Rnordman

Whether it's your salary or your cable bill, a lot of life is up for negotiation. 

Here's what works, according to the research.

Know your context.

Is the negotiation one-shot or long-term?

In "The Mind and the Heart of the Negotiator," Kellogg management professor Leigh Thompson notes that the interaction between a customer and the waitstaff at a highway roadside diner is one of the few one-shot negotiations that happen in life — there's little chance that patron or staff will see each other again. 

But every other negotiation is long-term, with employment negotiations as a primary example. If it's long-term, you need to manage not only monetary value, but the impression you're making.

Make the first offer.

It makes use of the anchoring effect.

If you start high, the hiring manager may adjust the figure down slightly. But that's typically a stronger position than starting low and trying to negotiate up.

"Whoever makes the first offer essentially drops an anchor on the table," Thompson tells Business Insider. "I might say that your opening offer is ridiculous, but nevertheless, unconsciously, I've been anchored." 

Make an aggressive offer.

Columbia University negotiation scholar Adam Galinsky says that people are overly cautious when making first offers. 

On HBS Working Knowledge, Galinsky likens negotiating a salary to selling a house: 

Take the perspective of the seller: more extreme first offers lead to higher final settlements...

High-anchor offers lead buyers to focus on a negotiated item's positive attributes. In addition, an aggressive first offer allows you to offer concessions and still reach an agreement that's much better than your alternatives.

In contrast, a nonaggressive first offer leaves you with two unappealing options: Make small concessions or stand by your demands.

I’m often asked what is the difference (or perhaps more correctly, what are the differences) between marketing and public relations.

While I can provide a pithy (but ultimately unsatisfying) answer, it’s an issue that comes with a number of layers and thus deserves a deeper explanation. So here we go!

Definition of public relations

My definition of public relations is deepening the intensity of connection an entity (company, individual, organisation) has with the people who matter most to the success of their business, cause or issue.

These could be your clients or customers, industry influencers such as analysts, bloggers or journalists; it may also be a local council, industry body or government authority if they’re somehow integral to the successful running of your business.

Notice I did not mention generating media coverage for your organisation. While there’s a definite need for companies to gain editorial exposure for their brand, product or service, by just focusing on this aspect you will miss out on the myriad opportunities that fall under the PR banner.

If I was to ‘dumb down’ my definition, PR is very much about establishing, growing and maintaining reputation. Of course building reputation requires increasing awareness, credibility and influence of, and trust in, an organisation.

Why is reputation important? Because people do business with people and organisations they know, like and trust. In today’s connected economy, reputation is everything – indeed, it’s the foundation that holds up entire businesses.

Marketing, on the other hand (and in the interests of clarity, I’m going to be blunt here) – is all about ‘selling stuff’.

I’ve dealt with hundreds of marketers of all persuasions over several decades and the one thing they all have in common is they want to sell more widgets, they want to win more clients for the services they provide; they want to sign up more members to their website; they want more people to visit their venue.

Reputation versus selling stuff

Do marketers place equal measure on reputation? Of course they do – the smart ones realise people do business with brands they trust.

Are PR people interested in selling more stuff? If you’re in the marketing communications side of public relations, of course you do – you want your efforts to lead to tangible business results.

Example marketing PR tactics might include:

• development of a multimedia platform (off which multiple promotional activities can ‘hang’);
• staging an event-based brand experience, public stunt and/or social experiment (I love this campaign, part of a strategy developed by PR firm Edelman);
• running a blogger and social influencer ‘outreach’ campaign;
• leveraging a brand’s sponsorship investment;
• initiating and managing community partnership initiatives;
• creating and socialising content designed to facilitate conversation around a particular topic or issue;
• … and yes, publicity and media relations activity (this could include everything from staging a media-only event through to direct one-on-one contact with journalists to pitch a story).

(By way of comparison, the corporate communications side of PR tends to be longer term in nature and more focused on building a favourable perception of a business or organisation; it includes functions such as managing crises and issues, communicating corporate governance initiatives, building relationships with key internal and external stakeholders etc. Importantly, there will often be crossover of corporate and marketing communication activities).

Breathtakingly broad

I’m not a classically trained marketer but from my experience a professional marketer’s responsibility is breathtakingly broad and includes:

• gaining insights from the market to inform new opportunities to increase revenue;
• developing (and pricing) new products and services for the marketplace;
• launching and promoting said products and services (including overseeing supporting advertising, digital and PR activities, and dealing with retailers in the case of physical products);
• growing and developing product and organisational brands.

Each one of those marketing elements requires deep expertise, and I ‘dips me lid’ to those professionals who can master such a broad scope of work!

So just as PR people are more often than not boxed in as publicity merchants – and marketers painted into the corner of just advertising and promotion – we can see there is much, much more to both sides of the equation.

That said, I’m going to finish up by making the following generalised (but I believe, fairly accurate) statements:

• Marketers will often put sales ahead of brand.
• PR will put brand (reputation) ahead of sales.
• But the good ones will find a way to align the two.
• Marketers prefer pushing one-way promotional messages directly to consumers.
• PR people prefer sparking conversation as a way of fuelling two-way engagement directly with consumers and stakeholders as well as via third-party influencers.

But the good ones on either side will see the other’s point of view and adapt accordingly.

And just to throw one final layer of perspective:

Marketers will often bring in PR people to add value to a campaign, but in some organisations, PR (or corporate comms or public affairs – the departments sometimes go under different names) will lead the way. Confused? :)

For small businesses, all you need to know is that much of what you do currently probably falls under a PR remit.

Creating content that builds reputation and authority; engaging with people and influencers on social media; speaking at events (or running your own), partnering with local community groups, or building relationships with bloggers, podcasters and journalists.

These activities, my friends, constitute PR today.

*Editors Note: This post was originally published as a guest post on SalesHacker.com by our Head of Sales Development at SalesLoft, Sean Kester, and our Director of Sales, Anthony Zhang.

Every Sales and Sales Development Team Need a SLA (Service Level Agreement). Here’s Our Service Level Agreement Template at SalesLoft.

Sales Development is not a new concept, but it is finally coming out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

High growth companies have used this form of professional appointment setting as the main driving force in their customer acquisition machine.

The Sales Development team works alongside the sales organization to set qualified demos and appointments and therefore must form an agreement. A SLA (or Service Level Agreement) outlines the “code of conduct” between the two departments. The goal is to have a documented set of rules, guidelines, and expectations between the two parties to remove gray area and leave as much black and white as possible.

The key to success is having the head of both departments in the same room to hammer out the compromise. Open dialogue and transparent communication is integral to ensuring that the needs of both parties are met and that buy-in from both sides is achieved.

Our Head of Sales Development, Sean Kester, and our Director of Sales, Anthony Zhang, collaborated to create this internal SLA.

1. Lead Qualification

Sales Development Responsibility: SDRs qualify prospects based on the first two sets of the ANUM model, Authority and Need. If the prospect does not have Authority (Can they sign? Were they asked to look into this solution by their manager? Do they hold the credit card?), or Need (Do their prospects exist on LinkedIn? Do they have a sales team? Do they actively prospect to discover new leads?), then the Sales Development Rep will not receive credit or commission for the demo.

• Outbound: Outbound SDRs agree that they will identify and prospect only into the ideal customer profile:
  • Titles: VP’s, Manager’s, Directors of Sales, Marketing, Inside Sales, Business Development, Sales Development, Market Development, etc.
  • Departments: Sales, Sales Development, Marketing, Marketing Development, etc.
  • Company Sizes: SMB, Enterprise, etc.
  • Industries: ex. Software, Marketing, IT, Finance, etc.
  • Function: Lead generation and new business development
• Inbound: Inbound SDRs will respond to marketing generated leads and inquiries to identify whether the marketing generated lead falls under the Authority and Need qualifiers before they pass to the Sales Executive.

Sales Executive Responsibility: The Sales Executive will assume that the prospect / lead falls under the first two sets of the ANUM model, Authority and Need.The Sales Executive will dig further into the prospect’s situation with specific questions to identify problems and gaps in their prospecting strategies, and create a sense of Urgency. Once Urgency is created through various questions, pricing is presented and budget is identified.

2. Lead Passing:

Sales Development Responsibility: Once the lead has been qualified, the SDR will access the Lead Pass Sheet and pass the lead out in a Round-Robin fashion. If the Sales Executive that is next in line is not available for the demo at the proposed time, the SDR may skip that particular Sales Executive and move to the next one in order to get the demo in place. However, the SDR agrees to make the previous Sales Executive their priority, and pass the lead to them when the next demo has been scheduled.

Sales Executive Responsibility: The Sales Executive understands that a “perfect” Round-Robin lead pass system is not always feasible because of conflicting times, calendars, and other priorities. The Sales Executive will trust the Sales Development Team and Process in receiving a fair and equal amount of demos.

3. Lead Ownership:

Sales Development Responsibility: The SDR will assume full ownership and responsibility over the prospect until the prospect has completed a demo with the Sales Executive. In cases of Demo Missed, Demo Rescheduled, Demo Cancelled, and No-Shows, the SDR is required to reschedule the meeting back onto the Sales Executive’s calendar.

The Sales Development Rep will not receive any commission until the demo has been completed.
It is in the SDRs’ best interest to send a reminder email the night before or morning of the meeting to ensure the best chance of the prospect showing up.

Sales Executive Responsibility:

• Post Demo: The Sales Executive will assume full ownership and responsibility over the prospect once the demo has been completed. This includes Follow-Up Demos, meeting with additional members from the team, and coordinating next steps.
• Prospect Running Late: The Sales Executive will have a “small window of ownership” if the prospect is running late. The Sales Executive may send an email to the prospect 5-7 minutes after the proposed meeting time to confirm the meeting and send a reminder to the prospect. After 11-13 minutes, the Sales Executive must chat, call, or email the SDR to notify them that the prospect was a No-Show.
• Giving Up Ownership: If the prospect becomes disengaged and “goes dark,” it is the Sales Executive’s responsibility to either continue to re-engage, or pass it back to the SDR lead pool to prospect into with the understanding that the prospect will fall back into Round-Robin rotation.
• Failure to Show: If the Sales Executive, in a case of emergency, cannot run the demo that has been scheduled, they must immediately notify the SDR and work with them to find a substitute Sales Executive that can run the meeting. The Sales Executive will also forfeit their demo to the other Sales Executive. It will not count against the Sales Executive that takes the demo, and the Sales Executive will not be backfilled for their forfeited demo. If a Sales Executive does not show up (or is late) for a demo that is scheduled on their calendar, punitive measures may be taken.

4. Google Calendar:

Sales Development Responsibility: The SDR should not schedule any meetings over the Sales Executive’s existing events. The SDR understands that if an open slot is available on the Sales Executive’s calendar, then it is safe to assume that the Sales Executive is available at that time. If a Sales Development Rep schedules a meeting on top of an existing event on the Sales Executive’s calendar, it is the Sales Development Rep’s responsibility to reschedule that meeting for the Sales Executive.

Sales Executive Responsibility: The Sales Executive is responsible for keeping their Google calendar updated at all times. They must block off all “busy times” on their calendar, which includes holidays, vacations, lunches, doctors appointments, phone calls, meetings, and other times at which they may not be available to run a demo. The calendar must be visible and clear in order for the SDR to schedule a demo. The Sales Executive agrees to forfeit the demo if they fail to mark an existing event on a calendar, and a demo is scheduled over it. In essence, they will be skipped on the Lead Pass Sheet.

5. Marking Demos in CRM and SDR Compensation:

Sales Development Responsibility: Once the demo has been scheduled, the SDR will create a specific Open Task for the Sales Executive in Salesforce (i.e. BDR Demo 1) for the Sales Executive to close after the demo has been completed. The SDR understands that they are paid based on Demos Completed by the Sales Executive team. The SDR will not actively close any Sales Executive assigned tasks. If this occurs, it is considered fraud by the company (paying themselves) and punitive steps may be taken.

Sales Executive Responsibility: The Sales Executive understands that the SDR is paid based on their number of Demos Completed on a monthly basis, and are reported on on a weekly basis. The Sales Executive agrees to close the Open Task assigned from the SDR as early as possible, preferably right after the demo has been completed or, at the latest, by the End of Business that day.

6. Trust and Respect Amongst The Teams:

Sales Development Responsibility: The SDR will assume that the Sales Executive is operating under the best interest of the company, and will do their best to close the deal. The SDR understands that the Sales Executive will, to their fullest potential, understand the situation, needs, and pains of the prospect, and will not “unqualify too early” to “give up too soon.”

Sales Executive Responsibility: The Sales Executive will assume that all leads passed over qualified to the best of the SDR’s ability, and were not passed “unscreened.” The Sales Executive will not treat the SDR as a “lesser” person or a personal assistant. The Sales Executive understands that the SDR has one of the hardest jobs at the company and will, at every opportunity, show appreciation and support. They are, after all, lining the Sales Executives’ pockets.

The post Our Service Level Agreement Template for Sales Development appeared first on SalesLoft.

Are you a conservatory supplier?

Have you noticed that it is harder to reach your customers these days?

If the answer to either of these questions is yes then this article is for you.

I’m going to show you how your prospective customers are researching what conservatory to buy and who they want to buy it from.

With 57% of the buying decision already being made before they contact your sales team, how on earth do you influence their buying decision?

The customer knows there is a problem that needs solved

The first thing your prospects are doing is researching online for solutions for their space challenges.

At this point they may not even they know they need a conservatory and a conservatory may not even be the best solution for them.

Maybe it is a garage conversion or orangery that would be the best fit for their needs.

They want to discover this for themselves and don’t want your salesperson to tell them.

Have you noticed over the last few years that when you speak to customers they already know what they want?

This is because they have done their research and know what they need.

They have read blogs and forums; they have downloaded free guides and watched helpful videos on the subjects.

Are you providing your prospective customers with this kind of content?

When I did a search on Google for “which conservatory should I buy?” not one conservatory firm came up answering this question.

I even searched YouTube and the one below is the best I could find.

