Rnordman

Asking questions and avoiding questions. We’ve looked at every angle over the past three months here in the CONNECT2Sell Blog. Although we’ve mentioned this once before, it bears repeating because so many sellers get it wrong. Why? Because there are too many tools, books, training programs and managers who are trying to make things easier for you.

In their efforts to help you, these resources are hurting you. There’s simply no way to shortcut when it comes to asking questions. You can’t depend on a script or a list of prescribed questions. Every conversation is (and should be) different. Your prepared questions interfere with the natural course of the conversation. Asking questions that are natural is always more productive.

Asking Questions Should Not Be Scripted

This is the last precaution for asking questions. For sellers who are new to asking questions, it is tempting to rely on pre-scripted questions. After all, there are many resources for effective sales questions and planning ahead could eliminate some of the challenges related to asking the “wrong” questions and/or constructing less effective questions.

But scripted questions should be avoided. They aren’t natural, and they will interfere with the seller’s ability to stay in the moment and conduct an interchange of ideas and information. Scripting questions before a buyer meeting causes sellers to depend on what’s written and miss opportunities to ask follow-up questions stemming from natural curiosity. Scripted questions feel impersonal and manipulative to buyers.

The other significant risk of relying on scripted questions is the implication needs assessment is a one-time event. But sellers who are operating with a strategic plan to understand buyer needs will be prepared to ask questions at any time, as buyer needs change frequently and unexpectedly.

Asking Questions Takes Practice. But It’s Worth It!

Sellers who master the skills of question-asking won’t need to depend on scripted questions. Instead, they will be fully equipped at any time to steer conversations with buyers so they can readily identify actionable needs, avoid asking manipulative questions, properly sequence questions to drill down from broad buyer needs to narrower needs linked to their own products, and advance sales smoothly.

Avoiding the wrong questions leaves room for the right ones.

Next Steps:

• To learn more about DISCOVER Questions® and how to get connected in meaningful ways with your buyers, order your copy of this bestseller from Amazon.com
• When you need sales or management coaching, customized sales training, or a dynamic speaker call us at 408-779-PFPS or book an appointment with Deb.
• Check out these resources for sales managers and front line sellers. New webinars, infographics, research, podcasts and more added every month!

The award-winning CONNECT2Sell Blog is for professional sellers who believe, as we do, that Every Sale Starts with a Connection.

Deb Calvert, “DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected” author and Top 50 Sales Influencer, is President of People First Productivity Solutions, a UC Berkeley instructor, and a former Sales/Training Director of a Fortune 500 media company. She speaks and writes about the Stop Selling & Start Leading movement and offers sales training, coaching and consulting as well as leadership development programs. She is certified as an executive and sales coach by the ICF and is a Certified Master of The Leadership Challenge®. Deb has worked in every sector and in 14 countries to build leadership capacity, team effectiveness and sales productivity with a “people first” approach.

The post Asking Questions that Are Natural and Productive appeared first on People First.

Disrupt or be Disrupted written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

In a few short years much of what you do, make, fix, sell, and ship, won’t mean much to anyone. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that if you stay put doing whatever it is your business does right now – you’ll be out of business.

If you want to survive, let alone thrive, you must tap new trends and produce new ideas at an accelerating rate.

Robots, artificial intelligence, and technology built on top of the internet will continue to threaten the very fabric of what most business (and jobs) are set up to do today. If I’m to be totally honest, it will wipe most business and jobs as we know them today completely away.

No one was a social media manager, app developer, or drone operator (there are 70,000 of these now) ten years ago.

And in ten years there will be very few cashiers, travel agents, and social media managers (coming full circle on this one pretty quickly).

This isn’t a new idea by any means. Each technological advance has done this for decades, (think cars, email, and computers) but the difference today is that evolution has been democratized. Meaning, in the past, entire industries were regulated into stability to maintain the status quo.

Today, anyone, working in the equivalent of a digital garage, can produce an innovation that can make what you do redundant.

And, the rate of innovation is going to accelerate in ways that will catch many people off guard.

I’m not writing this to suggest doom and gloom, but I do think that any business that lacks a plan for intentional innovation – even if it means deconstructing your current revenue model – is putting their business in a risky position.

Want proof that this is coming?

Right now, there are multi-million dollar small businesses with no offices, no employees, and no debt that are capable of competing with and beating out Fortune 500 companies. They are doing this, not simply because they offer better pricing, they are doing it because they also offer better products and better processes, and deliver results with more capable people.

It’s easy to witness the impact of what I’m describing in well-known examples like, Craigslist vs. paid classified ads, Uber vs. Taxis or Airbnb vs. Hotels, but it’s also happening in obscure fields by companies you’ve never heard of unless you work in that industry.

Ironically, some of these nimble disrupters, such as Netflix, have moved into the Fortune 500.

But I’m talking about something much smaller perhaps – down to the level of beating out your closest competitors.

Name your industry, name a job or task vital to that industry, and I guarantee you that there are companies working on making that job or task irrelevant.

There are many industries in serious trouble already, but it’s only a matter of time before most seemingly profitable industries come under fire.

Where to  look for your innovation

Here are a few things we know for sure

People are getting older and living longer

Some of the hottest markets right now are those in the field of medical technology and caring for aging adults.

How can your business look for innovation in this trend?

The way people pay for goods and services has forever changed

I went on a weeklong trip to a foreign country and never used cash of any currency. People expect to be able to pay, send, finance and split transactions using apps and online services.

How can your business meet this expectation?

People expect everything to be smart and convenient

Almost everyone has a smartphone these days, and they’ve gotten very used to being able to do more and more things with that device. Not only are they using apps to communicate and pay bills, but they are also turning to their smartphone to turn on lights, adjust the thermostat, monitor security.

How can your business tap into the fact that people have this powerful device with them at all times?

Companies no longer need offices or employees

As I stated in the intro above, a business is no longer a collection of people huddled in desks at a single location. Even businesses that have a physical location are finding employees using it less and less.

How can your business take advantage of this trend to run more profitably or fill the needs of companies that want and need virtual staff and freelance talent?

Millennials are fast becoming a significant buying force

Much has been written about the significant attitude shift in the generation that now makes up one of the prime buying demographics. Most members of the millennial generation are digital first when it comes to finding and engaging companies they buy from, but there’s also a strong need for connection to a brand’s story.

How can you make your brand more approachable and human while offering the convenience of digital technology?

I know that I’ve proposed more questions than answers today, but this is a topic I plan to return to repeatedly as I believe innovation is perhaps the most significant threat and greatest opportunity facing most small business today.

Innovation is a strategy that must be central to your day to day planning.

There is no denying it – we live in a world that moves at hyper-speed. We walk fast, talk fast, eat fast, and sleep less. This fast-paced reality is amplified in business. We have come to expect a response back from an email we just sent within minutes; we multi-task all day in order to get things done quicker. Needless to say, in certain high-stakes careers, responding to emails within a matter of minutes is of necessity…but what about the rest of us?

Of course one could argue that the more you get done at the office, the less you have to do at home, or the more money your company will pay you. This may be true to a point, but you could in fact be doing the exact opposite without even realizing it – that is, getting less done.

Slowing down to get ahead

Often, when we rush, we become sloppy. Mistakes are made. We read a document so quickly that, at the end, we realize we didn’t absorb any of the content, and have to read it over again. We send emails with typos and forget to save documents. According to an article entitled “Slow Down to Get Ahead,” rushing actually hinders our ability to be intellectually and emotionally available, which are normally signs of someone with high Executive Presence. In fact, research suggests that multi-tasking can reduce effectiveness. According to Dr. John Medina, New York Times bestselling author, being interrupted during a task can lead to 50% more errors!

That’s great, but now what?

There is truly value in slowing down to get ahead. But that’s much easier said than done when our days are filled with 300 emails, 20 phone calls, kids, dogs, and hopefully time for meals in between! Here are some tips to help you slow down and keep you focused:

1. Create a To-Do list the night before. Order the items in order of priority for the next day. Be sure to start with the ones at the top! This will help you stay focused and organized.
2. Finish one task before moving on to the next. This will help you avoid lost productivity while multi-tasking.
3. Take breaks throughout your workday. Five minutes here, ten minutes there. These breaks give your mind a few minutes to relax and reset, and will help you increase your productivity.
4. Become an expert delegator. We sometimes just want to do everything ourselves, to make sure it’s done right (and we also don’t have time to be explaining to someone how to do it properly!); but this is short term gain for long term pain. Being able to delegate work will not only help you out in the end, but will also help you to increase your Executive Presence.

It is often hard to keep up with the fast-paced world we find ourselves in. There is always something to do, an email to respond to, or a project to finish. It is, however, important to remember that rushing can not only lead to errors and lost productivity, but can also increase stress levels, something we are all trying to avoid!

I’ve written a lot about defending your price. But I haven’t yet shared what you can do to not have to defend your pricing in the first place. What can you do to preempt ever having to have a conversation about lowering your price?

Here’s the best recipe I know:

1. Open opportunities and get there early. You are not going to have an easy time building value throughout the sales process if you don’t get to the buyer early in their process. The earlier you establish yourself as someone with ideas, the greater the chance you can create value in their buying process. The opposite is also true: the later you get in, the lower your chances of creating and capturing value. Get in early.
2. Create massive value. You can’t play small ball and command a higher price. You have to create the biggest, most compelling, most differentiated value proposition you can. This means you can’t play it safe by presenting something you believe is small, palatable, and won’t ruffle anyone’s feathers. Go big.
3. Get price on the table from Jump St. If you know price is going to be an issue, get it out on the table as early in the process as possible. Don’t fear your pricing. Embrace it. Tell your dream client you are going to cost more and spend your time and energy showing them how much more they are going to get for their money. Talk about the right investment.
4. Build consensus. You want as many supporters for you and your solution as you can muster. The more time you spend building your case, the more support you gain. You want the decision to choose you to be fait accompli. You want to eliminate resistance and doubt. Build support.
5. Reiterate the value. In every conversation, reiterate the value your solution is going to create. Remind the stakeholders exactly how you are going to help them produce the outcomes they need. Always talk about the value.
6. Tie investments to outcomes. When you speak about your outcomes, tie the investment they are making to those outcomes. Explain exactly how the greater investment is necessary to producing the greater outcomes. Also, explain how a smaller investment puts those results at risk. Investments equal outcomes.
7. Help justify your price. If you want to protect your pricing, provide your contacts with the ability to justify the pricing inside their own organization. Give them the tools, the rationale, and the language to speak intelligently as to why your price is the right price to deliver the outcomes they need.

If I were going to add an eighth point here it would be this: focus on relationships. Without relationships, everything on this list is more difficult to accomplish. Relationships, despite anything you have read to the contrary, never go out of fashion. It’s the most fundamental and foundational of all things.

The post How to Avoid the Need to Defend Your Price appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Do you ever just sit and ponder what things would have been like if your company that introduced the mass-produced automobile to the market or that it was your business who popularized the iPhone? As ahead of the curve as these developments were in their time, there are several proven techniques that entrepreneurs and business executives can use to predict massive market trends before they materialize.

While from afar new business developments look random, there are often ‘tectonic shifts,’ if you will that occur beneath the surface–often shaking things up before shifts become visible to the general public. Hence, the key to predicting trends, as a business person, is simply a matter of recognizing the visual patterns as they come into view.

Here’s how you can prepare your business for success and identify trends before they fully materialize.

Understand the Current Business Environment.

On the surface, it might appear that developing an awareness of the business environment is merely about possessing a broad understanding of your industry. However, knowing your field goes beyond familiarizing yourself with top level news in your area. In fact, it extends to preparing yourself for environmental uncertainties. Doing so requires you to have knowledge of where you and your competitors fall on the game board so that you can estimate how changes in the competitive, regulatory, or technological landscape could impact your business.

Possessing this type of awareness does not come easy. It takes lots of deliberate research and planning to arrive at this state. Nonetheless, by regularly asking yourself how changes within the marketplace can impact your company, you will learn to prepare for things that your competitors can’t react to until after the fact.

Familiarize Yourself with Your Competitors’ Playbooks.

If you ever want to reach the point where your business can seamlessly adapt to your competitor’s moves, understanding how the competition operates is key. Although this begins with analyzing the current state of your competition, unless you study their prior responses to changes in the market, you’ll be basing any future decisions on incomplete information. Knowing how businesses in your field have behaved in the past, along with knowing where they are today can help you predict their next moves.

But what would this type of approach look like if you were to carry it out? Beating the competition to the punch requires you and your team to gather information as to what the competition is doing; this could mean monitoring their social media profiles, periodically reviewing their websites, or it could mean paying attention to statements that their executives make about current market conditions or future plans.

However, once you have built a complete profile on your competitors don’t rest on your laurels. Incorporate this advanced competitive intelligence into your decision-making process.

Focus on the Present While Planning for the Future.

As a small business or startup, it’s easy to become so mired in present-day challenges that you forget to look ahead to what’s new on the horizon. Instead, many entrepreneurs often experience deep highs and lows that come about because of a deeply project-centered approach to management. Hence, upon completing major projects, it’s not uncommon to find some business owners just sitting there waiting for whatever comes next.

Unfortunately, companies that adopt this approach end up having a tough time adapting to change. Indeed, many of them go out of business. Nonetheless, it doesn’t take as much to plan for tomorrow as one might think. The key lies in stopping periodically to reevaluate your current position and goal so that you may determine how best to proceed.

Know Your Audience

It’s hard if not impossible to overstate the importance of knowing your audience; this means understanding your current and future customers. Doing so requires building a comprehensive customer profile, sometimes referred to as a buyer persona. You can complete a customer profile by surveying a small but representative group of your clients to learn more about their needs, wants, and overall buying behaviors.

