Most of the time, being more productive means striking a better work-life balance and learning to mitigate the little stressors that eat away at efficiency and the psyche.

These hacks will help you maximize your time and happiness.

1. Know Thyself

What time are you at peak productivity? Now schedule your most crucial tasks during that time. If you’re a genius between the hours of 10 p.m. and midnight, then by golly, do whatever you have to do to block off that time and get ‘er done.

If you need a little help discovering your peak productivity, check out this app that promises to help you find it.

And if you work from home, here are some special hacks just for you.

2. Skip Facebook

It may be tempting to log in and just *peek* at what your news feed is up to, but that’s a dangerous move when you’re trying to get something done. Before you know it, you’re tangled in a web of cute animal videos and profilestalking, and it’s 30 minutes later before you realize you’ve entered the Facebook time warp.

One study showed 23 percent of workers cited Facebook as the destination to “waste time.”

But what if it’s your job to manage social media profiles for a company? Try staying within scheduling apps like Hootsuite so you’re not tempted to log in — or check out the Facebook at Work product that promises to keep work and personal separate on the network — and limit distractions from screaming goats.

3. Ditch the Smartphone

The average smartphone user checks his or her device 221 times a day.Putting your cell phone out of sight during work hours helps get it off your mind — unless you’re so far gone that you experience phantom cell-phone vibrations. In that case, start rethinking your relationship with technology.

4. Forget Multitasking and Just Focus

You might think you’re being more productive by sending those emails during a conference call, but think again. Multitasking reduces efficiency and the quality of work (plus, research shows it literally lowers your IQ). So when you have to get something done, just focus on the task at hand for best results.

And keep in mind that studies show the human brain can only focus for 90 to 120 minutes at a time before it needs a break.

5. Reimagine Your Inbox

Emails build a to-do list that other people create for you. So you need to manage that daily annoyance somehow.

Schedule certain times of the day that you check email, and stick with it. You can try tackling email first thing in the morning, after lunch, and at the end of day. And for God’s sake, turn off email notifications.

If you think this is going to be a problem for your teams or clients, let them know ahead of time how you communicate throughout the day.

You can also look into apps that let you get a handle on your inbox, like Productive Inbox , SimplyFile, or Boomerang for Gmail.

6. Change Your Scenery

If you’re feeling a little foggy midafternoon, try looking out the window into nature. No window? No problem — one study found simply looking at a computerized image of nature helped increase focus.

Even better though is to take a short walk outside. Research shows that a 30-minute lunchtime walk can help people cope with stress and boosts enthusiasm for the remainder of the afternoon.

7. Meditate

Just 15 minutes of mindfulness meditation can lead to more rational business decisions — not to mention better teamwork, being more creative, and a whole slew of health benefits.

Not the yogi type? Try the Headspace app, which has brought meditation to the masses. So go ahead and get your ohm on.

8. Ask for Help and Delegate

There is power in numbers. And frankly, there are things you’re just not good at and probably don’t want to do. When you’re feeling overwhelmed with tasks or underwhelmed by the tedious work on your plate, ask for help.

Guaranteed there is someone out there who can do the tasks you don’t want to 10 times better (try looking in Upwork), so find the person and delegate!

9. Create Innovation Time

Google made famous the idea of giving team members a percentage of time to work outside their normal projects and on what they think would most benefit the company.

If you’re constantly “doing,” you have no time to innovate. Making the same widget day after day does not allow you to think about what new widgets you might make.

Try setting aside time to work on something that will move the needle.

10. Be Agile

The agile approach to building products and software and managing projects is finding its way into other areas of business and even into people’s personal lives.

A popular method is Scrum (an agile framework), which breaks large tasks into smaller items that are worked on and completed typically within a one-week sprint.

11. Get Ergonomic

Sitting is the new smoking, don’t you know. And some research suggests that even if you exercise but still sit for long periods of time, your health is at risk. Not to mention aches, pains, and fatigue can be a real productivity killer.

Luckily, there’s been innovation in workstations that offer affordable sit-standoptions, chairs that move with you more naturally, desks that recline and even allow you to take a nap. (By the way, napping has also been linked with productivity.)

Originally posted on Inc.com

SEO is one of the most vital strategies to improve the growth of your business. Regardless of business size, it helps you improve your website’s rankings in the search engines. It also helps you generate more high-quality organic traffic.

Having said that, it is essential that you conduct a thorough competitor analysis before you design your SEO strategy. This will help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. These insights will help you create your own SEO strategy effectively.

However, it’s not easy to decide which parameters and tools to use for effective competitor analysis. That’s because there are a number of SEO tools and parameters to consider when you conduct a competitor analysis. So, it’s crucial that you invest your time into figuring out the most suitable parameters and tools to analyze your competition.

The process might sound intimidating. So, here are seven simple and easy-to-follow steps to conduct a thorough competitor analysis.

1. Identify Your Keywords

In the process of competitor analysis, the first step needs to be the identification of keywords. Detailed keyword research will help you, from an SEO perspective, understand your competitors better.

You can follow the simple process below to conduct effective keyword research.

Search and create a list of all potential and relevant topics for your business. This will help you narrow down on 5 to 10 of the most important topics.

Once you have selected important topics, it’s time to list the keywords related to each topic. However, make sure to list all of the keywords that have a direct impact on the rankings of your website. And select keywords that your target audience will use to search for your products and services.

While identifying the keywords, make sure to have a combination of long-tail keywords and shorter search terms. Why? Because shorter keywords will help you generate a larger volume of traffic whereas long-tail keywords can generate higher-quality traffic.

In addition to this, the integration of long-tail keywords in your content helps you fulfill user intent. When done correctly, specific keyword phrases help you gain top rankings in the search engines. Also, a varied combination of keywords will help you achieve your SEO goals.

Now that you have the keyword list analyze your competitors’ rankings. If your competitors are using the same list of keywords, then it’s good news for you. It implies that you can also use the same keywords to increase the rankings of your website.

However, there might be quite a few important keywords which your competitors are not using. So, don’t ignore these keywords as they can give you leverage over your competition.

You can use tools like the Google Keyword Planner. The tool helps you to collect the data directly from Google to identify potential keywords.

Image Source – Google

2. Identify Your Competitors

Once you have identified your list of potential keywords, it’s time to search for and create a list of your competitors. To determine your top competitors, you need to enter the selected keywords into search engines like Google, Yahoo, and/or Bing.

Then identify the web pages which are relevant to your niche. Also, make sure that these web pages show up in the top 10 search results. Next, analyze the web pages to find out who your competitors are.

You can use different tools to identify the most aggressive competitors from your industry. It can also give you a list of competitors for the domain you are analyzing. This will help you stay ahead in the game by simplifying your competitor analysis.

Once you identify your top competitors, you need to analyze their top ranking content. For a thorough competitor analysis, make sure to use metrics like inbound links, domain authority, link velocity, domain age, social shares, etc.

By keeping track of your competitors, you can learn about the latest trends in SEO and reposition yourself in the game.

3. Analyze the Backlink Profiles of Your Competitors

The third step in the process of competitor analysis is to analyze backlinks. The quality of your backlinks has a direct impact on the rankings of your website. The higher the quality of your backlinks, the higher your rankings. High-quality backlinks also help you gain the trust of your target audience.

So, make sure that the links coming to your website are of high quality, i.e. from relevant websites with high domain authority. This also indicates that your website contains high-quality content and is highly relevant. This gives you an opportunity to improve your search engine ranking and secure top ranks in relevant SERPs.

Having both high-quality and high-quantity backlinks to your website is essential.

So, to increase the number of quality backlinks on your website, you can glance through your competitors’ links. This will help you develop a strategy to build more backlinks from the sites that are linking to your competitors.

4. Analyze Social Media Profiles

Social media and social media campaigns have a significant impact on the search engine ranking of a website. Social media helps brands to establish and engage with their target audience at a personal level. As a result, the reach and awareness of the brands can increase manifold.

Plus, social media is where a lot of brands get most of their traffic, which further boosts their ranking and visibility. So, don’t forget to analyze the social media profiles of your competitors as part of your competitor analysis process.

Analyze what social media strategies your competitors are using to improve their ranking. Learn from their social media campaign mistakes and replicate their best practices.

5. Audit Your Competitors’ Content

Content is the key to achieving a higher ranking on search engines. Relevant, high-quality, and useful content on the website helps it to secure a top rank on search engines.

So for competitor analysis, you need to have a thorough audit plan for the content on your competitors’ website and yours as well. While you analyze and audit the content, make sure to consider parameters like outbound links, word count, and uniqueness.

Visuals like images and videos help brands to enhance the experience of their visitors. And outbound links increase brand credibility and improve relationships with the target audience as it guides them to more valuable content. So, find out if your competitors are using visuals and high-quality outbound links on their website.

6. Determine Domain Authority

One of the most critical parameters in competitor analysis is to determine the domain authority of your competitor’s website. It will help you narrow down on practical and realistic goals for your own website.

The Open Site Explorer tool by Moz can help you determine the domain authority of your competitors. It will also give you detailed data and information on KPIs like social metrics, domain authority, page authority, etc.

Image Source – Moz Open Site Explorer

7. Compare Yourself With Your Competitors

You have thoroughly analyzed your competitors and understood their strengths and weaknesses. So, the last step in the process of competitor analysis is to compare yourself with your competitors. How do your numbers stack up against those of the competition? How much lower or higher do you rank compared to them?

You need to figure out what is working and what isn’t working for your competitors. This will help you discover which strategies are most ideal for application and which ones you should avoid. You can also tweak them according to your needs before you implement them.

Final Thoughts

Competitor analysis will help you discover your strengths and weaknesses, so you can snowball your organic growth. It also gives you an opportunity to learn from your competitors’ successes and failures.

When done correctly, competitor analysis helps you to improve your strategies and stay ahead of your competitors. Based on the competitor analysis report, you can design and improve your SEO strategies so your business can grow.

Do you know of any other effective ways to analyze your competitors? If so, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

New to consulting and stressed about how to close your first deal? Or maybe you’re overwhelmed by juggling your first projects and the constant need to chase new work.

Luckily for you, your competition is probably making some serious proposal mistakes that are costing them business.

In this article, we’ll show you how newbie consultants can win the proposal game and scoop up business their competitors are leaving on the table.

1. Get In Front of the Right People

Even the best-written proposal will be dead in the water if you don’t lay the proper groundwork first.

Before you type one word, make sure:

• You have the right contact
• You’re offering the right service
• The timing is right for your service

The best way to figure that out? Cold email or call the potential client. A bit scary, but it’ll save you loads of time in the long run–no writing endless proposals that get zero response.

Ask if there’s an issue they need help with right now that’s a match for your expertise. Then, present how you could solve that problem for them. Be sure to ask what their timeline and budget is, too.

Once the client says they’re interested, tell them when you’ll send the proposal to them and what it’ll include.

Be clear you’ll expand more on ideas you already suggested. There should be no surprises for the client in your proposal. Surprises will make it much easier for them to say “no.”

2. Stick to a Winning Structure

Your proposal should be incredibly clear and logical, so the client understands immediately how you’ll add value to their business.

That can be a lot harder to achieve when you have wall after wall of eye-glazing text.

First off, do yourself a favor and use a pre-made consulting proposal template. It’ll give you an instant structure to work with and keep you focused on content that sells–what the project will involve and the ultimate benefit to the client’s bottom line.

A winning proposal should include:

• Project Overview: the issue the client’s facing, as discussed in your initial call/email
• Deliverables: results and how this will benefit the client’s company. Use bullet points.
• Project Schedule: start date, milestones and completion date
• Responsibilities: yours and the client’s, including resources they’ll need to make available to you
• Pricing: your base price
• Terms and Conditions: whether you require a retainer, when you’ll invoice, how you’d like to be paid and when, potential extra costs (for travel etc.)

Image Source

An attractive template will also help establish your personal brand.

If you’re new to proposal writing, you’ll probably also need help avoiding typos, bad word choices, jargon and confusing sentences. So don’t forget to check your grammar using Grammarly or a similar service.

3. Demonstrate You Can Solve the Client’s Problem

New consultants need to focus on how they’ll solve the client’s problem. Don’t bury it deep in your proposal–include it right in the project overview. State the outcome and ROI.

The client needs to be absolutely sure that by hiring you they’re making a sound investment.

For example, you’re a social media consultant who specializes in B2B healthcare marketing campaigns. You’re proposing to help a company that’s experiencing turnover in their marketing department. They made a series of bad hiring decisions and their revenue is suffering.

Use SMART goals in your proposal to show that you are strategic and guarantee a measurable win.

For example:

• I will increase your organic blog traffic by 15 percent in Q1, registrations by 10 percent and upgrades by 5 percent . This will increase revenue by x percent.

4. Keep It Short and Sweet

Your client doesn’t want to read a 25-page proposal. He or she doesn’t even want to read a 10-page proposal.

But, a two to three-page proposal? Perfectly doable.

Again, a proposal maker or template will help rein in any wordiness. They’ll help you focus on the client’s immediate needs and project deliverables.

You can also keep things short by always focusing on how your services are different and uniquely valuable to the client.

If you find you’re writing about your background, your past clients, anything to do with just you and not the client’s problem, you’re getting way off track.

The Takeaway: Make It Easy for the Client to Say “Yes”

B2B clients can be risk adverse. A 2018 survey by Demand Gen found that 45% of B2B buyers “are spending more time researching purchases compared to last year.”

By being specific in your proposal about what you’ll provide and how it’ll solve the client’s problem, you’ll make it much harder for the client to say “no.”

The statistics are bleak, but deserve to be repeated. 90% of startups fail, according to an in-depth analysis of 3,200 companies as part of the Startup Genome Report. The researchers blame “premature scaling” as the root cause, pointing out that 70% of startups in the study scaled before they were ready and that startup founders substantially underestimate how long it takes to validate their market.

It’s no wonder that the startup community obsesses over finding product-market fit. After all, product-market fit is a critical prerequisite to being able to scale in a manner that creates long-term value for shareholders.

For the uninitiated, product-market fit can be understood as instances when a startup introduces a new product that meets a real customer need, does so in a way that’s better than alternatives and in a market that can support a standalone business. Product-market fit tends to be a spectrum rather than a discrete, big bang event and it typically takes continued, sustained effort to improve it over time (e.g. by extending the market opportunity, creating more competitive differentiation, finding lower cost ways to acquire customers).

Unfortunately, all of the focus on product-market fit glosses over a concept that’s equally as important to a startup’s success: pricing.

Expanding the definition of product-market fit

First Round Capital recently investigated the most common mistakes made by startup founders who struggle to fundraise. Compared to peers who breezed through the fundraising process, those who struggled were:

• • • 3x more likely to say they monetized too late
    • 2x more likely to pursue the wrong business model
    • 1.4x more likely to say they botched their go-to-market strategy

Certainly, we can agree that picking the right go-to-market strategy is a part of finding product-market fit. But, deciding when to monetize and which business model to pursue seem disconnected, yet are clearly fundamental to a startup’s success.

I propose we reframe product-market fit to product-market-price fit. Here’s my working definition:

Product-market-price fit refers to instances when a startup offers a new product that meets a real need that customers will pay for at a price that can support a standalone business.

The price element of product-market-price fit speaks to a few different elements that underpin a startup’s ability to scale: their pricing power in the market, the attractiveness of their pricing model and the health of their unit economics.

How to find product-market-price fit

First, a startup should have signs of pricing power. Pricing power is interconnected with both the product (i.e. the product is so good that people will pay a fair price for it) and the market (i.e. the number of potential users multiplied by the average price equals a market large enough that it’s worth pursuing). If the only reason why a startup wins deals is because they have the lowest price in the market, I would be highly skeptical that they’ve found product-market-price fit, unless they’ve found a radically inventive way to cut costs out of the business. But if a startup can raise prices and prospects don’t balk, then it’s a clear sign that the product has substantial product-market-price fit and there’s room to invest more in scaling the business.

Startups need to find a pricing model that allows them to extract value out of what they’ve built from their target customer. In the age of SaaS and ubiquitous subscriptions, this may sound like a piece of cake. But subscriptions aren’t the only game in town, as I’ve written about previously.

Truth be told, SaaS startups now have nearly limitless pricing model options at their disposal. They could opt for different flavors of free (freemium, free trial, free products), different value metrics (seat-based pricing, usage-based pricing, unlimited plans) and different pricing structures (two-part tariffs, three-part tariff, pay as you go). Whatever model they choose must, at a minimum, cover their costs and appeal to prospective customers. Even better, the pricing model could become a disruptive source of competitive advantage, further signaling that a startup is ready to scale.

Logikcull, a legal tech startup that provides cloud discovery software, found that almost two-thirds of attorneys work at law firms with five or less attorneys. These firms balk at the idea of a pre-paid annual subscription, an insight that led Logikcull to introduce a disruptive no-commitment, pay as you go option.

Finally, pricing needs to enable a go-to-market strategy with healthy unit economics. If a startup charges too little, they won’t have the resources to support investing in paid marketing or expensive sales resources, a phenomenon known as being too hungry to eat. Low prices may also attract too many of the wrong customers, those who initially convert but do not stick around. This again results in an LTV:CAC ratio that isn’t strong enough to invest in growth.

It’s time for the startup community to elevate the role that pricing plays in building a stable foundation on which to scale. Pricing shouldn’t be an after-thought once a startup reaches product-market fit. It should instead be a key area of focus and experimentation in the early stages of a startup’s lifecycle. Let’s move from product-market fit to product-market-price fit.

