Rnordman

Nowadays, it is more difficult than ever to find the right people capable of and willing to take on the challenges as they come. The reason lies in a simple fact: everyone has gone crazy about innovation.

The ability to take risks and rise even stronger when they don’t pay off is the key feat of a talented employee. But, this is by no means the only desirable treat in people working in innovative environments.

Because innovation directly clashes with the traditional business model, executives often look for the wrong mindsets when hiring new employees. It is, therefore, important to realize that fast-paced business environments today call for talented people capable of addressing every rapid change that comes their way.

The best way to understand this is by listening to startup founders. Because startups function as families, people engaged in them are no strangers to shared successes and failures. What keeps them going is their understanding that failures are there to encourage them to do better, not to tell them it’s time to give up.

Different startup founders look for different traits in their employees, in accordance with their business vision. However, there are some traits universal to all creative thinkers, which every business would do good to observe when hiring new people.

1. Enthusiasm for Diversity

Perhaps not the first trait to look for a new hire, but definitely one of the essential ones is enthusiasm for diversity.

Because diversity is what drives innovation, people valuing it are of extreme importance for a business. The best results come in response to a multitude of ideas, and it is only natural to expect that people with different backgrounds and experiences will have different ideas.

2. High Standards

People who set high standards for themselves are, in the majority of cases, innovators. Even if their standards seem ridiculously high, you should take it as a good sign.

Simply put, people who aim high will stop at nothing to reach their goals and will always give their best to achieve the desired results. To achieve that, they will use their creativity, often applying non-traditional methods rarely seen in old-school business models.

Probably the most important trait of such people is that they rarely get discouraged. Negativity is the single most important drawback when it comes to the entrepreneurial mindset, as it keeps people away from risks, and risks are the most important factor in innovation.

3. Action-Taking

Following from the previous sentence, risks are synonymous with innovation. Simply having high standards and being creative isn’t sufficient for breakthroughs.

Action-takers are just the people you need in your organization. These people will go the extra mile to turn their ideas into reality, no matter how risky the situation.

The easiest way to spot this feat is by asking your prospective hires about their expectations. If they are content with doing their jobs from 9 to 5 to get their salaries and bonuses, they are not the right people for your business.

Always keep in mind the startup mindset, which includes people acting as families, working together towards mutual goals and always striving for better results, even if the present ones are stellar.

4. Result-Orientation

People who are more interested in great results than in their salaries are the right people for your business. That isn’t to say, however, that they should be underpaid or that they would be happy with just any amount of money.

It goes without saying that salaries should be in line with employees’ performances, even if it sounds unequal at first glance.

There is a significant difference, though, between people stopping at nothing to get a raise and people stopping at nothing to achieve better results. The latter is not necessarily driven by the idea of a promotion.

Innovative people take pride in their achievements for the sake of the achievements, not money.

This mindset is in direct contrast with the traditional business mindset that teaches people that risks aren’t worth taking, especially if things are going well at the moment.

5. Creative Thinking

If you’ve been following so far, it should be easy for you to conclude that people thinking outside the box are not only desirable, but also necessary for businesses that aim to succeed in competitive environments (and all of them do).

Simply put, innovative people are dreamers by vocation. Their vision drives them to take any risks necessary to achieve their dreams, which may well seem impossible and unrealistic to others.

Some people will know how to go about it, while others will need support, as they may have not been given the chance to play out their plans. It goes without saying that support and funds should be provided to them.

6. Originality

Outstanding ideas are not a common occurrence. People capable of coming up with them are original and non-traditional. You will easily spot them by observing how they work. No matter how impossible their ideas appear to be, they will make them appear easy to achieve.

7. Team Orientation

Now, we’ve heard many times how important it is to organize workshops and team buildings in which every employee will get their say.

It’s true!

When people get along, everyone will enjoy their work. On top of that, everyone will get to contribute. In this way, teams will share successes and failures, thus deepening their bond.

Innovators are team-oriented and willing to include everyone in the idea development process. The attitude makes everyone a part of a big family working on shared goals and the company’s vision.

Of course, these are only some of the innovative traits, but definitely among the most important ones. You will want to keep in mind that people willing to embrace a company’s vision are those who can share that enthusiasm across the board. In that way, everyone will start actively participating in business efforts, growing with the business while it is growing with them. Everything considered, looking for innovative people is well worth the trouble of searching for them high and low. After all, it is such people that will ultimately drive your company forward.

By Brenna Lofquist, Senior Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing

It’s no secret that buyers’ personas are a key element to marketing and sales. If you don’t understand the people you are targeting, how are you going to sell them your product or service? Personas should be developed and socialized to the organization, with feedback from sales and other departments that interact with prospects and customers. But what I really want to talk about here are the key elements of a great buyer persona.

In my experience, there are some elements of personas I’ve seen that I don’t find very useful as a marketer, but we won’t get into that. Each persona should act like a guide that will direct the content, formats, and channels your targets are using as well as messaging points that will resonate with them.

By no means is this an exhaustive list, but here are some of the key elements I believe are important when developing buyers’ personas.

Pain points

This should be a no brainer. To understand your audience, you need to know what pains they are experiencing in their business. This will help you better understand how your product/service can benefit them but also, how to speak to them with a message that will resonate. As you develop the pain points for a persona think about these questions:

• What challenges do they face?
• What concerns do they have?
• What keeps them up at night?
• What’s their biggest inhibitor to company growth?
• What does their boss obsess about?
• What takes up the most time in their day?

Pain points are important because they can inform multiple aspects of marketing including content creation and messaging. Take the time to interview customers, customer-facing roles within your company, and even enlist a third-party research company if you have the resources and budget.

Goals

Goals are similar to pain points in the way that they help to better understand what your audience is trying to achieve. Their goals will explain what they are striving for day-to-day and will help you to decide how your product or service can enable them to hit their goals easier, faster, more effectively, or efficiently. Here are some questions to think about when developing persona-specific goals:

• Is their role focused on revenue generation, business strategy, efficiency, employees, productivity, etc.?
  • Make sure to get as specific as you can
• What would make your services or product a must-have for them?
• What metrics or measures of success are important to them or are they measured on?

Again, take the time to interview customers within the different roles of your personas to understand their goals and how they might differ between organizations.

Job Focus Areas and Responsibilities

This area should be a brief synopsis of the persona’s main job focus areas and responsibilities within their role. Identifying this element of a persona will help to develop messaging that’s important to this persona and can also inform content creation based on topics or area they are focused on. Here are questions to think about:

• What are their focus areas and responsibilities within the organization?
  • Again, try to be specific as possible here
  • Are they responsible for business operations, technology, people, revenue, etc.?

Another idea is to think about it as a job description for a persona. Think about what areas of responsibility would be listed—those are the kinds of things you’ll want to mention in the job focus areas and responsibilities section.

Attitude and Reputation

This section gives you a look into the persona’s personality, including their strengths and weaknesses but also their perspective or feelings on certain topics all of which should be included in your persona documentation. I’ll note that this should be a generalization and doesn’t necessarily mean that every person fits into the stereotype or description provided in this section.

Attitude and reputation are often how you’ll identify how to talk to the person or things to steer clear of. For example, their reputation could be that they are a research, so they may want to bypass educational content and skip right to talking with sales. You can also use this section to talk about their role within the buying committee and how they interact with other personas. Here are questions to think about:

• What is their background in or what are they knowledgeable about?
• Do they influence other personas within the buying committee?
• Are there important things to note about how they interact with other buying committee members/personas?
• What is their attitude?
• What personality traits are these people likely to possess?

Knowing the persona’s attitude and reputation should give you a better idea for what type of person they are even outside of the organization. This can help you to plan your approach in communicating with this persona.

As I mentioned, this is not an exhaustive list of elements that should be included in your persona documentation, but they are four pretty important ones. Other elements that should be included are internal influencers, external sources of validation/content, preferred content formats, change agent triggers, use cases, and potential objections – to name a few.

I’d be curious to hear what key elements you think are most important for buyer’s personas – let me know!

The post The Key Elements of Great Buying Personas appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

Having been in the industry for 20 some years now, I get pretty tired of the sales and marketing squabbles. More than ever, marketing is generating new business and sales teams are doing a good job at marketing – so why is there such animosity between these two groups?

Because of the tension, I do a lot of consulting on helping to integrate sales and marketing teams so that they work better together. Here are a couple of tips to help smooth out the path towards integration.

Create a Shared Goal

Do you make your sales people operate with sales goals, but allow your marketing team to operate without any? Probably not, right – but if you ask your sales team, they might think you do.

Another way of saying this is that sales and marketing rarely know each other’s goals. This is the number one sign for me that there is no marketing and sales alignment.

The simplest way to align to opposing forces is to unite their focus against one common enemy. Rather than spending energy fighting each other, they can spend energy beating the goal together. This is why I am a huge proponent of a shared goal scorecard.

A scorecard is a collection of leading indicators both teams share that includes marketing metrics and sales metrics. It may include website visits, email opens, PPC clicks – all of the metrics that marketing uses to generate traffic and interest. It could also include a number of cold calls, number of appointments, number of emails sent – all of the metrics that are tracked by the sales team to help build the closing end of the funnel.

Once the numbers are on the table, the teams can begin to understand and see how each number impacts the others, and how they all ultimately impact the goal. For example, if we see that PPC (Pay-Per-Click) leads typically close at a higher rate, this allows the marketing team to focus their energy and dollars on this high-value channel. Conversely, if we see the sales team spending lots of time making cold calls with little results, the marketing department might be able to help automate this touchpoint with a tactic like account-based marketing.

It’s only through creating alignment and shared goals that ideas like these can be generated.

Cross Them Over

This is more of an experiential idea than a tried-and-true method for generating sales, but one of the challenges we typically see is that one team doesn’t “understand” the challenges the other team faces.

A simple solution is to have that team “ride” with the other team.

Bringing a member from the marketing team to a sales meeting is a great idea. It lets them experience firsthand the challenges and conversations that are happening with clients. The same thing holds true with the sales team: have them sit in the marketing meetings or having them look over the stats and try to manage a campaign on their own, so they can see the challenges and dynamics involved with reaching new people online.

It’s a simple tactic – but highly effective for the stubborn folks in the group.

Promote Brand as Everyone’s Problem to Solve.

The word “brand” is a horrible word. The reason – ask five different people and you will get five different opinions on what “brand” means. Even worse, ask five different branding agencies what brand it is and you’ll still get five different answers. But rather than trying to solve the deeper issues with brand definition, I’ve found that the better solution is to make brand everyone’s concern.

Here’s what I mean by this: pull sales, marketing, and operations teams into one conversation around what the brand of your business is in the marketplace. It will involve the way we talk to clients, it will involve the colors and fonts, and it will involve the way you do customer service.

It involves so much about the experience of engaging with your company. And they’re all correct.

Yet until there’s a shared dialogue around this, brand will necessarily be limited and inconsistent. Frustrations can develop around improper brand communication, use, and the message going out in the marketplace. Coming to some agreement – even if it’s a rough working document – around the brand of your company is great way to create alignment.

Brand clarity can allow the entire company to move forward with one unified voice.

Decapitate the Hydra

The Hydra, from Greek mythology, is a multi-headed beast that roamed the ocean – but even though it had multiple heads, it didn’t contradict itself or create silos that made action inconsistent. It was ultimately one, united creature.

Yet in organizations like yours, having a separate head of marketing and a VP of sales fully cements the silos in your organization. To fight this, I am a big advocate of a revenue team or a comprehensive sales and marketing alignment under one leader. Some companies call it a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) some just call it a VP of Marketing and Sales. However you name it, aligning both functions under your one leader has done more for this cause than any other move in the playbook.

The reason is actually very simple.

Having one leader means that the decision-maker must consider all factors in solving the revenue picture. Without this alignment, marketing and sales can have standoffs that blast board meetings and kill productive internal time through internal squabbling and priority hoarding. Aligning them under one leader allows that leader to create single decisions that encompass all interests.

Yet before you start pulling the trigger on this idea, let me throw out two warnings. First, don’t just go slapping a new title on your director of sales. The person in this director role needs to understand and appreciate both teams equally. We’ve seen directors of marketing and sales who were really just sales guys, and so they completely undervalue marketing’s role. We never see CMO’s becoming directors because, honestly, many CMOs are in the dark about how to actually make a deal happen.

Overall, though, there needs to be one role with a deeper understanding so that sales and marketing can come together to reach unified goals.

Conclusion

I hope these tips of been helpful and that they spur on some ideas as you look to align your marketing and sales efforts. It’s a competitive jungle out there, and you gotta make the most happen with what you’ve got. Both teams need to row together in the same direction to make it work. Good luck.

Sales is a contest, a competition. Because this is true, selling is about creating a preference to work with you, your company, and your solution. The greater the preference you create, the more likely you are to win. For our purposes, we are going to substitute the word “preference.” It might be a bit too nebulous, so we’ll substitute if for the provocative term “popular.”

How Popular Are You with Your Contacts?

Do the contacts within your dream client have a strong affinity for you as their sales rep? All things being equal, would they prefer to buy from you instead of your competitors?

For you to be popular with your clients, they would have to know you, like you, trust you, and you would also have to create value that includes better business results. Were you to decide how to improve your popularity among the contacts you are calling on, you could do no better than to schedule face-to-face meetings.

If those meetings find you inside the four walls of your prospective client’s building, your showing up is an indication that you believe they are important enough to command your time and attention, differentiating you from anyone who takes a more transactional view.

Your contacts watch you listen to them. Take notes. Confirm your understanding, and ask good questions. Doing these things improves your popularity. Deepening your understanding of who your contacts are, what they need, how they view their challenges, problems, and opportunities also improve your standing.

Being physically present for meetings provide an advantage of those who try to be more efficient when they should be more concerned with being effective. Your presence will improve your popularity.

How Popular Is Your Approach?

