpose your content to get as much mileage out of it as possible. When you speak at an event, the content you prepare is intellectual property and it offers a tremendous amount of value. By recording your presentation and offering it to your online audience, you expand your brand’s reach.

Grow Your Online Traffic

Here’s a fact many business owners don’t take into consideration: growing your presence offline will naturally grow your presence online. Think about it. What happens when audience members leave the event? They go home and type your name or your company’s name into Google to find out even more information about you. Suddenly your website and blog see a flood of new traffic. Not only will your traffic see a boost but your Google ranking may see a boost as well, making you more visible to others searching for what you have to offer.

Educate Prospects

Often, when people are aware they need help in a certain area of their life, they know just enough to go out and search for answers. When you can provide those answers, you become a trusted source of information. And, once people are armed with this information, they can make better purchasing decisions. And who better to purchase from than the brand who gave them invaluable information?

In today’s digital landscape, there is no denying that website and social media networks offer tremendous marketing opportunities. Having said this, you should never overlook the power and influence that comes from public speaking.

Public speaking is a great way to explain concepts, answer questions, create long-lasting personal relationships, and give your future client the confidence that your brand is right for them. If you haven’t thought about public speaking to grow your brand, you should definitely consider it. A memorable presentation can translate into increased revenue and set you apart from the competition.

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

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

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

An over-simplistic approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identifying and engaging the stakeholder group

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

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

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

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

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

A multi-dimensional assessment

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

Their role in the decision process

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

Their influence over the final decision

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

Their attitude towards us

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

Their top business priority

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

Their key decision factor

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

Our key value to them

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

The inevitability of imperfect knowledge

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

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

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

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

By the way, we’ve created a spreadsheet that many clients have found very helpful in assessing these factors in a consistent way. Please drop me a line if you’d like to discuss using it within your organisation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales , a regular contributor to the International Journal of Sales Transformation and the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates, Bob now works with growth-orientated B2B-focused scale-up businesses, equipping them to Sell in the Breakthrough Zone® by systematically creating, capturing and confirming their distinctive value in every customer interaction.

Software investors have traditionally focused on three key valuation drivers when evaluating businesses, including:

1. Revenue growth, which is strongly positively correlated with valuation (enterprise value / revenue)
2. Gross margin, which demonstrates the scalability and repeatability of product delivery to customers
3. Rule of 40, calculated as revenue growth plus EBITDA margin, which acts as a proxy for efficiency (balancing growth vs. burn)

Surprisingly, the 1H 2018 IPO Cohort¹ is not differentiated on key valuation drivers as compared with the broader public SaaS index². Let’s take a look:

Source(s): Pitchbook on 8/10/2018. Market data as of 6/30/2018.

Growth, particularly forward (2019P) growth of the Cohort is on par with the broader SaaS index (+1.6%). The Cohort isn’t surging towards market dominance significantly faster than other public companies. The 1H 2018 IPO Cohort operated at lower trailing gross margins compared to the SaaS index (-2.3%) suggesting implementation, support, and platform have not yet achieved the scalability of other public businesses. The median “Rule of 40” for the Cohort significantly trails the public SaaS index (-21.8%) which implies the capital outlay required to support the growth is greater than other companies.

Intuition alone tells us that the 1H 2018 IPO Cohort should not be significantly differentiated on valuation; however, despite performing (arguably) worse than the public index, the 1H 2018 IPO Cohort traded at a median multiple 3.1x (39%) higher than the rest of the public set as of 6/30/2018.

The data available for the 1H 2018 IPO Cohort neither support the valuations these businesses have received, nor can they be reconciled with performance since IPO.

What can we learn from recent IPOs?

Wall Street has lost its mind and is paying ridiculous multiples to get companies public!

Well, not so fast…

A subset of the companies in the 1H 2018 IPO Cohort are in fact significantly differentiated in that they leverage product led growth (PLG) strategies. Together, this group of public PLG companies is pulling up the median valuation of the Cohort. For these businesses, product usage serves as the primary driver of user acquisition, expansion, and retention meaning they can forgo significant investment on traditional marketing and sales activity.

Product led growth companies deliver a superior product experience, and as a result their products are extremely sticky – people log in regularly, users share the products with colleagues and friends, and these businesses tend to boast amazing NPS scores.

With the virality of user adoption and significant goodwill that they’ve built up with users, it’s easier for PLG business to successfully (and efficiently) accelerate growth via cross-sell / upsell over time. Atlassian, a great example of a PLG business, was able to show in their S-1 that $1 of spend in year 1 would become $7 of spend by year 5.

Intuition tells us that PLG businesses should perform better across all key valuation drivers. With that in mind, let’s look at another cut of the key valuation drivers for the 1H 2018 IPO Cohort, this time with the data segmented to visualize the characteristics for PLG businesses separately from non-PLG businesses:

Source(s): Pitchbook on 8/10/2018. Market data as of 6/30/2018.

Revenue growth of the PLG IPOs will outpace the SaaS index (+14.3%) in 2018E, spurred on by the ‘delightful’ product experiences product led companies deliver.

Because product usage drives go-to-market, it isn’t surprising that PLG gross margins also outperform the SaaS index as fewer implementation and support resources are required.

Finally, PLG companies in the 1H 2018 IPO Cohort do close the gap on Rule of 40. While “Rule of 40” of the Cohort still trails the broader index, businesses in this group will grow more efficiently over time due to strong net dollar retention and can therefore invest more upfront due to significant expansion potential.

When we segment statistics for PLG vs. non-PLG companies in the 1H 2018 IPO Cohort, we can see that not only do product led growth businesses perform better on all key valuation drivers, they also trade at revenue multiples 48% greater than their non-PLG peers in the 1H 2018 IPO Cohort (as of 6/30/2018).

Our intuition was right – the numbers speak for themselves and it’s clear that PLG companies perform better than non-PLG peers in the SaaS index!

Public market investors have realized that not all SaaS revenue is created equal. And in fact, companies that implement PLG strategies are more valuable.

What does this mean for you?

Let’s examine how product led growth plays out in reality by evaluating two giants in file sharing: Dropbox and Box. Both were founded in the mid 2000s and reached scale quickly. But Dropbox, which pursued a freemium, product led growth strategy, has clearly won the file sharing war. The company generates double Box’s revenue, spends a lower share of their revenue on sales & marketing, and consequently trades for a far higher revenue multiple (9.1x versus 5.2x).

Growth, gross margin, and “Rule of 40” are fundamental to software valuations, and it is clear that companies that employ PLG strategies are better suited to optimize all three. PLG businesses are therefore increasingly attractive to investors who gain high certainty around future growth and market leadership.

At OpenView, we believe businesses with PLG strategies will feature prominently among top performers in the software landscape.

To support ongoing thought leadership and to communicate trends in PLG businesses OpenView is excited to unveil our Product Led Growth Index to make available the financial, operating, and valuation data for the public PLG companies that we track.

Source(s): Pitchbook on 8/10/2018. Market data as of 6/30/2018.

The trends observed within the PLG segment of the 1H 2018 IPO cohort hold for the entire PLG Index. Growth, gross margin, and Rule of 40 all track above the non-PLG SaaS index, and this is reflected in the median revenue multiple (valuation) of PLG businesses tracking 29% higher (as of 6/30/2018).

1. 1H 2018 IPO Cohort includes Avalara, Carbon Black, Ceridian HCM, DocuSign, Domo, Dropbox, Pivotal Software, Pluralsight, Smartsheet, and Zuora.
2. OpenView’s public SaaS index includes ALRM, APPF, APPN, APTI, ATHN, AVLR, AYX, BAND, BCOV, BL, BNFT, BOX, CARB, CBLK, CBLK, CDAY, CISN, CLDR, COUP, CRM, CSLT, CSOD, DBX, DOCU, DOMO, ECOM, ELLI, EVBG, FIVN, HUBS, INST, KXS, LOGM, MB, MDB, MIME, NEWR, NOW, TWLO, OKTA, PAYC, PCTY, PFPT, PS, PVTL, QLYS, QTWO, RNG, RP, SEND, SHOP, SMAR, SPSC, TEAM, TWOU, ULTI, VEEV, WDAY, WIX, WK, WTC, YEXT, ZEN, ZUO.

The post Product Led Growth: The Secret to Becoming a Top Quartile Public Company appeared first on OpenView Labs.

This interview is part of a series featuring the presenters participating in this year's Core77 Conference, "Now What? Launching & Growing Your Creative Business" , a one-day event aimed to equip attendees with tangible skills and toolkits to help produce and promote their products or services.

Detroit-based furniture company Floyd gained momentum almost instantly through their initial Kickstarter campaign, but what they were pitching to the world wasn't a full piece of furniture. Instead, founders Kyle Hoff and Alex O'Dell focused on developing legs that could be fixed to any flat surface. After raising a quarter of a million dollars for the Floyd Legs, Kyle and Alex understood they were onto something. The furniture industry has been around for centuries but hasn't quite adapted to our fast-paced lives where we tend to rent instead of own and change living situations frequently. Following their Kickstarter success, Floyd has launched a bed frame, a table, a desk, a side table and most recently a sofa—all making use of an easily understandable modular system that allows each piece to be taken apart and brought along as their owners move through life.

What steps did Floyd take to innovate within the tough-to-crack furniture industry? What sets Floyd's business model apart from other furniture companies? Following the launch of the Floyd Sofa and in anticipation for their presentation at the 2018 Core77 Conference, we sat down with Kyle and Alex to learn just that (and then some).

Core77: How did the idea behind Floyd start?

Kyle: Alex and I started the company about 5 years ago now. I think the big emphasis for launching Floyd was this common frustration we had for moving furniture and throwing furniture away during the move-in process. I think it's a pretty common feeling. I've lived in a number cities, and Alex had moved quite a bit. We both had our fair share of IKEA LACK tables that hit the dumpster. We really wanted to investigate how we could change how people are consuming furniture, how they buy it, and how they experience it. The first product we launched was a product that had an early prototype that I brought with me to Detroit. We started to concept this idea of launching it on Kickstarter—the goal was to really see if there was a market out there and if these pain points existed for other people. Could we create something that's adaptable and lasting and find a market opportunity there?

Alex: It was about getting a product out there that we were super excited about. It was a little bit of a different way of looking at your furniture where you would just get four table legs that you would clamp to any surface. Furniture can often be taken seriously, but that this was a fun, creative product that we wanted people to have fun with. When we launched the campaign, our goal was $18,000, 100 sets of legs, and we ended up hitting that goal in the first few days and raised a quarter of million dollars. That was the initial capital to help us get started, and we re-invested that back into the business and began to grow from there.

Kyle: What we're after with Floyd today is really nailing one of each product in the home, and doing each very well. You come to Floyd for the bed frame, the table, the sofa, and you're confident that we're making a great product, a great experience, and something you can take apart and keep for a really long time versus eight months until your next move.

When designing furniture that's made to last longer than, say, IKEA, how do you get people interested and willing to pay the price?

Alex: I think we're not the only people that had that frustration and know that's not how you should consume furniture. We want to make really great pieces that are well designed and that are quality for a mass market. Some people get it, but with some people it takes a little bit of time to understand the value proposition of assembling, disassembling it and keeping it. IKEA sees almost a billion people in their stores each year, and a lot of that furniture ends up in a landfill. I think people are starting to realize that more. We hear from our customers all the time, and they really do care about the products they own, the clothing they buy etc. They want to appreciate it. I think that is a transition happening in furniture as well. People in New York pay $3,000, $4,000 per month for an apartment—why are you putting in $20 LACK table in your living room?

Kyle: We're also really transparent as to where our materials come from. I think that kind of transparency really resonates with people. I think that is something that has also struck a chord.

Along those same lines as transparency, you are very open and honest with the research you put into your products. Why have you chosen to illuminate this process, and what has the overall response been?

Alex: We're making products for how people live today, and to really believe that, it's important to ask people how they're living today by putting out surveys and really engaging our audience by asking, "What do you like about your couch today? What don't you like about it?" or "How do you sit on your sofa?" That gives us use cases and gives us a better sense of what we need to be designing for. Just an example of something that came up was, we really felt like people would care a lot about how their sofa looked, like the aesthetics. But as we surveyed people, we learned they cared equally about comfort as well as aesthetic, so that meant that we needed to double down not only on making this a great looking product but also a super cozy one. We're constantly adjusting based on what kind of feedback we're getting from people as we're designing the product.

Kyle: In a way, we're our own customer. We feel the pain points, and then I think it's really having our customers who are involved in our community, really understand what's there, their needs are and feeling about products. That allows the product to really resonate. Kickstarter is a very open forum where you get feedback from customers whether you want it or not. Starting out that way taught us to really appreciate our customers' insights, which have led us to launch different and new products and continue to evaluate how we can improve products.

Alex: One of the first images we showed of the sofa on our Instagram was actually the first prototype we ever built of it. It was made out of an old ping pong table surface that we had and our side table legs. It was a very rough image, and I think lot of furniture companies would probably be pretty terrified to put out an image just like that. We feel like it's honest to show how you can hack together that early vision as you begin to develop it. People get excited to be able to see where those ideas really start and then be able to see it fully formed—to see how far of a journey that product design has gone.

Since the furniture industry is used to a certain manufacturing process that's been done for hundreds of years now, what kinds of challenges have you faced while explaining your vision to manufacturers?

Kyle: When we were starting it was a lot harder. It took a lot of cold calling, a lot of denial to get our first products filled. I think when we were seeking manufacturers early on, we really wanted to learn from them. You have to go into their space and you have to speak their language and respect what they're working on and what they've built. The best way to learn about producing products are those conversations, and I think that still holds true today. I was at a steel manufacturer in Pennsylvania recently, and we spent the day there working through some design updates and some tweaks based on their production methods. For us, that helps us get to a more efficient, cost effective product, and for them, it helps them really learn what we're looking for. It benefits both parties if the product is easy to produce, and I think that's something they really value too. Going through the process of developing a sofa, we were working with a couple manufacturers we already built relationships with through the bed frames and table, so that really helped quite a bit.

We also added on some new types of manufacturers like textiles and cushions. It's still the same practice of learning from them about how they do things and understanding their path of knowledge because they've been building things for 9 years where you know, we're four, five years old.

Speaking of your new sofa, how does it differ from the other products you've designed, and what was the idea behind bringing a sofa into the mix?

