I spend most of my days on the computer, and when I’m not busy writing, I’m working on various entrepreneurial endeavors or interviewing and meeting with other business owners and entrepreneurs around my community and around the world for my podcast. I’ve realized in my time since leaving corporate America that entrepreneurs and small business owners often have a different perspective of the world than typical workers with a 9-5 day job. I scoured the web for great business owner insights that regular people don’t run into on a regular basis. Here are some favorite gems of wisdom that can help your succeed in your business, or your career.

Business lessons from entreprenuers

“That grades in school have only a minor correlation to success in entrepreneurship. Even in many cases, intelligence has only a minor correlation as well.” -Brian Sloan via Quora

I am a strong believer in education, and credit much of my online success to my two finances degrees, including an MBA. That said, I was not a 4.0 student. I was more in the 3.0-3.5 range. While that didn’t help me land a job at Goldman, in the world of entrepreneurship I do just fine. Thanks to a combination of the right skills and a solid work ethic, I have passed many of my peers in terms of income and business success. I even do better than many people smarter than me, as I focus on the right skills rather than just getting an A.

I recently read the story of Richard Rosner, arguably one of the most intelligent people in the world but someone who has had limited career success. Despite his record setting IQ, his career didn’t lead to any groundbreaking business or discoveries. He has worked as a stripper, roller rink waiter, and other menial jobs, plus a few media appearances. Many people without the same mental abilities built huge business empires through hard work and determination.

“Entrepreneurs know how messy running a business is – but you don’t hear about it because most of us are pretending it’s all under control.” -Asim Qureshi via Quora

Business blunders make the news when they impact a wide number of people, as is evidenced by recent airline PR problems and customer data hacks. But most of the time, business problems stay private inside the business. In a startup, everyone works on all parts of the business. Few financial, digital, human resources, or other parts of the business are handled perfectly. Many businesses operate with varying degrees of organized chaos on a daily basis.

The sign of a strong CEO is someone who can navigate the muddy waters of business and put on a confident face even in the midst of adversity. Things rarely go exactly as planned, and business leaders must always be ready to react and pivot when things go awry.

“When you’re starting a company, you’re wearing many hats. A [sic] entrepreneur learns what needs to be done fast.” -Nathan Resnick via Quora

In my business, which is a small, solo run enterprise, I am the CEO, accountant, salesman, marketer, inside legal counsel, and more. When I run into an issue, I can’t delegate to another employee, I just have to figure it out. But even in startups with growing teams, founders and everyone else should be ready to learn new skills on the fly. Resnick shared that he learned everything from accounting to patents while starting a small business in college, and that is not an entirely unique story.

Going in with co-founders can help offset your weaknesses, but at the end of the day business has to get done and move forward. That often means figuring things out as you go. What’s really cool, however, is that anyone can learn as they go, not just business owners.

“Overnight successes take 10 years.” -Eric Griffin via Quora

This is one I can certainly relate to! I gained a small bit of notice when my business broke the $10,000 per month mark consistently, but it took eight years of hard work to get there. The same is true of founders in a range of successful businesses. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and leaders across many companies and industries started working in garages, dorm rooms, and other less than glamorous locations for years before their business hit the big time.

While the media loves get rich quick stories, in reality most business success doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years of blood, sweat, and tears to reach huge levels of success.

“Entrepreneurship isn’t a job — it’s a lifestyle.” -Shirsha Dutta via Quora

At the end of a long workday, those who work for an employer can hang up their coat (or laptop) and head home for the day. While employers expect more and more and work hours often bleed into homelife and vacations, employees can usually leave work at the office. For entrepreneurs, all hours are business hours. It never stops. One day this week I started at 6:30am and last night I worked until 8:00pm. I took care of work communications on a recent vacation to Victoria, Canada, and I’m never away from my phone for fear of missing an important client email or call.

While it may invade my work-life balance, I wouldn’t give it up. I’m always working in many ways, as my mind rarely wanders far from my business and side hustle adventures. Most entrepreneurs would share a similar lifestyle experience, where you never completely shut down from the job.

Entrepreneurs are a unique breed

Business lessons come in many shapes and forms. Entrepreneurs often learn lessons on the job, figuring things out as they go. Take these lessons to heart and they can help you in your business, or even in a day job. If you embody the entrepreneurial spirit, theses business lessons likely resonate with you. If you struggle in your business, keep in mind that many have before you as well, and you are not alone. But if you can persevere, you and your business have good things ahead.

What happened to competitive advantage? There was a time when each business had one. Some had many. However, today, that seems to be disappearing. In 2009 The Harvard Business Review called competitive advantage “fleeting,” and less than six years later Wired called it “dead.” However, the disappearance of competitive advantages is motivating businesses to take a bold, innovative approach.

Business School Professor Rita McGrath explains, “to win in volatile and uncertain environments, executives need to learn how to exploit short-lived opportunities with speed and decisiveness.” Sales professionals are integral to this strategy.

As technology advances, competitive advantages are becoming easier to replicate. As a result, barriers to entry fall. More competitors enter the market. In response, companies are turning to more complex solutions to buoy profits. Therefore, the sales professional is expected to do more than sell and move on. They’re expected to support the customer throughout the implementation of the solution and beyond. It’s no surprise “Balancing sales and relationship management” was the leading concern among sales professionals in our 2018 Selling Challenges Study. Here we look at a few ways sales professionals can balance selling with the relationship management that’s critical to survival for both sides.

Separate Selling from Follow Up

Sales professionals can balance sales and relationship management by signaling their plan to the customer early in the relationship. That is, the sales professional must make clear their intention to keep new product discussions separate from the work they provide on solutions already implemented. Doing so allows the sales professional to carve out separate meeting time with the customer to focus on “whitespace” in the account without impeding on the value they’re expected to bring in the form of a relationship.

This approach is important for the sales professional because to grow their business with the customer they need both sides of the equation. The experience of providing ongoing support for existing solutions provides insight into the customer’s day-to-day operation. Meanwhile, the separate product discussions inform the sales professional of future business needs.

Become a Trusted Advisor with Four Characteristics

Increasingly complex solutions require deeper relationships between customers and sales professionals. Therefore, “becoming a trusted advisor” is important. Sales professionals are discovering that they need to articulate not only the value of the solution but their individual value as an ongoing resource to the customer. One Accenture survey of more than 1,200 companies worldwide revealed that sales professionals who “build a trusted relationship with customers can improve results.”

Sales professionals must develop into trusted advisors, a role characterized by four components. First, the sales professional must identify how the customer defines value. Next, they must generate ideas that resonate with this understanding while helping the customer build competitive advantage in their market. Then, the sales professional needs to communicate the value of the ideas before finally delivering on their commitment. Above all else, value must not only be communicated; it must be demonstrated.

Delineate the Groups

Sales professionals can balance sales and relationship management by approaching each routine as two, separate groups of stakeholders. This approach is important because it might limit the number of people the sales professional must engage when discussing new solutions. As a result, it becomes more manageable to bring value that’s relevant to each of these stakeholders. With this focused approach, the sales professional will also help prevent the sales cycle from becoming too long, a common outcome when engaging larger groups.

Of course, keeping the two groups separate is not always possible. In many cases, within a single company, the “relationship” and the “buying decision” customers overlap, or they might be the same group entirely. In this scenario, the sales professional can keep both relationship management and follow up conversations focused on two subsets of the single group. In fact, if some of the buying decision-makers may prefer to be included only in new product discussions as their C-level status keeps them engaged in broader corporate strategizing that doesn’t involve product implementation follow up.

Conclusion

Competitive advantage may be going away, but strategic thinking is not. In fact, it’s more important than ever. If the sales professional is going to help the customer leverage strategy, they must be strategic in their approach to the customer. Sustainable competitive advantage is “every company’s holy grail. And it’s no longer relevant for more and more companies,” remarks Professor Rita Gunther McGrath.

To help companies achieve this end, sales professionals need both selling opportunities and relationship management; each informs the other. Therefore, it’s critical to separate the conversations, rise to the status of a trusted advisor, and segment buyer groups.

The post How Sales Professionals are Balancing Sales and Relationship Management appeared first on Welcome to the Richardson Sales Blog.

How many touches does it take to get a contact to respond? Is it better to call or email a contact when reaching out for the first time? How long should you wait before following up with a contact after your first, fifth or tenth attempt? Is there a combination of sales touches that consistently outperforms the rest? These are just a few of the questions that keep our customers and SalesLoft’s lead data scientist Roi Ceren up at night.

Over the course of the past year, Ceren has analyzed more than 200 million sales interactions which have occurred on the SalesLoft Platform since January 2016, looking for answers to many of these questions. More significantly, with support from SalesLoft’s Chief Technology Officer Scott Mitchell, Ceren has been working on a framework for analyzing the behaviors of salespeople and their interactions with contacts, to develop the basis for machine learning which can predict the effectiveness of any series of sales interactions.

Ceren and Mitchell have published their research in an academic paper titled, “On Deriving Cadences via Engagement Score Maximization,” which is available here. For the benefit of our readers who lack a data science, behavioral science, or advanced mathematics background, we’ve extracted some of the most interesting and relevant insights from this research in this post.

The Research

What exactly is a derived cadence? The team began their research by looking at more than 200 million sales interactions and adjusted their sample to include the best examples of sales touches which ultimately led to a contact responding – resulting in a total data set of over 14.5 million interactions or 2.9 million cadences. Looking at events which resulted in a contact response, the team worked backwards to identify all steps in the sales process – or derive a cadence which ultimately led to successful interaction with a contact.

The team also analyzed the quality of responses each derived cadence generated, assigning a value based on the time effort a contact invested in the response – for example, the length of an email response or the duration of the first phone conversation between a user and a contact. These values enable SalesLoft to assign an engagement score for each cadence.

By mapping out the series of sales actions (cadences) which led to a contact response, and assigning a value to that response, the team has been able to build a model for analyzing the effectiveness of any cadence, but also for predicting the likely success or failure of any future cadence by comparing it to historical data cataloged in the derived cadence engine.

This work will serve as the framework for analyzing human actions to inform machine learning – enabling the team to analyze and recommend improvements to make cadences more effective. This framework will be able to inform users on things like:

• What is the probability of getting a response from a particular cadence?
• How long were responses to sales touches with this type of cadence in the past?
• How does our current cadence rank among other cadences?
• Which cadences produced the highest engagement score from contacts?

This framework makes it easier for SalesLoft to look at its large reservoir of sales interaction data and find answers faster. To illustrate this point, let’s explore some of the insights the team discovered through this research effort.

Insights for Action

To this point, sales cadences have been primarily built based on gut and instincts – or other informed opinions about the ideal formula for sales touches. With this research, SalesLoft is able to provide more mathematical, well-founded insights into the behavioral outcomes of actual cadences used to generate responses from contacts, not opinion.

Following are some of the insights the team found through its research:

Start With a Call and Email on Day One
More than 80% of the top 100 cadences analyzed by the team included a call and email on the same day, and almost always on the first day of the cadence. Furthermore, almost all of the cadences featuring multiple touches on the first day began with a phone call. If your current cadence doesn’t start with a phone call and an email follow-up on the first day, the research suggests this would be a good first adjustment to make.

Focus Your Efforts Early On
The best-performing cadences show much more effort early in the process – typically the first two weeks of a sales process – but then tapered off into more infrequent touches over the life of the cadence. In other words, the frequency of sales touches should be greater early in the cadence and should extend over time.

The graphic below shows the recommended number of days to wait before following up, based on the number of sales touches which have been attempted to date. This is based on the analysis of best performing cadences and is a useful resource for mapping out the optimal frequency of follow-up over the duration of a cadence.

Timing Between Touches Matter
As mentioned above, the timing between sales touches matters. When the team analyzed the effects of doubling, halving or evening out touches in a cadence, all had a negative impact on the engagement score as follows:

• Doubled: -97.47%
• Half: -90.69%
• Even: -36.13%

The charts below illustrate how sales interactions for the best 100 cadences were distributed over the duration of the cadence.

The key takeaway here is to balance sales touches over the course of the cadence using the guidance above. Have more frequent interaction early in the cadence, and be deliberate in extending the time between each touch to optimize the cadence.

Avoid Bursts of Activity
As an extension of the last insight, the team also found cadences that followed a set pattern of activity, like every five days in the example below, underperformed the best 100 underperformed the best 100 cadences above, which more evenly distributed sales touches.

For illustration, the graphic below shows a random selection of actual cadences on the SalesLoft Platform (versus the best 100 cadences illustrated in the last section). Sales touches in these cadences peaked every five days. These random cadences, while effective, significantly underperformed the best examples shared above – where sales touches were more evenly distributed.

Channel Diversity Matters
We’ve already mentioned the benefits of leveraging multiple channels – a phone call and email on the first day of a cadence. In many of the best-performing cadences, the team found multiple instances of two or more sales touches at later stages in a cadence, where reps used two or more channels when reaching out to a contact.

While phone is the most effective for the first touch, the best performing cadences all feature multiple channels, suggesting channel variety is an important factor determining cadence success.

To illustrate this point, the team looked at the impact of removing a channel or transforming a channel (such as phone to email) across some of the best-performing cadences in its framework. Looking at the impact of these variables across the best-performing cadences, the team found the following:

• Remove calls: -98.57% reduction in response
• Remove emails: -93.71% reduction in response
• Transform emails to calls: -91.43% reduction in response
• Transform calls to emails: -76.49% reduction in response

While long, email-only cadences showed the least reduction, it still had a significant negative impact in the success rate of the cadence. This experiment further validates the importance of channel variety in a cadence.

And while the team focused only on phone and email in this exercise, other experiments showed even stronger results when adding in other channels like direct mail or social media touches.

The Future of Sales Engagement

This is just the beginning in terms of how SalesLoft will be able to use this framework to help provide better buying experiences. While it’s obvious that there are many factors that influence sales effectiveness, this research provides glimpses into how analyses of sales behaviors combined with data-science can expose insights that can make us better sellers, and provide better buying experiences for our customers. We’re excited about the near-future possibilities of the SalesLoft platform being able to analyze cadences and determine their probability of success or to recommend adjustments to improve cadence performance over time.

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Want to learn more about the future of sales engagement and how you can use data to drive your team’s next steps? Join us at Rainmaker 2018. 

The post Research on 200 Million Sales Interactions Cracks the Code on Cadences appeared first on SalesLoft.

One of the primary benefits of a traditional university education used to be, as well as educating you in one or a number of specialisms, that it taught you how to think. I can’t help thinking that with the growth of vocational subjects and a relentless expansion of the tertiary education sector that some of this focus on learning how to think has somehow been lost or diluted - and yet employers have identified critical thinking skills as an increasingly important foundation for their future workforce.

We need an increasingly well-educated workforce - but are our educational systems preparing them properly when it comes to how they think about the world around them?

This is an issue that affects all sectors and not just the sales profession - but I am convinced that the ability to think critically is a vital attribute for top sales performers in increasingly complex and nuanced B2B buying environment and that we as sales leaders need to do more to encourage it…

I recently took the position that there is no “one best way” of selling that can be taught by rote or enforced through inflexible systems or processes. But if we accept that our sales processes and methodologies need to be customisable to reflect the unique nature of our business environment, and if we agree that sales people need to be able to adapt these frameworks in the context of the specifics of an individual sales opportunity then surely we need to be doing more to foster and encourage the critical thinking that is needed to support these flexible frameworks?

THINKING ABOUT PIPELINE REVIEWS

Of course, the obvious place to start is in our pipeline reviews and forecast meetings. Instead of trotting out the hackneyed old formula of checking next steps, probabilities and close dates, shouldn’t we be asking our sales people how they came to those conclusions. Shouldn’t we be probing for what they don’t know, and testing them with “what if” questions that uncover their understanding of the prospect’s real situation?

Shouldn’t we be expecting them to have a clearly thought-through strategy for each account - one that reflects their intimate understanding of the circumstances surrounding the opportunity? Shouldn’t we be challenging their assumptions? Shouldn’t we be encouraging them to acknowledge what they don’t know? Shouldn’t we be asking them about what could go wrong with the deal, and how they would react if it did?

Shouldn't we be expecting them to attempt to anticipate and uncover what each of the key stakeholders in the prospect's decision making team is likely to be thinking, why they are thinking it, and how we can best react to their motivations, priorities and concerns? 

LEARNING FROM UNEXPECTED OUTCOMES

And when an opportunity does go wrong, and when the outcomes are not what the sales person expected, shouldn’t we be challenging them to understand and appreciate what they could have known or done earlier, and to think about how they are going to change their approach to future deals to avoid the same mistakes? And shouldn’t we be sharing this learning across the sales organisation in a spirit of collective learning rather than apportioning blame?

Sir Clive Woodward, the coach who led the English Rugby team to World Cup success in 2003, talks about preparing his players to Think Correctly Under Pressure. The key thing about handling pressure is to have anticipated common scenarios and to have thought through - individually and collectively - how you would go about dealing with them. Here’s his video on the subject.