A great way to begin the process of organizing your buyers into personas is to schedule regular focus groups. In addition to using focus groups, you can also analyze buying patterns and social media activity. Another way to gain insight into customer behavior is to consult with your sales team.

Items that you want to pay close attention to include buying cycles, pain points, fears, goals, and other factors that influence your customers. Once you’ve successfully created the personas, you can build new offerings around each persona; this is an area where companies like Apple excel.

Enlist the Support of the Entire Team.

While your efforts are paramount to your firm’s ability to stay ahead of major trends, there’s only so much that you can do by yourself. Hence, to ensure lasting gains, you’ll need to make sure that everyone has ‘skin in the game.’ There’s no better way to do this than to create a continuous improvement plan that includes the entire organization.

Improving your business isn’t just about improving your products and services, but it also has to do with honing your processes and insights.

Expand Your Circle of Influence.

Anyone that you come into regular contact with during the course of business can share valuable insights with you; this includes distributors, manufacturers, media representatives, etc. However, it also includes those that you may not ordinarily look to for information.

Seeing around the corner of change often requires knowledge of the terrain beforehand. The best way to gain this type of information in the business arena is to broaden your scope of influence, which only requires you to bring others into your circle of influence. Widening your sources allows you to see things that you wouldn’t ordinarily see on your own.

Keep an Eye Out for Major Trends.

Massive shifts in the business environment have the power to drastically alter your company. These can include changes such as new business regulations, population changes, technological advances, etc.

You might be asking yourself what all of this has to do with you being able to predict impending market shifts. The answer is that connecting the dots across these seven areas gives you an aerial view of the market that your business occupies. And make no mistake, the ramifications of being able to see the big picture are massive. It means that while everyone else is scrambling to catch up, you’ll be two steps ahead.

In closing, let me be clear—no human being is capable of seeing the future. However, if you heed the tactics in this article, you’ll be well-poised to stay ahead of industry trends, while outmaneuvering the competition. And as we all know, that’s the stuff legends are made of – so let’s get started!

Account-based marketing (ABM) has been the topic of webinars, new martech, blogs, conferences and countless B2B conversations over the last year. For this reason, we included ABM in the research for the 2016 State of Pipeline Marketing Report.

According to the responses of over 350 marketers who took the survey, 67% are doing some form of account-based marketing. We’ve segmented the data to pivot responses by those whose marketing consists of 50% or more ABM, and those who have not implemented an ABM strategy.

Below, review the results account-based marketers are seeing in sales and marketing alignment and ROI, as well as their top priorities and how predictive analytics fit into an ABM tech stack.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Account-based marketing is not solely a marketing function. For the strategy to work well, sales and marketing teams must work together through the entire funnel. A result of this, supported by SOPM data, is strong sales and marketing alignment.

We asked respondents to rate their sales and marketing relationship on a sliding scale from “1- misaligned” to “5-tightly aligned.”

Respondents who aren’t doing any form of ABM reported a 1 or a 2 almost 2.5x as much as those who are doing 50% or more.

While those doing 50% or more ABM rated their relationship as a 4 or 5, 1.6x as much as those doing no ABM.

The data makes clear what we’ve long suspected, an account-based marketing strategy is a great way to get your sales and marketing teams to align and work together toward common goals. And when teams are aligned, they are likely to report a higher ROI.

In fact, 46% of marketers who took the survey and listed alignment as a 4 or 5, reported ROI greater than 2x, while only 13% of respondents with 1 or 2 alignment could say the same.

Average Marketing ROI for Account-Based Marketers

On the topic of marketing ROI, how do account-based marketers fare? We asked marketers doing 50% or more ABM the current average return on investment that they were seeing from their marketing efforts.

While an ROI of more than 2x is only separated by a few percentage points between marketers who aren’t doing ABM and marketers doing 50% or more ABM, the bigger story is in the marketers who are seeing an ROI of less than 1x.

First, although quite a few marketers doing no form of ABM are seeing more than 2x ROI, there’s almost the same amount seeing less than 1x ROI. The case isn’t very strong when there’s near equal amounts on both ends of the spectrum.

However, only 3% of marketers doing 50% or more ABM are seeing an ROI of less than 1x. The remaining percentages are spread from 1.1x to over 2x. That means that marketers who use account-based tactics in at least half of their marketing efforts, almost always see positive ROI.

Unlike traditional demand generation that waits for leads to come to you, account-based marketing names the ideal leads and targets them with personalized content. It’s an outbound strategy instead of an inbound strategy.

ABM means that time and money is spent only on pursuing specific, ideal accounts, so it makes sense that they are more likely to engage, close and deliver positive ROI.

Top Marketing Priority for Account-Based Marketers

With all the channels, strategies and tracking capabilities available to marketers today, the conversion optimization possibilities are endless. So, which do marketers prioritize? And specifically, which do account-based marketers prioritize?

In the SOPM survey, we asked marketers to choose their top marketing priority from options like Generating More Leads or Converting Leads to Revenue, and others like Implementing/Improving Attribution, Sales and Marketing Alignment, or Reducing the Cost of Customer Acquisition.

The graph above segments the data by the top two answers and then combines all other answers into one bar labeled “other.” What stands out is that 55% of marketers not doing any form of ABM, list generating leads as their top marketing priority, with just over 30% listing converting leads to revenue at the top. This leaves around 11% spread across all other answers.

On the other hand, marketers doing 50% or more ABM list converting leads to revenue as their top priority at 37% of respondents. What’s interesting is that generating more leads and “other” come in just over and just under the 30% mark respectively.

With this even spread across responses, it seems account-based marketers are still figuring out what marketing functions to prioritize. This could be due to the relative “newness” of implementing an ABM strategy. As more marketers dig into ABM, and more tech evolves to tracking and reporting ABM, I’d expect the gap between converting leads to revenue and all others, to widen.

Predictive Analytics

One marketing technology option that’s already available to account-based marketers is predictive analytics.

Predictive analytics is great for ABM because it helps marketing and sales teams know where an account is in the buying journey and how likely they are to purchase your product. For example, predictive account engagement scoring wraps up engagement, based on a number of factors like number of touchpoints and engaged personas, into a single score. This score tells marketers if the account needs more nurturing and tells salespeople when the account is ready to buy.

Based on the SOPM survey, over half of marketers doing 50% or more ABM are currently using predictive, or are considering implementing it in the near future. The takeaway here is that if you’re doing ABM and have yet to research the benefits of predictive analytics for your organization, you may be a step behind other account-based marketers.

Additionally, it seems the use of predictive within a demand gen strategy (not doing any ABM) is also on the rise with about 26% considering implementing it in the near future.

Conclusion

There has been a lot of buzz around account-based marketing in 2016, but based on the State of Pipeline Marketing Report it’s all for good reason. Marketers who have embraced an ABM strategy see greater ROI for their marketing efforts and better sales and marketing alignment than those who have yet to implement a strategy.

All of the data for this post was made possible by the annual State of Pipeline Marketing report. If you’d like to download the full report, click the link below.

I’ve written a lot about defending your price. But I haven’t yet shared what you can do to not have to defend your pricing in the first place. What can you do to preempt ever having to have a conversation about lowering your price?

Here’s the best recipe I know:

1. Open opportunities and get there early. You are not going to have an easy time building value throughout the sales process if you don’t get to the buyer early in their process. The earlier you establish yourself as someone with ideas, the greater the chance you can create value in their buying process. The opposite is also true: the later you get in, the lower your chances of creating and capturing value. Get in early.
2. Create massive value. You can’t play small ball and command a higher price. You have to create the biggest, most compelling, most differentiated value proposition you can. This means you can’t play it safe by presenting something you believe is small, palatable, and won’t ruffle anyone’s feathers. Go big.
3. Get price on the table from Jump St. If you know price is going to be an issue, get it out on the table as early in the process as possible. Don’t fear your pricing. Embrace it. Tell your dream client you are going to cost more and spend your time and energy showing them how much more they are going to get for their money. Talk about the right investment.
4. Build consensus. You want as many supporters for you and your solution as you can muster. The more time you spend building your case, the more support you gain. You want the decision to choose you to be fait accompli. You want to eliminate resistance and doubt. Build support.
5. Reiterate the value. In every conversation, reiterate the value your solution is going to create. Remind the stakeholders exactly how you are going to help them produce the outcomes they need. Always talk about the value.
6. Tie investments to outcomes. When you speak about your outcomes, tie the investment they are making to those outcomes. Explain exactly how the greater investment is necessary to producing the greater outcomes. Also, explain how a smaller investment puts those results at risk. Investments equal outcomes.
7. Help justify your price. If you want to protect your pricing, provide your contacts with the ability to justify the pricing inside their own organization. Give them the tools, the rationale, and the language to speak intelligently as to why your price is the right price to deliver the outcomes they need.

If I were going to add an eighth point here it would be this: focus on relationships. Without relationships, everything on this list is more difficult to accomplish. Relationships, despite anything you have read to the contrary, never go out of fashion. It’s the most fundamental and foundational of all things.

The post How to Avoid the Need to Defend Your Price appeared first on The Sales Blog.

 

By Kiki Schirr, {grow} Contributing Columnist

Medium can seem like the Dark Side to a marketing Padawan. Its dominance calls to us — but we’ve been warned by our elders that owned media is the only true road to power.

Most marketing blogs will have an article about how to use Medium as a marketer. Very few of these articles go into depth on whether you should, though.

Why you should consider using Medium

Medium is a powerful tool. It comes with a built-in audience that numbers more than 1.2 million unique signups. By posting good content frequently, an author can easily get 20,000 views per month. Bigger names draw more than 300,000.

Medium allows its readers to subscribe to content. Readers can choose to follow a writer or a publication. The benefit of owning a publication is that subscribers can also be reached via email newsletter.

Therefore, editors of publications have a powerful tool to reach out to their audience personally.

Why you should consider skipping Medium

However, while Medium does allow editors of publications to reach out via email, it never allows you to own the email list. If you or one of your authors suddenly got fed up with the site and left, you would walk away with nothing.

Owned media, that is content within your own control such as a blog or your own newsletter, is undoubtedly a safer route to travel. That being said, it can be frustrating to build traffic to your own site. The growth rate is slow and while some of your content might go viral, it is too unpredictable to count on breakout content.

Many of the best marketing blogs around have built their audience over a period of years. Their consistently solid content has been the draw.

There is no good substitute for loyal blog readers and especially newsletter subscribers. Being able to reach your targeted audience when you need to is the pinnacle of a marketer’s power. But with owned media, it would seem that there’s no such thing as overnight success.

But wait…

Or is there?

Many authors, Mark Schaefer included, have begun to cross-post their existing content to Medium.

This is the best of both worlds: your loyal readers can see the content on your site, and you can reach a new audience on Medium. Medium readers don’t care if content was first published there, and appreciate it if you mention that it was also published on your blog. (This is also a great opportunity to link to that blog!)

The big question is: can you convert Medium readers to be your loyal blog readers? Many marketers, frustrated by months of trying, might tell you no, conversion is impossible.

However, as it becomes clear that this is a market need, third party apps have sprung up to help marketers gain an audience from their Medium blog.

Enter Rabbut, stage left

One of the most visible 3rd party Medium tools is Rabbut, a service that allows you to promote your own content within a post. Rabbut has three core Medium services: an email intake form, story cards that allow you to promote other posts, and an ebook giveaway service.

Rabbut has two pricing tiers, free and $10/month. I’d recommend creating a Mailchimp list for your new subscribers before you sign up for Rabbut to make the linking smoother.

Once you link your Mailchimp, you can create a form. Simply edit the given text to suit your own needs and link your Medium account, and Rabbut will give you a link to copy/paste. Mine looked like this:

To see an example of Rabbut in action, click this article and scroll to the bottom.

The more traditional route

Even if you choose not to go with Rabbut, there are a few things you can do to optimize the amount of traffic your blog sees from Medium.

• In your personal profile, link to your blog
• At the end of your Medium posts, mention or link to your blog
• If you are cross posting existing content, link to the original article
• Link to relevant personal blog posts as supporting information within your Medium post

Don’t be discouraged by low click-through rates. Many readers are loyal to the platform and resent obvious attempts to draw them away from it. However, if the content you’re providing is tempting enough, they will not mind leaving. Just be aware that blatant links to your blog will not always go over well.

The people who do click through will be high quality readers.

Join the Dark Side…

Overall, Medium is a great place to experiment with a new, wider audience. In particular, it provides marketers, early adopters, freelancers, writers, and techies. If you think you could benefit from reaching out to any of those groups, hurry and sign up today.

For a few good articles on getting started, check out:

• Social Media Examiner
• Medium’s quick pro tips

Kiki Schirr is a freelance marketer. She is an avid Medium user and loves learning about new technologies. Kiki is currently focusing on a new Medium publication she calls Schirr Genius. Previously she worked on Tech Doodles. Kiki can be reached easily through Twitter.

Drawing by Kiki Schirr. Images are screen captures from real product use.

The post The Dark Power of Medium appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Let me ask you a question. Why does Engagio speak about Account Based Everything (ABE)? Why everything and not just marketing? It’s because an account-based approach can dramatically improve the entire customer experience — from first touch and sale to renewal and upsell.

ABE helps marketing and sales development teams to focus efforts. And critically, it also equips account executives and other quota-bearing teams to sell more effectively. How does it support sales enablement for quota-bearing teams? Consider the most fundamental problem for an account executive: stalled or failed pipeline.

Unsticking Stalled Opportunities

Account executives are constantly working their portfolio of opportunities. They’re continuously trying to move deals forward, but the reality is that 58% of these deals will never close. Not for your company. Not for a competitor. They’ll close for no one. They simply lose steam and fade from sight.