Alex: I think what's important is what's not different about the sofa because we really think about how we can take the initial DNA of our other products and evolve it. So that means real products and material, and that means being really intuitive. Also, people are buying our products online, so they need to be able to shift easily though a door. There are a lot of other considerations for the sofa that are completely different from the bed frame.

Kyle: When we started to approach the sofa, we wanted to solve some similar problems, and I think that's kind of how we see ourselves as a company—a problem solving furniture company. We were having the same kind of frustrations we had with bed frames where you couldn't easily move them, if you took them apart they didn't come back together well, and the joints would break down over time. With sofa's there are plenty of ongoing Reddit threads about the coils breaking down, the connections not lasting. What we wanted to build was something that really created a solid, intuitive connection between the legs, surface, and all these other parts, like we did with the bed frame.

We're also entering the world of comfort here where the bed frame was that hard product, so we had a lot to learn about materials that make for great comfort. That's why it was really important for us to work with a manufacturer who's been building cushions for a really long time. Design wise, as a core of Floyd's DNA, the idea is solving problems, simple materials, very honest and you can look at it and understand that you can disassemble it all then assemble again. We don't want it to be a question when you go to move whether or not you should leave our products behind, but in a way, we're encouraging the moving of the product. It goes to your next apartment with far more ease than the traditional sofa.

The furniture industry has been around for a very long time, so for many people it proves to be a difficult world to innovate and be successful in. Do you have any words of advice for people looking to start their own successful furniture company?

Kyle: The big thing that helped us early on was really building partnerships with manufacturers and thinking about the product at scale. So rather than building one-offs or five to ten of something that are really expensive, we wanted to make sure that we were building and designing products that could be attainable for a large number of people, then we could really think about furniture differently. One of our big advantages was thinking about those partnerships and those relationships. Listening to our customer hasn't always been our forte, but I think it's something we've really refined over the last couple years. We make sure that we're creating a great feedback loop and continuing to build better products. Also, don't try to be everything to all people—really be disciplined with what your materials are or what your design language is. Not everyone will resonate with your vision, and that's fine. If you focus in and really dial things in you can develop a passionate audience.

___________________________________________________________________________________

You want to start a creative business. Now What? Come to our 2018 Core77 Conference to learn more about launching & growing a product line or design studio of your own, October 25th, in Brooklyn!

Buy "Now What? Launching & Growing Your Creative Business" Tickets here.

Learn more about the new Floyd Sofa here!

Is the conversation that you want to have with your dream client around something vital? Is it something so important, so necessary that it should command their attention?

Not Product

In some rare cases, your product may rise to the level of being vital, demanding your dream client’s time, attention, and resources. This may be true when they are struggling to obtain whatever it is you sell, but less likely if they are already getting what you sell from your competitor. When the latter is true, when they already have what they need, the tiny improvement your product might produce is not a critical issue.

Not Service

Service issues and failures can disrupt a business, creating a strategic issue in an area where one would not exist if their current partner was executing well enough. Unless the day-to-day issues rise to the level that make it worth suffering through the switching costs, you aren’t like to displace your competitor by promising a better experience when your prospect has learned to live with the challenges that happen in the normal course of business.

Not a Few Pennies

You might be able to produce a better turn on the investment your prospect makes, and you may be able to reduce their pricing and show them some savings. There are, believe it or not, some salespeople and sales organizations that still lead with a lower price as a way to reduce their prospect’s costs as a way to improve the ROI. Sophisticated, savvy business people aren’t easily lured into changing partners for a lower price because they know that they are taking money out of their solution. Because saving a few pennies doesn’t move the needle, it isn’t a vital issue (and when saving a few pennies is vital, your prospect may not be doing well).

What makes something vital is how important it is to producing the necessary or critical outcomes your prospect needs. The things that rise to being vital tend to be the more strategic outcomes, things that contribute to the goals and the direction of the people who decide when—and if—they are going to entertain the idea of changing what they are doing.

When you show someone your product in the first five minutes of a call, you have identified yourself as someone who wants to talk about something non-vital.

The post Is What You Sell of Vital Importance? appeared first on The Sales Blog.

All companies want to grow, but not all of them know the best way to go about it. Real growth is all about maximizing the lifetime value of your customers. But to do that, it’s essential to go beyond the initial conversion and take a comprehensive look at your funnel as a whole.

Unfortunately, one of the most frequently-overlooked sections of the funnel is retention. If you want to maximize the lifetime value of your customers and amplify your growth, you need to deploy an enhanced focus on retention. That means focusing equally on acquiring new customers and making more money from your existing ones.

There are many benefits to this strategy. An enhanced focus on retention reduces marketing costs, boosts conversion rates, and increases profits. In fact, according to research from Bain & Company, increasing customer retention by even 5% can increase profits by 25-95%.

Here are 5 top customer retention strategies you can add to your playbook to increase retention rates and achieve substantial growth.

1. Post-Purchase Email Automation

Email marketing is one of the best tools for acquiring new customers, but not enough companies are using it to market to existing customers. According to a report from Manta and BIA Kelsey, 61% of small businesses surveyed said that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat customers rather than new customers. Who better to purchase again than those you’ve qualified and converted before?

The goal of post-purchase email automation is to increase engagement and loyalty through calculated nurturing: ‘calculated’, because not all customers are the same. Besides buying from you, they may have little else in common, so the best way to stay in front of them is to segment your customer list.

Segmenting allows you to send more relevant emails based on behavioral, demographic, and geographic characteristics. Arguably, the best way to segment customers is by engagement, because that allows you to customize the automation based on whether or not they have opened certain emails, if they have clicked on specific links within emails, or converted through specific emails. Having a “hot” or “cold” email list can really help craft targeted email campaigns so you use the right language and tactics to turn them into repeat customers.

Some common campaigns include:

• Follow-up campaigns, where you ask for customers’ feedback on their experience, check in to see if they have questions, or recommend helpful resources based on the products they purchased in the past.
• Reactivation campaigns, which focus on turning cold or disengaged customers into active customers by sharing inspiring content like blog posts and case studies, or recommending exclusive or best-selling merchandise related to what they bought before.
• “Hail Mary” campaigns, a last resort for extremely cold leads, which consist of throwing out large discount codes, free loss-leader products, or exclusive content they can’t find anywhere else, in the hopes that these deals are “too good to pass up,” bringing them to the warm lead list again.

2. Deploy Account Based Management

According to Forrester research, it costs 5x more to acquire a new customer than to retain your current customers. One of the best ways to retain customers is through account based management, which is a tailored approach to customer service where each account has a single point of contact.

With account based management, accounts get personalized service that focuses on individual consumers’ needs and goals. The role of the Customer Success Manager (CSM) is positioned not as a vendor but as an extension of the customer’s team. This approach has added benefits, such as:

• Allowing you to stay in front of customer issues and pain points that cause churn.
• Making it easier to upsell and grow average revenue per customer.
• Better comprehension of the disparity of success among accounts by having a baseline comparison of data.

Account based management isn’t cost effective or scalable for all products and services, but it can be especially useful for high-priced products, subscription services, key accounts, and enterprise solutions.

3. Deliver Prompt “Feedback-to-Action” Implementation

Millennials are leading the revolution in customer success, and companies not conforming are suffering when it comes to retention. In fact, Business Wire found that 74% of millennials decide to switch retailers if they receive poor customer service.

It’s no longer good enough to offer multiple ways for customers to vent their frustrations, make suggestions, and troubleshoot problems. You’ve also got to show that you’re listening and responding quickly.

Tesla is one of a handful of companies leading the charge in delivering on their promise to provide timely customer support. For example, when one Tesla owner complained on Twitter about people leaving their cars parked in charging stations after they were fully charged, which resulted in long lines, the company responded promptly. In just six days, Tesla CEO Elon Musk released an official statement and policy update that included an idling fee, which was rolled out in order to make superchargers more available. That kind of immediate response to feedback sparks fierce loyalty and goes a long way towards not only retaining current customers, but creating new ones.

4. Continually Update and Innovate

Customer expectations are at an all-time high, and nothing kills your retention rate like a lack of innovation and growth. These days, companies have to reframe the way they approach serving customers by anticipating future needs and challenges. Once they have a good grasp of their customers’ pain points and needs, then they can go about finding innovative ways to solve them.

Take the meditation app Headspace as an example. Headspace diversified its core product to include a partnership with 11 different airlines to offer in-flight meditation channels. At many airports, the company added phone booth-style relaxation pods so travelers can relax and meditate in high-stress areas. Now Headspace even offers a meditation app for kids and has partnered with Nike to offer sports meditation content.

Dedication and innovation like that builds loyalty, facilitates growth, and creates an immensely enjoyable customer experience, one that’s skyrocketed Headspace to 500,000+ subscribers and an estimated valuation of $250 million.

5. Grow Your Ecosystem

Every company has its core product or service, but those companies that value retention are constantly looking for ways to boost the lifetime value of their customers. One such tactic is to offer multiple product lines and value-added features, which increases average revenue per customer and promotes stickiness.

Apple is an excellent example of a company using an expanded ecosystem of products to promote retention. It does this with both its physical and digital products. In the last couple of years, Apple’s iOS loyalty has reached an astonishing 85-88%. Apple’s ecosystem is so large that the average American household has at least 2.6 Apple products. Loyal customers take it a step further by investing in specific iOS applications, iTunes music, storage space, and much more.

Customers investing so heavily in Apple products also makes it much more difficult for them to switch brands. The amount of money and time lost by switching from Apple over to a competitor is substantial enough to make consumers think twice. That’s why diversifying across multiple products and services can not only benefit your customers, but also boost your retention numbers and facilitate growth.

Retention is far from another word for loyalty. Retention is the measured frequency by which a current customer keeps on doing business with your company. Loyalty, on the other hand, is a measurement of that same customer’s predisposition to choose your business as their top preference.

Attracting a customer a second time around means they are technically retained, but the real reason they return isn’t because of their loyalty to your company, but rather some other factor such as selection, shipping terms, or pricing. So, while the ultimate goal should be focusing strategically on retention and maximizing lifetime customer value, you should also seek out opportunities along the way to make your customers loyal as well.

To do that, you’ve got to constantly innovate, listen to feedback and implement action quickly, expand your product ecosystem, and treat your customers as partners who you want to see succeed.

If you master these essential strategies, you’ll continually earn their business, their respect, and their loyalty.

What retention strategies have had the biggest impact on your business? Tell us in the comments below.

The term "sales pitch" might be a little old school, but the concept is not. At its core, a sales pitch is just a way to explain your product or service's value to the buyer. Call it what you will, but educating prospects on an offering's worth is still central to sales.

What has gone out of style are sales pitches that are long, product-focused, and boring. In fact, we have a separate article all about the essential elements of a sales pitch.

Twitter has effectively shortened our attention spans to statements that contain 140 or fewer characters. If buyers can find the time to hear your sales pitch at all, it had better be compelling and to the point.

In his book To Sell is Human, Daniel Pink presents six types of modern day sales pitches that act as updates to the classic elevator pitch.

Translate your product or service's value proposition into each of these six formats so you can whip out one or another when appropriate.

1. The One-Word Sales Pitch

Can you boil your entire presentation down to one word? It might seem silly, but consider the power of a brand that has complete command of one word. "When anybody thinks of you, they utter that word. When anybody utters that word, they think of you," Pink explains.

For example, HubSpot's one-word pitch might be "flywheel." President Obama's one-word pitch during his 2012 reelection campaign was "forward." Think of the single word that represents your offering and use it as a punchy tagline.

2. The Question Sales Pitch

This one should only be used when you're confident that your buyer either somewhat or completely understands the value of your product.

Instead of phrasing your pitch as a statement ("Strategic outsourcing will reduce your company's costs"), reformulate it as a question ("Would strategic outsourcing reduce your company's costs?").

Why does this work? "Question pitches prompt people to come up with their own reasons for agreeing (or not)," Pink writes. "And when people summon their own reasons for believing something, they endorse the belief more strongly and become more likely to act on it."

This is the upside. But if prospects aren't convinced of your offering's value, a question pitch might invite additional scrutiny ("Would outsourcing benefit us? I'm not sure ... "). So, it's critical to carefully assess the buyer's mindset before using this tactic.

3. The Rhyming Sales Pitch

Dr. Seuss was on to something. "Rhymes boost what linguists and cognitive scientists call 'processing fluency,' the ease with which our minds slice, dice, and make sense of stimuli," Pink explains.

And this has a surprising effect: Studies have found that rhyming statements are perceived to be more accurate than non-rhyming, even when both options convey the exact same message, Pink notes.

So, before you dismiss rhyming as child's play, take into consideration that a simple couplet could make the difference between a done deal and a competitive steal.

4. The Subject Line Sales Pitch

Salespeople are masters at the art of crafting intriguing email subject lines. Take that expertise and apply it to your sales pitches.

Pink writes that strong email subject lines follow three principles: utility, curiosity, and specificity. However, you shouldn't try to add elements of each into a single email header or sales pitch.

"Your email subject line should be either obviously useful or mysteriously intriguing, but probably not both," Pink writes. It's also noteworthy that the more information buyers are contending with, the less effective curiosity-provoking subject lines become.

The actionable takeaway? Craft two separate sales pitches -- one useful, and one intriguing -- and layer specificity onto both.

Deploy the first if the prospect is obviously pressed for time, or is buried in information from rival vendors or internal stakeholders. Use the second if they are just beginning their buying journey and can move at a more leisurely pace.

5. The Twitter Sales Pitch

Tweeting is an exercise in clarity and brevity. What would your sales pitch sound like if you only had 140 characters to work with?

Formulating a Twitter pitch forces you to think critically and creatively about the main highlights of your offering. It can also help you trim the unnecessary fat from your sales presentation.

Keep in mind that while it's easy for you to remember all the features of your offering (you do sell it, after all), a laundry list of functions is bound to overwhelm and confuse prospects.

6. The Pixar Sales Pitch

"Toy Story." "Up." "Finding Nemo." "WALL-E." Pixar is a master at creating not just stunning visuals but stories that resonate with children and adults alike.

Although the stars of the studio's movies range from robots to sea life to talking toys, each has a similar story structure at its core.

