Rnordman

Inside Sales Managers are getting too hung up looking for the perfect sales cadence formula — the perfect combination and spacing of phone/voicemail + phone/no voicemail + email + social touch that will generate results.

They’re driving themselves crazy, stressing out over finding the best outbound sales cadence, especially when the sales numbers aren’t meeting expectations.

Unfortunately they’re searching in vain because the simple fact is, IT DOES NOT EXIST.

There is no perfect sales cadence, but luckily there are two ways to improve the cadence you already have to make things simple, effective, and less stressful.

Both focus on output rather than spacing, and I’ll share them with you in this article.

Replace Sales Cadence Stress with Simplicity

Customer engagement tools such as Outreach, SalesLoft, and Xant (formerly InsideSales) equip managers and directors of inside sales teams to set up customized outbound sales cadences for their SDRs, BDRs, and ISRs to follow.

The best outbound sales cadences focus on action steps based around spacing, and will generally look something like this:

Day 1: CALL/VOICEMAIL/EMAIL #1

DAY 2: EMAIL #2

DAY 3: CALL/NO VOICEMAIL

DAY 5: EMAIL #3

As you can see, the primary factor for any sales cadence is action. The power behind a customer engagement platform is that it creates consistent action that drives a deal forward.

But many inside sales managers have lost sight of the reason a sales cadence works — the more at-bats you have, the higher chance you will have at hitting the ball. Because of that, they’ve become obsessed with finding the perfect sales cadence.

Pretending that prospects will conform and buy if a sales rep calls at this time and emails this many days after their last phone call, voicemail, email, or social touch is delusional at best. It sets you and your team up for failure.

There are too many factors that come into play when designing your sales cadence — which means there’s no universal “best outbound sales cadence” that will work across the board.

The fact is, the answer isn’t in the spacing, it’s output.

Here are two real-world, proven, old-school cadences that will work hand-in-hand with your customer engagement tools.

Outbound Sales Cadence Example #1

The first one is simple…

Sales reps have 60 days to make significant progress with a lead or account. If they can’t, another sales rep can take the lead over on the 61st day.

This system was created by the best sales manager I ever had. I was working for duPont Registry as an inside sales rep, cold calling luxury auto dealers.

The goal was to get the GM on the phone and convince them to have their inventory listed on the duPont Registry website (think AutoTrader for the high-end market).

Once a sales rep had a lead in their name, the clock was ticking. They had 60-days to move the needle significantly, or another sales rep could take the lead over and put it in their name. Then, the new rep had 60 days to do the same.

I love several things about this format…

It places the urgency on the sales reps, not the manager.

It creates accountability. Soft sales reps will not survive this type of environment, and only the strong will survive. Don’t you want the strongest team possible to win out over your competition?

It’s easy to manage. CRM’s such as SalesForce easily state the facts with time-stamped data-entry. Furthermore, if the sales rep did not enter their last conversation, their 60-day window passed, and another sales rep took over the account and closed it, too bad.

Outbound Sales Cadence Example #2

Back in the day, when I first got into inside sales, I worked for a company that advertised in PC Magazine. The leads would come via a card deck that the prospect mailed to us with their information.

The company would take those card decks, enter the lead info, and then print them out on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper — two columns, five leads per column.

We had 80+ inside sales reps who would walk over to the table, grab a few sheets of paper (leads), go back to their desk, and start dialing.

RELATED: Effective Cold Calling: 3 Tips to Avoid 3 Crucial Mistakes

It didn’t take long to realize that leads were duplicated randomly throughout the sheets of paper on an ongoing basis.

A common theme the sales reps would hear (loudly) from prospects is, “How many times are you people going to call me?”

This happened even if it was the first time a salesperson called that particular prospect — so we knew the company was recycling leads.

From a business perspective, it was brilliant. (Keep in mind this is before CRM existed to the level it does today.) Essentially, prospects were getting called until they answered the phone.

It was the ultimate cadence: volume.

So how do you combine what worked in the past (volume) and maximize its effectiveness with today’s customer engagement tools to get the best results without stressing about the perfect cadence?

Here’s how…

Your Best Outbound Sales Cadence + Volume

Essentially, instead of focusing primarily on spacing, focus on volume.

Step one: The sales leads are pre-screened and qualified to be considered prospects. It is essential only to put leads that match the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) into your cadence.

Step two: Once you have a list of pre-qualified leads, rather than focusing on the timing of each touch, concentrate on rotation.

For example, lead #1 gets called. If you get voicemail, leave (or auto-drop) your voicemail message, send your email, and call the next lead on the list. The first lead then gets dropped to the end of the line.

So, if you have 500 leads on your targeted list, the first lead becomes number 500, the second lead now becomes the first lead, and so on.

To continue the baseball analogy, you’re the pitcher, and you are cycling through the lineup.

Keep in mind, as sales calls are made:

• Once a prospect becomes a client, they need to be taken out of the lead list.
• Some prospects won’t want to be called again.
• Some leads may be interested but the timing isn’t right, so a follow-up call at a later date will be needed.

This means the lead list will have natural attrition, and this is why it will be essential to research and build a robust, pre-qualified list to get started. Then, once a week, schedule time to “prospect” and add in new leads to replace the leads that get removed.

This type of sales cadence puts the focus on what matters most: volume. And it removes the headaches of trying to create or find the perfect formula (spoiler alert, there is none).

Bringing It All Together

The beauty of these methods lies in their simplicity. They’re old-school tactics combined with modern tech and tools to create a brutally effective, simple, robust sales strategy.

But it gets better.

Combine the first example of the “60-day progress rule” with the rotation cadence strategy, and watch your sales numbers go up with little to no extra work from you or your reps.

The post 2 Simple Solutions to Improve Your Outbound Sales Cadence appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Mindful presenting isn’t a new age fad. It’s not about ‘chilling out’, cushions or candles. It’s not even about meditation.

Mindful presenting is about awareness. It’s designed to:

– Challenge the status quo of long, boring, and forgettable business presentations.

– Help professionals to craft and deliver presentations with clarity of purpose, real value and high impact.

– Create an emotional as well as intellectual connection with audiences.

– Shatter the old-fashioned idea that our job as presenters is to simply ‘inform and engage’ our audience.

The world has changed and continues to change at an unprecedented velocity.

Mindful presenting provides the platform to successful communication in the belief that regardless of the complexity or nature of our content our ultimate challenge is to connect with our audience.

‘The 21 Indisputable Laws of Mindful Presenting’ and the use of the word ‘laws’ may sound a little excessive. Before dismissing the idea as overzealous, please keep in mind that if we do not adhere to a ‘law’ there will be consequences; often negative ones.

LAW 1 – You must feel something

“There are two types of speakers: those that are nervous and those that are liars.” Mark Twain

If you’re one of the lucky ones you may feel excited, if you’re not, you will feel nervous to some degree. There is considerable evidence that tells us that there are a vast number of people who feel uncomfortable about giving a presentation or speaking in public. The University of Pittsburgh suggests that, ‘Most people experience some level of speech anxiety when they have to speak in front of a group; in fact, public speaking is many people’s greatest fear. Speech anxiety can range from a slight feeling of “nerves” to a nearly incapacitating fear.’

At Mindful Presenter we would go as far as to suggest that if you don’t feel something when you are called on to speak, then you would probably serve your audience better by declining the opportunity.

The first law of Mindful Presenting is that its perfectly normal to feel some degree of nerves when presenting. If you resist the law you will struggle. Our challenge is to accept it and find a way to use it to our advantage.

There is no ‘silver bullet’, pill, potion or miraculous hack to defy the first law; the solution is mindful presenting,

LAW 2 – Your audience must feel something

I don’t mean bored, lethargic, numb or indifferent.

There is a long standing and extremely damaging myth doing great harm in many businesses today. It’s a belief that our sole purpose when presenting to others is to simply inform and engage them; it’s an illusion. We live in world where most of us are already so overwhelmed by information that we have become desensitised to it. Unless it’s highly relevant, personal and of some tangible value to us it’s the last thing we need. If it doesn’t help us in some specific way then it’s just more ‘noise’.

What do we do with ‘noise’? We filter and forget most of it.

I agree with the communication theorist, coach and a speaker Nick Morgan who says, ‘Recent brain research confirms that the way memory works is by attaching emotion to events. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the memory. So bland just doesn’t cut it if you want to be remembered.’

If you choose to deny or ignore Law 2 you will suffer the consequence at the expense of your audience. The solution is to craft your presentation with a very clear intention; how do you want your audience to feel. I’ve written about this extensively on the Mindful Presenter blog page but here is one of my favourites; The 5 Most Important Words in Business Presenting.

LAW 3 – Connecting is everything

At our presentation skills training courses and one to one public speaking coaching sessions our message is clear; we all need to stop presenting and start connecting.

We believe that our success as a presenter, speaker, or leader revolves largely around our ability to connect with others.

Almost 7 decades ago, the American psychologist, Abraham Maslow proposed ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’. It’s a theory which remains extremely popular and extensively used today. Describing the pattern through which he believed human motivations generally move he cited the need for interpersonal relationships as a basic human need. Mindful presenting exemplifies that belief and presents it as a law; we call it connecting.

If we don’t connect ourselves and our ideas well to our audience, you could argue that the presentation was futile.

Here are 10 tips on how to connect with your audience.

LAW 4 – Your role is to influence

At the core of every presentation is information. Our audience need information to guide their thinking and to make decisions. In business presentations, information can normally be read at the comfort of your own desk. It can be digested in the knowledge that if you don’t understand something you can always phone or email the author. You don’t need to attend a presentation to simply receive information. With that awareness our job as presenters is much harder; we have to influence.

Influence beliefs, change, action or simply mindsets; we have to influence our audience.

To achieve that goal our content has to be rich, relevant and rewarding. We also need to understand what it will take to influence our audience in terms of not only what we say but the way we say it.

At the heart of influence is the word ‘yes’; that’s what we want our audience to think and say about our idea.

Dr Robert Cialdini’s ‘Six principles of influence’, shares some powerful universal principles which we can use in our role as presenters. I’ve shared some simple tips on how to use these principles when presenting in a previous article. ‘The A to Z of Mindful Presenting: P – Persuasion’.

LAW 5 – People don’t follow others back accident

The fifth law relates to respect. Today’s audiences are time poor, solution hungry and more discerning than ever. If we don’t respect them in every sense of the word, then our presentation will fail under the banner of mindlessness rather than mindfulness.

Mindful presenting extends respect to our audience’s:

– Time

– Knowledge

– Feelings

– Beliefs

– Attitudes

– Needs

– Challenges

– Anxieties

– Aspirations

There are countless ways of course to show respect for others and I’m confident that you will find some in this list of 99 that you will serve you well for your next presentation.

The mindful presenter will reflect very carefully on everything they respect in a speaker or presenter and begin by adopting those same attitudes and behaviours.

Here are 9 of my personal favourite ways of respecting my audience; ‘Mindful Presenting – 9 Ways to RESPECT your Audience’.

LAW 6 – ‘Less is more’

If you are struggling to accept this principle as a law of mindful presenting try:

– Presenting to your audience for 30 minutes when you could have done so in 10.

– Putting 14 bullet points on a slide and watching your audience’s reaction.

– Showing your audience a plethora of numbers or slide after slide of charts.

– Telling your audience, a story that is long, irrelevant and boring.

– Sharing information, insights or ideas which has little personal relevance or value to your audience.

I read an article recently called ‘These 3 Issues Make People Forget Up to 90 Percent of Your Presentation’ which suggested that an audience will remember:

• 60 percent of your presentation after 20 minutes
• 40 percent of your presentation within half a day
• 10 percent within a week

My personal and professional experience tells me that those numbers appear quite generous. Most business presentations I have attended in my corporate career I have forgotten by the time I’ve returned to my desk or my car.

The solution is to be mercenary with your content and only give your audience what they need and want to know that will make a difference to them. Everything else they will forget anyway.

Here are 4 tips which will help you to apply Law 5 effectively: ‘Most presentations are far too long – Less really is more!’

The 6 Laws

I’m mindful of the fact that I’ve taken a significant risk in naming this article ‘The 6 Indisputable Laws of Mindful Presenting’. The word ‘law’ in this context alone may be enough to raise a few eyebrows. Calling them ‘indisputable’ of course opens up another controversial challenge for some.

We live in a world of social media where many people make it their business to dispute a great deal, which of course can be quite healthy and appropriate.

That said my request before challenging these ‘laws’ is that you firstly craft and deliver a presentation to professionals which:

– You have absolutely no feeling about or for.

– Doesn’t leave your audience feeling anything at all.

– You haven’t made a connection with them.

– You haven’t influenced them in anyway.

– You haven’t respected them.

– You’ve taken far too long to get to the point

Image Courtesy of: istockphoto.com

• IBM is known for its splashy demonstrations of new AI-powered research initiatives like 'Project Debater,' a robot that can debate humans, and IBM Watson. 
• While those publicity stunts are helpful in garnering consumer interest and media attention, the key for IBM is translating the research into products it can sell to enterprises.
• On Wednesday, the tech giant announced it will begin offering clients applications based on Project Debater. The system can autonomously group together similar documents and understand complex aspect of the human language, like idioms. 
• A key role in bridging the gap between the two sides of the business are the data engineers, according to chief research scientist Ruchir Puri. 
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Sign up here to receive updates on all things Innovation Inc.

In June 2018, IBM pitted a robot against humans in two debates on telemedicine and space exploration — a publicity stunt meant to showcase the tech giant's AI prowess in an increasingly competitive market. 

Events like "Project Debater" are progressively more common for Big Blue. The first major even was in 2011 when IBM Watson — the company's signature AI platform — beat famed Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings at the trivia game. 

Alongside those two showcases, it is also preparing to launch an entirely robotic ship dubbed the "Mayflower Autonomous Ship," which is expected to cross the Atlantic in September with no humans on board. 

But while these consumer-friendly demonstrations draw eyeballs and media attention, the real value is in the applications that IBM eventually sells to corporate clients. 

The company is gradually perfecting how it translates buzzy research that can span up to 10 years into actual products, according to Rob Thomas, the general manager of data and Watson artificial intelligence at IBM. 

"The relationship is figuring out the right point in time when you start to grab stuff from the 3-5-10-year [research] road map and bring that into the 3-month, 9-month, 18-month" timeline for product launch, he told Business Insider. 

On Wednesday, for example, IBM announced that key parts of its Project Debater platform will now be available to clients. 

The system can employ natural language processing to cluster together groups of related documents, as well as understand some of the more complex aspects of the English language, like idioms. Such a task is difficult, as the meanings of phrases like "beat around the bush" go beyond the definitions of the specific words. 

Business Insider talked to Thomas and Ruchir Puri — a nearly 25-year veteran of IBM who was the chief architect of Watson and currently serves as the top scientist for the research arm of the organization — to learn how the tech giant bridges the gap between the two worlds.

Bringing in the business

At IBM, the conversation on the commercial side typically begins once the research arm publishes its technology outlook, an annual report that provides a high-level overview of all the different applications the company should be exploring.

In 2016, for example, the report highlighted the expected differences between consumer and enterprise AI applications.

While smart speakers, image analysis, and other tools were all the rage among consumers at the time, many companies were just exploring how they could adopt the advanced tech in their operations.

IBM narrowed in on the goals it thought corporations would need most: evaluating the trustworthiness of the algorithms, automation, and natural language processing.

"That was the broad canvas that was painted," Thomas said. "Research was fairly far down the path at that stage in terms of understanding those components."

The commercial team has since released products in each of those buckets. 

A key role in bridging the gap between the two sides is the data engineer, according to Puri. And that's largely because those in the position understand how to take data, apply it to the applications under development, and make it useful for clients. 

"It is not about the AI expert and the data scientist. [IBM] must ensure that the line of business people, the key stakeholders, are all there" making the case for why the tools are important, he said. And data engineers are "probably one of the most critical personas" involved in those discussions because they can understand how the technology meets the business need. 