PRACTICING OUR SKILLS

Role plays - if intelligently designed - can be extremely effective tools for helping our sales people to apply their critical thinking skills. But all too often, role plays have the simpler and less effective purpose of practicing a technique. We need to design our role plays so that they force our sales people to showcase their critical thinking skills and to anticipate and respond to predictable situations.

Properly preparing for significant meetings is another key way of sharpening our critical thinking skills. We should be thinking not only about what we want to get out of the meeting but also what questions our prospect might ask, and what objections they might raise and he we might best deal with them.

I am not arguing for orchestrating every interaction in advance like a meeting of Stalin’s cabinet. Quite the contrary: it is only by anticipating the possibilities that we can prepare ourselves to deal with the realities as they emerge. Preparation supports creativity and innovation rather than suppresses it. But the foundation must surely lie in developing our ability to think critically.

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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, home of the Value Selling System®. 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, enabling them to progressively create, capture and confirm their unique value in every customer interaction.

Do you still use Yahoo? Do you still remember MySpace? Compaq? Kodak? The cases of startups with superior ideas dethroning well-established incumbents are legion. This is the beauty of “creative destruction” – the term coined by innovation prophet Joseph Schumpeter almost a century ago. Incumbents have to keep innovating, lest they be overtaken by a new, more creative competitor. Arguably, at least in sectors shaped by technical change, entrepreneurial innovation has kept markets competitive far better than antitrust legislation ever could. For decades, creative destruction ensured competitive markets and a constant stream of new innovation. But what if that is no longer the case?

The trouble is that the source of innovation is shifting – from human ingenuity to data-driven machine-learning. Google’s self-driving cars are getting better through the analysis of billions of data points collected as Google’s self-driving cars roam the street. IBM Watson detects skin cancer as precisely as the average dermatologist because it has been training itself with hundreds of thousands of skin images. Siri and Alexa are getting better at understanding what we say because they never stop learning. Of course, it takes plenty of talented, creative people to build these products. But their improvement is driven less by a human “aha-moment” than by data and improvements in how machines learn from it.

Insight Center

Sometimes companies have to go out and collect a specific kind of data – think of Google’s cars roaming the streets of Silicon Valley. And sometimes companies pay for access to data so that their systems can learn. But more often than not, the data that fuels innovation is being generated by users interacting with an existing digital service. When we accept Siri’s suggestion, it’s feedback to Siri that she got it right. And when we surf away from Amazon’s product recommendation, it’s another feedback signal that we weren’t so happy. It’s the same when a driver in a Tesla takes over from assisted driving, or when we accept (or don’t accept) Google auto-completing our search query. This feedback data is incredibly valuable because it is the raw material feed into machine learning tools; it’s the very resource that fuels data-driven innovation. And the more you have, the better you get. Take self-driving cars as an example. During 2016, self-driving cars by major international car manufacturers improved by roughly a third. That’s a significant jump. But Google collected far more data per car to feed a more advanced machine learning system, and its cars improved by 400%– an amazing jump in innovation, and more than ten times as much as cars utilizing less data.

But if innovation is founded on data rather than human ideas, the firms that benefit are the ones that have access to the most data. Therefore, in many instances, innovation will no longer be a countervailing force to market concentration and scale. Instead, innovation will be a force that furthers them.

This would be a fundamental change to competition, and could cause market after market to become concentrated – as has already been happening in the U.S. If this happens, conventional antitrust measures won’t be much help, because they restrain uncompetitive behavior – but large companies using their data to learn and innovate isn’t illegal. In fact, they’re acting perfectly efficiently, using the benefits of their scale to squeeze novel insights out of troves of data.

The specter of companies with access to data becoming data-driven innovation leaders, leaving smaller competitors and startups behind in the dust, should concern policymakers intent on ensuring that markets stay dynamic and competitive. Their challenge is less to realize the problem than to devise a solution that keeps markets competitive without stifling data-driven innovation on the whole.

Most business leaders, on the other hand, face a very different challenge in this world of data-driven innovation. To compete against digital champions, they will have to overcome not just scale and network effects but especially these new data-driven feedback effects. For many innovative companies, the next few years will be a time of reckoning: as the power of data-driven innovation increases, these more conventional innovators will have to find access to data to continue to innovate. That necessitates at least two huge adjustments. First, they need to reposition themselves in the data value chain to gain and secure data access. That’s difficult if, for instance, all the data is captured upstream in the data value chain. Just ask suppliers in car manufacturing, or book publishers. Second, as innovation moves from human insight to data-driven machine learning, firms need to reorganize their internal innovation culture, emphasizing machine learning opportunities and putting in place data exploitation processes. This is hard because it often runs counter to an engineering culture that has long championed human ingenuity.

The adjustment will be so severe that numerous innovative firms will falter in the coming years, overtaken by more data-savvy competitors. And those that succeed will look very different than they do today. But firms wanting to stay innovative have no other choice. You may be doing well with your innovative company today, but as the source of innovation shifts, you will need to as well.

Demand marketers are drowning in options, including an ever-increasing list of demand generation channels.

With all these options vying for a piece of your marketing budget in 2018, it’s critical to remember that not all marketing tactics and channels perform equally. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Some channels are great at generating high-quality leads (the No. 1 priority among 77% of B2B marketers surveyed in Demand Gen Report’s 2017 Benchmark Survey). Other channels may not be great at those initial touches to generate leads, but perform well when it comes to converting those leads down the funnel (a top priority for 75% of marketers surveyed). Still, some marketing teams are more concerned with database size and need to focus on channels that will pump out a high volume of new contacts (a priority for 58% of B2B marketers).

Your organization’s unique circumstances will dictate the weight you ascribe to each individual channel and tactic. Here we’ll go through five tried-and-true marketing channels that deliver great results depending on specific demand gen requirements.

2018’s 5 Best Demand Marketing Channels

Even demand generation marketers operating in narrow verticals use a broad number of owned and paid channels for top-funnel lead generation. And this is just to get started – marketers still must employ a litany of tactics to convert these contacts into qualified leads and sales opportunities.

The range of sources, channels and tactics is so broad that most B2B marketers struggle to orchestrate and scale demand generation. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as “one channel to rule them all,” but time and time again, these five channels, when mixed diligently according to specific organizational needs, provide the lead quality, volume and conversion rates every demand generation team seeks.

1. A Company Blog

A company blog should be the cornerstone of your demand strategy. While a blog is a great way to generate quality leads, the primary goal should be to build credibility among your target audience by providing helpful content.

A company blog can also be a valuable tool for marketing experiments around ideas. Here at Integrate, we use our blog as an incubator for our POVs, messaging ideas and concepts that are later used to drive bigger content projects.

To drive success with a blog, your results all rest on the credibility and helpfulness. If you approach this owned channel with a goal of delivering audience value and earning an industry reputation for thought leadership, this demand generation channel can offer many benefits to your overall B2B marketing efforts, including traffic to your landing pages and quality inbound lead generation. Conversely, if you treat your blog simply as a conduit for lead volume, it won’t perform as expected.

2. Webinars

In the 2017 Demand Gen Report survey, webinars were the second highest rated channel for generating qualified, top-funnel leads (62%). When webinars are co-created with industry influencers and promoted wisely, registrations can be a high-powered source of quality leads.

To drive success with webinars, first things first – have something useful to say. It helps if you can deliver unique value about a trending topic or concern. For example, tomorrow we’re hosting a webinar outlining the steps B2B marketers should take to ensure they’re prepared for GDPR before May 25th.

Further, brands with the industry connections and credibility needed to collaborate with influencers are also likely to win the most leads through registrations. Continuing on the example above, we’re hosting the GDPR webinar with SiriusDecisions, which has greatly boosted registrations. But this probably wouldn’t have been possible if we had already built industry credibility over the previous years via the Integrate blog.

3. Events

How often have you put a business card in the fishbowl of a booth at an industry event just in hopes of winning a free Xbox, not because you actually needed the brand’s product?

We’re probably all guilty of this. Events can generate a lot of contacts, but quality can vary greatly depending on how you leverage them. In my experience, one of the most successful ways to target the right audiences and generate quality leads at events is through hosting case study sessions.

To drive success with live events, invest in the right ways to engage new contacts and convert existing prospects. Case study sessions are costlier than a booth in the business hall, but we’ve always benefited from outstanding ROI. Not only will you acquire a wealth of new contacts for your database, but you can be assured these new contacts are interested in your solution, having chosen to attend the session and already seen first-hand the positive results it has had for current customers.

Also, don’t neglect the value events hold for lead nurturing and moving prospects through the funnel. Event meetings and post-event dinners/cocktail parties are terrific ways to engage face-to-face with prospects and open sales opportunities.

4. Email

Is email the most effective marketing channel across the board for everyone, especially B2B firms?

Well, it depends, but B2B marketers certainly won’t leave email behind anytime soon. The Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 B2B Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report found that email is the third most influential source of information for B2B buyers – behind only recommendations from colleagues and industry thought leaders’ perspectives.

Email inboxes are crowded in 2018, to be sure, but brands who leverage email marketing wisely for appropriately timed messages are likely to reap the rewards.

To drive success with email, understand that this channel should be used for lead nurturing and prospect conversion, supporting the channels used for top-funnel lead gen. Buying contact lists and blasting them with emails is not only outdated, but will be increasingly risky as global data privacy regulations, including the new GDPR, come into effect.

Regarding email nurturing, let behavioral data from your qualified prospects dictate the shape of your email marketing campaigns at every stage of the funnel. The difference between an email that’s ignored as spam and an email that captures a prospect’s attention is relevance – including value and timing.

5. Third-Party Lead Generation

It’s very common for B2B marketing teams to experience stagnant results with owned demand generation channels (i.e., your website, blog and social media pages).

That’s why most organizations with hefty pipeline goals choose to expand their audience and gain more exposure in front of targeted personas and accounts by leveraging third-party media partnerships. Third-party lead gen sources can greatly expand the size of your database and pool of top-funnel leads, if you’re able to form the right partnerships and use smart targeting parameters.

To drive success with third-party led gen, you’ll need a well-structured lead nurturing process supported by the right demand generation technologies; demand orchestration software and marketing automation platforms (MAP) are the most important marketing technologies for successful third-party lead gen.

You’ll also need high-quality content to both entice new prospects via third-party channels and convert prospects through your marketing funnel. Otherwise, you’re just paying for lead data that’s unlikely to convert to opportunities.

Choosing the Right Demand Generation Channels in 2018

B2B marketers have some lofty demand generation goals. There’s pressure to adopt new tactics and experiment, contribute to a more profitable sales pipeline, and evolve to keep up with changing buyer behavior and increasingly sophisticated competitors – all while learning to comply with new data privacy regulations.

While it’s a lot of pressure, demand marketers are wise to make sure they’ve got the basics in place first before they look to more cutting-edge, experimental models of lead acquisition. The tried-and-true channels discussed above can contribute high-quality leads to your funnel in the quarters to come.

How do your current demand generation channels and tactics stack up against those of the most-effective B2B organizations? Objectively measure your strategy with the B2B Demand Marketing Assessment Guide & Orchestration Workbook, a comprehensive resource with 12 customizable worksheets to help B2B marketers measure their strategy against industry benchmarks.

Ask the CMO of any top-tier company about their tips for reaching business goals, and a robust digital marketing strategy will undoubtedly be slotted as number one. Digital marketing is more affordable, flexible, and engaging than traditional marketing methods. Even top-performing small and mid-sized companies are finding better competition, improved best practices, and increased engagement through digital marketing.

The digital marketing stream is not reserved for large corporations. Regardless of size, industry or geography, digital is a necessity for growth and business innovation today and beyond.

Here are 13 reasons that marketers can use to defend their digital marketing case.

1. Digital Marketing Costs Less

Traditional marketing campaigns, including print and television, are more costly because of pricey resources and the difficulty of tracking ROI. Digital marketing uses targeted research and analytics to quickly determine which approaches are working well and which aren’t worth the cost or resources. So, most digital marketing channels tend to be less costly from the start and prevent overspending on underperforming campaigns.

2. Small Businesses are More Competitive

Digital marketing closes much of the gap between large, medium, and small companies because it avails each level with many of the same resources. While big companies with larger budgets will be able to spend more on paid ads and advanced software, digital marketing gives SMBs more opportunities to compete, improve brand awareness, and build an audience.

3. ROI Measures Program Results

ROI asks the question, “What kind of results do my programs deliver?” While it’s not the easiest marketing measurement to calculate, the finished product is hugely valuable to measuring success. Single attribution (first touch/last touch) is the method of measurement used by nearly half of marketing teams. This method acknowledges the theory that it takes an average of seven touches to convert a cold lead to a sale, and puts the highest value on the first or last touch. When it comes to traditional marketing, it is much more difficult to measure the ROI of a print ad than it is to measure that of a digital ad, because the audience of a print ad is so much broader. With digital marketing, which can target specific audiences, it is easier to determine which ad led to which sale. Other methods of measuring ROI are attribution across multiple programs and people, test and control groups, and market mix modeling.

4. Online Market Share Clarifies Sales Figures

Online market share is the percentage of total market sales a company accounts for. This figure is determined by dividing the company’s total sales by online sales and multiplying that number by 100. The benefit? Market share gives sales figures context, allowing the company to view their sales regarding market size. Companies see precisely how they measure up to the competition, which better informs business innovation.

5. Easier A/B Testing Hones Communications

One of digital marketing’s best allowances is the ability for a company to experiment with almost every aspect of a marketing campaign. A/B testing the location of an email sign-up CTA, the color of a promotional banner, a subject line, etc., is much easier—and results are available much faster—on digital channels. With some diligence, simple changes can be tracked and used to target customers more effectively. For example, testing can be used to better engage a target audience, improve CTRs, help drive buyers through their journey and more. The results of A/B testing can be used to improve targeting of print ads as well. For example, if a company is targeting the same audience on Google as it is in a print magazine ad, the same language will be effective for both.

6. Mobile Marketing Increases Engagement

Did you know many people don’t even own desktop computers anymore? Mobile marketing opens up a whole world of opportunities for increased engagement, from creating a more personalized user experience to reaching new users. According to Global Web Index, more than 80% of internet users own a smartphone, and 90% of the time spent on their smartphone is devoted to apps. Mobile marketing—from email and social ad design to SEO to branded apps—allows you to reach users in their most native environment.

 7. Analytics Improve Business Models

Measuring digital analytics helps companies make informed decisions about where to invest their resources, improving efficiency. Gathering numbers for traditional marketing channels is a manual process, while most digital platforms, including social media and marketing automation, have built-in analytics dashboards with all of the data automatically available. View reports on dashboards for easy visuals, and map the customer journey, measuring performance metrics at each step.

8. Digital Delivers Personalized Attention

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Tech-savvy marketplaces have led customers and buyers to expect individual, personalized attention.

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Digital marketing eliminates the old “one size fits all” approach to marketing by giving companies better insight into segmentation. Using results from customer behavior tracking to personalize outreach creates the ideal customer experience. A better customer experience means increased trustworthiness and loyalty, more closed accounts, and a growing team of brand advocates.

9. Account-Based Marketing Closes Bigger B2B Accounts

Digital channels and tools have enabled a new strategy, account-based marketing, which uses highly personalized messaging to communicate with individual prospect accounts as markets of one. Account-based marketing is extremely targeted, which results in a more efficient use of resources and more significant B2B accounts.

10. Marketing Automation Lets You Grow Bigger Than Ever

Many simple, routine marketing tasks—including reporting—can be automated when they’re done digitally, by a robust marketing automation platform. This allows managers and marketing teams to focus on creating effective strategies and measuring meaningful analytics. These systems let marketing and sales teams focus on their expertise, and optimizing strategies, without wasting resources on smaller tasks.

11. Email Marketing Still Communicates Best

A good digital marketing strategy should cater to the audience’s preferences. Most people, 72%, in fact, prefer to hear from brands via email, making a strong case for an engaging email marketing strategy. Email marketing puts targeted messaging right in front of customers and potential customers. When automated, trigger emails can even be sent automatically based on customer activity, further personalizing interactions.

12. Social Media Builds Trust

A referral from a friend instantly makes a company seem more trustworthy to potential customers. Digital advertising leverages social media to make “likes” and other online reviews visible to friends of customers. Recommendations make a company stand out from the competition, automatically building trust.

13. SEO Puts Your Brand Where The Audience Can Find It

Everyone uses Google. In fact, 81% of B2B purchase cycles begin with a web search. That may be why search engine optimization (SEO) has the best ROI of any digital marketing channel. For a company to be seen on Google, it must show up on the search engine’s first page. A solid SEO strategy is used to improve a company’s Google ranking.

Meet Business Goals with Digital Marketing

The path to reaching business goals and finding success is through a strong digital marketing strategy. Better cost efficiency, more data to inform better decisions, and building on customer trust are just a few of the advantages to be gained from digital marketing. Start by investigating an email marketing solution. There are a lot of platforms available to help you get started very quickly. If you’re already doing email marketing, consider whether you’re ready to upgrade to a complete automation system.