The post From Product-Market Fit to Product-Market-Price Fit appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Price elasticity is one of the most fundamental, essential economic concepts any business owner or sales professional needs to understand. Having a pulse on the price elasticity of your offerings is central to forecasting effectively, structuring a sound pricing strategy, and building a responsive, successful company.

But what is price elasticity? How do you calculate it? What are the different types of price elasticity? And what do they mean for your business? Here, we'll answer all of those questions and more. Let's dive in.

What is price elasticity?

How to Calculate Price Elasticity

Price Elasticity of Demand

Price Elasticity of Demand Formula

Types of Price Elasticity of Demand

Price Elasticity of Supply

Price Elasticity of Supply Formula

Cross Price Elasticity

Cross Price Elasticity Formula

What is price elasticity?

Before we break things down, let’s begin by level setting on price elasticity in general. Price elasticity measures how sensitive the demand and supply of your product are to changes in price. For example, the price elasticity of demand measures many customers will continue to purchase your product or service if you increase the price.

Price elasticity can fall into one of three buckets:

• Price elastic — where price changes greatly affect the supply or demand of a product or service.
• Price inelastic — where supply and demand will work inversely (a.k.a. in the opposite direction) to price changes.
• Price unit elastic — where a price change is proportional to the change in supply and demand and they move at the same rate.

Now that we have a feel for what price elasticity is, let's take a look at how to calculate it.

How to Calculate Price Elasticity

To calculate price elasticity, divide the change in demand (or supply) for a product, service, resource, or commodity by its change in price. That figure will tell you which bucket your product falls into.

• A value of one means that your product is unit elastic and changes in your price reflect an equal change in supply or demand.
• A value of >1 means that your product is elastic and changes in your price will cause a greater than proportional change in supply or demand.
• A value of <1 means that your product is inelastic and changes in your price will result in a smaller change in the supply or demand for your product.

To illustrate these economics, here’s a chart that shows all three buckets:

Image Source

How can you apply price elasticity?

Price elasticity gives you some useful information on how to best price your products and services.

If you have an elastic product, then you should be cautious about raising prices since a price increase will greatly impact purchases (demand) and production (supply). But if your offering is price inelastic, then you can adjust your prices with less caution since you know that the change will have a smaller impact on supply and demand.

Now that we’ve covered how price elasticity impacts your business, let’s break things down even further.

Price Elasticity of Demand

The formula below (also known as PED) is used to identify how a change in price affects the supply or demand of an offering or commodity. If people still buy a product, service, or resource when the price is raised, that offering is inelastic. An offering is elastic when demand suffers due to price fluctuations.

For example, research shows that raising cigarette prices doesn’t do much to stop smokers from buying cigarettes — making cigarettes an inelastic commodity. Cable television, however, is a very elastic product. As the price of cable has increased, demand has decreased as more consumers "cut the cord."

Substitutions like Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services have made the cable industry elastic. There are also substitutions for Tobacco (including alternatives like vaporizers and nicotine patches), but none have affected their core consumer’s desire and ability to continue buying cigarettes.

If you sell 10,000 reams of paper at $100 per ream and then raise the price to $150 per ream and sell 7,000 reams, your elasticity of demand would be -0.88. This would be considered inelastic because it is less than one.

Broken down even further to include the calculation of percent change, this formula looks like:

((QN - QI) / (QN + QI) / 2) / ((PN - PI) / (PN + PI) / 2)

• QN = New quantity (7,000)
• QI = Initial quantity (10,000)
• PN = New price ($150)
• PI = Initial price ($100)

Our numbers plugged into this formula would be:

(7,000 - 10,000) / (7,000 +10,000) /2) / (150 - 100) / (150 - 100) / 2)

Head spinning? Check out this free calculator.

This formula is helpful in determining if a product or service is price sensitive. Ideally, you want your offering to be a must-have (inelastic) that consumers consider non-negotiable during price fluctuation, not a nice-to-have (elastic).

Types of Price Elasticity of Demand

1. Perfectly Inelastic Demand

If your PED equals 0, price changes do not affect your product’s demand. Generally speaking, only absolutely essential items and services have perfectly inelastic demand. Very few — if any — products or services like that exist, making perfectly inelastic demand a mostly hypothetical concept.

For instance, if there were a life-saving drug on the market that people would pay any price to obtain, demand would remain the same no matter how much the price might rise.

Image Source

2. Relatively Inelastic Demand

If the percent change for demand is less than the percent change of the product’s price. Necessary goods and services that people would be willing to pay more for have relatively elastic demand — in most cases.

This often includes goods or resources with no close substitutes like electricity — a near-essential resource without any viable alternative. Losing access to it would have massive implications on your daily life, and you'd have nowhere else to turn when that happened.

For the most part, people would be willing to cover any price increases to keep their power on. That said, electricity isn't as critical as a life-saving drug, so some people would be willing to go without it if the price were too steep — making demand for it relatively inelastic.

3. Unit Elastic Demand

If the change in demand for a product or service yields a proportional change in price — meaning a price raise of X% leads to an X% decrease in demand — the offering in question has unit elastic demand.

This type of price elasticity of demand is purely hypothetical. There are no actual examples of unit elastic demand in practice. Demand is never completely linear. Though there is obviously a direct relationship between price and demand, that relationship is never squarely one-to-one.

If a brand were to slightly raise its prices, it would still likely have consumers who prefer it to its alternatives enough to continue to buy its products or services — so a 10% raise in price wouldn't mean exactly 10% of existing customers automatically turn to that company's competitors.

In a similar vein, an extremely radical price hike for a nonessential product or service might turn off a disproportionately high number of customers, relative to the percentage change in prices. If a brand decided to raise prices 40% without warning — more than 40% of its existing customers might jump ship.

4. Relatively Elastic Demand

If demand change is greater than the change in your product’s price. Here, a relatively small change in price will make for a very large change in demand. Relatively elastic demand is typically associated with items that have several substitutes.

For instance, let's say there's an electronics manufacturer that sells 40-inch smart TVs for $250. All of its competitors sell similar products for the same price — and those competitors' TVs have virtually indistinguishable resolution and features from the manufacturer in question.

If the manufacturer were to raise its price from $250 to $275, consumers would likely be less inclined to pay an additional $25 for a product that's so fundamentally similar to its slightly less expensive competition — and demand for the manufacturer's TV would drop fairly radically, making its demand relatively elastic.

5. Perfectly Elastic Demand

If demand falls to zero at the slightest price increase or demand becomes great with a slight price decrease. Perfectly elastic demand demonstrates that the demand for a product is 100% directly tied to its price.

Like unit elastic demand, there are no actual examples of perfectly elastic demand in practice. Demand for a product or service is never linear enough to make any change in price prompt an absolute drop in demand.

There will always be some people who have preferences that are often unshaken by slight price changes. If the price of a bottle of Sprite was to increase by $1, there will still be consumers willing to pay more for it over alternatives like Sierra Mist or 7Up.

While some offerings have particularly price-sensitive customer bases, there aren't any that consumers will totally abandon as soon as that good costs even one cent more than it did before.

Image Source

Price Elasticity of Supply

The price elasticity of supply (PES) measures how responsive the supply of a product or service is when there is a change in price.

If supply is inelastic, it might mean a company is too short-staffed to keep up with demand, needs a longer lead time to produce more of its product, or doesn't have the resources to expand its facilities.

If supply is elastic, a company might have a surplus of available staff to increase supply. Knowing PES allows businesses to determine whether a change in price will negatively or positively affect the demand for its product or service.

If supply is inelastic, an increase in price leads to a change in supply that's less than the increase in price, meaning the PES is less than one. If supply is elastic, the price change yields a larger increase in supply making the PES greater than one.

For example, if the price of “World’s Greatest Boss” mugs falls 10% and the supply falls 5%, the PES is .5 and considered inelastic. If the price of bobbleheads increases by 15% and supply increases by 20%, the price elasticity of supply (PES) is 1.3 and elastic.

Cross Price Elasticity

Cross price elasticity of demand measures how responsive the demand for a product or service is when the price for another product or service changes. For example, if Hulu with Live TV raises its prices to $45 per month, will customers leave the service for YouTube TV — a similar streaming service charging only $40 per month?

As the price of Hulu Live rises, the demand for its competitor’s service rises. Within cross price elasticity, YouTube would be considered a "substitute good."

If, however, the cost of televisions increased and the number of customers using subscription services like Hulu or YouTube decreased because of the price increase of televisions, this would be called "complementary goods."

Cross price elasticity allows businesses to price their products or services competitively, plan for risks, and map their market. If your product or service has no real competitor, you don't need to consider cross price elasticity because there is no substitute for your offering. However, if a complementary product or service sees a market fluctuation, you might need to prepare for cross price elasticity.

Your product or service's price elasticity can inform your pricing strategy, help you feel out your competitive advantage, and ultimately dictate how your company plans for the future. Given the massive implications it can have on your business, having a grip on price elasticity — as a concept — is in your best interest.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in April 3, 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

You might say, “We need to be profitable. We need a win-win deal.” As much as I agree with the statement, it isn’t what you say as much as how you say it. You might be better off saying, “We want to make sure you achieve the outcomes we’ve discussed up to this point, and we don’t want you to invest more or less than you need to. Can I go back over the investments we are going to make to ensure you achieve your goals?”

When your prospect rejects your request for a meeting, the words you speak maybe, “I promise I won’t take a lot of your time.” In that statement, you have conceded that you don’t believe what you want to share is worth your dream client’s time, providing them with an easy “no.” Better might be, “What I have to share with you is valuable, even if you never do business with us. I promise I won’t waste one minute of your time, and you will find it valuable.” This addresses the prospect’s real concern.

Salespeople have been known to speak poorly of their competitors. I have heard them say, “There is no way they are profitable at their pricing, and that isn’t a sustainable business model.” And yet, they have been in business for decades and show no signs of extinction. There is a better way (and one I wrote about in Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition): “We know them well. We have friends there. They do good work, but we have wildly different ideas about the business model. Can I share with you what makes us different?”

Win customers away from your competition. Check out Eat Their Lunch

Because sales is conversations and commitments, one should work very hard at choosing words that make those conversations valuable and useful, earning the right to go from conversation to conversation by linking together the commitments necessary to go from target to close (as found in The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the 10 Commitments That Drive Sales).

Essential Reading!

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"The USA Today bestseller by the star sales speaker and author of The Sales Blog that reveals how all salespeople can attain huge sales success through strategies backed by extensive research and experience."

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The post It’s How You Say It appeared first on The Sales Blog.

There are a lot of questions about the trends analysis and implications framework in my third book, Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition. One of the most frequently asked questions is, “What trends and implications do I share with people in a purchasing role to engage them in a more strategic conversation.”

Win customers away from your competition. Check out Eat Their Lunch

There are no rules in sales, and you have to know them all, which is to say context matters. Generally, executive leaders invest in strategic outcomes, and people in purchasing roles tend to control the prices the company accepts, outcomes that are often at odds and the main reason, so many companies incur higher costs as the result of underinvesting.

Exceptions

There are exceptions to every rule (including this one). There are people in purchasing roles who see their role as “reducing costs” and ensuring the effectiveness of their companies “supply chain.” These enlightened purchasing types often reject the lowest priced offerings because their experience suggests that the “vendor” will cause them to incur higher prices.

The idea of a strategic partner is a concept that intimates a different relationship and greater accountability than a vendor or supplier, titles that suggest a low price and the equally low value one should expect. There are purchasing agents and supply chain managers who will accept a higher price when you can justify it for them.

These are, however, exceptions. Most of the time, the greater investment conversation needs to be held at a different level, with the stakeholders who are accountable for the overall success of the organization.

Executives Invest

Executive leaders invest in the products, services, and solutions that help them achieve their strategic goals, including their financial goals. Sometimes those goals include reducing the money they spend in certain categories. But more often than not, the decision-makers are willing and able to invest in the capabilities and outcomes they are responsible for delivering, even when it means investing more than they are now.

Most executives know that their purchasing team is going to ask for a discount or concession around pricing, and many will defend the investment if the salesperson they’re working with can help them justify the delta between what they are investing now or competitive alternatives.

If you want to have a productive conversation about trends, implications, and investment, you are more likely to find a receptive and engaged audience made up of decision-makers and management than purchasing agents, even though you will occasionally bump into a supply chain manager who is trying to spend more to ensure the outcomes their company needs to succeed.

If you are going to err one way or the other, assume leadership wants to invest and purchasing wants you to lower your price, and act accordingly.

Essential Reading!

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"The first ever playbook for B2B salespeople on how to win clients and customers who are already being serviced by your competition."

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The post Executives Invest. Purchasing Controls Pricing. appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Have you ever written an email but didn't want to send it immediately?

I don't know about you, but this is a normal occurrence for me. I've created email drafts and let them sit in my Drafts folder in Gmail, patiently waiting to send them so they reach my contacts' inboxes at just the right moment.

Does this sound like you too?

Well, if not, here are a few more reasons you might want to delay sending an email.

• You want the email to arrive in your prospect's inbox at the best time for them.
• The person you're emailing lives in a different time zone.
• You're working late and you want the email to arrive in the morning.

No matter the reason, having the flexibility to schedule emails so they send at the ideal time is a luxury, especially since email providers, like Gmail, lack this functionality. This is where the HubSpot Sales saves the day.

This free email scheduling tool allows you to schedule emails to send later in Gmail. Plus, you can preview or cancel the email before it sends if you need to make any last-minute changes. Sales automation like this can speed up your email sending processes, make you more efficient, and free up your time.

So, how can this tool work for you exactly?

1. Add the HubSpot Sales Google Chrome extension.

Navigate to the chrome web store and click the Add to Chrome button. You'll be prompted to log in.

2. Open up Gmail.

Once you're logged in, open up your Gmail inbox. You should see a HubSpot icon in the top, right-hand corner of the inbox. Click the icon and click the Turn on button.

3. Connect your inbox.

Click the Connect inbox button and follow the on-screen instructions. With the HubSpot tools turned on, now, you're ready to start writing and scheduling emails.

4. Click the Compose button.

Create a new email by clicking the Compose button. This will create a brand new email draft for you to work with.

Next, fill out the email details: To, Subject, and the content of your email. (If you're reaching out to a prospecting email, check out these prospecting email templates for inspiration.)

5. Click the clock icon.

Click the clock icon next to the Send button and select one of the following options:

• Tomorrow: This allows you to send the email tomorrow. Click the dropdown menu to select the recipient's timezone.
• Custom: Choose a specific date and time for your email to send.
• Best time to send or Best time to send this week: These "best time to send" features are available with Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise only. The tool suggests times to schedule your email so it will have a higher likelihood of opens, clicks, and replies based on the recipient's prior email engagement.

6. Click the Schedule button.

Once you've selected a time to send your post, click the orange Schedule button.

Once the email is scheduled, it will appear in the Scheduled Mail folder.

When you click on the folder, you'll be brought to a Scheduled emails outbox where you can see all your scheduled emails. From this page, you can either preview your email or delete it.

If the email preview looks good to go, your email is all set to send out at your desired time.

By scheduling emails, you'll ensure that your message makes it to the top of your prospects' inboxes and reaching them at times it's convenient for them. Looking for more? Check out the steps to create canned response Gmail templates next.

In a way, sales reps are like nurses or doctors. They take people’s temperatures to determine how they’re feeling. A “hot” prospect is ready to buy. A “cold” prospect is merely browsing inventory.

Before the internet, this heat check was usually performed in person. Sales reps would get a good sense of how interested someone was in their company’s products or services by spending some time with them.

Qualified leads would ultimately receive more attention—the sales rep might play 18 holes with them to help close the deal. For people looking to buy later, an occasional phone call to nurture the relationship would suffice.

But with the way modern customers conduct online research prior to purchasing, the human interaction aspect of qualifying leads has all but disappeared.

Many companies today have turned to innovative marketing automation software to analyze a prospect’s digital engagement behavior and determine whether they’re qualified enough to move on to the next step in the sales cycle.

But successfully qualifying leads for sales means having three key fundamentals in place:

1. A solid definition of “lead”

First things first. What’s a lead? At Marketo, we define a lead as any “qualified prospect that is starting to exhibit buying behavior.” That could mean when somebody begins following a social media account, subscribes to an email newsletter, or browses a product page on a website.

Of course, every business should have its own definition for what a lead is. Why? Because differentiating a lead from a non-lead will help you determine who’s worth nurturing and who’s not.

If you haven’t yet defined what a lead is for your organization, here’s how to get started:

Schedule a sit-down between sales and marketing. Talk about what your target market looks like, who’s in your database already, and what kind of buyers are currently closing deals. You’ll also want to discuss things like when to start lead nurturing and what makes a bad lead.

Marketing operations usually has access to the tools, systems, and data that tell you everything you need to know.

Once you’ve developed a solid definition, write it down. You’ll what to share what you’ve come up with so everyone’s on the same page.

And don’t forget to meet regularly. Your definition of a lead will change as your business grows or your priorities shift.

2. An effective lead scoring system

With a lead scoring system, you can assign values to prospects based on actions they take, behaviors they exhibit, and more. This will help you rank leads to determine which prospects are ripe for nurturing and which are ready to engage with your sales team.

There are four attributes you must identify through your lead scoring system:

• Lead fit: Collecting information around your prospects’ demographics (title, role, location), firmographics (industry, company size, name of company) and BANT (budget, authority, need, time) will give you an idea of whether they fit your ideal buyer profile. You can capture a lot of demographic and firmographic information through a registration page form. Gathering BANT data may require getting to know your prospects a little bit better—perhaps through progressive profiling.