Learning lessons from Watson 

It hasn't always been smooth sailing. 

When IBM first started rolling out Watson to enterprises, for example, the company struggled to meet the hype it created in industries like healthcare. 

One reason it was so difficult is because IBM tried to create platforms that were company-specific, according to Thomas. Now, it's pivoting to broader solutions that can be used by multiple customers. 

"Once we have a feel for the core technology and the use cases, we turn that into much more focused client discussions," he said. Now, "for people that wanted their own version of it, we kindly said it's probably not the right thing for us. So it was really about focusing on the things we knew [the tools] could do well."

So even when Project Debater was still in the research phase, the commercial-side of the business was already thinking about the potential applications — but it can take years before such technology is proven out.

"There are often discussions before [launch], but they are very hypothetical. It was still a little bit theoretical. We didn't know for sure that [Project Debater] was going to work. We thought it was, but we didn't know for sure," Thomas said. "It took that maturing a bit to where we could actually start to formulate use cases."

KPMG, for example, was already using Watson Discovery — effectively a search engine for companies that relies on the unstructured data stored internally across different verticals.

But Thomas and the team knew a tool like Project Debater that could help cluster documents would amplify the platform for the consulting giant. So it went to KPMG and sold them on the latest upgrade. 

As more tech giants tout the success they've had in using robots to replace humans in increasingly complex scenarios, the ability to turn research projects into actual enterprise products will become even more important.

SEE ALSO: Accenture's head of artificial intelligence shares the 4-step plan every company should consider before investing in AI

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A 45-year-long study discovered trends in successful hyper-intelligent children

• This story was delivered to Business Insider Intelligence Digital Health Pro subscribers earlier this morning.
• To get this story plus others to your inbox each day, hours before they're published on Business Insider, click here.

The tech giant introduced a line of solutions designed to streamline operations and bulk out tech capabilities within provider organizations. One solution is a healthcare-specific version of Microsoft Teams — its workplace communication platform — that seeks to make it easier for clinicians to schedule and manage consultations, conduct virtual visits, and coordinate with care teams.

Other new tools include a symptom checker embedded into its healthcare chatbot and an augmented cybersecurity solution for connected devices. These services should offer added value to potential healthcare partners looking to provide a more convenient experience for patients, fend off costly cyberattacks, and boost care coordination — a notorious dilemma within healthcare.

Microsoft's new offerings reveal that it's going all in on its enterprise-facing healthcare endeavors. Microsoft's healthcare play largely hinges on the products it sells to health organizations. It's been racing to get its cloud and AI solutions through healthcare company doors, and it counts major partners like health system Providence St. Joseph Health and pharma titan Novartis, for example.

Last April, we posited that the tech giant would dig deeper into the business-to-business realm when it scrapped its most prominent consumer offerings: It sunsetted its health records storage system HealthVault, and shelved both its Health Dashboard site and the web-connected features for its smartwatch and fitness tracker after a brief stint operating in the wearables market. Without consumer-facing elements bogging its health play down, Microsoft can likely allot more resources to honing on business-facing services and building out its portfolio of healthcare clients.  

Tech firms that augment communication among care teams are helping providers offer higher-quality care and reduce medical errors — and we think they'll see success hooking in partners. Microsoft, specifically, has zeroed in on building out its clinician communication platform.

Over the past few months, Microsoft has been embedding its Teams platform for health organizations with new features — including the ability to automatically tap into EHRs via a mobile device, per MobiHealthNews. But it isn't the only tech company looking to streamline communication: Teams competitor Slack earned HIPAA-compliance for some of its features last year — expanding the types of sensitive info it can process and signaling interest in forging deeper into the health space, per CNBC.

Hospitals are smart to invest in tech that slashes the time and effort it takes for clinicians to converse with one another: A lack of communication during care transition produces 80% of medical errors, Frost & Sullivan estimates — which cost the US healthcare system $20 billion annually and result in an estimated 100,000 deaths per year.

Want to read more stories like this one? Here's how to get access:

1. Sign up for Digital Health Pro, Business Insider Intelligence's expert product suite keeping you up-to-date on the people, technologies, trends, and companies shaping the future of healthcare, delivered to your inbox 6x a week. >> Get Started
2. Check to see if you already have access to Business Insider Intelligence through your company, or inquire about access if you don't. >> Check If You Have Enterprise Access
3. Explore related topics in more depth. >> Visit Our Report Store
4. Current subscribers can log in to read the briefing here.

Join the conversation about this story »

What follows is a riff on Dave Brock’s recent posts on failing and succeeding.

If you are innovating, it may make sense to fail often. But if your job is to win big deals, or something like that, there isn’t an upside to failing often. You are going to fail. When you do, it will not be your identity. Instead, it will be feedback that offers you some insight, if you are willing to look for it. There are two ways you can learn what you need to know to improve your success and improve your results. While both are important, one is faster and more certain.

Lessons Learned

As you pursue your goals, results, and perhaps, your dreams, you will sometimes fail. Failure is a part of success, not something separate from it. You will have to search far and wide to find a person who has not failed while trying to do otherwise. Anyone who suggests otherwise is dishonest and should be avoided.

This in no way suggests that you should try to fail, nor does it mean that you shouldn’t do everything in your power not to fail. You should not believe that failing due to your gross negligence, sloppiness, or outright lack of caring is something positive, even if you derived some lesson from it, a lesson that wouldn’t have been necessary if you had done good work.

Because you are going to fail, it is important that you learn something from the failure that will allow you to avoid repeating the mistakes that caused you to fail in the first place. It is, however, impossible to learn from a failure if you are going to absolve yourself of responsibility.

What Did You Learn?

The way to convert a failure into a lesson is to review what you did—or didn’t do—that caused the failure. You cannot learn something if you blame someone or something for your lack of success.

Laying the blame for losing a big deal at the feet of the contact that didn’t recognize the tremendous value of your solution or didn’t properly weigh all the factors you believe differentiated you from your competitor is to have learned nothing. More still, it indicates you should expect to experience this failure again, and not too long in the future.

Whether you blame your client, your pricing, your company’s offering, or any other external factor, you miss the opportunity to adjust your approach to improve your future outcomes. The only way to benefit from failure is to learn from it by recognizing what you might do to change the outcomes in the future. Your greatest failure in this case, is your failure to take responsibility for failing, a lesson that will be repeated until it is observed.

• What caused the failure?
• What can you do differently in the future that might lead to success?
• What are the circumstances or fact patterns that will allow you to recognize when one approach is better than some other potential course of action?

Learning from the Lessons of Others

How you learn is as important as what you learn.

One of the best ways to learn the lessons without actually having to suffer the failure yourself, is to learn from other people’s failures—and successes. Thankfully, you don’t have to learn every lesson the hard way, even though many of the lessons that take seem to come from painful missteps and mistakes. Instead, you can learn from people who experienced those painful failures.

Jim Rohn said, “Success leaves clues.” Failure also leaves clues, many of which are known, written in books, magazines, and websites. The lessons learned are documented for anyone who is wise enough to look backwards for lessons, instead of the sort of neophilia that causes one to believe anything new and novel is superior to what has come before.

Reducing the incidence of failing without learning the hard way means looking to the lessons of people who have already failed and discovered how to succeed. Instead of having to try to discover some strategy or approach that might work, you can look to what others have already discovered. Regardless of your challenge, if you know the outcome you want, it’s likely because you have already seen someone else produce it. If someone else has already achieved what you want, the strategies to succeed are already known.

Gross Negligence

If what you call a success is already well-known, extremely well-documented, and easily available, it is gross negligence not to study what is known as your best path to success, limiting the likelihood of failing in the many ways that others have already failed in the past.

When it is your craft or chosen profession that offers the opportunity to succeed or fail, and when, as Brock suggests, failures come with consequences, there is no reason not to look first to what is already known—instead of repeating the mistakes of others for yourself, spending time and effort learning for yourself—and harming yourself, your company, and your clients in the process.

Of the two ways you can learn from failure, one is better than the other.

Get the Free eBook!

Learn how to sell without a sales manager. Download my free eBook!

You need to make sales. You need help now. We’ve got you covered. This eBook will help you Seize Your Sales Destiny, with or without a manager.

Download Now

Are you looking to attract, engage, convert, and retain customers, build a strong user base that helps you grow constantly?

It’s what every marketer works for. But, are you a smart marketer who takes on innovative opportunities or one that waits for success to magically fall in their lap?

If you’re the former, you’re probably already using some tools for increasing efficiency, learning more about your customers, and eventually boosting sales. But do you have the right growth hacking tools in your marketing arsenal?

Here are the most remarkable tools you should consider utilizing to stimulate your business growth.

ProProfs Lead Quiz

With ProProfs Lead Quiz maker, you can create lead quizzes and, as it says on the site, boost your lead generation by up to 200%.

The quiz generator lets you easily create a quiz and personalize the results to make them go viral like wildfire. You can integrate it with various marketing tools, customize messages for social sharing, and collect valuable customer data.

Some of the numerous features include:

• Lead quizzes creation
• Lead forms customization
• Social promotion and traffic boost
• Insightful reports
• Seamless integrations

Pricing

ProProfs offers three pricing plans:

• Free – includes only unlimited quizzes and questions, and the sell-quizzes option
• Essentials – $0.25/quiz taker/month (minimum ten quiz takers, limited features)
• Premium – $0.50/quiz taker/month (minimum ten quiz takers, a massive array of features)

These plans include annual billing. There are also models for monthly billing, but they’re not discounted. You can also try the paid plans for free for 15 days.

Marketo

Marketo is an all-in-one marketing automation tool for empowering your marketing campaigns across various channels. From automation and marketing to insightful analytics and reports, it has everything you need for digital marketing success.

Marketo offers solutions for various marketing needs, each with its unique set of features. Some of them include lead management, account-based marketing, email marketing, consumer marketing, mobile marketing, revenue attribution, and more.

Some of the tool’s diverse capabilities include:

• Marketing automation
• Marketing analytics
• Account insights and profiling
• Predictive content
• Email automation
• Mobile marketing
• Social media marketing
• Website personalization
• Personalized digital ads

Pricing-

Marketo offers four pricing bundles designed for different needs. As it says on their site, the Select bundle is great for growth hackers.

The pricing is based on database size, so you’ll need to contact them to learn more. You can also request a free demo.

TribeBoost

TribeBoost is a social media marketing tool for startups, SaaS businesses, and influencers looking to extend their social reach. It’s an intuitive tool for growing your audience on Twitter and engaging your followers with high-quality, targeted content.

What’s awesome is that TribeBoost’s specialized team does all the work for you once you sign up for the service.

The features you can enjoy are:

• Managed targeted audience growth
• Targeted content delivery

Pricing-

TribeBoost offers three pricing tiers:

• Basic Tribe (1 Twitter account) – $148/month
• Extended Tribe (3 Twitter accounts) – $299/month
• Team Tribe (5 Twitter accounts) – $399/month

There’s also an agency pricing matrix offering bulk discounts. You’ll need to contact TribeBoost for more information.

Crowdfire

Crowdfire can be your go-to social media manager. It can help you discover and publish content, measure and analyze your ROI, follow social mentions, and manage all your social accounts in one place.

Its vast array of features includes:

• Article curation
• RSS feed customization
• Image curation
• Content scheduling
• Content publishing across various channels
• Tailored posts with previews
• Automatic best-times-to-post customization
• Report builder
• Advanced analytics
• Competitor analysis
• Mentions monitoring

Pricing-

Crowdfire offers four pricing models (billed annually):

• Free (1 account linked per social network) – perfect for trying it out
• Plus (2 accounts) – $7.48/month
• Premium (5 accounts) – $37.48/month
• VIP (50 accounts) – $74.98/month

You can pay for the tool on a monthly basis too, but the prices are a bit higher that way.

OptinMonster A/B Testing

OptinMonster, a lead generation tool for marketers, offers a built-in OptinMonster A/B Testing feature for helping you make data-driven decisions for boosting conversions and revenue.

It allows you to A/B test your content marketing campaigns to get insights for improving your landing page conversions and engaging your audience better.

Other features this software provides are:

• Drag ‘n’ Drop Builder for opt-in forms
• Campaign types
• Campaign triggers
• Targeted campaigns
• Software integrations
• Actionable insights

Pricing-

There are four pricing tiers at OptinMonster (annual billing):

• Basic (doesn’t include A/B testing) – $9/month
• Plus – $19/month
• Pro – $29/month
• Growth – $49/month

ListBuilder

With super user-friendly ListBuilder, you can extend your marketing reach and grow your email list. It lets you sync your POS or marketing system with your email marketing software, boosting your efficiency and your business in the process.

It includes the following features:

• Connecting your POS or marketing system to an email client
• Automatic syncing
• Scalability
• Software integrations
• Continuous updates

Pricing

ListBuilder costs $9.99 per month, but it also offers a 30-day free trial.

Mailbird

Mailbird is one of the best email clients for Windows, letting you seamlessly manage multiple accounts in one unified inbox. You can also customize the layout and integrate the client with all your favorite apps.

This growth hacking tool comes with the following features:

• Unified inbox
• Customizable layout
• App integrations
• Snooze email
• Speed reader
• Custom sounds
• Attachment search
• LinkedIn Lookup
• Multi-language support

Pricing-

You can choose from three pricing plans:

• Mailbird Personal Yearly – $1.21/month (billed annually)
• Mailbird Personal Pay Once – $32.5
• Mailbird Business – $1.88/month (billed annually)

You can also try the tool for free for 14 days, or get a custom-tailored pricing plan if you have a team of 10 or more.

Rebrandly

Rebrandly is a link management platform that helps you shorten, brand, and track URLs using a custom domain name. It lets you seamlessly manage and optimize your links to grow your audience and scale.

It comes with these useful features:

• Link management
• Link retargeting
• Domain name management
• Traffic routing & deep linking
• Collaboration
• Customized analytics
• Training and support

Pricing-

Rebrandly offers five pricing models:

• Free – comes with limited features
• Starter – $24/month
• Pro – $58/month
• Premium – $416/month
• Enterprise – custom price

These are all billed annually (monthly billing is a tad more expensive).

Unbox Social

Unbox Social is perfect for influencer marketing. It helps you discover influencers, track, and measure your brand performance. With its advanced analytics features, you can make data-driven decisions and empower your social media marketing.

The very cool features include:

• Competition tracking
• Social media analytics
• Social listening

Pricing-

Unbox Social offers two pricing plans (billed annually):

• Unbox Pro – $99/month
• Unbox Business – $199/month

There’s also a 14-day free trial.

Zapier

Zapier is the ultimate automation tool for growth hackers. It lets you connect multiple apps to automate workflows and seamlessly transfer data. It’s ideal for automating your day-to-day tasks and boosting your productivity.

It offers these fantastic features:

• Connecting your favorite apps
• Building and extending workflows
• Setting triggers to start workflows
• Automatically completing routine tasks
• Real-time alerts among linked apps
• More than 2000 app integrations

Pricing-

Zapier offers two pricing models:

• Free Forever – great for beginners, has limited features
• Premium Plans – starting at $20/month

You can also take advantage of a 14-day free trial.

Are you already using some of these awesome growth hacking tools? Is there any tool missing from the list that you think deserves to be here? Feel free to share your thoughts and experience with the community!

If you’ve ever watched The Office, you might remember the episode when Dwight and Jim discover that their customers have been giving them terrible reviews. They’re in total and utter denial — “The reason that I got bad customer reviews is because I didn’t! There is a massive conspiracy going on here!” Dwight protests.

While The Office is hardly a blueprint for workplace best practices, this exchange offers valuable insight into a startling reality: If Dunder Mifflin had a data and analytics plan that factored in customer satisfaction, Dwight and Jim probably wouldn’t have been taken by surprise. Like Dunder Mifflin, small and medium-sized businesses might not have the same muscle to exercise a comprehensive, full-bodied data and analytics strategy. They’re working with less people, fewer support tickets, and fewer chances to prioritize and iterate on feedback.

