Rnordman

I think we can all agree that “account-based” is a leading contender for 2016’s phrase of the year. If you watched a webinar, read a blog post, or attended a conference and had account-based as your drinking word, you’d have a frequent flyer number at your local ER.

Beneath the buzz, however, this one has some there there.

There are two tides propelling the account-based movement. One, the number and diversity of people involved in purchasing decisions has changed. The “buyer” has become the “buying unit” and is quickly growing into the “buying battalion.” Just about any single sale process seems to require dozens of yeses and risks running aground in the face of a single no.

Two, it is getting harder and harder to scale what worked in the past. Killed it at that BigCon tradeshow last year? Great! But doubling your spend next year won’t net you double the new logos. Same goes for PPC, social advertising, PR, etc.

Death, taxes, and diminishing returns are the immutable laws of our world.

I was working with a client recently charting their $10M to $100M trajectory. (They were kind enough to let me share these numbers with their name removed.) The path that got them to $10M looked like this:

That’s 53% of revenue coming from the mid-market. We projected out their path to $100M keeping that ratio constant. Here’s what I found:

I call that getting to $100M the hard way. But there’s an easier way: account-based revenue.

Enter account-based revenue (ABR)

I love all the excitement around the account-based movement. But I’m concerned that in the mad dash, we’re skipping over a few things.

1. Declaring ourselves account-based, doesn’t make it so
   I can declare myself a marathoner, but until I cross the finish line, words are just that. I’ve spoken with companies that have $15K, $50K, and $200K average selling prices. They all consider themselves account-based. That should alarm you.
2. Failing to spell out how account-based is different
   Selling to companies, not individual prospects isn’t account-based anything. Prospecting more than one person in an account? Fantastic! That’s account-centric selling and was innovative in 2004.
    

Being “account-centric” is just good old fashioned selling. This means:

• Targeting a set of specific accounts that fit a well-defined profile
• Designing processes to acquire those accounts
• A plan for database buildout and refresh
• Using account research and campaigns to stand out
• Building targeted content and offers
• Tracking account-centric measures

I’m willing to bet that the majority of you have been thinking this way for years. Not to be confusing, but account-centric and account-based strategies do share similarities in that they both think in terms of accounts, involve account teams, and plays/planning. But that is where the story ends.

I love this definition of account-based from Engagio's Jon Miller: 

“The goal is to optimize your sales and marketing resources – time, headcount and budget – by focusing them on the accounts most likely to drive big revenue.”

Account-centric tactics are a one-to-many play. One general budget and one dedicated set of sales resources focused on many accounts. With account-based, you need to think in terms of resource allocation per account. As Jon Miller said, that means time, headcount and budget. Unlike account-centric, account-based additionally requires a cross-functional team that often extends beyond the sales and marketing organizations.

Where do you want your revenue to come from?

Returning to the client I mentioned earlier, I asked them: how do you want to get to $100M? Option A requires a high volume of mid-market deals. Option B shifts some of those resources and focuses them upstream and account-based. I asked, do you want to get $100M the hard way or the ABR way?

Needless to say, they opted for Option B. The new path to $100M they presented to their Board looked like this:

Rebalancing with account-based revenue required 500 fewer new logos from the mid-market. We also estimated it will be 14-18% cheaper (sales & marketing operating expenses).

Parting thoughts

As with all innovative movements, there will be winners and losers in this game. The losers will struggle. They’ll think having SDRs call many contacts in a single account gets the job done. They’ll execute traditional demand generation strategies and measure success in traditional ways. They will live in the land of SALs and MQLs, never get to the promised land, and fail to understand why.

“Here’s the email template that got us into 5 of the Fortune 500,” said no one ever.

The winners will grasp the pitfalls of the “the hard way” and invest in the ABR way. They’ll be taking an intelligent approach to:

• Selecting accounts based on data, not wishful thinking or gut instinct
• Role definition and campaign orchestration from the SDR on up to CEO
• Single-use plays and offers so good your accounts would be willing to pay for them

 The winners will measure their success in more whales, larger average deal size, and significantly more revenue.

I'd love to hear where you are on your account-based journey. Please share in the comments below.
 

It's no secret that people love lists. They're organized, require minimal effort to read, and can make complicated information easy to digest.

Lists appeal to our innate tendency to categorize information, as well as help us feel less stressed, writes Maria Konnikova in The New Yorker.

Seeing information as a list makes you feel less overwhelmed by a task so it's easier to complete, which in turn makes you happier, says Konnikova, New York Times bestselling author of "The Confidence Game."

Here are 26 list ideas to get you started.

1. Recipes you want to try: Pull this out the next time you're stuck on what to make for dinner for instant inspiration.

2. Movies you want to see: You'll never have to sit through the "I don't care, what to do you want to watch?" scenario again.

3. Books you want to read: Next time you're reaching for another predictable beach read, look up that acclaimed novel-of-the-year, Oprah-recommended one instead.

4. TV shows you want to watch: You'll be prepared for when you binge-watch your way through "Stranger Things" and need a new addiction now.

5. Restaurants you want to try: Keep a running list of all the places you want to try and you'll never be left without a suggestion when deciding where to eat tonight. Bonus points if you organize it by type of cuisine.

6. Places to see: Maybe you've always wanted to visit the Great Wall of China, or even just the Statue of Liberty. Once you have a list, you'll be motivated to plan a trip.

7. Cities and countries you want to visit: Perhaps there's not a specific landmark you're dying to see, but you've always wanted to eat pasta in Italy or drink wine in France. Your list will remind of which trips you really need to take.

8. Places to visit in your hometown: It's not as exciting as jet-setting across the globe, but you'll have plenty of things to do instead of vegging out on your couch next Saturday.

9. Passwords: Never forget if your Amazon password is SoccerStar12 or Socc3rStar again.

10. Daily to-do list: Keep track of everything that's on your plate for the day. Plus, nothing feels better than crossing something off.

11. Done list: Looking back at your daily accomplishments will help you learn how to be more productive — and provides an automatic ego boost.

12. Bucket list: Everything you want to do before you die, from big things such as getting married or climbing Mt. Everest, down to small things such as baking the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

13. Short-term goals: What do you want to accomplish this month?

14. Long-term goals: What do you hope to accomplish in the next five to 10 years?

15. Professional accomplishments: Keep a list of all of those projects executed and compliments given. Aside from making you feel good when you're having an off-day, this list will be invaluable when it comes time to update your resume.

16. Criteria for your next job: The more hours, days, and years you spend at work, the more you know what you do and don't need to be your most effective, most productive self in both this position and the next.

17. DIY projects: Pinterest might be a great aspirational site, but this will help you keep track of the projects you actually want to complete, like organizing your old photos or painting the furniture in the guest room.

18. Home improvement projects: Writing down everything that needs to be done will allow you to prioritize what you should tackle first.

19. Grocery list: Knowing exactly what you need to buy — and sticking to it — will not only save you money, it will help you resist that box of cookies you know you don't need.

20. Drugstore list: We've all gone into Target for toothpaste and come out with $100 worth of items before. Keep a running list of the things you need, so you can avoid the inevitable $20 drug store "cover charge."

21. Wardrobe updates: Whether it's a necessity, like a new winter coat, or something fun, like trendy sneakers, having an idea of which items you're hunting for before you go shopping will help you avoid impulse buys, ultimately saving you money.

22. Important dates: Everyone loves when you remember their birthday or anniversary, so keep a list of your loved ones' significant dates and you'll never miss a chance to make their day.

23. Due dates: If you're even the slightest bit forgetful, writing down when you need to return that shirt by or when those frozen chicken breasts expire can save you stress in the long run.

24. Favorite quotes: You'll feel inspired all over again every time you read through your list. If you're still looking for a favorite, here are a few great quotes from Albert Einstein and Richard Branson to get you started.

25. Things you're thankful for: Revisit this on your toughest days to remind yourself how great your life is.

26. Things that make you happy: Whenever you're sad, you'll automatically give yourself several reasons to smile.

SEE ALSO: Here's the list you should make every Friday afternoon for maximum productivity the following week

DON'T MISS: My favorite productivity app is a free feature that's already on your iPhone

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This simple work hack will make you more productive

They say don’t judge an email by its subject line, but let’s be honest: We’re always keeping an eye out for the best of the best. After all, the subject line is one of the first impressions your message has on its recipients and can help you improve your opens and clicks.

That’s a lot of pressure for a seemingly short line of text.

While there is no secret to the perfect subject line, there are a few words and phrases that we turn to time and time again to get more eyes on our emails. To add some bling to your subject lines , check out these tips and tricks you can use today.

Create a sense of urgency

Stop everything and read this.

Got you, didn’t it? Getting people to take action from your email can be difficult. There’s a lot that goes into getting more opens and clicks. Urgency is one of those things that can have a big impact on whether or not your email gets read.

Here are some examples to get you started:

1. Back in stock, so don’t miss out

2. This is your *last chance* to shop our sale

3. Tick, tock! 30% off sale ends soon!

4. Going once, going twice!

5. Members get first dibs.

6. We couldn’t wait ‘til Friday!

7. When it’s gone, it’s gone.

8. You might want to hurry…

9. A little (limited-time-only) present

10. Available for 24 hours only

Have a strong call-to-action

When it comes down to getting your emails opened, experiential verbs (like “celebrate” and “love”) perform better than functional verbs (like “spend” and “grab”). That’s not to say these words won’t work – it’s really all about context.

The thing that everyone can agree on is that if you don’t ask, subscribers won’t take action. So try throwing some of these high-performing words in your next subject line:

11. Celebrate with savings!

12. Act now for friends and family savings!

13. 3 DIY Frame Hacks You Need to Try Now

14. Trust me, you need this…

15. send some. get some.

16. Don’t Let These Get Away

Get personal

Personalization. When it’s done right, it’s AWesome! But when it’s done wrong? It can be borderline creepy. Here are a few examples of how to do it the right way:

17. Because you need this…

18. Join me for a marg, Olivia?

19. You deserve a treat

20. Special delivery for Olivia

21. The jeans you don’t have (yet)

Repeat yourself

Being redundant pays off, especially when it comes to your subject line. That’s because it keeps you, the sender, top-of-mind. And being top-of-mind helps build trust, which can lead to more sales. It’s a win-win!

Try including your name or your company name in the subject line, à la these brands:

22. Welcome to the Away family

23. New and exclusive to Kaufmann Mercantile

24. The Madewell essentials

25. Did somebody say new Glossier?

26. The Giant Weekly Newsletter

27. New and Exclusive to Sephora

We don’t mean to brag, but…

Just kidding, we totally do. And that’s because adding key superlatives to your subject line can help strengthen your core message and make it more effective.

Just check out these example subject lines to see what I mean:

28. new favorite dress, hands down

29. Here’s a special treat, just for you!

30. This is big, huge, gigantic, amazing, incredible…

31. Our latest styles have just arrived

32. The PERFECT Facebook Ad

33. Best of the blog

34. A little luxury at a great price

Pose a question

A question is a great way to spark some curiosity around your email, but it’s the type of question that matters. Yes or no questions perform better than open-ended questions. And don’t forget about sentiment: Questions with a negative association (like don’t or can’t) are the worst-performers.

35. What do you think?

36. Do you like prizes?

37. Can you keep a secret?

38. How could you top this?

39. Today’s the day! Are you in?

40. Best gift ever?

41. Details, please! Did you like your purchase?

Punctuation and capitalization matter

Punctuation can completely change the tone of your subject line with one simple character. And that can impact how your subscribers respond to your message. Even the lack of punctuation can change the gist of your subject, keeping things casual.

Capitalization also has the same effect. Take notes.

42. MAJOR announcement!

43. Extra 30% off sale styles (!)

44. *permission to brag*

45. It’s giveaway time again…

46. T.G.I.SAAALE!

47. we’re melting

48. alert! today only

49. And the winner goes to…

50. N-E-W

51. Flash. Sale. Alert.

Try these out for yourself

We’re big proponents of trying out tricks and tactics to see what works best. While you can’t predict results by looking at how past subject lines performed, you can use them as a basis for future iteration.

Try adding some of these words and phrases in your next few subject lines and watch your open rates skyrocket.

Have a tried-and-true subject line trick of your own? Let us know in the comments!

For most brands and marketers, social media is an important and necessary component of their overall digital marketing strategy. Not only does social media help build brand awareness, but it also provides a conversational space for brands to engage their audience outside of their company website or brick and mortar stores or offices.

But let’s face it, competition for audience attention and engagement is stiff. With nearly all brands and marketers using social media, coupled with frequent platform changes to improve user experience, brands are fighting for organic visibility. In fact, 40% of marketers say social media marketing has gotten more difficult for them in the last 12 months, according to Social Media Examiner’s 2016 Industry Report.

While it may be more difficult to grab attention these days, the good news is that your target audience is still there, ready to be inspired by your company’s story and creativity, as well as some of your product or service promotions. According to survey findings from MarketingSherpa, 85% of U.S. consumers said they used social media, with 58% all respondents saying they follow brands on social media.

And the success of your social media efforts boils down to one thing: Likeability. People will follow your brand because they just plain like you and they like what you have to offer on social media, such as quality and entertaining content, discounts and special promotions, or customer service.

So how can your brand be more likeable on social media and stand out from the competition? Below we offer a few tips and examples that can help.

#1 – Be real.

If you want to grow meaningful connections—as well as your number of page likes and follows—the importance of authenticity cannot be overstated. Social media gives brands the opportunity to show their target audience who they are, not just what they sell.

Develop a brand voice and marketing strategy that brings a human element and some personality to your social media pages. This means it’s time to lose the jargon or sales pitch, and talk to people on their level. In addition, ask thoughtful questions and be timely in your responses to keep the conversation going and to show your audience your dedication.

Ben & Jerry’s, the makers of some of the most delicious ice cream on the planet, have blended their brand with creativity and humor, as well as some tongue-in-cheek references from time to time, into their Instagram postings.

#2 – Provide value through a mix of content.

Providing your audience with a mix of quality content is key for raising your likeability factor and showing your value.

Share links to helpful content on your website, but also make sure you’re calling their attention to other relevant and helpful pieces of content or news items that are out there. This will show them that you’re in the know and that you’re dedicated to providing them with something useful, even if it doesn’t have your name on it.

In addition, do not forget to include visual content as part of your mix. Humans are visual by nature and research shows that visual content can seriously boost engagement on social media.

Also, consider posting content natively within your platforms to eliminate the barrier between your audience and your content. While you give up some immediate website traffic, native content—especially native video content—allows your audience to interact with your content in the moment and can also boost engagement.

#3 – Don’t be overly promotional.

If your brand is only posting promotional messages, you need to stop. That’s not what your audience is looking for and you’re probably not seeing much ROI. Your audience wants to know who you are, what you stand for and what you can offer, which goes well beyond your line of products or services.

#4 – Invite discussion.

Social media is all about giving people a place to share their thoughts and experiences with one another. As mentioned above, ask your community engaging and thoughtful questions to get the conversation going and tap into their insights.

If you’re sharing industry news, ask them for their thoughts on recent developments. If you’ve recently launched a new product, ask for their feedback. HubSpot is constantly asking their audience for their thoughts on a variety of related topics, encouraging conversation and prompting shares. Here’s an example of a recent Facebook post.

If you’re on Twitter, consider posting a weekly poll on a relevant topic to inspire engagement. Here’s an example from our very own, Lee Odden.

#5 – Nurture your following.

If you really want to become a more likeable brand, you have to invest in social media community management. While your social media marketing efforts help drive your brand toward specific goals—such as increasing brand awareness or engagement—social media community management is all about nurturing your audience to grow a stronger, larger and more engaged following.

