Rnordman

Yeah, I know what the immediate reaction to the title of this post will be…..

“But Dave, we’re slaves to our managers and our companies………!”

I get it, I’m talking about something different, but if your managers are treating you like slaves, gently remind them the Emancipation Proclamation was put into effect on January 1, 1863 (for non US readers, I’ll have to do some research).

What I’m focusing on is the application of the principles of Servant Leadership to our how we work with our customers.

Underlying the concept of servant or transformational leadership are roughly 10 principles:

1. Listening
2. Empathy
3. Healing (In a business sense we may think of this more as coaching, mentoring, even problem solving).
4. Awareness (Both of ourselves and others.)
5. Persuasion
6. Conceptualization
7. Foresight
8. Stewardship
9. Commitment to the growth of people
10. Building community

But what if we examined the principles of servant leadership as applied to selling?

1. Listening—kind of obvious in engaging customers and understanding their goals, dreams, challenges, problems.  Yet too often, we spend the time talking.  Or we listen selectively, waiting for cues to go into pitch mode.  This is active listening–engaging the customer in deep understanding and conversations in which there is shared learning.
2. Empathy—if we can’t put ourselves in the customer’s shoes, if we can’t see things from their point of view, we will never be able to connect with them and engage them in meaningful ways.
3. Healing—in a very real sense, selling is about healing, helping the customer solve problems, helping them learn how to improve.  But this occurs at both an organizational and individual level.  Too often, we miss the connection at the individual level–we focus on the business goals and return.  But we forget how the individual–what do they want to achieve, how are we helping them, how do they see themselves in the situation?
4. Awareness—there are a couple of perspectives here.  The first focuses on our awareness of the customer, their problems, challenges, and opportunities.  The second is broadening the customers’ awareness of their own situations, of new methods, ways to improve, and so forth.
5. Persuasion—we talk a lot about this in selling, usually from the point of view of pitching.  I prefer to think of this as a way of helping the customer create and own a compelling need to change.
6. Conceptualization—this is critical, it’s really about helping the customer create a vision of a new future and how they might get there.  It’s important that the customer is involved in creating the vision–it becomes part of them, rather than someone else’s vision.
7. Foresight—encompasses the wisdom of past experiences, applying them to helping the customer achieve their goals.  We leverage not only the customer’s own experience, but the experiences of working with other customers in their attempts to solve similar problems.  We leverage these principles in our own process of engaging customers effectively.
8. Stewardship—this term has fallen out of fashion, but really speaks to personal ownership, accountability, and responsibility.  We see from that stewardship helps center us in our role within our own companies, as well as in trying to be genuinely helpful to our customers.
9. Commitment to the growth of people—this should be self explanatory.  It’s a drive for our own personal learning and growth, as well as working with our customers, teaching them, helping them learn, helping them address their problems/opportunities and to grow personally/organizationally.  How do we help our customer grow–organizationally and individually.  All this is really a core part of the value we create with our customers.
10. Building community—as sales people working in complex B2B sales, we know we need support from within our own company, our partners, and others.  We know our ability to grow our relationships within our enterprise accounts and territories is continually building trust and our relationships.

The Servant Sales Person creates superior value with their customers.  The Servant Sales Person creates superior value with their colleagues and within their organization.

The principles of Servant Leadership are also fundamentals to becoming a high performance sales person.

Oh, and by the way, you may want to drop a copy of this on your manager’s desk.  Perhaps, they’ll think of their role in being servant leaders to their teams 

 

 

How Big Data, Internet of Things, and Virtual Reality Rose and Fell

We just love disruption in the digital age. From the iPhone to ridesharing, and everything in between and beyond, consumers are always eager for the next best thing while brands are ready to change the way they do business.

But not everything that glitters is venture capital gold. Some recent solutions that were lauded as revolutionary seemed to have stalled, and are in danger of ending up like Coke Zero.

The Internet of Things

Just a few years ago, it looked like every home and business were on their way to being fully connected to the internet. This was the promise of the Internet of Things (IoT). Yet, we’re still waiting for our smart toothbrush and automated grocery stores.

IoT is still alive and well to some degree. According to the latest statistics and predictions, worldwide spending on IoT is forecast to reach $772.5 billion by the end of 2018 – representing an increase of 15 percent over the previous year. The global IoT market will reach $457 billion by 2020, with a yearly annual growth rate of approximately 28.5 percent. Even our own research on smart technology reveals that consumers are taking their time adopting new technology.

All other metrics point to growth.

The offline devil is in the details, however. According to advisory firm Bain, the biggest competitive areas for IoT will be in the enterprise and industrial segments. IoT market share will be dominated by smart cities and industrials, with smart utilities and wearables at the very bottom.

Basically, this means that unless you’re a cash-rich country like Qatar, ubiquitous smart homes and communities are still a thing of sci-fi.

Why do consumer applications lag so far behind? The main reasons are scalability and security. North American consumers are just too wary of security issues. In The Failure in the Market for the Internet of Things, Yosef Yudborovsky goes into detail about the security dangers of IoT, as well as troubling instances of hacking and privacy breaches. In fact, cyberattacks are increasing from 6.6 million attacks in 2015 to an expected 17.4 million attacks in 2020.

On the business side, IoT is just as troublesome. A recent Cisco study of 1,845 business and IT decision-makers found that almost 75 percent of IoT projects fail.

The top five reasons are:

• IoT integration
• Budget overruns
• Long completion times
• Poor quality of the data collected
• Lack of internal expertise

What we have here is an industry that hasn’t matured, suffers from limited expertise, and is lacking in technology standards. And above all of this, too many hackers.

Big Data

Big Data was supposed to be a big thing. It hasn’t delivered. Gartner even dropped it from its Hype Cycle of Emergent Technologies back in 2015. The hype is still there, though, with Big Data business worth $122 billion and growing. At the same time, a stunning 85 percent of big data projects fail.

Why the disconnect? According to TechCrunch, these are the reasons:

• The human brain is just not built to interpret large and complex data sets. Data sets must first be made “smaller” via aggregation, summarization, description, and presentation — but that sort of negates Big Data in the first place!
• There just is a limit on how much data will benefit an organization. More information is not better than the right information; and a lot of information can warp core assumptions without suggesting solutions.

In other words, businesses like what Big Data brings, but don’t know what to do with it.

The article suggests that smarter applications and predictive analytics could make Big Data more effective, or as it states: “Big businesses have absorbed Google-style tech, but are only just beginning to adopt Google-style thinking alongside it.”

Even with these changes, an article in Information Week explains that these stumbling blocks must be overcome in order for any Big Data project to work:

• Management resistance/trust gut feeling
• Selecting the wrong usages/trying to make the projects too big
• Asking the wrong questions without understanding the business
• Lacking the right skills within the methods and tech
• Unanticipated problems beyond Big Data technology in which people and systems don’t cooperate

It seems like the funny quote that went around the internet a few years ago regarding Big Data was not just funny, but prophetic. If you haven’t heard it, it claims that Big Data is like teenage sex: Everyone talks about it; nobody really knows how to do it; Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims to be doing it.

Looks like we need a lot of big data to overcome the Big Data issue…

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality bombed in the 90s, but its resurrection was supposed to be a religious experience in the digital age.

From the grave, virtual reality has risen more as a zombie.

As TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney explained last summer:

“Over the past several months it’s become clear that the war is no longer HTC and Oculus trying to discover who is Betamax and who is VHS, now they’re just trying to ensure that high-end VR doesn’t turn out to be LaserDisc. Though few of the big players are keen to readily admit it, many investors and analysts have been less than thrilled with the pace of headset sales over the past year.”

An article in The Economist agrees, saying that for this year: “Virtual reality has failed to live up to its hype, and mainstream consumers never really bought into the technology.”

Supporting the above takeaways, Game Developers Conference’s latest State of the Game Industry report states that of the 3,000 game developers surveyed, only 17 percent said their next game would include VR headsets.

The reasons for virtual reality’s sputtering are many: subpar content, high prices, cumbersome equipment, and the need for powerful specs on a computer or gaming console. You can easily add to these issues the reality that Apple—a standard bearer of tech trends—has yet to throw its VR hat in the ring.

The only good news (for consumers) is that virtual reality equipment has fallen in price, from the Oculus Rift to the HTC Vive to the PlayStation VR. Considering that many of these brands don’t release sales figures on their virtual reality products (already telling), quick and steep price drops are a key indicator of the lukewarm sales.

Of course, sometimes all it takes is a breakout game (I’m looking at you, Halo and the original Xbox). Another answer is perhaps more focus on virtual reality’s cousin, augmented reality. Two years ago, Pokémon Go put augmented reality on the map, and it remains more scalable due to its presence on smartphones and tablets.

Until something comes down the strategic or creative pipe, virtual reality is only a niche product stranded in a niche between success and Google Glass.

Will These Digital Solutions Succeed?

The big takeaway of these digital tech products is that they weren’t outright rejected by consumers and brands, despite, or perhaps because of, expectations. Companies offering these solutions simply hit the walls of scalability, processes, and truly understanding how to serve consumers. To wit, they could have done more market research and less hype-jumping.

In my opinion, strategically lowering the cost of equipment or focusing more on movies instead of complex games could have moved the needle in the right direction for virtual reality. Heavily investing and educating on cybersecurity could change the perception of IoT. Vendors who tutor organizations on how to leverage Big Data, instead of solely focusing on the sale, could make it more successful in projects.

As they say, the difference between a trend and fad is that a trend works. IoT, Big Data, and virtual reality do work, but working well has yet to trend.

I care a lot about sales technology, and what it can do for sales teams. But for one day, I am going to stop talking about it. Why? Because for a large number of sales teams, technology is completely irrelevant.

I wanted to give you this formula for pipeline sales management because I get a lot of questions from sellers about: time management, about how to keep the funnel filled, and about when (and if) you should take people out of your funnel.

Parking minimums are the strange, out-dated, and totally unscientific law that's probably languishing in your city's zoning code. They sound dull (and they are) but they're incredibly important because they have dramatically shaped our cities in a detrimental manner.

Today, I'm explaining exactly why these laws are harmful and what you can do about them.

1. They rob us of financial productivity and prosperity.

In this image showing the tax value per acre of land in Des Moines, IA, the taller plots produce high tax value per acre while the low-lying plots produce little tax value. We can clearly see that the areas filled with parking are contributing little to the municipal budget. (Source: Urban3)

In most cities, municipal services — be they fire protection, schools or streets — are paid for (in part) by property tax revenue, and the amount that every property is taxed is based on its assessed value.

For parking lots, that value is very little. When we multiply this calculation across our cities where parking lots are required by law for most properties, what we find is an enormous loss in tax value. This translates to fewer police officers on the roads, fewer teachers in the classrooms, fewer potholes patched, street lamps fixed, parks planted... and so on. 

As our friend Josh McCarty, who has studied the tax value of parking in depth, writes, "Ultimately parking is the single most important design feature that dilutes the tax productivity of development. Municipalities for whom property taxes are lifeblood should treat parking for what it is: dead weight."

2. They hinder small business owners, homeowners, developers and renters.

That's right, parking minimums are bad for just about everyone. Here's a quick break down:

• Small business owners are forced to spend their precious, hard-earned dollars paying for designated parking spaces for their customers instead of spending that money on supplies, space to sell products, etc. Or they're excluded outright from locating in certain areas because of a lack of parking.
• Homeowners are prevented from taking on basic projects like adding a small rental unit in a basement or backyard because parking minimums would mandate the provision of a parking space for the tenant of that unit (and the typical single-family lot doesn't have room to add that).
• Developers are unable to execute projects because (similar to homeowners) a lack of space on a given lot may prevent them from constructing the required parking to accompany it, or (similar to business owners) they are forced to spend a large portion of their development budget on storage for cars instead of units for paying tenants. (For more on this issue, listen to our interview with developer Monte Anderson.)
• Renters end up losing many housing opportunities because spaces that could be filled with homes are, instead, filled with parking.

3. They fill our cities with empty, useless space.

This is what one block of charming Old Town Pocatello, Idaho would look like if it had to follow modern day parking requirements. See more examples here.

This final point is made glaringly obvious on Strong Towns' annual #BlackFridayParking Day where we invite our readers to go out into their cities on one of the biggest shopping days of the year and take pictures of the parking lots around them. Every November, without fail, we see that even on this busy shopping day, city after city is filled with empty, unused asphalt.

Not only is this a waste of space that could be put to a thousand more productive uses, parking lots also create greater distance between the homes and businesses in our communities, making it take longer to get to them and forcing our cities to spend more on roads, traffic lights and other transportation infrastructure. What could be a simple walk between the grocery story and home is now a multi-mile drive — and parking minimums are one of the main culprits.

At the end of the day, cities full of parking are not attractive, inviting or enjoyable places to spend time in. Picture an exciting, fun destination you've traveled to. Maybe it's a cute beach town or a bustling metropolis. Was every building there separated by a sea of parking? I'm guessing not.

As architect Benjamin Ledford wrote last year, with parking minimums, we have forbidden what we value most. (See the image on the right.) Instead of family homes and thriving businesses, we have acres and acres of asphalt.

To sum up, parking minimums deplete our cities of tax revenue, hinder just about everyone who lives or does business in our communities and leave us with lots of empty, useless space.

If you've had enough of these silly, pointless requirements, check out our 5 Resources for Ending Parking Minimums or visit our Parking page for lots more on this issue, including success stories and an interactive map of towns getting rid of minimums.

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Marketing is going through massive changes thanks to artificial intelligence – and that’s a good thing.

Marketers are people who are in the profession because of a love of engaging with others, whether they are clients or the customers/consumers of the products and services they are passionate about helping to sell.

That said, it may seem odd to make the claim that the arrival of AI, something very non-human, is good news for marketing.

But as well as being “people”, marketers are also “numbers” focused. Statistics and performance metrics are pivotal to what they do. Today, thanks to technology, there’s more knowledge about customers, their likes, and dislikes, than ever before. There’s also more insight about how effectively – or otherwise – marketers are doing their job. From click-through rates to social likes and instantly updated sales figures, effectiveness in reaching customers has never been more measurable.

In fact, in many respects marketing has become too numbers and analysis heavy – and that aspect of the industry isn’t the reason why people become marketers in the first place. If you research this you’ll find seeking a creative role is top of the list, with number crunching not featuring at all.

Yes, marketers are creative people, experts at storytelling and highly professional at simply developing concepts to entice and excite people about using products and services.

Why does marketing need AI?

Here’s the good news about AI: it’s bringing marketers the chance to unclip their wings, free themselves of the more mundane number crunching and analysis, and focus on what they like the most – the creative, interactive, fulfilling work that lured them into the profession in the first place.

AI will raise the professional bar. It will help marketers to be more focused and effective at doing what they do best – producing creative work that delivers results.

Above all, AI will make marketing more relevant and that is good for everyone – customers and businesses alike. It will help marketers be marketers, and marketing to be as effective and efficient as it can be.

With such a pervasive technology, it’s impossible to capture its full effect but here are seven ways AI is going to propel marketing in the near future:

1. Improved marketing automation

Marketing automation has revolutionized the way the industry operates. Technology now enables automatic communication with existing and potential customers through the various online channels that have become increasingly vital parts of the marketing mix: social media, email, and websites.

Importantly, through automation, messaging can be customized to the individual recipient, and tailored to fit with their personal requirements and circumstances based on their known preferences and behavior.

But while the software can automate a series of rules that trigger and control this customized messaging, effective campaign execution still requires a level of intuition on the part of the marketer.

Messages are manually tweaked, and the results monitored, to see which variation achieves the best results.

This is time-consuming work and takes up hours that could be more valuably spent on other tasks. Happily, it’s also ideally suited to AI, which can analyze limitless customer data points to optimize all aspects of a campaign from determining the most effective email subject line to optimizing product pricing.

Being able to automate this type of analysis should be a key goal for marketers wanting to get back to focusing their time on their creative strengths.

2. Efficient content generation

We all know that high-quality content is at the heart of what marketers do on a daily basis – especially for any content or inbound marketing strategy.

Natural language generation (NLG) is a branch of AI set to have a major impact on content over the next few years.

A number of AI algorithms are already automatically producing well-written, data-backed articles. Generators of such articles include The Washington Post.

The technology has its limits. While NLG algorithms can generate readable reports, they are not able to produce detailed or nuanced analysis, so don’t expect them to replace senior writers in marketing organizations any time soon.

What they should allow, however, is for top communicators to step away from some of the more mundane report-generating chores. This will free them up to spend more time crafting and fine-tuning the exceptional copy that marketers should be focused on producing.

3. Better search results

Web content that drives search engine traffic to a site is at the heart of any content marketing or inbound marketing methodology.

AI is already a dominating factor in the world of search, regardless of what else marketers do.

RankBrain is a Google AI algorithm that helps the search giant process some of its queries and is also employed for the all-important task of ranking pages.

Understanding, and adapting to, how Google and other search engines operate is an inescapable task for effective marketers today, and keeping up with SEO trends can be a full-time job in itself. But if there is a single key takeaway regarding search engines’ increasing reliance on AI, it is this: the days of keyword stuffing as an effective SEO technique are over.

The bad news for marketers focused on “gaming” SEO is that RankBrain and other AI algorithms that are now driving search have become smart enough that those tricks no longer work.

The good news for creative marketers is that what AI search algorithms want – just like customers – is the best content. So get on with crafting that great work!

4. More engagement through chatbots

Marketing automation platform provider HubSpot believes chatbots are the future of marketing because they enable consumers to engage effectively with a product or service providers no matter where they are or what device they are using.

AI-enabled chatbots are an increasingly popular communication with brands who use them to interact with customers through messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Slack.

As HubSpot says, with chatbots, there are “no forms, cluttered inboxes, or wasted minutes spent searching and scrolling through content. Communication, service, and transactions intertwine.”

Example below:

If the AI is sophisticated enough, a chatbot can engage effectively enough to handle everything from a customer inquiry to a service request or an order placement.

Chatbots also have the advantage of providing brands with a learning platform for their AI through the customer feedback process. The chatbot interactions provide invaluable insights into consumer preferences, buying patterns, and more.

5. Improved social media experience

In the same way that search engines are improving their results through AI, social media platforms are also using the technology to deliver a better news feed experience to users – a move that has benefits for marketers using the platforms.

Facebook is using AI to identify and weed out low-quality posts – those with links back to dubious websites, for example, clickbait sites with little original content or excessively disruptive ads. Such posts, when recognized by the technology, are relegated in users’ news feeds.

As Top Notch Dezigns founder Derek Robinson told The Next Web, 2018 will be a big year for AI in social media and “will see a rise in real-time personalized content targeting with the aim of creating increased sales opportunities, mainly because AI can make use of effective behavioral targeting methodologies.”

6. Better return on investment

Department store magnate John Wanamaker (1838-1922) famously said: “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Even though digital campaigns offer a new level of tracking that should amount to more accountability and less wasted spending, the sentiment expressed by Wanamaker remains strongly in the minds of advertisers and marketers today.

By leveraging insights in real time, AI has the potential to improve conversion rates and increase marketing spend returns. Marketing ROI is boosted when AI is put to work across a combination of the platforms and resources discussed above. A chatbot, properly armed with lightning-speed relevant predictive insights into the customer it is engaging with, and access to quality content has the potential to be a far more effective sales closer than a human in a call center.

7. Global opportunities

There is a perception that AI can only be done effectively by major corporates with huge research, technology, and marketing budgets. But the reality is AI is being delivered increasingly on an “as-a-service” basis to organizations of all sizes.

Service providers like AWS are continuing to expand their AI services, which in terms makes it more attractive for developers to provide online AI tools for marketers.