When you consider the massive investment that your team made to acquire and nurture these opportunities, that’s a huge loss.

So, why do these deals disappear? They fall out of the pipeline because your prospects have a dozen other priorities competing for attention. They have multiple projects currently in flight that can’t be shuffled. And they can’t pull together an internal consensus to move things forward. The result is that promising deals stall and fall apart.

Sales enablement attempts, in part, to address this issue. It consists of a set of processes, technologies, and approaches to help sales people guide prospects to close more effectively. In this context that means unsticking those stuck opportunities and advancing more of them to close.

How? I think there is a major opportunity for companies to rethink their sales enablement efforts considering what ABE has taught us. Let me explain.

Sales Enablement Meet Account Based Everything

ABE is, in fact, one of the most important developments in sales enablement strategy in a decade. It helps sales teams focus efforts on the most fruitful target accounts. It helps sales people communicate messages that resonate on a company-by-company basis. It helps sales teams coordinate prospecting with their marketing colleagues. And it helps sales reps execute plays that guide prospect accounts over the goal line.

Let’s take a step back and think about several key elements of sales enablement. Per Forrester, sales enablement is:

A strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.

Now, I’ll go ahead and break that up into a set of overarching actions that we can address:

• Include all aspects of the organization in this strategic process
• Equip client-facing employees with the tools, processes, and skills needed
• Have valuable conversations with customers
• Focus on the correct customers and stakeholders within those customers
• Engage with your customers throughout the buyer’s journey

Notice that this is an overarching strategy — one that applies to the entire customer journey. That understanding is critical because a truly complete ABE approach, one that is proven to be more effective, applies to (*ahem*) everything in the customer experience. So, how does ABE apply to each of these sales enablement components? Let’s take a look.

Embrace the Whole Organization

Sales enablers are most effective when they take a holistic approach. They can see how the various pieces of the buyer’s journey fit together, and they can improve them. They also recognize how various teams fit together to support sales, as well as understand that all customer-facing roles can impact revenue.

Jon Miller’s vision of ABE is similarly comprehensive. He describes ABE, in part, as “…a strategic go-to-market approach that orchestrates personalized marketing, sales, and success efforts…”.

Note the embrace of multiple customer-facing teams. That’s helping enable sales. If marketing nurtures prospects and orchestrates these interactions at an account level, then they’re providing reps with radically better prospects. And if customer success identifies an enthusiastic customer that can be used as a reference or case study, that helps sales.

Action: Look across your entire customer journey to understand the various touch-points and how they can be orchestrated by account.

Focus on the Correct Accounts and Stakeholders Within Them

Enterprise sales and national account teams have for years taken a “Named Account” approach. These sales teams would select a set of companies to focus their attention. This strategy is a remarkably effective way to focus effort. And it echoes the ABE mentality.

I’m a big advocate of the Challenger Sale and Challenger Customer approach. In these approaches, the sales person focuses on helping the buyer to understand why there is value in breaking away from the status quo and how to build internal coalitions to affect change.

For account executives of non-transactional sales, this kind of focus works. One common way that it fails though is in the selection of the named accounts. Ask any sales leader why they chose the accounts in their named list and there’s a good chance it will be:

• Because we’ve always targeted these companies
• Because they are in the Fortune 500 / Global 2000 / Inc 5000, insert list name
• Because they were on some list and they were selected by filtering for geo or industry

That’s where ABE methodologies can help. Predictive technologies will build models of your ideal customers. You can apply those models against your target lists to identify the accounts most likely to convert. Use these lists of prioritized accounts as the basis for your named accounts. And then refine your model over time based on the results you’re seeing in your funnel.

Action: Adopt a predictive approach to prioritize which accounts the sales (and other customer-facing teams) focus on.

Equip Client Facing Teams

Sales teams are under an extraordinary amount of time constraints and business pressure. They must deliver against rising numbers every month and every quarter. So, they need to ensure that inefficiencies are squeezed out of their process.

I like to interview and brainstorm with the sales team about where there are inefficiencies. You can run time tests and survey the team as well to find where effort is being spent. You’ll find there are many ways to eliminate manual or inefficient steps.

Take the writing of emails to large numbers of prospect accounts. Are there shared elements of the email that can be templated or personalized at scale, while still giving the rep latitude to tailor? If your team does outbound calling then are there dialers that can queue calls and let you concentrate calling by account to maximize your impact?

Action: Understand the steps in your sales process and get efficiencies by automating what you can while supporting personalization.

Have Valuable Conversations with Customers

Taking an ABE approach differentiates your sales team from the “volume” players out there. You know who I mean — the sales people who will gladly send thousands of untargeted, generic emails. The sales people who offer no insight and no awareness of their prospects. More than 80% of sales people are these low-value reps. Which kind of sales team do you want in your organization?

Instead understand what are the triggers and priorities of your accounts, and focus your reps on communicating messages that address those information needs. Prospects are hungry for insight that improves their business. Do your reps have access to the content and intelligence they need to deliver that value?

Action: Identify key priority types and triggers, and measure across your target base to identify which messages will resonate with each account.

Engage Your Customers Throughout the Journey

Lastly, ABE reminds us that the buyer’s journey is not a fluid one. Accounts do not simply slide from top of funnel to being a customer. They stall midway through the funnel. They re-engage and come back as re-activated opportunities.

That means that sales people should be comfortable with passing prospect accounts back into the demand generation machine. Stalled accounts may need more nurturing or additional depth of contacts.

It also means that sales people need playbooks, content, and tactics that they can deploy to engage prospects. That could be interesting insights that help a prospect see the business value in continuing. Or maybe it’s data that helps the prospect account to create a more compelling business case to build an internal coalition.

Action: Understand the key friction points and exit points in your funnel. Identify what kinds of tactics can be used to re-awaken stalled accounts and get these plays into sales teams’ hands.

Equipping your sales team to advance and accelerate deals in the pipeline is imperative. And by combining learnings and approaches from ABE to sales enablement you can help boost your entire go-to-market. And that means more revenue.

Most people scoring interviews for the job you want arrive armed with knowledge of the industry, smart questions for the interviewer, and a classy outfit.

The question is, how can you go above and beyond, and show the interviewer you're exactly what they've been seeking?

In a Facebook Live interview at Business Insider's annual conference IGNITION, Business Insider asked Arianna Huffington about the qualities she looks for in new hires.

Huffington is the cofounder and former editor of The Huffington Post; she's currently the CEO of startup Thrive Global.

The first quality she mentioned was the confidence to speak up.

"I love working with people who say exactly what's on their minds," she said.

Jenna Lyons, president and executive creative director of J.Crew Group Inc., told Motto earlier this year that she's also impressed when people speak up. "I find it impossible to understand where a person stands if they don't join the conversation," she said.

It's hard to believe there are successful executives looking for employees who don't speak their minds — whether that's during the initial job interview or the regular workday, once you're hired. However, it's rarely lauded as a quality executives are seeking right off the bat.

The second quality Huffington looks for in new employees? The ability to take care of yourself.

"I think it takes a certain person to recognize that, when they take care of themselves, they're going to be better at their jobs," she said.

Huffington has for the past several years been an advocate for wellness, and for sleep in particular; she even published a book titled "The Sleep Revolution." As she told Business Insider earlier this year, people used to (and sometimes still do) celebrate sleep deprivation as a sign of commitment to your work.

But people are slowly starting to realize that, as she said, "all of the things we value in business are going to be affected in a negative way if we don't get enough sleep."

Again, it's probably not just Huffington who's looking for an employee who knows how to work hard — but also knows that pushing themselves to the brink can backfire. So if you're thinking about touting your ability to work 100-hour weeks, maybe don't.

Watch the full Facebook Live interview with Huffington:

SEE ALSO: Arianna Huffington shares the best career advice she ever received

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Arianna Huffington destroys the macho 'no sleep' mentality

How can big data boost your B2B blogging efforts? It has long been an influential force in many industries. For example, it has helped airlines to more accurately predict ETAs. It has been used in the healthcare industry to predict illness and and determine the best course of treatment. B2B PR is no exception.

Many predict that big data will become as integral to PR as social media — practically necessary for success. The strategic advantage you gain from big data has huge potential for B2B PR. Let’s look at how this data can improve your PR — especially when it comes to B2B blogging.

What is It?

Before you can use big data, you have to understand it. And while everyone puts their own particular spin on it, Forbes has summarized it this way: “A collection of data from traditional and digital sources inside and outside your company that represents a source for ongoing discovery and analysis.”

Big data typically encompasses the following four components, the “Four V’s,” if you will:

• Volume — This is what makes the data big. The total amount of data grows exponentially each year.
• Velocity — Because the data is so plentiful, it needs to be processed quickly.
• Variety — The data comprises any number of varieties, from numbers to pictures, to Twitter feeds…the list goes on.
• Value — This is the objective of big data. It should benefit you with insights that will help your business.

Big data opportunities abound for tech-savvy PR professionals and agencies. — Christopher S. Penn

To use big data and PR effectively, you need to have expertise in the subject, critical thinking ability, and access to the right tools. In the realm of PR, some helpful tools include Google Analytics, Buzzsumo, Cision, and Air PR, among others.

How to Use Big Data in B2B Blogging

1. Build More Effective Content Strategies

Does this world of data and analysis pose a threat to the creative process that goes into writing B2B blogs? Not at all — if anything, it only serves to move it forward.

With a steady eye and industry expertise, you’ll be able to see what this data reveals about your industry. Then, armed with this knowledge, you’ll be able to deliver fresh and even groundbreaking insights as well as a B2B blog strategy that will engage your audience and bring in new readers.

You can use a tool like Mention to monitor mentions of your company, or specific names or topics across the web and social media. See what people are talking about, and how you fit into the conversation — then use this information to improve your content strategy.

Meltwater is another tool that allows you to follow market trends and be the first to learn about stories as they emerge.

2. Adjust Your Message to Market Trends

Be the first in line for every trending story, hash tag, or idea. You can use collected data to determine what previously caused a market trend. You’ll then be more likely to predict when such a trend will resurface — leaving you in the thick of it.

Use Buzzsumo to see what content is trending. You can search by topic or by website — which offers you a prime opportunity to stay on top of what your competitors are doing, and then keep a step ahead.

Google Analytics is another must-have tool that allows you to track the progress of your B2B blogs and PR campaigns to see what works, where your audience is from, and what they search for on your site.

3. Embrace a New Way to Tell Stories

B2B PR is all about telling compelling stories. Buttress your story with big data that supports and enhances it

A tool like Google Trends can help you understand how a particular subject resonates around the world, and even in specific regions. Find data that will strengthen your story, and make it even more compelling.

You may also be interested in NewsWhip Spike, a paid service that shows you what content is trending worldwide, in real time. It ranks stories based on how fast a story spreads across social media, and how many social media interactions it has.

Opportunities are plentiful for big data to help you work faster and deliver greater business impact. –Christopher S. Penn

4. Use Your Expertise

The one draw-back in this world of big data and PR is that it doesn’t automatically answer the inevitable questions: Why is this data important? How does it affect my audience? But, at the same time, it gives you a prime opportunity to use your industry expertise to answer those questions. Be the first to do so and present new insights to your ever-hungry audience.

You may use a tool like CriticalMention, which monitors your brand and trending topics across TV, radio, online news, and social media. It makes it easy for you to take trending topics, and weave them into a story.

Where Does This Data Come From?

There are a number of ways that you can find data that fuels your PR engine.
First, you have internal data streams, or owned content. This may include information from your organization’s website, your branded blog, as well as company and brand pages on social networks.

Another option that enhances your B2B blogging efforts is shared data streams. This includes events, surveys and industry research that your organization has participated in, but that you do may not have exclusive right to.

Finally, you can use external data streams, such as news, academic studies, government data, social media conversations, and syndicated surveys.

Now the power is in your hands to take industry data and mold it into a valuable, insightful story. With the right tools and expertise, you have endless opportunities for growth and improvement.

Raise your hand if list building is on the top of your to-do list.

Email marketing helps you build relationships, grow your community and drive traffic to your website again and again. It’s a non-negotiable for the modern marketer.

And our industry friends agree: We asked 15 of them to share the number one list building tactic that helped them grow their own email list so you can start seeing success of your own.

1. When it comes to your sign up form, less is more

Erin King, Sr. Email Marketing Manager at Litmus

A painless sign-up process is essential when building a list. When potential subscribers are first opting in to your list, it can be tempting to ask them for a large amount of information (address, job title, company size, etc). But a lengthy sign up form can lead to a higher rate of sign-up abandonment.

Keep your sign up form fields to a minimum — at most, a name and email address. This is the start of your relationship with the subscriber, so no need to overwhelm them with too many questions. As you build trust with them, you can employ tactics like progressive profiling to learn more about them.

2. Make your sign up form work harder for you

Chad White, Research Director at Litmus

I’m a fan of strengthening strengths. Your best subscribers always come from owned acquisition sources — your website, stores, call center, mobile app and other sources close to your shopping and customer service operations — so I recommend improving those.

Make them work harder for you by:

• Making sign-up opportunities prominent during key interaction points
• Reducing unnecessary and low-value fields on sign up forms to reduce friction
• Making the sign up value proposition stronger
• Setting clear expectations as to what new subscribers will receive and how often
• Optimizing the sign up form call-to-action

Even small improvements to these subscriber acquisition sources are really valuable, because the subscribers you acquire through these sources are much more valuable than ones you attract elsewhere. So start A/B testing today.

3. Get social

Kristen Dunleavy, Content Marketing Manager at Movable Ink

When you add contextual elements to your emails, you show your audience that you really ‘get’ them. One way to build your list with context is by adding a live social feed to your emails. Give your social followers a heads up and tell them to sign up for your list to check it out.

