Last week’s terrifying false missile alert in Hawaii has Americans asking one of our favorite questions, “What if it happened here?” While statistically, your hometown is probably not a nuclear target, historian Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP shows you what it would look like.
Image blocking has always been a challenge for email marketers. Some email clients hide images by default, leaving your beautifully crafted newsletter as little more than a few stray alt tags scattered around in white space.
So how do you make sure your emails look presentable when stripped of their images?
Let’s rule out some ideas which don’t work before we look at those that do.
Adding images to a web page doesn’t necessarily mean linking to an external file. It’s possible to use a data URI instead and paste the image data right there in your HTML document.
There are drag-and-drop online converters which can generate the data for you. Just feed them an image and they’ll return a string of base64 code, ready to drop into your image src.
Take this simple circle for example:
It can be generated with this code:
Let’s try something more complex. At 500 pixels wide, the display block logo weighs in at nearly 25KB. Considering the 100KB limit for email HTML, that’s a big chunk spent on one image.
Our theory was that the inclusion of image data directly inside the HTML file rather than hosted on a server somewhere could trick email clients into displaying graphics automatically. That would have been worth some extra code here and there if managed carefully. Unfortunately, we were hoping for too much – testing reveals that embedded images are blocked just like any other.
To top things off, embedded images fail to render in several email clients and spam filters might not like their presence.
VERDICT: Avoid at all costs. There are zero advantages to embedding images in email.
Next up is the use of vector graphics. The SVG format is well supported on the web and offers some great benefits such as small file size and being zoom-able without turning into a pixellated smudge.
While SVG images can be standalone files, what we’re interested in is the ability to draw them using inline HTML code. Here’s the code for a hexagon:
<svg height=”366″ width=”420″> <polygon points=”110,10 310,10 410,183 310,356 110,356 10,183″ style=”fill:#fffd4a;stroke:#e47437;stroke-width:15;”/> </svg>
And here’s how it looks when rendered:
No img tag, nothing to be downloaded from a server and no heaps of indecipherable base64 code. If only it worked. While some email clients do support SVG using other methods, the inline HTML method is only likely to work in email clients where images aren’t blocked.
It’s also possible to insert an SVG image as an object with a data URI, similar to our attempts with embedded images earlier. As you’d expect, that technique is also doomed to failure.
VERDICT: It doesn’t work. Support is missing in the email clients which could benefit most from it.
Our previous attempts to smuggle images past image blocking have failed, so let’s take a new approach. Slicing images is common practice in web and email development. We’re going to take slicing to the extreme and divide a photograph into a full grid. We’ll place each slice into a separate table cell in our HTML file and apply a background colour based on its slice.
What we’re hoping to achieve is an impression of the original photograph which will be visible when images are turned off. The result is going to be blocky, but it’ll surely be a lot more visually striking than one big placeholder image with an alt tag.
Don’t worry, we’re not planning on figuring out the colours and coding all of this by hand. There’s an image-to-table converter which can do a lot of the work for us: https://codepen.io/johndjameson/details/qcaAm
Here’s the image which we’d like to convert:
We want to display it at a width of 600 pixels in our email. In order to be Retina-friendly, the source image is double that. To simplify the maths, I’ve temporarily resized it to 600 pixels in Photoshop.
Next step is to apply a Pixelate > Mosaic filter and adjust the size until the squares are at their largest while the photo’s subject remains recognisable. 15 pixels looks reasonable:
600 divided by 15 is 40, so that’s how many vertical slices we need. The height divides into 28 slices. 40 multiplied by 28 comes to 1,120. That means 1,120 individual image slices and this is where the plan starts to fall apart.
For the images alone, we’d need around 100KB of code and we’ve not even built the table structure yet. In other words, our HTML file would massively exceed the 100KB spam limit.
Let’s be smarter about our mosaic. We don’t actually need a precise grid. Instead we can manually divide the image into its most significant blocks of colour. That lets us cut out slices of varying widths and dramatically reduces the number of individual images required.
Since this needs to be a manual process, it’s a laborious (albeit strangely satisfying) task. The result might look like a relic from the 8-bit era but we’ve succeeded in giving a general impression of the original image and it needs only a streamlined 10KB of HTML code, tables and all.
It works pretty well in the email clients most likely to block images – currently Outlook, Outlook.com and Yahoo! Mail. Here’s how it looks in in Yahoo! for example:
Now for the bad news. Scaling this volume of slices to fit different screen sizes yields some unintended results when images are active:
This happens in major email clients and devices to varying degrees and that makes it too significant a hitch to ignore. The last thing we want to do is break the full version of our email in favour of a neat trick.
VERDICT: A nice idea which has some limited potential but fails to achieve our goals in this experiment.
All of the failed approaches above have one thing in common – they are attempts to cheat our way around image blocking. Your customer might have a legitimate reason to hide images so, in retrospect, these attempts could be considered as spam tactics. Good thing they don’t work.
Now for the fun part. The following methods will make sure your emails look great even when images are off.
Alt tags are important for accessibility and to let people know what your email is about if it arrives with images blocked. By default they look plain and uncompelling.
Take this mock-up email for example:
This is how ugly it looks with images off:
Making it look presentable couldn’t be simpler. We only need to apply a few basic CSS styles to the image and we can control the font family, colour and size just like any other text in our document. We also recommend experimenting with line-height to control the text’s vertical position. Couple that with background colours and text alignment on the table cells and you’ll find that the image-blocked email suddenly looks a lot more presentable:
In addition to the improvement from a design perspective, styled alt tags can make your copy more legible. Just look at the before and after screenshots for the red part of our template.
I’ll admit it – I’ve been lazy in the past when it come to prettifying alt tags. When rushing to meet deadlines it seems like an expendable step. Looking at the screenshots above serves as a reminder that it is not. Incorporate styled alt tags into your templates or set up code snippets and it’ll quickly become an integral part of your development process.
Support, as always, depends on the email client and browser but it’s generally decent. No hacks or fallbacks are needed – this is just simple inline code and can be thought of as best practice for email development.
VERDICT: Do it. It’s easy, effective and the code is minimal.
Traditionally we’ve been forced to pick one of two options when it comes to writing copy in email. We could either follow best practice by using actual text based on a handful of uninspiring desktop fonts or ignore best practice and resort to an image instead.
The introduction of web fonts changes that. By linking to a hosted font, whether it’s stored on your own server or at the convenient Google Fonts, you can display it on the user’s device. If their email client doesn’t support it, it’ll pick the next compatible typeface in your font stack. Outlook needs a little more attention or it’ll default to Times New Roman but there’s a simple fix for that. Have a look at this guide to web fonts at Litmus for the technical info.
With a world of fonts at your disposal, your typography options are vast. You can even keep your marketing department happy by sticking to brand approved fonts at all times. Here’s a comparison of desktop versus web fonts:
If you’re feeling adventurous, you could even try overlaying a web font on a background image. This lets you incorporate actual text into key elements of your design such as the hero image. Here’s an example:
There are a few key points to note.
Web fonts are currently supported in the places you’d expect – iPad, iPhone, Apple Mail, Samsung, Android native – and a couple more. Gmail and webmail will show your backup fonts for now.
VERDICT: This ought to be standard practice. Support is good and it’s easy to set up fallback fonts.
CSS is equipped with all sorts of features to bring HTML to life. The basics such as padding, fonts, colours and borders are all supported, at least partially, even in Outlook.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. CSS is capable of so much more and that invites us to experiment.
Here’s a simple table with some text:
Let’s round the corners by using the border-radius property:
Gradients may be out of fashion but we’re going to go ahead and apply one anyway. We can use background-image: linear-gradient to achieve that:
How about a drop shadow instead? Applying box-shadow to the table lets us create the illusion of depth:
Alternatively, we can apply some CSS to the text itself. Here’s how the header might look with text-shadow applied:
And here’s how it looks with an outline formed using -webkit-text-stroke and -webkit-text-fill-color:
If we really want to draw attention to a particular part of an email, we could apply a transform effect such as rotation:
Or even add some motion with a simple keyframe animation:
We can apply as many of these techniques as we like. This example might be a little over-the-top but it illustrates what can be achieved without images by combining CSS effects:
Support for these techniques is surprisingly good. They work perfectly on iPhone, iPad, Apple Mail, Android native and Samsung’s email app. There’s partial support in the webmail services and their mobile apps. Outlook doesn’t recognise any of the techniques listed above but nor do they cause any problems.
That brings us to the great thing about using these techniques in email: we don’t need to worry about any fallback tricks. So long as your base design looks ok without the fancy extras, you’re good. If a particular email client should fail to apply some of your CSS, it’ll fall back automatically to the basic table or somewhere in-between.
Of course, there are other CSS effects which could be used for some truly experimental email designs – calc, flexbox and fixed positioning to name a few. Some will work in email, some won’t but it’s going to be fun finding out.
VERDICT: Absolutely worthwhile, particularly if you know that Outlook users don’t make up a large portion of your audience.
Email is still web design lite but it’s becoming more sophisticated. Some email clients are very capable of handling modern CSS effects and web fonts, so we should make the most of that. It’s possible to do so without sending broken emails to the portion of your audience using older rendering engines. While hacks and tricks have a place and let us push the boundaries of what’s possible in email, clean code written with graceful degradation in mind won’t ever let you down.
And you can’t cheat image blocking.
You’d be forgiven if, when you hear the term “blockchain,” you immediately think of Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies are taking the markets by storm, masking other use cases for the technology.
Don’t be fooled, though – Bitcoin and its ilk are just one small example of the ways hyperledgers can be used. Blockchain will generate more than US$176 billion in business value worldwide by 2025, according to analysts Gartner, and exceed US$3.1 trillion by 2030.
Startup Everledger, for example, is using blockchain to track the provenance of diamonds. Why? In 2000, the United Nations adopted a diamond certification program known as the Kimberley Process, the goal of which was to keep blood diamonds – those mined in war zones and used to finance conflict – off the world market by certifying and tracking the provenance of every gem. But that tracking has been on paper, subject to fraud and alteration. Everledger records 40 points of metadata for each gem to create a unique digital thumbprint, and stores it in the IBM blockchain high security network service, which is by definition readable by many, but unchangeable. As the diamond changes hands, details are appended to the chain, rather like the chain-of-custody protocol used in law enforcement for evidence in court cases – you know where it’s been, who’s touched it and where it is at all times. You know its provenance.
“You cannot separate the value of an item from its provenance,” Leanne Kemp, founder and CEO of Everledger, said in a presentation at IBM Edge. “When provenance is lost, another word emerges: risk. Risk is the foundation of our biggest black markets. These problems are real, they’re quantifiable and they cost insurers US$50 billion annually.”
Another company, Blockverify, focuses on combatting fraud in pharmaceuticals, luxury items and electronics, detecting counterfeit products, diverted goods, stolen merchandise and fraudulent transactions. It lets these companies monitor their supply chains through its blockchain. Each item is labelled with a Block Verify tag that allows it to be tracked, and through an app lets stores and consumers verify that the product is genuine.
Getting products from A to B sounds easy, but it involves the exchange of a lot of data. Transportation management company TMW Systems has developed 54 business cases for a common communications footprint using blockchain to solve a number of costly problems in the industry.
“The biggest problem we have is tying together the carrier and the shipper,” says Tim Leonard, TMW’s CTO and EVP of technology. Carriers often bring in smaller companies to help deliver freight that they can’t move with their own trucks. However, critical insurance information can be hard to verify.
TMW is working with a new organization called the RiskBlock Alliance, formed by the Institutes Risk and Insurance Knowledge Group, and has worked with it on an application called RiskBlock, hosted in TMW’s blockchain, that ties together the trusted certification of the insurance information in near real time.
“It won’t replace my ERP (software) system. What the hyperledger can do for me … is build a connected world,” Leonard says. He also ties information about the commitments made by the shipper in the contract into the blockchain to allow the carrier to know precisely what was promised. Now, Leonard says, “I don’t have a lot of disputes between two parties in an agreement.”
Another place we don’t want disputes or unauthorized changes is in the energy grid. The U.S. Department of Energy is working with Pacific Northwest National Labs, Washington State University, Tennessee Valley Authority, Siemens, and the Department of Defense’s Homeland Defense and Security Information Analysis Center to use security vendor Guardtime‘s KSI blockchain to help protect the energy grid from tampering. The system functions will be threefold. It will: provide real-time response to unauthorized attempts to change critical data, configurations, applications and network appliance and sensor infrastructure; offer autonomous detection of data anomalies and log evidence for use in incident analysis; and act as a data exchange platform using smart contracts for the automated trading and settlement of contracts in the electricity production value chain.
Supply chains of all kinds benefit from blockchains. Vancouver-based Liberty Leaf Holdings has partnered with Blox Labs to build a blockchain-based smart contract supply chain management platform for legal cannabis. “The cannaBLOX Blockchain software will aim to ease and obliterate logistical bottlenecks, ensure product safety and quality of supply, minimize fraud and potential criminal activity,” Liberty said in a release. It will also “assist with taxation and regulatory compliance across various levels of government within the legalized cannabis marketplace.”
Other crops profit from blockchain, too. A U.S. pilot project last summer saw Ripe.io, a company specializing in building a blockchain for the food supply chain, use sensor and other data to track a tomato crop at Ward’s Berry Farm, south of Boston, Mass. for ripeness, sugar content and colour. It logged environmental factors such as light, humidity and temperature in the field, and then recorded humidity in the storage facility. The goal was to provide higher-quality produce as well as give distributors and customers better information about the product. Boutique restaurants in particular often want to know the provenance of their ingredients.
Even lawyers are getting in on the game. Dentons is the first Canadian law firm to join the Global Legal Blockchain Consortium, a group promoting a universal blockchain-based technology infrastructure for law.
“This gives Dentons the infrastructure to develop unique technology and legal offerings, working in tandem with our clients,” partner Andrea Johnson said in a statement. “We see applications for distributed ledger applications across many legal domains and industries in which our clients are active.”
These are but a few examples of the uses for blockchain technology. There are many more, including identity management, maritime insurance, proxy voting (Estonia tested this in partnership with NASDAQ) and automated shipping (imagine RFID-tagged pallets of goods publishing on the ledger their need to travel from A to B, then automated carrier systems bidding for the work, with the winning bid recorded in the blockchain, along with the shipment tracking information. A Finnish startup is working on just that solution).