One great way to do this is to leverage the unique conversations and engagements happening across your social pages. As an example, use the information you extracted from a Twitter poll as fodder for a Facebook or Instagram post. This not only gives you the opportunity for additional discussion and engagement, but also reminds your audience that they can follow and engage with you on multiple platforms.

#6 – Don’t shy away from negative feedback.

Every brand and business dreams of complete customer satisfaction, but that’s rarely the case. Things happen and social media is often an easy place for your customers to air their grievances. While it can be scary to allow mistakes to be visible for the whole social media world to see, use any negative feedback as an opportunity to show humility, understanding and your drive to take care of your customers.

Sun Country Airlines has this down. On Twitter, the company is on-top of what their audience is saying about their services—good or bad.

Here’s a recent example from a disappointed customer. The brand responded promptly and offered their assistance.

But here’s another example of someone who’s happy to be flying with them. Not only was this a quick response, the purple heart was sweet and spoke to the customer’s whole reason for flying.

The bottom line? Take the bad with the good to show your value and up your likeability factor.

#7 – Tell your company’s story.

As previously mentioned, social media is not the place for being salesy. It’s the place where you let your followers get a deeper look at who you are and what value you offer.

IBM does a fabulous job of company storytelling. The company’s Facebook page is filled with inspiring videos, articles and quotes that showcase the amazing innovative technology they’re bringing to the world and how’s transformed over time.

On Instagram, the company provides its audience with a deeper looking inside the company and the people who work there.

If You’re Good Enough and Smart Enough—Doggone It, People Will Like You

The beauty of social media is that it give brands the opportunity to put themselves out there and create meaningful interactions with their audience. But in order to be a likeable brand, you need to provide good, quality content and be smart about how you engage with your audience. Hopefully these tips and examples can help you on your way.

What have you done to increase your brand’s likeability on social media? Tell us in the comments section below.

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1. Keep Those Reviews Coming: Reviews can easily make an older book look relevant. People are still reading it, still reviewing it, so it must be worth reading. Even just a few new reviews per month can make a huge difference.
2. Update content as necessary: As I mentioned above, if you have an older non-fiction book that needs updating, you should update it. Even for fiction books that are older, I’ve known some authors to update things like switching a character’s use of a Blackberry to an iPhone, or updating pop culture references. Most of this is pretty easily done with a few quick word searches and yes, it does mean that you have to reformat the book – but if you want to keep it fresh, or if you’re planning to use this book as a carrot to draw readers in to your newer books, this may be worth it.
3. Update your Amazon Book Page: One thing that shouldn’t stay static is your Amazon book page. I always recommend updating it when you update an older book, get an award, big new blurb, etc. Even sometimes just updating the copy can be helpful to refresh the page.
4. Change your Book Cover: This is an odd trick, but it works. I’ve tried this a few times with books across fiction and non-fiction. What I’ve found is that changing up the older book’s cover can often help to spike the book on Amazon. More than that, a new cover can really help attract new readers.
5. Run Regular eBook Promos: Running regular promotions for your eBook can really help to keep up your momentum. I recommend trying one promo per month. This doesn’t mean you have to reduce the price to zero each time. One month, you can discount the book by $2, or make it half-priced, and then another month, mark the eBook down to zero. It’s just a great way to keep the book top of mind with your audience. Plus, eBook promos done regularly can help trigger your Amazon algorithm.
6. Play with Pricing: Pricing, much like eBook promotions, is also a great way to play with the Amazon algorithm. Pricing a book at .99 cents for a day can really help boost purchases. Make sure to share any promos/pricing changes to your social media fans. The needle won’t move far if you change your price in a vacuum. A note on this: I’ve had authors approach me, concerned that this will upset their readers and I haven’t found this to be the case. We all stumble on sale items after we’ve bought something.If you get a lot of flack, or find your readers are pretty vocal, offer them an Amazon gift card for $1 or whatever the pricing difference is (they have to show you proof of purchase). When I had an author offer this, she got no takers – the readers were just satisfied that she was willing to honor the sale price. I think you’ll find that your readers just want to be heard – but unless you’re doing hefty discounts like $10 a book, most of them won’t be so upset that they never want to read your stuff again.
7. Tie into Current Media Hook: While this mostly fits into the non-fiction category, it’s a great thing when you can find a national (or regional) angle to your book that the media might love. I’ve known authors to do this for older books that are going on five or more years old who have done very well. You can use it to pitch media, or you even on your blog and in social media. Finding a great book hook that has some national interest can go a long way to getting more current attention for your book.
8. Keep blogging, Stay Busy I see a lot of authors who seem to leave their own promotion party as soon as the book hits a year old. They stop blogging, rarely show up on social media anymore, and forget pitching. What does this tell your potential readers? If you aren’t interested in your own book, why should anyone else be? Stay active on your blog, even if it’s just once a week – get into your social media and keep talking, your readers are listening and once you stop talking, they will move onto someone else.
9. Too late for a review? Try This! But what if it’s just too late to pitch bloggers or reviewers for your older book? Well, then what about offering to write guest blogging pieces, or suggesting a book excerpt or author Q&A. Or, better yet, maybe approach less-high profile bloggers who can still give you some nice exposure, but aren’t so tied to book street dates the way some of the very high profile bloggers are. Exposure is exposure, whether it’s a review, mention, excerpt, or guest blog. Don’t just assume that because your book has aged, that it’s aged out of the market as well.
10. Every Update Deserves A Repitch: If you update the older book in any way, you should consider a fresh repitch of it. The Amazon date may show that it was published in 2014 or 2015 – if you have made specific, helpful, or significant changes and you just republish the book to the same page (a lot of authors do this to keep the reviews in tact). If this is the case, make sure that anyone you pitch knows that the book is newly updated and make sure your book description reflects that as well. For example, you could say something like: Newly updated as of October, 2016! In big, bold letters – so it’s easily visible at the top of the book description. And, as I mentioned, if you are pitching it to bloggers or reviewers, make sure they are aware of this as well.

Ultimately, it’s up to you, the author, to determine how relevant your book is at any given time. But, just because it’s been a year or two, or even more(!), since your older book was published, doesn’t mean that you can’t breathe new life into its marketability.  Whether you draw parallels between topics presented in the book and current news, use it as a promo for new books, or simply update the content, you have the power to get the word out. Just like ebook promotions don’t do anything in a vacuum, share any new information with your followers and in your newsletter. And maybe, giving your book a little kick will resuscitate it sufficiently to kick it to number one in its category!

I don’t know about you, but a couple of people reading this article might relate to this feeling:

You know who a good sales lead is for your company and you strongly believe that you can help them. And, as you hone your list of qualified sales leads, you begin your research before contacting them, just like you were told in the “identifying” stage of this Inbound Sales blog series.

You’ve actually followed all the strategies and tips laid out so far.

The result?

They. Download. Your. Content.

The time has come to call.

You know that most of the time people don’t answer, so you expect to leave a voicemail and follow up with an email.

You pick up your phone, put a smile on your face, feel the butterflies in your stomach and get all the necessary information in front of you.

This person is so perfect for your company that you almost have stage freight. It’s like they’re famous. It’s okay though because no one ever answers the phone.

Ring…Ring…Ring…

“Hello?” Says your perfect lead.

Wait. You weren’t ready for this. You think you say your name right but it’s all so fuzzy you just black out for the rest of the conversation.

They’ll talk to you again, right?

Reality Check – What You Must Do

Maybe your experience has not been as dramatic as the one I just described, but I know many (even if only a couple) of people were just relieved to know that they are not the only ones to go through that anxiety.

You can do all of the preparation and prospecting in the world, but if you do not know how to truly connect with your sales leads, they may see you as just another “sleazy” or “pushy” salesperson.

Better yet, they may not even acknowledge you at all with all the massive, over generalized email blasts and cold sales calls going out these days.

So, you must identify who your sales leads are. You must do your prospecting preparation in order to connect with those qualified sales leads. And you must offer value and genuinely personalize your approach to them as a person and a professional.

Otherwise, they won’t even give you the time of day.

It is the reality of today’s sales world and modern buyer.

Let’s Talk About How to Talk

Talking may seem extremely natural for many of you, including me. I got “excessive talking” on every report card I ever brought home growing up.

But the kind of talking I’m talking about is different. It’s strategic, genuine, practiced and handled under high pressure. The more you practice this way of conversing with your prospects, the better at it you will get.

So let’s talk about exactly what you talk about with your prospect when they answer the phone, how you engage with them in email, or interact with them on social media.

Here’s What NOT to Do

I have lost count of the number of people who have reached out to me to offer services that my company already does. They talk about SEO, digital marketing, content creation, website design and development; you name it.

First, they clearly did not do any research to see who they were even contacting. Not only did they completely lose the chance of connecting with me, but personally, they lost my respect.

Here’s an example of an email that I received not too long ago:

If they had researched my company, they would have known that we already provide those services to our clients. He also jumped the gun too soon by mentioning pricing (and do I really think I’m going to get a fabulous website for $299?)

A few other mistakes this person made that you should avoid include:

There Is No Attempt To Build Rapport

No matter what business you are in, you are dealing with people, selling to people and interacting with people. Talk to your prospect like a person first and salesperson second. That is done by building rapport, which is essential to building trust and connecting with your prospect.

Believe me, when only 3% of buyers think a salesperson is trustworthy, you can’t afford not to build rapport.^[1] But remember to always be genuine.

There Is No Personalization In This Email

Research has shown that emails with a personalized subject line have 26% higher open rates and personalized emails have 30% higher click-through rates.^[2] Making your email personal to your prospect, with details that you have researched prior to reaching out, shows that you’re human and you at least did your research, making you far less “sleazy” or “pushy”.

In fact, making your email personal can give you a 10% higher conversion rate.^[3]

There Is No Real Call-To-Action

These days with the modern buyer, you have to give something first before getting a response. That is why it is so essential to nurture your leads into becoming customers before just asking for a sale. Also, if you don’t give a clear next step aside from “drop me a line,” or “looking forward to your positive revert” your prospect will simply move on.

If you do end by asking them to call you back, then make sure you provide something of real value in your email. Otherwise, you are asking for way too much and are just sounding like a typical salesperson.

The Grammar In This Email Is Off-Putting

You don’t have to be a grammar scholar to know that the grammar used in this email is incorrect. It makes them sound like they are not really interested (or possibly not capable) of producing good work.

The Email Is All About Them And Not About Me

This email is wee, wee, weeing all over itself. That’s in reference to the number of times they refer to “we” and “our” instead of “you.” Prospects really don’t care about you or your company until you have answered how you are going to truly help them solve their pain points and reach their goals.

Once you have convinced them that you understand their issues and how to help them, then it’s OK to talk about you and your company and why you are their right choice. But, for this first email, why do I care that “their” website is the lifeblood of “their” organization? Honestly, they lost me in the first sentence.

So now that I feel bad for ripping apart this person’s email publicly, let’s move on to what you should actually do.

Here’s What You SHOULD Do

All connection attempts with your sales leads, whether by email, phone, or social media, should include at least some, if not all, of the following elements:

Prospect’s Name and Company

Make sure they know it is a human on the other side of that call or email, and not an automatic bot.

Rapport

Creating rapport is the best way to start your conversation. There are hundreds of things you can talk about, especially if you did your prospecting research before connecting with this person. Be genuine and have fun with it. (Hint: You’re awesome if you can make them laugh. Laughing automatically puts a person at ease physically and mentally)

Reason Why You Are Reaching Out To Them NOW

You absolutely need a compelling reason to reach out now, otherwise it will come across as a cold outreach. In Part 1 of this connect stage, I listed many ways and reasons to reach out to them.

Here are some other trigger events you can use to reach out to your prospects:

• Company Press Release
• Product Launch
• Recent Award
• New Hire
• Special Event Attendance
• Research Published
• Upcoming Tradeshows

Add Value

Earn the right to continue with your conversation when you are asking questions about their business or job by providing value to your prospect first.

Remember, this isn’t about you. This is about your prospect and bettering their life through your product or service.

So you need to see things through their perspective, walk in their shoes, empathize with their pressures, pains and key drivers, in order to provide value and to help them.

In fact, 95% of buyers chose a solution provider that provided them with the content they needed to help navigate through each stage of the buying process.^[4]

Help first, sell second.

Ask Questions (And The Right Kinds Of Questions)

There are different types of questions to ask your prospect. Some just scratch the surface in order to gather context while others are more deep, building upon their pain points or topics from your first line of questions.

For example, your first questions can be something like:

• “How long have you been at your company?”
• “What goals are you specifically focused on achieving this year?”
• “What buyers do you typically target?”

The second level questions that you ask should be powerful, open ended questions that engage your prospect and dig deeper into the questions you have already asked.

Avoid questions that are answered with “yes” and “no.” Deeper questions show that you have been listening to what they have been saying and are interested in hearing more.

Some examples include:

• “What are your strategies to make sure “that” happens?”
• “Will you tell me more about that?”

If you get past all these questions and the conversation allows for it, go into more questions that dive into an emotional impact.

Emotions are a powerful thing and most decisions are based on emotions, whether pain / fear, or gain / excitement.

Here are some examples:

• “If you can accomplish XYZ, what type of impact will that have on your company?”
• “If you can’t get XYZ to happen, what type of impact will that have on you personally?”

Positioning Statement

Positioning statements build your credibility in understanding what they struggle with or what they want to achieve. They also show that you can solve it.

Your positioning statement shows that you have been there and done that before, so you understand where they are coming from and what they care about.

Your prospect should relate to your positioning statement as if you were talking about them and their position specifically. That way, they will feel more comfortable and confident to carry on the conversation with you.

Matching Energy And Tone

You wouldn’t talk with the CEO of a company like you would the customer service representative, would you?

Well I guess after reading that sentence, you’re not anymore.

If you prepared for the connection attempt correctly, you will know the position they hold in the company. That gives you an idea of how to convey your tone and energy.

But if you are still unsure, when in doubt, match their tone and energy. Start out neutral and then adjust accordingly.

An excerpt of To Sell Is Human by Daniel H. Pink states:

“People therefore looked to social cues in the environment to determine whom they could trust. “One of those cues is the unconscious awareness of whether we are in synch with other people, and a way to do that is to match their behavioral patterns with our own.” Synching our mannerisms and vocal patterns to someone else so that we both understand and can be understood is fundamental to attunement.”

Call-to-Action

You should always be trying to move your prospect forward through the sales pipeline, but not in a way that will scare them away. So you need to tell them what their next step is and ask them to actually “do something.” It should be simple and easy for the prospect to complete.

By asking them to take an action, it also helps qualify your prospect as either someone who is likely to buy from you, or is actually an unqualified lead.

If they aren’t willing to do something small and simple for their own benefit, then they are not likely to be willing to buy from you.

Some examples of call-to-actions that you can ask your prospect to do at the end of your initial conversation include:

• Downloading a high-valued content offer that your marketing team created and then asking them to give you their thoughts on it.
• Setting up a short, 5 minute follow-up call to discuss one line item at a specified time and date.
• Asking for a referral to a decision-maker in their company or another colleague you would like to connect with.
• Asking them to watch a short free video of your product and then discuss their thoughts with you after.
• Setting up an exploratory meeting to dive further into what you just discussed with them.
• Offering a free consultation or product demo.

Humility

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we know more than others, we are the best, or we’ve got the best product or service in the world. Hey, that may be true, but it doesn’t help to assume that position when interacting with other people or carrying out our jobs.

I’ll give an example with a topic most of us are passionate about:

Football

Let’s go back to 1978 when the Eagles played the Giants. A game also referred to as The Miracle at the Meadowlands.

It was the last final seconds of the game, the Giants were set to win by a score of 17-12 and the Eagles had no timeouts left. The Giants had the ball, and all that was left to do was to have Joe Pisarcik, Quarterback of the Giants, snap the ball one last time and take a final knee in order to run out the remaining few seconds of the clock.

