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This article originally appeared in Manufacturing Today.

By Mark Donnolo

Manufacturing has undergone a radical transformation in the past 20 years, with a significant increase in technology, machine efficiency and reliance on ERP software. As the industry has shifted, so too have sales performance and sales compensation requirements.

Sales performance management and sales compensation issues arise when incentives aren’t properly aligned with C-level goals, sales people lose focus during long sales cycles and performance measures aren’t realistic. To ensure the sales organization is driving company success, sales leaders should tackle these challenges in the context of a sales performance management plan.

Challenge One: Translating C-Level Goals to the Front Line 

C-level goals are the focused business objectives of the company’s top leadership, used to set priorities for the sales organization’s strategy and compensation plans. In manufacturing, strategic goals include revenue growth, profitability, asset utilization and inventory management. The sales incentive plan is the communications device used to translate these goals to the front-line sales representatives.

It’s essential to have these metrics accurately forecasted and communicated to balance demand through sales with manufacturing capacity. Unlike other industries, if sales outsells the company’s production ability, customer experience and product quality can suffer.

An important principle of incentive plan design is to measure and pay for what the plan participants can control or influence while also accounting for the needs of the business. A smart incentive plan will give a sales representative a challenging but achievable target and measurable milestones. Typically, these performance measures include pipeline development and closed deals for new customers and retention, along with cross-sell and upsell for current customers. Often, depending on the size of the organization, you will have a mix of both “hunters” and “farmers” balancing out your sales organization.

Solution: Working with an industrial manufacturing company that had difficulty keeping the sales organization engaged and performance-focused, we determined that the sales team didn’t think they had control over the elements they were measured against. Overall, the team members didn’t have a clear understanding of how they were performing or what incentive pay they could expect. The original incentive plan included measurement of EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization), but sales reps felt they had no control over the company’s expenses, and the measurement of overall profitability had too many variables. This lack of clear targets for plan participants led to confusion, apathy and lack of retired quota.

The solution was to identify measures that could be influenced directly by sales reps but would also drive company profitability. By shifting the focus and the incentives for the reps to be compensated largely by the revenue and gross profit in their own territory, the company allowed the sales reps to better control their own earnings potential. The overall company finances were still critical, so the total company profitability was still measured, but not as large a percentage as the individual rep territory. This clarity greatly increased sales rep motivation, awareness of performance needs and positive results.

Incentive compensation planning, while usually driven by sales leadership, sales operations and general management with input from other key departments, should include sales team members from an insight and assessment perspective. Through interviews, sales call observations, focus groups and surveys, team members can weigh in on the positives and negatives of current incentive plans and share how their roles influence the sales cycle. A sales organization that has a voice in the assessment and design of an incentive plan usually adopts the plan more readily and regards it as a tool for individual and company-wide success.

Ultimately, meeting the objectives of the plan means meeting the objectives of company leadership. The message is woven into the measurement.

Challenge Two: Motivating Sales Reps through a Long Sales Cycle

Many manufacturing companies sell products that require major capital expense from the customer and have a long sales cycle that can extend a year or more. If the sales mix doesn’t account properly for several decision makers within the account and the long progression from lead to opportunity to conversion, companies are likely to experience attrition of sales team members. This can extend the sales cycle even further.

Solution: Sales incentive plans need to have a correctly balanced pay mix, setting base salary and target incentive pay to keep salespeople engaged and motivated during the sales cycle. This can frequently mean that the pay mix is shallower for long sales cycle roles, for example, 80% base salary plus 20% incentive pay. The incentive pay must be attractive enough to make the time investment worthwhile for sales team members while giving them enough salary to stay the course; a difficult balancing act. The salary must also consider any sales training that new recruits must undertake before being given a territory.

Along the way, measurements in a sales incentive plan may be focused on progress toward a sale and not just the sale itself. While a short sales cycle plan may only focus on revenue, a long sales cycle plan may include pipeline creation, sales qualified opportunities as well as the revenue that is generated. For one manufacturing company, a strategic milestone in a long sales cycle is a customer or prospect request and receipt of a significant proposal. Another point of measurement is a prospect accepting an invitation to participate in a test or product prototype stage. Rewarding these strategic milestones along the way to a sales closure also provides opportunities for sales leadership to communicate shorter term goals and to coach team members through the intricacies of a complex sales process.

To motivate and retain top performers, a company may offer vesting of incentive pay (above quota) on a two- to three-year schedule, enhancing value of earnings with overlapping vesting and further incentive funding to keep the sales rep engaged and looking ahead to future financial benefits of role longevity.

Another critical part of maintaining sales staff during long sales cycles is offering non-financial incentives to stay with the company. Top talent with applicable skills for the technology industry may be tempted by unique offerings from companies in that sector, which is accustomed to competing to hire and keep strong employees.

Strengthening a broader employee value proposition beyond a sales comp plan can enable manufacturing to compete with technology industry roles. In addition to incentive pay, focus on intangible rewards, quality of life perks, career coaching and other elements can help manufacturing companies compete for and retain top sales talent.

Challenge Three: Setting Effective Quotas

How do you know if your quotas are off base? The most obvious indicators would be if less than 50% of the sales organization is reaching or exceeding quota, the sales team overall is missing earning targets and employee turnover increases. In manufacturing companies, quota setting should be based on the characteristics of the products, sales cycles and customer markets.

Solution: Detailed metrics, including prior purchasing patterns, customer needs, demographics and characteristics are important to developing a realistic projection for sales. For large capital expense products, sporadic or episodic purchase patterns can make quota setting difficult. Heavy equipment or infrastructure products might only be purchased every few years. Quota setting in these cases requires deep dives into customer needs, buying scenarios and market research. Account planning can also be a helpful complementary element. Intelligence developed when forecasting the company’s direction and strategic approach can identify potential obstacles that require specific approaches, as well as new customer or market opportunities on the horizon.

Quota focus should be evaluated to determine if a general or more segmented model is most effective in meeting the organization’s overall goals and rewarding elements which sales can control. For example, in one organization, transitioning a generalist sales model to a focused new customer acquisition and current account management sales model – based on the company’s structure and sales ability to control those factors – turned around a five-year history of decline in quota attainment and returned the organization to growing sales revenues.

Quota setting is usually driven by a mix of sales leadership, finance, and sales operations with some input from product marketing. Initial proposed quotas are circulated to the business units, product leaders and major geographies who will evaluate how these goals are allocated to the front line. Ultimately, quotas are finalized at the highest levels of the organization.  But during development, it’s important to keep the process transparent. To avoid perceptions of unfairness or a quota re-set as punishment for previous shortfalls, demonstrate that goals are based on market research findings and opportunity models that show a path to achievement. Involve as many sales leaders as is feasible in the process to ensure quotas are finalized through dialogue and feedback, rather than handed down without input from the sales team.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint, to achieve realistic but potential-based quotas that all areas of the sales organization can understand and own.

When looking at your sales performance management and sales compensation program, consider the underpinnings of your C-level goals, sales cycle characteristics, and quotas to build plans that align with the business.

Original article may be found: http://www.manufacturing-today.com/sections/columns/2106-conquering-compensation-challenges.

The post Manufacturing Today: Conquering Compensation Challenges appeared first on SalesGlobe - Sales Effectiveness Consulting & Services.

Have you seen the new documentary called The Story of Sales? It is now viewable through the Salesforce website, who funded the project. There are also some upcoming viewings in cities around the country. I know firsthand how dedicated the interviewers, producer, director and everyone involved in the production were.

It is easy for many outside of the marketing profession (and some inside of it) to misunderstand what marketers do. For that reason, it is also easy to point the finger at marketers for scammy behavior by companies – both real and perceived.

As a marketer, it is sometimes difficult to defend the way that companies market themselves. Why? Because some of us lie.

Marketers lie for all sorts of different reasons. But those reasons all share something in common – that is that the lies are an effort to drive more sales. Some do it intentionally. Others do it mistakenly. Some don’t know they’re doing it until it gets pointed out to them.

Unintentional Lies

The unintentional lies are usually born out of some misunderstanding. The marketing team believes something about the company’s products that isn’t true. They then use this untruth in advertisements and promotional materials.

Just like anything else, ignorance is not a defense against false claims in advertising. They may be unintentional, but they’re still lies.

These types of lies are the result of siloed organizations that lack transparency and open communication. Marketers are not talking to sales teams and customer service reps and product developers. No one is telling them what is and is not a part of their offering.

To fix unintentional lies, marketing teams must invest in organizational development and training. Marketing should be fully integrated – from research and planning to development and sales.

Intentional Lies

The intentional lies are born out of fraud. These are lies that marketers are spreading in the marketplace that have no basis in reality. They are the kind of lies – like the VW diesel emissions scandal – that are intended to sell products to customers who would not otherwise purchase from you. The lie is what gets the sale.

Intentional lies come out of companies that don’t value honesty, that have failed to establish an ethical or moral culture. More often than not, these companies end up in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Giving Marketers a Bad Name

Whether marketers lie intentionally or unintentionally, they give other marketers a bad name. These bad actors are the reason why the public generally thinks of marketing as a disdainful profession. They don’t want to be advertised to, and they feel like all marketers are out to get them; that we have one hand in their wallets at all times.

To earn our reputations back, marketers must be willing to speak up. They must be willing to act in accordance with established ethical principles, and point out those companies or people (inside and outside of the organization) who fail to meet these standards.

If you have to lie about your product to sell it, you are marketing the wrong products.

The data we refer to as “sales intelligence” is one of the most frustrating necessities for sales teams. It’s information you have to have in order to do your job effectively, but it can be a Catch 22. You can only be as effective as the data you have, and the data is changing all the time and often difficult to find. Steve Bryerton and the team at DiscoverOrg are changing the way that sales data and intelligence is gathered, and have a team of 300 people who are curating data for salespeople by hand, every day. You’ve got to hear what has motivated this unprecedented step and how the DiscoverOrg team is able to offer a 95% accuracy guarantee. It’s on this episode of In The Arena.

@SteveBryerton: How To Get 95% Accurate #Sales Intelligence, Every Time - Episode #107 OF #InTheArena @DiscoverOrgClick To Tweet

What’s the most important piece of sales intelligence that sales reps are in need of?

Believe it or not, it’s an accurate phone number. It’s amazing how many incredible startups or progressive companies that are poised to change the world, force interested customers, clients, and partners to connect with them through a web form. Period. No phone number is even available on their website. Both Anthony and his guest, Steve Bryerton believe the day will come when these world-changing companies will rethink that decision and begin to provide a phone number to make a connection with their company more easily accessible. But until then, what do sales reps do? There are only two choices… you do the legwork of finding the contact data yourself, or you make use of those who make the task their business, literally. Listen to find out how you can make use of a professional team of sales intelligence detectives.

Sales Intelligence is a moving target. But you’ve still got to hit it

Every salesperson has experienced the scenario: You spend time on social media, scouring the internet, and researching company websites to find the exact right email or phone number for the person you want to speak to. But you can’t find it. Why? People move from one position to another within companies, they are hired away by competitors, their IT department changes the format of email addresses but hasn’t had time to update the website to reflect the changes. Lots of reasons. Spending time trying to find contact info is not the best use of your time, but what else can you do? Steve Bryerton and the DiscoverOrg team have an option for you… let their team do that legwork for you. On this episode, you’ll hear how you can get a free trial of their service and experience the relief and power of instant, accurate sales intelligence, every time.

#Sales Intelligence is a moving target. But you’ve still got to hit it @SteveBryerton @DiscoverOrgClick To Tweet

What kind of accuracy does your sales intelligence contain?

Suppose you’ve spent hours gathering data to contact the right person within the company you’re about to pitch. You make the call. You send the email. And it’s the wrong number or extension. The email is returned as inaccurate. Going back to square one has never been so painful. Is there a better way? Steve Bryerton says there is. In fact, the team at DiscoverOrg are focused on finding solutions that problem every day. In this conversation, you can hear how Steve and his team are providing 95% accurate data to sales leaders all around the world.

Accurate, actionable, comprehensive data on your target buyers is available

Anthony’s guest on this episode of In The Arena, Steve Bryerton is a Sales Leader at DiscoverOrg, a company that provides datasets that contain the most accurate and robust sales and marketing intelligence available in the market. The company uses a proprietary combination of technology, tools, and integrations and then human-verifies the data at least every 60 days. That enables them to guarantee a level of accuracy no other data provider can deliver. Toward the end of this episode, Steve explains how you can get a trial of the DiscoverOrg service to discover just how accurate their data is, so don’t miss his amazing offer.

Accurate, actionable, comprehensive data on your target #buyers is available @SteveBryerton #sales @DiscoverOrg Click To Tweet

Outline of this great episode

• The state of sales data in 2018
• What are the best data points salespeople need?
• The number of contacts and accounts Steve recommends to be effective
• The primary differentiation between Steve’s company and others who do the same thing
• How you can get a trial of Discover.org and what you can expect from it

Resources & Links mentioned in this episode

• The Outbound Conference
• DiscoverOrg – Steve is Director of Sales for the company
• Salesforce

The theme song “Into the Arena” is written and produced by Chris Sernel. You can find it on Soundcloud

Connect with Anthony

Website: www.TheSalesBlog.com

Youtube: www.Youtube.com/Iannarino

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iannarino

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iannarino

Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/+SAnthonyIannarino

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iannarino

Tweets you can use to share this episode

What’s the most important piece of #sales intelligence that sales reps are in need of? @SteveBryerton @DiscoverOrgClick To Tweet What kind of accuracy does your #sales intelligence contain? @SteveBryerton @DiscoverOrgClick To Tweet

The post Steve Bryerton: How To Get 95% Accurate Sales Intelligence, Every Time – Episode #107 appeared first on The Sales Blog.

The process of qualifying or disqualifying leads is an exercise that can be incredibly beneficial to you, if you do it the right way. It is important to eliminate prospects that are not serious or not able buy from you because it ultimately helps you optimize the amount of time you are spending on those who actually can or want to buy your products. Spending time on the right leads will increase your chances of success because you’re investing time and energy on the right people.

In order to start the process of qualifying or disqualifying a lead, it is important to ask these five fundamental questions:

1. How Well Does the Prospect Meet Your Ideal Customer Profile?

This question does not have to be an exhaustive process or a long list of qualities. The purpose of it is to gather enough information about them to know if there is a high probability that your solution will meet their wants and needs. Once you are further along in the sales process and you’ve gathered all of the necessary details, you will be in the right position to determine and articulate how your product will benefit them, help them grow, generate more revenue, or streamline their operations. Gather information that can help you either qualify or disqualify them for your product.

2. Do They Have a Budget In Mind?

Every business is different, which means that a budget can vary drastically from merchant to merchant. If your buyer has a particular budget number in mind, this is a great indication of if they are even able to purchase your product or not. As a sales person, whether or not they can actually purchase anything is crucial. When a business creates a budget towards a point of sale device, they are making a plan to either spend or save money. Price qualification is important, so find out how much they are planning to spend. If they have a budget of $200K and you know your solution is no less than $400K, then you know this is more than likely a deal-breaker.

3. What Is Driving the Decision?

Understanding why a merchant is in the market for a new or upgraded point of sale device is critical. Asking your prospect why they are looking will help determine what benefits your product can offer them. Once you have asked about the driving points, finding out what is working or not working with their current solution can help you position your product in the best possible way. Aside from the problems they are looking to solve, find out if there is a specific event driving this decision, such as product support about to expire.

4. When Are They Planning to Implement?

Knowing if you have the resources to available to meet their planned implementation date is important. If you are not able to provide the device to them by their implementation date or if their timeline is not flexible, it may be a good idea to not waste any more time on a sales cycle that has no realistic delivery point. Beyond that, it is important to know their timeline because as a value added reseller, the merchant is dependent on you for resources to install and support their new solution.

5. What Other Products Are They Considering?

It is always good to have an idea of what you are competing against for multiple reasons. For one, it helps you to understand up front how to position you, your company, and your products. It also helps promote value within your own products and to know if the competition is comparable. Consider the price of the competition. If you can see that the price point is vastly lower, than perhaps gaining their business is not realistic.

