Rnordman

This guest post is by renowned speech coach and sales trainer Patrica Fripp.  Join Patricia and David Hoffeld onThursday, November 17, 2016 at 2:00pm PST, when they collaborate to bring you a web event based on David’s new book, The Science of Selling. Register and enjoy a replay even if you can’t attend this complimentary web event. In the meantime, continue reading as Patricia shares the 11 biggest mistakes sales professionals make in their presentations.

11 Biggest Mistakes Sales Professionals Make in Their Presentations

By Patricia Fripp

Like Hollywood actors, sales professionals put themselves and their companies on the line with every word, taking a risk in the hope of a favorable outcome. Just like actors, even the best, most experienced sales professional benefits from some script review, rehearsal, and coaching.

Here are the 11 most common mistakes that I see on the sales stage and what you can do to avoid them:

1. Unclear Thinking

Want clarity? Imagine that a busy executive says, “You have exactly ten minutes to tell me what you want me to know about your company.”  At any stage of the sales process, you should know in advance what your prospect is really asking. The real question is, “What do I need to know about how your company can improve our company? Will your products or services solve a problem, create new opportunities, increase savings, maximize earnings, simplify our processes, develop our human capital, or increase market share?” At this point, the executive is more interested in his company than he is in yours. Accomplish this, and you have the opportunity to present your options more formally.

2. Talking Too Much

The key to connecting with a client is conversation and asking questions. The quality of client information received depends on the quality of your questions, as well as waiting for and listening to the answers! A successful encounter early in the sales process should probably consist mostly of open-ended questions—the kind that require essay answers rather than just yes or no. And never rush on with preprogrammed questions that indicate you have paid no attention to the answer you just received!

Your job is to work closely with the team or champion who will give you information. Do your research so that your questions about their company are well thought out. Do not be afraid to go deeper. If they want to increase sales, ask, “By how much?” “In the same market or expanding to a new one?” Do they want to improve morale? Ask, “What are the signs that make this a priority?” “What have you done before?” “How great a success has it been?” Will they be upgrading technology? Ask, “How long have you been investigating options?” You need to determine are they interested or desperate?

3. Wrong Structure

To keep a prospect or senior leadership interested, you have to prove this premise: “Your company’s condition will be dramatically improved when you do business with us.”

Your talking points and presentation structure will be better received if they are not structured around your company. The “This is who we are, what we do, our unique methodology, and who we do business with” conversation or presentation outline is not likely to get you very far. Use all the information you received from your questions to help them know you were listening. Structure the conversation or presentation around their interests, challenges, or opportunities.

Put as many of their words as possible into your presentation. Your prospects will not disagree with themselves. Yes, you will be talking about your company, your satisfied clients, and what is unique about you as a way to prove that you can appeal to what they are interested in, solve their challenges, and maximize their opportunities.

4. No Memorable Stories

People rarely remember your exact words. Instead, they remember the mental images your words inspire. Support your key points with vivid, relevant, client success stories. Help them see a movie in their minds by using your satisfied clients as memorable characters. What was their starting situation? Their problem and one your prospect can relate to?  How are their results since you worked with them?

The best stories are third-party endorsements that have your clients using much more glowing statements than you could if the words were your own. Endorsement stories should be like a good Hollywood movie: memorable characters that your prospects can identify with, vivid dialogue, and a dramatic lesson about the benefits of doing business with you. When telling those client stories, give them a back story, add drama, and use actual dialogue that has been edited. Director Alfred Hitchcock said, “A movie is like life with all the dull parts left out.”

“When the Vice President of Sales first called, he said, “Help. We heard you are the right person (or company) to help us solve . . . .” Always use the client’s words.

What we did was . . . . Here you insert the solution or methodology your prospect is most likely interested in. This can be delivered in your own words.

The success is also presented in the prospect’s words. “If John were here, he would say, ‘We would not have believed it possible that we could have . . . . You can’t go wrong choosing this company.’”

5. No Emotional Connection

Your customer or client justifies doing business with you for analytical reasons; what gives you the edge—what I like to call the “unfair advantage”—is creating an emotional connection. Build this emotional connection by incorporating stories with characters that they can relate to, using the word you as often as possible and talking from their point of view. Make it obvious that you are their advocate.  Congratulate them on their success. Thank them, not for their time, but for the opportunity to present your solution. Don’t say, “I will talk about”; instead say, “What you will hear is . . . .” As you put together each segment of your presentation, ask yourself, “Why would they care about this?” If they wouldn’t, leave it out, or reword it so that they will. Remember, as they listen, their unspoken question is, “What’s in this for us?” Logic makes us think; emotion makes us act.

6. Wrong Level of Abstraction

Get on the same wavelength with your prospects. For first contacts with executives, describe what your company can do for them from a big picture view—a high level of abstraction. Be able to change to go deeper if their questions lead you there. With middle managers, discuss exactly how you can work together—a medium level of abstraction. If you are dealing with IT professionals, use the lowest level of abstraction: plenty of data, facts, and figures. In other words, speak the same language, or bring an associate who can. Maximize each meeting.

7. No Pauses

Good music and good communication both contain changes of pace and pauses. As counterintuitive as it may seem, you actually connect on the silence. This is when your audience, even if it is one person, digests and reflects on what they have heard. If you rush on at full speed to squeeze in as much information as possible, chances are your prospects will remember less. Remember the rule, “Say less, say it well.” Give your clients enough time to ask a question or reflect. Pauses allow pondering and understanding.

8. Hmm, Ah, Err, You Know, So, Right

Non-words and low quality words usually fill the space where there needs to be silence. How often have you heard a presenter begin each new thought with “Now!” or “Um” or “So” as they scan notes or figure out what comes next. Rehearse in front of your sales manager or colleagues, giving them permission to call out whenever you hem or haw. Video and audio-record yourself, and note any digressions. You will never fix problems you are unaware of.

9. Weak Opening

Engage your audience with a powerful, relevant opening that includes them. For example, “You have an awesome responsibility,” or “Congratulations on your company’s recent success.” Then focus on their needs: increasing sales, reducing errors, cutting overhead, expanding their market, increasing their digital footprint, or perfecting their sales presentations, whatever your product can help your prospect do.  Do not thank them for their time. Thank them for the opportunity to discuss how you could well be the option they are looking for.

10. Weak Closing

After you have reviewed your key ideas, answered their questions, made your suggestion for the next logical step, and thanked them for the opportunity, it is time to make your last words linger.  For your concluding thought, pick a strong, positive sentence that you absolutely want embedded in their minds.  Just like the P.S. in a sales letter, you do not want to introduce a new idea. This will be a reinforcement of one of your main advantages or benefits; e.g., “Remember, 157 profitable quarters,” or “99% of the Fortune 100 do business with us,” or “We are large enough to satisfy all your requirements and small enough that you will be a valued client.”

11. Lack of Specificity

Specificity builds your credibility and helps position you above your competition.

What is the number one crime against your credibility? It’s a single, suddenly-popular buzzword that reminds me of fingernails screeching on a blackboard every time I hear it: stuff. It means debris, and your products are not. However, let’s look at the others. Thing is not much better than debris. Are there three things that will make you successful? Or is it three strategies, techniques, habits, ideas, philosophies, or action steps?

How about tons and bunches? Can you really get a ton of ideas? Do you leave the trade show with bunches of business cards? More likely it is three dozen.

You can’t tell a prospect, “With our program, you will really grow your business.” Instead, “There are no guarantees; however, our last three clients increased sales an average of 32% in seven months.”

Avoid these, and you’re on your way to becoming a star of the sales world, delivering a dazzling performance every time.

Companies who want a competitive edge hire Patricia Fripp. She is a Hall of Fame keynote speaker, executive speech coach, sales presentation skills and on-line training expert. Patricia is also a subject matter expert for Continuing Education at XTRACredits. When your message must be memorable, your presentation powerful, and your sales successful in-person or online Patricia Fripp can help.

To become a great speaker easily, conveniently and quickly you sign up for www.FrippVT. Why not sign up for your trial today or contact Patricia at (415) 753-6556.

The post 11 Biggest Mistakes Sales Professionals Make in Their Presentations appeared first on Hoffeld Group.

Two Hat Security founder Chris Priebe. (Portrait by Darren Hull)

Four years ago, Priebe started a venture dedicated to the dream of a bully-free Internet. The recipient of $2.5 million in funding this year, Two Hat Security now boasts troll-free global communities for clients and an A-list board. Priebe also works with police, analyzing digital messages and images. His goal is to one day be able head off attacks before they happen.

“We moved a lot as kids. If you weren’t born in a small town, good luck fitting in. I was down in Osoyoos, B.C., in my Grade 10 year and I saw that there were other kids that didn’t fit in, so I created a club. Well, the bullies didn’t like that, because I was empowering the people they were picking on. So they started targeting me specifically. They’d come outside my house at 10, 11 o’clock at night to call me out. Eventually, the police notified my parents that there was a legitimate threat against my life, so I had to go away to a private school in Alberta.

Change Agents 2016: Meet Canada's next generation of business leaders

“When it comes to the Internet, it’s not like physical bullying, because it doesn’t end at 11 or 12 o’clock at night. And [victims are] not only excluded by kids at school. The first reaction of parents is, ‘I’m going to take away your cellphone. I’m not going to allow you to be on Facebook.’ Suddenly, the victim loses all the opportunities. They can’t socialize.

“My brother Lance introduced me to the Internet when I was in Grade 12; that would be in 1994. It was incredible to me. All of a sudden I was connected to the entire world; all these possibilities came up. Around 1999 and 2000, Lance was experimenting in his basement with this idea of creating a game with characters that would be able to walk around and talk to each other online. His prototype was a bunch of penguins walking around on ice. He asked me, ‘Would you build out the back end for this system to make it really safe?’ Together, we created [children’s virtual-world video game] Club Penguin, which set the bar for having a safe and yet positively engaged online experience.

“After Disney bought Club Penguin [in 2007, in a deal worth US$700 million], they got me to do their application security. I took the knowledge that I had been learning about how people hack websites, and how to go about creating defensive systems, and looked at how it could be applied to online social interactions. I came to realize that only a small number of users were using the Internet to make others feel miserable and to degrade them. I realized that if I could identify who those maybe 1% of Internet users were, I could then apply a different level of security to their interactions. That’s the premise behind this entire company.

“Fast-forward four years, we’re now under contract to process four billion messages a day. We work with Animal Jam and Roblox, some of the biggest games and communities on the Internet. We’d really like to have conversations with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. A time is coming when people will no longer put up with these companies letting users be attacked when they’re just trying to enjoy themselves on the Internet.

“In some [high-profile cyber-bullying] cases, or technology might have averted the outcome. I had the chance to meet the mother of Amanda Todd [the 15-year-old B.C. girl who died by suicide in 2012 after being harassed and blackmailed online], an amazing woman. I was able to see how we could have helped in that situation. Ultimately, the big, hairy, audacious goal of our business is to remove bullying from the Internet.”

Twitter's abuse problem is starting to really harm its business

MORE ABOUT STARTUPS:

• How Launch Academy aims to train 100,000 Canadian startup entrepreneurs
• After a regulatory detour, fintech platform Lending Loop relaunches
• Change Agents 2016: Michael Litt, Vidyard
• Change Agents 2016: Victoria Lennox, Startup Canada
• Change Agents 2016: Angela Tran Kingyens, Version One Ventures
• Want to build a truly innovative economy? Get a good barista
• Slack announces new Toronto office, 145 jobs
• How young entrepreneurs build their networks from scratch

The post Chris Priebe of Two Hat Security is building a business to fight online trolls appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

When scrolling through the canon of iconic marketing moments, this scene from the holiday classic A Christmas Story perfectly encapsulates the modern consumer’s emotional reaction to most brand experiences:

We’ve all been in Ralphie’s shoes before. We get our hopes up that a company, at long last, has created something valuable, something that’s creative for the sake of being creative, that we can enjoy without feeling compelled to buy or sell anything. And then… the crushing moment of disillusionment.

“Drink more Ovaltine?!” we cry, disgusted. We trusted the brand to deliver something meaningful, and they betrayed our trust in favor of self-promotion. In a split second, that precious moment of connection is terminated. It’s unlikely we’ll ever give Ovaltine the chance to let us down again.

While it’s easy enough to poke fun at a 1940s radio play sponsored by a consumer brand, the sad truth is that brands continue to do the same thing to their audiences today. They distribute content that promises education, entertainment, and value. On the surface, it glimmers enough to attract clicks—but when consumers dive into the depths of what’s offered, they’re often disappointed. Sometimes, the content is just a thinly-veiled product marketing pitch; other times, it’s well-meaning information that simply falls flat from an execution perspective.

Why does this keep happening? Are marketers getting worse at their jobs? No, not exactly. Rather, in the transition from the “golden age” of marketing in the 1950s and 60s to the vast new digital marketing landscape, something interesting occurred.

All of the time and effort and resources that used to go into the art of marketing—that Don Draper creative wunderkind mojo we admire and sometimes poke fun at—is now largely being invested in science.

Source: Supafly

Digital properties provide us with a wealth of data about who our audience is, where they go online, and where their interests lie. It even tells us how they engage with the content we put out there on the web. There are thousands of tools that can help us track everything from page views to scroll depth to conversions to viewing history to eye color. (Maybe not the last one—yet.)

These tools are extremely useful because they reveal insights that force us to step outside our echo chambers and pay attention to what users prefer. They provide us with unbiased data with which to check our gut instincts. And they help us break a very complex ecosystem of interactions down into understandable metrics that we can measure and act upon.

But the crux of the issue is this: Science can’t fix the problems it uncovers with our content—it only reveals where things are broken. Without an investment in creativity, we’ll never be able to improve our experiences.

Related Reading: The ROI of Creative—Art and Science in Marketing

A New Golden Era, Powered by Creativity

In an interview with DMA, Brian Fetherstonhaugh, Chairman and CEO of OgilvyOne Worldwide, spoke to the importance of creativity quite elegantly:

Marketing is entering its next golden era − where wisdom, creativity and courage will carry the day. From search, mobile and social, we now finally have access to the real data about customers’ interests and intentions − what we have always been seeking but had to approximate. What we do with it now is up to us.

While chatter within the marketing community has remained loud around data collection and number crunching, there’s been a quiet movement, led by design- and story-focused innovators, to revisit the creative ethos of the previous golden age. The key difference this time around is that creativity can be informed by, and crafted around, real user feedback.

What’s fascinating about the current return to creativity is that brands and agencies aren’t the ones setting the precedent any more. Instead, companies are turning to creative sources outside the corporate world to re-learn how to incorporate creativity throughout their organization—from the leadership team to sales reps to everyone in between.

Sourcing Creativity from the Outside

Source: Olly Moss

One of the common places brands are turning to for inspiration is professional writers. In 2016, content marketing software company Skyword teamed up with seasoned screenwriter and storyteller Robert McKee to launch a seminar series called Storynomics. These seminars are designed to teach senior executives and marketing professionals how to apply storytelling structure to their business.

McKee has been using his storytelling expertise from film and theater to coach authors, screenwriters, and comedians for over 30 years. Today, this expertise is being transferred over to a business setting so that the people who own the stories at brands—namely, executives and marketers—can learn how to craft narratives more effectively.

Gotham Writers Workshop has taken a similar approach, using their learnings from teaching creativity and writing classes to thousands of students each year and applying them to corporate teams in their Corporate Creativity seminars.

Topics include things like divergent thinking, ideation, emotional narrative building, and crafting hooks. Teams also learn how to incorporate elements of creativity and storytelling in seemingly unrelated endeavors like problem solving and team building.

Straying farther afield from the mainstream, renegade tour company Museum Hack has also moved into the corporate training game with two different types of workshops: one focused on storytelling, and a more general disruption and creativity offering.

The company’s unique focus on telling relatable, off-the-radar, sometimes scandalous narratives behind artifacts and artworks means they employ a huge team of master storytellers. And this kind of creative, story-driven engagement is exactly what big brands like Google, Marriott, and Facebook pay good money to learn from Museum Hack’s tour guides.

Likewise, Third Rail Projects, an immersive theater company based in NYC, doesn’t seem like a logical fit for corporate trainings. But in addition to professional workshops for performance artists, they also offer customized workshops for brands.

Jennine Willett heads up the group’s education program, working one-on-one with professionals across a variety of industries. She and her team develop custom curricula that translate the magic of interactive storytelling, dance, movement, and other relevant aspects of Third Rail’s creative practice around specific business objectives.

One final example of creative education within a corporate setting is even more unexpected. At entertainment company Pixar, they’ve built an entire training program—Pixar University—to educate their employees and help them continue to push creative boundaries.

Technical Director Bill Polson told the San Francisco Chronicle this about the program:

“During 90 percent of your workday, you’re in this box—you get to do only certain things. And yet we’re all here because we love movies and art. At Pixar University, all the boxes get removed. All the walls come down, and you get to be the director of your own creative idea.”

Through the program, Polson and his colleagues have been able to take classes in drawing, screenwriting, and filmmaking—all things outside the scope of their normal day jobs. Over a dozen options are available each week to keep employees creatively challenged under the pressure of producing films on a highly aggressive release schedule.

What We Do Now

Source: SpaceX

These formalized creative workshops for brands are more than just an interesting new fad in corporate education. They’re a unique antidote to the Ovaltine content marketing approach that alienates consumers and puts results before meaningful connection.

Brands can be prone to navel-gazing and competitive analysis. When they look toward the future, they tend to pave the pathway with their own past accomplishments and those of their competitors. But creative inspiration that empowers meaningful change comes from outside the realm of what we know already.

Whether we seek out inspiration and new ways of thinking on our own, or attend a company event that helps us see our work through a different lens, it’s imperative that we continually challenge our standard approach and relearn, to some extent, what it means to be creatives in the business world.

How do we start?

By fixing our eyes on the dreamers, the rebels, the artists who’ve made a living by breaking the mold.

What do we do now?

We use wisdom to imbue our brave new data-driven world with creativity.

The INSIDER Summary:

• Daniel Gillaspia is a pro at managing airline miles, points, and rewards.
• He recommends using many credit cards carefully.
• Flying out of airline hubs and using companion passes also saves time and money.

When Daniel Gillaspia isn't working as a full-time attorney in Houston, he and his partner Bradley Darnell travel around the world by expertly managing airline miles, points, and rewards from their 45 credit cards.

"Travel is naturally a pretty expensive thing to to enjoy, but I knew that there were ways to do so-called 'travel hacking,'" Gillaspia said. "I started to learn the ins and outs of everything, and then I was like, 'Alright, well, I'm going to put this knowledge into practice and see how far it can get me.'"

He now shares this knowledge on UponArriving, a website he runs that covers the latest developments in credit cards, airline and hotel award programs, and other travel topics.

INSIDER asked Gillaspia for his best travel hacks. Here's his advice for making luxury travel happen at a fraction of the cost.

Make sure your finances are in order.

"The average American household has something like $15,000 worth of credit card debt, and if someone is prone to running up credit card balances, they should think twice about getting into this, because rewards credit cards almost always come with some of the highest APRs (annual percentage rates)," he said.

Choose cards with valuable sign-up bonuses.

