Rnordman

I recently met with a startup founder who told me that his app was ready for launch, so he just needed to focus on growth hacking.

“Why growth hacking?” I asked, interested in his response.

“Because I need to market my app” he replied.

OK, time out.

There’s a huge misconception when it comes to growth hacking and marketing.

Namely, that growth hacking is a replacement for marketing, or that a couple new tricks can propel you into the ranks of Facebook, Dropbox, and Airbnb.

Don’t get me wrong, growth hacking is a powerful force. When implemented correctly it can help to quickly scale a business, obtain a large user base, and crush your churn rate.

But that’s assuming that you have a business, and that you even have users to churn.

Early-stage companies — the ones that need growth the most, are the ones most likely to reach for the “growth hacking” kool aid.

They want to start a referral program, change a button color, add a snippet of code, and see massive growth.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way. Real growth requires a foundation to build on, a product that works, and a market that’s ready to receive it.

If you’ve tried growth hacking unsuccessfully in the past and you’re not sure why, it might have failed for one of 3 reasons…

Your Product Isn’t Developed

In order for there to be any component of virality around your product, your product has to first be available, and second, not suck.

This might sound obvious, but the second point is a lot easier said than done.

If we take a look at a typical viral loop for a product, we see that there are four distinct phases a user will go through: Discover, Try, Get Value, and Share.

Growth hacking can only help in the Share, Discover, and Try phases. Outside of helping to incentivize distribution and optimizing for conversion, growth hacking cannot give users value where there is none.

Even with all the growth hacks in the world, if you’re core product isn’t up to par with what you say it is, or if it simply doesn’t provide enough value, then no amount of growth hacking will ever help.

You Haven’t Found Product Market Fit

Finding product market fit is the building block of every successful business, yet many entrepreneurs seem eager to jump over this step and go straight for the glory.

Big mistake.

Trying to growth hack a product without product market fit is like trying to sell ice cream to a horse.

Do horses even want ice cream? I don’t know, but you should probably find out before you start buying Super Bowl ads.

Early stage companies that are still on the fence about product market fit should spend time talking to customers, iterating their product, and refining their audience until they know what they’re selling and to whom it’s valuable.

Sean Ellis’s Startup Pyramid

Until you’ve reached this point, leave growth hacking on the back burner.

You’re not clear on your USP

Your unique selling proposition (USP) is what separates you from your competitors. It’s how you describe your company in an elevator pitch. It’s the core differentiating factor that makes you stand out from the crowd.

If you’re not clear on what your USP is, how can you expect to communicate effectively with customers?

Even if you’ve developed a solid product, if you’re not sure how to position it in a way that’s enticing to prospective customers then no amount of growth hacking can give you success.

One tip to start to give some clarity on your USP is to test different headlines and messaging on a series of landing pages. Assuming you have the right type of website traffic, running quick A/B tests can be a simple way of gauging how well users are understanding your product, and how well they are responding to your USP.

Wishpond’s A/B Testing Platform

Once you’ve conclusively determined what type of messaging converts best, you can then apply it globally across your entire product (or specific product lines).

Growth Hacking as a Phase

Part of the difficulty of growth hacking is understanding that growth hacking is a phase rather than an underlying startup strategy.

While many start ups can utilize growth hacking, exactly when they should use it will entirely depend on where they are in their startup journey.

Startup Growth Phases – Graph from Growth Huddle

Getting back to what I told the startup founder who asked me about growth hacking for his new app, here’s what I told him:

• Focus on your product
• Focus on finding product market fit
• Focus on developing and understanding your USP

Then, and only then, can you focus on finding your growth hacking silver bullets.

A/B test your landing page’s headline and get a 5% conversion rate increase.

A/B test the color of your webinar page’s CTA button and get a 7% conversion rate increase.

A/B test the number of form fields you have on your online promotion and get a 6% conversion rate increase.

All well and good. No one’s telling you that these tests shouldn’t be run or that you can’t find success doing so.

But if you want to really grab that bottom line and shake it, you’ll need to start running some hard hitting, big money A/B tests

This article will show you five of my favorite A/B tests which are guaranteed to rock your business world.

Note: Any “bottom-line-shaking” A/B test has the potential to ruin your month. If you’re just starting with A/B testing, start with simpler tests and move towards the tests mentioned here. Also note that the tests in this article are actually multivariate tests, meaning they test more than one variable.

Let’s get rolling!

1. Pricing Page Redesign from Mailtrack.io

Nothing shakes your bottom line like a pricing page test. If you can improve the conversion rate of your pricing page by even 5% you’ll see huge revenue increases immediately.

This is pricing. This is where things happen.

The example from Mailtrack.io below shows a pretty standard pricing page with the greyed out checkmarks you expect to see from a pricing page…

Original Pricing Page:

New Pricing Page:

The Variables They’ve Changed, and Why:

• They’ve changed the page color scheme from grey and black to blue and green. This is less corporate and more casual, without losing any professionalism. It feels like there’s less pressure on the visitor.
• The “less pressure” element is also created with the headline change from “Upgrade Mailtrack” (which is quite insistent) to simply “Pricing.” They’ve also added a subheadline which gives visitors a choice – also known as giving your visitor power in the process.
• They’ve removed the checklist, which was a bit overwhelming. They’ve also dropped the left-side plan’s “no” and “limited” features, which felt like they were forcing the visitor towards the paid plan.
• They’ve emphasized the value points of their paid plan more effectively by showing a longer feature list as well as bolding the “Remove sent with Mailtrack” which is most likely a significant pain point for their users.
• They’ve limited the page’s navigation bar links (likely across their entire site). This focuses attention on the page’s ask.
• They’ve added “social proof” in the form of brand logos – “Used by Professionals At…”
• They’ve increased font size to make their messaging more apparent.

2. Homepage Redesign from Dispatch.me

Dispatch.me had the massive homepage you might expect from an on-demand customer experience platform. There’s a lot to say, a lot to talk about, so they built a homepage to match.

But, as anyone who read my article “Homepages are Dead: The Rise of The All Landing Page Website” knows, an exhaustively informative homepage might not be the best option.

This example from Dispatch.me, a field service software provider, shows why that is…

Original Homepage (click to see full size):

New Homepage:

The Variables They’ve Changed, and Why:

• They cut their page length by about 75%, removing a lot of white space and large platform screenshots.
• They focused on a large image of a non-model “hero shot” which seems to show a blue-collar worker using their platform on a tablet. This communicates that the platform’s not just “easy to use,” but “fast,” “at-your-fingertips” and “mobile friendly.” All with a single image.
• They’ve changed their value proposition/headline from “Deliver Exceptional Customer Experience” (which is vague) to “Work Better. Together” (which is vague, but inspirational). They’ve also added more specific subheadlines above and below the headline.
• They’ve made their homepage CTA “Get Started” stand out more with contrasting color and more action-based language.
• They’ve made their online chat more prominent in order to address any questions visitors might have. This is a great call given the removal of information from the page.
• They’ve provided obvious context for the value of their platform with “in the office,” “in the field,” “at home,” etc. This is a good call for any business where the true value of your service needs to be contextualized. It accomplishes the “Imagine if you were _. That’s where we come in.” part of sales.

3. PPC Campaign Landing Page Redesign from Namely.com

Your high-traffic PPC campaigns aren’t just high-impact because you’re spending serious money to continually rank where you need to, they’re also high-impact because the danger of a negative ROI is constantly threatening.

If your ad’s relevant landing page doesn’t convert you lose more than just a prospective user. You also lose the money you spent driving them there.

This A/B test example of a “free demo” landing page from onboarding software startup Namely.com showcases exactly how many variables you can change to really shake up your PPC campaign’s bottom line:

Original Landing Page:

New Landing Page:

The Variables They’ve Changed, and Why:

• They’ve removed a lot of the color and personality of their page, which you might think is counter-intuitive. But if they’ve had feedback from users/usability experts that their landing page doesn’t showcase their product enough, the emphasis on a software screenshot makes sense.
• They’ve emphasized the social proof/brand logo section of their landing page to focus attention on their growth and reputation.
• They’ve emphasized, as well, the customer testimonial (which is a really good one). They’ve made the customer’s headshot larger as well as the font size.
• They’ve added a bottom CTA button (best practice) below the fold, so visitors don’t have to scroll back up to convert.

4. Blog Entry Popup/Overlay Redesign from Wishpond

If you’re anything like Wishpond, your blog receives almost as much traffic (if not more) than your website does. Monetizing that traffic is a great way to touch your bottom line.

Running A/B tests on an entry overlay/welcome mat (which every new visitor will see) is the best example of a big money, high-impact strategy there is.

Here’s an example from the Wishpond Blog we ran earlier this year:

Original Overlay:

New Overlay:

The Variables We Changed, and Why:

• We removed Bree’s hero shot (which usually works well for us) and replaced it with a colorful, blue background. This contrasts well with any screen the visitor is coming from or going to, which stops them in their tracks just long enough for them to read our value proposition.
• We spread out our messaging and increased the font size. This made everything more legible.
• We told visitors what to expect when they converted on the overlay. Rather than surprise them when they arrived on a plans page, we gave them the three steps they’d be asked to take. This comforted viewers as well as increased conversion rates further down the campaign’s short funnel.
• We changed our CTA copy from “Sign Up” to “Get Started.” “Get Started” is significantly less intimidating and worked particularly well after the three-step process was communicated.
• We increased the button size of our CTAs.
• We added a negative CTA (“Not Today”) which visitors have to click to close the overlay. I’d be curious to see how effective an even more negative CTA would do – something like “No, I don’t want to grow my business.”

Here’s a screenshot of our A/B test results, showing the percentage of blog overlay viewers who clicked “Get Started” and went to our pricing page (orange line) compared to the original overlay (blue line):

Love when the graph looks like that…

Check out my article “Growth Hacking: How We Drove 82% More Blog Visitors to Pricing” for the complete story about this blog overlay A/B test.

5. Signup Page Redesign from Code4Startup

Your business’ signup page, like your pricing page, is where things really happen. This ain’t no plans page. This ain’t no homepage. This is where people give you their email address and signup for your service. They may not have paid yet, but they’re very close.

So it’s a good “big money” place to A/B test.

Code4Startup is an online coding bootcamp providing courses in Ruby, JS and different platforms. Their

Original Signup Page:

!signup page A/B test](https://d1e2wseyxx8ugp.cloudfront.net/page/a78de78b14c056e196034a27c137444b/18529486/800.jpg)

New Signup Page:

!signup page A/B test](https://d3ds0r8ijvk7u6.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/08/10113942/code4startup-new.jpg)

The Variables They’ve Changed, and Why:

• They de-emphasized the social login, likely because email address is far more valuable as lead information than a social login is. The email address you use to sign up for a platform like Code4Startup is more reliable than the one you use to login to Facebook.
• They removed the social sharing toolbar, likely because the numbers weren’t worth bragging about. If you don’t have at least a couple dozen social shares on your signup page, it looks worse than if you have nothing.
• They removed the CTA buttons which weren’t directly related to creating a free account: Subscribe and Go Pro. Focusing attention on a single conversion goal isn’t just the definition of a landing page, it’s also best practice.
• They removed the bottom navigation section. Again this is a great idea to focus attention on the page’s primary conversion goal. Any distraction is a bad distraction when it comes to landing page optimization.

Wrapping it Up

Hopefully seen a few big money A/B test examples has inspired you to put on your goggles and flippers and dive right in.

As I said at the beginning of this article, big money tests have the potential to ruin your day. But starting and growing a business is as much about risk as it is about reward, right?

With educated A/B testing, the rewards will far outweigh the risks. So what are you waiting for?

Shake that bottom line!

When Jim Koch left a comfortable career at Boston Consulting Group in 1984 to start the Boston Beer Company, his father told him he was making a terrible mistake.

The Kochs are a family of brewers, but Koch's dad thought the idea of trying to enter an industry dominated by brands like Budweiser and Coors was destined for failure.

Koch, however, started by aiming at a niche market. Today craft breweries produce 10% of all the beer in the United States, and Sam Adams is at the head of the pack, accounting for a full 1% of that slice, and bringing in more than a billion dollars in annual revenue.

In his new book "Quench Your Own Thirst," Koch shares 10 books he finds have had the most impact on his success. He previously explained the value of the first two selections in an interview with Business Insider last year, saying they helped him develop a philosophy of prioritizing customers over shareholders and using constant innovation as an advantage.

These are the titles he recommends you pick up if you're an aspiring entrepreneur or leader.

SEE ALSO: Anthony Bourdain discusses the new season of 'Parts Unknown,' his favorite restaurants, and how he went from outsider chef to the top of the food world

'Out of the Crisis' by W. Edward Deming

Deming was an American statistician who spent a decade in Japan after World War II. His lectures, consultation, and training contributed significantly to the country's postwar economic boom and the emergence of fine Japanese products on the global market.

In 1951, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers created the Deming Prize for exceptional achievement in industry, but Deming didn't gain notoriety in the US until the '80s.

His 1986 book "Out of the Crisis," which Koch said is written in charming colloquial language, outlines 14 management points that advocate for the need to forecast, stay innovative, and empower employees.

"Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation," Deming wrote. "The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment."

Koch said he takes this approach to his business, ignoring the daily ups and downs of the Boston Beer Company's stock price and prioritizing long-term growth over short-term results.