Yet at this stage, businesses have a chance to think about CX data with fresh eyes: Customer feedback can be gathered, iterated on, and influence revenue generation down the line. Their customer relationships can be looked at as data points to help them understand their customers’ needs.

Companies that measure performance provide better service

We live in an age where personalized customer experience matters. The Zendesk CX Trends report found that 50% of customers will ghost after one bad experience — and that number rises to 80% when bad experiences pile up. CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) and NPS (Net Promoter Score) can help agents measure their performance and help people across the organization, from product and marketing to sales, see where to work towards improvements.

Vincent Phamvan, CMO at Simplr argues that beyond metrics like CSAT and NPS, metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) are crucial for long-term growth. “Solutions that provide a unified view of the customer, and easy integrations, allow customer service teams to see relevant account data,” Phamvan writes in Relate, “ — and provide sales reps with context into the service history and health of a customer’s account—vital knowledge before attempting an upsell or contract renewal.” Phamvan raises a sobering point: As companies grow, customers suffer. Tracking relevant and actionable data so that your growing business understands your customers’ needs, whether that’s in customer support, buying behaviour, product quality — truly every aspect of your company — is crucial to providing the best CX possible.

Turning insights into actions

Every interaction you have with your customer is part of a larger conversation. CX experts always talk about keeping your customer at the center of your vision, but what does that actually look like? If the relationship you have with your customer could be plotted on a chart, it would be all over the place.

Maybe it’s purchase history, abandoned shopping carts, or returned merchandise. Maybe it includes conversations with customer support, open rates of outbound emails, and CSAT ratings. Maybe it’s a comment left on a social media page. When all of this information is available to your business — and it should be — you can glean incredible insights to adjust your roadmap and drive revenue. In fact, 64% of SMB leaders agree that creating customer profiles with this info helps their team provide better service! When all this data from thousands of transactions is analyzed, clear patterns will emerge.

Similarly, being able to visualize patterns in customer behaviour can clarify whether a small vocal minority is not an accurate reflection of the habits of your customer majority. A negative comment on social media can be alarming — but if the majority of your customers aren’t fazed by the issue, it probably isn’t worth reinventing the wheel to make one person change their mind. Clearly visualized data will influence product change when it’s actually necessary.

Modsy, an online interior-design service, built out a data and analytics strategy that brought customer feedback “back into the business and [built] persuasive, data-backed cases for making specific improvements to product features.” An accessible data and analytics strategy for a growing SMB like Modsy saw higher CSAT, lower resolution time, and iterations on their product that helped them grow. A support strategy isn’t just about organizing your tickets and customer conversations — although that’s a great start. It means listening to your customers, learning about them, and using what you learn to drive revenue.

Back at Dunder Mifflin, it turns out that Dwight and Jim’s customers were not, in fact, leaving horrible reviews. They were framed! But again, if Dwight and Jim’s customer data was visible to them and to the entire organization, it probably would not have been as easy to pull the wool over their eyes. Growing pains make for good television, but in your real-world business, it can make for bad customer experience. Building out a data and analytics strategy into your support and sales will improve customer experience when you make specific and informed changes — and ultimately, this will drive revenue. Customers are your best investment.

For more information about why your growing business should stay on top of your data, check out our research on how a data-driven approach to CX leads to better service by clicking here.

Recently, I wrote, “Making It Safe To Fail, Hogwash!” It was a rant about the social psycho-babble around failure. We seem to have a culture that revels in failure–that is encouraging people to experiment, learn, innovate, and grow through “making it safe to fail.”

Yet, we never talk about the concept of “making it safe to succeed.”

Some might think it’s the other side of the same coin. I actually think it’s quite different.

Think about it for your own organization, for a moment. As a leader, are you doing everything possible to make it safe for your people to succeed?

Some things to think about:

1. Are you recruiting and onboarding people who can succeed when given the opportunity and want to succeed? Have you developed rich competency models, for each role, and recruiting against that profile. Or are you recruiting the people you can get or with whom you have chemistry?
2. Are you onboarding them effectively, helping them learn what it takes to succeed with your customers and within your company?
3. Have you defined their job and your expectations of their performance with great clarity? Do they understand it? Have they internalized and owned it for their own? Do they understand the consequences of failure, do they own the accountability for those consequences.
4. Are you giving them the resources, processes, systems, tools, training, programs, and support critical to their ability to succeed?
5. Are you coaching and developing them, helping improve their ability to be successful?
6. Are you creating a culture where people are challenged, can grow, feel they are being listened to, feel they are valued, and where they want to work?
7. Are you creating an environment that fosters teamwork and collaboration?
8. Are you creating an environment that encourages curiosity, learning, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, experimentation?
9. Do people feel driven to succeed, but to do so ethically?
10. Do people feel driven to succeed, but when they fail, the organization rallies around them, helping them reassess corrective actions required to create success.

People don’t want it to be safe to fail. They want it to be safe to succeed, to stretch, to achieve, to be creative/innovative, to learn and grow. They want to be part of an organization obsessed doing the things that create consistent success.

Free-Photos / Pixabay

With younger generations in the workplace and increasingly in leadership roles, they want more access to continuous learning resources. For those in L&D teams, this means that your learning platforms and learning management systems (LMS) can’t stay at static repositories of courses and materials anymore.

Why is continuous learning important?

It is more important than ever to incorporate continuous learning into an LMS. Busy professionals don’t have the time to search for new sources of knowledge themselves. And hoping that people will stumble across eBooks, videos, books, articles and resources online is too haphazard to rely on as a way of sourcing new knowledge into L&D courses.

Deloitte recommends “flexible, open career models that offer enriching assignments, projects, and experiences rather than a static career progression” as a model for incorporating continuous learning. Younger generations, in particular, want and need more chances to learn new skills at work. For millennials, availability of professional development opportunities is one of the most important elements of company culture.

Traditional learning models in workplaces are prescriptive. Staff are told what they need to do, given time to learn the material and are usually given a test at the end. They have no control over when or why, or how. Whether this is delivered online, using a video, or in-person instructor-led, learning is simply a task that gets employees out of doing something else. It doesn’t make people want to learn more or take a proactive approach to learning more, or improving how they work.

It is better for employees and employers that staff have more control over what they learn.

Staff who are able to find out more and learn a little every day – instead of every so often (and only when instructed) – are more adaptable, better at taking initiative and make the organizations they work for more agile, cooperative, and sustainable. Team members who want to learn will see this as way to advance careers and make work more enjoyable, consequently creating more value for the organization.

With the right tools and resources in place, managers can take small every-day steps to encourage continuous learning.

How to incorporate continuous learning?

Incorporating continuous learning means having the tools and platforms to make that possible. An LMS is the ideal environment.

But within an LMS, L&D staff need the ability to plugin new resources and knowledge from a wide range of sources. When an LMS is custom-built, you can ensure that it comes with the features your team need to make continuous learning a reality. This could mean the ability to upload videos or plugin resources from third-party sources, such as webinars and online learning platforms.

In traditional learning platforms, those features aren’t always present and customizing an off-the-shelf model either isn’t possible, or would cost too much. What L&D teams need are learning platforms and apps that are as versatile as the styles of learning that employees now want and need. You don’t need to stick with a legacy system that no longer serves the need of your employees.

Team members should also have the ability to upload learning materials that they find and share, with the ability for L&D staff to review and approve before sharing that with everyone else. It is a good sign when employees are searching for knowledge themselves, but some editorial control is always useful for regulatory and compliance purposes.

Establishing a culture of continuous learning and improvement will produce big long-term payoffs. Staff will appreciate the support, put the learning to good use, and see this as a perk and a positive sign of a company that cares about the continuous development of employees.

I want to share two cold pitches I received today. One email. One Twitter DM. Both folks seem kind, nice and genuine. Both however are complete strangers to me. I do not trust strangers because I have no idea who they are, what they value, how good or bad their online reputation is, or, heck; […]

The post Why Cold Pitching Never Works as a Long Term Strategy appeared first on Blogging Tips.

Looking to sharpen your sales techniques?

We encourage you to dive into inbound sales techniques if you want to see really positive results.

Inbound sales takes the old, interruptive sales process and turns it on its head. Instead of blasting your message to as many people as possible and hoping for the best, you have the chance to make a genuine connection with prospects – creating true “win-win” outcomes.

What Is a Sales Technique?

via GIPHY

One of the main reasons inbound marketing is so powerful is that it’s permission-based. Early in the relationship, prospects signal they are willing to hear from you. But once you have that permission, what do you do?

That’s where inbound sales techniques come in.

Outbound sales are a lecture, while inbound sales are a conversation. There still needs to be direct contact between your prospects and sales team, but the route to get there is very different: Lead nurturing happens at every step.

As a result, prospects are more likely to lean in and listen when the sales call comes. Let’s review some of the best sales techniques your team can employ to start driving revenue, as well as some techniques that need to be put to rest.

Sales Prospecting Techniques

We’ll start with sales prospecting. Prospecting requires you to actively search for potential customers that will convert and drive your business.

Some key techniques include the following:

1. Conduct Research Before Connecting.

With buyer journeys in hand, it becomes easier to track your prospects’ interactions with your site and understand their thinking.

Someone who looks at a flyer about public speaking anxiety is in a different place (with different needs) than someone who reads about a master seminar for executives who want to give better presentations.

With granular insight into prospect activities, sales teams have the chance to open a conversation based on what they’ve seen a prospect do – rather than what they’d like the user to do to qualify better or move through the funnel.

2. Leverage Both Your Inbound Sales and Marketing Strategies.

You have a blog. Your social feeds are buzzing. You’ve made dozens of offers and tools for your prospects… but you’re still not closing the deal.

This is common for companies that go “all in” with inbound marketing strategies. The real question is, are you using inbound sales strategies as well?

Your sales team should have a well built process, content library, email sequences/templates, and a CRM set up to track progress with each and every prospect.

This way, marketing and sales can work together to find the gaps throughout the entire process, gain valuable information that is exchanged during sales emails and calls, and then improve where necessary.

3. Give Them Options for How to Contact You.

Not only are your prospects at different stages of the buyer’s journey, but prospects are also going to want to communicate in different ways.

Do they prefer email, a quick phone call, scheduling a meeting time, or using a chat bot to communicate?

via GIPHY

Businesses have already started to use Facebook Messenger bots as a way to provide customer service to their prospects and clients – and this is only going to get bigger throughout 2020 and beyond.

Find how your prospects like to communicate and converse with them there.

Sales Email Techniques

Email marketing and outreach is still incredibly relevant in B2B and B2C markets today, especially when it comes to sales. The goal is to get conversations started and find opportunities to engage with prospects.

Here are a few techniques to help you achieve that:

4. Segment Your Campaigns.

By segmenting your campaign, you can create emails that are highly targeted and personalized. Mailchimp found that segmented campaigns had a 14.31 percent higher open rate than non-segmented ones.

Taking the time to research and segment every list may seem like a pretty tedious task, but it obviously is worth the effort!

5. Establish a Personal Connection.

In order to survive the three-second skim that determines whether a prospect will delete your email or not, you’ll need to make it feel relevant to them through personalization.

Tailor the email to their interests by relaying the reason behind your outreach, or offer something significant about their position, company, or personal characteristics.

They’re much more likely to actually read the message if they feel like you’re actually interested in connecting with them.

6. Always Follow Up.

You can’t rely on single interactions to keep your business top of mind of your prospects. You’ll need to build trust, identify goals, build rapport, and learn about them in order to truly become a viable option for them.

The best way to do this through email is by following up.

It’s unfair to assume that they’re going to remember you in the midst of everything happening in their day to day if you haven’t established the standard of a lasting relationship yet.

That’s why it’s always a good idea to touch base, see where they’re at with resolving their problem, and remind them of the value you can provide.

Sales Techniques That Create Value

via GIPHY

You’ll find that you’ll close more deals and create legacy customers more easily if you prioritize providing value to your prospects.

Who are you more likely to come back to for auto repairs: the guy who rushes through the repair just to charge you for every nut and bolt or the guy who takes the time to make sure they’re addressing the right problem and walks you through how you can avoid it happening again?

Try these techniques to be more like the second guy:

7. Create a Detailed Buyer Journey.

Using inbound effectively means you need to talk to your prospect at every step of their path from awareness to consideration to decision.

Generally, though, a prospect will probably only contact you late in the process. You’ll need to rely on your website, automated emails, and other collateral to do the rest.

How can you make these tools effective, rather than feeling intrusive?

The answer is simpler than it looks. Map out the buyer’s journey your customers may have. What individual pain points could lead them through your sales funnel? Which products should your communication focus on for each one?

Only by refining your understanding of the buying process can you make sure the automated tools you use act as a true extension of your value.

8. Focus on Thought Leadership.

via GIPHY

Thought leadership is probably one of the most overused terms in sales and marketing today. Everyone and their dog wants to be a “thought leader,” but many brands have little understanding of what that means and how it impacts their sales process.

To make a long story short, thought leadership doesn’t stop at telling others your way is better. It focuses on what difference it makes and why.

By spreading truly innovative and thought-provoking content, you capture more leads who are interested in what you have to say.

This has a dramatic effect on the sales process as a whole, since it means people who connect with your brand already have an interest in what you have to say and recognize that your competitors may not offer the same value as you.

9. Educate Your Prospects.

Most companies have clients that fit into various personas – each with a different need. There is no “one size fits all” method for sales today. Modern sales is about focusing on educating each prospect with specific content targeted to their needs.

Think about their company and what their needs are. Then you can focus on helping them solve their problems, not just pitching your services.

Sales Call Techniques

Whether you’re a fan of picking up the phone or organizing video calls or not, sales calls are a part of the game. These techniques will help you feel more confident in your capabilities and woo your prospects:

10. Figure Out What to Ask and Teach in Sales Calls.

For you, the ultimate goal of a sales call is – not surprisingly – to make a sale. This goal and the tension it causes can sabotage a call fast, though.

To move forward, look at it from the prospect’s perspective: What do they want to learn from your call? How can you help them?

In the inbound methodology, sales pros need to get more comfortable with the role of mentor and advisor. It’s consultative selling turned up to the next level.

Acknowledge in your mind that some prospects simply aren’t right for your brand – focus first on answering questions, not objections.

11. Open a Two-Way Dialogue to Understand the Prospect.

The more comfortable a prospect gets, the more likely he or she is to make a purchase. How do you make someone comfortable?

The same way you would with anyone else: Take a genuine interest in the other person.

via GIPHY

Over the phone, a lot of the little physical cues that can make people comfortable aren’t available. The best way to spark rapport is to ask questions. Ask what brought them to this point, what they’ve tried, and what they need.

12. As the Conversation Develops, Let Them Sell Themselves.

For generations, “ask for the sale” has been one of the cardinal rules of traditional selling. As an inbound sales expert, you can still do this in your own way, but it’s often much better to let prospects ask themselves.

People are much more attached to ideas they’ve had themselves than ideas others have given them. Your role in inbound sales is to give the prospect enough information to justify their own decision.

13. Practice Active Listening.

If there’s one thing that ties all aspects of inbound sales together, it’s listening.

Today’s extended sales process starts with web designers and marketing pros developing new ways to “listen” to customers long before they make first contact. Using clear buyer journeys, effective calls to action, and good analytics, the whole team can make inferences about what leads are thinking.

It’s up to sales pros to take that and run with it in direct interactions. Every conversation includes opportunities, but you have to listen for them.

Where old-fashioned outbound selling was all about the company, inbound methods are all about the prospect. That requires sales pros to have the poise and balance needed to carefully listen to what prospects have to say once they’re on the phone.

Active listening helps people drop their guard because, again, they get the sense that they matter to you. Just by listening, you convey that you value their time and they have your full attention.

