We all know the two most popular websites in the world right now—Google and Facebook. On any given day, people are performing close to 3 billion Google searches, and over a quarter of the world’s population use Facebook. Bing is also growing fast and is now a major SEM contender.

Advertisers have much to gain from an integrated search and social advertising approach. But exactly how much?

To answer this question, we conducted a study of more than 200 enterprise advertisers managing Google, Bing, and Facebook campaigns. With billions of dollars in annualized ad spend managed on the Marin platform, we work with many of the world’s largest and most sophisticated advertisers.

Here’s what we found:

• Customers who click search and social ads are more likely to buy. Users who click both an advertiser’s search and social ads had an approximately two times greater conversion rate than users who click the search ad only. Users who click both the search and social ads have a click-through rate approximately four and a half times higher than users who only click social ads.
• Customers who click search and social ads spend more. Users who click both a search and social ad contribute approximately two times more revenue per click than users who click search ads only. Users who click both a search and social ad contribute six times more revenue per click than users who click a social ad only.
• Search campaigns perform better when managed alongside social campaigns. Search campaigns managed alongside social advertising campaigns have two times more revenue per click than search campaigns managed in isolation. An integrated search and social management strategy also benefits an advertiser’s revenue per conversion—advertisers have almost 10% higher revenue per conversion from their search campaigns when managed together with social advertising campaigns.

For full research results and actionable tips for cross-channel success, download The Multiplier Effect of Integrating Search and Social Advertising.

Marketing 20-30 years ago was so much easier and yet harder. We had less choices (print, newspaper, mail, radio & TV), but we had less data (no Google Analytics, or websites, email, online video, podcasts and more).

If you’re marketing online, there are a lot of new options that frankly I didn’t even know about years ago — things like virtual assistants, and now you hear this talk about funnels and lead pages and landing pages and all this other stuff. They all sound helpful and sexy and like something that can really improve your business, but the question I want to ask today is: Do you know the difference between a marketing funnel and a marketing system?

What’s A Marketing Funnel?

Let’s start off by looking at what a funnel is. A marketing funnel is used to guide people through a process — that is, you get them to a landing page and then you offer them a bribe, a prize, something to get their email address so that you can continue to communicate with them; or once they sign up, then you take them to next step and get them to buy what’s called a tripwire purchase, which could be free plus shipping. You’re going to send them your book for free, but they’ve got to pay for the shipping and handling, or you send them a free report or you give them access to a webinar or a video or something along those lines. The goal is to try to get them into your funnel and guide them through the process, which is great. It works really, really well, but the difference is that it’s really there to gather names and to grow your sphere of influence with a whole bunch of people that potentially could buy from you. This is a good thing, but with some businesses, this is not the end all, be all.

A lot of times, you have to think, what is my end game? What am I trying to achieve? I was working with a customer who called up and said, “Okay, I want to do a landing page.” The question I asked is, “Okay, well what is the end game? What are you trying to achieve?” Ultimately, what they were trying to achieve was booking a phone call so that they could qualify potential clients for a pretty high-level system that they have. That, my friend, is a system. There are lots of moving parts to this. A system requires looking at where you’re starting and what the end result is and what you want people to do.

What’s A Marketing System?

I would say one of the biggest differences between a funnel and a system is that a system has more moving parts. An example of this would be that most landing page software and funnel software have analytics built into it, but it’s really limited to what’s happening inside of that funnel. A true system has a lot of different pieces to it. Let me give you an example. In the case of this one client, they wanted to generate a phone call. That phone call specifically was to qualify and quantify whether somebody would be a good fit for this high-level thing that they’re selling. It starts out with having a website. It’s much more than a web page because you have one web page, you could say, “Okay, this is good for engineers and marketers and dog trainers and so on and so forth, but if you throw all of those three completely different groups on one landing page, it really says, ‘Well, is it really good for an engineer and a dog trainer?’”

What you have to do is take a look and say, “Okay, I’m going to create a landing page or a home page that says, ‘If you’re a dog trainer, click here. If you’re an engineer, click here. If you’re a marketer, click here,’ but even better, there are pages inside of the website that talk specifically to each one of those people.” In creating that system, why not write some blogs or create some content? There are lots of ways to create content. You could do blogging. You could do podcasting. You could do video. You could do webinars. You can do telesummits. You can do all kinds of things, but the goal is to drive them to the page specific to them and their needs.

Once they’re on that page, you have a call-to-action. What is that call-to-action? I’m ready to get started now; click here to book your free 15-minute phone consultation. Or, I’m not ready to get started right now, but I want to stay in touch because I love your blogs; join our email list. You don’t want to give people too many choices, but if they’re ready, they’re going to take action. If they’re not, you want to stay in touch with them. That’s the biggest difference between a funnel and a system.

Parts Of The System

Let’s look at some of the parts of that system. Alright, let’s say that you’re going to use webinars to drive people to a specific page. The webinars can have that sales message in there: “If you are ready to get started now, you can click this button or go to this link and set up that free 15-minute consultation” — but the problem is, are they qualified? Maybe you want to take them to a link that has a questionnaire on there. Are they ready to purchase now? How committed are they? Do they have the time to execute what it is that you’re selling? More importantly, do they have the budget? One of the things I talk about is that you want to work with customers that have the three P’s. They have to have a purpose. They have to have passion. They have to have a pocketbook, or pockets with money in them.

You want to make sure before you invest all of this time doing 15-minute consultations that you’re getting the right people in there. I suggest you make people qualify. Think about this. You’ve done the webinar. Now you get them to a page where they submit this. Once they’re approved, now you want to take them to scheduling software. I recommend Acuity Scheduling. It’s a fabulous program that integrates with a whole bunch of different things. It integrates with PayPal. It integrates with your calendars. It integrates with GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar, does a lot of different things. Now you can have them actually schedule that and look at your calendar and say, “Okay, I’m only going to take these phone calls on Tuesdays between one and four and that’s it.” They can book in 15-minute increments during that time.

That’s what a system does for you. It allows you to work people through the process. Some people would say that’s a funnel, but a system is what truly integrates all these different parts. Now, if they’re not ready to buy, you want to get them on your email. Again, I recommend AWeber for most businesses. Check that out.

Now, you’ve got to create the form that says, “Hey, I’m not ready to get started, but I want to stay in touch.” Then you want to create autoresponders that say, “Okay, here are some of the key points about what we’re talking about.” Maybe it will prompt them to say, “You know what? After I’ve seen these four or five sequenced emails, I’m ready to get started,” and at the bottom of each one of those emails is the CTA: “Are you ready to schedule your 15-minute appointment?” You take them through the same process, but in a different way. You take them into that form that is that questionnaire that qualifies them if they’re ready to purchase, and then, if they do qualify, then you give them the opportunity to select that 15-minute time slot.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, you can see some of the differences, and that building a system is a little bit more complex. It may involve a lot of third party software, whereas just a funnel itself is not going to solve everything. If you really want to gather the right people for your products and services, consider putting a system together. That’s essentially what I do in my business is help people figure out those systems. Think about it. Are you just trying to gather names or do you have an end game in mind? Make sure you work through all of those steps step-by-step in giving people an opportunity to buy from you in the future and buy from you today.

I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this subject. Comment below and share how you have created funnels or systems that have exceeded your expectations!

Just about anyone, not just the talented few, can be creative. Here are six techniques for coming up with loads of creative ideas. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

‘Growth hacking’ is special.

It requires a rare skill set. It’s a unique blend of technical chops and the ability to think at scale to take the number of users from zero to a hundred thousand to a few million. Quickly, within only a few months.

It’s important. But. It’s not new. Or all that unique after all.

In fact, most successful ‘growth hacks’ over the past few years date back to Marketing 101 from decades ago.

Here’s why.

How Dropbox Became a $10 Billion IPO Candidate

Dropbox is widely reported to go public this year.

Their last valuation, set when raising money back in 2014, put them at a $10 billion company.

Currently, they’re adding about 10 million new users each month and doing over $750 million annually, according to MIT.

That puts their total user base somewhere around the 500 million user mark. Which isn’t bad, considering that number has grown five-fold in the last four years.

(image source)

How did they growth so quickly? Especially ramping up in the last few years?

The easy and trite answer is ‘growth hacking’. A so-called ‘new-breed’ of aggressive marketing coined by Sean Ellis, that skyrockets daily users through a combination of technical and engineering tactics.

For example, in its early days Dropbox exploded from only 100,000 users to four million. In less than one year!

Their big success came down to a referral program that offered users a free account. That way, when you shared a document through Dropbox with someone who didn’t have it, they could easily create a free account. And yours would be credit.

So the action to share was incentivized. Which combined with their seamless service and network effects, lead to quick adoption.

Dropbox reportedly tried many tactics before this, including advertising. They even tried hiring a PR firm, but the “results were horrific”, according to CEO Drew Houston. Nothing seemed to scale until they landed on this viral-referral option.

But. This wasn’t necessarily a new or groundbreaking tactic.

In fact, the very first email service provider to take over the mainstream, Hotmail, used exactly the same approach. In the bottom of each email was a little link that incentivized users to create a new account. And this was about twenty years ago now!

(image source)

‘Growth hacking’, a unique approach that requires a special blend of technical talent and skills, is still good-old fashioned marketing at the end of the day.

Here’s why.

The Foundation of Every Successful ‘Growth Hack’

Only in the last few decades have we conflated the terms “marketing” and “advertising”.

Because today, most “marketing” teams only control or influence “advertising”. That’s especially true in larger organizations, where the focus is almost 100% on mass-media Promotion, PR, with perhaps a little Social sprinkled in.

But it wasn’t always like that.

Peter Drucker, the Godfather of Modern Management, once wrote, “the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous”.

In other words, it’s responsible for all this ‘stuff’ that lines up with a customer so well your product or service should almost sell itself.

Think back to Dropbox for a second. Arguably their success over competitors is their brilliant Product. (Even Sean Ellis, growth hacking originator, later opined that “B2C [growth] seems more product-driven.”)

Then their referral program has brilliantly executed Distribution, or “the process of making a product or service available for the consumer or business user that needs it. This can be done directly by the producer or service provider, or using indirect channels with intermediaries.”

You know what? That reminds me of something.

It kinda sounds like… something from college. Something that stuck out beyond the fog of a long night before.

Yes. That’s it. The Marketing Mix taught on your very first day of school.

The origins of the embarrassingly old-school Four-Ps date back to the 1940s. And yet here it is, almost 75 years later, still guiding some of the best and brightest companies in the world.

Want further proof?

Airbnb, another tech titan that seems likely to go public in the near future, got their early ‘growth hacking’ start by piggybacking on Craigslist’s huge user base. They would mass-email people listing on their system, and create a free toolset to help them republish their listings to their own platform.

(image source)

Once again, Distribution. And once again, not original.

In just a few years, YouTube shot up to over 25 million users and was quickly sold to Google.

(image source)

How’d they do it?

By piggybacking on MySpace. They created the ability to ‘share’ an embed code, encouraging MySpace users to embed videos (for free) on their own site, page, profile (or whatever the Hell MySpace called it back then).

These are still Distribution plays, where you’re utilizing another platform to reach the people most likely to want what you have.

But let’s expand.

How about Netflix? Already a massive, public company. Huge, quick growth. Largely due to a strong Lifetime Value of a Customer (because user’s stick with the service for so long), which allows them to spend around $18 dollars as their Cost of Customer Acquisition.

How about Groupon? Laugh all you want, but they’re still a public company. When their founder and CEO was infamously “let go” a few years ago, his shares in the company were still worth over $200 million bucks. (So we shouldn’t feel too bad for him.)

How’d they do it? By spending almost that exact figure – $200 mil a quarter – in order to fund local sales teams.

The list goes on and on. The biggest and brightest tech companies in the world fueled no doubt by highly skilled ‘growth hackers’ with a unique skillset and determination, still owe most of their Thanks to the ideas and strategies from decades ago.

The Great Growth Hacking Hoax Conclusion

A few months ago, Facebook introduced a new way for advertisers and publishers to work together.

The Branded Content update would allow, for the first time on their platform, individual ‘talent’ and influencers to work directly with brands on a sponsored or incentivized basis.

But guess what?

‘Branded content’, once again, has been around for decades. Centuries even.

Here’s my buddy Frank selling Bulova watches in the 1950s.

Before that, Proctor & Gamble was investing in soap operas since the ‘30s.

And before that, two ingenious brothers in rural France needed a way to expand a market for their new product.

So they introduced the Michelin Guide in 1895 (!) to encourage people to buy cars, drive to local restaurants, and buy their brand-new air-filled tires.

Those are the same style of tires we use today when we get in our cars and drive into town from the suburbs to sit down at a Michelin-starred dinner.

Connecting things to the internet has become somewhat blasé. Everything from your lightbulb to your garage door opener, coffeemaker, and water filter is online these days. Simply being connected is no longer enough — what matters is how these devices communicate with each other.

Gathering and analyzing useful insights from this massive flood of data is essential to the survival of your business. Stream syndication allows IoT data to be segmented out and resold via subscriptions. If you have access to cash register data at various retail locations, for example, you could give some of that information to teams that repair the devices to help spur proactive maintenance. You could also syndicate data to discern how much register tape has been used so suppliers can send a new shipment before a store runs out.

Smart cities with the right infrastructure can enable access to data through paid subscriptions, allowing businesses operating within their boundaries to gain unique insights. These businesses would have access to traffic patterns, crime reports, bus and train schedules, or any amount of useful municipal data that might help them run more efficiently.

Of course, that stockpile of data is useless if you don’t understand how to use it.

The Importance of Syndicated Data

Data security is vital in the modern age of hackers and cyberattacks. Businesses must protect their data streams to avoid losing customers, or worse, their entire businesses. This is particularly important for IoT data, which security experts agree will be a major target of malware attacks in 2017. Provisioning and syndicating data can provide that increased level of security.

By provisioning data, you’re able to grant and revoke access at a fine-grained level to individual subscribers, segmenting permissions by channel, user, or use group. Each device is assigned a token that lets you grant individual access rights. It also allows you to dig deeper into streaming data to categorize it and provide valuable insight.

Imagine how many hubs and connected devices exist in the modern person’s home, much less a large-scale smart city deployment. By segmenting and syndicating data, you can look through thousands of connected devices to directly see data streamed from your business’s connected lighting systems to determine which features and functionality are vital for the business to pursue.

Retailers are similarly able to harness this power to understand how their employees and customers think. IoT analytics can track customer behavior, streamline marketing, optimize supply chain efficiency, and provide deep analytics into competitors.

This real-time monitoring and execution of functions truly leverages the power of IoT data. Business can cut costs in operations an maintain system resources, as well as gain a much better sense of control over the data streamed and processed through the network. Data analytics are the key to making decisions based on cold facts instead of stumbling around in the dark.

Implementing Syndicated Data in Your Business

This abundance of information is all well and good, but deciphering it and actually implementing it to help your own bottom line are completely different things. By understanding how this information can — and cannot — help your business, you should be able to find ways to realistically provide a return on investment. These four strategies should help get you there:

1. Avoid dumb smart products. Anyone can connect something to the internet and call it “smart.” If getting online was a sign of true intelligence, our kids would be performing brain surgery considering the amount of time they spend on Snapchat and YouTube. Don’t connect devices to the internet and call it a day — find places where real-time IoT data makes your application more valuable to the actual intent of the product.

IoT data streams make devices truly “smart,” and integrating them into automated systems like IFTTT and hubs like Amazon Echo, Samsung SmartThings, Wink, etc., allows them to trigger actions based on real-world actions. Imagine your smart lightbulb knows to turn itself on — at your preferred color and intensity, naturally — based on your weight leaving your smart bed, and your smart coffeemaker has a pot brewed by the time you saunter into the kitchen. Now we’re talking.

2. Work with other players. The scenario above is nice, but you’re unlikely to sell someone the bulb, bed, and coffee maker required. There are a ton of pieces involved in IoT applications, and your product can’t be smart on its own. Use other services to empower those IoT streams to provide even more value. Numerous services and APIs are available to process data streams for any number of situations.

Monitoring services make data aggregation and visualization much more accessible for your live dashboards and charts. They also empower operations teams to monitor activity, sending real-time notifications to the necessary response parties if certain thresholds are met. Work with other IoT services to ensure you’re getting and providing the most value.

3. Divide and conquer. I briefly mentioned the importance of data provisioning earlier, but I’d like to reiterate how critical it is for the success of any organization. Heavy provisioning can ensure your IoT streams are more secure and controlled, similar to a MAC filter on your Wi-Fi router.

When it comes to syndicated data stream, costs can quickly escalate if you’re paying for access you don’t need. Be sure to start small and continue adding streams as the need grows. Data provisioning will only become more important as time passes, so get started on this today.

4. Always be monetizing. We once went by the motto of “always be selling,” but it’s a rather outdated concept these days. Instead, look for ways to monetize the data streams you already have access to. There could be a startup right now that would love nothing more than to sift through the gold mine of data you’re sitting on to help inform its own product or service. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and you’d be wise to remember that.

While the Internet of Things and big data can quickly become overwhelming, take solace in knowing you don’t need to understand exactly how everything works and interacts. You’re still completely free to build the world’s greatest smart recliner without first worrying about how to interface with every other smart home device under the sun. Know your niche, and the rest will follow.

Similarly, you don’t need to be an expert on big data to recognize the value the information you’re already collecting might have to third parties. Protect that data diligently, and learn to harness its power if you want to survive to fight another day.

Ready to jump into IoT yourself? Check out our webinar “Decoding the Internet of Things,” where we discuss the required technologies to get your IoT dream off the ground. Watch it on-demand here.

I just turned in the manuscript to my second book, The Lost Art of Closing. The book will published on August 8th, 2017, less than 10 months after the release date of my first book, The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need.

The Lost Art of Closing is about gaining all the commitments you need to move from target to close, creating a preference for you and your solution the whole way through. One of the reasons I wrote this book is because too many salespeople struggle to gain the commitments they need. In many cases, they cede control of the process to their prospective client, hurting both parties in the process.

Your prospective client tells you they’ll get back to you with a time for a follow up meeting. You agree, deciding it’s okay to wait for them to call or email you. You have lost control of the process. You are now working on your client’s timeline, and that means it’s going to take you longer to win their business—should they get back to you—and you are going to postpone the time it takes  to provide them with the best results to win.

How about this one: Your prospect tells you to email them your proposal and pricing. You believe you are serving your prospective client by providing them with what they ask for. And then . . . nothing. Silence. Your phone calls aren’t returned, your emails garner no response. Your prospective client may be busy, and it is possible that something came up. It’s also possible that after looking at your pricing without you there to remind them of the value you create, they decided to do nothing. You might have produced a different outcome, but you would have had to do something different.

Maybe you never emailed your pricing and proposal. You showed up, walked your dream client through the proposal, justified the delta between your price and what they were investing before. Then, as you were finishing, your dream client said, “We’d like to take a few days and look this over. We’ll get back to you.” Maybe they will. It’s possible. It sometimes happens. But maybe it won’t.

If you are waiting for your dream client to get back to you, you have made a mistake. You didn’t gain the commitment you needed when you should have.

The post If You Are Waiting for Your Prospect to Get Back with You appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Vancouver, BC, February 15, 2017--PayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) and TIO Networks Corp. (TSXV: TNC), a cloud-based multi-channel bill payment processing and receivables management company, announced a definitive agreement under which PayPal will acquire TIO for $3.35 CAD per share in cash or an approximate $304 million CAD equity value.

When my boss (a.k.a. my wife and business partner) gave me a copy of THE Boss’ autobiography, I tried not to look like an ingrate, even though I anticipated it would be a hard slog.  And that, my friends, is lesson #1 of this blog post: Keep your mind open, not just to the potential of any author to entertain you but also to the possibility that useful lessons—whether for life or business—can come from unexpected sources.  Here are just a few of the inspirational insights I gleaned from Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen’s riveting autobiography.

Luck Is Always Preceded by Hard Work

By the time Born to Run hit #3 on Billboard’s top 200 albums in 1975, Springsteen already had been playing professionally for more than a decade and accumulated way more than 10,000 hours of performance time at bars, nightclubs and concert venues up and down the east coast before getting his “lucky” record deal in 1973.  When reflecting upon his success, Springsteen notes, “It came down to this: I’d studied, honed, worked and sweated to acquire a set of skills that when put into action made me one of the best in the world at what I did. “

Even the Boss Needs Collaborators

As one of the greatest singer/songwriters in Rock ‘n’ Roll, Springsteen’s talk about the need for artistic collaboration—a lesson he learned after going it alone for the better part of 11 years (’88-’99)—is fascinating.  “You need to be adventurous, to listen to your heart and write what it’s telling you, but your creative instinct isn’t infallible.  The need to look for direction, input and some guidance outside of yourself can be healthy and fruitful,” he explains.

Longevity Is Built Through Respect of Teammates

Like startup businesses, most bands fall apart after a few years, even if they achieve momentary fame. Springteen and the E Street Band, on the other hand, have endured for more than five decades (their aforementioned break notwithstanding).

Springsteen attributes this longevity primarily to the E Street Band’s “style and playing abilities that had long been hand stitched to fit me perfectly.” Diving deeper, however, he addresses the fundamentals of teamwork: “Rock ‘n’ Roll bands that last have to come to one basic human realization: the guy standing next to you is more important than you think he is.”

Great Leaders Seek a Dynamic Tension Among Staffers

I’m not sure if Springsteen has read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” but he certainly understands its principles.  Rather than seeking “yes men” with a uniform perspective, Springsteen, like Lincoln before him, welcomed colleagues who had their own, often conflicting, opinions and style. Describing how he “gently played” Steve Van Zandt and Jon Landau “off each other for a purpose,” he adds, “it was why they were both there—I wanted the tension of two complementarily conflicting points of view.”

Show, Don’t Tell

Aghast at seeing posters plastered all over a concert venue proclaiming Springsteen as the NEXT BIG THING on his first trip to London, he had the offending objects ripped from the walls. Sensitive to the fact that his business is “SHOW business and that is the business of SHOWING… not TELLING,” he also could have been talking about modern marketing.  Brands that deliver value through their actions (e.g., useful content, speedy customer service, CSR, etc.) will always beat out those that rely on empty promises. “You don’t TELL people anything, you SHOW them, and let them decide,” The Boss concludes.

Final Notes on Born to Run: While witnessing Springsteen’s momentarily longest concert in the US ever (he topped it by a few minutes the next night) last summer at The Meadowlands with my grown-up kids, I marveled at his multi-generational appeal, his age-defying energy and talent, and the clear yet complex nature of his brand.  And while I can’t be certain non-fans will enjoy his autobiography as much as I did, I can assure you it is rich with lyrical prose and deep insights, including this hard-earned gem, “We honor our parents by carrying their best forward and laying the rest down.”

The post Marketing Wisdom From The Boss appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

  

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The booming growth of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), like most transformational technologies, is both exciting and scary. It’s exciting to consider all the ways our lives may improve, from managing our calendars to making  medical diagnoses, but it’s scary to consider the social and personal implications — and particularly the implications for our careers. As machine learning continues to grow, we all need to develop new skills in order to differentiate ourselves. But which ones?

It’s long been known that AI and automation/robotics will change markets and workforces. Self-driving cars will force over three thousand truck drivers to seek new forms of employment, and robotic production lines like Tesla’s will continue to eat away at manufacturing jobs, which are currently at 12 million and falling. But this is just the beginning of the disruption. As AI improves, which is happening quickly, a much broader set of “thinking” rather than “doing” jobs will be affected. We’re talking about jobs, that, until the last few years, we couldn’t imagine being done without the participation of an actual, trained human being.  Jobs like teacher, doctor, financial advisor, stockbroker, marketer, and business consultant.