"So I'm worried about, where are we in two years? In five years? How do I make this the best, strongest, healthiest company I can?" Koch told us.

Find it here »

'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas S. Kuhn

The late physicist's book has become "one of the most cited academic books of all time" since its initial publication in 1962, establishing Kuhn as "perhaps the most influential" philosopher of science in the 20th century, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Kuhn's book is best remembered for introducing the phrase "paradigm shift," representing instances in scientific history when a perspective was fundamentally shifted, like when quantum physics replaced Newtonian mechanics.

The paradigm shift theory can be applied to aspects of business as well, such as the way Americans expanded their beer consumption past huge brands like Budweiser and Heineken over the past two decades.

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" helped Koch "think about removing the blinders and not think within constraints," Koch told us.

"To be able to say, 'I know this is the way the world is, but why can't it be different and better?'"

Find it here »

'Accidents in North American Mountaineering' by the American Alpine Club

Before returning to Harvard to finish the dual MBA/JD program in 1978, Koch took a break and spent a few years as an Outward Bound instructor. Outward Bound is organization dedicated to fostering personal development through team building exercises outdoors.

In his book, Koch writes that his Harvard classmates may have turned up their noses at his decision, but he considers it pivotal to his success as an entrepreneur. "I found it invigorating to have no real responsibilities except to myself — life was now a blank canvas, every day a new choice."

One of the guides he came across during this time was the annual safety guide from the American Alpine Club, which uses the year's worst mountain climbing accidents to explain how such mistakes can be avoided. Koch later internalized it as a metaphor for business.

"Most fatalities begin as small mistakes that get compounded by unexpected conditions and bad judgment," he wrote. "There is usually a point where the right decision needs to be made and, if not made, fatality can only be avoided with unusually good luck (which rarely happens)."

Find it here »

It’s well documented that the B2B buyer conducts at least 57% of their journey online through research. So, how can a sales professional insert him/herself into that research? In one word – influence.

The salesperson’s challenge is to be influential to the buyer in order to be someone the buyer needs in his/her journey. A sales person should strive to influence the buyer’s journey to be someone the buyer seeks out for information. If this sounds unrealistic, lets review two ways for B2B sales professionals to create influence.

Be a Content Creator

We know that 75% of B2B buyers seek out content online in social channels during their research and evaluation phase. It’s logical then that if you create content on the topics that matter to the buyer and you amplify that content in social channels, you can increase your chance of inserting yourself into a buyer’s research program. Here are some ways to do this.

• Launch your own blog
• Launch your own podcast
• Create visuals and infographics
• Host webinars and Blab sessions
• Publish articles to LinkedIn
• Speak at events

Each of these requires focus, commitment and a lot of hard work. Even before you commit to one or more of these methods of creating content it’s imperative that you commit to being knowledgeable in your industry. If you’re just one or two years out of college, you might consider starting out as a content curator to help build your knowledge and authority. When you have the confidence to become a content creator, do it!

In addition to focus and commitment you also need to have a disciplined approach. Create content on the topics that your buyers care deeply about. Your content strategy should focus on what I call the 3 E’s of content – educate, enlighten, entertain.

Be a Content Curator

If creating original content is not viable for you, be the best content curator in your industry niche. Conduct research to identify great sources of content for the topics which are important to your buyer. Bookmark these sites and visit them daily. Let Google help you with Google Alerts. You can also curate articles on LinkedIn from influencers and your network.

As you find content that qualifies for the 3 E’s, share it with your network on LinkedIn and Twitter as well as anywhere else you engage with your buyers, e.g., Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, etc., I strongly recommend that you read each article that you share and add your commentary. You won’t create much influence if all you do is curate without commentary. You can create meaningful influence by being a source of valuable and relevant content to your buyer.

A natural by product of either of these two methods – creating or curating content – is being a networker. For example, when you create content be sure to mention other sources that support your content and link to them. Also give them a shoutout on social when you publish their content. Engage with those that you include in your content.

Similarly, when you curate someone’s content be sure to give them a shootout and engage with them by connecting, following, etc., For example, this topic was inspired by Tim Hughes in the podcast we recently recorded.

In the long run, if you’re not developing meaningful relationships you won’t build influence. Remember, word of mouth is still a powerful referral source, and it’s easier than ever through digital channels.

If it’s not obvious by now, building influence happens when you serve your buyer through relevant content that is helpful. Your buyer is trying to find a product or service to address a business issue. If you can insert yourself into his or her journey, you will build influence. And, influence opens doors to sales conversations. And, isn’t that what you want?

Feature Image Courtesy of Unsplash: Samuel Zeller

Author: Graham Gallivan

As we move towards the end of the dog days of summer, your marketing strategy shouldn’t cool down with the weather.

While your prospects may have been out on vacation throughout the summer, they’ll be back at their desks in no time. Or maybe you took some vacation days of your own and need a pick-me-up to get back in the zone. With summer coming to an end, you need to be on your A-game.

Here are a few of the top B2B marketing reads you may have missed from our blog this year. Read on for some of the hottest topics and trends you should be aware of to keep your marketing tactics fresh and on the mark:

1. SEO for B2B: 3 Reasons Why You Can’t Avoid It Anymore

SEO for B2B: 3 Reasons Why You Can’t Avoid It Anymore

Are you leveraging SEO to its greatest potential? If not, you’re not alone. But the hesitation that some B2B marketers face when it comes to SEO is the very reason that the brands that do use it have a strategic advantage (vs. the consumer marketing space where SEO competition is at its height). To get ahead of the competition, learn why SEO is one of your greatest strengths and how it can yield low hanging fruit you may be overlooking: 61% of B2B decision-makers start the decision-making process with a web search.

2. Dynamic Duo: Close More Deals with Sales and Marketing Alignment

Dynamic Duo: Close More Deals with Sales and Marketing Alignment

Do you have what it takes to align with sales to close more deals? Businesses are 67% better at closing deals when sales and marketing are operating in lockstep, according to joint research by Marketo and Reachforce. One of the key strategies B2B marketers should leverage to increase productivity is lead scoring–ranking leads for their sales-readiness, sanctioned by service level agreements (SLAs) that are agreed upon by both sales and marketing. Read on for more on lead scoring and other tips to improve sales and marketing alignment.

3. 4 Account-Based Marketing Lessons from the Field

4 Account-Based Marketing Lessons from the Field

While it’s not a new concept, one of the hottest trends in B2B marketing this year is account-based marketing (ABM). ABM is a strategic approach to lead generation in which your time and resources go into targeting a key group of specific accounts. Gone are the days of the broad-based marketing strategy as an end in and of itself.

While the traditional demand generation approach is great for generating and engaging a large number of qualified leads based on their attributes to move them further down the funnel and eventually close them, ABM is becomingly more critical for B2B marketers who want to win and retain certain key accounts. In fact, research shows that less than 1% of leads turn into revenue generating customers. Because of this, it’s time to evaluate the status quo and determine whether your time, budget, and resources should go into quality or quantity.

4. How to Unlock the Full Potential of Your Customer Base

How to Unlock the Full Potential of Your Customer Base

Another key strategy for B2B marketers is customer base marketing. This all comes down to the math and two key stats. The first, also known as Pareto’s 80/20 rule, is that 80% of your business wealth will come from 20% of your customer base. The second is that it costs at least 10 times more to acquire new customers than to sell to the ones you already have, according to eMarketer.

With these stats in mind, the key is to think beyond acquisition and focus on increasing the customer lifetime value by marketing additional cross-sell products or services to an existing customer, working to keep them happy and keep them as a customer, and developing current customers into loyal brand advocates.

5. Get Scrappy: 7 Tips for Smarter Digital Marketing

Get Scrappy: 7 Tips for Smarter Digital Marketing

With the array of tactics and new technologies in the marketplace, it can be challenging to identify what strategy will work best for you. They key? Get scrappy! Regardless of your organization’s size, most digital marketing teams feel that they could use more budget and resources. The key to succeeding in this digital age is to learn how to do more with less, using key tactics like putting brains before your budget, being efficient and effective, and seeing ideas everywhere.

6. Power to the Publishers: Content Is Going Full Throttle

Power to the Publishers: Content Is Going Full Throttle

Chances are you’re probably using content in your B2B marketing efforts, but are you leveraging all the available channels to get the most out of your content? The fact is that buyers today are more informed than ever, self-directing the majority of their journey before they ever interact with you, so hitting them with the right content at the right time is key. At the same time, technology advancements are driving our content marketing efforts further, allowing us to distribute on more channels and measure our results. Take advantage of what’s available so your content can rise to the top.

7. 5 Ways to Boost B2B Sales Through LinkedIn Social Selling

5 Ways to Boost B2B Sales Through LinkedIn Social Selling

As a B2B marketer, you’re likely constantly looking for ways to arm your sales team to close more business. While your sales team may already be using LinkedIn to reach their prospects, there’s probably more they could be doing to take full advantage of the platform. In fact, LinkedIn even offers a Social Selling Index (SSI) to measure how effective your sales team is at tapping their network–factoring in the amount of content they share, their level of interaction, and the number of connections they have with your target audience.

8. Demystifying Social ROI in B2B Marketing

Demystifying Social ROI in B2B Marketing

Contrary to popular belief, you can attribute revenue dollars to your social media campaigns. But because they’re more likely to serve as a point of initial or incremental engagement than as a deal closer, your social campaigns require tangible metrics. Learn how to use (and integrate) the latest tools and tactics to calculate your social ROI.

9. More is Not Always More: Be Wary of the Volume Game in B2B Demand Generation

More is Not Always More: Be Wary of the Volume Game in B2B Demand Generation

In demand generation, it’s not always a numbers game. Your organization needs to have a defined revenue model and business rules in place to ensure the best possible outcome. While it can be alluring to pump as many names into your database as possible, it’s even more important to make sure they’re vetted, giving your sales team the best chance for success. And once those leads become closed-won deals, make sure you’re analyzing your customer base to retain your customers and identify opportunities for growth–cross-selling and upselling them.

10. If Marketing Metrics Are Driving You Crazy, Read This

If Marketing Metrics Are Driving You Crazy, Read This

If there’s one topic that’s always top-of-mind for B2B marketers, it’s metrics. While there are a number of possible metrics you could track, the key to success for your business (and sanity), is focusing on the right set of metrics that indicate performance. Read on for a few tips on honing in on the right metrics that will serve you and your business well in the long run.

There you have it–10 B2B blogs to wrap up the summer with that will help you get back in the zone. Check out our other blogs and let us know your favorite ones in the comments below!

Summer Reading for B2B Marketers: 10 Must-Read Blogs to Get Back in the Zone was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post Summer Reading for B2B Marketers: 10 Must-Read Blogs to Get Back in the Zone appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Product demos and trials have slowly become integral part of B2B solution selling – especially due to the popularity of Cloud and SaaS (Software as a Service) models. The buyers want to touch and feel the product, try it for a while before making the purchasing decision.

Photo Courtesy: FreeImages.com/Roberto Burgos S.

In this blog, I shall discuss how psychology can explain why and how demos and trials work. Also, I’d present how to make them way more effective by making small adjustments – keeping the same psychological behaviors in view.

Magical power of Touch

Consumer researchers Joann Peck and Suzanne B. Shu established that for a prospective buyer, merely touching an object results in an increase of perceived ownership of the object. The effect is seen even with an imagery encouraging touch. The valuation of the object in the minds of the buyer also increases as she touches the object.

To test this idea, participants playing the role of potential buyers were shown 2 products: a coffee mug and a Slinky toy. Half of the participants were instructed to touch and feel the products and the other half explicitly asked not to touch them. The group that were able to touch the products showed much higher positive emotional reaction to those products – typically 3 times more than the ones who were explicitly asked not to have any tactile contact with the products!

So, as a seller, you need to make the buyer touch and feel your product as much intimately as possible to lead him towards buying the product. Now you know why supermarkets and bookstores allow you to hold their fares closely in their display isles and why the soft toy packaging has a strategic opening through which your kid can touch the furry belly of the toy.

How can you use this magical power of touch when you are in the business of non-tangible goods and services? The answer lies in giving a product demo and making it as interactive as possible – so as to simulate the deeper imagery of touch and feel.

Based on the Peck and Shu’s research, I’d suggest the following best practices as a sales person while showing the product demo:

1. Personalize the demo by entering/ preconfiguring the name and organization of the prospective buyer, use their brand colors and logos and anything that she strongly associates with.
2. Let the client type and press the buttons of your user interface on their laptop or mobile device. This is as close as she can get to the product. You could instruct, but let the buyer drive the demo.
3. During the demo, you should focus on the customer by understanding her needs and pain points – rather than focusing on the product. This will help the customer feel more ownership towards the product. Software products are usually complex and full of features to cover for all possible scenarios. Your job as the sales person is to make the client touch the right part of the product.
4. A demo should start with one of the specific problems or challenges the prospect said she is having. You should start like, “During our previous meeting, you stated you didn’t see much advertising revenue coming from your digital media assets. In this part of the demo I’ll show you how you would be able to monetize your digital assets through clever ad placements.” By doing this you can touch the actual need of the prospect immediately.

Principle of Reciprocity

Now let’s examine the psychology behind the free trials and how they seem to boost sales. A couple of very striking phenomena are in work here: 1) The Principle of Reciprocity and 2) Irrational power of Free.

