Rnordman

Sales is all about communication. Closing deals comes down to how well you ask effective questions, express your company’s value, listen to and address your prospects’ concerns, and build mutually beneficial relationships.

However, despite their best intentions, a salesperson’s bad verbal habits or unintentionally off-putting word choices can get in the way of forging profitable connections. After many years working in sales and training reps, I’ve identified eight common linguistic mistakes that cause the most damage to selling power. Of course, bad habits can be broken, so I’ve provided tips on how to reverse these negative inclinations.

1) Making assumptions. 

Instead of asking deeper questions to clarify a prospect’s needs or gain perspective on an objection, salespeople will sometimes make assumptions or jump to conclusions based on other situations they’ve experienced. A small jump here or there in the interest of time might not seem so harmful at the moment. But if the deal is built on a set of incorrect assumptions it will crumble when it comes time to close.

How to fix: If you think about it, you can generally feel yourself making an assumption. Work to recognize what you’re doing and stop yourself in the moment. If you tend to make assumptions unconsciously, develop your self-awareness by strategically prompting the prospect to validate your perceptions. Ask questions such as “Can I quickly summarize what we’ve discussed?” followed by “Does that reflect how you’re thinking about things?”

2) Weak language.

This is where I’d categorize the “kindas,” “sortas,” “likes,” and “you guys.” These colloquialisms, while perfectly fine in casual conversation, can make you sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about in a professional setting. And it’s a shame, because, like, you know what you’re talking about. But, when you preface it with “It’s sorta like … ” or “I was kinda thinking … ” or “You should really, like, consider our product ... " you most certainly risk being dismissed out of hand.

How to fix: Solicit a friend or colleague to listen to your sales dialog and give you honest feedback about the specific words that undermine your message. Another option is to record yourself and listen for weak language. Finally, join a public speaking group like Toastmasters to practice effective communication. 

3) Speaking/writing in passive tense.

At one point, someone decided that speaking and writing in passive tense sounded more business-y than using active language. This person was wrong. Passive tense sounds weak and noncommittal -- purge it from your speech. 

How to fix: Rearrange your sentences to put the subject before the verb. (Example: “We decided that … ” instead of “it was decided by the group that … ”)

4) Rephrasing and repeating.

Editing your writing is a good thing. Editing your speech -- while you’re talking -- is not. I hear reps do this all the time. They make a statement or ask a question and as they are talking, a little voice inside them says, “you can say that better,” so they restate what they said in a slightly different way. Often the voice pops in one more time and says, “maybe just a little better” and they restate one more time.

The rep thinks they’ve added real clarity to the conversation. But the person on the other end, namely the prospect, just heard the same thing said or asked three times in row. That’s tedious for the prospect and makes you sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

How to fix: Commit to what you’re saying. No matter how you started your message, stick with it -- even if it’s not perfect. You’ll sound more self-assured and confident than if you keep restating what you say in quick succession. If you’re not sure whether your message came through clearly, don’t be afraid to ask “Was that clear?” But don't ever ask "Does that make sense?" The latter implies that either you don’t know how to utter sensible statements or your prospect is stupid. Neither of these works in your favor.

5) Answering your own questions.

This is another habit I hear a lot. Instead of asking a prospect a straight question, salespeople couple it with potential answers.

Here’s an example. Instead of asking, “What are the top three things getting in your way right now?” I often hear reps ask something like, “What are the top three things getting in your way right now; is it X? Or Y? Or maybe even Z?” When you do this you run the risk of the prospect picking one of your answers just to keep the conversation moving. That is not a recipe for sales success. While it’s understandable that the rep wants to help the buyer fix their problem, they’re not doing anyone any favors by answering their own questions because that leads back to bad habit number one.

How to fix: This habit is hard to break. It’s going to take deliberate practice. Here’s what you have to do. Ask your question, and let it hang. Clamp you hand over your mouth if you have to. Silence is your friend in sales. Get comfortable with it. Speaking of asking questions …

6) Interrogating.

The majority of salespeople I encounter don’t know how to tap into their natural curiosity. They have the list of things they need to learn in order to qualify their prospect in front of them and come hell or high water they are going to get those answers. Turn on the bright light and let the interrogation begin.

This doesn’t work. The prospect knows what you are doing, and you are sending their guard through the roof. This approach to fact-finding, discovery, exploration, or whatever else your company calls gaining insight does not communicate genuine interest in the prospect’s situation. It communicates self-interest.

How to fix: Strive to be genuinely curious. What does that mean, you ask? It means being truly interested in what a person is doing, why they’re doing it, what’s working for them, and what’s not. This also takes practice.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Here’s how I develop my ability to ask genuinely curious questions.

When I’m at a social event or party, I set up a game in my head. When I meet a new person, I see how many questions I can ask them until they pose one to me. The objective is to make my line of questioning so natural that they don’t even realized I haven’t said anything other than ask questions. I’ve gone entire conversations where all I did was ask questions. It’s amazing what people will tell you when you are genuinely curious about them.

7) Not listening.

You might think that any time your prospect is talking and you’re not counts as listening. Guess what -- it doesn’t. The real question is who are you listening to when the prospect is talking. I’m willing to bet a good portion of the time you’re actually listening to the voice in your head.

That voice probably sounds like this: “Oh, that was a key nugget right there … they definitely need what I’m selling … I have to make sure I tell them about that new feature … man, they sure can yammer on about their company … I need to get this call wrapped up because I’ve got another one back to back … ” You get the point.

If that internal dialogue sounds familiar, you are missing valuable information that will yield your next deal because all you’re really doing is waiting for your turn to speak. 

How to fix: Clear your mind and eliminate distractions. When your prospect talks, the focus is all on them. Silence the voice in your head. Tell it to shut up. It’s costing you results. Also, don’t check your email, don’t look at Facebook, and don’t formulate a quick response and lie in wait to say it. Just listen.

8) Lacking conversational flexibility.

While it is true that different people prefer to communicate in different ways, salespeople that lack conversational flexibility can limit their results. That signature style you so painstakingly developed might not work with every prospect. In many ways, your ability to adapt to the buyer is what can make the difference in closing a deal. There are times when you have to communicate with prospects on their terms. If you don’t, they tune out.

How to fix: Many experts recommend mirroring your buyers, but I would advise against that. Parroting people’s words and body language comes off as fake. Instead, take a behavioral diagnostic test like DiSC to determine your communication and behavioral style in relation to others'. Then strive to further your self-awareness of how your way of communicating might come off to others by practicing with colleagues who have a radically different profile than you. This will allow you to be more relatable to a variety of different styles. Above all else, be genuine.

Can you think of other bad conversational habits to add to this list? Please write them in the comments.

“It is the skill of having a clear and decisive vision for the future
whilst staying focused on the present that makes the real difference
when it comes to performing under pressure.”

Keeping the balance between staying in the present and having a clear vision for the future is not only a challenge for athletes, but also for every sales professional. I will tap again into the wisdom of Steve Backley, English Javelin athlete and three-time Olympic medalist, and map his wisdom to the world of professional B2B sales.

Short-term tactics are only successful and sustainable when they follow a broader strategy. Short-term success, which is often driven by quarterly pressures, creates the freedom and trust for executing long-term strategies to create new business in new and existing accounts. Both aspects are equally important to build sustainable sales performance.

“Whilst you will be effective in the present, as a champion, you will take control of the future by planning for what may be over the horizon.”

Balancing present and future in opportunity management

Being effective in the present (current opportunities) means understanding the customers’ present as well as their desired future. It means deeply understanding the customer’s current environmental and situational context, their stakeholders’ different viewpoints and their desired results and wins. Understanding the customer’s specific context is one essential element in designing ways and approaches to a better future state. The next element is the impacted stakeholders’ different concepts that reflect their present understanding. These concepts have to be analyzed, understood and internalized before they can be mapped to the provider’s products and services. Only then can a shared vision of future success be created, including a path to this future state to help them to achieve their desired results and wins.

That means a sales professional has to build a bridge between the current state and a better future state. Sometimes, customers have already done that on their own. This is possible when the challenge they deal with is well known. But if the challenge they have to master is new, complex and more risky, they need a sales professional to show them different ways to achieve their desired results and wins, to understand the entire impact of the situation and to create a shared vision of future success.

Creating such a shared vision together across a customer community requires lots of adaptive and leadership competencies, but it is highly valuable for both. For salespeople, a shared vision of success is the prerequisite to enter the actual buying phase and to increase significantly the probability of a win. For customers, salespeople who provide perspectives this way are highly valuable because they provide an understanding of the bigger picture, the entire impact and the best way to achieve their desired results and wins. It helps them to make their best decision.

“You will make informed decisions about your chosen path based on relevant details that you see around you. While others become obsessed by things that are unimportant, you will have a great understanding of what is appropriate. You will possess the ability to assess a situation and plan for the future almost simultaneously.”

Balancing present and future in account management

Taking the issue of balancing present and future to another level, requires understanding how account and opportunity management fit together. Account management done the right way is not about creating plans nobody is using during the year. Instead, it means understanding entire accounts from their perspective as an entity (e.g., vision, business strategy, strategic initiatives and challenges, industry trends, financial performance, etc.) and to derive a portfolio of new business ideas – so-called account leads. That is the blueprint for executing your account strategy. Also here, it is about their context, concepts and decision dynamics to derive valuable new business ideas. Analyzing and understanding the existing relationship network to identify needs – where and how to improve and to grow this network – are additional key prerequisites to derive new business ideas. In particular, understanding an account’s specific decision dynamic is highly valuable when it comes to designing engagement approaches. There is a difference between decision dynamics on a single opportunity level versus a decision dynamic culture within an account that gets manifested in various opportunities.

The main purpose of account management is strategic; it’s identifying new business ideas to create additional value for an account. These business ideas then have to be developed into leads. The best ones will make the conversion into an opportunity. Then, the cycle of balancing opportunity and account management begins again. It always requires making informed decisions based on understanding the present and the future – in both dimensions, the single opportunity and the entire account.

“Your focus determines your reality.”

Source of quotations:
Steve Backley – The Champion in All of Us

Everyone wants their work to be recognized when they’ve done a good job. This type of social recognition is an innate human desire, and salespeople are no exception. When a member of a sales team meets or surpasses their quota, recognition that they’ve done a good job is expected. In the same vein, underperforming salespeople should expect coaching and guidance, or at the very least a review of their strategy going forward. 

So if leaders and managers know that everyone craves feedback and acknowledgment, why is a lack of recognition the number one reason unhappy employees leave their employers? The reason for this employee-employer divide is rooted in data.

While the past decade has offered employers a plethora of data collection and analysis solutions, many sales teams still do not possess the technology they need -- and employees are taking notice. According to a study by Bain & Company, 56% of companies don’t have the tools needed to collect data, or are collecting the wrong data. An even greater number -- 66% -- lacked the infrastructure to access and store data.

The fact of the matter is that while team expectations have evolved, reporting techniques and technologies are not being used nearly enough. How then, can sales managers both empower their team and satisfy their desire for recognition?

Creating Structure With Territory Management

The first step is to create an infrastructure for your team that facilitates modern data collection. For organizations that have salespeople working in the field, territory management should be near the top of the priority list. Assigning specific areas to individual sales reps prevents the cannibalization of client accounts and helps to reduce travel time between customers. Managers should keep territories flexible, and review them regularly. What started out as a quiet territory best suited for one salesperson might have quickly morphed into one better suited for a rep with an entirely different personality or skill set.

With a strong territory management system in place, it will be easier for managers to attribute customer feedback to specific employees and recognize which salespeople are converting leads into new customers. While in the long-term, territory management is a useful tool for organizing collected data, in the short-term it can bring clarity to some basic information which will help managers recognize employees who are performing well, and identify those who are underperforming.

Collecting and Organizing Your Data

With the proper infrastructure in place, sales managers can begin to collect data from their reps in the field. In order to gather a sufficient amount and quality of data without hindering salespeople, managers need a solution that offers simplicity and practicality for reps while still returning information with enough depth to be useful. The best tool for managing your field team’s activities will offer a mobile option for sales reps that not only allows them to take purchase orders and perform retail audits, but also to report on performance.

With a huge amount of collected data, managers need a way to organize and analyze quickly. The system you use to manage your field team should provide visibility into this data and make the information easy to organize, analyze, and export. However, raw data alone is not quite enough when employees want their work recognized, and business owners want to see strides made in efficiency and effectiveness.

Defining Success and Acting on Your Data

In order to quantify success, it is first necessary to determine what success is specific to your organization. These personalized metrics of success are known as KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. KPIs can be set for anything, so long as they are quantifiable, and have consistent enough data to provide a foundation for future decisions. 

For example, field sales teams might collect data that can be used for a territory performance KPI. Managers can look at the relative size of all territories compared to the number of clients in each, and then compare that to the average employee performance. The results may show that certain reps are performing far above the average, while others are falling behind. In this case, the solution could simply be altering territory size or reallocating clients. 

KPIs can even be used for employee-specific metrics. Managers can collect data on specific employees’ functions over a time period of weeks or months, and then determine the causes of their decline or ascension in relation to their peers. Maybe your star salesperson has been upselling all of his clients, but the data shows he is below average in number of customer visits when compared to other employees. With this salesperson-specific data in hand, managers are in a position to confidently give accolades to those who have earned it.