Everyone watching and playing the game thought it was over and that the Giants had won the game. Even the commentators started to read the end credits of the game before the final play had begun.

Except for one person.

Herman Edwards, Cornerback for the Eagles.

The ball snapped to the over-confident Pisarcik, and instead of having the humility to take a knee and end the game, he instead remained standing, possibly because of his pride, although we can’t really say what was in his head.

But as he remained standing, he fumbled the ball.

Sure enough, Edwards was more than ready to swoop in and pick up the football. He ran 26 yards for a touchdown, untouched by members of the other team.

Game over; the Eagles won.

Do You See It?

The Giants were so confident and comfortable that they had won the game before it was actually over, they lost sight of their need to remain humble and stay fully engaged in the game until the final seconds wound down.

The Eagles, already humbled by the fact that they were losing, were able to see clearly what the Giants couldn’t about the game. They knew not to feel sorry for themselves, but instead to continue to work hard all the way to the end, to figure out how to fix their issues, to look for opportunities to turn things around, and to fight back in order to eventually win.

Moral of the story – never assume that you have a sale until the paper is actually signed, and never underestimate your competitors.

Perspective and Empathy

As I said before, you need to have empathy for your prospect and understand their situation from their perspective. See what your prospect sees. Care about their issues. Find solutions that specifically work for your prospect, not what you think works in general for all your prospects.

If you assume that you already know how to win their business, then you’ll be blind to what your prospect actually needs to solve their issues or to achieve their goals. Instead of fighting to make them your customer, fight for a way to make their world, their job and their company better.

The best way to do that is to start with humility.

To quote Daniel H. Pink’s book, To Sell Is Human again,

“Martin surprised me by repeatedly using a word one rarely hears in this context: “humility.” “The most common thread in the people who are really good at [moving others] is humility,” she told me. “They take the attitude of ‘I’m sitting in the small chair so you can sit in the big chair.’ ” That’s perspective-taking through reducing power, the first rule of attunement.”

Tie It All Together

This is a lot to think about all at once when you’re sitting there on the phone with your prospect, or putting together an email for them, or reaching out to them on social media.

You might not be able to fit all of this into one conversation, and really, that’s okay. If you remember one key takeaway from this entirely too long blog article, it is to be human.

This includes not writing like a robot in your emails. Instead, write like you actually talk. Say “you” instead of “I” and “your needs” instead of “I want.”

This means when you attempt to talk to your sales leads on social media, tailor it to what they are already talking about because you know that is something they care about.

This also means that you need to be personable, empathetic, “perspective-taking,” actively listening, building rapport, offering any help you can, without asking for much in return; including a sale.

I bet you never imagined that you would ever have to practice being human.

I know I didn’t.

Now I am humbled.

^[1]https://research.hubspot.com

^[2]www.getresponse.com

^[3]www.Aberdeen.com

^[4]www.demandgenreport.com

It’s the age-old question that still troubles many companies: are your teams marketing or are they selling? While marketing and sales work hand-in-hand, they are two very different concepts that require two very different methods. If you are trying to market when you should be selling (and vice versa), you could miss out on valuable opportunities. Defining the two early during employee onboarding, and then reiterated during training, could eliminate ambiguity while potentially adding benefit to your profit margin.

At surface level, marketing essentially generates leads and sales closes deals. It seems pretty cut and dry. If I were to tell you to go sell someone a smartphone, how would you approach this challenge? Would you sell the smartphone? Or would you market it? If you were to sell it, you would likely resort to rhetorical tactics to create some sort of artificial need for the smartphone. You would discuss pricing and accessibility. Maybe you will discuss how that particular smartphone would help boost productivity at work. You would essentially sell the overall benefit or value of the smartphone to the consumer.

If you were to market the smartphone, you would talk about the past and future of the smartphone marketplace. Maybe you would tout the values or culture of the producer (i.e. Apple, Samsung) of the smartphone. Or show the features that will help that person stay more connected with friends and family. In other words, you would market the experience of the smartphone to the consumer.

Marketing and sales strategies could differ depending on your company’s mission and objectives in the marketplace. Here is a look at how the two may differ.

Marketing

• Generates leads
• Creates awareness of the company and not necessarily the product
• Focuses on messaging and branding
• Requests feedback from clients
• Conducts market research and focus groups regularly to target audiences
• Engages in one-way communication with the consumers through various media channels (radio, television, social media)

Sales

• Actively seeks potential clients
• Focuses on networking and creating relationships
• Creates awareness of the product and not necessarily the company
• Targets a single company or person
• Closes deals
• Engages in two-way communication with the consumer

The relationship between marketing and sales is almost like a marriage. There needs to be a process developed that allows both sales and marketing to work together to achieve a common goal. Since many of your new employees may come from other companies, the process that aligns with your company should be clearly defined during the onboarding process.

There are a number of different ways you can illustrate the differences. One would be to simply create online training that would mimic both the sales and marketing processes. Here, the new employee would engage with customers through a series of branching scenarios. During these scenarios, the learner would have to decipher the sales and marketing processes to answer questions as it applies to the customer. The online training should be developed in tandem to facilitated discussions and job aides and other written discourse. The training should also align with the company’s brand messaging and mission statement. More importantly, the training should bring both marketing and sales together to work together as a team.

One of the hardest parts of launching a new product is determining its price. After putting so much effort into its research and development, the product may seem priceless to you, but it’s important to detach yourself from these emotions so you can come up with a fair, yet profitable pricing strategy. Here are the things you need to consider to create the ideal pricing strategy for your product:

Your Customers

Before you price your products, it’s imperative that you get to know your customers to understand what they would be comfortable spending. Invest in market research to see how much your customers typically spend on products in your category. Do your customers care more about quality or price? Where do they shop? How much do they spend per trip? Ask questions such as “if product A was priced at $X, would you buy it? What about $Y?” This information will help you set a range for your product’s pricing so you can appeal to your target market.

Your Competitors

As you analyze your customers, take a look at your competitors, too. How are they pricing their products? Once you have this information, you can take a few different approaches: price your product lower than the competitors to appeal to price-conscious customers, or price your product above competitors so customers perceive you as higher quality. But, if you do choose to price your product above competitors, be sure you can justify the extra cost to customers by clearly advertising a unique feature or benefit of your product that competitors don’t have.

Pricing Objectives

What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Every business is trying to make money, but what are your pricing objectives? Companies that are about to approach investors often want to be able to show profit, so if this is your goal, you have to price accordingly. On the other hand, companies that are hoping to penetrate the market as quickly as possible to beat out other competitors and steal market share may want to focus on maximizing the number of units sold. In this case, price your product competitively just to entice customers to buy it in the beginning.

Cost

Regardless of what your customers want, how your competitors are pricing their products, and your own pricing objectives, you have to consider the cost of creating your product before finalizing its price. Be sure to think about both the variable and fixed costs of your product so you can calculate exactly what you need to sell it for in order to make a profit. This should be done before taking any other factors into consideration.

Remember, distributors, wholesalers, product brokers and retailers all rely on you to develop a pricing strategy that makes everyone in the supply chain money, so this is a task that should be taken very seriously. What things do you consider when creating a pricing strategy? Let us know if anything was left off of this list in the comments below!

When it comes to setting strategy, which is more effective: one great thinker or a wise crowd?

To find out, I turned to my ongoing Top Pricer Tournament, in which 884 people — managers, consultants, professors, students — make pricing strategy decisions for a generic business competing against other generic businesses. The decision options available to each person work out to 14,739 possible strategies in each of three generic industries.

About half of the 884 strategies entered in each industry were chosen by two or more people; some were picked by two dozen. We’ll call these the popular strategies. The other half were chosen by only one per­son. They are the loner strategies.

If the wisdom of crowds applies to strategic thinking, popular strategies should out­perform the loners. If it doesn’t, the loners should outperform the crowd.

You and Your Team Series

Thinking Strategically

Email marketing is a lot like dating. You send emails to build a relationship, and hopefully, take things to the next level where the subscriber decides to make a purchase.

But the truth is, not every contact is interested what you have to offer. On average, about 25% of your contacts will churn, or leave your list, each year.

There are actually two kinds of churn. Those that come out and say, “I think we should break up” and hit the unsubscribe button, and those that don’t call anymore becoming inactive subscribers.

How do you keep these relationship crushers from affecting your bottom line? You have to turn on the charm. Here are ten ways to reduce churn with email campaigns:

1. Use double opt-in

Right from the start, you should make sure that a contact wants to be in an email relationship with you. To do so, set up a double opt-in process. When a contact signs up, send them an email to confirm they’re interested.

Not all marketers opt for double opt-in. Only 39% of marketers use a double opt-in process, according to MarketingSherpa. Some marketers believe that the additional confirmation email is just another hurdle that keeps a subscriber from becoming a customer.

But making a subscriber think twice about signing up can be a good thing. It’s more important to have a list of truly interested subscribers than it is to have a huge list of half-hearted subscribers.

Here’s an example of a confirmation email that UNICEF NZ created for its audience:

2. Send a welcome email

Once subscribers have confirmed their interest in your email list, you should welcome them to engage them from the get-go.

Rather than touting your products right out of the gate, use your welcome email to highlight the benefits of receiving your emails.

How does this reduce churn? Some customers that sign up for your list might be on the fence about your product or brand. By showcasing the benefits, you provide a level of reassurance. You’re bringing them one step closer to your sales funnel.

Here’s a great example of a welcome email from Converse. Notice the bulleted list that describes not only the benefits of the email list but also what subscribers can expect in terms of content.

3. Educate subscribers

One of the best ways to reduce email churn is to continually educate subscribers about your brand, product, service, or non-profit.

To build a relationship, you have to get to know one another. On a date, you ask questions and have conversations to find things you have in common with one another, right?

The email version of this is to send educational emails. Newsletters are a great way to accomplish this, or you can start educating subscribers soon after they sign up, like American Red Cross, does with this email:

4. Keep ‘em happy with great deals

The main reason people chose to join a list is for great deals or special offers, according to GetData, so don’t disappoint. Send emails that offer promotional gifts, discount codes, or coupons.

Rather than sending coupons to everyone on your list, consider segmenting your list and tailoring the sale to fit a specific audience. For instance, offer 15% off to your VIP customers, or free shipping on a future purchase to customers that recently bought an item from you.

Here’s a great deal sent by Sephora:

5. Find out why subscribers are leaving

If you don’t know why subscribers are leaving, you won’t be able to reduce email churn. To figure out why subscribers are saying, “Adios,” consider sending a survey to get some answers. Try using a survey tool like GetFeedback to create and send a simple survey.

You can use the feedback to make changes and keep subscribers from bailing on you.

Of course, you don’t have to wait for an unsettling churn rate to ask for customer feedback. In fact, it’s a good idea to collect feedback several times a year to stay on top of what your subscribers want.

Apartment Therapy sent this survey for that very purpose:

6. Provide what’s missing

During the course of collecting feedback, you might find that customers are leaving because you don’t offer a feature they’re looking for, a service they want, the right amount of post-purchase product support, or competitive pricing.

Whatever the problem is, work to solve it. Once you’ve made changes, announce it to your entire audience via email.

Here’s a great example from Niice that highlights a new feature they’re offering. Notice the email references that subscribers inspired the change.

7. Win back subscribers that have one foot out the door

Consider creating a re-engagement campaign to catch subscribers before they leave. The tricky part is figuring out when a subscriber is teetering at this point. It all depends on your sales cycle, but when your emails start to go unread for 4-6 weeks, it’s time to reach out.

Research from MarketingSherpa shows that just 15% of marketers actually send “win-back” emails, but they can be successful at bringing customers back.

You might send subscribers a discount to entice them to make a purchase or provide a link to get them interested in your product or service again. You can use marketing automation to make this a cinch and trigger your re-engagement emails based on opening or clicking links in your emails.

St. Jude Children’s Hospital sends their past patrons a re-engagement email reminding them to give again.

8. Create a preference center

What causes the majority of subscribers to opt out? Sixty-nine percent of subscribers leave a list because they receive too many emails, according to a report from Chadwick Martin Bailey.

In addition to email frequency, many subscribers jump ship because the content they receive isn’t relevant.

You can solve both of these problems by setting up an email preference center. By allowing subscribers to choose how frequently they receive your emails and select what kind of content they want, you can decrease your churn rate.

Once you have the preference center set up, encourage subscribers to use it by sending an email like this one from publisher Penguin Random House:

9. Offer a list of tailored products

Subscribers won’t leave your list if they receive messages that resonate with them. That’s why it’s important to collect customer data, segment your lists, and tailor content directly to each niche.

Converse does a great job with this. The email below was sent to a subscriber that recently purchased a pair of water resistant shoes from the online store. Based on the past purchase, Converse sent the subscriber this specific email that offers more rain gear.

10. Say thanks

You can’t think of your subscribers as line items on a spreadsheet – they’re human. To show that you value more than a subscriber’s average revenue contribution, create email campaigns that show your appreciation. After all, it’s customers that keep your business running.

One of the best ways to show your human side is to say thanks. Thank customers for helping you reach a goal or just for being loyal customers.

Here’s a great example of a thank you email from the Academy of American Poets:

Wrap up

Email churn isn’t something to ignore. If subscribers are leaving your list, it could signal a problem with your email relationships. Think of the ten tips above as email therapy that will help you sustain a healthy email relationship with your subscribers, and keep them from hitting the unsubscribe button.

We’re on to “PART 2: Searching on LinkedIn,” of my four-part series on using LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index score to benchmark your progress on LinkedIn and improve your engagement to yield more conversations for your business.

Here is PART 1: It’s More Than You Think (includes “Profile Facelift: 10 Updates in 10 Days”), in case you missed it or need to reference back. Before reading further, it is time to re-calculate your SSI score. Remember LinkedIn is updating this weekly.

STOP. CLICK HERE. CALCULATE YOUR NEW SSI SCORE (and all four quadrants).

Finding the right people: 25 points

· Searching for people

· Your profile views

· Days active

I. Use LinkedIn to Search for People

The number one activity on LinkedIn is looking at profiles. If you are not surprised by this fact, then I hope you have nearly a perfect 25 out of 25 score in your first Social Selling Index quadrant relating to your professional brand, or, LinkedIn profile.

Use LinkedIn as a search tool to identify decision makers, potential candidates to hire, and your current and past clients. If you use LinkedIn enough and are still on the free subscription level, you may approach and hit the commercial search limit threshold. When you have a LinkedIn Premium subscription (especially Sales Navigator), you get access to many advanced filters to narrow down your search more quickly, more profile results to view, more saved searches to get more leads, and the list goes on.

Here are some of the basics from my previous colleague, Erin, on how to use LinkedIn’s advanced search functionality.

Are you using Boolean methodology when searching on LinkedIn? If you are not, you may not be not be impressed with LinkedIn’s database because LinkedIn is not returning the ‘right’ results back to you; when actually, you may not be asking the question in the correct way. It can be a tricky thing, but once you are comfortable with it, searching with Boolean is powerful. Here are a few tricks:

* Image credit to LinkedIn

II. Who’s Viewed YOUR Profile

Me: “By a show of hands, do you like viewing who is checking you out on LinkedIn?”

Audience: Cue all hands up.

I always ask this question in a group and without fail, everyone’s hands go up. We are curious creatures. We want to know who is looking at us. I always say that while that is interesting intel, it is what you do with that information that bears fruit. However, I will not digress with that separate topic of conversation…

The number of people looking at your profile is a factor LinkedIn considers when calculating your second Find the Right People quadrant. The more people who take a peak behind the curtain at your profile, the more coins you can add to your 25-point bucket.