"There's the Chase Sapphire Reserve that offers a 100,000 point sign-up bonus, which could convert into $10,000 worth of first-class airfare, but you have people running into Wal-Mart signing up for cards that send them home with a free rotisserie chicken," he said. "Not all cards are created equally."

Keep an eye out for multiple sign-up offers on the same credit card.

"If you just search around a little bit more, you may find a sign-up bonus for the same card offering 20,000 more miles or something like that," he said.

The more cards you have, the better — as long as you keep track of them.

Gillaspia estimates that between him and his partner, they have 45 different credit cards.

"A lot of people shudder when they hear that, they think our credit score is in the crapper," he said, "But actually, our credit scores are as strong as they've ever been."

The key is keeping track of them and paying them off fully each month. Gillaspia uses two to four cards regularly, and organizes the rest in intricate spreadsheets.

"The more credit cards you have, the bigger payment history you can build up over time. If you're responsible and don't run up a huge balance on your credit cards, pay them off each month and keep their utilization down to a minimum, you're going to inevitably increase your score over time," he said.

Think of points as a form of currency, and spring for deals that give you the best exchange rate.

"You don't want your points to be redeemed for poor values, really low values," he said. "You always want to maximize."

Fly out of airline hubs.

Flying out of an airline's headquarters means you will have more flight options, and thus save time and minimize extraneous connecting flights. 

"It's just a better, more efficient use of miles a lot of times, if you're going through hubs," said Gillaspia. "And it also saves time, especially for people like me who like to do weekend getaways."

Earn a companion pass.

A companion pass allows another person to fly for free on any flight you book. It's earned after reaching a certain number of points, depending on the airline.

Gillaspia's companion pass allowed him and his partner to get away about every two weeks to explore places around the US and the Caribbean.

"I would say that while the first class experiences we enjoy are certainly our favorite way to fly, earning the Southwest Companion Pass was one of the best things we ever did," he said.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This backpack solves the annoying problem of having to carry your suit when you travel

In business, it’s mostly who you know. It’s a universal truth that doesn’t have to have bad connotations. If anything, it’s the crux of the popular professional networking platform LinkedIn. Founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and gaining massive popularity in 2006, the site has connected the business world in many ways.

Professionals wanting to solidify their connections and networks have used LinkedIn to enhance their careers. It wasn’t long after they used the site that businesses started to take advantage as well. The latter’s presence changed the game of headhunting and recruitment, so much so that an applicant’s behavior and persona on the site is a factor on whether they should be hired or not.

While maintaining a LinkedIn profile is different from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, the same general rules apply: a proper primary photo, decent posts, and keeping your whole profile up-to-date. Aside from those, though, how do you cater your personal page to make it more noticeable, especially to bigger clients?

Optimizing your profile can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a good grasp of the system’s functions. But take a few lessons from the most common mistakes on LinkedIn and start connecting and communicating with the top brass of companies.

Complete the essentials

Suffice to say, a complete profile will get more views. “Users with complete [p]rofiles are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities ….” These profiles all include a face to look at, past titles or jobs, skills that can be endorsed, education information, and connections.

Without a photo, you won’t be easily recognized. Taking away the fact that there are more than 3 billion people in the world with an active Internet connection, there are bound to be persons with the same name as you. To avoid forcing possible connections to play that matching game (which they don’t/won’t have the time to do anyway), make yourself easily seen and recognizable. There’s a caveat though: any willy-nilly photo won’t do. If you want to be seen as a professional, you have to upload a decent photo. Show your best professional side. You don’t have to dress up; you need to look presentable.

In relation to “being professional,” being completely honest about your achievements, work history, and education is also prudent. If you have to lie about your previous jobs, past experiences, and even connections, then why should they add you to their network? Not only are you misrepresenting yourself; you’re also undermining the people you want to connect with. In the same way that respect begets respect, being transparent with your career highlights makes you more trustworthy… and worth the time that potential connections are going to invest on you. Make it count.

Further trick out the details

Completing the essentials is just making your profile presentable to a degree. A lot more can be done to polish your profile and make it fully readable and noticeable.

Start with a simple one: customize the vanity URL of your personal page. At the very least, remove the numbers and have it reflect your name. A shorter—and more specific—address makes finding your profile easier and shows that you work on the little details. Plus, it’ll be easier to include your LinkedIn profile on your business card.

Another part to focus on is the Summary section. Although it says “summary,” the field has two thousand characters you can use to your full advantage. Make it robust. Describe your experiences in colorful detail. What can you do? What made you an asset? What did you do that benefited the company? Tell it all. Impress your readers with your capabilities and successes. But still avoid walls of text. With proper formatting and strict editing, you’ll soon roll out a great summary. If you can also beef it up with the proper keywords (more on that in a bit), then go for it. They also make you more searchable.

You can also arrange your whole profile to how you want it to look. If you want your Summary right below your headline, you’re free to place it there. If you want to highlight your skills next, then you can place that section below your Summary.

It’s also worth noting that you can organize and place the skills you want to be seen on the Skills section. By placing both your most recommended and your most recognizable skills, you’re effectively strengthening your profile to showcase the things you’re really good at. And companies will take notice of that.

Keyword: keywords

SEO is a practice that sees itself in almost every avenue. From blogs to advertising and marketing, it’s a good way to make sure your post is visible. You do this with the use of keywords. You can take the same discipline to LinkedIn to make your profile stand out. Incorporate keywords into your headline, your summary, and everywhere else you can put them. Just make sure you don’t overstuff your profile with them. LinkedIn’s algorithm works on your favor this way since the emphasis will be on your keywords, making you rank higher.

In that regard, having a clean headline secures a better position in terms of visibility ranking. Since it’s often the first part of your profile that people see, making it clean, concise, and complete is a must. Don’t be bland with your title and company. You may have only 120 characters to make an impression, but it’s more than enough to make a colorful, creative, and brief description of what you do and why you do it. Impress first-time visitors with your wit. Make them read more of your profile.

Above are a few of the semi-advanced-level tricks that could beef up your personal LinkedIn page and get you noticed by bigger companies. By completing your profile and incorporating a few well-chosen words on your “Summary,” you already increase your chances of being searched because of the website’s algorithm. It also helps that you could be promoted by other connections because of how well you are doing both online and offline.

Making your presence felt on LinkedIn will eat away your time, but you have to make an effort. Don’t be embarrassed to say that you’re promoting yourself, shamelessly or otherwise. If it lands you bigger opportunities, then who’s to say you were wrong in doing so?

Take the chance. Make it work. And when something big comes, nail it. You know you can do it.

Resources:

Dougherty, Jim. “10 Tips to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile.” Cision. February 8, 2016. www.cision.com/us/2016/02/10-tips-to-optimize-your-linkedin-profile

Dougherty, Lisa. “16 Tip to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile and Your Personal Brand.” LinkedIn Pulse. July 8, 2014. www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140708162049-7239647-16-tips-to-optimize-your-linkedin-profile-and-enhance-your-personal-brand

Faeth, Bill. “The 13 Sneakiest LinkedIn SEO Tips to Boost Your Profile’s Views.” Inbound Marketing Agents. November 22, 2014. www.inboundmarketingagents.com/inbound-marketing-agents-blog/bid/263750/The-13-Sneakiest-LinkedIn-SEO-Tips-to-Boost-Your-Profile-s-Views

Foote, Andy. “Why You Should COMPLETE Your LinkedIn PROFILE.” Linkedinsights. March 27, 2013. www.linkedinsights.com/why-you-should-complete-your-linkedin-profile

Halpert, Marc. “8 Ways to Spring Clean Your LinkedIn Profile.” Inc. April 4, 2016. www.inc.com/marc-halpert/spring-clean-linkedin-personal-profile.html

Lee, Ellen. “LinkedIn startup story: Connecting the business world.” CNN Money. June 2, 2009. money.cnn.com/2009/06/02/smallbusiness/linkedin_startup_story.smb

Virgillito, Dan. “10 Actionable Ways To Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile.” Elegant Themes. July 29, 2015. www.elegantthemes.com/blog/tips-tricks/10-actionable-ways-to-optimize-your-linkedin-profile

“8 Mistakes You Should Never Make On LinkedIn.” Forbes. March 4, 2013. www.forbes.com/sites/learnvest/2013/03/04/8-mistakes-you-should-never-make-on-linkedin/#577e08fb7194

There is a great deal of wisdom that can be gained from owning and operating a small business. The valuable lessons learned can also provide a boost to new entrepreneurs who are investing their time, effort and money in trying to get a business off the ground.

Several CEOs shared their experiences in features by Business Insider and Business News Daily, specifically about things they wish they had known when starting a business. Here’s a sample.

New obstacles

An entrepreneur may get overwhelmed as a small business takes its first baby steps. The level of responsibility can be dizzying at times, and how the owner handles these moments is important for long-term success. Rachel Katz Galatt, CEO and founder of Maternal Science Inc., describes her approach in Nicole Fallon’s roundup for Business News Daily.

“I’ve always enjoyed wearing many hats and juggling multiple responsibilities; however, many of the functions I am now managing were owned by corporate: tax returns, balance sheets, bill payments, etc,” she says. “All of these functions in the financial discipline, especially the money that pays for the programs to grow my business, would have been handled by another department. I knew that I was going to be taking on these responsibilities, but I didn’t really grasp or think about what it entailed. It is definitely very eye-opening and has forced me to become much more disciplined.”

Lean on others

It’s important for new business owners to know there is a positive support system within the company. Learning how and when to delegate will probably take some time. Anisa Telwar, founder and CEO of cosmetics company Anisa, talks about this in Max Nisen’s Business Insider piece.

“The one thing I wish I would have known when I started my business was that I did not have to be the smartest person in the room,” Telwar says. “I thought as the owner and president that I had to have all of the answers and create all of the solutions. Over 20 years and through the maturity and growth of the business, I learned that it was impossible for me to do it and know it all. In order to grow my company and increase its value, I was forced to let go.”

Perfection isn’t realistic

Small business owners may pride themselves on being thorough, and paying close attention to every aspect of the company. What they may find, however, is that this isn’t always going to be possible, especially as problems arise or as growth opportunities present themselves. Brij Patel, cofounder of Fetch Storage, explains his perspective for Business News Daily.

“When I started my first business, I had a hard time keeping things moving due to a desire for perfection in every little detail,” he says. “I was delaying making important decisions because I often felt the circumstances weren’t optimal, and this ultimately stunted the growth of the company for some time. I learned that it is often more important to make a decision promptly than it is to get it perfectly right. Stagnancy is poisonous for a small company, and decisions are what will keep everything moving toward your goals.”

The challenges never end

In other words, it’s always something. Even those with a great deal of experience can find themselves exasperated by the constant small-business fires to put out. Jim Scott, founder of creative agency mono, describes this for Business Insider.

“It really doesn’t get easier,” he says. “That’s one thing I wish I knew back when we started our agency. Like a lot of startups, we launched the company from an attic. And as my two partners and I set out to conquer the world, we thought we’d follow a particular path, one that was exceedingly difficult at the beginning, but eventually, when we made it, it would be easy. As it turns out, we’re still working as hard as we ever have.”

Hiring is everything

There’s something to the old saying “You’re only as good as the people around you.” Finding the right people to help launch and maintain a small business can be a significant challenge. Sabrina Parsons, CEO of Palo Alto Software, is included in the Business Insider feature, and says that hiring requires a detailed interview process.

“I’ve learned the importance of taking the extra steps to hire and retain talent that fits best with our company and culture,” Parsons says. “It’s important to assign ‘homework’ assignments that fit the role we’re hiring for and have candidates present their assignment to us, or even the entire team they’ll be working with, during the interview process. We also make sure to check several references, ask challenging questions, and role play during interviews. … We’ve found that if we don’t take these steps it can sometimes result in a hire that is not a good fit for either party. So taking the time to do due diligence on candidates has been tremendously helpful.”

Financial projections

It’s no simple task to plan for all financial possibilities, including capital requirements, expenses and revenue potential. New small business owners may need advisers to help guide them. Wayne Connors, managing partner of 401kInvestor.com, discusses this in the Business News Daily story.

“Too often entrepreneurs are overly optimistic in their sales projections,” he says. “They don’t accurately know their customer acquisition costs, and they usually underestimate the capital they need. My rule of thumb is that whatever amount of money you think you need, double it.”

Work-life balance

This is a struggle for many of us, regardless of profession or status. Small business owners may get so involved in the day-to-day operation that they neglect their life outside of it. Here’s how David Morken, CEO and founder of Bandwidth, describes it in the Business Insider piece.

“My company has an ’embargo policy,’ which means that when on vacation, none of our employees are allowed to contact work and vice versa,” he says. “The lesson is that business owners do not put enough value on free time, so [they] face burnout. Leaders also need to hire and train employees effectively, so others are best prepared to lead in their absence.”

Don’t get attached

It’s only natural to find a sense of pride in starting a small business and watching it grow and flourish. That kind of connection can be difficult to deal with down the road as opportunities arise and circumstances change. James Green, CEO of ad technology company Magnetic, describes this for Business Insider, saying he wishes he had known that he “shouldn’t get emotionally attached” to businesses he created.

“Companies have no feelings, and they are things, not people,” he says. “Put bluntly (and laying aside non-profits and other nontraditional entities), companies are here for one reason and one reason alone: to make money. Everyone knows that money can’t buy you love, and by extension it makes no sense to love your company. There may come a time when you have to change it, dissolve it, close it, give it to someone else to run, cede control to investors, or any other number of things.”

Marketing agencies need to learn from tech leaders

Having spent ten years spearheading one of the UK’s leading dot com companies to digital success, Dave Heath is now shaking up the agency landscape by taking dot com thinking into agency processes.

Dave believes all companies should behave like a dot com; and an agency’s role is to help clients take a dot com approach to gain competitive advantage, especially where technology is core to achieving business goals – arguably in 2016 this is almost every company.

Some of the largest dot com companies are undoubtedly leading the field in digital innovation, delivering huge profits as a result. 
Dot coms tend to act differently to multi-channel businesses that have added digital on to more traditional ‘offline’ routes to market. This became more apparent when I came agency-side a year ago.

Years ago dot coms’ recognised that their consumer world starting to change faster than they could react to, this drove them to internally re-align their people, process and technology to enable them to be as reactive to this faster consumer change. A by-product of this thinking and doing also drives innovation. Empowered teams had to be able to challenge many constraints – from red tape process and monolithic architectures that impacted each team to be able to change direction as fast as possible, with the least amount of disruption and waste.

What lessons can we learn from dotcoms behaviour?

Dot coms generally take four themes that depend on each other to work, and they deliver this through in-house cross functional autonomous teams, setting their own rules.

The first theme is they align their organisation for success – not by grouping disciplines together into a marketing department, an IT department and design department for example.– this promotes a lack of collaboration, increases blame culture and waste. In fact, they look at their product offering and split it into a set of smaller stand-alone products as much as they can – and align a mix of disciplines into cross functional teams that own these discreet parts of the overall product. Consider it is a mini business inside the business.

The second theme is that this team are then given problems to solve – and not given predefined solutions. They need to take ownership and accountability for solving a business problem – this is a fundamental part of empowerment and autonomy. A team that is given the problem of increasing their conversion by 3% will create more innovative ways to solve that problem and in many ways over deliver, as opposed to being told to simply change all the buttons to blue as blue converts better.

The third theme is that the team create fast feedback loops that apply a ‘build – measure – learn’ culture. They effectively define a hypothesis that solves a given problem, deliver an MVP against it as fast as possible then measure it. The team then learn and iterate on the product until a point where the value return is not worth further investment – exploiting the 80% of the value from 20% of the effort rule. Then the team move on to their next priority hypothesis & value and repeat the process.

Underpinning these 3 themes is the fact that they invest in supporting a culture of continuous improvement and learning, allowing the team to challenge everything, taking the time to remove constraints  & dependencies or blockers in process & technology that inhibit the discreet teams to iterate as fast as possible. As an example, if 2 teams rely on a shared system, process or dependency which causes delay in the way those teams operate or improve, the teams must aim to remove the dependency so they can work again more autonomously – and not accept it as immovable.

Spotify is a good example of a dot com’s way of dealing with multiple teams in a product development organisation. Spotify has created a scaling delivery model – with Squads, Tribes, Chapters, and Guilds – that’s helping it to continually iterate and improve as the consumer habits and the market changes. Its growth is largely down to the fact that every team can work autonomously and get fast to market with new products as long as they align to the company goal. 

Is the traditional agency relationship the problem?

The problem for non-dot com companies, which don’t have the maturity or size of team to iterate at this speed and with such depth of insight, has tended to lie with their agencies, however traditional agencies don’t tend to work like this or challenge the client to take this approach.

There has been a client/agency process inherited from old ways of producing a marketing campaign, that a client sets a brief based on a pre-defined solution and the agency designs and builds it, launching with a big ta-da moment … hoping that it has built the right thing; waiting with baited breath to see how consumers actually use it.

There is a need for a shift in agency thinking, so agencies like ours now apply a dot com approach that is supporting and helping our clients to be agile, faster to market, stealing market share.  By setting a fluid roadmap based on what we learn, using a dot coms’ build – measure – learn methodology, the team of agency & client work together to break down the dependencies and iterate based on insight and not opinion.

Dot coms rarely create a large pre-defined solution, then build it, instead they work out what single change would add the most value to their business, prototype it, measure, build and learn - making iterative improvements before moving on to the next thing.  They take an MVP (minimal viable product) approach to everything. The MVP line is the minimum set of features (driven by their necessity, value and user feedback) that you believe are the items that you can go live with to create a great experience. Going live here reduces risk from the technical delivery, but also validates that we are going in the right direction whilst creating revenue return far earlier.

While this approach isn’t necessarily for the faint hearted – because it relies on a belief that you have to be prepared to change direction based on real-time consumer use – we believe being iterative and adaptive, evolving client products not working to static project plans, is vital in achieving digital transformation. 

Digital is not just about technology, it’s a way of solving problems, creating unique experiences and accelerating business change. Digital cuts across the enterprise, so taking a dot com approach is vital for overall business success.”

Thanks to Dave for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Dave Heath is technical director at digital agency Code Computerlove. Prior to this, he was head of engineering & delivery (web and multichannel) at LateRooms.com. Read Dave’s latest whitepaper on ‘Putting an end to the Build and Bust of content management systems’ here.

Does your marketing department have a silo detective? Things that don’t make sense in the way business is done can almost always be traced to silo-ization. And the pain of business silos is well-known to everyone, whether employee or customer.

But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Marketing silos, like most things in life, have “two sides to the coin”. The good side: variety, ownership, accountability, specialization, and efficiency — yes, we need these. The bad side: short-sightedness, self-centeredness, inaccessibility, and inefficiency — of course these are painful. Use wisdom in determining whether a silo should be eliminated. In some cases, elimination creates its own set of downsides.

Overall, the key to dealing with silos inside a business is in expanding our perspectives and motivations in the work we do. This is the genesis of collaboration and universality (i.e. compatibility) needed to overcome the negatives while benefiting from the positives.

Your silo detectives should seek ways to expand (a) perspectives, (b) motivations, (c) collaboration and (d) universality whenever a silo is identified.

Did you know there are at least 10 silos impacting customer experience?

1) Organizational Silos
“Another department handles that” is all-too-common for customers to hear. “You have to go to X to get that” or “I’ll transfer you to Y” are similarly frustrating.

