A few weeks ago, Jonathan Farrington, CEO Top Sales World, interviewed Byron Matthews and me for the July edition of Top Sales Magazine to discuss the launch of our new book Sales Enablement: A Master Framework to Engage, Equip, and Empower A World-Class Sales Force.

JF: Your book Sales Enablement: A Master Framework to Engage, Equip, and Empower A World-Class Sales Force seems to be the first strategic, holistic, and research-based book on sales enablement in the market. What was your motivation for writing this book now?

BM: In a nutshell, it’s because buyers are getting better at buying than sellers are getting better at selling. That gap has increased so much now that it’s an inflection point and caused sales enablement to be born. Our selling models have to change fundamentally, from information to inspiration. And that’s why sales enablement exists, to engage, equip and empower our sales force to engage differently with the modern buyers. We work with a few thousands of clients a year all over the world. We see a tremendous amount of investments in sales organizations of all shapes and sizes. The one thing that is just so pervasive right now is this sales enablement function. As we are researching sales enablement at CSO Insights for many years, we had to go out in the market to show what successful looks like in enablement because there was no blueprint, no playbook out there.

TS: Sales enablement is all over the place, it’s the fastest growing movement in sales, from 19% of organizations with sales enablement in 2013 up to 59% in 2017. In parallel, the confusion about sales enablement was growing at the same speed because so many people got into new enablement roles, influenced by the functional bias of their executives but without a clear concept how to approach it successfully. In the age of the customer, traditional how-to-sell approaches, centered around what a product IS and what it DOES, are no longer valuable, relevant and differentiating for modern buyers. Instead, buyers want to learn how a product or service can help them to solve a business problem and to achieve their goals, and that’s all about what a product or service MEANS in THEIR context. And that requires a very different way to engage buyers, an inspirational approach, as Byron said. And that requires different skills, different conversations, different content, different value messages, and different coaching. Building an enablement function to provide all these services in a consistent and effective way to transform sales forces in the age of the customer, that’s what our book is all about.

JF: Whilst, as you suggest, Tamara, enablement seems to be a fast-growing movement, my understanding is that only one-third of organizations are successful with enablement implementation according to your research. Can we talk about the challenges organizations are running into at the implementation stage?

TS: The main challenge we see in our research and with our clients is how enablement is set up in an organization. Running enablement as a tactical program, in an ad-hoc or project manner without senior executive sponsorship and with no clear vision of what it should help to achieve is a recipe for failure.

The successful one-third run sales enablement based on a formal vision of success and a formal enablement charter. Such a charter defines how sales enablement helps to support the strategy, how selling challenges are addressed with different enablement services, for what roles and how success is measured. Organizations that run sales enablement this way see up to 27.6% better quota attainment rates. That’s a lot!
Another key challenge is that enablement services are created around products instead of aligning them to the different phases of the customer’s path, relevant buyer roles, and business challenges. We spend an entire chapter on the role of value messaging as the glue that holds, for instance, product training and value messaging guidelines and customer-facing content and internal playbooks together. If all these assets are inconsistent to each other they are neither used nor are they effective in any way. And the third key challenge is not to enable sales managers to become excellent coaches to drive adoption and reinforcement. Sales coaching is actually the most impactful enablement service, improving win rates and quota attainment up to 28%.

JF: All of that makes perfect sense. Byron, may I ask you what’s the role of technology, especially CRM, when it comes to effective sales enablement?

BM: Technology plays a huge role. In general, sales and sales enablement technologies are promising to reduce the tedium, which means all the non-selling activities salespeople do (65%) and increase ingenuity (creating value in buyer interactions, 35%). The problem is that there are more than 500 technology companies out there that are dedicated to improving sales performance. Just a few years ago, there were a hundred. Let me focus on CRM because it’s the foundation for all other sales technologies. This explosion of vendors won’t continue like this. Let me share with you our perspective on this.

Initially, the idea of CRM was based on salespeople’s personal Rolodex, let’s call it CRM 1.0. In the nineties, Tom Siebel built a packaged CRM solution, an on-premise service that provided visibility into pipeline and opportunities. CRM 2.0. Then, Salesforce wiped out Siebel almost overnight, put the CRM in the cloud and made it much cheaper. And hundreds of companies started to provide various cloud-based point solutions for sales challenges. Technology drove this evolution, not salespeople. CRM still is very often about manager benefits, not about seller benefits. Guess what? Tedium increased, it didn’t decrease. Now, there is CRM 4.0 on the horizon to fix what’s broken by focusing on what drives sales results. And that’s seller behavior. CRM 4.0 will be AI-based, insight led, and it will be powered by methodology, an ally in helping sellers to improve sales performance.

JF: I fully appreciate that the book is structured by the sales enablement clarity model, in fact, a diamond with different facets that has to be cut and polished based on an organization’s context and challenges: Byron, what advice would you give sales leaders looking to create and sustain an enablement function?

BM: First and foremost, sales leaders have to understand why sales enablement was born, that it’s not another word for training, content, technology or sales excellence, etc. In fact, sales enablement takes all this to a new level. And therefore, sales leaders have to fully understand the transformation needs of their sales forces. They have to understand that sales organizations have to speed up very quickly, have to become a lot more agile to transform their selling models so that the sales force can be valuable, relevant and differentiating for today’s modern buyers. And a transformation requires their senior executive sponsorship, their priority, and commitment, to work with the enablement leader to develop a clear vision of success and a strategic set-up of the enablement function. Only then, as Tamara said, a solid approach based on a charter can be successfully implemented.

JF: Tamara, what advice would you give sales enablement leaders looking to evolve their function to even greater levels?

TS: If we want to get better at something, we should first assess where we are at right now. Even if an organization does not have any formal enablement initiative or function right now, enablement happens, usually in many different functions and in an inconsistent way. That’s what you can call a rough diamond that needs to be cut and polished to be valuable and effective. Wherever you are in your organization, maybe having a rough diamond or a partially cut and polished one, our enablement maturity assessment model and the related tool on our book expert page would be the first step. Based on knowing their maturity level, enablement leaders should discuss the current state with their sponsors, map against the current business strategy and the state of sales strategy implementation to adjust and hone their enablement strategy.
General recommendations are implementing an enablement charter if that’s not already done (we have a process and a template in the book!), ensuring a solid foundation of a sales process that is well aligned to the customer’s path (together with sales operations), aligning the enablement services to each other along the customer’s path to ensure consistency and effectiveness. And then, addressing sales managers, enabling them to become frontline coaches is key to success and should always be an element of a mature and scalable sales enablement approach.

JF: What are the main ideas and principles sales leaders should take from the book? 

BM: The key message for sales leaders is to understand sales enablement as its core, as the engine to transform your sales force to engage in a different way, inspiring instead of informing, to meet the needs of the modern buyer. Sales enablement is all about sophisticating a salesperson to meet the needs of professional selling today, which is being valuable, relevant and differentiating in every interaction. Sales transformation was always a scary word for many sales leaders, now it’s about time to change. Sales enablement is the engine to drive this transformation. As this is a massive undertaking, sales leaders have to understand the bigger picture, so that they can provide the resources and the budget needed for sales enablement leaders to actually implement enablement successfully.

JF: Tamara, may I ask you the same question, specifically, regarding how sales enablement leaders should leverage the clarity model?

TS: The main idea for sales enablement leaders is to get from sales enablement confusion to clarity and strategy, leveraging real-world enablement expertise, experience, and research. We support this idea in our book with a research-based sales enablement framework, the clarity model that allows enablement leaders to achieve different things: One is to assess their current enablement maturity stage to understand where they are at. Two is to leverage the framework to evolve and sharpen their enablement strategy, using the data we provide so that enablement leaders can get an idea what their outcomes could look like and why. Three is to use the related checklists, processes and practical templates in the book to actually implement enablement successfully. And four is to get inspired by the case studies, quotes, and examples we have featured in the book.

JF: Finally, Byron, what can we expect from Miller Heiman Group next?

BM: We are working on a couple of exciting things. We are proud to launch Scout! Scout is our new sales analytics platform that helps drive seller actions, change deal outcomes and replicate winning. With Scout, you will always “see the move that moves the deal.” Additionally, we are proud to launch Strategic Selling with Perspective which is our contribution to evolve our services to the ever-changing buyers in the digital age.

JF: And Tamara, what’s next in the world of research?

TS: We just launched our first ever Buyer Preferences Study. We are working on our Sales Effectiveness Study and, most important for me, we are already recruiting participants for our 2018 Sales Enablement Optimization Study.

 

The post Sales Enablement: A Master Framework to Engage, Equip, and Empower A World-Class Sales Force appeared first on Sales Enablement Perspectives.

Before you set your pricing strategy, or even make tactical pricing decisions, it is a good idea to understand the market dynamics for your offer. Economists tell us that prices will trend to the point where the line for price elasticity of demand intersects the line for the price elasticity of supply. That is the theory anyway. It is only true for commodities where there is no differentiation of buyers or sellers, and it is somewhat approaching perfect information. This does not describe your market. If your product development teams are doing a good job, there is no perfect substitute for your offer and your customers come in all different shapes and sizes, with different needs and pricing sensitivities.

This does not mean you can ignore the connection between price and demand. The shape of the price elasticity of demand curve is an important constraint on your strategy. Here are sketches of four typical demand curves. Which of these reflects your market? If you don't know the answer, you can often figure this out by looking at your own transactional data (if you have pricing software it may help you to do this), or through market research or even by talking to experts in your market and applying common sense.

The simplest assumption (top left) is that demand will increase more or less linearly as you reduce price. If this is even approximately true, then you have a lot of room to set your strategic direction. Most markets are not like this though.

In many markets, demand is not all that sensitive to price at the top end of the market, but very sensitive to price in the bottom end (top right). If this is the case you need to have a premium strategy and stay in the top end of the market, or you need to be able to compete for market share with a low price in the bottom end of the market. It is often difficult to survive in the middle. We are seeing a lot of markets move towards this sort of concave structure with a resulting hollowing out of the middle. This can put a lot of pressure on companies with mid-market offers. If this is happening in your market, you need a strategy to compete at the high end or the low end, or you may even need to move into an adjacent market. In B2B software, we are seeing this trend in markets that are commoditizing, like customer relationship management (CRM), learning management systems, (LMS) and supply chain management (SCM). One of our hypotheses is that this is going to happen very quickly with artificial intelligence (AI) and that the many companies investing in this area are going to get caught in a mid-market squeeze.

On the other hand, there are plenty of markets with a convex demand curve (bottom left). These markets are similar to the linear case, but with a price floor that it does not make sense to go below. At the bottom end of the market, the lower prices will not make up for the small increase in demand.

S-shaped curves (seen in the bottom middle and bottom right) can create interesting market dynamics. In the bottom middle curve, there is usually a small 'luxury' market and a large mid-market with almost no low end (it is too difficult to make money at the low end of these markets). This is an alternative possible outcome for AI, with a very small number of high end offers and a large number of mid-market offers. The curve on the bottom right also generates an interesting market dynamic, with solid high end and low end markets, but little in between. Many pharmaceutical products have this market structure.

Even when the demand curve has the same shape, the slope is an important question. Markets with a steep slope are very price sensitive and price changes require careful thought and monitoring. If the slope is flatter there is more room for experiment and some forgiveness of error. In general, the more competitive a market and the less differentiation, the steeper the slope.

Price elasticity of demand is only one determinant of market dynamics. Equally important is cross price elasticity. This is the tendency for people to switch to a substitute in response to a price change. If the price of coffee at Starbucks goes up are you likely to switch to another coffee shop or will you remain loyal to Starbucks? At some point you will switch. You will probably not pay $15 for a cup of coffee, but generally speaking Starbucks has a low cross-price elasticity. On the other hand, the cross-price elasticity for things that are easily substituted tends to be high, such as bottled water.

This gets really interesting when you combine price elasticity of demand with cross price elasticity. It is possible to have high cross price elasticity and low price elasticity of demand. I this case, lower prices do not grow the market but the can shift market share from one supplier to another.

Let's look at four possible scenarios: Low Price Elasticity of Demand and Low Cross Price Elasticity; Low Price Elasticity of Demand and High Cross Price Elasticity; High Price Elasticity of Demand and Low Cross Price Elasticity; and High Price Elasticity of Demand and High Cross Price Elasticity. You need to know which of these four quadrants you are in.

Stable Markets: Low Price Elasticity of Demand and Low Cross Price Elasticity

These are nice markets to operate in. The focus is on value rather than price, there are many opportunities for differentiation, value-based segmentation and customer targeting are the key. The combination of low price elasticity of demand and low cross price elasticity means that a premium pricing strategy is almost certainly the right choice. On the down side, these markets often grow slower than markets with high price elasticity of demand.

Competitive Markets: Low Price Elasticity of Demand and High Cross Price Elasticity

These are the toughest markets to operate in. There is not a lot of room to grow the overall market (to 'grow the pie' so to speak). Any price cut generally leads to a price war that destroys value for all competitors and any price increase pushes demand over to competitors. In this type of market you have to be willing and able to send out strong pricing signals such as "we will not be undersold" or "everyday low prices." Mature markets where there is a lot of commoditization are generally in this quadrant.

Growth Markets: High Price Elasticity of Demand and Low Cross Price Elasticity

These are some of the most interesting markets as there are many different pricing strategies that will work. You can adopt a premium pricing strategy and optimize gross profit, or go for more of a penetration strategy and try to grow market share and revenue. Many early-stage markets have this structure. (If it is not a growth market why are you investing in innovating here?) Differentiation is important in these markets, and one of the ways you can differentiate is with your pricing strategy.

Chaotic Markets: High Price Elasticity of Demand and High Cross Price Elasticity

As understanding of a market grows among both buyers and sellers, a chaotic situation can emerge in which both price elasticity of demand and cross price elasticity are high. In these markets, which are often Geoffrey Moore's tornado markets, pricing is dynamic and needs to be reviewed weekly, sometimes daily. Prices will trend down as there is a lot of pressure to both grow the market and to capture market share. Pure premium strategies are likely to fail as competitors compete to undermine your value propositions, which are increasingly well understood and easily copied. Penetration strategies will provoke competitive responses, but unlike Competitive Markets there is often enough growth to make up for lower prices. In chaotic markets pricing needs to be central to strategy and pricing experts who are able to think on their feet stay aware of shifts in the market are critical.

Questions to ask

You can't set a pricing strategy without understanding the market dynamics. Make sure you know which quadrant you are acting in and which direction the market is heading. Stable markets can become chaotic when disruptive solutions bring in new customers. Growth markets become more competitive as they mature. If you are acting in a chaotic market, will it mature unto a growth or competitive market?

As you develop and evolve your pricing strategy, make sure you can answer the following questions.

1. If I raise my prices, what will my competitors do? Will they raise prices along with me or will they lower prices and try to take away my customers?

2. If I raise prices, what will my customers do? Will they accept the raise while expecting more value or will they look for other solutions?

3. If I lower my prices, what will my competitors do? Will they lower their prices to match me or will they stay put?

4. If I lower my prices, what will my customers do? Will they buy more or simply pocket the price reduction?

5. If my competitor raises prices, what will I do? Will I also raise prices or will I try to steal some of their customers using the new price differential?

