At Influitive’s Advocamp summit, countless professionals regaled the crowd with tales of how software enhanced their careers, touched their lives, and even earned them promotions. They drove home a valuable point that often gets lost in all the talk about generating demand and marketing to accounts: If your product helps your customers get promoted, it will spread like wildfire. Click To Tweet

In this post, I’ll explain how customer advocacy is a powerful undercurrent that helps products spread.

Ask Not What Your Customers Can Do for You

In a breakout session, Addy Clark, Director of Customer Marketing at FinancialForce, shared how an advocacy software advanced her career. She used it to direct customer advocates to engage prospects on social media and as the number of referrals and pipeline attribution skyrocketed, so did her title, from customer service manager to a global director. Clark humbly credited the software with a big part of that success. Kelsie Swensen, a marketing manager at Egencia, attested to how one particular software made her look like a rock star internally. It put her in more direct communication with her customers and the human-centered insights helped her and her team beat their goals and flourish. Amy Rosenberg, a marketing manager at the HR software Namely, recounted how a software system boosted her visibility within her organization. She had so much control over customer marketing that she gave her boss 20 named references as a tongue-in-cheek holiday present.

All of these individuals carved time out of their busy days to speak. Speaking on stage can be flattering, no doubt, yet each was insistent that they were there to give back. They wanted to demonstrate their appreciation to the teams behind the software, but more often than not, their gratitude settled on the object that had a very real, very human impact upon their careers: the software itself. If feeling indebted to a bundle of code seems strange, it shouldn’t. By a strange quirk of human psychology, we develop all kinds of relationships to things, and this plays a large part in marketing.

Software Attachment Theory 

It may surprise you to know that many smart device owners frequently apologize to those objects. It’s part of a process known as anthropomorphization where we assign personalities and people-like qualities to objects. As items accompany us through our lives, we pour meaning into them. “Things are repositories for the meaning people project on them,” wrote Julie Beck, a psychology editor for The Atlantic, in an article about our sometimes irrational attachment to belongings. Objects can serve as a bridge to people or feelings, and actually evoke those feelings while the object is present. It’s why we get nostalgic about momentos, why we collect souvenirs, and why so many positive software testimonials use the word “love.”

When software plays a pivotal role in helping someone get recognition at work, feel effective, get complimented, and get promoted, it accumulates some of the gratitude typically bestowed upon teammates. Combine this effect with the fact that the brand is a proxy for all the positive interactions those users have with the people who make up the company and you have a very real connection between people and software. A software company’s mere logo can come to hold the weight of an old keepsake. When users’ gratitude bubbles over, they do what happy people do: They tell everyone.

People Talk

Word-of-mouth is a powerful, largely unacknowledged force in most marketers’ success. It rarely fits neatly into spreadsheets, it generally defies quantification, it isn’t easily tied back to top-line metrics, and thus isn’t talked about enough in B2B. Most marketers only embrace it as a happy coincidence, and sometimes work their handful of references into the ground before seeking new ones.

Jonah Berger, a psychology professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the books Contagious and Invisible Influence, thinks marketers should be much more proactive about grooming advocates. During his keynote speech at Advocamp, he shared a few facts. According to Berger, word-of-mouth is:

• Responsible for 20-50% of all buying decisions
• 10 times more effective than traditional advertising

And the kicker? 85-90% of word of mouth is communicated offline. Meaning, nine out of ten product mentions—even in B2B—occur during everyday conversations between friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances, at cookouts, dinner parties, soccer games, airports, and more.

Berger also offered a checklist for marketers to streamline their messages for word-of-mouth distribution:

• Social currency—Does talking about your product make people look intelligent, clever, or funny?
• Triggers—Are there everyday events that can trigger a conversation about it?
• Emotion—Does it make people feel something?
• Public—Can it be shared publicly?
• Practical value—Is there an obvious way to take action?
• Stories—Can it be told as a story?

An example of a fully word-of-mouth optimized story comes from a speakeasy bar in New York City called Please Don’t Tell or PDT. The bar is hidden behind a telephone booth in a taco joint. When someone stumbles across it, they cannot help but tell their exciting story of discovery to everyone they know. Sharing makes them look cool, is triggered anytime they have cocktails, and is infused with emotion.

In the B2B world, few stories check all these boxes better than someone telling a story about how they were suddenly propelled forward in their career. A personal success story has social currency—everyone wants to share tips and tricks. It has a trigger because talking about an accomplishment is relevant to almost any conversation. It’s steeped in emotion, it’s public information, it has practical value, it’s told in a narrative, and your software hitches a ride because it serves as the punchline.

Happy advocates operate like homing missiles. They seek out people for whom the story is most relevant—like colleagues in similar roles who happen to be ideal buyers.

And over time, those happily-attached advocates take that software everywhere they go. According to Marketo Senior Customer Marketing Manager, Kevin Lau, “if a software system helps you knock it out of the park and earn a promotion or additional headcount, you’d better believe you use it again.”

Promote Your Product by Promoting Your Customers

Building a product that helps users get promoted extends far beyond marketing—it’s a whole company initiative. It’s the responsibility of the product, design, enablement, and leadership teams to serve the customer so well that they exalt in its utility. But marketers can lead the charge in making this relationship known, and by amplifying the stories of those advocates.  Happy users develop relationships with the tools that make their lives easier. If marketers can make their tools easier to love, advocates will want to tell the whole world. Perhaps they’ll even get excited enough that one day, they’ll take time out of their busy day to show up to your summit and exclaim to an audience of potential buyers, “I can’t stop telling people about it!”

Do you have a product or company you evangelize? Have you ever turned a customer into a brand advocate? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments.

The post Does Your Product Help Your Customers Get Promoted? appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Most of our friends living in the marketing world these days know just how complicated the digital age has become, not only for them, but for the all the people they’re trying to reach. You have to get your brand in front of potential customers more times than ever, and in a memorable way, through precisely the right channel, at exactly the right time… probably multiple times… to even have a fighting chance. And by the way, don’t interrupt or try to sell them while you’re doing it.

Back to the Stone Age reference when life was so much simpler… right?

On second thought, maybe not.

Hunting, foraging, gathering and fighting for food and shelter just to survive doesn’t exactly sound like ‘easy street’ either, does it?

At first glance (a.k.a. ‘Google search’), you can easily find marketing report templates everywhere. In seconds you can grab one of a million free formats, read endless blogs advising you on how to set up the ‘ideal report’ – and just about go blind trying to sift through all the options. You can run reports from SEO tools, paid advertising tools (Google Adwords, Facebook, etc.), website analytics (Google analytics, WebTrends, etc.), marketing automation tools, CRM systems, eCommerce platforms and more.

Data is everywhere, and that’s a great thing. But data is everywhere, and that’s also the biggest challenge. Without data, we’re simply lost trying to figure out what’s working and what’s not, and how to remove the subjectivity from our reporting and planning process. Never mind the uncomfortable meetings trying to decipher what’s what for management.

The truth is, your marketing report template should give you just enough data to tell the story (to yourself, clients and/or management), see macro and micro trends clearly, and understand (with confidence) what’s working, and what’s not. It shouldn’t – and doesn’t – need to be every data point and every metric at your disposal. It needs to be focused on a few key metrics that are most critical to your role and/or business.

That said, you should understand the deeper dive data behind the top key metrics and be able answer how other parts of the plan are ultimately impacting the short list of what you need in your template report.

Once you have an initial report template built, save it and replicate it for future use to save time and, as importantly, to compare similar data sets over various time periods.

Sounds so simple, I know. Then you grab the data from just one system, say it’s Google Analytics, and your output report is 13 pages long. That’s just one reporting system. It’s like an encyclopedia of pie charts, tables, trend-lines, Venn diagrams and icons – literally volumes of data that can quickly suck you down into quicksand.

So maybe we should really be looking for ways to simplify the marketing data like they did in the iconic TV series, Mad Men (hence the cave man art image overlay). Here’s what marketers in their day did: they knew (or got to know) their ideal customer better than they knew themselves. They learned, by however means necessary, what made them tick at an emotional, visceral level.

That’s psychology, not data.

Understanding the psychology of why people buy anything is the key. Today’s buyers want to be educated, not sold – but ultimately, they still buy based on emotion. So, why take your marketing report template back to the Stone Age, or Mad Men days, when clearly, marketing was simpler than it is today? Here are 3 compelling reasons to scale it back sooner versus later.

1. Management is busy. Help them focus on the metrics that truly matter.

Most marketers will tell you that brand awareness is key to driving enough visibility to build traffic over time and therefore conversions. Most managers will tell you all that matters are sales.

So, find the marketing metrics that reveal which channels drive the most impressions, clicks and conversions, at the least cost, and work closely with sales when doing so. Remember to test different calls to action to learn which prospects respond to most.

2. Visualization of your data helps simplify the results and see the whole story without getting caught in the weeds.

Yes, it’s still true, a picture is worth a thousand words. Take the short list of key metrics most important to your business and chart them over time periods using a dashboard reporting tool. Select a month, quarter, 6-month or 12-month period, and compare to the same length of time in the previous period. That view will reveal precisely what channels are having the most impact, and those that are under-performing or simply costing too much.

A dashboard (also known as a business intelligence tool or BI software) means you can pull data in from all the systems storing it once, then create an initial report that will ‘refresh’ and automatically update as you go. Big time-saver.

3. Use the Google Multi-Channel Funnel (MCF) report to set expectations that there’s no silver bullet.

It’s easy to forget while swimming in the sea of data that today’s buyers – especially in business to business industries – rarely take a direct, linear path from a single brand exposure (one keyword text ad or a single Facebook post) and go straight to a purchase (unless you’re in the eCommerce and/or consumer industry). They need to see you many times across several channels as they research and consider your product or service.

The MCF report shows the various channel paths visitors to your website took before finally converting into a lead – from organic and paid search, to social media and direct traffic. That information helps you understand the non-linear paths as much as possible, so you can set expectations with your team that there’s no single silver bullet activity that will do all the heavy lifting on your marketing goals.

If you’re still not sure where to start, start simpler and with just a few metrics, such as:

1. Impressions – totals by channel, then total over all
2. Response/click rate – totals by channel, then total over all
3. Cost per conversion – average by channel, compare CPC per channel

Investigate user reviews on dashboard tools and leverage their free trials and offers to find which one is easiest to connect to your data sources, and easiest to build, save and reuse visual reports.

Whether you’re a mid-sized business or a small startup there are important steps to keep in mind that can get your company noticed. Read on and learn how to harness flexibility to your advantage, why knowing your audience is essential and how to find a rhythm that will land your company in the spotlight!

Smaller Business Means Agility

Use the size of a small or mid-sized business to your advantage! Large companies require more process when it comes to decision-making, but as a smaller and growing organization your team can be more flexible and benefit from trial and error marketing strategies.

Smaller companies and startups can also benefit from taking risks with outside-of-the-box approaches. For example, if the majority of companies focus exclusively on the digital realm, try making a statement by reaching out to your customers through traditional mail.

Additionally, being more agile will allow your company to quickly follow trends and relate them back to your business. When the Jamaican Women’s Bobsled team lost their bobsled and became unable to compete in the Winter Games, Red Stripe beer (manufactured in Jamaica) jumped on the trending story and offered to purchase a bobsled for the team.

Being a small or mid-sized company has strengths, such as flexibility, that when used to your advantage can help you get noticed!

Remember Your Business’ Audience

In any business it’s important to remember, not everyone is your audience. Consider what is unique about your customers and create content meaningful to them. Develop a plan to attract the right people to your company rather than hopelessly trying to target all people.

Make sure your content and marketing strategies highlight your business’ mission and provide useful information to your audience. Whenever you send out e-newsletters, blog posts or social media updates, ask if you are adding value to your customers or to your industry as a whole.

Knowing your customer will also help you determine which platforms to set up. While up to 91 percent of Baby Boomers use email and Facebook, fewer than 5% of them will be engaging in Twitter.

Understanding your customer will help you stay focused on your message and empower you to optimize strategies to get your business noticed.

Rhythm is Key for Your Business

It might sound like dancing, but rhythm and authenticity have their place in mid-sized business and smaller startup companies too. Your style is the unique voice of your brand which should be authentic to help it stand out from the crowd. Determine your business’ tone and content in advance and then use it consistently to help your audience start to feel that they know you.

Updating your audience consistently is also important! Your business should have a personality that consumers feel they know and from whom they are excited to get consistent (but not too many) updates. Depending on the type of content, consider creating blog posts and sending e-newsletters at regular intervals. This strategy will help your customers stay up to date and will prompt search engines to take notice too!

Consider planning out your content objectives and posts on a calendar to ensure that your rhythm is maintained over time.

Final Thoughts

Being a small or mid-sized business has its own advantages that can easily be used to get your company noticed. Use your agility to try out-of-the-box approaches or to quickly capitalize on hot trends and events. Always remember to speak directly to your audience and with a memorable voice. And don’t forget to feel the rhythm and send content at regular intervals. Beyond getting noticed, these steps can help you become unforgettable!

• Donald Trump has been railing against Amazon lately in a series of tweets, charging that the company pays too little in state and local taxes and has a deal with the US Postal Service that's costing the latter money.
• The president's tweets may lead to new taxes and higher shipping rates for Amazon, but such moves may end up benefitting the company in the long run, analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a new report.
• Unlike other online sellers, Amazon already collects state sales taxes in most states, and any increase in shipping costs will likely be "manageable," the analysts said.

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Amazon investors shouldn't get too worked up about the potshots President Trump has been taking at the company lately, a new research report advises.

Trump's been making a lot of noise about Amazon not paying its fair share of taxes and having a deal with the US Postal Service that's supposedly costing the latter "massive amounts" of money. The president has railed about the company needing to pay more in taxes and higher rates to the USPS. Amazon's stock has been trading down in recent days amid the president's attacks on the company.