III. How Active You Are on LinkedIn Matters

I reached out to LinkedIn on this element of the “Find the Right People” quadrant of the Social Selling Index score. Here is their definition:

Days Active refers to how many calendar days a year the user is active on the site. In other words, how many calendar days out of the year (or month) is the user signed on to LinkedIn and using the tools to prospect. The length of time signed on is not part of that measurement, just whether there was user activity on the site on that calendar day.

I confirmed that this activity is accounted for across all devices including desktop, mobile, etc.

Next Steps & Accountability

Finding the right people on LinkedIn, as it relates to your Social Selling Index score, will be impacted by (1) your activity on LinkedIn, using it to (2) search for the right people and how many people are coming to (3) view your LinkedIn profile.

Don’t have an intentional time scheduled with LinkedIn yet? Set the timer on your phone for 30 minutes, 3 days each week to take action inside of LinkedIn. Search on LinkedIn for prospects, candidates to hire, and don’t forget about your current and past clients.

What is your next step? Capture your overall SSI score and four quadrant scores!

This post was originally published on LinkedIn and is part 2 of a 4 part series.

What are the most effective B2B lead generation tactics? How about social media, content marketing and search engine optimization?

Nope.

These shiny new tactics have their place, but according to research depicted in the chart, they pale in comparison to some good old-fashioned tactics. Ranking in the first, second and third spots for B2B lead generation are inside sales, executive events and telemarketing.

Given how we feel about those pesky telemarketers who call just as we’re about to sit down for dinner and relax, this finding may be surprising. But remember, we’re talking B2B, not B2C. Business calls tend to be more targeted and professional. Therefore, they are more likely to be welcomed than random calls at home from robotic script readers.

If you look at this chart, one observation jumps to the forefront. One-on-one marketing, whether in-person or on the phone, still rules the day in a digital age.

Given the effectiveness of these somewhat old-fashioned techniques, why is it that we see such
a rush to use alternative marketing tactics? In the case of telemarketing, I believe it’s partly because its reputation has been tarnished by its B2C cousin. But also, it may be because B2B telemarketing is perceived to be expensive. With social media options whose costs can be limited to the time it takes to tweet or post, there is some stiff competition going on when it comes to costs. But look at where those tactics fall on the effectiveness scale. They are sitting pretty low.

If you’re spending more, perhaps the more important question is “What’s the ROI?” After all, if you will get a return, it’s worth spending more. Research conducted by the DMA showed a 1000 percent ROI on telemarketing. Spend $1 and you’ll get $11 back. It seems that most marketers would be pretty excited about those numbers.

How are marketers using telemarketing? The biggest use was to generate leads (84%). Making appointments followed close on its heels (79%). Nurturing leads (68%) and data cleansing (62%) fell into the third and fourth spots.

All this evidence presented about the power of B2B telemarketing is not to say that it should stand alone. It may lead the way, but there are substantial synergies created when companies couple telemarketing with email marketing. And, of course, email marketing is most effective when you support it with educational content that answers your prospects’ questions and helps move them through the buying cycle. It’s all about creating the right mix … but don’t leave out one of the most important ingredients.

There’s one critical warning to the promise of telemarketing. Not all B2B telemarketing is created equal.

Typically, companies fall into telemarketing almost by accident. For instance, the marketing team might return from a trade show with a bunch of leads. They wonder what to do with them. They could give them to sales, but the list is not qualified. And the last time they did that, sales, understandably, failed to follow up. It would be like throwing away their trade show investment.

So the marketers say “Why don’t we put our marketing intern, Mary, on the phone to follow up?” Well, it turns out Mary hates making calls. Also, no one trains her, and she’s not a natural telemarketer. Nothing against Mary! As a result, the effort fails. When this happens, the conclusion is “Telemarketing does not work for us.” In reality, all the company has proved is that poorly planned and executed telemarketing does not produce results.

To give telemarketing a chance and see how it stacks up against other tactics you’re using, you can consider outsourcing the task to a professional B2B telemarketing agency. They will have trained business development representatives who love to be on the phone, developing relationships as they help other business people to solve problems. They do their jobs well because they are trained in best practices, and have the systems to support them, as well as a comfortable office environment in which to work.

The tech world isn’t like any other world. Tech-minded people live in a constant race to invent, discover or share the latest and greatest products and services. It takes a special kind of marketing plan to stand out in the tech world. Fresh information beats stale, generic information any day of the week in the technology realm. Many startup companies never quite get off the ground because they don’t realize that using their tech-minded identities to create an approachable and authoritative stance is the best way to go. What does it take to stand out in an industry that’s ruled by leaders, thinkers, builders and innovators who always stand out? Inbound marketing has never been more relevant than it is today. In fact, it is nearly impossible for a startup company to create a noticeable identity without making some portion of its overall marketing strategy dependent on inbound tactics. Take a look at the five reasons why inbound marketing is the best bet for tech startups.

It Positions You as an Expert

Everybody loves a fixer. Professionals seek out those authoritative voices that always bring fresh, helpful perspectives to the problems or limitations that are plaguing their industries. The tech industry probably loves fixers more than any other industry. This makes sense when you consider how delicate and complicated the worlds of digital security and application development are. Inbound marketing is the best way to position your tech startup as the important player that you want it to be in the industry. You can use inbound marketing to carve a niche as an authority in the areas of concern your startup company addresses. People who need your services will have a chance to view your company as an antidote to a pain point. There is simply no better way to increase exposure and build customer trust. The problem with the large-scale content generation that dominates the Internet today is that much of it is actually useless.

It’s Something Your Competitors Are Already Doing

There is simply no way around the fact that inbound marketing is the future. In fact, your competitors are probably already using inbound marketing to gain a foothold in the market you share with them. Isn’t it easier to embrace the future today than it is to try to catch up tomorrow? Inbound marketing is something that should be invested in as soon as possible because it becomes more effective the longer it is in place. This means that your reputation and trust cycle will already be where you want them to be by the time your startup company grows and you increase market share. The bottom line is that inbound marketing provides startup companies with the greatest reach for influencing and attracting clients.

It’s Compatible With Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding efforts are the bread and butter of the tech industry in today’s unusual economy. Many wildly successful tech firms got their starts through crowdfunding platforms. If you’ve dabbled in crowdfunding efforts to launch your startup company, you’ve already embraced and used many of the most important aspects of inbound marketing. These tactics have helped you to build trust and inspire people to provide you with capital. To abandon the principles of inbound marketing now would actually betray the roots of your company.

It’s a Wildly Cost-Effective Strategy

If you’ve managed a startup company, you already know how important it is to account for every dollar you spend. Inbound marketing is a great way to ensure that every dollar you spend for outreach finds its way back to you in the form of new clients and better sales. Inbound excels at keeping costs down without skimping on impact. Many people are intimidated by the initial setup costs of inbound marketing when they first research the concept. However, first impressions can be deceiving when it comes to this form of marketing. Inbound leads are generally cheaper than outbound ones. In addition, an inbound lead typically generates three times as many sales per month within a year.

It Uses Technology to Reach a Technology-Minded Base

Why would you want to appeal to tech-minded customers using any other method than technology? It definitely takes one to know one when it comes to identifying and approaching potential customers in the tech world. Inbound marketing is a great way to integrate the tech aspect of your business with your strategy for reaching out to potential clients. Reaching out using common ground breaks the ice and lets the people you’re connecting with know that you operate in the same wheelhouse as they do.

Being able to place valuable content into the hands of people who will actually read and use it is an important part of becoming recognized in an industry. Delivering content and information that is genuinely helpful and useful is the first step to creating relationships and enhancing your visibility.

If you only see live chat as a customer service channel, you’re looking at it all wrong. As it happens, live chat is one of the highest performing sales engines in the ecommerce landscape, typically boosting web conversions by 20%. To help brands capitalise on this opportunity, we’ve put together the ultimate guide to converting chats to sales – available via the infographic below.

In any sales landscape – digital or traditional – conversations generate conversions. Having somebody there to answer questions, to offer up useful information and to establish that initial relationship is key to winning a prospect’s trust, and in turn, their custom.

Live chat is no different. Every single live chat session is a potential ecommerce sale opportunity, rich with data, insight and engaged prospects. In fact, customers engaging with live chat applications have been shown to spend up to 60% more than customers who don’t interact – a staggering uptake, by any standards. What’s more, online chatters are 2.8 times more likely to convert than website visitors who don’t engage at all.

With so much at stake, it is essential that businesses invest time into a live chat sales strategy. After all, you wouldn’t enter a face-to-face sales pitch without any preparation. If the same level of thought was applied to approaching web leads with online live chat sessions, any business would see their digital sales increase.

Using live chat software, sales professionals can strike up conversations with otherwise unreachable prospects in real-time. They can manually target website visitors based on their activity and page views, and reach out with support and assistance at opportune moments.

This infographic outlines the three steps to converting live chat leads, from pre-chat preparation to what to expect during the conversation and, finally, advice on how to follow up with sales prospects after the chat has ended. Read to find out how to nurture your web visitors into prospects, your prospects into customers, and your customers into loyal, higher-value spenders.

Full-size infographic available for download here.

Using personal characteristics and professional interests of a typical buyer is one strategy for developing B2B buyer personas.

Another common, and often more effective approach, is to create personas based on the prospect’s stage within the buying journey.

A detailed personal profile is still valuable in generating sales leads, but you should take account of the distinct needs of your buyers throughout their journey.

Last month we talked about The Power of Buyer Personas in our post Answering Your Buyers Questions With Content Marketing, the following is a look at the benefits of a stage-based persona, and how companies develop marketing strategies that align with a particular stage in the buyer’s journey.

The Stages

Your company may have its own labels and number of stages in a typical buying path. However, the three general stages often considered in stage-based persona development are awareness, consideration and decision.

These phases align closely with the somewhat antiquated AIDA marketing acronym — Attention, Interest, Decision and Action.

Marketing Strategy

The goal of developing personas based on journey stage is to formulate marketing strategies that hit people at the right moment. Someone just starting to search for information is in a different place than someone who is nearing a purchase decision, for instance.

Content marketing, in particular, is often centred on connecting people at the right time with the right message.

With that in mind, you should also be tailoring your message. For example, segmenting your ideal customer into sub-categories so that it includes the following headings:

• Industry Specific
• Company Type
• Department
• Personal Information

If you align your content with your personas and then map that to where your buyers are in their journey, it enables you to engage with them in a much more effective and personalised manner.

Understanding the Buying Cycle

Your B2B buyer personas will obviously differ from those of competitors and companies in other industries. However, it is good to have a general familiarity with the motives and interests of prospects that dictate how they behave at each stage.

Here is a basic depiction of the awareness-consideration-decision evolution:

Awareness: At this stage, the prospect has just begun to search for information related to a critical business issue. Promotional strategies aimed at people matching this persona quality include basic problem definition, general solution-based information and branding. Companies with innovative or high-tech solutions must first communicate the potential for a business to improve itself based on access to the new product.

Consideration: Buyers at this stage have gotten more serious about finding a solution. They have learned about how to generally address the business issue, and now want to evaluate provider or brand options. Marketing aimed at this buyer type is more solution-based and highlights brand benefits.

Decision: Buyers at the decision stage are preparing to take action on a purchase. In some cases, a case study, testimonial or demonstration is necessary to nudge a hesitant buyer off the fence. Some prospects need to hear salespeople differentiate their solution from competitors, and need to know how the company will assure a quality experience.

Wrap Up

Whether you merge personal profiles and buyer stages or focus specifically on stage-based personas, it is critical in B2B to know the buying cycle stage of a targeted buyer.

The more you understand the motives, preferences and particular needs of a prospect at a certain stage, the greater your ability to communicate on-time and in the right way.

Essentially, know who you are targeting, when you are targeting them in their buying cycle, and what you are targeting them with.

Contact us to discuss how our content syndication services can help you to achieve your company’s B2B marketing objectives.

If you’ve ever been a salesperson, you know that it doesn’t matter if you’ve been selling for five months or fifteen years, you will struggle with fear. Along with that struggle is the search for a remedy, with everyone telling you to just do it–whatever it is. And it’s true. The fears that come with selling are often ones that prevent you from actually doing work, never knowing if your fear was actually warranted.

Fear kills more dreams than failure ever will.

This quote by Suzy Kassem tells it like it is. You will never know what will happen unless you actually do something. There are salespeople who are already convinced that the prospect is going to say no even before picking up the phone. Well, the prospect probably will.

As the sales manager, it is part of your job to help sales reps navigate their daily tasks and goals. In the core of this is helping them have the right attitude towards selling, and actually get on the phone or on the field and sell. Fear is definitely out of that equation.

Make them realize: If they never give themselves the chance to succeed, they never will.

The first step: Acknowledging the issue

Reps need to recognize a challenge in order to overcome it. Being in denial about the fear that comes with a sales job will only delay the process of learning how to overcome it.

There are different fears sales reps struggle with. Here are some of them:

• Fear of rejection
• Fear of losing their job
• Fear of annoying the prospect
• Fear of doing the wrong thing
• Fear of being embarrassed

Putting their egos on the backburner is a prerequisite. From there, you can help identify their fears and tackle them head on.

How to help reps overcome sales fears

Sales reps should turn to management when they feel like they’re unable to accomplish tasks. At the same time, sales managers should be able to identify when reps are exhibiting behavior that looks like being overwhelmed by their fears of failure.

When you rep or your whole team needs help, here are some steps you should take.

Demystify rejection

When a prospect says no, they are not rejecting you. There is simply a disconnect between the value you see and the value they perceive. The rejection is not personal; it’s more like “I can’t see why I should buy that right now.”

Instead of taking the no to heart, teach your reps to immerse themselves in the reason instead. This is a chance for the rep to sit back and think of what could’ve gone better in the sales call. It’s the best time to reexamine their approach.

Teaching them the simple shift from dwelling on the no to focusing on the why will help them see past one event and realize that they can take what they learned from a single call to improve all the other ones after it.

Build confidence through sales training

As you should know, sales training is an ongoing process. You as the manager are in charge of taking notes on the weaknesses and strengths of your team. Ensuring that they are well-equipped not only with tools but with soft skills will give them confidence in their daily tasks.

Not only do managers have to note down what the sales reps need to improve on, you also need to deliver constant training yourself. Many sales managers lag in this regard. Simply keeping sales collateral and materials updated gives a huge boost in having your reps always ready for the floor.

Put them in the position to succeed and watch their lack of confidence vanish.

Dissect sales assumptions

A lot of sales reps operate on assumptions. They read somewhere that one shouldn’t talk to a non-decision maker so they don’t call at all. They also heard that cold calling is dead so they just wait for inbound leads. They’re afraid to act during these situations because they’ve heard something somewhere and they’re pretty sure they will fail so might as well not try.

You need to sit your reps down–let it be known that assumptions and results very rarely go hand-in-hand. If in their heads, they already have the complete storyline of how they will fail, the will fail.

This is what you need them to do: Before a cold call, ask them what they think is going to happen. Listen to the rep tell you a fantasy tale about how prospects hate being called on the phone without an appointment, how busy this particular prospect is, or how they saw that this prospect already has a product in place. After they spill, ask them a simple question: “Did all of that already happen or are you making that up right now?”

This is a teaching moment. They will realize how much they are limiting themselves when you allow them to vocalize their fears. They need to drop the assumptions. This simple shift in attitude will help them shift their behavior towards selling.

Focus on activity metrics

From your side of the game, here’s what you can do to encourage call activity and prevent your reps from being bound by their fear of rejection: Focus on activity metrics. Activity metrics measure the activity that is taken, not the particular result.

For sales, activity metrics include tracking how many calls were made, how many were connected to, how many voicemails were left, how many attempts at appointment setting were taken, and so on.

There are two reasons why this approach would work: First, you’re setting a goal that they can hit no matter what the outcome on the other end of the line is. Second, if the rep is suffering from really low confidence, this gives them the opportunity to keep practicing. Give them low-quality leads at first, so they can just focus on making the phone calls. Shadow them and give them pointers. Gradually give them better leads as they improve.