• Lead interest: Studying your prospects’ online body language by analyzing how they engage with your brand will give you insight into how interested they are in your product or service. The more interest they show, the more likely they are to buy—and the more heavily you should shower them with attention and valuable content. 

• Lead behavior: Certain prospect behavior shines a light on where they are in the customer journey. Visiting a website or attending a webinar are the signs of an early-stage prospect. Checking out a pricing page or watching a solution demo reveal buyer intent. You can take advantage of this information by offering early-stage prospects more educational content and passing off leads with high buyer intent to sales. 

• Buying stage/timing: Knowing when your lead intends to buy is extremely important. If a prospect is just beginning to research a product, it’s not the time to put the hard sell on them. Instead, send valuable information about how the product can help solve their problems. By closely evaluating a prospect’s behavior, you’ll get a firm sense of where they are in the buying journey.

Developing a lead scoring system is a core component of lead management—and no department is better suited to help your company bring this system into fruition than your marketing operations team.

That’s because marketing operations has access to the data required to establish a lead scoring program—so it doesn’t have to rely on guesswork.

3. A culture built on testing and optimization

Like most things in marketing, your lead nurturing program shouldn’t be a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. You’ll want to regularly test what’s working and what’s not so you can optimize your processes.

But what exactly should you be testing? In a word: Everything.

The goal of your lead nurturing program is to provide satisfying customer experiences that align with your audiences’ preferences and ultimately drive sales.

So, scrutinize every method you use to engage with your prospects. Measure how people respond to your social media posts, the offers on your websites, and the material in your videos.

Email nurture streams, in particular, provide a plethora of opportunities to test and optimize. You can:

• Assess how different variations of a subject line impact open rates
• See if click-through rates improve by swapping your content type
• Evaluate whether readers respond better to short or long emails
• Change the layout to learn what kind of design resonates most with readers
• Modify send frequency to get a better idea of how often audiences want to be contacted

By creating a culture of testing and optimization, sales and marketing can collaborate to turn qualified leads into surefire customers.

A new frontier of qualifying leads emerges with AI

The three fundamentals above will go a long way toward helping you successfully qualify leads for sales. But like we’ve seen before with the emergence of the internet, there’s always something new around the corner ready to shake up the status quo.

Today, that’s AI.

Sales reps currently spend a lot of time and attention just determining if a prospect is a qualified lead. Sometimes, it’s all for naught, as a months-long engagement could develop into nothing.

Hiring more sales reps isn’t the answer. But leaning on innovative conversational AI and machine learning could be.

Instead of an employee interacting with a prospect, an AI-driven bot could communicate with them. When a person visits a website, the bot can converse with them, help them, and, most importantly, collect the valuable insight needed to decide if they’re a qualified lead.

This allows human sales reps to limit their focus to building relationships with prospects who are actually worth their time.

A chance to transform lead qualification

With a few key principles and an eye on the future, you can do wonders for your lead qualification program. And it won’t be long until your entire organization feels the effects—experiencing more closed deals and higher revenue.

Download The Definitive Guide to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales Development to learn more.

The post The 3 Essentials of a Successful Qualified Leads Program appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Dollars and Sense. How we misthink money and how to spend smarter. Dan Ariely & Jeff Kreisler. 2017. ISBN 9780062651204. Ariely ( Predictably Irrational)  and Kreisler take a look at pricing, value and how we deal with it in several new ways.  Some of their definitions will seem novel, however everything makes sense and is back yup with psychological case studies and stories. With a concise and humorous style the authors make the topics quite delightful.  All of us will recognize our own thought processes in this book and yet I doubt we will not always take heed and change for the better.  Good book for sales managers, husbands and someone just starting out.

You know you’re writing a formal email if you have to pause and wonder, “Is this too casual?” or “What salutation should I use?” or “Is this the right tone?”

When I entered the working world, I found myself staring at my inbox and watching the cursor blink. I would second guess my word choice and read the message multiple times to make sure it felt right. However, after trial and error, I’ve found writing a formal email doesn’t have to be a struggle.

Using these formal email guidelines is a surefire way to make sure your business emails have the right not. You’ll always send the perfect message, whether you’re reaching out for the first time or just following up.

Table of Contents

• What is a formal email?
• When to Write a Formal Email
• How to Write a Formal Email
• Formal Email Template
• Formal Email Example

What is a formal email?

Formal emails are messages that require a high level of formality. Usually, you don’t know the recipient or only know them in a business context. You may be messaging a client or a potential employer. The goal is to convey respect and professionalism while getting your message across.

When to Write a Formal Email

A formal email is used when conducting business, sending a professional inquiry, or corresponding about a job. Let’s explore some common scenarios that require formal emails.

Job Applications

When applying for a new role, you want to put your best foot forward. So, in your emails, you’ll need to demonstrate your professionalism and seriousness. You’ll likely include a cover letter-like message with a formal tone to impress the recipient.

Business Correspondence

Formal emails are often used when conducting business. That includes reaching out to clients, contacting business partners, or requesting information from suppliers. Here, you’re looking to show the recipient that you take your role seriously, and you hope they do the same.

Formal emails are also a great way to show prospective clients that you respect their time and can handle their situation with care.

Reaching Out to Senior Leaders

Depending on your role and your organization’s culture, you may need to write formal emails when working with senior leaders. This is especially true when making a request or seeking help from these authority figures. A formal email shows that you respect them and acknowledge the hierarchical structure of the workplace.

Dealing with Complaints or Disputes

In the business world, roadblocks are inevitable. When discussing these challenges, you’ll want to write formal emails. This is true whether you’re working with a colleague, client, vendor, or manager. Clear, concise communication maintains a professional tone and increases the chances of a resolution.

Legal Matters

If lawyers or regulatory bodies are involved, keep your emails formal. Precise language and a formal tone are essential in these situations. Certain phrases have very specific meanings, and you’ll want to make sure you get it right.

1. Greet appropriately.

First, choose an appropriate greeting. Casual introductions like “Hey,” “Hi there,” or just the person’s name should be reserved for casual correspondence with friends, family, and familiar colleagues.

If you’re addressing an executive, business associate, or prospect, take a more formal tone. Here are a few formal email greetings to consider:

1. Dear [Name],
2. Hello [Name],
3. To Whom It May Concern,
4. Greetings [Name],
5. Dear [Department Name],
6. Dear [Job Title],
7. Dear Search Committee,
8. Good Morning, [Name],
9. I hope this email finds you well.

When in doubt, always choose a greeting that’s more formal than casual. One salutation to kick to the curb for good? “Dear Sir or Madam.” Here’s why.

What we like: Dear [name] or Greetings [name] are tried and true. They’re easily the most recognizable greeting for an email and keep a professional tone no matter what the situation.

2. Check your email address.

If you’re not sending an email from your work alias, revisit your personal email address to make sure it’s professional and reflective of your current life stage.

If you’re still rocking that sk8rgurl2003@aol.com address, consider updating to one that includes some combination of your first and last name. This ensures your first impression is authoritative and adult — and not the early 2000s equivalent of a trucker hat.

Pro tip: Keeping your email more formal is definitely the way to go. Using your name or initials with a unique sequence of numbers is always preferable over a more personalized email address.

3. Choose a professional font.

Read: Ditch the purple Comic Sans. While you might prefer to use the Papyrus font in your personal correspondence with friends and family, keep your professional emails distraction-free by choosing Arial, Times New Roman, or Calibri.

After all, you want the first thing your reader notices to be your message, not your font.

What We Like: Arial is a base font and is most commonly supported. Keeping it simple enhances your presentation, allowing the reader to focus on your message rather than the font.

4. Craft your subject line.

Keep your subject line to seven words or less for optimal open rates, and don’t try to dazzle your reader with extreme subject lines in the first email. Before you write your subject line, ask yourself three questions:

1. “Who is my audience?” Is it an executive, a marketing manager, or maybe a small business owner? Knowing who your audience is will help with step number two …
2. “What do they care about?” Your subject line is your reader’s first impression of you (minus your email address). Make it count by focusing on something they care about. That might be a mutual connection, a business pain point, or a meeting you’ve already scheduled. Make your subject line relevant to them and earn the email open.
3. “Does my subject line reflect what’s inside?” Never try to trick your recipient into opening your email. If you send a message with the subject line, “Regarding next week’s call,” and you have no such call scheduled, you’re asking to get marked as spam and lose all trust and credibility.

Short, clear, and concise is the best way to open formal correspondence. Here are some subject line examples:

• “RE: 6/8 demo call with HubSpot.”
• “[Mutual connection] recommended we chat.”
• “Meeting RE: Demo call with HubSpot.”
• “Follow Up RE: Phone call with HubSpot.”
• “Question about [goal].”
• “Hi [name], [question]?”
• “A [benefit] for [prospect’s company].”
• “We have [insert fact] in common.”

Want more great subject line inspiration? Check out this list, guaranteed to get prospects to open, read, and respond.

Pro tip: In this instance, you want to keep it situational. Keep in mind who your audience is and what you’re trying to convey. Work that information into the subject to keep the experience more eye-catching from start to finish.

5. Introduce yourself.

Your first sentence should tell them who you are — without telling them your life story. Many of us start emails with our name, title, company, and what our company does.

Many of us also receive emails like this and skim through the first paragraph because we just don’t care yet. We want to know what the sender can do for us, not who they do it for and why.

Here’s what not to do:

Dear April,

My name is Leslie, and I’m a park director with the Indiana Parks and Recreation Department. We’re dedicated to making Indiana parks more beautiful and visitor-friendly.

I’m reaching out today to see if you would be interested in learning more about our summer initiative to get more kids outside and to the parks. I know you run a summer camp, and I’d love to talk about partnering with you to use our parks for certain outdoor activities.

Let me know if you’d like to learn more.

Sincerely,
Leslie Knope

This email is long; it spends too much time telling April who Leslie is, and it never addresses how using local parks will benefit April and her summer camp. Instead, try this greeting:

Dear April,

Do your summer camp kids (and counselors) ever need a change of scene after a week or two in the same location? I’m Leslie Knope with the Parks & Rec department, and I’d love to help your campers burn off some energy in our local parks this summer.

If you’d like to learn more about our summer parks program, book time on my calendar here: [Insert calendar link]

I hope to speak with you soon.

Sincerely,
Leslie Knope

This email is shorter, leads with the benefit, and follows up with Leslie’s name and company name only. It also closes with a clear call to action. More impactful? I’d say so.

What we like: Introducing yourself right away is paramount to the process. Keeping your intro to the first sentence of the body of your email helps keep your reader informed. Your audience is less likely to continue if it isn’t apparent where this email is coming from.

Image Source

6. Keep things short and concise.

As discussed above, don’t burden your professional emails with a lot of “fluff” or information that doesn’t matter to your recipient. Edit your emails for length and clarity. Add bullets, new paragraphs, and lists wherever you can. These formatting tools can make your email easier to read and more impactful.

Here’s an example of what not to do:

Hi Ron,

My name is Donna, and we met at the Carpenters of Indiana conference last week. I wanted to follow up with you regarding some contract work for a few of my clients. Specifically, I need someone to make 50 park benches, three pergolas, and eight gazebos. I’m gathering bids from a few local carpenters and was hoping you could provide me with a quote for these projects by the end of the week.

Thanks,
Donna Meagle

This is clunky; it’s hard to discern the most pertinent parts of Donna’s message, and the language is a bit too casual. Instead, try this:

Hello Ron,

My name is Donna, and we spoke at the Carpenters of Indiana event last week. I’m currently collecting bids for the following projects:

• 50 park benches
• 3 pergolas
• 8 gazebos

I need these projects done no later than June 6, 2023, and I’m requesting all bids be returned by March 15, 2023.

Your work is impressive, and I hope we receive a bid from you.

Regards,
Donna Meagle

This email is much more direct, professional, and well-organized. It’s easy for the reader to skim, clearly features the most important information, and increases the likelihood of Donna receiving a response from Ron.

Pro tip: Short and sweet can definitely be useful, but don't undersell your message. You want to be to the point. Summarize the entirety of the purpose of the correspondence in a paragraph or two. Droning on will not keep the reader’s attention, but not providing enough information can be just as damaging.

7. Use a formal close.

Ready to bring it home? Make sure you close your email appropriately. Leave casual closing phases like, “Cheers,” “Thanks,” and “Best,” for close colleagues. Choose one of the following, more formal, closes below:

1. Thank you for your time,
2. Sincerely,
3. Respectfully,
4. Thank you,
5. Looking forward to hearing from you,
6. Have a wonderful day,
7. Best regards,
8. With gratitude,
9. Will follow up soon.

Image Source

These sign offs carry the right tone through the last drop of your formal email. As you develop rapport with your business associates, it’s normal to pick up more casual and creative closes. Until then, these farewells are your best bet.

What we like: “Sincerely” is our top recommendation, another classic closing that effectively wraps up your message.

8. Include a professional signature.

If your email address is the first impression, your email signature is the last. Make sure it includes the following:

• Your name.
• Your contact information (phone number, website, calendar link, address).
• Your title.
• A professional headshot.
• A link to or badge for any professional accolades you’ve recently received.
• Links to appropriate social media channels (i.e., LinkedIn or Twitter).

Want to see examples of stellar email signatures from real people? Check out this roundup of professional email signature examples.

Pro tip: For most cases, including your full name and some basic info, such as job title or any contact info, is more than enough to close a now perfectly crafted email.

9. Proofread.

This might seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised what you overlook when you’ve read the same email draft three times in a row.

Instead of trusting your eye, drop your email text into Microsoft Word and use their Review > Spelling & Grammar tool.

You can also copy and paste your message into Hemingway Editor to proofread for run-on sentences, comma splices, and other pesky grammatical errors.

Always double-check that you’ve spelled your recipient’s name and company name correctly. If there’s one thing that ruffles the feathers of my inbox, it’s seeing an email come through addressed to “Megan” when my name everywhere on the internet is listed as “Meg” or seeing someone tell me how much they love “Hubspot” when the correct capitalization is “HubSpot.”

What we like: Using the tools provided by your system will always be a benefit. Proofread and then run a spell check to make sure there aren't any misses.

Formal Email Template

Now that we’ve discussed the nine most important aspects of a formal email, let’s put them together to create a template you can use in almost any situation.

[Appropriate subject line]

Dear [Name],

My name is [Your name], and I’m reaching out to [insert the benefit you’re offering or the request you have of them].

[Two to three sentences supporting your main point and bulleted list or bolded terms when necessary].

[Include CTA when appropriate].

Kind Regards,
[Signature]

Want access to more email templates? Check out these templates, guaranteed to start a relationship with your prospect. And click here to learn how to find almost anyone’s email address without being creepy.

Formal Email Example

It’s hard to visualize a template in action, so let’s create an example using all of our best practices to bring the template above to life.

RE: Parks & Rec + Sweetums Proposal

Hello Nick,

My name is Tom Haverford, and we spoke last week about Sweetums’ proposal to be the exclusive supplier of lemonade to all Indiana parks in 2024.

I’d like to get a meeting on our respective calendars to discuss the following:

• When lemonade would be delivered to park refreshment centers
• Lemonade sizing and pricing
• Recycling efforts for used lemonade cups

Please feel free to book time on my calendar here: [Link to calendar]

Kind Regards,
Tom Haverford
Administrator, Pawnee Parks & Recreation
123-456-7890

See my latest article on our “Healthy Parks, Healthy You” initiative here.

Writing Great Formal Emails

Writing a formal email doesn’t have to be scary — and it doesn’t have to be stuffy. Use these nine tips for better professional emails and ensure your correspondence earns you the respect you deserve.

We were doing a deal review. It was a big deal with a prestigious customer. Procurement was involved. As we discussed the deal, the sales person said:

“Procurement thinks this is a good solution, but they aren’t willing to pay more than $X and we are a whole lot more at Y.”

“Have you presented the business case to the procurement folks?” I asked.

“We’ve talked about how much this improves productivity and reduces costs, we’ve provided some industry data….” replied the sales person.

“But have you provided a specific business case to them?” I asked.

“No, they’re stuck on the huge price difference…..the deal is stalled!” the frustrated sales person replied.

Sound familiar? I hear the same thing in too many deal reviews. In this case it was procurement, but any customer will raise the price objection–and they should.

And it becomes the showstopper for the deal. Sales people come back pleading for a discount to match the customer expectations.

We will seldom win if we compete on price! (I know I sound like a broken record, but you can’t imagine the number of deals I review where this is the only basis of competing.

But what really matters is the business case…..

Back to the original example. We chatted about the customer’s situation, “Does the customer understand how this solution will increase reduce costs and increase productivity?”

“They understand the concepts and they’ve read the case studies,” replies the sales person, “They think they should achieve savings in the same range as our case studies.”

“Have you developed a specific business case for them? Are you using their numbers to show how much it will increase productivity and reduce costs?” I asked.

“Well, no, they understand the principles, but we still have the pricing problem,” the sales person replies, “beside, they should be able to look at the business case themselves.”

“Clearly, they haven’t, otherwise they wouldn’t be arguing about price!” I reply.

After doing a back of the envelope calculation, we found the net savings to be several million, productivity improvements would add another couple of million.

The sales person says, “I get this, but they don’t like our price!”

“Can they get these savings from any other solution?” I ask.

“No, we are in a good position, we are the only solution that can give them these savings….” replies the sales person.

“So you are telling me this customer will walk away from millions in savings and productivity improvement, just because they don’t like our price?” I reply, getting a little impatient.

At this point, the sales person lapsed into silence.

We talked further, he defended himself, saying the customer understood the value proposition and what they would achieve. But he and they never translated this into a specific business case for the customer.