The retailers like Costco have figured out the effectiveness of doling out free samples. Samples have boosted sales in some cases by as much as 2,000 percent. Free sample can even bring behavioral change by swaying people to buy things impulsively.

Free samples help consumers learn more about products and the increased “touch” during sampling enhances their “perceived ownership”. They also operate at a more subconscious level. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and a popular TED talker researches and talks about this topic. If somebody does something for you — such as giving you a shot of mojito or a sheet of color sticker for free — you really feel a rather surprisingly strong obligation to do something back for them. This is Principle of Reciprocity for you!

The irrational power of “free” is another behavioral trait that Dan Ariely explains in his book called Predictably Irrational. With the opportunity to receive something for free, the actual value of the product or service is no longer considered. Ariely claims, “Most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is FREE! we forget the downside. FREE! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is.”

In one of his experiments, people were given the option to choose between two offers: One was a $10 Amazon gift certificate for free, the other was a $20 gift card available for $7. More people chose the $10 gift card even though the other option provided more value.

So, it’s not surprising that most of the software products now-a-days come with a free trial period for full-featured product, freemium schemes, free base slab with limited features etc.

Here are some recommendations on how to manage your free trials based on the principles described above:

1. Offer a no-string-attached free trial. Simple T&C, no credit card, no questionnaires to fill in. You need to trust the prospective customer and wow her and then expect the principle of reciprocity to kick in. If you make your customer worry about her credit card getting charged at the end of the trial period, her focus will be on that and not on the product in trial.

2. Highlight the word: FREE in all the ways possible. “Free unlimited video views for 30 days” is much attractive proposition than “50% discount of your monthly rental for first 6 months” – even though the later was more profitable for the customer.

3. If you are launching a new product – for which there are other similar products – you should consider time-locked free trial to bridge the gap between consumer’s prior belief and the true functionality of your software. On the other hand, if your product is a new innovation, it’s prudent to offer a limited version free trial for perpetuity to exploit the network effect. This is explained more in this paper by Hsing Kenneth Cheng and Yipeng Liu.

4. For a time-locked free trial, create the sense of urgency. Say trial end in 29 days (or may be in 696 hrs!)! But also be willing to make concessions. If there a technical issue that prevented the customer from using the product for the full period, give them extra time and assistance.

5. Engage with the users actively during the free trial. If a consumer gets something for free but doesn’t actually use it, then you are wasting your time and efforts. Offer support often, and let customers know how to get help if they need it. In general, just stay in touch.

6. Finally, the Free trial is not only for the low value SaaS customers who are availing your service from the internet. This is equally applicable also for large value enterprise sales with software licenses costing 100’s of 1000 US dollars. The same consumer psychology work in both the cases.

In modern B2B sales scenario, Demos and Free trials should be used as an effective sales tool – and not just as a necessary evil. The return on investment on these efforts could be significantly BIG depending on the strategy that you adopt and small tweaks you apply on your approach.

DID YOU KNOW: 74% OF MARKETERS SAY TARGETED PERSONALISATION INCREASES CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT?

Email marketing can be one of the most powerful tools when it comes to getting more sales for your small business. The biggest problem is that most small businesses do not understand how powerful it can be to personalise emails and without the touch of personalisation, you could be missing out on a lot of engagement and new, or repeat customers.

I have spent the last 8 years building an email database, which now has over 10,000 small businesses and the one thing I have learnt is the importance of personalisation. It’s all well and good me telling you this, but without factual evidence that this is the case, you might find it hard to believe.

Email provider Mailjet ran a study just last month which revealed that UK internet users believe that personalised emails are the best way to get them to click on a user’s. As you can see below, 38.9% of 16-29 year olds said that personalisation was the second most important attribute that would make them click on an email. This percentage grows to 39.6% for 30-44 year olds, and to 42.9% for 45-59 year olds. Averaging out the below attributes, personalisation scores the highest with an average of 40.2%.

With that in mind, personalisation is critical and if you don’t know how to do this, I am going to share 3 tips on how to personalise your emails to get more sales. The 3 tips I am going to share as based around using an email marketing tool called Mailchimp. For a small business, Mailchimp is the best marketing software, as it is free to use up till 2,000 users and has amazing features. If you are using a different tool; don’t worry. What I am going to share can be applied to any email marketing tool as long as you have an automation feature available.

1. PERSONALISE EMAILS BASED ON A SCORING SYSTEM

Email automation in particular, should run itself. This however cannot happen unless you have a lead scoring system in place that defines certain behaviours or demographics. You can “score” your leads however you like, but to be descriptive, use terms like “prospect”, “warm”, “hot”, “buying customer”.

Mapping this will allow you to have control over what each user will receive from you in terms of your email marketing. Base your model on the above, and the demographics (interests, gender, age, location) and their behaviour (attended a webinar, attended a talk).

Mailchimp does allow you to do this, and you can find out exactly how to score your leads here.

2. MERGE TAGS

A merge tag inside of Mailchimp is an algorithm that takes a piece of personal data from a user inside of Mailchimp, giving you a nice way to personalise an email you send. For example; I will use the first name merge tag in the subject line of an email I send. It will look something like “Come and meet me at [TRADESHOW], Name!”. Inserting the merge tag will take the first name of your contact, and slot it into whenever you use that piece of code.

For a merge tag to work, you are going to have to collect the personal data when doing lead generation. I will always ask for a first name, and email address on any sign up forms I use as I know this is what I need for my merge tag, and to personalise my email communication.

3. INTEGRATE YOUR EMAIL TOOL WITH YOUR LEAD GENERATION TOOL

This is really important for me, as I have a lot of lead generation content. I offer different downloads, strategies, courses and other types of content as a free download, in exchange for a name and email address. To make this run smoothly, I integrate my email marketing tool (mailchimp) with my lead generation tool (instapages) so that as soon as someone downloads for example, my 6 step social media lead generation strategy, they then go into the automation funnel which is already set up, and they receive the series of emails relating to what they signed up for.

I hope you now see the importance of personalisation and automation to get more sales through your email marketing.

How do you personalise your email marketing?

Brands typically think of their blog as a customer acquisition and audience development channel. And indeed it is. But it can also be a targeted resource for sales enablement.

Sales reps can reference relevant blog posts and proprietary reports to reinforce any arguments they have made in their sales pitch. For clients, reading a thorough article on a topic they are unfamiliar with or unsure about can provide just enough evidence to support a positive purchasing decision. In today’s world, salespeople should use whatever resources they have at their disposal to gain a competitive edge.

Using Content to Stay Competitive

For your sales team to be successful, managers must provide them with the right tools. Typically, this equates to customer relationship management software (CRM), sales training, and analytics. Going the extra mile with sales enablement, however, is vital to your sales process. A 2016 study by Demand Metric found, “75% of survey respondents reported that sales enablement made a moderate or significant contribution to their sales forces.” Developing blog posts with a keen eye towards the sales process is a great way to do just that.

How Storytelling Can Lead to More Sales

Over the past decade, the traditional sales cycle has been overtaken by the customer journey. This process allows customers to make their own purchasing decisions by leveraging a mix of existing brand recognition, targeted outreach, and personal research. If you’re able to capture a prospect’s attention and provide an exceptional experience, you can shorten the buyer’s journey and expedite the sale. And an authoritative brand blog can be your best ally.

For your blog content to be effective as a sales enablement tool, it has to align with buyers’ needs at various stages of the customer journey. The most opportune time to use your blog is what business writer Minda Zetlin calls the “parachute moment.” In an article for Inc., she explains, “Chances are, you already know what sorts of situations lead your customers to desperately need your product. If you don’t, think back to some of the easiest sales you’ve made, the times when customers didn’t hesitate or haggle, the times they paid extra for a rush delivery.” For your blog to be useful for your sales team, content must be strategically crafted to speak directly to customers encountering unique situations and obstacles throughout the buyer’s journey.

Complementing the Customer Journey

Creating content for specific stages in the customer journey means getting more creative with your blog. Here are four types of content that you will need to develop for your sales team to aid them in nurturing customers through each step of the sales process:

Making Your Blog Well-Worth Reading

The final step to turning your blog into the perfect sales enablement tool is: Make it more engaging. Use your blog as an open FAQ where prospects and customers can submit questions or topics they would like more information on. For every person willing to ask a question, many more will be wondering the answer themselves. This will help you figure out what content your sales team needs in order to provide an exceptional customer experience and further boost brand loyalty.

You should also use your blog to provide important product and company updates, and relevant industry news. This gives existing customers a reason to return regularly and use you as a hub of information pertinent to their career.

Creating content that is useful throughout the sales process is trickier than creating content for inbound leads. But by focusing on the needs and wants of your customers and sales team your blog will evolve into a powerful sales tool. Use it wisely to assist in streamlining the sales process. As a result, you may even see an increase in your reps’ close ratios.

Start leveraging your content to win clients and close deals. Begin your PandaDoc 14-Day trial today!

Chances are good you think you're more or less the same person you were last week. But the lining of your gut is totally different, and the hairs on your head are 2.5 millimeters longer.

The human body's ability to replace worn out cells with shiny new ones is key to the long lifespans we're so used to. There are a couple things we keep all our lives, like the visual cortex, but almost everything wears out and gets replaced, at least for part of our lives. And some things, like our hair and nails, just grow and grow and grow.

We've gathered together scientists' estimates scientists of how quickly we go through different types of cells. Many of these ages have been established using a technique called bomb-pulse dating, which uses the traces of atomic radiation we each carry to determine how old cells are. 

Keep in mind: All of these are average numbers.

For everything that's regularly replaced, you'll be carrying a cells that are slightly older — and a lot that are younger, since cells are replaced on rotation not all at once. And these numbers represent total ages, so for example, an individual cell doesn't stay on the surface of your skin for over a month — its lifespan includes the time it takes to rise through all the skin layers.

But it's incredible to think an individual heart cell will spend decades powering your whole body.

SEE ALSO: How getting more sleep affects your mind and body

SEE ALSO: Every baby born in 2016 contains atom bomb radiation — here's why

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A nutrition expert reveals how often you should eat to look better

The standard modus operandi for folks who are drilling holes and driving screws is to have one tool for each. Not having to continually swap bits is worth the weight of an extra tool pulling one side of your belt down. Thus most folks doing this sort of work have both a drill and an impact driver, and ideally the latter is stubbier and can get into tight spaces.

However, for DIY'ers doing light-duty work where the power of an impact driver is not needed, it would be handy to have one tool that could swiftly bring both a twist bit and a driver bit to bear. Enter Worx's Switchdriver, which features a two-headed rotating chuck:

Despite its 20-volt battery, this doesn't look like the kind of heavy-duty tool a contractor would rely on, nor does the "three easy payments of $33.33" provide any illusion that you're getting, say, Festool quality here. And the overall length is unlikely to be useful, in driving mode, inside a cabinet. But I admire that the company is experimenting with a well-established form factor in order to improve the UX. That is the kind of thinking, and risk-taking, that will eventually advance the category.

See sample pages from this book at Wink.

Where Discovery Sparks Imagination: A Pictorial History of Radio and Electricity
by John D. Jenkins
American Museum of Radio and Electricity
2009, 224 pages, 8.2 x 10 x 1 inches
$16 Buy a copy on Amazon

If you’re ever up near the Canadian border in the little college town of Bellingham, WA make time to check out a gem of a museum there: The SPARK Museum of Electrical Invention. It’s fully charged up and literally crackling with excitement (and a 4-million volt Tesla coil!). SPARK showcases all manner of fascinating artifacts all about the history of electricity from early static electricity generators to advanced vacuum tubes that went to the moon. Can’t make the trip? Then get this wonderful book!

And even if you do go to SPARK in person, you’ll also want to read Where Discovery Sparks Imagination. It features lavish color photographs of hundreds of the items on display together with the interesting stories of the people and places that go along with the things. I learned even more about Alessandro Volta and volts, Andre-Marie Ampere and amps, and Georg Ohm and ohms. See the recreation of the Titanic’s radio room. Learn how an undertaker in Kansas City invented the first dial phone to short circuit his competitor’s switchboard shenanigans. Anyone who has used a phone, listened to a recording, or turned on a lamp will enjoy seeing the primitive but clever inventions that predate today’s smart phones, PCs and LED lights. Fans of steampunkery will geek out at the endless array of 19th-century wonders like Wimhurst generators, telegraphs, “electro-magnetic motive machines,” as well as a forest of vacuum-tube devices, handsome wood-burl radio cabinetry and brassy mechanical sound players.

I was delighted to see included whimsical touches, too, like the mascot characters that put a friendly face on electrical consumer products: sure, they have a “Nipper” (the RCA mascot dog), but also the very cool 1920s Maxfield Parrish designed “Selling Fool” point of purchase display doll (with wooden jointed, posable limbs with slits for holding ad cards – and a radio tube for a helmet!). Until I can go back to SPARK (Science Powered Adventures for Real Kids) in person, I’m digging this book!

Photos Deb Ransom

Canadian MPs get a pretty lengthy summer break and while most spend it in their constituencies, Rona Ambrose has found a way to spend hers like most vacationing Canucks: with a beer in hand. The interim Conservative leader has been spotted clutching a brewski everywhere from Stack Brewing in Sudbury to Walkerville Brewery in Windsor. Why is Ambrose all up in the suds this summer? Chatelaine gave her a call to find out.

