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For 13+ years in marketing, I’ve never seen a B2B company who’d say they don’t have a B2B marketing strategy framework or that their marketing strategy is ineffective.

But at the same time 6200+ B2B marketers say that their biggest challenges are generating traffic and leads, and proving the ROI of marketing activities.

Which can be interpreted in simple words as: “We simply don’t know what to do next and don’t know whether what we’re doing now is a good strategy”.

In this guide, I’ll share with you a proven B2B marketing strategy framework that will help you identify the most prolific market segments, your ideal customer profile, and the right marketing channels to generate leads.

What Is A B2B Marketing Strategy?

According to Wikipedia, a marketing strategy is a long-term, forward-looking approach to planning with the fundamental goal of achieving a sustainable competitive advantage.

Sounds weird and unclear, agree?

That’s why so many companies create 40-page documents stating the mission, vision, values, etc. The truth is nobody has a clear idea what should be achieved and in what way.

I’m a big fan of simplifying things.

For me, marketing strategy is the way to go from point A (current situation) to the point B (desired outcomes) by planned beforehand (marketing channels and tools) with affordable resources (marketing budget, team, etc.).

How do you create this strategy the right way?

Let’s dive in into the step by step process.

B2b Marketing Strategy Framework

1. Segment your market and focus on a target segment
2. Create an ICP for every market segment
3. Run a competitor analysis
4. Develop a USP for each market you want to target
5. Take your prospects through the buyer journey

1) Segment your market and focus on a target segment

Imagine you’re scaling a tech startup and you’ve decided to invest in CRM. You’ve read tons of information and stopped on 2 variants.

One of them is a CRM which gets your sales organized.

Another one is a specialized CRM which help to organize your sales, track recurring revenue, and the churn rate. Which one will you choose? The answer is obvious!

That’s the power of marketing segmentation.

When we focus on a specific market segment, we can personalize our offer not only by *FNAME*, *ROLE*, and *INDUSTRY* but according to the needs and challenges of the companies who belong to this segment.

This always leads to higher conversions, ROI, and revenue.

Start here:

To figure out your segments, start with these 2 simple questions:

• Who can be a potential buyer of my products (your target audience)?
• Why do they buy products or services like mine? What kind of problems or tasks do they want to solve?

Evaluate these segments with these criteria:

• Competition level
• The breadth of the market
• Lifetime value
• Segment growth
• Continuity
• Your past experience
• Ease of getting past gatekeepers
• Solvency
• Margin

After this exercise, you’ll realize 2 things:

• Not all market segments are equal. Some segments can generate higher ROI but require more resources. On the contrary, some have less potential but you can generate revenue easily.
• All market segments are unique and have different needs. Which means you’d create a different proposal for every market segment you want to prospect and use different approaches.

2) Create an ICP for every market segment

What’s the difference between an ideal customer profile (ICP) and simple customer profile?

Well, this is a good question which points out to a common marketing mistake.

I see so many companies just look at all their clients from different segments and try to create an average persona from all the data they have.

As a result, instead of adopting their product, proposals, and lead generation marketing campaigns according to this, people they try to create a universal product pitch.

The biggest difference between ICP and a “simple” customer profile is that an ICP focuses on attracting high-quality leads who are similar to your key customers instead of prospecting everybody who might buy your product.

There are 3 benefits of such an approach:

• You’ll be really able to personalize all your marketing materials: sales pages, proposals, ads, lead nurturing emails, etc.
• You can figure out the most effective lead generation channels instead of guessing what works.
• You’ll be able to choose the right marketing qualification criteria to evaluate the efficiency of every marketing campaign.

Next steps:

Here is an exact process to create an ICP:

• Choose one market segment
• Select top 10 customers from this segment
• Fill in the ideal customer profile template
• Collect additional data about these customers from social media
• Survey your customers
• Create an ideal customer profile from the data you’ve collected

The easiest part here is to collect the data as sex, age, location, job role, industry. On LinkedIn, you can simply open profile and scrape the data.

I also highly recommend collecting data such as:

• Websites your customers are sharing content from on their profiles. This will give you an idea about where you can apply for guest posting or collaboration.
• Influencers with whose content they engage — this will give you an idea about whom you should start to build relationships with.
• Communities where they contribute. You can use these communities for co-marketing, contribution, and content distribution.

3) Run a competitor analysis

It’s smart to work on your foundation before implementing any marketing tactic.

There are dozens of marketing channels, tools, and growth hacks you can implement. SEO, PPC, Facebook Ads, cold outreach, etc. The truth is that they all at the same time work on some markets and don’t work on others.

How do you figure out what marketing channels you should focus on?

• Survey your core customers (what we covered in the previous step)
• Spy on your competitors

Next steps:

I highly recommend using tools like SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, and BuzzSumo to understand where your competitors’ traffic comes from.

This data will give you a better idea about the channels you should really focus on instead of diluting your efforts.

The second part of competitors analysis is devoted to learning more about the sales process, strengths, and weaknesses, USP (unique selling proposition), pricing policy, etc.

The list of things you analyze is completely dependent on the industry but these are mandatory points you should always check.

4) Develop a USP for each market you want to target

Many companies think that positioning and a USP are the same.

This isn’t true.

Positioning is how the customer perceives your company, brand, or product. In simple words,  it’s what you do, how are you different from your competitors and how you can help a prospect.

Next steps:

Here’s a five-step process I use to develop a USP:

• Reach out to your core customers. Ask them what their favorite features are.
• Select top-10 features and rank them by their importance
• Compare your product/top features with your top three competitors.
• Choose the criteria where you top your competitors.
• Formulate your USP by focusing on some of these factors: impact, feature, need, target audience etc.

5) Take your prospects through the buyer journey

According to Hubspot, at any given time, only 3% of your market is actively buying. 56% are not ready, 40% is poised to begin.

Another fact: 63% of people requesting information on your company today will not purchase for at least three months – and 20% will take more than 12 months to buy.

So, if you focus only on bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) activities, you’re leaving 97% of your audience untapped.

Start here:

Realize that the sales funnel is only a part of the customer journey.

Before working on sales qualified leads, you must attract them (ToFu activities), qualify them (MoFu activities), and nurture them (BoFu activities).

Also, besides the marketing funnel, the buyer journey also comprises a:

• Sales funnel which is responsible for lead nurturing and closing deals
• Post-sales funnel — responsible for educating buyers while tracking customer satisfaction.
• Referrals funnel — responsible for generating referrals, recommendations and case studies.

Get Started with Your B2B Marketing Strategy Framework

Your marketing strategy should consist of:

• Clear goals you want to achieve (e.g. increase sales by 30%) that are based on current indicators
• Milestones
• Market segments you’ll focus on
• Marketing channels and tools you’ll use
• Resources (team, budget, etc.)

And, your marketing strategy should also have these attached to it:

• DRI (Directly Responsible Individual)
• Deadline
• Budget
• Expected outcome
• Execution and analysis

I really hope this guide gave you some fresh insights on what to improve in your marketing strategy or how to create a new one from scratch.

What did you think was the most useful here? Share your thoughts in the comments!

The post If You’re Building Your B2B Marketing Strategy, Start Here appeared first on Sales Hacker.

For startups and technology enabled sales teams, meeting a prospect in person feels like a waste of time. Why spend half a day with just one customer, when you could email or call hundreds? But while this might feel like common knowledge, it doesn’t mean in-person selling is dead.

When it comes to the top of your funnel, in-person selling is the last thing you want to do. But as you get closer to the close, it can become one of the best sales strategies you have. But you have to do it right.

Meeting in-person builds better relationships

At the top of the funnel, you want to grab someone’s attention. It’s all about the pitch. The offer. The value you’re presenting. But as you get closer to the deal, that dynamic shifts. Instead of just being about numbers, the deal becomes more and more about the relationship.

There’s no denying that every industry is getting crowded. And with all those competitors to choose from, a prospect’s decision usually comes down to how they feel about you. That’s where it’s so important to build a strong, human connect. And nothing does this better than meeting in person.

Here’s why:

• There’s more context around the conversation: When you meet in person, you get an insider’s view on how to pitch and negotiate. You get to see the way that person physically reacts. How they talk and sit. Their office and coworkers. Knowledge is power in sales. And in-person meetings give you so much more than a call or email will.
• You get to read their body, not just their words: Communication is 93% nonverbal, which means you’re missing out on so much if you can’t physically see the person you’re talking to. Are they saying “maybe” but their body is tense? You might be able to get some of this from a video call, but it’s not the same as sitting in the same physical location and reading someone’s whole body, tone, and presence.

• You build a deeper, more personal connection: For thousands of years, humans have built relationships around shared experiences and breaking bread. The simple act of being with someone and having a coffee or a meal can help build that relationship and give you an advantage.

• You get more (and higher quality) time: In-person meetings are rarely 10 minutes. So while you might not get to talk to as many prospects by going in-person, the interactions you have will be better quality.

• They’ll give you 100% of their attention: When you’re on a call or emailing a prospect, you’ll be lucky to get half their attention. The modern workplace is distracting and we’re all busy. But in most cases, when you meet in person you get that person’s undivided attention.

As long as humans are making the buying decision for companies, meeting in person will offer you a strategic advantage.

Where in-person selling fits into your sales process

Meeting your prospects and customers in person is a huge opportunity. But like I said at the beginning of this post, it only makes sense if you do it in the right way and at the right time.

So how do you know if it’s worth it to meet in-person? A simple test is to ask yourself these two questions:

• How big of a deal is this? In-person selling is expensive, both in time and money. And it should only be used when the expected results match the effort.

• Is it the right time to meet in person? You’re going to get the best results if you meet in-person later in the sales lifecycle. Are you facing a crisis right before the deal’s supposed to close? Are there too many stakeholders involved to answer everyone’s questions and concerns? When the time is right, you want to elevate and escalate to an in-person meeting.

Once you’ve decided the situation warrants an in-person meeting, you can use one of the best hacks I know.

The “show up follow up” hack

When a high-value prospect goes quiet or sends you a message at the 11th hour to say they went with someone else, a call or email won’t do. You need to show up.

It’s a classic sales tactic, but simply come by the office and tell them:

“I was just in the area and wanted to drop by and say hello.”

If that feels too forward, you can give them a quick heads up beforehand and say:

“I’m going to be in the area tomorrow and wanted to drop by. We’ve been speaking for months and I’d like to be able to meet in person, shake hands, and drop off a small gift for you and the team. Even if we don’t get to work together, I value our relationship.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking. This strategy is old school. It only works for the typical loud, outgoing, extroverted salesperson. You’re more technical and this won’t work with your customers.

But in-person selling doesn’t have to be aggressive. It’s about persistence, not insistence. You’re showing your prospects that you value the deal so much that you’re taking time out of your day to be there with them and do whatever it takes.

In fact, this is the exact technique Sam Altman—current president of startup incubator Y Combinator and former technical startup founder—used to save his first company, Loopt.

Loopt had built one of the first location-based mobile apps. Yet as the story goes, after months of negotiating a company defining contract, the prospect backed out at the last minute, choosing a competitor’s app instead.

So what did Sam do? He knew this deal was too important to let go, and so the mild-mannered, soft-spoken, technical founder bought a bunch of tickets, flew his team to Orange County, and “happened to be in the company’s neighborhood” the next day.

After just 15 of meeting in-person, the company had completely changed their perspective on Sam and the deal was saved.

The secret to sales is (and always will be) building better relationships

I know showing up at someone’s office can feel desperate, overwhelming, or over aggressive. But drastic times call for drastic measures.

If a high-value prospect disappears or ditches you at the last minute for a competitor, you need to make yourself undeniable. You can’t be archived or ignored if you’re in front of them. And I’ve seen time and again how companies and careers have been revived just by using this technique.

As long as there’s a human being on the other end of your deal, selling in person will never go out of style. It takes courage. It takes guts. But showing up in-person can turn around a deal in a way an email or call could never do.

Want to close more deals? Few things will help you accomplish that like a strong follow-up will. I've written an entire book on follow-up techniques, and even more importantly, the mindset and philosophy that makes follow-ups effective. And I'm giving you a free copy today!

Get The Follow-Up Formula today

However, to make more sales, it is not enough to be throwing money at your Facebook ads without putting in the work.

What work?

Managing and optimizing your Facebook campaigns to get the most online sales for your budget.

We know, we know, time is money and most eCommerce entrepreneurs are trying to run a lean business, meaning you’re probably doing most of the heavy lifting. However, if you’re not optimizing your PPC campaigns, you’re leaving revenue on the table.

In this post, we will show you how to quickly optimize Facebook ads for more online sales with the 7 most important and efficient Facebook ad optimization hacks.

So without further ado or wasting valuable time, here they are.

1. Start With the Right Marketing Objective

It is not enough to just say, “My primary objective is more online sales,” because as every marketer will tell you, a good sales strategy includes a sales funnel. At an elementary level, this funnel looks something like this:

Therefore, to truly get more online sales for your eCommerce business, not only does each element of your campaigns have to be optimized for more sales, but your campaigns should be optimized – as a whole – to the stage of the sales funnel you are marketing to.

At the very least, you should be running a campaign to drive potential shoppers to your store, a campaign to retarget that traffic and turn potential shoppers to customers and lastly, run remarketing campaigns aimed at turning one-time customers into repeat customers.

Therefore, the first and most important step is to ensure that your Facebook campaign objective matches your goal for your ads. This ensures that Facebook’s algorithm knows how to auto-optimize for your specific campaign for optimum ad delivery for the type of customer you are targeting.

Facebook ad newbie? Here’s a breakdown of the top Facebook campaign objective types recommended for eCommerce:

• Brand Awareness: Use brand awareness objectives if you are looking to introduce your eCommerce brand to brand-new audiences.
• Traffic: Use the traffic objective when you want to drive potential shoppers to your online store, your promotion or product pages.
• Video Views: Video views is a good way to optimize your brand awareness or product launch videos for more views.
• Messages: Interact with potential shoppers one-on-one with Facebook Messenger ads.
• Catalog Sales: Catalog sales campaigns enable you to target specific products within your catalog to automatically show; also known as Dynamic Product Ads.
• Conversions: Convert potential shoppers into customers through Facebook conversion campaigns.

2. Accelerate Your Facebook Campaign Results for Better, Quicker Optimization

Once you have created a new Facebook campaign, it can take a few days before you have enough data from that campaign to start optimizing. To assess whether a new campaign is working for you, you need at least 10,000 impressions; but if you don’t have any budget to spare, waiting this out to see whether the ad performs well can be costly.

There is a way to work around this if you want to accelerate that process to get your ROIs and spend optimized faster. It is what is commonly referred to as the FTO (fast take off) method.

The idea is to force Facebook to use more resources at the start of the campaign to get more impressions more quickly. To do this, you want to start with a lifetime or daily budget that is higher than your planned spend, to gauge quality and spend.

Important Note: This does not mean you should select Facebook’s Accelerated Delivery, as this will focus on speed rather than on accelerating the results of your campaign to optimize. Additionally, even using the FTO method requires a 24-48 time frame to assess before making campaign changes.

Once you reach 10k impressions, you can then optimize your campaign to ensure the ROI is on point and then lower your budget to match your planned campaign spend.

3. Rotate Ads to Fight Fatigue

We don’t need studies to tell us that seeing an ad repeatedly in our news feeds can get annoying and boring. However, when you do look at the numbers, like from this AdEspresso analysis, it really drives it home. Boring = lower CRS and higher CPCs.

This doesn’t mean you should be pausing those high-performing campaigns. Instead, by creating a few variations of your ads within that campaign, you can fight fatigue while maintaining those good results – which can be as simple as changing up your product photos.

To do this, create multiple sets within your campaigns with different ad variations and then schedule these sets to run at different times or on different weekdays. This can be particularly powerful when running Facebook remarketing campaigns when past shoppers could be seeing your ads more than once a day.