Since the goal of this entire practice is to get answers, it is best to avoid interrogation or aggressive questioning. Pepper them into casual conversation naturally to help make the prospect feel the most comfortable with you. Assure them that you are trying to find the best fit for them and to see if your solutions are the most beneficial. Remember to always be honest and genuine, business owners appreciate that.

These questions, but more importantly the answers to them, will provide you with the insight you need to figure out if you should invest your time and energy into pursuing the lead. Work to get all of the above questions answered while you are getting to know the prospect. If the prospect cannot answer most of these questions, you may be wasting your time completely. At the most basic level, qualifying leads is essentially time management – putting a focus of your efforts on the person who will yield a return.

For most sales reps, cold calling is about as fun as a root canal. In fact, it's one of the toughest games to crack.

Still, despite its flaws, it's one of the most effective ways to connect with prospects. But in order to see results, you need a solid strategy at play. Luckily, science can point us in the right direction.

Here, we'll cover 19 science-backed tips to uplevel your cold calling strategy and make better calls.

1. Start all sales calls with a bang.

Always start your sales calls in style. One study tried to figure out how to increase room service tips for waiters in hotels. Much to the researchers' surprise, all the waiters had to do was start with a positive comment. When hotel guests opened their door, waiters said "good morning" and gave a positive weather forecast for the day.

How does this help you? Never start your sales calls or meetings by talking about bad weather, traffic, or being busy. Always begin with a positive comment or anecdote. Think great weather, fun weekend plans, or a favorite sports team winning a game. That kicks most sales calls off on the right foot.

2. Buy as much time as possible.

It's not enough to get a prospect's attention during a cold call — you also need to hold it. Research shows the longer the sales call, the greater your chance of securing a follow-up meeting or demo. In fact, successful cold calls — or ones that end in a follow-up meeting — typically last around five minutes.

Remember, the secret to cold calling isn't about talking — it's about listening. While your cold call likely begins as a pitch, it should slowly evolve into a back-and-forth conversation. Once a prospect starts talking, let them speak without interruption. If they speak for four minutes straight, the probability of winning the sale increases.

3. Don't bad-mouth competitors during sales calls.

The biggest self-sabotaging mistake during a sales call is to speak ill of a competitor. Due to a psychological quirk called "spontaneous trait transference," research has shown that whenever you say bad things about someone else, your audience puts those same traits on you.

For instance, if you say your competitor is unreliable, your potential client can’t help but associate this traits with you, even if they know logically that you are talking about a third party. So no matter what, when it comes to gossip about competitors, always say, "No comment."

4. Use awesome labels.

Assigning a positive label or trait to people — like having high intelligence or being a good person — generally compels them to live up to the label.

In one study about fundraising, researchers told average donors that they were, in fact, among the highest donors. Can you guess what happened? Those donors proceeded to donate an above average amount.

When you are with a client or potential customer, give them good labels. Of course, be sure that the labels are sensible and genuine. Never attempt anything that will push people into thinking that you are inauthentic, fake, or manipulative.

For example, you can say, "You are one of our best customers" or, "You’re such a pleasure to do business with." Having received the compliment, the client will want to be one of your best customers or try even harder to be a pleasing business partner.

5. Set the agenda and stay in control.

When I get on sales calls that I've set up from meeting requests, I always like to articulate clear agendas and ask the prospects if that's okay with them. This way, I can keep calls on track and accomplish what I want to achieve while making customers feel that they are in control of the conversation.

For example, you might say, "Well, I’m glad we can connect today. I’d love to go over XYZ and then answer any questions you might have. How does that sound to you?"

6. Stand up.

Allow your passion and excitement for the product to come through in your sales calls. Make it something the prospect can be infected by. In my experience, sales reps can achieve this by standing up and doing sales calls in a main common space instead of hiding in a cubicle or a conference room.

As former Mattermark CEO Danielle Morrill says, "Speak loud and proud!"

7. Use emphasis wisely.

Highlighting certain words or phrases is an effective communication tool that helps you convey your message better. Focus on your inflection, especially on voicemails. Former Bedrock Data CEO John Marcus describes this as "putting makeup" on your calls.

By adding inflection to the right words, you sound more passionate and articulate and, in turn, more convincing.

8. Adopt a cold-calling persona.

Often, it's not the cold-calling itself people are timid of — it's the fear of rejection and embarrassment. But the truth is, 60% of customers say no four times before saying yes. In other words, you have to persevere through a lot of rejection before you can land a sale.

To soften the blow, research suggests adopting a cold-calling persona. It's a way to separate yourself from the feeling of personal rejection. While this may not affect your close rate, it makes the rejection feel less brutal and puts you in a better, more productive headspace.

9. Simplify options.

Too many options can easily confuse buyers, making it harder for them to select, rationalize, and affirm a purchase decision. Unless you're a data analytics engine, information overload rarely delivers a benefit.

When describing your product, reduce the number of options and features you want the prospect to focus on. The goal is to show them just enough of your product to solve their problems without going overboard on details.

This way, they can arrive at a decision faster and feel more confident that they are not missing out on anything. Only when the likelihood of attrition/rejection becomes overwhelming should you present countermeasures (i.e., the next tier of options).

10. Adopt smart product positioning.

How you frame your product often spells the difference between a closed deal and a lost opportunity. Groundbreaking research in behavioral economics confirms that framing matters.

For example, saving $10 feels oddly different across varied buying scenarios (purchasing a smartphone vs. buying a shirt, for example) even when the amount saved is exactly the same.

Packaging the product as a solution instead of just a commodity or service also increases the likelihood of conversion. At the end of the day, you perform better by solving problems than by selling products.

11. Get emotional.

People rarely hinge their purchase decisions on solidly rational grounds. In most cases, they buy stuff largely because of emotional triggers and other hyper-personal, sometimes illogical factors.

Nostalgia, brand loyalty, associative/sentimental attachments to a product, and other intangible benefits can serve as persuasion levers as much as a product's technical features.

When engaging prospects, probe for the emotional button that can sway their purchase decision. Articulate a product'’s value through the use of relevant and powerful storytelling. In some instances, adopting the pleasure-pain dichotomy may work. Depending on the situation, people's aversion to pain or their deep anticipation of pleasure can be leveraged as powerful selling tools.

Lastly, personal trust — however misplaced — also works in selling, as social media recommendations prove. People will believe an idea or buy a product if these are endorsed by family, friends, or influencers they trust. As a seller, you can pull this powerful string through referrals, testimonials, and influencer marketing.

12. Clarify the product's value.

Make it easier for prospects to assess a product's subjective (emotion-based) and objective (fact-based) benefits. Use storytelling and framing techniques to set your product apart from other options available in the market.

Whenever possible, have an ROI calculator or formula at hand to help prospects quantify the benefits of the product when emotional triggers are inadequate to push them towards a firm decision. In either case, clearly demonstrate that the value customers receive more than justifies the price.

13. Empower customers.

People enjoy discovering stuff that makes them feel good or solutions that address their pesky problems. But they resent being forced, wrangled, goaded, or tricked into a purchase decision.

Because business is leaning more towards a subscription-based paradigm, brands aim to build long-term relationships with customers. If people perceive that you are force-feeding terms or tricking them into buying, you’ll lose not just customers but a revenue stream. Hence, give customers enough space, freedom, and power to make purchase decisions they will not regret.

You can achieve this by closely involving customers in developing the solutions they need. Get their feedback and give them a semblance of control in the problem-solving process. But always direct the conversation towards your value proposition.

14. Use risk-reversal language.

If you're like me, you always check the return policy before buying anything online. Why? Because every purchase — big or small — comes with a degree of risk. And it just so happens that people hate taking risks.

Odds are, your prospects are thinking, "Will this really solve my problems?" or, "Is it worth the price?"

If the perceived risk for your product is high enough, your cold call comes to a halt. But, you can remedy this by using risk-reversal language — phrases like, "no contracts," "easy opt outs," and "cancel anytime." In fact, 32% of sales reps saw an increase in win rates using phrases like these.

Taking on the risk gives prospects an easier path to convert. In other words, you make it easy for them to do business with you.

15. There's a time for everything.

In life as in sales, timing matters. Depending on your industry and the specific prospect you are engaging, the proper timing for making calls, doing presentations, sending emails, scheduling meetings, and attempting a close exist.

There are a number of studies that pinpoint the specific times within a day most optimal for reaching out to your target consumers. Find one for your niche and implement accordingly.

16. Serve hot, not cold

Practically speaking, cold calling is becoming a relic of the past. With business intelligence software, social media, and other digital resources, approaching a prospect without any clue about who they are and what they need has become a grossly desperate if not an outright stupid move to make.

Plan and prepare for each call. Use business intelligence tools, like RingCentral, Aircall, and Dialpad to unify all your communications in one place. Additionally, probe their social media accounts to discover pain points and other opportunities.

Participate in their conversations and identify the values, thought leaders, and brands they associate with. Know as much as you can about a prospect to make them feel important, that you have done your homework, and care about their success.

17. Observe, record, and predict.

Much of science involves carefully observing nature, recording your findings, and making predictions based on your observations. Sales follows a similar framework.

The key is to limit your talk time and listen to what your prospects are saying. When prospects talk extensively about their situation, you have already pulled the right strings. Keep them talking. Observe their behavior. Discern their needs based on their statements. Design and propose a solution that squarely addresses their problems.

Ask the right questions. Probe for relevant answers. And truly listen. That is what top-notch selling is all about.

18. Make it about you, too.

Selling is a two-way street. Even if you take care of customers but neglect honing your skills and attitude as a sales practitioner, you won’t go as high as you could.

Customers warm up to and trust business contacts who are masters at their craft. Train to be the very best at what you do so customers will see that your solutions are peerless, and they will lose significant value when they move to another vendor.

Think big and set higher goals to challenge yourself and your team. As behavioral economists suggest, organize your goals into several mini objectives that incrementally increase in difficulty. Perform the easy ones first to establish a string of successes that will give you the momentum, confidence, and motivation you need to beat more challenging goals later on.

19. Avoid the traditional close.

How you close a cold call is just as critical as how you start it. Generic phrases like, "Hope we can talk soon" or, "I'll circle back later" are safe options, but they rarely inspire action.

Before hanging up, try asking a question — something along the lines of, "Next time we talk, I want to show you [X]. How about next Wednesday?" This creates an easy path for the follow-up meeting.

Back To You

If cold-calling sends you into a cold sweat, you're not alone. In order to succeed, it's often about having the right strategies in place. Start with the tips in this post and continuously test different approaches to find what works best.

The Civilization video game franchise is one of the most successful in history. First released in 1991, the computer game allows players to build a civilization from a single settler into a global empire. With more than 40 million copies sold, countless hours have been spent playing the game. Many would argue that computer games are a waste of time or merely another form of entertainment. But there is more to some games than at first meets the eye. Civilization is a great way to learn business lessons and economic concepts that are applicable to modern businesses.

Growth requires balance

I have spent an embarrassing number of hours playing Civilization games, going back to Civilization 2 on the old PC in my buddy’s basement in elementary school. A consistent lesson along the way is that growing too fast leaves you vulnerable and growing too slowly puts you behind your competitors. Success requires finding the right balance.

Rapid growth in the Civilization game leads to poorly defended cities. Just like in the famed book The Art of War by Sun Tzu, competing civilizations can spot a weak point, break in, and destroy your little empire in a matter of a few turns. In the business world, it looks a little different. Maybe you grew into a new territory and can’t beat a strong, local business. Perhaps being too conservative spending on marketing could allow a competitor to pass your business in sales and name recognition. Whatever you do, don’t sit too idle or blow your capital reserves growing too quickly. Find the right pace for your business needs.

Competitors may behave irrationally

In video games and in life, it can be hard to predict how competitors will behave in certain situations. In some cases, a high-pressure technique will lead to a competitor withering away. In other cases, a competitor under pressure will act like a threatened rattlesnake and strike back, whether or not that will leave them more exposed if it doesn’t work.

In the game Civilization VI, a foreign power may attack for silly reasons. Whether you have too close borders, tower over the other’s culture, or did a trade deal with a friend, they may turn around and condemn you or attack. Business competitors can do the same thing, but there is no reset button or difficulty level setting you can use to prevent this type of behavior. The best thing you can do is build an ethical, stable, and sustainable business with a focus on long-term success. When competitors do pop up, hopefully, you can easily weather the storm.

Alliances can pay off

Over the course of the game, players meet and form relationships with other civilizations. Sometimes that means befriending a weaker or stronger civilization with hopes of a good long-term payoff. Those alliances can lead to trade deals, views into maps from other parts of the world, and other benefits along the way. In a rough situation, allies may also be willing to declare joint war against a common foe or declare war against an aggressor who attacked your civilization.

The parallels to business here are uncanny. Businesses regularly forge relationships with other businesses as suppliers, vendors, and partners. Long-term relationships often lead to better business results for everyone involved. If you invest in relationships and treat other businesses in the industry well, you may have a great friend when the need arises.

Specialization leads to victory

There are several options for victory in the Civilization series. You can win through science, culture, or domination, for example. Forgetting any of these areas will lead to an early failure, as you need science to develop culture and your military. But being too general also leads to failure, as those who specialize in one area over another tend to reach the finish line first.

In business, most companies can’t emulate the success of major conglomerates like Berkshire Hathaway. Some long-time conglomerates like General Electric are on the downfall. The companies growing fastest today focus on one or two things and doing them incredibly well. Even if they do reach across multiple product lines, they tend to have an industry, component, or target customer in common. Even if you think you have what it takes to be the next Warren Buffett, you may be better off reining things in and focusing on one specific area of business.

Even a close ally can declare war

Sometimes you are in the midst of a great game, and suddenly an ally declares war. For the next ten turns, you are going to be locked in this conflict, if not longer. But sometimes conflict is just how things pan out. Even if you offer trade deals, gifts, and other perks, you might still get drawn into battle.

In business, people cross each other and declare war all of the time. This concept is what makes many business-focused movies so compelling. Would Wall Street have been as much fun to watch without conflict between Gordon Gecko and Bud Fox? Would The Wolf of Wall Street have been as exciting had Steve Madden not suddenly started selling shares? But in real business, you shouldn’t treat it like a roll of the dice. Be careful with your relationships, and always have a plan in case your business comes under attack.

Business lessons live in unexpected places

It is impossible to work all the time, but it is possible to find business inspiration from unlikely and unexpected places. If you can find business lessons in sports, video games, movies, TV, and other entertainment, you might be able to turn those idle hours into something even more useful. Thanks to Civilization, my business acumen is up at least a few points. And I have a feeling I have more lessons waiting the next time I boot it up.

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

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming how companies and consumers go about their days around the world. The technology that underlies this whole segment is evolving quickly, whether it’s the rapid rise of the Amazon Echo and voice assistants upending the consumer space, or growth of AI-powered analytics platforms for the enterprise market.

And Business Insider Intelligence is keeping its finger on the pulse of this ongoing revolution by conducting our second annual Global IoT Executive Survey, which provides us with critical insights on new developments within the IoT and explains how top-level perspectives are changing year-to-year. Our survey includes more than 400 responses from key executives around the world, including C-suite and director-level respondents.

Through this exclusive study and in-depth research into the field, Business Insider Intelligence details the components that make up the IoT ecosystem. We size the IoT market and use exclusive data to identify key trends in device installations and investment. And we profile the enterprise and consumer IoT segments individually, drilling down into the drivers and characteristics that are shaping each market.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• We project that there will be more than 55 billion IoT devices by 2025, up from about 9 billion in 2017.
• We forecast that there will be nearly $15 trillion in aggregate IoT investment between 2017 and 2025, with survey data showing that companies' plans to invest in IoT solutions are accelerating.
• The report highlights the opinions and experiences of IoT decision-makers on topics that include: drivers for adoption; major challenges and pain points; deployment and maturity of IoT implementations; investment in and utilization of devices; the decision-making process; and forward- looking plans.

In full, the report:

• Provides a primer on the basics of the IoT ecosystem.
• Offers forecasts for the IoT moving forward, and highlights areas of interest in the coming years.
• Looks at who is and is not adopting the IoT, and why.
• Highlights drivers and challenges facing companies that are implementing IoT solutions.