What are your “reasons why” for digital? Do they differ from mine? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments!

The post Why Digital Marketing is Crucial—No Matter the Size of Your Business appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Visual content is processed 60,000 times faster than text. Using infographics in your marketing can help you better engage and capture reader attention.

But here’s the thing:

Infographics aren’t just great for grabbing a reader’s attention.

• They get shares, which helps you reach and engage a new audience.
• They rank for keywords, allowing you to fill difficult search ranking placements with engaging content.
• They get backlinks. People love to link to assets that capture complex or interesting topics in a simple visual format.
• The can generate leads. Leveraging interactive elements allows marketers to capture lead information directly within the infographic.

Infographics give marketers the quadruple threat.

But it’s not enough to spend hours researching and crafting the perfect infographic. You need a strategy, and enough follow-through to get your ideal audience to actually see it, and take action.

In this post, I’m going to explain how you can ramp up your infographic marketing strategy to get more traffic, shares, backlinks, engagement…and leads.

But first, check out some successful infographic marketing campaigns for some inspiration.

Successful Infographic Marketing Examples

Infographics are a secret weapon you can use to get tens of thousands of social shares and loads of high-value links from authority websites.

Here are three awesome examples that knocked it out of the park.

Toggl: Software Development Methods Explained With Cars

This infographic targeted development teams — an audience that could be future Toggl customers. Its funny, irreverent style and cartoonish design landed it over 30,000 social shares.

Results:

• 36,100 shares
• 353 backlinks
• 1,000 keywords (including a first page slot for “software development methods”, their target keyword)

Kissmetrics: How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line

This infographic ranks for 3,000+ keywords, including the competitive search term “loading time”. This keyword targets a perfect prospect: a concerned website owner, looking to improve their site.

Results:

• 6,300 shares
• 26,800 backlinks
• 3,300 keywords

Copyblogger: 15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look Silly

This educational infographic tapped into two of the internet’s biggest fears: making grammar mistakes, and looking silly. It ranks on the first page for “common grammatical errors”, which gets over 4,000 monthly organic searches.

Results:

• 254,900 shares
• 6,000 backlinks
• 3,200 keywords

A Data-Driven Look at Why Infographics are Still Crushing It for B2B Marketers

Infographics weren’t just a big thing in the early 2010s, they were the next big thing. And, marketers went absolutely nuts over them.

Infographics tap into an evolutionary human trait – brains process graphical information much easier, and faster.

Science aside, let’s look at some hard data to back this up:

41.5% of Marketers Say Infographics are the Most Engaging Type of Visual Content

A 2017 study by Venngage revealed 41.5% of marketers report infographics are the most engaging visuals they produce.

Ahead of videos, charts, and gifs…

37% of Marketers Think Visual Content is the Most Important — More Important than Blogging

The 2016 Social Media Examiner Industry Report shows us that marketers put great importance on visual content.

37% of marketers believe visual content is more important than blogging, which proves the effectiveness of their results.

Infographics are Liked and Shared on Social Media 300% More Than Any Other Type of Content

NNGroup states that visual content — infographics in particular — does exceptionally well on social media, getting 300% more likes and shares than other kinds of content. The same study also emphasized the importance of combining images and information to improve user experience:

“The commonality across all of these examples (and thousands more in our other studies) is that users pay attention to information-carrying images that show content that’s relevant to the task at hand. And users ignore purely decorative images that don’t add real content to the page. So much fluff — of which there’s too much already on the web.”

BUT:

Infographics are only as powerful as the foundation they are built on…

A Simple 4-Step Framework for Creating a High-Performing Infographic

You can burn money churning out infographics on any random topic, or you could drive meaningful results by nailing the following four things:

1. Choose the right topic
2. Choose the right facts and stats to tell a compelling story
3. Choose the right layout and visual design
4. Choose the right interactive elements

Step 1: Choose the Right Topic

It’s not all about the latest trending topics. Driving traffic that doesn’t align with your overarching business objectives won’t benefit the bottom line, it’ll just pump up your vanity metrics.

So, how do you know what the right topic is?

Choose a topic that:

• Hits one of your target keywords (“An in-depth map of the customer journey”)
• Solves a key pain point for your customers (“The anatomy of a perfect blog post”)
• Plays on your audience’s fears and aspirations, invokes awe, happiness, outrage, or humor (“The 7 kinds of terrible SaaS customers” or “How Bad Customer Support is Burning Your Bottom Line”)

The best starting point is keyword research. Keywords help drive demand. The more searches a question gets, the more people want to know the answer.

After you’ve got the right keyword (or question/topic), the rest is positioning.

The first step to finding the right topic/keywords is opening up your keyword research tool of choice. In this example, I’m going to use Ahrefs, and the example of a fictional web design agency.

Let’s say I’m looking to attract businesses in the early stages of the funnel; users that want to design a website, but can’t. A common way to build a website — and a necessary first step — is to use HTML.

So, how about we target folks looking to learn HTML?

An infographic targeting “HTML basics” also isn’t just something you read once and forget about. It could be a resource the learner constantly refers back to.

Check out SEO 1 Click’s infographic for an example of an infographic that helps prospects solve a pain point, targets a keyword, and plays to the reader’s aspirations.

Step 2: Choose the Right Facts and Stats to Tell a Compelling Story

You can get huge lists of statistics for any topic by running some basic Google searches:

Unless you’re in a really niche area, there’s no shortage of data. And, if there is, have a go at gathering some data yourself, like Process Street did in this post and infographic about SaaS pricing pages.

You’ve got to handpick the right stats to tell your story and make your point.

To do this, you can pick a proven structure to get started:

• Data-driven: uses data to tell a story, sometimes starting out by illustrating the prevalence of a particular trend (eg: mobile phone usage) and building up to talk specifics that relate to the infographic’s purpose (marketing SMS open rate).
• Problem/solution: poses a problem to tell a story, and then uses data to prove the effectiveness of a solution. This is a good structure to use to add a human element or narrative to an infographic, like this example below.

Step 3: Choose the Right Layout and Visual Design

You can have the best data in the world, but a poor layout will have readers bouncing from your page page at sonic speed. This is something you’ve really got to nail, but don’t worry — like a lot of content, it’s best to stick to proven methods.

Now’s a good time to draw from an infographic by Piktochart’s SeeMei Chow:

You see infographics using the six templates above all the time — they’re clear, and make it easy for the reader to make sense of the information. You can use an in-house designer, hire a freelancer, or use an infographic maker.

Step 4: Choose the Right Interactive Elements

Interactive infographics like this one help marketers better engage their audience, and stand out from the crowd. The interactivity takes the content’s narrative to a whole new level, and encourages readers to participate and provide their own information (which you can use to later market to them).

More than half of buyers are influenced by custom content:

Add interactive elements like questions, animations, calculators, or hidden content to your infographic. Interactivity takes infographics to a whole new level — they can turn a one-way monolgue into a two-way dialogue.

This gif is a snippet from the MailChimp 2016 report, an infographic that keeps the reader’s attention with its unique design and animated elements.

Taking it a step further, you can add elements to force readers to actively participate in the content experience by clicking to reveal information and enter details to get personalized results:

This interactive infographic takes input by asking the user to select their areas of focus for winter home maintenance. While clicking through to select areas in the graphic, the user reveals extra information before submitting their selection through a lead generation form.

It’s easy to see how this added layer of interactivity can drive users to take action, not just consume content — interactive content has a 2x higher conversion rate than static content.

Want to see how other B2B companies are using interactive infographics to collect qualified leads? Check out this post for 75 additional examples.

Now it’s time to get some eyeballs on your infographic…

How to Promote Your Infographics

It’s not enough to email your list once, post a quick tweet, and wait for the views to roll in. You’ve got to put in extra effort to make sure your infographic gets the attention, shares, and backlinks it deserves.

The tactics for infographic promotion are a little different to tactics for promoting other content. For infographics, you want to focus on the effectiveness of visuals in social media, and make it easy for other blogs to use your infographic in their site so you can get quality backlinks and drive targeted referral traffic to your site.

Here are some actionable tips for promoting infographics:

Make It Embeddable

At the bottom of infographics, you’ll often see a box like this:

This embed code makes it easier for bloggers to embed a sourced version of the infographic on their site. The sourcing is great for you because it means a backlink, but also easier for the blogger because they don’t have to handle any of the attribution or code.

The box with the embed code is a simple HTML <textarea> element, and the embed code includes a link back to both the post that hosts the infographic and the image file itself. That’s technically two backlinks for Unbounce, which helps them rank the page on Google search results, as well as the infographic itself in Google Images.

You can use this free tool from Siege Media to create embed codes for your graphics.

Pitch it as a Guestographic

If you’ve got an inbox, you’ve probably seen an email that goes something like this:

“I saw you linked back to a post about productivity on your blog, so figured you’d want to link to my post too”.

Sure, sending out thousands of emails like this might get you a few backlinks for your infographic, but there’s a way to do it that is far more effective.

In his post about guestographics, Brian Dean lays out the formula to build high-authority backlinks:

Great Content + Targeted Outreach + Added Value = Links

Let’s assume you’ve already got the great content part down. Next up is targeted outreach.

Your target? Blogs covering your infographic’s topic. These are easy to find in Google:

Every result on the first page here is a great target, but getting that data into a workable format can be a pain. Instead, you could use something like Ahrefs to grab an Excel sheet of the URLs in seconds:

With a list of URLs in hand, you can either manually source the emails and contacts, or use a tool like Hunter.io — the top-rated email finder among SEO experts.

Armed with a list of relevant contacts and a piece of great, linkable content, you need to execute the next step very carefully, because here’s where it could all go wrong.

Remember that terrible outreach email style I told you about earlier? That’s exactly what you don’t want to do.

Ask yourself: why would the recipient actually care about the offer? What’s in it for them? The trick, as outlined by Brian Dean and countless other SEO experts, is a two-part email sequence.

Part one – a short email based on this template:

“Hey [first name],

I was browsing for [topic] content, and found your blog.

I really liked [something specific that you liked about their page].

And, I just put together an infographic on [topic]. I figured you’d be interested in it.

Let me know if you want to check it out.”

Part two – send the infographic and pitch unique content:

Great, here’s a link: [link to infographic]

Also, let me know if you want to post it on your site. I’ll happily send a unique intro over just for you!

Pretty simple, but you get the picture.

You can automate these outreach emails in a tool like BuzzStream or Mailshake.

Repurpose Sections into Social Share Images for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn

The beauty of infographics is that they’re not just one-and-done content. They’re perfect for re-purposing on social media to drive traffic back to the original post and engage your audience.

Simply screenshotting the infographic and writing a quick summary in the tweet or post is enough. Check this out:

Trello’s keyboard shortcuts feature was widely promoted through an infographic guide. The team shared screenshots of the infographic on social media, and had users retweeting graphical versions of a product’s user guide… If that’s not a huge product marketing win, I don’t know what is.

For more data-driven infographics, excerpt compelling data points that will make your audience want to click and share.

This infographic snippet from Crazy Egg offers an arresting stat, and gets more mileage out of the same piece of content while offering something new to casual Twitter engagers.

Here’s something to try:

Every time you make a new infographic, prepare 8-10 snippets of the key facts and queue up social media posts in a tool like Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout, Social Jukebox for periodic re-promoting. That’s social promotion on full autopilot, constantly driving traffic back to your infographic.

Use Buzzsumo to Find Influencers Sharing Content Related to Your Infographic Topic

Influencers have the attention of thousands of fans. What if you could leverage their audience to amplify your content and reach a completely new audience?

The thing is, influencers always need to be on the lookout for content their audience will love. It’s a big responsibility. Make it easy for them to find it :)

The first step is make a list of influencers who have shared content related to your infographic. BuzzSumo makes this super easy:

Just paste a URL that relates to your infographic, and get a list of influencers who shared it on social. These people are likely to share your infographic, too!

With your list in hand, either in a spreadsheet, Twitter list, or saved inside BuzzSumo, it’s time to start connecting and building relationships.

1. Share a piece of their content
2. Leave a comment on their blog
3. Reach out and let them know you’ve seen they are interested in your infographic’s topic and share your content with them.

This is similar to the guestographic tactic mentioned above, but the aim is to build influencer relationships and get shares instead of backlinks.

Cut Out the Stats and Compile into a Slideshare to Reach B2B Decision Makers

The B2B world is hungry for Slideshares.

According to B2Bmarketing.net, SlideShare receives 500% more traffic from business owners than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. This huge audience combined with native lead capture functionality makes Slideshare a true force for B2B marketing.

(Officevibe are killing it on Slideshare by repurposing infographic content into slideshows — this one got over 85,000 views.)

Once it’s on Slideshare, you can leverage the platform’s connection to LinkedIn:

Embed it in a LinkedIn Pulse article that summarizes the stats, and share it to personal, employee, and company pages.

Want more strategies to promote your infographic?

Here you go:

10 Additional Infographic Promotion Tactics to Try in 2018

1. Promote to your existing fans (website visitors, customers and Lookalike Audiences on Facebook).
2. Use the quora hack: find high traffic threads relating to your topic, and respond with a helpful answer that includes a link to your infographic.
3. Send it to your list (and re-send to non-openers with a different subject line angle).
4. Submit it to infographic directories — here’s 20.
5. Get it featured on popular Pinterest boards in your niche.
6. Export the Twitter handles of people sharing similar infographics or content topics out of Buzzsumo. Upload the lists as a Twitter targeting audience, as explained in this guide.
7. Submit your infographic to Quuu Promote to get it suggested to influencers.
8. Reach out to the cited sources and let them know you featured them. Ask for help promoting.
9. Use BuzzSumo to extract all the people sharing related content in the past. Use Scrape Similar to scrape all the people commenting on related content. Reach out and let them know about your new visual asset on the topic. These folks have already shared your content, and are more likely to do it again.
10. Co-create an infographic with an influencer to tap into their audience. Brian Dean and Larry Kim, for example, partnered on a Wordstream infographic on the topic of increasing click-through rates in search engines. The article got a ton of engagement, and now ranks for a bunch of high-traffic keywords.

BONUS: Skyrocket Engagement (and Conversions) by Repurposing Static Content into an Interactive Infographic

While traditional infographics are effective, the internet has become saturated with them. They’re so ubiquitous, people are becoming less responsive to all the noise. It’s important to adapt your tactics in order to maintain a competitive content marketing advantage, and engage readers.

But engagement isn’t the end goal. It’s not enough.

At the end of the day, you want to be capturing more qualified leads for your business.

Enter interactive infographics.

We wrote a huge guide on how to make them here. But, here’s the 10,000ft view:

1. Start with ideation and data gathering
2. Select a visual theme that fits the story
3. User action should create a reaction
4. Personalize the content by requiring user input
5. Hide content to inspire action and engagement
6. Include in-graphic forms to capture information

Is it worth the extra effort to convert static content into interactive experiences?

Yes! But don’t just take our word for it. Check this out:

That’s 36% of marketers that believe static content is effective at converting, versus 70% of marketers who say their interactive content is effective.

Plus, what’s more appealing? A static image like this…

Or an interactive infographic like this?

Not convinced yet?

Here are 8 other interactive content stats that might change your mind :)

Ready. Set. Promote.

By now you should have a solid roadmap for building engaging infographics, and getting them in front of more people.

While static infographics are a great content marketing medium, they are becoming less effective every day. If you want to break through the noise and go above social engagement and links, consider adding interactive infographics to the mix. They can be used to capture leads across all stages of the buyer journey.

Check out SnapApp’s interactive infographic toolset here.

Almost half of your potential customers say they will “gladly switch brands to use a coupon.”

For mobile coupon users, it’s even worse; six in ten.

Why those no-good, two-faced, traitorous customers! Right?

Wrong: Customer loyalty isn’t a right. It’s an asset, which means you have to build it.

And if you’re not building loyalty, your website may be taking buyers to the dance, only to have your competitor take them to the altar.

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Your website may be taking buyers to the dance, only to have your competitor take them to the altar.

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Fortunately, there’s an amazing way to build loyalty that has a proven 4000% ROI, nearly double the return on investment of the next most profitable marketing option.**

But first, let’s look at where you may be making your mistake.

You worked so hard to make a great product or service. You made your website so that people can find it. And your traffic is huge. They’re finding you… and abandoning you.

Actually, that’s how it’s supposed to work, now more than ever thanks to the internet. We are all just a few clicks away from becoming an expert on any subject. So we research everything—especially our purchases.

How many tabs do you have open right now because you’re researching something? I personally have a terrible tab crisis researching information for this blog.

Tab addiction: So many tabs, I can’t read my tabs.

Now imagine a consumer found your site first, and your product got them excited, and hungry to learn more. And so they kept your tab and opened another tab. And then another. And another.

Before long, your tab is just a sliver.