So the next time you hear the term blockchain, don’t just think of those shiny cryptocurrencies. In truth, use cases are only limited by developers’ imaginations.
If you’re looking to send marketing emails that actually get read, there’s really nothing tricky about it; it’s simply a matter of providing your readers with a reason to open your message and see what you have to say. Of course, one tried and true method is to include discounts and coupons in every marketing message you send. While this is no doubt an effective strategy, there is a potential downside—namely, your company may not be able to afford big discounts on a regular basis.
Fortunately, there are other ways to make marketing emails valuable. In fact, there’s a growing trend of sending marketing emails with “sticky” editorial content—a trend that’s summarized in a recent Marketing Land article. “Today’s consumers (B2C and B2B) value content that goes beyond offers, promotions and product information,” the article says. “They crave useful information that speaks to the intersection of their lifestyle and brand values.”
The tough part is coming up with editorial content that truly does enrich the life of your reader—content that offers something really valuable. We’re here to help. Here are just a few ideas for your email marketing content, via the content creation pros at Grammar Chic, Inc.
Good content is the first step toward effective email marketing—though there are other considerations to make, too. Compelling subject lines and carefully targeted email lists also help.
Jobseekers depend on their resume—and, to a slightly lesser extent, their LinkedIn profile—to inform recruiters and hiring managers about the skills they bring to the table. With that said, there is such a thing as having too much information on your job search documents—or, rather, having information that does more harm than good.
It’s worthwhile to periodically go through your professional documents and eliminate anything that’s dragging you down. We’ve prepared a checklist for you—10 things you’re safe to eliminate from your resume and your LinkedIn profile now.
Editor’s Note: The full version of this article – Freemium vs Free Trial vs Hybrid Customer Acquisition Model in SaaS – appears on Medium here.
What is the most effective process for acquiring customers? This is one of the most important decisions that companies have to make in the early stages. Customer acquisition strategy often covers the media channels and tools used to attract new customers. However, SaaS companies not only have to get prospects to their website but they must also design the initial interaction between prospect and product – how prospects will engage with your product for the first time.
Freemium and free trial customer acquisition models are the most popular in SaaS industry. So what’s the difference?
Freemium provides access to part of a software product to prospects free of charge, without a time limit. Free trial on the other hand provides partial or complete product access to prospects free of charge for a limited time. Typically, a free trial runs for 14 or 30 days.
Even though some of the fastest growing companies in SaaS use a freemium model, designing an effective freemium plan that not only allows prospects to use your product for free but also entices them to convert isn’t easy. But it is possible. Just look at industry leaders like Slack, Dropbox, Asana, Atlassian and others.
While it can be very effective, freemium is often criticized because it doesn’t always create the sense of urgency for free customers to pay for the product. The cost of servicing free customers is another factor that should be carefully examined. But more often freemium fails because its use is flawed from the beginning. Companies often overlook the importance of the type of freemium to offer, and fail to properly nurture newly signed up prospects, onboard them efficiently and provide clear a path for a customer to grow towards a paid subscription.
Let’s review a few of the most common reasons why SaaS companies fail with a freemium model.
Giving away too much of the product is one way to fail with freemium. Assuming that the cost to service free customers is low, companies must strike a careful balance. They need to provide access to just enough of the product to continuously derive value but not quite enough to eliminate the incentive for users to buy the product. The goal of freemium is to entice customers to increase product usage and ultimatley convert to a paid subscription.
If you provide features that are of low importance to the user, or limit you free version to the level where no value can be extracted from the product, you will most likely fail. Even if you provide your product free of charge, users still have to derive some value from it. For example, if SurveyMonkey allowed just one question per free survey, it’s unlikely anyone would find enough value to use the tool. What’s more, fewer survey responders would be exposed to the SurveyMonkey product and brand.
One of the main criticisms of the freemium model is that it doesn’t create a sense of urgency. A free trial expires, which creates urgency for users to invest the time to use and learn about the product value. However, companies can craft freemium plans that highlight the urgency factor.
Analyze your freemium users and categorize them into three buckets:
No matter how good your product is, it will never be the case that everyone finds enough value to buy it. Thus, not everyone is the ideal customer. Plus, not everyone has the budget. These free customers can still love your product and share positive reviews. They can be influencers and promote your product and related content across social media but conversion to a paid customer might never happen. Therefore, focus on building urgency with the third category of free users who fit your ideal customer profile, have budget, but most likely do not yet use your product enough to pay for it.
You can create the urgency by communicating new premium features that deliver more value or by highlighting the value missed by not having access to a premium subscription.
Too many companies overlook the importance of nurturing free customers while highlighting the differences between their free and paid versions. Instead, they rely on the idea that free customers will understand the product value and will convert themselves over time or as their needs grow. Companies have to continuously educate users on how they can get more benefits from the paid version of the product. It’s worth it to educate freemium users about new releases and product upgrades.
This is related to the previous point. Companies need to outline a clear path to take free users to paid customers. It’s a mistake to think that free users don’t need to be analyzed or tracked. First, tracking free users can help you understand target customers better and create data-driven research content. For example, say your product tracks mobile app performance and collects uptime and the most common issues related to downtime. Your company could use this data to create an industry report showcasing uptime for each mobile app category. This type of customer usage-driven content is extremely effective in marketing and PR.
Even with the free version of your product, users will need to learn how to use your product. Remember, “empty state” or “zero data” is what prospects see during their initial signup process when no data is available in the product. Providing free access to your product that looks empty isn’t going to help you convert free users to paid customers. This is all part of onboarding, which is critical for successful product adoption and can also guide prospects through the steps to generate more data so they realize even more product value.
We talked about the cost of a freemium offering – it can quickly add up when considering all your costs, everything from cloud storage to support. Communicate to your users what’s included and excluded in the free version of the product. Ensure that your costs are manageable in the long term.
Don’t look at a freemium model as a thing of the past. Freemium can boost your product growth especially in the early stages of a startup. It can put your product in front of more people early in the buying process. And freemium can help SaaS companies get critical feedback from large number of users. But if you are going to try freemium, remember the 7 mistakes to avoid.
The post 7 Reasons Why Companies Fail with Freemium (And How to Actually Succeed) appeared first on OpenView Labs.
This post is part of Business Insider's ongoing series on Better Capitalism.
Over the past few decades, the US economy has undergone a profound change.
This change has helped rich Americans get richer. But it has also contributed to growing income inequality and the decline of the middle class. In so doing, it has fueled populist anger across the political spectrum and slowed the growth of the economy as a whole.
What is this change?
The embrace of the idea that the only mission of companies is to maximize short-term profit for shareholders.
Talk to some people in the money management business, and they'll proclaim that this is a law of capitalism. They'll also cite other supposed laws of capitalism, including the idea that employees are "costs" and competent managers should minimize these costs by paying employees as little as possible.
But these practices aren't actually laws of capitalism.
They're choices.
They're choices that arose out of the shareholder activism movement that began in the early 1980s — a movement that was reasonable and necessary back then but has since been taken too far.
And they're choices we should revisit if we want to restore a sense of fairness and opportunity to reinvigorate our economy.
Not long ago, America's corporate owners and managers made different choices — choices that were better for average Americans and the economy. These managers and owners also had a profoundly different understanding of their responsibilities.
"The job of management," proclaimed Frank Abrams, the chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in 1951, "is to maintain an equitable and working balance among of the claims of the various directly interested groups… stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large."
By paying good wages, investing in future products, and generating reasonable (not "maximized") profits, American companies in the 1950s and 1960s created value for all of their constituencies, not just one. As a result, the country and economy boomed.
Over more recent decades, however, this balance has radically shifted.
The stagnation and bear market of the 1970s contributed to the rise of shareholder activism, a trend immortalized in the 1980s by the fictional corporate raider Gordon Gekko in the movie "Wall Street." In that era, American companies had become bloated and complacent, and they needed a kick in the ass. "Greed is good," Gekko declared, while firing smug, overpaid managers and restructuring weak companies. Beleaguered shareholders justifiably cheered.
But 30 years later, Gekko's shareholder revolution is still going strong, and the pendulum has now swung too far the other way. Urged on by a vast and hypercompetitive money management industry, American companies now increasingly serve a single constituency — shareholders — while stiffing employees and minimizing investments in future products.
This "shareholder value" religion is visible in the divergence between profits and wages.
Corporate profit margins have been rising for 15 years and are now near their highest levels ever. Corporate wages, meanwhile, have been declining for four decades and are near their lowest level ever.
Nor are these the only ways that the "shareholder value" obsession has warped our economy.
The richest 1% of Americans now own nearly 45% of the country's wealth, near the highest level since the "Gilded Age" of the 1920s. These Americans had an average net worth of $14 million in 2013. At the same time, the average wealth of "90%-ers" has plunged in recent years to just above $80,000, the same level as in the mid-1980s. Millions of Americans who work full time for highly profitable corporations earn so little that they're below the poverty line. The bottom 50% of Americans own nothing.
Beyond fairness and decency — the ethical decision to share more of the economic value a company creates with the people who devote their lives to creating it — the profit-maximization obsession also hurts the economy.
Why?
Because wages and investments at one company become revenue for other companies.
Consumers account for about 70% of the spending in the economy, so our spending is what drives economic growth. Most consumers work, so another name for them is "employees." And except for the richest Americans, most of us spend almost everything we make.
When we are paid less, we have less to spend, and economic growth slows. When we are paid more, we spend more, and growth accelerates.
Consumer spending also drives business investment. When consumers are flush, businesses invest aggressively to meet demand. When consumers are strapped, however, companies sit on their cash — or just hand it to shareholders. Amid today's already weak demand, companies are exacerbating the problem by cutting investments and increasing dividends and stock buybacks.
To be clear: There's nothing necessarily wrong with some hedge fund managers making $500 million a year — or a president being worth a self-reported $10 billion. Capitalism is the best economic system known to man, and the "profit motive" helps drive it.
The problem is that when capitalism is practiced the way it is today, wealth becomes so concentrated that much of it doesn't get spent. Billionaires and centimillionaires can hire only so many service providers and purchase only so many cars, houses, and islands. Their spending accounts for only a tiny fraction of the spending in the economy.
Economists cite many factors that have contributed to the rise of profits and decline of wages over the past few decades — globalization, the "skills gap," the decline of unions, the loss of "high-paying manufacturing jobs."
These trends are real, but they obscure the real cause: Company owners are choosing to maximize short-term profit by paying their employees as little as possible.
It's time for a more balanced approach.
Happily, in recent years, we've seen some encouraging signs. Many companies, from Walmart to Apple to Starbucks to JPMorgan, have voluntarily given their lowest-paid hourly employees a pay increase. The increases aren't extravagant — at Walmart, an employee can still work full time all year and be below the poverty line. But they are a step in the right direction.
Some corporations have begun emphasizing the need for companies to have a triple or even quadruple bottom line, creating value for customers, employees, and society in addition to shareholders.
Perhaps most encouragingly, one of the world's largest asset managers, BlackRock, now expects companies to create value across multiple dimensions.
"Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose," BlackRock CEO Larry Fink wrote in an open letter to corporate CEOs. "To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate."
That's better capitalism. Practicing it will make the world a better place.
SEE ALSO: Meet the top 100 business visionaries creating value for the world
Join the conversation about this story »
The Marketing Framework That is a Must For Your Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
Traditionally, the marketing and sales funnel had the approach of taking a large target group and getting a few clients out of it (i.e. the funnel analogy).
Of course, the funnel concept won’t ever go away, but about ten years ago I defined what I think is still a much better approach – I call it the Marketing Hourglass.
It borrows from the funnel shape but turns it on its head after the purchase to help intentionally account for the idea of creating a remarkable customer experience.
However, the buyer behavior has changed significantly in recent years. In fact, according to a CEB survey, 57% of a typical purchase decision is made before a customer even talks to a supplier. If they decide they have a problem, they’ll go out and proactively try to find a solution.
If you’re not getting found in that state of the customer journey, you’re in real trouble.
In the same survey mentioned above, they found that 53% of those surveyed claimed that the sales experience itself was one of the greatest contributing factors in continued loyalty to the brand.
Knowing this is why I developed the Marketing Hourglass as a tool that can help you create the picture for your client’s overall marketing strategy. In my opinion, it’s a more holistic and increasingly effective approach in the “era of the customer” we live in today.
Instead of creating demand, our job is to really organize behavior, and I believe this behavior falls into the following seven stages:
Know
One of the best ways to become known is through organic search. Keep advertising in mind during this phase as well and use content to spark interest.
Creating a process that makes it easy for current customers to refer the business is also a great way to generate awareness with new prospects.
Like
Once a prospect has been attracted to your site, you must give them reasons to come back and like your business. An eNewsletter is an example of a tremendous content tool for nurturing leads during this phase as it allows you to demonstrate expertise, knowledge, resources, and experience over time.
Trust
Reviews, success stories, and client testimonials are your golden tickets in this phase. The ability to tell why your organization does what it does in stories that illustrate purpose in action is perhaps the key trust building content piece of the puzzle.
Try
This is a phase that many people skip, but it can be the easiest way to move people to buy. This stage is basically an audition and it’s where you need to deliver more than anyone could possibly consider doing for a free or low-cost version of what you sell.
In this stage, offer ebooks, webinars, and other information-focused content. Consider offering free evaluations or trials here as well.
Buy
In this phase, you must be able to show real results. Keep in mind, the total customer experience is measured by the end result, not the build-up to the sale. Keep the customer experience high. Exceed their expectations and surprise them.
Create content that acts as a new customer kit. Consider creating quick start guides, in-depth user manuals, and customer support communities as well.
Repeat
Ensure your clients receive and understand the value of doing business with you. Don’t wait for them to call you when they need something, stay top of mind through educational content.
Consider creating a results review process where you help your client measure the results they are actually getting by working with you.
Refer
The Marketing Hourglass journey is ultimately about turning happy clients into referral clients by creating a great experience.
Start this phase by documenting your referral process. Create tools that make it easy for you to teach your biggest fans and strategic partners how to refer you.
For people who have come to know about your business, you essentially need to walk with them all the way down the path to where they become your biggest fan.
You can use this framework to build an overall strategy and launch a product or campaign. By doing this, you’ll start to find flexibility where anytime somebody comes to you, you can fill in the gaps with the stage above to truly help them out.