Using technology, including AI tools, we can reach talent and services, clients, customers, and markets wherever they happen to be.

This universal access makes for an exciting time in the marketing industry. We are only limited by our imaginations.

Wrapping up

AI has been called the next electricity – it’s going to be everywhere, have a major impact on all parts of our lives and bring huge benefit, especially to marketing.

But it is technology that doesn’t contribute to the emotional or intuitive side to decision making that people bring to the table. That, at least for now, is the job – exclusively – of the human marketer.

So embrace your creative side, start thinking about palming off the boring stuff to AI, and free yourself up to start doing your best marketing work ever!

 

If you get a chance today, pop down to your local High Street and visit a range of shops. You’ll find your local bookstore, full of printed items. The town’s newsagent will have plenty of magazines available too. Head over to a fashion shop and you’ll find free printed magazines of the latest trends. Then pop down to the stationery store and you’ll be met with tons of printer paper for sale – literally.

Print is not going away. We’ve had more than 25 years of the web and a decade of smartphones, yet print is still soldiering on, refusing to be set aside. Most book sales are printed books, not e-books. Plus there is a whole new business arena whereby firms have sprung up which will turn your digital items into printed materials of all kinds. People love print.

A new study has revealed that in spite of some growth in the readership of digital magazines, still almost two-thirds of people read printed magazines every month. The shift towards digital is not as rapid as some pundits think. Plus it appears that some people are reading both by subscribing to the digital and print version of the same title.

Many of the world’s leading digital firms appreciate the value of print. Both Airbnb and Asos have printed magazines, for instance. Plus, luxury brands allocated most of their promotional spending to print. That’s hardly surprising as a recent study showed that print advertising produces a significantly higher return on investment (ROI) compared with other forms of adverts. Plus 45% of people who make purchases online do so after searching for an item having read about it in print.

Altogether, print is highly influential and valuable to businesses. But why?

The psychology of print

Printed documents of all kinds appear to trigger different brain responses when compared with their digital counterparts. According to one study, people spend more time on physical items than digital ones. Furthermore, they remember what they read in print better than what they saw digitally. On top of this, there was a higher emotional connection between printed advertising and the reader than between digital material and the viewer. In other words, printed materials provide greater overall engagement than the digital alternatives.

The rush to digital might seem to make economic sense as a business doesn’t have the distribution costs, for instance, but the downside is weaker engagement by target audiences. Print lingers in the mind as well as in reality. This means that people are attracted to printed items more than digital ones because they are easier to use in the longer-term due to the memory effect of print.

Furthermore, print involves us physically. We have to pick it up and touch it to engage with it. That makes us feel more connected to the document than is possible for us with a website. The fact that you have touched a magazine brings you closer to it psychologically than merely viewing a website with no other sensory input.

Businesses are not attracted to print

The reason that people love digital is because of its measurement capabilities. You can track people on social media, see what they clicked on, follow their journey through your website, discover the keywords they use, see how long they looked at something and a whole host of other data. Collecting and analyzing this data means you can work out how to improve your engagement and thereby increase sales if that is your intention.

Doing the same with printed documents is impossible. You have no way of knowing how long someone read your content in a magazine. Nor do you know anything about their journey through the material. You don’t even know what was in their mind – what keywords were being focused on – if they do read your printed material.

The result is that with digital it is really easy to measure ROI, whereas for print it is difficult (unless you organize a complex and detailed survey, for instance). This means that business owners and marketers are attracted to digital because they can measure it, a point also made by SmartInsights.

This attraction to digital over print is in spite of the overwhelming evidence of the value of print and the importance in the mind of the buyer.

Three ways your business can get more from print

Given that most businesses are attracted to digital because of its measurement capabilities, the best way to improve the usage of print is to establish measurement systems for print that can provide useful data.

1. Phone numbers. Get a phone number that you only use in printed campaigns. Get a different number to your main office one, or the one on your website. Then the logs of calls will show you which people saw your printed promotion and you will then be able to see how many of them bought from you, or took the action you wanted. If you use the same number in print as you do online you have no way of measuring the impact of print-based orders as they will use the same number as the website.
2. Domain names. Get a domain name for each specific campaign and then use redirection to send that to the specific landing page on your website that you need. Do not get the domain name indexed by search engines. In this way, you can be sure that everyone who used that domain name did so after seeing it in print. Even if they were given the domain name by a friend, the referral was due to the printed item. If you use your normal domain name, then you have no way of knowing whether the visitor came from print or elsewhere.
3. Coupon codes. If you are using brochures, leaflets or other forms of printed advertising offer a discount with them which can only be applied using a specific code. That code is only available on each individual printed item, which means you have a means of measuring the impact of print.

Just because you cannot measure print as easily as digital, does not mean you should give up on it. In spite of its vast usage, digital is still the minor way in which people engage with the world. Print is still much more important than many would have you believe – especially your marketing team who will focus on the instant attraction and measurability of digital. Remind them that your customers are still spending a great deal of time with print, in spite of estimates that print engagement is falling. Such estimates often come from organisations that measure ROI, which is so much easier with digital than print. As a result, they want you to believe that print is on its way out.

No doubt the Ancient Egyptians said that when hieroglyphics were replaced with writing, but just look at the popularity of emojis. Four thousand years on and graphical communication is still popular. Digital is not going to replace print any time soon either. Indeed, all of the evidence shows that people still love it. Hence if you ignore it in your business you are missing out.

One of the essential pillars of a successful business is an effective sales territory strategy.

Sales territory planning requires careful thought and consideration — getting it right the first time is crucial. Constant changes in territory division can dampen your sales team's productivity and take a toll on employee morale. And from the client’s perspective, frequent changes in account managers can lead to unstable relationships and create a higher risk for churn.

In this post, we'll cover exactly how to execute sales territory planning and management that keeps your team and your customers in mind. You'll also get best practices for sales territory design, alignment, and the rules of sales territory engagement.

Understanding, planning, and managing sales territories can make or break your sales efforts. Your reps need a firm grasp on the specific customer segments they’re responsible for and the general framework of your team’s territories overall. Only then can your team successfully close deals using this strategy.

How you structure, define, and distribute the territories you work with has massive implications for your organization’s sales efficiency and bottom line.

A strategic sales territory design, exceptional territory management, and sales territory alignment are the building blocks of a successful sales territory plan. So here’s some perspective on how to do them right.

Building a Sales Territory Plan

If you choose to design your sales territories without a plan, you’ll quickly find that your resources and budget are disappearing faster than your ROI can keep up. Sound familiar?

If you're on borrowed time and money quarter after quarter trying to prospect and close new business, get familiar with these sales territory rules of engagement below.

1. Define your market.

To effectively set up territories, sales leaders must first understand the environment of their business. There are numerous ways for a business to define a market. Factors could include geography, size, and consumer demographics, competition, and more. But starting with internal company factors is key.

Take a look at your company's core values, goals, and revenue. Which segment of your customer base is most aligned with these and generating the most revenue for the business?

Once you identify who this group is, look for similar niche markets that your sales team could tap into. For example, if your most profitable customers are in the consumer packaged goods sector, try targeting niche sectors of this industry like food & beverage or health & beauty products. These could become new territories for your business.

Know what is unique to your business and prioritize based on what your climate demands. Targeting a profitable market segment as its own sales territory will lead to lowered overhead costs, increased sales, and reduced customer churn.

2. Assess account quality.

After you've identified the perfect target market for your sales territory, you'll need to evaluate the value of each account within the market. The measurement could be either quantitative or qualitative, depending on the product or service your business offers.

For example, a beverage company might rank the value of its accounts by net profitability. In contrast, a company that relies heavily on customer recommendations could focus on accounts that are more likely to provide a referral for their company.

By determining the value of each account, you can prioritize each one in your sales territory planning. That way, your sales team understands which accounts are reflected in their quota metrics and can give these accounts the attention they deserve.

3. Determine territory quality.

After assessing the quality of each account, it’s time to determine how qualified the territory is as a whole. As with the accounts’ values, this process is subjective based on different business needs and priorities.

Continuing the consumer packaged goods example, if you have a food & beverage territory and a health & beauty territory, you may realize that each of them has different sales cycles, churn rates, and even repeat purchases. These are just a few examples of factors that could affect the quality of a sales territory.

Internally, you may decide that the sales cycle is the biggest determinant of territory quality and use this factor to rank each one from highest to lowest. A shorter sales cycle for the health & beauty territory could mean a quicker ROI for your team, so you could rank health & beauty as a higher quality territory than the food & beverage territory.

To get a better picture of territory value, include your sales team in these discussions. After all, no one knows the territories better than the reps who work within them each day. This way, you can assign the appropriate reps to maximize the potential of each territory.

4. Understand your sales reps’ strengths.

The next step of effective territory management may be the most important of all. After determining the quality of each sales territory, you must assign reps with the applicable skills to develop and optimize each one.

An example of an excellent sales territory assignment is assigning a territory defined by large enterprise deals to a rep who has experience closing big deals.

Now this isn't to say that as a sales leader you should cherry pick certain reps to work certain territories. This step represents the opposite. Instead of relegating reps to highly specialized roles to the point of creating silos, you can cultivate an environment of continuous learning. Use the expertise of each sales rep to introduce best practices for each territory that can be passed on to other team members.

By strategically assigning qualified reps to accounts, you will empower your entire team to deliver an amazing buying experience for your clients.

5. Review your sales territory plan.

The four steps outlined above will prepare your business to put a sales territory plan into action, but you'll need to do a final diagnosis of costs associated with each territory. Analyzing cost metrics will help you as a sales leader zero in on specific inefficiencies in the system and solve for them.

There are several ways to identify these industries, but I recommend you start with customer acquisition cost or CAC. By using this metric, you'll quickly come up with a list of costs associated with prospecting and closing each deal. You can even compare CAC over time, against competitors, or against industry standards to determine what a healthy CAC should be for the territory.

6. Design the final plan.

The last step of building a sales territory plan is to put it all together by designing your sales territories.

There are some strides businesses can take to ensure their sales territory management is as efficient and effective as possible. Below are some of the sales territory management best practices.

1. Put a stellar sales leader in place.

A sales territory plan is pretty much useless when you don't have the right sales leader in place to guide its execution. This person will be responsible for sales territory development, team management, and stakeholder alignment, so take your time and do your research when filling this role.

As you're considering promoting your next sales territory manager from within or hiring one externally, check out our post on what to look for in a good sales territory manager.

2. Practice sound cadence management.

Proper cadence management — the process of prioritizing, structuring, timing, and conducting account interactions — is central to successful sales territory management efforts. Your reps need to gauge account priority level, group accounts based on that assessment, and determine the best frequency, pattern, and nature of touches between them and contacts.

Cadences will differ from territory to territory. It might take some trial and error, but properly managing territories often hinges upon how you contact the prospects you’re trying to reach within each one.

3. Consistently keep track of your data and customer needs.

Territory management is agile by nature. You can’t expect a specific territory to remain stagnant in how it responds to your sales strategies. Customer circumstances change, and you need to be able to quickly adapt to them.

That’s why your reps need to keep records of their sales data in a CRM — making sure you’re keeping tabs on what is and isn’t working for you. Have reps maintain notes from their appointments and keep them on record. Stay abreast of every trend within all your territories to ensure they’re being catered to as effectively as possible.

4. Don’t forget to pursue new leads.

Effective sales territory management isn’t specific to existing accounts. Though this is a crucial component of the process, it’s not the only one. Always pursue new business — one way or another.

That doesn’t mean forgetting about current accounts. You still need to keep them happy — particularly high-volume ones. But if you want to grow your business, you have to consistently pursue new opportunities within your territories. Both kinds of customers serve an essential function to the health of your business, so both need their fair share of attention.

Remote Territory Management

Not all sales territories require an in-person presence, and there are instances when your reps will have to work remotely. If this is the case, your reps still need to abide by the best practices mentioned above, but in all likelihood, they’ll need to adjust their cadence.

A cadence that rests on in-person interactions will have to change if those interactions can’t happen anymore. It might mean finding a new progression that incorporates more phone time and remote tools like video calls.

It might take some trial and error, but you have to land on a cadence better suited to handle remote interactions — and that might not look like the one your reps are used to using.

In addition to adjusting cadence, you may have to adapt your sales territory plan to changes in the market or internally within the company. This is where sales territory alignment comes in.

The most common way sales territory alignment occurs is geographically, especially for remote sales teams who work in the field and meet customers face-to-face. If you notice that there's increased demand for your product or service in the northeast region, you can restrict the territory to the area with the most concentrated demand and expand the corresponding team in that area.

You may have to align your sales territories three to four years, but as often as every year can be normal for fast-paced industries like technology, medical sales, and real estate.

Final Thoughts

An effective sales territory design can be the difference between well-organized, cohesive, successful sales efforts and inefficient, scattershot wastes of resources.

If you understand and implement the sales territory rules of engagement discussed in this article, you can increase your chances of success no matter the territory you find yourself in.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

 

There are people who believe that the choice of medium is the dominant factor for producing results when prospecting. They believe that the tools are what produces a better outcome, that some choice of medium is so much better than another that salespeople should shift their efforts to those tools. This group believes that the primary challenge for salespeople is that they lack the knowledge of how to use the relatively new tools, believing that the primary challenge in selling well today is a lack of training in using them. More still, they believe that single change worth noting as it pertains to sales results is the internet, when in fact, it is one of many, and not the most important.

Like those who have tried to improve sales effectiveness in the past, they look for things that can easily be trained and employed. Like the sales manager that attempts to improve sales by demanding more activity because he is at a total loss as to how to help people become more effective, this group of people believes that shifting the focus to the use of new tools will increase the salesperson’s effectiveness. The tools, however, do not increase a salesperson’s effectiveness, even if they improve their efficiency.

The tools do not create any value for the client to suggest that the salesperson using a certain tool is someone worth meeting with, someone with the business acumen or situational knowledge to improve their future results. If there is a challenge in prospecting now, it is a lack of value being traded for time, not the medium being used to make the ask.

The tools offer nothing when it comes to controlling the process, gaining the commitments necessary to consult with clients and help them make the changes they need to make inside their own company. They offer even less when it comes to helping deal with a client’s internal conflicts, competing priorities, and a systemic resistance to change.

The new tools do nothing to improve the intangibles that weigh heavily in a decision to buy from one person instead of another. They don’t make one a peer, provide executive presence, or create a preference to work with an individual or their company.

The poor thinking here is that the tools are what is missing when it comes to producing better results. The tools themselves provide no insight. They produce no content; they only deliver the content. They are not a reason for a client to take a meeting or to decide to engage with a salesperson. Those who focus on tools inflate the value of them to a level they cannot possibly deliver.

The tools available to you in sales are useful, but they are not enough to make you an effective salesperson. In most cases, they are a distraction from the real challenges of selling well, and your efforts are better spent working on the messenger and not the medium.

The post The Sales Improvement You Need Will Not Be Found in Tools appeared first on The Sales Blog.

This article is adapted from an excerpt in the new book The Creative Curve by Allen Gannett, from Penguin Random House.

Most of what you know about creativity is a lie.

Our culture has embraced the idea that creative genius is inborn and innate.

And, if you’re not one of the privileged few with creative skill in your genes, there’s not much you can do to change that. You’re either a brilliantly creative content marketer or you’re not. That’s how the creativity story goes.

And it’s totally, completely, utterly wrong. You can teach yourself to become more creative.

I’ve spent the last three years speaking with creative experts of all stripes. I sat down with Michelin star restaurateur José Andrés; Netflix CCO Ted Sarandos; reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian; The New York Times writer and co-creator of Billions, Andrew Ross Sorkin; YouTube superstar Casey Neistat; creator of Black-ish, Kenya Barris; Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s; and countless other creative heavyweights.

To understand the scientific processes behind creative insight, I chatted with leading neuroscientists and pioneering academics.

Here’s what I learned.

To improve your creativity, you need to understand the two titanic forces behind every instance of creative success: familiarity and novelty.

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To improve creativity, know the two titanic forces behind success – familiarity & novelty, says @Allen.
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Attracted to the familiar

In 1968, Robert Zajonc conducted a study that would revolutionize the field of psychology. He recruited students at the University of Michigan for a “language learning experiment.”

He showed them “Chinese characters,” claiming they signified various adjectives. Students saw the characters at varying frequencies before rating their positivity (i.e., a good trait or bad trait) and how much they “liked” the character.

The “Chinese characters” had no meaning. The study tested whether frequency affected their feelings. And it did. The more often participants saw a character, the more positively they perceived it. They liked the character just because they saw it more.

Put another way, familiarity is attractive. We feel safe.

But, there’s a problem with this conclusion.

Have you ever noticed that when a new iPhone model comes out, the old one seems less attractive? If people are more comfortable with things that are familiar, shouldn’t everyone be carrying iPhones from 2008?

The attractive power of familiarity is limited by something. And the same researcher discovered what that is.

Interested in novelty

Imagine you’re walking through an art museum and you see this abstract painting.

Now imagine you walk by it five more times. Would seeing it repeatedly change your opinion of the work? What if you saw it 10 times? 25 times?

Robert Zajonc’s team of researchers conducted a similar experiment. Paintings seen by students 25 times were about 15 percent less liked than ones seen for a single time. In short, the students preferred novel paintings more than familiar ones.

Now we know we are motivated by novelty and fear of the unfamiliar. How do we balance our interest with our apprehension?

Intersection of familiarity and novelty

Researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of Montreal wanted to know.

They played clips from a half-dozen songs for 108 students. Students reported liking a clip more the second through eighth time they were exposed to it. But they liked it progressively less between the ninth and 32nd plays.

Both of Zajonc’s studies are correct, but neither provides the full picture. At first, the more we are exposed to something the more we like it. Once that exposure reaches a peak, we tire and like that thing less and less each time we encounter it.

If you graph the interplay between familiarity and novelty – between nostalgia and excitement for the new – you get a distinct shape.

Embrace the creative curve

The pursuit of both familiarity and novelty results in a bell-shaped curve relationship between preference and familiarity. I call this bell-shaped curve the creative curve.

Here’s how it works.

Creative insights aimed at the bottom right part of the curve won’t be long for the world. Too much novelty and not enough familiarity means that the idea will attract fringe interest but most people will stay away.

As the curve slopes up, familiarity increases and novelty sinks to non-threatening levels. The upward slope is what I call “the sweet spot” of the creative curve. Ideas in this region are familiar enough to be comfortable, yet novel enough to compel attention.

But as people become more and more familiar with the new idea, the novelty bonus deteriorates. Then, we reach the point of cliché, where familiarity and novelty are perfectly balanced.

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Novelty bonus deteriorates as people become more familiar with a new idea, says @Allen. Read more>>
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It’s a bad idea to aim an idea at any part of the curve past the point of cliché. Many ideas become a follow-on failure. For example, if you opened a cupcake shop in 2015 soon after the cupcake craze had peaked, you might have had a busy year. By 2016 or 2017, you likely would have experienced a sudden drop in business.

Put that all together and here’s what you get.

Case study: Clothing brand Ed Hardy

Let’s look at how the creative curve operates in real life.

Don Ed Hardy was a tattoo artist originally best known for his Japanese-inspired designs at Tattoo City, the San Francisco studio he opened in 1977.

In the late 2000s, businessman Christian Audigier convinced Hardy to license his designs. Audigier’s branding acumen made Hardy’s artwork a smashing success. By mid-2009, the snakes and skulls of Hardy’s tattoos were plastered on anything and everything.

Suddenly, Ed Hardy was a household name. And this ubiquity was big money. In 2009, the Ed Hardy brand sold $700 million in clothing and accessories.

Familiarity had created an empire.