Former Story Artist Emma Coats released this narrative template that can be applied to all of Pixar's films:

Once upon a time _____. Every day, _____. One day _____. Because of that, _____. Because of that, _____. Until finally, _____.

By phrasing your sales pitch in this way, it automatically becomes a story, which top salespeople know stick in people's heads much better than a dry recitation of facts. Want to learn more about turning your sales pitch into a story? Check out this article.

In addition, this template makes it easy for sellers to place their prospects front and center -- and buyers should always be the hero of a sales story.

Here's what this type of sales pitch might look like in action:

• Once upon a time, staffing agencies struggled to find the quality talent they needed.
• Every day, they checked a number of social media sites and sifted through dozens of resumes searching for needles in the haystacks.
• One day, a new type of software was invented that automated this search process and quickly returned qualified candidates based on sophisticated algorithms.
• Because of that, staffing agencies were able to more efficiently fill open positions.
• Because of that, they were able to serve more clients without taking a toll on productivity.
• Until finally, the agencies vastly increased their number of customers and amount of new revenue.

Perfecting your sales pitch is crucial to being good at selling. Practice on friends and colleagues until you master the right type of pitch for you.

Need more inspiration? Check out these sales pitch examples too good to ignore.

Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts that will explore the questions that surround artificial intelligence and machine learning within the space of sales enablement. We all know there’s an overabundance of hype around these topics. When I joined Seismic to tackle intelligent technologies in 2016, it was important that we didn’t fall into the same hype cycle as everyone else. We’re here for one purpose, and that’s to solve big problems. Amazing technologies are of course a part of that. But we are setting out to separate fact from fiction, give you a way to determine if your sales enablement platform is smart, and how these smart qualities correlate to real-world values.

A sales enablement platform is an incredibly powerful tool that can do many different things. One of the best aspects of a sales enablement platform, in fact, is just how many people within an organization can benefit from its capabilities. However, not all platforms are created equal. Plenty of solutions can do basic functions that seemingly improve the day-to-day lives of sellers, but in reality, they do not go nearly far enough in providing sellers with the tools they need to be successful.

What separates the best from the rest of the pack when it comes to sales enablement platforms? We like to think of it in terms of smartness and intelligence. We’re not necessarily strictly talking about artificial intelligence or machine learning, either, although those do play a part in helping a sales enablement platform become smart. An intelligent sales enablement platform does many different things to help sellers be more successful. To truly determine if a platform is smart, you have to focus on its ability to solve big, hairy problems that plague your organization.

Let’s take a look at the top 5 ways to determine if your sales enablement platform is smart for sellers.

Powerful Search Capabilities

Looking for the right piece of content eats up way too much time of a typical seller’s day. 31% of a seller’s time is spent searching for or creating content. Extrapolate that number over an entire year and that’s an unfathomable amount of time lost to searching for content when a seller could instead be, well, selling.

So, a smart sales enablement platform will provide sellers with a strong search capability that greatly reduces the time they spend rooting around for content.

The kind of search we’re talking about isn’t just your ordinary Google search. Oftentimes sellers won’t remember the exact title of the content they’re looking for, and they shouldn’t be hampered by that. A smart sales enablement platform will give sellers the power to search based on any tidbit they want—an image, the color of an infographic, a statistic within the content, or even the words spoken in a video. With that powerful a search engine at their fingertips, sellers will never waste time looking for content again.

Taking it even further, that content must be organized based on actual real-world performance. Are your peers using it effectively? Do prospects engage with it in depth? Is it progressing deals forward? All of these factors contribute to which content the search engine surfaces. Only the best stuff on top.

Content That Finds You

What if a seller doesn’t know what piece of content they need? It’s one thing to know a piece of content exists and go find it, it’s an entirely different beast to not even know what piece of content would work to progress a deal to the next stage. What should a seller do in this situation?

If their organization has invested in a smart sales enablement platform, they won’t have to sweat not knowing the perfect content to send to their buyers. Because, with that smart platform, the content finds you.

The platform will know what pieces of content are effective in the exact situation any seller finds themselves. It then pushes that content to the seller proactively with relevant information about why that particular piece is effective in that situation. A smart sales enablement platform also gives the seller the content wherever they live. Whether it’s through email, CRM or a mobile device, a seller can be confident that content will find them, and they don’t have to change their behavior. This aspect takes away any guess work and allows sellers to focus on closing the deal.

Content Personalization

One of the most powerful and impactful things a smart sales enablement platform should do is enable sellers to quickly and efficiently create custom content. We live in a world of 1-to-1 communication and hyper-personalization and buyers have come to expect content that speaks directly to their needs and pain points.

The problem for sellers is that customizing content for every person they are attempting to sell to is a daunting task. Buyers will sniff out a piece of content in a second if it doesn’t accurately reflect what they care about, or if it feels ingenuine.

A smart sales enablement platform will provide sellers with their own tool for quickly creating a beautiful, custom piece of content. An intelligent platform gives sellers the ability to pull in data, logos, and any information they need from their CRM system. Content that is componentized provides sellers a way to quickly personalize based on persona, product type, or any other necessary criteria. Data intensive pieces can be quickly updated with real-time data from disparate sources. These are just a handful of examples of what personalization can do, the only limit is your imagination.

A sales enablement platform can’t be considered smart if doesn’t allow a seller to create personalized content in a few clicks.

Know What Buyers Care About

Sending content to buyers is great, but if sellers don’t have any insights into how buyers are engaging with content then that strategy is effectively useless.

A smart sales enablement platform empowers sellers to send content to their buyers and track exactly how they engage with the material. With these types of insights, sellers can learn the best time to engage with a buyer and what particular topics interest them the most. A seller that has access to an intelligent sales enablement platform is notified when the exact right time to reach out to a buyer is and exactly what they should discuss. This results in less time spent guessing and strategizing, and more time building relationships.

Get Better at Your Job With a Sales Enablement Platform

Everyone in every profession is striving to get better at their job. Sellers with access to a smart sales enablement platform just happen to have a leg up on everyone else.

These solutions leverage sales readiness tools to constantly provides sellers with the opportunity to learn and improve their understanding of content, the organizations offerings, and improved ways of selling. Wherever a seller is, they should have the opportunity to complete training on a piece of content exactly when they need it.

The ability to access training materials at exactly the right time within an intelligent sales enablement platform has profound effects on a sales force. It reduces the time to ramp, increases productivity, and allows sellers to focus at becoming a better version of themselves.

And in the end, that’s exactly what a smart sales enablement platform is designed to do: make you better at your job.

The sales landscape is driven by speed. ‘Always be closing’ is still a mantra that is rife within the industry. But with the right approach to data, technology, and strategy, salespeople can break through to their prospects not only quicker, but smarter.

And salespeople will definitely need to consider different approaches – cold calling doesn’t work anymore. Findings from Kevin Scott, Head of Sales Solutions at LinkedIn, found that 90% of B2B decision markers never actually respond to any form of cold outreach, while 75% of them use social media within their decision-making process.

The name of the game, as long as the fit is right between the buyer and the product or service, is value. In fact, demonstrating value came in third of factors that get prospects to talk to you, according to research conducted by the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research, just after the need for the service, and the budget.

Therefore, salespeople need to be creating more value for their prospects during the early stages, and also reaching them where it matters most – whether it’s through social, email, or on the phone. Buyers want to hear from reps in the first stage: when they’re looking for opportunities to improve their business (71%) or trying to solve a problem (62%). Value can come in the form of content created to tackle the buyer’s most pressing pain points, personalised videos, and a genuine appetite to help the buyer with their issues. This not only gives the salesperson an opportunity to show their business’s expertise but also demonstrates first-hand how buyer will benefit from such a transaction.

With these thoughts in mind, we have taken a few stats that highlight current, pressing issues within the sales industry from sources such as Hubspot and Google. Off the back of these findings, we have given some key tips for salespeople to implement to make sure they’re not falling behind. Take a look at these 8 sales industry insights:

Original image source.

Content has always been a very important component of inbound marketing, and now more so with Google’s algorithm that reward fresh, relevant content. Without good content, it is hard to drive visitors to your website or convert them into leads.

Decide on your messaging strategy:

Here are four questions to ask yourself about your website’s content:

1. Do visitors immediately understand what the website is about?
2. Will visitors know which page they are on and why?
3. Can visitors easily navigate to the next page?
4. Is there some value proposition to cause visitors to interact with your site rather than someone else’s?

An affirmative answer to all four questions will translate into more traffic, more leads, and a lower bounce rate.

Here are a few tips for making sure your message gets out:

• Use headlines and subheads to outline your most important ideas on each page. Avoid clichés, doublespeak and jargon.
• Offer a powerful value proposition. That means either giving away something of value of offering it at an incredibly attractive price. Anything from downloads to free offers can be used.
• Include clear calls-to-action, which direct visitors on what to do next to benefit from the value proposition. Put links into the body content that direct readers to registration dialogs, data intake forms, exclusive offers, etc.
• Perform A/B testing on your copy and headlines to see which alternative yields better results. There are online tools from Google and others that help determine which variation drives more conversions.
• Go beyond simple product content. Offer eBooks, videos, white papers and other types of educational content. This attracts visitors who may not know yet that they want to buy from you – they are on the outer tip of the marketing funnel. Suck them into the funnel with free, valuable content.
• When delivering a sales pitch, use a writing style that matches colloquial one-on-one conversation. Pronouns like “you” and “we” are preferred over “one” or “they”. Never talk down to your audience.
• Your content should help visitors solve their problems. Don’t go around bragging about how you are the best – instead make a point of explaining how your content helps viewers.

Share quality content:

When we speak about quality content, we are actually talking about quality, unique content. If you copy, you die. Search engines pick it up right away and penalize you, sometimes by de-indexing you altogether. If you have nothing original to say, don’t say it. Next, write to the highest language standards you can. Humans appreciate good grammar, sentence construction, proper spelling and logical thought. Your original content should educate or entertain its readership – boring content is, well, boring. People are busy and need to extract value from your content, or they will spend their time elsewhere.

There are times when it helps to provide evidence to prove a point. If, in the course of presenting your material, you quote facts, statistics, events, etc., give them some backing with a credit, either inline or as a footnote. A backlink to your source would be appropriate.

Finally, try to avoid jargon and clichés, such as “cutting edge” or “mission critical”. These phrases have been so overused that they have lost their meanings. They turn off readers and make your content seem suspect. Prose that contains phrases like “groundbreaking” seldom is. Often, spammy websites substitute clever headlines and captions for clear content. You can’t trick your readers into enjoying your content with snappy headlines alone. Give them clear, concise material and leave the gimmicks to others.

We get it, sometimes it seems like you blink an eye and there is a new app out. However, that is not an excuse to allow yourself to get behind on technology. Let’s face it, technology isn’t going to wait for us to catch up, and eventually not knowing about popular business tools is going to hurt us severely. Believe it or not, a lot of these apps can be extremely productive and potentially useful in your everyday lives. The following are five tools that we at Intero use on a regular basis and believe they would be helpful to every salesperson.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator App

Ok, so we are a little biased toward LinkedIn, but their Sales Navigator App is fantastic. If you’re one of our digitally literate salespeople, then you know Sales Navigator is an extension of LinkedIn made specially to track leads and accounts of people and companies on LinkedIn. This app allows you to access Sales Navigator on-the-go, giving you the ability to view your saved leads and accounts, access your InMail inbox, and save new leads at the touch of your fingertips. Your Sales Navigator homepage is also explicitly specialized based on what your leads post, rather than your connections, so you will never miss a post from one of your top leads. Now you don’t have an excuse for not staying on top of prospective clients and companies!

Download the Sales Navigator App here.

If you want to know how you can get more out of the LinkedIn mobile app, visit our blog post 13 Tips to Get the Most Out of the LinkedIn Mobile App.

Elevate

LinkedIn’s Elevate app is genius, and extremely valuable to every salesperson out there trying to sell their products, increase engagement, and get the word out about their company. So what is so unique about Elevate? You’ve probably heard that your employees are the biggest advocates for your company, and with this app, you can get them involved in content posting! How it works is simple: you create content or repost content that is specific and valuable to your industry, then you suggest this content through the app to employees, and they post it to their profiles. This app takes away the headache of bugging employees to repost your content. Additionally, Elevate allows you to see how your employees increased traffic to your site and more!

Get started with Elevate here.

Calendly

If you’ve ever worked with us before or even kept up with our previous blog posts, then you know we are huge fans of Calendly. Calendly is a calendar scheduling tool that allows your clients, coworkers, etc. to schedule a time that works best with them without conflicting with your schedule as well. This tool saves hours of time going back and forth about scheduling, and it makes scheduling meetings simple. Calendly also allows you to personalize when you are open to meeting, as well as create specific events if you have more than one person scheduling for the same topic. When we say Calendly is the ultimate time saver, we mean it.

Check out our blog post 3 Reasons You Need to Use a Calendar Scheduling App to learn more why we think this tool is life changing.

Get Calendly here.

CRM’s

CRM’s are crucial to any salesperson. CRM, if you aren’t familiar with the abbreviation, is a customer relationship management tool. There is a myriad of different CRM’s available, so I will share three that we have found to be productive.

At Intero, we use Airtable to track our customers. Airtable is extremely useful because it mimics the look of a spreadsheet, and allows us to share tables within our team, as well as to clients. There are also dozens of templates for everything from content planning to product planning, making it resourceful. Oh, and did we mention it is so easy to use?

Another favorite CRM is Salesforce. Salesforce is more of a corporate CRM that allows companies to use multiple apps to keep track of current and prospective clients. Salesforce allows you to vet potential clients, as well as track engagement with a specific client. Lastly, Salesforce is conveniently accessible through a mobile app, so you always have handy!

The last CRM is HubSpot. It’s free to use and allows you to track customer interaction easily, contact customers immediately, and your pipeline can be easily monitored and organized. The best part is there is no limit on how much storage and contacts that you can have on HubSpot. Ultimately, you have to find the best fit for you!

Get Airtable here.

Learn more about Salesforce here.

Get HubSpot CRM here.

Zoom

Zoom is our favorite meeting app, mainly because it is so simple for everyone to use, and it can fulfill a variety of tasks in one meeting. Zoom offers the ability to record sessions, screen share, use computer audio, and use video conferencing. If you wanted to provide even more insight and value to your customers, you could create webinars offering prospective clients with information about your product or company. Zoom makes it easy to sell and close deals with people no matter where they are located.

