The Science of Selling is a different kind of sales book.  What makes it different?  It’s not based on my career in sales or best practices that I made up by evaluating a certain group of salespeople.  Instead, it’s based on what selling should always be focused on – buyers.  Well, more specifically what thousands of scientific studies have proven regarding how potential customers’ brains make buying decisions.

The Gap Between Science And Modern Sales Practices

It was many years ago when I first stumbled on a scientific journal that described how the brain is wired to be influenced.  As I read it, I immediately saw its application for selling.  It offered an accurate, predictable and evidence-backed way of looking at and interacting with potential customers. 

However, as I began to invest more time and money in learning scientific disciplines such as social psychology, cognitive psychology, social neuroscience and behavioral economics, I became alarmed.  The more I studied the scientific research of how the brain makes choices and which factors influence what we decide to buy, the more I realized that there is an alarming gap between this proven science and modern sales practices.  In fact, some of the most commonly taught sales behaviors blatantly contradict science.

This is a very serious concern because science discloses reality. When salespeople sell against science they are inadvertently selling in ways that will decrease their effectiveness.  And unfortunately, this is a rampant problem.  For instance, one study cited in the Harvard Business Review found that 63% of the behaviors salespeople engage in hinder their ability to earn sales.  Why?  Because these behaviors conflict with how the brain is wired to formulate buying decisions. 

Yet, the opposite is also true.  The research shows that heightened levels of sales performance are a result of how closely aligned sales behaviors are with how the brain naturally creates a buying decision.  In other words, the more your way of selling mirrors how your buyers’ brains are influenced and naturally form buying decisions, the more successful you will be. 

Now because of this science it’s no longer necessary to guess why top producers perform better than average ones.  Armed with scientific data, we now have the tools to improve any salesperson’s performance.

That’s why I wrote The Science of Selling.  It connects the dots between this cutting-edge science and the real-world sales situations you face every day to help you consistently succeed. It offers a new way of looking at and relating to buyers that is accurate, predictable, and reproducible.  In fact, it’s the only way of selling that is scientifically proven to increase your sales results.  And those who have embraced it have a dramatic advantage over their competitors. 

The post Why I Wrote THE SCIENCE OF SELLING appeared first on Hoffeld Group.

It is a fact that the properties of water are two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.

This fact is easily proven using an exemplar, a scientific method of proof. You look at a water molecule through a microscope and notice that you see two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. You ask someone else to look through the microscope, and they report the very same finding. This injunction is repeated, and you have a fact. No one ever discovered evidence to the contrary.

My friend Graham wrote a post on LinkedIn, hyperbolically titled Personal Relationships no longer matter in B2B Sales. The evidence he cites regarding some emerging trends are worth noting, but they are not, as he believes them to be, facts. They are surely not unyielding scientific facts. They are instead contextual trends and some of his personal experiences, being found in some places and not in others, experienced by some, but not all.

It is a very rare thing that I respond so directly to a post like Graham’s, but I find this line of thinking dangerous. It is disempowering, and it is an abdication of your duty to create value for your clients, something that is made more difficult through an arms-length process and a transactional relationship—the resulting sales landscape in Graham’s view.

Fortunately, Graham mostly misreads the evidence. The trends he cites, in fact, point to the opposite conclusion.

Consensus Buying Behaviors

Consensus buying behaviors do not spell the end of personal relationships in B2B sales. Citing CEB’s research that there are now 5.2 stakeholders in the average B2B buying decision, Graham suggests that you cannot “develop meaningful relationships” with multiple stakeholders from “cross-functional” segments of the business and from “different regions, all with their own (and often conflicting) agenda(s).” Yet this is exactly what we do.

Commercial relationships are personal. However, being known, liked, and trusted now also requires another component: economic value. To create that economic value, it helps to be known, liked, and trusted, because that improves the likelihood of you being able to build consensus and manage change.

Can you imagine that consensus can be more easily found with no personal relationships? Is the salesperson’s absence in this process going to allow this consensus to spring from thin air, with silos being torn down on their own, concerns resolving themselves, and enlightened stakeholders suddenly setting aside their differences for the greater good without so much as a peep? Happy days were this true. But it isn’t.

There are plenty of salespeople who successfully manage multiple relationships and help their clients find consensus around change, even when they are spread out across the globe, and even when they have competing agendas. There are also plenty of salespeople who cannot. Either way, this work is being done successfully by salespeople every single day.

Graham’s next point is in conflict with this point. That point is the idea that people buy from machines and websites.

Avoiding the Salesperson

If a salesperson cannot help find consensus, how on Earth does a website enable an agreement between conflicting agendas and needs that are at odds? The idea that buyers don’t need salespeople is mostly true in B2C, and in more transactional B2B sales.

Graham suggests that buyers in “practically every industry, segment, category, and region are now demonstrating that they prefer to bypass the salesperson every chance they get.”

All generalizations are lies, and this one is no exception. There will be countless sales calls made during the week in which you read this post, all with prospective and existing clients who have agreed to meet with a salesperson. Some portion of these prospects and clients may have chosen to place an order online, with as many or more preferring to speak with someone who can actually help them come to the right decision.

Incorrectly, Graham cites the reason for the resistance to meeting with salespeople as the buyer’s knowledge that “each and every salesperson has a vested interest in trying to convince the buyer to purchase their product regardless of whether it’s the right fit for their problem.” This generalization is also out of sync with how most salespeople sell. Most salespeople don’t sell people things they don’t need. The reason many B2B buyers don’t like to meet with salespeople is because they are presently satisfied, and because too many salespeople waste their time.

Citing Forrester, Graham says, “93% of B2B buyers say that they prefer to buy online rather than from a salesperson when they’ve decided what to buy and just need to make the purchase” What people say they prefer in surveys and what they do are often at odds, and that is likely also the case here. But there is a certain truth that when a purchase is low risk, of low strategic value, and of relatively low importance, people will transact. That, however, is not the type of sale many people in B2B are engaged in now.

Buyers Have Evolved, Sellers Have Not

Graham makes a statement of fact that is untrue when he suggests that “Buyers have evolved but sales people have not. B2B buyers no longer need a ‘personal relationship’ with you in order to make a decision. They will NOT stick with you just because you are a good person – trusted, likeable and dependable.”

In one sense, Graham is correct. Trusted, likeable, and dependable are no longer enough. You aren’t likely to have a client retain you if you don’t create economic value. To do so, you now need deep chops. You need business acumen and situational knowledge. You need to be able to manage change, as noted above. You also need to be a leader.

It is factually incorrect to suggest that salespeople have not evolved. Some may be evolving faster, and some more slowly, but there is an evolution that seems to match the customer’s evolution. Are we really selling like it’s 1958? Has the work of Rackham, and Heiman, and CEB, and Hanan, and Brock, and Bertuzzi, and Blount, and Weinberg and Konrath and many others not been widely adopted? What Graham sees as the end of personal relationships is really evidence of the evolution of commercial relationships, now requiring greater value creation, something more easily done with personal relationships, and frighteningly impossible without.

Digital Engagement

The Digital Kool-Aid has been distributed, and many have drunk deeply from what has been served. To their detriment, I am afraid.

From Graham’s post: “Yes, there are some instances when buyers still prefer to interact with a sales person, but when they do, it’s increasingly via digital means like email, chat, sales engagement platforms, Skype and collaborative software rather than F2F or via phone calls.”

As far as I know, sexting has not replaced sex. I say this only half joking. The truth is that the things that make us human haven’t changed much over the last 50,000 years. Trust still matters. Caring still matters. Having someone looking after you, helping you see around corners and avoid risk still matter very much to people who lead companies and make decisions.

Why would clients prefer Skype if not to see the person to whom they are speaking? What is it about looking someone in the eyes?

The belief that clients prefer not to meet face-to-face is extraordinarily incorrect and unhealthy, and suggesting that you forgo face-to-face visits is malpractice. There aren’t too many things that are going to help you create a preference for you, your company, and your solution like your presence. Showing up to understand your client’s world, to spend time with them, to learn about their business and, yes, to deepen your relationships will help you create a competitive advantage.

What This Really Means

Some types of selling are more difficult than they used to be. They require greater skills, as well as the ability manage more complexity. They also require different skills, like Business Acumen, Change Management, and Leadership, the final three chapters of my book, The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need.

Relationships are more important now, and more is required of you if you want to maintain those relationships.

All things being equal, relationships win. All things being unequal, relationships still win. Your job in sales is to make all things unequal. Don’t believe me? Try to compete successfully without them.

I just looked over my last week’s calendar. I made a face-to-face sales call every day last week.

The post Personal Relationships Matter More Now Than Ever In Sales appeared first on The Sales Blog.

When you think of SEO, you generally focus exclusively on Google. While Google itself is undoubtedly the biggest search engine in the world now, but then if you consider e-commerce , Amazon is far more important considering it has three times the higher volume of products.

Therefore, as an SEO enthusiast, you simply cannot afford to ignore the Amazon Store, due to the large volume of traffic as well as search queries in handles. This makes the Amazon marketplace or Amazon Store not only an important sales tool for online business but equally important for Amazon itself.

The basic understanding

If you are serious about optimizing your product on the Amazon Store then it’s imperative for you to obtain some basic knowledge on how product listing in Amazon happens. Now, Amazon uses its own unique algorithm Amazon A9.

Amazon combines the two components of consumer interaction and product information to optimize products through the A9 algorithm. Apart from that, product ranking on Amazon also depends on the following factors –

• Product Page Optimization
• Seller Rank
• Pageviews & CTR

Another aspect that you as an internet marketer should have knowledge about, is the tools for optimization. As you know, keywords play a crucial role in any search engine optimization process. This is no different for Amazon, therefore, as an SEO enthusiast keyword search tools like KeywordTool.io and Keyword Tool Dominator can be real handy.

Tips for Amazon Store Optimization

The search bar remains the primary way to locate items on the shopping store though customers can browse items through the categories on the left-hand side of the page. Amazon’s search function identifies keywords from product titles and descriptions, manufacturers, designers/brands or search terms.

Therefore, once you know the basics of the optimization process in Amazon, you can go through the list of tips to optimize your product on the shopping portal.

1. Product Titles

Product titles are key to the process and should be full of keywords. It should have a customer-friendly structure and use the space in whole. However, titles should avoid caps, asterisks, punctuation and other special characters.

Moreover, as customers can search for a product in varied ways it’s important to experiment and know what works and what doesn’t in product titles.

2. Search terms and index

When highlighting a search term, it is important to optimize multiple search terms. Avoid using the same words that appear on the title in the description of the product or otherwise.

Again Amazon’s search index takes into account the price, sales history and availability of a product. A better selling product simply rises up the search list and Amazon hardly shuffles these results.

3. Browse Nodes

Browse nodes are product codes that help to identify products from the categories. A merchant can opt for two codes for every item. This helps in providing more information for a product and increases its visibility in the marketplace.

4. Filtered Navigation and Product Variation

Filtered navigation, though a recent addition, it allows the merchant to offer further detailed information about a product. Moreover, as customers use this tool to search more relevant items, therefore, it’s important to include detailed information about a product in the product listing.

Product variation again is a tool that sellers can use to offer customers a glimpse of their product range. This can be done by providing an SKU of the product which establishes every product’s parentage. Users by using these tools get to check different products from the same product page.

5. Product Description

The product description is undoubtedly a very important optimization tool. See, different customers search for the same product in different ways or for different purposes. To cater to different types of customers, putting a short crisp description with every product is important.

Make the description within 200 words, comprising the important details of the product. An effective way is to include the features of the product in bullets, which adds to the broadcast appeal of the product.

6. Product Images

One of the most important components of online marketing is the image of the product. As Amazon is a virtual shopping medium images play a vital role in driving conversions.

Ideal images should occupy 80% of the space and should be 500×500 pixels. Images shouldn’t have any borders, seller’s logos, watermarks or any other texts and should be in a white background.

7. Pricing

Comparative pricing is an effective way of ensuring steady conversions. It is important that customers are told how much they are saving on every purchase. Amazon thus, offers two different forms of comparative pricing – a “Sale” price and a “Was” price.

Conclusion

The above-given points are just a quick guide on tips that will help you to optimize your product and elevate a product’s sale. The process of optimization is a detailed one and if you really want to know how to rank your product on the Amazon store, it’s important you consult experts for quick effective results.

I’m not a pricing expert.

When you think about customer satisfaction, the first question that comes to mind is probably a broad one: How happy are your customers? It’s important to measure overall customer happiness, but customer satisfaction surveys can do much more than that when they’re tied to specific goals.

Customer loyalty is a big goal for most companies. We know customer acquisition is expensive, and new customers are far less reliable than existing customers. Since customer satisfaction is a prerequisite for customer loyalty, the way you measure and understand it can truly impact your bottom line.

Consider these statistics on customer loyalty and churn:

• Two thirds of customers who leave a company do so because of the treatment they received. (Kissmetrics)
• 61% of customers take their business to a competitor when they leave. (Kissmetrics)
• Existing customers spend 67% more with a business than new customers. (Selfstartr)
• The average repeat retail customer spends 67% more in months 31-36 of her shopping relationship than in months 0-6. (Bain & Company)

It’s clear that customer satisfaction should be a top priority. But where do you start? First, you identify the key drivers of customer satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) in your business. Specialized customer satisfaction surveys reveal customer preferences, top reasons for churn, and opportunities to improve processes company-wide.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys That Lead to Better Business

1. Customer Support Satisfaction Surveys

Customer support satisfaction surveys are the most common CSAT use case, and for good reason. 78% of customers have opted out of an intended purchase because of a bad customer service experience. Since service is key to profitability, businesses need an effective way to measure it and take action on the data.

Businesses use customer support satisfaction surveys to identify common customer issues, how they’re resolved, and how happy customers are with the resolutions. The results often reveal patterns that help organizations refine their support practices, along with other areas of the company.

TRY THIS: Use CRM surveys to tie support satisfaction results with your other customer data, like sign-up date, age, and purchase frequency. Together, the results give you a clearer picture of customer needs by demographic.

2. Product Satisfaction Surveys

Want to know what customers think of your products? What about the features or variety they’d like to see next? Product satisfaction surveys help you build smarter so you can sell more.

Customers perceive products differently than the companies producing them. Consumers might catch issues the team missed. Or customers might echo one simple request that isn’t on the roadmap. Product surveys open up that communication.

Any time there’s a significant change in the market, it’s smart to gather customer feedback to establish your brand’s competitive positioning. Remember how the launch of the iPhone (a huge market change) prompted handset makers to move away from physical keyboards and start producing multi-touch screens? Imagine how far competitors would have fallen had they not paid attention to the consumer response.

TRY THIS: Send product surveys before and after a release to examine how perception changes. Product releases are a key time to for customer feedback. It can guide product marketing and development efforts in the future.

3. Sales Satisfaction Surveys

Your sales team is responsible for securing new revenue and building brand awareness. When they connect with people, your profits grow. But interestingly enough, reports indicate that only 13% of customers believe a salesperson can actually understand their needs.

Sales satisfaction surveys and competitive loss surveys help fix the disconnect. You can pinpoint the factors that lead to won and lost deals and use that to refine the sales process. Those results also inform marketing campaigns that generate sales leads. Marketing can support the sales team with stronger collateral that responds to prospective customers’ needs.

TRY THIS: Add an open-ended question to your competitive loss survey to give people more response freedom. If someone says price was the issue, they can expand on that. Maybe their response will reveal something fixable, like confusion around your pricing structure.

4. Website and Checkout Satisfaction Surveys

Shoppers make more of their purchases online than they do in stores. That means your website and checkout processes deserve extra attention. Placing surveys on your site is a simple way to capture timely feedback.