Everybody’s business has these stages, they may just not be addressing them all and that’s what you need to point out.
Take a look at the ways that your business comes into contact with your customers and prospects. Some of the touchpoints may be planned and scripted, and some may not. Some happen by accident, while some simply don’t happen at all (i.e. are people successfully make it from marketing to sales). Touchpoints can include:
Once you map the touchpoints, you need to have a conversation about:
You may only be paying attention when somebody is trying to buy and a lot of times people have to be nurtured and trust your before you can even attempt to help them solve a problem. This element is important, but it’s often hard for people to wrap their minds around because many are used to just focusing on the sale.
In order to effectively build a Marketing Hourglass, you must fully understand the questions your prospects are asking themselves before they are aware that your solution exists.
It’s helpful to just brainstorm around the seven stages.
With an understanding of the customer’s touchpoints and journey, you can start to fill in the logical stages of your hourglass with the discoveries you found, which will lead to a greater experience.
By taking the marketing hourglass approach and giving equal attention to building trust and delivering a remarkable experience, you set your business up to create the kind of momentum that comes from an end to end customer journey.
Want my advice? Take the time to fully understand this tool, as it is something you will return to over and over again.
If you liked this post, check out our Ultimate Guide to Small Business Marketing Strategy.
In an increasingly digitized world, brick-and-mortar retailers are facing immense pressure to understand and accommodate their customers’ changing needs, including at the point of sale (POS).
More than two years after the EMV liability shift in October 2015, most large merchants globally have upgraded their payment systems. And beyond upgrading to meet new standards, many major retailers are adopting full-feature, “smart” devices — and supplementing them with valuable tools and services — to help them better engage customers and build loyalty.
But POS solutions aren’t “one size fits all.” Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) don't usually have the same capabilities as larger merchants, which often have the resources and funds to adopt robust solutions or develop them in-house. That's where app marketplaces come in: POS app marketplaces are platforms, typically deployed by POS providers, where developers can host third-party business apps that offer back-office services, like accounting and inventory, and customer-retention tools, like loyalty programs and coupons.
SMBs' growing needs present a huge opportunity for POS terminal providers, software providers, and resellers. The US counts roughly 8 million SMBs, or 99.7% of all businesses. Until now, constraints such as time and budget have made it difficult for SMBs to implement value-added services that meet their unique needs. But app marketplaces enable providers to cater to SMBs with specialized solutions.
App marketplaces also alleviate some of the issues associated with the overcrowded payments space. Relatively new players that have effectively leveraged the rise of the digital economy, like mPOS firm Square, are increasingly encroaching on the payments industry, putting pricing pressure on payment hardware and service giants. This has diminished client loyalty as merchants seek out the most affordable solution, and it's resulted in lost revenue for providers. However, app marketplaces can be used as tools not only to build client loyalty, but also as a revenue booster — Verifone, for instance, charges developers 30% of net revenue for each installed app and a distribution fee for each free app.
In this report, Business Insider Intelligence looks at the drivers of POS app marketplaces and the legacy and challenger firms that are supplying them. The report also highlights the strategies these providers are employing, and the ways that they can capitalize on the emergence of this new market. Finally, it looks to the future of POS app marketplaces, and how they may evolve moving forward.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:
In full, the report:
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Do you have a pricing process? Who is responsible for pricing? Do you know if your pricing is effective? What is your policy around discounting?
How we answer these questions is influenced by our organizational culture. Culture has a significant impact on whether we even have a pricing strategy and the effectiveness of the strategy once we have one. Culture determines:
ownership of pricing decisions
how significant the role of pricing is within the overall organizational strategy
how adaptive pricing is to changes in the market, and
whether the execution of our pricing strategy is effective
Good pricing is never static. It is an iterative process. Markets change and so should pricing. A pricing model that makes strategic sense today may become misaligned very quickly as markets evolve. Static pricing is usually indicative of organizational inertia and complacency, or the lack of a well-defined organizational pricing process that enables price setting, monitoring and optimization.
Pricing is the biggest lever to maximizing revenue, profit or market share, yet so often it is treated as an after-thought. Whether it is organizations that are just starting out, or those that are well-established within the market, not having a well-defined pricing process makes tackling pricing decisions seem like an uphill task.
More often than not, organizations “guesstimate” what they believe to be a reasonable price based on costs and competitor pricing. Then they hope for the best. Odds are, this ad-hoc approach to pricing does not maximize returns and that money is being left on the table. A well- structured pricing process requires:
making pricing decisions a part of core organizational strategy, and
ensuring there is a shared goal for pricing success for all stakeholders within the organization.
Pricing decisions can significantly impact multiple stakeholders within an organization. Any leadership role or any department within the organization that looks to lead pricing change will require buy-in from other stakeholders. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or success metrics for all the stakeholders within the organization should be in alignment with any proactive change in pricing strategy. Pricing cannot be a siloed activity, and requires a larger organizational conversation about immediate and long-term financial goals as well as product and market strategy.
Good pricing needs great execution. Having a pricing strategy is not enough. Even if there is leadership alignment, there must also be buy-in from those who are in charge of the day-to-day implementation and execution of pricing. Communication is key to pricing change enablement. Those in charge of executing on pricing must know why they are required to implement changes. Any change to the status quo needs a compelling reason. Pricing is a collaborative process and there should be a shared goal for pricing success.
An organization’s approach to risk also plays a significant role in how they approach pricing. How an organization rewards success and penalizes failure can significantly impact how proactive their approach to pricing is and the willingness of stakeholders within the organization to lead change. If the pricing champion bears the risk of failure, yet the organization as a whole stands to win from a pricing success, fewer pricing initiatives will be taken. Good pricing is iterative and stakeholders need the space to learn, optimize and grow.
So if you would like to change your culture around pricing, start with a scenario analysis. Weigh the financial implications of status quo versus price optimization for key business metrics. When pricing can significantly impact the long-term sustainability of your organization, complacency is just not an option.
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR BLOGMistakes during your sales conversations cost you deals.
Buyers have dozens of options and more power than ever before.
That means you can’t afford to slip up during sales conversations.
Your buyers won’t have it.
They’ll move to another vendor faster than you can blink, leaving your pockets empty.
Knowing the most common mistakes will help you avoid them.
Our data science team at Gong.io has analyzed sales conversations with machine learning and AI for nearly two years.
We’ve analyzed over one million B2B sales call recordings to tease out what’s working and what’s not, based on hard data.
We recorded, transcribed, and analyzed the calls using conversation intelligence technology to tease out both patterns of success, and failure.
Of the dozens of mistakes we’ve surfaced, here are the top 13 that blow deals. Don’t be one of the below-quota salespeople who makes these mistakes.
Let’s begin with talk-to-listen ratios.
Top sales reps talk at most for 46% of a sales call. That means they listen for at least 54% of it. Mid-range performers talk for up to 68% of the time, and the poorest-performing reps aren’t far behind them.
Don’t talk about pricing in the first third of the sales call. Our data is clear on this one.
Top-performing reps talk pricing way into one-hour sales calls … 38 to 46 minutes in, to be precise. Their counterparts who talk about pricing in the first 15 minutes in blow it big time. Their sales numbers aren’t anywhere near as good. Take the hint. Establish value before talking price.
Don’t tell buyers how something works, tell them the results they’re going to get. Spend more time on business value and less on techie and features talk.
Here are two nuggets to encourage you to adopt this approach:
Ever used “we provide” or “it’s on the road map” in a sales call? If you still made the sale, you’re one of the lucky ones because those are sales killers.
You need to stop using them ASAP.
The word “discount” can decrease your chance of a sale by 17%. And saying “absolutely” or “perfect” more than four times on a call drops your chances of a sale by 16%.
Here are the rest of the words you should avoid that we surfaced in the analysis:
Bonus stat:
Mentioning your company’s name six or more times on a call drops your chances of success by 19%.
Mirroring is an approval-seeking behavior. It can come across as needy, which is an unattractive quality, especially in sales reps.
Our data shows that sales reps and buyers begin to sync their speech patterns two to three minutes into a call. That includes their rate of speech, the frequency of their pauses, and their use of positive and negative words.
Here’s the surprise …
While average reps mirror their buyers, top reps don’t.
They get the buyer to mirror them.
Check out the graphs below. You’ll see that the top reps led the rate of speech and let the buyer mirror them. That’s how it should be. Stop trying so hard. Be calm and positive and let your charisma bring the buyer into your world.
Notice that “average” reps cater to their buyers:
And notice that successful reps pull buyers into their speech patterns:
Winning sales reps devote almost 13% more time at the end of their demos to discussing “next steps.” They use that time to confirm how they’ll move the project forward. That’s critical to confirming buy-in.
Without confirming next steps and buy-in, you’re marketing, not selling.
Think about the discovery part of the call. How do you unpack a buyer’s pain points and business issues? Do you ask enough questions or too many? What’s the right number?
As a general rule, the more questions you ask, the better. Average reps ask 6.3 questions and top performers ask 10 to 14 … and they also dig deeper and listen more. But be careful! There’s a diminishing rate of return. After 14 questions, your sales rate heads back down toward average.
Don’t grill your buyer with rapid-fire questions. They’ll think you’re going through a checklist without listening to their problems.
Spread your questions throughout the conversation in a balanced, natural way. If you ask all your questions at the beginning of the call, you’ll sound scripted and impersonal. That’s the opposite of the vibe you want to create.
The graphs below shows that average performers ask lots of questions at the start of a call. Top salespeople insert them evenly throughout the conversation.
Take turns. It’s going to feel more authentic for everyone and will increase your chances of success. Bounce back and forth between speakers to make sure everyone is engaged in the conversation.
In fact, a higher number of “speaker switches” per minute correlates with your odds of a second meeting and a strong connection.
This is not a football game. You don’t want to hold onto the ball for extended periods of time. Think tennis instead.
This one’s simple. Address your competition early in the sales cycle, not late in the game (e.g. during discovery and first demos). When you do, your chances of closing a deal increase by 49%.
If you wait until later to discuss your competitor your win rates will decline.
Competitive deals are won early and lost late.
This one’s a shocker. Coaches and trainers tell everyone to avoid filler words. Truth is, top, mid, and low-performing reps use the same filler words with the same frequency. Filler words don’t correlate with a call or deal’s success or failure.
That’s right, they have no impact on win rates, sales cycle length, conversion rates from opportunity stages … nothing.
However… they are still annoying 
So it’s worth stripping them out of your sales conversations, if for no other reason than to hold yourself to a high standard of communication.
Here are the most common filler words used on sales calls. Notice that “so” is the most common; it takes up 33% of all filler words.
Talking about your company too much (e.g., overviews, awards, history) decreases your chances of progressing to the next opportunity milestone and winning the deal.
How much is too much? More than two minutes. It’s like a cliff — go over it and you’re done. As long as you speak in general terms about your company for two minutes or less (on average), you’ll be fine.
Sometimes, the cheesiest sayings are true. Like, “there’s strength in numbers.”
During your sales cycle, have at least one call that includes other people from your company.
It could be your sales manager, a product manager explaining the a product’s benefits, or even your sales engineer.
That simple act correlates with a 258% higher likelihood of closing a deal, compared with flying solo on every call.
Bring peers or managers into the mix and watch your numbers soar.
Shift what you say and how you say it, and reap the rewards.
A word of caution. Don’t make too many changes all at once. Try adding a new approach or two in your next few sales conversations. When they become second nature, drop in another and then another until you’ve mastered all 13 … and watch your 2018 sales numbers rise.
P.S. Now that we’ve covered the mistakes to avoid, what about the habits of success?
Take a look at our free eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Winning Sales Conversations.
The post Do You Make These 13 Mistakes During Your Sales Conversations? appeared first on Sales Hacker.
I recently wrote about the phases B2B prospects tend to go through as their buying decision process evolves, and the need to align our sales and marketing tactics accordingly. Of course, our prospect’s journey is rarely linear: at any point they can choose to move forwards, revert to a previous phase, go around in circles, put the project on hold, or abandon the journey altogether.
But the phase our prospect has reached in their buying journey isn't the only thing we need to be aware of when it comes to understanding their likely buying behaviour: we also need to determine whether or not they have a clear goal in mind, and whether or not they have a clear process for deciding how to achieve that goal.
This isn’t as crazy as you might think: one of the primary reasons that so many buying journeys end in “no decision” is that the exercise either lacked a clear goal, or a clear buying decision process, or both. Or the ultimate decision makers in the customer might actually have been satisfied with the status quo all along…
It’s helpful to visualise these combinations as a classic 4-box matrix. Along one axis, we assess whether or not the prospect has a clear goal, and along the other whether or not the prospect has a clear process. And just to complete matters, let’s park “satisfied with the status quo” in the centre of the picture.
That gives us 5 potential options:
As you can imagine, these five different buying modes drive five very different buying behaviours, and we need to respond by adopting appropriately different sales strategies and behaviours. Let’s consider the implications of each.
In this mode, the prospect isn’t actually convinced of the need for change but is nevertheless going through what appear to be a set of buying motions. Sometimes this happens because the instigator of the buying process is simply curious about what is out there, and/or has an unhealthy amount of time on their hands to follow trivial pursuits.
Or, the prospect may be happy with an existing supplier, and intends to retain them, but is seeking alternative competitive quotes in order to beat them down on price. Unless we can persuade them to change their decision criteria, which are usually heavily biased in favour of the incumbent, we are on a hiding to nothing.
Some of the indicators include a lack of serious interest in the details of the competing solutions, being given a short time frame to respond, and/or a refusal to grant access to either the ultimate decision maker or the business problem owner.
Whether the project turns out to be a trivial pursuit or a hiding to nothing, there is little we can do other than waste our time unless we can persuade the prospect to change their parameters. If we can’t, the only sensible thing is to politely qualify out early - and if we are feeling particularly mischievous and wish to do the incumbent harm make sure we submit an outrageously low-balled indicative response (as opposed to a binding quote) before we do so.
When our prospects believe they know both what they want to achieve (where) and how they are going to achieve it, they are in what we call “painting by numbers” mode. They have a very clear specification of what they want to buy, and they have a very well-defined process for how they are going to make the buying decision. This mode is particularly common where an organisation is buying a well-defined commodity or raw material on a repetitive basis.
Some of the indicators include inviting vendors to participate late in the cycle, typically through the issuing of an often-unexpected RFP. This may be the first time we're aware of the project, but the buyer is already a long way through their buying decision process already. They are on a mission, and in no mood to be diverted.