Get started with Zoom here.

We hope that you take some time and look into each of these tools if you are not familiar with them already. We guarantee that these tools are not only going to improve your abilities as a salesperson, but they are going to make you much more digitally literate when it comes to selling to the newest generation of people, where everyone works and operates through digital tools and networks.

Has hitting reset ever been easy?

In sales, you can have the most productive month of your career, creating pipeline and accruing revenue so far beyond your goals that you think you’ve peaked.

And then your numbers reset to zero when the next month comes. You’re back to square one, and sometimes it’s tough to get yourself going again.

Now, imagine if your higher-ups told you to focus only on 75 best-fit accounts instead of the 700+ accounts you’re accustomed to handling. Sounds like a terrible idea for any company who wants to make money, right?

Strange as it may sound, account-based marketing actually helps deal with some of the stagnation that develops in sales pipelines that come only from lead-based pursuits. In the long run, ABM can provide more consistent revenue streams through relationships with best-fit accounts.

But it’s so counterintuitive. How can any team make that adjustment?

Recently, Stuart English and Ryan Vitello from our sales development team sat down on the #FlipMyFunnel podcast to explain how a player-coach relationship between SDRs and management can get you past the growing pains of switching to account-based marketing and achieving the long-term dividends it offers.

Their approach to tackling some of the early setbacks of ABM is four-pronged.

Growing Pains Are Inevitable

Nothing makes a sales team’s momentum come to a grinding halt like taking an axe to their pipeline and stripping away a huge portion of the reps’ accounts.

But that’s exactly how switching to account-based marketing can seem at the onset. Even if everyone involved starts on a strong foot and has enthusiasm enough to carry past the first shockwaves, flipping the funnel this drastically can be overwhelming.

“How can we expect our customers to be our biggest advocates when we’re not even doing this ourselves?” –Ryan Vitello

You’re going to fail at some point.

And the way you take on that failure — however it manifests — will determine your course of business moving forward.

Ryan put it this way: “I think failures can be looked at in one of two ways. One is you failed, lost miserably, and you go home from that. The second is you’ve failed, but then you’ve learned from it and you pick yourself back up and go.”

So, how do you change the way you think about business and survive the transition to ABM?

Get Your Entire Sales Team Engaged

Your first paradigm shift is a total commitment to team engagement.

It starts at the top. “If the leaders don’t believe in it,” Ryan says, “how are the managers in the trenches going to believe in it?” And it goes all the way to the individual salespeople.

At first, this commitment will be what helps you look beyond the dip in opportunity flow once you implement a target account strategy. You may even think like Ryan. “It made me feel like, ‘Man, my team isn’t doing their jobs correctly,’” he shares.

“At first, it was tough. People said, ‘I’m not winning anymore.” – Ryan Vitello

If you’re looking for success in terms of vanity metrics, in terms of how well someone can pound numbers and generate leads, Ryan’s first impression is exactly what you’ll come up with.

Fortunately for Terminus, Ryan and the rest of the team were able to shift their collective mindset and look toward the long-term.

But it takes time for a seed to take root and grow. What you sacrifice in the breadth of accounts when you switch to targeting only best-fit accounts, you more than makeup for in the depth of engagement with those select clients you’ve chosen to pursue.

If you can get the whole team on board with this idea that you can get better returns down the road, you’re better equipped to get past those growing pains.

In Terminus’ case, Stuart noted more than twice the number of demos he set made it to the “Interest” stage with ABM than with traditional, lead-based sales.

Uncover Your Sales Superpowers

Next, you’ll want to figure out what your team’s sales superpowers are.

A lot of group efforts fall into the trap of having too many cooks in the kitchen. They get a situation like Ryan describes: “Everyone was trying to do everything, but nobody was doing anything well.”

You have to specialize your team members’ roles. As Ryan puts it,”We had to quickly understand what everyone’s superpower was in terms of being a sales professional.”

This goes beyond merely delegating tasks. Think of it this way: you want to figure out how everyone on your team can best adhere to John Maxwell’s 85/10/5 rule.

In other words, Ryan says, “85 percent of your time should be spent doing what you’re best at, 10 percent should be spent perfecting that craft, and then 5 percent should be learning about your weaknesses.”

Some people are masters on the phone and are great at making personal calls that ramp up engagement, while others can pen a phrase so well that their personalized emails see far more returns. Placing your team members in positions to succeed as individuals will help your unit do just that.

“You have to know your messaging is going to hit home.” –Stuart English

Stuart, for example, has a knack for finding specific reasons to make personal contact — whether through phone calls or face-to-face — with clients based on outreach materials he sends. Instead of “just reaching out” and testing the waters with a prospective account, Stuart opts for more concerted plays for their engagement.

If you can understand the roles each of your team members can play, you’ll be that much closer to surviving and thriving after the shift to ABM.

Restructure Your Compensation Model

Next, you’ll need to change how you look for and give out compensation. But don’t panic — it’s not as scary as it might seem.

Pursuing best-fit accounts emphasizes deep relationships with clients. With that being said, the sheer volume of accounts you’ve turned into opportunities from pounding the numbers in the past will have to go to the chopping block.

Slowing down your sales reps from their sweet spot of several hundred accounts to maybe one hundred target accounts will be daunting at first. Mindset changes always are.

To compensate for the decline in accounts, reconfigure the way you reward your reps for the work they do. Emphasize engagement and quality.

“There has to be a heightened sense of focus in what you’re doing in regards to sales, or even marketing.” – Ryan Vitello

But it will also present them with a challenge: Do more with less. You’ll be going from a volume-based outlook to a focused, targeted approach that delves into relationships with clients and meets their needs personally. Quality over quantity.

That personal focus, if you do it well, drives conversion rates through the roof.

Focus on Leadership

Finally, this shift succeeds or fails with leadership.

Leaders are the ones who can see the big picture.

They have the ability to look at the amount of time reps and managers (and themselves) are spending on things that don’t matter. And believe me, you’d be surprised at how much time we all spend doing things that don’t matter in the long run.

They’re the starting point for making Fit + Intent + Engagement — the foundational formula for successful account-based marketing — foundational to the way your sales team thinks and works.

They can ask the big questions: “What is our go-to-market strategy? Who are the accounts we should target? When do we go after them? What are the most effective ways to engage with them?”

And, ultimately, leaders are the ones whose focus and enthusiasm matters the most. Their position as influencers sets the mood for the rest of the operation.

Parting Wisdom

“Everyone’s seeing, but they’re not necessarily observing.” –Ryan Vitello

Ryan and Stuart are both well-versed in the tools of their trades, and having survived the switch to highly targeted account-based marketing, they both can boil down their advice to simple nuggets of wisdom.

From the management perspective, Ryan has but one keyword: Focus.

“Focus on the right people,” he says. “Focus on the right accounts. Focus on the right activities. And if you do that, you’ll ultimately find success. Success is not something you just stumble upon by accident. It’s something you have to be intentional about.”

Stuart, on the other hand, has advice as someone in the trenches of sales every day: “Play to your strengths.”

Focus. Play to your strengths.

One More Thought

The personal approach of best-fit ABM starts in-house.

If you can deepen the relationships between you, your managers, and sales reps, it’ll show. It will show in how each of those players interacts with your clients, and it will show in your revenue numbers.

Make it personal on all accounts.

You’re behind on the number of calls you need to make for the week. Worse yet, the quarter is nearing an end and making that number is looking impossible.  Is this you?

You will never have anything to close unless you first start to prospect, but just because you have a list of leads doesn’t mean they are going to instantly become customers.

As much as sales process is a mindset, I believe prospecting is at the top of the mindset.  If you don’t have the right mindset to prospect, then there is little chance you’ll prospect. This then translates into even less to close.

How do you create a prospecting mindset? First, thinking you don’t have to answer this question is a mistake.  Prospecting is not an activity of just going through the motions. No, it’s about engaging, connecting, and setting the table to create value.

You know I talk on the prospecting a lot in my keynotes. Here’s a 94-second segment from my time at the Growth Acceleration Summit hosted by Zoominfo:

 

Ready for my list? Here are 10 questions you need to get serious about.

1. How does the customer benefit from what I sell? Record all of the benefits your customers benefit from when they buy from you. Be specific and include not only the benefit, but also how it helped them.

2. How does my personal style connect with prospects and customers? Record what makes you special and makes you a person with whom people want to engage.

3. How does what I sell differ from other options in the marketplace? Record everything that sets what you sell apart, but do not include price.  There is no place for price in prospecting, so leave it off the table

4. What so I like about my customers? Record all of the things you like about your customers, including things that may include their personal lives.

5. What is the main obstacles in my day that block me from prospecting? Record all of the activities you get caught up in during the day you feel keep you from prospecting.

6. What is keeping you from blocking on your calendar specific time periods each day and week to prospect? You’ll never have enough time to prospect unless you dedicate the time to do it.

7. Are you relying on Marketing to provide you with leads? Why? How good are the leads they give you? What’s stopping you from getting your own leads?

8. Who are the negative voices in my life I need to get rid of? There are people with whom you associate that you really can’t afford to spend time with.  Hanging out with negative people will do nothing but create negative results.

9. What are my personal excuses? OK, here is where it gets personal.  Write down every single excuse you’ve ever had about why you didn’t prospect when you were supposed to.  Write down everything. By no means is this the time to leave anything out. When you’re done with the list, look at it closely and realize you are in control of everything.

Every excuse is your excuse. It doesn’t belong to anyone else. Each one belongs to you.  Your objective is to accept responsibility and NOT allow any one excuse stand in the way of you prospecting.

10. Who will hold me accountable? If you want to succeed, you must be willing to be held accountable. Who can you have as your partner? I like to say how sales is not a solo activity, but rather it’s a team sport, and you need somebody on your team. Who will you ask who can hold you accountable?

Take these 10 questions to heart and use them to propel you toward a more solid and productive prospecting mindset.

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

One thread that binds my career is top-of-funnel content. I’ve co-written two books on the importance of early-stage content and how to identify and capitalize on those opportunities. I’ve also had a lot of success launching content for the early phases in the customer journey: What some people call the “awareness” or “learning” phases. And I’ve written extensively about what success looks like for top-of-funnel content. But I have rarely led sustainable upper-funnel content efforts for a simple reason: It’s difficult to track the first touches in a multi-touch customer journey to revenue.

As I said in the referenced blog post:

When I have been successful in educating executives on recognizing their successes, I have convinced them to focus on optimizing the experience to get a higher share of users to take the next steps in their customer journeys. That kind of growth is much more valuable, as you can attribute it to revenue.

I should have added, “in theory.” In practice, few digital marketers I talk to have attribution working well enough to give each touch point in a customer journey the credit it is due. Upper-funnel content is expensive. It’s an easy line item on a budget to cut if there is no way to track it to revenue. Most of my upper-funnel content efforts were ultimately redesigned out of existence because there was no way to prove they generated revenue.

This is the paradox of upper-funnel content. Without attribution, you can’t prove it was instrumental in generating leads. But redesign it out of existence and suddenly, your lead volume goes way down. Why? Because no one becomes a lead until they’re ready. And they only get ready by first learning the what, why, and how of their topics of interest. These are the basic building blocks of upper-funnel content. Attribution modeling is the solution to the paradox. When you develop an attribution model, you figure out how important the content is to the leads you generate and give it the credit it is due.

We have developed some methods at IBM to give all the content in a journey the credit it is due, including upper-funnel content. I can share the basic methods with you now. Before I do that, however, I want to highlight a common dead end, so we can move on from it.

Last-touch attribution

Most people I talk to at conferences say they have attribution. But after I grill them for information on how they do it, they ultimately acknowledge that they mostly use “last-touch” attribution. That means giving all the credit for the last thing a prospect did before becoming a lead.

For several reasons, last-touch attribution doesn’t work. The main reason is the last thing a prospect sees before becoming a lead might not be the most important. If it is treated as such, a disproportionate amount of resources go to developing it, and you end up with a very bottom-heavy experience.

Last-touch is also bad because you never fill up the pipeline for bottom-of-the-funnel interactions without having top-of-funnel experiences. For example, the last thing many of our high quality leads did was to take a free trial. In last-touch attribution, you would give all the credit to the trial. But nobody takes a free trial without first learning about what they want to try. And nobody sets out to learn about what they want to try without first understanding what problem the tech solves. The more complex the product, the more touch points are necessary just to get to the point of wanting a free trial. In this example, top-of-funnel experiences contributed to the quality and quantity of the lead, but get no credit.

Last-touch attribution is really no attribution. So the question becomes, how do you move towards a true attribution model?

Start with response scoring

The first step is to score all your content in terms of how it contributed to leads and wins. If a white paper is downloaded often, and a high percentage of the respondents who register to take the download become sales, that white paper should be scored relatively highly. Let’s say you have 100 white papers, you can rank sort them on the number of high quality leads they generate, and give them scores on that scale from 0 to 100. Now you have a way to measure the relative value of those white papers.

But assets like white papers don’t generate leads by themselves. They have to be part of campaigns, which puts them in front of the audience using paid, owned, or earned means. If you use the same white paper in multiple channels, it is bound to generate more responses in some channels than others.

Let’s say a particular white paper about migrating to the cloud gets a lot of quality responses through organic search. For example, a lot of people query “how do I migrate to the cloud?” and visit the page where the paper can be downloaded. When they visit, they download the white paper and give quality information about themselves in exchange for the asset. This indicates that the paper does its job in early-stage education.

Now let’s say you try to use the same white paper in a paid search campaign that focuses on a product name like IBM Cloud Migration Services. When prospects click the ad, they get a single-offer landing page with the same white paper on it. Here, most of the users abandon the experience before filling out the form, and the paper does not generate a lot of quality responses.

How can the same paper do well in one context and poorly in another? In this case, the paper is useful for early-stage prospects but not for late-stage prospects. By the time someone searches for a brand name, chances are they have already learned all the basics and are ready for a deeper conversation. So a paper that tells them what they already know is no longer relevant.

This example illustrates why simple response scoring is not enough. You need an attribution model that helps you understand the value of assets when they are most useful. Once you have this more nuanced response scoring method, you can begin to pay attention to other variables in the mix.