Your social media feeds have been packed with photos of you hanging out at Canadian craft breweries this summer. What’s that all about?

We have this campaign we’re running called Free the Beer, which has a fun side and a serious side. The fun side is [the Conservative party] is promoting craft breweries, which have become really trendy for good reason. These are people in our own communities who have decided to invest their own money, start their own craft brewery and make great home-grown brew in their neighbourhoods. Now the serious side is these are small business owners who, because of outdated trade laws, can’t actually sell their product to other Canadians across the country; they can only sell in their own province.

So a Canadian craft brewery can’t expand beyond provincial borders while Budweiser flows freely nationwide.

Right. It’s about free trade and it’s about consumer’s choice; it’s about jobs and it’s about small businesses. That’s the serious side. But we thought we’d try to make it fun to just highlight the ridiculousness of these trade barriers, so we started Free the Beer. We even created some swag.

Got any koozies?

Yep. We’ve got beer koozies, we’ve got coasters.

Rona Ambrose visits an Ontario brewery as part of the Free the Beer campaign. (Photograph by Brad Davey)

Are you a beer drinker yourself?

Well, I enjoy tasting it. But I’m not a drinker, period. With my schedule, I don’t really have time.

But if we went to a bar, what would you order?

I typically have a martini. But while I’d never actually order a beer, these craft breweries have all these cool flavours. We went to one in Erieau, Ont. called Bayside Brewing Co. and they make this Wild Cherry Lager. I could have drank that all afternoon.

So you’d go for a radler, that German-style beer cut with grapefruit juice?

Yes! I think I’m a girly beer drinker — I like the fruity ones. And the radler has lower alcohol.

Bar or patio?

Patio, always.

Pretzels or chips?

Chips.

Shotgun or funnel?

Oh my god! Shotgun.

Can or bottle?

Bottle.

And how’s your beer-pong game?

Are you kidding me? My beer pong game is AMAZING. We had a huge beer-pong tournament at Stornoway [in May] for the university campus clubs, and they were all in their little suits and stuff. We were like, “Take off your ties! Relax!” We set up this huge beer-pong table in the kitchen and there must have been 60 people shoved in there. I kicked BUTT. I crushed them, those poor kids. They were like, “How are you so good at beer pong?”

How are you so good at beer pong?

I said to them, “Here’s the big secret: Don’t drink the beer.”

This interview has been condensed and edited.

The post Rona Ambrose’s mission to give us more Canadian beer appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The inconveniences of air travel can range for disastrous to mildly irritating, whether it's a canceled flight or a seemingly endless security line. Thankfully, the good people of Reddit banded together and enlisted airport workers, from rampers to flight attendants, to reveal travel hacks straight from the source.

Here are 14 of their best tips to help you navigate your next trip with ease.

Avoid paying for a luggage cart by using one that was left in the pickup area outside the terminal by someone who didn’t return theirs. Bonus: return them for money.

Take batteries out electric toothbrushes and other appliances before packing them. Vibrating suitcases have grounded many flights due to security concerns.

If you lose something, check ALL the lost and founds. The TSA, the airport police, and each airline all have their own.

This story starts about a month ago when Vasil Azarov with Startup Socials challenged me to create an actionable SEO webinar that could improve brand’s organic Google rankings quickly. If you know anything about SEO, that’s not easy to do quickly. I sat down and thought about all the client SEO strategies I’ve worked on, and how they affected the rankings.

I narrowed down all the strategies I knew and came up with 5 SEO Hacks that when tested, doubled the number of website rankings in organic search. The websites tested were focused on 10 longtail keyword’s rankings from a 30 day period. These 5 hacks then became the topic of the webinar we did.

With the standard amount of promotion, the webinar quickly became one of the most RSVP’d webinars I’ve ever held.

Clearly, there is a high level of interest in how to hack SEO.

So, I’ve compiled the basics from my webinar into this blog post to tell you EXACTLY how to create an SEO roadmap for your business, that if done correctly, will double your rankings in 90 days or less.

Here goes.

SEO Hack #1

Here are the 5 SEO Hacks that can drastically increase your rankings

For a while, I saw a trend where SEOs focused largely on link building as a strategy for ranking higher organically in Google. SEOs were most concerned with quantity of links, studying anchor text diversity and setting up PBN networks (a gray / black hat tactic that Google will now penalize you for) to try and outrank their competition.

I began to realize that there was a large neglect of some of the technical SEO strategies. This is where we start the road map to the major SEO Hacks.

Baselining Your Rankings

Using SEMRush.com, Moz.com or another rank tracking platform, gather all the rankings you’ve got on a Google Sheet. You’ll need this to track your progress through this SEO roadmap.

You’re not following Google’s mantra and it’s hurting your traffic.

Over a lot of other things, user experience is top priority for Google search.

So much so, that site speed, user experience and page layout have all been attributed to ranking factors in the Google search algorithm.

What many site owners don’t know, is that there’s an easy way to check how Google grades your site on these aspects.

Google’s Pagespeed Insights is our SEO Hack #1 because most sites fail it badly, and the items are easy to fix for the most part. With this tool, Google grades the website on Mobile and Desktop and produces a score. It also shows what specifically needs to be corrected on your site.

Give this to your developer, get all of the items corrected and your rankings will go up. Also note, that 100/100 scores are almost impossible to score. Typically, scoring around 80 or above is a great range to shoot for.

Here are the items that are covered in the different scoring windows:

SEO Hack #2

Google’s secret communication portal they reward you for using. Every project I work on, I install Google Webmaster Tools on the client’s website. A large majority of them don’t have it installed. This is a major way you can improve your rankings immediately.

Indexing, checking for penalties, sitelinks, and search traffic inside of this tool is our SEO Hack #3. In the slide below, here are the major areas to correct in the communication portal.

Take Up More Real Estate in Google

• Site Links – Encourage to display your most converting pages in search results.

Faster Loading With Schema

• Highlighter – Testing shows Google ranks structured data highlighter.

Constantly Check Errors

• Errors – If there are errors Google may not even have the page in their index.

Encourage Google To Index

• Sitemap – This is a ranking killer that’s happening on a lot of sites.

SEO Hack #3

Steal the traffic from the major competition in your space.

You probably know the major competition in your space, right? Here’s how to steal the traffic.

This strategy takes a good copywriter, a virtual assistant to do outreach and a solid designer. This is an on-going hack you’ll want to perform month after month.

Step 1 – Look up your biggest competitor on OpenSiteExplorer.org and download all of the incoming backlinks to their website. These are places where reporters, bloggers and influencers have written or linked to their website, causing them to rank high in Google.

Step 2 – Check out each of the sites linking to theirs and do some research on the writer or website that covered up. You’ll want to decide and open a conversation about submitting some content about your website to them.

Step 3 – This is where a great copywriter comes in. Getting published is a skill, but once you are, you’ll get some great links and start ranking for the keywords your competitor. The top 3 listings in Google typically get over 75% of the clicks for that keywords. That’s your chance to steal traffic.

As a pro-tip, here’s the ideal way to structure the link building to your website with different types of content from sites that link to you. It’s important to stagger the type of content, anchor text and page it links to.

SEO Hack #4

A rising (keyword) tide raises all ships. The roadmap is already there.

Many people wonder what to blog about, write guest posts or PR pieces about. Most specifically, people wonder what keywords to include. There’s a great hack for that.

Deep inside of your Google Webmaster Tools, there’s a keyword roadmap. This map shows you all of the keywords your site is showing up in Google for, called impressions. If you focus more of your marketing department’s content on those impressions, you’ll start ranking higher and higher for them.

Here’s an example of a roadmap from ClaytonWood.org

These keywords I’m not ranking for, but once consistent content gets published with these keywords in mind, they’ll start ranking on the first page.

This list gives you an indication of relevant keywords that are relatively easy to rank for, with the right content strategy.

This is a great list to use to outline your blog content calendar, and a great list to make sure you include in your guest postings or PR strategy.

Here are the factors that come into play:

SEO Hack #5

Scaling the unscalable SEO tasks and the tools to do it with.

Saving the best for last here, there are a set of SEO tools that industry insiders use, pass around, and sometimes keep quiet about. These help in the content syndication process shown below.

This process requires an intern, VA or a combination of tools. Getting the linkable content in the right hands is simple if you know the process. This is why scaling link building through content syndication is our SEO Hack #5.

List of potential publishers

• From ahrefs.com, OpenSiteExplorer.org, BuzzSumo and more.

List of great content titles

• Use a copywriter from Freelancer.com, UpWork.com or someone referred to you.

Outreach tools

• PressRush.com is my favorite tool to use for outreach, but there are a lot out there.

Syndicated content

• Buffer and Hootsuite and the main players here for gathering some social traction of the content.

My favorite SEO tools are

• DocSend
• BuzzSumo
• Yet Another Mail Merge
• PipeDrive
• AdEspresso

Google Webmaster Tools

All of the things we’re reviewing today are the do-it-yourself type of hacks. The variable is that some of them take some experience to execute quickly. For those that are in the leadership at a brand, a startup or wearing a number of hats (including marketing), this roadmap should be seriously considered.

Traffic from organic web searches (because of SEO) is some of the most valuable traffic online. Once you’re ranking high, it’s possible to stay there for quite some time.

Final Thoughts

SEO is one of the most elusive (and beneficial) marketing channels out there. Following certain processes for improving rankings can very quickly change the position of your website in Google search. That’s what we teach in this SEO Hacking course.

Each year, the Aberdeen Group surveys more than 200 companies to ask them about their new hire onboarding efforts. The report finds that best-in-class companies that offer dynamic onboarding programs enjoy a much higher employee retention rate – and employees reach their goals faster than those at companies without strong programs. Companies that show a commitment to onboarding use tactical and strategic initiatives, a structured approach, in addition to technology throughout the onboarding process. These efforts pay immediate dividends by working to protect an investment in recruiting and employing high performing sales people, helping to provide increased revenue performance; improved client experience; and protecting company brand reputation.

Creating, executing, and maintaining an effective onboarding program takes commitment from the entire organization, including Sales VPs and Human Resource Leaders, particularly when training salespeople involved in long sales cycles for sophisticated offering. Leading B2B organizations today embrace an interdepartmental approach, which uses technology to enhance their onboarding program and enable new sales hires to hit their targets, faster.

Here are six pieces of technology your organization can utilize in your organization’s onboarding plan:

1. Develop a welcome plan

Technology: HR software that offers automated options

New sales employees require an abundance of items: A desk, laptop, business cards, a phone number, accounts login for all the CRM your department uses, access to your virtual private network (VPN), a corporate credit card, a key account and stakeholder list, etc. It’s a long list. Fortunately, the majority of HR cloud services and software packages have onboarding features that can help HR and Sales coordinate everything from tax paperwork to seating assignments and IT. In order to be successful, a checklist of everything your new hire requires on arrival should be developed that incorporates the expertise of all of the departments your new sales hire will interact with – HR, finance, accounting, facilities, etc. Important in this process is ensuring that feedback on the onboarding process is collected from the new employee. The top sales organizations we partner with utilize this information to refine their software’s functionality and the onboarding process. By utilizing HR specific software, organizations’ enhance their ability to orchestrate a smooth first week for their new sales hire, and ultimately generate higher sales, faster.

2. Embrace your new sales hire

Technology: Social media

As soon as the hire is official, start using social media to welcome your new hire to the team. A Harvard Business Review Online article contends that social tools improve the onboarding experience for employees. One of the best tools you can use to help your salesperson get acclimated is LinkedIn – it will serve as a cheat sheet for helping them remember coworker’s names and faces, and also serve as a learning tool to help them make associations with co-workers, particularly those working remotely. Encouraging team members to send the new hire an invitation to connect, or creating a closed group for your department that your new hire can join provides a unique channel through which new sales hires can be introduced to their team.

The LinkedIn group method can also act as a sales learning tool where team members can share selling techniques and insights (for more information on how to great a LinkedIn group, see our reference list) about important selling activities. Unfortunately, many companies have tried – and failed – to make their own proprietary social networking tools, but why re-create the wheel? Using a familiar tool like LinkedIn requires little effort and is efficient. And don’t worry, Facebook fans, Facebook at Work is coming soon.

3. Develop a detailed onboarding plan

Technology: Excel

Word class organizations invest heavily in their onboarding process (Stein and Christiansen, 2010). Sitting a new employee in front of training videos, or providing vague direction on who to talk with about your products or services is a recipe for failure. One of piece of advice we provide clients as part of a structured onboarding process is to devise a discovery roadmap that the employee should follow to learn about their new job, the organization’s sales strategy, and the organization’s selling environment. As noted by Harvard Business Professor, Frank Cespedes, new sales hires “need to learn about the company and how other functions affect, and are affected by, selling behaviors. They don’t need to know how to do other jobs in the firm. But they do need to know what those jobs are and how those activities affect selling.”

Tip: Start with the big picture and drill down to the details, providing the names of people inside and outside of the organization the employee should contact and get to know. You’ll wind up with an agenda for the employee to follow for his or her first few weeks, and your new employee will be able to set appointments and meet people at their speed – an important way to ensure the new salesperson focuses on tasks and selling skills that add immediate value to the team. Your matrix might look like this (in fact, copy and paste it into an Excel spreadsheet and start working on it right now.)