Difference between an Orangery and a Conservatory

The customer recognises a need for a solution like yours

Now that they have completed their initial research they have now established a buying criteria and are looking at which conservatory supplier can best help them.

They are still not ready to speak to you at this stage as they have not decided if you are the one that can help them.

How do they decide?

By the content on your website.

Do you  have case studies on your website?

Do you have content that answers questions around prices or the process you go through in building their conservatory?

These are the questions they want answered and will look for firms that do and these will be the firm they contact.

Evaluate conservatory suppliers

Now they know what they want and have a list of potential conservatory builders in mind it is time to decide which ones to contact.

Do you just offer a ‘contact us’ form?

Or maybe a ‘get a quote’ form?

Maybe you should think of a softer approach like a free consultation to start the conversation with the customer.

They will then have given you permission to engage in a sales conversation and if you try to have this kind of conversation before this point you will just turn them away.

Conclusion

To effectively sell to your buyers today you have to be helpful and answer the questions they are asking before they contact you.

Create content on your website that answers these questions and you will build trust and authority with your buyers.

They are then more likely to buy from you. Every salesperson knows, you need to build trust and sales talk won’t do that, being helpful will.

This is how people are buying conservatories now and you need to adapt to their behaviour, if you don’t you are leaving a lot of sales on the table and inviting your competition to overtake you and to become the biggest authority in conservatories.

Would you not rather that be you?

Editor’s Note: Guest post by Ash Alhashim, Director of Sales Development at Optimizely. Ash will be speaking at the upcoming Sales Hacker Conference in NYC on April 30th. 

I’d like to take a trip down memory lane with you. All the way back to 2005.

Imagine:

You’re walking down the street, texting on your new Blackberry Electron. You jokingly text your friend back, “You shut your mouth when you’re talking to me!” one of the many lines you shamelessly recycle from Wedding Crashers. What a great film. That Owen Wilson guy’s on fire. It can only get better for him from here.

As you reminisce about more great 2005 movie quotes, you realize you’re across the street from an Apple Store. Maybe you should go inside and check out one of those new iPods your friend keeps yammering on about? You decide it’s worth a shot, and you walk in the door–blinded by the array of shiny Apple products.

Okay, we’re back in 2015 now. [Thank goodness; I wasn’t sure how much more Kelly Clarkson I could take]. What happens next in our collective hypothetical memory is the subject I’d like to dive into in the following article. The question I’m posing is:

“What is the best way for an Apple Sales Rep to facilitate the sale of an iPod to our curious, but apathetic, prospect?”

BANT is Dead

When you think about BANT [qualifying sales prospects by inquiring about Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe] as it relates to this B2C sales scenario, you realize pretty quickly how ineffective it is in galvanizing a prospect like this one into action.

Imagine:

Apple Rep: Hi sir, how can I help you?

You: I wanted to learn more about this iPod thing I keep hearing about.

Apple Rep: Sure thing! The iPod is our best-selling item right now, happy to tell you more. But before I do that, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?

You: Uhh, sure.

Apple Rep: Do you have budget?

You: What?

Apple Rep: Do you have $300-$400 set aside for an MP3 player?

You: I mean, I do have money, but I didn’t think—

Apple Rep: Well do you have buying power?

You: blank stare

Apple Rep: What is your need for an MP3 player?

You: Well, I don’t need one, I just thought—

Apple Rep: Do you have a pain caused by listening to music on a portable CD player? What is it about listening to CDs that keeps you up at night?

You: Dude. You must’ve sipped too much sizzurp. I’m outtie.

The point of that hyperbolic conversation was to show how ineffective BANT is when it comes to selling products in nascent markets. The iPod was a new technology. It changed the way we consume media. Therefore, Apple was “selling into uncharted territory.” Because of this, the Law of Diffusion of Innovation applied to iPod sales. This theory, presented by Everett Rogers in the early 1960s, suggests that the rate at which new technologies are adopted is a standard distribution.

Law of Diffusion of Innovation, visualized [Source:Wikipedia]

Rogers broke up the curve into five distinct audience segments, that anyone who has read Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm should recognize: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. The early + late majority segments make up almost 70% of the market (moving forward I’ll refer to these two segments simply as the “market majority”).

It’s safe to say that if a new technology or idea doesn’t “cross the chasm” and gain majority market share, companies selling products in that space won’t last. Note that I am talking about category adoption, not product adoption. In other words, I’m not saying that if Salesforce’s CRM product doesn’t capture the market majority, Salesforce will fail. I am saying that if CRMs don’t gain widespread adoption, the idea of CRM will fail.

BANT works when you’re selling to nerdy innovators and early adopters who can’t wait to be the first person in their social groups to adopt this tech. These folks might even buy in spite of BANT.  I was an early adopter of the iPod and iPhone, and I would have let the sales reps flip through my high school yearbook and ridicule my hemp necklaces and JNCO jeans just so that I could get my hands on those devices first.

“BANT works when you’re selling to nerdy innovators and early adopters…” – @ashalhashim
Click To Tweet

But an interesting thing happens when you start selling to early majority folk: the customer’s desire to change their own behavior dissipates. People, on average, become more cautious and pragmatic. The attitude of the buyer goes from “man, I can’t wait to trash that stupid Discman,” to considering how to get the most from that stupid Discman. In other words, people in the early majority are still annoyed with the limitations of the incumbent technology, but they believe that incremental improvements to that technology will suffice. Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

The biggest problem with BANT, though, is that it assumes that the customer not only has budget, a need, and a timeline for evaluating and purchasing software in place: as a prerequisite, it assumes that the customer is aware of the fact that they should be buying a product like yours in the first place.

I wouldn’t be doing you much good, though, if I just wrote this to let you know that BANT sucks.  The purpose of this article is to offer saleshumans selling disruptive, game-changing products a new sales discovery framework that is better suited for the type of conversation you will be having with prospects who are in the “unconscious incompetence” stage of learning [in other words, individuals who not only don’t know about what you do, but do not recognize the learning deficit].

The model I’m referring to is GROW-ROI.

GROW-ROI stands for:

• Goals
• Roadmap
• Obstacles
• Widen

• Reference
• Outcomes
• Introduction

GROW-ROI puts discovery at the top of the sales funnel, instead of qualifying and disqualifying. It is an attitude change: instead of looking for reasons to disqualify a prospect for not having budget, need, or timeline established, you’re trying to find common ground so that you can push the opportunity through. [I’d argue that authority is always relevant, because you always want to be talking to the right person].

GROW-ROI makes the middle of your funnel, the shaky ground where the SDR hands off the buyer to the Account Executive, much fatter than it was with BANT.

But enough with the GROW-ROI ad. Let’s explore it in detail.

Goals

In order to have intelligent and meaningful conversations with prospects, you need to understand what they are trying to accomplish. Now, this doesn’t mean interrogating them for 45 minutes so that you can hand off a “qualified lead” over to an AE. It means building rapport.

Consider what your product helps companies do. Now ask yourself “why does that matter?” When you have an answer, ask yourself why that answer matters. Keep doing this until you hit a wall. You’re [hopefully] landed at “helps companies make more money” or “helps companies save money” or some combination of the two. “Goals” questions should be focused on the big picture, and how much money or savings they want to see within a set timeframe.

Note, that goals should be quantifiable, measurable gains. If you get fuzzy answers here, dig in deeper. How much additional revenue do you need to make this year? How many more marketing qualified leads do you need in order to meet your goals? The best way to do this is to start off by learning what’s going on today. Hint: this part of the conversation has nothing to do with your product, and often has little to do with what your product directly solves.

Roadmap

Roadmap questions are ones that help you understand how your prospect plans on accomplishing their goals. What is your plan of attack for making more money from your website? Do you plan on spending more on AdWords to drive more traffic to your site? Retargeting? Do you plan on doing more with your social media presence? There are so many ways to make more money online.

A majority of the time, especially when you’re selling to a prospect that is squarely in the market majority, their answer as to how they’re going to accomplish their goal will have little to do with the solution you’re selling. This is okay!

At Optimizely, we sell a product that helps companies improve the digital experiences they deliver to their customers—and increase online revenue as a result—through A/B testing and personalization. But, when we ask prospects how they plan on making more money from their websites, one answer we don’t often get from early majority prospects is “through optimization.”

That’s because most companies aren’t doing it today, and going back to the unconscious incompetence point from earlier, don’t even know that they should be testing.  They want to do more of the “tried and true” stuff that has typically worked in the past. The problem is, what worked yesterday won’t necessarily work today. This is where “teaching, tailoring, and taking control” lessons of The Challenger Sale really become important. You’re in the process of learning about your prospect’s business. Soon, the time will come to teach and take control.

Obstacles

What challenges does your prospect anticipate she might face in trying to accomplish her goals? What could prevent her from getting to the finish line? Chances are she’s tried to accomplish similar goals in the past. What went wrong then, and how is she ensuring that history doesn’t repeat itself?

Widen

In Matt Dixon’s The Challenger Sale, this is referred to as “reframing.” What you are essentially doing here is helping the prospect realize that the goals and challenges she is speaking about is not the entire picture. There is more to it.

Marketers will often tell us at Optimizely,, with the very best of intentions, that their goals are to run A/B tests in order to increase conversion rates.

Why does that matter? And, is that the whole picture?

The reason websites care about increasing conversion rates is that, all other variables held constant, higher conversion rates equal more revenue. So it’s not about increasing conversion rates; it’s about making more money.

On top of that, many of our prospects don’t realize what Optimizely can do around personalization, particularly if they have a lot of first or third party data about their website visitors. We do a lot more than just A/B testing. This is where we  help the buyer realize that.

Reference

Now is the time to teach through storytelling. The time to juxtapose the buyer’s limited understanding of how your product might be able to help with a clear, mind-blowing example of the effect your product was able to have on one of your existing customers.

When you give a reference, go big. Don’t match the buyer up with a case study of a company that did the thing they think they can do with your product. Show them what’s possible if they start doing the thing your product gets them doing.

Try to be as specific and relatable as possible (by vertical, by buyer persona, or by use-case] as that will help make your story resonate. But, most importantly, offer a great narrative!

Outcomes

What did your product do for the customer you just referenced? There are two directions you can generally go here:

Person: What were the benefits that person reaped? Did she get promoted? A raise? A big ol’ bonus? This is a great way to generate excitement with your buyer.

Organization: What were the positive implications for the business line? What did that mean for the business as a whole?

Introduction

This is the part where you wake them up. That daydream with the big wins was nice, but now is the time to bring them back to reality. Here, you will introduce them to the account executive who will manage their evaluation cycle.

Introduction also means stands for introducing the buyer to the evaluation and purchasing plan. It’s important to remember, after all, that you are a saleshuman: you specialize in selling software for a living. Your buyer is likely not a professional procurer of technology.  Be professional but firm, and set expectations for what your sales process looks like. Let them also know what all all involved parties–this includes them–will have to do along the path towards wild success.

Conclusion:

I hope this was helpful. It has been for us at Optimizely. Crossing the chasm is never easy, and we struggled to figure out how to get out of our sales funk as we grew past the early adopters stage [MISS U GUYZZZZ!].

The Tao Te Ching teaches us:

“When they think that they know the answers,
people are difficult to guide.
When they know that they don’t know,
people can find their own way.”

Lao Tzu couldn’t have been more correct.

When it comes to selling products in the early majority of emerging markets, there is an order of operations. First, you must make the buyer aware of his learning deficit. Do this by reframing the conversation, and then persuade him through storytelling. Once you you’ve done these things, set expectations as to what he’ll need to do in order to be able to actually use the product. From there, the selling process gets much easier.

Just don’t screw up the demo :)

Sales Hacker Conference New York

Join Ash at the next Sales Hacker Conference where he will presenting on Ramping Up Sales Development at One of the Fastest Growing SaaS Companies.

View Now

The post Why You Should Stop Using BANT appeared first on Sales Hacker.

LinkedIn isn’t just for your personal network; this powerful professional network can be leveraged to boost your business as well.

A strong professional brand will provide you with numerous resources, help your company stand out and keep you informed on what is happening in your industry. It can also be a great resource for hiring, marketing and potentially even in-bound sales as you form relationships and get involved in relevant conversations through this diverse platform.

Here are 3 ways every small business can make their LinkedIn business page a resourceful, effective asset.

1. It will help you with hiring

Even if you aren’t currently hiring, your business will benefit from keeping an updated, engaging LinkedIn profile for your brand. It is important for any small business to have an online presence.

A branded LinkedIn page for your business will help you stay connected and informed of trends in your market’s employment field, job postings from other competitors or similar industries you can stay apprised of and keep you in conversations with your future potential workforce.

You can also use your LinkedIn small business page to build relationships with others in your industry. Prospective hires may take notice of your business long before they reach out to you directly, so it’s a great way to keep conversations going with passive candidates that could become active when you’re ready to hire.

When you are ready to start looking for potential employees, utilize the LinkedIn search function to find contacts in your industry and location to do some active recruiting vs. simply posting job descriptions alone.

When it is time to hire, you will also be able to post an open position using LinkedIn Jobs, which will allow you to set parameters to search for a targeted set of applicants. You will be able to view applicants’ profiles immediately and also see what potential applicants have viewed your job posting. LinkedIn guarantees a minimum of ten applicants per posting, so it can be a great way for a small business to leverage more target hiring tactics than a Craigslist or Want Ad post alone.

2. It will help you with sales

Although not through direct sales, LinkedIn will help you build relationships through the content you provide with potential vendors, partners and most importantly, clients.

LinkedIn allows you to publish content and share it to those in your professional network. This is a great way to build trust for your brand. In the current era of social media, passive social selling is becoming another effective online marketing tool your business can utilize. LinkedIn recognizes this and offers businesses a service called Sales Navigator, which allows you to search with specific filters to identify high quality sales leads.

LinkedIn has over 347 million members; that is a large pool of potential customers and professional connections. LinkedIn Ads gives businesses the opportunity to advertise to a targeted professional audience on LinkedIn, although they can be costly, so investigate costs before you commit to this tactic.