Your consultative sales approach is one of the primary ways you created value for your prospective clients, or it is the way you waste their time. Your method exists somewhere on this continuum.

One of the ways you increase your popularity is by recognizing where your contacts are in their decision. Recognize what they need from you, and provide it to them throughout the sales conversation. If you realize they are experiencing dissonance and struggling to understand their world and the root cause of their challenges, helping them understand and make sense of things is value. In larger, complex, B2B sales, you are providing a process that helps them understand their choices and make the right decision is also value.

In The Lost Art of Closing, there is a chapter on Controlling the Process, one of the two rules that begin the book, the other being the Trading Value rule (see this video for more). Some believed the language to be too strong, but it isn’t. Instead, it’s consultative.No more pushy sales tactics. The Lost Art of Closing shows you how to proactively lead your customer and close your sales.

You have considerably more experience by the nature of having sold what you sell more often and across more companies and industries. You help your client by helping them with the conversations and commitments necessary to better results.

Your popularity rises when you exercise an approach that serves your contacts and their company where you find them. You are not going to be favored by complying with a request to send a proposal and pricing by email.

How Popular Is Your Solution?

Ultimately, you are going to ask your potential customer to buy your solution. Your solution is also going to need to be more popular than competitive solutions. The solution is your advice, which means you are responsible for the popularity of the solution you propose.

Salespeople who provide one solution without collaborating and making adjustments to the solution or customizing it to better fit what their client needs often end up with a solution that is easy for their prospect to reject. It isn’t “their” solution as much as it is the salesperson’s and their company’s solution.

One of the ways you improve the popularity of your solution is through your consultative selling approach. The more collaborative the approach, the higher your odds of developing a solution that fits your prospective client. The more you build consensus around the solution through the sales cycle, the more significant support you will have when your client decides to move forward with you or your competition.

I am guilty of writing about the responsibilities of the salesperson because you are ultimately responsible for your wins and your losses. The control you have over your solution comes down to your ability to collaborate. You need to make it “our solution,” so you and your client both own it.

How Popular Is the Idea of Working with You?

In the end, your B2B buyer is going to decide whether they want to work with you or your competitors. This is the nature of the decision you are asking them to take when you ask for their business.

You may or may not have the support you need at the end of the sales conversation you’ve had with your dream client. Your competition will find themselves in the very same position. You never want to work from behind the process, approaching your work in sales as something that isn’t about creating enough value that your contacts prefer to work with you. Creating a preference is much harder later in the sales conversation than earlier, once they’ve agreed on a purchase decision.

The long trend towards a desire for greater consensus means that at some point, people are going to raise their hand in favor of one salesperson, their company, and their solution. You may not want to think of deal as a popularity contest, even though that is what it is. Your prospects are measuring your performance and deciding who they choose as a partner.

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

The post Sales as a Popularity Contest appeared first on The Sales Blog.

One of the most effective tools you have in your arsenal as a sales rep is cold-calling. It’s a direct line to finding out what’s important to prospects, what challenges they face, and what they need to convert. And contrary to what you might expect, potential clients are often receptive to cold calls. A study by Rain Group found that 82% of buyers are open to booking meetings when sales reps reach out.

Nevertheless, cold-calling is terrifying for many sales reps. You’re trying to sell a new prospect on a product they know little or nothing about. And you don’t know if you’ll upset them by calling or if they’ll shut down the conversation before you get a chance to explain.

To help you figure out what to say to prospects, we’ve gathered 17 cold-calling scripts from a number of our favorite sales resources—like Rain Sales Training and First Round Review. These scripts cover a wide range of scenarios, so you have a template for all types of cold-calling situations.

Let’s dive in!

1. Gauge their interest before diving in.

Before launching into your script, check to see if it’s okay to proceed with your potential buyer. Giving them the option to say no shows that you respect their time.

Throughout the following script, the sales rep checks in by asking questions.

Sample script

Hi [PROSPECT_NAME], this is David from [COMPANY_NAME]. How are you?

We’re working on some solutions that will help you to recruit and train new members of your marketing team. Is that something that you would like to learn more about?

(Prospect says yes).

There are two different ways that companies can work with us. We can help you to find new marketing talent for a percentage of the base salary, or we can help you to train new members of your marketing team without online virtual digital marketing training programs. These programs teach your new team members the ins and outs of digital marketing and allows your teams to define the channels they study. Which one of these would you like to hear about?

(Prospect chooses the option they are interested in).

Great. I have a few questions that I will need to ask before we get started. Is that alright?

(Prospect says yes, and you ask predefined qualifying questions so you know what aspects of your products and programs to present)

I’ll tell you a bit more and then we can schedule an appointment before we end the call today to go over our solution in more detail. Does that sound good?

Source: RiseFuel

2. Set time expectations.

Right from the beginning of your call, let the prospect know the expected length of the conversation. Knowing how long the pitch will last, prospects will be more likely to commit to the call. Make sure you stick to the time limit you mention to avoid losing the prospect’s trust.

This script leads with the time expectation of two minutes.

Sample script

[PROSPECT_NAME], have I caught you at an ok time?” (If they say yes): “Great, thank you. I would like to take 2 minutes to tell you why I called. If at the end of 2 minutes you have any questions, I’d love to answer them. If not, you can just let me go. Okay?

(If prospect says yes):

Ok, great. The reason I called is because I read though your website and I know you are recruiting sales staff. It can be a challenge to, number one FIND the right people and two to KEEP them on board once you have them. Because of our experience (using our proprietary software) and the skill of the people we hire to do all preliminary screening, we have a slightly better than a 90% success rate – helping our clients hire sales staff who become top tier producers within the first year. And as you can well guess successful salespeople tend to stay put for a long while. “Do you currently have a system in place that gains you the salesforce you need to meet your company’s demand?

Source: Eventual Millionaire

3. Identify their biggest challenge.

Start your pitch by asking questions about the prospects pain points. You’ll be able to identify specific ways your product could help this prospect and tailor your pitch accordingly.

In the following script, the sales rep asks about the prospects challenges first. Later, the rep explains how their product could solve their unique problem.

Sample script

Hi, Erin. I’m John from [COMPANY_NAME]. We’re a brand templating platform that empowers B2B companies to create effective sales materials quickly. I’m calling to see if we can help your company.

What would you say are your biggest challenges in ensuring your sales team get the content and materials they need to convince leads?

I empathize with the source of your frustration. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like your team is having trouble finding the right materials to close their sales. A lot of our clients deal with the same hurdle — getting the collateral you need to close a sale can be tough, especially when you don’t have enough resources on deck.

Now that I think of it, we work with a handful of companies like yours. Most have found our platform to be easy-to-use, while the template gallery reduces production time and puts the power of content creation in the hands of your sales reps — that way they can focus on curating the perfect content for their clients. Do you have platforms or services like this in-use?

Source: Lucidpress

4. Highlight product benefits.

Introduce examples of how your product or service solves a pain point. For example, reference current customer data to determine common pain points prospects face. Also, review buyer personas and their corresponding pain points. Match prospects to each persona to figure out which product features to talk about.

The following cold-calling script highlights three key benefits that the sales rep’s company offers.

Sample script

My name is John Smith and I am with [COMPANY_NAME], we’re a <insert type of company>.

We’ve been scheduling brief phone calls to introduce ourselves and share best practice information. We’d like to tell you how other <industry> companies are…

• Protecting their global shipping operations and ensuring continuous cash flow
• Achieving the best possible efficiencies by connecting all <blank> disciplines
• Using <our client’s special expertise> to create competitive differentiation and capture market share

Do you have 30 minutes this week to discuss these benefits further?

Source: Rain Sales Training

5. State your purpose.

After several attempts to get a prospect on the phone, you might be tempted to engage in small talk. A better approach is to get to the point and make clear why you’re calling. For example, tell them you have a product they might be interested in.

The sales rep in the following script introduces themselves first and then states the purpose of the call.

Sample script

My name is Jane Smith, and I’m calling from [COMPANY_NAME]. We are a <insert type of company>.

The reason I am calling is to schedule a brief telephone meeting to review the findings of the work we have been doing on what makes the biggest difference in <topic area> for leaders who are looking to <do something specific that benefits the company>. It is fascinating stuff, especially since in the next ten years there will be <an important industry dynamic that you need to attend to>.

If you’re interested, we’ll even make some recommendations as to what areas to focus on that will make the biggest difference in your particular situation.

It’s fascinating intelligence, and I was hoping you might have some time on the morning of Thursday, June 6 or anytime in the afternoon during the week of June 22. What would work for you?

Source: Rain Sales Training

6. Showcase what differentiates you from the competition.

Incorporate key points that set you apart from your competitors. Know your competitors so that you can offer rebuttals and showcase what differentiates you. Don’t forget to be respectful of the competition — prospects may have used them in the past (or are still using them).

The script below highlights examples of features that differ from the competition.

Sample script

If the prospect asks, “Is this like COMPETITOR_NAME?”

Oh! You’re familiar with [COMPETITOR_NAME]. TalentBin is similar, but is actually the original pioneer in the industry, with the richest functionality, the best data sources, and the most automation. Which is why TalentBin has won the most industry acclaim and awards! Given your familiarity with the space, it seems like a demo would be very helpful for you to further complete your knowledge.

Are you available DAY or DAY next week for a thirty-minute demo? I promise it will be worth it.

Source: First Round Review

7. Use social proof.

Social proof, like testimonials and reviews, is a compelling sales tool. Seventy-two percent of people trust product recommendations from strangers!

The following cold-calling script highlights current customers, similar to the prospect, that already use the product being sold.

Sample script

“Hey there! [SALES REP NAME] from [COMPANY_NAME] here.

You’re hearing from me today because it looks like your organization loves to focus on honest, superior customer service. At [Company name], we’re all about that too. We’re backed by awesome customers like [Customer 1] and [Customer 2], and [Social media proof].

These organizations typically see [Results] (Consider prospect needs/wants, such as increased sales, cost savings, etc.) within [Time] after implementing with us.

[Prospect’s first name], I would love to connect with you about your specific needs and what your resources currently look like. I also have a suggestion for how to [Result]. Give me a call back at [Number] if it’s convenient for you, or feel free to reply to the email that I will be following up with. Thanks!”

Source: G2Crowd

8. Share if it’s a referral.

Ninety-two percent of people trust recommendations from peers. Get prospects to take an interest in what you have to say by sharing the experiences of people they know.

The following template doesn’t just highlight benefits; it also names the referrer. An approach like this makes the benefits more meaningful—the prospect knows the referrer and hopefully trusts their judgment.

Sample script

Hi [PROSPECT_NAME],

[NAME OF REFERRER] and I are seeing great results with [YOUR COMPANY]’s marketing automation at the moment and, when talking about who else would benefit, your name came up.

Congratulations on securing investment/your new acquisition/[ACHIEVEMENT]. What you’re doing at [PROSPECT COMPANY] is impressive!

I’d love to show you how we’ve helped [NAME OF REFERRER] generate [RESULT] and how we may be able to do the same for you. Would this be of interest?

Source: Keap

9. Show that you did your research.

Prospects don’t know you well, so you need to give them a reason to trust you. One way to gain trust is to show how much you know about the prospect’s business. Find creative ways to learn about your prospects’ company and their needs. For example, use LinkedIn or the company’s website to learn about current events. Show that you’re interested in their business.

The following scripts call out details unique to each prospect. Use these to put prospects at ease and build instant rapport.

Sample script

Hi [PROSPECT_NAME],

“I notice you used to work at [PAST COMPANY], how did you find the culture there?”

“I saw that you studied at [UNIVERSITY]. A friend of mine also went to school there!”

Source: Keap

10. Share powerful stats.

Share data that relates to your prospect’s pain points. For example, if a prospect wants to improve their productivity, tell them how your product helps them do this.

The script below features an impressive stat early in the conversation. Once the prospect hears how much the product has benefited other companies, they will likely be interested in learning more and ask questions.

Sample script

“Hi I’m [SALES REP NAME] from the office of [COMPANY_NAME] and [FOUNDER’S NAME], the owner, asked me to call and give your company a tool he created that has increased sales at companies like yours by as much as 40%. To be sure I’m not wasting your time and that I can actually help you, tell me, how many salespeople do you have?” (wait for answer)

“What are your two biggest recurring problems you’ve experienced with salespeople?” (wait for answer)

“If I could accomplish half of what I’ve stated, 40% increase in sales, would you make time to see me?” (wait for answer)

“Other than yourself, who else would be involved in the order to understand how you might use this?” (wait for answer)

“When is a good time to get your full attention for about 18 minutes?”

Source: Grant Cardone

11. Ask questions.

Ask questions to understand your prospects’ needs better and show that you’re genuinely interested in helping them. By asking questions, you’ll be able to tailor your pitch for the prospect you’re speaking to.

In the following cold-calling script, the sales rep asks the prospect a question to gauge their hiring needs.

Sample script

Hi there!

This is [SALES REP NAME] at [COMPANY_NAME]. I wanted to reach out, because we’ve been helping staffing agencies like yours identify backdoor hires.

Are you familiar with backdoor hires, or have you had many at your agency?

(optional sample response)
Prospect: Yes, we are familiar with them, but we don’t do much about it because we don’t know how we’d go about it.

Yeah, we hear that quite a bit. It sounds like a demo with our Account Director NAME might make sense — do you have 20 minutes on DAY or DAY?

Source: First Round Review

12. Highlight product efficiencies.

Show prospects they’re missing out on efficiencies by not using your product. Explain which product features address these inefficiencies, and give examples of current customer wins.

This next script uses a shocking stat to show prospects how much companies lose by not using their product.

Sample script

Hi there!
This is [SALE REP NAME] at [COMPANY_NAME]. How’s your day going?

The reason I’m calling is that we develop software that notifies recruiters when clients hire their candidates and forget to tell them. Last year, we found over 4,200 missed fees across just 120 customers.