But familiarity giveth, and familiarity taketh away.

After 2009, Ed Hardy shirts were a gaudy cliché. By 2016, the brand was gasping for air.

How did a brand climb so high then tumble so far?

Let’s look at Google. The search engine giant’s tool shows the number of people who search for a phrase over time. It’s a good way to observe and time trends. What happens when we plug in the words “Ed Hardy”?

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.@Google search trends can illustrate a topic’s creative curve, says @Allen.
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Notice anything familiar?

Putting the creative curve to work

Content marketing is all about providing value to your audience. And that’s why creativity is so important.

Your audience has seen the same five tricks repeated 500 times. Repetition is boring, and boring doesn’t add value. That’s where creativity comes in. If you can provide something novel and exciting, you’ll catch eyes and hold focus.

But here’s where people mess up. You need to balance this novelty with familiarity.

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Creative success requires a balance of novelty and familiarity, says @Allen. Read more>>
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If you offer a bold take on a topic and a revolutionary method of presentation and do it at an unexpected time, you risk novelty overload. Pick one creative angle and commit to it fully. Don’t change too many things at once. Repaint the wheel, don’t reinvent it. Too new is sometimes as bad as too boring.

Content marketers who learn how to strike the perfect balance between the familiar and the novel will set themselves up for dependable and repeatable creative success.

Adapted from THE CREATIVE CURVE: HOW TO DEVELOP THE RIGHT IDEA, AT THE RIGHT TIME © 2018 by Allen Gannett. Published by Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Catch Allen and his insight on LinkedIn video at one of hundreds of sessions at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today using code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post The Secret to Hitting the Creative Sweet Spot appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

In today’s digital age, influencers are hot property. Because of this fact, influencer marketing has become the fastest growing customer acquisition method.

Brands, who once spent their time chasing celebrities instead, are now turning to influencers to endorse their products. Collective Bias proved this point in a recent study, which revealed that 30% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product endorsed by a lesser well-known blogger, as opposed to a celebrity.

So, what makes influencer marketing tick? In a world cluttered with brand content, consumers want nothing more than authenticity. And so, they are more likely to engage with and value the opinions of influencers instead.

While brands continue to jump on the influencer marketing bandwagon, how many are actually doing it right?

Here are 5 common influencer marketing mistakes you should avoid in order to run a successful campaign:

Focusing On Follower Count

Focusing strictly on how many followers an influencer has is the most common mistake businesses make while choosing an influencer to promote their brand. An influencer will not be automatically suitable for your specific campaign just because he or she has 100,000 followers. Similarly, don’t remove any potential options from your list just because they only have 30,000 followers or less.

If you have decided to spend your hard earned money on the campaign, you need to be extremely careful while selecting the influencer. Take time to dig into the finer details.

Do thorough research, including:

• Go through the prospective influencer’s pages
• Study the kind of content they post
• Check whether your brand fits in with their audience and tone of voice
• Look at the kind of engagement they get on their posts
• Scan their comments and check to see if they are genuine in their responses

These are some areas you should explore to make a better informed decision.

Setting Unclear Goals

Like every campaign you run, this one needs to have clear goals and objectives. What are you trying to achieve from this influencer campaign?

Are you spreading awareness about a new product, creating buzz about a promotional offer, increasing social engagement, or driving clicks to your website?

This is a start, but you need to do more than just setting influencer marketing goals. Share these goals with the influencer to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Remember – the influencer’s efforts will be as good as your input. Set expectations from the beginning and clearly communicate the campaign KPIs for best results.

Failing to Involve the Influencer

Influencer collaboration is all about building valuable relations. It is a two-way street.

You shouldn’t expect to call all the shots just because you are the one spending the money.

Once you have gotten an influencer on-board, you need to work together with him/her to chalk out a content plan for your campaign. It’s a good idea to work on a mini content calendar and be aware of what content is going up on which platform, and when it will be posted.

Make sure you aren’t the overpowering marketer trying to control every step. Respect the influencer for the platform they have built and trust their judgement. Let’s face it, they know what works best with their followers. That’s why you engaged with them in the first place.

Overdoing the Branding and Pitching

While the purpose of the campaign is obviously to draw attention to your brand, don’t overdo it by plastering that communication all over the influencer’s posts.

The beauty of influencer marketing lies in its authenticity and subtlety. Try to seed the message within their content, such that it flows very organically.

By treating it as another piece of branded content, you will never be able to maximize the potential of this trending marketing tool.

So, educate the influencer about your brand/product and make them aware of the key message you want to communicate. But in the end, let them give the campaign his/her unique spin.

Not Measuring Results

As with all campaigns, it is important to measure the effectiveness of the influencer campaign in light of the goal(s) you had set out to achieve. Link each objective to a metric, and reflect back on the success of it after completion.

For example, if you wanted to drive clicks to your website, insert tracking links to understand if you got any traffic from the influencer’s posts. Similarly, if increasing social engagement was the objective, track how your fan base has increased with the help of social media analytics tools.

Definitely make it a point to measure the campaign effectiveness, as it tells you how the campaign fared and the impact it had. This will help you learn from your mistakes and improve your influencer marketing efforts in any future campaigns.

From spreading brand awareness and enriching your SEO to building trust and loyalty – influencer marketing can be incredibly beneficial for your brand, if done correctly.

So, avoid these common mistakes. Approach influencer marketing relations with trust and transparency. After all, it is a mutually beneficial relationship, and how you manage it is crucial to the campaign’s success.

We’ve been compiling this sales automation tools list for a while, trying to figure out the best way to get the information out there.

There are a number of existing resources available on sales automation, but they don’t offer use cases and examples of how to put the tools to action. So our team tried to fill the gap to help you build or enhance your own sales stack.

Here goes our effort to curate the ultimate list of sales automation tools!

What Is Sales Automation?

Sales automation tools are software-based solutions that help you perform many sales tasks faster, easier, and more efficiently.

As far as I know, these solutions initially focused on tedious or redundant tasks — from sales prospecting to contract signing.

With the increasing use of artificial intelligence, data analytics, and machine learning to drive many solutions, sales automation capabilities have also become more targeted.

Why Do You Need Sales Automation?

For organizations that need to sell something, sales automation tools have become nearly as indispensable as calendars and phones. Based on experience, businesses would find it painfully difficult to keep competition at bay.

Left to its own, a sales force will eventually become too bloated and unwieldy. This is especially the case if everyone on the team reverts to performing tedious tasks manually.

There’s simply no escaping it. To thrive in the new economy, you need sales-enabling technologies that optimize your existing tools, talent, and teamwork.

Related: Best 160+ Sales Tools: The Complete List (2018 Update)

Pros and Cons of Using Sales Automation

Among other things, sales automation enables reps on the floor to get deeper insight about prospects, and managers to create strategic visualizations to improve overall sales team performance. Sales organizations now turn to different automation software to enhance the overall buyer journey.

Not everything in the world of selling should be automated

Customers are people and they expect to be treated like humans  — by humans on the other side of the selling dynamic. If they feel being tracked and treated like a mere statistic by a computer program, customers will lose interest.

To win their game, sellers need to orchestrate excellent customer experiences and trigger the right emotional responses.

While sophisticated chatbots can help marketers and sellers engage retail consumers, B2B buyers still demand meaningful relationships with expert human consultants.

Technology is only as good as the human using it

Unless a sales rep knows her way around the tools she uses, the likelihood of bungling and turning prospects away is all too real. An automated email campaign that is poorly planned can easily exceed the peskiness of spam, for example.

And once you allow your brand to be tainted with a reputation as a spammer, you are bringing your business closer to irrelevance.

Bottom line: for your business to reap the full rewards of sales automation, you’ll need a roster of competent, well-trained, and tech-savvy sales practitioners on the team.

Here’s Our Master List of Sales Automation Tools to:

1. Scrape websites to find a certain type or subset of customers
2. Build a lead list fast
3. Get a bunch of prospect email addresses and other contact info
4. Find the right targets
5. Improve prospecting workflow and outcome
6. Power up your outbound and inbound email campaigns
7. Outsource the sales development process
8. Develop sales people through training
9. Acquire CRM capabilities for less
10. Match CRM for your business scale and model
11. Generate sales forecasts more easily
12. Enhance your marketing efforts
13. Facilitate data integration
14. Integrate services with Salesforce
15. Run internal email drip campaigns
16. Improve demos and conferencing
17. Manage contracts
18. Conduct mobile research
19. Conduct social research
20. Implement account-based selling/marketing
21. Analyze, manage, and improve sales performance
22. Perform data analysis
23. Improve search engine optimization (SEO) efforts
24. Gather and weaponize business intelligence
25. Create, share, and manage content
26. Enhance daily productivity

Web Scraping

Web scraping can be a salesperson’s best friend. A few years ago, this would mean they’d need to be pretty technical. To learn about Python and APIs  — almost foreign to them — is a big task. Fortunately, even non-technical salespeople can easily scrape sites these days using tools such as Import.io and Kimono.

Web Scraping Tools

• Import.io
• Portia
• Kimono
• ParseHub

Lead List Building

I’m not a fan of paying for lists. In fact is it an AWFUL idea.

The two main reasons are 1) it’s not a good way to spend money when you’re a startup and 2) the bounce rate is ridiculously high.

List Building Tools

• LeadIQ
• ZenProspect
• SellHack
• Toofr
• StackLead
• Prospect.io
• Sumo
• OptinMonster

Email Databases

To reiterate, I’m not a believer in buying email lists but these are the top companies in the space for directly purchasing on a per email basis. I believe there is value here in the speed it would take you to get a list built using these products. I just don’t believe in the accuracy or price tag associated with it, especially for cash-strapped startups and lean organizations.

Email Database Tools

• Zoominfo
• Data.com
• LimeLeads
• DiscoverOrg
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Finding the Right Targets

When finding the right customers, you want to look for few defining factors right off the bat. You should find companies that can afford your product, companies that are using similar products, or companies similar to your current client base.

That’s an easy start, AKA your Low Hanging Fruit. After you can dive in, decide which point persons based on specific corporate roles/positions you’d like to start the conversation with. These products can help you with the first part.

Customer Intelligence Tools

• Outreach
• Datanyze
• MixRank
• Mintigo

Prospecting Workflow and Outcome

One of the telltale signs of a productive sales team is a full and flowing sales pipeline. While it sounds simple, keeping a healthy pipeline is not always so easy for many business organizations. Not all prospects are worth the effort, for example. And bringing every qualified lead from one phase of the sales cycle to the next does not always turn out as planned.

To help your team streamline your sales process, you should consider adopting tools and technologies that match your business model, goals, and sales framework/methodology.

Prospecting Tools

• Accent Accelerate
• Deal Sheet
• Fileboard
• Live Hive
• Inside Sales
• Outbound Works
• Cognism
• DataFox
• DealSignal
• KickFire
• Lead411
• LeadFeeder
• LeadFuze
• LeadGenius
• LeadIQ
• Growbots
• GrowLabs
• LeanData
• SalesExec
• Conversica
• Sudo
• Troops
• Reachable

Outbound, Inbound, and General Email Management

This might be the top sales automation gem in this entire post. If you’re not one of those lucky companies that can expect to draw hundreds of inbound leads on a consistent basis, then you probably need to get things started by going on the attack.

I’d also recommend this post from Martin Weiss on building your outbound sales strategy.

Top Email Management Tools

• Outreach
• MixMax
• MixRank
• SalesLoft
• ToutApp
• Yesware
• HubSpot Sales
• Reply
• SenderGen
• Sigstr
• ZynBit
• Cirrus Insight
• FullContact
• GetResponse
• Rapportive

Related: How to Build a Sales Stack Your Sales Reps Will Love

Outsourcing the Sales Development Process

Ah my favorite part. Everything above just told you which software to use to automate most of the lead gen and prospecting process. Now imagine if you could train someone to do it for you for you!

Finding and contracting freelance SDRs is easier than ever. With the advancements in remote working technologies, you can outsource the SD process quickly and build long-term business relationships easily.

Sales Development Outsourcing Solutions

• AltiSales
• Outbound Works
• TaskUs
• Upwork
• Fiverr

Sales Training Solutions

Some of the best education portals for salespeople are Winning By Design, JBarrows Training, Saleshood and The Harris Consulting Group. Winning By Design are sales scientists who create playbooks and textbooks on sales. John Barrows trains sales reps at Salesforce, Box, LinkedIn, Marketo, Zendesk and more of the world’s biggest B2B SaaS companies.

Meanwhile, Elay Cohen (the former SVP of Sales Productivity at Salesforce) launched Saleshood to share his customer engagement secrets to the masses. Factor 8 is another notable sales training provider that can help keep your team on full throttle.

Sales Training Solutions

• Winning By Design
• JBarrows Training
• The Harris Consulting Group
• SalesHood
• Sales Hacker
• Factor 8
• HireVue
• LearnCore

Startup CRMs

Not everyone can afford Salesforce right out of the gate. While it’s definitely the most scalable solution out there, smaller companies can depend on the following CRMs to do the job nearly as well.

Depending on your deals and the size of your team, one of these products might be better for you than the others. With all being said, CRM systems can boost your sales automation process significantly.

CRMs For Startups

• Nextiva CRM
• Pipedrive
• Close.io
• SalesforceIQ (RelateIQ)
• Zoho
• Base
• Agile CRM
• Contactually
• Infusionsoft
• Insightly
• ProsperWorks
• Apptivo

CRMs in General

If you’ve been running a mid-size to enterprise-scale organization for a while and would like to update your sales team’s CRM, then there is a wide range of options available.

CRM Solutions

• Nextiva CRM
• Pipeliner
• Freshsales
• Membrain
• Salesforce
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• NetSuite

Sales Forecasting

Having a general idea of your revenue trend is important for strategy formulation and tactical fine-tuning. Your ability to map sales performance over the short term also enables you to re-allocate scarce resources to where they will be needed most. That is where sales forecasting solutions come quite handy.

Sales Forecasting Tools

• ProsperWorks
• InsightSquared
• Aviso Insight
• DataHug

Marketing Automation

Without sales, marketing is empty. Without marketing, sales is dead. That pretty much explains why there’s a need to align sales and marketing. And that is why many companies are also beefing up on marketing automation to improve campaign efficiencies.

Marketing Automation Tools

• Active Campaign
• Autopilot HQ
• Act – On
• LeadFuze
• Marketo
• HubSpot
• SalesWings
• Pardot
• Nextiva Automation

Enterprise/Personal Data Integration

These days, you can’t afford to rely solely on your CRM to stay above the competition and keep your brand ahead of the curve. You’ll always need supporting technologies to extend the capabilities of your tool set.

However, when salespeople mention “sales stack,” they definitely mean a virtual stack comprising of different technologies. The problem is, the sales tech landscape has products from different vendors — and these products don’t necessarily get along well with each other.

Data Integration / Enrichment Tools

• Zapier
• Ringlead
• Clearbit
• IFTTT
• Bedrock Data
• Talend
• Informatica

Salesforce Integrations

Salesforce remains the standard product when it comes to customer relationship management. Having dominated the market for more than a decade, this pioneering CRM solution naturally creates ripples of third-party integration development around it.

Top Salesforce Integrations

• DataLoader.io
• Xvoyant
• Skyvia
• Jitterbit
• Salesvue
• MapAnything
• Velocify Pulse
• Galigeo

Internal Drip Campaigns

Executing an email drip campaign is among the most potent methods in B2B lead nurturing and inbound marketing. Basically, a drip campaign is an automated sequence of pre-crafted, personalized, and contextualized email messages that are sent to a select group of recipients over a certain period. The purpose is to assess and guide recipient behavior towards a specific action such as a sign up or a purchase.

Drip Campaign Tools

• Customer.io
• AWeber
• MailChimp
• Drip
• Pardot

Demo/Conferencing

Presenting, video conferencing, and product demos are crucial elements of the sales process especially in the B2B sector. They are also important channels for internal communication, collaboration, and training.

Demo/Conferencing Tools

• Nextiva
• Gong
• Chorus.ai
• Zoom
• GoToMeeting
• Skype
• DemoChimp/Consensus
• Jiminny
• NewVoiceMedia
• Refract
• VanillaSoft
• ExecVision
• ConnectAndSell
• FrontSpin

E-Signature

You’ve done the tough tasks of finding prospects, driving positive conversations, and orchestrating meaningful customer experiences. Your prospect has finally given the nod.

Well and good, but you’re not off the hook yet. You still need to generate legally binding agreements, personalize service terms, get customers to sign up for the service, and manage contracts moving forward.

E-Signature Tools

• Concord
• Docusign
• Adobe Sign
• GetAccept
• HelloSign
• Apptus
• Octiv
• Qvidian
• SpringCM

Mobile Research

The maturing mobile environment has become a welcoming place not only to showcase your products but also to perform many of your tasks as a sales professional.

Heeding the demand, a number of CRMs such as Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Zoho have already deployed robust mobile versions. Sales enablement software and marketing automation have wisely joined the bandwagon.

Meanwhile, buyers can do their product research, shopping, and purchases directly from their mobile devices. In fact, 93% of customers who use mobile for product research end up buying something.

Mobile Research Tools

• Pocket
• Evernote Scannable
• Slack
• Skype Mobile

Social Research

Like mobile, social media has become pervasive and remarkably influential. Any sales organization that lack a social selling strategy is bound to play second fiddle to those who do.

Social Research Tools

• CircleBack
• Nudge.ai
• HootSuite
• Sprout Social

Account-Based Sales and Marketing

With customers becoming the center of business, many vendors in the B2B space have adopted account-based selling as their default sales framework. If you are a player in this sector, there are many account-based solutions that can take your process and performance to new highs.

Account Based Sales & Marketing Solutions

• Engagio
• PersistIQ
• PFL
• Terminus
• Triblio
• Revegy
• Smart Rooms (Journey Sales)

Individual/Team Performance Management

Even the finest sales tools in the world won’t take you very far unless the talent using them are also world-class. Successful sales organizations know they need to consistently assess, train, and develop the people behind their brand.

And because corporate survival and growth depend primarily on sales, technology solutions that aim to drive focus and high performance among sales professionals abound.

Performance Management Solutions

• Xvoyant
• Hoopla
• Veelo
• Ambition
• Altify
• LevelEleven
• ThinkSmartOne
• MindTickle
• PointForward
• Qstream
• CallidusCloud Commissions
• Xactly

Data Analytics

The most valuable digital brands in the world (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) use data to dominate the market. Data has become crucial to success that many businesses now employ Chief Data Officers.

Not surprisingly, sales organizations that lack strong data infrastructures fare poorly compared to their competitors who leverage analytics in their sales process.

Here are some tools that can help your team harness the game-changing benefits of data.

Data Analytics Solutions

• Nextiva Analytics
• TrustSphere
• 6sense
• Lionboard Analytics
• RingLead
• TopOPPS
• Alinean
• Bombora
• Clari
• Domo
• Geckoboard
• Klipfolio
• Sisense
• SpringML
• Tableau

Search Engine Optimization

The web is a battleground and only digital marketers who are well versed in the inner workings of SEO will ultimately claim victory in the field. A good percentage of sales now occur online and your brand will lose competitiveness if it lacks an aggressive SEO (search engine optimization) strategy – and that goes for startups too. SEO for startups can be a huge advantage later on down the road, rewarding compounding efforts for years to come.

Related: The Express Guide to Keyword Research for Salespeople

Some of the most useful SEO tools are in this list. If you are looking for powerful SEO platforms with plenty of features, Moz Pro, Ahrefs, and SEMrush are some of the most widely used.