4. Capitalize on Likes, Shares & Views by Using the Same Post for Multiple Campaigns

No matter what your Facebook campaign objective is, there is no denying that the amount of engagement on that ad or post can boost credibility, further engagement, and trust – all working to help you convert more sales. This also helps you get some free organic engagement, which is the cherry on the top.

Ever wondered how some of your competitors have thousands of likes, shares, comments or views from their campaigns? Then this optimization hack is for you.

One way to do this is to select the ‘Use existing campaign’ option when creating a new campaign. Here you can choose an existing campaign, ad set or ad, allowing you to show an ad that includes all of its previous engagement in your new campaign.

For example, let’s say you want to use a video for a variety of campaigns. Instead of creating all new campaigns for one video, you can use the initial one to create other campaigns, which means you are showing all the accumulated campaign engagement in every campaign you create from it. Alternatively, you could post your video on your Facebook account, and then create multiple campaigns from that single post to rack up good video numbers like this one from our friends at GearBunch, who have 69k views in just two weeks from their new video Facebook ad.

5. Base Ad Scheduling on Your Data

Sometimes it is the smallest Facebook optimization hacks that separate the newbies from the pros. One such hack involves your ad scheduling. Many beginner Facebook advertisers have their ads running 24/7 and if they’re performing well, don’t look any further. However, if you take a close look at your ad data, you will notice that there are different times in a day or days in a week that perform better than others in terms of conversions.

By ensuring your ads only run during the times your target audience is more likely to buy (based on your own data), you will improve your ROIs. Additionally, this will have the added benefit of limiting ad frequency which we mentioned earlier.

Pro Tip: Don’t just use your Facebook advertising data; look into your site analytics data as well. Look at when your shoppers are more active online and the popular days for sales on your site.

6. Facebook Ad Placement Optimization

When creating your campaigns, Facebook offers a host of placement options that include Facebook’s feeds, right-hand column and instant articles, Instagram posts, instream videos and suggested videos, audience network, and Messenger.

To start, editing or deleting placements that are sucking your budgets will ensure you’re not wasting budget on placements that are pulling your whole ROI average down. Some placements may seem expensive, but are they bringing in the sales?

The first thing to do is try to match the placement with your target audience and your objective when you first create a campaign. Once a campaign is up and running, look for those placements that are pulling your whole average down and remove them from your ad set.

The second thing to consider is to create new ad sets that are designed for a particular top-performing placement. In other words, don’t have a one-ad-fits-all approach with Facebook. Instead, create ads that are not just tailored to your target audience, but for the platform that ad will be delivered to. Just because you’ve got an ad killing it on Facebook doesn’t mean that same ad will kill it on Instagram or Messenger. Instead, try to segment your campaigns based on your own data so that you’re delivering to one placement option per campaign.

7. Use Auto-Optimization Rules to Optimize on Autopilot

The key to optimizing Facebook ads for more online sales lies in your ability to constantly monitor your ad performance and quickly make the adjustments needed. This can feel like a full-time job, which is why Facebook auto-optimization rules are so handy. These rules enable you to automatically turn on and off your campaigns, ad sets or ads, adjust your budgets and bids and set up notifications when certain important conditions are met.

If you’re new to automatic rules, here’s Facebook’s step-by-step guide to creating one:

The Bottom Line: Test, Test & Test Again

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, you cannot create the perfect campaign for YOUR brand without first testing said campaign to YOUR target market.

We can give our expert hacks and tips, but to truly optimize your Facebook ads for more online sales, you need to optimize them specifically for your market to find what works for your brand specifically. Before throwing your whole budget into the ring, you should be testing your ad design, copy, CTAs and placements, your campaign objectives and bidding methods.

Pro Tip: The most important thing to consider when testing is to ensure that you are standardizing your tests. This means setting a fixed cost or traffic threshold, then changing one small variable at a time, to be able to make a quantifiable comparison.

Once you have created and optimized your campaigns into winners, head over to our How to Scale A Facebook Ad Campaign video tutorial.

Gratitude is the easiest path to positive emotions—and in the workplace, a simple “thank you” can provide all kinds of quick positivity.

A Wharton School study found that managers who remember to say “thank you” to their subordinates can foster a more motivated workforce. LinkedIn has taken notice and devised a way to send timely compliments with a single click.

How to Send Kudos on LinkedIn

Kudos are an app-only LinkedIn feature for now on iOS and Android. You can shower your appreciation on a single connection or a group of your contacts on LinkedIn:

1. Open the LinkedIn app on iOS or Android.
2. Tap on the Share icon on top of your Home feed to open the Message box.
3. Write a message if you want and tap again on the ribbon icon placed at the bottom-right of the share message box.
4. Select an individual connection or multiple people if you want to send the kudos to a team. Click Next.
5. Choose from the 10 kudos categories, like the simple ‘Thank You”, “Team Player”, or “Great Presentation”. You can also choose the more praiseful “Outside the Box Thinker” or “Making Work Fun”. Click Next.
6. Post to share the kudos and the person you appreciated will receive a notification that lets them know about your shout-out.

To prevent you from carpet bombing your network with senseless kudos, LinkedIn limits it to three per week, so use them when you really mean to.

A compliment can be paid with an email or a text message too. LinkedIn Kudos gives you another way. The important thing to remind yourself is that a gentle expression of gratitude can help someone make their day, add something to their LinkedIn public profile, and also boost your own self-esteem.

Image Credit: Jirsak/Depositphotos

Read the full article: How to Say “Well Done” and “Thank You” on LinkedIn With Kudos

What makes a brand successful in the digital age? A joint study by SAP, Siegel+Gale, and Shift Thinking suggests that digital brands don’t just do things differently; they also think differently. Where traditional brands focus on positioning their brands in the minds of their customers, digital brands focus on positioning their brands in the lives of their customers. Furthermore, they engage customers more as users than as buyers, shifting their investments from pre-purchase promotion and sales to post-purchase renewal and advocacy.

As part of our study, we conducted an online survey of more than 5,000 U.S. consumers and asked them about 50 different brands, both digital and traditional. We asked them about their perception, usage, preference, and advocacy for the brands. We also supplemented the survey with well-known brand rankings, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and an analysis of their marketing expenditures and strategies.

We found distinct differences between legacy/traditional brands and newcomer/digital brands. For example, consider the following “brand twins” – pairs of legacy and newcomer brands that compete in the same industry. In every case, the legacy brand rated higher on the statement “Is a brand that people look up to.” But the newcomer brands all rated higher on the statement “Makes my life easier.”

• Airbnb vs. Hilton/Marriott
• Dollar Shave vs. Gillette
• Red Bull vs. Coca-Cola
• Venmo vs. American Express/Visa
• Tesla vs. BMW

There were similar differences in how people’s brand perceptions are formed and reinforced. Respondents were more likely to hear about legacy brands through advertising and traditional media, compared to digital brands which are more often discovered via social media and direct word of mouth.

Overall, we found two distinct clusters, which we have categorized as purchase brands and usage brands:

• Purchase brands focus on creating demand to buy the product, while usage brands focus on creating demand for the use of the product. Consider the makeup department of a department store. The whole focus is getting you to buy the product with samples and professional makeovers. By contrast, Sephora and Ulta provide instruction, community, and services to help people feel confident in being able to use the makeup themselves when they get home.
• Purchase brands emphasize promotion; usage brands emphasize advocacy. Vail Resorts remade their entire marketing strategy with a program called EpicMix. It’s a social network for skiers that uses gamification, performance data, and photos as social currencies that skiers want to share with their friends. Most other ski resorts focus on promoting their snow-making abilities and giving discounts on lift tickets.
• Purchase brands worry about what they say to customers; usage brands worry about what customers say to each other. For example, where traditional hotels put more emphasis on the content in their advertising, Airbnb puts a greater emphasis on the content generated and shared by hosts and guests about their experiences.
• Purchase brands try to shape what people think about the brand along the path to purchase; usage brands influence how people experience the brand at every touchpoint. Apple Stores are an example of this shift, from the removal of a checkout area at the front of the store to the prominence of the Genius Bar. Where other stores are focused on making a purchase, Apple Stores are about having an experience.

The simple view would be that traditional brands are purchase brands and digital brands are usage brands. But there are exceptions, including brands like Visa, FedEx, Lego, and Costco, which exhibit many of the characteristics of usage brands. We suspect that the nature of their products, culture, and business model leads them to more of a usage mentality. They think of customers less as one-time buyers and more as users or members with an ongoing relationship.

The difference between purchase and usage brands can be seen through the lens of the “moments of truth” method that has become a cornerstone of customer experience design. Purchase brands focus on the “moments of truth” that happen before the transaction, such as researching, shopping, and buying the product. By contrast, usage brands focus on the moments of truth that happen after the transaction, whether in delivery, service, education, or sharing.

The benefits of shifting from purchase to usage are reinforced by our research. Survey respondents show more loyalty to usage brands. They had stronger advocacy in the form of spontaneous recommendations to others. And they showed a higher preference for usage brands over competitors, not just in making the purchase but in a willingness to pay a premium in price. On average, the usage brands were willing to pay a 7% premium, were 8% less likely to switch, and were more than twice as likely to make a spontaneous recommendation of the brand.

Golf coaches have long known what marketers are figuring out: the best way to hit the ball is to focus on the swing and follow-through.

Companies looking to exploit the branding potential unlocked by core digital technologies need to make the shift in their engagement with customers – from purchase to usage. These changes fundamentally require rethinking strategy, organization, investment, and measurement. In many organizations, marketing comes after product development. But a usage mindset requires a closer relationship between marketing and product development because the brand and experience are increasingly one and the same. Typically at purchase brands, customer service and loyalty take a back seat to marketing campaigns and lead generation. Usage brands, by contrast, elevate customer service and loyalty from resource-starved cost-centers to key drivers of growth and profitability.

The role and investments in advertising must also change to shift toward a usage model. Purchase brands try to create differentiation in brand perception in the hope it will influence consideration and purchase. But usage brands are focused on how their products will make a customer’s life better. The role of advertising for a usage brand becomes getting useful content and experiences into the hands of customers. The message becomes “Look how we can make your life better now, before you’ve even spent any money with us. Just think how much more we can do if you become a customer and use our product or service.”

The shift from purchase to usage has implications for measurement as well. Ad impressions are valuable, but what matters most is engagement. Usage brands look at engagement through a much wider aperture. They recognize that some of the most meaningful activity happens outside the sales funnel. Do people find the content created by the brand to be relevant and useful? Are people actually using the product? Are people spontaneously talking about the brand or product? A usage brand marketer would rather have a five-star rating in their online reviews than win an advertising award at Cannes.

More broadly, the shift from purchase to usage suggests that we need to rethink how we measure brand equity. We’ve all seen the annual brand ratings put out by the top firms. But they measure how much a brand is worth to investors more than consumers. Furthermore, their focus is on how people perceive the brand rather than how they experience the brand. Companies that get too focused on winning in the ratings will find themselves ultimately losing in the marketplace.

Although our survey emphasized B2C brands, we believe the Purchase and Usage mindsets are equally, or even more, relevant for B2B brands. Business solutions tend to have longer life cycles than consumer products and there is an even greater opportunity to deliver value outside the sales funnel. In addition, many B2B companies are moving to cloud-based services with membership and subscription-based business models. With these models, the purchase is just the beginning of a long-term relationship. The economics are driven primarily by renewals rather than by initial purchase. In turn, renewal rates are driven not by what buyers think about the brand, but what users experience of the product or service. The key is to think about prospects not as buyers, but as future users.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Mark Bonchek, Founder, Shift Thinking

The Blake Project Can Help: Differentiate Your Brand In The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we feature Roderick Jefferson, a leader in the sales enablement space to talk about sales enablement and onboarding new sales reps. Tune in!

If you missed episode 17, give it a listen here: PODCAST 17: The True Secrets to Successful Enterprise Sales

What You’ll Learn

• The definition of sales enablement and the key elements
• The importance of coaching and training
• Developing the right onboarding process to shorten sales cycles and rep productivity
• Aligning sales enablement and sales leadership
• Managing your career as you work through leadership challenges
• The differences between a mentor and a sponsor in professional development

Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast

• We’re on iTunes
• And on Stitcher

Show Agenda and Timestamps

1. Show Introduction [0:09]
2. About Roderick Jefferson: Baseball Card Stats [3:00]
3. Definition of Sales Enablement [7:06]
4. Sales Enablement vs. Sales Management [10:38]
5. Listen, Learn, Lead [11:18]
6. Sales Enablement in a Growing Org [13:15]
7. Onboarding Methodologies [15:48]
8. Changes Over the Past 25 Years [20:51]
9. Biggest Mistakes For Early Stage Companies [29:35]
10. Getting Started in Sales [33:34]
11. Making the Leap to Management [36:46]
12. Seeking Out a Mentor [39:01]
13. Sam’s Corner [45:18]

Sales Hacker Podcast—Sponsored by Aircall and Outreach

Sam Jacobs: Welcome to the Sales Hacker Podcast, folks. This week on the Sales Hacker Podcast, we’re excited that we’ve got, not one but two amazing sponsors. The first is Aircall.

They’re a phone system designed for the modern sales team. They seamlessly integrate into your CRM, eliminating data entry for your reps and providing you with greater visibility into your team’s performance through advanced reporting.

Our second sponsor is a company you guys probably know, Outreach. Outreach.io is the leading sales engagement platform. Outreach makes customer facing teams more effective and improves visibility into what really drives results.

Without further ado, thanks for bearing with us. Let’s listen to episode 18 with Roderick Jefferson.

About Roderick Jefferson: Baseball Card Stats

Sam Jacobs: My guest today is Roderick Jefferson, and he’s the CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates. He’s an acknowledged thought leader in the sales enablement space. And he’s got 20 years of leadership experience building enablement organizations across the enterprise universe.

He’s won a bunch of awards, including the 2015 Sales Onboarding Program of the Year, by Serious Decisions. He’s one of the founding members of the Sales Enablement Society, and he’s a member of several advisory boards. Roderick, welcome!

Roderick Jefferson: Hey Sam, thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

Sam Jacobs: So let’s start off. What is Roderick Jefferson & Associates?

Roderick Jefferson: We are a consulting firm, focused on small to medium sized business, in the 10 to 500 million dollar range.

And what we focus on is really helping to drive consistency, and repeatable and scalable practices that lead to increased revenue. Also, we have a focus on leadership and executive coaching, and finally the third arm of the chair is focused on keynote speaking.

Definition of Sales Enablement

Sam Jacobs: What is the definition of sales enablement? How do you define it?

Roderick Jefferson: That’s actually why we started the Sales Enablement Society. To get a clear definition and a charter for sales enablement. And so my definition is:

Getting sales teams into the right conversations the right way, with the right tools.

And we help them to break the complexity of sales enablement into practical ideas through scalable, repeatable processes. This ultimately lead to increased revenue. It is an ongoing occurrence, not a single event.

Sales Enablement vs. Sales Management

Sam Jacobs: How does sales enablement differ from sales management?

Roderick Jefferson: There is a symbiotic hand and glove relationship between the two. I believe that enablement is here to understand the needs of the business, and translate those into tools, templates, programs, processes. And then where the sales leadership comes in is, they should own the adoption and the execution piece. On the back end, enablement circles back again, to own the tracking, the sales metrics, the KPIs, and the reporting piece. So, we’re working hand in hand.

Listen, Learn, Lead

Sam Jacobs: Is it accurate to say that your process is listen, learn, lead?

Roderick Jefferson: Well, you’re absolutely right, you nailed it. It is the listen, learn, lead philosophy that we take. What we do is help to collaborate, communicate, and then orchestrate. I look at sales enablement as the hub that spokes out to every part of the org anization. I call us the translators of dialects and languages.

Sales Enablement in a Growing Org

Sam Jacobs: What’s the true value of sales enablement in a growing org?