Unless we can reframe either the process or the goal, our chances of winning primarily depend on our ability to offer the best price, delivery and contractual terms against the specification that has already been established by the customer. If we can’t change the game, we either have to play by their rules or chose to walk away.
If we choose to compete, this usually turns into a painful and expensive process for any vendor that isn't in the driving seat when it comes to influencing the prospect's specification. If sales people fail to recognise that they are involved in a "paint by numbers" project, they can waste an incredible amount of both their selling time and their colleague’s valuable resources. Don’t let them.
In this mode, the prospect has a clear goal but lacks a clear process for deciding how best to achieve it. Assuming that we can also work with the prospect to create a significant value gap between their current situation and their desired future position, these projects give us a tremendous opportunity to shape the prospect’s thinking.
Our prospect is on a mission to change things. They have a vision of where they want to get to. But their maps - which ought to show them how to get there - have large blank areas with labels like “unexplored territory” or even (depending on the vendors they choose to call in for advice) “here be dragons”.
Some of the indicators include a clear vision of what they believe they need to achieve, combined with an openness to consider any and all credible means to achieve their goal. They will be as or more interested in what is different about our knowledge of the problem and our approach to solving it as in the fine details of our solution.
This is an excellent opportunity for us to implement our value selling and consultative sales skills. We have the opportunity to fill in the gaps in the terrain, to help them think differently about their options, to offer them a roadmap and to show them the way forward.
If we've got a smart sales team, supported by an intelligent marketing organisation, they ought to relish these "pursuing a vision" projects. They give us a real chance to establish our thought leadership, and to distinctively differentiate our approach - so the challenge is to find more of them, by engaging with the prospect before they have worked out how to solve an urgent problem.
Or maybe the reverse is true - our prospects, although they are dissatisfied with the status quo, are unclear about what they need to change to (where) or what success would look like and are shackled by a rigid procurement process that dictates how they are going to make the buying decision. We can think of these prospects as “Busy Going Nowhere”.
They are confined by an often-bureaucratic procurement process that they either cannot break away from or do not wish to escape, but when questioned seem to lack a clear or coherent vision of what success would look like once the buying process has come to a conclusion.
Some of the indicators include Kafkaesque “we’re doing it this way because we’re doing it this way” conversations with functionaries who are self-evidently not the ultimate business problem owners, combined with an inability to get to the heart of the underlying business drivers.
Like “painting by numbers”, this mode is often associated with the receipt of an unanticipated RFP. If you sense that your prospect may be in “busy going nowhere” mode - and in particular if you have no opportunity to reshape their vision or influence their decision process - you need to think very carefully whether you want to waste your sales resources on the project.
These can be horrible and frustrating opportunities to work on. I'm told that some public procurement projects have these characteristics. We need to get to someone senior enough to be able to reshape their thinking about what they are trying to achieve. If we can't, even if we win, we can probably count on a painful and protracted negotiation process and an equally painful and profit-free implementation.
Last, but by no means least likely, our prospect may know that they need to change but they have no clear idea of what they need to change to or how they are going to get there. Our prospect is often reacting to a recent trigger event or tipping point that has made continuing with the status quo untenable. They know they need to change - but they are not yet sure what they need to change to.
This is another golden opportunity to exercise our value selling and consultative selling skills. Our objective must be to help them shape a vision of what they could accomplish, as well as holding their hand on the journey towards their destination. These situations often represent a real opportunity to demonstrate the full value we could bring to them.
The first thing we need to do if we encounter a one of these projects is to make sure that the prospect sees a real need to change. We need to highlight the cost and consequences of inaction to them, illustrate the alternatives available to them, and start - right from this early stage - to lead their thinking in the direction of our strongest, most relevant capabilities.
Just as when prospects are “pursuing a vision”, these “searching for guidance” projects give us a real chance to establish our thought leadership, to stand out from the crowd, and to distinctively differentiate our approach.
Some sales people may be concerned that these could turn out to be lengthy sales cycles, but they do not have to be: if we find ourselves talking direct to the business problem owner, if we can build their trust, if we can help to recognise the urgent need for change, if we can work with them to shape a compelling vision of their solution and if we can convince them that we are the right partner to guide them on their journey, these opportunities can often move swiftly to a conclusion.
So, there we have it: the five distinctively different potential buying decision modes. The mode our prospect is currently in will significantly influence their behaviour - and knowing which mode they are in must influence our approach to dealing with them. Of course, once we’ve diagnosed their current mode, it may be possible - with a focused effort - to move a prospect from one mode to another that is more favourable to us.
How well do you currently understand which mode each of your current prospects are in - and if that is unclear, what are you going to do to determine their true buying mode ? But even more important than that, once you’ve worked it out, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to adapt your strategies?
You're probably used to asking your sales people what stage their opportunities are at. Hopefully, you've already got them thinking about the stage the prospect has reached in their buying decision journey, and not just about the stage the sales person has reached in their sales process, which as we know can be a completely different (and frequently more optimistic) matter.
This idea of buying "modes" is probably new to them and maybe also to you. But I'd strongly encourage you to explain these different modes to your sales people and ask them to position each of the deals they are working on against these 5 categories.
If - as might often be the case - their buying mode is either unclear or isn't very favourable, you can strategise with them to either work out how to reframe the prospect's thinking or recognise that, since you're probably going to lose, you might as well qualify out early.
I'd like to pay tribute to the brilliant Eddie Obeng of Pentacle the Virtual Business School, creator of Qube for inspiring this article. He was just a little more creative in naming the modes. In addition to “painting by numbers”, he called them “the quest for the grail”, “running around like headless chickens” and “lost in the fog”. I wonder if you can match them up with my slightly less colourful equivalents?
BLOG: Creating a new axis for SPIN® Selling
BLOG: Self-awareness and self-honesty in complex B2B sales
BLOG: We need to collectively develop sales competencies
BLOG: Where is your prospect in their buying journey?
WEBINAR: Selling in the Breakthrough Zone
DOWNLOAD: Our Guide to the Value Selling System
DOWNLOAD: 12-Point Value Selling Self-Assessment
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.
The complexity surrounding SaaS sales and software buying decisions is increasing. The reason: traditional software models based on one-time, upfront licensing fees have evolved to SaaS cloud solutions. Now, pricing is pay-as-you-go. Therefore, buyers expect value that extends beyond the closing of the sale. This change in the software market means that professionals selling the cloud need to redesign their approach to buyers. However, the buyers are also changing.
Simply put: IT buyers are only a segment of the group. With more business functions depending on SaaS capabilities, multiple stakeholders are entering the buying process. Cloud computing service providers need to engage various needs while articulating how the solution brings value to the business.
While these challenges are significant, so are the rewards. According to Gartner, “As of 2016, approximately 17 percent of the total market revenue for infrastructure, middleware, applications, and business process services had shifted to the cloud.” Moreover, “through 2021, this will increase to approximately 28 percent.” The future isn’t up in the air — it’s in the clouds.
Here, we look at five best practices for selling the cloud.
Today, IT stakeholders have moved to an influencer role, while business-unit stakeholders and C-level executives occupy the primary buying position. As a result, the sales cycle is increasing amid divergent objectives within the same organization. Each stakeholder has a personal definition of value. The selling professional must address each one. Without the appropriate preparation, too many sales professionals are falling short of this need.
According to Forrester research, eight out of 10 executive buyers believe sales meetings are a waste of time, citing that “salespeople grade themselves an A minus on understanding customers’ issues and where they can help, whereas buyers give salespeople a failing grade.” Sellers must be aware of the players on the field and their positions. Only then can they truly prepare and deliver value.
In a rush to meet the needs of companies shifting to SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS, too many sales professionals fall into the trap of simply reciting product features. Doing so lacks answers to the essential question “So what?” The appropriate answer to this question is different depending on who the sales professional is engaging. CIO and CISOs are increasingly focused on managing risk. Therefore, they need to understand how the solution will address those concerns.
Meanwhile, the CTO needs to know how the software delivers value to the technology team. These are the kinds of meaningful conversations that fulfill the ROI expectations that continue to escalate on the buying side of the transaction.
The buyers will not achieve consensus on their own. This job falls to the sales professional. The status quo is the boulder they must move in order to reach the sale. Customer stakeholders must come together, vocalize their viewpoints, and allow sometimes difficult conversations to unfold. This aspect of selling is critical to maintaining momentum. Here, it’s particularly effective for the seller to not only join disparate groups but also to underscore the risks of not moving forward.
The benefits of making buyer consensus a priority will be substantial in the future. Bain predicts that revenue from the Global Cloud IT market will increase from $180 billion in 2015 to $390 billion in 2020. Earning a share of this growth requires sellers to take the initiative and bring people together.
The path to the sale is paved with experience. To consistently improve their process, sales professionals must watch how previous customers capitalize on the solution. This routine is not limited to just those in a sales position. Marketing and customer service professionals must also regularly renew efforts to keep pace with customers. The result is synchronicity in which the sales process develops into a repeatable flow. This approach creates a compounding effect that keeps the customer’s experience at the center.
Remember, this is part of the organizational learning curve. Therefore, achieving results takes time and consistency. If the selling organization cannot unite themselves, they will have difficulty uniting those in the customer’s business.
SaaS sales are no longer characterized by upfront capital investment. In some ways, the sales professional’s relationship with the customer is only as good as their last subscription renewal. The customer can part ways with the sales professional at any time. Therefore, promises must be right-sized and unwavering. It’s easy to cut the cord when there never was one in the first place.
Conversations must be open, honest, and transparent. The sales professional will assist their rise to the role of a trusted advisor by demonstrating a forthright demeanor. In the end, the buyer understands that they’re talking with someone who stands behind their word.
As IBM reported, “80 percent of US companies are planning to increase their use of cloud-managed services.” Sellers willing to do preparation and combat the status quo will capture much of this growth.
The time to revitalize efforts is now.
The post Selling the Cloud: Modern Solutions to Selling SaaS appeared first on Welcome to the Richardson Sales Blog.
Merriam-Webster defines the holy grail as: “an object or goal that is sought after for its great significance.” Can companies reach the holy grail of marketing—the perfect lead?
Well, what is a perfect lead? Those of us at PointClear do not believe in the alphabet soup of acronyms such as BANT, ANUM and the granddaddy of all acronyms, MAN.
What is wrong with these formulaic approaches to lead qualification?
This blog, by Frederik Jonsson, is interesting as well as entertaining. He talks about other acronyms including NUTCASE, which is Need, Uniqueness, Timing, Cash, Authority, Solutions, Enemies :)
I don’t think there is such a thing as a perfect lead. All leads have warts. However, the formula I use to qualify a lead and optimize the lead's value is Pain, Priority, Process and Environment.
Is there a pain or need? Is that pain driven by some type of priority (compliance, or a condition of need? (That is, is there a need that creates a sense of urgency?) What is the process to establish a budget and timeframe? Is the prospect a match from an environment standpoint? (Environment could be existing technology, disposition toward or against outsourcing, etc.)
What is your definition of the perfect lead—and why?
Today I have some resources to help you build a stronger business network through one of the top growing social networks — LinkedIn. Here’s four links with tips and tricks to kick start your Monday.
Networking with influencers and leads is more effective with the right strategy and tools. As you make new connections your goal is to build great relationships with people who will want to purchase your products or services. There are several ways you can improve your LinkedIn marketing for a larger reach. Would you like to make solid connections online? Take advantage of these top resources, and let me know how these work for you!
Leverage your social media content for better visibility. Social Champ is a management platform that allows you to schedule content to all of your networks ahead of time in a way that can be scaled and measured by you and/or your team. Share interesting stories, provide valuable information, and attract interested readers by connecting your blog’s RSS feed.
If you would like reach a better pool of employees on LinkedIn, then you’ll want to be the first to sign up for this new feature coming later this year. LinkedIn Talent Insights will provide direct access to rich data from the leading talent agencies so that you can find the right fit for your company. The feature will include real-time reporting and information on the latest trends online.
Making new connections on LinkedIn can be made easier by adding code to your landing page. With the Company Profile Plugin Generator you can display your profile — LinkedIn provides the code for you to install. This can enhance your online sales and maximize opportunities.
Monitor and track your sales with automated updating. SalesLoft provides a cohesive view of all your activity through 15 customizable activity fields. These include the duration of calls, sentiment, email activity, and deep customer insights. Apply automation rules to repetitive campaigns with control over the flow of data.
Hopefully you will find these LinkedIn tools useful to your business networking and sales. Are there any that you would like to add as well?
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Every B2B marketer faces challenges. However, the individual struggles of one B2B demand generation marketer can look very different from another – even if they’re on the same team.
Demand marketers come from a diverse variety of backgrounds, which can range from marketing to journalism; technology to public relations; web design to sales and much more. While some excel at writing, others would rather face a thousand spreadsheets than author a thought leadership blog post.
In contrast, some marketers can blaze through the math and statistics necessary for complex calculations, but glaze over at the idea of a graphic design task.
However, here’s what’s really important: demand generation as a discipline comprises many different tactics, each of which requires the mobilization of many skills and abilities. The real challenges facing B2B demand generation teams in 2018 aren’t necessarily tactical-level struggles. Instead, they’re strategic barriers to team alignment, process efficiency, program performance transparency and customer-centricity.
Michael Brenner, CEO of the Marketing Insider Group writes, “Demand generation is complex. 7,000-piece jigsaw puzzle complex.” To make things more complex, the number of pieces and tactics required to successfully deploy a demand generation campaign aren’t diminishing. To be sure, they’re increasing in number, rapidly.
The most successful B2B marketing organizations in 2018 are those which figure out how to solve both the big and small challenges – assembling the right skill sets, marketing tech and processes in a way that creates a compelling, multi-channel customer journey.
For most organizations, “quality content” in 2018 involves quite a bit more than eBooks, white papers and blogs. Content Marketing Research Institute’s annual B2B survey revealed the average organization used eight different tactics in 2017.
The most commonly reported content tactics included:
Other mentioned tactics include, but are not limited to research reports, interactive tools, digital magazines, mobile applications, podcasts and virtual conferences.
Creating content requires more than just subject matter experts pounding a keyboard. It requires a team of multimedia experts who can disseminate campaign messaging across a range of channels relevant to the entire buyer journey.