I’d love to set up a time for you to speak with our Account Director NAME, because I think we can identify fees you’ve already earned. Do you have twenty minutes on DAY or DAY?

Source: First Round Review

13. Tell an engaging story.

Capture the attention of your prospects by sharing the outcome of a customer success story. Talk about the problem they experienced—choose a problem similar to the prospect’s—and explain how you worked with the customer to solve it. Only use this approach when the prospect says they have time to discuss. They won’t be receptive if they’re pressed for time.

The following cold-calling script tells the story of an industry issue and how the product helped find a solution. The language is descriptive and paints a vivid picture for prospects.

Sample script

Hey there!

It’s [SALE REP NAME] from [COMPANY NAME].

(Pleasantries. Weather. Sports team. Personal tidbits.)
So, I’m calling because I know that [ACCOUNT_NAME] hires quite a few (software engineering/design/health care) professionals.

Monster recently acquired a company called TalentBin. Did you see that news?

Prospect responds with, “Yes, I did.”

Got it! So TalentBin develops tools used by recruiters to find talent. And it does this by crawling the entire Internet for activity that those folks engage in. Because these sorts of candidates are highly employed, recruiting them often requires a passive-candidate outreach approach.

But at the same time, because these folks tend to not spend time on professional social networks like LinkedIn, finding them there can be really problematic. Unlike recruiters and salespeople, they just don’t spend time there.
However, these sorts of professionals do spend time other places online, leaving trails of information about what they do professionally. TalentBin scoops up all of that information and makes it recruiter-ready.

As a result, TalentBin identifies more of these professionals than any other sourcing tool on the market. It makes it easy for you to reach them directly, by providing personal contact information, like personal email addresses, and social communication vectors like Twitter, Meetup, Facebook, and so on.

Pretty nifty, eh?

Source: First Round Review

14. Highlight your industry expertise.

Prospects want to work with a salesperson who understands the industry and offers relevant solutions. Showcase your expertise by referencing recent customer successes and industry awards.

The following script mentions developer platforms, which indicates the sales rep’s knowledge and experience.

Sample script

TalentBin identifies more professionals than any other sourcing tool on the market. It makes it easy for you to reach them directly, by providing personal contact information, like personal email addresses, and social communication vectors like Twitter, Meetup, Facebook, and so on.

Pretty nifty, eh?

Yeah, what’s more:

For instance, in a given geography, say TalentBin will have five to ten times the number of Ruby, Java, .NET, iOS, and Android developers compared to LinkedIn, and will have oodles of personal email addresses for those candidates. This is because TalentBin has crawled GitHub, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Twitter, and many other sites where those engineers hang out.

Source: First Round Review

15. Explain next steps.

Even if a cold call goes well and the prospect was engaged and asked lots of questions, you can still lose the connection. You don’t close the sale. Instead, explain next steps so prospects know what you need from them.

The sales rep in the script below explains the next step—booking a demo—at the end of the call.

Sample script

Because of [ACCOUNT_NAME’s] current hiring characteristics, I feel that this is something that would be very impactful to your business. I would love to set up a walk-through demo for your team with myself and my TalentBin product specialist colleague to dig in more.

Are you available DAY or DAY next week for a thirty-minute demo? I promise it will be worth your time.

Source: First Round Review

16. Be polite yet persistent.

If the prospect says they’re not interested, don’t immediately lose hope. Restate the benefits of your product or service for their company. Prospects will voice more objections, but calmly explain what you can do for them. Don’t be aggressive or pushy.

In the script below, the salesperson reaffirms their belief that their product will help the prospect. They’re polite but direct.

Sample script

Are you available DAY or DAY next week for a thirty-minute demo? I promise it will be worth your time.

If prospect responds, “I’m not interested,” deflect and articulate value. Drive them towards a demo.

[PROSPECT_NAME], I wouldn’t be on the phone with you right now if I didn’t strongly think that this could help [ACCOUNT_NAME] hire more people, faster, with less cost and less work on the part of your recruiters. [In the case of an agency, “And ultimately make ACCOUNT_NAME more money.”]

I promise you that this sort of technology is going to be industry standard. By deferring consideration of it, you’re putting your business and your ability as a recruiter at a disadvantage.

Source: First Round Review

17. Prepare for strategic follow-up.

Try to set up the next meeting during your call. Sometimes prospects will deflect and say to connect through email when they can look at their calendar. If you follow up by email and they don’t respond, be persistent. Following up multiple times is normal–63% of prospects have to hear your pitch three to five times before they trust it.

The example below shows how to capture email addresses and book follow-up meetings in the call.

Sample script

In case the prospect deflects and asks for an email or says it’s not a good time:

“Can we find [Amount of time] next week to talk more?”

If the prospect says to send email in order to get off the phone.
“Yeah, that’s not a problem. What’s the best email to send that to?”

The prospect gives you their email address.
“Great, I’ll send you an email and include some possible times. Just so I send over reasonable times, is there a day that works better for you?“

The prospect tells you day(s) that are most ideal.
“Typically, mornings or afternoons?“

The prospect chooses either morning or afternoon. Pick a specific time on a day mentioned in either the morning or afternoon.

“Great, [Day] at [Time] works for me. I’ll send you a calendar invite as a placeholder.”

Source: G2Crowd

Use cold calling scripts to build your customer base

Cold calling scripts are an incredibly helpful tool for introducing your products to prospects in a friendly, informative way. Start by following the templates closely to minimize nerves. As you get more comfortable, take note of the language that seems to resonate well with the prospects you call. As you find opportunities to refine the scripts, you’ll find that your cold calls lead to more qualified prospects.

“People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.”—Zig Ziglar

Marketers have really run with this idea in the age of content marketing. Over the last decade, storytelling has become the core tenant of so many marketing strategies, promising a means of capturing buyer attention on an emotional level.

We may have gone too far, though. Storytelling has become yet another marketing buzzword. It’s thrown around without much discussion about its practicality. And while marketers may recognize the inherent value, sales teams often roll their eyes at pie in the sky storytelling tactics.

But it’s about time we move beyond storytelling as a marketing buzzword. By taking advantage of a few practical storytelling techniques, your sales team can appeal to buyer emotions and boost close rates.

4 Storytelling Tips and Techniques for Sales

Despite resistance to the marketing buzzword, your sales team is probably already using storytelling in some way during pitches without even realizing it. To unlock the real potential of storytelling, we need to infuse it into sales pitches more actively.

Instead of loading prospects up with promotional messaging and statistics, take advantage of the following four storytelling tips and techniques to make your pitches more engaging.

1. Customer as Hero

For B2B teams, the challenger sale has emerged as a primary technique. Exposing flaws in the beliefs of prospects and teaching them new lessons about their business can be a powerful means of appealing to their logic.

But when you want to focus on emotions, making customers the heroes of your stories can be even more effective. Too often, your products and services become the heroes of the buyer’s journey. Flipping the script will put you in a better position to execute the challenger sale and build relationships with prospects.

2. Data with a Narrative

Storytelling seems like another buzzword because sales teams look at it as impractical. But just because you’re telling stories doesn’t mean data goes out the window. In fact, data should be treated as a key tool in any storytelling situation.

The key to getting more out of data and statistics is to create a narrative around the numbers. By bringing creativity and visualizations to raw data, you can satisfy the emotional and logical needs of the buyer and keep them engaged in the purchase process.

3. Three-Act Structure

When you’re thinking of using storytelling to improve your sales pitches, the best thing you can do is focus on structure. Like any simple story, building your sales pitch into a three-act structure can make it easier to engage with prospects.

Our brains are hardwired to understand stories with a beginning, climax, and end. Focusing on how your sales pitch follows a hero’s journey will ensure messages resonate with prospects and create a lasting impression within target buying teams.

4. Make Use of Metaphors

Storytelling is just like any other sales tactic or technique—it’s a tool used to make your pitches more persuasive. We appeal to the emotions of prospects because it’s a more persuasive approach than appealing to their logic. So, when you’re using storytelling in sales, make the most of metaphors and their ability to persuade people.

According to Seth Godin, “a metaphor takes what we know and uses it as a lever to understand something else. And the only way we can do that is by starting with the true thing and then twisting it into a new thing, a thing we’ll be able to also understand.” If you can come up with relevant metaphors, they’ll help you engage with prospects more effectively.

Intent Data: Your Foundation for Sales Storytelling

The techniques listed here will help your sales team take a more practical approach to storytelling and go beyond the high-level marketing buzzword. But personalization will really be at the core of your success. Any stories you use for sales pitches become significantly more effective when they’re tailored specifically to the needs of individual target accounts.

To reach this level of personalization, you have to know as much as possible about each target account, the contacts who make up the buying team, and the pain points that motivate them. That’s where intent data helps.

If you want to learn how intent data can fuel your storytelling, sales, and marketing processes, check out our white paper, Demystifying B2B Purchase Intent Data.

Not every business is serious about creating user personas these days mainly because their initial efforts may have fallen by the wayside.

However, the truth is: User persona is one of the most critical UX tools that aid businesses to be user-centered and not self-centered. Their use ensures that companies don’t turn a blind eye to users’ needs, rather champion their cause.

So the point is, if you are not investing enough time and effort in the development of user personas, it might result in the creation of flawed ones that may not drive traffic to your business.

Here are some user persona mistakes that businesses commit leading to the creation of a flawed user persona.

#1. The Rapid Fire Persona

As it turns out, this kind of buyer persona is developed in 2 x 10 calls. Sure, it’s better to have something than nothing for reference purposes when developing your designs. But then, user persona developed based on rapid-fire questions is not going to help your cause.

The question is: how could you know anyone in 2 minutes, let alone a group of people over a quick chat session. Creating user personas based on rapid-fire calls or chat sessions is one of the biggest UX mistakes that researchers and designers commit.

#2. The Single Experience Persona

User personas have worked for several companies. The issue arises when businesses start making assumptions from a single user experience. Because what if things may not have gone well with this particular user with whom you may have just interacted with. So it is wrong if businesses generalize and create personas from an individual user experience.

Also, it’s always nice to dig a little further and find out what went wrong with this particular user to avoid repeating the same mistakes in the next persona project.

#3. We Cooked it up Persona

Yes, there are user personas that are roughly put together from the raw data made available by the marketing or the customer care team. Sometimes user personas are created by employees themselves as and when the need arises.

Very often an image from an online photo gallery is pulled out and gets pinned to a wall. And some bullet points get scribbled down below the photo. Over a while, both the image and its meaning gets lost amidst tight deadlines and insurmountable deliverables.

However, the point is, in this day and age when real people don’t have the time to talk with each other, how would they relate to a stock photo?

#4. Personas Build in Isolation

If your researchers are creating personas in isolation without the involvement of designers then such user personas won’t bode well with the designers, who are actually the end-users.

For the widespread adoption and meaningful impact of personas, the involvement of the end-users is critical. This is important because otherwise, designers won’t have a proper understanding of the user data and the rigor that went into creating them. So, it’s always a good idea for designers to have a one-on-one with real users. It would make them feel close to the users, resulting in better UX.

#5. Outdated Personas

With businesses evolving with technological changes, users change too. So there are chances of personas becoming obsolete, primarily when they no longer reflect current users’ behavior needs or goals. This means personas may have to be updated to reflect the present needs of the user, which, in turn, would enable the designer to serve their actual needs.

#6. Wordy Personas

If your persona looks wordy and messy, your end-user will literally have to brace up for ordeal even before reading a word. “This will be heavy,” will be the message you will be putting across in the first glance. So keep wordy bios off your radar because people are not really happy using them.

#7. Stereotyping Personas

Sometimes you simply go ahead and dub your user as Maria. So what, you may ask? The problem is, by dubbing her as Maria you will be looking at your user persona through the eyes of a female. Put another way, you won’t be using persona in a neutral sense.

The point is stereotyping hinders the design process. Predicting behaviors and attitudes based on cultural, gender, and things like that prejudice our understanding of behaviors and reactions of user groups. As far as possible, look at user personas neutrally.

#8. One Size Fits-all Personas

You need to have a specific goal in mind while sketching a user persona for your business. There’s nothing like one-size-fits-all persona. The data captured should reflect the purpose of the persona and the scope of work. If it doesn’t, then such data won’t be useful for business.

For example, a marketing team working with a couple of user personas for a complete range of banking products such as savings, car loans, home loans and more will only be able to create general user persona, and not thorough one. So their products may or may not resonate with their audience.

Conclusion

There you go! 7 user persona mistakes that businesses tend to commit. So, if your business is experiencing a failed persona experience, then it could be one of the reasons listed above. Figure out what went wrong and right the wrongs. If you are building personas for the first time, then you can use this checklist to avoid issues from popping up.

Also, remember to keep your designers in the loop, talk about personas in meetings, and cement their place in projects. Avoid these pitfalls, and you will have a successful persona right from the start.

InsideSales.com Introduces the Revenue Acceleration Cloud Powered by Real Intelligence, the Cloud offering drives unparalleled revenue growth with unique collective human experience data SILICON SLOPES, Utah—September 17, 2019—InsideSales.com today introduced the Revenue Acceleration Cloud, building on its global, enterprise-grade customer base and the company’s innovative foundation. The Cloud offering is comprised of aReal Intelligence platform, […]

The post InsideSales.com Introduces the Revenue Acceleration Cloud appeared first on The Sales Insider.

 In this episode of Sales Secrets, I talk about how to optimize sales process and, more importantly, how to do it right, from top to bottom. Keep reading to learn more. RELATED: What Role Content Plays in the Sales Process w/Dave Koslow @DocSend In this article: How to Optimize Sales Process from Top to […]

The post How To Optimize Your Sales Process Top To Bottom appeared first on The Sales Insider.

• Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platforms provide more financial transparency options by letting banks open up their APIs for third parties to develop new services.
• Techy-savvy legacy banks can fend off the encroaching threat of fintechs by moving into the BaaS space to share their data and infrastructure.
• In addition to BaaS coverage, Insider Intelligence publishes thousands of research reports, charts, and forecasts on the Banking industry. You can learn more about becoming a client here.