It's unclear whether Trump's outbursts will lead to any policy changes. But even if they do, the effect on Amazon will likely be minimal and, ironically, may actually help the company, analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a note issued late Wednesday.

The impact of both new taxes and higher postal rates are both "manageable," the analysts said.

Despite Trump's assertions, Amazon already collects sales taxes

On the tax front, Trump has charged that Amazon pays "little or no tax to state & local governments." The president appears to be referring to sales taxes, which has been a long-festering issue between the e-commerce industry and state authorities.

Thanks to a decades-old Supreme Court ruling, ecommerce companies that operate nationally only have to collect sales taxes in the states in which they have an office, warehouse, or other physical presence. In the early days of the etail industry, Amazon and other online stores used that loophole in the law to offer goods tax-free to most of their customers.

Many ecommerce outlets and small online vendors still use the loophole to avoid collecting sales taxes. Indeed, many stores and individual sellers who offer goods through Amazon's website don't collect taxes on their sales.

But Amazon itself collects sales taxes on the goods it sells directly to customers in nearly all the states, the Morgan Stanley analysts noted. Indeed, it's been collecting sales taxes in half of all US states for the last two years now.

Because of that, Amazon arguably has a cost disadvantage compared with other online outlets. Its goods ended up costing consumers more because it collects sales taxes, or it has to cut into its profits to offer them for less.

Making all online stores collect sales taxes would help Amazon

As a result any move by the government to put in place a law that would require all online vendors to collect sales taxes could end up being a boon to Amazon, because it would be able to better compete on price, the analysts said.

"Retailers essentially now will be on the same tax-playing field," the analysts said. They continued: "It is not clear where else consumers would go for purchases."

With prices more even across the board, customers would most likely make their purchase decisions on other factors, such as loyalty to particular stores. That's an area where Amazon has an advantage, thanks to its Prime membership service, they said.

There is a risk that more uniform sales tax enforcement might lead to a price war, where online retailers across the board cut their prices to mitigate the new taxes they're forced to collect, the analysts warned. And Amazon may feel compelled to match those reductions, which could cut into its bottom line. But the company has some flexibility to reduce prices, thanks to the large scale of its operations, they said.

"As a base case, we would expect [Amazon] to invest rationally (and with a long-term cash-flow focus)," they said.

Amazon should expect higher — but "manageable" —postage costs

On the Postal Service front, Amazon may well see higher rates as a result of Trump's agitation. While the USPS is likely making money on its deal with Amazon, it's probably giving the company a 50% to 60% discount off its average rates. Amazon's contract with the Postal Service is reportedly subject to renegotiation this year, and the USPS is likely to push for higher rates, the analysts said.

But the Postal Service will probably keep its demands modest, because package delivery has become its big money maker and packages shipped by Amazon represent about 24% of all the packages the USPS delivers, they said. 

"The USPS needs Amazon," they said.

Of course, Amazon depends on the Postal Service, too. The USPS delivers about 45% of all of the company's packages in the US, according to the analysts. But because of its relatively low rates and Amazon's dependence on other carriers, the money it pays the USPS each year is a smaller fraction of its shipping costs than that volume would indicate.

As a result, even if the Postal Service hiked its rates dramatically, Amazon's overall costs wouldn't go up that much. A 10% jump in rates would increase Amazon's overall operating costs by about $713 million a year, or about 0.3 percent, according to the report. A 50% jump in rates would increase Amazon's costs by about $3.6 billion, or about 1.4%.

"Even this bump up in shipping costs feels manageable," the analysts said.

Such a move would obviously affect the company's profitability, but it would also likely encourage the company to further build out its own delivery network, the analysts said. That's what Amazon did in Japan in response to a price hike from the local postage service.

Such an investment "would weigh on near-term profits but likely lead to higher long-term profitability," they said.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft has all the right ingredients to top Amazon in the cloud, says the company's former Silicon Valley chief

Join the conversation about this story »

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Whether or not you participate, we all know that Black Friday creates a painful sense of urgency in consumers that those of us in the non-retail world battle with constantly. And while thousands urgently indulge in Cyber Monday, we cringe every time a prospect responds with, "Can you get back to me in a month?"

It's very likely that your prospect forgets your name by the time you reach out a month later. At HubSpot, lacking urgency is the number one objection we face in the sales funnel. It's happened to me on numerous occasions -- which is why I'd like to share one of the approaches we've tested and have statistically proven to succeed for our buyer context.

In my experience, sense of urgency is best addressed right after the goal setting phase of the discovery conversation. Once goals are established, explore why it's critical for the prospect to address the pain now. Understand the negative consequences of inaction and the positive implications of moving now.

Role-Play Exercise for Creating Urgency

I'd like to illustrate our approach with an example roleplay. Let's start off right where we have established a quantifiable goal with the prospect.

Rep: “I see, John. So you're telling me that you're adding three salespeople in Q4 of this year. In order for these salespeople to be successful, you need to increase your marketing qualified leads by 20%. Is this correct?”

Prospect: “Exactly.”

Rep: “Excellent John. Thanks for clarifying. We have helped hundreds of companies with that goal. Help me understand one thing though John ... let’s flash forward to six months from now and you're generating the same lead flow as today. Is that really that bad?”

[Probing for negative consequences.]

Prospect: “Actually that would be really bad.”

Rep: “Why?”

Prospect: “Well, we'll have to spread the current marketing qualified lead flow across all of our salespeople and nobody will hit their number.”

Rep: “I see. So the sales reps make a little less money. The company still does well.”

[Probing into negative consequences at the company level.]

Prospect: “No. The company loses too. We increase costs but do not increase revenue. Furthermore, sales will get frustrated. Attrition will likely occur. We could lose our best people.”

Rep: “Okay. That is pretty serious. Can’t the salespeople simply cold call to supplement the marketing qualified lead flow?”

Prospect: “We have tried that, both with the salespeople and with junior appointment-setters. It didn't work. We need to find an effective source of demand generation for these new salespeople.”

Rep: “I see, John. On the flip-side, if you are successful in increasing MQL flow by 20%, what happens then?”

[Probing for positive implications.]

Prospect: “Well, in that case, the sales team should hit its numbers and we'll hit our revenue growth targets for next year.”

Rep: “Great John. Thanks for clarifying. This information will help me as I assemble my recommended strategy for you. It almost sounds like we should have kicked this off last month!”

[Normally here I'd explicitly restate everything to ensure we have it right, but you get the point.]

Prospect: “Totally.”

Rep: “Well, let’s get to work. I can assemble the strategy tonight. Can you move things around tomorrow morning so we can review it?”

Prospect: “Let’s do it.”

Explicitly walking the prospect through this dialogue is important. Now we both understand why this project simply cannot wait. I didn't trick him. I didn't put words in his mouth. I truthfully just understood his priorities and how I can help.

If the sense of urgency doesn't exist, then you may need to challenge the prospect on what other initiatives are more important. You may even need to switch over to a provocative sales approach if you think the prospect is focused on the wrong priorities.

While this process helps me invest my time appropriately, more importantly, it helps me avoid wasting my prospect’s time. We all know that “nice-to-have” initiatives never happen. So, why waste my prospect’s time on an initiative that is not critical to them?

Bonus for Sales Coaches: Customized Coaching Plan

If you're a sales manager and you have a salesperson struggling with a sense of urgency development, schedule a weekly meeting to review all the new opportunities created that week. For each opportunity, ask the rep the same three questions:

1. Why does the prospect need to buy today?
2. What are the negative implications if they don't?
3. What are the positive implications if they do?

If you want to be even more disciplined, you can add these custom fields to each opportunity record in your CRM. For example, HubSpot CRM lets you customize properties and take notes within a contact record, all while automatically logging emails and calls.

Or, you could ask the salesperson to email the answers to these questions to you whenever they move an opportunity record forward. Repetitive cadences are your friend.

3 Ways to Rekindle Urgency in Prospects

By incorporating the strategies above into your approach to sales, you should be able to move more deals across the finish line. But it never hurts to have a few more tactics in your arsenal when a prospect hits you with, "Not now," does it?

1. Illustrate your impact

You should have already done this extensively, but if your prospect isn't seeing the urgency of implementing your product/service now, it should be repeated.

Instead of stats and client reviews, tell your prospect a story of success. Make sure it's high impact, riddled with solved pain points, and, of course, true.

Data points will do little to sway your prospect at this point, but a well-told story can do wonders.

2. Help them see what they will miss out on.

Most of us are motivating by avoiding pain and achieving pleasure, so it's helpful to use this when inspiring urgency in your prospects. So, after demonstrating the ROI and impact of your product/service, talk about the cost of doing nothing (i.e., "We're able to lower new hire onboarding time by up to 50%. That turns new hires into high-impact players in as little as two months. Can you afford to miss out on that immediate revenue boost?")

3. Lower the hurdle

Less investment, risk, scope, paperwork, administration, and effort will always make your offer more attractive. Keep deal momentum up and you'll find the urgency is naturally present. To do this, be timely and immediate with your follow up, always present timelines and next steps after meetings, and push deadlines by days instead of weeks.

Every year, new advancements within the technology space have assisted businesses by creating new opportunities for customer outreach. Over the last couple years, the B2B space has noticed real potential in incorporating Artificial Intelligence in Marketing, however, there is still a significant lag in adoption. Even though marketers have tested the waters when it comes to machine learning algorithms, there is still major ground to be covered when it comes to predictive analytics, personalization, statistical analysis as well as lead generation. Given its potential, Artificial Intelligence in B2B sales and marketing is here to transform the way people interact with brands, information and services.

A good handful of enterprise giants dread the idea of automating their marketing functions with the use of AI, however, by measuring the effect of AI in the customer service industry, one can affirm that understanding customer nuance and deriving insights from relevant customer data will not be entirely manual or managed by humans alone.

Research shows that, approximately 70% of US citizens prefer to shop online. Additionally, total revenue generation from online ads has exceeded that of TV, desktop and newspaper ads.

Such real-time statistics highlight how customers are open to making their online presence an indivisible part of their lives. This is also a vital indicator of how marketers urgently need to shift their focus on developing more powerful pre-sales strategies to leverage the potential opportunities offered by modern methods of B2B marketing.

However, all online marketing campaigns and efforts revolve around how much business value is drawn from the data related to their everyday customer interactions and engagements. Certain factors involved in the data management process make or break the final outcome. So how do you go about manipulating data that offers insights into your customer journey?

Challenges in harvesting precious data

To address every minute requirement of customers and reach maximum acquisition within the B2B marketing space, enterprises should concentrate their efforts towards learning their customers. Be it end users or corporate clients, each individual leaves behind a plethora of information through their online clicks and search, live campaigns, chat or e-mail communication, website visits and purchases. When it comes to insights in the form of customer mindset, demographics and their behavior from heaps of data — enterprises need to consider incorporating Artificial Intelligence in Marketing and Sales strategies.

Lack of proper skillset being a major challenge, businesses often miss out on insight as data collected is disposed or mismanaged or considered redundant — resulting in poor pre-sales marketing strategy. This is why, when it comes to harvesting and processing customer interaction data, the presence of Artificial Intelligence in sales and marketing would offer unparalleled insight resulting in significant ROI.

Customer’s ethos, impulse and buying pattern

There really is no better place for businesses to invest in Artificial Intelligence solutions than customer service and engagement.

Whether it is prediction or personalization, marketers will be able to touch all domains of brand marketing through 360-degree navigation of customers’ habits, tendencies, impulses, and buying patterns. To give you a quick overview, Artificial Intelligence in Marketing can help in the following –

· Predict potential customers

· Discriminate between buyers and visitors

· Identify special trends and choices

· Personalize various online campaigns

· Improved lead generation

· Smart decision making

· Increased efficiency

· Drive more sales and revenue

Reports on consumer research also suggest that 80% of marketing executives believe that Artificial Intelligence in B2B marketing will revolutionize the field completely in the next five years.

Artificial Intelligence in B2B Marketing leads to empowered customers

Machine learning + intelligence + digital marketing = empowered customers.

The adoption of artificial intelligence in B2B marketing will not only help businesses, but it will also touch customers by empowering them by giving them more than they can expect. This is where marketers can reap insights from their software and transform it into smart purchase decisions for customers.

With predictive analytics blending with natural language processing, it becomes easier to predict customer’s future choices and shopping behavior.

We are already seeing the rise of AI-assisted message prompts where customers receive relevant suggestions and purchase offers in the B2C space.

Real-time machine learning use cases

· Chatbots and Voice Assistants: Chatbots and digital voice assistants are quintessential examples of conversational computing combined with powerful AI to drive seamless user experience using transient data like Google, Amazon and Facebook.

· User Engagement: Making a predictive analytics model derived with the help of active machine learning will help merchants run their commerce more efficiently by proactively sensing customer pulse and boosting retention.

· Natural Language Processing: Machine learning can be further expanded with NLP to enhance digital advertising & data organization as well as build far more accurate predictive models that work on most relevant keywords as done by QuanticMind.

Artifical Intelligence in Marketing = more relevance and control

Before the Internet became an everyday part of our lives, real-time advertising was a cul-de-sac. Traditional one-way means of advertising and customer service ruled the market, generating no sufficient response. Prior to the widespread adoption of the Internet, B2B sales and marketing suffered from the absence of interactive dialogue. It was hard for potential customers to identify the right solutions given that there were no social channels to share brand experience in words.

Cut to the scene today — things are poles apart. Customers can not only control purchase journey but identify and select their favorites in no time. Online media is now fluid, fast and provides uninterrupted but more importantly, relevant services for customers to avail.

