Rnordman

Anything that takes control of you can oppress you. Anything that can make you do something without conscious thought has a certain power over you. When it drives behaviors that harm you, it is oppressing you.

What if an object that was designed to serve you commanded such power over you that it could literally make you pick it up? An object that could take control of your senses, your sight, your hearing, would also rule your focus and attention. The more frequently such an object could command your attention, the more power it would have over you.

 Over time, the subject could become central to your identity. It could become part of you, so much so that you could never be without that object. Anything with this type of control over you would have the ability to change the nature of your relationships. It might, for example, be able to pull your attention away from people who were sitting close to you in a meeting-or even at dinner. It could take your attention away from the experience you might otherwise be having and devoted to something that is not only not worth your time, but something that is captured in a way that makes it available forever.

If this object was so ubiquitous, and exerted such power over the great majority of people, one might not even notice that they were being controlled by something that they should instead be controlling. Instead of that object being the servant of its owner, its owner would become the servant of that object. If the object were to fall in the hands of people who wanted to command the attention of those who use the object, they might intentionally create software designed to keep the owner of the object connected to it and occupied with novelties with little value, designed only to serve those who profit from gaining control of their focus and attention.

The object is less than 36 inches away from you right now, and likely never more than that unless you have mistakenly forgot it, in which case you will immediately turn around and retrieve it.

Being always connected is a form of oppression.

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Do you dream about riding in a blimp? Soon you’ll be able to ride in a luxurious modern-day version of the airship.

The Airlander 10 is a hybrid air vehicle — part lighter-than-air blimp, part plane — that can take off and land from virtually any flat surface, eliminating the need for airports. It’s also designed to use less fuel than a plane, but carry heavier loads than conventional airships. The aircraft — dubbed “the flying bum” because of its curvaceous design — had first test flight two years ago, and was originally developed for the U.S. military as a surveillance machine, but now it’s been rebranded as a luxury aircraft.

“Air travel has become very much about getting from A to B as quickly as possible. What we’re offering is a way of making the journey a joy,” said Stephen McGlennan, CEO of HAV.

This month Hybrid Air Vehicles Limited revealed the 46-metre-long cabin, created in partnership with Design Q. The aircraft can carry up to 19 passengers (plus the crew). It can only travel up to 148 km/h, but can stay aloft for up to two weeks. There’s no word on how much one of its “three-day expeditions” will cost, but in the meantime, you can take a tour of the interior of this flying cruise ship.

Even in the sky, a fully stocked “altitude bar” is a must-have.

And you can take your drink over to these sofas and stare out the huge windows.

Or take a seat and stare at the stunning ground.

Actually, forget the view, check out these luxury bean bags.

This sky bed is nicer than most land beds.

And this is what you’ll be seeing when you lie down.

With files from The Associated Press

Prepare for the invasion of the unskippables. If the Stories social media slideshow format is the future of mobile TV, it’s going to end up with commercials. Users won’t love them. And done wrong they could pester people away from spending so much time watching what friends do day-to-day. But there’s no way Facebook and its family of apps will keep letting us fast-forward past Stories ads just a split-second after they appear on our screens.

We’re on the cusp of the shift to Stories. Facebook estimates that across social media apps, sharing to Stories will surpass sharing through feeds some time in 2019. One big reason is they don’t take a ton of thought to create. Hold up your phone, shoot a photo or short video and you’ve instantly got immersive, eye-catching, full-screen content. And you never had to think.

Facebook CPO Chris Cox at F8 2018 charts the rise of Stories that will see the format surpass feed sharing in 2019

Unlike text, which requires pre-meditated reflection that can be daunting to some, Stories are point and shoot. They don’t even require a caption. Sure, if you’re witty or artistic you can embellish them with all sorts of commentary and creativity. They can be a way to project your inner monologue over the outside world. But the base level of effort necessary to make a Story is arguably less than sharing a status update. That’s helped Stories rocket to more than 1.3 billion daily users across Facebook’s apps and Snapchat.

The problem, at least for Facebook, is that monetizing the News Feed with status-style ads was a lot more straightforward. Those ads, which have fueled Facebook’s ascent to earning $13 billion in revenue and $5 billion in profit per quarter, were ostensibly old-school banners. Text, tiny photo and a link. Advertisers have grown accustomed to them over 20 years of practice. Even small businesses on a tight budget could make these ads. And it at least took users a second to scroll past them — just long enough to make them occasionally effective at implanting a brand or tempting a click.

Stories, and Stories ads, are fundamentally different. They require big, tantalizing photos at a minimum, or preferably stylish video that lasts five to 15 seconds. That’s a huge upward creative leap for advertisers to make, particularly small businesses that’ll have trouble shooting that polished content themselves. Rather than displaying a splayed out preview of a link, users typically have to swipe up or tap a smaller section of a Story ad to click through.

And Stories are inherently skippable. Users have learned to rapidly tap to progress slide by slide through friends’ Stories, especially when racing through those with too many posts or that come from more distant acquaintances. People are quick with the trigger finger the moment they’re bored, especially if it’s with an ad.

A new type of ad blindness has emerged. Instead of our eyes glazing over as we scroll past, we stare intensely searching for the slightest hint that something isn’t worth our time and should be skipped. A brand name, “sponsored” label, stilted product shot or anything that looks asocial leads us to instantly tap past.

This is why Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg scared the hell out of investors on the brutal earnings call when she admitted about Stories that, “The question is, will this monetize at the same rate as News Feed? And we honestly don’t know.” It’s a radically new format advertisers will need time to adopt and perfect. Facebook had spent the past year warning that revenue growth would decelerate as it ran out of News Feed ad inventory, but it’d never stressed the danger as what it was: Stories. That contributed to its record-breaking $120 billion share price drop.

The shift from News Feed ads to Stories ads will be a bigger transition than desktop ads to mobile ads for Facebook. Feed ads looked and worked identically, it was just the screen around them changing. Stories ads are an entirely new beast.

Stories ads are a bigger shift than web to mobile

There is one familiar format Stories ads are reminiscent of: television commercials. Before the age of TiVo and DVRs, you had to sit through the commercials to get your next hit of content. I believe the same will eventually be true for Stories, to the tune of billions in revenue for Facebook.

Snapchat is cornered by Facebook’s competition and desperate to avoid missing revenue estimates again. So this week, it rolled out unskippable vertical video ads it actually calls “Commercials” to 100 more advertisers, and they’ll soon be self-serve for buyers. Snap first debuted them in May, though the six-second promos are still only inserted into its longer-form multi-minute premium Shows, not user-generated Stories. A Snap spokesperson said they couldn’t comment on future plans. But I’d expect its stance will inevitably change. Friends’ Stories are interesting enough to compel people to watch through entire ads, so the platform could make us watch.

Snapchat is desperate, and that’s why it’s already working on unskippable ads. If Facebook’s apps like Instagram and WhatsApp were locked in heated battle with Snapchat, I think we’d see more brinkmanship here. Each would hope the other would show unskippable ads first so it could try to steal their pissed-off users.

But Facebook has largely vanquished Snapchat, which has seen user growth sink significantly. Snapchat has 191 million daily users, but Facebook Stories has 150 million, Messenger Stories has 70 million, Instagram Stories has 400 million and WhatsApp Stories (called Status) leads with 450 million. Most people’s friends around the world aren’t posting to Snapchat Stories, so Facebook doesn’t risk pushing users there with overly aggressive ads, except perhaps amongst U.S. teens.

Instagram’s three-slide Stories carousel ads

That’s why I expect we’ll quickly see Facebook start to test unskippable Stories ads. They’ll likely be heavily capped at first, to maybe one to three per day per user. Facebook took a similar approach to slowly rolling out auto-play video News Feed ads back in 2014. And Facebook’s apps will probably only show them after a friend’s story before your next pal’s, in-between rather than as dreaded pre-rolls. Instagram already offers carousel Stories ads with up to three slides instead of one, so users have to tap three times to blow past them.

An Instagram spokesperson told me they had “no plans to share right now” about unskippable ads, and a Facebook spokesperson said “We don’t have any plans to test unskippable stories ads on Facebook or Instagram.” But plans can change. A Snap spokesperson noted that unlike a full 30-second TV spot, Snapchat’s Commercials are up to six seconds, which matches an emerging industry trend for mobile video ads. Budweiser recently made some six-second online ads that it also ran on TV, showing the format’s reuseability that could speed up adoption. For brand advertisers not seeking an on-the-spot purchase, they need time to leave an impression.

By making some Stories ads unskippable, Facebook’s apps could charge more while making them more impactful for advertisers. It would also reduce the creative pressure on businesses because they won’t be forced to make that first split-second so flashy so people don’t fast-forward. Employing unskippable ads could also create an incentive for people to pay for a hypothetical ad-free Facebook Premium subscription in the future.

If Facebook makes the Stories ad format work, it has a bright future that contrasts with the doomsday vibes conjured by its share price plummet. Facebook has more than 5X more (duplicated) Stories users across its apps than its nearest competitor Snapchat. The social giant sees libraries full of Stories created each day waiting to be monetized.

Source: Pixabay.com

My company has been working with a customer on a case study and an accompanying webinar. While this probably sounds very uninteresting, this customer has a particularly interesting story because it exposes the power of customer service journey mapping.

The primary theme of their story has to do with their return on investment as well as some of the immediate benefits they have realized since going live. While this is great information to share, the role customer service journey mapping played in their success is the real star.

Mapping exercises are typically used to understand where bottlenecks exist in process flows and how to streamline things. This particular customer had also chosen to map to understand exactly what services were being provided and how. You see, there was some confusion and misinformation about exactly how everything was working, so this was also a journey of discovery. But what started as a seemingly simple exercise of determining how to get from a service request to a solution quickly began producing additional treasure for them.

Dead ends

A significant service channel for this customer is the telephone. The majority of their mapping activities involved following telephone numbers through IVRs and menuing systems, so this was a natural starting point. It ended up opening their eyes to issues they didn’t realize they had.

They were already aware telephone hold times were an issue. One of the reasons for choosing a new customer management solution was to improve overall productivity, as well as to offer more self-service options to promote new channels for customers. But mapping the customer service experience exposed flaws in their call routing.

For one, some queues were not adequately staffed to handle the volume of calls they were receiving. In other cases, certain types of calls were routed directly to voicemail–and to voicemail boxes that were only being checked by a single staff member. The result was hours–yes, hours–of hold time and in some cases days to respond to voicemail messages.

A money pit

Their telephone channel is a mix of toll and toll-free options, and the contract with their telecom provider requires they pay for hold time on the toll-free lines. It was considered a low and competitive rate at the time it was negotiated, and the contract had not been given much thought since signing. They decided to look more closely at what those long hold times were costing them.

What they found was stunning. Hold time costs across various departments amounted to nearly $85,000 per year. $85,000 in costs that had zero value in assisting customers. $85,000 that did nothing to help address customer issues, let alone improve customer satisfaction. This finding and their plans on how to address it became an addition to the ROI of the project.

New automation and self-service opportunities

Adding automation and self-service had been one of the more significant reasons for selecting a new customer service management system. Their expected ROI from such additions incorporated expected productivity gains and cost savings from such improvements. Once again, what they found was they hadn’t uncovered all the opportunities.

As they worked through the customer journey mapping, they made a point of looking for new scenarios to automate and to provide customer self-service options. Not surprisingly, their customer service journey mapping struck several new veins of automation opportunities.

Remember those calls condemned to sit on hold and the others sent to voicemail purgatory? They determined the majority of those calls consist of common questions that can be addressed with knowledge base articles. Another typical call type is requests for information specific to their customers, which could be automated through online form data collection followed by emailing the customized forms or sending them via postal mail. With a more robust knowledge management system and automation in a catalog of services integrated with their service website, customers could now more easily self-serve.

A rewarding adventure

When they undertook their customer service journey mapping process, their goals were simple: to fully understand their customer service processes and ease moving to a new customer service management system. They would also improve some processes along the way. As such, they kept their eyes open for improvement opportunities. They are overjoyed they did.

Customer service journey mapping is commonly performed to improve a service process, making the path to a solution more effortless for customers. In this case, it exposed several broken paths as well brought new opportunities to save on costs and offer self-service. As you conduct mapping exercises of your own, keep your eyes open for all the ways improvements can not only improve the customer experience but drive cost savings and better business performance as well.

Now that we’ve lived with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for almost two months, it’s time to look at the next step: making sure your opt-in procedure passes muster with this and other laws governing email, data, transparency, and privacy.

Did you lose a big chunk of your email list after GDPR went into effect on May 25? This could have happened for any of these reasons:

• You ran a re-permissioning campaign, either to EU-specific email addresses or to your entire list if you couldn’t tell where your subscribers lived, but you didn’t get a great response. (Many emailers reported hearing from less than half of their subscribers.)
• You removed addresses of people who were opted in involuntarily because you used pre-checked opt-in forms whenever you captured email addresses, on transactional emails, website or event registrations, downloads or any other use of your websites. Note: Opt-out methods such as removing a checkmark in an opt-in box are now illegal under GDPR and other email laws, such as CASL (Canada’s Anti-Spam Law). It also violates best practices.
• You removed email addresses that you collected using other dubious permission methods or methods that GDPR, CASL and other email laws prohibit or whose data and permission you couldn’t verify.

If you haven’t audited or updated your email list lately, you’d better get on that before any more time goes by. We’re already seeing GDPR complaints being filed against companies like Facebook and Google over marketing practices like forced consent.

Now it’s rebuilding time

GDPR essentially codifies responsible data and email practices. Following the rules means you’re putting your subscribers first. This has become table stakes in this age of empowered and data-wary consumers. You’ll also comply with just about every email law on the planet.

These steps will help you build a list that will pass the data sniff test and, more importantly, give you a database of subscribers who really do want to hear from you. That higher quality will justify the work you put into tuning up your opt-in practices.