Sales Closing Techniques

via GIPHY

All of the techniques above are meant to help you get to this point: the closing of a deal. But the job’s not done yet.

Here are some sales closing techniques to get you over that last hurdle:

14. Emphasize the Risk.

There’s no sort of pressure like the pressure of missing out on something big.

Highlight the features and benefits that your prospect is risking losing if they walk away from a deal. Human nature prods us to make decisions by reacting from a fear of loss.

When you were a kid, how many times did you buy a toy or video game because you had FOMO, a fear of missing out? All of your friends would be in the know, but you’d be out of the loop.

The same behavior applies when you’re closing deals. Remind them of all they have to lose if telling them what they can gain just isn’t enough.

15. Hold Your Ground.

This is around the point in the sales process that customers start nickel and diming you in order to earn some discounts.

And while we’ll encourage you to try and meet your customers with a fair price for a better customer experience, we also warn against being taken advantage of.

Oftentimes, salespeople make concessions throughout the sales process, keying customers in to where they can try and demand a lower price.

Be sure to protect your business’ value at every step of the sale and remember to hold your ground when it comes to close.

You can give a little here and there where it makes sense for both you and your customer, but avoid underselling the true value of your product or service just so you can say you made a sale.

16. Differentiate Your Company.

Truth be told, this should be done from start to finish, but it does carry some significant weight toward the end of a sale. The customer is in the decision stage of their journey and is likely re-examining all of their options one last time since they know they’re approaching that final call.

Now’s the time to remind them of how your business is going to transform the way they function in a way only you can.

via GIPHY

Differentiate yourself from your competitors by leveraging emotion along with data. Discuss how other customers were in difficult situations and how they ultimately had easier, less stressful lives after using your product or service.

Remind them that the two of you have made it to this point because you both know you’re capable of improving their situation.

Sales Techniques That Don’t Work

All too often, we witness salespeople practice old, dated techniques that haven’t aged well in an age of consumers who know their tricks and are aware that they hold all the buying power.

And while there are dozens of strategies that should be retired, we’ll go over just a few.

Relying on the Elevator Pitch

We all know how valuable the perfect elevator pitch can be in order to get your foot in the door and start the conversation, but if that’s all you’ve got, you’ll lose a prospect’s interest quickly.

Your elevator pitch is meant to encapsulate what your product or service can do for them in as few words as possible.

When a prospect enters the consideration stage, though, they want more than just a couple of sentences. They want to hear about the value in doing business with you. They want features and benefits and ROI data.

You can’t expect a sale to happen based off your scripted spiel alone.

via GIPHY

Instead, work on building a narrative around them and the value your business can offer them.

Only Speaking to Benefits

Yes, communicating the pros of your offer is an important part of the sale, but it’s important to acknowledge it’s not the only part.

Sometimes, salespeople prioritize listing off benefits in an effort to win a customer over without recognizing that customers today perform a lot of research before they make a purchase.

You’ll need to tell them what features your product or service offers and how they provide the value you’ve mentioned.

Only speaking to the benefits of your business can make you come across as shallow or worse, as if you don’t understand how your business helps people yourself. Give them more details and they’ll give you more attention.

Bad Mouthing the Competition

Customers can see right through this ploy, and it will backfire pretty badly.

Unless you’re in a remote, niche market, you likely have competitors. And, if you’ve been smart, you know what they’re offering and how.

Use that information to up the game of your own business rather than try to tear them down. Talking negatively about your competition can often result on those negative comments being reflected on you in the customer’s mind.

How often do you walk away from a gossip thinking that they’d make a great friend to confide in?

If a customer brings up a competitor, use that opportunity to differentiate yourself from the competition by highlighting how your product or service can offer more value and how.

It’s never a good idea to just dive into slander or trash talk. You’re not convincing anyone to join your side that way.

Applying Too Much Pressure

via GIPHY

No one likes to feel forced into a decision. While you do want to keep the stakes high and cross that finish line quickly, customers don’t like to be rushed or bullied into a purchase.

If a customer seems like they’re stalling or is demonstrating hesitation, take the time to figure out what their objections are that are keeping them from moving forward.

Having that conversation will provide you the opportunity to remove those obstacles and give them confidence in knowing that you’re truly trying to provide them the best value by hearing them out. You’ll also gain insight to how you can avoid those same obstacles with other customers in the future.

It should feel more like you’re holding their hand through the sales process, rather than shoving them from behind down the funnel.

via GIPHY

As consumers become smarter and more conscious of the power they have, it’s easy for sales pros to feel discouraged by increasingly resistant markets. But a change in customer behaviors and patterns doesn’t mean the end of business.

It just means it’s time to adapt.

If you take these sales techniques and add them to your playbook, you’ll find the interactions you have with customers change for the better. You’ll experience less resistance and more conversation, which leads to a much more value-oriented sale.

Give some of these techniques a shot and let us know if you see a difference!

There are clients and prospects who seem to have an immunity to your insights. They cling to the belief that they know everything they need to know, that nothing you might share with them could prove to be of value to them, nor could it improve their results. Your experience counts for nothing, nor does data or facts that are validated by neutral parties. Resistance is part of insight selling. Here is how to respond when your dream client rejects your insight.

Recognize Their Fear and Constraints

The root causes of contacts resisting your insights, regardless of their validity, is more often some fear or some constraint than it is a pig-headed reluctance on their part, even though the latter is sometimes true.

In consultative sales, your insights might suggest that your prospective client should do something different. While your point of view and your recommendation might serve them, they make a business model that precludes them, making the change you would have them make. Your prospective client might have a weak competitive position in their market, making them unable to pass off any increase in costs to their clients or customers—even if it improved their quality.

The contacts you share your insights with might also believe that every insight you share points to the truth about their circumstances, as well as what they should be doing now. They may believe that what you would have them do would increase the price they pay for what you sell but lower their overall costs, making them more profitable. Some will fear that they will pay more only to incur the same costs they are already paying, and thus fear losing money in soft costs, the costs that are more difficult to capture.

From time to time, you will bump into people who cannot accept your insights because what you would have them do would be a financial disincentive for them personally. I once had a client whose assumptions about their costs were off by just over three-hundred percent. When confronted with the math, management disclosed that their bonus compensation was based on the costs they used internally, which prevented them from making a change that would have lowered their overall costs while taking money out of their paychecks.

Shaping Mindshare Takes Time

There are some people who will look at your insights, recognize the value to their business, and begin the process of exploring change. There are others who are more skeptical and who still need more time to change what they believe. Your plan to share your insight and make a change should not be built on the idea that seeing new information for the first time should cause an immediate decision to change.

One of the best beliefs you can have about any resistance from your contacts to your insights is that you haven’t effectively conveyed the information—even if this is not true. The value in believing you have failed is that it means you need to change your approach and try again, the key to persisting over time. My own experience is that you are just as likely to have to share information in different formats over a longer period as you are to have a single meeting that causes your dream client to change. The times your insights lead to change at first sight are balanced by the times it takes you three years to gain any real traction.

Don’t Give Up Your Argument

The fact that your contact or contacts refuse to believe your insights is no reason for you to give up your argument. If what you share is good, right, and true, there is no reason to give up trying to convince your contacts to absorb new information and make changes accordingly.

In part, whether others believe your insights depends on whether you believe what you are sharing. If you give up quickly, you project that you expected to convince your client or prospective client to change their mind in a single meeting. When that doesn’t happen, giving up and going away makes it look like what you were sharing was tactical, and when it failed, you quit.

Persisting over time is proof that you believe what you are saying is true, and it also gives your potential client time to process ideas that are in conflict with what they believe, how they run their business, and what they believe makes them successful. Success in B2B sales is often the result of your persistence.

Develop a More Open Contact

When you run headlong into a dead end, try another path. Because one contact or group of stakeholders doesn’t believe or isn’t willing to take action on the ideas you have shared with them is no evidence that there are not others in the same company who will be compelled by your theory and your point of view.

In a day and age when consensus is necessary, it pays to acquire contacts throughout your dream client’s company. You will find senior leaders who stubbornly adhere to the idea that what they know is all they need to know. There will be people in positions that indicate they have little real authority who will see what you share as the explanation they have been looking for to understand why they struggle.

While it’s true that you fill find leaders who push change throughout the organization, you will also find that arming people in other roles gives them the ability to argue for change, providing the facts, data, and views that allow them to engage in an argument about what they need, why they need it, and how it will improve their results.

Some People Have to Be Hurt

Sadly, and not uncommonly, you will find some prospective clients who have to suffer failure before they are willing to take your advice, like the person who finds the will to change their beliefs about their health only after suffering a heart attack.

You are better off being patiently, professionally persistent instead of judgmental and overly provocative. You don’t want your prospective client to be embarrassed by the fact that they failed and search for help elsewhere. It can be difficult for people to take advice for some of the reasons stated in the first point here. Winning big deals eventually is better than losing them for a long period of time because you embarrassed or insulted them.

Your Sales Approach Matters

Insight selling is a modern sales approach, which is to say it is highly effective when done well, but not always easy to execute.

In B2B sales, when you are sharing your insights, you need to make sure you do so with the kind of bedside manner that increases the willingness to accept it. If what you share challenges the client for whatever reason, you need to deliver it in a way that lessens the challenge, if that means your client can better act on what you share.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation continue to change the business landscape. Nowhere is this more apparent than in customer service. In fact, Forrester calls both out as major contributors to the three “megatrends” they see taking shape in 2020, calling both “a long-term investment … to better support your customers and your agents.”

Taking a closer look at these trends, the first is how the use of AI and automation make it possible to more readily scale customer service operations. The most obvious is in having AI and automation handle repetitive and simple inquiries. Another example is how AI and automation will power self-service technologies such as chatbots, knowledge management, communities, and automated solutions. This all comes in addition to tasks like prioritizing, categorizing, and routing cases.

With more and more of the high-volume and repetitious work being addressed by self-service and automation, more complex issues and those requiring empathy are directed to agents. For this reason, the second trend identifies the importance of desktop technologies that utilize AI. This provides agents with timely, in-context answers and guidance to help reduce resolution time. Likewise, with help “riding alongside,” new agents can be on-boarded and become productive faster.

With AI and automation moving into the agent’s territory, the third trend sees changes coming to customer service culture. While the need for basic-skilled agents will lessen, the need for higher-level roles like superagents, chatbot designers, and other AI-related positions will grow. FUD–fear, uncertainty, and doubt–will also likely occur.

Acting on these trends means a brighter future for customers and new opportunities for agents; but if poorly executed, they create the potential for spectacular failure. To smooth the transition, consider these three pre-adoption steps to make success possible.

Ready the data

While AI holds great promise of speeding work along, the truth is that it’s really not all that smart or skilled–at least to begin with. AI (better termed as machine learning in this context) requires teaching the machine how to behave in very narrow and structured circumstances. Just as humans learn, AI requires three things: credible, correct data; a good-sized volume of data to analyze; and time to build a model from it all. Without all three, an AI initiative will fail.

For example, if AI will work with cases–prioritization, categorization, and routing–prior case data should be validated for accuracy before starting the learning process. Along those lines, any means by which human-entered case data can be standardized (e.g. training errant agents in proper case entry, use of pick lists, etc.) will help minimize future case data review. Experts suggest at least six months of data is required to build good models, and AI must be constantly learning from the work of human counterparts as well as their own mistakes to succeed.

Clean up processes

In addition to aligning how data is collected, look at how it moves around the organization. This is important to automation for a few reasons.

First, a process might not be nearly as efficient as expected. Processes have a tendency to evolve and become more complex over time. One of the benefits of automation is the speed by which it can execute. It will operate much more quickly if its actions are reduced to the minimum necessary. Use the move to automation to evaluate if the process end-to-end still makes sense.

In preparing to automate a process, this is also the opportunity to update its documentation. All series of tasks–automated or manual–should clearly state its intent and the steps it takes. Moving to automation doesn’t remove this requirement; in fact, it makes it even more important.

And the bonus? Since it’s a form of technology, automation may fail. If the process has been simplified and documented, tasks can quickly transition (temporarily) back to manual until automation is available again.

Address human concerns

It’s in most people’s nature to fear and resist change. AI and automation are not just a fundamental change coming to customer service, they are technologies many don’t understand, further fueling that apprehension. In some cases, that anxiety even leads to illness.

Alleviate these challenges by getting ahead of employees’ concerns. Involve employees early in the planning process. Adopting AI and automation is a journey and not a destination, so share the roadmap. Transparency and discussion help prevent insecurity from taking hold.

Having addressed the emotional side of the equation, the truth is not every employee in a role affected by AI and automation will have the skills and knowledge to transition into new positions. Provide a route into those new jobs with training–internally and externally–that will help them build the necessary expertise. By starting these discussions and taking these actions well in advance of AI and automation entering the scene, agents have more time to up-level their skills for what’s needed.

Succeed through preparation

They may be megatrends, but that doesn’t mean bringing AI and automation into customer service is a simple undertaking and a quick win. Though they offer to handle the mundane, repetitive work and make it possible to solve customer issues faster, much is needed to realize that value.

Ensure a successful outcome by doing the pre-work. Amass accurate and sound data by cleaning-up what exists and the adjust (if needed) the process of generating new data that machine learning will consume. Evaluate, rearchitect, and document processes headed for automation. Respond to employees’ emotional needs while also setting them up for the new opportunities ahead. Taking these issues into account will smooth the addition and strengthen the success of AI and automation in customer service.

As an online marketer or business owner, you’re probably quite familiar with link outreach emails. In fact, you probably receive them all the time. You know, those pesky emails from other websites attempting to entice you to link to them in one of your blog posts. Or perhaps you’ve been emailed a pitch by a company hoping to score a guest post on your site. Yes, I’m talking about those emails.

White hat link building has become a lot tougher than it used to be and with a colossal 4.2 billion webpages in existence, trusting that you’ll earn links naturally isn’t always practical. This is why many opt to simply ask other websites for links via email outreach. But, is email outreach still considered an effective link building tactic? Keep reading to find out.

The Reality of Link Outreach Emails

Think about how many times you’ve received a link outreach email. How many times have you opened those emails? How many times have you taken the time to respond?

Recent studies have found that people open fewer than 24% of outreach emails and respond to less than 8.5%. The reality is that the vast majority of general outreach messages are ignored. But, when it comes to cold link outreach emails, open and response rates can be even worse.

The problem is that many people on the web just scrape other’s ideas and run with them without putting much thought or effort behind them. In the case of link outreach emails, many tend to copy and paste ingenuine, depersonalized, and uncompelling link outreach templates. If you’ve noticed that a majority of the link outreach emails look eerily similar, this is why.

With this approach, both Google and the recipient are likely to assume your message is just another spam email. In fact, many of them will probably end up in your recipient’s spam folder. This is not only an inefficient way to send link outreach emails but it also bares significant reputation risks.

The Right Way to Send Link Outreach Emails

Link outreach emails can work only if they’re done properly. Taking shortcuts is not going to yield the results you’re looking for and, quite frankly, it’s a huge waste of time.

Instead, consider creating your own personalized outreach messages that are concise and communicate value without pushing benefits. This is guaranteed to increase your chances of improving your response and open rate.

Here are a few other tips for writing your own link outreach emails:

• Be transparent: They know you want a link so don’t beat around the bush.
• Be Relevant: Don’t spam any email you find. Only connect with relevant sites and niches.
• Empathize: If you’re cold-emailing them, acknowledge that and let them know you understand the feeling.
• Tell them who you are: Share your title or position if relevant.
• Reciprocate: Let them know you are willing to share the love and help them out as well.

Link Building: The Bottom Line

Email outreach for link building can be very effective when done properly but, it shouldn’t be the only link building tactic you rely on. It can be extremely time-consuming and you shouldn’t expect to receive a huge response. If you choose to do email link outreach, take the time to do it right. Even if you don’t get the links you’re looking for, you may earn respect and that could lead to future opportunities.