Is the online checkout process seamless? Are payment methods convenient? How does the site perform on mobile? Are customers finding answers quickly? Questions like this help fine-tune your site for conversions.

TRY THIS: Add a web survey to your site to capture visitor info. You can learn a lot about your audience this way. Plus, web surveys catch feedback at the very moment visitors are evaluating your brand, rather than hours or days later.

5. Event Satisfaction Surveys

Event surveys are a great way to gauge brand perception before and after the big day. Whether you’re hosting an event or tabling at a conference, each interaction you have makes a public statement about your brand. That’s worth measuring.

Conference surveys tell companies more about the leads they generate and help keep your brand top-of-mind. Attendee and customer feedback from events you host can impact your planning and execution in the future.

TRY THIS: Use professional, branded surveys to send the right message. Consistency is especially important when you’re following up after a packed event. People are inundated with logos and messaging and swag, so your conference surveys have to tell them who you are quickly.

6. Overall Satisfaction Surveys

We talked about overall satisfaction at the start. Specific customer satisfaction surveys deliver feedback at critical moments throughout the customer journey, but the big picture is important too. Many companies periodically survey their entire customer base to measure customer satisfaction.

Here are a few tips for gauging overall satisfaction. (Read more on survey best practices.)

1. Time surveys right. You don’t have to send overall satisfaction surveys all at once. Consider setting up triggers that send the survey to individual customers right after they’ve had a key experience with your company. This will likely increase survey response rates and generate better feedback.
2. Keep surveys short. Overall customer satisfaction surveys should be anywhere from 2-5 questions. If you make them any longer, you’ll kill your completion rate and end up with unreliable data.
3. Ask relevant questions. It’s best to stick to the basics. Don’t overcomplicate questions or ask about topics unrelated to the customer’s experience. Some safe options: How satisfied were you with the service? How friendly were our employees? Were you able to get the help you needed? Did we have the product you were looking for? How well did we answer your questions? Is there anything we could do to improve your experience?

Sending out a general customer satisfaction survey periodically is a great way to determine how well your company is connecting with its customer base. The results can then help you strengthen customer relationships.

Wrap-up

Companies rely on customers, but they’re often blind to their needs and wants. When profits take a hit, business leaders put hindsight to work, evaluating where mistakes were made. Oftentimes, those mistakes could have been avoided if companies listened a bit better.

Customer surveys help create a proactive culture. When feedback is visible at every corner of the business, departments can align on objectives that lead to better decisions for their customers. And when customer satisfaction is a priority for the entire company, each team member sees how their role impacts customer loyalty.

Happy customers are the lifeblood of business. They buy your products and services. They work as advocates for your brand. And ultimately, they help keep your business relevant in a highly competitive market. But what about unhappy customers?

While it’s tempting to praise the people who like us most, the not-so-happy customers also determine our success or failure.

Unhappy Customers May Be the True Key to Success

Consider the consequences of one of the most viral customer videos of all time, posted by an unhappy United Airlines customer.

Just 4 weeks after Dave Carroll released United Breaks Guitars, United Airlines stock price fell 10%. The drop resulted in a $180 million loss for stockholders. The actions of just one unhappy customer resulted in a PR nightmare for United Airlines and millions of dollars down the drain for investors.

Now take a look at the average lifetime value of a Starbucks customer, as calculated by Kissmetrics. Over the course of 20 years, a Starbucks customer is expected to bring in just over $14,000 for the java giant. That’s nothing to sniff at, but compare the two customers and you’ll see the discrepancy. Unhappy customers need attention.

Even though the incident created a bit of a crisis for United Airlines, it did end happily. A month after working with Carroll to rectify the situation, United Airlines stocks traded as high as $6, representing an 81.27% overall increase.

Sometimes unhappy customers force companies to confront and solve the problems that are negatively impacting their business. And those solutions can lead to major success.

Here are 3 more examples that highlight the value of unhappy customers.

1. Unhappy customers give the most honest feedback.

The only way to stay relevant is to focus on catering to customers’ changing needs. The easiest way to reveal those is to ask.

Customer feedback provides actionable insights on products and services. If a number of customers are all complaining about the same thing, you should probably consider fixing it. By leveraging that kind of feedback, companies can step outside their internal perspective to find solutions that drive revenue and make customers happy.

Remember what Domino’s did years back? After getting labeled the worst-tasting pizza on the market, they decided to do something about it. Domino’s publicly admitted to their pizza’s poor quality, worked hard to change their recipes, and launched a new website and social media campaign. This campaign encouraged food bloggers and food lovers to try the new recipe and share feedback on social media.

This marketing approach didn’t just improve their ratings—it made their sales skyrocket.

Domino’s isn’t the only big company to benefit from honesty. Best Buy, NASCAR, and Yahoo have turned customer feedback into significant and positive change.

Eliciting feedback—specifically negative—to make smarter business decisions is critical to the long-term success of any company.

2. Unhappy customers help hone customer service skills.

Every business owner and customer-facing employee has dealt with the displeased. Unhappy customers shouldn’t be avoided or even dreaded. They present the best opportunities for growth by putting customer service and problem-solving skills to the test.

Ritz-Carlton is a great example. They use proactive customer service practices to avoid disaster. Employees are trained to offer a free appetizer (compliments of the chef) to any diner that waits more than 20 minutes for their food. Instead of a weak apology, this approach solves the hunger problem, resets customer expectations, and refocuses attention on the Ritz’s wonderful service.

Negative feedback is a chance to win back favor and improve customer experience.

3. Unhappy customers help manage online reputation.

When customers are upset, businesses brace for bad reviews, and for good reason. Zendesk found that 45% of customers surveyed had shared bad customer service experiences on social media.

Bad reviews aren’t just an ego hit—they’re very bad for business. A BrightLocal study found that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends, and they have a major impact on purchase decisions.

When you receive negative feedback online, take the time to respond to customers. Whether or not their criticism is justified, go above and beyond to solve the problem. Your efforts will appear online for all to see, and that sends a positive message.

KLM customer service makes excellent use of social media. As a result, their Facebook page touts an impressive 24-minute average first response time and a 92% response rate. Any customer with a complaint can visit their page, ask a question, and expect a quick response.

Wrap-up

The rise of social media and review sites makes it increasingly difficult to manage an online reputation. So nowadays, the simplest way to avoid bad publicity is to ask for it directly.

Companies that survey customers at specific, critical moments—like after support interactions—can get ahead of bad situations. And it’s important to keep a constant pulse on customer health through Net Promoter Score surveys and customer satisfaction surveys, which help companies spot troubled customers before they lose them.

Retaining unhappy customers can pay off big time. On average, it’s 7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one. So feed your existing relationships—they’re worth it.

And remember, when unhappy customers share their experiences, they’re teaching you how to make your business better. If you design your organization around effective communication, customers are more likely to share their problems directly rather than publicly.

Over time, that customer data will help you build a customer-centric brand that shows a consistent commitment to customer happiness.

Google may seem like an enigma when it comes to understanding its algorithm, but short of actually explaining its secret formula, Google is actually fairly open about helping you understand what it looks for when evaluating sites.

The search giant provides regular feedback from its top executives and in information that it publishes on its blogs and help centers. It also provides extensive site analytics, as well as a Search Analytics Report that explains how well your site is performing.

Now, it has introduced yet another tool to help webmasters get more information about their sites so that they can improve performance in search. Here’s what you can find on the new Google help document:

Impressions Information

The new help document covers exactly what Google considers to be an impression and provides information about what situations must occur to count an impression.

For example, whenever a link appears in a search result, it counts as an impression, whether a user clicks on the link or not. However, if a link appears in a carousel, an impression will only be recorded when the user scrolls past the link.

Links appearing in a Knowledge Graph Card can be recorded by site or by page. If you are looking at data grouped by site on your Search Analytics Report, you will only get one impression for that site. However, if you are looking at data grouped by page, you will see an impression for each page listed in the card.

Each search element will appear differently, so it is worth reading the report fully and carefully to better understand this aspect.

Search Position

Search position is not always so simple. In fact, analyzing it is often quite complex.

There are many different types of search results that appear on the same page. For example, the blue links for pages on a site appear in a basic list on the search results page. However, a single listing on the page could be a carousel for results from accelerated mobile pages. Another listing could include multiple links on a Knowledge Graph Card. Each of those links would have the same search position.

The device type and screen size can also influence what search position a link has.

The appearance of items that have only query refinement links or that have no links at all can also influence the position of other items on the page. For example, a listing of thumbnails for image search would not have a search position, which means that the item below it would be the next counted position.

Any links that appear in the results must get an impression to have a search position recorded.

When you look at the position value on the Search Analytics Report, it is important that you understand these and other complex issues so you know what your data actually tells you about the performance of your site.

A position of 1 isn’t always the most valuable position. For example, a Knowledge Graph Card result has high visibility and big search impact. However, it will have a very low search position because the positions are read left to right and top to bottom.

Information about search positions and their values is quite complicated, so it is important that you read the full document to understand the information you are getting.

Data on Clicks

Basically, a click leading to another page counts as a click. But as with all things related to search, there are a couple of special situations that require additional explanation.

For example, if a user clicks a link from search, goes back to search results and then clicks on the same link later in the session, that is only going to count as one click. The user may have actually clicked on the link twice, but as far as Google is concerned, that second click was like pressing “play” after a visit had been on pause. The second click was not a new discovery.

Query refinements also will not count toward clicks. That means that if a user searches for “Seven Wonders of the World,” for example, and then clicks on one of the images that appears in the thumbnails at the top of search, that will not record a click. The reason is that clicking on that thumbnail actually opens up new search results — this time in image search.

If you think about query refinements, this makes sense. After all, who would the click be attributed to? The click leads to a list of search results that is provided by Google.

Reading your Search Analytics Report can help you get a much better sense of how your site is performing, and this new help document will ensure you are reading the data correctly. Dive into your search data and figure out where your site stands now so that you can make any changes that are needed.

Blogging is an attractive avenue for building your authority, amassing a large audience, and developing your brand. Some bloggers, however, take it to the next level by selling their infomercial product.

With products such as paid courses, subscription-based content, and eBooks, bloggers can establish themselves as niche experts. This status can drive massive traffic to your site and make readers more receptive to your blog content. Furthermore, infomercial products can be reliable sources of passive income, which can help you sustain and grow your website for the long-term.

When it comes to a particular infomercial product, the numerous benefits of eBooks make them a popular choice for independent bloggers and small business owners. However, they can be challenging to make and sell.

If you are planning to sell your eBook, below are the things you need to remember:

Plan Epic Content

Writing eBooks is different from creating blog posts. You need to do extensive research, provide in-depth information, and structure the entire eBook into an experience that fosters learning.

Although writing an entire eBook may sound like a daunting task, it is a very rewarding experience from start to finish especially if you already have a particular set of objectives for your project. For example, will your eBook be a full-length self-help book, or will it be just a quick guide? Will you be using visual content within the pages to improve the reading experience?

Answering these problems will help you look for the right tools for the job. Additionally, make sure you plan an outline that covers every section of the book. Doing so will make the content more cohesive rather than a combination of disjointed articles. It will also speed up the entire writing process because you no longer have to form new ideas as you go.

Make it Look Professional

Apparently, an eBook must be packaged like an actual book. That means you also need all the visual details such as a cover page, a table of contents, an author bio page, and some acknowledgments if necessary.

When it comes to eBooks, however, there’s no need for a fancy publishing house to make it look professional. If you are skilled in image editing, then you are free to create your visuals. If not, then you can hire a freelance eBook designer from websites like Upwork. Just be careful on whom you choose to work with. Look for those with a proven track record or see if they can show you a design portfolio.

Keep in mind that your eBook’s cover design must be eye-catching. If you plan to outsource a freelancer, be sure to collaborate well with the designer to minimize revisions. Also, make sure that the cover looks good in thumbnails.

Invest Time and Money for Editing

Grammar or spelling mistake can be forgivable in a blog post, but not on a paid eBook. If you want to establish yourself as a reliable information provider, you must iron out all the creases and present your best work. That said, be sure to proofread and polish your eBook before saving it in a PDF format.

A rule of thumb is to read and edit the entire eBook at least once. Then, have someone else read it and check it for errors you may have missed. If you have extra funds, then you might as well hire a professional editor from freelancing platforms. Alternatively, look for recommendations from your peers. Keep in mind that editing an eBook is a tremendous responsibility. You cannot afford to leave it in the hands of someone you cannot trust.

Choose a Platform

Self-publishing platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, Lulu, and Smashwords made it easy for bloggers to monetize their work. Unlike traditional publishing, self-publishing an eBook as a blogger gives the owner full control of the design and selling processes. Unfortunately, having to shoulder all the responsibilities is a double-edged sword.

Keep in mind that you need thorough research to understand how a self-publishing company works. How much royalty do they offer authors? Are there any eligibility requirements for aspiring self-publishers? Most importantly, can this self-publishing company expose your eBook to the right audience?

Finally, self-publishing your eBook means you will be directly involved with its promotion. A good strategy is to promote it via newsletter to your subscribers who are most likely to buy. Promoting it in channels like social media and other people’s blogs will also maximize its exposure.

Conclusion

Self-publishing an eBook is a great way to offer more value to your readers. However, you need thorough research and planning if you want to self-publish your work. Despite the challenges, rest assured that writing and selling an eBook is a straightforward process. It can be fun especially if you are enthused with the topic.

I write this fresh off a trip that took me from Cleveland to Helsinki with a brief stop in Copenhagen and then to London.

It’s been almost 10 years now since I’ve been speaking on the topic of content marketing in and around Europe.  Over that time, content marketing has become a driving force, maybe THE biggest change I’ve seen in the approach to marketing around this continent.  It is slowly evolving from a product-centric to a more audience-centered strategic approach.

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#Contentmarketing is evolving from a product-centric to audience-centered strategic approach says @joepulizzi.
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And yet, just as we’ve seen in the United States, marketers in Europe tend to overcomplicate the idea of content marketing. There is still a belief that we need to be everywhere our customers are on the web.  That we need to be on all social platforms (like it or not). That we need to be distributing our stories 11 different ways every day. That we need to create viral content (don’t get me started on that one).

When I take the stage telling marketers in Finland and the United Kingdom to slow down, to choose channels carefully, possibly desert publishing on some social media sites, and to simplify their strategies, I often get pushback.

“Too simplistic,” I hear.

“My management expects us to publish on every platform,” I hear again and again.

“We need immediate results” is a common pushback.

All I can advise is that you should zig when everyone else zags.

Let your competitors waste their time and resources publishing more and more content, while you go out and build a loyal audience that will reap rewards for years to come.

Remember, more content does not mean more assets.  The asset is the audience, and the content is what gets you to the asset.

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The asset is the audience … The #content is what gets you to the asset says @joepulizzi.
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A simplified approach

If you are a marketer who has a handle on your content marketing approach, this post will serve as a review.  For everyone else, you can use this to help you document a content marketing strategy that you can present to your team and continue to refine.

You need to answer the following questions as you proceed with any marketing approach, but they will be particularly helpful for a content-first approach.

Answer big-picture questions

These broad questions must be answered to start your documented strategy:

1. What is the challenge? What business challenge (specifically) are you trying to solve?
2. What is your dream outcome of this approach?
3. What is the risk if you fail?
4. Who is involved? What permission do you need from your managers to participate?
5. How much will you spend?
6. What if things go wrong? What is your plan if you don’t achieve your goals quickly enough, if there is a customer complaint, or if other problems arise?
7. How long do you have to show success?