Top SEO Tools

• Moz Pro
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Majestic
• Cognitive SEO
• KeywordTool.io
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider
• DeepCrawl
• Botify
• Searchmetrics
• BuzzSumo
• SimilarWeb
• SpyFu
• Yoast

Business and Market Intelligence

In the digital economy, business success takes a lot more than just knowing the terrain. It entails having the right information about the right prospects at the right time. Business intelligence has become indispensable that you need at least one service dedicated to gathering relevant intel.

Business Intelligence Tools

• Nextiva Analytics
• Artesian
• D&B Hoover’s
• Emissary
• Mattermark
• EverString
• FirstRain

Content Creation, Sharing, and Management

Even in the universe of selling, content remains king. Your message and how you express it matter. Whether the message aims to engage customers, train sales rep, or motivate internal teams, outcomes ultimately rely on the quality and relevance of content.

But the impact of messaging doesn’t end there. How you create, share, and manage content also affect your efficiency and productivity as a team.

Content Management Tools

• BrainShark
• Canva
• Prezi
• Google Slides
• Videolicious
• Vidyard
• Bigtincan
• Docurated
• Whut
• DemoChimp (Consensus)
• ClearSlide
• Knowledge Tree
• Highspot
• Infor Sales Portal
• Allbound
• PandaDoc
• Conga
• DocSend
• Showpad
• Dooly
• Guru
• SAVO
• Folloze
• RO Innovation

Daily Use / Productivity

Capping this list are personal productivity tools that can either automate or otherwise improve your performance or workflow on a daily basis.

Workflow / Productivity Tools

• Pocket
• OneTab
• Evernote
• Zapier
• Slack
• Hull
• Google Trends

Sales Automation for Reps

Sales Reps perform many tasks and activities across the sales process. These include prospecting, lead nurturing, and customer engagement. Hence, automations that enhance lead generation, sales call performance, and sales email engagement would greatly extend the capabilities of sales reps.

Top Picks

• Outreach
• Prospect.io
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• GoToMeeting
• Customer.io
• HubSpot Sales
• Zapier

Sales Automation for Managers

Sales managers need to exercise critical, strategic, and analytical thinking while performing many of their functions. Tasks that are often associated with sales leaders include reports generation, presenting, metrics analysis, etc. They also need to do some talent hiring/outsourcing/training every now and then.

The following automations, technologies, and solutions can help sales leaders perform their jobs better.

Top Picks

• NextOS
• BrainShark
• Upwork
• Prezi
• Zoom
• DataHug
• SalesExec

Final Thoughts

Salesforce recently published its widely anticipated State of Sales Report for 2018 and the findings are alarming. With competition getting tougher and customer expectations on the rise, nearly 60% of sales reps expect to miss quota this year.

As market challenges render the job of sellers harder than it already is, smart salespeople can no longer afford to go out on the field empty-handed. They’ll need every help they can get. If you’re serious about your sales performance, you’d want to get the best automation solutions on your side.

The range of options can be mind-boggling but we’ve trimmed the shelf to help you make a decision faster and easier. So choose any of the tools I’ve cited that are relevant to your role, goals, and situation. Now is the time to up your game.

The post Sales Automation: 250+ Tools to Turbocharge Your Sales Process appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Email is a great way to market to contacts and to stay top of mind. Segmentation can further assist the ability to market relevant information to interested contacts.

We’re probably all familiar with the different kinds of email, but what we might not know is that they actually have secret lives. Spooky.

Sure, email is a great medium to educate and nurture, but what else is going on here? Let’s find out, here’s a look at some of the most common forms of email and what’s going on below the surface.

Newsletters

I love newsletters. They’re great for sending emails with a lot of links that are broken up into sections. This broken up structure allows us to do some cool things:

• Include a bunch of content in one email that might be relevant to several different personas.
• Feature a bunch of links without causing decision paralysis.

Being as we’re able to send this email out to a bunch of people with a ton of links we can monitor several email engagement analytics:

• Opens
• Clicks
• Unsubscribes

Only the beginning, people! Due to the (potentially) persona agnostic nature of newsletters we can send this one email to the entire database. With tools like HubSpot, we can change the subject line based on the persona of the recipient with smart content. So, this should give us reliable open metrics, great.

But, what’s even more important is the ability to send this one email to everyone in our database. If you haven’t sent one email to everyone in your database in a couple months or more this is for you.

Sending one email to everyone is a great way to clean up your database. Chances are some of your contacts have changed their email at some point, and if you’re B2B this is even more relevant. You really want those dead email addresses out of your database because they’re costing you money. The more contacts you have, or the more emails you send, the more you have to pay.

Soooo, you probably only want to pay for live emails, right? And, how do you monitor dead email addresses? Newsletters!

Quick takeaway

Newsletters secretly keep your database clean by identifying dead email addresses.

Form Submission Follow Up

Another crazy important email is the form submission follow up.

Let’s suppose you start sending monthly newsletters, you’re capturing dead emails, adding them to a list, and removing that list every month or so.

At this point, submission follow up emails will keep your database clean through regular, real-time maintenance.

If someone gives you a fake email you’ll find out immediately. No need to wait for the monthly newsletter. Understandably, this leads to a clean database, and a clean database is a financially smart database.

In addition to the technical side of email database maintenance, follow up emails also “introduce” your company to someone’s inbox. They’re more likely to remember you if you email them right after they fill out a form because they’re thinking about you. Aww.

This should reduce the chances of them marking any of your future emails as SPAM. Which is good for domain reputation.

Quick takeaway

Form submission follows up secretly keep your database clean and improve domain reputation.

Nurturing or Automation Emails

Enrolling contacts in a workflow is a pretty obvious next step for marketers. We want to nurture those new leads into MQLs that we can pass over to sales.

Sure, that’s true, but there are two sides to this coin. While we’re qualifying some contacts, we’re also disqualifying other contacts.

Staying in regular contact with people lets us see how engaged they are with our brand. If someone fills out one form and never opens any of the ten emails that follow, then we might have a contact who isn’t interested in moving forward.

Depending on how long someone is likely to stay in the buyer’s journey, we might want to send a re-opt-in email at the end of the workflow if they don’t seem engaged.

Just like with the secret lives of some other email types, we can use these emails to keep our database clean. If someone’s not going to move forward let’s get them out of the database and keep our marketing costs in check.

Congruently, if someone is engaging with our automated emails, then we should be able to pass them over to sales. We can achieve this by having a goal for the workflow, and as I always say “if there’s no goal, then we don’t need a workflow”.

Let’s make a bottom of funnel form submission that goal and pass over contacts to sales in the form of MQLs once the goal is met.

Quick takeaway

Nurture or automation emails secretly keep your database clean by disqualifying contacts who aren’t interested in moving forward. They also support a scalable process to pass qualified leads over to sales.

Ibbaka is a strong advocate for value-based pricing, especially when it comes to innovative new offers that have real differentiation. The foundation of value-based pricing is the value an offer provides to a customer relative to an alternative. Value of course has emotional and economic components. In today's world, both are essential.

To price on value (and not on something like willingness to pay, which is not a good proxy for value) one has to create and communicate that value. Your customers will only accept your value claims and your pricing if they think you are being fair to them. What does it mean to be fair? In pricing, the perception of fairness is based on three things: transparency, consistency and value.

One of our customers is dealing with fairness. They have brought a new offer to market and a segment (just a segment and not all) of their customers do not think the pricing is fair. 

Transparency

Your pricing needs to be transparent. This does not mean it has to be published on your pricing page. Publishing your pricing to the public is often a good idea, especially if your pricing page also communicates value and helps people choose the offer or tier that is best for them. This is not required for transparency. To be transparent, at the appropriate point in the selling process, you have to be able to explain to your customer how you set your price and how the specific price being offered to them has been calculated. We have all seen pricing pages that are so complex or opaque that they reduce rather than support transparency.

Some software companies seem to pride themselves on the complexity of their pricing and provide their sales teams with complicated pricing calculators that are basically black boxes, for the sales person and the customer. The pricing calculations are often based on obscure technical criteria that only the seller really understands. Some very powerful, quasi monopolies, can get away with this, but I doubt that anyone believes this pricing is fair.

Some people believe that cost plus pricing is transparent and therefore fair. Large procurement departments often believe this. One result is that they often demand that vendors share their costs. There are a couple of challenges with this. What costs are to be included here? Just the variable costs or some combination of variable and fixed costs? How does one account for sunk costs in R&D or staff training? Should there be an allowance for future R&D or staff training that may or may not benefit the client. Costs seem clear and transparent but for most businesses they are a slippery thing.  Of course, cost plus pricing does not reflect value and puts the incentives in the wrong place. Good pricing design should work to align value for buyer and seller and create a positive sum game. Cost-based pricing does not do this.

Consistency

Have you ever been frustrated when buying an airplane ticket online to see the price change as you try to make the purchase? The same thing often happens when making a hotel reservation. How does this make you feel? If you are like me, you get annoyed. It is even more annoying to learn that your friend got the same ticket for 20% less. Procurement people have the same reaction to this sort of inconsistency, only in their case their job can depend on it. The cardinal sin for a procurement officer is to have a competitor drive a better deal with a key supplier.

Consistency is a key component of pricing fairness. Treat similar buyers in a similar way. Do not change prices without considering the impact on your customers and partners. Avoid rapid and unpredictable price changes (especially those triggered by pricing algorithms or AIs that may be interacting with other algorithms and AIs to cause spikes and cracks).

Value

The best way to ensure that prices are seem to be fair is to create great differentiated value and then share that value with customers. Price is not usually included in Economic Value Estimation (EVE) calculations as the EVE is usually used as an input into pricing strategy and value communication. I do like the representation below as it shows how differentiated value, total economic value and price interact to define the economic value provided to the customer. If you are not providing value, there is no price that will be fair.

From LeveragePoint

How much of the value that you create do you capture back into price is a question of pricing strategy but you should always be providing additional value over what the buyer can get elsewhere.

You need to communicate this value as well of course. Value communication is actually a part of pricing transparency.

Impact of discounting

Discounting is the sword that cuts both ways. It can be used to improve pricing fairness but it often contributes to a lack of transparency and inconsistent pricing. Which is true at your company?

I know of several companies that offer discounts to customers who will not be getting the full value of a solution. Sometimes this is accompanied by the removal of parts of the solution that are not providing value (this is generally thought to be the best practice) but in a few cases these companies are discounting to make sure that the customer is receiving fair value.

This is the exception though. In most cases, discounting is either a negotiation ploy, and is factored into the the initial price, or is the outcome of negotiations. This is not always a bad thing. Sometimes the negotiation process leads to conversations that improve transparency and mutual understanding of value. The discount is a reflection of this conversation. One can see this in the bargaining that takes place in the souks or even in online trading sites. Too often though, discounts are erratic and depend on the skills and relative power of each player. Sales gives a discount in order to close the deal even if this reduces pricing consistency and fairness. Uncertainty about discounting (pricing transparency) gives rise to the fear that someone else is getting a better deal.

A well designed discounting program can improve pricing fairness if it is based on value-based principles and applied consistently. A reactive and ad-hoc approaching reduces the perception of fairness and will tend to drive prices down without creating happy customers.

Build fairness into your pricing strategy.

Fairness should be part of your pricing strategy. Look at your price setting methods and how you communicate price and ask the following questions"

1. Is it clear how we set prices? Can we explain this to ourselves? Can we explain this to our customers? Is our website clear on this? Can sales communicate it?
2. Is our pricing consistent? Do we treat similar customers in the same way? Is our discounting policy clear and consistent?
3. Are we creating differentiated value? Do we use this to set prices? Do we adjust prices based on the value we are creating? Are we sharing that value with our customers?

 

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The first few seconds of a cold call is really crucial.

It’s in those first 15-20 seconds that you have to establish interest for prospects to stay on the line and listen to you. And to do that right, you need to have a great opening line.

Yes, the way you open the cold call decides the success of the call.

We’re living in this world where its ‘hurry up and get to the point.’ Prospects don’t have time to listen to you. But besides being busy, they are probably receiving hundreds of cold calls every week, some even from your direct competition! So why would they want to listen to you, leave alone talk?

Before we answer that, let’s look at a cold call transcript which most Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) use today.

SDR: “Hi, may I speak with Susan?”

Prospect: “This is Susan. How can I help you?”

SDR: “Hi Susan, this is John from ABC company. We’re a Google-backed software company that helps companies like yours streamline their support. We have worked with many companies like XYZ in the past, and they have had a 51% reduction in their support queries. What I’d like to do is ask you some questions to see how your current process works and provide you with a solution that will help you save cost….”

Prospect: **Hangs up**

What went wrong here?

EVERYTHING!

• The SDR had zero connection with the prospect.
• There was lack of empathy that the prospect might be busy, or not interested.
• The SDR did not ask permission to take the call further.

Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes for a second. How would you feel if someone barges in on your day and starts making a pitch without asking your permission to speak further? You’re most likely to think what most prospects are thinking, “How do I get this salesperson off the phone!”

The key to effective cold calling is to establish a real connection with the prospect, empathize and be given the floor to make the pitch. Flyn Penoyer, Inside Sales Trainer and Strategist at Penoyer Communications said, “Before you start your “sales call” it is critically important that you have the prospect in communication with you. He or she must be “interested in talking.”

So how can you get prospects to listen and talk to you?

In this article, we’ll talk about some of the best cold call opening lines you can use to get prospects to stay on the line and interact with you. The article also gives you different variations of opening lines and some that you should totally avoid.

#1. “I must have caught you in the middle of something, but the reason for my call is…”

Prospects are busy. They are trying to get work done. So when you cold call, you’re catching them completely off guard and actually disrupting their work. An opening line that acknowledges the fact that you’re interrupting their busy day shows that you are not only honest but also empathic.

Cold calling is 10% of what you say and 90% of how you say it. And if you are using this opening line, here’s how to use it in the conversation.

SDR: “Hi Susan, it’s John at ABC Company. I know I must have caught you in the middle of something.” *pause*

It’s important to pause, giving them time to ease down, assess their surroundings and respond to you.

Prospect: “Well, yeah.”

In most cases, the prospect will give a positive response because everyone is busy and got something to do. So your next sentence depends on their tonality and their willingness to talk to you.

SDR: “Got it. I’ll be really quick. The reason for my call is… “

Or

“Can I call back sometime later during the day?

“Can I call you back on Wednesday at 3:30 pm?”

Other variations

“Hi Susan, it’s John over at ABC Company. How are you?” *pause*

How are you? How have you been? How you doing? Or any way to warm up to the cold prospect after introducing yourself. But if you’re using it for non-English-speaking scenarios, it may not translate best to reach the same level of impact.

“Listen, I know you’re busy, but the reason for my call is…”

What you shouldn’t use

“Sorry, I’m catching you out of the blue here. I’ll just take a minute.”

This line is a lot similar to the above ones but here’s what you shouldn’t do — never apologize at the opening of the cold call. It makes you sound weak and unimportant.

Instead, you can say, “I know I’m catching you out of the blue here. I’ll just take a minute.”

Cold calling tip

Use your first name: When you use your first name, your callers would probably think you are a customer or a friend or an acquaintance and would engage in further discussion. Introducing yourself with your last name would make the conversation formal and if it’s difficult to pronounce they may not want to take the conversation further simply because they don’t know you.

#2. “I didn’t catch you at a bad time, did I?”

People like to say ‘No.’ Their mind is super occupied with a lot of things that when a stranger, out of the blue, asks for their time, the answer is ‘No.’

This opening line goes along the lines of ‘Did I catch you at a bad time?’ but it gives a positive tone to it. When you use this as your opening line, you are leading the prospect to respond with a No which gives you the permission to talk and ask for a meeting.

So when you say, “Hi Susan, it’s John from ABC Company. I didn’t catch you at a bad time, did I?” the prospect is most likely to say No, allowing you to take the conversation further.

Other variations

“Hi Susan, it’s John from ABC Company. Did I catch you at a bad time?”

Many sales books and SDRs swear by that line as the best cold call opener. But here’s what happens when you use ‘Did I catch you at a bad time?’

• If prospects respond with ‘yeah it’s a bad time,’ there are chances that the SDR may blank out because they expect prospects to play as per their script, which usually never happens.
• When you use this line for C-suite people, it gives them a one-way ticket to say along the lines, ‘oh I was just about to get into a meeting.’ It’s hard enough to get them on the phone, and using this line gives them an easy way out.

Instead, you can make it sound positive by saying, ‘Did I catch you at an OK time? Did I catch you at a good time? Or Is it a good time to talk?’

Here’s an example of how you need to use these lines,

SDR: “Hello may I speak with Anthony?”

Prospect: “This is Anthony.”

SDR: “Anthony, did I get you at a good time, sir?”

If you say this with confidence, 90% of the people will say yes or hint to the word yes. And that’s definitely a green light for you to continue.

But here’s why there are huge chances for this opening line to work — 90% of the people will say yes before you introducing yourself. You are getting them into a situation where they cannot bailout of the call, and even if they don’t want to talk to you, it allows you to finish your conversation with them.

What you shouldn’t use

“Hi Susan, it’s John from ABC Company. Do you have a minute?”

Like I mentioned earlier in the post, when you (a stranger) ask prospects for their time on a busy workday, they are not going to give it to you. And most likely, your conversation is not going to last a minute, right?

Cold calling tip

Tonality: It’s not what to say, it’s how you say it. Talk to your cold callers like you are talking to a friend and not like you’re reading from a script. And most importantly, don’t be intimidated when you talk to C-suite people. Be relaxed, sound confident and make a conversation, not a sales pitch.

#3. “I was wondering if you could help me out for a moment?”

If you ask people for their time, they aren’t going to give it to you. But if you ask for help, they most likely will be receptive. People like to help because they feel good, or they believe in karma, or they are genetically programmed to do so. So how about using this psychology in your opening line.

Jason McElhone, Director of Inside Sales and cold-calling expert at MarketSource shares this opening line technique in one of his webinars. Here’s how he suggests using this line.

“Hi Susan, it’s John from ABC company. I was wondering if you could help me out for a moment?”

They don’t know who you are, but since you’re just asking for help, they will most likely say, “yeah, sure.” At this point, they are also curious to know who is on the line and what do you want from them. They would probably think you are a customer, a friend or someone who is lost and needs help. So once you have the prospect in conversation with you, thank them and talk about that one pressing pain point for the prospect.

“Great, I really appreciate it. Thank you.” *pause*

“Listen, the reason I’m calling, Susan is that most businesses are finding it incredibly challenging to streamline their support process.”

The word ‘listen’ is a subtle command, asking them to pause their work and hear you out. It also helps in mentioning the prospect’s name in your sentences to make them want to listen to you.

The other variations can be “Can you help me out for a second?” or in line with the one above.

Cold calling tip

Use international/toll-free numbers: Even before you get to the opening line, the prospects have to pick up your call. When you call them from an international or toll-free number, there are more chances that they will pick up the call. They will be curious to know who is calling them.

There are, of course, a lot more cold call opening lines that have worked for salespeople. Try out the ones mentioned in the blog, add your spin and let us know how it goes.

In the meantime, let’s have a conversation. Tag your friend or colleague and loop them in this discussion.

When I first started doing SEO it seemed like a piece of cake to me. In 2018, boy, how wrong I was. This job can drive you crazy, sometimes. Literally.

You have to do stuff like:

• Analyzing a ton of competitors links
• Finding the right keywords for the content
• Finding the right influencers for the campaign
• Finding their contact information
• Outreaching all of them in an organic way
• Tracking any little link trend

Folks who don’t know how it works could think it’s not stressful. But I used to drink more coffee than a whole Starbucks client base during my first campaigns. And, for some unknown reasons, my right eye used to do a really weird nervous twitching thing.