Jon Miller, CEO of Engagio, and former VP of Marketo, highlights the fact that context is also important when it comes to the success of content marketing within a demand generation program. Miller writes, “Not only do you need different content for each buyer role, you need to customize content for each stage in the buying cycle.”
Solving the quality content challenge requires a mastery of multimedia and the ability to personalize content for the full-funnel customer journey.
There’s no simple answer to how to solve the quality content dilemma. Today’s most successful B2B marketers are using a variety of solutions, from demand generation orchestration software for smarter management of third-party distribution sources, to outsourcing.
Generating traffic and leads is the most commonly reported challenge among today’s marketing professionals, according to the 2017 State of Inbound Report by HubSpot. At many demand organizations, top-of-funnel lead sources involve many paid and owned sources which makes management a time-consuming task.
While it’s technically possible to manually manage and measure many different lead sources individually, it’s not practical or efficient.
Trying to manually compare the contributions of your events, webinars, third-party lead gen vendors and call centers in a way that contributes to a 360-degree view of top-of-funnel performance is time-consuming and resource draining. Adopting solutions that automate top-of-funnel efforts and centralize lead source management can provide marketers with an efficient view of performance.
How much does a bad lead cost?
A lot, especially if it’s a lead that can’t be qualified due to data quality issues. Research by Integrate reveals that up to 40% of B2B marketing databases include bad lead data.
This measure of bad data includes issues such as:
In fact, 54% of marketers report a lack of data quality or completeness as their most challenging success barrier. While manually verifying leads before they’re entered into your marketing automation platform or CRM can mitigate some quality issues, it’s not a scalable solution.
Technologies for data validation and enhancement can prevent the cost of paying for bad leads from third-party sources and standardize data formats, making manual entry and verification a time-consuming task of the past.
As demand marketers hit their KPIs and prove the ROI of their B2B marketing activities, they may be given more budget. Those who are given a budget increase can hire new staff, acquire new technology or outsource some of their marketing activities in the year to come.
While your system may work well with eight staff members, can it scale to accommodate twelve contributors and a third-party agency?
The challenge of scaling efficiency while maintaining forward motion during periods of rapid growth isn’t unique to demand marketers, but it is common.
The solution to make an ever-increasing number of puzzle pieces fit is technology and processes.
Even the most sophisticated software for orchestrating demand generation can’t compensate for communication issues, a lack of executive buy-in to new demand marketing solutions or the use of shadow IT by staff (the use of unauthorized technology). Similarly, even the smartest processes can’t scale if you’re too busy doing manual data entry to even think about strategy.
The secret to scaling efficiency is in the right balance of processes and MarTech.
Algorithms on search and social media networks are increasingly attuned to content quality as a signal for ranking content.
B2B decision-makers are also faced with a plethora of choice. If your content isn’t as good as your competitor, you could be categorized as less trustworthy or authoritative than other brands in your category.
B2B marketers can’t afford to be apathetic when it comes to marketing quality.
While the idea of quality is well-understood, what’s less understood is the risks associated with raging perfectionism.
This can result in analysis paralysis. Amanda Zantal-Wiener, a Senior Staff Writer at HubSpot, admits she was once afflicted by a tendency to over-analyze her own efforts. She writes, “No one’s work is perfect…mine certainly isn’t.”
Good and finished is better than unfinished in the name of perfection.
The full-funnel mindset that drives B2B demand generation requires full-funnel collaboration. Marketers are called upon to work closely with sales and customer success teams, while maintaining frequent communications and support from the c-suite.
Maintaining good relationships with sales, customer success, IT and the c-suite is critical to the success of the entire organization.
Back in 2006, Doctors Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham and Suj Krishnaswamy – all renowned academics and authors in the field of marketing – published an article in the Harvard Business Review titled, “Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing.” In this article, they called for marketing teams to move beyond alignment to integration. They defined the concept of integration between marketing, sales and customer service as a relationship where teams “share structures, systems, and rewards…develop and implement shared metrics” and create a “rise or fall together” culture.
Habits of the best-aligned customer-focused B2B organizations include:
B2B demand generation is, at the end of the day, a customer-centric discipline.
If your organization hasn’t centered your strategy and efforts around the buyer’s journey, you’re unlikely to see the results you desire. It’s rare for B2B marketers to be unfamiliar with their customers’ demographics or firmographics, pain points or the key stages of the customer journey. However, marketers struggle if buyer personas and the buyer journey aren’t at the core of their efforts.
Randy Guard, EVP and CMO of SAS, stated in a Forbes interview, “By designing your content, your approach, your marketing and your sales around a deeper understanding of the customer, you will create a brand that delivers greater value.” Maintaining the customer’s perspective is a challenge that will continue to face demand marketing teams, but organizations who develop a culture of customer-centricity are likely to achieve significant reward for their efforts.
Reading over the greatest demand marketing challenges facing B2B marketing organizations, you’re likely to notice a trend. These challenges are all, in general, strategic in nature. With rare exceptions, the biggest barriers to demand marketing success are rarely tactical-level issues, such as frustrations adopting new technologies or struggles with web design.
As marketers navigate the complex puzzle of B2B marketing success, overcoming these challenges requires alignment of people, processes and technology. While there’s no single success tactic shared by the most effective demand marketers, organizations who work towards internal alignment, customer-centricity and process automation are likely to overcome some of the most common challenges.
If you’ve mastered the art of research to connect with relevance, you are clearly doing something right. You still may be missing a critical piece of the puzzle, however.
You start by methodically prioritizing your prospecting list, then you research your most important targets. All good so far.
Now comes the connecting part, which for most of today’s B2B sales reps, typically involves email. The sad truth is that even if your messaging is air-tight, email has been so thoroughly abused by marketers and sales reps alike that people naturally associate emails from unknown senders with spam. From consistently irrelevant messages to warnings of malicious links and attachments, we’re programmed to be skeptical of emails from strangers. Our instinct is to disregard them. And few things frustrate sales pros more than pouring energy into a thoughtful communication strategy only to be completely disregarded.
When it comes to prospecting, the best sales reps do something different: they orchestrate their research and outreach in a way that invites a response. Enter PointDrive. What is PointDrive?
Every day, your prospects are bombarded with an overwhelming amount of information in emails. By continuing to send sales content, presentations, training materials, case studies, contracts, and more via email, you add to the problem. Even if a prospect asks you to send information, few of them get jazzed receiving an email that looks like this:
Never mind the time it takes to access the various downloads and links (which can easily get lost in conversation threads). Such an email doesn’t exactly invite the prospect to share all that content with others on the buying committee. Even if the recipient decides to forward your attachments, it’s easy to lose control of the story you’re trying to tell.
Plus, once you send off a message, you’re in waiting mode. You’re left speculating whether the prospect saw your email or viewed the content. No wonder so many reps pester prospects with follow-up messages to find out where things stand.
PointDrive puts an end to this misery for you and your prospects. Simply package up your content in a presentation and then share it via a secure URL. Then, your prospects access all the content you want to share via any device, including desktop, tablet, or mobile. And that’s a good thing since as many as 70% of your buyers open emails on the go.
That means no more bogging down prospects with links that are a pain to navigate and lots of attachments that can be a headache to download and share. That’s a pretty big deal considering that 71% of B2B buyers want vendors to make it easier to access their content, according to The 2017 Content Preferences Survey Report by Demand Gen Report. Just as important, you’ll know precisely what’s happening with your messages and content since everything is associated with a trackable URL.
It takes very little time to create a well-organized, visually interesting, and easy-to-navigate presentation using PointDrive from within Sales Navigator. You can either copy and reuse a presentation created and shared by one of your colleagues, or create a new one featuring default branding applied by your administrator.
You can filter the “Team Presentations” list by category to find the ones most pertinent to your customer segment or job function, and you’ll be notified whenever one of your colleagues adds a new presentation to the list. If you choose to copy a presentation, you’ll be shown as the creator of the new presentation, but all existing content, messaging, and branding will stay intact to save you time.
To create your own presentation from scratch, simply click on the “New Presentation” button in the top right corner of the PointDrive screen.
Inserting content is a simple matter of clicking a button to add assets, including Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft PowerPoint decks, PDFs, any web link, videos hosted on YouTube or Vimeo, and even Google Map locations.
For each file you upload, PointDrive creates a thumbnail preview that you can keep or change. You can also add titles and commentary to each asset to guide your prospect.
PointDrive settings allow you to set rules for each presentation, such as preventing downloads or copying of sensitive documents, like price sheets, or requiring a password to access the presentation. You can also set an expiration date and choose not to be notified about the recipient’s activity, such as whether the prospect opened the presentation.
When you’re ready to share the presentation, you’ll get a custom URL you can share via LinkedIn InMail, email, a text message or any other medium you choose.
Here’s what it will look like from your prospect’s perspective:
Even if you’ve done your best to select the most fitting buyers, not all prospects are ready to buy. The beauty of PointDrive is that it empowers you with insight into whether or not the recipient opened, consumed, and shared the content. That type of information can help you better gauge a prospect’s propensity to buy so that you can prioritize your efforts accordingly.
You’ll be notified once the recipient opens the presentation and interacts with the content, and can see time spent on each page of a multi-page document, and total time spent watching a video. All these are clues into what resonates most, giving you a strong sense of whether or not the prospect is in a buying mode and empowering you to follow up based on data-driven insights.
Plus, as your content is forwarded, PointDrive gives you full visibility so you can identify others involved in the buying decision and save them as leads in Sales Navigator.
To see how a single presentation is performing with all recipients, click on the presentation title, which takes you to a screen showing the overall activity by asset across all viewers.
Using PointDrive will take you out of wait-and-wonder mode and into a data-driven position of more control. No more wondering whether a prospect has viewed the content you sent and shared your full narrative with other stakeholders. No more trying to figure out which content is resonating with which buyers. No more guessing which content will best move buyers along the path to purchase. With PointDrive, you can better engage prospects and influence deal outcomes.
To see the power of PointDrive for yourself, request a demo of Sales Navigator.
For more tips on how to use the most effective sales tools, subscribe to the LinkedIn Sales Blog.
Keeping the top of your pipeline full – regardless of the day of the month and how full the middle of the pipeline is – is crucial to continued, predictable success as a sales professional. It’s also a pain.
With 40% of sales professionals saying prospecting is the hardest part of their job, you’re not alone.
And as you’re intimately aware, it’s hard to focus on the continued pursuit of cold leads when you have warm ones on the verge of signing on with you.
You also are more familiar than you’d like to be with the feeling of the end of the quarter coming up… and being a little short of quota.
That’s not the best time to be starting your outreach – Gong Research found that average salespeople made far more calls in the last month of the quarter than the first two. And the success rate of those “eleventh hour” calls? They tended to be lower than any other month.
You can do better.
Today, we’ve created a step-by-step guide to help you get better at prospecting without having to manage it so meticulously yourself.
You’re not the first person to write a sales email. So why would you start from ground zero? Take a look at how other professionals are using proven templates, then iterate on them to further improve.
We like these ones from The Muse, Hubspot, and Attach.
If you’re not using email scraping tools, you’re missing out on some fantastic opportunities. With a little effort, you can find almost anyone’s email.
Additionally, it is pretty simple to manage automatic email followup in your pipeline, making sure you don’t miss an opportunity because of a failure to followup.
Fin, Clara, Clarke. They are all AI tools here to make your life easier. While none of them can take the place of a real life assistant (yet), they can give you a serious leg up while you’re trying to get your systems into shape.
Use these to start taking notes during calls, help with scheduling, and more.
One of the top ways Prialto assistants are utilized continues to be in a sales development role, where they are handling prospecting and followup based on the sales system you have developed. (Alternatively, we can collaboratively co-create one with you based on our best practices using the tools we mentioned above.)
Amazon’s private label brands had almost $450 million in sales in 2017—and third-party sellers are catching onto this trend.
On the outset, it seems like a simple way to make extra money on the marketplace— buy a generic product and sell it under your own brand. But what’s the catch? Even an easy idea has its downfalls when not executed correctly. Let’s check out the common pitfalls.
Product research is the first pitfall that online sellers reach when trying to become a private label brand on Amazon. Either in choosing the product itself, or in deciding if it’s going to make profits.
Firstly, by choosing the wrong product category, they can really set themselves up for failure. The gut instinct would be to see the best-selling products on Amazon and start from there. However, this is where online sellers run into trouble with falling into common product categories like clothes, children’s toys, food, or even phone cases which are ubiquitous online. This is not to say you will fail if you do choose any of these product categories, but that they are particularly difficult to promote differently than the competition.
Once you’ve carefully researched the product category that your online business will fall into, you have to purchase the product. Here are prices that new sellers sometimes forget to consider:
Ultimately, if you research data and information on the products, combined with your own business acumen, you will be able to make an informed decision on the best products to choose as private label brands.
We all know that it’s easy to be skeptical of a product when the product page isn’t up to scratch. If you’re a frequent Amazon buyer, you’re probably well aware of poor product listings, with questionable images, spammy titles or misleading descriptions.
Not to mention, this is amplified by a lack of any reviews to prove reliability to your customers. Although this may be undervalued by many online sellers, Shopify’s data demonstrates how nine in 10 consumers read roughly 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business.
Here’s how to up your product page performance:
It’s easy to conduct poor product research that can capsize your private label brand in the first place. This leads to terrible decisions in the long run, like for example, believing that Fulfillment by Merchant is a cheaper and easier option compared to FBA.
As an online seller, you save a vast amount of time passing off that responsibility to Amazon. You can ship your inventory to one of the FBA warehouses and Amazon will store, pick, package, and ship every order you receive to consumers- it’s a no-brainer!
Whether you choose FBM or FBA, ensure you buy enough inventory for each batch. If you’re left short, there’s less room for promotion and giveaways. If your online business can afford it, aim to buy 500 to 1,000 units on your first trials.
When you sell on Amazon, you are self-employed. This means you are required to fill out all your tax information under “Tax Settings” in the Seller Central tab. The same applies if your online business is signed up with FBA. Oftentimes, new sellers forget the fact that even if they ship off some of their inventory to an Amazon fulfillment center in a different state, which requires them to pay a sales tax nexus in that state also. Online sellers who ignore this point end up with surprises in their taxes at the end of the year.
To be a successful private label brand on Amazon you must think outside the box and be persistent, even if you don’t see profits immediately. Whether you’ve experienced one of the points above or you’re new to the private label game, watch out for these pitfalls and you can set yourself up for success from the beginning.