This helps create buzz around your email list and gives you the chance to showcase user-generated content in your emails.

4. Ask your audience what they want

Amy Schmittauer, Founder of Savvy Sexy Social

Anytime my audience gives me an idea of something they want or need, I try to create the ultimate lead magnet around that so I can grow my list. It’s a win-win for everyone because I’ve specifically offered them something they asked for in return for contact information. Instead of just guessing what your audience wants, ask and create the very best thing you could offer. They will opt-in happily knowing you listened!

5. Add an integration to the mix

Noah Kagan, Chief Sumo at SumoMe

Use Welcome Mat from SumoMe and make custom versions for different pages and different traffic sources.

For more on pop-up forms: 3 Ways You Can Use Pop Up Forms for Good and Not Evil

6. Promote on your podcast

Nick Loper, Chief Side Hustler at Side Hustle Nation

The list building tactic I’ve found most effective is creating content-specific opt-in offers and linking those in the post or mentioning those on the podcast. The simplest way to do it is just to create a PDF version of the post to download and read later. If you have a really long epic article, this can be surprisingly effective.

7. Leverage your expertise

Carl Sednaoui, Director of Marketing at MailCharts

As an entrepreneur, you’re likely to have expertise in whatever your business focuses on. Leverage that expertise to create and distribute valuable educational content. This will help you connect with your community while growing your reputation and email list. 37 Signals, the company behind Basecamp, are also firms believers of promotion through education.

We’ve had tremendous success with this exact approach at MailCharts. This is why we’ve created everything from email courses, to ebooks, to full reports.

8. Don’t underestimate word-of-mouth

Mike Nelson, Email Geek at Really Good Emails

As for the best list building tactic, word of mouth is actually what we go for. Seems strange in a digital world full of pop-ups and form fields (which we have), but we try to be out-of-the-box and give the reader something to talk about. Whether it is our strange humor about a subject or providing an interesting article about a new strategy, we want people to have a connection with our emails so they tell their colleagues where they got the info. We see a lot of people at the same company sign up at once, which is always fun to see because it shows that word got around the team.

9. Identify pain points, solve them with incentives

Rachel Moffatt, Social Media Manager at Express Writers

The best way to grow your email list with quality subscribers is to provide an incentive your target audience would find valuable. Provide a solution to the problems they’re facing! One of the best ways to do this is through content upgrades on individual blog posts. It’s the perfect way to get new visitors to your website to take action after reading a blog post. And it will definitely give your list a major boost!

10. Get ridiculously tailored with your content

Brian Dean, Founder of Backlinko

My number list building tactic (by far) is The Content Upgrade. When I first started building my email list I’d offer every visitor the exact same “bribe”. So whether you were reading a post about link building or keyword research, you were offered the same exact ebook.

Needless to say, that untargeted approach didn’t work very well. In fact, my sitewide conversion rate for email optins was below 0.5 percent.

Then one day I stumbled on a strategy called The Content Upgrade. Instead of offering everyone the same thing, I offered them something ridiculously tailored to what they were reading.

In fact, the offer was a “bonus” from that same post. For example, someone reading about link building tips would get offered an extra five tips by signing up.

And it worked! One of my posts saw a boost in conversions of 785 percent. And many others have had similar increases.

11. Give away something of value

Nick Westergaard, Chief Brand Strategist at Brand Driven Digital

As a speaker, my number one list building tactic is offering my slides as a free download with your email address. The slides are something attendees often want and email is something easy to give for that. It’s a win-win!

12. Try an email course

Henneke Duistermaat, Founder of Enchanting Marketing

My snackable writing course is my favorite list building technique. Compared to a downloadable report, the advantage of an email course is that it builds a relationship with readers over time.

Instead of sharing a lot of tips in one go and making people feel overwhelmed, subscribers get one tip at a time that’s easy to implement. People seem to love it!

13. Remember the 3 P’s

Andy Crestodina, Co-Founder and Strategic Director at Orbit Media Studios

Email list growth is a conversion optimization challenge. And the conversion rate is determined by the three P’s:

Prominence
The sign up form is visually prominent. It doesn’t have to be a pop-up, but it should be high on the visual hierarchy of the page.

Promise
The benefits of subscribing are explicit. The sign up form tells people the topic and the frequency.

Proof
There is some indication that you’re legit. This could be the number of subscribers or a short, sweet testimonial.

Here’s a site that does it badly. No prominence, promise or proof. Why would anyone sign up for this?

Here’s our site, which does it well. Prominence (Red box, which sticks to the navigation so it’s always there, not matter how far down you scroll); promise (What do you get? web marketing tips! How often? Bi-weekly!); and proof (13,000 people subscribe to this newsletter.

The impact on list growth is huge if you do it right. So add the three Ps! If you need a fourth P, consider privacy or give people a present.

14. Warm up your audience with valuable content

Jenna Kutcher, Founder of the Jenna Kutcher Course and Host of The Goal Digger Podcast

Not a lot of entrepreneurs know the impact of having an email list for their business, but email lists are so important no matter what industry you’re in. This is because it connects you to people who are already interested in your products and services. And more importantly, you own that list. The time you are spending on social media to grow your following is basically like renting space and any day, the people who own that space can change the game with algorithms.

So much of my time is spent creating free valuable content for my audience to demonstrate that I care about them and understand their needs. This gives them a no-risk way to get to know me and my style before comfortably purchasing down the road.

15. Invite feedback

Tom Tate, Marketing Product Manager at AWeber

Invite your audience to be advocates. If you are delivering awesome value in your emails, your audience will take notice and engage, but they may not always share your content. Just as you must invite your audience to sign up for your emails, you should also invite your audience to share your emails.

I recommend testing a ‘P.S. message’ that reads, “If you didn’t receive any value from this email, tell me. If you did receive value from this email, tell everyone. Seriously, if you have a friend that would benefit from this message, send it over to them!”

I’ve added a similar message to all of my emails, along with a link to join for non-subscribers and noticed a regular uptick in referral traffic and subscribers.

Put these tactics to action

The best part about all of these pro tips? They’re actionable, affordable and some take less than five minutes to implement.

Start by implementing one (or more!) of these tips to start boosting your list growth today.

China is building a trans-asia high speed rail line in south east asia and helped build a $100 billion city in Malaysia, just across the border from Singapore.

China has begun building a high speed rail that will connect Myanmar’s cities. This will cut the journey time from Muse, Shan State, to Yangon to one hour.

“This will be an Asian continental railroad that will connect Kunming and Ruili in Yunnan province with Thailand and Malaysia via Myanmar. Work has already begun on the rail link between Kunming and Ruili, and work is proceeding on the Lu Zen tunnel,” said China’s consul general Wang Zongying.

“We want to connect Southeast Asia with a trans-Asia railroad that will go as far as Indonesia and Singapore, and we look forward to cooperation from the countries concerned,” he told The Myanmar Times. China was devoting great attention to questions of cost, he said.

He told the audience that the train would eventually reach a speed of 350kph, cutting the journey time from Muse to Yangon to an hour.

$100 billion on a Malaysian version of Shenzhen

China is betting that the city of Johor Bahru, bordering Singapore, will eventually become the next Shenzhen. Shenzhen is a 10 million person city across the border from Hong Kong.

Chinese companies have come to Malaysia as growth in many of their home cities is slowing, forcing some of the world’s biggest builders to look abroad to keep erecting the giant residential complexes that sprouted across China during the boom years. They found a prime spot in this special economic zone, three times the size of Singapore, on the southern tip of the Asian mainland.

The Forest City project will span four artificial islands. Photographer: Ore Huiying/Bloomberg



The scale of the projects is dizzying. Country Garden’s Forest City, on four artificial islands, will house 700,000 people on an area four times the size of New York’s Central Park. It will have office towers, parks, hotels, shopping malls and an international school, all draped with greenery. Construction began in February and about 8,000 apartments have been sold, the company said.

It’s the biggest of about 60 projects in the Iskandar Malaysia zone around Johor Bahru, known as JB, that could add more than half-a-million homes. The influx has contributed to a drop of almost one-third in the value of residential sales in the state last year, with some developers offering discounts of 20 percent or more. Average resale prices per square foot for high-rise flats in JB fell 10 percent last year, according to property consultant CH Williams Talhar and Wong.

Read more »

Key Findings from a survey of 500 European fashion retailers

Retailers are undoubtedly enthusiastic about innovation, with more than half viewing it as a priority for their business. But when it comes to actually delivering innovation, retailers face a variety of challenges.

To find out how retailers are approaching innovation in 2017 and beyond, we surveyed 500 retailers from across Europe. Here, in a summary of our full report, we share five key findings.

9 in 10 retailers take innovation seriously

Almost all retailers surveyed recognise the value of innovation, highlighting the growing importance of innovating in order to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive market. UK retailers in particular, place great emphasis on innovation, with 76% of respondents saying that it is a priority for their business.

A lack of time is the #1 barrier to innovation

Fashion retailers cite several barriers to innovation, including a lack of time or resources (43%), lack of investment (40%) and integration issues (39%). Not having a clear vision or strategy is also holding many retailers back.

Only 15% of retailers have a dedicated role for innovation

A myriad of roles are said to hold responsibility for innovation, with CEO/MD coming at the top with 24%, followed by CMO (18%), CDO (16%) and chief customer/experience officer (11%). Fifteen percent of retailers claim that innovation is embedded into all teams.

Fewer than 50% of retailers have a defined process for innovation

Currently, only 4 in 10 retailers report having a defined process for innovation, but almost half claim they are planning to implement one within a year. Those retailers with an annual turnover exceeding £500m are by far the most likely to already have a process in place (73%).

27% of retailers consider positive media attention a KPI for their innovation programmes

Positive media coverage is most important to Belgian (41%) and German (37%) retailers, which is not surprising given the fact that a quarter of German retailers view innovation as a buzzword (versus 8% of all retailers surveyed) and may therefore be driving “innovation” purely for the positive PR it can bring.

Retailers are primarily interested in customer satisfaction as a measure of the success of the innovation programme (45%), followed by increased revenue (44%) and number of newly attained customers (42%).

Read the full report

This is a summary from a full research report, the result of interviews with 500 retailers across Europe on how they are delivering on the fundamentals of retail versus how they are approaching innovation. Click here to download the full report.

 

 

 

With Rogue One: A Star Wars Story coming out soon, it got me thinking about one of my favorite powers of the Force -- the Jedi Mind trick.

As a refresher to you non-Star Wars buffs, the Jedi Mind trick is when a Jedi uses the Force to put their ideas into someone else’s brain, which encourages that adversary to comply with the Jedi’s wishes.

Remember the scene in Star Wars: Episode IV when Obi Wan Kenobi stops the Stormtroopers from finding R2D2 and C3PO? With a wave of his hand, Obi Wan tells them exactly what he wants them to say and they mindlessly repeat “these aren’t the droids you are looking for,” and then let him through the checkpoint.

You can use its powers in sales as well.

The key to being a Sales Jedi is getting your prospects to verbally articulate why they want to do what you are suggesting. You can’t just get them to regurgitate your proposal, but you need them to be able to explain why they agree with you.

The Power of Repetition in Sales (The Power of Repetition in Sales)

Repetition is a very useful sales technique. If you can get your customer to repeat the value of your product back to you, it has a self-reinforcing effect, and over time becomes their opinion. It's sort of similar to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But to fully embrace the benefits of the Jedi Mind trick, you need to take it one step further. You need to get your customer to be able to articulate and understand that value, not just repeat it.

Start this process on your initial sales call. When you have a client on the phone, ask them, “What do you see of value here?” and then take notes on their reply. Keep the tone positive and the conversation on value.

Later, repeat back to them the points they brought up. The client will obviously agree with you if you use their own words, making your statements more influential and easier for them to digest.

Another Sales Technique From a Real-Life Sales Jedi

A real life Obi Wan is Harvard professor and well-known author Daniel Pink. He taught me a similar sales technique I find fascinating and extremely effective.

His idea is that if you can prompt others to speak about their own reasons for doing something it is way more compelling than pushing your reasons onto them. He further shows that when it is someone’s own ideas, they are far more likely to behave based on those reasons.

So how can you be a Sales Jedi and get your prospects and customers to say what you want? Pink lays out a two question approach: First, ask them to rate their readiness to buy, and then question them on why they picked that rating. Let’s walk through an example.

Pretend you are trying to sell a CRM to a small business owner who thinks her shop runs just fine on spreadsheets. She is hesitant to embrace change, but you can sense that in the back of her mind, she's aware they really should be utilizing a database.

The first step is to ask her to rate her readiness to adopt a CRM on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being "not ready" and 10 being "fully ready." Let’s say she responds with a “3.” Your follow-up question: “Why didn’t you pick a lower number?”

All of a sudden, a crazy thing happens. This question prompts the prospect to explain why she is actually more ready she realized. This creates a wonderful starting point for her to see your point of view.

According to Pink, persuasion is prompting someone to see why they might want what you want. No question that perfecting this technique will take some practice, but it’s a great skill to work on.

Whether you are trying to steal the plans to the original Death Star or just attempting to close a new client, the Jedi Mind trick is a powerful tool to keep in your sales bag of tricks. Try it out and let me know how it works for you.

McKinsey is out with its annual global banking survey, and it makes for pretty miserable reading.

The report is focused primarily on the challenges posed by low economic growth, the low-interest-rate policies that tend to go with it, and the digitization of banking.

"To counter the headwinds now gathering force, most banks will need to embark on a fundamental transformation that exceeds previous efforts," the management consultant said.

The following table caught our eye as we read through the report. It shows the industry's return on equity in 2015 hit 9.6%, roughly returning the cost of capital.