Every time I have done studies like this as part of campaign optimization, I have also found that the same paper performs differently in two early-stage experiences. Perhaps in one, users have to scroll to get the link to the download whereas the other experience is easier. You never learn how changing UX can change performance until you try to score your assets in the mix. If you have attribution, they become markers to help improve the whole experience, including the asset itself.

From response scoring to attribution modeling

The first step in moving to attribution modeling is to look for patterns in the responses you are getting for your assets. In the example above, the white paper performed well in the early stages of the customer journey and poorly in the late stages. The hypothesis is white papers tend to do better in the top-of-funnel. Test that by looking at all your white papers to see if that pattern is consistent. If so, you can tune your experience by moving your white papers to top-of-funnel and move other things, like product demo videos, later.

This tuning is important prior to implementing attribution because the data can be very noisy if you don’t havewell-tunedned experience design first. If you implement attribution prior to tuning, it’s not the end of the world, but you will need to cut through the noise to tune the attribution. And this can be difficult because there are so many variables to control, it’s difficult to draw valid conclusions from the data.

When we started doing this at IBM, we found that five out of the 1000 or so white papers we had in market generated any kind of quality responses. The temptation was to say, “white papers don’t work.” But when did a further analysis of the five that worked, we found that they were highly technical in nature, not just delivering strategic points of view, but giving tactical guidance of how to implement a solution. Also, all our testing was done on late-stage offers, when tactical information is relevant but strategy is not.

Instead of jumping to conclusions, we started looking at how strategic white papers performed in early-stage experiences, and found that they performed better. All we needed to do was wire up the tracking system to show that people who downloaded those white papers also did late-stage activities leading to quality responses. When those leads closed, we could attribute the early-stage white papers to both leads and wins.

This example illuminates how attribution modeling works best. It doesn’t work to try to make all kinds of assumptions and wire something up based on the assumptions. That leads to conclusions like, “white papers don’t work.” But if you want to know how well a particular white paper is working, you have to take all these variables into account. Assuming the context in which the white paper is delivered to the audience conforms to best practices (landing page UX, right asset type, etc.), you can compare their response scores on an apples-to-apples basis.

A note on gating

Another variable you will need to control is whether or not your assets are gated. In early stages, prospects are less likely to fill out a form with their correct information to download an asset. Also, gating can prevent them from finding the assets in the first place, because the gate prevents search engines from indexing the assets independently of the experiences where they live. So the best practice is not to gate assets in early-stage experiences.

But if you don’t gate, how do you know the asset contributed to a lead? The answer is tracking. You can cookie the user anonymously and track their activities through the point where they fill out a form. When they do fill out the form, you can add all those other touches to the client reference, with the name and email you capture. All those touch points contribute in some way to the lead. Your attribution model can then take those touch points into account.

I have intentionally avoided the question of how much weight to give individual touches in a multi-touch client journey. Weighting can add bias to the algorithm, which obviously affects the results. But it is up to you to weight things the way you think measures your touch points accurately. I would start with giving equal weight to all the touch points, and then look for patterns in the data to determine that you want to weight certain items higher than others.

Conclusion

Attribution modeling is as much art as science. I hope after reading this, you are not so intimidated on getting started. It’s not that hard. You make hypotheses (based on best practices) about what you think is working, and you test it. You learn a lot in this process, and eventually you are able to attribute any page or asset (or combinations) you publish to the business results that matter. If you have a working attribution model, you can learn how to focus on the things that matter more. Most importantly, you can get the funding you need to do more of the things that work. In particular, you can build sustainable top-of-funnel content marketing programs.

How referable are you? Do you get referrals without having to ask? If not, there are a few steps you can do to increase your word-of-mouth marketing and be more referable. You might notice that just by having a good attitude and a little knowledge about what you are selling can work in your favor. You may have also noticed that putting in a little elbow grease has provided you with a few good online reviews. Still, you can do more, which you will find in this blog post. However, three common misconceptions are demystified first. Then, you will find six steps that can help enhance your word-of-mouth marketing.

3 truths about word-of-mouth marketing

It comes as no surprise that effective word-of-mouth marketing strategies are in high demand. The problem, however, is that much is misunderstood about turning a naturally occurring process into a plan of action. As usual, many of our holdups are rooted in old thought processes. Below, Gabbie Cohen attempts to help clear the smoke by highlighting three common misconceptions.

1. Word-of-mouth is market-y

Word-of-mouth marketing is not meant to be market-y in the traditional sense and marketers who treat it like typical marketing will not see the results they are looking for. In fact, these are absolutely opposing approaches and the rise of social media and brand advocates will continue to make gimmicks even less relevant with time.

The key to word-of-mouth marketing is to create opportunities for consumers, or brand advocates, to share about a brand’s products and services across all touch points, so they can share when and where they are inspired. By creating a convenient environment for them, consumers will be more willing to spread word-of-mouth marketing about a brand, and if given easy-to-use tools to amplify those messages, brands can see an increase in reach and awareness.

2. Word-of-mouth marketing is reserved for revolutionary products

While having a bang-up product or service certainly helps things along, it is not a requirement for effective word-of-mouth marketing. The real key to success here is answering a question. No matter what you have to offer, people will talk about it if it fills a real need.

3. Word-of-mouth marketing is a replacement strategy

While word-of-mouth marketing is certainly in the throes of a revolutionary breakthrough, it would not be wise to shift focus solely on what consumers are saying about you or your brand. Word-of-mouth marketing is highly complementary. If harnessed correctly, it can carry your messaging far beyond your immediate audience.

6 steps that can help enhance your word-of-mouth marketing

You may have word of mouth already occurring. That is great! But, you can do more. Megan Mosley gives you six steps that can help enhance your word-of-mouth marketing.

Step 1: Establish a foundation for word-of-mouth marketing

First, you need to create a foundation so that word of mouth can occur. Here are a few tips on creating a sturdy foundation.

· Focus on your customer service

The biggest thing you should focus on is your customer service. In fact, without good customer service, your business might suffer. If you are not doing well, you can guarantee that no one will want to refer you (in a positive way). Customer service matters because of social currency: a consumer’s willingness to share. If you want people to spend their social currency on you, you have to give them a good reason to do so. When your great product and unbeatable customer service pair up, people feel much more comfortable spending their social currency on you.

· Marketing is a team sport

Even in this digital age, where everything is easy to share, you still have to ‘work’ on being referable. What helps is to make marketing a team sport. When your whole team is involved, it is much easier to promote your best self.

A great way to build up your brand is to experience it with your front line. Better understanding the customer’s perspective and expectations can give you great insight into your brand and it will allow you to modify accordingly. Also, it will allow you to understand the problems your employees and staff experience.

To kick things into high gear, remember that your brand and culture come down from the qualities of the founder. So, if the leaders of the business are not portraying what is important from the top down, the whole ecosystem could crumble. But, if the brand values are funneled down, the overall experience should be better for everyone.

· Communication is expected

Communication will allow you to provide excellent customer service and it will help you truly make all your marketing efforts a team sport. People want you to be responsive. They want their questions answered and they want to know that you are evolving with their needs. However, they are not looking for mechanical answers; they are looking for conversational and personalized encounters, which may seem counterintuitive in this age of social media and the internet.

There are ways to personalize today’s preferred modern communication. For example, live-chat tools are the perfect way for you to increase your communication channels and be convenient for customers.

· Use social media

The easiest way to create a word-of-mouth channel is to use social media platforms. They allow the customer to easily and conveniently talk with you as well as share you. By being where your customers are, you are making it even easier for word of mouth to occur. And, if you are often communicating with your customers and sharing resources, jokes, updates, etc., you are making yourself referable. People refer who/what they like, so make yourself referable.

Step 2: Understand where your referrals come from and why people buy

Understanding your customers and their referrals can help you figure out why they buy in the first place. The basics could be the cost of your product, the quality of your product or even your customer service. That primary information is important but customers research your reviews and rely on recommendations too. So, it is important to ask for feedback when and where you can. Getting feedback from your customers can provide you with insight into what you should and should not be doing. This dialog will help you understand why customers buy and create a foundation of trust for others to become customers.

Step 3: Design your program with the user in mind

What can you do to make people spend their social currency? By designing your referral program with the user in mind, it is pretty easy to get open channels of communication. These two elements can encourage this:

1. Templates
   The easier you make it for customers to refer you, the more likely they will. By providing them with templated messages, you are increasing your word-of-mouth potential. You simply create the message your customers will share with their friends. This can include imagery and a brief description of what your business is all about. You can even allow your customers the chance to customize the message.
2. Rewards
   You may notice that the reward can be the driving point for a referral. The user will always want to know the benefit of sharing. Regardless of how much they actually like your business, if there is no immediate need to share, the chances of you being shared might not be there.

Step 4: Promote, promote, promote

Like any other marketing promotion, your referral program needs to be promoted and fed into marketing channels. Promoting your program is important as it helps your program get seen. Promotion does not just mean making your program visible on your homepage. Anywhere you interact with customers can be a great touch point for referral program promotion. Here are two ways you can ask for referrals and increase your word of mouth.

1. Use your email
   You regularly communicate with your customers, partners, and employees through email. This means it is a great platform to ask for a referral. You can implement the ask as a fun image at the bottom of every email or you can ask for a referral and promote your program with a dedicated email.
2. Social media
   Between direct messaging, commenting, and posting updates, you have multiple ways to reach your audience. Plus, if the information about your program is already on your social sites, you are making it that much easier for people to join and share. Social media can also be a great way for you to increase your social proof, meaning people will have a much easier time spending their social currency on you.

Step 5: Automate and create repeatable processes

As with all good marketing, making processes repeatable is key to creating a good experience for users. It is easy to create new resources; the real effort is making everything consistent. This is because your brand image and tone are strongest when they are consistent across all channels. The same rules apply to your referral program. Just like other campaigns, it relies on communication cadence. You need to think of the right time to promote your program and ask for a referral.

Software is a great option for helping you automate the referral process. Not only can you automate the entire referral process, you can automate your referral program to trigger at certain points in your sales process and marketing campaigns.

Step 6: Analyze, monitor, and measure

After everything is all set up, all you have left to do is track and measure its success. This will allow you to see where in the process you need to approve.

Round 1: Establish a baseline to see where your word-of-mouth advertising should go

Before you start any marketing or advertising campaign, you need to set your baseline. Before you try to measure your growth, you need to understand where you currently are. The same applies to tracking your word of mouth. Your baseline may include tracking converted leads, web traffic, incoming phones or another very specific variable.

Then, you need to establish what your goals will be so that you can put a campaign into motion. This will be a great base for you to track and test changes. Plus, it can help you gain insight into what you should be asking your users. Listening to feedback and testing changes may be exactly what you need to determine your ‘perfect’ campaign.

Round 2: Go back to step 2

Go back to step 2 once a year and see what has changed. You may find that your ideal customer has shifted or that your old incentives are not working quite like they used to at getting people to refer. There are tools for this too.

Social media marketing

As you can tell, social media marketing is a big part of word-of-mouth marketing. Fortunately, I have recently released my ultimate guide to social media marketing, so you can learn more about this particular type of marketing if you need it.

A successful career in sales is dependent on your ability to ask good sales discovery questions. To develop that skill, you must know when it's time to dig deeper with probing questions. You know the kind: the type of questions necessary to uncover your prospect's core needs … fast.

In these cases, simply asking, "Tell me about your biggest challenges with your current solution," and moving on isn't enough. You must probe with follow-up questions that will give your prospect the confidence to share the real hurdles they're facing.

Here's a comprehensive list of probing sales qualifying questions you can ask buyers to get intimately familiar with their situation and formulate potential solutions. If you'd like my complete list of 450 sales questions for every situation, download this ebook.

And, don't forget: probing questions are as much about listening as they are about speaking. Make sure you're really listening to your prospect's responses, so you know just which question to ask next.

Sales Probing Questions

Use these questions at the beginning of your sales process to identify key information about your prospect. Elaboration is the first step in gaining clarity and context around your prospects' struggles. Once your prospect gives you specific details, you will have more context that will help your client.

1. "How can we help?"
2. "Could you please give me some background to this?"
3. "Can you tell me more about the present situation/problem?"
4. "Tell me more about it."
5. "How long have you been thinking about this?"
6. "Why do you think it is happening?"
7. "What goals and objectives do you have for this?"
8. "What is your biggest challenge with this?"
9. "What are your key objectives with this?"
10. "What do you like about your current supplier?"
11. "What are you using/doing now?"
12. "Do you have any preference with regards to the solution?"
13. "What three key outcomes do you want from this?"
14. "Can you please tell me about that?"
15. "Can you give me an example?"
16. "Can you be more specific?"
17. "How does this look/sound/feel to you?"
18. "Why are you seeking to do this work/project/engagement?"

Questions For Identifying Symptoms For Big-Picture Problems

The following sales questions are designed to help you identify the barriers your prospect is facing. Understanding what, how, and how long these issues have been present will help you get to the root of the problem.

The root of these barriers are more than likely showing up in other areas in their business or personal development. These questions will help you to identify which issues need to be addressed first.

1. "Why isn’t this particular service/product/situation/issue working for you right now?"
2. "How long has it been an issue/problem?"
3. "Why do you think the issue/problem has been going on for so long?"
4. "How much longer can you afford to have the problem go unresolved?"
5. "How is it impacting your organization/customers/staff?"
6. "How severe is the problem?"
7. "When do you need the issue/problem fixed by?"
8. "Why have you been dealing with this for so long?"
9. "What bothers you the most about this situation/issue/problem?"
10. "What has prevented you from fixing this in the past?"
11. "What kind of timeframe are you working in to fix this?"
12. "How long have you been thinking about it?"
13. "Is this problem causing other problems?"
14. "Does your competition have these problems?"
15. "What is the biggest problem that you are facing with this?"
16. "What other problems are you experiencing?"
17. "What alternatives have you considered?"
18. "What are the intangible effects of the problem?"
19. "Does the issue cause problems with employee morale?"
20. "Does the issue cause problems that negatively affect the motivation of your staff?"
21. "Can this problem affect productivity?"
22. "Is this problem unique to your organization?"
23. "Is this an industry-wide problem?"
24. "Is it regional or geographical?"
25. "When you went to your existing supplier and shared your frustrations about this problem, what reassurances did they give you that it wouldn’t be repeated?"
26. "How did these problems/issues first come about? What were the original causes?"
27. "What have you done in the past to address the problem?"
28. "Does this affect other parts of the business?"
29. "What kind of pressure is this causing you and the business?"
30. "What options have you tried?"
31. "What are the long-term effects of the problem?"
32. "How does the problem ultimately affect your current customers?"
33. "How does the problem ultimately affect your prospective customers?"
34. "How does the problem ultimately affect your sales teams?"
35. "How does the problem ultimately affect your other employees?"
36. "How does the problem ultimately affect your sales process?"
37. "How does the problem ultimately affect your reputation/goodwill/brand?"
38. "Do you feel this problem/issue has given your competition a competitive advantage? If so, how?"
39. "Who did you work with last time and why?"
40. "How often do you think the problem has come up when you weren’t aware of it?"
41. "What are the long-term effects of the problem? If you were in your competitors’ shoes, how would you take advantage of this?"
42. "Do you know what your competition is thinking/planning about this?"
43. "Do they suffer from the same problem?"
44. "Does this affect other parts of the business?"