Across industries, digital transformation is democratizing data to enable greater transparency and better cusomter experiences. New technologies are opening up legacy systems to emerging startups and third parties and, in some cases, putting data directly in the hands of consumers.

In financial services, Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platforms have surfaced as a key component of open banking, in which firms provide more financial transparency options for account holders by opening their application programming interfaces (APIs) for third parties to develop new services.

Fintechs and digital banks have been encroaching on incumbent institutions in the banking game and disrupting traditional business models — but by moving into the BaaS space, tech-savvy legacy banks can turn this looming threat into an opportunity.

What is banking-as-a-service?

BaaS is an end-to-end model that allows digital banks and other third parties to connect with banks' systems directly via APIs so they can build banking offerings on top of the providers' regulated infrastructure, as well as unlock the open banking opportunity reshaping the global financial services landscape.

Techy-savvy legacy firms can fend off the encroaching threat of fintechs by moving into the BaaS space to share their data and infrastructure. In a matter of years, access to this level of information will become table stakes for digitally native customers — so banks that begin now will be ahead of the curve, and likely rewarded with high demand.

How does banking-as-a-service work?

The BaaS model begins with a fintech, digital bank, or other third-party provider (TPP) paying a fee to access the BaaS platform. The financial institution opens its APIs to the TPP, thereby granting access to the systems and information necessary to build new banking products or offer white label banking services. 

In addition to getting ahead in open banking, legacy institutions that launch their own BaaS platforms are also opening up new revenue streams. The two main monetization strategies for BaaS include charging clients a monthly fee for access to the BaaS platform or charging a la carte for each service used.

Top banking-as-a-service firms

Here are the top BaaS platform providers broken out into purely BaaS-focused fintech players and retail banks that have launched their own BaaS platforms:

Pure BaaS providers:

• solarisBank
• Bankable
• Treezor
• 11:FS Foundry
• Cambr
• ClearBank

BaaS providers with B2C operations:

• Starling Bank
• Fidor Bank
• BBVA

Banking-as-a-service industry outlook

A number of countries have already begun introducing open banking regulations, indicating that the financial services industry is moving toward an era where shared data and infrastructure will become consumers' new expectations.

Tech-savvy legacy banks that create their own BaaS platforms now will not only get ahead of the open banking opportunity before their competitors, but also unlock a new stream of revenue by monetizing their platforms. 

In the UK, the new revenue potential generated through open banking-enabled small- and medium-sized business and retail customer propositions was £500 million ($700 million) in 2018, per PwC — and Insider Intelligence expects that to grow at a 25% compound annual growth rate to reach £1.9 billion ($2 billion) by 2024.

Beyond adding a new revenue stream, developing a BaaS solution also allows legacy banks to establish relationships and forge partnerships with emerging fintechs — thereby keeping themselves ahead of the trends that will inevitably follow once BaaS and open banking become mainstream.

Interested in more related Banking research?

In addition to BaaS, Insider Intelligence publishes a wealth of research reports, charts, forecasts, and analysis of the Banking industry. You can learn more about accessing all of this content here. 

And here are some related Banking reports that might interest you:

1. The Rise of Banking-as-a-Service, which looks at the benefits banks stand to gain by offering BaaS platforms, discusses already successful players in the industry, and recommends strategies for moving into BaaS.
2. The Global Neobanks Report, which explores how the neobank market has grown rapidly, and what's in store as the industry pivots from hyper-growth to sustainability. 
3. AI in Banking, which identifies the most meaningful AI applications across banks' front and middle offices, as well as the winning AI strategies used by financial institutions so far. 

Join the conversation about this story »

What is cadence in sales? How can it affect the growth of your business? To find out more, read on and learn about cadence definition, elements, and most importantly, how a sales cadence can benefit your business. RELATED: Four Laws To Build A Sales Cadence In this article: The Art of Creating a Sales Cadence The […]

The post Cadence Definition: What A Salesperson Should Know appeared first on The Sales Insider.

Today, I’ll talk about account-based marketing and share three steps you should follow to succeed in it. Keep reading to find out more. RELATED: Secrets of Account Based Marketing (ABM) Tactics w/Shari Johnston @Winning By Design In this article: Account-Based Marketing Best Practices Know Who You’re Targeting Have a Digital Machine That Works Implement Strategic Plays Strategic […]

The post Three Steps To Successful Account-Based Marketing appeared first on The Sales Insider.

Hundreds of pundits, thousands of articles, hundreds of books, hundreds/thousands of sales/marketing automation suppliers purport to have their miracle cures to fixing sales performance.

Somehow the miracle cures seem to be:

• “Just train your people to do these 3 things….”
• “Do this one thing…..”
• “Implement this new technology….”
• “You just need to prospect….”
• …..and on and on and on…..

Don’t get me wrong, many of these things are important and can contribute in big ways to improving sales performance. My own company, helps our clients in many of these areas, whether it’s new processes, methodologies, restructuring, better articulating value.

Any of these take time, and there are the challenges of getting people to actually execute on these things.

But there is one area that costs us millions a year, that can drive huge leaps in performance.

Drum roll……….

It’s focusing on talent, creating a culture where people want to work and where people are valued.

I’ve become a broken record on this issue, citing the data on declining sales/management tenure. In the past 5 years, average tenure has decreased from around 3 years to 16.5 months! Gallup data shows employee engagement (not exclusively sales) at the lowest levels ever.

We (management) have a crisis of talent/culture/values. If we can’t attract/recruit, onboard, coach/develop/grow, and retain people, all the investments in new training, new programs, new technology, new methodology, new processes, new anything are wasted. The people we put them in place for, never had the chance to master them–at least in our own companies.

Too many managers/leaders claim, “This is just the way today’s workforce is,” or “It’s a millennial issue.”

Alternatively, there are those leaders, that despite what their web sites say, really don’t value people. They view people as replaceable widgets. Objects to be used as long as they do what they are told, then replaced, when they don’t produce the desired results.

Frankly, I believe these are excuses or simply bad leadership. While there are too few, there are companies that truly value talent and create cultures where people want to work, contribute and where they can grow. They do these things, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but it produces stunning business results!

One of my favorite clients is, by far, the market leader in their space, has average attrition (voluntary, involuntary) of about 3%. They recruit the right people, develop them, grow them, and retain them. They reap the benefits of skyrocketing sales performance across virtually any metric one would want: Reps making quota, growth, revenue attainment, customer retention/growth, margin, and so forth.

This issue is, perhaps, the most important issues, sales and business executives must face in the coming years–if they want to grow, respond to the changes in markets, gain share with their customers.

None of our other initiatives, while important, will ever achieve full impact until we begin to create organizations where people want to work, and we fill those organizations with the people/talent that enable us to perform.

Some might argue whether this is the fastest way to do this–perhaps the title of this article is a little click-baity. But I stand firm on this being the fastest way to drive sustainable performance improvements, simply because nothing else we do can be sustainable without this.

Among the different email marketing metrics like open rate and click-through rate that you often take into consider, there is another metric that should not be overlooked. It is known as “BOUNCE RATE”.

While open rate and click-through rate are positive metrics, bounce rate is a negative one. Even if your open rate and click-through rate is at par with the industry benchmarks, a high bounce rate may destroy your reputation as a sender.

When the email server rejects an email, it is known as a bounce. Based on the reason of the bounced email, there are two main types of bounces, namely soft bounce and hard bounce. You will be able to find all these terms in the report of your email campaign.

To learn more on the number of hard and soft bounces, just click on “10” and you will see something like this:

Pay special attention to the number of bounces to make sure that your subscribers are able to receive your emails and they are not landing in the spam folder.

Hard Bounces (Permanent Delivery Failure)

A hard bounce is symbolic of a permanent reason that an email cannot be delivered. More often than not, bounced email addresses get instantly pruned without any manual effort. They are the ones that are dead on arrival, such as “there is no such mailbox at that domain”. They will not be included in any of the future lists.

Some of the common reasons for the hard bounce are:

• The email address of the recipient is invalid and does not exist.

If the email address submitted by the subscriber is fake, the email gets hard bounced and fails to get delivered permanently. All these addresses should be removed from the subscriber list so that your sender reputation does not hampered due to poor email deliverability.

• There is no domain by that name.

In case the domain name behind the subscriber’s email address does not exist, it leads to a hard bounce.

• Delivery has been completely blocked by the email server of the recipient.

Quite often, the email gets blocked by a spam filter on the recipient’s device, the company’s email firewall, at their ISP/Data center or each of the above. Commonly noticed SMTP replies for spam filtered emails are Blocked, Denied, and Unacceptable Content.

It is even possible that the corporate spam filters and email firewalls consider the similar-looking emails as spam and block the ESP sending it. In case the recipient email server finds too many emails being deployed from a single server at a time, the email can be temporarily blocked. However, there is a chance of permanent block, which can be overcome only by asking the concerned technical professionals to whitelist the IP addresses from that ESP.

Sometimes, bigger ISPs like Gmail or MSN/Hotmail could be blocking the emails you send, but this is generally for a temporary period of time. They will unblock the senders once the spam complaints subside.

Soft Bounces (Temporary Delivery Failure)

A temporary delivery issue can result in a soft bounce. Repeated soft bounces will be counted as a hard bounce and removed from the subscriber list. The number of soft bounces allowed before an email address gets converted into a hard bounce varies in different ESPs.

An email address may soft bounce for reasons like:

• Recipient email server is temporary offline.

If there are some configuration changes going on in the recipients’ server, it might temporarily reject the messages sent to them.

You can avoid this by creating a copy of the original email and send it to the respective subscribers after a few days.

• Email message exceeds the average size allowed by the recipient email server.

Sending an email message that is too large can lead to a soft bounce. It means that the recipient email server will not be able to send it to the recipient’s inbox.

• Mailbox has reached the limit of maximum emails permissible.

You must have experienced this situation at work. Well, I have faced it several times. My mailbox is flooded with work emails and messages from brands or companies I have subscribed to. As a result, there are a number of occasions when I can neither send nor receive emails. Your subscribers could also be struggling with a similar situation and it could lead to a soft bounce. You can always try emailing these contacts again at a later date.

Mitigating the Impact of Bounce Rate

It is of utmost importance to monitor the bounce rate so that you know where your email sender reputation stands. A high bounce rate will negatively affect the email deliverability rate. Therefore, you should periodically prune your email list and remove invalid addresses if your ESP does not do it automatically.

As far as soft bounces are concerned, you can send a test email to the subscribers and see if it gets sent. If it does, you will be able to conclude that your marketing email or newsletter has a problem, and you should consider revising it.

You should send emails to your lists regularly to reduce the chances of breeching the hard bounce threshold, which means that your bounce rate should not have time to reach dangerous levels and your list hygiene is maintained.

Another recommendation is to have a double opt-in method so that your subscriber list has valid email addresses only. It helps to prevent any typos that can lead to hard bounces.

The importance of organically building an email list rather than purchasing it cannot be emphasized enough. Sending emails to purchased lists can land your emails in spam trap and lead to too many bounces.

Wrapping Up

It is crucial to understand the demarcation between a soft bounce and hard bounce if you are considering email deliverability. Hard bounces are the most important indicators of an unhealthy email list. Consequently, you should analyze your subscriber list and keep it clean as far as possible.

Hiring sales talent is hard. There are a lot of salespeople out there, and you’ll get inundated with resumes as soon as you put out a job ad.

How do you pick the best rep for your company? What should you look for in your applicants? How do you know if they’re going to be successful or if they’re just good at talking themselves up in the interview?

I’ve been hiring salespeople for 17 years, and I’ve found that there are seven things sales reps need to have if they’re going to be successful. That applies to reps looking for their first jobs just as much as it does to people with decades of experience. Now I look for those traits when I’m hiring—and keeping them in mind has helped me hire some phenomenal salespeople.

Use these seven qualifiers when you’re hiring your next salesperson, and you’ll be a lot more likely to hire a good one.

1. Strong follow-up game

Effective follow-up is one of the skills that set the all-stars apart from the average sellers. So I look for people who instinctively understand the power of following up.

Sure, you can teach someone how important it is. But if they already understand its importance, they’re a step ahead. And if they know how to do it, they’re about as close to a sure hire as you’ll find. Following up is how deals get closed, and if I don’t have to teach that to someone, they’re a strong contender in the hiring process.

I always keep an eye out for applicants who follow up skillfully during the interview process. If they’re already using the follow-up tactics we like to see at Close, they’re a strong candidate for the job.

If, on the other hand, they have annoying follow-up tendencies, they’re pushed down the list. A sense of desperation or accusation in their follow-ups is an immediate disqualifier. That’s not how you win sales, and it’s certainly not how you get a sales job.

2. High tolerance for rejection

There are three parts to a great sales close: asking early, asking often, and embracing the no. Some salespeople get flustered when a prospect says no. They might just accept that as an answer and end the call. They might start in with awkward follow-up questions or get defensive. That’s bad.

What they should do instead is dig deeper to find out why the prospect isn’t ready to buy. “What’s the process we need to go through to get you ready to buy?” is one of the most important questions in any of our sales reps’ arsenal—largely because we ask for the close early and get a lot of nos.

This is especially true in the modern sales age. Many of the high-velocity sales teams I know are using technologies like predictive dialing. That means reps are talking to a ton of people every day. So they’re hearing a lot of nos. And they have to be able to handle it and not trip up over their own ego.

3. Responsive to feedback and eager to learn

Everyone says they’re open to feedback, but few actually are. By the end of an interview, I want to know how an applicant handles feedback. I want people on my team that are not only open to constructive criticism but actually, seek it out. If they want to learn, I want them on my team.

But it goes further than that. They need to be able to put that feedback into action. This is astonishingly rare. Just because someone is open to feedback doesn’t mean they’re good at putting it into action. Some sales reps need to be told over and over to make a change.