And after a few days of research, all the information blurs, and then the now-open tab—your competitor—does what you should have done days ago: It gets their email address.

You’ve likely lost. Even if this consumer finds you again, statistics and human nature are working against you.

Email remarketing is the most powerful tool in your arsenal to turn your site’s visitors into lifelong LOYAL customers. Don’t believe me? Take a look:

Why does it work so well?

1. It lets you personalize, extend and evolve the conversation with shoppers for far less investment than other communication methods.
2. It keeps you top of mind.
3. It lets you earn loyalty through rewards (How about YOU switch a brand preference with a coupon!)

But what about the myth that emails are an unwelcome disturbance? Check out the 2015 results of a survey from MarketingSherpa asking how often, if ever, people like to receive promotional emails:

61% of respondents prefer your emails more than weekly!

A well planned, well-executed email remarketing plan is essential for the long-term growth of any company today. Ask your competitor, who just emailed a coupon to everyone in the country.

Ever entered the bookstore, and bought the first book you saw, not knowing anything about the book? Never! You have shown interest, just by picking up the book. Your first instinct is to check the plot. If there are testimonials from the top newspapers printed on the book cover, you tend to read them too. Next, you pull out your phone and check for reviews on Goodreads. Once you are satisfied, you make the purchase and walk out of the store happy.

That’s how a lead nurturing campaign works. It gives your prospect a clear idea about the brand, thus helping them move from consideration to decision stage.

Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than those who buy immediately.

When someone visits your website, it is not always because they have made up their mind to buy from you. In fact, most of your leads lie in the top or middle of the sales funnel. They are either in the research phase, which means they would not want to know more about you or, they are in the consideration phase, which means they still need time to think before buying.

You need to work on an active inbound lead nurturing email strategy that will help you convert your leads into customers.

How Lead Nurturing Helps

Companies that nurture their leads generate 50% more sales. Lead nurturing allows you to connect with your prospects, engage them, and gain their trust. Let’s see how lead nurturing helps you as a business:

• Immediate connect: You get to connect and respond to your leads immediately. The faster you answer, the higher your chances are of converting the lead into customer.
• Show your expertise: When they sign up for your newsletter, they are hardly aware of what you do, and why they should choose you. The lead nurturing campaign gives you a platform to showcase your expertise.
• Understand the prospect: If you know what your prospect is interested in, you can get them to complete the purchase easily.
• Identify the pain areas: This will help you offer relevant content. Depending on how they respond, you can communicate further, and convert it to sales.
• Opportunities to segment: No two prospects will behave in the same way when they see an email from you. Lead nurturing helps you identify how your prospect is likely to behave and segment the email based on that.

How Email Automation Helps

Imagine sending out the nurturing emails to all your leads manually. That would not just cost you a lot of time, but also a lot of money. Automation helps you send out relevant emails at the right time to the right audience. When you build campaigns that connect with your audience’s needs, chances of improving your conversion are high.

Targeted emails help you reach out to your audience at a time they are more likely to open it. If you use email automation, you will just need to create a campaign, and the job gets done. You can concentrate on your core business, while your leads are being targeted and persuaded to convert.

An email marketing campaign works only when you can monitor the open and engagement rates. Depending on the metrics, you can identify what the reader is interested in, and accordingly, send them content and information.

Segmentation is possible based on the metrics you have, to send a more targeted and personalized email.

Finally, your sales team can concentrate on conversion of quality leads that are nurtured by the email campaigns.

If the receiver has subscribed, without the intention of buying right away, your email campaigns can place your brand at the top of the mind, and work towards moving them along the sales funnel gradually.

Lead Nurturing Automation

The idea of nurturing your leads is to understand their journey, offer them information that is relevant, and help them make the right decision.

To make sure you achieve your goals via automation, you need to define the workflow. With a workflow, you would read into the recipient’s behavior, and send in information accordingly. You will know the buyer like the back of your hand and provide them with instances that help them in their journey.

There are three aspects of lead nurturing email automation:

• Adding value to your content to nurture your relationship with the prospect.
• Provide them with content that educates them about your brand and the services or products. Make sure you take this as slow as possible so that they don’t feel you are hard selling.
• Personalize your workflows by segmenting the audience. This will help you offer relevant content to the audience at the right time.

Best Practices for Email Automation

If you want to nurture your leads with email automation, there are few things that you need to consider before planning the campaign.

• Work on the goal: Your ultimate goal is to move the prospect to the next stage in the lifecycle by providing them relevant content. The goal could be getting the prospect to attend a webinar or visit the pages on the website, depending on the lifecycle stage. There will be a goal at every stage of the workflow, which if met, the prospect moves to the next stage. However, if the goal is not met, you make another attempt at achieving the goal.
• Identify the personas: It is important to consider the persona when defining the workflow. The right personas inserted into the workflow will help you personalize the emails better and make moving them towards the decision stage easier.
• Frequency & type of emails: The total number of emails you should send in the series is defined by the type of emails you will need to send to the segmented audience. This depends on the lifecycle stage of the prospect. Plan the frequency as well. You don’t want to overwhelm your prospects with too many emails within a short span of time.
• Build agile campaigns: Each prospect will take a different route along the sales funnel. It is important for you to nurture them accordingly. Ideally, you should have different nurture campaigns based on how the prospect is engaging with your email. This will also help you spot the bottlenecks in the campaign, and help you convert them into opportunities.

The Email Automation Workflow

Types of Emails to Send

Depending on your goal, here are the lead nurturing campaigns you should be planning. When nurturing the lead, you may want to engage them, educate them or convert them, depending on the lifecycle stage. Let’s see the types of emails you should send depending on your goal.

If you want to engage the prospects

Email Type 1: Welcome

This helps you onboard the newly signed up prospects. The welcome email is an excellent way of educating and engaging the new prospects. As they are new, the email content should be designed accordingly. It is always a good idea to welcome them with a series of emails.

This email by designbetter.co welcomes the subscriber. It gives them an idea of what to expect from the brand’s emails. It is the first step towards engaging and nurturing the lead. The series of emails containing all the information and educational material about the brand will help engage further.

Email Type 2: Pre-eminent

Even after on-boarding, your leads may not be sales ready. You need to ensure your brand stays at the top-of-the-mind. This is why you should engage your audience in the top-of-the-mind recall engagement campaigns. It is important to offer value to the prospect at each stage of their decision-making journey.

Email Type 3: Re-engagement

This is a great automated campaign to nurture the leads who became inactive at some point along the decision-making journey. This will help get these inactive leads into the sales funnel once again.

When you haven’t heard from your prospect for a while, sending them a re-engagement email/s similar tothe one sent by Typeform can help you get them on-board again.

If you want to educate the prospects

When the prospect is in the research or consideration stage, it is important to educate them. Here are a few lead nurturing campaigns you can automate to educate the prospects.

Email Type 1: Address the pain points

You can send out an automated email series, which addresses their pain points, and helps them understand how your product can help them. The content should offer everything the prospect needs to know about the product.

This email by Kid & Coe has identified five-star getaways in theUSA. For the segment looking out for options, this is the perfect email, as it addresses their question with the right products.

Email Type 2: Highlight the USP

There are too many brands that focus on the same issue as yours. You may want to differentiate your product from that of the competitors. You can attempt this by highlighting your USP and showing how your product is different. This email campaign needs to be planned and segmented based on the prospect’s needs and lifecycle stage.

If you want to convert the prospect

At some point along the journey, your prospect is ready to convert into a customer. This is when you need to plan out campaigns that can close the deal for you.

Email Type 1: Showcase your expertise

By now, the prospect is interested in you and is well aware of your products and services. It is time to convert them. Send them an email that reinforces their belief in you. The content should convey why they should choose you. Industry reports and press releases that showcase your expertise can help you convert easily.

This email aptly explains why you should opt for Verizon. If the user was researching networks, and considering Verizon, this is the perfect time to send such an email.

Email Type 2: Promotional campaigns

When the prospect is nearing the end of the sales funnel, you can offer them an incentive to convert. Trigger the purchase by sending out an email that offers them discounts. You can even offer special pricing to the prospect, which will convince them to complete the purchase.

The email sent by Crate & Barrel is the apt promotional mailer. If the prospect is already thinking about purchasing, this email will persuade them to complete the purchase.

Wrapping up

Email automation in a lead nurturing campaign helps you respond to your prospects immediately. You can follow the buyer’s journey and engage them at the right touch points, thus improving their experience. By monitoring and measuring the email campaigns, you would be aware of the prospect’s lifecycle stage, and provide them with information that is likely to help them take the decision. It is patience and constant engagement that will get you the next customer from a lead.

This post was co-written by Shopify’s Casandra Campbell.

Content marketing can be a valuable tool for nearly any company, in nearly any industry, at nearly any point in the sales funnel. But with the glut of content available, how does a brand create and distribute content that allows the company (and the audience) to experience that value?

We sent out a request for examples of awesome content marketing via HARO and other channels. In this article, we highlight four out-of-the-box case studies that show how content marketing can be used to create true value.

Shutterstock’s annual Creative Trends infographic

Shutterstock is one of the largest online marketplaces for licensing royalty-free images, videos, and music. For its annual Creative Trends report, Shutterstock analyzes its customers’ search and download data to predict the styles and trends that will dominate the coming year and distributes results in the form of an infographic hosted on its site.

Results

Shutterstock reports its 2017 Creative Trends infographic earned:

• Mentions in more than 100 articles
• 6 billion unique site visits
• 5,300 social media shares, 11,000 social media engagements

Why we love it

Creating one piece of content to serve multiple audiences is usually a bad idea. By trying to serve too many types of reader, you typically end up making your content too broad and readers lose interest.

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Creating one piece of #content to serve multiple audiences is usually a bad idea. @TheSearchGuru @Casandra_Camp
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However, Shutterstock makes it work by using its proprietary data, which is already useful internally for predicting and serving consumer trends, to create something genuinely useful to two vital Shutterstock audiences:

• Contributors – the photographers, videographers, artists, and musicians who contribute content to its marketplace
• Customers – the individuals who purchase and download that content

Contributors get paid when their content is downloaded. Being on trend allows them to make more money. For Shutterstock customers, staying ahead of trends helps them ensure that the print materials, videos, and websites they are creating look fresh.

And, rather than cutting its data 1,000 ways to produce a lengthy downloadable report, Shutterstock stays true to its brand and delivers the information in a succinct, visually impactful format.

How to make this strategy work

• Focus on the value of your content to your audience. Content can only serve multiple audiences if it’s genuinely useful to multiple audiences.
• Consider using data you have rather than spending time and money building and promoting a survey.
• Don’t be afraid to share proprietary data if it could provide insights your audience can’t get anywhere else.

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Use internal data rather than spending time & money building a survey. @TheSearchGuru @Casandra_Camp
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SEMrush’s Easter egg hunt

SEMrush is a leading competitive research toolkit for online marketing. It has more than 20 research tools for SEO, PPC, and content marketing, and an expanding list of features.

Although coming up with those new features hasn’t been a problem, telling its users about those new features has. SEMrush gamified its educational process with a virtual Easter egg hunt, challenging users to find 15 “Easter eggs” by completing desired actions within various SEMrush tools.

SEMrush scored a big social media win by making it easy for users to tweet their accomplishments.

Results

SEMrush reports its Easter egg hunt, launched in April 2017, earned:

• More than 9,300 participants
• 8 million Twitter impressions (16% of those who tweeted had 1,000-plus followers)

Why we love it

This is an awesome example of how companies can apply content marketing outside of customer acquisition. It was probably a hard sell to spend more money and development time building a sitewide scavenger hunt after SEMrush presumably spent a decent chunk of money developing new features.

Many of the best SaaS companies are using content marketing to drive customer success by creating user academies and certification programs. Gamification of the tool set guided users through adopting new features. It’s a novel, entertaining approach.

Finally, by making it easy for users to tweet their accomplishments, the SEMrush team scored a social media victory on top of driving user engagement.

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In gamification #content make it easy for users to tweet their accomplishments. @TheSearchGuru @Casandra_Camp
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How to make this strategy work

• Use content marketing outside of customer acquisition.
• You invest time and resources improving your products and developing new features. Spend time and resources developing a campaign to drive new feature adoption.
• The best performing content is interesting, informative, and interactive.

PureVPN and cyberstalking prevention

PureVPN is a paid virtual private network service that uses end-to-end encryption to provide online privacy and security to its users. Pure’s simplified user experience is geared toward females who want to reduce their cyber footprint with private, secure web browsing. The advantages of using a VPN are well understood within the tech community. But communicating that value to non-tech female consumers is a challenge.

PureVPN created a campaign that appeals to a group of consumers who could directly benefit from use of a VPN: past and potential victims of cyberstalking. Pure created a campaign page with striking visual images and a knowledge base of information on cyberstalking, including interviews with security experts and high-profile victims (Kris Degioia, a former vice president of marketing at Google and past victim of cyberstalking, among them).

Results

PureVPN reports its Let’s Stop Cyberstalking campaign earned:

• 2,000 social media shares
• 75% increase in site traffic (63% of which was female)

Why we love it

This is an example of what can happen when companies get out of their swim lane and do it well. It works here for two reasons.

First, PureVPN treated this emotionally charged subject with the utmost care. Other brands have tried to leverage sensitive topics in the past only to watch it blow up in their faces like Pepsi’s ham-handed combining of Kendall Jenner and imagery from the Black Lives Matter movement.

Second, PureVPN offers a product that directly addresses some of the factors that put one of their key demographics at risk.

Pure also made sure to put adequate effort behind promoting the content. It implemented an optimal social media strategy to push the content and contributed to discussions within online communities to start the campaign awareness – a terrific example of guerilla PR tactics that took a lot of sweat, but likely minimal budget.

Finally, Pure made it easy for consumers to contribute to the conversation. According to its marketing department, within days of launching the campaign, PureVPN received submissions from users sharing their cyberstalking stories and providing tips on how to fight and prevent cyberstalking.

How to make this strategy work

• Step out of your swim lane when and where it makes sense. Just because you make a tech product doesn’t mean you only have to market to a tech audience.

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Just b/c you make a tech product doesn't mean you only market to a tech audience. @TheSearchGuru @Casandra_Camp
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• If you choose to leverage an emotionally charged issue, add value to the space. Be aware of the possibility for backlash if your treatment of an issue is disrespectful.
• Put your weight behind promotion.

24Slides giveaway

24Slides is a team of 65-plus of the world’s best – as the company claims – PowerPoint designers based between Copenhagen and Indonesia. They design presentations for companies with high volume demands. To build its email list, 24Slides created a fully editable, 20-slide corporate PowerPoint template, and gave it away. To access the template, customers enter their name and email on a home page popup, comment “yes,” or share it as a LinkedIn Pulse article.

Results

According to the folks at 24Slides, this strategy earned:

• 500,000-plus reads on LinkedIn
• 60,000 comments
• 80,000 email leads

24Slides has replicated the campaign three times, with similar results each time, growing its email list to 130,000 subscribers.

Why we love it

Offering a downloadable piece of content in exchange for contact information is a classic top-of-funnel tactic for gathering large volumes of unqualified leads. But there are three things of note about this campaign.

First, this is a great way to build a fast email list. Rented lists are the worst. With this campaign, 24Slides is giving away one of its core services. That’s a risky-feeling move that many companies don’t make. But 24Slides wasn’t focused on the potential cost of the campaign. It was focused on building a monster email list quickly.

Second, by requiring users to comment on or share a LinkedIn Pulse article, 24Slides effectively gamed the algorithm and ensured some level of virality. The more people interact with a LinkedIn article, the more likely the platform’s algorithm will designate it a useful piece of content and serve it to more people.

Finally, once 24Slides had a template for a winning campaign, it was able to replicate it several times with equal success.

How to make this strategy work

• Building a quality email list should be a priority for your content. Email lists are one of the most valuable marketing assets available.
• To build a list fast, you must take a risk and offer something really valuable to potential customers.

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Rented email lists are the worst. Make list-building a priority for #content. @TheSearchGuru @Casandra_Camp
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Conclusion

Content marketing isn’t always an obvious choice for your company. But, these four case studies are excellent examples of how content marketing can be useful in nearly any industry, at nearly any stage of the sales funnel.

Gather more out-of-the-box ideas and inspiration at Content Marketing World this September in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today and use the code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 4 Case Studies Show How to Crush It With Out-of-the-Box Content Marketing appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Many organizations have adopted the practice of hosting Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) with each of their sales professionals to review what happened the previous quarter and to, perhaps more importantly, look ahead to future quarters.

While QBRs are often dreaded by just about everyone in the sales organization due to their reputation for being incredibly time consuming and invasive, they can be very helpful for not just the sales leader, but the team of sales professionals as well. In order to host QBRs that are viewed as invaluable, it all comes down to preparation and constructing just the right agenda that packs quantitative and qualitative data points into a succinct time period.

In this article, we’ll provide some guidelines about preparation, and will share a sample agenda that strikes a balance of examining KPIs without abandoning qualitative learning.