There are just a lot of things that machines can do better than human beings, and we shouldn’t be too proud to admit it.  Many skilled jobs follow the same general workflow:

1. Gather data
2. Analyze the data
3. Interpret the results
4. Determine a recommended course of action
5. Implement the course of action

We can look at any number of occupations to see that this holds true.  Doctors perform tests, analyze the results, interpret the results to make a diagnosis, plan a course of treatment, and then work with the patient to make this treatment plan a reality.

Financial advisers gather and analyze data about their clients and potential investment vehicles, interpret the implications given a variety of factors such as risk tolerance, recommend an investment strategy, and help their clients carry this strategy out over time.

Business consultants do much of the same, but diagnose and solve business problems.

These highly skilled workers can command high rates because of three capabilities.  Their abilities to go through the early rote tasks quickly and accurately; their experiences and judgment in determining a course of action; and their savviness  for helping clients navigate that course.  AI and machine learning will quickly surpass our abilities on the first two capabilities—and this will shift the skillset required for any worker wishing to stay in these careers as they are transformed by artificial intelligence.

It’s easy to see the role of automated systems in data gathering and analysis.  We’ve accepted that machines can do these types of tasks efficiently.  However, their potential goes much further.  Human beings are limited, and often biased.  Doctors will never be able to keep up with every new publication in their areas of expertise.  Instead, they must rely on a small number of personal experiences rather than the complete knowledge in their field. Consultants, too, can only experience so many company transformations over their careers.  From a narrow set of experiences, they form their preferences, expectations, and insights.  Human beings can’t just plug in more servers when we reach our limits processing new information.  Instead, we must rely on our own, often biased, preferences, habits, and rules of thumb.

Some people may say that we will never trust machines with important decisions such as the management of our health and money, but this is twentieth century thinking.  But a new generation is engaging with smart machines that they trust, and often prefer.  Further, it’s hard for anyone to argue with results.  IBM’s Watson is already cracking medical cases that stump doctors, and investors are fleeing expensive, actively managed funds for better-performing passive ones. The value of some of our most prized career paths is already being eroded.

Those that want to stay relevant in their professions will need to focus on skills and capabilities that artificial intelligence has trouble replicating — understanding, motivating, and interacting with human beings.  A smart machine might be able to diagnose an illness and even recommend treatment better than a doctor.  It takes a person, however, to sit with a patient, understand their life situation (finances, family, quality of life, etc.), and help determine what treatment plan is optimal.

Similarly, a smart machine may be able to diagnose complex business problems and recommend actions to improve an organization.  A human being, however, is still best suited to jobs like spurring the leadership team to action, avoiding political hot buttons, and identifying savvy individuals to lead change.

It’s these human capabilities that will become more and more prized over the next decade.  Skills like persuasion, social understanding, and empathy are going to become differentiators as artificial intelligence and machine learning take over our other tasks.  Unfortunately, these human-oriented skills have generally been viewed as second priority in terms of training and education.  We’ve all experienced the doctor, financial planner, or consultant who is more focused on his or her reports and data than on our unique situations and desires.

For better or worse, these skills will become essential to anyone who wants to stay relevant in their field as automated systems proliferate.  We have three recommendations:

• Don’t fight the progress of technology. Machine learning and AI have the ability to improve outcomes and lower cost — so don’t fight the robots. Welcome the change in your industry and work to make it fruitful and complementary.
• Examine your own capabilities interacting with, motivating, and assessing people. Recognize your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to emotional intelligence.
• Invest in developing your emotional intelligence. The simplest way is to change your mental model about what is important in your role, and begin focusing on how you can better manage, influence, and relate to others.  Or, take it a step further by seeking out training and stretch opportunities.

What you have to offer — what you can do better than any smart machine — is relate to the people around you.  Begin to nurture and invest in these abilities the same way that you have the more technical parts of your career.  If you can be an outstanding motivator, manager, or listener, then you will still have a part to play as technology changes your industry.

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

Peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, defined as informal payments made from one person to another, have long been a prominent feature of the payments industry.

That’s because individuals transfer funds to each other on a regular basis, whether it's to make a recurring payment, reimburse a friend, or split a dinner bill.  

Cash and checks have historically dominated the P2P ecosystem, and they’re still a popular tool. But as smartphones become a primary computing device, top digital platforms, like Venmo and Google Wallet, have enabled customers to turn away from cash and make those payments digitally with ease. Over the next few years, though overall P2P spend will remain constant, a shift to mobile payments across the board and increased spending power from the digital-savvy younger generation will cause the mobile P2P industry to skyrocket. 

That poses a problem for firms providing these services, though. Historically, most of these players have taken on mobile P2P at a loss because it’s a low-friction way to onboard users and won’t catch on unless it’s free, or largely free, to consumers. But as it becomes more popular and starts to eat into these firms’ traditional streams of revenue, finding ways to monetize is increasingly important. That could mean moving P2P functionality into more profitable environments, leveraging existing networks of friends to encourage spending, or offering value-added services at a nominal fee.

A new report from BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, examines what’s driving this shift to mobile P2P and explains why companies need to find a way to capitalize on it quickly. It discusses how firms can use the tools they have to gain in the P2P space, details several cases, and evaluates which strategies might be the most effective in monetizing these platforms.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Consumers still want mobile P2P services, and they’re turning to them. Individuals pay their peers on a regular basis, and as smartphones are increasingly used as computing devices, these consumers look to such services for fast and easy ways to pay. 
• Monetizing P2P is more important than ever. Initially, P2P was a valuable onboarding tool for companies, and when it was still a small segment, taking it on at little value or a loss didn’t have major implications. But as volume grows and user bases scale fast, finding ways to monetize quickly should be a priority for firms looking to stay ahead.
• New technology could put some apps ahead of their peers. P2P continues to rely on networks, especially for informal, social transactions. But rather than having a large network, it’s becoming important for firms to understand their user bases and the networks within them. This means that chat apps, and leveraging bot and AI technology, may offer a distinct advantage.

In full, the report:

• Forecasts the growth of the P2P market, and what portion of that will come from mobile channels, through 2021.
• Explains the factors driving that growth and details why it will come from increased usage, not increased spend per user.
• Evaluates why mobile P2P isn’t profitable for companies, and details several cases of attempts to monetize.
• Assesses which of these strategies could be most successful, and what companies need to leverage to succeed in the space.
• Provides context from other markets to explain shifting trends.

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1. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >> Learn More Now
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Customer churn, as we reviewed in a post last week, is an important metric to watch. As marketers, it is in our power to improve customer churn, to keep more customers engaged and satisfied so that we don’t have to spend so much time and effort recruiting new customers.

To address customer churn, we first must understand the different things that can go wrong. Here is a list of several common reasons why your churn rate might be higher than normal:

1. Your product does not meet their needs or solve their problem
2. They had a bad shopping, sales, or service experience
3. Your competitor poaches them with a special offer

The first step in fixing your churn rate problem is figuring out which of these factors is causing them to leave in the first place. It may be one or more of these reasons, or it may be something else entirely. Until you know what it is, there is little you can do to fix it.

Surveys and focus groups are the best way to diagnose the problem. You can look at data and analytics at your disposal and make educated guesses based on what you see in the marketplace, but nothing is as effective as going straight to the source.

Your frontline staff can also help here, since they are the ones closest to your customers. They might be able to share the things they hear from people who don’t become regular customers.

Now, let’s get to the answer. Below are several things you can do to improve customer churn for each of the potential issues mentioned above.

Your product does not meet their needs or solve their problem:

1. Iterate – talk to customers and adjust your offering according to their needs
2. Make sure you are targeting the right customers with your marketing
3. Make sure you are not lying in your marketing copy, adjust the language and highlight the correct benefits

They had a bad shopping, sales, or service experience:

1. Rethink service – processes, people, and technology
2. Put customer relationships first and foremost in any new strategy
3. Try a softer sales approach and a more hands-on, educational strategy

Your competitor poaches them with a special offer:

1. Use marketing to highlight your unique value proposition to make it clearer why your price is what it is
2. Offer discounts for loyal customers
3. Continue to market to existing customers to make sure they feel the love

These 7 mini-questions will create way more value for your prospects—and help you sell more. Implement them now for immediate results.

The post 7 Mini-Questions to Ask Your Prospects to Create More Value appeared first on Sales Speaker Marc Wayshak.

I met Aman Naimat, Senior Vice President of Technology at Demandbase at their headquarters in San Francisco on my recent visit to California for Social Media Strategies Summit. Aman is working on leveraging the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data science for marketing and sales platforms. On this podcast, episode 150, Aman and I discuss how AI functions in account-based marketing (ABM).

Image source: Demand Gen Report

Before working with Demandbase Aman was previously founder and CTO of Spiderbook, a data-driven sales engine for account-based targeting. Aman has been building CRM systems since he was 19 and was the architect for the Oracle CRM Applications. He has a Masters in Computer Science with research focused on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Understanding from Stanford University, a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Stanford, and is a Fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Aman has many patents and scientific publications on Information Retrieval, CRM, and Databases.

AI is Changing the B2B Landscape

Demandbase found that among 500 B2B marketing executives 80% believe that AI will completely change B2B marketing in the next five years. Previous marketing automation focused on efficiency but lacks intimacy with buyers. AI can now help to build this intimacy between brands and their customers. An infinite number of rules are required to create a personalized experience, and the new generation of AI allows for a greater volume of rules. The first step is having knowledge and an understanding of your buyers and their interests to identify what actions are needed to create a highly personalized experience.

Aman noted that Artificial Intelligence is just getting started and there’s lots of excitement about it. He doesn’t recommend jumping all in with AI; instead, focus on problems that will generate revenue and that you already have data on and understand and is challenging to humans. For example, serving highly personalized content to website visitors is one way to utilize AI at scale. Aman says when you mingle structured and unstructured data, magic happens. A fully-customized experience requires 10 billion rules. A human cannot process this volume, but AI powered systems can!

In AI, deep learning builds on natural language generation, and chat bots allow for a personalized conversation. However, the whole buyer’s journey is a conversation according to Aman. The conversations are also happening outside of your website, in person, at conferences, on social media, on forums, etc. Aman suggests allowing AI to access the available unstructured data via the Internet, noting that it is the new source of truth.

The New Generation of AI

Aman notes a trust factor is needed with AI. When it works, it often does non-obvious things. AI powered systems should tell you why it’s doing something, and it should allow for feedback from humans. He says the low 10% adoption rate of AI is because there is a lack of viable systems with very few vertical industry solutions. Good AI products fit comfortably into day-to-day life, and people naturally understand how to use them. These programs are friendly and useful such as Netflix and Amazon.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is all about hyper-targeting accounts that will likely buy from your brand. Artificial Intelligence allows you to understand the accounts greater. It allows for increased intimacy, through knowledge of who to talk to, general research, and the creation of personalized messaging both online and offline.

 

On this episode, you’ll also hear from the Founder and CEO of Demandbase, Chris Golec. Chris explains how marketing needs a better understanding of how to use AI and how it will impact results. Listen to the full episode to hear Chris’ prediction of when AI will become mainstream in B2B marketing.

Featured On This Episode:

• Demandbase’s website
• Aman Naimat on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Chris Golec on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Download Social Business Journal, Volume 9: What’s Working in Employee Advocacy
• Join our Social Business Engine community
• Write a review of this podcast in iTunes
• Social Business Engine on Twitter: @sbengine
• Social Business Engine video channel | YouTube channel

There are TWO WAYS you can listen to this podcast with Aman Naimat.

Tech startups don’t have a lot of room for miscalculating buyer behaviors. Here’s what you need to know to be able to anticipate, identify and satisfy changing buyer behaviors for the sake of creating an effective marketing strategy.

The buyer you engage with today won’t be the buyer you engage with tomorrow. The reality is that the fast-paced, whirlwind nature of the tech landscape means that the needs of buyers are changing at a rapid pace. What are some of the things that can drive the fickle natures of buyers? Most people are influenced by two factors:

• Rising expectations
• Mobile obsessions

The reality is that a B2B company needs to be able to rise to the challenge when the expectations of buyers change. The goal should be to meet demands without shattering the core of what you offer. This can often be achieved by tweaking the way you deliver a product or engage with buyers instead of actually overhauling your product completely. Survival in the competitive B2B marketplace all comes down to creating a buyer-led marketing strategy.

Keeping Your Finger on the Pulse of Your Target Audience

It’s very important to create a buyer persona early in the game if your B2B company is attempting to create a targeted and tight marketing initiative. However, what many startup leaders fail to realize is that creating an initial buyer persona is only the first step in what should be a very long and consistent process. It’s vital that you make sure the buyer persona you’re basing your marketing plans on doesn’t become an outdated relic that causes you to create a strategy that’s out of step. Here is the proper process for creating and maintaining a relevant buyer persona:

• Step 1: Use data to compile a primary buyer persona
• Step 2: Build a campaign targeting that persona
• Step 3: Measure the campaign’s success and engagement level following a launch
• Step 4: Measure the campaign’s success over time
• Step 5: Utilize surveys from current and past clients to gauge buyer changes
• Step 6: Tweak your buyer persona

Understanding the Habits and Motivations of Buyers

It’s important to craft and study your B2B personas using a variety of metrics across various social channels. Some of the data regarding prospects that you must collect and assess includes:

• Habits
• Interests
• Pain points
• Interaction levels

Why Some Behaviors Matter More Than Others?

Marketers can sometimes become alarmed when they discover changes in buyer behavior. However, not all changes are equal. What are the changes that are important? Here are the top changes in buyer wants that a B2B company cannot afford to ignore:

• A need for more collaboration between the buyer and the source
• A desire for more streamlined content and communication
• A desire for one-on-one attention
• A need for more flexibility in terms of committing to an integrated product or system
• A need for personalized solutions over ready-made solutions
• A desire to bring either more or fewer people into the decision-making process
• A need to stretch out buying cycles

How to Respond to Changes in Behavior from Buyers

Some changes in buyer habits are quite easy to spot. The changes that are easy to spot should be used as thermometers that can gauge the interest and engagement of buyers before they completely change course. One of the biggest indicators that something is changing among buyers is a sudden decrease in the open rates and click-through rates on emails. If you notice that customers are ignoring more emails than before, it may time to change your communication strategy. The reality is that today’s consumers are being flooded with more digital content than ever before. Every brand is trying to get in front of your buyers. The reality is that some of them may be doing a better job than you are at engaging your audience. How can you adjust your marketing strategy to fix the problem of ignored emails? Some steps to follow include:

• Create more personalized content
• Send less content to avoid flooding inboxes and creating information fatigue
• Focus on creating better content
• Try to shift some of your content delivery to social media

The Role of Impatience in Shifting Buyer Behaviors

Impatience is actually one of the buyer behaviors that is proving to be the most challenging for marketers to adjust to. Our mobile world has caused every second we wait for something to feel like an excruciating eternity. The 85 billion mobile searches that happen each year exceed the amount of desktop searches that take place. Most buyers want the ease of accessing information and taking action using mobile devices. However, they also want secure and highly responsive interactions. It can be extremely hard to put together elegant mobile resources that are also safe and user-friendly. This means that marketers have to work around the beast that is contradiction. Why is it important to deliver when it comes to mobile? The fact that three out of four mobile searches lead to action should be enough to inspire B2B companies to be willing to cater to contradictory desires. This is especially important when you consider that up to 80 percent of users simply abandon a mobile site if they encounter a bad or inconvenient experience. Attracting leads and pleasing current clients comes down to having a mobile presence that captures these two qualities:

• Easy to navigate
• Personalized

Adaptive and Agile Marketing Is the Answer

B2B marketing needs to be more adaptive and agile than ever before. Buyer behaviors will only continue to splinter in more directions as improving technology increases the demand for instant access to information and lightning-fast responses. There is really only one constant when it comes to giving buyers what they need. Your B2B company must be able to offer the solution to the problem your buyers are trying to solve. This is admittedly not an easy thing to do. The only way to achieve this in today’s crowded marketplace is to create customer-centric content that establishes your brand’s value, trustworthiness and ability to deliver. While the technology and platforms you use to get your message across may be sophisticated, your actions should be hinged on the simple philosophy of connecting by offering to help.

Having a strong sales team is absolutely necessary to the success of any sales manager, director or VP.

Therefore, it seems only natural that when it comes to building your sales team, you cannot simply rely on the luck of the draw—you need to have a strategic plan in place to find and hire the right salespeople.

With that in mind, let us explore a couple of ways you can build the ideal sales team.

 

2 Underutilized Ways to Build a High-Performing Sales Team

1. Look for candidates with the key traits that support a successful sales team

Some of these traits include:

• Need for Achievement. With every successful salesperson, there needs to be a driving force to make it through the grind and every day challenges. The Need to Achieve is that driving force, as this is what keeps the members of your sales team motivated. Additionally, people with the desire to achieve more tend to serve as motivation for others.
• A sense of Competitiveness. Every sales team should have a healthy sense of Competitiveness. This is important because a sales team that is on its toes and eager to win challenges really wants to beat out competitors while crushing previous sales goals.
• A strong desire for career advancement. If a member of your sales team is content to stay in one level of their career that may mean they do not have the inner Drive necessary to be a high-performing salesperson. Look to add members to your team that are goal-driven and looking forward to their future. When members of your sales team strive to get better at what they do for the chance of career advancement, it will help them and your company become more successful.
• A genuine sense of Optimism. Aside from a strict work ethic, you should look for sales candidates that display a sense of Optimism. Things do not always go according to plan, so having sales reps who know how to look past minor setbacks and continue working hard is a huge benefit for your team. When you have reps who show an optimistic outlook on life, they tend to look toward the future instead of letting their past failures negatively affect them.
• The ability to set aside their pride and learn from others. Pride can get in the way of a salesperson’s career, especially if they refuse to ask for help or do not want to learn from others. In the world of sales, learning is a continuing process, and it should be a priority for your sales team to grow and learn as much as they can. Look to add new members who are eager to learn and encourage existing sales reps to look to others with more experience for help with improving their skills.
• The willingness to help others. Although the sales process can seem like an individual process at times, sales is a team sport. As new sales reps are welcomed into your sales team, it is important for your existing sales reps to serve as mentors for new members. This will not only allow your team to grow at a more rapid rate—it will display your sales reps’ leadership abilities.

 

2. Monitor your sales team’s progress and define success

In order to build a high-performing sales team, you must clearly define what success means for your team and your company.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that sales success is factored through the behavior and results of your team, not just one or the other.

When you focus only on sales activity, closing becomes less of a priority. Likewise, if you only focus on your sales reps’ results, it could be discouraging to your team in the event of a sales drought.

To help you measure your team’s sales performance, here are a few performance indicators you should pay attention to:

 

Lead Response Times

Ask yourself:

“How quickly are my salespeople responding to incoming leads?

When sales prospects are involved, time is of the essence and your reps must act quickly in order to improve their chances of success.

According to statistics, a rep is 100 times less likely to make contact with a lead if they wait to call 30 minutes after receiving a submission. After that, the odds of reaching that lead drop by up to 3000 times!

Make sure your team is responding to leads immediately in order to maximize their chances of converting a lead.

 

Average Call Duration

A major part of the sales process involves developing a connection with clients and prospects.

When it comes to phone calls, your salespeople could be spending too much time with a client. On the flip side, they may not be dedicating enough time to them.

Keep track of your sales reps’ call durations to help you identify who is underperforming and why they are missing their quotas.

 

Social Media

This is a tough indicator to keep track of, but it is extremely beneficial to your sales team.

High-performing sales reps are often active on social media, especially LinkedIn ─ a great resource for connecting with leads.

This can be tied back to sales reps with a sense of achievement and enthusiasm, as they are willing to go above and beyond what is generally required from salespeople.

One way to keep track of this is to check your reps’ sales and/or CRM notes to see if they have logged any time into prospecting through social media.

 

Final Thoughts

In the end, building a high-performing sales team requires finding the right people to join your team and encouraging them to succeed as they follow their career goals.

It also involves defining what success means for your company and sales team, and then measuring that success so you can continue to push boundaries and set new goals.

Are you ready to build a powerful sales team?

Contact SalesDrive, LLC today to find out how we can help you find and hire high-Drive sales candidates who are relentless in their quest for success.

 

The post 2 Simple, Yet Overlooked, Ways to Build a High-Performing Sales Team appeared first on SalesDrive, LLC.

A lot of articles highlighting sales and appointment setting techniques focus on helping your company move from good to great.

However, a lot of sales success tips that could help you become one of the elites in your industry are overlooked.

The following is a look at a handful of tips you might not have considered in planning for your growth.

Prioritise the Discovery

It is unlikely that a sales organisation will ever become elite without prioritising the discovery stage.

Of course, the first phase of discovery is identifying the ideal prospects to target for appointment setting. This process includes developing a profile that meshes with each of your solutions.

Then, research to develop a thorough understanding of the interests and needs of each persona. This pre-call research prepares you to ask the right questions to get to the pain points of your prospects.

By learning the particular circumstances of a buyer, sets you up to sell the most targeted solution possible.

Plan Your Time Investment

Time is the salesperson’s most valuable asset, so it makes sense to budget for it just as you would money.

Calculate the amount of time you expect your reps to put into the entire selling process to reach your periodic goals.

Look for strategies that allow you to optimise results and reduce time-wasters. Find efficiency improvements.

Outsourcing inside sales activities like appointment setting is one method teams are using to help reps focus on closing deals.

Your sales team is your most valuable resource. Therefore, it makes sense to have them doing what they do best – selling.

Send Personalised HTML Emails

Top marketing and sales teams are using responsive, personalised HTML email designs in 2017 to capture attention from individual prospects and customers.

This approach to automated communication allows you to communicate on a personal level while achieving mass scale with a large contact base.

The trick is to design messages that appeal to particular preferences and interests of the segmented individual and organise efficient distribution. This is why your buyer personas are so important to have prepared from the start.

Email campaigns are particularly useful during lead generation and in customer retention stages. Keeping your brand and valuable resources in front of clients is an important element of retention and brand advocacy.

Leverage Social Selling

Top sellers use social tools like LinkedIn and Twitter to cast a wider net in appointment setting.

Setting up profiles and interacting directly with people in your target market allows you to learn more about their traits and behaviours. You also learn about how they mix with people in their industries and marketplaces.

This increased access to prospect information is helpful in connecting with prospects on social platforms.

Engage in informative and educational conversations that build rapport and open the door for you to start conversations about a prospect’s needs and your solutions. Because when you think about it, buyers are using social selling too. Except that they are using it to research you and your company.

Wrap Up

To reach elite levels of performance in your industry, you need to consider factors that lead to optimised appointment setting and sales conversion success.

Focus on strategies that personalizethe buyer experience and leverage tech tools to do so efficiently.

Most importantly, document & share the appointment setting techniques that work best for you.

It could be a case that some of your team is pursuing bad-quality leads and your techniques may help them.

My sales management mentor, Donnie Williams (who was also my sales manager in the late 1990’s and my business partner in the early 2000’s), was great with one liners. He’s the one who came up with the quip I often use when salespeople tell us they are worried about selling more because production or the operations people can’t keep up. With a straight face he would reply that “your job in sales is not to worry about or help out operations; your job is to bury the bastards!” Another one of my favorite Donnie lines was “Sales is about results and they do not lie.”

I couldn’t agree more. However, today, it’s amusing how few salespeople seem willing to take full responsibility for their own results. They’re masters at pointing the finger of blame at everyone: It’s Obama’s (now Trump’s) fault. It’s my territory. It’s the stupid customer. It’s the competitor. It’s the product. It’s our pricing. And everyone’s new favorite, “the sales development reps (SDRs) are not getting me enough meetings and leads, and many that they do hand over are crap.”

Listen up, folks, and listen good. I don’t care what you read in some blog post about inbound marketing, or were told by a #socialselling charlatan preaching that the phone is dead, or how much your low-performing peers whine about the lack of leads coming from marketing or the BDRs/SDRs, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE HEALTH OF YOUR OWN SALES PIPELINE. Period.