1. Hunt down any stray prechecked forms.

Don’t stop with your website-based forms, such as the blank that appears somewhere on the homepage, or a popover that blooms on the page when a browser lands on it or moves to close the page.

Your audit should extend to every form where you collect email addresses for marketing messages, like these:

• All transactional emails
• Event registration forms
• New-account forms
• Download registrations
• Information requests

Sending emails as part of a business transaction or information request is permitted under most laws – GDPR calls it “legitimate interest” – but you must be clear about the conditions under which you’ll send emails. This implied permission doesn’t generally extend to marketing messages.

2. Be clear about the benefits subscribers will get from your emails.

Does that sound familiar? We talk about this all the time. It’s not enough to ask your customers to sign up for your email. Do you know anybody who wants more email in their inboxes? You must instead beef up your benefits – the “what’s in it for me?” statement that’s uppermost in skeptical subscribers’ minds.

If your email invitation is limited to a variation of “Sign up to get our emails,” it’s time to re-think and tune up your value proposition. Talk up your email features and benefits (and then carry through on them).

3. Be equally transparent about how you collect, secure and delete user data.

This is the essence of GDPR. The law isn’t about email. It’s about data collection and security. Here’s a good model to follow from Typeform, a Barcelona-based designer of data-collection tools like surveys and quizzes:

4. Force consumers to choose.

No, this is not forced consent. Rather, you give your consumers two options: “yes” and “no,” and require them to choose one or the other before proceeding.

This gives you a clear record of your customer’s intent. It also forces you to sell your email benefits as vigorously (and truthfully) as you would the best-selling product on your site to persuade more customers to opt in.

Why you still need to think about GDPR

The law applies beyond the borders of the European Union’s 26-member countries because it protects the data rights of individuals. So, the law covers any resident of an EU country in your database (whether customer, subscriber, prospect or whatever) even those living somewhere else.

We covered some GDPR basics in an earlier blog post (“Opt in again for GDPR? 9 email re-permissioning examples from 7 brands“). Also, the GDPR website has several resources to help you understand the law and how it affects your data practices.

Got questions about building a GDPR-compliant email list? Let us know in the comments below!

Branding is certainly a well-known concept for marketers everywhere. After all, a brand is what makes a business more than a sum of transactions: branding is what makes customers fall in love.

There’s plenty of advice and guidance on the internet to help any company shape their branding strategy. But once you have a branding strategy, how do you implement it in your email marketing? One answer is curated email newsletters. But how can you leverage your email newsletters to build upon your existing brand?

In this post, you’ll learn how you can build a strong brand through curated email newsletters, complete with brand-building principles and tactics that you can immediately put into practice.

Why strong branding matters

In case you need to catch up on the value of branding, here’s a brief overview of what a strong brand looks like, and why you should think about branding. This goes beyond your email newsletters, as your brand affects who you are as a company.

Let’s get caught up on some common definitions of branding:

• “Branding is all of the ways you establish an image of your company in your customers’ eyes.” (Shopify)
• “Branding is the marketing practice of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products.” (Entrepreneur)
• “Your brand is what leaves the lasting impact and influences the crucial decision of whether or not someone will become a long-term customer.” (Leighton Interactive)

To summarize, branding is the impression your company leaves on a customer or potential customer. We see terms like “image,” “symbol,” and “design” mentioned in those definitions, showing how important visual composition is to your branding in addition to your messaging.

So, why is branding so important?

• Branding improves recognition, creates trust, supports advertising, builds financial value, inspires employees, and generates new customers. (Deluxe Enterprise Operations)
• A strong brand makes your company look bigger, builds loyalty and trust, conveys stability, and makes your business memorable. (Masterful Marketing)
• Branding is what makes your company different from the competition and helps you connect with customers emotionally. Building your brand helps you grow your business. (The Branding Journal)

Building your brand, quite simply, moves your business forward. A stronger brand attracts more business.

So how does this pertain to email newsletters? Let’s apply some of these principles to newsletters and continue our mission of building a stronger brand.

Make the experience consistent

Email newsletters have a wide variety of elements in them. Copy, logos, color palettes, images, CTAs, etc. Each element of an email should be approached through a consistent brand strategy.

A consistent design allows your subscribers and customers to know who you are right off the bat. It also helps them know what to expect, and then navigate, read, and interact with your content easier, according to UX Collective. While the first thing that comes to mind might be visuals, this also applies to your creative copywriting as well.

Let’s look at a handful of these pieces and explore what this looks like.

Images

Images convey a lot about your brand. A huge differentiator is between photos and illustrations. While you don’t necessarily need to stick to either one or the other, you should think about how your audience is interacting with your brand at various points, and how images play a part in that.

For example, maybe all your content (i.e. blog, guides, walkthroughs) use illustrations as the header images, but your homepage uses stock photography. That’s awesome—just make sure you’re sticking to that model. Mixing your images, in this case, might confuse a recipient as to whether they’re looking at your blog content or your homepage content, or if it’s content from a different company that you’re presenting.

The newsletter from Apartment Therapy always includes very bright photos with a lot of natural light.

Similarly, using the same image in both the email newsletter and the page your reader lands on after clicking a CTA will help orient them. Think about if you see a sign to a restaurant. You walk in, but then the sign on the hosting station is entirely different. It’d probably make you wonder if you were in the right place for a moment. The same happens to your readers when they see content in your email newsletter and then experience something totally different when they click through.

Using consistency in images will work to solidify your brand, helping your readers know what to expect and ultimately engage with your content.

Text: copy, tone, fonts

Words carry a lot of meaning. As a marketer, you’re well aware of this. Whether coming up with email copy comes to you easily or not, the words you use should always be passed through your branding guide.

Copywriting is a big deal here. To help people continue their reading from your email newsletter to your content, you should write with the goal of creating a seamless experience. Your newsletter copy should entice the recipient, and continue that story with the same tone and style as they click through to your content.

This email newsletter from MIchael Kors provides the right amount of intrigue to entice a click.

The same is true for font and other styles. Since your objective is to get people to engage with your content, you definitely don’t want them to bounce when they reach the next page. Some studies actually show that improving your email and website fonts or styles can reduce bounce rates by 92%. More eyes on the page mean more engagement, which ultimately creates more customers.

If you’ve ever been on the Airbnb website, you’ll feel right at home when viewing this email. Even down to the fonts and text spacing, this email layout is extremely consistent with their website, making the reader have a seamless experience and know what to expect from Airbnb.

Layout

Your email service provider is packed with different email newsletter templates. You may have a robust preferences center with a handful of different types of newsletters for your subscribers to receive. No matter how many newsletters you send, consistency is key.

Single-column, zig-zag, inverted pyramid—all these layout styles can work well with your content when used consistently. But if you send a newsletter one week that has three columns, and then one that has only a single block of content, it can be really confusing to subscribers.

Imagine if you received a slew of emails that had a single piece of content with a single CTA. You’ve been trained by this company to look only at a single item at a time when you’re viewing their emails. Visualize, then, you open a three-column email with tons of images and copy from that same company. In this case, you’re unlikely to scroll down because you’ve never had to scroll before. You’ve been conditioned to engage with that brand’s content a specific way.

This principle can be applied to your various types of email newsletters, announcements, offers, and even your website. The more you train your reader, the easier it will be for them to recognize your brand and digest content.

Make the experience unique

Let your branding shine through. Leverage the quality of your content and the tone your company uses. There are tons of templates to look through online that can spark formatting and design ideas. Think beyond that. Consider what only your company—your brand— can do.

Unique content

What makes your content stand out? Is it the range of topics? The specificity of topics? The perspective you take? Lean into whatever it is that makes your content stand out and highlight that.

In their weekly content email newsletter, Invision does a stellar job in highlighting their content.

They lean on great images to highlight their content, and even the format of their email newsletters serve to communicate the message of modern design. These elements serve to showcase their branding and ultimately their product.

Another important part of their branding is wittiness, which shines through in their CTAs. This brings us to the topic of tone.

Tone of voice

Your email newsletters hinge on words. Great images are awesome, and interesting stories are compelling. But the only thing tying your images and stories together are words. JCI Marketing puts it this way:

“Creating a brand for your business is much more than just creating a logo. It involves everything from creating a visual identity, creating your brand’s personality and finding your voice as a business.”

A lot of companies use adjectives to describe their tone of voice. Look at this example from Percolate:

This is a great place to start. Once you can identify your company’s tone of voice, you can start filtering all your copy through this funnel. From subject lines to headlines, body copy to CTAs, with your brand voice as a guiding light, you’ll not only make sure it’s consistent but identifiable.

Apple is known for their tone of voice—especially when it comes to their marketing materials. Their taglines are often written with a play on words, which is immediately identifiable as Apple messaging. Here’s an example from the iPhone 5 announcement, when the phone changed sizes to be a bit taller than the previous generation.

Creating a tone of voice that is memorable and identifiable by your customers not only makes it easier for them to know what to expect from your email newsletters, but it also adds personality and intrigue to your content. This drives more engagement, more recognition of your brand, and ultimately more sales.

Wrap up

Zeroing in on your brand helps your audience hone in on your email newsletters. By filtering your newsletters through your brand guidelines, you can train your audience on what to expect from your content, and familiarize them with your company. Creating consistent and unique experiences between your email newsletters, website, and other platforms will strengthen your brand, increasing your content engagement and sales.

Your buyers need a lot of things, but more of the same content isn’t one of them. After all, they have millions of resources at their fingertips, thanks to social media and the slew of other media outlets and analyst firms at their disposal. One thing they do need? More time to read this content. In fact, more than half (51%) of B2B buyers still say they’re overwhelmed by the amount of content available, according to Demand Gen Report’s 2018 Content Preferences Survey.

When people are overwhelmed, they do one of two things:

1. They stick to what they know, often relying on gut instinct.

1. They go to trusted sources, whether they’re analyst firms, publications or colleagues and peers.

As content creators, that means it’s our job to ensure that our content isn’t just compelling and visually appealing; it’s also got to be relevant to our audience and their objectives, needs and pain points. This marketing reality reaffirms the need for alignment on WIFM (“What’s in it for me?”) messaging in which content is designed from the buyer’s point of view.

From a high level, designing your messaging and content requires an understanding of your audience, who they are, what they want, and most of all, how you can help them. And while every piece of content we create – whether it’s an E-book, checklist or blog – has a primary audience, there are many other people reading your content who may also play a role in the decision-making process. These people make up the “buying committee,” and they all play their own unique roles and have their own distinct needs. What’s more, all of these players rely on content in some way, which creates a very complicated situation for your team.

Meet the Modern Buying Committee

Over the past year, 61% of B2B buyers said that their purchase cycle increased somewhat or significantly, according to the Demand Gen Report 2018 B2B Buyers Survey. On average, 79% of respondents said there were up to six people involved in the decision-making process.

While it varies by organization, buying committees typically consist of the following cast of characters:

• Target buyers: They’re the ones who are actually purchasing the solution/platform/technology. They are considered your primary audience.
• Users: Your secondary audience, these are the people who are actually using your solution/platform/technology.
• Influencers: These executives don’t have the final say in the decision, but they certainly play a role in determining which features and capabilities are important, and, most of all, which vendors should be considered. For example, if the CMO is leading the search for a new marketing automation platform, he/she may need to get buy-in from the CFO.
• Gatekeepers: The gatekeepers finalize the budget for purchase decisions and ultimately give the final “OK” at the selection phase.
• Other outside sources/influencers: These executives are sometimes not in the buying committee. Sometimes, they may not even be in your audience’s company. Regardless, they’re trusted peers and colleagues that influence the buyer somehow and guide them toward specific options.

We’re not saying you must create content for all of these executives in order to be successful in your efforts. However, there are some key things you must know about these players and apply as you strategize and create your content. For instance, you must know who is in the buying committee, as well as their:

• Roles and responsibilities
• Priorities
• Content preferences
• Watering holes (i.e., where they go to find information)
• Device preferences (i.e., desktops/laptops versus tablets and smartphones)

Another point to consider is the average age of your target audience. We don’t mean to be ageist, but the reality is, buyer preferences and expectations vary significantly based on their age. Now, with 82% of companies reporting that they have at least one millennial employee in their buying committee, marketers must assess and even rethink their content marketing and amplification strategies. For example, these buyers value company authenticity and rely heavily on social media as they research solutions. How would this make you rethink or refine your tactics?

Regardless of age, your audience has preferences, beliefs and biases based on what they know, what they assume and what they’ve experienced. It’s important to understand and keep those insights at the forefront when developing your content.

6 Tips for Creating “Committee-Friendly” Content

The B2B buying committee isn’t going away. If anything, it’ll only get larger and more complex over time. But that doesn’t mean you should simply create vague and generalized content, hoping that it’ll resonate with someone. Instead, you must think more critically about the content you do create. Here are some tips to get you on the right track:

1. Identify your primary and secondary audiences: How do these buyers work together? Are there any key similarities between their roles, responsibilities, goals or pain points?

1. Consider context: Determine how your primary and secondary audiences will consume content. For example, should all assets be created with mobile accessibility in mind?

1. Think about how buyers will share content: Consider this a game of “content telephone.” How do different committee members find content? How does it get shared throughout the committee? Who typically reads and responds to content that is shared? This information will help you identify key readers to tailor your content messaging toward.

1. Identify ways to speak to core audiences within your content: Find ways to sprinkle in messaging that speaks to key users, influencers and decision-makers. How will their day-to-day lives be impacted by specific trends and market decisions? How will your solutions help them be more successful?

1. Incorporate data and insights from trustworthy sources: Up to 78% of B2B buyers place a greater emphasis on the trustworthiness of content sources and 65% prefer to read content from credible industry influencers, according to the 2018 Content Preferences Survey. When you understand the buying committee’s key watering holes and the influencers they gravitate toward, you will be able to establish a hearty list of sources to tout in your content.