Before managers can hope to fulfill a goal and achieve success, they need to define that success, and quantify what they expect from employees. Recognition of great work creates a far more satisfying and successful working environment for everyone involved. Keeping management techniques and technology up-to-date is necessary for sales teams to flourish going forward, and if organizations want to avoid low morale and high turnover, they need to adapt.

Do you want to become a powerful Inbound Marketing Machine and crush your rivals? If you’re reading this post then are chances are you do. I’m here to help you lubricate those Inbound gears and give you a foundation that you can use to position your business as a thought leader and lead-generating behemoth. Inbound Marketing isn’t a fancy phrase modern agencies use to WOW potential clients, it’s a real strategy for marketing online that delivers tangible. Here are seven Inbound Marketing tips to help you conquer your competition and attract new leads to your business.

1. Don’t Broadcast – Solve Problems

What do you hate most about watching TV or listening to the radio? I’m willing to bet all the tea in China that it’s the commercials. No one likes being interrupted during their favorite shows. That’s why so many people record their favorite shows. No one has time for Mr. Joe Blow selling golden toilet seats when Walter White is taking on the Mexican meth cartel or The Bachelor is handing out roses. The arrival of Tivo and the DVR has made this form of advertising less effective, not to mention it’s hard to track results. Inbound Marketing changes this formula by attracting people to your business by solving their problem at the very time they are searching for a solution. This formula is customer centric, not marketing centric. Just makes sense doesn’t it?

2. The Strategy

Now that we know we want to solve their problem, how do we do that? We do this by attracting the right people to our site with targeted content that helps answer questions they are typing into Google or other search engines. Surveys have said 80 percent of business decision makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus an advertisement. You want to be where that 80 percent is looking, don’t you?

We want to Attract, Convert, Close, then Delight — this is called the Inbound Marketing Methodology. It’s a powerful formula that positions your business as an industry leader and a problem solver. We want to pull people into the Attract, or top of the funnel phase. We do this with remarkable content. Once we have them on our site our goal is to convert them to a lead, thus moving them further down the sales funnel. The job is done once we convert a visitor into a lead though, now we have to close them with a different type of content. You can read more about the Inbound Marketing Methodology here.

3. Whose Problems Are We Solving?

Your business has different types of customers. Say for example you sell plumbing services, you wouldn’t talk to a homeowner with frozen pipes the same way you would a contractor looking to install piping throughout a new home build. That’s why you have to create what we call Buyer Personas. A Buyer Persona is a fictional character that symbolizes a certain set of demographics and habits. HomeOwner Hank has different problems than Contractor Carl and they use different terminologies when speaking about pluming. You’ll put a story to each of these personas. Dig into what makes them tick, why they do the things they do. After interviewing several HomeOwner Hanks or Contractor Carls you’ll begin to see trends and problems you can address.

Content using simple to understand language will need to be created to attract people in the HomeOwner Hank group. Possibly lots of How To and DIY posts. Then on the Contractor Carl side you’ll be able to use more technical terms that might relate to the home building process. Each of these Buyer Persona’s will have different pain-points, it’s your job to create content that speaks to them both.

4. How Do We Solve Their Problems?

Content is the heart beat of the Inbound Marketing process. Your content needs to be remarkable and it needs to be focused on solving the problems of your buyer personas.

Let’s use our HomeOwner Hank and see if we can’t help him out. Something your potential customer might type into Google would be, “frozen pipes.” A blog post called “5 Ways to Prevent Pipes from Freezing Over” would be very useful to that person. Then, oh by the way, we can help fix your problem. Convert them with a call-to-action to move them to the next phase of becoming a customer.

5. Discovering The Buyer’s Journey

Would you talk to someone that’s ready to buy your services the same way as someone just looking for a solution to solve their specific problem? No. There are different stages people take when buying a product and it’s called the Buyer’s Journey. The Buyer’s Journey is comprised of three different stages; Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. This strategy puts defined goals to each level of the typical sales funnel.

Most businesses just blast out messages that talk to people in the Decision or bottom of the funnel stage.

“Buy Now $100 OFF!” “Save 20% on New Widgets!”

People in the Awareness or the top of the funnel aren’t ready for this, they are just figuring out they have a problem and how to solve it.

For example, let’s say your car won’t start, but your dealership only blasts out a $1500 rebate on new car purchases. The person who’s car won’t start isn’t looking for a new car, they are trying to figure out why it won’t start. They go online and do research, typing into Google, “car won’t start,” and they find articles, from your competition, about the reasons why a car won’t start. Then at the end of the article they are prompted to fill out a contact form for the free eBook: How Cars Age. This person has now determined that the car’s electrical system is to blame and that it will be less expensive to buy a new car than to fix the electrical system. Your competition emailed this lead to offer a free car diagnostic, then suggested the person test drive similar cars on their lot.

Who do you think got the sale, the person shouting out prices or the one helping solving the customers problem? It was the one building trust and moving the prospect down the Buyer’s Journey.

6. Distribute With The Hub & Spoke Model

You want to be where people are. Now days people spend time online in social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. These are NOT great advertising channels, but they are great places to share the remarkable top of the funnel content.

Create blog posts with useful DIY videos, take creative photos of your team in the office, show your product being used in humorous ways. Then take these posts and distribute them to your social networks. The work isn’t done though, now you have to engage with people and stir the pot. Social networks are suppose to be fun and most importantly “SOCIAL.” Be human, not a stuffy business.

Social Media, forums, SEO, engagement, being human, targeted email lists—all of these methods help to distribute your content, create brand advocates, and attract more people into the Awareness phase of your Buyer’s Journey.

7. Becoming An Inbound Master

These are the basics of Inbound Marketing, but there’s still a mountain of information and skills you need to learn before becoming a true Inbound Marketing Machine. The best place to get these magical skill is the HubSpot Academy.

Go to http://academy.hubspot.com and become Inbound Certified. They will walk you through all the ins and outs of inbound strategy with simple and engaging videos. At the end you’ll take a test, and if passed, you’ll be Inbound Certified. You’ll feel like Superman, ready to take on the world! They even give you a cool badge to put on your LinkedIn page.

Inbound Marketing has been around for several years but most businesses are just now learning of how to use it and the benefits it brings to your business. It’s not a quick process, it’s a foundation. One that will position you and your business as a industry leader. Hopefully the tips listed above will help and inspire you to be come a true Inbound Marketing Machine. For a more in depth look at becoming a marketing machine please download our free Inbound Marketing Strategy ebook. It will open you up to a whole new world.

There is an increasing pool of research—from respected organizations like Gallup and the Harvard Business Review, and also many newer research firms— demonstrating that the costs of a bad hire in B2B sales, more than any other functional group, are enormous. Most B2B companies tend to grossly underestimate the negative consequences a bad sales hire can bring to their company.

Some of the costs to consider include:

B2B Sales Direct Costs

• Lost revenue (lost and delayed business)
• Extra training and management required
• Costs of turnover (firing and replacing – from both time and direct hiring costs)

B2B Sales Indirect Costs

• Long-term impact on market share and brand – lost customers and brand loyalty
• Impact on morale – leading to lower overall performance of other team members and higher turnover— and ultimately the loss of your best salespeople

An Example Of The Costs

Let’s look at a methodology developed by Croner and Abraham for a company where the sales quota of the best salespeople is $1.5 million, and sub-par performers are delivering half of that ($750,000).

The annual impact of having a poor performer on the team can be estimated at $1,360,000 (including lost revenue, lost clients, and extra management costs). The costs of delaying action, to remove this individual, are $2.6 million over two years!

You must remember that B2B salespeople represent your company to your clients. Therefore, the impact of brand and market-share erosion over time, of a sub-par salesperson, can have grave consequences for your company.

“In industries that rely on their B2B sales force to generate revenue, people are four times more important in building customer loyalty, than the products or services themselves” (Smith and Rutigliano).

Other Insights

CSO Insights, a sales research firm, puts out statistics it gathers every year from surveys it does with over 2500 companies.

They found that only 58.2 percent of B2B sales reps made quota in 2013 out of the 2500+ companies surveyed. That means that 42.8 percent of sales reps missed their quota.

That is a very alarming statistic.

A Typical Observation

CSO Insights had this conversation with a sales rep from one of their interview companies.

Sales rep: “Yeah, that program is great. Really powerful. In fact, the only time it doesn’t work is when I don’t use it.”

CSO Insights: “That’s quite an endorsement. How often would you say you use the principles you learned in the program?”

Sales rep: “Uh, maybe half the time.”

Now please think about that for a moment. If it works every time the rep uses it, why wouldn’t the rep use it all the time? Does he/she simply not need a win every time? Very unlikely!

It’s usually because the sales rep hasn’t had ongoing coaching to ingrain the sales training methodology into their daily routine.

Does Training & Coaching Pay Off?

Here are two interesting graphics about training and coaching:

As you can see from the first graphic, training gives a one-time boost in sales behavior and results, but people quickly slip back into their old familiar behavior without coaching reinforcement, and increases in sales are negligible.

However, with coaching after training, you can see that although there is a slight dip in both graphics right after training, the sales people who received coaching keep getting better and better results.

Through all of my coaching years, I have found that coaching costs very little compared to the increased results that have occurred. In many cases, coaching fees were less than 1 percent of the overall increase in revenues.

So, if you truly want to grow your business, you need to have your sales people trained and coached by professionals. And in most cases, this means hiring outside professional B2B sales coaches. You will see a very worthwhile ROI.

Conclusions

Competing at the top level is very exacting and can be very trying mentally. Anyone who has ever played golf knows that for sure.

But in order to succeed at any level, people need coaching. This is true for executives, business owners, and especially for sales and marketing people.

You use coaching for two main reasons.

1. To help you learn new skills, and to perfect or change old ones,
2. To give you feedback on how you are performing those skills, and to correct mistakes.

Feedback needs to be timely, accurate, consistent, relevant, and individualized. The other four factors are fairly self-explanatory, but let’s have a look at what is needed to be accurate, and why it is important to be accurate.

In order to be accurate, you need to have some kind of measurement system in place to give you metrics about how someone is performing all the way through the sales cycle.

You need to measure things like;
1. Is she following up on leads? (I hope you have a good lead generation system.)
2. Is he using the sales and marketing methodology that you have implemented? ( I hope you have one.)
3. Does she qualify prospects well, so she’s not chasing people that aren’t going to buy right now? (My GAIM Plan helps here.)
4. Is he demonstrating your system properly, or does he do it too early or too late in the sales cycle?
5. Does she follow a correct proposal writing script that your company has implemented?
6. Does he follow-up properly with all prospects?
7. And all the way through the sales cycle.

You need to measure everything right through the sales cycle, until you either lose or win the business.

As you can see, in order for your company to meet its revenue targets in any year, you need to be implementing coaching in your business.

This coaching should also include the executives of your company, so everyone is on the same page.

It becomes pretty obvious that training with coaching pays off.

Are your sales reps, marketers, and executives getting the training and coaching they need to understand sales and marketing better, and to able to reach quotas?

Check out three videos I’ve produced on the three skills most B2B sales people lack that keep them reaching quota.

As we start the new year, I want to offer some observations on what we’re learning here about inside sales management. Sales executives often ask about new ways to build a sales a pipeline. How can your business use an inside sales function to produce leads? There is a risk that reorganizing your teams could potentially kill your inside sales efforts, so this question is so important to address.

Is Inside Sales The Answer For A Stronger Sales Pipeline?

It happens all the time – a company recognizes that inside sales can benefit the field sales organization by producing qualified leads. It makes sense to look for ways to help the company by selling through a lower cost channel. Management considers inside sales as a way to build a strong, predictable pipeline. So, the company decides to hire an in-house inside sales representative. It seems like a great idea. But wait, not so fast.

What result can you expect? The actual benefits may vary from great to none. The purpose here is to see what impact management can have. The challenge is for management to find what makes the difference between best and poor performance. If results are poor, leadership will question whether inside sales can be a viable option to support the field sales team. Executives may disband the function and label the effort unsuccessful, never to surface again in the company.

If you achieve great results, how can you make great results even better? If expected results are not reached, what is the culprit? Without a look at the key roles of inside sales management, pipelines suffer and inside sales is no longer viewed as a possible solution to pipeline building.

Effective Management Is Key To Inside Sales Results

There may be many factors that affect results. We will look at the solutions that come from having effective and consistent inside sales management.

So here are eight key factors in managing inside sales to see more income from your sales pipeline:

1) Reporting: Have the inside sales representative report to an available manager.

Make sure that that the higher level manager has the time and skill to manage the inside sales representative. Many times an inside sales representative is hired and managed by a person who is too busy or doesn’t have the skill set to effectively oversee the in-house sales program. You don’t want to invite a continuing debate about whether inside sales reports to sales or marketing.

We have found that the reporting structure varies by organization. What matters is that the manager should be consistently available to the inside sales representative.

It is important to involve the inside sales representative in weekly working meetings, traditionally called “one on ones.” Use this time to review activity and results, provide guidance and resolve issues.

2) Hiring: Your choice of hire depends on whether you want the inside sales representative to generate leads or close deals.

Who you hire depends on the tasks you want the representative to be responsible for. It matters whether the person will be responsible for generating leads for business development or sales, or if the person will be responsible for closing deals.