When you find someone who not only seeks out feedback but actually makes a change in their selling when you suggest it, you’ve struck gold.

4. Great communication skills

This seems like a no-brainer, but there are career salespeople out there who are just bad communicators. And they keep getting hired. I don’t get it.

When I hire a rep, they need great communication skills. They need to have empathy and be able to read a prospect. They need to have a sixth sense for what to say next. They need to be a fantastic listener. That’s one that people miss out on a lot—salespeople spend a lot of time listening instead of talking, and the best sellers are especially good at listening. (We’ll talk about that more in a moment.)

But communication skills go beyond the phone; a lot of modern prospecting and selling happens via email. So they need to be able to write well, too. Tons of typos and weird sentence constructions just aren’t going to fly in a high-performing sales organization. You want people who can present a professional face for us and use their communication skills to close deals.

5. High energy and positive vibes

Salespeople spend most of their time interacting with people—and not just prospects. They also interact with other team members. So they need to have a positive energy that lifts up the people they interact with.

Even if someone is a great closer, you don’t want them on your team if they’re bringing people down. Positivity is part of it, but an openness to learning new things, being accepting of other people, and a genuine interest in building relationships are crucial.

This can be hard to intuit in a short interview, but it’s something to pay attention to. If you’re checking references, be sure to ask about the kind of energy this person brings to the workplace.

6. Competitiveness and ambition

The all-time greats in the sales world tend to be very competitive, ambitious people. They’re go-getters. They ask for forgiveness instead of permission. Using sales incentives is a great way to motivate your reps, but the top performers are motivated by their overwhelming drive to succeed.

This kind of rep also responds really well to some friendly competition within your team. Competition is one of my favorite ways to motivate and engage reps; salespeople love winning, and if you can get them competing with one another (on a friendly level, of course), they not only get an extra dose of motivation, but they have fun with it.

Striking a balance between a strong drive to close deals and the helpfulness people have come to expect in our relationship-based-selling era is tough. But reps who are driven to win and want to improve will find that balance. And they’ll become some of your best reps.

7. Great listening skills

I mentioned this once before, but it’s so important that I’ll bring it up again. Everyone seems to think that great salespeople are fast talkers, able to sidestep any objection and get the prospect to buy no matter what. And that’s valuable. But listening is even more valuable.

It’s counterintuitive, but reps who actively listen and ask good questions maintain control of the sales conversation. They get the prospect to do the work for them by sharing their concerns and coming up with their own ideas to overcome them.

By gaining a real understanding of the prospect, what they need, and what their concerns are, your salespeople are put in the perfect position not just to close a deal, but to help that prospect. That’s what gets you deals and long-term customers.

Don’t underestimate the value of listening. It’s crucial.

Prioritize these traits to hire awesome sales reps

Every company has different needs for their sales teams. But keeping an eye out for these seven traits will help you get the best reps every time.

Not everyone will have all seven of them right away. You also need to watch for people who are willing to learn these skills and traits. Sometimes you can teach them. Sometimes you can’t. But the more open your applicants are to learning and developing skills, the better.

This is a guest contribution by Steli Efti of Close. Interested in contributing to the CloserIQ blog? Check out our guidelines here.
Recruit College Grads using our Free “SDR Job Template”

The post 7 Traits I Look for When Hiring Sales Talent appeared first on CloserIQ Blog.

Your customers are your enterprise’s life’s blood. When you get a new customer, work to retain them and grow customer lifetime value. While the sales team will always be looking for new customers, retaining a current customer is far cheaper than finding a new customer to replace them. When you retain a customer, you’ve won a valuable patron who will be far likelier to want future sales or try new products.

So, don’t focus solely on hunting up one-time customers. Apply a few key customer retention optimization strategies to build deep, lasting customer relationships.

Why Retention Matters

Retention is a result of the customer experience. We all know what customer experience is— just remember the best, or worst, experience you’ve had as a customer and you’ll know how important it is! Your brand’s product and people create a lasting impression that stays with new customers. Once the sale is completed, it’s the customer success team’s job to expand upon the customer’s good experience at the time of the transaction.

When practicing customer retention optimization, keep in mind that the success of your clients is the success of your company. To retain them, you must ensure that they are successful in using your product. Follow your customers’ lead based on the goals they wish to achieve using your product. By understanding your customers’ goals, you can offer them training on how they can use your product to achieve their goals and keep track of their progress.

Make sure your customer success team is responsive and attentive, as customers hate having to contact a company multiple times. Keep detailed records of every customer touchpoint and make them available to all your team members. When you share customer data across teams, you ensure that customers don’t have to repeat their stories to multiple representatives.

The Best Customer Retention Optimization Strategies

To retain customers and reduce churn, you need to provide value throughout the entire customer journey. Don’t just think about retention when renewal rolls around; this should be a continuous effort.

Here are some excellent customer retention optimization strategies to leverage:

• Implement a Customer-Centric Culture. If you aren’t a customer-centric company, now’s the time to become one. Make the customer and their goals a top priority and structure your company around meeting their needs. This will help you provide better service and a better product, which enhances the overall customer experience and makes customers more likely to stay.
• Focus on the Entire Customer Journey. From onboarding to renewal, keep the customer in mind. No matter what new feature you develop or what communication you send, you should focus on analyzing product use to identify trends or bottlenecks that customers may encounter during their journey. By constantly monitoring your customers and gathering as much feedback as possible, you will forge a deeper connection, identify warning signs to help avoid escalations and, overall, improve the customer journey.
• Optimize the Onboarding Stage. Onboarding is the most important stage of the customer journey. Not only must you quicken the customer’s onboarding, but you must provide seamless service as customer success specialists pick up where salespeople left off. To do this, you’ll need to have a clean internal handoff between departments. If this is currently a problem, look into implementing solutions as soon as possible.
• Unify Communication Channels. Make sure communication between internal teams is clear and unified. For instance, during the handoff between sales to the customer success team, both teams need to communicate customer information so that everyone is on the same page. Maintaining open communication throughout the journey will make for a better customer experience and increased retention. Also, everyone who interacts with customers should know the standardized messaging so you can present a consistent voice when engaging customers.
• Be Proactive. Start thinking about the future of your relationship with a customer from the very start. What may the customer need down the road? Have other customers encountered challenges you can help this customer avoid? Know what your goals are for the client relationship and work toward those efforts during your initial engagements.It’s also a good idea to send proactive product update emails that include product roadmaps.
• Analyze Usage and Research Customers. In order to retain customers, you’re going to need data. How are they using the product? Are there any usage trends? Keep a close eye on how customers use your product and what they are using it for so you can discover new ways to deliver value.
• Take Responsibility. Most importantly, always deliver on what was promised. Give customers what you told them you would give and they will come to trust you. And if you fall short for any reason, take responsibility. When things go wrong, that’s the best way to salvage the relationship and show customers that you really do care.

Implement these steps and customers will be impressed by your brand’s dedication. You’ll start to see higher retention rates and lower churn rates.

Leveraging Software as Part of Your Customer Retention Optimization

One of the challenges brands often run into when trying to implement customer retention optimization is that they don’t have the right tools needed to connect with all their customers in a meaningful way. If this inability to connect is making it hard for you to retain customers, try using a customer success platform. Such comprehensive software offers visibility of customer health at every stage of the customer journey, puts all your data in one place so you can make smarter decisions, and helps you effectively engage customers. And with all the functionality you need to proactively nurture customers, you can easily meet your customer retention goals.

So, give customer retention optimization strategies a try. Your customers will love engaging with your brand on a deeper level and will be excited about your future products, releases, and innovations. It’s the right way to grow solid, long-term customer relationships.

Totango offers all the functionality you need to increase customer retention. Request a demo.

By Tibor Shanto

While it is true that the only reason for a prospecting call is to set up the first formal interaction, there is so much more that can be accomplished. Most are focused on and working on getting that primary directive right. One thing that many fail to do in prospecting calls is set the momentum for the Discovery and beyond. Tactically. You can and should pack your prospecting call with things to unpack during Discovery.

Planting Seeds

A good prospecting call needs to lead to more than a calendar invite for the first formal encounter. It should leave the prospect anticipating the meeting, curious to find out what follows. But it has to be by design and planning. The goal is to help the prospect expand their thinking on areas they were already focused on. If you’re the elements and message of your prospecting call aligns with their agenda, you can ignite that curiosity. Which of course, requires that we don’t spill everything during the prospecting call.

Let’s Stay Together

This has become a lost craft in the day of sales disintegration, i.e., SaaS sales. I know some have told me ‘it is specializing’, which does leave the question of who owns managing the relationship. Not with any given individual, but the account. A couple of algorithms, some automation, and some bubbly CX folks can mask that shortcoming. What it can’t mask is the disjointed experience for the buyer(s), and the inability to leverage your Subject Matter Expertise to the fullest. While this may not be noticed in offerings with one or two functions, it impacts more layered sales that tailored or specifically integrated or implemented. Where it is less about a single pain or scratch, and more about the changes the buyer needs to make to their business.

That kind of sale involves more, more of everything, including effort. Not just in terms of the people and politics involved, but in how you set direction in a way that facilitates their buying process while ensuring you maintain mind share.

And that’s why the seeds we plant in our prospecting calls, can be harvested during Discovery, without the need for manure.

The advantage one or two trick ponies have is they only need to hit one or two things, and pretend to know and care about the rest. Test it, ask how integrates with you whole flow, not just elements of it. This means satisfying one maybe two expectations, not the apparently 5.4 to 6.8, cited by Gartner (then CEB).

What To Pack To Unpack

It starts with forgetting the product, yes, leave the product in the car or drawer ion this case. Picture one of t5.4 above (a whole one), on their way to work, sitting on the commuter train thinking about their to-do list. I can almost guarantee that they aren’t thinking about “product”. Even when thinking about process or area your product addresses, they aren’t thinking product, but an outcome. This group makes up about 70% of any buying segment. The best salespeople connect with that, the anticipated outcomes and the results they lead to and build on it. Those who lead and stay with product eventually have to work hard to connect their “solution,” to expectations a buyer has defined in a different language.

Making Art Together

The critical advantage of leaving your product in the car is what it forces you to do. If you can’t talk product, and you’re an SME, you must speak about your area of expertise. Which is the areas of their business impacted, how, why, and most importantly: to what end. When I encourage salespeople to leave their product in the car, it doesn’t mean they go in empty-handed. (no not a brochure). Grab your brushes, a canvas, a choice of colours and a pallet, and go in and create a unique piece based on the buyer’s vision, enabled by your expertise.

It is a beautiful experience to have the buyer draw out their vision, and then jointly shape it using your expertise.

Success requires you to be contrarian, uncomfortable, while accepting the prospect’s discomfort for the same reason, change.

Beyond the discomfort of being product free, you need to learn to lead with the ending, not product or problem or pain. That’s right, tell them what is on the last page, the happy ending, the buyer, is the hero, and you as Cyrano.  Odd as it may seem, you want to start with the punch line and work back, as you would from the last page. And as you do, you eventually do have to take them to your product. As you move back from the punchline, you can create a journey that aligns with the outcomes they were thinking about on their train ride.

A Gallery of Success

Finding these endings to start with is not as difficult as it sounds; it is a question of will and discipline. The discipline is to face and understand why things turned out as they did. Whether it was a win, a loss, or no decision, it needs to be understood. We do offer our clients our 360 Degree Deal View; it is indeed more about the discipline than the tool. (You can download on our site). Once you have completed a few, you will see trends forming. One of which is how your product aligns with business impacts six months after the purchase. Most salespeople do not go back and ask how day to day work-flows, and outcomes have changed. They can talk about how their clients are using the product, but change?

It is even worse when it comes to losses. Salespeople rarely have an accurate picture of why they lost. Price and features, the go-to; but professional post-mortems always point to completely missing the business case.

Real Triggers

When you begin to see things from the perspective of outcomes, you can pack your prospecting calls with those things drive engagement, at the outset, through Discovery. As you develop your review habit and discipline (360 Degree style), you’ll find other triggers to leverage. Giving you an entirely different set of triggers to build on. These will help you help your prospect be an active contributor to the solutions you mutually create, specifically for them.  It will also accelerate your cycle, by helping the buyer(s) shorten their buying cycle.  It all starts with how you begin, which is why you need to pack your prospecting call with things to unpack during Discovery.

The post Pack Your Prospecting Call With Things to Unpack During Discovery appeared first on TiborShanto.com.

While crucial to sales success, the proliferation of content in today’s modern business world has muddied the sales funnel waters and made it that much tougher to navigate. Companies invest great resources into creating all kinds of content for websites, blogs and social platforms, and the idea is to use that content to get as many prospects into the top of the funnel. From there, the content is used to nurture those relationships until the prospect is willing to make a purchase. But how does all that content work together and fit into the funnel? And further, how do you optimize it all so that it’s proven to convert? While a business’ funnel will be unique to the specific company, the modern sales funnel should include the following characteristics:

• Advertising – It is at the top of the sales funnel with the purpose of engaging with as many potential customers as possible. It includes a company’s email marketing strategies, direct mail campaigns, Adword initiatives and all general advertising strategies. The more eyeballs on your advertising means more potential customers thinking about your brand. You want prospects to see your website banner, commercial, billboard or whatever ad route your company chooses, and think – Huh, I was thinking about that. I need to check them out!
• 3^rd Party Verifications (Search) – Once a potential customer becomes aware of your brand, their likely next step is to see what others are saying about your company through testimonials, social media interactions and news stories that came about through public relations efforts. This allows them to ensure that your business is reputable and that the service or product meets what they’re actually need.
• Your Public Pitch – If a potential client is comfortable with your brand and in need of your service, they’ll next want to check out your owned content, like the company website and blog. By reviewing product pages and blog posts, they’ll better understand exactly what you can offer them, about how much it will cost and what it entails overall.
• Buyer Action – If all goes according to plan, and the potential prospect likes what they’ve encountered throughout the funnel, they’ll reach out directly to your company and request a proposal or demo. While getting to this point is a huge win, your company’s work is not done yet. Next will be the first, actual person-to-person interaction your company will have with the prospect.
• Personal Pitch – The last stage of the funnel is where you’ll meet with clients and provide them with some sort of presentation. To ensure success, more firms are utilizing presentation management to develop a strategy around the creation, distribution and repurposing of the crucial business communication assets that are proven to convert leads into sales. You’ll want to make sure all of your company’s communication assets are housed in one central location, formatted to present and ready to be re-used so team members can quickly find approved content that is specific to the prospect’s needs, allowing the presentation to follow the conversation, as opposed to the rigid, predetermined PowerPoint culture. While an important last step, too often, organizations focus all their resources to the top of the funnel, and don’t concentrate enough on this one last step.