This is the theoretically ideal organizational chart of a startup. There’s a CEO at the top in red, VPs in orange, senior contributors in dark gray, team leads in green, and junior individual contributors in light gray.

This is the org chart of the typical startup. It’s a very different in reality. The departments are lopsided and scraggly. The span of control is out of control. Sometimes there are directors running teams that should be headed by VPs. Other times, departments are missing leaders and so another leader takes the helm. Is this so bad?

As a startup evolves from product market fit to scaling, organizational design becomes an executive imperative. To scale means hiring lots of people. Hiring a large team is necessary, but insufficient. That team needs the right structure to thrive.

Span of control the number of people reporting to a manager. Most managers work well with 6-7 reports. Weekly one-on-ones, career planning, coaching, training and development consume a big chunk of manager’s time. Managers bear another major responsibility: building their teams.

In high growth companies, leaders may spend upwards of 30% of their time recruiting - about one to two days a week. First meetings, second meetings, references, hiring committee meetings - it adds up quickly.

If your span of control is sixteen, your Monday and Tuesday are consumed entirely by one-on-ones. Combine that with recruiting and you have one day a week for the day job. That won’t work.

Many startups go through the first transition from founding team to a few VPs and then don’t think through the importance of middle management. The reason middle managers are key is they cut the span and control and defray the recruiting responsibility, freeing leaders to spend time running the company. In the transition from product market fit to scaling, this is a key step.

And it’s easy to overlook that necessity to scale.

This article is written with field sales teams in mind. However, if you run an inside sales team exclusively, don’t despair, you may still find a nugget or two of helpful information as well.

Containing costs is important in every business. But for businesses where the costs of creating new customers are measured by lenders to determine the health of that business, they are especially important to manage.

In the electronic security industry, as well as SaaS, telecom and other recurring revenue businesses, customer creation costs are a key component which determines the company’s ability to borrow for expansion.

Conference Panel Insights

While attending the recent Barnes Buchanan annual conference, which focuses on the various market and financial elements impacting the security industry, I listened to the perennial lender panel discussing the metrics associated with the industry. The session, which featured a group of senior and sub-debt lenders, discussed recurring monthly revenue, customer attrition rates and the cost to create new customers. I also had the privilege of hosting a breakfast where we discussed the state of sales in the security industry. My topics were much the same as the lender panel but from a different perspective.

Hearing these many business leaders discuss containing their customer creation costs, it seemed to be the squishiest of the measurements for companies that have field sales teams. However, I shared a few ideas in my presentation that addressed the concern and I will share them here.

Consider Utilizing an Inside Sales Team – Pat yourself on the back if you are already implementing this, but be sure you are doing it as efficiently and as effectively as possible. Here are a couple of compelling statistics that support this strategy:

Research shows that 35% to 50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. [Source: com]
An outside sales call costs $308, an inside sales call costs $50 [Source: PointClear]

Unfortunately, I have often seen, particularly in the security industry, that customer service personnel are slapped onto the phone untrained and then called inside salespersons. They are not one and the same. Inside salespeople need to be excellent at the following:

• Building rapport quickly
• Asking compelling questions to uncover underlying reasons why they are potentially interested in your services
• Fully qualifying (or disqualifying as the case may be) and potentially even closing the sale from an emotional standpoint before a field sales rep is even engaged

Implement a Repeatable Predictive Sales Process – Whether an inside seller or field seller, following a repeatable predictive sales process is one of the easiest tools to implement and requires the least amount of true sales skill to master.

Only 31% of sellers are proficient at following a repeatable sales process however 75% of the Top 10% of sellers are strong in this competency.
87% of the Top 10% are strong in qualifying while only 25% of the general selling population are proficient at qualifying. [Source: Objective Management Group]

Implement a predictive repeatable sales process with a strong emphasis on DIS-qualifying, rather than letting salespeople shoot from the hip. This will help stop your salespeople from wasting time on fruitless proposal generating and spend more time with the right prospects. The result will be increased efficiency and more business, along with contained costs to create customers.
Focus on the Right Targets –

Of the Top 10% of sellers across more than 200 surveyed industries, 95% are effective at selling value compared to only 29% of all salespeople in the security and recurring revenue businesses. [Source: Objective Management Group].

So, if the security and other recurring revenue business salespeople aren’t selling value what are they selling? Price is the answer, which means they are likely not resonating with the right prospects and not maximizing profit for the business.

In this crowded landscape, with new entrants likely encroaching on your market continuously, it is more critical than ever that you know what your differentiated value is to your ideal clients. And your salespeople need to know it too. If you aren’t practicing what it is and focusing on it, your salespeople are making it up and it isn’t working.

Of the numerous sales teams we have analyzed in the security industry, none of them has had a clear, succinct, spot-on value proposition that is utilized across the whole team.

Trust me, I know. We video record their value propositions and, by-and-large, they have no idea what their value proposition is, how it might differ from a competitor and why the customer would care.

If your sellers think that every company or consumer out there is a right fit for your company, you are wasting money on field sales. It is like finding a needle in a haystack.

And if you are paying your salespeople a small base, a small draw or nothing at all unless they sell something, you are kidding yourself that it isn’t costing you anything to allow them to flounder around and work themselves into the grave. Not only will you have increased turnover, which is extremely costly, but you will have the largest of all costs in a recurring revenue business: Opportunity Cost.

Opportunity cost is the biggest killer of this type of business, especially if customers in your market sign multi-year contracts.

Don’t Overlook Hiring

In addition to these strategies, you must hire right. Be precise on who will work (and who won’t work) in your particular market and role. Remember, inside sales is not customer service, and field sales is different than inside sales.

Next, go hire them and onboard them quickly, completely and efficiently, so they are equipped to sell to your well-defined market as quickly as possible.

If you need a little help in the onboarding arena, we are happy to build a comprehensive program for you, or you can get a jump start on it yourself by accessing The First 90 Days, which is an outline of what you need in your onboarding program.

As the digitization of the marketplace reaches near-saturation, organizations will compete for customers based on value derived—and this will be driven by customer success. Flexible subscription and recurring revenue models mean the customer is in control of their service and tech partnerships and reserve the right to move on to a competitor. Customer success and retention have therefore become critical to achieving maximum customer lifetime value.

This is our look at the leading customer success trends for 2020. Many of the dominant themes for the coming year and decade address the need to better align enterprise actions with customer goals.

1. Customer Success will Become Centralized
2. Connecting Customer Data Streams for a Better View
3. Proactive Engagement Will Become a Priority
4. Personalized Experience Delivered at Scale with Dynamic Assignment
5. Data-Driven Scaling Customer Success Initiatives Will Maximize Growth
6. Leveraging AI to Guide Your Customer Success Team
7. Your CS Software Will Determine Customer Lifetime Value

1. Customer Success will Become Centralized

Customer success is going to be everyone’s business, not just the CS team’s. Everyone will need to truly care about customer goals. Having one unified platform to control customer success functions is key. Your CS team needs to work with every other part of your enterprise. This means:

• Sharing customer data across a single, universally accessible platform
• Establishing cross-functional lines of communication
• Connect customer data streams
• Surrounding the customer with a consistent, personalized experience

Everyone in your organization should have access to customer data to make the right decisions, and everyone in the company should and can participate in customer success in order to contribute to outcomes. Toward this end, many enterprises will spend 2020 focused on creating a positive and consistent customer journey by encouraging cross-functional dialogue. Much of this can be accomplished by leveraging platforms that make it easy to exchange customer information, update customer records, and collaborate behind the scenes without involving the customer.

2. Connecting Customer Data Streams for a Better View

All customer data needs to be available, viewable, and shareable across the enterprise to give full picture of the customer. Data in a CRM is at risk of being siloed, and should be operationalized. Also, data streams need to be connected to create a fuller picture of the customer journey.

CRM is already considered a silo and efforts to operationalize it by customizing it will be difficult. It wasn’t built for that purpose. That’s why teams will be moving towards solutions that meant to handle large volumes of data and operationalize it intelligently. A customer data platform (CDP) can connect:

1. Financial data (contract dates, value, etc.)
2. Support tickets
3. Product usage
4. Customer feedback, and more.

3. Proactive Engagement Will Become a Priority

You’re only as important as the value you deliver. Today’s customer-centric enterprises must nurture their customers’ ambitions and proactively lead them toward value, rather than merely supplying the tools, checking in periodically, and for the most part, leaving them to their own affairs. In order to anticipate the next phase of your customer’s growth and deliver value you must first understand their current situation. That said, proactive and predictive engagements are just the steps before Dynamic Engagement, which can be solved with Dynamic Assignment.

4. Personalized Experience Delivered at Scale with Dynamic Assignment

Enterprises are beginning to embrace concepts such as dynamic assignment, which automatically matches new customers with the right people at the right time, efficiently, based on working connections. This could include connecting a customer with a product expert about a specific feature. It could be the staff member’s portfolio is rich in a specific region, industry, or expertise, or merely that they have the most capacity to take on a new relationship. This streamlined assignment offers more tailored customer experiences and maximizes the opportunity for an early experience of value.

5. Data-Driven Scaling Customer Success Initiatives Will Maximize Growth

The days of an expanding customer base being met with a move to a bigger office and a greater employee headcount are over. You can maximize the increased value of success and scale customer success through digital engagement. The idea is to use technology to scale external initiatives such as customer engagement through digital campaigns and internal communications, like enabling an early warning system. For example, consider how automations can help manage the tech-touch consumer segment.

These digital solutions allow your CS team to service a greater number of customers without reducing their effectiveness. Increased sophistication of these platforms will allow your team to follow a greater number of customer variables and to better link current behaviors with future needs. Your team shouldn’t just know a customer is struggling. They should have actionable steps in place and resources to utilize. There should be a path for them to follow that is standardized across the board so that everyone can do well and help their customers succeed.

6. Leveraging AI to Guide Your Customer Success Team

Smart programs could offer advances in customer product use and analysis, including better cross-functional communication. Internet of Things (IoT) technologies could reveal key information about customer behavior.

AI is still in its B2B infancy, but there’s clear potential for it to play a role in better understanding your customers. For best results, AI should be embedded in a platform as an engine to help guide your teams and to solve problems with your customers. It’s definitely a must-have capability for CS solutions.

7. Your CS Software Will Determine Customer Lifetime Value

Customer success software will become increasingly important this year. The solution you choose determines how much information you can gather from a range of sources, how well this information can be analyzed, understood and shared, and how effectively you can turn customer knowledge into value-driven, goal-based action.

You want to ensure that customer goals are constantly being achieved, which eventually results in your goals being achieved. Make sure you have a success plan (preferably built into your CS software) to do just that.

You can be ready at every stage of the customer journey to create a series of actionable steps, measure against your goals, and adjust as you go—if you have the right customer success software.

Totango’s customer success platform is built with the future in mind. When you’re ready to start giving your customers the experience they demand, create a free trial account to get started today.

Let’s talk about content marketing and Cher.

Yes, Cher.

Because love her or hate her (I love her. I love her so much.), Cher is brilliant at content strategy and repurposing content, and we need to talk about it.

So today we’re covering the main content repurposing strategy Cher has leaned into, that we should all be stealing as marketers.

Maximalist vs. Minimalist Content Marketing

Cher is so good at content strategy for the same reason I am: her personality is maximalist, so her marketing isn’t.

What I mean is, when she does create content, it’s so maximalist and powerful and packs such a punch, that she doesn’t need do it often.

It’s maximalist, more cowbell content marketing versus minimalist, Cher-style content marketing.

Instead of “more cowbell content marketing,” where you churn out content constantly because for every business problem, “the prescription is more content.”

And one reason I love looking at pop culture and entertainment for content creation and repurposing strategy is because they have to be masters of it. In entertainment, content IS the product.

So when someone creates it, they’re sure to milk it for all it’s worth.

That’s where a greatest hits funnel comes in.

The Value of Your Greatest Hits

One thing that Cher is personally the freaking queen of, is working her greatest hits.

She is so good at this, especially in this stage of her career.

She’s released multiple greatest hits albums, whether they were officially called that or were just a compilation of well, her greatest hits.

Not only that, she’s gone on, like, half a dozen farewell tours performing those same favorite, greatest hits.

And then released and sold video recordings and albums of those tours!

A TRUE legend, she’s even released a whole album and then launched a tour around SOMEONE ELSE’S greatest hits (her Abba/Mamma Mia stuff).

Looking at her discography, I count 22 releases that could be categorized as greatest hits!

Twenty-two! And that doesn’t even include her work under Sonny & Cher!

And those products were all created based on content that ALREADY existed. Not just content that already existed, but the BEST of her content that already existed.

The tried, true, and proven stuff that Cher KNOWS will sell.

That’s the genius of leveraging your greatest hits content in new ways.

Your greatest hits content is your most popular, highest converting content. So why wouldn’t you milk it for all it’s worth?

Especially in your email marketing, which is one of the most important nurturing channels and consistently the marketing strategy with the highest ROI!

Why You Need a Greatest Hits Funnel

Since these greatest hits are so powerful, you should be making sure that every single new lead, subscriber, prospect, whatever you want to call them…is seeing your best and highest converting content.

Even if your highest converting, best performing blog post was published two years ago, you want any new prospect considering you today to see it.

This is where a greatest hits funnel — an automated email sequence highlighting your best and most important content — comes in.

Since it’s based on content you’ve already created, it’s super quick and simple to set up.

You can use your greatest hits funnel as a:

• Welcome sequence
• Nurture sequence
• Sales sequence
• Re-engagement sequence
• Pretty much any sequence you need

I’ve said before that a welcome sequence is the first email automation marketers should set up, but it’s tied with a greatest hits funnel.

Your greatest hits funnel could BE a welcome sequence, or you can create a greatest hits funnel that serves another need before moving onto your welcome sequence.

For example, for Work Brighter, I’ve been writing blog posts about productivity and balance for years longer than Work Brighter has technically been a business with products to sell and a sales funnel to sell with.

Same goes with curating the Work Brighter Weekly – there’s over 200 editions of the newsletter new subscribers have missed.

And that content’s not just interesting and fun (although it is both!).

It addresses important mindset shifts and information I know people need before they’ll become a customer.

So when someone first signs up for the newsletter, I send them some of those old blog posts or newsletters.

Because like I talk about in my video on Julie Andrews-style welcome sequences, those are the kind of content you want people using for “getting to know you, getting to know all about you.”

Ways to Structure Your Greatest Hits Funnel

There are multiple ways to go about your greatest hits funnel.

The first, and easiest, way is to have a few emails that curate links to your best content. You could have one email of your best blog posts, another of your best emails, another of your best videos, etc.

Another option – and this is what I do with Work Brighter – is to have a welcome sequence that weaves emails about your greatest hits in between pitches for your offer.

This is a great way to put together a sales funnel without creating a ton of new content and copy.

Because who said sales funnels need to be overwhelming?!

And finally, you can create a dedicated sequence of greatest hits to put between other funnels, like your welcome sequence and sales funnel. Or after your sales funnel to keep people engaged between promos or to break up more formal newsletters.

Hell, you can even use your greatest hits funnel to REPLACE your regular newsletters.

I used to have a romance book review blog, and when I first stopped writing new posts, I still had people joining my email list to follow posts. So I put together the book reviews for my 50 favorite books from my time reviewing. That way, for more than a year after I stopped reviewing, people were still going back to my old reviews, and buying things from them.

How to Make It Even Easier

I have good news if you’ve already emailed your list about your greatest hits content in the past: you can repurpose THAT too.

Just update and revise that email copy and move it into your greatest hits funnel.

You’ve already created your best content.

Instead of just trying to recreate it, it’s time to compile your greatest hits album that can make you more money and more fame on autopilot.

In this article we cover:

• Intro to Research
• Define Your Audience
• Identify your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
• Business Plan & Budget

Having you been wanting to start your own business? or maybe you have and you don’t know what to do next? don’t worry, you have come to the right place. For both circumstances we have arranged a step by step guide that will allow you to move forward.