3. It will help you with press opportunities

Not only does LinkedIn provide you with hiring and sales opportunities, it is a great place to inform your professional network of recent news and updated information. LinkedIn Groups are an excellent opportunity to gain familiarity within your industry or specific interest. You will be able to search for an established group or create your own professional group.

Being a part of a group gives your small business an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise and share pertinent information, which can potentially land you with press. Not just press releases, but to be cited and referenced as an expert source in your field. According to LinkedIn, each connection you make is on average connected to another 110 professionals.

By sharing your expertise and providing regular, relevant industry content on LinkedIn, you will be reaching a substantial number of like-minded professionals. A strong professional brand on LinkedIn will help your small business stand out and offers many opportunities.

If you’re looking to grow your existing business through lead generation, here are five questions to answer when you’re trying to get started. If you can clearly answer these five questions and you’ll be on your way.

1. Do you really know how and why your customers buy from you?

This is the most fundamental question that every business needs to answer. Why do buyers buy from you and what process do they use to narrow their choices and decide on you? Few businesses can answer that question.

This is why I suggest developing buyer personas based on the teachings of the Buyer Persona Institute, by Adele Revella, including her 5 Rings of Insight™. This was also well documented in Joe Pulluzi’s great book, Epic Content Marketing, which he called, Audience Personas.

2. Do you have content which engages your prospective buyers?

The buyer insights gained in the first question will help you create content which engages your prospective buyers, and teaches you the right words to use. Develop case studies and customer videos. Take a videographer out with you to visit customers. When I hosted Marketing Made Simple TV, I asked my guests to create promotional videos for me, and they all said yes. Global CEO of Young and Rubicam, David Sable, once said, “If you don’t ask, the answer is NO.” Just ask and almost always people say yes.

One local software company featured static customer logos, but those logos beg unanswerable questions:

• What did the buyers buy from us?
• What broken process(es) did they solve?
• What was their ROI?

Logos do not answer these buyer questions. Case studies and customer videos answer these questions. A logo engages eyes only, but videos engage eyes and ears, which is why videos are so important today and why brief customer videos should be a priority for you. They’re also helpful for sales to show to prospective buyers.

In addition, mobile is more and more important today, especially since it was announced by Business News that Google is indexing mobile sites.

3. Do you have lead nurturing set up to earn trust and gain favor?

Creating great content using the proper words from your buyer persona development is the key to setting up lead nurturing in your marketing automation software. You need to map your content to the buying process, which was outlined in How to Find New Customers. Marketo also has a great eBook on lead nurturing. You can use whatever buying process you prefer and you do not have to use this one, but this one works fine.

• Untroubled/Unaware (Don’t even know they have a problem.)
• Have Problem (Know the problem, but not how big it is.)
• Need Solution (It’s big. We need solve it.)
• Which to Consider? (Who’s on the short list?)
• Which is Best? (Of the ones we considered, which one is the best choice?)

It’s also strongly suggested that you do Lead Scoring along with Lead Nurturing. Lead scoring is the process of adding points for online behavior. For instance, a visit an online demonstration or customer testimonial may be worth a lot of points, but a visit to your careers page may be assigned negative values. (Job seekers are not buyers.) Set those up in your marketing automation software. Keep testing and experimenting and it will get better and better over time.

4. Do you have landing pages that engage prospective buyers?

Once you’ve earned trust via lead nurturing, the prospective buyer will likely visit your website to learn more. Where are they going? Are they going to a home page or single purpose landing page.

Does the content on your landing page map to the marketing content they recently received from you? Does the landing page invite them to engage with you? You’ve got to ensure everything works together well, so keep working till everything works smoothly together.

5. Do you have a well-defined process of handing qualified leads to salespeople?

Now that your leads are well nurtured and their behaviors are scored, you can assign a point value to hand leads off to sales. Let’s assume a score of 75 matches a time to hand the deal to a salesperson. Don’t hand a lead to Sales too soon, because Brian Carroll found only 5 to 15% of leads are any good.

What happens to the deal that got 75 points you just handed to sales? Did she accept it? A Marketing Lead is not a Sales Accepted lead. “Marketing looks for Mr. Right. Sales looks for Mr. Right Now.” is a great line once said to me. Once marketing hands a lead to sales, it is up to Sales to accept it.

It is not accepted or is not followed up, you need a way to clawback the lead or take it back if it was not followed up in defined amount of time and put it back into Marketing.

Clawbacks were well defined several years ago by Steve Woods of Eloqua in his blog Digital Body Language, which is as useful today as it was in 2009. Marketing facts are marketing facts.

What do you think of these five questions and answers?

(Darren Calabrese/CP)

When you think of innovative companies, high-tech startups founded by Ping-Pong-playing millennials spring to mind, not a 96-year-old grocer. But Loblaw Cos. Ltd. shows that companies don’t have to be young to hatch new ideas.

It’s easy to overlook all the innovative concepts the business has developed. Take its President’s Choice brand. Loblaw has been a world leader when it comes to creating an in-house label that is every bit as good, if not better, than the leading national competitors, says David Soberman, national chair in strategic marketing at the Rotman School of Management. Or consider that Loblaw began developing organic foods under the PC umbrella before organic truly became mainstream. What sets the company apart is its ability to pounce on consumer trends early and its willingness to spend big to see its concepts through. Gambling on ambitious ideas is part of its DNA.

Perhaps Loblaw’s boldest move was its foray into clothing in 2006, with Joe Fresh. While some initially questioned the idea of selling apparel in a grocery store, no one doubts the logic today. “The idea of selling apparel in a supermarket isn’t that crazy,” says Soberman, noting that Carrefour in France has been doing it for years. Yet Loblaw is still the only grocery store in Canada with an apparel section, he adds.

Expect the marriage between Loblaw and Shoppers Drug Mart to create more fertile ground to develop fresh ideas. Loblaw’s takeover of the drugstore chain was barely complete before it unveiled a national patient contact centre last June, which was developed to ensure customers are kept up to date with their prescriptions.

It’s not uncommon for patients to fall behind or stop taking medication, either because they forget or they feel better and no longer see the need to continue. But as Ashesh Desai, senior vice-president of pharmacy operations for Shoppers Drug Mart explains, this has a significant impact on the health-care system. “Not taking the medications as prescribed actually results in people getting more sick,” he says.

The Shoppers patient contact centre, located in Mississauga, Ont., is the first of its kind in Canada. It’s staffed by pharmacists and pharmacy technicians who will make about five million calls a year, answering patient questions and reminding them to refill their prescriptions. The idea was developed after consulting with pharmacists, who found they were spending a great deal of time calling customers to ensure they were on top of their medications.

The effort is all part of a larger goal to rebrand pharmacists as experts­­—not mere pill dispensers—and get more people into Shoppers. Retail stores are where pharmacists have the best ability to meet one-on-one with patients. “We want to be able to talk to and service people, and provide real patient care services,” Desai says.

MORE ABOUT LOBLAWS & JOE FRESH:

• Loblaw and Shoppers: a disaggregated superstore
• Loblaw’s ‘brilliant tactical move’ captures Shoppers Drug Mart
• Do you really want to buy rotisserie chicken at the drugstore?
• Loblaws’ new “PC Plus” loyalty program is really a game in disguise
• Joe Fresh and the Bangladesh disaster

---

Follow Us

Like Us

The post How Loblaws stays on the cutting edge after 96 years appeared first on Canadian Business.

The Bitcoin ecosystem has never been more diverse. There are multi-million-dollar companies trying to take the digital currency "mainstream," hackers dreaming up a new blockchain-powered social order, and everything in between.

We've spent the last several weeks speaking to CEOs, journalists, investors, and others in Bitcoin scene in search of some of the most exciting startups and projects out there.

We've drawn on the expert advice we've been given. We've also looked at funding, to see what crypto companies are turning financiers' heads. And lastly, we've hunted ourselves for the most ambitious projects out there, taking the basic principles underpinning the decentralised digital currency in the most outlandish — and exciting — directions.

25. Edgelogic: Stamping out diamond thieves

Bitcoin's advocates argue that the underlying "blockchain" technology extends far beyond currency alone. One example, Edgelogic, wants to stamp out diamond thieves. It does this by registering the precious stones on a public ledger called Blocktrace. Bitcoin's blockchain technology distributes the record of all transactions using the digital currency between users on the network (meaning they can't be later changed to defraud users). Similarly, Edgelogic's Blocktrace will share the details of valuables on the network, making it harder to fence stolen goods or commit insurance fraud.

Director Leanna Kemp told the Financial Times that she's "not excited about Bitcoin. It's the underlying technology that really excites me."

24. Blade: Getting shops to take Bitcoin

Retailer adoption is still a major hurdle facing Bitcoin: In the real world, there are very few shops that are able to accept the digital currency. While companies like Coinbase and Blockchain are building merchant tools to make this easier, Blade has a workaround in the interim. It offers a pre-paid debit card that users can top up with Bitcoin, and then use anywhere that accepts cards. It means crypto aficionados can continue to "pay with Bitcoin" even in shops that have never heard of digital currencies.

CoinDesk reports that the CEO, Ed Boyle, previously served as general manager for American Express' prepaid cards unit.

23. Coinapult: Pegging Bitcoin to commodity prices

Bitcoin may be exciting, it may be innovative, but it's not exactly stable. In January 2015, its value plummeted by 30% in a matter of days, having already declined all year from its giddy highs of $1,000+ at the start of 2014.

Coinapult offers a solution for those who want to hold Bitcoin but worry about the price risk with a service called LOCKS. Launched in July 2014, it lets users pegs their Bitcoin to the value of a variety of commodities, including the US dollar, British pounds, gold, and silver.

So if the user bought $10-worth of Bitcoin, then the price doubled overnight, they would continue to hold $10-worth of Bitcoin at the new price. It means they don't profit off the price rise — but they're also inured to a potential dropoff.

Founded in 2011, Coinapult is based in Panama City.

Engagement! Everyone wants engagement from their content. The problem is we’re not quite sure of the best way to get it. Engagement is one area in which content marketing is more art than science.

Even though there are no formulas to predict engagement, there are patterns of success. Here are five things you should add to every blog post to increase engagement.

But first, what is engagement? Since engagement is the whole point of this article, it’s important to define terms. Many of the how-to articles on online engagement simply gloss over the missing definition of engagement. If it’s so important (and most content marketers agree that it is), then what is engagement?

It’s kind of fuzzy

Much of the discussion around engagement happened a long time ago – 2007ish. Engagement has come a long way, and so have our tools for measuring it. In spite of the progress, the definition of engagement still needs to be clarified.

Mark Ghuneim, General Manager of the Curator tool for Twitter, proposed a consumer typology of engagement that looks like this:

Chart source

Still, that’s vague, at least to me.

Here’s a working definition

To keep it simple, I define content engagement as real people responding in measurable ways to your content. There’s a lot of overlap between social engagement and content engagement, but I’m focusing on the actual interaction with the content itself as opposed to how that content is distributed on the social web.

Engagement starts with objectives

Before you try to measure engagement, make sure you understand the goal of your content. Why does it even exist online? Most businesses have one or more objectives. Here are some common ones:

• Increase leads
• Increase page views (Note: For many sites, the goal is simply to increase traffic separate from any other level of site activity.)
• Boost brand awareness
• Encourage audience interactions such as:
  • Comments
  • Social sharing
  • Quizzes and personality identifiers (e.g., BuzzFeed’s Which Disney Princess Are You?)

To get your engagement right, you should first get your objectives right. Here’s how the process is pictured by Digital Telepathy.

Image source

From your objectives, answer the question: What is it that I want these blog readers to do? You want viewers to make some behavioral change. That action is the engagement.

Engagement simplified to six features

For the sake of simplicity, I want to boil down this discussion to six features of engagement that I will tell you how to increase:

• Comments – People share their thoughts, ask questions, or criticize your blog post.

• Social sharing – Users share the article on their personal social networks.

• Dwell time – How long do users stay on the page? This metric available in Google Analytics tells you if people are spending time on the page.

• Reading – RavenTools says “the best way to measure reader engagement is to track user scrolling.” Tools such as Crazy Egg allow you to view scroll maps (where, how much, and how far people scrolled) and heat maps (where people click).

• Links – The quantity and velocity of inbound links tell who considers your content to be important. More links equal a higher trust, better SEO, and more readers.

• Conversions – Whatever your conversion action, it is one of the most meaningful engagement metrics. Many blogs use email sign-ups as the primary conversion action.

Your engagement metric depends on your content platform

To measure engagement, though, we need to know what platform is used. For example, if you’re hosting a webinar, you would measure engagement by the number of sign-ups, attendees, duration online, interactivity in online comments, the number of questions asked, and conversions after the webinar.

If you use Google+ as your primary content platform, then you can measure engagement by plusses, shares, and ripples.

Now that we have a basic understanding of engagement, let’s figure out how to improve our blog engagement.

Increase engagement with these five simple elements

1. An obvious point

Your article or blog post should be extremely clear as to what it’s trying to say. It needs to have an obvious point.

This may sound obvious, but many blog posts fail to do so. Why is this so important? If your content is unclear, then people won’t understand what you’re trying to say, and will, therefore, have no motivation to share or read the article.

Next time you comment on an article or share it on social media, ask yourself what about the article compelled you to do so. Chances are that you understood what the author was trying to say. His point was obvious, and you responded.

How do you communicate an obvious point? Let me share a few of the things that I’ve used:

Your point should be in your headline.

A weak headline is a nonstarter. A strong headline, by contrast, is motivating.

Here’s an example of a strong headline:

The headline tells me everything I need to know to motive me to read the article, with just enough understanding and a bit of curiosity. It tells me the content:

• Poses 25 questions
• Is about social media marketing
• Will help me define a social media marketing strategy
• Will give me answers to the questions

Clear, compelling, and obvious. That’s what you need to accomplish in your headline.

Make your point in your first few lines.