Top-producers own their results. Always have, always will. While they love a freebie or a quality lead as much as the next guy, they never depend on someone else to fill their pipeline. Said differently, they don’t allow themselves to play the victim card. The perennial winners I’ve observed in sales roles work all stages of the sales process/funnel and never take for granted that the top of the funnel has enough going into it. And if they sense for even a second that the lead or appointment flow isn’t what it should be to enable them to hit their sales goals, they immediately spring into action and laser-focus on creating new opportunities. Please read that last line again, because there are way too many sellers living in reactive mode chasing only known opportunities instead of pursuing strategic target accounts.

Let me repeat the great phrase that a top-producer shared last year at a New Sales. Simplified. workshop I was leading:

“Appointments set for us by the BDRs/SDRs should be viewed the same way we view the Social Security portion of our retirement income – as gravy.”

Not sure any of us can say that better. Just like we are responsible for our own retirement income and better not be counting on the government, we are completely responsible for ensuring that our pipelines are jam-packed with sales opportunities. Can I get an “amen!”

——————————————————————————————————

If any of what’s in this article resonates with you, or scares you, or provokes you toward action, or is maybe something that your colleagues, sales manager, or friends in sales need to hear, please invite them to join a few of my favorite sales gurus and me at the Virtual Sales Kickoff 2017.  The theme is Prospecting, Pipeline, and Productivity. It’s Thursday at 11:00am Eastern (10:00 where the cool kids live), and it’s FREE thanks to our sponsor Cirrus Insight. Even if you can’t make the live event on the web, CLICK HERE to register anyway so you get access to the recording. I promise that you’ll leave that hour with powerful, practical ideas that will help you improve at prospecting and keeping your pipeline full. Don’t miss out on this opportunity! There are already 5000 people registered.

I talked with Matt Heinz, a prolific author and nationally recognized, award-winning blogger. He is president and founder of Heinz Marketing, a pipeline strategy and marketing execution company, & has fifteen years of marketing, business development, and sales experience moving from a variety of organizations and industries. He’s a dynamic speaker, known not only for his keen insight and humor but is actionable in motivating takeaways. Matt’s career focuses on consistently delivering measurable results with greater sales, revenue growth, product success, and customer loyalty. Matt is a repeat winner of the top fifty most influential people in sales lead management, and top fifty sales and marketing influencers, and today we are going to talk about sales enablement best practices for B2B marketers.

DR: I’m super excited to dig into this topic, and after seeing you recently speak at CM World, I know that you are going to have some great insight, and your bio lives up to the truth as far as not only your keen insight but your humor. You definitely lived up to that. So, to kind of just dig into everything, I first want to let the listeners out there have you explain what sales enablement is.

MH: Well, to me, sales enablement is best defined by how we measure it. I think that sales enablement is focused on increasing the efficiency of the sales organization, helping them spend more time actively selling, as well as increasing the conversion rate of their opportunities to close deals. So, if we can help them convert more and do it faster, that is the ultimate measure of value, I believe, of sales engagement.

DR: You’re saying ‘we’. You mean the marketing team, correct?

MH: I do. I think sales enablement historically has come out of sales operations, but it’s often in more of a reactive and administrative role. I think sales enablement is a great opportunity for marketing to embrace more than their traditional role, to really more actively support more of the sales funnel, and huge part of sales enablement is content, it’s stories, it’s ensuring you’ve got the right message for the right prospect at the right stage of the buying journey. It is perfectly suited for marketing to own that, and create really more consistency and velocity of customer conversation.

DR: I’d like to kind of start on the top and work our way through to the end if that’s all right, and like to have you maybe talk about at the beginning how marketing can help with providing buyer insights as far as like, who should sales go after? How can marketing help there?

MH: I think marketing has a perfect opportunity to really own the customer persona, to understand in your target organization, what does the buying committee look like. CED tells us that on average, amongst B2B buyers, there’s now 6.8 individuals that are actively involved in making a purchase decision. So, it’s not just understanding who the buyer is, but understanding who the buyers are. Each of those individuals often has their own goals, their own perspectives, so they need their own set of messaging. I think where we see a lot of account based marketing programs come into play, is building consensus and coordination among those different people, sometimes from different departments, very often from different perspectives, to build internal consensus towards filling a need, and ultimately choosing your solution.

DR: And I would like to just kind of give a shout out to Adele Revella. I think she’s a great resource for helping you. Are you familiar with Adele?

MH: Adele literally wrote the book on target personas, and you’d do well to follow sort of her perspectives, but I think just to simply understand who the primary players are, differentiate decision makers from stakeholders and influencers, understand the different stages they’re going through as they make a decision, including stages that have nothing to do with your product or service, and simply have to deal with them getting to a change for themselves. What does that change mean, what does it represent for each of those individuals in that group of 6.8?

DR: Let’s assume we’ve done our homework, and you have your buyer insights. How and where can this information be best utilized?

MH: Well, everywhere. I think a lot of times personas get developed, and then they’re applied to marketing campaigns. Clearly, I can’t think of anything that is in front of one of those target prospects that shouldn’t be driven by those target personas. I think probably the biggest thing when we talk about sales enablement, is making sure that the messages coming from sales reflect those personas as well.

DR: And sales might be too caught up in the weeds.

MH: You see a lot of differences and conflicts sometimes between sales and marketing. I believe that the vast majority of the time, people are working with the best of intentions. Sales is not trying to just shoehorn people into deals without making sure that they need it, but I think left to their own devices, sales wants to sell, unless you can put a case in front of them that says, listen, you’re not going to compel someone to move forward unless they have a fundamental need & here are some tools, messages, & templates to do that. I think that in the same way, marketing needs to understand that a chatty prospect is not a qualified prospect. Someone who attends your webinar isn’t necessarily someone who’s ready to buy in the next thirty days. So, there’s a coming together of sales and marketing, against common objectives that I think will help them find quite a bit of common ground.

DR: In the last couple years we’ve heard that sales and marketing need to get together in the same meetings. You’re yet another expert out there that’s saying, ‘Hey, sales and marketing, hold hands, get together, talk everything out, let’s get aligned.’ Top of mind awareness obviously has always been critical. That’s mainly the role of marketing in general. Can you dig into some ways that marketing teams can do this?

MH: Sure. I think first is just that the approach is important. I don’t really want to be known, I want to be known for something, and that for something, I’d rather it not be my product or service, I’d rather it be sort of a specific outcome, or solving a particular pain, or helping someone receive a particular outcome that they care about. And I think you can do that without really helping people understand anything about your product or service, simply by sharing information, becoming a trusted expert in a particular category.

Ideally, a greater and greater percent of your addressable market starts to seek you out and come back, because you are providing value in some consistent way around a consistent theme, and I think this is where content marketing could really play a big role, because companies can create and curate content around some central themes, so people start to associate them with those themes, and when you’re known for a theme, when you’re associated with approaching and tackling a particular problem, when people have that problem they’ll come to you for advice. There have been many studies that show psychologically, there are people making the connection in their head between ‘you understand this problem, therefore you may have a solution for me’. Just because you understand and create good content doesn’t mean you have the best solution, but that is the connection most people make in their heads, which makes you as the seller the incumbent when someone comes back to you and says, ‘I now have this problem. Help me.’

DR: I think a lot of people don’t quite understand content marketing all the way. I always call it the simplest and hardest thing to understand. It’s not a linear way of thinking, but once you get it, you’re like ‘Oh, that’s what it is?’ You explain it really well. Say you’re a small business owner or marketing person for a small company. How can you create the same sort of brand awareness as big companies with their target markets?

MH: Well, does a company of one count? I try not to use myself as an example, but I think about when I first started Heinz Marketing about eight years ago, there was just me, and a laptop, and a bus pass. There was nothing else. I didn’t have the budget, I was using Constant Contact and pulling a few emails out every once in a while. What I did have was a WordPress blog, and I opened a Twitter account. I tried to think about, okay, what’s the kind of content I want to be known for? What’s the kind of content that the people I want to attract to my business are going to be interested in? I started writing, started sharing, started curating, and that continues to this day to be foundational for us as a business. We’ve been investing in that for many years now. For some people, writing comes easier to them than others, and some people, content creation is easier. I’m not going to say it’s easy to be consistent and do this on a regular basis, but I also believe that we’re living in an amazing time when you can create advantages for yourself, you can create an audience.

You can own a media channel with zero cost if you taking advantage of, and dig into, and put in the time and effort to create it.

DR: You said eight years ago, and now you’re one of the top fifty most influential people in sales and lead management, right? And you started as a company of one, and you basically just practiced what you’re preaching now, right?

MH: What’s interesting about that is, influencer lists and whatnot were never the goals, still aren’t the goals. It’s a nice validation for what we’re doing, and clearly, I’ll take it, because it helps drive leads in the door as well, but it was never about getting on any lists. It was about leveraging the channels I had in front of me with zero dollars. I think it’s an opportunity that almost anyone has. One of my favorite examples to watch these days is actually Carlos Gil, who was at LinkedIn for a while. I believe he’s at BMC Software now, but he has become synonymous with leveraging Snapchat in B2B. He’s made something amazing for himself just by being himself, by being generous, by sharing good content.

MH: Do it on a quality level, respond, be generous, be responsive, create a two-way level of communication. I think the bigger the company gets, the less likely you have individuals that are willing to step out and play that role themselves, but we don’t want to follow buildings and logos, we want to follow people, we want to hear from people, and sometimes the smaller the company, the easier it is for someone to sort of be the face of that company, or for someone to step out and be a representative of that company. But I think the more often people can leverage personality, and humanity, and emotion in their content, and in their marketing, the better it works.

DR: Well, I think a lot of people know this, but buying decisions are actually emotional decisions. They’re not they’re not analytical decisions. Suppose that you know you have brand awareness that you’re creating, your company is a trusted source, but circling back to the whole sales enablement with marketing and sales, how can marketing and marketing departments help create name recognition for individual salespeople, and/or do you feel like this is something that’s really important, and marketers should focus on, or should it mainly be more about the company and its brand awareness?

MH: It’s always going to be a mix of both, but I think it is important to build relationships and to create a bond between prospect and seller. And let’s not pretend that the seller is a building. I think a lot of companies are concerned about individual salespeople building into their own personal brand, and when they walk out the door, they walk out the door with that. That’s always going to be a challenge with any employee that you have. You’re always going to lose some intellectual capital, you’re going to lose something internally or externally when people leave, but in the meantime, I’d rather leverage that, and I’d rather leverage the fact that people can build relationships – that people want to follow other people, not buildings and logos. You as a marketing team can empower every sales rep with content, with tools, with processes that they can follow to regularly and far more frequently engage a wider, scalable audience of prospects. It’s everything from curating content into their social channels to remembering to send someone a happy birthday card. There’s a thousand things you can do as part of that, some more scalable than others, but all of it is best done when it’s people building relationships with people.

DR: I’d like to move on to lead nurturing and nurture campaigns. These words get thrown out a lot, and they sometimes feel like they mean similar things, sometimes they seem like they mean different things, but I would like to kind of have you explain. Because I think that this is one of the things that’s really right up your alley, and I’ve heard you talk about, and I’d like to first of all just explain what these are, and then I’d like to have you explain some good ways these can be accomplished, the lead nurturing and nurture campaigns.

MH: Sure. I think in general what I’ve found is usually between ten and fifteen percent of inbound leads are qualified and ready to buy, and something between sixty and sixty-five percent of inbound leads are qualified and not ready to buy. So, you’ve got an audience where you have the right person at the right company, they just don’t have the level of urgency or a particular interest, or context to move forward right now. Well, without lead nurturing you’d throw them back in the sea and then hope they catch you hook again some day. Today you have the opportunity to stay in touch with them, to put more value added information in front of them, to keep their attention, and in the process also build and reinforce and expand their understanding of the connection between you, your brand, and what you represent, so that when the timing is right, they are more likely to come back to you, but you’re also more likely to have the right content in front of them so you can help move them forward.

If I’m sitting in front of a CFO, I’m saying listen, lead nurturing, it has an exponential impact on lowering your acquisition cost, and making your sales and marketing more efficient. There’s a media replacement value from a traditional marketing realm of lead nurturing, that is highly material for companies that are in a mature growth stage sales environment.

DR: Now, on like a practical level, how does this get accomplished? How do you do this?

MH: Well, I mean I’ve seen some companies just do it very simply with what we abbreviate as the EFN, the ’email effing newsletter’. Literally just getting a little bit of content in front of people on a regular basis is valuable enough that they see your name, and they associate that with goodness. If you want to take it another step forward, you can say segment salespeople from marketing people, segment your health care targets versus your manufacturing targets. So you can segment a million different ways based on different groupings and contexts of prospects, but in its simplest form, lead nurturing is just staying in front of prospects.

MH: It can be done with your email effing newsletter, it can be done by a sales rep reaching out and sharing an article every once in a while. The execution can take a lot of different formats., but at the end of the day, what are you doing to keep the attention of your prospects? Earn a right to have that attention on a regular basis, such that it’s usually not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when that particularly qualified prospect has a need, you want to be there, and you want to make sure they associate that problem and that intended outcome with you, so that you’re the first called they make.

DR: Okay. So, a salesperson engages with a prospect and they don’t buy, right? Then are you looking at possibly creating a marketing automated program where the salesperson drops them into that bucket or whatever you want to call it, and then they get pinged every month, every couple months with like another piece of content that might be of interest to them? Would that be one example of staying in front in addition to a monthly newsletter? Is that an example that you like?

MH: Yeah, you’ve got the idea. I would differentiate between nurturing leads and nurturing stalled opportunities, though. Here’s how I would differentiate those –

• if someone is a lead and you’ve never really had sort of an opportunity discussion, maybe
• sales has tried to qualify them and they’re not ready to buy
• marketing will re-market to them.

It might be in a newsletter format, it might be in a more contextual, segmented marketing campaign. Ideally, it’s a combination of channels, so they’re seeing you on email, on social, and across the web, and maybe some events and direct mail. I differentiate that from someone who becomes an opportunity and doesn’t close. The majority of closed deals are closed lost, they’re just closed not now, so when we do pipeline development for clients, we call that ‘stage close nurture’. Then you’ve got a combination of marketing doing outreach as well as sales doing periodic direct outreach, because at that point they actually have a direct relationship with someone on the sales team, and so we want to leverage that as much as possible.

DR: Okay. Well, that really leads me to my next point here. So now that a salesperson has engaged, is there anything else marketing can do at that stage or is it mainly that I’ve passed the baton, not counting the content with the monthly newsletters and stuff like that? And the answer might be I’ve passed the baton, now it’s now sales team, but is there anything else marketing can do at the stage of helping them through the sales process?

MH: Well, I think the answer to that is kind of back to the beginning of our discussion, sales enablement. There’s certainly content that can help get the lead over to the sales team, but once sales have that lead, what conversation should they have, in what order? What tools to they have to better facilitate engaging with those prospects? Everything from communicating with the prospect, to presenting a demo, to presenting a proposal – I think about the technology stack that sits in front of the sales team, and I feel like that’s a sales enablement function that can be supplied by marketing. So, again, like back to that definition of ‘What can you do to make your sales team more efficient?’ and ‘What can you do to help them convert more deals?’, if it helps directly with one of those objectives, I think it falls under sales enablement, and I think it falls within the purview of the modern marketing organization.

DR: And this would be a combination of potentially some of it being automated, and some of it being as they go through the sales process it sounds like. You basically are like, ‘Here are your bullets. You fire which one when you feel like you need to fire it.’ At some point, logic and normal conversation come into play. In this day and age, it seems like there’s so much talk about marketing automation, and all these tools, and technology, and all this other marketing tech stuff, that you kind of get lost and you forget there is a human and a logical element here, and you don’t want to automate yourself where you lose the trust of the contact because it looks automated. So, it sounds like it’s a combination of both, is what I’m hearing.

MH: It absolutely is. I mean a good example of that is the idea of sales scripts. I have never seen a sales script that works. There is no script that you can use in every situation with a prospect. Now, you can script a voicemail, you can script an e-mail template obviously, and you can script the beginning of a conversation, but from that point forward, you can have a sense of direction, you can have some bullet points of where you want the conversation to go, but to a large extent, once you get into a live call, you’re in improv time. You have to be good on your feet, you have to know where you want to go with that conversation – you’re literally doing custom communication at each one of those times. Look, if you’re doing B2B sales, unless you’re doing something that is simple and transactional, which is a minority of situations, the human element is extremely important. We’re not going to get rid of salespeople anytime soon for these complex deals that need reframing, that need consensus building, that needs someone that can help shepherd the customer to get to the right outcome.

When people are doing this right, and when salespeople are doing their job right, you’re not advocating for your deal, you’re advocating for the customer’s needs. You’re advocating for an outcome your customer desires, and when you’ve got those organizations with your six point eight decision makers, that requires a set of skill. It still requires a deft human hand.

DR: Now let’s move offline a little bit. You have a ton of experience in sales and marketing, and you’re obviously super crazy versed with the cutting-edge technology, and tools and everything. But let’s go a little bit old school. What are some offline, non-digital activities that you’ve seen marketing play a role in helping sales with, to maybe give possibly some tangible ideas, some things that maybe are a forgotten lost art that you’ve seen work for yourself, and that are continuing to work for other people?

MH: Sure. A lot of the old ‘traditional’ channels still work really effectively as long as you use them well. Direct mail works really well. Sitting on the table in the back of my office right now is something called a ‘man crate’. Someone sent me this, it was part of a marketing campaign, and I kid you not like I open up this cardboard box, and inside the cardboard box is this wooden crate that is glued together, and it came with a small crowbar. I had to crowbar the damn thing open, and there was something in it, and a message, and look, that’s not cheap. You can’t do that if you’re trying to market to millions of people, but it made an impression. I’ve talked about it a lot. It’s still sitting here, and people ask me what the hell is that thing, and I say, ‘It’s a man crate. Let me tell you about it. Let me tell you who sent it to me.’

DR: Let’s give them a shout out so that that hard work pays off for them.

MH: Yeah, the company is Evention, and they’re doing some great work in the in the big data ABM space, and it was just unique, it was different, it stood out. We’ve done a few things like that with some of our clients that have sort of small and strategic targets. You’re not looking for lowest common denominator, you’re not always looking for the lowest cost per lead. Sometimes you do something to stand out, especially amongst those decision makers and senior people that are hard to get to events. Like if you go to salesforce.com, a couple people in there in the enterprise, IT, services space – what’s your most effective marketing channel? And the answer I’ve heard at least two or three times now is dinners. They do dinners with twenty or thirty people in the room, and seventy percent of them are prospects, and thirty percent of them are customers and partners, and they just have a conversation. It’s a relationship building opportunity. It differentiates them. It’s memorable.

So, I can go on and on about a bunch of examples that are sort of quote unquote old school, and none of them having anything to do with digital. The channel is simply the conduit of an experience, or a message, or an outcome that helps take you closer to a mutually beneficial sort of resolution or outcome.

DR: And thank you notes, right? Send those thank you notes, handwritten.

MH: And thanks to the worldwide web, you don’t even have to handwrite them. There’s a company called MailLift. You can integrate into the sales force, or you can send them a formatted/templated email. You can’t make this up, they have a team of retired teachers that will handwrite your letters for you.

DR: Well, I don’t t think anyone could match my handwriting, so they’d have to contract a specific fifth grader to write for me. And to bring this kind of together with digital – and you mention ABM account based marketing – if I’m reading between the lines, or maybe within the lines of all of this, it’s about narrowing down the people that you can then engage with at a higher cost, a dinner level, sending them a crate type of thing. You’re right, I promise you, you most likely you weren’t one of five hundred people who got that. There was probably a reason that you got narrowed down in some form or fashion, so I think you might know where I’m going at with that if you want to kind of expand on that to bring the technology part to this offline specific part, and how people can narrow that down.

MH: Well, I want to address it not by technology, but in terms of like business value. And this is where I think the reframe for marketers becomes really important. If you as a marketer are focused on generating leads, if your number one goal is to generate leads, you probably have a lead goal, and you probably have a finite budget you’re trying to stay within to generate those leads. But not every lead is created differently, not every sale is created differently. What if I told you that a particular segment of your customer base not only converts to sales at a higher rate but also has a three x lifetime value of your average customer? What are you willing to do to buy that lead? How much are you willing to spend to generate that prospect? So, all of a sudden, if you start thinking about lifetime value, start looking at metrics that are at the bottom if not beyond the sales funnel, it changes the economics, it changes the prioritization of the way you think about what you might do in marketing. Now, too often, marketers, B2B marketers, even marketers in a complex market are focused on volume or focused on economies of scale. We want to get as much impact out of stuff as possible. We like our ‘up and to the right’ charts that show lead volume.

I could care less about lead volume, and I bet your C-suite doesn’t give a crap about marketing qualified leads. They want the pipeline. They want closed deals. They want margin. They want lifetime value. So, at the minimum, start using the language of your business as a marketer, and ideally, you start to focus your efforts on what’s going to give you the best ROI on those business metrics. It’s the executive dashboard, not your operational marketing dashboard you should be focused the most on.

DR: So basically, it might be worth taking a slice your budget and going after some of these big fish with really nice smelling bait. Really go after them.

MH: They may not even be your biggest fish. I mean if you look at your database, if you look at the trends in your business, you may find that there is a unique small segment, maybe a smaller type customer, or a customer in a unique, unappreciated market that loves your product, that loves your service, that sticks around longer, that spends more money, so it’s not always the biggest logos. I mean when people do account based marketing programs, you don’t go after the Fortune 100 just because they’re the top hundred businesses. What are the attributes of companies that are most likely to need your services? What are the attributes of companies that tend to be your best customers? Your top one hundred logos may not be the world’s top one hundred logos, but you still need to focus on where you can get deals, and where you can get your best, most satisfied customers.

DR: Awesome point. As we move a little bit further, now you’ve got people, you’re talking to them, they’ve nurtured, you’re engaged, you’re getting close to that sale. As we approach the close of the sale, are there ways marketing teams can help the sales team secure it there, or again, is it the sales’ job to kind of close and finish it off? Is there anything marketing can do?

MH: So, the fifth of six buying journey stages according to SiriusDecisions is what Sirius calls ‘justify the decision’, and I think that’s a critical stage for marketers. I think once you get to the point where you have bought off, you’ve got a high percentage of that 6.8 decision makers internally bought off on what you’re doing, what do you need to arm them with to go to the final decision maker to sign on the dotted line? What’s the final set of decision-making criteria? Is it an ROI calculator? Is it case studies? What can you do to get the risk low enough to move forward where someone will finally say yes? And there’s a lot of ways to do that. I mean some of that is sales’ job, to sort of really cement that internal consensus so that they go to the decision maker with a unified front, to say ‘We all believe we should do this.’ You may have already set the groundwork to do that, but what other messages, what other supporting points, what case studies and areas of justification can you arm your sales team with that they can use with your prospects, use with closing the deal, to get them across the finish line?

DR: So, basically, I’ve always even personally had a hard time thinking about it, because it almost sounds like lead nurturing, you have this stage, this stage, this stage, and ‘marketing needs to jump in now’, but what you’re saying is, marketing, just think it through ahead of time. Think it through, think of these buying stages and the content that would be necessary through those – and obviously one of them is going to be closed towards the end of the sale – what would be something that would be compelling, and develop that piece of content ahead of time, and then just make sure the salespeople know it’s at their disposal. It’s not anything that they’re necessarily needing to jump in at the twelfth hour, it’s something that they should have thought of in the first hour, and got the sales team another bullet to use at the right time, with the case study, or ROI paper – all those other examples you gave.