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Fear is something that sales reps deal with on a daily basis. The key is having the tools to battle it. As their manager, it is your duty to make sure that they have access to those tools and that you are providing support as needed.

Trade shows offer a unique opportunity for face-to-face communication with potential buyers; however, your sales team must have a focused plan to produce a superior return on the investment.

Even though there is so much publicity about the wave of selling in the future being so dependent on social selling, inbound marketing and such, tradeshows offer a way to get in front of potential buyers and interact with them on a more personal level. Statistics provided by Trade Show News Network reveal that 81 percent of tradeshow attendees have buying authority. And 92 percent of tradeshow attendees indicate they are looking for new products. This is great news.

However, exhibiting at trade shows can be a big expense. You must have a focused plan to produce an adequate or superior return on the investment. And it is important to note that the investment is not just dollars. There is an investment of time — significant time — away from the office for all who participate. There is a physical investment. Working trade shows is hard on the body. It can be physically demanding and tiring. If your team is continuously, mindlessly attending trade shows without adequate reward in the form of new business they will wear down, which can negatively impact future sales effectiveness.

Especially if you are concentrated in an industry that is saturated with trade shows and conferences it is easy to lose more enthusiasm when attending several in the span of a year. If you have employees who have been in the industry for a while you might even have some complacency. They might view it as a time to catch up with old acquaintances and see existing clients, but may not have the fire to thoughtfully plan how they will attack the show to be as efficient as possible to generate new business.

It seems that in most industries there are a wide variety of trade shows to attend. Without your guidance, focus and enthusiasm, you may be throwing money down the drain.

Planning & Preparation Are Critical

First and foremost, you must have a trade show calendar and plan. Which shows are you attending and why? For some companies, it is a matter of brand awareness that they exhibit at shows. However, you may do yourself more harm than good if you simply exhibit, but don’t staff the booth with salespeople who can appropriately articulate your value proposition. Or you may do harm if your booth projects an image of mediocrity, or an image of being just another equipment manufacturer or service provider.

If your budget does not allow for a professional booth that projects an outstanding image, you may want to reconsider the number of shows in which you actually exhibit. You might want to select fewer shows and do a far more robust job with preparation, promotions and focus. You can still attend the show and make appointments with key clients, prospects and partners to meet at the show. Maybe you can even partner with another company as a referral partner to use their booth as a meeting place with your contacts. But do not put up a sloppy, unprofessional booth. Exhibit companies such as Skyline Exhibits, for instance, can work with most any budget to make your material look polished and professional.

Also important is your pre-show preparation. As mentioned, it is important to have a presence at the show projecting the right image. Well, it is equally important to adequately plan how your people will work the show when they are there. If you have been exhibiting at shows for some time, you probably have a well-oiled marketing machine focused on the pre-show marketing, the “at-show” buzz and the “after show” follow-up — from a marketing perspective. Let’s focus, therefore, on the sales side of things.

Lead Your Sales Team

As the leader of your sales team it is important that you provide the leadership with regard to your team’s trade show execution plan. Two months prior to the event, you should begin holding meetings with your sales team to discuss the goals for the show and to ask each attendee to create their own action plan.

Even if an upcoming show is quickly approaching as you’re reading this blog, plan as much as you can in the time available leading up to the show. Any request for focus and commitment to a plan will pay dividends.

If there has been zero planning time then you might want to just do a huddle each morning of the show or night before, and ask each team member for their goals for each day as it relates to the show. It will be best if you provide the overriding goals for the show and let each individual determine his or her own specific action plan.

Whether you have two months or two hours to help your team focus, each sales team member should complete the quick focus considerations.

Trade Show Lead Qualifying Quick List

Regardless of whether or not you have had the opportunity to be well-planned in advance, conduct a contest each day among your participants as to how many qualified leads they can produce, with the operative word being qualified. At a trade show, it can be easy to spend an inordinate amount of time with unqualified individuals. Help your team fight through the urge to become marketers and just randomly talk about your products and services, and help them stay focused as salespeople. Just use a quick and easy trade show lead-qualifying checklist to determine if a lead is qualified, such as:

1. They have a compelling reason and we understand why they want (or better yet need) to do something with a product or service we can provide to help them achieve their goals.
2. They have a budget to spend, are willing to spend with us and we can demonstrate an adequate ROI for them. (Depending on your time available to spend with leads, the complexity of your sale, and the authority of the person you are speaking with, you may not be able to ascertain this. That is okay as long as you do No. 3 below on this list.)
3. They scheduled a next step with us, complete with an appointment on the calendar.

“I don’t want to take all of your time, because there might be other things you want to see. Would you want to actually schedule a follow-up?”

I want to provide special emphasis on the last bullet point. Just getting an agreement that it is okay for the salesperson to call or email following the show is not good enough. Your salespeople will spend countless hours trying to reach people who were all gung-ho at the show but then fizzle, because they weren’t really qualified leads; they were just being nice. An easy way to get the next step is to say, “I don’t want to take all of your time, because there might be other things you want to see. Would you want to actually schedule a follow-up?” Then pull out your phones and get an appointment on the calendar, right then and there. If the “lead” won’t schedule, then it isn’t a qualified lead.

These quick tips should provide you with some easy steps to maximize the effectiveness of your team and their time spent at the show. Remember that if you provide your team with a little inspiration to focus, and request that they be thoughtful with their actions, you will experience a much better ROI.

Considerations For Salespeople Attending a Trade Show

• Number of days away from normal selling activities
• Number of new leads necessary to make the event beneficial
• Number of existing clients I need to connect with at the show
• Number of known prospects I need to connect with at the show
• Dollars of revenue I plan to generate from attending the show

Download the full template for creating a trade show action plan for your team members here.

When the average person thinks about sales, they probably think about closing, and if they’re buyers -- getting closed.

But today, sales isn’t about hard closing. In fact, closing of any kind isn’t even at the center of a modern inbound sales process. The most important step in the modern sales process is discovery.

That’s because inbound sales reps provide value by making informed recommendations to their prospects. And reps are only able to do so by stepping into buyers’ shoes, learning about their priorities, and crafting solutions that will fit their world.

Discovery is the foundation of every sales process, so it’s crucial to get it right. The nine mistakes below will prevent you from getting the information you need to close deals.

1) Not knowing enough to make an assumption about the prospect’s business

You have to do your research, especially if you got lucky and landed a meeting through a connect call without looking up your prospect or their business. During discovery, you shouldn’t ever be asking questions like, “What’s your job title?” or “Remind me where your office is located?”

Instead, you should have formed a few assumptions about the prospect’s situation that you aim to confirm or deny during the call. For example, if your prospect is hiring their first group of sales development representatives, you could assume they are investing in outbound sales efforts. On the call, confirm or deny this -- maybe they’re actually hiring SDRs because they have more inbound leads than their quota-carrying reps can handle.

The bottom line is that you should know enough about your prospect’s business to make a few educated guesses about areas relating to your product, then seek out information that will fill in the blanks.

2) Allowing your assumptions to shape the call

While you should have assumptions, you shouldn’t make them and proceed as if they’ve been confirmed. Stating your assumptions as if they’re true or worse, not voicing them at all and giving your prospect a chance to correct you, can cause you to miss crucial information or take you down an irrelevant path of questioning.

All this results in wasted time. Every minute you spend pursuing a line of questioning based on a false premise is time you’ll never get back that isn’t advancing your deal. And if you barrel through the call as if your assumptions are true, your prospect won’t feel heard and you’ll damage your own credibility.

3) Treating discovery like a checklist process

The quickest way to turn discovery calls from an opportunity to a failure? Rigidly sticking to a list of prepared questions.

Prospects don’t feel like they’re being interrogated, and rattling off a series of 25 questions will certainly achieve that effect. Discovery calls should have the flow of a natural conversation -- an unexpected answer to a common question can mean you need to go completely off-script, and if you insist on proceeding as normal you’ll just annoy your prospect.

4) Not following a discovery framework

Discovery calls are all about balance. Just as templates are useful but scripts aren’t, you shouldn’t go into a discovery call with no structure at all. Whether your company follows a sales playbook or you’re still figuring out a go-to-market strategy, sketch out three or four key areas that are important to cover on each discovery call and spend some time on each.

5) Being afraid of having multiple discovery calls

Sometimes, the 30 minutes or an hour you booked will be up before you’ve covered half of your framework. Usually, this is a good sign -- a prospect who’s a bad fit or doesn’t want to buy probably won’t run out the clock. (Of course, sometimes you’re just dealing with a rambler.)

Instead of trying to skip to the next step in your process, slow it down and suggest a second discovery call. Try saying something like, “Thanks for this information. It looks like our time is up for today, but would you be open to speaking at [future time]? We still haven’t discussed X and Y, and I won’t be able to tell if we’re a good fit until we do.”

Prospects will appreciate that you’re taking the time to assess your mutual fit rather than pushing them through a sales process that might not be right for them.

6) Asking leading questions

Leading questions -- such as “How much will your growth slow next year?” -- are forbidden in courtrooms for a reason. They coach witnesses (or in your case, prospects) on the answer the questioner is looking for, and often lead to inaccurate answers.

That’s bad for you. Your job in discovery is to assess the prospect’s situation as it is, not lead them to describe the answers you want to hear. While this might land you the sale in the short term, it’ll eventually lead to a churned customer. You might not even win the deal at all if the prospect gets irritated enough.

To avoid asking leading questions, try rephrasing questions like this:

• Leading question: “If you don’t implement [new strategy], how much will your growth slow next year?”
• Non-leading question: “If you don’t implement [new strategy], what happens to [metric]?”

7) Disqualifying too early

Don’t be trigger-happy. Your prospect doesn’t need to fit every single line of your company’s buyer persona -- they just need to have a core problem that your product can effectively solve.

So if you hear something that sounds off to you, don’t write off the prospect immediately. Dig a little deeper to find out whether there’s true misalignment or if, more likely, your buyer hasn’t recognized a business pain yet, explained their point fully, or is mis-explaining something.

8) Disqualifying too late

That being said, hanging onto every last shred of hope is unproductive. Rejection is inherently part of sales, and it goes both ways. It’s important to get comfortable turning away prospects you can’t help. Though it might seem counterproductive to cut people from your pipeline, doing so has three major positive effects:

1. Your pipeline becomes a more accurate forecast and you’ll have a better understanding of where you need to invest more time and what deals you can realistically expect to close
2. You get more time back in your day to work deals that are actually likely to close
3. Your prospects will respect that you’re giving them a real recommendation rather than forcing a product on them they don’t need, which helps you build a positive brand

So stop being afraid of losing deals, and get junk deals out of your pipeline.

9) Talking too much

Remember the point of a discovery call: To discover. That means you have to take the time to let your prospects speak rather than rambling on yourself.

Salespeople who spend the majority of a discovery call talking about themselves or their products will find they’re leaving these calls with absolutely no idea of how to help their prospects. And that means they won’t be able to move the sales process forward in any meaningful way.

What mistakes do you think are most damaging to the discovery process? Let us know in the comments below.

The first potato chip ever made was intended as an insult.

The year was 1853. George Crum was a chef at the upscale Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, NY.

One day, a patron complained about Mr. Crum’s fried potatoes. He called them soggy and bland. He sent them back and demanded a new batch.

Mr. Crum did not deal well with the feedback. He proceeded to slice a potato into paper-thin cuts and fried them until they were so delicate you could shatter them with a light pressure between two fingers. Next, he over-salted his new creation and sent it out to the disappointed patron.

The patron? He loved it so much that he ordered a second serving.

The word quickly spread, and soon “Saratoga Chips” were known all over New England.

Today, we have a multi-billion dollar snack industry that simply begun as an intended insult.

Next time you see someone eating potato chips, what do you think the odds are of you telling them this story? We say it’s pretty high.

And next, what if we told you all you need to do to close a deal is tell a good story?

Think we’re crazy? Perhaps a little. But science is on our side.

In this post, we’re going to look into how you can use a story-based approach to more effectively communicate, and ultimately sell, your product or service.

But let’s start from the beginning. Why the heck do stories work so well?

Why do stories work?

Humans have been using stories as a primary method of communication for over 40,000 years. But why do they stick in our memories? Why do we tell them over and over again? Why do they have such a huge impact on us and the way we interact with each other?

The simple answer? We’re wired that way. We store, index and retrieve information in the form of stories.

Research shows our brains are not hard-wired to understand logic or retain facts for very long. Our brains are wired to understand and retain stories. A story is a journey that moves the listener, and when the listener goes on that journey they feel different. The result is persuasion and sometimes action.

— Jennifer Aaker, marketing professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business

That’s right. Evolution has designed our brains for storytelling. When we hear stories, chemicals are released in our brain which make us feel empathy and motivate us to cooperate with other people. It’s a neural mechanism that allows us to develop relationships with strangers.  

Once a story has captured our attention for long enough, we become emotionally invested. That’s why stories can do something to us that facts and figures can’t achieve. They can move us to tears or change our attitudes, opinions, and behaviors.

This scene from Mad Men, in which Don Draper uses his own family in a pitch, illustrates this perfectly.

When you sell a product, your prospect will start thinking about what their day currently looks like and their daily challenges. Next, they’ll then start imagining how your product or service will resolve those challenges.

But before we get into all that, let’s look at what it takes to craft a good story.

The core elements of a compelling story

You don’t have to be a natural storyteller in order to tell a good story. You just need to understand the basic mechanics of it in order to effectively convey a message.

These are the seven core elements of a story.

1. Stasis

This is the everyday life in which a story is set.

2. Trigger

The trigger is beyond the control of the protagonist and can be either unpleasant or pleasant.

3. Quest

The trigger leads to a quest for a solution.

4. Critical choice

This is when the protagonist needs to make a tough decision which truly reveals their character.

5. Climax

The decision the protagonist made results in the highest peak of tension in the narrative.

6. Reversal

The reversal is the result of the critical choice and climax. This will change the status of the character.

7. Resolution

The resolution is a return to a new, fresh stasis. The characters should be changed, as they’re now wiser and enlightened. At this point, the story is complete.

Now, we’re going to use the above elements and demonstrate them in the context of our CRM.

The search for a better sales process (Example)

When Mark started his new job, the company looked very different from today.

Stasis

The sales process was fully controlled by the individual sales reps. The data was all over the place. Everything was extremely time-consuming.

Trigger

As the recently hired Sales Manager, all eyes was on him to make things better.

Quest

So Mark went looking for a solution. He needed an automated sales process that would help his reps be more productive and not spend all their time on admin tasks and data entry.

Soon, he found our inside sales CRM, Close.io.

Critical choice

After a few calculations, he realized that the investment was a no-brainer.

The CRM would significantly cut down the time his reps spent doing calls, entering notes, and writing and sending email. That time saved would add up to approximately $60,000 per rep per year.

He bought it.

Climax

The following day, Mark introduced the new tool to his sales reps.

Reversal

In the first week, one rep increased his personal sales by 50 percent, others by 10–20 percent.

Resolution

Since then, the trend has continued. The sales reps are more productive than ever and consistently bring in more revenue.

This is the story of a real Close.io customer. Next, let’s take a look at how you can bring storyselling into your sales process.

How to bring storyselling into your sales process

First things first, what exactly is storyselling?

Definition: Storyselling is the act of selling your product or service through telling a story.

But there’s much more to it than what this simple explanation provides. Using stories in sales will help you:

• Capture the attention of your prospect or customer
• Build trust and rapport
• Motivate your prospect or customer to take action
• Create context around data and numbers to make them interesting and relevant
• Transform beliefs and change behaviors

You can use stories at every stage of the sales process: explaining product features, handling objections, answering questions, and negotiating.

Depending on your prospect’s situation, you’ll want to use one or a combination of the following: company, product, customer or personal story.