Inside sales representatives tasked with generating or qualifying leads generally come straight out of college. Good candidates may have had an internship with the company. A desired background may include various roles such as customer service or inside sales representative. Your new hire may come from another part of your organization, or you may find one from another organization in a dissimilar role.

Regardless of where you find candidates, they should possess certain traits that allow them to succeed in this role (a topic for another blog post.) A sales representative who carries quota may be prime for promotion. Needless to say, hiring right makes management easier.

3) Metrics: The measures of success are different for inside sales than for field sales, and require tracking a greater volume of data.

You may want to base your new inside sales representative’s compensation on performance. But know that inside sales metrics differ considerably from field sales or business development metrics, so your compensation plans will be different.

The nature of inside sales activity tends to produce voluminous amounts of data to track. It’s important to follow certain metrics to evaluate activity and ensure success. Deals closed may be a metric that is often used, however it is usually not the only metric to determine an inside sales representative’s success in generating leads. Most of the time, performance and compensation metrics measure the quality and quantity of leads delivered.

4) Training: Whether generating leads or closing deals, training is necessary for new hires as well as experienced staff.

New hire training should be specific to inside sales and cover your company culture, and how to position you in relation to your competition. The goal is to enable new hires to perform their job functions. Ongoing training should also occur on a daily basis. Representatives from various departments should be able to share their knowledge with the inside sales representatives regularly. You can provide opportunities through lunch meetings or discussions that allow insides sales staff to bring up topics to address.

5) Inclusion: Many times, the legacy sales process excludes inside sales representatives from key interactions with field sales. Find ways to integrate them.

Your traditional sales activities may exclude inside sales staff from interactions that can otherwise help them in their role and allow them to produce better results for the company. There are many ways to include inside sales representatives in key activities of the teams they support. Inside sales representatives should be present at kickoffs and sales conferences. They should be able to participate in weekly monthly sales calls with the sales organization.

By being involved, representative learn from the field sales representative and see the outcome of meetings with prospects. Inside sales representatives spend their days in house generating leads or closing sales. It is important for them to participate in sales calls as well. Any training given to the sales or business development team should include the inside sales representatives.

6) Management potential: You may want to plan ahead for the management of your inside sales team as your organization evolves.

If you have a salesforce or business development team greater than four, you will probably be looking to hire a second inside sales representative to qualify leads. With that eventual plan in mind, it’s a good idea to hire one inside sales representative who has management potential. This person can later serve as a manager for the group. Alternatively, you may want to structure a new smaller team, and look for a representative who has the potential to become a manager of a group of two or more.

7) Document your processes: Have written guides and definitions to standardize the message and activities.

Inside sales representatives should be instructed on the process created for them to perform their jobs most efficiently. Guides and scripts for calls and emails should be part of the process to standardize the message.

Include success stories and qualifying questions that inside sales representatives should be aware of and use. In addition, have a defined process for lead definition, lead passing and lead follow up. For inside sales representatives hired to close sales leads, there should also be a process for completing closed deals.

8) Focus: It is imperative that each inside sales representative is focused on accomplishing their own goals.

If an inside sales representative is responsible for generating leads, the focus needs to be 100 percent on doing just that. Not all sales representatives are equally able to perform inside and outbound sales. Most inside sales representatives are much more skilled at one function over the other. Too often inside sales representatives become administrative assistants to the sales or business development representatives. This diverts inside sales staff from performing their primary responsibilities. The ability to achieve goals and produce intended results for the company suffers as a result.

Some inside sales representatives should be tasked with inbound efforts and others with outbound efforts. But each representative should remain fully focused on their own activities.

Managing an inside sales function is very different from managing a field organization or a marketing team. I hope these points provide guidance in helping to manage the important tasks of inside sales representatives to increase your sales pipeline.

Success stories are effective to use as proof and reinforcement late in the buying cycle once a customer has already formed a complete buying vision that fully recognizes “why change?” and “why you?”

These stories are easy to tell because you’re providing proof to a customer who has already recognized that he or she has a problem that your solution can solve. Success stories are effective because they gloss over the problem so that they can focus on the solution as proof.

The problem is that the vast majority of customers at any stage of the sales cycle are not yet sold on why they should change or why they should change through you. These customers are not looking for proof of a solution to a problem they don’t yet think they have. Without a full appreciation of the value of your product, your salespeople will be forced to follow the customer down the road of commoditization and discounting when the customer decides to buy, or no decision when he or she does not decide to buy.

With 60-70% of enterprise sales opportunities ending in no decision, there is a huge opportunity for salespeople to learn to tell a more effective story that not only provides proof, but also inspires customers to change.

To inspire change, salespeople must learn to tell a new type of story, one that shines a light of insight on customers so they realize they aren’t ankle-deep in problems but are, in fact, drowning in problems before salespeople step forward to rescue these customers with their solution. We call this new type of story an Insight Scenario.

Success stories fail to inspire customers to change and buy your product for the following six reasons:

1. Sells Solution vs. Sells the Problem

Success stories gloss over the problem so they can focus on the solution as proof. As a result, they provide only a superficial reason to change, such as the customer’s current system lacks ‘timeliness’ or  is ‘prone to error.’ The reasons do little to inspire customers to change. Insight Scenarios, on the other hand, flip the problem-solution ratio upside-down because salespeople must open before they can close. By increasing the time spent developing the problem from 25 percent to 75 percent, Insight Scenarios allow the salesperson to sell the problem before the solution.

2. Abstract vs. Concrete

Success stories are about companies solving abstract problems, so they leave it to customers to figure out how they could use the seller’s product to solve their problem. Insight Scenarios, on the other hand, provide context by asking “So then what happens?” until they tell the story of a real person solving a real problem by using the seller’s product.

3. Sameness vs. Contrast

Success stories are vague about the problem and specific about the solution. Insight Scenarios, on the other hand, create a clear contrast between “hell” if customers don’t buy your product and “heaven” if they do. As a result, customers are inspired to change because the risk to the status quo now feels greater than the cost of the seller’s solution along with the risk of change.

4. Monologue vs. Dialogue

Success stories are sales conversation-killing monologues that flood customers with far too much information. Insight Scenarios, on the other hand, are limited to addressing only one point per story. They are designed to deliver short bursts of insight in less than two minutes to start a dialogue in which customers start to tell themselves a new story in which new choices make more sense.

5. Repels vs. Attracts

Success stories are usually about a seller who rides in on a white horse and rescues the poor hapless customer. But customers don’t want to see themselves as the loser in your story. Insight Scenarios, on the other hand, always make buyers or their employees the heroes of the story and make an outside force, such as changes in technology or regulations, the villain. As a result, Insight Scenarios attract rather than repel customers.

6. Irrelevant vs. Relevant

Success stories are about how the seller rescued the customer. But if the customer doesn’t yet fully recognize his or her problem, the story will have little relevance. The purpose of an Insight Scenario, on the other hand, is to shine a light on unrecognized customer value so that the Insight Scenario closes the value gap.

So it’s easy to learn how to tell a success story, but it’s challenging to tell a relevant story that inspires a customer to change. Did you know, for example, that 7 out of 10 Hollywood films lose money, 1 breaks-even, and only 2 out of 10 make money? Even though Hollywood has more money than God to hire the best script writers and other creative thinkers, most films fail. However, in sales, unlike Hollywood, our stories can’t just entertain. They must inspire customers to change, and we do that by delivering an Insight Scenario.

Salespeople need to know how to convert their success stories into Insight Scenarios that are unique to the specific company, title, and gap they are trying to fill. They must first sell the idea conversationally through a series of insight scenarios before they can leave behind the success story as proof.

If I could give salespeople training in only one thing, I would pick any of the fifteen things on this list before I would train them on “social selling.”

1. How to Cold Call and Book Appointments: There isn’t anything higher on this list because cold calling is what would improve most salespeople’s results faster than anything else.
2. How to Overcome Objections (or Resolve Concerns): No matter how good you are, without the language and rationale to deal with objections, you aren’t creating or winning an opportunity.
3. How to Differentiate Themselves and Their Company: I’ve never asked a salesperson what make their company different and gotten a compelling response, even when their leadership team believes they know their differentiators.
4. How to Leverage the Buying Cycle: Salespeople would benefit more from knowing how to serve their dream clients as they go through the stages of buying more than anything they might learn about Twitter.
5. How to Understand What Makes an Opportunity: Unless and until your dream client agrees to pursue change with you, you don’t have an opportunity.
6. Why They Need to Follow Their Process: Most companies don’t follow a process, and neither do their salespeople. I’d teach them why they should follow it and how it helps them win.
7. How to Target and Nurture Their Dream Clients: Too little time, too many prospects. You have to focus on the clients for whom you create the most value. You need to nurture those relationships.
8. How to Plan a Sales Call: Honestly, most salespeople don’t plan their sales calls at all. It’s a mistake to waste a client interaction.
9. How to Open a Sales Call: Without the ability to open a sales call effectively, you quickly come across as an amateur and a time waster.
10. How to Do Good Discovery: Without understanding your dream client’s most strategic needs, it’s difficult to be compelling, and it’s more difficult to frame your solution.
11. How to Gain Commitments: First, most salespeople don’t know all the commitment they need, and when they do, they don’t have the language to gain those commitments. I’d teach them to close.
12. How to Build Consensus: No one builds consensus on LinkedIn. Complex sales require consensus. Without it, you lose to the status quo.
13. How to Think Like an Businessperson: In B2B sales, business acumen and situational knowledge are what allows you to create value. I’d teach this before I’d let the salesperson flounder around on Facebook.
14. How to Tell a Story: One of the ways you prove how what makes you different makes a difference for your clients is through the stories you tell. Tweet that.
15. How to Negotiate: Most salespeople crumble at the first question about price. I’d teach them to negotiate around value.

I could extend this list by another 15 competencies salespeople need more than they need social selling. If you want to build a personal brand that stands the test of time, being good at what you do counts for than being known.

The post 15 Things I Would Train Salespeople On Instead of Social Selling appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Fab.com was once considered the fastest growing startup in the world. The e-commerce site partnered with thousands of designers to sell their funky decor and trinkets via flash sales.

Within its first six months, Fab generated $20 million and Silicon Valley investors valued the company at $400 million. At its peak, the company raised a total of $336 million at a $900 million valuation with a $200 million+ run rate.

But then Fab crashed. 

This month, the assets of Fab are expected to be acquired by PCH Innovations for $15-50 million in a stock-based deal.

The company and its CEO, Jason Goldberg, made a lot of mistakes during the course of Fab. You can read about them all in detail here. 

When Goldberg realized Fab was failing, he wrote a 5-page memo to his executive team. It's dated October 11 2013, a few months after the company raised a $150 million round of financing at a $900 million valuation from Tencent.

Then, Fab was laying off hundreds of staffers and pivoting its business for the fourth or fifth time. The memo provides a transparent look into a troubled company that blew $200 million before figuring out a sustainable business model. It is proof that even the most hyped tech companies with gobs of funding can go sideways very quickly.

Printed copies of the memo were handed to the executives. Business Insider got a copy and typed it all out to protect the source. Here it is in full:

CEO Missive

October 11, 2013

We are going to make this work.

• It has to start with brutal honesty
• We have a job to do. That job is to make Fab successful.
• I want your help doing that.
• But it won't be exactly the same as it has been.
• And you might not always be comfortable with everything we have to do. Change is hard.
• And we have to establish a few ground rules:
• I have a full mandate from the board to do whatever it takes to guide this to a good outcome. I am responsible for their/our money. My role is to steer this ship and you have to be 100% ok with that.
• Jason is allowed to ask and question anything. And he will make tough calls that the team may not like, but will need to try to find a way to get behind. We're in full-on preservation mode right now. This is serious.
• There has to be scrutiny and measurement on every aspect of the business, there is no room for blind faith bets.
• I can't do this if the team -- the CPLUS group -- are are [sic] not in a good head space. The broader team takes their emotional cues from you.
• We're better at this together than against each other.
• I have promised the board certain things:
• We will guide this business to being self-sustainable.
• We will narrow our focus to a specific target customer while we figure out a repeatable business plan to service them. Jennifer/Michael.
• We will question everything and apply analytical rigor to our decision process.
• We will do a ruthless assessment of our talent and fill in our gaps.
• The debate about our path is over. At this point it's about deliberate action.
• We are not done righting this ship. It will be a constant, every day effort.

So..