Roderick Jefferson: I think that’s a component of the value of enablement, and it’s a strong component. Because we are hand in hand, focused on ushering in that acceleration to revenue. And the value I think, comes from four pieces.

One is, the purpose of enablement, as I outlined earlier and that is about driving revenue. Second is, the people piece. What’s the right structure and talent needed to be able to achieve that purpose? The next is the programs that we bring into place.

That could be onboarding, accreditations, certifications, QBRs, guided learning plans, those kind of things. And the last piece is the orchestration, inside of a given platform. And that is what are the systems and tools that are required to really manage all of those other pieces we talked about.

Onboarding Methodologies

Sam Jacobs: To the point of a great onboarding program, is there specific learning methodologies that you’re using?

Roderick Jefferson: It is a multimedia approach because there are different types of learners. You’ve got your visual, your kinesthetic, etc. We’ve gotta make sure that we hit all of those.

But we do have a centralized communication strategy that we put in place for every one of our engagements. It goes like this: you need to have some form of content management system in place. A learning management system is key. We want to also make sure that you have a centralized event calendar.

Changes In Learning Over the Past 25 Years

Sam Jacobs: What do you think are the themes that have evolved over the past 20 years?

Roderick Jefferson: Well there are a few things. Buyers are far more savvy now and further along in their buying cycle by the time they actually bring in a sales rep or an AE.

The second is I believe that the buyers now expect you to speak their language instead of trying to have them conform to your language or your messaging and position. The other thing that has changed significantly are the sales tools and automations that are required.

I can now pull together six five-minute podcasts where I can’t get the typical millennial to sit down for half an hour. So the way that we deliver content has changed significantly, the modalities have changed, they’ve certainly improved.

But they’ve changed the way that we teach. And most importantly I think we are getting away from training and getting closer to enablement and my philosophy is that you train animals and you enable people.

Biggest Mistakes For Early Stage Companies

Sam Jacobs: What are the biggest mistakes that early stage companies make when it comes to revenue and what is your advice to them?

Roderick Jefferson: Assuming that because they sold somewhere else and they were successful they would be successful inside of your organization.

We have all focused for the longest time on ideal customer profile. What I’ve been introducing as I’m consulting is: let’s focus on the ideal employee profile now. And that’s where I believe sales enablement should be a part of the interview process.

One, we come at it with a different set of lenses, and secondly, our BS meter is much higher. Thirdly we’re looking at the propensity for long-term success inside of the programs that we’re helping to build.

Getting Started in Sales

Sam Jacobs: If you’re a young person working in product, or you’re in investment banking and you want to make the jump to startups, how do you self-evaluate? What’s the best way to figure out if you’d be good at sales?

Roderick Jefferson: Now if you want to have a career in sales, start doing the most non-threatening activity on the planet. Ask someone for an informational interview.

I’m not asking for a job or for help to get me into the company — ‘m asking you to tell me about you.

The one thing that everybody is going to talk about. But go in and make sure that you have a set plan of questions that are going to help you direct and navigate either left or right when you come out of this conversation. It’s not just, “Hey, so tell me about your career and what you did.” Rather, “I have specific questions, tell me what your job looks like, what do you love about your job, what do you not like about your job?”

Making the Leap to Management

Sam Jacobs: How do you figure out if you should make the leap to management?

Roderick Jefferson: Don’t draw a line in the sand. Let me start there. We all say, by 24 months, by 12 months, by 18 months.

No, it actually really comes down to, what are your career goals? What’s going to enhance your quality of life? Where do you see yourself going and do you have the network to get there? Let’s go with the old adage of, your net worth is determined by your network. We all know that’s true, especially in sales. It’s about who you know.

I’ve always looked at it from the perspective of: I’ve done my homework and got the numbers that support it. Do I have a mentor or sponsor that can help me get there? Let me explain the difference to people that don’t know.

A mentor is someone that speaks about you. I can get your resume in front of the right person, I can move you up a lot. A sponsor is someone that speaks for you. And that is the person that says, they may not be ready yet, but I’m willing to put my reputation on the line, that I’m going to get them prepared to get there. Especially when you’re moving to a leadership role. If you don’t have that sponsor that will say that for you, you’re not ready.

Seeking Out a Mentor

Sam Jacobs: In your experience, do you reach out to someone and say, “Will you be my mentor?” Or do you just develop a relationship and then it sort of happens?

Roderick Jefferson: For the folks that I am a mentor for, I ask them a series of questions.

When someone says, “I want you to be my mentor”, I start with, “Why me?” and “What do you really know about me?” That’s not an arrogant statement. It’s just “Have you done your homework?”

The biggest piece that I ask them is, “In this relationship of mentor/mentee, how are we going to make this mutually equitable?” I’m not asking you to buy things, I’m not asking you to do things. But I have to learn something from you, the same way that I’m giving back to you. If you can’t tell me what I can learn from you, I’m not the right person to be a mentor for you.

Sam’s Corner

Sam Jacobs: Folks, it’s Sam’s Corner. That was a really interesting interview with Roderick Jefferson from Roderick Jefferson & Associates. He has spent time with all the big names that we know and love, Salesforce.com, Oracle, Marketo, and many, many more.

RJ mentioned that a mentor is someone who talks about you and a sponsor is someone who talks for you.

You need those sponsors in your career in order to take those next steps. So, if you’re out there, and you’re thinking about how to take those next steps in your career, I would really strongly encourage you to network. I would encourage you to cultivate and build relationships.

So that is Sam’s Corner. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you guys next time!

Don’t Miss Episode 19

To check out the show notes, see upcoming guests, and play more episodes from our incredible lineup of sales leaders, visit www.saleshacker.com/podcast-subscribe

You can also find the Sales Hacking podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. If you enjoyed this episode please give us a share on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Finally, a special thanks again to this month’s sponsors, Outreach and Aircall. If you want to get in touch with me, find my social handles in my bio below.

I’ll see you next time!

The post PODCAST 18: How the Right Onboarding Plan Can Turbocharge Revenue Growth appeared first on Sales Hacker.

qimono / Pixabay

This is a serious issue that every marketer, brand, agency and tech team need to address. It’s simple – now that digital media and advanced technology have transferred control of the buying journey to the buyers, anything they don’t want is a complete waste of time and budget.

Your flashy website? Buyers don’t care. What your salesperson says about buyers? Forget it. Your C-suite’s advice on launch messaging? The worst. Your agency’s new strategy? Wasted.

All those efforts are going to waste. Billions of dollars lost. And the buyers are fed up.

It’s no secret that price and product have taken a back seat to the customer experiences when they interact with your brand. And yet billions of dollars annually are poured into new marketing content — assets that brands think the customers want to consume. Billions more are invested in products based on what brands think customers want.

In comparison, mere pennies are spent to listen and understand what buyers really want – the expectations buyers have and what they need to know as they navigate their journeys.

Have you ever met someone at a BBQ who talks only about himself, interrupts you, and thinks he knows everything? I hate that guy. He comes across as arrogant and self-centered. I’d rather stick my face in those 500-degree coals than listen to his opinions.

Is that your content, your product, or the reason your sales and marketing teams can’t align?

It’s not just your customer’s experience after they buy, but every moment beginning with your first contact with a new prospect. It’s all critical, and yet we continue to flood the market with our own brilliant ideas.

Listen, this isn’t rocket science, so slow down! Think, listen, learn, get out of your own way and stop bullying the marketplace with your thoughts, your sales teams’ thoughts, your executives’ thoughts, your product teams’ thoughts. It’s time to go learn from the buyer and build your strategy around their thoughts.

You’re probably thinking,’…. what are you talking about, we are listening to customers?! We have buyer and customer personas and marketing automation too. We conduct surveys with questions we think are important, our customers answered our questions, so we know what they think.

‘We, we, we’…will take you all the way home but not to the bank, it isn’t working. It doesn’t matter what youthink, your questions don’t matter. Your sales team’s opinions don’t matter. The pretty pictures and obvious stuff you’re using to profile your personas doesn’t matter either.

The only part that matters is your persona’s expectations for their buying journey.

There is only one way to know how to communicate with buyers, and that involves real insight into the questions they are asking at each step of their journey. Don’t ask for their cell phone. Don’t ask for their email. Don’t ask, answer. You should already know. Do your homework. Prepare. Study their journey. Understand it. Give the buyer what your competitors aren’t providing … give them answers to their questions so they can decide if you have what they want.

Chances are you are not that unique, what you offer really isn’t that different. How and when you answer your buyer’s questions is the absolute most important thing you can do to help customers choose you.

So now …are answers the new marketing currency? Spoiler alert – yes, yes, they are.

Silly me, I always thought we were supposed to sell solutions.

That is, as sales people, we were supposed to understand our customers and their businesses–not in the abstract, but very specifically.  What are Christy’s goals, dreams?  What is she accountable for?  What issues stand in the way of her achieving these?  What happens when she doesn’t achieve them?

Likewise, I thought we were supposed to understand the customer’s businesses, again, not in the abstract, but very specifically.  What are the goals/priorities of Christy’s managers, all the way up to the top of the company?  How is the company doing in achieving those goals?  How are they performing for their customers and in their markets?  How are they performing compared to the alternatives?  What stands in the way of their achieving their goal?  What do they need to change?  What is their willingness to change?  What happens if they don’t change?

Then again, back to Christy, what’s this mean to her, her colleagues, and the other 5.8 people that might be involved in the buying process?

Then finally, how do we help them achieve their goals?  How do we help them change?  But this was very specific, it focused on Christy and the other 5.8, it focused on the company.  “Currently, your performance is this…., I understand you want to change to do that……  If you aren’t successful the consequences are…..  But if you did this……  you could achieve that…. In this period of time….. and the risks would be these….”

I thought that we were supposed to focus on those issues most important to Christy and her colleagues.  While we might have a laundry list of many areas where we could help them, those that were important to Christy and her team were the one’s we focused on, and we didn’t bother her with the things that were irrelevant to them.

That’s what solution selling is about…….or at least that’s what I thought.

Yet, it seems that’s not how solution selling is practiced by the majority of sales and marketing people.

It seems solution selling is more “self centered,” that is about the seller’s company, products(solutions), and how wonderful these are.  It seems this type of solution selling works this way:

Reach out to as many people, organizations as you can—the more the better, the more frequently the better.

Present,  “This is our company and all these customers “just like you,” buy from us…”  It turns out none of those companies are “just like us,” but I’m left with figuring out it maybe the are and what it might mean.

Present,  “These are our wonderful products and this is what they do…….”

Alternatively, “Our solutions help you increase revenue, decrease costs, improve profitability, improve customer satisfaction, improve your competitiveness, improve productivity….”

Then on to the demo, where we learn more about what the products do….

By that time, the customer is supposed to have that “Aha moment,” and immediately succumb to issuing a purchase order, as the sales person moves to the next customer selling the same solution.

And then customer success contacts us with, “what do you want to do……..”

It seems today’s solution selling is, indeed, about problems and the problems solved.

But it is not about Christy’s or her organization’s problems.  That is, it is not specifically about what concerns her, her team and her organization.  It is not specific about what they will achieve, when they will achieve it, how they can achieve it, what they have to do/change, or the risks…..

It seems solution selling is not about the customer, but what we do and the problems we solve.

For Christy and her team to understand what it means to them (or what is even relevant to them), they have to become solution buyers.  That is, they have to sort through the lists of features/functions/speeds/feeds.  They have to sort through the problems the solutions address always asking,

“What does this mean to me/us?  What parts of this solution are relevant to me/us?  How will it impact us?  What specific results will we achieve?  What do we have to do to achieve them?  How do we do this?  What are the risks?”

It seems the new version of solution selling is just about generic problems/opportunities.  To understand what it means to the customer, the customer has to figure it out.

Apparently, the new solution selling is dependent on the customers’ abilities to be great solution buyers.

That is, they have to have the ability, and willingness, to sort through the solution to figure out what it means to them.  They have to recognize where their problems are, recognize they need to change, then figure out the specific improvements the solution will provide them.

For them it’s insufficient to know the solution improves productivity, improves revenue, reduces costs, improves competitiveness.  They have to answer, “by how much, when, how do we do it?”

And customers have figured this out, they know they have to become solution buyers.  They know the solution sellers won’t be able to help them out with these issues.   They don’t know how, they don’t have the ability, or they don’t care.

Solution buyers have learned they have to figure these things out themselves.  And they have become very efficient at it–they’ve learned they don’t need solution sellers.

Amazon’s highly visible search for a second headquarters has offered one tremendous public benefit: it has raised public awareness of what bad economic development is. Even Saturday Night Live satirized the lengths to which local officials will go to woo a major company, which include offering massive amounts of taxpayer subsidies, despite dubious economic returns.

But if attracting Amazon and other companies is not the right way to create jobs, then what is?

To start, it’s easy to understand why local leaders pursue these business attraction deals: economic development is routinely mayors’ top policy priority, as new jobs can boost local employment rates, raise residents’ incomes, stabilize city budgets, and revitalize distressed neighborhoods. Landing a flashy new business headquarters is great PR, a highly visible way to show that leaders are directly helping local economies. This leads state and local governments to spend an estimated $45 billion on economic development subsidies and incentives each year, even when they rarely factor into corporations’ final decisions.

All this attention lavished on business recruitment overstates their importance to total job creation. One study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that attracting out-of-state businesses accounts for just 3% to 14% of all jobs created in a state each year. Furthermore, evidence suggests that the pipeline of corporate relocations is drying up, leading to spiraling subsidies for the few mega deals that do emerge.

Meanwhile, a mountain of research suggests that the bulk of job creation happens elsewhere. The Kauffman Foundation notes that fast-growing startups play an outsized role in job creation. Economist Gary Kunkle emphasizes the importance of “sustained growth” companies of all sizes, which add jobs steadily over several years, rather than in a single massive expansion. Other researchers, including Enrico Moretti, Michael Porter, and my colleague Mark Muro, point to the power of clusters — especially in tech-based advanced industries — for regional job creation. They note that close proximity to competitors and suppliers allows companies to share talent, supply chains, and infrastructure, leading to more innovation, growth, and spillover benefits in the form of new local jobs.

In short, the bulk of job growth comes from empowering existing people and businesses in a community to grow, innovate, and start new ventures. Local leaders and voters should demand this kind of good economic development, which then attracts other firms that want to be part of a dynamic local business environment.

Broadly speaking, here are three ways to grow jobs from within:

1. Invest in a start-up ecosystem. With economic dynamism on the decline in recent years, local leaders have been launching efforts to support early-stage companies. This can include investments in startup accelerators, which can provide resources and mentors to aspiring entrepreneurs, or efforts to build a more diverse pipeline of entrepreneurs within a region’s start-up ecosystem, as is taking place in San Diego and Atlanta.
2. Help small- and middle-market firms scale. Beyond start-ups, local leaders can also help existing small- and mid-sized establishments survive, innovate, and grow. Some communities, including Chicago, are helping small businesses expand their supplier relationships among a network of universities, hospitals, and other private sector institutions. Others provide customized services to small and mid-sized manufacturers. And some have focused on middle-market firms, which have the size and proven products to invest in continuous improvement, yet face unique challenges. Helping these companies find skilled workers, enter global markets, and access capital, as can be seen with one promising initiative in Philadelphia, can facilitate job growth.
3. Deepen industry specializations. San Diego’s life sciences specialization, Milwaukee’s water tech cluster, and Indianapolis’s bio health tech ecosystem were hardly the result of dumb luck. Instead, a series of strategic moves by private and public leaders helped create competitive advantages in these sectors, as described in a recent Brookings report. This included bringing firms together, linking industry and university expertise to make the most of commercial opportunities, and making key public investments.

These economic strategies benefit directly from a broader array of investments that matter to global competitiveness, such as transit-accessible job centers, modern air and logistics infrastructure, and industry partnerships with technical schools and colleges to help workers gain valuable credentials.