The company story

Every company has a founding story, a reason why the business exists in the first place. Often, it starts with a passion, an idea, or a revelation. Share that story. It’ll create authenticity and credibility.

Ever heard the story of Close.io? This is why we exist and continue to build the best inside sales CRM on the market.

The product story

Your product story can be about the inception of your product, and also about how it changed and improved over time, and why it is what it is today.

Push for Pizza uses the story behind how they came up with the idea for the app in this brilliantly simple ad.

Customer stories

By sharing your customer stories, your prospects will be able to visualize what they can do using your product or service. It’ll give your product or service a higher level of relevancy, regardless of the situation they’re in.

Airbnb does an amazing job at putting their customers (hosts and guests) at the center of their brand. Take a look at Stories from the Airbnb community and you’ll see what we mean.

Your personal story

People buy from people they trust, like, and have a connection with. People connect through stories. Sharing your personal story will help build trust and rapport with your prospect.

In this Medium post, The Muse founder Kathryn Minshew shares her failures that ultimately led to an extremely successful business.

The happy ending

We don’t like change.

In fact, science tells us we don’t just dislike it—we fight it. Our brains want to stay put. They want to be comfortable and safe. So in order to change, we need to both see and feel a new and better way of doing things. This can be achieved through stories.

Limitations to change only exist in our heads. Once we change our minds, we can change (and improve) our business.

Present your prospect with two outcomes:

1. The happy ending: Your prospect takes action (buys your product or service) and it results in a positive change, e.g. more productive sales reps, increased revenue.
   
   
2. The heartbreaking ending: Your prospect doesn’t take action and starts falling behind their competitors, putting the entire business at risk.

Your story is not about features. It’s about a narrated journey that transforms the life of your prospects and customers and leaves them in a better place than before.

How to get started with storyselling today

Getting started with storyselling is easier than you might think. How about we start right now?

Here’s how you do it:

1. Collect existing stories from your team. Not just from sales reps, include marketing, product and devs, too. Get every department involved.
   
   
2. Evaluate the stories you’ve collected. Do this together with your salespeople and get the full scope on which stories have been successful in the past.
   
   
3. Figure out what’s missing. Are the stories good enough or do you need new and better stories?
   
   
4. Create new stories. Based on current inventory, you might need to create new stories that are better suited to tackle common objections.
   
   
5. Test your stories. Test your existing and newly crafted stories on your leads. Start with less important leads and, once you learn what’s working and not working, begin using your best stories on more important leads.
   
   
6. Maintain your story inventory. Keep an inventory (a spreadsheet will do!) of your most successful stories that’s accessible to your entire sales team.
   
   
7. Do consistent check-ins. Are the stories working as well as they used to? Can they be replaced with better stories? Keep an eye on the use of stories to make sure they achieve what they should.

We've created a template so that you can get started with storytelling today. This includes:

• Story collection template
• Story elements
• Storyselling examples

Share it with your team members today and ask them to share their most valuable customer stories or personal stories that have proven to be effective.

Simply enter your email and you'll be redirected to your template. Soon, you and your team will be telling deal-closing stories.

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Here's a simple 3-step process to make your message stick: Highlight the highlights. Mark what's memorable. Ask for attention.

The most important lesson I ever learned in sales
He who asks all the questions is controlling the direction of the conversation. Sales is all about asking questions and actively listening, and very little about talking.

3 mission-critical sales lessons from heist movies
Heist movies not only make great entertainment but also have amazing sales lessons. These are 3 unforgettable sales tips straight from Hollywood.

With only two months left in the year, dread is setting in for millions of sales representatives across the world: the fear of missing annual quotas. With jobs and the welfare of families on the line — including for some in the Sales Hacker and Pipedrive audiences — this is where quotas start to get very real.

Unfortunately, many salespeople won’t make their marks. Only 54.6% of sales reps achieve their quotas each year, according to research from CSO Insights. If you’re one of the people not on track to hit your quotas, you’re probably asking yourself: “What can I do?”

In sales, you can always look at the four sales Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to determine how well you’re doing and how to improve: the number of deals you open, deal size, sales velocity, and conversion rate.

But with six weeks to go and a chance of missing your annual quota, focus only on opportunities that have a higher than 75% probability of being closed and won by December 31st. In other words, spend these weeks on deals you can actually win, and declare all others ‘lost efforts’ for now to free up more of your time to do so.

By focusing on two of your four KPIs — sales velocity and conversion rate — you can turn things around, or at least do enough to make your quotas.

Combining hard work with smart work

It’s possible to improve in sales with just hard work… if time is on your side. If you start regularly adding more deals into your pipeline and keep up the new standard, you’ll see an uplift in results in some time. It’s easier to do this if you have ongoing capacity to work with more deals.

Similarly, you can increase your average deal size over time with some mental effort. Eventually you will start closing larger deals consistently and even set a minimum deal size for yourself. But it won’t happen overnight, and sometimes it requires a complete reset and restart of your approach to sales.

So, even though it could be a great long term idea and growth opportunity, now is not the time to focus on getting more deals into your pipeline, or forcing larger deals without your mind fully behind it. Even if you work through to the final day of the year, many of your prospects are already six weeks away from closing budgets and sipping Christmas cocktails.

The key is to work smarter
First, find one or two deals to start with that you can realistically close before year end, and believe you have a strong chance of winning them. Decide to give them your best attention and care before finding two more, and so on.

No doubt, many of you have plenty of deals in your pipelines ten months into the year. The critical question to ask now is: “Which of these can I actually win?” Again, if you feel you have lower than a 75% chance to win, declare the deal a lost effort (you can always pick it back up in January).

Here’s my take on how to improve the two sales KPIs that matter most in November and December:

Close deals faster

Easier said than done, right? The good thing is that closing faster does not mean start running instead of walking, or talking faster on calls. The speed has to come from spending no time on deals you can’t win during the last two months of the year.

Some sales reps avoid nudging potential deals through the pipeline out of fear they’ll turn off prospects by seeming too aggressive.

It’s not that simple.

I’ve learned it is up to both the prospect and me to determine how long a decision to buy should take. If a prospect tells you certain people need to sign off on a purchase, offer to do a demonstration with a Q&A for this group — within a fixed time frame that leaves room to maneuver — or offer to call again the next day after they’ve had a chance to consult.

Also, I’ve learned that asking people the very general question of whether they’ve made a decision actually slows things down. Instead, I ask them whether they expect to make a decision within the next two weeks, for example. Or, at this point in the year, whether they are serious about getting the deal wrapped up before we all close for the holidays.

Sometimes such appropriate sales tactics even make them comfortable enough to decide there and then, but at the very least, you avoid making the prospect feel pressured, have a follow up target, and know if they’ll contribute to you hitting your annual sales quota.

And if you discover a certain deal will ultimately fail, it’s better to have reached “no” quickly and get that dud deal out of your pipeline and away from your KPIs. Getting deals done or finding out a deal won’t happen lets you put your time and energy into those leads with 75% or better chance of converting.

Convert more deals

Again, it’s far easier to want to see a higher conversion rate than actually achieve it. But, it starts with believing you should convert more than 30, 40 or 50% of the deals you work on.

As you start your interaction with a prospect, the goal should be to find out as early as possible whether the buying intent is there, and whether you and your solution might have an edge over the competition, or not.

Take time to write down some characteristics of the prospects that became your customers.

• What business problem and pain did they express, or respond best to?
• How urgent were they about solving it?
• What type of action did they agree to as next steps?
• Which roles in the company were immediately involved in the process?
• Which objections haven’t you heard from them (but have heard from many of the prospects that didn’t convert to customers)?
• What reasons did they base their decision to buy your solution on, and why did they decide to buy from you? (Maybe you never asked but you will now.)

Now, use this description of your ‘ideal customer’ to assess whether you’re about to detect another one of them early on in the process, or spend your valuable time with those who will probably never end up as your customers.

In addition, pay attention to what happens to conversions as you move forward in your pipeline. Sometimes, it’s not a wrong prospect but a slightly undeveloped skill, or wrong mindset that makes the difference.

See if you spot a fault or weakness in the way you:

• Approach people in the beginning of the process
• Ask for a more in-depth meeting
• Discover the needs of the prospect, or help them realize the magnitude of their situation
• Demo your solution, or put together a proposal
• Elicit real objections, and how you handle them

It may be helpful to discuss with a teammate who is particularly strong in one of these aspects. Ask them about the specific way they do it, or shadow them for a short period of time to observe their method yourself.

Don’t panic

The need to sell can make people anxious, especially with quotas looming, but anxiety-based selling doesn’t work. Prospects sense desperation and are less likely to buy.

Don’t be that salesperson.

Instead, drill down on the sales activities that are most likely to help you succeed, and attend to the two sales KPIs that give you the best shot of hitting your quota.

The post You’re About to Miss your Quota, It’s Time to Close Faster and Better appeared first on Sales Hacker.

The old school sales manager let his sales team operate like a black box. Leads went in, and deals came out. He didn’t care how or why.

When the black box didn’t produce enough outputs, the manager simply demanded, “hit your number or you’re out!”

Modern sales leaders are just as focused on results, but more prudent in how to get there. They understand that sales is a cascading chain of controllable activities that lead to a desired outcome – closing more business, and that they can create a team of stellar sellers by guiding them through that process.

Unlike her aloof, old school counterpart, the modern sales leader is in the trenches, optimizing her sales process and her people – much like a seasoned athletic coach. In fact, the best sales leaders operate a lot like the world’s best coaches. Here’s why.

Modern sales leaders live and die by data

I’m not talking about the lagging metrics from your CRM reports and dashboards. By the time you see those numbers, it’s too late to change them. I mean real-time, actionable data that keeps a finger on the pulse of your sales organization.

Modern sales leaders should understand where leads come from, how they progress as opportunities through the sales cycle and what it took to turn them into customers. More importantly, the modern sales leader is not afraid to dive into the data and find out when and why you’re losing deals.

This doesn’t mean modern sales leaders must be M.I.T. statisticians. Rather, we need to take a page from the book of Moneyball pioneer Billy Beane. He revolutionized America’s oldest pastime by looking at baseball statistics in a brand new way. Instead of just focusing on batting average as the other general managers did, Beane found other statistics like on-base percentage which he discovered is the top leading indicator to earning more runs.

You need to understand your team just as well as Billy Beane. A sales activity management system automatically tracks activity data in real time, so that your salespeople, and you, can stay focused on the activities that matter. Modern sales leaders use these insights to create and optimize their sales process.

Modern sales leaders use activities to drive results

When Michael Phelps is training for the Olympics, do you think his coach tells him just “swim faster” to win? Definitely not. The coach focuses on body rotation, stroke patterns, and breathing technique – all of which will help Michael swim faster.

Modern sales leaders also utilize this inputs-drive-outputs approach. “Just get the deal done” is not an adequate coaching strategy. We must use data to uncover the critical activities that lead to closing business and coach sales reps around them.

These activities are the fundamental steps in your defined sales process. For field sales reps, those key sales activities might include qualified opportunities created, face-to-face meetings, proposals presented and deals closed. You can reverse engineer your sales process to determine how much of each activity you need to hit your revenue goals.

Old school sales leaders shy away from monitoring and managing sales rep activities for fear of micromanaging. In “Cracking the Sales Management Code,” Vantage Point Performance Partner Jason Jordan equates it to sending your troops into the battlefield without marching orders. Each sales rep employs trial-and-error strategy to closing business that may or may not succeed.

Modern sales leaders enable their team to succeed by providing them with defined activity goals and personal scorecards. Reps can track where they stand against their activity goals in real time, which drives focus and improves decision-making on where to spend their time.

Modern sales leaders course-correct performance

Imagine you’re a quarterback on the field at The Big House running plays before Saturday’s game. The center snaps the ball, you fall back into the pocket and…. a whistle blows.

Jim Harbaugh walks out onto the field. He tells you to loosen your grip on the ball, rotate your hips, and shift your weight from your back foot to the front during the pass. Next play, you throw a touchdown.

All-star coaches correct performance in real time. They don’t wait until the game is over to give you feedback and tips. It’s the same with modern sales leaders. They don’t wait until the end of the month or the quarter to tell a sales rep what they could have done better. Modern sales leaders course-correct sales performance in real time with activity data.

When activity data shows that a rep isn’t performing the right amount of a specific key activity, the sales leader knows where to coach. If a metric falls behind for the entire team, the leader can quickly rally reps around it with a contest or spiff. Like calibrating a well-oiled machine, modern sales leaders ensure that every metric moves at the appropriate pace.

To create a team of Olympic sellers, you must first become an Olympic coach. Transform into a modern sales leader by embracing your data, driving with activities and managing performance in real time.

Everyone dreams of predicting the future, and this is especially true of marketers. Knowing how likely a person is to become a customer, and why, is the Holy Grail for marketers. So it’s no surprise that predictive analytics is an increasingly popular topic.

Predictive analytics uses big data and machine intelligence to calculate how likely a specific outcome is based on customer data and historical actions. While this isn’t exactly the same as predicting the future, marketers can draw conclusions from predictive analytics to improve their key campaign metrics.

As the amount of available data grows, predictive analytics has the potential to become even more valuable. However, it can be easy to get lost in the sheer amount of information. Here are four tips to get the most out of your predictive analytics efforts:

1. Smaller Data = Better Data

Organizations collect data with various methods and sources, and analyze it to bring to light trends, insights, strengths, and weaknesses–but that goal isn’t realistic when there’s simply too much data and not enough resources to parse through it.

To create measurable campaigns, marketers need data that’s actionable. This is where big data can struggle–there’s so much of it that individual insights can get lost in the weeds. By analyzing big data with specific categories and goals in mind, however, you can break data sets down into small slices, or “small data,” which helps you focus on insights that are practical and actionable.

As marketers, we use data to maximize the alignment between our buyers’ expectations and needs to the value we’re able to provide them with as little friction as possible. We can break down our data on a couple of different levels to achieve this:

1. Data to define your customer persona, or who your target audience is (e.g. segment, vertical, target market, company size, geography)
2. Data to define what they need for success (e.g. tools, resources, content) and how you can help them

For example, a B2B organization might use big data to evaluate its most common customers–say, small and medium-sized business owners or sales managers. Digging into those customer profiles manually, or with an analytics solution, can uncover even more details: demographics that can be used to create customer profiles, behavioral clues (e.g. pages clicked on when they’re most likely to open emails), and the problems that they’re immediately focused on solving, such as acquisition, employee retention, or increasing profits.

2. Maximize Small Data with Predictive Analytics

Once you’re looking at the right data in the right amounts, predictive analytics can help you identify and analyze usage patterns. For example, an online retailer might use predictive analytics to discover the different ways that their customers interact with them such as how often they log on to the website, use features like search, or contact customer service. Of course, these different events present new opportunities. Potential customers might search for a specific term when they’re ready to buy or search two related items and be primed for an upsell–cues that marketers can use to inform their campaigns.

Using predictive analysis, you can gain a better idea of what to look for and optimize your campaigns for the best possible outcomes. Let’s say a B2B technology provider that provides software with a freemium subscription model wants to quantify how likely trial users are to become paid subscribers. The company can match the behavior of trial users to their customers who have paid for a subscription. By analyzing this data, the company can identify trial users that are most likely to convert and then target them with personalized emails and other offers, like tips for using the software or a time-sensitive discount for a paid subscription.

3. Improve the Customer Experience

You can discover a lot of information about your potential and existing customers through your conversations and interactions with them. This information can be added to the full data picture and linked to particular outcomes, like renewals and increases or decreases in business. This allows marketers to further refine their message and identify customer characteristics that tend to lead to positive outcomes.