These are broad questions for a reason. They are intended to get you into the right mindset before you start to talk about any type of content creation.

Get more specific

1. What’s the specific need to reach the objective? (e.g., create leads, have better customers, generate higher-quality leads, make direct sales)
2. How big of an opportunity is it? Is this opportunity big enough to warrant spending your time and/or money?
3. How will the initiative align to your business objectives? With your existing marketing?
4. What are the risks? What sources could prevent you from achieving the goals? Which of those things can you control and minimize the likelihood of their occurrence?

Detail your audience

Now that you have a feel for the problem you are trying to solve for and the reason to create content in the first place, you can begin to focus on the persona.

1. Who is the target audience? (only one)
2. What content or information do they need as it pertains to this plan?
3. How will this help your audience with their job or life in some way?
4. Why would your audience care about this? (Do they?)
5. What unique value proposition (UVP) do you offer this persona? What differentiating value do you bring to the table?

Develop your content

You want to highly scrutinize the content.  If the information isn’t truly differentiated, with limited competition, there is little chance you will break through and gather attention.

1. What is the content niche you are planning to cover?
2. What other companies provide this kind of information? Do you even have an opportunity to become a leading resource in this area? How do you find out?
3. Can you purchase an existing external asset instead of developing a new one?
4. Where will you find the stories in this content niche? Who in the company has the expertise to help? What internal assets and other content do you already have?
5. What resources (staffing and otherwise) will you need?
6. How will the stories mainly be told (audio, video, textual)? Remember, you want to focus on one key content type and one key distribution platform (a blog, a magazine, an event series, a podcast, a video series, etc.)
7. What key design issues will make or break the program?
8. What platform makes the most sense to distribute the content?
9. Will this be a new content brand or woven into an existing product or company brand?

Distribute and measure

1. How will the information be found by the audience?
2. What current assets do you have to distribute the content? What partnerships can be leveraged? Is there paid budget available?
3. How will you know the initiative is successful?
4. What subscription tools will you use to capture audience information?
5. What key assets need to be created to capture the necessary data?
6. What other departments should you bring in to maximize impact?
7. What technology are you missing for enabling collaboration and measurement? What are “must-haves” and what are “nice-to-haves”?
8. What internal communication will you need to make sure the program gets and keeps buy-in?
9. How quickly, considering the buying cycle, can you tie the initiative to sales, cost savings, or customer loyalty?
10. What internal issues need to be worked out so you can tie the subscribers to revenue?

Create the business statement

While there are more questions to be asked, answering the above will uncover the opportunities and gaps in your overall plan.

Now, you can take this information and create a business statement, which will serve as an elevator pitch for the overall project.  Here’s an example.

Problem: The mechanical engineers (our key buyers and key leads) gathered from our traditional marketing processes often come to us very late in the buyer’s journey. Even if the sales team can break through and get a meeting, we are trying to win the business solely on price and not on value. Thus, yield has been significantly impacted over the past 12 months. It has become a significant management concern.

Solution: If we can build a loyal audience of mechanical engineers by developing an amazing awareness experience for our brand, we will be able to bypass the RFP process, increase the quality of our leads (pulling leads from our subscriber base), and earn more business without competition or product discounts.

Our own engineers are some of the smartest around designing industrial soldering equipment (ISE).  Currently, three publications cover the design/build process of ISE, but none solely focus on ISE.  We believe, if done right, we can become the leading informational resource in this area, build a loyal subscriber base of mechanical engineers who design/build in this area, and then build our lead flow from the subscriber base after a series of behaviors take place and we hit the appropriate lead score (subscribe, engage, download, attend webinar, etc.)

After reviewing all possible content avenues, we believe that a blog/e-newsletter combo would be the most appropriate. The initial plan is to create two blog posts per week (Tuesday and Thursday, with a Saturday e-newsletter) until we see a minimum of 5,000 subscribers to the e-newsletter.  Once achieved, we will increase frequency to three times per week.

The incentive to sign up for the newsletter will be a free sample template for the design/build process.  This was already developed by another department, and we have its approval to redesign and share it as an extremely valuable download.

We believe that the 5,000-subscriber mark is achievable in six months with adequate promotion leveraging our current database and partnering with outside media organizations. Considering a buying journey of six months, we believe that we’ll start to see yield impact at about the eight-month mark of the program, with the ultimate goal to increase average yield per sale by 15%. Considering the budget and resources needed for this program, we believe that with new business and the overall yield impact, the program will generate 5.5 times ROI in a 12-month period.

What you just read is the kind of one-page report you would present to your management team.  Obviously, you’ll add things like a content marketing mission statement, team structure, distribution plans and more. But in this case, the goal is only to get your strategic thoughts on paper so that you have a solid business plan and hypothesis for moving forward with this opportunity.

And remember, this plan is not set in stone … it can and should be updated regularly.

Good luck!

Want to receive daily insight to help you create and regularly update your content marketing strategy? Subscribe to the free CMI newsletter.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post A Simple Approach to Document Your Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Spreadsheets get a raw deal. We are so dependent on tools like Excel and Google Sheets for managing budgets and P&Ls that it’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing spreadsheets only as applications for managing money, or at the very least, for working with numbers.

But the structure and features of spreadsheets make them so useful for a wider range of purposes, from project planning to writing. Breaking information or text into cells helps you break your work into bite-size chunks so you can find different ways of structuring it. The ability to sort and filter cells makes it easy to find, categorize, or reorganize lists or content. And yes, it’s nice to be able to do quick calculations when you are working with numbers.

Content Creation

Spreadsheets can be useful writing tools because they can help you organize resources and ideas. Here are a few ways you can use spreadsheets in content creation.

Structure a document. When you’re putting together a major document, PowerPoint deck, or book, the hardest part is often figuring out the structure. If you have seen (or authored) a document or deck that has the structure you need, consider mapping the structure out in a spreadsheet. I once drafted a book proposal by mapping out the structure of a book I admired, using column A to capture the title of each chapter and column B for each subsection within each chapter. Then I wrote my proposal in column C, mirroring the structure of the original book.

Create an asset file. If there’s a certain type of information you need again and again — like quotes you can use in speeches, or examples for presentations and reports — a spreadsheet can be a useful way of organizing that information in a way that makes it easy to find again. For example, I created a spreadsheet of digital lifestyle anecdotes, labeled by subtype (“money,” “family,” “business,” etc.). Because I can search or sort by those subtypes, I can easily refer back to those quotes when I need a story to illustrate a speech or blog post.

Build an idea file. Jotting down new project or story ideas in a plain text file is better than nothing, but makes it hard to organize and prioritize — let alone track those ideas through to completion. I now keep all my blog post and story ideas in a Google Sheet, with columns for “subject” (the broad topic area each idea relates to), intended outlet (e.g., HBR), and status (idea, pitched, assigned, complete). While some people maintain this kind of file using a project management tool like Trello, I’ve found a spreadsheet gives me more options for customizing my setup and organizing my ideas in different ways. Since it’s a pain to open my spreadsheet every time I have a new idea, though, I also maintain an Evernote notebook titled “story ideas”; when I have an idea, I immediately add it to that notebook (one note for each idea), and this If This Then That recipe simply adds my idea to that Google Sheet as a new row.

Planning and Organizing

In a world full of purpose-built task managers and productivity tools, it can be tempting to use a different application for each aspect of productivity or information management. But spreadsheets are often more flexible and powerful than specific productivity apps, because you don’t have to install a new application for each use case — and you can tailor them to your personal requirements. Here are a few of my favorite ways to use them:

Plan a project. You don’t necessarily need a dedicated project management tool to plan a project, track milestones, or capture dependencies. I create many of my project plans in a spreadsheet, with one column for dates (with a row for each week) and a column for each team or team member. That way I can map out what each person needs to accomplish in a given week, and keep the whole project on track. I often add an additional column to estimate my own hours at each step along the way, so I know how much time to block off in my schedule for each week of the project.

Set priorities. Whether I’m looking ahead at the week, the quarter, or the year, I find that a spreadsheet is the best way of capturing all my tasks or projects, estimating the time each one requires, and then prioritizing my to-dos based on the time I actually have available. It’s easier for me to see the big picture in a spreadsheet than in a task manager, and once I decide what I am going to prioritize, I can transfer actionable items to a task manager (without clogging it up with all the stuff I won’t actually have time to tackle). You can create your own spreadsheets for each type of prioritization process, or get the spreadsheets I use as part of the new Getting the Right Work Done tool kit.

Create a directory. AppSheet is a web service that lets you create mobile apps from spreadsheets, and it’s a great way to create a flexible contact directory for your team or organization. I created a mobile app for my kids’ school by getting parents to fill in a contact form I created with Google Forms; that form populates the Google Sheet that drives the directory, so we can offer a mobile app that not only lets parents search for a specific family but also allows them to see a list of kids by homeroom — or even a map of families so we can plan carpools. You can do the same thing for your organization, or even for your own personal contact list.

Working with Data

Surprise! Yes, spreadsheets are also useful in working with data. In addition to the obvious — organizing and calculating data, and creating basic charts — here are a couple of my favorite ways to use spreadsheets when working with data.

Surface interesting data. I do most of my serious data analysis in Tableau, but when I first dig into tables to summarize survey results, I use a spreadsheet to see which segmentations yield the most-interesting variations. For example, if I have a survey where results are segmented by age, gender, ethnicity, and social media usage (my usual columns), I want to see whether any of those segments differ significantly from the overall average. So I create what I call “Brent columns” — named for Brent Peppiatt, the colleague who showed me how to set up conditional formatting for a set of columns. If the responses for a particular segment (e.g., 18-to-25-year-olds) give a response that’s more than 10% higher or lower than the average, my conditional formatting turns that cell green. It’s a great way to quickly scan hundreds of response cells to see which ones are worth zeroing in on. (Excel has a button to do this quickly, but there is an art to making it work right, showing the right ranges in the right colors to actually help you interpret your data.)

Plan your infographics. If you’re producing a set of data-driven infographics for publication, you probably won’t want to release graphics you created in a spreadsheet. (I usually rely on Tableau or Infogr.am for infographic design.) But a spreadsheet is still essential for getting your data ready for visualization, particularly if someone else will do the actual graphic design. Create a separate worksheet for each graphic you need, and put the data you will be visualizing in a simple, clear table. Then create a rough mockup of your desired design using your spreadsheet’s built-in chart creation tools. Annotate the table and mockup with a few lines at the top of each worksheet, explaining what this graphic is intended to show, and what the key point of the chart needs to be. That makes it a lot easier for a designer to get their hands on the data (as opposed to wading through a huge spreadsheet) and it makes your communications goals clear.

Getting More from Your Spreadsheets

Once you start using spreadsheets for more than just financial data, you may find it helpful to have a few different spreadsheet applications in your tool kit. I use Excel for any spreadsheet I’m working on solo, or if I need advanced filtering, conditional formatting, or chart options. I use Google Sheets when I need to share a spreadsheet with other people, when I want to connect it to other web services (like my Evernote-powered ideas file), or when I want other people to add data to it from a form (like my support request system) — or when I want to be able to access it on the go.

There are also a few spreadsheet features that many people overlook or underuse but that will make spreadsheets more useful to you.

Learning how to use filters. Showing or hiding specific cells depending on whether they contain a specific word or value makes spreadsheets a lot more useful for quickly zooming in on specific information (as in a file of quotes or examples), and can speed up the process of cleaning up a workbook so that it’s more usable (by making it easy to just show and copy the rows you care about).

Conditional formatting. Making cells change color based on their content or value can take a little more work to nail down, but it is essential for anyone who routinely works with enormous spreadsheets of data they need to scan quickly.

Cell annotation. Most spreadsheet applications allow you to annotate cells; this lets you attach comments to a specific cell so you can explain what it means (or how to use it).

Invest a little time in learning to get more from your spreadsheets, and you’ll likely find yourself where I am now: turning to my spreadsheet applications as a way of dramatically simplifying and accelerating a wide range of business tasks.

The Economist Group recently published a report that provides several interesting perspectives on the development, use, and effectiveness of thought leadership content. Thought leadership disrupted: New rules for the content age is based on a survey (conducted in association with Hill+Knowlton Strategies) of 1,644 global marketing and business executives that was fielded in April 2016.

Survey responses were segmented based on whether the respondents were marketers (those who plan, develop, or manage thought leadership content) or executives (those who consume thought leadership content). In this post, I’m focusing on the survey data relating to executive respondents.

To set the stage for the data, it’s important to understand how The Economist Group defined thought leadership. Here’s the definition the firm asked survey participants to read before they took the survey:

“Thought leadership is the practice of influencing a community of interest by developing information, analysis and insight that helps its audience understand its world and plan for the future. It can be delivered through any medium, and can help companies raise awareness, shift perception and increase the status of their brand.”

Obviously, this definition is fairly broad, and it gives survey respondents some room to apply their own interpretation of what constitutes thought leadership.

Executives are Becoming Selective

More than two-thirds (68%) of executive respondents said they consume thought leadership content at least weekly, and almost as many (63%) said they have increased their consumption of thought leadership content over the past 12 months. But 75% of the respondents also said they have become more selective in their content consumption over the past 12-24 months, and 82% said that the volume of thought leadership content available is what has made them more selective.

The increased selectivity on the part of executives has made it harder for marketers to create break-through thought leadership content. Surveyed executives reported that, on average, they engage with only about 25% of the thought leadership content they see every day.

What Drives the Consumption of Thought Leadership Content?

The Economist Group also asked executives to identify three factors (from a list of 15) that drive their consumption of thought leadership content. The following table shows the top five consumption drivers chosen by the surveyed executives:

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Makes for Good (and Bad) Thought Leadership Content?

When executives were asked what qualities made thought leadership content compelling, the most popular qualities were:

• Innovative (40% of respondents)
• Big picture (36%)
• Transformative (36%)
• Credible (35%)

When executives were asked what words they associated with poor thought leadership content, the top three choices were superficial (34% of respondents), sales-driven (31%), and biased (28%).

The Impact of Thought Leadership

The value of compelling thought leadership to sellers is abundantly clear. Seventy percent of executives said that good thought leadership content led them to consume additional content from the same source, and 72% said they are more inclined to do business with organizations that are thought leaders.

Top image courtesy of Abhijit Bhadurl via Flickr CC.

B2B companies almost always focus on business value when marketing or selling their products and services. After all, ROI is the holy grail for businesses—if you can prove that you can deliver strong ROI, you win the deal, right? Except it doesn’t seem to work that way.

A 2013 study by Google and CEB’s Marketing Leadership Council found that, on average, B2B customers are significantly more emotionally connected to their vendors and service providers than consumers are.

The study surveyed 3,000 purchasers of 36 B2B brands across multiple industries and compared their responses with baseline consumer data. When asked, “Do you see a real difference between suppliers and value the difference enough to pay for it?” 86% of B2B buyers said “no.”

What made B2B buyers commit to their vendors if it wasn’t a difference in business value? Personal value. The study revealed that B2B purchasers are almost 50% more likely to buy a product or service when they see personal value€ (like an opportunity for career advancement or making their jobs easier) in their business purchase decision. They are 8x more likely to pay a premium for comparable products and services when personal value is present.

Here’s a 4-step process to infuse your marketing with emotion tied to personal value.

1. Understand what your target audience values.

Different groups of people will value different things, so it’s essential that you’re targeting what will resonate with your particular market segment. The best way to understand your audience is to talk with them. Asking the following questions will give you insight.