Your opening paragraph or two should convey your basic idea. Don’t leave people wondering, “What the heck is she going to say?” Put forth your main idea, then develop it.

Long, wandering introductions are not compelling. You lose readers before they even understand what you’re trying to say.

Support your point using the structure or outline of your article.

The structure of the post (discussed below) must support your main idea. You need an outline that explains or proves the point of the article. An article is not a bunch of disparate thoughts. It’s a cohesive series of thoughts that supports a main idea.

Repeat your point in the conclusion.

The conclusion wraps up the article by making the main point obvious once again. Remind people of what you’re saying. Don’t let them forget.

2. A structure

Every article needs to have a clear structure in order for it to be engaging. The idea of structure has two parts – logical and visual.

Logical structure — Make it coherent.

As you research and write your article, create and follow an outline. Don’t merely string together a few thoughts. Instead, create something with shape and substance. Your outline forms the bones for a successful and engaging article.

Visual structure — Make it easy to read.

Visual structure is just as important as logical structure. Why? Because no one will read (i.e., engage with) your content if it isn’t visually pleasing.

Image source

Compare that wall of text to this:

A few well-placed visual formatting techniques make a huge difference. These include:

• Headings
• Short paragraphs (no longer than seven lines)
• Bullet points
• Numbered lists

Breaking up your content compels viewers to read and engage with it.

3. A conclusion

How does your article end? If it concludes with a whimper, then your readers will whimper away without engaging. If it ends in confusion, then your readers feel the same. If it ends abruptly, your readers won’t know what to do next.

Somehow, the conclusion of an article has become one of the most neglected pieces of real estate in the entire Internet. We labor over headlines and opening lines, but we forget what to do when it’s time to say “This article is over.”

The way you end it has the potential to engage readers or leave them floundering. Take a look at the ConversionXL blog if you need an example of great conclusions.

The end nails it. It is obvious with the use of that single word, conclusion. The wrap-up is clean. It sums up the article, reiterates the main point, and makes a great call to action.

There are a few basic elements to a great ending:

• It’s labeled as a conclusion.
• It’s short.
• It sums things up concisely.
• It encourages action.

Give your conclusions a little extra time and attention, and you likely will improve engagement on your posts.

4. A question

Not everyone does this, but I’ve used it with incredible success. At the end of almost every article, I ask a question.

Why do I do this? Because it makes people think. Engagement doesn’t always have measurable metrics. When readers reach the end of my article, I want them to be thinking about and applying the principles that I’ve explained.

Asking and answering questions is one of the most effective techniques for teaching critical thinking and building knowledge. A simple question in closing helps to produce this response.

My questions are not an attempt to inspire comments, though they sometimes do. Instead, my question is a simple challenge to encourage thought.

Here’s one of my recent blogs, which includes a somewhat obvious question. People didn’t answer the question in the comments, which was fine. I didn’t expect it.

Sometimes, writers ask a question or call for action in the comments. This is appropriate. Author Tim Ferriss does on his blog, and he finds it successful.

5. A bit of controversy

This one is optional, but it doesn’t hurt.

Controversy is everywhere. I have encountered it within every niche in which I’ve dabbled. Some controversy is silly. Some is serious. Most is engaging.

Take this discussion from Moz. The topic has to do with the disavow tool, a rather abstruse SEO issue. The issue was apparently controversial.

The post was so controversial that the editor had to step into the comments to weed out inappropriate argumentation.

Controversy is like fire. It can be dangerous. You might get burned. But at the same time, it’s especially useful if you want engagement.

Conclusion: Don’t stop at engagement

This is an article dealing with engagement so I’m not going to turn around and tell you that it’s not important. I do, however, want to offer a caution. Content marketing is not all about the engagement. Engagement is only part of content marketing, not its sum and substance.

Even though engagement isn’t the end-all, it is important. And even in the swirling maelstrom of social change, we should still try to measure it.

Measurement tools exist, and developers are making these tools even better. But we need to realize that if we focus only on engagement, then we may miss some of the most significant components of business success: brand value, trustworthiness, customer loyalty, etc. These things can’t be measured, but they can be achieved.

Engagement is one way of achieving these successes. So go ahead and work to increase engagement. It’s well worth the effort.

What are the best ways you’ve found to increase engagement?

Stay engaged with the latest content marketing news and insights. Connect today with the Content Marketing Institute and sign up for daily and/or weekly highlights of the CMI blog and exclusive content from CMI Founder Joe Pulizzi.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 5 Engagement-Driven Elements You Should Add to Every Blog Post appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

I remember an old spoof from the cartoons: the character is listening to the radio and an ad comes on.

Announcer: “I’m talking to YOU!”

Character: “Me?”

Announcer: “Yes, YOU, Elmer Snodgrass of 123 Elm Street; I’m talking to YOU!”

When I was a kid, I thought it was pretty cool that the radio could speak directly to each person in that way. I’ve become more sophisticated since then, but I still have the perhaps naïve impression that salespeople can strive for the same effect.

Have you ever received a Valentine’s Day card that addressed, “To whom it may concern?” Maybe not in so many words, but I’m sure you’ve received cards that were so impersonal that they were totally meaningless—they may even defeat the purpose.

The same thought applies to value propositions that salespeople tell their prospects; they’re usually so generic that all the meaning and interest has been leached out of them. They come across as a required formality, filled with platitudes and one-size-fits-all generalities.

I recently received an email in which the first line was: “I visited your website and found that your business complements our services.” Makes you want to drop everything and call them right away, doesn’t it? That’s a line that could have been—and probably was—sent to about a thousand other recipients. We get so many of these that it seems like nothing will get through to someone when you do have something useful for them to hear.

The only way you can make your value proposition sound like you wrote specifically for the person hearing it—is to write it specifically for the person hearing it. Write it in such a way that the person has no doubt at all that you have spent time thinking about them and their needs and have a plausible idea that can improve their lives in some way.

People do care about things that apply directly to them. Think of the cocktail party effect: you’re at a party in a crowded room with many conversations going on at once, but if someone mentions your name across the room, you pick up on it instantly.

To make it apply directly to the recipient, you have to speak to their unique business and to them personally.

Frame it in terms of their unique business

What’s unique about a business? It’s not selling more or spending less—everyone wants to do that, so if that’s all you talk about, how can you be special? What is unique about a business is how they plan to get there—their business strategies and initiatives, the unique challenges they face, are specific to them.

To find something unique, visit their website and find out what they do, and read their annual report if they have one; find out what they care about; glean some of the language they like to use. Even better, if you can find something their CEO or other high-ranking executive said—in a speech or an article—that applies to what you sell—use that. Best of all is to use an analogy that compares what you do for them to what they do for their customers.

If you want to earn the right to a hearing, you have to show knowledge: To put a different twist on an old saying, “They don’t care how much you care until they know how much you know.”

Make it personal

While knowing a lot about their company is a great start, you can get even more specific by relating it to them personally, because even in B2B sales, all decisions are ultimately personal. Most complex sales are going to involve several different people, and each has a different view of the need or the stake in the outcome. So, if you can relate your value proposition to something you can do for them in their specific position, you’re more likely to pique someone’s interest.

Probably the most effective is to show you know something about them personally, and the best way to do this is by using a referral; show you’re part of the club by having a little inside knowledge. Next best is to use something from your research, maybe something that they said or wrote, or the way they describe themselves on their LinkedIn profile.

Is it difficult to make your value proposition sound unique? Not really, but it does take work on your part, and that’s good. Special would not be special if anyone could do it.

I’d like to close with a sales lesson from Leo Tolstoy, who said,

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

To show value, you have to find someone who is unhappy, or who can be made unhappy when they find out what’s possible. That’s why you need to make your value proposition sound different: every customer is unhappy in their own way. If you can show that you understand that, maybe even can name it in your value proposition, you will add unique value.

More importantly, Elmer Snodgrass of 123 Elm Street will hear you loud and clear!

Note: A version of this post ran in Kelly Riggs’ Business LockerRoom blog on March 5.

On Farnoosh Torabi's So Money podcast, motivational speaker and author Tony Robbins shared the one thing he buys to make his life easier or better:

"Private jets. Private flight. Extraordinary," he said. "There's nothing that changes quality of life when you travel as much as I do, as that."

In fact, he was persuaded to give private flights a try after a 13-hour lost-luggage, delayed-flight ordeal between San Diego and Aspen, where he was visiting a billionaire friend for Christmas. He told Torabi how his friend explained the value of bypassing commercial flights:

I said, "Dude, I'm not a billionaire like you." He goes, "You don't have to be a billionaire. You have to start thinking that you're worth it."

And he said, "Here's what you need to do. You need to go charter." He said, "Now if you go charter, you're not gonna like the price you see. 'Cause you're gonna see, 'I could've got a ticket for $800 and made all those trips. Now when I charter, this thing might cost me $5,000 — for the small jet in those days — to do this trip.'"

He said, "But, I'm gonna tell you something, if you just take a budget and you just say, 'For the year I'm gonna spend this, but I can go when I want, where I want, wherever I want, in the middle of the night, with my own food. I can sleep in the middle of the night 'cause I've got a bed on the plane.'"

He said, "It will change your productivity more than anything on earth." And it sounded insane. So he said, "Start with a small amount. Pick a number, and just say you're gonna charter. Don't be stupid and buy a jet. That doesn't make any sense." He goes, "Just go charter."

Find out what other successful people buy to make their lives easier or better.

Listen to the full interview with Tony Robbins.

SEE ALSO: The one thing Tim Ferriss buys to make his life easier

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's what master of success Tony Robbins does every morning

In this edition of the CB Elevator Pitch, editor James Cowan looks at the long-standing rivalry of Lyft and Uber, the two major services competing to eclipse the traditional taxi industry with distributed fleets managed by smartphone apps. Although still far smaller than Uber, Lyft is running a successful charm offensive to brand itself the kinder, gentler version of Uber, whose hyper-competitive tactics have crossed the line several times, as our business ethics blogger Chris MacDonald wrote recently:

I’m no Uber hater. In fact, I’ll admit from the start to being an Uber fan. I use the service frequently here in Toronto, and I love the model. But that makes it all the more disappointing that a company with a great idea is using scummy tactics to gain and hold market share. [...] Capitalism embraces competition, but the kind of competition it embraces is not unrestricted. It is competition based on innovation, and on a dedication to producing a better product at a better price than the other guy does. As others have pointed out, failure to compete (say, when such failure takes the form of collusion) is itself unethical and illegal. But that fact certainly doesn’t licence every imaginable competitive strategy. Hockey, too, is a rough game. And players are obligated not to generously share the puck with members of the other team. But the best hockey—and the best business—happens when competitors fight hard within the rules of the game, winning because of their superior talent, not because they busted the other guy’s knees.

MORE ABOUT UBER & LYFT:

• Uber’s tactics against rival Lyft crossed the ethical double-yellow line
• Uber can’t be an $18 billion company with marketing this dorky
• There are lots of successful companies with lousy work culture
• Being a small, sexy startup doesn’t make you innovative

---

Follow Us

Like Us

The post The CB Elevator Pitch: How Lyft makes itself the kinder, gentler Uber appeared first on Canadian Business.

Thousands of blogs and articles on social selling, media, marketing focus on building Personal Brands and Thought Leadership. The experts proclaim sales people must become thought leaders and focus on building their personal brands. These same experts say sales people must engage socially, whether through blogging, social engagement, or whatever mechanisms, developing and demonstrating their thought leadership to prospects, customers, and markets.

In truth I struggled with these concepts. From a corporate management point of view, I’ve always thought it more important to build and reinforce a company’s brand and thought leadership. I’ve wondered why a sales person with a Small and Medium Business Territory in St. Louis, Missouri should focus on building their global brand presence and thought leadership in Mumbai, Shenzhen, Paris, Capetown, and Sao Paulo. I’ve tended to think of that as a distraction.

Thankfully, I’ve come around. I think it’s critical for sales people to build their personal brands and thought leadership! It’s actually something the best sales people have done long before the concept of social selling was ever conceived. Even long before Vice President Al Gore invented the web.

In the old days, sales people thought of this as building their personal relationships, credibility, and trust with their customers. We think of this as building our reputation in our company, with our customers, and in our communities. Ultimately, these reputations were enhanced by living up to our commitments, assuring customers got the results we committed, assuring they were satisfied and promoters of both our companies and us. Today, this is loosely called personal brand building — though I’ve never heard a social selling expert talk about it this way.

They always brought new ideas to their customers. They got the customer to think differently about their businesses, helped them find ways to improve results, reduce costs, improve quality, profitability, and grow. Today, we call this providing insight and building thought leadership.

In engaging their customers–in every interaction, it’s critical for sales people to build their “brands.” It’s important to provide thought leadership. But where these efforts are most meaningful, relevant and impactful is when they are hyper local. We are successful when our customers treat us as trusted advisors and look for our help as they seek to achieve their goals.

We reap the benefits of this brand building and thought leadership in growing the results we and our customers achieve, growing our “following” through strong referrals made by our customers to others in the community or industries.

I’m less convinced, however, on the importance of building a personal brand and our thought leadership broadly. The objection is really based on having sales people focus their time and efforts on their own customers, markets and territories. Prospecting, expanding your relationships, visibility, engagement in your own territory is the highest priority and most effective ways sales people can use their time.

It is critical that we continue to build our value, credibility, trust and confidence with our customers. It is critical that we continue to challenge customers to think differently.

Great founders start businesses not to create a company but to solve a problem, to serve a calling, and to understand that they have a purpose that can actually make a meaningful difference. But of course, they also want their businesses to survive – and thrive – after they’ve moved on.

Great performance can never come without great people and culture, and the opposite is also true – great people and culture are affiliated most with high-performing organizations. We can argue over which drives the other. But there is one undeniable truth: when a company is in its earliest days – when there is no performance or numbers to speak of – the key differentiators are the team, their purpose, and their culture. The team is the company’s raw DNA, the purpose their religion, and culture their unique way of operating based on common principles, norms, and values. Like aiming a rocket ship into orbit, if you get this wrong from the start, your trajectory will only get worse over time.