4. Training details

Technology: Video

While personal interaction is important for a new employee, there are some tasks that employees will have to learn through video, particularly as they start drilling down into learning the ins and outs of your product or service. In fact, the Society for Human Resource Management’s paper, “Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success” promotes the use of a wide variety of learning tools and environments – including video – to help new employees learn. Fortunately, tools are available to make this happen.

Many of our clients have training videos for their customers. Utilizing a video editor to augment existing sales videos with notes and voiceovers that are useful for salespeople to know is just one method of incorporating video into your onboarding process. PowerPoint can also be recorded.

Tip: Have your top sales person walk through a PowerPoint deck, providing selling insights on topics like typical customer encounters, important selling skills, different sales approaches, and success stories. Use PowerPoint’s record functionality and save the presentation for new salespeople.

5. Measure progress

Technology: Gamification

The Aberdeen report found that only 17 percent of organizations apply gaming techniques to the new hire experience – but those who use it improve engagement by 48 percent. Tools as simple and easy as Survey Monkey or TINY Pulse enable organizations to send quick quizzes with feedback options that employees can use. Since the administrator can review the results of the participants, managers are provided another tool to gauge their new hires progress.

only 17 percent of organizations apply gaming techniques to the new hire experience – but those who use it improve engagement by 48 percent.

6. Mastering the client call

Technology: Google Hangouts

Pairing new sales hires with top sellers is one of the most vital exercises of any sales onboarding processes since a new hire can actively learn about effective selling tasks and activities. If selling is done primarily over the phone, consider using Google Hangouts. The technology allows for two-way video communication that can be recorded. Clients are typically more than willing to participate in a video call, particularly if they know there’s a new employee trying to learn (we’ve all been there), and being able to review the play-by-play afterwards with the salesperson is helpful to everyone in the process. Google Hangouts provide yet another technological tool to handle role-playing for sales calls – reviewing video is a great way for an employee to get visual and audio feedback on how they’re doing, and gives their manager an opportunity to pause and replay to reinforce what they did well, and point out where they need improvement.

New employees are eager to learn so they can get selling. By developing and embracing a structured onboarding strategy that utilizes technology to make new hires feel welcome, engage them right away, and set them on a path of learning and socialization, sales managers can feel confident that their new hire will be set up for success.

Need more in-depth information on implementing an effective sales onboarding strategy?

Read our eBook, The First 90 Days – Your Guide to Making New Sales Hires Produce Fast.

References:

Onboarding 2013, A New Look at New Hires, Madeline Laurano, Aberdeen Group
Creating a LinkedIn Group, LinkedIn
Facebook at Work, Facebook
Successful Onboarding: Strategies to Unlock Hidden Value Within Your Organization, Mark Stein and Lilith Christiansen
Social Tools can Improve Employee Onboarding, Karie Willyerd
Facebook Developing ‘Facebook at Work’ Service, Says Report, Issie Lapowsky, Wired.com
Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success, Tyla N. Bauer, Ph.D, Society for Human Resource Management

The post Six Sales Onboarding Tools to Welcome and Train New Hires appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

Not too long ago brand storytelling was often dismissed as a soft topic meant for tactical conversations. The C-suite wasn’t to be bothered. As the best stories propelled brands to the front time and time again, senior leadership became enlightened by the power of story.

Rightfully so, brand storytelling shapes the meaning brands represent. That meaning is intrinsically linked to what customers value. What customers value is at the center of a brand’s existence. At a recent brand storytelling workshop on Wall Street, I was not surprised to see the CEO at the front of the room. The message of his participation is clear — this work is too important now.

To gain an advantage through storytelling, there is much to think through. It is a strategic and creative process. Look to these fifteen insights to build a foundation that will help your brand rise.

1. Four Ways To Extend Your Brand Story

We live in a world filling with stories. But that doesn’t mean for one moment that simply telling a story will make you a fascinating brand. Stories aren’t defined by the teller. In the end, their success is decided by the listener and the watcher. Persuasion happens through interest not by repetition these days. So who’s leaning in to hear more from you? And how will your story position you to deliver more of what they are interested in seeing happen?

2. Leveraging Brand Heritage For Stories And Strength

The brands that remind consumers of what they have, where they are and where they’ve come from are doing well. It’s a timely reminder of just how much the story of a brand links to the narrative that buyers run in their own minds of the lives they lead and the lives they would lead if they could.

3. Seven Ways To Craft A Brand Counter Story

You can’t beat a story with facts, you can only beat it with a better story. So if a competitor has a better story, listing the facts of your product only makes their story stronger. And if you do decide to tell a counter-story, you can’t have one that is only a tiny bit better. You should aim to tell a story that is 10 times better and more compelling.

4. Every Brand Price Point Needs A Story

The temptation is to see story as a luxury item: something that brands implement to lift their margin. There’s nothing wrong with that of course – it’s powerful and it works. At The Blake Project we don’t think that story is just a top-end nice-to-have. Our view is that most brands, no matter where they are priced in the marketplace, need a storyline.

5. Eight Keys To Telling A Competitive Brand Story

Everyone has a story now. Or at least most brands claim to have one. But having a story in many ways is like having a product. Really it means nothing if it is not competitive as a narrative and personally relevant to each recipient. So your story must be distinctive from the other stories that are in play in a market and it must continue to be so. That’s why you can’t set and forget a brand story.

6. Tell All Of Your Brand Stories

Marketers often talk about story as if it is one thing. But brands with multiple stakeholders need to cater for different responses and priorities by streaming a range of stories to a range of audiences at different times. The reason is simple. The things that make a brand attractive in one context are different from what they might be in another context. Inclination changes, sometimes markedly, depending upon what people value.

7. Provoking Reaction Through Brand Storytelling

By way of example, Disney tells stories filled with magic in order to generate a palpable feeling of wonder from its audiences. The experiences Disney provides at the box office, at its parks and at its live events then bring that sense of wonder alive. As a result, wonder is the benchmark reaction for Disney. A Disney story, film or experience that does not generate wonder is off-brand. What sorts of reactions should brands be looking to provoke through their stories today? We explore.

8. Brands As Storylines

What would happen if marketers acted more like television producers and creators? How might that change the way brands tell their stories? As the worlds of brands, media and entertainment converge, and channels become screens rather than outlets each of these disciplines will borrow success factors from the other.

9. The Next Era Of Brand Conversations

Too many brands continue to fail at convincingly placing what they have to offer inside the lives of the people they are trying to reach. A lot of that seems to come down to a simple misalignment of priorities: while marketing teams ponder data and speak earnestly about really understanding their buyers as individuals, those interests are not reflected as clearly as they should be in what they end up saying.

10. Eight Characteristics Of A Motivating Brand Story

What makes a brand story engaging to customers and effective in motivating them to buy? In our experience, there are eight fundamental characteristics of a motivating brand story.

11. What Makes A Great Brand Story?

Storytelling is of course very much an idea whose time has come. And brands are increasingly using story formats to express themselves and to explain their place in the market and the world. But, if I may reference Sheryl Sandberg, what gives a story “lean-in” value? Filmmaker Andrew Stanton explains that we humans love stories because of their affirmative value. We need that affirmation, says Stanton, and stories provide that connection. Stories, he says, work across time and allow us to find similarities with others. In his presentation, Stanton draws our attention to six great guidelines.

12. Brand Storytelling In The Digital Age

Just like the cave paintings of prehistoric man to the carving of symbols on rock tablets and ancient temple walls, the social web is the universal medium of the digital age. Indeed the digital age offers many new forms, structures and venues to deliver the “moral” of your brand story to customers. But there’s a catch.

13. Brand Storytelling And The Hero Of Your Brand

At the center of every brand story is a hero. The hero could be an idea, a person, or a thing – to be effective at brand storytelling, it’s critical to know what attributes define the inner character of the hero. The hero, of course, is the brand itself. Like any good story that teaches and informs us about a higher ideal, brand storytelling is about the higher purpose of why the hero exists and why we should care.

14. The Intersection Of Brand Positioning And Storytelling

Positioning a brand with exact precision is job one of every brand marketer. Job two of every brand marketer is to connect the core idea of “highly valued and in short supply” to a compelling and transcendent brand story. The point where brand positioning and brand storytelling intersect and overlap is where the real magic happens.

15. Brands Must Master The Art of Storytelling

Brands that lose their way lose their connection to their sacred story first. If you’re managing a brand that is underperforming, ask yourself if the leadership of your organization are the first champions and trust holders of your brands mythic story, and if the story still provides the guidance and illumination to keep the tribe connected to its transcendent meaning and behaving in a way that supports the truth of why the brand matters.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Strategic Brand Storytelling Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

If you’re using a script for questions during needs assessment, you’re going to miss important information.

Here’s the problem with all those books and training manuals and tools that include a script for questions: canned questions do not work. In fact, they will work against you instead of working for you.

All too often, when sellers rely on a script for questions, they do not know exactly why they are asking a particular question.

Without understanding the strategic purpose of the questions they ask, sellers will sound scattered. Their questions will not make sense to buyers. Although they made sense in the prepared script for questions, in a live setting these same questions just don’t work.

Additionally, not grasping the strategic value of questions causes sellers to miss key information revealed in response to those questions. When sellers ask random questions with no clear direction, they talk over their buyers or ask multiple questions in rapid fire. This is confusing for buyers. For sellers, it is unproductive because the constant retooling of questions and attempts to recover from awkward questions take their focus off listening to the buyers’ responses.

Here’s what can happen when you use a script for questions:

The dialogue below is a script from an actual sales call. This seller decided never to use a script for questions again.

After this call, the seller learned to think more strategically about how to craft questions and about the importance of understanding the intention behind each question. Building those skills made a huge difference in his sales interactions. As you read through the dialogue of the call, try to relate to what’s happening. Look for parallels between what this seller is doing and what you may be doing in sales calls when you, too, lack clarity about what you’d like to know.

Seller: So… How long have you been in business?

Buyer: Next year will be our 10-year anniversary.

Seller: I bet the years have gone by quickly. Did you start the business?

Buyer: Yes. I had a partner at first.

Seller: Didn’t work out?

Buyer: It was okay. I bought him out when he decided to move because his wife took a job in Cincinnati.

Seller: So now it’s just you making all the decisions? Do you have any silent partners or other people involved?

Buyer: My management team makes a lot of the decisions. It just depends on the type of decision and what’s involved.

Seller: So big decisions go up for a vote? I mean, let’s say you were thinking about a change in suppliers. Would everyone be involved in that decision or would you just tell them? Is it all managers or certain managers?

Buyer: It really depends on…

Seller: (Interrupting) Like if you were thinking my company could be a good fit with your company… Then what? Who else would you be talking to about doing business with us? Should they be here now? Would it be better if I met directly with someone else?

Buyer: Since I don’t know a lot about your systems, I can’t answer that right now. I took the meeting to try and understand more about the full integration functionality you mentioned. We have some systems that work well, some that don’t. The idea of full integration is appealing but could be overwhelming. I’m just looking to get a better sense of what’s involved before I bring in anyone else.

Seller: Okay, I have some other questions, too, so let me just look at my list here… We don’t really know who the decision makers will be. Next, um, could you tell me more about your budgeting processes and buying cycles?

Buyer: Yeah, sure. What do you want to know?

Seller: Well, budget process… And it says buying cycles… Let’s just come back to that later.

Buyer: It’s…

Seller: (Interrupting) I just don’t feel right asking about that. Let’s try this one. What is the lifetime value of a customer?

Buyer: Hmmmm… I’d have to do some calculations… That’s a good question. Let me open up this referral data…

Seller: (10 seconds later) We can come back to that, too. I don’t want to take up too much of your time. Who is your ideal customer? You know, the company size, geography or whatever…

Buyer: Right. Is it okay if I bring up a little data to answer that? We track it and it’s the first of the month, so I’ve got the most recent report.

Seller: If you want, you can just send it to me.

Buyer: No, I can’t send this. It’s not something I want floating around.

Seller: I understand. So what is the average transaction for a sale?

Buyer: Do you want me to look that up?

Seller: Only if you want. You could just give me a ballpark number. I’m also wondering about frequency of transactions. Like how often does a customer purchase, I think?

Buyer: This is a lot of detailed information. Where are you going with this?

Seller: I’m just, uh, asking questions about your business before I tell you about my business. You know, to see the fit for both of us? To, um, uh, you know, help you make the right selection?

In this situation, the seller had been given a list of pre-written script of needs assessment questions. The seller had not yet been to a training program to learn the purpose or value of these questions. He didn’t know what some of the questions meant, let alone how the information gathered could be used. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. It is one of the reasons why sellers reject questions and the process of needs assessment.

Throughout this dialogue, the seller asked the questions and expected the buyer to provide instant answers. Presumably, the seller thought the value of the question would become apparent in the answer. When pressed to explain a question or the purpose of a question, the seller was unable to do so. The seller saw so little value in the questions that he did not allow time for the buyer to answer even when the buyer affirmed the question.

This seller did not understand the content of his own questions nor the intent behind them. Without clarity of intent, questions will not be crafted effectively. Without understanding the content you’d like to see in a response, you can’t craft questions to efficiently yield that content.

If you’d like to learn more about how to craft your own questions and conduct an effective needs assessment, be sure to read DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected. This approach to questions is what truly differentiates sellers and creates value for buyers.