6. If my competitor raises prices, what will their customers do? Can they carry their customers with them to the new price level? Will they be seen as the stronger solution that provides more value? Or will some of their customers start to look for alternatives?

7. If my competitor lowers prices, what will I do? Will I have to follow suit and risk a price war or can I afford to ignore this?

8. If my competitor lowers prices, what will their customers do? Does my competitor have an opportunity to trigger overall market growth or is this more about market share?

You need to ask these questions many times, and track how your answers change as the market evolves. Markets are dynamic systems, and pricing has to respond to changes in market dynamics. Put this on the agenda for your next leadership meeting.

 

 

 

Most sales and marketing teams are looking for ways to generate more leads. It's likely a daily discussion for most of us, but have you ever considered that your sales reps need fewer leads—or more accurately, fewer raw, unfiltered, unqualified leads. Sales reps need leads that have been carefully qualified and properly and consistently nurtured increasing the likelihood of a sale.

Why Doesn’t It Work?

1. Marketing is paid, in fact rewarded for, lead quantity and not quality.
2. Technology solutions push more, poor quality, leads to sales faster and more efficiently than ever.

Far too many companies evaluate marketing’s success by the number of leads they hand over to sales. Many of the same companies fail to hold sales accountable for closing the good leads and for reporting back results that feed the marketing and sales model. The overall result is often wasted marketing dollars and wasted sales time.

The true measure of successful marketing should be how well marketing creates sales opportunities that have a high potential of developing into sales. The true measure of sales should be how well they close these good leads from marketing.

What Can You Do About It?

1) Develop a process to measure the cost per fully-qualified lead.

In addition to analyzing the actual cost of a qualified lead (not just the cost to generate a raw lead), you should also carefully measure the progression of leads through the sales process.

When analyzing one lead source for a giant software client, we found that marketing had generated 3,117 leads at a cost of $23.15 per lead. However, upon further analysis only 40 were fully qualified and warranted sales follow-up. Of the rest 586 were disqualified, had bad data, or were existing customers. 514 required further nurturing before they could be considered sales ready and the balance couldn't be contacted after multiple attempts. The actual cost to obtain a fully qualified lead—$2,662.24.

If you are inspecting outcomes and conducting in-depth analysis at every step, you can substantially improve results.

2) Designate a group to nurture leads until they are sales-ready; and to take opportunities back if sales cannot gain traction for one reason or another.

Whose job is lead filtration, qualification and development? In our experience, best practices suggest that a separate group, inside or outside the company, needs to take control of the vital lead development function. Think of this group of specialists as “lead farmers,” or prospect development specialists—they qualify inbound leads, nurture lukewarm prospects, and turn the developed leads over to the sales force for harvesting. Often this process takes months.

A lead farmer equips the sales rep with in-depth knowledge about the prospect. With advance insight into the prospect’s motivations, pain points and buying plans, the sales rep can engage the prospect in a consultative conversation rather than launching into a cold-call presentation or a discovery interview.

By not passing unfiltered, unqualified leads to your sales team—and focusing instead on delivering fewer, yet more qualified prospects—you have the very real potential to significantly impact your organization’s ability to generate revenue.

 

 

• IBM's Chief Marketing Officer Michelle Peluso joined the tech giant two years ago and completely revamped how her 5,000-person department works.
• Inspired by her time as CEO at Travelocity, Peluso implemented the Agile Method, a project management technique used primarily by software engineers.
• Agile's main components are short deadlines, and small "squads" which work together to complete tasks as a team. Each squad has people with diverse areas of expertise.
• It leads to "better outcomes," Peluso says, and has helped IBM become more data-centric in its marketing.

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When Michelle Peluso joined IBM two years ago as chief marketing officer, she decided to completely revamp the way people worked. If she was going to move the storied media company's 5,500-person global marketing team forward, she thought, they would have to be more agile, or rather, Agile. 

Agile is a project management methodology that became popular with software development teams in the early 2000s. The methodology is designed to maximize "value creation" by pushing out product updates faster — usually on a two week deadline. 

It's the way that tech titans like Facebook and Google got so big so fast, by organizing teams so that they could improve the product in real time with a constant stream of small updates. 

So how does a computer programming technique apply to advertisements, brochures and other marketing material?

In marketing, this means putting out brand campaigns one piece at a time, and adjusting the next iteration based off of data and customer feedback. Previously, marketing teams at IBM would work on projects for months before putting anything out into the world, Peluso said. 

"You just feel more productive. It's more rewarding to get to see work going live faster and much more regularly," Peluso told Business Insider. "It tends to produce better outcomes because you're iterating all of the time."

Agile brought an end to IBM's work-from-home policy 

Peluso, who first tested the methodology while CEO at Travelocity, thinks IBM may the most "aggressive at scale" teams to use Agile for marketing. 

To make this happen, IBM reorganized its marketers from large, focused departments into 8 to 10 person "squads" who all bring different skill sets to a project. 

"So instead of having a full-functioning creative department or a full-functioning product marketing department or content department or social department or analytics department, every squad has to have some of those ingredients," Peluso said.

The transition hasn't been without some difficulties. For one, about 2,600 people on Peluso's team worked from home when she first joined IBM. But in spring 2017, IBM made waves by requiring that those people, as well as some software teams, make their way back to IBM offices. 

Team co-location, Peluso said, is vital for Agile to work well since workflow becomes organized around what a squad can accomplish in a set time frame, rather than what the individual can get done. 

"They start their day with certain rituals. They do a daily stand up each morning and end with retrospectives," Peluso explained, adding that each team decides on a joint priority at the start of the day. "It really pushes and forces reconciliation on what is most important."

Now data is front and center for everyone

Changing up how its teams work has positioned IBM to have a more data-centric approach to its marketing campaigns.

For one, the data-minded team members work side-by-side with the creative minds, which means that analytics are involved from the very beginning. Additionally, the shorter deadlines means that IBM can actively adapt its next project to earlier feedback. 

"Now it's like a real time sport," Peluso said.

To put its data to work, IBM has put what Peluso calls "a huge amount of effort" into taxonomizing how it understands data across the entire company. 

"I can't have a different metrics and measurement than the sales team has," Peluso said. "We ground ourselves in the sales and finance data and then we work backwards, so there's not competing versions of the truth and the numbers."

The marketing team also has its own digital dashboard where all of the marketing data from various marketing tech platforms is aggregated into charts and graphs to give insights into its campaigns. Namely, it indicates which teams are making the most out of their ad dollars, and which ones need to play catch up. 

"It's almost the gamification of data," Peluso said. "You create an environment where people strive to do better and you have a lot of transparency."

SEE ALSO: This VC explains why she's sticking to small checks even as $100 million rounds become the norm in Silicon Valley

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We all need time to unplug and recharge. Research shows that disconnecting — especially from email — can make us significantly less stressed and more productive. And yet, many of us are often hesitant to take the first step — putting up an appropriate out of office (OOO) message that sets clear boundaries for our time off. I’ve personally always battled a fear that an OOO message could have unintended consequences, including being perceived as a “slacker,” or leading to missed opportunities.

But the very thing that many of us don’t wish to do — because we believe it could negatively influence our image or success — can often be effectively used to do just the opposite. OOO messages can be an incredible tool to fuel your success. Using these autoresponders — whether during vacation, a conference, or the big moments in our lives like the birth of a child — can create social connection with recipients including colleagues, clients, and vendors.

Sharing a small piece of information about you, your trip, or your company’s product or service can serve to deepen a business relationship or the connection a client feels toward your company. Research finds that social connection, which adds meaning and depth to our relationships, is the greatest predictor of long-term levels of happiness, and can be a major contributing factor to our performance at work. When people feel positively linked to us, they are more likely to want to do business with us, and will be more likely to want to figure out solutions to problems together. Connection comes from feeling like you really know someone.

You and Your Team Series

Time Off

The loudest voices on the social channels will tell you the largest change in sales is the advent of those same social channels. They are all hyped up on digital transformation and social selling and all the shiny, digital objects that capture their attention. While it’s nice to have new tools, they are not even close to the largest change in sales over the last decade.

Here are the new rules of B2B Sales:

Rule 1: Your business acumen must now be equal to or greater than your sales acumen.

The largest and most important change that has occurred in B2B sales is the requirement that the salesperson has the business acumen and situational knowledge to help their clients understand why and how they need to change what they are doing.

It is no longer enough to show up with a slide deck that outlines your company’s storied history, your global or national footprint, your board of directors and investors, the logos of the big companies that buy from you, and your product and service offerings. It is no longer enough to talk features, benefits, and advantages, these providing no advice as it pertains to change. Overcoming objections provides clients zero value in a world where change is necessary and one in which real and valid concerns need to be addressed.

If you are going to succeed in B2B sales, you are going to need to be someone with the advice and counsel your dream clients need.

Rule 2: You must sell strategic outcomes.

No one wants to buy your product or service or solution. With rare exceptions, no one cares about what you sell. Instead, they care about their business, their products and services and solutions, and their clients and customers. What they want most of all is better outcomes in all the areas where better outcomes would help them produce better results for their business.

The reason you must be other-oriented instead of self-oriented is because the focus of the conversation you have with your dream clients and existing clients needs to be about the strategic outcomes they need. There has been a serious change to what clients want and need from salespeople, as well as what creates a preference to work with one over another. While it used to be enough to look for “dissatisfaction” or “pain,” unless you can very tightly tie what needs to change to some strategic outcome, you will struggle to displace your competitor in an account.

This rule follows the first rule on business acumen. Without the business acumen, you aren’t going to be able to sell strategic outcomes. Instead, you’ll sell a solution that solves the client’s existing pain. And while this may be what they believe they want and need from you, you will struggle to maintain the margins you need to serve your clients, and you will not position yourself or your company as a strategic partner.

Strategic business results are much more compelling than products, services, or solutions.

Rule 3: You are responsible for controlling the process.

There are a lot of pseudo-experts on sales who will tell you that buyers now have all the power, that the best thing you can do is provide them with the information they need when they ask for it, and that salespeople create no value. These beliefs are not only false, they are disempowering. The truth is quite the opposite.

Right now, your dream clients need someone who knows what needs to change, why it needs to change, how it needs to change, and how guide them from their current state to a better future state. If your dream client knew what to do and how to do it, they would already be generating the better results they need. If they had a process that served them in understanding why and how they need to change, they’d have already done what you know they need to do.

Your dream clients don’t know that they need to collaborate with you to design a solution that is going to work inside their company. It’s likely they have never considered who they need on their side to decide, and they may not have even considered how much consensus is going to be necessary to move forward with a new idea. It’s almost impossible that they believe that they are underinvesting in the results they need, nor do they know that they need to have all their concerns resolved before moving forward. You, on the other hand, know all these things.

If your client has a process, it’s likely an RFP. If they don’t, they are going to flail around, avoiding making the commitments they need to make to produce the strategic outcomes they need. This makes controlling the process your responsibility.

If you don’t control the process, the process will prevent your client from making good decisions—and it will cost you opportunities.

Rule 4: You lead change initiatives.

You lead change initiatives. You lead your team by owning the outcomes you sell and by ensuring they own the transactions (all the things they need to do to produce those outcomes). You also help lead your client’s team, educating them and ensuring they make the necessary changes on their side.

There is no list of sales competencies that includes leadership, minus this one. It isn’t the way that we have historically thought about the role of salesperson. The attributes and skills that make one a good salesperson are very helpful for those who lead, and the lack of the tangibles and intangibles in leadership are as pronounced in sales as they are in leadership. Chief among these competencies are being able to share a compelling vision of the future, helping people make the changes they need to make, and marshaling the necessary resources.

Salespeople also need to deal with the conflict that come with any real change initiative, including conflicting needs, conflicting priorities, and conflicting ideas about what needs to be done to succeed (the “how” to change). If the salesperson cannot—or will not—lead, then the strategic outcomes are almost certain to be put at risk.

You must lead others in the pursuit of a better future state.

Rule 5: You are accountable for what you sell.

In the past, you may have sold a product or service and left it to the client to figure out for themselves how to achieve the results they needed. The end of your responsibility may have been ink on a contract and a signed statement of work or order form.

If you want to be a trusted advisor and a strategic partner, the price of admission is that you own the outcomes you sell. It isn’t enough that you provide the advice, even though you must obey those rules (rules 1 and 2). It isn’t enough that you know how to help your dream client make a good decision (rule 3). The reason that you need to lead (rule 4) is because you are being measured on your ability to deliver the strategic outcomes you sell.

The fact that your product or service is delivered is not enough. Without generating the outcome, your client is not going to get what they needed—and what they were promised—and you are not going to retain your client, nor will you have created the result that would give you an absolute right to propose the next change initiative that moves them closer to the better future results they need.

You own the outcomes you sell.

These are the new rules for success in B2B sales. Violate them at your peril.

The post The New Rules of B2B Sales appeared first on The Sales Blog.

by Bradley R. Staats If you know me, you won’t be surprised that I was drawn to this book when a copy was sent to me. After all, I am a lifelong learner, and nearly all of my writing implies (if not overtly suggests) the value of lifelong learning. The book was sent to me […]

The post Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive appeared first on Kevin Eikenberry on Leadership & Learning.

Increasingly, companies are recognizing that by creating and maintaining a culture of continuous process improvement, they can fuel efficiency, engagement and innovation in the workplace. Just as importantly, a process improvement culture can set the stage for greater profitability and corporate growth.

If making continuous process improvement an integral part of your corporate DNA holds the potential to benefit your staff, your customers and your company’s bottom line, why is it sometimes difficult to generate buy-in from the exec team and employees, and to sustain process management efforts over the long haul?

Let’s start with the C-Suite. To build a compelling case for business process improvement, the exec team needs to understand how it will help them to achieve their business goals. Linking process improvement to the company’s business strategy and demonstrating how each of the processes that will be targeted for improvement will ultimately add value to the organization, will go a long way toward attracting the interest and support of senior leadership team.

Employing a structure that shows how process improvement connects the company’s technology, services and strategy with regard to the customer can also be effective in garnering support from the top. It’s also essential to identify and understand the critical issues and process problems the company is currently facing in order to address them in the process improvement plan.

To identify these issues, you’ll need to get input from employees at all levels within the business. Doing so will serve to pinpoint not only what is keeping staff up at night, but also where disconnects exist between those doing the day-to-day work and the executive team. It is also important to get feedback from customers – what issues are impacting them, and do they have specific complaints or problems?

To ensure that teams throughout the company are motivated to participate and make the process improvement initiatives work, you’ll need to secure buy-in across the business. Consider taking these steps to make that happen:

1. Identify process champions in each department or business team. These champions are typically creative doers who are most likely to challenge the status quo as well as identify alternative (and hopefully better) ways of doing things. Getting their buy-in will help immeasurably in communicating how process improvement can make things better for both staff and customers.

2. Use short, sharp messages that provide examples of exactly how process improvement will make things better. Stay away from messaging that focuses simply on enhancements like reducing costs or improving customer experience. They tend to be overused and not specific enough to grab attention. Because process improvement is about incremental transformation, messaging should be specific, honest and realistic. It also needs to be maintained over an extended period of time.