A business’ specific sales funnel will change depending on how the business functions and the specific strategies it deems most effective, but by applying the strategies detailed above, companies will be sure to get the most out of its content while providing its employees with a map towards successful selling. Now, more than ever, companies are creating compelling content that will generate sales – it’s just about maximizing it to convert!

Software developers are rapidly becoming the most important buyers of technology and infrastructure in companies of all sizes. Yet all too often, developers are treated as an idiosyncratic and difficult audience—hard to reach, tricky to engage, and challenging to sell to. What’s more is that developers and software engineers are often treated as a monolithic group, when in reality there are dozens of disciplines with specific needs.

Related read: I Asked 50+ Developers How They Buy Software. Here’s What I Learned.

This is simply a bad stereotype and a hangover of outdated selling techniques. As the balance of power within companies shifts to technical roles, and sales teams understand that selling to developers is about building with them, not talking at them—progress is being made. Still, many shy away, creating an advantage for those companies that can engage.

At Stripe, we sell to developers all over the world. In our mission to increase the GDP of the internet, we work with both small startups and public companies, helping them remove the complexity of processing the payments that are the heartbeat of every business. Before Stripe, developers had to invest countless hours and dollars building infrastructure from scratch to carry out straightforward tasks like accepting payments and moving money around the world.

“The hard pitch, the feature list, rehearsed objection handling, competitor depositioning—none of these things matter when the buyer of a product is the person who builds with it.”

We’ve successfully reached developers thanks to an intentional sales strategy, and the creation of a team and company culture that treats the sales process as an opportunity to understand and solve our customers’ most critical problems and to improve our product.

Stripe is a company built by developers, for developers. As we’ve grown, we’ve come to understand that developer sales isn’t about selling in a traditional sense. The hard pitch, the feature list, rehearsed objection handling, competitor depositioning—none of these things matter when the buyer of a product is the person who builds with it, rather than a procurement professional.

At Stripe, sales isn’t about trying to convince a reluctant developer to sign a big deal. It’s about enabling developers to try our product, and understand how it can transform their business and build a case for them to use internally.

Step 1: (Really) know your audience

If traditional sales approaches don’t work with developer audiences, how can companies sell to them? We’ve found that the product experience is a crucial component of the sales process. If a developer is looking to solve a specific problem, the best way to show them value is to get them using and exploring the product.

The only thing that will convince a developer to consider your product is first-hand experience of its value. Your job is to make it as easy as possible for them to gain this experience. Developers expect a quality product, strong documentation, frictionless self-serve signup, and the ability to experiment without commitment.

“The only thing that will convince a developer to consider your product is first-hand experience of its value.”

Builders want to build. At Stripe, we provide instant self serve signup and API keys so developers can begin experimenting immediately. They don’t have to sign a contract. We don’t make them speak to a salesperson—unless they want to. We give open access to the tools they need to explore our products and build confidence with experimentation. Our job is to stand by and unblock any challenges they might face, and then help them make their internal case for adoption. The rest can come later once they know that our platform is what they want to build on.

Related read: The Do’s and Don’ts of Marketing to Developers

This isn’t the typical SaaS sales approach. That normally begins with an initial “discovery” conversation, a demo and a walkthrough of features. That said, our product-led approach doesn’t keep us from being proactive about sales. A lot of our business is built on developing larger relationships from inbound leads and self-serve signups. Of course, we’re very responsive when prospects reach out to us for support, but only in certain situations do we make the first move. When reaching out, it’s important to position yourself and enable them to ramp quicker on the product.

We also watch for specific behaviors and signals that tell us when a prospect or existing user has the potential to convert into a new or more valuable customer:

• • • Product interactions: If we see an uptick in engagement—rising API calls in test mode, new products being activated or tested, increasing velocity of logins to the dashboard, etc.—that’s a strong signal of momentum building within an organization.
    • Direct contact: We are a product-led organization, but we see it as a good thing when prospects reach out to us directly. Sometimes, they reach out because they can’t find something (in which case, we know we have a problem we need to fix). But, usually any direct engagement is a positive signal for sales. If we reach out too early, our sales team has less signal at best and is annoying for customers at worst.
    • Customer value: We look at basic things like how big a company is, what their current revenue is, how much of that revenue is derived from online business, etc. But we also look at more nuanced information, like whether they’ve raised VC funding (a good indicator of future growth), and what other technical tools they use (as an indicator of ability to integrate Stripe).
    • Complex use cases: Typically, the more complex a use case or business model is, the more differentiated our product is. So, when we see something that’s more challenging than the average, it’s usually a good sign that we’re going to have a more in-depth conversation that will ultimately lead to a more robust relationship. These situations are where applying sales resource can be very valuable.

Step 2: Hire the right people

To work successfully with the discerning developer audience, you need salespeople who have sufficient technical prowess in order to earn their trust. They don’t need to be able to code, but they do need to deeply understand the logic and functionality of the API and be able to translate that knowledge into relevant solutions for each prospect, based on what they’ve understood the customer is looking to achieve.

Related read: Founders Shouldn’t Hire a VP of Sales—Here’s Why

The profile of people we hire into sales has evolved over the years. We began with a generalist profile, a common strategy for younger companies that are still figuring out product-market fit and defining the buyer audience. For the most part, that early team was comprised of people who had some technical experience—in product or consulting—but not necessarily a lot of hands-on sales experience. A common mistake that startups make is to hire a salesperson with too much experience as their first sales hire. This profile often fails, as early sales is about finding and refining product-market fit rather than closing as many deals as possible.

“To work successfully with the discerning developer audience, you need salespeople who have sufficient technical prowess in order to earn their trust.”

As our company matured and we gained more clarity about our position in the market, our sales process became more sophisticated and segmented. Now, we’ve refined our salesperson profile to focus on those who not only have lots of sales experience, but also have a specific type of experience. We need people who are familiar with selling to a technical audience, know how to sell a more complex product, and are comfortable with a consultative sales approach. Here it’s important to think of analogous products to yours and find people who’ve successfully sold those products. These may not be immediately obvious or similar products to yours.

We also look for people who can operate successfully in a product-led organization with a strong engineering focus, and with strong opinions about what products should and shouldn’t do. This is critical for us because we rely on sales to provide customer feedback to our product organization. They need to bridge the gap between the front lines and our own developer team, but we need them to do so impartially. We don’t want them trying to unduly influence the roadmap in order to close a specific deal. Our goal is to build products that help all of our users, not cater to one demanding customer.

That said, there is great value in partnering closely with a few larger customers to help inform how we evolve our product. Shopify is a great example of this kind of relationship. We listen very carefully to their needs and they work with us as a beta user on emerging features and products. Often they are building at the cutting edge of e-commerce and we listen very carefully to their needs and often adjust our roadmap to accommodate. What we build for them can often be useful for other users and so this speeds up our product development.

Step 3: Structure your organization carefully

Many SaaS companies struggle when faced with the question of whether to go broad or deep on their product offerings. At Stripe, we’ve been able to circumvent that issue by taking an API-led, platform approach. Our core payments platform (Payments and Connect) sits on top of our cloud-based infrastructure, and our suite of applications to manage revenue, prevent fraud and expand internationally sit on top of that platform.

While it’s powerful for our customers, this structure creates some additional complexity for our salespeople. Instead of only having to train them on a single product with a limited number of straightforward use cases, we now have to train our sales team on a range of interrelated products that address a wider range of more nuanced use cases and have variations in functionality depending on how they’re implemented using the API. It also means that each time we add a new product, we also have to consider the resulting connections and interactions between all the other products.

We believe the tradeoff is worth it. The platform approach delivers a much higher quality product and experience for our customers. We have several ways to make the situation more manageable for our sales team, both on the product side and the sales organization side.

Platform structure
Each of the Stripe add-on products—Radar, Sigma, Billing and Atlas—is anchored to our core payments platform. None of the applications can be used standalone. Instead, each one is additive to the overall Stripe experience. This makes it easier for us to scale because we can sell to our existing customers. It also makes it more straightforward for our customers because each component is pre-integrated, so it requires less work to implement.

Even though we’re adding more products, from a technical perspective we’re just adding to the scope of the existing API. This model makes a lot of sense because it gives customers the ability to easily do more without much incremental work, which creates a lot of product stickiness. This, in turn, results in higher retention, which leads to greater customer LTV. It’s a win-win.

Sales support
Over the years, we’ve iterated our sales organization but at the core is a commitment to making sure each salesperson has deep knowledge about not only each of our products and their various uses cases, but the larger ecosystem that encompasses all possible combinations and interactions. This allows them to adapt solutions based on specific customer needs.

As we’ve grown, we’ve used customer segmentation to enable sales specialization. In addition to segmenting by company size, we further segment based on vertical. This means that while each salesperson still has to be familiar with all the products, they can focus on the ones that are most common to the group of customers they are serving. Being able to specialize creates more opportunities to develop even more tailored solutions for that customer segment.

Finally, we’ve added additional supporting functions who step in to help facilitate larger, more complex sales. Our solutions architects help to flush out technical details during the sales process, while our deployment team helps with planning and managing the integration process. The lead sales person remains involved, but having these additional resources helps to ensure that each member of the team is spending their time as productively as possible.

Collaboration is critical

How you sell is as important as what you sell—especially when it comes to working with developers. You may have an amazing product, but if you aren’t able to capture your audience’s interest, it’s unlikely that they’ll take the first step and experiment with it.

To succeed, you need to align how your customers want to buy and how your sales team sells. If you’re selling to developers, this means taking a collaborative, product-led approach that leaves many of the more traditional sales approaches way behind.

“How you sell is as important as what you sell—especially when it comes to working with developers.”

Building the right kind of sales organization is no small undertaking, but it doesn’t need to be as complicated as you might think. Start by taking the time to gain a deep understanding of your buyers—who they are, what they need, and the kind of sales experience that will genuinely help them achieve their goals—and then over-deliver on their expectations.

Then, invest in hiring the right people to deliver this. These people are the face of your company. They are on your front line day in and day out, and their collaboration with and dedication to your customers can make or break the trajectory of your company. Choose wisely.

Always be strategic about how you structure and expand your sales organization alongside your products. Think ahead so that you don’t paint yourself into a corner on either front and maintain sufficient flexibility. Make sure that you keep your sales team well informed and well supported so that they can develop as your product does.

Editor’s note: This story was first published in September 2019 and updated in February 2021. The author is now Chief Revenue Officer at Fidel API.

The post How Stripe Built a Sales Organization to Successfully Sell to Developers appeared first on OpenView.

 Author and speaker Brian Robinson shares the selling formula that became the key principles to his sales success. Keep reading to find out more. RELATED: The Advantage of Non-Commissioned Sales People w/Mitch Little @Microchip In this article: What Is Sales Malpractice? Why We Suffer from Sales Malpractice The Selling Formula: How You Can Overcome […]

The post The Selling Formula w/Brian Robinson appeared first on The Sales Insider.

Remember drip irrigation system you were taught at school wherein water was fed to the plants in small quantities?

Drip email marketing is quite similar to this technique.

Drip email marketing is commonly confused with email automation. Well, they both refer to a semi-magical and super-powerful process of sending emails to your subscribers automatically. You build a series of relevant messages to be triggered at a particular time or after the subscriber activity. For instance, when you get a new subscriber, you can set up a welcome email workflow to introduce your brand and inform him or her about your products and services.

After the welcome series, you might consider following up with the recent subscribers a few days later with valuable information and links to your social media accounts. You can incentivize the recipients to make the first purchase and know more about your products or services.

Why Drip Campaigns?

Drip email campaigns not only help you acquire customers but also generate repeat business from the existing ones. More often than not, your shoppers get distracted and forget to buy the products they have added to the cart. Cart abandonment email is a type of drip campaign that can come handy in such cases.

At times, drip campaigns can be used to send useful content based on the behavior of the prospects and the resources downloaded by them. Such emails aid brand recall and keep your brand at the top of the subscriber’s mind.

By sending highly relevant and personalized emails, you can engage your prospective customers and encourage them to choose your products. As these emails are tailormade according to the subscriber’s interests, they are more likely to draw his or her attention and get opened.

It is quite evident that drip campaigns enable an automated movement of the lead towards conversion, which ultimately saves you time and manual intervention.

Drip campaigns can not only be used in the convert and close the leads, but also to delight them once the sale is made. Email marketing automation allows you to upsell and cross-sell your products to the customers and entice them to come back for another one.

Pro-tip: The key to having an effective drip marketing campaign is that the reader should not be able to decipher that it is an automated email. It should sound as human as possible.

Examples of Awesome Drip Email Campaigns

1.Welcome Email

A well-designed welcome email is the one that compels the reader to know more about your brand and builds a good first impression. It sets the right expectations and the tone of your future communications.

Here’s an example by Hawthorne. See the kind of visual appeal they have added to the email with beautiful static images and illustrations that throw light on how they work and their offerings. The last section features the testimonials from global brands, followed by a clear CTA and the link to their Instagram account.