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Before we get into our 2017 recap and 2018 road map, I wanted to provide some quick background on how Sales Hacker came to be.
I can’t believe it’s been 4 years since we threw our first Sales Hacker Conference in September of 2013.
300 people showed up to learn about all the new advancements in Sales Technology. I ran it myself, and made $60k profit, in only 4 weeks worth of work (although,TONS of work went into those 4 weeks).
Here’s a screenshot of the first Sales Hacker conference website.
And here’s a photo of Aaron Ross breaking down his epic predictable revenue framework on one of the first ever Sales Hacker panel discussions.
I had no idea that Sales Hacker would eventually become what it is today. I’ll let our amazing community members tell you better than I can!
In March of 2014, I went full-time on Sales Hacker. I figured, if I try it for a year and it doesn’t work, I’ll have made some money and built a good network. Why not?
In March of 2014, I started the Sales Hacker Blog. I actually negotiated to buy the Sales Hacker domain from someone who was writing a sales book and scooped up a bunch of domains. I got it for $600 and wrote the first few articles along with the recap posts from the previous conference.
We ran NYC in April of 2014, and SF in the Fall. I hired my first employee to help us with events. It was scary and I had little idea as to what I was doing. We also started our meetups that spanned 5 continents and 32 cities globally.
Here’s Aaron Ross speaking at our first ever NYC event in 2014. Still holds to be our most popular YouTube video to this very day.
In 2015 we ramped up. I hired our first salesperson, and got my old virtual assistant team back. We kept pushing and knocking on doors. We kept adding value to a rapidly growing space.
And in the fall of 2015, we ran our first 1000 person Sales Stack conference. It was a huge risk. I signed on for a big, expensive venue, and we started selling tickets for a massive event at Pier 27.
Brian Walton, Kyle Porter, Andrea Austin, and Armando Mann at Sales Stack 2015 delivering the SDR playbook for high performing sales teams.
We sold out a 1000 person event in 3 months and had over 45 vendors there exhibiting. This was an inflection point. Since that event, we’ve generated 8 figures in revenue and a few million in profit through Sales Hacker, Inc.
2017 was the real turning point for our business. We built out the team and a strong foundation that would take us to the next level.
In 2017, we worked with over 100 vendors in the sales and marketing space.
Here’s a bird’s eye view of our newly relaunched SaaS Sales & Education Partner Directory.
We worked extremely hard on building our new Partner Program for vendors in the sales space.
Instead of seeing a landing page with a bunch of logo links, now we have a much more sophisticated directory, and every partner gets their own nifty custom built landing page.
Here’s an example of what we’ve built for our friends over at Pipedrive.
You can easily discover all Pipedrive’s content produced on Sales Hacker, (all broken down by content type), and should you feel inclined to do so, you can easily learn more about their platform and choose to contact them via our portal.
It’s exciting, as we aim to be a platform that allows SaaS brands to build targeted thought-leadership to new audiences.
Vendors are funny sometimes. When left to their own devices, most marketing materials can be incredibly salesy. When vendors partner with us, we only care about enabling them to showcase their unique thought-leadership.
Who better than an outbound emailing company to tell us, with data, when the best time to send a sales email is?
Who better than a conversational intelligence company to tell us, with data, what the best time to bring up pricing is on a discovery call?
We partner with these fine organizations to get you the data that can help you make practical and tactical decisions, not bombard you with sales pitches.
If you’re a vendor in the space that we’re not currently working with, get in touch with us HERE.
We realized that our homepage needed some love. The above the fold section was too busy, and lacked a clear value proposition.
Fast forward to 2018. We’ve simplified our messaging and removed homepage distractions. This has led to tremendous results for us, primarily in email list growth and increased site engagement.
We also realized that many people were still asking, “So, what is Sales Hacker anyway?”
In order to simplify and explain our offerings, we condensed it into 3 simple columns on our homepage, right below the fold.
We also explicitly say what we do:
We provide world class thought-leadership, webinars, conferences, online courses, sales training & digital partnerships.
List growth is at a consistent 6-10% MoM, and we’re hosting over 100,000 monthly site visitors.
We did a deep dive into our audience data at the beginning of last year, and spent a healthy chunk of time doing UX research. This would prove to be crucial for our 2017 growth.
Our SEO and content quality has improved significantly since 2016, therefore allowing us to reap incredible organic traffic and audience engagement benefits.
Specifically, we’ve 3x’d our overall and organic traffic in 2017 thanks to our improved content strategy and audience targeting. We’ll be continuing to ramp this up in 2018!
Our webinars are some of the most well attended in the sales and marketing industry, with an average of 500 attendees per webinar and over 3,000 webinar attendees per month.
The Anatomy of a Winning Sales Demo was a record breaking webinar for us in 2017 with nearly 1,000 registrations.
Last year we did our first international sales conference, with over 500 sales practitioners coming out to enjoy our London event.
The response from Sales Hacker London was so overwhelming that we have confirmed it again for October 2018!
Special thanks to Jacco van der Kooij for CRUSHING the opening keynote for us.
Over 3,000 sales professionals have enjoyed our conferences in 2017 across NYC, SF, London.
We’ve worked with the biggest companies in the space, and have done partnerships with Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Docusign, LinkedIn, Adobe, and more. We’re super thankful to our partners for trusting us with their brands.
Originally, we started as “The future of sales.” And to a degree, we still are.
We wanted to usher in the adoption of new sales technologies. As the tech changes, so does what works.
That said, in 2018, we’re building “The largest community of salespeople backed by budget.”
By this we mean salespeople employed at companies that care about investing in sales training, sales technology, or sales recruiting services, to support sales innovation. We want to help growth focused companies transform their sales orgs for the modern world.
In our business, we support three different end users.
This is our community of salespeople backed by budget as mentioned above. Folks who attend webinars, read blog posts, enjoy conferences, and all of our other offerings so they can do their jobs better and train their teams on the best and most innovative new practices.
We provide a platform and a voice for practitioners who are packed with relevant knowledge but don’t have an audience to deliver it to. We provide that audience and those eager listeners who can’t wait to pick the brains of leaders who have been there, done that.
We create a way for vendors selling innovative sales training, technology, and recruiting a way to connect in an honest, authentic, and educational manner with our valuable and engaged audience. In the end they establish credibility and awareness in the market, generate leads, and create thought leadership. We don’t allow sales pitches of any kind within our content.
Our path has evolved as the industry has involved. We don’t want to keep pace, we want to be ahead of the pack!
In many ways, I feel like we’re just getting started.
2017 felt like the first year we had a real business. We suffered some growing pains here and there like scaling content, selling while building, and not giving ourselves enough time to execute on certain initiatives, but what startups haven’t?
In 2018, we have plans to tie up those loose ends in our processes, and continue our march forward as we take it to the next level.
Here’s what you can expect from us, and where we plan to put our resources over the next year.
A huge focus in 2018 is on targeted list growth, segmenting, and ensuring high NPS.
This means we’re making it our business to only serve you the content that YOU want to see.
To do this, we’ve spent significant resources on building the foundation of the site and marketing automation to allow subscribers and readers to discover the content that resonates with their persona. We’re still a work in progress here, but be aware of this in 2018.
On top of that, our goal for next year is to a little over double our subscriber base to 150,000.
We’ll also be launching a few things in the new year that should spark growth and also build our community and brand leadership.
I mentioned we did growth research at the beginning of 2017. This was a crucial part of re-shaping our strategy. We’re going to continue doing this in 2018, especially for content, webinars and conferences.
My advice for doing this is really simple:
Ask your customers what they want, and then give it to them.
We love that so many practitioners want to work with us. It’s the life blood of our organization. Without the community, we wouldn’t have much.
In 2017, we really started getting bombarded with more requests than we could handle, and needed a simplified way to track our inquiries and manage requests.
Not a bad problem to have! But still, we needed a solution. Out of that was born our exclusive contributor network.
Our content averages hundreds of shares and thousands of views.
Our conferences offer opportunities to speak in front of thousands of sales & marketing leaders.
So with that said, you can now apply to become an official Sales Hacker contributor, and get offered to speak at conferences, on virtual events, webinars, write blog content and much more!
We knew stepping up content quality across the board was one of the most important initiatives for us in 2017. We thrive on content, and so does our audience, so we made some major overhauls.
I’m proud to say, we’ve had over a dozen ground breaking articles in 2017 with hundreds of high quality back links, thousands of social shares and tens of thousands of page views.
From the in-depth audience interviews, we learned that prospecting and outreach driven topics were among the highest desired content.
So, we built some really amazing outbound / prospecting driven content last year.
Here’s a few top performers:
We also wanted to learn what type of content our audience hated.
Turns out, it’s the stuff you might expect. Aside from sales emails. Our hypothesis there was that audiences are sick of the same old fluffy sales email articles, so if we were continue to pursue that topic it would need to be 10x content quality.
Then, we learned what our audience really wanted. And of course, we gave it to them.
We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to contribute some amazing guest articles in 2017 that have helped us earn additional buzz.
Here are a few of our favorites:
– When You Have to Fire Good People, HBR.org
– From Local Meetups to Global Community, Sales Hacker Shares Their Secret to Growth, Freshchat
– I’m a CEO and I Play With Puppies at Work, Time.com/money
– The Single Most Important Factor in Entrepreneurial Success, Observer
– Demystifying the Role of Account Based Marketing, Intercom
– Building a Sales Organization Where Millennials Will Thrive, Quotable
– AMPlify Podcast: What It Takes To Cut Through The Noise
– 7 Problems With Sales & Marketing Alignment (And How To Fix Them), Heinz Marketing
– Max’s Big Sales Interview on Pipedrive
Our number one priority for 2018 is targeted audience building, and with that, we’re offering more Enterprise / Executive content and services.
With that said, we’re partnering with the best in class providers like Winning By Design, J Barrows Sales Training, and many others to deliver more training and consulting services and high quality executive content.
Check out these tactical guides from our Executive content series so far, in exclusive partnership with Winning By Design.
We’ll also be launching a podcast, which was something that our community voiced their opinions on almost unanimously in our 2017 engagement survey. However, I was still very against it, but we couldn’t deny the data any longer.
I told the team, the only way we run one is if we could figure out two things:
1. A unique and engaging format that isn’t just another Sales podcast.
2. A podcast host who has been there, done that, very recently or is still a VP/C level revenue leader and has done it at virtually all stages of a company.
I think we really nailed both. Stay tuned for more info to come in Q2!
With the Revenue Summit right around the corner, this is the perfect time to share some things we’ve learned about conferences over the past 4 years.
At its core, the top two elements of a successful conference are the learnings and the networking. Always have and always will be!
And despite the ever growing noisy conference space, salespeople believe in-person conferences are still valuable. We believe that too.
The problem with conferences is that it’s tough to differentiate. We just have to have the best, most targeted and actionable content from actual practitioners. That’s all we care about. That’s our brand and always has been. If you can do that, the right people will come.
Some actionable steps we’re taking to make conferences better:
The Sales Hacker team knows now more than ever before, what resonates with our audience. We’re not just picking any old topics, we’re aligning and referring back to top webinars and top blog content based on engagement metrics, to determine the most desired conference topics.
Check out our topics for Revenue Summit 2018. We’ve spent a lot of time curating this and we expect there to be a ridiculous turnout!
Panels are cool, don’t get me wrong. But people want actionable, step by step walk-through sessions that explain how to actually do something.
Practitioners want to know: Do this, and don’t do this – and that’s why you’ll be successful.
We’ll make sure there’s a lot more takeaways in 2018.
I’m really excited to continue building on top of the solid foundation the team and community created in 2017.
We wrote an in-depth piece on 2018 sales trends, but there are a few specific things I want to point out here.
I’m pretty geeked about the critical role communities are playing inside of tech companies themselves, and the further evolution of sales.
Take this article from Marc Benioff on Salesforce’s dominance over the CRM market, and why they think Microsoft doesn’t have a chance. It’s all about the community they’ve built.
Another external trend is the effects of GDPR, and the overall noise in both inbound and outbound. Because of these trends, channels are becoming the best option to get in front of your target customers. Not only do you get the visibility and access, but if often even comes with an endorsement from a trusted partner.
When companies go to calculate their CAC and include everything from digital ad spend to time it takes an SDR to get someone on the phone, they’ll realize that channels and communities are by far the best ways to access their target customers in 2018.
Lastly, I really love the changes happening rapidly with AI coming into its own and augmenting sales in new and intriguing ways.
My favorite trending examples are chat bots, conversation intelligence, increased sales & marketing productivity via Slack, and big data analysis.
We’re here to help you uncover all of the exciting possibilities available to your org in 2018.
Welp, that’s all for our recap and road map. It’s been an exciting ride so far, and it’s only going to get better.
Want to help out? Share Sales Hacker with friends and colleagues and stay tuned for more exciting initiatives as the year goes on.
The post Sales Hacker’s Yearly Recap & 2018 Roadmap For Growth (VERY Transparent) appeared first on Sales Hacker.
I recently returned from a two-day sales seminar on how to conduct a sales exploratory call. An exploratory call is a 40-minute call with a prospective customer to uncover why they want to change their marketing strategies.
The training class was held for a select group of Hubspot partners in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hubspot provides an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps agencies like IQnection to implement strategies to help their customers to attract visitors, convert leads, and turn prospects into customers.
The class was led by David Winehaus and Dan Tyre*. David is a self-proclaimed introvert, while Dan is whatever the term is for the exact opposite. Several times during the class Dan yelled out from the back of the room, “squeeze your lion!!!!” What he was saying is we should remember to pause after we ask a question. The lion toy we received at the end of the class is to remind us to paws (pause) and listen.
You’ll notice in the photo that my lion’s mane is significantly longer than mine, however after two days with David and Dan I feel my sales muscles becoming as strong as the lion’s muscles. Sadly, my mane is in a state of atrophy.
Attending the class in person provided opportunities to share ideas with other Hubspot partners from all over the country (and one person from Portugal). Everyone had something to contribute to the conversation and helped me think outside our agency’s perspective.
So, what were some of the takeaways? Here are just a few:
I learned many more strategies and techniques from David’s class. If you have to opportunity to take the class in person I highly recommend it. It will help you move from sales lion cub, cute but ineffective, to a grown sales lion.