QBR Preparation Guidelines

Hosting an individualized QBR with each sales professional can be extremely time consuming for all involved. Team members must pull reports in which to glean important metrics and KPIs, scour conversation notes, create their slides, and practice their presentation and response handling for the questions they’ll receive. And while the sales professional’s job is extensive and takes away from selling time, your output as a sales leader is even greater. Rather than prepare for just one presentation, you must prepare for many, and may even be asked to present your own QBR to superiors, such as the VP of Sales or even the entire executive team. It’s your responsibility to pull reports, identify key trends, create the agenda and the QBR outline, review each sales professional’s performance, and potentially prepare your own summary for superiors.

Because of the immense preparation that goes into hosting successful QBRs each and every quarter, it’s imperative that they’re not dreaded, but rather looked forward to as a time of joint learning. In order to set the tone for a successful QBR, as a sales leader, you must keep these guidelines in mind:

• Prepare the QBR agenda several weeks in advance in order to give all participants ample time to prepare (2-4 weeks is optimal)
• Block out time on the sales professional’s calendar well in advance so they can schedule prospect or customer meetings around the time block
• Determine other individuals that should attend the QBR (Solutions Consultants, supporting SDRs, other Sales Managers, etc)
• Outline all metrics, reports, and deliverables that will be reviewed during the time and request that Sales Ops pull necessary reports
• Provide sales professionals with a pre-built QBR presentation template so that each presentation follows the same structure
• Respect the time allotment and do not exceed the calendar block, even if a follow-up needs to be scheduled
• Approach the conversation with an appropriate amount of both constructive criticism of what can be approved along with praise for what is exceeding expectations
• Never end the QBR without resolution or at least a detailed action plan or next steps in place

With these guidelines in mind, you can now create the agenda elements which will ultimately be shared with your team of sales professionals so they can begin to prepare for their personalized QBR.

Creating the Balanced QBR Agenda

Below, you’ll find an agenda example along with proposed KPIs and metrics to include at each discussion point to ensure the meeting isn’t just helpful, but data-driven.

Introduction and Pipeline Review (Sales Leader)

Data to include (both for team and sales professional):

• Current pipeline and weighted pipeline
• Quarter over quarter comparison (trailing 2 quarters)
• Quota attainment and quota coverage
• Average deal size
• Conversion % by pipeline stage
• # of won deals vs. # of lost deals

In the initial portion of the QBR, the sales leader opens up the meeting by reviewing top line metrics that are relevant to the following conversation. This helps to set the stage for the meeting and ensures that the sales professional and sales manager are aligned on the highest level of KPIs before diving into specific metrics and deals.

Last Quarter Recap (Sales Professional)

Data to include (as it relates to sales professional only):

• Last quarter breakdown by pipeline
• Weighted pipeline at quarter start vs. quarter end
• Closed won new business $ vs. closed lost or no decision $
• Marketing lead and opportunity contribution and analysis
• Self-generated lead and opportunity contribution and analysis
• Qualitative learnings recap

At this point in the discussion, the sales professional provides a thorough recap of the previous quarter, sharing factual data points and also interjecting his or her viewpoint on each element. For example, sharing perspective on why he believes marketing generated leads closed at higher rates than self-generated leads or what decision factors ultimately led to the closed lost deals. During this reflection, the sales professional can also share more qualitative learnings that aren’t necessarily data-backed, but are equally important for discussion. This may include his or her speculation as to what can be improved in future quarters, or suggestions for sales training seminars.

Future Quarter Look Ahead (Sales Professional)

Data to include (as it relates to sales professional only):

• Weighted pipeline at quarter start
• Breakdown of current opportunities by stage
• Breakdown of current leads and opportunities by source (including a note of marketing generated or self-generated)

Next, the sales professional shares pipeline metrics for the upcoming quarter, being sure to cover the current state of his or her pipeline along with a breakdown of leads and opportunities. While conversations about the upcoming quarter are more difficult to base off of metrics, previous quarter learnings can provide a baseline, which is why it’s key to cover previous performance first. This discussion revolves mostly around aspects such as pipeline confidence and sales approach plan. As we’ll cover in a following point, the sales professional and leader should discuss the specific sales plans for key accounts, which is especially important for those selling to large, complex enterprises.

Key Learnings and Success Milestones (Collaborative)

While some key learnings may have already been addressed in previous agenda items, it’s a good idea to dedicate an entire section of the QBR to constructive criticism and praise. Having a dedicated time to bring up difficult conversations near the end of the meeting can accomplish two things: 1) Give the sales professional and sales leader space to air out any grievances, discuss challenges, and highlight opportunities with no interruptions and 2) Allow for resolution during the meeting itself without having to put off action—after all, the purpose of the QBR is to resolve what worked, but more importantly, plan for even more effective future quarters.

As a sales leader, have questions prepared to ask the sales professional if qualitative conversation doesn’t naturally occur:

• What can our organization as a whole do a better job of?
• Are there tools or resources you need in order to improve?
• Do you feel like we spend enough 1:1 time together? How can I better coach you on a weekly basis?>
• What topics should we cover in a future sales workshop or all-hands meeting?
• What was the most important thing you learned last quarter? How will you apply it to this quarter?

Strategic Account Planning (Collaborative)

For sales professionals covering complex, enterprise deals, this section of the agenda is exceptionally important and shouldn’t be glossed over. It’s tempting to focus on deal mechanics versus building a business case, which is why the QBR is the perfect opportunity to discuss both approaches.

During this time of strategic account planning, the sales leader and the sales professional can work together to identify the very top accounts (between 2-5, depending on deal size) that are expected to close during the upcoming quarter and dive into the business case. During this time, discuss questions such as:

• What problem is the sales professional solving for the prospect?
• What is the actual root cause of that problem?
• Why is that problem (or solution) important to them?
• How does the sales professional know that a budget has been dedicated to solving the problem?
• Is the sales professional talking to the right stakeholders in the department or the organization?
• Is the sales professional aware of the security audits that may need to be conducted? Or other “gotchas” that might slow the deal?
• What is the business driver or compelling event that will get the deal across the line in a timely fashion?

Then, during weekly 1:1’s, continue to address the status and outcomes from the previous week, all based on tangible and actionable data points.

Final Questions and Next Steps (Collaborative)

While no data points are necessary in this final agenda item, it’s imperative to ensure all i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed. If there are unchecked items or if the presentation runs long, be sure to schedule another meeting or determine the action items for both parties. While QBRs can be an extremely effective tool, they can also expose emotion and pent up frustration and, if left unaddressed, can present obstacles down the road. Use this final stage to address any final questions, to reinforce points discussed, and to close the loop.

The post Creating the Right Agenda for Data-Backed Quarterly Business Reviews appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Maybe you recently got an Echo or a similar voice-activated gadget from Amazon. Or perhaps you are a long-time owner who uses the device regularly. In either case, you may wonder how to use the Alexa personal assistant for improved productivity. Asking Alexa to tell you a joke is amusing but it doesn’t help you make progress. Fortunately, there are numerous ways to use Echo and Alexa to get more done in a day. Download: Alexa for iOS | Android (Free) 1. Set Automated Updates With Alexa Routines The Alexa Routines capability is relatively new. It allows you to trigger...

Read the full article: How to Use Amazon Echo and Alexa to Be More Productive

Share of voice reigns as a popular and valuable metric for measuring the effectiveness of an organization’s public relations. Share of voice can provide quantifiable data that illustrates how its PR fares against competitors and helps determine PR’s contribution to business goals. Although share of voice has limitations when examined by itself, the metric can be refined to overcome those drawbacks.

PR measurement experts define share of voice as the percentage of all online content and conversations about your company or brand, compared to those of competitors. Media measurement vendors like Glean.info gather every earned news mention and social media post that includes your brand or your competitors and create a chart or pie graph that shows your slice of all media mentions. The graphic can be based on number of mentions, reach based on circulation/readership, or based on positive/negative sentiment. To get accurate share of voice results, you must monitor media for competitors’ names and brands as well as your own. The keyword searches must parallel each other.

Benefits of Share of Voice for PR Measurement

PR often aims to increase awareness of their company and products. But awareness is difficult to measure. Share of voice quantifies how PR impacts business goals and how its media placements stack up against competitors. The metric can also help PR set goals and plans and tweak strategies as campaigns move forward.

Share of voice can reveal your strengths and weaknesses. Digging deeper into the data can reveal what types of announcements or activities gain media coverage. It can uncover new media outlets to contact and competitors’ successful strategies to emulate, and tell you if media outlets and bloggers in your sector mention your company.

By showing clients or senior corporate executives how PR helps meet business objectives or where their PR falls short of competitors, PR can convince decision-makers to increase investment in public relations. “Business leaders, especially those in the B2B and SaaS space, make decisions based on hard data and numbers, so the more you can provide, the better chance you have of prolonging that investment,” says Heidi Harmon, an account executive at BLASTMedia.

Drawbacks – and How to Fix Them

Share of voice does have limitations. It only measures the amount of coverage, not the quality. It doesn’t take into account sentiment, where the brand name appears in the article, how many other companies may have been mentioned in the article, the publication’s readership, or other qualifying factors.

Sometimes less is more: Your share of mentions may be low, but the mentions may be favorable. Depending on your goals and desired audience, a single mention in a well-targeted trade publication may be more valuable than several mentions in general consumer publications.

Better Share of Voice Insights

Measurement professionals can compile more meaningful share of voice reports by ranking mentions by sentiment, publications’ circulation, reader quality, solo mention vs. mentions with competitors, and other factors. For instance, PR can assign a tier one grade to influential national publications or media outlets in a specific niche and give a tier two rating to local or generic media outlets. Measurement tools can also analyze share of voice in precise geographic areas or around certain keyword phrases.

Media measurement tools can analyze tone to grade sentiment of mentions on a positive to negative scale. While automated sentiment analysis can review large numbers of posts quickly and affordably, trained human analysts provide more accurate results. Some media measurement services like Glean.info can provide a hybrid approach, with human analysts spot checking automated assessments of media mentions.

If placing more thought leadership articles than competitors is your goal, a measurement tool can search and count only coverage that features the executive’s commentary, bylines from the executive or executive profiles, adds Kate Bachman, an account director at PR agency InkHouse.

“SOV is a flexible and useful metric when used correctly and in concert with other metrics and strategic considerations,” Bachman says.

Examine Media Coverage from Multiple Angles

“It is important to look at your media coverage from multiple angles,” advises Bethany Cramer, public relations manager at Marketing Works. “The amount of coverage secured is not the only available metric. It is essential to not only track your coverage, but to look deeper and compare your company to its competitors.”

Consider narrowing your search. Share of voice can become overwhelming if your sector is large. Try narrowing searches to particular areas of interest among your customers. Some share of voice computations consider only a select list of competitors. Discovering the top competitors enables you to figure out what portion of the market they’re attempting to influence, explains PR agency Walker Sands. You can also restrict your share of voice measurement to top tier publications, either consumer or trade.

Add share of search to your PR measurement, suggests Christopher Penn, vice president, marketing technology, at Shift Communications. Internet searches indicate customers’ intent, even though searchers don’t publicly comment on the topic. Good AdWords can compare the monthly average volume of searchers for your brand to competitors. The Google keyword planner estimates the average monthly number of searches for a keyword. Google now requires AdWords users to meet AdWords minimum spending requirements to view detailed data.

“Share of search volume matters for all those people who are thinking about brands, thinking about choices, but not talking about them,” Penn says.

Bottom Line: PR measurement experts often analyze share of voice to learn how PR campaigns perform compared to competitors. The metric can provide especially meaningful insights if PR can dig deeper into the data and examine different components of media coverage.

This article was first published on the Glean.info blog.

Sign-up for a free demo of the Glean.info media monitoring & measurement dashboard.

A mining engineering professor at the University of B.C. is hoping that his parodies of pop songs will help reduce mercury pollution in small scale gold mining in developing countries.

Marcello Veiga is heading to Colombia on Wednesday where he will be singing to about 600 miners in 11 states about the dangers of using highly toxic mercury in extracting gold.

Worldwide, artisanal and small-scale gold mining in rural areas is the single biggest industrial user of mercury at about 1,400 tonnes a year.

Other countries where significant amounts of mercury is used in artisanal gold mining include Peru, Ecuador, Zimbabwe and Indonesia.

Veiga believes singing parodies to miners is the best way to educate them about changing their methods so they’re not harming their own health and that of their families and communities.

One of the first songs he wrote is I Just Called to Say Don’t Mine It sung to the tune of I Just Called to Say I Love You, the 1984 Stevie Wonder pop tune.

“The first one relates to a person who wants to get rich and doesn’t care about enforcement,” Veiga said.

“That is exactly the attitude of the miners. They say ‘Who cares about enforcement? The authorities are never going to come here.’”

Sample lyrics:

I just called to say don’t mine it

I just called to say how much I care

If you mine and don’t reclaim it

I guarantee your life will be a nightmare

Another Veiga song is They Don’t Wanna Talk About It. It’s a parody of I Don’t Wanna Talk About It which was written by Danny Whitten and made popular by Rod Stewart in 1974. Veiga’s version is about men potentially becoming impotent from mercury pollution.

Sample lyrics:

And with time you’ll find that you became impotent

I don’t want to talk about you

But the girls will do

You will say that ‘global warming did it’

You will say ‘Viagra is gonna help me’

But you don’t see … it was the mercury

For impoverished people living in rural areas of developing countries, the lure of artisanal gold mining is huge. Often, they’re making as little as $60 a month. With gold at close to US$43 a gram, artisanal gold mining can generate from $500 to $1,000 a month for a miner, Veiga said.

He said the response to his songs has been fantastic. In South America, some songs are translated into Spanish with colloquialisms so that the audience understands what he’s singing.

“They love it,” Veiga said in an interview at UBC.

“It’s the way to get the guys laughing. This is the best way to educate them about the dangers of mercury pollution.”

Veiga, from Brazil, said he started getting interested in the issue in 1980 when Jacques Cousteau visited Brazil and drew attention to the connection between mercury and gold mining.

From 2002 to 2008, Veiga was the chief technical adviser on global mercury for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization in Vienna. He became a UBC mining professor in 2008-2009.

At UBC, Veiga was known as the professor who sang to his class. Every Wednesday, he would bring out his guitar and sing a song related to a theme he was teaching such as acid rain or climate change. If he could do it at UBC, he thought, he could do it in the field as well.

“When I was there in Columbia, I started to sing in English with translation in Spanish to the miners, to the authorities, making jokes about sustainability,” said Veiga who has studied the effects of gold mining in more than 40 countries.

When mercury is added to gold ore taken from the ground or riverbeds, it chemically binds with the gold; because the gold-mercury amalgam is heavier than crushed rock particles, it sinks and is recovered from the muddy mixture. The mercury is either squeezed from the amalgam by hand or burned off.

The former method is highly inefficient and can result in as much as 80 per cent of the gold and mercury being lost; the second method results in toxic airborne mercury.

One way to help reduce the health effects of airborne mercury pollution is to convince miners to use retorts — relatively inexpensive condensation systems — that recover mercury when the amalgam is being burned.

In 2010 tests conducted by Veiga in Antioquia, a mountainous area in northwest Colombia, inorganic mercury vapour was measured at almost 1,000 times the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines for long-term exposure. Three years later, after initiatives led by Veiga at UBC and the US Department of State to introduce cleaner extraction methods, mercury levels had been reduced by as much as 60 per cent.

Last August, the Minamata Convention came into effect. The international convention ratified by 88 countries — including Canada last April — seeks to protect human health by reducing mercury emissions.

Health affects of mercury pollution can include damaged kidneys and irreversible neurological damage such as short-term memory loss, speech impairment and impaired vision.

Veiga’s research has found unique isotopes of mercury from small-scale mines in Ecuador downriver in Peru 160 km away. As a result of the contamination of fish, Peru is looking for financial compensation from Ecuador.

“I try to be friendly,” he said about his approach in the field.

“I can’t tell the miners to do this to use a retort to protect themselves, their family and community. I believe in education — and songs.”

kevingriffin@postmedia.com

 

No matter how far you’ve come in your content marketing career – and how much you continue to progress – there are always a few things you wish you were better at, understood more deeply, or had known about earlier.

On my career path, I traveled from print journalism to public relations to digital publishing before arriving at the content marketing crossroads. At that point, I needed to get up to speed on some fundamentals that hadn’t factored into my previous roles; so I turned to informational resources like CMI to power my journey of discovery. (Yep, I relied on content marketing to strengthen my ability to be a content marketer.)

There’s always more to learn; but my self-education efforts have helped me to bridge some knowledge gaps, develop new skills and techniques, and produce better results for my clients and content partners.

I thought I would return the favor by revisiting the fundamentals of successful content marketing from top to bottom. Think of this post as a road map to CMI’s best resources on topics where you or your team might benefit from a refresher course or an expanded view.