In customers’ minds, this means delays in getting on with their objective. It means hassles: having to re-explain the situation, or worse, having to recite yet again account numbers and security answers.

Why we do this: Obviously businesses must have departments to specialize knowledge and streamline work.

What’s missing for the customer experience is information-sharing, empowerment and collaboration among departments to minimize delays and hassles. Additionally, chronic thorns in customers’ sides typically span multiple organizations, emphasizing the dire need for organizational collaboration.

2) Channel Silos
“We only handle in-store transactions; you’ll have to contact the dealer you bought from, or our online group.”

In customers’ minds, this means extra costs, delays, premature roll-outs, and lack of brand integrity: am I dealing with one brand or a mish-mash of opportunists?

Why we do this: A variety of sales and service channels help customers get what they need when they need it.

What’s missing for the customer experience is integrated data, policies, and procedures, and experience continuity across sales channels, across service channels and between sales and service channels.

3) Systems Silos
“You’ll have to log-in to our other site” or “That mobile app isn’t available for the type of account you have” or “That went to the fax machine at our national site”.

In customers’ minds, this means red tape nuisances, mustering patience to understand the lack of logic, chasing things that fell into a black hole, and tiresome delays.

Why we do this: Businesses acquire other businesses and adopt new technologies, and it takes time to consolidate or integrate.

What’s missing for the customer experience is proactive communication about what to expect, carrying the ball for the customer rather than pushing the inconvenience on them, and taking initiative to prevent black holes.

4) Data Silos
“That’s in another database” or “thanks for being transferred to me; what is your account number and situation again?”

In customers’ minds, this means repetition, wasted time, and uncertainty.

Why we do this: Businesses capture data all along the customer life cycle, from different sources, and in various formats.

What’s missing for the customer experience is minimization of the mundane and laborious steps to get what they need.

5) Process Silos
“Welcome from your dealer” and “welcome from your success manager” and similar messages from so many departments might underscore your enthusiasm for the customer, but multiple groups sending onboarding notes, or requesting survey feedback, and so forth indicate broken processes.

In customers’ minds, this means means extra reading, redundant interactions, and confusion about who to go to for what, another set of things to integrate into their already busy life.

Why we do this: Businesses have many moving parts that serve customers and want customer inputs.

What’s missing for the customer experience is simplicity, with a focus on their own life/business rather than a sizable amount of their mindshare on the supplier’s business.

6) Vision Silos
Different people managing different parts of the customer experience have different visions of the customer experience strategy. Information Technology’s vision may be at odds with Marketing’s vision, and so on across the C-suite. Furthermore, voice-of-the-customer managers envision survey responsiveness that maximizes referrers, while loyalty managers envision renewals that hit monthly quotas, digital marketing managers envision personalized interactions, and customer care managers envision first contact resolution.

In customers’ minds, this means enticements to behave when and how the company wants them to, and policies and requests that don’t always seem to be in their best interest.

Why we do this: Businesses have targets for growth, cost containment, and risk reduction, adjusted for each functional area.

What’s missing for the customer experience is an irrefutable feeling that their well-being comes first, when and how it best fits their objectives, as a trust-builder and precursor to organic growth, cost containment, and risk reduction.

7) Assumption Silos
Different people throughout a company have different understandings of customers realities. Focus on survey scores rather than customer survey verbatims, journey maps focused on a touchpoint, and other common practices obscure an accurate big picture of the end-to-end customer life cycle.

In customers’ minds, this means inconsistent empathy for their plight, and inconsistent experience across their end-to-end journey or life cycle.

Why we do this: Businesses are busy with running the business, and it takes a concerted effort to create a common understanding across thousands of employees.

What’s missing for the customer experience is “doing the whole job” across customers’ needs and feeling valued as a long-term customer as much or more than a new customer is valued.

8) Goal Silos
Customer-facing staff have customer experience goals, but staff that doesn’t interface with customers typically do not see a connection of their work to customer experience; they’re focused on productivity or other internal criteria.

In customers’ minds, this means products, processes, policies and business models that don’t always respect customers’ expectations.

Why we do this: Businesses have multiple obligations: shareholders, industry analysts, customers, and so forth. It’s easy to dilute the over-arching importance of customers as the lifeblood of funding for all the business does.

What’s missing for the customer experience is getting things right the first time and all the time, as much as is humanly possible — preventing the need to rely so heavily on customer-facing staff and enticements.

9) Metrics Silos
Performance measurement of the business may be different from performance measurements of organizations, individuals, and teams. Particularly when it comes to dashboards, incentive pay, and recognition.

In customers’ minds, this means heroics take precedence over prevention of issues, they’re directed to give a certain rating when the survey comes around, issues are resolved for individuals rather than customers collectively, and the supplier is content with industry-leading survey scores rather than resolving chronic issues once and for all.

Why we do this: Businesses measure what’s tied to goals; this may work well if the goals are accurately tied to accurate assumptions and well-founded shared vision for customer experience excellence.

What’s missing for the customer experience is prevention of issues and anticipation of their expectations and reactions.

10) Handoff Silos
“That’s not my job” may be heard anywhere in a company, and anywhere across a customer experience journey or the customer life cycle. “That’s the fault of Y” is often heard by customers when sloppy handoffs occur between software or hardware or services, or between headquarters or branches, or between alliance partners, and so forth.

In customers’ minds, this means headaches in trying to achieve their objectives, a possible bottomless pit of time and effort to figure things out on their own.

Why we do this: Businesses need to define scope and boundaries to maintain productivity and return on investment.

What’s missing for the customer experience is prevention of surprises and true solutions toward their objectives.

Next Steps
Your silo detectives will certainly be busy identifying missed opportunities among these 10 silo categories. Missed opportunities mean precious resources are wasted, potential growth is unrealized, money is left on the table, avoidable churn of customers and employees takes a toll on the whole business, and return on investment across a wide variety of business endeavors could be much higher.

If you’re seeking to stand out from the crowd, span silos. If you want to thrive in ease-of-doing-business, span silos. If your aim is customer experience excellence, it’s imperative to span silos.

According to Hubspot, the buyer’s journey consists of three stages:

• Awareness Stage: The buyer realizes they have a problem
• Consideration Stage: The buyer defines their problem and researches options to solve it.
• Decision Stage: The buyer chooses a solution

I completely agree with the buyer’s journey. Many times, there is one more stage advertisers should focus on, however: the Retention Stage. The buyer has purchased your product or service, but will likely purchase more

For this post, I define paid media as there three different channels:

• Paid Search
• Display Advertising
• Paid Social

All three of these different paid media channels have tactics that can target users across the entire customer’s journey. Many times when talking to clients, they see these channels serving one or perhaps two stages of the customer’s journey.

However, I argue they can each serve all three to develop a truly integrated paid media strategy and address all stages of the buyer’s journey. I will outline each and tactics within each that you can utilize to help nurture your potential buyers all the way down to repeat customers.

Paid Search

Paid Search is typically thought of addressing both the consideration stage and decision stage.

Long-tail search such as “Vizio 60 inch LCD TV” is an example of a long-tail search query. The individual searching knows the brand they want and the size and type of television. They are researching options (and perhaps prices) to find the best deal. Therefore, this individual is in the Consideration Stage.

The user could then search “Best buy Vizio 60 inch LCD TV”. He or she has decided that Best Buy is the retailer to which they’d like to buy and have entered the Decision Stage.

Where advertisers tend not to invest fund is in the Awareness Stage and the Retention Stage.

The Awareness Stage is typically search queries that involve “head terms”, in this example it could be “60-inch LCD tv” or even “LCD TVs”. The searcher realizes they need a television, but aren’t sure what type of television is best for their needs. I realize they keywords have a lower last-click attribution ROI than search queries in the consideration stage, but that doesn’t mean that are not valuable to your organization. This is where the concept of attribution comes into play including assisted clicks and conversions that eventually lead to users buying from your organization.

The Retention Stage can be addressed by using tactics such as Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, or otherwise known as RLSA. You leverage the same lists as you would for your AdWords remarketing campaigns but apply them to search. RLSA can address both the Consideration Stage (for individuals that have not yet converted) but also the Retention Stage. Once a purchase has been made, you can have a separate remarketing list for them.

You can then bid on other keywords for products that you offer that relate to what they purchased, such as “HDMI cable”, “blue ray player”, or “LCD tv stand”. You are now using RLSA to retain and essentially cross-sell other products. Since the consumer has already purchased from your web site, it is likely they will buy again if your web site has other products they need. You could even tailor the ad to offer an additional discount for their loyalty.

Display Advertising

Display advertising is typically thought of as addressing the Awareness and Consideration stages.

Targeting people contextually, using third party data providers, or even based on specific demographics, can help you target a large audience to generate awareness of your products or services. For example, you can use topic targeting on the Google Display Network to identify users that are browsing sites that deal with televisions:

For the Consideration Stage, you can go a bit deeper in how you target. Remember, these are prospective buyers that know they have a problem (or in this case a need), and are researching options. To address this audience, the Google Display Network (and other display platforms) can target “in-market” prospects or consumers that have recently expressed interest in your product or service. To really hone in on your audience, I’d recommend layering multiple targeting types, such as “in-market” along with “topic targeting”.

The Decision Stage is where retargeting comes along. Now that you’ve exposed individuals to your brand and products or services via awareness and consideration tactics, you can retarget these users who visited your site. You can even get as specific as showing the same television they looked at via dynamic remarketing. You can also follow past visitors of your site across different web pages until they make a purchase.

After the user as made a purchase, the next step is to retain them in the Retention Stage. Similar to search, you can suggest complimentary products to help cross-sell them. Display partners offer CRM retargeting, which is essentially targeting past buyers across websites based on their email addresses.

You simply share a list of the email addresses from your CRM or point of sale system and your display partner will use their technologies to try to match the email address you provided with the email address that the user is logged into.

Match rates can vary significantly from 20% to over 50%. Long story short, you need a relatively large database of email addresses to use this tactic, but it can be very effective when you do. Also, if your email lists are large enough, you might want to segment them based on what your customers purchased to develop extremely relevant creative and increase the likeliness of success.

Paid Social

Since paid social can consist of so many platforms/publishers, I’ll focus on Facebook ads which are the most mature, sophisticated, and also has the largest reach. When talking to many clients, they see Facebook ads as a way to primarily address the Awareness Stage. To create awareness for your brand, you can target Facebook users based on demographics for generating “fans” or “likes” for your brand. This was a common tactic when Facebook ads first rolled out and is still a goal for many organizations today.

To target the Consideration Stage, you might layer on multiple targeting tactics such as demographics, interests, and even third party data providers. For example, you might target people who are interested in “smart TVs”, “high-definition televisions”, and in the market for “consumer electronics”.

Similar to display advertising, you can retarget people to address the Decision Stage. These are individuals that have been to your site, and even visited particular products or services. You leverage a cookie, just like in display advertising, to track the user and also know which pages he or she visited. You can then show ads on their Facebook feed to these past site visitors to help them make a decision.

Good news, you’ve acquired a new customer. Now, how do you use Facebook ads to retain and grow their lifetime value and target the Retention Stage? Well, Facebook also has a solution called custom audiences. This is very similar to CRM retargeting for display, but you do not need a partner and fewer email addresses are required to run a campaign. After uploading (and potentially segmenting by products or services purchased) email addresses, you can use a cross-selling strategy and promote complimentary products.

Conclusion

My main point of this post is to illustrate that all paid media channels can address all stages of the customer’s journey AND it’s important to understand that all stages and channels can and should be utilized to truly create an integrated paid media strategy.

Determining how much to invest in each paid media channel and at each stage is where it gets tricky, and depend on both the advertising budget you have and the analytics capabilities you have in place.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Mazirama via DepositPhotos

Screenshot by Joe Castro. Taken October 2016

What are some of the most enduring slogans and taglines? Think for a moment about the ones you really love, the ones that captured the essence of the brand while also capturing the attention of consumers. What makes them so special, and how can you do the same for your business?

Believe it or not, crafting a memorable slogan or tagline involves a lot more than simply putting words together. There is an art to it, an art that requires some knowledge of literary devices. Let’s examine some of your favorite slogans and taglines from the past and see how these literary devices were put to work for those brands.

Isocolon

This strange word just means that you use a particular cadence and rhythm to make the phrases memorable. It usually involves similar syllables in each phrase so that there’s a hint of repetition. Some very famous slogans and taglines include:

The few. The proud. The Marines.

Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.

Anthimeria

Have you ever heard someone make a verb into a noun or vice versa? Maybe you’ve heard someone say, “I heart you,” which is cringe-inducing for an English teacher, but perfectly acceptable in popular speech. Brands do the same thing—taking parts of speech and mixing them up for something fun with their taglines. Consider Ikea, Subway, and Apple:

Live unböring.

Eat fresh.

Think different.

Anastrophe

Some wordsmiths will rearrange words so that the order seems unusual, while the message still makes sense. If done correctly, your slogan will almost seem like poetry. Again, this one’s not easy to pull off, so it’s one of the lesser used techniques. Still, take a look at this tagline from Adidas:

Impossible is nothing.

Litotes

Have you ever heard a slogan that seems to downplay the amazingness of the brand or product? Using a double negative, such as “It’s not the worst thing in the world,” is a tongue-in-cheek way of emphasizing the greatness. One brand that used this particular device comes to mind:

Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.

Hyperbole

Perhaps one of the most commonly used literary device out there, hyperbole gives brands the chance to exaggerate their greatness without appearing conceited. It’s all done in fun, right? Think about Carlsberg beer’s slogan:

Probably the best beer in the world.

These devices prove that coming up with a slogan takes a lot of work, right? Not only must you pull together words that emphasize your brand’s unique value, but those words must also be memorable enough to stand the test of time.

What are some of the best slogans and taglines you’ve heard? Do they fit the devices mentioned here? We’d love to know more about your journey toward choosing the best words for your brand.

Editor’s Note: This is the last part in a series covering best practices for building a great product & engineering team. You can read the first three parts of this series here, here and here.

If you’ve been keeping up with this series, you know that earlier this summer I sat down with two stellar engineering & product leaders – Yoav Shapira, Engineering Manager at Facebook, and Craig Daniel, VP Product at join.me. You also know by now that these two have a ton of wisdom to share. So today, in our final post, we’ll discuss why, when and how to build a cross-functional engineering team.

The Value of Cross-functional Teams

“Put simply, you make more informed choices if you have more data,” says Yoav Shapira. And when it comes to building high functioning teams, the same rings true. For Shapira, it makes sense to include employees from marketing, sales and customer support on engineering teams. “You not only build personal relationships between developers and other stakeholders across the company, you gain a unique perspective from every department.”

In fact, Shapira would argue that the decision to go cross-functional can be vastly more important than even the development methodology you choose to employ.

“It’s so much easier if the engineer can turn to a salesperson and ask, ‘Hey, will this demo well? Will it sell well?’” Why not go right to the source?

When and How to Go Cross-functional

While the value of cross-functional teams is undisputed, determining the right time to go cross-functional can be a little trickier. Shapira says to start from the very beginning.
“I don’t think you can do it too early. It usually happens anyhow,” he says. “Typically when you start a company you have a founding team or its first year employees, one from each functional area, and a lot of decisions are cross-functional by default.”

Things start to unravel, however, as the company grows. “When you get to that middling stage where you’ve hired 10 or 20 engineers, you experience a breakdown in communication,” Shapira adds. “You don’t want to lose those connections.”

But if restructuring your company sounds daunting, Shapira suggests starting small. Building cross-functional teams doesn’t have to be a formal endeavor. Instead, let the sales team know what new features you’re building. “The one or two team members who really care about what you’re working on can become your alpha testers – your guinea pigs so to speak. The others might not care, and that’s totally fine.” Don’t force it.

Hackathons can also ease your employees into the idea of working on cross-functional teams. “There’s an interesting pattern we’re starting to see at Facebook and a few other Silicon Valley companies,” says Shapira. “Rather than a typical hackathon, companies are now holding ‘hack months,’ which, contrary to how it sounds, is not a month long hackathon where individuals or small teams work on a project of their choosing. Instead, hack months allow individuals to work on different teams.”

The reason for the month-long stints? Well, as you can imagine, teams can’t accomplish much in a day or two. But, give employees a month and “you can really make a significant impact,” says Shapira. “At the end of the month, team members will either decide they like their new teams better or will go back to their original team with a ton of new knowledge.”

For Craig Daniel and join.me, building cross-functional teams hasn’t been straightforward, but the benefits are plain to see.

join.me, a subsidiary of LogMeIn, hasn’t formally rolled out cross-functional teams, but the product team actively releases new features for LogMeIn employees to test out on a regular basis. “We actually have Slack channels where we release new features and gather feedback,” says Daniel. “It’s typically the same people every time, the ones who really care and want to give feedback, but they get in the loop early. They’re advocates for each feature by the time they become generally available.”

Continuous, Rapid Improvement

As cross-functional teams become more prominent at startups, mixing these teams up will become crucial. After all, the benefits of cross-functional teams come largely from blending different departments. You want to avoid group think at all costs.

While Shapira says each leader or organization will find a timing that fits their own company, he tries to keep teams together for about a year. He also is careful not to completely scramble each team. Instead, Shapira says to “add someone new and take one or two other teams members out at a time. The ideal team should have three or four developers, a PM, a marketer and salesperson. All in, you should have seven or eight people,” he says.

And what happens when you need a team member to serve on more than one cross-functional team? Well, you’ve misplanned.

“Correct your planning. Document why you failed, understand if you need to hire differently or replan the project or train someone else,” says Shapira. Building the perfect cross-functional team isn’t easy, but it’s well worth it.

Have your own experiences building and managing cross-functional engineering teams? Let us know in the comments.

The post Cross-functional Engineering Teams: Embedding the Voice of the Business in Every Decision appeared first on OpenView Labs.

The post Three Counter-intuitive Ideas for 2019 Sales Kickoff Meetings by Eric Nitschke appeared first on Corporate Visions.

Want to wow your sales team for kickoff? Try some new approaches that could help reps have value conversations customers want to have.

Tis the season for picking sales meeting kickoff themes for sales and marketing organizations around the world. You definitely have to set the dates, confirm the budget, find the location, and get executive buy-in. But when it comes to the content for the sales kickoff meeting, don’t settle for a new version of the same checklist you may be using.

Here are three counterintuitive ideas to help your salespeople really remember and use your content from your 2019 sales kickoff.

1. Model conversations vs. new sales pitches
Sales kickoffs are usually full of new products and updated features. And that’s okay. But instead of hours of feature-dense presentations that focus all on you, what if you modeled great customer conversations?

76% of buyers will buy from a company that illustrates a buying vision—rather than another entry in a long list of commodity suppliers. Show your sales reps how to lead to your offerings by creating the urgency for customers to make a change in the way they’re solving for future challenges. Then you can position your offerings in a unique and impactful way. (Also read It Takes More Than a Technology Stack to Drive Demand)

 2. Enable conversation competencies vs. sales processes
Many companies are making great inroads in new training methodologies and technologies, but how much time will you dedicate to training skills and processes that mostly feature how your salespeople should manage a sale cycle when most people agree the customer has the most power?