Real-time data analysis and forecasting

Online marketing moguls often parrot the term “real time” while describing the performance of pre-sales efforts or customer service. But, the arrival of machine learning in the face of intelligent marketing has made it quite possible. Artificial Intelligence in Marketing has successfully broken all the barriers that stopped businesses from reaching their prospects. All it takes for a machine is to process the online data created by their behavioral pattern to produce relevant, customer-specific solutions along with forecasting future buying trends based on past purchase patterns.

Marketing content gets persuasive and influential

To interact with the target audience, company’s marketers take it upon themselves to use gathered insight to design email campaigns and compose creative ads. The content writers have to make precise guesswork about what customers can and will relate to. However, with the integration of Natural Language Generation, content curation can be automated based on customer preferences and demographics.

Developing relevant content pieces for your target audiences in order to move them through different stages of the marketing funnel will far more streamlined with the incorporation of AI in Marketing.

Algorithms can be ran to collect and collate data of your customers/audience pertaining to what they like to read, their current challenges and concerns with regards to your business or service offerings etc. Post acquiring data that is highly personalized to this extent, marketers can then curate and create content that is relevant and answers their questions either through outreach systems like emails or social media or by incorporating intelligent chatbots that can directly converse with their potential customers.

Final remarks

All in all, it is safe to say that a lot is happening and set to happen in the world of B2B marketing with respect to AI. Acknowledging the fact that Artificial Intelligence has powerful potential to shape sales and marketing is imperative. All the practical use cases suggest that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can help manage the wild flow of data for businesses to create real-time predictive models and effectively engage with customers while simultaneously gaining competitive advantage.

Optimized decision making, shorter sales cycle through ‘predictive’ buying and personalized outreach are some compelling outcomes to result in a WIN/WIN scenario for both — enterprises and its customers. Enterprises should collaborate with the right technology partner in order to assist them in the transition of adopting AI in their marketing strategies.

In “The Tortoise and the Hare” Aesop describes a race between a slow-moving tortoise and a fast-moving over-confident hare. Despite the skittish hare racing ahead at first, his slow-but-steady competitor arrives at the finishing line ahead of him.

This widely-told ancient fable has been used to make the case for “more haste, less speed”, to support the biblical observation that “the race is not to the swift” and to reinforce the virtues of persistence and perseverance.

The lessons can be applied to many aspects of life – not least of which the sales process. It’s my observation that many so-called “sales closing problems” actually have their roots in “opening problems” and the failure to do sufficient upfront discovery…

As Mike Kunkle points out in his recent LinkedIn commentary, whenever we fail to invest in a proper upfront diagnosis of our customer’s situation, our sales campaign is very likely to stall or go off the rails later on.

I believe that in any complex sales situation there is a compelling case for hastening slowly, for conducting a detailed early-stage discovery exercise, and for resisting the temptation to prematurely propose our solution even if we are being pressed to do so by the customer.

diagnosing before we prescribe

There are clear parallels with the medical profession: an apparently simple condition such as a headache or muscle pains can often act as an indicator of a deeper and much more serious health problem.

If a doctor rushes to a premature conclusion, fails to diagnose other less obvious but more significant indicators, and simply prescribes a couple of aspirin, they could put the patient’s long-term health or even life at risk.

Any doctor adopting such a careless approach could be properly accused of medical malpractice, and the same applies to the sales environment. Any time we rush ahead and propose a “solution” without fully understanding the customer’s true situation, we are guilty of sales malpractice, and we run the same risk of causing long-term harm to the business health of both our customers and ourselves.

Just as patients (despite all the information available to them over the internet) are not always capable of accurate self-diagnosis, our customers – despite access to overwhelming volumes of online information – are not always capable of seeing the wood for the trees.

drilling into the need behind the need

And it’s not just bad sales practice to simply respond to what our customer thinks they are suffering from or need – it dramatically reduces our chances of establishing genuine differentiation against all the other options the customer may be considering.

When all solutions look the same, our customer is likely to choose the simplest/cheapest/easiest option or decide to do nothing. And to return to the medical analogy, claiming to have a better drug isn’t very helpful if we’re actually treating the wrong problem.

We need to drill into the need beyond the need. In complex B2B sales, discovery is the critical foundation upon which all the other elements of a successful sale must be built. If our foundations are weak or shaky, the entire edifice of our sales campaign could collapse at any time – and probably will.

building strong foundations from the start

It’s far easier to build strong foundations at the start of the sales process, rather than attempt to shore them up later when it becomes apparent that they are too weak to support our solution proposal.

I’ve written before about the critical role that discovery plays in complex B2B sales. But the essential lesson is that we cannot afford to rush it. The early stages of a sales engagement give us an opportunity to pursue lines of inquiry that we may not be able to return to later.

The questions we choose to ask, the insights we choose to share and the stories we choose to tell serve to shape the entire subsequent direction of our sales campaign. They can make the difference between pursuing a promising path or rushing headlong towards a dead end.

They can help us determine whether the customer has a compelling reason to act, to help shape their vision of a solution and decision process and to establish whether we have a strong and distinctive problem-solution fit.

They can help us to avoid solving the wrong problem, dealing with the wrong people and wasting our time pursuing opportunities that were never real or prospects who were never likely to become profitable customers.

They can help us avoid wasting both our own time and our that of our prospective customers. They can help us stumbling across showstopper issues late in the process that we wish we had (and could have) discovered far earlier in the process.

But when we invest in discovery, we set the scene for an effective and productive sales process that will soon overtake all those “hare” sales people that have rushed ahead but subsequently stalled. And when we invest in discovery, we can accurately qualify out bad opportunities far earlier in the sales cycle.

Great discovery delivers better outcomes for everyone involved. It’s sometimes tempting to rush the process. It’s sometimes tempting to accede to an impatient customer’s request that we deliver them a proposal ASAP. But that would amount to sales malpractice, and we ought to know better…

You have a great product. You’re using different online avenues to promote and sell it. Maybe it’s selling well and you want to take it further. Or maybe it’s not and you need a new strategy.

So you’ve decided to hit one of the biggest online stores and become an Amazon Seller. But where do you start?

These 12 online sources can help you get on the right track. You’ll not only learn how to become an Amazon Seller but get instructions, tips, and help with fulfillment, shipping, and other essentials.

1. Online Selling Experiment

The Online Selling Experiment website is for those interested in selling on Amazon, eBay, and Shopify. You can get training, coaching, and tips for selling your product online.

They offer a terrific beginner’s guide for selling on Amazon. The guide starts with an overview and screenshot of the basics. Then it moves onto how to sell on Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon). You can also review the benefits of the FBA program or other options, and then jump into step-by-step instructions.

Complete with images to accompany the instructions along with community questions and answers, the guide on Online Selling Experiment is a good place to start.

2. StartupBros

StartupBros is another nice site to check out with a beginner’s guide for selling on Amazon. The guide has a helpful table on contents on the right side, so you can skip between different sections.

From top to bottom, you can find out how much money you need to get started, types of products to sell, how to create an account and a product listing, shipping method options, registering your brand, and finally, what to do at tax time.

For getting started as well as keeping a handy reference for down the road, take a look at StartupBros.­

4. FitSmallBusiness

For a lengthy guide condensed into five simple steps, FitSmallBusiness offers helpful information. The site covers marketing, finance, retail, sales, and much more.

The beginner’s guide for selling on Amazon takes you through products to sell, setting up your seller account, creating a product listing, managing your inventory, and fulfilling your orders. This is a useful guide packed with information in easy-to-understand language.

FitSmallBusiness also has a search tool and you can explore the other categories mentioned for help marketing your product. Just click the menu button from the top left to review what the site has to offer.

5. Jungle Scout

If you are interested in a useful video with a full transcript, check out Jungle Scout. The guide for how to sell on Amazon FBA is for beginners and takes you through seven steps.

This guide is quite useful in that you can get help with sourcing product manufacturers, negotiating with suppliers, and positioning your product on search engines. And of course, details specific to Amazon selling like creating a product listing and launching your product through Amazon’s fulfillment center are in the guide too.

For a helpful video you can listen to with a transcript that you can read and reference, Jungle Scout is worth your time.

6. Project Life Mastery

If you like the idea of a video Amazon selling guide, another good option comes from Project Life Mastery on YouTube. The video gives you step-by-step instructions for selling on Amazon.

The tutorial goes onto help you with building your online business, how to private label a product, and gives you information on fulfillment, shipping, and more. What’s nice about this video is that you can follow along as the host heads right to Amazon for a hands-on look at the process.

7. The Selling Family

Maybe a personal experience guide is more to your liking. The Selling Family website tells you a story about their beginnings as an Amazon seller and then goes on to show you how to do the same thing.

Take a look at their beginner’s guide for selling on Amazon FBA, complete with instructions and images. If you like what you see, the site offers a few extras that might interest you. Check out their Amazon Boot Camp training class or sign up for their free 7-day email course.

Whether you decide just to check out the guide or explore the other offerings, The Selling Family is another great source for starting your Amazon selling experience.

8. eCommerceWeekly

The eCommerceWeekly site gives you an A-to-Z guide for selling on Amazon but breaks it down into bite-sized pieces for you.

Click the links at the top of the guide to jump to those sections or just scroll down the page and browse. You choose where to begin from how to create an Amazon Seller account to understanding pricing plans. You can even check out information on advanced Amazon Sellers, fulfillment by Amazon, and Amazon updates and news.

The eCommerceWeekly offerings don’t stop at Amazon though. So, if you plan to take your product to a broader market, review their topics on Etsy, eBay, PayPal, and international selling.

If you happen to be selling on eBay as well, check out how you can make more money and tips for selling more overall on eBay.

9. Udemy

If a structured course is more your learning style, Udemy offers several classes for selling on Amazon. From free to paid options, you can learn how to get started as an Amazon Seller or dig into how to private label products for Amazon FBA.

The courses on Udemy include lectures, videos, and written material. And some classes provide you with a certificate of completion when you finish. This is a terrific source for an organized learner to begin their Amazon selling journey.

10. wikiHow

The guide on wikiHow for how to sell on Amazon is a good option if you learn well with pictures. The guide has four parts broken down into creating your seller account, creating a listing, packing, and shipping, and managing your account.

Each step in the guide contains a helpful image along with a bit of written explanation where needed. So, following the steps is easy. You can also review the community questions and answers from others like you. The wikiHow guide is helpful and lets you ask your own questions if needed.

11. nChannel

The nChannel website seeks to help people sell products through various avenues. Their guide for selling on Amazon is a little older than the others on this list but still helpful.

Move through each of the six steps with clear instructions, explanations, and images. Just keep in mind that some photos may differ from updates to the Amazon interface since the guide was published in 2015. The nChannel site and guide provide helpful tips for selling on Amazon.

12. BigCommerce

For a guide broken down into chapters, review the one from BigCommerce. There are 17 chapters in all, but you may only read those applicable to you.

Like many similar sites and guides, this one offers instructions with images to give you a clear picture of the process. BigCommerce also provides advice and tips for pricing strategies, help for growing your Amazon sales, and secrets to long-term success on Amazon.

For anyone interested in becoming an Amazon Seller, the guide on BigCommerce is one to check out. Plus, you can download the complete guide to read offline if you prefer.

Get Ready to Sell

Don’t forget that on your journey to becoming an official Amazon Seller you can always go straight to the source. Amazon has details for getting started as an Amazon Seller, benefits of selling on their site, and a helpful Amazon business guide.

Plus, you can check out our articles on Amazon updates that make selling used goods easier and why you should sell your handmade crafts on Amazon.

Editor's note: this post was originally published on Sales Pop! on March 26, 2018.

What if you could boost the retention rates of your star performers, increase overall sales productivity, heighten levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, grow top line revenue AND improve bottom line profit margins? What if one, single thing could do all that? Would you do that one thing?

Of course you would! So why aren’t you?

So, you’re trying to grow a business. You’re in a stronger position than you might think. It’s never been easier for companies to acquire new customers, but at the same time, it’s never been easier for your competition to take them away.

This means one thing.

The primary focus of any business with growth on its mind shouldn’t be customer acquisition – it should be customer retention.

It’s long been said that it costs 5x (or more) to acquire a new customer than keep an existing one, but in a world where a customer could be lost with a Google search and a few clicks, you need to be doing more than ever to ensure that once a customer comes on board, they stay there.

This is where onboarding comes into play.

As you already know, onboarding is the process of turning new sign-ups or users into devoted customers. It’s about teaching new customers the value of your product, giving them that “aha” moment, and getting them to that point as quickly as possible.

Get your onboarding experience right, and you’ll have found the key to substantial growth.

Here are 7 ways you can improve your onboarding experience to do just that.

1. Appoint All Users an Account Manager

So you want to maximize the impact of your onboarding experience? Then you should be assigning every single customer their own account manager.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s just you and an assistant, or if you have a team of 200 – you need to ensure your customers are communicating with the same person every time they have an interaction with your company.

This works for a number of reasons.

Customers who interact with the same team member every time they have a question or problem will be more likely to:

• Ask for help
• Get better results from the product
• Develop an emotional affiliation with the brand
• Sing your praises and refer other customers, and, most importantly (in this context)…
• Remain a customer for longer

2. Involve Account Managers in the Onboarding Process

Assigning customers a dedicated account manager involves much more than handing them the name, email address and direct line of the person they need to contact if they have any questions or queries, and you can probably guess why.

In most cases, customers won’t reach out and contact their account manager if they encounter a problem or want help getting to grips with your product. They just won’t do anything.

Your account managers have to be taking the initiative when it comes to onboarding new customers.