Action-Oriented Probing Questions

Once you have context of your prospect’s barriers, knowing what action your prospect should take is key. These questions will help your prospect see the pathway to improving their business and will also establish trust between you and them. Each question helps your prospect identify action steps that will help the two of you formulate the right solutions.

1. "What number would you put on this issue in terms of prioritization?"
2. "How much more productive could your people be if the problem did not exist?"
3. "If you were your competition, what would you do right now?"
4. "If you could design the perfect solution, what would it look like, how much would you spend, and how long would it go for?"
5. "What sense of urgency do you have here?"
6. "What three key outcomes do you want from solving the problem?"
7. "What are your top three requirements that this solution just has to have?"
8. "If you could have things the way you wanted, what would it look like?"
9. "What are you using/doing now?"
10. "How important is this need (on a scale of 1-10)?"
11. "What options are you currently looking at?"
12. "In a perfect world, what would you like to see happen with this?"
13. "What is your strategy to fix this problem?"
14. "What are you currently doing to address the problem?"

Financial Probing Questions

Revenue drives decisions for most businesses. These questions will give you a deeper understanding of where your prospect may be hesitant to move forward or why they have been making certain choices around money.

Asking these questions will deepen your analysis on what financial barriers your prospect is facing. Since money is a more sensitive topic, you should transition into these questions once you feel like you’ve established a sense of trust with your prospect.

1. "What is it costing you?"
2. "Do you know in what other areas the problem is costing you money?"
3. "Can you put an amount on the problem in terms of cost: Weekly, monthly, annually?"
4. "Can you see how much money you/your organization loses every day by not solving this issue?"
5. "How does the problem ultimately affect your pricing/selling costs?"
6. "How much does this problem cost you in man hours/time?"
7. "Looking at this from a point of lost sales, how much is just one sale worth to the company?"
8. "How much is the issue/problem costing you in time/money/resources/staff/energy?"
9. "Can you make an educated guess as to how much it costs you?"
10. "What kind of return or payoff will you be looking for if you get a successful resolution of the problem?"
11. "What are you working with at the moment?  Just a ball park... "
12. "How do you handle budget considerations?"

Accountability and Clarity Probing Questions

These questions solidify your understanding of your prospect’s position by delving further into the details. This also helps your prospect get clear on all the issues that will be addressed while they work with you. These questions will be good to wrap up your sales session and finalize your scope of work.

1. "Who is ultimately responsible for this?"
2. "Why are you seeking to do this work/project/engagement?"
3. "Who else is aware of it?"
4. "What has made you want to look into this now?"
5. "What kind of timeframe are you working within?"
6. "Is there anything I have overlooked?"
7. "Have I covered everything?"
8. "What alternatives have you considered?"
9. "Do you have any questions you’d like to ask me?"
10. "What other factors have we not discussed that are important to you?"
11. "Are there any other areas I haven’t asked you about that are important?"
12. "What else should I know?"
13. "Have I asked you about every detail that’s important to you?"
14. "How soon would you like to move with this?"
15. "Does this affect other parts of the business?"
16. "What’s your role in this situation/issue/problem?"
17. "Who supports this action?"

An Effective Sale Strategy Means Asking The Right Questions

If you want to make your sales process effective for you and your prospect, this list of probing questions is guaranteed to help. Asking questions that aid your understanding of your prospect will increase the chances of closing the sale. Demonstrating the will to listen to pain points, barriers, and deadlines are crucial for an effective sales meeting.

These probing questions are designed to help you get the right information. They will prompt your prospect to take action and help them visualize how to close the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

With so many options of items and services to purchase it is no wonder that buyers simply freeze sometimes and don’t make a buying decision.

What’s the same, and what’s different about the companies’ services you are comparing?

It seems as plain as day – a buyer needs to understand your service (or product) as compared to others and how any of the options will help the buyer. It’s so not about the seller.

What makes a neighborhood "work"? Above and beyond the practical considerations of quality of life and affordability (both of which are always subject to the follow-up question, "For whom?"), what makes a neighborhood a distinctive place that will have enduring value over the ages?

Some common answers might involve visual harmony, order, and cohesive character. Many famous great neighborhoods are distinguished by such traits. It wouldn't take long to figure out that you were in Jane Jacobs's beloved Greenwich Village if you were blindfolded and dropped off there. The same goes for the Savannah historic district. The same for San Francisco's Alamo Square. These are places with an impeccable imageability—I can tell you what each place looks like, and it looks like no place else on Earth.

Historic preservationists and politically active homeowners alike will often tell you that new development ought to be "compatible" with the neighborhood in which it's built. Lack of compatibility, we're told, is the road to ruin: build something out of place, out of scale, or out of character with its surroundings, and it will inexorably deflate adjacent property values and rob a neighborhood of its desirability.

It's hard to argue with the value of compatibility on its face. But in practice, what constitutes "compatible" development rests on some tenuous assumptions. "Stuff should look just like the stuff that's next door to it, because then we know those buildings, and their users, will get along with each other," is often the default reasoning. But the example I'm about to discuss suggests it's a lot more complicated than that.

The eclectic West End of Vancouver, British Columbia, is a fascinating challenge to common understandings of neighborhood compatibility. It maybe shouldn't work on paper. It's a direct blow to the notion that "compatibility" requires homogeneity in terms of building height, size, and massing. It suggests a very different understanding of neighborhood compatibility, in which eclecticism is a virtue, not a liability.

Map of Vancouver with the West End highlighted in red. (Source: Google)

The West End is a small rectangle of land, a couple square kilometers at most, hemmed in on Vancouver's downtown peninsula between the central business district and Stanley Park, the city's iconic forested refuge. In its current form, much of it was built out in the 1950s and 1960s. With about 42,000 residents, it is one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in North America.

In the United States, those were the years of urban renewal, bleak modernist public-housing projects, and the explosive growth of the suburbs. But north of the 49th parallel, this Canadian city took a strikingly different path: one that has earned it the label "Vancouverism" for its distinctive urban planning philosophy. The hallmark of Vancouverism is the fairly liberal acceptance of high-rise residential towers as a key to both environmental sustainability and affordability, coupled with a planning approach that prioritizes public space, greenery, sunlight and great views as a counterbalance to the potential negative effects of that high-rise development.

Vancouver's West End

There is an anything-goes architectural disorder in the West End that U.S. (and for that matter, Canadian) planners would rarely tolerate, and in fact have rarely tolerated. High-rise concrete edifices sit next to boxy mid-rises sit next to the odd humble duplex. There is virtually never a visual connection or commonality in the West End between a building and the one next to it. And yet a miraculous thing dawns on you as you stroll the West End: instead of half of these buildings feeling glaringly out of place, none of them feel out of place.

I've been told what's supposed to happen if you allow high-rise construction to loom over someone's mid-rise home, or mid-rise construction over someone's modest front porch. Claustrophobia! No sunlight! Lack of privacy! Noise, constant disruption! It will surely destroy the residential quality of life. Right?

In fact, the West End strikes me as a profoundly pleasant place to stroll around, and quality of life seems to be there in spades. It's a much more socioeconomically and demographically diverse neighborhood than you'd expect. I checked out some Canadian Census data—the average income is extremely close to that of the metropolitan area as a whole, at about C$46,000, confounding my initial expectation that this famous neighborhood adjacent to downtown would be wealthy and exclusive. And the age distribution is not radically different from that of the metro area, though the West End has fewer children and more 20-39 year olds. It doesn't feel congested; traffic was a non-issue when I was there, except on one main drag at the neighborhood's edge, which connects to the Lions Gate Bridge (the main route north out of the city).

The West End was quiet and peaceful on a weekday rush-hour stroll, and again on a Saturday morning. I saw a wide range of people walking the streets and hanging out in parks and plazas. And although large multifamily buildings are supposed to doom any sense of neighborhood cohesion or culture, I saw definite signs of neighborliness, most prominently in the form of locals greeting each other right and left at a farmers' market.

The West End, by virtue of its location, affords unparalleled access to what Vancouver has to offer: downtown jobs and culture, dining, shopping, the beach, Stanley Park. And it affords that access to a lot of people—and evidently not just the super-rich, even in one of the world's most expensive cities.

And I didn't find it ugly, even. The West End has a lot of individually ugly buildings, but it has managed to inoculate itself against them through urban design. Ugly buildings do not an ugly neighborhood make.

How on earth does that trick work? A lot has to do with the streetscape: there are ample shade trees. There are comfortable sidewalks buffered from traffic. The buildings don't dominate the view. Although many are quite tall, they don't appear to loom over the street and make a canyon out of it.

From a pedestrian perspective, the most important thing about the buildings in any location is what's happening facing the sidewalk on the first story. Everything above that is far less crucial to the experience of being there.

The West End strikes me as a challenge not just to the the views of a certain breed of anti-development, anti-density homeowner activist, but also to those of the planning establishment.

With the rise of New Urbanism as a dominant current of thought in modern planning, most planners you'll meet are on board with the virtues of mixed-use, compact development. You won't find much objection to the West End on density grounds from within that establishment. At the same time, however, you'd find few planners willing to embrace a regulatory regime that would allow more neighborhoods like it to be created. Its results would be seen as too unpredictable.

Form-based codes are all the rage: my own (U.S.) city right now is working on a complete replacement of its zoning code with a form-based alternative. A form-based code takes a light touch with regard to building use (a corner store, a dentist's office, a private home, all good), but regulates neighborhood compatibility based on the form of buildings: their size, scale, materials, and relationship to the street.

What form-based code could possibly produce the West End?

This very organization, Strong Towns, might also by default be skeptical of the West End. We extol the virtues of complexity, of "chaotic but smart" development, of not being overly prescriptive. But we also talk a lot about the "next increment of development" in neighborhoods. The idea is that cataclysmic change is bad for resilience, so neighborhoods should evolve incrementally over time. Single-family homes can become duplexes, duplexes can be replaced over a generation by small apartment buildings, and so forth—gradually taller and more intense.

No skyscrapers here. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

When applied to physical buildings, the idea of "the next increment" evokes row-house neighborhoods, where homogeneity is the name of the game. It evokes Paris—by all means, build a 6-story building in Paris next to a 5-story building.

It certainly doesn't evoke a 30-story tower next to a 2-story duplex.

The West End is a very different kind of place than Baron Haussmann's Paris. It's attractive in its disorder. It has some of the appeal of the untamed rainforests that still blanket much of the British Columbia coast, not that of a manicured English garden. You've got huge canopy trees, you've got an understory, you've got ferns carpeting the forest floor—the diversity and multiple levels of height add to the intrigue. You turn a corner and you don't know what you're going to encounter.

So let's add some nuance to the idea of "next increment." Maybe it doesn't have to mean that each building can at most be a little bit bigger or taller than the one next to it.

What if we think about incrementalism on the neighborhood level, while accepting that what happens at the block or building level might be much more chaotic and variable? The purpose of incremental development, as a philosophy, is to ensure that neighborhoods are able to evolve in ways that are responsive to the changing pressures of demographics, economics, shifting cultural preferences, and so on. And this evolution can't be directed from the top down; it must be the product of the actions of many people working independently of, but learning from, each other. This feedback mechanism produces a resilient place.

A resilient place, though, can involve a good dose of disorder and incongruity and eclecticism. More than many of us are, by default, comfortable with. Does the West End's eclecticism mean that it can evolve and adapt? I can't speak to Vancouver's zoning codes—I know nothing about them. But I know that you could build virtually anything in the West End and it wouldn't be out of place with its surroundings. And that strikes me as a profound advantage.

I can't help but think that urbanist heroine Jane Jacobs must have loved this neighborhood, though I don't know that for a fact. Her legacy is hotly contested everywhere, but especially in Canada, where she spent much of her later life, and quite often in Vancouver.

Jacobs has been invoked in Vancouver by both the champions of eclectic "Vancouverism" and by its opponents. The city's former mayor Sam Sullivan describes himself as a Jacobs fanboy turned skeptic when he realized that high-rise development was a necessary component of Vancouver's future sustainability—implying that Jacobs, the famous opponent of top-down planning and mega-projects, would have disapproved.

But witnessing signs of a "sidewalk ballet" in the West End—lively streets and neighborly neighbors—I think the conflict between two visions of the livable city has been dramatically overstated. Maybe high-rises are more compatible with an organic sense of community than many would like to think. At the very least, they offer a whole lot of members of that community places to live, and there's something to be said for that.

If your preferred version of What Would Jane Do?—or of the ideal, harmonious neighborhood or city—is pro-density or anti-density, pro-height or anti-height, pro-homogeneity or pro-eclecticism, well...reality is more complex and has a surprise or two around the corner for you. On a walk around Vancouver, it was nice to be reminded of that.

(All photos by the author unless otherwise specified.)

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Search Engine Optimization, better known as SEO, is what helps websites get to the top of search results in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. When someone searches for a specific topic and your business website is at the top of the results, you can gather that you will get far more business and exposure than a website towards the bottom. Here are eight vital reasons why you should implement SEO for your business this year.

1. Get More Traffic

If your business is at the top of the list of search results, more people will come to your website over a business on page 3 of the search results. 75% of people don’t scroll any further than the first page. The higher you are in search results, the more traffic will flow to your website, blog, or online store. This is a powerful way to make sales, fulfill your customer’s needs, help as many consumers as you can, and grow your business.