71% of sales managers agree the ability to “articulate value” is the biggest difference between high and low sales performers. So what if you enabled your team’s competencies to progress opportunities based on having conversations that customers truly find valuable? What if they could create pipeline based on establishing differentiation, write proposals that pass executive muster, and close opportunities profitably without losing value throughout the sale cycle? That would make for a big kickoff! (Also read Are Your Reps a Selling “Triple Threat?”)

3. Advise brain science vs. new theories
Hey, I love a good book, too. And sometimes CEOs fall in love with a new business book that offers to introduce best practices into your sales training. But often companies just imitate the processes of other companies with mixed successes. The challenge is that “best practices” are other people’s successes, which means it’s old news, and your competitors read the same books. So at best you’re frustrating your team and at worst your enabling mediocrity.

But what if you didn’t follow the crowd to this year’s book club favorite theory, and instead introduced skills that leverage how the human brain perceives value, and how buyers make decisions based on how it perceives value? Understanding how customers buy, vs. how OTHER salespeople sell, would make a much greater impact at a sales kickoff! (Also read Best Practices Aren’t Always the Best Methods over at td.org)

You only get a few days with your whole sales team in one place. Try one of these counterintuitive ideas! And I’d be interested in your plans for your 2019 kickoff meetings!

Thank you for reading this post from Corporate Visions - Differentiate Your Marketing Messages and Sales Conversations.

In recent years, there has been a staggering surge in interest in intelligent systems as applied to everything from customer support to curing cancer. Simply sprinkling the term “AI” into startup pitch decks seems to increase the likelihood of getting access to funding. The media continuously reports that AI is going to steal our jobs, and the U.S. government seems as worried about the prospect of super-intelligent killer robots as it is about addressing the highest wealth disparity in the country’s history. Comparatively, there has been very little discussion of what artificial intelligence is, and where we should expect it to actually affect business.

When people talk about AI, machine learning, automation, big data, cognitive computing, or deep learning, they’re talking about the ability of machines to learn to fulfill objectives based on data and reasoning. This is tremendously important, and is already changing business in practically every industry. In spite of all the bold claims, there remain several core problems at the heart of Artificial Intelligence where little progress has been made (including learning by analogy, and natural language understanding). Machine learning isn’t magic, and the truth is we have neither the data nor the understanding necessary to build machines that make routine decisions as well as human beings.

Insight Center

That may come as a disappointment to some, and potentially disrupt some very expensive marketing campaigns. But the likelihood of self-directed, super-intelligent computational agents emerging in the foreseeable future is extremely low — so keep it out of the yearly business plan for now. Having said that, an enormous amount can already be achieved with the machinery we have today. And that’s where forward-thinking managers should be focusing.

Over the next five to 10 years, the biggest business gains will likely stem from getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Building upon the business intelligence revolution of the past years, machine learning will turbocharge finding patterns and automate value extraction in many areas. Data will increasingly drive a real-time economy, where resources are marshaled more efficiently, and the production of goods and services becomes on-demand, with lower failure rates and much better predictability. This will mean different things for different industries.

In services, we will not only get better at forecasting demand, but will learn to provide the right product on a hyper-individualized basis (the Netflix approach).

In retail we will see more sophisticated supply chains, a deeper understanding of consumer preferences, and the ability to customize products and purchase experiences both on- and off-line. Retailers will focus on trend creation and preference formation/brand building.

In manufacturing there will be an evolution towards real-time complete system monitoring, an area known as “anomaly detection.” The components will become increasingly connected, allowing for streams of real-time data that machine learning algorithms can use to reveal problems before they happen, optimize the lifetime of components, and reduce the need for human interventions.

In agriculture, data will be used to decide which crops to grow, in what quantities, in what locations, and will render the growing process more efficient year after year. This will create more efficient supply chains, better food, and more sustainable growth with fewer resources.

In short, AI may be a ways off, but machine learning already offers huge potential. So how can managers incorporate it into daily decision-making and longer-term planning? How can a company become ML-ready?

First, catalogue your business processes. Look for procedures and decisions that are made frequently and consistently, like approving or denying a loan application. Make sure you’re collecting as much data as is feasible about how the decision was made, along with any data used to make it. And make sure to collect the decision itself. In the hypothetical loan example, you want to record whether the loan was approved; the data used to make that decision; and any other information about the circumstances behind the decision. (Who made it? At what time of day? How confident did they feel in the decision?) This is the kind of data that can be used to fuel machine learning in the future.

Second, focus on simple problems. Automation and machine learning will work well where the problem is well defined and well understood, and where the available data exemplifies the information necessary to make a decision. A good problem for machine learning is identifying a fraudulent transaction. The question “What makes customers feel happy?” is vaguer, more challenging, and not the place to start.

Third, don’t use machine learning where standard business logic will suffice. Machine learning is useful when the set of rules is unclear, or follows complex, non-linear patterns. If you want transparency and reliability, go for the simplest possible approach that meets your performance criteria.

Fourth, if a process is complicated, use machine learning to create decision support systems. If the objective is too unclear to define with respect to the data, try to create intermediate results to help your teams be more effective. You can think of machine learning as part of the hierarchical decision-making path, and it will engender a better understanding of the problem in future.

The point is that there is a lot that can be done without needing to dig very deep. The majority of your workforce will continue to have a job, and you can help them to be more productive, and work on more interesting and demanding (read: more valuable) tasks by digitizing more of the mechanical parts of your business. For now, artificial intelligence cannot turn a business’s performance from bad to good, but it can make some aspects of a good business great.

If you run out of low hanging fruit — though I’ll wager you won’t — it may be time to consider building a team to attack more complex problems with machine learning. Be patient, as this investment will not pay off immediately. If you do decide to create such a team, be open, engage with the research community, and you will be contributing to building tomorrow’s economy.

Companies are always looking for the best ways to assess the potential of employees. Managers want to understand how their teams contribute to the organization, and they want to identify high performers and potential leaders along the way. Many know and use the nine-box model, for example, to map past performance against future leadership potential. The people the model identifies as those with the most promise are often the ones a company will invest in through additional training and talent development programs.

But are these measurement methods still valid? Just as our workplaces have changed, the way we measure an employee’s value also needs to change. Our belief is that companies aren’t properly identifying the right people or behaviors in the first place — they fail to accurately assess an employee’s potential value to the organization because of what they can’t see. Specifically, traditional organizational reporting structures limit managers’ visibility into how their employees are influencing and contributing to other teams. New workplace metrics are needed to help leaders get a more complete picture of this.

One window into an employee’s impact within an organization is understanding how they collaborate and influence others within the organization. The latter trait in particular is something Korn Ferry research has identified as an important way to identify employees with leadership potential.

We got a unique window into this when TINYpulse — a software provider that helps companies measure workplace sentiment and peer-to-peer recognition through ongoing, one-question pulse surveys — partnered with Microsoft Workplace Analytics to examine the relationship between employee feedback, collaboration, and performance. TINYpulse provided Microsoft with aggregated numbers from a tool called Cheers for Peers, with which employees can send “cheers” to each other to recognize good work. TINYpulse tracked how many cheers were sent and received per employee at their company over a six-month period.

To understand how employee recognition relates to organizational influence, Microsoft analyzed how the number of cheers sent and received within TINYpulse correlated with network centrality in the email and meeting network over the same period. Network centrality is an index used to measure those with higher influence based on the number of connections that they have and the number of connections that their connections have — like Google’s PageRank algorithm but for people.

The study found that the number of cheers an employee received was highly correlated with high network influence. This means the group of people who received the most praise from colleagues acted as communication hubs for the entire organization and were central to work getting done. Examining a bit further, we found that the number of aggregate internal interactions was also highly correlated with the number of cheers received. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that this supports the notion that as people collaborated more with colleagues, they were recognized more by others at work.

We learned that highly regarded employees tend to collaborate across an organization, but we also wanted answers to two other questions: What behaviors make us believe certain employees are talented? and How can managers benefit from that information, particularly as it pertains to identifying potential leaders?

In the second stage of the research, TINYpulse provided Microsoft with a list of the top-performing employees it identified as those with high leadership potential. The list was matched with email and calendar behavioral data, and then anonymized and aggregated.

For the go-to-market segment, representing employees in sales and marketing functions, we found that top performers spent an average of 25 hours in their email and calendar per week, nearly 14 hours a week in internal collaboration, and about 12 hours a week in external collaboration. These numbers were similar to those of low performers.

There were two major differences, however. First, high performers spent nearly four hours more per week collaborating internally rather than externally, and this group had larger internal networks (an average of 27 connections), indicating they are more influential within the company than their peers. For comparison, the employee sample identified as low performers had an average network size of 20.

Second, high-potential individuals in the go-to-market group spent 34% more time with product and engineering groups than the team average. This is particularly important in the highly competitive software-as-service business, which requires very tight collaboration between those who interact with the users, buyers, and competition and the people who build the product.

“By analyzing this data, we were able to quantify the specific behaviors behind high-performing groups being flagged for leadership development and management opportunities,” said David Niu, CEO of TINYpulse. “Understanding the how behind improved performance helps us identify the right behaviors to encourage and reward, which means development opportunities are open to more people.”

Investments in leadership development increased 14% in 2014, according to Bersin by Deloitte, and the current demand for high-caliber talent is further compounded by new graduates entering the workforce each year. For companies to succeed, they must innovate in how they identify, train, and retain high-performing employees through new data-driven approaches. The traits of high performers are multidimensional, nuanced — and sometimes hidden. Although it is in its early stages, the powerful combination of self-reported employee feedback and objective measures gleaned through aggregate calendar and email activities can provide a more complete picture of performance and potential. Together, they have the potential to help unlock the mysteries surrounding what constitutes the best and brightest.

B2B marketers who use blogs generate 67 percent more leads than those who do not.

Your blog is the backbone of your online content-marketing strategy. Having a blog-posting strategy in place that resonates with your target audience will help you in your goal of generating more leads for your business. It also helps establish your business as a thought leader in your industry.

Know Your Audience

Your blog’s success depends heavily on whether or not you are delivering the content your audience is interested in. Your blog-posting strategy needs to revolve around topics that establish you as a thought leader in the industry. Also, when you post content that resonates with your audience, it’ll lead to increased conversions.

You can find out whom you need to develop content for via the following ways:

• Create reader personas and tailor content to what they’d want to see.
• Develop surveys to see what interests your audience.
• Monitor your previous content (what performed well and what didn’t).

Here is an example of an insurance company that knows its audience. Once someone requests a quote or indicates that he or she is interested in a specific insurance type, the home page blog stream was updated to posts that were relevant to that type of insurance. The company also tailored follow-up emails to those topics.

Create Goals

You always want to be working toward something when it comes to your blog-posting strategy and creating clearly defined goals helps you do just that. Make sure these are SMART goals. An example of a SMART goal for your blog would be “Increase blog subscribers by 20 percent in Q4.”

Blog Consistently

Establishing a routine as part of your blog-posting strategy is a must. Your readers will become used to seeing your content consistently and on a schedule. You’re at risk for losing your audience if you decide to take breaks from posting, so stick to the publishing calendar.

Blogging consistently also helps with SEO, because search engines prefer fresh content. Aside from the increase in long-tail keywords (which we will elaborate on later), you will see a decrease in your bounce rate with more time spent per visitor on your site.

Here is a case study of how blogging consistently can work wonders, even for niche companies like Conversant Bio. Its blog visits went from about 5,000 visits in December 2014 to 34,000 visits per month 10 months later in October 2015. Not only that, but it saw the number of quality leads increase by 700 percent.

Make the Most Out of Your Blog Posts

Your current blog-posting strategy can be great when it comes to frequency, but if what you post isn’t optimized, you won’t see your blogging efforts turn into any new leads.

Links

Including internal and external links is important for your blog posts. Internal links will increase traffic and rankings for SEO as well as establish you as a thought leader in your space, while external links help establish credibility and maybe even an opportunity for them to link to you as well. It is also important to ensure these links are natural for a reader and you aren’t adding in a link for the sake of it. Consider building out a link-building campaign to help beef up your link profile.

Keyword research

Keyword research is a fundamental part of your blog-posting strategy. Quality content is favored by search engines, but if you aren’t using words that people are searching for, your blog won’t perform as well as it can. There are many tools out there to help you in your keyword research—HubSpot Keyword Tool and Moz Keyword Explorer are just two examples.

It’s also important to use more long-tail keywords, meaning phrases with three to four words that are specific to your topic. Popular search terms actually make up less than 30 percent of the searches performed on the Web. The remaining 70 percent lie in what’s called the “long tail” of search, according to Moz.

You may have great ideas, but finding out what questions are being asked directly from prospects, customers, or others online will help ensure you are writing blog posts that actually help answer real questions your audience is asking. This is a great post from a SmartBug colleague to help you do just that.

Images

Your blog post isn’t just about the copy; the image is also an important part. A blog post that is visually appealing will see more engagement; it also helps you increase traffic from image search engines (just be sure to include an alt tag). Consider if charts or graphs help illustrate the story. Recruit a graphic designer if need be. We are a visual culture, and social media is becoming more image-centric, so it is important to include a visual in each and every post for maximum views.

Guest posting

Crafting a guest-blogging campaign is great for obtaining backlinks to your site, which is great in terms of SEO. Guest blogging also helps share your content with a larger audience, so it helps build brand awareness.

Post on LinkedIn Pulse, which will reach your connections. You can even do a Part 1 on Pulse and Part 2 on your blog to cross-drive traffic! But make sure you don’t post exactly the same thing on both.

CTAs

All of your blog posts need to be action-driven; there should be something that entices the reader to become a lead. Calls to action (CTAs) can be visual or just plain text but need to be related to the blog post in some way; otherwise, you will see a very low conversion rate on your posts. Although most CTAs tend to be located at the bottom of a blog post, play around with the placement to see what works best for your company.

Source: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/blog-anchor-text-call-to-action-study#sm.0000v9gyta1543d92rmwmiu51qui9

Maybe try using in-line anchor text CTAs, like shown in the image above. One of our clients at SmartBug has seen a six percent to seven percent conversion rate with in-line text CTAs when in the middle of the post.

Promote

In order to increase your reach of your blog posts, you need to share them across social media channels. Sending out one tweet about your new post isn’t going to cut it either. There need to be multiple messages scheduled per platform that your company is on. Invite your employees to share the posts to increase your reach even further and add them to the automatic blog notifications so that they get an email whenever a new blog post comes out.

Keep in mind that different social channels have different peak times for sharing, as well as what should be included in that message. Paid social advertising is also a great idea to help build your blog audience. Just make sure you’re keeping track of posts that are performing well (and not so well) so that you can continuously improve.

Promotional Idea: A quality blog series can be put into a PDF for your sales team to send to prospects or as a leave-behind.

Measurement

In order to see how successful your blog-posting strategy has been, you need to analyze your efforts. There are many important metrics to measure when it comes to your blog, but the most important ones are traffic numbers and conversion rates. From there, you can tailor your content to what your audience wants to read about.

Also, look through your old posts that still receive traffic and see if any can be optimized. Here’s a HubSpot blog article on the success that HubSpot has seen with blog optimization of past posts.

In short, getting the most value out of your blog-posting strategy is done through careful research of reader personas, optimizing your posts, promoting on social media, and learning from what has worked in the past and what hasn’t. If you follow these steps, you are on the path to a successful blog that your readers look to for news and advice.

Occasionally using buzzwords or jargon won’t hurt a salesperson’s credibility, but doing so frequently will.

Tired clichés and overused phrases make reps sound like walking product brochures, not trusted consultants.

Buyers want to do business with someone who is genuine and human -- not someone who relies on empty words to make themselves sound smarter or more impressive.

Research also shows people are less likely to believe a statement using abstract language than one using concrete language.

In other words, reps who rely on buzzwords seem less trustworthy. If they want prospects to believe them, salespeople should be as straightforward as possible.

How to Cut Out Buzzwords and Jargon

Kicking the buzzword habit can be tough. When you hear a word or phrase over and over again, it tends to sneak into your own speech.

The first step is recognizing which words and phrases to eliminate. Next time you’re about to say or type one of the items on this list, ask yourself how you’d communicate the same idea to a young child who doesn’t know any idioms.

Here’s an email rewritten without jargon.

Before:

After:

If you’re still struggling to speak plainly, Intuit business writer Tim Parker has two tips.

First, think like an editor and cut every word that doesn’t add meaning to your explanation.

“If a word or phrase doesn’t deliver specific details, it’s probably not making much of an impact,” Parker explains. “Consider replacing or omitting it.”

Second, Parker recommends giving examples. Rather than saying your company “has a solid track record,” tell your prospect about the typical results your clients see.

When You Should Use Jargon

Salespeople shouldn’t cut out “corporate speak” entirely. Using industry- or vertical-specific terms will help them prove their expertise and experience to buyers.

For instance, I recently listened to a call between a rep and the CEO of an artisanal coffee company. The salesperson mentioned the coffee’s “roast profile,” which immediately changed the tone of the conversation. The CEO had seemed pretty distracted. After the rep demonstrated her knowledge of the coffee space, however, he was eager to talk.

There are two different approaches to learning a prospect’s language, depending on the rep’s selling situation.

• If they’re working solely with one industry, salespeople should subscribe to that industry’s publications, attend its events, network with its experts, and read relevant books.
• If they’re working with buyers in multiple verticals and need to quickly get up to speed, reps can visit their prospects’ websites, read their email newsletters, see what executives post on LinkedIn and Twitter, and look for the most popular industry websites and note which terms come up.

It can also be helpful to search “[industry] + jargon,” “[industry] + terminology,” and “[industry] + common phrases.”

Reps should be careful not to use any terminology they don’t fully understand. Prospects will quickly lose confidence in a salesperson who bungles a basic term.

The Ultimate List of Buzzwords and Jargon to Avoid

Actions

• Push the envelope
• Disrupt
• Innovate
• Leverage
• Get our ducks in a row
• Streamline
• Drill down
• Take it offline
• Interface
• Boil the ocean
• Align
• Synthesize
• Touch base
• Circle back
• Get down to brass tacks
• Give 110%
• Move the needle
• Architect
• Put it on the back burner
• Cast a wide net
• Lean in
• Raise the bar
• Move up the value chain
• Run it up the flagpole
• Put boots on the ground
• Spend calories doing X
• Flex your [design, creative, analytical, etc.] muscle
• Take a step back
• Circle the wagons
• Punt (an idea)
• Peel the onion
• Build it from the ground up

Nouns

• Deep dive
• Paradigm shift
• Synergy
• Core competency
• Game-changer
• Window of opportunity
• Wheelhouse
• Low-hanging fruit
• Bandwidth
• Learnings
• Big picture
• Many moving parts
• Hard stop
• 360 view

Adjectives

• Outside-the-box
• Next generation
• Intentional
• Progressive
• In agreeance
• Mission critical
• Revolutionary
• Leading
• Cutting-edge
• High-tech
• Forward-thinking
• Dynamic
• Proactive
• Bleeding-edge
• Impactful
• Actionable
• Granular
• Viral
• Scaleable
• Robust
• Cut and dry
• Transformative
• Integrated
• Holistic

Your prospects don’t have the desire to translate a buzzword-laden explanation or email into plain English. Not only do clichés and jargon harm your credibility, they also sap your prospects’ patience and make your message less effective. Unless you’re using industry-specific jargon (correctly), try to eliminate this language.