You can (and should) help them do this by supplying them with a list of tasks they need to complete every time they’re assigned a new client. This will probably include things like:

• An introductory phone call (this is always better than an email).
• Providing the customer with a short questionnaire designed to help the account manager better understand them, their target audience, and their need for the product.
• A follow-up call upon receipt of the questionnaire to clarify its contents and ask for further detail if needed.
• A further follow-up call 2-4 weeks later to see how the customer is getting on.
• Occasional check-ins by email or phone call after this (ideally check with the customer on how they would prefer to be contacted, and how often).

3. Help New Customers Get a Quick Win

The sooner a customer realizes what your product can do for them, the greater the odds that they will stick around for the long haul.

Bear in mind what we’re talking about here: quick wins. You don’t need to transform your customer’s business. You just need to get them to do something that helps them realize its value.

Take Evernote. The first win a user has with the app will be leaving a note. That’s all it takes to understand the app’s value and greatly boost the odds of new users coming back.

Health app My Fitness Pal asks new users to input data about their weight, lifestyle and goals, and immediately offers up instructions and a timeline for achieving those targets.

Image Credit

These are simple wins, to the point that they might sound insignificant – but imagine what would happen if users downloaded these apps and didn’t immediately use them.

Ensuring new customers experience a positive interaction with your product – i.e. a quick win – is essential to any and every onboarding process.

4. When They’ve Had That Quick Win, Ask for Referrals

As essential as customer retention is to growth, you still need to be acquiring new customers on the sidelines.

One of the most effective methods of customer acquisition is referrals.

Happy customers tell other people. Those other people come on board, get value from your product, and the cycle continues.

Or so you hope.

The fact is, even happy customers rarely refer others because they simply don’t think about it.

According to Texas Tech, although 83% of satisfied customers are willing to refer a product or service, only 29% actually do.

The lesson here is, if you want customers to refer new customers, you have to ask them to. That said, timing is key.

Asking for a referral the second a customer comes on board will get you nowhere. Wait until they’ve had that quick win.

Once a customer understands your product’s value, they’re far more likely to respond positively to a referral request.

5. Create Email Sequences

Between 40% and 60% of new software users open an app once, and never return.

Ensuring account managers are following a process along the lines of the one described earlier will help here.

So will email sequences.

Often, software users don’t return, not because you did something wrong or because there was an issue with your product, but because they simply forgot you were a thing.

So remind them.

Automated email sequences are really handy for reminding inactive users that your product exists, and that based on their previous interaction with it, is something that may be useful to them.

They can also help onboard on-the-fence users by showing them how to use different elements of the product (ideally just one element per email), and remind them that their account manager is there for them when needed.

For even better results, segment your email sequences into groups according to users who have signed up and never returned, and those who are interacting with the product, but aren’t yet fully onboarded.

6. Encourage Existing Customers to Share Their Success Stories

It’s probably not news to you that content like reviews, testimonials and case studies has a big impact on conversions, but here’s a stat from a recent BrightLocal study, just in case:

In short, consumers trust the opinions and experiences of other consumers. Ask your existing customers to share their success stories, and use them as part of both the pre- and post-sales process (i.e. feature them on your site as a conversion tool for potential new customers, and in onboarding emails as tool to help tempt inactive users to return).

7. Engage Churned Customers

This is one of the most common mistakes I see companies make, and one of the most frustrating mistakes to me personally.

Don’t let customers leave silently – get in touch with them and try to find out what made them go.

Sure, some of those customers won’t want to hear from you, and that’s fine. But this won’t be the case for all customers.

I’ve been one of those customers.

They will have left for a very specific reason, and chances are, they’re going to be happy to tell you why – if you just take the time to ask them. They might even be frustrated that your product let them down in some way, they left, and you didn’t bother to follow up and find out why.

Make sure you’re following up with every churned customer, asking their reasons for leaving, and adjusting your onboarding processes in response.

Do you have any other tips for boosting growth by improving onboarding experiences? Comments are just below – if you’ve got the time, it’d be great to hear your ideas.

It’s 11:55 p.m. and Steven Howard has just returned to his hotel room in Beijing after a draining day of meetings to promote his lithium exploration company. The next morning, he would fly to Seoul to do it again, and then on to Tokyo.

“I’ve got wings and wheels strapped to my rear end,” said Howard, who returned from Asia just before Easter says about his travel schedule which included stops in Hong Kong, Shenzen, Huizhou and Tianjin.

Howard, whose background is in oil and gas, leads one of the dozens of Canadian-listed mining companies looking to capitalize on the roaring demand for lithium being created by the world’s budding electric vehicle industry, before the bubble bursts.

• Major international lithium and battery manufacturer teams up with junior explorer to solve supply shortages
• 'Car biz is hell': Elon Musk back to sleeping on the factory floor as Model 3 delays pile up

But his company faces an odd dilemma: lithium prices have never been this high, estimated at more than US$13,000 per ton, yet there are growing fears that the supply and demand forecasts are out of whack, and that prices will crash. Unlike the other materials that are key to electric vehicle batteries, such as copper and nickel, the market for lithium is relatively opaque — with no futures’ market and no benchmark price as most lithium is sold in private transactions.

The fruits of looking in Asia came into focus on Thursday evening when Japan’s SoftBank announced a $100 million investment in TSX-listed Nemaska Lithium, which aims to begin construction this spring on a 33,000-ton per year lithium mine and electrochemical plant in northern Quebec.

“This is a cornerstone of what we needed,” said Nemaska chief executive Guy Bourassa, who still needs to raise around $725 million. “And it opens up a lot of doors.”

Bourassa said SoftBank contacted his company last fall after studying whether to invest in a electric battery factory and struck the deal for 9.9 per cent of the company, plus rights to 20 per cent of its lithium production. The Japanese company, which owns a 15 per cent stake in Uber Inc., controls huge fleets of taxis in India and China that it wants to convert to electric vehicles.

As a result, lithium explorers are feeling more pressure than ever, and are having a harder time raising cash on the stock exchanges, in what should be a bull market for the metal producers. That’s sending them into Asia, where a more advanced electric vehicle industry is creating real demand for lithium, and opportunities to lock in sales agreements, even for mines that remain years away from being built.

“It’s just such a different world over there,” said Howard, chief executive of Lithium Energi Exploration Inc., who returned from Asia just before Easter. “I was astounded by the number of electric vehicles … they’re way ahead of us, leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the world.”

Based in Dallas, Tex., he’s been using the TSX Venture Exchange to raise funds to convert a plot of land in Argentina into a brine pond, from which lithium can one day be extracted, and — if his recent trip pays off — sold to a battery maker or auto company in Asia.

The company has yet to drill any holes, which puts it several years away from production, assuming it finds lithium of sufficient grade and quantity in the first place.

Analysts say average lithium prices, as reported by the largest producers and found in spot prices in China, have doubled in the past two years, leading to a proliferation of exploration companies. Between the TSX and the TSX Venture Exchange, at least 75 companies were mining or exploring for lithium, and that number doesn’t include the companies seeking to extract lithium from industrial wastewater or batteries.

But even as a rush ensues, lithium prices remain hazy, in part because a few large players dominate the market and keep their prices private, said Chris Berry, who advises companies and is moderating a panel discussion in Shanghai later this month on the lack of transparency in the lithium market.

“Because there’s no futures market with respect to lithium … you’re really left to talk anecdotally,” said Berry, founder of New York-based House Mountain Partners.

A number of events have also conspired to throw cold water on lithium mining companies.

Most recently, a Tesla Inc. driver in California died in a fiery crash that drew concerns about the flammability of electric vehicle batteries, which, coupled with the Palo Alto, CA.-based electric vehicle company’s rising debt load, has raised questions about its business model.

In late February, Morgan Stanley released a report that suggested the price of lithium could drop 45 per cent to around US$7,000 per ton by 2021. The report suggested that growth forecasts for electric vehicles, currently 1.6 per cent of global sales, may be overestimated, and that there could soon be an oversupply of lithium.

It also noted the Chilean Economic Development Agency has increased the production quota for Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile S.A — a large producer that is 32 per cent owned by Saskatoon-based Nutrien, the company created by the merger of Agrium Corp. and The Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan. Combined with a quota increase for another large producer, Albemarle Corp., an additional 200,000 tons of lithium could come online by 2025, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.

For perspective, Rupert Merer, an analyst with National Bank Financial, pegs current lithium production at around 200,000 tons per year, and forecasts demand will quadruple to 800,000 tons per year by 2025.

“When you have that kind of growth, it’s always going to be hard to nail that kind of demand and supply accurately,” said Merer.

Meanwhile, stocks of the biggest lithium producers are in the doldrums: Albermarle, Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile and FMC Corporation are all trading down at least 20 per cent since January. Junior explorers have not been spared either: Howard’s company’s stock price has nearly halved, from 93 cents in November down to 46 cents on Tuesday. 

If prices stay that low, Howard and others are convinced a wave of mergers will sweep the industry as buyers snap up cheap assets.

That helped convince him to hop on a plane to China and spend a week meeting with executives from car companies and battery cathode makers, about one day purchasing lithium from his company.

“We’re coming closer to the end of the stampede, if you will,” he said.

In one ray of hope, last month, a consortium of Chinese investors paid a significant premium to purchase all shares of Vancouver-based Lithium X Energy Corp. — an exploration company with prospects in Argentina, but still years away from production — for an aggregate price tag of US$265 million.

But there was skepticism before the deal closed, with Lithium X shares trading as low as $1.77 — a 32 per cent discount — three days before NextView New Energy Lion Hong Kong Ltd. paid $2.61 per share in early March to take the company private.  

“Lithium X was created at the beginning of a wave,” said Brian Paes-Braga, former chief executive of the company, who added the plan was always to sell the company before more lithium projects came online and caused a price correction.

Still, Paes-Braga said his company — backed by Vancouver billionaire Frank Giustra, and chaired by Paul Matsyek, a veteran of the mining industry — exemplifies the differences between western and Asian investment strategies for the lithium market.

“I think there’s two different agendas, one is economic value creation,” said Paes-Braga, referring to his own company. “The other is a demand side agenda in China.”

In China, as part of an initiative to upgrade its industries, known as ‘Made in China 2025’, the country has set a strategic priority to lead the world in electric vehicle production and targets seven million new electric vehicles by 2025 compared to 330,000 in 2015, according to the research firm CRU Group.

That’s helping to drive consensus that the electric vehicle industry is set for big growth in the next five to seven years, but both the supply and the demand forecasts are predicated on multiple assumptions.

“The point is there’s a lot of growth and demand coming,” said MacMurray Whale, an analyst with Cormark Securities.

Even Nemaska, which announced the deal with SoftBank this week, had been down more than 50 per cent from its January peak, trading at $1.17 on Friday.

“It is more difficult to raise money” on an exchange, said Bourassa. “It’s not the flavour of the month anymore.”

But, he added,“In China and Korea and Japan, I can guarantee you that they’re struggling to get their hands on a good supply.”

• Email: gfriedman@postmedia.com | Twitter: GabeFriedz

Imagine that you’ve built a terrific product and are all set to launch it in the market as the next big thing that will solve people’s problems. But which people? “We are targeting everyone” is a phrase that no strategic marketer ever wants to hear. And yet, this seems to be a common practice amongst B2B organizations in most industries.

If you are marketing your business without an in-depth understanding of who your ideal customer is, you are probably just shooting in the dark. And I’m not just talking about defining the B2B organizations you want to work with in terms of industry, number of employees or number of locations. In today’s complex buying world, you have to go deeper to understand the individual departments and decision makers you need to target to ultimately make a sale.

When you target everyone, you target no one

Differentiation has always been a major hurdle for businesses, but it’s becoming even more difficult. According to some studies, the average consumer is bombarded with nearly 10,000 brand messages every day. The number, however, is growing rapidly as more and more channels are opening up for marketers to reach their customers.

Also, with a ginormous amount of data at your disposal, delivering targeted and personalized messages to customers is more feasible than ever. But that’s not happening. At least, not for a majority of organizations. An eMarketer report found that B2B marketers that leverage data continue to struggle with using it effectively to provide one-to-one experiences to buyers. The research shows that B2Bs have started adopting data and analytics more widely but many are not able to use it effectively.

I’ve seen a lot of companies simply blasting their content out to a bunch of people who may or may not care about their products or services. Many others spend time and effort trying to create messaging to hit “everyone”. The result? Every year, B2B organizations are wasting $958 million on ineffective marketing programs and content, according to a survey.

If you think everyone is your customer and targeting everyone is your safest bet, think again. You’re probably letting your hard work, time, and money go down the drain. Instead, you need to identify, target and align sales and marketing initiatives that speak to your ideal customer.

Have you defined your ideal customer?

Personalized marketing starts with defining your ideal customer. Sounds simple enough, but I haven’t found too many companies that are doing this. Some organizations have created buyer personas, but according to a survey, only 15% are actually using them.

If you don’t spend the time to know your customers and understand their needs, preferences, and motivations, you’ll end up with a generic customer profile. And, your messaging won’t be any better than it was before.

Your prospective buyers expect to receive communications that are relevant and focused on their individual needs and pain points. This is a tall order and something marketers have been trying to estimate through segmentation based on their goals — engagement, awareness, retention, revenue, and so on. Good news is, with technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), the job of customer targeting and delivering personalized communications is getting easier and more precise than ever. Basically, it’s taking the “gut” and “guess-work” out of the process.

For example, AI can help you improve the user experience of your website by making it more personalized to the visitor. It can analyze thousands of data points about a single user — such as demographics, location, device, and interaction with the website, etc. — to display the content and offers that are best suited to the visitor.

As a marketer, the challenge is:

How do you ensure that your message will resonate with your target audience?

And the first step to answering that question is to determine who your target audience is!

Define your ideal customer in three steps

The Oxford dictionary defines the word ‘ideal’ as “satisfying one’s conception of what is perfect; most suitable”. In that sense, your ideal customer is the perfect or most suitable prototype of someone who will buy — or be benefited by — your products. That is who you’d want to target.