2. Grow Your Business

With more targeted traffic coming to your website, it’s a no-brainer that your top KPIs will improve. If you are a business heavily focused on sales, executing SEO will drive those numbers up as you begin to rank higher. If you are a blog and want your posts to outrank your competition, use SEO to gain more traction to your content. Your business can grow much faster when a strategic SEO strategy is in place. The more visible your business is, the better.

3. Get Website Visitors Into Your Sales Funnel

One of the top sales priorities of businesses is getting more traffic into your sales funnel. With SEO, you can do just that. A sales funnel is the buying process in which a business leads a customer through to purchase their products. More traffic and growth equals more opportunity to make use of your sales funnel. If you’re ranking higher on Google, you’ll get more traffic into your sales funnel.

4. Your Competition is Ahead of You

If you’re under the impression that your work is done once you reach the top of the results, you might be mistaken. Your competition is constantly fighting for those top spots too. Once you reach the top of the ranks, you must continue to work to maintain your status. Not to mention, completely ignoring SEO is practically handing your competition business without a fight. Even local, small businesses are optimizing their sites for SEO. If you aren’t putting in the proper focus, they’ll be at the top while you’re nowhere in sight. If you are a small business yourself and you are a bit intimidated by giant corporate competitors, not to worry. Small businesses are frequently outranking their larger counterparts due to proper SEO implementation. It just goes to show that using the right strategies and tactics can make your business succeed no matter the size.

5. It Won’t Go Away

SEO is something that is only going to grow more important as the years go on. Therefore, it’s something to put at the forefront of your strategy. The techniques of SEO will continue to evolve as the world does, and your competition is aware and adapting in order to keep ranking near the top. SEO has become the heart of which all other online marketing strategies stem from to create maximum effectiveness. Search engines are a modern-day way of life. 93% of people who are looking for businesses, services, or products, do so using a search engine. This habit won’t be changing anytime soon (if ever) so as long as people keep using search engines, you’ll want your business to be there for them to find.

6. Build Brand Awareness

Consumers are far more likely to trust businesses ranking near the top than those on the second or third pages (if they ever scroll that far). The higher the rank, the higher the clout. The higher the clout, the more people will trust you. The more that people trust you, the higher the chance of a lead/sale. You’ll create a far more loyal following the more legit your business seems at a glance. That’s a win-win situation for both you as a business owner and the consumer.

7. Acquire Monthly Recurring Traffic

With more targeted traffic coming to your website organically and you sitting near the top of the search results, you’ll see an increase in your bottom line and the ROI will be worth it. There’s a higher chance of traffic not only being led into your sales funnel, but also to your email list. Retaining the traffic you receive from being a rockstar in your SEO implementation will qualify you for a loyal following that returns to your website repeatedly. This could call for repeat sales, gaining more and more trust, and/or more shares on social media. Lucky for you and your business, social media and SEO work hand in hand. The more popular you are on social media, the more SEO can increase that visibility. The more loyal your customer base, the higher your success.

8. Generate High-Quality Leads

One of the main perks of SEO is that people don’t find your business unless they want to. Meaning, you only show up when people are looking for the product, service, or location specific to your business. How much more targeted of an audience could you ask for? A good reminder is to make sure your content, products, or services are up to par with what consumers are looking for. More quality leads equals more conversions.

An SEO strategy is absolutely vital for long-term success. When done correctly, it can give you consistent and endless organic traffic and results. There are Google algorithm updates that can make it a little more tough (they’re always trying to rule out spam, which is great, but can make it all a bit trickier). Since 3 billion people search the internet every single day, it’s time you implemented an SEO plan to reel in some success.

Learn more about The 8 Success Principles for Any Business Model’s SEO here.

One of the hardest things for any growing agency is capturing leads at scale. In this guide, we’ll share unbeatable tactics you can use to grow not just a handful, but hundreds of leads. Read on to learn how.

You’ve got a finely optimized suite of services. Your project management systems are top-notch. And your operations are humming at an industrial pace.

Except there is a problem: your sales pipeline is completely dry.

Leads are the fuel to your agency’s growth engine. The most finely optimized system can’t yield any results if you don’t supply it with a steady stream of leads.

But far too often, agencies pursue unscalable lead generation tactics. Referrals, cold outreach, and haphazard content marketing approaches dominate. These might work, but they’re hard to predict and even harder to scale.

What you need is a scalable approach to lead generation.

Below, I’ll share 12 tactics to acquire leads at scale, covering everything from organic search to directories and social media.

1. Create Landing Pages for Long-Tail Keywords

The agency formula for creating landing pages is often the same. The homepage leads to service pages, each of which targets a broad and highly competitive keyword (such as “SEO” or “content marketing”).

While these landing pages can give website visitors a good idea of what you offer, they can’t help attract any traffic.

Further, because of their broad focus, they don’t do a good job of pitching your services to niche customers. Do you offer “content marketing” services to only enterprise customers, or do you also serve small startups?

Your visitors have no idea, which can turn them away.

To solve this problem, create more targeted landing pages.

For example, Foxtail Marketing has landing pages for all the niche industries it serves:

(Image credit: FoxtailMarketing)

This helps in two ways:

• It educates Foxtail’s website visitors about its range of services and industry focus
• It helps Foxtail attract traffic from long-tail search queries (the site ranks #2 for “SEO for forex companies”)

Further, since the landing pages are highly targeted, leads acquired through them will be of a better quality as well. Anyone searching for “SEO for SaaS businesses” is most likely a SaaS company looking for SEO help.

In fact, HubSpot’s research shows that the more landing pages you create, the more leads you’ll capture.

(Image credit: HubSpot)

If you’re going to adopt this tactic, keep two things in mind:

• Add at least 500+ words of content to the landing page to increase your ranking chances
• Create separate pages for:
  • Industries (“SEO for e-commerce”)
  • Geographies (“SEO in Austin”),
  • A combination of the two (“SEO for e-commerce companies in atlanta”).

The best part about this tactic is that you can use the same content template for every landing page. Thus, you can quickly build out dozens of landing pages covering all areas of expertise to land leads at scale.

2. Create Content Upgrades Based on Search Intent

If you’ve been around our website, you might have noticed these boxes on some blog posts:

This is a “content upgrade”.

A content upgrade, as I mentioned in my email marketing guide, is a downloadable document that “upgrades” the experience of the current content by:

• Offering additional material such as tips, advice, etc.
• Condensing existing content into a friendlier format

In the above example, we condensed the article into a short, two-page PDF. Visitors can access it after sharing their email address:

Content upgrades are great for capturing leads because they are contextually relevant. A person reading an article about “team building activities” is also likely interested in downloading a PDF with a list of such activities.

Because of this, content upgrades often get conversion rates close to 10%.

(Image credit: MIDINation)

For a content upgrade to be effective, it needs to be highly targeted. It should answer the question: “What does the reader want from this article?”

One way to figure this out is to use search intent.

Here’s how: log into your Google Webmaster Tools account. Go to Search Traffic > Search Analytics. Select the ‘Pages’ radio button and click on a high-traffic web page.

Once selected, click ‘Queries’. This will show you a list of keywords people used to find the page.

Any content upgrade that focuses on these keywords will be contextually relevant.

You can do this for all your top-performing pages to capture leads at scale with targeted content upgrades.

3. Update Existing Pages to Increase Traffic

You might have noticed that Google shows the date of publication (when available) for every query:

Unsurprisingly, most top results are recently published or updated.

This is part of Google’s push to prioritize recency in its algorithm. This is particularly true for time-sensitive topics where a 5-year old page might not have the most relevant information.

You can take advantage of this change by updating your existing pages with newer content. This can push articles languishing on page 2 and 3 to the 1st page, increasing your traffic.

Further, since updating a page requires far less effort than creating a new one, this is an easy tactic to scale across your entire content library.

Here’s how to use it:

Log into your Google Analytics account and head to Behavior > Site Content > All Content. Look for pages that:

• Have low traffic
• Have low bounce rate and high average time on page
• Are focused on topics that can change over time (“SEO tips” can change, “What is SEO” is evergreen)

Once you’ve found these pages, update them with fresh content. Add a content upgrade to them if possible.

You’ll find that a lot of these pages will automatically rank better within a few weeks.

For instance, we used this tactic to improve traffic to this page from 400 to 1,000+ pageviews in just four months.

4. Offer Free Audits, Tools, and Consultations

A month ago, we surveyed 122 agency websites to evaluate their pricing and sales tactics.

We found that a large number of agencies, especially digital and SEO agencies, were offering free consultations or audits to capture leads:

Offering free things is old hat as far as lead generation goes. But free audits and consultations have the added benefit of tying directly into the sales process.

When you offer a free consultation, you don’t just get an email and a phone number; you get a chance to get the prospect on the phone. This cuts the qualification process drastically – you’ll know within minutes into a conversation whether a prospect is likely to convert or not.

Similarly, offering a free audit helps you check whether a prospect’s business is a good fit for your agency.

An example of an SEM agency offering a free consultation (Image source; HigherVisibility)

In our roundup of agency marketing tips, Kevin Simonson of Metric Digital spoke about the importance of free audits for his agency.

“Our agency’s top client acquisition strategy is to offer a free marketing audit. There’s no commitment from the prospective client, and they get great advice. Plus we always learn a ton about digital marketing and how brands work.”

Untargeted leads will be a problem, of course, especially if you have a lot of traffic. But if you’re struggling with lead volume, this can be a viable tactic to get more prospects into the pipeline while cutting short the qualification process.

4. Develop Strategic Partnerships

Instead of capturing leads on your own, how about “borrowing” them from other companies?

By developing partnerships with related companies, you can both serve your clients better. A SEO agency can partner with a creative agency to offer design services to its clients. And the creative agency can expand its services to include SEO.

This mutual exchange of expertise helps everyone – you, your partners, and your clients.

As an agency, your partners will fall into three buckets:

• Other agencies offering non-competing services in related or tangential industries.
• Software providers offering tools that align with your agency’s services.
• Service providers offering services (such as web hosting) that require help from agencies.

Partnering with software or service providers is a time-honored agency practice (think of Google Partners or HubSpot Certified Agencies). While these can be lucrative, the high visibility and lower barriers to entry makes these partnerships not quite as fruitful as the ones you can strike with other agencies.

Above: HubSpot’s Certified Agency program (Image credit: HubSpot)

When you consider other agencies for partnerships, two factors should guide your search:

• Service gaps: Look for agencies that have an obvious gap in their services. Say, they offer SEM but don’t have a design team on hand.
• Reciprocity: A partnership means you have to give something in return. Ask yourself: what can you offer, and what are you willing to give up? Most likely, you will have to offer free services or leads of a similar quality.

Your ideal partner is someone slightly larger than you in a tangential, non-competing industry. You want people who can introduce you to a whole new subset of clients. For instance, if you work primarily with insurance clients, look for a partner in the pet supplies space.

Don’t fret about competition. As Julien Brandt of Organik SEO says, “I feel like there is plenty of business out there for everyone and many agencies and service providers serve the same vertical in a different capacity.”

Once you do strike a partnership, extend it further by:

• Collaborating on content, especially high-value offerings such as webinars
• White-labeling some high-volume services that have a low strategic impact (such as content creation)

5. Use Niche Directory Listings

Want leads without the effort of attracting them?

Then you need to get listed on niche agency directories.

Agency directories such as Clutch.co, UpCity, and DigitalAgencyNetwork have access to a massive pool of traffic. There a pre-selection effect in place as well – anyone searching on these directories is already interested in buying agency services.

An example of an agency listings page on Clutch (Image credit: Clutch.co)

As Les Kollegian of Jacob Tyler says:

“The most effective way we find clients is by helping clients find us. We have asked our bigger clients to provide reviews of our services on clutch.co…which has given us credibility to prospects who have not heard of our firm.”

Unless you’re willing to pay (which can be worthwhile if you understand your M-CAC and CLTV), you’ll have to invest some effort to spruce up your listing.

Here’s what David Gaz says about directory listings:

“The key is to build a relationship with the people who run the directories and develop a compelling profile. It’s a symbiotic relationship because they need you as much as you need them. The reviews that your clients post and the quality of your work are what drive traffic to their site, which in turn collectively drives leads to you.”

The hardest part is getting reviews. Approach this the same way you would approach getting referrals, i.e.:

• Identify your top clients through qualitative feedback or tools such as NPS scores
• Ask for reviews at positive moments in the relationship – project close, meeting key deadlines, etc.
• Incentivize reviews by offering discounts or free services (mention the incentive in the actual review so that you don’t flout the directory’s rules)

The quality of the reviews matters as much as the quantity. It’s better to get 5 in-depth reviews from trusted clients than to get 20 shallow ones from non-descript companies.

6. Automate Outbound Campaigns

A sophisticated outbound sales campaign isn’t just about cold calling prospects. Rather, it is about building a sales engine that can identify targeted leads and pitch them relevant offers, at scale.

The core ingredients of this engine are:

• Identifying prospects at scale
• Scheduling personalized messages
• Continuous improvement through A/B testing

For the first part – prospecting – you need to find businesses that fit your target client persona. Use tools like Manta (location, size), Datanyze, BuiltWith, and CrunchBase to create separate lists of targets based on their:

• Technology use
• Company size
• Location
• Industry

Prioritize targets that find a spot in multiple lists (such as a company that uses WordPress, makes $10M in revenue, and is located in your city). Once you find these high-value targets, augment data using Salesforce, Pardot, or Datanyze to find decision makers.

Use tools like GrowBots to automate messaging at scale. For a cheaper alternative, try MailShake.

Instead of writing every message from scratch, create templatse that allows room for “minimally effective personalization”. That is, a message with just enough personalization to appear hand-crafted.

For example, this template from FreshSales can pull in data from a CRM automatically. The only field you actually need to personalize is the highlighted benefit statement:

An example of a personalized email template (Image credit: FreshSales)

Along with automated scheduling, this limited personalization is crucial for achieving scale in your outbound campaigns.

7. Use Facebook Ads with Remarketing to Retain Interest

Hiring an agency isn’t an impulse buy. Companies deliberate extensively before deciding who to work with.

Given the long sales cycle, it is crucial that you retain your prospects’ interest over time. It’s not enough to make a favorable impression on first touch; you have to maintain top-of-mind-awareness (TOMA) throughout the cycle.