Reflect back on your career in sales. For some of you, it’s only a few years, for some it goes back a couple of decades.

Regardless how long you have been involved in selling, things have changed in enormous ways.

Much of what we do has changed. We used to be the gateway to information about products and services. Customers met with us to learn about new products, capabilities and services. Now they self educate through the web. They no longer need us to educate them about our products.

Buying has changed, the customer is definitely in charge (I think they always have been), but it’s changed beyond this. Customers are much more time constrained, they are so busy doing their jobs, they often don’t have time to learn about new methods and approaches. In complex B2B buying, it has become a consensus decision, instead of a decision maker, there are 6.8. The majority of buying decisions end in no decision made, primarily because buyers struggle with their own internal processes. And decisions are getting inspected by higher levels of management to assure they are aligned with corporate priorities.

The tools we leverage and how we do our jobs has changed. More selling is done at a distance, over the phone, through video/conferencing. Face to face meetings, while still important, are less frequent. Reaching customers is much more difficult, part of it is because they are so busy, part of it is they need us less.

We have tools that enable us to do things that, 10 years ago, were unimaginable. Analytics, research tools, social tools like LinkedIn enable us to be much more informed about the customer and individuals before our first contact. Social tools enable us to engage customers in very different ways, through multiple channels. Other tools help increase our efficiency, we can get more things done, faster (we can also create crap at the speed of light). We have mobile tools that help us when we are with the customer.

New methods, thinking, and approaches change how we sell. Whether at one end we look at high volume/high velocity approaches or at the other end, we look at Insight/Challenger selling. There are hundreds to thousands of articles to learn from, published daily, hundreds to thousands of books published every year. All with insights on how we can be more effective in engaging our customers.

Everything has changed in Buying and Selling!

Yet results show us getting worse. Quota performance is declining, job tenure is shortening, win rates are declining and sales cycles are increasing. Many are declaring the “death of sales” as AI and automation seek to shift much of the buying. (And some of our customers are cheering this fact.) We are now on a 7/24 clock, struggling to keep up. I’ll stop here, before you get depressed.

With all the things that have changed, the capabilities we have that were unthinkable even 10 years ago, one would expect to see tremendous improvements in results we produce.

What’s wrong with this picture?

The only thing that is left is us! Perhaps it’s us that cause the problems. Perhaps, in spite of everything that has changed in buying and selling, we haven’t.

We continue to sell with old mindsets. We focus on our goals, our commissions, and what we need to achieve rather than the customer. We focus on our products and solutions rather than what the customer is trying to achieve. The more “advanced” in our midst may be focused on helping the customer to buy, yet the customer is focused on solving a problem, not just buying.

As much as we talk about value, we focus on price. When we succeed, the customer got a good deal, but may not be realizing the value they expected.

As managers, we still drive activity, focusing on volumes and not outcomes and progress. In days past, it used to be, “How many doors did you knock on?” Today, it’s been replaced by “How many dials, how many emails, how many tweets, how many followers?”

We know growth and improvement come through learning (and coaching is a vital part of learning). Yet most of the money we invest in training is wasted because it isn’t reinforced and applied. Or we are training on the wrong things.

We know we need new skills to engage our customers differently, but how many are looking at skills like curiosity, critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, project management? Instead, we continue to focus on the skills we looked at 10 or more years ago.

Many of us have the same business models we’ve always had, we have the same sales process–if we even have a sales process, we measure the same things–and they are all trailing indicators, we reward the behaviors made us successful in the past, but may not be the behaviors needed for success today and in the future.

Perhaps the problem is that we haven’t changed. All the things that have changed around us, all the new tools, methods, capabilities we have are useless until we change.

We need to focus on our mindset, fixed mindsets are always beset with limitations. We need to adapt (genuinely, not via lip service) growth oriented mindsets. We need to build organizations with growth oriented mindsets.

Until each of us starts to change, everything else is just wasted effort.

You may have heard that buyer personas are a vital tool for salespeople, and wondered if you should feature them in an upcoming launch or sales kickoff.

The first point is that although personas can appear deceivingly simple to create, the most common paths used to to build them generates personas which are NOT valuable to salespeople.

It is a waste of time to assign a name and photo to obvious pain points, or to focus on personal details unrelated to the problems you address. For example, one client showed us personas that included information about their prospect’s recreational activities. Unless you’re selling exercise equipment, your reps don’t need to hear that the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is 45, married, and attends spin class three times a week. Yes, this make the CMO more human, but it does nothing to help your sales (or marketing) team frame a compelling argument for your data analytics solution.

No Fiction. Facts.

Far from fictitious or idealistic portraits, buyer personas need to be built on well-researched insights into the actual priorities, success factors, and decision criteria that factor into your buyer’s decision to solve the problem you address.

Before you deliver buyer personas to your sales team, make sure you consider these three points:

1. Ensure Success for that First Sales Interaction

Many personas are built around job titles, with additional notes such as whether that role is risk adverse or tech savvy. This is a start, but not nearly enough to help your salesperson know how to engage this buyer in a first meeting.

Does your persona include specifics on the drivers that cause buyers to reject the status quo and begin to evaluate solutions like yours? Your reps need to know which buyers are receptive, which are not, and most critically, which company or individual dynamics predict a willingness to change.

These insights also tell you which roles you should target. In a recent study, our client learned that their preferred buyers — those looking for higher-priced quality & guarantees of performance – were least involved in day-to-day operations, which everyone naturally assumed was where the high quality pitch would work. Totally new, totally fresh, this was an insight they were NOT expecting until we interviewed real buyers

By the way: this is what sales reps already LOOK AND LISTEN for when reading the web, watching the news or reading a company’s news releases. The more you can arm reps with KEY INSIGHTS they can use to fine-tune their “sales radars,” the faster they will find real opportunities and weed out time-wasters who just have time to talk.

This approach creates “wedges” to crack open opportunities that a product or ROI pitch simply cannot. Your reps will love these insights as they leave “less informed” competitors in the dust.

2. Win/Loss Can Only Tell You So Much: Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid

While you may have heard that features or price are high on the list of reasons that buyers don’t choose you, unscripted, “safe” conversations with real buyers prove that these are only a small part of the story. There’s a LOT more to these decisions that buyers are not revealing to sales reps during the sales process, or to whomever is conducting the follow-on win/loss interview.

These unexpressed objections are CRITICAL because they allow your salespeople to address objections your competitors will never discover.

One of the primary objectives for buyer personas is to anticipate the buyer’s questions, and the answers they hope to hear, as they research options, weigh alternatives, and make a selection.

Every rep can tell you story after story of the “deal that almost was,” where everything looked just right and then: NOTHING. The prospect went dark, the deal went cold, it just wasn’t time.

It’s not the things you expect that can kill a deal, it’s the ones you don’t anticipate. Buying insight interviews prove that even the most informed companies have, at most, 90% of the facts about what matters to their buyers. The missing 10% is slowing down your entire sales pipeline.

3. Use Buying Insights to Build Synergy between Marketing and Sales Teams

Despite big investments in marketing automation, lead scoring, and shared goals, when you listen to buyers, you’ll hear that sales and marketing efforts remain largely disconnected.

Buyers are frustrated and lose trust in a company when the answers they need aren’t readily available. No one cares whether sales or marketing is at fault – if a buyer perceives the disconnect between themselves and the company, you’ve just added ANOTHER obstacle to the sale.

It helps to start with the understanding that sales people persuade one buyer at a time, while marketing persuades markets full of buyers. Now conversations between sales and marketing can focus on the perceptions that exist and what the teams can do, separately and jointly, to educate the market and persuade buyers that you have a solution that is a perfect match for the buyer’s expectations.

The goal should be meaningful sales and marketing plays that aren’t based on simple buyer profiles or obvious pain sheets. Instead, your activities are built on facts that aren’t easy to discover, creating a competitive advantage that will be much more sustainable than a price reduction or feature enhancement.

Properly researched buyer personas are far more than a clever way to dramatize WHO “might” be the person involved in a buying decision plus their personality, pains and objectives. To be valuable to sales, they need to provide new insights about how, when and why buyers choose products or services like yours – the very insights salespeople wish they had to close a deal.

In our upcoming webinar series, we will explain how effective buying insights are uncovered using interviews that involve a completely unscripted dialog between an interviewer and real buyers. You’ll see how skills much like a journalist’s uncover the practical, emotional and rational stories related by people who have recently spent money to solve the same problem you address.

I began my career in B2B software sales prior to the digital age. The sales tools and processes during those times were very different than they are today.

For some reason, this 50-something tech veteran has taken to digital like a fish in water. I embraced social media around 2007. As digital transformation has unfolded over the past five-plus years, I’ve realized that being proficient in social channels is a necessary skill in B2B sales. I’ve never once resisted this evolution. To me, it’s just natural…After all, industry began with the telephone, then email, now social media as primary communication and engagement tools. But, not all B2B sales professionals are on the same page, regardless of years of experience.

75% of B2B buyers conduct research for products and services in social channels. Source IDC.

There is much discussion about the evolution of the B2B buyer’s journey. While it varies from industry to industry, one thing for sure is that most B2B decision-makers are leveraging social media channels to conduct research on products and services they need for their business.

Make no mistake, the fundamental premise hasn’t changed. B2B buyers are looking to solve business problems and to get an ROI on their investment. But, unlike my sales days in the 80s and 90s, the way to influence the modern B2B buyer is largely accomplished through digital channels.

B2B buyers are influenced by people and content.

The B2B buyer is online studying product features, pricing and reviews through blog posts, white papers, webcasts, podcasts, case studies and social media profiles of the people who make up a potential vendor organization. They are influenced by anyone online who credibly supplies answers to their questions.

However, many B2B sales professionals underestimate how much they can influence buyers through a social profile that serves as a sales asset 24/7. Moreover, sales professionals can influence buyers by providing useful information through social channels that helps them answer questions during their journey.

67% of B2B buyers’ evaluation process is completed online. Source: Global Performance Group

The B2B buyer’s journey is not linear. Often, there are committees formed to evaluate products and services, with each committee member engaged in their own unique aspect of the online research process to determine if a product/service fits their needs. It’s imperative to provide relevant content to help each committee member move through each stage of their journey. Each member of the committee – aka persona – can include people whose focus may include vendor reputation, technical evaluators, financial evaluators, etc. The B2B sales person should recognize these personas and seek to engage with each persona through relevant content as provided by the marketing team, or curated on their own if necessary.

For example, an executive seeks to learn how other companies have used your products successfully. The technical evaluator wants to know that your product has the necessary features, and the financial evaluator needs to know how to achieve an ROI with your product.

You should provide content through social media channels that assist all members of the decision-making committee on their journey toward their ultimate decision.

78% of sales people who use social media perform better than those who don’t. Source: HubSpot

Integrating social media engagement in your selling process is table stakes. Not doing so is foolish for the simple reason that your buyer is there. And, while the buyer isn’t always open to engaging with a sales person during the research phase, inserting yourself into their research as a useful resource, is an effective way to be influential to the buyer and build your sales pipeline. If your product is a good fit, and you are a helpful resource, those buyers can become an inbound lead.

64% of sales people that use inbound social selling reach their quotas. Source: HubSpot

A sales person’s ability to meet quotas increases substantially when they integrate social selling into their sales process. Effective social media engagement expands your reach and boosts your sales potential.

In fact, effective social selling can create competitive advantage. Remember that most B2B buyers use social media to find information when they start their evaluation process. When you integrate social selling into your sales process, you can engage with the buyer sooner in their journey and potentially enjoy competitive advantage.

98% of sales people with at least 5,000 LinkedIn contacts reach their quota. Source: HubSpot

The more exposure you have within your industry segment, the greater the chance that you will be able to meet or surpass your sales quota. You should always be striving to expand your network. Your connections give you credibility and can also open up new opportunities for you through their network. Incidentally, you should do the same for people in your network.

How a B2B Sales Pro Got Invited into an Opportunity through Social Selling

One of our technology clients had a sales person who was monitoring conversations in LinkedIn and tweets from prospective companies, as well as from her competitors. She observed an online exchange between a competitor’s sales person and a person at a company representing a prospective customer. The exchange was clear about the intent of the prospect inquiring into product features of the competitor. Sidenote: a public inquiry such as this may be unavoidable, but do your best to keep such an inquiry private through Twitter DMs, text, email or phone conversations.

In this case, the technology sales person at our client reached out to the prospect to insert herself into the conversation. Her outreach was direct and to the point about the prospect’s inquiry. A sales conversation ensued and eventually, our client’s sales person won the business, much to the dismay of the competitive sales person involved in the digital conversation.

How This Story Could’ve Gone South

Your buyer will check you out online because they can. Imagine if the prospect in this story visited the sales person’s LinkedIn profile prior to agreeing to engage and was not impressed with her profile. Chances are that prospect would not have engaged with that sales person’s outreach, even if the brand she represents is an authoritative vendor. In that case, it’s possible the prospect might search out a different sales person from that authoritative vendor. It’s imperative (table stakes) for a sales person to have a social profile that serves as a sales asset comprised of a strong headline, a well written summary that’s customer centric and relevant experience that’s also customer centric. Such a social profile will attract inbound sales conversations.

How a Sales Person Sold Out a Seminar

This client sales person is located in a territory with many companies in the oil and gas industry. His company scheduled a half day seminar to present solutions to the oil and gas industry. Less than two months before the seminar, no one was signed up to attend the event.

The sales person used Twitter to identify people in the oil and gas industry in and near this geographic location. In addition to discovering people to invite to the event, he discovered a local chapter of an industry association. He contacted the association to inform them of the planned seminar. The association agreed to share information about the event with their membership through their Twitter account. In short, the association partnered with this sales person to promote the event, and the event ‘sold out.’ More importantly, the event produced a rich pipeline of new opportunity for this sales person.

Lessons Learned from These Two Examples

Both examples above have common threads. In both cases, the sale person embraced social business strategies as contemporary means of reaching and engaging people for effective sales processes.

Also, in both cases the sales person invested time to conduct research in social channels, notably LinkedIn and Twitter. I mention this because it takes time to “listen” on social channels. When it’s done purposefully and with an efficient process, the payoff can be huge.

77% of B2B buyers are unwilling to speak to a salesperson before completing research online. Source: Global Performance Group.

The B2B buyer is intentionally conducting research online. Providing useful content to your prospective buyer on social media is a great way to start a sales conversation. If you’re not sharing information that addresses the problems your prospects face, then you’re probably missing out on sales opportunities. The typical B2B buyer is in search of relevant information. You should be a source of that information. So, it’s important that you’re providing the information they need through social media to influence their willingness to have a sales conversation with you.

57% of the buyer’s journey is completed before a sales person talks with them. Source: HubSpot.

Ensure you’re keeping prospects engaged on social media by sharing content that will help them take the next step in their buying journey. Most of the time your buyers don’t want to speak with a sales representative until they have conducted enough research to validate that vendor as a contender. Buyers engage in content found through blog posts and discussions on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, product reviews, etc. So, make sure that you’re visible to your prospects and give them what they need, or you risk missing out on the chance to have a sales conversation with them.

Download our guide 8 Reasons Sales Professionals Must Use Social Media to Succeed.

Image source: Pixabay.

The changing demographic makeup of the modern sales force has created an opportunity for sales managers and learning and development professionals to rethink their approaches to sales training. According to Pew Research, millennials became the largest segment of employees in the nation in 2015. 

The growing emergence of multigenerational sales teams is just one complicating factor in an increasingly complex selling environment. Another challenge facing sellers is that buyers come to the table ultra-informed, using the internet to find solutions before they contact potential vendors. The pace of business is accelerating, as are demands on sales professionals. They must spend their time wisely, which means minimizing days off the floor.

A recent Richardson whitepaper titled “The Future of Sales Training: Innovation for a Salesforce in Transition” explored these challenges and their solutions. The answer requires stepping back and rethinking ways to personalize training and to address how different employees learn. To be most effective, training programs need to meet employees where they are in terms of learning styles and preferences.

Technology as the Cause of and Solution to Modern Sales Training Challenges 

Each generation grew up using that era's tools. As a result, there are differing levels of comfort with today’s digital world. Millennials grew up hardwired to technology, conducting most of their daily tasks online.

This means trainers should lean on formats that millennials and other modern learners are accustomed to: Gaming, social networks, and mobile technology. Content needs to be “chunked” into manageable and relevant modules so millennials learn in a format that keeps them interested.

By taking what has worked with previous generations and blending it with new approaches to content and delivery, the entire multigenerational salesforce can better engage in learning through blended or online sales training solutions. This is in fact the aim of Richardson's online sales training program, Accelerate.

Developing next-generation sales training for multigenerational selling organizations requires integrating old and new content delivery modes. To maximize learning speed and results, while minimizing time out of the field, we must flip the traditional classroom.

This technology-based “flipped classroom” approach saves time and money for sales professionals and their organizations, while supporting proficiency in learning skills, knowledge retention, and content reinforcement. A modular course format delivers content in small, bite-sized units, with specific learning paths designated for core or advanced levels and by sales function. Videos, infographics, and other media help learners visualize key concepts and make them memorable. 

The Future of Sales Training

Achieving rapid and sustained behavior change through sales training takes more than just conveying data. It takes teaching sellers new ways to think, new skills, and new behaviors that lead to the desired habits. 

Technology is both the cause of and a solution to the challenge of engaging today’s learners. It bridges the gap between traditional training and online engagement, helping sales professionals from all generations to accelerate their time to skill mastery and achieve results.

Outbound B2B sales are becoming less and less effective. In fact, a recent survey found that connecting with a prospect now takes 18 or more phone calls, callback rates are below 1%, and only 24% of outbound sales emails are ever opened. Meanwhile, 84% of B2B buyers are now starting the purchasing process with a referral, and peer recommendations are influencing more than 90% of all B2B buying decisions.

Why are more and more buyers avoiding salespeople during the buying process? Sales reps, according to Forrester, tend to prioritize a sales agenda over solving a customer’s problem. If organizations don’t change their outdated thinking and create effective sales models for today’s digital era, Forrester warns that 1 million B2B salespeople will lose their jobs to self-service e-commerce by 2020.

The answer to the shift away from reliance on outbound sales could reside in social selling, the strategy of adding social media to the sales professional’s toolbox. With social selling, salespeople use social media platforms to research, prospect, and network by sharing educational content and answering questions. As a result, they’re able to build relationships until prospects are ready to buy.

This is different than social media marketing, where a brand engages many, aiming to increase overall brand awareness or promote a specific product or service by producing content that users will share with their network. Social selling concentrates on producing focused content and providing one-to-one communication between the salesperson and the buyer. Both strategies create valuable content from the consumer’s perspective and use similar social networks and social software tools. But with social selling, the goal is for the rep to form a relationship with each prospect, providing suggestions and answering questions rather than building an affinity for the organization’s brand.

Social selling makes sense for achieving quota and revenue objectives for multiple reasons. First, three out of four B2B buyers rely on social media to engage with peers about buying decisions. In a recent B2B buyers survey, 53% of the respondents reported that social media plays a role in assessing tools and technologies, and when making a final selection.