That means the industry at large is walking a fine line between destroying value and creating it.

"To be sure, some banks earn well above this mark, but many do not," the report said.

It also shows the component parts that help determine a bank's return, including margins, costs, fines, and capital.

In simple terms, the more boxes that are highlighted green, the better. That would suggest improving conditions. Red boxes show deteriorating conditions. There are 30 green boxes and 30 red.

"Global banking is delicately perched between profit and loss, and the next move seems likely to be downward with the main questions being around timing and how quickly the industry can adjust," the report said.

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The U.S. Army’s efforts to come to grips with a dramatic upsurge in war-related behavioral conditions over the past 13 years holds valuable lessons for bringing precision mental health care to the civilian world.

Virtually everyone realizes that precision medicine, which aims to tailor care to the individual patient’s needs, is essential. Yet in attempts to bring patient-centered, outcomes-based approaches to health care in recent years, mental health has taken a back seat to other areas of medical care. Almost alone among industrialized nations, the United States does not systematically collect data on mental health care outcomes and lacks any nationwide means for harnessing it. Further, the broad range of difficult conditions, competing therapies, and different professions within mental health care have made it seem a poor candidate for the precise assessment, ongoing monitoring, and individualized feedback that are necessary components for making precision medicine a reality.

All three of those essential components of precision medicine are now being addressed in the Army, using a system called the Behavioral Health Data Portal (BHDP). It makes possible the routine collection of patient-reported data using standardized screening instruments, incorporates redesigned patient and care team workflows to allow consistent monitoring, and embeds clinical-decision-support systems for providing individualized feedback and action at the point of care. And it tackles two of the most difficult challenges of ongoing precision care: following patients over time and as they move from place to place and from care provider to care provider.

Between 2003, when the Iraq war began and the conflict in Afghanistan was two years old, the Army’s volume of mental health care visits tripled, from 1.1 million to 3.3 million. Between 2007 and 2011, more than $2.5 billion was spent addressing the problem, yet there was no way to determine whether troubled soldiers were getting better or to more precisely tailor their treatment.

Insight Center

Against that backdrop, the Army began with hospital-level experiments focused on early and robust screening for behavioral health conditions. The Army’s centralized management team responsible for its behavioral health service line built consensus among Army psychiatrists, psychologists, and licensed clinical social workers on the standard instruments that would be used for screening and follow-up for specific conditions such as PTSD, depression, alcohol use, and for the general assessment of functioning.

Previous efforts at consistent patient screening employed a manual process. Soldiers completed paper forms, which were then scored by support personnel or the care provider. Depending on the responses to the initial screening, soldiers then filled out more forms before or during their session. Such a manual process is labor-intensive and potentially error prone. It also reduces time in session with a provider.

Today when soldiers check in for appointments, they are provided with a laptop or tablet with individualized log-in information. Depending on the nature of the appointment, they complete either a standardized intake screen for their initial appointment or a disease-specific set of screening instruments. This patient-reported data is captured in a HIPAA-compliant manner within BHDP, and the back-end server computes the score and charts progress. Providers log into the BHDP website, where they can immediately see the patient reported data and use the built-in- charting function to visualize progress over time. These data are persistent across geographical locations and can be transferred to other health systems if required when a soldier leaves the Army.

BHDP requires the use of an additional information system because the electronic health record (EHR) system used by the U.S. Department of Defense does not support the capture and visualization of patient-reported mental health care data. Even in the civilian community, EHR software companies have not focused on mental health care, and their use of proprietary architectures has impeded interoperability among different care organizations and thus the portability of patients’ health records.

Early on, providers using BHDP expressed concern about the time required for soldiers to complete the standardized screening instruments before they actually saw the provider. So during initial rollout from May 2012 through February 2014, we examined 80,000 BHDP surveys in four military-treatment facilities. We found that on average it took less than 30 minutes for the first visit and less than eight minutes for a follow-up visit. The appointment process was then modified, with soldiers required to check in 45 minutes before their first visit, and 15 minutes ahead of time for each subsequent visit to ensure that data collection did not reduce face time with the care provider. The Army now routinely collects over 60,000 data points per month, less than 1% of which is incomplete.

Providers also worried that some soldiers misunderstood the questions or misreported their symptoms, calling into question the validity of the data. Consider the case of a soldier who completes a PTSD screening instrument in which she reports trouble remembering important parts of a stressful experience from the past, but is able to vividly reconstruct the experience in her conversations with the provider. The availability of the screening data in real time enables the provider to understand that the soldier has misunderstood the scale, marking 5 for extremely bothered, instead of 1 for not at all bothered. The provider cannot change the patient-reported data but can now incorporate that self-reported information when meeting face to face with the patient, to improve treatment planning and progress tracking.

Even though BHDP collects patient responses and scores the screening instrument, it does not replace the clinical interview; nor does it dictate to care providers the treatments and therapies they should employ. Unlike physical diseases requiring standard lab tests or medical procedures, mental illnesses may respond to a variety of different treatments. Further, the contextual and individual nature of mental illness calls for highly individualized treatment, which is the aim of precision medicine now made possible in the Army by the BHDP’s systematic and consistent provision of actionable data.

The BHDP system has allowed the Army to develop new ways of examining patients and improving the quality of care for key diseases such as PTSD and major depressive disorder. Prior to the introduction of BHDP, it was challenging to examine quality of PTSD care in the Army. It relied on structure and process measures such as access to care and number of visits within an episode of care to act as proxies of care quality. Today, the Army can use the large volume of practice data that is being collected in BHDP to answer the most important question: Do soldiers feel they are getting better? Prior to BHDP, there was no systematic means of collecting and analyzing these data. The notes in the electronic medical record are often a provider’s perception of the effects of treatment, whereas the data in BHDP is purely patient self-reported data.

The benefits of such a system are many, whether in a military or civilian setting: Care providers and patients have a richer, more detailed means of seeing the effects of care. Other members of the care team can see patient progress and ensure other care is consistent with the treatment currently underway. Practice managers can more efficiently and effectively use their providers to meet the needs of their patient base. Health system leaders can identify local best practices and diffuse them across the wider health system. Data on outcomes can be used to develop a comprehensive picture of a health system’s performance. And the volume of data enables better understanding of the progression of diseases at the level of the individual, the provider, the location, and the country.

The Army, of course, enjoys a degree of centralization and a command-and-control structure that makes comprehensive, system-wide improvements more easily attainable than in the civilian system. However, the high cost of health care and the urgency to improve care quality has created significant momentum toward more systematic management of health in the civilian world.

Organizational structures such as accountable care organizations (ACOs) — groups of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers who come together to manage a patient’s whole health —are a step toward coordinated high-quality care. The implementation of the Affordable Care Act has expanded access to mental health care for over 62 million beneficiaries. This will require health systems to better coordinate, assess, and improve mental health care.

Building a learning health system will require uniform data standards for health information technology and greater interoperability among electronic health record systems as a necessary foundation for delivering coordinated treatment and tracking of patient progress. But even well short of centralization, individual health systems can draw on the Army’s experience to improve precision of mental healthcare. It will require the development of clinical-decision-support systems such as BHDP to capture more precise mental-health-outcomes data, and redesigned clinical-care workflows to protect patient face time with care providers. Health systems can improve on the Army design by incorporating BHDP capabilities directly into the electronic medical record. This combination of clear policy, well-designed technology, and redesigned workflows can come together to enable precision mental healthcare.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Are you someone who pays close attention to your competitors and follows what they do? Or, do you set your own course and not pay much attention to your competition?

There are pros and cons to each strategy and perhaps the best strategy is taking the lead, setting your strategy and keeping a sharp, but not obsessive, eye on the most important competitors. The company that has a clear plan for their social channels is the one you should study. If they are B2C, they should have an impressive presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If they are B2B, they lead with LinkedIn and, depending on their industry, may use other key channels including Twitter, YouTube and maybe even Facebook.

Don’t stop at their company’s social channels. Look at their leadership team, marketing and sales people. What are they doing on social channels? Especially LinkedIn? I rarely look at other professionals on Facebook, but I do check LinkedIn, Twitter and now Instagram.

A prospective client mentioned that he uses Facebook and thinks he has some Facebook friends who might be good centers of influence. I suggested he connect with those Facebook friends on LinkedIn, a more natural place for business networking.

I look for certain kinds of information on each channel. On LinkedIn I look to see how profiles are written and managed (or not), the number of connections a particular person has and whether they are active, posting or sharing content. And potentially even writing original content.

There are leaders, big and small, that successfully leverage these channels, their profiles, their network and their ability to curate interesting and relevant articles that others appreciate and find valuable. If you aren’t there yet, no worries. Find a company you admire and follow them. If they are in your industry, even better.

Marketing departments typically lead the way, by creating the content and mastering the liking and sharing. Notice the salespeople who take their company’s marketing content, make their own and use it to initiate, add interest and further a conversation with a prospect, client or partner. These are the people I want to find. These typically are the salespeople who have, or are in the process of, mastering a new set of sales skills.

The salespeople who are researching, listening, interacting, responding and building online business relationships mirror what they would do if they met someone in person. They think creatively, ask questions, are engaging, tailor their conversation and turn connections into actual business relationships.

If your salespeople aren’t using LinkedIn as a prospecting and nurturing tool, they are missing opportunities. They are missing new markets, additional geographies, and deepening connections with prospective and current clients. They need to stand out and share their expertise and your company’s value proposition.

If you are a sales leader, here are some considerations:

• How are you currently finding new business?
• Are you okay with your salespeople missing out on new business connections that may lead to new business?
• If your salespeople added one, five, ten, twenty of the right clients in a year, what would that look like for your business?
• Do you know the questions to ask them to make sure they are using LinkedIn and other social channels well?
• Do you review and measure your sales process, training, and content?

If not, it’s time to reconsider, don’t you think?

Top of mind for sales executives today: How do I equip my sellers with the right tools and resources—at the right time—to optimize customer engagements and increase sales productivity?

Lenati recently hosted an Executive Leadership Roundtable in partnership with Highspot, with Senior Sales Enablement Executives looking to modernize their sales teams. The Executives represented companies that ranged in sales enablement maturity (from fully mature to undefined), but interestingly enough, all shared similar challenges around increasing productivity and efficiencies within their sales teams.

A key question asked by many Executives at the event: “How do I effectively build a sales enablement organization?” Sales Enablement encompasses a variety of core drivers. It is a strategic shift to enable sellers to effectively and easily approach buyers and increase sales productivity. There is no “silver bullet” for what is going to be most effective for your organization, but there are a few key things that help ensure you design sales enablement approaches that are focused on helping sellers increase revenue.

Designing an Effective Sales Enablement Strategy:

• Gain Buy-in from Leadership: Executive alignment and support from the top down is critical to your success. Most fail without it. Work early to build leadership sponsorship, focus on one or two well-respected sales leaders allowing it to mature organically over time. Provide executives with a “virtual office” allowing them to easily hear and see what you are solving for.

• Align Sales & Marketing: Sales and Marketing must align on business goals and accountabilities. Build an alliance with marketing focused on establishing expectations, agreement on the go-to-market strategy, sharing common assets, and standardizing the taxonomy. Establish a “top gun committee” to meet once a month to review and refine strategies, while creating unity and removing isolated working groups.

• Establish Governance on Content: A sales enablement effort without a clearly defined content management strategy is most likely to fail. Invest in a content management system that will enable you to easily track delivery and score all your content and playbooks. Ensure that your sellers are provided contextual content—surfacing the most successful assets and plays to the top—allowing them to have the most effective content that drive sales results.

Leading companies say sales enablement is a key part of their revenue growth strategy for 2017. Sales leaders recognize that planning for sales team efficiency long-term will require a strategic shift. The big hurdle is understanding what to provide the sales team to drive better outcomes and improvements in performance. As a sales leader, your sales organization’s success is dependent on your ability to properly answer those questions and enable the salesforce.

Originally published on Lenati.com

Finding your brand voice isn’t something that you do once and then forget about. As new competitors and products come into the market, it’s crucial to stay aware of how your voice comes across to customers.

For example, many B2B companies create new voices for new products. But they don’t update their overall corporate voice to match where they want to go in the future.

Over time, inconsistencies in your brand voice can add up to a host of mixed messages, as Marketing and Sales are unsure of how to talk about your products and services. This lack of a consistent voice ultimately leaves customers confused about how you can help them.

You need to evolve your voice over time to keep pace with customer, industry and product changes.

Here are nine actionable steps that will help you rediscover your B2B brand voice:

Step 1: Review Your Brand Persona

Reach out to key stakeholders such as customers, subject matter experts, partners and employees to find out how they view your brand. Ask questions such as:

• If our company was a person, who would they be? Tell me about their personality traits.
• What is the tone you feel our company communicates?
• What do you think is the purpose of our company’s communications?
• What do you like about our company’s personality? Why?
• What do you dislike about our company’s personality? Why?

Take these answers and look for ways your brand is either resonating or miscommunicating with your audience. To do this, you can review a cross section of your content with a critical eye.

Compare your findings with current trends and dialogue in your industry. Also look at conversations between your competitors and potential customers to gain further insights.

Step 2. Establish the Defining Elements of Your Brand Voice

Now that you have the findings from your outreach, it’s time to answer some important questions that will help develop your brand’s voice:

1. What are our company values?
2. Why do we do what we do?
3. What personality traits best define our company?
4. Who is our target market?
5. How do we want them to feel when they interact with us?
6. How do we make our customers feel like heroes?
7. What first impression do we want to make?
8. What message are we communicating?
9. What pain do we solve?
10. How do we demonstrate our value and results?
11. What status quo do we break?
12. What makes us different?
13. What unique story do we have to tell?
14. What are we passionate about?
15. What other brands resonate with us?
16. What words do we like?
17. What words do we dislike?
18. What words describe the tone we will use?
19. Do we speak formally or conversationally?
20. If we could summarize our brand in one word what would it be?