After some two decades of launching, building, and operating some of my own businesses to both meaningful failure and meaningful success, I’ve observed some important principles for building and scaling a culture that can live beyond a set of founders to become a lasting institution. I’m certain there are other key things to do regarding culture and variations on the themes I set forth below, but here are my top six immutable laws of building and scaling great culture:

1. Start with purpose. I learned this from my partner Mats Lederhausen who has had a string of great business and culture-building successes as the former Chairman of Chipotle, Chairman of Roti, and co-founder of Redbox. The common theme he sees is that you need to begin by understanding your “why” — from the inside out. This is about mission, not marketing. What calling does your business serve? This should feel authentic, inspirational, and aspirational. The companies with strong purpose are the ones we tend to love best because they feel different – Chipotle, Pret a Manger, Ikea, Container Store, or Apple to name a few. Whether it’s trying to just offer better food, or democratize great design, the cause behind the brand is clear.

2. Define common language, values, and standards. A great mentor of mine, Tsun-yan Hsieh, was one of the foremost leaders at McKinsey. Over 30 years, he shaped a large part of its people development program, and taught me the framework of “common values and common standards.” Great cultures need a common language that allows people to actually understand each other: first, a common set of values, which are the evergreen principles of the firm, and second, a common set of standards by which a business will measure how they’re upholding those principles. For example, if you have mentorship as a stated value, then you must consider how you define it and how to measure it. Will it mean that you expect employees to follow a certain promotion path and career timeline? Does it mean that you will hold internal 360s that determine mentorship scores, and tie those scores to people’s bonuses? Or will you create go further, and only promote the people who develop others? Only when you have common language, common values, and common standards can you have a cohesive culture.

3. Lead by example. Leaders must reflect the firm’s values and standards. They must be the strongest representations of the firm’s culture and purpose, not just writing or memorizing the mission statement, but rather internalizing and exemplifying what the company stands for. Again, a few examples bring this to life: do people feel that a Richard Branson lives the Virgin way of spirited fun when he makes daredevil entrances or entertains on his island? Do people have any doubt that John Mackey of Whole Foods approaches food with a greater consciousness about its quality and provenance? These types of leaders have not just an incredible passion and work ethic for what they do, but a cultural ethic in that how they do what they do inspires others.

4. Embrace your frontline cultural ambassadors. Every organization I’ve worked with has people throughout the employee base who are unsung heroes of brand and cultural ambassadorship. These are people who love the company and its core purpose. They are your best cultural cheerleaders. They may be the folks on the shop floor trying to solve a product issue, an assistant talking to countless stakeholders, an analyst crunching the numbers, a customer service rep empathetically talking with customers, or a mid-level manager developing other people every day. When they tell friends and family about where they work, they don’t talk about a workplace but a work story, with a voice that comes from the heart. You know them when you see them, but as a company grows, it can take more effort to identify them. Do you know who these people are? Have you rewarded them and thanked them? At a time when outsourcing functions such as customer service or automating checkout procedures are becoming more common, the role of frontline cultural ambassadors does not diminish, but rather disproportionately increases and can become a real competitive advantage.

5. Seek, speak, and act with truth. Arguably self-awareness and truth-seeking are a subset of one’s values (point number 2), but I would argue that self-awareness and truth-seeking are so important that they should be on every company’s list of values. Some call this integrity, but truth seeking and self-awareness are slightly different. If integrity is best described by C.S. Lewis as “doing the right thing, even when nobody is watching,” then truth-seeking and self-awareness are about having the ability to be completely honest about your own strengths, weaknesses, and biases. In an authentic and strong culture this applies not only to the leadership team, but every single employee. Such self-awareness and truth-seeking is easy to lose, and hard to win back. When cultures are failing, there are usually root causes that can rarely be fixed quickly. During these times, people want to flip a light switch and — ta da! – see that the culture is fixed. Unfortunately, building, evolving and transforming cultures takes both time and hard work.

6. Be greedy with your human capital – then treat them right. The mantra at our own firm is that in the end it’s always about people and character. When recruiting folks, spend more time screening for character than you do screening for skill. While skills can be learned, it is much harder to cultivate attitude and character. This practice, known as “hire for attitude and train for skill,” was pioneered by Southwest about 40 years ago, helping to explain its track record as an admired, purpose-driven company. There is no doubt that over time, institutional character and culture is the simple by-product of individual people. Whether you are hiring based on competency or character, remember that A’s will always attract other A’s — but B’s will attract C’s. Bottom-line: be super greedy with the talent you bring in to make sure you get the A players. Compromising on talent that is good enough but not necessarily the best you think you can get, especially in pivotal job roles, is a sure formula to short-circuit your own culture and long-term performance. Once you’ve hired the right people, treat them right. The best long-term retention strategy is to mentor people toward meaningful roles. I’ve found that what matters more than any extrinsic rewards — like compensation and title — is pushing and developing people towards their full potential.

In business, we often overweight the “what” of the business and underweight the “how” and “why.” But it is the “how” and “why” that form both the soul and character of business — what employees feel when they come to work, and what customers feel when they do business with you. If you’re lucky enough to hit upon the right culture, do everything you can to preserve and scale it. If you can do that, then you can have a chance of not just growing a successful business, but of building a business that will survive long after you’re gone.

If I move again, it will be to a really tiny house like this one.

About four years ago, I got pneumonia.

Trust me. Coughing up blood makes you listen hard to a doctor’s advice to stay in bed. So I canceled my fancy plans to meet with a client on the west coast. And canceled all my calls and meetings.

No one really even batted an eye. It was rather humbling.

Then I went to bed for a solid week and an entire weekend.

I spent a lot of time thinking during those ten days. About what mattered. And what didn’t. I didn’t check facebook or email or twitter. I just slept and slept and slept some more. While I can’t say that I was as industrious as Blair Enns, whose post YOU MUST READ, I did make some decisions to shift some of my personal thinking. I put my house on the market and moved to little three room house (1100 Square Feet). I gave away or donated over half my belongings. I stopped buying needless stuff.

I decided less was more in a major way.

I have always lived a very simple life, but this was a huge jump to a whole new level of living simply.

So. Why am I talking about my bout of  pneumonia and my love of living simply on the Brains on Fire blog?

Well, I believe businesses can take a cue from stepping back and trying to figure out how to do less.

So often, businesses get caught up in being everywhere. Innovate more, do more, engage more, make more impressions! You see articles and books about ten things you should DO NOW to grow your business. Those are the kinds of words we hear from strategists and marketers alike.

But perhaps the better advice is to look for ways to do less.

Figure out the one thing you do really, really well and do that. Say no more often to work or products or services that are not a good fit for your organization. Engage meaningfully with a smaller group of people. Stay completely off some social channels and focus on one that you care about. The one place where you can add value to others lives. Write less emails. Take the time to figure out processes for the mundane so you do less busy work and focus more effort on what really matters.

So. How can you step back and simplify your day today? What might you gain by doing less? Personally or in the work you do?

The post I hope you get pneumonia. appeared first on Brains on Fire.

“I fight authority and authority always wins”

So says the song by John Mellencamp.

In the digital marketing world, why fight authority when you can become authoritative yourself?

Today there are more tools and resources than ever for individuals, startups and even nimble divisions within large organizations to become an authority in their industry.

In the context of business and marketing, I like to think of authority as “being the best answer” wherever customers are looking. Ubiquitous in presence, contextually relevant, useful above all others and a focus on something specific – all of these traits combine in a meaningful way to create authority.

Authority that wins.

But how do you create authority? What are the practical integrated marketing steps needed when it comes to design, content, traffic and conversion?

The upcoming Authority Rainmaker conference in Denver May 13-15 includes an impressive mix of marketing smarties, so I tapped a few for their perspectives on what authority for marketing actually means. Check out these 15 definitions and see if they inspire you to think a little differently about how to accelerate your marketing game with authority. Not only can you learn to win with authority, but there’s a chance for you to “win” authority for yourself!

“Online authority is about demonstrating expertise instead of merely claiming it. It’s about freely sharing what you know with people whether they buy from you or not, with the natural consequence that more people do buy from you, because they know, like, and trust you more than the competition.” @brianclark

Tweet Brian’s quote
Brian Clark
Founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media

“Your authority as a professional will be measured according to your ability to get others to listen and take action.”@SallyHogshead

Tweet Sally’s quote
Sally Hogshead
Speaker, Author, Creative Director at Hogshead Media
(Read our interview with Sally Hogshead here)

“Authority is providing original, thoughtful commentary or material on a subject that attracts attention and respect from others.”  @dannysullivan

Tweet Danny’s quote
Danny Sullivan
Founding editor of Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. Chief Content Officer of Third Door Media

“The etymology of ‘authority’ is the Latin ‘auctoritas,’ which also eventually gave us ‘author.'”

“That root makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Because the best authors give generously of their knowledge, with honest empathy for the needs and burdens of their audiences.”

“‘Authoritarian’ types might think that authority gives permission to strong-arm or bully. But true authorities know that you can only earn authority from generously helping others.” @annhandley

Tweet Ann’s quote
Ann Handley
Best-Selling Author and Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs

“Authority is the capacity to use one’s expertise and understanding to help others learn more, work smarter, and live better.” @DanielPink

Tweet Dan’s quote
Daniel Pink
Best-Selling Author, host & co-executive producer of Crowd Control on National Geographic Channel
(Read our interview with Dan Pink here)

“Authority for me is about how you can become more skillful and effective at helping people solve problems they care about. It’s about being very good at what you do, but it’s also about being very good at getting the word out — because you can’t help if no one knows you’re there.” @soniasimone

Tweet Sonia’s quote
Sonia Simone
Chief Content Officer at Copyblogger Media
(Read our interview with Sonia Simone here)

“Authority is about earning the right to add value and provide opportunities to a particular community.” @chrisbrogan

Tweet Chris’s quote
Chris Brogan
Best-Selling Author and CEO of Owner Media Group

“Authority is the trustworthiness built by brands through a commitment to quality, consistency, and thought leadership.” @ipullrank

Tweet Michael’s quote
Michael King
Founder & Digital Marketing Consultant iPullRank & Global Associate at Moz.

“Authority is the privilege earned over time through effort, empathy, and efficacy, to influence the thoughts and actions others.” @JerodMorris

Tweet Jerod’s quote
Jerod Morris
Vice President of Marketing at Copyblogger Media

“I believe every business should have the goal of being the leading informational resource/expert for their market niche. You can’t just have the best product, but the best content today to be the leader. That’s authority.” @JoePulizzi

Tweet Joe’s quote
Joe Pulizzi
Author, Founder of Content Marketing Institute, Content Marketing World

“Authority isn’t bestowed, it’s earned. You earn it when you stand out, engage, and lead in new directions.” @pamelaiwilson

Tweet Pamela’s quote
Pamela Wilson
Director of Special Projects at Copyblogger Media

“Authority is ‘responsibility’. If the client fails, you’ve been a bad teacher. It’s like being a pilot on a flight. You can’t get only half the passengers across. You have to get everyone across!” @seandsouza

Tweet Sean’s quote
Sean D’Souza
Author and Owner at PsychoTactics

“Authority is a privilege we earn to share our values with people who believe in what we believe in.” @bernadettejiwa

Tweet Bernadette’s quote
Bernadette Jiwa
Best-Selling Author and Founder of The Story of Telling

“As marketers, we challenge authority yet also crave it. We strive mightily to earn it.” @chiefmartec

Tweet Scott’s quote
Scott Brinker
Co-founder & CTO ion interactive

“Authority is a state of influence enjoyed by those who’ve demonstrated their expertise in a certain craft, over a long period of time.”

“The playwright David Mamet has written about the manipulation of theatrical audiences, how a crowd can be “tricked” into laughter or tears, but a gasp is always real.”

“Similarly, many attempt to claim authority through plots, pretense, or plain old hubris … but that path only ever makes a shit sandwich. True authority — in the context of business and marketing — can only be given, and it can only be given by an audience that has been truly delighted by your work.” @robertbruce

Tweet Robert’s quote
Robert Bruce
Emcee of the Authority Rainmaker Conference

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg in knowledge from these smart marketers and business leaders. You can learn from all of these marketing authorities in person at the Authority Rainmaker conference from Copyblogger Media coming up in Denver, May 13-15, 2015.

There’s literally a rock star line up of speakers that include the fine folks above as well as a closing keynote from musician, writer, journalist, publisher, actor, television and radio host, spoken word artist, comedian, and activist: Henry Rollins.

On a personal note: I attended the inaugural Authority conference last year and I can’t wait to get there again. The content was amazing, the venue and food were great and of the best things of all was the networking.

If you want a conference where you can make real connections with other smart, creative people from a variety of industries and backgrounds that are actually making things happen, this is one of those events. Authority is not too big where you get lost in the chaos of 8 different tracks and it’s not too small that you don’t meet someone new every session.

If you want to learn and network with a group like this, then be sure to check out the Authority Rainmaker website for more detailed information about the agenda, speakers, amazing venue and registration. Presentations are divided between Design, Content, Traffic and Conversion so you’ll get a complete framework to take back and implement. The early bird registration rate ends March 31st, so be sure to check it out soon.

Now I have a question for you:

How do YOU win at marketing with authority?

Even better, how would you like to win a free pass to Authority Rainmaker? 

As a marketer, and especially in a world where integrated marketing is more important, the value of creating authority for yourself and your brand is something I think every marketing, communications and business person can relate to and appreciate. I think there’s a lot of wisdom about the value of authority and marketing amongst our community and we’d love to tap into that knowledge.

That’s why TopRank Marketing is going to be giving away a FREE pass to Authority Rainmaker’s 2015 event.

What do you have to do to participate?

With the history of blogging and content creation at Copyblogger, participation in this free pass giveaway ($800 value) involves writing a blog post about what authority means to you for marketing.  The post can link to the Authority Rainmaker event site http://tprk.us/trar15 or this blog post – either is fine.