1. Find ways to tailor foundational content to different committee members: There may be ways to tweak specific areas of assets so they speak more directly to different committee members. Depending on your budget and timeline, you could find ways to repurpose your content for three or more different committee buyer roles without much effort.

It’s unclear how buying committees will evolve and how buying preferences will change, but one thing will remain the same: Buyers trust and respond to content that’s authentic, credible and speaks to their needs and priorities. Want to learn how your team can create content for the ever-evolving buying committee? Reach out to our Director of Marketing, Product and Channel, Jessica Baum, to plan a strategic discussion.

Email is one of the oldest forms of modern communication. But it’s still so effective that companies continue to put a lot of effort into making this sales technique stand out in consumers’ inboxes. The mistake that many of them make, however, is not focusing on solving the right problems within their messages.

Cold emails that go on and on about how great a product is are a dime a dozen. They fail because they solve the wrong objection. Like a car salesman who glosses over your concerns as he tries to close a sale, semi-personalized lead generation emails are rarely relevant. In one Periscope by McKinsey study, consumers say only about 40 percent of the emails they received actually felt somewhat personal.

Adding a little credibility to your message can be effective, but if it’s all you do, then you’re not even answering the right question. Your audience members want to know why they need your product. The answer is never “Because we’re a good company with a good product.” The real answer lies in how contextualized and relevant you can make the product’s benefits to each prospect’s current circumstances.

Personalized Versus One-to-One Cold Emails

The idea behind personalizing emails to your consumers is to speak as though you are talking to each individual one-on-one. On the surface, the premise is simple: Make every single email feel like it was sent from a human to a human. You don’t have to be very email-savvy to spot a pseudo-personalized email, and when consumers realize they’re on a list, the tactic backfires.

Think about how you communicate with your colleagues and describe your services in person to new employees. Speak casually and conversationally, using vernacular when appropriate. Consider what needs to be said and who you’re saying it to. If your email sounds like a pitch when you say it out loud, then it reads like one, too.

So how do you make thousands of emails sound like each one was written personally? It takes a heavy focus on defining and segmenting your buyer personas. Writing out every cold email you send isn’t viable, but highly detailed personas will help you engage every prospect as personally as if you had.

Creating One-to-One Cold Emails for Your Entire Audience

It seems obvious to say that CEOs of companies making $1 million to $10 million in revenue face different challenges than the heads of companies making $1 billion to $2 billion. When you look closer, though, you might find that the messages you send to both targets are identical. That theoretical knowledge didn’t make its way into your practical strategies.

One-to-one messaging forces you to segment your audience in ways you might not have thought of. Instead of just title, separate prospects by revenue and employee count, as well. This creates new groups and subsets of prospects that all face similar challenges you can address personally and in detail.

It also creates a new set of challenges for you and your marketing team. To tackle them effectively, be sure to follow these steps throughout the process of writing a cold sales email:

1. Experiment first.

Experimenting and testing are not the same. Before testing anything, experiment with crazy ideas with no bias or regard for your desired outcome. Sure, finding the “perfect” email strategy should be your ultimate goal, but some of the best tactics come from harebrained ideas that never would’ve gained traction without the freedom to experiment.

2. Test your hypotheses.

Your experiments will give you a few raw hypotheses to test. If you already have an email strategy that works well, A/B test it against each hypothesis you think has merit. Compartmentalize the tests by adding 10 percent to whatever your meeting conversion rate already is. That way, you can track any new clients you get without compromising your revenue goals.

3. Build out personas.

The better you understand the different buyer personas you’re trying to reach, the more successfully you can test your new ideas. Identify real people, visit their LinkedIn profiles, and message a colleague that fits the description. Then, ask your colleague all of the questions you have for your persona and use his answers to tweak your message, so it doesn’t come off as generic or unfocused.

4. Leverage variable tags.

After you’ve built your personas, utilize the variable tags in your email marketing automation tools. Along with things like “first name” and “company,” you’ll also find a multitude of other helpful tags, or you can customize tags as necessary. Put your customer data to work: Tag downloaded resources, frequency of communication with your company, and other differentiators so you can create a sequence that keeps each persona engaged.

5. Embrace one-to-one communication.

Emails are only one small factor in your lead generation strategy; the one-to-one concept of communicating should permeate all of your customer engagement. Consider how you can make each prospect feel like she is your only priority by translating each message across different channels. Make sure the message in a lead’s inbox aligns with the one she saw on your website, her LinkedIn profile and every other social media channel.

Like messages on different platforms, your emails to different personas shouldn’t just regurgitate the same thing over and over. Sure, they should serve the overall, one-to-one conversation you’re trying to have with your leads, but they must do so in a way that makes the communication feel personal. It’s the only way to make sure your emails don’t feel like just another dry attempt to make a sale.

Need some help making your emails shine? My company, Sapper Consulting, can help you learn how to increase sales through enterprise content. Request a demo today.

Do you send a lot of emails? Manage hundreds of contacts? Have a communication workflow? Then you know what it’s like to be totally overwhelmed by your inbox. CRM tools could be the simple fix you can try.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you keep track of your contacts, your interactions with them, and your workflows. Gmail CRMs integrate directly into your inbox and help you supercharge your Gmail experience by making the process easier.

So what’s the best Gmail CRM?

1. Streak (Fully Integrated)

Because it lives entirely within Gmail, using Streak means you don’t have to sign up for and configure a new app. But it provides almost all the functionality of a standalone CRM system.

After you’ve created a Box—a container for a set of interactions—your related emails are automatically added. You can see when your last contact was. Add contacts at an organization or on a project. You can also create a custom workflow to track your contacts.

Streak tracks opens and views and has super-fast snippet system. You can add a pre-written snippet just by typing “#” and a keyword.

Best of all, there’s a great free plan:

• Personal (Free): Access to nearly all features and 200 tracked emails per month.
• Professional ($49/user): Unlimited email tracking, reports, and Zapier integrations.
• Enterprise ($99/user): Custom permissions, data validation, backup, and premium support.

2. NetHunt (Fully Integrated)

This Gmail CRM is built around Records, a collection of emails, tasks, and files. Records can be grouped into folders and displayed in custom views

NetHunt also lets you set follow-up dates and reminders. They’re color-coded and sorted into folders so you always know what you need to do next.

One big advantage of NetHunt is that the free plan allows for two users to access the workspace. Small companies can use the free plan until they expand and still take advantage of collaboration. Reporting is also included in the free plan.

Here’s what you’ll get:

• Free: 2 users, 2,500 records, 200 campaigns, 200 tracked emails, link tracking, reporting, and Zapier integration.
• Professional ($24/user): Unlimited users, 25,000 records, 2,000 daily campaigns, unlimited tracking, and Google Drive and Calendar integration.
• Enterprise ($48/user): 250,000 records, dedicated customer success manager, and custom development.

3. Zoho CRM (Integration)

Zoho’s suite doesn’t just include one of the best Microsoft Office alternatives, but also a great CRM. While it’s not as tightly integrated as some of the extensions above, it does let you manage much of your workflow from within Gmail.

You can create new leads and contacts, add tasks and calls to a customer entry, create deals, and see contact information. You could conceivably do just about everything from within Gmail. But to get an overview, you’ll need to head to the CRM.

We’ll give you the simple version of Zoho’s CRM pricing here. For more details, check out their pricing page (annual pricing is also available):

• Free: 3 users, leads, contacts, tasks, 25,000 entries, team collaboration features, and limited SalesForce automation.
• Standard ($18/user): Improved support, reminders, schedule reports, more reporting options, mass email, and campaigns.
• Professional ($40/user): Process management, more reporting options, improved social integration, inventory management, and a whole lot more.

4. Propeller (Integration)

It’s easy to start using the simple interface of Propeller’s Gmail CRM extension. New messages show buttons for templates, tracking, and follow-ups. Contacts are managed directly from Gmail. Pipelines are displayed in-window.

It’s worth noting, however, that you’ll need to access Propeller’s web app to see all of your information.

Propeller’s biggest draw is its seamless integration. It feels like it’s already part of Gmail. Learning to use the CRM and getting up and running will be lightning-fast. The fact that every subscription comes with a one-hour onboarding session only makes it easier.

The simplicity of the app extends to their pricing, as well:

• One plan ($35/user): You get everything. You also lock in the price forever, so you don’t have to worry about price changes. If you pay annually, you’ll pay $29/month/user.

5. Insightly (Integration)

Insightly is a professional-level CRM that includes features like custom Kanban sales pipelines, custom reports, and relationship maps.

This is an app built for enterprise-level selling and relationship management. But the fact that it has a free plan for up to two users makes it small-business-friendly.

You have quite a few pricing options:

• Free: 2 users, 2,500 records, task management, project management, lead tracking, and standard dashboards (no scheduling or templates).
• Plus ($29/user): 100,000 records, custom reports, contacts and calendar sync, custom branding, and more integrations.
• Professional ($49/user): 250,000 records, workflow automation, and custom dashboards.
• Enterprise ($99/user): Unlimited records, and a dedicated support specialist.

6. ProsperWorks (Integration)

It’s clear that ProsperWorks was designed with Google Apps in mind. In addition to CRM for Gmail, you can also connect Drive, Calendar, and even Hangouts. Their chatbot will notify you when changes are made to entries in the CRM. It’s pretty cool.

The CRM app is sleek and easy to use, much like a Google product. Although the cheapest plan misses out on features that you’ll get for free elsewhere, you get a lot of great reporting options. And alerts when your sales process breaks down, which is useful for teams.

Here’s what you’ll get:

• Basic ($19/user): 30,000 records, three templates, one bulk send, and Calendar and Hangouts integration.
• Professional ($49/user): 100,000 records, 10 templates, 10 bulk sends, task automation, and marketing integrations.
• Business ($119/user): 500,000 records, unlimited templates, unlimited bulk sends, goal tracking, leaderboards, and premium support.

7. Arcade CRM (Integration)

Arcade CRM includes a contact database, task management, calendar integration, document management, sales pipeline visualization, and more.

The Gmail CRM extension lets you create templates, set reminders, and track email opens. Although the Gmail integration doesn’t have as many features as Streak or NetHunt, its close integration with the CRM suite does make it very useful.

Pricing for Arcade is dead simple:

• One plan ($15/user): All features. You get everything. If you pay annually, it’s $12/month.

The Best Gmail CRM: The Winner Is…

After seeing the options, two Gmail CRMs stand out from the rest.

Streak is definitely the best choice if you want a CRM completely integrated into Gmail. There’s no switching back and forth between apps, and the interface has just about everything you could need.

Not only that, but the free plan is totally functional. It’s definitely the best free CRM for Gmail—and one of the best overall, as well.

If you’re looking for a standalone CRM that integrates with Gmail, Zoho CRM will give you the most options. The CRM is professional-level, contains a huge amount of features, and is easily scalable.

Zoho’s free plan gives you access to the features you need and includes collaboration among three team members.

(I have to say, though, that the simplicity of Prosperworks’ Gmail integration makes it a solid contender as well.)

If you don’t need this much power, you can always step up your Google Contacts game and use that to manage your contacts.

Read the full article: The 7 Best Gmail CRMs Compared: Which Inbox Manager Is Best?

Should you go over the head of the stakeholder you have been working with on the big opportunity? Should you continue to work on having them invite in the executive sponsor your need on their own? Should you stay single-threaded because doing something different destroys the relationship-even if by doing so there is no deal?

Should you start in the C-suite, looking for a sponsor who will help you get in front of the people who you are going to need to work with on any initiative you would do together? Should you go directly to the people the C-Suite would forward you to as the best first step? Or, should you start lower in the organization, get an understanding of how to make a difference and move up?

Should you present a disruptive idea that is going to change your dream clients view of their business and compel change, allowing you to create an opportunity to do something together? Should you come in with the intention of doing discovery, exploring what your prospective client already believes they need to change and eliciting their ideas about what should be done? Or, should you enter into the conversation with a pitch and value proposition that would change their business if they agreed to move forward?

Should you treat an objection as something that lacks merit, believing it needs to be overcome and argue your case? Or does it make more sense to look at an objection as a legitimate concern, one that needs to be resolved to the client’s satisfaction for you to move forward together?

Should your first price be your best and final offer and one you are going to defend no matter what your dream client throws at you? Knowing that you are going to be asked for a discount, should you pad your number to make sure you can easily provide a concession, hoping it is enough to win over your competitors with irrational pricing? Or, should you prepare to negotiate in a way that permits your to give up something to gain something else worth as much or more to you?

In sales, there are not universal answers to each and every situation you encounter. Instead, there are only choices, decisions you have to make about what you believe is right for each situation, considering your goals and the context of each scenario individually. Good sales results come from good choices well executed.

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The post Good Choices Make For Good Sales Results appeared first on The Sales Blog.

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With so many recognition program KPIs, it’s easy to forget about the true importance of recognition. It’s not just about how many awards are sent, or how many times employees log on to the program. It’s not only about the rewards they redeem, or any other recognition program KPIs you can imagine. While these indicators can give you an idea of how well your program is performing, at the end of the day, it is the emotional effect on your employees that matters.

The drawback of recognition program KPIs

Look around your company. Do your employees seem to be in better spirits than before you started your recognition program? Do they seem to smile more, complain less, and connect with coworkers and customers? These are the emotional signs that your recognition program is effective.

Your recognition program KPIs will give the quantifiable data that you can present to executives, but in actuality, those are just numbers on a page. There is the potential that impressive numbers are skewed because of some outside cultural factor. Maybe you have created a significant prize award for the person who sends the most recognition messages, but instead of creating an environment of appreciation, your employees simply send messages of “thanks” that are nothing more than air, in an excuse to send messages to get a prize. In this situation, your recognition culture will be watered down, and those messages, which were meant to improve the employee experience, wind up meaning nothing more than a means to a prize. This isn’t to say that incentive rewards are always bad – rather, they must be used wisely otherwise.