The customer doesn’t have to like our price! They can scream and shout about how unreasonable it is. As long as we have a business case that shows a superior return for them, price is absolutely irrelevant.

The customer would be insane not to select a solution that provides millions in improvement, regardless of the price of the solution.

I wish I made this up, but it is too common. We sell on price, we lose on price. We sell on business value, we sell on the fact the customer can’t get these outcomes unless the pay what we are charging, we focus on their business return, not the price of our products.

Thanks for indulging me, I’m off my soapbox, but can’t help getting impatient with the number of opportunities I see where the focus is on defending our price, rather than focusing on business outcomes!

I have sold to Marketers for a long time. Somewhere along the way, I started thinking like one.

*Gasp*

Don’t get it twisted: I live to drive revenue. So when I first realized I was thinking like a marketer, I was shocked and a little upset. Was I going soft? Losing my edge?

It turns out that this shift in thinking was the single best thing that happened in my career. Instead of “losing my edge”, I gained a whole new arsenal of tools that I could wield to make my job easier. I was able to add more value to my organization, communicate better, close deals faster, and prospects even started coming to me.

I felt like I had just fallen into Wonderland. What was this crazy new world? As I explored it, I began to wonder why more sales people didn’t spend more time here.

It’s been a few years since this shift and I have boiled my success down to four key marketing tactics I now believe all salespeople need to learn to be successful.

Marketing tactics for salespeople:

1. Learn copywriting skills to create succinct, relevant messages
2. Use online communities to build a lead generation machine
3. Build a Brand for Yourself on Social Media
4. Own the Whole Sales Funnel

1. Learn Copywriting Skills To Create Succinct, Relevant Messages

“If you can’t explain it to a 6-year old, you don’t know it yourself.” – Albert Einstein

Great sales people are excellent communicators but we often fall into the trap of knowing too much about our product or service. Someone who likes storytelling and has a long story to tell can be at a disadvantage. Buyers are more informed than ever and want answers as efficiently and succinctly as possible. Sellers who can tell an engaging story about their product and themselves win.

When I first started creating my own content, particularly blog posts & linkedin posts, a lot of it was way too long and it was too focused around my organization. I learned very quickly: nobody cares.

In the online world you will be given maybe two seconds before people decide if what you are delivering is worth spending their precious time on. I observed that I needed to always lead with value, make it easy to read & keep my message clear, concise and simple.

Here’s an example (note the simplicity and structure):

After I saw how powerful concision could be on LinkedIn, I decided to give it a try on my sales calls, too. My next call finished almost fifteen minutes earlier than my usual thirty minutes. Of those fifteen minutes I was on the phone, I spent only about two of them explaining my value proposition. That deal closed in two weeks.

Do this now:

Review your value proposition and cut it down to 1-2 sentences. If you can’t articulate the value in two sentences tops, I don’t believe that you know your product/service well enough from the perspective of your buyer.

Bonus:

Record your calls and give yourself a mulligan: practice the same points you made in the call, but using only 50% of the words.

2. Contribute in Online Communities to Build a Lead Generation Machine

“‘Build it, and they will come’ only works in the movies. Social Media is a ‘build it, nurture it, engage them’ and they may come and stay.” – Seth Godin

Marketers are great and finding where the ideal customer spends their time and – more importantly – their attention. They know what blogs they read, what newsletters they subscribe to, what slack channels they’re active on, and they spend time and money to make sure their brand is also present in those channels. If you want to create your own steady funnel of leads, you need to take a chapter out of their playbook.

Look for industry-specific groups or communities that are engaged in discussions about the problems and challenges that you can help solve and start to live there. Carve out twenty minutes a day to post and engage with thoughtful comments, and over time you’ll begin to build yourself up as an expert in your field.

No pitching.

I repeat: no pitching.

You want people seeing you as an industry expert/consultant and not just another sales guy. That takes time, and a good faith effort to just be interested and interesting.

I remember the first time an ideal prospect literally begged to jump on a call with me to “pick my brain” after a comment I had left in a group. I almost fainted! But I never looked back. These connections made with prospects in good faith ultimately resulted in over $2.5M in revenue over the past year, without the support of a marketing team (aside from myself).

Do this now:

Go join an industry community your buyers may be interested in, and share an article and your opinions on it. It can’t be an article authored by your organization.

Bonus:

Choose a channel and start to build your own community. This is a hard road, but if done right can pay off in a big way.

3. Build a Brand for Yourself on Social Media

“Extreme Ownership. Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame.” – Jacco Willick

Don’t you wish marketing had your back more? How come your accounts never get those re-targeted ads or invited on those fancy webinars? Maybe then your decision maker would actually get back to you, your deals wouldn’t have stalled, and your quarter would have been a big win.

I remember having these thoughts. Being frustrated. Feeling like I was helpless. I would follow up three, four, ten times with every member of the buying committee and even try a new champion but still nothing. Deals dragged on as I continued this endless follow-up.

By becoming my own marketer, I realized that I didn’t have to wait for marketing to provide me with air cover. I could build a drone to cover my ass while I battled it out in the trenches. And that drones name is: targeted, relevant content. It’s helped me get more than a million views of my LinkedIn content in the past year.

Creating social content is not just a top of the funnel activity to drive new leads, either. It’s helped me push stalled deals along, too. I can’t even count the times I’ve posted a video on LinkedIn and magically the next day my prospect sends me a note apologizing for being absent, explaining that they were just “very, very busy”.

People lead busy lives so make it difficult for them to forget about you.

Do this now:

Pick a challenge your prospects face, come up with three bullet points that can help them solve it (without your product), and go create your first LinkedIn video. Use subtitles to increase engagement.

Bonus:

Learn how to edit your videos with iMovie, to take your video quality a notch or two above your competitors.

4. Own the Whole Sales Funnel

“The more the world is specialized, the more it will be run by generalists” – Marcel Masse

I’m not on the whole “robots are going to replace salespeople” train. Frankly, I think that’s a ridiculous idea. But I do think that AI will slowly start taking over menial, repeatable tasks and sellers who act like order-takers will no longer have a place at the table. The future of sales will demand creativity, humanity, and authenticity, because AI cannot do those things.

Deep role specialization in sales has become the norm, but I actually think that AI and new tech will bring back the “generalist” who has a wide variety of skills in sales, marketing and operations. Rather than focus on acting on one part of the sales process, generalists can use tools all the way from lead gen to close, and spend their time optimizing the whole funnel, all the way to close. They will perform as many different business functions as is needed in the organization at that given moment.

Businesses are moving faster than ever and don’t have time to go out hire a new person every time they want to exploit a particular opportunity in the market. I believe that orgs will start to look for salespeople that can have an impact beyond just the revenue they bring in.

Do this now:

Go learn how to use Canva and create that piece of sales enablement material that you’ve been begging for!

Bonus:

Learn how to build and manage a sales stack, and test new tools on your own to improve your technical skills.

Looking for More Inspiration?

Here are a few salespeople who are great marketers that I’d recommend following (in no particular order):

• Tito Bhort
• Katherine Berry
• Andrew Mewborn
• Amy Volas
• Morgan Ingram
• Jeremy Leveille
• Daniel Disney
• Dale Dupree

The post All Salespeople Must Learn These 4 Marketing Tactics to Increase Sales in 2019 appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Using data to fuel and optimize a legacy marketing strategy into an intent marketing strategy is a priority for many Marketing and Sales organizations in the B2B industry.

The capturing and synthesizing of insights from buyer intent signals emitted on the web is possible because of key technology enablers such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, automated marketing platforms, and intent data providers.

In an article on DMNews.com, Kayla Matthews explores five robust opportunities for B2B organizations to succeed at “intent marketing,” or “any marketing that concentrates on a what a prospect tells marketers, ether directly or indirectly, they need or want at a given point in time.”

Five Ways to Succeed at Intent Marketing

1. Video ad targeting is a key tactic to leverage the power of intent data. Marketing spend allocated to video advertising can really get some mileage; even B2B prospects scroll through their phones and engage with ads.

Marketers can even target ads on YouTube videos to prospects who have been identified and segmented based on purchase intent signals they’ve emitted.

2. Increased data volume is both a boon and a potential trap for data-hungry marketing organizations. Though today’s unprecedented amounts of data about user intent, behavior, purchase history and much more are powering B2B Marketing and Sales operations, they still require careful attention and thorough governance. With great amounts of data come great privacy, security, and compliance requirements.

Competitive marketing technology stacks contain tools and software that enable the collection and analysis of such huge quantities and disparate types of data, and they allow marketers and sales reps to execute personalization tactics to engage the right audiences at the right time, using various approaches and channels.

3. AI introduces many possibilities and capabilities to the modern marketing function. AI-powered programs and analytics capture buyer intent signals from amidst the din of all web traffic; natural language processing engines parse keywords, searches, research behavior, and content consumption; and machine learning algorithms are able to learn from the data insights to make better and better predictions about outcomes and buyer journeys and intent.

Indeed, Aberdeen research shows that augmenting your marketing operations with AI improves performance and return on marketing investment.

Additionally, the increasing ease-of-use and user-friendliness of business intelligence and data analytics programs means even your least tech-savvy marketers can make some sense of insights that used to need a data scientist to discover and interpret.

4. Account-based marketing (ABM) has replaced the marketing strategies of the past, and it’s not even what you’d call nascent any longer. ABM lets marketers focus their efforts on intelligently segmented categories of prospects and treat those engagements as they would interactions with established accounts – not just prospects.

Intent data is the key to successful ABM. It informs the segmentation of prospects who have emitted purchase intent signals, and the machine learning algorithms can use their historical predictions to refine and improve each subsequent prediction.

5. Intent-based content marketing is possible only with verified and accurate intent data. Throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks doesn’t do it anymore; B2B marketers must consider buyer intent when strategizing and creating content.

When content matches a user’s intent, it will perform better, resonate more, and engage the user much more than content that doesn’t address their needs or stage of the buyer’s journey. A prospect conducts active research when they have a problem to solve – use your content to address the problem they’ve expressed intent to solve.

As cutting-edge, artificially intelligent marketing stacks improve, content-based marketing will become more effective at helping prospects find the solutions they seek than any marketing they’ve (or we’ve!) known.

Did you know that 68% of buyers prefer to research information about purchasing options on their own? In fact, 60% prefer not to interact with a salesperson at all!¹  What’s a salesperson to do to get buyers to engage?

A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of SalesLoft found that “while increasingly independent, prospective customers will engage with knowledgeable, empathetic, and informed sellers who provide relevant information and insights tailored to their business and needs.”²

Translation: The rules of (sales) engagement have changed. Sales professionals can’t afford to come across as unprepared or pushy. B2B buyers now expect sales experiences.

How exactly can sellers accomplish this? From Forrester:

To address this challenge, revenue-producing teams are adopting customer-obsessed sales engagement strategies, ones that harness customer data and technology to personalize sales communications, establish a human connection, and drive decisions based on how buyers really buy. Top firms are turning to sales enablement technologies to help produce these outcomes: Half of the sales and marketing professionals that Forrester surveyed last year said their sales enablement budgets increased in 2018 relative to 2017, with 27% reporting investment increases of more than 15% compared to the prior year.³

SalesLoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact^TM (TEI) study to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by adopting the SalesLoft sales engagement platform. Our platform enables firms to create a personalized, scalable, and consistent go-to-market process across the sales organization.

Using the Forrester Consulting TEI^TM report, we created an infographic to demonstrate some of the topline results from the study. Keep reading if you’re interested in how SalesLoft’s sales engagement platform enables organizations to create a personalized, scalable, and consistent go-to-market process across the sales organization. Or simply if cost savings are of interest to you.

Oh, and there’s a fun fact about the cost of Alaska.

Forrester TEI Report Findings

Interested in learning more about how SalesLoft’s sales engagement platform can transform your sales organization?  Download the full report here.

If your LinkedIn profile talks about how you’ve made president’s club, your goal attainment, or the sizes of deals you closed, you’re doing it wrong.

You should be proud of those achievements, but as a salesperson you should optimize your LinkedIn profile for sales, not for your ego.

By paying careful attention to each element of your profile, you set yourself up for successful social selling.

Here is how all salespeople should optimize their LinkedIn profile:

• Choose a profile photo that represents you authentically
• Use a custom cover photo
• Learn from the best: LinkedIn headlines examples for sales
• Write a summary that attracts the right connections
• Fill your experience section with positivity
• Show how interesting you are with education and volunteer experience
• List your most important skills and get endorsements
• Get recommendations from trusted professionals
• Highlight your accomplishments

LinkedIn Profile Photos for Salespeople

Who are you? What is your personal brand? Are you a buttoned-up, traditional professional or are you more of a chill dude?

However you describe yourself, you need a profile picture that represents you as both a person and as a personal brand. To make that work, there are some things you should do, and some you definitely shouldn’t.

LinkedIn Profile Picture Do’s and Don’ts:

DON’T include multiple people: People want to know who you are. If that’s hard to figure out, they’re less likely to put in the effort to make a connection.

DO be authentic: If you’re a very serious person, go ahead and take a serious photo. If you’re a little more relaxed, it’s probably okay to go with a cheerful candid or a reasonably creative photo that conveys your unique flair. That said…

DON’T think of your LinkedIn profile image like an Instagram selfie: LinkedIn remains a professional setting. This may not be the right place for your alluring pouty face.

DON’T hold alcohol: Unless you’re in alcohol sales of some kind, it’s generally not a great idea to show off your enthusiasm for liquor on LinkedIn. In fact, it might be a good idea to skip food or beverages in your profile picture in general.

If you can’t seem to find a photo of yourself that makes the cut, think about booking a professional shoot or asking a friend to take some photos the next time you hang out. Just remember what you’re taking the photos for, and make sure you communicate that clearly.

Create a Custom Cover Photo

After your profile picture, the cover photo is the first thing people see on your LinkedIn profile. Most of the time, people leave their cover photo on the default or are some random photo of pencils or a forest.

Look at all this wasted space:

That’s no good! This is the most valuable real estate on your LinkedIn profile to constantly keep your prospects and peers updated on your company.

Look at this beauty:

(Check out any of the Lessonly team member’s LinkedIn profiles. They have a variety of custom header images their team can choose from that allow employees to express themselves while representing their brand.)

Talk with your marketing department, they may already have some cover photos designed. If you don’t have a cover photo that your marketing team designed, here are some tips on designing your cover photo:

1. Customize it for LinkedIn: My mother always said if you’re going to do something, do it right. So, when you go to create your LinkedIn cover photo, please understand the nuances like the circular photo in the bottom-left corner, the sizing of the image, and how it looks both on mobile and desktop.

There are some helpful (and free) templates in Canva that help with this.

2. Keep it Relevant and Up-to-Date: Did your company just publish an epic white paper or ebook? Ask the marketing team to create custom social covers that bring awareness to it while having a clear call to action.

3. Be Clear and Concise: You don’t want a million words or supersaturated graphics on your cover photo. Figure out how you can provide just enough value to keep your prospect interested in your company.

LinkedIn Headline Examples and Advice

A good LinkedIn headline should quickly capture other users’ interest with relevant information. Consider the following:

1. Use your company one-liner: Chances are, your marketing team put a lot of effort into developing that one-liner you never use. Think about using it as your headline. That way, you and your prospects can get used to this phrasing for your product offering before they even enter the sales funnel.

Here’s a good example from Max Altschuler, VP of Marketing at Outreach.

2. Exclude your job title: While your prospects may buy from you, they aren’t necessarily coming to your LinkedIn because they care about you specifically. They want to know what you can do for them. So instead of your title, try including your passions, skills, or even a product description in your headline. And never use the words “guru”, “ninja”, or “rockstar”.

I like this example headline from Mark Aquino at LightStep:

3. Create a story: If you feel in your heart of hearts that it’s important to tell the world what you do, craft it into a story that demonstrates a kind of case study. For example, an account executive might say, “I build relationships with individuals by understanding their needs and connecting them to the right products.”

Focus the story on the outcomes you give your prospects, not on your individual function.

For example, look at Joe Apfelbaum’s headline:

4. Don’t Brag: We all know you’re the best salesperson, but your prospect doesn’t care. Don’t brag about being a “quota crusher” or any other super sales-jargon, all-about-me talk. You can highlight an accomplishment (especially if it’s outside of work), but don’t go overboard.

Now that you’ve crafted a compelling headline, let’s move on to your LinkedIn bio.

LinkedIn Summary Examples + Tips for Salespeople

The summary is one of the central parts of your LinkedIn profile, and one of the most important. It can teach people a lot about you, and your prospects can learn about what your company can do for them.

It’s super important to get this part right. Here’s how.

1. Write the way you talk: Sales is all about building genuine connections. If your LinkedIn summary sounds like it was written by a robot, that’s the impression your prospects will get.

Don’t be afraid to be true to yourself, or to add a personal flair to your bio (I like to throw a “y’all” in every so often). Being down-to-earth and real with others will go a long way toward making the right connections.

Check out David Gerhardt’s LinkedIn Profile Summary if you want to see authenticity in action:

David’s about page oozes personality, and by the end, you feel like you know everything about him. 

Emojis are okay, if that’s part of your personal brand.

2. Start with your prospect’s problem: Can I repeat this enough? This is all your prospect cares about. Demonstrate that you know what that problem is by focusing on how you can help them deal with the issues that impact them most.

Here’s a solid example from Viveka (Vivica) von Rosen:

Or, you can use your summary to show you understand your buyer’s biggest pain points:

3. Share a testimonial: Has one of your accounts contributed a testimonial, or can you ask for one? If so, using this in your summary can be powerful.