3. Look for a few quick wins so that both senior leadership and employees immediately see the benefits of the process improvement effort. Identify processes with high levels of inefficiency that are negatively impacting customer experience or are in high-risk areas. It is important for these wins to provide tangible benefits that are quantifiable. Company leadership and teams across the business will want to see more than the promise of happier customers for them to buy in.

4. Process improvement efforts must deliver and demonstrate value on an ongoing basis to maintain continued buy-in from both leadership and staff. Implement regular reviews in order to track and report on the progress being made. These reviews will also serve to identify new areas of opportunity, while maintaining the momentum already being generated. Perhaps most importantly, reviews will provide an opportunity to celebrate the successes achieved to date and the progress being made. Both are critical to maintaining process improvement momentum.

To be successful, business process improvement should become an integrated part of day-to-day operational processes and reviews. Rather than being viewed as an administrative add-on, it needs to become a normal part of a company’s project methodology.

Get process improvement off on the right foot and ensure it is successful, build a solid case and garner both buy-in and involvement from individuals at all levels within the company. While the hardest part may be getting started, maintaining a process improvement culture will become easier once there are a few wins that demonstrate the benefits to customers, staff, and executives.

What does leadership look like in 2018?

Are leaders still believed? Are leaders still trusted? The obvious answer is, "of course!" Just look at the health of the market, the economy and how one business, in particular, crossed the financial threshold into the trillion dollar market valuation (well done, Apple). On the other hand, stop and think about the divisive state of politics, the news, the global economy and the changes shifting us away from a more connected and open world, to one of nationalism and "let's take care of our own first." With all of these strange shifts (it does seem like we're talking out of both sides of our mouth), the leaders of today not only have to deal with the economics and politics at work, but must dig deeper, and find more reason and meaning for their team to pull it together, show up, stand out and make a difference.

Leadership is about more than nurturing a team and contributing true economic value to the corporation.

Our world of disruption, innovation and transformation is less about the technology that we're deploying (and the people who make it happen), and much more about getting back to what Simon Sinek has defined as "the why?" As more and more leaders begin to think about the true corporate "why?," and how the culture of the team will (and must) adapt as our business world changes, there is - perhaps - something bigger to think about: How can we, as a brand, truly open up more. Not just to our consumers, but to our team as well.

Take a principled approach. Read Ray Dalio's Principles.

It's a big book, it's a deep book and it's a counter-intuitive book to how most businesses operate today. These principles worked for Ray Dalio (founder of Bridgewater Associates, which, over the last forty years, has become the largest and best performing hedge fund in the world). What's most striking about the book, Principles - Life & Work (and how Bridgewater grew) is their unprecedented transparency (you can also learn about how radical it truly was in his TED Talk: How to build a company where the best ideas win). While Dalio encourages every organization (and individual) to pursue this route, there was a bigger theme (for me, personally) that emerged from the book that every organization (and individual) can focus on...

Make visible that which is hidden.

Data, business process, human resources, technology implementations, sales, marketing, professional development, internal meetings, team performance, and the list goes on. There are countless areas where leaders can make significant changes and advances, simply by making visible (to all) that which is hidden (to most). A great (and public) example would be MLS (aka Multiple Listing Service) for the residential real estate market. Think back before this platform existed. If an individual wanted to buy a home, they would speak to a realtor (usually referred by a family member or friend). This realtor held all of the available MLS information in a black box. More often than not, consumers would only hear of homes that the real estate agent was personally listing (which may be expanded to other agents in their office, or agents that the consumer's agent was friends with). It was hard (almost impossible) to get a pulse for how many homes were on the market, their prices and more. The agents guarded this information. While the real estate industry may still have agents that don't like the disruptive force of MLS, the industry continues to roll along. Consumers don't just feel more empowered in their own home ownership journey, they are having more open and honest conversations with their agents, because there is less being hidden from them. 

It's not just an open market.

A former Google employee once told me that everyone who worked at company can see very specific information about every teammate on their internal platform. There was even an area that had each Googler's presentation skills rated. Rated not just on how this individual does in the room, but ranked in relation to every other Googler. By making that (usually) hidden information visible, teams for pitches and presentations could get sorted in a much more efficient way. A strategic by-product of this ranking, was that Googler's with a higher rating would often get called for external presentations (to clients or industry events) and this would heighten their visibility within Google, and to their industry. A helpful bump to one's professional development. 

A chance to make visible that which is hidden is available to one and all. 

It's a great question for every leader to ask: What is hidden that we can make visible? It can be asked today. Even if it is answered and resolved, it can be asked again next month, next quarter, and every year. There is always more. Companies always have these incredible pockets of information, talent and value that sits hidden and/or dormant (to a certain degree). As the French would say: "ouvre la fenetre!" Open the window. Let the sun shine in. Let the people walking by see what's inside. Take a look around. Which companies have made visible that which is hidden, and how did that work out for them? Leaders lead. That is the job. Leaders clearing the path, not just for the rest of the team (and the bottom line) to succeed, but to set the business on a course that allows it to thrive (not just survive) in these hyper-competitive (and different) times. 

Let this be the leadership battlecry from this day forward: Make visible that which is hidden!

Tags: advertising apple brand bridgewater associates business business blog business process business strategy corporate culture creativity ctrl alt delete culture data digital marketing digital marketing blog digital transformation disruption economics economy global economy google googler human resources innovation leader leadership management management thinking marketing marketing blog media mitch joel mitchjoel mls multiple listing service performance politics presentation presentation skills principles professional development public markets radical transparency ray dalio real estate sales simon sinek six pixels group six pixels of separation social media start with why talent technology ted ted talk transformation transparency trust

A few years back, I wrote a draft of a book that I called Moneyhall: Building a Strong Town in an Unfair Time. It was a crash course in applying Moneyball thinking to city hall. It was poorly received by potential publishers who judged the overlap in the Venn diagram of urban planning and baseball analytics to be too small to properly market. They were right, and consequently the book will never be published. (Don’t fret—it seriously wasn’t that good.)

One aspect of the book that even my friends objected to was my definition of winning. It’s a fairly clear concept in baseball—you win games, win a division, and the team that wins the World Series is the ultimate winner—but for cities, the concept of winning is more ambiguous. Here’s how I described it:

What does it mean for a city to win? For local governments, there is no defined start and end point like there is in a baseball season. Things don’t ever reset, as they do for baseball after the playoffs. Therefore, the idea of “winning” is not quite as easy to define.

For cities operating in an unfair time, winning is the absence of losing. Winning means being around year after year as the stable, reliable platform which enables a city’s residents to be successful.

To fully understand what I’m suggesting, it is important to distinguish between the local government that manages the city and the people, businesses and institutions that dwell within its boundaries.

People win. Businesses win. Non-profits and local institutions win. Cities serve them all in that regard. The local government as an entity is a platform for communal action, not an end unto itself. What is the point of having a city government that is thriving—with high tax revenues, nice facilities and new projects—when the people it serves are struggling?

Local government can’t (or shouldn’t) progress independently of the people it serves. But if people in a community see their lives improve in ways that don’t allow the local government to take a victory lap, that's fine. It's a problem if a city government prospers while serving a community that struggles. The opposite is acceptable.

Finally, and most importantly, it's okay for private individuals to take risks in a different way than we should tolerate from our local officials. Families and businesses can lose and be okay. The risks they take sometimes don’t work out and they end up in bankruptcy. As a society, we’ve recognized that we should provide a degree of protection and assistance to people who try and fail. People can start over. They can recover and move on. In many instances, I would call such risk takers heroes. At the very least, they are courageous, and we need courageous.

For a local government, the stakes are much different. The failure of a city brings harm to more people outside of city hall than within. In many ways, those in the local government are the least harmed.

While politicians and city staff stand to benefit from actions the government takes, the entire population bears the burden if those actions fail. This is, thus, an asymmetrical risk, one where the person exposed to risk (the resident) is different from the decision-maker and primary beneficiary (public officials and professional staff).

In his most recent book, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, Nassim Taleb affirms my thinking: for local governments, winning is the absence of losing. As he states in the book:

The central problem is that if there is a possibility of ruin, cost-benefit analyses are no longer possible.

Then later:

The central asymmetry of life is: In a strategy that entails ruin, benefits never offset risks of ruin. Every single risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy. Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin.

This kind of prudence is not fun. For professional staff—the planner, the engineer, the city manager—it’s way more inspiring (and better for the resume) to have a grand vision, one with big budgets and bold actions. The fact that our systems of state and federal governance, not to mention corporate consolidation and centralized finance, promote such thinking merely serves to normalize it.

It’s rarely seen as enough to just be competent—to merely, for example, run the buses on time and collect the trash within budget. Yet we should value these humble achievements. There is no downside to simple competence. There is zero risk. None. And all kinds of reasons to believe that doing the little things well has a ton of upside.

For the past two weeks I’ve written about local governments that are taking large, systematic risks—Cobb County and Akron—when what is needed most desperately is a strategy that, first and foremost, avoids ruin.

And now, returning from a vacation where I was disconnected from our media stream, I’m hit with lots of feedback—from public officials and others—that not only defends these risks, but fails to grasp in even the most basic way that there is any risk at all. It’s just the way things are done. I find that so divorced from reality that I struggle to even respond to it.

I’ll close with another quote from Skin in the Game:

                One may be risk-loving yet completely averse to ruin.

Contrary to what has been suggested, I am not against local governments taking risk. Quite the opposite, in fact; I am “risk-loving.” I just want those risks to be of the type that do not include the chance of ruin. This means small bets for which the worst-case outcome is entirely tolerable.

Millions in debt for a new stadium in the hope that mixed-use development around it may prove profitable—despite no track record locally of such success—risks ruin, especially when the rest of the community’s development pattern is so financially unbalanced.

Three decades of subsidy for a new business on a remote site with a history of failure—a development which, despite the risk, has no meaningful chance to positively impact the community’s bottom line, even if successful—risks ruin, especially while the city’s productive core neighborhoods decline from lack of basic service and maintenance.

Let’s stop it already with the delusions of grandeur. Let's ditch the notion that the elusive prosperity we seek can be manufactured all at once, that our genius can not merely downplay risk but overcome it. Let's just focus for a while on basic competence. Our communities win when local governments avoid losing.

By Mark Schaefer

It’s obvious that marketing starts with strategy, and strategy starts with defining your value proposition — what is unique and compelling about you and what you do?

It’s always surprising to me how often this fundamental idea is either mis-understood or ignored. Over the last month I’ve met with business owners who have named these points of differentiation:

• “Great people, great service.”
• “We care for your business success.”
• “Expect the best.”

These are not points of differentiation. They are meaningless slogans that could describe almost any business.

Why are you different? What is your story?

Can you finish this sentence?

Finding your true point of differentiation can be agonizing but today I’m going to provide a little exercise that is a good place to start.

In my book Social Media Explained, I describe the six questions I use with clients to determine a social media strategy. The first one is this: Can you finish this sentence … “Only we …?”

It is a deceptively simple exercise … and maddeningly difficult. You can’t have a social media or content strategy without an over-arching marketing strategy and if you can’t finish that sentence, that indicates you don’t have a marketing strategy (even if you insist that you do!).

About 95 percent of the time I pose this question, business owners are stopped in their tracks. Or perhaps they answer with something like “we have great service.” Well heck, everybody has great service. My trash removal company has great service. Everybody should have great service just to be in business. That probably does not make you different.

Why should I buy from YOU? Name that.

The point of differentiation test

Another way to approach this is to gather top company leaders around a table, have them get out a piece of paper and ask them the same question. Can they finish the sentence? If you get different answers, you are not ready for social media. You are not ready to be producing content. You don’t have a marketing strategy because you don’t know what to say.

This may be the hardest question to answer in business, but also the most important. Before you can have a digital strategy, a social media strategy, or even a Facebook page, you should be able to finish that sentence or you are wasting your time and money.

Trust me, even if it takes weeks to accurately name your “only we” it is worth the effort in the long run. The worst mistake you can make in business is to execute beautifully on an incorrect strategy. If you’re being asked to run a social media program without a marketing strategy, you’re being set up for failure.

The truth is out there

Finding your “only we” is probably not going to come from gathering your employees around a table and asking for ideas. Go ask your customers. Not in a survey. Go out and actually talk to them. Why do they love you? Why do they keep coming back to you? Why do they believe in you and refer you to others?

Is it because of …

• Selection
• Experience
• History
• Price
• Location
• Value
• Quality
• Personality
• Reputation

I could name hundreds of potential factors. Is it because you are lemon-scented or have a big purple sign or the best return policy? What is it? There MUST be a reason.

It’s important to get feedback from outside your company because very often what you think you’re selling is not what the customer is buying. Example: I had a client that thought it was selling the latest high-tech business communication systems. But when we asked customers why they loved them, they told me it is because they knew this company would never let their system go down.

My customer thought they were selling tech. The customers were buying comfort. That changes the marketing message, doesn’t it?

Determine your “only we” (or, if you’re on your own, your “only I”) and your marketing strategy will light up like an airport runway before you.

Only then will you know what to say, where to say it, and who cares about it.

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world.  Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com

The post Discovering your true point of differentiation appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Editor’s Note: The following article is based on a recent episode of OpenView’s BUILD podcast. You can listen to the full episode featuring Brad Coffey, Chief Strategy Officer at HubSpot here.

Pricing. For expansion-stage companies, it’s an important (and often ubiquitous) topic of conversation. While most company leaders recognize that there’s an ongoing opportunity to improve pricing structure in response to market changes and other factors, the actual process of updating pricing can induce deep anxiety in even the most stalwart of CEOs. Change is hard, even when it’s for the best. And changes in pricing might upset current customers or reduce your win rate with future customers. There’s a lot at stake.

Brad Coffey, Chief Strategy Officer at Hubspot, has successfully run the pricing gauntlet twice in recent years as the inbound marketing giant implemented two major pricing initiatives. Many of the lessons Brad ultimately learned from going through these updates took months (even years) to fully play out, but in retrospect he was able to see that there is definitely a set of best practices that can be applied to launching a new pricing structure. Happily, Brad is willing to share the wisdom he’s gained.

Everyone Has to Start Somewhere

“In the beginning, we picked the price point out of thin air,” Brad admits. This isn’t an unusual way for a startup to determine initial pricing. But, as Brad points out, that baseline price often becomes the foundation for later pricing. In Hubspot’s case, as they released new products, they created simple tiered pricing that was basically multiples of that initial price point.

The turning point that inspired Brad and the rest of the team to take a closer look at their pricing structure came while Hubspot was in the midst of a fundraising effort. In the process of analyzing their metrics for venture capitalists, the team realized that there was room for improvement. “We had a pretty good story, and there were parts of the business that were doing really well,” Brad recalls. “We were acquiring customers and our retention was pretty good, but we weren’t getting many upgrades.” This insight inspired some soul searching, and they realized it was time to update their pricing to match the value they were actually delivering.

The Major Pricing Overhaul in 3 Steps

The pricing overhaul process involved most of Hubspot’s executive team as well as leaders of the product team and the company’s founders. Working together, this group engaged in a three-step process to develop a new and more effective pricing strategy.