• Step 1: Acknowledge that we have serious problems.
• Step 2: Ground ourselves in reality on what it will take to fix our problems.
• Step 3: Focus on fixing it.
• Resources.
• Time.
• People.
• Determination
• We have to be brutally honest with ourselves about where we are at.
• We spent $200M in the past 2 years. $200M!
• We spent $200M and we have not proven out our business model
• We spent $200M and we have not proven that we know precisely what customers want to buy.
• This is not an indictment about any person or persons or team.
• It must be a thoughtful discussion about what's best for Fab.
• We have north of $100M and we a) have to make it last b) figure out all the things we should have been figuring out over the last two years.
• This is it.
• It will be super difficult to raise another round, and if we do raise a round some of the consequences (including not controlling our own destiny, potentially nasty down round, etc)
• We are the most heavily funded startup in NYC at 2 years in our life cycle and we have spent 2/3 of the cash - its a privilege and enormous responsibility
• We have to figure all of this out quickly or we will run out of runway
• Holy shit this is a big deal
• Retail businesses are all about the merchandise.
• No amount of marketing or financial engineering can overcome the merchandise.
• Successful retail is a marriage of merchandising and supply chain.
• Successful retail is a marriage of merchandising and operations.
• Selling a lifestyle = ruthlessly executing on a tight creative vision that is married with a deep and proven understanding of what customers will buy.
• Turning around a retail business is a slog. It wont [sic] happen overnight. Planning cycles. We need time.
• The only way we get time is to cut our spend - we need to be creative and brutal about it
• We must, must, must, narrow the focus. Even more than we already have. 
• Fab does X better than anyone else for Y. And here's the proof.
• That's not to say we can't come back and do more later and build that lifestyle brand we want to build, but we have to earn the right bit by bit right now.
• Especially because we buy inventory. We can no longer afford to take big chances on stuff that doesn't sell. Everything has to be focused, even the misses.
• We've got a limited shot at this and focus is the only way we are going to get there. Disciplined focus.
• It is not enough to say let's just get back to where we used to be.
• Strict frameworks. Buy what we love, within a strict framework of what our customers want.
• What customers want and will pay for matters more right now than what we want them to want.
• It's not about us. It's about Jennifer and Michael. [Jennifer and Michael are made-up profiles of Fab's target user based on an internal customer survey]
• We won't [sic] have the opportunity to build a business that Jennifer and Michael admire and shop from unless we:
• Focus, focus, focus.
• Slow things down.
• Continue honing in on costs and inefficiencies.
• Instrument and measure everything.
• Clear everything off our plates to do this right.

What do you all need in order to do this?

• We have failed in the past to clearly identify what Fab's core value proposition is to consumers.
• Who we target. Narrow, specific customer target.
• How, Product offering, price point.

We are doing [sic] do that now.

• We have failed in the past to acknowledge the cost-focused, execution-focused, low margin requirements of an e-commerce business. We are doing that now.

I have made mistakes.

• I guided us to go too fast.
• I enabled us to lose our core focus.
• I didn't insist on our honing in on our target customer.
• I didn't build discipline around costs and business metrics enough into our culture.
• I didn't build a retail merchandising / marketing culture.
• I spent too much on marketing before we got the consumer value proposition right.
• I allowed us to over invest in Europe vs. insisting on scaling global teams from teh start.
• I didn't build a culture and discipline that connected supply chain to merchandising to delivery. I allowed silos of teams and thinking, and that has seeded an awful an [sic] cancerous distrust.
• I didn't see the need to course correct fast enough.
• Etc.
• Etc.

And all of you have made mistakes too.

I need you all to do this: Write down the mistakes you made.

It's not about blame. It's about healthy introspective dose of realism that is needed by all of us in order to go forward. We can't build a better Fab until we have a clear sense for what we should have done different, better, smarter.

Things you can expect over the next weeks and months.

• Ruthless attention to righting this ship.
• Ruthless attention to focusing the business.
• Ruthless attention to opportunities to shave costs without hampering our future.
• More more more Jennifer and Michael.
• Influx of retail and ecomm experience.
• Hires.
• Brown-bags.
• Advisors/mentors.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: What Happened When A Bunch Of Young Boys Were Told To Hit A Girl

In our work as Sales Outsourcers, one C-Level Title that we work with is the Chief Revenue Officer. Why does this title exist? Shouldn’t the SVP of Sales, the CEO or a business GM be ensuring that the company is making money?

Businesses of all sizes are driven by the impetus to achieve and maintain a steady revenue stream. And while it may seem counterintuitive, most businesses are not structured in a way that ensures a predictable revenue stream. There are many revenue generating processes that need be monitored: for example, billing processes, customer fulfillment success, timely revenue recognition. But one main source of revenue processes that can work against a predictable revenue stream is the makeup of sales and marketing departments that generally work in isolated bubbles, interacting only when absolutely necessary. Such a territorial approach in both sales and marketing often fosters unproductivity, and most importantly a loss in the line of sight of the main goal: revenue growth.

Enter the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). The CRO has been, until recently, a role seen mostly in start-ups and smaller businesses to keep an eye on the bottom line while the rest of the C-Level team grew key partnerships, looked for growth opportunities or sourced funding. But now bigger businesses that are past the initial growth hurdle are viewing the CRO role as an essential, longer-term role, the key to aligning departments company-wide in a concerted effort to raise revenue. Consider the following companies that have recently added the CRO to bolster revenue performance: SolarCity, L.A. Times, Altisource, and Marin Software.

The CRO role boasts many responsibilities that have potential to directly and positively impact a business’s revenue stream for all activities that generate revenue:

• Pricing Strategies: product prices should reflect perceived market value to the extent that they generate the highest return.
• Sales Performance: sales strategies and tactics strive to sell product to the most valuable segment of the market with a goal to generate the most revenue possible.
• Advertising/Marketing Effectiveness: expenses for marketing and promotion activities are revisited and refined consistently to generate the highest ROI.
• Distribution Efficiency: all channels of distribution are consistently evaluated and refined to identify and develop channels that offer the most profitable means of distribution.

While the above highlight the primary responsibilities of a CRO, there are certain qualities that indicate how successful a CRO might be in their role. Consider the following traits as benchmarks for an effective CRO:

• Constant communicator: the CRO communicates the revenue strategy company-wide, with a special focus on marketing and sales efforts, to ensure all teams are aligned in strategy and execution for the greatest revenue attainment.
• Reliant on data and metrics: a numbers guy (or gal), the CRO holds teams accountable by exhibiting fluency in data and tying performance to established metrics that determine sales and marketing success.
• Seasoned mediator: the model CRO is an objective go-between for marketing and sales teams, understanding both differences and similarities inherent in the two roles. The CRO bridges the gap between the two functionalities, ensuring they serve their unique purpose while coordinating with each other to ensure the company realizes a full revenue cycle.
• Results orientated: the CRO focuses on both long and short term results. Here the CRO ties in the short term perspective that many sales departments work in (driving quarterly results, prospecting, closing deals), as well as the long term programs through which marketing often operates.

The CRO is a role that draws from attributes that are already prevalent in the various departments found within most companies. However, it is only when these key elements are extracted from the likes of sales and marketing folk and amalgamated into one supreme role, does a company realize the full extent of revenue generation and overall growth. In our world, the function the CRO holds is to mostly optimize the sales revenue chain. Perhaps it’s time your company considered getting the most out of its business by bringing on a Chief Revenue Officer, not just for sales optimization but to govern and optimize all revenue generating processes.

We’d love to hear your opinions on the role of the CRO. Feel free to connect with us.

Business modeling is more than designing a new business model. It’s about defining a strategy for the future, together with your team, using visual tools.

Writing a business plan is a waste of time

We live in a time where little is predictable. Many professional services organizations navigate a space where competitors appear overnight and unexpectedly, clients demand monthly innovations, and business plans rarely last a full year. Organizations are looking for new revenue streams, new ways to add value for their audiences, and new business models.

New skills, new tools, new mindset

In today’s world, managers and entrepreneurs need new skills, new tools and a new mindset. Entrepreneurs need to think like designers and use visual tools for strategy and innovation. These tools can be used to make complex issues simple and understandable, to create future scenarios, to generate different options, and to develop prototypes. No more lengthy business plans full of Excel sheets, with numbers no one reads or understands. Visual tools are easy to understand by everyone in an organization and help you to co-create with your full team. They help you unlock the potential within your organization, collect all feasible ideas for a future strategy, engage your full team, and make strategy an experience.

Business Model Canvas

Visual tools like the Business Model Canvas can improve the way you work, help you to design your future business and be more successful in what you do. The Business Model Canvas is a strategic and visual management tool that allows you to describe, design, challenge, invent, and pivot your business model. It helps you create a business model around your idea and find out how you really add value for your clients and partners.

On a single sheet of paper, you can map out your complete business model, which can then be easily shared with other members of the organization, partners or stakeholders. Here at Business Models Inc., we use the Business Model Canvas in combination with a multitude of other visual tools: the Vision Canvas can help your firm map out its goals in a visual way, while the Context Canvas lets you visualize the context you are operating in. With the Value Proposition Canvas, you can design a value proposition your clients really want and test it in the market.

http:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN36EcTE54Q

Depending on the results you want to achieve, you can select different visual tools. They can all be combined. Together, they make up the Business Model Innovation process: a set of visual tools to design your strategy for the future.

Use visual tools to make strategy and innovation concrete

In order to be able to use visual tools, you need a completely different mindset, so forget (almost) everything you learned during your business classes. First of all, you need people in your innovation team from different kind of backgrounds – not just your management team, innovation managers and entrepreneurs. It has to be as diverse as possible.

Plan your strategy meetings beforehand and decide which visual tools you need to get the results you want. Do you want to create a shared vision, a new business model or a new product/service for your customers? By using the Business Model Canvas, or any other visual tool, you can think like a designer, design your future strategy and become successful in your market.

To learn more about innovating your firm’s business model to create the ultimate differentiator, join us for a free webinar with Patrick van der Pijl on February 25th at 1PM EST.

In the post-WW II decades through the 1990’s – and for many into the 2000’s, the business and world economy was focused on the mass “push-down” economic model. In simplistic terms, B2B was predicated on mass production and how many mass-produced products can be sold through marketing, sales, and distribution. Fortunes rose or fell based on whether B2B organizations were caught with inventory bloat or inability to meet demand. The post-WW II decade’s spawned market research, sales effectiveness, marketing communications, “push-down” hierarchal organization models, and more. All intended to “push-down” harder and faster than any other competitive organization.

Fifteen years into the new century, we have seen more changes occurring than in all the post-WW II sixty-five years leading up to the year 2000. Progressive as well as innovative B2B organizations are changing. B2B buyers are changing as well. The old “push-down” models are no longer working. Giving way to new models revolving around sharing, collaboration, and networked capabilities. The implications for B2B marketing and organizations is they must relearn what it means to connect with B2B buyers.

The Old Ways Are Simply Not Working

An ongoing theme over the past few years has been the issue of ineffectiveness. Ineffectiveness runs rampant in sales and content marketing. Ineffectiveness itself, as an issue, has spawned a cottage sub-economy of services, technologies, and consultants based on remedying ineffectiveness. We have seen this with the hyper growth of content marketing. Where, despite the hyper growth, survey after survey shows continued dissatisfaction. With satisfied effectiveness struggling to breakthrough thirty-eight percent.

My observations are based on a few hundred qualitative buyer interviews over the past few years. What is evident is the old ways are simply not working. When we look at the issue of ineffectiveness, there is an important factor many companies can be failing to realize. It is this: while companies adopt new tactics such as content marketing, they do so within old “push-down” frameworks and understanding of their B2B buyers.

We can generalize safely around this idea – B2B organizations that have grasped this profound dilemma and have adopted are succeeding while those who have yet to – are struggling.

The New B2B Buyer

With the old ways simply not working, we are beginning to see a new B2B Buyer emerge. There are several characteristics, after looking back at in-depth qualitative buyer interviews over the past few years, which are beginning to surface about the new B2B Buyer:

• Work is done in a pervasive networked environment
• Value is placed on sharing, not hoarding information
• Disdain and have work-around for content and information overload
• Have a high degree of need for personalization and customization
• Personal goal-directed behaviors are more pronounced
• Networked collaboration capabilities are sought from vendors and partners
• Prefer working in flatter organizations versus rigid hierarchal organizations
• Use digital technology to be as virtual as possible and everywhere as possible
• Buying decisions are made in networked collaborative circles, not according to rigid process or journeys

As you can see with the above characteristics, a new B2B Buyer is emerging out of the thrashing and chaos, which followed the economic downturn beginning in 2008. The rise in networked and social technologies over the past five years is certainly an underlying engine making these new B2B Buyer behaviors possible.

The Right Buyer Personas Matter

One of the pressing challenges for B2B marketing, sales, and strategy leaders is to figure out how to make their organizations fit for the 21^st century and the new B2B Buyer. What separates this moment in time from those of the earlier decades following post-WW II is there is little room for trial and error. Getting it right the first time is critical for one wrong move can open the door for competitors to get a foothold, which will be hard to budge.

B2B companies have begun to look towards buyer persona development as one of the means to help them understand the new B2B Buyer and to inform how best to adapt. What matters now is for them to know they have the right buyer personas. The dizzying amount of content and consultants claiming buyer persona expertise is bound to cause confusion and disillusionment.

Buyer personas arose out of the need to have a sound methodology, rooted in design, to uncover new buying and thinking behaviors. Thus, allowing organizations the ability to make informed decisions on how to formulate marketing and selling strategies as well as to adapt to a changing world. Dismaying is the number of articles, trainings, research reports, and conference presentations, which continue to force-fit buyer personas into the old paradigms of the B2B buyer profile. Amounting to a profiling of older albeit fading perceptions of the B2B buyer most often found in product marketing and sales.

The new B2B Buyer is developing a new way of thinking, different terminologies, new languages, and comprises an altogether different way of working. Yet, companies are still rooted in profiling buyers, under the guise of buyer personas, in the old product marketing and sales language of pain points, buying criteria, (KSF’s) key success factors, (KPI’s) key performance indicators, risks, and buying processes. What B2B leaders must guard against is having a buyer persona of their B2B buyer who very well fits the profiling mold of a 1980’s product marketing or sales playbook. Instead, B2B organizations can have a determined focus on deeply understanding the new narrative stories of their customers and buyers.