For example, certain customers may respond better to certain content, but it’s also true that some customers respond better to certain message delivery platforms–text, email, phone. This is the type of information, contained in small data, that can have great value when paired with predictive analytics. Someone who doesn’t want to be bothered over the phone can receive a text; someone who prefers that personal touch can get a call.

Predictive analytics can also identify things like engagement markers, which can be critical for turning website browsers into customers. For example, let’s say that the B2B company that provides a freemium subscription finds that its best repeat customers tend to log in to the platform multiple times per day during their trial period. If a trial user isn’t logging in at all, someone from your team can contact that person and offer to answer questions or provide assistance. Predictive analysis can flag markers like these at specific time periods–the first week of the trial, day 15, or five days before the trial ends. By comparing this data with what your best customers are doing, you can truly understand your prospects’ expectations and work to exceed them.

4. Pair It with Marketing Automation

Basic marketing platforms can populate an email with a customer’s name, company or birthday. However, to truly provide value to your buyers, it’s critical to go above and beyond the status quo by using a sophisticated marketing automation platform to segment and deliver personalized content, offers, and messages that address each buyer’s unique challenges and goals.

By combining small data, marketing automation, and predictive analytics, you can gain even deeper insights about your prospects and customers, and use these insights to deliver messages that change the game. Marketers can use predictive analytics to uncover the users who respond in high volumes at different stages of a campaign, and then use a marketing automation platform to personalize and refine outreach to those customers. Those messages can also hone in on the content that customers are most likely to engage with and automatically display the most relevant content.

Data is only as valuable as the customers it helps you gain–and keep. It’s still not possible to predict the future, but when predictive analytics is used with small data on a marketing automation platform, you can target specific segments that share similar interests and needs. This puts marketers in a better position to acquire leads or contacts, generate ROI, and ultimately retain satisfied customers.

Have you started applying predictive analytics to your marketing campaigns? I’d love to hear about your experience below.

CALGARY – Oilsands giant Suncor Energy is reporting net third-quarter earnings of $392 million compared with a net loss of $376 million in the same period of last year.

The Calgary-based company reports a strong production rebound after second-quarter interruptions caused by the wildfire that swept through Fort McMurray, Alta.

It says output from its own oilsands operations rose to 433,700 barrels per day in the three months ended Sept. 30 from 178,000 bpd in the second quarter.

It says its 54 per cent ownership of Syncrude Canada delivered 183,800 bpd in the third quarter versus 36,000 bpd in the second quarter. It increased its 2016 production guidance from Syncrude by 15,000 bpd based on the improved reliability.

Operating earnings, which strip out one-time and non-cash items such as foreign exchange losses, were $346 million, down from $410 million in the third quarter of 2015, as lower crude oil prices and refinery profit margins offset operating improvements and lower costs.

In a release, Suncor said it started a sales process for certain assets in its renewable energy business in the third quarter and advanced a previously announced sales process for its lubricants division.

The post Suncor production recovery after wildfire leads to $392 million net profit appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Back in the day, Sales Development Reps (who probably weren’t even called that yet) kept track of the lead records manually — probably in some sort of rolodex-looking spreadsheet. But thanks to the invention of the Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) — specifically the big dog, Salesforce — modern SDRs can track a company’s interaction with current and potential customers, aggregating data from multiple sources to provide a complete view of each customer and how the company is interacting with them.

Not only is this processes cleaner and more modern, but the amount of customer data available through Salesforce allows for better segmentation and targeting on the front end, giving sales organizations (and the companies they serve) clarity to evolve and improve. But while it’s easy to see how this CRM technology has transformed the way businesses interact with their customers, the baseline functionality hasn’t evolved much.

More modern approaches to sales, like sales engagement, take some finesse to integrate fully with Salesforce, turning this customer data into a customer acquisition machine. That’s why we created our newest ebook, “Salesforce for Sales Engagement: Sales Development Reps,” to help SDRs understand their lead records in Salesforce and turn them into fuel for their sales engagement process.

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DOWNLOAD THE EBOOK TODAY

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To begin, let’s assume your sales organization has these two things:

• A sales operations team or point person that has set up your instance of Salesforce.
• A basic level of lead organization in place.

Assuming you’re working with that framework, one of the first things you’ll need to become familiar with is your lead view in Salesforce. This will show you a complete list of all leads assigned to you, the SDR, and can be configured by your Salesforce Admin. The main value here is the information the lead view provides: a contact’s name, company, title, and contact information. Talk about sales GOLD.

So now that you have this information, what do you do with it? First things first, break down your list of leads into more manageable groups so that you can tailor and personalize your correspondence approach with each of these specific leads. But in order to do this, you need to understand a few things about your Lead Records.

We all know that lead records contain a lot of information. But for an SDR, more information equals more personalization in your messaging. And the more personalized and precise your messages are, the more likely you’ll be to get a response. What more could you want?

Before diving in headfirst into this exciting pool of data, here are a few details you should focus your attention on when assessing your lead data:

1. Date/Source. This is the “when” and “where” of your lead, particularly for inbound SDRs. Understanding how long ago a lead came into your system will change the way you approach the lead in your messaging. Understanding the lead source will also impact the way you treat a lead. For example, if a lead comes into your system through a free trial form, you need to treat them very differently than a lead that’s downloaded an ebook.

2. Score or Grade. A lead’s score (or sometimes called grade) is based on how well they fit your company’s ideal customer profile (ICP), and the activity they’ve taken throughout the sales funnel. Somebody who matches your ideal company size and industry vertical will receive an A or a high score, where poor fits will receive lower grades and get added to low-value nurture campaigns — or ignored completely.

3. Activity. The activity field in Salesforce will tell you if you or another person in the company has contacted or touched this lead in the past, and provide the specifics of that activity. This is key to understanding where a lead is in the buying process, and what next steps should be taken to continue moving them closer to purchase.

Understanding your lead records in Salesforce, and how those details will affect how you connect with your leads is a huge asset to you as a modern SDR. Letting these insights slide under the rug as simply CRM inputs is a detriment to your sales process. Take control of your Salesforce lead data and empower your process with knowledge.

Download your free copy today and start getting the most out of Salesforce with your lead records. Just few small tweaks to your process can turn a CRM like Salesforce into your secret weapon for customer acquisition.

The post More Lead Records Insight Equals More Personalization appeared first on SalesLoft.

Is your content filling the sales pipeline with new prospects? It’s easy to get stuck in a content rut – pushing out content without seeing any payoff. But a stale content marketing campaign can be revitalized with something as simple as variety.

Here are 5 different types of content you can incorporate into your content marketing to pull new leads into your pipeline, and boost your profile as an industry thought leader to boot.

1. eBooks

If you’re after prospects’ email addresses (and why wouldn’t you be?), eBooks are a great way to go. By writing a quality eBook about a topic that your audience cares about, you can offer them something of value in exchange for their contact information. Providing an eBook after a prospect fills out a form is a type of gated content, and it’s a proven method of bringing in targeted leads.

Tip: Try including thoughts from industry leaders and commenters in your eBook. This way, you will not only add authority to your content, but you can get these influencers to share the eBook to their networks once it’s published.

2. Whitepapers

Whitepapers typically address a problem or topic, and provide first-hand research that helps the reader come up with a solution or understand the topic more thoroughly. Because whitepapers rely on expertise and research, they will increase your reputation as an industry leader.

Tip: Try building a whitepaper around a common challenge facing your audience, and show them how your product or methodology can give them the solution.

3. Case Studies

Have you done excellent work for past clients and customers? Don’t be afraid to show it off! Case studies can highlight your proven track record of success, and will show potential new customers exactly why they should work with you.

Tip: Keep your case studies short and to the point, and try to use data whenever possible. They should act more as a foot in the door with potential customers, with the ultimate goal being a discussion (and the closing of a sale) with a salesperson.

4. Blog Posts

Ah, the classic piece of content for B2B sales and marketing teams – the blog post. Although this is a common form of content marketing, it should not be taken lightly. Each post should add value to your readers and industry, and should be positioned to achieve one or more of your sales/marketing goals.

Tip: Include a call to action at the end of each blog post, encouraging prospects to sign up for your newsletter, or contact you. You can also create content upgrades, by including a link to a related ebook, whitepaper or other content at the end of your posts.

5. Email Newsletters

If you’re not sending email newsletters monthly (or more frequently) to your lists, you’re missing out on some great lead generation opportunities. Newsletters will keep you top-of-mind with potential buyers, and can often hit their inbox just as they need a nudge to make a purchase.

Tip: Not getting great engagement from your emails? Try these 5 tips to boost engagement!

In a previous post about pipeline marketing, I talked through why marketers should be less concerned with vanity metrics like the number of net new leads in their marketing CRM, and more focused on things like marketing-sourced MRR, new platform users, etc. — KPIs that actually drive your business. To do this, one of the things your marketing operations team will need to build is a multi-touch and multi-channel attribution model. Essentially an infrastructure to track the behaviors and touchpoints of each lead in your database to better understand the path of least resistance from web visit to sign-up (if you do it right you might even be able to build a predictive revenue model!).

KPIs don’t end with, say, a 400% increase in net-new marketing-sourced leads. KPIs carry through to the number of marketing-sourced customers, and this is where growth marketing meets pipeline marketing.

Source: Bizible

The growth team owns the flow of customers into the product. The only way to understand that flow is to build out an attribution model that is capable of tracking the different behaviors of the leads in the funnel.

Attribution is the science of assigning credit of a customer to the source and behavior touchpoints throughout their experience with a brand. There are different layers of source and attribution data one can gather depending on how advanced the attribution model is, but at a very minimum, one will understand the marketing channels and tactics that are not only driving leads, but driving customers.

Without an attribution model in place, one wouldn’t have the data to inform its growth marketing strategy.

The goal of attribution modeling is to uncover the touchpoints that are producing positive results, and, with an advanced attribution system, marketing teams can determine how profitable each touchpoint is by using their associated costs. This allows for targeted optimization opportunities across the entire marketing playbook.

Growth marketers have to be inherently curious and scrappy. They’re part inbound marketer, part optimizer, part SEO/SEM wizard, part analytics animal, part operations guru, and part creative scientist. Their goal is to optimize the hell out of the marketing machine and let those results bleed into the undeniable quality of the marketing-sourced sales pipeline.

Growth marketing is only as valuable as the dollar amount of marketing-sourced MRR in the bank account. Creating joint accountability between marketing and sales organizations will allow brands to focus less on the vanity metrics and dig into solving real business problems. Once the alignment is set between the teams, operators can get to work on optimizing everything from lead acquisition, to lead management, to customer retention. Furthermore, businesses get the data to prove which tactic drives those renewing customers and which tactics simply drive MQLs.

You crushed your revenue goal last quarter, but your celebration was overshadowed by the fear of impending doom. You have a monstrous quota looming and your pipeline looks positively skeletal. What a nightmare!

Fear not – we have a few devilish tricks up our sleeve that are sure to breathe life into even the most grisly of sales pipelines. Ready to dig in?

Increase Productivity

At first glance, this probably seems like a painfully obvious suggestion: if you’re not doing enough, you must do more. But it’s not so much about identifying the need to increase productivity (obvious) as it is how to go about doing it (not so obvious).

One of the best ways to do this is to minimize the amount of time your reps spend on activities other than selling. Research shows that reps spend just ⅓ of their time actually selling, while the other ⅔ is spent on tasks like data-entry and reporting. What a waste – think about how much more business you could generate if each of your reps could spend 60%+ more time selling.

One way to make this happen is to minimize the amount of data your reps must manually enter into your CRM by choosing a solution that automatically records calls, emails, appointments and more. Another way is to forego your multiple sales point solutions – power dialer, contact manager, reporting center, etc. – in favor of an all-in-one sales platform that eliminates the need for reps to constantly navigate between UIs.

Realign with Marketing

Studies show that the failure of marketing and sales teams to stay in sync costs B2B companies 10% or more of annual revenue. On the flip side, companies where sales and marketing work in harmony are 67% better at closing deals. Taking the pulse of sales and marketing alignment in your company can reveal key areas for lead generation optimization that can significantly impact pipeline health.

Sales reps field leads from a variety of marketing sources, like advertising, email, content and more. More often than not, they focus on those which they know are easiest to close, ignoring an average of 50% of marketing leads and likely leaving gobs of money on the table. Knowing which lead sources drive the most wins and revenue for your business will show reps which leads to focus on, as well as help marketers prioritize these particular channels.

To do this, you need to know the lead yield of each marketing source. Lead yield is a simple way to compare the value one lead produces versus another on an equal playing field. The formula is as follows: Sales Revenue / # of Leads Generated = Lead Yield. For instance, if you want to know how much value you get in return for a lead from one source (A) versus another source (B), you can compare their respective lead yields as shown below:

In this particular case, not only are leads from Source B more likely to close, but they also close at a higher dollar value than Source A. Focusing on generating more leads from Source B (marketing) and converting these leads (sales) will beef up the pipeline in no time. For more tips on how to improve your sales and marketing alignment, check out this blog post.

Examine Your Sales Process

A sales pipeline is merely a representation of a much more complex and underpinning sales process that outlines the exact steps reps must take to move a deal from one stage of the pipeline to the next. To understand which parts are working and which should be adjusted, you must map your process to your sales formula. While your business may adapt the sales formula to suit its own unique pipeline and process, the baseline formula, definitions for its variables and sample process mapping are as follows:

As you capture the information necessary to complete each step of your sales process and develop a consistent data set, measuring these key data points or factors across the sales formula will uncover actionable insights to improve your pipeline. For example, there is probably a step in your sales process to give a demo. As your reps follow this process and enter information around which demos they are providing prospects, you will soon find out whether demo A has a higher conversion than demo B, and can adjust your sales process accordingly.

It’s Alive!

The next time your sales pipeline starts looking grim, laugh in the face of danger. Remember, you’re a sales beast, and with these three tips you have the perfect potion to fill your pipeline with only the most thrilling opportunities.

This is where it gets real.

You’ve connected with your sales prospects and survived the first phone call, email conversation or social media interaction. Despite possibly embarrassing yourself, they are actually going to talk to you again since you set up the follow-up exploratory meeting.

In the dating world, this would be considered the second date. You’ve peaked their interest enough that they want to hear more about you, but this is when the real questions, wants and needs hit the fan.

If you’re a father with a daughter (in my father’s case 3 daughters), this is when you’re sitting there in the living room with the new “boyfriend.” You may or may not have a shotgun across your lap, depending on the intimidation tactics you like to use, but you’ve got a whole reel of questions in your head ready to throw at this guy to qualify (or disqualify) him to be worthy enough to date your daughter.

In a job interview, this is the big moment when you’re answering numerous questions on more topics than you cared to answer in order to qualify for a job.

In a Presidential election, this is the point when a candidate is being interviewed on all relevant topics to prove they qualify for the big chair in the White House.

I think you get the point. I don’t mean that this specific exploratory conversation should be just as intimidating, but depending on how you conduct it, it may turn out to feel this way for your sales prospect.

This is the make or break conversation for both sides. Both sides should ask questions, but you’re the one mainly asking and they are the one mainly answering and explaining.

There is a fine line between interrogating and exploring your sales prospect’s pain points, goals, needs, priorities, strategies, budget, timing and more.

On the interrogation side of that fine line, your prospect will most likely feel intimidated. They will see you as the father with the shotgun on his lap.

On the exploration side of that fine line, your prospect will most likely feel like they are connecting with you and getting to know you on a deeper level.

Aspire To Inquire

Alright, so I’ll admit it. You’re about to see a whole bunch of questions to ask your prospects and you might be thinking, “How the heck do you expect me not to come across as an Interrogator, Lexi?”

I hear you. But remember this is not supposed to be black and white and by the book. It’s not a “You must say this first, then they must respond this way, then you must respond with this question, and so on.”