Step 1: Do Your Homework

For Hubspot, the starting point for the pricing conversation was heavy analysis on two major data points. First, the team took a deep internal dive on retention. They wanted to uncover which parts of the product were most valuable by identifying correlations between particular features and people sticking with the product. The team’s research helped them pinpoint the parts of the product that had a lot of sizzle in a demo, but that users dropped after a few months. They were also able to single out the parts of the product that were maybe harder to sell and set up, but which – once in place – played an important role in keeping users on board for the long haul. Specifically, for Hubspot, the feature that had the most influence on retention was contacts. “We realized that once a user got contacts into the system, they were going to stick around longer,” Brad says. “Having contacts allowed them to get more value out of the platform.”

To complement this internal data point, the team also analyzed the market to see how their competitors were pricing. This helped Hubspot understand what customers were used to paying and also gave them a window into pricing strategies that were different from their own, simple approach.

Step 2: Get Input from Everyone

Based on their research and analysis, the team crafted their initial vision for the new pricing. Next step: get feedback from everywhere.

“We solicited feedback from our peers, our customers, and from all our employees. We even posted the new proposed pricing on our internal wiki where we had a rousing debate leading up to final decisions.”

While there were plenty of external people Hubspot could have engaged in this process (including pricing consultants), the team decided to drive the process internally via their own staff and customers. Working with a very detailed high-fidelity mockup of the new pricing page, Brad shared the new strategy with anyone who would talk with him. “It was a little nerve-wracking,” he says. “But it worked to get us the feedback, so it turned out to be a pretty valuable process.”

In addition to benchmarking specific price points against Hubspot’s competitive set, Brad interviewed customers to try and understand what they expected to pay for the product. It was, of course, important to understand how price factored into deals lost and won; but Brad ultimately felt that figuring out which price accurately reflected the value customers saw in the product was more important when it came to determining whether the new pricing structure would fly or flop.

“It’s important to understand what the customer’s value axis is and how they expect to pay for it. We need to kind of put customers on the spot and ask them what they think about certain tradeoffs.”

Step 3: Implement Like a Pro

There were two keys to ensure a smooth transition: consistent weekly meetings and having all the right people involved – not only at each step of the process, but in the appropriate roles. The weekly meeting served as a valuable touchstone throughout the process, giving the team a chance to assess progress, proactively decide on next steps, and continuously engage different groups within the company to prepare for the changes.

The list of attendees shifted throughout the hundred days leading up to the launch. Initially, the focus was on people in the product and finance areas to ensure that the pricing model was in place in terms of packaging and the mechanics of delivering it to market.

“It was important for the product team to really own the process. More than just ‘getting on board,’ they needed to be able to drive the process in a way that delivers a lot of impact.”

From there, different functional teams cycled into the meetings. The product marketing team attended as talk turned to positioning, promotion, and launch plans. The sales team got involved as the launch loomed closer so they could be fully trained on the new pricing and the marketing plan supporting it. Services-oriented groups were next and helped prepare for the rollout to the existing install base including customers coming up for renewal. Throughout the process, anyone who wanted to learn more about the pricing change was welcomed and encouraged to get involved.

Looking Back: Challenges, Lessons and Outcomes

In retrospect, the pricing overhaul was a clear win for Hubspot, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t without its challenges. For instance, Brad acknowledges that there was plenty of internal debate throughout the process. Rather than allow conflicts to bring things to a grinding halt, Brad stole the “disagree-and-commit” concept from Amazon. This approach allowed everyone to have a voice and ensured that the process was very transparent, but also made it clear that once a decision was reached, everyone needed be 100% on board. “I love that HubSpot is the kind of a company that encourages loud, boisterous debate,” Brad says. “But with this approach, once we’ve made a decision, it’s going to get done. If you disagree, it’s your responsibility to speak up and let the team know you disagree; but it’s also your responsibility to really get on board – not just give the project lip service, but to put everything in to make the effort as good an experience as possible for our customers.”

In addition to internal machinations, there were also some customer-facing hurdles to clear. For one, the price change involved charging customers for adding contacts. Research had shown that the ability to add contacts was a highly valued feature that increased customer retention, but up until the price change, customers hadn’t had to pay for contacts. “There was a voice in the back of my head that kept me up at night,” Brad recalls. “It said, ‘Let me get this straight, Brad. You want customers to add contacts to HubSpot, so you’re going to start charging them to add contacts to HubSpot, and actually increase their price when they add more? Isn’t that going to completely disincentivize them from doing the exact thing you want them to do?’ I’m not going to lie. It was a little terrifying.”

Happily, everything turned out great, an outcome Brad attributes in huge part to the company’s inside sales model, which enabled everyone to clearly articulate the value of having contacts in HubSpot. It also helped that contact-based pricing was something the market expected because they were used to that kind of pricing structure. In the end, the pricing change ended up creating a great deal of alignment across the company. From the marketing positioning to the sales pitch and from services and onboarding to product development, each group within the organization was able to really focus on delivering value through contacts.

Another customer-facing challenge that almost always comes up was whether or not to grandfather in existing customers. This question inspired some great debate, but HubSpot’s philosophy of being very generous with existing customers drove the team to uphold their standard – and very forgiving – grandfathering policy. “It may not be the right move for all companies in all situations,” Brad says. “But we were lucky enough to be growing quickly so that as the install base churned over time and we added more customers, the economics shifted toward having the majority (and eventually all) of our customers migrated onto the contact tier pricing.”

While it took some time to switch all customers over to the new pricing, the team committed and the resulting improvement in retention proved that was the right move. In 2011, the company’s retention was in the low 70s and they were seeing approximately 2 to 3% in upgrades, so, overall, about 75% revenue retention. In 2014, after the pricing overhaul, retention jumped into the low 80s and upgrades increased to about 15%, resulting in almost 100% revenue retention. While the pricing update wasn’t the only change HubSpot made over those three years, the shift in pricing strategy definitely made a big impact.

Looking Ahead: Creating New Opportunity with a Freemium Product

In 2014, coming off their IPO, HubSpot faced another major turning point: whether they should stay within their existing product footprint or go wide and expand from marketing into adjacent categories like sales and customer success. Ultimately, they chose to go wide, and they take the opportunity to try something radically different than anything they’d done before: enter the market with a freemium product.

Unlike the core pricing overhaul, which involved almost the entire company, the approach to developing the freemium sales product involved assembling a small group of some of HubSpot’s best people – engineers, product folks, sales reps, service team members, etc. – to create an all-star team with a tight feedback loop.

“This was a completely new motion for us,” Brad says. “We gave this group a lot of ownership and autonomy to figure things out. We didn’t want it to become a process in which every executive was tossing their pet rock into the design or lobbying their opinions. We wanted to enable the team to make decisions really, really quickly.” In addition to creative and decision-making autonomy, HubSpot also gave the team their own budget.

This experiment was mostly a success, though Brad notes that they did initially take the independence factor a little too far. “We wound up investing in a few different freemium motions at the same time and some of them were going after a different persona on a different tech stack with a different brand name,” he explains. “Ultimately, we ended up putting everything on the same platform and tech stack, so that – if you did use all of our products – they looked the same, felt the same, and worked incredibly well together. We also brought all products back under the HubSpot brand and made sure that as people tried our freemium products, they were also aware of the other HubSpot products they could buy.”

Because the sales category was an entirely new market for HubSpot, the team had the advantage of any win being a net positive. There was no existing revenue stream to compare to and no worry about cannibalizing existing business. The tightly coordinated team was able to launch the freemium product within about six months, an impressively short timeframe. Even better, the launch had a substantial impact on HubSpot’s business. “Historically, we had three products – a basic, a pro, and an enterprise. Now, we’re able to lead with a free product, which has been a dramatic shift,” Brad says. “Now, instead of just getting our content, prospects can actually start to use and engage with our product and ultimately, via upgrade, touchlessly buy more. It’s really shifted our frame of reference internally.”

The freemium approach has also generated excellent NPS results, proving that the product is generating a lot of value for users. And, on the other side, the economics have also worked out well as the team continues to find and implement new ways to upgrade users either within the sales product or by adding the marketing product.

“We’ve been around for about ten years now,” Brad says. “Early on, we were a single-product company, but we’re now in the midst of what we think of as ‘phase two,’ which is about becoming a suite of apps. We have a marketing product, a sales product, and we announced a customer success product last fall. We built all of this on the foundation of a free CRM that’s working really, really well for us. Eventually, we want to open that up and turn that into a platform that others can develop on top of – we’re looking ahead and thinking broadly about how we can enable millions of businesses to grow. That’s our ultimate mission.”

The post Lesson’s from HubSpot: How to Overhaul Pricing in 3 Steps appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Need to streamline your processes, schedule in advance, track data? There’s a tool for that.

It can be a double-edged sword, but we live in a time when there are tools for everything marketing related. B2B marketers can literally use 10, 20, or 30+ tools on a daily basis to manage and execute their marketing strategy.

While we can’t cover all the B2B marketing tools out there, here are a few that we find to add value either by streamlining efforts, providing actionable data/metrics, or improving efficiency for B2B marketers. (Stay tuned at the end for links to other articles discussing marketing tools.)

Analytics Tracking + Reporting

At the heart of a strong B2B marketing plan is data. Data regarding what works, doesn’t work, can be improved, provides value, or brings in revenue. There are two main tools that we find helpful in tracking and reporting data for marketers:

• Google Analytics
• Moz

We recommend to all of our B2B website and marketing clients to install Google Analytics tracking on their website. It’s a multi-functional baseline, free tool that provides a good amount of data on website traffic, user behavior, top visited pages, and more. A lot of information can be gleaned from Google Analytics, and recently, Google took a step to start adding insights on top of the data. There are many web analytics tools out there, but Google Analytics is a great place to start.

While not the only SEO tracking software tool out there, Moz has been around for a while and wins at being straightforward, current, accessible and having a huge community for helping ferret out and solve SEO-related issues. We like that it allows us to track and monitor our target keyword terms and competitors, and performs site crawls regularly. The crawls are helpful for determining where we need to improve meta data, incorporate redirects, and fix other technical issues that can negatively impact our B2B web design’s functionality.

Google Analytics: an introduction for new users.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

The tools B2B marketers and sales folks use to track current, past, and potential customers vary widely depending on the industry, products or services, and organization. For example, a jet engine builder may not have 1,000 customers to track, so an expensive CRM system won’t make sense. However, if you are manufacturing computer hardware components that can be used for medical devices, airplanes, and heavy machinery, you may need a tool to track all those leads.

Here are a few CRMs that we like for businesses that offer different levels – from free to enterprise level. The good news on these three? They are typically easy to integrate with WordPress or other marketing tools.

• Salesforce
• Zoho
• HubSpot

Salesforce has been in the CRM game for a long time (even back when it was just called sales databases) and has a range of options, from out-of-the-box solutions for smaller businesses to enterprise level programs that often require a Salesforce-specific administrator.

Zoho is starting to gain in popularity as a CRM and is even starting to become more widely used for the integrated email marketing automation solution.

HubSpot has been known as a marketing software solution since its inception in 2005. Why? Because it did a great job marketing to marketers! Well done, HubSpot! However, it also works well as a CRM tool for sales teams, too.

Social Scheduling + Content Curation

These two terms, social scheduling and content curation, often go hand-in-hand and there are three great tools that we like that handle both. Many B2B marketing professionals need a way to schedule and promote original thought leadership or content while also sharing helpful content from reputable sources. Here are tools that do both:

• Buffer
• Feedly
• Hootsuite

Buffer is an app that enables a user to publish content according to any chosen schedule on various social media profiles or pages, reply to social media posts/comments, and analyze the results.

It does have the ability to add feeds to schedule curated content, but we prefer its integration with…

Feedly. Feedly is a good tool for B2B marketers that need to find, organize, read, and share content. It’s essentially a news aggregator where a user can pull in RSS feeds from chosen publications and can search for news or articles by topics. It has great integrations, including Buffer, Hootsuite, Slack, WordPress, Google Docs, and more.

On par with Buffer, Hootsuite is a reliable tool for brands that have teams that need to collaborate on content, manage content for multiple brands, and report on social activity.

Email Marketing

You do all that hard work to capture data from potential leads, including names and email addresses, so it’s critical to have an email marketing strategy to monetize that owned media asset. Here are three simple email marketing platforms to help you get the most out of your email list.

• MailChimp
• HubSpot
• Constant Contact

MailChimp is a great marketing automation platform, the largest in the world according to their marketing! The interface is clean, easy to navigate, and has capabilities to send emails, create ads, design landing pages, embed sign-up forms, and now postcards (holy print, Batman!).

As mentioned before, HubSpot has a good CRM, but it also has a really well-integrated email automation solution as well.

Lastly is Constant Contact. We find Constant Contact to be fairly limited in its capabilities and doesn’t always have the most user-friendly design options, but it’s still a simple email solution so we are keeping it on our list.

Landing Pages + Pop-ups

If you are using WordPress in your B2B website design and digital marketing, creating landing pages can be a snap and there are a host of plugins for creating pop-ups. While we have a development team on staff who are pros at taking our landing page designs and making them work, we know that not all marketing budgets include full-time developers or web designers. As such, we’ve gathered a few tools to help with creating landing pages and pop-ups.

• Unbounce
• HubSpot
• HelloBar

Unbounce is an all-in-one design tool to create custom landing pages, sticky bars, and branded pop-ups. It can be used by skilled designers or marketing generalists, depending on the complexity of the designs needed. It’s a great solution for turning around a landing page design quickly, but it is limited by the customization options.

Again, HubSpot popping up on the list (no, they did not pay us to be listed this many times) for building landing pages. The caveat here is that it’s not simple to use. The interface is clunky and there is a large learning curve for creating designs and templates. They do have a ton of training though so if you invest in the tool (and it can be a hefty investment), you’ll have tons of training materials at your fingertips.

HelloBar is one of our favorite, free tools for creating pop-ups and CTAs. It’s free, so it’s no frills but functional. The limitations also work in its favor as it’s easy to use and implement quickly.

Editing Tools for Design + Content

We’ve found that B2B marketing departments come in all shapes and sizes. Some teams include 15 designers and 10 copywriters, while others simply require their team members to have some design and copywriting skills. As such, we’ve picked a couple of tools for those required to handle a variety of marketing capabilities.

• Grammarly
• Adobe Suite (Photoshop)
• Canva

The Grammarly app and browser extension is a great tool not just for B2B marketers, but anyone who writes emails, blog plots, presentations, etc. It’s important to present a polished, professional persona through all written text, and Grammarly has proven to be a good tool for catching wrong use case, incorrect tense, and other grammar and style issues.

You know you are a pretty big deal when one of your products or services becomes a verb. “I’m just going photoshop that person out of the background.” Adobe Creative Suite, which includes Photoshop software, is a must-have tool for all B2B marketers that touch design materials, especially images.

The last tool that we have time to discuss is Canva. Canva is a multi-purpose tool for marketers with little to no budget. The tool is easy for non-designers to use and allows for finding/sourcing images, editing images, crafting digital designs, adding text, etc.

You are an expert, but if you can’t market your consulting business, you will soon find yourself out of business.