What is content marketing?

Like most things in life, you can’t reach your full potential for success with content marketing until you understand exactly what it is (and what it isn’t) – including how it’s defined, what business goals it can help you achieve, and what roles it should play in relation to your other marketing disciplines and techniques. 

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#Contentmarketing success starts with knowing what it is AND what it isn't, says @joderama.
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While some circles of the digital industry have yet to agree on a definitive characterization of the technique, the definition we use at CMI represents the consensus:

Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

In short, instead of pitching your products or services, content marketing works by capturing the attention of your target audience members and helping them address their informational and task-oriented needs. The belief is that your audience over time will come to trust and rely on your guidance, recognize your company’s unique value proposition, and ultimately reward you with business and loyalty.

Let’s unpack the definition further to hone in on its three most essential components:

• It is relevant to a target audience: To build and reinforce loyal, trusting relationships between your business and potential buyers, your content marketing efforts need to communicate with them on their own terms and appeal to them based on their interests – not just the perspectives and priorities your business wants to further. 

• It provides them with tangible value: Content marketing is most likely to succeed when it serves a specific and largely unmet need, like delivering critical information buyers are likely searching for, providing a tool or technique to make their lives easier, or guiding them through the steps of a complicated process they might have difficulty navigating. 

• It is consistent: Even if you luckily find viral success with a single content effort, those gains can only be sustained over the long term if your content efforts remain consistent – meaning they are produced on an ongoing basis, delivered on a reliable schedule, and always aligned with the standards of quality, value, and purpose your audience expects. 

Goals to pursue through content marketing

You can accomplish a lot with a consistent, relevant, and valuable content marketing program. But you’ll never be able to attain the results you want if you haven’t first identified your goals. 

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You can't get results if you haven't identified your #content marketing goals, says @joderama.
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Some of the most common goals marketers pursue through their content programs include:

• Brand awareness: Getting discovered by the right consumers
• Audience engagement: Capturing the interest of casual readers and nurturing them into subscribers
• Lead generation: Identifying and qualifying consumers who are most likely to become customers
• Driving loyalty and evangelism: Retaining your existing customers by increasing their positive perception of and satisfaction with your business
• Increasing sales and profitability: Closing more deals, reducing your marketing costs, and opening up new revenue streams.

Where content fits in your marketing plan

Content marketing can’t function at its best in a vacuum nor is it meant to be a replacement for other promotional techniques. Content works best when it operates in a cooperative capacity – when it is used to fuel and complement your other marketing efforts in alignment with your overarching business goals.

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#Contentmarketing can't function at its best in vacuum, says @joderama.
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For example, content marketing works well with:

• Native advertising
• Branded content 
• Product marketing
• Traditional marketing
• Social media
• SEO
• Inbound marketing
• Public relations
• Influencer marketing

Getting the buy-in you need

Now that you can clearly characterize content marketing’s value proposition, you’ll be better able to communicate its benefits in terms that others – including your internal and external teams, the C-suite, and other key stakeholders – will understand and appreciate.

The value proposition is a must if you want to secure buy-in and ongoing support: If executive management does not believe in the value of content marketing, it will be incredibly difficult to get the budget, resources, and approvals to keep your content engine running at peak performance over the long term.

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Executive buy-in is a must to keep the #contentmarketing engine running long-term, says @joderama.
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While every buy-in conversation is unique to the organization’s priorities and marketing goals, at a minimum be prepared to address common questions and objections, such as:

• Why does the company need content marketing? For example, point out how integral it is to remaining competitive online or its important role in consumers’ purchasing process.

• How does content help meet the marketing goals? For example, you can discuss content’s influence over brand perception and decision-making, its capacity to increase loyalty or to reduce marketing and media expenses, or how it can be used to engage audiences that distrust and avoid traditional advertising.

• What budget and infrastructure are needed? To execute on your strategy effectively, include team members and skills, tools and technologies, editorial processes, and media channels.

• What are the expectations for success? Detail the business results your content efforts will help accomplish, and an estimate of the time you expect it to take for those results to be realized.

The following checklist can take your buy-in preparation process further, giving you the tools to assure stakeholders that your content program will be well positioned to achieve success. You may not be able to get every element in place before you ask executives for their support, but the more boxes you can check, the more effective your content marketing program buy-in pitch is likely to be.

Setting the stage for success

With buy-in secured, you can get down to the business of planning, creating, and sharing the high-quality content your audience craves.

While no single technique for developing and managing content suits every organization, we recommend following this content marketing framework. Think of it as a syllabus of sorts, covering the five core elements necessary to run a successful, scalable, and highly strategic content marketing operation:

• Purpose and goals: This is the foundation of your content marketing strategy – why you are creating content and the value it will provide for your business.

• Audience: A well-defined explanation of who your content can help the most and the benefits your program is designed to provide for them.

• Unique brand story: The specific and compelling ideas that will flow through your content creation efforts, and how they will reflect your organization’s values and brand voice.

• Processes and teams: The details of how you will structure, plan, execute, and manage the tasks involved in activating your content marketing strategy.

• Measurement plan: The way you will monitor the performance of your content, evaluate its impact, and implement processes for ongoing optimization.

In upcoming posts, I’ll dive more deeply into each of these building blocks and explore best practices for applying them within your organization. Stay tuned.

Don’t miss future posts helping your content marketing become more mature (and more successful). Subscribe to the weekday e-newsletter.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Road Map to Success: Resources to Refresh Your Content Marketing Program appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

You can’t do what your clients want you to do when doing so hurts them.

From the very first time you interact with your dream client, they will try to avoid taking the actions necessary to produce better results. They’ll tell you they are happy when they aren’t, to check back in the next quarter, or to email them information. Their concern is that you will waste their time and when you give up and go away it is proof that they are correct. If you can help them produce better results, you must persist, ask again, and help them agree to a meeting.

When you are engaged with your prospective client, they will want you to provide them with a proposal and pricing before you have done the work of collaborating with them to build a solution that works. They’ll want you to make it easy on them and transact, emailing them a proposal and pricing, even when doing so doesn’t serve them.

You will have clients that don’t want to engage anyone else on their team in the change initiative you are working on together. They’ll want you to work with them and them alone, leaving out the people who will be affected by the decision who will be served by your solution. They won’t want to go through the messy exercise of building consensus, without which they will struggle to produce results.

Many if not most of your dream clients won’t want to invest the money necessary to produce the results they need. They’ll want the better results, but they’ll believe the big lie that they are entitled to better, faster, and cheaper (even though there is no such offering, nor has there ever been one that checked all three of these boxes). They’ll want you to provide a discount and help them take money out of their solution.

Some of your prospects won’t want to have difficult conversations. They won’t want to talk about the issues that are inherent in their business, preferring instead to ignore them and hope that nothing bad happens to them. They will want you to avoid talking about the people on their team that refuse to execute, as well as the systemic changes they need to make. They will want you to avoid the hard stuff, the difficult changes they know they need to make (and that they have been aware of for years).

If you care about your clients, you won’t give them what they want, you will help them with what they need. You need the courage to go first. You need the skillful means necessary to address what needs to be addressed. You need to care enough to do what is right, not what is easy.

The post If You Care About Your Clients appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Retention, retained revenue, gross churn, negative churn, expansion…in 2018 the SaaS gods will surely create at least 5 more terms for the concepts of keeping and growing recurring revenue from an existing customer base.

Whatever you may call it, as a B2B SaaS leader how to achieve negative churn is what should be keeping you up at night. Here are some ideas to help you get back to sleep:

1. Make Customer Adoption a Top 3 Strategic Priority for the Entire Company

A quick one to start: Establishing and maintaining customer adoption of your product is THE core-prerequisite to retaining customer revenue and expanding that revenue i.e. creating negative churn. That being agreed, we need to define what ‘adoption’ is and isn’t so we can measure its achievement and status.

2. Recognize that Usage Does Not Equal Adoption

Adoption is NOT a customer achieving utility of your SaaS product. The customer that has activated their account, set up their team’s profiles, migrated their data, consumed the training and is appearing as ‘active’ in your environment does not automatically equate to an adopted customer.

Adoption is achieved and maintained when the customer is realizing recurring value from your product. Value is realized each time the customer achieves a Value-based Outcome that 1) you have prescribed to them 2) they have agreed is desirable and 3) you both can measure the results of. This is customer success.

3. Approach Retention and Expansion as a Science Not an Art

To achieve negative churn consistently and efficiently across your customer cohorts, standardized formulas that achieve and maintain adoption, as defined above, are needed. This is opposed to custom or even reactive approaches that are prone to high costs, overruns and failures.

By defining prescriptive Value-based Outcomes for your ideal customer profiles, repeatable and measurable activities that achieve those outcomes can be mapped. These activities will cover which:

• Feature/functions in your product must be used by what user role and how often,
• Onboarding/enablement/service tasks your teams must complete
• Equivalent tasks the customer must complete their side.

Measuring of the completion of these activities drives the definition of leading Key Performance Indicators and other leading metrics that will enable prediction of revenue churn risks and revenue expansion opportunities.

By the way, if a customer isn’t seeking the Value-based Outcomes you prescribe, they shouldn’t be your customer…which brings us to:

4. Ensure Your Sales Strategy and Process is Setting Customers Up for Success 

Sales teams squeezing the square customer into the round product does not create a customer that can be retained or expanded. Instead, a customer expecting outcomes that can’t be efficiently or effectively delivered is created. These customers will churn.

Execution of your adoption formulas starts the moment a customer enters your sales funnel as a new prospect. Sales qualification, discovery, governance and presentation/demo processes should be fully aligned with the dependencies, assumptions and results defined in your formulas. By doing this, you are creating alignment with how adoption will be executed and therefore how retention and expansion will be achieved.

As an example: ensuring that the customer is purchasing the correct products/modules with the correct number of users/role profiles will reduce the risk of revenue churn at time of renewal. “Correct” is defined as those products/modules and users/roles that enable the customer to perform the in-product activities prescribed by you to achieve value realization. If the customer can’t measure value against it, don’t sell it.

And the last one for today:

5. Create a Churn Risk Management Framework (CRMF)

Revenue churn is one of the top operational risks facing any subscription revenue company. Establish a CRMF by borrowing best practices from the discipline of Operational Risk Management (ORM). A CRMF includes processes for identifying  mitigating, monitoring and reporting churn risks, as well as associated assessment and measurement standards.

A CRMF defines the churn risks applicable to your customer cohorts. Each risk is assessed by impact and likelihood. Velocity could also be used as part of the assessment. Controls are designed and documented in the CRMF to mitigate each churn risk. These controls exist/should exist in your adoption formulas and overall customer success strategy.

Test the controls on a regular basis. Any issues identified can be remediated to increase the strength of these processes helping prevent churn.  Integrate executive visibility and action into the CRMF to instill a company-wide culture of customer ownership. Use the CRMF to define responsibilities and accountabilities in your churn risk mitigation strategies.

Celebrate when you retain a customer. Analyze, learn and take action when you lose a customer.

The post 5 Keys to Unlocking Negative Churn in B2B SaaS appeared first on OpenView Labs.

There are several facts I thought I knew about prospecting. Most buyers are resistant to reps’ contact attempts, they don’t want to hear about the product, and getting their ear requires extreme persistence.

However, a new report debunked these beliefs. The RAIN Group Center for Sales Research surveyed 488 buyers and 489 sellers in 25+ industries to get their take on effective methods, timing, and more. The results are probably not what you’d expect -- but they do bode well for your prospecting strategy.

When do buyers want to hear from salespeople?

Because most prospects do their own research these days, salespeople often assume they’re not interested in talking until midway through the buying process -- if not further.

But according to this report, that’s not true. Buyers want to hear from reps in the first stage: when they’re looking for opportunities to improve their business (71%) or trying to solve a problem (62%).

Just 2% of prospects don’t want to engage with sellers at all during the buyer’s journey.

How should you reach out to prospects?

Eight in 10 prospects prefer talking to reps over email, which matches up with the percentage of reps (78%) who use it.

Half of buyers like speaking over phone, compared to 70% of reps. And that percentage increases the higher up the ladder you go; if you’re working with a VP or member of the C-suite, try giving them a call.

Prospects are also open to communicating with sellers at industry events (34%), via LinkedIn (21%), text (21%), voicemail (21%) and social media (18%).

What makes a prospect talk to you?

Eighty-two percent of buyers say they take meetings with reps who reach out to them. So what makes the difference between a “yes” and a “no”?

This data point is pretty surprising: While it’s common wisdom to focus on the prospect, not your product, the biggest factor in whether prospects connect with you is a need for your product or service (75%).

Currently having budget is second-most important (64%), although it’s worth keeping in mind higher-level buyers usually have more freedom and can find the money if they want your solution.

In your first interaction, focus on what you can bring to the table. Offering to provide something of value is the third most influential factor (63%).

How can you add value?

That begs the question: What does “something of value” entail? The surveyors asked prospects which types of content influence them to accept a meeting or otherwise connect.

Primary research data relevant to their business was the most popular answer (69%), followed closely by descriptions of the provider’s capabilities (67%) and content 100% customized to our specific situation (67%).

Reaching out to a C-level prospect? Bring your business case. A whopping 75% of them will take a call because of an ROI case (vs. 64% of directors and 59% of managers).

What makes a meeting successful?

Once you’ve gotten a call on the books, you have to make it pay off (literally). Roughly 58% of buyers say their sales meetings aren’t valuable. To make your conversation worth their time, focus on the value you can deliver them (which 96% say impacts their purchasing decision), collaborate (93%), provide industry/market insights and give them new perspective (92%), and help them better understand their needs (92%).

TL;DR:

• Reach out early in the buying process so you can influence the decision criteria and develop trust with the prospect before your competitors
• Emailing and calling are the best ways to get in touch with prospects
• You’re most likely to get a response if they have a current or future need for your product/service
• Tease something of value before your first meeting

Once a year I teach a class in the MBA program at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. For the last seven years, my charter has been to introduce MBA students to the real world of B2B marketing. This year, I brought a special guest to help me talk about this real world: Dan Brown, VP of marketing operations at Verint. In addition to having him give the class an overview of his role as a marketing operations leader and what he is responsible for, I requested that he be prepared to talk about career strategies for the students.

Imagine my surprise when Brown began to talk about careers in marketing operations, and he looked the class straight in the eye and said, “Let me begin by saying, I would not hire anyone in this class.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then he went onto explain why: “You simply do not have the right mix of skills and experience. What I need in my marketing operations group are people with solid technical skills, who exhibit a business mindset, who have extensive marketing experience and who are excellent communicators and collaborators.”

Brown added that finding talent has been one of his top challenges as a marketing operations leader.

What CMOs say about the skills gap

In a parallel discussion, I was working with four CMOs preparing for a panel discussion at an upcoming marketing operations conference. The name of the panel discussion is “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Growing a Marketing Operations Capability.” As we were brainstorming topics for the panel to discuss, one CMO was particularly passionate about the challenge of acquiring, keeping, training and grooming talent.

Once this CMO began talking about this topic, the others joined in to express a similar level of extreme frustration with talent acquisition and management in the marketing operations organization. And this frustration went beyond finding the right skills and the right skills mix. A strong shared sentiment was that building a marketing operations team that can evolve with the fast-changing technology landscape will be a strategic imperative.

The gating factor

I share these stories to point out that as we begin to look into 2018, the limiting or gating factor to marketing operations performance and strategic value to the firm is and will continue be talent acquisition and management.

In a study sponsored by SAP and the Technical University of Munich, 64 percent of respondents “rather disagreed” or “strongly disagreed” with the statement that they currently had enough personnel with the right skills to lead digital transformation of the firm. As we move into 2018, and the pace of technology continues to accelerate, the role of marketing operations continues to evolve, and the marketing operations leader will need new approaches to address this serious challenge.

Talent acquisition strategies

I see talent acquisition as the capability of defining, evaluating and securing marketing operations talent to enable a high-performing team. Here are three strategies used by fast-growing marketing operations teams:

1. The Good Accident
2. The Intentional Path
3. Work with HR

The Good Accident strategy refers to having someone on your marketing team who assumes a marketing operations role early in the maturity of the group and grows into the role as the organization grows. This person may be called a “First-Gen” marketing operations professional, and I see many of these types of people. They enjoy technology, are curious and are constantly looking for a new challenge.

The Intentional Path strategy is a proactive talent acquisition strategy that either hires from the outside or grooms from the inside. I call this person a “Second-Gen” marketing operations professional. The Second-Genner is either hired (at a premium) from another company or is a more technical person who has worked in marketing before coming into the marketing operations group.

Marketing experience is a critically important element, as I’ve seen more than one IT group crash and burn as they tried to run marketing operations. They simply did not have a marketing context in which to create value.

The third strategy for talent acquisition is to work with HR to find the right talent. OK, this sounds so simple, yet I bet that 85 percent of all marketing operations leaders do not work with HR.