In addition, more than three-quarters (82%) of the B2B buyers said the winning vendor’s social content had a significant impact on their buying decision. A LinkedIn survey found that B2B buyers are five times more likely to engage with a sales rep who provides new insights about their business or industry. Another survey showed that 72% of the B2B salespeople who use social media report that they outperformed their sales peers, and more than half of them indicated they closed deals as a direct result of social media.

Social sales content also gets salespeople involved earlier in the sales cycle, which means they’re more likely to define the criteria for an ideal solution or the “buying vision,” and thus, more likely to win the sale.

It doesn’t take a significant amount of time to get started in social selling. B2B salespeople only need to invest 5% to 10% of their time to be successful with social. Salespeople should begin carving out a small percentage of their daily time for social media. Regular interaction with a prospect may not lead to a direct sale this week or quarter, but could result in a significant win within the year.

Salespeople should also collaborate with their social marketing counterparts to make the most of their social efforts. Marketing can train salespeople in social media systems, processes, and best practices. According to a survey, 75% of B2B salespeople indicated they were trained in the effective use of social media. This training can encompass everything from working in specific social media channels to using corporate social media software, understanding the business’s social media guidelines, and orienting social media content around customer interests and needs, rather than on brand features, benefits, and prices.

What’s more, sales and marketing can collaborate on information to ensure that their efforts are aligned and to identify common goals and metrics that both teams can support. Since sales pride themselves on their one-on-one relationships with customers, they can discuss with marketing customer successes and concerns, changing customer needs, customer questions, and industry updates.

Integrating systems and encouraging transparency will also go a long way. Salesforce, for example, emphasizes the importance of improved communication between sales and marketing citing an App Data Room and Marketo study that found sales and marketing alignment can improve sales efforts at closing deals by 67% and help marketing generate 209% more value from their efforts.

One way to improve communication between sales and marketing is by creating a portal. BMC Software, a B2B IT solutions company, took this approach when they created BMC BeSocial, a secure portal where salespeople can find content created by marketing and other employees to share by posting immediately or scheduling for later. The portal also provides guidelines, tips, and frequently asked questions on how to use social media.

Carlos Gil, the Head of Global Social Media Marketing for BMC Software, and his team of content creators, social media managers, socially engaged salespeople, and other employees developed a well-articulated and tailored employee advocacy program. BMC then leverages LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to deliver a mix of content — everything from eBooks, whitepapers, and blogs to videos, news, events, and updates.

For salespeople and other socially engaged employees to get started, they sign up to BeSocial with their LinkedIn account and then select and share content curated by Gil’s business unit. The BeSocial portal makes social easy and fun, offering badges to gamify the experience, which provides an incentive to share. The portal and program are working. Social media is helping to raise awareness, increase percentage of mentions or share of voice compared to competitors, and drive global demand for BMC products and services.

After all, social media is too important to be left to marketing. In fact, a recent study found skilled social media sales professionals are six times more likely to exceed quota over peers with basic or no social media skills. It is time to get started with social selling and meet your prospects where they’re spending their time. Your organization could be halfway there if marketing has already made the shift to integrating social media into their strategies. When marketing combines their long-game with sales short game in social selling, it can be a win-win for both teams — and for your overall business.

Editor’s note: We’ve updated the headline of this article to better reflect the main idea.

Salespeople: Stop me if the dialogue below seems at all familiar. Because unfortunately, it happens to your prospects all the time.

Sales rep: “Hello, Kathy?”

Me: “Actually, it’s Katie. Can I help you?”

Sales rep: “Oh yes, Kathy, sorry. (Person you’ve never heard of) suggested I reach out to you about (product I’ve never heard of) for DubStop.”

Me: “That’s odd -- I work at HubSpot, not DubStop.”

Sales Rep: “Oh yes, yes, HubSpot, that’s what I meant -- what a great name. You really need our services.”

Me: (Eye roll and politely ends conversation)

Anyone who has even been on the other side of a bad sales call knows just how painful they can be. The awkward pauses, the terribly phrased questions, the flustered demeanor -- they are brutal for everyone involved, and elicit a wide range of emotions from sympathy for the rep to discomfort of trying to keep your anger in check when the rep finally exceeds your patience.

Having been on the receiving end of countless pitches for everything from software, to media monitoring services, to fitness equipment, to sponsorship opportunities, I’ve seen my fair share of horrendous sales calls. But, I’ve also been fortunate to work with exceptional professionals who truly offer value on every interaction.

Below is a quick overview of what not to do to avoid eye rolls on the receiving end of your sales calls.

1) Don't Ask Awkward, Open-Ended Questions

Small talk is tough, there’s no question, but there is nothing worse than an awkward floater question to get things started. In my previous role, our company was headquartered in Phoenix but I was in our Boston office. I cannot tell you how many people started the conversation with “How is life in Phoenix?” Inevitably, I’d have to respond: “Unfortunately, I can't tell you because I don’t live and work there.”

If you didn’t have time to look up the city I’m located in on LinkedIn, chances are, our conversation will be a short one. Anyone can sympathize with an awkward kickoff, but don’t compensate by asking questions that don’t lead to a more productive conversation.

It's imperative to ask questions that are grounded in things you truly know about the person on the other end of the phone (leveraging a recent tweet, for example) or that actually lead to a helpful conversation (focused on a recent brand initiative or company project). Develop great icebreaker questions that work for your phone cadence, personality, and sales style, and keep the conversation moving -- no one wants to spend 30 minutes talking to you about generic weather patterns.

2) Don't Come to the Call Unprepared

Bad sales reps are surprised when you pick up the phone. Great sales reps anticipate it and are ready and armed with the information they need to connect.

I can’t tell you how many people have called and asked me to tell them a little bit about what HubSpot does. There is nothing more annoying. If you’re going to call me during the workday, know a little bit about my business, what we do, and, at the very least, ask questions that help get to the point of what you’re selling. Asking me open-ended questions that you can answer by Googling our company is not the fastest way to a sale -- it’s just endlessly frustrating.

Great sales reps follow the ultimate Boy Scout motto: Be prepared. They are armed with smart questions that lead to a productive conversations and up-to-date information on our company. Exceptional salespeople don’t just look at the top search result or quickly scan your website -- they understand your current business priorities and ask intelligent questions based on what’s available on your company’s website and social media channels.

A lack of preparation reflects a lack of respect for your prospect’s time. Value it accordingly by taking the time to research their business prior to the call.

3) Don't Lose Focus

Nowadays, it’s very common to be on a work call, looking at a monitor with your Gmail open, and glancing at your iPhone to see if someone responded to your text. We are the ultimate attention-deficit generation, as enabled by both technology and the pace of a modern workplace.

A confluence of devices and conversations can be great to keep things interesting, but when it comes to a sales connect call, a lack of focus is endlessly frustrating to your prospect. Generally, it means you miss valuable information, inflection points where you can push for more information, or opportunities to build additional rapport or solve their business problems.

Once you’ve earned your way into a two-way conversation on a sales call, it’s imperative that you bring your A-game -- not for five seconds or five minutes, but for the duration of the entire call. It’s blatantly obvious to prospects when you’re just running through a script and not listening to their responses, and it’s annoying to have to repeat yourself to the rep on the other end of the phone.

A consultative sale is a two-way street, and the best reps are like athletes: intensely focused on the task at hand and invested 100% in seeing it through. Whether you are prospecting or closing, the person on the other end of the phone deserves your undivided attention, so stick with one conversation, shut out the distractions, and make the most of your time. The information you gather as a rep will be of higher quality, and the prospect will know that you were truly invested in learning more about their business needs and challenges.

4) Don't Talk Too Much

Thirty years ago, salespeople played a largely informative role. Buyers couldn't find basic information like pricing, product features, terms of service, or testimonials online, so they relied on sales reps to provide that information. Today, buyers are far more informed and rely on sales reps to use their experience to craft a customized plan for buyers. That means your primary goal as a salesperson is to determine how your product or service aligns with the challenges and goals of the people you're speaking with. 

Your first call to a prospect should be all about determining if that basic fit exists. You'll probably have to do some education and explanation so your buyer can learn what you're about. But nothing turns prospects off more quickly than a sales rep who doesn't know when to stop talking.

Think about it: You should walk away from that first call with an understanding of the problems your prospect's facing, why those problems are important, whether they are willing to invest time and money in solving those problems, and how you can help. But too many reps jump the gun on that last part and start reciting their value proposition, a list of their features, and what they can do.

Stop. Breathe. Is what you're saying even relevant yet? At some point, prospects will want to hear your insight. But if you're coming into every call guns blazing, you won't give buyers any opportunity to tell you what they're loking for -- which means you won't have any idea if you're being relevant.

Effective selling is exceptionally hard work and requires a combination of intelligence, leadership, assertiveness, preparation, and patience, but truly terrible sales calls make sales painful and significantly harder than they need to be. The best sales reps in the world guide and help their prospects to long-term success, while unprepared and unfocused reps often earn their way to a dial tone or very brief conversations.

Thinking and preparing before you dial improves the experience for both parties and makes the likelihood of a sale increase exponentially, which is a win for everyone involved. What’s not to love about that? It sure beats talking about the weather.

Explaining how you are spending your marketing dollars is a challenge that all heads of marketing face. Cynics in your company are always happy to point out a failed program, which tars all your demand efforts with the same brush. What to do? Counterintuitive as it may seem, start by pointing out your failures. Here’s how.

Many marketing teams make the mistake of lumping all of their demand generation programs together. So all people hear about is the total number of leads delivered to sales. But when you do this, one bad program taints all leads. Stop letting that happen. Instead, use what I call the “Demand Maturity Matrix” to present a structured view of your demand generation efforts.

The matrix is useful in communicating to other teams as well as within your own. Prioritizing your demand generation efforts in this way is helpful in communicating to your CEO or your board. The matrix demonstrates you have a plan and a disciplined approach to marketing investment. By pointing out programs that have failed, you remove that dart from the cynic’s blowgun. Failed programs are just a matter of course.

Your marketing team will also benefit. Conversations within your team will become more objective. I’ve also found this approach encourages creativity by allowing the introduction of new ideas in a metered fashion while not taking too much budget away from programs that are working. Having a category for failed efforts tells your team that it’s okay to fail—it’s expected, really—and you can conduct constructive post mortems on things that didn’t work.

Here are my five categories of demand generation programs in the Demand Maturity Matrix. I suggest you use these five, but adjust the thresholds according to your business or budget.

Moneymakers: These are your mature programs with a known ROI. You can tell your CEO how much pipeline one dollar of investment will yield. Arguably, you could stick only to these programs if there is enough headroom to get you all of the leads you need.

Emerging: These programs are showing a positive ROI, but maybe not quite as much as your guaranteed moneymakers. Perhaps they are not optimized or have not had enough time to yield. You should use your judgment on how long to run them until they either graduate to become Moneymakers or are retired.

Experimental: Marketing teams should always be innovating—or copying programs they have seen elsewhere (no sin in this, as it says in one of my fave books to flip through, Steal Like an Artist). Allocate small budgets to these until you can tell whether they are moving up or out. This categorization is also really effective with budget gatekeepers. Just show them that you’re allocating a small amount for an experiment that could get big. If you have an example of an experiment that made it all the way to the Moneymakers stage, even better. “You wouldn’t want your parsimony over a $5000 purchase order to stand in the way of a big payoff, would ya, boss?”

Bullpen: For those few humans who have never watched a baseball game, the bullpen is where relief pitchers warm up. Put your ideas for experiments here until you have time to work on them.

Retired: Not all programs work. Put your failed Experimental and Emerging programs here. I find this effective in demonstrating one’s fiduciary responsibility to one’s superiors. You are not a wanton spendthrift. You pull the plug on stuff that does not work.

Importantly, programs can only move up or move all the way down to Retired. You can’t cheat by simply knocking a program down one level. Cut the ballast and move on.

Here’s an example of how you might display the matrix. I’ve made these numbers up; I’m not going to telegraph my marketing mix. Plus, they really vary by company.

The Demand Maturity Matrix – track your successes and your failures plus your up-and-comers.

The table above is pretty straightforward to read. I’ve intentionally left out CPL and conversion rates for this “executive summary” version. It’s pretty easy for a CEO to look at this table and understand the yield on marketing investment per program. The emerging paid social program is ROI positive but not at the level of the Google AdWords program. The comments field shows what is being done to improve its performance, or the impetus for planned experiments. For the partner webcasts experiment—which was inspired when someone noticed higher registration when a system integrator partner spoke on a webcast—I’ve included an estimate, which should serve as a target for the experiment.

You can create a more robust version of the matrix for your team. In that I would include not only the CPL and conversion rates but the quarterly lead counts per program.

Organize your demand generation programs into these five categories, and you will find it easier to ask for more money and still have room for creativity. Give your successes, crazy ideas and failures equal billing, and watch your demand soar.

Social media is a powerful tool.

It’s completely changed how we communicate and interact with the world. And one of the greatest benefits of Twitter is the ability to follow role models in your desired field. You can learn what they’re reading, who they admire, and how they navigate through their professions.

As a marketer, I’m always intrigued by the number of powerful women in the industry. From agency owners to skilled subject-matter experts, women are paving the way to make a difference in business and their communities.

So, I scoured multiple profiles and websites to find the unsung heroes in marketing. Some influencers you may recognize, and others will be brand new to your radar. However, all the individuals on this list are making an impact.

Here are 100 women marketers to follow:

1. Ericka Pittman (@ErickaMPittman)— Ericka is the Vice President at Combs Enterprises. Recognized for building strong brands, this Baruch College alumna has a proven track record establishing a lasting presence in new markets, identifying growth opportunities, and initiating strong business alliances.
2. Devin Bramhall (@devinemily)— A self-proclaimed startup junkie, Devin works at the Director of Content at HelpScout. She is a storyteller who likes to take pictures and ride her bike.
   
3. Christine Del Castillo (@chrissachrissa) — Christine leads all things community and PR at Workable. She plans events, writes content, and runs the social channels. When not at work, Christine runs a meetup series for community pros called CMX Boston.
   
4. Juliana Casale (@attackofthetext) — Juliana is a natural-born networker and the Content Marketing Manager with Nanigans. She is the founding member of the Boston Content Committee. Her specialties content strategy, brand voice, and digital advertising.
   
5. Nadya Khoja (@NadyaKhoja) — Nadya is the Director of Marketing at Venngage. She’s an avid contributor at Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, and The Next Web. When she has time, Nadya directs, produces, and sound designs for experimental and interactive performances.
6. Shanelle Mullin (@shanelle_mullin) — Shanelle handles the content and growth at ConversionXL. She’s a proponent of influencer marketing and turns conversations into friendships and friendships into sales.
7. Talia Wolf (@TaliaGw) — With more than ten years experience in conversion optimization, growth, and marketing leadership, Talia is the CMO at Banana Splash. She focuses on creating better user journeys and online experiences using emotional and behavioral targeting to generate more revenue.
8. Stacey MacNaught (@staceycav) — Stacey is the Search Director at Tecmark UK. She leads a team of brilliant people carrying out content marketing led SEO campaigns. Stacey has had the opportunity to speak at Mozcon Seattle, BrightonSEO, SearchLove London, and SASCon.
9. Angie Schottmuller (@aschottmuller) — Angie is a growth marketing consultant and a Forbes Top 10 Online Marketer. She helps organizations catapult ROI and get an average 4X more out of existing marketing efforts through data-driven technology and persuasive psychology.
10. Lianna Patch (@punchlinecopy) — Lianna is the Copy Director at SNAP Copy. She specializes in conversion copywriting and content strategy. Her tagline: I write stuff that makes people buy stuff.
11. Casandra Campbell (@Casandra_Camp) — Casandra handles growth at Shopify. Her expertise includes helping small businesses get bigger. She uses proven case studies and tested tactics get business results.
    
12. Tiffany Da Silva (@bellastone) — Tiffany is a growth consultant and Founder of Flowjo. Over the past ten years, she has worked in all facets of online marketing including email marketing, SEO, PPC, social media, and conversion rate optimization.
    
13. Jen Havice (@jenhavice) — Jen is conversion optimizer and copywriter at Make Mention. She helps businesses get better performing websites and marketing campaigns with higher converting online copy.
    
14. Claire Vo (@clairevo) —Claire co-founded Experiment Engine. An innovative creative professional, with both hands-on and senior leadership experience, her experience spans e-commerce and interactive and UX design.
    
15. Kristy Bolsinger (@kristy) — Kristy is the Senior Manager of Customer Experience and Optimization at F5 Networks. She helps companies expand their brands and extend their reach on social media channels.
    
16. Theresa Baiocco Farr (@theresabaiocco) — Co-founder of Conversion Max Theresa helps mid-sized businesses increase their website’s revenues. She has been a featured speaker on conversion optimization at Conversion Conference, Pubcon, and Webcam.
17. Stefanie Grieser (@smgrieser) — Strategic marketing professional, innovative thinker, and entrepreneurial problem solver. Stefanie is the International Marketing Manager at Unbounce, where she oversees and manages all marketing localization projects.
18. Erin Bury (@erinbury) — Erin is the Managing Director at 88Creative. She’s a digital marketer, technology journalist, and startup enthusiast. She has led sessions about entrepreneurship and marketing at events across North America.
    
19. Lisa Barone (@LisaBarone) — Chief Marketing Officer at Overit, Lisa is responsible for the strategic development and implementation of all external and internal marketing initiatives. Her writings and opinions have been featured Inc. Magazine, BusinessWeek, and Forbes.
    
20. Lauren Moon (@elmoonio) — Lauren is the Content Marketing Manager at Trello, where she leads creative marketing and campaign strategy, editorial calendar management, and community outreach. Her background also includes social media marketing, copy editing, and front end web design.
    
21. Margaret Magnarelli (@mmagnarelli) — Margaret is an artful editor at helping legacy brands innovate, establishing a brand voice and message, and boosting business through content. Currently, she is the Managing Editor at Monster.
    
22. Joanna Wiebe (@copyhackers) — Joanna is the Founder of Copy Hackers, the home of conversion copywriting. She’s worked with the world’s most exciting startups: Shopify, Metalab, Mind Valley, and Neil Patel’s Quick Sprout,
    
23. Susan Moeller (@SusanCMoeller) — Susan is the Business Development Manager at Buzzsumo. She teaches marketers and publishers to leverage data for better content.
    
24. Rebecca Kelley (@rebeccakelley) — Since 2006, Rebecca has worked in the tech sphere. She’s the Senior Editor at Leafly and specialized in social media marketing, community building, and content creation.
    