Heather Ann Havenwood used to use several testimonials in her summary:

4. Share facts and figures: If you can incorporate real sales statistics that demonstrate how you helped customers and maybe even add a case study or two, that will show prospects that you’re all about adding measurable value.

Richard Harris has this down in his profile summary:

5. Add keywords: Some people include keywords based on the top skills listed at the bottom of their LinkedIn summary. I also suggest adding keywords that your prospects are likely to search, so your profile appears in LinkedIn search results. Check the tags on your company blog if you need a quick way to figure this out.

6. Don’t be afraid to brag about your company (not yourself): If you haven’t done that, the end of your summary is the perfect place to talk about how much you love your company, your team, and the results they achieve for customers.

7. Include your contact information: Make sure you add at least your email address and company website to the contact info section in your intro. You need to be easy to reach!

Fill Your Experience Section with Positivity

It’s tempting to fill out your experience section like a resume or a job description. Before you do, though, remember that your buyer doesn’t care about your quota attainment – only their own problems.

So how should you approach this section? It’s easier than you think. Just do the following:

1. Get everyone on the same page: It’s important to align your sales and marketing teams around what your company description should be. For instance, using your company’s one-liner will help to build a consistent brand in the minds of your prospects, regardless of who they speak to at your organization.

2. Do a bit of humble bragging: Have you helped a lot of people in your position? Have your clients achieved impressive goals because of your products? Shout it out, and show your gratitude for being given the opportunity to help so many people.

3. Include all your positions: If your role changed while you were at any one employer, list all those positions. If you had several title changes, but your responsibilities remained the same, just focus on the different things you achieved in each role.

4. Keep it short: Unlike this article, your experience descriptions should be pretty short for each position. Aim for less than 75 words. Bullet points can help keep things concise and readable, too.

5. Add a punchy call to action: At the end of the day, you always want your prospects to take action. Add a vibrant CTA on your description of your current role that leads to prospects to a relevant page on your website, like a case study, product page, or pricing page.

Here’s a great example of a simple CTA:

Show How Interesting You Are With Education and Volunteer Experience

You exist outside of work! Use this section to provide high-level information that points to the human behind the screen.

Get your degree in something weird? That’s a great conversation starter.

Did you join a board of directors for a non-profit? You can flex a little here.

There are a few key things to avoid, though:

• DON’T include your highschool, even if you went to a fancy private academy that your parents paid too much for

• DON’T include fraternity or sorority volunteer experience. Instead, go volunteer somewhere new, then update your LinkedIn profile.

• DON’T include the year in which you graduated from college. Sometimes age can be an unconscious bias in how people communicate with and respect you.

List Your Most Important Skills and Get Endorsements

While it’s nice to be appreciated by your coworkers, LinkedIn endorsements shouldn’t be given only by your peers. You also need endorsements from credible people in your field and from the customers you’ve helped. This shows that you know how to add value and that you’re good at building connections.

Which skills should you choose for this section? I recommend keeping it mostly simple, focusing mainly on the tactics you rely on to help your prospects, which they’re most likely searching for anyway.

Get Recommendations from Trusted Professionals

Many people think that recommendations only matter for your future career opportunities, but they also act as testimonials.

If you can write a genuine recommendation about your experience of working with someone, do it. Chances are, they’ll return the favor, adding value for both of you. This goes for prospects-turned-customers, too!

If they don’t respond immediately, don’t panic. Consider nudging them with a few endorsements, but be ready to move on to a new LinkedIn connection with a great recommendation if it doesn’t work out.

Highlight Your Accomplishments: Honors & Awards, Projects, Publications, Language

This section can either make you look like the rockstar you are… or it can make you look like a total jerk. There’s an art to talking about your accomplishments, and when you’re in sales this becomes crucial.

Here are some tips:

1. List only External Honors & Awards: No president’s club! Instead, focus this section on external awards you’ve received, like being a part of Sales Hacker’s Annual Top 50 Awards.

2. Publications: If you’re a big guest-poster, or have been quoted in a wide variety of sales content, this is the place to showcase it.

3. Languages: If you don’t really speak that language, don’t include it. Two years of French from high school doesn’t count.

4. Projects: Most people leave this section blank. But if you did some great sales project, or helped a customer build a custom solution (and have their permission to share), highlight it here.

Now get to selling!

Optimizing your profile is only the first step to successful social selling on LinkedIn, but it’s an important one. Now you’ve got to create social content that gets attention, connect with the right people, and start real-world sales conversations.

Good luck!

The post How to Optimize your LinkedIn Profile for Sales [2020 Edition] appeared first on Sales Hacker.

The best sellers use tailored sales collateral — materials developed by their business to support the sales process — to engage prospects at the right time with the right information to close deals faster. Today’s most effective collateral bears little resemblance to the jargon-heavy brochures of years past. In fact, modern sales collateral pivots away from the vendor’s perspective and instead incorporates insight from credible third parties. According to Gartner, “content that features a third party telling or validating a story is inherently more credible and trustworthy than the same story told by a vendor.”

Answer These Four Questions to Develop Effective Sales Collateral

None of this is news for top-performing sales and marketing teams. But as buyers’ expectations evolve alongside rapid technology disruption in every industry, it may be increasingly difficult for sales and marketing to consistently develop collateral that influences revenue. The key to successful sales collateral is to map the content to your buyer’s needs by asking these simple questions:

1. Who are we selling to?
2. What questions do they need answered and when?
3. Who do they trust to answer these questions?
4. What content will most effectively answer their questions?

Build the Foundation for Sales Collateral that Connects

Answering these questions will define the basics of your buyer personas. Let’s say your company sells a modern application development automation platform, so software developers and their managers are both target buyers. Here are the questions that matter and some example answers:

1. Motivation (such as, “How can I accelerate release velocity?”)
2. Purchase process (ex. Hacker News > open source > free trials > deep-dive demo with sales engineer)
3. Influencers (fellow developers, VP of Development)
4. Preferred communication styles (Anything but email)

These insights are a critical part of developing sales collateral that connects with your prospects and differentiates you from your competition. Though acquiring this information may seem daunting at first, the plethora of research on a vast range of buyer types, plus the many tools that make surveying and actually speaking to your existing customer base cost- and time-efficient, have significantly lowered the barrier to real understanding of potential buyers.

Develop Sales Collateral that Maps to Your Buyer’s Journey

Once you have a strong foundation of anecdotal and data-based intelligence, you can confidently develop collateral that aligns to the purchase process, often called the buyer’s journey, so your sales team can answer your prospects’ questions with credible information that matches their current decision-making stage.

To continue our software developer example, it’s unlikely a developer prospect will want a support pricing document when they’ve just begun researching modern development processes. However, they may very well want access to a notable technology analyst’s side-by-side comparison of popular development methodologies. You can also give your prospect relevant information that differentiates your platform by following up a 300-level demonstration with collateral that details the technology integrations and coding languages your product supports.

Regardless of the stage, it’s critical to map sales collateral to your prospects’ motivations at any given time. SiriusDecisions found that 71% of sales leaders say that their sellers fail to connect their solution to prospects’ needs. So, just as best practices guidance and credible third-party advice is influential early in the buyer’s journey, detailed case studies that align with the prospect’s use case and demonstrate a clear return on investment will be critical in the decision-making stage.

Sales Collateral Only Works If It’s Easy to Use

You understand your buyer, their motivations and influences, and their journey to a purchase. By leveraging credible third-party voices, insightful data, and existing customer stories, you build a sales collateral repository that likely includes:

• Third-party research
• Best practice guides
• Sales presentations
• Customer case studies
• Product overview and deep dive materials
• Pricing guides

Now that you’re in the last mile to influence revenue with sales collateral, how do you enable sellers to learn about, find, and use this content? How do you track their use and see if they’re aligning collateral to the appropriate buyer’s journey stages? How do you know what is generating real buyer engagement and what’s falling flat?

Sales enablement technology can answer these questions and offer a comprehensive platform for organizing, using, and analyzing the effectiveness of sales collateral. By providing your sales teams with a single workflow for intuitive content management, just-in-time training, efficient communication, and dynamic pitching, you’ll maximize the value of sales collateral in shortening deal cycles.

Sales collateral is paramount to buyer engagement. Follow the steps outlined in this blog to build a strong foundation for creating compelling collateral, and then explore sales enablement technology to turbocharge your sales execution.

Why would a company purposefully sell items at the same (or different prices) only to average the selling prices later for reporting purposes? Well, the average selling price can reveal a lot about the health of a company.

Read further to get a better understanding of the average selling price and how to calculate it for your business.

Table of Contents

• What is a selling price?
• What is an average selling price?
• How can I use an average selling price?
• How to Calculate Average Selling Price
• Is the average selling price right for your business?

The following factors help organizations determine the selling price of their products:

• The price a buyer is willing to pay.
• The price a seller is willing to accept.
• The price that’s competitive in the market.
• The price of COGs (Cost of Goods).

Depending on the type of business you own and the offerings you sell, you might prioritize one of these factors over the others.

Business executives and investors pay close attention to the average selling price because it is a reliable indicator of a company’s financial performance. In most cases, the higher the average selling price of a product, the better. But in some cases, like start-ups or businesses making a comeback, a low average selling price can be a smart, short-term strategy to penetrate the market.

The average selling price can also summarize these factors and help you determine the price you should assign your product.

Remember, your average selling price and “the interplay between demand and supply serves as a barometer of economic health,” as ecommerce author Neeraj Singh says.

Your pricing model determines your customers, positioning, packaging, channels, and margins.

Ash Maurya, pricing expert and founder of LeanStack, warns, “If you don’t choose your pricing, the market pushes you towards the average. If you chase average pricing, you become average. Don’t leave your pricing for others to determine.”

Pro tip: Creating high demand for a product can greatly influence its selling price. Check out this blog on creating high demand.

For example, electronics have a higher average selling price than books. Alternatively, electronics typically have a shorter product life cycle than books. Take the first generation iPhone and the J.K. Rowling novel, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” Both products came out in 2007.

The iPhone and the seventh Harry Potter novel have different life cycles. The 2007 iPhone’s product life cycle immediately shortened with the release of the 2008 iPhone 3G. While it could be considered a collector’s item, its function is effectively useless after years of new devices and software updates.

The novel, however, has an infinite life cycle. As long as people are reading, its product life cycle continues.

Pro tip: It’s important to remember that if you’re running promotions on your ecommerce website, you will want to let retail partners know so they can competitively price the product because you wouldn’t want to hurt your partners’ bottom line in the meantime.

How can I use an average selling price?

Create a market entry strategy.

If you’re entering a new market, you need to determine the price of your products or services. Using the average selling price facilitates this process.

Once you calculate this metric, your company can use this information to set itself apart as a luxury or value retailer. Based on the ASP, increasing your prices can give your company the appearance of premium products; however, this higher cost can lead to fewer sales. Alternatively, if you set your cost below the ASP, your company might sell more but deal with smaller profit margins.

Pro tip: You will want to keep track of your average selling price and margins over the calendar year. The boundary you have on how often you discount a product and how low it can be is known as your MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) policy.

Identify trends.

Using an average selling price will help your company identify trends in the market. Let’s use headphones to demonstrate this. Say a company like Bose released a set of headphones for $300 last year, and they made 150,000 sales. This year, they released their newest pair at $250 and sold 250,000 units. Although the company dropped the cost of their product, this decrease incentivized more customers to make a purchase and led to a $17.5 million increase.

If a new or existing company was preparing to launch a new product in this industry, identifying this trend could expedite settling on a market price.

Pro tip: Check out this free template to help you conduct market research and identify the best price.

Make conclusions about products and services.

Do you keep a product, or do you scrap it? The average selling price helps your company decide. If you increase your selling price due to ASP and notice a drop in sales, that is not necessarily surprising. Alternatively, if a decrease in your price still leads to a fall in sales, it is time to pay attention. While multiple factors could be at play, ASP will ultimately help you decide if you need to work on a strategy for the product or remove it from your catalog.

Supply and demand also play a key role in determining product quality. Assistant Manager of EU Finance Mohamed Hagag describes this as “supply and demand are fundamental principles in economics that describe the relationship between the quantity of a good or service supplied by producers and the quantity demanded by consumers.”

Pro tip: Marketing and sales should attend any meetings that discuss a product’s end-of-life cycle. Sometimes, a product just isn’t getting the push it needs to succeed rather than needing to be retired.

How to Calculate Average Selling Price

Average selling price (ASP) is the amount of money a product in a specific category is sold for across different markets and channels. To calculate the average selling price of a product, take the total revenue earned from the product or service and divide it by the number of products or services sold.

Pipedrive, HubSpot, and Salesforce are three of the top sales tracking software tools in the industry. Instead of calculating your average selling price in a spreadsheet, these tools make the process easier.

When using HubSpot’s CRM, first, make sure you look at deals that closed in your desired period. The data you need is the sum of the total revenue from the closed-won deals and the number of units from the closed-won deals. To find the average selling price, divide the sum of the total revenue by the total number of units.

Pro tip: Even if you are not using sales tracking software, the average selling price is still painless to calculate with spreadsheet software. To use this tool, add up all the columns with your sales revenue numbers and divide by the number of units sold.

Actual Selling Price Formula

Now that we understand the average selling price and how to calculate it, let’s apply this concept to the actual selling price and apply these formulas to a scenario.

For example, we have determined that the average selling price for Android smartphones is $261. Let’s say you’re trying to determine a price for your new state-of-the-art cell phone. You would likely price your product above the average to stand out as a high-tech phone provider.

But how much is enough — or worse — too much? Luckily, you won’t need to guess this number. A simple formula can calculate the actual selling price of your mobile phone.

The selling price formula is:

Cost of Goods (COG) is the price a retailer pays for the product, including the product itself and any packaging. The profit margin is a percentage of the cost price.

Let’s define the key elements in the formula.

• COG: The price a retailer paid for the product.
• Profit Margin: A percentage of the cost price.

The actual selling price can tell you how much to price your high-tech cell phones. Once your product life cycle is nearing completion, you can calculate the average selling price of your luxury phones to see how it compares to the price you sold them for and the average selling price of basic, low-tech phones.

Pro tip: There are different ways to improve your margins that don’t involve selling more products. For example, maybe you can use a different type of packaging that uses less plastic or is cheaper, improving your margins. Evaluating the COG frequently can help you increase revenue.

How to Calculate Selling Price Per Unit

Follow Along With HubSpot’s Sales Pricing Calculator

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If your business purchases inventory in bulk and sells it, you’ll want your selling price per unit to be higher than what you paid to turn a profit. Otherwise, you’ll break even on revenue. While that’s not as bad as losing money, it’s certainly not as good as making it.

For example, Hot Pie’s Bakery Supply needs to calculate the selling price for its product line of bread machines. The business purchased 20 bread machines for $3,000.

• Total cost of units purchased: $3,000
• Number of units purchased: 20
• Cost price: $150 ($3,000/20)

Now, it’s time to plug the numbers into the selling price formula. The cost price for each bread machine is $150, and the business hopes to earn a 40% profit margin. Here is what the selling price formula would look like in action:

Selling Price = $150 + (40% x $150)

Selling Price = $150 + (0.4 x $150)

Selling Price = $150 + $60

Selling Price = $210

Based on the formula, Hot Pie's Bakery Supply has a selling price. Each bread machine will be sold to buyers for $210.

Let’s fast-forward one quarter. Hot Pie finished the quarter with $4,000 in revenue. The business leaders want to know the average selling price of Hot Pie’s bread machines.

Total revenue: $4,000

Number of products sold: 20

Here’s the formula for the average selling price in action:

Average Selling Price = $4,000 ÷ 20

Average Selling Price = $200

This is an example where the actual selling price and the average selling price don’t match exactly. It happens for several reasons, like introducing a lower-priced sale item to sell inventory faster or an unplanned discount to smooth over a customer interaction. It might also occur if you don’t account for selling price factors.

Pro tip: Selling a product for very little margin or profit is not unheard of and could still be a good strategy. Consider Costco, which sells rotisserie chickens for no or hardly any profit yet gets customers into its store with these sales. Sometimes, margins need to be sacrificed to get the results you want.

Is the average selling price right for your business?

Both actual and average selling prices are critical to telling the financial story of a business. If the pricing is not based on what a buyer is willing to pay or competition in the market, you may end up with a pricing strategy that doesn’t make you money.

With the correct selling price in place, your business can earn a profit and win over loyal customers along the way.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in April 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Wondering why a marketer is writing about business development? It’s because I’ve learned that business development is more than just a fancy term for sales.

Business development is actually a company-wide strategy that brings every department on the same page — including marketing and sales.

So grab a comfy chair, get a cup of coffee (or something stronger), and let's dive headfirst into the world of business development planning.

Table of Contents

• Business Development Planning
• How to Develop a Business Development Strategy
• Business Development Strategy Example

Business Development Planning

Business development planning is the process of creating a roadmap for your company’s growth and success. I think of it as a treasure map that lets you navigate the treacherous waters of the business world to find the buried treasure (aka long-term profitability).

That said, just like in a treasure hunt, you must also perform a series of steps to ensure you end up with a treasure in your hands:

• Market analysis. Research the industry, competitors, and target audience to uncover opportunities and potential challenges.
• Goal setting. Business development planning is incomplete without measurable goals, as the individual department members can’t see where to go without a big, red “X” on the map.
• Strategy development. Create a game plan for reaching your goals, including tactics for marketing, sales, and partnerships.
• Resource allocation. Ensure you have the team, budget, and tools to make your journey a success.
• Performance tracking. To ensure you’re headed in the right direction, check your compass (metrics and KPIs).