Next Steps:

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

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

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

The post The Problem with Using a Script for Questions appeared first on People First.

When business people start talking about the current marketing and buying landscape these days, and they’re doing it a lot, they usually default to tactics – social networking, sales collateral, blogging, webinars, video, mobile, and email.

With every emerging platform there seems to be an equally reactive rush to embrace the accompanying tactics and I think most people are asking the wrong thing.

Instead of how do we create a viral video, where can we buy a sales list or how much should we spend on online ads, the question is and should be this.

What behaviors are our current customers showcasing right now when it comes to marketing and buying and how can we tap those behaviors using some combination of traditional and online tools.

How to meet the needs of the great, self-educated and on-demand buyer

We buy products and services differently, so as marketers and sales professionals, we have to market and sell differently.

Not only that, we need to guide buyers on a journey they want to take by identifying the core behaviors they desperately want to experience on their way to becoming loyal customers.

Organizations that understand this and create and organize opportunities for people to experience these behaviors at any point along the customer lifecycle will win.

1.Give buyers a way to get to know you

Permission – Today’s prospective clients want to give permission to the companies they want to learn more about. They look forward to anticipated, personal and relevant messages. For organizations that get this, it’s the privilege of marketing to people who want to be marketed to. Once you’ve embarked upon giving your prospects a way for you to whisper to them, you can spend less time marketing to strangers and more time marketing to friends.

2. Help buyers make good decisions

Educate – Today’s prospects want to learn more about the companies that might be addressing their needs. Most organizations don’t tend to think of shopping as an educating activity, but it definitely is. When buyers shop, they seek out information. They “kick the tires.” They educate themselves to make good decisions.

3. Earn buyer trust through other people

Trust – Trust is the most important factor and today’s prospects want to see peers they relate to have come to trust certain organizations. Seth Godin famously said, “What would change the mind of many people resistant to evidence is a series of eager testimonials.”

4. Create buyer samples before core offerings

Sample – Today’s prospects want to be able to sample your expertise, product or service so they don’t look foolish. Today’s shift in buying now demands a very tangible way prospects can experience your offer.

Prospects want to be able to sample your expertise, product or service and it’s the easiest way to move people to actually buying all-in, particularly in highly competitive and highly priced situations.

• Demo— a group consulting model that would demonstrate expertise by offering advice and answering questions in a free weekly session that could be upgraded to one-on-one consulting
• 30 – 90 Minute Consultation or Coaching— A personal or life coach might create a “get unstuck” in 3 sessions mini engagement that allows someone to try out coaching without a long term commitment
• Audit— an marketing firm may offer a free or low cost audit providing solid recommendations that could turn into long-term paid projects
• Trial Offer— an home improvement contractor might create a 4-Hour You Point and We Fix starter offering
• Assessment— an structural engineering firm might sell a feasibility analysis as a product.
• Seminar or Workshop— an sales training and development firm might offer free a seminar with worksheets and CDs.
• Basic or Low Cost Version— an accounting firm might sell a certain type of low-cost tax return.

5. Make buyers the big winner

Refer – More than ever today’s prospects want to share with the world how smart they are. They want an experience that surprises them, excites them or so clearly exceeds their expectation in ways that make them turn to social channels to share their story.

Give the self-educated and on-demand buyer what she or he came for

It’s a brave new world here in marketing and selling. The way we used to market doesn’t work today. The way we sell traditionally doesn’t either

We need to find a new way: a way that accepts and embraces how we learn, shop and buy.

If you are to address these rules of marketing and buying, every marketing, sales and service initiative, process and campaign must be designed to organize around the behavior your buyer desperately wants to experience.

Sales and trust. Not exactly two words today’s buyers think of as synonymous. According to HubSpot Research, only 3% of people consider salespeople trustworthy.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I've found a breach in trust is the most common reason a rep loses a deal.

And yet talking about obtaining and maintaining trust is rarely discussed amongst sales leaders. It's about time we talk about trust and sales with honesty.

If you find the below strategies valuable, I encourage you to register for free for HubSpot's Inbound Sales Day. I'll be expanding on this topic with a session called "Lessons in Trust from the World's Best Closer: The Doctor." Learn more about Inbound Sales Day and register here.

1) You don't follow through on exactly what (and when) you promised.

It's just too easy to say, "I'll have that to you by the end of the day." Then the end of the day comes and ... you decide you can send it tomorrow, you're too swamped and couldn't get it done.

Your email tomorrow morning either ignores your dishonesty or starts with an apology.

Either way, you've already lost trust and credibility. Get in the habit of under-promising and over-delivering. If you need to send follow up collateral or answer questions, don't set yourself up for failure.

2) You talk about what you want, not the buyer.

Have you ever sent an email (or started a call) that began with "Hey Jane, I wanted to..." or “Hi Jane, I’d like to…” Stop. Please, for the love of sales, stop talking about what you want to do.

Your buyer doesn't care about the fact that you "wanted" to follow up or you "want" to get on a call. It's filler junk and you know it.

Instead, dig deeper and be consultative. For example:

Jane, following our call we had three unanswered questions. My recommendation is to find time with you and John the CTO so we can work through the technical limitations openly. I will bring along Amie, a technical resource from my end. Our joint availability for a call is [times or calendar link]. Please confirm the time that works for you and I will send an invite."

Make a recommendation based on the information you have and be firm with why. Don't gloss over it or say "I wanted to."

3) You ask over and over, "Does that make sense?"

Asking the question is an easy mistake to make because it comes from a place of innocence. You want to understand that the information was communicated and consumed accurately.

In reality, it casts uncertainty and doubt on you as the salesperson about the accuracy and veracity of your content.

Most of the time, you use, "Does that make sense?" as a transitional phrase. The courteous thing to do is for your prospect to say "yes," so you can move on.

Try asking, "How does that sound to you?" or another phase that doesn't evoke a yes/no response.

4) Your sales process is inconsistent.

There are many different sales processes for moving a deal through a funnel. Pick something simple and stick with it. I write and speak about The Six Gateways of Sales as a simple sales process to move a deal through the funnel.

Trust, unironically, I consider the third gateway.

The point is to be consistent with every prospect. When there are inconsistencies, you tend to get lost with exactly where the deal sits. Not only do you lose track of your prospects' goals, you lose your own.

When you're at a loss, so is your prospect. Sometimes you regather information or become repetitive. These are indicators of a lack of commitment to your process and a slippery slope toward losing trust.

5) Saying "Yes, we can totally do that" to every request.

In Sales is a Science, author Allan Lobeck states that "No" is the most powerful word in sales. I believe it's also the most honest word a rep can use.

I can't overstate the power of being honest about the limitations of your product or service. Saying no actually empowers you as a figure of authority. Because when you're honest about limitations, you prove you're more interested in helping than in selling. What's more, you'll often find your prospects thanking you for your honesty.

Resist the rookie urge to be a "yes wo/man." It's killing your trust and your deals.

6) Sending unpersonalized sales collateral.

By the time your prospect is talking with you, she has already progressed through 57% of the buyer’s journey. In short, she already understands the high-level value of your product/service.

Do not regurgitate what is already available on your website.

If you want to earn the prospect's trust, you need to send helpful collateral. Personalize collateral to your prospect’s buyer persona, industry, and incorporate a case study that captures both.

Modularized sales collateral allows you to compile a proposal or sell sheet fast and on time. It also shows that you put something together that addresses who they are.

7) You say "Thank you" during your calls.

Pete Caputa, VP Sales at HubSpot, says his worst pet peeve is when sales reps say "thank you for your time."

Change the way you think about closing a call. Make it an explicit goal to have your prospect thank you for your time. Resist the urge to say thank you and instead close with, "I'm glad I could be helpful today."

Or, even better, respond with, "You're welcome." Your prospect gave you their time because you were helpful, and they'll continue doing so if you continue to be helpful.

8) You treat your prospect's time as more valuable than yours.

Why is it that consultants get paid for their time by their clients, but not sales reps?

Because clients of consultants respect their time. They are paying for it.

Be on time, helpful, sincere, and don't let transgressions against your time go unnoticed. When a prospect shows up late for a meeting or misses one altogether, there should be a cost. Even if that cost is a simple acknowledgement, don't let it slide. You might feel awkward at first, but push through and be cordial.

When a prospect stops respecting your time, it's an indicator things are going south.

9) Your questions let prospects off the hook too easy.

But not in the way you think. I'm referring to the simple scenario when you ask a question and get a response that seems helpful, when in reality the response is too superficial to help you help your prospect.

For instance, you might ask what the timeline is to solve the problem they are encountering.

A common response from a prospect might be, "Sometime this quarter." The rookie mistake would be to jot this answer down in the CRM as the accurate timeline.

Don't let them off so easy! You'll gain trust as a result. Try instead to follow up with, "Why is the company making a decision this quarter?"

You might get a response like, "Our CEO said that if we don't increase revenue by 15% next quarter, we'll miss our targets."

Now you're getting somewhere. You know that to win the deal and their trust you have to prove your solution can either deliver those results or provide equal value.

It's far too easy to think of the answer to the first question as an adequate response. What ends up happening is that you then use "this quarter," as ammo to pressure the deal to close with your contact. When in reality, you could have built rapport by helping build a case to the CEO.

I'll be expanding on the topic of trust with a session called "Lessons in Trust from the World's Best Closer: The Doctor". Learn more about Inbound Sales Day and register here.

Sales organizations want to deliver a fantastic sales experience for all of their customers. But what does that mean, exactly? Being sold to doesn’t always have the best connotation, but we instinctively know a good salesperson versus a bad one, even if we can’t quite grasp what the extra something they have is.

But we want to know what that extra something is. In our series, we’re going to experts around the world who we think have that extra something and asking all about that crucial last mile with a prospect: the in-person meeting.

This Month’s Expert

We got a chance to ask David Hoffeld, CEO and Chief Sales Trainer of Hoffeld Group, about how he approaches sales. David has worked with small and medium businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Because of the results his insights generate, David is a sales and leadership contributor to Fast Company, and has been featured in Fortune, U.S. News and World Report,The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, CBS Radio, Fox News Radio, and more.

David has pioneered a revolutionary sales approach based on neuroscience and behavioral science that radically increases sales, which he’s written about in his new book, The Science of Selling: Proven Strategies to Make Your Pitch, Influence Decisions, and Close the Deal. He has a truly unique perspective, backed by science, on the sales experience. In his own words, here’s what makes a great one.

How would you describe your meeting style and approach?

David: My sales approach is based entirely on what science has revealed regarding how the brain is influenced and constructs a buying decision. When I say science, I mean it. I study social psychology, cognitive psychology, social neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics, and apply this proven science to sales. It is the foundation of everything I do and teach.

Why does this science matter and why does it significantly increase sales? The closer your sales approach is to how the brain is wired to be positively influenced and create a buying decision, the more effective you will be. This may seem obvious, until you realize that salespeople struggle with defining how the buying decision occurs – what has to happen in buyers’ brains before they will decide to say “yes” to the sale. Yet, how can salespeople guide buyers through the buying decision when they are not sure how it occurs? The answer is they can’t or at least not as effectively as they could if they knew how to sell the way the brain makes a buying decision.

The good news is that there is now decades of research in this area. Over 10 years ago, I saw its application to selling; I spent a ridiculous amount of time and money learning this science and also conducting some original sales-specific research based on it. Now, because of science, salespeople don’t have to guess their way through the sale, follow the conjecture-based ideas about selling, or use anecdotal evidence. Today, salespeople can base the way they sell on hard, scientific evidence that will allow them to be far more effective, improve sales results, and better serve buyers.

How does in-person sales differ from other types?

David: When salespeople are sitting in front of buyers, the main difference is that the influence of peripheral factors (dress, nonverbal communication, presentation style, use of pictures when presenting, etc.) are amplified and shape the perception of the salesperson’s message. Also, a salesperson can use these peripheral cues to more quickly build and deepen rapport, trust and engagement, if they know how. Unfortunately, these opportunities are often lost because salespeople do not know how to effectively leverage them.

What’s the biggest challenge of in-person sales?

David: The #1 reason sales people underperform is they inadvertently deploy selling behaviors that conflict with how the brain is wired to be influenced and formulate a buying decision. One study published in the Harvard Business Review found that 63 percent of the salespeople analyzed in the experiment regularly behaved in ways that drove down the likelihood of the sale. However, once salespeople understand the basics of how the brain is influenced and makes a buying decision they can modify their behaviors and truly make the way they sell focused on buyers and helping them make positive buying choices.

That is what my firm specializes in, and my upcoming book, The Science of Selling, shows salespeople how to practically and quickly apply the science to improve their results immediately.

How should you respond to customer objections in a meeting?

David: Two thoughts on this: The research shows the best way—by far—to deal with objections is to neutralize them before they are ever verbalized by the buyer. Once a buyer verbalizes an objection, it is much harder to overcome in comparison to negating it preemptively. How do you do this? There is some groundbreaking research that conclusively shows that objections are the result of the breakdown of the mental process that prospects go through when constructing a buying decision. Once you know what those mental steps are you can often knock out objections before they begin to plague your prospects’ minds with doubt.

That said, this is not always possible and there are times when you must handle objections after they are verbalized. As a rule, earlier is usually better. The later in the sale they arise the more challenging they usually are to overcome. Also, a key to dealing with objections it to follow a process and always present new evidence or reframe the situation so that your prospects don’t have to reject their previous choice, but can instead make a new decision.