Starting a business is not easy, we understand how scary and unfamiliar it can be when starting from scratch. This is why we have provided you with the best guide and to clam your nerves we have even provided you with some insights from the CEO of vCita and how we become so successful.

Here, we have created a full step by step guide to help you kick start your business adventure. In this article we will cover all the whole loop, all the way from the introduction stage in your research market to budgeting and creating a business plan.

1. Intro to Research

Research your market

Want to strike oil? Before you start drilling, you need to find out what are the demands are for oil and how much it will cost you to meet the demand. In other words, you need to understand the market from both perspectives as the customer and the supplier – get to know the market.

The aim of doing market research is for you to understand what it takes to run a business in a specific field that you want to enter. It doesn’t matter if you come with prior experience, working as an employee in a specific field or from a different profession. Running a business is quite different, as the latter of demands require a whole new set of skills and knowledge.

In your research, You should aim to get all the basic information to help you understand what it takes to run a business in your field (e.g. rent costs, taxes and regulations, product costs, potential customers). Your research will help you avoid making future mistakes by giving you a clear and precise view of the potential challenges that come with running a business.

In many ways market research is like a navigation app that guides you to the selected destination, in the best way possible. You wouldn’t start a cross country drive without a GSP, you would you? Same thing here, you don’t want to start a business without researching the journey!

What you need to know

Don’t feel overwhelmed by the idea of market research. Granted, you could research your market for a year and still have plenty to learn and discover. But, at a certain point, research will only get you so far. Eventually, you will simply need to get hands-on experience by running your business and apply what you’ve learned through your research. So, what should you focus on in the research/learning stage?

Stay focused on these key areas:

1. Define your audiences and your potential customers’ personas
2. Identify your unique selling point (USP)
3. Get the info needed to create a business plan and budget.

There are three major points that are worth exploring further, but before we start let’s understand how to conduct efficient market research.

How do I do market research?

Good market research consists of three main activities:

• Online search (yes, that means googling!)
• Learn from others
• Behave like a customer

A. Online search

You wouldn’t believe how much knowledge you can get within 3 hours of searching the web. For example, doing a simple Google keyword search for your product or service will likely open your eyes to things you never considered before. This will help you prepare for unseen challenges.

Online research will also help you stay up-to-date with the latest news and trends in your industry, so make sure to follow relevant blogs, websites and other resources.

The web can give answers to the following questions –

• Who are the competitors and what do they offer?
• What are the main keywords and terms used in my field?
• How do people discover your product or service?
• What is the touchpoint with your products/service – where do people encounter your product in their daily lives?
• What is the current price range of the product you are offering?

Start by googling your service/ product and read the first two result pages.

B. Learn from others

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, simply talk to others in your industry to find out what to do and which mistakes you can avoid. Even by speaking to other business owners and colleagues in your field, you can get first-hand insight, this is a valuable way to gain knowledge. Use their experience to inform your own strategy.

As you do your research there are several key questions you should seek to answer:

• What does it take to get into the field? (costs, regulations etc)
• What are the main stages a business in the field goes through?
• What is needed to produce the product/deliver the service and how much does it cost?
• What are issues or problems that may occur?

Tips: Set Meetings: Make a goal to set one meeting per week with someone in your field in the first few months. It will not only help you learn but also help you network and discover new opportunities.

C. Behave like a customer

Putting your self in the customer’s shoes, exploring what the market currently has to offer, will give you a good understanding of what is working and what is not.

When talking about the customer journey, we try to identify the main stages that a potential customer will go through (target audience). From the moment the potential client aware of the product/service to the moment they purchase it.

You can understand your target audiences’ experience by simply shopping online for the type of product/service you plan to sell. By acting as a potential customer, you are going through the process of searching and purchasing online, you should identify the following four stages:

1. Awareness – The moment a customer understands there is a product or service that answers a need there needs. For example, a couple that finds out they’re about to have a baby and suddenly discovers the world of baby products and services.
2. Interest – The process of getting the needed information about the product or service. How do they connect to the need? How does the product/service relate to the customer’s current values and lifestyle? And what are the variables in choosing the right product or service?
3. Consideration – After gathering the needed information and feeling that they can make a knowledgeable decision, in this stage an evaluation of the different alternatives that the market offer occur.
4. Purchase/decision – The process of purchasing the product or service, from the deciding moment until finalizing the payment for it.

Knowledge is power, the more information you gather about your market (from industry news, research and people in the field, type of customers), the more you will be prepared for the upcoming challenges.

Act like a Customer

1. Think of three scenarios that might create a need for your product or service.
2. Next, think of three factors that might affect a customer’s choice when it comes to your product or service.
3. Finally, act like your target customer: Purchase the product or service from three different competitors.

For each, write down one thing you liked about the purchase experience and one thing you would improve about it. Once you’ve completed researching your market, you can move onto the next section and start defining your audiences.

2. Define Your Audience

Mapping market opportunities

It sounds obvious, but all businesses need to understand the markets they want to target and operate within. The more knowledge you have about your market(s), the better you’ll be able to identify the market opportunities that are most relevant and profitable to you.

A market opportunity is a need or a demand from the market that can be addressed by a product or service provided by your business. So, what are your market opportunities? This is the time to think big by brainstorming all the different type of needs your service or product can serve.

For example: If you’re a photographer and provide photography services, think of the all the different types of products and services in the photography world. You can do entertainment photography like headshots for actors or models.

For families, you can offer baby portraits, weddings, life events, holiday cards. For the corporate world, you can shoot products, staff headshots, advertising materials and more.

So how do you narrow it down, or do you even have to? By the end of this lesson, you will have a much clearer idea of which opportunities and audiences you feel are worth pursuing. To start, you need to think big. Write down 5 different types of needs for the products or services your business offer.

Identify your audience

An audience is the group of people that share the same need or potential need for your product or service. Segmenting your audience into smaller groups (or “personas”) will allow you to address their needs with more specific and direct messaging, as well as differentiate between different type of customers and offer each group the right product or service.

After all, you will likely have a variety of people interested in your product or service—so, it’s important to categorize them and market to them accordingly.

For Example: let’s take a yoga instructor. In order to identify the market segments, she needs to ask her self two main questions:
a. Who wants/needs my yoga services?
b. What is their motivation? Why do they want/need my services?

Let’s take a look. Here are 5 examples of different segments of people who might want to do yoga (these can also be interpreted as different market opportunities):

Define Your Audiences

Now it’s time to think of your potential customers. Write down at least 5-6 audiences (or personas) who would seek your product or service. This includes

• Who are your audiences?
• Define why they would want to patron your business.
• Identify the clients by their demographics, needs, and type of use in your product.
• What can I sell them? (products/service)

Once you’ve completed this list, now choose the three personas you think are the strongest—the ones who are likeliest to purchase from you and why.

Why choose three? Keep in mind that it’s difficult for a business—especially a new business—to address all market segments at once, which is why you need to focus on the ones that are most relevant and valuable when you start out.

Audience Personas

The most effective way to define and understand your target audience is by creating “Personas” for your customers. A “persona” is a profile that your target customer fits. You need to build the persona based on the information you’ve gathered from your market research.

Within your general audience, there will be several personas, which make it easier for you to remember the different customer characteristics and needs. In most cases, your target audience will not be one homogenous group with the same interests and problems. Instead, they will fall into several categories, as they did in our earlier example of a yoga instructor and her varied audience.

You should aim to identify 3-5 personas among your target audience. This is large enough to cover different types of customers and small enough to still be manageable. However, don’t confuse personas with a “niche” audience. Every persona should represent a significant segment of your target audience; not a fringe. The segment must be large enough to justify marketing to it directly.

How to create a persona?

When building your audience personas try to think of all the different characters of it. Answer the following questions –

1. Demographics and general information (name, profession, age, gender, education level, marriage status, where he/she lives, etc.)
2. Life story and main events (hobbies, things he/she likes and dislikes, tech level, etc).
3. The need or problem he/she has and what is motivating this customer to seek your product or service?
4. How can your business solve the need or problem?

When is it useful to address different personas?

When you start to conduct your marketing activities down the line, you will really appreciate having various personas within your audience. It will help you appeal more personally to your customers instead of lumping them all together—after all, their motivations and needs are unique.

Build Audience Personas

Once you’ve sketched out the basic personas amongst your target audience, it’s time to move onto the next stage in identifying your unique selling points.

3. Identify your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Now that you’ve researched your market and identified your potential audiences, it’s time to identify your USP—Unique Selling Proposition. Your USP is a special element that sets your business apart from your competitors and motivates customers to come to you over others. It could be something about the products or service you provide or something about the values or ideals you represent.

Your USP will help you move onto your next steps of branding your business (which we’ll explore in our next chapter).

Your USP also helps you focus your business. Remember, you can’t be everything to everyone. While you may offer different types of related products and services and appeal to different audience segments (as we discussed in previous sections), you do need to focus on the one special thing that sets you apart. This one unique attribute should appeal to your entire audience and apply it to all of your products and services.

If, for example, you are a coffee shop that defines your USP as fair trade and environmentally friendly, the USP should weave into your entire business. It’s not enough that your coffee beans are fair trade. You also need to incorporate your eco-friendly, socially conscious USP into the fabric of your business, meaning the materials you use to serve your beverages, your recycling messaging, how you treat your employees and more. Ideally, your customers should feel your USP in various aspects of your business.

You can define your USP by looking at these three major components:

A. Price

How does the price of your product or service compare with that of your competitors? Do you set competitive prices that match theirs or offer more savings? For example, if you own a coffee shop, is your coffee 20 percent less expensive than your local Starbucks? Keep in mind that in order to offer competitive prices, you need to think creatively about how to reduce your business expenses so that you still turn a profit (we’ll discuss this later on in the Finance chapter).

On the flip side, you can also define your USP with higher price points. This approach is usually seen in the “luxury” market, where consumers associate a higher price point with higher status or quality. For example, let’s look at the wine market. Research shows that consumers often associate higher quality with higher-priced wine even if the wine is exactly the same. When given a blind taste test of “different” wines that are actually the same but priced differently, consumers overwhelmingly report that they prefer the more expensive sample. This is an example of how price can have a psychological impact on consumer behavior.

B. Quality of Product/Service

The quality of a product or service can be defined by many different things, which fall onto a spectrum. Here are the most common factors that determine quality:

• Longevity– How long will the impact of the product or service last?
• Efficiency – How quickly will the product or service produce the intended results?
• Responsiveness – How well does the product or service respond to the customer’s needs or challenges?

C. Customer Experience

The quality of your product or service is also determined by what kind of experience your customer or client has with it.

For example, if you are a hairstylist, the quality of your service not only depends on the skills of your hair cutting. It also depends on your interaction with your clients. Being on schedule, friendly and making them feel comfortable and welcome has a huge impact on customer experience and is what can make you stand out from other hairstylists. Customer experience also applies to products.

For example, think about your daily cup of coffee and how important the cup is to your experience. A sturdy cup that is designed to contain heat will be more comfortable to hold than a flimsy paper cup.

To sum up, your business can define its USP through various factors, and therefore, you can base your USP around one or multiple attributes. In order to determine your USP, you really need to understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and what you do differently (or ideally what you do better) than they do.

In your research, you will also probably come across the term “value proposition.” Your value proposition is simply a statement that explains your USP. For example, if your USP is based on matching your competitors’ prices, your “value proposition” communicates that: “We will match any price!”

4. Business Plan & Budget

Business Plan & Budget

Having a business is not just about making money. It’s also very much about knowing how to spend money strategically so you can maximize your earnings and minimize your costs. This is where a budget comes in! Your business budget is critical for keeping your business afloat. It’ll help you track your costs, income, net profit, cash flow, debts and balance it all so you’re always in the red.

It’ll also help you grow down the line. Without a budget that maps your financials, it’ll be nearly impossible to assess how your business is performing from quarter to quarter, year to year. You won’t know where to invest more money and where to trim the fat. Operating a business without a budget is like trying to read a book in the dark!

What Your Budget Should Tell You

When you draft a budget, you are basically trying to understand three major financial questions:

a) How much money do you have/will you need to initially launch your business?

b) How much money will your business cost to operate?

c) How much does your business need to earn in order to meet your operating costs and provide you with income?

When you crunch these numbers, you might discover that you won’t have the funds to launch or operate based on your business goals. You can solve this by taking a business loan or using your own credit, but bankers will want to see your budget to determine your loan terms. This also goes for potential investors if you seek investment, shareholders or some sort of financial partner for your business.

You’ll want to map out your budget within a 12-month plan. Here are the things to include:

• Initial investment
• Cost of day-to-day operations
• Fixed costs (staff, equipment, materials, etc)
• an estimate of your monthly income

What to Include in Your Budget

A healthy budget needs to keep track of the following:

• Revenues – This is the amount of money flowing into your business. Revenue is a net number of incomes that do not subtract your costs.
• Costs – This is everything you spend on your business from insurance to employee salaries, equipment and materials, services (like web hosting) and even the small stuff like the monthly coffee costs for your office.
• Profits – This is the fun number ( or should be), Your profits measure everything you earn after your expenses are accounted for. The better your budget, the easier it will be for you to figure out how to maximize your profits. With profits, you can pay yourself and/or re-invest in your business to keep it growing.

Ideally, with a well-calculated budget, you’ll be able to maintain a healthy cash flow (the balance of money coming into and out of your business), or easily weather those times where cash flow isn’t so fluid (when more money is coming out).

Getting Budgeting Help

To get you started, we created a basic budget spreadsheet for you to begin mapping things out. This spreadsheet will help you start to crunch your numbers to get a rough yet solid idea of what your operating costs and incomes will look like. First and foremost, it’s critical to understand the money you’ll need to spend on a fixed and regular basis. Our spreadsheet helps you wrap your head around those expenses, one you’ll need to invest in right away and ones you’ll want to consider for growth.

Our spreadsheet is a great way to get started on your budgeting path. Once you’ve completed this basic step, it’s time to think of other resources to help you.

Financial professionals – Most small businesses won’t need an accountant on staff, but it’s a good idea to have one looking after your finances. You can hire an accountant on a monthly retainer to review your finances so you don’t have any surprises hit you.

Accounting Software – There are so many user-friendly, powerful accounting software options on the market specifically for small business owners. We recommend our partner Intuit Quickbooks, which offers all the tools you need to manage your budget like a pro.

Bookkeeper – When it comes to managing your day-to-day financial operations, it’s wise to have a bookkeeper if you can afford one. A bookkeeper will tabulate income and costs to help you have a healthy cash flow.

Just as the value of money ebbs and flows and the stock market soars and dips, so can your budget. Your budget should be a living document that you regularly review and revise. Has the interest rate on your loan changed? Has your rent gone up? Have you given employees a raise? Are you selling at a higher rate than last quarter? Has the cost of your materials changed at all? Your insurance premiums? All of these financials need to be considered on a quarterly basis at minimum.

Mapping the customer journey illustrates the relationship between a customer and the business owner’s overtime. It provides insights into the total experience from the customers, helping you grasp a better understanding and addresses customers’ needs and pain points as they experience your product or service. At this point in time, you may not be able to understand why each stage is absolutely necessary

Customer journey map illustrates the relationship of a customer with a business over a period of time using storytelling technique and visual cues. Story are being told from the perspective of the customer, which provides insights into the total experience from the customers, helping you get a better understanding and addresses customers’ needs and pain points as they experience your product or service.

Every year I teach classrooms full of students who leave class understanding the basics of how to search for product/market fit—and thinking their next goal is to “get funded.”

That’s a mistake.

There are two reasons to raise money:

1. You have a killer idea that is only partially validated, that you think can get to $50M+ of revenue in 5 years with 80%+ gross margins (if margins are lower, you need a lot more revenue)and you need money to get to product-market fit, or
2. You (think) you have product-market fit with real customers and real revenue and need money to grow and expand.