• What is important to you as a [title or role]?
• What is the most challenging part of your day?
• If you could eliminate one daily activity, what would it be?
• What job-related issue do you worry about the most?
• What are your one-year goals?
• Where do you see yourself in two years?

Once you’ve interviewed a representative sample of your target audience, map out the shared needs and goals that you see overlap. These are the personal values you’ll want to focus on in your marketing.

2. Identify the language and messages that connect with your audience’s personal values.

You need to learn how your prospects and customers talk when describing the needs and goals you’ve identified. What words do they use? What’s the level of frustration or desire? You can’t learn this information by asking them—they won’t interact with you in a natural, unguarded way. You need to “eavesdrop” in their natural environment—in LinkedIn or Facebook groups, online forums, and social media conversations. Then craft your messaging using your buyers’ words and phrases.

3. Test different messaging to see what resonates.

How will you know if you’ve hit upon the right messaging? You won’t know until you test. Try different messages in your email marketing and on social media and look for what gets liked and shared the most.

4. Motivate buyers to act by digging into the pain of non-action as well as highlighting personal gains.

Once you’ve captured a buyer’s interest with your appeal to personal value, you’ve got to motivate that buyer to take action and make the purchase. You’ll always face an uphill battle because buyers worry about the risk involved in a purchase. You have to overcome that worry by showing that the pain of not taking action is greater than the pain of worry. You’ll find which pain to dig into for your specific audience in the research you did in Step 1. In your messaging, highlight the personal difficulties or emotional needs that should be solved or met, as well as future personal gains from the purchase.

We forget that B2B buying is really P2P (person to person) buying. Companies don’t buy from vendors. Purchasing agents, managers, C-suite executives, and partners buy from salespeople, company reps, and freelancers. And these people are just as influenced by emotion as consumers. The emotion is different, but it’s just as present.

In this week's #EmailChat, we teamed up with Express Writers, a copywriting agency known for creating epic content for their clients, to talk about the ways that modern marketers can optimize their content for maximum shareability. From getting more likes, shares and retweets to increasing email opens and clicks, read on for your five-minute guide to share-worthy content.

When creating content, aim to engage

You can't predict when or if a piece of content will go viral, but you can aim to make your content more engaging. And creating actionable, engaging content is a vital part of any marketing strategy. https://twitter.com/oliviadello/status/784064739332780033 Shareable content is – in it's most simplest terms – content that has a likelihood to be shared. MovableInk calls it content that "makes you feel something." It's how you know you're delivering a great experience to your readers. https://twitter.com/movableink/status/784063630547513344 https://twitter.com/ExpWriters/status/784064117338435584

Shareable content is not one-size-fits-all

We asked what the qualities of a share-worthy piece of content were, and we received quite the influx of tweets on the topic! Our guest, Express Writers, said, "Shareable content should provide value to your audience and speak to their interests. Give them what they're looking for!" https://twitter.com/ExpWriters/status/784065254712025089 Others stressed the importance of relevancy. https://twitter.com/movableink/status/784065314426355712 What is the goal of your content? What kind of feeling are you trying to evoke from your audience? It's important that you answer these questions as you walk through the content creation process. https://twitter.com/oliviadello/status/784065497159655424

Some are more shareable than others

The content that sees the highest engagement really depends on your audience, but we have seen some stats that suggest that multimedia content has a higher likelihood of sharing. Think eye-catching graphics, videos, and GIFs. List-style posts also do really well, as people love their quick and "snackable" format. https://twitter.com/oliviadello/status/784067049135931392

Optimize for shares

You guys couldn't stress it enough: When it comes to creating shareable content, you should make it easy for your readers to share! This means adding social sharing buttons to every post, 'Pin It' buttons on images, click-to-tweet links, etc. We loved what @PamelaHughes shared about promoting her email list: https://twitter.com/pamelahughes/status/784067998822834176 Plus, teasing your email content is a great strategy for giving people incentive to sign up for your newsletter. https://twitter.com/movableink/status/784068756536455169 https://twitter.com/missmontesa/status/784068900032024576

Add these words to your email vernacular

When's the last time you asked your followers to retweet your post? Or your email subscribers to forward your newsletter to a friend? Sometimes the most obvious answer is something that gets glossed over, but telling people to simply "share" your content can have a big impact. https://twitter.com/missmontesa/status/784069941150572544 https://twitter.com/ExpWriters/status/784070040765235201

Keep an eye on your performance

The numbers don't lie; if you're serious about optimizing your content, analyzing your data is a must. https://twitter.com/oliviadello/status/784071464031051776 Whether you're looking to increase your reach on social media or improve your open and click through rates, you need to get down and dirty with your data. Again, remember the goal and make necessary tweaks to continuously improve. https://twitter.com/ExpWriters/status/784071650857852928 https://twitter.com/missmontesa/status/784071792340135936

TL;DR: Your share-worthy content checklist

https://twitter.com/ExpWriters/status/784073469893943296 Before you hit 'send' (...or post, tweet, pin), be sure to consider the following as you review your content:

• Emotion - How does it make your reader feel?
• Relevance - Does this piece of content fit your niche?
• Design - Are you using the right colors and graphics to optimize for shares?
• Targeting - Does your content include the right words, phrases and hashtags to get your audience to interact?

https://twitter.com/movableink/status/784073567839322112 https://twitter.com/oliviadello/status/784074170896449536

Next month

Join us on Thursday, November 3 at 12pm ET for the next #EmailChat, featuring guest host AddThis. Spread the word: [bctt tweet="Save the date! @AWeber #EmailChat on Thursday, October 3 at 12pm ET featuring @AddThis. " via="no"]

The post 7 Ways to Create Share-Worthy Content appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

It is a fact that the properties of water are two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.

This fact is easily proven using an exemplar, a scientific method of proof. You look at a water molecule through a microscope and notice that you see two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. You ask someone else to look through the microscope, and they report the very same finding. This injunction is repeated, and you have a fact. No one ever discovered evidence to the contrary.

My friend Graham wrote a post on LinkedIn, hyperbolically titled Personal Relationships no longer matter in B2B Sales. The evidence he cites regarding some emerging trends are worth noting, but they are not, as he believes them to be, facts. They are surely not unyielding scientific facts. They are instead contextual trends and some of his personal experiences, being found in some places and not in others, experienced by some, but not all.

It is a very rare thing that I respond so directly to a post like Graham’s, but I find this line of thinking dangerous. It is disempowering, and it is an abdication of your duty to create value for your clients, something that is made more difficult through an arms-length process and a transactional relationship—the resulting sales landscape in Graham’s view.

Fortunately, Graham mostly misreads the evidence. The trends he cites, in fact, point to the opposite conclusion.

Consensus Buying Behaviors

Consensus buying behaviors do not spell the end of personal relationships in B2B sales. Citing CEB’s research that there are now 5.2 stakeholders in the average B2B buying decision, Graham suggests that you cannot “develop meaningful relationships” with multiple stakeholders from “cross-functional” segments of the business and from “different regions, all with their own (and often conflicting) agenda(s).” Yet this is exactly what we do.

Commercial relationships are personal. However, being known, liked, and trusted now also requires another component: economic value. To create that economic value, it helps to be known, liked, and trusted, because that improves the likelihood of you being able to build consensus and manage change.

Can you imagine that consensus can be more easily found with no personal relationships? Is the salesperson’s absence in this process going to allow this consensus to spring from thin air, with silos being torn down on their own, concerns resolving themselves, and enlightened stakeholders suddenly setting aside their differences for the greater good without so much as a peep? Happy days were this true. But it isn’t.

There are plenty of salespeople who successfully manage multiple relationships and help their clients find consensus around change, even when they are spread out across the globe, and even when they have competing agendas. There are also plenty of salespeople who cannot. Either way, this work is being done successfully by salespeople every single day.

Graham’s next point is in conflict with this point. That point is the idea that people buy from machines and websites.

Avoiding the Salesperson

If a salesperson cannot help find consensus, how on Earth does a website enable an agreement between conflicting agendas and needs that are at odds? The idea that buyers don’t need salespeople is mostly true in B2C, and in more transactional B2B sales.

Graham suggests that buyers in “practically every industry, segment, category, and region are now demonstrating that they prefer to bypass the salesperson every chance they get.”

All generalizations are lies, and this one is no exception. There will be countless sales calls made during the week in which you read this post, all with prospective and existing clients who have agreed to meet with a salesperson. Some portion of these prospects and clients may have chosen to place an order online, with as many or more preferring to speak with someone who can actually help them come to the right decision.

Incorrectly, Graham cites the reason for the resistance to meeting with salespeople as the buyer’s knowledge that “each and every salesperson has a vested interest in trying to convince the buyer to purchase their product regardless of whether it’s the right fit for their problem.” This generalization is also out of sync with how most salespeople sell. Most salespeople don’t sell people things they don’t need. The reason many B2B buyers don’t like to meet with salespeople is because they are presently satisfied, and because too many salespeople waste their time.

Citing Forrester, Graham says, “93% of B2B buyers say that they prefer to buy online rather than from a salesperson when they’ve decided what to buy and just need to make the purchase” What people say they prefer in surveys and what they do are often at odds, and that is likely also the case here. But there is a certain truth that when a purchase is low risk, of low strategic value, and of relatively low importance, people will transact. That, however, is not the type of sale many people in B2B are engaged in now.

Buyers Have Evolved, Sellers Have Not

Graham makes a statement of fact that is untrue when he suggests that “Buyers have evolved but sales people have not. B2B buyers no longer need a ‘personal relationship’ with you in order to make a decision. They will NOT stick with you just because you are a good person – trusted, likeable and dependable.”

In one sense, Graham is correct. Trusted, likeable, and dependable are no longer enough. You aren’t likely to have a client retain you if you don’t create economic value. To do so, you now need deep chops. You need business acumen and situational knowledge. You need to be able to manage change, as noted above. You also need to be a leader.

It is factually incorrect to suggest that salespeople have not evolved. Some may be evolving faster, and some more slowly, but there is an evolution that seems to match the customer’s evolution. Are we really selling like it’s 1958? Has the work of Rackham, and Heiman, and CEB, and Hanan, and Brock, and Bertuzzi, and Blount, and Weinberg and Konrath and many others not been widely adopted? What Graham sees as the end of personal relationships is really evidence of the evolution of commercial relationships, now requiring greater value creation, something more easily done with personal relationships, and frighteningly impossible without.

Digital Engagement

The Digital Kool-Aid has been distributed, and many have drunk deeply from what has been served. To their detriment, I am afraid.

From Graham’s post: “Yes, there are some instances when buyers still prefer to interact with a sales person, but when they do, it’s increasingly via digital means like email, chat, sales engagement platforms, Skype and collaborative software rather than F2F or via phone calls.”

As far as I know, sexting has not replaced sex. I say this only half joking. The truth is that the things that make us human haven’t changed much over the last 50,000 years. Trust still matters. Caring still matters. Having someone looking after you, helping you see around corners and avoid risk still matter very much to people who lead companies and make decisions.

Why would clients prefer Skype if not to see the person to whom they are speaking? What is it about looking someone in the eyes?

The belief that clients prefer not to meet face-to-face is extraordinarily incorrect and unhealthy, and suggesting that you forgo face-to-face visits is malpractice. There aren’t too many things that are going to help you create a preference for you, your company, and your solution like your presence. Showing up to understand your client’s world, to spend time with them, to learn about their business and, yes, to deepen your relationships will help you create a competitive advantage.

What This Really Means

Some types of selling are more difficult than they used to be. They require greater skills, as well as the ability manage more complexity. They also require different skills, like Business Acumen, Change Management, and Leadership, the final three chapters of my book, The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need.

Relationships are more important now, and more is required of you if you want to maintain those relationships.

All things being equal, relationships win. All things being unequal, relationships still win. Your job in sales is to make all things unequal. Don’t believe me? Try to compete successfully without them.

I just looked over my last week’s calendar. I made a face-to-face sales call every day last week.

The post Personal Relationships Matter More Now Than Ever In Sales appeared first on The Sales Blog.

It’s all over the Internet: Social Selling. One of the newer buzzwords added to our business vocabulary. But what is social selling? How can the most powerful business development tool, LinkedIn, play a key role in you generating more business opportunities? How can you benchmark your progress with metrics? How is your LinkedIn presence helping or hindering your sales?

Social Selling & Its Role in Your Business

Thousands of results populate when searching for the definition of social selling. Why? The term itself is newer to our business pocket dictionary, but the truth is that selling has always been social. From networking events, to business meetings, to countless phone calls…In order to sell we must be social. We must interact with other professionals and build relationships to determine who is the right fit for our products and services. Unless you have been living under a rock for the last fifteen years, you know that the buying process has changed.

How the Buying Process Has Changed

Business is conducted virtually through online platforms at an ever-growing rapid rate. Buyers are engaged online and vetting your company throughout the entire purchasing process, even through implementation*. A study released by LinkedIn in early 2016 states that buyers are also 7.2x more connected than the typical LinkedIn member. What does that mean for you? If you are not connected with your clients and prospects, you better be, or else your competition will be.

Also, according to Forrester Research, “90% of the buyer’s journey may be complete before a prospects reaches out to a salesperson.” This is critical. As salespeople, we cannot be content with finding one key decision maker and directing all prospecting efforts to only them. We must reach a broader buying group, which means targeting messages to scale within multiple parts of a prospective company so we can influence the final buying decision. Not to mention that there are now 5.4 people involved in the average B2B buying decision*.

With the majority of buyers saying they do not respond to cold outreach, it makes sense to hear that buyers are 5x more likely to engage with a sales professional via a warm introduction than cold outreach*. This means that knowing the people in your immediate LinkedIn network is critical if you want to utilize it as a business tool in your prospecting tool belt. The more you can authentically know those 1st level connections, the greater chance you have in asking for and receiving warm introductions.

Measure, Benchmark, Commit, Repeat

Less and less I am challenged by a potential client asking me, “What success can you guarantee me through LinkedIn?” Those who do not ask this question understand that they are going to get out of the tool what they put into it. This is not to say we cannot measure and benchmark your progress and success though. On the contrary, LinkedIn developed a score called the Social Selling Index that allows us to capture our current status, see where we need to make improvements, and then adjust as necessary.

The LinkedIn profile accounts for 25% of the SSI score and it reveals, in my opinion, the most important element of the score and your success with LinkedIn in general. I always say that I can teach you how to be the most proficient LinkedIn user, but if you do not look reasonably intelligent, no one will engage with you.

How complete is your LinkedIn profile? Is it an accurate and complete reflection of how the business community knows you offline? Have you looked at your colleagues on LinkedIn? Dedicating time to this is paramount to incorporating LinkedIn into your business prospecting.

As you continue to build and improve your LinkedIn profile, engaging with your network on a consistent and personalized basis is also critical. If you do not use LinkedIn regularly today, I recommend committing thirty minutes three times per week in your calendar to get you started.

By measuring your LinkedIn SSI score to benchmark your starting point, committing time in LinkedIn throughout the week, and repeating the process, not only will you build momentum and create a habit, but you will undoubtedly see how LinkedIn plays a key role in your social selling success.

If you are leading a team of sales people and do not give them access and training to LinkedIn, you are giving away deals to your competition.

Selling is not altogether a completely different animal than it was even just a decade ago; now, the relationships you are seeking to develop are more accessible and enhanced than ever before with tools like LinkedIn. So, what is your next move? Commit time to update your LinkedIn profile? Hire a consultant for private LinkedIn training? Delegate your company development funds to improve your team and organization’s presence and knowledge of LinkedIn?

Wherever your priority lands, take action. Start the conversation.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn by Lindsey McMillion Stemann, Principal of McMillion Consulting, LLC.