While that’s enough of Jack Sparrow — or Captain Jack Sparrow — let’s dig deeper into how to develop a business development strategy.

How to Develop a Business Development Strategy

1. Define your business objectives.

While you might want to settle with “make more money than last year,” you need to define your wishes into clear objectives to have a shot at achieving them. So, whether your business objective is to reach a revenue figure, develop a new product, or expand into a new geographic region, lay it out.

To come up with clear business objectives, I recommend going SMART:

• Specific.
• Measurable.
• Attainable.
• Relevant.
• Time-Bound.

For instance, if you own an ecommerce company, you might define your business objective as: “Increase average order value by 15% in the next six months by implementing a personalized product recommendation system and offering bundled deals.”

If you’re having a hard time coming up with SMART business objectives, I find HubSpot’s free template for SMART goal setting incredibly helpful for getting started.

2. Conduct market research.

You might think that you know your market inside out, but let’s face it — assumptions can be dangerous.

In fact, Amy Kauffman, chief marketing officer at CMO Room, shares that, “The biggest mistake I see companies make when developing their business strategy is not doing enough market research upfront. Many founders are overconfident in their product or idea and assume that if they build it, customers will automatically come."

Put on a pair of X-ray glasses to see what’s really going on beneath the surface. Find out what your customers want, how much potential the target market has, and what your competitors are up to.

At this point, I typically scour industry reports, government statistics, and online databases. If you wish to do the same, here are my recommended sources:

• Industry reports. Check out industry research from Gartner, McKinsey & Company, and Forrester.
• Government statistics. If you manage an American business, I recommend the U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Federal Reserve Economic Data for their incredible breadth of insights. Outside the U.S., you can try out location-specific sources, like Eurostat, or global sources, such as World Bank Open Data.
• Online databases. While there are too many online databases to make sense of, I typically look for statistics from our annual reports, like HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report, since our researchers take due care in collecting data. Other than that, I also like eMarketer, Pew Research Center, and Statista.

That said, while these sources should provide most of the data you require, I still recommend using the good old-fashioned method of talking to people. Use surveys or interviews to get inside your potential customers’ heads. Find out what makes them tick, what keeps them up at night, and what they really need.

David Janovic, founder of RJ Living, especially recommends detailed market research for businesses expanding to new markets: “When entering a new market it's definitely crucial to be putting the time and effort into conducting thorough market research — which will help you understand the local landscape, customer preferences, and potential competitors."

Finally, I take all the juicy data and connect the dots to inform my business development strategy moving forward.

3. Identify your target customers.

Once you’ve done your market research homework, it’s time to zero in on your ideal customers. After all, you can’t please everyone.

I recommend creating buyer personas, which are fictional yet realistic representations of your ideal customers based on data. If you have existing buyer personas, update them based on the insights from the market research.

Pro tip: If you don’t have any buyer personas or need to develop another one for a new audience segment, check out HubSpot’s buyer persona generator. It helps you flesh out your target customers' pain points and motivations.

Next, evaluate the market size, growth potential, and opportunity of each buyer persona. See which buyer personas align with your business objectives and prioritize them accordingly.

4. Evaluate your current position.

Now that you have researched the market and the customers, I recommend taking a long, hard look in the mirror to assess your current position and figure out where you stand.

The best way to do this is with the trusty SWOT analysis — a strategic planning technique used to identify a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats — to help you determine where you’re at in comparison to your competitors.

Kauffman also shares the same opinion: “Competitive analysis should play a central role in developing the business strategy. It's critical to have a deep understanding of the competitive landscape — not just who the players are but their strengths, weaknesses, positioning, and likely moves."

Once I have the data on the competitive landscape, I start filling out a SWOT analysis template:

• Strengths. I start by noting whatever our brand is excelling at (i.e., your competitive advantage). For instance, when it comes to HubSpot, we have a strong brand reputation and a loyal customer base. Plus, our content marketing game is on point as well, with thought leadership pieces.
• Weaknesses. Next up, I highlight the areas where we’re struggling or falling short. For instance, the sheer amount of features in the HubSpot platform might feel overwhelming for new users.
• Opportunities. I look at the market trends, audience segments, and emerging technologies our brand can leverage. For instance, HubSpot benefits from remote work and ecommerce growth.
• Threats. Lastly, I check out competitors, markets, and regulations to identify threats that could potentially derail our success. For example, if there’s an economic downturn, businesses might reduce their spending on martech such as HubSpot.

Pro tip: Remember, SWOT analysis isn't a one-and-done deal. So, even if you conducted a SWOT analysis during the startup stage, I suggest doing it again while developing a business development strategy since businesses evolve, markets shift, and customer preferences change over time.

While SWOT analysis provides a bird’s-eye view of the competitive landscape, I believe you can also find many granular but important details about business by taking a deep dive into your sales funnel, marketing mix, and customer experience.

In particular, you can look for clogs in the sales pipeline where potential customers are getting stuck. Or you can review your marketing efforts and see what’s working and what could be improved. Finally, you could ask customers to identify unmet needs.

5. Develop strategies.

Now it’s time to don your strategy hat and craft effective strategies for each department to drive business growth. While the exact strategy depends on your business and its objectives, here’s how it looks for different departments.

Sales

No effective business development strategy is complete without a sales plan. If you’ve already established a sales plan, make sure to unify it with your business development efforts.

Your plan should outline your target audience, identify potential obstacles, provide a “game plan” for sales reps, outline responsibilities for team members, and define market conditions. If you haven’t created a sales plan before, I recommend checking out our free sales plan template.

Besides that, see if you can benefit from any technology improvements in the sales department. For instance, our data shows that 81% of sales professionals found AI to be helpful for reducing manual tasks.

Marketing

If you equate strategic business development to only sales, you’ll lack a steady sales channel to support your business development strategy.

After all, 96% of leads do their own homework before talking to a sales rep. So, if you don’t have marketing content to attract leads, your well-trained sales professionals end up doing, well, nothing.

According to Kauffman, it's a prevalent issue. “Failing to have marketing expertise at the table from the very beginning, when initially planning and developing the product or business, is another common pitfall. Marketing should not be an afterthought — it needs to be deeply embedded in the overall strategy from day one."

I recommend cooking up some marketing strategies to:

• Resonate with the target audience. Identify appropriate channels, customize messaging, and personalize content to develop a marketing mix that aligns with the target customers’ preferences and behaviors.
• Educate the audience. Don’t assume everyone will immediately “get” it. Instead, use marketing to attract, engage, and explain what you offer.
• Increase brand visibility. Up to71% of prospects prefer doing research independently without talking to a sales professional, so I recommend using search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing to build a trustworthy brand.

Customer Success

While it might appear that business development means getting more customers, it doesn’t have to be the case. You can also get more business from your existing customers since you’ve already earned their trust. In fact, our data shows that 72% of a company's revenue comes from existing customers.

While there are several ways to gain customers' trust, I recommend establishing a personal connection instead of relying on coupons, discounts, or free perks.

For instance, you can listen to customers’ feedback and improve your product to fully win them over to your side.

Image Source

Paul L. Gunn Jr., founder of the KUOG Corporation, agrees, saying that the “heartfelt action to go beyond the transactional to deliver a solution that speaks to the intangibles anchors them to often support a long-term relationship and make significant tangible impact."

6. Define tactics and action plans.

Once you’ve got your strategies in place, it’s time to get tactical. I recommend you start with identifying key initiatives and projects that will bring your strategies to life.

If you’ve already filled out our free sales plan template, your sales team will be well and ready. If you haven’t, start doing so by assigning roles, tasks, and responsibilities to everyone on the team. For fleshing out your marketing strategy, I like using HubSpot’s free marketing plan template.

If you like to work without a template, ensure your action plans include information on the following:

• Tasks. Let the team members know what they’re responsible for, who the lead is, and what’s required of them.
• Timeline. Instead of going with “we'll get it done when we get it done,” set realistic milestones and deadlines for each initiative to keep everyone on track and accountable.
• Budgets. Since money doesn’t grow on trees, you need to be smart about where you allocate your resources. Instead of blowing your entire budget on a flashy marketing campaign, put money into initiatives that will truly move the needle.

7. Set metrics and KPIs.

If you can’t track your progress, you cannot know if your business plan for development is working. That’s why setting clear metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) is so important — it’s basically a scoreboard for your business development efforts.

To start, identify the specific metrics that align with your business objectives and strategies. I usually find the following metrics incredibly insightful:

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC). CAC tells you how much you’re spending to attract new customers. By optimizing your marketing and sales, you can lower your CAC.
• Conversion rate. Conversion rate measures the effectiveness of different marketing and sales processes, such as how many customers took a desired action.
• Win rate. Unlike conversion rate, win rate deals only with sales opportunities. It’s a percentage of how many sales opportunities your sales team successfully closed — which provides insights into your sales progress.
• Net promoter score (NPS). NPS measures customer satisfaction with your brand or how likely they are to recommend your brand to others.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV, also called LTV, helps businesses understand the total revenue they can expect from a single customer.

Gauri Manglik, CEO of Instrumentl, especially recommends tracking LTV to SaaS companies: “The key is that LTV captures both revenue and engagement over time, not just a snapshot. So rather than looking at new sales in isolation, I always encourage SaaS companies to make LTV their north star metric for business development.”

Pro tip: After identifying the relevant metrics or KPIs, you can also set SMART goals for each to make tracking easier. Plus, you can create dashboards to visualize the progress against the KPIs. It’ll make it easy for team members to see how they’re doing and what they need to improve.

8. Allocate resources.

While I’ve already mentioned resource allocation during action plans, you must also approach resource management in a big-picture mode to execute your business development strategy seamlessly.

I recommend prioritizing the initiatives based on their potential impact and alignment with your business objectives. In other words, focus your resources on the areas that give you the most bang for your buck.

Beyond that, you must also take a hard look at your current resources. If you have any gaps in skills, expertise, or technology, fill those gaps first — by hiring new talent, investing in training, or getting a new tool.

For example, 63% of sales leaders share that AI makes it easier for them to compete with other businesses, so you might also improve your sales metrics by adopting an AI-powered sales solution.

Additionally, resource allocation isn’t a one-and-done deal (like other things on this list), so keep a close eye on the ROI of different initiatives outlined in your business development plan and shift your resources as required. If something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to try a different approach.

9. Implement and monitor.

Since you’ve got a solid plan, a team of do-ers, and enough resources to pull it off, it’s time to put all the strategizing and planning into action and watch the magic happen.

First things first, ensure all your plans have reached the shop floor — everyone knows their role and has the tools they need to crush it. Plus, don’t forget to keep the communication lines open as situations arise to be on top of your game and fix the issue right there and then.

And once you have kicked things off, keep your fingers on the pulse and track your progress against the metrics and KPIs. It’s like checking your GPS in a new city to ensure you’re staying on course.

Lastly, remember to celebrate your wins along the way — whatever size they might be — to keep the team motivated and engaged for the long haul.

10. Continuously review and update.

Since markets evolve, customer trends change, and competitors improve, a business development strategy is never a finished document. Instead, you must keep reviewing and updating your strategies to generate new business for your brand.

Here’s how I approach it:

• Conduct regular check-ins. Assess your current strategies regularly. Are you hitting your targets? Are there any areas that require improvement? Ask tough questions and adjust if required instead of sitting idly.
• Collect market intelligence. Instead of only relying on internal feedback, stay up-to-date with market trends, customer needs, and competitor activities. Use that knowledge to update your strategies and tactics.
• Ask customers for feedback. Your customers should be the center of your attention as they provide specific insights, relevant ideas, and word-of-mouth referrals.

Business Development Strategy Example

While navigating all the moving parts of a business development strategy might appear confusing, here’s an example of a business development strategy I put together for an ecommerce store, “GreenThreads,” which sells eco-friendly clothing and accessories.

Business Objectives Example

Increase online sales revenue by 25% within the next 12 months by expanding product range and implementing targeted marketing campaigns.

Market Research Example

• According to Material Exchange, 86% of brands asked for sustainable material options in 2023, compared to 52% in 2022.
• Millennials and Gen Z-ers make up 68% of the total sustainable apparel market.
• According to McKinsey & Company, two-thirds of fashion brands who made decarbonization commitments are behind on their schedule.

Target Customer Persona Example

Meet “Eco-Conscious Sam,” a 24-year-old urban professional who values sustainability and ethical consumption. She‘s always on the lookout for fashionable clothing and accessories that align with her values, and she’s willing to pay a bit more for high-quality, eco-friendly products. Sam is active on social media and loves to share her favorite sustainable brands with her followers.

SWOT Analysis Example

• Strengths. GreenThreads is like the superhero of sustainable fashion, fighting fast fashion with its eco-friendly powers and ethical production processes. With a user-friendly online platform, it makes it easier for customers to shop with a clear conscience.
• Weaknesses. GreenThreads’ prices may be higher than those of its fast-fashion competitors. The limited product range might limit the options for customers.
• Opportunities. With sustainable fashion becoming the talk of the town, GreenThreads has the chance to win over eco-conscious consumers. Partnering with influencers and expanding globally could make GreenThreads the world’s most wanted (in a good way!).
• Threats. GreenThreads faces fierce competition from other eco-friendly brands. Plus, the volatile economic environment forces many customers to prioritize penny-pinching over planet-saving.

Action Plans Example

• Product expansion. GreenThreads will develop a line of eco-friendly accessories to complement clothing offerings.
• Marketing. GreenThreads will use user-generated content and eco-friendly influencer partnerships to launch targeted social media campaigns.

Metrics and KPIs Example

GreenThreads will measure:

• Sales revenue.
• Product performance.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC).

If GreenThreads hits the 25% sales revenue, they can pat themselves on the back. Plus, product performance and CAC will tell GreenThreads how effective they were in expanding the product range and their marketing efforts.

Budget Allocation Example

• Marketing. $50,000.
• Influencer partnerships. $20,000.
• Product expansion. $115,000.

Create a Strategic Business Development Plan

With a strategic business development plan, you‘re not just throwing darts blindfolded and hoping for the best. You’re investing your precious resources, time, and hard-earned money into initiatives that'll knock the socks off your short-term and long-term goals alike.

But don’t take my word for it. Sit down with your team, break out the snacks, and start brainstorming your own master plan to set your business up for long-term success.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2023 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Engaging Customers with Video

Many brands are now choosing to tell their stories through video, and it’s not surprising to see why. 90% of customers say video helps them make buying decisions and 64% of customers say that seeing a video makes them more likely to buy (Forbes).

Consumers want and expect video content to both educate and entertain. It has become the norm across social media platforms, with “stories” being a relatively new addition.

However, while brands are capitalizing on the power of video in their marketing, many are missing a trick when it comes to understanding the customer experience, and socializing the results of CX programs. After all, CX professionals, researchers and senior execs are consumers too!

In this day and age, video content is found to be more engaging than written reports. In fact, 59% of execs would prefer to watch a video, rather than read text on the same subject.

If something connects with us emotionally, we will find that more memorable. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve never felt emotionally connected to a PowerPoint chart!

Finding the Story

Although videos are a fantastic way to tell stories, you still need to identify the right story to tell.

CX programs can provide us with insights into the key drivers of satisfaction or NPS with open-ends and text analytics, providing a view on the all-important question, “why.”

Sometimes we need to go deeper. We need more detail, and we need a to unlock the emotional connections that customers have with our brands. The cultural shift towards video that has taken place, facilitated by advancements in technology and the extremely high adoption rates of mobile devices, means that consumers are able, and willing to video their experiences, thoughts, and behaviors. Video questions can easily be incorporated into CX programs for a seamless experience for respondents. Not only does it provide consumers with an engaging way to provide feedback, but it gives you more data, greater context and brings the customers to life.

Through video, consumers provide at least 6 times more words in their reviews than they would in a traditional free text response. And not only do they say more words to provide greater detail on a topic, but they actually also talk about more topics, providing additional themes for your business to analyze and attend to.

Getting Emotional with CX

As the great storyteller, Maya Angelou, has said….

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

So much of our decision-making as consumers is driven by emotion, yet it’s actually one of the hardest things to capture. By getting closer to uncovering how interactions and experiences make customers feel, there comes a certain understand of what is working, and what needs improving.

When you talk with someone face to face, you can get a real sense of how they feel – even if they are trying to hide it! Our facial expressions and our tone of voice give away clues to our emotional reactions. Video not only captures those reactions, but the capabilities exist to extract the meaning from that content, giving you great insight into the emotional highs and lows. And it matters as, 86% of buyers will pay more for a better brand experience, but only 1% feel that vendors consistently meet expectations (Oracle).

Why Isn’t Video Used More?

Historically, video has been challenging to work with. Before the advancements in AI and machine learning, gaining insight from video content was a long and painful process, requiring hours of watching, tagging and time-stamping content. Now the technology exists to automate this process, so you can benefit from the richness of video feedback without the manual headache. This frees up time to focus on the interpretation of the data and the creation of the insight story.

There also seems to be some nervousness in inviting video feedback from customers. Through social media, people have the opportunity to tell everyone what they think anyway. By incorporating video feedback into a CX program, you have the ability to focus on the areas that matter most and to understand feedback in a wider context such as the customer type, customer journey or touch points.

The Inescapable Truth

Videos are hard to ignore. They can sometimes be quite shocking or hugely inspiring, but either way they are memorable. It’s quite shocking to see some stories in the news sometimes, like the video of that passenger who was removed from a United Airlines flight. But truthfully, if we had just read about the incident, would it have had the same impact as the visual context?