So, if you don’t want to run for a Guinness world record as the most stressed SEO pro of the world, check out these link building tools and use them to run your campaigns. They’ll make your life much easier (and less caffeinated!).

1. Ahrefs This is probably the most popular tool among SEO professionals, because it takes many useful features and puts them all in one place.This platform gives you pretty accurate metrics about:
   • The organic traffic keywords and top site pages that drive more visits to your competitor’s website
   • Thousands of keyword suggestions, keyword trends and a keyword difficulty score, which will make it easier to decide what keyword you’re going to target.
   • Backlinks. With advanced reports and filters.
   • Most shared content around the web for specific keywords
   • Rank trends. You’ll could not only see trends in clear and handy charts, but also set up alerts for specific changes in your rankings.

   Add to this a simple and good-looking interface and you’ll have a hell of a rockstar link building tool.

2. Buzzsumo Struggle to find the people to contact for your guest posts or links to your site? This tool reveals the humans behind the domains you’ve put your eye on.Most marketers prefer using this platform to find the right influencers and analyze what content is performing better on the net, in order to prioritize outreach.

   It also allows you to build and manage lists of Twitter influencers by industry. And this makes it a hell of a lot faster to connect with the valuable publications you’ve found.

3. Buzzstream Want to track and manage all the steps of your elaborated outreach campaigns from one single place?Well, Buzzstream is right up your alley.I have to say that the contact finder feature may not the best.

   But you can:

   • import from other sources the contacts you don’t find here
   • create different contact lists for different campaigns or different purposes
   • run bulk emails
   • avoid being too spammy, adding personalization to your pitches
   • monitoring responses
4. Hunter.io If you don’t know how to find the email of an influencer, this tool will be gold for you.It’s much better than Buzzstream in finding emails on a site, and much easier to use.Thanks to the Chrome extension, you don’t have to switch tabs or tools.Just activate the plugin on the prospect’s site and let it do the magic. You’ll have your much-desired email address in just a few moments.
5. Mailshake While Buzzstream offers you more features to manage your outreach campaigns, it would seem a bit complicated for some people. Not to mention that it could be a bit expensive for not established marketers.In which case you should opt for Mailshake. You must accept less functionality, but you’ll also have a simpler interface and a cheaper price plan.This makes Buzzstream better for large campaigns, while Mailshake for smaller ones.
6. Facebook Most of the businesses have a Facebook page.If you check the about section of the page, you’ll often be able to find the email you were looking for. Even if it’s not present on their site and the plugins can’t pull it out.
7. GuestPostTracker This site has the largest list of sites that accept guest posts.The list is constantly updated and integrated with the contact information of the site owners.Your whole campaign can’t be based on this site alone, but it’s obviously a great time-saving tool.
8. Linkedin This social media giant is a huge business database that can make your outreach much smoother.You can find a company info and message the directly, without the need of their email.But, if you prefer to manage all of your outreach in one platform, you can just pull out the contact info using Hunter.io, as you would do on the company’s website.
9. Google Sheets
   Some tools have developed specific features and reports to manage lists of influencers, links, domains, keywords and all the other stuff without leaving their platform.Nevertheless, Google Sheets are an awesomely useful tool for any marketer. You can easily export the data in these documents from any of the best SEO services, including all the above-mentioned ones. So, sharing all this data with your colleagues in an organized way will be a piece of cake.

Conclusion

Some of the link building tools mentioned here are very similar to others.

For example, SEMRush, NinjaOutReach, Pitchbox, CognitiveSEO, Kerboo, Majestic, SpyFu and others are very solid alternatives to the services I’ve talked about.

If you’re on a tight budget, check them all out to compare the pricing plans and the features, to make sure you pay only for the things you need the most right now.If you’re an advanced marketer, on the other hand, you could try several tools at the same time, especially for finding, analyzing and tracking links.

Having large amounts of data from different sources will make your campaigns more accurate. But such a sophistication is required only for large, complex and expensive campaigns. Definitely not the cup of tea of the average newbie.

If you have other favorite link building tools, feel free to tell us about them in the comments.

Regardless of the field you’re in, your sales team is the bread & butter that keeps your engine running. They work hard each and every day to ensure that your organization has a steady pipeline of customers eager to give your products/services a go.

No matter how skilled your other departments are, they’re the ones ensuring that you’re bringing in enough profit to keep the show running. So don’t you want to make sure that you’re giving them everything they need to reach their full potential?

Of course you do.

That’s why you’re here. To improve your sales enablement.

What exactly does Sales Enablement mean anyway?

For those out of the loop, sales enablement is when you provide your sales reps with all the information they need. All the materials and tools. So that they’ll be successful at each stage of the buying process. They’ll also be able to answer any question their prospect throws at them, all while guiding them to the end goal (a sale!).

This information can take the form of case studies, sales best practices, articles, etc. No matter what form the information takes, it needs to be easily digestible and transferable to every part of your sales department.

With that said, don’t think that the key to major profits is as easy as giving your sales reps a couple articles on the internet. Sales enablement is really tricky and many organizations aren’t using it correctly in their day to day operations.

To make sure that you’re successful in your efforts, we’ve put together a list of the 6 biggest sales enablement problems. All so you know what to watch out for along with the best practices that will get you to where you want to be.

6 Most Common Sales Enablement Problems

1. You aren’t investing enough time into training your new sales reps and aren’t equipping them with the right resources

Yes, as it turns out, one of the biggest mistakes people make with their sales enablement starts right at the beginning of their onboarding process.

(Source: Here’s a great visual (attached to a great article) from MindTickle)

You need to train your sales reps on how to use the content that your company has readily available along with why it’s so important to do so, and the best way to do that is by incorporating these pieces of content into your onboarding process so that your trainees are better familiarized with it.

Along with the correct use of content, ask yourself this, “Am I giving my sales reps EVERYTHING they need to be successful?”

By this, I mean are you coaching your reps on how to promote your products/services, how to present them to leads, and how to deliver as much positive information concerning the value of your product as possible.

I know that sometimes this step is hard, but it is necessary if you want your team to reach the level of engagement and success that you want them to.

2. Not enough cohesion between your sales & marketing

Make sure to settle any beef between your sales and marketing teams, then sit them all down to discuss your new plan of action.

Because a major issue with most companies’ sales enablement is that their sales & marketing teams don’t work together.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you should tear down your walls and adopt an open floor plan. Just that more effort needs to be put into making sure that these two departments are on the same page with their strategies and that they’re working as one cohesive unit.

So get out there and make sure that your sales & marketing departments are sharing information, insights, and are working together to nurture leads and close deals for your organization.

3. You’re not making quality marketing content

Now that you understand how important content is during the onboarding process, you can also understand why it’s important that you’re working to ensure that your blogs, case studies, articles, and even your social media posts, are all of the highest quality that will not only display your organization in a good light but will fill your sales reps in on everything that they need to know to be successful.

(Source: Kapost)

Here are some tips to consider when building your content so that you know you’re getting the most out of it

Key Point: Be research-driven and use hard data.

Although this may seem like a no-brainer, you’d be surprised by the lack of research and planning that goes into many brands marketing materials. Unfortunately, many brands see their blog or other written collateral as a task that they can rush through in their spare time, and the lack of effort can be seen in the end result.

To avoid creating any content that misses its mark, make sure that you’re pulling plenty of hard-data and researched points so that your content is better accepted. This is because when it’s delivered with information from solid sources that support your point, your sales people will be more likely to take the message seriously.

Outline all of your important points beforehand

Also, in order to make sure that your piece hits all the points that you want it to, make sure that you’re taking the time to thoroughly outline each and every piece with your research and important points before you get started. That way you’re sure that you don’t miss anything and that you’re hitting each point that you wanted to.

4. You’re not using enough technology & tools to supply your sales reps with the information to do their jobs

We can all agree that a major part of sales in 2018 is utilizing technology to its fullest extent so as to make a sales person’s job that much easier (CRM, chrome extensions, automation tools, etc).

A good piece of technology should help the sales rep qualify leads and instruct them on the best way to go about initiating a conversation with a new lead.

To get a better idea of what to look for, you should work to find:

• Automation tools that increase the productivity and efficiency of your sales reps.
• CRM software that tracks and manages your leads as well as relaying important data regarding your sales process.

Remember that you’re a sales person in the 21st century. So make sure that you have the tools that represent that.

5. You aren’t focusing on building meaningful relationships with your clientele

In sales, building a strong relationship with your clientele and prospects should be your number one priority. Having a solid relationship with your leads puts you in a much better position. Way better than another sales rep who is just shooting a generic sales pitch to a bunch of emails on a contact list.

Here are some guidelines to help guide yourself to successful relationships with your clients:

Always share knowledge

Your clients may not have the same level of expertise in your field as you do. So, make sure that you’re sharing all important information with them. Doing so will create more confidence and trust in you in each step of the process.

Maintain a high standard of communication

A large part of making your client feel special is responding to their questions and comments. Especially in a timely manner. All so they know they’re one of your top priorities. This means that you should never take more than one business day to respond to an email or phone call (unless you have a really good excuse).

Be good with feedback

Lastly, it’s crucial that you lay the foundation down. Creating a place your clients feel comfortable being as honest and open with you as they need to be. If not, they’ll feel like their ideas and concerns aren’t being taken seriously. They may want to move on to the next salesperson that will make them feel at ease.

Always exceed expectations

This one may seem like a no-brainer but is worth bringing up regardless. You should always be working to exceed your clients’ expectations at each step of the process.

Have your client in mind and start thinking of what’s important to them. This could mean delivering work that’s really visually appealing. Or giving detailed walkthroughs so that they fully understand each feature. Things like that.

If you approach sales enablement the correct way, your sales reps will be equipped with everything they need to cultivate a strong relationship with their clients and will stand out from the sea of salespeople trying to get their attention.

6. There’s not enough transparency within your own organization regarding your own sales process

What’s one of the most common problems with organizations? Transparency. Usually, those with a complex sales process are less transparent. That tends to cause a level of distrust and a lack of collaboration. Everyone at the company should be able to see what’s going on behind the scenes. Especially when it comes to something as important as sales.

Start by openly sharing the information that you all have on your prospects and customers. Along with instilling levels of transparency within your other departments. That way everyone can benefit from each others’ knowledge base.

Closing thoughts

Sales enablement has the power to really benefit your sales reps. But only if you use it correctly. Give it a half-hearted effort and it’ll show half-hearted results.

So take the time out to sit down with your sales department. And thoroughly dissect each step of your sales process to understand exactly where and how sales enablement can benefit your organization.

Continually improving the customer experience and satisfaction with service support is a goal of every service desk. While there are many metrics that influence measures of customer satisfaction, the four service desk agent performance metrics discussed here are among those that have a great impact and should be monitored in real-time, as well as trends occurring over a period of time.

1. Forecast Accuracy

Forecast accuracy refers to forecasting the number of calls that will be received for a given period of time. Clearly, if the forecast anticipates 1,000 calls during a certain period but the service desk actually receives 1,500, customers will not be served as they should. Too few agents to handle the call volume will lead to increased wait times. Average Speed to Answer and Abandoned Call Rate will both climb into unacceptable territory. Cost per Contact will increase due to long wait times on toll-free lines. Agent Utilization will surge to undesirable levels as agents struggle to keep up with the call volume.

On the other hand, if only 500 calls are received during the time when 1,000 were forecast, Agent Utilization will plummet, and Cost per Contact will skyrocket. While customers should experience excellent service during such a period, it will be at the expense of the service desk due to over-staffing.

As such, forecast accuracy is a metric that affects both cost of operation and the customer experience. Calculating the forecast accuracy for a service desk can be done in many ways, ranging from simple to more complex approaches that use standard deviation and correlation coefficients. Here are two ways that are both straightforward and can yield useful information.

Forecast accuracy is a ratio that can be expressed as a percentage using this formula.

If the service desk receives a total of 1,000 calls and had forecast only 947 calls:

Note that “Total Calls” refers to the total calls made to the service desk, not the number of calls answered. When a customer calls, abandons the call, then calls again, using Total Calls may slightly overstate the actual volume. However, this is a better approach than counting only the calls that were answered—which can potentially understate the actual call volume substantially.

A similar approach can be used when evaluating forecast accuracy for a service desk over several periods of time. For example, assume there are six periods of time—they could be days, weeks, months or another period. The table shows the total calls received during each period and the forecast that was made for each. The “Error” column shows the over- or under-forecasting as a difference between Total Calls and the Forecast. The “% Error” column shows that same metric as a percentage, with an “Average Apparent Error” of 4.14% over the entire period being monitored (highlighted in grey).

This is an apparent error because the positive and negative errors and percentages cancel one another out to some degree.

A more accurate measure of forecast accuracy uses the absolute value of each error. Therefore, the ABS(Error) column shows those absolute values which do not forgive forecasting errors, whether positive or negative. Similarly, the “ABS(% Error)” column shows that error rate as a percentage. The “Average True Error,” highlighted in orange, provides a more accurate measure of forecast accuracy. Most industry experts suggest that forecasting accuracy should remain at five percent or less.

2. First Contact Resolution (FCR)

All forms of contact will need to be considered in this metric and it has a powerful effect upon customer satisfaction. Imagine dialing into a service desk over a period of a few weeks only to find that the agent who greets you is unable to resolve your incident on three of five different calls. Many callers would perceive the service desk as being staffed with untrained agents, and that perception of the service desk would extend to the caller’s perception of the company as well. “What’s wrong with XYZ company? I have to talk to two or three different people just to get an answer.”

The most useful formula for FCR compares the number of contacts handled successfully by the first tier support agents divided by the number of contacts received. Note that “Total Contacts Received” needs to be adjusted to remove those contacts that, by policy, cannot be handled by first tier agents. For instance, a customer calling to replace a failed hard drive must be referred to the team that goes on site and deals with hardware issues, which is usually not the first tier of agents.

3. Average Handle Time (AHT)

Also known as Contact Handle Time, this metric measures the average time a service desk agent spends in resolving a customer incident. That includes the time speaking (or chatting online) with the customer, any time spent on hold after the call has begun, the time spent wrapping up the call and any after-call work required to fully resolve the incident. After-call work might include updating the ticketing or CRM system, for instance. The sum of these, divided by the number of calls handled.

Not all service desk managers include On-Hold Time in this metric, which is a mistake. Not including the On-Hold Time can under-state AHT when service desk agents place callers on hold to either “take a break” from the call, or to shorten their AHT metric.

Where agents have been suitably trained to handle the calls they receive, Average Handling Time reflects the complexity of incidents the service desk handles. An agent resolving a complex international banking issue, for instance, is likely to have longer average handle times than an agent answering basic questions about opening a consumer bank account.

Average handle time can have a profound effect on the customer experience if management focuses too strongly on AHT. Agents, feeling under pressure to resolve every call as quickly as possible, may rush to complete each call or unnecessarily escalate it to the second tier of agents. In either case, agents do not resolve incidents to the satisfaction of the caller, which can impact customer satisfaction.

4. Service Desk Efficiency

If you define efficiency as the work input that achieves a particular output, the simplest measure of efficiency requires only two metrics.

The first relates to the cost of operation, which measures the work input. You may use a number of metrics that relate to cost, but perhaps the simplest to use is the Cost per Contact metric described elsewhere.

The second metric measures the output, and for this the Customer Satisfaction metric serves well.

Tracking these two metrics over time gives you a reasonable measure of efficiency, and there’s no question that an efficient service desk influences the customer experience.

Actively Monitor Your Operation

The best approach to closely watch these four service desk agent performance metrics that influence the customer experience is to monitor real-time trend analysis and automate your reporting capabilities. You should consolidate data from multiple service support centers and multiple technology sources from all of your vendors. When you bring in and centrally review all the relevant data from these systems, you’ll have the actionable performance metrics for which you can make informed business decisions and optimize your operations.

This article was originally published on the RDT Metrics blog and was reprinted with permission.

Devon Zuegel is a software engineer, urban planning enthusiast and Strong Towns reader. Today we're sharing an essay she wrote, originally published on her website. 

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The way we live is shaped by our infrastructure — the public spaces, building codes, and utilities that serve a city or region. It can act as the foundation for thriving communities, but it can also establish unhealthy patterns when designed poorly.

For decades, San Francisco’s waterfront was dominated by the massive Embarcadero Freeway. The Ferry Building was hidden in the shadow of a grungy overpass, and the double decker highway blocked residents’ access to the bay all along the eastern edge of the peninsula. One local writer said the freeway “shunted pedestrians through a dark, sooty gauntlet between downtown and the San Francisco Bay".

Then, in 2002, the freeway was replaced with a palm-lined boulevard and a streetcar line down the middle. The Embarcadero was transformed from a fading industrial zone into a center of tourism and leisure. San Francisco’s stunning waterfront became a destination rather than just a place to pass through.

The turning point for the Embarcadero was the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that destroyed the freeway. Demolition proposals had always been shot down due to fears that it would create unbearable traffic.

The quake forced San Franciscans to live without the freeway, and they quickly discovered that the feared congestion never happened. Instead, the neighborhood saw a massive economic boost, and the new boulevard is one of the best parts of the city. By damaging the highway beyond repair, the quake was able to do what political pressure couldn’t.

Unfortunately, America’s inherited infrastructure is more like the old Embarcadero Highway than the boulevard that replaced it. Urban planners spent the 20th century building cities for cars, not people, and alternatives to driving have been systemically undervalued. This legacy has resulted in substandard health outcomes, missed economic opportunities, and a shortage of affordable housing.

We can’t wait around for another earthquake to reverse generations of bad policy. Luckily, it doesn’t require a natural disaster to begin reshaping our infrastructure. Small changes can have an outsized impact in expanding alternatives for how people move around. Rebuilding our infrastructure to enable walking, cycling, and mass transit would bring health and economic benefits that far outweigh its price tag.

Our infrastructure is making us sick

The American health care crisis is, at its heart, an urban design crisis. To get a sense for the toll our car-centric infrastructure has taken on our physical and mental well-being:

• Car fatalities have killed far more Americans than all of our wars combined.
• Commuting by car ranks as people’s least favorite regular activity.
• A 23 minute driving commute has the same effect on happiness as a 19% reduction in income.
• For every extra 5 minutes Atlanta residents drive each day, they are 3% more likely to be obese.

“Doctors focus on remote disease risks, but what really kills us is our built environment," explained Dr. Richard Jackson, a physician who served for 9 years as the CDC’s Director for Environmental Health. People who walk, bike, or take some form of mass transit to work weigh less, live longer, and have lower divorce rates than commuters who drive. They also have lower rates of depression, more free time, and a more robust social life.

Despite its costs, driving remains the most common mode of travel in the US, at around 85 percent of commuting trips. One out of six workers commutes more than 45 minutes each way, and private vehicles account for 60% of trips a mile or shorter. But it’s not drivers’ fault; rather, our infrastructure encourages — and in many cases forces — us to depend on cars. Our communities are built at the scale of highways rather than humans. Expressways slice through neighborhoods, and widened streets prioritize the flow of cars over making it worth traveling to their destinations. In the 1950s and 60s, large scale demolitions were commonplace in order to make way for fast moving motorized traffic, and communities from New York to Los Angeles have never fully recovered.

People choose to drive despite its costs because they lack reasonable alternatives. Unfortunately, this isn’t an accident of history. Our transportation system has been overly focused on automobile traffic flow as its metric of success. This single-minded focus has come at the cost of infrastructure that supports alternative ways to travel. Traffic flow should, instead, be one goal out of many. Communities would be far healthier if our infrastructure actively encouraged walking, cycling, and other forms of transportation rather than subsidizing driving and ignoring alternatives.