MH: You’re absolutely right. I think there are a couple ways to think about that. One is if you understand your customers well, and you understand the buying journey they go through, you should be able to anticipate the needs from a messaging and justification point they have at the end of the process. But each organization is going to be a little different, and I think if you don’t have the ability to be innovative and agile at the end of the process as well – as a team, there may be things marketing can provide, there may be things sales can brainstorm and deliver, there may be one objector inside that 6.8 you’ve got to deal with, and deal with in a custom way for the culture and politics of that organization. So, there isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ for everybody. I think your playbook, and your content, and your buying journey execution can handle the majority of situations, but you have to also be prepared to go to the war room and get innovative, and creative, to get more of those deals across the line.

DR: So, they’re sold, right? Do you have any examples of how marketing has helped with keeping clients as lifelong customers?

MH: Well, once someone’s bought, ideally the product or service is what keeps them on board I think, but there’s an opportunity clearly to resell, to confirm the decision, to communicate overtly the benefit people are getting even if they’re seeing it, even if they’re not calculating it themselves. I think the mistake a lot of companies make is they approach renewals at the time of renewal, as opposed to beginning renewal on day one. You have to constantly be thinking about, ‘What do I do to make sure that the renewal with this customer is a slam dunk? That it’s done without a second guess?’ Part of that is just your product or service fulfilling the promise that you started with, but the relationship people have with you, the way they feel about the relationship, the service they get, sometimes people aren’t choosing the best product in the market, sometimes they’re choosing their favorite, someone that they feel comfortable with. Especially when they’ve got a relationship, it’s painful to change vendors, it’s painful to change to someone else.

You’d rather just stick with what you’ve got. So, don’t give people a reason to leave, give them every reason to believe in you, to continue to favor you, and to stay with you.

DR: That’s something that gets forgotten. Business owners don’t like to hear it. They want to go, ‘Sales, marketing, why are our sales numbers down?’ Well, at some point your product needs to take over. What you promised, what you sold – I guess Volvo could have the best marketing and sales in the world, but if the cars weren’t actually safe, then at the end of the day, people are going to stop driving them. So yeah, that’s kind of forgotten a little bit.

I think you’ve given a ton of great pointers, great information. You’ve really explained how sales and marketing can really work together, specifically how marketing can help sales. Do you have any parting thoughts?

MH: Make sure that you are seen and/or acting as a profit center for the business. Get out of the trap of reporting on operational metrics, and reinforce in the organization that what you care about is a means to an end. Focus on the same metrics, the same goals that your sales team has, put your money where your mouth is on that as well, and it’s amazing to see the change of how companies’ marketing departments are perceived, and funded, and supported when that happens.

DR: Awesome. Matt, how can people continue to learn from you?

MH: Well, you can find us at heinzmarketing.com. We’re on Twitter @heinzmarketing. If you have any questions for me directly, I’m just matt@heinzmarketing.com, and we blog every day and try to be as generous with our ideas as we can.

DR: Or go to any one of these top conferences and they might see you speaking, right?

MH: Absolutely!

ABOUT MATT HEINZ

Prolific author and nationally recognized, award-winning blogger, Matt Heinz is President and Founder of Heinz Marketing with 15 years of marketing, business development and sales experience from a variety of organizations and industries. Matt’s career focuses on consistently delivering measurable results with greater sales, revenue growth, product success and customer loyalty. Matt is a repeat winner of Top 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management and Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers.

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Do you ever wonder what the world would be like if everyone said exactly what they thought, no matter what?

If you have, it’s probably led to the imagination of a bleak existence that has left you thankful for reservation and politeness. Honesty is often harsh enough, especially when dealing with the general public.

Although, it would be nice if people didn’t waste your time.

As a sales rep, it never gets any easier to give your best effort during a demo or sales call just to realize (sooner or later) that the person you’re talking to is not serious.

They aren’t going to buy. They knew it all along but you have to find out—and sometimes it stings.

While you may hold onto your frustration for a while after these calls, you may not have to deal with as many going forward.

Two of the sales terms that will help you out immensely in this area are “suspect” and “prospect”. Knowing the difference and how to label leads in your funnel quickly will save you precious time.

Defining these two terms is exactly what we hope to do in this post. Let’s get into it.

What is a Suspect?

We’ve alluded to this in the introduction of our post.

A suspect is the person who will stick around for a certain amount of time in the sales conversation and funnel process without any means or intention to buy the products you’re selling.

Identifying these “leads” quickly means less frustration, less wasted time, and (typically) higher conversions.

You may be thinking, “I know they are the people I don’t want to talk to, but how do I find them out?”

Well, it’s tricky.

Often times, these pipeline fillers are just as active and engaged as any other lead. It makes them very difficult to identify in the marketing phase.

• Some are just bored at work, looking for stuff they can claim is relevant.
• Others want to impress their boss, but don’t have pocketbook to buy your solution.
• Others still just wanted your downloadable resources or thought the webinar sounded good and decided to stick around to see what else you got for them.

Sure, they may buy in the future. However now—they’ve got nothing for you.

How do you identify these particular leads and stop wasting time? Good question. To answer, we first have to look at the definition of a “prospect”.

What is a Prospect?

No need to hide this one.

If a suspect is someone who is wasting your time, a prospect is a lead that is worth your time. The one who is genuinely looking for a solution to their problem. Someone who wants to hear about your offer in order to make an actual decision.

If you were doing demos to prospects all month long, your quota woes would be a thing of the past.

Individuals who make up prospects may include:

• A decision maker that is researching a new solution for a common pain your products solve.
• A member of a buying team charged with finding a solution/better solution similar to your products.
• A supervisor of the decision maker who has involved him or herself in finding a solution.

Keep in mind that prospects still need to be closed. The point of this post isn’t to give you a magic bullet that means just dialing the digits and sending the invoice.

Our intention is to help you define, determine, and identify the differences between those who are close to buying and those that aren’t. In other words, you won’t speak with prospects less—just suspects.

Savvy?

The Number One Difference Between Suspects and Prospects

In any conversation, it’s a two-way street. One person talks, the other listens—and vice versa.

Both suspects and prospects will talk with you, engage with your content, and maybe even reply to emails and answer the phone. However, if you listen closely and ask the right questions (more on that further down); you’ll notice that suspects act a little suspect.

Mainly, they won’t give up the information you need to determine their readiness. So, the counterintuitive answer is:

If you can’t get the information you need from a lead, they are most likely a suspect.

Why?

The suspect isn’t really looking and that means they don’t have to give you proprietary or other knowledge that isn’t public. If someone is genuinely looking for a solution, they’ll give you the details (if you ask them to tell you).

So, the simple answer is to ask qualifying questions. But it’s not quite that simple.

If you are on a sales call, you get the ball rolling to the point of momentum. If they buy, it’s great. If they don’t, you’ve wasted an hour or so of your life.

Even if you find great qualifying questions to weed out the suspects, you’re on a “sales” call. At the moment you realize this, do you end the call with, “Hey! You’re just a phony!!”

Of course not. We don’t live in a world where you can just say what you think, remember?

The answer?

Add a Step to Your Process

Many sales teams can quickly weed out suspects by offering a quick qualifying call to determine the severity of the need.

Not a sales call, but a call that determines the readiness and “fit” of a lead. A call needs to be had, too. Live chat is a very cool feature, but this step is better on a call.

There are so many benefits to doing this that it could warrant its own post. However, we will go over a few here to let you know.

• Instant Weed Eater: Offering a call to suspects is like kryptonite to the majority of them. Mention that you’ll be asking them some quick questions to determine their needs and they’re outta here. It’s the equivalent of approaching a person in a retail location and hearing, “Just looking!”

• Prospect Identifier: Offering the same call opportunity to a prospect, and they’ll perk up. Depending on the immediate nature of their need, they may even clear the schedule. So much of sales is reading the responses of your leads and that includes things like this scenario.

• Professional Appearance: Believe it or not, it looks way better on you to add a step to the process. This fact is especially true for B2B and high-priced items. Having a qualifying call shows the lead that you have a process (a.k.a. You have your stuff together). It’s just professional to ensure the quality of the potential partnership.

• Pre-Sells Prospect: If you recognize on your call that the person on the other end is a prospect, don’t just end the call. Begin casting the vision that your products will create. Find out as much information as you can and use it to tailor your demo or sales call perfectly to them. They’ll be more excited for the next call and so will you.

Like we said, these calls are amazing.

Having a Proper Qualifying Call

First, you have to define the success of this call.

It can go well two different ways. If you are talking to a suspect and it ends in 10 minutes—success. Likewise, if you are speaking with a genuine prospect it may run up to 45 minutes.

Remember, if you’re picking up the prospect clues; it’s time to start preparing your pitch.

Keep them on the line and gather all the intel you can to rock your demo, but DON’T pitch them. Once they’re more interested and looking to talk further about the solution—END THE CALL.

Seriously, we didn’t mean to yell at you in all caps, but you’ve got to stop short of your pitch.

Consider this a bonus tip. It’s about the process. Sure, sometimes they’ll be ready to buy right then and there. Rare, but it happens. Scheduling a call allows you to use the intel in your pitch later and gives you a point to refer back to (namely the qualifying call).

What Questions Should I Ask?

HubSpot did a great piece that outlines the key areas any rep will want to find out during a qualifying call. It’s a valuable resource given the fact that most questions you’ll ask won’t come from a template.

That said, a couple of template questions never hurt anyone (that we know of). Take these and tweak away to your needs.

• What has caused you to find a solution for [pain/problem]?
• Have you used any other solutions (either third-party or in-house)?
• Do you have a budget in mind and how does the purchasing process look at [business]?
• What issues or concerns could keep you from making a decision to solve [pain/problem] in the near future?
• If you don’t purchase a solution, who and how would that affect your workplace?

While these are (very) general, even using these tailored to your qualifying call would yield incredible data from prospects and send suspects packing without the wasted time of a full pitch.

Now that you know the difference and how to separate them—get on the phone. Get your list of qualified leads and start weeding out suspects and warming up prospects.

B2B marketers are always looking for ways to reach their target audience and drive more demand. Simultaneously, there are tons of vendors and media that sell opportunities to drive that demand — that could be ad buys on a cost per click (CPC) or cost per impression (CPM) basis, opportunities to participate in events/conferences where your audience will be, or a number of other possibilities.

The decision of which opportunities to go for and which to pass on can be tough for marketers to evaluate because on the surface, they’re often not an apples to apples comparison.

In this post, we’ll discuss how to evaluate the various demand opportunities as objectively and as data-driven as possible.

1. Identify CPL (CPL)

Cost per lead is a good starting point for evaluating demand opportunities.

Business economics help marketers figure out the maximum they are willing to pay per lead. This is calculated by starting with desired profit margins, and then backing out all the way to lead generation: profit margin > deal size > win rate > opp conversion rate > cost per lead. If a company can stay within this CPL ceiling, and if everything goes down the funnel as expected, a company will successfully achieve its goals.

While demand opportunities are increasingly using CPL pricing models, the majority still operate on a CPC or CPM basis. Therefore, you need to know how to convert CPC and CPM models to CPL.

1.a. CPC-to-CPL

For example, let’s say you set a total campaign budget at $1,000 and you set your max bid for $10 per click. Assuming your ads are good (e.g. relevant content), you would expect at least 100 clicks. Because your bid is actually a ceiling, you likely will pay less than $10 per click and end up with greater than 100 clicks. The next step is calculate your click to lead conversion ratio. Out of those 100 clicks, how many actually become leads? To calculate this, you can look at past performance in your attribution data. Alternatively, channel or web analytics can tell you a click to form fill conversion rate (which may be close enough if you have a short marketing funnel).

1.b. CPM-to-CPL

If you’re bidding on CPM, you need to add one more step. You must calculate how many impressions it takes, on average, to generate one click. And then you can proceed to calculate how many of those clicks will become leads.

Note that the method in which you bid may alter how the ad platforms algorithm decides to deliver your ads. If you’re paying on a cost per click basis, the ad platform may optimize ad delivery for clicks, whereas if you’re paying on a cost per impression basis, it may not optimize for clicks.

2. Identify Cost Per Qualified Lead (CPQL)

Cost per lead, by itself, can be deceiving. If you’re paying a really low CPL, but the percentage of those leads that are actually quality leads are also low, it may not end up being a cost effective opportunity. On the other hand, a high initial cost per lead may end up being a decent opportunity if every or nearly every lead is high quality. To do this, we need to figure out the cost per qualified lead.

Now that you can calculate CPL no matter the pricing model, the next step is to figure out the quality of the leads that you will potentially be getting from your demand opportunity. Not all channels are the same, not all media are the same, not all audiences are the same.

Until you’ve run a test with that opportunity or a similar one, it can be tough to predict exactly how an audience will perform. Do your research and ask questions to find out what percentage of the leads that you’ll get will meet your qualification criteria. Is there a way that you can only pay for qualified leads? Can you use your qualification criteria to inform the targeting?

Depending on the opportunity and the information provided, this step can be a difficult task to get accurate.

3. Evaluate Channel Lead-to-Opp Conversion Rate

Even once you’ve calculated a CPQL, there are more factors to consider. After all, leads themselves (even qualified leads) aren’t valuable to a business — customers are.

When you look at the buyer funnel, the next step is converting the qualified leads into sales opportunities.

One of the most effective ways to break down your overall lead-to-opp conversion rate is by channel. A lead created from a media buy, for example, is probably not going to convert at the same rate as a lead created at a user conference.

An attribution solution allows marketers to break down their marketing performance by channel. Using a cross-channel lead report and a cross-channel opportunity report, you can calculate the historical conversion rate for each channel. Even better, if you have predictive analytics, use your predicted lead-to-opp conversion rate for an even more accurate understanding of how leads move down the funnel.

If you have one demand opportunity, which has a historical channel lead-to-opp conversion rate of 5% and another opportunity that has a rate of 10%, the second opportunity is a better option, even if the CPL is a little more expensive.

Another factor to consider in this stage is timing. Will this demand opportunity put your sales development team over their capacity? The longer it takes for the sales team to reach out to net new leads, the less likely they will convert into opportunities.

4. Evaluate Channel Win Rate

For many marketing organizations, getting to sales opportunity is as far down the funnel as they go. But for revenue-driven marketers, if you truly want to evaluate using the entire funnel, you must also consider the channel win rate when evaluating your options.

When looking at your attribution data, filter your closed opportunities by touchpoint channel. Within a set timeframe, count how many closed opportunities had a touchpoint from the channel that you want to analyze; then, count how many closed-won opportunities had a touchpoint from the same channel. Closed-won divided by total closed gives you your channel win rate. Read more about win rate analysis.

5. Adding It All Up

So now you have your CPL, your CPQL, your channel lead-to-opp conversion rate, and your channel win rate.

With a bit of math, you get your estimated cost per customer for that demand opportunity. Is that number something you’re willing to pay? If it is, go for it.

As you can see, it’s pretty straightforward. The bigger challenge, however, is getting accurate conversion rates throughout the funnel.

How to get accurate conversion rates throughout the buyer funnel

Getting accurate data starts with full-funnel marketing measurement, through an advanced attribution solution. This tracks buyer touchpoints at every stage — leads, opps, and closed-won customers — and from every source at multiple levels of granularity.

With this level of accuracy and granularity, steps 3 and 4 are possible and the conversion rates can be used with confidence. Furthermore, as mentioned in step 3, this process becomes even more precise with the use of predictive analytics. Through aggregated data and machine learning, a predictive engine can give a better prediction of stage conversion compared to historical data alone.

What happens if you’ve never used a channel before? How do you get the historical data necessary for steps 3, 4, and 5? As machine learning gives rise to a growth in predictive analytics, marketers will be able to tap into aggregated databases to see how similar organizations fared in similar situations. Alternatively, marketers can look to benchmark reports or ask their fellow marketers who may have experience using specific channels or media.

As you can see, accurately evaluating demand opportunities requires data throughout the entire funnel. For data-driven marketers who want to maximize their likelihood of success, going through the full process is well worth the time investment.

If you want to learn more about full-funnel marketing and full-funnel measurement, check out the Definitive Guide to Pipeline Marketing.

B2B social media isn’t the easiest of tasks. LinkedIn has become one of the most popularly used and important social networks to reach out to business buyers and build connections with other professionals. With its niche advantage and increase of content marketing, it’s increasingly becoming an outlet for B2B marketers with several advantages.

LinkedIn is a platform that enables you to not only build relationships, look for new hires and jobs, but establish a well oriented marketing campaign. Today businesses are using LinkedIn to establish thought leadership, conduct industry research, gain and improve reputation, and generate leads.

Learn the four main reasons as to why B2B marketers should be using LinkedIn:

Thought leadership

There are several platform features that allow individuals to put themselves into a leadership position, or thought leadership within specific domains. LinkedIn is a lush turf for thought leaders to present themselves and become trusted advisors.

By these thought leaders producing quality content, being active within the networks communities, and updating their personal profiles, their leadership within specific industries grow and develop into a much larger perspective — influencer marketing.

Industry research

LinkedIn is not only a social media platform, but a useful tool, as well. The network is perfect to expand your horizons, listen to other, seek out opinions and insights, and of course, ask questions.

By following your favorite companies and brands, along with connecting and networking with people, you can quickly stay up to day on your interests and favorite industry research.

Improving reputation

Did you know that more that more than two professionals sign up on LinkedIn every second? With this continuation of the signup rate, businesses have more opportunity and potential to increase contacts and expand their own book of business.

By using personal and community group features within LinkedIn, companies and those professionals that represent them all increase their visibility and credibility — as brands and even individuals. The main purpose of this social media platform is networking, but it allows to engage and identify with others, thus building and improving relationships and reputations.

Generate leads

While several might not view LinkedIn as a network with the capabilities of direct sales, it is one of the best networks to demand lead generation. Aside from the raw and organic measurements of obtaining leads via LinkedIn, the platform now offers personalized means of identifying new leads, engaging with those potentials and transforming them into consumers.

Prospects are likely to posts questions. By listening, networking, and responding, the potential of a new lead via LinkedIn becomes more imaginable. If the answer you return to the prospect is what the potential client is looking for, then they will initiate communications.

It’s a common misconception that social media is only for B2C companies in order to build overall brand awareness and develop a marketing strategy. As a B2B marketing expert, you are responsible for several tasks including lead generation, reputation and providing real, measurable results. B2B marketers net undeniable results on LinkedIn.

I know that there’s about a 50/50 split between readers who really dig this kind of metaphoric marketing mindmeld and those who are already rolling their eyes, so I’m going to start with a really quick summary of the point I’m trying to get to. (If you’re in the half that enjoys a good story, SPOILER ALERT!)

The Summary

One of the key challenges that continues to plague companies, even years into the modern inbound-focused digital marketing age we’re in right now, is the disconnect between the Sales and Marketing departments. Specifically, the fact that – more often than not – Marketing has fully adopted an inbound marketing strategy (or at least is making strides in that direction) while Sales is resisting the change.

The end result is a huge number of missed opportunities in the form of qualified leads falling through the cracks, prospective customers being rejected by Sales when, in fact, they’re just not ready right now to pull the trigger, and generally far too few easily collected leads making it all the way through to the closing stage.

To fix this problem, I submit that Sales teams need to “evolve”: Get off the fence about inbound sales, stop whining about “the way we’ve always done it” and start taking advantage of the potentially endless stream of qualified leads your inbound marketing-focused colleagues are sending you.

Get off the fence about inbound sales, stop whining about “the way we’ve always done it” and start taking advantage of the potentially endless stream of qualified leads your inbound marketing-focused colleagues are sending you.

If you do, you’ll find greater success, higher conversion rates, and lower cost-per-customer on the other side of what really is a simple transition.

There, Speedy McHurry, now just scroll to the bottom to find out how to make it happen.

The Plight of Prehistoric Man

Before there was such a thing as “civilization”, the human family consisted of separate nomadic groups of individuals who subsisted on what we customarily call “hunting-gathering.” That means that they were constantly on the move, always seeking out opportunities to hunt down prey that could serve as food, and along the way, they’d also collect whatever easily accessible food and other supplies they found, like nuts, berries, bones, etc.

And it worked.

In fact, while there are about as many theories being batted around as there are scientists to propose them, anthropologists all agree that humans subsisted on hunting-gathering for far longer than they’ve been using other methods of obtaining food and necessities of life.

But, even though it was sufficient to keep people alive and fuel the growth of the human family, hunting-gathering had some definite limitations:

Labor-intensive

As a group of hunter-gatherers, early humans often walked dozens of miles in a day, sniffing the ground, looking for footprints and scat, and otherwise trying to figure out where the nearest mammoth or aurochs was at. In fact, many scientists believe that man’s natural endurance – his ability to just keep doggedly moving with little or no rest – is what made it possible for him to succeed in bringing down prey so much larger and stronger than he was.

After walking God knows how far tracking down the prey, they had whatever sort of fierce battle the animal had left in it, and I’m sure our ancestors came away banged up or worse from these encounters.

Then, of course, they had to use primitive stone tools and their bare hands to butcher whatever bits they could carry back to where the rest of the group was hanging out (presumably looking for some cranberries to dress up the dino-turkey they were hunting), and they had to physically lug that meat back however many miles they’d come to get it.

That’s just a ton of work. And calorie-for-calorie, it’s pretty inefficient.

Time-consuming

Practically speaking, the whole process described above would take at least the bulk of the day every day. And, at various times during the year or in certain areas, it probably took even longer than that.

In other words, the time it took to just obtain the necessary food for the group left little or no time for any other productive work. Once a hunter finished their 18-hour marathon of grueling physical labor, then managed to fill their belly with a portion of what they brought home, how long do you think it was before they fell asleep next to the fire? And without refrigeration, they couldn’t exactly count on a tasty plate of leftovers the next day.

That was prehistoric man’s daily grind.

Could get messy

Without getting unnecessarily detailed here, let’s just say that killing, butchering, and lugging around slabs of mammoth meat is dirty business.

Likewise, the smell of half a dozen successful hunters coming home after 12 hours in the summer heat was none too pleasant. Tack on the smell of whatever they’re carrying with them, and you get the picture.

Enough said.

Sales has been a hunting-gathering process for too long now

You might have thought I’d gotten so far off the topic by now, there was no coming back. But hold on because we’re circling around now.

Like our hunter-gatherer ancestors, sales professionals have subsisted for years on “hunting” and “gathering” activities which we call prospecting and networking. Of course, over the years the tools and methods have changed with the times. It’s probably pretty rare these days to find a salesperson thumbing through their Rolodex with a beige desk phone lodged between their shoulder and their ear. But whether you’re looking at an actual drawer full of business cards, or a LinkedIn Contacts list that’s just as disorganized, it comes to the same thing.

And these sales skills have been successful, no doubt about it. In fact, they still can be in certain circumstances and for particularly skilled salespeople.

But, like the hunting-gathering efforts described above, traditional sales skills have always had some inherent limitations:

• Labor-intensive: Old-school prospecting – whether you’re talking about opening the yellow pages to a random page and cold calling the day away or any modern technological equivalent – takes a lot of time. It’s a numbers game, and the numbers are extremely high if you’re relying solely on rented lists, hastily compiled databases, or desk drawers full of business cards.
• Time-consuming: Note the phrase used above, “cold calling the day away.” Multiply that by weeks and months in many cases, and that’s how old-school salespeople are spending far too much of their time.
• Could get messy: Frankly, the modern customer has little to no patience for a lot of the old-school sales tactics, so their success is drying up. Combine that with all the technological means at the customer’s disposal to ignore or avoid a pitch, and you’re left with an even scarier numbers game.

So the question sales pros need to consider now is, what did our hunter-gatherer ancestors do to overcome these limitations?

The Development of Agriculture

What they did – just a few thousand years ago, in fact – was finally figure out that collecting food and other necessities of life didn’t always require the messy, time-consuming, and labor-intensive effort they’d been putting into it.

They discovered that, with a little ingenuity, some basic tools, and the help of Mother Nature, they could plant a seed in the ground and a few weeks or months later, they’d have a meal magically appear in front of them. They could capture a few animals (instead of killing one at a time) and keep them healthy until they reproduced, and they’d magically have an endless supply of meat that wouldn’t run away or fight back.