 

Join the conversation about this story »

Even the most fearless seeming business owners can get a twinge of anxiety when one of their ideas is performing below expectation. What sets them apart is that they keep pushing through the struggle. To succeed in any area of life, you have to first accept that a few failures along the way are inevitable.

Tabling ideas you have because of fear will mean that you get nothing done. It’s not the act of failing that you should harp on. Instead, it’s what you learn from it and how you respond. Here are a few ways to leverage failure to grow your business:

Fail Fast

Fail fast is a common saying in the freelancing and entrepreneurial space. In a nutshell, it means to experiment and assess the results quickly. If your experiment is a failure, learn from it and move forward without hesitation.

There is a stipulation to this in my opinion. You should do market research and other homework before your experiment. Don’t just try things without a plan or purpose. You’ll waste your time and money. However, when you do come up with a feasible idea, roll it out quickly and be prepared to confront the outcome right away. Don’t avoid the truth.

Early in my freelance career, I charged way too little for my freelance services. It was a completely unsustainable business model considering the amount of hours I worked. I knew something wasn’t right, but I avoided the truth for too long because I didn’t want to admit to myself that I was failing. This did me a disservice. This will also do you a disservice. There’s nothing wrong with failing. Allow yourself to fail fast so you can adjust your business model and move forward.

Welcome Feedback and Come Back Stronger

Feedback is the best way to improve if you mess up a project with a client. No one likes to receive tons of edit requests or get negative reviews from customers but it happens and you should grow from it.

No one is perfect all the time. There’s actually something wrong if you only get excellent feedback with no constructive criticism. You’re either someone who doesn’t accept constructive criticism well and people avoid giving it to you. Or your clients, contractors, and other people around you are “yes men and women.” Nobody wins in this situation. Look at Kanye West.

Don’t make excuses when you get constructive criticism or get down on yourself. Listen, accept the feedback, identify areas of improvement, and then redeliver (if that’s part of your contract).

Get Help Where You Struggle

Another great thing about failing is it teaches you where your strengths and weaknesses are so you can focus your energy on areas where you excel. You can always outsource tasks that aren’t your strength.

Don’t keep trying to do better if you’ve identified that you’re just not great at something. Maybe writing isn’t your forte but you’re very good at public speaking and doing brand influencer work at events. Stick to your bread and butter and hire someone to do the tasks that are a time suck.

Failing is very important in this regard. If you have plenty of ideas but act on none of them to avoid failing, you’re essentially an explorer without a compass. It’s very hard to choose a direction when you have no experiences to guide you.

Final Word

Realizing that failure isn’t bad has been life-changing for my business. Accepting that it happens helps you learn from situations must faster instead of holding out hope that the results will miraculously change. Nothing miraculously changes without you tweaking your approach.

If you don’t have enough money for a business coach, course, or whatever you think you need, researching and experimenting on your own can get you by until you have the funds to reinvest into your business.

As a salesperson, a big part of your compensation is variable. Closing big deals takes time. And with such high earning potential, it can be tough to make it through slow months. Worrying about finances weighs on your mind and can hold you back from your full earning potential. After all, why go after that big, uncertain deal, when there’s a smaller fish guaranteed to close?

Passive income provides financial freedom and the ability to take larger risks by going after massive deals -- regardless of sales cycle. It also protects you from the months when you simply miss quote (Which happens to the best of us). But how do you get started? Here are my tips for diversifying your finances and take bigger risks with passive income.

1. Teach a class and put it online

If you find yourself reviewing the same content at coffee meetings, consider developing that content into an online course. For example, if you’re a salesperson who helps social media marketers save thousands in ad spend with your product, you likely have many conversations about social media best practices. Distill that knowledge into an online class.

Platforms like Udemy, Teachable, and Kajabi make it easy to create, market, and profit from your online classes. This saves you from taking too many meetings on the same topic, and it gives you an opportunity to earn passive income.

And you’re not limited just to sales knowledge. Consider your hobbies as well. If you’re an expert stamp collector (Why not?), create an online class for experienced collectors of French stamps from the early 20th century.

Not an expert at the topic at hand? That’s alright. Level your course for beginners, and help your audience get a “101” view of the topic at hand.

2. Collect rent without owning property

Renting property sounds like something you’d need a sizeable amount of cash on hand to do. After all, you must own a building and hire a property management group, right?

If you have the necessary funds to do this, great. But, if you’re a less-established salesperson, consider buying a share of a property. For as little as $500-$5,000, platforms like Fundrise, Roofstock, and RealityShares allow you to do just that.

These programs payout dividends quarterly and can net you 6-7% in passive income on the money you deploy. One thing to note here is that each investment has a term tied to it, typically, one-to-five years. This signals when you’ll get your initial investment back on the property. So be ready to part with that initial investment for a while.

3. Find interest income from crowdfunding

Alternative investments, like peer-to-peer debt that pay you interest, can provide nice passive income streams. Platforms like LendingClub make this type of venture easy. You can deploy funds in $25 increments and fund almost anything -- from projects around the house to family trips and refinancing.

Before pulling the trigger on an investment here, you should have access to the borrower’s track record with lending, their credit history, and their household income. In peer-to-peer lending, it’s not enough to get the interest income, you’ll want your principal back too. For this reason, pay attention to the maturity date as well.

4. Charge for what you’re good at

Do you excel at discovery calls, building rapport, or closing enterprise deals? Do your colleagues often come to you for advice or help? Start marketing those skills and charging for classes, one-on-one coaching, or seminars.

Advertise your services on Craigslist, local job boards, and targeted LinkedIn or Facebook groups. If your city has local sales meetups, reach out and ask if you might be able to speak one week and tease your training or coaching services at the end.

Take a look at similar online offerings to judge where pricing should begin, and once you’ve developed a client roster, increase that price by 10-20% with each new client you take on.

5. Take up photography

Already have a passion for photography? Great! If not, invest in some equipment and online classes from Lynda, Creative Live, or Craftsy to create a portfolio you’ll be proud to share. Next, build a website, Facebook group, and Instagram page to showcase your work and drum up interest.

Start by taking photographs of friends and family at a discounted rate, and build out your client base with referrals. Photography is an excellent source of passive income, because you’re able to set your own hours, and work primarily on weekends.

Once you’ve developed an impressive body of work, shop your photos to sites like Shutterstock. If they use them, you’ll receive a royalty each time a customer downloads one of your images.

6. Create a YouTube channel

All the kids are doing it. Create videos of you sharing sales advice, speaking about that stamp hobby, or even cooking your favorite weeknight meal. Create a destination YouTube channel and populate it with a regular cadence of videos.

The monetization comes from the ads that appear on your page and play before or after your content. Put simply, when someone watches one of your videos, you’ll make money from the ads that appear.

The more viewers, the more ads. From channel teasers to copyright regulations, you’ll want to make sure you know how to responsibly run a channel of your own. Here’s a great video to help you get started.

7. Sign up for Uber or Lyft

Have a free Friday night or want to swap that expensive happy hour habit for something more lucrative? Sign up to be a driver with Lyft or Uber. You set your own hours, get paid regularly, and there’s little-to-no cost to begin.

Lyft even offers rentals if you don’t have a car of your own. Get a car any time, and return it when you’re done. One night a week might be all you need. According to Lyft, some drivers make more than $800 just driving on a Friday night.

8. Spend time with furry friends

Like Uber for pets … kind of. Sites like Rover and Wag give you the same freedom to choose your schedule, services, and rates. What you get in return? Snuggles, a little extra exercise, and some epic greetings from your canine clientele.

Pick from dog walking, simply letting pets out in their backyard, or even house sitting. You can even specify what size of dog you’re most comfortable walking. Out of all the ways to make a little extra cash -- this might be the most fun.

As a sales rep, your finances can be a roller coaster. Will you close that big deal or push it to next quarter?

Passive income helps you gain control over your financial future. It also gives you the steady income while maintaining the commission upside of a sales role. So, happy closing and happy earning. Start putting your free time to work today.

Depending on your personality type, networking can either sound like a lot of fun, or like absolute torture. While the outgoing among us have no trouble meeting new people or turning strangers into friends, introverts may find the entire prospect rather anxiety-producing.

And yet, business networking is a part of life, and a key to professional success—so what’s to be done? Fortunately, there is much that can be done for introverts to succeed at networking, without it being absolute torture. Let me explain.

How Introverts Can Excel at Business Networking

Prepare some questions. Before the event, sit down and list a few questions you might ask to help break the ice with people. I’m not talking about clichéd icebreakers or standard getting-to-know-you questions, either; think of some complex questions that might lead to a deeper, more personal connection.

Find the best place to camp out. Once you’re at the event, find a place in the room where you can comfortably hang out and greet people. I recommend being near the food. Being around food tends to make people happier—and chattier!

Ask a friend to introduce you. For key connections, ask a friend to serve as facilitator—which can make you feel more confident, and also make the person you’re meeting feel more trusting toward you.

Don’t be negative. If you want to be remembered for the right reasons, I recommend not complaining about work of about your current co-workers—even if you’re ultimately hoping to make a career transition. Speak positively of others and give plenty of compliments!

Ask about the other person. Not only can this take the pressure off you, but most people love talking about themselves—so it’s a win-win!

Highlight common ground. If the other person says something that resonates with you, or that illustrates a shared value, make sure you seize on it; draw attention to it. That can help make the connection stick!

Get Better at Business Networking

No matter how much you loathe the concept of business networking, it does matter—and you can be great at it. These tips should point you in the right direction.

Chances are that you’re familiar with the word encryption. You’ve probably heard about how important it is, as well as how vital it is for keeping so much of our hyper-networked lives secure.

Use WhatsApp? You’re using encryption. Log into online banking? Same again. Have to ask the barista for a Wi-Fi code? That’s because you’re connecting to a network using encryption—the password is the key.

But even though we use encryption in our day-to-day lives, most encryption terminology remains mysterious. Here’s a list of 11 essential encryption terms you need to understand.

1. Plaintext

Let’s start with the most basic encryption term, which is simple but just as important as the others: plaintext is an unencrypted, readable, plain message that anyone can read.

2. Ciphertext

Ciphertext is the result of the encryption process. The encrypted plaintext appears as apparently random strings of characters, rendering them useless. A cipher is another way of referring to the encryption algorithm that transforms the plaintext, hence the term ciphertext.

3. Encryption

Encryption is the process of applying a mathematical function to a file that renders its contents unreadable and inaccessible—unless you have the decryption key.

For instance, let’s say you have a Microsoft Word document. You apply a password using Microsoft Office’s inbuilt encryption function. The file is now unreadable and inaccessible to anyone without the password. You can even encrypt your entire hard drive for security.

4. Decryption

If encryption locks the file, then decryption reverses the process, turning ciphertext back to plaintext. Decryption requires two elements: the correct password and the corresponding decryption algorithm.

5. Keys

The encryption process requires a cryptographic key that tells the algorithm how to transform the plaintext into ciphertext. Kerckhoffs’s principle states that “only secrecy of the key provides security,” while Shannon’s maxim continues “the enemy knows the system.”

These two statements influence the role of encryption, and keys within that.

Keeping the details of an entire encryption algorithm secret is extremely difficult; keeping a much smaller key secret is easier. The key locks and unlocks the algorithm, allowing the encryption or decryption process to function.

Is a Key a Password?

No. Well, at least not entirely. Key creation is a result of using an algorithm, whereas a password is usually a user choice. The confusion arises as we rarely specifically interact with a cryptographic key, whereas passwords are part of daily life.

Passwords are at times part of the key creation process. A user enters their super-strong password using all manner of characters and symbols, and the algorithm generates a key using their input.

6. Hash

When a website encrypts your password, it uses an encryption algorithm to convert your plaintext password to a hash. A hash is different from encryption in that once the data is hashed, it cannot be unhashed. Or rather, it is extremely difficult.

Hashing is really useful when you need to verify something’s authenticity, but not have it read back. In this, password hashing offers some protection against brute-force attacks (where the attacker tries every possible password combination).

You might have even heard of some of the common hashing algorithms, such as MD5, SHA, SHA-1, and SHA-2. Some are stronger than others, while some, such as MD5, are outright vulnerable. For instance, if you head to the site MD5 Online, you’ll note they have 123,255,542,234 words in their MD5 hash database. Go ahead, give it a try.

• Select MD5 Encrypt from the top menu.
• Type your password, hit Encrypt, and view the MD5 hash.
• Select the hash, press Ctrl + C to copy the hash, and select MD5 Decrypt from the top menu.
• Select the box and press Ctrl + V to paste the hash.
• Complete the CAPTCHA, and press Decrypt.

As you see, a hashed password doesn’t automatically mean it is secure (depending on the password you chose, of course). But there are additional encryption functions that boost security.

7. Salt

When passwords are part of key creation, the encryption process requires additional security steps. One of those steps is salting the passwords. At a basic level, a salt adds random data to a one-way hash function. Let’s examine what that means using an example.

There are two users with the exact same password: hunter2.

We run hunter2 through an SHA256 hash generator and receive f52fbd32b2b3b86ff88ef6c490628285f482af15ddcb29541f94bcf526a3f6c7.

Someone hacks the password database and they check this hash; each account with the corresponding hash is immediately vulnerable.

This time, we use an individual salt, adding a random data value to each user password:

• Salt example #1: hunter2 + sausage: 3436d420e833d662c480ff64fce63c7d27ddabfb1b6a423f2ea45caa169fb157
• Salt example #2: hunter2 + bacon: 728963c70b8a570e2501fa618c975509215bd0ff5cddaf405abf06234b20602c

Quickly compare the hashes for the same passwords with and without the (extremely basic) salt:

• Without salt: f52fbd32b2b3b86ff88ef6c490628285f482af15ddcb29541f94bcf526a3f6c7
• Salt example #1: 3436d420e833d662c480ff64fce63c7d27ddabfb1b6a423f2ea45caa169fb157
• Salt example #2: 728963c70b8a570e2501fa618c975509215bd0ff5cddaf405abf06234b20602c

You see that the addition of the salt sufficiently randomizes the hash value that your password remains (almost) completely safe during a breach. And better yet, the password still links to your username so there is no database confusion when you sign into the site or service.

8. Symmetric and Asymmetric Algorithms

In modern computing, there are two primary encryption algorithm types: symmetric and asymmetric. They both encrypt data, but function in a slightly different manner.

• Symmetric algorithm: Uses the same key for both encryption and decryption. Both parties must agree on the algorithm key before commencing communication.
• Asymmetric algorithm: Uses two different keys: a public key and a private key. This enables secure encryption while communicating without previously establishing a mutual algorithm. This is also known as public key cryptology (see the following section).

The overwhelming majority of online services we use in our daily lives implement some form of public-key cryptology.

9. Public and Private Keys

Now we understand more about the function of keys in the encryption process, we can look at public and private keys.

An asymmetric algorithm uses two keys: a public key and a private key. The public key can be sent to other people, while the private key is only known by the owner. What’s the purpose of this?

Well, anyone with the intended recipient’s public key can encrypt a private message for them, while the recipient can only read the contents of that message provided they have access to the paired private key. Check out the below image for more clarity.

Public and private keys also play an essential role in digital signatures, whereby a sender can sign their message with their private encryption key. Those with the public key can then verify the message, safe in the knowledge that the original message came from the sender’s private key.

A key pair is the mathematically linked public and private key generated by an encryption algorithm.

10. HTTPS

HTTPS (HTTP Secure) is a now widely implemented security upgrade for the HTTP application protocol that is a foundation of the internet as we know it. When using a HTTPS connection, your data is encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS), protecting your data while in transit.

HTTPS generates long-term private and public keys that in turn are used to create a short-term session key. The session key is a single-use symmetric key that the connection destroys once you leave the HTTPS site (closing the connection and ending its encryption). However, when you revisit the site, you will receive another single-use session key to secure your communication.

A site must completely adhere to HTTPS to offer users complete security. Since 2018 the majority of sites online began offering HTTPS connections over standard HTTP.

11. End-to-End Encryption

One of the biggest encryption buzzwords is that of end-to-end encryption. Social messaging platform service WhatsApp began offering its users end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in 2016, making sure their messages are private at all times.