2. Lead Nurturing Emails

Lead nurturing emails work with the primary objective of strengthening your relationship with the buyers at different stages of the sales funnel, like awareness, consideration, and decision. These emails take into account what the prospects could be looking for and offer information accordingly.

For example, if a prospect has signed up for the trial of your process and workflow management for their organization, you can send them pertinent information on how they can use your service to the maximum potential.

Here’s how Process Street does it.

3. Product Recommendation Emails

Once a customer has purchased from you, you should send product recommendation emails that match his or her interests and prompt them to make another purchase. Most of the online shoppers are impulsive and product recommendations can trigger this instinct and compel them to purchase.

These emails work on the principle of artificial intelligence and retrieve data from the history of purchases in order to send personalized offers.

Coursera does it effectively by giving utmost consideration to my past interaction with their brand. They have sent me a recommendation email that features courses based on my search history as well as courses I previously took.

4. Cart Abandonment Emails

One of the most important drip campaigns for ecommerce industry is the cart abandonment email. It reminds the customer about the products they have left in the cart and inspires them to complete the purchase. It is a good idea to send a series of cart abandonment emails within a duration of 48 hours. Sending emails at regular intervals might convince them to check out and make the purchase.

I love the cart abandonment email series by ASICS as it highlights the product left in the cart in the first email followed by a clear CTA. The second email displays the item and also features three of their bestsellers. Take a look.

5. Re-engagement Email

Re-engagement emails, like the name suggests, are used to win back dormant customers who have not opened the emails you have sent in the past three to six months. It is a run-of-the-mill occurrence that people sign up, open your emails for a few months and then forget about your brand as they get too busy with their lives or simply disinterested.

Re-engagement emails can rekindle the lost association and make them buy from you.

Check the win-back email example by Asana and see how they have used an attractive GIF in the header image followed by an engaging copy. The CTA is prominent enough to generate interest and persuade the reader to click-through.

Wrapping Up

Drip emails must be scheduled to be sent within two to seven days after the previous email communication. What’s important is that the subscriber should not receive a wrong drip campaign. Always, remember to remove the prospect from the drip campaign, lest they receive an irrelevant trigger email.

Do you have a drip email campaign strategy in place? If yes, do let us know how do you make it work in the comments below.

Today I’m going to share three CRM tools that will help improve your public relations. Let’s hope that these get your week off to a great start.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools have long been used by public relations professionals to manage relationships with media. While a journalist isn’t a public relations professionals’ customer, in a way you are selling an idea that a media outlet has to buy into.

Here are my top three CRM tools to help improve your public relations. Let me know in the comments how they work out.

Plan, Organize and Track Your Team’s Projects with Monday.com

You’re gonna learn to stop hating Mondays after you use this tool. It (beautifully) visualizes all your projects in a team environment. It also has companion apps for iOs and Android which are pretty good. Best is that the tool is intuitive and lets you have total transparency among all your shared projects.

Plan, Organize and Track Your Team’s Projects with Monday.com

Create a Marketing CRM with MailChimp

No, MailChimp isn’t a CRM tool, but it can be used as one when integrated with your CRM solution. Customer Segmentation is a key tactic for marketing professionals, but you can use a similar approach when reaching out to press. If you send out monthly or quarterly momentum press releases or recaps on the activity of your business, segmenting press by audience and sending specific, tailored messages to each group may help a journalist collect information from you about market trends, analyst reports, news, infographics, and blog posts.

Create a Marketing CRM with MailChimp

Pitch Story Ideas with Agile CRM

It’s inexpensive, easy, and powerful – all good topline features for public relations professionals. We’re on tight budgets, don’t want to complicate the uncomplicated, yet need a solution that can do a lot for a little. Agile CRM is the one. Add in a contact and then import their LinkedIn and Twitter feeds. You can also track conversations you’ve had with them over email by linking your email account.

Pitch Story Ideas with Agile CRM

Hope this gives you a head start on how better to manage your public relations with CRM tools.

Tell me in the comments.

To be successful in the modern selling age, sellers need to be constantly adding new tools to their “prospecting belts”. But you don’t have to look as far as you think, marketers use all types of tricks to drive demand and build brand awareness. Why not leverage some of those?

The post What Habits Salespeople Should Steal from Marketing Teams? appeared first on Sales Hacker.

When you understand your dream client’s challenges and know what they need to do, it can be easy to rush to give them the right answer. You know what the solution is, and you know exactly how to help your prospect get the better result they need. When this approach causes your dream client to slow down, retreat, disengage or go dark, it’s because you disconnected from them in the sales conversation. Getting too far ahead is how you lose your dream client in the sales conversation.

Too Many Steps Ahead on the Path

The contacts with whom you are having the sales conversation may be trying to understand why they are struggling to produce the result they need, what options are available to them, and whether or not something might work for them individually. In short, if they withdraw from the conversation, it is because they want to explore and collaborate.

You may know everything you need to offer them solid advice as to what they should do without any more conversation. Your dream client may still need more conversation. Because you sell every day, you are way ahead of your dream client in the sales conversation. You have disconnected from them by getting too many steps ahead of them on the path.

Decoupling from the Sales Conversation

You are in a discovery call, and you are talking with your contacts about why they might change, what is possible, and how they might think about some initiative to improve things. They are engaged with you in this conversation, and you are all together in the place. In The Lost Art of Closing, I called this commitment, Explore. You might call it discovery or diagnosis, both of which work, but I prefer the broadening of the idea, as it eliminates asking a “What’s keep you up at night” kind of approach.

Imagine this exploration provides you with the clearest of view of their problem and its solution. You are right, and you are confident. You know what your contacts need to do, so you explain the solution and how your contacts should move forward. The conversation is now different, and your contacts lean back instead of leaning forward. When this is true, it’s because you left the conversation and moved on to another conversation, one they weren’t quite prepared to have. You decoupled from them, and in doing so, you left them behind.

In the parlance of The Lost Art of Closing, you skipped a number of the ten commitments, including change, collaborate, consensus, and invest and went straight to reviewing a potential solution. To be clear, you may talk about the solution because it is a necessary part of an early conversation. If you talk about it as a way of exploring possible ideas, you stay connected by not framing the solution as your final answer (even though it very well might be).

As Fast as They Can Go and No Faster

I wrote an entire book on controlling the process, winning deals, and ensuring you don’t take more time than is necessary to win deals by providing you help your dream client have the conversations they need and to make and keep the commitments that allow them to move forward.

You might want to speed the deal along because you need it, in which case, your speed becomes your prospect’s obstacle to an agreement. Your client may want to speed things up because they want to get the better results sooner, causing them to make decisions that slow or kill the initiative because they didn’t want to take the time to do something like, acquire an executive sponsor or build consensus. Fast is slow, and slow is fast.

Some of your dream clients are going to move faster than others. A few of them are going to need more time than you believe they should. They might need to go over ground you already covered or bring in new stakeholders who need to go back to the beginning of the conversation. You cannot control the speed of the deal by skipping past the discussions and the necessary commitments.

You can only go as fast as your client can go and no faster, which makes it your job to control the process, which is to say “sell the process,” and provide the roadmap that helps your dream client know what they need to do and helps keep you connected.

Where Are You? Where Are They?

The Lost Art of Closing is my attempt to provide a map of the terrain. It is helpful to know where your client is in the sales conversation so you can serve them where they are, not where you want them to be. It is helpful to be able to share with your prospective client where they are and what comes next for most of the people with whom you engage in this process.

How you increase the speed of the deal (velocity) is by linking the necessary conversations together and accelerating the commitments, not by skipping them or pretending they aren’t needed when they are.

The idea here is a nonlinear methodology. You don’t have to have ten meetings to get through the ten commitments, and in fact, some B2C salespeople have used this framework, sharing that they accomplish nine of the ten in a single meeting. As soon as people who use this idea recognize how far out in front of their prospects they are, they go back and pick them up where they left them. Then they make sure they move them forward at a pace that provides the result both they and their prospective clients need.

The post How You Lose Your Dream Client In The Sales Conversation appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Gabe Larsen dives into why you should take the time to personalize your LinkedIn connection request, and teaches you how to send a connection request on LinkedIn. Keep reading to find out more. RELATED: Social Selling and the Law of Reciprocity In this article: The Right Approach to Social Selling: LinkedIn Connection Request LinkedIn Connection […]

The post Should Only 14% Of LinkedIn Connection Requests Be Personalized? appeared first on The Sales Insider.

You did it! You just hired a new Sales Development Representative! He or she is 24 years old, with plenty of lead generation experience, is sharp, and is ready to crush it.

Now what?

Whether they are SDR hire #1 or #20, you need to get them up and running quickly and efficiently. It’s your responsibility to show them the ropes so they can start producing for your company.

For many companies, the ramp-up time for new sales professionals typically is 6 months or more, but inside sales has changed. Sales automation tools like email and dialing technology have turned SDRs into revenue-generating machines. When you feed them the right amount of training with the right amount of technology, that machine pumps out killer results.

Here are some simple ways to ramp up SDRs to see those results as soon as possible.

1. Set Expectations and Create an SDR Onboarding Schedule

You’ve hired correctly, so your new candidate is coachable. Now give them your 2-week SDR onboarding schedule.

Make it scalable by putting every new SDR through the same process, regardless of where they are in their career. The 2 weeks should be dedicated to these areas:

• Product knowledge
• Buyer personas
• Competition
• Tools training
• Role playing (lots of it)

As a Sales Manager, you need to be actively involved with training new SDRs. This will send the message that their performance matters. It also helps you accurately evaluate new hire progress.

Here’s an example of an SDR 2-week onboarding schedule:

2. Create a Library of Sales and Company Resources

To make it easier for your new hire, create a library of all resources in the cloud. Use applications like Google Drive or Dropbox to organize the information, and share it with your entire sales force.

Here are some suggestions for your library:

• Sales Playbook – This is your sales bible! Include best practices for:
  • Prospecting
  • Objection handling
  • CRM maintenance
  • Using tools to maximize productivity

• Industry Articles – Keep your team on top of your industry by sharing:
  • Best practices
  • New trends
  • Blogs
  • Top social media profiles to follow

• Sales Articles – Include useful reading related to:
  • Cold calling and email tips
  • Social selling
  • New technologies
  • New trends in sales development

• Scripts – Include your most effective scripts, so new SDRs can get up to speed quickly.
  • Cold call scripts
  • Voicemail scripts
  • Email scripts

• Weekly Sales Huddle Slides – Provide anything you might share in a huddle.
  • PowerPoint slides from your product training
  • Sales contests
  • New changes in your sales processes

• Competitor Overviews – Keep this updated, so your SDRs stay on top of the competition.
  • SWOT analysis on each of your competitors

3. Develop a Coaching Cadence

Now, this is where SDR Ramp is important. After 2 weeks of training, the coaching should never stop.

During your weekly team huddles or weekly one-on-ones, create a team-wide training schedule. With a consistent coaching cadence, your team will stay flexible and up-to-date on fresh sales strategies, competitors, and new product releases.

Here are some topics to start off your coaching cadence:

• Mental Toughness
  • How to stay positive during sales slumps
  • How having the right attitude helps them reach their goals

• Time Management
  • How to effectively manage your day
  • How to spend time prospecting
  • How (and when) to take breaks
  • How to manage emails and calendars efficiently

• Handling Objections
  • Have your team share their responses to some of your most common objections.
  • Make sure everyone is involved so they can learn from each other.
  • Create that team culture of transparency.

• Active Listening Skills
  • “How” to listen.
  • Key pain points to listen for during the qualifying phone calls.
  • Tips to concentrate, stop selling the product, and ask the right questions.

4. Use Performance Management for Ongoing Training

Give your new hires meaningful work through Cascading Goals. Each quarter, have them set goals like:

• Read 2 books
• Increase my number of dials by 10%
• Lead in number of opportunities created

Personal or work-related, it’s important to have your reps choose their own goals and have something to work towards.

The beauty of Cascading Goals is that they can align to a team or a company goal. For example, the company sets this goal: “Close $500k in New Business in Q4.” Now, SDRs know how to track their performance, and it’s easy to visualize their impact on the company’s success.

Here’s a snapshot of how we eat our own dog food by using our solution for its Performance Management system with Goal Alignment:

5. Defend Your Culture

Startup culture isn’t about foosball & free beer. Define your culture, communicate it, and defend it from day 1. Here are some hacks on how to do this:

• Have them come in at 10/11am during the first week of onboarding.
  • This gives you time in the morning to prepare and handle your daily activities.

• Take them out for team happy hour, or a company meeting before their start date.
  • Getting them out of the office is the best way to break the new-hire ice and give them a chance to get to know the team.

• Clean their desk and have their new computer waiting for them on day 1.
  • It’s an awesome feeling when you first walk into a new job and your shiny new equipment is ready for you.

• Buy lunch on the first day.
  • Nothing better than a free lunch! Take them to a restaurant or order takeout — anything to keep the positive vibes flowing the first day on the job.

SDR Training: An Overview

The more you can do to help your SDRs internalize new information, the faster they will ramp up. When you find SDRs who fit your success profile, these 4 tasks are priority-one:

• Develop a comprehensive training program
• Provide ongoing sales coaching
• Measure and monitor sales activity levels
• Keep defending your culture

By creating this framework, you can confidently scale your sales organization and ramp up your SDRs quickly!

The post SDR Training: 5 Tips for Faster Onboarding and Ramp Up appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Read this article to find out more about sales influencer Grant Cardone’s seven simple tips to help you improve your sales follow up technique.

RELATED: Infographic: Sales Follow-Up Guide – How To Talk To Customers So They Listen

In this article:

1. Who Is Grant Cardone?
2. Why Should You Follow Up?
3. How Do I Get My Reps to Follow Up?
4. What Does Grant Recommend?
   1. Take Action
   2. Frequency Leads to Greatness
   3. Get Regular
   4. Don’t Wait Too Long
   5. Be Creative
   6. Have a Purpose
   7. Leave a Message

Seven Tips to Help Improve Your Sales Follow Up Technique

Who Is Grant Cardone?