Step 3. Create a Comparison of What Your Voice Is and Isn’t

Mailchimp has a fantastic style guide that is worth reading. One standout takeaway is their example of comparing what their voice is and what isn’t.

This is a valuable exercise to go through before developing your brand voice guide.

Step 4. Create Your Brand Voice Guide

Summarize all of your answers in a concise guide for distribution throughout your organization. Whether you decide to add your voice guide to your brand bible or have it stand alone, create a document that is informative and engaging.

A style guide is a valuable tool that helps your writers, designers, and other content team members align your content with your brand. Your style guide can include:

• A description of your target audience and key personas
• Information on your content goals
• A description of your brand voice
• Notes on spelling and punctuation
• The name of the style manual that you follow, such as AP or Globe and Mail
• A list of items to include in your blog posts – such as author bios and pull quotes
• Links to your logo and other key design elements

Some great examples of Style Guides include:

Skype

Adobe

University of Leeds

Step 5. Just Because It’s B2B Doesn’t Mean It Has to Be Boring

B2B buyers are still people. They want to be informed, engaged and entertained. When you define your brand’s voice, make sure your communications:

• Are genuine
• Are concise – don’t overwhelm people with too many details or too much information
• Drop meaningless adjectives
• Use your customers’ language and tell their stories
• Have unique visuals – avoid stock photography whenever possible

With your revised brand voice in mind, go through your existing content and look for pieces that no longer serve your company. What do you need to revamp with your new tone?

Also be sure to give your new brand guide to your content creators so that they can incorporate your changes into future content.

If you enter ‘Time Management Book’ in Amazon’s search bar, you will receive 43,584 results. These books offer hundreds of ways to maximize your time to be more efficient. But not many are focused specifically on the particular challenges sales professionals face. Online distractions and email addiction are often major problems for salespeople who spend much of their time online in an effort to stay up to date and competitive.

So, how does an overwhelmed sales professional free up time to focus on high impact selling activities and maintain a healthy work/life balance? Jill Konrath’s latest book More Sales, Less Time, answers these questions.

Packed with actionable advice on how to succeed in the age of distraction, this book promises to help you reclaim at least an hour a day, free up time to focus on priority sales activities, optimize your sales process, and transform your life by incorporating new, more productive habits.

Peak Sales Marketing Specialist and Sales Hiring Expert Taylor Dumouchel caught up with Jill to discuss how salespeople can succeed in the age of distraction:

Jill, what was your inspiration for writing More Sales, Less Time?

Shortly after my last book Snap Selling – all about selling to crazy-busy buyers – came out, I was speaking in front of a large group of salespeople at a conference. Afterward, a sales rep named Matt, came up to me and said, “Jill this is really good stuff for buyers and I see how this is going to work but I am crazy busy too! What do you have for sales people?”

He went on to describe his life. He would get up in the morning, race to the office, work around the clock, and try to meet his recently raised quota. He just couldn’t see any way to get it all done AND have a life AND be a father to his children.

The problem was, I didn’t have a response for Matt. I was feeling exactly the same way. As more time went on, there were more and more salespeople coming up to me saying, “I’m crazy busy. What advice do you have for me?” And I didn’t know the answer.

And finally, I got sick of not knowing. I was so crazy busy that I couldn’t stand it either. I needed to find a solution. And every time I address a sales challenge, and figure out a way to resolve it, I write a book about it. Thus, More Sales, Less Time.

The book is a model for how salespeople can succeed in the age of distraction. What would you say are the top causes of salespeople falling behind in their work?

The biggest reason salespeople fall behind is something that they haven’t a clue that they’re doing. They jump around from one task to another all day long. And, they think that’s the way they’re supposed to work. They get online in the morning, check email, think of something else they need to do, jump on LinkedIn, then check email, then jump to writing that proposal they need to work on, but then they think, “I better check email”.

All day long, they are moving from one focus to another. But the time increment between task jumping is miniscule. Research shows it used to be 3.5 minutes before people would switch tasks but with the digital age, it’s now 2-2.5 minutes. Research also shows that 72 percent of people respond to an email within six seconds. And, since they have so much riding on them, salespeople are amongst those who are constantly checking and responding to email. One of them just might be from the prospect they were hoping they’d close today. And as a result, their whole day is a function of disruption.

What we really need to consider is what this disruption does to our thinking and overall productivity. Research shows if you’re constantly disrupted, you’re adding an hour or two to your workday. But, this disruption also harms your thinking ability. And today, in order to be successful in sales, you need to be a world-class thinker. You need to be strategic, a fast-learner, up-to-date on what’s going on, and have insights for clients. Your head needs to be in the game, but if you’re bouncing around, it won’t be.

You say in order to overcome distractions, there needs to be a change. However, as you mention in the book, our brains are resistant to breaking bad habits. How can we overcome time-sucking temptations and recover lost time?

Habits are really hard to change – and I had no idea how hard they were until I started changing small habits of mine to get more done. I found out that my brain wanted to do things a certain way. For example, my brain was stuck on email. Every time a new email came in my brain instantly thought – “better check that!”

When we try to change habits, our brains create a massive resistance. To overcome this, you need to create goals and be really clear on what you want to accomplish. The goal can be anything from freeing up more time so you can get out of the office and have fun, to working hard to earn that promotion. Once you have established that goal, you need to ask yourself what you need to do differently and come up with a positive action – one that you can start doing and not one that you should stop doing.

It’s harder to change habits than we think. But in order to get more sales in less time, we absolutely have to change these default bad habits.

Let’s talk about email again. In the book, you advise readers to avoid checking email constantly. However, salespeople often feel the need to get back to important clients or prospects immediately. Will limiting time on email harm their sales?

As I mentioned before, most salespeople feel a strong sense of urgency and are constantly checking their emails, often responding within seconds. And, in some jobs, such as Inside Sales Reps, when your job is to follow up on leads coming in, there is research to support that quick replies have an impact on sales success.

But with the average salesperson, responding to an email in five seconds versus 60 minutes does not necessarily impact sales success.

How do you figure out if limiting time on email will affect your sales? Try conducting an urgency experiment. In my book, I discuss conducting this experiment myself. For a couple of days, I tested if not replying within 15 minutes would have any effect on my relationship with the client. I found there was no effect – and most of you will find the same thing.

In reality, our email is not as urgent as we think it is and it’s killing productivity. Research shows people who constantly check email are lowering their intelligence. Women who constantly check email drop their IQ by five points, and men drop it by a catastrophic 15 points.

So if we want to be really good at our sales jobs, we should not let email harm our ability to think, learn, and make critical decisions for our clients.

How are the distraction-busters mentioned in your book more effective than traditional time management strategies?

Most people think they need to master time management but time management assumes that you’re in an office and not living online. In reality, salespeople live online – it’s just how we do our jobs today.

Whether it’s communicating via email or social networks, or doing research on clients, salespeople are online and thus, living in a world where they are constantly exposed to distractions. In fact, the other day I found myself looking up, “Top Celebrity Plastic Surgery Fails.”

Can we manage that? That’s not time management – it’s distraction management. We have to use a whole lot of different techniques to protect us. What I found is we have to create a firewall around us.

You mentioned a firewall, tell me what a firewall is?

A firewall is protection from the storm of the distraction that’s around you. It’s admitting that we are powerless in this age of distraction of getting sucked in. I know I am not capable of preventing distraction myself – so I need a firewall to protect me.

How do you create a firewall? The first thing I did was use a software application called “Rescue Time” to investigate how I was really spending my time online. It was a rude awakening to see the amount of time I wasted being distracted.

The next step was getting my email monitoring under control. I was spending too much time constantly checking incoming email, which the majority of the time was not even work-related. To stop this time-sucking habit, I signed up for “enroll.me.” It’s a wonderful application that gives you the choice of whether or not you want to receive your subscription emails. I’ve been using this application for over a year now and I have unsubscribed from over 1,244 email subscriptions. Ultimately, this tool has given me an inbox that is much more friendly to work with.

Another software application I highly suggest using to create your firewall is called “Freedom.” Freedom is an app that will help you reduce distractions by blocking you from certain websites and apps for a period of time. When I have some focused work that I need to complete distraction-free, I launch “Freedom.” It gives me the opportunity to set a time limit for how long I want to be protected, and what sites and apps I want to avoid, and it works on all my devices – so I can’t cheat and check my email on my cellphone. And, we all cheat if we don’t protect ourselves with that firewall.

Your book teaches salespeople to reclaim time lost to distractions. How can they then optimize the time they do have to sell more?

I actually wanted to call my book Optimize Me because I think that’s really what it’s about – it’s how to get the most from yourself. Once you protect yourself from those distractions, you need to figure out how to spend the time you’ve reclaimed.

Start by asking yourself this question – what’s the most important thing I should be working on?

Most salespeople when they get to work they sit down and immediately start going through all their emails. Then boom – an hour and a half is gone and they haven’t really worked on anything essential.

The important question sellers should ask themselves at the beginning of the day is, “What do I NEED to get done?” Looking at all the things you could do and knowing you simply do not have enough time to do all of them, what one thing will help you reach your goal today?

Don’t just jump into work. By taking that time to focus, you actually do what you need to do.

Another thing that’s crucial, and that a lot of people don’t realize, is that our brains are not meant to sit at a computer all day long. It actually wears us out.

We need to think about working our day in blocks of time focused on specific activities. Put them on your calendar. Work in blocks. Then allow yourself to take a break.

One study on what differentiated top performers found that top performers work really hard for 52 minutes and then take a 17-minute break. The study found that the break gave their brain a chance to relax. They socialized with people, got up and moved around and, when they got back to their computer, they were much more productive.

The best thing to do is to leave your computer because when you do, your brain turns into mind wandering mode and finds the answers – better answers – to the questions you’ve been thinking about.

You talk about how gamification is used as a tool to help salespeople spark internal motivation to optimize their time. How can salespeople who work remotely or aren’t part of a “team” motivate themselves, when self-discipline becomes tiring?

First of all, trying to control our lives and to be so disciplined is perhaps one of the hardest things we ever have to do. You’re only given a certain amount of willpower per day and if you’re using it to go online and fight distractions, you wear yourself out much faster and actually reduce the quality of your thinking.

For me, it was so hard to change my habits, and I work remotely so I have to motivate myself – which can be a real challenge.

In order to change and become someone who got a lot done during the day, I actually decided to invent a game for myself. I studied gamification and read a number of books. I created an avatar for myself with challenges where I could move up through levels. But, it was such a pain to actually use the game I threw it away.

But I had one thing that changed everything for me – my avatar, Jill the Time Master. Each day when I got in the office, I would see the picture of my avatar hanging on the wall, and it would motivate me to play the role of Time Master. It was really silly and I never told anyone about it for a long time. But by playing the role of Time Master, I actually became the Time Master.

Research indicates that when you act as if you’re someone else, you start to possess some of the qualities you are pretending to be.

My day started changing as I started becoming the avatar. Jill the Time Master didn’t try to fight habits – she created new ones.

Now that readers have minimized distraction and optimized time, let’s dive into the next part – more sales. What are some tips salespeople can use to accelerate their sales?

There are many things salespeople can do to accelerate their sales – and this is something that has always fascinated me and was the focus of all my previous books.

First and foremost, people can study their craft and become better salespeople. The more you spend time determining the effectiveness of your actions and studying different ways to interact with customers and help them realize the value of change, the more successful you will be.

But, there are other strategies you can use to accelerate your sales. One thing I always felt was crucial to sales success was leveraging trigger events. Trigger events are things that happen – internal or external to a company — that change the organization’s priorities.

One example of this could be a bad third quarter earnings report. If a company has a bad third quarter, all of a sudden there is going to be pressure across the board to reduce costs and drive more sales. So, how can you leverage the fact that your client needs to be more cost conscience? Well, your product may help increase productivity or efficiency. If you can call someone right now, while they’re under pressure to meet these objectives, and craft a personalized message to get in, you’re more likely to get the sale. If you track your client’s environment, you can leverage the trigger event to get in the company.

Another thing you can do to accelerate sales is to make decisions simpler for your prospects. In many cases, salespeople will want to impress prospects, so they tend to overcomplicate things and send an information overload. But prospects are busy people. They barely have time to read your message let alone read three pages of information on the value of your product/service. Simplifying things as much as you can really contributes to accelerating sales.

Those are just some strategies mentioned in my book.

What are some strategies you recommend to help salespeople to keep overwhelmed buyers moving?

At the front end, salespeople need to be able to pique someone’s curiosity. They really need to look at their value proposition and figure out what is of most interest to prospects. But people at the front end of the sales cycle, often haven’t made these decisions before and they’re quite overwhelmed.

Research shows in many decisions, there are 6-7 people involved. And, they feel overwhelmed and don’t know how to make the decision. One thing you can do is help them create a road map that shows where they are in the buying cycle currently and how that matches up with your other clients who are making similar decisions. You can then outline a typical process other companies are following to get them from where there are today to their end goal. The road map helps clarify exactly what they will need to do and also establishes you as a knowledgeable person who has worked with similar companies before and truly understands how their company works.

Another thing that makes a big difference is talking about the tough stuff. Discuss the challenges they may face and propose solutions to how to handle them. For example, the financial department is going to want know about risk. You can present the client with some ideas on how they can reduce the risk and get the financial department to buy into the decision. Your client is in a situation where they have to get all buying decision makers to agree. Help make that process easier by providing advice on how to overcome challenges, and how you can make a difference.