In the context of a messaging service, EE2E means that once you hit the send button, the encryption remains in place until the recipient receives the messages. What is happening here? Well, this means that the private key used for encoding and decoding your messages never leaves your device, in turn ensuring that no one but you can send messages using your moniker.

WhatsApp isn’t the first, or even the only messaging service to offer end to end encryption. It did, however, move the idea of mobile message encryption further into the mainstream—much to the ire of myriad government agencies around the world.

Encryption Until the End

Unfortunately, there are many governments and other organizations that really dislike encryption. They hate it for the very same reasons we think it is fantastic—it keeps your communication private and, in no small part, helps the internet function.

Without it, the internet would become an extremely dangerous place. You certainly wouldn’t complete your online banking, purchase new slippers from Amazon, or tell your doctor what’s wrong with you.

On the surface, encryption and encryption terminology seems daunting. I won’t lie; the mathematical underpinnings of encryption are at times complicated. But you can still appreciate encryption without the numbers, and that alone is really useful.

If you want to start encrypting your digital world, check the easiest ways to encrypt your daily life with minimal effort.

Read the full article: 11 Basic Encryption Terms Everyone Should Know by Now

In his book The Amazon Way on IoT (Internet of Things) John Rossman talks about the importance of designing a flywheel for your business. The flywheel is the positive feedback loop that keeps your business growing and becoming more and more efficient. He sees the flywheel as being at the centre of Amazon's success.

From The Amazon Way on IoT by John Rossman

The original Amazon flywheel was built on growth and everything within the organization was about driving growth. Profit was way down the on the list of things to be optimized.

Having a huge selection of goods (initially books) and a well designed user interface plus rapid delivery, led to a great customer experience that increased traffic. Increased traffic drew in more and more sellers that led to increased selection. Increased selection improved the customer experience and on and on around the circle. All this led to GROWTH that drove down the cost structure, enabling Amazon to lower costs and to further improve the customer experience.

This is a great example of the application of systems thinking to business design. The key concepts of system thinking are feedback loops (positive and negative) and how they interact. At Ibbaka, we have been applying this approach to the analysis of 2-sided and 3-sided marketplaces and we are extending it to our overall analysis of pricing strategy. An example is our recent post on designing pricing that encourages the behaviors that increase the value of a solution to the customer. 

John Rossman goes on to show how Amazon is building its Amazon Web Services flywheel and the role that the Internet of Things plays in increasing its momentum. His sketch looks like this.

 

From The Amazon Way on IoT by John Rossman

Infrastructure scale drives innovation up and costs down, leading to greater adoption of AWS. This creates Big Data. Amazon's IoT devices (and other devices using the AWS infrastructure) generate data used in Machine Learning, that provides customer insights and further drives up Infrastructure scale.

I don't think this is quite right. I would it tweak it a bit so that the IoT devices are feeding BiG Data, which is used for Machine Learning, which in turn generates Customer Insights, and  drives Innovation.

From The Amazon Way on IoT by John Rossman tweaked by Steven Forth

This is a second powerful flywheel for Amazon. AWS already accounts for about 10% of Amazon's revenues and was a US$17.46 billion business in 2017. In the fourth quarter of 2017, AWS operating income equated to more than 60% of the operating income for the entirety of Amazon.

What does all this have to do with pricing?

Your pricing strategy should be designed to add to the momentum, and should not be a break on any of the feedback loops that feed the momentum. If your flywheel is leveraging Big Data for Machine Learning, don't price the actions that are contributing to the data generation that will inform your future innovations, and that is creating value for your customers.

A few things to do.

1. Model the flywheel for your business (if you don't have a flywheel that is a deeper problem), look at the positive and the negative feedback loops. A positive feedback loop builds the momentum, a negative feedback loop acts like a break.
2. Check the feedback loops and see how you are pricing them. If you are pricing positive feedback loops, can you stop or reduce prices? If you are not pricing the negative feedback loops, can you do so?
3. Search for new positive feedback loops. How can you evolve your business to add new positive feedback, like Amazon has done by adding IoT devices to its AWS flywheel? How will these new feedback loops impact your pricing and revenue model? Can you monetize them while still having them function?

Systems thinking is a powerful way to organize and design your business. Pricing needs to account for the system of feedback loops and as the song says, you want to "Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative." (from Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive by Jimmy Mercer.)

A couple of good resources on systems thinking are the book Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows and Introduction to Systems Thinking by Daniel Kim.

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Conversational interactions between content consumers and brands – via SMS text-style messaging and chatbots – are redefining how marketing teams can engage their audiences.

When communication technology provides greater immediacy and convenience to content consumers like this, changes in expectations are likely to follow — many of us who manage brands learned this lesson through the growth and evolution of social media.

And, as those of us who adhere to an inbound methodology know, when there’s an audience that actively wants to hear from you it’s important that you be prepared with the right content for that moment. Learn how to prepare your brand.

Messaging fits content marketing mission

Our raison d’être as content marketers is to craft content experiences that provide value while simultaneously amplifying our brand story to our audiences.

Messaging and chatbots represent the next logical extension of this mission, and you may not think about them as content distribution channels yet, but you need to be.

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Messaging and chatbots represent the next logical extension of the #contentmarketing mission, says @cfrascl.
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Marketing automation software provider HubSpot recently released functionality to make it easier to repurpose content for chat or messaging. That means a lot of marketing teams and agencies are going to be fumbling with how to make use of chat and messaging as a content marketing channel.

Other indicators come from the likes of Buffer, Gartner, eMarketer, Dell, Neil Patel, and this awesome resource from TOPBOTS (some of these bots are glorified “repeat past order” buttons, but some represent content delivery mechanisms).

Drive deeper relationships

Last year, Forrester wrote an article on messaging apps published in Forbes, which includes a quote that should resonate with all of us who subscribe to CMI’s content marketing methodology: 

Messaging apps will introduce a paradigm shift for marketers where interactive and contextual conversations will replace ad broadcasting. New conversational interfaces will drive deeper relationships between consumers and brands.

Three phrases leap out at me from that quote: “interactive and contextual,” “replace ad broadcasting,” and “drive deeper relationships.” These concepts are the spirit of smart content marketing. You are creating value and building a relationship over time. You are not going for the quick and often fruitless hard sell.

We need to keep up with customer engagement norms, and, moreover, we need to capitalize on the opportunity for interactivity and personalization in a one-to-one content delivery channel.

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Capitalize on opportunity for interactivity & personalization in 1-1 content delivery channel. @cfrascl
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How to adapt content in chatbot world

You can’t just duplicate existing content in your conversational scripts. Though the goals and methods are the same — contact by permission rather than interruption, create value to build a relationship, and use interactivity and personalization to drive engagement — their implementation looks different when you shift to conversational content.

Contingent permission

Chatbots are initiated by the audience, thus permission is automatic. SMS or texting, which require users to opt in, allows you to reach your content consumer via a native app on their phones. Though unsubscribe rates are close to 2% at best (far greater than for email outreach, which is well under 0.5%), SMS boasts an average open rate north of 80% and response rate of 45%.

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Over 80% of text messages from marketers get opened, says @SHIFTComm. #research
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To retain permission to access your audience through this high-priority channel, you need to be mindful of both content and timing. (Timing made the difference between 1.8% and 8.5% unsubscribe rates in the previously mentioned research.)

SMS messaging is great for reminders or follow-up, as you are more likely to know where the person has been or what their interests are. It can also be valuable for pushing out alerts, depending on the perceived value and timeliness of the alert. This brings us to how value looks different in conversational content.

Structure and rewarding choice (aka engagement)

Each message appears below the history of your messages, triggering a reminder of the value you’ve provided (or failed to provide). As such, it’s important that each message is valuable, relevant, consistent, and timely to justify your continued access to audience members’ phones.

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SMS messaging needs to be mindful of both #content & timing to justify continued access to phones. @cfrascl
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If you haven’t segmented your audience prior to beginning your SMS campaign, ask questions through SMS. Be sure that any question (or short set of simple questions) results in an immediate and relevant payoff for the recipient (e.g., ungated resource, discount code).

Let’s explore this effective example from Hyundai’s Kona vehicle model.

Asking about the consumer’s preference for city, outdoors, or unique experiences is a great way to start the conversation. The recipients will answer honestly because they want to receive content that is most relevant to their interests. And now, Hyundai has an indicator of what content to send that person.

TIP: The maximum length of an SMS message is 160 characters.

To really capitalize on a conversational channel like this, you must immediately provide one piece of relevant content. Hyundai would need at least three pieces of content before it sent that Kona message.

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Be ready to provide a piece of relevant #content based on the response to your brand’s text, says @cfrascl.
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TIP: If you send a link to content, make sure the URL is short and easy to click.

After getting a consumer to answer a few questions over the course of three to six weeks, you can connect them with extremely well-targeted content (and you may have even learned something about where they are in their buyer’s journey). And from the recipients’ perspective, if the content you’ve delivered fits with what they told you they were looking for, they will be eager to continue consuming it.

With SMS and texting, don’t send multiple messages in sequence. Give your recipients a choice that’s easy to respond to in your first message. After they respond, be explicit in your second message about how the value you’re offering (a link to an article, a discount code, etc.) speaks directly to the choice they just made. Then leave them alone for a few days. A best practice is about one to two messages per week, but your personas’ respective appetites may vary.

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SMS & texting: don’t send multiple messages in sequence. Send 1 to 2 messages per week, says @cfrascl.
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Though SMS marketing should be text-based, short, and sent with appropriate regularity, chatbots keep the text shorter and often send multiple messages in quick succession. Chatbots also convey tone primarily through images:

Each of these chatbot messages has fewer than 100 characters, but still conveys personality and builds engagement to motivate the consumer to engage. The bot’s premise is to recommend content based on what the consumer reports as valuable. The Epic Reads bot boasts a 57% click-through rate, 35% user return rate, and an average of more than 50 messages per user from start to finish. (Note: Epic Read’s messages have a slight delay between them to politely (though not necessarily accurately) simulate the time a human would need to type and send the next message.)

Ongoing interaction

This last point is only relevant for chatbot-based marketing efforts. Even if you don’t use the conversations to gather more data about your leads, you should ask questions or phrase your interactions in a way that demands a response. For instance, Lionsgate, in promoting its Power Rangers movie, uses one of the characters as the voice of its bot. Conversation opens strong with a question before it hits a wall:

While ultimately it doesn’t matter what the user says, it’s not clear how (or if) the user is supposed to respond after the chatbot’s last statement. I would not be surprised if engagement dropped off at this point, which is a shame because it’s so early in the conversation and the bot eventually gets into a good response-asking rhythm.

It’s important to remember that, though responses to chatbots may be trivial, they make the conversation feel distinct.

National Geographic’s Genius-inspired bot offers a different example of an interaction. The Genius chatbot has answers at the ready based on whether the user does or does not have plans for the evening:

Like Epic Reads, the Power Rangers and Genius bots have a personality – the groaner comedy of Alpha 5 and Genius’ Albert Einstein with his courteous inquiry.

In review

Conversational content maximizes engagement when it uses questions to simulate choice and cultivates relationships by providing immediate, convenient, and relevant content when consumers respond to those choices. Keep messages short, as the medium is designed for quick consumption on a mobile device.

If you are building a chatbot:

• Give it a personality.
• Allow for slight delay between messages to replicate human interaction.
• Incorporate even trivial questions to ensure a conversational feeling.

If you are using SMS text messaging:

• Keep it under 160 characters.
• Pay close attention to the timing of unsubscribes.
• Avoid sending more than one to two messages a week.

Is this a waste of time? Are chatbots and SMS marketing an unsustainable, flash-in-the-pan fad?

Is conversational content going to irrevocably disrupt more traditional digital marketing strategies?

Cite your sources in the comments.

Join us for in-person conversations with thousands of content marketers – and learn a lot about content conversations – at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7. Register today and use the code BLOG100 to save $100. 

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Conversational Content: How to Market Through Text Messaging and Chatbots appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Preparing for your first sales job is similar to preparing for a big sale. You must do your research, build the right toolbox, and have experienced leaders on deck to help.

As director of the Entrepreneurial Leadership Program and a professor at Tufts University, this is the first piece of advice I give my students. I offer to help each of them find their post-graduate jobs, but they must hold up their end of the partnership. They have to show up and do the work.

I recently had a student visit my office for help landing his first job. First, he brought me the LinkedIn profile of a connection I had at his target company. Then, he shared the front page of the company’s website. Lastly, he presented his value proposition (more on that below). This young man had done the work, and I was happy to send a message on his behalf.

So, how do you get started? I’ve placed students in jobs at LinkedIn, Google, HubSpot, Fidelity, and Amazon, and I’m sharing with you what I’ve shared with them. You’ll find my tips and advice below, but it’s up to you to show up and do the work.

How to Start a Sales Career

Have the right tools

1. Business Cards

When I advise students to order business cards, I often get questions like, “Isn’t that presumptuous?” or “Why do I need them?” Think of it this way, if I take you to a business meeting and the host gives you their card, how will you respond?

Without business cards, you’d be in the uncomfortable position of scribbling your contact information on a two-week-old pizza receipt. It’s an unprofessional and unreliable first impression.

Have business cards printed with your name, website, and contact information included. And, while we're on the subject, made sure all of this information is on your email signature. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to learn about you.

2. A Very Good LinkedIn Profile

I've had several hiring managers tell me the only reason they look at a resume is to get the correct spelling of the person's name to find their LinkedIn profile.

When searching for your first (or any) job, it’s important your LinkedIn account be in top shape. You should have at least 250 connections to give you authenticity as a candidate and play to LinkedIn’s algorithm.

After all, while you’re busy finding the right role, it never hurts for LinkedIn to pull your profile into employer searches. Optimizing your account ensures your name shows up when it counts.

You should also source three solid references. Don’t confuse references with skill endorsements on LinkedIn. Ask previous employers, professors, or mentors to write three-to-five sentences about your performance, work ethic, and strengths. This will impress future employers and do more to demonstrate your value than a static “endorsement,” which anyone can submit.

3. Your Professional Value Proposition

In my experience, a good resume is read in less than 60 seconds. Make sure your application stands out by building an airtight, attention-grabbing value proposition.

Each week, in my class, three students present their value propositions. They’re around three bullet points, each approximately two sentences long. And they highlight why the student is passionate about their career path, what sets them apart, and the value they'll bring to the right company.

After each student’s presentation, they conduct self-critique, and the rest of the class offers constructive feedback enabling all of us to improve our own unique value propositions.

I’ve interviewed 10,000 salespeople throughout my career, and I can easily say the value prop is any job candidate’s most important asset. Spend time on it, and you’ll benefit from your efforts for years to come.

Master the “marketing of me”

I often take students through a market targeting exercise. The takeaway of this particular assignment is if you’re selling red pens, you need to market to the persona who wants to buy red pens. I encourage my students to identify the “persona” of the business they’d like to work for, so they know how to market themselves.

We start by answering a series of questions:

1. Where do you want to work? Start with the geography of where you’d like to live and work.
2. What market vertical are you interested in? Identify whether you’d like to work in consumer products, the automotive industry, or medical sales. Often students will give me an answer like “healthcare.” This isn’t specific enough. Within healthcare, what industry have you identified? Are you interested in biotech, hospitals, or IT? These are important questions to answer.
3. Explain the job you’d like to have. Are you looking for entry level sales jobs? Are you interested in getting broad marketing experience? Verbalize what your ideal role entails.
4. What size of company are you considering? Get specific here. Don’t just say, “middle market.” Decide what the approximate headcount of your target organization is. Are they SMB or enterprise?
5. What are the best skills you can market? When I say “skills,” I’m talking about skills you’ve been trained in, such as deal closing, discover, or relationship management.
6. Are their specific companies you’re interested in? Explain why you’re interested in these companies. Don't have a specific company nailed down? Simply say, "I'm interested in companies such as Pfizer, Merck & Co., and Johnson & Johnson."
7. What’s your value proposition? Pull from the section above for help here.

Once you’ve answered these seven questions, you should have a better idea of the job you want. You also have the foundation for a great cover letter.