Walkability has major economic benefits

It makes financial sense for cities to invest in walkability. There is a scarcity of walkable neighborhoods in the US housing market, and this unmet demand is reflected in the prices people are willing to pay for housing in those cities that embrace a pedestrian-friendly model. Cities that remove barriers to pedestrian-centric development have an economic edge on those that do not.

San Francisco’s Ferry Building, before and after the Embarcadero Freeway was torn down

Having a critical mass of pedestrians signals that a neighborhood is safe and interesting, which, in turn, draws more people into that area. This creates a positive feedback loop; with people and opportunities nearby, it becomes increasingly attractive for businesses and residents to move in. Walkability correlates with property values so closely that it has become standard practice in real estate to advertise a home’s “walk score" because a high grade earns a premium. Websites like Zillow and Apartments.com offer calculations for commute length and walkability to everyday destinations like grocery stores, and it is common for real estate agents to advertise the walk score as a major selling point.

The Embarcadero in San Francisco is a perfect illustration of how transitioning away from car-centric infrastructure can revitalize a neighborhood. When the highway was removed in 2002, the area experienced a massive economic boost. Within four years, housing in the area increased by 51% and jobs increased by 23%, and by freeing up land for development, the highway removal has also increased the city’s tax base.

Portland, OR offers another helpful model. In contrast to most American cities, Portland has invested in multiple modes of transportation for decades. As a result, its residents drive 20% less than other major metropolitan areas, and the city has experienced economic benefits beyond just a rise in property values. “Portlanders save a bundle on cars and gas, [so] residents have more money to spend on other things they value, which in turn stimulates the local economy," said economist Joe Cortright in Portland’s Green Dividend. Less driving leads to greater savings, and those savings flow to the local economy rather than distant oil producers.

Walkability makes communities more affordable

Walkable, transit-friendly cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are infamous for their high housing prices. However, when housing and transportation costs are considered together, these places are far more affordable than sprawling cities. It is true that rents and property values decrease as you move farther from the city center, but the added costs of owning and operating a car quickly burns through whatever savings came from moving away.

This calculation is even more clear when you also consider the opportunity cost of driving. Time spent in traffic means you have less time to do other things that you care about. “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every 10 minutes of commuting results in 10% fewer social connections," said Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam. “Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness." Workers with long commutes are also less productive. Employee absenteeism would be about 15–20% less if all workers had a negligible commute, and workers with a long commute are more likely to leave early or arrive late.

Affordable housing would be far more attainable if our infrastructure encouraged walking and alternative forms of transportation. Parking minimums are one example of how car-centric infrastructure works against this goal. A standard parking spot occupies as much square footage as a small studio apartment, and that’s without factoring in the driveway space required for maneuvering into the spot. All in all, shops in California are required to provide 288 square feet of parking space for every 250 square feet of retail space — 115% more space is required to accommodate the parking for any new retail development. In Los Angeles, 3.3 spaces exist for every car in the city. Other states have similar or worse requirements. As a result, acreage devoted to parking hovers around 30% of the ground area in the core of the average sun belt city. This is area that could otherwise be used for some other productive use. If we could make even a tiny dent in the amount of space consumed by parking, we could greatly improve the affordability of cities.

Parking minimums not only consume valuable space, they also induce more driving. With so much area devoted to parking, the distance between destinations increases, which in turn increases the necessity of driving. With more drivers doing more traveling, more parking spots are needed to accommodate their cars, continuing this vicious cycle. On the bright side, this also means that the benefits of changing these requirements are compounding. If we loosen requirements, we would also see a reduction in demand for parking spots, because the demand for driving itself would decrease as destinations cluster closer together.

Fun fact: SimCity was forced to pretend that all parking lots were underground, because the game would be “really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots". SimCity’s lead designer explained, “I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities … We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive."

Tactical, concentrated improvements have an outsized impact

It is feasible — both financially and politically — to make cities more walkable. Simple, low-cost improvements to features like painted bike lanes, wayfinding signs, curb cuts, and tree coverage have an disproportionate impact in transforming a car-dependent metropolis into human-scale, walkable neighborhoods. It is rare that cities find a goal that is both worthwhile and attainable, so urban planners should jump on this opportunity.

Concentrated efforts to revitalize a small area can have a massive impact on an entire city. Mountain View, California, where I grew up, is a great example of this. When I was a kid, the town’s suburban sprawl required a car ride to get anywhere. However, in the past few years, resources have been directed towards making specific areas in and around downtown more walkable, and residents all over town have seen the benefits.

In the summer, the main street is closed for weekly street festivals. Downtown parking spots have been replaced with cafe seating, separated from the road by planter beds. The Stevens Creek Trail connects otherwise isolated neighborhoods to these walkable zones, providing a corridor extending from the marshlands at the edge of the city into the heart of Mountain View and through three other neighboring cities. This corridor lets residents all over town benefit from efforts concentrated in a few small areas of the city.

Most streets are still oriented towards cars, but few neighborhoods are more than a short stroll away from a connection to pedestrian-friendly zone. When used strategically, limited resources can revitalize the walkability of an entire community.

A parking lot becomes a farmers market in Mountain View.
Bike lanes on Market St have made San Francisco far more bike-friendly.

Communities all around the country have begun to to experiment with retrofitting their built environments in other small ways. The changes don’t have to be radical — they can be as small as repainting crosswalks or planting more trees to provide shade from the sun. California requires employers who provide parking for employees to offer a cash allowance in lieu of a parking space. It has become common for downtowns to close Main Street for farmers markets and street fairs, and food trucks are a popular way to attract people to public spaces without the risk and hassle of setting up permanent shops.

Improvements can range from grassroots efforts to add seating in public parks to city projects to reshape road networks and everything in between. Each community is different in its needs, resources, and existing infrastructure, so I find it particularly exciting to see how different towns come up with creative solutions that fit their particular situations.

Walkability leads to better health outcomes, more affordable housing, and greater economic vitality. The best part is that easy, low-cost changes can go a long way in improving the options for how people move around their communities. Cities all around the country have begun to appreciate and capitalize on alternative modes of transportation, especially walking.

We still have decades of auto-dependent land use trends to offset, but small shifts in the way our received infrastructure is designed can go a long way to making our neighborhoods more walkable — and in turn healthier, more affordable, and more vibrant.

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The explosive growth of technology has rapidly changed -- and will continue to change -- the sales game. That means new skills are required for success.

Many of the brute force activities that have set sales leaders apart in the past are being taken over by technology. Why pound the phone or knock on doors when it’s easy to set up a sequential marketing program and have AI comb through social posts looking for buying indicators?

Likewise, easy access to information has placed control of the buying process firmly in the hands of prospective customers. They don’t need a salesperson to feed them facts and features. Those things are a Google search away.

So, how do you build skills that will propel you to success in the new sales world?

What's Old Is New Again

In the new sales environment, prospects need someone to help them translate information into a useable form. They need someone with the expertise to help them make better, more efficient decisions.

That’s where the modern salesperson steps in.

Successful salespeople create and facilitate relationships with their prospective customers. They use those relationships as bridges to provide insight into the customer’s buying process. And, ultimately, they position themselves as the solution to prospects’ challenges.

It’s not about out-machining the machines. The interpersonal skills of the past have come to the forefront again. A salesperson’s ability to build a relationship with their prospect, to ask the right questions, to discover their pain points, and to creatively identify solutions are critical to success.

You Can’t Rely Solely on Traditional Training Methods

This evolution has left sales organizations scrambling. Many of these skills don’t come from work in the classroom or the convention center. Traditional training formats, like sales training or reading sales books, can only go so far.

The problem is compounded by the overwhelming demands on our time. It’s hard to spend a day at a training session when you know how many emails are waiting for you. And most of us have a book or two just waiting for us when we can find the time.

Functional Skills for the Modern Salesperson

Instead of waiting for your company to provide training, it’s possible to borrow ideas from physical fitness to build your skills now.

Functional training in the gym relies on exercises that mimic the actions you engage in during your daily life. Similarly, you should look to activities you’re already engaged in as practice sessions to build your sales skills. You can find opportunities to train yourself in interaction, empathy, and creativity all around you.

It just requires intentional focus and a little planning to develop these skills every day.

Here are five functional skills you can develop on a daily basis.

1. Create empathy with your customers

Ironically, as we find more places to insert technology into our world, human interaction becomes more important. An algorithm might be better at uncovering a prospect’s needs, but it can’t replace your ability to engage human-to-human.

Empathy is an innate human ability you can improve with practice. Luckily, you’re surrounded by people every day you can run through repetitions with. As a rule of thumb, do these two things:

• Challenge yourself to make eye contact with everyone who serves you (like the Starbucks barista or waiter at your favorite restaurant). Greet them by name if they have a name tag.
• When you’re spending time with friends, take five minutes to ask them about a hobby they’re excited about. Do nothing but listen to them.

2. Uncover challenges and prospects’ pain points

The ability to dig deep with prospective customers is a critical skill. As technology takes over the simple and transactional sales, salespeople should be able to work with their prospects to identify and clarify the real problems they face.

Every salesperson thinks they’re good at asking questions, but the superstars will be the ones who learn how to be true detectives while also making their customers feel comfortable and forthcoming. To foster this skill, do the following:

• Go to a professional event and commit to talking as little as possible. When you feel like making a statement, ask a question.
• When listening to your favorite interviewers (on TV, radio, or podcasts), pay attention to how they ask questions to get people to open up. Practice the methods you uncover.

3. Influence audiences

One-on-one conversations are important, but there’s a good chance you’re going to be presenting in front of a group. At some point, you’ll be called in to speak to your main contact and four other people on the decision-making committee and you want to hit it out of the park.

To get comfortable in front a group, practice the following:

• Watch clips of top stand-up comedians. Find your favorites online and watch the same one at least three times. The first time, you’ll laugh. The second time, you’ll notice what they’re doing. The third time, you’ll start to learn how they’re doing it.
• Join a local toastmasters group. One of the easiest ways to improve public speaking is to practice.
• Take an improv comedy class. You’ll laugh a lot and lose some of your fear of being in front of others.

4. Be competitive (in a healthy way)

Competition can provide defined goals and positive rewards that motivate past the challenges in the sale profession. The goal is to develop a healthy relationship with competition. That means it drives without crippling you when you fail or pushing you to engage in activity that is detrimental to you, your teammates, or your company.

Competitiveness can be built like a muscle. The more you use it, the more effective it is. And the best person to compete against is yourself. Here’s how to cultivate this functional skill:

• Set weekly or monthly goals for activities you want to improve in outside work. For example: going to the gym, reading a certain number of pages, or getting to the office at a certain time. Track your results.
• Set activity and outcome goals in and out of work. Write them down on the first of the month, and review how you did and set new ones at the end of the month.
• Post your “personal bests” in the different areas of your sales role. Try to beat yourself.

5. Find creative solutions

Speaking of muscles, experts say creativity isn’t a nebulous attribute. In practice, creativity is the ability to combine information from two different areas into something new. And that’s exactly what salespeople need to do to provide value for their customers.

Practicing creativity outside work can have a positive impact at work, even if you don’t think you’re an artist. Here’s how to build those skills:

• Listen to podcasts that interview creative people and pay attention to where their ideas come from.
• Take a class. It could be art, cooking, or a foreign language, but it will make your brain work in new ways.

Functional skills are crucial for success in sales. Take time to develop them and defeat the robots -- or just work better with them.

“You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.”– Dad

This piece of advice applies to events throughout your life – from your first of day school to the first time someone stalks views your online profile. There is no such thing as a first impression mulligan! If your foray into social selling starts with an outdated or incomplete profile, valuable time spent prospecting will likely be wasted.

Previously, LinkedIn was viewed as a place for those who were desperately seeking employment. Today, the platform has evolved into a powerful sales tool. LinkedIn is one of the best places for you to establish your professional brand. Fifteen years in, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with 500 million users. As such, your social profile should not merely be a repurposed resume.

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

Unsure how to get started? Here are 5 ways to optimize your LinkedIn profile for social selling.

5 Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

1. Have a professional profile picture

Why It’s Important

Consider how you want potential business connections to view you. According to LinkedIn, profiles with pictures earn an InMail response rate of 40%. Do you have a professional profile picture? We all love cute baby pictures; however, they don’t project the best professional image of YOU at first glance.

How To Start

Many organizations or professional conferences (like SalesLoft’s Rainmaker) offer opportunities to have a headshot taken. If you don’t have access to those resources, you can source a photo on your own. That doesn’t mean a duck face selfie. Recruit a friend or family member to take the shot for you.

Tips & Tricks

Wear business attire for your photo. Choose a solid color shirt and stand in front of a simple background in a well-lit area. Don’t forget to smile! Your profile picture is chance to communicate that you are likable and trustworthy.

Example:

2. Make your headline compelling

Why It’s Important

A headline is a chance to state your value proposition quickly. It’s unlikely that your job title is indicative of the value you bring your customers. It most certainly won’t help you rise above the noise. The headline is the first line people will read about you are. Make it count! (No pressure.)

Tips & Tricks

Writing a compelling headline isn’t as difficult as you think. Think outside of the box and use the space to describe two things: who you help and how you do it. Not sure how to put it into words? Fill in the blanks below:

Helping [the people you serve] Do [outcomes most impactful to their business].

Think carefully about the keywords you include in your headline. LinkedIn crawls your headline to pull search results. Choose keywords that people would most likely use to find someone like you and incorporate them into your headline.

How To Get Started

Look for people in a role similar to yours at companies you admire. Analyze their headlines and see if they’re doing something that you can translate to your position. Then do something just a little bit better (or a lot better, if the opportunity presents itself).

Example:

3. Write a concise summary

Why It’s Important

When writing your summary, think about how you introduce yourself in a business setting. Your LinkedIn summary is a virtual elevator pitch. Elevator rides are 20 seconds. That doesn’t give you much time to make an impression. Use no more than three paragraphs with 3-4 short sentences to deliver your pitch.

Tips & Tricks

Make sure your summary highlights the key benefits of your offering, and tailor it to the audience you hope to reach. For instance, if you sell project management software to a niche industry, include a sentence or two about what your tailored solution means to customers in that market.

Reiterate the value proposition that you so eloquently described in your headline, and provide social proof of how you help companies achieve results. End the summary with a brief call-to-action explaining why a buyer would want to be in touch with you.

How To Get Started

There are two easily accessible pieces of information that can help to structure your summary. The job description you read as part of your hiring process will have a lot of great words and phrases for you to consider. Additionally, your company’s “About Us” or paragraph at the end of press releases is an excellent source of inspiration. Step it up a notch by adding your own spin. Just like you did in #2, seek out the profiles of people you admire for inspiration.

Example:

4. Post examples depicting how you help clients

Why It’s Important

LinkedIn offers you the opportunity to include media in your profile. While it may read similarly to a resume, you should not view your page as a static document. It’s an ever-changing digital portfolio of your experience. Write about relevant experience, and include presentations or visuals highlighting your best work.

Tips & Tricks

People are visual. The phrase, “a picture is worth 1,000 words,” is famous for a reason. Don’t bore people with 20 bullet points about a job you had 15 years ago. Presentations and project photos visually differentiate your value proposition. Does your company create amazing custom software applications for clients? Share a screenshot or a mock-up from your last implementation.

How To Get Started

Forgive the broken record, but look for inspiration in the profile of someone you admire. Don’t plagiarize; instead, use the ideas as a starting point. Rummage through your company’s blog posts, release notes, social media posts and other marketing materials for content. It’s content ripe for stealing! Marketing will be happy to see you’re using the material they created for you. Don’t hesitate to show off your work – you’ll give the marketing team the warm fuzzies and build a closer relationship with them.

5. Emphasize how you enable customers to grow their businesses

Why It’s Important

What do you hope to gain by being active on LinkedIn? If you are researching business development opportunities or getting to know a new client, the first thing you do is their LinkedIn profile. You want to learn more about their background and discover common ground. The reverse is also true.

When you send an InMail to a prospect, the first thing they do is explore your profile. Make sure the information they find is relevant.

Tips & Tricks

Write your experience section with an emphasis on how you enabled customers to improve their businesses. That’s what is impactful to a prospect, not how many times or by how much you exceeded quota.

How To Get Started

What was true for points 2-4 remains true for your experience section. Additionally, be sure to leverage content included in your first call pitch and other training and coaching materials to get traction.

Example:

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Now that you’ve completed your profile, it’s time to start selling. We’ll post a guide for getting started with social selling next week. In the meantime, start making connections!

Pro tip: Don’t request to connect with someone until you’ve had at least one interaction – either in person or online. If you have a mutual connection, send a personalized invitation explaining why you’d like to be in their network. Start adding value immediately by linking to research that’s relevant to them, or sharing an insight related to an article they recently shared. Personalization shows that you did your research and are genuinely interested in building a relationship.

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

The post How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Social Selling appeared first on SalesLoft.

Whether you’re just starting out after graduation, or you’ve been working for years, there’s one important question that you can ask yourself before you start job hunting. What is my unique selling point.

Having a USP (sometimes also called a unique selling proposition) is a marketing term. It’s used to by sellers to demonstrate to buyers why this particular product is different (and better) than the others. It’s not too much of a stretch to see how, with some vacancies attracting hundreds of applications, knowing what it is that makes you stand out can be a big advantage.

Your personal USP could be one of a number of things. It could be your experience, or your soft-skills. But quite often what makes a person stand out from other candidates isn’t job related; for example, an IT contractor has kept the fact he was a volunteer Santa Claus on his CV for 30 years because it works well as an ice-breaker.

So how do you work out what your personal USP is? Here are some things to think about.

Experience

Grab your CV and look through it. Rather than thinking about it as separate jobs, look for themes or consistencies. Have you always been given extra responsibility? Are there aspects to your roles that you’ve really enjoyed or excelled at? Do you have a significant number of years in a given field, or have you been part of some major changes?

Skills

Now carry out the same exercise but look at what skills you used in each job. Don’t just think about the technical skills that you learned on the job, consider things like soft of transferrable skills that you’ve picked up. For example: A manager you worked with may have had a good project management or personal organisation solution that you’ve come to use. Have you learned a foreign language?

Training

Look back as far as school and make a list of all the qualifications that you’ve achieved and any training courses you’ve completed. If you don’t keep notes on these things it can be easy to forget the one-day workshop in presentation skills, or your first aid certificate. Again, look for themes either in what you’ve learned (your expertise) or what they tell you about yourself. A constant curiosity and a willingness to do research are not bad things to be able to say about yourself.

Your Life

A really useful exercise that many counsellors get their clients to carry out is to create a timeline of your life. Beginning at the year of your birth, you continue until your current age adding positive things above the line, and negative things below. This is a great way to take a step back from your life and to see what the recurring themes are.

If you prefer to keep the personal stuff out of your work life, you could start the timeline with your first job and look at positive and negative experiences in work alone. Either way, once you’ve got your timeline and you can see the themes, think about what your personal values are. If you know what you are passionate about, what you believe in, it will be much easier to choose the right role.

Think About It

You’ve now got a lot of information about yourself, presented in ways that you don’t normally see it. What strikes you about yourself, from this new perspective? Do you have unique skill or experience? If there isn’t one thing that stands out, is there a combination of things which you think is unusual?

Hopefully, now you’ve looked at things from a slightly different angle you’re able to see yourself as more than just a list of jobs. Your unique pattern of training, skills, experience and values make you a rare combination. And I bet there’s someone out there who is looking to hire a person just like that.

Talk to Yourself

This might sound a little crazy, and if it’s outside your comfort zone, then you can always ask a friend to do a little role play with you. But you need to spend some time vverbalizingwhat you have just discovered about yourself, so you can hear how it sounds out loud. If a friend will help, ask them to question you about what you are saying, so that you can firm up your ideas.