One final thing that helps keep overwhelmed buyers moving is not to try to oversell them. Start with one thing to get them working with you on the project – perhaps doing research or working with one area in the company. By doing that, you get your foot in the door and have an opportunity to show your value, develop a relationship, find out more ways to help them, and build the deal as you go along.

Finally, can you tell us how using the strategies in your book helped you gain more sales, in less time?

Yes, I can! Let me first say – it helped me gain sanity. If you’re constantly working around the clock it is exhausting and you are not your best self. The best thing these strategies taught me personally, was to limit the number of hours I was working. My goal was to hold my income steady, but not work so much.

Now, I’m working on reducing the number of hours even more to see if I can still earn the same income in fewer hours. I started out this project really crazy-busy. And it’s almost as if I wore that as a badge of honor – I was proud to be crazy busy and proud that everybody ‘needed’ me. It made me feel invaluable.

But what I found out is being crazy-busy is something I control, and I’m not at my best when I’m out of control. I really believe people can sell more in less time.

Watch the full interview with Jill: 

Join the #MoreSalesLessTimeChallenge for simple strategies to help you earn more revenue without working round the clock.

About Jill:

With over 1/4 million LinkedIn followers, Jill Konrath was recently named one of the top 7 sales influencers of the 21st century. She’s an international speaker and bestselling author of 4 books including SNAP Selling, Agile Selling and Selling to Big Companies. Her newest one, More Sales Less Time was just released on December 6^th.

The most recent challenge Jill has tackled is overwhelm. Every sales rep she talked to was crazy-busy, working non-stop. She felt the same way. Today, after several years of serious study, epic battles with deeply ingrained habits and personal experimentation, she’s a different person.

In her newest book, MORE SALES, LESS TIME, Jill shares what she learned—the good, the bad and the ugly. (Yes, you’ll see some of her warts!) Most importantly, you’ll discover how to regain one to two hours per day—and get your mental mojo back so you can be at the top of your sales game.

 

The post More Sales, Less Time: One-on-One Interview with Jill Konrath appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

Why are you on social media? Are you using it for brand awareness, or are you aiming more toward lead generation? Using social media marketing for lead generation is probably the most results-oriented approach because it impacts your business’ bottom line faster and more directly than any other method.

The ultimate question is: how do you use your social media activity to bring in leads?

That’s where these 7 tips come into play. With these tips, you’ll increase the likelihood of generating leads and improving the quality of them. You don’t have time to waste on ineffective social media marketing, so it’s time you get acquainted with these lead-generating best practices.

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Provide Value

It might seem like your focus on social media should be to directly and blatantly bring in leads through sales pitches and self-promotion. This isn’t what social media is meant for. Instead, your activity should focus on building relationships through the exchange of value.

If you want to use your social media marketing for lead generation, start by publishing content that can help the audience you want to reach. When you help them resolve their pain points, you’ll see that they’re more likely to take the next step with your business.

Include Persuasive CTAs

Your target audience isn’t going to know how to act on your posts if you don’t give them direction. With a convincing call-to-action (CTA) in your social media posts, you help them know what to do and help you get them to take further action.

When you’re adding a CTA to your social content, make sure the copy is persuasive enough while also being accurate about where you’re leading them. When people see that you’re offering something worth the click, they’re expecting to be sent to where you said they’d go. Don’t deceive them with clickbait but rather have a CTA that leads to something worth their time.

Advertise

If you really want to increase your brand awareness to reach a wider audience, use social media advertising. It’ll give you more opportunities for lead generation than if you stuck with organic content alone. With advertisements, you have more options for generating high-quality leads that may not already know about you.

The important part about advertising to keep in mind is that you should use the targeting options to your best advantage. Advertising can get unnecessarily pricey and even wasted if you try to reach too broad an audience. It can also negatively affect your brand image if you’re advertising to the wrong people. When you’re ready to start advertising, have a strategy ready to go with all the components you’ll need accessible.

Know Your Audience

Social media is all about conversations and relationship-building. If you want your social media marketing to bring in relevant, high-quality leads, you need to know who to focus your attention on and how you’re going to communicate with them. It’s not practical for you to give equal attention to the entire social sphere, so it’s important to have buyer personas set up that’ll guide your social media communications.

Create social media-based personas of the people who can become marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to be passed on to your sales team. Many times, your leads could be irrelevant or not yet ready, so make sure your social media activity is nurturing the right people with the right content at the right time. This is where the buyer’s journey advice from HubSpot can be helpful.

Lead People Directly to Landing Pages

Social media calls to action, as described above, are essential to getting your social media audience to take an action. Ideally, you want your social audience to click on a link that leads to your website. The best practice for this is to have them land on a webpage with a form, also known as a landing page.

Your landing page should always be relevant to the content and CTA from your social media post. The page should always be optimized to convince visitors to fill out the form in exchange for something of value. To get people to this page, your social media content needs to be convincing and descriptive of what you’re offering and why it matters to your audience.

Work Closely with Sales

Marketing and sales teams sometimes resemble the silos you do not want to have. Both teams should work together in a business cycle or an exchange of information. On social media, marketing staff can make their activity work well for optimal lead generation by communicating with the sales staff. How? Sales staff know what customers want to see and what works for them. They’re a great source of information that’ll help marketers create social media content their audience will act on.

When both teams communicate with each other, marketers will be able to create more targeted, effective content for social media. In turn, marketers will attract more MQLs to pass on to sales. Sales will then pass on recommendations for content that led to sales qualified leads (SQLs). It’s a highly-effective cycle. Marketers need to work closely with sales to make their social media content bring in the right leads for their business.

Be Patient and Persistent

Social media is not going to bring you leads as soon as you start. You’ll see people click through to your website and sometimes fill out your form, but qualified leads only come when you’re patient and persistent. Your social media activity should focus on a nurturing-based process that results in both action and loyalty. Social media marketing is most effective for lead generation when you’re willing to dedicate effort over time.

To develop a healthy flow of qualified leads from social media, you need to publish content that helps your audience, not necessarily what directly helps your business. Social media marketing is a conversational platform where you take the time to help your audience resolve their pain points. This, in turn, will get them more and more interested in what you have to offer. They’ll become more likely to follow through with your business and become a qualified lead. Be patient and never give up on your social activity because it’s only a matter of time.

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Congratulations. You are now ready to use social media marketing for lead generation. You know why your content needs to provide value and include a call-to-action. You know how social media advertising can benefit your lead generation efforts. You’re better able to act on social media by knowing who your audience is and what they’re looking for. You received advice about how landing pages can help bring social media results. You know why marketing and sales must work together to get qualified leads from social media. You also know why you need to be patient and persistent with your social media marketing activity.

That’s it. It’s time for you to get out there and enhance your social media marketing to produce real, qualified leads for sales. Use these tips as a guide.

When thinking of direct mail, you might imagine big, colorful postcards from the local car dealership or the latest advertisements from a mortgage company, all of which end up in the same place: the trash.

Knowing this, why would you, as a marketer, want to reach out to customers through direct mail? After all, most your customers are using digital channels. Wouldn’t that be the best place to reach them?

Statistics tell an interesting story, one that might change your mind: a 2011 report found 50% of customers preferred direct mail over email, and up to 80 percent say they open most direct mail – even if they consider it to be junk.

And while marketers are sending less direct mail and more emails, open rates for marketing emails are steadily declining. Direct mail and digital marketing, however, aren’t an either-or proposition. Combining these two marketing methods creates a powerful synergy, one that could create amazing results for your next campaign. But where should you start? Check out these five ways to begin integrating direct mail and digital marketing now.

1. Fusing direct mail and email

According to DMN, when executed correctly, combining direct mail and email could lead to response rates that are more than double the typical results. This could seriously impact your ROI. When starting your campaign, it’s important to send direct mail to prospects first.

A week after prospects receive the letter, follow up with an email. Continue to follow up through email up to four times for each printed mail piece. Also, don’t forget to create a strong call to action for each marketing piece. Readers must feel a great sense of urgency to respond to your offer. Test different calls to action in both your email and direct mail pieces to determine which one provides the best results.

Key takeaway: More effectively capture your target market’s attention through direct mail, and continue to drive them to action through email marketing. Since email marketing is used more frequently by marketers, it’s best to start by sending a direct mail piece first.

2. Tie direct mail to interactive marketing

A Utah-based digital marketing agency combined direct mail with digital marketing to drive greater engagement with its customers. The company sends a holiday card to customers each year, but recently, it decided to combine digital and direct mail for greater results. The company started by sending a holiday mailer to its clients. The front of the card included a poem focused on the company’s core values, and inside, there was a $20 bill and a QR code. Scanning the code led customers to a YouTube video that featured staffers expressing their sincere gratitude to their customers.

But what about the cash? Why send a $20 bill?

The video asked recipients to use the cash inside the card to do a charitable act and then share those actions via a tweet using the hashtag #20helps. It showed that small acts of kindness add up.

For example, one client tweeted, “Getting in the spirit. $20 gift cards to help @VOAUT and SLC homeless teens.” Another shared how they gave the $20 bill to a cashier at a local store during checkout to apply to the next person in line. Integrating direct mail and digital marketing helped this company communicate its core values and solidify its relationships with customers.

Key takeaway: Use direct mail and digital marketing to amplify messaging. When using these channels together, keep the message simple and consistent throughout both types of marketing efforts.

3. Drive customers to a digital offer

One great strategy that fuses direct mail and digital marketing is mailing a printed piece and then driving customers to a high-value lead magnet online. For example, Verizon and Motorola joined forces to reach their shared target audience. The goal was to capture prospects’ attention prior to a major upcoming event: the Super Bowl.

The campaign kicked off with a direct mailer sent to a targeted list of prospective customers. The call to action drove customers to a landing page that provided a shot at winning a pair of NFL Super Bowl tickets.

Customers could reach the page by scanning a QR code included in the direct mailer or by entering the landing page URL (both allowed easy tracking). Once at the landing page, prospects were asked to watch a short video about the companies’ offerings, and then they were provided with an opportunity to enter the contest. The companies used the entry information to move customers through their sales funnels in the future.

Key Takeaway: Moving prospects from direct mail to digital channels requires a compelling reason. Evaluate your target audience and ask the following critical question: “What will drive them to action?” Create an offer they simply can’t refuse, one that will motivate and entice them to take quick action.

4. Driving engagement and spreading awareness

You can also merge direct mail and digital marketing efforts to drive engagement with your existing audience and spread the word about new offerings or upcoming changes. Software company Adobe did just that when it made a major change to its Creative Suite (which would only be available via the cloud in the future). A direct mail and digitally integrated campaign was created to reach the target audience and drive engagement at a critical point in time.

In the past, a core segment of the company’s target audience, namely, print designers, were ignoring the company’s offers. The company wanted to reach this important group of designers prior to the upcoming software change. It launched a campaign titled “Print is dead,” which would address a major pain point.

Designers who read the piece would find it actually explained print is not dead, and instead, the piece honored the work designers were doing.

The audience loved the piece, and since Adobe made it available through digital channels, they shared it through Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. Customers even requested additional printed pieces of the mailer to share with friends.

Combining print and digital allowed Adobe to reconnect with an important part of its target audience at a critical point in time, which helped drive adoption of their new product.

Key takeaway: Direct mail is an effective tool for capturing attention and sharing details about upcoming changes or product launches. Blend direct mail and digital channels for greater impact and to reach audiences more effectively.

Creating Synergy between Direct Mail and Digital Channels: Dos and Don’ts

Are you ready to launch a direct mail and digital marketing campaign but not sure where to start? If so, check out these dos and don’ts to create greater success in your first campaign.

Do drive the audience to valuable digital marketing pieces. Create high-value content, such as white papers, eBooks, and reports address the audience’s pain points. Use customized URLs to track results so you know where leads are coming from and can iterate based on these results moving forward. Also, consider gating these assets, which requires prospects to enter their name and email, to help continue to move prospects through the sales funnel.

Don’t hard sell in the first mailing. The first direct mail piece is all about starting a conversation. Building this relationship will create the framework for future sales. So, with the first direct mail piece, ask for a small action (not a sale). For example, “Download this white paper by visiting this URL or using a QR code.”

Do use only one call to action. Customers may get lost if you include more than one call to action. For example, “Download this white paper or visit our website to learn more.” Barry Schwartz, author of “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less,” says, “Choose less and feel better.” A single call to action helps customers feel better; they know what to do next.

Don’t give everything away. Create an element of mystery in your direct mail piece. Key in on the audience’s specific pain point, then drive them to the next action in the sequence, which can be a digital channel. For example, “Check out Twitter to find the answer” or “Download this case study to learn how you can increase sales by 400 percent in 4 weeks or less.” Keep customers in suspense so you can move them from one channel (direct mail) to another channel (digital) more seamlessly.

Moving Forward

Customers are more digitally connected than ever. They are tethered to their devices, feeling a sense of panic when they’re more than a few feet away. As a result, they are also becoming numb to all the digital noise. When you use direct mail to capture that critical first piece of attention, you effectively cut through all that noise. As the THX message in the movie theaters says, “The audience is listening.”

As marketers, this solves the first and very critical challenge: We must capture attention. Once you have that attention, you can more effectively communicate marketing messages and generate the desired results.

You purchased a list, and John Smith is now in your database. He has not, however, expressed to your company any interest in your products or services. As such, he falls into the category of “suspect.”

A call to John is cold.

And, understandably, whether they are the initiator or recipient of such a call, most people prefer not to engage in this activity. Luckily, today you can use LinkedIn to warm up the call and make the experience more pleasant and fruitful to both parties. Here are some tips to get started.

Check Out the Individual’s Profile

To discover what’s important to John, read his LinkedIn Summary and information about his current position. This helps you determine how you might be able to help him and the best angle for your approach.