Not all startups need outside investment to grow.

What most founders don’t realize is:

• Every stage of a startup requires a different set of metrics and milestones and founder skills. Knowing these will help a founder position her pitch to get investors’ attention.
• Founders need to keep their eye on the prize — not just the next funding round

Luckily, I teach with two great VCs, Mar Hershenson of Pear Ventures and Jeff Epstein of Bessemer Venture Partners who both put together presentations unraveling the mysteries of how and why startups raise money. Jeff’s presentation is from the point of a view of “What Investors Want” (see resources here) while Mar’s takes it from a founder trying to figure out the funding landscape. And thanks to Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate (my first Lean LaunchPad co-instructor) for her suggestions.

Keep in mind that there is no “one way” to raise money Different investors will almost certainly have different models, and different regions may have different math. Still, there are some benchmarks to keep in mind.

Here’s the first 2½ years of a startup journey.

The Startup Investment Landscape

For startups the early stage funding landscape looks like this:

• Step 1: The Pre-seed round – you raise $500K-$2.5M
• Step 2: The Seed round – you raise $2.5-$7.5M
• Step 3: The Series A – you raise $7.5-$25M
• Step 4: Series B – you raise $15-$65M
• Step 5: Series, C, D….

(Btw, the definition of each startup financing stage has changed in the last decade.  What was a Series A round in 2005 is now a pre-seed or seed round. And what used to be a seed round a decade ago is now a pre-seed round. Lots of reasons for this shift, but it basically boils down to there’s a lot more money that wants to invest in startups, and all of it is racing to get in early.)

This is a journey that can be planned and measured. In a pre-seed round you are focused on building minimal viable products, testing your insights and searching for product/market fit.  In the seed round you have an early product and by the end you’ve found product/market fit and understand the scale of what you’re building and the levers that you can pull to accelerate growth. For a Series A round you want to prove you have built a repeatable and scalable sales/revenue model and understand all parts of the business model. Series B is about proving your net revenue model (can you be profitable?). Series C onwards funds growing your company to $100M in gross profit.

(At the end of this post, we’ll discuss the valuation at each step (how much the investors value your company and therefore how much of it you need to give up to get this money) and how much revenue you should generate at each step.)

Pitch
By the way, If your pitch is not going to knock investors’ socks off, if you cannot communicate a big vision and a unique insight about the 10x advantages which customers and users will care deeply about, then even if you build out the smartest, most thoughtful process of chasing fundraising, you will fail.

Team, Product, Traction, Business Model and Market
In each step of funding there are five questions you (and potential investors) will be asking: Tell me about your team, your product, your traction, your business model and the market.

Team is just what it sounds like. Tell me why you’re the right person to lead this company (bad answer “Because it’s my idea.” Better answer, “Because I’m the customer.”) Tell me about the group of people you’ve surrounded yourself with – your cofounders and then your key executives. Each stage of funding and company growth requires additional expertise and new skills, and you’ll want to demonstrate that you have these with potential investors.

Product (sometimes called the “value proposition”) is the product or service you’re building. One of the tough things for a startup is to figure out how much of the “product” has to be real and working at each stage of funding.

Traction is a fancy investor word for “Show me you’re making progress.” It’s sometimes called “product/market fit.” In a startup’s early days – pre-seed and seed – this is not about how much revenue you’ve made but more about how much customer passion your product is creating and how many more are loving it each week/month.  (Read Ann Miura-Ko’s article on product/market fit here.)

Business Model
Founders tend to fixate on the product. Now that product/market fit is part of the lexicon most understand that the product also needs passionate customers. But great product and eager customers are just part of what makes a great business. The rest that makes up a company is called its business model. These elements of the business model– revenue (pricing, pricing strategy), distribution channel, How to Get/Keep/Grow customers, Key Activities, Resources and Costs – are other, critical parts your start up needs to understand and have in place.

Market is a euphemism for “How big can your company grow?” Investors want to put their money to work in a startup that can be worth billions or tens of billions of dollars. What are your unique insights about technology, economics, change in market, etc. What evidence do you have that you can grow this big? How will you do it?

The big idea about all of this is that at each step of funding, the order and priority of team, product, traction and market changes.

Pre-seed Round of Funding
In the pre-seed stage, a startup is searching for product/market fit. There are no customers and no product, just a series of minimal viable products.

Funding:  Startups typically raise anywhere from $500K to $2,500,000 in pre-seed. At the low-end this might come from friends, family or angel investors. At the high-end pre-seed angel funds might invest. (Yes, there are venture funds that look for and invest in startups this early.)

• Team: As you’re raising money from friends, family or angels, investors in this round are betting mostly about you and your team. Have you or your team members achieved anything important in the past? Any wins to date in your startup? Do you have co-founders who complement your skills? (Warning signs are “We were in the dorm together” or “It’s my team from the class I took.”)
• Traction: Tell investors about your search for product/market fit and what you’ve learned from potential customers to date. Show them the evolution of your minimal viable product and its current state. You need to begin to “instrument” your customer acquisition process with analytics.

(Product/market fit means that you’ve found the match between your potential customers’ pains, gains and jobs to be done and the features of your minimal viable product. I.e. your product fits the needs of your target customers.)

• Product: At this stage you are building a series of low-fidelity products (sometimes called a minimal viable product or MVP.) It might be a wire-frame, PowerPoint demo or prototype. The goal of the product at this stage is not a sale, but to test hypotheses about customer product/market fit. (Along with the MVP you share your three-year product vision to see if your product vision engages a passionate customer response.
• Market: Tell us why this is going to be a huge market. Even better, start with a unique insight – what have people missed, what’s changed, what’s now possible? (Warning signs are, “No one has thought of this/is doing this/we have the exclusive patents.”)
  
• Business Model: List all the parts of your business model. What are your assumptions about each part? What is some of the critical metrics that matter? Number of customers? Revenue per customer? Number of employees? Revenue, Gross Margin? Expenses? How do you plan to test them.

Goal/Time: By the end of the pre-seed stage the company ought to have evidence that it has found product/market fit. You should be thinking about an end-to-end pipeline of how to Get/Keep/Grow customers. This pre-seed stage typically takes 6-12 months.

Pre-Seed Round Paperwork: Smart investors will typically give you minimal paperwork – either a convertible note or a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) or a KISS (Keep It Simple Securities).

Seed Round of Funding
By the end of the pre-seed stage (about a year into your startup), your startup has evidence that they’ve found product/market fit. (One sign is that you are no longer changing your website/sales PowerPoint/product/app every time you need to acquire a customer.) Now it’s time to raise money to acquire paying customers.

Funding:  Startups typically raise anywhere from $1.5 million– $7.5 million in a seed round. At the low-end this might come from angel investors and pre-seed funds. At the high-end, funds specializing in Seed rounds and Series A funds might invest.

• Traction: For a seed round investors want to focus on traction. You need to provide proof that customers love and can’t live without your product. This means you have evidence that you’ve found product/market fit and have fanatic customers who are reference accounts. You’ve built detailed analytics tracking into your product and you should be seeing organic and viral growth; and can provide Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active Users, 30d/90d/120d retention. Retention and low attrition are good signs of customer validation.

(Note that each market – web/SAAS/physical products – and channel – online/direct sales –  has different metrics and a different funnel steps.)For example, this should translate to revenue ~$0-200K/Annual Recurring Revenue with a clear plan to reach $1.5M-2M in 18 months. The goal is to iterate on building a repeatable engine for growth that makes the economics work. This is different than focusing solely on the gross revenue number.

(Your ARR and revenue milestones will depend on what business you’re in.  For example, not all revenue is recurring and even in a subscription model for a consumer goods company, your recurring revenue will not be valued the same as if you’re selling enterprise software and operating costs are so vastly different.  As an example, $1 of revenue for a direct to consumer company is worth ~$1 in valuation at scale (Zappos was sold for $1B when they had $1B in sales).  On the other hand, in a SaaS business $1 in recurring annual revenue equals ~10x in valuation.)

• Product: At this stage you have a high-fidelity product, one that earlyvangelists (early passionate customers) can use and pay for. Enough of the product is demonstrable enough that you can gauge customers’ price sensitivity, depth of engagement, etc. The three-year product roadmap gets earlyvangelists engaged.
• Team: Do you have a core team that can build the first product and get early sales? The culture needs to be hypothesis > experiment > data > insight > validate/invalidate/modify hypotheses.
• Business Model: In seed you often discover that your business has more moving parts than you originally thought. You may be in a multi-sided market with other customer segments/partners that are critical to your business. You should be testing all parts of your business model; revenue models/pricing, resources, activities and partners.
• Market: Tell us why the data validates that this is going to be a huge market. At first the founders do the first sale, then they prove your first salespeople can repeat that sale.

Goal/Time: By the end of the seed stage, the company ought to have evidence that repeatable sales can be made by the founding team.  This typically takes 12-18 months.

Seed Round Paperwork: While founders will still want minimal paperwork – either a convertible note or a SAFE or a KISS– professional investors at this round often want an equity round with a more formal set of documents for their investments. You’ll see a Term Sheet, Stock Purchase Agreement, Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation, Investors’ Rights Agreement, Right of First Refusal and Co-Sale Agreement and a Voting Agreement.

Series A Round of Funding
By the end of the seed stage–about 2½ years into your startup– your startup has a repeatable and scalable sales model and a provable case that there can be a multi-billion dollar valuation.

Funding:  Startups typically raise anywhere from $7.5 million – $25 million in a Series A round. This size round typically comes from a venture fund or a corporate VC.

• Market: You need to convince investors that this is at least a $1B+ company.
• Product: At this stage you have a fully-featured first version of the product needed to scale sales. And you are working to the three-year product vision, iterating and course correcting based on customer feedback.
• Traction: For a Series A round investors want to focus on a repeatable and scalable sales model with efficient growth. That means you need metrics that prove you have it. Repeatable sales means if you hire an account exec, you know that they will close $1M Annual Recurring Revenue in a year. Or if you spend $100K in ad spend, you can get 100,000 new users.Startups raising an A round typically have $ ½M-$4M Annual Recurring Revenue. Note that the focus should not just be on growth month-to-month but also on efficient growth.

For example, other metrics include achieving net retention of 80-150%, getting a Lifetime Value/Customer Acquisition Cost ratio greater than 3, getting to two times Customer Acquisition Cost Payback Period in less than 18 Months. You should have a realistic plan to grow revenue 3-5x in 12 to 18 months.

These numbers differ dramatically for e-commerce versus consumer, versus SAAS, etc. You should know what the right success metrics are for your industry. (The best VC’s will actually tell you what metrics they are looking for.)

• Team: The core product team is working efficiently and the sales team for scale is in place and 75% are meeting quota.
• Business Model: By the end of Series A, all parts of the business model have been tested and they add up to a scalable, repeatable and profitable business.

Goal: By the end of the Series A, the company ought to prove that you’re a business not a hobby. You need to show > $5M in gross profit.  Just to put your journey in perspective, if you want to achieve Unicorn status or go public, you ultimately need to deliver $100 million annual gross profit in Years 6 – 8.

Series A Paperwork: You’ll be seeing a Term Sheet, Stock Purchase Agreement, Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation, Investors’ Rights Agreement, Right of First Refusal and Co-Sale Agreement and a Voting Agreement.

Revenue Growth
Some investors think of the ideal startup revenue growth with a shorthand of “triple, triple, double, double, double.”

Years 1-3: $0-$2M in revenue
Year 4: Triple the revenue to $2-$6M
Year 5: Triple the revenue again to $6-$18M
Year 6: Double the revenue to $12-$36M
Year 7: Double the revenue again to: $24-$72M
Year 8: Double the revenue again to: $48-$144M

Valuations
Fair or not, not all startups are equal in the eye of their potential investors. Some startups may be considered “hotter” than others and get much higher valuations. A hot startup may be even able to skip the pre-seed round and go directly to a seed round – meaning more money raised at a higher valuation. The criteria for a “hot” startup include:

• The background of the founders
  • attended a top university i.e. Stanford, MIT, Harvard
  • had previous experience at a high-growth company, ie Facebook, Google, etc.
  • serial entrepreneur
• A “hot” market
  • It depends on the month or year – is it AI? Big Data? AR/VR, Cyber, Robotics
• Hype
  • Do you have a big investor leading the round?
  • Have you gone through Y-Combinator?
  • Are you famous?
• Location
  • Silicon Valley
  • Other innovation clusters
• FOMO
  • A startup with a huge vision and story can create FOMO (fear of missing out) in investors – one of the strongest forces for accelerating your fundraising process.
  • At the same time VCs worry about FOLS: Fear of looking stupid
  • FOMO> FOLS

Lessons Learned

• Every stage of a startup requires a different set of metrics and milestones and founder skills.
• Knowing what investors want at each stage provides founders with guideposts
• Founders need to keep their eye on the prize not just the next funding round

• Bruce Daisley was previously Twitter's most senior employee outside of the United States in his role of vice president across Europe, Middle East, and Africa; he joined the company in 2012 having previously run YouTube UK at Google.
• The following is an excerpt from his new book, "Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job."
• Research shows that laughter can build trust, build bonds, and, as creative guards come down, lead to better ideas.
• Find something that works for your team, like a social gathering, and stick with it.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

I once had a boss who had scolded our team: "Now's not the time to be seen laughing." Times were tough and it was his hunch that the optics of a team cracking up might not look like they were earnestly endeavoring to turn things round.

But it turns out that humor is a very powerful tool in the workplace. Evidence suggests that it builds trust, forges bonds among colleagues, helps us cope with stress, and inspires creativity and problem solving. In short, laughter is the secret weapon for building great teams. 

Psychologist Robert Provine has taken a keen interest in laughter as humankind's way to synchronize with each other, particularly in the workplace. Just as birds sing to each other, or dogs in neighboring backyards bark at each other, or wolves howl together, so humans laugh to connect with one another, to achieve synchronization.

"Laughter is the quintessential human social signal. Laughter is about relationships … Think of the last time you sat in an audience, laughing and letting waves of laughter wash over you," Provine wrote. "A pleasant experience — one of life's best. But consider now the primal nature of the animal chorus and the way the members of an audience synchronize their noises."

What Provine is talking about here is not about laughing because a joke is funny. It's about laughing as a form of social bonding and group coordination.

Provine studied and recorded over a thousand laughter episodes in offices. And what he discovered was that laughter wasn't triggered by humor or hilarious jokes but by seemingly innocuous comments:

"I'll see you guys later." "We can handle this." "I think I'm done."

"I told you so." "There you go." "Must be nice."

Laughter here wasn't a response to humor (nor was it meant sarcastically or facetiously). It was a human means to warm a room, to lift the mood, to create a sense of connection. Just as birds in a forest join one another in song, so we laugh together to come together. 

And, by the same token, it indicates that we feel we're in a safe and secure environment. Professor Sophie Scott from University College London points out that scientists have observed that many mammals exhibit laughter-type reactions but that these can be easily stopped by a negative stimulus.

"Rats stop laughing if they feel anxious," she said. "Humans do the same thing."

On the other hand, a moment of laughter is an indication that we feel relaxed and safe, that we can afford to let our protective guard down. Or, as Professor Scott put it: "It's a sign if people are laughing that they're not in that anxious state. It's a marker that the group is in a good place."

Scott also points to a link between humor and stress: "There is literature on workplace humor for professions that have quite stressful jobs like doctors, police, and nurses. They tend to be characterized by quite dark humor that's quite exclusive. If you're not part of that group you can be surprised they're laughing at that. But for that group it works because it's just a reason to share laughter in situations where they need to make it better."

An inability to laugh suggests that there may be something wrong: that people feel wary of others, that they don't trust them, that they don't feel they can risk letting their guard down.