How much should you talk compared to a prospect in a face-to-face meeting?

David: Obviously, listening to your prospects is paramount. It is hard to productively influence someone and sell to them if you don’t understand them, their situation and needs. However, most sales training on listening is overly simplistic motivational speeches that extoll the virtues of listening, remind salespeople that they have two ears and only one mouth and implore them to listen more than they speak. Not only are these ideas unhelpful, but they trivialize the important task of listening.

Instead, the key to effective listening is to focus salespeople not on listening more, but on what they should be listening for. Until you understand some important things about your prospects and their situation such as: problems they want to solve, scope and cause of the problems, who is involved in the decision, how their buy-in is achieved, needed product or service parameters, time frame, budgets and other factors—presenting your product or service is irresponsible since you don’t yet know enough about your prospects to show them how you, your company, and product or service can truly meet their needs.

I don’t believe, nor is there any evidence to suggest a magical ratio of talking to listening that salespeople should follow. Instead, they should focus on gaining an in-depth perspective of the mission critical factors that will influence the sale, which involves listening a lot, and then present how they can truly help their prospects, which involves presenting and listening. I have found that helping salespeople understand what they should listen for often solves any problems with listening.

It’s not every day that a group of leading B2B marketers gather in Boston. Last week over 400 marketers attended #FlipMyFunnel in Boston to share best practices in marketing on topics including Account-Based Marketing (ABM), MarTech, Sales Development Email Dos and Don’ts (some scary examples here), Leadership, Big Data and much, more. This was my second #FlipMyFunnel event and it seems to keep getting better.

If you missed the event, here are some ideas talked about at #FlipMyFunnel:

Account-Based Marketing for some, is more than marketing-
Account-Based Marketing isn’t something totally new, it is however, a way to approach targeting buyers differently. Sophisticated marketers have focused on account segmentation for years, however, today’s ABM as presented at #FlipMyFunnel is a way to target accounts across all aspects of marketing from content, data, leveraging MarTec and includes sales. The ideas presented at #FlipMyFunnel were really more about Account-Based Everything, showcasing that this is a way of thinking about more than just marketing.

Relevant content matters. Poor content impacts business-
In a session with Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing, a series of poorly written, erroneously personalized and most of all, generic sales development emails were shown to the audience. The impact of receiving a wildly inappropriate introductory email asking for 20 minutes to learn how you market, not only alienates the buyer, but reflects poorly on your organization.

Focus on always delivering buyer-centric, relevant and educational sales development emails,otherwise, the buyer will surely ignore the email, but may even unsubscribe. Marketing and sales need to align on messaging and agree on how to engage the buyer, whether an organization uses an Account-Based Marketing strategy or not.

The funnel isn’t dead- it’s just thinner-
Just because the industry is talking Account-Based Marketing more than the sales funnel doesn’t mean the sales funnel is dead. Craig Rosenberg, the “Funnelholic” says it is now just a thinner funnel. Marketers as always, need to think about quality over quantity, but now more than ever when thinking only about specific accounts. Add in the requirement of relevant, personalized content and the need for more specific, customized content for each buyer, the funnel isn’t the same as it once was.

The CMO is the change agent in an organization-
Marketing organizations have changed over the past ten years with the introduction of marketing automation, big data, and mobile everything. Marketing is responsible for driving revenue, and is now held accountable to their own quotas and measure themselves against key performance indicators. Marketing is now a data-driven organization. Today’s marketing organization isn’t static; it’s constantly changing to meet the needs of our buyers, maximizing people, process, content, technology and data. As a result, the role of the CMO has changed to that of a change agent in an organization. The CMO speaks in terms of results, of revenue and contribution to pipeline. The CMO must be the agent that aligns marketing and sales to meet the needs of the buyer and the CMO now addresses changes in the market and builds agile teams to meet those needs.

The presenters at #FlipMyFunnel shared insights on how they are addressing the needs of their buyers by becoming more relevant in all areas that impact the buyers, not just marketing. Focusing on certain accounts isn’t new in marketing; however, shifting the focus to specific accounts across all areas of the organization is a twist. The conference gave marketers a taste of Account-Based Everything.

Author: Erika Goldwater CIPP/US @erikawg VP Marketing, ANNUITAS

The post Account-Based Everything? appeared first on ANNUITAS.

Social selling evangelist. Marketer trapped in a salesperson’s body. Unwavering customer advocate. However you describe Jill Rowley, it’s clear that she is an influential voice, resource and advocate for effective selling in today’s complex buying landscape.

I had the pleasure of meeting Jill at Dreamforce this past year, and most recently spoke with her on our newest episode of the Sales Enablement Shift podcast. While a lot can change in a year, much of what Jill presented at Dreamforce is still relevant today: the customer is still in control of the sales process, salespeople still don’t know enough about these buyers to consistently have meaningful interactions with them, and social selling and listening are still not being optimized by sales teams to improve win rates.

“The buyer and the buying process have changed so much in the past ten years…buyers don’t buy products anymore, they are buying experiences and expect much more from the vendor,” Jill shared in the recent episode.

Because buyers are now in charge, Jill says that each salesperson must act as the buyer’s consultant, subject matter (and portfolio) expert, and concierge to deliver best practices and foster a community of customer success. This is a lot of hats to expect each salesperson to wear. It is also where sales enablement comes in. The level of sales competency necessary to keep up with buyers requires a central sales enablement function that must be elevated from its current state as a one-off checklist item to a more strategic, ongoing process. As such, treating sales enablement as a training function, an isolated event, or a “dumping ground” for interdepartmental initiatives will not enable sales. So what does Jill say is necessary for a successful sales enablement strategy?

1. Formalize a sales enablement charter. No matter how mature your organization’s sales enablement function is, it’s important to create a charter that explicitly highlights the vision, mission, objectives, metrics and processes of sales enablement. A charter will dictate any and all decisions made around sales enablement, including hires and technology investments, and most importantly will help sales enablement gain buy-in at the executive level. [Sneak peek: we’ll be taking a deep dive into how to create and formalize a charter in an upcoming episode of the Sales Enablement Shift podcast with Tamara Schenk!]
2. Understand your buyer. As shared in this podcast episode, one of Jill Rowley’s social selling commandments is “know thy buyer.” And this doesn’t just mean addressing him or her by name in an email or knowing what his or her company does, but doing the nitty-gritty research of what his or her role, pain points, and passions are outside of work. Jill shared a story about a prospect of hers that tweeted about a toy that teaches children the basics of coding, and how she bought that toy and sent it to the prospect. Understanding the buyer happens on an individual level of course, but it’s also up to the sales enablement function to facilitate this understanding. Without an understanding of the buyer, it’s difficult to enable sales.
3. Make social selling a part of your sales enablement strategy. As you foster a buyer-centric sales strategy, social selling may naturally become an established part of your sales process. “Sales enablement is exactly where social selling fits” in the larger sales landscape, according to Jill, because social platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) are great places to learn about a buyer and to see things through a buyer’s point of view. But don’t expect reps to simply pick up social selling one day. It’s important to consciously implement and deliver the value of social selling over a period of time with your sales reps. “I think organizations need to think about [social selling] in a more holistic and programmatic way, so that you don’t have a lot of random acts of social selling throughout the organization,” Jill shared. As with any new or unfamiliar initiative, it’s best to start small with a controlled group of individuals, measure the effectiveness, and then scale.

Social selling and sales enablement are two peas in a pod: both are intent on improving the relationship between seller and buyer, and work hand-in-hand to ensure the salesperson is prepared for today’s buyer-led sales interaction. Many thanks to Jill for her valuable insights, and be sure to listen to her episode of the Sales Enablement Shift podcast. You might even get to hear her sing some Tracy Chapman…

Has your content team ever created a one-hit wonder? If so, you may be sitting on an opportunity to create many pieces of killer content from that original piece.

That’s what my team did. In this post, I’ll show how Radix, a B2B copywriting agency, atomized one core article into a set of pieces — a steady flow of fresh content over two years. During those two years, we turned the message of one newsletter article written by our founder, Fiona Campbell-Howes, into these 10 pieces:

• Three blog posts
• Three podcasts
• One presentation
• One board game
• One infographic
• One quiz

This content set has helped us fill our marketing funnel with new clients and projects. Here’s how we did it.

Our original piece: Exclusive newsletter article

We kicked off our atomization program with this piece – The Seven Types of B2B Copywriter: Which One Is Best for You? It started life in October 2013 as an exclusive article for our newsletter subscribers. The article was based on Fiona’s theory that there are different types of B2B copywriters, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and that using the right (or wrong) one on a given asset or campaign has a huge impact on the results.

We realized that this message had legs, after seeing good click-through rates on that newsletter. We decided that it would be a shame to limit that message’s audience to the select (read tiny) bunch of discerning B2B marketing professionals who subscribed to our newsletter. We had to take the message wider.

Atomization defined

What is atomization, exactly? Jay Baer defines it as “taking a strong content marketing platform or theme, and executing it in many, strategically sound ways.” As he points out, atomization offers loads of benefits:

• It’s “resource efficient”: Atomization means you can get your content to cover more ground without having to make completely new content all the time. If an idea clicks with your audience, it makes sense to make the most of it.

• It “helps win the relevancy wars”: You can cover more platforms and in different ways, increasing the chances of your content being perceived as hyper-relevant to part of your audience.

• It has “built-in amplification”: Having your content on different platforms means that your audience could touch it multiple times. This attention-multiplier effect makes it seem like you’re everywhere. Your themes and ideas slowly sink in.

Atomization can squeeze more value from your successful content. It can bring that content to new audiences by adapting it for platforms and consumption preferences. It can extend the value of an existing piece of content by months or — as in our case — years.

How we atomized our content – and measured its success

What does a process of content atomization look like in practice? Read on, as I describe in chronological order how our process has played out.

First, a warning (or cautionary tale) — Radix is a small company. While as copywriters we’re set up to create and publish content, we’re not that brilliant — yet— at scientifically tracking its impact or ROI.

We’re avid users of Google Analytics to track the reach of our content, but during a lot of the period covered by this atomization program, Google Analytics was plagued with referral spam — to the point where we gave up using it for a few months.

Add to that the fact that we forgot one month to renew our subscription to the service that provides our podcast download stats, and you’ll understand why some of the atomization we describe doesn’t have performance data.

Under the circumstances, how do we know that our atomization program is successful? We listen to what people say, and we watch our bottom line.

• Clients and prospects have told us how much they loved our Funnel! board game and our interactive quiz.
• Agency clients and prospects have asked us how we can help them produce more innovative content formats.
• Industry influencers have shared and retweeted these content pieces to our core B2B tech-marketing audience.
• Most telling of all, in the three years since starting our atomization program, our revenue increased an average of 28% year over year — with no sales and marketing effort other than our content marketing program. That’s a pretty good result.

We atomized our content, and revenue bumped up 28%, says @ek6891.
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In the sections below, I walk through what we did to atomize our content. Think of the content set as a molecule. Our main message — that B2B marketers must match the copywriter to the content project — is the nucleus. Each piece of content is an atom.

Atom 1: First blog post

In the same month that the newsletter went out, we published the article as a blog post, making it searchable and shareable. We made no changes to the content; we simply made it public.

This post quickly became one of our top-performing posts in search — and it stayed on top, month in, month out, for almost two years. During that time, we watched our search rankings for “B2B copywriter” climb.

Atom 2: First podcast

Lots of marketing folks (our audience) tune in to podcasts to get doses of insight while driving to work, walking the dog, or doing the ironing. We were running a monthly podcast, so the month after we published the first blog post, we spun off our second atom – a podcast where we discussed the seven types of B2B copywriter.

To add perspective and keep the theme fresh, we invited Lindsay Clark, a business and technology journalist, to give his view of what kind of copywriting the journalist type is best suited to do. The episode took nine hours to set up, record, edit, and publish. It pulled in around 100 listeners.

We thought we had taken the original piece as far as we could. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

Atom 3: Board game

We came back to the seven types of B2B copywriters after our company book club discussed Joe Pulizzi’s Epic Content Marketing and its emphasis on “breaking through the clutter.” During the meeting we asked ourselves, what kind of content could break through the clutter for us? Kieran, one of our copywriters, suggested a board game.

A board game!

It sounded ambitious, sure. But we didn’t know of anyone else using a board game as a content format for marketing. We decided to create one.

Funnel! — full name: Funnel! The Content Marketing Strategy Game — took 16 months to develop. Our team worked on it along with our everyday tasks. We discussed gameplay mechanics. We designed the game. We tested the game. We produced the game. Finally, we shipped the game. We sent it to a mix of clients, marketing agencies we wanted as clients, and industry people we liked — 33 recipients.

Suddenly, our target audiences were interested in us. The game was featured in B2B Marketing magazine. Best of all, Funnel! helped us start conversations with four B2B marketing agencies that had never given us the time of day. As a bonus, artwork and design elements that we created for the game found their way into other content atoms, helping us make the most of our investment.

Atom 4: Presentation

Building on the themes that we had developed in creating our board game, we pitched a presentation to the annual U.K. shindig, the B2B Marketing Summit. This was a strategic move for us because attendees closely matched our target personas; speaking at this event would enable us to reach a more focused audience than our blog posts could. Speaking would give us a chance to show our core audience how much their choice of copywriter could affect them.