Meanwhile, since economic development incentives will not be going away anytime soon, local leaders should at least use them to reward firms that create quality jobs, locate in underserved neighborhoods, or commit to community benefits.

As the competition for Amazon’s second headquarters heats up in the remaining months, the real winners will be the cities that play in the game that counts—growing an inclusive, sustainable economy that invests in homegrown people and businesses.

Nathan Arnosti contributed research to this post.

There’s a fine line between being helpful and being creepy. The goal of social selling is to draw prospects in, not scare them away.

Most people think of social selling as using social media platforms to sell. That’s a gross oversimplification. You have to build some trust and influence first. If I just walked up to you and said, “Yo. Buy this sweet stereo I have in my trunk.” you (probably) wouldn’t do it. Social media is no different. Instead, apply the Golden Rule of Sales: don’t sell in a way you wouldn’t want to buy.

Salespeople should use social media to provide insights for prospects by answering questions, responding to comments, sharing content… anything to add value. I’ll say it again: Add value. Don’t add noise.

How exactly do you do that? Below we detail How to Get Started with Social Selling to help you navigate a tricky space and be seen as an asset throughout the buying process – from awareness to consideration to the close.

1. Create a professional profile

We actually covered this one a couple of weeks ago in our post, How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Social Selling. Having an up-to-date social profile is step one to not being creepy.

Check out the full post for 5 steps (with examples!) to do that. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt:

“Have you ever searched for someone on LinkedIn only to find their profile is nothing more than their name or their photo is 20 years old? Do you sort of feel like they’re lazy? It’s frustrating and doesn’t reflect well on the individual. Maybe they just aren’t into social media, but that doesn’t change your perception. Don’t be that person… especially if you’re using LinkedIn as part of your sales process.”

2. Post relevant content

Content is a way for you to continually demonstrate ways you can add value to your target audience. That doesn’t mean slaving over a keyboard to write original thought pieces. Instead, look at industry news, relevant technology advancements, and LinkedIn posts that are getting a lot of engagement.

Posting content your prospects are interested in helps you stand out – it doesn’t have to be “yours” or even your company’s work. In fact, it’s better to put up content from a variety of sources to prevent a perception that you’re self-serving. Develop a point of view, write a couple of sentences, and share it. Adding your insight on a piece sparks conversations with your target audience.

You down with OPP? (Other People’s Publications)

3. Do some light stalking

Many social networks offer someway to “watch” people/companies of interest. On Twitter, you can create lists of people or hashtags to watch. Facebook allows you to take a page like one step further with a “follow” so you’re always aware of new posts. LinkedIn has a similar follow feature for both companies and individuals.

Take it a step further by subscribing to LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It is a premium paid service, but it makes stalking research much easier. The tool helps you identify new leads based on a variety of parameters: location, industry, company size, etc. Using those search results, you can build a qualified prospect list. From there, you can…

4. Make a connection

The rules of engagement when it comes to connecting with someone are vague. Social media is the new business card, but at what point are you handed this virtual business card? On Twitter, you’re free to follow people all day long. It’s expected and even encouraged. On LinkedIn, you should be more cautious.

It’s generally considered bad form – even annoying – to request a connection from someone with whom you’ve never had a meaningful interaction. After you’ve engaged with a target in person or online, a personalized invitation is fine. The key word there is personalized. Take the extra 30 seconds to tell the person why you’d like to be in their network. This should be easy if you’ve been engaging with OPP; reference something posted on the person’s company page or a piece of content related to something they recently shared to show that you’re not just some rando.

5. Get engaged

Join LinkedIn groups and offer insights. Comment on your prospect’s post. Tweet back. Whatever you do, don’t make it a sales pitch. No one is browsing their social platform of choice on a Sunday night, just hoping someone will try to sell to them.

Remember The Gold Rule of Sales. Engage in a meaningful way; add value by contributing a thought-provoking response to an article.

Want extra credit? Share an article with a target customer and include a thoughtful comment.

BONUS: Ask for referrals

Referral selling is one of the most effective techniques you can use. In fact, 92% of buyers trust referrals from people they know (we have a short video on that here). Social selling makes it easier for you to get referrals within your LinkedIn network.

Here’s how:

1. Identify stakeholders to whom you’d like to be introduced.
2. Stop by their LinkedIn profile.
3. Check for common connections.
4. Request an introduction from your mutual friend. (Don’t forget to say thank you.)
5. Start the conversation.

Social selling is not a one-and-done activity. Add it to your existing sales cadences. There is some start-up effort, but the payoff is worthwhile. Recent TOPO research indicates that generating your own leads creates the best long-term results. On average, marketing is still only responsible for 30% of lead generation for sales. That leaves you – the sales rep – to generate an average of 70% of your own leads if you are to hit quota.

Your prospects and customers are already on social media, and they’re using it for business. Go where your prospects and customers are. Just don’t forget: social selling works best when your primary goal is to add value and build relationships. In the wise words of Oprah, “It is better to be interested than interesting.”

Pssst… did you know that SalesLoft now offers LinkedIn Sales Navigator steps? These allow salespeople to include four kinds of LinkedIn Sales Navigator steps (InMail, Research, Connection Request, & Ask for an Introduction) in cadences that can be executed directly from within SalesLoft and Salesforce.

The post 5 Social Selling Tips and Tricks appeared first on SalesLoft.

fancycrave1 / Pixabay

Ours is a data-driven world.

For businesses seeking to survive and thrive, data-driven decision-making has become an essential part of driving growth and remaining competitive. As data becomes more available to growing businesses, the pressure mounts to use that data effectively to steer the company through the rough waters of today’s competitive marketplace. In short, the more data that’s available, the greater the demand for making sense of that data.

That’s the job of Business Intelligence (BI to help business leaders make informed decisions. BI ultimately helps organizations enhance operational efficiency and accelerate progress towards enterprise goals. They help companies keep a firm finger on the pulse of the business with informed insights, real-time performance metrics, and more accurate perspectives of operations from one end of the organization to the other.

As IT evolves, as the marketplace gets more sophisticated, and as the volume of business data proliferates, executives and managers depend more and more on nuanced business insights to make timely, efficient, and even surgical business decisions. The ability to adeptly monitor performance, forecast trends, improve customer experience, recognize impending opportunities, respond to blips in the market, and better manage departments has never been more powerful.

Calling all analysts.

The rise in demand for ways to make sense of data has created a robust market for business intelligence (BI) analysts. Professionals with the ability to transform data to communicate information of high value to support an organization’s decision-making have never been more sought-after. In fact, BI is one of the only fields that has continued to expand over the last decade, even in the face of economic volatility.

According to Gartner, a global IT research firm, the BI market is expected to grow to $22.8 billion by 2020. Not surprisingly, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reflects the same sentiments: the demand for business intelligence analysts is expected to grow by 21% from 2014 to 2024.

In fact, the demand for the position is far outpacing the supply, for many reasons. The sheer prominence of BI across all industries has created a shortage of qualified personnel. The job requires a unique set of skills that not everyone can claim to have: both technical and business expertise, and the ability to communicate with all types of stakeholders. With new BI technologies and tools continually emerging, the bar remains high, and the market remains competitive among job seekers.

It may be worth it
The position is also enjoying greater respect and prominence within organizations as well. Top decision-makers are choosing to invest more in the growth area and are not inclined to outsource the position. They recognize that analysts need to have an ongoing presence within the organization to make sure that what they do aligns with the current and future needs of the business.

In addition, the life of a BI project is one of constant modification, as goals change, metrics get added or subtracted, or new data becomes available. Support for new data and more responsive data reporting tools frequently expand the requirements of BI projects. There’s always more to do.

BI analysts earn a respectable wage and can expect it to increase over time. Today, the average annual salary of a BI analyst is $66k per year, according to Payscale.com. Bonuses and profit sharing benefits are also frequently offered and can boost the total into the $98k range. Taking it to the next level, business intelligence analysts often progress into higher-paying roles, like business intelligence architect, business intelligence developer, or business intelligence manager, whose median annual compensation runs around $112,000.

Is it right for you?
With a lucrative future, how do know if becoming a BI analyst is right for you? To succeed, you need to be comfortable in two seemingly different worlds: business strategy and computer science. On the one hand, you benefit from being able to understand the mindset of a business executive. On the other, you need to know how to use specific programming languages and tools, as well as have the precision required to work with data detail. It’s a good bet it’s up your alley if you are good at analytical thinking, enjoy searching for solutions to problems, and are detail-oriented, persistent, and flexible.

Those who are best suited to fill BI analyst shoes like working with ideas. They like searching for facts and figuring out problems mentally. They can synthesize a variety of needs and questions and make recommendations for action. They are comfortable starting up and carrying out projects. They like leading people and don’t shy away from making many decisions.

How to get started
Now is a great time to take advantage of a career opportunity that seems to have a bright and rewarding future. Here are some suggestions to get started in the field if you haven’t already:

• Start with a degree. Start with an undergraduate degree in information systems, computer science, data science, or engineering. Learn as much as you can about data-related topics: data architecture, database design, data mining, data visualization, and more. You’ll also need to obtain a basic understand of business processes and organizational operations.
• Secure an internship. Before or after graduating, try to secure an internship or entry-level job within a BI team. Get a better grasp of how your knowledge can be applied in real-life scenarios. Take advantage of on-the-job trainings. Whenever possible, learn from the experts how to master Excel and SQL skills, and to gain experience working with an ERP system like Oracle or SAP.
• Invest in certifications. Certifications will give you a deeper understanding of the topic as well as open more doors for you. A good place to start is with the Certified Business Intelligence Professional (CBIP), proposed by The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), and the ICCP. There are other common certifications that are available to you as well, including Microsoft’s Certified Solutions Expert in business intelligence.
• Build communication skills. It’s also important to develop solid presentation and communication skills. BI analysts are often relied upon to facilitate meetings, discuss organizational data, present and explain key findings, and train new personnel. The ability to convey ideas clearly and even influence your audience will take you a long way.

Last week I posted about the value of free content vs putting a gate that requires an email address and other personal information to get the content. Many people commented about my strategy of totally free content on my post Really, Truly, Actually Free Content and on social media. Today, I am sharing the results of one free content offer, an ebook that has generated millions of dollars in new business for the author.

Digital marketing is hot right now. I am not sure if it’s because I’m in it every day and things are all changing or whether it’s actually hot, but it feels like it’s really on fire. Whenever I talk to entrepreneurs, they want to know what’s the latest network or what’s the best growth hack for any given network. The biggest opportunity and the most overlooked “hack” isn’t a hack at all. It’s just fundamentals. In fact, the most successful marketing strategies share this one valuable trait… They bring value.

A few years ago “value” was a hot term in leadership circles. “Bring value” they’d say, but they never give you real examples of value. If you google value posts, you’ll get everything from a list of how to bring fiscal value to how to better listen to people. However, none of these posts help the digital marketer or the entrepreneur craft pieces that communicate value.

So how do bring value? What does Gary Vaynerchuk say about value? He talks about being the best you can be. That’s great but what if you are a SaaS entrepreneur, how does that translate. Here are a few examples.

Talk About The Process In-Depth (AKA the Tutorial)

Facebook/Youtube/Instagram post of your workspace and with the description of how many hours you worked or what techniques you used to create whatever it is you’re creating.

For those that want to follow in your footsteps, so hints on how you got there are invaluable to them. Also, you can help set their expectations. Imagine a writer’s surprise after a year of writing to find out there are seven more drafts, for example.

Frequently Asked Questions

This is my old go to for content because it is the best content ever. Don’t just do the awful support page nonsense that never helps anyone, that’s not value. What’s valuable is an in-depth answer to a question people have about you or your product or service. Don’t hold back either.

If you’re struggling with questions for a newly formed business, try these tricks.

• Search your email for questions; chances are really good that you’ve taken some questions for granted.
• Pretend to be a customer of yours and ask yourself what they would naturally ask
• Get someone to test your service or product without instructions have them ask you questions.
• When in doubt, use YouTube suggests! Type some things into YouTube and let it suggest your topic.

The key is the depth and the authenticity of your answer. That’s what’s going to bring the most value.

As a side note, YouTube and Instagram have gone on record that the only thing they care about is Watch Time, so how do you do that? Bring Value!

Tell A Personal Story

This one might be tough, but sometimes it can bring the most impact. Telling a personal story (AKA Testimony) about a challenge you’ve had as an entrepreneur or as a human being and how you overcame the challenge. People love stories and telling your story will not only help you connect with the audience but if there are lessons to be learned, then you’ll be bringing legitimate value.

Whenever I watch Shark Tank, I enjoy them because the show has done a good job of telling us their story. Damon John’s story in particular, how he was in a bad place, hustled and got out is a story that many entrepreneurs can relate to, and new ones can get hope from. Every time he tells the story of how his hard work paid off, particularly when he goes into detail about sneaking on to hip-hop recording sets he’s bringing value.

When someone tells you a story, like “The Secret” they don’t bring value. Yes, life has many opportunities. However, it’s the hard work that puts you in the position to take advantage of the opportunities. Yes, the attitude is a big, big part of it, but you can’t have it all without work. That kind of message brings value.

Where To Bring Value

As you think about bringing value, you get to decide the medium. Whether it’s a blog post, maybe an image with the description that matches, or perhaps it’s a YouTube video (which be re-used on another platform) it doesn’t much matter if you’re bringing value it will attract others.

The point of the post is that the most successful strategies online are where the most value is brought. It could be something small like sharing a tip, and it could be a heart-wrenching story. It’s a fact that the most popular game streamers are the ones that try to communicate value to those watching.

The moment your dream client decides to take a meeting with you because they believe it will be worth the investment of their time. This moment is the opportunity for you to create a new opportunity. For you. And for your dream client.

The moment during early conversations when your dream client discovers something about themselves, something they didn’t know but for the questions you asked and the insights you shared. This is the moment you demonstrated an understanding of why your dream client needs to change now.

The moment your prospective client recognizes that you understand their world well enough to be considered as a potential strategic partner, someone devoted to helping them produce better results. This is when your dream client recognizes you have intimacy, a deep, personal understanding and that you are other-oriented.

The moment you address your dream client’s concerns with empathy, intelligence, and by deepening their understanding of how they can move forward successfully. Change comes with a good bit off fear. The ability to banish that fear by proving confidence is what helps them move forward in spite of the difficulties, known and unknown.

The moment your prospect trusts you well enough to start introducing you to other stakeholders within their organization, especially those stakeholders in executive leadership whose support will be necessary to make the kind of change you’re proposing. It is now believed that you will make your contact look good, and that they believe you are going to be able to gain the support of the leadership team.

The moment your dream client acknowledges they’ve been underinvesting in the results they need and a greater investment in the strategic outcomes is necessary to bring their company from the current state to the better future state they desire. When your dream client is willing to invest more in you and your solution, you have created a differentiated, compelling value proposition and a preference to work with you.

The moment your dream client commits to buying from you and you commit to executing your solution for them, and you begin to do the work to move them forward. This is not the moment you win, but it is the culmination of all the prior moments.

The moment those results are produced, you are, as if by magic, no longer a salesperson and instead a trusted advisor.

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Are you looking for new ways to boost your teams’ sales performance?

If the answer is yes, then here’s another question for you: how much are you helping your salespeople be the best that they can be? Without the knowledge and the tools they need, even the best sales people can only get so far.

In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to use sales enablement to boost your overall sales performance.

But, first, what is sales enablement?

Sales enablement refers to the process of supplying your sales team with any necessary training, content, and tools to help them boost their sales performance.

In other words…it’s giving your team what they need to do their jobs as effectively as possible.

How to implement sales enablement to boost sales performance in your company

As per its definition, there are three essential elements that make up a strong sales enablement strategy: training/onboarding, content, and tools.