Former FBI director James Comey observed that he found it remarkable that he'd never seen President Trump laugh. For Comey, laughter in a leader is a signal of openness and a willingness to show vulnerability: "The mark of a great leader is a combination of things that seem contradictory: enough confidence to be humble."

Insecure people, by contrast, "can't take joy in the achievements of the people around them and a marker of that balance between confidence and humility is humor. If you are insecure you cannot laugh. Engaging in a humorous encounter is a risk for an insecure leader because I might have to acknowledge you, that you've said something funny that I didn't say." Comey recalled that he'd seen Presidents Bush and Obama use humor to relax people, "to get to the truth."

There's something else to bear in mind, too: The relaxation brought about by laughter opens our minds to creative thinking. John Kounios from Drexel University and Mark Beeman from Northwestern University invited volunteers to watch a video of Robin Williams delivering comedy and then asked them to solve a series of tricky logic puzzles. They discovered that a short laugh improved people's puzzle-solving ability by 20%.

Why should this be the case? Well, it appears that laughter triggers the superior anterior temporal gyrus — an area of the brain, just above the right ear, associated with connecting distantly linked ideas. When rigid concentration isn't the answer, it would appear that the distraction caused by laughter can prove invaluable.

Laughter, then, performs numerous functions. It builds trust, it helps us bond with one another, it creates sync. And as our creative guards come down, it helps us have better ideas. Teams who laugh and joke together tend to be better able to open up and share challenges with each other — which is particularly important for coping with stress and enhancing creative problem solving. So much is clear. 

So how do we unlock these benefits of laughter in our workplaces? Provine's suggestion is that we should try to adopt a "laugh-ready attitude": "You can voluntarily choose to laugh more by lowering your threshold for amusement," he argued. "Just be willing and prepared to laugh."

And one of the ways he suggests that we do this is to arrange more social events — meetings and gatherings in your company intended simply to get people together.

The critical thing is to find something that works for your team — and stick to it. Former head of digital at BBC Radio 1 Andy Puleston told me that one ritual the station observed was epic, funny, emotion-filled send-off speeches. Andy would spend time gathering memories, jokes, and photos from teammates and coworkers to give a fully rounded tribute to the leaver. Through those tributes everyone in the team would be more vividly aware of what they were part of; Andy said the room was always filled with "a lot of laughter."

In straitened economic times, the notion of prioritizing discussion and laughter as one of the most important things to do as a team might seem superfluous and trivial — if not to yourself, then to others. But if people say as much to you, remind them of the numerous benefits. Maybe next time inspiration strikes, it will find you laughing.

Adapted from "EAT SLEEP WORK REPEAT by Bruce Daisley," copyright 2020. Reprinted with permission by HarperOne/HarperCollins.

SEE ALSO: How to use David Bowie's brainstorming method to be more creative at work

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Taylor Swift is the world's highest-paid celebrity. Here's how she makes and spends her $360 million.

Leading Sales Operations is challenging; you’re managing people, technology, and processes. The one thing you should be able to rely on is the numbers. They tell the story of how well your sales team is performing against organizational goals and industry standards.

What Sales KPIs are the most important? Every organization is different, and there may be particular metrics you may want to measure that reflect your sales team’s processes and technology. Here, we present standard sales KPIs that every sales organization should measure. Use these metrics as goal-setting benchmarks and to help determine areas where improvement is needed.

Help Your Sales Team Succeed: Focus on These 7 Revenue Success Metrics

Thanks to the folks at Toggl for this great list of Sales KPIs. The following KPIs are standard, though some may carry more weight than others. Set goals and track your team’s performance over time, making adjustments to processes and sales technology, and providing training when necessary to help your sales team succeed.

Share this Image on Your Site

<p><a href=”https://dealhub.io/7-sales-kpis-to-measure-in-2020/”><img src=”https://dealhub.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/7-Sales-KPIs-to-Measure-in-2020.png” alt=”Revenue Success Metrics” width=”508″ border=”0″ /></a></p>

Gross & Net Profit Margins

Gross and Net Profit Margins are where the rubber meets the road. They are essential in determining a company’s viability.

Gross Profit = Net Sales – Cost of Goods and Services (COGS)

Net Profit = Gross Profit – (Total Operating Expenses + Taxes + Interest + Depreciation + Amortization)

Many factors contribute to the calculation of profit margin. For additional details on how to calculate Gross and Net Profit, check out Toggl’s article that includes an in-depth overview of these crucial KPIs.

Sales Revenue

When calculating Sales Revenue, first, you’ll want to determine revenue for each product and service you offer. Factor in volume pricing, discounts, and refunds. The basic equation is:

Price Per Unit Sold x Number of Units Sold = Revenue

Prospecting Activity

Track the time and effort required to source and follow up with leads, and report this information consistently, noting any outliers.

• Client calls/emails
• Meetings with prospects
• Product/Service demos
• Any other applicable activities

Funnel Flow

You want to determine how smoothly prospects move from one step in the funnel to the next. Lag time or low engagement in one area indicates opportunities or improvement.

• Leads qualification stages
• Average lead response time
• Content engagement throughout the funnel
• Qualification ratio between funnel stages

Customer Retention

It’s essential to measure the change in customer volume over a period of time. A negative value is cause for concern and should be addressed immediately.

CG* – CL* = C*

*CG = Customers Gained

*CL = Customers Lost

C* = Customers lost or gained (could be a negative value)

Churn Rate

Customer retention is crucial to a thriving organization, especially for subscription-based businesses. Churn rate determines whether or not you are gaining more customers than you are losing, and are a vital KPI for customer success teams to track.

Customer Churn = C* / T* x C

C* = Customers lost/gained

T* = during a period

C = Customers

Year-to-Date Sales Growth

YTD Sales Growth indicates the percentage change in sales volume over a period of time.

(VC* – VS) / VS x 100 = V%

*VC = Current Sales Volume (or number of customers)

*VS = Volume of Customers (previous number of customers)

Who Benefits from Setting Sales KPIs

Sales managers need to be able to respond to market influences as well as organizational performance. Without a clear picture of your business, forecasting and adjustments become guesses. There’s no room for guesswork when business success is on the line.

Sales teams need a clear roadmap to achieve their targets. With sales KPIs as their north star and the right sales technology to help them achieve their goals, they will always know where they stand and where improvements are needed.

Base KPIs on Sales Activities

Superoffice recommends breaking your sales process into measurable activities. Each activity contributes to a KPI. Set goals for individual sales activities. Those activities, carried out over time, help sales teams achieve their KPI targets. Some examples include:

• Holding x number of meetings with new prospects
• Sending out x number of sales proposals
• Conducting x follow up calls

Monitor, Review, and Adjust Your Sales KPIs

You can’t “set it and forget it” when it comes to Sales KPIs. If you set our KPIs at the beginning of the year and then don’t track and review your progress until the end of the year, you’ll miss 12 months of opportunities to make adjustments and steer the ship in the right direction.

Set up dashboards, sync with your CRM, and track your team’s progress. Give them visibility into how they are doing so they can self-manage and be accountable for their individual results.

Achieve Your Sales KPIs with DealStack

DealHub’s deal acceleration platform is a connected DealStack, and it will help your sales teams achieve their KPIs through a highly personalized and streamlined sales process that produces unified data insights into every buyer engagement.

DealStack allows sales teams to work with all of their sales technologies from within their CRM, as one workflow, rather than working with separate silo software solutions. Working from a unified cooperative platform inherently increases efficiency and productivity. Unified insights gathered throughout the buyer’s journey enhance your ability to track your sales team’s performance and improve the sales process.

Learn about the benefits of using a Deal Acceleration Platform.

Artificial Intelligence Marketing (AIM) provides superior solutions to bridge the gap between analytics and execution. It is the process of going through massive piles of data to originate positive results. As per the courtesy of Forbes, retailers invested around 5.9 billion US dollars on AIM. North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific are mainly using this type of digital marketing and advertising.

Likewise, remote health monitoring, wearable AR, IoT kitchen appliances, and brain-sensing gadgets lie under the game-changing innovations. Prominent technologies are playing their role in the futuristic era. What about the impact of technology-specific marketing and advertising?

What Is Artificial Intelligence Marketing?

Artificial Intelligence Marketing is the process of leveraging the latest technology for the betterment of customers. It is an effective way through which advertisers can upsurge the return on investments (ROI) of their ads campaigns. This method utilizes customer data, machine learning, and other relatable computations for gathering considerable results.

AIM further assists marketers to generate appropriate content for the target audience. For this reason, understanding the importance and proper method for AI marketing is essential.

The Importance of Artificial Intelligence Marketing

Artificial Intelligence influences digital marketing and advertising at a high level. According to researches on Statista, the global software market for this technology is most likely to reach 89.85 billion US dollars by 2025. Furthermore, a universal survey in June 2018 concluded that 41% of AI companies are in the United States of America.

Artificial Intelligence Marketing allows advertisers to crunch massive bundles of data analytics through social media and emails speedily. As a result, marketers can experience a boost in return of investment (ROI) and campaign performance. All in all, Artificial Intelligence is known as one of the most effective digital marketing strategies worldwide.

Digital marketers can make the most of AIM by using it appropriately. Therefore, understanding every element of AI marketing is essential.

Artificial Intelligence Marketing – How To Use It?

Digital marketers can take the best advantage of AIM under several methods.

Sales Forecasting

AIM is applicable for combining records about past transactions. It can retrieve data through emails, phone calls, and meetings too. This attribute of Artificial Intelligence Marketing can assist in predicting the outcome of the most likely sales of current and future campaigns.

Customer Indulgent

AI marketing can help in analyzing customer expectations. The data generated through AIM is essential for understanding when a customer most probably needs a product. Digital marketers can also create profiles of their target audience.

This approach will help segregate interested individuals and opt-out rest.

Surge Pricing

Artificial Intelligence Marketing can also help digital marketers in applying this method of personalized pricing. In this strategy, retailers determine the price of products as per the demand of the audience. A considerable example of this includes the cost of ride transfer apps that offer the best discount codes when there is a rise in rates elsewhere.

Also, advertisers utilize AIM to increase their rates as soon as their product goes on-demand.

Voice Recognition

Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are the prominent chatbots based on the speech recognition technology. Artificial Intelligence can efficiently recognize spoken words and turn them into text. As a result, the duration of command execution boosts up.

Marketers can use this digital marketing and advertising strategy in their campaigns. The statistical calculation for 2020 by Oberlo estimates the average of US voice search users to reach 127.11 million by 2021. Moreover, the voice shopping market is most likely to hit the roof with 40 billion US dollars by 2022.

Content Creation

Artificial Intelligence Marketing and content writing can pair up for better results. As per the fact, AI-written content is not eloquent and acutely informative. However, it is applicable for generating simple blogs regarding stock updates, sports news, and financial reports.

Therefore, digital marketers can use AIM for creating personalized web content through content intelligence.

Automated Ad Targeting

Marketers can automate the process of ad-buying/selling with the data generated from cookies of apps and websites people visited. Artificial Intelligence is beneficial here as it effectively targets particular audiences that can relate to the advertiser’s criteria.

For example, AIM for Facebook Ads consumes data analytics for targeting and retargeting customer ads as per their profiles.

Essential Elements of Artificial Intelligence Marketing

AI marketing strengthens with a few core elements. These include Big Data, Robust Solutions, and Machine Learning.

Big Data

The concept of Big Data is clear and forthright. It revolves around the ability of digital marketers to crunch massive data with negligible manual work. Advertisers can utilize this approach for connecting to a target audience at the exact time through numerous channels.

Robust Solutions

AI marketing solutions interpret problems precisely like humans. Henceforth, it swiftly identifies large data sets and construes relevant insights. AI solutions are also able to deduce emotions during a conversation. A considerable example of this is Gmail service, as it intelligently generates emails by the smart compose feature of Google AI.

Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence plays a substantial role in machine learning, as it enables a machine to improve performance over previous experiences. Digital marketers can use ML to predict daily insights and customer responses. As a result, advertisers easily understand the root cause of most reactions.

Artificial Intelligence Marketing Is the Future Approach

AIM is the king of digital marketing and advertising. This technology-driven method is most likely to rule every platform in the industry. Business owners are globally adopting artificial Intelligence. According to Forbes, 77% of companies in the USA and the UK are using AI-related technologies.

Among these, 31% experienced dynamic business value growth. Also, top business functions like sales and marketing gained a topnotch value of 35% and 32%, respectively. Machine Learning and Chatbots ranked as the leading AI technologies with a 34% value for each.

Digital marketers who have not yet adopted Artificial Intelligence Marketing must rethink and work harder to stand out in the futuristic era.

The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman. John Perkins.  2016. ISBN 9781626566750.  If you don’t read about the international crooks you will not recognize them at home.  The author worked many years as an EHM. He was trained to go into third world or struggling countries to inflate growth projections from large infrastructure projects  ( Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Panama etc). These projects would then be funded by the World Bank and others and the country would be loaded up with debt.  . The money lent would go to US firms to do the work (of course some $  would find its way into select in country pockets).  The US engineering/construction company owners would pocket huge profits.

The projects would under deliver and the country would not be able to pay even the interest on these huge loans.  The US would pressure the govts to take on more debt, vote certain ways at the UN , buy more US products and so on.. The peoples’ lives would get worse not better. ( shades of the banana king and 1MDB )  If the govts did not play ball with US plans, regime change, assassination etc. would happen (Chile, Honduras, Ecuador, Panama.  Wrap a large disinformation campaign about this all.   You could not make this stuff up.  The author points out now that the same tricks are going on in US states with big projects and perhaps even in Canada.

A potent read, albeit the author is not concise enough for me. The story speaks very loud about the dangers of these large US companies, the military industrial complex and US policy.  Evidently China is following the same US playbook.

breaking and entering. the extraordinary story of a hacker called “alien”. Jeremy n. Smith. 2019. ISBN 9780544911222.  The fascinating story of a young woman , with ability, finding her way to conquer the world of hacking.  Follow her early days at MIT through employment by the US govt, then security contractor to forming her own successful security company.  The author weaves very interesting and educational book out of this life.  I really enjoy it when, a journalist does a great job like this.  You will learn a lot and get some great insights into building a company whats here  and whats coming wrto security issues.  Good cross country read.

Play Bigger. How pirates, dreamers, and innovators create and dominate markets. Alan Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead.   2016.  ISBN 9780062407610.   This book was referenced in Traversing the Traction Gap so I had to read it.  It is very good and specifically addresses category creation, which is something that wildly successful companies do over and over. The authors take you through a proven  methodology of becoming a category kind. ( For many types to organizations and individuals). You will appreciate the highly specific and recognizable examples used by the authors.  Unlike other books in this genre , it has the benefits of depth and thought coming from the experiences of four individuals.  It could be a life changing book for executives and individuals.  But you need to want to be more than better, you want to be recognized as different  ( Apple is not just better, it is different)

The Fish That Ate The Whale. The life and times of America’s banana king.Rich Cohen.2012 ISBN 9781429946292.  The author did exhaustive research on the rise of a poor immigrant Sam “the Banana Man” Zemurray to the largest shareholder of United Fruit.  Along the way  he reshaped Central America and Cuba, launched regime changes, wrote the playbook for CIA operations in banana republics, funded the Zionist movement in Israel, and shipped thousands of Zionist to Israel on his fleet of banana boats.  Good book on hands on leadership,  very hard work a, dogged determination, strong will and the perils of a one man at the top business structure. Gives good background on the mess that is now Central America and insights into US policy (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy)

Better Selling Through Storytelling. The essential roadmap to becoming a revenue rockstar. John Livesay. 2019. ISBN 9781642793734.  Called the Pitch Whisper, the author does lay out a smart method for making pitches and presentations. This fits very neatly into ABM and Value Selling methodologies, by reminding the reader to focus on value (impact) to the audience. Its not we but you.  Good case studies and relevant quotes, plus a very readable text makes this a valuable adding to your sales tool-belt.  A read it in one go – its that concise and good.