*Dan is co-author of the upcoming book, Inbound Organization: How to Build and Strengthen Your Company’s Future Using Inbound Principles
By Mark Schaefer
I had the honor of studying under the legendary American management consultant Peter Drucker while I was earning my master’s degree from Claremont Graduate University.
Dr. Drucker was the most brilliant man I’ve known, and this was an extraordinarily impactful period of my professional life. He was one of those few people I’ve met in life who can distill complexity to its essence.
Spending three years under his tutelage literally formed my consulting style and there is not a single week that goes by that I don’t hear his voice in my head. And yet, I realized that I’ve never really talked about those lessons here on my blog.
Today I’ll recount the top five lessons from Dr. Drucker that I think would help anybody become a more effective marketing consultant.
One of Dr. Drucker’s most famous contributions to management consulting is “the five questions.”
You can’t have a business strategy without knowing the answers to these questions in highly accurate detail.
In my practice, I have evolved these questions to a bit of a shortcut. I ask my customers to complete this sentence: “Only we …” To finish that sentence, you need to know how your mission, your customer, etc.
Most companies cannot answer these questions easily, and discerning the answers is job one, no matter how long it takes.
Dr. Drucker taught via the Harvard Case Method. For weeks, our class would dissect lengthy, detailed case studies to try to get to the bottom of the problems. This taught me to remove the emotion from a business situation and observe it as puzzle with many pieces.
My fellow students were all accomplished leaders and eager to “win” the case study by being the first with a correct answer. Dr. Drucker was a pretty mellow guy but boy he would get mad if you tried to “solve” the case study.
“How can you be so arrogant?” he would declare. “The people in this case have worked at their company for 30 years and they can’t figure it out. What makes you think you have the answers?”
The key value of a consultant and a great leader, he said, was not to have the right answers. You needed to have the right questions.
Having this pounded into my head for three years forever changed the way I looked at business and leadership. When I have a consulting engagement, I don’t try to tell people what to do. I’m very humble and ask questions and probe until I have the right questions. If you identify the right questions, the customer is smart enough to know you’re on to something and help figure out a solution.
In a traditional consulting model, the client is a bystander. Dr. Drucker taught me that the client is the true expert and will have the answer, with my guidance.
This also reduces political friction … people like to implement their own solutions!
This was one of Dr. Drucker’s mantras and I have seen this wisdom in action throughout my career.
One value of being an outside consultant is being able to innocently question conventional wisdom. Often, challenging “mass agreement” has provided a spark for breakthrough thinking.
The scenario where I find this most valuable is when it comes to assumptions about customers and what they value. When a discussion begins with “Everybody knows …” about customers and what customers value, I need to question it.
Markets and customers are being profoundly impacted by technology. Marketing plans rarely last more than a year any more. This is why I almost always start a consulting engagement with customer visits, or at least customer discussions, to re-visit client “truths.”
Dr. Drucker taught me the power in ignorance. Once a student asked him how he could know so much about so many industries, and he said “I don’t. That’s my secret! Ignorance is the most powerful element in helping a customer solve problems.”
Luckily, ignorance has always come easy for me.
Here’s an example. One time I was helping a pharma company with a sales problem. They had done a tremendous amount of research to find out what would increase sales with doctors and had created a data-based strategy. But the more money they put into the execution of strategy, the more their sales declined!
“Everybody knows personal selling doesn’t work any more,” I was told … and they had research to prove it. But I needed to question this and noticed in the data that competitors were winning markets by doing the opposite of what our research said to do. They were increasing investment in personal selling efforts. Presumably they had access to the same doctors that we did and had the same research — what was going on here?
This was a clue I could not gloss over.
What I found was that the doctors were not truthful on their survey responses. They hated to admit they liked the personal sales attention but in fact, that is what made them buy! When my client reversed direction and re-invested in personal selling the trend turned around.
Dr. Drucker approached problem-solving like Sherlock Holmes unraveling a mystery.
Once, when we were going through a case, he exclaimed “The dog isn’t barking! Wouldn’t you expect the dog to be barking? That’s what we’ve been looking for!”
What he meant by this was, often the key to finding an answer is to notice what is NOT there … something that you would expect to be there. When some data point is missing or something just seems to be absent from the puzzle, don’t gloss over it — dive into it. This is almost always an important clue.
I can remember coming home from an engagement and telling my wife “Everyone is so quiet in the meetings. It’s almost like they are afraid to participate. Why aren’t they talking?”
I had been around business long enough to know that this was a clue and what I discovered was that there was a tremendous amount of fear in the organization. The team knew how to solve problems but were afraid to speak up with their opinions. We didn’t have a marketing problem at all. We had a leadership problem.
Peter Drucker is the most-quoted business professional in history and one of his most famous sayings is: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”
I’m sure this upsets all my accounting friends but I think what Dr. Drucker was saying here is that a company must move forward. If you’re not pushing forward, you’re dying.
This is one of the most challenging issues for a consultant. Many company successes are built on a well-established idea or system. Over time, managers are rewarded for maintaining that idea and system. Even though leaders may talk publicly about the need for change, most are apprehensive about moving into a new future, especially if it means giving up a familiar career.
This is one of Drucker’s strongest messages: Continuing what led to past success will inevitably lead to failure. No matter what. He may have first uttered these words in the 1980s, but the advice is completely relevant today
These are some of the principles that guide me and my consulting practice. This is Dr. Drucker’s voice in my head and I hope in some small way I’ve carried his torch to you today.
Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.
The post Five of my best insights on becoming a great marketing consultant appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.
When Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc.’s queso was trashed on Twitter after its debut last year, RBC Capital Markets assigned a machine to weigh the effect of the social media storm on the beleaguered burrito chain.
The result was a research note subtitled “Worst queso scenario?” that used analysis of tweets and Google searches to help analyst David Palmer justify cutting estimates on Chipotle’s earnings and sales. Artificial intelligence, or AI, helped show that negative sentiments on the queso launch affected Chipotle’s brand.
Royal Bank of Canada is one of the few North American banks to have incorporated AI into capital-markets research, reshaping how analysts work and offering a signpost for where other firms are heading. RBC’s research group has six data scientists and specialists split between Toronto and New York in its RBC Elements unit.
“It’s a critical must-do for any research department,” Marc Harris, RBC’s head of U.S. research, said by phone from New York. “Giving great sell-side analysts access to great data-science resources is going to be mission critical to their success — not 10 years from now, but over the course of the next three to five years.”
Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that aims to imbue machines with aspects of reasoning. The term now includes machine learning, which is the ability for computers to learn by ingesting data and processing text.
The financial industry is rushing to embrace the nascent technology to help in areas including trading, investing and automating interactions with customers. Hedge funds and money managers also have adopted AI as a research tool.
Europe has seen some AI innovation for equity research due to MiFID II regulations, according to Jodie Wallis, managing director for artificial intelligence in Canada with consulting firm Accenture Plc. In the U.S., firms like Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Corp. have been “quite vocal” about using such technology, she said.
“Most large banks, and probably all of the big banks in Canada, are at least piloting AI in equity research, but with varying degrees of commercial success at this point,” Wallis said in an interview. “There are a couple that are ahead in terms of their ability to extract real value out of those investments now, but that is definitely an area where all the banks are looking.”
Royal Bank Chief Executive Officer David McKay has publicly embraced AI since 2016, bringing on board industry and academic experts and establishing labs and partnerships. RBC has more than 200 data scientists working in various departments including capital markets. Advances in computer processing power have made what was once the realm of science fiction now achievable for everyday operations.
“It’s not easy to do this, but the rewards of doing it right are definitely proving to be worth it,” RBC’s Harris said. “This is a long-term marathon, not a short-term sprint.”
In the Chipotle note, data showed that negative tweets outnumbered positive ones in the week after the queso launch, and that sentiment remained negative, though improving, for some time. Two years ago, finding correlations between social media data and stocks didn’t work, but advances in natural language processing with AI makes this data more valuable in finding impact, according to Harris.
Harris, who describes using AI in financial research as being “a first- to second-inning phenomena,” said he expects more work like that done on the Chipotle note.
“We’ve now got literally several dozen projects in our pipeline that follow a similar track,” Harris said. “We’re basically trying to look at energy, industrials, a lot of different verticals.”
If you’re struggling to complete existing tech work within your organization, brace yourself. The already shallow talent pool is shrinking even faster.
As big data matures, companies are demanding more from their analytics. Simply focusing on storage and processing was so yesterday. Today, companies aim at generating more agility, more speed, and more value from their data.
Not only do these requirements provide a glimpse of big data’s future, they also indicate the critical skills expected to grow in demand.
It’s projected that enterprises will continue investing more into big data projects over the next few years. Below are five changes to expect as demands on big data evolve.
1. The need for speed
Like many large organizations, you’re probably shifting your attention from collecting more data to collecting the right data. Doing so requires processing information faster. Often, in real time.
2. Adopting more AI
Deep Learning, a sub-set of artificial intelligence, is helping companies use their large data sets to solve a wider array of business problems. Forrester Research envisions more services will develop “support applications and processes with machines that mimic some aspects of human intelligence.”
3. Preserving privacy
With greater amounts of data comes herculean responsibility. Data analysts must remain vigilant against data breaches, discriminatory algorithms, exposing identities, and so on.
4. Flexible technology
Tableau predicts companies will explore use case-specific architecture design based on needs. The company also sees a trend towards platforms that are data- and source-agnostic. This can provide analytics on all data—a feature more companies are demanding.
5. Variety over volume
The movement to integrate more new and legacy data sources will continue to grow. It’s expected that companies will demand platforms provide direct connectivity to various data sources.
Achieving these advances requires skilled specialists. The problem is, tech already faces a talent shortage for existing needs.
Our schools and tech programs aren’t churning out enough qualified graduates to keep pace with demand. Last year alone, 1.3 million software jobs opened, and it’s estimated nearly 513,000 remain unfilled.
Tech unemployment rate remains low and continues dropping. In the high-demand computer and engineering segments, tech unemployment stands nearly half that of the national average.
Data scientists were the third fastest growing skill in demand on Upwork in Q4 2016. And an MIT Sloan Management Review showed 40% of the companies surveyed were struggling to find and retain data analytics talent.
The numbers will continue worsening. By 2018, it’s predicted demand will create 905,000 more jobs involving data management and interpretation skills.
Below are critical tech skills in exceptionally short supply:
Not only is demand outpacing supply, fewer people are looking for jobs. The latest ratio of unemployed Americans to open jobs is a low 1.4 to 1.
What’s more, a growing number of professionals are shunning traditional jobs to go freelance. The latest Freelancing in America survey reports 35% of the U.S. workforce freelances. And that number is growing.
It’s not just the freedom and flexibility that entice these workers. Freelancers report more work satisfaction, control over their career progress, greater respect, and higher income than working 9-5 jobs. It’ll be a tough sell convincing freelancers to give up those perks.
Business operations today have changed dramatically since the Industrial Age. But many companies still rely on traditional workforce solutions from over 100 years ago. Such as sourcing local talent and expecting them to work from a centralized location.
The rise of freelancers and increasing globalization signal that as business technology advances, so must hiring practices.
The truth is, the talent you need is available. But you can’t find it through traditional means. If you’re not sure where to start, see new workforce solutions in Bridging the Talent Gap that Technology Built.
This new guide from Upwork reviews the state of the tech talent shortage and how other companies use innovative ways to secure critical tech talent. Get ahead by downloading it now.
A killer SaaS product won’t sell itself. Even after your marketing and sales team have generated sales, the process doesn’t end there. A whopping 90 percent of people who opt in for a free trial never become paying customers.
Why?
Because getting used to your product or making it work requires effort, and sometimes people leave simply because they don’t understand how it benefits them.
In most cases, it isn’t your product that turns potential customers away—it is your customer onboarding process. And a minor mistake can cost your business a lot. In fact, a mere 1 percent difference in churn rate can have a 12 percent impact on your company valuation in five years.
Here are four of the most common customer onboarding mistakes that some of the biggest businesses make and how you can avoid them.
The earlier your customers get to know your product, the better. Research shows that a delay in delivering your customers their first success with your product will result in churn.
This is where businesses repeat a couple mistakes.
Not understanding success from customers’ point of view: Success to you is when a trialist converts to a paying customer. That’s not how your users define it.
For instance, when a customer purchases a quadcopter, the first success might be a safe delivery of the quadcopter, or when a customer assembles the quadcopter successfully, or when a successful flight takes place. Ask your customers and see how they define success.
Making it hard for them to achieve their first success: If you’re sending your customers a 7-hour training video series that will allow them to start using your software, you aren’t of much help. Don’t make it hard or cumbersome for your customers to achieve their first success.
As much as 69 percent of millennials feel good when they can solve a problem themselves, rather than relying on someone else to do it for them. Therefore, your job is to make it easier for your customers to achieve their first success. Help them—you don’t have to do it on their behalf.
Key takeaways: Understand success from your customers’ point of view and help them achieve it as quickly as possible.
Helping with first success isn’t enough. It is only the beginning.
If you fail to provide immediate exceptional value right from day one, you will lose customers—and revenue. Statistics show as much as 95 percent of a SaaS company’s earnings come from renewals and upsells.
You need to validate your customer’s decision to choose you and unfortunately that’s where a lot of businesses go wrong. Because they’re too busy celebrating the number of acquired customers and meeting their sales goals and forget to focus on delivering value that their customers expect.
So how do you do it?
Make every customer count by ensuring them that choosing your product was the right choice. Deliver value throughout the customer journey, right from the first success.
This value could be related to customer services, product features, bonuses, personalization, usability, tutorial, or anything that wows your customers.
One big mistake that businesses often make is that they overpromise benefits. The hype created to generate sales is a challenge to live up to. That’s where delivering true value to your customers becomes a next-level game.
Picture this: your customers expect a revolutionary, all-in-one and self-managing project management product; you sent them a traditional tool that doesn’t meet their expectations. Don’t fall into this trap.
Key takeaway: Deliver exceptional value to your customers. Don’t create hype. Focus on creating lifetime customers by delivering value throughout the customer journey.
What do you think your customers will do when they have too many options to choose from on the welcome screen?
They will either skip the onboarding process (if that’s an option) or you will receive a request for a refund.
The onboarding process has to be focused on the most important features of your product. Take Dropbox, for example. It asks users to add photos as soon as they choose a plan, a core feature.