Here are the main steps that you need to take to implement sales enablement across your company and boost your overall sales performance:

Onboarding and continuous training

A great onboarding and training process will make a huge difference to your success. Not only that, but you need to continue training your sales people as time goes on – or, even better, provide them with an easy way to access the information they need and learn by themselves – particularly for easier processes.

To be blunt, you can’t expect your team to deliver amazing results if you don’t coach them properly.

But if you do coach them continuously, you can – and should – expect amazing results; in fact, in some companies, sales coaching has improved their win rates by as much as 25%.

So, how exactly do you implement this successfully? There’s so much to do, starting with onboarding and leading to training to regular coaching programmes.

To help, you can use a sales enablement tool like MindTickle, which can pretty much help you with everything that means onboarding, training and coaching, and skill development.

For example, in terms of onboarding, you can create learning paths for different sales roles and assign them to new salespeople automatically, as well as track their progress using milestones and certificates (gamification has that power to make learning a bit more fun).

You can also use the same platform to continue coaching your sales people, create structured coaching programs, and easy 1 on 1 on-the-job coaching.

Plus, you can keep your sales people up to date on any updates by publishing these updates on the platform. And one of my favourite parts is that you can track your team’s success through detailed analytics and make sure you clearly understand how your and your teams’ efforts have impacted your company’s sales performance.

Ensure better collaboration between different departments

Especially your marketing and sales teams.

Start by implementing an easy way for people to communicate within your company; team collaboration tools like Slack or Zoho Connect can make their lives much easier as they’ll be able to communicate at any moment from anyplace, as well as find any documents, files, or information they need in the same place.

But it’s not just about the tools; there needs to be a closer collaboration – an alignment, if you will – between the sales and marketing departments, from collaborating on strategy to establishing exactly what makes a quality lead.

This is particularly important (establishing guidelines for quality leads and a clear lead scoring template); this way, the marketing team doesn’t send low quality leads to your salespeople and instead focuses on the best prospects so as to boost win rates and be more productive at the same time.

Circling back to collaboration tools, they are also great for sharing the content that your team needs. For example on Slack, you can create channels dedicated to sharing new and important content, so that your team knows exactly where to find what they need as well as receive notifications on their devices when anything new is updated. Easy access to relevant content is an essential aspect of sales enablement.

Provide your team with relevant technology

Another highly important aspect of sales enablement is providing your team with the technology they need to perform well; not just the tools previously mentioned (team communication tools), but also:

• CRM (customer relationship management) tools
• Marketing automation tools
• And sales intelligence tools

These are the 4 main categories that you need to cover; these tools will help with your team’s productivity, but they also help them improve their results.

CRM tools for example, give your team easy access to any information they need about a lead, prospective customer, or existing customers. All of these contacts will be stored in one place so that any interaction with a lead, prospect, or customer is stored catalogued (with some tools, this is done automatically) on one platform.

This is another place where alignment between your sales and marketing teams comes in handy; that’s because your marketing team usually have a lot of contact with leads before they’re sent to your sales team and this way, all of their interactions can be accessed making easier for sales teams to, well…sell.

For example, you can use a tool like Repsly, which is a CRM tool with a focus on sales enablement.

You can use it to empower your teams with all the information they need about their leads and customers; plus, you can track their sales activity and generate reports to help you optimise and improve their overall performance.

Next in line is marketing automation; this empowers both your marketing and your sales teams. First of all, it helps nurture your leads and in a more effective and less time-consuming way.

Furthermore, it improves the lead scoring process; meaning, it will be easier for your marketing team to score leads accurately and only send the best over to the sales team.

It’s also great for testing and optimising. Marketing automation tools allow you to test different workflows and see how they perform so that you can optimise your strategy and nurture more leads.

Use tools like Hubspot, for example, to automate your outreach, set up marketing automation, store your customer information automatically, and discover more leads, among other features.

And last but not least, your team needs access to in-depth sales intelligence to help them optimise their sales strategies and to sell more.

For example, if you use LinkedIn for lead generation and sales, use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find quality leads more easily, reach out and engage your leads, as well as get access to sales insights and intelligence.

Another great option is Lead411, which helps teams with trigger-based sales, lead intelligence, as well as up to date contact information so you don’t lose time unnecessarily.

Conclusion

The best way to boost your sales performance and your sales team’s productivity is to invest in them and provide them with the tools, content, and knowledge they need in order to perform at the top of their capabilities. And that is what sales enablement is, in a nutshell: empowering your salespeople.

Are you one of those salespeople who is timid when engaging a prospect with tough questions?  Are you one who tries to gently nurture a lead or a prospect, so you don’t lose them?

You can’t afford to nurture them. You don’t have time. They don’t have time. If you want to nurture something, then go visit a retirement center. You’ll find plenty of people there who you can nurture.

From the start we have to be focused on moving the lead forward, and that includes creating value as quickly as possible.  Check out this video where I share about a sales call where understanding the value the customer desired was essential if I wanted to close the deal.

You create value by asking questions early, and I mean very early in the process.  If you fail to have a plan as to how you tie value to the outcomes the prospect desires, then you run a major risk of the prospect never going anywhere.  This means you need to ask “value focused” questions sooner than you most likely have been doing.

“Value focused” questions are ones that get the other person discussing the real issues they’re facing.  They aren’t absolute questions regarding price, but rather they’re questions that help uncover the outcome the customer wants.

In the video, I share a conversation with a CEO regarding my fees.  If I had not known the critical issues the CEO and his company were facing, I would never have been able to close the deal.   The reason I new the issues the CEO was having is because of the questions I asked.

You can’t afford to not ask tough questions early in the process.  The questions you ask will vary based on what you do and who you’re working with, but here are just a couple to get you thinking:

What is the risk if you don’t do anything?

Why has this become a problem for you?

How will this impact other parts of your business?

You see the questions are designed to engage.  Don’t think you can’t ask questions like this during the first call.  If you don’t ask questions like this, you run the risk of having the other person focus the conversation on the features of what you sell and that you’re nothing more than a low-price vendor.

Today your job is to up your game with the questions you ask. Don’t hold back.  The faster you know the outcome the prospect is looking for, the sooner you will be able to equate it to value.  In the end your customers will only pay for value.

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

Jim Marshall, a long-time Sandler trainer from Florida, joins the podcast to talk about how first-time managers can be successful at coaching their direct reports. Learn the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques of great leaders, and learn how to incorporate them into your new management position. 

Online retail sales in the USA increased by 16 percent to reach $453.5 billion in 2017, compared to in-store sales growth of just 3.4%, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report, proving once again that the future of e-commerce is bright.

Besides the faster growth, an e-commerce business has many inherent advantages over running a traditional brick-and-mortar store, including lower overhead costs, the potential to scale very quickly and the luxury of outsourcing tasks to contractors so you can run a million dollar one-person business.

But why isn’t everyone finding success in e-commerce? One reason is that running an online store requires a different mindset and habits than those needed to run a traditional offline business. Many business owners have a hard time when their mindsets may be stuck in the offline world.

In addition, some online sellers may be doing this as a side hustle while working a full-time job, even approaching this new entrepreneurial endeavor with the same mindset as their 9-to-5 job, which doesn’t work.

Rather than talk about the latest tactics and endless shiny new objects, I’d like to take a step back and take a deeper look at the habits of highly effective Amazon and e-commerce sellers.

Why habits?

Because tactics, the latest new tricks and worrying about the competition and Chinese sellers will only get you so far. It’s habits and principles that will set the foundation for a strong mindset and a strong business.

Based on my experience selling online since 2004, masterminding with other successful sellers, as well as studying highly effective leaders in the business world, I’ve distilled it down to the following six habits.

1. Start with the finish in mind
2. Be proactive
3. Prioritize your work
4. Done is better than perfect
5. Pivot like a top gun
6. Never stop learning

#1. Start with the finish in mind

Rather than jumping in and trying every new tactic, what’s your end goal?

Let’s say it’s to build a million-dollar business, which is great, but then what? What will you do with your 7-figure business and how will you run it?

No matter what your end goal is you first have to define it. This way you can then map out how to get there.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
Abraham Lincoln

So the builder must define his goal first and then sharpen the axe before he begins to hack away at it.

The architect has a clear image in their head before they start the hard work of actually building it. They can clearly visualize what the end goal looks like. With that image in mind and the blueprint on paper, they can then take the steps to build that dream house.

The same is true with growing and scaling an e-commerce business.

Ask yourself these two questions:

1. What is my end goal?
2. Is what I’m doing now going to take me there?

Take a second and ask yourself: is the ladder you’re climbing now leaning against the wrong wall?

If so, you better get off and get on the right path to your goal.

#2. Be proactive

There are two types of people in this world: proactive and reactive.

Reactive people wait for things to happen and then passively respond to them. For example, if you have a SKU that is selling 10 units a day, your feedback is 4.0 stars and you feel like it’s good enough so you don’t do anything to improve it.

What happens to reactive people? The market is evolving while they are stagnating. Gradually more and more competitors will come into your niche until eventually the market becomes flooded. It becomes a price war. Your sales will plummet as a result.

Sales will drop from 10 sales per day to one or two. Your Best Sellers Rank (BSR) drops like a rock. Your listing is pushed off page 1 to page 6.

Then you try to improve your product until you realize it’s too late.

Stephen Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, said that reactive people “focus on the weakness of other people, the problems in the environment and circumstances over which they have no control. They focus results in blaming and accusing attitudes, reactive language and increased feelings of victimization.”

This reminds me of the complaints sellers have every day about Amazon raising its long-term storage fees, the marketplaces being too competitive because of Chinese sellers and changes to Brand Registry requirements.

You can moan about those factors all day long but can you do anything to change it? No. As a result, being reactive lowers your productivity.

Reactive people are focused on and concerned about things they cannot control and as a result, spend their energies on that rather than proactively working on the things that they can control to grow their business!

When faced with the same challenges, proactive people may say: Amazon is raising its long-term storage fees—what can I do to reduce my storage fees? Maybe it’s time to consider storing less inventory in Amazon’s expensive fulfillment centers and moving it to a third-party warehouse with lower storage fees.

Or how can I better forecast my inventory levels when I reorder so that I don’t keep so much excess in stock? Or maybe it’s time to cut my losses and liquidate this inventory so I can replenish my bestsellers to make me more money, a la the 80/20 rule. In other words, focus on the 20 percent of your products that generate 80 percent of your sales revenue.

Another trait of proactive e-commerce business owners is that they will build a moat around their business to protect it from competitors and reduce risks from external factors.

They will proactively review their customer comments (as well as their competitors’) to discover ways to improve their product and add value to it so that they maintain a high feedback review score of 4.5 stars and above.

Maybe they build a website to diversify their sales so they don’t keep all their eggs in one basket, in case one of their channels may suddenly close off someday, i.e. an Amazon suspension.

They may find ways to collect email addresses and build a relationship with their customers so they are loyal, repeat shoppers rather than one-off sales from Amazon.

I initially did this with my first e-commerce business back in 2005. I started on eBay selling women’s shoes and clothing. After learning the ropes, making mistakes and improving, I eventually became a power seller. I went to eBay Live and read all the books I could find about selling online and found a strategy that made sense: multichannel selling. So I created my own private-label website on Yahoo Shopping and drove Google ads to it. I started getting sales on my website and I was super happy.

Then Amazon opened up to third-party sellers and I began selling there as well. This was before Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and I was fulfilling all shipments myself using a tape gun, boxes from Uline and my trusty Zebra barcode printer. I remember making daily trips to my local post office and skipping the line and dropping off my packages directly at the loading dock.

But I digress. This is an example of being proactive and protecting your asset against the risk of putting all your eggs in one basket which we see so many Amazon sellers doing right now.

#3. Prioritize your work

Let’s face it—in this day and age we are bombarded from all directions by email, Facebook messages, Slack, Twitter, WeChat, this, that and the other thing.

How does an e-commerce seller manage to run an effective business?

They prioritize their work.

This can be done a number of ways but one effective way is to divide your tasks into four quadrants which you can label in a matrix with the following headings:

• Important
• Not important
• Urgent
• Not urgent

Taken from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey

By doing this, the highly effective entrepreneur will instantly know where their tasks fall and decide how to take action on them.

They can also easily decide which tasks they should delegate.

For example, busy work such as answering routine customer service questions can be delegated to a virtual assistant or team member while you, the business owner, focus on ways to grow your business.

These can include making improvements to your product so you overcome your competition, planning your email marketing strategy so you can build a relationship with your customers and sell more to them and creating Facebook Messenger campaigns to automate customer service and save you time.

They also decide which tasks they can automate using software to save them time and money and which tasks they can ignore because they are not important and not urgent. We all have the same 168 hours a week and it’s up to us how to prioritize them so we can we most efficient.

The key is the quadrants they choose to focus the bulk of their time on will determine how effective and successful they are.

Now I have a question for you.

If there was one task that would make a huge impact on your life, what would that be? And how much time are you spending on that task per week?

#4. Done is better than perfect

Sometimes we can be perfectionists and try to make something the best we can before we launch it.

I know because that was me. I would constantly go back and try to perfect a product so it was 100 percent before I launched it. If the color was just a shade too bright on the fabric, I would tell the supplier to go back and re-dye it. This would delay the launch another two to three weeks. As a result, we missed out on the cutoff date for the holiday shopping season and we lost a ton of sales.

However, at the end of the day, we need to let the market (i.e. our customers) decide—with their wallets.

If we don’t ship we will never know—and the result is that we lose.

“Real artists ship.”
Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was notorious for telling his employees to deliver a product to meet his expectations and to deliver it by the ship date.

It was under these constraints and pressures that the iPod, iPhone and iPad that you are using every day were created and shipped.

In fact, if we were to look back, the iPhone 4 had a critical problem with its antenna where if you made a call and cradled the phone with your left hand you would lose all reception and the call would drop. In other words, the iPhone 4 was a phone that couldn’t make reliable phone calls. I remember this very clearly because I owned one.

Now I’m not sure if Jobs knew about this design defect but he shipped the phone anyways and sold millions of iPhones. Later he pivoted and corrected this flaw in a genius way that not only kept most customers satisfied but loving Apple even more.

So the takeaway is that done is better than perfect. You don’t need a 100 percent perfect product before you launch. Rather than spending six months perfecting a product package and potentially missing out on hundreds or thousands of sales, release a minimum viable product or MVP.

Instead of spending months developing a fancy custom package in version 1.0 of your product, I recommend using the existing packaging with your supplier and have a designer quickly customize the design with your logo and information. This should take only a few days. You want to validate your idea first.

Build a good enough product and worry about the last mile after you launch and get real customer feedback. Maybe what you thought was a flaw isn’t a flaw at all in your customers’ eyes.

And take the feedback that they give you to improve your product in version 2.0.

#5. Pivot like a top gun

Going back to the iPhone 4’s problem with its antenna, Steve Jobs cleverly pivoted and offered a free “bumper” case to all customers. This not only solved the antenna problem but customers were ecstatic to get a free iPhone case. Somehow the act of receiving a free piece of rubber for my phone made up for the “defect.” In fact, I respected Apple even more because they gave me a case for free.

Lesson learned: pivot quickly like a top gun.

According to a study of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the businesses that survive and thrive are the ones that pivot and change their businesses quickly as the market changes.

“He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives.”
Lt. Colonel John Boyd

This concept is taken from jet fighter pilots and is called an OODA loop. OODA stands for:

• Observe
• Orient
• Decide
• Act

It’s a feedback loop where you first observe what is the problem.

Steve Jobs observed that a disproportionate number of customers complained about their iPhone 4 dropping calls. He probably compared the frequency of complaints to the older iPhone 1 and iPhone 3G complaint records as a benchmark.

Then he oriented Apple as a customer service-focused company by providing a free bumper to all customers who bought an iPhone 4. He probably consulted with his supply chain leader (Tim Cook) to find out the product costs and fulfillment costs to decide whether it was worthwhile. The product cost for this piece of rubber and to ship it would probably be far less than $1 per unit landed.