Which Economy Are You Prepared For?

The collaborative economy, sometimes referred to as the sharing as well as the networked economy, will continue to expand and strengthen throughout the rest of this present decade. In five years, the new B2B Buyer will be more commonplace and most likely only a resemblance of where they are today.

What B2B companies must wrestle with is this: do they continue to operate in the receding “push-down” economy or do they embrace the future of a collaborative economy? Understanding the difference between the two and making the right choice – will be the difference between longevity and struggle.

As many readers and followers know, one of my favorite thinkers in the world is business thinker and futurist Don Tapscott. In this captivating video, he talks about how the collaborative economy is fundamentally changing business and the world as we know it:

Please share and support the collaborative economy.

Imagine a near future where there will be a wireless sensor on the bottom of every shampoo, detergent, and medication container. It will tell you how much product is left and trigger a replacement order once it gets to 10% full or approaches its expiration date.

Now imagine a future laundry detergent dispenser that is connected wirelessly to sensors in the washing machine and can mix multiple channels of active ingredients dynamically to suit the conditions of the wash and optimize the cleaning process.

This type of intelligent, personalized experience is not possible today, but it will be commonplace in the “Internet of Everyday Things” in which low-cost, even disposable products will have digital capabilities through low cost sensors and connectivity.

New Product Experiences

With the Internet of Everyday Things, consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies will for the very first time have visibility into how their customers are using their products in the home, and even more importantly, they’ll have the power to change the product experience in real-time to suit the specific user and environment. That’s really game changing for an industry that continuously worries about how to differentiate products and protect margins.

Above: The smart shoe: Sensors in the soles of shoes could pick up a variety of measurements.

In many ways, this is an extension of the transition in value creation from standalone devices to connected systems that is already occurring with products such as the Nest thermostat that learns our patterns and preferences over time and controls our environment to save energy usage. We are also seeing exciting innovations in smart clothing and footwear that can adapt to changing environmental conditions and personal usage to improve athletic performance.

Creating a Digital Nervous System

But the Internet of Everyday Things goes beyond just personalization. The combination of sensing, control, and optimization creates a “Digital Nervous System” that can be applied at multiple levels to enable real-world, real-time optimization. For example, a retail store can be aware of which customers are nearby and, based on real-time inventory, generate the optimal set of offers that are delivered to its customers’ smartphones.

As another example, cities will be aware of real-time traffic conditions and accidents based on sensor data from fixed and human sensors through services like Waze. They will be able to use planning and optimization algorithms operating at the city-wide system level that will reroute drivers (or self-driving cars) through specific messages to individual drivers instead of just broadcasting notices on electronic signs that often result in secondary bottlenecks.

New Business Models

But even more profoundly, the Internet of Everyday Things will change the definition of what companies sell and how they sell, and companies will face competition from new players who compete with a different set of economics and value propositions.

Take Nest again as an example. Why did Google pay $3.2 billion for it? It’s because Google is in the business of monetizing data, and Nest generates data from its customers. Since Google can monetize the data, Nest will always have a pricing advantage over thermostat companies that do not have that ability.

Above: Disposable printed circuits on thin flex materials could make any product “connected.”

Now let’s apply this kind of thinking back to CPG companies. They may think that they are in the business of selling consumables, but really they are selling outcomes such as clean clothes or a clean home. Many industrial manufacturers have already made the transition in business model from selling products to outcome-based services, such as selling jet engines via “Power by the Hour” with service level guarantees.

Could CPG companies provide new forms of sensing in the home through their products and packaging such that their customers could verify cleanliness? And if so, could they offer a business model like charging a subscription model for the outcome of verified cleanliness regardless of the amount of cleaning products actually used? It’s really interesting to consider all the new possibilities in business models and customer experience in the future.

Key Enablers

It may sound like this Internet of Everyday Things is still really far away in the future. After all, we need to make sensors cheap enough for disposable products. And you would be right if we were using silicon. But this is already in the present for companies, like PARC, that are developing the underlying technologies. We’re working with partners such as Thinfilm Electronics to develop printing-based manufacturing processes to create low cost electronics such as sensor tags that add intelligence to everyday objects.

To configure and manage these billions of products with IP addresses, we’re also working on a new technology called Content-Centric Networking that uses named content addressing instead of IP addresses to route data more efficiently, and encrypts data at the packet level instead of at the endpoints for improved security.

And to enable real-time planning and control on autonomous systems at large scale, we have been working in digital manufacturing, including AI-based planning and control software for reconfigurable systems that span hundreds of modules and thousands of variations that has led to in-memory graph-based planning algorithms that have the potential to scale to very large systems.

So while the Internet of Everyday Things may be farther away than we would like, it is closer than you may think. Now is the right time to think about how it will transform products and business models and start experimenting with sensors, analytics, and services to learn what’s possible, in what form factors and user experiences, and at what price points.

Lawrence Lee is senior director of strategy for PARC, where he manages innovation strategy and commercialization of PARC’s R&D services for Xerox and its global clients. He also shares PARC’s best practices in innovation management with companies around the world seeking to adapt them for their own goals.

Confession: at our house, we watch a LOT of reality TV. One of our favorite series – and one of the few reality shows that’s also family-friendly – is ABC’s Shark Tank. I love the brash personalities, the high-stakes negotiation, and seeing entrepreneurs achieve their life’s dream. Our children love the banter, the friendly insults, and seeing people get rich.

But there’s another side of Shark Tank that I appreciate, and that is: it’s great sales training. The entrepreneurs who appear on the show are all pitching a product, a service, the Next Big Thing. Some of them are good at it (selling, that is), and some are well, just plain awful. As someone who’s attended a few sales training classes in my day, I have yelled advice at the TV a few times during the show (often along the lines of “TAKE THE DEAL FOR PETE’S SAKE”), much to my kids’ embarrassment.

Here are the top 5 sales tips my kids have learned from those outbursts:

1. Know your facts.

There are two things that impress the sharks. One is sales (revenue). The other is someone who knows their numbers – revenue, margins, manufacturing cost, cost of customer acquisition. Even the greatest salesperson in the world can’t close if he/she doesn’t know the facts. And nothing deflates buyer confidence more than a lack of knowledge. It sounds like you’re just making stuff up.

2. Know when to shut up.

In my first ever sales job, I remember a training class in which we were to ask the “buyer” (in this case, a sales trainer) for the sale and then wait for a response. And wait. And wait some more. If you broke the silence, you failed. The lesson was patience, and the ability to withstand an awkward silence. Entrepreneurs on Shark Tank will often whittle down to one remaining shark, that shark will sit silent, pondering a decision, and then the begging begins. (“Barbara, PLEEEEEEASE ….”) It’s called desperation, and it’s the quickest way to trigger hesitation in the mind of the buyer.

3. Save some ammo.

Typical Shark Tank Scenario #2: a shark will complain that the product is too big, and that the entrepreneur should consider making a smaller, cheaper version. Instantly, the entrepreneur presents them with a prototype of that very product. But why did she hold back? Because the most winning sales message is one that addresses a specific buyer need or objection. And conversely, the least effective message is one that’s irrelevant to the buyer. Bide your time. Wait for the expressed need. Then pounce.

4. Always counter.

On Shark Tank, it’s rare that a shark will offer the precise terms that an entrepreneur requested. And most entrepreneurs grossly inflate the value of their business because they know they’re going to be low-balled. But when that low-ball offer comes, why would you ever take it without making a counter offer? Sure, the buyer may not accept that price either. But if you don’t ask, you’ll never know.

5. Be prepared to say no.

If you’re willing to sell at any cost, you’re guaranteed to only get the lowest price. Sharks can smell desperation. And most buyers can too. Maybe it’s the end of the quarter and you need that one sale to make quota. Maybe in your business, any sale is better than no sale. However, in most companies, there are good customers and bad customers, good margins and bad margins, relationships that will build your brand and improve your reputation, and others that are doomed to fail. Know your limits. Be prepared to walk away. Sometimes saying “no” makes you a more valuable proposition.

We’ve been hearing this for a while; content marketing is huge in digital marketing right now. The phrase ‘content is king’ has been thrown around in the world of digital media over the last year or so, and most brands who place focus on their digital marketing presence have adopted content marketing strategies in one form or another.

But as with every popular marketing channel or activity, there are right ways, wrong ways, innovative ways and copycat ways of doing everything- and with this, various myths and half-truths are born. Digital marketers embarking upon their initial content marketing strategies are finding it hard to figure out what works, what doesn’t, what best practice is, and what examples to follow. So below are some of the most common ‘content marketing myths’ and their realities.

Myth #1: To succeed at content marketing you need big budgets and big teams.

Companies with the most remarkable and talked about content marketing strategies are often those with the large budgets and teams behind them, but that’s no reason to be discouraged. Many small sized companies are finding content marketing a really successful tool, at a lower cost than more traditional forms of outbound marketing. In fact, 60% of B2C small business marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget over the next 12 months, knowing that it can be a very effective strategy for brand awareness and lead generation.

Aim for what is realistically achievable given your own budget and team size. If you’re a team of one person producing content for your brand, don’t compare yourself to the larger companies.

Myth #2: Let’s produce content that will ‘go viral’!

If your content does ‘go viral,’ that’s fantastic! Normal content has to work hard to get noticed amongst the clutter and noise of the internet, whereas viral content fuelled by social sharing explodes onto the public consciousness and takes over for a few weeks or months. What kind of content goes viral? Very often it’s purely down to luck more than anything else.

Sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy have become pretty savvy at creating viral content and that seems to have become their modus operandi. However, not all publishers necessarily want their content to go viral. In fact, some publishers such as The Verge, discourage their writers from even looking at traffic numbers, so they don’t get too caught up in the numbers and forget the goal they initially set out to achieve, which is to deliver great, original editorial content that speaks to the reader.

Content marketing should serve many purposes, including to raise brand awareness, generate leads and interest from stakeholders, as well as establish a brand’s reputation, voice, and personality; and viral content doesn’t always achieve those goals.

Myth #3: Content marketing simply means creating MORE content MORE often

Content marketing is really all just about adding more content to my website, right? Wrong!

Increased blogging frequency can have a positive effect on website traffic levels, as this Hubspot research demonstrates, but take these figures with a pinch of salt as they won’t apply to every case.

Simply adding more content to your site does not constitute a sound content strategy and will likely not lead to improved business outcomes. Google’s Panda Update aimed to filter out poor quality and thin content from search results, so those websites that had simply created abundant amounts of irrelevant, low quality, and keyword stuffed content, suffered the consequences greatly.

Focus on quality, not quantity. Do you have the resources to produce large quantities of quality content? Relevancy, timeliness, context, and utility should be top of mind when creating content. Focus on what’s realistically achievable for your team, and then keep your mind on the quality, rather than the quantity.

Myth #4: My company website has a blog, therefore we do content marketing effectively

Content is so much more than posts on a blog! Think about content holistically and think about how your target audience consume different types of content.

Blog content is great, but not everyone likes reading blogs! While some people are more responsive to visual content like infographics, others may prefer to read about the finer details via a whitepaper or listen via a webinar. So don’t limit your content to one type. Written, visual, video, and audio content are great ways to stretch out your content and allow it to reach a much wider audience.

Myth #5: Building ONLY quality content is not realistic. You have to pad it out with some low quality stuff to keep output numbers high

If you’re short on time or staff, it’s easy to churn out low quality content just to meet output targets, and this happens all too often.

Many marketers believe coming up with different and original blog topics is impossible as, after a while you’ve covered all topics, right? Wrong! Did you know that 16 percent of the daily queries on Google have never been seen before? If you’re running out of ideas for blog topics why not connect with your frontline customer facing staff members who deal with customer enquiries on a daily basis, to find out what your customers are really after? Speak to your sales or accounts team to tap into the themes and topics of importance to your target audience and you’ll never run out of meaningful ideas for your content creation efforts.

Myth #6: Why put so much effort into creating one piece of content when it has only one life?

When you’ve spent hours writing that perfect blog article, it can feel like a waste of time for only one piece of content that will be old news in a couple of days or weeks. That’s where you’re missing the opportunity. Through one great piece of content, you can create multiple content types that can be scattered across the internet in various forms.

Think of it this way: you could conduct some really great research into your chosen topic, from that you could turn some of your findings into a really strong blog article, a whitepaper, as well as an infographic (that’s three pieces of content already). You could save some of your other findings and offer them to industry press or other bloggers to write about- they could then ask you to write a guest article, or publish some of your findings, leading to some great PR and possibly a backlink for your brand.

You could even repurpose your original article to fit into another blog that covers similar topics. You could take some of the comments generated from the first 3 pieces of content you wrote and write a follow- up article, answering people’s questions or concerns about the data published. A few months later you could conduct the same research to see if anything has changed since then and publish your new findings. In the meantime, other bloggers or publishers may have picked up on your content and written pieces of their own about it, again leading to some great PR and SEO for your brand.

One single idea can lead to multiple pieces of content with a long shelf life, so don’t be discouraged if you’re spending hours perfecting your work, be proud of it and let the world know about it!