25. Hana Abaza (@HanaAbaza) — Hana is the Vice President of Marketing at Uberflip. She has a knack for communicating inspired tech solutions to mainstream audiences. She loves the entire marketing process from product development to commercialization.
26. Amy Porterfield (@AmyPorterfield) — Amy helps people create professional webinar strategies. She is a well-known social media strategist who specializes in Facebook.
27. Kaleigh Moore (@kaleighf ) — The bulk of Kaleigh’s experience lies in social media marketing, writing, and editing. She is a freelance writer specializing in SaaS and e-commerce.
28. Nichole Elizabeth Demere (@NikkiElizDemere ) — Nichole is a SaaS consultant and customer success evangelist. Her specialty is strategizing ways to improve retention and strengthen brands. She also is the founder of Authentic Curation.
29. Andrea Wahbe (@TheRunningStart) — Andrea is a B2B marketing strategist. Her expertise is in developing compelling corporate stories that generate sales leads.
30. Shana Pilewski (@ShangRaeLa) — Shana works at Outbrain as a Content Development Strategist. She has 5+ years of experience in digital marketing, ranging from social media strategy to overseeing marketing initiatives.
31. Brittany Melton (@xobritdear) — Brittany is a logo and web designer, helping creative entrepreneurs create beautiful websites. She has worked on design teams for an array of entrepreneurs, like speaker Patrice Washington from RealMoneyAnswers and Tonya Rapley from MyFabFinance.
32. Lolly Spindler (@LollySpindler) — Content Marketing Manager at Xoombi, Lolly helps her clients with everything from SEO audits to creating well-written content. She has published over 200 posts.
33. Brittany Berger (@thatbberg) — Brittany is the Head of Content & PR at Mention. This marketer is in love with words—writing and reading them. Her expertise includes social media, communications, blogging, and inbound marketing.
34. Yulia Shevardenkova (@YuliaShevy) — Yulia connects with the online marketing community. She is the Communications Manager for SEMrush and has organized B2B conferences in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg.
35. Alexandra Tachalova (@AlexTachalova) — Alexandra is a digital marketing consultant and Founder of Digital Olympus. She possesses extensive experience in corporate communication, customer relationship management, search engine marketing and lead generation
36. Alina Benny (@alinacbenny) — Alina is a corporate marketer with Freshdesk. She handles content across the company’s four products. She also volunteers for IEEE Women In Engineering.
37. Kiki Schirr (@kikischirr) — Kiki is a freelance digital marketer specializing in content marketing, branding, and strategy. One of her past projects included connecting a major medical brand with targeted startups for business development. She also is a regular contributor to the social media blog {grow}.
38. Michelle Nickolaisen (@_ChelleShock) — Michelle is all about writing and content marketing. She specializes in making B2B content not boring. She also creates workshops, classes, and digital products for freelancers.
39. Shenee Howard (@heyshenee) — Shenee is a brand strategist, copywriter, and business coach. She equips entrepreneurs and small businesses with the strategies they need to attract adoring fans and loyal customers.
40. Sharon Hurley Hall (@SHurleyHall) — With a background in journalism, Sharon is a skilled professional writer and blogger. Her recent work includes writing feature style customer stories, interviewing company insiders for case studies, and writing articles for corporate newsletters.
41. Cara Hogan (@CaraHogan27) — Cara is the Content Marketing Manager at Rentlytics. She enjoys creating high-quality content like blogs, podcasts, and in-depth eBooks. She is a grammar perfectionist, a prolific Tweeter, and a news lover.
42. Melissa Kimble (@Melissa_Kimble) — Melissa is an expert in running social media campaigns, handling social media for live events, and leading brand ambassador and influencer programs. She is the Senior Social Media Manager at Ebony Magazine.
43. Cali Pitchel (@caliptichel) — Cali is the Director of Growth and Customer Success at Joy the App. She’s also an award-winning copywriter and content marketer with demonstrated success, both on the agency and client side.
44. Cheryl Lawson (@Partyaficionado) — Founder of Social Media Tulsa, Cheryl loves discussing social media, event marketing, and digital marketing. She is also the CEO of Party Aficionado, a leading social marketing firm.
45. Chelsea Baldwin (@chelseajanea) — Chelsea founded Copy Power, where she delivers the copywriting businesses need to be remembered online. In her career, she has worked for several companies, including Click Labs and Climate Connect.
    
46. Janet Choi (@lethargarian) — Janet is the Senior Manager of Product Marketing and Content at Customer.io. She has experience in content strategy, social media, and email marketing. Her writing has appeared in Fast Company, The Next Web, and Business Insider.
47. Clara Buchanan (@clara_buchanan) — Clara is the Founder of Hypergrow and a growth strategist working with early stage technology companies. She mentors budding entrepreneurs at EDGE Edtech, Kaplan, and Techstar’s educational technology accelerator.
    
48. Ronnie Kassif (@Ronnie6121) — As an inbound marketing expert, Ronnie works as a Marketing Manager at Digital Telepathy. Her strengths include content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing.
    
49. Samantha Anderson (@SamAnderson41) — Samantha is the Co-Founder of 41 Orange, Inc., a content and marketing service provider. She has worked with Fortune 500 tech, financial, and consumer brands to shape their online presence. She also loves traveling.
    
50. Sweta Patel (@SwetaSpeaks) — Sweta is a Demand Generation Manager for Full Circle Insights. Her specialties range from creative marketing to advertising to event planning.
51. Taru Bhargav (@TaruBhargav) — A passionate tea trailblazer, Taru is an Inbound Marketer at AppVirality. She enjoys writing about social media, content marketing, mobile and app marketing. Her published work has appeared in MarketingProfs, HubSpot, and Marketo.
    
52. Joei Chan (@joeei) — Currently working at Mention in the content marketing division, Joei shapes boring content into engaging narrative. When she’s not writing, she usually eating.
    
53. Katy Katz (@katykatztx) —Kay is a Senior Consultant at SmartBug Media, and she loves helping brands tell their story. She has spoken at multiple conferences around the country, including Pubcon, MnSearch, and Zenit.
    
54. Kelly Kuhn-Wallace (@KKDUB) — Executives hire Kelly to figure out what will drive more growth at their companies. She describes herself as a growth marketing and strategy consultant with ice cream issues.
    
55. Sarah E. Brown (@SEBMarketing ) — Sarah works as the Senior Manager of Growth Marketing at ServiceRocket. She also co-hosts Helping Sells Radio, a technology podcast. Sarah is a growth catalyst for B2B SaaS companies.
    
56. Tia Fomenoff (@tiafomenoff ) — Tia is the Director of Product Marketing at Thinkific and previously worked at Unbounce and Buffer. She’s happiest when helping others achieve their goals. Tia is always up for learning something new.
    
57. Violeta Nedkova (@VioletaNedkova) — Violeta is a marketing coach, who helps businesses with growth, copywriting, and pre-launch strategy. She is a multi-passionate individual with expertise in social media, writing, and startups.
    
58. Lisa Kalner Williams (@kalnerwilliams) — Lisa is the Content Marketing Director at Agorapulse. Since 2009, she’s worked with companies and agencies on social media marketing analysis, strategy, and instruction.
    
59. Azure Collier (@azurecollier) — Azure works as the Social Media Marketing and Community Manager at Constant Contact. Her specialties include email marketing, event marketing, public relations, and journalism.
    
60. Dhariana Lozano (@DhariLo) — Co-Founder of Supremacy Marketing, Dhariana keeps up with the ever-changing world of digital marketing. She loves helping businesses and individuals grow and thrive online and beyond.
61. Zoë Björnson (@kzoeb) — Zoë is a content marketer who turned to the product side. She works as the Product Marketing Manager for about.me. She can help businesses with social media strategy, email marketing, and community building.
    
62. Suzanne Nguyen (@StringStory) — Suzanne helps traditional brands use emerging social platforms, like Snapchat and Facebook Live. She’s a millennial marketer and consultant who specializes in creating social wows.
    
63. Aja Frost (@ajavuu) — Aja is a Staff Writer at Hubspot, where she champions the inbound sales movement. When she’s not brainstorming ideas, Aja can be found running, listening to podcasts, or geeking out about cool tech.
    
64. Sakita Holley (@MissSuccess) — Sakita is the Founder and CEO at House of Success PR, a lifestyle brand relations firm. She also hosts a podcast called Hashtags + Stilettos that helps millennial women win at work.
    
65. Mattie James (@Mattieologie) — Mattie is the editor and creator of personal style blog, Mattieologie.com. Her expertise ranges from social media management to digital branding to photography.
    
66. Emmelie De La Cruz (@EmmelieDeLaCruz) — Emmelie is a digital marketing manager and social media specialist focused on content creation and engaged communication on social networks and the web. Her work experience in marketing and communications spreads over various industries including healthcare, entertainment, and education.
    
67. Amber Janae (@WhoIsAmberJanae) — Amber is a Marketing Specialist at One Workplace, where she handles copywriting, social media management, and blog writing. She’s worked for notable companies, like Pacific Gas & Electric, Best Buy, and Ford Motor Company.
    
68. Kyshira Moffett (@KyshiraM) — Kyshira is a brand strategist, career advisor, and professional speaker. This year, she developed the Hustle HER Way summit. She also is passionate about serving her community.
    
69. Maxine Green (@lexicamarketing) — Maxine is the Marketing Manager for SessionCam. She has experience of working with both blue chip companies and startups. Her specialties encompass SEO, social media, and content development.
70. Chasity Cooper (@chasityscooper) — Chasity is an expert in the areas of digital communications strategy, online brand management, and public relations. She looks to empower and educate a generation of thinkers, doers, and game changers through effective storytelling.
71. Amelia Willson (@amelioratethis) — Amelia is the Content Marketing Manager at HostGator. She is an online marketing professional with proven experience in SEO, copywriting, content strategy, and social media for B2B and B2C audiences.
72. Cara Harshman (@CaraHarshman) — Cara is a freelance journalist, content marketer, and storyteller. Previously, she worked at Optimizely, where she experienced many facets of B2B marketing, sales, and customer success,
73. Krystal Franklin (@krysfranklintv) — Digital content producer Krystal works for the Tom Joyner Morning Show at REACH Media. She is responsible for creating fresh and engaging content. She also has helped produce several national events, including the 2008 NBA All-Star Game and Steve Harvey’s Annual Mentoring Weekend for Boys.
    
74. Courtney Seiter (@courtneyseiter) — Courtney holds the title of Inclusivity Catalyst at Buffer. She labels herself as a writer, editor, Nashvillian, music nerd, cyclist, and discerning GIF collector.
75. Liliana Holloway (@Liliholl) — Liliana is a passionate and creative digital marketer, who loves brainstorming, planning, and delivering quality campaigns. Over the years, she has earned extensive experience in email and social media marketing and web content management.
76. Kelly Hungerford (@KDHungerford) — Native Californian and people-person Kelly is a social brand strategist at Communityworks. She helps startups and brands with limited in-house digital expertise or resources create, implement, and optimize digital operations.
77. Ariel Rule (@arielrule) — Ariel is a Social Media Manager at Duda. She also works with businesses to craft copy and content that blasts sales and conversion goals to infinity and beyond.
78. Jes Kirkwood (@jeskirkwood ) — Jes is a Marketing Consultant for Autopilot. At heart, she’s a strategist—forward-thinking and intuitive, yet driven by research and biased toward action. Her values include diversity and inclusion, access over ownership, and work-life balance.
79. Kerry O’Shea Gorgone (@KerryGorgone) — Lawyer. Professional interviewer. Writer. Kerry is also the host of the Marketing Smarts podcast. At MarketingProfs, she is the Senior Program Manager of Enterprise Learning, where she oversees the development of virtual and face-to-face learning programs for marketing professionals.
80. Ileane Smith (@Ileane) — Ileane is a blogger, podcaster, YouTuber, and social media veteran. Her expertise includes direct mail and email promotions.
81. Gina Schreck (@Ginaschreck) — Gina is the Founder of SocialKNX, a digital marketing, and social media management agency. She’s also a social media marketing speaker. She loves big adventures and sings loud in her car.
82. Ilise Benun (@ilisebenun) — Ilise is a national speaker and the Founder of Marketing Mentor, a business coaching program. She specializes in creating marketing plans and reviewing proposals for creative professionals.
83. Madalyn Sklar (@MadalynSklar) — Madalyn is a social media power influencer, blogger, podcaster, and business coach. Known for her Twitter expertise, she hosts #TwitterSmarter. Her eagerness to share years of accumulated knowledge makes her one of the most in-demand conference speakers.
84. Mary Green (@MaryGreenCNY) — From building out inbound marketing campaigns to generating copy for landing pages, Mary has worked to optimize businesses’ marketing budgets. Previously a Digital Marketing Strategist at Inbound.org, she collaborated with the head of HubSpot labs to implement community, marketing, and product projects.
85. Minal Patel (@Minal2804 ) — Minal founded Marketing by Minal to help businesses focus their marketing efforts. During her career, she has worked with some of the industry’s top companies, including Constant Contact and SMART Technologies.
86. Kellie O’Brien (@KellieOBrienAU) — Kellie is an author, speaker, and blogger, who specializes in social media, online marketing, and launch strategy. With16 years of journalism experience, she lives and breathes story and strategy.
    
87. Evangeline Umali (@Reims_U) — Evangeline is a Content Strategist at Navigant Consulting Inc. She manages the content creation process from beginning to end.
    
88. Warsan Amin (@WarsanAmin) — Warsan is an online media professional. She helps business owners and nonprofit organizations become independent marketers. She also cares about causes in civil rights, economic empowerment, and education
    
89. Sarah Cousins (@Sarah__Cousins) — Sarah is a self-proclaimed marketing and social media geek. She loves to write sales pages, website copy, feature articles. and blog posts. Her skills include project management, targeted marketing, and public relations.
90. Kelly Weppler (@marketingkelly) — Sales and marketing professional, Kelly has proven success developing customer relationships and sales strategy to deliver client value. She’s also a Master Duct Tape Marketing Consultant, focusing on lead generation for small technology companies.
91. Sue Duris (@SueDuris) — Sue is customer-obsessed and loves helping people achieve their goals. She is the Director of Marketing and Customer Experience at M4 Communications. As a strong communicator, she thrives in collaborative and innovative environments.
92. Peg Fitzpatrick (@PegFitzpatrick) — Peg is the Director of Social Media Marketing for Guy Kawasaki. She shares her professional experience in the trenches of social media, marketing, and blogging as a speaker. She also writes on LinkedIn and her personal blog.
    
93. Andrea Vahl (@AndreaVahl) — Andrea is a social media consultant and speaker, who is passionate about helping businesses understand and leverage the power of social media. She also is the Co-Founder of Social Media Manager School, an online training course to help consultants and businesses learn social media marketing.
    
94. Kim Garst (@kimgarst) — Live streaming strategist. Social selling professional. Twitter expert. Kim is extremely passionate about sharing her knowledge around digital media, social media, and social selling.
    
95. Brittnee Anderson (@_iambrittnee) — Marketing Manager for Essence Beauty Box, Brittnee develops and executes strategic 360 marketing plans to acquire and retain subscribers. Her specialties include marketing and branding strategy, pricing and promotion strategy, and paid media.
    
96. Pam Neely (@PamellaNeely) — Pam is a content creation powerhouse—part writer, part marketer. She caters to companies seeking long-form blog posts and other marketing content to reach small business audiences.
    
97. Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) — Ann works as the Brand Manager for Internet Marketing Ninjas. Her skill set spans across keyword research, online reputation management, and link building.
    
98. Casie Gillette (@Casieg) — Cassie is the Director of Online Marketing for KoMarketing Associates, helping to guide company initiatives, service offerings, and the organization’s presence online. She’s an expert at copywriting, marketing communications, website usability, and client services.
    
99. Christina Baldassarre (@ChristinaBaldas) — Christina is the Founder and Managing Partner at Zebra Advertisement. Her clients include over 5000 businesses from all over the world, including marketing professionals, agencies, and small businesses. In her free time, she is a passionate equestrian rider.
100. Maureen Jann (@MaureenOnPoint) — Maureen is responsible for leading her team to drive sales at Point It as the Director of Marketing. Her unexpected guerrilla marketing tactics help her stay on budget and keep the prospect experience authentic.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Creative Commons

Are you managing a team of sales reps? Are they failing to jump on the phone and make calls? If yes, what does the phone mean to them?

It’s no secret that a debate exists among many sales managers on how to track the performance of a sales team. What’s more important, the number of calls a sales rep makes, or the quality of the calls? Let’s face it, if you’re not making calls, you can’t measure the quality of them!

Maybe a more important question is: does your team have enough opportunity to hit their targets? Do they have enough data to make the calls?

What’s your revenue opportunity?

In order for a sales team to succeed, they need to measure their revenue opportunity with 3 key factors:

If any of these factors are out of sync, the revenue opportunity will gradually become smaller and smaller. Ask yourself these questions:

• Are you behind on hiring your sales team?
• Do you have a high turnover rate?
• Is the sales team lacking enough opportunities in their pipeline?
• Are the pipelines full of low value leads?

If you find yourself nodding in response to any of these questions, then Houston, we have a problem! In most companies, these factors are brought back in line by the management team.

How effective is your sales team?

Assuming that your revenue opportunity is in place, to increase productivity of your sales team, you need to drill down and understand the performance levels of each salesperson. Here are 6 suggested KPIs:

1. Number of Calls Per Day vs Talk Time

• The number of outbound sales calls will differ from one industry to another. In the payment industry for example, sales reps have a lot of pre and post work to do.
• The range of outbound calls will typically vary from around 40 calls to over 80 a day. It is safe to say that every sales rep should aim for at least 50 calls a day.
• If you have an outbound dialer, sales reps can potentially generate in excess of 100 calls a day
• Sales reps should have a talk time target to track the amount of time they spend talking to decision makers, as opposed to gatekeepers. Consider a talk time target of 2-3 hours

2. Percentage of Calls at Each Sales Cycle

It’s important to know how each sales rep is progressing along their sales cycle. If a sales rep is not experiencing much success on their first call attempt, chances are they’ll probably have a low conversion rate by the time they close a sale.

Here’s an example of good sales pipeline progression:

And an example of poor progression:

The second example highlights that the sales rep is failing to get past the gate keeper, and is struggling to schedule time with the decision maker. Monitoring the sales cycle progression will help identify coaching and training opportunities for sales management to help improve efficiency of their team’s outbound calls.

3. Conversion Rate

People often say that a 10% conversion rate for an inside sales team is quite good, but it will vary from company to company. If your brand is well known and has a strong market position, sales reps could generate in excess of a 30% conversion rate, vs a startup which could be generating only a 5-10% conversion rate.

4. Close Lost Rate

Although a sales rep may have a high conversion rate, make sure to monitor their close lost rate too, as that could also be very high. If it is, it could be that they are burning leads, in which case you need to put out the fire!

5. Average Value of Merchant Won

When setting a sales target, you must consider the average value of a merchant that’s won. Some sales teams are winning 1000s of merchants (which is great), but the average win was so low, that they were missing their sales targets by miles. Not so great!

6. Performance Against Target

Sales targets are normally set against factors such as: country, team, and sales rep level. It is also important to include targets for:

1. Average merchant size
2. Close won rate
3. Close lost rate
4. Number of calls to be made each day, week, month
5. Commission Target

These 6 KPIs offer a helping hand to sales managers, helping them understand the performance levels of each of their reps. Naturally, this is a long term effort, but it paves the way for implementing the metrics necessary to measure sales performance, and keep track of how well a sales team is doing.

Content creates conversions. Right? That’s what all the marketing experts say. If you want to increase visits and generate new leads, then your blog needs to deliver valuable content.

But what if your blog content isn’t generating any new leads? Your site visits have plateaued and your conversions are stuck in the mud. It’s not that your content is bad—in fact, you’re certain it’s more targeted and more valuable than ever. What’s going on?

There’s more to effective B2B blogging than creating good content. Here are the top seven reasons your blog isn’t getting more visitors or leads.