Nothing fancy. No multiple CTAs. Either do it, or skip it.
Here are a few tips to avoid throwing spaghetti at the wall, as Eric Siu calls it, during the onboarding process.
Key takeaways: Channel user attention toward the most important product features, without making it appear messy. Let them focus on one thing at a time.
While overpromising can be suicidal, over-communication is better than under-communication throughout the onboarding process. If you only send a couple of automated emails, you’re missing customers, losing revenue and breaking the rules of communication. And no, a welcome email is not enough.
Follow up at every stage. Celebrate your customer wins. Remind them of features they aren’t using. Share case studies. Offer help.
Here is an example of the type of communication we are talking about. This is the message that Typeform users get when they create a template. It’s not an email—it’s incorporated into their onboarding process.
Communication and regular follow-ups build trust and help convert users into customers. Onboarding isn’t all about your product—it’s about customer experience and building trust. Here is a handwritten note that Stride sent to its users.
The purpose of follow-ups should be:
Key takeaways: Communicate with your customers throughout the onboarding process to ensure they achieve the desired outcome from your product as soon as possible, without extra effort. Customer onboarding is a journey that begins as soon as conversion happens and you have to make it fun and meaningful.
Ever walked out of a meeting, or read a memo from the executive suite, and said to yourself, “Why did they decide that?”
Ever had an idea that you thought was great unceremoniously shot down with some vague comment about “the numbers won’t work.”
Accounting and financial considerations are vital in nearly every decision made by a company, nonprofit, or government agency. That includes the decisions made by your organization.
If you want to understand more about why certain decisions are made or, even better, make smarter, more persuasive decisions yourself, consider increasing your accounting knowledge.
An understanding of accounting principles — perhaps even a Master’s degree or a CPA designation — will help you upgrade your career. But even before you complete your first class, you’ll get an upgrade to your business savvy.
Here are five situations where you’ll be able to wow your peers and your managers — or at least understand how they really think — by thinking like an accountant.
What accounting will teach you: Sales increases don’t always translate to immediate cash in the bank. Depending on when and how revenues are recognized, and what your company must do to provide products or services, higher sales can sometimes even mean a cash crunch in the short term.
Your instant upgrade: Knowing why your company needs to cut back on spending, even as sales rise, helps you make smarter recommendations about costs that could be reduced.
What accounting will teach you: The cost of making a product is just one part of the cost of doing business. The “cost of goods sold” includes everything from salaries of manufacturing employees to raw materials. But the company has other expenses, too, including leases on office space, customer service costs, and some employee salaries (maybe even yours). Your company doesn’t start recording a profit until all those expenses are paid.
Your instant upgrade: Understanding that the costs of manufacturing a product are just part of your company’s expenses.
What accounting will teach you: Investors think more about the future than the current state of your company when they decide how much they’re willing to pay for your company stock. Is your company sitting on a lot of cash? That might mean there are no profitable new ventures to invest it in, which means growth prospects are poor. The result: Investors downgrade your stock and share prices sink.
Your instant upgrade: Understanding that stock prices depend mostly on how profitable a company will be in the future, and less on how it has done in the past.
What accounting will teach you: Your CFO is pretty smart. Borrowing is cheap right now, thanks to low interest rates, and paying higher dividends to shareholders will boost the stock price. Got coworkers who are asking the same thing? With your MAC classes, you’ll be able to explain the decision to them.
Your instant upgrade: Knowing what’s behind your company’s financial decisions will help you better understand why and how top management make certain decisions, and what that could mean for your future with the firm.
What accounting will teach you: The concept of stock options isn’t too hard, but to get the most value from them takes smarts. The value of options depends on the stock price when you exercise it — usually, that’s not when the options are granted to you. Typically there are limits on when you can exercise those options — when they “vest.” Also, once you exercise an option and buy stock, there are tax implications depending on what you do with those shares and when you do it.
Your instant upgrade: Being able to analyze complex compensation choices, such as stock options. That’s useful if you’re receiving those options, and useful if, one day, you’re the one deciding whether to grant them to employees.
Want more tips and insight on how accounting knowledge will improve your business savvy and fiscal intelligence? Download this free learning guide, “How Thinking Like an Accountant Can Make You Smarter (and more valuable)."
Or, if you’re interested in where your current knowledge and skills stand, take our short, but insightful, Business IQ Test.
This post is sponsored by UNC Master of Accounting Program. | Content written and provided by UNC Master of Accounting Program.
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Communication plays an enormous role in a business’ potential success. Regardless of the quality of products or services that a company provides, the chances for a bright future are weakened if internal communication is poor.
There is more to it than just the basic concepts, like sharing ideas, information and feedback. It’s wise for CEOs to also put candor in focus. By emphasizing an open and honest dialogue, executives can encourage employees to truly speak their minds. Employees will feel more engaged by knowing that their opinions matter to the leadership team.
As Alan Murray wrote for The Wall Street Journal: “There are no silver bullets in the field of management. But insisting on candor comes as close to being an all-purpose problem-solver as any idea yet encountered. There are many different terms for it — transparency, integrity, honesty, full-disclosure, facing reality — but whatever you call it, it appears to be at the core of all great organizations.”
An example of the importance of candor comes in a story by Fast Company, which references a survey done by 15Five, of more than a thousand employees around the country. The results showed a vast majority (85 percent) are “unsatisfied with the quality of communication in their workplace,” and 81 percent “would rather join a company that values ‘open communication’ than one that offers perks such as top health plans, free food, and gym memberships.”
Here’s a look at how candor can strengthen a business’ overall communication.
Set the example
Business leaders can’t expect employees to share information and display open-and-honest candor if they’re not willing to take the same approach themselves. Communication is a two-way street, and management should do its part. Joseph Folkman emphasizes being “a role model of candor” in a story for Forbes.
“When you see an issue that needs to be challenged, speak up and be candid,” he writes. “Challenge standard procedures that don’t add significant value. When employees see you speaking up, they are more likely to do so as well. When they see you say nothing in a meeting with your superiors but then complain afterward about a decision your boss made, they will act the same way toward you.”
Information flow
An unsettling feeling that employees may encounter in the workplace is uncertainty. Thoughts of “What are we doing? Where are we going?” when it comes to goals and overall direction can create anxiety. CEOs should put a heavy emphasis on making their vision clear, so that no one in the organization feels left out of the plan, and so employees can fully contribute to the open and honest discussion.
The Wall Street Journal detailed the importance of information flow in creating a “culture of candor” in a story adapted from its Guide to Management book, written by Murray: “That doesn’t mean everyone needs to know everything; but it does mean that critical information gets to the right people at the right time and for the right reason.”
Here are some of Murray’s points on information flow:
These are natural tendencies, Murray explains, so “managers must insist on candor at all times.”
Listen to all sides
It’s one thing for an executive to say he or she welcomes feedback. It’s another to follow through and actually seek it out. Employees may have valid points that run counter to the way the company usually operates, or complaints that may be hard for the leadership to hear. In a story for American Express’ OPEN Forum, Bruna Martinuzzi advises leaders to not strictly rely on “information from a few select employees.”
“Those who have ‘the boss’s ear’ might have personal agendas, and you might end up with biased information,” Martinuzzi says. “Contrasting opinions will help you see the different facets of important issues that you may have otherwise missed. Make sure you and your managers stay open to a number of sources of information from every corner of the company. For example, those closest to the customer, regardless of their level in the company, can provide valuable information to help you improve your products and services because they’re getting feedback directly from the end users.”
Caring and challenging
The importance of candor is a prime focus of Kim Scott, who served in management positions at Apple, Google and Twitter. She wrote the bestseller Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, which was published in 2017. In a story by Ron Carucci for Forbes, Scott describes the importance of honest feedback, calling it “the atomic building block of good management.”
“There is nothing more damaging to human relationships than an imbalance of power,” she explains. “Candor is the honest broker of truth that neutralizes the imbalance.”
Scott explains two sides of the “radical candor” concept in Carucci’s story:
Turn complaints into progress
Everyone vents about their job in one way or another. It’s only natural that employees will have frustrations. Don Charlton, founder and chief product officer of JazzHR, describes a technique that helped him to improve the culture in a story for Inc.com. He presented a scenario in which employees could describe office problems as they would if they were discussing them outside of the office — a safe atmosphere that allowed them to be free in expressing themselves:
“You know that issue in the business that you vent about to friends at a bar, or a co-worker at lunch, or even someone at home? What about that issue that runs through your mind before bed and in the shower the next day? Yeah, that issue. Well that issue most likely only gets resolved if you mention it here. If you don’t mention it, we can’t fix it together, especially if some of us don’t even know about it. So speak up — this is a safe place to be candid.”
The result was a positive one. Charlton says that it “encouraged even the shyest employees to speak up.”
“They realized business problems that affect them outside of work can only get fixed when they are shared in the open at work, and all that time spent stressing at lunch, at a bar or at home is a self-imposed, avoidable intrusion of work problems into their personal life. And when the problem is brought to light, especially in a large public forum such as a staff meeting, management is now on notice to fix things. And good managers are thankful (never vengeful) that employees don’t assume they can see everything right and wrong about the business.”
The power of praise
Everyone naturally wants to know that they are appreciated. This can go beyond assignments and projects, and move into creating cultural improvements in the business. A story by Joseph Grenny for Harvard Business Review details the case of an unnamed executive (called “Phil” for the purposes of the story). Phil was president at a large defense company, and didn’t have a great track record when it came to candor, because of his “command and control” style of leadership. But he made a concerted effort to turn the culture around, Grenny writes, and he succeeded. One of the techniques that was successful was public praise related to voicing opinions.
Phil asked for employee feedback in an “Ask the President” feature in the company’s internal newsletter. His willingness to answer “the most universally asked and highly sensitive questions” made an impact.
“He was careful to sympathize with the questioners and to validate their concerns,” Grenny explains. “The workforce took note — seeing evidence that disagreement would no longer be treated as insubordination. Questions could be asked anonymously or not, and over time more and more of the questioners identified themselves — which gave Phil a chance to commend them in the newsletter for their candor. Public praise is more about influencing those who hear it than those who receive it.”
Predicting cryptocurrency prices is a fool’s game yet this fool is about to try. The drivers of a single cryptocurrency’s value are currently too varied and vague to make assessments based on any one point. News is trending up on Bitcoin? Maybe there’s a hack or an API failure that is driving it down at the same time. Ethereum looking sluggish? Who knows: maybe someone will… Read More
Editor's Note: This guest post was contributed by Mike Schultz, President at RAIN Group.
Imagine this scenario. You’re a seller who just engaged a buyer about an opportunity and they’re interested. Conversations progress and are going well, but then the buyer decides they don’t want to proceed.
The return on investment was tremendous; more than a 30-times ROI was easy to see.
So, what happened? How did the buyer not see this as an easy “yes?”
Often times in sales, buyers may see the ROI case, they may love to achieve the ROI, but there’s one major problem—they don’t believe it.
It’s too risky.
Forty years ago, marketers and sellers weren’t focused as much on results and impact. The transition away from the features and benefits had just begun.
Today, every company's marketing and sales message promises results—often wild results—as their first foot forward. Yet while everyone is promising results, buyers regularly report disappointment.
Bain & Company conducted a study where 375 companies were asked if they believed they delivered a "superior value proposition" to clients. Of those, 80% agreed.
Bain then asked the clients of those same companies if they agreed. Only 8% did.
The problem is that buyers don't believe they get what they expect or were promised. They've been burned in the past and are skeptical of sellers and their exaggerated claims. It's just too risky.
In a vacuum, risk and reward move together—the higher the reward, the greater the perception of risk. As a seller, you have the power to either minimize or heighten this perception. And if you want to win the sale, you must focus on diminishing it.
In the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research study, What Sales Winners Do Differently, we analyzed over 700 B2B purchases. One of the key findings was that minimizing risk has increased in importance according to buyers, and the sellers who win are much more attuned to risk than second-place finishers. It’s not surprising given the fact that buyers have been burned in the past.
Yet for every 10 pieces of advice you find about demonstrating the impact case and the ROI to buyers, you may find one piece of advice about minimizing the perception of risk in sales. If this is a key factor to winning sales, why is it rarely discussed?
There are the four categories buyers tend to perceive risk. To win you must minimize risk in each of these categories:
1. You, the Seller
Buyers have to believe, and believe in, you, the seller. They need to trust you and your advice.
Risk is lessened when you demonstrate intimacy, competency, integrity, and reliability. Spend time getting to know your buyers well and show them that you know what you’re doing. Find ways to illustrate that you keep their best interest in mind at all times. Lastly, deliver on what you promise. Always.
When buyers perceive the risk in you, the seller, to be too high, they won't take your advice, they won't trust your motives, they won't seek to build a relationship with you, and ultimately, they won't buy from you.
2. Your Offering
Buyers have to believe the product or service will perform as advertised. They need to be confident that it will be implemented, completed, and operate properly. If they have any reservations that it won't work as it's supposed to, won't get adopted, or won't last very long, then the risk is too high for the buyer to move forward.
Spend the necessary time with them to ensure they believe in the product or service. If they don’t, the opportunity will go south quick.
3. Your Company
Buyers need to believe your company is the right partner for them. When evaluating a purchase, buyers ask themselves, "Should I align with this company? Are they a good partner for us?"
When buyers believe you are a good partner, they tend to trust the company, believe it's a good company to associate with, believe the company will be around for the long term and will grow with them, and believe that if there are problems, the company will resolve them.
Buyers may trust your advice and like your offerings, but if your company is perceived as risky, they will look to align with one of your competitors.
4. The Outcome
Buyers need to believe they will achieve the promised results in an acceptable timeframe. They need to be confident that they’re making a good investment. They need to believe the result will be achieved, and that the best way to achieve it is with your help.
Share success stories and case studies from other clients you’ve worked with. Offer references. Offer a guarantee. Share how you will help them avoid potential obstacles. The more you can tangiblize the outcome and prove to them you’ve helped others get there, the more likely they are to trust that the outcome is indeed achievable.
Buyers may trust you, your offering, and your company, but if they don't believe in the outcome, they will take no action because they won’t think it’s worth it.
It's up to you to discover which categories are most important to each individual buyer and to minimize risk in each category. At the end of the day, if you can get your buyers to believe—in you, your offering, your company, and the outcome you say you can achieve—then you've got a good chance of winning the sale.
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