In the end, all initiatives that require quantifiable results, and are only focused on your recognition program KPIs, will fail. People are way more complex than numbers on a page. You should still use those numbers because they can be useful information, but do not confuse their value with true program effectiveness.

So how do you measure the effectiveness of a recognition program?

The answer is by talking to your employees. Interview them and see how the culture is going. Observe how employees interact with each other throughout the day. Do they stick to their workstations without talking to anyone? Do they laugh at jokes? Do they say hello in the hallway? Do they organize after-work activities together? Are people frequently ill, or come to work late? Do they seem to enjoy spending their day at work?

Another answer is to actually read the recognition messages that are sent. Are they simply fluff? Are they all sent to the same 10 people? Are some departments doing better than others? By analyzing the content more than the sheer numbers, you are able to get a major glimpse into the culture of your company.

Your recognition program KPIs are only a way to measure aspects of your program but fall short in understanding the true result. At the end of the day, it is the emotional health of your employees that creates a great work environment. Happy employees help customers become happy. Happy employees take pride in their work. Happy employees are the backbone of a successful company.

In the hyper-competitive world of banking, clients are always demanding greater levels of personalized service. In fact, it’s practically a prerequisite for entrusting institutions to manage their financial affairs and elevate the customer experience. This reality puts intense pressure on your relationship managers, who are not only responsible for helping to deliver that personalization but also deepening existing client relationships and establishing meaningful new ones.

The truth is that relationship managers can make the difference between whether a customer remains loyal to a bank or chooses to begin a relationship with them at all. That’s why it’s so important to empower them to succeed by removing the barriers that make their jobs harder than they need to be.

One of those barriers is preparing the variety of sales and marketing collateral such as the presentations, pitch books, and proposals they need to personalize interactions and maximize the outcome of their meetings. While these and other materials are essential, creating them manually is a timely and inefficient process. More importantly, it’s one that can easily divert relationship managers’ time—time that could be spent on more valuable work, such as engaging prospects and customers face to face and growing existing relationships.

The Value (and Challenge) of Content

Make no mistake. Highly personalized content—whether that’s reports, proposals, presentations or product offers—is an extremely important part of creating great customer experience. The customer feels more understood when they see individualized solutions presented to them, rather than generic offers.

Putting in the effort to prepare a tailor-made consultation shows that the relationship manager understands customers and their unique needs individually, making it significantly easier to build trust and sell more. Plus, it leads to greater customer satisfaction and retention—the ultimate goal for every relationship manager.

The problem is that when relationship managers create content ahead of client or prospect meetings, it’s never a copy-and-paste situation. They need to create and present personalized, valuable information that lets the customer know they’ve done their homework and truly understand the client’s individual financial circumstances, needs, and aspirations.

While personalized content is a crucial weapon in relationship managers’ arsenals, producing it can take days. That’s not surprising, considering it includes gathering data, sourcing the right marketing materials, ensuring everything is up to date and compliant, and packaging all of that into a professional presentation that’s in line with company message and brand guidelines.

Further complicating matters is the fact that at many banks, this information and collateral is stored in disparate systems, making it even more time-consuming to retrieve. This causes version control and compliance headaches, and costs the relationship manager time as they inspect each document to ensure accuracy.

Luckily technology provides a solution.

Empowering Relationship Managers with Technology

So what’s the answer? Leveraging sales and marketing enablement technology can pay huge dividends. By automating many of the manual tasks needed to create valuable personalized content, for example, relationship managers can prepare for their all-important in-person meetings in a fraction of the time.

Sales and marketing enablement technology means that relationship managers can access the information they need in minutes. Plus, leveraging new technologies can help deepen client relationships thanks to improved data management, better analytical capabilities, and easy data extraction for reporting. Having this information available at the touch of a button saves enormous amounts of time and effort.

When you digitally manage all of your bank’s collateral through one system, it also helps you standardize your documents, eliminating tiresome formatting tasks and improving the effectiveness of individual materials that can be tracked and evaluated. And with access to deep content analytics, it’s easy for relationship managers to see what content is and isn’t working—giving them the ability to change up their approach.

While the time and resource savings might seem obvious, they are worth spelling out. Organizations using sales and marketing enablement technology have been able to reduce the time to produce content by as much as 83 percent.[1]

The Way Forward

The less time your relationship managers spend project managing content updates, the more time they’ll have for true relationship management. Automating time-consuming manual processes like creating proposals, reports, and sales and marketing materials means your relationship managers can direct their time to activities that are of most value to the business.

To learn more about how content automation can empower your client relationship managers, download our new eBook “Going Agile: How Sales and Marketing Enablement Technology Can Bring Greater Efficiency to Banking.”

[1] Seismic Capital One Case Study, https://seismic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Capital-One_Case-Study.pdf

Dr. Robert B. Cialdini wrote his book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” with two simple questions in mind: why do people say ‘yes’ and how do we get them to say ‘yes’ more often?

It’s a question that salespeople and marketers wrestle with every day. But Cialdini’s research condensed the art of persuasion down to 6 separate factors.

This blog will dissect each one, and give some actionable examples of how they can be put into practice in sales and marketing teams.

Reciprocity

Simply put, reciprocity is the act of giving back to others in the form of a behaviour, gift, or service.

Therefore, in order to generate leads and turn them into sales, salespeople and marketers need to develop content that their audience will be happy to exchange their personal information for.

Creating content that is engaging, useful, and solves a pain point for the target audience is essential to fill the sales pipeline. It’s also a large reason why, as seen below, 3 of the top priorities for marketers in 2018 are all content-related.

Likewise, if your company’s salespeople use this content to deliver added value without expectation, you’ll have warmer, more engaged sales prospects as a result.

Scarcity

Scarcity is used all the time in B2C marketing. There’s no doubt that we get our act together and stop procrastinating when the flights say ‘2 available at this price.’

But B2B marketers can also use scarcity to their advantage. One example is promoting deals or running campaigns based on seasonality, such as the end of the financial year.

Salespeople can also run free assessments or guidance for a limited time. But for this to work, you will also need to demonstrate why your proposition is unique, and what they will lose out on if they do not consider your proposal.

Authority

For best practices, people always follow the lead of the experts.

Marketers should look to invest time and effort into distributing their own blog content, with consistent quality. Aside from thought-leadership, there’s also a tangible benefit to producing high-quality blog content. Hubspot found that companies that published 16+ blog posts per month received almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published 0-4 monthly posts.

Not only that, but salespeople can utilise this very same blog content, and send it to leads whose pain points have been made obvious. This not only builds trust, but also establishes your position as an expert in your field.

Consistency

As a brand, it’s essential that your content and messaging come with a consistent tone and direction. That’s why both sales and marketing teams need to collaborate on, and use, a buyer persona document.

For marketers, this will keep your blog content, social media posts, and paid ads consistent with the pain points of the persona, which will lead them back to your company as the solution.

Likewise, salespeople should follow suit. For example, your MD persona may not like emails with large banners and colourful pictures. It may be better to keep it simple and include a link to a useful piece of content. Everyone’s short on time, so give them what they want and give it to them consistently.

Liking

Persuasion science tells us that we like:

• People who are similar to us
• People who pay us compliments
• People who cooperate with us towards mutual goals.

Of course, all three can play a part to turn a stranger into a customer. Smart salespeople establish common ground with their leads and prospects, and will already be familiar with this tactic to build rapport.

But marketers, in their own way, are salespeople too. They, therefore, need to find ways that help prospects reach their goals, used personalized automation to deliver this content, while also making sure their message is delivered in a way that makes them feel included and safe.

Consensus

When people are unsure, they look to others to see if they’re on the right track. You’re more likely to visit a popular restaurant that has rave reviews than one that doesn’t.

This is why we often see blog subscribe call-to-actions that start with how many subscribers have already signed up, such as the example below. Other examples that can be used throughout the sales process are case studies, reviews, or customer references.

Convinced?

To sell better and faster, you need the right information from your leads to make informed decisions and personalize their journey towards a sale.

My company, Yellowstep, has put together an ebook on selling better and faster, which will give you practical tips and CRM insights to fill your sales pipeline. Get your free copy today.

I once worked in Japan. In many ways, it was an ideal job, and I was paid very well. But I felt miserable, lonely, and pointless.

As the only foreigner in an 80 strong staff, I can remember passing the entire 8 hour day without saying a word to anyone. Those days were tough; I can still clearly feel the effect it had on me. A lethargy used to come over me on those days, where I couldn’t muster the energy to do anything productive.

Conversation matters more than we realise. Human beings are social creatures. We crave connection and belonging. Long ago, our physical survival depended on it. Today, our emotional and mental wellbeing rely on it. We weren’t designed to be alone. And yet isolation and loneliness are increasingly prevalent in today’s workplace.

Benefits of small talk

Small talk isn’t just a pleasant nicety. It is essential to our wellbeing, and to our mental health.

Behavioral scientists have found that feeling socially connected increases health and happiness, while feeling disconnected contributes to feeling lonely and unhappy.

Making small talk as we go about our working day makes us feel more connected to the space in this world that we inhabit. It’s the small talk; niceties with the receptionist every morning, a mid-morning break with a colleague, stopping by someone’s desk for a chat; about the everyday things; the weather, sport, going on holidays; that matter, and that shouldn’t be trivialised. An experiment conducted by psychologists in British Colombia found that regular social interactions through small talk resulted in significantly higher positive emotions than those who didn’t engage.

Conversation aids Connection

It is a modern irony that despite being hyper-connected, we often find ourselves lonely and isolated. Isolation and loneliness are increasingly common social anxieties of the 21st century workplace. Because you see more and more we replace conversation with technology and assume it works the same. But we are beginning to see the detrimental effects of an over-reliance on technology at the expense of face to face conversation. A third of Irish people cited loneliness as a factor in triggering mental health issues. (Pieta house)

The solution is more complex than one simple word. But talking certainly helps.

‘’Talking is regarded as the most effective means of looking after your own mental health.’’

HSE study https://www.healthpromotion.ie/hp-files/docs/HSP00612.pdf

In the workplace, the key to successful relationships is in learning to connect with people, not just communicate with them. We connect through face to face conversation, where we are present and engaged and showing the other person that we value them by giving them the gift of our time.

Conversation creates Engagement

When we make time for someone, check in with them, make the effort to have a chat with them, we show them that we care. Gallup has listed ‘caring’ as one of the core elements that predict employee engagement, performance, and productivity. Regarding small talk as superficial and unnecessary is short-sighted at best.

| ‘’Fancy action plans don’t create engagement. Ongoing two-way dialogue creates engagement.’’ Gallup.

Multiple studies have shown that people who have a best friend in work are more actively engaged in their work, more motivated to do good work, more productive, and happier. Tom Rath, in his book Vital Friends, states that people who have a best friend at work are 7 times more likely to be engaged in their work.

Conversation in the workplace isn’t just a nice noise to hear, it is an essential component of a healthy, dynamic, connected workplace. Talking creates trust, understanding, and empathy. Creating a culture where conversation is prioritized, from the top down, and on a daily basis, should be one of the core focuses of any corporate wellbeing program.

I’m not big on definitives.  Interests change, opinions change, priorities change over time.  But if there’s any constant in sales, it’s certain words and phrases that never work.

Do yourself a favor and do a search through your sales materials (email templates, call scripts, playbooks) and think carefully about whether these are working for you or against you.

• Assigned: I continue to be surprised how many reps start their email by telling me they’ve been “assigned to my account.”  Assignments are for school and detention, not for prospecting.
• Touching Base: There may be no two-word phrase with less value embedded than this one.  I’ve been guilty of using it in the past too, but it’s lazy.  Even “following up” is better than this (don’t use that one either).
• I Need: In fact, try to eliminate as many uses of the words “I” and “we” from your sales and marketing copy.  Say “you” more often.
• I’m Sorry: If you are apologizing for the interruption or follow-up email, that tells me you know it’s actually not that valuable.
• I Hope You Don’t Mind: Same.
• You Didn’t…: This is usually followed by words like “respond”, “read”, etc.  But this phrase immediately puts me on the defensive.  If you’re trying to make me feel bad to get a response, it’s not working.
• I Saw That You Are…: This feels like personalization but I don’t really care how you found me or segmented me.  And the more time you take up front telling me how you found me, the more likely you’re going to lose me to the delete button before I get to the (potentially) good stuff.

I could probably write this post with different words and phrases every week.  But if you start creating messages that put the prospect’s true interest first and foremost, you’ll eliminate these and future bad words/phrases from the get-go.

The post If you use these words, you’re doing it wrong appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

In recent years I have ran into a number of misconceptions regarding AI, and sometimes when discussing AI with people from outside the field, I feel like we are talking about two different topics. This article is an attempt at clarifying what AI practitioners mean by AI, and where it is in its current state.

The first misconception has to do with Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI:

1. Applied AI systems are just limited versions of AGI

Despite what many think,the state of the art in AI is still far behind human intelligence. Artificial General Intelligence, i.e. AGI, has been the motivating fuel for all AI scientists from Turing to today. Somewhat analogous to Alchemy, the eternal quest for AGI that replicates and exceeds human intelligence has resulted in the creation of many techniques and scientific breakthroughs. AGI has helped us understand facets of human and natural intelligence, and as a result, we’ve built  effective algorithms inspired by our understanding and models of them.