Here’s a step-by-step process to create the ideal client profile:

1. Internal analysis

Take a look at the data available in your organization. There are many ways to slice and dice it. But the first step is to collect relevant data about your current customer base and to study every resource you have about your ‘perfect’ customer. This includes asking questions such as:

• What industry are they in?
• How many employees do they have?
• What is their annual revenue?
• What products/ services do they buy from you?
• How long have they been a customer?
• How profitable are they?
• What was the sales cycle like? (Long, short, complex, etc.)
• How easy are they to work with? And do you enjoy it? (Some customers can be a drain on your energy and resources, and therefore wouldn’t be “ideal”)
• What pain points and/or triggers originally brought them to your company?
• Is there a specific organizational structure that benefits from your product or solution more (such as a centralized vs. decentralized model)?

2. Interview sales

Interview your sales team to understand where they are seeing the most success. If you sell in more than one region or more than one product set, spend the time to understand which regions or products impact your success the most. You may have different ideal customer targets to consider depending on the competitive landscape or geographical make-up of the customer base.

3. Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are a great tool to get everyone in agreement on who you are targeting and why. In order to be effective, they need to be developed based on actual customer interviews. I’ve discussed the process of creating successful buyer personas in greater depths in one of my previous articles.

Following these steps will help you paint the picture of your ideal client. Will there be outliers? Of course. After all, there is no magic bullet when it comes to marketing your business. There will be a few initial trials-and-errors but one thing is for sure — this will give you a solid starting point to focus your marketing and sales resources on targeted goals based on the ideal customer profile.

Management must view pricing as dynamic and leverage internal data and industry benchmarks to optimize pricing strategy.

Keep on reading: Why Pricing Can Make or Break Your SaaS Company

If you are a sales leader looking to get ahead of the competition, enhancing your personas with pricing metrics could be your secret weapon. According to a recent study, about 1% of B2B SaaS companies can describe their buyer personas

When an email campaign succeeds, the upside is obvious; improved engagement and increased revenue. But what’s required to consistently repeat that success is less obvious.

The truth is that email teams are often thrown together. They’re commonly comprised of people whose primary skill-sets aren’t specific to email and they’re given tools frequently designed with email as an afterthought. Or, even worse, tools that were cobbled together through assorted hacks so they kind-of, sort-of work for email.

No wonder so many companies’ email programs underperform.

To change underperforming to high-performing, the first step is prioritizing email. Both transactional and marketing email should be viewed as essential parts of the customer experience. The second step is investing in the right people, processes, and programs.

I have a weakness for alliteration – even when it’s slightly corny. So I like to call these key elements The Three Ps of a High-Performing Email Team.

Let’s take a closer look:

People: It can sometimes feel like ‘email marketers’ are a dime a dozen. But the people you need for a high-performing email team have skills that go beyond marketing. Your team should have expertise in all areas of email production and your program should comprise all customer emails, not just those that originate from the marketing team. I’m talking about a cross-functional team collaborating on a program that puts transactional and promotional emails under a single CX umbrella.

Seek out pros skilled at email strategy, production, and deployment, including copy, design and development. Of course, they should be good marketers, too. Make sure everyone from the copywriter to the person writing the code appreciates the value of email and its impact on CX.

That means treating transactional and promotional email as different but equally vital touchpoints in the customer journey.

Processes: Process improvements are about more than just speeding things up. While doing things faster is good, doing things better is far more important.

A good first step is getting your transactional emails out of your codebase. Find a way to edit/update transactional emails without depending on developers who likely have higher priority tasks.

After that:

• Establish a library of email templates, using modular content elements. That way you’re not constantly starting from scratch. Make sure creating localized versions is part of the standard process.

• Use the time and effort your template library saves to do more extensive A/B and multivariate testing. Test as many elements as you can — one at a time, of course — subject, preheader, body copy, images, CTAs, etc.
  • For marketing email, use batch testing, where you send a small test to a subset of your list, then the winning version goes to the rest.
  • For transactional, it’s better to use what I call “continuous testing.” That’s where you run multiple rounds of testing on every email, so you’re continuously optimizing.

• Establish KPIs for every email you send. Incorporate performance measurement and data analysis into the process.
  • While you’re at it, you might also want to establish a standardized process for documenting each email. Track the email’s purpose, who owns it, when/why it’s sent, and to whom. Include how it gets triggered, what data it relies on, performance, etc.The institutional knowledge you will build over time will be invaluable.

• Take action on your test results. Use them to improve not only open, click, and conversion rates but also to fine tune segmentation and improve customer experience. Then keep testing.

• Establish a central approval process to ensure every email is fully reviewed and tested before deployment. Maintain consistency by formalizing stakeholder sign-off on brand governance, regulatory compliance, and reputation management.

Programs: To ensure your people can properly execute, you need to give them the right tools and technologies.

At a minimum, a high-performing email team will need the following:

• A template editor to edit both copy and HTML. It should include a visual preview and have the ability to incorporate variables to test personalization and dynamic content. Integrate your editor with production and/or your in-house digital messaging service/third-party ESP by API or web hooks.

• A tool to automate integration with customer data for personalization and dynamic content, either pulled from the database (marketing emails) or pushed by an online or in-app event trigger (transactional).

• A testing tool to preview rendering across multiple devices and email clients

• An analytics tool to measure performance

Putting in the time and effort to create a solid email team, with the right processes and programs in place, isn’t easy. But doing so will help deliver significantly improved results, over and over.

Download high res version here. 

By Jaimy Szymanski with Jeremiah Owyang

Though consumer applications may receive most of the fanfare, mixed reality technologies offer enterprises many opportunities to supercharge employee skill-sets as well.

Utilizing internal-facing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications––often referred to simply as “XR” for “extended reality”––companies can increase collaboration and transform traditional approaches to education and training, repairs and maintenance, sales, product and site design, and more.

The latest report from Kaleido Insights’ we published “Prepare for the New Reality of ‘Super Employees,’” explores in detail the most effective cross-departmental use cases of mixed reality within organizations. These are applicable to a variety of industries (see Fig. 1 below), with advantages of utilizing XR over traditional processes, practices, and legacy technologies abound. The six enterprise use cases are:

1. Engineering and Design Modeling: Utilizing 3D modeling in engineering products is a tried-and-true method in most manufacturing environments. Reviewing designs in a collaborative VR space offers novel opportunities as traditional computer-aided design and modeling (CAD/CAM) technologies evolve.
2. Training and Employee Education: Conducting training exercises in a VR environment offers many benefits over real-world programs, including increased safety; managing information transfer amidst high employee turnover; scaling trainers; and upskilling existing workers.
3. Real-time Information Overlay: Primarily a use case meant for AR, real-time information is provided to a viewer utilizing wearable AR headsets or accessible through a mobile device or tablet via an AR app, while simultaneously viewing real-world surroundings.
4. Theft Protection: Though primarily retail in its industrial application, theft protection is an emerging use case utilized by large retailers to combat shrinkage of high ticket-value items.
5. B2B Sales: VR and AR can offer new, immersive opportunities to sell industrial products while simultaneously increasing portability and scaling salesperson efforts.
6. Marketing and Entertainment: AR and VR content marketing is a growing field for digital marketers looking to reach audiences in new, engaging ways in order to compete with other online and mobile experiences.

From designing machinery in a collaborative VR space to avoid collision issues, to utilizing AR wearables to overlay information for technician repairs in real-time, the XR space is filled with opportunity for innovative corporations seeking to empower “super employees” while achieving greater efficiencies and engagement. Like many modern-day superheroes, these employees are strengthened with superpowers made possible via technological sidekicks that augment their bionic brains.

Learn more about each enterprise XR use case, as well as challenges to adoption and recommendations for implementation, by downloading the full report here. 

Love it or hate it, a sales proposal is a critical part of every successful deal. Although some salespeople consider it a waste of time, if done properly, it can not only help you close more deals, but also enable you to explore up-sell opportunities and drive more revenues.

A well-written sales proposal gives you a chance to show that you understand your prospect’s needs, that you have listened to them diligently, and that you’ll provide a compelling solution.

Checklist for Your Sales Proposal

Here’s a 4-step checklist to help you evaluate your sales proposal

• Is it organized?
• Is it readable?
• Does it address your prospect’s pain point?
• Does it provide pricing and timeline?

Is it organized?

Often, when we work on a sales proposal, we end up filling it with a lot of content. Sure, you may know your sales proposal in and out. But is it organized well enough to help your prospects easily search through it and find the information they’re looking for?

Are all the sections organized logically? Do they support your story?

A thin, well-organized proposal is more effective than a detailed, unorganized document.

Is it readable?

Although your proposal needs to be written professionally, it should also be easy to understand. If you add too much jargon and too many technical information, it will turn off your readers.

It’s essential to communicate the complexities in a lucid way. Break down the problem and make your solution easy to understand. If your proposal is hard to read, then your prospects will assume that your solution is difficult to implement, or requires highly knowledgeable experts.

Remember, your sales proposal will, often, be reviewed by multiple stakeholders. The easier it is to understand your proposal, the sooner you’ll be able to build a consensus, and close the deal.

Sometimes you might not be able to meet all the decision makers at the same time. In such cases, your proposal is likely to be passed around via email, with no one to present its information on your behalf. So keep your proposal simple and intuitive.

Does it address your prospect’s pain points?

Make sure that your proposal directly addresses your prospect’s pain points. When we spend weeks working on a proposal, it’s possible to drown the essentials amidst details.

Your proposal should clearly describe the problem and why it’s detrimental to your prospect’s business. It should also explain how your solution can help them solve their problem.

Does it address pricing and timeline?

No prospect likes ambiguity, especially when it comes to how much they need to pay and how long it will take to benefit from your solution.

Be transparent and provide them estimates upfront.

Ensure that you help them understand the variables (e.g users, data, projects) your pricing is based on. For example, do they need to pay double if they double their users? This will enable your prospects to forecast how their expenses will grow as their usage increases.

If you provide huge discounts for bulk requirements, make sure to highlight it.

Also, point out the things that are unlimited (e.g 24×7 support, unlimited reports) in your solution. If your competitor charges for any of these things, this might help you clinch the deal.

It can be tricky to estimate the timeline. I’ve seen prospects come up with new requirements when we’re in the middle of the execution phase, which only pushes things further. So make sure you clearly communicate the underlying caveats. For example, you’ll be able to implement your solution in 2 months, provided there are only up to 2 rounds of requirements gathering within the next 2 weeks.

Finally, make the purchase experience quick and easy. Describe the various payment methods supported by your business, how they can use them, and what they can expect after they make the payment.

Writing a Winning Sales Proposal

To create a great buying experience for your prospects that closes the deal, you need to provide relevant and practical content in your proposal.

Although the actual format of sales proposal varies from person to person, it’s a tool that you can use to convince your prospects to purchase your solution to their problem.

Here’s a 5 step checklist to write a winning proposal

1. Write a personalized cover letter
2. Focus on the ‘why’
3. Include customer testimonials
4. Make it easy for prospects to do business with you
5. It should be accessible on mobile

1. Write a personalized cover letter

Many salespeople send the same cover letter in all their proposals. Prospects can easily see through it, and assume that they’re just another lead for you and not a valuable potential customer.

Your cover letter will receive the most views and sets the tone for your proposal. So it needs to not only capture your prospect’s attention but also connect with them emotionally.

Place the most relevant, differentiating information about your solution and company in the most valuable real estate of your page — above the fold.

2. Focus on the why

While preparing your sales proposal, it’s easy to get lost in details and flood it with “what” your solution does — its capabilities, features and benefits.

However, it’s more important to focus on “why” your solution will solve your prospect’s problem. Remember, they’re already evaluating various potential solutions and are likely to know what each of them is basically capable of doing. So you need to convince them as to why your product/service is the most suitable one.

Most sales proposals are focused on what they can provide to prospects. It’s more important to communicate the outcomes your prospect will achieve as a result of the deal.

Prospects don’t pay for features and deliverables, they pay for outcomes and results. Use your sales proposal as an opportunity to showcase your solution’s unique selling proposition (USP) and prove its ROI.

The beginning portions of your proposal should address the problems that your prospect is facing. This will turn your proposal into a working document that basically outlines client objectives, a powerful way to persuade your prospects.

3. Include customer testimonials

Did you know that 72% of people think positive reviews and testimonials make them trust a business more? People love to read reviews. So include them in your sales proposal to demonstrate how your solution has helped others.

However, there are couple of things to keep in mind, while using testimonials.

First, ensure that the customer in your testimonials is similar to your prospect. For example, if your prospect is a small business owner, a testimonial from the CEO of a Fortune 500 company won’t help. They’ll simply assume your solution is not meant for them.

Second, use testimonials that talk about similar use cases. For example, if your prospect is looking for a solution with superior reporting capabilities, include testimonials that talk about report generation and distribution.

Avoid using the same testimonials in all your proposals. The key is to use the ones that can strike a chord with your prospects.

4. Make it easy for prospects to do business with you

Every prospect wants an easy buying experience. Ensure that your proposal contains all the required information needed to make a buying decision.

The recipient of your proposal might not be the final decision maker. In fact, even the signer might need to get buy-ins from other influencers.

Find out all the stakeholders likely to be involved in the sales process. Include the necessary information required to convince each one of them.

For example, your proposal might be reviewed by an IT manager who needs to know about your security practices. It might also be seen by the CFO who is looking for different pricing scenarios. Make sure to include all the relevant information that will help various stakeholders make a buying a decision.

Similarly, terms and conditions are an important piece of information reviewed by lawyers to estimate the risk involved in the deal.