Myth #7: The real purpose behind content marketing is just to improve SEO

For many brands this may be the case. They may see content marketing as an avenue to improving their keyword rankings by keyword stuffing their content and producing mass quantities of thin and low quality content with the sole aim of aiding their SEO strategy. But as discussed in point three, content marketing is so much more than that.

By providing useful, quality content to your audience, your brand becomes a trusted source of reliable information. This not only improves the reputation of your brand, but builds loyal brand followers. These followers may be valuable sales leads, or may in turn recommend or refer your brand to others who in turn will become strong leads or long term customers.

Yes, content marketing can have a very positive effect on your SEO. It can drive more traffic to your website, improve your keyword rankings and help you build backlinks. But if the quality is not there, these results will only be short-term. With quality content, all these elements can be achieved, as well as repeat visits, improved social media engagement, lead generation, and loyalty.

By now, everyone understands the importance of blogging but some don’t really know why. Below, I give you 6 reasons why blogging for your business is beneficial. Read on to learn more!

Become an expert

The more you blog about industry trends, insider tips, lessons, products and services, the more knowledgeable you seem to a potential client. Let content build relationships for you.

Strut your stuff because there’s no better way to show your potentials that you really know your stuff. Write thought provoking articles based on your experience and education and build a connection with your audience.

People will view you as the expert of your industry and you can become the go-to-place for updates and information.

Grow your network

Blogging opens the door to meeting like-minded individuals and connecting with an audience. Tapping into a network can help you build your own community of fans and friends. Furthermore, these online relationships can lead to offline friendships as well.

Boost traffic

The more frequent you blog, the more traffic you will drive to your site. Blogs give sites 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links.

Many people wonder how frequently a blogger needs to publish content in order to make an impact in their content marketing results. In 2012, Hubspot found that companies that blog 15+ times per month get 5 times more traffic than companies that don’t blog.

Generating blog content fuels social media. With social media distribution and promotion, blogs are amplified and shared, thus creating more traffic. If you can squeeze it into your content production schedule, blogging on other peoples’ sites (guest blogging), will also increase traffic to your own blog.

As well as seeing your pageviews and unique views increase, you will also see “time spent” climb up too. People spend more than 50% of their time online with content with an additional 30% of their time on social channels where content can be shared.

Gain leads and sales

Per dollar spent, content marketing generates approximately 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing.

Nowadays, buyers control their journey through the buying cycle much more than today’s vendors control the selling cycle. Today’s buyers might be anywhere from 70% to 90% of the way through their journey before they reach out to you so you want to make sure you’re engaging with the customer every step of the way.

Customers are finding content on their own in an ever-expanding number of ways and channels, this includes every piece of content published about product and / or service.

Acquire new skills

Blogging is not just about writing. It’s also about branding, design, marketing, lead generation and budgeting. When you start getting really into it, you won’t even notice that you’re learning new skills. What’s great is that as you see your blog improving, you’ll want to learn everything you can about the blogosphere.

Increases engagement and brand loyalty

If you produce quality content, you will increase audience engagement and brand loyalty. 70% of customers prefer getting to know companies via articles over ads. Improving the quality of your articles is somewhat of a mystery though. How do I know what my readers really like? How can I get more clicks? How can I make it more shareable? These are questions every blogger asks. What if I told you there’s a solution for that? Check out the Atomic App for Chrome. This Chrome extension will answer all of your quality content questions.

Are you worried prospects will think your email marketing is spammy? They won’t if your focus is on them, what they need and when they need it.

Email marketing has gotten a bad rap. Like other innovative technologies that marketers have gotten hold of over the years, it’s become the object of much derision.

Gary Vaynerchuk famously talks about how “marketers ruin everything.” In this excerpt from an Inbound Conference keynote, he singles out email. (Warning: graphic language.)

Because of this widespread contempt for email marketing, some companies are reluctant to fully embrace the power and effectiveness of email marketing.

That’s too bad, because email marketing is the connective tissue of all Internet marketing. According to McKinsey, email marketing is 40 times as effective at customer acquisition than social media.

Email drives increased website visitors, helps convert website visitors into leads, helps nurture leads into customers and, perhaps most importantly, helps deepen your relationship with customers.

If you can deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time, your email marketing will supercharge your lead generation, sales closing percentages and customer satisfaction (and upsales).

So how do you go about unlocking this mysterious power of email marketing? It’s no mystery. But it does involve some thought and planning.

Here are the three most important things to creating effective email marketing that your prospects won’t hate. In fact, they’ll love it.

1. Determine Who Your Audience Is

Think about your buyer persona. In Adele Revella’s “The Buyer Persona Manifesto,” she offers this definition of a buyer persona:

“It’s an archetype, a composite picture of the real people who buy, or might buy, products like the ones you sell.”

Buyer personas are like an avatar crafted from direct interviews with as many buyers as possible. And from their behavior observed at conferences, social media, etc.

If you don’t have one, do some buyer persona research to find out who your real buyers are (sometimes it’s not who you think).

When researching buyer personas, ignore extraneous things about them like hobbies and instead focus on what Revella calls “The Five Rings of Insight™” –

1. Priority Initiatives – What causes certain buyers to buy from a company like yours, and how are they different from buyers who remain attached to the status quo?
2. Success Factors – What operational or personal results does your buyer persona expect from purchasing from you?
3. Perceived Barriers – What concerns cause your buyer to believe that your company is not their best option?
4. The Buyer’s Journey – What process does this persona follow in researching and selecting a solution that can overcome the Perceived Barriers and achieve the Success Factors?
5. Decision Criteria – Which aspects of the competing offerings do your buyers perceive as most critical, and what do they expect from each one?

2. Segment Your List

Studies show that email lists deteriorate by about 25% per year. So, a list with 10,000 will have 5,625 viable contacts in 3 years. List deterioration is primarily because people change jobs (and email addresses) and unsubscribe for various reasons.

The way to keep your email list working hard (and on a net growth trajectory) is to segment it. In other words, don’t send the same message to everyone on your list.

Segmentation works. According to research by Lyris, Inc., email list segmentation helps drive results. When marketers were asked to indicate their top three results of using segmented email lists, 39% experienced higher open rates, 28% experienced lower unsubscribe rates, and 24% experienced better deliverability and increased sales leads.

Here are additional examples of segmentation you can do to improve your email marketing results:

• Geography – This is effective if the location of your recipient has an effect on the sale. For instance, does your business have geographic limitations? Is there an event within a certain geographic area that pertains to the recipients? Geographic segmentation can include IP area, time zone, area code and address.
• Industry/Company – If your customers or prospect are in different industries (and have indicated such), targeted emails about their specific industry will have greater relevance. Additional segmentation can include company type (B2B, B2C, B2G, etc.) or company size.
• Job Title (or Role) – Just like with your buyer personas, an email that speaks to the issues or concerns of a business owner might be different from a non-management employee.
• Behavior – One of the best segmentation approaches is to send email based on what someone has already downloaded from your site, which emails they’ve opened and which (and how many) pages they have viewed.

A word of caution about email list segmentation: keep it simple. With marketing automation software, the segmentation possibilities are seemingly endless. Don’t go too far in that direction, at least not at first.

3. Send The Right Content At The Right Time

The people on your list are at widely varying stages of the customer lifecycle. Are the people on your list researching how to solve a problem? Researching solutions providers like your company? Are they a customer?

The emails that you send to prospects need to overlay (as much as possible) with where they are in their buying cycle.

TOP – For instance, in the top of the cycle, a prospect is is expressing the symptoms of a problem or an opportunity. The problem doesn’t have a name yet and they aren’t sure what their problem is. They probably need more educational research to get their arms around the problem. They won’t be interested in information about your company.

MIDDLE – Once the buyer has given a name to their problem or opportunity, they then start to consider all the available approaches/methods to solving their problem. Content that is most relevant to the buyer at this stage would help him weigh his options such as comparison white papers, expert guides, webinars, videos, etc.

BOTTOM – Later, the buyer may reach that stage when they have defined their solution strategy, method, or approach. They are starting to compile a list of available vendors and products within their solution strategy. Here, they will need supporting documentation, data, benchmarks or endorsements in order to make or recommend a final decision. This is when they will be receptive to information about your company. The right content for this stage includes vendor (or product) comparisons, case studies, trial download, a live demo, product literature, etc.

Conclusion

Email marketing, when done right, can delight your prospects and help build a relationship with your company even before their first conversation with a sales person. But it needs to be all about the prospect – who they are, what information they need and where they are in their buying journey.

photo credit: The Bait via photopin (license) | Charts: HubSpot

As a modern marketer, you probably deal with a variety of campaigns and strategies in your day-to-day: email marketing, social media, display, lead gen, and more. You’re accountable to your boss (who might also be the CEO), but you’re also accountable to sales and even customer support. You’re always juggling the need to prove ROI, align with sales, and prove to your customers that your service is great.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Many marketers, both B2B and B2C, struggle with these things, and many of them have turned to voice-based marketing automation (VBMA) tools to strengthen their efforts across the board. If the following 6 scenarios sound familiar, you might need VBMA too.

You Struggle with Tracking ROI in the Digital/Mobile Age

It’s 2015: the year that mobile search will surpass desktop search, and digital is a landscape where most marketers are thriving. But many still struggle to track leads that come in from online, unaware of tools like dynamic number insertion and click-to-calls. The way to track that ROI exists, but if the results elude you, it’s time for VBMA.

Your Phone Menu Has No Marketing Goals

Maybe you already have an IVR. But if you still think the only use for an automated phone menu is to simply greet callers so you don’t have to have a receptionist, you definitely not only need to upgrade your IVR, but rethink everything it can do for your business. IVR can be a way to generate and score leads, conduct market research, and more.

Your Geo-Location Abilities Are Non-Existent

If your business has multiple locations, a geo-location tool is critical. Far more sophisticated than a simple Store Locator, geo-location gives you the power to optimize the calls your business receives from mobile devices, routing them automatically based on the caller’s precise location. As mentioned above, being able to track these calls just makes it even sweeter, and it’s extremely helpful to customers.

Phone Calls to Your Business Never See Your CRM

Customers call you. You have a CRM. If these two things are mutually exclusive, then you need a VBMA integration. ASAP.

Your Search Marketing Strategy Is Uninformed by Phone Call Data

Most marketers are advertising on multiple search engines, which is already a task in itself. But too many marketers make the huge mistake of ignoring phone call data in the search marketing space: according to Google, 70% of consumers have used the click-to-call button on a search ad. A search marketing strategy that is missing phone calls is missing a huge piece of the picture. Using a bid management tool? You’re not off the hook. There are better ways to make the most of that activity.

You Test Web Variations, But You Haven’t Realized That Calls Are the New Clicks

If you’re smart, you’re using a tool like Optimizely to test web page variations of your site. But you’re not as smart as you think you are if you’re not considering calls in this strategy. 30 billion calls were made to businesses in the U.S. alone in 2013, and that number is expected to reach 65 billion by 2016. With the mobile surge, more people than ever before prefer to call than click. Are you keeping up?

If any of these examples sound like you, it’s time to step it up.

Do you remember the board game Guess Who? You and your opponent would try to guess which character each other selected by confirming various features such as eye color, hair, hats, glasses, and more. As you narrowed down your choices by asking characteristic questions, the winner made the best guess, first.

For a board game, this strategy works well. You take a shot in the dark and hope to arrive at the right answer by process of elimination. For marketers however, maybe a guessing game isn’t the right strategy.

Misunderstanding your buyer can manifest itself in many ways; poor campaign performance or a rise in email unsubscribes due to irrelevant messaging, dwindling conversion rates from mis-targeted website copy, failing sales numbers due to unqualified leads plus a lack of effective training and sales enablement materials, and more.

If you’re experiencing any of these symptoms, call your doctor. Here are 7 warning signs you maybe don’t know your B2B customer as well as you should.

1. Your product is the protagonist of your story.

Grab the nearest piece of marketing content – your last email campaign sent is a great place to start. Count how many times you see the words “we” or “our.” Now count how many instances of the word “you” or “yours” appears. Hopefully, your copy is skewed towards the latter. But take a close look. Is the copy focused on your solution, its benefits, and its features? Who is the real main character in the storyline of this piece of content? If it’s not the intended recipient, here’s a reality check: they don’t care.

2. You haven’t updated your buyer personas recently.

Honesty time: when was the last time you conducted fresh research to understand your buyers? Is your team relying on information about customers that was created before you had an iPhone (7 years ago)? If so, it’s time to revisit what’s happening in the worlds of your buyers. Business pressures evolve at the speed of life, which moves incredibly fast for many industry segments, especially technology. Understanding your buyers should never be considered a one-and-done project; even if you think you know, there’s likely room for updates. You may be surprised what’s changed.

3. There’s a donkey in the room.

Ok not a donkey, more specifically an ass. Wait, before you get offended, I’m referencing the age-old saying “when you assume you make an ass out of u and me.” When creating marketing content, product strategy, or sales playbooks (for example,) simply relying on assumptions can often lead to incorrect judgements and dangerous conclusions. Some humility in admitting you may be wrong can go a long way in course-correcting deep-seated assumptions about your buyers. If the assumptions are coming from the very top of an organization, it can be seem impossible to convince otherwise; seek to apply as much data as possible to assumptions to help validate, or invalidate, ideas.