We’re looking for original, clever and insightful posts and of course, this is about promoting the Authority Rainmaker event as much as it is about giving away a free pass, so be sure to share why you would like to attend the conference and what you’d be looking forward to most.

Once you publish your blog post, email us: authority15 at toprankblog dot com

We’ll be watching for posts until April 8th, 2015 and will announce the winner of the free pass giveaway on April 13th, 2015.

Transportation, accommodations and all other costs for the event are up to the winner. Good luck!

Top photo: Shutterstock

Disclosure: Copyblogger Media is a TopRank Online Marketing Client

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2015. | Winning With Authority Rainmaker – 15 Marketing Influencers Define Authority for Marketing Success | http://www.toprankblog.com

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

As you may be aware I have the honour of being one of the presenters at this year’s Sales Performance Summit, the event is both live, and being webcast live simultaneously to anyone with a web connection, even the folks on the International Space Station. What I found interesting is the number of people who are questioning the wisdom of charging for the simulcast, many of those questioning us are themselves sales pundits. They point to great content being made available on the web for free; or that the webcast will cut into our live attendance as people can participate from their office and save.

But here is the deal, I believe buyers are smarter than that, tire kickers maybe not. People know value, and they are willing to pay fair value for value received. Much of what is available for free on the web has a hidden cost, usually some form of product promotion or some other offer made during the presentation. Organizers of the Summit have committed to no selling, no hidden cost, just actionable insights for improving Performance Management.

There is nothing wrong with free webinars or web events, I have done them, and will do them in the future. Everyone knows what they are signing up for, and in my case, can’t speak for others, I always make sure that there are some specific take aways, both in terms of steps or things attendees can do to improve their sales, and or tools they can use over and above whatever product the sponsor may offer.

I remember working with a global brand, one specifically known for their selling prowess and power. As we got down to the short strokes, the buyer, a director of Sales Productivity, asked me to offer the initial session free, this would allow them to assess how to roll it out to other geographies, a show of good faith on my part. I pointed out that my mortgage holder offered no such sign of good faith for having my mortgage.

To make his point, he told me that another provider delivering a different program is doing a “pilot” for free. I pointed out that I do not set pricing for them, but I do for Renbor, and the price quoted was fair value. He asked why I would suppose that the other party would be willing to do that: “Maybe they want my business more and are willing to show this gesture?” I offered, “Maybe they know what their stuff was worth”. We went back and forth, and I finally said “OK, if I do it free, and when we get around to price and negotiations, and your team asks me how to handle it, I will tell them do what I do, give it away free. Or we can come to a mutually fair price point and I can share with them how to not get bullied on price” I am not sure what he like less, being called a bully or having to pay for the program.

There are three things you need to have in place to avoid the price or free trap:

• Understand real value you bring to the buyer’s objectives
• Be able to articulate, demonstrate and validate that you have helped other buyers achieve those objectives, and that they were able to attain a measurable ROI at your full price. This takes work and a deep understanding of the buyers objectives, their process of achieving those objectives, and barriers that have prevented them for getting there that you have successfully broken down
• This is the hardest, have enough of a prospect base where you have the ability to turn away from bad deals. Without that, you’ll be able to rationalize any price, even the absence of one. Want to win the price game, learn to prospect.

Remember free is a four latter word, one that begins with the letter F to boot!

Tibor Shanto

Over the last 15 years the world of marketing has changed so significantly that many can hardly recognize it at all. The days of potential customers talking to salespeople in order to learn about a product are fading out quickly and door-to-door salesmanship is all but a thing of the past.

The accessibility of the internet and creation of social media networks has significantly adjusted the role of the marketing department in most highly successful companies.

Technological innovations are driving new developments that seem to alter the best-laid marketing plans nearly every day. The entire industry is changing so rapidly that it has become impossible to maintain the pace.

One of the most recent strategies that has experienced great success is short video marketing, a system in which marketing teams create short 6-15 second videos that convey a quick, strong message to customers.

Nearly 59% of the world’s top brands are active on Instagram and other sites hosting short videos

A prime example of this brand marketing strategy in action is through Nike’s recent Instagram success.

In the last year, the company has increased its Instagram following by nearly 8 million people – a growth of roughly 200 percent, and the jump is credited primarily to the incorporation of video marketing.

But why are these videos thought to have such a profound impact?

How is Nike utilizing video to reach customers effectively?

The ‘Average Joe’

Although Nike has been known for many of the big names that it has sponsored over the years, and many of its ad campaigns pay tribute to them, the short videos produced in the Instagram video marketing strategy are much more commonly focused on the ‘Average Joe’.

This adds effectiveness to a short ad, because viewers can visualize themselves reaching goals.

The product becomes easily relatable in the short timeframe Nike’s marketing team has to advertise.

Being able to visualize yourself using a product is a powerful psychological factor.

Products you can see yourself using regularly – especially when making yourself more successful – are more likely to sell widely.

Marketers that can take advantage of that are almost automatically at a huge advantage because the process creates a certain level of customer loyalty.

Defeating those inner demons

Perhaps the marketing strategy that Nike uses the most successfully is their ability to tell the ‘hero story’ effectively.

A common theme in many Nike ads is the runner who battles his or her inner laziness to get up early and push harder to run further. They are the hero, their attempt to get fit is the quest, and their lazy self is the antagonist.

Everyone wants to see themselves beating their weaknesses, and these short video ads are designed to promote our desire to go out and do just that.

They inspire the viewer.

Repetitive scenes

Finally, when video ads are less than 15 seconds every scene matters. It is important that the viewer is left with a take away message of the product.

The scenes in many of these videos are repetitive. Seeing something over and over again increases our likelihood of considering it to be something worth purchasing.

Successful short videos do just that.

They are short enough to grab and keep our attention, and repetitive enough that we tend to remember the message they are trying to send – whether it’s hitting the alarm button repeatedly every morning, or quick snapshots to the shoes the actor or actress is wearing.

By doing this, Nike is ensuring that potential buyers are going to foster a memory of their brand.

Even if the buyer doesn’t remember the whole campaign later, they are going to remember that the average runner that got up early every morning to fight laziness was wearing Nike attire. Not bad for a 15 second video.

If I were to choose one word for salespeople and business owners to embrace it would be “consistency.” It’s not as exciting or sexy a word as say “aggressiveness” or “innovate,” but it’s a word that can make a huge difference in any long-term relationship you want to develop with a potential customer. Here are a few aspects of sales where consistency is an asset:

Pricing

One of the fastest ways to lose trust with a client is to change the price they were quoted. There is nothing more frustrating and annoying for a potential customer than to get excited about a product or service, getting a price quote that is palatable and then hearing that the price went up. That said, there are certainly some times that pricing can, and should, change like when a product evolves or over a certain amount of time. But if the price shifts from one day to the next it can be perceived as shifty and subsequently it puts you in a position of having to rebuild trust with the customer.

Follow Through

Successful salespeople know that follow through is vital. Follow through can be as simple as telling a potential customer you’ll call them next week and actually doing that or turning in your proposal by the due date. Consistently doing what you say you are going to do is one of the most reliable ways to build trust. If you really want to be stellar at follow through, call your customer after the sale and make sure they are happy. Showing up when there isn’t a deal at stake is a great way to foster a strong long-term relationship. And clearly, following up after the sale is no-brainer if you are selling to someone that may upgrade, renew or purchase more products or services from you in the future.

Personal Branding & Social Media

One of the great tools that the modern salesperson has in their toolkit is social media and putting some careful thought in your twitter and LinkedIn profiles is important. Having consistency across your social media profiles is one way that you can subtly build trust as you interact with people across the social channels. For example, I advise my social selling consulting clients to use the same photo across all of their profiles. You should do this too. Make sure you choose a photo in which people can see your face clearly so that if and when you meet your customer in person, they can easily recognize you. That alone will not build your business, just as using social media without picking up a phone won’t close deals, but we can all use a little extra help here and there.

Marketing Language

In the current landscape of business, our customers can do a boatload of research about a product before they ever talk to a salesperson. In fact, according to this Acquity Research Report, 90% of B2B buyers research products online before purchasing. For this reason, in conversations and emails you should use some of the same language that the customer may have seen on your website or in your marketing collateral. You want it to feel like a fluid experience moving from the research phase into the sales cycle and having consistency in the language and statistics can help that along.

CRM

Treat your CRM like the goldmine that it is. Be super-consistent about logging every lead, prospect and potential deal. It’s a fantastic tool. Here are some of the ways that I use my CRM:

• Staying on top of potential deals by creating opportunities when there is one. This allows me to focus my time where the potential revenue lies.
• Looking up a name if I’m trolling an exhibit hall at a conference and I see a prospect or customer’s booth. This way I can approach the booth and ask if my point of contact is there. If they are, wonderful à we can say in person. If they aren’t there, at least the person I’m talking will know that it’s not the conference version of a cold call.
• Pulling quarterly reports to see if there are any good accounts that I haven’t attended to recently.
• Looking up notes from past conversations and emails so that when I talk to my POC, the conversation starts where we left off last time.

Being diligent and consistent about using your CRM allows you to show up as consistent to your potential clients AND it allows you to stay focused on the business, not wasting time trying to find that sticky note where you wrote down a person’s contact info.

The salesperson that thinks like the tortoise rather than the hare will win in the long run. Sales isn’t about flash and glamour, it’s about building trust and following through. Being consistent will help you do both.

Want to make 2015 the year you close more deals than ever? Download the free e-book with 130 sales tips:

As a B2B marketer, I spend a lot of time thinking about marketing funnels. The very idea of a marketing funnel, however, is a bit of a misnomer. When you pour liquid into the top of a funnel, it flows effortlessly to the bottom.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case for sales leads. Just because a lead is in the proverbial funnel doesn’t mean it will ultimately convert into a sale. As you and I both know, it’s never a good idea to bet on a sale. Just because you had a good sales meeting doesn’t mean you’ll be closing the deal anytime soon, or ever.

What if there was a way to remove some of this variability from the marketing funnel? Welcome to the world of automated lead management, where leads are nurtured by providing the right information to the right prospects at the right time, all without lifting a finger.

B2B companies already use CRM software to automate customer relation management with real-time responses to customer actions. If your customers are busy, that means your leads are busy, too. In a world of instant gratification, real-time response is the new normal. And we’re not just talking about dedicated Twitter feeds to address customer service complaints. Your business needs a real-time response system in place to address your future customers’ needs before you even make the first sale.

Marketing automation has seen the fastest growth of any CRM-related segment in the last five years, according to Focus Research.

And there’s a good reason for this. In this same time frame, the average sales cycle has increased by 22 percent. Companies require more information than ever before in order to close a deal. Consequently, a longer sales cycle demands real-time response to lead actions so your business can instantly provide this information at exactly the right moment.

Is your business automating its lead management program? If not, it should. Consider the following benefits of automated lead management:

Intuitively respond with action-based triggers

No one wants to be spammed. On the flip side, failing to stay in regular contact with leads means you may no longer be top of mind when they’re finally ready to make a purchase. And if you’re not touching base with your leads on a regular basis, then you won’t know what your leads need, making it nearly impossible to meet these needs when the time comes.

Effective marketing is all about delivering the right message at the right time. Action-based triggers, like downloading an eBook or signing up for a webinar, will generate a specific, intuitive response.

Automate repetitive tasks

Is your sales team still wasting valuable time on data entry or ad-hoc marketing? Marketing automation uses intelligent, adaptive schedules to eliminate repetitive tasks.

For example, you can automate status-based follow-ups with leads or even schedule social media posts and emails campaigns weeks or months in advance. Automating these repetitive tasks frees your sales team up to focus on cultivating deeper relationships.

Take immediate action with real-time notifications

Lead nurturing needs to be timely and relevant. Depending on where a lead is in your sales funnel, they may need a reminder email about an upcoming webinar or an immediate phone call from your top-performing sales representative. Marketing automation with real-time notifications ensures that when your lead’s needs are met immediately.

Bottom line:

You can’t force a sale. The biggest sales usually come from the strongest relationships, and those are built slowly over time. Automated lead nurturing campaigns empower you to build mutually beneficial relationships with your leads. By automating the most common and repetitive tasks, you’ll save time save time and resources that free your sales team up to focus on the most qualified leads at exactly the right moment.

When I became the leader of a sales team for the first time in the mid 90’s, I did not have the luxury of selling for many years and being mentored by someone who could teach me the ropes. Instead, I was a company founder who filled a need that we had at the time to build our sales team, and I kind of made things up as I went along. As I think back to those days, I realize how much I struggled to achieve my goals, and while I was successful, I can’t deny that it probably had as much to do with luck and timing as it did with my will and effort.

It was a time of great learning but there are a few lessons that would have served me well if I had known them in advance. Here are the top things I wish I had known before becoming a sales manager.

Process is critical

Without many years in sales myself and having to take over leadership of a sales group, I didn’t appreciate the value of a structured selling process. I told my sales reps to call-qualify-develop and close and left them to their own devices beyond this, which meant that each rep sold in their own unique way. Beyond ensuring that customers received different experiences from my sales team, it made it very difficult for me to coach and develop my reps. It also made it difficult for me to forecast and/or proactively address problems because I had no system for breaking down a rep’s pipeline of opportunities and/or looking at whether they were focusing on activities that would lead to success. In short, without a structured process in place, some of the characteristics of a dysfunctional sales team were beginning to reveal themselves.

Get the Right People on the Bus

Not all sales people can sell. This is an obvious lesson to me now, but as a first time sales manager I assumed that with enough effort and coaching, any rep could be successful. I now know that it is the small minority of reps that consistently exceed quotas. Most reps are at best mediocre and a significant percentage of the sales population will never achieve their goals no matter how much training and management you throw at them. Trying to achieve your own targets with a sales force of mediocre reps is like boxing with one hand tied behind your back.