Package all the required information with appropriate call-to-action. If your prospect is ready to proceed with the deal, they’ll want to do it as soon as possible. Include a call-to-action that allows your prospects to electronically sign your proposal to close the deal or accept a letter of intent. It will help you quickly move the process forward.

5. It should be accessible on mobile

Today, more people are doing business on-the-go. This is especially true for decision makers such as managers and executives, who are likely to review your proposal on their phones.

So ensure that your documents can be viewed and interacted with on mobile devices.

Wrapping Up

As a salesperson, you can grow revenues in two ways — close more deals or close bigger deals. A good sales proposal helps you do both.

Start with a strong discovery process by asking thoughtful questions. Begin your sales proposal by rehashing the top three objectives your clients discuss with you.

Next, describe how your solution will add value to their business by achieving those objectives.

Finally, show them how your solution costs only a fraction of the value it delivers, making it easy to close the deal.

Just this last week there were several articles in the news about the value of measurement and analytics. These are just a few of the stories published recently:

Forbes: Data Science is the Key to Marketing ROI.

This year alone, the U.S. is projected to absorb a shortfall of 190,000 data scientists — and that’s not even counting the 1.5 million more analysts and leaders needed to make use of the information big data supplies.

IT World: Is Analytics Adding Business Value?

Data analytics is receiving vast amounts of attention in the trade press, on many websites and at conferences. References are even spilling into the mainstream media.

Forbes: the ROI of a Great Story

The business world is (rightly) enamored by analytics, set on using their predictive value to construct a strategy, increase profitability and bolster bottom-line growth.

Take a look at the marketing and PR jobs posted on sites like Indeed, Glass Door or even LinkedIn, and you’ll find these words cropping up in a large percentage of the ads.

• Collaborate with in-house data scientists and research analysts to identify interesting stories.
• Develop, research, and write data-oriented stories, reports and infographics.
• Deliver measurement and reporting of results and optimization plans and communicate this to a cross-functional team.
• Emphasis on client onboarding, paid marketing strategy, campaign management, analytics, and reporting.
• Track, measure, and report on results of PR and social media campaigns.

Why do employers value data, analytics, and measurement so highly?

A Competitive Edge

According to McKinsey, the volume of available data is growing exponentially, with more added every day from billions of phones, sensors, payment systems, and cameras, but organizations are struggling to turn data into value. Those who advance the furthest fastest will have a significant competitive advantage; those who fall behind risk becoming irrelevant.

Analytics Provide Insights that Can Lead to Opportunities

Business leaders know this is possible and CEOs all over the world are asking questions about how analytics can help them plan and develop future strategies that will lead to expansion. Right now there is a shortage of analysts with the skills to deliver these insights, so it’s a very hot skill.

Informed Decision Making Instead of Trial and Error

The CMO survey of 2018 shows that reliance on marketing analytics to make decisions has increased from 30% to 42% in the past 5 years, with B2C companies using analytics 55% of the time. The survey also reports that the use of quantitative tools to demonstrate the impact of marketing spend has increased 28% over the last five years. This is good news for savvy marketers and PR practitioners who learn these skills – it could lead to a seat at the boardroom table.

• The HotelTonight app sells unbooked hotel rooms around the world for discounted prices at the last minute.
• It's the "best-kept secret in UK and Europe travel," according to CEO Sam Shank.
• The prices get cheaper the closer you get to the booking date, according to Shank.
• He added that booking hotels through an app and choosing Sunday night for your stay will also get you better rates.

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If you're on Instagram, it's hard to miss the bloggers who seem to frequent the plushest and most expensive hotels in the world — places that are out of reach to the rest of us.

However, if you know what to ask for — and have the right tools — a life of luxury is more affordable than you think.

Hotel booking app HotelTonight offers last-minute rooms at a range of hotels around the globe at discounts as high as 50%.

CEO Sam Shank told Business Insider his app is "the best-kept secret in travel in the UK and Europe" despite having "better deals than you'll find anywhere else and being a lot easier to use."

According to the company, hotels have an average occupancy rate of 65%, meaning 1 in 3 rooms are typically going to waste.

In order to make some bank on rooms that are still empty at the last minute, the hotels load them onto the HotelTonight app, which then offers them to users at discounted rates.

Taking bookings mobile

Shank launched HotelTonight in January 2011. The app is his third online travel company.

"The first was a hotel review site called TravelPost, which was acquired by SideStep (later purchased by KAYAK), then I started a travel deal search engine called DealBase," he said.

HotelTonight came about because Shank was obsessed with apps, but uninspired by what he saw in the travel category.

"Hotels said they always have rooms available at the end of the night and always hope someone will walk in," Shank said. Meanwhile, there are "customers who have a need to have a room at the very last minute."

The company initially launched in three markets — New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — and is now in 2,000 cities and 35 countries around the globe. Its most recent launch was in Israel.

From basic to high-roller

The app works with hotels across six categories designed to cover all comers: Basic, Solid, Charming, Hip, Luxe, and Highroller.

Users can browse recommendations based on their location, can search by city, or can access a hidden menu by typing in the city name followed by a comma and a "magic word," such as "free breakfast" or "pet friendly."

Some of the most luxurious hotels on the site offering deep discounts are the Hotel Baume and Hotel Saint Marc in Paris, or The Lalit and The Athenaeum in London.

At the time of writing this — 12 p.m. on a Tuesday — the best offers for London tonight include a £338 room at The Lalit going for £230...

...As well as deals on hotspots like The Curtain and The Groucho Club.

Meanwhile, New York City deals include a suite at the "Highroller" Tuscany hotel for £242, discounted from £1,317.

There are a number of factors that play a role in landing the cheapest possible hotel fare, according to Shank.

There's an ideal time to book...

"Generally speaking, hotel rooms work the exact opposite of flights," Shank said. "With a flight, the worst time to book a flight is right before the plane takes off.

"With hotels, the rate declines the closer you get to arrival. The longer you wait, the better the deals are."

However, while the best deals may happen last-minute, six months ago the app expanded to allow users to book up to 100 days in advance in around 100 cities.

"Our hotel partners loved the app, it provides incremental revenue, and they wanted to be able to sell rooms earlier instead of selling them through legacy online travel agencies," Shank said.

"It really depends on what level of spontaneity you’re feeling like. If you see something you feel good about, go ahead and lock that in. If you’re more willing to stay in a new hotel, we’re going to have something great and the prices do decline the longer you wait."

...And you should always do it through an app

"If you book on an app, HotelTonight or in general, you’re going to unlock better rates," Shank said.

"Hotels see those travelers as an incremental customer — they’re reaching a customer that is on the go, that is somebody that’s segmented from the website traffic and website customer. That’s how the market’s developed."

There's even a best day to stay

Shank said that finding the cheapest deal is "market-dependent and seasonal," and varies a lot based on what's going on in the city.

"Is there a conference in town? Is there an event in town? Is Wimbledon going on?"

However, he said that in general, the cheapest day to stay in a hotel is Sunday.

"It doesn’t have as strong leisure travel and business travel hasn’t started yet," he said.

"You might go to a hotel with a pool, have some time away from your regular life," he said. "Sunday night’s a great time to do it, and if you pick a hotel close to your office, you can even skip the tube ride."

Make the most of reward programmes

With HotelTonight, you can also get a better deal by booking multi-night stays, looking out for "Geo Rates" — location-based discounts — and joining HotelTonight's rewards program, HT Perks, which gives customers better discounts the more they book.

"It's our version of a loyalty programme or rewards programme," Shank said. "I get frustrated by points programmes, because you never know when they're going to be devalued.

"We've created a system where you level up based on what you spend, and can unlock deeper discounts and special savings, but it works a lot like a game — once you hit your level, you never lose it. Once you've earned it, you've earned it."

The app's new "Upgrades" feature also gives you the option to stay in a suite for a minimum of 50% off.

Once you book,  you can also live chat with an "HT Pro" in the app to ask any questions and submit any requests you have to "personalise your stay in advance."

The alternative to a travel agent

In the near future, Shank said the app will start to include push notifications that will tell you about hotel deals for upcoming trips you have "watched" through the app, and will also tell you about low fares on hotels you "favourite."

It's all part of an effort to be a one-stop-shop for hotels — according the company, HotelTonight customers save 17% on average over other online travel agencies.

"The goal is to be a full-service alternative to the legacy travel agencies and provide an experience that’s faster, and provides better value," Shank said.

SEE ALSO: Frequent travellers tell us why you should always take the hotel room with the sofa bed — and reveal 9 other easy ways to make a cheaper room feel like a suite

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's why we give better advice to our friends than we give to ourselves

One of the most common questions I am asked in my Professional Scrum Master (PSM) courses and in coaching engagements is:

How do we build trust?

This is a complex topic. And there are no simple or quick processes or techniques that will guarantee an outcome. Nor can you know how long it will take to build trust.

Trust is fluid and constantly evolving.

There is no “end goal.”

Because trust is a feeling.

Trust is a characteristic of a relationship, of many interconnected and overlapping relationships.

It may be challenging and complex, but trust is essential to enable agility. So let’s define what trust is and the elements required to build trust.

What is Trust

Trust is a willingness to be vulnerable. When I trust, I am essentially making something important to me vulnerable to the actions of someone else.

Distrust is when I don’t feel that something I have made vulnerable to you is actually safe with you.

What are things we make vulnerable? It could be position, reputation, ideas, work or creation, opportunity, or feelings. It could be a paycheck.

Anatomy of Trust

Brené Brown uses the acronym BRAVING to talk about the elements required to build trust. Brené says that when we trust, “we are BRAVING connection with someone.” Let’s explore each element related to enabling agility.

Boundaries

I establish clear boundaries, and I stick to my boundaries. You establish boundaries, and you hold your boundaries. We both respect each other’s boundaries.

The Scrum framework is an example of boundaries that help a Scrum Team focus and self-organize around a goal to deliver shippable product by the end of a Sprint. Team members stick to this boundary by not accepting additional work during the Sprint that would endanger that goal. Others in the organization respect this boundary by not forcing or pressuring them to break this boundary.

People may also set individual boundaries in the context of the workplace. I may set a boundary that I leave my work at the office. Or perhaps I don’t check email on the weekend. Maybe I don’t take on any new projects or activities unless I remove something equivalent.

Reliability

I do what I say I will do. You do what you say you will do. Over and over and over again.

Reliability is important when you need to collaborate in order to solve challenging problems and innovate. Reliability is important when success is measured by team outcomes, not solely by individual activities. You can’t just be reliable once. Consistency matters. There are two things you must consider in order to be reliable.

1. Establish clear expectations.

A Scrum Team creates a clear Sprint Goal and a transparent plan for achieving it. These expectations are revisited at least on a daily basis in the Daily Scrum. A Scrum Team also sets a clear expectation of quality and completeness in their definition of “Done.”

2. Don’t overcommit.

When we have too many plates spinning in the air, we can have problems focusing, we may cut corners or forget things, and we can experience burnout. Learn to say “no” or “not now.”

Of course, we cannot predict exactly how long things will take. So we may be wrong.

But did we focus on the thing we said we would do? Were we open about new information that would affect our ability to accomplish the thing we said we would do?

Improving my reliability has been an intentional focus this past year. Specifically, I never say “yes” to new opportunities or requests immediately. I take some time to consider if it is something I really want to do in the greater context of my life. And if I do, I then consider what I am removing to make space and outline some expectations (outcomes, time commitment, working agreements, etc.). More often than not, I end up saying “no” or “not now.”

Accountability

I hold you to account for doing the things you said you would do. You can hold me to account for doing the things I said I would do.

“Calling someone out” is not a bad thing. It’s a thing you do when you deeply respect and care for someone. And if you are on the receiving end of it, you appreciate that this person had the courage to help you see something maybe you were unable to see and to help you do better.

And since we are human beings, we are going to screw up.

When you do, own it. Apologize and make amends.

When you are on the receiving end of it, you allow the other person to own it, apologize, and make amends.

Vault

What you share with me, I will hold in confidence. And I expect you to do the same with me.. and with others.

When we gossip or collude with others, we are demonstrating that we will not hold information in confidence. This erodes trust.

I often find coaching opportunities around this topic. As a Scrum Master, a team member may come to me about issues with another team member. Ultimately, I will coach this team member on addressing the issues with that person directly.

If you put yourself in the other person’s shoes, how would you feel if a team member was complaining about you to someone else?

The Sprint Retrospective is an example of where we honor the “vault” as a team. Only Scrum Team members participate, and the specifics of what happens in the room stays in the room. A Scrum Master helps keep a positive, continuous improvement focus rather than just dwelling on the negative and complaining.

Integrity

This is about choosing courage over comfort. This is about choosing what is right over what is simply fun, fast, or easy. Practice your values rather than just professing them.

Product Owners show integrity by saying no to stakeholders who want something that is not in alignment with the product vision or is of low value. They don’t just put it at the bottom of the Product Backlog to make the stakeholder happy.

Scrum Teams show integrity by not showing partially done software in the Sprint Review.

When our leaders profess their values, we expect their actions and decisions to reflect them. People don’t trust leaders who say one thing but then do another. If a leader says he values learning and innovation, but he measures individuals on a strict “billable hours” policy or by “lines of code”, this inconsistency breaks down integrity.

Non-Judgment

You can be struggling and ask for help, and I will not judge you. I can be struggling and ask for help, and you will not judge me.

Practicing non-judgment honors vulnerability. It must be okay to need help. In fact, we should place value on being willing to ask for help. We cannot think less of someone when we offer them help.

I may think that the quality of your work has been suffering and does not meet our standards, but I am not going to assume you intentionally did poor quality work or that you don’t have the same level of commitment as I do. I can hold you accountable from a place of non-judgment.

Truly believing that we learn from failure is another way that teams and organizations practice non-judgment.

Generosity

You can assume the most generous things about my words, actions, and intentions. And I will do the same for you.