Update your CV

Now that you know yourself better, it’s time to make sure that your CV better reflects this new version of you. Spend some time reworking it, thinking about that USP and the roles that you want to apply for – what is it about you that the interviewer shouldn’t ignore?

And now you’ve got a better idea of who you really are, it’s time to apply for that job that is so uniquely yours!

Sarah Dixon writes for Inspiring Interns, which specialises in sourcing candidates for internships and graduate jobs.

There is a lot of discussion in marketing around engagement. But what is it really?

Engagement is an early hallmark of success. It’s the new marketing currency. While there is quite a bit written about how desirable the outcome is (i.e., revenue), creating the right activities that result in engagement and measure engagement is more nebulous.

What is engagement?

1) Engagement is an outcome – As marketers, we try to drive awareness and address pain points our potential buyers or customers have. If we are doing our job well, buyers interact with us resulting in engagement. Engagement is an outcome, not a button you click.

So, in an environment that is noisy and overwrought with messages, how can you do a good job delight people and encourage an interaction?

2) Messaging matters – and being personal matters – It goes back to some basic principles, but it is essential to know your buyer and what they care about and when – and you need to communicate to them in a way that is meaningful. But how do we know what our buyers care about and how can we do this at scale?

1. Start by identifying where is it essential to be personal and where it is OK to be customized.
2. Read their blogs or articles
3. Check out earnings calls or annual reports
4. Follow them on social media or review their Twitter profile – what do they like and care about?
5. Pay attention to what they talk about at conferences

3) Delighting your buyer isn’t usually the result of one tactic. Life would sure be easier if this was true! In most B2B buying cycles, you will touch your potential buyers multiple times across a variety of channels. It is never just an email, targeted ads or direct mail – it’s typically a combination. Orchestrated plays coordinate a set of tactics across multiple people in a personalized manner. The cool part is the ability to SCALE a set of personalized interactions that actually work!

Here is an example of a broad-based email compared to a personalized play. This was for an executive event.

Here is some additional data of plays we run at Engagio.

4) Measuring engagement is understanding EARLY if right people at the right accounts spending time with us.

For many marketers attributing marketing initiatives to revenue is a top priority. There isn’t a marketer on the planet that doesn’t have to address if their initiative is effective or not whether it is for brand, acquisition, adoption, retention, etc. While the end goal is clearly showing pipeline and won revenue, we all know many B2B deals (including x-sell/up-sell) can take months to close. Measuring engagement is a powerful way to evaluate the early impact of initiatives at all parts of the customer lifecycle. Here is an example I showed recently at a Board Meeting. I am showing the right people at the right companies are interacting with us and the trend is moving up. Note, this engagement data includes marketing programs of ALL types – not just web traffic.

Above all, engagement is about time. Before someone spends money with you, they’ll first spend time with you. The more time they spend, the more interest they’re showing in doing business with you. It is a critical early indicator of success and something marketing and sales both understand and relate to.

I hope these tips make it easier for you to have success with your customers!

By Tibor Shanto

In the past, I have spoken about the importance of dynamics in sales from prospecting to close. Especially when prospecting, where salespeople put a disproportionate amount of effort on their “message”, without taking into account some of the other elements that impact how clear their message is received, dynamics. It would be easy to blame the salesperson, but remember, in most cases, someone (manager or management) put them up to it, telling reps to do it pretty much the way they are doing it, so when it does not work, don’t blame the rep.

Another success factor many sales types often ignore, or miss is context. Context is critical; it shapes the meaning of what you say and the prospect’s willingness to take it in, and to the degree, they will deal with it, if in fact, they took it in.

The Features Of failure

Most approaches still lean heavily on ‘features’ and ‘pain.’ Get past the buzzwords, and talk of ROI, few ads highlight anything beyond how their features address the buyers pain. To be fair, in most instances the scenario they do solve for the “pains” they speak to, the question is how many people see the same pain the same way, or do they define the same situation a differently based on context?

From a B2B perspective, at any given time about 70% of players in that market are not looking for what we sell. The “Status Quo” is busy doing what they are doing, and are impervious to anything we do from an indirect messaging standpoint. No matter how great our content is, these folks are actively choosing not to interact with it. Which why many are rediscovering telephone prospecting, or what real salespeople call cold calling. Great, but if we fall back on basically the same message, speaking to features and pain, and not greater traction. Why, no context.

Why would someone who is not experiencing the pain you are looking for, take time out of their busy day only to explain to you why they don’t ‘need’ or ‘want’ what you are offering? As you probably experienced, they don’t. But they do, on a regular basis take the time to speak to me when I change the ‘context’ of my message, from the temporary state of ‘pain’ they are in now, to business objectives they have set and how I have helped others achieve those objectives and the rewards they bring.

I can take the very same features and present them in context of outcomes they are looking at, and actively working to achieve, not current, and what they see as temporary, pain. When changing the ‘context’ of the future state, one defined by outcomes, usually successful outcomes, that benefit the business and the individual. Even when dealing with an active buyer who has ‘pain,’ by focusing on a future state, two or three steps beyond where they are now, it is implicit and accepted that whatever small problem plaguing them now would be solved as we move headlong to the better future state.

Stop Being A Pain

Sales as an industry are fascinated by pain, ask a group of sales people what they want to know about their prospects, and it’s always “I wanna know their pain point!” As one SaaS VP told me, “I only want to know about one pain, the one we can fix with our product.” Here is where the lack of context can severely hurt you, in this case, the shifting science around pain.

Sales has placed a lot of bets on the idea that “people will make more effort to move away from pain than they would to moving towards pleasure.” As long as that was the prevailing and accepted view, “selling to pain” made sense. So when trying to get a buyer to move off the line, running away from pain was believed to be more effective than showing them an alternated better state. First off, the 70% that does not perceive or admit to pain will be utterly deaf to your message.

But then the science changed, another piece of folk myth bullshit laid to rest. It seems that people will make more of an effort to achieve pleasure than to avoid or escape pain. That changes the context, doesn’t it?

Instead of running around the countryside looking for unsuspecting prospects to kick in the shin and then offer up the Aspirin, salespeople can spend time focusing on where their buyers want to go, not just on the hurdles in their way. After all, if you have not painted a picture of what happens after their pain passes, you value will end there. But if you start with their future state, the one they see as critical to their evolution and success. Surely you will be in a position to address the small road bumps they may be dealing with now. When a Status Quo buyer blows you off, it is not because they don’t believe you can help the one thing you are good at, it is because your message lacks anything of interest in ‘context’ of their real objectives.

A Bigger Following

The other advantage of objectives over pain is that you can engage a bigger audience in the buying organization. Pain-based approaches audience-centric, helping specific roles with specific tasks. But as most senior decision makers do not use the systems directly, they interact with the outputs or processed elements of “your solution”, but they are rarely hands on. Which means they can’t relate to or care about the features or pain we speak to; talk about those, and they bail. Present how your product can deliver their articulated future state, and the things that this will enable them to do, and you have a context for engagement. This allows you to engage more people in the buying group, and help them understand what you bring to the table in their own context.

The post Context in Blowing Sales appeared first on TiborShanto.com.

With the year half over, you may be wondering what happened to your book sales. Maybe you started off the year with the best of intentions, and maybe some of your book marketing efforts did well, while others fell a bit flat. The book promotion journey can often be a confusing one. Regardless of where you are in the book marketing process, now is a good time to check in with your efforts and explore how well your book discovery is working out. This will help you realign your marketing efforts and start selling more books.

When you read blogs about book promotion, a lot of them cite “book discovery” as a big issue. Too many books! Not enough book discovery! And, with all the books being published each day that statement seems to ring true. The problem is, it’s really only half true.

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Book discovery, in and of itself, is not a problem. For example, you can run Facebook ads all day long and get a lot of discovery. The question really is: are you getting the right kind of book discovery? And therein lies the biggest problem authors face. This is why I thought it would be a good time to hit the pause button on your marketing efforts, however briefly, and take a close look at what you’re doing. All of July will be focused on your core book marketing journey. I’ve created a series of eight posts that will zero in on the most popular ways to promote a book, and then identify how they can be done better. How you can increase or, in some cases, even triple the amount of exposure your ads get. Get more book reviews, and ultimately start selling more books on Amazon?

The New Reality of Book Marketing

If you would have asked me, five years ago, what would be trending in book promotion, I likely would have suggested something to do with social media. While social media plays a big role, it’s only part of the story. The biggest new trend, and the thing that will really help you start selling more books, is just one thing: repetition. The act of seeing a book over and over again is what separates the books that don’t do so well from those that sell like gangbusters. Add to that, that the repetition has to be focused on your core audience. So repetition in, say, a series of Facebook ads, all skewed to the wrong audience is the kind of bad book discovery I mentioned earlier. In bad book discovery, the people who are seeing your book don’t really care.

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So repetition is important, and the right kind of repetition could potentially add a significant increase to your bottom line and help you start selling more books.

What Your Price Point Says About Your Book

Did you know that the higher your book is priced, the more you’ll need to spend on book marketing in order to hit your book discovery stride and get readers to find it? This may seem counterproductive if, let’s say, you’ve priced your book high in order to “earn back” what you’ve invested in it thus far. But it’s true. For example, a book that’s priced over $20 needs to get in front of your intended market three times, before they’ll even consider a buy. But books under $3 need half that exposure. So, while there’s nothing wrong with pricing your book at $20, you’d better be prepared to do a lot of book promotion for it and drop the price regularly to $2 to help increase the level of exposure and reduce some of the book marketing work you’ll have to do to get it out there.

The other thing to consider is the time needed to convert a buyer to your $20 book, vs. a book at a lower price point. Books that are priced over $10 are rarely bought the same day, whereas a $2 book can be an instant purchase. I’m not advocating for cheap books, but I think somewhere in between $2 and $10 is definitely a good place to start selling more books, especially if you’re a newbie author. (For more information on pricing, you’ll want to read this article.)

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Your Cover, Your Message, Your Book Description

Did you know that your book’s message – title and subtitle will get noticed before your imagery does? And while it’s great to spend some time finding the exact right image for optimal book discovery. I would suggest you spend twice as long on the title and subtitle of your book.

Many times, authors think that readers will buy it anyway. This is so far from the truth, it’s almost scary. Most consumers buy in four, maybe six categories. They’re very focused on what they want, and what they don’t want. Consumers make near instant decisions and, in most cases, use their intuition to assess whether the book’s message is right for them. Your message needs to be crystal clear, or your consumer simply won’t buy. The same holds true for authors trying to break through to a new trend that hasn’t quite hit the mainstream market. You know what you’re writing about is going to change your area of expertise completely, and you want to be the first. Because who wouldn’t right? But here’s the thing: if your consumer isn’t familiar with this phrase, or issue, or whatever it is you’re addressing, it’s going to be a very hard sell.

Instead, in your book promotion, you might consider addressing something your consumer is familiar with that is tethered to your topic and bring them in that way. (Read more about alignment here!)

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Your Busy, Busy Amazon Book Page

Have you looked at your Amazon page recently? If you haven’t you should, because it’s pretty busy. Amazon does everything they can to push people to things they want them to notice. Yes, it’s your book page, but the competition for other stuff is fierce. The reason I mention this is that you’ve absolutely got to make sure that your page is tight and focused. Your book cover has to be outstanding, and your book description has to be compelling enough to keep shoppers engaged, rather than scrolling past it to visit some enticing Amazon offer.

If you aren’t sure if your book page is tight enough, ask yourself some hard questions. Starting with the most important one: Who cares? Who will care about your book based on just the description? This is what translates into book sales. So here are some things to look at:

• Is there a blurb you can lead with in your book description? Remember people like what other people like.
• Did you leave space in between paragraphs to make your book description scannable? This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Consumers don’t read, they scan. Short paragraphs, and bullet points when possible. All of this helps to open up your book description, so it’s breathable and easier to read.
• Does your book description lead off with the most important, key element of your book? If your first sentence isn’t specific or doesn’t zero in on why readers would love your book, you should a redo.

We’ll cover this more in-depth in another post, but for now note that your book page needs to be crystal clear, enticing, and keep consumers from clicking off to something else.

The Importance of Knowing Your Reader

It has been my experience that authors spend a lot of time agonizing over things like their book title, and book cover. Editing is hopefully right up there, but not always as top of mind as you might think.

But the biggest misstep that authors often make is not knowing who they are writing for. Sure, you should first write the book that you want to write, but if you aren’t focused on your specific market and fulfilling their needs in some way, then don’t expect to see any book sales,  either.

Do you know your reader, really? Do you know what your reader likes, dislikes or gravitates to when it comes to your specific market?

As I mentioned earlier readers are pretty particular, when it comes to the books and genres they gravitate to very specific book genres. The importance of knowing the “look” your reader gravitates to, as well as book specifics will be key to selling more books and acing your book discovery.

One way to get to know your reader is to read a lot in your genre. Get to know other books and authors is a good way to knowing your reader, too. As well, check out some top best-selling authors in your market and look at their also-boughts on Amazon. This will help you dig into your genre even further and maximize book sales.

This is one element of knowing your reader, the other is a reader profile which we are offering to our authors who want to dig into more reader demographics. You can download your own reader profile here, and we’ll dig into this topic more in the next couple of weeks.

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The Real Key to Advertising Your Book

I generally dislike running book advertisements. Mostly because authors tend to not run ads as effectively as they can. Ads, in and of themselves, have less direct power these days – unless they are connected to something specific like a specific book promotion, event, or something else. Or they are run in a very specific niche, like Amazon or Bookbub ads. When I say “less direct power,” what I mean is that they don’t have the wham factor they used to.

Facebook ads are a great example of this. While they tend to be a go-to for authors, they aren’t often as effective in boosting book sales as we’d like – and often because they are used wrong, aren’t specific enough to the demographic, or aren’t promoting something hyper-specific like a book promotion discount. Consumers seeing an ad for a book will rarely take action, just because they see this ad. Sure, having repetitive market exposure can help to increase consumer awareness to your book. But Facebook ads can get expensive, so you’ll want to use them the right way and for the right purpose.

Amazon ads are fabulous, but again they need to be run in a specific fashion. For example, taking the Amazon suggested keywords rarely, if ever, works well. In order to do these effectively, you’ll need to start by doing your own research. We’ve got a piece coming on ads, and I also wrote this article on Amazon ads recently, too.

The key to running ads, is not just to run them, but run them smartly. While the New York Times might seem like a great market, and certainly impressive, does running a pricey ad there make sense? Often it does not translate into book sales.

The other kind of ad is an eBook ad for your pricing promo. I love these, in general they are always great as a boost to your book sales. And this is a case where even if you aren’t selling a lot of books during the promo, these kinds of boosts can help your book discovery and visibility as well as your overall Amazon algorithm.

The month of July is dedicated to finding the right kind of book discovery, to help lead your reader to visibility and finally sales deliberation (should I buy it, or no?) Because if you can get them that far and your book cover is awesome and your book page is tight, you can likely make the sale.

I hope you’ll continue following us down this book discovery path, and I hope that at the end of this, you’re not only selling more books, but seeing the fruits of your book marketing labor return to you tenfold.

What have you learned about book discovery and what techniques and strategies are working well for you?

I’m writing this article during one of the longest heat waves, my home city Toronto, Canada is in the midst of right now.

But hockey is on the minds of all Maple Leaf fans right now, because the Maple Leafs just signed John Tavares on June 1st, the free agent opening day, and one of the best players in the NHL right now, to a 7 year contract.

So, us long enduring Leaf fans have some hope of possibly a Stanley Cup after, so far, a 52 year drought. All in spite of this summer heat.

Before I give you my reason why fighting in hockey reminds me of B2B marketing, let me tell you about a hockey fight when the Toronto Maple Leafs played the Montreal Canadiens in their 2013/14 NHL league opener.

Not only does hockey still have fighting, the only sport in the world that allows it without ejection of the players involved, except of course boxing and ultimate fighting, actual fighting matches; but until about two years ago, every hockey team in the NHL had an enforcer. The job of the enforcer was to fight the enforcer on the opposing team, so that his teammates will be protected.

And this is a fairly new phenomenon, within the past 10 to 15 years. Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous in your life?

In that opener, the two enforcers went at each other. And during the fight, one enforcer (The Maple Leaf) fell backward while he had a hold of the other enforcer’s (Montreal) jersey. As he fell, he pulled the Montreal enforcer down to the ice. The Montreal enforcer was unable to break the fall with his hands or arms, and he hit his head, chin first, and was out like a light immediately. He was diagnosed afterward with a severe concussion.

Fighting has always been in hockey, and so that is the reason many people say it has to stay. We used to watch TV with rabbit ears, but we progressed.

As a Canadian who has played hockey, and watched it all of my life, I think fighting needs to go. And this is from a guy whose Dad told me, that if I was ever in another hockey fight, he was going to pull me from hockey. But some of us do grow up, except the morons that run the NHL.

Every other sport has changed dramatically over the past number of years. Football players used to play both ways. Now they have a specialist for each position. Most teams carry three kickers.

Fighting in hockey is so anachronistic. Especially when you know that three retired enforcers died from brain injuries just a few years ago. One of these guys was in his 20’s and the other two were in their 30’s. Shameful & idiotic!

So what does fighting in hockey have to do with B2B marketing?

Well, just like hockey fights are archaic and dumb in today’s age, I believe most B2B companies also live in the past when it comes to their marketing. The marketing of most B2B companies is also outdated.

Is your B2B marketing archaic?

Most B2B companies, especially SMB’s, still seem to believe that hiring a so called sales person to cold call is the best (some believe only) way to get new clients. And we all know that cold calling is anachronistic.

Please see my blog post on this, In B2B sales, is the hunter role dead?

As I find hockey fights outdated, so is the way most B2B companies market their products and services. And what I find ironic about this is that many of these B2B companies are technology companies, and yet they won’t adapt to the new technologies of marketing.

Of course these technologies include a website which almost all companies have. But B2B marketing should also include the use of blogs, videos, Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitter, PPC, email marketing, etc. to their utmost. And yet very few companies use these effectively. Many B2B companies don’t use them at all

These Internet platforms need to be used extensively now, because that is where B2B clients are. They are looking for the products and services B2B companies sell.

They do Google searches. They check out LinkedIn profiles. They research you and your company on Twitter. They like watching demos and product and marketing videos. And they like to know what others are saying about specific products and services that you sell.

Research tells us that 80% of B2B buyers search for the products and services they want before contacting a supplier. And over 90% of B2B buyers research a company before they will talk to them.

You need to be using all of these technologies in your marketing, if you want to succeed. You need to step out of the past, and into the present, and use contemporary marketing to fuel the growth of your business.

However, a real problem is that these technologies seem to change every day. So it is very difficult, for SMB’s especially, to have enough staff to keep up with these changes. They need to hire outside resources to help them.

If you want to know how you can effectively grow your business using social media and other Internet platforms, please contact me and let me show you, for free, some of the ways you can grow your business.

BTW, hockey fighting has been greatly curtailed over the past few years, and hopefully it will disappear soon, so we can all enjoy the greatest game on earth, even more.

Below are six examples of sales discovery questions you should ask your prospects for an accelerated sales process.

In sales, it’s normal to spend hours rehearsing for an upcoming demo and fine-tuning the deck. But when it comes to the discovery call, many of us assume we can wing it.

It’s strange because the discovery call is how we uncover critical information early in the sales cycle. Details like use case and a prospect’s fit for our solution help us prioritize our deals. As account executives, the discovery call is our first opportunity to talk to a prospect after they’ve been qualified by an SDR.