Now’s also the time to reach out to your connectors. These are people like me who are connected, experienced, and willing to help. Present your “marketing of me” exercise and value proposition to them, and ask for assistance in reaching out to potential employers. If you’ve done the work, they’re likely to say “yes” to your requests.

Know what the red flags are (and avoid them)

Red Flags

Before I agree to help a student, I look for a few things. The first is red flags. If I’m dealing with a person who’s always expecting something from me, I immediately take a step back. I don’t like working with anyone who believes they’re entitled to help or a position -- and my connections don’t either.

I also pay attention to how well the person listens. If I’m working with someone who’s ready to pounce on every word I say, or interrupt and disregard what I’m bringing to the conversation, I already know they’re not ready to successfully tackle a role in sales.

Positive Attributes

What I look for in candidates are attributes. Many people confuse attributes with skills. Skills can be learned, while attributes are usually natural abilities that are harder to pick up. Here are a few attributes I look for in successful job candidates:

1. Curiosity - This is baked into you. It’s not a skill. You must be curious about your customer, your role, and your company’s success to be a great employee.
2. Work ethic - When I hire people, I want to know they’re going to work as hard as I do.
3. Commitment - I want to see you’ve devoted time and attention to something. It might be a job you worked all four years of college, a summer internship, or a hobby you’ve practiced consistently for years. Whatever it is, I want to know you have what it takes to see work through.
4. Drive - Are you hungry for the job and for the work it will take to get there?
5. Passion - If someone says they’re “excited” about a job, I want to correct them. Excitement is something you feel about graduation or a big trip. I want to know you’re passionate about the job you’re applying for. Passionate folks do great work.

Not sure what attributes you possess? Take a personality test, such as Myers-Briggs or Predictive Index.

Not everyone is enrolled in a class like the one I teach. You might even be several years or decades into your career. And that’s alright. Reach out to a mentor, an old professor, or even a successful aunt, and ask for their help.

Everyone’s been in your position, which makes most of us willing to help. Ask for guidance, and then be willing to put in the work necessary to succeed.

Machine learning sits at the forefront of innovation across a growing number of industries in today’s business world. Still, it’s a mistake to think of machine learning as one monolithic business solution — there are many forms of machine learning and each is capable of solving different sets of problems. The most popular forms of ML used in business today are supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised, and reinforcement learning. At Vidora, we’ve used these techniques to help Fortune 500 partners solve some of their most pressing problems in innovative ways. This article draws from our experiences to demystify these four common approaches to ML, introducing practical applications of each technique so that anyone in your organization can recognize how machine learning can enhance your business.

Machine Learning at a Glance

Machine learning is an approach to Artificial Intelligence which borrows principles from computer science and statistics to model relationships in data. Unlike other AI systems which distill human knowledge into explicit rules (e.g. Expert Systems), ML instructs an algorithm to learn for itself by analyzing data. The more data it processes, the smarter the algorithm gets.

Machine learning is not a new concept. Its theoretical foundation was laid in the 1950s when Alan Turing conceptualized a “learning machine”. That same decade, Frank Rosenblatt invented the “perceptron” to roughly simulate the learning process of the brain. More algorithms followed, but machine learning remained largely confined to academia until only recently. With explosions in data availability and computational power, it is finally possible for businesses to deploy machine learning at scale. Organizations have had success with each type of learning, but making the right choice for your business problem requires an understanding of which conditions are best suited for each approach.

Supervised Learning

If you know which metric you’d like to predict and have examples labeled with that metric, supervised learning is the best approach. A supervised algorithm is shown the “right answer” for a set of sample data and finds a function which approximates the relationship between the inputs and outputs. This functional mapping takes the general form y = f(x) — specify your target output y, provide your inputs x, and the ML algorithm will learn the optimal f() by finding patterns in the data.

y = f(x)
	Description	Training Phase	Live Model
y	Output	Supplied	Predicted
x	Input	Supplied	Supplied
f()	Functional mapping	Learned	Used to generate predictions

Supervised learning outputs typically have one of two forms. Regression outputs are real-valued numbers that exist in a continuous space. For instance, many of Vidora’s eCommerce customers want to forecast how much money each customer is likely to spend, so that high-value customer may be targeted with personalized promotional offers. A simple linear regression structures this problem through the familiar formula y = mx + b, where y is predicted expenditure and x is some attribute of each customer — say, number of site visits. During training, we supply labeled input-output pairs — i.e. customers for which transaction history is already known — and the algorithm finds the optimal parameters m and b to make this relationship as accurate as possible. In reality, Vidora’s regression model is likely to input hundreds of customer attributes each with its own parameter, but the algorithm’s mechanism of action remains the same.

Classification outputs, on the other hand, fall into discrete categories. For example, Vidora’s subscription customers often wish to identify the best communication channel to reach and retain each user: email or push notification. A linear classification algorithm distinguishes between the two by plotting attributes of each user and finding a line which separates the data into two groups based on their labels. Users known to be responsive to email fall on one side of the line, and those responsive to push fall on the other.

Popular supervised learning algorithms:

Regression: Linear regression Random forest Multi-layer perceptron Convolutional deep neural networks

Classification: Logistic regression Support vector machines Convolutional deep neural networks Naive Bayes

Unsupervised Learning

Unsupervised learning is used when training data has no specific label for the algorithm to predict. Without “right answers” to train on, the job of an unsupervised algorithm becomes clustering the data in order to uncover new rules and patterns. Finding inherent structures in the data can yield important and practical insights, from detecting data anomalies that mark credit card fraud, to revealing what your best customers have in common.

Popular unsupervised learning algorithms:

K-means clustering Principal component analysis Non-negative matrix factorization Hidden Markov model Hebbian learning Autoencoders

Semi-supervised Learning

At Vidora, we’ve seen that collecting labeled data at scale is a challenge for many business organizations, but unlabeled data is relatively abundant. Semi-supervised learning makes use of this plentiful unlabeled data to gain a better understanding of the population structure and distribution. For instance, a bank which offers home loans may wish to identify which of its customers own a house, but may have limited access to this information. Under the semi-supervised approach, an algorithm would first use information obtained from labeled data to predict homeownership for unlabeled data. Next, both the labeled and predicted data are passed through a supervised framework to learn a homeowner identification model. Despite never being evaluated, the estimated labels may improve performance of the supervised model by providing a larger set of potential homeowners from which the algorithm can learn.

Popular semi-supervised learning algorithms:

PU classification Transductive SVM Co-training

Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning is used in situations where the computer is an agent interacting with its environment in pursuit of a goal. Here, feedback is the key ingredient. Rather than being shown a “right answer”, the algorithm is provided a reward signal against which it evaluates and adjusts its methods. With experience, the algorithm learns which sequence of actions gives it the best chance of maximizing its reward and achieving its goal.

Reinforcement learning typically requires huge amounts of data, but doesn’t force your business to be highly specific about its goals. Some autonomous vehicles learn to drive through reinforcement. These cars are instructed to get from point A to point B under only two broad conditions: obey the rules of the road, and don’t crash. The rest is learned through trial and error. Google’s famed AlphaGo program also learned to play the ancient Chinese board game Go using reinforcement. Armed with only the game’s rules and a goal of winning, AlphaGo learned which moves tended to maximize its chance of success. Merely two years after making its first move, AlphaGo famously dethroned the Go world champion in 2016.

Popular reinforcement learning algorithms:

Q-learning Temporal difference Monte Carlo tree search Sarsa

ML and Your Business

Each of supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised, and reinforcement learning has shown meaningful success in the business world. As the practical scope of machine learning broadens, fluency in its key concepts becomes an increasingly important business skill even for those with no data science experience. Recognizing which sorts of problems each ML approach is best-equipped to solve empowers business experts to recognize where the technology may make its greatest contributions to key business outcomes.

Michael Firn is a Product Manager at Vidora, where he works closely with both Vidora’s engineering team and Vidora’s Fortune 500 partners such as News Corp, Walmart and Time to help develop and implement machine learning solutions to their business problems. 

When you were in high school, you probably came across the so-called “popular” kids. You know, the ones who love being the center of attention and who claim to be everyone’s friend.

I bet you wanted to be part of the gang, I mean who wouldn’t, they’re the cool kids right??!

Later in life though you realize it’s not about the quantity of friends you have, but about their quality.

Oftentimes, businesses try to sell their products to as many people as possible, hoping such approach will improve sales. But let’s face it, you cannot please everyone (just like you can’t be everyone’s friend), so quit trying.

The key to success is to identify your perfect target audience, a good friend, who will stay with you for the good and for the bad. Who will forgive you a few missteps and won’t trade you for “a better model” as soon as an opportunity comes around.

OK, jokes aside, here is a simple target audience definition:

It’s a group of people or companies who are most likely to buy your product or service.

What if I get my target audience wrong?

Getting your target audience right is incredibly important for both marketing and sales (all kinds of sales) but especially outbound sales.

After messing up your target audience…

Why?

Because outbound sales requires sending cold emails, and let’s be honest, most people don’t like receiving emails from people they don’t know.

They will only respond to your message if it’s relevant to them, which is why it’s so crucial to get your target audience right. Any message which doesn’t resonate with your reader will be perceived as spam.

Don’t sell to all

So, if you’re trying to sell to everyone, then clearly you have no idea who your target audience is (unless you’re selling a mass product of course), and it’s no good, so let’s fix it.

How to identify your perfect target audience?

Here is a list of questions that should help you identify your perfect target audience.

• What problem does my product solve?

To identify your perfect target audience you have to define the problem your product or service can solve. So you can then find a group of people/companies which can benefit from using it – i.e. you have to figure out their pain points.

If you are able to address multiple problems, then great as it means you can expand your target audience. Making it too narrow will limit your selling potential.

Making it too broad will have a negative impact on your performance – as it will be too difficult to tailor your messaging – cause one size fits all doesn’t work!

The citation below nicely summarizes the concept of selecting your target audience:

“It’s all about balance. If you try to reach everyone you will likely appeal to no-one, but if only a handful of people meet all your criteria you’ve needlessly gone too far”.

• Which sector should I focus on?

Is your product made for a specific sector? Or is the sector completely irrelevant? In our case, the vertical doesn’t matter. We have customers in a variety of sectors.

However, it is important to consider the sector while identifying your perfect target audience as customers from different sectors will have different expectations, and quite often different needs or priorities.

There might be sectors more keen on buying your products. Certain verticals are more regulated than others, and therefore might be more difficult to sell to.

Have you noticed any differences in your close rate? Even though we don’t limit ourselves to any particular sector, we have observed some close rate differences per sector.

Here is a very useful tool to compare your sales close rate against your industry competitors.

• Where are my customers located?

Are there any geographies that you want to exclude, or focus on in particular? There will be markets more in demand for your product/service than others. For example, when it comes to outbound sales, the US is the ultimate winner.

Not only because people are more familiar with the outbound sales concept, but also because there is no legislation which would forbid it. The location criterion is something you should closely monitor, as the situation might suddenly change.

For example, due to the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) doing outbound sales in Europe will be practically impossible.

• What’s the ideal company size?

Size matters (sometimes). To identify your perfect target audience you have to decide whether you want to sell to small, medium or large businesses (what company size you want to appeal to), because the sales process will be very different. In general, the larger the company the longer the sales cycle.

Bigger firms tend to have higher expectations, they are more demanding. Is your product/service ready to satisfy their needs, or would you have to significantly modify it to meet their expectations?

Smaller companies usually have lower budgets and want to ensure that every dollar is well spent. Think about if your product is something that smaller businesses can afford.

The decision-making process also varies, but we’ll talk about it in a second.

• Who is involved in the decision making process?

Bigger companies = more bureaucracy which means more people involved in the decision-making process. You’ve got to identify them all and learn how to appeal to each person, as they’ll have different priorities and pain points.

Let’s take a company selling automation software as an example. We’ll consider 3 different stakeholders.

No. 1: Customer success specialist, customer hero, customer service representative

What value we deliver for them: They don’t have to enter data into individual applications

What objections they have: Don’t want to go through a time-consuming implementation process

How do your features perform the jobs they need to be done: It’s easy to automate tedious tasks, the interface is easy to navigate cutting down on time needed to set up tasks.

No 2: VP of customer success, head of customer service, customer service director

What value we deliver for them: They can automate their team’s processes, can ensure no requests get dropped

What objections they have: don’t want difficult onboarding, don’t want any lag between integrations

How do your features perform the jobs they need to be done: 750 integrations including their full support stack, full support means that there is no downtime.

No 3: CEO, COO, CTO

What value we deliver for them: They can build their software stack organically, in an integrated manner, works across every team in the company

What objections they have: Needs to be cost-effective, can’t drop any integrations

How do your features perform the jobs they need to be done: Team pricing plan, 750 integrations including all software used by the company

Bear in mind that the buyer might not necessarily be the user.

• Who are my competitors selling to?

To identify your perfect target audience you should check who your competitors sell to. Have they published any case studies showing how their customers benefited from using their product? If they did, you should definitely get hold of them to verify their target audience.

You can and you should read their product reviews on product review websites such as Capterra or G2Crowd because:

a. They can give you a clearer idea of who they’re targeting

b. Reviewers often mention the pain points that the product addressed or didn’t address

• What is the churn rate for my current customers?

Just because a certain market segment is easy to sell to, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a good fit for you. So another question you should ask yourself while identifying your perfect target audience is: what is the churn rate among my current customers.

If it’s unusually high then, you have to figure out why that is, and if necessary revise your targeting criteria. For example, we have discovered that our churn rate is much higher among customers who have very little or zero experience in outbound sales.

This allowed us to adjust our targeting, and focus more on companies who have previous outbound sales experience.

You should keep one thing in mind, your target audience is not static but dynamic; it will be forever changing.

You have to continuously learn about it; it’s ok to initially have some information gaps.

But it’s crucial to fill them whenever you get a chance, to eventually create an ideal (or not so ideal) customer profile. Good luck!

Are you tired of writing the same type of content on your business blog? Because chances are your readers feel the same.

The main problem is that you’re boring. It is your responsibility to come up with interesting topics for your blog regardless of your industry. And if you can’t be interesting, then you have a problem.

To be interesting, you need to start by creating content that solves the problem your readers have.

Therefore, if you want to attract more readers to your blog, then you need to refill your source of information on how to create content that your audience wants to read.

Luckily for you, here are five best blogging practices you need to keep in mind at all times.

Acknowledge your audience’s pain points

First and foremost, you need to have a clear understanding of who you are writing for and what can you bring to the table.

Pain points are a great motivator to get people to click.

Truth is: If there’s no problem to solve, they usually don’t bother to know what you have to say.

If you look at the website of Elite Legal Marketing, at a glance, you’ll see that they understand what their target market needs and that they are there to be the go-to problem solver.

An approach like this is often a useful strategy to get your target customers reach out to you on the problem they are facing rather than you reaching out to them.

To summarize, one of your primary jobs is to identify your customers’ pain points and then create a content that resonates with them.

Talk about relevant issues and predict the future ones

In B2B blogging, talking about hot topics is a way to get them involved and keep them updated on the current happenings.

But aside from knowing what is trending, most businesses want to find out what’s next for their industries too.

For example, this article from Kuno Creative predicts what will be the trends in digital marketing for the next coming years. What this tells us is how the blog knows the anticipation of their readers for the future so they made it a point to create a content that provides information on what their audience can expect on the subject.

This practice can also position yourself to be the industry expert that other businesses look up to as a source of information.

Don’t sell too much nor too little

You’ve probably come across with an article that seems as if all they want is to get your money. Remember the impression it gave you?

In blogging, you are free to talk about all the products and services that you offer but you don’t want to appear as a pushy and over demanding business.

Usually, readers already know that you are selling something. If you focus your blog on selling, you may end up losing their interest.

Instead, focus on making your content:

• Educational
• Engaging
• Relevant

These three things sum up to creating compelling stories that will get your buyers to trust your brand and ultimately be your customers.

But, while you are not pushy, you need to make sure that you are persistent. Don’t forget to remind them that you have something you genuinely believe will be a great help to them.

Always remember the visuals

Imagine a blog that does provide valuable information but is overloaded with pure text.

According to Rank Watch, human brain process visuals 60,000 times faster than texts.