Instead, it’s rapport building, reiterating what you covered in your last conversation, stating the goals for this conversation you’re about to have, more rapport, asking your first question related to a topic you just stated, listening, then…

Well that’s the thing about this not being an interrogation. You play it by ear on what you just heard them say.

I’m not saying to not have an agenda or a list of questions and to be prepared for the conversation. I am just saying to absolutely, whatever you do, do not forget to listen.

Because your list of questions after that will be based upon what you hear. Not what you had planned by the book.

Keep in mind that at this point, the buyer most likely wants to connect with you. In fact, 60% of buyers are interested in talking to a salesperson after they have done their research and have shortlisted companies that they want to consider buying from.^[1]

And trust me, after your connection conversation with them, they have most likely done a great deal of research into the whole matter.

Why This Is So Important

Qualification.

The questions you ask and dig deeper into with your sales prospect will lead you down the path of knowing even more accurately how qualified they are as a sales lead and a customer.

This is key to sales productivity and separating yourself from the stereotypical “sleazy” and “pushy” sales person.

Only 3% of buyers trust a salespeople. Therefore, it is critical to your success for you to not be what the other 97% of buyers assume you to be as a salesperson.^[2]

How exactly does this make you more productive and less sleazy?

Because at the end of this exploratory conversation, you will either break up with your prospect because they are not a good fit, or you will schedule the next step in your sales pipeline, whether it’s a product demo or sales proposal.

How to Break Up With Your Prospect

If breaking up was so easy, then there wouldn’t be so many sad loves songs. Don’t worry, this is not supposed to be emotional or heart breaking. You definitely need to keep a connection with your prospect and still be in contact with them from time to time.

And always bail on a great note.

Some options for moving on are:

• Give them helpful resources and advice for solving their problem. Tell them to always come back for help in any way. Over time, continuously send them content and resources on the topics they care about.
• Give them a referral to someone who might be a better fit for them. You can also ask for a referral down the road for anyone they know that could use your product or service.
• Give them homework that takes longer and requires more effort that will actually help them gain greater results. This solution is for the times when they are a good fit but the timing or budget is off right now. By helping them in their growth efforts, you can reengage with them after they are in a better place to do business with you.

Here’s an example of nurturing a prospect post-break up:

Notice that I provided helpful resources on the topics we discussed in our exploratory conversation, I checked in to keep a nurtured relationship going because I do actually care, and I offered to meet with them in case they still need help with anything.

In this case, bailing does not mean it’s the end. It just means that you focus your efforts, time and energy on other sales prospects that are more qualified to buy.

Cue Your Inner Indiana Jones

Your main goal in your exploratory conversation is to uncover your prospect’s deep-seated goals. This is supported by the development of trust, credibility, rapport and objection handling.

There are many topics and categories that can be used to uncover your prospect’s main goals. You may have scratched the surface in your connection call and are already set up to jump right into talking further about it.

Either way, here are the categories and topics you should consider discussing:

Goals

• What are the main drivers your team needs to accomplish this year?
• How often are you tracking your progress against them?
• Where do you want to be by X amount of time?

Plan

• What have you been doing so far to accomplish XYZ goal?
• In your opinion, how successful has this been?
• Have you considered doing XYZ to accomplish this goal?

Challenges

• What do you see getting in the way of you achieving XYZ goal?
• What’s your strategy to address these challenges?
• What do you already have in place currently to address this issue?

Time

• How much time do you have to make XYZ happen?
• How fast do you need to see results?
• At what point will you know if your plan is working or not working?

Budget

• Do you have a budget?
• How are you currently spending your budget to achieve XYZ goal?
• Have you seen an ROI on it yet?

Authority

• Tell me more about your role in the company.
• What is your typical process for making a decision on XYZ product or service?
• Is there anyone else you need to include in our conversations?

Need

• How much of a priority is this for you right now?
• What will happen if XYZ goal doesn’t happen?
• If you keep doing what you’re doing now, do you think you will still meet your goals?

The Company

• Who is your target market? How do you currently reach them right now?
• Who are your competitors?
• What makes you different from your competitors?

If at any point you are stuck and they give you a short answer, or you just really want to know more about what they just said, simply repeat these words: “Tell me more about that…”

Pain or Gain? That Is The Question.

This whole exploratory conversation will go down one of two ways: driven by pain or driven by gain.

In other words, driven by goals, achievements, excitements and open doors. Or, driven by challenges, fears, anxieties and failures.

Either way, your prospect’s decisions will be based upon pain or gain. They will make their decisions based upon a need or based upon a desire. Therefore, you must listen carefully to the way they explain their answers to your questions early on in the conversation in order to know which road to go down for the rest of the questions to ask.

If you identify quickly what motivates your prospect to buy, then you will be able to influence them and build an urgency to make a decision. You do this by walking them through the categories listed above, and by taking the time to learn what failure looks like to them and what success looks like to them.

Only then will you be able to completely tailor this exploratory conversation to their wants and needs and be able to accurately determine whether this is a good fit or a bad fit.

Let me put this concept together for you in one of the best sales and marketing ideas I have seen yet:

The Working Woman Example

When I was in the Navy stationed in San Diego, I came across a downtown spa named “Girl on the Go!” They had me at “open until 10 PM.” As so many other professionals can relate, many spas are not open by the time you get home from work and can catch your breath.

This spa is specifically targeted towards working professionals, offering services from nails to massages to facials and more.

But I didn’t need all of that. I just needed my nails done quickly for a rare special event and Girl on the Go! was there for me.

Dana, the owner and a stranger to me at that time, took me in with open arms and handed me a glass of wine and anything else I needed.

I was sold.

It wasn’t until I returned a couple of more times, and connected with Dana over a few more conversations, that she uncovered some of my other wants and needs: one specifically having to do with my skin.

I had struggled with skin issues for a long time and after her long exploratory conversation with me, while simultaneously paying close attention to what I was saying and my emotional drivers, I gave her a chance. I had already started to trust her and she got me to see value in the way she did things.

Next thing I know, I’m having an hour facial with Dana and during this time we connected further on life, goals, wants, needs, work, relationships, and more. She built a rapport and connection with me which led to my return for another facial. And another one.

Soon, I trusted Dana with more than just her spa services. She was my friend, esthetician and trusted adviser. Not only was I going to her for most of the services at her spa, but I was referring everyone I knew to her as well.

Dana, while selling her spa services, was also genuine and a good listener. She went the extra mile to help with certain challenges of mine. She would add personal touches by sending me a text about a topic we had discussed the previous week.

She was human first and a salesperson second.

Now, I am in Orlando, FL and we still keep in touch. That is what building genuine rapport and connections looks like. It’s how to create relationships instead of just sales, and how to gain returning customers.

Through this type of rapport and relationship building, you don’t just get one customer out of it. You get one – plus everyone else they sing your praises to.

And who knows?

You may just get a great friendship out of it too.

[1]HubSpot Research

[2]HubSpot Research

When you stake your business on the quality of your leads, you quickly learn the importance of building out multiple sales roles. With so many irons in the fire, sales executives and account managers can’t waste time with dead-end accounts. And when prospecting starts to become too much for the sales team, quotas and revenues suffer.

At Modernize, for instance, leads are our life-blood. It didn’t take long for us to realize that our process only works with an efficient conversion rate, which means freeing up the time of experienced sales reps so they can focus on quality leads. And that’s much more likely to happen when those leads are first vetted for their likelihood of converting into sales. Enter our sales development representatives.

SDRs qualify outbound leads, evaluating each for its potential. They gather prospective accounts from multiple sources and move them through the top of our sales funnel. And that lets us concentrate more on the leads that count. But it didn’t come all at once. The role had to be carved out of the workload of our existing sales teams, and new hires had to be made. Here are five lessons we learned from our experience building an SDR team.

Make the Case for Your Team

The executive team may not exactly thrill at the prospect of hiring several new employees, especially if it’s to do work that’s already tasked to the existing sales team—unless you can help them see the end-game. In our case, it was helpful to use real-world test results to make our case for our team. We created situational testing to see how an SDR team might function once established. We built a list, created a quick process, and started dialing. We established a contact rate, demo set rate, and close rate. This was the business case we needed to justify creating a SDR team. It also became the foundation of our current SDR process.

Create a Team, Not Just a Role

When we first defined Sales Development as a role, it was important that we hire a robust team, rather than a single employee. The reasoning behind that decision was metrics-based. It’s incredibly difficult to determine the effectiveness of a new role by gauging one employee’s performance. Is your SDR underperforming? Over-performing? Without any historical performance rates to compare, it’s extremely hard to tell. By creating a small team, you’ll be able to understand the impact the role can truly have on your company. Then you can scale from there.

Bring In Outside Help

If you’re a Sales Executive or Manager, your strengths probably lie in your leadership and people skills—but building a SDR team involves all sorts of process challenges that may feel slightly foreign to you. We tell homeowners not to be afraid to call in the pros, so why should our internal team be any different? That’s why we engaged a professional consultant to help us build out proper SDR practices from the get-go. That way, we could clearly identify and separate their workflow from the rest of the sales team, and rely on defined processes, rather than something nebulous or ad-hoc. When everyone understood their roles and their goals, the team could work much more efficiently. It’s worth the investment to get it right at the beginning instead of fixing bad processes and behaviors later.

Gamify It!

Research indicates that employee engagement and productivity can be significantly strengthened using gamification strategies. We leveraged those positive benefits and built a dashboard in Salesforce that is sent out to the entire team and management at the end of each day. It includes metrics like the number of calls and emails, the amount of demos set, a count of qualified opportunities, and more. The SDRs compete to have the best numbers on the dashboard. This also prepares them for moving up to self-directed, quota-driven positions within the sales team.

Build a Career Path for SDRs

Hitting the phones all day is tough work. If you’re not careful, employee burnout—and the resulting turnover—can sap your team of its vitality and productivity. We’ve designed our SDR role as a training ground to fill out our existing sales team. For instance, our SDRs sit in on every demo they set up. That way, they become comfortable with the sales process and can do it themselves when the time is right—which, for top SDRs, may be as little as six to twelve months. Of course, for this system to work, you need to have a well-articulated hiring plan in place. SDR teams will always have higher turnover rates than other positions due to the work volume, so selecting hires for their resilience, experience, and potential is crucial to retention levels. When you generate a career path for SDRs, the quality of your applicants naturally improves. Meanwhile, you also create a talent pool to fill open positions on other teams.

A well-defined SDR team has benefits that extend well past the sales team. When you fully integrate your SDRs into your company workflow, their actions not only grow revenue but may also increase employee satisfaction and loyalty across teams. At the end of the day, they’re well worth the investment.

Depending on your role and experience, you will have very specific opinions on how to market your products and services. Unfortunately there are a lot of options to choose from and getting the right balance of programs and level-of-spend can be a challenge.

Most will agree that customer acquisition, retention and revenue is the end goal, but every executive (CEO, CRO, CFO) has a different notion of what marketing should do to support these goals.

Getting Everyone Aligned is Key

No matter how big or small your company is, it is critically important to have executive agreement and commitment to a marketing strategy and plan that is aligned to achieve company goals.

Your strategy, plan and spend will be dictated by:

• Customer acquisition and revenue goals
• Sales/business development strategy
• Target market (B2B, B2C, C2C)
• Geography (local, regional, national, international)
• Resources (budget and people)

Many technology companies often waste time and money on programs that aren’t aligned with sales, which result in longer sales cycles, higher cost-of-sales and missed revenue opportunities.

The CMO is challenged with balancing the plethora of available marketing options and optimizing the return on every marketing dollar spent. If you haven’t sat in a marketing chair, you probably don’t understand the cost & complexity of executing marketing programs.

To help people better understand the scope of marketing and investment options, I have listed typical deliverables and tactical options that marketing must balance to meet company objectives.

First, the Essentials

There are five fundamental marketing deliverables required to succeed in a technology business.

• Customer Profile – Marketing should construct personas for the buyer, influencers and users of your product/service.

• Positioning – You should have a compelling story that sparks the interest of your buyer and differentiates you from your competitors.

• Relevant Content – Thought leading content (white papers), customer use cases, expert testimonials and product/service knowledge is an essential element for a high tech marketing program.

• Online Presence – Your website is your global storefront, provides the content for customer research and directly reflects your brand value.

• Sales Readiness – You must enable your sales people with product training, customer-facing content and sales tools that are aligned with the sales playbook.

Options are Plentiful

Optimizing your marketing mix and associated spend is largely dictated by the definition of your target customer. Your goal is to construct an effective mix of marketing programs that ultimately results in qualified opportunities for sales and high win rates.

In addition to the items mentioned above, a typical B2B marketing plan will consider a balanced program that includes:

• Physical Events – If you select the right events (trade shows, seminars), you can justify the ROI by following the qualified leads through the pipeline. But, cost per lead can be high.

• Digital Events – Webinars typically provide a lower cost per lead than physical events and can be leveraged over time by re-marketing them as an on-demand event.

• Telemarketing – Establishing an outbound telemarketing capability to find qualified opportunities and set-up meetings can be very cost effective. A telemarketing program also supports recruiting attendees to physical and digital events.

• Email Marketing – With a solid opt-in database, you can execute low cost email marketing campaigns to nurture prospects along the sales cycle and keep people informed about company news.

• Advertising – Traditional print advertising is hard to measure and expensive, but may make sense if you have the funds to maintain frequency. Digital ads, including online banners and pay-per-click, are easy to measure and quick to adjust, so spending is easier to control, and risk is much less.

• Public Relations – A PR program makes sense if you are producing newsworthy content and you know what your prospects/customers are reading. Newsworthy means that the editor of the publication sees your news as relevant to their readership. Measuring placement is easy, but it is difficult to measure customer impressions.

• Analyst Relations – Enterprise customers rely on industry experts and analyst firms (Gartner, Forrester, IDC) for advice. These firms establish product categories and rank technology suppliers. They influence the vendor selection process and can influence the licensing/pricing decision.

• Social Marketing – Social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram) are free and seem like a no-brainer. Often thought to be more relevant for B2C companies, more B2B firms are getting on board. If you decide to participate, make sure you have the resources to contribute, monitor and respond to customer inquiries/comments.

• Branding – Many people think branding equals advertising, but advertising is only one component of a brand strategy. A company’s brand is a mix of many things, too much to discuss here. Engaging a branding firm can pay big dividends over the long haul.

Aside from these discretionary programs, you must also take into account the cost of marketing infrastructure/tools (Marketo, Salesforce, Pardot, etc.) and the cost of outsourcing specialty services (graphic design, copywriting). You may also have to allocate resources to support user group meetings/events and annual sales kick-off events.

Finally, set aside a slush fund for unanticipated events, like a product launch, acquisition or push into a new territory

Optimizing Your Marketing Mix / Spend

I wish I could offer a formula to optimize your spend and mix, but there are too many factors that influence where and how to invest. At a high level, you should consider the following:

• Start by understanding the needs of your primary customer, sales. Prioritize your tactical plan so it is aligned with sales objectives. Frequent, high quality communication between sales and marketing is a critical success factor when constructing and measuring the effectiveness of your programs.

• Once you have an agreed-upon strategy, give it some time to develop. Learn from the day-to-day execution and evolve the plan/tactics in light of what you learn. Try to avoid micro-managing your strategy and over reacting to programs that didn’t deliver immediate results. It takes time for messaging to rise above the clutter, especially in this day and age.

• Integrate your programs to get maximum exposure. Nothing you do should stand-alone. Plan up-front to leverage every marketing program across all customer-facing assets, and this includes keeping sales informed of programs so they can inform their customers and prospects.

Of course your marketing mix is constrained by available budget. There are rarely enough funds to execute the strategy completely. Determine the boundaries of the discretionary marketing budget, develop a balanced approach and be prepared to adjust your plan on short notice. Build on programs that deliver results and discard those that didn’t meet expectations.

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