4. Your empathy is… nonexistent.

Tony Zambito, an advisor to our business, is an evangelist for a more human centered approach to modern marketing. In a great post about empathy in marketing, he writes:

“In the modern marketing world where content has become the dominant way we communicate, empathy serves as a foundation to stand above the overdosing flood of information experienced by customers and buyers. It requires us to understand the context of the goals and challenges of our customers and buyers. Have you taken the time to put yourselves in their shoes? Lived a day in their life, considered the challenges they face and the problems they seek to solve?”

If the answer to these questions is no… chances are you don’t know your buyer very well.

5. You’re focused more on process than the people you’re selling to.

What’s on your to-do list this week? This month? This quarter? I’m willing to bet as a marketer, there are about a million items on that list. A big one is likely related to the process by which you launch campaigns, or the process of passing leads to sales, or the process of lead scoring. Improving the relationship between marketing and sales is an enormous challenge and one on the top of many lists!

Ardath Albee, also an advisor to Cintell, writes in a recent article about the power of the B2B buyer’s perspective, “rather than marketing programs or sales processes, we should be focused on buyer initiatives first and make them the drivers for what we do.” She makes a great case that by seeking to create a “continuum experience” where regardless of where the interaction is coming from, whether marketing or sales, companies should build on a foundation of consistent messaging and storytelling across all channels, cross-functionally. As she writes, “when we’re all on the same page, it truly makes the label of marketing or sales irrelevant.”

In several of my books I have brought out why innovators need to think multiple releases ahead because competitors catch up rapidly with ubiquitous access to technology. This week, the fleeting advantage from technology was in vivid display at the Hyundai dealer.

My family tends to be “value” shoppers when it comes to cars. Our vehicles tend to average 7 to 8 years and 80,000 to 100,000 miles. Our Vera Cruz SUV was approaching that EOL and the dealer called me to offer a very generous trade-in. I expected to walk out with the base model of the replacement Santa Fe – my technophobe wife would have preferred that. Instead I got a model chockfull of technology. What's remarkable is the vehicle for about $ 30K packs features which just a couple of years ago were only available on Mercedes, Lexus, BMW, Tesla models at twice or three times the price.

Panoramic sunroof

Proximity sensors for auto tailgate open and for blind spot detection

Touch screen for all kinds of navigation, communication, rear view and entertainment options

Mobile app to control access to car, monitor whereabouts etc.

Next-gen rear view mirror

HID Xenon headlights with LED accents

And some of the features are available even on Hyundai’s smaller cars for $15K.

And as you look around there is so much more technology in the form of electric options, autonomous driving, mobile hotspots and more that our new SUV is already dated.  

Few health care leaders would disagree that the U.S. health care industry needs to drastically change. But do we have leaders in place who have the courage to raise their hand and lead the charge? In the classical theory of disruption, reform from within is almost impossible. It is hungry, fast-moving new entrants that upend slumbering incumbents. But at athenahealth, we’re seeing early signs of another possibility; more than any time in recent memory, provider groups themselves are preparing to do the disrupting.

Over the past two years, we’ve convened health care leaders at roundtables and other events to discuss the challenges and opportunities they face, both inside their organization and from the external market. As part of this process, we formally surveyed more than 150 executives; the sample represented a broad cross-section of health care, with respondents serving in leadership roles at organizations as diverse as physician practices, hospitalist staffing agencies and large health systems. What we found was a remarkable portrait of courage — a willingness to abandon the status quo in favor of an uncertain path.

In the survey more than 70% of participants reported that they felt their organization was well positioned for future success, with about 15% strongly agreeing with that sentiment. More than three-quarters said they are on a good path to successfully compete in their local markets. Fear of aggressive new competition is minimal, with only 3% of survey participants saying they feel very unprepared relative to their markets.

But this optimism is not a sign of complacency. More than half of the executives we surveyed believe their operational model is in need of change and disruption. At any other time or in any other industry, these results would seem contradictory. After all, we expect incumbents to feel most confident about the future when they believe their operating models are sustainable — and to fear extinction when disruption is on the march.

In healthcare, however, an instinct to disrupt existing models makes perfect sense. From every quarter, the industry is under pressure to cut costs and improve quality and the debate around the Affordable Care Act has crystallized the need for reform; many providers are leading the charge, moving further and faster to redesign care delivery than the law requires. Many health care leaders understand that there will be little room in the health care landscape of the next decade for laggards. These leaders may feel confident about their strategic direction, but they know their current models won’t get them where they need to go. Thus they need to become their own disruptors.

We asked our roundtable members where they hope to be in five years — and received an array of responses that all pointed toward disruption. One participant, the CEO of a staffing organization for hospital emergency departments, is looking beyond emergency care. “We hope to become a recognized leader in integrating physician care across transitions of care,” he told us — even though, ultimately, better care transitions will mean fewer E.D. admissions, which would threaten his existing business model.

The chief strategy officer of a west-coast medical center we surveyed is confronting a future in which her organization’s current strategy — top-quality tertiary and quaternary care — would be less competitive. “We need to position our enterprise for a post-reform era,” she told us, which means “moving from a tertiary/quaternary care model only to a dual strategy in which we are also a population health manager.” Rather than fearing the population health managers who would erode this organization’s high-margin business in complex surgeries, this strategy officer plans to join them — and reap the rewards of shifting from payment based on patient volume to payment based on delivering value.

Generally we found the respondents clear-eyed about the difficulty of changing course. One CEO of a large Midwestern health system reminded us that his system is already a Medicare ACO (Accountable Care Organization), and he and his colleagues are “positioned well in our thinking” about the future. But, he said, “we are not positioned well in some of our operating fundamentals such as infrastructure, analytics, process, and compensation models.”

The overwhelming sentiment among our roundtable participants was that the impediments to change are mostly internal. Less than a fifth of respondents said that market competition is the primary challenge they face in addressing the ongoing shift from volume-based to value-based payment. A similar share said that outdated or ineffective IT infrastructure is their major roadblock, and almost two-thirds identified either cultural resistance or misalignment with physicians as their biggest obstacle. One executive told us that his greatest challenge is persuading the “59-year-old physician who recognizes that things are changing but is hoping he or she can hang on.”

Overcoming such challenges requires intrepid leadership. Respondents to our survey said they are scanning widely for models of executives who have successfully disrupted their own organizations. When we asked which companies health care executives most admire, the top choice wasn’t Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, or any other blue chip health care institution. It was Apple: the tech giant with a history of cannibalizing its own products before a competitor does and  promoting disruption before being overtaken by it.

Sales Coaching

Asking questions is an underpinning of successful selling. The notion – ask, listen, and then talk is a powerful principle in the science of successful selling.

Asking questions is also an underpinning of successful interactions between salespeople and their sales managers.

Consider this …

Effective coaching is not so much about teaching people, as it is about helping them to learn – that’s why top coaches ask more than tell. The problem is too many times when coaching, managers do it the other way around. They don’t ask enough questions and they talk more than the sales rep.

Given all that we thought it would be a good idea to provide some specific questions that could be used to get the sales coaching session on the right track. While there are no silver bullets, here is a starter list of 11 questions that could be used when coaching after a sales call.

• How do you think the call went?
• What do you think was the customer’s major walk-away from the call?
• What specific piece of value did the customer gain from the call?
• How did we differentiate ourselves from the competition?
• If you could do the call again what would you consider doing differently?
• What happen that you did not anticipate – how could you have prepared differently?
• Which part of the call didn’t go so well? How would you improve on it?
• What did you plan to do that you didn’t do – why?
• Who did the most talking?
• Did you leave the call with one of the advances you planned?
• What did you learn from the call that will impact your future calls on this customer?

Obviously the sales coaching questions that you would use would depend on the specific rep and the type of call. So your list of questions would be unique for each call. However, when coaching it is always a good idea to plan some coaching questions before the call and then modify the list as the call progresses.

Even though Twitter has been around for quite a while now, we still see so many businesses and professionals making basic (and embarrassing) mistakes. Using Twitter properly isn’t difficult, but for those who are still struggling, we’ll show you four common Twitter mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Sounding Too Desperate

We get it; you’re a business. One of the reasons you’re using Twitter and social media is to increase your sales. However, begging people to buy your products or follow you is embarrassing, damages your brand reputation, and won’t work.

What should you do instead?

Provide meaningful content. The 80/20 rule is more relevant than ever nowadays. Eighty percent of the time you should be providing VALUE to your customers, whereas you should only be promoting yourself 20 percent of the time. If you do nothing but parrot sales and promotions, you’ll find yourself quickly ignored on Twitter, or worse, lose followers!

2. Hashtag Abuse

I’ve talked about the dangers of using too many hashtags many times before, but it’s just so important. Too many hashtags makes you look desperate for attention, and makes your tweet look confusing and unfocused. Sure, your tweet might be seen by more people, but they’re also much more likely to be ignored.

What should you do instead?

Always try to keep to around two hashtags a tweet. Three is also acceptable but anything over that is a bit much. Keep your hashtags relevant to keep your tweet clear and concise.

3. Retweeting EVERYTHING!

Having an active Twitter feed is great, but going through and retweeting as much stuff as you can will drive your followers crazy. Pushing out over a hundred retweets an hour (we know some people that do this!) will definitely cause you to lose followers.

What should you do instead?

Selectively retweet. Think of your Twitter feed as a portfolio. Would you clutter your portfolio with irrelevant information?

Think about why someone would follow your account. Maybe they followed you because they thought you were an industry leader. Maybe they followed you because they wanted deals on your products. Only re-tweet things you think your followers would actually be interested in and you’ll solidify your position as an industry leader.

4. Not Caring Enough

Let’s be honest, a lot of people hire interns (or worse yet, unpaid interns) to manage their Twitter accounts. It might seem simple enough work to post a few articles online, but your Twitter is your public image. One mistake, especially if you have a lot of followers, could be absolutely devastating.

What should you do instead?

The best case scenario is if you managed your own social media networks or hire someone else to do it for you. Maybe a reputable marketing agency with over 15 years in the business.

If you INSIST on getting someone inexperienced (and inexpensive) to run your social media profile, make sure you keep a close eye on any wayward tweets coming out of your official account, at least for the first month or so. If this person has no experience with Twitter, have them get approval from a supervisor before the tweet goes out (at least initially).

When someone says “Uber,” what immediately comes to mind? If seemingly endless controversies are top of the list, you’re not alone.

Perhaps the biggest one is just two short words: surge pricing.

One of the longest standing complaints of users and journalists alike is its use of dynamic pricing, or “surge pricing.” Dynamic pricing often flies below the radar until something you want or need costs more than usual. The prevalence of Uber’s take on dynamic pricing makes it seem like it’s just a series of price increases, but dynamic pricing can actually do a lot more than Uber would have you believe.

To put it simply, Uber is giving dynamic pricing a bad name: Valleywag’s Kevin Montgomery stated, “Surge pricing is Silicon Valley’s most insidious trend.”

To go deeper, it’s important to look at which companies are doing it. Most importantly, it’s critical to check how they’re doing it.

Sprig, a food delivery company that serves San Francisco and Palo Alto, jumped into the dynamic pricing game starting in October of 2014 in a slightly less conventional way — it features both price increases and decreases. Uber will never send you a notification that says “demand is low, your ride will be half off!” Sprig, on the other hand, claims to provide free delivery when demand is low, compared to the base delivery fee that starts at $2.

While Sprig’s adoption of “dynamic delivery charges” may have earned it a spot in Uber’s book in the eyes of disgruntled consumers, the company is providing a more accurate view of what dynamic pricing actually entails: cuts as well as increases. This is one thing that Sprig is getting right and it puts the company in a good position to quell the backlash against Uber’s take on surge pricing.

The reality of it is that both Uber and Sprig know that they are solving a problem for consumers, and an immediate one. Giving the option to get notified when you’ll be able to pay less is a good start, but not everyone is interested or able to wait.

Tapping and swiping over to a competitor is easy.

These two startups are just the latest getting on the dynamic pricing bandwagon, but the retail industryhas really been owning the implementation in recent years.

Amazon was one of the first retailers to use dynamic pricing to its advantage. It has usually focused on price decreases to keep its crown as king of the loss leaders (although it was dethroned in some categories this past holiday season when competitors like Wal-Mart and Target stepped up their game). Even though the competition is fierce, dynamic pricing in retail differs from Uber’s surge pricing model because headphones will never be jacked up to 8x the usual price on Sunday at 4PM, just because a lot of people are ordering them.

As dynamic pricing morphs and is adopted in numerous industries, it’s important to look into where it’s working best.

It boils down to supply and demand, price elasticity, and the competitive landscape. In practice, this would look like Sprig considering the amount of food prepared, which drivers are in a given area, which meals are selling best, how many meals were purchased at surge prices historically, and the pricing for similar meals from competitors like Munchery, and using all that data to calculate a fair price.

For all companies trying to push a dynamic pricing strategy, it’s about providing the right product or service at the right time and at the right price.