Our proposal was accepted.

We spent a month assembling the presentation, The 7 Types of B2B Copywriter and How the Wrong One Can Destroy Your Campaign, reusing artwork from the board game in the slides. The talk, which Fiona gave in June 2015, was live-tweeted by a large B2B agency and by B2B Marketing magazine. It brought Radix two new business leads and put us on more radar.

Atom 5: Second podcast

When Fiona returned from the summit, we used the information from her presentation and her overall experience of the event to create another podcast episode. It pointed listeners to the talk’s unedited slide deck on SlideShare, giving listeners a visual reference to go with what was discussed in the audio.

Rather than repeat the talk, we brought together highlights with knowledge shared by other summit presenters.

Requiring only six hours of production time, the episode went live in June 2015. As of this writing, it reached over 200 listeners, and the SlideShare presentation has been viewed over 1,000 times.

Atom 6: Second blog post

When we set out to create our board game, we discovered that marketers don’t have a lot of guidance on how to do such a thing. We decided to share what we had learned. Two months after we released Funnel!, we published a blog post that walked our readers through the steps we had taken, giving them a road map for making their own games.

It was tricky nailing down how the board game came into existence since its development had taken so long, but we eventually pulled together the story. Here’s an excerpt:

This blog post (amplified, of course, through social media) generated another round of interest in the board game. It also gave us another chance to spread the game’s underlying idea, the nucleus of our content atomization program: the seven types of B2B copywriter.

Atom 7: Third podcast

Pulling together key points from the blog post describing how Funnel! was made, I set up a third podcast, which went live in August 2015. This one featured interviews with the two leaders of the game’s creation. We talked about the challenges they encountered and the things they would do differently if they were to make another game.

Having the guys talk about the game allowed us to show a human side of the story. We demonstrated that the game’s mechanics weren’t formed in a vacuum. We made it clear that you don’t need to be a game theorist to make something that’s fun to play.

And we shared our main message (about the seven types of B2B copywriter) with listeners who had forgotten about it as well as those who had never heard it.

Sadly, we don’t have download stats for this podcast because we forgot to update our subscription to the tracking service — a cautionary tale for marketers everywhere.

Atom 8: Quiz

After we had done a lot of telling B2B marketers what types of copywriter are out there, we realized that we had no content aimed at enabling B2B copywriters to find out which kind they are. This is a key audience for us when it comes to recruitment and finding freelance copywriters. Plenty of the marketers we work with write copy, too, and we thought it would be fun for them to find out what kind of writers they are.

We created a quiz based on the qualities as we had described them in the summit presentation. Using a third-party platform, we created an interactive quiz that we could embed on our website and share over social media. Again, we reused art assets created for the board game.

The quiz went live in October 2015. Since it’s a piece of interactive content suitable for social media, it was shared widely on Twitter. Clients and prospects also told us that they enjoyed it.

Atom 9: Infographic

Next, we created an infographic aimed at people who had not encountered the seven types of copywriter. It summarizes the information contained in the original blog post and presentation.

Click to enlarge
Image source: Infographic: The 7 Types of B2B Copywriter – and How to Use Them

This was our third time using original artwork from the game. Having existing art enabled us to design the infographic in-house.

Like the quiz, this piece of content was for our social media followers and designed to raise interest in existing content that they may have missed.

That’s nine pieces of content … and we’re not finished yet.

What we learned

Marketers often worry that atomization means repetition. And it does. But you don’t have to repeat things in a stale way. In fact, everything we atomized felt fresh. In creating all these pieces of content, we never felt like we were repeating the original article wholesale. Each format made unique demands on the original information.

You can see how distinct each piece is if you compare the original article with Funnel!. Their forms couldn’t be more different.

What stayed the same from one content atom to another, whatever its form, was the nucleus — the core idea that you need different types of copywriter for different types of content.

We found that each new effort not only garnered new interest in our idea and our business but also brought a new audience to our related content pieces.

The process of atomizing the original article into new forms meant that we had to consider the content needs of our different audiences. For example, the audience seeking to find out “which” type of copywriter they were in the quiz was different from the people who attended Fiona’s session at the B2B Marketing Summit. The summit presentation was aimed at B2B marketers in agencies and on the client side, the quiz was for B2B copywriters.

How to get atomization to work for you

If you have a “strong content marketing platform or theme” that resonates with an audience you want to reach, consider these atomization truths:

• There are always multiple ways to use a good idea. When you invest in a big, hard-hitting piece of content, experiment with atomizing that content.
• You don’t have to repurpose the whole piece of content each time. Pull out parts of an original piece of killer content and retell those sub-messages — or expand on them — separately.
• Different audiences find different formats engaging. Choose formats that your target audiences are most likely to be drawn to.
• Content reuse should always be part of your strategy. Reuse content elements whenever possible.

#Content reuse should always be part of your strategy, says @ek6891.
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Starting with a single strong idea and applying a little imagination and a lot of planning, my team created 10 pieces of interesting and varied marketing content that have helped our company keep business coming in. How many pieces might you atomize from one of your big ideas?

Atom 10?

You just read it — the third blog post. I hope you enjoyed it.

For more strategies that can help your content hit the right speed, sign up for our Content Strategy for Marketers weekly email newsletter, which features exclusive insights from Robert Rose, CMI’s chief content adviser. If you’re like many other marketers we meet, you’ll come to look forward to his thoughts every Saturday.

Cover image by kazuend, unsplash, via pixabay.com

The post How to Atomize 1 Killer Piece of Content Into 10 appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Ever try to reach a prospect and just get radio silence? Constantly trying to call or email those ideal customers, but never hearing back? That’s because in today’s over-emailed, over-stimulated, overwhelmingly social-driven customers’ world, old-school outreach processes are falling flat.

Using the same old methods to pursue modern leads is an exercise in futility.

We know it’s no surprise to you that potential ideal customers are becoming harder to reach, simply because there’s more information and more stimuli for prospects to sort through than at any other point in the history of the Earth.

Take email alone: In 2015, the number of emails sent and received per day total over 205 billion. This figure is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 3% over the next four years, reaching over 246 billion by the end of 2019.

Because of the gravity of this problem, you need to be more persistent and persuasive than ever before. The crew at Telenet and Ovation Sales Group did a study in just 2007 and found that it took 3.68 cold call attempts to reach a prospect…

Today, it takes 8.

And according to our friends over at Sirius Decisions, the average sales rep only makes 2 attempts to contact a prospect. TWO! Keep in mind that their same study also found that the sales process has become 22% longer than years past. Do the math… it’s not enough.

That’s why the best sales reps adopt new technology like an oxygen tank, breathing life and effectiveness into traditional contact methods.

And while the outside perception may be that modern business moves quickly, the reality is actually that it moves quite slowly. You have to be able to cut through the noise to reach those ideal customers, or at least be organized and persistent enough to break through over time.

With more leads to manage than ever before, this is one giant leap for modern sales professionals. That’s why we created our newest eBook, Houston, We Have a Sales Problem, to help you have more meaningful conversations with ideal customers.

DOWNLOAD THE EBOOK TODAY

First things first, you need have a regular sales cadence. The reason most sales reps give up on a deal is not because the lead is a bad fit or unwilling to buy. It’s because they lack the patience and ability to follow up enough times to finally break through the prospect’s stratosphere.

But this is much easier said than done. With so many leads to keep track of, you need a tool that can organize the process.

Sales platforms like SalesLoft help you monitor exactly where your leads are in your sales cadence, how many times they’ve been contacted, and what should be said next. No need to sort through a CRM to find which leads need to be contacted that day — SalesLoft compiles them for you, along with exactly what you should say to elicit a response.

Then, make sure you slip some calling tricks up your suit sleeve. Take phone calls for example — you shouldn’t have to put down your mouse to pick up the phone. The right sales tools allow you to dial right from your browser. What’s more, tools like SalesLoft can customize the area code of the number sales reps are calling from to each individual prospect, as local calls are more likely to warrant an answer.

It can be disheartening to feel like you’re moonwalking in your cadence, but sales is a game of inches. And a well-oiled cadence can be the determining factor behind the connection with ideal customers. Take each step as a unique opportunity to prospect with sincerity, add value to conversations, and connect with those ideal customers that will convert.

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Download your copy of the eBook today to launch into greater detail on each of these issues, how deeply they impact a sales organization, and what using the right sales tools can do to solve them.

The post Ideal Customers are From Mars, Sales Reps are From Venus appeared first on SalesLoft.

The post The Must-Have Social Media Tool Every Content Marketer Needs appeared first on Copyblogger.

Very little feels quite as good in the world of inbound marketing as launching a new piece of premium content and watching those form submissions come rolling in. After all, once you’ve been involved in inbound marketing for a few months, you know that success is measured by three core figures: website traffic, conversions, and revenue. Now, while both website traffic and revenue correspond directly with key performance indicators (KPIs), website visitors and customers, respectively, how does one measure the success of conversions?

Leads. Contact conversions. Form submissions.

But unfortunately for you, and possibly that landing page’s form submissions, not all leads are created equal. So while that latest landing page may have led to 100 form submissions, not all of those submissions carry equal weight. And in order to successfully qualify leads, we must first understand the different types that exist.

What Is a Lead?

In its simplest form, a lead is a contact that was added to your database when that contact submitted a form. That person who filled out your Contact Us form and is now in your Contacts database—he or she’s a lead. That person who registered for your upcoming webinar and is now in your Contacts database—he or she’s a lead. That contact who was imported from Salesforce and now lives in your HubSpot Contacts database—not a lead.

Essentially, leads are contacts who were interested enough in your organization to provide you with their information in an exchange. Be it for a resource or initiating contact, these people wanted something from you. However, just because someone wants to download a resource from your website does not mean that he or she is a valid, or qualified, prospect. Which brings us to the next steps of lead qualification: the marketing qualified lead (MQL) and the sales qualified lead (SQL).

What Is a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)?

An MQL, unfortunately, is still not quite ready to make a sale. However, because of the information that you have gathered from him or her, you can tell that he or she is more engaged and closer to the point of sale than a standard lead.

What Is a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?

An SQL is ready for a sale and is thus worthy of a direct sales follow-up. These are the most valuable of all the leads, for not only have they indicated that they are interested in your company and its products/services, but they have indicated that they are ready to buy.

The Importance of Demographics and Psychographics

Now that you understand the different lead qualifications that exist, it’s time to get qualifying, right? Well, not quite yet. Unfortunately, while these categories of lead qualification will not ever change, not all companies can qualify leads in the same way. Before you can begin to qualify your leads, you need to take a look back at your buyer personas.

Which details and psychographics truly cause them to be considered an ideal customer? Is it their job title? Their company’s total revenue? The start date of their organization’s buying cycle? While these demographic details most definitely contribute to how they are perceived by your company’s sales team, they are not the only details that matter.

Their behaviors matter as well. What do I mean by this? I mean, a contact who has visited your website every day for the past month is most likely more interested in your organization than a contact who viewed your website once three months ago. Your contacts’ behaviors matter. Perhaps your sales team also knows that it has a 95 percent lead-to-customer conversion rate after a contact views a demo. Therefore, those contacts who view the demo could be considered more sales-ready than those who have only subscribed to your blog.

Once you understand which behavioral and demographic details most clearly indicate either the sales-readiness or idealness of certain contacts, you can move forward in the lead qualification process. I have two favorite methods to measure, or qualify, leads:

HubSpot’s Smart Lists

If you’re unaware of Smart Lists, let me just say that I think they are one of the best tools in HubSpot. They allow you to essentially cast a net over not only your existing contacts, but any new contacts that come in (regardless of the source), and create a list based on criteria that you provide.

Let’s say you want to create a list of all leads whom you have defined as SQLs. For all intents and purposes, we’re going to keep this simple and say that SQLs have been defined as having “director” in their job title and have filled out a specific bottom-of-the-funnel form. Once the filters are set and the list is activated, you are good to go. From that point on, as soon as any contact meets those conditions, he or she will be added to the list.

Pro Tip: Create an internal notification workflow in order to notify your sales team when this happens.

HubSpot’s Lead Scoring

HubSpot’s lead scoring allows you to take the factors and behaviors that your company believes to be most important and, essentially, score each and every contact in your system. Personally, what helps me is to think of all of your leads like an old-fashioned mercury thermometer that measures from 0 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. At the bottom, it’s cold. Around 75 degrees, it’s warm, but up at 100—that’s where it’s hot.

Using lead scoring, the weight that you assign to different values and behaviors of leads contributes to how quickly they jump up (or down) that measuring stick. Thus, it takes into account all factors all at once, allowing you to see the bigger-picture view of your leads.

If you designate an SQL as a 90 or above, you know that if you have 10 leads at a score of 90 or above, all of the positive and negative attributes that you have chosen to measure have already been counted. Lead scoring essentially does the heavy lifting of profiling for you. And with the use of a corresponding Smart List (lead score = 90 or above) and an internal notification workflow, it too can keep you notified whenever a truly qualified lead appears in your contact database.

Once Your Leads Are Qualified…

Whether your leads fall into a qualified lead Smart List or hit that particular lead score mark, you have successfully qualified your leads. The next steps are to categorize them officially through the establishment of lifecycle stages and reach out to those leads who are ready for contact.