Video delivers the inescapable truth: it can’t be rationalized the same as text, scores, or charts: video provides an emotional connection which drives action.

Showreels can be created in minutes that bring insights to life, using real customers, talking about real experiences. These videos can be game changing for your CX program – they deliver powerful stories that make people sit up and listen. CX programs should be a way of constantly improving the experience, not just a means of giving the experience a certain score.

Here's a situation salespeople find themselves in often: your potential buyer wants more features from the product. They want a "feature-complete solution" that checks off all the boxes.

But you don't want to add every feature you can think of. You know that more features don't make for a better product—in fact, oftentimes the more features you add to a product, the worse it gets. It's not about building more features—it's about building the right ones in a way that empowers your customers to accomplish their desired outcome better than any other tool out there.

In this situation, it can be hard to have a productive conversation with prospects. They want more features, but you know that more isn’t always better. And that can cost you sales. Ultimately, it's just another sales objection.

Want our template on handling objections? You can download it free here.

So what do I tell teams in this situation?

Sell your product philosophy before you sell your product

It’s tough to have this kind of conversation. You run into this often with first-time buyers. They do their research and come at you with a huge list of features they want.

This is why I tell reps not to start with the features and benefits of the product.

That seems counterintuitive, but it gives you time to address something even more important: the philosophy and point of view behind your product.

If you’ve built something, you’re an expert in that field. You’ve seen what your competition is offering. You’ve seen which features are useful and which are just distractions.

You left those features out of your product for a reason. And you need to let prospects know that.

To do that, tell prospects your story. Tell them why you chose to include the features you did. Tell them you didn’t set out to create a product with the most features—you set out to build one with the best features.

That might seem like a minuscule difference. But it can mean the world in a sales conversation.

And don’t forget to explain why you left things out, either. That’s important, too.

What you’re doing here is selling the story of your company.

The power of storyselling

Effective salespeople have something in common with engaging public speakers: they’re great storytellers.

The human brain is wired for storytelling. Stories light up the brain’s emotional centers. That’s what makes people feel a connection—and that connection leads to sales. Features and benefits are important. But if features and benefits were all that mattered, the world wouldn't need sales people. Buyers could compare features and make a buying decision based on that alone. A real connection is even more important than features and benefits.

In most cases, good storysellers make the story about their prospect. Making a prospect the hero of a story is something that salespeople have done forever. And it works.

But in this case, your company is the hero of the story. It might go something like this:

• You (the prospect) have this specific problem
• We went through the same problem
• It was frustrating not finding a good solution
• We looked at all of the options and found that they didn’t solve the problem for us
• So we built one ourselves
• We focused on what’s important instead of trying to include every feature we could possibly think of
• Here’s the story of a company like yours that found our product to be very useful

If that customer found success because you included fewer features, even better. That’s perfect. For a specific example, we’ll talk about the story that we use at Close in a moment.

Good storytelling grabs your prospect’s attention and gets them to focus on how your product will help them. They won’t check out immediately when you say you don’t have the latest trendy feature that your competitors have.

Instead, they’ll see why you built your product the way you did and understand the value in a simpler, more focused tool.

If you tell the story well, they’ll buy into that idea, too. Combine the story of your company with your product philosophy and you’ll nail this type of sales conversation.

Once you’ve sold your product philosophy, you can get into the features and benefits of your product. You can do all the things you’d normally do on a sales call. But until a feature-hungry prospect understands why you did what you did, they’ll be skeptical.

How we sell the story behind our own product

We’ve been doing this a long time. Close doesn’t have as many features as some of the big sales CRMs. And that makes some of our prospects nervous.

We have a simple product philosophy: salespeople should spend more time communicating with prospects. Seems like a given, right?

Unfortunately, it’s not. Most B2B sales reps spend a huge amount of time entering data into their CRM software and doing other administrative busywork. This is a colossal waste of company resources.

When salespeople aren’t communicating, they’re not doing what they’re best at. So administrating, logging their activities, entering data, organizing leads, and all the other things sales reps do are distractions. That creates friction. We wanted to change that.

Here’s an example. One of our customers was previously using Salesforce, and they did a lot of cold calling. Their reps had to click 16 times to log a single call in Salesforce. 16 times! Once they switched to Close, that number went down to 2. They saved 14 clicks with every call.

That doesn’t sound like much, right?

But consider this: each rep was making about 100 calls every day. So they’re saving 140 clicks. With a team of 30 people, that’s 21,000 saved clicks every week. Now you’re looking at some serious time savings.

At this point, you know our product philosophy. You see exactly why we didn’t include the millions of features that are in Salesforce. And you understand why that’s a good thing.

If we were in a sales conversation, I could now go on to selling the features and benefits of our product.

I’d tell you about Close’s predictive dialer, which automatically calls through a rep’s lead list and only involves the rep when someone picks up the phone. It lets your sales reps spend more time doing what they do best: selling.

The fact that we have fewer features than Salesforce is actually a benefit. Lots of people don’t see it that way at first. But once we tell this story, they get it.

That’s the power of telling your product philosophy.

Make sure your salespeople are on board

When you’re the only one making sales calls or presentations, you sell your product philosophy with ease. You know the story behind your product, you know the point of view your company has, and you can articulate them.

In the beginning, we had a small team of founders that sold Close. We had all helped create the product, so it was easy for us to talk about our philosophy. That’s the case with most startups.

But as your sales team grows, that story can get lost.

It’s easy to overlook that fact—I’ve done it myself. Some of your salespeople will get out of the habit of selling your company story. Others might not know the story at all.

To make sure that your salespeople are selling your product philosophy, include it in your sales trainings. Make sure to talk about it on a regular basis. Listen to your reps’ calls to see if they’re sharing the story well.

Once your team sees how effective sharing your product philosophy is, they’ll do it on their own. But you have to help them get started. You have to make your philosophy part of the sales process.

Empathize with your prospects

It’s easy to get frustrated with prospects who want all the features. But when you understand where they’re coming from, selling them on your philosophy gets easier.

They’re usually first-time buyers—not experts. They’re feeling a bit unsure of their decisions and insecure about the buying process. So they figure that if a product has every feature on the market, it’s probably a good choice.

It’s an understandable reaction. You know that the product with the most features won’t be the best choice for them. Now you just have to tell them why—and you’ll get that sale. That’s the power of selling your philosophy, and not just your product.

Want to get better at handling ANY objection? It all starts with the right objection management template. Download yours today!

GET YOUR FREE OBJECTION MANAGEMENT TEMPLATE

Summary: Society has no shortage of opinions on the unique workplace habits of Millennials. The sales world is no different, but many of those stereotypes miss what makes Millennials shine when it comes to forging connections and closing deals.

For years, the sales world has heard endless stories about Millennials and what makes them tick. Let’s be honest: We’ve probably formed opinions and let them shift into stereotypes without much firsthand experience.

Well, those stereotypes have real-life consequences on sales teams.

By 2020, Millennials will make up 50% of the workforce. It’s time for sales leaders to cast aside the stereotypes and take a hard look at Millennial motivations, strengths, and shortcomings. Attracting and inspiring top sales talent will depend on it.

So how do you maximize the effectiveness of Millennials on your sales team? Let’s start by debunking a few of the more prevalent Millennial myths.

5 Myths About Millennials We Disagree With

1. Millennials change sales jobs quickly.
2. Millennials don’t know the difference between a real relationship and fake rapport.
3. Millennials aren’t willing to work hard.
4. Millennials have unrealistic expectations.
5. Millennials challenge authority.

Myth 1: Millennials change sales jobs quickly

When Baby Boomers entered the workforce, the prevailing wisdom was that employees who were loyal to their companies would earn more, advance to higher-level positions, and reap 401(k) or pension rewards.

Viewing Millennials through this lens, Boomers and Generation Xers accuse the younger generation of job-hopping in an attempt to find shortcuts to success instead of paying their dues.

The truth: The turnover for sales staff is notoriously high across the field. Some estimates report sales turnover rate as high as 34.7% per year.

Sales burnout has always been a problem in the industry, but it’s gotten worse. According to a 2018 report by The Bridge Group, the average tenure for a sales rep is down to one and a half years—and that includes ramp-up and onboarding timeframes.

Despite the trouble with retention, there’s no evidence that Millennials are job-hopping more than any other generation. In fact, when controlling for other variables, Millennials tend to stay in jobs longer than other generations did during this time in their lives.

According to a study by Pew Research Center, when compared to Gen Xers at the same age, the percentage of Millennials staying with their employers for 13 or more months is slightly higher.

Myth 2: Millennials don’t know the difference between a real relationship and fake rapport

Other generations see the way Millennials connect with people as fake or inauthentic, especially when it comes to talking through technology-based channels.

As digital natives, Millennials are comfortable using technology as a self-expression. Other generations might write off the way Millennials build relationships with leads, but that’s a mistake.

The truth: Sales leaders miss the forest for the trees as they consider how Millennials build their pipeline. We tend to hear about the downside of growing up connected, but in sales, being connected to many potential buyers and customers is the point.

Millennials feel comfortable sharing intimate details and personal stories. Because of their transparency, Millennials often have a natural mindset that balances attraction and promotion when it comes to building pipelines and closing business.

In fact, Millennials are some of the best social sellers.

In addition, Millennials’ comfort with mass communication helps bridge gaps and attract prospects in the sales funnel. As they push out content on social, in blog posts, and online, Millennial sales reps tend to reach broader audiences.

Their connectivity can erase the distance between buyers and sellers. In the past, having to build a customer base one person at a time—whether through conversation, email, or a seminar—was labor-intensive and time-consuming. Now, the ability to push out content that resonates with buyers greatly increases the area a seller can cover.

Myth 3: Millennials aren’t willing to work hard

Millennials are more likely than other generations in sales to spend time on social media, work odd hours, and automate sales processes. Other generations often misinterpret that behavior to mean that Millennials aren’t able or willing to work hard.

Millennials can get a bad rep for taking shortcuts in building rapport with leads or cutting corners in the sales process.

The truth: When I think of Millennial sales reps, I’m reminded of my friend and colleague, an extremely successful sales executive for a $56 million pharmaceutical business. When I asked her for the secret to her success, she told me it was “being lazy.”

She wasn’t being funny or self-deprecating; what she really meant was that she constantly found ways to work smarter, not harder.

She had a keen sense of which activities generated revenue and which were administrative. She designed the sales process for her team so it was filled with as much revenue-generating time as possible.

This is how Millennials approach the sales process. They utilize tools, resources, and technology to work smarter and more efficiently — but they don’t opt out of hard work.

They integrate technology effectively, use it to their advantage, and automate as many processes as possible. Their CRMs are robust, clean, and organized. They rely on data to make smarter decisions, and they optimize the time and energy they spend on leads.

Even if it doesn’t look like the same kind of work performed by other generations, Millennials are putting in elbow grease.

RELATED: Millennial Men with No Degrees: Come Work in Sales

Myth 4: Millennials have unrealistic expectations of career advancement in sales.

Older generations think Millennials believe they deserve promotions, rewards, and benefits without working hard for them.

As we’ve already mentioned, other generations expected to work at the same company, be patient, and wait for opportunity. When Millennials push for advancement, it can come across as greedy or entitled to other generations.

The truth: The first Millennials entered the workforce at the height of the Great Recession. Many had firsthand experience with “last in, first out” layoffs early in their careers.

It was a rude awakening to a new and sobering reality: The unspoken social contract that hard work and patience would be rewarded simply isn’t true anymore.

In fact, employment instability could be what attracted independent Millennials to sales to begin with. A career in sales lets them control their own destinies, schedules, salaries, and rewards to some extent.

Beyond the promise of autonomy and decent wages, sales teams have an advantage when it comes to appealing to this Millennial appetite for career advancement.

Starting with entry-level positions, success in sales is based on meeting your numbers. By structuring quotas, rewards, and advancements with shorter intervals of measurement, sales teams can align with Millennial expectations while accomplishing organizational objectives.

Employers must recognize these preferences and factor them into how they define roles and career paths. Training programs that go beyond how to do your current job to encompass opportunities to build skills for future roles can help you keep Millennials engaged and motivated.

Myth 5: Millennials challenge authority.

Boomers and Gen Xers might feel uncomfortable with Millennials’ tendency to ask questions or offer input on things that technically are beyond their defined roles––interpreting it as disrespectful.

Millennials can be seen as pushy or conceited, especially when it comes to technology or culture.

The truth: Millennials came of age in a world where credibility comes from informal authority and expertise—not formal titles. Growing up with social media also encouraged a belief that it’s important and valuable to share one’s opinions.

Millennials seek collaborative environments where they can contribute and see the impact of their work. On sales teams, it can be awkward for other generations to have Millennials challenge or question ideas. However, Millennials truly are comfortable questioning ideas, using technology to research, and arriving at a better solution.

Their intentions are typically genuine. Sales managers should view this feedback as a challenge to be better, especially when it comes to the sales process or implementing new technology.

Your expertise won’t be automatically accepted simply because of your tenure or title. By engaging in the dialogue prompted by your Millennial co-workers, the entire team can step up its game to stay current on skills, learn new ways of tracking customer relationship management data, or integrate processes to reach different markets.

The Dos and Don’ts of Leading Millennials in Sales

How do you work with Millennials in sales? Here are some dos and don’ts to keep in mind.

Do: Embrace Flexibility

Millennials view “productivity” as “the work they complete.” Because of their technological proficiency, they don’t need to be in an office to get that work done—and work doesn’t have to happen from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

What’s more important is that Millennial sellers meet the expectations of client communications. In fact, 74% expect their employers to offer this sort of flexibility. Deliver the flexibility Millennials demand, and judge sales performance accordingly.

Do: Give Clear Feedback—More Often

Get comfortable delivering more frequent feedback. Work with the Millennials on your team to establish incremental objectives, and be prepared to discuss progress regularly.

Offer to use a combination of communication channels—email, text, phone calls, and in-person chats—to connect.

Don’t: Dismiss Their Technological Savvy When Building Pipelines

Being connected to technology and using it for self-expression is like breathing for Millennials. They’re comfortable being themselves in both work and personal environments.

Their prospects and clients are likely Millennials, too. Their authenticity and use of digital tools will attract like-minded people.

RELATED: 32 Omnichannel Technology Tools to Sell Anywhere, All the Time

Don’t: Fail to Connect Meaning to Work

Millennials want their work to be about more than a paycheck. They want to make a difference in the world around them. More than 90% of Millennials want to connect their abilities to a cause.

Create opportunities for employees to give back, such as company-wide service days. It might seem minor, but these small gestures make a difference. Employees who see their work as having a positive impact are three times more engaged and productive.

The Bottom Line

In a multigenerational workforce, everyone has a different perspective. Celebrating these differences (and not pushing people to conform) isn’t always easy. But a little bit of patience is well worth the effort—particularly in sales—because it helps your team better understand and communicate with prospective clients across generations.

What are you learning from the Millennials on your team? I’m interested in hearing how you’re adapting your leadership style to meet their needs.

The post 5 Myths About Working with Millennials in Sales (Debunked!) appeared first on Sales Hacker.

This can be because salespeople lack the technical ability and are still following ineffective sales methodologies.

This is where sales enablement enters the scene!

Sales enablement is a powerful tool for increasing sales performance.

What exactly is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is the set of practices, processes, and platform that helps the sales organizations improve the performance of sales teams to increase revenue through new customer acquisition.

In today’s customer-centric landscape, B2B sales leaders must evaluate sales enablement practices in order to achieve the desired goals.

Here are the top 7 sales enablement best practices that can help you succeed:

1 Adopt new selling techniques

Traditional sales and traditional sales tactics are no longer required. It is true that old tried selling techniques are not working like they used to. In order to deal with today’s new customers successfully, the sales representatives are required to develop new selling techniques based on buyers’ behavior.

The new selling techniques not only engage customers effectively but also improve the customer experience.

Here comes the role of B2B sales leaders who need to ensure proper sales training and the sales management infrastructure. The leaders should offer the best guidance and encourage the teams to utilize the tools effectively.

2 Understand your sales reps

Understanding the sales team is crucial. Salespeople are the focus of sales enablement efforts because they are the real persons who can generate leads. You need to make sure that your sales team has excellent communication skills and the ability to connect with clients at all levels in the organizational hierarchy.

Just having a sales enablement team is not sufficient as you need to find out whether your team member really understands the company set goals.

This is where training enters! The sales leaders need to train their teams on how their role is important and fits within your organization.

3 Engage

In order to close a deal effectively, the sales representatives must reach stakeholders who are involved in the purchase decision across a customer’s organization.

With access to the decision makers, the sales representatives will easily follow the unique value of doing business with your organization in a way that resonates with each stakeholder personally.

Communication with the right person is the must. The sales representatives if know the role of stakeholders in a purchase decision, they can effectively interact with them, providing relevant product information for the given audience.

4 Produce Relevant Content

It is critical for the sales organizations to produce the right content that would be helpful for the sales teams.

The motive of sales enablement content is to help your sales representatives by educating prospects and overcome objections which prospects might have during the sales process.

You need to find out what types of content are buyers looking for at each stage.

The first and foremost step towards delivering the right content at the right moment is to understand your customers. Know that your prospects are looking for different types of content at different stages in their decision-making process.

The accurate and relevant content allows the sales teams to make the best possible sales strategy for inducing of the client to buy the product from your organization.

It is good to create a general map of your sales cycle that can provide a general idea of types of content that can be best for each stage of the sales cycle.