For instance, if one of our business development specialists discovered that John Smith’s primary concern is building relationships with resellers to increase his software company’s sales, she could then tailor her communications around helping to solve channel recruitment and management challenges.

Another area to look is published posts. If John has articles on LinkedIn, they can give you a window into his thinking and provide a launching point for a conversation.

Also, scroll to the bottom of the profile to find his interests. Perhaps you both enjoy skiing or are dedicated to animal rescue. Such insights help you find common ground. Even if your interests don’t intersect, understanding that he enjoys hunting and fishing may give you clues for personalizing your approach.

And, don’t forget to look at their employment history. You may know or have things in common by the companies they worked at.

Discover More about Their Company

Once you have a feel for the person, learn more about the company for which they work. For most people, you can click from their current experience section to their LinkedIn company page where you’ll find their business’ statistics, such as the number of employees, plus the latest news.

Has the company introduced a new product? Are they merging with another organization? Are there any changes that make the timing ripe for the organization to benefit from your products or services?

Go for the Intro

Back to the profile. On the right-hand side, you’ll see “How You’re Connected.” If you have a connection in common, try to get an introduction. Here’s how you do it:

Dear Sue:

I hope everything is going well with your new business.

I see you’re connected with John Smith, Marketing VP at Ability Software. I believe we could help them to analyze the market and reach out to new partners that mirror the characteristics of their current top performers.

Would you be able to introduce us? If not, I’d appreciate any insights you could give me before I reach out to him.

Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you.

See how it’s worded so you don’t put your connection in an awkward position? You don’t expect an introduction…they can just give you some insights.

Asking for the introduction may seem like extra work, but in the long run, this practice will increase your efficiency. Here’s the proof. If anyone knows the ins and outs of LinkedIn, it’s the professionals at LinkedIn. They also sell, and their data tells the tale. LinkedIn’s biggest source of leads in 2015 was warm introductions (32%). This was followed closely by marketing leads (28%) and InMail (25%). The remaining leads came from emails, calls and events.

But here’s the really big news … drumroll, please. LinkedIn was not only 37% more likely to win a deal with a warm introduction, but also deal sizes were 23% larger than the average of all the other lead sources.

Opt for InMail

Sometimes there’s no one to introduce you. Your next option for an initial outreach before calling is LinkedIn InMail. If you have a premium package on LinkedIn, you can use a limited number of InMails to reach out to people you don’t know. And the results from InMails aren’t too shabby either. A study conducted by InsideSales.com found that when they put the same content in an InMail as they did in an email, they achieved a 700 percent boost in response rates!

Be Visible

You don’t always have to reach out directly to be noticed.

If you can find groups where people are interacting with each other, it’s a good place to get to know people.

Another excellent option is to publish articles on LinkedIn. Your connections and followers will see it. Also, it goes into the newsfeed of professionals who like and share it, spreading your influence further. And if you create a post that gets featured on Pulse, it will be distributed to an even larger audience.

The value of this visibility is that a wide group of professionals may start to know, like and trust you.

Make the Warm Call

Ideally, your prospect may have read some of your articles or those written by other members of your organization. You’ve also been introduced by a mutual connection and sent an InMail to set an appointment.

Now you’re ready to make a warm call. It might go something like this:

“Hello John, this is Jeff with 3D2B. I appreciate that Sue was able to connect us. The reason I wanted to talk was that I noticed you’re responsible for building relationships with resellers. We offer channel recruitment and management services that have helped other software companies identify new partners and expand their businesses. I was wondering what challenges you face in building strong sales partnerships….”

Doesn’t that seem a lot easier and more productive than calling someone out of the blue without knowing what is relevant to them and how you can help them?

Call us at +1 718-709-0900 (US) or +39 06 978446 60 (EMEA), or contact us online to learn how you can respond to leads faster and pass more qualified leads to your sales team.

While women make up 51.5% of all managers, much fewer women rise to the C-suite. A survey of 25,000 Harvard Business School graduates found that although male and female graduates had similar levels of ambition, men were significantly more likely to have positions in senior management, direct reports, and profit-and-loss responsibility.

We know having a sponsor who supports your career can help level the playing field for women. So who are the men in your organization known as informal champions of women, for the way that their behaviors advance female leaders? And what do they have in common?

From previous research, we already know that these “male champions” genuinely believe in fairness, gender equity, and the development of talent in their organizations, and that they are easily identified by female leaders for the critical role they play advancing women’s careers.

But we wanted to know more about what these men do differently. How do they stand up to pressure from peers or the expectations of outmoded organizational cultures? How do they use their power to create diverse, inclusive organizations?

We asked senior male and female leaders in Fortune 500 companies and non-profit organizations to tell us about the behaviors of these “male champions.” We conducted 75 semi-structured confidential interviews with leaders in the C-suite or one to three levels below C-suite in both Fortune 500 companies and non-profit organizations. After subjecting these interviews to a rigorous qualitative analysis, we saw several themes emerge.

Generally, we saw that “male champions” have learned that gender inclusiveness means involving both men and women in advancing women’s leadership. Although many organizations have attempted to fight gender bias by focusing on women – offering training programs or networking groups specifically for them — the leaders we interviewed realized that any solutions that involve only 50% of the human population are likely to have limited success.

More specifically, we found that some of the key behavioral themes associated with gender inclusive leadership that support women’s career advancement are:

• using their authority to push workplace culture toward gender equality
• thinking of gender inclusiveness as part of effective talent management
• providing gender-aware mentoring and coaching
• practicing other-focused leadership, not self-focused leadership

Using their authority to change workplace culture

As researchers, we know that gender parity in the workplace is associated with improved profitability. Companies with female board representation have been found to outperform those with no women on their boards. Gender parity has been found to correlate with increased sales revenue, more customers, and greater relative profits.  Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were found to be 15% more likely to outperform those in the bottom quartile.

In our experience, most executives don’t know about this research. But even so, many of the leaders told us that gender inclusiveness is simply good strategy for the organization, and they explicitly used their authority to push for it.

For example, one leader addressed the business logic for diversity and inclusion, stating, “Let’s do cost/benefit. If we are excluding half the talent on the planet…[do] we have the best chance of getting the best talent, or if we doubled our chances of getting the best talent do you think we’d have the best chance? Obviously, we want to fish in a bigger pond.” Another leader emphasized that a lack of diversity demonstrates a lack of effectiveness in systems, noting, “My experience is when you get to very high levels, whether it’s government, higher education, or business, there are excellent men and women so if you’re really not making good progress toward having representation at all levels of the company, you’re doing something wrong.”

Taking this attitude has an impact on the overall culture of the organization. As one of our leaders described her champion, “He’s creating the environment that says, ‘I care about all,’ and that may be broader than just women but that is modeling an environment that makes it harder for others not to be champions, too.”

Another leader mentioned that he had built so much trust within his organization that he was able to single-handedly champion women into very high positions of power, saying, “I can walk into the Executive Committee and say ‘This woman deserves to be on the bench 2-3 years from now.  I want her to become the CEO.'” In a more nuanced way, another leader championed women by vying for them when they were in positions where success may have been unlikely, noting, “I was in a position of power to do something, and I suggested coaching for one woman whose direct boss was not very good.  I just did the little things you do for someone to position them to move up in the organization.”

While they were able to have a strong impact on women’s careers in many ways, the male champions also recognized that their values were not always shared by others in their organizations. Leaders reported the need to show courage and persistence in order to overcome resistance to gender inclusiveness even in their own teams and peer groups.

One described the ways in which he pushes back on non-diverse pipelines directly: “I have what I call ‘talent days,’ in which my management team spends the whole day once a quarter, and we try to look through our organization for rising stars and try to identify people early. The other thing that we do is we try to make sure that we have proactive interviewing. For any position, we have leading and lagging metrics for diversity. And I ask them: ‘How come, in the last month, you’ve gone after a large number of new people, and you haven’t interviewed one woman for the position?’ I started asking questions like this – I am not expecting them to have the answers. I’m expecting them to know that the next time I ask these questions, you better have the answers because I already have the data.”

Similarly, one of our champions mentioned the importance of pushing back on gender stereotypes, saying, “I think just having the courage to raise the questions is important.  If I’m in a people review with all the business leads and we’re talking about behaviors and we’re saying, this woman is just really, you know, aggressive, the Scarlet A!  Then I ask them ‘Are we’re talking about it with almost the exact same behaviors as a male, in a very complementary way?’  So being able to have the courage to raise those questions, and not in an antagonistic fashion, but more in a very constructive, non-judgmental way is very important.” Finally, one the females who had been championed, summed it up, saying, “Many of these men with whom I worked, clearly were very comfortable in their own skin and believed in the values of having equity in the workplace and were willing to stand up and fight for it.”

Recognizing gender inclusiveness as effective talent management

Although many of the male leaders said they had not known they were considered to be “male champions” until recommended for the research study, examples of their behavior show that they practiced talent management effective for gender inclusion, using best-practice strategies in recruitment, early identification of talent, and succession planning. For example, a leader described his hiring process, detailing, “We’ll remember if we hired the absolute best person for the job, which includes considering women and building diversity in our team. So I hold the jobs open, [and] we’ve never lowered the bar. That’s probably not that unique, but I make sure we have a slate of candidates that include all who are qualified for the job.”

Similarly, another leader noted, “It’s not particularly hard for me …to make sure that we have a slate of candidates that are qualified folks that include women.” Finally, other leaders mentioned that they were consciously consistent about ensuring that men and women were given the same opportunities on their teams. For example, one leader stated “We do have mentor programs, we do have emergent leader programs, we have things that require executives and SVP-types within the business to participate.  It makes the high potentials better leaders”, while another leader noted, “I always try to get at least 50% women in my groups and I’ve been pretty successful at doing that and my current group I think is 80% women and there’s a lot of research that shows you need diversity, and it’s just smart to do that.”

Providing gender aware mentoring and coaching

Mentoring was recently found to be the most impactful activity for increasing diversity and inclusion at work, compared to diversity training and a variety of other diversity initiatives.  Receiving mentorship from senior males can increase compensation and career progress satisfaction for women, particularly for those working in male-dominated industries.

Many champions made special efforts to provide visibility to talented women through mentoring and coaching. For example, a leader mentioned strategically exposing women to the leadership process, stating, “One of the things I would do is take one of our high performing women executives and often make them chief of staff to me so they would run my office, participate in executive committee meetings, format the meetings, really be an extension of my office to give them an opportunity to see the world top down and to work with other senior executives, which was a very important developmental experience for them.”

Other leaders mentioned that they helped to coach women by providing necessary skills that they would need to get the job done. For example, one leader recounted a conversation with a female he championed, stating, “She said ‘I’m not sure if I’m good enough to do the job.’ I said ‘Well, I think you really are so let’s talk about where you feel you need more development.’ So if they’re not confident before they have the job, you’ve got to be proactive and ask them ‘What do you need to be comfortable with that job?’”

Finally, one of our champions mentioned that understanding the goals of women he has championed was also key, saying, “They don’t necessarily have the visibility either because of the roles that they’re in or because they’re not necessarily getting sponsored… We expand their visibility but also arm them with experiences that will broaden their perspective and therefore enable them to compete even more effectively for big roles.”

Women leaders also recognize when opportunities for visibility are provided to them. One of our female interviewees mentioned, “I realized before I gave the presentation, thankfully, that he was giving me a huge opportunity to be seen by a much broader audience and he never made a lot fanfare about it. He never told me that he wanted to help my career.  He just did.” Similarly, another female interviewee highlighted the importance of being let into strategic networks, stating, “I often went to lunch with him when he went to lunch with people. I sat in on a lot of phone calls.”  In the same vein, another female interviewee mentioned that being privy to new contacts within the organization was helpful in career advancement, noting, “You get increased contacts across the organization and more senior contacts than you typically would, because even if you haven’t met somebody, if they’ve seen your name on a report or heard of your name with regard to a high profile project, when you do meet them they already know who you are.”

Further, as a result of the mentoring and coaching, many women reported feeling greater self-confidence which gave them the comfort of doing even more. One female interviewee stated, “The outcome of some of these actions that my male mentors took is they helped me understand that I had a lot more capacity than even I knew.” Similarly, another female interviewee mentioned, “It’s building self-confidence, it gives you the confidence that you belong at the table and that you have a right to be there.”

Practicing other-focused leadership

For cross-gender mentoring relationships to be successful, Stacy D. Blake-Beard suggests mentors need to possess both crucial mentoring skills but also an ally mentality.  Allies  are “dominant group members who work to end prejudice in their personal and professional lives, and relinquish social privileges conferred by their group status through their support of nondominant groups” in the commonly used definition.

Enabling the development of others’ leadership requires moving away from a focus on one’s personal power so that others may be recognized for their achievements.  Many of the male champions we interviewed embodied this spirit of leadership as an exercise for others – not for oneself.

One leader explained, “How many people can you point to who are in leadership positions in the company because they worked for you, with you, and you helped make them better? A lot of times people want to hire, what I call “younger brothers and sisters” that are not threatening and not really as effective as they need to be. Your job is to hire and develop people who can be better than you, if they’re not better than you to begin with.”

A female interviewee concurred, stating, “I also think that there might be some level of altruism too, right? They’re doing it for the greater good of the organization, and, and not necessarily having a strategic goal in mind, but it’s the right thing to be doing for people.”

Through behaviors like these, men can begin to change organizational cultures from the top down. Acknowledging the crucial role that men can play in creating gender equality at work is necessary in order to truly engage the entire workforce in conversations surrounding equality and fairness at work. The examples provided by male champions and female leaders who have been championed by them contain important leadership lessons, useful for any organization interested in promoting gender inclusivity at work.