Whenever you write your content, make sure to include at least two of these four elements: text, photos, audio, & videos.

You can also mix up your formats and do other types of content like:

• Webinar
• Presentations
• Infographics
• E-books

This is crucial because you only have a second to grab people’s attention so make sure not to miss any of your chances!

Analyze your blog performance

You need to know whether your efforts are not wasted.

To know if you’re doing something right (or wrong), you must dive deep into your blog’s metrics. Here’s a guide on what you should look into to know where you are at the moment.

One of the best tools to track your blog’s performance is Google Analytics. It provides comprehensive data that lets you benchmark your progress and find ways on how to improve your progress.

Jason Acidre puts the data provided by Google Analytics to improve his blog traffic by almost half after implementing the tactics he shared in this post.

Knowing your blog’s performance will tell you a lot of information that will be beneficial to your blog’s success. Then, you can decide which strategy you need to tweak, step-up, or completely stop.

Conclusion

Being a trusted online business is becoming increasingly difficult. It’s because you have to be interesting to survive.

By following the tips above, you’ll be able to speak the language of your readers and not bore them to tears. Because there’s nothing more interesting than a blog that provides content that resonates with their needs and wants.

How do you plan to use these practices on your business blog? Share with us in the comments below!

Related posts:

Brand.com Review Of Best Practices for Guest Blogging

6 Bad Blogging Habits and Misconceptions You Need to Stop

 

Unless you are the low-price leader, value selling is essential to the success of your business.

It's a rather straightforward proposition to sell on price only. The real challenge is to learn how to demonstrate that the extra cost of your product or service is worth it. That takes more persuasive skills, better navigation of the prospect organization, a broader understanding of strategic objectives - and frankly a likable demeanor - to convince your target of the value you offer.

Value selling is PointClear's bread and butter. I practice it every day in my role as lead salesperson for the company. (We are not the low-price leader.) I spend a lot of time on the phone talking to prospects about the value of informed conversation; the value of an automated cadence with built-in analytics capabilities; and the value of agile lead management processes that let marketing apply learnings to do an even better job of providing the leads sales needs.

Our people do as well. They tele-prospect on behalf of our clients using a value-selling approach, applying their training and experience to advance the pipeline and deliver return that's well worth the price of our services.

The challenge is that some companies and some roles do not lend themselves to selling value. Examples are big companies that have commodity acquisition departments (or purchasing departments); or smaller entrepreneur-run companies that feel that they can do every thing better and cheaper inside. (See this blog for a build vs. buy analysis that takes that argument off the table.)

It is possible however to qualify for an inhospitable environment. You just have to ask the right questions. The challenge is that lead generators with happy ears don’t ask the questions that might effectively disqualify an account. A so-called lead with a company that will never buy is going to end up being a waste of a field sales rep’s time

I am really interested in the finer points of value selling, which is why I constantly reach out to credible sources to make sure we're on top of the industry's best thinking on the topic. There's always more insight and validation to be had. Today, in this blog, I share some recent findings:

Jonathan Farrington

My friend Jonathan Farrington of Top Sales World does a great job of dissecting what value selling is and provides some specific examples for how to apply it:

The Value Formula

The formula for calculating value is the benefit minus the cost of achieving or acquiring the benefit - i.e. value = benefit - cost. So, it is important that we use rigorous questioning techniques to uncover as many needs as possible for which we can offer benefit-oriented solutions. We need to be able to explain and sell benefits. The more needs we can uncover, the more benefits we can deliver, the more benefits the greater the pay back, the greater the pay back the higher the value, the higher the value, the better the chance to up sell and cross sell.

Proving Value

Using the right questioning techniques will uncover needs, if they are there to be uncovered. However, it is one thing to uncover the need, it is another thing to prove that there is adequate pay back and value in fulfilling the needs.

Having uncovered the needs, we must probe and find out as much as we can about those needs and the implications to the customer if they are not met or fulfilled. We do this by asking past, present and future questions - i.e. “How did you use to do this?” (Past), “How do you do this now?” (Present) and “How do you plan to do it?” (Future).

What we are trying to establish is the difference between what the customer used to do and how he does it now. If we can establish this, then the comparison between what they are presently doing and what they may be able to do, based on our solution, will be easier to grasp. This is important, because the difference between them doing something and not doing it, is the “value gap.” We need to find value gaps that we can attach a price to, so that we can justify the benefit in terms of added value.

Let’s Take an Example

Your customer used to have a manual stock and inventory system. Using your database for an automated system has enabled them to increase shipments by 20% per day. With the shipments of goods totaling $10,000 per day, the value gap - i.e. system or no system - is $2,000 per day. If the system is down, it would cost $200 to $400 in lost or delayed shipments per hour. Staying as they are, or going for a support agreement that would reduce down-time, is the value gap opportunity. That gap is worth $200 to $400 per hour.

Value Added Arguments

You should always be looking for opportunities to offer more features that will be of benefit by asking the customer to tell you areas in which they would like to see greater support or additional services. If you say, “Mr. Smith, we would like you to upgrade to our gold support agreement - you will receive earlier notification of software upgrades,” the usual response will be, “We don’t need them.” Far better, using reasoning and questions to assist the customer into a position where they ask or inquire about additional services, explain to you what the possible outcome would be if they did not have those additional services. Then, you present a value-added argument to fill the gap.

Summary

The best product, at the best price, does not always win the order. We have all been outsold by a competitive salesperson probably offering less of a solution and sometimes even at a higher price. By selling benefits, and proving value and not talking about features, the prospect will understand the payoff that your solution will deliver. Do not leave them to work it out for themselves, they might not bother!

Dave Kurlan

Another industry friend, Dave Kurlan, offers a great video: “A New Guide for Selling Value” (the interview was conducted by Selling Power’s Gerhard Gschwandtner). Dave says selling value is not about cost justification or giving something extra. It is about asking good, tough, challenging questions and pushing back a little bit when necessary. Buyers want a sales rep who gets it, sees things differently, listens and cares – plus the buyer must like the seller.

Mike Weinberg

In another video, Mike Weinberg stresses the necessity for sales to be a value creator and consultant, not just another supplier/vendor.

Brian Tracy

Brian Tracy has trained more than 2 million salespeople in 75 countries and he teaches them all the same thing: Sell the value and the benefit of your product or service to your customer. Focus on explaining and expressing how it works for the customer. If you focus on the value, the price becomes less and less important. If you don’t focus on value, the only thing you can talk about is price.

Sales Performance International

This blog from Sales Performance International answers the question: “is relationship selling a bad thing? No, not at all! People buy from people whom they like and trust. But what companies need to start doing is developing value-based relationships.”

To build value-based relationships, you primarily do two things:

1. Understand the account and the relationships you need to have. Understand the entire account, not just the local plant. Build an account plan that identifies the company’s strategic objectives and the key executives responsible for executing that strategy. These are the people that you need to build relationships with.
2. Quantify the value that your organization’s products, services, and solutions have already brought to the customer. It’s proven – sellers who quantify the value of their solutions have greater success with gaining access to those executive-level contacts.

Tom Hopkins

Tom Hopkins, in this blog, provides a helpful dialog that demonstrates the difference between price and value selling:

The buyer says, “Your bid is at $4,100 and your competitor’s bid is at $3,600. Match the competitor’s price or I will buy from them.”

You respond with, “I’ll be glad to see what we can do for you about lowering your investment. However, to ensure getting you the highest-quality product, I may not be able to match the competitor’s bid.”

Many buyers are so conditioned to deal in price, they are caught off guard. “Well, uh…why not?” your buyer asks.

That is your opportunity to affirm the value of your products. “Because there are too many ways to cut corners when the money is tight. We don’t believe in cutting corners. We charge enough to do the job right the first time.”

You’ve just planted a seed of insecurity in the buyer’s mind. She starts to wonder what she’ll lose in quality by playing the price game. You just reset the focus of the conversation from price back to value. If she is still in the conversation, she will probably say, “How low can you go?”

 “I’ll check on it and get back to you as quickly as possible.” What you’ve just done here is to stall her from purchasing from the competition. If she’s really interested in how low you can go, she will wait for your answer before making any decisions.

We Have all Caved in on Price

However, why sell into situations where you are going to have to compromise to justify purchasing’s job (unless that is just the kind of business you are in). In 2017 I was introduced to an SVP of Sales who was pointed toward us by one of our long-time clients. He said: “You have the business, I just want you to work through my sales operations guy to finalize the deal.” That was when the deal was derailed. The sales operations guy found a firm that would do the work for half the fee for our services. I looked up the company we were competing against and found out that they paid 1099 home-based agents between $10 and $11 per hour.

Yet, I took the high road. I simply asked what cost they had taken out the business and what the impact of that change might have on results. His answer was that they were so much less expensive they just had to try the other company. Result: A total failure – but then they decided to take it inside. Both decisions cost them almost all of 2017 in opportunity cost not to mention the wasted investment in a low-quality vendor that didn’t perform.

Wrap-up

In this LinkedIn article, “Selling in 2018: The Survival of the Fittest,” Jonathan Farrington wrote the following: “It is the ability to earn trust and connect on the basis of transparency, vulnerability and genuine concern in working with customers to bring value that will help them grow their business."

This reach-out-and-refresh exercise confirms the value of value selling to me, as a salesperson selling PointClear’s lead generation, lead qualification and lead nurturing services to B2B companies, and as a firm serving other companies with high-value value propositions. Continual learning at its best!

I would appreciate your feedback on this blog – especially if have other examples of value-based selling.

 

We’ve all heard the news— Account Based Marketing, or ABM, is an incredibly effective way to target prospects and close more deals. In fact, companies with an ABM strategy in place generate 208% more revenue for their marketing efforts than companies without an ABM strategy (source). But—you already knew that.

Now that ABM has proven to be more than just a passing trend, it’s time to take it to the next level. Today’s blog post explores five key metrics to consider before your next ABM campaign. Keep reading!

5 Metrics that Could Make or Break Your Next ABM Campaign

1. Account Coverage

Let’s start with account coverage—a phrase that refers to a team’s ability to both identify and penetrate a large number of key accounts. Here’s why account coverage is important: If you have many target accounts with low levels of penetration, you’ll have a difficult time converting those accounts to customers.

On the other hand, if you only have a few target accounts with optimal account penetration, you’ll only ever be able to close a few deals. Here’s what we mean:

Use these two primary metrics to understand account coverage:

• Percentage of key personnel you’ve engaged with from each account.
• Percentage of accounts you’ve engaged with from within your target market.

As you implement more campaigns and scale your ABM efforts over time, you’ll get a better understanding of what an ideal percentage looks like for both of these items. What’s most important, however, is that you see a general upward trend—meaning you’re engaging with more contacts within your accounts while simultaneously increasing the number of key accounts on your radar.

2. Account Quality

Arguably even more important than account coverage is our next metric: account quality. Consider this scenario: you’ve identified over 1,000 target accounts and initiated positive engagement with important contacts from over 75% of them—yet, in the end, your efforts generate lackluster results. What gives?

The answer: poor account quality. You can have perfect account coverage, but if your account targeting strategy is off, you’ll never achieve the results you’re looking for.

Just as you would while prospecting, you must do your research and determine which qualities make an account a good fit for your product. Is it the size of the company? The revenue they generate each month? Or is it the fact that they use a certain set of technologies to run their business?

Once you’ve developed an ideal customer profile or a set of buyer personas, analyze how well your target accounts match up to these standards. We recommend that you actually score each account as you would score a singular lead.

Here’s how you do it: If your ideal customers generate X amount of revenue, have X amount of employees, work in X industry, and don’t currently have a product like yours, they receive a score of ‘100’. For every marker they miss, they go down ten points.

Later on, when we discuss engagement, this score will become important.

3. Opportunities and Revenue

Typically, a marketer’s success lies within their ability to generate leads. With an account-based approach, however, leads become less important. This is largely due to the fact that multiple leads can come from within a single account—which then shifts the value more towards the account itself.

For this reason, we recommend you focus more on the opportunities created and the revenue generated by your account-based efforts. This concept is referred to as “Account Based Revenue,” a phrase coined by ABM pro, Trish Bertuzzi.

The idea behind account-based revenue (instead of Account Based Marketing) is to purposely break down the silos between the two departments, ultimately better aligning marketing and sales and generating more revenue for your company.

Now, instead of leads, you can use revenue and sales opportunities to accurately evaluate your account coverage and quality. It’s a no-brainer.

4. Account Engagement

We’ve already stressed the importance of quality over quantity when it comes to ABM—and account engagement is no exception to this rule. More traditional marketing methodology might look at a campaign that generates 1,000 engagements and deem it a success. But, with ABM, the number of engagements no longer matters. What’s more important is who’s doing the engaging, the length of the engagement, and how meaningful the interactions are.

Take a direct mail ABM campaign for example: an HR software company takes the time and effort to send a targeted gift package to HR directors within their top accounts. The unique landing page created for the campaign receives thousands of hits—but ultimately the campaign generates very little revenue.

Here’s why: upon receiving the gift package, HR directors handed it over to receptionists and secretaries without a second glance. So, while engagement was high, it wasn’t coming from the intended audience.

We recommend this: Prior to deploying a new ABM campaign, establish what successful engagement looks like. Does the person have a specific job title? Do they respond to a certain CTA? Does the time they spend on a certain page matter? Once you’ve defined successful engagement, it becomes much easier to measure.

5. Improvement over time.

Although not as specific as other metrics covered in this post, a key part of Account Based Marketing is analyzing your results and adjusting your campaigns to be more successful the next time around.

The way to generate more revenue, engage better accounts, and close more deals is to use what you’ve already done and apply it to future endeavors. You may not get it right the first time around but, as long as you make strategic, data-driven improvements, you’ll make progress.

Take engagement for example. If you notice multiple visits to your website from the IP address of a target account, but time-on-page is dismal, you know something is wrong with your landing pages. Maybe it’s your content. Maybe your offer isn’t compelling. Or, maybe it’s the imagery your use. Test one thing at a time and be methodical about your strategy. As you learn what works, your campaigns will improve.

Key Takeaways

These are just few metrics that can make or break the success of your Account Based Marketing strategies. But remember, success will be measured differently depending on your specific campaigns and goals. We recommend that you start every campaign with a clear goal and a defined set of metrics you intend to monitor.

Setting aside specifics, the overall key to ABM success lies within your ability to treat each company or account like an audience of one. How well you hone in on that specific company’s interests, needs, and pain points will determine how successful you are.

For beginners, focus on the key metrics mentioned in this article and you’ll be on your path to ABM success.

Are great salespeople born or made? It’s a continuous debate and one becomes a never-ending road to unactionable conclusions. When you really dissect it (and oh, do people dissect it), you risk winding up in circles going over whether innate qualities like charisma and confidence are more important than skills developed through deliberate practice over time.

To determine what sales leaders are truly looking for in their new hires – and subsequently, the strategies they use to train these new hires, we surveyed over 150 sales executives and sales enablement leaders. You can read the full report here, or read on for a summary of the three main schools of thought we found most leaders follow when hiring salespeople.

School #1: Hire “A” Players

You can try to train a turkey to climb a tree, but you’re probably better off hiring a squirrel.

Managers of the opinion that great salespeople are born, not made, tend to believe certain skills can’t be taught — at least not to the extent where someone without natural talent could ever keep up with true superstars. Organizations adopting this mentality will obviously seek out “A” players from the outset. Around 15% of executives and enablement leaders we surveyed fell into this bucket.

The pros and cons of adopting a hiring and sales management strategy that reflects this school of thought:

Pros:

• Talent acquired typically boasts a lengthy track record of success so they hit the ground running.
• These folks rely on innate skills so little to no training is required.

Cons:

• Organizations are in stiff competition with others who hire this way. Consequently, forking up the highest salaries, benefits, and perks becomes a must in order to attract and retain salespeople.
• Competitors constantly shop the company’s top talent, so they face heightened risk of unwanted attrition.

School #2: Develop “A” Players with training

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit.

People who take training seriously often go on to accomplish great feats, and organizations with a training mindset often do, too. These companies place a lot of focus on developing internal learning and development programs as well as contracting outside experts and consultants. A larger slice of folks we surveyed emphasize training as the key to high performance (around 22%).