The alternative would be to recall the phones and replace them which would be much more costly than giving customers a piece of rubber.

Jobs being the master sales probably observed that the gift may bring more goodwill to Apple customers.

Next Steve Jobs decided to make the free replacement offer to customers and announced it publicly. Successful leaders make decisions quickly. They don’t dilly dally and procrastinate.

He then took action by allowing customers to pick up their free bumpers at their local Apple store. Notice he took this decision quickly which is another important mark of an OODA loop.

The shorter the loop the more likely you will survive.

Eighties movie fans will remember that in the movie “Top Gun,” fighter pilot Maverick reacted a lot faster than his opponents so he was able to outmaneuver them and blow them out of the sky. His OODA loop was short and he pivoted quickly.

His buddy Goose, on the other hand, cracked under pressure and was shot down. In other words, a long OODA loop meant that he wasn’t so lucky.

Imagine if Steve Jobs wavered on his decision. What would that say about his business prowess? And customers would continue to complain and probably return their phones. Also, this would have given competitors like Samsung a prime opportunity to step in and offer a better phone to steal market share away from Apple.

Jobs’ short OODA loop meant Apple came away from this “problem” with happy and loyal customers and staved off his competitors. Going back to my iPhone 4, after I got the free bumper, I continue using iPhones today!

The same OODA loop applies to e-commerce sellers. Many sellers get stuck with analysis paralysis. They can look at endless new products and not choose any. As a result, they get stuck and watch their competitors blow them by.

Imagine if you launched that product you were looking at a year ago. How much more in sales would you be selling now? $10,000? $25,000? $100,000?

If there are policy changes on Amazon’s side, what do you do? Complain in Facebook groups about how Amazon is stealing your money or do you pivot quickly so you can outmaneuver your competitors and thrive like Maverick?

Remember: observe, orient, decide and action.

#6. Never stop learning

How do you stay ahead? Do you attend conferences to learn from top speakers and be around like-minded people? Do you buy courses to learn and improve your skills? Or do you read books to broaden your knowledge? Maybe you attend masterminds to bring together skills, experiences and insights from different people and hold each other accountable as you track your improvement?

Regardless of what you do to stay ahead the common theme to succeed is this: never stop learning.

“Like rowing a boat upstream, if you stop moving forward you fall back.”
Chinese Proverb

I believe in the super competitive world of e-commerce this is truer now than ever. In 2017, an estimated 1 million new sellers registered to sell on Amazon.

And it’s not just people in your country. Sellers are joining from all over the world from the U.S. to the EU to Australia to China, the latter responsible for an estimated one-third of the newbies.

On the ground in China, Amazon even holds training events to help educate these new sellers. They get information straight from Amazon and many even get dedicated managers to help them get started.

Word on the street is that in certain parts of China like Shenzhen, everyone from barbers to taxi drivers is selling on Amazon. So what are you doing to stay ahead of your competitors?

As an Amazon FBA business owner who’s running a one-man or one-woman show, you might be working a full-time job in addition to your FBA business as a side hustle.

So time is your most precious resource.

You’ve probably watched Case Study, listened to countless Amazon gurus on podcasts and YouTube or taken courses like ASM (Amazon Selling Machine) so you have a basic level of knowledge.

You might have a couple of SKUs up and running. You may have up to $1,000 in sales a day from your one or two products.

Now your goal is to grow into a 7-figure business.

But wait. It’s not so easy to hit that monthly revenue goal.

You might be completely disorganized right now, contacting suppliers, trying to keep track of cash flow and forecasting when to reorder your products, running profitable pay-per-click campaigns, trying to figure out Facebook ads and influencer marketing and not having enough time to do everything.

So how do you plan to hit that goal?

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
Confucius

Want to apply these habits to your business? Download a free worksheet here.

Deciding an Account Based Marketing approach is right for your organization is one thing; putting it into play is another. Purchasing account-based technology is not the same as deploying an ABM strategy. In fact, if you purchase this technology before developing your strategy, you’re off to a questionable start.

An effective ABM journey starts with some basics: benchmarking current performance, finalizing your Ideal Customer Profile right, and pinpointing your addressable market. Let’s dive into each.

Benchmark

ABM begins with figuring out where your organization is on the maturity curve for demand generation. This will allow you to determine what steps to take and elements to put in place for program success.

Think of it this way: before running a marathon, you would go on many training runs and likely participate in shorter races and perhaps even a half-marathon. In other words, you would work up to the marathon, rather than take it on immediately. Companies should take the same approach with ABM.

While organizations need to assess multiple aspects of their business, the following three are key:

• Level of systems (Salesforce & marketing automation) maturity
• Data strategy, management/governance maturity
• Maturity with regards to omni-channel marketing

This would be one example of a maturity curve bridging from a lead-based system to account based system:

An ABM strategy is not just about purchasing the right technology.

Get Your Ideal Customer Profile Right

Next is understanding your ideal customer. Too few companies have developed a shared understanding of their ideal customer across Sales, SDRs/ADRs and Marketing. Yet an ideal customer profile (ICP) is a foundational element of an ABM approach on tiering and target focus. Arriving at a well-considered, comprehensive ICP can take several weeks to do right, as you’ll need to analyze historical sales data, and conduct both internal interviews along with prospect and customer interviews.

Many demographic and firmographic elements are part of the typical ICP: industry, revenues, geography, number of employees, years in business, and more. Note that as companies apply Artificial Intelligence to crunch their data, it’s possible to include more variables in the ICP model. That said, many organizations experience the law of diminishing returns – or only incremental impact – once the number of variables exceeds a certain number. The most important aspect is ensuring the data you base your ICP on is accurate and easily and continuously available.

Beyond demographics and firmographics, organizations should incorporate other attributes into their ICP. What you consider important might differ from what another company values. The key is to zero in on the variables most tightly associated with your organization’s definition of success. In most cases, the following are worth considering as part of your ICP definition:

• Where you’ve experienced success (i.e., industries or types of company)
• High-value opportunity
• High likelihood of deal closing quickly
• Lifetime profitability of account

It’s just as critical to understand what serves as top catalysts for prospects engaging your company so you can zero in on the most fitting prospects. For example, you might find your ideal customer values:

• The opportunity to drive new revenues using your product
• Keeping their existing authentication in place
• The fact that your hardware scalability and licensing matches your business model
• That you offer high levels of local support

At the same time, it’s vital to know which prospects to avoid, even if they satisfy your ICP. Simply put, certain prospect requirements may mean a deal is not worth pursuing. This depends, of course, on your organization’s business model and offering, but the following should spark ideas of what might constitute red flags:

• Needs a quick dashboard build (but your process lasts months)
• Prefers Web-based development (but you don’t offer this)
• Needs a full-stack, ETL solution (you can only provide part of the solution)

If you’re really advanced, you can layer in engagement data for a more holistic view potential target accounts. The fastest path to traction is with those companies that already have some level of engagement with you.

This could include:

• Past sales into the company
• Rep activity levels
• Account engagement by persona
• Current coverage of key decision-makers
• Existing relationships and connections into the account
• Executive entry points

This information is found from a variety of sources, including:

• Your CRM data
• Web analytics
• Marketing automation reports
• LinkedIn
• Engagio
• Sales rep activity
• Executive input

Pinpoint Your Addressable Market

The next step is defining your addressable market. In other words, how many and which companies match your ICP? Figuring this out is how you will come up with a list of target accounts. This step is essential – yet often overlooked. Instead, many organizations rely on the list of named accounts that Sales leadership or reps come up with. However, companies on a targeted account list are not always actively in the market. The ideal is to focus on those that fit your ICP and are actively in the market to make a purchase.

Just like the process for defining your ICP, it can take time to pinpoint your total addressable market, as shown in the process diagram below. We’ve had great success helping our clients arrive at total addressable market using a combination of Dun &Bradstreet, Mintigo, Leadspace, Oceanos, and EverString (which provides firmographic, technographic and intent data). In fact, we helped one of our clients, Trifacta, arrive at a very tight definition around a specific industry vertical, contributing to Trifacta winning an award in ABM performance.

Process for arriving at addressable market via EverString and Dun & Bradstreet

Assess market sizing by setting filters on technology

Addressing these three elements is the smart way to kick-start your ABM strategy.

Every day, each of us gets dozens of horrendously bad prospecting emails.  My friend, Hank Barnes, of Gartner has made a regular #FridayFails series featuring his worst of the week.

Fortunately, spam filters take care of most of them, but some filter through anyway.  I’ve limited my writing about these–there’s just too much bad material that it gets repetitive.  But I can’t refrain from writing about a certain category of prospecting letters.  It’s those written by self proclaimed experts in sales, marketing, sales enablement, prospecting, content.

I write about these for several reasons.  First, even people who know better do stupid things.  Second, if they are using the methods and techniques they espouse as “best practice,” then their prospecting is actually a representation of their work–and what they can do for you.  Read Buyer Beware!  Finally, I do get some sort of perverse joy at calling these horrendous effort to people’s attention.

Before I go further, I’ve done terribly bad prospecting before, I’ll probably fall victim to some bad efforts in the future.  We all make mistakes, hopefully, learn and improve.  But the examples I highlight from these self proclaimed guru’s represent systemic approaches they use.  It’s not just one ill conceived approach, but it’s them consciously executing the very worst of prospecting, inflicting it over and over in a mindless way.

About a week ago, a good friend and client, let’s call him John, forwarded me an email stream, saying, “This is just horrible prospecting!  It’s from someone who does similar stuff to you…..”  John  is EVP of Sales and Marketing for a $B plus organization.  He’s done some tremendous things in building the capability of the organization, and we’ve been proud to help in those efforts.  So it was funny to see his reaction to this person’s prospecting efforts.

This morning, he forwarded me the email stream, yes the madness continued.  His note simply said, “This takes the cake for all time worst email prospecting!”

I’ve reproduced the email flow below, as you would expect, all names and links have been changed.

Email 1:

John,

I notice on LinkedIn that we have several connections in common. As the Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing at XYZ, I would think that we also have similar challenges driving growth and results.

We’ve been successful at helping other Sales & Marketing VPs at companies like Company A, Company B, and Company C to hit their numbers through our Sales Enablement technology.

Here is a quick 1-minute video on our website that better explains it [Link to self promotional video]

Do you have a few minutes to talk next week?

Regards, Bob, CEO, [Sales Enablement Company]

Email 2, 5 days later, this was a forward of the original email with the new note leading:

John,

Just following up on my previous email.

Best Regards, Bob, CEO, [Sales Enablement Company]

Email 3, 5 days later, another build on the prior emails:

John,

Sorry to keep bothering you.   I just think that we can really help you drive revenue at XYZ through sales effectiveness.

Regards, Bob, CEO, [Sales Enablement Company]

Email 4, 5 days later, same pattern:

John, just following up.

Bob. CEO, [Sales Enablement company]

Email 5, 1 day later, you guessed it same pattern:

John,

I should stop bugging you soon. I don’t want you to think that I’m as annoying as this other “Canadian”, Justin Bieber.

[Link to Justin Bieber song]

Regards, Bob, CEO, [Sales Enablement Company]

What in the world is “Bob” trying to accomplish, and is this a demonstration of his organization’s competence and expertise in selling?

He’s not creating any value in his messaging.  He might have in the first, but while he chose references in the same industry as John’s, the references were B2B2C examples, and John runs a B2B business.  So there wasn’t much he could learn from those references—beside the links took him to “here’s our fantastic products.”

Bob could have demonstrated his knowledge by providing some insight into the challenges the industry is facing (tremendous industry consolidation, regulatory, restructuring issues impacting all players).  He could have provided some examples of how his organization helped similar companies address those challenges.  But he didn’t.

Then in his subsequent emails, he didn’t build on anything.  He didn’t expand his message, he didn’t address other issues, he didn’t demonstrate any knowledge of the issues John may have been facing.  He didn’t provide any insight into industry activity (It so happened John’s company made a major disruptive acquisition, but of course Chris didn’t take the time to acknowledge that or even talk about the integration challenges of that acquisition.).

Bob was simply too lazy to build a message that demonstrated knowledge, delivered insight, or provoked interest.  But I suppose, his company thinks that volume and touches count, not content.

Bob goes further in insulting John.  He acknowledges, two times, that his messages are nothing more than harassment.  That he isn’t engaging, that he isn’t trying to create value.  All he wants to do is “bug” and waste John’s time.

What Bob has done has been not just squander a potential to build a relationship and help my friend.  He’s created a “prospect” actively telling his friends, “If this is an example of their work, stay away from them!”

John asked me what to do.  I gave a few snide suggestions, but in the end told him not to react, just “SPAM” it.  I added, you can expect he will give you 9-11 additional emails because that’s what the data says–it takes 14-16 touches to get someone to respond.  It’s already programmed into his drip campaign, we know the mailing pattern, so we can predict the days you are likely to get an email.

John sighed, he just created a rule to move all messages from Bob’s company into his SPAM filter.

The profession of selling deserves better than this!  Our customers deserve better than this!

As you evaluate vendors, including companies like mine, make sure we practice what we preach.  The way we prospect and develop relationships with you, the way we engage and create value for you and your team is likely to be what we will drive in working with your team.  If you think “Bob’s” approach is right, if it builds the relationships and engages customers in the way that you think represents your company well–then clearly he has a solution for you.  If not, then don’t waste your time.

It seems like everywhere we look there’s some new social media or marketing tactics being touted as the next big thing.

As marketers and businesses, we’re constantly looking for ways to reach our audience in creative ways and so we often jump around from strategy to strategy – often leaving what used to work in the past.

But what about those marketing tactics that once worked like a charm?

Today on The Science of Social Media we’re dusting off and breaking down 6 old school marketing tactics that still work like a charm on social media. Plus, we’re exploring exactly how your business can implement them in new, fun, and creative ways.

Let’s dive in!

How to listen: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS

What you’ll learn in this episode

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation between Hailley Griffis and Brian Peters. Short on time? No worries! Here are four quick takeaways:

• Why having real, authentic conversations with your audience is key
• How to focus on creating memorable social media and marketing content
• Why repurposing evergreen content is still a highly relevant marketing tactic
• Television advertising and social media: Why and how they’re related

Must-read resources from the episode

• 5 Old School Social Media Tactics That Are No Longer Effective (And What To Do Instead) – Buffer Blog
• Social Media Engagement is the New Social Media Marketing: How To Do It Well – Buffer Blog
• 6 Shortcuts to Speed Up Your Social Media Scheduling Process – Buffer Blog
• 10 Old-School Marketing Tactics that Still Work – GrowthHackers

6 Old school marketing tactics that still work on social media [complete podcast transcript]

Hailley: Hi everyone! I’m Hailley Griffis and this is The Science of Social Media, a podcast by Buffer. Your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and learning.

Brian: Welcome to episode #105! I’m Brian Peters and this week we’re going old school marketing tactics. Well, not totally. We’re going new school with some old school flair. Remember all of the stuff that used to work on social media? Well, some of it still does, and quite effectively I might add.

Hailley: Yes, really excited for this one, Brian. I think we all get caught up in thinking about what’s next on social media and we forget that some of the tactics that helped us once are still very relevant today.

Let’s kick of the show!

Hailley: There are few greater joys in a marketer’s life than experimenting with a new technique—and having it work like a charm.

You feel like a cross between a scientist, an artist, and a magician, am I right?

Brian: Couldn’t agree more.

Hailley: And as many of us do (after a little celebrating of course), we officially add the new tactic to our marketing tactics repertoire and then start searching for the next thing to experiment with.

But because you’re always looking forward, you might not notice that the marketing tactics that worked so well in the beginning has now become, dare I say, obsolete.