What if I told you that your best performing and the highest engaging channel is one that you don’t even use? As you’ve probably figured out from the title, I’m talking about direct mail marketing.

Direct mail has some of the highest response rates and competitive cost-per-acquisition across most marketing channels including digital ones like email, social, and display advertising. If you’re still skeptical, here’s some data that might convince you otherwise.

How Direct Mail Marketing Outperforms Other Digital Tactics

From the DMA Response Rate Report 2015

• Direct mail achieves a 3.7% response rate with a house list and a 1.0% response rate with a prospect list. All digital channels combined only achieve a 0.62% response rate
• Cost-per-acquisition for direct mail is very competitive at $19, compared to Email ($11-15), Social Media ($16-18), Paid Search ($21-30)
• Direct mail offers a strong return on marketing investment with the same ROI as social media (15-17%)

From the DMA 2015 Statistical Fact Book

• Of people who receive direct mail, 42.2% of recipients either read or scan it, while only 22.8% say they don’t read it
• Mail volume has been steadily decreasing, down by 35% over the past decade, which makes it easier to stand out

Now as a marketer you probably have two follow-up questions:

• How do I know if direct mail marketing is right for my business?
• How do I build an effective direct mail marketing campaign?

To address the former, we hosted a webinar with our partner and direct mail experts, Printing for Less (PFL). To help address the second question, we teamed up with our friends at Firewood Marketing to bring you this comprehensive guide to creating a direct mail marketing campaign.

How To Create A Direct Mail Marketing Campaign

As with any marketing effort, there are few critical questions you need to address prior to launching a campaign. Here’s a great visual from Firewood Marketing that highlights the six key factors that impact direct mail performance.

Defining Direct Mail Marketing Goals

Direct mail marketing campaigns can lead to a number of beneficial outcomes, such as increased lead volume, site traffic, demo signups, sales, and more. But before you walk through the content and logistics of your campaign, it’s important to determine which objectives matter most.

Here’s a list of questions you can use to organize and launch your direct mail campaign:

• What is your budget? Have you allocated enough resources to various marketing channels?
• Are you willing to try direct mail more than once? Note: Mailing regularly is a requirement of successful direct mail campaigns
• Do you have enough time to appropriately plan your campaign details? Have you thought about creatives, call-to-actions, design, and personalization?
• Do you have the data you need to launch a targeted campaign? Have you segmented your audience?
• Is your direct mail campaign going to a large enough group to test results? Note: A/B testing is relevant for non-digital channels as well

If you don’t have answers for all these questions yet, that’s okay. It’s important to have a solid understanding of your market, define clear objectives for your campaign, have a product that is mature enough to appeal to a broad audience, and most importantly have patience (this isn’t email).

Examples of Direct Mail Marketing Objectives

As you think about your direct mail objectives, remember that direct mail isn’t a ‘one-and-done’ tactic, and it should be part of an integrated marketing approach. So your objectives can (and should) vary based on your prospects and their stage in the buyer’s journey.

Here are some examples to help you get started:

• To generate 200 new sales leads over 8 weeks
• To get 300 prospects to my landing page and sign up for a webinar
• To have 50 prospects call our office to set up an in-person demo or meeting
• To cross-sell new products to 25 customers
• To have 100 people download our eBook from our website

Firewood Direct Mail Marketing Tip #1: Your direct mail piece should include a clear, simple call-to-action that directly aligns with your marketing goals. So if your goal is primarily lead capture, it would make sense to direct your prospects to fill out an online form. But if you are trying to make an immediate sale (and you have the kind of product that doesn’t require a long sales cycle), only providing a phone number for response may generate a better close rate.

Determine Cost-Benefit Analysis

If this is your first time launching a direct mail campaign, or you’re interested in testing out the performance of direct mail against digital channels, a cost-benefit analysis is a handy way to measure the results of your campaign.

But putting together the exact cost for a direct mail campaign can be challenging since there are many variable costs, including:

• Design / collateral
• Number of recipients
• Type of mailing (postcard, large envelope, etc.)
• Postage (first class, standard, presorted, etc.)

Overall costs can vary greatly for a direct mail campaign.

Most successful campaigns yield a 1-5% response rate, but you need to look beyond this metric. Tracking other metrics like conversion rates, which represents the number of respondents that convert to paying customers, is another important metric to track.

Firewood Direct Mail Marketing Tip #2: Direct mail is an effective but expensive prospecting channel. That’s why it’s important to factor in the lifetime value of a new customer – not just the immediate CPA – when doing a cost-benefit analysis.

Targeting Your Best Audience

Consumption habits and conversion rates can vary drastically between verticals and audience segments. When building out your mailing list, it’s important to take into account your target personas, identify which stage of the buying cycle they’re in, and then align your direct mail offers to prospects accordingly.

The best practice is to build out segments of your target accounts and use fit, behavioral, and intent data (from your CRM, marketing automation, and predictive platforms) to ensure you’re reaching the right audience. A big misconception with direct mail is that it’s a “one-size-fits-all” channel. On the contrary, direct mail nowadays (like other marketing channels) is about personalized and timely offers that target custom lists based on all available customer and prospect data.

Why Using Predictive Simplifies Direct Mail Marketing Campaigns

It would be remiss of us to not talk about the data behind your campaign since it’s one of the most critical elements of your marketing efforts.

If this is your first campaign, it will be extremely helpful to take stock of the success you’ve had on other channels – digital advertising, organic user growth, social media, etc. – and expand on that success with direct mail.

Your campaign is only as good as the data supporting it, and predictive can elevate your campaign results with more targeted outreach. Marketers can use predictive signals such as company size, region, web presence, etc. to get more details into audience segments, allowing for better personalization.

Predictive also enables marketers to identify “look-alikes” or accounts with attributes similar to their existing customers, to identify new leads in their CRM that have never been reached before.

Firewood Direct Mail Marketing Tip #3: The key to direct mail success is targeting the right prospect at the right time. Use trigger events (like relocation, close of funding rounds, new hires, promotions, etc.) in conjunction with other targeting variables to maximize marketing relevancy and success.

Deciding What to Send

When thinking about your direct mail offer and what you should send, use principles like the AIDA formula (see below) to prepare clear copy and a desirable offer.

A – attention (awareness): attract the attention of the prospect / customer

I – interest: raise interest by focusing on and demonstrating advantages and benefits (instead of focusing on features)

D – desire: convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs

A – action: lead customers towards action and/or purchase decisions

If you’re still struggling with building an offer, start with a simple thought exercise of writing a letter to your prospect. This will help clarify what you want to express, then build out your offer with the AIDA formula.

Firewood Direct Mail Marketing Tip #4: Unusual formats, shapes, and sizes can help your message to stand out in the mailbox and get noticed. But be careful about getting too “quirky” or you may not be taken seriously.

Crafting a Compelling Call-To-Action (CTA)

Similar to your digital efforts, it’s important to include a clear and compelling CTA in your mailer. Remember: The direct mail offer is just one step in the buyer’s journey. So be sure to share a logical “next step” for your prospects.

For example, direct your recipients to a specific landing page, which can make it easy for them to find more information, and also help you track the success of your campaign.

Creating Direct Mail Offers

The offer is an important part of your direct mail campaign, after all, it incentivizes your prospects to take a favorable action. When creating your offer, refer back to the direct mail objectives you defined earlier and consider all relevant audience information.

Your offers can vary greatly based on the prospects you’re targeting and the campaign’s intended goal. Here are some examples to help get you started:

• Early bird discounts or special introductory prices to boost sales
• Free gifts and samples to increase brand awareness
• Free reports or eBooks to generate leads
• ‘Recommend a friend’ offers to grow your subscription base
• Loyalty programs to encourage upsells and cross-sells

You could also team up with a partner company to offer their product in return for trying out yours. For example, offering an Amazon or Visa gift card to respondents that fill out a survey.

Firewood Direct Mail Marketing Tip #5: A direct mail piece with a clear offer will outperform one without. But to maximize lead quality, you’ll want to tie the offer directly to your product or service (think free trial or percentage off) rather than gift cards, cash, or other non-relevant offers.

Printing and Mailing Logistics

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that printing and mailing are a big part of your direct mailers. If you’re new to direct mail and need some help, use the information below to guide your mailing efforts.

Printing

If you’ve ever had business cards printed you most likely are familiar with the importance of color matching, paper types, and straight cuts. But there are two overarching tips you should keep in mind to help jumpstart your printing efforts smoothly:

1. Build relationships: If you’re serious about direct mail and plan on running several mailings, start building relationships at a few print shops. You need multiple contacts just in case one of them is too busy to handle your campaign needs. Note: The print shop doesn’t have to be local, but they should ideally be accessible, have the bandwidth to handle last-minute changes, and deliver on time.
2. Ask for references: As you look for new contacts, reach out to any partners or companies that have done direct mailers in the past. Or, ask your print shop of choice to direct you to reference customers. Use these references to ensure your print shop delivers high-quality mailers on time. Get additional information to help address any questions you might have about the process, especially if this is your first direct mail campaign.

Mailing

If you’re only sending postcards or something simple, then you can take them from the printer to the post office. But if your mailers require folding, envelopes, order forms and more, you probably need to enlist the help of a Mail Processing Facility.

A Mail Processing Facility will take all of your materials, put them together, and send them off via USPS. Standard practice dictates that the facility will provide a quote from USPS for the shipping. Note: It’s also often suggested that you should issue a check payable to USPS for the amount of the quote – to ensure your payment is going to the postal service and no one else.

Firewood Direct Mail Marketing Tip #6: There are a lot of small, but incredibly important, steps that will either make or break the accurate production, personalization, and mailing of a direct mail campaign. To avoid common pitfalls, choose a printer who specializes in direct mail, and let them guide you.

Measuring Success

Measuring the success of your direct mail campaign doesn’t have to be tricky. Use the tips outlined below to simplify measuring the performance of your mailers.

Testing Different Offers

Similar to other marketing campaigns, it’s important to test out various offers, CTAs, headlines, images, and other aspects of your mailers. The most successful tests experiment with a specific area of the mailer. Some examples include:

• Offers: offer a cash discount ($10) or a percentage discount (10%)
• Calls to Action: ask one group of recipients to call, and ask the other group to email

Similar to A/B testing in digital channels, testing your mailers can ensure that your next campaign outperforms the first one.

Coding Mailers To Track Responses

Although your mailer is going out in a non-digital channel, you can still track responses to your campaign by assigning each mailing a batch number. Adding specific calls to action to your mailers helps you calculate the total response, and adding unique codes to your mailers helps you easily track individuals response.

To collect responses using codes, you can set up a unique campaign URL, email address, or phone number that invites respondents to enter their unique codes. For example www.yourbusiness.com/09141783

Note: Some companies use codes effectively by inviting recipients to visit a website to enter a raffle, fill out a questionnaire, or collect a prize.

Firewood Direct Mail Marketing Tip #7: In addition to using unique URL, phone numbers and the like to track responses, always do at least one match back after every campaign to correctly attribute prospects who were impacted by your direct mail campaign, but chose to respond via non-trackable channels (like through your home page, or at a brick-and-mortar location).

Calculating ROI

When measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your campaign, you need to take multiple factors into account. Here’s a list of variables you should consider when calculating the ROI for your direct mail campaign:

• Campaign audience size
• Cost per mailing
• Total campaign budget
• Response rate
• Conversion rate
• Number of buyers
• Average revenue per buyer
• Revenue generated
• Profit generated

Let’s look at an example calculation to better understand how you can calculate your campaign ROI. For the sake of this illustration, we’ll simplify the example by assuming:
Revenue – Campaign Costs = Profit

Results of the campaign

• Campaign audience size = 5,000
• Cost per mailing = $0.60
• Total campaign budget = $3,000
• Response rate = 1.4%
• Conversion rate = 92.9%
• Number of buyers = 5,000 * 1.4% * 92.9% = 65
• Average revenue per buyer = $100.00
• Revenue generated = $6,500
• Profit generated = $3,500

Using the data above, we can calculate ROI by looking at Profit / Total campaign budget:
$3,500 / $3,000 = 116.7%

As you can see from this scenario, even with a very low response rate, you can achieve a high ROI with direct mail marketing.

Note: To track and measure success, you should add all recipients of your mailers to your CRM. If you use Salesforce, using the “Campaign” object is an easy way to attribute revenue to certain marketing campaigns.

Firewood Direct Mail Marketing Tip #8: Always use lifetime value (LTV) when calculating direct mail ROI. While often more expensive to acquire, in our experience direct mail-sourced customers can often have a significantly higher LTV than customers sourced through other channels.

Recap & Getting Started

This can be a lot of info to take in, so here’s a quick rundown of the key factors for direct mail success:

Now that we’ve covered the basics, it’s time to put everything you’ve read into practice.

Creating a high-performing direct mail campaign takes time and effort, so be persistent. And, keep an eye out for these common pitfalls.

It might be intimidating to keep sending your mailers to the same address when you don’t receive a response, but remember that timing is a critical part of any marketing process. If you build your campaign on accurate business data, target the right audience segment, and personalize your offers to resonate with prospects, then you should have the confidence to continue sending mailers until you convert the address to a customer.

Firewood Direct Mail Marketing Tip #9: Just like any online marketing effort, be prepared to test, learn, and test again. It is rare that any direct mail campaign will be successful right out of the gate, so allow a minimum of 6 months to a year of focused testing before deciding whether direct mail is right for you and your marketing efforts.

Learn more about direct mail marketing and find out if it’s right for your business by watching this webinar we hosted with Printing for Less (PFL).

The Pipeline Guest Post – Elizabeth Dupont

How many calls do you handle on a daily basis?  If you’re in sales, you probably make at least 50 calls a day, and that’s not even counting how many you calls you receive. You spend most of your day making connections and engaging customers, but it would be impossible to remember the minutiae of every conversation. So how do you keep track of who you’ve spoken with and when?

The answer is call tracking.

The Basics and Benefits of Call Tracking

When you were in college, no doubt you spent a lot of time taking notes. It was tedious work, but it always paid off when you were able to remember information for your exams. The same concept holds true with phone calls.

Call tracking is essentially “taking notes” on each call you make and receive. You record details on the person with whom you spoke, what type of call it was (i.e., outbound or inbound), and the time and date of any follow-up calls or meetings you may have scheduled. When you save information about the call, you set yourself up for better communication with the customer as well as practical statistics of each call. This way, not only are you gaining critical information on how much phone traffic you receive, but you also make it easier to keep track of your customers and where they are in your sales process.

An added (and very important) benefit that sales tracking provides is that it allows you to create a better overall experience for your customer. Your customers are individuals, and they want to be appreciated and treated with respect. Remembering important snippets and details from previous conversations shows that you understand your client’s needs and want to provide them with solutions, not just make a sale. By logging such details about each sales call you make, you can make each call personal and relatable for your clients.

On the more technical end of the spectrum, call tracking also has the benefit of revealing certain metrics about your business. For instance, you can see at a glance how many outbound and inbound calls you’re making and receiving on a daily basis. You can also view statistics on how many calls you’re missing versus how many are answered, so you know exactly what area of your business needs the most attention.

Top Sales Tracking Methods

Now that you’ve seen the importance of call tracking, the next bridge to cross is implementation. There are several ways to keep track of your calls, but here we’ll go over the three most-used methods that make logging easy and effective.