The pros and cons of a hiring and sales management strategy that reflects this thinking:

Pros:

• Training has a positive effect on sales team culture and group performance.
• It can also improve salespeople’s focus on things which take practice, like strategizing about a buyer’s business problems to provide insight throughout the buying process. These efforts lead to better customer conversations and experiences, and thus better revenue performance and brand equity.
• Sales organizations with great training programs develop their salespeople as professionals more thoroughly, which reduces the likelihood of unwanted attrition.

Cons:

• Training is expensive and tough to schedule, so executing in small doses over time usually isn’t feasible. Most organizations are forced to rely on lengthy training over short periods, which exposes them to greater risk of oversaturating their team and producing “training fatigue.”
• Organizations expend lots of energy constantly searching for innovative training practices in order to keep up with evolving expectations.
• Training programs need to refresh periodically to remain effective, so a sizable budget for training is necessary.

School #3: Develop “A” Players with coaching

Great coaching comes from an awareness that people have to arrive at their own answers.

Learning by coming to your own conclusions with the help of an experienced mentor leads to powerful results. A plurality of sales executives and enablement leaders we surveyed — a full 45% — subscribe to the idea that continuous coaching and feedback is the key to developing high-performing sales teams. Organizations adopting systems and processes that reflect this philosophy tend to emphasize coaching programs, one-on-one mentoring and frequent ride-alongs.

The pros and cons of this approach:

Pros:

• Continuous, one-on-one feedback from a coach gives sales reps a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses so they know what to focus on when pursuing a deal.
• Coaches and mentors give the salesperson an objective viewpoint to draw from as well as an example to follow.
• Well-developed coaching frameworks tend to give salespeople a better understanding of the organization’s selling and messaging strategy because they get more face time with company management to solve problems across many different deals.

Cons:

• Companies that rely on coaching face greater potential for low morale and poor performance if managers are bad at it–this is because of the higher likelihood they’ve hired on salespeople who need more hands-on professional development to produce results.
• A coach with more of an autocratic style can hinder creativity when it comes to strategizing about deals — and a lot of the personality traits needed to become a successful manager are linked with those that predispose someone to autocratic tendencies.
• Great coaches can be tough to find. Organizations wind up expending lots of energy searching for people with the right balance of soft skills, aptitude for quickly gaining product and industry knowledge, and propensity for bigger picture thinking.

The Great Equalizer for Sales Management Strategy

Whichever approach suits you, there’s one metric any organization can use to objectively measure selling skills and improve performance across teams comprised of both naturally gifted sales hires, as well as those who’ve had to work for it:

Sales competency.

Regardless of the category that a salesperson falls into, systematically analyzing the skills and knowledge required to perform each different activity throughout the sales process gives organizations the means to cut through the noise. This type of sales learning breaks down the sales process into discrete competencies (like territory management, prospect development, negotiation, etc.) and then drills down into each one to zero in on the precise mix of knowledge and skill needed to improve it. The use of competency-based learning is a growing trend in the world of education — and sales training and performance management practitioners are beginning to take note.

Marketing has always struggled to show its value. Perhaps this explains why there are still a small number of CMOs in the boardroom. Only 21% had a marketing background among FTSE 100 CEOs. The annual Robert Half FTSE 100 CEO Tracker showed that majority of CEOs (43%) have a background in finance. That big discrepancy suggests a gap in value placed on the disciplines.

Marketing as a Growth Driver

However, things are changing. Raconteur cited executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, revealing the proportion of European CEOs with a marketing background to have grown from 15% to 21% between 2011 and 2015. It also pointed out current Tesco CEO Dave Lewis being responsible for Unilever’s Dove Real Beauty campaign. Another example was Procter & Gamble’s former UK marketing chief Roisin Donnelly joining the board of Just Eat.

Not only that, Deloitte found that 27% of surveyed CMOs said their role is primarily responsible for growth strategies and revenue generation, above the CEO (21%). The report also revealed that for 68% of CMOs, being the growth driver is the top or one of the highest expectations by senior management and the board from them.

A shifting focus to a more customer-centric world makes this true: Consumers demanding personalized and on-demand products and services, and brand recall becoming more critical than ever as customer attention span decreases. And who’s on the ground, interacting with customers? CMOs and their teams. This makes them key players in the boardroom, being considered the voice of the customer at the leadership table.

The CMO job description has also undergone massive change in recent years. In addition to creative work, it now also involves a lot of analytics. Delivering key results using a balanced combination of both skills makes it a challenging (but exciting) role.

As a marketer, how can you fulfill your increasingly important responsibility and justify the investments the organization makes to execute your growth strategy? How can you achieve results by combining creativity and analytics?

The Alexa of Marketing

The secret behind the success of intelligent personal assistants such as Alexa is the power of an artificial intelligence system built upon, and continually learning from, human data. Not only does Alexa help you turn on the lights, read your emails, or remind you what to buy at the grocery store, it also gathers data to continuously improve and add value.

In marketing, the future lies in how data can be leveraged to guide marketing activities at scale and in real-time. That’s become possible with your own “marketing Alexa”—a kind of marketing technology that leverages AI, predictive analytics, and machine learning to strengthen your marketing strategy with data-driven decisions and actions—from lead generation and ranking to branding and campaign management.

This explains why four in 10 CMOs knew more about AI than the average consumer (vs. 18% of consumers), and that 55% expected AI to have a more significant impact on marketing and communications than social media ever had, according to Weber Shandwick and with KRC Research.

Gartner also revealed that in 2017-2018, CMOs allocated 9.2% of their total marketing expense budget on marketing analytics—behind any other capability. Moreover, when Deloitte asked which areas had the most impact on CMOs’ ability to generate revenue, one of the top solutions was targeting, personalization and predictive analytics (44%), which allow them to harness their data.

The main benefits of an AI-powered platform are delivering customer experience, identifying, understanding, and growing customers, and measuring and optimizing marketing performance.

Let’s see how AI and predictive analytics power marketing’s own version of Alexa.

Knowing Your Customers

Consumers today are upending the market. They are tech-savvy, demanding, and knowledgeable, expecting personalized approach regardless of the channel they use to interact with a brand. For any marketing activity to work, the first requirement is to truly know your target customers because who else are you doing all the work for? You can ask your intelligent personal assistant to:

Discover Your ICP

Using a robust set of indicators made from first and third-party data, an AI platform can scan your database to identify valuable customers and predict their likelihood to convert. The characteristics that make your actual customers unique compared to all the leads or prospects in your database paint a picture or profile of your target, your ideal customer profile (ICP).

Segment Your Market

Now that you know your ICP, it is easier for your AI platform to divide your target customers into segments, with each having its unique campaigns, messaging, and general strategy. You can also ask the platform to do more than traditional segmentation, with new data sets such as technologies in use, social influences, firmographic data, and intent-based data. Letting you customize your approach per segment enables you to better connect with customers and leave a lasting impression.

Jumpstart Your ABM Strategy

Your targets may be large organizations that have complex purchase processes with many decision makers across departments. AI platforms can leverage account-based marketing (ABM) which enables you to gather consensus from all buyer participants to close a deal. With ABM, you can get more, such as customer retention and cross-sell and upsell opportunities, generating higher value deals in the long run.

Create New Audiences

Once you have your ICP and ABM in place, then you can ask the platform to explore predictive audiences. This helps you understand your target audiences better, create account lists for ABM, and see other green field accounts identified for you. With your target audiences ready, your AI system can provide you with insights to refine your current strategy, or even expand to new markets, geographically or even into a new vertical.

Knowing Your Wins

These are what you are going to bring in the boardroom—data-driven creative outputs and strategic actions and results. It is essential to communicate the business value and financial impact of your marketing initiatives vis-à-vis the overall enterprise strategy. And what better way to do that than providing the data proofs that boardroom officers want to see. Helping you prepare for your next board meeting, you can ask your marketing personal assistant to:

Focus on the Right Prospects

With insights at hand, an AI platform helps you focus your energy and budget to customers who have the highest likelihood to buy. This is important so that every penny, time, and effort spent on one customer by the whole organization bears fruit. Having a clear view of who, what, where, and how to target is gold for marketers today.

Optimize Customer Engagement

Delivering personalized customer experience has become a necessity for brands. Knowing your ICP and other marketing indicators, you are more than capable of being attuned with your customers and create a very targeted approach to their lifestyle and behavior. Your platform can also help you build rapport and deliver what customers truly need by being consistent and present across their buying journey.

 Empower Your Sales

An AI platform shows the context behind why a target is labeled as such to sales so they can prioritize. By prioritizing leads and accounts that are more than likely to buy, they become more efficient. The intelligence on buyer persona and metrics that predict the performance of existing leads and accounts help sales improve results. And in return, contributes to the achieving the revenue for the organization.

Grow Your Market

By using existing data, the platform can find new targets in new markets. Indicators that describe high-value customers in your existing market can lead you to new customers with the same characteristics in the new market. This saves a lot of resources that you would’ve used in market research and strategic analysis.

CMOs are aware of the critical role they play as the voice of the customer in the boardroom. And an AI-powered, intelligent personal assistant such as Mintigo^AI helps to show marketing’s value. But to truly drive growth for the business, there must be a change in organizational mindset towards a more customer-centric approach. And the boardroom, being the source of tough decisions on vision and strategy, must promote the collective work of driving the organization’s attention and focus on the most important aspect: the customers.

What potential do you see for an AI-powered marketing personal assistant? How might this make your job easier? Tell me about your future vision in the comments.

The post The Alexa of Marketing: Helping Win Customers and the Boardroom appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Depending on the size of your sales force, you may have hundreds of hours of selling time each week sitting in bad meetings. Your sales meetings are often run poorly by your front line sales managers.   It’s a sad truth

As I sit in a hotel at the foot of the University of Texas campus for a day and a half of reliving my youth while simultaneously brainwashing my child, 413 email marketing newsletters await my attention this morning.

Deleted them all.

Today’s email marketers’ problem is that technology has made it too easy to group these kinds of emails into smart inboxes separated from our “real” email. That real email is sitting in my personal smart in-box, the one that has emails from real people like you, that I’m doing business with, etc. The emails I really want and need to read.

So when I check my email, I can quickly get to the good stuff and either ignore the newsletters and notifications for now, or just clear them all, like I did with those 413 email newsletters.

3 Ways to Overcome Email Filtering

First, make them pay. I know, paywall… kiss of death to traffic right? Maybe… but the WSJ has been doing it since the beginning and while it has taken them a longer time to get the traffic level they now enjoy, they’ve been charging me north of $250/yr (and everyone else) while they’ve built that traffic. Yep, sometimes less is more… as in more cash my friend.

Second, give them something valuable. There is one newsletter in my stream that is strictly a curation of products. The stuff is always cool, different and often items I’ve not seen elsewhere. I don’t read every one of them but most get a quick glance. Until that one time they ran a sale on an item and I didn’t pull the trigger. Shortly thereafter, buyer’s or lack of buyer’s remorse kicked in and I found myself glancing at every email they sent until the item reappeared. Then I bought it.

Now that I have it, my familiar glance at some but not at others pattern has reemerged. But even though I’m just quicky scrolling through the 20’ish items they include in each newsletter, I’m still paying attention. I’m still a possible sale.

Which brings me to my third, and most powerful suggestion for breaking through the inbox filters of the world – scarcity.

Give your readers something they can’t get anywhere else. Something they’ll value, whether it’s super cool items, outstanding pricing, thoughtful or helpful information, etc. Take the time to really understand your email audience’s needs/wants/desires from you and from life. Then make sure that every single time you email them, you’re touching one of those needs/wants/desires.

Image courtesy of TapInfluence

Influence marketing is all the rage. Influencers get paid big bucks to capitalize on their large networks in hopes that the brands they recommend will fly off the shelves.

In fact, influencers have a more limited impact on purchases — and their biggest impact comes at a small, defined portion of the purchase cycle. Thus, influence marketing ignores some of the most critical steps in the buying process. You can read another post about the failure of influence marketing to move product as well as recommendations for better ROI.

Influence marketing

To understand influence marketing, take a look at this infographic from Google and McKinsey.

Rather than the funnel that we commonly see, the infographic shows a circular process that better fits actual purchase decisions.

You see, consumers don’t always use a see–think–do process that starts with awareness and ends with conversion, like that depicted on the right. Instead, they might go through a see–do–think, which describes an impulse purchase or a see–feel–do when emotional input goes into the decision-making process. They also might take large breaks during the process, reflected by the narrowing of the funnel towards the bottom, but they might also jump back into the process where they left off after some time, especially if factors, like affordability, interfere with making a purchase.

Stages in the decision-making process

In the circular depiction of the consumer decision-making process, a consumer might start anywhere. But, let’s assume the consumer starts with a first awareness of the product and follow that consumer to the final stages of the process.

Stage 1: Consideration set

We commonly think prices heavily influence consumers. All you have to do is look at the number of i-devices (iPad, iPhones, Macs) to understand how little price impacts purchase as these are often the most expensive options in their product category.

Instead, consumers form a consideration set composed of acceptable products in a particular category. If we’re in the market for a phone, that consideration set might include iPhone, Samsung, Motorola, and Google. Once in the consideration set, price often becomes much less important.

In addition to a consideration set, we might have an inept set consisting of products that don’t offer sufficient performance propositions to fulfill our needs. A product from a brand we’ve had problems with in the past or have heard negative comments about might end up in the inept set. As a brand, you NEVER want to be there because you have no chance of being purchased by the consumer.

A number of factors land a product in the consideration set, such as positive reviews, advertising, or recommendations from social media (including tacit recommendations that simply involve seeing someone with the brand or having them refer to the brand, such as emails that state the response was created on a particular mobile phone). For instance, Starbucks owes much of its success to photos showing celebrities simply holding their cups. This shows how influencer marketing works.

Influencers who are compensated for their opinions often have less impact because consumers don’t trust them to be objective, which is the true value of influencer marketing.

Stage 2: 0 moment of truth

Consumers are constantly updating their consideration set as they take in new information from a variety of sources. Since this process is driven by recall, in most cases, rather than a physical list, memory plays an important part in driving purchases. For instance, a consumer might simply forget about a brand in their consideration set if they aren’t prompted to remember it. Seeing a new commercial for a brand, might add it back into the consideration set again and drive purchases.

Another pesky element of memory is that things have a tendency to get all jumbled up so we don’t always remember accurately. After all, we have lots more important things to occupy our brains than remembering your product. I did a study a few years back where I asked folks to tell me about an ad they’d seen for a prescription drug. A frightening result occurred when I noticed a strong tendency of informants to mix up the drugs and even simple things like the disease it was designed to treat. Or they reported the main elements of the commercial attributing it to a different brand. This could have deadly consequences and you’d think we’d devote more brain power to remembering these brands than, say, toothpaste.

Stage 3: 1st moment of truth

A final list of brands fleshes out the consideration set, which now contains more information about the brands. We may now move to a purchase decision or loop back to the 0 moment of truth to gather more information.

Our purchase decision is only part of the process that makes your cash register ring. The other part is actually acting on that decision. A variety of factors might interfere with making an actual purchase to the point where we often see only a 30% correlation between a purchase decision and an actual purchase. That means only about 30% of the people who say they’ll buy the brand actually do.

Stage 4: 2nd moment of truth

Influencer marketing has come full circle as the buyer opens and uses his/her product. They’re now the one able to influence others facing a purchase decision. It’s these personal, unbiased recommendations that really add gas to the influencer marketing engine.

It’s not enough just to provide a good product, which is hard enough. You have to motivate your buyers to recommend your brand to their friends. Sometimes it takes superior performance … giving buyers a little something unexpected … that drives recommendation. In other cases, it’s a constant stream of digital efforts, especially email marketing, that might push them over the edge to make a recommendation.

Recommendations from existing buyers are much more valuable than getting them to purchase your product in the first place, so don’t lose focus on influencer marketing at this juncture.

Stage 5: Trigger

Remember in Stage 3 we talked about how external factors, such as affordability, might interfere between the purchase decision and an actual purchase. Sometimes it takes a trigger to overcome inertia or to help the consumer cross the line to actually make a purchase.