Brian: With that in mind, we took a look back at the strategies and tactics that we used a few years ago to see if they still worked.

What follows are 8 old school social tactics that are still as relevant as ever in 2018.

Are you ready Hailley?

Hailley: Absolutely.

Marketing Tactic #1: Having real, meaningful interactions and conversations with your followers

Brian: Remember social media before there was a tool for every single one of your needs? Back when gaining just 100 followers on Twitter and having a single conversation was a huge milestone.

Well, believe it or not, real conversations and interactions are more important than ever on social today.

Hailley: Agreed, automation has made our lives so much easier and our marketing so much more effective, but that also means a personal touch goes a lot further these days!

As our colleague and blog editor Ash Read once said in an article, “It feels amazing to know that our favorite brands and personalities value our support. And sometimes all it takes to show that is a personal response.”

This strategy definitely requires more time, energy, and resources than setting up an automate message to new followers or fans, but it’s well worth it in the long run.

Brian: Couldn’t agree more – that’s been one of the cornerstones for us at Buffer on social media over the years and it has led to an incredible amount of word-of-mouth marketing.

Note: We’d love for you to check out Buffer Reply. One of the fastest-growing social media and customers service engagement tools on the market.

Marketing Tactic #2: Focusing on creating memorable and shareable content

Hailley: We talk about this a lot here on the show – and yes, it’s fairly obvious, but I think this one is what has always made social media so great.

You want people to engage with your content because, well, they want to. With that in mind, focus on making it as shareable as possible.

Brian: Yeah so get this.

A recent analysis of 65,000 articles found that a piece’s virality comes down to two main factors: arousal and dominance.

Which sounds a bit strange haha but in plain English, arousal means “riled up.” Feelings like anger and excitement are high-arousal emotions. Dominance, on the other hand, is the feeling of being in control.

When you’re inspired or joyful, you’re experiencing high dominance; when you’re scared, you’re experiencing low dominance.

Hailley: Articles that perform the best on social use a high-arousal, high-dominance combo.

And you’re probably wondering what that would look like!

Well, and here’s a throwback post for you, a photo of Vin Diesel with his daughter racked up 8.1 million interactions (making it the fifth most popular Facebook post of 2015), thanks to the strong, positive emotions it generated.

But strong, negative emotions can be powerful marketing tactics too—take the Dove “Choose Beautiful” campaign, for example. That social campaign put a spotlight on low self-esteem and it turned out extremely successful.

Brian: Yep!

Marketing Tactic # 3 – Use influencers and partnerships to expand your reach

Brian: Before influencer marketing was one of the hottest topics in social media, brands and marketers were partnering up to amplify their reach on social.

That tactic is still alive and thriving today and we actually use it all of the time here at Buffer.

Hailley: They key here is to think quality, not quantity when it comes to influencers and partnerships.

Before you team up on a social takeover, article, or research study, ask yourself, “Will this truly benefit my audience?”

If the answer is “yes,” you’re in good shape.

That means their content or expertise is an optimal fit for your audience—so you’ll benefit whether or not the influencer promotes it. And you also want to make sure that your content will benefit their audience as well.

Brian: Exactly! When both parties in the partnership are genuinely excited and passionate about the project, it will go so much further than if you were just forcing it for the sake of collaborating.

Your audiences will be able to see right through that as well.

Seek out potential partners that has an active, engaged audience as well as a great reputation in the industry. Both of those factors are key things to have going in.

Marketing Tactic #4: Repurposing top performing evergreen content

Hailley: We actually just had the pleasure of speaking with the team over at Ahrefs and they shared some great insights into how they’re doing social media strategy and this one was one of their top tips.

Sometime in March this year, they decided to run what they called a “re-circulation” experiment where they decided to dust off their underutilized social accounts and lightly repurpose their top performing content from over the years in quirky and fun posts.

Brian: What was interesting is they said to make things easier, they didn’t set any hard KPIs or goals. They just wanted to highlight cool stuff that they might have missed and see how things went from there.

Turns out, plenty of these posts were really well-received and performed really well.

Initially, they were simply aiming to see if there were any changes in the number of people who liked or shared their content. And guess what? You guessed it, the data instantly confirmed what they were hoping to see: a definite boost in overall engagement and link clicks.

Hailley: I love that.

This one is super important because as marketers and businesses we spend a ton of time, energy, and money on marketing tactics aimed at creating great content then it’s on to the next thing.

What we forget is that a lot of the content we create still has a ton of life in it. All it takes is a quick update to make sure everything is still relevant and some brainstorming on ways to repurpose and repackage the content.

Brian: Great point. And repurposing might involve experimenting with new headlines or creating a video to accompany the post or even creating a podcast episode from it. So many ways to get the most out of your content.

Marketing Tactic #5: Share for a benefit

Brian: As we chatted about last episode, giving your audience an incentive to interact with your content is an old school way of generating engagement that still works today in 2018.

Hailley: Going back to our friends over at Ahrefs, they wanted to figure out a way to get 1k re-tweets on Twitter and increase brand awareness around their product at the same time.

So what they did is they had their founder and CEO Tweet out something along the lines of, “hey, we’ll increase limits on the standard Ahrefs plan if this Tweet gets 1,000 Retweets.

And it was super sly because they were going to increase the limits either way, but they also wanted to figure out a fun way to draw some attention to that fact.

Brian: Yeah such a solid PR move. One of my favorite marketing tactics!

There’s an interesting part of that story as well…

The initial Tweet only collected about 100 re-tweets which is good given that Dmitry doesn’t really have a large following on Twitter.

To give it a little boost, they pushed it out to their users via an Intercom announcement and also shared it in their private Facebook Group. That ended up boosting the Retweet count to nearly 700.

Hailley: Funnily enough, at this point the Tweet jumped up another 500 re-tweets in no time at all to total almost 1.3k;

They were joking that they suspected that someone lost his or her patience and purchased re-tweets on a service like Fiverr or something.

Either way, they made good on their promise and it was a success on both social media and for their customers.

Brian: Great stuff. I didn’t even know you could buy retweets.

Marketing Tactic #6: Television advertising

I know, I know. You’re probably thinking, but Brian! social media isn’t television. What in the world could you mean?

Hailley: We’re thinking it, Brian!

Avid listeners of our show might remember episode #101 where we talked about IGTV and how that’s becoming the new norm for television.

Well that’s still the case, but platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have long been a go-to place for people to go to catch up with the favorite influencers, mini series, and now shows.

Brian: Exactly, and so advertising in general is a one of the most old school marketing tactics on social media, but 1) it still works, and 2) brands now have the opportunity to sort of view social media as the modern day television.

That means they have the opportunity to create pre-roll ads on YouTube, ads on Instagram Stories, and eventually ads on IGTV because you better believe that those are going to be a huge part of Instagram moving forward.

Hailley: Yup and while many brands treat social media users and TV viewers as if they are two separate audiences, posting television content to YouTube is an excellent way to increase the reach of existing campaigns.

For example, Super Bowl commercials like Mountain Dew’s PuppyMonkeyBaby became a viral phenomena by hitting both platforms.

And I’m sure you’ve seen the great commercials that Grammarly runs on YouTube. Those have been wildly successful for them.

Brian: Love it. We’re all TV advertisers now haha!

One last takeaway here is to remember that while implementing these old school tactics, continue to test and refine your approach.

Define the criteria you want to measure at the outset of your new campaign. Whether the goal is brand awareness or increased sales, set KPIs to follow and measure your success against those numbers.

Then, get creative!

Hailley: Thank you for tuning in to The Science of Social Media today. The show notes for this episode are available in either iTunes, Soundcloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll include links to all of the marketing tactics resources we covered into today’s show.

If you ever want to get in touch with me or Hailley, we’re always here for your on social media using the hashtag #bufferpodcast. You can also say hi to us anytime and hello@bufferapp.com

Brian: As always, thank you so much for your iTunes reviews! It’s so awesome to read through all your kind comments there – and we actually do read through all of them so thank you.

Don’t miss next week’s episode where we’ll be diving into the psychology behind social media and what makes people take action on different social channels.

Until next Monday, everyone!

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Hailley on Twitter and Hailley’s Website
• Brian on Twitter and Brian’s Website

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

You can spend countless hours fine-tuning your SEO, polishing your content, and launching marketing campaigns, but if you do not capture your customers’ attention from the start, your conversion rates will continue to disappoint. The current average add-to-cart rate clocks in at 9.67%. If your number is lower than this, there’s no better time than the present to take action. Luckily, there are a number of hacks that will help improve your rates, while simultaneously saving you time and money.

1. Create a Sense of Urgency

Creating urgency on your website is not about pressuring people to purchase your products or services. Creating urgency is best done by creating a deadline to push your customers to act faster than they would otherwise.

If a sales event feels urgent, people will rush to purchase before the sale runs out. 2 great examples of this are Black Friday and the recent Amazon Prime Day sale. Also keep in mind that numerous studies have found that more people are likely to make a purchase during the tail end of a sale than the beginning since there’s FOMO by that point (fear of missing out). So be ready to step up your marketing game towards the end to really wrap things up with a bang.

A few ways you can increase sense of urgency outside of running sales include:

• Adding countdown timers to your landing pages
• Promoting email-gated content with limited time bonuses, such as checklists and templates
• Offering free shipping for a limited time
• Offering free upgrades for a limited time

2. Embrace the “Try Before You Buy” Principle

One of the most effective ways to affect purchasing behavior is through sampling. Regardless of whether the ‘sampling’ is in the form of a free trial of something or samples, the bottom line is that people love samples.

PDF Pro does a great job of this on the landing page, advertising a free trial with a “free upgrade.” Credit card companies use this extensively as well, offering credit with no interest for a certain period of time. A free sample with a strong sense of urgency can be an incredibly powerful way to push customers to try your services – and likely convert to long-term customers.

3. Transform Casual Shoppers into Recurring Customers Through Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are a great way to turn people into repeat buyers. Kohl’s is well known for its Kohl’s Cash Program, which rewards both in-store and online shoppers with $10 for every $50 that they spend during certain promotional periods. As simple as it may sound, Kohl’s has managed to successfully improve their customer loyalty through this initiative.

Any time you make reward your readers for returning to your website, you can improve customer loyalty in the same way. Rewarding customers for referrals, offering discounts for frequent purchasers, and hosting sales, discounts, and coupons on major anniversaries can all imitate the success of loyalty programs in brick-and-mortar stores.

4. Don’t Overwhelm People with Choices

For this to work, you have to give people the right number of options so that they are able to compare different products, but not to the point point of overwhelm. This sweet spot of choices eliminates distractions and, subsequently, increases conversions.

Often times, you’ll find that having tons of options will result in more traffic, but generally, you won’t see it converting into actual purchases. Plus, fewer options suggests that the options you’re presenting are the best options available, which can help improve customer satisfaction rates.

Amazon is a well-known ecommerce site that’s built an entire platform around offering customers a multitude of different options. While the amount of products that Amazon features is beneficial in certain situations, it can also lead to overwhelm due to the sheer number of choices for any single product. For example, if you type headphones on the search bar on Amazon, you’ll get 100,000 results. Within those results, you have sub-categories and sub-sub categories.

5. Write Compelling and Concise Calls To Action (CTAs)

If you’ve ever signed up to a subscription or email list online, then you have definitely come across some powerful calls to action. CTAs come in three different styles:

• Simple and effective
• Fantastic wording,
• Great balance of text with multiple buttons

There are different ways to write compelling CTAs, depending on what you want someone to do on your website. For example, do you want someone to sign up for a free trial of something? If so, say so using powerful language like “Claim Your Free Trial.” As someone is leaving, do you want them to see a pop-up both that invites them to opt-in to your newsletter so that you can continue to market to them in the future? If so, entice them by using language like “Send Me Specials Now!”

As an ecommerce site, you need to constantly be refining your CTAs, since they just may be the deciding factor between someone buying – or abandoning their shopping cart all together. Evernote has a simple and straightforward one-liner: ‘Remember Everything.’ It’s short and easily remembered.

Test out different types of text on your buttons as well. Some of the most common include:

• Get Started
• Subscribe
• Join Free (for a specified period of time)
• Sign Up For Free,
• Sign Up

Shout Me Loud‘s sign-up on the home page has a strong CTA that doesn’t feel too overwhelming. Microsoft’s simple but powerful “Shop Now” links are a strong motivation as well.

Now Get Out There and Execute!

Researchers have been studying consumer behavior and psychology for the past eighty years, and the foundational basics of sales 101 hasn’t changed during that time. Convincing someone to buy means identifying the problem and then providing a solution to it. While optimizing sales can – and often does – involve trial-and-error, and hacks often work differently across varying industries, these tips should still help boost sales on your website. Just make sure that you are consistently tracking the results of your efforts and fine-tuning, as needed. Optimization is ALWAYS the name of the game.

There are many different ways to apply the 80/20 rule. The law states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

For email marketers, the rule applies quite obviously in some areas, and more subtly in others. Let’s take a look at some examples, and see what it means for those of you out there trying to do more with your email marketing programs.

80/20 Rule for Subscribers

In the past, email marketers used to run around telling everyone how many subscribers they had. It was as if the bigger the list, the more successful we would be. As if raw number of subscribers was the be all and end all of email.

We’ve advanced beyond that now, I hope. We are smart enough to know that it’s not the size of the list that matters, it’s the outcomes.

We measure outcomes in a number of ways – opens, clicks, engagement, and conversions. A successful email marketing strategy is one that engages more people and leads them to purchase.

Applying the 80/20 rule here is easy. 80% of your actions (opens, clicks, sales, etc.) are going to come from 20% of your subscribers. These are your most engaged prospects or customers.

This matters because it helps you understand and set priorities. While you might always chase new subscriber growth, you need to know those subscribers who are most likely to take action. They are the ones keeping your business alive, the ones driving all of the ROI on your email marketing campaigns. And the more you can design the program around them, the better off you will be.

80/20 Rules for Emails

Sophisticated email marketers are managing a number of different campaigns for their company. You may have a weekly newsletter list, a product announcement list, a press list, a customer loyalty campaign, an onboarding campaign, and an abandoned cart campaign. You might have even more.

And each of these lists/campaigns has a number of different emails tied to them. Even small or mid-sized companies might send more than 100 different kinds of emails over the course of a calendar year.

But will all of those emails impact the business equally? Obviously not.

It’s likely that 80% of all performance will be driven off of just 20% of those emails. And this matters to email marketers because it tells us where to focus and how to prioritize our time.

While it might be nice to spend the time and effort to redesign your email newsletter every few months, if it’s not driving sales or loyalty, your time might be better spent elsewhere. Focus on those emails that are most likely to boost performance and you’ll be rewarded for it with higher pay/more resources.

Other Uses of the 80/20 Rule

20% of the products or services that you offer will make up 80% of the total sales you get from email marketing.

Though you will constantly be testing, 80% of the overall lift in performance will come from the 20% of tests that you run that will actually matter.

Conclusion

Your time is valuable. It’s valuable to you and it’s valuable to your company. Make sure you are focusing on the right things by measuring outcomes and being aware of where your efforts will have the largest payoffs.

Companies are using AI in all kinds of innovative ways to advance their businesses. If you’ve ever searched Netflix to watch a movie, AI (a recommendation algorithm) was no doubt used in your decision about what to watch.  If you’ve shopped on Amazon, your decision about what to buy was also influenced by AI (via an association algorithm).  If you’ve ever ordered an Uber, AI (a location algorithm) was used to have a car in your vicinity quickly.  If you ever had a thought about a product or a vacation, and it seemed to suddenly pop up on your search page or in your email inbox, I can assure you it was based on AI (a classification algorithm) monitoring your online activity.