1. VoIP Call Tracking: If you’re logging calls mainly for the metrics, then this is the route for you. VoIP systems digitally and automatically track your inbound, outbound, and missed calls, providing you with detailed reports on each area. This allows you to see which hours and departments received the most phone traffic, so you can tell whether you’re staffed accordingly or whether you need to be making more sales calls.
2. CRM Software: When your CRM software is linked to your VoIP system, the two can work in tandem to give you the best possible tracking available. Place a phone call using your VoIP system, and your CRM will automatically pull up specifics on the customer and your previous calls. When you’ve finished the call, your CRM will prompt you to log the call, and you can add more notes on the call and save it for future. This not only gives you the bare-bones metrics (i.e., whether the call was inbound or outbound, the duration of the call, etc.), but also allows you to add in your own details so you can give a better customer experience.
3. Call Report Templates: This is the manual, DIY method of tracking calls if you don’t have VoIP or CRM. Call report templates are basically worksheets with areas for you to fill in the particulars of the call yourself. You can make your own template using a program such as Excel, creating a spreadsheet with individual columns for date, time, inbound/outbound, customer name, notes, and any other information that you wish to provide on each call.

Call tracking may seem superfluous, but in an age where businesses are dealing with larger call volumes, it’s critical to have some way of monitoring your call info. Call tracking is the key to keeping tabs on your leads in a systematic, organized manner, so you and your customer will both benefit.

About Elizabeth:

Elizabeth Dupont specializes in various fields including business, marketing, and technology, and regularly writes for Fit Small Business and other publications. When she isn’t writing, she’s wrangling her four kids, working on art projects, or reading fiction. Connect with her via LinkedIn or via email at [liz.dupont09@gmail.com].

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The post 3 Ways to Stay on Top of Your Sales Calls appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

You write emails every day to prospect, nurture, and follow up with leads. And then what happens?

You sit and wait. And if you're like most salespeople, you never hear back from the majority of your recipients.

Those unopened emails are lost opportunities. Lost revenue. Your company can’t afford that. You have a quota to hit. You can’t afford to lose these opportunities.

What if you could write subject lines that get your emails opened? Better yet, what if those emails could effectively get prospects to book meetings with you?

You need to improve your emails, but your team is too busy prospecting and sending out emails and trying to hit quota to give you feedback. Your manager is stretched thin and too busy to give you feedback.

That’s why I’m partnering up with Keenan, CEO of A Sales Guy, Inc., to review your sales emails live on October 20th at 3:00 p.m. We’re going to give you immediately actionable feedback to improve your emails and start closing more deals.

No BS. No fluffy, expert, thought leader stuff. Just valuable, actionable feedback from real, successful salespeople. Take your emails and make them better. Turn them into messages that close deals. Register below to attend and get a link to submit your own sales email for review.

Save your seat for the live sales email review now.

Sales success all comes down to the quality of your sales pipeline. The type of prospects you pursue -- and how you go about pursuing them -- makes all the difference in whether or not you meet your sales goals. 

There are dozens of competing prospecting strategies out there. But these two powerful prospecting hacks will fill up your pipeline faster, and with better prospects, than any other approaches will. Implement these two best practices right now, and start to dominate your competition:

1) Craft a sales prospecting campaign.

One of the most common mistakes salespeople make is that being inconsistent about prospecting. They jump back and forth between phone calls and emails with no real plan in place. Instead of haphazardly contacting your prospects, create a consistent campaign using every single tool at your disposal. 

A sales prospecting campaign is an intentional plan that enables you to contact each prospect at least seven to 15 times, using a strategic mix of sales phone calls, letters, packages, voicemails, emails, and drop-ins. To create your plan, visually map out a consistent process you can track in your CRM.

For example, you could start with a phone call, email, and FedEx package. Follow up on the package a few days later with another email, call, and voicemail. If you still don’t get through to the prospect, it’s time to follow up with a letter, call, voicemail, and email.

However you schedule your methods of contact, track them in your CRM so you know where you are in the process with each individual prospect. Even if you don’t engage new leads right away, you’ll slowly but surely get on the radar with new prospects when you follow a consistent plan. Remember, all of your competitors are sporadically calling and sending prospecting emails without a real strategy in place, so you’re a step ahead of the game.

2) Host exclusive, invitation-only events.

How would you like to double your business this year -- and next year, and the year after that? One of the best ways to accomplish this lofty goal is to implement a creative strategy for attracting new clients: Host exclusive, invitation-only events as the lynchpin of your prospecting approach. Twice a year, host one of these events at a nice venue that makes your guests feel like they’re at a truly exclusive affair.

Once you have an event scheduled, ask everyone in your network for introductions to people who might be interested in attending. Once you explain the type of prospects you’re looking to include, people will get really excited to use their connections to provide someone they know with an exclusive invitation to your event.

Be sure to invite both your top clients and your top prospects. Once these groups start chatting, you’ll likely find that your top clients will do your selling for you! At the event, plan to share your best practices with your guests. Use your unique perspective as a salesperson to bring insight and spark good discussion about what’s going on in the marketplace. This will boost the value of your event -- and your value as an expert in your field.

If you’re looking for ways to radically transform your sales pipeline, there’s no better place to start than a sales prospecting campaign and exclusive, invitation-only events. Which of these strategies will you use first to connect with your most valuable prospects? Check out this ebook with 25 tips to crush your sales goal for even more powerful prospecting advice.

Time is money. Time is of the essence. There aren’t enough hours in the day.

How many days a week do you hear these statements? For sales teams everywhere, surely it’s quite often. There are plenty of time-saving tricks out there that promise a full day’s work can get done in an hour, but do they really work?

We sat down with one of our lead sales team members, Sandy Moore, to find out what she uses most frequently to manage her busy schedule and growing client list. She recommended HubSpot Sales, the customer relationship management (CRM) system from HubSpot that helps sales associates at every stage of the process. The CRM is free to anyone with a HubSpot account, and there are upgraded versions depending on the capabilities you need to support your team. Sandy gave us the top five tools she uses most frequently to stay organized and efficient that can help you, too.

1. Templates

There is a lot of back and forth communication between you and prospects during the sales process. Many of the conversations will be similar as you go through answering questions and determining whether you are the right fit to work together. Rather than spending time typing out the same information over and over, save that information in the HubSpot Sales tool for email templates. The HubSpot Sales templates tool is where you can create a folder to store standard language for emails. From the first outreach to closing the sale, you will have standard language ready to send to your prospect that you can use and customize for each individual. This also ensures that each prospect gets all the material they need to make an informed decision and keeps you from forgetting vital information.

Not only can you write out these templates, you can put them into the sequence you will use them throughout your sales conversation. This takes it a step further, as the templates tool helps you send email sequences to prospects if they haven’t responded after a certain amount of time and gives prospects the chance to schedule time to speak with you.

The templates are customizable, so you can tailor them to each individual based on your conversations.

2. Documents

The sales process takes a very similar course from start to finish, so it’s best to be prepared and to respond quickly. Having all the documents you need in one spot can make all the difference between getting a sale and losing to someone else. With the documents tool, you can upload items you send on a regular basis, which also helps keep those items consistent among sales team members. That way, all prospective clients are seeing the same documents.

Even more helpful: You can tell when the prospect has viewed the document and for how long, allowing you to gauge whether they read the document in its entirety and where they spent the most time. This will help you understand what’s most important to their needs.

3. Meetings

Trying to coordinate a meeting can get time-consuming as you go through your calendar, especially if you’re talking to a prospect in another time zone. The meetings tool allows you to share your calendar with the prospect; they can then see when you’re available and set up the time that works with their schedule. The link can be shared with anyone, and they can select a time and it will book in your calendar without you having to do anything. You will receive a notification that a meeting has been scheduled, who it is with and what time the meeting will be.

You can provide specific increments of time-based on where you are in the sales process. You will want to allocate more time to talk to someone who is further down the pipeline because it may require more time to answer questions or present documents. The meetings tool in HubSpot Sales lets you set the meeting length to fit your schedule.

4. Call Queue

As a sales representative, you likely spend part of your day making phone calls. Call queue can help speed up this task by eliminating the need to even pick up a phone. Go into call queue, pull up your list of prospects to call, and dial directly from the HubSpot Sales tool. But take note: You need to have HubSpot synced to your phone number for this to work.

As an automated call service, you don’t have to spend the time sorting phone numbers and remembering what your last conversation was—call queue does it all for you. Set it up to call a list of prospects and after a call is finished, call queue waits 60 seconds before dialing the next number automatically. It can even record calls if necessary, and the tool knows which states require callers to inform prospective clients that the call will be recorded so you stay compliant.

5.Email Sync

Have you ever realized you need to contact a prospect, but you can’t remember the details of your most recent conversation? When you sync your email with the Sales tool, your email correspondences with prospects get logged in your notes so you don’t have to go digging through your inbox. You can view the message you sent and what time by viewing the HubSpot database contact timeline, can sort through their contact record. Automatically send emails directly from the tool so you can do everything in one place—any organization’s dream.

What email looks like from Gmail account, check box to log to CRM

What it looks like to send email directly from contact record

With a daily schedule full of responsibilities, managing time the right way is crucial to achieving success and avoiding mistakes. These HubSpot Sales tools take your time into account, allowing you to work smarter, not harder. By eliminating the tedious, redundant tasks from your daily routine, you can focus on what you do best—nurture leads and meet your sales goals.

For more guidance on successful CRM strategies, download our CMO’s Guide to Sales Enablement & CRM: Advice from Top B2B Marketing Leaders.

Questions are some of the most valuable tools in a salesperson’s arsenal. With a well-crafted inquiry, reps can open their prospect’s mind to a new possibility, compel them to action, discover relevant information, or secure buy-in for the next step.

But if reps ask questions aggressively, they won’t get far.

Instead, they’ll alienate prospects or even anger them -- and, unsurprisingly, angry prospects aren’t eager to talk.

The silver lining? There’s a simple test for differentiating between aggressive and assertive questions.

How to Tell an Aggressive Sales Question From an Assertive One

When attempting to determine whether a question is aggressive or assertive, length is your first clue. In general, longer questions feel more aggressive than assertive ones.

When the salesperson leads with intent or context, prospects can feel pressured to respond a certain way. Getting right to the point, on the other hand, makes prospects feel like they can answer however they’d like.

That brings me to the second indicator -- the format. Aggressive questions start with the rep’s reasoning and then segue into the actual request, like so:

“It’ll probably take less time if I speak to your HR department myself. Who should I contact?”

Compare that to a question that cuts to the chase:

“Is anyone in HR assigned to this area?”

The first variation comes across as far more pushy. The decision to speak to HR sounds like a foregone conclusion, because the rep has introduced their reasoning first. The salesperson is also taking for granted their choice is the right one for the buyer -- and that’s a dangerous assumption to make.

The second variation leaves room for the buyer to introduce an alternative (like talking to HR herself, or suggesting a different contact), enabling buyer and rep to come to a mutually agreed-upon next step.

The Formula For Assertive Sales Questions

Reps can turn an aggressive question into an assertive one by asking it in one sentence. This rule forces them to cut out all preface, leaving only the core ask.

Here’s an example:

Before:“The events team will definitely want to come to the demo so they can evaluate our offering. When would be a good time for all of us to meet?”

After:“Is there a good time for you, me, and the events team to meet for a demo?”

Of course, the salesperson should provide an explanation if their prospect requests it. Imagine that in the above scenario, the buyer says, “Wait, why should the events team attend this meeting?”

The rep might reply, “If the events team manages their mobile bookings through the tool, it would free up operations to focus more attention on assisting your team.”

With that context, the buyer can either approve the events team’s attendance, or say it’s not necessary.

There’s an added benefit to asking one-sentence questions; When reps keep their queries short, they never fall into the trap of nervous rambling. It’s easy to accidentally ask a two, three, or even four-part question -- but doing so can easily confuse or even overwhelm a prospect.

Seasoned salespeople usually find that brief, focused questions keep the conversation on track and decrease potential hesitation. While it can feel awkward or rude at first to immediately get to the heart of the question, the more reps practice this technique, the more comfortable they become.

Tips for Asking Assertive Sales Questions

1. Leave yourself out of it

Remove the singular pronouns, including “me” and “I” around things you want. The assertive salesperson asks for what they want and waits for the answer.

For example, “You know, it would be great to get another point of view on the next call. Can you invite your boss?” You’re stating the answer you want and then convincing your prospect why they should say yes.

The aggressive person says something passive like, “I’d really love to have your boss on the demo.” This is a statement dressed as a question -- and it’s the sign of a passive aggressive salesperson who’s not brave enough to ask for what they want.

2. Don’t indicate your dislike of prospect answers

Every once in a while, a prospect will respond to your question with an answer you don’t like. Avoid the temptation to indicate your dislike. If a customer says they’ll review contracts at the end of the month -- then have to push that date back due to a legal issue, don’t say, “Really. Why’s that?”

This type of follow-up question expresses your displeasure at the delay and serves no purpose other than to challenge your prospect’s honesty and erode trust.

If your prospect says, “We have a two-week delay because of legal,” respond by saying, “Thanks for explaining that to me. What can you do by the date we agreed to?”

You’re accepting their answer and asking if there’s anything you can collectively accomplish by the original date. If their answer is, “I’m afraid we won’t be able to meet any of our deadlines quite yet,” it’s time to move on.

3. Be conscious of your verb choice

Telling your prospect, “I’d really like to meet your boss,” is a statement, not a question -- and it’s aggressive. If you want to meet their manager, say “I’d love the chance to explain the benefits of our product to your boss. Would it be possible for us to meet?”

You don’t close for access to your prospect’s manager, you close for power. The more specific your close, the more assertive you are. The more a prospect has to ask what you mean, the more aggressive you are.

If you’re following up after a competitor’s pitch, avoid saying, “I’m calling to check in.” Instead, explain “I’m calling to see how [Competitor’s] pitch was.” Keeping your request specific makes it impossible for your prospect to misunderstand or avoid answering the question.

Walking the line between assertive and aggressive takes effort -- and the way salespeople ask questions is just one aspect.

However, if you want to project confidence, involve your prospect in the decision-making process, and keep them focused, it’s always best to stick to single-sentence questions and skip the upfront explanation.

Want more from Jeff? Check out his "Your Sales MBA Blog" today. 

Many engineering firms focus most of their attention on operations, which is understandable considering the complex nature of the work. However, like any type of company, they must rely on a productive and effective sales operation in order to reliably communicate the value of their services to high-quality prospects.

Gather as many details as possible about your targeted prospects

Audience targeting is arguably even more important for engineering firms than it is for other types of businesses. Your prospects have incredibly specific needs and are trying to solve extremely detailed problems, which heightens the importance of identifying exactly whom you’re selling to and understanding what they’re looking for.

This requires a deep and robust connection between the marketing and sales functions, but it’s the surest way to demonstrate to your prospects that you have thorough knowledge of the issues they are facing. For optimal results, engineering companies should research and invest in innovative customer relationship management software solutions, which utilize advanced analytical processes by tracking numerous customer data points.

Use relevant content to drive value for your audience, even if a sale isn’t imminent

In a recent survey by Gartner, only one-third of buyers indicated that they believed salespeople effectively communicated business value. This is troubling indeed, since providing value should always be the number one priority for anyone selling anything, whether it’s a traditional product or a highly-technical professional service. Salespeople have access to a powerful tool that they employ all too rarely: content.

Content can be strategically incorporated throughout all stages of the selling process, and it can also be used to maintain communications with existing clients and contribute to future growth of the account. The one caveat to using content to drive sales is that it must always be relevant to the client’s business interests. Content is just another tool used in service of creating value for the audience, and sharing pieces that don’t follow this rule will encourage the client to ignore your communications or even potentially sever the relationship.