5 Alignment

Internal organizational alignment is considered the most complex part of the B2B sales enablement practices. The best sales enablement teams work hand-in-hand with the sales teams and sales leaders and are able to bridge the gap.

The sales leaders are not only responsible for training salespeople but also help them about the entire sales conversion funnel from beginning to end.

This concept is must in order to fully understand the characteristics of their customer; marketing and sales organizations that must align to share insights manage leads and access resources.

According to a recent study, the companies following this kind of strategy are able to create a reliable pipeline with higher revenues.

With a proper strategy, it is conceivable to experience better communication between the marketing and sales division of any commercial enterprise for a better business prospect.

The sales and marketing alignment have made the best-in-class companies outperformed the competition by two times and nearly three times the growth rate for CRM adoption.

Businesses with aligned sales and marketing teams achieve higher revenue in comparison to misaligned teams.

6 Embrace Technology

It cannot be denied that most of the strategies and methodology that drives successful sales organizations are grounded in technology. Embracing technological advances has become an essential need in order to develop a competitive advantage or to achieve greater success. Fortunately, there are numerous digital sales tools and applications available that help facilitates sales enablement initiative.

Experimenting with new tools and techniques may push the boundaries of the sales professionals. The right and latest technologies can really boost sales efforts as it will help with goal-setting, training and more. The businesses dedicating the appropriate resources to a measurable and structured sales enablement programs are experiencing quantifiable improvements in revenue growth.

Together with the flexible, agile workforce, Technology supports the teams to generate more revenue and profits.

7 Share Wins

Lastly, it is highly important to create a culture of gratitude and positivity between your marketing and sales departments. Teamwork is a crucial key for winning any challenge. Sharing success with the team will make them feel better, builds trust, motivate them to work dedicatedly.

Let your sales reps know that they have closed a new deal effectively! This not only highlights the representatives’ achievement but also motivates other salespeople to make the most.

Sales Enablement is really necessary!

Sales enablement is indeed a crucial topic for both sales and marketing teams. Marketing and Sales department are closely interlinked and aimed at common goals i.e. revenue generation.

Whereas, sales enablement connects the sales and marketing teams and focuses on a strategy that ensures that the process is fully integrated into the current sales processes. Just a small improvement to sales team effectiveness can have a great influence on the bottom line.

For example: Imagine a change in profit from 30% to 40%, which can be worth millions of dollars in additional revenue, all driven by sales enablement.

Implementing sales enablement helps in the fostering of business networking, driving better sales behavior, facilitating streamlined communication between the sellers and the buyers.

Buyer has changed

Buyers of today are smart and educated, which eventually have changed the buying process. Cold calling and push marketing are longer a part of the process. Understanding the needs of the customers is on priority which can be accomplished by sales enablement.

Build a better relationship with customers

Retaining customers must be the central focus of your marketing plan. A necessary step to build retention is simply to prioritize customer relationship management (CRM) tools. The most important aspects are to fulfill the needs of the customers which keep on changing with time. Either they are new or already existing customers; they would not need the same products or services every time. This is where sale enablement helps!

Maximize sales opportunities

Sales teams will be able to achieve targets and improve leads only if they have the right information. Without having the required information about the customers, salespeople cannot be successful in sales.

Working with the CRM team is a good option. With the CRM team, the sales people can collect much vital information about their customers.

Why Sales enablement is a key to revenue attainment?

A recent study has found that organizations with a dedicated sales enablement role observe and 8.2% in revenue attainment versus those that do not.

The only motive of sales enablement is to grow revenue by increasing the effectiveness of sales teams through the right processes, the right technology and improving selling behavior.

Selling these days is entirely based on customer interactions which mean providing content and insights are going to shape the buyer’s journey and translate to success. Interaction with customers offers a great opportunity for organizations to accelerate their sales for generating more revenue. Expecting this kind of results with software investment can be pretty expensive, but with an online sales enablement can lower down the cost quite dramatically along with providing the same results.

Top three parts to effective sales force enablement

• Alignment of sales processes to the customer’s journey.

• Content Effectiveness

• Coaching/Training

The sales enablement’s job is to create basic sales and marketing methodologies, but with an introduction to other modern tactics, such as social selling into the environment with training, workshops, and coaching.

No doubt in the coming time, sales enablement will continue to increase sales productivity. Regardless, sales leaders need to be active before adopting new sales enablement technologies for their own sake.

Know your audience, your charter, priorities, team, and resources to execute unrelentingly!

Do you know how your prospecting emails look on a smartphone? Most likely, you are drafting your prospecting emails on a laptop or desktop and you think they look good. I hate to break it to you, but they probably don’t if you aren’t following the “one-swipe” rule.

If you haven’t heard of this rule, don’t worry! You are not alone. Most salespeople have not heard of it either, and that’s why I want to share it with you. The one-swipe rule is where your email can be read on a smartphone with only one-swipe. If your prospecting email requires that the person scroll for 3 miles to read it, forget it, they won’t read it.

Grab my ebook along with more tips on this subject here!

Take a moment to think about how you look at your emails on your tablet or smartphone. If it’s long, you probably just click delete, because it takes too much time to scroll through it. It’s a pain! This is especially true with emails from people you don’t know or regarding topics that are not important or relevant to you.

Don’t expect for a moment that just because you wrote your email on a laptop they will read your email on a laptop. Recent studies show that more people view emails on a smartphone than on a laptop. Before you send your next prospecting email, first send to yourself and take a look at it on your smartphone or tablet. I think you’ll be surprised! The key is to keep it short and to the point. If you don’t grab the prospect’s attention in your first ten words, you’ve lost them.

Never send an email without checking it against the one-swipe rule! I have a brand new ebook that goes deeper into this subject of using email to prospect. Grab your copy today! Also, be sure to click on the link in the ebook to a 42-minute video of me sharing more insights.

Once you read the ebook and watch the video, share your thoughts with me. I would love to hear what you think and answer any questions you may have. Sales is not a solo activity; sales is a team sport and we’re on the same team.

Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

Generating high-quality content on a consistent basis has become one of the most critical tasks in any online marketing strategy. And for a good reason.

A well-written piece of content published on your website can help boost your ranking on search engines. This makes it easier for your target audience to find you when they search online. When your site ranks high on Google, other search engines also promote your brand as a reputable leader within your niche.

More importantly, it helps increase the chances of your target customers doing business with you. These days, customers make their buying decisions based on the research they do online and from recommendations.

The challenge of creating new content

There’s just one problem about creating new content, and that is the fact that it requires a significant amount of time and effort.

On average, it takes an expert content writer 1-2 hours to write a well-written 500-word blog post.

Unfortunately, 500 words are no longer enough for a blog post to rank on the first page of Google (unless your name happens to be Seth Godin). Recent studies show that the average length of blog posts that list on the first page of Google is about 1,890 words.

Source: Backlinko

That’s why according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2019 Industry Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, 74% of B2B marketers have begun creating long-form content.

Source: Content Marketing Institute

That also means that it now takes roughly 3x longer for an expert content writer to develop a quality blog post.

Some B2B businesses opt to outsource their content writing tasks to a freelance content writer. This option may free up their time to focus on other tasks. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a price to pay, literally.

On average, freelance content writers charge $30 per hour to write one blog post.

Again, it doesn’t sound like much. However, if you plan on publishing one long-form blog post each week, you’re looking at spending anywhere between $4,000 and $8,000 each year!
And that’s just the beginning.

Video content takes a lot longer to create and publish than a blog post. It takes up to 12 hours to create a one-minute video from start to finish.

Fortunately, there are now ways that you can generate B2B leads without having to keep creating new content. Here are a few:

1. Repurposing your best-performing content

Given the time that it takes to develop a piece of content on your website, you want to make sure that you can extend its lifetime value as much as possible. You can do this by recycling existing content into something new.

Repurposing your existing content also helps you expand your audience reach. People that match your buyer persona may prefer watching videos or listening to a podcast than reading a long-form blog post. Converting existing content into a new format makes your content more appealing to a broader audience, allowing you to cast your net further to generate more leads for your business.

That doesn’t mean that you should repurpose every single piece of content you’ve ever published. Instead, look for material that received the most engagement and conversions because these are the pieces that resonate the most with your target audience.

Evergreen content is also great to repurpose. These content pieces continue to be timely and relevant despite the ever-changing trends within your industry or niche.

One example of this is this guide on creating an inbound marketing playbook for startup founders. Even though recent trends caused influencer marketing to evolve since the time that I wrote this blog post, startup founders and marketers can still apply the points I shared here and get results.

Because of this, I decided to repurpose the blog post into a PDF that startup founders can download and refer to when they meet with their teams and plan out their inbound marketing strategy.

If you’re creating video tutorials on a specific topic, you can repurpose these by repackaging them into a mini-training workshop that you can offer to your viewers on your website.

2. Maximize your “About Us” Page

Your “About Us” page is perhaps the second most visited page on your website. The reason? Telling your potential customers you’ve got a fantastic product or service is no longer enough to get them to buy. You need to connect with them on an emotional level. That’s because these days, customers prefer buying from a business that shares the same principles they value. It’s this emotional allegiance they create with a brand that not only encourages them to make a purchase but gets them to become loyal customers.

If you have a website, chances are you already have an “About Us” page up and running. Here are some tips to tweak it to help you generate more leads.

Tell the story behind why you started your business

This gives you the opportunity to target the pain points your customers currently face. Write these in such a way that your target customer will feel that you genuinely understand them, and explain how your business and products help address these issues.

Explain your Unique Selling Point

Chances are, there are other businesses out there that are offering products and services that are similar to yours. Your Unique Selling Point should explain to your target customers what sets you apart from your competitors. More importantly, it should convince them why they should do business with you and not with someone else.

Include your core principles

People regard their core principles as sacred and non-negotiable. So when your core principles match theirs, they are more likely to do business with you.

Inject your personality

Just because you’re running a business doesn’t mean that you have to always speak in a very formal manner, especially if this isn’t the culture you foster within your company. Writing up your “About Us” page in a way that you would tell your friends about what you do helps make your brand more human and approachable.

Canva’s “About Us” page is a perfect example of putting all of these tips together.

Not only did they tell the story of why and how Canva started, but they also presented this in a visually appealing format that indirectly showcases the capabilities of the service they’re offering.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Canva’s “About Us” page is how they presented the photos of their founders and the rest of their team.

Rather than using those conventional headshot photos you see in most “About Us” pages, they are shown here wearing casual clothes and goofing around. This tells their visitors a lot about the principles and corporate culture they observe within the company.

3. Boost your social listening skills

As you continue marketing your brand and products, you can bet people will begin talking about you online. Some will be good while others won’t be as flattering. Both offer you the opportunity to engage with and convert them into leads.

The challenge here is knowing where these conversations are taking place and where they are happening.

Using a social listening platform that monitors and alerts you each time your brand or product is mentioned comes in handy.

The reason is straightforward: many potential clients no longer use the traditional route of sending an email or call to inquire further about your products or services. The majority send out their inquiries on social media just like this inquiry made about Mention’s features:

The beauty about this is that because this is done in real-time, you’re able to shorten your sales cycle.

On top of investing in a good social media listening tool like Mention or Sprout Social, here are some tips to effectively use social listening to generate leads and customers:

• • • Choose relevant keywords to your brand and products. Any social media channel can be “noisy.” Narrowing down your alerts to keywords based on your overall goal will help you quickly jump in the conversation and begin the nurturing process.
    • Jump into your social media account at least once a week. Social media listening tools aren’t perfect. Taking the time to visit your social media accounts give you a better picture of the conversations that are taking place there. This will also help you adjust your keywords so that you can catch any of those conversations that you may have missed.
    • Check your competitors’ social media accounts. Pay close attention to the complaints they’ve received from their existing customers. These can open the door for you to slowly introduce your products as an alternative for them to consider.

4. Offer a free trial

Offering a free trial for your product or service to your target customers for a limited time can help you generate probably the best leads in your list.

Apart from the fact that people love free stuff, those that sign up for a free trial are leads that are already seriously considering purchasing your product or services. Giving them the chance to try your product or service in their businesses allows them to make a better purchasing decision.

This is precisely what happened with SAP SE when they launched their Business One ERP system. Part of their lead generation campaign was to offer potential customers visiting their website a 30-day free trial of their system. This offer alone helped them generate 3,700 new leads that they can convert into paying customers.

As we have seen, there are several other ways that you can gather new leads to convert for your business without having to create new content.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that you can forget about publishing quality content on your website. It’s still a crucial aspect of any marketing strategy. However, supplementing this with any one of these other strategies can significantly increase the number of leads you generate for your business.

The post 5 Ways to Generate B2B Leads without Creating New Content appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Sales teams struggle to get a consistent stream of qualified leads in the pipe and consistently score meetings with decision-makers. But picture a world where you’ll only talk to people who want to talk to you, get meetings with one call, and collapse your prospecting time.

That’s the world of referral sales. Turning referrals from “happenstance” to “happening all the time” drives revenue like no other channel.

Whether you make cold calls now or not, leverage the power of your referral network and hit your sales numbers without hitting the phones—with less sweat and results you can bank on.

The post Stop Cold Calling: Get the One-Call Meeting appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Generating and increasing leads is only part of the equation when it comes to growing your revenue. To achieve your sales objectives, you have to convert the leads to customers. You can improve lead conversion and grow your business by monitoring and optimizing your inbound phone calls and training your sales team.

Training Your Sales Team to Maximize Performance

Turn your sales team into a revenue-generating machine by investing in their training and professional development. Training a sales team requires both conventional and new techniques that leverage advancements in tracking and analytics. Here’s how you can train your sales team to maximize your performance:

1. Know Your Sales Team’s Strengths and Where They Can Improve

Find out the strengths and weaknesses of each member of your sales team to understand which member will perform better in different circumstances. You can train them accordingly and give personalized attention for their overall development.

2. Use Call Recording to Help Them Improve Sales Calls

By using the business call recording feature available with your call tracking software, you can record your sales calls and use them for training your agents. You can ask your team to listen to a few calls that resulted in a sale to find out how the agent converted the lead, and also do the same for the calls that resulted in a missed opportunity to identify areas of improvement.

3. Measure Your Sales Data Through Call Tracking

With call tracking software, you can track important metrics that help you improve your sales process. Find out about:

• The number of calls and touch points that are required before conversion
• The marketing channels that lead to conversions
• The marketing campaigns which are more effective

All this information will prepare your sales team to effectively handle the call and close the sale.

4. Streamline Your Sales Process Through Automation

Automating your sales process helps give your team an edge over competitors. For example, an automated email marketing software helps your team to better connect and engage with prospects and leads through customized email campaigns.

Lead Conversion Tips to Increase Sales

Below are seven conversion optimization tips you can implement to increase sales from inbound lead calls:

1. Create Great Landing Pages

Use call tracking software to get the data you need to tweak your landing pages for better conversions. For example, implement call tracking numbers to gauge how well the copy, headline, or call-to-action on a landing page resonates with your target audience.

2. Use Lead Scoring to Your Advantage

Not all leads are the same. Therefore, it is important to rank the leads based on preset scales you have chosen to know where they fall in your sales funnel. Lead scoring allows you to determine the importance and likelihood of a lead converting to a customer. With this information, know how to approach the lead as well as determine the optimal resources to use to close a sale.

3. Optimize Your Marketing Processes

You can determine the performance of your marketing campaigns by using a call tracker to discover marketing channels or ads that result in phone calls. The data gathered can inform you of the landing pages to implement call tracking phone numbers for conversion purposes.

4. Uncover the Lead Conversion Path

When a visitor sees your content and then clicks on it, this is the start of the conversion path. From there, the visitor can be directed to a landing page, where a lead magnet can be provided in exchange for contact information. Lead tracking and management software can provide an overview of the lead conversion path.

5. Implement Geographic Targeting

Call tracking software can also tell you the geographic location of your leads. For example, see calls by state or area codes that are generating the most business. You can drill down on the areas that generate the majority of calls and adjust your strategy to target the areas more heavily.

6. Gather Intelligence and Customer Feedback

Collecting customer data can help you understand your customers’ satisfaction rate and, in turn, boost conversions. Customer feedback can be used to track support and provide insight on how your services, products, and overall processes are perceived.

7. Integrate Your CRM Database

You can integrate a CRM software to your marketing automation platform to get the most value out of your leads. The CRM contains information about your customers obtained through different lead generation methods. The information can help you choose the best way to approach leads to close sales.

Use these smart tips to optimize lead conversion and improve your sales team’s performance.

In my book, High-Profit Selling, I talk a lot about how to maximize your price and not cave to the customer. Once you start to cave in, it’s amazing how low you will go and how frequently you will do it. I have never met a salesperson who only gave a discount one time.

Getting customers to focus on their needs and not on your price requires focus and process. In my book, I outline, 10 Steps To Execute a Price Increase. Here is a small part of what I share in the 10 steps:

1. Know your strategy as to what the price increase is going to accomplish and establish expectations and goals.
2. Determine and isolate the customer’s key benefits, as these will help you sell the increase.
3. Never “ask” for a price increase, you tell the customer what the price will be.
4. Reinforce the price increase by sharing the “FDPOV.”

So, how are you doing when it comes to being able to get the price you want? Are you standing your ground or caving in and allowing the customer to dictate your price?

If you have not read my book, High-Profit Selling, I strongly suggest you get a copy today.

My publisher, HarperCollins just agreed to offer the Kindle version for only $2.99, so there’s no reason why you should not get it. You and many others need to read this book NOW! This low price is only good for a couple of weeks, so do not wait!

Give it a read and let me know how it helps you and your company. I know it will!

Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results