Hire Slowly, Fire Fast

In my early times as a sales manager, I had a tendency to let reps miss their quarterly targets indefinitely without any repurcussions. This was partly due to the fact that I didn’t know how to manage failing reps and partly because I didn’t like firing people, but I quickly came to realize that accountability is a very powerful lever. A sales force that is not held accountable for meeting its goals is a sales force that won’t regularly meet its goals. So, from that point forward, when reps fell behind, I would work with them to make sure they were performing the tasks that would lead to success. I can tolerate bad luck, but not poor habits. If a rep couldn’t deliver the right results or the right behavior, I quickly parted ways and found another rep who would.

Wining Culture

Early in my career I assumed that a culture of success would naturally occur over time. I had it backwards. To achieve success, a sales leader has to actively create a winning culture, which starts with their own actions and by helping the team establish the habit of achieving increasingly larger goals. This is very powerful. When the team uses the language of success, behaves in ways that leads to success, helps each other be successful, expects to be successful, and has a low tolerance for failure, success is far more likely.

Learning these valuable lessons made life a whole lot easier and probably saved me from losing my hair, but more importantly enabled me to achieve much great success as a sales manager.

Photo Credit: Asim Bijarani via Compfight cc

The post What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a Sales Manager appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

LinkedIn is one of the most straightforward, accessible forums for effective sales prospecting. It gives you immediate access to millions of potential customers with needs and interests that align with your offering and sales process.

But how can you make the most of the platform? Where should you be looking? And what does it take to productively connect with prospects via LinkedIn? Here, we'll answer all of those questions and more with our list of five key tips you can leverage to take your LinkedIn prospecting efforts to the next level. Let's jump in.

5 LinkedIn Prospecting Tips

1. Make sure your profile is easily findable, fleshed out, and professional.

When you connect with a prospect on LinkedIn, you're making a digital first impression — so make sure your profile is presentable, looks professional, and effectively conveys your qualifications and accomplishments.

LinkedIn prospecting is about cultivating immediate trust, and your prospects are going to be much more inclined to hear you out if your profile is fleshed out with a professional headshot, up-to-date descriptions of your work experience, a series of impressive endorsements, and a quick yet thoughtful look into what your company does.

Bear in mind, you don't have to be too over-the-top or fancy, you just need to demonstrate that you and your business are legit. That doesn't have to mean writing a five-paragraph essay to detail every last one of your previous responsibilities at every company you've worked at — but it does mean making sure your accomplishments are sufficiently highlighted without grammatical errors or too much technical jargon.

2. Conduct thoughtful, well-researched outreach.

A lot of salespeople waste time, effort, and deal potential by conducting impersonal outreach when prospecting on LinkedIn. They often run into trouble by "selling first" over the platform. For instance, they might try to connect with a prospect by saying something like:

"Hey there!

I work at XYZ company, we sell ABC software to businesses like yours. Do you have some time to set aside for a chat?

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing from you!"

Cut-and-paste, impersonal messages like that generally don't register with prospects. The person on the other side of a message like that can tell that you don't know much — if anything — about their business. They'll know you're treating them like another brick in the wall and will be less inclined to hear you out.

That's why you need to add some degree of personalization to your LinkedIn prospecting. Take a second to explore content your prospect might have posted.

Check if they're active in any LinkedIn groups, and see if you can notice any interests or concerns they might have — and incorporate that insight into your outreach.

One way or another, show that you have some grip on what they do and know how your product or service could remedy issues they might be having. Try something like this

"Hello Emma,

I was browsing the 'Edtech Startup Community' group on LinkedIn earlier and saw the article you posted about curriculum planning at trade schools. I thought the case you made for how less traditional educational institutions can still benefit from curriculum planning software was incisive and interesting.

If that article is any indication, you're setting yourself up to be an excellent thought leader in your space. I'd love to connect with you to talk a bit more about how you think companies like yours can appeal to and tap into those kinds of markets.

Thanks!

Zach"

Taking a more measured, personalized approach where you "show" as opposed to "tell" what you can do for a prospect will make your outreach more effective and set the stage for a more immediately productive conversation.

3. Constantly expand your network.

ABC — Always Be Connecting.

You can't win if you never try. In a similar vein, you can't prospect effectively on LinkedIn if you retire to your corner of the platform and never actually make connections. You need to constantly expand your network.

Establish connections with your peers and potential prospects. From there, see if you can link up with any shared connections that might stand to gain from your product or insight.

Your LinkedIn game should never be stagnant. There are always more connections you can make that will either be productive in themselves or put you in touch with other people that will help your prospecting.

4. Master LinkedIn search.

LinkedIn search is the easiest way to find prospects that fit the bills you're looking for — and it doesn't take a premium membership to make the most of it. Even a free account gives you the resources to sufficiently screen prospects by criteria like location, title, company, and industry.

For instance, imagine if you're looking to reach executives at IT companies in the greater San Francisco area. LinkedIn provides the resources for you to easily find and connect with those kinds of prospects — even if they go by varying titles, like "President," "Owner," "CEO," or "Founder."

With LinkedIn search, you can pin down those users — regardless of how they identify themselves — by searching for "President or CEO or Owner or Founder." Searching by that criteria will return results for anyone with one of those keywords in their title.

And if LinkedIn's free search isn't specific enough for you, you can upgrade to a premium account to access additional filters, including company size and seniority.

5. Maintain an active presence in relevant LinkedIn groups.

As I mentioned in the second point on this list, LinkedIn groups can be an excellent resource for finding and connecting with prospects. Maintaining an active presence in these kinds of forums allows you to acquaint yourself with potential customers and learn more about your vertical, certain industries, and your target base.

Comment on content you find particularly engaging or interesting. Read up on relevant material your fellow group members post to get a better picture of their needs and interests. And finally, find the prospects you're looking for — and send them connection requests that show you know what you're talking about.

When leveraged correctly, LinkedIn groups provide a one-stop-shop for all your prospecting needs. They give you access to a base of users that consistently engage with the platform, offer the basis for conversation starters to drive effective outreach, and provide educational resources to help you bolster your industry knowledge and frame yourself as a trusted advisor throughout your sales process.

Regardless of your industry or vertical, you stand to gain a lot from prospecting on LinkedIn. If you decide to use the platform to connect with potential customers, be sure to identify your prospects with careful intention, learn as much as you can about them, and reach out with some degree of thoughtfulness and personalization. If you can nail those elements, you'll see the kinds of results you want from your LinkedIn prospecting efforts.

Nobody likes hearing sales complaints but handled well, they’re a great indicator of how your team’s performing – and how you could improve it.

Let’s face it, sales people don’t have the easiest of jobs. How many times have you had to deal with sales complaints about cold leads and phone numbers that don’t provide any results?

This blog lists some of the big sales complaints from salespeople. While some complaints may seem insignificant, there is a serious side: happy salespeople are productive salespeople. Remember: complaints are your friend. A complaint from your sales team is a trouble ticket that shows you where your process needs tweaking.

#1: “But my phone day’s Tuesday!”

Having a weekly plan of activity can be a good thing: leads prospecting on Monday, phoning on Tuesday, appointments on Wednesday and so on. But what if your prospects don’t follow the same schedule? What if they’re always in on Monday but Tuesday is used for travel?

If your team members work in patterns, is there any way you could work with their preferences? For a large enough database, yes. Many CRM applications can slice analytical data.

Suppose you discovered that the engineering sector tends to answer its phones on Fridays, while IT workers prefer Wednesdays? Armed with such insight, assigning leads becomes an exercise in increasing productivity and satisfying both staff and customers.

#2: “I’ve already made my targets this month.”

Studies show a marked slowdown in activity, per head, once targets are hit. If a big sale on the 15th takes Fred over his goals, he’ll tend to slacken off for the rest of the month.

Very often, this is tied to commission structures. Some sales departments limit the total commission pot, or reduce the percentage above a certain sales volume. Neither of these are exactly an incentive for your salesperson working the phones, although it limits your risk on paper.

There’s the clue: on paper. What else looks good on paper? A good CRM consultant can set up your purchase funnels and conversion probabilities to show you where increasing commission rates might be a good idea. For example, a three percent commission for the first £50,000 in sales each month might be worth upping to 5% after that level is reached, if it’d deliver an extra £35,000 in turnover.

#3: “But I’ve already sent him an email!”

As time goes on, you’ve probably heard sales complaints about how Generation Y (let alone Z) is harder to reach by phone. (In the mobile world, usage of voice minutes is actually going down.) Many salespeople think an email is just as good.

Today’s sales are made via a variety of contact touchpoints, building trust in bits and pieces over time. Here’s the thing: Customer Relationship Management applications that connect different channels (like phone, email and SMS) can show you which sequences work best.

So take your salespeople aside and show them the sequence of contacts that tends to produce results most often. Perhaps the first touch is indeed an email, but in 70 percent of successful sales, they received a phone call within 24 hours. Your salespeople may even have kept a cold lead warm by sending them a text message every two weeks.

#4: “That list’s been done to death.”

When your list has been contacted over and over again, it becomes a common sales complaint that there’s no life left in it. But studies demonstrate that an “old” but well-targeted list pulls far better than a fresh but untested one.

If a lead has stalled, it may be your customer journey that’s missing a few stages. Your CRM dashboard may be able to show you where the pinch-points are – and what actions (perhaps a new script, a side offer) can get the funnel moving again. Getting together with your marketing team may generate some ideas.

#5: “If I make those calls, I’ll have to put them on CRM.”

Last comes the real buzzkill – and it’s valid. If your CRM system makes it hard to add names or contact reports, wouldn’t you be tempted to “store up” notes to add later instead of keeping records updated in real-time?

This one plays hell with your weekly reports. So look at how people really use CRM, and redesign your dashboard and processes to make it easier for them. (Difficulty of use is a prime reason many CRM implementations fail.)

So for an antidote to all the complaints, remember: CRM serves your people, not the other way around.

Takeaways:

Counteract your sales team’s complaints with these important points:

• If your salespeople have patterns, see if there’s advantage in working with them.
• Offer incentive schemes to make things better for everyone.
• Show your salespeople the sequence that leads to a sale, not just the script.
• Sales people respond to hard data. To change behaviour, always back up with evidence.
• Updating CRM should be seen as a core part of sales success.

Keep your sales team happy by increasing the potential for profits with The ultimate guide to: upselling and cross selling.

This post first appeared on the Redspire blog.

You’ve successfully converted your B2B leads into prospects.

Now, you have to close the deal and ensure that they become customers.

With a little push and some nurturing, you can make it happen. The following are a few strategies for getting your prospects to make the leap from potential to secured customers.

Offer an Introductory Trial

A free trial run shows potential customers exactly how your product works. It can also increase their excitement about your product and services and show them how it’ll improve their lives and business practices.

According to Close.io’s Steli Efti, free trials should be a maximum of 14 days long in most cases. Though he writes about software startups, his advice applies to any B2B business.

A shorter free trial will create a sense of urgency for your prospects to actually use your product, and it’ll reduce customer acquisition costs because your sales cycle time will be cut down.

You should only offer longer trials if your product or service is something that a customer will become dependent upon very quickly. For example, streaming music service Spotify lets customers experience their premium service free for 30 days. During this time, customers build playlists they can listen to offline, don’t hear as many commercials, and get used to skipping from song to song without a certain limit that applies to free users.

After that trial, customers most likely won’t want to go back to the free version, and will pay the monthly fee to receive a better product.

During your free trial run, make sure that you send customers emails asking whether or not they’re enjoying your product or service. Efti suggests messaging users and asking if they need their free trial extended. That way, it creates a dialogue between your company and your customer, and you can find out their business needs.

Provide Exclusive Content

Content works to your advantage in a number of ways. It can demonstrate your expertise in your field, establish your brand ambassadors as industry influencers, give people an insight into your product and what you do, and, ultimately, persuade prospects to into becoming customers.

If potential customers were at all hesitant about your product, excellent content will show them that your company’s professionals know exactly what they’re doing. In addition, it can clear up any questions they might have about your product. Above all, it can show them how your product will save them time and money, which is what companies value the most.

The content here is different than the content in the lead stage. During the prospect stage, your company must educate the prospects “with a more promotional touch than in the first stage… [and] teach them how to overcome their challenges,” writes blogger Valerie Levin of Oktopost.

Levin also recommends showing prospects your eBooks, whitepapers, and case studies during this stage. To unlock this content, prospects should have to enter their email addresses. That way, they’ll receive the value from the content, and you’ll have their contact information to sell your products and services to them. It’s a win-win situation.

Handhold Every Step of the Way

This stage of the sales funnel is when you illustrate your superior customer service skills to your prospects. It’s crucial that during this time, you make sure that all their questions are answered, their needs are met, and they are receiving the correct information about your product or service.

You can do this by having members of your sales team send follow up emails to your potential customers. They should talk to the prospect about what his or her specific business needs are, and what is holding them back from achieving any of their goals. Then, they should explain to the prospect how you can help them reach those goals and solve those problems.

It’s critical that at this step, the sales and marketing teams are working together. Marketing can compile content that answers prospects’ questions and send it out, while sales team members act as the face of your company. Adding a personal touch and making the potential customer feel like you’re there for them is what will separate you from other B2B businesses.

Show Social Proof

If you want customers to sign up for your product or service, you have to show them that their peers are doing the same by providing social proof. When customers are considering a product, it’s extremely useful to show them that friends and colleagues are already utilizing it. This social proof can come in the form of testimonials, endorsements, or product reviews from influencers in your field.

To get the social proof, you can ask satisfied customers for testimonials or endorsements that you will display on your website, or encourage them to post about your product on their social media pages. It’s not enough for you to tell prospects that you have something great to offer; your customers have to do some of the talking as well to provide you with some credibility.

Anyone can find prospects in a stack of leads – it’s those who focus on nurturing those prospects that ultimately create loyal customers and raving fans.

Does your B2B business successfully convert prospects into customers? Join us and continue the conversation on our Facebook or Google+ pages.