Once you create a brand, your goal is to position your business so your ideal clients can find you.

There is not one magic solution to making clients come to you. Instead, you need time, money, effort, and a great deal of strategy.

Let us take a look at the common marketing tips that also apply to consultants:

• Provide expert value; become a thought leader
• Be an active voice on various social media platforms
• Networking is marketing, so it should be like a second skin to you.

Consistency is key to making these techniques work for your business. It also demands a lot of time—hours that you’d rather exert on performing and growing your business.

Today we break down specific and affordable marketing tactics. These four strategies should help you market your business wisely and get you results more quickly.

#1 Pay for Ads to Your Advantage

The internet has caused advertisers to go overboard with their campaigns. Whether you’re watching a movie on YouTube or doing research on the Net, ads will suddenly pop up and block your view or distract you from accessing the content you want.

Contrary to what advertisers will tell you about marketing with ads, the audience has become smarter in avoiding these annoying distractions. Ad blockers for one make your paid efforts virtually useless.

On the other hand, you can still make the most of paid advertisements. If you do Paid Advertisements right, you can successfully land client after client.

Nowadays, content marketing is becoming more popular among businesses and organizations because they are effective.

Two Words: Attention Span

Experts say you have as much as three seconds to get the attention of a potential client through ads.

The three-second rule is the same whether you use digital advertising, email advertising, print advertising or direct mail.

While it is vital as a thought leader to construct a message with urgency and utmost importance, a photograph that demands attention is a must. Visually, the image you pair with your message should stand out in a sea of advertisements.

#2 If You Want to Grow, You Can’t Do it By Yourself

One of the downfalls of independent consultants is when they try to handle their business single-handedly.

Everyone has weaknesses even as they have uncontested strengths.

When working through a marketing strategy, you need to understand what you’re good at and know your limitations.

For instance, not everyone is good at sales. Not all look forward to delivering a cold pitch. If you can create a team and outsource your weaknesses effectively, you can focus more of your time doing what you genuinely enjoy.

Successful consultants know where they excel and build a team that is strong in areas of their weaknesses.

#3 Don’t Be Afraid to Charge for Your Services

One of the dilemmas of those in the service industry is knowing how much to charge.

You may resolve to offer a standard price based on how other consultants charge.

On the other hand, you shouldn’t compare your worth to what others offer. Each person has his or her level of expertise. Focus on authenticity. Your customers will be able to tell.

In no way should you give your time and labor for free. No matter what consultancy services you offer, you have a right to demand a fee—or else don’t jump in on a deal.

Be wary that you will be losing contracts when you stand by your worth. Others may say you are not worth that much and compare you to freelancers on Upwork, for instance. Don’t be discouraged.

Clients who understand the value that you offer are ready to pay your real worth.

On the contrary, you need to be willing to offer some of your time. You may need to sit down with a potential client, listen to his problems, draft a solution, and cue in your expertise.

Never be pushy. Leave it to your client to decide whether or not he needs your services now. Do offer yourself as open to doing business with the client anytime they need your consultancy.

#4 Don’t Expect to Sell Every Time

People want to feel like they have the control over their decisions when buying. No one wants to feel like they are pressured to purchase. When growing your consulting business, be genuinely helpful without expecting a sale in return all the time.

The sale will come in its own time. In the meantime, you are putting yourself out there as someone who provides value. Once your services are needed, your clients know you are the go-to.

This article originally published at The Savvy Marketer.

If you're in sales, you've likely seen the 2011 "Lead Response Management Study." It analyzed three year's worth of data,100,000 call attempts, six companies, and 15,000 leads and synthesized findings to bring salespeople scientific answers to age-old questions like "What are the best days to call my prospects?" and "What time should I contact my leads?"

This kind of research is invaluable to reps. It helps them plan their weeks, maximize the impact of each call they make, and become more efficient, successful salespeople.

But have salespeople begun to rely too much on these numbers? In a recent GSA Business Development blog, the U.K.-based author laments, "I often hear statements such as ‘We should never call on a Friday afternoon' or … ‘August is a bad time since people are away.' If I had a pound for every time I've heard those comments over the past 17 years, I probably wouldn't need to run my business. I could retire on these earnings."

The author continues, "The fact is that if you make sufficient calls, you will reach enough people whichever time of day or year you call."

So, which is it? Is there a time, date, or approach to calling your prospects that's scientifically better than the rest? Should we chalk it all up to hard work? And has the data changed since 2011's groundbreaking study?

I'll do my best to answer those questions below, as we dissect the perfect follow-up call for salespeople in 2019.

Best Times to Make Sales Calls

These days, many reps are more comfortable sending an automated email than picking up the phone. But, before moving forward, it's worth identifying whether the phone is even the best way to follow up with leads today.

That answer is "Yes." A recent study by sales pro Marc Wayshak shows the phone is still the best tool in selling, with 41.2% of respondents naming their phone as their most effective sales tool.

Best Days of the Week to Call Leads

The best days of the week to call leads are on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

In the classic Lead Response Management Study, Wednesday and Thursday were the best days to qualify leads. In fact, there was a 49% difference between leads qualified (meaning they agreed to enter the sales process) on Thursdays and those that qualified on Tuesdays.

So, does this data still hold true today? A 2017 CallHippo survey looked at 24 weeks of data across thousands of companies and found Wednesdays and Thursdays are still the best days to call prospects.

In this survey, they found a 46% difference between calls made on Wednesdays (the best day to call) and those made on Mondays. Friday remained the worst day on which to call prospects.

Best Times to Call Leads

The best times of day to call leads are between 4:00 and 5:00PM and between 8:00 and 10:00 AM in their local time zone.

The Lead Management Study discovered the best time to qualify leads was between 4:00 PM and 5:00 PM local time. The second-best time was around 8:00 AM. 

The worst time of day to call leads is between 11:00 AM and 2:30 PM in their local time zone.

The worst time to qualify leads during the work day? Stay away from the phone at 11:00 AM and 2:30 PM respectively -- unless you're unafraid of the 164% qualifying success rate difference between reps who called between 1:00 PM and 2:00 PM and those calling between 4:00 PM and 5:00 PM.

When looking at how this data has aged, the same CallHippo survey found between 4:00 PM and 5:00 PM is still the best time to call prospects. 11:00 AM and 12:00 PM is the second most successful time to call -- a different result from the Lead Management Study -- and between 1:00 PM and 2:00 PM is the least successful time.

A 2018 PhoneBurner study, however, found the most productive time to cold call prospects is 10:00 AM in the prospect's time zone. Of those salespeople surveyed during this time, 15.53% had their calls answered -- 3% better than the second-best hour, 2:00 PM, which saw a 15.01% success rate. Their data did support the findings that between 12:00 and 1:00 PM is the worst time to call your prospect.

Best Response Time for Connecting with Leads

The best response time for following up with leads is within 10 minutes.

The Lead Management Study saw a whopping 400% decrease in odds of qualifying leads when reps waited 10 minutes or more to follow up. And the rate of success continued to decrease the longer reps went before following up. The best time to call new leads was within five minutes of their first trigger event.

A 2018 InsideSales.com test seems to support this data -- kind of. In their survey, InsideSales.com Labs tested the response times and persistence of nearly 200 companies and scored their replies.

They did this by looking at only high-priority inbound leads signaling intent to purchase (i.e., demos, contact forms, or pricing requests). International siding company James Hardie earned the number one spot with a 3:48-minute response time and seven touches total.

They were the only company to come in under that magic five-minute follow-up mark, however. The other companies in the top 10 rang in slightly under or well above the 10-minute mark. LinkedIn had a 9:03-minute response time with five touches total.

Consulting firm KPA had a 19:37-minute lead response time but a respectable six touches total. And platform company Dynamic Signal nabbed the number two spot with an 8:20-minute response time and an impressive 14 total touches.

How to Make a Follow-Up Sales Call

With all of this updated data, what should you do when it pays off and a prospect actually answers the phone?

Make Multiple Follow-Up Calls

Sales reps should make at least six follow-up calls to leads before moving on.

The Lead Management Study shows reps should call at least six times before throwing in the towel. Shockingly, over 30% of leads in the study were never contacted at all. By making more call attempts -- or call attempts, period -- sales reps experienced up to a 70% increase in contact rates.

A 2018 Bridge Group Inc. SDR Metrics Report found most reps make an average of 45 dials per day -- a number that's hovered around 50 for the last decade.

The report states "There is much debate over the usefulness of this metric. It remains, however, one of the few levers that individual SDRs are able to pull. Dials are 100% under your reps' control -- conversions, demos, and meetings are not."

The study also cites an article by EverFi President Preston Clark in which he laments "The Rise of the Silent Sales Floor." He says, "When the hum of voices is replaced with the hum of keystrokes, you should be very, very concerned." To remedy this, Clark recommends reps learn how to lead a sales process from start to finish. "Every step. Every stage. Open to close."

Make a Good Impression When You Connect with Leads

Sales reps should use active, friendly, and engaging language to interest leads within the first five minutes of connecting on a follow-up call.

The data experts over at Gong.io analyzed more than 100,000 connected outreach calls and analyzed them using AI. They found a few things to be true:

• Once connected, you have five seconds to earn five minutes of your prospect's time.
• Successful calls are almost twice as long as unsuccessful calls, clocking in at 5:50 and 3:14 minutes respectively.
• Successful calls are about educating your prospect and selling a meeting. Therefore, successful salespeople spend 54% of the call talking, while unsuccessful salespeople spent only 42% of their time speaking.
• Don't be afraid of the "monologue." Successful calls saw a whopping 70% more five-second monologues from salespeople than unsuccessful calls.
• Don't fear silence from your prospects. Unsuccessful calls saw prospect monologues up to eight seconds long. In successful calls, prospect's monologues lasted only around 3.5 seconds.
• Using "Did I catch you at a bad time" makes you 40% less likely to book a meeting.
• Asking "How are you?" correlates with a 3.4X higher likelihood of booking a meeting.
• Beginning your call with "The reason I'm calling is …" increases your success rate by 2.1X.
• Asking "How have you been?" increases success rates by 6.6X.
• Using "We" instead of "I" increased success rates by 35%.

Ask Customers and Leads for More Referrals 

Sales reps should source referrals to increase the pool of leads they're following up with every day.

While the Lead Management Study's data showed reps should be calling at least six times before moving on, it's also important to pay attention to how many leads you're reaching out to.

A recent survey by Marc Wayshak shows most salespeople aren't getting in front of enough prospects. In fact, 66.7% of respondents reported reaching out to 250 or fewer leads in the past year. Only 15% reached out to over 1,000 prospects.

While 54% of salespeople in Wayshak's survey lamented it's harder -- or much harder -- to get in front of prospects than it was five years ago, these numbers also reveal an increased need for salespeople to outreach to more prospects and leads than ever before.

One way to boost your pipeline and gain more leads to call? Ask for referrals. 57.9% of respondents asked for fewer than one referral a month. Roughly 40% reported rarely asking. And only 18.6% asked every person they met with for a referral.

Since referrals have a much higher chance of closing, they can be a great place to start when you're trying to increase lead count and thereby the number of follow-up calls you can make.

Few salespeople relish making prospecting calls. But it's one of the most important parts of the job. So, shouldn't you do it well and maximize your impact, so you can spend more time doing the part of your work you actually love? This data can help you do just that.

To learn more about prospecting, read about how to introduce yourself over email next.

Getting people to click to read your content is hard, whether you’re trying to entice them in an email or tempt them in the search engine results.

But once you finally get them on your page, you must work even harder to keep them there.

Lots of technical ways can keep them from bouncing (faster load times, minimum pop-ups, clear site navigation, etc.).

But what about non-technical ways?

Which content formats are inherently readable, interesting, and absorbing? Which ones make your readers subconsciously stay focused, moving down your page?

Take these four formats for a spin.

Image-dense, long-form blogs

Long-form blogs are heavy hitters in the content world. When you create these, you step up to the plate and take a big swing. If you strategized, planned, and executed, you’ll hit a home run.

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Long-form #blogs are heavy hitters in the #content world, says @JuliaEMcCoy.
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Many marketers mistakenly think long-form content is too daunting for readers. BuzzSumo and Moz famously analyzed over 1 million blog articles and found over 2,000 words to be a sweet spot for engagement.

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#Blog articles over 2,000 words are a sweet spot for engagement via @buzzsumo @moz #research.
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And, of course, when your readers engage, they likely spend more time with your content and on your site.

But long-form content should not be exclusively text. Images should be a major component.

Look at this post from WordStream. I zoomed out the page so you can see how the images are sprinkled through the text evenly:

Using images in long-form content does a few things:

• Attracts readers’ eyes as they scroll and gives them a rest from the text
• Helps readers better remember the information
• Makes the post more entertaining

TIP: Include an image every 200 words in long-form content to increase engagement and keep your readers on the page.

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Include an image every 200 words in long-form #content, advises @JuliaEMcCoy.
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Listicles

Love them or hate them, posts in list form do extremely well with website visitors.

In that BuzzSumo/Moz study, list posts wiped the floor with all other post formats. The average total shares for listicles was nearly 11,000, and the next closest format (how-to) averaged 1,782 shares.

Why are listicles a huge hit?

One word: format.

As it turns out, brains love lists. Content formatted as lists provides:

• A pattern for readers’ minds to glom onto
• A way to make sense of the information
• A headline (usually) that indicates how much time it takes to skim the list
• An element of curiosity (readers need to scroll down to see each item)
• Satisfaction (readers can mentally check off each point on the list)

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It turns out our brains love lists, says @JuliaEMcCoy.
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An example of a list post that’s trending on CMI: 

TIP: Create list posts that provide a whopping amount of value for your audience. Each point should be unique, helpful, interesting, or valuable.

TIP: Your content doesn’t have to be a listicle format to recoup the list benefits. You can number your points, add numbered lists in the text, or use bullet points to help make sense of the information.

Step-by-step guides (with visuals)

Step-by-step guides (or how-to’s) are the runners-up to listicles because:

• They directly answer the questions your audience is asking. This factor inherently makes them readable because they’re directly addressing a user need.
• How-to posts often contain lots of illustrative images, which increases the probability of engagement as we already explored.

Effective how-to content combines the winning elements of the other content formats discussed, which adds up to longer dwell time and a lower bounce rate because they:

• Are presented as steps in list form
• Include images that help explain processes or concepts
• Are usually in-depth and long-form

The Kitchn’s How to Make a Latte at Home Without an Espresso Machine is an excellent example of a step-by-step process in list format:

…And illustrative images that help you understand the techniques described:

Plus, it includes tips, tricks, and definitions to help you make the perfect latte at home:

TIP: A truly engaging how-to post needs a list of steps, pictures, and in-depth descriptions to make readers trust your advice, follow your directions, and, ultimately, stay on the page.

Call-to-action-centered content

Call-to-action-centered content is a type that continually motivates the reader throughout the piece. Often, this type of writing is called “conversion copywriting” because copywriters use it on landing pages and sales pages to lead the reader to a profitable action or conversion.

Here’s the key to crafting CTA-centered content: Every word on the page should make the user want to keep reading. Every word should lead them to the CTA, which will tell them what to do next. The primary point is to get them to act, but this technique also keeps them on your page longer. Copyhackers’ Joanna Wiebe calls this “sticky copy.”