What does it take to become a master of sales and transform your sales team into top performers?

Grant Cardone shared his thoughts on achieving sales greatness at XANT’s Sales Acceleration Summit, the world’s largest online sales summit.

Many people mistakenly believe that in order to be a great salesperson, you must be a fast talker or have a natural ability to read people.

That’s not true.

According to Grant Cardone, following up with your prospects is the difference-maker that will ensure you are the best in your space. And he should know.

Cardone is a “New York Times” bestselling author and leading authority on sales and entrepreneurship.

Why Should You Follow Up?

XANT conducted a lead response survey and determined that, on average, sales reps call a prospect only one or two times before giving up. Yet 80% of sales take five to 12 contacts.

This disconnect shows just how many opportunities are going to waste.

Even mortgage lenders find significant results when they conduct follow up emails and calls.

Whether you follow up through calls, email, or even through social media, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you followed up on your potential clients.

How Do I Get My Reps to Follow Up?

This question keeps managers up at night and leads to hair loss. Too many sales leaders struggle to get their reps to call their leads more often.

Some reasons why sales reps forget to follow-up is they get too busy and they forget. Another common reason (and mistake) why sales reps don’t follow-up is due to a misguided assumption.

They might think that customers will contact them by themselves. However, this shouldn’t be what sales reps rely on if they want to achieve their sales goals.

While many blame laziness, the culprit behind inconsistent follow-up is that many sales reps simply don’t know what to do or what to say.

What Does Grant Recommend?

Grant is a big believer in the power of follow-ups, so he shared seven simple tips to improve sales rep follow up:

1. Take Action

Planning is great, but eventually, you need to pick up the phone. According to a study, 48% of all salespeople don’t make the call.

This means that if you just start dialing, you’re already in the upper tier of sales professionals.

Having a proactive mindset is an essential skill for any sales professional. It’s not only vital during the follow-up phase, but it’s also crucial in every other part of the sales process.

Don’t wait until months pass before you follow-up on your client. Otherwise, you’re letting a great opportunity pass you by.

2. Frequency Leads to Greatness

As mentioned earlier, the vast majority of sales are done after the fourth call. After all, sales is all about repeated jabs instead of landing a knockout punch.

Therefore, reps should make five to 12 calls, not one or two.

The reason why frequency works so well is that it helps you get to know your leads. Aside from that, your clients had the opportunity to get to know you as well.

The frequency will help you figure out a client’s pain point. Therefore, you help yourself create a sales pitch that genuinely encapsulates the needs of your lead.

3. Get Regular

Grant emphasizes a regular regimen, sometimes referred to as a sales cadence.

Sales Cadence Definition: A sales cadence is a set of sequential activities you take depending on the lead.

Managers should outline in their CRM what sales activities their reps should be following over a designated period.

RELATED: 3 Best Practices For An Effective ABM Follow-Up Strategy

4. Don’t Wait Too Long

Far too many sales professionals wait too long to follow up and between follow-ups. XANT research has found that when sales reps respond within five minutes of an inquiry versus 30 minutes, they get a 21x uplift in qualifications.

Your fast response can help you connect with a lead who’s already interested in what you’re offering. People who inquire are further along the sales funnel, so they’re ready to buy compared to those who haven’t made an inquiry.

5. Be Creative

You need to find creative ways of reaching out to customers. It doesn’t always have to be a phone call or an email.

You can text, post on social media sites, send invitations to charity events, or offer referrals.

You should ask your client while you’re in a conversation with them their preferred form of contact. Once you know what they prefer, schedule the follow-up meeting with them then and there.

6. Have a Purpose

Salespeople often become an annoyance when they don’t have a clear purpose. Although the frequency is important, each attempt must come with a reason.

Make sure your follow-up questions make sense. Furthermore, make sure you aren’t asking questions you’ve already covered before.

If you’ve scheduled the follow-up beforehand, it becomes easier to tackle this problem. Since your prospect is already expecting you, you don’t have to try too hard to show that your follow-up has a purpose.

7. Leave a Message

Always leave a message when calling a prospect. Better yet, leave a message and an email.

Decision-makers are very busy, and leaving a message can set yourself apart from the many others fighting for their attention.

Aside from that, leaving messages can be a decent reminder about what you’ve covered before. An average person tends to be forgetful, so a brief rundown of what you just talked about is sure to be helpful.

You can watch Grant’s full presentation, or any of our other sales summit speakers, on-demand by registering today.

A sales follow-up is a crucial step that any great salesperson knows to take. It’s a simple way of showing that you care about the person on the other end of your sales pitch.

From developing a sales cadence to leaving messages, there are many simple, yet effective steps you can take to level up your follow-up strategy. Try them out with your next prospect soon to see what positive changes happen to your sales results.

Which of the tips above have you tried, and what were the results? Let us know by leaving a comment down below!

Up Next:

• 14 Helpful Tips For Working From Home While Social Distancing
• XANT Introduces Industry’s First Mobile Sales Engagement Solution
• 4 Simple Questions That Will Transform Your Sales Process

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on March 18, 2016, and has been updated for quality and relevancy.

The post Grant Cardone’s 7 Simple Tips To Improve Sales Follow-Up appeared first on XANT.

Keep reading to learn what it takes to be a successful business development manager and leader in this article. RELATED: ‘The Sales Development Playbook’ [FREE E-BOOK] Trish Bertuzzi In this article: What Makes Business Development a Challenging Job? Secret Strategies to Motivate Your Team Create a Connection Lead From the Front Use Sales Gamification Permanently Train […]

The post 11 Secrets Of Successful Business Sales Development Leaders [INFOGRAPHIC] appeared first on The Sales Insider.

You get to work in the morning. Your favorite CRM overflows with the names of people who signed up for your product recently. You can also see everyone who’ve been using it for a while. Sound familiar?

And so, you begin. You start calling and emailing all those leads frantically. Perhaps you go through the entire list one name after another or focus on the leads that you think are the most likely to close now. 

But, eventually, reality hits you. You realize that you’re wasting time. Your efforts generate zero traction, and you start suspecting why. You’re reaching out to the wrong people!

What’s worse, you have absolutely no idea who the right ones would be. You begin second-guessing everything you do, and it’s a downward spiral from then on. 

Unfortunately, I see this happening to SaaS inside sales teams over and over again. They get the leads and plenty of them. It’s just that they have absolutely no idea which of those people are worth their time and effort. 

Now, before I show you how to solve it – and the good news is that you can – let me give you a bit more context on the problem. 

Why you have no choice but to qualify leads and identify hot opportunities upfront

No leads are the same, and I’m sure you know that already. According to some research studies, even up to 50% of them might not be a good fit for your product. 

But do you know the real cost of not telling those people apart?

You cannot reach the best opportunities at the right moment. You don’t know who they are, after all! But with timing being such a critical factor in sales, the cost of this is much higher than just missing out on a deal or two: 

You dilute your brand and trust in the process. 

I always illustrate this problem with a company I use to run Refiner. Its software helps us manage the key marketing channel. However, as we use it for ourselves only, we have little or no need for many features on the product’s higher plans. Hell, our usage levels don’t come close to the plan’s limits. 

Yet, every week we get automated emails asking us to hop on a call, book a demo or blatantly giving us discounts to upgrade.

It was fun watching their efforts at first (“Look, they don’t score users, clearly. They haven’t asked us a single qualifying question! Maybe we should reach out to them too?”) Eventually, however, it has become irritating, to the point of starting to consider switching vendors. 

You waste time processing low-quality leads. I think this goes without saying. With around half of the leads not being a good fit, the chances of you focusing on low-quality ones are quite high.

You burn out quickly. This is particularly true if you have to process all inbound leads – free trial signups, freemium users, top-of-the-funnel marketing-qualified leads, etc. – without considering their quality. 

I’ve seen startups reaching out to every newsletter signup with a direct sales message, actually - no nurturing cadence or pre-qualification. None of the company’s salespeople loved this approach, of course, and the staff rotation was always ridiculously high. 

You could, potentially, close bad deals and harm the business. In the amazing guide to lead qualification, Steli pointed out rightly:

Sometimes you might successfully sell to people who shouldn't buy your product. This isn't just bad for the customer whom you persuaded into a bad buying decision—selling to the wrong customers is also bad for you and your company.

It’s true. You can be so good at selling that you’ll convert a low-quality lead. But will that benefit your business in the long run? I doubt it. 

Without qualifying, you cannot assess or measure the lead quality. You have no way to identify how many good leads do you generate, on average, in fact.

You cannot build any scalable processes for processing leads either. You have to rely on the team to process all leads or use the gut feeling to spot potentially high-value opportunities. 

Finally, you have no idea how to make the conversation relevant. With little or no context, besides the person’s name and other basic details, you will, most likely, have no idea what to talk to them about or how to start the conversation to make it relevant to them. 

When you qualify leads, particularly, if you follow the system I’ve outlined below, you will know their context. You’ll know whether they’ve been logging into the app often, or how many of their employees use it, or whether they’ve been inviting new people over.

Insights like these offer a great opportunity to kick start a meaningful conversation. But you need to uncover them first, of course. 

So, let’s talk about that. 

How to qualify and score SaaS leads

Compared to other businesses, your SaaS company receives an incredible variety of leads.

A law firm, for example, would get business inquiries, mostly. True, some firms might offer lead magnets and other lead generation assets. But even then, their efforts are geared for connecting with the customer quickly and making the sale. 

SaaS, on the other hand, gets freemium users, free trial signups, demo requests, direct pre-sale inquiries, RFPs, in the case of enterprise products, newsletter signups, lead magnet signups, content-generated leads and a whole lot more. 

It’s crazy, actually…

Another difference is the difficulty to become a lead. When you reach out to a law firm, you most likely have some sort of a problem that requires legal assistance. It would be impossible to engage with such a firm otherwise, wouldn't it?

But what’s stopping someone from signing up for your free account or even a trial? All they have to do is type their name and email and they’re in. Unfortunately, this means that they can do it on a whim or out of sheer boredom too. 

I hear these challenges echoed by many SaaS founders. 

They tell me how demo requests and sales inquiries generate relatively good-quality leads. But trials, freemiums, and other lead sources deliver a mixed bag of opportunities.

Some of these people can become clients, of course. But many of them have signed up without any intention to use the product for longer. 

Now, I understand why SaaS offers a low barrier to sign up. It’s a numbers game after all. But it doesn’t make your job any easier, doesn’t it? It’s up to you to identify those best people and convert them into paying customers.

But how can you figure out their buying intent easily, or tell whether someone is a decision-maker at all?

Enter lead qualification and scoring

I’ve been using both terms – lead qualification and scoring – quite often in this guide so far. So, before we go any further, let’s define them quickly.

Lead scoring is a process of ranking inbound leads on a scale based on their different characteristics and behavior to determine their interest in a company’s products or services.

Lead qualification, on the other hand, helps to determine whether that person indeed matches your ideal client profile (ICP) and whether they are worth processing by the sales team right now.

Both form one process, with lead scoring happening first, followed by qualification to identify the biggest fit.

(A quick note: In this guide, I’m assuming that you know who your ICP is. If you’re not sure, check out this amazing ICP guide from Steli.)

What information do you need to collect to score and qualify leads?

1. Explicit data collected during the lead generation process from the lead directly (i.e. signup form, asking for their name, and email.)
2. Implicit data your company has uncovered about them (through enriching customer profiles, for example.) This might include the company size and other information about it, the person’s title, their location, and many other characteristics. 
3. Behavioral data revealing the person’s interactions with the product and their engagement as a user. 

Combined with the other two, behavioral data helps you track the purchase intent signals (i.e. inviting more people in the company to the app, high usage levels, etc.).

Scoring leads using the insights above

The biggest factor for your scoring success is knowing which characteristics identify your ICP. 

To develop the scoring model, you assign values, both positive and negative, to each ICP characteristic that you can uncover with the insights above. 

Take the email address for example. If you sell to customers, the quality of the email (i.e. whether it’s on a free domain or a business account) may not matter that much to you. But if you want to work with SMBs or mid-market companies, any signups from Gmail accounts might indicate lower purchase intent. 

Depending on your ICP you could assign negative values to all signups from free email accounts. 

(Note: email quality might not discount the person as an opportunity. Their usage levels might reveal a serious intent. However, it might be an indication of their value.) 

The same goes for other explicit, implicit, and behavioral data – job title, company size, location, product usage, engagement, etc. 

Based on the scores, you can divide leads into different categories, and know whom to reach out to and when. How you divide them depends on your ICPs, product, pricing level, and many other factors. 

Here’s one example of lead qualification criteria and how to act on it. I’ve used sample numbers below but they should give you a good indication of how to develop a similar framework.

• Score 91 or higher: Notifying the sales team about those opportunities to process immediately. 
• Score 71-90: Gathering more information or product usage data about other leads to gain clarity about their intent. 
• Score 61-70: Manually evaluating to look for signs that they could still be worth processing. This might mean leaving them out for now but watching for any signs that their score could go up regularly.
• Score 60 and below: Discarding as low value.

Wrapping it up

Sometimes you have just too many leads to process. When you go through the list one by one, the first thing you realize is that most of the time you’re reaching out to the wrong people anyway. 

Among other things, qualifying those people beforehand allows you to:

• Focus on the biggest opportunities only, and do so at the right moment.
• Maximize your productivity and output. 
• Improve your overall lead quality
• Make each sales conversation more relevant to the lead. 

I hope that this guide has helped you realize the value of lead qualification, and outlined how to get started doing so. 

About the author

Moritz Dausinger is the founder and CEO of Refiner.io, a lead scoring and qualification tool helping B2B SaaS companies with a self-service model to go upmarket by identifying their high-value opportunities on autopilot.