In other words, humans discovered agriculture. And that was the key that allowed them to stop traveling around so much and to start settling down into what quickly became a fair approximation of “civilization” as we know it today.

This practice not only provided a more predictable supply of food for far less time and effort, but it allowed mankind to focus on other cool things before collapsing next to the fire at night. Things like mathematics, art, astronomy, and sarcasm.

Agriculture is what made it possible for prehistoric man to become… us.

Sales Teams Need to Evolve Too

What would happen if a hunter-gatherer salesperson chose to “evolve” by focusing more on farming?

Quite simply, it would reduce the amount of wasted time and effort they’re currently investing in traditional prospecting and networking efforts that are only yielding occasional positive results and are much more likely to make a mess in one way or another.

But what is the sales equivalent of discovering agriculture?

It’s embracing inbound sales.

Inbound sales is the modern sales methodology that effectively maps to how today’s customer actually makes purchasing decisions. It relies heavily on leads supplied by an active inbound marketing program and works hand-in-hand with marketers to continually optimize the customer’s experience at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Like working the ground or raising livestock, the process of strategically attracting and educating prospects, identifying qualified leads, nurturing and advising them until they’re ready to buy, and then delighting customers, offers companies a far more predictable stream of revenue that’s both trackable and scalable. It also means that sales teams can stop “moving around” so much, desperately searching for the next opportunity, because the opportunities will be coming to them.

And finally, embracing inbound sales leaves a company with more time and resources to explore other beneficial pursuits that could even spur further evolution down the road.

Who would’ve thought that in this digital age marketers would be falling back in love with the phone. It’s such an unexpected match, right?

On the contrary. It’s the perfect pairing because consumers still want to call. And as marketers realize how well phone calls pair with attribution, it’s only a matter of time before they rekindle their “romance” with the phone, so to speak. It’s true love. And what better time to talk about why than on Valentine’s Day.

Calls and attribution go together just like peanut butter and jelly, spaghetti and meatballs, and Chicago and polar vortexes (unfortunately). If you have yet to experience the magical pairing of customer calls with your attribution reporting then it’s time to get cozy because I’m going to tell you all about how this love story evolves. Here are the 4 stages marketers experience when falling in love with calls.

[Stage One] Calls and Attribution Sitting in a Tree

Stage one is all about awareness. It’s like when you first meet your crush and want to ask them to be your valentine. That’s the sweet feeling data-driven marketers get when they learn they can include offline conversions, such as in-store visits and phone calls, into their attribution reporting.

What occurs is a newfound awareness for a conversion type they knew existed, but could never grasp. Maybe it happens after they are exposed to a stat about how mobile marketing drives billions of calls to US businesses, or come across a chart like this:

Make Sure You’re Compatible: To determine if your business is compatible with phone calls, take a step back and identify every single way customers contact your business. If they are “C-A-L-L-I-N-G” from a tree (or maybe just their home), and you rely on phone calls to close sales or provide additional information to consumers during the customer journey, your crush on phone calls is legitimate.

[Stage Two] First Comes Love…

Stage two is all about falling in love with call conversions. They add more value to your life as a marketer. Without them, your CPL and ROI could be off by 50% or more (meaning you could be losing out on leads, customers, and credibility).

Once marketers are aware they can track phone calls, they kick off their relationship by using call attribution technology. And after they experience the powerful benefits of tracking and attributing calls to their marketing campaigns, the love only grows deeper.

Just like in a relationship, over time you begin to learn more and more about your partner. The same goes with call attribution. When your marketing generates a call, call attribution technology collects data on your campaigns and your caller. It attributes that phone lead to the right keyword, ad, web page(s), and channel(s) responsible for driving it. You also get more information about the caller, including their name, phone number, geographic location, day and time, and more. And marketers can then use this data to optimize their marketing.

Treat Them Well: When you’re using call data to power your optimizations, you’ll begin driving even more calls to your business from your campaigns. To spread the love to your customers and ensure they feel special, use the data to help tailor their caller experience. Nearly two-thirds of enterprises are engaging in personalized marketing to meet their customer needs.

If the caller is a qualified sales lead, deliver them right away to the best person to convert them to a customer. And send them to to most relevant store, dealership, or office location based on their geographic location. They’ll fall in love with their personalized call experience.

[Stage Three] …Then Comes Marriage

Stage three involves merging call data with existing marketing and analytics technology. This gives marketers a holistic view of customer activity, both online and offline. And for data-driven marketers, it’s the perfect marriage of calls and data integration.

You get to analyze calls the same way you do for online clicks. Call data can be married to your CRM, web analytics, bid management, marketing automation, and more tools:

Craft Your Proposal: When proposing to integrate call data within your marketing stack, you must think about every place where it will give you an advantage. If you integrate it within a CRM like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, for example, you will be able to follow a phone lead and see if they convert to revenue.

[Stage Four] Then Comes Improved ROI in an Optimization Carriage

Stage four is when everything you’ve been doing to include phone calls in your attribution reporting comes full circle. From awareness of and falling in love with phone calls to marrying the tools in your martech stack, it all comes together to drive a certain outcome.

When you take call data and use it to help power campaign optimizations, you’re using complete data (both online and offline). The result? Improved CPA. Improved ROI. Improved CPL. Marketers gain the ability to drive real, accurate results after falling in love with phone calls.

Keep the Carriage Moving: As with anything in marketing and in any relationship, you don’t want to get too comfortable or take anything for granted. Don’t let the carriage get stuck in a routine – continue to test ways you can drive more call conversions (e.g., try some A/B testing) and ways you can use your call data to optimize your campaigns.

Want to learn more about mastering online-to-offline marketing? Check out this on-demand webinar.

You might be a horrible leader, but if you stay in sales long enough, you will be promoted to management.

However, your chances of ascending higher -- to a VP or Director of Sales position -- are zero. Only successful sales managers become sales executives.

To excel as a manager (and someday make it to the C-suite), avoid these four significant failures.

1) Communicating Change the Wrong Way

Sales managers must frequently hand down directions from above to their reps. The problem is, most managers completely miss the mark when they do.

Rather than allying themselves with company leadership, they try to take their team’s side.

Suppose the C-suite decides to shift from a geographic to vertical-based territory system. The sales manager wants to show she “gets it,” so she echoes what she thinks her salespeople are feeling with statements like:

• “I know this is hard but … ”
• “If it were up to me ... ”
• “I’m asking for quota relief … ”

This is an extremely dangerous path to go down. After all, the manager can’t reverse the change. Her attitude makes her team members resistant to something they can’t control.

Instead of taking an “us versus them” stance, sales managers should represent change as positive. The manager in this example might say, “Great news. We’re moving to verticals -- which will make lead assignment much easier and open up new accounts. This is one of the best moves the company has made all year for us.”

Now, her reps are far likelier to embrace the change.

What if you truly think leadership is making a bad decision? It’s fine to question an idea before it’s been realized. Once it’s in action, you must publicly adopt it no matter how you feel. Have a private conversation with other managers and executives, but never communicate your uncertainty to your salespeople.

The reality is, great sales managers aren’t transparent. Your ultimate job is marshalling your team to hit an aggregate target. If you broadcast every concern you hold, you won’t be able to achieve that goal.

2) Not Proactively Coaching Your Reps

Some sales managers are reluctant to, in their words, “micromanage.” When they were on the floor, they didn’t need reminders or motivation to make enough calls, set a certain number of meetings, ask for referrals, etc.

In fact, as reps they may have resented managers who tried to coach them. The common mentality is, “I already know how to do my job.”

Now that they’ve been promoted, these managers only get involved with a deal when it's 75% likely or higher to close. They don’t realize most of their salespeople actually need reinforcement to hit those leading metrics.

With that in mind, don’t ignore your reps because you’re hesitant to be too controlling. Shadow your salespeople, pinpoint their weaknesses, and give them the support they need to improve -- whether that’s saying, “Spend the next hour emailing prospects” or “Let’s work on your questioning strategy.”

3) Neglecting Your Firing Skills

There’s no doubt recruiting is a huge component of the position. I recommend dedicating an hour per day to filling your candidate pipeline: Searching for potential hires on LinkedIn, asking your network for referrals, having coffee meetings, and so forth.

What many sales managers never grasp? Your firing abilities are even more critical than your hiring abilities. Every low-performing rep harms your team’s potential to hit or exceed quota; plus, they’re bad for morale.

Devote time and energy to recognizing when people aren’t succeeding or don’t have the right skills. The sooner you part ways with them, the healthier your team will be.

If you’re not sure how to spot these tells, look at the last 10 salespeople who were terminated. Did the majority of them lack a specific ability? When and how did they start showing signs of poor fit? (This is also a good exercise to identify areas for coaching and training.)

4) Championing Hopeless Causes

Grab a pen and paper and write down the top three internal campaigns you’re waging.

Most sales managers are fighting similar battles: They’re trying to get more (or better) leads, redistribute the marketing budget, secure certain features in upcoming product releases, and so on.

These are the wrong conflicts. You’re never going to win the lead, marketing, or product wars. If you want to be a great sales manager, channel your time, energy, and resources into ones you can win, like running competitive analyses, getting more training, and rewarding your salespeople for their victories and progress.

Steer clear of these four mistakes, and you’ll be ahead of the game. There may be a corner office in your future.

Learn more about Jeff’s sales strategies to keep your career moving in the right direction. Check out his public workshops in Menlo Park, CA on 2/21 when he’ll be exploring prospecting techniques and negotiating and closing tactics.

Author: Vyoma Kapur

Financial services. Healthcare. Higher education. Manufacturing. Marketing to a new vertical is no easy feat. It takes time, resources, and dedication. But all the hard work and investment pay off as you go from being relatively unknown in a segment to the best-in-class solution.

Rather than dedicating all their resources into broad-based marketing, many organizations are adopting a vertical approach. This enables marketers to develop a “beachhead strategy”, focusing on and winning a particular market first before moving into other, larger markets. A vertical approach can be very effective when marketing to target accounts as well, helping you and your organization deliver a more personalized experience.

Let’s look at five key steps to penetrate a new industry:

1. Understand the Market

Start by understanding the market of the segment or vertical you’re trying to penetrate and its nuances. At Marketo, we have team members who are dedicated to verticals of interest. These roles span different functions—segment marketing managers, solution consultants, and account executives—and they are tasked with different areas of market research to establish the breadth and depth of the segment—from perusing analyst reports to staying on top of emerging trends. It’s also critical to look at your own database and leverage the sales and customer success teams for insights as well.

Here are some good questions to answer to get a better understanding of the market:

• How many existing customers in the vertical do you have?
• What is the churn rate of the customers in this vertical vs. your overall churn rate, and what factors might contribute to that?
• How are those customers using your product or service; in other words, is there a product-market fit?

Ultimately, your goal should be to establish the total addressable market (TAM), or total available market, which is essentially the revenue opportunity available for your product or service.

2. Identify Your Personas

Once you have a good understanding of the vertical, start identifying your personas so you can map their buyer journeys and understand how they interact with the different touchpoints at each stage.

Who are the decision-makers and influencers, and what are their demographics and behaviors? How are they different from the personas in other segments? At Marketo, for example, we found that the ideal personas in certain industries may be sales or IT leaders as opposed to marketing leaders, as they drive most of the purchasing decisions. Don’t forget about others who play a role in the purchase process as well, such as influencers or gatekeepers. Again, be sure to include your sales team in your research process—they will have valuable insights and feedback since they are on the front line.

3. Build Sales Support

This step is critical, so don’t cut corners or overlook it! Your sales team is eventually going to be doing the selling, so they need to be armed with as much knowledge and as many resources as possible. You need to enable both your inside and field sales teams with the right messaging and content so they can effectively sell into the chosen segment. For example, if you want to engage asset management firms, a term that would resonate with them is “assets under management” or “AUM.” Similarly, you may find that some of your common vernacular will not work in a new segment. For example, don’t make references to “leads” when trying to penetrate the higher education market.

Much of your messaging development for a new vertical should be based on your research from the prior steps; you should already have an idea of what kind of messages would resonate with your buyers, so it then becomes a matter of creating a cohesive and succinct messaging framework for your sales team.

Here are some segment-specific materials you can create to fully enable your sales team for outbound prospecting:

• Call lists: List of qualified people in selected accounts for sales outreach
• Call scripts: General guidance on what to say when cold calling prospects
• Datasheets: One-page documents explaining how your product is a good fit for a certain segment
• Training decks: Slide deck for internal sales enablement designed to provide basic knowledge on the chosen segment to your sales team
• One-page overviews: High-level document addressing the challenges, pain points, and solutions for the chosen segment

4. Start Your Demand Generation Engine

To scale your vertical strategy, demand generation is instrumental in driving qualified leads for the chosen segment, engaging them, and nudging them to the next stage of the customer lifecycle.

To run programs across the lifecycle effectively, the content you have already created may not be sufficient; you need content that’s tailored to each stage of the buyer’s journey. At the early stage, content such as ebooks, slideshows, and blog posts are effective for generating awareness. At the mid-stage, webinars and case studies play an important role in nurturing leads. And at the late stage, product demos can go a long way. While this may sound like a lot, with strategic repurposing, you can ensure that each vertical has content that’s tailored to the market and buyer’s journey.

A helpful exercise is to map out the programs and the frequency with which you can run each program. It is easy to overpromise, but a framework like this will help you set expectations and stay within your budget and resources.

5. Measure Your Results

As with every initiative, it’s important to measure your results. You may not see enough traction initially since much of groundwork is focused on research, content development, and training and leads take time to mature. However, early-stage metrics are still good indicators of early success as you measure all the way through to your ROI.

Here are some important marketing metrics to track at various stages:

• Early-stage:
  • New names: The number of buyers who are in your database but have not engaged with your company yet (e.g. acquired through a business card at a tradeshow)
  • Leads: The number of leads who are qualified buyers based on your buyer profile and are opted-in to your marketing communications through engagement with your brand
• Mid-stage:
  • Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): The number of qualified leads based on the scoring model agreed upon by sales and marketing
  • Sales qualified leads (SQLS): The number of qualified leads who are interested in your product or service and are a good fit, based on further evaluation from your sales team
• Late-stage:
  • Opportunities: The number of SQLs who fit the BANT criteria (budget, authority, need, and time).
  • Pipeline: The total value of opportunities created in the segment
  • Closed won: The number of opportunities that were successfully turned into paying customers. It is important to compare this metric with “closed lost” in order to ascertain the win rate
  • Revenue: The revenue generated from closed won opportunities since the programs started

While these metrics may look similar to those for your broad-based programs, the focus will be on vertical accounts specifically. Accordingly, you may want to set up separate reports and dashboards in your marketing platform to track them.

Want to learn more about industry or other areas of marketing? Attend Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit, the premier marketing industry event, in San Francisco from April 23-26th! Join my session with Graham Gallivan on “Penetrating Industries With An Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategy”.

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5 Steps to Market to a New Vertical was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 5 Steps to Market to a New Vertical appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Ready to hire salespeople but don’t know where to start? You’re in the right place. Steli Efti, the CEO of Close.io, recently did a webinar on B2B sales hiring. Although it’s geared towards B2B companies and startups, the principles can be applied to most companies.

He has helped over 200 venture-backed startups scale their sales and is excited to share the lessons he’s learned with you. He covers everything you need to know about sales hiring such as when to hire salespeople, what traits to look for or avoid, how to train them and more. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

 We’re releasing our latest book, The Sales Hiring Playbook, soon. Be among the first to get a free copy.

Transcript

Steli Efti: Boom! Perfect. All right, let me—this is one of those things. Let me hit Play. Control Panel. Beautiful. All right, ladies and gentlemen. Hey, Matteo. Good to see you guys. So—yeah. Let’s rock and roll. Welcome everybody to today’s webinar. This is going to be a good one. I’m really excited about this one. So, I’m going to go through kind of the ABC’s and the basics of sales hiring specifically for B2B companies and startups, but really most of these base principles apply to most companies out there.

So, I’m going to keep the content fairly short and on point and really want to lean more heavily on the Q&A side of things. So I’m going to go through the basics of hiring amazing talent, onboarding that talent really successfully and then we’re going to have a conversation. And mainly, I want to just answer your questions, right? So, hopefully, you have a bunch of questions already coming into this. If you don’t, make sure to come up with questions as I’m going through these slides. And as you are thinking of questions, start writing them out in chat.

I’m not going to be stopping the—I’m not going to be responding to them in real time, but by the end of—when we get to the Q&A section, if I already have a bunch of questions in chat, it’s just going to make this webinar a lot more content-intensive because I’m going to be able to launch right into answering some of these questions.

Steli's background: Pivoting from ElasticSales to Close.io

All right. So, let’s get started. Sales Hiring 101, you know, how to hire and manage, you know, amazing sales talent for your B2B company. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I know most of you people already know me, know my background but just to run through the reason why both I care and know a thing or two about how to hire sales talent, how to grow sales teams or organize and structure sales teams and set salespeople up for success.

We used to run a company called ElasticSales where we were running a large sales organization and we’re helping over 200 venture-backed startups in Silicon Valley, scaled their sales efforts internally and externally. And as part of running ElasticSales as many of you know, we built a little piece of internal software called Close.io.

It’s our kind of magical CRM that’s focused on empowering sales teams, close more deals, make more revenue, make things happen. And with Close.io today, there is thousands and thousands of sales teams all around the world that are using our platform and are growing their teams based on Close.io and I personally am talking to—I don’t know how many founders—but it’s more than—it’s probably like 5 to 10 founders and sales leaders every single week giving them advice on how to retain, how to acquire, how to manage, how to coach sales talents. So, we live and breathe this stuff every single day. We see an incredible amount of best practices, experimentation, things that companies do that work, things that companies attempt that don’t work and it’s just a lot of accumulation of knowledge that I want to make, you know—I want to make accessible to you and that’s the whole purpose of this is taking all the lessons and learnings and know-how that we have accumulated and sharing it with you guys so you can be more successful. Simple as that. So, with that being said, let’s launch right into some of the basics of sales hiring and sales management and then, you know, for me even more excitingly, we’ll get to your questions and my answers to those. All right.

So, we live and breathe this stuff every single day. We see an incredible amount of best practices, experimentation, things that companies do that work, things that companies attempt that don’t work and it’s just a lot of accumulation of knowledge that I want to make, you know—I want to make accessible to you and that’s the whole purpose of this is taking all the lessons and learnings and know-how that we have accumulated and sharing it with you guys so you can be more successful. Simple as that. So, with that being said, let’s launch right into some of the basics of sales hiring and sales management and then, you know, for me even more excitingly, we’ll get to your questions and my answers to those. All right.

So, with that being said, let’s launch right into some of the basics of sales hiring and sales management and then, you know, for me even more excitingly, we’ll get to your questions and my answers to those. All right.

Startup sales hiring framework

Step #1: Founder-driven sales

So, first of all, let me share my framework of startup sales hiring in general. Again, this applies to any kind of business really. I think Step #1, you know, the most fundamental thing you have to do is that you have to sell yourself first, and it doesn’t matter if—like at the beginning obviously that’s the founders but even if somebody in here is the first salesperson that works at that B2B startup or company and you’re like “I’m not a founder, but I’m the first sales guy or gal.” The same step applies to you. First, you have to sell, right? No matter if you have a sales background or not, no matter if selling is going to be ultimately the thing you’re going to do forever or just for certain period of time. There’s no way around this. At the beginning, the founders need to sell or the first sales person needs to, you know, do the job themselves. Whatever job you’re trying to hire people for, you have to be able to perform that job yourself even if you do it poorly. In order to understand what the job entails and how to hire effectively for that job and how to set other people up for success in that job, you have to do it. So, Step #1, there’s no way around this, and I know a lot of people want to avoid this and find work around to this, but Step #1 no matter who you are and what your situation is and no matter how much you think you’re not a salesperson, you have to sell yourself first. Once you’ve done it and I always say this is—Step #1 is being a shitty salesperson yourself, right?

First, you have to sell, right? No matter if you have a sales background or not, no matter if selling is going to be ultimately the thing you’re going to do forever or just for certain period of time. There’s no way around this. At the beginning, the founders need to sell or the first sales person needs to, you know, do the job themselves. Whatever job you’re trying to hire people for, you have to be able to perform that job yourself even if you do it poorly. In order to understand what the job entails and how to hire effectively for that job and how to set other people up for success in that job, you have to do it. So, Step #1, there’s no way around this, and I know a lot of people want to avoid this and find work around to this, but Step #1 no matter who you are and what your situation is and no matter how much you think you’re not a salesperson, you have to sell yourself first. Once you’ve done it and I always say this is—Step #1 is being a shitty salesperson yourself, right?

In order to understand what the job entails and how to hire effectively for that job and how to set other people up for success in that job, you have to do it. So, Step #1, there’s no way around this, and I know a lot of people want to avoid this and find work around to this, but Step #1 no matter who you are and what your situation is and no matter how much you think you’re not a salesperson, you have to sell yourself first. Once you’ve done it and I always say this is—Step #1 is being a shitty salesperson yourself, right?