That price often changes depending on the time of day, and companies like Sprig and Uber understand this. But big changes aren’t necessarily sustainable in markets where new competitors pop up often. Maybe they should take a page out of retail’s playbook, and instead of cornering the market and increasing the price, dynamically price to match with fluctuations in the market.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This Flying Car Is Real And It Can Fly 430 Miles On A Full Tank

“Let’s throw the ball here!” Pete Carroll’s, Head Coach of the Seattle Seahawks, now famous directive to his offensive coordinator who in-turn made the play call. The front page of the Seattle Times screamed the next day “The worst call in NFL history cost us the Super Bowl.”

Let’s take a step back for a minute. To set the stage for those who missed the Super Bowl, Seattle was down four points with around two minutes to go. Aided by a miracle catch, they moved to the five-yard line of New England with a little more than a minute to go and had four downs to punch it in.

Easy pickins, especially given that Seattle’s best player that night was their running back, Marshawn Lynch. On first down, Lynch gained four yards. 50 seconds left and now Seattle had three plays to get one yard. If Seattle scored in any of the next three plays, they’d be hoisting the Lombardi trophy.

And then, Pete Carroll and his coordinator made the fateful call to throw the ball instead of run it. Russell Wilson’s, the Seahawk quarterback, throw was intercepted by an unheralded rookie named Malcom Butler, from the Patriots.

Game, set and match—New England.

I am neither a fan of Seattle nor New England, so I wasn’t emotionally stung by the result. But I was taken aback by Pete Carroll’s error in judgment at the most critical moment of his entire season, maybe the most critical moment that some of his players may ever encounter in their careers. He made a very risky call. And it cost them the chance for repeat glory.

I really admire Carroll for being a standout person who immediately took the blame for the result and emphasized that the buck stops with him. These acts exemplify what a great leader he is! However, over the past week he has defended his thinking and I believe that there were three critical flaws at the end that cost his team the game—strategic missteps that we all can learn from and incorporate into our daily lives as marketers and professionals:

1. In Critical Moments, Always Put the Ball in the Hands of Your Best Player

We want the best players on our teams to be involved in the most critical moments. Imagine playing the Chicago Bulls of the 90’s or the Lakers over the past decade. Who’s taking the shot when the game is on the line? You can bet its Jordan and Kobe respectively—the game-changers!

The same thinking applies to our businesses too. Imagine briefing Gartner on a key magic quadrant discussion or delivering a keynote presentation at a prestigious conference to thousands of prospective buyers—you want your A+ players driving these initiatives. Our probability of success is so much higher with the proverbial ball in the hands of our stars.

And Seattle did exactly the opposite. Marshawn Lynch was their best player that night and had gained more than 100 yards up to that point. As the play was coming, Seattle fans would’ve screamed—we want him on that ball, we need him on that ball! Unfortunately for them, Seattle put the ball in the hands of their third best wide-receiver—Ricardo Lockette.

2. When Taking Risks, Take Them Early

If we have to take risks in any game or project, it’s almost always better to do it early and as quickly as possible. This is clear for those of us who are tennis players: we take more risks on the first serve and play the second serve cautiously. As a result, if we fail in our first attempt, the point is not over. We still have a chance to recover or even be ahead of where we were.

As marketers, we absolutely don’t want to try out untested messaging in a big end-of-the-year campaign or introduce some new pricing approach late in the 4^th quarter of our business. These are risky moves that leave us no time for recovery and don’t give a second chance to get it right. Instead, if we want to take risks, we do it earlier, when less is on the line.

Pete Carroll, while defending his pass play call, pointed out that he had taken the same risk in the end of the first half, where Seattle threw the ball with just six seconds left and scored. He actually corroborated my point above—if the pass play had failed at the end of the half, he’d still have time to recover from the error. With fifty seconds left in the game, he left his team no time to recover in case a mistake happened. And it did.

3. When Making a Strategic Move, Always Choose Your Dominant Strategy

In the 1990s’, Princeton University Professors Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff published their book Thinking Strategically, a must-read playbook for all of us who yearn to gain a competitive edge in marketing, politics, or everyday life. In this book, they discuss the concept of a dominant strategy—a course of action a player takes that has the best chance to out-perform all his other actions, no matter what the opponent did. If this strategy is clear, the answer is simple: this is the first thing one should seek.

Imagine you’re a marketer in a highly price-sensitive market and have established the #1 position in your category. Let’s say your competition has introduced an aggressive promotion to gain some ground and finish strong at the end the year. Your best strategy not to lose any ground would be to exactly match that move—a course of action that can outperform others, no matter what your opponent did. With other factors remaining constant, you cannot lose market share based on a pricing war alone. Coke follows this strategy in many markets not to lose market share to Pepsi. And in Vegas, you can follow the same strategy vs. your friend in the last hand at the Roulette table.

With one yard left to gain, Seattle should’ve pondered—what course of action gives us the best chance to out-perform all others, regardless of what New England does? I opine that running the ball would’ve been the one. Why? Marshawn Lynch, the best running back in the league, had not been stopped before in the entire game for less than a yard (less than two actually). He had just gained four yards on the previous play. A quick risk-reward analysis should’ve skewed the decision entirely in favor of running the ball—the risk was significantly lower with running the ball than passing it, while the reward was no worse and likely better.

Many people point out that the New England player made a great defensive play by intercepting the ball. No arguments here. But a good strategist would’ve anticipated the risk of such an act at a critical juncture and reasoned backwards to call a play that mitigated this risk and provided equal or greater reward. Ironically, such a move would’ve also taken advantage of a strategic blunder by the opponent—inexplicably, New England didn’t call a timeout to save time in case their offensive needed to come back. The game would’ve been over if Seattle scored.

So there we go. My vantage point on three strategic missteps that either in isolation or in combination, can lead to undesirable results. However, a friend of mine presented a more evolved perspective on why Seattle lost—he reasoned that as they were never meant to be at the Super Bowl in the first place, given how lucky they were to get the win over Green Bay, the result was all about karmic justice. Maybe he is right. Maybe this had less to do with critical thinking. Maybe, Carroll was destined to have this momentary lapse of reason at perhaps the most critical moment of his career!

5 Ways to Captivate Customers with Storytelling written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Today’s guest post is from Corey Pemberton – Enjoy! 

Small businesses can’t match the marketing budgets of mega-corporations like Apple or Coca-Cola.

But maybe they don’t have to. They have another weapon in their arsenal that can help them level the playing field and stand out from competitors: storytelling.

My Life Through Photograpy via Photopin.com

You can use storytelling to get your target customers’ attention and resonate with them on an emotional level. It works in every niche because it relies on human psychology instead of gimmicks.

Here are five ways to tap into the incredible power of storytelling to captivate customers:

5. Choose the Right Protagonist

Most businesses have spent a lot of time and money developing quality products or services. They’re understandably proud of what they’ve created. This creates a tendency to discuss what they’re selling at length.

But potential customers aren’t interested in your product or service taking center stage. They’re only interested in hearing about what you’re selling in a limited context: what it can do for them.

Choose the customer as the hero instead. Framing the story from their perspective helps you focus on what’s most compelling. It’s relatable because your marketing starts to sound exactly like the conversations already taking place in their heads.

4. Set High Stakes

Worrying about Middle Earth keeps us reading The Lord of the Rings. We keep watching The Devil Wears Prada to see if Anne Hathaway will ever stop suffering at the hands of her crazy boss.

Your agonizing decision between a ham or turkey sandwich, on the other hand, probably isn’t compelling enough to keep people interested. The stakes aren’t high enough.

A lot of your ideal customers are in a comfort zone of non-action. Many don’t even realize how much better their lives could be with your product or service in them.

What would happen if the “heroes” of your marketing stories don’t become customers? What if they do?

Make the stakes clear, and spell them out early on. By doing so, you give people a reason to keep listening—and encourage more to become buyers.

3. Appeal to Multiple Senses

Great storytellers pepper their stories with sensory details that spark the imagination; we feel like we’re really there, right in the middle of the action.

You can do this with your marketing too. Invoking the five senses paints a mental picture in people’s minds and gets them receptive to what you have to say.

A lot of businesses get bogged down marketing on strictly a logical level. That has a time and place, but it can bore people to tears if you don’t create an emotional connection first.

Use descriptive language and imagery to get your target customers seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling, and tasting how different their lives would be with your product or service. Then support that with logical selling points like features and technical specifications.

2. Start in the Middle of the Action

Do you think Saving Private Ryan would have been better if it started with a thirty-minute introduction about the history of the Third Reich?

Me neither. The movie grabs you from the start by dropping you right in the middle of the action: soldiers storming the Normandy beaches.

You have only a few seconds to capture someone’s interest. If you don’t, they’ll find one of your competitors instead.

What do your customers care about the most? What keeps them up at night? Lead with your strongest points—ones that shake them on an emotional level.

1. Begin with the End in Mind

Ask a lot of small business owners about their marketing goals, and they’ll fill your ears with warm and fuzzy answers like “repeat exposure” and “brand awareness.”

Those answers might work for corporations with huge marketing budgets. But they aren’t helpful for smaller businesses looking for an immediate return on investment.

It helps to start with the end in mind. For every marketing material you create, what concrete action do you want someone to take after engaging with it? It could be joining your email list, scheduling a consultation, trying your software, etc.

Understanding where you’re going, hones your focus; it keeps you from rambling and losing valuable attention.

So, how do you use storytelling in your marketing strategy?
Corey Pemberton is a copywriter and blogger for hire. He uses storytelling strategies to help small businesses and software startups get more leads and customers online. Feel free to stop by his website or say hello on Twitter.

Image via BigStockPhoto.com

Listen to this blog post as a podcast: 

I’m going to take a wild guess about what you’ve been up to lately. Call me psychic, but I’m guessing you’ve been angling for budget over the last few months. I’ll go a step farther and predict that in doing so, you only shared your successes. The programs and campaigns that didn’t work, the spending that didn’t quite pay off—those probably went unmentioned.

Okay, I’m not really psychic. I just know that end of year is when many marketers ask for a budget for the year ahead. I also know that marketers love to highlight their achievements (who doesn’t?) and ignore everything else. That might seem like a successful strategy in the short run—hey, if you got your budget, you did good, right? But that approach can actually hurt you in the long run.

Here’s why. Too many marketing departments launch campaigns in a vacuum. They meet their quota, congratulate themselves, and raise the quota for next time. What they don’t do? Look at the conversion rate. They don’t gain any insight into what drove their successes and failures, or how they can optimize future efforts. And so they ignore the wave of leads who didn’t convert. The programs that crashed and burned. All that wasted time and budget.

Too many marketing departments launch campaigns in a vacuum. — @myleadmd (Tweet This)

This is what separates good marketers from the mediocre: They do the strategy, planning, and execution that get great results. That includes getting honest about their mistakes—scrutinizing their failures and modifying as necessary. Is it fun? Not usually. But does it drive excellence and ROI? Yes, it does. Unquestionably.

This is probably a good place to point out that everyone fails, by the way. All of us, sooner or later. Sometimes that failure is subtle, as when a team focuses only on new net leads and passes the sales team a truckload of unqualified leads. Sometimes failure feels more obvious, like when a splashy big budget campaign falls on its face.

Regardless of what shape failure takes, what matters is having the bravery to face it, learn from it, and the integrity to fix it. That way you’ll know what budget you really need, and how you can allocate it for maximum return.

Common Failures, Smart Fixes

When one of your initiatives doesn’t go as planned, the worst thing you can do is kick sand over it. Instead, you need to find the underlying dynamic. By illuminating shortcomings, you can request budget to correct them. Consider the following problems that tend to plague marketers.

Your lead quality needs to increase.

Forget about your conversions for a second, and look at those other people you got in the door. What’s your plan for them? Obviously, you don’t want to inflict their unqualified selves on sales, so it’s time to develop good nurturing programs. Yes, they take some thought, and they’ll need to be reevaluated and adjusted as time goes on. But they’re worth it because they gradually warm up cooler leads, turning them into qualified prospects.

Your lead scoring is inaccurate.

A lot of so-called common wisdom about lead behavior has been disproven. So if you’re still assuming that webinar attendance signals a future buyer, you may want to revamp your scoring process. Ask sales about the prospects they work with. What traits and behaviors are more likely to lead to a sale? What sources seems to supply the most interested leads? The idea is to find patterns in successful conversions.

You’re not doing the math.

Maybe numbers aren’t really your thing, but there comes a time when you have to buckle down and figure out the facts. How are your efforts being attributed? Which campaigns had the most interest and conversion to revenue? These are the results that will help you determine how many MQLs you need to convert at a higher percentage.

Your buyer personas are outdated.

It’s time to be brutally honest: If your buyer personas are a function of role or job title you are living in the dark ages. Are you designing your sales and marketing strategies with the buyers psychology in mind? It’s also important to keep personas fresh; don’t make the mistake of assuming today’s buyers are your 2013 buyers. You may be selling to a new demographic these days—buyers further along the maturity curve or answering an unexpected need. Dig into your buyers and prospects at least twice per year, and make sure you understand exactly who you should be targeting.

Your content is meaningless.

A clever tagline and pretty design don’t go as far as they used to. Your leads and customers are experts by now at ignoring marketing messages. What does get and hold attention? Relevance. The more your campaigns resonate on an individual level, the higher your conversion rate will go.

Have I convinced you yet to get honest about your shortcomings? I hope so. Remember, you can’t fix what isn’t working until you admit it—and request the budget to get the right improvements in place.