These same types of AI algorithms can be used to power any company’s decision-making process, helping you make better business predictions. Based on research for my book Sales Ex Machina: How Artificial Intelligence is Changing the World of Selling, here are five specific areas where AI algorithms can be leveraged to help your business grow by helping your sales team sell more:

Price Optimization: Knowing what discount, if any, to give a client is always a tricky situation. You want to win the deal, but at the same time you don’t want to leave money on the table.  Today, an AI algorithm could tell you what the ideal discount rate should be for a proposal to ensure that you’re most likely to win the deal by looking at specific features of each past deal that was won or lost. Features could include: size of the deal in terms of dollar amount, product specification compliance, number of competitors, company size, territory/region, client’s industry, client’s annual revenues, public or private company, level of decision-makers (influencers) involved, timing (e.g., Q2 vs Q4), new or existing client, etc.

Insight Center

Forecasting: Sales managers face the daunting challenge of trying to predict where their team’s total sales numbers will fall each quarter. Using an AI algorithm, managers are now able to predict with a high degree of accuracy next quarter’s revenue, which in turn would help a company, from an operations standpoint, to better manage inventory and resources.

Upselling and Cross-Selling:  The fastest and most economical way to grow your top-line revenue is to sell more to your existing client base. But the million dollar question is, who is more likely to buy more?  You can spend a lot of money on marketing to those who won’t buy, or you can use an AI algorithm to help identify which of your existing clients are more likely to buy a better version of what they currently own (up-sell) and/or which are most likely to want a new product offering altogether (cross-sell). The net effect is an increase in revenue and a drop in marketing costs.

Lead Scoring: A salesperson with a rich pipeline of qualified potential clients has to make decisions on a daily, or even hourly, basis as to where to focus their time when it comes to closing deals to hit their monthly or quarterly quota.  Often, this decision-making process is based on gut instinct and incomplete information. With AI, the algorithm can compile historical information about a client, along with social media postings and the salesperson’s customer interaction history (e.g., emails sent, voicemails left, text messages sent, etc.) and rank the opportunities or leads in the pipeline according to their chances of closing successfully.

Managing for Performance: Every month, sales managers have to assess the revenue pipelines of each of their salespeople with an eye towards nurturing deals that might stall, or worse, fall through. Using AI, sales managers can now use dashboards to visually see which salespeople are likely to hit their quotas along with which outstanding deals stand a good chance of being closed. This will allow a manager to focus their attention on key salespeople and associated deals that will help the company hit their quota.

In each of the five examples above, the quantity of gathered data used will increase the algorithm’s ability to give a more accurate prediction, which in turn will drive behavior.  This is key.  The value of any prediction lies in how it can be used to guide a salesperson’s or manager’s behavior to improve the company’s bottom line.

If you choose to harness the power of AI on your own sales team, where do you begin?

First, identify the different types of data sets that exist within a company that can be combined to give a more complete picture of the customer base. For example, the sales department obviously has historical purchase data, and the marketing department has website analytics and data from promotional campaigns (e.g., response rates from clients).  Combining these data sets can allow an AI algorithm to make better predictions about who is more likely to respond to an offer.

These data sets then need to be combined with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform (e.g., Saleforce.com, Microsoft 365, Zoho, and many others) which will serve as a repository for all customer transactions and interactions.  These CRM platforms have tools that will allow you to analyze the data sets for patterns, and generate the types of predictions mentioned in the five examples above. (More and more CRM companies are adding “intelligence” as part of their platform options.  For example, Salesforce.com now has an AppExchange where you can purchase AI plug-ins like InsideSales.com’s Neuralytics to record, store, and analyze phone calls.)

The challenge for any company is always finding new ways to grow their revenue, reduce costs, and expand market share, while at the same time minimizing risks. It’s become apparent to leading edge companies that leveraging their existing internal database, and mining it for new opportunities using AI, will allow them do to so prudently.  If data is indeed the new oil, then companies who can capture the data, analyze it, and generate actionable insights will have salespeople who’ll be able to close more deals, more often.

We’ve all heard of influencer marketing. If you haven’t, you’re missing out on an opportunity to drive 11 times more ROI than traditional forms of digital marketing. But what does that mean for B2B and SaaS companies?

When we hear the word ‘influencer’, we might think of someone with a big Instagram or YouTube following. Those may be relevant platforms for B2C businesses, but not so much with B2B and SaaS products.

In fact, being an influencer doesn’t necessarily mean having a lot of followers. In a world where people often ignore ads and, instead, turn to social networks to help them with purchase decisions, anyone can be an influencer. They just have to recommend a product to someone. Whether they’re a social media superstar, a business owner or an average employee, it doesn’t matter.

We’ve covered the difference between macro and micro-influencers before. More specifically, how the latter can be easier to reach and give you more meaningful benefits, especially when you mix it with dark social.

It’s harder for B2B businesses to take advantage of influencer marketing. Unlike B2C, most people don’t buy software just because a celebrity told them to – they need to see value in what they’re buying.

When targeting influencers, it’s important to make sure that their interests and what they’re already sharing relate to what you’re selling. With SaaS products, you want people who actually see value in your software to recommend it, otherwise, it just doesn’t feel genuine. The backbone of a successful influencer campaign is a relationship where both parties benefit from it.

A few ways influencer marketing can work for you

Review websites are usually the first place B2B buyers will check when deciding if they want to buy software. G2 Crowd and Capterra are good starting points for brands who want to focus on this. A positive review might come from someone who fits your influencer persona and since they already love your brand, it’ll be easier to reach out to them and convince them to vouch for you in other platforms.

Something to keep in mind is that other businesses can be influencers for SaaS products as well. Blogging is a key marketing channel for a lot of brands so it’s a good idea to consider guest posting. It can work in two ways – you give influencers the opportunity to write posts on your blog, or you can write for other bigger websites. Either way, it’s always a good idea to share and show interest in someone else’s content before you reach out with a proposition.

Affiliate programs are another great way to approach influencer marketing. You give an influencer a certain percentage of a sale when it originates from their affiliate link, which is usually easy to track. This does have limitations, mostly because someone can make a purchase long after they’ve clicked on the affiliate link. There’s a chance that cookies will expire or the user will delete them. A good way to solve this might involve promo codes.

Isolated marketing is another way to make the tracing task easier. You promote a certain “test” product/feature only through influencer marketing – this means that, regardless of how long it takes for the sale to happen, it will directly link back to the influencer.

Show me the money: impact and ROI of influencer marketing

After you’ve chosen some influencers and reached out to them, how exactly are you tracking and measuring what you’re achieving with your strategy?

It’s not easy to measure the direct influence a person has when they share your content, especially when you’re trying to manage several different influencers. This is something marketers sometimes don’t look into with enough attention.

Undertaking an influencer marketing campaign involves setting clear goals that will, later on, help you calculate your ROI. There are many reasons why someone would want to invest in influencer marketing. Is your goal to increase brand awareness? Sales? Build brand image? Each of these is going to have a different ROI, so it’s important that you know exactly what you want to reach.

If it’s brand awareness, you’ll focus more on how your website’s traffic is changing, the number of shares you’re getting, impressions, etc. Whereas with goals more oriented towards getting a more positive brand image, you’ll want to be more concerned with brand perception and what people are saying about you. This may be challenging to measure, but it’s possible through reviews, surveys, and social media.

But if increasing sales is your ultimate goal, your results are directly tied to revenue. It doesn’t really matter if you’re getting a lot of traffic to your website when it’s not converting to sales, right? This means that you need to keep a close eye on where leads are coming from. If they’re coming from influencers, you need to measure how many of them are turning into actual sales so you can determine if your campaign is worth continuing.

Of course, measuring the success of your influencer marketing strategies takes time and patience. Although methods are still vague, some companies are using data-driven strategies to get through the results.

One case study we’re doing at GetSocial (with a mid-sized US publisher) is using a proprietary tool that provides influence analysis of which users are generating more traffic to the publisher’s website. As stated above, for them (and us), influence is not about a big following but the ability of driving growth.

Through this experience, and talking with many other partners, we’ve came to the conclusion that some values are often shared in the influencer marketing community:

• Transparency: the ability to know exactly which influencers are contributing to one’s goals;
• Alignment: the ability to define several goals (ex.: sales, subscriptions, likes) and identify, for each of those goals, who has contributed the most to reaching them;
• Discovery: because the internet is not made of stars but, instead, of little “atoms”, the ability to identify micro-influencers. Those who may not generate a massive contribute but, in scale, can make a significant difference to the company

Influencer marketing is no longer something you can avoid. If you’ve brushed it off in the past, it might be time to reflect on the idea again. Pay attention to the minds that are shaping your industry, as well as the people that are already loving your product. Figure out how they can help you achieve your business goals and how you can help them with theirs. It’s a strategy that is no longer restricted to B2C brands, as the SaaS world continues to grow and embrace new opportunities.

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 Christoph Janz, Managing Partner at Point Nine Capital here.

As an early stage-investor, Christoph Janz from Point Nine Capital has an excellent track record of investing in high-growth technology companies – think FreeAgent, Geckoboard and Typeform. Perhaps one of the best-known companies in his portfolio, however, is also the first.

“It really all started with Zendesk. I knew nothing about SaaS, but I fell in love with the idea of the consumerization of enterprise software.”

Christoph got involved with the company when it was about a year old and the product had only been in the market a few weeks. At that time, the fledgling company boasted a whopping fifty or so customers, each paying $100 per month. Today, Zendesk is aiming to hit a billion dollars in ARR within the next couple of years.

Clearly, the Zendesk team knows a little something about growth.

Yet it definitely wasn’t smooth sailing all the way. After procuring a pretty small seed round, the company was on the hunt for its next round of financing, but nobody wanted to invest. Christoph describes it as a “difficult time,” noting that while they did eventually land great Series A and B investors, he’s sure there were plenty of issues he wasn’t aware of at the time. It just goes to show that even the companies who are setting the bar had to start somewhere and clear their share of hurdles, just like everyone else.

Being as close as he was to the growth experiences of Zendesk and other ventures, Christoph has earned unique and valuable insight into why growth is so important and how to drive and manage it successfully. In a recent conversation, he shared some of his hard-won knowledge.

Knowing When to Scale (and Proving It’ll Work)

One of the most crucial pivot points in a company’s growth arc is the point at which you start to scale. How do you know when you’re ready to flip that switch, and how can you prove to investors and others that you can make it work?

Christoph’s primary rule of thumb is that you’re ready to scale when you are confident that you will be able to maintain your return on investment (ROI) as you grow. So, for instance, if you double your investment in sales and marketing, then you should be able to double your results – capture twice as many leads, convert twice as many customers, or drive twice as much revenue. “It’s obviously not going to work overnight after you pull the trigger,” Christoph says. “But, if you’re starting off at a pretty small scale, you should see your results scale more or less in step with your efforts pretty immediately. If you don’t see that, it’s an indication that you’re not really ready to scale.”

Christoph has observed that, typically, the biggest obstacle to building a $100M+ company is identifying customer acquisition channels that are both profitable and scalable. Unlike in consumer sales, there aren’t many mass-market advertising channels that work well for B2B. You can be pretty sure that you’re at a point where you can overcome this additional challenge if:

• New hires are hitting their quota. This means not only that there’s enough demand for your product, but also that you’ve been able to industrialize your sales process so that founders and superstar sales people are no longer necessary in order to make a sale.

• Outbound sales is a strong channel for you. Maintaining a reasonable CAC with outbound is difficult, so if it’s working for you that’s a strong indicator that you’re ready to scale.

• You’re able to increase your SEM budget without jeopardizing CAC. While this isn’t a reliable indicator of future performance on its own, in combination with other positive factors, it helps to corroborate your claim that it’s time to scale.

• Your content marketing “machine” consistently generates more leads each month. This means that you’ve found the narrative that resonates with your audience and that you’ve got the right marketing people on your team. Time to charge ahead.

Based on Christoph’s experience, he notes that other prerequisites for successful scaling include a high return rate, a non-leaky funnel, and unit economics that make sense. If you’re missing any of these puzzle pieces, it may mean you’re not quite ready to start ramping up.

The Tricky Business of Defining “Good” Growth

“Venture capitalists have a kind of strange business model,” Christoph says. “This is because the history shows that the vast majority of the returns in any venture capital fund are driven by a small number of extraordinarily exceptional outliers.” This is one reason why an investor’s perspective on growth can be very different from a founder’s.

An investor might set a benchmark based on the incredibly fast and substantial growth of standout brands like Slack and Dropbox. These rare “unicorn” companies skew expectations, often to unrealistic heights. A founder, on the other hand, may be very happy to build a viable and profitable company that may eventually exit for a few hundred million dollars. Even that scenario represents a sort of outlier, though it’s not enough to capture the attention of a large VC firm.

In addition to having to balance these different perspectives and opinions about what constitutes “winning” growth, there are many other factors that come into play. For instance, the market or vertical may be one that doesn’t grow as fast as other markets. Sometimes, it pays to be patient.

How to Grow – Multiple Paths to the Same Destination

Just as there are different ways to define growth, there are different ways to create it. There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy that will work one-hundred percent of the time. The right approach depends on the company, the product, the market, the vertical, and a number of other influences. In the SaaS industry, there’s sort of magic number that companies aim for: $100 million in ARR. This sweet spot is somewhat arbitrary, it’s also pretty universally recognized as an earmark of companies that are worth a billion dollars (or on their way to reaching that lofty goal).

Christoph created a framework to help SaaS leaders get their heads around which path their company might take to earn a coveted spot in the $100 million ARR club. He uses animals to define the different combinations of ARPA (average revenue per account) and number of customers that will get a company to $100 million in ARR. Here’s a quick excerpt from his initial blog post on the topic:

To build a Web company with $100 million in annual revenues, you essentially need:

• [The Elephant] 1,000 enterprise customers paying you $100k+ per year each; or
• [The Deer] 10,000 medium-sized companies paying you $10k+ per year each; or
• [The Rabbit] 100,000 small businesses paying you $1k+ per year each; or
• [The Mouse] 1M consumers or “prosumers” paying you $100+ per year each (or, in the case of eCommerce businesses, 1M customers generating $100+ in contribution margin per year each); or
• [The Fly] 10M active consumers who you monetize at $10+ per year each by selling ads

Christoph points out in his original post (and a subsequent one, which added three new categories to his original framework: the Blue Whale, Brontosaurus, and Microbe) that hunting each of these different “animals” requires a very different approach. You can’t hunt an elephant the same way you’d hunt a rabbit. (For the record, Christoph – who is a vegetarian – only uses the term hunting figuratively.)

For each of these growth strategies, you need the right tools. “One of the biggest reasons why SaaS companies can’t find ways to grow beyond a certain scale is that they are hunting deer from an ACV perspective, but it takes elephant-type effort to acquire these customers,” Christoph explains. “I’ve seen many cases of companies that are in a situation where they have to apply field sales to sell a product either because the product is too complicated to sell over the phone, or because there isn’t enough online demand. The trouble is, if you’re not able to extract six figures from each customer, you’re not going to be able to build a profitable and scalable customer acquisition engine.”

Bottom line: you need the math to work.

There really is more than one way to get from startup to $100 million in ARR; and how you get there depends a lot on your particular product, business model, market, and audience.

Christoph currently has a number of fast-growing companies in his portfolio – Front, Automile, Algolia, Contentful, and Typeform – each one taking their own approach to growth. Outside of his own investments, he admires Slack and Dropbox, two companies that have seen astronomical growth using a bottom-up, product led acquisition model. “It’s probably no coincidence that these two companies – which are maybe the two fastest-growing SaaS companies in recent history – both have a bottom-up, viral distribution element,” Christoph says. “It allows them to grow much faster while also being more capital efficient than traditional SaaS companies.”

Whether you’re collecting elephants or mice as a way of growing your company, you’ll have a better shot at reaching your goals if you’re clear and strategic about it. You will be more successful if you understand the different paths to that elusive $100 million ARR, where your product fits in Christoph’s business-building framework, and how to recognize the signals that it’s time to start scaling.

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