Step #2: Founder sales manager

So, once you’ve done the job yourself even if you’ve done it poorly, you get to Step #2. And Step #2 is that now you move from being maybe a poor or mediocre salesperson yourself or some of you might be amazing salespeople; it doesn’t really matter. You move from doing sales yourself to now managing salespeople. In most startups, you want the founders to be the first ones that are going to be attempting to do a little bit of sales management themselves. And with founders, I joke oftentimes that you go from being a bad salesperson to being a bad sales manager. That’s totally cool. It’s totally fine. The healthy way of approaching this is when you do sales yourself, you’re trying to attempt and prove that there’s a market out there. You can get customers. You can acquire customers. Once you’ve got a bunch of customers, now what you’re trying to do in Step #2 is you try to bring in some junior talent and I’m going to talk about this in detail now, but you’re going to bring in some junior talent to prove “Can I teach anyone else to generate some results?” Or “Can I teach other people to generate the same results I’ve generated?” That’s really the question you’re trying to answer in Step #2 and this is for most people where, you know, hiring starts is you go out there and you hire the first few people to figure out “Is it possible for me to replicate the success that we’ve had

Once you’ve got a bunch of customers, now what you’re trying to do in Step #2 is you try to bring in some junior talent and I’m going to talk about this in detail now, but you’re going to bring in some junior talent to prove “Can I teach anyone else to generate some results?” Or “Can I teach other people to generate the same results I’ve generated?” That’s really the question you’re trying to answer in Step #2 and this is for most people where, you know, hiring starts is you go out there and you hire the first few people to figure out “Is it possible for me to replicate the success that we’ve had selling with other people?” That’s really the basis of that. And

And in that stage, in that Step #2, you really want to hire more junior sales talent. That is not the time to go and hire people that have 50 years of experience. That’s not the time to hire people that are VPs of sales of other companies to do selling for you. At that stage, you really just want to have some junior talent that’s going to come in that has some basic hustle gene, people that are young, ambitious, hungry, sharp, smart and passionate and that you can teach the ABC’s of what you’ve been doing for them to replicate. Now, these people, these junior salespeople that you’re trying to hire, these people are not going to be—so what you’re looking for there is not many years of experience but what you’re still looking for is core DNA. You’re looking for somebody that does have some level of killer instinct, that has some level of competitiveness, that is a good communicator, that likes people and could be liked by other people, somebody that has mental strength and discipline. Like these certain traits that you can’t teach somebody and a killer instinct to try to go for a close or to pick up the phone and call somebody with a high level of possibility of being rejected. These types of things you don’t want to have to teach somebody. You want people that already have that kind of in their gene, in their personality. What you want to teach them is you want to them about your product, about your market and then you want to teach them the ABC’s of here’s how you write an email, here’s how you prospect. You want to teach them the basics of performing the job, but you don’t want to teach them what it takes to be somebody that could be good in sales, and we’ll talk about this a little bit more in detail later. So, somebody asked and I can answer this on this slide immediately. “What makes somebody a junior talent? What defines junior talent?” Junior talent defined—junior means somebody that does not have many years of experience, maybe one year of business experience but surely not 10, 20, 15 years of experience in a traditional sales job, but that has

You’re looking for somebody that does have some level of killer instinct, that has some level of competitiveness, that is a good communicator, that likes people and could be liked by other people, somebody that has mental strength and discipline. Like these certain traits that you can’t teach somebody and a killer instinct to try to go for a close or to pick up the phone and call somebody with a high level of possibility of being rejected. These types of things you don’t want to have to teach somebody. You want people that already have that kind of in their gene, in their personality. What you want to teach them is you want to them about your product, about your market and then you want to teach them the ABC’s of here’s how you write an email, here’s how you prospect. You want to teach them the basics of performing the job, but you don’t want to teach them what it takes to be somebody that could be good in sales, and we’ll talk about this a little bit more in detail later. So, somebody asked and I can answer this on this slide immediately. “What makes somebody a junior talent? What defines junior talent?” Junior talent defined—junior means somebody that does not have many years of experience, maybe one year of business experience but surely not 10, 20, 15 years of experience in a traditional sales job, but that has

You want people that already have that kind of in their gene, in their personality. What you want to teach them is you want to them about your product, about your market and then you want to teach them the ABC’s of here’s how you write an email, here’s how you prospect. You want to teach them the basics of performing the job, but you don’t want to teach them what it takes to be somebody that could be good in sales, and we’ll talk about this a little bit more in detail later. So, somebody asked and I can answer this on this slide immediately. “What makes somebody a junior talent? What defines junior talent?” Junior talent defined—junior means somebody that does not have many years of experience, maybe one year of business experience but surely not 10, 20, 15 years of experience in a traditional sales job, but that has

So, somebody asked and I can answer this on this slide immediately. “What makes somebody a junior talent? What defines junior talent?” Junior talent defined—junior means somebody that does not have many years of experience, maybe one year of business experience but surely not 10, 20, 15 years of experience in a traditional sales job, but that has talent to do sales. And the talent to do sales in most cases will mean this is somebody I would want to buy from. This is somebody that is fearless. This is somebody that hustles. This is somebody that wants to communicate. This is somebody that has a high level of tolerance for rejection. You’re looking for these types of things. And—We’ll talk about

And—We’ll talk about kind of, you know, about the personality type of salespeople that most startups should try to hire for a little later. So I’m going to drop to that question in a bit, but we go from Step 1—we’re doing all the selling ourselves—to Step 2, we are hiring some junior people to teach what we’ve been doing and see can we get some results, and at this stage, things are still very much in motion. They’re fluid. You’re not looking for perfection. You’re still experimenting. You’re experimenting. You’re trying to figure out some kind of a process that creates some kind of—some results that you can, you know, base on. And also, in that step and stage #2, one base tip in general when it comes to sales hiring and I’ll throw out there early is you want to hire in triples, if not, in couples, even better in triples, which means if you want to hire one salesperson, you really want to bring in three people to see who’s going to be that one person that’s going to stand out and be the perfect type of person to do the job because if you just hire one junior salesperson and you are let’s say a more inexperienced sales manager

And also, in that step and stage #2, one base tip in general when it comes to sales hiring and I’ll throw out there early is you want to hire in triples, if not, in couples, even better in triples, which means if you want to hire one salesperson, you really want to bring in three people to see who’s going to be that one person that’s going to stand out and be the perfect type of person to do the job because if you just hire one junior salesperson and you are let’s say a more inexperienced sales manager yourself. Now, if that person doesn’t perform well, you don’t really know what the problem is. You don’t know if it’s the salesperson or if it is your product or if it is the way you manage. You don’t know where the blame lies. Now if you hire two or three people, ideally three people that are very different in their characteristic and their background and their personality. You hire people that look and act a little differently and you give them the same training, the same product, the same leads and you see is there a difference in terms of how they perform. If they all perform equally poor, maybe the problem is

Now if you hire two or three people, ideally three people that are very different in their characteristic and their background and their personality. You hire people that look and act a little differently and you give them the same training, the same product, the same leads and you see is there a difference in terms of how they perform. If they all perform equally poor, maybe the problem is on you or your product. But if one of them—typically one of them will outperform the other two and that gives you a lot of information and a strong signal on what type of person will do really well in your company. So, I always advise to hire in threes when it comes to salespeople. Competition is healthy in sales. Measuring yourself with other people is really healthy. It’s going to always be hard to measure somebody that’s just started with your results, you know. You might have been with the company for a little while. Now you bring in somebody new. That person obviously is not selling as well as you. Now, how do you compare their performance? How do you benchmark their performance? It’s always tricky. But if you bring in three new people and they all start on day 1, it’s very easy to benchmark. You can look at all the results that all three generate with the same training, the same amount on the job and you can clearly see the differences in their abilities and what they’re capable of doing or not.

Competition is healthy in sales. Measuring yourself with other people is really healthy. It’s going to always be hard to measure somebody that’s just started with your results, you know. You might have been with the company for a little while. Now you bring in somebody new. That person obviously is not selling as well as you. Now, how do you compare their performance? How do you benchmark their performance? It’s always tricky. But if you bring in three new people and they all start on day 1, it’s very easy to benchmark. You can look at all the results that all three generate with the same training, the same amount on the job and you can clearly see the differences in their abilities and what they’re capable of doing or not.

Step #3: Junior sales leader

So, you do it yourself in Step 1 and Step 2, you bring in some junior people, two to three of them at once, and you see can I replicate some of the results that we’ve been doing. And once you’ve done that and you get some kind of results. You’re closing deals. You’re making revenue. You may or may not be killing it yet. Even if it’s very slow. Even if it’s not as profitable or quite as amazing as you think it should be, if you have some kind of result and you have some kind of repeatability with those results, then you’re getting to territory of Stage #3 which is when you want to bring in a junior sales leader. This is somebody—here’s how I define this person. This is somebody that has been a sales manager for a relatively short period of time but relatively successfully. Ideally, this is somebody that has been where you are right now in your stage a year or two ago. So, you want to hire somebody that works at a company that two years ago they were where you are right now and they have grown past that stage. The reason why you want to do that is you want to benefit and bank on all the lessons that this person learned at company X to come in and instantly gain a massive ROI from that. So, you want to bring in somebody that was a junior sales manager which means a sales manager with one or two years of experience—successful experience at a startup that’s just a step or two ahead of you. You bring in that person. You recruit and hire that person. That person now comes in and there’s already a team, right? You’ve been managing a small team. There’s already some results. There’s revenue. There’s some stuff going on and that person will immediately be able to identify what you’re doing wrong, what are easy wins that they’ve experienced and proven at the other company that they can immediately bring

This is somebody—here’s how I define this person. This is somebody that has been a sales manager for a relatively short period of time but relatively successfully. Ideally, this is somebody that has been where you are right now in your stage a year or two ago. So, you want to hire somebody that works at a company that two years ago they were where you are right now and they have grown past that stage. The reason why you want to do that is you want to benefit and bank on all the lessons that this person learned at company X to come in and instantly gain a massive ROI from that. So, you want to bring in somebody that was a junior sales manager which means a sales manager with one or two years of experience—successful experience at a startup that’s just a step or two ahead of you. You bring in that person. You recruit and hire that person. That person now comes in and there’s already a team, right? You’ve been managing a small team. There’s already some results. There’s revenue. There’s some stuff going on and that person will immediately be able to identify what you’re doing wrong, what are easy wins that they’ve experienced and proven at the other company that they can immediately bring

So, you want to bring in somebody that was a junior sales manager which means a sales manager with one or two years of experience—successful experience at a startup that’s just a step or two ahead of you. You bring in that person. You recruit and hire that person. That person now comes in and there’s already a team, right? You’ve been managing a small team. There’s already some results. There’s revenue. There’s some stuff going on and that person will immediately be able to identify what you’re doing wrong, what are easy wins that they’ve experienced and proven at the other company that they can immediately bring in to—they’ll immediately bring in some more sales talent. They’ll organize and structure things a little bit better. They cut some stupid things you’re doing. They add some smart things that they’ve learned. They’re instantly going to get you to that next level, and that’s going to make a massive difference. And I’m going to be rocking—like keep the questions going. I love the quality and

And I’m going to be rocking—like keep the questions going. I love the quality and the quantity of questions. Just keep them going. I’m going to be ignoring them for now because I just have a few slides to get through and then I’m going to come back and really do an intensive Q&;A section. So just keep them coming as you can think of them. So, Step 1, you do it yourself. Step 2, you manage a few people—junior people to see if they can do it. Step 3, you bring in some junior sales leadership that has a bit more experience than you in managing people, a year or two ahead of you. They come in. They bring instant wins. They grow the team. They grow your efforts. They mature your efforts and maybe they start growing one or two junior sales leaders under them and then once that—once you get to the point where your sales model is both predictable and repeatable and you think “We got it. We know exactly what amount of sales we’re going to do next month. We know exactly how to double the sales that we’re doing. We know the mechanics. We know the formula. Now, we need to scale this as fast as possible.”

So, Step 1, you do it yourself. Step 2, you manage a few people—junior people to see if they can do it. Step 3, you bring in some junior sales leadership that has a bit more experience than you in managing people, a year or two ahead of you. They come in. They bring instant wins. They grow the team. They grow your efforts. They mature your efforts and maybe they start growing one or two junior sales leaders under them and then once that—once you get to the point where your sales model is both predictable and repeatable and you think “We got it. We know exactly what amount of sales we’re going to do next month. We know exactly how to double the sales that we’re doing. We know the mechanics. We know the formula. Now, we need to scale this as fast as possible.”

Step #4: Senior sales leader

That’s when you get to Stage #4 which is when you bring in some serious senior sales leadership. So what that means is that now you bring in the VP of sales. Now you bring in the guy or gal that’s been doing this job for 10 years, that’s been a VP of sales at one or two other companies successfully and that person comes in and that person needs this structure to shine. That person comes in and there’s already one or two sales managers. There’s a team of 10, 20 people, 30 people, whatever it is and now that person will do things to help scale this effort. This person will set up a compensation structure that’s really scalable. This VP of sales is going to set up a recruiting and hiring structure that’s really scalable. This VP of sales is going to create a training and career program, is going to redesign the organization structure of the sales team. This VP of sales is going to do all these things that are required to really scale your organization. Now, too many startups or sales, you know, people that need sales in their company, they make the mistakes that they want to hire this VP of sales right away. A VP of sales in Stage #2 is horrible. That person has not been selling themselves for many, many years. They have talents, the experience, the know-how, the skillset. Has not been trying to figure out how to sell something that nobody has ever heard of and that is very unproven and that maybe in three months, you’re going to have to pivot anyways and do something completely different. That is not the stage to hire super-senior salespeople. That’s why you want to do it at the right time, at the right stage. You do the right thing at the wrong time, you’re fucked, right? You’re trying to, you know, get in your garden when it’s snowing and it’s winter and try to like make things grow there. It’s not going to be a good time. So, you want to make sure that you bring in the right people at the right time when they really can give your business a boost. First, you do it yourself, then you help others do it, then you bring in somebody that has proven that they can teach and coach others doing it much better than you, somebody with a bit of experience. And once that’s rocking and rolling and you have a model that’s ready to scale, you bring in kind of the executive, kind of CEO of your sales team, the VP of sales, the director of sales, the person that’s a real kind of sales leader at the very high level and that person kind of orchestrates the organization to grow in and scale up really, really fast. All right. That being said, as a bunch of basic questions that people have when it comes to hiring, again, I’m going to go through with them really quickly and then we’re going to really focus and hone in on the Q&A section. So, first, a basic question is, you know—well, it’s actually not true.

This VP of sales is going to set up a recruiting and hiring structure that’s really scalable. This VP of sales is going to create a training and career program, is going to redesign the organization structure of the sales team. This VP of sales is going to do all these things that are required to really scale your organization. Now, too many startups or sales, you know, people that need sales in their company, they make the mistakes that they want to hire this VP of sales right away. A VP of sales in Stage #2 is horrible. That person has not been selling themselves for many, many years. They have talents, the experience, the know-how, the skillset. Has not been trying to figure out how to sell something that nobody has ever heard of and that is very unproven and that maybe in three months, you’re going to have to pivot anyways and do something completely different. That is not the stage to hire super-senior salespeople. That’s why you want to do it at the right time, at the right stage. You do the right thing at the wrong time, you’re fucked, right? You’re trying to, you know, get in your garden when it’s snowing and it’s winter and try to like make things grow there. It’s not going to be a good time. So, you want to make sure that you bring in the right people at the right time when they really can give your business a boost. First, you do it yourself, then you help others do it, then you bring in somebody that has proven that they can teach and coach others doing it much better than you, somebody with a bit of experience. And once that’s rocking and rolling and you have a model that’s ready to scale, you bring in kind of the executive, kind of CEO of your sales team, the VP of sales, the director of sales, the person that’s a real kind of sales leader at the very high level and that person kind of orchestrates the organization to grow in and scale up really, really fast. All right. That being said, as a bunch of basic questions that people have when it comes to hiring, again, I’m going to go through with them really quickly and then we’re going to really focus and hone in on the Q&A section. So, first, a basic question is, you know—well, it’s actually not true.

So, you want to make sure that you bring in the right people at the right time when they really can give your business a boost. First, you do it yourself, then you help others do it, then you bring in somebody that has proven that they can teach and coach others doing it much better than you, somebody with a bit of experience. And once that’s rocking and rolling and you have a model that’s ready to scale, you bring in kind of the executive, kind of CEO of your sales team, the VP of sales, the director of sales, the person that’s a real kind of sales leader at the very high level and that person kind of orchestrates the organization to grow in and scale up really, really fast. All right. That being said, as a bunch of basic questions that people have when it comes to hiring, again, I’m going to go through with them really quickly and then we’re going to really focus and hone in on the Q&A section. So, first, a basic question is, you know—well, it’s actually not true.

All right. That being said, as a bunch of basic questions that people have when it comes to hiring, again, I’m going to go through with them really quickly and then we’re going to really focus and hone in on the Q&A section. So, first, a basic question is, you know—well, it’s actually not true.

Where do you find sales talent?

Well, let’s start this way. First question is “Where the hell do I find sales talent?” Right? That’s really the first question that most people have. Where can I find the greatest salespeople ever? Well, I’ll tell you where you won’t find them. You won’t find most great sales talent by posting on some generic job board and saying “We’re hiring salespeople.” Most companies especially startups will not have a great time with this. Here’s the reality. Here’s the truth of selling, a few truths. Number one, nobody grows up wanting to be a salesperson, which means that by definition most of the magical sales—most of the people that are crushing it in sales, most of the best sales talent, for most of their life, they did not think of themselves as salespeople or as people that want to be in sales. So, what that uncovers is that there’s an incredible amount of sales talent out there that does not consider themselves salespeople and would not consider themselves as looking for a sales job. That’s really important to consider, and I’ll tell you some stories that from ElasticSales day. But before I get to that, that’s one thing you need to keep in mind.

Number one, nobody grows up wanting to be a salesperson, which means that by definition most of the magical sales—most of the people that are crushing it in sales, most of the best sales talent, for most of their life, they did not think of themselves as salespeople or as people that want to be in sales. So, what that uncovers is that there’s an incredible amount of sales talent out there that does not consider themselves salespeople and would not consider themselves as looking for a sales job. That’s really important to consider, and I’ll tell you some stories that from ElasticSales day. But before I get to that, that’s one thing you need to keep in mind.

Avoid senior sales hires early on

The other thing you need to keep in mind about sales talent is that if somebody—so there’s two categories, right? If somebody has a lot of experience, a lot being 5 to 10 years of sales experience and they are good, you cannot hire them, right? Maybe you can if they’re your brother, your mother, your sister, your grandfather, your uncle, your best friend since childhood, you know, competitive advantage is unfair. But most people that are—somebody who’s really good at sales and they have been doing sales for a while, they’re not looking for a job. They’re not applying for your job post on Craigslist. They’re not in the market looking for work. They’re making a ton of fucking money and they are in high demand. They are being recruited. They’re not looking for jobs. So most people that have many, many years of experience, if they are good, they’re out of the question for you. If you find somebody that applies for your job and has many years of experience and tells you they are amazing, you should be scared. There’s something wrong here. There’s something wrong here, right? There’s something that fundamentally does not compute.

They’re not applying for your job post on Craigslist. They’re not in the market looking for work. They’re making a ton of fucking money and they are in high demand. They are being recruited. They’re not looking for jobs. So most people that have many, many years of experience, if they are good, they’re out of the question for you. If you find somebody that applies for your job and has many years of experience and tells you they are amazing, you should be scared. There’s something wrong here. There’s something wrong here, right? There’s something that fundamentally does not compute.

How to recruit people who have sales potential

So, if we take off most people that have many, many years of sales experience as people that we can hire from, we have to look for people that have less experience, and I’ll tell you in the more junior bracket of sales hiring talent, we at ElasticSales, we were building one of the best sales teams in technology history. We were doing sales for hundreds of other B2B companies. All of our sales hires, all of them were people that had never had a sales job before and that did not apply for a sales job and they were not thinking of themselves as salespeople. We were aggressively recruiting people that did not want to have a sales job and here’s how we did it. You know, the first person that I hired as a salesperson was a founder of a failing startup, a guy that was actually an engineer, that actually worked at NASA and worked on the Mars Rover landing like a rocket. Like I always joke sales is rocket science but just in case we got us

All of our sales hires, all of them were people that had never had a sales job before and that did not apply for a sales job and they were not thinking of themselves as salespeople. We were aggressively recruiting people that did not want to have a sales job and here’s how we did it. You know, the first person that I hired as a salesperson was a founder of a failing startup, a guy that was actually an engineer, that actually worked at NASA and worked on the Mars Rover landing like a rocket. Like I always joke sales is rocket science but just in case we got us one, like this was a guy with zero sales experience but he had sales talents. He was a good communicator. He was a people person. He was somebody with a massive tolerance for pain and rejection and was somebody that was hustling his ass off as a founder of his own startup. He had all the building blocks of a great salesperson. So that was the first person I recruited and convinced that learning to sell would make him a better entrepreneur long-term, that making a good amount of money right now was important because his startup was failing and that being part early on of what we were building would be something really special. I recruited him based on that premise more than anything else. And then, I did what I always do. I asked every single hire that’s great, “Hey,” on their first day, “who is somebody that—who is the first person that comes to mind that you think would be amazing

He was a good communicator. He was a people person. He was somebody with a massive tolerance for pain and rejection and was somebody that was hustling his ass off as a founder of his own startup. He had all the building blocks of a great salesperson. So that was the first person I recruited and convinced that learning to sell would make him a better entrepreneur long-term, that making a good amount of money right now was important because his startup was failing and that being part early on of what we were building would be something really special. I recruited him based on that premise more than anything else. And then, I did what I always do. I asked every single hire that’s great, “Hey,” on their first day, “who is somebody that—who is the first person that comes to mind that you think would be amazing

And then, I did what I always do. I asked every single hire that’s great, “Hey,” on their first day, “who is somebody that—who is the first person that comes to mind that you think would be amazing at sales but would not never ever in a million years work here? Who’s somebody you know that would never fucking work here? But if we could make that happen, it would have been like game-changing for our company.” I’m asking people to give me recommendations for people that are unhireable, that I cannot hire. I ask them, “Who’s somebody I can’t hire that you love and you think is incredibly talented?” And what do I do once I get that name? I call them right there and then. And here’s my pitch to that person, I go “Hey, I’m just—you know, it’s the first day of Bob. So Bob is a good friend of

And here’s my pitch to that person, I go “Hey, I’m just—you know, it’s the first day of Bob. So Bob is a good friend of yours he told me. We just hired him. It’s his first day. The reason why I’m calling is anytime I hire somebody new, I ask them who’s the smartest person you know, somebody we would never be able to hire, and Bob said you. He said you are incredible. You are this. You are that. You’re the other. You’re the most amazing person ever. And you know what, I love to meet amazing people. So independently from us being able to hire you or not, I just wanted to get to know you a little bit.” Nobody rejects that. Everybody loves to be amazing. Everybody loves to be, you know, called by the founder or CEO or the director of sales and be saying, “Hey, this new hire—your friend said you’re the most amazing person they know.” What do I do then? I get to know them and I try to figure them out and I try to figure out what they’re trying to do in life, where they are right now and what they’re going to do next and I tell them about us and our vision and what we’re trying to do and why it’s special. And I basically sell them on the vision and the company and myself and the team, more so than on the job. And at the

What do I do then? I get to know them and I try to figure them out and I try to figure out what they’re trying to do in life, where they are right now and what they’re going to do next and I tell them about us and our vision and what we’re trying to do and why it’s special. And I basically sell them on the vision and the company and myself and the team, more so than on the job. And at the end if the conversation goes well, I tell them, “You know what, this was such a good conversation. I’d love to have you just come in for a day or two just brainstorm with the team, get to know us, give us feedback. I think you’re really smart. I think you’re really talented.” And step-by- step, they come in and it’s a dating process where they and us fall in love with each other and then at the end of it, they go “Holy shit! I guess now I’m in sales.” Like we hire as I said an electrical engineer that was a founder as a salesperson. We hired somebody that had just been accepted by Harvard Business School. His lifelong dream was to get an MBA at Harvard. He was working at a PR agency in New York. He never wanted to be in sales. He was preparing to go to Harvard. He spent a weekend with us. Next thing you know he relocated and started as a salesperson for us. I could go on

We hired somebody that had just been accepted by Harvard Business School. His lifelong dream was to get an MBA at Harvard. He was working at a PR agency in New York. He never wanted to be in sales. He was preparing to go to Harvard. He spent a weekend with us. Next thing you know he relocated and started as a salesperson for us. I could go on

I could go on story for story for story. All the people we hired were all coming in through internal recommendations and they were—none of them had any sales background, but all of them had sales talent and then we trained them and we made them great. And all of them today, by the way, all the entire first 20 hires at ElasticSales that were like our first sales hires, all of them today are directors of sales, VPs of sales or CEOs and founders of their own successful startups. Where do you find talent? Anywhere and everywhere. You just have to look differently. Don’t go and try to find people that are salespeople. Try to find people that have sales talent. How do I get—? There you go.

How to interview salespeople

Now, how do you interview salespeople? Very briefly on that. It’s actually very simple. So, philosophically I want you guys to understand this one simple truth: You don’t know if somebody is great at sales until they’ve proven it consistently. There’s no way that you can interview somebody to know for certain if they’re going to be great at the job of selling for more than a day or two, right? Some people are just amazing at interviewing, but that will not always translate into the actual job of selling. So—is there some things that you can do

There’s no way that you can interview somebody to know for certain if they’re going to be great at the job of selling for more than a day or two, right? Some people are just amazing at interviewing, but that will not always translate into the actual job of selling. So—is there some things that you can do on the interviewing process? Of course. Give them some homework, like have them sell you. That’s first, right? Don’t just ask them how were your revenue structures? Would you like to sell? No. Have them pitch you something.

That’s first, right? Don’t just ask them how were your revenue structures? Would you like to sell? No. Have them pitch you something.