I asked a VP of HR about this recently, and their response was, “They typically know what they want.” Wait, what?? Hiring the right talent is critical to leading digital transformation, and working closely with HR (the hiring professionals) should be business-as-usual!

Talent management

Talent management is the capability of aligning employees with strategic objectives; implementing learning and development programs; developing career paths; providing opportunities for professional growth and development; and rewarding and recognizing achievement. As the marketing operations organization grows and evolves, establishing formal talent management processes will be essential.

One aspect of talent management often neglected is aligning marketing operations talent with all the parts of marketing. I’ve seen companies bring in marketing operations talent, and these new roles totally upset the equilibrium of marketing.

Employees have a need to know where and how they fit into the ecosystem, and new roles bring change. Aligning the new talent with the existing and different talent is a key role for marketing operations management.

Conclusions

The strategic marketing operations leader has many challenges, from budgets to technology to enabling and proving results from marketing. The key factor for effective marketing operations performance is the ability to attract, keep and grow the right talent pool and to fully integrate this talent pool across marketing.

It’s time for marketing operations leaders to formalize and mature their talent acquisition and management capabilities, and in doing so, be proactive and intentional. Helping the senior management team understand the direct correlation between the marketing operations skills gap and performance will be a key task for the strategic marketing operations leader in 2018.

Samar Minallah Khan, the feminist Pakistani anthropologist and filmmaker, was enraged. Local tribal leaders were trading little girls as compensation for their male family members’ crimes.

These leaders, responsible for settling legal disputes in their villages, act as local judges. A longstanding practice was to address major crimes by “compensating” a harmed family with a daughter of the family doing the harm. The guilty father or uncle was then considered “free” and the village was told this issue was “resolved.” Samar thought this tradition, called swara, was horrendous — it forever changed a young girl’s life, through no fault of her own. But although she was angry, she realized she’d never get to the outcome she wanted if she led with that anger.

So she tried something else. First, she listened more than she talked. She listened to the religious (male) leaders explain the use of swara, and its benefits, and she asked how that tradition would have been interpreted by the Prophet Mohammad. She listened to the fathers and uncles who allowed their crimes to be expiated this way. And by listening, Samar learned so much that it enabled her to bridge a seemingly unbridgeable chasm of difference.

Samar had first assumed that the fathers whose crimes were being forgiven this way were happy to let their daughters suffer for their crimes, but when she listened to them, she heard that they were not. They wanted another way. She heard from local leaders that they placed an extremely high value on tradition. She heard from religious Muslim legal scholars that swara was a form of “vicarious liability,” which is not allowed in Islam. And finally, she heard that in earlier times, disputes were also resolved by sending a girl to an enemy’s family, but she didn’t stay there permanently; instead, she would be given gifts and then sent back to her parents’ home. All of this, she taped.

She convened local communities to watch these videos and talk with each other about the tradition and its implications. One by one, local tribal leaders changed what they considered true justice. They decided that swara could be replaced by monetary compensation. Samar created change not by selling her idea, but creating a way for everyone arrive at a new idea, together.

What Samar did was to ask people to share their perspective, without trying to convince them of hers. It sounds like something for a movie script, not necessarily practical advice for business leaders. But maybe it should be.

I found myself thinking, somewhat wistfully, of Samar the other day during a terrible, but not unusual, meeting. A leader had asked 30 of his best and the brightest to gather so that he could hear their input on what he perceived as a marketing gap. But the very design of the meeting meant he would be hearing very little: The agenda called for three hours of presentations and about 15 total minutes of Q&A (if none of the presentations ran over, that is).

I left feeling that he didn’t really want to listen, that what he wanted was to convince the 30 people present of his perspective so that we could become his mouthpiece and fix his “marketing gap” for him. And because of the format of the meeting, I left unconvinced that I wanted to do that.

Even though it doesn’t work very well, this approach is, of course, common — in any setting where one party is trying to convince another party to change, whether that’s in an organization, during a political debate, or at a contentious family dinner. Identify what key ideas could convince them. Find persuasive facts. Enthusiastically share. Beat their facts back with your facts.

This isn’t the way to create lasting change. The best way to sway others is not to tell them your answer, but to arrive at an answer — together. Listening is the key pathway to go from your idea to our idea. To reshape the idea as needed, and to ultimately create the kind of shared ownership that is needed for any idea to become a new reality.

The next time you head into a meeting where a major decision will be made, or important issue discussed, try the following exercise I’ve used to prepare for the workshops I run on innovation and leadership:

Find an index card or sheet of paper (a paper napkin will also do). On one side, write key ideas that could be useful for you to share. I say “could” because you will reevaluate any of it once you learn more. On the other side, brainstorm questions you want to ask and things you hope to learn.

For example, at last year’s Drucker Forum conference in Vienna, I was part of an executive round table with John Hagel, Julia Kirby, and Hal Gregersen to talk about “the power to innovate.” Before our session kicked off, I jotted down a handful of questions on the back of an index card:

• Why are these executives attending our session? What is their motivation?
• What is the core “power to innovate” problem at their firms? What does that specifically look like?
• Do they think they have enough ideas, or too many ideas, or not good quality?
• Is innovation, to them, a problem of idea selection, market connection or execution, or something else?
• Can “innovation” be discussed in general terms — without a specific context — and have it be useful?
• Who or what set of ideas are they listening to now about innovation? What is missing, or why is that idea set not working?

I didn’t end up asking all of these questions, but writing them down meant that I was primed to be curious, to listen for motivations, needs, and emotions. Developing a list of questions can help you be ready to really listen to what is actually going on.

Most of us don’t do that. Most of us listen to the degree we can understand points of agreement or disagreement, or to prepare what to say in response, rather than to learn. But when we do that, we’re not so much hearing other people as we are waiting for our turn to speak.

To listen is to pay attention to. Listening means stepping outside one’s own interests, to actually want to know more, and to care what others’ interests are. To not just hear words, but to pay attention to the underlying needs and frames of reference.

Which gets to why we aren’t already great listeners. We’re afraid that if we’re listening, we’re not advocating for our own ideas and why those ideas matter. We’re afraid we’re giving up on our convictions.

But we can all have more faith in ourselves. And each other.

People trust people, not brands, as the saying goes—and the rise of user-generated content in e-commerce is fast outranking all other forms of marketing when it comes to influencing purchase decisions.

User-generated content (UGC) is one of the most useful forms of free marketing that an e-commerce business could ask for: authentic, trustworthy content created by fans and influencers, sharing reviews, images and videos of your product online.

According to TurnTo Networks, 90 percent of consumers trust online recommendations from friends, while user-generated content is 20 percent more influential to millennials’ buying decisions than other media channels.

Social media is an exceptional way to harness the power of UGC—especially Instagram, which had 500 daily active users in September 2017, reinforcing its importance as a marketing tool.

It’s clear that UGC can influence conversion rates. Let’s look at other reasons why online sellers should embrace it.

Product reviews from customers

According to Nielsen, 66 percent of consumers trust opinions posted online.

As a brand, it’s important that you contribute to the online conversation and answer queries on social media and specialist forums. This shows people that their opinions matter and creates a two-way conversation that allows brands to build trust online.

In addition to getting reviews organically, your business can target positive reviews and increase seller ratings on Amazon, eBay and Trustpilot with xSellco Feedback. Our personalized feedback software sends smart, selective requests that can improve your brand rating and boost sales.

It’s critical to understand how seller feedback and product ratings influence buyer behavior, so taking the time to request it will only benefit your business.

User-generated content is a cost-effective way to grow your business

As user-generated content is created by users, businesses don’t need to pay for it. This strategy can be considered alongside paid advertising campaigns. Companies can give users the incentive to share content, such as a competition or giveaway.

Who can forget Tourism Queensland’s campaign that encouraged people to apply for a job as a caretaker on a tropical island? The campaign went viral, with 35,000 video applications. The campaign achieved 8.4 million unique website visits and around $368 million in media coverage.

Improves your organic presence

Most shoppers will begin their online journey by researching online. Typically, they look for product reviews, testimonials, video reviews or product demonstrations, along with discussions on forums and social media channels. They’re looking for information they can trust.

If there’s one thing search engines love, it is fresh and relevant content that provides value to users. How does this help your SEO strategy? Users engaging with your brand online will help to increase traffic to your website and help your local SEO. According to a 2017 SEOMoz survey, the influence of customer reviews on local search rankings compared to other factors was 21.5%, up from 10.8% in 2015.

Combats negative online publicity

Businesses should be wary of fake reviews and testimonials. But negative reviews should be taken seriously—and user-generated content can be used to tackle bad publicity.

To harness the benefit of negative reviews, you have to watch out for recurring trends throughout. With feedback software like xSellco, you can use the dashboard as a point of reference to oversee all your customer reviews.

Every online business should be aiming to have a mix of positive and negative reviews. The key is to engage with negative reviews to create a positive outcome and show you’re interested in what the customer has to say. This shows transparency and reinforces customer trust.

User-generated content is the future

The bottom line is that UGC gives a business a way to pat itself on the back, solve a problem for a customer, or offers a new angle to improve upon—ultimately, it’s providing invaluable visibility to your products.

Remember, your business is built on your relationship with your customers—without them, you couldn’t exist! Being aware of how to utilize their content is paramount. Plus, no matter how persuasive your paid marketing campaigns are, nothing beats being able to say, “Don’t take our word for it. This is what our customers are saying.”

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Using Content As Your Voice of Strategy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

I’ve said it once (or twice) and I’ll say it again: content is no longer king, it’s air. It not only touches all aspects of your marketing these days but of your business as well.

Your audience expects to find information about any product, service, or challenge they face simply by typing a keyword into Google. If you aren’t showing up, even if someone referred them to you, there’s a good chance they won’t decide to move forward with you because of a lack of trust.

In my opinion (and I’m not alone), the most important element when it comes to building a long-term, sustainable marketing system is content. But here’s the thing, it’s not enough to simply produce content for content’s sake. You must use content as your voice of strategy, and the best way to do this is to produce content that focuses on education and building trust – all based on your core business objectives and message.

In order to be effective with this, you must come up with a plan. Waking up in the morning and deciding what you are going to write about on your blog that day isn’t sustainable.

The Total Content System

I came up with this approach a while back and it essentially allows you to plan, delegate, curate, create, collaborate, repurpose and get more out of every piece of content you produce.

Create foundational content themes

Develop a list of core content topics and assign one to each month for the next 12 months. Each theme should be a substantial topic related to your business or industry and represent an important keyword search term. You can also designate terms that you know you would like to rank higher for, but currently, have little or no content that leads people online or off to you.

Bundle your topics into packages

I find it helpful to think about it like a book, where each month represents a chapter in what will ultimately make up an important body of work by the end of this year.

But the key is to develop multiple subtopics around each theme and then develop a core “guide” for each theme by linking the various subject together.

I recorded a podcast on this topic that may shed more light on it for you – Content Marketing for Small Business

Develop your content delivery platform

Once you have your themes, you can organize your Content Delivery Platform. Here are a few examples of content that I use and how I use them.

• Blog posts – I write a weekly blog post that ultimately contributes to a monthly guide with other content of the same theme.
• Podcast – I publish a podcast episode twice/week and aim to have at least one of them be a solo show that discusses and aspect of my theme for the month.
• Webinars – Since we are creating all this rich, topic-specific content we host monthly online seminars to deliver the content in a new form.
• Content package – The final step is to take all of this content from each month and create a package that allows people interested in the monthly topic to access the entire package in one tidy resource.

Integrate content with core business objectives

Once the first two steps are complete, you must map your content plan to your core business objectives. This step allows you to better understand how to get a return on your content investment and how much you should actually invest in creating a certain form or package of content.

One of the most important aspects of a Total Content System plan is that it changes the lens you use to view all the information that comes at you all day long.

When you know what your monthly themes are, all of a sudden tools, articles, and conversations take on new meaning and seem to somehow organize themselves for the benefit of your ongoing, long-term approach.

Now, in order for all of this to be truly effective, I want to reiterate that the content must build trust and must educate your audience.

What types of content build trust?

• Blogs – A blog should be your starting point for your content strategy because it makes content production, syndication and sharing so easy. Plus, search engines love blog content which can help boost your SEO.
• Social media – Building rich profiles, and optimizing links, images and videos that point back to your main site is an important part of the content as strategy plan.
• Reviews – You’ll never have total control over this category, but ignore it and it may be one of the most damaging to your brand. Get proactive and monitor this channel aggressively.
• Testimonials – This content adds important trust-building endorsements and makes for great brand building assets out there on Google and YouTube.

What types of content work best for educating your audience?

• Podcasts – Podcasts are becomingly increasingly popular and serve as a fantastic way to engage and educate your audience in an easily digestible format.
• Seminars – People want information packaged in ways that will help them get what they want. Presentations, workshop, and seminars are tremendous ways to provide education with increased engagement.
• FAQs – There’s no denying the value of information packaged in this format, but go beyond the questions that routinely get asked and include those that should get asked but don’t.
• Success stories – Building rich examples of actual clients succeeding through the use of your product or service offerings is a tremendous way to help people learn from other individuals and business just like them.

If you liked this post, check out our Ultimate Guide to Small Business Marketing Strategy.

We have all heard of competitors’ having a key rainmaker on their sales team that have constantly shattered sales records.

So you may be thinking, “I need to hire a sales rainmaker.”

The truth is, you may actually already have a rainmaker on your team – you simply have been looking at all of the wrong traits and data to evaluate your team.

Keep reading to learn how to spot the rainmaker already on your sales team. Once you understand how rainmakers work, you can then harness their potential and give them the right support they need to make your company’s sales soar.

 

What is a Rainmaker in Sales?

Named after the Native American dance performed during times of draught to bring on rain that will keep crops alive, a rainmaker in sales is someone who works their own form of magic to bring frequent new business and accounts to the company.

Becoming a true rainmaker in the sales world requires a balance of expertly honed skills and deftly tapping in to a salesperson’s innate personality traits.

Many struggling salespeople spend a great deal of time trying to unlock the mystery of how to become a rainmaker in sales on their own. This makes your job as a sales manager even more difficult if your salespeople have not yet realized their own potential.

Read on to learn what it takes for your sales reps to become successful sales rainmakers, and how your sales team can benefit from the strength and power of these master sales professionals.

 

How to Recognize a Rainmaker in Sales

1. Sales rainmakers never give up.

One of the key qualities of a sales rainmaker is that she never gives up.

And a salesperson of this caliber knows that there is a fine line between persistence that pays, and annoyance that loses.

Rainmakers walk that fine line, and are careful in their persistence. Rather than a constant badgering, rainmakers continue to pursue their customers slowly, confidently and for the long-term.

While sometimes that persistence ends in a home run, there are many times that it ends in rejection, and rainmakers are highly skilled at handling the “no’s” with pride.

Rather than giving up after a whole slew of “no’s,” sales rainmakers stick with it, and push through the rejections without slowing down.

How do they get through all the rejections?

They do so by being both self-motivated and self-disciplined at the same time. Rainmakers in sales discipline themselves to keep waking up every day, and giving every client their best effort, regardless of what happened yesterday.

They also motivate themselves by remembering that there is a light at the end of the long tunnel, and it is a very bright one.

 

2. Sales rainmakers know their customers in and out.

Successful rainmakers are able to think just like their customers — what they like, what they do not like; what will bring them in, and what will push them away.

A big part of knowing their customers is catering their conversations to each individual prospect — a rainmaker never makes the same sales pitch to every potential customer.

Instead, they know how to read a person and gather what their behavioral style is and what their motivation to buy is — which challenges that prospect faces and which solutions they are looking for.

By collecting that information, your rainmaker is able to pitch something relevant and meaningful to each customer, thus massively increasing their chances of a successful sale.

Rainmakers are also highly skilled at understanding how their product or service will make the customer’s life better and are able to clearly communicate that with their prospects.

They also have a deep understanding of the competition they are up against, and how to present that information to a potential customer who asks “Why you and not the other guy?”

 

3. Sales rainmakers build genuine relationships with their customers.

Once rainmakers have connected with their prospects, they never stop working to build a relationship with that person.

Rather than jumping right into the sales pitch (as happens too often in the sales world), rainmakers first take the time to build trust by listening to their prospects’ complaints, concerns and interests.

Similar to how a doctor would wait to write a prescription until they know what the patient’s symptoms are; a rainmaker does not suggest products to a potential customer until he knows what the prospect needs.

This step is key to making their customers feel like an individual, rather than one person on a list of many the sales rep will be calling that day.

Sincerely listening to the struggles that their customers share is far more important than many salespeople realize.

This step really defines the difference between a regular salesperson and a rainmaker because it helps them build genuine and lasting relationships.

Rainmakers rely on those long-term customer relationships to help them not only make the sale today, but also so that they become the customer’s go-to person for future purchases.

 

 

4. Sales rainmakers know their own weaknesses.

Rainmakers are always looking for ways to improve and thrive on professional development. That is because in the end, that means they will learn how to connect with more prospects and close more sales.