However, when it comes to practical applications of AI, AI practitioners do not necessarily restrict themselves to pure models of human decision making, learning, and problem solving. Rather, in the interest of solving the problem and achieving acceptable performance, AI practitioners often do what it takes to build practical systems. At the heart of the algorithmic breakthroughs that resulted in Deep Learning systems, for instance, is a technique called back-propagation. This technique, however, is not how the brain builds models of the world. This brings us to the next misconception:

2. There is a one-size-fits-all AI solution.

A common misconception is that AI can be used to solve every problem out there–i.e. the state of the art AI has reached a level such that minor configurations of ‘the AI’ allows us to tackle different problems. I’ve even heard people assume that moving from one problem to the next makes the AI system smarter, as if the same AI system is now solving both problems at the same time. The reality is much different: AI systems need to be engineered, sometimes heavily,  and require specifically trained models in order to be applied to a problem. And while similar tasks, especially those involving sensing the world (e.g., speech recognition, image or video processing) now have a library of available reference models, these models need to be specifically engineered to meet deployment requirements and may not be useful out of the box. Furthermore, AI systems are seldom the only component of AI-based solutions. It often takes many tailor-made classically programed components to come together to augment one or more AI techniques used within a system. And yes, there are a multitude of different AI techniques out there, used alone or in hybrid solutions in conjunction with others, therefore it is incorrect to say:

3. AI is the same as Deep Learning

Back in the day, we thought the term artificial neural networks (ANNs) was really cool. Until, that is, the initial euphoria around it’s potential backfired due to its lack of scaling and aptitude towards over-fitting. Now that those problems have, for the most part, been resolved, we’ve avoided the stigma of the old name by “rebranding” artificial neural networks as  “Deep Learning”. Deep Learning or Deep Networks are ANNs at scale, and the ‘deep’ refers not to deep thinking, but to the number of hidden layers we can now afford within our ANNs (previously it was a handful at most, and now they can be in the hundreds). Deep Learning is used to generate models off of labeled data sets. The ‘learning’ in Deep Learning methods refers to the generation of the models, not to the models being able to learn real-time as new data becomes available. The ‘learning’ phase of Deep Learning models actually happens offline, needs many iterations, is time and process intensive, and is difficult to parallelize.

Recently, Deep Learning models are being used in online learning applications. The online learning in such systems is achieved using different AI techniques such as Reinforcement Learning, or online Neuro-evolution. A limitation of such systems is the fact that the contribution from the Deep Learning model can only be achieved if the domain of use can be mostly experienced during the off-line learning period. Once the model is generated, it remains static and not entirely robust to changes in the application domain. A good example of this is in ecommerce applications–seasonal changes or short sales periods on ecommerce websites would require a deep learning model to be taken offline and retrained on sale items or new stock. However, now with platforms like Sentient Ascend that use evolutionary algorithms to power website optimization, large amounts of historical data is no longer needed to be effective, rather, it uses neuro-evolution to shift and adjust the website in real time based on the site’s current environment.   

For the most part, though, Deep Learning systems are fueled by large data sets, and so the prospect of new and useful models being generated from large and unique datasets has fueled the misconception that…

4. It’s all about BIG data

It’s not. It’s actually about good data. Large, imbalanced datasets can be deceptive, especially if they only partially capture the data most relevant to the domain. Furthermore, in many domains, historical data can become irrelevant quickly. In high-frequency trading in the New York Stock Exchange, for instance, recent data is of much more relevance and value than, for example data from before 2001, when they had not yet adopted decimalization.

Finally, a general misconception I run into quite often:

5. If a system solves a problem that we think requires intelligence, that means it is using AI

This one is a bit philosophical in nature, and it does depend on your definition of intelligence. Indeed, Turing’s definition would not refute this. However, as far as mainstream AI is concerned, a fully engineered system, say to enable self-driving cars, which does not use any AI techniques, is not considered an AI system. If the behavior of the system is not the result of the emergent behavior of AI techniques used under the hood, if programmers write the code from start to finish, in a deterministic and engineered fashion, then the system is not considered an AI-based system, even if it seems so.

AI paves the way for a better future

Despite the common misconceptions around AI, the one correct assumption is that AI is here to stay and is indeed, the window to the future. AI still has a long way to go before it can be used to solve every problem out there and to be industrialized for wide scale use. Deep Learning models, for instance, take many expert PhD-hours to design effectively, often requiring elaborately engineered parameter settings and architectural choices depending on the use case. Currently, AI scientists are hard at work on simplifying this task and are even using other AI techniques such as reinforcement learning and population-based or evolutionary architecture search to reduce this effort. The next big step for AI is to make it be creative and adaptive, while at the same time, powerful enough to exceed human capacity to build models.  

by Babak Hodjat, co-founder & CEO Sentient Technologies

geralt / Pixabay

As a channel marketer, you’re likely very familiar with your top channel partners. They are the ones who engage with you often and send you referrals regularly. If your program has a number of active, vocal partners it’s possible they take up all of your time, causing you to ignore a larger, quieter (and sometimes under-performing) segment of your partner channel – the long tail partner.

The long tail partner, sometimes called a low-touch, high-potential partner or self-service partner, is a partner who rarely engages with you but still sends a few lucrative deals within any given year. While many companies view these partners as disengaged or disinterested, and therefore not worth their time, others are seeing the immense value in these partners. In fact, according to Jay McBain, Forresters’ principal analyst, companies are starting to embrace these partners and actively employ referral strategies to turn these partners into a reliable source of growth.

“If companies could figure out a way to manage [these] partners even more efficiently – don’t assign a channel account manager, limit access to a rich set of expensive resources, and make all support flexible, automated, and self-service — they could rely on that annual revenue at high profits with no touching and little cost,” McBain said in an interview with Channel Marketer Report.

Companies don’t have to have a love/hate relationship with their long tail partners. By turning these partners into referral (transactional) partners, you can maximize their output while minimizing the time and cost spent trying to engage this segment of your partner channel.

Reseller vs. Referral

Companies with well-developed partner programs know that reseller partners require a high investment with an uncertain return. Despite the high investment, reseller partner programs continue to dominate the industry. However, new referral marketing technology (aimed at automating the referral process) is starting to shift how companies think about their resellers vs. referrals. In fact, many companies are now finding that partnerships based on referrals are showing incredible success and challenging the status quo reseller partner programs.

Here are just a few of the benefits an automated referral partner program can bring to your company, your partners and your sales team:

1. Quality leads: Did you know that 31 percent of referral leads from partners made a purchase? This number jumped to 41 percent when a sales team understands and participates in the referral process.
2. Shorter sales cycles: Referral deals tend to move faster through the pipeline because they are warm, high-quality leads. In addition, your sales team will have access to the partner who made the referral and that partner can help to prequalify the lead or move the deal forward.
3. Cost savings: Automation often results in significant cost savings. In a referral partner model, you can scale the large number of referral partners without having to add additional resources to manage, nurture and market the partner channel.
4. Happy customers: Partners can easily meet customers’ needs with your company’s products and offerings. And because referral leads are the highest quality, partners know they will receive the attention and care they deserve throughout the buying process.
5. Easy partner management: With an automated referral partner program, sales won’t need to manually track which partner referred whom, and what payment goes where. All of this is automated through the system so the sales team can focus on selling.

You can read more about the benefits here.

Why Automated Referral Programs Are A Perfect Fit

Investing in referral automation software can be a great way for companies to provide these transactional referral partners an easy, hands-off way to submit deals. By providing a program that is flexible and automated, you can manage a large number of these partners for little cost with a high return.

For Jamie Mendez, director of channel marketing at IBM, making it easy for transactional referral partners to engage was vital to their program, as these partners are usually digitally-savvy. “Their expectation is they’re going to engage with you digitally,” she said in the same interview with Channel Market Report. “If you’re not up to par digitally, you’re not someone they want to work with anyway.”

That’s why it’s key, when researching referral automation software, to find a solution that fits all of your program’s needs without completely changing your existing workflow. By keeping the mechanics of your program the same, and simply automating the process, you can better automate the experience for these partners and see a better return on the deals they submit, while keeping your top channel partners engaged and happy.

geralt / Pixabay

Nobody likes to be told how to do their job. Even worse is being told how you should be measuring your performance. In fact, if you were to do those things to me I would immediately move your email to my junk folder and mark you as spam! I don’t have time for negativity or brown-nosing; I’m here to chew bubblegum and write mind-blowing blogs, and I’m all of out bubblegum! However, Salesforce recently released their third State of Sales report, so we’re going to be talking all about measurement and sales KPIs.

We must be sure that all of our activities are contributing to the bottom-line and contributing in a meaningful way. And so, enter stage right: sales KPIs. There are plenty of kinds of KPIs out there but oftentimes the ones most people care about are sales KPIs. It makes sense, though. People want to quickly know how well an organization is performing, and oftentimes the easiest—and quickest—way to do that is by looking at sales KPIs.

In their survey of nearly 3,000 sellers and sales leaders, Salesforce included some questions about sales KPIs and tracked the results to gain an understanding of which sales KPIs are the most popular around the globe.

Popular Sales KPIs

Two of the most popular sales KPIs won’t come as a surprise. The real surprise is at the top of the list, and it speaks to an emerging trend that’s worth exploring. The number one sales KPI in popularity is: customer satisfaction! 66% of respondents said they tracked it as a sales KPI, and 23% said they would be tracking it as a sales KPI in the next two years.

I’m not sure about you, but that’s a big shock to me. Maybe I’m just a slack-jawed simpleton (probably), but I don’t often think about Sales as being super dialed-in to customer satisfaction. Obviously, sellers care about customer satisfaction because it’s way easier to sell something customers are satisfied with than the opposite. But for this to be the most popular sales KPI comes as a shock.

The idea that customer satisfaction is the most popular sales KPI speaks to an overall, larger trend. Organizations, now more than ever, are focusing on customers. As Salesforce puts it, this sales KPI “puts sales teams in good company, as metrics are leaning towards customer experience no matter the department.” Sellers are adapting, just like everyone else, and realizing that if customers are happy, then their job gets a whole lot easier.

The remaining two sales KPIs won’t shock you nearly as much. In fact, I would venture they’ve been two of the most popular sales KPIs since old Korg started selling rocks to the other Cro-Magnons. There may be one surprising twist to the rankings, but let’s dive into the statistics before we get to that.

Tied for 2^nd and 3^rd most popular sales KPIs are team quota met, and individual quota met, respectively. Both came in with 65% of respondents saying they measured these sales KPIS. (Side note: who isn’t tracking these KPIs? If you’re one of them, you’ve got some things to sort out.)

The interesting wrinkle to these two is the fact that they’re tied. It would seem like the individual quota would be the most popular between the two sales KPIs. Organizations want to know how individuals are performing and if they are contributing in a meaningful way. But it looks like these organizations may care just as much about how overall teams are performing as they do about individuals.

These sales KPIs offer a glimpse into some changing trends in the sales world. Customer satisfaction is becoming a bigger focus for organizations and concentrating on building strong performing teams is almost as important as training strong individual performers. Is your organization tracking these sales KPIs?

Before you go let’s just take a quick look at the top-10 sales KPIs as identified by the State of Sales report:

• Customer Satisfaction
• Team Quota Met
• Individual Quota Met
• Customer Retention/Attrition
• Customer Usage
• Conversion Rate
• Activity Quantity
• Customer Acquisition Cost
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Pipeline Accuracy

ThomasWolter / Pixabay

Are your customers successful and happy with your products and services? Are they telling their friends and business partners to buy from you? If they have a concern, are you making meaningful change to address it? These are questions that all businesses need to ask themselves to ensure everything is being done to create customer delight. Happy customers are not only retained but they also help create more happy customers. Having solid answers to these questions helps drive a smooth customer experience throughout your sales cycle, the delivery, use or implementation of your product, and through any ongoing post-sale interactions.

To realize these goals a company needs to ensure their practices delight customers at every stage. And as the saying goes: “You cannot change what you cannot measure”.

Measuring and Acting

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” -Bill Gates

When companies sell a product or service, they are selling the value that it provides and the experiences the buyer has with it. Not only must your product perform as expected, but the customer must realize value through a positive experience both with the product itself and through all points of contact with your business. Achieving these outcomes is not immediately intuitive. Therefore companies need metrics to understand what success means.

Often, departments within a business focus on a few key performance indicators to help judge how they are doing. Ultimately, each department’s metrics are essential to their roles, however, the customer’s success is the responsibility of the business as a whole, not one specific team. For example, a sales department may focus on a revenue metric to show success; if sales targets are met or growing, then business is going well. However, this metric focuses solely on your sales team’s outcomes and does not adequately factor in customer outcomes. Over time, if existing customers are not successful, sales growth will stall. Repeat business and word-of-mouth promotion by delighted customers are vital to the long-term success of a business.

Another crucial touchpoint is when a concern or problem arises through a customer service or success team. No business wants their product or process to break down or otherwise not meet their customers’ expectations. But, inevitably when the unexpected occurs, there must be a process through which to understand the problem and do something with that information. The only thing worse than not collecting customer feedback is not actioning it when you do. Listening to and engaging with the voice of the customer is vital to a business’ ability to help customers be successful. Driving a positive experience, even when things go wrong, helps improve the loyalty and satisfaction of your customers.

Measuring these various metrics with multiple tools, or between separated departments leads to a lack of focus on the touchpoints that need improvement and to a weak feedback loop through the organization. Capturing feedback at each step of the customer journey and aggregating that data to build a view into how delighted customers are, helps to make solid data-driven decisions on where to improve the customer experience.

Customer Experience Metrics

“The key is when a customer walks away, thinking ‘Wow, I love doing business with them, and I want to tell others about the experience.’” -Shep Hyken

Customer Experience is a differentiator. PwC found that “73% [of buyers] point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions.” It is imperative to ensure the customer experience is measured accurately. Within customer experience, there are 2 measures typically used by companies. Briefly, these are:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score is a measure of customer loyalty to a company. It is measured by asking the question: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our product to your friends and colleagues?”. Once the data is collected, the score is formed by subtracting the percentage of promoters (9 and 10 ratings) from the percentage of detractors (0-6 ratings).

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

CSAT is about meeting expectations and usually revolves around one element of the customer experience. eg. “Are you happy with the product?” or “Was your support ticket solved quickly?”. It is usually a Yes/No or 5-point scale and is presented as an average of all responses.