The risk of doing it poorly or not at all is getting stuck in “the land of no decision” with the deal and your quota on the line. You can try dragging both across the finish, but even the best salesperson can’t persuade a prospect to buy a solution and use it if it’s not a good fit.

That’s why it’s so important to ask the right questions at this crucial step in the sales process.

1. What Initially Piqued Your Interest?

Whether you’re dealing with an inbound or outbound lead, this is a softball question that helps uncover your prospect’s motivations for checking out your product. It’s a friendly way of learning about your prospect’s challenges at the start of the call.

Some prospects may even give you in-depth answers that allow you to skip to more complex questions. Here’s an example of an answer I got:

“Our pipeline is light for next quarter and our CRO has asked me evaluate multiple vendors that can help us become more efficient in converting website visitors to qualified opportunities. We’re looking to make a decision on a live chat product by the end of this month.”

Since it’s a probing question, I’ve found prospects are willing to share information more freely. For inbound leads I tailor the question to ask, “What drove you to request a demo?” and if I’m chatting with a lead on Intercom, I rephrase my questions based on the pages they’ve visited, such as our pricing and solution pages.

If it’s an outbound lead, I ask, “Was there something specific in my outreach that piqued your interest?”

2. What’s The Problem You’re Trying To Solve?

Disqualifying leads is just as important as qualifying them. Not every prospect will be a good candidate for our product and to hit quota, we need to prioritize our pipeline and focus on prospects who can benefit from what we’re selling.

This question helps gauge a prospect’s fit for our solution. For instance, if the prospect is just “browsing” the latest tools on the market, that tells me they’re unlikely to move forward in the sales process and even if they do, it’s going to be dragged out. It’s always a good idea to learn how to walk away from a business deal.

3. How Are You Addressing This Problem Today?

Once you’ve determined what problem your prospect is trying to solve and the reason they took the meeting, it’s time to understand why they don’t already have a solution in place.

Is their current solution just not cutting it?

Has budget been the blocker to getting a solution in place?

Asking this question helps you learn more about your prospect’s internal processes. You’ll want to find out their current setup and what would be required to make your solution work. The last thing you want is to spend time forcing a square peg into a round hole.

4. How Are You Measuring Your Goals?

Peter Drucker famously said,

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

People buy software to solve problems but in order for your solution to be compelling, they need know what metric they want to impact. Let’s say, your prospect answers your question with:

“We measure our 10 sales reps on monthly revenue. Currently their quota is 70K per month and our lead conversion rate is 5%. If we increase our conversion rate to 8%, we can get an additional 5K revenue per month per rep.”

This is one of the most important discovery questions because it shows you how serious the prospect is about solving the problem. You can use their answer to drive urgency for the deal, especially if it starts to stall. You can point back to the data and highlight how every month they wait will cost them 50K in lost revenue.

Not having clear measurable goals is a big, red flag. If they expect to increase revenue but don’t know their lead conversion rate, it’s hard to establish realistic expectations for implementing your solution and doesn’t aid the handover to your customer success team.

5. How Far Are You Into Your Evaluation Process?

Understanding your prospect’s timeline and the competitors you’re selling against early in the sales cycle will have a profound impact on your win rate. It’s important to find out, are you the first solution they’re evaluating or the last? If you’re first into the deal, you can set the decision criteria for your prospect’s evaluation process and that gives you a big advantage.

If you’re not the first, then you need to be cognizant of the selling techniques your competitors might be using. For example, is their strategy to break down each of your solutions feature by feature? It’s important you approach the demo knowing what your product does well and critically, what your product doesn’t offer and why.

The goal of asking this question is to walk-away with those two key pieces of information: timeline and competitors. If you need to probe further, I suggest following up with the questions, “When would you like to be up and running with a solution?” and “Which other vendors are you currently evaluating?”

Also related: Using the Science of Perfect Timing to Improve Sales Outcomes

6. Who Else On Your Team Should Be Involved?

According to HBR, the average number of people involved in B2B purchases has climbed to seven. Chances are the prospect who hops on your discovery call won’t be the only stakeholder in your deal. It might seem obvious, but it’s critical to get face-time with all the relevant stakeholders.

New account executives will often ask prospects, “Who’s the main decision maker?” This is a really easy way to irritate your buyer. You risk making them feel small, especially if they are the main decision maker.

A better approach is to ask, “Who else on your team will be involved in the evaluation process?” Or say, “Typically we invite everyone who’s weighing in on the evaluation process to the demo. Who should I include from your end?”

Also related: 10 Tips to Build Rapport Internally to Navigate Complex Deals

Using Discovery Calls To Find The Right Fit

It’s the insights you gain and share on the discovery call that help you find prospects that are the right fit for your solution. Remember in order to gain your your prospects’ trust, you also need to add value. For me that means sharing relevant customer stories that tie the challenges my prospects are facing to what I’ve seen current customers accomplish.

The discovery call is a two-way conversation that sets me and my prospect up for success.

The post 6 Discovery Call Questions To Help You Prioritize Your Pipeline appeared first on Sales Hacker.

We’ve all seen countless times the commercials for Capital One where it ends with the question, “What’s in your wallet?”

That line got me thinking, “What’s in your pipeline?”  Is your sales pipeline nothing more than a sewer pipe, because you’ve got lousy leads, bad prospects and stalled customers plugging it up?

Early in my sales career, I had a boss who would rip me apart if I didn’t have a full pipeline. It didn’t take me long to figure out the best way to keep him off my back was to stuff my sales pipeline with opportunities.

The “opportunities” I had in my pipeline had little-to-no chance of ever turning into a sale, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was my boss didn’t bug me. Worse was what it did to me! First, it lulled me into thinking life was good, and second, it made it harder for me to know what I did need to be working on.

Check out this 54-second video where I did deeper into this issue:

 

 

Our goal can’t be having a massive pipeline. Our goal needs to be having deals that close.  Right now would be a perfect time for you to review your pipeline and pull out of it the sewage that’s plugging it up.

Ask yourself the hard questions you’ve been avoiding about each opportunity. The questions you need to be asking yourself include:

What specifically can I do now to move the deal forward?

Am I in control of this opportunity?  If not, why is it in my pipeline?

Is there someone else I need to engage with to help move the deal forward?

What is the timeline for the opportunity and what makes me believe the timeline is accurate?

Is this opportunity a good use of my time?

It’s time to get serious about what you leave in your pipeline. That’s why I’m saying you need to be asking yourself tough questions.  When I’m working with sales teams, a key item I focus on is the length of time it takes for a lead to become a customer.  The objective is to be working to make the time from lead to customer as short as possible.

If it only took you half as much time to close a deal, doesn’t it seem reasonable you’d be able to close more deals?  Obvious answer is “yes,” and it all starts by keeping the sewage out of your pipeline.

What’s in your pipeline?

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

In today’s digital world, it’s difficult to find someone who doesn’t engage on social media no matter what demographic they are in. Gone are the days of being nervous of our parents having a Facebook account when in these times family events and social gatherings are easier to plan online.

Key Stat: According to the Pew Research Center, nearly 70% of adults in the US are on at least one social media site.

If you’re in the business of gaining prospects, your role will be a lot more challenging if you don’t take advantage of the information your potential clients already provide online. Investing in social media lead generation (using social for prospecting new leads) is extremely effective when done right.

Interested in learning how to get started?

The following steps will take you through what to look for when it comes to navigating social media platforms for prospecting success.

Research and Identify Your Prospects

 

Before you even begin to engage with your prospects, do a bit of research online to develop a list of the type of clients you are looking for. Social media lead generation doesn’t mean you randomly select and message any account with your pitch. Once you fall into the area of spam, you have already failed.

Find prospects who are both similar to the clients you already have, as well as ones who you would like to have, but may be a bit more challenging or seem out of reach. You never know what can happen when prospecting through social media, and since this method develops a tailored pitch for your prospect, every attempt is great practice or future business.

Take your list of prospects and find out their social media profiles on the different platforms that exist. You’ll definitely want to look at the big three of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can simply type in their name into the search fields on those sites, or go directly to the prospect’s website where it’s likely they will already be linked.

Find prospects who are both similar to the clients you already have, as well as ones who you would like to have, but may be a bit more challenging or seem out of reach.

To take this a step further, find out who the exact people are that you want to be talking to.

Check out the “Our Team” or “About Me” sections of a prospect’s website to find biographies and information of key players within the company. You should see if they have their own individual social media profiles to follow and be sure to include LinkedIn in this type of search.

Do Not Introduce and Pitch Yourself Right Away

Just a reminder that social media is fantastic for lead generation and initial contact. That said, it should (almost) always be used in conjunction with other methods.

 

Often times, decision makers only take one method seriously. Meaning, they may not respond to messages on LinkedIn, but reply to emails. (And vice versa.)

Using 3-4 different outreach methods ensures that you saturate your lead pool just enough to maximize response. Using social media lead generation is a great start, but we recommend plugging that data into a tool and filling in the holes (i.e. physical address, email, etc.).

For instance,

You can definitely do some great preliminary research on potential leads via social, send them a cold email and then request an add on LinkedIn. (All of which you can do using LeadFuze.)

Just because you’ve now identified and followed your prospect on social media, doesn’t mean you’re ready to engage with them or have a well-developed pitch to send their way. Remember that social media lead generation is not the digital world equivalent of cold-calling on the telephone. This strategy means more work for a customized pitch to increase your chances of gaining business.

At this stage you want to get a feel for your prospect’s social media behaviors. Observe how and when they choose to engage online through their profiles. Are they more active first thing in the morning or do they tend to post more actively after the work day is over?

Other behaviors to look at are the type of posts and information they are putting online. Are the majority of their posts recycled from other social media accounts or do they take a more active personal approach and share their opinions and ideas to their followers?

Important Point

Remember that, on personal accounts, some people will have a disclaimer that “retweets are not endorsements.” When it comes to a business’s social media profile, it’s more than likely that any shared posts are in line with their own values or something that they relate to or support as a company.

Businesses use social media to not only showcase their brand and values, but to also engage with their own customers. If your prospect regularly interacts with customers on their own social media profiles, then it’s easy to assume that their level of social media savvy will lend itself well to your prospecting strategy.

Knowing when your prospect engages on social media will also give you guidance on when you should interact with them for your pitch. It’s difficult to know how many messages a person or business gets on a daily basis or how often they check their inbox, but they are more likely to see your message if they are already actively interacting online at the time you send it.

Build Your Personalized Pitch

 

You are now ready to introduce yourself to your prospect. It’s important to think about every line in the initial message that you send them and to plan to tailor your pitch to be in line with how your prospect uses social media. And perhaps they followed you back after you followed them. Good. It means they’re already receptive to listening.

Or maybe they recently put out a blog about the types of tools and services they use to keep their business running, and you happen to know of a way that they can do it better.

Notes such as these that you would have made during your research steps are the key to building your pitch. Consider how you yourself might personally use social media or online business listings and review sites to find a company that can fulfill a service you need. Put yourself in the shoes of your prospect.

What needs do you think your prospect has and what services can you provide to help them be better at what they do? Even though this is the basis of your pitch strategy, don’t forget to make it personal. In the world of social media, people appreciate the human factor behind the digital profiles and no one wants to feel like they are being pitched to by a robot.

Conversions Come from Conversations that Count

 

More on the robot thing. Seriously, just don’t do it. When the point of social media is to in fact, be social, you can’t approach a prospect with a general scripted sales pitch that you could use on just anyone. This is another point where posted content comes into play. Are your prospects already social media influencers? Do they write blogs on their company website or participate in common hashtag themes like #MotivationMonday? These are great opportunities to get in there and get a conversation going.

It’s very likely that your prospect would love feedback on their blog, or discuss the issues that it covers even further. What you have to make sure is that you are genuine about it. These days most people can see right through a sales pitch, and they’re less likely to be responsive if they feel that’s the only reason you contacted them.

Remember that you have to present something of value to your prospect, and a great way to do that is through conversations that help you understand them more. If you have genuine interest in the content or posts they create, then re-share them if they’re in line with your company values and interests.

The authenticity of your voice and the value that you represent to your prospect as a contact is what will drive the conversation, and hopefully the conversion, further.

Use Social Media to Highlight Your Own Values

Let’s flip roles for a second. Don’t forget that prospects can also come to you organically. Even based on your own social media posts. Do you openly and regularly interact with your clients through social media? Do you write your own blog posts that are relevant to your industry?

When there is potential for conversion, don’t doubt that a prospect will research you while they are making their decision. The more activity that you present on social media, the more authentic you become when reaching out to prospects through the same platforms you use daily.

Part of showing the value of your services is showcasing the relationships you already have with your current clients. If one of your clients announces some great news or an amazing achievement, you should boost that announcement in a post on social media. This shows that you truly care about the relationships you have within your network and about the success of those you work with.

The more activity that you present on social media, the more authentic you become when reaching out to prospects through the same platforms you use daily.

To be successful in connecting and engaging with prospects through social media, you have to show that you can present the services and value you provide on the different social media networks you’re using.

If you want to go even further, consider endorsing your prospect through your own social media channels, because they’ve done something that you feel is valuable to your network. What better way to introduce yourself to a company than to compliment what they do?

Things to Remember

The rules of traditional methods of prospecting still apply. The ways in which we can reach new clients has simply evolved. But don’t be too long winded in your pitch, and remember to create a mutually beneficial conversation that doesn’t waste anyone’s time.

Even though the above process may seem quite lengthy, it can actually decrease the time spent on your sales process because your initial research and early conversations help build up to securing your first official sales meeting.

Social media is a great tool in the sales process to build your reputation and easily and quickly display the services that you provide. Your own social media profiles may provide the validation a prospect needs to move forward.

Most importantly, remember that you are prospecting actual people. So make sure you’re being social, genuine, and conversational. You won’t get conversions by being an unidentifiable obscure business. But you can do by personifying your values and services in transparent and authentic ways.

The world of online courses has gotten bigger and bigger. So much so that it isn’t just universities getting on board. Experts have realized that they can use their authority to build a base of willing students eager to learn from them. This has led to thousands of free and paid online courses that are used as a marketing tactic for different brands.

If you are reading this, it can be assumed that you are at least interested in making a course. Or perhaps you already have one and don’t know how to promote it. Either way, here are 11 ways you can generate leads by marketing your course to the public.

1. Know Your Audience BEFORE You Create Your Course

For those of you who haven’t created your course yet, this is the best first step you can take. You probably have a general idea of who you are looking to educate. But how specific is that group? Having a more solid demographic in mind is going to help you to create a more balanced and helpful course.

Let’s say you want to create a course on creating a Disavow file. You wouldn’t spend the first half of the course going over the basic of what those updates are, what they mean and how SEO applies to website traffic. You would assume they already knew that much, at least.

Searching Google for your focus keywords will help you a lot when it comes to understanding your target audience. Google search results adapt to searchers’ needs: Google has been successful learning to give its users exactly what they want, so now we can learn from Google’s results what it is our customers need.

[Image source: The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Intent: What Keywords Tell Your Customers – Based on types of search results you can guess what the search intent is]

Additionally, Google Suggest:

… and “People Also Ask” results both give further insight into what interests your target user most:

As I shared previously, you can use Serpstat to see which types of “universal” search results any given query triggers:

… as well as use its filters to restrict your search to queries triggering a particular search type (and hence a particular intent):

2. Understand What Makes Your Course Unique

There are so many courses out there right now. If you aren’t offering something special, no one is going to take the bait. You should predicate your promotion on what it is you have to offer that is different than everyone else.

If you have a well-established brand, just having it offered under that banner could be enough. If not, you may want to start thinking of a few angles that you can use in a trial and error process to find what is the most effective way of advertising your course.

3. Monitor Your Competition

I was debating which one to put first: the point about being unique or this one. Quite clearly, one never goes without the other. In any industry, there’s always a brand that has positioned itself as a knowledge hub, i.e. the leader of niche education. In the SEO industry we have Moz, for example, which provides Q&A, weekly videos, downloadable guides, and more. Small businesses have SmallBizTrends that monitors news, offers downloadable business resources, and more.

If you are trying to become a knowledge hub in your industry, you need to monitor existing leaders to get a better idea of what they create, how they engage readers, and how they turn them into leads.

4. Take a Survey of Potential Students

A quick was to get the above mentioned unique perspective is to find out what it is your potential students are looking for in a course. If they are searching that must mean they haven’t found it in all the others that are floating out there on the web. It is a good place to start for ideas.

Try Wyzerr for collecting feedback: It gamifies the surveying experience making it more entertaining and engaging. There are many more surveying options though that integrate right into your WordPress blog.

It could also be used as a way to get their email, too … but more on that, later.

5. Use a Platform that Offers Flexibility

There are free course hosting platforms out there but they have little to no control over anything: Branding, pricing, linking, etc. You can send updates to your students but you cannot add links in them which is also extremely limited.

If you have at least some budget to spare, consider using a more advanced solution that would allow you to create lead generation magnets, lead generation landing pages and lead generation special offers.

Uscreen is one of the best solutions and it’s very affordable too. You’ll be able to brand your course, place it on your own domain, schedule newsletters and special offers and more. You will also be able to easily create your own app to offer your students a handy mobile access (and keeping them engaged with push notifications)

6. Use Multiple Promotional Platforms

Your blog and Twitter are obvious places to promote your course. But what about a landing page? A Youtube channel? Youtube videos? Instagram posts? Snapchat stories a teasers? Reddit? Tumblr? Slideshare?

You can really expand beyond the average platform and have a well-rounded promotional launch that takes advantage of the many different forms of media that different people respond to. You want videos, slideshows, infographics, blog posts, social media posts, podcast interviews… anything you can get that reaches a different audience that may respond better to varying forms of promotion.

7. Don’t Just Use a Single Learning Form

Just like not everyone responds to a single form of promotion, not everyone learns the same way. That is why online university courses use videos, graphics, written questions and discussions to help their students learn the material. It is a great way to make sure everyone learns something in a way that is beneficial to them.

One of the best ways to promote a course is to be able to boast about this multifaceted approach to learning. If they know they won’t just be reading page after page of dry content, they will be much more willing to sign up. This means more work for you, but it is worth it.

8. Leverage Email Marketing

Remember that hint about getting email addresses? Email marketing remains one of the most effective forms of marketing available. For small to medium businesses, the click-through versus open rate is pretty good and the fact that everyone has their phone connected to their email means you have mobile covered, as well.

If you can build an email list, or even if you can incorporate email directly into your course, you will be much more successful. I personally love using more traditional drip campaigns as a reminder system for daily or weekly lessons and to keep people on task.

Plus, you can use an email list for future courses.

9. Offer a Condensed Version For Free

The assumption is that you are charging something for your course. But even if you aren’t, you should have a free condensed version that acts as a “mini-course”. This takes some of the ideas, tips and lessons you have made for your bigger course and offers it for something faster.

It may seem as though you are giving the cow away for free. But this actually whets the whistle of anyone who might consider taking the course and isn’t sure yet if they want to invest the time, energy and money into it.

Think of a mini course as the lead gen magnet.

10. Have Promotions, Bundles or Discount Opportunities

Planning to make multiple courses? Have a service, product or ebook? It is a great opportunity to sweeten the deal with bundles. If not, you can create promotions, discounts and sales that give people your course for less.

One of the most effective ways I have used this tactic is to offer half off to the first twenty people who sign up—you should see the rush!

11. Get Out Into the Community

Did you know you probably have live meetups in you community about the very thing you are teaching? See about joining up by checking sites like Meetup.com. Join localized subreddits and Facebook groups. Start your own.

This gives you a chance to speak, meet others face to face and begin local promotion.

Do you have any tips for making a course hit the big time? Let us know in the comments!

The post How to Market Your Course to Generate Leads appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.