Be readily available for the client when things go right… and when they don’t

Many sales experts as well as buyers have indicated that they view salesperson responsiveness as one of the most important factors throughout the customer journey, and it’s prominence also follows through into the post-sale relationship. This is especially true for engineering services, as clients are managing expensive, lengthy projects that are varied in scope. When dealing with these clients, accurate and fast communication is an absolute necessity before, during, and after the job.

Emphasize KPIs that are tailored to your industry

Metrics are an integral component to the sustained success of any company, but not all indicators make sense in every situation. Engineering firms are working in a distinctly different selling environment than other product-based B2B sales organizations, and it’s important to strategically choose KPIs that reflect this fact.

For example, the sales cycle for a typical engineering firm is usually long when compared to other types of professional services and products. Prospects spend a significant amount of time researching options, and the negotiation period can be lengthy due to complex variables and regulations that must be examined. This increases the importance of effective lead generation, since spending so much effort on a prospect that isn’t a good fit can seriously impact the organization’s future. Because of this, you may want to focus on metrics that indicate the health of your lead generation effort, such as such as percentage of sales-qualified leads converted or lead profile deal size.

Pull out all the stops to nurture your relationships

Sometimes the details mean everything in the relationship between a client and a sales professional. Communication skills, responsiveness time, willingness to contribute ongoing value, and acting with respect and kindness all play crucial roles in maintaining healthy relationships with clients. Acquiring new customers is expensive for engineering firms, so it makes sense to try and provide as much value as possible for your existing customer base. These things may seem like small touches, but taken as a whole they represent your company’s dedication to nurturing a long-term business relationship.

Build trust, and then use it to everyone’s advantage

Building trust in a B2B setting often takes time, but once you have achieved it, it can yield tremendous benefits. Rely on your trusted and satisfied customers for high-quality referrals. With over 80% of buyers seeking recommendations before considering a purchase, having a trusted referral could easily be the difference between a new prospect accepting a sales call or looking at other options. Your existing clients will want to continue their fruitful relationship with you while opening up another opportunity for your firm to provide value for someone else.

The biggest disconnect between marketing and sales is the hand-off of marketing qualified leads (MQL’s) to sales and the acceptance of those leads (SAL’s) by sales. Unfortunately, the baton gets dropped more frequently than it is successfully passed.

My solution to this is having a lead definition agreed upon by marketing and sales, and the establishment of a judicial branch to evaluate leads that are not accepted and passed back to marketing or dead in the funnel. You can read more about the judicial branch here. 

According to Terry Flaherty, Senior Research Director, Demand Creation Strategies at SiriusDecisions in this blog, “Measuring the Impact of Successful Sales Handoffs” :

“Organizations with a formal SAL stage in their lead management process generate 9.3 closed/won deals per 1,000 inquiries, while organizations without a formal SAL stage generate only 4.6 closed/won deals per 1,000 inquiries. That’s more than 100 percent higher performance for companies that have the rigor of sales acceptance in their lead management process.

While the process is in place, the acceptance rate of 42 percent is still much lower than it should be. When marketing, teleservices, and sales are aligned on lead definition, the SAL rate should be at or above 85 percent. The 42 percent rate could be an indication of either disagreement in lead definitions in these companies, or inconsistent adoption by the sales team of the SAL stage in the process. So it’s great that companies are measuring this, but there are still significant opportunities for improvement.

Another possible contributing factor to the 42 percent SAL conversion rate is the SAL stage being triggered by lead quality assessed from the first sales conversation instead of by handoff. The SAL stage is intended to provide insight on the execution of the sales handoff process, not reflect lead quality. Lead quality will be assessed against the progression of leads and opportunities to the later stages in the Revenue Stream after the successful change-in-control process handoff.”

Imagine doubling revenue by managing the handoff of MQL’s to sales through the sales accepted stage.

If you want to talk about how that can be done, by establishing an agreed upon lead definition and a judicial branch, just let me know.

 

It’s a rapidly changing landscape for sales development professionals. Prospects are becoming harder to reach. They’re “smarter” about knowing which emails are coming from an automated system, even if it looks like a SDR could’ve written it. They’re not picking up phone calls, even from numbers in their own area code. They’re not accepting any and all LinkedIn connection requests.

At the same time, quotas are getting bigger. So how do you stand out from your peers and capture precious seconds of attention from key targets at the accounts you care about most? The answer: Better technology and teamwork.

More about the technologies later, but let’s talk for one second about teamwork. Odds are, you’re not going to get a prospect to engage the first time you reach out to them, even if it’s a carefully researched, timely email. Senior executives, especially, are just too busy these days. They also consume information in a variety of ways, from talking to peers, live events, LinkedIn, Twitter, and browsing relevant websites, your key targets are on more channels than ever.

All this means that sales development organizations can’t do it alone. They need to work with marketing to laser-focus on the people they’re targeting and be in sync in terms of messaging and orchestration across all the channels.

“Senior Execs are 2.5x more likely to respond to quality multi-touch campaigns.”

— Dan McDade, CEO, PointClear

Multiple touchpoints across different channels to multiple stakeholders is a great idea in theory, but it’s much easier said than done. But finally, there’s been a tech stack developed to help with solving exactly this challenge, a tech stack we’ve mapped to illustrate exactly the tools you need to help you with each challenge and channel.

“When it comes to SDR technology, you want Iron Man, not Terminator. Technology is there to make a good salesperson better… not to take the human out of the equation.”

— Matt Amundson, VP of Sales Development & Field Marketing, Everstring

Core Sales Development Tools

Who: Data Vendors

To identify and prioritize target accounts, find accurate contact data, and maintain data quality

Example vendors: Dun & Bradstreet, Leadspace, DiscoverOrg, Email Hunter, Norbert, Datanyze…

What: Account Insight

To understand what will be relevant and resonant at each target account

Example vendors: LinkedIn, InsideView, Mattermark, DataFox, Owler…

What: Person Insight

To help research individual prospects and customers and tailor relevant messaging

Example vendors: LinkedIn, Crystal, Accompany, Triggerfox…

Where: Human Email / Sales Email

To streamline and automate creation, sending, and tracking of highly relevant emails – ideally emails that are personalized, reviewed, and sent by human to humans

Example vendors: Engagio, Outreach, SalesLoft, ToutApp, Yesware…

Where: Phone / Dialer

To increase efficiency, drive consistency, and improve quality for phone and voicemail interactions

Example vendors: InsideSales.com, FrontSpin, RingDNA, Ring.io, Velocify…

Where: Social

To interact with prospects and customers via social channels

Example vendors: LinkedIn, Twitter, rFactr, Nudge…

Where: Orchestration

To synchronize interactions that span channels (email + phone + social + demand gen) and departments (marketing, sales development, sales, and customer success) into coordinated multi-step Plays

Example vendors: Engagio

“Orchestration is the big step – the leap from old-school sales development to the new account based sales development.”

— Kristina McMillan, Sales Development Practice Leader, TOPO

Infrastructure Tools

Beyond the core Sales Development technologies, there are additional tools that are essential for any Account Based strategy.

Core: Lead to Account Matching

To match leads to the right target account, tie their activity to the right company, route them to the right owner, and get credit for the campaigns that touch them.

Example vendors: Engagio, LeanData…

Core: Account Based Analytics

To understand which accounts have the best engagement and opportunity for growth (track MQAs), optimize SDR performance, and measure which marketing investments best reach target accounts and accelerate deals.

Example vendors: Engagio, ZenIQ… (plus BrightFunnel and Bizible for attribution-based analytics)

Core: Account Planning

To map accounts, track account information, and manage account strategies.

Example vendors: Altify, Revegy, manual…

Core: CRM

To manage accounts, contacts, opportunities, and so much more…

Example vendors: Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, SugarCRM, Hubspot…

Additional Tools for Account Based Marketing

In addition to the core tools listed above, there are a variety of tools that tend to be part of a broader Account Based Marketing initiative. When taken in conjunction with the Sales tools, you have the core elements of an Account Based Everything stack.

Who: Predictive Analytics

To identify and score potential accounts based on likelihood to convert

Example vendors: 6Sense, Everstring, Infer, Lattice Engines, Mintigo, Radius…

Who: Intent & Technographics

To improve account selection with advanced data

Example vendors: Bombora, BuiltWith, Datanyze, Ghostery, HG Data…

Where: Account Advertising

To show display ads building awareness at specific accounts

Example vendors: Demandbase, Terminus, LinkedIn, Madison Logic…

Where: Website Personalization

To customize the website experience for specific accounts and industries

Example vendors: Demandbase, Evergage, Marketo, Triblio…

Where: Direct & Dimensional Mail / Physical

To send packages, hand written letters, and other items to key people at target accounts

Example vendors: PFL, Bond… (this can also be done manually with checklists, mail houses, etc.)

TOPO, one of the preeminent think tanks on sales development, breaks down the technologies sales dev orgs use by their maturity:

Sales Development Technology Maturity

When it comes to technology for Sales Development, TOPO identifies three levels of maturity.

Source: TOPO SDR Benchmarks

We agree, but we think that in order to be fully optimized, sales development and marketing need to work together on key account penetration. Thus, we’ve zoomed out to look at all the tools marketing and sales development needs in the Account Based Everything Market Map.

The Account Based Everything Market Map

The ABE Market Map identifies vendors across each of the core technology categories.

Also, be sure to check out the linkable ABE Market Map. Drop us a comment at the bottom – we’d love to hear your feedback!

First things first. I’ve done the math on this, and each of your sales people is losing you money – and you’re not helping them.

While closing deals is often the most emphasised part of selling, you never get this opportunity without first landing appointments.

One of the mainstays of any business is getting appointments with influential people in an organisation.

Notice I didn’t say the “right” person, or the “decision maker”, that will come with time. It is rare you can call the CEO, CIO or CFO and get an appointment on the back of a cold call.

Most businesses today have a range of people involved with any purchase, particularly those in the technology sector. Unless you are very skilled at getting in to see the “right” people, your focus should be on getting in the front door and moving up the value chain.

You have one objective and one objective only – to get your prospect at ease as quickly as possible in order to schedule an appointment with them.

Research and Prepare

Cold calling may seem like a mundane task, and often it can be. Let’s be honest here, no sales person likes making cold calls.

Sales people enjoy building relationships and essentially want to close deals. That’s what you pay them for, right!

So think about this for a moment:

Your company’s reputation is on the line each and every time someone makes a bad call.

And you’ll do well to find me a sales person who prefers making cold calling over closing deals! Check out the Pros & Cons section from this feedback from BDM’s:

Sales people, you must be in the right frame of mind and understand the market you are calling into.

Calling the wrong people with the wrong mindset and faulty information won’t get you appointments. If you haven’t done your research properly, you can forget about it. Savvy buyers will know you are simply looking to sell something.

Research and preparation is a necessary starting point for efficient appointment setting. You need to call on people that have a genuine need or preference for the solutions you offer and be able to demonstrate value if you are asked.

Part of your preparation should be understanding objections and ensuring you have a logical set of steps to help the prospect overcome their own objections.

Because objections are good. You should welcome them. They allow you assist the buyer down a path that can help them overcome their objection.

Look at it this way: Which of these comments would you rather hear? “I’m not sure your solution can help us reduce our lead times for project delivery” or “Sure, send me on some information”.

Research the marketplace, align your prospecting efforts with the solutions your company provides and develop a clear profile of the audience you need to go after.

If your role is in sales management, coach your reps to make calls with the intent of helping targeted prospects with a need.

As someone who has been on the receiving end of cold calls (yes, I get them too!), there is nothing worse than a sales person who is not prepared for questions.

Stop Selling!

Yes, you did read that correctly.

Salespeople have a natural inclination to want to sell a product when interacting with a potential buyer. Nobody wants to have something pushed upon them.

Instead, appointment setting calls are designed to intrigue a prospect enough to get a face-to-face meeting. Your goal is to set an appointment, not sell them something. (Or as in the case of my new friend John, a demonstration of the service.)

By calling with a genuine desire to help, it is easier for salespeople not to pressure prospects.

Don’t force the issue. Instead, reps should call with a sincere belief that they are trying to help a prospect out of a situation or predicament. This helpful tone is less likely to offend buyers or put them on guard.

Remember, your goal is to arrange a meeting so don’t lose focus of that. Don’t be shy about getting to the point and asking for some time to introduce how your company has helped similar organisations. Just make sure you have your facts & figures correct.

How Sales People Are Losing You Money

A simple but often effective way to enhance your appointment setting efficiency is to turn this role over to an outside firm. Many sales reps dread cold calling above most other tasks.

Let them focus on the selling processes they relish to close more deals and turn appointment setting over to experts in this area.

Firms that specialise in appointment setting services usually have advanced processes, highly experienced staff, and technology tools to generate high-quality appointments.

Let’s look at it logically. And for the sake of simplicity, I’ve purposefully left out the additional costs associated with having someone on your payroll.

According to Glassdoor the average Business Development Manager salary per annum is

• Dublin is €44,875k
• London £43,719k
• San Francisco $97,067
• New York $105,218.

Let’s assume that your sales person spends (a very conservative) 2 hours per day researching and cold calling for new business and prospects.

That’s 10 hours a week, which is 40 hours per month.

So over the course of a year, each of your sales people spends a minimum of 480 hours just looking for new prospects.

If we take it that they work 8 hours a day, that is 60 working days prospecting.

And if there are 20 working days in each month, you’ve just lost a whole quarter to each sales person looking for leads and not closing any sales!

To put it another way, your sales people LOSE 3 months of closing new deals because they are too busy looking for new leads, costing you a minimum of €11,250, £10,929, $24,266, or $26,304 respectively. And that is per person!

Wrap Up

We all understand that if you can’t get an appointment, you can’t make a sale.

Therefore, it follows that salespeople need to spend adequate time researching and preparing for prospecting calls.

However, in spending a lot of their time doing this “top of funnel” activity they are losing out on buyers who may be closer to making a purchasing decision.

Salespeople are damn good at what they do – sales. So recognise that, and let them do what you pay them to do. Stop tying them down by asking them to focus on areas that negatively impact your bottom line.

Not only is it costing you money to carry on with this method, you are also losing potential clients to your competitors because of it.

One of the perks of my job is the ability to ask “why” like an energetic preschooler. For me, nothing evokes this question with more enthusiasm than participating in digital experience personalization discussions with Evergage staff and customers. For example,

“We are we going to change this hero image when visitors arrive after their first visit.”

“Why?”

“We need to inform mobile visitors about our mobile app.”

“Why.”

“We need to engage our email subscribers with content about a particular offer.”

“Why!”

These are all very reasonable plans. We hear them from customers all the time. But what transforms the “whys” from questions to statements or exclamations is an unrelenting desire to ferret out the origins of these requirements. The broader goal of these assessments is to assure that brands spend the necessary time to confirm that personalization execution is deeply rooted in broader company strategy.

At Evergage, we’ve established a workshop approach to helping clients connect the dots between strategy and execution. The building blocks are straightforward, but often under-considered. So if you’re planning out your personalization strategy, or even continuing to build on an existing strategy, you can ask yourself these five questions:

1. What are your business goals?

It sounds obvious to determine your goals before you begin any initiative, but we often see that marketers want to dive right in and begin planning personalization campaigns before they have established what they are trying to accomplish.

Do you want to improve customer satisfaction? Are you focused on customer conversions or lifetime value? Do you want to grow customer share of wallet, average order value or revenue per visitor? Do you want to impact the customer service experience by assuring access to relevant content? Knowing your goal is imperative in good personalization planning, as it helps you narrow your focus to those initiatives that will have real impact.

2. How will you measure success?

Measuring impact will not be possible without well-defined key performance indicators (KPIs). Even still, it is surprisingly common for business goals to lack defined KPIs.