Customer Delight Score

Customer Delight Score is a superset of these and other departmental metrics which helps your business understand what is going right and what needs change. Customer Delight goes beyond satisfaction and loyalty as individual ratings and helps focus on the reasons that lead to them. By combining a holistic view of a given customer’s NPS, CSAT and other sentiments throughout your customer journey, your business can track actions against real customer concerns at all touchpoints and consistently delight customers with the value and experiences they want.

Why Measure Customer Delight?

“Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create raving fans.” -Ken Blanchard

Delighted customers are created by going above and beyond the expectations and making them feel special. This feeling is achieved by finding out the motivation behind your customer’s survey answers and learning what they want from your business at each step of your customer journey. Customer Delight Score is a metric that helps your business know if you are genuinely making customers happy. It is calculated by measuring your customer sentiment at touchpoints, including NPS and CSAT surveys, support channels, sales process and any other milestones. Using a Customer Experience Management Platform, you can combine and track actionable customer feedback effectively to deliver better experiences.

Surveying customers at various times during the customer journey helps your business gain valuable insight by comparing written and numerical feedback with sentiment analysis tied to a specific interaction and customer. With this data, you can drill down to learn what meaningful steps are necessary within your business to improve your product, service or process, with a goal to increase retention, and delight more customers more frequently. Using Customer Delight Score will help you listen to and action your customers’ concerns and will create successful experiences, more value and lead to longer-term loyalty, higher retention and increased word-of-mouth advertising.

“Net Promoter, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered service marks, and Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld“

Over the last few months, SalesLoft partnered with Modern Sales Pros (MSP), an invite-only group for sales management and operations professionals, to embark on an eight-city Salon Tour. A salon, for the uninitiated, is a formal gathering where individuals have in-depth discussions over a wide range of topics.

Along the way, we interacted with over 1,000 sales professionals across the country. We’ve learned what Modern Sales Pros are reading, and shared what we’ve overheard, but now it’s time to learn what they’re doing in practice!

With so many sales experts gathered in one area, how could we not take the opportunity to pick everyone’s brain for sales knowledge? We asked each attendee three questions to learn the best practices organizations implement with their sales organizations to make their sellers successful.

Attendees across the country – from New York to Atlanta to San Francisco and even virtually – blew us away with their answers. We’ve crunched the numbers, analyzed the responses, and summarized our findings below to explore what Modern Sales Pros are doing in practice.

Question 1:

What percent of Account Executives are personalizing emails?

The importance of email personalization can’t be understated. The old “spray and pray” formula is no longer an effective strategy. Salespeople need to connect with prospects on a deeper level. We asked Modern Sales Pros how many of their AEs incorporated personalization, at any level, into their email prospecting and provided the results below.

What the graph tells us

The noisy sales landscape means that sellers need to differentiate themselves from the competition to connect with customers. A more personalized approach to prospecting gets customers to engage, piques their interest, and motivates them to respond.

The majority of respondents (71%) indicated that their Account Executives include some level of personalization in their email prospecting. While the level of personalization isn’t clear, our research suggests there’s a dramatic improvement in reply and open rates when emails are personalized. Even personalizing just 20% of email content leads to a 33% increase in open rate.

With the majority of MSP members incorporating personalization into prospecting and customer engagement, it’s no secret that success relies on connecting with the prospect. If you’re not using personalization to reach new customers, try it! Start with the email subject line and work your way down and wait for the replies to come flying in.

Question 2:

How is your organization helping salespeople ask effective questions?

What’s the benefit of asking effective questions? We’re glad you asked. Asking the right questions uncovers specific needs and sets any salesperson up to nail their sales pitch. Question-asking is an art form, and the only way to get better is through practice and preparation.

Organizations can prepare their sellers in a variety of ways to improve question-asking abilities, so we asked the Modern Sales Pros what techniques or approaches they use in their organization.

What the graph tells us

Plain and simple – all of the Modern Sales Pros and their organizations invest in the ability to ask effective questions.

Professional development took the cake (53%) when it comes to what MSP members do to help reps ask effective questions. Coaching opportunities or attending training are examples of ways organizations can invest in professional development.

Discovery tools came in second, with 46% of respondents leveraging technology to assist in asking better questions. Whether it’s utilizing the CRM or leveraging sales prospecting tools, researching a prospect before a discovery call can aid in developing better questions to dig deeper into challenge areas.

Daily sparring was the third most popular method, with 24% of MSPers using this practical approach to development. When teams practice together and role-play conversations, it helps prepare one another reps for calls. In fact, The Association for Talent Development found that learning from peers helped 91% of sales reps succeed.

Whatever the approach, all Modern Sales Pros agreed that it’s vital to ask effective questions to understand the customer better. Asking effective questions allows reps to better position their solution for the customer.

Question 3:

How often do you provide sales coaching?

It’s no secret that ongoing sales coaching impacts sales success. Investing in improving skills, implementing best practices, and focusing on the overall development of the sales team pays off tremendously in the long run. Modern Sales Pros understand the importance of development and shared with us how often they provide sales coaching.

What the graph tells us

The results speak for themselves, Modern Sales Pros love sales coaching, and why wouldn’t they?! The ROI from coaching reps is huge. A study by Altify found that sales coaching increases sales productivity by 88%. Increasing productivity leads to an increase in revenue, confidence, and overall success of a sales team. Most respondents (86%) provide coaching at least on a bi-weekly basis, and 100% utilize it as a best practice.

The most impactful result was the frequency of coaching. Coaching isn’t useful if it’s a one-time event; ongoing training has the most significant impact on sales success. When 87% of sales training is forgotten within a month, providing training on a regular basis reinforces lessons and best practices.

Thank you to everyone who joined us on the MSP Salon Tour! It was a great success, and we loved learning and sharing the best practices and strategies leading organizations employ to increase the effectiveness of their sellers. If you weren’t able to join us on this tour, we hope to see you at the next one!

Looking for more best practices of top performing sales reps? Check out our latest research here! 

The post What Modern Sales Pros Are Doing in Practice appeared first on SalesLoft.

Aymanjed / Pixabay

If you’re a B2B (business-to-business) company and you don’t have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in place with your customers, you’re missing out on an important opportunity to improve customer retention and satisfaction. SLAs are contractually agreed upon terms between a company and their customers that ensures the services provided meet certain thresholds (i.e. uptime, responsiveness, etc.). This can mean guaranteeing servers will have 99.9% uptime for your product or that all customer service inquiries will be responded to within a 24-hour window.

With many companies already striving for a high level of service, what is the importance of Service Level Agreements in the B2B industry? Here are the key reasons so many companies rely on SLAs for their profitability…

They strengthen the customer relationship at its core – From a customer’s perspective, entering into a new business relationship has a lot of risk. A bad relationship can lead to operational issues, impacting the bottom line and even their professional career. SLAs are the safety net of accountability that businesses use to alleviate these fears. They ensure customers won’t be forgotten after they sign on the dotted line by holding everyone fully accountable for their actions. Some SLAs even offer financial and product “kickbacks” to customers should a business not hold up their end of the agreement, eliminating even more potential concerns.

A good SLA strategy can increase new business – Too often, customers will leave a competitor because they are inattentive. Issues and requests slip through the cracks, creating even more problems and chaos that can only be solved by terminating the relationship. Your prospective customers are often looking to start a new professional relationship because they’ve experienced poor service and are looking for a partner who will listen and respond to their needs. With this in mind, leveraging business SLAs can be an incredibly powerful sales tool. However, you can’t just promise great SLAs over the phone; instead make sure prospects ask current customers about their experience with your SLAs while performing their due diligence. Hearing about the success and impact of a thriving SLA program can make or break a deal, especially for a prospect with an experience of poor service delivery in the past.

SLAs create clear and defined communication boundaries – While defined SLAs provide clear guidelines for employees to communicate with customers, the benefits of SLAs aren’t completely one-sided. A carefully constructed agreement can also be leveraged as a resource by your employees for difficult conversations. For example, many companies have that one customer that doesn’t hesitate to follow up several times a day to check in on the status of their issue. When this happens too often, an SLA can be a key document in reaffirming communication guidelines. You can refer to the SLA and let the customer know that they agreed, in writing, to allow for a 12-hour response period for a non-severe issue. This reminder usually makes the customer back off, increasing productivity and improving staff morale.

Rock solid SLAs go a long way in retaining customers – When evaluating your unique business-customer relationship, it’s important to remember that every customer you have has similar relationships across different industries. Because of this, you are constantly being compared and evaluated not only to your direct competition but also other companies that a customer works with. One way to stand out from all other companies is by providing excellent customer service reinforced by rock solid SLAs. Take the time up front to negotiate these agreements so they meet your customer’s exact needs but are also fair to your business. Shining in customer service not only leads to happier business relationships, but it also reduces churn and increases your referral rate.

In short, Service Level Agreements are so important in the B2B industry because they can turn a good company into a great one. They create a formalized communication process that both a business and its customers agree upon so both parties can be as efficient and successful as possible.

Let’s explore how to run top-notch discovery calls and avoid the biggest outbound prospecting mistakes AEs are making.

I previously wrote a Sales Hacker article deconstructing Lead Qualification, where we explained the Buyer’s Journey, overlaid with human psychology and the “P-MAP” qualification criteria.

Here’s a picture from that article:

I also recently explained that there’s not a clear agreement on where to draw the line between “inbound” and “outbound”, many times causing companies to be confused regarding the classification of trade show scans and webinar attendees.

Therefore having Inbound, Warm Outbound and Cold Outbound is a better way to set clear boundaries. The definitions for these are helpful to understanding this blog, so please skim through those before you continue.

Now that you understand the difference between these 3 buckets, we need to further understand where the prospect’s mind is at when they show up to the “demo” or “intro call”. The reason for this is that unless you align your presentation with the prospects needs and their stage in the Buyer’s Journey, you’re unlikely to win them over.

Article overview:

1. How to do an Inbound Discovery Call (for context)
2. Outbound Discovery Calls: What NOT to do
3. Running an Outbound Discovery Call
4. How to get someone through a Buyer’s Journey
5. The key to unlocking success with your outbound prospecting

How to do an Inbound Discovery Call (For Context)

It seems to me that all AEs learn how to run Inbound Discovery calls, as these are the easiest. The prospect is showing up to the meeting after already having engaged with your website and content. They have sent a request to meet with you because they perceive you can help them with a current initiative.

Sometimes they even have requirements and a budget assigned to this. In short, they are further down the funnel and further along their buyer’s journey:

Most AEs are really good at managing Inbound demos. They ask great discovery questions such as:

• What drove you to talk to us?
• Do you have other options are you considering?
• In terms of requirements, what do you need for this initiative? How will you measure success?
• What is the deadline for implementation, or when are you hoping it’ll be up and running?
• Tell me more about who else needs to sign off on this? Who else will this affect?
• Have you determined a budget for this project yet?

You can call it BANT, MEDDIC or some other acronym, but the purpose of these questions in sales is to learn things the prospect already knows.

When a demo is coming inbound, a lot of these questions can be answered quite quickly because they have a defined pain and an active project to solve it.

Maybe they don’t have the full criteria yet, but with a  bit of work, you can align yourself with their needs.

How NOT to run Outbound Discovery Calls

The biggest problem I see with AEs is that instead of understanding the principles behind the Buyer’s Journey and how companies make purchases, they focus on their own “Discovery Call Process.”

What this means is that rather than helping the prospect, the AEs just show up at the Discovery and do the “show up and throw up” on the Discovery Call asking the same “inbound-driven questions.”

Unfortunately, the prospect is not yet at a point where they have answers to your questions, and therefore the majority of your deals die immediately after a demo.

I have even seen companies that don’t pay their SDRs unless the AE marks a demo Qualified, and establish the qualification criteria to be our ‘inbound-driven’.

That’s a recipe for failure. (Here’s how to fix that problem)

Here’s a 2-minute example:

How to Run an Outbound Discovery Call

So rather than inbound-driven questions, when doing Outbound prospecting demos you should ask problem-based questions.

Focus on why they need to change the current situation and educate them on what the GAP is between where they are today and where they could be if they made these changes.

You should also show that you have done the research necessary to get context and not ask dumb questions. By running a problem-oriented Discovery call, you will be able to move your prospects from “Strangers” to “Awareness” and then to “Consideration”.

You will be helping them recognize the challenge or opportunity they have in front of them.

Once on the Consideration stage, the prospect will start evaluating other vendors, as they look for a comparison to your solution. If you have really reached out to your ICP and you have helped them shape how they think about this challenge/opportunity, your solution will be positioned many steps ahead of the competition.

Remember, early on there’s no competition, there are no requirements, there’s no perceived “pain”, there are no KPIs or launch date.

You have to work to get them there. Think again, is your qualification criteria for Outbound all messed up? Focus outbound demos on the problem, not the solution

Here is a good flow for a cold outbound discovery call (7 minutes):

If your AE tells you that prospects are not interested, do not blame the SDR, train the AE instead. Here’s the key learning of today:

The purpose of an SDR is to bring ‘curious’ prospects to the AE. The AE is responsible to uncover pains, challenges, and opportunities and create interest.

The economic sale is made when the contract is signed, but the psychological decision to buy is made much earlier on, when the prospect becomes a fan of how your product can help him. That’s what the best AEs are good at, creating fans.

How to Get Someone Through a Buyer’s Journey

Finally, we need to recognize that some of these Discovery Calls are neither inbound nor cold outbound. This is the tricky “warm outbound” leads that require further adaptability.

For example, when you get a referral, or when you get a trade show scan re-engaged after 3 months. Some of these might already have a small need or might have brand recognition for your company, there’s some awareness, but most likely there’s no “initiative”.

In these cases, you still need to understand what the prospects are trying to get out of the conversation. Below is a checklist you can use to nudge the conversation and move the prospect to the next stages.

Awareness:

• Awareness that they have a challenge or opportunity
• Knowledge that solutions exist
• Understanding of the quantifiable impact of this challenge or opportunity
• High-level understanding of the investment needed (money, time, effort, etc.)