If they’ve had a sales job before, have them sell you that product. If they have never ever sold anything, have them sell something that they use and like, “Hey, do you like your iPhone? What’s your favorite software product?” “Oh, I fucking love Gmail” or “I fucking love Facebook or Twitter,” or “I’m a huge Snapchat fan.” “Cool. Pitch me Snapchat, right? Sell me on it.” Let them pitch you. Let them prove to you that they’re capable of doing it. It’s like saying, “What kind of interview questions can I ask somebody to know if they’re going to be an NBA basketball superstar?” I mean, of course, I can ask some questions to know if they’re going to be

Let them pitch you. Let them prove to you that they’re capable of doing it. It’s like saying, “What kind of interview questions can I ask somebody to know if they’re going to be an NBA basketball superstar?” I mean, of course, I can ask some questions to know if they’re going to be culture-fit, if they’re smart, if they’re asked a question, they’re good communicators. But at the end of the day, I have to throw that person a ball and have them play. There’s no question I can ask on a piece of paper that somebody could answer that would make me know and spot if someone is going to be an NBA basketball superstar. I need to see them play the ball. So, throw them the ball as quickly as possible.

Have them pitch you something. Have them—I always like to do this exercise. Have them write a cold email. Here’s what I tell people. At Close.io, we don’t even do any cold emailing right now, but I would still give this exercise to people. “Hey, here’s how our core customer is, ideal customer. Here’s what our product does. Here’s an exercise for you. I want you to go out there on the web and research a company that you think would be an ideal customer for us. Then, I want you to find a person at that company that you think would be the ideal buyer, and then I want you to write an email to that person that would convince them to get into

Have them write a cold email. Here’s what I tell people. At Close.io, we don’t even do any cold emailing right now, but I would still give this exercise to people. “Hey, here’s how our core customer is, ideal customer. Here’s what our product does. Here’s an exercise for you. I want you to go out there on the web and research a company that you think would be an ideal customer for us. Then, I want you to find a person at that company that you think would be the ideal buyer, and then I want you to write an email to that person that would convince them to get into conversation with us. And I want you to send that email to me as if I was that person. And then I want you at the end of that email to describe to me your philosophy, your strategy of how did you come up with that company, how did you come up with that person within that company, why did you write the email the way you wrote it, what was your strategy, what was your thought process behind it.” I give them that task.

That tells you a shit ton about them, not just what kind of company they’d find, what kind of person, what subject line they’ll write, what the email is and what their thought process was behind it, but also how much time it took them to do that. Like all that is a ton of lessons that you can learn from that. If you can, you want to do that when they’re in so they can—this can be a collaborative effort where they can cheat and ask their friends to write that email. But either way, in some cases, if you get too much talent, you can have this as a homework, kind of filter out people that are totally not right for the job from other people.

But, yeah, you want to have them pitch you. You want to have them write a cold email, do some research and explain their thinking. And then you’re ultimately going to have to make a judgment call, but you will never know until you have them do the job.

Why you should do a 30-day trial period before giving someone a full-time job offer

So, one of the reasons—or one of the lessons we learn out of that is that for most sales jobs, we never offer somebody full-time employment for our sales job. We would always do a contract first, 30 days trial period where you can trial out our company, do you really like this job and working with us? And we can trial you and see are you really the right fit for this job. We’d always do a 30- day trial period before giving somebody a full-time job offer. I know that in Europe and other places, that might be difficult and you might have to find more creative ways around it, but I would always test before giving somebody a full-time job on this because you never know until you see them.

How do they perform day in, day out? Are they consistent? How do they do when they have a bad day? How do they do when they have a good day? Right? All these things are things you need to see before you really can judge somebody as a salesperson. All right. I’m not going to talk about this too long.

What type of traits should you look for in salespeople?

What to avoid: Wolves and lambs

What kind of person are we looking for when we’re looking for ideal sales talent? I really think that the salesperson of the future is not the salesperson of the past. So, the people that were amazing at selling in the past where they’re kind of Wolf of Wall Street’s, the unfriendly and strong personality types. This is the top left of this quadrant, right?

Unfriendly and strong means “I come from a place where I want to take things away from you so I can gain them. I’m not friendly. I want to crush the competition. I want to kill the competition. I want to destroy everybody. I want to get as much money from people as possible. I’m in it completely selfishly to take away value from people’s pockets and put it in my own. But I also do it not just unfriendly but I do it with strength. I’m aggressive. I’m alpha. I’m super-pushy.” These people traditionally have reined the sales organizations that’s why selling has such a bad name. And these are the people that to a certain degree will always have some type of success. It’s going to be dwindling over the future, but they have success because they are aggressive and people are afraid of them and they are pushing people into decisions that they then later regret.

Now, this model doesn’t work anymore. It does still in some cases, but it works less and less and less, and I predict it will be a declining trend in the future because information is so all- encompassing and especially in today’s world, most products that you don’t buy once in a lifetime and you can never cancel, most of the products, you can change your mind or you can cancel it if it’s a subscription product. And so, unhappy customers are just fucking horrible for your business. So, people that come from a place of unfriendly strength even if they’re super- alpha and aggressive and you think, “No, this guy could sell a lot,” they’re typically very toxic for your business. Don’t hire these people.

The exact opposite—the friendly and weak—those are also not the right people unfortunately, right? If somebody is super-friendly but they’re all weak, they’re all apologetic. You know, when you go to “Boo!” they’re always like “Ahh” get afraid. They’re not going to be able to tell people what to do. They’re not going to be able to really push and hustle. They’re not going to be right for you. They’re not going to be able to convince anybody of anything.

What to look for: Friendly strength

So, what we’re really looking for the sweet spot is the friendly and strong, right? And the best way of thinking about this is thinking about it in a framework of like a good doctor or a great lawyer, somebody that’s a domain expert, somebody that’s an expert. This is a person that ideally wants you to succeed. He wants you to do well. He wants their customers to do well. He wants to create value. But he also comes from a place of strength. He knows better than you. He is an expert in this space. He will tell you what to do. He’s not going to ask you. He’s going to ask you “What is your situation?” He’s going to be very, very empathetic to try to understand everything and anything, get

He’s going to be very, very empathetic to try to understand everything and anything, get perfect context of what is the situation. But once this expert truly understands what’s going on and they prescribe a solution, they’re not debating that solution with you. They’re not wishy-washy, “Maybe you want to do this or maybe not. I’m also not really sure what we should do here.” That’s not what you want to hear from your doctor. You want to hear from your doctor, “All right, we got it. It’s this and here’s the cure. Here’s how we’re going to get to fix this problem for you,” right? We’ve done this before. It works. It’ll work this time as well. So, you’re looking for people that you—just ask yourself “Could this be a good doctor, a good lawyer?” Somebody that has authority, somebody that has strength but is also trustworthy. Look for these types of people because these are going to be the people that are going to be great for you and your sales team.

That’s not what you want to hear from your doctor. You want to hear from your doctor, “All right, we got it. It’s this and here’s the cure. Here’s how we’re going to get to fix this problem for you,” right? We’ve done this before. It works. It’ll work this time as well. So, you’re looking for people that you—just ask yourself “Could this be a good doctor, a good lawyer?” Somebody that has authority, somebody that has strength but is also trustworthy. Look for these types of people because these are going to be the people that are going to be great for you and your sales team.

How to onboard and train salespeople

All right. Few words on onboarding and training salespeople and then a little bit about how to compensate them and then we’re going to go into all your questions. So keep them coming. All right. So, onboarding and training. Again, this is not rocket science, people, right? There’s three basic things you could really do to onboard somebody really quickly—or three basic tactics. Tactic 1 is they can shadow you or other successful salespeople, right? What that means is you—“Hey, this is your first day as a salesperson in our company? Awesome. Sit next to John or Bob or Mary. They’re amazing at this job. They’re doing the job that you need to learn how to And just today or for the next two days, you just sit there and you just observe what they do. You listen to their sales call. You look at how they manage the sales emails. You go with them to sales meetings. You just shadow somebody that’s doing the job.” And this could be the entire day or it could be just, “Hey, we make sure that every day there’s three different salespeople where you’re going to join one sales call or sales meeting, right? So you can see a variety of tactics but you only join when there’s an actual sales conversation going on.” So people could shadow other people when they do the job. You can do

Tactic 1 is they can shadow you or other successful salespeople, right? What that means is you—“Hey, this is your first day as a salesperson in our company? Awesome. Sit next to John or Bob or Mary. They’re amazing at this job. They’re doing the job that you need to learn how to And just today or for the next two days, you just sit there and you just observe what they do. You listen to their sales call. You look at how they manage the sales emails. You go with them to sales meetings. You just shadow somebody that’s doing the job.” And this could be the entire day or it could be just, “Hey, we make sure that every day there’s three different salespeople where you’re going to join one sales call or sales meeting, right? So you can see a variety of tactics but you only join when there’s an actual sales conversation going on.” So people could shadow other people when they do the job. You can do

You can do trainings with them in mock situations, so you do play by plays, right? You do mock calls. “Ring-ring- ring! Hey, I’m Bob.” And then the person has to—you’re still doing the sales conversation, but it’s not a real one. It’s with you for training purposes. Sales meeting, sales conversation, mock emails. “Hey, send me a prospect email—send me an email to get on a demo call,” and then they send the email and then you pretend to be the prospect and you go, “Ahh, I don’t really have time right now.” You go back and forth and you train them on how to send emails, how to make sales calls, how to make sales meetings happen, how to close, how to negotiate. You do mock training sessions with them. And you can do that. Other people on the team can do that, and then you drop them into cold water. You have them do the fucking work. Do the job, but you honestly give them the easy work first. And easy can mean small. It can mean like low-quality leads, smaller leads, leads where you don’t—you’re not—it’s not going to be a make or break. If they mess something up there, if they don’t get something right, it doesn’t matter. It’s not the end of the world, right? We like to get salespeople

Other people on the team can do that, and then you drop them into cold water. You have them do the fucking work. Do the job, but you honestly give them the easy work first. And easy can mean small. It can mean like low-quality leads, smaller leads, leads where you don’t—you’re not—it’s not going to be a make or break. If they mess something up there, if they don’t get something right, it doesn’t matter. It’s not the end of the world, right? We like to get salespeople

We like to get salespeople onboarded as quickly as possible. Do actual selling as quickly as possible. If you’re not a Fortune 500 company, you don’t have like months and months of training people. You have to get them onboarded really, really quickly. And one hack and trick to onboarding somebody effectively especially when you have a really technical product without training them for months and months and months—I mean—and there’s other things you can do, right? I mean they should be signing up for your competition and then have the competitors pitching them on their product. You should have them do all kinds of research. I mean there’s a ton of things that you can do to train people and get them

I mean there’s a ton of things that you can do to train people and get them onboarded, but the main philosophy is do it fast and the main philosophy on the product and technology side is instead of trying to train them to perfection is this 80/20 rule is you want to figure out what other top 10, top 20 questions that most prospects, most customers ask about the product or the technology. You want to write down the answers to these questions and then you want to give this document to your new people to train and onboard them. I’m a big fan of scripts and documentation that helps you onboard and train people really, really well, so make sure that you have a sales call script. Make sure that you have a Q&;A script or like “Here’s the top questions people ask us. Here’s the response that you can give for these.” And then train your new salespeople that if there is a question that they are not sure about or they don’t know the answer to, then they need to say “I don’t know.” Here’s the script for this. Somebody asked a difficult technical question the new sales hire doesn’t know. The answer is “That’s a great question. Honestly, I don’t know the right answer to this and I don’t want to give you false information. Let me get back to you on this. I can go and find the right information and get you the right information. But before I do that, let me ask you, why is this important for you? Why do you need this? In an ideal world, what would be my answer? What would you want us to have? What would you want it to be and why?” Train them to be honest when they don’t know something to just say “I don’t know but I’ll get you the information,” but then train them to ask the right questions, the what it is they want and why so that you have—they have all the context needed when they go back to the team to ask. And then what happens is that the first few weeks, your new sales hires, they will come back often to—they’re going to have tons of questions and every week, it’s going to be less and less and eventually the delta X of product knowledge and technology and industry knowledge just goes away because most prospects will ask the same questions.

And then train your new salespeople that if there is a question that they are not sure about or they don’t know the answer to, then they need to say “I don’t know.” Here’s the script for this. Somebody asked a difficult technical question the new sales hire doesn’t know. The answer is “That’s a great question. Honestly, I don’t know the right answer to this and I don’t want to give you false information. Let me get back to you on this. I can go and find the right information and get you the right information. But before I do that, let me ask you, why is this important for you? Why do you need this? In an ideal world, what would be my answer? What would you want us to have? What would you want it to be and why?” Train them to be honest when they don’t know something to just say “I don’t know but I’ll get you the information,” but then train them to ask the right questions, the what it is they want and why so that you have—they have all the context needed when they go back to the team to ask. And then what happens is that the first few weeks, your new sales hires, they will come back often to—they’re going to have tons of questions and every week, it’s going to be less and less and eventually the delta X of product knowledge and technology and industry knowledge just goes away because most prospects will ask the same questions.

Here’s the script for this. Somebody asked a difficult technical question the new sales hire doesn’t know. The answer is “That’s a great question. Honestly, I don’t know the right answer to this and I don’t want to give you false information. Let me get back to you on this. I can go and find the right information and get you the right information. But before I do that, let me ask you, why is this important for you? Why do you need this? In an ideal world, what would be my answer? What would you want us to have? What would you want it to be and why?” Train them to be honest when they don’t know something to just say “I don’t know but I’ll get you the information,” but then train them to ask the right questions, the what it is they want and why so that you have—they have all the context needed when they go back to the team to ask.

And then what happens is that the first few weeks, your new sales hires, they will come back often to—they’re going to have tons of questions and every week, it’s going to be less and less and eventually the delta X of product knowledge and technology and industry knowledge just goes away because most prospects will ask the same questions.

3 ways to organize your sales team

All right. A few quick words on how to structure the sales team, again, there’s three simple structures. There’s the all-you-can-eat-all-in-one structure where basically every salesperson is their own sales team. They have to do the lead generation themselves. They have to prospect themselves. They have to do the qualifying themselves, the closing themselves. They have to do A to Z everything on their own. They get zero support. They just have to figure out everything on their own and that’s the island structure. That’s one way of organizing a sales team.

There’s the assembly line. Assembly line is basically you have different teams and you build expertise and structures around these teams. So you have the lead generation team, then you have the SDR team, you know, the team that’s generating leads and qualifying them. You have the account executive team. Those are the people that are the closers and then you have the success team. Those are the people that they call managers, right? So from generating the lead to qualifying it to closing it to servicing it, you have a different person doing their job, different teams and every lead is being pushed through the assembly line down the assembly line from the top of the funnel to the bottom of it. That’s one way of structuring your sales team. And then the last way of structuring your sales team is in pods. Pods are basically instead of having this SDR team and then having the closer team and then having the success team, what you have is you have these pods that are like one lead generation person, one qualifying person or two qualifying people, one closer or two closers and one success person. So, you have pods, the teams that have all key functional responsibilities in one group so that every customer that’s being acquired by that group is owned within the group. The lifecycle of the entire customer doesn’t pass on in the future. It stays

And then the last way of structuring your sales team is in pods. Pods are basically instead of having this SDR team and then having the closer team and then having the success team, what you have is you have these pods that are like one lead generation person, one qualifying person or two qualifying people, one closer or two closers and one success person. So, you have pods, the teams that have all key functional responsibilities in one group so that every customer that’s being acquired by that group is owned within the group. The lifecycle of the entire customer doesn’t pass on in the future. It stays within the pot. Each and every one of these three structures

Each and every one of these three structures have pros and cons. In the technology and startup world, you almost never see the all-in- one structure anymore. It’s mostly a battle between assembly lines and pods. There’s pros and cons in both of them. Pods are better because typically you have much more collaborative efforts. You have much more—a high level of empathy and understanding on each and every level of the person who’s doing lead gen understands everything that the success person has to do. So, the quality of work is usually a lot better. The collaboration method is a lot better. The empathy, the cultural level is a lot better, a lot more friendly, and the customer experience oftentimes can be much better. So those are the pros versus the assembly line. The cons versus the assembly line on the

The cons versus the assembly line on the pot structure and vice versa, the pro on the assembly line structure is that you typically have a lot less competition in each function and with that less skill and expertise. So, the closer—if you have a team full of closers, then they are going to push themselves to become better and better and better. They’re going to see what other people do in the closing team. Just that natural—that competition is going to breed excellence. If you’re the only closer or if it’s you and one other closer in your little pot of other people, you’re going to have less of that push by excellence, less of that friendly competitive structure, less of like real positional expertise, right? So, depending on the market you’re in, depending on how aggressive you have to be, either the assembly line or the pod structure is a better structure, but all three are basic available structures on how to organize your sales team. And all of them are available—I will say that right now in the valley, I would say it’s about a 50-50 split between assembly lines and pods just to give you guys some benchmarking. So, there’s really

And all of them are available—I will say that right now in the valley, I would say it’s about a 50-50 split between assembly lines and pods just to give you guys some benchmarking. So, there’s really no thing that’s better than the other. It really depends on your company, your culture and your market, how you want to do that.

How to compensate salespeople

All right. So, few final words on how to pay these new people and all these sales hires and then we’ll go into Q&A finally. So, again, keep the questions coming. All right. So, compensation structures, well, a few words on compensation. Number one, don’t overthink this. You have to think about—no, let me get to that in the next slide. So, the components of compensation structures. Let’s start with the ABCs here. So, you can pay a base salary. This is something that is guaranteed no matter what the person does as long as they show up, they get this base. There’s commission, and

There’s commission, and commission can both be a percentage of revenue but it can also be just a fixed dollar amount. So, you know, in most B2B scenarios, you’re going to have some kind of a percentage, so every time you close a deal, you get X percent of the deal size. But there’s industries—so there’s ways where you could say, “Hey, fore every deal you bring in, you get, you know, whatever, $100, $200” or “For every—” especially in the SDR space, it could be easier to say, “Hey, every lead you—every qualified lead or every demos scheduled gets you $200, $100,” whatever it is, some fixed amount. That has nothing to do with how big the deal is going to end up being at the end.

So, you have a base. You have a commission. You have bonus structure. So, bonus and commission are fairly similar, but they’re not the same. Commission is very transactional and it’s very related. “I did this one demo so I got this one little piece of money.” A bonus can be—is usually more of a bigger chunk of money that comes less regularly and that comes even more accumulative. So, every quarter, we pay out a bonus for maybe the best performer on the sales team, right? That has nothing to do with the amount of deals you closed or—it’s not a percentage of your deals. It is a reward for being the best of all of them. Or, if the overall company, if we accomplish this revenue goal, everybody on the sales team gets a certain bonus. So, bonus can be the kind of more flexible, more related. And then there is

And then there is as a fourth compensation component, they are benefits and other things that you could do. Obviously, you could—you cannot just pay people with money. You could pay salespeople in, you know, getting a lease car or getting a cellphone or smartphone and the bill paid for. You could pay them in getting trainings and really expensive seminars paid for, weekend trips. There’s all kinds of things you could pay people in that are not pure cash in their bank account. So, you have to consider all components as ways to compensate for your sales team.

Now, when it comes to like coming up with a compensation structure, I really want all of you to have an MVP state of mind when it comes to that. You want to have a minimum viable—an MVC in this case—a minimum viable compensation structure. First of all, start ASAP. Most people try to come up with the perfect compensation structure before they announce it. There is no such thing as a perfect compensation structure. A compensation structure is a living, breathing, changing

A compensation structure is a living, breathing, changing thing and it will always have to keep evolving as your business, your market, your industry is evolving and changing. It sucks but it’s just one of these truths. It’s just like with a product, you’re never just going to have the perfect and then you never have to touch it again. You’re going to have to constantly reinvent, change, make additions, make updates. And the same thing is true for compensation structures. So, don’t wait for the perfect time or when you have the perfect formula. Just start ASAP. Start simple. Start very, very basic and then start with an open mind that you’re probably going to screw it up in version 1. You’re going to have to change it. You’re going to have to tell your people about this. This is part of being—it’s part of the fun of being a salesperson in a startup. If you want to have a compensation structure that is set in stone, go to IBM, right? Go to Oracle. Go to some large organizations

So, don’t wait for the perfect time or when you have the perfect formula. Just start ASAP. Start simple. Start very, very basic and then start with an open mind that you’re probably going to screw it up in version 1. You’re going to have to change it. You’re going to have to tell your people about this. This is part of being—it’s part of the fun of being a salesperson in a startup. If you want to have a compensation structure that is set in stone, go to IBM, right? Go to Oracle. Go to some large organizations that’s been around forever. If you want to be at a startup, change means also that some things are going to be in fluid motion when it comes to your payment. So, compensation structure. Start really fast and then there’s really two ways to go about and you can do it collaboratively. You could tell people honestly, “Hey, we don’t have the perfect compensation structure yet for this job. I want to come up with the right compensation structure with you and we have to keep in mind this is not just about how we are going to get money, but this is about how the people we’re going to be hiring are going to be making money and how this company is going to scale. So we really need to figure out a compensation structure that’s going to incentivize all the right things and it’s going to be really scalable for the business. And the cool thing is you are going to have input on this. We’re going to do this together. You can be very collaborative and many Silicon Valley startups do that. Or, you can take the other approach, is get more aggressive. It’s the fake it until you make it one.

So, compensation structure. Start really fast and then there’s really two ways to go about and you can do it collaboratively. You could tell people honestly, “Hey, we don’t have the perfect compensation structure yet for this job. I want to come up with the right compensation structure with you and we have to keep in mind this is not just about how we are going to get money, but this is about how the people we’re going to be hiring are going to be making money and how this company is going to scale. So we really need to figure out a compensation structure that’s going to incentivize all the right things and it’s going to be really scalable for the business. And the cool thing is you are going to have input on this. We’re going to do this together. You can be very collaborative and many Silicon Valley startups do that. Or, you can take the other approach, is get more aggressive. It’s the fake it until you make it one.

Or, you can take the other approach, is get more aggressive. It’s the fake it until you make it one. Is you talk to a few people that have up commission structures before. You take the best first guess and create a version 1 of that for your business. You cross your fingers. You hope it works, and if it doesn’t, you have to change it. And if that pisses off your sales team, you have to get rid of them and hire new salespeople, right? It’s a much more aggressive approach where you pretend this is the commission structure and it works perfectly. There’s no doubt about it. You’re going to be making this amount of money and then if it doesn’t work out, you go, “You know what? We screwed up. I’m sorry. We’re going to have to start again. And if that’s too much of a hassle and if you’re really pissed, go find a job that’s more stable.” And you go and hire new people. This is much more of an aggressive approach. I’ve seen startups do this and do this successfully. It’s a question of ethics. It’s a question of style and culture and this is not for everybody. But these are the two. You can either do it with your sales team or you could pretend that you figured it out alone and you can pretend that this is the right compensation structure. And then if it’s not, you’re going to have to deal with some trouble and the trouble typically means that people are going to be really pissed if you changed around the compensation structure especially when you have to lower it or take it away in certain parts where it’s just not feasible. And sometimes that means that you have to part ways with people because they’re never going to get over that.

It’s a much more aggressive approach where you pretend this is the commission structure and it works perfectly. There’s no doubt about it. You’re going to be making this amount of money and then if it doesn’t work out, you go, “You know what? We screwed up. I’m sorry. We’re going to have to start again. And if that’s too much of a hassle and if you’re really pissed, go find a job that’s more stable.” And you go and hire new people. This is much more of an aggressive approach. I’ve seen startups do this and do this successfully. It’s a question of ethics. It’s a question of style and culture and this is not for everybody. But these are the two. You can either do it with your sales team or you could pretend that you figured it out alone and you can pretend that this is the right compensation structure. And then if it’s not, you’re going to have to deal with some trouble and the trouble typically means that people are going to be really pissed if you changed around the compensation structure especially when you have to lower it or take it away in certain parts where it’s just not feasible. And sometimes that means that you have to part ways with people because they’re never going to get over that.

Q&A

When do you need hunters versus farmers?