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Every word on the page should make the user want to keep reading, says @JuliaEMcCoy.
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How do you write sticky copy? How do you translate that into content that’s CTA-centered and keeps them reading? Make it about them:

• Do topic and keyword research to find a subject your readers care about. You can’t write about just any random topic and expect results. If no one cares, no one will read it. In Joanna’s post, it’s easy to see why marketing writers will care about her topic: Sticky copy leads to conversions.
• Address the readers directly. Incorporate “you” language throughout the content. Begin with the headline, like Joanna’s:

She directly addresses the reader with a command (“Don’t Be a Freakin’ Wallflower!”) and follows it up with a CTA (“Write Sticky Copy That Gets Noticed”).

• Focus on an action that is beneficial for readers. Will they save money? Get more free time? Improve a skill? Improve their relationships?

Joanna also has this covered. If readers follow her tips, they’ll get more engagement on their posts. As she writes:

Today, let’s take a look at 2 ways to make your website copy stickier so people actually READ it and RECALL it.

• Inspire readers to take the action. Tell them why they should care. Tell them specifically how the benefits will play out. It should be all about motivating them by providing valuable information.

Joanna’s motivational, inspirational language looks like this:

So, how can you take your product, service or app … and position it as something sticky? Check out these sticky topics. At least one of them CAN work on your home page, and ALL of them can work in your blog posts.

She also notes how easy the steps are to implement:

For now, let’s talk about the words you’re using. Once you know what words to change, it’s easy to go ahead and do that on your site ASAP. (That’s foreshadowing, BTW. Guess what action I’m going to ask you to take at the end of this post!)

And she continues to directly address her reader with commands:

It all works. Joanna’s post makes you want to keep reading because all the elements are there.

TIP: As you implement these points into your next content piece, remember to focus on the CTA. Keep calling your readers to action and you’ll have a better chance of keeping them on the page.

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Keep calling your readers to action & you’ll have a better chance of keeping them on the page. @JuliaEMcCoy
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Website visitor retention growth = higher ROI

The longer you can keep readers on your page, the more likely they will engage with your content.

This engagement has benefits that will help you leap forward with your content marketing:

• Longer dwell time on your pages and lower bounce rates equal improved rankings.
• Higher conversions equal more potential customers.
• More shares and links equal more authority.

Remember: Great, high-quality content in addictive formats is what keeps your readers reading. Nothing less will do. Don’t skimp out on quality and effort in the creation stage, and all the stages that follow will be easier – including your bounce-rate optimization.

Expand your effective use of content formats for long-term success from knowledge you can pick up at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100. 

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Get Your Readers to Stay Longer With These 4 Formats appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

By now, I’m sure you’re sick of hearing how social media can drive conversions and create brand growth. However, your social media accounts can be a fully functional sales channel that drives revenue. Let’s take a look at how you can strategize your social media platforms and examine sales tactics that work on social.

In this blog, I’ll help you turn your social media presence into an engaging sales funnel.

What Channel Is the Best for…? 

The short answer: it depends.

Here’s why:

Users come to social media platforms for many different reasons, and not every channel is the best channel to approach your potential customer or to engage your current customers. Some social media platforms are better at marketing certain niches than others. For example, if you run a service-based consultancy that deals with providing services to other businesses, then LinkedIn would be the best platform to engage your customers. Instagram is a great place to sell things with visual appeal and can cater better to industries such as wearable goods. However, this doesn’t mean people who sell supplements can’t effectively build a market around Instagram.

Basic Social Media Guidelines 

Here are a few simple rules for marketing on social media:

• Aim to establish your brand as an authority in your industry.
• Create content that’s insightful and relevant to your audience.
• Strive to solve problems when you engage with your potential customers.
• Use the proper platform for your needs.
• Automate whenever possible because it streamlines your marketing strategy. Look for a tool that allows you to plan your social media moves and grab relevant statistics when you need them.

For Almost Every Brand: Facebook

Undoubtedly, Facebook is the biggest of the social media giants and the most widely-used social media channel. Most of your current and potential customers are daily Facebook users.

On Facebook, it’s easy to market almost anything, but there are a couple of ways that you can get ahead:

• If you’re selling specialty goods or services, then group-based marketing might be an excellent idea. To do so, you build a following within a Facebook group and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.  Once you’ve achieved that, your group will look to you for recommendations for products and services that fit their needs.
• Consumer product retailing is the easiest to sell on Facebook because of their Marketplace consumer selling platform, the multiple ways to customize ads, and different methods of building a following such as creating a page or a group.

The downside of Facebook is that it is not the best place to sell for B2B, though it can be instrumental in brand-building for B2B companies.

For B2B: LinkedIn

One of my favorite social media platforms to turn into a sales funnel is LinkedIn because I’ve seen first-hand how effective it can be. LinkedIn works best under the same principle as group-based marketing: you establish yourself as a leader and then position engaging content for your potential customers. The best way to utilize LinkedIn is with B2B service-based businesses and combining it with a remarketing strategy.

Take your posts with the highest engagement and determine what is resonating with your audience. You can then retarget them on other platforms. You could email them immediately, but LinkedIn marketing has to be combined with a soft-selling strategy to perform best. Potential customers are turned off by unresearched, unwanted cold messages from salespeople. Instead, salespeople and marketers alike should focus on building their networks and sharing relevant information for their ideal customer profile.  

For Retail and Customer Service: Chatbots

Everyone from the financial industry to retail outlets is getting obsessed with chatbots.

Why?

Chatbots work to drive sales. This is especially true for those with a retail front or required to provide information on demand for their customers.

Here’s an example of how clothing retailer H&M uses a chatbot:

In the example given, you can see a major fashion chain interacting with a customer on Facebook, reacting in real time to customer feedback.

Here is why chatbots on social platforms are so useful:

• They engage with the customer, so it’s almost as if you have a “merchandiser” or sales rep that can readily assist your customers at any time.
• A continuous sales plan can be implemented since bots are automated.
• Recording feedback is more straightforward since data can be set to be automatically collected.

If you are an online retail outlet, chatbots are a great option to explore. Currently, it’s possible to integrate these with the top e-commerce platforms available online.

Social Media as a Sales Channel

Spamming your potential customers with multi-channel ads in the wrong place at the wrong time is never the right thing to do. With these tips, you’ll be able to determine what channel, and what sales techniques will be best for your customers and prospects.

How have you used social media to increase your sales? Tell me about it in the comments.

The post How Social Media Can Act as a Primary Sales Channel for Your Business appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here.

As headlines like "Amazon Is Secretly Becoming a Bank" and "Google Wants to Be a Bank Now" increasingly crop up in the news, tech giants are coming into the spotlight as the next potential payments disruptors.

And with these firms' broad reach and hefty resources, the possibility that they'll descend on financial services is a hard narrative to shy away from. To mitigate potential losses under this scenario, traditional players will have to grasp not only the level of the threat, but also which segments of the financial industry are most at risk of disruption.

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, collectively known as GAFAM, are already active investors in the payments industry, and they're slowly encroaching on legacy providers' core offerings. Each of these five companies has introduced features and offerings that have the potential to disrupt specific parts of the banking system. And we expect a plethora of additional offerings to hit the market as these companies look to build out their ecosystems.

However, it remains unlikely that any of these firms will become full-blown banks or entirely upend incumbents, due to regulatory barriers and the entrenched positions of big banks. Moreover, consumers still trust traditional firms first and foremost with their financial data. That means these companies are far more likely to rattle the cages of incumbents than they are to cause their total demise. That said, these companies have a proven capacity to revolutionize industries, making their entry into payments critical to watch for legacy players, especially as their moves demonstrate an intent to be a disruptive force in the industry.

In this report, Business Insider Intelligence analyzes the current impact GAFAM is having on the financial services industry, and the strengths and weaknesses of each firm's position in payments. We also discuss the barriers these companies face as they push deeper into financial services, as well as which aspects of a bank’s core business provide the biggest opportunities for the new players. Lastly, we assess these companies' future potential in payments and the broader financial services industry, and examine ways incumbents can manage the threat.

Here are some of the key takeaways: 

• GAFAM has been actively encroaching on the payments space. This includes offering mobile wallets for in-store and online payments, peer-to-peer money transfer services, and even loans for small- and medium-sized businesses. 
• These firms' broad reach and hefty resources have put them in a strong position to take on legacy players. GAFAM has products that have been adopted by millions of users, and in some cases, billions. They also have access to a tremendous amount of capital — Apple, Microsoft, and Google had over $400 billion combined in cash at the end of 2016.
• However, these firms have to overcome major barriers to compete against legacy players, which includes regulation and trust. For example, 60% of respondents to a Business Insider Intelligence survey stated that they trust their bank most to provide them financial services.
•  As a result of these barriers, it's more likely that GAFAM will make a dent in very specific segments of the financial services industry rather than completely disrupt it. 

In full, the report:

• Explains what GAFAM's done to place themselves in a position to be the next potential payments disruptors.
• Breaks down the strengths and weaknesses of each company as it relates to their ability to build out an extensive financial ecosystem. 
• Looks at the potential barriers that could limit GAFAM's ability to capture a significant share of the payments industry from traditional players. 
• Identifies what strategies legacy players will have to deploy to mitigate the threat by these tech giants.

 

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Still stuck at 100, 500, or 1000 subscribers? Are you looking for effective ways to grow your email list and convert website traffic into subscribers? Well, you’ve come to the right place.

Did you know that by 2022 the number of email users is expected to reach 4.3 billion users? Clearly, you have a great potential of reaching a massive audience by building an email list. And there’s no better time to get started than right now.

In this post, we’re going to show you some of the most effective ways you can use to get your website visitors to join your email list. The best part is, you won’t even have to hire any experts. You can implement these strategies on your website all by yourself.

Let’s get started, shall we?

1. Setup exit-intent popups

Almost every blog and website has popup optin forms these days. They work well to convert visitors into subscribers. However, exit-intent popups are actually much more effective at generating more subscribers because they only appear right before the visitor leaves your site, making them much less intrusive.

Exit-intent is a technology that comes with most of the popular lead generation software programs. It allows you to accurately predict when a visitor is about to leave your website and create opt-in forms that pop-up at that very moment to capture the user’s attention.

This will help you in several different ways by allowing you to grab the attention of your visitors to convert them into a subscriber or a sale and also to reduce your website bounce rate.

2. Improve engagement with 2-step opt-ins

Most users often ignore popup messages when they interfere with their user experience. This is why you need to have a backup plan to convert those visitors.

With 2-step opt-ins, you can create email sign up forms that only open when a user clicks on a link or an image. This puts users in control and allows them to subscribe whenever they want.

For example, Backlinko is one of the many websites that uses 2-step opt-ins. It helps you to grab the attention of the users when they are immersed in the content of the blog posts and gives them the opportunity to join your email list on their own.

3. Embed sign up forms inside blog posts

As more and more visitors choose to read your blog posts on mobile vs. desktop, you’ll need to come up with a strategy to make sure your email capture form is visible. One strategy is to include the sign-up form in your blog posts, usually right after it, before the comment section.

Inline opt-in forms are great opportunities to offer content upgrades. It’s a type of lead magnet that lets you attract subscribers by offering an additional piece of content at the end of a blog post.

Checklists, guides, and PDF versions of blog posts are some of the popular content upgrades you can use to increase email signups.

4. Use a sticky floating bar

Wouldn’t it be amazing to have an opt-in form floating around on your website at all times, allowing visitors to subscribe to your email list at any time? This is exactly what you can accomplish with sticky floating bars.

Floating bars lets you show a simple opt-in form or a CTA (call to action) with a link to a landing page to generate more leads. Unlike other methods of lead generation, floating bars take less space on your website and stick to the top of your pages, so that even when users scroll down on your long blog posts, your opt-in forms will always be visible.

This is a great way to capture emails, especially when you’re targeting mobile visitors. Since floating bars take less space, they do wonders at converting mobile visitors into subscribers.

5. Generate leads from comments

The comments section on your blog is another great source of lead generation. You can easily collect the emails of the users who leave a comment on your blog posts to grow your email list by simply using a free WordPress plugin.

A common problem with the default comment system on WordPress is that it doesn’t notify users when someone replies to a comment. You can fix this problem using the Subscribe To Comments Reloaded plugin while also growing your email list.

Once you install the plugin, it will allow users to choose to receive notifications for replies via email when leaving a comment on your blog. This helps users to stay engaged with your blog and gives you the ability to export the emails to your email list. It’s a win-win.

In conclusion

One thing to keep in mind when growing an email list is that it’s a process that takes time. You can’t expect to build an email list of thousands of subscribers overnight.

Once you implement the strategies we’ve described above, you can get to work and start generating more traffic to your website. The more visitors you have coming to your website the higher chance you’ll have at converting more subscribers.

I don’t know how many sales calls I observe. Over the course of years, it’s 1000’s. The majority of them are the same—it’s all about our products. The typical process looks like:

If there is any discovery, discovery is focused on the customer product needs—what capabilities are they looking for (never the question, “Why are these important to you?”), what products do they currently use, what features are they looking for, what is the target pricing…….

As quickly as possible, sales people get into describing their products, the more “sophisticated,” use a Features, Benefits, Advantages approach, but the conversation is focused on the product.

Usually, at some point, there is “show and tell,” (Thank goodness we had all that practice in Kindergarten and First Grade!). It may be a demo, it may be looking at the physical product, usually it’s accompanied by the physical/virtual brochures, case studies, testimonials. Often, the strategy seems to be focused on quantity, as if the more stuff we can inundate the customer with, the more it will influence the customer to make a decision in our favor.

And of course, that “stuff,” is exactly the same as what the sales people have already talked about.

At some point sales provides a proposal, most of the time it’s a quotation–all the products that are being proposed, listed by line item. How many of each, the unit price, and the extended price, then the total price. If the customer is “lucky,” there may be a cover letter with a few meaningless paragraphs about why the product and our company is great and a final paragraph saying, “We look forward to being your partner…”

And then the customer has to make a decision…..

The good news, all our competitors do exactly the same thing.

The customer is left to figure out which product is the best for them–the customer is just looking to solve a problem and achieve goals, but all that’s been presented is information about the products.

In the end, it’s hard to choose, so they resort to the only thing that differentiates the alternatives—price.

To them, the alternatives are the same. To them, any solution will do–otherwise they wouldn’t have even met with us, so the dilemma becomes, which is the lowest price.

And we wonder……..

“Why don’t customers want to see us?”

“Why do customers say we don’t understand them, their goals, their problems, what they want to achieve, their business, and their markets?”

The problem is too often, we view “selling” as being walking, talking product brochures. Yes, maybe we can go into a little more than the brochures, maybe we can present the data in a more appealing manner. Maybe we personalize our presentation by using the customer’s name and company, “Martha, our product comes in 20 different, fashionable colors, to fit into any factory environment Acme Manufacturing has…..”

But that’s not what our customers need, that’s not the “help” our customers are looking for, that’s not what creates value for the customers.

If it were, they can get all that information at a web site or in a brochure.