Generosity means recognizing that we are all human. We make mistakes. We go through difficult times. Generosity means we are willing to forgive, offer an opportunity to make amends, and hold space for the inevitable learning and growth that is part of being human and being part of a team.

I may feel disrespected by something you said in our planning session, but I know you would not intentionally hurt me. I will have a direct and honest conversation about how I feel, but I will not label you as a disrespectful person.

Make It Real

Set aside 10 minutes and reflect on these questions. Pick one or two relationships where you want to build trust.

Step 1: How can the acronym BRAVING help you think about and talk about trust differently?

Step 2: What examples can you identify where you have established each of the 7 elements of BRAVING?

Step 3: Where do you have an opportunity to improve each of the 7 elements of BRAVING?

Bonus: And if you have 25 minutes, check out Brene Brown’s talk on the Anatomy of Trust. Then ask yourself who is filling up your marble jar, and how are you filling up the marble jar? (Yes, you have to watch the video to know what that means.)

Through a detailed genetic study of kinship, an international team is the first to demonstrate that just like human societies, beluga whales appear to value culture as well as their ancestral roots and family ties. They have demonstrated that related whales returned to the same locations year after year, and even generation after generation.

Limp-along sales growth and a salesforce that’s stuck in a mink-lined rut are symptomatic of ‘Sameness Selling.’ And it may be more common than you imagine.

Just consider for a moment some of the main B2B sales problems today. Think about how issues like these can disrupt well-intended investments of time and resources in your sales call activity:

 4 Issues Impacting Sales Call Effectiveness Right Now

• Companies use low price points to win sales because the salesforce doesn’t know how to differentiate product value and sell at higher prices.

 

• Buyers can’t stand most salespeople. They don’t want to see them, and why should they? The majority of salespeople can’t quantify their value effectively, can’t defend value in the face of price pushback, and they offer nothing in the way of new insights that can actually benefit the buyer’s decision-making process. The number one complaint from decision-makers is that salespeople waste their time.

 

• Salespeople are failing. A number of recent studies point to the fact that 1 out of 2 sales reps don’t hit their sales numbers annually, win rates are still going down across industries and less than 1 out of 10 customers believe that sales reps present clearly differentiated value messaging.

 

• Sales managers have high expectations. Most sales managers expect their salespeople to differentiate the company’s value effectively, make sales at higher prices and hit their numbers consistently. However, most companies have underinvested in sales training especially the type of training and tools needed to be successful in an environment where products or services are commoditized by customers.

All we have to do is look back a few years and we should recognize how B2B selling has been in a “Low Differentiation Era” for some time. The commoditization of products and services and supplier parity is prevalent. This gives salespeople little influence with decision-makers, especially if they aren’t equipped to communicate a compelling value message and differentiate from competitors in relevant, convincing ways.

“When salespeople communicate with a sameness solution message, the buyer won’t see what the salesperson assumes are obvious advantages.”

Is it any wonder why customers often choose to buy from low-priced providers? Or, they stick with the same status quo solution they’ve relied on for eons.  When sameness selling is what they get from salespeople, customers stick with cheaper, customary options.

Many, if not most sales leaders don’t know how to solve this problem. As a result, the demand for highly effective sales training and consulting is significant. Wide-scale sameness among competitors has never been this prevalent and many-a-salesforce is trying to catch up with the times.

Revamping sales training can help but only if it is strongly focused on value-differentiated selling concepts that produce behavior change. Don’t waste your money on a one or two-day conventional seminar! Unless it involves learning that’s tailor fit to specific needs and selling scenarios, and it includes several months of repeat, sequential learning and follow-up coaching – it will produce mediocre results. Save your money, talk to me first.

Here Are 3 Ideas To Think About…

Good idea: Get boned up on how to handle the customer conversation about value.

Better idea: Learn how to create the value discussion with any buyer.

Best idea: Develop the ability to communicate a compelling value message that’s tailored to your customer’s value drivers while differentiating from competitors effectively.

 

“The Five Rules of Megavalue Selling,” is a roadmap to making sales by differentiating and articulating a convincing value message. Mark trains salespeople and advises sales managers and leaders on improving sales growth, customer experience and strategic account management. 

I swear, every day I see some salesperson on LinkedIn say, “What you missed is that in my 500 years of sales experience, people always buy from people. That will never change.”

I was acutely reminded of this while looking back on a LinkedIn post I wrote a year ago, seeing comments like these:

And while it might be true people often do buy from companies that employ people, the reason they must buy from people is because they must buy from salespeople. Not because the salesperson definitively adds value to the buyer (Though they certainly can!).

People Buy from Companies

Obviously, B2C understands this intimately, and buyers seem to have fully embraced the trend. Look at companies across so many different categories, like:

• Amazon - I buy almost everything I need on Amazon, and you probably do too. Nearly 50% of all product searches today start on Amazon. Ever spoken to someone to buy something through their website? That answer’s likely, “No.” The “Buy Now” button is all I need.
• Netflix - Somewhere along the way, “We all decided that we hated wearing pants and wanted to stay at home on our couch instead of getting dressed and driving to Blockbuster,” said sales expert Derek Wyszynski, when I asked him the write the concluding chapter in my book, Inbound Selling: How to Change the Way You Sell to Match How People Buy.
• Uber - We all wanted personal drivers and got sick of waiting to ride in the back of a cab with polyester seats that stank of vomit, so the world gave us Uber.
• Instacart/Seamless - This takes us back to the theme of “hatred toward pants.” We decided we’d rather pay someone to pick up and deliver our groceries, so we have services like Instacart and Seamless.
• TurboTax - We didn’t want to deal with CPAs and tax preparers directly anymore, so companies like TurboTax cut out the middleman and allow us to file our taxes from the comfort of home.

Of course, you’re thinking … “Yea, whatever, this is just B2C.” Is it? One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in the past year is “If you want to know where B2B sales is going, look at B2C sales first.” Why? Because B2C doesn’t have the luxury of solving problems with people. They must use technology. And, as soon as they figure out a distribution method that works, B2B will follow.

Hint: Amazon is now creating business applications for Alexa and Facebook has already created business applications for Messenger. Global Tech companies like Atlassian and Basecamp have 100,000 and 2.5 million users respectively worldwide, and neither have sales teams.

And software isn’t the only industry moving in this direction. Here are a few non-software examples:

• WeWork (Office space) - You can buy office space directly through their website without speaking with a sales rep.
• Upwork (Professional Services) - You can buy every professional service under the sun for your business (Marketing, copywriting, sales consulting, training, website design, app building, and so on) without ever talking to a sales rep.
• Rev (Transcription Services) - Upload an audio file and have it transcribed in under 24 hours … again, no sales reps.
• SpaceX (Rockets) - Did you know SpaceX has no sales team, aside from Elon Musk?

If you’re a B2B salesperson, do you actually think buyers are running through the streets screaming, “Stop AI! I love getting cold calls and talking to salespeople. Please don’t make it easy for me to purchase your widgets all by myself!” Of course not.

I’m not saying salespeople are not smart, high-value people. I am saying if the work we’re doing could be done without us -- or using less of our attention -- it should be.

So, how should salespeople move forward? First, it’s important to realize relationship selling is not a sustainable competitive advantage. People sometimes buy from people, but not because they want to -- usually, it’s because they have to.

Second, you must accept technology is the preferred buying channel -- and it’s an ally not an enemy. Use it to your advantage and stop trying to resist it.

Third, rethink what you bring to the table for your customers and your company. I already know what you’re going to say next: “I add value.” Every relationship seller says that but -- with the exception of a select few -- you’re going to find very few people who can articulate what it actually means or how to do it.

If you want to be a value-based seller and stop relying on your existence as a human to be the value-add in sales, here’s what to do instead:

1. Read about industry trends impacting your buyers -- every day

Ask yourself if you can easily answer the following question without Google or your company’s homepage: “What are the top three things your prospective customers are concerned about today, and what are the best companies doing to fix it?”

If you can’t, you don’t read enough. Being able to answer this question, and others like it, could be the sole factor that distinguishes your value to prospective buyers. If you don’t know where to start, go back and talk with existing customers. Talk to your marketing team.

Follow industry blogs, and set up Google News Alerts for topics your customers care about. This is a hard muscle to build, but it can be built with practice and dedication.

2. Walk a mile in your customers’ shoes by experiencing their pain

Pain is everything. There are at least two general schools of thought in the sales world: Pain-based selling and opportunity-based selling. You’re either finding the nerve and pressing your thumb down on it hard, or you’re painting a picture filled with unicorns, rainbows, and treasure chests for your prospects.

In my opinion, pain-based selling is far more effective. But to know pain, you must experience it. I learned this quickly when I started at HubSpot. In my first 30 days on the job, I had to build and launch my own website as if I were a marketer -- the very persona I was selling into. This project made me far more effective at selling to our prospective customers.

3. Learn about open-ended questions and active listening

I was auditing Mark Roberge’s Harvard Business School class recently, and he recapped the current state of the sales environment. He pointed out that few reps today actually understand the value of asking their prospects questions. He also remarked there are many reps out there practicing “Alligator Selling” (big mouth, small ears).

This is only reinforced by HubSpot Research showing buyers still think most sellers are pushy. In Roberge’s class, he starts by teaching his students questions are a valuable way of selling. Then, he explains closed-ended questions (yes/no questions) are better than no questions, but insufficient to understand what truly matters to a buyer.

Ultimately, he teaches them the value of open-ended questions starting with phrases like, “What’s your opinion on …” or, “To what extent …” or, “How do you think …” and “What led up to …”.

To understand what truly matters to your prospect, they must explain it to you in their own words -- before you consider positioning your solution as the one that will solve their challenge. Because, early and mid-sales process, you can’t fully understand which problems they’re trying to solve and why.

If you do, however, you’ll always be able to tailor your company’s solution within their specific context. Ultimately, this makes you more valuable to the prospect, which increases the chances of them becoming a customer.

Most importantly, using open-ended lines of questioning to get prospects to open up to you matters because most people are resistant to what they hear, but believe what they say. When you get them to say they need to change, there’s no selling involved. They’ve sold themselves for you.

4. Be the expert in your company’s product or service

Nothing replaces superior product knowledge. At the end of the day, knowing your company’s products or services better than anyone else can be the difference between you winning and losing deals.

Think of this from your customer’s perspective. If they see you have to ask someone else questions repeatedly, or bring someone else in to do product demos, etc. … eventually, they’re going to think “Why am I dealing with this person and not those other people who seem to have all the answers?” And they’d be right.

If, on the other hand, you demonstrate extremely deep knowledge of how your own products and services work, you’ll demonstrate you’re a valuable resource before and after they become a client, and you’ll plant the seed you’ll appreciate the value in the product itself, because you’ve mastered it so intimately. After all, if you don’t care enough to master your own product, why should they?

5. Take time to research and customize everything

As a mentor, and as a sales manager, the first time I showed my team how I prepared for calls, they looked at me like I had six heads. I explained I take at least 30 minutes to prepare for every discovery call (the first real call in our sales process after an initial 15-20 minute connect call).

Then, I spend between 30 and 60 minutes preparing for a goal setting call (the third call in our sales process). And I take another 60 to 90 minutes preparing for a demo (the fourth call in our process). Finally, I spend between 30 and 60 minutes preparing for a closing call or pricing call.

Why did I spend between two and four hours preparing for each of my calls with every prospect? Because information is power, and personalization is everything. It was only through deeply reviewing my notes from every call -- and ensuring I hadn’t missed company updates along the way -- that I was able to make every single prospect feel like I built a solution just for them. And frankly, I did.

To this day I still attribute my success as a sales rep and a sales manager to this dedicated level of research and preparation, and you should too.

6. Walk away from deals regularly

One of the most bizarre things that happened to me when I started at HubSpot was getting congratulatory emails from our VP of Sales for having the most closed lost opportunities in a month.

What? Isn’t sales supposed to be about bringing in as much revenue as possible? At the time, it made no sense to me. But the way he looked at it was two-fold. First, I wasn’t spending my time with people who weren’t committed to changing their business. This made me a more efficient time manager and, ultimately, led to higher wins rates and more accurate forecasts.

Second, I wouldn’t just sell to anyone who had a pulse and a credit card. While sales teams are strongly encouraged to bring in as much revenue as possible, the quality of that revenue matters. If you sign up a customer who really shouldn’t have become a customer in the first place, it will wreak havoc on many parts of your book as a sales rep and the broader business.

Bad revenue creates unpredictable, unsustainable growth. Despite this reality, some sales teams believe reps should, “Sell through the churn.” Even if your company doesn’t have mechanisms in place to prevent or penalize you for selling bad revenue,

I’d encourage you to hold yourself to a higher standard. You’ll ultimately win more deals, create higher retention customers, and generate referrals from those customers you wouldn’t be getting otherwise.

Salespeople are not going away. I understand that, and I’m not suggesting they should. I’m simply trying to impress upon CEOs and sales leaders that “existing” doesn’t make you worthy of your role in sales. If you like what I wrote and want to learn more, I also have a book coming out in April 2018, available to pre-order here: Inbound Selling: How to Change the Way You Sell to Match How People Buy.

I recently watched a video of Rob Jeppsen, CEO of Xvoyant, explaining how to take a different approach when building out your pre and post sales funnel stages. Many times the process of defining the pre and post sales stages is part of building out a customer journey map or strategy

One of the key takeaways from Jeppsen’s approach is to define what you want the customer to experience along the journey before you define the stage names. Let’s dive into this a little deeper.

Traditional High-Level Funnel Pre and Post Sale Stages

Let’s start with a high-level simple example of stages. Traditionally, you might start with the following high-level stages (very simplified): awareness, education, selection, commitment, handoff, onboarding, utilization, expansion, and renewal. Below illustrates simple stages and actions.