Which metrics do you need to impact in order to reach your goals? You may want to examine bounce rate, engagement levels, content consumption, average order value, add-to-cart rate, cart abandonment rate, etc. — depending on your business model. Whatever the metric, make sure you have a strong baseline and reasonable benchmark lift targets to help validate business impact.

3. Who are you targeting?

In order to hit your goals and impact your key metrics, you need to know who you are trying to reach. It can be helpful to think about your visitors leveraging four key areas:

• Situational data: Geographic location, referral source, device and browser
• Attitudes and preferences: Customer interests, lifecycle, affinity, recency and frequency of visits
• True intent: Purpose of visit (browsing products, offer shopping, login, research, etc.) — intent will differ based on your industry
• Profile data: Demographic data, marketing responses, offline data, etc.

The combination of data elements should be used to help you characterize visitors according to different personas. Once you have identified your key personas and validated the corresponding characteristics, you can target those visitors specifically across digital channels and speak to them in a consistent and impactful manner.

4. What are your customer journeys?

Whether the digital experience for your customers follows a specific path or, more likely, a diverse range of touchpoints, summarize them into broader stages. For example, maybe your customers flow loosely through discovery, exploration, use, and inquiry stages.

Then breakdown these stages into groupings of visitors (or segments). For example, within the discovery stage, you can create segments of first-time visitors that arrive to your site from search, email, or social, or you can create segments of loyal customers who review complementary products. When you focus on where the visitor is in his journey, you will be able to assure the experience is relevant to him and that the impact of that experience addresses your business goals.

5. What data sources do I need?

Finally, before you begin implementing personalization, ensure that you have all the data sources you need to be successful. Data should not only support success analysis, but also drive a relevant experience in real time. Whether including market automation, CRM, ESP, BI or other data, make sure to evaluate how online and offline information can help positively shape visitor experience across your digital properties.

We recognize data integration is typically a process. The best way to advance your data strategy is to start simple and build from there.

Final Thoughts

Armed with your business goals, success metrics, personas, journeys and a data-centric engagement approach, you are truly ready to plan your personalized experiences. Answering these five questions shouldn’t be boring or laborious; we expect you’ll find the process informative, fun, and, most importantly, impactful.

If you were to believe everything that you read in the media, it would be tempting to believe that the global manufacturing sector is in a perpetual state of decline. The popular press often creates a negative and distorted view of the marketplace, however, and one which tends to be at odds with the reported facts and figures. Take the perception of the Chinese manufacturing sector, for example, which remains largely negative despite the fact that output has recently risen to its highest rate in October 2014.

This gap between perception and reality has been driven by a recent, economical evolution, with many Western countries such as the UK and the US now deriving the vast majority of their revenues from the provision of services. To many, this represents a decline in the global manufacturing sector, but this does not take into account the fact that the prevalence of production and industry varies between individual nations. In China, for example, manufacturing is the dominant driver of revenues, accounting for an estimated 46.8% of the nation’s GDP and millions of jobs.

So as we can see, manufacturing remains a key economic engine and one that generates billions of dollars on an annual basis. It also creates innumerable jobs, while showcasing incredibly durability when rebounding from periods of economic decline.

3 Lessons that Manufacturers Can Heed from the Leading Automotive Brands

No single sector embodies these strengths and the lure of the manufacturing industry better than the automotive trade, which remains at the forefront of innovation and product design techniques. For the leading brands such as Ford and Toyota, this desire to constantly break new ground is something that influences every aspect of their ventures, creating progressive workplaces which are the envy of other industries.

These brands and their approach to product innovation also offer genuine inspiration to start-ups and independent manufacturers across the globe, creating a template that drives success and long-term growth. For example: –

Understanding the Principle of Lean Manufacturing

When we think of creativity and product design, we often envisage highly engineered solutions that offer multiple options to customers. Adopting such an ethos incurs significant costs, however, which in turn can prove prohibitive for small manufacturers who are just starting out.

Fortunately, the efforts of automotive brands such as Toyota and Ford have shown us that innovative solutions and products can be created with minimal consumer options, particularly when you are looking to trial a brand new design feature or launch an original product. In fact, Toyota cultivated an entire philosophy based on this principle, which was referred to as lean manufacturing and prioritised the development of simplistic manual systems that could then be translated in technological solutions if they were effective.

Ford have also adopted this philosophy throughout its illustrious history, with lean manufacturing largely responsible for the brand’s renowned and immensely successful range of affordable cars. These models are often sold with no factory options when they are launched, as new products are designed in a single format and with one, carefully selected colour. This reduces costs incrementally across the range, without forcing the brand to compromise on the innovation or performance of each vehicle.

Clearly, lean manufacturing is something that can reduce the cost base for small or independent firms, enabling them to focus their design efforts while realising maximum profit margins.

Embracing Automation and its True Role within the Workplace

The rapid and unrelenting pace of technological advancement is something that many individuals find oppressive, particularly in humanised entities such as the job market. To some, the rise of automation and the prospect of technology eventually superseding human nature is something to fear, although much of this is borne out of uncertainty and misunderstanding.

While there is no doubt that automation has impacted negatively on some aspects of the job market, this is part of a targeted evolution that simply culls some jobs while actively creating others. In manufacturing terms, the purpose of automation is to reduce costs and improve efficiency, while making human employees more productive within increasingly expansive job roles.

This is a lesson that has long-since been heeded within the automotive sector, whether you consider the rise of automated manufacturing processes or the industry-wide development of driverless vehicles. There are other examples too, with the Stratasys brand having broken new ground by designing a car that can be manufactured by a 3D printer. Cultivated through a process known as additive manufacturing, this enables the brand to eliminate many of the heavy tools used in conventional automotive assembly and reduce their costs considerably.

Despite this, it also created new jobs roles and opportunities that are unique to the process of 3D printing. This is something that all small and independent manufacturers can learn from, as far from being something that is to be feared or detrimental to the human element of your brand, automation is an innovative tool that can be used to empower growth and employee productivity.

Creating a Culture of Bold and Innovative Thinking within your Company

While the concept of mainstream, driverless cars still has some way to go before it is fully realised, this type of innovative thinking is pivotal to the success of manufacturing businesses as a whole. It is also more prevalent in the automotive sector than anywhere else, as we can see from the sheer number of brands that are actively embracing automated technology and integrating this into their designs. Car brands have also proved particularly skilled at thinking creatively while maintaining a clearly defined value proposition, which is crucial to the viability of any commercial idea.

This is just one example from the market; of course, but the fact remains that there are many more that can offer inspiration to small and start-up manufacturers. Take Nissan’s launch of the world’s first, all-purpose electric car back in 2011, which has since inspired a number of imitators and catapulted this type of niche vehicle into the mainstream market.

Given that the success of this innovation also required creative marketing that was focused on budgetary constraints rather than the environmental benefits of the car (in order to reach a wider target audience), the value of clearly-defined and bold thinking is obvious as is its ability to drive long-term growth.

For any burgeoning manufacturer, there is a pressing need to create a culture of bold and creative thinking within their company. Product designers should be empowered to think creatively and without limitations, before these ideas are shaped and given context by strategic marketers and operators within the business. This helps to simultaneously promote and manage creative processes, enabling manufacturers to break new ground while remaining commercially successful.

B2B marketers are always pressed for time. Marketers build strategies, run programs, manage technologies and teams, so how do we make the most of our time? The goal is to be as efficient as possible while still producing a quality product. Work smarter, not harder.

Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) are often referred to as the “Swiss Army Knife” of technology. They are such a powerful tool that there aren’t many things that a robust MAP can’t enable. Modern marketers use MAPs to help streamline processes, reduce errors during production and there are a million and one hacks to make the most of this technology.

Here are a few marketing automation hacks you need to try:

Tokens-
In Marketo, tokens are variables for dynamic content that create a shortcut to a specific value. Tokens can be set for programs, campaigns, leads, etc. If you have common elements across emails, tokens are a great way to not only reduce error but reduce time for editing. If you need to change the value of a token you can do so once, instead of having to manually edit every asset in the instance.

The first name greeting in your emails is a great example of how you can use a lead level token to populate personalized content. However, as a best practice, be sure to set a default value for your lead level tokens in case the lead doesn’t have a value for what your token is referencing.

A blog post by RevEngine states “When used properly, program tokens cut down the time marketing spends creating programs in half (or more).”

Cloning-
Cloning gives users the ability to replicate programs, assets, and lists identically. It reduces the amount of time it takes to build out a program or an email, simply by cloning an existing program or email with identical features. Just be sure to update the information relevant to the new program or asset.

Also as a best practice, be sure to confirm that what you are cloning from has passed through quality assurance tests and is free of errors. If not, you could be cloning multiple mistakes into new programs and assets, therefore creating more work for yourself versus saving time.

Snippets-
Snippets can be a time saver in the production process. Snippets are sections of reusable code and can be used in any editable region of an email or landing page. This is ideal for commonly used elements across multiple assets. Instead of writing new code for each element on each email or landing page, you can use a Snippet to automate the coding across multiple assets.

As Litmus states, “With the help of snippets, you can build emails more easily – and more quickly – than ever before. Spend less time building and troubleshooting emails, and more time creating better email experiences for your subscribers.”

If you are not already utilizing these marketing automation time-savers, you should be. There are numerous resources that can not only explain more in detail what Tokens, Cloning, and Snippets are, but they can teach you how to implement them in your instance. Get some time back in your work week by improving your production process and becoming more efficient with these marketing automation hacks and work smarter, not harder.

Two words: keyword research. The concept seems simple, on its surface. But as soon as you start peeling back the layers, it’s easy to succumb to a free-fall down a well of conflicting or never-ending questions.

For example, does effective keyword research take a long time? How does the inbound approach to search ranking actually work? What are the best tools? How can you compete for those super popular keywords, anyway? Or should you even bother with those at all?

These are just some of the most commonly asked questions when it comes to the age-old debate on whether or not keyword research still works. Let’s take a deeper look.

Keywords Matter

Let’s start by unpacking the most basic question out there: What is keyword research?

Essentially it is when people use keywords to find and research actual search terms that individuals enter into search engines. The knowledge about these actual search terms (search volume, competitiveness, etc.) can then help inform your content and marketing strategy.

Why would this matter? On average, almost two-thirds of your web traffic comes from organic search, which is driven by keywords. Or, more simply, keywords are the search engine equivalent of the questions your would-be prospects are trying to answer. (And you want to position yourself as the answer.)

Although the practice of performing keyword research may still be happening, the process of how we conduct it has undoubtedly evolved. From the research itself to the targeting process, things are different than than they were five years ago. Here’s an example.

Because that data is hidden, we need to go deeper — looking at things like Google Suggest and related searches, which are down at the bottom of the page. Moreover, we need to start conducting customer interviews. Today, we develop our core list of keywords through a focused content strategy that forces us to think of the audiences we want to target.

That means it’s imperative to get inside the head of your personas and to uncover their pain points. Without this kind of discussion, you’ll end up putting energy behind unfocused strategies with scattershot results.

Best Practices

Keyword research is extremely effective, but there are a few important steps you need to follow to guarantee you are getting the most value out of it.

Step 1: Create a list of relevant topics.

Think about the generic topics (about five to 10 different areas) you want to rank for. We aren’t getting into the specifics just yet here, but keep in mind that these should be high-level topics that pertain to business objectives or revenue goals. For instance, a particular service line you intend to focus on, during a specified timeframe.

Step 2: Complete your generic topics with more specific keywords.

Here is where you identify some keywords that fall into those generic categories from earlier. These are keyword phrases you think are important to rank for in the search engine results pages.

Pro tip: Make sure you have an efficient amount of long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords contain longer keyword phrases, typically including three or more words.

Now here’s a quick pop quiz:

Which of the following do you think is easier rank for?

1. Designer purse
2. How to care for your Louis Vuitton purse

The answer is No. 2. This is because someone who is looking for something that specific is most likely a more qualified searcher for your product or service than someone looking for something more generic. In this case it’s easier to narrow down exactly what your customer may be looking for since they typed such a specific phrase into the search bar.

Step 3: Research related search terms.

I love this step. There are some seriously awesome SEO tools out there to help research your keywords and provide suggestions, but keep on reading – I’m getting to those shortly.

Step 4: Analyze how your competitors are ranking for these keywords.

It’s important to understand what keywords your competitors are trying to rank for. This last step helps you evaluate your keywords in yet another way.

Put it to use

Looking for some tips and tricks to help get you started? Here are five keyword research tool options that will improve your SEO from the beginning.

• HubSpot SEO

If you use HubSpot, their Keywords tool (under the Reporting dropdown menu) can help you optimize the right keywords, improve your rank over time and analyze your competitors all in one place.

• SEMRush

Here at Quintain, we love SEMrush. It provides insight into your competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search and link-building.

• Suggested Searches

Simple, yet effective. These are the search predictions at the bottom of the page after you type in your keyword in Google.

• GoogleTrends

Find out what keywords and searched terms are trending near you right now – great when you’re completing final optimization on a blog.

• Google Suggest

One of the best keyword research tools is Google autocomplete. These suggested queries provide ideas on how people are using our targeted keywords.

Final Thought

Now that you understand that keyword research definitely still matters, remember that it’s not meant to be the strategy – although it certainly supports what you’re trying to accomplish.

Put simply, if your content isn’t attracting the right visitors (meaning your keywords aren’t targeting the right visitors) you may still see the traffic spikes you want, but not the conversions. If you do see the conversions, these leads may go nowhere because you didn’t use your target keywords effectively, or you failed to have the proper email or lead scoring workflows in place to nurture those leads.

Keep in mind, however, that your keyword research needs to be aligned with your persona’s pain points, which in turn is aligned with your overall revenue, business and organizational goals. Remember to use specific long-tail keywords and understand the context of your keyword research from the start.

Finally, it’s important to re-evaluate these keywords every few months, at the minimum. As you gain even more authority in the search engine response pages, you can begin to add more keywords to your lists and develop additional areas to target.

Let’s get back to the basics of writing sales proposals.

Join sales coach Deb Calvert in this re-broadcast from CONNECT! Online Radio for Selling Professionals^® if you want to improve your proposals. You’ll learn the difference between a proposal and a presentation, why more is not necessarily better in writing sales proposal, and how to write compelling proposals that drive faster sales results.

Excerpts from Deb Calvert’s coaching writing sales proposals

Deb: “Where proposals really just fall flat is when they are price quotes. They are not proposals at all. They are statement of capabilities and a price. You’ve got to go deeper. That going deeper doesn’t start when you sit down to write the proposal. It starts when you think about how to challenge the buyer…”

“I ran across a quote this week… It’s from Henry Ford.. and the quote says it like this, ‘ If I had ask people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’ So if you’re stuck in a mode of order-fulfillment for what the customer has an interest in or what the prospect has expressed a desire for, that’s a price quote. If all you’re doing is order-fulfillment proposal writing, you’re just going to be selling faster horses. You’ll never be inventing, challenging, taking your buyers to the next level. In order to do that, you would have to anticipate and understand and probe to find out not only what they say they need but also their underlying latent needs. The latent needs are the ones that haven’t fully discovered yet for themselves.”

There’s more to learn! Tune in to find out more on the basics on writing sales proposals with Deb Calvert, your on-air sales coach

This is just the start! Listen to the rest of this episode to get detailed information on the basics on writing sales proposals. There’s no better way to maximize your windshield time than by listening to CONNECT! Online Radio for Sales Professionals^®. We’ll help you cut out continuances, put an end to pending and stop stalling out in sales.

 

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