       

       

Sales enablement is a powerful tool to increase sales and drive business growth. It helps sales teams deliver the right message at the right time to prospects. When sales people are on message, they convert leads and close opportunities faster. But the selling space is becoming more complex, and it is increasingly difficult to align […]

The post Top 70 Sales Enablement Tools to Boost Your Business appeared first on KnowledgeTree.

This is part two in a series of five blog posts that examines the metrics you should measure throughout the five stages of the customer lifecycle: attract, capture, nurture, convert, and expand.

Once you’ve managed to attract the attention of your prospects, it’s time to capture their information and convert them into leads. In part two of this series on customer lifecycle metrics, we’ll focus on the metrics that measure how well you’re capturing prospects, building their profiles, and getting them ready to buy.

According to Marketing Automation Trends Report 2014 from Pepper Global, B2B marketers indicate that the most important benefit of marketing automation is the ability to generate more and better leads. Quickly turning anonymous visitors into qualified leads is one of the many great benefits of marketing automation, especially since the process can be streamlined and automated.

Let’s take a look at a few of the tactics B2B marketers use to capture data about prospects and gain additional insight into who those people are and what they want:

• Visitor tracking: Most website visitors won’t convert into a lead right away. By tracking the activity of your anonymous website visitors, you can find out what they’re interested in. If they convert in the future, you’ll have a record of their pre-conversion engagement, which is very useful for segmentation and sales follow-up.
• Landing pages: Offering up a single web page that delivers the specific information your visitors are looking for can dramatically increase conversion for visitors to your site.
• Lead capture forms: Use web forms to serve up gated content or offer email subscriptions, where the prospect provides information (such as a name and email address) in order to download, view, or continue to receive the information they’re interested in.
• Progressive profiling: Don’t make prospects provide too much information, or they’ll click away. With progressive profiling, you can serve up different form fields to contacts based on what you already know about them. That way, you can build their demographic/behavior profile over time in a less-intrusive way.

As you can see, every one of these tactics is designed to find out a little more about who your prospects are, what they want, and what might be the best way to start a conversation with them in order to keep them coming back. Now let’s take a look at the metrics that can help you measure the progress of your lead capturing efforts.

Capture Metrics

During the capture stage of the customer lifecycle, your primary focus is getting as many quality leads as possible. Questions to ask at this stage include: How many content consumers became known visitors? What calls to action are most effective? Which audiences are responding the best, and how can we find more like them? Which channels are most effective? The goal is to increase the number of known prospects in the funnel and gain as much information about them as you can. That insight will be crucial to the lead nurturing stage that comes next.

• Conversion rate on calls to action (CTA): This number shows you the effectiveness of your CTAs in converting unknown visitors into known visitors through the forms that are filled out. Calculate the conversion rate of CTA by dividing the number of form fills (“submits”) by the number of unique views.
• Cost per click (CPC) and cost per form fill: If you are using online advertising tactics like pay-per-click (PPC), these metrics are relevant to calculating the cost of each lead.
• Number of net-new prospects: Tract the number of new prospects, from all sources, for the time period being tracked.
• Leads by source: The lead source is a direct indication of the conversion potential of a lead, based on historical results. This information will help inform the lead nurturing stage of the lifecycle, and also reveals which channels produce the best leads.

In addition to these general capture metrics, you may want to consider metrics that are specific to the lead capturing tactics you’re using.

Visitor tracking:

• Number of visits made by each visitor
• Number and type of companies and organizations visitors work for
• Number and type of referring sites
• Search terms used to find your site

Landing pages:

• Views, clickthroughs, and number of conversions
• Landing page performance over time, year-over-year
• A/B testing results for landing page options

Lead capture forms:

• Cost per lead
• Number of marketing qualified leads generated
• Number of sales accepted leads
• A/B testing results for form page elements

You can also look at which channels are the most effective drivers to your destination pages across your inbound marketing campaigns.

Which form do you think would perform better with your prospects? Testing is the only way to be sure.

During the attraction phase of the lifecycle, your focus on driving brand awareness, creating campaigns, and bringing visitors to your site. In the capture phase, it’s all about collecting prospect data, managing and segmenting leads, and using the data you collect to optimize every element of your attraction and capture efforts. This includes fine-tuning the offers you provide, the messaging you include, and the channels you use. And of course, A/B testing can help you refine your efforts, down to the granular level of which color to use for a call to action button.

What other metrics do you track in order to measure the success of your lead capturing campaigns? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Be sure to download the eBook, The New Marketing Metrics for B2B, to get metrics for every stage of the customer journey, as well as a five-step plan to help you analyze your business process and continually improve the results of your marketing.

LinkedIn is so much more than an online resume. It’s a place to connect with industry insiders and customers. It’s a place to scout leads and seek business opportunities.

Your summary is the front door to your LinkedIn profile. It’s the first thing people read through after landing on your profile page, and it can make or break your ability to connect with your intended audience.

Here are the five steps you need to take to create an effective, true-to-you LinkedIn summary that stands out from the crowd and helps you reach your goals.

1. Decide on Your Voice

First person or third person – it doesn’t really matter on LinkedIn. What are you comfortable with?

I usually recommend to my service-industry clients that they write in first person, because it can make the whole summary feel friendlier.

But a speaker might want to write in the third person to convey more authority. It’s really a personal decision.

2. Know Your Purpose

Your LinkedIn summary is going to look completely different if you’re trying to attract sales leads versus if you were trying to find a job. The motivation behind your profile will drastically impact how you should write your summary.

What’s the purpose of your LinkedIn profile? Are you:

• Increasing your business’s visibility? Talk more about why you started your business and what differentiates your business from others in your industry.
• Attracting sales leads? Talk more about the benefits and value of your products and services, and how you personally work to ensure satisfied customers.
• Finding a job or freelance work? Talk more about your accomplishments and what you’re currently looking for in a job.
• Hiring more employees? Talk more about your company culture and what makes your company unique in the industry.

3. Pull Out Your Resume

Grab your resume – but do NOT dump it into your summary! Instead, mine it for powerful phrases. Look for:

• Big accomplishments – Add stats to go with them if you can. Did you save your last employer millions of dollars? Did you help your last client go from a 3% conversion rate on their online ad to 10%?
• Superpowers – What can you do better than anyone else? Can you spot a spelling mistake from ten miles away or fix a broken computer over the phone in five minutes flat?
• Values – What drives your decision-making? What is a “good day” to you?
• Stand-out attributes – How do you stand out from the other people on LinkedIn that might have similar resumes? Do you have extra-amazing focus due to your long history of running marathons?
• Passions – What gets you pumped? What makes you want to be the first person in the office every morning? Or – and I like to put this section at the end for punch (again, personal choice) – what do you do in your personal time?

With the purpose (Step 2) in mind, take these nuggets and turn them into paragraphs that highlight who you really are, and how you will bring value to your intended audience.

4. Make the First Paragraph Count

The first few sentences of your LinkedIn profile summary are crucial to convincing people to keep reading. Think of those sentences like an extended headline. Make them powerful, memorable and enticing.

You don’t have to be grammatically correct, here, either (though a writer like me might want to be careful of going TOO overboard with the creative grammar). You can use single-word sentences or phrases separated by pipes, like this:

Meticulous. Detail oriented. Deadline-driven.

Meticulous writer | Detail-oriented project manager | Deadline-driven content marketing expert

I personally prefer natural sentences to these punctuated phrases – I think they’re more professional – but it really is a personal choice.

No matter how you decide to write that first paragraph, make it count!

5. Add Media If You’ve Got It

LinkedIn allows you to upload images, videos and documents to your profile summary. Use this to make your profile more engaging and help your intended audience get to know you better.

Are you an author? Upload an image of your book cover with a blurb about the book.

Are you a great speaker? Upload a video of you speaking at a recent conference.

In Summary

LinkedIn has a 2,000-word character limitation for the summary section, but that is plenty of room to convey a strong message to your intended audience. Spend some time crafting your LinkedIn profile summary, and update it as often as you need to for it to be 100% accurate at all times. After all, your summary is your audience’s window into you.

If your goal for inbound marketing isn’t sustainable sales growth, you might want to rethink your strategy. Sales is the engine behind all kinds of companies and successful business people. What’s often missing is a comprehensive strategy that makes it easier, not harder, to grow sales month-over-month and year-over-year. At the core is an alignment in purpose and method between Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. This drives up efficiency and drives down cost while improving sales performance. Let’s look at the five best ways to make that happen.

Align Sales, Marketing and Customer Service

This is often done after building teams and processes in silos, which makes change difficult to accomplish. Ideally, this is one of the first things you do as a Leadership Team when you’re launching your business. You need to decide what kind of company you want to be in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years and longer term.

Put together a reasonable business plan that includes Goals, Challenges, Finance, Marketing, Sales and Support. In today’s fast-paced, cloud-enabled buyer journey, you can’t afford to have dysfunctional teams working at cross purposes. Successful companies require team leaders for Sales, Marketing and Customer Service to work together to jointly create service level agreements (SLAs) that spell out how the teams will work together to accomplish business (not department) goals, agree upon benchmarks and targets and build trust through mutual accountability. They must also agree upon buyer personas (ideal customers), markets, go-to-market strategy and the process to attract, convert and delight customers. It’s possible to retrofit these things, but it can take months to untangle prior art and bad practices. Once you have SLAs in place, it’s time to build a robust pipeline.

Build Your Pipeline With Targeted Inbound Marketing Campaigns

You might think that building a great sales team would come first, but if you think about it, you need to build a sales delivery vehicle first, and that’s targeted inbound marketing. You can try outbound marketing if you want, but eventually you will need inbound to compete on the Internet, which is where most buyers do their research. I use the word “targeted” because if you want to get your sales team up and running quickly, they need highly qualified sales leads. The more qualified, the better, because that increases sales efficiency by reducing time wasted on prospecting and qualifying leads and by increasing close rates. Targeted campaigns highly relevant and helpful to potential buyers convert visitors to leads and customers at much higher rates than “spray and pray” campaigns to a wider audience.

Where should Marketing get started? The first step is strategy and planning. Your Leadership Team should have identified core buyer personas from their SLA meetings, so you should be ready to start creating targeted inbound campaigns using a content marketing strategy that reaches and attracts buyers at each stage of the buyer journey. You will also need to develop a content team to continuously support those campaigns and develop new ones, so make sure you add that to the Business Plan.

Before you can build sustainable sales, Marketing needs to develop an effective lead management process using marketing technology and processes that align with the goals and methods of Sales. It does no good to attract leads sales reps reject or deliver leads when it is either too early or too late in the buyer journey. Together, Marketing and Sales need to craft an effective pipeline that is constantly filled with qualified buyers who get nurtured with enough valuable information to influence a buy decision and enough lead intelligence to help sales reps close every high-value opportunity.

Where does customer service fit in? Nowadays the buyer journey often includes some form of free trial. If you don’t have readily available, easy-to-find-and-use support resources on your website and social media sites and you don’t nurture free-trialers with information to help them learn and appreciate your products or services, you are bound to fail. For complex products requiring a fair amount of onboarding and on-demand support, you will probably need a support team available by phone, email, chat, social network and online forum. Great customer service improves the odds of closing sales and retaining customers over the long haul.

Attract Great Sales, Marketing and Support Talent

Building a great pipeline will require great architects and engineers. Once the Plan is in place, you need to start building teams. This is an artform in itself. Among other things, you will need to consider not only skills and experience, but also intellect, cultural fit and character. Then there’s compensation, training, career path and team building. Here are a few great books to consult before you start recruiting.

The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge

Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh

Focus on the Sales Process

There’s a great myth out there that with inbound marketing, you no longer need sales reps. There’s only one case that supports the myth, e-commerce. With every other kind of sale, you need an experienced rep to help the buyer learn how to solve her problems and buy from you.

With the emphasis on helping rather than persuading, you will need reps who understand your buyers and your products and how to find the best fit for both. As you onboard new reps, your training process needs to account for the difference between inbound sales (helping) and outbound sales (persuading). Understanding the difference will enable your reps to find and transform qualified sales leads into loyal customers.

But there’s more to successful sales than knowledge and empathy. Your sales team must have a well-defined, carefully considered sales process in place committed to by each team, manager and rep. The process must also be aligned with Marketing and Customer Service processes in order to meet the requirements of the three-team SLA. The sales process should cover, at a minimum:

• What should you do when you get an inbound lead?
• What sequence and cadence of calls and emails should you use?
• What should you do prior to calling?
• What’s the goal and content of each call?
• What questions should you ask?
• How should you qualify leads?
• How and when should you prepare and send a quote?
• What’s the protocol for internal review?
• How should you document each communication and status change?
• How often should you call or email to nurture the sale?
• What content should you use to nurture the sale?
• What’s next after winning the deal?
• What’s next after losing a deal?
• What actions should you take to analyze success or failure?

Leverage Technology

No one who has ever done sales would say that it’s easy. It gets easier with experience, a great product and an outstanding support team. Fortunately, today’s sales rep has a ton of new technology available to help expedite and improve her chances of winning sales deals. Learning how to use these tools is crucial not only for the sales rep but also for the entire customer-facing organization.

Marketing automation and sales enablement tools in particular can make the job a lot easier by presenting the rep with highly qualified leads and lead intelligence and allowing the rep to respond with exactly the right information at exactly the right time to forge a strong relationship with a lead or prospect. Technology also makes the sales team more accountable and provides Management with insights to help them make better decisions and investments to grow sales over time.

Many of these tools are now available on mobile devices, freeing the rep to leave the traditional desk and interact more in live settings without missing opportunities. Our favorite sales and marketing platform is HubSpot because it combines both sales and marketing disciplines on a single lead database and user interface, but there are others to consider. Integrating sales and marketing with customer service apps can also streamline and improve your customers’ experience and increase customer lifetime value. Training your teams to use these tools should be an important part of your SLA and new-hire onboarding process.

With careful planning and building aligned Sales, Marketing and Customer Service teams, you have the opportunity to grow sales in a sustainable way and optimize your chances of success. Without them, you may be taking a big, unnecessary risk.

Photo credit: Kool Cats Photography