Top 7 B2B Blogging Mistakes You’re Making

1. Your titles don’t tantalize

Often, a weak blog title can be the difference between content that converts and content that crashes. Follow these guidelines to draw more visits and to increase conversions:

• Use compelling, action-oriented language.
• Say something unexpected.
• Be bold and be clear.
• Use numbers, like “Top 7 Ways…” Odd numbers seem to be most effective.
• Be specific.
• Include keywords.
• Keep the title under 60 characters.

2. You’re hiding your content

If you’re not promoting your content like crazy, you may as well not even write it. When it comes to inbound marketing, “If you build it they will come” is just one piece of the inbound puzzle. Distributing your content to the right persona in the right place is key. Here are some easy ways to get your content in front of more eyeballs:

• Share your blog on social media and encourage others to do so. Promote your blog articles on the platforms that your personas hang out on. Here’s a great guide for posting on different social media platforms.
• Syndicate your content on sites like Medium or Business 2 Community to expand your reach. Post it on LinkedIn groups.
• Ask influential thought leaders to help you spread your content—especially if you mention them in your article.
• Feature your articles in a monthly newsletter that you send to all of your contacts.
• Don’t forget to let your sales and business development team know about the post. They can share it individually to prospects as another way to stay in touch and on top of mind.

Above all, think about where your personas go to find and share valuable content. That’s where you want your content to be.

3. SEO is AWOL

One of the best ways to get your blog noticed is to get it listed on page 1 of search engine results. Optimize your content for search engines by following these practices:

• Include long-tail keywords in your URL, blog title, headings, and body text. EXAMPLE: 5 tips to improve blogging SEO vs. How to make your blog better.
• Add meaningful alt text with keywords to your images.
• Link to relevant websites.
• Add a meta description that uses keywords. Keep it to 140 characters or fewer.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by SEO? Here are 10 simple SEO fixes you can do right now to improve your search rankings.

4. Your posts are few and far between

Blogs with frequent, regular posting schedules draw visitors, because they have a lot to offer that readers find valuable. If visitors know a quality blog is going to be updated frequently, they’ll keep coming back for more. If you’re posting rarely, or sporadically, your blog will have an unmanaged, abandoned feel. Plus, search engines ignore websites that aren’t constantly updating their content.

How often should you be blogging? Companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that publish 0-4 monthly posts.

But two caveats:

• Every business is different, so play around with it a bit and monitor your ROI each quarter.
• If you’re only blogging a couple of times a month now, don’t try to jump up to 16 right away. Increase your blogging as you’re able, and scale wisely. If you flame out, you’ll end up worse than you began.

5. You’re snubbing subscriptions

People get busy. They’ll sometimes forget to check out your latest article. After a while, they can unintentionally fall out of the habit altogether. But if you make it easy for them to subscribe to your blog, they can get every one of your articles automatically.

And here’s a bonus: Blog subscriptions are a great way to encourage readers to share your content with their contacts.

6. The content is a sore sight for eyes

No one wants to be confronted with a wall of text. It causes eye strain and mental fatigue—and it’s just plain boring. Like this:

The less you make their eyeballs work, the more your readers will enjoy your posts. Break up the content:

• Add images and graphical elements. You don’t need much to make a big impact.
• Use bulleted lists to make content easy to skim.
• Break up text with section headers. (This also helps with SEO.)
• Write at an 8th-grade reading level for optimal readability. You can check the reading level with tools like the Readability Test Tool or Hemingway App.

7. The rest of your content is a well-kept secret

Let your readers know about other great content on your site. Include next steps or calls to action at the end of your blog posts. Pepper your articles with internal links to other related content on your site. This helps keep readers on your website and provides opportunities to build their trust in you as a thought leader.

Content may be king, but an anonymous king is easy to ignore. Implement these best practices, track your metrics, and soon you’ll start to see site visits increasing and new leads converting.

Graph credit: HubSpot

Too often, marketing and sales exist in their own worlds, not actively thinking about what the other team’s doing except as it directly relates to their own work. Even worse, in some organizations they view each other as rivals, competing for the same budget spend.

That’s not doing anyone any good. Marketing and sales are two parts of the same process, working toward the same primary goal: helping the business earn more customers.

Unsurprisingly, the companies where the two departments manage to work together are better at achieving that goal. Research has shown that alignment between marketing and sales leads to a 208 percent increase in revenue.

If your sales and marketing departments aren’t actively collaborating now, make working toward greater alignment a priority. A lot of the work of getting there will be about changing mindsets—convincing both departments how beneficial working together as allies will be.

For the rest, technology can help.

Technology Can Keep Everyone On the Same Page

Technology is never a solution on its own, but it often works as a tool that makes the solution easier to achieve. Marketers and sales teams today have a number of tech tools that create an easier path to better collaboration, if organizations use them effectively.

Make all lead knowledge shared knowledge.

Possibly the most important piece of technology you have for ensuring sales and marketing stay on the same page is your customer relationship management platform (CRM). In fact, it plays such a big role in better sales enablement that we wrote a whole guide on the subject.

While you can read the whole thing to get deeper into the subject, the main reason the CRM is important to improving collaboration is because it works as a shared knowledge base for sales and marketing.

Everything marketing learns about a lead before they get handed off to sales should be recorded in there. By the time sales makes a move to contact a lead, they should have a clear idea of where they are in the buyer’s journey, how they’ve interacted with your brand so far, and the position each contact associated with the account is in (if there are multiple contacts). That information equips sales with the knowledge they need to provide a relevant approach to each lead, tailored to their specific needs and situation.

Coming full circle, marketing then benefits from knowing which of the qualified leads become sales, and which ones fizzled out and why. That knowledge strengthens your targeting efforts and enables you to do a better job qualifying future leads.

Keep the lines of communication open.

The CRM gives everyone in both departments the most important information available on each lead and customer at the moment they need it. But for the two departments to consistently see each other as collaborators, you want to set up a means for ongoing communication.

Fortunately, you can find many different technology products that enable ongoing communication for business teams. From shared chat functions, like Skype and Google Chat (which don’t cost anything) to project management platforms like Basecamp and Trello, you should have little difficulty finding a tech solution that makes ongoing collaboration possible between the two departments.

The trickier part is getting everyone in the habit of using it.

How to Get Your Team to Use Tech for Better Sales and Marketing Collaboration

So, you have the technology. You’ve identified it as just the thing to help your teams work together better. That’s a start.

Now how do you actually get people to use it for that purpose?

Provide ample training.

You can’t drop a product in your employees’ laps and assume they’ll figure it out on their own. Some of the tech we mentioned, like Skype, might already be familiar to some of your staff, but don’t assume that’s true of everyone. Devote some time to training everyone on both teams in how to use the technology so they understand all the available features you want them to take advantage of.

Provide initial CRM training, but also make sure they have access to ongoing support to help them through any questions or difficulties they face using it. You won’t accomplish your goal of ongoing collaboration unless people continue using the tech for the months and years to come.

Develop a clear process for use.

The technology itself isn’t enough to keep people on the same page. You should have some clear standards for how to use it.

For example, you should have clear instructions for when and how to update the classifications for a lead in the CRM—when does a lead go from being a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL)? What milestones in the process are sales representatives expected to record in the CRM for everyone to see?

Without clear guidelines for how the technology should be used, you risk everyone taking different approaches to it and failing to understand each other after all. Define the process you want everyone to follow early on and make sure it’s clearly communicated to each person in both departments.

People often resist doing things differently. Be prepared to make a case to your team about why better communication and collaboration between your departments matters and why the work of doing it right is worth it. The process will take some time and require effort from both teams, but the results will pay off.

Jim Collins “Good to Great” has been the inspiration for many CEOs who are determined to elevate their companies from run-of-the-mill to lasting greatness. There are many lessons to be learned from the book, but one of the most significant is the idea that before organisations can stand a chance of realising their potential, they must get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and get the right people in the right seats.

This concept holds true for every department, but the principles have particular relevance for companies seeking to build an excellent sales organisation that is capable of significant, scalable growth whilst delivering reliable revenue performance every quarter along the way.

Making bad hires or failing to address personnel issues has a particular impact on the sales function. In organisations with complex or lengthy sales cycles the knock-on impact of bad recruiting or the acceptance of poor performance can resonate for multiple quarters - and cause sales leaders to lose their jobs...

EXPERIENCE ISN'T ENOUGH

Markets and buyer expectations are evolving so fast that we cannot rely on experience as the primary factor in recruitment decisions. Attitude, aptitude, adaptability, curiosity, cultural fit and the capacity for continuous learning have become far more effective predictors of long-term sales success.

If we are to recruit the right sales people onto our sales bus, then we need to assess their character as well as their claims of accomplishment. We need to judge whether they are likely to fit in to our environment, and whether they have a powerful internal commitment to continual personal development that is not dependent on how many training courses we end up paying to send them on.

My observations suggest that the more people candidates interact with during the interview process, the better - including their potential peers. The more we test what they are capable of actually doing, rather than saying, the better - through realistic role plays and scenarios. Conducting formal role based psychographic sales assessments can also make an important contribution.

A 360° PERSPECTIVE

But what really seems to matter is taking the time, combining all the inputs to get a complete 360° view of the candidate, and involving multiple people in the decision. It’s expensive in time and resources. But the cost of a bad sales hire is far higher. Recruitment is hard: I’ve learned that it’s critical that we take the process seriously, set the bar high, and refuse to accept sub-standard hires.

Which then leads to the question of where we stand with regard to existing members of the sales team. Were they in retrospect the right people in the first place (would we hire them again?), are they still the right people, and are they in the right seats - from the perspective of both their potential contribution to the organisation and their personal development goals?

Just as in recruitment, attitude, aptitude, adaptability, curiosity, cultural fit and the capacity for continuous learning are the key indicators of whether any individual has the potential to do better than they currently are. But they are also the factors that tend to be innate and hardest to change.

DIFFICULT DECISIONS

It can lead to some tough conversations, but we cannot afford not to confront these issues. We need to give able people who are willing the chance to improve. We may need to accept that we have failed them and that we need to do more to enable them to realise their potential. But both in recruiting new talent and managing the existing team, ensuring we always have the right people on the bus in the right seats is one of every sales leader’s most critical responsibilities.

We can’t ignore how easy or difficult it is to manage each individual. Our chances to change behaviour are highest where people are open and responsive to fresh ideas and keen to learn. Conversely, we can all probably reflect on the frustrations of trying to manage someone who refuses to see the need for change, and may even overtly or covertly rebel against it.

Organisations typically only tolerate these “lone wolves” for as long as they deliver their numbers. But even that tolerance may be misplaced. If these mavericks cannot see how the world is changing around them, it’s only a matter of time before their luck will inevitably fail - and let’s not forget that their impact on the rest of the team can often (but not always) be corrosive.

Having observed a few of these situations over the years, I’ve concluded that attitude and aptitude problems have to be confronted, even if sales performance appears to be currently satisfactory. If attitude and aptitude show promise, it’s worth investing time to see how the individual can be developed and whether they would do better in another seat on the sales bus.

LEARN FROM THE BEST - AND LET THE WOLVES GO

Understanding what makes your role-model top performers tick, and systematically sharing their best practices with the rest of the sales organisation can be tremendously productive, and is usually welcomed with open arms by sales people who are willing to learn and committed to continual personal development.

As far as the “lone wolves” are concerned, you need to make it clear that their performance is assessed not just in terms of their personal revenue numbers, but the way in which their results are achieved and their contribution to both the satisfaction of the customer and the well-being of the sales team as a whole.

These conversations needs to take place, and they can’t be informal: they needs to be clearly documented and deviations from expected behaviour recorded and reviewed, because you may need this information to justify a conclusion that the individual no longer has a role to play in your future sales organisation.

Some sales leaders take the view that “lone wolves” are incapable of changing their spots (to mix a carnivore metaphor), but I believe that it’s worth at least one honest attempt to help them recognise the need to for change, and to support them in achieving it. But there need to be limits to our tolerance.

In the long run, excellent sales organisations are built from smart individuals in appropriate roles, in a supportive environment in which the whole team learns and develops together. So - when you think about your sales organisation today, and your ambitions for the future: do you have the right people on the bus in the right seats? And what are you doing about the people that will only hold the bus back if they remain on it? 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales and the Founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the B2B sales process consultants. Following a successful corporate career spanning start-ups to established corporates, Bob now works with a growing client base of B2B-focused growth-phase technology companies, helping them to implement structured selling systems that drive predictable revenue growth.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

• 10 Tell-Tale Signs That Your Sales Process Could Benefit From Some Attention
• A Simple Guide to Compelling Messaging for the Complex Sale
• ADOPTED: A Structured Approach to Opportunity Qualification for the Complex Sale

A previous version of this article was published on CustomerThink.

While B2B companies are investing in content for marketing, making more content is not creating the windfall of leads that many senior business marketing executives had hoped for. The problem? A lack of insight about what makes better content.

I believe that finding a solution to the “more” vs. “better” challenge starts with customer empathy.

As an example, Steve Rayson, director at BuzzSumo and Anders Pink, explained: “The primary motivation of B2B customers is to do their jobs better. Thus, at BuzzSumo we spend a lot of time trying to understand the questions our customers are asking and the issues they are struggling with. We then try to produce helpful content which addresses these concerns.”

Put yourself in the shoes of a business customer: When you need to buy a new phone system for your company, where do you look first? How about when you need to hire a consultant or find a scalable marketing automation system to grow leads and sales, where do you go to find the right solution?

Whether business customers use search, read an industry publication, or respond to an ongoing nurture message delivered by email, the variety of resources that business buyers rely upon for research can vary greatly. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that buyers have questions and business marketers have answers. And B2B marketers are increasingly relying on content marketing to deliver those answers.

In fact, 89% of marketers are now relying on content marketing, according to the “B2B Content Marketing 2017” report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. Marketers now spend an average of 29% of their total marketing budgets on content marketing, and 39% plan to increase that spend, according to the study.

With content marketing so popular among brands and content high in demand from customers, why are many B2B marketers so challenged to stand out and be effective? One reason is that the inherent pressure to produce can result in content that does not resonate.

“There is pressure for companies to ensure there is quality content being produced and distributed, yet at the same time, be visible and present,” noted Ketna Mistry, director of social media at S&P Global. “Creating valuable, digestible, and attractive content to a relevant audience quickly enough, so that content opportunities are not missed, often means something is sacrificed.”

The New Paths To Information Discovery
B2B CMOs and senior marketing executives not satisfied with their progress with content investments must understand the effect of major changes in information discovery, consumption, and interaction among business customers.

The way business customers find and interact with information when researching solutions has evolved significantly, with changes that include the ubiquity of internet access, growth of social media, and mobile.

Self-directed business buyers pull themselves through most of the B2B sales cycle with whatever content they can find. At the same time, B2B brands are challenged to stand out among a deluge of competitive content and growing distrust of ads.

The good news is that there is a trend among successful B2B marketing executives that involves taking a more customer-centric and integrated approach to content. By making sure insights from sources such as search, social media, email, and web analytics are integrated into content marketing planning, B2B marketers are making more strategically valuable decisions about their content marketing and how specialty areas of marketing are organized in the company.

“These marketing disciplines used to live in silos, with experts dedicated to each. The new trend is for what I call ‘a hybrid marketer’ to not be one-dimensional, but instead understand how these strategies and tactics all fit together and then embrace technology to bring them together as part of a fully integrated marketing approach,” said Jason Miller, group manager of global content and social media marketing at LinkedIn.

With insight about buyer preferences on where they find solution content and what formats and topics are preferred as well as the triggers that will motivate next steps, B2B brands can become the best answer for buyers wherever they may be looking. Content that is easy to find, relevant, and more useful makes it more effective to attract, engage, and convert more business.

Buyer Behaviors Earn Results
A great example of leveraging buyer insight for content comes from YouEarnedIt, an employee recognition and reward platform that wanted to show how companies can better engage employees. Their approach started with a multi-touch campaign that included several guides, lists, and a conference panel at SXSW.

Amplification of content occurred through a blog, landing pages, social channels, emails, and guest blog posts with calls to action. Buyer insight was used with follow-up content that was automatically delivered based on reader behaviors and segmentation. Results of this multi-channel and multi-content format approach included 270 new sales-qualified leads and an 11% contact to SQL conversion rate.

As marketers, we often overcomplicate solutions because our industry moves so quickly. It’s possible that the strategic answer to dealing with information overload for buyers and limited resources for creating content comes in a much simpler form.

A Best-Answer Approach
A best-answer approach to content marketing sums up the need to empathize with buyers to understand what questions they have. It also reflects the importance of quality and usefulness in content to satisfy customers’ needs while they conduct their research at each stage of the buying journey.

“It’s critical for B2B marketers, in fact for any marketer, to really understand their audience including how, when, and where they consume content. This type of research (which should be ongoing) is likely to highlight the importance of making sure your content is present and fit for purpose across multiple channels, platforms, and devices,” said Simon Morris, director of demand marketing EMEA at Adobe.

Successful marketers are evolving their sophistication at using a customer-centric approach to content planning and, in the case of Zendesk, a phased approach.

Data-Informed Content Speeds Results
To accelerate sales enablement with content, Zendesk’s first phase included research, aligning content, and reviewing sales data. Phase two focused on repurposing content and developing a framework, and phase three involved administering sales enablement training tools and guides.

The result of this data-informed program included a 730% increase in deal closings, with 5,000 companies and a 130% increase quarter over quarter in outbound booking amount. For a round-up of other successful B2B case studies, take a look here.

In order for B2B marketers to put a “best-answer” content marketing strategy into action, there are three essential insights about customers’ search for information that are useful.

1. Discovery: Where does your specific target audience discover solution content? Do they search? What keywords do they use? Do they see ads? Where? Do they subscribe to newsletters or publications? Which ones? Are they influenced by peers and experts? On which social channels or forums?

Understanding the start of a buyer’s journey can help you develop the right marketing strategy for owned, paid, earned, and co-created media.

2. Consumption: What are your buyers’ preferences for content type? Do they prefer a blog post or video, then a webinar or white paper followed by a cost calculator or case study?

Content topic, format, and media type all matter when delivering a best-answer experience because they enable relevance, utility, and engagement.

3. Action: What triggers will motivate your buyer to take the next step? Can they go from awareness direct to inquiry, or do they need to be educated over a period of evaluation along with a buying committee?

Best-answer content empathizes with what a buyer needs to satisfy their process towards collecting the information and confidence necessary to make a decision wherever they may be in the sales process.

Once these customer insights are put in place within a B2B content marketing program, the need to integrate messaging across channels and tactics will also be important as the table below shows.

The best content isn’t really that great unless it can be found, consumed, and acted upon by buyers. That is why an effective content marketing program is customer-centric and incorporates data from SEO, insights about format and topics from social media, topical relevance of content from buyer persona research, and awareness of what effect media and influencers can have on buyers’ research and purchasing decisions.

Ultimately, a best-answer approach to B2B content helps strategic marketers overcome the challenges of standing out with an approach that provides buyers with more relevant content when and where it matters most, and in the formats they prefer.

A European version of this article originally appeared in my column at CMO.com.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2016. | The One Thing You Must Have for B2B Marketing Success: Be the Best Answer | http://www.toprankblog.com

The post The One Thing You Must Have for B2B Marketing Success: Be the Best Answer appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.