After those points are clear, the prospect is fully aware and can move to the next stage.

Consideration:

• Who will be the person or people responsible to lead this initiative?
• Agreement that the cost of no-action is higher than the cost of the solution.
• How will success be measured?
• Who else will be affected by this project? Are they on board?
• Are there any compelling events, or a desired timeline?
• What will be the process to evaluate solutions? How will the decision be made?

After all those steps, the prospect can safely move to a decision and purchasing process. At this stage, you have gotten a verbal commit, and you are going through legal, procurement, security review, or whatever other criteria you need to pass. The psychological sale is made.

Finally, when the paperwork is done, they purchase.

The Key is to Define Roles and Train for Discovery Calls

The hardest part of a sale is always to drive a prospect form being a stranger, to choosing you as a vendor. Too many organizations are failing despite the fact that their SDRs do a good job of creating curiosity in the prospect’s mind. These prospects give your company a chance to show them value, yet the AEs who “show up and throw up”.

The death zone is killing your deals and your company. You need to take action, you need to train your AEs, not on closing techniques, but on Discovery Calls. You need to define what is the role of your SDRs, and who is in charge of helping prospects find the gap.

If you ask me, here’s what I would tell you:

SDRs: find complete strangers and make them curious about our solution. Have them accept a meeting

AEs: Get curious people and show them the challenge or opportunity ahead, help them quantify it and take action.

When deals come inbound, the sale is easier as you need to meet requirements, rather than build them. However, the sales also tend to be hyper-competitive, and the deal sizes are smaller.

Outbound might mean a much more difficult Discovery process and longer sales cycles, but it also means bigger deals, less competition, and a more scalable, and sustainable revenue engine.

Please let me know in the comments if this was helpful.

Need help with Outbound? I’ve built 23 teams through AltiSales, send me a message. Maybe I can give you a hand.

AltiSales is hiring experienced remote SDRs! You must be a top performer at your current company to qualify for an interview.

Submit your resume on our website: www.altisales.com/careers

The post Stop Your AEs from Ruining Your Outbound Demos – An Actionable Guide appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Email marketing, if not kept engaging enough with your subscribers may hit a stale spot, and that calls for extra effort than the usual practices you follow in email campaign management.

It’s stated that roughly 60% subscribers in an emailing list are inactive at any given time. Re-engaging them helps you bring them out of inactivity (owing to whatever reason), back into sales funnel and eventually contributing to the revenue generation.

Understanding the Reasons: Why email subscribers become inactive

If someone subscribes to your brand, they must have a strong reason/expectation inspiring them to be kept updated about the brand. With time, the interest and expectations diminish, and the subscriber may be in any one of the situations:

1. The subscriber will become inactive i.e. they’ll continue receiving your emails but do not open, nor unsubscribe
2. The subscriber will unsubscribe

Till the subscriber has not unsubscribed, it is not the end of the world. By analyzing your data, generating insight, figuring out what they want either by running a survey or feedback, you get to know what they want and have a chance to bring back. Unfortunately, before you start your efforts to winning back your subscribers, it is important to understand what the reason for inactivity may be.

• Cluttered inbox: The email is lost in the flood of other subscribed email and the subscriber is unknown about it.
• Change in preferences: The subscribers’ preferences and requirements have changed but they are lazy to unsubscribe.
• Freeload on information: The subscriber just wises to connect with the brand & competitors but is not interested in making a purchase.
• Save it for later: The subscriber has put your email on the snooze list and plans to read your emails on a later date.
• Too high sending frequency: You may not have clearly specified your sending frequency during the sign-up process and now the subscriber is overwhelmed by the sudden influx of the emails.
• Weak or non-actionable subject lines: Most subscribers open the email based on the effectiveness of the subject line.
• Signed up for one time offer: The subscriber was lured by the lucrative discount you offered during sign up process, but they stopped engaging after that.
• Change of circumstances like job or relocation: This mostly happens in the B2B industry but possible in situations where the subscriber used their business email address to subscribe and owing to change in their job may not receive your emails. (Such inactive are a dead end and cannot be brought back, better to remove from the list)
• Bad Experience: The subscriber had a bad experience and stopped opening your emails. The experience might be based on a broken email design or a bad online experience. While working with our 5000+ client base, we ensure that every email template built are compatible and render perfectly in 40+ email clients. For this, we have some rigorous QA in place too, and that’s what make our customers trust us when they have the need for a perfect PSD to email template.

As you can observe, the reasons for inactivity can be different and so will the strategy to win them back. The message, the frequency, the offers, the design, the CTA will change in each case. Let’s understand why it’s important to revive the inactive email subscribers.

Why re-engaging in-actives is as important as bringing new customers

Calculation shows that it costs 5x to acquire new customers as compared to retaining a new customer. And 81% of marketers agree that email is the most reliable channel for customer retention. Even if you don’t consider it from the revenue point of view, having inactive subscribers in your mailing list is like cutting the branch on which you are sitting.

Your subscribers not opening your email leads to a drop in the engagement for your email, directly translating into poor sender reputation and in turn poor deliverability. In fact, ISPs take note of inactive email addresses and after a pre-set duration of inactivity, convert these email address into SPAM traps.

Moreover, by sending emails that you know your inactive subscribers won’t open, you are wasting precious resources on them. This is especially applicable when your ESP charges you based on the monthly send volume.

How to plan your win-back emails before winning back your subscribers

Having a re-engagement automation set-up is an important step in email campaign management workflow. The success of an email marketer depends on how well they can monitor the progress of a customer in the sales funnel and enhance their experience by modifying the emails as needed. If you are looking to learn the ropes of email campaign management for your Win-back campaigns, this ebook on Campaign Management could be a great asset.

The efforts for winning back your inactive subscriber begins much before you plan your re-engagement emails. It begins with

• The understanding what factors qualify as inactivity,
• What triggered the inactivity,
• Identifying the objective behind re-engaging the inactive subscribers,
• Preparing the incentives to win back and finally,
• How to keep your customers engaged.

What qualifies as an inactive email subscriber

Defining inactivity in your email campaign strategy is very important as your approach will change depending on your win-back being customer-centric or subscriber-centric based.

• A customer-centric approach will focus on those inactive subscribers who are opening your emails, may or may not be clicking on the CTA but haven’t purchased anything for long. The end goal of a customer-centric approach will be to motivate the subscriber to make the purchase.
• A subscriber-centric approach will focus on those inactive subscribers who are not opening your emails. The end goal of a subscriber-centric approach will be to motivate the subscriber to open the emails, change their preferences or (last straw) unsubscribe.

Next comes the duration of no activity to be qualified as an inactive. This depends on your sending frequency (for subscriber-centric) / last order (for customer-centric) and varies from industry to industry.

“For a brand sending bi-weekly emails, inactivity period might be 3 months and for a brand with monthly email sending schedule, the inactivity period might be 6 months or a year. “

Ways to tackle different levels of inactivity

Now that you have a clear understanding of which of your inactive subscribers are worth winning back.

• For a subscriber-centric approach, those inactive subscribers who have not opened previous 5-10 emails are a prime target for re-targeting.
• For a customer-centric approach, the baseline condition is based on the order value. If someone made high-order purchases in past and gone inactive, they are more relevant to return compared to those who made only a couple of purchases in past.

Winning back your inactive subscribers is a step-by-step process where you need to implement a strategy that starts with your inactive subscribers opening your emails at the very least. Once they open the email, the copy needs to solve the reason for inactivity and prompt them to click the CTA. Let’s move to resolve the issues in each stage one at a time.

Stage:1 – Prompt inactive to open emails

Subject lines and pre-header text are your biggest bet here. It needs to be actionable words such as “Come back, we miss you” or “Is this over?” to motivate your subscribers to take note. Research suggests that using a shorter subject line is more effective in win-back emails. Research from Return Path showed that using the words “miss you” in a subject line achieved a 13 % read rate, and messages with the words “come back” in their subject lines achieved a 12.7 % read rate. Check out the following Father’s Day subject lines.

Stage:2 – Improving email copy

Congratulations! If they open your win-back email based on the subject line; this means that a ray of hope still exists, and it is time for your email copy to shine through. You can either try to win them back with an incentive or tell them to update their preferences to receive better-tailored emails. Ask them if they are still interested in being part of your list.

In the above example, the sender has introduced himself and then proceeds to ask the important question. The subscriber has the choice to either be subscribed or be left alone with two different links.

If the subscriber was active in the past, use the data to send them personalized email content. Personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates, so it’s worth tailoring content to subscribers – even inactive ones.

Stage:3 – Calling them to action

The effectiveness of your email copy is measured on the clicks on the CTA button of your win-back email. Those who are inactive are not going to readily check out all products that you got to provide, as soon as you send a re-engagement email. So, one golden rule for CTA in a re-engagement email is ‘ONLY ONE CTA’. Following brands have not only featured a single CTA button, they have managed to innovate it.

Grammarly has a giant red button. Even those who didn’t read the email copy will be tempted to push it. (We were too)

Return Path’s re-engagement has two giant animal heads for the subscribers to choose. The copy supports the overall flow.

Ticketfly’s re-engagement email gets you as soon as you open it. A heart touching GIF in the first fold, empathetic email copy is doing their work excellently. Moreover, they have added what has changed since the subscriber has become inactive.

A great email design by Polyvore. The minimal text manages to convey the message effortlessly and the CTA is very subtle yet visible.

Stage:4 – Making them pay… for their products

Great! They are back in your sales funnel. Now you need to make sure that they are not going inactive in a while. In case they do, it is an indication that your regular content is not engaging enough and needs improvement.

Key Takeaways

There are quite a few things that make re-engagement emails impressive. All you need to do is:

• Tell subscribers what they have missed since they were away
• Propose an exclusive offer
• Give a collection of offers that makes it difficult to say no
• Add a pinch of emotions to lure subscribers
• Provide other ways to connect- social media
• Send them a compilation of missed notifications
• Use humor to grab eyeballs
• Play the guilt card
• Remind subscribers why they are part of your list
• Politely make them take a decision- Re-engage or Part Ways

In most cases, the success of a business partner program is almost always driven by a scientific blend of quantity (how many partners you have) and relevance (what are you offering to partners for sharing your brand).

Typically, when companies have the right messaging and relevant rewards for partners that are adding to the top of the funnel, passing along leads, and even helping to close deals – it’s a ripple effect.

Scaling Growth with a Business Partner Program

While it is easier said than done, growing your business via partner marketing can be done with a little help from the experts. We sat down with HubSpot to learn how the inbound marketing & sales software company leverages partner marketing and the key variables to consider when scaling your business partner program.

Here are 3 key elements of running a successful partner campaign:

Expand Partnerships

Similar to running a referral program, partner marketing is in part a numbers game. Instead of limiting your program to a small niche group, you’re likely to see better results with expanded outreach.

When companies open up their programs to different types of partners, activity spikes and the top of the funnel begins to expand.

HubSpot classifies their partners into three different categories: Sales partners, agency partners, and connect partners. Each partnership type has a unique model in terms of new customer acquisition, what their roles are, how they function operationally, and the value they provide to HubSpot. Each segment is also incentivized differently, based on their primary objectives.

By creating custom partner programs for a variety of segments, HubSpot is able to personalize campaigns, messaging, and incentives to the specific interests and motivations of each type of partner. Additionally, they have the ability to utilize different categories to achieve various business goals.

“We are able to expand and enter into new markets with ease by leveraging partnerships. Additionally, with partners, we are able to service clients that we may not otherwise be able to.” – HubSpot

Understand What Partners Value

Organizations that leverage partner marketing are investing in an opportunity to benefit from an active, engaged, and often times, localized network that understands exactly what their audience needs. This is why it’s of utmost importance for companies to truly understand what their partners value as well.

The best business partner program incentives are reflective of the hard work that partners put in as they share your product or service. While most marketers understand that a reward should be given in exchange for a lead, how can companies ensure that they’re using the right incentive for the right partners at the right time?

While financial rewards – revenue share, flat-rate incentives, and discounts – are definitely a part of the equation, it’s also important to find partners that VALUE their business and are looking to find solutions that are the best fit for their own clients.

“The partners that are solely focused on the financial motivation are typically not the best for long-term success. The partners that want to add value for their clients and pick the best solution for them are the ones that will ultimately develop the best relationship with you and your brand.” – HubSpot

Reward Partners At The Right Time

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to developing an incentive structure, it’s important to build a program that best suits your company and partners. Selecting the form and flow of your rewards is the first step in developing an effective program that will generate the most leads for your business. The most successful incentive structures are easy to explain, implement, and payout.

“Transparency is key when it comes to allowing your partners to know where they stand – in terms of how many of their leads have come through, where they stand in terms of payments, and other aspects of your program’s details.” – HubSpot

If you’re generating a healthy amount of leads per month, but don’t have a way to automate payments, your business partner program will become a drain on your marketing or finance team. The last thing you want is to be spending more time managing reward payouts to partners than investing in activities to develop your partners and acquire new business.

Partner marketing is most valuable when you’re able to easily amplify results without proportionately increasing internal resources. Without the right tools, capabilities, and systems in place, achieving that efficiency at scale is virtually impossible.

As you’re building your business partner program, don’t make it difficult for potential partners to learn about and apply for your program. Focus your time, energy, and resources on developing relevant content and incentives, as well as training and supporting your partners. Then, focus on optimizing those partner campaigns as you start to collect data and analyze trends. You, and your bottom line, will be happy you did.

To watch the full webinar with HubSpot, click the image below.

How resilient are you? You most likely think you’re incredibly resilient and you face rejection and well.

I had a person tell me one time how they take rejection better than anyone and that is why they are a top performer in their company.  It wasn’t more than a few weeks later when I saw the same person face multiple rejections in the same day, and poof — they folded like a cheap suit.

Sales leadership is about being resilient.