The Traditional Way

Pre Sales

1. Awareness – Building awareness of your product or service.

2. Education – Educating the buyers and committee with solution selling.

3. Selection – Trying to get selected as the best solution to deliver solutions and business outcomes.

Sale Occurs

4. Commitment – Signing the deal, celebration, and two way commitment towards success.

Post Sales (Customer Success)

5. Handoff – Transferring commitments, solutions, goals, and success criteria.

6. Onboarding – Onboarding the solution promised during the sales process.

7. Utilization – Utilization of the solution to deliver behavior change, business outcomes, and ROI.

8. Expansion – Unlocking new opportunities to further expand business impact

9. Renewal – Renewing the customer for another period of time

You might be tempted to start by writing the stages down like I have above. While that process is not bad, Jeppsen’s approach will help you take it to the next level.

Define the Experiences

Define the experiences you want your prospective clients and current clients to have during their customer journey. By starting with experiences versus stages, you are following the Jeppsen approach. Then you can define the stage to measure it in your CRM or customer success management platform.

Below is an example of what we want prospective clients and current clients to say after they experience our company at every stage of the customer journey or funnel stages.

The Experience Way (Jeppsen’s Approach)

Pre Sales

1. Ugh! I’ve got a problem and it needs to be better—Awareness

2. Aha! There’s actually a solution that works—Education

3. This is the place! There are actually experts here—Selection

Sale Occurs

4. Let’s do this! I’m committed to success from both sides—Commitment

Post Sales (Customer Success)

5. I’m in good hands! They clearly know what I want and need—Handoff

6. Boom! They did what they said they would do—Onboarding

7. Yeah! This is working—Utilization

8. Awesome! I’ve got to share with others—Expansion

9. ROI! I have tangible results and I’m excited to work with you again—Renewal

The goal of the Jeppsen approach is to help your company create emotional positive moments with your prospects and clients. To do this you will have to build experiences based on your customer’s perspective. This is called outside-in thinking. Outside-in thinking means that you look at your business from the customer’s perspective and design processes, tools, and products on what is best for your customer and what meets your customer’s needs.

If you want to keep your business afloat, then you need to find a way to get clients. However, you won’t be able to bag new customers if you don’t have a lead generation strategy in place. By finding a way to acquire warm leads to your business, you can sell your services to a revolving door of clients and don’t worry about running out of prospective buyers.

When it comes to generating leads online, growing your email list is one of the most effective ways to do so. However, you need to diversify your lead acquisition tactics and look beyond opt-in forms and the like.

In this post, you will learn different ways to come up with leads for your business using the tools featured below:

1. Text Request

Text Request is a mobile app that lets you send and receive texts using your business number. It improves customer engagement, team collaboration, and contact management. This is what you need if you want to develop your business messaging strategy.

Top Features

Communication Management

Manage your clients and leads more directly to texting them at your convenience. This makes it easier to convert visitors to leads.

Feedback Collection

It lets you know what your client wants according to the report it gives you. You’re also presented with statistics, keywords, and other useful data.

What we like most

This app has a user-friendly interface. The texts and data are also tamper-proof because they can’t be deleted. What’s even better is that multiple people can log in on this. The excellent customer service is also a thumbs-up.

2. LeadBerry

Leadberry is a web-based B2B lead generation app powered by Google Analytics. It would notify you if a brand visited your site, along with a comprehensive report of their valuable company data, such as their contacts, analytics, and sales.

Top Features

Visitor Tracker

You’ll know the person or company that viewed your website. This lets you know which audience to target — those who are most interested.

Data Gathering

Leadberry automatically gathers data from the people inside your business. From LinkedIn to Facebook and Twitter profiles. You can easily contact them with this feature.

What we like most

It’s easy-to-use as everything shows up at the right place and time. There are no technical jargons or any unneeded complexities. Users can personalize it according to their preference.

3. Find that Lead

Find that Lead is a Chrome extension that lets you find emails of your leads on LinkedIn and Twitter. It helps you generate thousands of emails from your niche so you can run a cold email outreach strategy using their information.

Top Features

Social Media Integration

It automatically searches for emails using LinkedIn and Twitter. This can also search the email of any domain. Simply open the extension and hit “find mail.”

Contact Export

You can export your emails to its Chrome extension. It then gives you a list of emails in just a few seconds.

What we like most

It’s a simple but highly-effective tool to boost your lead generation campaign. Its filterable lead finding feature and customer support are also spot-on. All these for a meager price.

4. Gmelius

Gmelius is for you if boosting your Gmail or Gsuite’s inbox is your top priority. It gives you reminders from your Gmail to email leads at specific times. This also lets you collaborate with others while protecting your privacy. It even enables you to customize your inbox to fit your needs. This tool won’t let you forget your leads because you can schedule your emails.

Top Features

Email Analyzer

It analyses your email and checks its contents. Each email type has its icon, letting you know its attachments.

Email Scheduler

This lets you set the date and time you want your email sent. It’s great if you’re always busy or communicating with a person in another time zone.

What we like most

It integrates well with Gmail and various CRMs. It improves your reach and marketing campaign. Creating a workflow library and marketing templates is made easier with this tool. You can even schedule and group your mail in a few seconds.

5. TARS

TARS is an automation tool that improves communication between customers and businesses. It builds a chatbot that helps increase your network and capture more leads. This one is for people who want to boost their productivity while improving customer relationships. As an example, TARS helped StyleDiem increase their conversion rate to 25%. They also helped BabyChakra to get three-times more leads.

Top Features

Notifications

You’ll receive a notification every time TARS gets a response from a visitor. This lets you gather data in real-time.

Unlimited Responses

You can set it to have as many responses as you want. This lets you create smart and varied replies to your visitors.

What we like most

Its interface input section is pretty neat and sleek. The simple design also makes it user-friendly. All you have to do is input a well-thought-out message script, and your chatbot will respond smartly.

Conclusion

Every business needs to capture more leads because these are its lifeblood. With the help of the tools mentioned above, there’s no doubt you’re going to rake in huge conversion rates. Just choose the one which you find ideal for your lead acquisition strategy. When you do, then you’re bound for greater success.

The difference between inside sales and outside sales is quite significant. It’s important to understand the key differences between the two if you’re building a sales team or trying to recruit sales talent.

A person who’s great at inside sales isn’t necessarily great at outside sales, and vice versa. In order to put together an effective sales team, you need to be able to recognize the skills that lead to success in each kind of sales.

In this blog post, we’ll break down the differences between inside and outside sales so that you’ll be able to build the sales system and the sales team that works best for you.

Inside sales vs. outside sales: The basics

At the most basic level, the difference between inside and outside sales comes down to where the sales process happens: Are you selling in person or remotely? Inside sales professionals identify, nurture and turn leads into customers remotely, while outside sales professionals meet and attempt to close their prospects face-to-face.

In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor considers someone an "outside salesperson" if they meet the following requirements:

The second point—“regularly engaged away from the employer’s place or places of business”—is the key. An outside sales rep is often knocking on doors, attending luncheons, speaking at events and setting up booths at conferences while most inside salespeople very rarely meet clients in the flesh.

If we were to go back in time a decade or two, it would be close to impossible to find an inside sales professional. But now, the rise of technology has made the role much more viable—and often more effective—than the more traditional outside sales role.

As this new role has evolved, the job requirements and skills have become distinct from those of an outside salesperson. Here are a few of the main differences:

Different tools for closing sales

The most important tool in the arsenal of an inside sales professional is a quality inside sales CRM. The ideal CRM will offer email management and tracking, phone calling, and SMS functionality (all things that Close.io offers).

While the best outside sales professionals likely use a CRM, they don’t rely on it so exclusively. An outside sales professional also needs equipment to pitch their product or service on-site, conduct on-site training and set up a booth at a conference. A set of golf clubs helps too.

Different sales cycle

Thanks to a methodical, well-defined sales process, inside sales often has a significantly shorter sales cycle. The inside sales process prioritizes lead scoring and reporting, allowing salespeople to focus on nurturing relationships that matter.

Different costs

Outside sales may drain your budget more quickly than inside sales. Your inside sales team really only needs computers, a CRM system, WiFi access and a bit of hustle. An outside salesperson might need a company car, lunch and dinner budgets, golf memberships, flights and more.

Different Scaling Capabilities

An inside salesperson can establish and nurture relationships with people all over the world from their computer—and they can do it with hundreds of prospects at once through email automation and great technology like Close.io which lets you manage multiple relationships at once.

An outside sales professional pitching clients in person can only pitch one client at a time. While the outside salesperson is wining and dining their prospect or spending hours on a golf course to close one deal, an effective inside sales pro could be closing multiple deals.

Different Skills

The best inside sales professionals and the best outside sales professionals have a lot of skills in common: Both work great on their feet, love to communicate, focus on results and are driven to understand their prospects’ problems.

One key difference between the two is the necessity of virtual communication skills. For outside sales, these things can be helpful, but for inside sales, communicating over text message, Twitter, LinkedIn and email is a critical part of the job. Inside salespeople use these skills to communicate on a regular basis while many outside sales professionals rely solely on voice and face-to-face.

Wrapping things up

So what’s better: inside sales or outside sales?

The reality is—both have a role. Some organizations rely on nothing but an inside sales team and find success, while others adopt a more blended approach with great results. It all comes down to your how much your product or service costs, how much you’re willing to spend on sales, and how your clients like to buy.

Once you’ve taken the time to understand your buyer and determine which sales approach makes the most sense for you, be sure to set yourself up with the right tools and the right team to make that approach work. If you decide to embrace inside sales, one of the highest ROI activities you can engage in is to develop strong follow-up habits.

We found it to be so crucial to the success of any sales team that we've written an entire book about it—and you can get it free today!

Download The Follow-Up Formula

Technology has evolved so significantly in the last 25 years that most people can’t keep up. Keeping up is exactly what you need to ensure you are doing. Companies everywhere focus on digital transformation because it impacts how they make sales. Your sales team must understand the digital process before they can sell products and services. Otherwise, you are bound to lose customers because they want things done differently, more now than ever before. The goal of digital transformation is to connect you with your customers and use a variety of technologies to do so. The three-step process is simple and effective, but you have to ensure that you help your sales team fully understand it and how it can work for them.

The Right Tools

The first step to your sales team becoming digital is giving them the tools they require to be part of the digital age. Almost everyone has cell phones, tablets, and other electronic devices, but you need to ensure that they have one just for company purposes. You may not give every salesperson the ability to scope leads online, but you should have a team (or a few people) devoted to it. They can utilize social media, cloud-based CRM and mobile technology to present your company digitally. Having a great website that is not mobile-friendly is a big mistake today with more than half of the internet being accessed via mobile devices. Keeping up with simple, but extremely important technology updates like this can give your sales team the advantage when push comes to shove.

Appropriate Training

There are specific tools required so that salespeople can transform digitally, but they also need the right training. While they probably know how to operate a cell phone and use it on social media, they may not understand the nuances of selling online. You may also have to invest in a digital sales course to help teach them what social media channels they can use and how to use them to better reach their customers and prospects. Or you might need to teach them the new CRM system and help them understand the changes they soon face. Helping your sales force keep up with technology through training is key to ensuring your sales force is not falling behind.

Automation

The digital transformation of your sales team can’t be complete without automation. Making appointments, creating invoices, and sending emails take up time that your employees don’t have. If you want them to be successful and more productive, automate some of these mundane tasks so that your sales force can focus on what they are good at, getting more leads and sales! By automating some of their workloads through the use of simple automation tools you are improving efficiency.

In the End, You Win!

Staying abreast of these three steps year after year is no easy task. You may need to hire a few people along the way in order to really take advantage of all of the new technologies that emerge in the coming years. If you are able to stay ahead of the technology curve, your company will outsell your competition. Word of mouth will spread that your company is doing cutting-edge work and the investment will be a small price to pay compared to your returns. Purchasing from a company that is technically savvy is much easier and often more exciting than purchasing from a company that is falling behind. Don’t be the company that is falling behind!

Lately, I’ve noticed somewhat of an unfortunate pattern taking hold in sales. Scratch that, the use of “lately” is misleading; the trend has been more or less obvious for years. Here’s the thing: salespeople don’t listen to learn. Say what?!

Here, I’ll repeat myself – all while looking at YOU, sales pro: you’re not listening to your prospect to learn. Instead, you’re listening to sell. You’re listening to hear your prospects utter what you think are key phrases like, “I don’t use video,” or “I use go-to-meeting…” And too often, you’re not getting any deeper, scratching only the surface of what could be a meaningful and potentially lucrative conversation. Big mistake – HUGE!

If we all believe in the virtues of being “customer first,” then why, during that first pitch, do so many of us spend so much time focusing on our product, our service and what we’re selling – thereby missing what matters most? Bottom line, if you want to land that deal, you need to know (way) more about your prospect.

Start by asking a lot of questions and listen (really listen!) to their answers. Learn as much as humanly possible about your prospect’s approaches, methodologies, objectives, pains, and issues – and this includes the context, not just the data.

Look, you’re not paid to simply take orders; you’re paid to influence the customer to buy. And to become a genuine influencer, you gotta LISTEN TO LEARN!

Did this little bit of advice motive you? I sure hope so! But in the meantime, if you’re looking to hear more from me on what it takes to become a serious, problem-centric sales person (i.e. an influencer in the game), check out my session: It’s the Problem, Stupid!, at the 2018 Growth Acceleration Summit— a sales and marketing event held by ZoomInfo, a leading B2B data provider. The event will be held in Boston this June 18-20. It’ll change the way you look at selling and how you manage deals forever. Trust me.

Learn more here: https://events.zoominfo.com/

Use my promo code, KEENAN100, to save $100 on conference passes!

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