An affordable, non-interruptive way to do this is through remarketing, especially when its paired with targeted content.

Here’s a simplified process to do this:

• Set up a targeted Facebook ad campaign sharing a targeted content piece
• Add a lead magnet to capture leads from the content
• Add remaining visitors to a remarketing campaign

You can expand this by sending all captured leads to a more aggressive remarketing campaign.

For example, Ax Agency advertised an article on ‘fatal marketing mistakes’ as part of its Christmas promotions:

(Image credit: FunnelDash)

The trick to make remarketing work is to bid low for ads and high for the remarketing. This eliminates low-interest prospects. If someone is engaging with you a second time (through the remarketing campaign), they’re more likely to be interested in your services.

As David Gaz said in our previous article on the best agency marketing tips:

“Bid low for the ads, and bid high for the remarketing. Once they click on the remarketing ads they are almost certainly a client.”

8. Repurpose Content and Distribute Off-Site

Content marketing can be one of your most powerful sources of new leads. But by publishing only on your own site, you’re greatly limiting the reach of your content.

Repurposing your content and sharing it on high-traffic sites – Slideshare, Quora, LinkedIn, etc. – can give you access to entirely new audiences. Pair this repurposed content with the right lead magnets, and they can turn into a goldmine of new leads.

For example, we repurpose our blog posts on LinkedIn that generate hundreds of additional views every week. Not bad for a few minutes of work!

Some sites such as Slideshare also have built-in tools to make capturing leads easier. Others such as Quora will let you plug in your website in highly targeted questions.

When repurposing your content, consider four questions:

• How easy is the content to repurpose?
• Can you reuse the repurposed content elsewhere?
• How targeted is the content topic?
• How many secondary channels can you distribute the repurposed content on?

Some content repurposing approaches – such as Slideshare presentations – will require significant upfront investment, but will have high reusability (you can embed a presentation in multiple posts). Others can be created easily and redistributed on multiple platforms (such as an article summary published on Medium and LinkedIn).

Another tactic I recommend is searching Quora for sub-headers in your article. Answer the top questions that show up with content from your article.

For example, one of the sub-headers in our previous article on building a referral system is “develop an incentive program”. Searching for it on Quora shows me several questions where I can plug in our blog post:

Here’s a process you can follow for repurposing your content:

• Summarize articles and syndicate them on Medium, LinkedIn, and Google+
• Search Quora for sub-headers from your article. Share your article in relevant questions.
• Create a slide deck from your article and share it on Slideshare and Scribd. You can also embed Slideshare presentations on your own site.
• Condense article into informal posts and share them on targeted sub-reddits on Reddit.

Your goal should be to maximize how much value you extract from your content. The wider you spread your net, the more people you’ll be able to reach.

9. Target High-Volume Tangential Keywords

Targeting middle and bottom-of-the-funnel keywords within your industry will be the bread and butter of your content marketing campaign. But you can quickly run out of viable keywords to target with this strategy.

One solution is to focus on high-volume, top-of-the-funnel keywords in tangential industries. that Typically, these are keywords that have an indirect relation to your business.

For example, we created this article on ‘team building activities’ that ranks at the top of the SERPs and brings us thousands of visitors every month.

Although “team building activities” isn’t directly related to project management, it is a part of team building, which, in turn, is a part of effective management.

The key benefits of targeting such tangential keywords are:

• Lower competition: Everyone in your industry targets the same industry-specific keywords. But the competition for tangential industry is often lower.
• Higher traffic: Since you’re picking keywords in related industries, you can usually pick high-volume, broad keywords that can bring in substantial traffic.

On the flip side, your leads from such keywords will be untargeted. Be prepared to invest in a lead qualification program to filter out poor quality leads.

10. Scale Lead-Generation from Client Referrals

Client referrals are an excellent source of leads, but they’re hard to scale.

Or are they?

As we showed in an earlier post, scaling client referrals isn’t just possible, it’s downright easy.

Here’s the process in a nutshell:

• Identify your most satisfied clients by using the Net Promoter System (NPS)
• Use LinkedIn to find desirable lead targets from your top clients’ connections.
• Offer personalized incentives for introductions and referrals.
• Reduce friction in sending referrals by creating ready-to-use templates that clients can use in introductions.
• Time your referral ask at positive moments in your relationship (such as project delivery, meeting a key milestone, etc.)

This process works because you only target clients who are happy to recommend others to you (as identified by their NPS scores). By creating templates and asking for specific introductions, you also reduce the friction in sending referrals.

11. Create a Targeted Affiliate Program

You don’t usually think of “agency” when you think of “affiliate programs”. The practice is far more widespread in the software and e-commerce industries.

But agencies can benefit from affiliate programs as well, especially when they are highly targeted.

Conceptually, the process works the same way as any conventional referral program. When someone becomes an affiliate, they get a special link to send you referrals. Any sales attributed to this link earns the referrer a commission.

Marketing agency 180Fusion, for instance, offers separate client referral and affiliate referral programs:

(Image credit: 180Fusion)

The problem with affiliate programs is that it’s not always easy to attribute a sale to a specific referral. There’s also the problem of untargeted leads and referral scams. While lead volume is a good thing, it can quickly become an issue if the leads are consistently low-quality.

The antidote to this problem is to create a closed, invite-only affiliate program that targets influencers. With this approach, you’ll recruit influencers the same way you would land client referrals, that is:

• Find influencers with substantial following in your industry (usually bloggers)
• Create highly targeted landing pages for them to promote your agency services
• Use these personalized landing pages to show your intent when recruiting influencers

You’ll have to pay a generous commission, of course. But influencers will also appreciate if you create promotion assets for them (such as personalized landing pages).

The key benefit of this targeted approach is that it eliminates all tire kickers. Since you have complete control over who gets into the affiliate program, you can remove low quality affiliates. The personalized approach will also help you (and the influencers) improve conversion rates.

The large volume of traffic influencers have access to also means that you can get high-quality leads at scale.

If you’re going to use this tactic, here are some tools you can use to manage affiliates:

• LeadDyno
• Scaleo
• Tapfiliate

12. Create a Lead Capture Plan for Events

Capturing leads from events is easy: show up, network, collect business cards.

The trouble with this passive approach is that you either end up collecting too few or too untargeted leads.

What you need is a comprehensive lead generation plan for events.

Here are a few tips:

Before the event

Before the event starts, ask the organizers for a list of attending companies. Study their websites and identify any that would be a good fit for your agency.

For this list of top prospects, create personalized material that you can hand out during the event. This doesn’t have to be elaborate; a card with the company’s name is more than enough.

PipeCandy, for instance, created greeting cards with the target’s name and a personalized pitch to hand out at events:

(Image credit: PipeCandy)

Doing your homework before the event makes sure that you won’t just make a great impression, but you’ll also collect high-value leads.

At the event

Events are, first and foremost, about people. Whether it’s a trade show or a conference, selling should take a backseat to building relationships.

That said, your lead generation efforts should be guided by data, not intuition. Supplement badge scans with an optional data-collection form. Make sure that you only ask for relevant data not available through badge scans.

Another tactic you can try is to tie in your event promotions to your content offers. Ask yourself: what are the top “themes” in your content marketing? What are your most popular pieces of content? Is there any way you can bring these content experiences to the event?

For example, your most popular content piece might feature an interview with an influencer. If you can get this influencer to attend the event on your behalf, you can create a more cohesive content experience.

Once you’ve wrapped up the event, make sure to follow-up and schedule phone calls with all targeted leads.

Over to you

It’s never easy to scale lead generation, but these tactics should help. Not all of these will be applicable to your agency. Pick a tactic that fits your budget and current requirements.

What tactics do you use to grow your agency? Share with us in the comments below!

Modern content marketers can’t get by on a limited knowledge base these days. Along with insights around their brand and product, they have to have skills that help them deliver top-quality, valuable content to the target audience that drive results.

The reason: More than 2 million (yes, million) blog posts are published every single day. With so much competition and noise in the content marketing environment, content marketers have to go above and beyond if they want to stand out (and be remembered.)

But what are the specific skills a modern content marketer needs to succeed within his or her role? Let’s take a look at five specific areas of expertise that are essential today, as well as some expert insight and resources to help develop them as well.

1. Effective Communication

According to 2017 data from Content Marketing Institute, the number one factor contributing to marketers’ increased success over the past year is higher quality content creation. In short, that means the marketers driving better results are the ones who have gotten better at telling stories and sharing valuable material that the audience actually cares about.

Image source

Better content means potential leads and customers get more value out of the blog posts being shared. They’re learning something new. They’re being taught how to solve a problem. They’re leveraging the information shared to relieve pain points within their lives and/or work.

Ann Handley, Head of MarketingProfs, said,

“Content marketers today have to have the ability to write clearly, which helps with understanding how best to build content assets and campaigns that your customers will enjoy and value.”

So what’s the secret sauce for this “better quality” content, anyway? Let’s do a quick dive into Communications 101 and look at two key elements around stellar content that produces results:

1. Storytelling. Scientific research shows that stories not only produce an emotional response within the brain, but it also produces a phenomenon called neural coupling, in which the brain waves in the listener to mirror those of the storyteller. By telling stories in content and pairing it with an interactive element, you can build immersive experiences for your audience that are memorable and impactful.
2. Knowing your audience. When you truly understand who you’re writing for, the challenges they face, and what they need/want to hear from you, your ability to effectively communicate improves by leaps and bounds. Marketer Andy Newman said, “The ability to filter out the noise and understand what really matters to people is essential for effective content marketing today.”

Looking for a few resources to improve your communication efforts? Try these:

• Copyhackers: Great for advanced copywriting advice to drive sales efforts
• Copyblogger: Storytelling and writing insights for content marketers at any level
• Enchanting Marketing: Beginner level, easy-to-digest tips on storytelling and communication

2. Research Prowess

The best content marketers love learning and know the value of high-quality research.

By pouring over data and new scientific findings, they share important data with readers–and can quickly build their ethos so they’re seen an expert. But this also means that the highly skilled content marketers often question current best practices. They rely on data and tested hypotheses over assumptions and following the status quo.

Marketing experts like Jay Acunzo say this gives them a competitive advantage:

“In questioning best practices, marketers act like investigators. The goal of their work isn’t to understand what worked best for others. Instead, their goal is to know what will work best for THEM, as quickly as possible, and in as tailored a manner as possible. Experts may care about absolutes and theory, but investigators care about evidence. That’s the hallmark of any great content marketer today.”

So where can content marketers turn for reliable, authority-building research?

• Their own marketing experiments. By conducting original research, they can get hands-on with experimentation and showcase never-before-seen findings around what they learned in the process.
• Google Scholar. This resource has up-to-date scientific data published in trusted publications that are peer-reviewed.
• JSTOR. This digital library has a catalog of esteemed journals, magazines, and books.

3. Grasp on Customer Experience/UX

With Forrester research showing more than 90% of marketers say that a good customer experience is critical to their success, you can understand why customer experience and user experience (UX) skills are a top priority for content marketers today.

But keeping a firm grasp on what customers need and want out of brand interactions is no easy task. It requires the creation of an ongoing feedback loop through surveys, quizzes, and other interactive experiences–and then action based on the data collected.

“Remember that every interaction is a chance to make it or break it with customers,” said marketer Holly Landis. “Interview/survey your audience to find out what their REAL problems are–don’t just assume. Tailor content based on those findings.”

Resources for strengthening customer experience skills include:

• Survey tools like SurveyMoney and GetFeedback. This software allows you to conduct email surveys on an ongoing basis so you always know what your audience wants and needs.
• Interactive quizzes and assessments. These resources allows you to build these data-collecting assets for improved customer experience.

4. Metrics/Analytics and Data Synthesis

Today, content marketers have to be skilled in not only looking at analytics, but also in synthesizing multiple pieces of data to draw conclusions and make smart marketing decisions. And there are many, many different metrics a content marketer has to study in that process.

A few of the key content marketing metrics skilled marketers need to study today are:

• Pageviews
• Average time on page
• Bounce rate
• Social shares
• Lead submission rate

By understanding the numbers around content marketing efforts, content marketers can better report on their efforts to the leadership team, translating day-to-day work into real, tangible results. This data synthesis also helps an expert marketers connect the dots between different marketing activities and the conversion-driving results everyone is working toward.

Marketing writer Alexander Lewis echoed this when he said,

“Knowing how to find primary sources is crucial. Content marketers should publish idea and information they receive directly from a source and learn some basics about interpreting data. Many blogs are just regurgitated information gleaned from other topical articles.”

There are many tools out there today that make strengthening this particular skill ultra-easy:

• Google Analytics. This basic tool provides baseline insight into website performance, lead generation, and customer acquisition.
• Buzzsumo. This tool allows marketers to look at in-depth analytics around content marketing performance across channels.
• Hotjar. This tool lets you take a behind-the-scenes peek at website visitors’ real-time interactions with your content marketing efforts.

5. SEO

SearchEngineLand data says that search engine optimization (SEO) skills paired with content marketing can supercharge marketing efforts for maximum results.

Here’s why: Not only do SEO skills help content become more organically discoverable, but it also adds synergy to an ongoing PPC strategy, too. When these two efforts work together, both aspects of marketing become more powerful and impactful for the business.

SEO expert Brendan Hufford had a lot to say about this:

“Content marketers need to learn SEO skills for two primary reasons: First, unlike every other method of marketing your content, organic search traffic is the only time people are actively looking for your products and services. Second, SEO transforms ordinary content into assets that stack on top of each other, multiplying the impact of your efforts,” he said.

Even if you’re not an SEO expert, there are plenty of resources that can get you up to speed in little to no time:

• Moz’s SEO resource center. This information hub is jam-packed with free lessons on SEO and how to leverage it in content marketing efforts.
• SearchEngineJournal. This site has all of the up-to-date news and trends on SEO to keep you on the cutting edge of this realm.
• Hubspot’s SEO resources. Hubspot has a collection of lessons and posts that can help even the most beginner-level learner rise to expert status via actionable material.

Skills Content Marketers Need Today: Are You Up to Par?

With so many skills needed for effective content marketing today, it can feel slightly overwhelming when you try to think about how you’ll prioritize your education efforts–but with this shortlist of the most necessary skills for content marketers today, we hope this will take some of the guesswork out of your training.