Think about all the factors that might interfere with a purchase and wipe them out. Amazon, for example, got rid of the many clicks involved in the process with their 1-click buying. The fewer clicks the more likely you are to make a purchase.

In other cases, a trigger comes in the form of affirmation from your social network. If everyone else seems to be making a similar brand choice, it may be just the nudge a consumer needs to push them over the edge. Influencer marketing at work.

Don’t stop there

Now’s not the time to stop your efforts at influencer marketing. You need to keep communicating to ensure you stay in the consideration set, you need to get feedback from users to ensure you continue to delight them with your product and innovate to keep giving them more. You need to engage with them to motivate them to participate in your influencer marketing program.

If we boil it down to the basics, there is one over-riding reason why our customers accept the need for change rather than sticking with the status quo: because (with or without our help) they perceive a large and growing value gap between their current situation and their future aspirations.

When this value gap is small and stable, they will be inclined to avoid the cost and risk of change and they will inevitably have other higher-priority projects that they will be more inclined to plough their scarce time, energy and money into.

But when this value gap is large and growing, when the pain, cost and risk of staying the same is perceived to be far higher than even the inevitable costs and risks associated with any significant change project, they will be inclined to make action a priority.

That’s why establishing, influencing and wherever possible amplifying our customer’s perceived value gap is such a critical element of any successful complex B2B sales campaign…

Current situation vs. future aspirations

And it’s why the essential foundation of any successful complex B2B sales campaign is a clear awareness of both the customer’s current situation and their future aspirations. But simply asking our customer where they believe they are today and where they want to get to in the future - and then merely responding to what they have told us - is a weak and inadequate strategy.

Rather than simply reacting to what they tell us about their current situation, we need to stick with the problem and delve deeply into the implications, the consequences and the as-yet unacknowledged needs that inevitably lie behind the customer’s initially stated needs. In other words, we need to help them to work out for themselves for themselves the full cost of inaction and their compelling reason to act.

The same is true when asking our prospective customer what future objective they want to achieve. By developing the goals that lie behind the initial goal, we can help them to recognise for themselves that timely action is even more important than they initially imagined.

We want to stretch both the negative aspects of sticking with their current situation and the positive benefits of achieving their future aspirations - but this amplification of our customer’s value gap comes with a caveat.

We must be careful to avoid stretching the scope of the project so much that it expands into an uncontrollable monster that requires far wider stakeholder involvement and far higher levels of scrutiny than would have been required to get the initial opportunity over the line.

It’s a question of balance, but one that I have seen top-performing sales people consistently master. They often do it in an unconsciously competent way, so in the rest of this article I’ll try and deconstruct what I observe them doing instinctively into a framework that any averagely intelligent sales person ought to be able to master with the right coaching.

There are four interlocking aspects:

• “Why change?” - persuading our customer that sticking with the status quo is the wrong strategy
• “What to?” - influencing our customer’s future aspirations and vision of a solution in a way that is strongly aligned with our core advantages
• “Why us?” - persuading our customer that our approach offers them a distinctively better chance of achieving their aspirations
• “Why now?” - equipping our champion to argue that our project is a higher priority than their organisation’s other investment opportunities

Let’s examine each aspect in sequence - whilst recognising that in practice the boundaries between them will inevitably blur and overlap.

Why change?

We may initiate this stage by introducing an issue to our customer that they were not previously aware of or concerned about - or they may volunteer an issue that is currently on their mind. But whatever the initial source, we need to explore the problems behind the problem, the objectives behind the objective, and the constraints and limitations that may be holding them back.

We need to find ways of testing and ranking the relative impact and priority of these issues. We will want to know who else is affected, to understand how they might already have attempted to address the issue and with what results, and to establish whether there appears to be a strong enough initial business case for change.

Above all, we must resist the temptation to dive in and pitch our “solution” the moment they acknowledge an issue that we believe we can solve. If once we have developed their issues enough their case for change seems strong enough, we must then turn to helping them answer the question “what to?”

When focusing on this initial “why change?” aspect, we need to pay particular attention to:

• Our customer’s perception of their most critical challenges
• Our customer’s perception of their most significant opportunities
• Our customer’s perception of their most significant constraints

What to?

Once our customer is persuaded that there is a compelling reason to change, and assuming we have convinced them of our credentials, their focus usually turns to defining what their perfect solution needs to look like, what their credible options are, who needs to be on the decision-making team, and what their decision process and timetable ought to be.

Now, you might think that this is an idealised model of the customer decision journey, and in some respects it is. Many customers (not to say many sales people) can be tempted to rush past or ignore some of these aspects. But the chances of their buying process getting derailed later on increase dramatically if strong and thoughtful foundations are not properly laid at this stage.

If we sense that our customer is rushing ahead or is already in the selection stage without having established a clear vision of a solution, we need to educate them why it is their interests to get clarity in these matters before going any further.

But if we have managed to position ourselves as a credible, experienced and trusted advisor while the customer is in this phase, we have a tremendous opportunity to shape our customer’s vision of a solution in a way that leads towards (rather than directly with) our unique approach and capabilities.

When focusing on this “what to?” aspect, we need to pay particular attention to:

• The high-level approach the customer should be specifying
• The key capabilities the customer should be specifying
• The undesirable attributes that our customer needs to avoid

Why us?

By the time our customer has reached this phase, they are already actively evaluating one or a range of apparently credible solution options. If this is the first time we have become aware of the opportunity (for example through the receipt of an unanticipated RFP), we need to very carefully assess whether we have a realistic chance of winning.

Research by Forrester has convincingly demonstrated that the vendor that does the most to influence the customer's vision of a solution (by actively engaging them during the “what to” phase) wins three-quarters of opportunities - leaving the late arrivals to fight over the scraps - typically by having to engage in a race to the bottom on price.

Similar studies by Accenture and IBM revealed that any individual vendor’s chance of winning an unanticipated RFP fall into the low single digits. It’s simply not worth investing our time unless we can engage with the business problem owner and revisit the considerations they went through in their “what to?” phase in the hope of uncovering a previously unconsidered angle.

Otherwise, this is the phase during which we must convincingly establish both our company and solution credentials and persuade the customer that we offer them the best and most reliable chance of achieving their future aspirations.

When focusing on this “why you?” aspect, we need to pay particular attention to:

• The alternative options the customer chooses to shortlist for evaluation
• How our customer perceives our unique advantages
• The supporting evidence needed to support our customer’s preference

Why now?

Of course, the question “why now?” first emerges way back during the customer’s initial “why change?” phase, but at that time the question is typically taken to mean “why should we pursue this project now?”

The “why now?” question occupies centre stage again the end of the buying journey, but now it has a different meaning. Rather than the absolute priority of the individual project, the customer’s attention is now focused on the relative priority of the project compared to all their other current investment opportunities.

Given that no organisation ever has enough resources, projects vying for final approval find themselves compared, stack ranked and prioritised. Winning our champion’s recommendation is not enough to guarantee success - we must understand the bigger picture and help our champion to position the relative importance of our project to their ultimate decision authority.

When focusing on this “why now?” aspect, we need to pay particular attention to:

• Helping our champion to perfect their internal business case
• Understanding and influencing the relative priority of our project
• Ensuring that the negative impacts of delay are recognised

What next?

If you’ve got this far and can relate to the potential advantages of adopting this value gap perspective, I recommend that you review a handful of your most important sales opportunities. How much do you understand about the critical elements of your customer’s value gap?

How are you going to apply this knowledge in your opportunity strategy - and how are you going to fill in the gaps in your knowledge? Please drop me a line or book a call if you’d like to discuss how to put these principles into practice.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales and the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates, Bob now works with a growing client base of tech-based B2B-focused high-growth businesses, equipping them to Sell in the Breakthrough Zone by systematically creating, capturing and confirming their unique value in every customer interaction.

Many salespeople become giddy when they see an RFP (Request for Proposal) that falls within their sales area. Because it looks like there’s strong alignment between what a company requests and what they sell, the deal is as good as done.

Not so fast! Let’s look at this more closely and examine your chances of success with RFPs -- and how you can enhance them.

Are RFPs the Perfectly Qualified Sales Lead?

One of the first things reps are taught is the importance of qualifying new leads. A qualified lead stands a good chance of being won, but an unqualified lead may cost you days, months, and sometimes years of wasted effort.

What is a qualified lead?

1. The prospective buyer must have a clearly articulated need
2. There must be a purchasing timeline
3. The purchase must have an allocated budget
4. The buying process and its participants must be defined

The question is, how should you treat an RFP? An RFP is a document issued by a purchasing company to a select group of vendors they believe can meet their company needs. The qualification criteria listed above is typically in place. And, on the surface, an RFP appears to be a perfectly qualified lead.

But is it really?

Is the Deck Stacked Against You?

How many times have you and your fellow reps reacted with excitement when an apparently winnable RFP hit your desk? How many hours did you spend assembling a team to write a proposal, gather information and data, answer the questions, revise and review, and finally submit the RFP, believing it would bring you a windfall? And how many times have you failed?

For example, one day, I received a call from the head of sales at a large manufacturer. He had read a piece I’d published online and was interested to learn if my company could help him define a new sales strategy for his team.

Over the next several weeks, my team defined the scope of work, created a project plan to help his sales force, assigned resources to the effort, and selected a kick-off date. Prior to the kick-off date, however, I received an alarming call. He’d been informed the project must be put ‘out to bid’ to at least two other vendors, because its total cost exceeded $500,000.

Apparently, our “slam-dunk” would have some competition. A vendor-selection committee had been formed, and we were not invited because, “There’s no need to worry,” said the head of sales. “We’re still going to do this project with you.”

Despite my protestations and sense of panic, my contact assured me, “Just sit tight. Give me two weeks, and then we’ll pick up where we left off.” True to his word, we were back on the telephone two weeks later rescheduling the project kick-off meeting.

What happened during those two weeks?

Our client had issued an RFP and received proposals from three consulting firms. Even though we were not the lowest bidder, we were the successful bidder because, in the words of my contact, “It was your project. I just had to jump through some hoops to make it work internally.” In other words, the entire RFP process was essentially a sham.

This is a great story if you’re the beneficiary of these shenanigans, but not if you’re the loser. The other three consulting firms had entered an imaginary contest to win an unwinnable project. Imagine the time, energy, and resources expended by all in these two, short weeks.

Before Submitting Your RFP Response, Remember These Lessons

1. RFPs are hard to evaluate. RFPs might have a defined need, timeline, budget, and buying process -- but they’re much harder to evaluate than regular leads.

2. RFPs might look like highly qualified but, often, they’re not. When presented with an RFP, try to talk yourself out of responding to it, rather than automatically assuming you should. Win rates are usually against you. “Losing” the RFP by failing to bid can be a gain, because you’ve not wasted precious resources.

3. No existing relationship with the issuer? You’ve probably already lost. And you’ve definitely lost if the RFP response you send is the first time the purchaser is seeing your name.

4. Your company’s online presence and thought leadership is vital to successfully influencing purchasing decisions. Successful content marketing is key to influencing decision makers, most of whom are already halfway through the decision making process before receiving your response.

5. Create an in-house RFP process and RFP response “swat team” to quickly and efficiently respond to requests without causing an unnecessary drain on internal resources.

6. Don't expect a successful sale. It might seem like the stage is set for a successful purchase. But it’s not necessarily set for a successful sale. Don’t let the excitement of an inevitable purchase fool you into believing it’s your inevitable sale.

I'm not saying you should never submit an RFP proposal, but I am saying there's no golden ticket in sales -- and that extends to RFPs. Consider whether this RFP is a realistic goal, and whether it's the best use of your team's time before crafting a response. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is all around us. It’s how Google answers our searches, Amazon recommends products, and Pandora plays another song.

For marketers, AI enables scalable growth, drives revenue, and personalizes customer experiences. Savvy marketers are discovering that AI is an exceptionally powerful strategy. It empowers them to excel in their roles by engaging with their audiences through personalized, targeted messaging—all at scale.

AI technologies are also creating key internal opportunities that drive better alignment between marketing and sales resulting in an increase in revenue and a healthy pipeline.
Let’s look at five ways AI can help marketing and sales continue to tear down silos.

1. Support Sales with Relevant Customer Experiences

Customers have come to expect personalized experiences and interactions through their preferred format or channel. Nothing says, “I’m not listening” like getting an automated email about a free trial that a lead already signed up for with a sales rep. In fact, “irrelevant content” is the #1 reason that customers disengage.

Engaging thousands of prospects and customers through personalized content is impossible without arming your marketing forces with artificial intelligence.

AI-powered predictive content tools are empowering marketers to be more strategic, while simultaneously lightening the workload.  These AI-powered marketing programs can crawl your site for blog articles, case studies, white papers, ebooks, videos, etc. Once the content arsenal is assembled, AI predicts which collateral will appeal to—and ultimately convert—each audience segment. Insights can be used to engage visitors across email, web, social, and mobile channels for a full omni-channel approach. The result is one-to-one value marketing that businesses weren’t previously able to achieve without considerable scaling.

A marketing engagement platform powered by AI technologies equips marketers with data-driven intelligence that aligns company-wide strategies for a unified brand conversation.

2. Agree on Qualified Leads and Accounts from the Beginning

Now more than ever, closing deals requires an orchestrated alignment between marketing and sales. Historically, one of the most difficult areas of alignment is agreeing on what qualifies a lead, or in an account-based marketing scenario, what makes for an “ideal customer profile.”

Of course, marketers are equipped with a wide range of lead and account scoring tools and strategies, resulting in an automated qualification process, but even automation has its limitations. It can be difficult to set up scoring in a meaningful way that aligns broad audiences, product offerings, and sales tactics.

However, predictive lead scoring and predictive account scoring provide value where other solutions may not, resulting in a strong foundation between sales and marketing. Predictive scoring programs scan digital signals from across the web to find prospects who match your brand’s ideal customer profile. All you have to do is get together with sales to identify those “perfect” customers or clients.

3. Personalize and Scale Messaging with AI Insights

Google has been using AI and machine learning longer than most marketing teams, and they’re more heavily invested in it than most of us combined.

Google’s machine learning program, RankBrain, monitors user engagement 24/7/365 in order to provide the best search results for every query that someone types into a Google search bar. The results of that constant investigation is displayed in every search engine results page (SERP).

If your company develops EHR software, for example, data-driven insights into your audience are one Google search away. Search “EHR” and look at the answers Google’s AI is providing. Is it a definition? Are they product pages? What related searches are listed at the bottom?

Those are all keys to understanding the language your audience is using, the questions they’re asking, and the key criteria that define your ideal customer profile—which is crucial information for both marketing and sales. You can get this vital information by reverse-engineering organic search results.

4. Make Analytics Actionable

Leveraging data to design better customer engagement strategies is key to winning your customer’s heart. This means testing, measuring and analyzing.

The irony lies in the fact that marketers use artificial intelligence to drive more meaningful human interactions. AI-powered platforms are not only capable of collecting and aggregating marketing metrics—they empower marketers to draw meaningful analytics and applications out of that data and apply it to being more personal with their customers.

A great platform will monitor the metrics, flag anything that needs attention and makes some basic changes or adjustments as necessary. Sales and marketing can align on these powerful data points and insights to apply creative solutions and meaningful engagement.

5. Focus on Creating a World-Class Strategy

AI and machine learning-powered programs effortlessly offload monotonous tasks resulting in more time reserved for strategy development.

AI can consolidate data, hone customer profiles, select and send next-step content to leads, and more. This results in a marketing and sales team focused on doing what they do best – developing strategies that create valuable customer experiences.

AI for Marketers + Sales Reps

AI is opening a lot of doors for marketers, and there is still time to get on board before your competition.

Machine learning should never live solely within the marketing department. Sales and marketing will be better equipped to orchestrate coordinated impactful efforts by leveraging AI. Whether it’s improved collaboration on qualifying leads, content delivery, messaging, analytics, or strategy, AI technology serves up excellent opportunities to align internally and drive meaningful customer engagement.

What potential do you see with AI built for marketers? How might it help your sales and marketing alignment? Tell me your thoughts in the comments.

The post 5 Ways AI Can Help Sales and Marketing Alignment appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.