Yet, that’s what too many sales people do……

Selling is more than being a walking talking product brochure.

 

Organizations that optimize sales and marketing achieve kickass results by doing just three things well.

1. Agree on their market, media and message
2. Measure what matters
3. Deliver fewer, but better, leads to sales

 

Agree

Sounds simple, yes, but most B2B companies are doing just the opposite. Often sales and marketing haven’t collaborated on such fundamental issues as who their audiences are, how to best reach them and once they do, what to say. Without this agreement a company is wasting time and money—and relying on luck to close deals. These three essentials—market, media and message—need to be posted on every screen and wall in the organization, and if anything changes, consensus needs to be achieved. If marketing and sales can’t manage this, it’s up to the c-level to make sure it gets done.

 

Measure

These same companies are frequently not holding their sales and marketing teams appropriately accountable for the leads they close. They’re measuring how many leads that sales qualifies are closed. The average sales rep closes 1 in 5 leads they qualify—but they’re only qualifying a third of the leads they’re provided. So, the average sales person is closing less than 10%. Optimized companies, whose reps qualify more of their leads, have close rates 150% higher than average. Again, if top management isn’t making sure this is happening, it’s not.

 

Deliver

Most marketing people are focused on quantity—generating the highest number of leads for the lowest cost. At the same time, sales folks frequently express frustration at the quality of leads they receive. They clamor for more, but they’re not following up on the ones they’ve got. The solution is to align the thinking. Spend more for fewer leads that are qualified, nurtured and likely to close. This isn’t the area to scrimp on—marketing needs to be responsible for the leads it develops, and sales needs to act on every lead received. Company leadership must see to it.

No matter where you are now, following these specific steps you can help you emerge from chaos … rise above average … and achieve a fully optimized state of prospect development.

It is possible for your organization to get better ROI on marketing … to keep your sales people focused on what they do best … and to close 5 times more deals.

 

 

 

 

Are your organization’s sales and marketing behaviors, practices and processes reliably and sustainably producing the outcomes you need? You can achieve a fully optimized state of prospect development and close significantly more deals by taking 3 important steps. To learn more, click here.

 

 

 

 

Many traditional sales techniques that have worked in the past are turning out to be ineffective due to technology taking over the process.

No need to pick up the phone or go door to door promoting your products when it’s easier to set up an effective digital marketing campaign that uses AI to pull out all potential leads.

On the other hand, easy access to information has allowed prospects to have full control of the buying process. They don’t need a salesperson to guide them or provide a list of features and benefits of a particular product. All this data is available in the form of product descriptions and reviews on the internet.

All you have to do is type in the right keywords on Google for it. In fact, out of 3.5 billion daily Google searches I’m pretty sure most of them are related to product information.

How a Salesperson can still make a Difference

Now that you know product details are in the grasp of consumers, you can still contribute and help your respective companies close more deals. What prospects still lack is their ability to understand and translate most of the information that’s available on the internet.

Regardless of all the information you find on the internet, you can’t compare it with the expertise a salesperson has for a group of products or a particular industry. That’s when these sales experts can implement modern sales techniques.

Successful modern sales reps make efforts to enhance their relationship with potential prospects. These relationships are used as gateways to influence a customer’s buying options. Eventually, before you know it, you’ll be in their minds just like you used to be when cold calling was an effective strategy.

You can never expect machines to act more than what they are. The influence a human has on another human is beyond any AI or AR technology taking over the world.

Essential Skills to bring you back in the Game

Note:

Beatrice is about to give you some awesome salesperson skills. Things that can be developed over time and make you better at selling.

But before we get into that, I wanted to give you a bonus skill that takes zero talent. What is it?

Keep following up.

Take a look at this commonly tossed around graphic:

This is data and it shows that 3 of 4 reps aren’t contacting their prospects enough to actually close the deal. Imagine if you just picked up the phone or sent another email. It requires no betterment (which we totally suggest), but will likely improve your deals.

You may be asking, “Do I just keep emailing (or calling)?”

Yes and no. You should be reaching out in a number of ways. One of my favorite right now is the one-two punch of cold email to direct mail. You send something in the direct mail and wait 3-4 days (enough time for your mail to get to your prospect).

Then, you hit them with an email. A message that has your offer and let them known they should have something from you in their mailbox.

Now back to Beatrice’s amazing skill-improving content.

Do I have your attention now? I’m pretty sure by now you must already be drooling for those tips to make you the talk of the town again. These skills are pretty easy to master. All they require is a little bit of planning and complete focus.

Now is the right time!

Here are five essential skills that every salesperson needs to develop to survive in their particular industry.

1 Be Compassionate With your Prospects

Remember, regardless of technological development changing how things work around here; it can’t beat the effects of human-to-human interactions.

Have you seen the movie ‘I, Robot’? Though the movie was pretty good with Will Smith becoming a living nightmare for all the robots, it comprised a message that I took pretty seriously. And I’m sure many others might have also understood it in the same way!

‘Robots can never ultimately replace humans, PERIOD!’

The way a human being can be compassionate with the customer and get into their heads is something technology may never specialize in. As a salesperson, you need to focus on creating a relationship with your target audience instead of always throwing sales pitches at them.

It will take you time to control your emotions and have regular talks instead of promotional ones, but I have faith in you. With enough practice and focus, you can quickly capitalize on this skill. Here are two things you should do to adapt to this change.

• Start listening more! I know it’s difficult as you have a habit of talking more, but you need to start listening to what your customers want, not what you wish to sell.
• Enhance your face-to-face communication skills as a rational human being with lots of eye-contact, giggles and greetings.

2 Get Over your Prospect’s Head

How? With exceptional knowledge! I’m pretty sure you are an expert in convincing someone to buy a product from you, but do you have enough experience to win their trust and get involved in a good conversation? If not, you’re not alone.

We know that salespersons go through extensive training sessions that help them pitch in the best way and capture many high-quality leads. However, these training sessions lack the lessons that you need to learn to become someone who can generate a healthy conversation on just about anything.

A healthy conversation is authentic and can be used to make an impact and influence your listeners. The day you become an expert in capturing the attention of a group of people, you’ll definitely be in a win-win position.

3 Target Your Prospect’s Pressure Points

If you are able to make someone spill out everything about them, my friend, you’ve got a crucial skill that could take you to the top of the charts. Technology is limited to taking care of transactional sales, but a salesperson has the power to understand and identify the real problems a customer faces.

Only those salespersons can survive in the current era that can make prospects feel comfortable and safe. As soon as they think that you are talking to them for a commercial purpose, they’ll show you their hand walk away.

To learn how to develop this skill, you need to see how some of the top TV hosts ask their guests questions.

Wondering how that helps?

If you’ve ever noticed, these hosts are experts in making even the shyest person share something personal. In addition, you’ll also see them offend guests in the most inoffensive way and make it look funny instead. Start with ‘The Daily Show’ to see what I mean.

4 Look For Creative Ideas

One primary reason a salesperson’s KPI isn’t showing a good outcome is that they are lacking in providing value to their prospects. Come up with something new! Customers have gotten bored with the same old cold call every month to get insurance or apply for a loan, or a get a new credit card.

If you want to get someone to buy your service or product you first have to inform them how they’ll benefit from the deal first. These customers are already aware of the fact that all you care about is reaching your monthly target and getting an employee of the month award.

However, what’s in it for them? Nothing, most of the time! To tackle this persona you need to become creative with your sales pitches. Creativity is the art of combining information from different resources to come up with something entirely new. Artistic, isn’t it? Want to learn how? It’s quite simple, actually.

Follow influential and creative business leaders of the world. Read their blogs and interviews to understand what they focus more on. In fact, I would advise you even to meet someone creative to know where they develop their ideas from.

On the other hand, another way to bring out the creativity in you is by getting involved in extracurricular activities. It could be cooking classes, camping, arts, music and much more.

5 Learn to Compete with Others

Competition within the organization can always be suitable for any organization. No wonder many top businesses offer bonuses to top performers.

However, this competition should still be healthy. All members of the sales department need to work as a team at the end of the day. You wouldn’t want them capturing each other’s clients and not focusing on luring unique leads.

The same goes for an individual salesperson as well. Competition isn’t working hard to beat your own teammates. In fact, it should be an attempt to accomplish your goals. In addition, if you and your sales team achieve a goal together, believe me, it’ll be a more significant achievement.

The best person to compete with you is always yourself. All you have to do is start making a habit of setting daily, weekly and monthly goals for yourself. These goals can be related to just about anything. From going to the gym every day to reaching the office on time, to finishing a book in a week.

Note down all your goals and evaluate your performance on a monthly basis. As soon as you get the hang of it, you can even add these skills as your goals to become a better modern-day salesperson.

Start Again!

Are you a salesperson getting called into your boss’s room every week for not achieving your target or obtaining a reasonable KPI? Well, there are many just like you who are suffering from this change in consumer behavior and spending pattern.

However, you can change that by developing all five of the skills listed above. These skills are perfect to make you competitive and high-performing in this innovative era. Don’t waste time in working on traditional techniques and create a new plan to revamp your approach for a better future in your field of expertise.

As a marketer or savvy business person, you understand that in order for things to get done, you have to set goals at work.

But the problem isn’t defining your objectives, it’s actually achieving them. You get your team all hyped up (or maybe need help motivating them), but at the end of the quarter, the numbers have barely moved.

Sounds like you haven’t been SMART about goal setting.

Whether you need better structure, trackability or to establish clear milestones, we’re here to help you hit your marks.

What the SMART Goals Acronym Stands For

As a marketers, you have three general concerns. You want to get more visitors to your website, convert more prospects into leads and nurture more leads into customers. The right marketing goals can help you achieve these.

In order for your ambition to be SMART, it should be:

1. Specific

2. Measurable

3. Attainable

4. Relevant

5. Timely

How to Write SMART Goals

Let’s explore each of the core parts of the SMART goals acronym to develop, and actually achieve, your marketing objectives.

S is for Specific

Goals often fail because they are too broad to work towards. It’s easy to say you want to increase sales, but announcing “This quarter, our goal is to bring in more customers!” at a staff meeting won’t have any tangible impact.

Without a specific benchmark, your statement won’t be very motivating. Of course you want them to sell more, but how much more?

Outline what you want to achieve to communicate what exactly is expected of them.

A REAL SMART GOAL EXAMPLE

Let’s say your marketing team is developing a set of workshops to teach clients a new software. For this example, let’s say they’re HubSpot tutorials.

It’s not enough to say you want to do more workshops this quarter. You need to address the specifics:

• How will the goal be reached? // What tactics will you be using to achieve your goal? We’ll talk about this more in the M is for Measurable point below.
• Who will be involved? // Determine what team members you’ll need help from and outline their responsibilities and expectations.
• What do you need to get started and follow-through? // Create a list of all the deliverables you have to make, such as the workshop web page, landing page, thank-you page, the materials for the workshops, the presentation, their take-home documents, your follow-up emails or review.
• What is the end-goal of all of this? // Maybe at the end of the year, you hope to make a certain amount of revenue or have a certain number of companies you helped.

Don’t forget to get specific when telling your team why this goal is important too, which we’ll address more below.

M is for Measurable

Sometimes in business, it’s easy for a marketer to base interactions on feelings about relationships. At the end of the day, your boss wants to know your clients are happy with the work you do and continue to write their retainer checks.

Although it can be helpful to gauge your client’s disposition, feelings can be ambiguous and a dangerous way to drive decision-making.

You know what’s not ambiguous? Data. Assign a number to your goals to break them down into measurable results.

What metrics are relevant to your industry? For marketers, we often track website visits, number of leads and customers, clicks, opens— all sorts of interaction and engagement metrics.

A REAL SMART GOAL EXAMPLE

Maybe your KPIs for SEO are around your organic traffic, keyword density, backlinking profile and more. These metrics all have numbers like daily visits, percentage you used a phrase per article and number of referring domains and links.

But, there are things in any field that take some smart strategizing to assign a value to. For example, search engine results page (SERP) rankings can be tricky to measure. Some SEOs assign values to ranking on page one of Google based on the “position” it appears in, say in the number three slot out of eleven links.

No matter how you assign value to each metric, it’s important to set a standard for quantifying your data.

A is for Attainable

Your goal should be lofty, but not unrealistic. It should be something that you look at and think, “Yeah, I’m going to need to buckle down and really commit to get this done,” but not something that would require you to work crazy extra hours or jump through hoops to complete.

It’s all too easy to look at a goal through rose-tinted glasses and bite off more than you can chew. Avoid this by mindfully accessing every word of your proposition.

A REAL SMART GOAL EXAMPLE

The goal should be attainable around your sense of time, money and talent. Let’s explore these:

• Do you have enough time to do it? // If you only work 40 hours a week and are salaried, you should be able to devote only your paid time towards achieving your goal. Working outside of your set hours will give your boss and peers a misguided perception of what is achievable in that timeframe. (This is going to tie in with the last letter of the SMART acronym here in a bit!)
• Is it within your budget? // Your goal must stick to your budget and not have you scrambling for additional moola. Owner of your business or not, your goal should especially not require dipping into your own wallet instead of a business fund.

• Do you have the knowledge or skill(s) needed to deliver? // Lastly, your goal must be within the scope of your skills and expertise. It sounds silly, but this can be easy to underestimate. If you aren’t knowledgeable in a certain area to the necessary level, ensure you have someone on your team who is and can collaborate to ensure all elements of the goal are possible.

Goals that are too intimidating will deter participation (both for you personally and all those involved), so do your homework before committing to an ambition that is low-key delusional or #extra.

R is for Relevant

Relevance often starts with accessing your big “WHY.” Why does your company exist? What is the jet-fuel behind every action you take?

Look at your goal and ask yourself, “at the end of the day, does achieving this goal align with our overarching purpose?”

This part of the acronym starts to break down within companies who lack a strong vision. If your company doesn’t have a formal mission statement, think of your own why. Why do you wake up everyday and go to work? If it’s to help people, assess how this goal helps your company at large by supporting this initiative.

A REAL SMART GOAL EXAMPLE

For years, the iconic tech junkies at Apple have stood behind this statement:

“Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user-friendly.”

If Apple were to release a product mimicking another company’s design or made a flashy, complicated interface, it would be completely against all their brand has built. Look at your own business and ask yourself how relevant your goal is to your brand.

T is for Time-Bound

Simply put, set an exact day (sometimes even time of day) to have your goal completed by. Your plan should have a clearly defined deadline that everyone involved must comply to.

Don’t forget that your timing must be something that is realistic and achievable. Although it’s nice to be ambitious, like the other elements of the SMART goal acronym, make sure your timeline is relevant and attainable.

A REAL SMART GOAL EXAMPLE

Let’s say you have a big presentation coming up and need some data to prove the success of a long-term project. If you need a certain deliverable for a meeting, it heightens the importance of planning!

If your goal is stretched out over the course of a few months, it’s imperative to set mini-deadlines along the way to keep up your pace and nurture the team with “micro wins.” Consider incentivizing these finish line markers with small prizes.

With a smart goal of “Handcraft 200 mermaid tail necklaces by September 1, 2018 to sell at the weekend Jewelry Expo,” treat yourself and your business partner to drinks after you each create 50. The incremental steps will help everyone feel like they are making progress and keep the morale strong.