All right. There’s a million more things to be said about all these charts, but that’s why we do Q&A. All right. So, finally, let me get to your questions and you can keep the questions coming as I’m scrolling through them and trying to answer them as good as I can one by one. All right. Let me take a look at this. So, one question was “When do you need hunters versus farmers?” So, another way of saying hunter or farmer, a hunter is basically somebody that’s prospecting and closing and a farmer is typically somebody that is account managing, right? Somebody that’s keeping the relationship and making sure that the relationship grows. But it depends on your market. If you do enterprise sale like it depends on your market and maturity of the business that you’re in, but typically you need both, right? You will always need both and one way or another, you’ll need people that bring you business in and then you’re going to need people that keep that business. Today, we call the people that keep a business success managers. You know, a few years ago, they would be called account managers. But it’s basically the same—it’s like a person that is building and keeping a relationship with our customers so that our customers keep spending more money with us. And every time we have a new product or there’s a renewal of contract, that customer stays and expands their business with us. And you will always need both. What is more important depends on the stage of your company and where you’re at. At the beginning, you’re going to have to be both in one way or another. And also, you’re going to probably have to hire some people that are capable of doing both before you start specializing people too fast.

So, one question was “When do you need hunters versus farmers?” So, another way of saying hunter or farmer, a hunter is basically somebody that’s prospecting and closing and a farmer is typically somebody that is account managing, right? Somebody that’s keeping the relationship and making sure that the relationship grows. But it depends on your market. If you do enterprise sale like it depends on your market and maturity of the business that you’re in, but typically you need both, right? You will always need both and one way or another, you’ll need people that bring you business in and then you’re going to need people that keep that business. Today, we call the people that keep a business success managers. You know, a few years ago, they would be called account managers. But it’s basically the same—it’s like a person that is building and keeping a relationship with our customers so that our customers keep spending more money with us. And every time we have a new product or there’s a renewal of contract, that customer stays and expands their business with us. And you will always need both. What is more important depends on the stage of your company and where you’re at. At the beginning, you’re going to have to be both in one way or another. And also, you’re going to probably have to hire some people that are capable of doing both before you start specializing people too fast.

Today, we call the people that keep a business success managers. You know, a few years ago, they would be called account managers. But it’s basically the same—it’s like a person that is building and keeping a relationship with our customers so that our customers keep spending more money with us. And every time we have a new product or there’s a renewal of contract, that customer stays and expands their business with us. And you will always need both. What is more important depends on the stage of your company and where you’re at. At the beginning, you’re going to have to be both in one way or another. And also, you’re going to probably have to hire some people that are capable of doing both before you start specializing people too fast.

What is more important depends on the stage of your company and where you’re at. At the beginning, you’re going to have to be both in one way or another. And also, you’re going to probably have to hire some people that are capable of doing both before you start specializing people too fast.

How should you expand sales in international markets?

All right. Next question, “So, if a company had success in Europe and is now trying to enter in the really important market of—like a new and important market like let’s say the U.S. or Latin America, is it still a good idea to go through step 1, 2 and 3?” Yeah, I would say so. That’s a good question. But I would definitely say so if I’m having tremendous success in the U.S. and now I say “We want to enter the Japanese market.” I am not just going to hire some Japanese person that has a lot of experience in selling and go “Here’s what we did in the U.S. You have a lot of experience in Japan. Best of luck. I’m sure you’re going to crush it.” Not to say that I would go to Japan and try to do it myself, but I would still go over there to Japan and say, “You know what, in the next 6 months, I’m going to live in Japan. I’m going to try to hire a few Japanese people with experience, get some advisers and I’m going to try to be involved in every step of the way to see what’s going on, to try to learn about that market, to try to understand if what they’re doing makes sense or not.” You really have to immerse yourself. And then, yeah, like—so, you might have to merge step 1, 2 and 3 a little bit, but you still have to be really hands-on. I would absolutely advise on that, yeah.

Not to say that I would go to Japan and try to do it myself, but I would still go over there to Japan and say, “You know what, in the next 6 months, I’m going to live in Japan. I’m going to try to hire a few Japanese people with experience, get some advisers and I’m going to try to be involved in every step of the way to see what’s going on, to try to learn about that market, to try to understand if what they’re doing makes sense or not.” You really have to immerse yourself. And then, yeah, like—so, you might have to merge step 1, 2 and 3 a little bit, but you still have to be really hands-on. I would absolutely advise on that, yeah.

And then, yeah, like—so, you might have to merge step 1, 2 and 3 a little bit, but you still have to be really hands-on. I would absolutely advise on that, yeah.

When can you determine whether you’ve hired the right salesperson or not?

All right. Next question, “For companies with sales cycles that are 3 to 6 months, let’s say, how can you quickly decide if the salesperson is working or not?” Yeah, it’s a really great question. When—in most jobs, you’re not going to know how great they are closing in the first few weeks because they’re not going to be closing anything. So, what you’re going to have to do is you’re going to have to judge them on all the steps that come before the close. And it’s going to have to be—it might have to be just a qualitative judgment call versus a quantitative one, right? So, you know, you’re going to—so let’s say somebody has to prospect and close, but the closing cycle takes 6 months, what you have to judge them on is how well do they prospect and you’re going to join them in their per sales call and judge them how well did they do the first call? You’re going to judge them on how good are they doing on the follow-up? How aggressive are they on managing the objections that the customer had? How good are they in preparing the next call? Like, you’re going to look for all these little clues where they get—when somebody tells them no, what do they do? You’re going to have to judge them on different clues than just how much revenue the person bring in because it takes too much time for that number to manifest itself, so you have to look for other things to judge people on. It’s as simple as that. It’s not

You’re going to judge them on how good are they doing on the follow-up? How aggressive are they on managing the objections that the customer had? How good are they in preparing the next call? Like, you’re going to look for all these little clues where they get—when somebody tells them no, what do they do? You’re going to have to judge them on different clues than just how much revenue the person bring in because it takes too much time for that number to manifest itself, so you have to look for other things to judge people on. It’s as simple as that. It’s not perfect science, but you’re going to have to make a judgment call. Do I think this person can close this deal or not? And if you don’t think so, you’re going to have to wait for 6 months to know for certain it didn’t happen. You have experience in this. You’ve seen deals close. You can just judge them on all the early signs of how they deal with things on a day-to- day. Yeah, that’s really it. That’s the best you can do. It’s

And if you don’t think so, you’re going to have to wait for 6 months to know for certain it didn’t happen. You have experience in this. You’ve seen deals close. You can just judge them on all the early signs of how they deal with things on a day-to- day. Yeah, that’s really it. That’s the best you can do. It’s a great—it’s an excellent question. Next. And let me know if I answered it—by the way, if any question—if any answer I give is not clear enough or you want even more information, just follow up with more questions in chat. I’ll go through them. All right. Next question. Let me scroll here. “When we were selling to supermarkets, we found a school where supermarket managers were educated. We got in touched and started hiring. Very good experience because they understood our client’s problems right away and we’re really thankful for an opportunity outside the normal culture.” So find that interesting talent pool to hire from. “Well, we hired two people there.” Okay. All right. Oh, that’s just an example. It’s not even a question. Awesome example.

Next. And let me know if I answered it—by the way, if any question—if any answer I give is not clear enough or you want even more information, just follow up with more questions in chat. I’ll go through them. All right. Next question. Let me scroll here. “When we were selling to supermarkets, we found a school where supermarket managers were educated. We got in touched and started hiring. Very good experience because they understood our client’s problems right away and we’re really thankful for an opportunity outside the normal culture.” So find that interesting talent pool to hire from. “Well, we hired two people there.” Okay. All right. Oh, that’s just an example. It’s not even a question. Awesome example.

Let me scroll here. “When we were selling to supermarkets, we found a school where supermarket managers were educated. We got in touched and started hiring. Very good experience because they understood our client’s problems right away and we’re really thankful for an opportunity outside the normal culture.” So find that interesting talent pool to hire from. “Well, we hired two people there.” Okay. All right. Oh, that’s just an example. It’s not even a question. Awesome example.

Can you teach salespeople to be friendly and strong?

Question now. “Can you teach weak people to be strong? Or can you teach unfriendly people to be friendly? Or is it personality?” That’s such a great question. I love it. I’m not going to tell you what you can or cannot do, and I’m not going to tell you that people cannot change because I think they can. But I am not going to attempt to teach a weak person to be strong. I’ve tried this many, many, many—I’ve tried this a shit ton of times, never with success. If somebody is weak, teaching them to be strong is a very hard thing. It’s not impossible, but it’s very hard. It needs you to be perfect, them to be perfect. The moment needs to be perfect, the timing. A lot of things have to come together for that to work. In most cases, it’s just not going to work and it’s going to take so much time and energy from you and from them and it’s still not going to result

If somebody is weak, teaching them to be strong is a very hard thing. It’s not impossible, but it’s very hard. It needs you to be perfect, them to be perfect. The moment needs to be perfect, the timing. A lot of things have to come together for that to work. In most cases, it’s just not going to work and it’s going to take so much time and energy from you and from them and it’s still not going to result into anything successful. So, if somebody is weak, I don’t want to be in the business of making them strong. And if somebody is unfriendly, fuck them. Honestly, it’s the no-asshole rule. If somebody is an asshole, fuck them. That’s even like with weak people, I have a soft spot because these are great people and I want them to be strong, so that’s why I’ve attempted to teach weak people to be strong so many times. But with unfriendly people, fuck them. I don’t have any desire to teach them to be friendly. So, no, if somebody is an asshole, they can go. If somebody is weak, I’m sorry but they have to go. That’s my approach at least to this.

So, if somebody is weak, I don’t want to be in the business of making them strong. And if somebody is unfriendly, fuck them. Honestly, it’s the no-asshole rule. If somebody is an asshole, fuck them. That’s even like with weak people, I have a soft spot because these are great people and I want them to be strong, so that’s why I’ve attempted to teach weak people to be strong so many times. But with unfriendly people, fuck them. I don’t have any desire to teach them to be friendly. So, no, if somebody is an asshole, they can go. If somebody is weak, I’m sorry but they have to go. That’s my approach at least to this.

Would you outsource sales overseas?

Next question. “Would you hire overseas contract just for sales? If so, how would you check their skills?” I don’t know, man. I mean this is one of these things that’s like “Hey, I want—” as the example earlier, I want to get into the Japanese market. I’m just going to hire a contract in Japan.” This is such a hard thing to do well. The chances of this not working are astronomical. It’s like can you win the lottery? Yes. But should that be your strategy for how to become rich? Probably not. So, I’m very skeptical on overseas contractors. If you really, really have to do it, you would want to do a shit ton of Skype calls. If you can, you would want to have them travel to you and spend two weeks at your office or you travel to them and spend two weeks with them. If you can’t do that, do lots of Skype calls with video to see them. Have them record their calls so you can listen to them. Have them have access to the email account that they’re using for your business so you can see everything and track everything that’s going on to really know what’s. But I’m not excited about overseas contractors.

If you can’t do that, do lots of Skype calls with video to see them. Have them record their calls so you can listen to them. Have them have access to the email account that they’re using for your business so you can see everything and track everything that’s going on to really know what’s. But I’m not excited about overseas contractors.

Is it a red flag if someone previously worked at a big company or job hops a lot?

Next question. “Is it always a red flag if someone worked previously at big companies like Salesforce or LinkedIn? But worked in all such companies less than one year.” Yeah. I mean it’s definitely—that’s a great question. So, it’s definitely a red flag. Red flag does not mean that this person should work for you or that this person isn’t amazing. A red flag is just something that needs to be paid attention to, something that you need to learn more about. So if I look at somebody’s resume and I see the past 5 companies he worked at and it’s all like 6 months, 12 months, 9 months, 8 months, 7 months. That’s a red flag. So, that makes me very, very skeptical and I will bring it up. The first thing I’ll say is “Hey, dude, why can’t you keep a job? Or why are you leaving jobs everywhere? Give me a good explanation.” I’ll just right out tell people, “What’s wrong with you?” And most of the time, they will give you an explanation, but then the judgment that I have

So if I look at somebody’s resume and I see the past 5 companies he worked at and it’s all like 6 months, 12 months, 9 months, 8 months, 7 months. That’s a red flag. So, that makes me very, very skeptical and I will bring it up. The first thing I’ll say is “Hey, dude, why can’t you keep a job? Or why are you leaving jobs everywhere? Give me a good explanation.” I’ll just right out tell people, “What’s wrong with you?” And most of the time, they will give you an explanation, but then the judgment that I have

And most of the time, they will give you an explanation, but then the judgment that I have is is the explanation really fucking good? Or is it whatever? If they’re like, “Yeah, you know, that’s a good point and I agree and I can also see how that would appear that way. But it was really just circumstances in this company. I did a really good job and I really loved it, but then my boss switched and since I’m really attached to that boss, that other company gave me an offer and then that was the reason why I switched. That company was a new startup and they’re really messed up, so I really hated what they were doing, so I was ready to find something else. And this other company—” If they have an excuse explanation for everything, that doesn’t make—that makes sense but in accumulative still doesn’t explain the problem, I’m going to shy away and not hire them. If somebody tells me outright, “You know what, dude, you’re right. For the past 4 years, I’ve been fucking around. Whenever a job got too easy, I got bored. Or whenever I was offered more money, I left. This looks shitty on my resume for good reasons. I think those were poor decisions in hindsight but that’s what it was. I’ve done this for long enough. I’m ready now to change.” They say that. It doesn’t mean that they’re not going to want to leave 6 months from

If somebody tells me outright, “You know what, dude, you’re right. For the past 4 years, I’ve been fucking around. Whenever a job got too easy, I got bored. Or whenever I was offered more money, I left. This looks shitty on my resume for good reasons. I think those were poor decisions in hindsight but that’s what it was. I’ve done this for long enough. I’m ready now to change.” They say that. It doesn’t mean that they’re not going to want to leave 6 months from now, like that’s a real risk. But at least—I’m like “All right. At least this guy is real—or gal. At least this person is self-aware. He seems to be honest. Do I want to take a risk or not?” But it’s always a red flag for sure. Somebody that can’t stay at a job for an extended period of time, that’s not a good thing.

Should you test senior sales candidates during the interview process?

Next question. “When you’re looking for someone—for a sales director or VP position, is it a great idea to ask ‘Can I give you some homework or test task?’ For example, do some kind of role play sales test to see how candidates will try to sell you on the product, qualify and all that, or prepare a brief sales strategy for our company?” For more senior sales hires, it all depends. It depends. If you’re recruiting them, if I am the VP of sales at LinkedIn and you’re reaching out to me, you’re not going to be able to give me homework, right? Because you’re trying to sell me I should join your company. If I apply, maybe, but it depends on how senior the person is. If the person is super-senior, a VP of sales

If you’re recruiting them, if I am the VP of sales at LinkedIn and you’re reaching out to me, you’re not going to be able to give me homework, right? Because you’re trying to sell me I should join your company. If I apply, maybe, but it depends on how senior the person is. If the person is super-senior, a VP of sales of Microsoft, you don’t want that person to do mock calls with you because they’re not—they don’t have to be good at selling. They don’t have to be good at sales at all. The VP of sales is to not be good at selling at all. Their job is totally different. It’s like the chief technology officer doesn’t have to be a great designer or great at UI or gain dynamic or anything. Their skillset is a totally different one. The VP of sales needs to be great at scaling large sales organizations. They need to be an amazing manager. They ...

Did you know that 46% percent of social media traffic coming to B2B company sites is from LinkedIn? With that kind of reach, it’s no wonder why 79% of B2B Marketers say LinkedIn is an effective source for generating leads.

Even though LinkedIn is a great tool to grow your business, reach new leads and engage new contacts, I still see many organizations whose LinkedIn presence is inconsistent and disorganized. I see sales leaders whose salespeople aren’t putting their best foot forward on this important social and business networking platform, and it costs them big time.

If you want to improve your team’s use of LinkedIn, check out this free webinar I’m hosting with BrightTALK on Feb. 22. I’ll let you in on the five secrets that will change your approach to LinkedIn networking. Click here to register!

I regularly practice what I preach and use LinkedIn to grow my business. Here are some immediate things you need actively monitor to ensure your team isn’t tanking your LinkedIn results.

Do Profiles Look Like Resumes?

Are your people looking for a job? Maybe they are, and maybe they aren’t, but as long as they’re on your team, their profiles need to contribute to your brand and presence. Each person needs a summary statement on their profile that reflects the value they bring to your customers—not something like “sales leader with a proven track record” which we see all too often.

When your ideal customer finds the profile of one of your team members, what do you want them to know about your organization and about your salesperson? What value do they add? How can they help your potential customers? That’s the key that needs to be addressed right up front.

Another place where a profile drifts into the “sounds like a resume” territory is in the description of the current job. Something else we see all too often is those descriptions listing things like “consistently meets quota” or “top 10 achievers.” Stop that. Think about a description that starts with “I help our customers by…” and have your team members fill in the blanks with a value statement. Don’t stifle their creativity, but do insist that they include content that communicates their strengths and achievements in ways that communicate value to your potential customers.

Make sure the writing is clean, crisp, and clear to grab the attention of anyone looking at the profile. Be sure they’re not adding friction to potential connections with punctuation errors or boring information.

Make A Strong First Impression

The profile is the first impression your team members’ contacts will get, and those prospects use it to decide if they will accept a connection request. A strong profile helps people identify with team members so they can get to know them, like them, and, eventually, trust them. If your team members’ profiles make a good first impression, people will connect with them and refer them to other connections within their networks.

All the information and details on their profiles matter. All sections should be filled out so new connections can read and find common areas of interest.

The photo is a critical part of their first impression, and it must reflect your team members in their professional roles—not a super casual beach picture, not a cartoon avatar, and not a glamour shot (and yes, I’ve seen those, too).

Help your team with these tips about their profile picture:

• Have good lighting
• Avoid distracting backgrounds
• Wear business attire
• Don’t forget to look up and smile! A smile on your friendly face is the first thing that will engage them.

Want to put together a fun team-building event? Bring in a professional photographer to do head shots of your team members. This is also a great opportunity to get candid photos of your team members working together that will invite prospects into your environment.

How’s That Company Description?

The company description in each of your team members’ profiles should be consistent, on-brand, and written in terms that communicate value to your potential customers. Each team member should be properly linked to the company LinkedIn profile, allowing them to be found when people are looking at the corporate profile as well. Believe it or not, I’ve seen salespeople who have even linked themselves to the wrong company. Check this, and make sure your people know the right profile to link to.

It’s Social Media – Interact

Creating strong profiles will make a good impression on your potential customers, but if you want results, your people need to interact. LinkedIn is just like real life, so when your salespeople connect with new prospects, teach them to build a rapport by reading, commenting and sharing the connection’s content. Encourage them to send personal messages with their connection requests that include who they are and why they would like to connect. Ask them to schedule time specifically for their activity on LinkedIn. They can use LinkedIn throughout the sales process and to stay connected to clients.

BUT—and this is a big one—since “liking” a post on LinkedIn shows up to all of their contacts, coach them to like posts that will advance their professional agenda, not political posts or jokes or other things that are too off-topic (or keep those few and far between).

Remember to Add Value

Coach your team to focus on adding value to your potential customers. Share content that will advance THEIR agenda. Help them get more exposure. Share content from thought leaders in your industry, and help your salespeople add their own commentary to content they’re sharing. When your organization has a new blog post to offer, have your salespeople promote it to their networks with some consistent messaging (but let them put their own spins on that message, of course!).

The post 5 Secrets to Boost Your LinkedIn Presence appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

You know your company’s value proposition is solid. You know your salespeople are great at what they do. You know your marketing is reaching a wide audience.

So why aren’t your conversions and revenues where they need to be?

Often, business owners and marketers find themselves in positions like this, where the ingredients for success are there but the revenue numbers just aren’t back that up.

If this becomes the case, it may be time to organize your sales funnel.

A sales funnel is a tool for classifying leads and contacts into different categories, to be approached strategically based on their place in the buyer’s journey. It’s value is based on the idea that different types of marketing and sales strategies apply more saliently for different contacts. Largely, this is done based on their readiness to purchase. Using this concept, you can qualify your leads and prospects as they move through the funnel. As they move on to each successive phase, you can confidently present them with content specifically geared for someone getting increasingly ready to purchase.

In 2016, 67% of marketers rated their content marketing maturity as adolescent, young, or in its first steps. This means that there is still immense room to grow, especially for businesses using content to guide prospects through a targeted sales funnel. As marketers learn more about how to create engaging content, they’ll naturally start to improve at using that content strategically.

These strategies will vary across different industries and product categories. Many B2B marketers, for instance, will find themselves working with a longer, more involved funnel due to the complexity of delivering a value proposition to another business owner.

Top Of The Funnel (ToFu)

The top of your sales funnel should correlate with the beginning of the buyer’s journey for your prospects. These are people who are only recently aware that your business exists. Accordingly, it’s important not to scare them away by coming on too strong right off the bat.

This is where the prospect is experiencing what HubSpot would define as the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. At this point, they are aware of their problem and can benefit from educational resources in the general area of their problem.

Source: blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-for-every-funnel-stage#sm.00000p5m452mkbehssvzckt62kao1

The content presented here should be introductory. Good examples are how-to guides, educational ebooks, and best practices checklists. The idea is to demonstrate value to the prospect on a macro level. It’s not time to drill down into specific solutions to their problem quite yet or come across as overly aggressive and salesy.

Middle Of The Funnel (MoFu)

The middle of the funnel is a tough place for salespeople and marketers to navigate. On the one hand, the prospect has shown some demonstrable level of interest. The building blocks of what could be a fruitful business relationship are in place. On the other, you’re right on the precipice of a real commitment. You still have a chance to get out before committing too much of your time and resources if it doesn’t seem like the return on the investment will be worth it.

As for the buyer’s journey, HubSpot considers this the prospect’s evaluation phase. They’ve identified your business as a possible solution for their pain point. They may still be considering other options, but at the very least you have a seat at the table.

Content during this phase should be a bit more directly related to the prospect’s problem. Some good examples are comparison white papers, in-depth guides, and pertinent video content. As you inch closer to the time to actually sell, you’ll start to establish your business as a good fit for the prospect and vice versa. If this isn’t quite “gelling”, it may be time to simply recognize a poor fit and move on. This can be a tough pill to swallow, but the time and frustration it saves you by avoiding a lengthy and unfruitful entanglement may be worth it.

Bottom Of The Funnel (BoFu)

By this point, you’ve convinced your prospect that your company is legitimate and trustworthy. Here, the prospect is at the purchase stage of the buyer’s journey. They are fairly certain how they’ll solve their pain point; they just haven’t decided who will be best to help them accomplish this. The remaining hesitation is more likely to be based on budget concerns and/or standard due diligence. Accordingly, it’s important to give them a more detailed look at what they will get out of doing business with you.

It’s been said that BoFu content offers are invitations to be sold to. The prospect’s engagement with the content serves as confirmation that they’ve accepted the invitation. Once this occurs, you can move towards a more formal sales proposition and it won’t feel out of place because of the contextual background you’ve built up with your targeted content.

Good content for the bottom of the funnel prospects includes product-specific breakdowns, pricing comparisons, case studies, and, if your potential client is in the same geographic area as you, a live demo can be a great closing technique.

One underestimated aspect of using an organized sales funnel is the insight it gives you about your salespeople. That doesn’t have to be understood in a cutthroat, “Hit your quotas or else” kind of way, either. Sales funnels can show you how each salesperson is performing at each specific stage of the funnel. If one person does consistently well at a particular stage, investigate further. Is there some technique or piece of content that he/she has found to be especially effective prospects in that stage?

Finally, it’s also important to optimize each stage of the sales funnel, a process that will be ongoing, and constantly in flux. As Brian Ainsley Horn has written for Entrepreneur, “The last step in the sales funnel is to keep your momentum going. Follow up with all the new customers you have acquired and ensure they are happy with their product or service.”

If so, find a way to impart that selling wisdom to the rest of the team. Even if that means setting aside time for a training or team meeting, the results – in the form of more conversions – just may surprise you.

TIO Networks sold to the Silicon Valley giant in deal expected to close