It’s a trait that needs to be on full display at any time. You may be having an awesome quarter with everything going right and having to be resilient could easily be the furthest thing from your mind, but you can’t allow that to happen.

Resilience is typically viewed as being able to handle oneself in the face of rejection as I described earlier, but I think it’s more than that. Resilience is a driver of persistence when it comes to spending time prospecting even when things are good. Resilience is the activity you do to stay in touch with clients when you’re tired and want to shut things down.  Resilience is always being respectful and engaging with others, even when those around you are people you’ll never see again.

How resilient are you in light of what I described in the preceding paragraph?

I find myself having to challenge myself frequently with regard to my own resilience.  Those who are the most resilient are those who are the most even natured in not only how they respond to others, but also in how they handle their own time.  Show me a resilient person and I’ll show you a productive, results-oriented person.

Over the years, I’ve found the most resilient sales leaders are those who early in their career faced a lot of rejection from customers.  Looking back on my own career, I see now the numerous times I had leads or prospects reject me and how I became more resilient from it. Resilience in my life has been built out of the hundreds or thousands of times a proposal was rejected.

Your challenge is to see resilence as a trait you grow and as an attribute that will help you become a stronger sales leader.

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

Did you know the average win rate for an Inside Sales Team is only 22%?

But elite teams win 50% of their deals.

That’s a BIIIG difference. Achieve this as a sales leader and you:

• Double sales without hiring a single rep.
• Earn more money with less stress.
• Impress your boss or CEO.
• Get Promoted.

But, getting there isn’t easy. In fact, I struggled with low win rates for years.

I was hired at 23 to run sales for a startup. Predictably, my responsibilities grew with the company: soon I was hiring and managing a large team.

The problem was I had no idea what I was doing. And I wasn’t alone: many SaaS sales leaders have little formal management or sales training. They learn by trial and (lot’s of) error.

No surprise the average inside sales team closes at just north of 20%.

So how can you join the elite and close 50% of your deals?

The answer is simple. World-class sales leaders are world-class at two things:

1. Identifying the next, MOST important thing to work on
2. Taking massive action to complete it

Sound easy? The good news is it is relatively easy with the right approach. Just design your organization the way the experts do.

The Blueprint for a Successful Sales Organization

Though each company demands a tailored approach, there is a universal framework for building a successful sales organization.

I call this “The Blueprint”. There are 5 building blocks:

1. The Menu
2. The Thematic Structure
3. The Plan
4. The Tools
5. Focused Execution

1. The Menu

Attempting to increase win rates before knowing every option is like ordering food before reading the menu.

But, that’s exactly what most sales organizations (and their leaders) do.

Instead, FIRST take time to identify the possibilities, THEN prioritize.

Action: Meet with key members of your team. Ask: “what discrete initiatives could we greenlight to improve our win rates”?

Brainstorm and consult resources until you have identified at least 100 initiatives.

2. The Thematic Structure

Sales leaders who work on 10 completely unrelated items tread organizational water.

Avoid this by creating a Thematic Structure of possible initiatives. This is your blueprint for success: an organized vision of what your sales organization looks like once it’s a well-oiled deal-closing machine.

This Blueprint will help you focus your efforts, prioritize, and create an effective long-term plan to improve your organization.

Action: Organize your menu of initiatives by theme

Each case is unique, but the most common high-level themes for a SaaS company are:

• People
• Processes
• Tactics
• Offering

Start with a few major themes like these, and group your initiatives (and sub-initiatives) accordingly.

Goal: Create a clear visual structure that indicates how each initiative fits into the bigger picture.

3. The Plan

Here’s how most sales leaders plan their quarters:

1. Pick a couple “flavor-of-the-month problems” reps are complaining about experiencing
2. Cobble-together ideas for solutions
3. Work like hell to implement them

Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Don’t keep making poor Henry roll in his grave: use your new Menu and Thematic Structure to improve proactively instead of reactively.

Action: Make a strategic plan for the next Year:

1. Review your Thematic Structure
2. Identify the broad swaths that are most important to complete this year
3. Prioritize and create a plan by Quarter/Month

To drive lasting improvement, focus on comprehensively attacking the broad set of initiatives for specific themes each Quarter.

4. The Tools

Top sales leaders consult world-class resources. Thematic execution gives you the time to prioritize depth over breadth in your sales education. Seize this opportunity to level-up your research.

Focused on improving your People this quarter? Don’t just read blog posts: buy, read, and review “The Sales Acceleration Formula” by Mark Roberge. It’s comprehensive and, when aligned with your core focus, well worth the reading time.

Spend less time reading listicles and blog posts, and more time sucking the marrow out of world-class resources.

Action: Consult comprehensive, world-class resources when executing each quarter’s thematic initiatives.

1. Proactively identify the 2-3 best resources for each theme
2. Consume them and keep a detailed list of takeaways
3. Incorporate these takeaways into your Quarter’s tactical plan

5. Focused Execution

Without Focused Execution, none of the rest matters. There are two rules you must follow:

1. Do work on the initiatives you’ve prioritized
2. Don’t get distracted along the way

Boy is that easier said than done…

Action: Incorporate these three tips for achieving focused execution.

1. Focus on habits, not goals.

Goals are tricky little devils. They require willpower to accomplish, and you can’t control the outcome.

You can control habits. And, when properly selected and implemented, habits nearly guarantee you achieve your goals.

Example:

• Goal: Hire 6 rockstar AEs by January
• Habit: Reach out to 10 qualified candidates every morning

See the difference? A goal’s success is determined by the outcome. A successful habit determines the outcome.

2. Practice “The ONE Thing”

According to the fantastic book The ONE Thing¨ there is always ONE thing you can do to achieve your goals that “makes all the rest either easier or unnecessary.”

The key is to make this happen before you work on the flotsam and jetsam of the day.

Is hiring your priority? Schedule two hours at the beginning of each day to identify and contact candidates.

Stephen Covey put it best: “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”

3. Protect your time.

Practice extreme minimalism outside your Blueprint Roadmap (much easier once you have a Blueprint).

Respond to irrelevant ideas/requests with “I love the idea, but our priority is to build our Blueprint for a World Class Sales Organization – let’s complete xyz first, and then decide whether to tackle this.”

As Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”

Final Steps

If you craft a quality blueprint and diligently complete it, you’ll see real, lasting improvement every quarter. Soon, you’ll have all the tools in place to be a top sales organization.

Want to save time building your blueprint for success? I’ve organized 114 ways a SaaS company can increase win rates into a single, thematically organized diagram here.

The post The Blueprint for a Successful Sales Organization appeared first on OpenView Labs.

The Pipeline Guest Post – By Wayne Turmel

It’s not your father’s world of sales any more. The simple days of calling a client and doing a deal over coffee are long gone. Now, clients can screen calls, send our emails to spam and reject our sales pitches without ever having to look us in the eyes.

Is this actually the death of salesmen?

Not really.  We may now live in a digital culture with all sorts of wireless gadgets, but nothing has replaced good, old-fashioned salesmanship. But if you’re clinging to the days of calling prospects from the rotary phone on your desk and ignoring the new tools at your disposal,then you’re probably going to be drinking a lot of coffee all by yourself and not closing as many sales as you could.

Of all the digital tools out there, nothing can help sales professionals like the webcam. Yes, camera can be  a little grainy and sometimes the audio and video can get garbled if your connection isn’t speedy enough. And nobody (probably not even award-winning actors) likes to see themselves on the screen.

But really, to be successful in sales today, you have two options:  you can complain about how uncomfortable you are and pine for the “good ole days”, or you can embrace the technology and use it for your benefit.

It still comes down to communication.

Communication happens best when we can see the other person in real time and pick up all the subtle verbal, non-verbal and physical signals that help us understand people. Any sales professional worth their salt knows how to make an effective sales call.  Video only builds on that and provides us with the visual cues that can help us read the customer and to communicate more more effectively. It’s not much different than sitting across the table from your customer (except that with webcams they’re probably sitting on the table inside your monitor).

And if you’re a little uneasy about appearing on screen, that’s okay and perfectly natural. It’s also something you have to address. Anything that makes a sales professional uncomfortable can be a roadblock to a sale. Uncomfortable salespeople aren’t that effective.

Remember where you came from

Few sales professionals are “naturals” who are initially comfortable talking to complete strangers, cold-calling, or any of the other “risky” interpersonal communication required of good sales professionals. The vast majority have to grow into those skills.

Remember when you were starting out? You had to grow in your comfort talking to customers in person and on the phone. It took time and practice. You (and your sales managers) invested your time and effort to bridge that comfort gap and you became successful.

It’s no different using webcams. If you work at it, you’ll get good at it. And make no mistake, you need to get good at it.

How managers can help their sales staff.

Managers can help train their sales staff and get them more comfortable by implementing webcams internally. Conduct your sales meetings or trainings using webcams. It may be awkward at first, but you’ll be surprised at how quickly everyone adapts. And when they reach a level of comfort, then they can start using webcams with clients.

Give your clients options.

About two years ago, I began setting each appointment by asking, “do you want to talk by phone or webcam?” At first, most chose the phone. Now, over a third of my sales calls now are by webcam. Remember, many of your customers are already using these tools and you need to appear at least as comfortable with technology as they are or you’ll lose credibility.

And if you’re managing a sales team that’s not office-based, you’re probably noticing some unique challenges, too. If that’s the case, we’ve put together the ultimate guide for you, The Long Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership.

Technology is changing, but it’s still all about connecting with and communicating to our customers. It’s only the tool that’s changing. You owe it to them and yourself to get comfortable with webcam technology to provide the best sales experience possible.

About the author:

Wayne Turmel is the co-founder of The Remote Leadership Institute and the author of many books, including ATD’s 10 Steps to Successful Virtual Presentations. Wayne and Kevin Eikenberry are the co-authors of The Long Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Leadership.

The post Webcams are a necessity for virtual sales professionals appeared first on TiborShanto.com.

In January 2018, Engagio conducted a comprehensive survey of more than 1,260 companies to assess trends in B2B marketing. We recently released the results in our ABM Outlook Survey 2018 report.

This is an inside look at the state of Account Based Marketing. More specifically, our research examined:

• How companies are utilizing ABM as a strategy
• How organizations are structuring their teams to support ABM
• How ABM can be measured at different stages
• The challenges most organizations are facing regarding ABM

In this survey, 37% of responses were from small companies (100 employees or less), 44% of responses were mid-market companies (between 250-2,500 employees), and 19% of responses were from enterprise companies (2,500 and up employees).

Along with showing the results, we included our interpretation of the data to help you draw insights and apply them as you continue down your ABM journey. The research underscores where companies are at with their ABM programs and the key challenges they are facing.

In this post, we’ll examine 3 key takeaways and their implications. For other takeaways and insights, download the full report here.

64.8% of companies are currently using a mix of ABM and traditional demand generation programs.

We asked, “What marketing strategies do you currently use? 1) Demand generation, 2) Account Based Marketing, or 3) A mix of both.”

Fewer than 10% of companies are using ABM exclusively while about 27% report using only demand generation – a hybrid approach is common for most B2B organizations.

There’s no hard and fast rule about what percent of your programs should be dedicated to ABM and what percent should be dedicated to demand generation. Think of it as a spectrum. On one end, you have companies selling to the Future 100. The vast majority of their efforts are going to be focused on ABM. On the other end, you have companies selling into the SMB market. The majority of their efforts are going to be focused on demand generation. Most likely, you’re somewhere in the middle, so you’ll want to balance the two strategies.

Here’s an example of how you can think about which type of strategy to apply to a particular segment of your business:

On average, 29% percent of the total marketing budget will be dedicated to ABM in 2018

We asked “What % of your total marketing budget do you plan to dedicated to ABM in 2018?”

Many marketing teams reported a 45% increase in ABM budget from 2017 to 2018. In many cases, teams need to invest in ABM to drive the business outcomes they are responsible for (growth, retention, higher ASPs, cross-sell).

Furthermore, the previously mentioned study by ITSMA and the ABM Leadership Alliance supports this finding as well – 72% of companies surveyed increased their ABM budgets in 2017.

One question that remains is “where do you get the budget for ABM?” Here are a few ideas to try:

• Use dollars from lower performing marketing programs
• If you have some budget set aside for testing, use that to try a pilot
• Partner with other teams to fund program or pilot
• Bucket this under another initiative

On average, roughly 40% of the marketing team is involved in their ABM strategy.

We asked, “What % of your overall marketing team is involved in ABM?”

With this new go-to-market strategy comes new roles and responsibilities. Integrating ABM into your current go-to-market strategy doesn’t necessarily require a wholesale change of your marketing organization. You can leverage your existing team to support and execute ABM. It’s a matter of identifying the required roles, properly structuring your team, and aligning with sales.

The reality is that you can get started with ABM right away. In fact, integrating an ABM strategy into your current strategy doesn’t require a wholesale change. Call upon your current marketing team to spin up a pilot program to prove ABM success before fully investing.

Here is one simple example of how to leverage people you already have:

Read the rest of the findings in our ABM Outlook Survey 2018 report.

Account Based Marketing has disrupted the marketing game, raising the stakes for both Marketing and Sales. Marketing can no longer live by the generation of qualified leads alone; ABM now engages this organization throughout the buyer journey and with other customer-facing teams more than ever before.

The results from companies who got on board early are already in: faster business acquisition, successful expansion into existing accounts, smarter marketing spend and customers who feel understood—and for your company, that means less churn due to better quality deals.

The retail industry has been in a state of upheaval for decades. Is a store that sells no goods the future of retailing?

Tom Webster and I think so, and we talk about it on the new episode of The Marketing Companion.

Listen in as we explore this idea and also debate what will happen when digital ad prices keep rising, a threat to marketing nobody’s really discussing, and our effort to make The Marketing Companion the world’s most hipster podcast. You won’t want to miss it:

The post Is a store with no sales the future of retailing? appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

       

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