Writing SMART Goals is an Integral Part of the Inbound Marketing Process

Setting goals at work starts with a well-established marketing plan. Make sure you’re only putting effort into specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely objectives.

This can sound overwhelming, but it’s something that’s ingrained naturally in most inbound marketers. Once you master the five elements of the SMART goals acronym, it’ll become a fluid part of your monthly planning and reporting.

It ain’t so hard. Download The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing to learn how you could implement a successful marketing campaign to support your goals.

How much time and energy do you put into writing your email subject lines? Many people spend so much time focusing on what’s inside the email that they completely neglect their subject lines. And more often than not, their open rates take a hit as a result.

Optimizing your email subject is a crucial step in maximizing your marketing campaign. After all, if your subject blends in with the rest of your readers’ inbox, they’re probably going to skip right over your message.

So, how do you write subject lines that grab the recipient’s attention? Here are six tips to help you get started.

1. Personalize your email subject lines

A guaranteed way to improve the effectiveness of your targeted email campaign is to personalize your subject lines.

The simple act of adding your subscriber’s name in the subject can increase your email open rate by 26%. That’s because a name in the subject line makes subscribers feel as though your email was meant specifically for them.

Not only that, email personalization techniques are useful for custom tailoring your email campaigns to suit the needs and expectations of the individual, making your content stand apart from the rest.

2. Create email subject lines that target specific audiences

Building segmented lists can go a long way in helping you deliver content to the people who value it the most. List segmentation allows you break followers up into various demographics, which helps you to adjust your tone and content to best suit each grouping. This includes age and location demographics, buying habits, and more.

For example, you might send one email to a segment of people interested in a specific type of product you sell (like shoes), while another segment gets an email focused on your new clothing products.

3. Get right to the point

The average desktop client shows roughly 65 characters in a subject line, while mobile phones display as little as 25-30 characters. For this reason, it’s important to make your point known to the reader right away.

We recommend using as little as five or six words to convey your message. That’ll give you a subject line that’s optimized for both desktop and mobile users, which is important considering more emails are opened on mobile devices than desktops.

4. Put your important words at the beginning of the subject

Your subject line is the reader’s first impression if your email. And if you’re unable to effectively capture their attention, it might be your last impression as well. Avoid this by being strategic with your word placement, putting the most important words at the beginning of the sentence where you know they’ll be spotted.

Consider the following examples:

• All winter clothes are marked down by 50%
• 50% markdown on all winter clothes

In the first example, we don’t know that clothes are half off until the very end of a 43-character subject line. The second subject, on the other hand, tells us the most important information at the beginning of the sentence. As a result, the second example does a better job at attracting the reader’s attention.

5. Lose the filler words

Starting your subject line with filler words and phrases like “hey there,” “hello,” and “nice to meet you” creates unnecessary clutter by taking away from your intended point. And in the age of mobile browsing, the last thing you want to do is use some of your prime subject line real estate on words that have no real value.

One phrase that does have value, however, is “thank you.” Great for strengthening the relationship with your following, simple expressions of gratitude tell your readers that you recognize and appreciate their support.

6. Run A/B tests

There are going to be times when you perform every subject line tip in the email marketer’s handbook and your subjects still fall flat. Fortunately, with the help of A/B testing, you can reduce the chances of creating a boring and uneventful subject line.

Marketing platforms like Campaign Monitor make it easy to test open rates for different titles. All you have to do is come up with a list of subject lines that vary in length, tone, and the usage of power words.

Some example of A/B tests include:

• Testing emails with and without the reader’s name in the title
• Testing short versus long subject lines
• Testing generic subject lines versus subjects written with specific segments in mind

Once finished, you’ll be able to check the results of your A/B tests and see which subject lines had the highest open rates. This not only helps you choose the best subject for your next newsletter, it also gives you a better understanding of what subject line styles work best with your readers.

Wrap up

Remember, your subject line is almost as important as your email content itself. With the help of this guide, you’ll be more likely to create attention-grabbing emails that speak directly the reader—not your mailing list.

To make sure your business is on the right track toward growth, it’s important to set goals – but perhaps what’s even more important is making sure you have systems in place that will help you track your progress toward achieving those goals. Thanks to Google Analytics, it’s fairly easy to set and track goal progress directly from within your dashboard.

To create, edit, and share goals in Google Analytics, you must have Edit permission at the View level in the account you’re working with. If you do not, speak to the administrator of your account to have those enabled.

Step One: Creating a New Goal

Once you’ve signed into Google Analytics, click Admin, then choose the view you want. From there, look at the View column, and click Goals.

To create a new goal, click +NEW GOAL. You can also choose to import a goal from the gallery, or to click on an existing goal to edit it. If the +NEW GOAL or Import options are not visible, it’s because you’ve already created the maximum 20 goals for the current view.

You have three options for creating goals:

• Use a template.
• Create a custom goal.
• Create a smart goal.

Using a Template to Create a New Goal

Choose a Template from the list, and click Next to complete the Goal setup. Templates are included within Google Analytics on an industry basis. If your account does not have an industry category selected, you won’t see this option. Once you choose your industry, you can see a list of available templates to use for goal creation.

Creating a Custom Goal

Choose Custom from the list of options, click Next Step, then select the Type of Goal, and click Next to continue setting up your goal.

There are several types of goals:

• Destination goals
• Duration goals
• Event goals
• Pages/Screens per session

Destination goals treat a pageview or screenview as a conversion. Enter the screen name or page URL in the Destination field. Specify the match type as Equals to, Begins with, or Regular expression. If you want to track the success of your funnel, you’ll turn on the Funnel option, and for each step in the funnel, click +Add another Step, then enter a page name or an app screen name, as you did in the Destination field.

If you want to measure user engagement, you’ll treat the session time as a conversion. Choose the hours, minutes, and seconds to set the minimum session time you want to consider a conversion. Any session that lasts longer than this will count as a conversion.

Event goals treat certain interactions within your site or app as the conversion. Use the Event Conditions to set up at least one event prior to creating this type of goal.

Pages/Screens per session goals also measure user engagement. You can specify a certain number of pages as a conversion, and when a user hits that threshold, it will count as a conversion.

Creating a Smart Goal

If your account meets all the necessary prerequisites, you will have the option to create Smart Goals. You’ll follow the same steps to create a goal, then choose Smart Goals from the options, and click “Next Step” to continue.

To be eligible to turn on Smart Goals, you must first link your Analytics to AdWords accounts. Your AdWords account must have sent 500 clicks to the selected Analytics view over the past 30 days before you can set up Smart Goals. If it ever falls below 250 clicks, Smart Goals will deactivate until it hits 500 clicks or more again. Your Reporting View must not show more than 10 million views within 30 days, and you must have data sharing turned on.

Goals & Monetary Values

Once you set up Goals in your account, you can assign monetary values to them, to help you determine how much money each page or campaign is helping your business earn. Every goal type, except for Smart Goals, allows you to sign a monetary value to each conversion. If dealing with events for e-commerce, such as when someone purchases a product, there are additional considerations for assigning the monetary value. If you’re tracking a transaction or purchase with the E-commerce Tracking code, leave the Goal Value blank. The actual value of the transaction will appear in the Revenue metric (not the Goal Value metric) and will come from the Ecommerce Tracking code in your shopping cart.

Verifying Your Goals

When you’re ready to test your goal to make sure it works, click Verify Goal. It will calculate the conversion rate for the last seven days based on data that’s already in your account. It is not a projection of how well you can expect the goal to convert in the future.

At some point in our careers, we find ourselves in need of help from others — whether it’s to make a direct connection to a hiring manager, to gather information on a prospective client company, or to get help in learning about a new industry quickly. However, over the years, we often lose touch with people in our network as work, family, and other demands fill our limited time. As if reaching out to ask for help wasn’t hard enough, what do you do when the person whose help you need is someone you haven’t spoken to in over a decade?

As an executive coach, I have seen clients in this situation many times. Building and nurturing our personal and professional networks is essential for career success, with research showing that robust networks lead to better opportunities, faster advancement, and greater status, among other benefits. When it would help you to ask for help from someone you’ve lost touch with, you don’t need to feel awkward. Just keep a few things in mind:

Shift your perspective. The last thing any of us want is to be seen as the person who reaches out to someone only when we need something from them. No one wants to be that person. This concern, alone, can prevent us from getting back in touch. Changing the way you view your outreach to this person can make the initial contact feel a little less uncomfortable. I have often reminded clients, “Guess what? They also haven’t contacted you over the last 10-plus years. They might be really glad to hear from you.” Taking the perspective of shared responsibility for the lapse in contact, or looking at your outreach as a positive event and a good reason to reestablish a relationship with your contact can be helpful in overcoming the mental hurdle to your initial outreach.

Acknowledge the absence of contact. Calling out the elephant in the room can also ease the awkwardness. If the context of your relationship was less formal, say a college or graduate school classmate, you might use a bit of humor and say something like “Blast from the past” in the subject line. If your relationship was more formal in nature, perhaps a former boss or client, you might say something like “Reconnecting” in the subject line. In my own experience sending these types of email, and that of my clients, when there is name recognition by the person receiving the email, the response rate has been over 90% with one of these subject lines. Early in the body of your email, you can acknowledge it’s been a while since you’ve been in touch and briefly update them on what you’ve been doing professionally. This will also help provide useful context for your request.

Pay attention to tone. Making requests that sound either desperate or demanding can result not only in your request being denied or ignored, but it can also taint the other person’s view of you. You want your tone to appear confident in that you believe that this request is something that the other person is able to say yes to. At the same time, you also want to make it somewhat tentative by recognizing that they are likely very busy. You can also offer to make it easier for them by saying something like, “Please let me know how I can make it easier for you to fulfill this request.” They may ask you to draft an email that can easily be forwarded or to send additional information.

Give them an out. In recognizing that you are aware that they may be short on time to fulfill your request, giving the other person an out will also help both you and your contact to save face in the event that they cannot help you. You might say something like, “I’m sure you are very busy, so if this is not a good time for you (or if you don’t feel like you know this person well enough to make an introduction), I completely understand.”

Offer to reciprocate. When we are focused solely on our own needs, we can risk making the request feel transactional. By viewing your request in the context of a larger, reciprocal relationship and asking how you can be helpful to the other person, you help to build the relationship. By saying something like, “Please let me know how I can be helpful to you, either now or in the future,” you open the door for them to reach out for help when they need it. Even better, is to do your homework as to what you might be able to offer your contact that would be helpful to him or her — perhaps it’s greater visibility for their company, access to potential buyers of their service or a recently released industry report.

Show appreciation. Regardless of whether your contact is able to help you, letting him or her know in a short note that you appreciate their reply and are glad to be back in touch can leave both parties feeling good about the interaction. If they are able to help you with your request, sending a follow-up thank you note and even a small gift like a bottle of wine or gift card for their favorite coffee shop can be a nice touch. I once reached out to a former colleague to ask for an introduction to the head of talent management at a large company, where I then had the opportunity to propose a sizable engagement. My contact had a stressful job, so I gave her a gift certificate to a day spa, even before I knew the outcome of my proposal, letting her know how much I appreciated the opportunity that her introduction created, no matter the outcome.

Stay in contact. Now that you’ve reconnected with this person after all of these years, this is your opportunity to stay in touch. This may be something small like including this person on your holiday card list or connecting on LinkedIn (or other appropriate social media), or inviting them to have coffee or lunch when you are in their neighborhood or city.

Reaching out to those that we’ve lost touch with doesn’t have to be a huge hurdle to asking for help when we need it. By keeping the above guidelines in mind, you can gracefully bridge these gaps in a relationship to reengage your network and build mutually beneficial relationships.

Building Connections with Social Media

For most salespeople, the ABC acronym sounds familiar. Most remember the “Always Be Closing” acronym, but that phrase has become outdated. In the age of social selling, the ABC acronym has taken on a new identity. The ‘C’ now stands better for “connecting” because you cannot sell on social media if you can’t connect with customers in a meaningful way. To do that, you must maintain a steady stream of fresh content, excitable photos, videos, and develop a following of people who follow others to maintain a healthy fresh network of connections.

Of course, most salespeople start with coworkers, family, and friends when they’re learning the ropes, but you should also expand your network by building connections with social media. The overall goal is to raise awareness and interest of your customers with your company or brand. You can reach out to customers, influencers, speakers, journalists, bloggers, and even people you meet on the street. In the digital age, your social media acts as a business card.

The ABC Strategy

While the ins-and-outs of your strategizing are likely to change with the time, the core strategy for building connections with social media should be to connect with interesting or influential people who are intrigued with building connections with your brand. Over time you will build more connections with people of interest allowing your social capital to zoom skyward.

The key is to first gather information about your buyers, whom they trust, what their interests are, and connect with those people to earn trust and likeability through extension. However, be aware of who you associate with when building connections through social media. You could potential tarnish your company or brand if you don’t pay attention.

Quality, Not Quantity

When building connections with social media, most people focus on the number of celebrities or interesting people they can get to like or follow them. However, you have to be careful if you don’t know much about these people because you run the risk of being associated with negative issues or whatever public relations disaster that celebrity or influencer might be involved in. Instead, focus on a few people that spark your interest and learn as much as you can about them to ensure they’re brand won’t hurt your ratings.

Learn to Develop the Right Content for Social Media

You’ve made the connections now it’s time to start thinking about how to create fresh and unique content that will keep your consumers engaged, interested, and educated. Building connections with social media means always staying up to date with new ways to maintain your brand’s digital presence. Having a structured strategy for your content allows you to understand which connections are more engaged with your brand, what kinds of messages are working, and what kind of content you need to create.

You will never be able to maximize the value your customer receives from what you sell until you see yourself as a sales leader.

Sales leaders are confident and are comfortable in asking what others would view as tough questions.  When you create maximum value, you can achieve maximum revenue.

Watch this two-minute video, as I share a situation from my own business about helping the customer see more value:

 

How confident are you when talking with your customers?  Confidence comes from believing you can help the other person.  When you see results in others from what you’ve provided, it fuels your confidence.

Confidence in a conversation is a two-way street.  As one party exhibits more confidence, it’s only natural for the other party to exhibit more, too.  The more confident everyone is, the deeper the conversation and the greater the ability to uncover new levels of value.

Sales leadership is not a title. It’s an approach one takes to each conversation.   In the story I share in the video, there is little chance I would have avoided offering a discount, let alone being able to secure additional work, if I had not been confident.

My confidence allowed me to not be shaken when the customer stated at the start of the call that my price was too high. Had I not been confident, I would have come down in price.  Anything less than being totally confident would have resulted in me offering a discount.

You can’t take a pill or read one article and suddenly become confident and be a sales leader. If it were that easy, then everyone would be a sales leader.  Sales leadership is based on a fundamental belief you can help others achieve what they didn’t think was possible. It’s a belief that is unwavering due to your personal track record of helping others.

Make it your objective to be seen as the leader who brings out the best in others.  As you do, you’ll move yourself closer to not only being a sales leader, but also closer to creating more value for your customers. In so doing, you’ll bring in more revenue for you.

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