While it is difficult for most of us to self-analyze and acknowledge where we need help, rainmakers are eager to admit their weaknesses because they are ready to jump into the next learning opportunity.

They view each of their own weaknesses as a challenge and actively work to improve as much as they can.

However, it is important to note that rainmakers are also self-aware enough to admit when they need help. That help could come in the form of mentoring, or could even include finding ways to delegate tasks to others so that they can focus more time on tasks that they are more proficient in.

 

5. Sales rainmakers always have goals.

Rainmakers never embark on their sales pitches without a goal in mind. And oftentimes, that goal is not monetary.

It may be at first for many salespeople, but rainmakers think long-term and set goals to help them create a great life that includes many things aside from money.

By having those goals in mind ahead of their sales pitch, they are able to stay focused throughout the meeting and are able to close more deals in the end.

 

6. Rainmakers possess a key innate personality trait.

Drive is an unteachable personality trait that research has shown is shared by successful sales rainmakers.

Drive is based on an objective measurement of a salesperson’s Need for Achievement, Competitiveness, and Optimism – all crucial traits needed to succeed long-term in the sales industry.

Unfortunately, Drive is not as easy to recognize in your salespeople.

In fact, Drive cannot be assessed by sales managers on their own.

In order to accurately evaluate a salesperson’s true potential, Drive must be measured by an objective online sales assessment. This prevents any personal bias from affecting your decisions as a sales manager.

Each salesperson’s assessment results will give you more insight as to which of your sales reps have those key innate personality traits needed to become true sales producers.

 

With the right resources, mentoring, and company culture, those sales reps who scored high in Drive will become your company’s sales rainmakers.

 

In Closing

With the constant growth in competition of all types of products and services in today’s world, along with the evolving sophistication of buyers who can see right through old sales tricks, it is more important now than ever that your salespeople learn how to effectively connect with their customers.

A rainmaker works to create a real bond, not just make a sale.

To evaluate your current salespeople and discover those who have the innate ability to become a sales rainmaker, request a FREE trial of our sales assessment today!

The post An Expert Guide to Finding Your Team’s Sales Rainmaker appeared first on SalesDrive, LLC.

There are several facts I thought I knew about prospecting. Most buyers are resistant to reps’ contact attempts, they don’t want to hear about the product, and getting their ear requires extreme persistence.

However, a new report debunked these beliefs. The RAIN Group Center for Sales Research surveyed 488 buyers and 489 sellers in 25+ industries to get their take on effective methods, timing, and more. The results are probably not what you’d expect -- but they do bode well for your prospecting strategy.

When do buyers want to hear from salespeople?

Because most prospects do their own research these days, salespeople often assume they’re not interested in talking until midway through the buying process -- if not further.

But according to this report, that’s not true. Buyers want to hear from reps in the first stage: when they’re looking for opportunities to improve their business (71%) or trying to solve a problem (62%).

Just 2% of prospects don’t want to engage with sellers at all during the buyer’s journey.

How should you reach out to prospects?

Eight in 10 prospects prefer talking to reps over email, which matches up with the percentage of reps (78%) who use it.

Half of buyers like speaking over phone, compared to 70% of reps. And that percentage increases the higher up the ladder you go; if you’re working with a VP or member of the C-suite, try giving them a call.

Prospects are also open to communicating with sellers at industry events (34%), via LinkedIn (21%), text (21%), voicemail (21%) and social media (18%).

What makes a prospect talk to you?

Eighty-two percent of buyers say they take meetings with reps who reach out to them. So what makes the difference between a “yes” and a “no”?

This data point is pretty surprising: While it’s common wisdom to focus on the prospect, not your product, the biggest factor in whether prospects connect with you is a need for your product or service (75%).

Currently having budget is second-most important (64%), although it’s worth keeping in mind higher-level buyers usually have more freedom and can find the money if they want your solution.

In your first interaction, focus on what you can bring to the table. Offering to provide something of value is the third most influential factor (63%).

How can you add value?

That begs the question: What does “something of value” entail? The surveyors asked prospects which types of content influence them to accept a meeting or otherwise connect.

Primary research data relevant to their business was the most popular answer (69%), followed closely by descriptions of the provider’s capabilities (67%) and content 100% customized to our specific situation (67%).

Reaching out to a C-level prospect? Bring your business case. A whopping 75% of them will take a call because of an ROI case (vs. 64% of directors and 59% of managers).

What makes a meeting successful?

Once you’ve gotten a call on the books, you have to make it pay off (literally). Roughly 58% of buyers say their sales meetings aren’t valuable. To make your conversation worth their time, focus on the value you can deliver them (which 96% say impacts their purchasing decision), collaborate (93%), provide industry/market insights and give them new perspective (92%), and help them better understand their needs (92%).

TL;DR:

• Reach out early in the buying process so you can influence the decision criteria and develop trust with the prospect before your competitors
• Emailing and calling are the best ways to get in touch with prospects
• You’re most likely to get a response if they have a current or future need for your product/service
• Tease something of value before your first meeting

Many sellers think of a value proposition as a statement or series of statements that explain how you solve your customers’ problems and deliver specific benefits.

Thinking of a value proposition as a statement does sellers a disservice. There’s so much more to the value that you can bring than a simple statement can deliver. Sure, you can and should generalize key points of what you do, for whom, and the results you get.

However, by the time a buyer buys something, the value proposition to them of making this purchase now, from you will take on much richer and deeper meaning.

Sellers should think about value propositions differently than just a simple statement.

Value Proposition Definition

We define value proposition as the collection of reasons why a buyer makes a purchase.

In essence, it captures the factors that affect whether buyers purchase and from whom.

A value proposition is not a statement, but a concept about why people buy something. Given that different buyers make purchases for different reasons, you need to communicate different components of your value proposition in different ways for different buyers.

At the end of every sale, the collection of reasons why a buyer makes a purchase can be bucketed into three categories:

• Resonate: They want or need it
• Differentiate: They believe you’re the best choice among all available options
• Substantiate: They trust you and have confidence that they’ll get the desired results

Do these three things and you’ll not only win sales, but you’ll also win them with premium fees and higher customer loyalty.

How exactly do you do this?

Resonate

There are two areas sellers need to resonate:

1. Rational: Everyone talks about ROI and the financial impact of a sale. This is the rational impact of engaging your solutions. You need to make a compelling ROI case for your buyers. You also need to make the case that the ROI might not materialize, or other negative effects might arise, if the buyer waits.
2. Emotional: What’s rarely talked about, and equally important, is the emotional impact. The emotional resonance of why buyers actually take action. People buy with their hearts and justify with their heads. For the greatest sales success, you need to feed both.

Do this well and you’ll answer the questions “Why act?” and “Why now? for the buyer.

Differentiate

Everyone talks about their unique selling proposition (USP) — the one thing that nobody else can match. I advise sellers against thinking this way. In The Inevitable, author Kevin Kelly shares how solutions are more and more replicable. Even if you develop a USP, your competitors can and will copy it in no time. While your offerings can be duplicated, there are still reasons why people buy from one person versus another. Differentiation boils down to two key points:

1. Overall distinction: Products and services might be the same, but if you add up multiple factors, it leads to overall distinction of one seller or one company. A buyer may say, “I really liked how they talked to me, they’re in the three countries we need, and they’ve worked with companies in our industry.” It’s not just about one unique thing, it’s the collection of overall distinction picture.
2. Perception of scarcity: If buyers believe it’s hard to find what you can bring to the table, they’ll pay more for it. Scarcity can come from you and the experience during the buying process. Sellers who push buyers and provide insight are able to change the conversation in their sales process and redefine buyer needs. They help buyers expand their perception of value and they find themselves selling in the blue ocean—where they are categorically distinctive from the competition.

Do this well and you’ll answer the question “Why us?” for the buyer.

Substantiate

When substantiating your messaging, it’s not just whether or not your products and services are going to work. Buyers have to believe and trust in:

1. You: If buyers believe and trust you, then they’ll want and take your advice.
2. Your offering: Buyers need to believe the offering will perform the way it’s described.
3. Your company: Buyers need to trust your company. Think of the old catch phrase, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
4. The outcome you’ll achieve: Buyers need to believe that your solution is going to make a significant difference.

Do this well and you’ll answer the question “Why trust?” for the buyer.

Resonate. Substantiate. Differentiate. Make the case for the buyer and you’ll have a killer value proposition that enables you to win more sales, increase loyalty, and achieve premium fees.

If we ask you, point-blank, what is the most common method of prospecting, you would certainly answer us – and with good reason – that it is the “phoning”, or more precisely one of the components. Of the latter, namely cold calling.

As a reminder, this Anglicism simply refers to the issue of outgoing calls to a population with no apparent intention to purchase.

For more than forty years, this prospecting technique has predominated in the day-to-day life of the sales teams responsible for generating leads.

However, with the emergence of the Web, then new approaches related to Inbound Marketing, we are now faced with the need for the implementation of an unprecedented prospecting strategy integrating the aforementioned elements.

In this framework, which evolves more and more quickly, the object of this article consists, from the limits of the traditional “phoning”, to present you the 15 keys that you will need to know in order to work effectively on the elaboration than the implementation of an adapted prospecting strategy.

The reasons why classical phoning is no longer sufficient on its own

First and foremost, there is a need to agree on the elements that define a good prospecting strategy, namely reliability (or consistency), return on investment, and effectiveness of targeting.

In fact, you should not restrict the objectives of prospecting simply to generate leads on a “one-shot” operation, and for a minimum cost.

On the other hand, it is necessary to look for methods whose implementation is translated systematically by the generation of qualified leads (and not just any prospect), all while taking care to maximize its ROI – which does not necessarily mean to seek the lower cost.

At this point, you are entitled to ask yourself what in this definition now makes it impossible to confine to traditional phoning, but the answer will probably not surprise you.

It is obvious that talking on the phone with strangers is increasingly difficult – and less appreciated by the recipients of these calls.

In fact, thanks to the Web, potential customers can now easily access most of the information they may want to obtain from suppliers/service providers.

“Phoning” is mostly seen as a nuisance, and for the commercial prospector trade to have a future, he must no longer be content with these “cold calls”.

Recently, an article published by the prestigious Harvard Business Review reported a failure rate of cold calling between 90% and 98% (!), and less than 0.5% of calls are translated by a catch of appointment.

Starting from there, and since only one in five meetings with a salesperson will lead to a sale, it takes almost 7000 “cold calls” before having the slightest positive impact on sales…

Having said this, the need for prospecting has obviously not disappeared, and we are now going to list the alternatives to the traditional methods that will make it possible to bring the stages of commercial prospection into the twenty-first century.

The 15 modern ways to generate qualified leads

In order for your business to continue to grow in the future by continuously generating more qualified leads, we have good and bad news, the good news being that you will not have to plead anyone, the bad one residing in the amount of work to provide and the need to review all your thinking.

Before listing the 15 new prospecting methods for your sellers, simply state that they do not claim to be exhaustive, on the one hand, and that they are not, on the other hand, ranked in order of importance.

In addition, if you do not have to implement them all, our experience in the field leads us to advise you to put a maximum work.

The first key element in developing a new-generation prospecting strategy is the concept of “content marketing”, that is, the sharing of content that is both useful and optimized for SEO. The goal is to build a reference image in his area of expertise, pledge natural flow and regular leads.

The second method worth mentioning is blogs, again to create a “bridge” between the bread points of your potential customers and your expertise.

The third and fourth elements of a strategy to know come together around social networks, and involve respectively the implementation of a strategy to “social media” and the fact joining LinkedIn groups to answer the questions in your field.

Then comes fifth on our list, sharing blog posts, as well as interesting articles found on the web, on online groups where your buyer persona meet.

We have previously mentioned cold calling, but a similar logic applies to emails, through cold emailing, and the latter is ultimately just as ineffective.

However, emails can be very useful, and our sixth tip concerns the creation of a series of emails containing relevant information, always in a logic “inbound”, that is to say without seeking to sell excessively because this error would bring you back to the cold emailing side.

The seventh key element requires a “tracking” of the behavior of your visitors when they visit your site/blog, to optimize the timing of the eighth method, sending e-mail notifications to prospects who have shown a strong interest for a particular product/service on your website.

In the ninth and tenth position on our list is the use of an effective and integrated customer relationship management tool – to keep the history of your relationship with each prospect – and to support you as much as you can. Encrypted data rather than crystal balls.

Our eleventh and twelfth tips involve first of all abandoning the over-formatted scripts to appear more “human” in your approach and do not forget to stay in touch with your prospects after they’ve become customers, so to make them regular consumers.

And even if they did not realize their interest in order, continue to water them in useful information, if only to stay in a corner of their head for the day when they would again need the same service/product.

Finally, the last three key elements relate to knowing how to offer free of charge some of your expertise in order to gain both visibility and credibility, as well as to use the videos to share your knowledge, without forgetting to ask your satisfied customers to share their feedback, becoming prescribers.

Once you have reached turn visitors from your site/blog into an active phase of research into qualified contacts, using the resources of inbound marketing, these prospects will then be significantly more receptive to answer you in case of call – which would not have been the case if you had disturbed them in full meeting …

By viewing your sites, blogs and social media pages as powerful lead generation tools, you can truly connect your sales and marketing teams, giving a new approach to the business development strategy.

What is CRM?

If you’re asking this question, you’re not alone. The CRM system (Customer Relationship Management system) could be the most influential sales tool today, but only 18% of businesses adopt a CRM in their first year.

That’s about 2 in every 5 businesses.

Which means 3 out of 5 businesses around the world are switching between a bunch of tools, including spreadsheets, email clients, and sticky notes, to run their daily sales.

Can they get the job done? Perhaps.

Is there a better way of doing business? Yes.

That’s where CRMs step in.

Back in 2011, Nucleus Research concluded that you earn $5.60 for every dollar spent on CRM. That return went up to $8.71 in 2014—an ROI of 771%.

Now why so many businesses are missing out on such a massive opportunity is anybody’s guess, and probably a topic for another blog.

For now, we’ll look at what CRM can bring to the table for you.

The quantitative benefits

• In a survey, 47% of users stated that CRM significantly impacted customer retention. 47% of users also cited a significant impact on customer satisfaction.
• In a 2014 report, 74% of users said their CRM gave them improved access to customer data.

Considering that data accessibility is key to shortening the sales cycle for salespeople by 8–14 percent (on average), it explains why 53% of top-performing companies are investing in CRM to drive sales productivity.

That’s a lot of number-crunching, by the way. Time for a breather.

The qualitative benefits

Fact is, the tools of the sales trade have evolved. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, customer databases meant the rolodex. It was the bible for sales reps across the world, but it also had an element of risk; a high-performing rep could walk out with their rolodex (and all the information about your clients). When businesses shifted to digital, spreadsheets and emails held crucial data about pipelines and lead lists.

Both spreadsheets and emails have changed the way we do business—no contention there. But they’re not the tools you want for managing relationships with your customers.

When you want instant information about that call last Wednesday with John Barney, you can’t afford to rummage through sticky notes and Post-its. Or if you have to quickly go back to that email from 2 months ago, good luck with the Sent folder.

The CRM system is unique because it’s a software solution built for one demographic—your sales teams. And that’s why it’s the best tool for building lasting relationships with your customers.

✓ A single, exhaustive solution: A CRM system has phone, email, reports, notes, appointments, your leads, deals and more—in one package.

✓ Instant insights into your customers: Your interactions with the customer (and their interactions with your website/product) are captured in a chronological timeline.

✓ Creating a close-knit team: Because data is on the cloud, all your team members can share conversations and sales information in real time. This results in greater context, better communication, and a well-informed business.

The CRM system can also do something about salespeople spending only 35.9% of their time selling. Imagine—just over a quarter of sales time spent selling, with the rest going into a black hole of mundane tasks like data entry, sending the same emails again and again, and figuring out if a lead is hot or cold.

By automating repetitive actions through workflows, CRMs do the grunt work while reps can focus on making calls, engaging in intelligent conversations and personalizing the sale.

And unlike rolodexes, CRMs have evolved.

Initially built as web applications only, CRM systems are now available (and fully functional) as mobile apps. And reps love it. 81% of users have said they use different types of devices to access their CRM.

Investing in a CRM

So how much should you pay for a CRM system?

It depends.

The size of your sales team, the type of your business, and what you want to get out of the CRM—all these are decisive factors. There are free CRM software too, which give you a bundle of features at zero cost, forever.

Irrespective of whether you’re a paying customer or a freemium user, moving from spreadsheets to CRM (at 10x the benefits and 10x the features) is a win.

Closing notes

Are CRMs a short-term solution before something better comes along? Are they just another tool destined for obsolescence?

Not until 2025, at least.

In a 2013 report, Gartner predicted that CRM will be a $36.5B market by 2017. In 2017, Grand View Research estimated the CRM market to be worth $81.9 billion by 2025.

Bottom line: CRMs are not going anywhere. The pertinent question is—what can you make them do for you?